699 - Jack London - live
Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds with guest Nato Green examine writer Jack London. Recorded live in San Francisco
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All right.
Oh, you're listening to the dollop.
This is an American history podcast where each week I, Dave Anthony, read a story from American history to a conservative history.
What the fuck?
You've said a lot of mean stuff.
How dare you, Gareth Reynolds, who has no idea what the topic is going to be about.
Our guest tonight is someone who I've wanted to get on the podcast for a long time because
I really enjoy his comedy and I respect his comedy, which is very rare.
And also, he is a union organizer, which is
and he brings that to his comedy, which is a really fucking hard thing to do, and it's good.
So, ladies and gentlemen, NATO Green.
Have some wine, yeah.
Let's be with you.
Unprofessional.
I would never drink on it.
The couch is such a great vibe for this.
Feels like we're on your talk show.
I overdosed on fentanyl 11 times on the way here tonight.
Welcome to San Francisco.
This city.
Have you tried our fentanyl?
This is just so bad.
The terroir of our fentanyl.
It's like estate-grown.
Yeah.
I'm so excited to do your show for the first time, and I had a dream about it last night.
And in my dream, we were doing the show here, and you were married, and Gareth was a woman, and you were excited to report that you had spent your time in San Francisco visiting our famous toothpaste museum.
I love the toothpaste museum.
Excuse me, you're sleeping on the fact that I'm your lady wife?
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
That's 100%.
That's just typical Dave.
Typical man.
Most people, when they dream about the podcast, they dream of you as my wife.
It's interesting.
What an interesting thing to say and not blink during.
It's a crazy thing.
One of my favorite things about the way things are now is how all conservatives are terrified of cities.
Don't you get killed when you walk down the street?
It's so funny to live your life being like, honey no
that's a city
what are you doing
stay rural
drive through this field
as as a city guy like i'm i've always been scared of the country like if i can't hear oh yeah screaming and gunshots i can't sleep no we all saw deliverance right like like i'm a jew from the city like anything like if i see woods you know what i mean yeah like i'm immediately murdered that's how it works right
The wind just whispers, are you low?
Yeah, yeah, you look a little low.
I didn't see hay until I was 27.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, I'm so scared of not cities.
January 12th, 1876.
Year of our Lord J-Town.
This is a Christian podcast, by the way.
I don't know if you know it.
He is risen.
He is risen and fucking catching waves and
he's rad.
What do we all say he's rad?
Say it.
Jesus, Dave.
All right.
John Griffith Cheney was born in San Francisco to mother Flora, a spiritualist who made her money conducting sanances and teaching music.
You ought to do both.
You got to have a backup for spiritualism.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's probably for music teaching.
A side hustle.
Yeah, a side hustle.
Yeah, you do music.
People are like, nah, he's not that good.
And then you're like, your grandpa's here.
What?
Take my watch.
Yeah.
There's treasure in your yard.
Keep digging.
And his stepdad, who was John London, the boy would take his stepdad's name since his biological father, who was a traveling astrologer, Jesus Christ, skipped out on him.
That's the best kind of astrologer, one that's on the move.
That's definitely like a Tinder job in California.
Traveling astrologer.
Not to confuse the menu.
That dad abandonment conversation with the child.
Son, I've got to go tell people what a Sagittarius is.
You can't do that in town?
No, I've got to ride the rolling fields and tell people what their fucking moon signs.
I don't even know those things.
They're rising.
It doesn't sound like you even know what you're doing.
Nobody does.
That's the beauty of it.
I got to go.
Some guys are trying to hang me.
I'm going to leave town for a little while.
I misdiagnosed an Aries.
I'm on the run.
And you know they're known for their bad tempers.
I think that's a cancer.
Whatever it is.
Not to confuse the two Johns, right?
So he took his dad's name.
So it's John London and John London.
Little John London started going by
little John London started going by.
Oh, wow.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Started going.
Okay, all right.
All right, all right.
Everybody just calm down.
It was.
Jesus Christ.
It was God!
Little John!
London.
Wait, you went by Jack London?
Yes.
Uh-oh.
Uh-oh.
He drank his first beer at five.
Fuck yeah.
Oh, fuck yeah.
So Jack London endured a typical 19th century working class existence as a child.
Before he was a teenager, he worked as a farmhand, a newsie, an ice delivery boy, a bowling alley pin monkey, a grocery boy, and he hunted cats to sell to Chinatown.
Oh, Jesus.
Just trying to put a little money on the table.
Sometimes you got to hunt cats for Chinatown.
So you want a tidbit of San Francisco history related to Chinatown?
Yes.
So in the late 19th century, the
conventional wisdom of medical science was that uh infectious disease was smelled by uh sent uh spread by weird odors
and so as you know and so uh when there was an infectious disease outbreak because they used different kinds of ingredients in Chinatown there would be like race rites and they would just go burn down Chinatown
periodically because they would blame Chinatown for like
so San Francisco General Hospital originally was
a leper colony.
That was how it was founded and where they would put any Chinese people who were sick because they were
that was like the way that the racists policed the borders of Chinatown.
Welcome to San Francisco, liberal San Francisco.
A lot's changed.
Well, the cool thing is, RFK Jr.
is bringing all that back.
What a good business model.
Can you flip this computer towards me a little?
Is that possible?
May I?
Here you go.
Thank you, Jesus Christ.
Before, oh, I did that.
All this boy, before he settled into as a teenager, a 10-cent an hour work at a Dickinson cannery.
Dickinsian cannery.
Dickinsean?
Dickinsian.
Dickinsian?
Yeah, like Dick's, but...
Can Dick?
Yeah.
Nice.
He said he was treated like a, quote, work beast.
Okay.
How old is he?
He's a child.
Okay.
But it sounds like, you know, he can't hold a fucking job.
I mean,
no.
Kids these days, they're just, they give you a thousand excuses on why they can't work at factories.
It's disgusting.
I'm little.
I don't deserve this.
The fumes hurt.
My hands aren't working.
I'm watching a lot of my friends get hurt in these things.
I want to go outside.
It's fucking disgusting.
You get it.
10 cents an hour.
Yeah.
Maybe
he wanted to be paid 12 cents an hour.
Yeah.
Oh, here we go.
Union guy.
General strike, everybody.
Don't listen to him, Luke.
So.
Fight through the pain, Luke.
It's fine.
So Jack couldn't take the grueling conditions of the industrial hellhole anymore, and he turned to crime.
Nice.
Which, yeah, that's that's what happens.
That's when you call the cops.
Right.
Specifically maritime crime, he became an
sea crime?
An oyster pirate.
Oh.
Isn't that a sushi roll?
I mean, it probably is, yeah.
Oyster pirate.
What do you think's on it?
On an oyster pirate?
Yeah.
I mean, it's the American version.
So it's like rice and avocado and oysters and then like a shitload of sauce that belongs at McDonald's.
And we're like, I don't know why I'm not losing weight on my new sushi diet.
It's supposed to be healthy.
Hand me more Thousand Island dressing.
I do hate any sauce on sushi.
It's crazy.
I can stop it.
It's crazy.
So he would poach oysters on private beds in San Francisco Bay on his boat, the Razzle Dazzle.
That fucking
kid is kicking ass.
I mean, he's a child.
Of course, he calls it the Razzle Dazzle.
Dude, he's fucking, it's like baby Kenny Powers.
He's fucking
slamming beers on his boat, stealing oysters in his boat, his boat?
Yeah.
His boat.
His boat.
He's sailing out into the bay as a 10-year-old.
With the Razzle Dazzle.
On the Razzle Dazzle.
What's up, motherfuckers?
Prepare to be boarded by the pirate.
The dread Razzle Dazzle is coming for you.
And you're...
Next up, your Mignonet.
It's like, oh, shit, here comes a Razzle Dazzle.
Suck him down, boys.
Jesus Christ.
I came here to shuck and to fuck.
Who are you?
I'm almost 11.
What the fuck?
All right, everybody, chill out.
Who's got a grip?
I brought my special glove for it.
Yeah, that's right.
I got my shuck glove.
So he was so good as an oyster pirate that he earned more than one month's factory wages in a single night.
So he's like a stripper.
Yeah, that's how I'd like us to think of the boy.
I think everyone agrees that's how we should picture this.
How many oysters is that?
I don't know, but it's a shit.
This is a shit ton.
This is when it was just, they were just fucking everywhere, like before we, before we ruined oysters in America.
But yeah, it's probably, I don't know how many it is, but it's probably a fuckload.
Like you're out all night.
Right, collecting oysters.
It wasn't like, oh, I took the Subaru to Mollis Bay to pay $37 for four oysters.
That's what it should be.
That's how we do it.
That's hunting now, yeah.
That's hunting.
Foraging.
I went to the farmer's market.
No, but I saw a picture of a low low tide in, like, this is San Francisco, and it was just all oyster beds, like, which obviously is not there now.
Yeah, that was smart.
Yeah.
Just keep eating it.
What do we don't eat?
Cover in oil.
Bing, bang, boom.
It's a toilet.
It's not meant to be funny.
It's a poignant point.
Go ahead.
Thank God we've replaced all those oysters with like 17 Hyatts.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, those are jobs.
That's how it works.
It's going to be really good in the end.
This is the end.
And it's going to be awesome.
Those people who travel all the time, it's going really good out there everywhere.
So soon Jack Lennon was being called the Prince of Oyster Pirates.
Nobody could beat that?
Nope.
In his memoirs, he recalled that life on the waterfront among the hard-drinking sailors and unemployed men thrilled him and that he would, quote, rather reign among booze fighters than toil
12 hours a day at a machine.
100%.
I mean, without question.
Yeah.
At any age.
Yeah.
Let alone 10 or 11.
Yeah.
That's fucking great.
Did he try stand up?
Start a podcast, London.
Yeah.
He would.
He'd be huge on TikTok.
At 15, he said he drank two Bay Area Oyster Pirates under the table.
That has to be really fucking weird to even agree to that sit down as a grown man.
Yeah, all right.
I'd like to drink with this child.
Yeah, I'll enter a drinking competition with this child.
It's probably at Specs.
Near Fairfax.
Yeah.
It was at this time.
Specs, one of the last union bars in Sarah.
One of the last union bars.
If you order a course, they will kick you out.
They got a problem with Nazi water?
It was at this time that Jack became a lifelong devotee of socialism.
No.
It's bad.
It's bad.
Wait, hold up.
So what was it about drinking the sailors under the table that gets you into socialism?
I mean, for me,
what's that step?
I don't know what that step is.
I think it was more seeing the conditions than it was
living as the prince of oyster pirates.
I hear there's a prince around here.
We need to redistribute all this oysters to the people.
Just like someone in the monarchy.
He began by joining Coxley's army, the first ever protest march on the White House.
the conservatives and some liberals were just like, there's no flags at these protests in Los Angeles.
Yeah, there are, just not American ones.
Wonder why.
Coxley and his men.
That's exactly right.
It is that funny.
And don't think that you're an outlier.
The rest of the people fell short on what just happened.
You laughed the right amount.
It's ridiculous how bad everyone else did.
Coxley and his men demanded what essentially became the New Deal, government-funded public works programs.
Now, Jack never made it all the way to D.C., but his experience with the work and stiffs gave him more insight into the camaraderie among the working class.
I feel like
that snippet is a little bit misleading because it was Coxley's army marched on the White House, didn't make it to D.C.
How far did he get?
Like,
well, I was marching on the White House, but I only made it to Walnut Creek.
So, and then we, I, and then I ran out of oysters.
I just went back.
Come on, he made it to Concord.
Go on, brothers.
I'll see you when you get back.
Give the White House my regard, those fuckers.
I'll be over here with the oysters.
Well, it's like the Howard Dean speech.
He's like, Go on, everyone.
We're going to D.C.
Yeah, but he was like, Yeah, I'll stay here.
Fuck it.
It's over.
I really.
Yeah,
yeah, he probably was just like, oh, you guys are going to D.C.
Okay.
Ah.
Well, there's only so much
a comrade can do.
You definitely keep marching and then slowly just fade.
You don't like to walk.
You start walking backwards looking like you're marching forwards.
We're going all the way.
We're going all the way.
We're going all the way.
I mean, that's literally why we haven't overthrown the government yet.
Like, if you look around the world where they overthrow the government, people don't go home.
But here, people are going to go to the march and be like, I'm going to march until they go by the takeria and then I'm going to peel out.
Yeah, yeah.
Which taqueria are we talking about, though?
It's strictly Cancun, right?
So.
Yeah, I mean, it's just the same thing that they're like, walk, march on the sidewalks.
Okay, okay.
Yeah, we like to follow rules and like bail on shit.
Right.
That's why all of our marches are only like from Civic Center down Market Street to Justin Herman Plaza or from Justin Herman Plaza down Market Street to Civic Center.
We just backed we're ready to overthrow the government if we can do it on the one street only.
Have them done to us.
Move DC here.
Yeah, if you want to fuck with shit, if you want to have real protests, you don't do it in one area.
You do it in many areas at once.
All over your city.
Because they can't defend that.
Officer?
So you told this, We have cops here tonight.
So you told this to get the instigators to yell out.
Well, that's.
We got one.
Who else thinks that guy's right?
All right, arrest!
Drop the gas!
We only have like four.
So.
Dave, everybody knows that if you want to overthrow the government, you have to leave the city and go to the suburbs because it is really pretty easy to overwhelm a small-town police department.
Oh, my God.
They really don't know what they're doing.
Once, I had two cop cars pull up on me in Cordo Madera, and I was like, send all of you.
And they were like, we are all of us.
We're looking for backup.
You have him.
Oh.
We're waiting for backup from Roenert Park.
Most
in the suburbs, most of the cops are just harassing teenagers and taking their beer.
That's me.
At least that was what it was like for me.
I used to play poker with when I was in high school.
I had an older buddy.
Did you drink him under the table?
Yes.
Are you mad?
And I would bring my bag of oysters, and they'd bring their boots.
But he had two cops who were friends, and that's how we got all the liquor and drugs.
Because they would just confiscate it and then bring it.
They used to be cool.
Man, they used to be cool.
Those are the days.
They don't don't do that now.
Now cops are awesome.
So it became the New Deal.
He had camaraderie with the working class.
And the panic of 1893 was raging and decimating the American economy, which was partially caused by the McKinley Tariff Act that raised tariffs 50%.
Ah, okay.
Oh.
And we've learned a lot since those ones.
And so now we got good ones.
Yeah,
120%.
Yep.
Yeah.
You're saying like that's that good.
Yeah, make them more.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It's working.
Yeah, let him cook.
So Jack became a hobo.
So Jack rode the rails and saw the degradation of American life for a growing portion of society.
Yeah, he's doing it.
It was the worst depression ever,
until the next one.
And Jack wrote about his experience lambasting liberals for their ideas of philanthropy, quote, oh, you charity mongers.
By the way, I like how you said philanthropy, like Tony Soprano.
Yeah.
Philanthropy.
Philanthropy.
Oh, you charity mongers, go to the poor and learn.
For the poor alone are the charitable.
Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog.
Damn.
He should be a writer.
You're thinking of a different one.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
He was arrested for vagrancy for sleeping on a sidewalk when he traveled to see Niagara Falls and put in a New York prison for 30 days.
That would be an interesting thing.
That's what HBO Max is changing its name to, by the way.
Hobos.
What are you now?
We don't know.
Quote, I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery.
This is in prison.
I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool, the shambles, and the charnel house of our civilization.
I was scared into thinking.
Oh, god damn.
That's a nightmare.
Who wants to be scared into thinking?
Oh, that's what you did to me.
You're a rotten prick, you are.
I'm Sahoe.
Oh, I can't say mad at you, little guy.
Such a cutie.
So he vowed to stop subsisting on brawn and switch gears to pursue his studies and become a, quote, brain merchant.
So the time in an upstate New York prison terrified him into going back to San Francisco.
And here he joined the Socialist Labor Party.
And he rolled in UC Berkeley and started giving public speeches demanding labor reform.
Did that for about a year until he ran out of money.
And then he got kicked out of school.
By 1897,
he became a sailor.
And by 1897, he was an expert sailor and he had sailed across the Pacific Ocean.
Jesus.
He was an expert brawler, having drank his way from pub to pub across several waterfronts.
Wait, an expert brawler?
Yeah, he would just get in drunken fights.
Oh, okay.
That's what I figured it meant.
What did you think it might mean?
That, but I was like, what is an expert brawler?
Like, I beat the shit out of people, well.
Like, he trained.
Not just that he did it a lot, but that he, like, had mastery.
Oh.
Yeah.
Skills.
Sure.
He had a sensei.
I don't.
Now we're definitely leaving.
Yeah, yeah, he did.
It was like a wash-on, wash-off situation.
Stop it right now.
With fists.
And boobs.
There had been a training montage of some sort.
Yeah, there was a training montage.
Listen, you guys need to stop pretending like the karate kid story is what's happening because I'm going to start buying into it.
In July, the steamership Excelsior came in from Alaska and Docker.
You know, back then at UC Berkeley, you could just major in fist fighting.
It was like a whole department.
Department of Fist-to-Cuff Studies.
That's right.
You can still do that at the University of Texas.
Leave them alone.
They're figuring it out.
They are not.
Yeah, they are.
They're absolutely not figuring it out.
Yeah.
What if our entire school is funded by a football game?
Okay.
Forget water.
Let's figure out the bathroom.
Fuck it.
Making weed illegal is the greatest thing that they could have done.
For all the people like, bingo, move.
What?
No, fuck.
Oh, the best thing ever ever is Joe Rogan moving to a state that made pot illegal.
Oh, so great,
so good.
It is fucking great.
So, this steamship Excelsior comes to a comes from Alaska, docks in San Francisco, and it has thousands of pounds of gold on it because they had discovered gold.
And word gets out, and there starts one of the most insane gold rushes in human history.
So, the Yukon is harsh, brutal, it's a violent territory.
If that's if you survive the trip to get there.
Wow.
It's estimated one in 15 men died before reaching the goldfields.
Fuck.
But those are good odds.
I was going to say, you do kind of like it a little.
Yeah,
14 guys lived.
Yeah.
A little too many for my honestly.
I'd be like, hey, some of these other guys got to drop.
So you would kill guys on the way there?
No.
Make it harder for them?
Yes.
Yes.
Slowly make it more difficult.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just eat their gruel in the mess hall.
How do you eat gruel?
Yeah.
How do you do it again?
Yeah.
That's the beauty of gruel.
If you could get it, you could fucking slurp it.
It's a slurper.
It's a stewy.
It's like paper-mâché.
You could just slurp it down.
All right, you're both looking at me the same way, so I'm going to take it out.
All right, so gruel.
So Jack obviously did not want to be one of the guys who dies.
Interesting.
He's 21.
Jesus Christ.
Definitely felt older.
An expert fighter.
Expert fighter.
Prince of Oysters.
Prince of Oysters.
Used to be on the Razzle Dazzle.
He's done it all.
And he goes with his six-year-old brother-in-law.
Six?
60.
That's better.
I'm married.
And they packed up some goods and they got on a steamship for Alaska.
While they're on the ship, they meet three other gold seekers from the area.
Ira, who was a carpenter and weighed a little less than 100 pounds.
What?
Well, we know one out of the fucking 15 is gone now.
Yeah.
Ira.
I mean, I guarantee you, Ira's gone.
That's why he brought it up.
Under 100 pounds.
I'm ready to go.
We're eating soon.
Oh, little Ira.
Bye-bye, buddy.
How long is the trip?
It's quite a while, you idiot.
This feels vaguely anti-Semitic to me somehow.
There's some sickly Jew carpenter aboard the Excelsior.
I want to walk away from my Ira impression immediately, obviously.
I did not know.
No, lean into it, Goy.
No, it's not a good.
All right, fine.
I got the pass.
This is a very word of course he's going to get gold
We're having a laugh if we can't laugh
It's it's for the coins for Hanukkah.
Yes
Also there was Fred a red-haired court reporter who kept a diary
interesting this feels like Clue.
Like you're setting up, I'm like,
so far, both those guys should be gone.
We're putting together a gang.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah.
We got the guy under 100 pounds and a redhead before sunscreen.
Yeah.
The guy under 100 pounds and a guy is like, I'm a snitch.
Yeah.
I mean, 14.
I mean, nine.
And then Big Jim.
Big Jim makes it.
He's the only one who had his experience as a miner.
Yeah,
Big Jim makes it.
So they docked in Skagway and undertook the deadliest and most grueling part of the journey, which was the Chilcot Pass.
I can't imagine getting off that ship and then having to do that.
Yeah, this is none of this is worth it?
No.
None of it's worth it.
It's just like, why would you?
Like, just for like,
if there was skiing at the top, I wouldn't do that.
Yeah.
No.
Four out of 15 die walking up the hill.
Yeah.
So it's a very narrow, ice-choked mountain trail that rose a mile in elevation in a very short amount of time.
That's good, though.
You want that.
So there's a brutal bottleneck where men and animals died by the thousands.
Sure.
There's nothing like seafaring to prepare you for hard cardiac.
Absolutely.
It's okay, boys.
I know oysters.
Jack quote, dead horses were everywhere.
Oh, that's good.
That's good.
You want that?
The trail.
Once again, yes.
The trail was a boneyard.
One could not walk a hundred feet.
What's she said?
What's up?
Yeah.
Welcome to the boneyard.
That's what I I call my room.
I have erectile dysfunction.
I didn't expect you to come all the way home.
All right, and that's not a lot of disclaimers.
I apologize.
Here's a to-go bag and a note that says, I'm sorry you bought me this bullshit.
I'll go down on you.
What is that?
My mouth gets sore quick, so I'll early.
I should have trained my job, but once again, I didn't think this was gonna happen.
Is this a seance?
The only thing that'll be rising is the dead.
So you could not walk 100 feet without stepping over or around carcasses.
That's cool, though.
That's what she said.
Jesus Christ.
Right, so rich guys go that way.
And then there's Overland, and then there's the worst route over here.
Right.
Jesus Christ.
But where the fuck are rich guys going?
You know, they're like, I mean, they got to do something.
They're like, look at me.
Yeah, it's like when, you know, the Trumps go hunt elephants in Africa.
Like, whoa.
Like, they made that, there's something to show.
It's for the Graham.
If you keep looking at me, I'm going to leave the show.
Stop it.
Okay, so here's the crazy thing.
You don't cross
the trail once.
The Canadian government is getting sick of just dumb Americans going up there unprepared and dying of hunger.
Let them go.
So they made a rule.
Every man had to bring 2,000 pounds of supplies with him, which was enough to last a year.
2,000 pounds?
Wait.
Okay, so this meant
you had to cross the Chilcote Pass dozens of times to bring all your supplies.
Oh my God.
Including the most infamous section, which is the golden stairs, a steep 1,500 step path carved into ice.
Holy fuck.
So they're just being like, don't do this.
Yeah.
All right, I brought all my stuff.
It should only be about 200 trips.
How in the fuck do we discourage dumb Americans?
Like when they see them, are they fucking, what the fuck are they doing?
We got all our stuff.
What?
We packed.
I'm going to leave mine in a pile here, and then I'm going to go up, and then I'm going to leave some in a pile there, and I'm going to come back and get it.
And I'm going to do it.
Just keep an eye on it for me, will you?
You don't think it's going to snow up here or anything like that, do you?
Because that would really be a flaw in my plan.
Jesus Christ.
Jack, quote, I climbed that pass 30 times, each with a 50-pound load.
My shoulders bled through my coat.
What the fuck?
I've done that, though.
Why?
To get the gold, baby.
If you get up there, you're going to be
so rich.
There's not enough gold for new shoulders at this time.
You really don't see people with that level of like
drive anymore.
No, it's just Elon.
It's just Elon.
It's that grind mentality, dude.
It's that grind mentality.
He's on the grind set.
Yeah.
Like, now it's just like, I'm going to send my drone to get the gold for me.
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Oh, no, kids.
Yeah, the kids are definitely like,
my kid, he's like,
yeah, I don't want to work.
And I was like, my wife's like, what?
And I was like, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you shouldn't want to work.
Now I'm going to go out into the yard and put on the clamps.
No, that's the whole thing with
the Medicaid cuts and stuff, where they're just like, I mean, there's so many people who are just playing video games.
You're like, so?
Fucking...
Yeah, why not?
What the fuck?
Fuck you.
Why can't people who are.
You got to go to work.
You have to work.
You have to work.
Why?
You just have to.
At the same time, they're like, and AI is taking all the jobs.
Yeah, it's taking all the jobs.
And I get eight weeks paid vacation a year and the best health care in the world.
You have to work.
They should kill them.
So
that should be what you have to do to work in the Senate.
I agree.
Yeah.
And then you're like, all right.
Yeah.
I would feel better about it if there were more senators with bloody shoulders.
Oh, yes.
Every bill they're passing is like a new shoulder skin grafting bill.
So many Americans are suffering with shoulder strapitis.
Your show.
Ah!
Order.
Oh, never mind.
Ah!
Ah!
All they talk about.
Only a few months after they went through an avalanche claimed 60 lives in minutes,
on the trek, many gold seekers went mad and turned back, or they took their own lives.
Oh, that's a cra, that's fucking nuts.
How can you even tell?
That they took their own life?
Well, you'd just like lay down.
Wouldn't that be the fastest way to do it?
Or you just
slice your throat or
pop out your eyes with a spoon.
Yeah.
You're definitely entering Fantasiesville.
You could smash your head with a rock.
Oh, Jesus.
You could set your monkey loose.
All right, okay.
Hey.
Once we get in the monkey.
By the way, I'm bringing a monkey with me to the Klondike.
No one else is going to have a monkey.
I'm going to make a fortune.
The monkey's dead.
Fuck.
I didn't think about how little his organs are.
I just thought they could handle the snow situation.
Weren't there snow monkeys?
I thought there was.
There should be, but.
There are, but you brought a capuchin.
That is a tropical monkey, sir.
Yeah, but they're really fun.
Oh, they were.
He's not as fun now.
By the way, he took his own life.
I'm 100%.
There's no way he didn't want to stay a part of this.
Come on.
He's a kabuchin.
Capuchin.
Capuchin.
Not a kombuchin.
He's not a fucking mushroom drink.
Why not?
Or actually, he is now.
I still don't think that's a chance.
I'm going to cook him.
Starvation, hypothermia, dysentery, and frostbite were rampant.
Jack wrote of the physical toll: quote, our hands cracked and bled.
Teeth loosened in the gums.
Wow.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Is it cold?
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, your fucking mouth is frozen.
Gates became shuffles.
We had entered the kingdom of frost.
If only they could have anticipated.
So.
Hey, boys, bring socks.
One pair should be sufficient.
You got a lot of stuff to schlep over the pass.
2,000 pounds.
Maybe a couple pairs of socks, Max.
And if if it gets really bad, you just turn Ira into socks.
We're not making it.
What are we doing?
Too soon.
We just found out about him.
Jack's brother-in-law was in so much pain from his rheumatism that he turned and left.
Who goes with rheumatism?
You know what?
Everything hurts.
I should go to the Klondike.
Maybe it'll all freeze.
I'll be numb.
So, once they crossed the pass, they still had almost 600 miles to travel with 2,000 pounds of gear each.
What the fuck?
So, what do they do once that they're just continuing to do the up and down with their 2,000 pounds of shit?
I guess so, yeah.
They got a, yeah.
I mean,
we got to take over Canada.
That rule's bullshit
too soon.
I agree, we can't come soon enough.
We'll show them.
Uh, dump is brought to to you by Helix Sleep.
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Gareth the dollop is also brought to you by
squarespace dave
come on
podcast is brought to you by squarespace this is a squarespace podcast it is well i mean it should be it should just be called the squarespace i don't think it's it doesn't help no i don't agree but i love squarespace and every website we're associated with is squarespace that's right because you can't beat them
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It does it all on its own.
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We're selling stuff on our website.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if we've even mentioned that.
Go to the dollop.
Did you mention it?
I don't think so.
Go to dollapodcast.com.
There's now a merch tab where you can really peer inside the mind of Luke and what he creates.
But that's all Squarespace, and they make it really so easy a Luke can do it.
Should be a Squarespace tag.
Gareth, you could set up a premium workshop, which
I'm hoping you do.
Did I tell you that I did do that?
And I lost a thumb.
Can you believe that?
Yes.
Right off.
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Gareth,
we are also brought to you by Rocket Money.
Rocket Money, of course, is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings.
And that's what it's done for me and Gareth.
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I got one for you right here.
I don't mean to,
I'm not trying to attack anyone, but look, there was a home workout app that I still had.
Oh, yeah.
It was hidden.
And Rocket Money not only said you don't need this anymore, it said you should be working out still, but you shouldn't be paying to not work out.
Well, the other thing that they get you is they get you with the yearly subscription instead of monthly and that completely slips by.
Like, that's a really important thing.
And sometimes you'll be, yep, sometimes you'll just be like, oh, you know, if you don't do it soon enough, you'll be like, you just missed it.
And then, you know, $113 later.
Yeah.
And it's a year, and then you forget about it.
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Five.
Third string point guard?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm coming off the bench.
So you're not playing.
So you're not on the bench.
I'll see sometime.
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That's a pretty sweet deal, kiddo.
Wow.
What a demeaning.
What a demeaning.
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There's no way they go get it.
It's really not good.
What?
That was produced by Kenny Loggins, dude.
It wasn't.
It was.
Don't
besmirch Loggins.
Dave, this is a live episode.
Which one is this?
What do we got here?
This is...
No, tonight's.
This is.
Oh, yeah, it's live.
Yeah.
This is
Jack London.
I really thought we had a miscommunication, and we were about to record an episode while I'm sitting here freezing.
We should point out that on Wednesday, if you haven't already joined, we are doing a live three-part on Patreon 700th episode.
So it'll be 700 to 703.
We will be recording, but with James Odomian, and
the subject is
President William Jefferson Clinton.
And so if you're not a part of Patreon, might be a good time to start.
As well as
we just watched Under Siege on Patreon.
We're watching a lot of Seagal stuff.
And we've also
watched and commented on
the Seagal SNL episode.
Which felt longer, a full-length feature movie or the one-hour edited Steven Seagal?
Seagal.
By far.
The SNL.
Painful.
Unreal.
You'd rather have a root canal, but if you want to enjoy any of that,
go to our Patreon.
Very easy.
Very fun.
Lots of cool stuff.
So enjoy this episode, everybody.
I'm going to work out now.
So if you want to come over and smell me about 45 minutes, you can.
God, what's going on?
Smell.
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So after Group.
He did this
because he ran out of money to go to UC Berkeley.
That's right.
He couldn't think of any other way
to pay college tuition.
Oh, shit.
Well, we're out of oysters, so
I've hawked the Razzle Dazzle to the pawn shop.
I'm out of options to pay for my tuition.
Well, you know what I'm doing next, obviously.
Oh, it's time for the walk of death.
Yeah.
So after a grueling 16 miles, which Jax, do you want to try bartending?
No.
Yeah, I'm going to go to Alaska and schlep for gold.
Do you want to do some carpentry maybe?
That's not good.
No.
No.
Do you want to work in a library?
No.
No.
No.
I'm thinking I want to go somewhere where I have to have my feet cut off.
I want my hand cracks to finally explore themselves.
Okay, so it's 16 miles, but it's much more than that because, like you said, they have to repeatedly go back and get gear.
And so they are making double five.
Yeah.
So they came to the Yukon River and they chopped down trees and built a 27-foot-long boat.
Can you imagine just chopping down trees without any of this?
After all this, like, now we have to chop down a forest.
No, if we get to the point where they're like, and now we chop down trees to build the boat, I'm like, well, I'm dead.
Yeah.
I can't do this anymore.
Throw my supplies on me.
So they built a
27-foot-long boat.
They built the boat.
Jesus.
I guess Ira survived.
It's my moment to shine.
Glad you guys didn't eat me 500 miles ago.
So the boat worked very well, and they crossed a series of lakes and began the 500-mile voyage to gold country.
Jesus Christ.
And as they approached a set of very dangerous rapids, They saw most other men carrying their boats and gear to pass the rapids on dry land.
Yep, so that's what you do.
Jack Jack was an excellent sailor.
He's like,
Boys, I'm an oyster pirate.
I know how rapids work.
I'm a sailor.
Coming about.
Jack.
Say he wants to put a little bit of his old razzle dazzle into the trip.
Trust me.
Hundreds of would-be miners dropped their supplies and jeered as Jack steered perfectly through the water.
They ran the canyon in two minutes.
Shit.
Nope.
It's like the Kessel run.
It's like the Kessel run.
White Castle?
No,
Han Solo.
Did the Kessel run and some parsecs.
Someone just said no, which I don't think is the right response.
Are you guys getting mad about Star Wars facts right now?
Whatever.
Are you arguing the Star Wars fact?
No, you're not.
You're just upset that he did it.
Under 12 parsecs.
I said under something, something.
Yeah, so 12 was implied.
Checkmate.
Up top.
Man, you fucking, you fell for that so hard.
Oh, my God.
Set up and slammed.
I don't know.
Why are we going to go on?
We talked about the Kessel run.
We're done.
It's over.
At the next set of rapids, with much bigger and scarier waves, Jack assured his partners that everything would be all right.
Too cocky.
His exceptional boatmanship saved the day.
No damage was done except one snapped paddle.
Wow.
Good for him.
In fact, Jack was so confident that he doubled back and helped a young couple who had accidentally
gone into the rapids.
Let's go back up the other way up the rapids.
Jack, what?
Trust me.
I'm as cocky as they come.
It's time for what I call a little razzle dazzle.
Let's dance.
Jack, now.
As a matter of fact, let's go back to the boats.
Jack!
I'm about to teach these Alaska Rapids a thing or two about the mean streets of Alameda.
Yes, we helped a couple who were stuck in the rapids.
That's nice.
Yeah.
They finally made it to the capital of the Yukon gold rush, Dawson City.
Of the 100,000 gold rushers, fewer than 30,000 made it to Dawson.
Wow.
That's still too many.
Too many, yeah.
And only a few actually struck gold.
Most lost everything.
That's the worst fucking outcome possible.
Yeah.
I made it.
It was a mistake.
Financially, I'm ruined.
Shoulder-wise, I'm ruined.
I lost all my family.
Those are the same numbers.
Just like crypto.
I love crypto.
This is crypto.
I love crypto guys right now.
They're like, oh, so I'm the dumb one, right?
Give it a little bit.
But these are the same numbers as stand-up comedy.
30,000 get through,
couple strike gold.
We're all working on sperm odds.
That is.
I'm glad no one told me that when I started, because I'd have been like, I'm fucking done.
I'm not doing this.
Sperm.
Jack observed the futility, quote, gold was not the madness hope was.
They died chasing a yellow lie wrapped in frost.
I mean, all well and good for him, but he's among them.
Yeah.
You know, he's up there too.
Yeah.
Dawson Dawson was as much of a city as could exist in a place where temperatures often went below negative 70 degrees.
Oh my fucking God.
Just let me die.
It's got five hats on his hand.
That'll be nice.
Staying warm.
I once pumped gas and it was one of those, it was, you couldn't, you know,
didn't have the thing.
Yeah, the thing, the doodle.
In Nebraska, when it was like zero, but Windchill was negative 30, and I was like, I'm going to die.
I'm not gonna make it through this Like it's fucking crazy like you're just standing out there.
So how the fuck now imagine that.
Yeah, yeah
Who had it harder me.
Yeah, I agree.
None of these guys had to pump gas.
No, I know now it's disgusting fucking comedy.
Yeah
It was a swampy settlement with makeshift cabins and tents sprouting every which way the combination
of the frost-bitten landscape, the paranoia of someone stealing your gold, and the alienation from civilization led to some very weird shit.
It doesn't sound like it.
Podcasting.
Men would offer the town's few women their literal weight in gold to marry them.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Oh, God.
Why would women even stay there?
Run!
Because they get gold.
Yeah, even then, I'd be like, nah, I'll figure it out somewhere else.
I mean, if you're a sex worker, you're making a fortune.
Yeah, if you're a sex worker, but you're also like, I'm good.
I'm actually taking a few days off.
This is fucking crazy.
They'd pay nearly $3,000 for a box of oranges.
What?
Yeah, because
they'd pay nearly $3,000 for a box of oranges.
What?
We're going to have that soon.
Wait.
Huh?
They'd literally bathe in expensive champagne and want.
But that's like one of those things where it's like, okay, so you got got fucking sticky and needed
a bath again?
That's nice.
It's just fun.
Well, it's not, it's on paper.
Here's one for you.
And one man bought the entire town's supply of eggs to impress a burlesque dancer.
Bingo.
And let me tell you from experience, it works.
How do you like that?
Would you like another egg?
Love a frittata.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, boy, do they.
How about a bang and quiche, huh?
You like that?
Huh?
Don't wink at me when you say bang and quiche.
Yeah.
It's pronounced quickie.
Yeah.
How about I scramble these eggs and then scramble those eggs, huh?
What do you say, huh?
Um,
so
in Dawson Crowsta,
I'm in.
That sounds good.
In Dawson, crime rates were basically that of a war zone.
Street justice, frontier law, and vigilanteism dominated.
There was a code, don't steal another man's gold, don't cheat at cards, and don't touch another man's wife.
Yeah, that's good.
Codes are good.
They're followed.
If you
do, don't get caught.
If you did get caught, you could expect public floggings, branding,
banishment from the camp, which is basically a death sentence, hanging without a trial.
A death sentence.
Tarring and feathering or other public humiliation.
You know, I'm going to pick branding.
Oh!
You know what?
I'd like to be flogged.
Yeah, I wouldn't want the flogging.
Could I pick where I get branded?
No.
Tramp stamp me.
Say daddy's girl.
I'd do branding too.
Sure.
Yeah, out of all those.
There's a choice between branding and tarring and feathering.
Tar feather.
You're doing tar feather?
100%.
So
I'm just sitting there.
Think of all the eggs I'd lay.
If I had all the eggs and I was tarred and feathered, that's awesome.
That's a look.
That's a vibe.
Back to that burlesque show.
I did the full transformation.
You sold me a chicken, granted, a large chicken, but it is shit.
I can hear you, motherfucker.
I'm doing the best I can with what I have.
Every day I'm out there trying.
All you do is eat.
I don't know how to produce eggs.
I don't know how it works.
I've been a chicken for like four days
on account of a bag Todd's wife.
Now I'm a chicken.
I'm trying.
I'm sorry.
His wife's a monkey.
What?
In one case, a man accused of stealing was tied to a post in Dawson Square with a sign that read, thief, watch me die.
I didn't write that.
Should I put him, watch him die, or should I put watch...
Me, first person.
First person?
Yeah.
Watch me die.
Yeah.
But aren't people going to be like, why would he write that?
He won't be there to answer that question.
But then if he wrote it, also, this would be very hard.
All right, do it MM style.
Do EM
Watch M die?
Yeah, because he's like doing it in the, I don't know, he's doing it in the mirror.
It was your note.
Well,
I'm dead.
I mean, I'm a court reporter, so I get very stuck on this shit.
I'm dead.
Are you the guy who?
Ira really came in handy on the gallows.
They really, thank God they had a carpenter.
Ira, can you build some stuff?
Yo, you want houses or a
seesaw?
He builds it.
He's like, putting the walls on.
No, guillotine is what we're.
Gallows.
So he was forced to survive.
a negative
70 degree winter night, but he somehow survived.
But then he was chased out by a classic torch-wielding mob.
Always.
Jack?
Jack was?
No, this is the guy that they
got tied up.
Watched me die.
But the other thing about a tar and feather, tar, hot.
Feathers, you know, that's what blankets are made of.
You know, it's like a tuvet.
Insulation.
Yeah, it's your whole body's warmer.
We know that tar then cools.
Feathers do not.
It's like I'm a Dow.
Jack, quote, there were no courts in the snow.
There were guns, ropes, and a great silence afterward.
I wish there was snow court.
That'd be awesome.
So, whoa.
Jack was lucky to stay away from all that stuff.
In fact, he even stayed away from mining.
He was more interested in spending time at the local bars, observing the sourdoughs, what is what they called seasoned miners.
listening to their stories and learning all he could through conversation.
Jack became friends with two brothers and camped outside their cabin, and he became very close with the men, but even closer to their 140-pound St.
Bernard Scotch collie mix, whose name was also Jack.
Whoa.
One of the brothers admired Jack's rapport with dogs.
Quote, Jack always spoke and acted toward the dog as if he recognized his noble qualities.
He had an appreciative and instant eye for fine traits and honored them in a dog as he would a man.
Good.
He's a dog guy.
Yeah, it's great.
I like him.
It's very likable.
That December, when the weather was at its worst, Jack left Dawson and headed eight miles upriver, joining his old partners where they had staked a claim.
They've lived mostly on canned meat, bread, and beans.
And whatever they could kill.
It's like us in the van.
It's very
similar.
And I can only imagine what was happening.
They had to chop water out of the river with an axe.
Chop water out of the river?
I'm going to go cut some water down for you.
I'm thirsty and feeling stabby.
It really took my brain a minute to get through that.
Yeah.
I'm going to go chop some water.
They would light fires to thaw the ground and dig for gold.
Oh, my God.
Well, that's not going to work.
No, obviously.
It didn't.
They but found practically none.
They were in sort of a makeshift cabin complex along the river, often hanging out with their neighbors and playing cards to pass the time.
I don't think they really wanted to find me quite out.
They were there.
They just were like, we're up here now.
I'm tired still from the walk.
Yeah.
More
beans.
More beans.
Almost every single one of these men would become characters in Jack's novels.
So soon enough, because of the lack of fruits and veggies, they all caught scurvy, and Jack got it the worst.
They called it Arctic leprosy, and it killed many prospectors.
His gums bled, his joints ached, and he lost strength.
All he could do to try and stop it was eat boiled beans and brush his teeth with salt.
Fuck.
Jesus Christ.
There are a lot of times where it genuinely thought someone fell.
There are a lot of times.
Where you look back.
I mean, we've talked about it a bunch, but it's like you'll look back and you'll be like, oh, there's no plumbing.
Like, people are just shitting in the streets or however like society that truly is eating boiled beans and brushing with salt well
first of all salt the beans
i'm i'm glad he was still committed to dental hygiene though yeah like trying like i always
read like when i read books about things that happened a long time ago i i like i i always wish like in you know like the three musketeers that there wasn't dental hygiene and so then i imagining the characters that half the dialogue would be like, your breath stinks.
Oh.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
We've talked, we definitely have talked about the breath.
The smells.
Just the smells.
And the way, like, talking to someone, you'd be like, yeah, it smells like shit.
And they'd be like, he stinks like shit.
Everything was like, man, it fucking stinks.
Yeah.
Smells like shit.
There was just a nice light change on that one, too.
Lighting was like, fucking bingo.
Time to work a little magic up there.
Oh, I thought that was a planned light cue.
Yeah, no, we're doing, well, well, you weren't at the queue to queue earlier.
Yeah, we're doing a lot of that.
Scurvy lights, hit them.
Let's go.
Make them yellow.
But the scurvy wasn't the thing that tormented him the most.
It was the quote: thousands and millions of mosquitoes biting him through overalls and heavy underwear.
So those are like industrial mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes have gone soft.
Yeah.
Woke.
Too much DEI in the mosquitoes.
Completely.
They can't even penetrate a basic HM garment.
It's really ridiculous how weak they are now.
Liberals.
Those lib-tarred mosquitoes.
Well,
before they bite you, they're like, May I take your blood?
It's like, just fuck out of here.
Cuck.
Suck your blood and read some bell hooks.
So the time had come for Jack to leave the Klondike and head back.
How the fuck is he going to get out of here?
Well, he just walked.
He went the other way.
What just rolled?
I mean, he made it.
I mean, he doesn't have to walk 20 times to get surprised.
He doesn't have all the shit anymore.
No,
it's not a picnic.
Jack summed up his time.
In the Klondike, quote, I saw the naked soul of man, and it was starving.
So once he got home, he recovered from scurvy and quickly got back to writing.
So he was a voracious writer, devouring empty pages, churning out action, adventure.
He'd often work for 18 hours a day on short stories based on his travels.
So he's a cocaine addict.
Well, there's, there's.
And there's.
I have another story about
my teeth.
Every story's about his mouth.
Gums, chapter 11.
Journey to the center of the molar.
But I mean, life must be so much better than what it was.
And he lived so many crazy that he was probably like, fucking, I don't mind.
Yeah.
I'll just go to work.
This is great.
My mouth works again.
Yeah, I can eat food.
Yeah.
When he wasn't writing, he was reading, learning how to write in a commercially viable way so he could finally make some fucking money for once in his life.
So nobody bid.
Jack became depressed.
Then suddenly he got a yes.
It was from Overland Monthly and it was the low ball fee of just $5.
Ow, dang it.
Is he like 24 at this point?
Yeah, or I think he's younger.
Yeah.
What?
Yep.
Jesus Christ.
Mouth lived a life, though.
So he reluctantly took the $5
and was so broke that he had to borrow a dime just to pick up a copy of his own story.
Then almost two years after he returned, penniless and despondent, he finally struck gold.
The Atlantic wanted to pay him almost five grand in today's money for a short story called An Odyssey of
the North.
He eagerly accepted, and his career took off into the stratosphere after that.
Jack had mastered the type of action-packed stories that were all the rage in the magazine world, and now, just 24 years old,
he was being hailed as the American Kipling.
Jack married his math tutor, Bessie.
We've all done that.
Yeah.
We've all done that.
He definitely hired her to fuck.
Like, he wasn't like, I want to learn math.
He's like, you're hot.
What do you do?
Will you teach me math?
Tell me.
Let's do algebra.
I need to learn some math to write about the Yukon.
And walk me through that again, huh?
They had two daughters, Joan and Becky.
But he still had the wonderlust and a wanderlust, and he wasn't quite ready to settle down.
He ran for mayor of Alaska.
Fucking idiot.
Right?
Still had the wanderlust.
After all that.
Yeah.
Died in Alaska.
You know, sometimes I want to get out there and just muck it up a little still.
Go see the old boys, lose a mouth again, something like that.
BFF a dog, chop down some ice.
Joan and Becky, I'm going to wander off and
be a traveling astrologer like my pappy
urinaries urinaries urinaries
um
he still he did run for mayor of oakland in 1900 but lost badly because he did not campaign
i get it
back then it was a lot harder to do that
his next project was to be a 4,000 word short story honoring Jack the Dog.
But unfortunately, quote, it got away from me.
That's so great.
It ballooned to over 30,000 words.
This was to become
He wrote it in just one month.
Wow.
So he's like Stephen King on cocaine writing.
Right.
In a, quote, creative fever dream and submitted it to Macmillan Publishing.
The head guy thought it was brilliant and offered the equivalent of $75,000 for the full rights.
Jack couldn't say no.
He had a wife and two kids to feed.
This proved to be one of the most lucrative deals in publishing history for Macmillan as it sold millions of copies and Jack didn't get a dime in royalties.
Yeah.
Wonder why he's a socialist.
But it didn't matter to him.
He was a celebrity now, making hundreds of thousands of dollars on stories and speaking engagements.
He was one of the first authors to live a life in the headlines like a movie star, and he spent his money like one, too.
He divorced his wife and married Charmian Kittridge, who
he'd known for years.
Easy, sir.
Her name is Chairman?
It's Charmian.
Oh, shit.
That is a miss.
I mean, maybe she's a communist.
Welcome to my wife, Chairman.
That, oh.
Okay, that's after you get married stuff.
Also, call me Chairman.
She's changed.
Someone should have checked that.
Yeah.
I'd like to gavel this wedding to order
So when when Jack had been injured in a buggy ride his wife Bess asked Charmian to take care of him and she did very well do that very very well, and that's when their affair began a little too well
She continued he continued to be a really big drinker He famously portrays alcohol as a figure he refers to as the noseless one
which represents the deceptive nature of alcohol and its power to control the drinker.
I don't get it.
I thought there was gonna be like a syphilis tie-in.
I know right?
Have a sip.
There you go.
Yeah, what's up, noseless?
There you go.
Feels pretty noseless right now.
That's right.
Tribune was a socialist firebrand and an author who Jack respected tremendously.
His own socialist views had only hardened during his time in the Yukon,
despite having a little dalliance with Nietzsche's great man theories.
The Cooperative Pact.
Typical 20-something.
Every fucking 22-year-old.
I'm getting into Nietzsche.
Shut the fuck up.
Oh my god.
Go for a walk, kid.
Get back to me when you don't hate women.
The cooperative pact survives and the lone wolves don't.
He expanded upon his beliefs in other writings, like in The People of the Abyss, when he embedded himself in the slums of London, England.
Quote, the people of the abyss are the human waste of the greatest empire the world has ever seen.
Oh, come on.
Lighten up.
Chill out.
What are you doing?
Just because your mouth came back to you.
He also set out without a warning, without structural change, socialism specifically, and he said collapse is inevitable.
Quote, the path of civilization is strewn with the wrecks of nations that have tried to lift themselves out of the abyss by charity and not by justice.
I feel like his writing would have really benefited from some punch-up.
Yep.
Just pitching some jokes.
A little heavy.
He wrote more specifically about his socialist views in books like The War of the Classes and Revolution and other essays.
explaining his views to the everyman, quote, socialism, when stripped of its academic finery, is merely the economic expression of the ethical desire for justice.
I got to remember that next time someone, yeah.
That's not covered with academic finery.
You know, it's the economic expression of the ethical manifestation of justice.
That's very every man kind of.
Yeah.
That's what you got to say.
That's a bumper stick.
That's what you say to the people in the abyss.
Hey, it's the ethical
expression of What?
Yeah.
You can't even remember it.
You just heard it.
I just heard it.
I didn't get it till this guy guy broke it down, but now it makes sense.
Now would you say it's the economic of the ethical?
No, no, it's the ethical
expression of the
ethical
desires of every
motherfucker.
Yeah.
Trust me, I married a chairman.
That's how this works.
He also said, quote, socialism is coming.
It is not a theory.
It is a force.
It is being born in the smoke of factory hells
and the blood of child labor.
I mean, imagine getting him to back to today.
You'd be like, wait, what the fuck?
See?
Wait a minute.
Emily Auster said, what?
Jack London's How It Started, How It's Going meme would suck so hard.
He's such a buzzkill.
He's doing memes.
He also predicted fascism in kind of a perfect way decades before Hitler with his novel The Iron Heel
featured a future capitalist oligarchy that makes up nine-tenths of 1% of the population and hoards 70% of the wealth.
God.
It's like literally right.
The oligarchy consumes the government and absolutely demolishes a socialist uprising in America.
Fuck.
He predicted manufactured consent and Goebbels' propaganda machine, the brown shirts, the hollow performance of democracy, and the regime as the arbiter of peace via the barrel of a gun.
Wow.
Another heel.
The novel in particular inspired not only writers like George Orwell, as he wrote in 1984, but also revolutionaries themselves.
Trotsky and Lenin both admired Jack and his book.
But he angered a lot of fellow socialists by predicting it would take a centuries-long struggle, not an overnight explosion in the streets.
Something that almost 120 years after its publication seems like it may have been pretty on the nose.
So many socialists attack Jack for embracing his celebrity lifestyle.
And Jack was a champagne socialist, you know, for sure.
But he believed everyone else should be too.
In a letter to fellow writer
Upton Sinclair, he wrote, quote, because I have tasted wine and known women, shall I be called less a socialist?
Because I wear clean shirts, shall I be called a traitor?
I have no patience with those who sneer at me for making money.
I am preaching socialism every day with every story I write.
Same.
So when he wasn't writing, when he wasn't doing social arguments, he kept busy working.
He traveled to Korea and Japan as a war correspondent for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner.
he didn't exactly have the best time.
Quote, the function of a war correspondent, so far as I can ascertain, is to sit down.
I'd love that he went and being like, what a vacation.
You know what?
I didn't have a great time.
The whole country was in a pretty bad state.
The function of a war correspondent, so far as I can ascertain, is to sit up on the hills where honored guests cannot be injured.
The fighting was so far away that we weren't certain any noise was involved.
That's so funny.
Think of today's war correspondents where they're just doing like warp horn.
They are always on a balcony, too.
Like right behind me.
It's unbelievable.
We're all living in fear.
Meanwhile, you just got to go to LA and be Australian.
Boom.
Fucking let's go.
He also traveled to the South Pacific with
Charmion on a yacht custom-made for the journey.
They were like about to hit rapids.
He was like, I've got an idea.
Heck no, what are you doing?
Trust me.
So this is where he kind of have have to talk about his pretty bad views on race.
Uh-oh.
It's always
something.
There's very few perfect.
John Brown, the only one.
John Brown's the only one.
John Brown.
Every time you're like, all right, we got a winner.
It's like, bad, he actually
had a slave.
He subscribed to Anglo-Saxon socialism, which is that socialism would overthrow capitalism, but only after the Anglo-Saxon race had outbred other peoples of the world.
Jesus Christ.
Way off.
A big miss.
His white supremacist views from his early writing.
I mean, you really teased us.
I was really on board.
He was also like a big white power guy.
So
there's a whole section in Marx.
It's in the third volume of Das Capital about surplus value and the accumulation of capital, and and then just like a lot of white people raw dogging.
The whole white people raw dogging sequel.
People overlook that part of Marx, but
yeah.
I mean it was so vulgar.
Yeah, there's a whole
section, no a-now.
Yeah.
Doggy will be the style.
So his white supremacist views from his early writings are a product of the contradictions of the time, but some of the things he wrote were just, you know, really fucking racist.
But his socialist views evolved, so did his views on race.
He wrote a book about being a boozer, John Barleycorn, and in it he wrote the first literary description.
That's a great fake hotel stay name.
In it, he wrote the first literary description of pink elephants.
Oh, wow.
Quote, there are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers.
There is the man, whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots,
who walks generously
with widespread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.
He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.
And then there's the guy who reads the story to him.
It's got your glasses.
That's how I see it.
He did become.
How do you believe in the superiority of the white race when you just saw fucking 70,000 dumb honkies die on their way to the Yukon?
Yeah.
Looking for gold.
Looking for gold.
Yeah.
Like, oh yeah, these people are definitely better.
These people
for the future of humanity.
Canada just tried to put a tariff on you to not go, and you're like, all right, sounds good.
We'll make 800 trips.
You fucking idiots.
We got this.
We're going to lose all our teeth and brush our teeth with salt, but
we should be in charge of the world.
That tracks.
When you're only eating boiled beans and brushing your teeth with salt, you're like, are we maybe not the chosen ones?
Are we the master race right now?
This feels like master race stuff, what we're doing.
Walk me through what the Indians were doing one more time.
Would you please?
I think they were using pinto beans.
What?
They refry the beans?
You can do that?
Genius.
He did become much more anti-colonialist, writing non-white people as complex, dignified, and capable characters.
And after his travels with Charaman, he even wrote a story about a Hawaiian leper as a metaphor for how
colonialism stripped the indigenous people of their autonomy under the guise of public health.
Quote, because we are sick, they take our liberty, we have obeyed the law, we have done no wrong, and yet they would put us in a prison.
Okay, so
he
evolved a bit on that.
It was also just the time.
Like everybody fucking thought that, like,
eugenics was like it.
Here we go.
But I'm not going to define it.
This is a different time.
Here we go.
He spent a lot of his money on a ranch in Glen Ellen and building a palatial home known as Wolf House.
All right, we get it.
Wolf House.
Sounds like where Charlie Sheen lives.
We get it.
You wrote a wolf story.
Yeah, I sure did.
The ranch pioneered the use of organic, sustainable farming, trying to show that socialist harmony with the earth can create a better world around us.
It was a success, although one that cost him far more money than he thought.
The house, unfortunately, burned down right before he was able to move in, and they had to rebuild.
Jesus Christ.
Wow.
Jack never made it into Wolf House because his kidneys failed.
I wonder why.
In part, obviously, due to alcoholism.
In 1916, he died.
He was 40.
Oh, my God.
He was 40?
Yeah.
Wow, he lived.
Since his death, he has become a bit of a punching bag by critics and academics.
They relegated him to juvenile literature, dismissing him as a boy's adventure author.
One critic quoted, his popularity became a liability.
He was too widely read to be taken seriously.
Wait, what?
Modern scholars have re-evaluated his work and have begun to appreciate him more.
But, you know, really, he's a vital, flawed character who stood astride of both 19th and 20th century.
His contradictions mirrored America itself between individualism and solidarity, and idealism and empire.
Jack Lennon biographer Earl Labor quoted: London wrote with his fists, his fire, and his contradictions.
If he was messy, it's because he was real.
There you go, Jack Lennon.
Holy shit.
The research was done by Josh Androwski.
Sources: Gold Fever, Deadly Cold, and the Amazing True Adventures of Jack London in the Wild by Richard Grant, to the short, frantic, rags to riches, Life of Jack London by Kenneth Brandt.
The Many Sides of Jack London by Owen Clayton, Inside Jack London's Story, From the Gold Rush to Literary Fame by Aaliyah Silverman, Jack London, American Life by Earl Labor, Jack London, A Writer's Fight for Better America by Cecilia Tiche, Jack London's Racial Lives, a critical biography by Jan Reisman Lee.
Oh, fuck.
All right.
Well, that's it, yeah?
Yeah.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
Appreciate it very much.
Thanks for coming out.
That's the end of our tour as well.
So,
God bless.
Thank you.
Thank you.
What's up, doll heads?
Join the Gare Force.
Come on, go to garethrones.com for tickets and information like going to see my new special taping.
That's right, I'm taping a new hour on October 4th at the Den Theater in Chicago, Illinois.
Two shows at 7:15 and a 9:30.
But before that, you can see me in Bozeman, Montana, September 5th and September 6th.
Los Angeles at the Lyric Hyperion Theater, September 13th, September 16th.
Then I'll be in Pasadena, California, September 17th.
And then I will be in San Diego at the American Comedy Co.
on September 21st.
I'll be in Chandler, Arizona, September 24th.
Kansas City, Missouri, September 26th, September 27th.
Columbia, Missouri, September 28th.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30th.
Appleton, Wisconsin, October 1st.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, October 3rd.
Two shows.
And like I said, the special taping, October 4th, two shows.
And then in November, November 6th, 7th, 8th, I'll be in Sunnyvale, California at Rooster T Feathers.
Go to GarethReynolds.com for tickets and information.
Join me.
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