*rc3 preroll music*
Herald: So the next talk is Mike Bonanno of the Yes Men, and I think we'll just
allow him to get started right away. Mike, please go.
Mike Bonanno: Thank you so much and hello everybody. It's so good to be here
participating in the chaos. I can say that I've intended to for years, but finally,
maybe due to the pandemic, I'm finally here. So and it's great to to be here
after observing from afar for about twenty five years. Anyway, I was told that the
other day that I'm getting kind of old. The Yes Men are elderly now. And so a lot
of people wouldn't, you know, know very much about the types of things or what we
had been doing. And I'll admit I've forgotten most of it myself. So I look
through it, I looked through the archives, just something that would introduce what
we do a little bit. And I found this picture that you see here where I'm
holding up an ExxonMobil card, business card. And then Andy, who's the guy that I
work with at the Yes Men, the co-founder of the group is there holding a National
Petroleum Council card. And this is from an event that we were at and I think
2009 or so where we went to a conference in Calgary, Alberta,
representing these two companies. We've been weaseling, weaseling our way into
events, conferences and sometimes online types of venues for over two decades now
and representing people in power. And we do one of two things. Either we do
something satirical and funny in front of an audience that usually thinks we are the
most powerful people in the room, or we do something that is more utopian where we
announce the reality that we might like to see, like in our wildest dreams, what we
might think ExxonMobil might say if they suddenly turned around and stopped being
some of the world's largest climate criminals and had a kind of reckoning and
woke up and decided to fight climate change. So anyway, there's been a lot of
things that have happened over the last two decades in terms of the media
landscape and the sort of flexibility of reality that have made our tactics more or
less useful. Also, like who's in power politically makes a difference, because
this, the types of things that we do, this kind of mischief we find works pretty well
when there's people who are movable, who's in office. Whereas if you have a total
despotic tyrant, then you have to go to more tactical methods instead of the types
of things that we do that are all about, you know, pushing political leaders to
change or about sort of bolstering a movement like creating some exciting, fun,
entertaining media that shows us all that the people that we're fighting are
actually really fallible and no different than you and I, despite the kind of power
that they hold. So I'm going to go ahead and play a little video clip here.
Hopefully it works. This is a video clip from our second, third Yes Men film.
Narrator within video: We don't usually get arrested, but ever since the 1990's,
Mike and I have been dressing up in secondhand suits and impersonating big
and powerful people. Actor: Hello, this is Reggie Lambrick
calling. I'm from the "Yes Bush Can" campaign
A: Hi, this is Kinnithrung Sprat from the WTO.
A: My name is Francesco Guerrero A: My name is Brad, I'm Halliburton's
N: We weasel our way onto center stage, at least for a little while.
Rr: Mr. Oswin, you're not even on the directory. You're not even listed. You
don't even have a phone number. A: It's come to that.
Rr: The hoax was an elaborate one. A: For the first time, Dow is accepting
full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe.
R: So the prank, which briefly knocked three percent of Dow shares.
N: When the jig is up, it makes the news. R: It's a group of pranksters who call
themselves The Yes Men. R: An activist group called Yes Men…
N: It's not the way most people protest,
but it's our way to say no to corporate greed.
*pop* Oooh!
M: Oops! OK *laughing*. So, I just want to
give a little bit of backstory: I've made three films, three feature docs in the
last 15 years. We released one, it seems, every five years. That's kind of a
compilation of a bunch of the antics that weave the exploits, whatever we want to
call them. But a lot of people ask, well, how do you start doing this? With what
initiative? Why, how? And it all kind of happened by accident. I just wanted to
start out by showing you the World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva. This
is obviously a pretty large building in one of the most expensive real estate
markets in the world. And how did we get our first major kind of exploit like this
was when we when we actually impersonated the WTO. And so this is their
headquarters. This at the time was our headquarters. You can see this little plot
here is where we lived. This is a meeting of the OMC, the WTO. And of course, this
is the kind of meeting that we used to have. And so people would say, well, how
did you end up representing the WTO on television? You know, on stage? At
business meetings? Here we are standing with several dignitaries in Australia
after a trade conference there. And the answer was, is actually way simpler
than it needs to be. Like a lot of things with social engineering, it's actually a
lot dumber and less technical than people imagine. This is Andy at a computer. At
that thing down there. And that's called that's called the computer. There's a
television in the background, a CRT. We had put up a website called gwbush.com
that was meant to be a satirical website for George Bush, who at the time was
running for president. He wasn't president yet, but you can see that his banner for
his website said valuable, said "education, values, responsibility". It's
the banner on the bottom. And then our banner at the top said, "valuable,
educated, prosperous". These are subtle differences, but they're differences that
make a big difference in English because there and of course, in this one, instead
of sitting with his wife smiling in front of the Texas state capitol, he's pointing
his finger at black people. So it was meant to be satirical, but it turned out a
lot of people took it seriously anyway. And it got a lot of press coverage. This
is some old, an old Netscape window, browser window here. And then, sorry, it
got a lot of press coverage and then actually, George Bush denounced it at
several press conferences and he made it famous, quote, at the time, although he
made tons of famous gaffes and at this press conference he said about us, there
ought to be limits to freedom. That was what he was suggesting when they asked
what they should do about us for making this website that look like he hasn't made
fun of them. We put up a website at gatt.org, which a lot of people associated
with the World Trade Organization, because GATT, the Global Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade, was the predecessor organization to the WTO and the predecessor, the
previously existing agreement. So we had that website. This is actually Bretton
Woods where they first set up the GATT, I believe, in 1946. And then of course the
WTO building that you've already seen on the shores of Geneva. Now in the early
1990s, the mid late 1990s, there was a big global movement against neoliberalization
and neoliberal policies. And the WTO was a big focus of that. And Andy and I were
participating. This is one of the marches that you see of people mostly in the
global south who are rebelling against the free market ideologies that were really
hurting the poorest of people in many of those countries. And of course, there are
protests like the famous Battle of Seattle, which was famous because it shut
down the city of Seattle during a OMC meeting. And this is a great picture of
what it's like to be to be there at that event. It was. But unfortunately, we
couldn't be there. I mean, Andy couldn't be there to experience this wonderful
feeling of tear gas. And so, feeling left out, we put up a fake website for the WTO.
And again, it's a satirical website, but it's at gatt.org.
And unlike the WTO's web sites that…
The WTO website was very hard to find out how to talk to anybody there.
Although they emphasized their transparency as an organization, they were
very hard to actually speak to. And since their web page had literally thousands of
pages of documents, legal documents that you needed to be a lawyer to understand.
Ultimately, it wasn't very transparent. And so our web site, on the other hand,
gatt.org, was very easy to hit the contact button and get in touch with what a lot of
people turned out to think was the, were the WTO. Now, that became news and the WTO
issued a press release saying: warning, fake WTO website. And so since they had
actually then sent this press release to their entire mailing list, the Google
algorithm, which was fairly new at the time, ranked our web site very high in the
rankings just below theirs actually. Without any warnings about it being fake.
So many people would go to their real WTO website, would fail to be able to get in
touch with them, and then instead would actually come to our website and on our
website, we posted these alerts like fake WTO website, misleading the public just to
make sure that people knew that we that we existed. We wanted to help them help the
WTO do this work of warning people about the fakes, this sort of hall of mirrors.
So once again, the word deplorable gets used in reference to us. This here is the
then director general of the WTO whose name happened to be Mike Moore, and he was
from New Zealand, very different. He's a former prime minister of New Zealand, very
different prime minister than they have now, really. But he held a press
conference where he announced that he deplored the fake website and said that
they undermine the transparency. And so, of course, we published this on our fake
website as well. And then immediately it gets picked up and widely, widely picked
up by the press. So without actually going to Seattle, we managed to actually engage
the WTO and to get them to talk to us, to address us, and then to get several rounds
of media attention that we used to try to redirect traffic to what was happening in
Seattle, to what was happening on the ground with the movement. And actually,
this for us, we've been doing things like this before, but for us this was like a
really big win because we realized, wow, this took very little work. It was a lot of
fun and with absolutely no power - you remember what our office looked like
compared to the WTO - we were able to sort of do these moves that would throw a much
heavier opponent like judo moves. And so, anyway, we got into it. So many people
then were mistaking our website for theirs, thanks to the sort of internet
being so new and the you know, I mean, the web, the world wide web and the way search
engines worked, that we got a lot of email from people, questions like: "Could you
advise me of the relationship of Gibraltar to the WTO?" And this is the Treasury
Department of the Isle of Man asking us this question. So, you know, it's fun,
it's entertaining. Another question might be: "I would like to interview a WTO
spokesperson on South America's new technology sector." By the way, on the
relationship of Gibraltar to the WTO, we explained in detail how Gibraltar was a
rock south of Spain, a really big rock *laughs* in the, basically, in between the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean and the WTO is this human construction,
imagination organization, very different thing. So we we became experts basically
very quickly overnight. It was a lot of fun. And then finally, we were so good at
it, so good at being the WTO that we started to get invitations. "Can the director
general, Mike Moore, address our conference in Salzburg?" was a question we
got and well, this is Mike Moore. This is what he looks like. And we realize, damn,
we can't we can't possibly be that guy. This is a problem. We can't send him
either. So we wrote to them and we said, well, we can't send you Director General
Mike Moore, but we would very much like to send a substitute. And that's when they
embraced the idea of Andreas Bicklbauer, Dr. Andreas Bicklbauer, which is a name we
got out of the Vienna phone book. Actually, a friend of ours, Hans of Uber
Morgan, had sort of sponsored our trip by leaving some cash on the table of his
apartment and leaving us the keys. So when we arrived in Vienna with our new
thrift store suits, we were immediately ready to go to this conference as the
World Trade Organization. So that's sort of how it happened in the beginning. This
adventure in mischief, which has now lasted twenty years, doing these things in
person was something that just almost sort of like occurred spontaneously. But then
once we were onto that and into that, it became quite an energizing and addictive
sport thing that we've got a sportcoat that launched us onto the twenty years of
fun and excitement. And we haven't quite landed yet. But I'm worried about that
landing because it could could be a rough one. So I want to just frame what we're
doing a little more. You know, some of you probably recognize this guy. This is Santa
Claus. This is an actual photograph of Santa Claus emerging from a chimney,
looking at a photographer who happens to be crouched in this room in somebody's
house. They both had to break in, in order to do this. And so my point here is that,
you know, we love mischief, we love mischief, and we actually even love
trespass. We love breaking in. We love breaking and entering. The stories of
crossing borders, crossing boundaries, changing shape, putting on disguises, the
masquerade. These are the stories that really carry us through history. They are
some of our oldest stories. And this season, with Christmas is no exception.
Now, the stories have been hijacked and manipulated in a number of ways, just as
all information and stories are in our culture and Santa Claus is reckless, break
in in order to leave gifts, have become something hijacked by capitalism, in part
created by capitalism. But the fact that we want to lean on this idea of him
trespassing, I think is that's really important. That's a key to something. So
remember, don't tell anybody, though. Santa Claus will do so. We have this
history we see it fitting into something that's sort of common to all cultures, and
this is the idea of the trickster. This is often a deity or sometimes it's actually
based on a real historical figure that's more recent. But all cultures have these.
I won't say all, but nearly all cultures have these trickster characters. There's a
few listed on this sort of cartoon image here, Kokopelli of the Hopi or the Zooni,
which is, you know, in the United States, in North America, Aboriginal people in
North America, Anansi, the spider of West Africa, the Raven and the Pacific
Northwest. It goes on and on because they're everywhere. Everybody has these.
And it doesn't take too much digging to find out about your own trickster
character in your culture. And since we're kind of in, I think mostly in Germany
right now, and actually my mother is Dutch, so I'm going to stick with, I'm
going to go with Reynard, the Fox or the Fox as a character, as a trickster
character. And so we're going to look at a little bit more history through the Fox's
lens to frame the types of things that we're doing through the eyes of the of the
trickster. Jesus, another trickster. *Laughs*. And I'm not a big fan, although I am a fan of
some of his original tactics. You know, he rode in on this donkey and this is an
actual photograph of him because, you know, somebody had a time machine and went
back and got this shot of him riding a donkey into Bethlehem. And, you know, this
is like nobody rides a donkey into Jerusalem. Nobody rides a donkey. It
didn't make sense. He did it because he knew that people would talk about it. It
was a symbolic action that was meant to project the kind of humility and make
people tell stories about what happened. So the idea was to propagate this myth,
which, of course, works so well that now we have you know, we have Christianity.
But here's Nasrudin riding a donkey backwards a century later. And again, an
original photo. This is sort of a wise aged coming from out of Turkey and part of
Islamic tradition. And again, all these stories, though, are stories of a kind of
wisdom. And these are sort of the reason I say they're Trickster's is that they were
fighting larger powers. I mean, Jesus was fighting the Romans. Jesus was leading a
movement of liberation at the time. It became something entirely different. But
we see the same thing. This version of the trickster, that's Nasrudin is like a wise
man is usually about telling a story where through cleverness and sometimes agility,
a character can outwit others who have more power, who would otherwise exercise
power over them. I mean, there are good trickster's and bad, but we like to focus
on the idea of the good trickster, which is those who are fighting power instead of
those who are serving power. So here's another example, a modest proposal. This
is a pamphlet published by Jonathan Swift where he suggested that the Irish eat
their babies in order to solve the hunger problem in Ireland. Because, of course,
the potato famine was not a famine that was caused by lack of food in that
country. It was caused by lack of money, as most famines are. The British were
still shipping grains out of Ireland because they made money when people were
starving to death because the potato crops had failed. So this is a comment on that.
Well, why don't the Irish just eat their own babies? And then it was, it's become
one of the most famous examples of, you know, English satire in history and
English language that is. This is the seventeen hundreds. So the whole point
here is that this pamphlet, like a lot of this sort of hacking techniques that we
end up using now, this pamphlet was like disguising itself as something else when
it was first published. OK, I'm going to skip ahead. These are a few pictures of
the women's movement, but I want to get through this stuff quickly. The whole
purpose here is to show you that, again, this obsession with stories with
infiltrating with causing trouble, which they did, is something that's constant,
has continued to happen, to occur. Hang on a second ... he's showing a low power, but
I'm a power problem. I'm going to have to go and get another power supply because
this one is not working. But this is a group called Climate Rush that was, that
was repeating those actions. So I'm going to run off and get another power supply. I
will be back in just a moment. I'm going to leave you with a picture of a Gandy's
saltmarsh. Now, just a minute. This is actually Surmont Sumati Naidu, who is
leading one of the salt marches. I'll be right back.
Herald: I will use this interruption to remind you that you can ask questions at
the hashtag "#rc3one", "one" spelled out as a word on Twitter and Mastodon and also on
the IRC. And now we all sing some songs together and wait.
Mike: Hey, everybody, sorry. They are good *laughs*.
H: Welcome back. M: Thank you. That's not the thing that I
expected to stop working. Never had a power supply just stop in the middle. OK,
well, anyway, I was also going to say that a lot of the stuff that we get inspiration
from comes from principles of nonviolence going where you're not supposed to go,
crossing borders. This is, again, trickster tactics. So the tactics of
civil disobedience are the same kind of tactics that we use when we infiltrate and
do something in a business meeting. It's doing something illegal, something that is
illegal, but might, of course, have just ends in mind or might even be the right
thing to do. So the salt march in India during the Indian independence movement
was where people marched to the sea and made salt, which was illegal because it
was being taxed by the British. And it's one of the ways that the British crown was
suppressing the local populations and preventing India from having autonomy and
from being able to break the yoke of colonialism. So, again, the idea was to
try to cross those boundaries and to do it in a way that was visible to the world.
Another example is the bus protests in the United States during the civil rights
movement. This is a woman actually well before Rosa Parks who this photo here is
of, there was this woman whose last name is Morgan, who - this is over a decade
earlier -, who was riding on the bus and refused to give up her seat. And so there
are many, many people doing these sorts of tactics which were really about crossing
these borders, crossing these boundaries. All right. I'm going to move ahead here
through a few more slides of occupations, things like the American Indian movement
that was, sorry, this is Indians of all tribes occupying Alcatraz saying this is,
this space is ours. This is after the prison had left the island. This is just
off the coast of San Francisco in 1971 and again at Standing Rock,
same kinds of tactics, occupation, refusing to move and getting moved by the
authorities and a display of violence that shows really that should in theory at
least be embarrassing for those wielding power when they claim to be benevolent.
Billboard alteration, another simple transgression. It's just like going up
there and changing a billboard. Street signs, you can change the street signs in
Malcolm X Street, which is something that in the early 90's I was doing in Portland,
Oregon, and this was in protest of them not naming a street for Martin Luther
King. Sometimes it is as simple as changing an existing sign. Like Hollyweed.
I show this because it's a successful campaign. You know, weed is now pretty
much legal. Well, it's legal in California and in it will be soon, probably in most
of the United States, if not all. And things like banner hangs, again, going
where you're not supposed to. Getting your message there. If you don't have the money
for a banner, you can draw it on a beach. You can put on a costume like Superbarrio
in Mexico City. This is after the earthquake in 1987. This guy showed up
wearing a wrestling outfit and demanded rights for the poor people in Mexico. And
the neighborhoods that weren't being repaired by the government. And people
loved him so much and the media loved him so much. That when he started to challenge
political leaders to wrestling matches, they kind of had to show up and talk to
him. Otherwise, it would be very embarrassing. So this is an example of
using some kind of flamboyant tactic in plain sight to go places you're not
allowed to go. And then again, the masked man, the identity here for the Zapatistas
as a sort of the flip side of that is the obscured identity, you know. Wearing a
mask because you have to. Because you're actually participating in an armed
rebellion. But also this movement of the Zapatistas was really thinking very much
about their media image and about presenting their revolution to the world.
And having it exists on a global stage. Oh, and here is Comandante Ramona, who's
the leader of the Zapatistas with Subcomandante Marcos. And again, thinking
about who is in charge here. And it's this under five foot tall indigenous elder who
is running the Zapatista revolution at the time in 1994. Just one or two more slides
here of other things. To put it all in context, here's a group called the Space
Hijackers with one of their tanks. They had a few they bought a few tanks. It
turns out that in the UK it's not that hard to buy them. And they dressed as
these sort of comic riot police. And this was sort of the clown car that distracted
the real riot police who followed them. And then let their other tank roll right
into the largest arms show in the world in London. So sometimes these plots involve
decoys, involved many layers in order to access these venues. But this is a picture
of a teddy bear catapult. The fun thing about this, this is that the FTAA, a
protest in in Quebec City, in Canada. And the fun thing about this is that it
created a dilemma for the police. Because the world leaders are meeting inside the
fortress city. Literally, it's the only fortress city in North America. Europe has
a lot of them. But this is at the top of the hill. There's a fort in Quebec and
that's where they were meeting. And, of course, the antiglobalization activists
surrounded it and laid siege to it. And one group built this hilarious catapult
and were flinging teddy bears in. And the police were faced with the decision. Do we
arrest? Do we stop the teddy bears from being flung in? And do we arrest the
catapult and then look ridiculous walking away with it? Or do we let them keep
flinging? Neither option was a good one. They arrested the activists. And
they then there's this hilarious picture of them hauling around their catapult
teddy bears. If you can't make a catapult, you don't have the means, maybe you have
some bread and you can strap it to your head like in the Egyptian... the recent
revolution in the Arab Spring. Where people were strapping all kinds of things
to their heads to make a statement about the violence that was being perpetrated
against them. Because, of course, the state is saying that they were creating
the violence and the activists were saying, no, we don't even have helmets.
We're going to just strap whatever we have to our head. And it became a hilarious
living meme. Where people are walking around with all kinds of crazy makeshift
helmets. One more image, the flying penis that attacked Garry Kasparov in, I think
what became a very popular viral video for its moment. And you can look this up, but
this is also a warning. Because this phallus, which is flying, it's like an RC
helicopter with a dildo attached to it. And this thing, which was flown against
Kasparov, who was at the time the strongest opposition candidate to Putin,
could very well be the KGB's flying phallus. So everybody uses these tactics.
And I say that because, you know, it was, it became a really popular and
embarrassing video that was against Kasparov. And so who knows who was behind
it. Who was at the controls? So to go back to what we do with the Yes Men. We are not
beneath a few phallic metaphors ourselves because it works really well When you're
trying to impersonate people in power. This is an example of one time when we
went to a conference in Finland representing the WTO and announced that
the WTO's solution to the problem of sweatshops was this thing called the
"Employee Visualization Appendage". Which was a three foot long phallus that had a
kind of heads up display on it, that allowed you to see your remote workers
anywhere in the world. And give them electric shocks. And of course, the
audience loved it because because they thought we were the most powerful people
in the room. At the beginning of the talk, we were wearing business suits and we made
a breakaway business suit that I could tear off of Andy, in one quick movement. And
then this three foot long inflatable phallus was instantly deployed with a CO₂
cartridge. Inflated in a matter of maybe a second and a half. And this is a story
from the newspaper, the second largest daily in Finland, that sort of
explains a little bit about the WTO plans. So I don't know, how well you could
see those videos.Can I get a little feedback on that? Can anybody tell me how
easy it was to see some of the video? H: It looked OK. The sound was great and
the video was very stuttery. But you could do it.
M: OK, so I'll show a little bit more video. I'm going to actually show... I'm
going to skip this one. This is probably the most famous of the things that we've
done. It's in our second film, which is called "The Yes Men fix the World". And
you can find that, it's on You Tube, other places, file sharing. And this is
where Andy was representing Dow Chemical on a live television broadcast on the 20th
anniversary of the Bhopal catastrophe. And as Dow Chemical, he took responsibility
for the disaster and offered to pay back the victims and meet their demands. And
clean up the plant site. So sometimes you use that tactic where we, if we're given
enough power and we have the right platform, it's incredibly useful to
announce that sort of utopian solution. Or to announce that the company that you're
targeting is meeting the demands that activists have been asking for
years. Because then it puts the company in a real dilemma.They have no good
choice. They either have to say "That wasn't us and we are not fixing the problem that
we created." Or if they ignore it, then they have this disinformation out there in the
universe. That means they have to act. So I'm going to skip that and I'm going to go
to this, which is a more slightly more recent thing. This is also pretty old,
though. This is, I think in our last Yes Men movie called 'The Yes Men Are
Revolting'. And what we're doing here is creating a replica of the stage at the
Copenhagen climate conference. So this is 2009, the COP15. And the reason, we just
wanted to create something that looked enough like it so that we can make
Internet videos to embed in our fake website that would allow us to make
announcements as the COP15 that would, I mean as the official climate conference on
behalf of Canada and Uganda. And I'm going to play a little video here.
Newsreader: Well, while Terry was looking through those documents, the world was
laughing at Canada because of another one. It surfaced as a press release or so
everyone believed. But soon it was clear Canada had been punked. Leslie McKinnon
reports. McKinnon: First, there was this demo
inside parliament. 20 or so protesters who caused a minor stir. Then this Greenpeace
paper, but that got mostly reported as a breach of security story. Neither managed
to get Canada's climate policy as much attention in Copenhagen as today's
multilayered hoax. The day began with this press release announcing the astonishing
news that Canada was suddenly doubling its emission cuts to 40 percent below 1990
levels by 2020 and that it would generously pony up 13 billion dollars to
be allocated to the African countries for emissions reduction. Then there was this
article about it on what looked like the Wall Street Journal's website. See then
this, a news conference purportedly by the Ugandan delegate, posted on what looked
like the Copenhagen conference website. Delegate: Dearest Delegates.
McKinnon: It looked amazingly real until the speaker compared Canada's oil reserves
to a loaded gun. Delegate: ... and seemed ready to pull the
trigger on millions of us around the globe. You left us no choice but to deal
as criminal. McKinnon: But a press release from
Environment Canada followed, that seemingly deplored the spoof releases and
false hopes. This turned out to be a hoax. In fact, it was all a hoax.
Person 1 in video: I mean, you think it's a game, but it's not a game. It's a
serious situation. Person 2: You're playing games. I'm not
playing games. McKinnon: Truth can be stranger than
fiction. This is the prime minister's spokesman blaiming the stunt on Stephen
Elbo (?) of the environmental group [inaudible].
Person 2: And I want an apology. McKinnon: And this is also the real thing.
Jim Prentice: I was in the plenary session at the time that this happened, and I
really can't comment any further. Interviewee: Why is it a hoax that Canada
is going to do the right thing? McKinnon: This environmentalist thinks the
whole elaborate joke worth. Interviewee: I had nothing to do with this
one, but I'm really happy that they did it.
McKinnon: As to who pulled this off. There are reports tonight it's a group of
pranksters who call themselves the Yes Men. They say they'll have a press
conference tomorrow, if you can believe that. Leslie McKinnon, CBC News, Ottawa.
Newsreader: Well that climate related stunt is one of many that have happened
lately. Bonanno: OK, so just to wrap that little
thing up. You can see here that we're just in a basement. Basically, these
microphones are just made out of pipe cleaners and electrical tape. We printed
out a bunch of you know, we had to make our own teleprompter, print out a bunch of
the logos and paste them up on the wall. We use the reverse shots of the audience
for the videos from other videos that we found already on their website, and it
created this kind of illusion where we could do both the big conference room and
the press briefing room fairly easily. So we made several videos and then eventually
we had the press conference the next day, which highlighted mostly the position of
the Ugandan participants in this project, particularly Kodili Chandia, who's there
sitting in the middle in that red suit. So I just wanted to show that, because it's
really interesting. And that's, again, it's 10 years old and it was effective at
the... at that moment. And there weren't a lot of people talking about fake news at
that time. But something that people are really concerned about now is whether
these tactics work anymore. And I think it just depends on the context. We found that
sometimes they work really well. In fact, we had a successful action a few weeks ago
that got a lot of attention for the Bank of England's fiscal policy. But they don't
really work very well against a rogue head of state like Donald Trump or something.
There's no amount of satire or kind of like utopian thinking that can work on
that... on that kind of wildcard. So just to end the talking part or the ranting
part, this here we have an image of Renard the fox, which is, of course, something
I'd like to leave you with. And I think getting in touch with all of our trickster
roots is a good thing to do, because when we find the roots, we also find that we
have common ground with everybody else who has trickster characters in their cultural
histories. And this is forever confused, only confuse from below. This is one of
our primary tenets of Confuse-ianism. And we've started a school called the
Trickster Academy. We can talk about that later. OK, I'm going to stop sharing and
talk to you in person. Herald: I think I'm back.
B: Great. Sorry, that talk took so long. I just…
H: That's OK. You had a lot of interesting stuff to say.
B: I got ambitious with saying things.
H: And I think the phrase "the KGB's flying phallus" is one for the ages.
B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean maybe the phallus
people are listen are here now and can come forward and ask a question or tell us
who they are. But as far as I know, nobody knows. Could still be the KGB.
H: All right. We have the first questions. Questions.
Why are you guys always such assholes?
B: Yeah, that's a really good question.
We are always such assholes because
we don't care about what people think about us.
I was once at a party where me and my brother had built this giant tower of
chairs in in the swimming pool. Because it was like this fancy place. We didn't get
to go to fancy places like that, and we dive off the giant tower of chairs. It was
great fun and we thought we knew how to have a party, but apparently people were
really offended and then somebody lost their golden necklace in the pool. And so
we, of course, were swimming and we went and found it for the guy. And he was so
excited and so overjoyed. He said, I don't care what everybody else thinks. You guys
are OK. So I've always remembered that word of wisdom. And I thought, OK, our
goal is not to make friends with people. Our goal is to get to that place. In fact,
we can be the fall guy for a big organization that's worried about the
reputation. So like if the Sierra Club, big environmental organization, wants to
use the kind of tactics that we do, but is worried that their membership will gonna
be unpleased, then they can get in touch with us and we'll do it for them.
H: So that's how you finance working on The Yes Men full time?
B: I actually finance it by working at a university, so I still teach at
university, but Jacques more than I has financed it through things like that. And,
and some of the actions–quite a few of the actions–have been financed by, by
large NGOs like the Greenpeaces of the world.
H: Nice. So people on the Internet want to know if you've ever had to go to jail for
your actions. B: I've never had to go to jail for these
kinds of actions. H: You went to jail for unrelated reasons?
B: I went I went to jail for ice skating once. Seriously, come on. New York City.
I just, you know…
I highly recommend ice skating on Prospect Park Lake.
It was originally built for ice skating.
You know there's pictures of hundreds of people doing it in the 19th century.
But if you do it now, you get arrested.
And they actually take you in overnight.
So you get to spend a night in jail. Which, by the way,
is a very... it's not exclusive, but it's expensive.
It costs the taxpayers $1700 per night.
H: It's a pretty good hotel for this kind of money.
B: Yes. Yes. It's like a five star.
H: So did you read any book about social engineering
or did you just wing it until you figured out all the tricks?
B: It was, sort of, yeah.
It was like reverse engineering the social engineering for us.
Because it was figuring it out as we went,
but then starting to discover a world of people doing things
and yeah reading about it.
So, and there are so many people doing so many amazing things.
I mean, I'm loving following some of these people now on
even Youtubers who do stuff like this.
So yeah, but there are a few books.
I'm reading a great book about early con men right now that's really fun.
It's like… I can't remember the title. I'd have to grab it to read the title.
but yeah, constantly constant education.
And also, I think it's necessary also to always have innovation.
You know, but ultimately, it seems like it does boil down to the one thing
and that is understanding what somebody wants, right?
Like if you know who you're talking to,
and you know what they want,
then you can build a world that delivers it to them
and that seems to deliver to them the thing that they desire.
And that is… That usually works really well.
You know, it's a…
even on people who are expecting it.
*laughing*
H: All right, the next one is a trivia question,
which I really enjoy as a concept.
What are the top three most impactful events in world history
that you can summarize in the fewest words possible?
Sounds like a game show. I like it.
B: Top three
H: Fewest words
B: In human history?
H: In the world history. B: In world history.
H: So I guess it can include geological events before humans.
B: Yeah, I kind of want to say, you know, Big Bang, even though I don't know.
That's what I've been told, I don't totally really understand it, but…
Big Bang. How many words am I left?
H: I think as few as possible.
B: Big Bang, asteroid, Anthropocene.
H: Very good. I'm sure you won, whatever the game was.
B: I feel like I won. I feel great about that answer.
H: How did you guys come up with the human candle idea?
And maybe explain the human candle idea.
B: So the human candle idea was...
Actually this goes back to the very first slide! Thanks for the call back.
When I'm holding up the business card that says Exxon.
We were at a conference representing ExxonMobil
in Calgary, Alberta, at the stampede grounds
which is where they have the largest rodeo in the world,
and they also have Canada's largest oil conference.
And we had convinced them to host us
by telling them that Lee Raymond, who is the former CEO of ExxonMobil,
would go to their conference. So I claim that I was from a PR agency,
got in touch with the people running the conference.
I had a domain name that looked like
Hill+Knowlton or Burson-Marsteller. I can't remember who.
One of the big PR companies that tends to do this kind of
high level, you know, bullshitting.
And so I promised them that Lee Raymond had a very important
announcement to make that would really put their conference on the map.
And, of course, they were excited about it. But then…
This is the tricky part.
At that point, I had to tell them that,
you know, they had to keep it secret
until just before the announcement because
what he was going to say had such repercussions for the global economy
that they could very well be breaking
various kinds of SEC (that's like, stock market) laws,
if they didn't embargo the information.
So I said, this is important. You're part of a web of, you know,
You're part of a bubble of secrecy. We have to maintain the secret.
Because as soon as people know that he's going to make a big announcement,
they're going to freak out, because he had a new position with the government.
And so they bought it. And, in fact, this is one of those
counterintuitive things where you would think that telling them that you have this
great honeypot for their conference, this guy who other people are going to register
to see at their conference, you think that that then when you tell them that they
can't tell anyone that it would be immediately blow you up, but it doesn't
because they feel like they're on the inside of something big then.
And so they kept the secret.
And then what we decided we're going to announce was that
ExxonMobil had a climate change solution.
Which was to turn the humans who die as a result of climate change
into a new biofuel called Vivoleum.
And so we had an animated thing.
It's in our second movie, The Yes Men Fix the World.
But that idea came from us thinking about
what is the logical extension of ExxonMobil's climate policy?
Because at the time, it had just been revealed
that ExxonMobil had done all of this
very shady suppression of knowledge about the about climate change.
ExxonMobil had scientists working for them in the 70s that knew that climate change
was huge problem and they had decided to suppress the information themselves.
And then they went on a protracted campaign
of suppressing the information at the federal level in the United States
and at the global level.
So they became the target,
and this announcement became the… what we were going to do.
And then, of course, when we're at the conference, at the very last minute,
Lee Raymond, the former CEO of ExxonMobil,
who's now has a federal position with the US government,
Doesn't show up, and a substitute takes his place on the stage.
Then that's. Yeah.
So did I answer the question? I can't remember.
H: I think someone wanted to know how you you came up with the idea.
H: But… B: Yeah, that was...
H: But that is also difficult to answer, right?
B: I think it was really just shooting the shit, as they say, with with some friends.
And as I remember, it was a guy called Bob Ostertag, who worked with us for a while,
who is actually a more of like a musician. And, you know, anyway…
He was the one, I think, who really pushed that idea forward.
And it turned out to be a really fun one. *laughs*
H: I mean it's basically a direct callback to the Jonathan Swift stuff, right?
You really get very into people's bodies.
B: It is. It's a classic. I mean, babies, people eating them, cannibalism…
I mean, these are like…
You know, they hit you. They hit you. Right where it, right where you feel it.
*chuckles* H: Yeah. All right. Another question is:
Do you worry at all that your campaigns erode trust in the media?
Or do you just think that they should maybe pay some more attention?
B: Yeah, no, we don't worry about that at all. I mean, it's…
It's weird because for a while, there was something to worry about there,
because people's, y'know, trust in the media.
I mean, now it's just a… it's just a weird landscape, totally bizarre.
I mean, in terms of what people believe or don't believe.
One of the things that we do all the time, though, is
reveal our hoaxes immediately after we perpetrate them.
And so the result is that there is actually more information
as opposed to, you know, what we see as fake news
which is people who are perpetrating a hoax,
and they mean for it to exist for eternity, ideally.
Like, if you create a falsehood, and you're not revealing it,
that's the type of thing that the advertising industry,
PR agencies have done, and governments have done for centuries.
But our types of hoaxes are meant to be revealed right away.
H: All right. I have a mysterious question. B: Yes!
H: Oh, OK. Now I understand. What are your thoughts about the orange man?
And I've just realized that that's Donald Trump.
B: Oh, I don't know if I would have gone... H: Or just unrelated orange person,
if you know any. B: Yeah, I mean, it's confusing for me
because an orange man. I started thinking about Poland and about there's all kinds
of orange people here and there, but * chuckles* Or orange movements. Anyway, the
orange man, oh, God, no. Horrible. H: All right, so the Dutch national
football team, what's your opinion? That's different orange men, right?
B: Yes, the Dutch football. I have to, have to be a fan because my mother is
Dutch. What can I say? And also, it's like a tiny country and I like kind of an
underdog that still out…like…does really ridiculously well. I mean, I don't know.
I don't know. I'm not… Football is awesome. Yes. Why not?
Nothing that wrong with it. *chuckles*
H: Is there a reason you don't have a bulb in your socket on your ceiling?
B: Oh, yeah. It's because I moved it to here.
*laughs* H: Ahh, nice.
B: This is my studio lighting and I got rid of that one and I created this one.
H: It looks great. I also have all the lights pointed at me now.
B: *chuckles* Thanks for that question. I like it.
H: Here.That's interesting. Can we trace the lineage of the tire rubber ducks into
Chinese umbrellas back to that taped bread? I think it's about these helmets.
B: Yes. Yes, definitely. *chuckles*
I don't know actually. If anybody can do that, do let me know. The empty bulb,
though. I'm putting my finger on right now. Here. Reminds me, though, that this
is like another… I remember the CIA sabotage manual that they were dropping on
El Salvador…actually, on Nicaragua. Sorry. Where they were encouraging people to like
sabotage everywhere because at the time it was, y'know, communist. And so the idea
was that if people broke everything, then the country would come to a standstill.
So they suggested things like taking the light bulb out and putting a coin in there
and putting the light bulb back in. So, I don't know. You know, everybody uses these
tactics. Again, thinking about the CIA's flying penis. You know.
H: Oh, now it is the CIA. B: Yeah, CIA sabotage manuals.
H: Maybe one last question. Do you have any projects in the pipeline?
I mean, I assume you don't want to talk about them, but you can.
B: You know, we have a movie about walls that we're working on. But we took a
hiatus with COVID. And we have a whole bunch of other things that are in the
works. Some of them we're doing independently, not as the Yes Men. But I'm
doing stuff and Andy is doing stuff. And yeah, we're also always trying to
recalibrate because, you know, the terrain is changing so quickly. And it's such a
strange and interesting moment, particularly in the United States,
but also all over the world. H: Yeah, there's a... I mean, there's many
questions that are along the lines of like, how do you feel about satire in this
year when it's just seems like half the news is satire. Right? Or at least it
feels just completely unhinged. Right? B: Yeah. And I don't think a lot of times
it doesn't... I don't think satire about Donald Trump works. I don't even think
that any of this stuff that was on Saturday Night Live was funny. You know,
where they impersonate the people in the administration. It's just like worse
versions of the real thing that's really funny if you could actually laugh about it
it if it wasn't real. I mean, it must have been the same, like looking at Hitler
in the in the 30's, you know, like you probably look at that and think this
cannot be real. But, you know, here's this crazy looking guy saying crazy shit. And
so then what do you do? And I think that you you choose different tactics for a
while, but you fight. H: It seems like the funniest thing to do
for him, would to just pretend he's giving a coherent speech. Right?
B: Totally. Yeah. I mean, it is like… *laughs*
He keeps outdoing himself.
What happened in the final weeks of the campaign and just after,
with Giuliani and the Four Seasons Total Landscaping, and the face melting off,
and the… I mean, there were so many things where you just like
the levels of crazy theater were… Oh man. I… Yeah. Anyway.
H: I mean, you could have definitely just claimed that as a Yes Men stunt.
B: Definitely. Definitely. It was a stroke of genius that. *laughs*
H: Yes. Alright, maybe a last question.
Do you have any things that failed spectacularly that you…
B: Yes! H: …want reveal to the world?
B: Yes. We have many things that have failed spectacularly. And there's some of
them that you can read about on the Yes Men website, which is at theyesmen.org.
And one in particular that I recommend reading about
that we documented, at least in text, is an event where we impersonated a
group called the International Web Police who claimed to be securing the Internet.
This is back in the late 90's, or around 2002 or something.
Anyway, it was a funny event. And… yes. I'm not going to get into it here.
But it amuses me just to think about it. *chuckles*
H: All right. Thank you very much.
B: Thank you so much! H: Somehow you have disappeared from my screen.
All right. Now there you are. Well, thank you.
B: Thank you!
H: I think we will go offline at some random point now.
Goodbye, Internet.
B: Goodbye.
*postroll music*
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