Part One: A Madhouse Against the Nazis: the Story of François Tosquelles and Saint-Albans
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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

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free discreet shipping. That's adamandeve.com, code IHEART for 50% off. This is Doug Gottlieb for the Doug Gottlieb Show. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability.

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It's me, Paige DeSorbo, and I'm so excited to share my new shoe collection at DSW, filled with my favorite styles and trends for spring. Because if you know me, you know I'm kind of obsessed with shoes. And by kind of obsessed, I mean head over heels. You're going to love these shoes. So snag super cute styles like cute flats, fun heels, and cool sneakers from the Paige DeSorbo collection right now at your DSW store or DSW.com.

Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, people try to do good things with it. And this is like an extra that this week episode. But first, I'm your host, Margaret Hilljoy. And second, but not in order of lower priority, but just literally in temporal order of who's introduced, is my guest, Alison Raskin. Hi, how are you? I'm so good. It's great to see you.

It's good to see you too. And I hear that tomorrow, not tomorrow as we record, but tomorrow as of release, do you have a book coming out? Are you the Alison Raskin, the New York Times bestselling author of a new rom-com, Save the Date, that comes out tomorrow? You know what? I am. And I'm freaking out about it in both good and anxiety-driven ways.

Book releases are weird because, like, you have to be, like, really, really, really excited as it all builds up and then it collapses so fast, you know? And, like, I mean, the book has a long tail on everyone and it still matters and stuff, but...

I don't know. Yeah, you're like, for like years, you're like working on this thing. You're like, okay, this is going to change everything for me. And then sometimes people just enjoy it and then your life stays the same, which is also wonderful, but. Yeah, that is usually what happens with most books. And then also, of course, like I would guess, how long ago did you finish this book, writing it? Well, because like, you know about the whole like, I don't know when copy edits finish, but I know I had to get like,

My first full draft was due in December of 2023. Yeah. And so then maybe like a few months after that, it got finalized. Yeah. It's been a wait. That's the thing that's funny about books is they're like, by the time it comes out and everyone's suddenly excited about it, you're usually like writing the next thing and you're like, yeah, totally. I'm writing the next thing and I'm behind on the next thing. So it's... Me too. I am currently...

Behind on a thing. Yeah. Have you seen the good meme exactly for you? It's the dog in the house on fire that usually says like, this is fine or whatever. But instead it says, so I have a book coming out. And also because my other book, my nonfiction book got kind of screwed up with when it came out. It came out six months ago. And so I'm like, people are probably like, Allison, we just went through this with you. Like we're not ready for this level of self-promotion back to back.

I like to think that people just sort of accept it as like, well, that's her job. Like, I hope that because that's what I have to do constantly. I'm currently not in a publicity cycle for a book because I just finished a publicity cycle for a book. But like, wait, how do I make this tie into what we're talking about today? Books matter. Escapism is genuinely a useful thing. I think it's

Tolkien has a quote that then is paraphrased by Le Guin about how, imagine telling a soldier in a POW camp that they shouldn't try to escape. Why do people talk trash on escapism? We should be able to escape. And so this idea that like reading something that's lighthearted or serious, but like, I'm guessing since it's a rom-com, it's like somewhat lighthearted, you know? And like,

I don't know. There's an actual value to that is what I'll say. I think that's so true. And I'm someone that like, I steer clear of like really sad books and really sad TV and movies because I don't know, I experienced that so much in my real life that like when I've engaging with like narrative content, I want to like tap into like my more positive emotions. It makes sense to me. I like writing both, but I really like writing kind of like

pulpy, fun adventure, even though adventure is usually a description of bad things happening. You know, like violence is like actually really bad. It hurts everyone involved. But we're like, fun!

Also with the rom-com, it was inspired by my broken engagement. It's like, oh, I'm turning one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life into this fun love story, which is also kind of a cool way of reclaiming the narrative around it. Sometimes as a writer, you're like, oh, I don't have anything to write about until the next terrible thing happens to me. Yeah, the first several stories I sold were a

about some of the worst things that have ever happened to me just turned into like fiction. And then at some point I was like, what am I going to do when I can't like just stare at the abyss of my soul anymore? But this story, okay, the story that I'm going to tell you this week, this story has it all. This story is like, if someone were to come up with the ultimate cool people who did cool stuff episode, it would maybe be this story. And one of the things in this story is maybe my favorite love story that I've ever told on this show.

I'm very excited and honored to be here for this. Yeah. Well, it ties into the last thing I had you on. But first, or third, depending on how we're counting things, we also have producers like Sophie Lichterman, who's not with us today on recording, but is our producer. And also Rory is our audio engineer and everyone has to say hi to Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. And our theme music was written for Spion Woman.

And this week, okay, normally I do the like, have you heard about this thing? And it is possible that you have, but I haven't talked to anyone who's heard of this thing besides my friend who told me about it in the first place. This week, we're going to be talking about the Saint-Alban Hospital in rural France, like Saint-Alban is how I would want to pronounce it. And I'm not good at pronouncing French. This hospital in rural France is

where patients and doctors collectively resisted fascist occupation, and while they were at it, they radically reinvented psychiatry and psychotherapy. We are going to talk in particular about its founder, who was either an anti-authoritarian communist or an anarcho-syndicalist or an anarcho-communist, depending on what source you read, whose name was Francois Tosquelles.

who fought in the Spanish Civil War before fleeing to France, fleeing one fascist occupation to find himself square in the middle of another one. I mean, that has to be so annoying. Like, I can't. Like, you must just be like, really? I know. And I think about it a lot when I'm like,

for some weird reason, a lot of trans people and other people who are marginalized are like thinking about like, I wonder if the US is the place to live, you know? Oh, definitely. And I think a lot about the people who fled France or like some of the other people in this story fled Italy or Germany or whatever, and then ended up in another country that was also fascist occupied very shortly. But the reason I'm having you on for this one, a few months ago,

You probably remember, but I'm going to remind the audience. We ran some episodes about alternative models by and for people living with mental illness. You were the guest on episodes about Fountainhouse and the Clubhouse model for helping folks when they are out of a mental health hospital. And the core idea of that model, the Clubhouse model, is to break down hierarchies like between the sick and the well, the patient and the doctor.

It is a model that is designed to help people build agency by giving them an actual stake, not just in their own healing, but their own stake in the entire facility, the entire clubhouse. And that model has since spread around the world. Then, a couple weeks later, for people who have been listening a lot, I covered Bethel House, which is a comparable organization in Japan that takes things a step further or maybe a step in a different direction.

and has built a sort of entire society that runs parallel to mainstream Japanese culture, and how they developed this idea of self-study, by which patients themselves become the experts on their own ailments and treatments, and how that idea has spread, again, across the world. The other thing that came up in both of those episodes that ties into this one too, is how, maybe rather than the collectives of patients needing to learn from the, like, healthy world,

The healthy world has a lot to learn from people who are dealing with stuff, not because they have this problem, but because they are dealing with the problem. They are like facing something and dealing with it head on. Yes. The simplest clear example of that I can use is that when we did the Bethel House, the Japanese group.

They developed a disaster preparedness framework for their members and for the local town soon enough that was inclusive of both mental and physical disability. Basically, like...

They're kind of within the tsunami warning zone, right? On a coast. I'm so afraid of tsunamis. That's one of my major triggers. I don't know why. Oh, interesting. Do you live anywhere near a coast? I don't. Well, I do, but it's very funny because my husband was like making fun of me for being afraid of tsunamis. He was like, a tsunami is never going to happen in LA. And then I was like, John, there's literally tsunami warning signs that we walk by. Oh yeah, no, you all might have a tsunami. You probably won't. Yeah, I don't know.

Like there's signs that say leaving tsunami zone. Yeah, like earthquake and fire are more immediate concerns. Yes, definitely. But you're not out of the tsunami woods. I'm one mile from the ocean. That's as close as I'll get. Yeah. I have reoccurring...

I don't even want to say nightmares, but dreams about tsunamis or specifically I would have called them tidal waves when I was a kid. Oh, yeah. Like I have like dreams about like being kind of near the ocean. And then like usually I'm either like watching the wave come and just being like, well, I had a good run or I like am in a house and I like the house gets like under the wave. And then I just have to keep moving up and up and up in the house.

I don't know. I think that my fear around this came from some movie I saw that had this intense opening scene of a whole community in a tsunami. Yeah. And it's like those images just all over. Yeah. No, it makes sense. And if you lived where folks lived in Japan, which I can't remember the name of the town right now because that's not the script I'm reading from right now. But they...

The folks at Bethel House came up with a plan, first just for themselves. They have all these community houses of people who are, you know, mental and sometimes physically disabled. And they're like, oh, well, how will we take care of ourselves and each other? And so they came up with this plan about how to know exactly who had what needs and how to get everyone up the mountain and take care of people, right? And so then they started working with the city council around that plan and

And it got enacted townwide. And then it served as the model for Japan's official disaster preparedness, specifically to include disabled people.

That's amazing because that's a huge issue. I mean, I know in our country, but I assume around the world. Yeah, especially when you're like an island nation, you know. Oh, but there's disability and preparedness. Yeah, totally. Yeah, like there's just like there's no plan. And we saw that like have huge ramifications with the L.A. fires. Yeah. And it's...

People don't take into account disabled people in like any aspect of society, really. Yeah, absolutely. And I would meet a lot of people who are like, oh, I have trouble walking or I have the following needs or I need a thyroid pill every day. So like, I'm not even going to bother preparing. But then after that, I would start meeting people in the disability preparedness community. And I realized that the way that folks have been organizing things

They don't have anything to learn from us. We have a lot to learn from them. Absolutely. The actual mutual aid communities that people have built because they need to. Who better to learn from than people for whom preparedness is required for them to interact with the ableist world that's around them? And that's a theme we're going to continue to explore this week. Not specifically does it... I love talking about preparedness, so that's the angle I use for that particular part of it. But instead that...

You know, this isn't about like, oh, we help take care of those poor people, but instead like, oh, people are doing amazing stuff. In the book Storming Bedlam, Madness, Utopia, and Revolt by Sasha Warren, the author states, quote, we have grown accustomed to reading about asylum psychiatry as the project of states seeking new, subtler means of social control.

However, at its points of origin in France and England, psychiatry was among the most radical and promising of the reform movements that proliferated during the Industrial and French Revolutions. Unlike the reformers opening prisons or schools, its founders were motivated by a revolutionary approach to sociability that resembled nothing so closely as the socialist utopias of Robert Owen and Charles Foray. Foray, I don't know how to pronounce that guy's name. It's probably British, so they probably pronounce all the letters.

To continue the quote, in the early 19th century, psychiatrists in the moral treatment movement championed a therapeutic model that not only acted as if the mad person was human, but that in the best environmental and architectural conditions immersed in a consciously and collectively organized social world engaged in meaningful reproductive labor in common, the asylum could prefigure a more perfect world for all.

That's a very different understanding of what mental institutions have been in America. Yeah. This is not me being like, obviously institutions have been a positive force in society. You know, like...

But I was thinking about what you were saying earlier. I have a master's in psychology and do a lot in the mental health field. And one of the things I love the most learning in school that like we learned, like, I don't know, my first semester was that the client is the expert in their own life. Yeah. Yeah.

Totally. And so many clinicians I feel like don't operate under that model. Yeah. But they know themselves better than we'll ever know them and their context and their resources and their capacities. Yeah. One of the things I loved about the Bethel House group in particular was that the self-study thing that they promoted wasn't just, it was, it starts from the position of like, okay, this is your lived experience that you know it better than I ever will.

But then it was like, all right, and so here's tools to like systematize that and introduce it into the scientific method and like build collectively knowledge. So it's not just you're not just the expert on your own version of the suffering, but you're able to become the expert along with other people who deal with it of like the problem itself. You know, I love that.

So the place that I'm going to describe this week, I was thinking about this. I was just on the phone with my friend. Like one of the things I do before I record is I usually call one of my friends and kind of just like tell the story to them really quickly. Like so that I find the parts that I'm the most excited about, right? The parts that make me start talking really fast and getting really excited. And one of the things I was talking about with my friend was that it's like, I'm going to describe a place that,

in one of the worst possible environments, which is France under a Nazi occupation, in a place of people who are being eugenicized, right? Like, Nazis not famously very good on mental health. And yet, there are elements of this thing that I'm describing where I suspect that, like, some people would be happier there than they are now because of community. I'm not trying to be like, it's good, actually, right?

But there's a thing that comes up a lot. Rebecca Solnit writes about this a lot, about like the surprising utopia that comes up during disaster and crisis because people actually have meaning and work together, you know? Yeah. One of my professors said something, you know, I was like, how are we ever going to like address climate change? You know, like, are we ever going to like get our stuff together? And he was like, what we need is like a common enemy. Yeah.

He was like, we would need to have aliens come for humans to start to see humans as the tribe rather than these smaller sections. And I hope dearly that that is not right. That is my dearest hope is that we can finally see that people are people. Without the aliens coming? Yeah. But you know what we can all unite against? What?

Ads, yeah. Yeah, uh-huh. Here they are. Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week. For happiness every night, you need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys. It's cool. It's cool. You have earbuds in, right?

Adam and Eve, America's most trusted source for adult products, has been making people very happy for over 50 years. With thousands of toys for both men and women. Just go to adamandeve.com now and enter code IHEART for 50% off almost any one item. Plus free discreet shipping. That's adamandeve.com, code IHEART for 50% off.

Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, "Hey, we came to play"? Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially? Step up like a boss and save the day? Or see what life's like under the tree of life? Did you? If you could, would you? When we come through, it's true magic, 'cause we came to play. Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.

This is Doug Gottlieb for the Doug Gottlieb Show. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. Get

Get in a Tundra with available I-Force Max hybrid engine delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma with available off-road features like crawl control. It can take you beyond the trails. Toyota trucks are built to last year after year, mile after mile. So don't wait. Get yours today. Visit BuyAToyota.com for deals and more. Toyota, let's go places.

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And we're back. Boy, I sure am willing to set aside all my differences in order to support all of the advertisers. It's a positive version. All of the advertisers are so great. I love all of them. Anyway...

Where better to start a story about people seeking a better world for all than Catalonia, the occupied region of Spain that continues to fight for autonomy and independence to this day? We're going to start our story with our main protagonist this week. It's a man named Francois Tusqueas, sometimes Francesc Tusqueas.

Francesc is the Catalan version of the same name. And so even though he's mostly remembered as Francois in history books and stuff, he was pretty into being Catalan. So I'm going to mostly use Francesc throughout. I'm guessing he preferred the name, but I don't know. I actually think he kind of didn't care. That's what I mostly think. Why do you think that? Because he was really into being a refugee. He was really into the idea. He actually, he has all these quotes about like,

Making people work to understand you because you're speaking their language in an accented way creates a more real connection with people because they actually have to think about what you say. And he's like really into like the primary right under all other rights is the right to roam, the right to be in different places. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, no, I really like him. I like kept waiting for the like turn where he was like actually bad, but I have not found it. This is like one of the most unabashedly like...

And at some point you should look up a photo of him. He's just this kind of like round faced man who's balding up top and has a mustache and glasses. And like, he's so sweet looking. I don't know. Whatever. Anyway. I love when there's one person where you just get to the end of their whole biography and you're like, that was okay. I didn't freak out at one point. I know. I'm sure he did something bad. I haven't found it yet. And I have read a bunch of different people's takes on it.

A lot of the writing about him is trapped behind my lack of speaking French. Oh, yeah. But I found everything I could, and I auto-translated some other stuff. I don't rely on auto-translations for anything besides, like, background material or, like, just, like, trying to get context on someone, like, some minor character where there's, like, a, you know, article about them in Castilian but not in English or whatever, you know. So, Francesc Tusqueas.

was born in 1912 in Catalonia, in a city called Ruiz. And I'm usually, when I mispronounce things that are French, I'm like, yeah, I don't really care. I'm genuinely sorry I'm going to mispronounce all the Catalan in this piece, but I'm going to. His parents, at least later, run a haberdashery. So selling sewing supplies, I believe. I always thought a haberdashery was a hat maker.

But it's not. It's like definitely a word I've heard, but I don't think I ever had any idea what it meant. Yeah, I just assumed it was a hat maker. I have no idea why I thought that. And then I looked it up and it was like, it is not. It is a sewing shop. I also think that they're like selling made things like dresses and things, but I'm not entirely certain. Which would actually put them in a really cool lineage with like a bunch of other really cool. There's been like a bunch of dressmakers within radical history that I've covered before on the show.

That's so cool. I wonder what that's about. I know. I think part of it is that a lot of women who are independent end up political radicals. And if you're in the 19th century and you're an independent woman and you need enough money to raise your family, you might become a dressmaker.

That makes sense. Lucy Parsons was a dressmaker, and she's one of the reasons the death of her husband is the reason we have May Day, the celebration of the first of May, as a labor holiday. That was the very first episode of this show, if you want to hear me talk about Haymarket.

That's so cool. Do you celebrate it every May 1st? Yeah, no, yeah. Actually, May Day is like the anarchists and like a lot of other political radicals will have big events on May 1st and have like... Usually it's... I really like it because it's our day of like picnics and stuff. Usually we all get together because we're like protesting. And sometimes we do on May Day. But more often than that, we just like have like fucking games and like...

People, like, give readings. That's so lovely. Last year, I think, I spoke at the student occupation in Chapel Hill about the history of May Day. And, I don't know, I like May 1st. Okay, so his family are anarcho-syndicalists, which was a powerful social movement at the time in Spain, especially in Catalonia. And anarcho-syndicalists fight for a socialist society without the state or hierarchy. Okay.

It's possible that his grandparents were anarcho-syndicalists too, and maybe their parents before them. I don't know. I just know that there were a lot of multi-generational anarchist families at that time and place, which I find really cool. I have read, this is not the most important thing about this man, but it is a thing I spent no small amount of time trying to figure out. I have read an incredible number of conflicting reports about him specifically and how he grew up and what his political affiliation was.

He was either an anti-authoritarian communist, like a Marxist who doesn't like Stalin, which is a very reasonable position, or he was an anarchist communist or an anarcho-syndicalist or whatever. I can promise you he's cool either way. I couldn't promise you exactly how he identified. We know he wasn't fiscally conservative. Yeah, totally. Yeah, and he wasn't a big fan of Stalin or other dictators. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

He was one of those kids who grew up knowing exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a psychiatrist and he wanted to destroy capitalism. Those are his things. Starting at the age of seven, he went with his father to learn about psychiatry from the nearby Paramatha Institute. I am uncertain exactly how the seven-year-old ends up going to the psychiatric institution to learn. I don't know whether the dad was a patient. I don't believe the dad was a doctor, but I'm not sure.

I think he was just indulging his kids' interests. Yeah, maybe like the apprenticeship approach or something. Well, I do know that either by 15, he started studying medicine more formally or that he graduated college at 15. I've read both. All right. So it might be that he graduated college at 15 and then entered med school. I, again, read a bunch of conflicting things about this man.

And he grew up speaking Catalan, which is a different language than Spanish, Castilian. I learned this by showing up in Barcelona and being like, I know a little bit of Spanish. And people were like, we don't fucking speak Spanish. And I'm like, ah, shit. For his entire life, he refused to learn to speak Castilian Spanish well. He was Catalan. The Spanish were the oppressors. But he also wasn't like, he was like chill about it. He wasn't like, I hate everyone who is Spanish. He just didn't like the Spanish government.

He was, as you might have guessed, wildly political. He joined a clandestine communist organization, the BOC, the Workers and Peasants Bloc, which was the clandestine wing of the larger Catalan Balearic Communist Federation. The Balearic Islands are islands off the coast of Catalonia. And this federation had both anarchists and communists in it. There's a lot of historical getting along and not getting along between those groups.

This particular Communist Federation worked alongside the anarchists of the CNTFIA. I know that that's alphabet soup as fuck. And normally I try to kind of gloss over the alphabet soup shit. It's kind of my niche interest, but it does not need to be yours or the listeners. But the way that these groups relate is going to affect his life and the outcome of what happens. Because he broke with Stalinism. He broke with Stalinism early on.

Stalin tried to get the Communist Federation that he was part of to go to Madrid and do communist propaganda in Castilian. And so Francesca and a few friends wrote Stalin, which is a fucking, that's a brave move. This man does not put up with people who disagree with him. The Federation itself was afraid to write Stalin back. So he just wrote Stalin back.

That's amazing. I know. He's like 22 and he's like, I disagree with this man. Well, maybe that's why. Yeah. When you're 22, you're like, I'll write a letter to anyone. Yeah, totally. So he writes Stalin back and he's like, you obviously don't know. I'm paraphrasing here. You obviously don't know shit about Spain. We're not going to go and say all power to the Soviets in Madrid. We don't have Soviets, which is the name for like a specific style of like a workers' council.

Okay. And we're definitely not going to go and speak Castilian in Madrid. That is the oppressor's language. We're not doing that for you, buddy. By 1935, when he's 23 or so, he's now working at the Paramata Institute, the place he'd been going ever since he was little. So he like, he had a fucking plan and he fucking followed the plan. He's learning under a bunch of refugees who have fled Nazism from Austria and Germany.

And he helped start... I know you wanted another acronym. So here's another acronym. The POUM. The P-O-U-M. The Workers' Party of Marxist Unification. Which were basically the communists who don't like Stalin and were down to work in the broader left, including with anarchists. And he wrote about...

And I just like this part because women are written out of history, so I have to go and find the places where they're not written out of history. And props to this man. Women are written out of this story, but not by him. He tried to include women in this story whenever possible. So he wrote about how within his clandestine group, there was a specific women's liberation movement that was sex positive. He said that there was a, quote,

Group of women who talked about sex and the freedom to get laid. It was a kind of women's liberation front made up of anarchist women or anarchists from the bloc. The bloc being the group. The political situation in Spain is complicated at this point in history. This is not a thing that I don't think Americans end up learning about in school, but if you listen to this podcast regularly, you've heard me do like eight episodes about this fucking thing. Spain had been a monarchy for a long ass time.

Starting in the 1930s, like 1931 or so, it became a republic. It was not a very stable republic because the far right and the far left kept trying to take it over.

The far right kept trying to take it over. The far left, actually, rather than trying to take it over, kept kind of trying to declare independence. Like, basically, anarcho-syndicalists who would make up the vast majority of some town in a rural area would be like, we're done with the state. We're putting up our black and red flag. We're now an independent anarcho-syndicalist commune. Kind of like the Monty Python sketch. And they just kept doing this over and over again and forcing the state to come put them down.

Then, in 1936, three white right-wing generals, who were all white, were like, we should stage a coup. There's a reason I'm talking about this today. I think the Spanish Civil War is unfortunately wildly relevant to the American audience right now. They're like, we're going to stage a coup.

Two of those three generals, they're all like, we're going to do this together. And then two of them die mysteriously in plane crashes. Oh, my God. As will happen when you're having a conspiracy with other evil people. I wish it had been leftists who did that. I assume Franco took them out. I don't know. Maybe it was literally a coincidence that two of the... It's probably not a coincidence. Yeah.

And so the third general, Francisco Franco, he basically invades his own country. He has an army in North Africa and he shows up and he's like, I'm fucking taking over Spain. He has this famous quote, I am willing to kill one half of the country to rule the other half of the country. Yep. I see why that feels very relevant right now. Yeah, I know. Lord. Yeah.

His coup failed in large part due to the organizing of the far left, especially in Barcelona and Catalonia in general. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia. In Barcelona, anarchists and cops, an unlikely alliance that no one wants to talk about, fought off the fascists. And so they show up and they're like, we're just going to roll in and take over. And instead people are like, we're going to shoot you if you do that. And the coup was defeated, but a civil war broke out instead.

And if you're playing Cool People Bingo, check off the basically free square in the middle. Margaret talks about the Spanish Civil War because that's what we're going to do. But don't worry. If you're playing Cool People Bingo, there will be tuberculosis later in this episode because that's the other thing that somehow comes up all the time in history.

Well, as John Green's latest book, everything is tuberculosis. No, I haven't read it yet, but like tuberculosis has been a running theme. And I'm just like, I didn't expect it when I first started doing this show. Like, oh, if you read about the 19th century and you read about radicals, they either get killed by the state or they die of tuberculosis. That's like kind of it. Wow. Wow.

I mean, that's always like in all the movies whenever a character like coughs into a handkerchief and there's blood. That's tuberculosis, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, cool. And it's actually tied into like, there's really cool ways it's tied into the show before too where like the Young Lords were this Puerto Rican independence radical group that's kind of parallel to the Black Panthers in the late 60s, early 70s. And one of the things that they would do in New York is that the Puerto Rican communities they were part of were under...

Like no one was screening them for tuberculosis, but like white neighborhoods were getting these like tuberculosis vans were going around and X-raying people. And so they just hijacked one of those vans and they brought it to their neighborhood. And the people working in the van were like, sweet. Fuck yeah. Like they're not mad. They're like, I want to go where, where help, you know, you don't become a tuberculosis ambulance driver because you, because you just only want to help rich people, you know? I love that. Yeah. Yeah.

So the Civil War breaks out and the Marxists and the anarchists, I'm going to separate Marxists from communists like the Stalinists, right? The Marxists and the anarchists form militias and they rush off to the front and they stop the fascists from sweeping across the country.

The PUM, which our guy Francesc is part of, they are mostly famous in history because this is the group that the young George Orwell came down and joined. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's cool. We have a whole two-parter about him. It's always funny when right-wing politicians try to cite Orwell, right? Because Orwell literally went to Spain to throw grenades at fascists. And his opinions about fascists never changed.

Ever. People quote him from the right wing? Yeah, because he also was like, I'm gonna put this in air quotes. He was anti-communist in that he was anti the USSR's regime, the dictatorial regime. He was an anti-authoritarian and he was a socialist and like kind of a Democrat, you know. And so he didn't like Stalinists because they...

Well, I'll get to what happened to Orwell with the Stalinists in a little bit. So Orwell comes down and he joins the PUM and he throws grenades at fascists. So young Francesc, he rushes off to the front with everybody else desperate to stop Catalonia from falling to the fascists. Meanwhile, the anarchists take control of most of Catalonia and create a non-hierarchical society within the Spanish Republic.

And I am uncertain if Francesc ever took up arms. I'm guessing not. I think basically since he was a doctor, he's doing doctor stuff right away, right? Which is absolutely just as important. But most of what I found out about his life is in French, so I don't have all of the details of this period. But I do know that soon enough, or right away, he starts doing psychiatry at the front lines, like three kilometers from the actual front.

Wow. He's really interested in what happens during war. I'm just going to read this quote because I find it interesting. Quote, science is a behavioral disorder for some people who become obsessed with it.

They want to control everything through science. War is uncontrollable. But as the surrealists would say, exquisite corpses appear. That is to say, the unexpected, free association, which are not pure fancy. They are more real than the real. And so he's kind of just like into the strange case. I don't think he's like pro it, but he's like,

interested in the strange chaotic formations that happen that are outside what you can like assume you can just control. Well, it's also so interesting. I find like the difference of how people act by themselves and how they act when they're in a group. Totally. Because it's really drastically different often. Yeah. No, absolutely. Like groups have their own characters and psychoses and like issues. Mm-hmm.

which is prescient. That's going to tie into the style of psychotherapy that he develops. Oh. But you know what he didn't develop? You know what only came later? Ads? Well, ads themselves probably already existed. But these ads in particular probably weren't around during the Spanish Civil War. And if they were, they were probably for very different things. But time always changes. And these are the ads that we have. Here they are.

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Don't wait. This awesome offer won't last forever. Go to CheapCaribbean.com to start your search for paradise and book before April 30th to save big. And we're back. So we didn't have the word PTSD back then. Well, it's not a word. It's a, oh, it's not even an acronym. I will probably die still calling a series of letters an acronym, even if it doesn't spell anything. Oh, an acronym has to be a word? Yeah.

Yeah, according to patents and maybe people who are correct, but I'm just going to call it an acronym. Whatever. No one had PTSD back then. In World War I, in English, you would have called it shell shock. Francesc called it being war neurotic. And he developed a lot of ideas about how to treat war neurotics. And as far as I can tell, he was pretty effective.

He wrote, and this is a bit of a confusing translation. It wasn't a machine translation, but it just isn't perfect. He wrote, quote, If you sent a war neurotic 150 kilometers from the front line, you make it a chronic case. You can only treat him near the family where the troubles occurred.

And I just think family is like not necessarily the, but the source, right? Interesting. He's saying you got to, you got to do it where it happens. Yeah. There's like debate around like how quickly to offer mental health services after like a big trauma. Ooh, interesting. You know, like some like big natural disaster or something. And like sometimes doing it right away can be helpful, but sometimes it can actually be damaging. And so there's like not a clear way to address it.

Yeah, and he's just like, he's exploring. He's like, how the hell do I save all of these people, you know? Yeah. And soon enough, he becomes the chief physician for the Army Psychiatric Services. Not just for the PUM, like the militia that he's part of, but the entire Republican Army, like the entire Spanish Army, right? Oh, wow. And did you know that I'm in my 40s and have been a professional writer for a decade and I still cannot spell physician or psychiatric? Yeah.

I have a master's degree in psychology and I can't spell psychiatric. Yeah, no, it's hard. It's a hard one. I can't do it. It's weird because I'm like, I could probably spell psychology. Sometimes I can't. Yeah. It's really embarrassing. It's terrible. I'm, you know, I always say I hate the bourgeoisie because I can't spell them. And...

So he starts setting up not just one clinic, but just like all of the clinics, right? And his whole thing is that he believes in the idea that the place matters and that the character of the place is part of the cure and the community matters and is part of the cure and that people's psychiatric needs are sort of a community problem with community solutions, right?

So he starts setting up all of these clinics and helping people care for people. And he doesn't pick the caregivers, the psychiatric nurses and stuff, from psychiatrists because he's like, he kind of hates doctors and psychiatrists his whole life. He specifically is like, psychiatrists and doctors have a fear of madness, is what he keeps saying.

That's so true. Yeah. That feels like very insightful in a lot of ways because it doesn't follow the certain rules of like, you know, tuberculosis or it manifests so differently. Yeah, totally. Which is like, it gets out to this quote about like war is not, you can't science it. You can't math it, you know? I mean, there's math involved, but like mostly with artillery, but,

And so when he's picking psychiatric nurses and psychiatric care and he's teaching all along, he's very into like breaking walls and like teaching psychiatric methods to everyone he can. He picks one of the groups he picks is lawyers who are afraid to go pick up a gun but still care about the cause, which is really relatable. He also picks like literary scholars and painters and musicians and shit.

And he also picks priests and nuns. And there's like whole convents that get turned into psychiatric care facilities. And he also picks sex workers. I believe brothels were illegal in Spain in the Spanish Republic and probably in the monarchy before that.

the anarchist-controlled regions legalized sex work and allowed... There's a cool thing where they set up the Syndicat L'Amour, the union of love, in which sex workers were protected legally and allowed them to set their own rates. But when he's setting it up at psychiatric care facilities, he's like, all right, no one knows these men better than the women who sleep with them. And there are women fighting in the militias as well, but they're not the majority of the units. Right.

So the brothels can stay open. Three or four workers there will get trained as psychiatric nurses, and they're not allowed to sleep with the people who are their psychiatric clients, you know? But they are, like, not, like, told that they can't work that way anymore or something like that, right? They're just like, oh, you can't sleep with these people because you're their, like, therapist, you know? Yeah.

This is brilliant. I know. I know. I really love it. I know. I was like, this story has radical nuns. It has sex workers. It has like... Well, I imagine sex workers deal with a lot of people's mental health and their various issues. Yeah, they do. That is... And I mean, literally their safety depends on understanding the mental health of their clients and things like that too, you know? That's so true. Yeah.

And the inclusion of priests and nuns in this part is also really interesting because there's a lot of right-wing rhetoric around the Spanish Civil War, especially after Franco wins. Spoiler alert, Spain falls to fascism for most of the 20th century. They basically claim that the leftists, especially the anarchists, just run around and killed all the priests and nuns, that they just slaughtered them all.

The left-wing position is, no, we didn't do that, but we killed a lot of fascist priests because a lot of the priests in a given small town would be basically elements of the fascist state, which is true. But I also suspect that there was a lot of war crimes. There's a war, there's war crimes. People are going to do absolutely terrible things.

But there's also this thing where like when you read a like leftist history, they never want to admit that there's like rad Christians and rad religious people, you know? Really? So the priests and nuns, not never, but especially specifically communist stuff, again with capital C communism or whatever. And then in Spain, it's a particularly complicated thing because Franco was a Catholic fascist. Like Franco is actually honestly a closer comparison to

to modern Christian nationalism because it was specifically Christian in nature. Franco was specifically Catholic in nature, although he actually resisted the Catholic Church a lot. But that's besides the point. Well, he can't have anyone have control over him. No, exactly. Actually, that was the thing is that the Pope was like, well, I get to control who's, you know, your bishops and stuff because I'm the Pope. And Franco was like, no, I get to control because I'm the fascist dictator. Anyway, so...

Things didn't stay rosy during the war. War is never rosy. It's actually just really bad. By 1937, Stalin tried taking over the left in Spain. Basically, he was like, I'm in charge of all of this. You need to come under my command or I'll kill you all. Right? To all of this, like, diverse groups of people of different, like, Marxists and anarchists and all these people who are doing all this other stuff and are the people who had stopped the fascists. Right?

We've covered this a lot in other episodes, but soon enough he is sending secret police from Russia to Spain to round up all the anti-Stalinists in kind of a prequel to the Great Purge he started doing in Russia the next year in 1938. Ironically, most of the people that Stalin sent to go torture and disappear leftists in Spain themselves got tortured and disappeared by Stalin like a year later.

Isn't that wild? Yeah. How that just seems to always happen. Yeah. The leopard's eating the face party. Just, uh, yep. Uh-huh.

I always like shitting on Stalin, but I am not including this just to shit on him more. It is important to understanding Francesc's character and his therapy and his ideas to understand that he was someone who lived through occupation after occupation, through one authoritarian regime after another, from Stalin coming and saying, like, I am in charge of all of the left, to Franco, and then to the Vichy France and the Nazi controlling of France.

The PUM, the group that he was part of, was specifically singled out for abuse by the Stalinists. So important PUM leaders were being disappeared and tortured. So George Orwell, right? He's off at the front. His wife is here too. And she's just like left out of all the history books too. And it's really fucking annoying. And she's like doing a lot of important work, just like not at the front with a rifle or whatever, you know, God forbid. So George Orwell, who wasn't shitty to his wife about this, it's just historians who are,

He gets shot through the neck by a fascist, right, while he's fighting at the front. And then he goes and he survives that. And he's recovering at a hospital. And while he's recovering, the Stalinists basically declare war on the PUM that he's fighting with. And there's a warrant out for his arrest. And so his wife helps smuggle him out of the country under an assumed name. And the two of them leave Spain.

And this is why Orwell became a leftist anti-communist, because they tried to kill him after he had taken a bullet through the neck fighting fascism. It's almost like when you're any type of extreme, you lose sight of the plot. Yeah, totally. Yeah, just fucking authoritarianism will, when you think that you are so right that everyone has to do what you say, you know? Yep.

And so Orwell wasn't the only Poom militant whose wife smuggled him to safety. Enter Helene Tuskeas, Francesc's wife, who was Spanish and not Catalan. She's practically not in the story at first until you look really hard to find her in the story. Why would you include women when you write history? I can't imagine. Fortunately, did you know, Alison Raskin, that women can write for themselves? I keep hiring someone to do it for me. Ha ha ha!

I had no idea. Okay, what's funny about this is right after I came out, I got hired to write male point of view romance as a ghostwriter. And so I think that secretly, at least one male name was secretly a woman writing it. But like, I suspect that's more common in the romance field than anyone will think.

I don't want to name names. Yeah. I have, I don't even know if I know of like any male romance writers really. Yeah. Um,

Yeah, as soon as I came out, they were like, can you write male romance? And I was like, God damn it. And I was like, I mean, in a weird way, I'm in like a really good position to do it because I'm like, well, I kind of understand the male point of view. Like, you know, I got exposed to it a lot. Yeah. Locker room talk. Yeah. Actually, no, locker room talk has always avoided me. I think men have always known I'm not a safe person to say that shit around. Not even because I've been like a fiery feminist, but just because like,

No one's ever mistaken me as one of the boys. Like, that is not a thing that has ever happened to me. And you aren't, so. Yeah, I know. I absolutely spent gym class sitting in the corner painting my nails with the other goth girls. And no one knew why I was there, including me, but it made more sense. So I was able to find some letters written by Marie Rose Oriba.

which is his daughter. And shout out to the author Ben Platts Mills, who was the one who wrote her and published her letters. While Francesc was at the front, Helene and his daughter Mary Rose lived with his parents in their haberdashing. And life during wartime fucking sucked, whether you're at the front or not. Reuss, the town whose name I can't pronounce, was under a blockade and supplies were short.

The family got by by selling what she sewed and selling off what she accumulated in her life, like basically all of the stuff of their life. She's just like slowly selling in order so that she and her kid can eat. She would also sneak out across the blockade to a small village in the Hinterlands because she had connections there with the local priests because the brother of the chaplain of Paramata Institute, where her husband worked, he lived there. And the priest would give her supplies to smuggle back into Ruiz's.

Or as her daughter put it, Helene came back to her in-laws loaded like a mule. And so she's smuggling food in past the blockades from the fascists. As the fascists bombed Ruiz, they would regularly take farm at a refuge 100 kilometers away. And there's all these like heartbreaking stories about like the mom is like traveling there with her like three-year-old daughter and is like seeing orphan kids by the side of the road. And she's like terrified she's going to lose her kid. And, you know, it's a...

Like, war actually just sucks, you know? We should avoid it whenever possible. The best efforts of the Spanish Republic were not enough to hold back the tide of fascism. It's hard to say whether or not they could have succeeded if Stalin hadn't betrayed the fight in the middle of it. But one thing that is certain and ties into the story is that the ostensibly leftist government of France...

They're run by the Popular Front at this point, which is this idea that comes up a lot. This isn't a bad plan, which is basically like when your country is falling to fascism, all of the electoral people who are left of fascist form the Popular Front party. And they're like,

Look, just vote for not fascist. And it also doesn't even mean vote for the most watered down Democrat or whatever. It literally means like Democrats voting for socialists, socialists voting for communists, communists voting for Democrats. Like it means like whoever's running, if they're not a fascist, radical left or center left, you're voting for them in that time.

But there was a popular front in Spain. That is like how they ended up with the Republic, right? There was a popular front in France that was how they didn't fall electorally to fascism. Later, they're going to... Actually, both popular fronts fell militarily to fascism. It's almost like when they don't get their way, they pull out guns. Uh-huh. Yeah. This is a scary time, both the story you're telling and the one that we're living through. Yeah. So...

The popular front government of France did nothing to help Spain. And this is a big sticking point and problem in history. Basically, the Western governments, like the UK and France, were like, you know, we're going to sit this one out. And they actually specifically set up a blockade that no war materials was allowed to go to either side, which sounds fair, but it's not. It cripples the left, not the right. Because the right is getting their war material from Germany and Italy.

And also, this is why Stalin had such an outsized impact, is there actually weren't really many communists or Stalinists in Spain. It was mostly sort of social democrats and anarchists in Spain at the time. But Stalin was like, yo, I got tanks and shit. And people were like, all right, we fucking need them. You know? So the popular front of France did nothing to fucking help Spain.

Neither did the UK. The great leftist powers just let Spain fall, despite the best efforts of a lot of anti-fascist volunteers from those countries and other countries, including the first black man to command a mixed white and black troops in an American unit came from the US and fought in the Spanish Civil War. And like, there's like all kinds of stories of just amazing volunteers. As Franco's forces swept across the country,

The retreat, the Ritterata, began. 300,000 civilians and 200,000 militants escaped across the border into France. Helene didn't go with Francesca at first since she wasn't in immediate danger. There was a death warrant out for him because he'd been a high up person on the anti-fascist side, right? So Franco's like, oh, I'm gonna kill you. And he's like, I think I'm gonna leave the country now. It's been pleasant, but I gotta go.

So Helene doesn't go at first. He's to go first and figure out the plan, like, okay, where are we going to go when we get there? And then send her a signal to come herself with their daughter. So Francesc and a friend crossed the highest point of the Pyrenees Mountains because fascists were bombarding the route that most people were using to escape. Like, again, this is just how fucking, like, when he said, I'm willing to kill half of Spain to rule the other half, he meant it. Like, everyone trying to leave the country, they're, like, not even trying to fight him anymore. He's like,

I'm just going to blow up all of them. Fuck them. So Francesc's daughter, Mary Rose, relates the following story that her mother told about her father when he crosses into France. Quote, a gold bracelet that she had sewn into the lining of his coat so that he could sell it for his needs. He asked the first shepherd he found, what is that worth? Nothing was the reply. So here, my dad said, and he gave the bracelet to the shepherd.

Isn't that like... I'm trying to understand like what that means. I know. I know. I think there's like a couple things going on with it. I think on some level he's like, it's possible that gold is like... Lost value. Everyone escaping is just like, oh, I brought gold with me. And everyone's like, yeah, it doesn't fucking worth anything here. But also he's just like, all right, well, you're a shepherd. You want this fucking gold thing? Like he's also just like, like I think he's like kind of just being nice, but he's also maybe a little bit like...

ah fuck my like you know i guess i got nothing yeah you know because we think he believes the shepherd yeah totally okay okay but i also like i'm sure on some level he knows that gold has value so it's like i think it's also being presented as a like altruistic moment from her father but i i'm not 100 certain it's a very confusing story in some ways it really is

So when he's still in the mountains, a monastery in France takes him and his friend in and cares for their feet. I don't know the direct translation. It says phrases like cared for their feet. I don't know if it's bandaged them, washed them. If they wash their feet, it's literally the most Jesus-y thing you can do. It's literally, there's a thing about washing people's feet.

And then he comes down out of the mountains, and a cop basically is like, all right, you got two options. You can go to the Foreign Legion, or you can report to Septford's, a concentration camp that's been set up for refugees. And so he and his friend go to Septford's, the concentration camp. Before Nazis and their death camps, concentration camp had a different connotation. It was not a good connotation, but it wasn't quite the same. It's not a death camp. A lot of people die there, but that's not the point of it, right?

It's when you just concentrate a bunch of people in a camp, usually refugees or whatever, like we have in the United States right now. Septsfonds, this concentration camp, was set up in February 1939 to house Spanish Republicans and German Jews. It was 125 acres that had been sheep grazing land.

There were 50 kilometers of barbed wire fences. There was electric fences. There were watchtowers and spotlights. There were a thousand soldiers serving as guards, not to keep the prisoners safe, but to keep them prisoners. There was an infirmary and there was a prison. The whole thing is a prison, but there's a prison within the prison. There's no running water. There's no heat. There's no electricity. People slept on haystacks. Mud and sand were everywhere. One inmate wrote...

I felt like crying to dry the ink with which I am writing for tears have turned to sand. Yeah. It's devastating. I will say whenever I read like shit from a hundred years ago, I'm like, man, the average person knew how to fucking write. Like it's so true. Cause like, yeah, that's how you fucking communicate like letters and shit, you know?

I also just wonder if like our a lot of our like current vocabulary just doesn't feel like it has the same heft as like the common language back then. Oh, my God. It might be that way. Like 100 years from now. Yeah. People are going to be like, oh, wow. They used like all the time in their sentences and they talked about how things were based. Isn't that beautiful? I mean, like maybe. Right. Yeah. No, no. You're probably right.

Like cooked. Why do they call things cooked? That's such an interesting metaphor. Soon enough, this camp needed a cemetery too. At least 81 people died there, many by suicide. And inmates of the camp were forced to work for the war effort as manual labor. So this world-renowned at this point psychiatrist, Francesc Tusquejas, is in the camp and he immediately sets to work building up a psychiatric facility in the camp.

I love this guy. He is like the Energizer Bunny. He just doesn't care where he is. He is setting up a psychiatrist camp. Yep, exactly. He gets permission from the warden. The warden probably didn't give him permission to do everything he did in the psychiatric care facility, though. Like help people escape the camp.

And while he was there, he hit upon this realization that's like sort of obvious in retrospect, although it has not been fully incorporated into modern psychiatric facilities. Keeping people in captivity is really bad for their mental health, whether it's a prison, a concentration camp, or an asylum. And he says all the time, he's only there for like six months or maybe even less. He says all the time that he did some of his best work in that camp as a therapist.

I've read three different accounts of how he got out. One was that the camp was liberated. I think that account is just wrong. The camp was liberated in 1944 from the Nazis. I found no collaborating evidence that it was corroborating, whatever, corroborating evidence that it was liberated prior to that. One account is that he himself escaped, which is entirely possible. He was helping people escape. He certainly could have escaped.

And one that I find the most likely, which is that someone from a nearby asylum was like, hey, can we have that guy, though? He's like good at this stuff. He got poached? Yeah. Yeah, he got poached. Yeah. The job hunters, headhunters, whatever. Either way, on January 6th, 1940, he arrives at San Alban, a tiny town with a mental asylum.

Saint-Aubin is in Luzerre, the least populated part of France, up in the mountains. It's kind of south-central, if you imagine a map of France. I'll be honest, I can't. Yeah, fair enough. I don't know what any country looks like, really. Yeah, France is kind of a big, almost square blob with some things sticking out of various sides. Okay. Just in the middle, the bottom, in the mountains. Almost every version of this story that I read, I read like seven different accounts of this thing. Okay.

And they were all like, when he shows up, that place is a dirty shithole and everything sucks and it's overcrowded. You will be shocked to know this has never happened before. This erases the work of a woman who came before him and set things in motion that he just picked up on.

Well, history does love to repeat itself, as does leaving women out of history. I know. And one of the things I find that's fascinating is whenever I read about these early 20th century men,

they're usually not the ones writing women out of the story. It's the historians who are obsessed with great men. The like quote unquote great men of history, at least on the left who are like passably feminist are passably feminist and they like care about shit. And they're like, no, I'm part of a big thing where women are helping and absolutely support women, you know? But then the people who are obsessed with great men are like, this man's so good. I don't know why they have that voice, but that's what they sound like. Um,

It makes sense, right? Because the people that are working with those women probably really appreciated their work. Yeah. And in their head, they couldn't write them out of the story because of how much they were a part of it. Yeah. Yeah. So there was this woman named Agnes Masson. She's Italian, but she fled Italy because she was anti-fascist. Like literally her passport application or her like naturalization papers or whatever in 1927 says like reason for leaving. And it's like,

not compatible with the current administration of Italy or whatever, because Italy is under Mussolini at this point. That's such a great line. I'm going to put that everywhere. Not compatible with the current administration. Yeah, totally. We should make t-shirts. Yeah, totally. And she is the first woman to direct a French psychiatric hospital. So imagine leaving her out of the fucking story. From 1933 to 1936, she ran Saint-Albain.

She started the long, slow work of turning the place around. And what she did, both of these people did amazing work. What she did was like physical infrastructure. She hooked up water and electricity. She set up like central heating. I think it's a castle. Like, I don't think it's a huge castle, but it's a castle, you know? She ends solitary confinement and she ends the use of straitjackets. And the way she convinces, there's like, there's nuns who work there, right?

The way she convinces the nuns that they're going to stop using straitjackets rules. She takes one of the head nuns and she's like, I'm just going to leave you in a straitjacket overnight. And then like the next day, she's like, so what do you think? Straitjackets? Yay or nay? How you feeling on them? And they're like, all right, no more fucking straitjackets. Brilliant technique. Yeah. She also adds a library to the place.

And later she moves on to another institution and she stays rad. And like she continues to also revolutionize psychiatric care in France. But why would anyone talk about her even though she did it like five places instead of just one? She started at another institution and she started organizing social events that brought people from outside the asylum into the asylum for like dances and shit so that they were part of society of the town that they were part of.

And this was a scandal in the press and the government. So the government was going to fire her, but the patients stuck up for her. And she got to keep her job for a while. And she also started letting patients know that how long they were going to be held at the facility was up to the patient themselves. She'd be like, all right, how long should you be here? Like, what do you need? You know?

She's cool. Eventually she does get fired. She moves from place to place, I think partly because people keep running her out. And then eventually she's not able to find work anymore because she's too based. Eh? Based? Eh? People in the future. That's like me saying, oh, now I can't come up with that old timey word. Oh, well. We'll think of something. Yeah. And so it's this legacy of improvement and anti-fascism and refuginess that Toscaeus walks into.

And how the patients and the doctors then create a secret society to fuel anti-fascist partisan resistance to the Nazis and reinvent medical care for the mentally ill, we'll talk about on Wednesday. That's my cliffhanger. It's a good one. Thank you. Thank you. Anyway, how are you feeling about this so far?

I'm energized and excited. I think this is so awesome. And sometimes it just sucks to think about all the things that could have caught on. I know. Right? That it's not that the thing didn't ever exist. It's like it was there. We just didn't run with it the way we ran with the worst option. I know. It's just like this doesn't specifically make money for private institutions. Like I am guessing that that's the majority of the fucking difference. But I...

I don't know. Maybe that's the wrong kind of cynical. Maybe it's some other terrible reason instead. I'm sure there's a lot of stigma around these people, you know, back then. Totally. Of just like not being willing to view them as, you know, autonomous human beings who should be involved in their care.

Yeah. People want really, really hard to other mentally ill people because they want to really, really hard things that could never be them. It's so much like homelessness. You know, it's like thinking the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I could never be me. Whatever happens to that person doesn't matter because that's totally not me because I have.

paycheck coming up. Like, you know, like... And I think that's like the mentality that is like what arrived us at Trump is like people thinking that anyone that is suffering in this country deserves it because they've done something wrong. Yeah. Rather than that the entire system is rigged against all of us. Totally. The number of people who are just like, oh shit, I voted for Trump and now ICE is coming for someone I care about or I lost my job in the federal government or...

you know, there's no way I'll be able to afford anything because of tariffs or whatever. Like, and I don't even want to like pathologize or blame. I'm not like super excited about people who voted for Trump, but like, you know, it's like, all right, well, if someone does a thing and then they learn their lesson, we got to let them learn their lesson.

Yeah, and it also just like, I think just like speaks to how harmful that worldview is that like, you know, good people get rewarded, bad people get punished. And how like that's, it's just not how society works. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

But if people want to reward themselves by getting a chance to read something that will let them think about romance and comedy, do you have any suggestions for them?

You know what? I do. I would recommend that they check out my brand new rom-com, Save the Date, which is more calm than spicy for people who, look, if you're here for five chili peppers, this isn't the book for you. But if you're here, you know, to see someone fight against some ideas around romance and marriage and sort of deal with her mental health along the way, then I recommend that.

saved the date. And it would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it one day before it comes out. And for anyone who's like, I don't know, what's the point of pre-ordering the day before it comes out? It's worth knowing that pre-orders have a really disproportionate impact on the sort of algorithms that shouldn't run our world. Because what that means is that you get this specific boost of sales at one moment. And like,

Well, you're already a New York Times bestseller, but the best chance to get to be that way is pre-orders, by and large, for people. And so I would encourage anyone who's excited about it to pre-order it a day early.

What do I want to promote? I know I just promised that I'm out of my book promotion cycle, but I do have a book coming out. It's kind of the inverse of what Save the Date is. If you are looking to escape by thinking about reflections on death and magic, I have a book called Death.

The Immortal Choir holds every voice that comes out from the Anarchist Publishing Collective, Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness. I think it comes out June 2nd. But you can pre-order it. If you miss the Kickstarter, you can pre-order it. And all the pre-orders through several places, I think AK Press and Firestorm Books and Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness, come with a signature in the book. So that's a bonus.

And I will have to sit there and sign a whole stack of stickers, book plates. But worse problems have happened.

I had to make my signature my initials because my actual signature is so illegible and ugly that I had to just like shift it into initials. It's a good move. Mine is largely illegible, but I start it with a heart and then the M is recognizable. That's like how I've always. Oh, that's nice. Yeah.

Anyway, we'll be back Wednesday and with uplifting stories. This is genuinely one of my favorite stories. And it's oddly, even though it's taking place in one of the worst moments in human history, oddly uplifting. So I think you all will like it. And so we'll see you on Wednesday.

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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