This week’s episode is our audio bookclub conversation about Michael Lewis’ The Premonition. The book is about the state-level & federal bureaucrats who foresaw the pandemic, as early as the George W. Bush administration. It lays out the pandemic response plans they built, how they were passed on to the Obama administration, and eventually discarded by the Trump administration in 2017, with disastrous consequences. 

Note: Our next #NerdFarmReads selection is Dopesick by Beth Macy. You can grab it from our friends at Libro FM (join using promo code “tacoma”).

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

In September, teachers in Seattle Schools went on a five-day strike. While the usual suspects in conservative media collectively pulled a hamstring faking umbrage, the community was widely supportive of the strike. Yet many people were caught off-guard by it and its seemingly rapid resolution.

We reached out to Dahlia Bazzaz and Monica Velez from the Seattle Times to get their takes on the strike and its connection to wider state-wide politics and events in Olympia.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

After a series of episodes about mass incarceration and duplicitous, corrupt sheriffs, today’s episode is something different. We talked about Running with the Devil: the Wild World of John McAffee, a new Netflix documentary film and Untold: the Girlfriend that Didn’t Exist, a series about the catfishing of Manti Te’o, then linebacker at Notre Dame.

Our guests and Hope Teague Bowling and Megan Holyoke of the Interchanagle White Ladies Podcast.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

In this episode, the second of a two-part series, we continue exploring the controversial term of Pierce County Sheriff, Ed Troyer. In this episode, we look and the public record including two official investigations into Troyer’s misconduct, first as the department’s Public Information Officer and eventually as Sheriff.  

Our guest today is Justin Camarata. He is a former member of the Tacoma City Council and a regular guest across the shows here on Channel 253. This conversation leans heavily on the reporting of local journalists, particularly Kari Plog from KNKX. Each document or report we refer to in the discussion is in the show notes below. 

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

In this episode, the first of a two-part series, we dig into the turbulent term of the elected Pierce County Sheriff, Ed Troyer. In this episode, we look at Troyer’s influence on the investigation into the killing of Manuel Ellis and his stalking & harassing of Black newspaper delivery driver Sedrick Altheimer, which we covered in 2021. This conversation is focused on Troyer’s impact on the Black community and Black residents in Pierce County. In part two, we will take a longer look at the public record on Sheriff Troyer.

Our guest today is Jamika Scott. She is a former candidate for mayor of Tacoma, a filmmaker, co-host of We Art Tacoma here on Channel 253, and a member of the Tacoma Action Collective (TAC). TAC is a group of activists and organizers pushing for governmental reform & accountability in the City of Tacoma.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

The United States imprisons twice as many people per capita as Vladimir Putin’s Russia and four times the number of communist China. The Prison Within is a documentary about mass incarceration and the harm it does to the incarcerated and all of us. 

Our guest this week is Katherin Hervey. She is the writer and director of the film. We talked about her motivations for making the film, what she learned about our punitive system of mass incarceration, and what all of this tells us about the US.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Danny Caine is the co-owner and proprietor of the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas. He is also the author of How to Resist Amazon and Why a zine/audiobook about the business practices of Amazon and how they harm society. We discussed his book and the monopolistic, predatory market behavior that Amazon engages in: data mining, exploiting marketplace sellers & sub-contractors, union busting, etc.

In the second segment, we talked about some alternatives to Amazon products that we utilize, like our friends at LibroFM (remember to use promo code “Tacoma”), rather than Audible and the recent choice to move Channel 253 to Libsyn, rather than hosting our shows on Amazon Web Services.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

On July 13, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a year over year price rise of 9.1%. Driven by rising food and energy costs, the United States is experiencing the worst inflationary period since 1980. We wanted to get to the bottom of the causes of this inflationary cycle (nope, it’s not stimulus checks), how people can protect themselves from inflation (congrats, vegans), and how long this inflationary cycle might last (shorter than you think).

Our guest is our favorite economist, Bill Dickens. Bill is a utilities economist and chief economist and president of BJNJ. His work typically focuses on hydro, natural gas, and smart grid technologies. But he’s always up for a conversation about macroeconomics.

Special thanks to Rep. Strickland for introducing Bill to us last summer.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

This week, we are discussing police unions and how they protect bad actors. But it is also a conversation about the elected officials who don’t hold law enforcement accountable. This conversation is in part a response to the decision by the Pierce County Prosecutor to not charge Officer Phan for his vehicle attack in January 2021. It is also partly in response to the ongoing “slow-strike” Tacoma Police are engaging in. Lastly, it is inspired by the ongoing controversy around Ed Troyer, the disgraced Pierce County Sherriff, who is facing criminal charges.

Our guest, Aaron Brickman, is a Labor Relations Specialist who has worked with several major national unions. He joined us to discuss police unions, their contracts, and why so often police officers get to keep their jobs after committing gross misconduct.

The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member

Over the month of June, the US Supreme Court released a series of rulings that upended established precedent (accepted legal patterns) in American society. They weakened the first amendment’s establishment clause, the fifth amendment’s Miranda protections, the ability of states to regulate gun ownership, the EPA’s ability to issue regulations regarding climate change, and most notably gave states the green light to ban all abortions within their borders.

Other rights appear on the chopping block with the court’s belligerent 6-3 DGAF Conservative majority and their peculiar reading of the US Constitution. 

So we put up the Bat-Signal and were able to connect with legal nerd and policy activist Summer Stinson. Summer has a JD from the University of Oregon, was a law clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and currently leads the Economic Opportunity Institute. 

She appears today on the show in a personal capacity.

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The Nerd Farmer Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts and is brought to you by Libro FM 

Please consider supporting the podcast by joining Channel 253 as a member