The Bigfoot Manifesto

In Episode 34 of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave Pederson is joined by environmental scientist, organizer and writer Nicole Levin for a deeply personal conversation about Gaza, genocide, Zionism, Jewish identity, Palestinian humanity, political belonging and the moral meaning of "Never Again."

Nicole reflects on growing up Jewish with the Holocaust as a central part of her historical and moral education, and on understanding "Never Again" as a universal warning — not only a promise of Jewish safety, but a principle meant to apply to everyone.

She talks candidly about how her views on Israel and Palestine changed over time, the personal cost of using the word "genocide," and what happens when conscience begins to conflict with family, community and inherited political identity.

The conversation also explores antisemitism and anti-Zionism, progressive Jewish solidarity with Palestinians, the nonprofit industrial complex, climate activism, burnout, institutional compromise and the politics of hopelessness.

Dave and Nicole also discuss her new book, Diary of a Mad Girl: Me Vs. The Oil Industry Vs. My Nonprofit Job, a story about activism, economic insecurity, burnout and finding hope while the systems around you feel increasingly broken.

What does "Never Again" mean if it only applies to us?

Follow Nicole Levin

Website: https://www.nicolejlevin.com/ Substack: https://nicolejoellelevin.substack.com/ Instagram: @njldraws

Signed preorder — Diary of a Mad Girl: https://skylightbooks.com/pre-order-signed-copies-diary-mad-girl-nicole-levin

Listen to The Bigfoot Manifesto

Website: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/ep34/ Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/apple-tbm-ep34 Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/spotify-tbm-ep34 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBigfootManifesto

Available on all major podcast platforms.

Bigfoot vs. the Health Insurance Beast: Why America Still Doesn't Have Universal Healthcare

Dave Pederson talks with Wendell Potter, former Cigna vice president of corporate communications turned health insurance whistleblower, author, journalist, president of the Center for Health and Democracy, and editor-in-chief of HEALTH CARE un-covered.

After spending nearly two decades inside the insurance industry, Potter walked away after confronting the human consequences of the system he had helped defend. In this episode, he explains how insurers turned words like "choice," "competition," "socialized medicine," and "government takeover" into political weapons — and why he now describes much of his former work as propaganda.

Dave and Wendell dig into claim denials, prior authorization, narrow networks, deductibles, "benefit buy down," medical debt, vertically integrated insurance giants, pharmacy benefit managers, executive compensation, and the growing use of algorithms and AI in coverage decisions.

They also break down the difference between universal healthcare, single payer, and a national health service, what the Affordable Care Act accomplished and failed to fix, and why the United States continues to spend more than other wealthy nations without guaranteeing healthcare to everyone.

Is the American healthcare system broken — or is it delivering exactly the financial results it was designed to deliver?

Learn more about Wendell Potter: https://wendellpotter.com

Books: https://wendellpotter.com/books

HEALTH CARE un-covered: https://healthcareuncovered.substack.com

Center for Health & Democracy: https://centerforhealthanddemocracy.org

The Bigfoot Manifesto — Progressive Politics. Cryptid Truth. https://bigfootmanifesto.com

When workers start organizing, corporations rarely improvise. They call in the professionals.

In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave Pederson talks with Professor John Logan, Professor and Program Director of Labor and Employment Studies at San Francisco State University, about the modern union-busting industrial complex: consultants, management-side law firms, captive meetings, surveillance, delay tactics, "employee relations" specialists, data tools, and legal loopholes designed to stop workers from exercising a federally protected right.

Logan traces the history from Pinkertons, labor spies, and company unions to today's polished anti-union campaigns at Amazon, Starbucks, Trader Joe's, REI, Tesla, and beyond. The old union buster carried a club. The modern version carries a PowerPoint deck titled "Maintaining a Direct Relationship."

We discuss how the union-avoidance industry was built, why employers spend billions fighting worker organizing, how fear and futility are manufactured, why progressive-branded companies often fight unions aggressively, how first-contract delay becomes a union-busting strategy, and why American labor law protects the right to organize on paper while letting employers dominate the process in practice.

As Professor Logan explains, workers would organize in far greater numbers if they were given a fair choice. The problem is that corporations control the workplace, the schedule, the message, the legal timeline, and often the fear.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jVo26rhhuK4

Guest Links:

John Logan — SF State Faculty Bio https://cob.sfsu.edu/directory/john-logan

John Logan — Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/people/john-logan/

Corporate Union Busting in Plain Sight — John Logan / EPI https://www.epi.org/publication/corporate-union-busting/

The Union Avoidance Industry in the United States — John Logan https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00518.x

The U.S. Union Avoidance Industry Goes Global — John Logan https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1095796019893336

The Bigfoot Manifesto: https://bigfootmanifesto.com

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBigfootManifesto

Apple Podcasts: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/apple

Spotify: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/spotify

Parents pay more than they can afford. Child-care educators earn less than they can live on. Providers still struggle to remain open. How can all three be true?

Dave Pederson talks with nationally recognized family-policy expert Elliot Haspel about why America's child-care crisis isn't a personal budgeting failure—it is the predictable result of treating essential social infrastructure like an ordinary private-market purchase.

Elliot explains the labor economics that make child care uniquely difficult to finance, how Richard Nixon's 1971 veto helped establish America's "free-market family," and what the pandemic revealed about child care's role as a load-bearing pillar of society.

They also explore:

• Why competition alone cannot fix the child-care market • What New Mexico and Vermont are doing differently • Why people without young children still have a stake in child care • The missing value of stay-at-home parents and unpaid caregivers • Why paid family leave must be part of the solution • Why a subsidy without an available slot is not genuine access • What a universal child-care choice guarantee could look like

ABOUT ELLIOT HASPEL

Elliot Haspel is a nationally recognized family-policy expert and commentator specializing in child-care issues. He is the author of Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It and Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care For All. He writes The Family Frontier, serves as a senior fellow at Capita, and is a fellow with New America's Better Life Lab.

WATCH THE VIDEO EPISODE https://youtu.be/0GHqj1rZw5I

ELLIOT'S WORK

Official website: https://elliothaspel.com/

Raising a Nation: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/raising-a-nation-9780197799291

Crawling Behind: https://bookshop.org/p/books/crawling-behind-america-s-child-care-crisis-and-how-to-fix-it-elliot-haspel/13149188

The Family Frontier: https://familyfrontier.substack.com/

Capita: https://capita.org/person/elliot-haspel/

New America: https://www.newamerica.org/people/elliot-haspel/

THE BIGFOOT MANIFESTO

Website: https://www.bigfootmanifesto.com Apple Podcasts: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/apple Spotify: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/spotify YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBigfootManifesto

The Bigfoot Manifesto explores progressive politics, economic inequality, concentrated power, and the monsters hiding inside American institutions.

#ChildCare #UniversalChildCare #FamilyPolicy #CareEconomy #TheBigfootManifesto

Universal basic income is usually presented as an anti-poverty program. Scott Santens argues that it is also a foundation for freedom—the ability to refuse an abusive job, leave a dangerous situation, care for family, or pursue meaningful work without risking homelessness.

Dave Pederson talks with Scott about what UBI actually is, why it should be universal and unconditional, and whether people would really stop working. They examine basic income as a "permanent strike fund" that could raise workers' bargaining power, strengthen unions, support unpaid caregivers, and ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence are shared by everyone whose knowledge helped build it.

They also discuss:

• Why UBI is different from traditional welfare • What existing basic-income experiments tell us about employment • How UBI could increase wages and improve undesirable jobs • Ways to fund basic income through tax credits, land-value taxes, wealth funds, and other dividends • Whether UBI would cause inflation • The relationship between financial independence and domestic violence • How basic income could encourage creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation

Scott Santens has researched and advocated for unconditional universal basic income since 2013. He is the founder and CEO of the Income To Support All Foundation, host of The Basic Income Show, founder of the AI Pledge for Humanity, and author of Let There Be Money.

SCOTT SANTENS

Substack: https://scottsantens.substack.com

Basic Income FAQ: https://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq

Income To Support All Newsletter: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com

Let There Be Money: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NH31Y4C

THE BIGFOOT MANIFESTO

Website: https://www.bigfootmanifesto.com

Apple Podcasts: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/apple

Spotify: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/spotify

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBigfootManifesto

Progressive politics. Cryptid truths. And the monsters hiding in American power.

#UniversalBasicIncome #UBI #ScottSantens #WorkersRights #TheBigfootManifesto

Nick Hanauer joins The Bigfoot Manifesto for a conversation about Markets Built for Humans, his new co-authored work with Eric Beinhocker, and why America needs to abandon trickle-down economics once and for all.

For fifty years, Americans were told that if we cut taxes for the rich, weakened labor, deregulated corporations, let monopolies grow, and trusted markets to magically fix everything, prosperity would eventually reach everyone else.

But the magic never came.

Instead, wages stagnated, the middle class got squeezed, corporate power exploded, Wall Street extracted more and more from the real economy, and democracy started to rot from the inside.

Nick's argument is both radical and obvious: the economy should serve human beings.

In this episode, Dave and Nick talk about why trickle-down economics became the dominant myth of American life, why "rich people are job creators" is such a powerful story, why workers and customers actually drive growth, and why fairness is not anti-growth — fairness is how growth happens.

They also dig into Market Humanism, middle-out economics, labor power, overtime protections, unions, antitrust, shareholder primacy, AI, GDP, the stock market, and why a hollowed-out middle class is not just an economic problem — it is a democratic crisis.

Bigfoot may be blurry, but trickle-down is invisible for a reason: it was never really there.

Read Markets Built for Humans: https://www.marketsbuiltforhumans.org/

Listen to Pitchfork Economics: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/

The Bigfoot Manifesto: https://bigfootmanifesto.com

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBigfootManifesto

Listen / Subscribe: Apple Podcasts: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/apple Spotify: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/spotify

Support the show / merch: https://bigfootmanifesto-shop.fourthwall.com/

Everybody says AI lives in "the cloud." But the cloud is not weightless.

In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave talks with Danny Caine of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance about the data center boom powering AI, Big Tech, and the next major infrastructure fight.

These massive server farms need land, water, electricity, tax breaks, zoning approvals, and public tolerance — but too often, communities are the last to know what is being negotiated in their own backyard.

Dave and Danny dig into why AI is driving a rapid data center buildout, how shell companies and secrecy keep showing up in these deals, why local residents are pushing back, and whether ordinary ratepayers could end up subsidizing Big Tech's power needs.

This is not an anti-technology conversation. It is a pro-democracy conversation.

Bigfoot may be hiding in the woods, but the server farms are hiding in plain sight.

Links:

ILSR — The Data Centers Are Coming: https://ilsr.org/building-local-power/the-data-centers-are-coming/

Inequality.org — I Stood in Data Center Alley: https://inequality.org/article/i-stood-in-data-center-alley/

ILSR — The Policies Communities Need to Meet the AI Moment: https://ilsr.org/articles/the-policies-communities-need-to-meet-the-ai-moment/

The Bigfoot Manifesto Merch: https://bigfootmanifesto-shop.fourthwall.com/

Subscribe, share, and follow The Bigfoot Manifesto for more conversations about corporate monsters, progressive politics, labor, democracy, inequality, and the cryptids hiding in America's broken systems.

The real monster isn't hiding in the warehouse.

It's in the scanner, the algorithm, the productivity metric, the union-busting meeting, the legal delay, and the idea that workers should be grateful just to survive.

In Episode 27 of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave Pederson talks with Derrick Palmer, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, one of the worker-organizers behind the historic JFK8 victory on Staten Island, and author of Handbook for the Revolution: Building a More Perfect Union for the Twenty-First Century.

Derrick also appeared in Dave's film Americonned, and this conversation brings that story into the present: the warehouse economy, corporate power, worker dignity, organizing from inside the machine, and what happens after workers win a union election but still have to fight for a contract.

Dave and Derrick dig into Amazon's metric-driven workplace, surveillance, fear, worker burnout, the pandemic breaking point, how private anger becomes collective strength, and why Derrick wrote a handbook instead of just a memoir.

They also talk about what workers should do first when they think their workplace needs a union, how to build trust inside a workplace, why winning the union vote is not the finish line, and how corporations use delay as a weapon against worker power.

Bigfoot may leave footprints. Amazon leaves time-off-task reports.

But Derrick Palmer and the workers at JFK8 proved that even one of the most powerful corporations on Earth can be challenged when workers stop accepting the story they've been sold and start building power together.

Guest: Derrick Palmer Co-founder, Amazon Labor Union Author, Handbook for the Revolution

Buy Derrick Palmer's book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250455338/handbookfortherevolution/

Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1: https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/

Contact Amazon Labor Union-IBT Local 1: https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/contact

Organize with Teamsters Amazon Division: https://teamster.org/divisions/amazon-division/

Know your rights during union organizing: https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/your-rights-during-union-organizing

Watch Americonned on Gathr: https://gathr.com/vod/c1a0e0ba

The Bigfoot Manifesto: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/

Howard Polskin of TheRighting joins Dave Pederson to track the headlines, podcasts, traffic charts, and outrage narratives shaping MAGA media.

What happens when millions of Americans are living inside a completely different media weather system?

In Episode 26 of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave Pederson talks with Howard Polskin, founder and chief curator of TheRighting, a media company that tracks conservative news outlets, right-wing headlines, podcast rankings, traffic data, and the broader media ecosystem shaping MAGA politics.

Howard began following right-wing media after the 2016 election, asking the same question many liberals asked: How did this happen? What he found was not just a few fringe websites, but an alternate information universe powered by grievance, fear, anti-woke panic, celebrity pundits, Trump loyalty tests, and headlines designed to make every political disagreement feel like the end of civilization.

This episode digs into how right-wing media works, why outrage is a business model, how fringe narratives move into mainstream politics, why podcasts build such deep loyalty, and what progressives need to understand without simply amplifying every bad-faith frame.

Bigfoot may be folklore. But the outrage ecosystem is measurable.

It has headlines, traffic reports, subscriber charts, podcast rankings, algorithms, donor networks, celebrity pundits, and a business model that turns fear into loyalty.

Guest: Howard Polskin Founder & Chief Curator, TheRighting Website: https://therighting.com/

The Bigfoot Manifesto: https://bigfootmanifesto.com/

In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave talks with Victoria Casavecchia, founder of Empowered Victories Wellness, a Registered Nurse and Board-Certified Nurse Coach with nearly 30 years of experience in pediatric nursing.

Victoria joins the show to talk about the youth mental health crisis, the rise in anxiety, depression, burnout, and disconnection among kids and teens, and why America's healthcare system often waits until families are in crisis before offering real help.

The conversation covers how anxiety can show up physically, why parents are overwhelmed too, the role of sleep, food, movement, mindfulness, and connection, and where nurse coaching fits in the "missing middle" between toughing it out and emergency care.

This isn't just about individual wellness. It's about a healthcare system that asks families to solve a public health crisis one private coping skill at a time.

Because Bigfoot may be hard to find — but try finding affordable mental healthcare when your kid needs help right now.

Guest: Victoria Casavecchia, RN, NC-BC Empowered Victories Wellness: https://www.empoweredvictorieswellness.com/

Helpful Links: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: https://988lifeline.org/ Find mental health or substance use treatment: https://findtreatment.gov/ NAMI resources for kids, teens, and families: https://www.nami.org/kids-teens-and-young-adults/ SAMHSA National Helpline: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/helplines/national-helpline