State of the Podcast (January 2026)

We're in our fifth year now and I'm still amazed at your ability to give an introduction. So Hello and welcome to the labor-john podcast. State of the podcast. It's our annual State of the podcast. Our second annual, we've been doing this for five years, but hey, you figure that shit out. Not us. That's not on us. That's on you. Hey, welcome to the SOTP. 2012. My name is Sam James and I'm joined as always by I'm Gabe Christie. That's what he says. He's been saying that for five years, but I don't only believe him. I don't believe this guy. You're right. I'm Gabriel Thomas Christie. My core address is my mother's maiden name is redacted. Why is your mother's maiden being redacted? It's a traditional Jewish name. Oh, oh, God, Gabe. Not state of the world. All right. We're going to talk about just some things that have been going on behind the scenes that we kind of just want to share with everybody because like you're part of this, you know, it's not just us too. You know, we have to pull other people in it to share with our misery, you know. We have to build a pair of social relationship. Exactly. We want everybody in the labor sphere to come together and do our work for us. Gabe, that is the goal. So we just want to talk about a couple things that are going on and are soon to be going on. Starting with something that I'm personally very, very excited about is the free library of Philadelphia has a club, a vinyl listening club where they listen to records. They expect people to bring in their own records and you listen to each others and talk about and everything. And so the library acts host sometimes to come in and present blah, blah, blah. And one, two, three, labor, John will be hosting one of these sessions at the Parkway Central Library here in Philadelphia for the library mixtape vinyl listening club on January 28th, 2026 at 5.30 pm, which will roughly go on for about two hours if I can bullshit my way through it fast enough. And it's co-hosted by the free library of Philadelphia's music department and the very, very, very lovely people who work there and we're helping us put this on, put this together. And the theme is songs of solidarity and strife and we're going to be presenting some records from our personal music collections and some of our family members personal music collections that we lifted some records from. And I'm really excited about this game. How about you, buddy? I'm excited about it too. This has led me to discover that I have a 1946 or produced record of a led billy that I inherited from my grandfather that which we will be sharing. We will be with you on January 28th, 2026 at the Parkway Central Library. So Parkway Central Library read a book. It's good for you. Listen to a record. It's better for you. Okay, moving on Gabe, unless you have anything else to say about that wonderful event. No, I'm excited as well. 5.30 to 7.30 pm. Yes, it's going to be a lot of fun. And up next is free. It is free at the free library of Philadelphia. I just take something I just leave. That's how my parents work. Yeah, they haven't got me. I have to show them this card thing. But it's a weird system. Yeah, no, it's these these commies. It's something inherited from, I don't know, Benjamin Franklin famous communist. All right, Gabe. Moving on to another big piece of news. Talk about old dead people. And Jesus Christ, what? Benjamin Franklin. No, we moved on Gabe. I'll go into the next thing. Our new website. Gabe, you have the script right in front of you, man. I do. I'm surprised by this. Anyway, we are just as organized and put together as we always have been. But yeah, there's a new website coming. And it's going to be delicious. Like picture our website now. But glorious. We have not achieved gloriousness yet. But we hope to do that with this new website because specifically this new website gives us the ability to do some what we always wanted to do. And that is the built out the Philly or Philadelphia labor history archives, which we had kind of tried to do this already with what I was calling the Philadelphia labor Lyceum at the time, which was a short lived project of building out a basically a digital museum to both highlight my now admittedly minuscule button collection compared to some other unnamed people's button collections. But also we're picking fights with our friends on Instagram. But also to show to serve as a way to share some Philly labor history through digital exhibits. Now, I am or we are working on rebuilding that. And with a slightly more focused goal. So we'll no longer or it eventually will house some digitized or some photos of my button collection. But more importantly more of Gabe's buttons. Tons. More importantly, it will be built out as almost an encyclopedia of Philadelphia labor history. One of the things that we've or that I realized going through all of the research that we've done for this podcast and the literally over I think 1500 some odd newspaper clippings that I've compiled over the past four and a half years that all of that is a lot of information that is currently just sitting as tagged newspaper clippings on newspapers.com which is not the most accessible format. So my hope and my goal with the Lyceum or with the Philly Delphi labor archives. RIP Lyceum. Yes. That's both because it's kind of more focused on being a community archive now and also because no knows what a Lyceum is unless you've already had a long conversation in which I have subjected you to my labor Lyceum's rant. Which if you have been subjected to that I'm sorry but the thank you are finally apologizing. It's taken five years. But the goal is to take all of the information in those newspaper clippings. Upload it into the archives and then go through and work through the data that is in each of those newspaper clippings because each one in of itself tells a story about what happened on like one specific day of a strike. But within that there's also information about individual people and we need to collect that information and make different entries for like Joe Smith getting arrested at 10th and Chessnut while on strike in 1907. That was made up I don't know if that's an actual person. But that's an example of the kind of information that gets recorded in these newspaper clippings. Also we tend especially earlier clippings before seemingly about the 1940s. They really like to put people's home addresses in announcements of arrest. Let's talk to everybody's great grandfather. Yeah. So we can pretty easily build out a map of like who got arrested in different strikes. Also we can build out maps of where and when these strikes happened. Now where this gets into everyone else doing our work for us. Part of this goal is to make this as user friendly as possible so that we can have people who were sensible and didn't ruin their lives by going into the museum industry or libraries and archives. Be able to enter this information in and work with us to build this out. So that's not only to save the labor and make sure that this kind of work gets done, but also because I personally firmly believe that every worker should be a steward of their own heritage. And that at least in Philly, this is the working classes heritage. And it doesn't belong to Sam and I. This belongs to everyone. Speaking of self-gave, mine, oh my, I believe it belongs to everyone personally. And so while Sam and I are the ones hosting it, we want to make sure that this is a community thing. And I suppose a service that we are providing as part of the labor drawn project, such as the days. So yeah, if you want to get involved, or if you know anyone who might want to get involved, get in touch, we will keep you updated on how to do that. And once the basic framework is built out, we will start hopefully bringing people in to do some data entry, which is always so much fun. You get to learn a lot about metadata. It's a good thing I'm off camera, buddy. You didn't, I'm excited. And speaking of Game Paid, or hypothetically Game Paid for your services and the work that you do, we want to emphasize our sincere apologies to our patrons who have been waiting for a new episode for a little bit, but we have just been busy as F. And there's no, there's no, we have, you know, there's, we can't apologize. There's two of us. There's just two of us, you know, I mean, goddamn, I mean, come on. I mean, we still want to say thank you to every single one of our patrons and anybody who's ever going to a show, anybody's ever done anything to support us in any kind of way. We just want to say thank you, you know, we really do we're fucking appreciate that. I believe, you know, seeing people out in the crowd and noticing us and, you know, being excited to see us is pretty magical. I didn't think I'd experienced this kind of feeling in my life, okay, but it's, I think it's happiness. I think this might be happiness. It might be the pills weren't working. So I guess I had to go to working class history podcasting. I mean, that is the millennial approach you need. Yes. Balance both. If you hit your 30s and you don't have a podcast yet, there's something wrong with you. No, there's something very right with you. If you're in your 30s and you don't have a podcast, we got one more little tiny labor history aspect to get through. And then we have something very cool. But first, okay, take it away because out. This is really cool. So the one other thing that we're working on and where your patron dues are going is helping to sustain all of this insanity is making a series of little like brochure pamphlets that are going to cover different aspects of Philadelphia labor history. We're currently starting with one focusing on kind of Northwest Philly, German townish area, which we're doing in conjunction with the library. We love the library. We do. We do. We do. But we plan to expand this and make more little pamphlets. So those might be popping up at various locations as they get completed. And we so stay tuned for that. And this is all again, part of the our overall master plan of just teaching everybody Philadelphia labor history. And by the end of the 21st century. Yes. By the time I die, I want at least like three other people in Philadelphia to be mildly familiar with the 1946 United Electrical Workers Strike. You got me. So there's one game that I need two more. Two more than we can kill you. Yep. And speaking of pamphlets, something that we didn't really share that much. But keep an eye out for those local Philly and who like their local Philly Zines. Keep an eye out in a couple of shops. We'll put it on our socials once we find where they all are. But we've been graciously, nicely, very nicely acts to write a little blurb in a couple of local Zines and here in Philly. And it's cool just to get a little bit, you know, a little bit of history out at a time, you know, to some segments who maybe are unfamiliar with the history, you know, of the working class here in Philly. And so we've been doing that for a little while. We got some new ones coming out as well. So just if you're in Philly, take a look around at your local shop. If you see a scene, pick it up because we may be in it. Dispossibility. That's a big man. Not us physically. Well, our writing might be in the scene. They kept asking for my toenails, Gabe. Okay. That's like what unrelated. All right, Gabe, do you have anything else for the lovely people who are subjected to listening to us every week? I do not. I think you should close this out with the final topic. Gabe Christie. I'm sorry, Gabriel Tom is Christie. Social Security number two five. Has created an amazing logo, a new logo for us. Labor John is going to have its third, I say second official because the one that I made in the beginning sucked, then we had a really lovely one made by a friend of mine, Whiteie Ellis, who was a tattoo artist now in North Carolina. If you're in North Carolina and you need a tattoo, hit me up because I'll send you to him. It's amazing. He came up with this logo for us. And we've used it since I think the end of 2021, 2022. I think the beginning of 2022, we introduced this one. And we thought, you know, we've come into our own little more. And so Gabe has been working on this logo for months, many months. And we've been going back and forth and seeing like what works and what doesn't work. And we're finally at a point where we think we're ready to release it because it looks really good in my own personal opinion. And Gabe, I know you've done so much work for this. I just want you to explain or, you know, get out a little PTSD or something or anything you want to talk about about this new logo that we got coming out. I want to be clear by working on it. What Sam means is blatantly ripping off an old railroad logo and teaching myself Adobe Illustrator. God damn it. Take a compliment. No. But thank you. All right. But yeah, we've come up with a new logo. And I would also like to give a shout out to my long-suffering wife, who helped me or helped me learn Adobe Illustrator and gave me lots of very good critique on the final design. And I hope you all like it. And we're not sure we're fully finalized on color choice, but that might we'll figure out what to do with that moving forward. But the logo design you will get to see. And it's lovely. Well, thank you people for enjoying it because when they think of labor, John, they're going to see this logo game. Frantically, I think it is just, I should have just been your face. Speaking of Gabe, unrelated, but I want to bust of your head in my every room of my house. I want you to watch and like paintings. You know, those paintings that kind of like watch you where you move around the room. I want that. I want you to be watch me in all times. Sam, we're supposed to develop a pair of social relationship with our listeners. Not each other. Well, I don't want to go paragliding with my listeners. I'm going to go paragliding with my co-host and good friend Gabe Christie. Gabe, your time is Christie. You know, paragliding does sound fun. It sounds kind of scary, but also fun. I don't know. Gabe, keep us on track. Anyway, I think we have new logo. A lot of stuff. Anyway, yeah, stay tuned for more episodes. That's what we do every week about. I think we're getting back on track with a regular recording schedule. Yeah, we're trying to keep it the Mondays again every other Monday. Yeah, we've been, the past year has been rough. So we apologize for any inconsistencies in upload times. I believe. But that's a recession indicator is when the podcasters are having a tough time, Gabe. Yeah, some bads happening in this country. Yeah, we're fine though, Gabe. Definitely didn't finally start getting back into therapy today. So good things. State of the podcast, not state of Gabe's mind at the current moment in time. - Alright, one and the same. - They're one. and the same actually. And most of all, thanks to you Gabe Christie for all the work you do for our podcast and our little labor history project. We love you. Take this compliment you motherfucker. I will. Thank you. And thanks to you, Sam James, for all the incredible editing and meming and I'll just say it basically single handedly setting up the library event because I haven't had any time to do that. And all of your amazing music and actually getting out to shows so that I can live vicariously through you. And also just being an awesome person and a fantastic host. Gabe, is that it? And a great dad. Oh my, oh, you son of a bitch. All right. So, that's the heavy game. I'm flustered. Stay to the podcast 2026. Thank you for listening. Keep listening. We got a lot of stuff cool coming down the road here. So thanks a lot. Thank you. And we love you. Marius, please. All of us. All of them marry all of us. Yes. Everybody should get you want. If we all get married, what is a marriage buddy union?