Kent and Wonder discuss the documentary Union, the story of the Amazon Labor Union, using the untimed astrological charts of its founder, Chris Smalls. Striking themes that came up were the overthrowing of an old, established guard, and the startling emergence of a potential new order and what it takes to get a collective mass of people on board with a revolution. These themes correspond to the 11th House as well as to the outer transits of the planets Saturn and Uranus, which are represented on the day of Smalls’ birth. Also under discussion: Mars in the US founding chart at the same degree as Chris Smalls’ Mercury.
Distribution: Currently on Theatrical Run, more info
Directors: Stephen Maing & Brett Story
Run Time: 100 minutes
Astrological Data: Chris Smalls, 4 July 1988, Rodden Rating: X, Source: Wikipedia
Astrological Data: Unfortunately we had to record this episode twice and the second time we recorded it we neglected to cover how the date the ALU was founded has a Saturn Uranus square which squares Smalls’ natal Pluto. So, the founding of the union is an echo of Smalls natal chart (which contains a Saturn Uranus conjunction) and therefore can be seen to be an event that catalyzes a new relationship to this signature in it. Be advised that this founding chart, which is untimed, is also contradicted by the ALU’s own website which gives the date of the founding as April 20th, rather than the 1st. This means the chart is actually a Rodden rating of XX rather than X as specified on the chart above. Regardless of which date is correct, Saturn and Uranus are slow moving, so this transit would have been active all month long.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.439] Kent Bye: Hello, my name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This season, we're looking at documentaries from Sundance 2024. In today's episode, we're going to be diving into a piece called Union. This was a part of the U.S. documentary competition and actually picked up a special jury award for the art of change. So this was directed by Stephen Meng and Brett Story, and this is the second of seven of our section of episodes that we're calling The Power of the Collective, Movements, and Friendships. So Wonder, I'll pass it along to you to read the synopsis.
[00:00:49.461] Wonder Bright: Union, the Amazon Labor Union, ALU, a group of current and former Amazon workers in New York City's Staten Island, takes on one of the world's largest and most powerful companies in the fight to unionize. Chronicling the historic efforts of the ALU, Union is an intimate and surprising journey of dogged determination, unorthodox tactics, and speaking up despite David versus Goliath odds. Capturing up close, in the trenches moments with the upstart labor union leaders, including the charismatic Chris Smalls, as they try to build support for their movement on their own terms. Filmmakers Brett Story and Stephen Maing bear witness to the realities of labor organizing in the United States. Challenging at best, near impossible when facing the unlimited resources and influence of a corporate giant. They track exhilarating victories and demoralizing setbacks along the way, but foremost spotlight the far-reaching ability of collective action to inspire hope and bring self-determination to workers who've long felt disenfranchised and powerless. And that synopsis was brought to us by Sundance programmer Basil Tsiokos.
[00:02:04.815] Kent Bye: Yeah, so I think a lot of this film, you end up seeing what ends up being a lot of grassroots campaigning and sitting outside of this Amazon warehouse that's based in New York City. And you see them trying to convince a lot of the workers that are working there to sign up for this union. The caveat is that they gave this statistic in the film that this particular warehouse has a turnover rate of around 150% a year, which means that once every six months or so, they essentially swap out all of their workforce. So a high turnover rate, which means that they have to keep campaigning and get enough people that are working there at the time to sign up and to vote to be able to start this union. So it ends up being a little bit of this David versus Goliath battle because you see all the resources that Amazon is putting into both having these special sessions to try to convince the new employees against forming the union, just highlighting different things like it's going to be high fees. Where on the other side of it, you have just a lot of really terrible work conditions that these workers are under where They don't have a lot of protections. They have very short breaks. They can barely make it to their lunch areas to go have a break to eat. They're like 12 or 13 hour shifts just on their feet a lot. A lot of really rigorous algorithmically enforced standards they have to face. And then on top of all that, they're not really paid all that much and they're just treated in a quite inhuman way. So, there's a lot of grievances that each of these workers have, but yet each of them have decided to work there just because they need a job and it's enough money for them to survive on, but the working conditions are quite horrendous. So, we end up following a number of these former workers of Amazon who have really taken up this charge to try to start up this Amazon labor union. Christopher Smalls is one of the big leaders, and we follow a number of other people who are also on this organizing team. But it ends up being a lot of the film of finding all sorts of innovative ways for them to talk to and listen to a lot of the grievances for the workers that work at this warehouse.
[00:04:13.763] Wonder Bright: Yeah, and if you're old enough like me to remember 80s films like Matewan or Norma Rae, which are films which tell tales of union organizing to inspire people about what America actually is about, right? This film is really a bit of a startling document of how far the American sentiment has shifted in terms of what we think unions are in this country anymore. So because of that and because I also was raised in a family where the auto workers union was really important. My mother's side of the family all comes from Detroit and my grandfather worked for the Ford Motor Company from the time that he was in his teens until he retired in his 60s or 70s. So I come from this lineage that really believed in unions and believed in the power of the unions and what they meant and that that was actually a function of a working democratic society and it was a real triumph to have created unions in the first place, which is probably why in my teenage years my mom took me to see films like Matewan and Norma Rae because she wanted me to understand what an important function unions provide in a democratic culture. And I'm aware as I'm saying that out loud that there's a lot of people who are living now who have no experience of that, no understanding of it, no perception of it remotely, because for them a union is something that because they're believing what we're being told about unions now. Like unions are there to take money from the workers and get fat off of your union dues and they don't work for you and just like a whole host of things that you know, over the course of the last summer where we're seeing some efforts being made on the behalf of labor organizers, it's been really heartening to see the SAG strike, you know, experience a certain measure of success and the auto workers union to actually also begin to make some new inroads into this. But watching this film and how hard these workers are working to just be accorded the most decent small modicum of respect as human beings. It is just, it's hard for me to put into words how sad I find it. And I think this film does a really good job of capturing the conditions on the ground in Staten Island as Chris Smalls, who's the leader of the ALU, organizes this real ragtag assortment of people and when I say ragtag I mean they're there because they really truly believe in this cause and they don't have a lot of resources to put towards it. In fact, that's the whole reason they're doing it and they also feel ragtag in the sense that it just feels so impossible what they're doing. And it's so hard for them to convince other people that it, just at times, I'm like, how are they even still doing this? There's the sequence where they're trying to keep their tent up in the wind in this horrible storm, and then they're trying to dismantle it because they can't keep it up. And you just have this experience of what it's physically taking for them to do this. And you know it's just the tip of the iceberg because we also see them meeting late at night and waking up early in the morning. Like, the leader of the union Chris Smalls has invited the documentary team into his home, and we see him waking up on his foldout couch where he's sleeping there with some of his kids. And, you know, these are not people with a lot of financial resources, but they are so determined. And, you know, I guess I'm old enough to remember when the American underdog was a version of American patriotism that we really remembered and that we wanted to root for. So although this film isn't like the sweeping saga where they do achieve things and we'll get into that but, like, this isn't a complete coup where now the ALU has been established in Staten Island and Amazon workers across the country can celebrate this, because they're the only unionized labor force in the whole Amazon ecosystem. That’s, like, one amongst many and Amazon is still fighting them in court and has not sat down at the bargaining table with them as yet. So, you know, at the moment, it's a symbolic win. It's a very important symbolic win. And it hasn't actually helped the people that voted for that union as of yet.
[00:09:18.308] Kent Bye: Yeah. When I think about some of the different primary archetypes, I think about how there's a David versus Goliath. So you have this Jupiterian expansive, one of the biggest corporations in the world, Amazon, who has huge amounts of profits that are really on the backs of all these workers and laborers who are helping to make it one of the most profitable companies in the world. I'm reminded of one of the very first scenes of the film is Jeff Bezos taking a joyride in his rocket up into space then it fades out and it says, Union. So you see this contrast between this extravagant life of this billionaire juxtaposed against the really harsh working conditions, which is much more of a Saturnine experience of a lot of the limits, constraints and boundaries and just really hard work. Much more of a 6th house expression of a job and a career rather than a 10th house. Whereas a 10th house would be much more around you're getting some amount of social status of your job and that you are getting some acclaim for the work that you do, but this is really in the 6th house signification of service and jobs that are much more jobs that you do for money and that there's a context of the traditional significations of the 6th house being derived from slavery and real explicit exploitation of people in their labor. That sort of evolved in kind of more of a modern astrological interpretation in terms of being a part of the service industry or this kind of blue collar workers that the types of working conditions that people are under, that they're really trying to find a little bit of these leverage points so that they can be able to come to the table and negotiate either better working conditions or push back against some of these really extreme expectations that they have. You know, the fact that they have 150% turnover rate should speak to some degree of how they've managed to sustain this over time and kind of get away with it. But it's really not sustainable for anyone that's actually working there to go through those conditions. And so you see a lot of these former workers that were part of Amazon who either got fired for some sort of reason, but they saw enough of a vision and this kind of hopes and dreams and aspirations, this more 11th house ideal of what would be the more ideal situation of really trying to start this movement. and campaigning. So a lot of the film ends up being in this 11th house experience of pounding the pavement, campaigning, talking to people, trying to get people to vote yes, that they should at least have enough signatures that they could then have a vote. So they're trying to get enough petitions where people who are current employees and you see them get to that point and then Amazon's using a lot of the 9th house tactics of these nuances of the law to push back against. And so you see Amazon spending millions of dollars on both people to try to do union busters and to try to spread information that this would not be a good idea or even to have lawyers that are fighting against all these petitions and these votes that are happening to the point, like you said, they still haven't come to the table to negotiate anything, at least as of the recording and display of this documentary that was shown here at Sundance. So you see a lot of this David versus Goliath dynamics of how much resources this company has, but despite all that, they're able to have enough of a collective movement to not only get the petition, but ultimately get the vote to win to have the Amazon labor union be officially recognized. And there was a lot of questions during the Q&A of like, why weren't there other unions that came in and be able to do it? And Chris Smalls was like, look, Amazon has been around as a company for 29 years and yet there still hasn't been a union that's been able to have any success against Amazon. And he said that there was actually previous attempts by the Teamsters and others who just weren't able to counteract all the ways that Amazon was doing to be able to do this kind of union busting. So you have this situation where they're able to finally break through, but still, like you said, it's kind of a symbolic one because it still hasn't been able to push it over to the next level. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on what significations you're seeing in the film.
[00:13:25.083] Wonder Bright: Well, and also as you were outlining what they were doing to do that, like this, pounding the streets, talking to everybody, I was thinking how much of a 3rd house expression that is, especially trying to counter this 9th house legal argument. And they do do that. They go through the legal route to become formally recognized as a union. And they're able to do that despite Amazon meeting them at every step of the way with much better paid lawyers than anything they've got. But a lot of the way that they're actually able to make the inroads they do is because of that conversation, that 3rd house conversation they're having with people. And I think it's also probably worth pointing out that the jobs that they're trying to get unionized are currently absolutely 6th house jobs. So the 6th house traditionally is the house of enslavement and illness. So I always think of the 6th House as the kinds of occupations that are service jobs, factory jobs. If you're working in a jail, then you're 100 percent doing a 6th House occupation. Often these jobs are really task-based and the thing that those jobs have in common with illness, which is also a 6th house signature, is that when you're ill and when you're working a task-based job like that, you don't get to control what your body is doing during the course of the day. Like, there's another power that's dictating how your body, like, where your body is going to be from this time to that time and your ability to exert free will is really relegated to how you're going to react to the experience of being in that zone of having to do this physical work or emotional work for other people. And I think that's one of the things that is so dynamic and exciting about the labor union movement at the turn of the 20th century until the middle of the 20th century because there is this growing understanding that that kind of labor movement is really critical to the working of a culture and a working of a society. And if we're going to break out of the feudal model where you have the serfs and you have the lords, and if we're going to break out of the enslavement model where you have the slavers and then you have the enslaved, if we're going to break out of those kinds of systems, then that kind of work actually needs to be acknowledged and honored and people need to be paid good money for it. And then of course we have this whole history where we start seeing big corporations farming out the jobs overseas because they don't want to pay the labor what the unions are able to demand for their work. I mean I haven't tracked it enough to be able to competently describe what happened. We do see some of the tools that major corporations have used to break the back of unions in this country because we watch how they have union busters come into Amazon and speak to the workers about not voting for the ALU to become a union. And these people who are brought in to bust these unions and speak to workers about voting against them, are paid so much money, but it's worth it to a major corporation like Amazon to pay people to come in, just one or two people to come in. It's worth it to them to pay them an enormous amount of money to come in and lecture their workers. They take the workers off the floor and treat them to this lecture about not voting for union because it's worth it to them to pay those people that much money to do that rather than pay the workers what they might actually be worth, you know? Because nobody's making any money in this country anymore. Like, there's no middle class anymore. People are desperate for these jobs. And so you have this high turnover rate, which means that they never have to be accountable for any of the things that they're creating because they just can't sustain it. And so they move on and someone else comes to fill their place.
[00:17:54.409] Kent Bye: Yeah. And one of the other primary significations I see in this film is there's a whole lot of Mercury because there's a lot of talking and campaigning and really listening as well. So listening and speaking and advocating for the union, but also just the internal organization for how the budding Amazon labor union before it was actually officially recognized, all the different meetings they have to have. And so you get this sense of, like, they're trying to hold it together and be kind of an unorthodox, grassroots driven, roll your own kind of union where they're not leveraging all of the institutional knowledge of existing unions. And also all the existing unions would tell them you're doing everything completely wrong, but they had a sense of this vision that what they needed to do is to just be present and to be there and to understand the conditions inside and to really advocate one-on-one in a whole series of different conversations. And so you see later on like some of the frisson of that lack of organization or lack of institutional knowledge for what it means to run some of these organizations that you see some nascent frictions that are happening in the context of the stress that they have. So a lot of Mars infighting and bickering combined with the kind of mercurial nature of what it takes to kind of run these meetings. So, you know, it's still yet to be seen how the Amazon labor union will get officially recognized and be able to advocate for improved working conditions or improved pay. But yeah, there's a lot of kind of mercury vibes that I'm getting throughout the course of this film.
[00:19:24.972] Wonder Bright: I love that you've brought that up because it directly ties to Chris Small's birthday. We don't have the time that he was born, but the internet reports that he was born on July 4th, 1988. So I'm going to get to his mercury in just a second. But first of all, I just want to point out that he's born on Independence Day. So, we already know that he's going to have a resonance with the chart of the United States, which is born on July 4th, 1776. And we don't have an exact timed chart for the U.S. chart. This is a matter of great debate amongst astrologers, so I'm not actually going to get into any kind of rising signs or timed charts with the United States because I don't personally have a horse in that race.
[00:20:16.902] Kent Bye: There is a Sibley chart that most people look to.
[00:20:19.244] Wonder Bright: Right, yes. That's the one that is sort of like used primarily, but everybody agrees it happened July 4th, however, and it happened in 1776. I think the Rodden rating is a C, and most people generally go with the Sibley chart for an English astrologer that gave a time of 10 past 5 p.m. Anyway, the point is that on July 4th, 1776, Mars was at 21 degrees Gemini. And this is the planetary signature that astrologers talked a lot about during 9-11, because Saturn and Pluto were opposing one another in Gemini and Sagittarius, conjunct that Mars. And Mars is where we fight for things. It's where we are martial. And this is, of course, something that the United States is known for, that one of the reasons we became a world power is because we have a lot of firepower and our military is, let's just say it's very dangerous and it's been weaponized against many countries. And on July 4th, 1988, the Independence Day that Chris Smalls was born on, Mercury is at 21 degrees Gemini. So that means that Chris Smalls' Mercury is conjoined the Mars of the United States birth chart. So, first of all, Mercury in Gemini is a really facile planet. Mercury likes being in Gemini. It excels in Gemini because it rules Gemini. So, Mercury in Gemini is at its most mercurial and it has that ability to be fleet of foot and to respond quickly to many different kinds of situations. And you see that in this film, that Chris Smalls has this capacity to, in a very agile way, roll with the punches as they come. And he's very deft on his feet and deft with his tongue in the way that he responds to situations. And we see that whether he's responding to Amazon, or whether he's responding to people in the group who confront him. You know, like, even in the Q&A, the way that he's responding to certain questions people in the audience has, he's just really deft with his tongue, silver tongued. And not in a manipulative way, but just in that kind of like, Mercury and Gemini can be really good at the double entendre or the pun, because Mercury and Gemini can see two things simultaneously. And so that makes him really able to go with things. And the fact that his Mercury is conjoined the Mars for the United States chart says something to me about his ability to speak to the way that America weaponizes different aspects of its culture. So, in this instance, he's really speaking to the way that this major corporation, he's not just taking on Amazon when he takes on creating a union at Amazon. One of the things that's really important to understand about what's happening in this film is it's not just David / Chris Smalls, the ALU, against Amazon / Goliath. It's against the United States' current corporate culture and how we understand it and situate it. something that no one can take down and no one can even speak against. And there's something about the way that Chris Smalls marshals this group of people to do that, that really speaks to that mercurial space of dealing with how U.S. culture has weaponized corporations and capitalism right now.
[00:24:19.778] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I look at his chart, I'm really noticing this really tight partile conjunction between Saturn at 28°S and Uranus at 28°S. And this is an outer planet transit that is starting a new cycle. Saturn representing a lot of the structures and forms of society; limitations, boundaries, constraints. Uranus is really trying to liberate and give this rebellious Promethean influence to try to shake things up. We've talked about this Saturn-Uranus a couple of other times, but there can be a little bit of a polarity shift with this where in the 2008 election, you had a Saturn-Uranus opposition where Obama was the liberal, but he was much more conservative and John McCain was the conservative, but he was like the maverick and he was bringing on people like Sarah Palin. So you have the limitations and structures of capitalism in this case, the big company that's represented by Amazon, and then you have the rebellious trying to create a labor union that's fighting for the rights of the people. So that really tight conjunction is also bringing in that liberation energy. So when I look at the outer planet transits, there's a real epoch that's beginning at that moment that I see that Chris Smalls is really this charismatic figure that's able to really marshal a lot of the resources and to be quite an inspiration and to lead, like you said, this ragtag group of people who don't have a lot of institutional support. They're kind of doing things in a way that is unorthodox and against the grain with how you would normally do it. But yet they're still able to find some success in doing that.
[00:25:51.789] Wonder Bright: Well, largely because there is no normal anymore. Like that's sort of the whole point that for me was really underscored by watching them at work in this film. And if you've been listening to this podcast at all, you may have heard me talk about the generation born between 1988 and 1994, where we have Saturn beginning to conjoin the outer planets, Uranus, Neptune. And once it moves out of Sagittarius, it's doing so from the signs of Capricorn and Aquarius, where it's in its own domain. It rules Capricorn and Aquarius. It has a lot of power there. But even before that, as evidenced by Chris Small's chart in 1988, we're already getting Saturn moving into the conjunctions with those outer planets, because it's in 1988 that it conjoins Uranus three times. In July, when Chris Smalls is born, that's the second of three times that it conjoins Uranus. So this generation from 88 to 94, this is a generation that I've spoken about before, I really love Y'all. I just, I really love that generation. I think of that generation as being the major players in terms of identifying systems of power that are no longer working for us as a collective. And they're really clear about identifying human rights violations and being able to identify new terms for the LGBTQIA plus community. to help people speak to the intersections within which they live and use this new language as a way to identify harms done, but also to create collective power. And so when I saw that Chris Smalls was born in 1988, I was, like, he's one of my team. I was, like, oh, I love him already. You know, so, like, it's kind of great to be able to talk about this film. After we have just talked about Harvey Milk because Times of Harvey Milk shows a man of his time. And I feel like Union also does that same thing. It shows a man of his time. And in this instance, it's Chris Smalls identifying harm done and what needs to be done about it. And, you know, when I look at his Saturn-Uranus conjunction, I see that power there in addition to, of course, his Mercury on the United States Mars.
[00:28:23.305] Kent Bye: Great. And so when you start to think about a film like Union in a remedial context, then who would you prescribe this film to?
[00:28:32.512] Wonder Bright: Well, I would prescribe this film to somebody who wanted to understand that Uranus-Saturn conjunction, and especially in terms of how it might relate to deconstructing systems of power in the United States. You mentioned earlier that there are some unorthodox methods that Chris Smalls and his team use. And one of them is that at one point, it's like a brief moment in the film, Chris Smalls gets signatures from people by offering them free little baggies of marijuana. And on the one hand, you might think, Well, that's ridiculous and disgusting or like whatever. I didn't, you know, as a former stoner myself and as somebody who has spent more than her fair share of time in six house service jobs. I am a big believer in the way that Dan Savage in his book about the seven deadly sins breaks down the deadly sin of sloth. and uses that entire chapter to talk about the enormous amount of marijuana that people in the United States smoke and use and imbibe. And he wrote about it in a way that I'd never thought of before because he writes about how overworked Americans are. and how we have less vacation time, we get less money, and a lot of us are working in these backbreaking service positions with no time to ourselves, no healthcare, like no framework for anything, but just our time is not our own in a way that is really profound. And he points out that marijuana actually alters your perception of time. So someone can go home, get high, and instead of like just feeling like they had two hours to themselves at the end of the night, because time changes, your perception of time shifts when you're high, that you actually feel like you got to go away for the weekend, even though you just went home and got high that evening. So Dan Savage really makes this point that marijuana alters your perception of time and he does it in this way that really talks about the troubles of the sixth house, the cost of working in the United States for no pay, no healthcare, no benefits and you've lost your time in addition to that. So on the one hand, yes, this is a completely unorthodox thing that Chris Smalls did in order to like try and get some signatures. And then on the other hand, I want to just suggest that he's identifying a problem that these workers have. And he actually has a medication for that, you know, like, to me, that was actually like a moment in the film that I found really compelling, where I was, like, I would 100% have signed that if I was an Amazon worker, and I would have fallen in love with him in that moment. And in fact, I did fall in love with him in that moment. And this is despite the fact that Chris Smalls wears sunglasses, like, I want to say like 70% of the film. That's how it felt to me, perhaps because that's a pet peeve of mine. But by the time that happened, I was just giving it up for him entirely. And one of the things that's really a feature of how he presents himself is that he dresses in a real hip hop fashion. And then he's often just wearing these sunglasses. Like I didn't think anything about the hip hop fashion, but the sunglasses were definitely irritating for me. But I also feel like It's so interesting to watch him because when he's talking to people, if you just listen to what he's saying, if I just listen to what he's saying instead of getting so irritated that I can't see his face and then I can't read his features and that just like for me is like an interruption. But when you actually just listen to the power of his speech, he's so smart and he is so on it, you know. And I want to just read this little brief thing that I found on Wikipedia where they're quoting Chris Smalls talking in the New York Times. And he's responding to complaints that he wears this urban sort of streetwear aesthetic. And he says in this New York Times article regarding criticism of his appearance, that “it really, quote, motivates me to continue dressing the way I do because I want y'all to understand it's not about how I look. If I was to run for president, I would look just like this. I'd walk in the White House with a pair of Jordans on because this is who I am as a person". And then there's a picture of him right above that meeting Joe Biden in the White House dressed exactly like that. And it's just so perfect and beautiful because he's really honestly like speaking to the American cult of individuality where in America, as my brother once said to me, in America, what you got to understand is that everyone's an outlaw. And Chris Smalls is embodying that, you know, like, he's being 100% who he is. And it's actually the power of his speech and his ability to name what he sees from his unique perspective. That is what's so compelling about him. And I would love to know his time of birth, because I'm very curious where that Uranus-Saturn conjunction falls in his chart, because that way of being, to me, is really symbolized by that conjunction in Sagittarius, which is very Jupiterian. It's a visionary space to occupy, Sagittarius. And for Saturn conjunct Uranus in Sagittarius to like show up in the personage of Chris Smalls to me just floods my heart with affection.
[00:34:34.153] Kent Bye: Yeah. And when I think about what I want to bear witness to in this film, I feel like on the one hand, Chris Smalls is an extremely compelling leader to be able to marshal all the support that needed to happen to bring about the Amazon labor union. But at the same time, he would have never been able to do this alone. So this really is an example of a collective movement of lots of other volunteers that are there along the way. Some of them were followed within the film, as like these other primary characters who are helping to really bring this about. So it was really quite a team effort to accomplish this. And so, yeah, it wouldn't have been possible for just one person to do it. So this is a great example of a 11th house collective movement that they were able to really build up enough support and to have enough of a vision for what they wanted and to get enough people to sign up for it. So Yeah, I just want to bear witness to that process of really having a grassroots movement that against all odds, they were able to really pull it off.
[00:35:30.237] Wonder Bright: Yeah. I mean, this is why we put it in this section, the power of the collective. You know, it's similar to what the Times of Harvey Milk documents, you know, that the power of a leader is actually only as strong as the power of the collective that they're able to marshal. And we actually need more leaders who are able to speak to the collective in the way that Harvey Milk did, certainly. And also, perhaps the way that Chris Smalls is, you know, like, we need people who are going to be able to think outside of the box, because the box has changed a lot since the times of Harvey Milk. And this film gives us some clues, I think, to what that might look like. So I really want to bear witness to future leaders and collective movements that might take inspiration from the story that we are told in Union.
[00:36:29.502] Kent Bye: Hmm. Awesome. Well, that's all that we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the story all the way down podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast and please do spread the word, tell your friends and consider signing up for the newsletter at story all the way down.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thanks so much.
