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 educa...

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...

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, surveill...

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 ord...

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 wo...

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, pr...

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,...

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...

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 c...

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'...

What if the real monster eating Main Street isn't hiding in the woods — it's hiding in the checkout button, the delivery truck, the dollar store, the grocery aisle, and the corporate boardroom? In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson talks with Stacy Mitchell , co-executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance , about monopoly power, Amazon, dollar stores, grocery con...

Is war a glitch in the American system — or is it how the system works? In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson talks with historian, foreign policy analyst, and American Prestige co-host Daniel Bessner about U.S. empire, war, sanctions, oil, the national security state, and the political economy hiding underneath the language of "freedom," "stability," and "democracy." Using Iran...

Is AI still just a tool — or have we started worshipping the machine? In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto, Dave Pederson talks with Dr. Peter Solomon, author of 100 Years to Extinction and 12 Years to AI Singularity, about artificial intelligence, human extinction, Henry Adams, technology as a secular religion, and whether humanity can survive the technologies it has created. The conversation...

In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson is joined by fellow producer Jeff Mann and director Sean Claffey to revisit Americonned and ask a hard question: what has changed since the film first came out in June 2023? The episode returns to the film's central warning that inequality, labor precarity, housing instability, political capture, and the collapse of the middle class were nev...

In Episode 20 of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson sits down with former police chief, law enforcement consultant, educator, and DOJ reform expert Dr. Edward Dwain Denmark for a deep conversation about policing in America: how its myths are built, how power is protected, and why accountability so often breaks down. This episode digs into the story Americans are told about policing — that polic...

Episode 19: The Sasquatch Paradox 2.0 — Why AI Replaces Workers, Not CEOs If AI is supposedly smart enough to replace drivers, writers, coders, designers, warehouse workers, and maybe even teachers, then why does it never seem to come for hedge fund managers, private equity executives, or the C-suite? In Episode 19 of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson talks with tech critic, author, and podcas...

Guest: Kev LeStarge Is Bigfoot real? That's not the question. In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson sits down with lifelong Sasquatch researcher and children's author Kev LeStarge to explore something deeper: why people need Bigfoot to be real. Kev grew up in Wisconsin chasing the mystery of Sasquatch, eventually going on expeditions across the country and writing his first chil...

The Department of Justice released three million pages of Epstein-related documents. Twelve ZIP files. Non-searchable PDFs. No index. No database. No public search tool. Technically public. Practically unusable. In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave is joined by investigative journalist Andrea Chalupa (Gaslit Nation) and civic technologist Patrick Duggan to unpack what transparency actua...

"Due Process Under Siege" examines the growing threat to immigration rights and civil liberties in the United States. This episode looks at how deportation policy, ICE enforcement, and executive power, especially under Donald Trump, are testing the limits of constitutional law. This is not about partisan politics. It is about transparency, accountability, and whether due process still exists. Host...

"Small government" sounds comforting — a tidy garden where everyone minds their own business and freedom magically flourishes. But while we're admiring the gnomes, something much bigger is climbing over the fence. This week on The Bigfoot Manifesto , host Dave Pederson is joined by David Dayen , executive editor of The American Prospect and one of the sharpest reporters covering power, policy, and...

🎙 The Bigfoot Manifesto Gentrification isn't "organic change." It isn't inevitable. And it definitely isn't caused by coffee shops. In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , we're joined by housing policy expert and author Samuel Stein to unpack how gentrification is built—by policy, finance, zoning laws, tax incentives, and real estate speculation —and why cities keep feeding a system that displ...

Christianity isn't just a belief system — it's a training program. In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , host Dave Pederson talks with author and former Christian James Aames about religious indoctrination, fear-based belief, and why leaving faith is so psychologically difficult. James explains how Christianity spreads through childhood conditioning rather than adult choice, why doubt is fram...

Bigfoot vs. Customer Service Hell – Why Everything is Broken Customer service used to be a feature. Now it's a weapon. In this episode of The Bigfoot Manifesto , host Dave Pederson is joined by Jared Lerner , the creator of Customer Service Hell , a website documenting the most infuriating, absurd, and soul-crushing customer service experiences of modern capitalism. Jared has spent nearly two deca...

This week on The Bigfoot Manifesto , Dave Pederson is joined by Andy Shernoff — founding member of The Dictators , songwriter, producer, and historian of the New York punk scene — for a wide-ranging conversation about music, technology, and who actually gets paid anymore. Andy has lived through every major shift in the music industry: from vinyl and major labels, to DIY punk, to streaming platform...

Sustainable Creativity, DIY Economies, and Fighting Corporate Control with Ethan Minsker What responsibility do artists have in an era of climate crisis, corporate consolidation, and cultural disposability? In Episode Ten of The Bigfoot Manifesto , host Dave Pederson speaks with artist, writer, filmmaker, and cultural organizer Ethan Minsker about sustainable art practices, DIY publishing, and res...