Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 2: Hello, Welcome to a week it happened here. This is Garrison.
Speaker 2: We're going to be doing a little bit of an
Speaker 2: update on some of the things that have been happening
Speaker 2: in Atlanta, Georgia the past few weeks in relation to
Speaker 2: the Stop Cop City movement with me today to help
Speaker 2: go through the many, many happenings of the past of
Speaker 2: the past few weeks, is a Matt from the Atlantic
Speaker 2: Community Press Collective.
Speaker 3: Hello, Hello, my friend, good to see you.
Speaker 2: Yes, last time, last time we talked on the show,
Speaker 2: it was during our very very critically acclaimed comedy episode,
Speaker 2: So nice to highlight I lighted the season. I'm glad
Speaker 2: you approve. As someone who was on the episode.
Speaker 3: I might have been like the target audience for that, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was like there was like four jokes that
Speaker 2: only like three people get. But that's the right. So
Speaker 2: this is going to be a bit of a bit
Speaker 2: of a looser episode because people are preparing for the
Speaker 2: Week of Action. Uh, there's a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of things in play. It's kind of a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff still up in the air. So I don't I
Speaker 2: don't have time to put something super super superscripted together,
Speaker 2: but many things have happened that are worth talking about,
Speaker 2: especially before the Week of Action. I guess would the
Speaker 2: first thing on the docket be to kind of go
Speaker 2: over the stuff regarding the extra funding that that the
Speaker 2: city seems to be uh be giving towards the Copsity project,
Speaker 2: even beyond like the thirty three million dollars that was
Speaker 2: the that was the target about the city council vote
Speaker 2: a few a few days ago. But there's a whole
Speaker 2: bunch of extra extra money floating around, as discovered by
Speaker 2: you guys at the Atlantic Atlantic Community Press Collective and
Speaker 2: then who had had their turnalism pretty margital in by
Speaker 2: every other outlet.
Speaker 3: They put our name, they put our name in there,
Speaker 3: and you know, then you get paid, and you get
Speaker 3: paid in the spotlight. Right, that's how that worked.
Speaker 2: I'm only paying you an exposure for these episodes exactly,
Speaker 2: which is which is which isn't true FAI.
Speaker 3: But anyway, so yeah, okay, So going back to twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, this conversation started a couple of months after
Speaker 3: the lease legislation was stuck. Back then, it was a
Speaker 3: conversation about like a fifty five million dollars funding package
Speaker 3: between the Atlanta Police Foundation and keep operating off there
Speaker 3: at the time, John Kee. So that conversation has more
Speaker 3: opked over the last two years, but that the key
Speaker 3: part of it was the extra money was going to
Speaker 3: come from this lease back agreement. So originally it was
Speaker 3: going to be a twenty year, one million dollar a year.
Speaker 3: We found out that that is actually a thirty year,
Speaker 3: one point two million dollars a year paid for thirty
Speaker 3: six million dollars going to the Atlanta Police Foundation. And
Speaker 3: part of what they were what they had talked about
Speaker 3: using it for in twenty twenty one, was to pay
Speaker 3: down this twenty million dollar loan construction loan that the
Speaker 3: Atlanta Police Foundation was planning on taking out to build
Speaker 3: the facility. So when they were talking about that, like
Speaker 3: sixty million dollar philanthropic donation. They really they meant or
Speaker 3: twenty of that was going to come from from a
Speaker 3: loan that the city was going to pay back so immediately.
Speaker 3: Like these numbers were stewed from the get go and
Speaker 3: have been misleading for the last year and a half.
Speaker 2: And I mean part of the original plans for the
Speaker 2: Copsity project and people are unaware included what like thirty
Speaker 2: million dollars of public funds being contributed and the other
Speaker 2: sixty million for the first phase was supposed to come
Speaker 2: via like private funds, with the Land Police Findation doing
Speaker 2: like fundraising via all their big corporate backers. And then
Speaker 2: what's happened in the past few months of them trying
Speaker 2: to trying to downscale some of the more expensive parts
Speaker 2: of the plan and like cutting some of the fad
Speaker 2: in terms of like the stables aren't going to be
Speaker 2: the same spot that they wanted there to be stables,
Speaker 2: and other small kind of money saving cuts, and then
Speaker 2: all this increase in the amount of the project that's
Speaker 2: just being funded by taxpayers. It seems like the APS
Speaker 2: been not as successful and being able to fund their
Speaker 2: project privately as they initially hoped. That's at least my
Speaker 2: read from what's from what's going on here.
Speaker 3: So maybe not from what they originally hoped, but from
Speaker 3: what they originally show us or told us that they
Speaker 3: were going to do. According to the chief financial operator
Speaker 3: of the City of Atlanta, Mohammed Bala, he said that
Speaker 3: the Atlantic Police Foundation has raised thirty three point four
Speaker 3: million dollars in film graphic funds for this which their
Speaker 3: goal apparently this whole time was only thirty million dollars
Speaker 3: in actual funds from corporations and film graphic organizations.
Speaker 2: Including the streamer Destiny, who've donated I think twenty thousand
Speaker 2: dollars to the Atlantic Philly Station, which is a fight,
Speaker 2: which is a reference to all of you Internet cells
Speaker 2: out there who are also we are also cursed with
Speaker 2: this knowledge.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the other interesting thing is is originally ten million
Speaker 3: dollars it was supposed to come in new market credits,
Speaker 3: and we're getting like really into the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is finances, and I'm sorry as soon as
Speaker 2: you said new market tax credits part of my braid
Speaker 2: just like shut off but continue continue.
Speaker 3: Like thirty thousand foot overview that money is supposed to
Speaker 3: go to like revitalizing impoverished or like underserved communities. It's
Speaker 3: supposed to go to like businesses that want to like
Speaker 3: open grocery stores and food deserts and things like that.
Speaker 3: So it's not ten million dollars anymore now it's five
Speaker 3: million dollars. But it's still going to build a police
Speaker 3: training center and you know, predominantly black neighborhood that it's
Speaker 3: under the average monthly income. So things got twisted here
Speaker 3: that this doesn't seem like a revitalization project that that
Speaker 3: is supposed to improve the lives of the neighbors around it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's it seems like the the the amount
Speaker 2: of funding that they actually are going to end up
Speaker 2: receiving from public funds is ballooned to be much bigger
Speaker 2: than they initially promised. And then project was initially sold on,
Speaker 2: which is just another another another thing in the long
Speaker 2: line of of of APF moments.
Speaker 3: So this entire time, the deputy Chief Operating Officer for
Speaker 3: the City of Atlanta, la Chandra Burks. She has been
Speaker 3: playing quarterback for the Finance conversation, and she was part
Speaker 3: of the Finance Conversation the way back and plain so
Speaker 3: somebody she's she's in the mayor's cabinet and like she's
Speaker 3: privy to these conversations. So the entire time like this
Speaker 3: is happening, Andre Dickens is still like out in the
Speaker 3: press repeating this thirty million dollar number, like tell the
Speaker 3: to Rose Scott, who's basically our our NPR like person
Speaker 3: here detel it to the a jac the paper of record,
Speaker 3: and says that it's gonna be thirty million dollars if
Speaker 3: it goes over, it's gonna it's gonna come out of
Speaker 3: the Atlanta Police aboutation. And then of course you know
Speaker 3: his his cabinet is having conversations about way more money.
Speaker 2: This entire well, do you know who else cares a
Speaker 2: lot about money?
Speaker 3: The products and services services, The products and services.
Speaker 2: The products services really really do want your money. And
Speaker 2: now also the the Sophie is poking me to tell
Speaker 2: you the apthel premium subscription option also cares a lot
Speaker 2: about your money. Uh, and Android version launching shortly anyway,
Speaker 2: here's the ads. Okay, we are back. We're gonna talk
Speaker 2: about another another another good uh. Staying on the topic
Speaker 2: of of of stealing your money and using it for purposes,
Speaker 2: and it's probably not very good. Let's talk about let's
Speaker 2: talk about the the the two Atlanta City Council meetings
Speaker 2: that happened. One was during late May, right, that was
Speaker 2: the first one with public comment. That was like people
Speaker 2: were being public comment for like seven hours. That lasted
Speaker 2: quite a while. It was it was a pretty pretty
Speaker 2: long day. And then on the then during the meeting
Speaker 2: on June fifth was even longer.
Speaker 5: Like how.
Speaker 2: Late were you at city Council on the June on
Speaker 2: June fifth?
Speaker 6: All?
Speaker 3: Right, Well, on May fifteenth, the first city Council meeting
Speaker 3: one where we kind of like we're like, hey, this
Speaker 3: this is going to come up for vote, so and
Speaker 3: then organizers you know, got everyone to show up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so about seven and a half hours of public comments
Speaker 3: that night city Council meeting ended up like like eleven o'clock.
Speaker 3: And then there was a meeting that the Finance Executive
Speaker 3: Committee meeting in between that had about two hours of
Speaker 3: public comment, which for a subcommittee meeting is a lot. Uh.
Speaker 3: And then all of that, every like record was blown
Speaker 3: out of the water on June fifth, where we had
Speaker 3: just just over fourteen hours of public comment that includes
Speaker 3: like breaks for disruption and like a ten minute break
Speaker 3: that the City Council took and then a lot of
Speaker 3: arguing between Doug Ship and the city couple of president
Speaker 3: trying to help people down. But you know, overall it
Speaker 3: was fourteen and a half hours of just public comment,
Speaker 3: which is the largest public in person public comment session
Speaker 3: that is in modern history. Yeah, and it was basically unanimous.
Speaker 3: There were four speakers who got up pretty early who
Speaker 3: were in favor of the training center, and then everyone
Speaker 3: else was anti cop city.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Did I remember remember seeing some things about like
Speaker 2: APF police departments trying to like trying to push people
Speaker 2: through to give public comment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there was a rumor going around that the
Speaker 3: Atlantic Police Foundation and the Mayor's office were trying to
Speaker 3: get fifty people. There was like this number. It was
Speaker 3: like fifty people. I never saw anything to back up,
Speaker 3: but okay, they did seem like the four people who
Speaker 3: showed up were kind of coordinated, and you know, like
Speaker 3: one of them brought their kids, which the stop top
Speaker 3: city side does the same thing. So it did seem
Speaker 3: to be some like intentional parallels.
Speaker 2: But what was not parallel was just the sheer number
Speaker 2: of people on the different sides.
Speaker 3: It was I don't think anybody who's in favor of
Speaker 3: the facility is like going to wait fourteen hours to
Speaker 3: talk for two minutes. Yeah, that's just not going to happen.
Speaker 3: And you know, the Atlanta Police Foundation hasn't shown up
Speaker 3: to defend the facility in since twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 3: like they're the most invested.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. It is striking the amount of which
Speaker 2: their work on it is just so much like backdoor lobbying,
Speaker 2: and they really have never had to defend the project
Speaker 2: like publicly and openly. It's it's all. It's all just
Speaker 2: these these these back backer meetings between city council members,
Speaker 2: between people, people in the Air's office, between people and
Speaker 2: the police department.
Speaker 3: Yeah, by the Police Foundation lobbyist was actually running around
Speaker 3: City Hall on juth it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not surprising. So I feel like most if people
Speaker 2: are online, they probably heard the result of the vote
Speaker 2: after fourteen hours of public common which was almost like
Speaker 2: unanimously against the facility. What was it of four to eleven?
Speaker 3: Yeah, four votes against eleven in favor.
Speaker 2: So they they passed the funding package, allocating at least
Speaker 2: the thirty three million plus the future loans.
Speaker 3: The least back agreement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, the the.
Speaker 3: Thirty one million plus the least back. Okay, we're not
Speaker 3: going to get more deep than.
Speaker 2: That, Okay, but yes, it was it was like what
Speaker 2: what time was? That was like four am? At thirty Jesus,
Speaker 2: So I got there.
Speaker 3: There was a Young Democrats like thing against There was
Speaker 3: a press conference with the Young Democrats of the already
Speaker 3: coming out against cup City at eight am. So I
Speaker 3: was there at seven thirty. I left City Hall at
Speaker 3: six thirty.
Speaker 2: That was.
Speaker 3: The wildest game.
Speaker 2: So so, after probably the longest city council meeting day
Speaker 2: in quite a while.
Speaker 3: They in history, in history, sure in history, they single day.
Speaker 2: They voted to approve the funding, which I mean, I
Speaker 2: don't know, I think I wasn't I was not surprised.
Speaker 2: I wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed as as a
Speaker 2: as a as a parent would say.
Speaker 3: I want to point out a couple of things that
Speaker 3: that they did in preparation, So I think city Council
Speaker 3: was prepared for like an action Orgler's veto, and they
Speaker 3: had to moves to kind of neutralize them. The first
Speaker 3: is they moved the actual vote on this to the
Speaker 3: very last thing. So the vote on the funding came
Speaker 3: at the end of the meeting, so if you know,
Speaker 3: there was an attempt to stop the vote itself, it
Speaker 3: wouldn't have affected any city business before that. And then
Speaker 3: they also prepared a committee room so that if you know,
Speaker 3: things got rowdy or there was some sort of direct
Speaker 3: action in the chambers itself, they were just going to
Speaker 3: take the council and physically move them to a different
Speaker 3: room and let people continue to demonstrate in city Council.
Speaker 3: So I think they were they they made some wise
Speaker 3: moves on their end to prepare.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they've loaded the chamber with the cops before
Speaker 2: the vote. I know, back like during the afternoon they
Speaker 2: were setting up kind of barricades and staging around City Hall.
Speaker 2: I mean, it just seemed to be a lot of
Speaker 2: like erratic, uretic stuff happening around, did not I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I was unsure what was going to happen myself.
Speaker 2: I didn't know how how it would play out, what
Speaker 2: what tax people will try to employ. It seemed like
Speaker 2: people mostly tried to kind of like go buy the
Speaker 2: book there and see how far that would get. And
Speaker 2: then if the result was like what we got, then
Speaker 2: other other things will happen in these next few months,
Speaker 2: especially with a week of action coming up. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: do you think people on that like what did people
Speaker 2: on the ground think, Like, did did they think that
Speaker 2: that the vote would go through? And do they think
Speaker 2: the vote would be stopped? I met, I am, I
Speaker 2: am kind of it's it's been, it's been. It's been
Speaker 2: a little little over a month since I've been in Atlanta,
Speaker 2: and I think that the mood on the ground fluctuates
Speaker 2: so quickly often.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think it's, you know, kind of dependent
Speaker 3: upon which segment of the movement we're talking about. There's
Speaker 3: there's obviously full sections of the movement that at are
Speaker 3: opposed to electoralism. They still showed up, like they still
Speaker 3: you know, came and gave public comment, and I feel
Speaker 3: like they they didn't expect that this would go any
Speaker 3: other way. There's more like electorally plugged in groups that there.
Speaker 3: You know, there was a slim chance of this thing
Speaker 3: getting sent back to committee, and that was the closest
Speaker 3: that this had to not going through city council. You know.
Speaker 3: The kind of the whip count that that we learned
Speaker 3: was if it if it came to a straight up
Speaker 3: or downvote, it was always going to go through. It's
Speaker 3: never the numbers to do anything else. Yeah, So there
Speaker 3: was some lobbying happening behind the scenes that uh, with
Speaker 3: student organizers and various other organizers who are more prone
Speaker 3: to having these these discussions, especially with elected officials. So
Speaker 3: there was bobbying for the tickets sent back to community
Speaker 3: to committe where it would be I will and hopefully
Speaker 3: delay the actual funding and mess up if he had
Speaker 3: slumming mechanism. But that didn't happen. So there were people
Speaker 3: who were hopeful, Like even I was, you know, I
Speaker 3: said that this was the closest electorally that we'd ever
Speaker 3: come to stopping it. I you know, just kind of
Speaker 3: knowing how the whip count changed over the course of
Speaker 3: like forty eight hours. It got close and then then
Speaker 3: it got taken away. Every Dickens called city council members
Speaker 3: into his office Monday morning and started feeling them off.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I mean, and this was never going to
Speaker 2: be the end of the movement by any means. There
Speaker 2: was already plans for things afterwards, like the Week of
Speaker 2: Action at the end of June. Here and I guess
Speaker 2: we can we can talk about how some of the
Speaker 2: ways the movement might continue going forward after these these
Speaker 2: these messages from our our lovely sponsors who endorse everything
Speaker 2: we're saying. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. I know you agree
Speaker 2: with me on this, so we're back. Ghost was crazy, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean most people don't. So as if you're part
Speaker 2: of like gold, yeah, exactly, if you're part of the
Speaker 2: ghost on the community, there is there is a few
Speaker 2: types of ghosts who actually really like bargaining material possessions.
Speaker 2: If they're able to give away enough of their stuff,
Speaker 2: their souls able to actually transcend to the next level
Speaker 2: and go to a more safe, like a more RESTful place.
Speaker 2: So these are people who've been too materially driven on Earth.
Speaker 2: Their soul gets trapped in that, so they have to
Speaker 2: have to make sure that they get rid of their
Speaker 2: gold in orders to them to go to their next place,
Speaker 2: whether that's like that's like a safer version of Limbo, Paradise, heaven, hell, whatever.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I wait for you.
Speaker 3: To move here so I can learn more about this.
Speaker 2: I was just making all of that up on the fly.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about what's gonna happen next. Obviously, there's
Speaker 2: a week of backtion planned for June twenty fourth to
Speaker 2: July first, which is going to be a very hot week.
Speaker 2: So there's that, to my understanding, in Trench we Creek,
Speaker 2: Trenchman Creek Park is still closed, correct, So in Trench Creek.
Speaker 3: Park is still closed.
Speaker 4: There is.
Speaker 3: There is a motion or there's some legislation in the
Speaker 3: the Caab County Border Commissioners that is supposed to come
Speaker 3: up again on Tuesday. The CEO's office asked for like
Speaker 3: thirty days to finish cleaning up the park, so the
Speaker 3: thirty days will expire Monday, and then there's a Border
Speaker 3: Commissioners meeting on Tuesday. After that, they hopefully the park
Speaker 3: is open, but we'll see.
Speaker 2: So it may or may not be open. That is
Speaker 2: still park that is still to be determined. I've heard
Speaker 2: there will be another music festival of some sort, not
Speaker 2: many details as of the time of recording, so we
Speaker 2: knew that was gonna happen. I talked about this during
Speaker 2: during the Week of Action retrospective episode, which honestly is
Speaker 2: still pretty applicable here in terms of the amount of
Speaker 2: destruction that's happened in the forest and how people are
Speaker 2: thinking about ways to continue resistance in the face of
Speaker 2: not again I'm against the binary of like victory and defeat.
Speaker 2: I think that's not a useful way of looking at
Speaker 2: this situation at this point. But you're, you're, you're, they're
Speaker 2: kind of looking down like the barrel of something now,
Speaker 2: being like a lot of the land's been cleared, a
Speaker 2: lot of the trees have been cut. Preconstruction is ongoing,
Speaker 2: Construction is scheduled for this summer. They just got approved
Speaker 2: for all the city funding right Like, things are in motion.
Speaker 2: So the ways that people are going to choose to
Speaker 2: resist now might be different in the ways that they
Speaker 2: chose to resist like a year or two ago, because
Speaker 2: it's just a very different, very different situation. There's a
Speaker 2: different risk level, there's a lot of more surveillance around
Speaker 2: the forest, there's a lot more surveillance outside the forest.
Speaker 2: It's just it's just a very different scenario. So I
Speaker 2: think if the retrospective episode still contains a few things
Speaker 2: about how how systance might might take forms during these
Speaker 2: next few weeks. But there's this this this other thing
Speaker 2: that came up after the city council meeting, which is
Speaker 2: the referendum that some people are planning. Uh, do you
Speaker 2: want to go over a little bit of those details.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a lot of people or I've seen kind
Speaker 3: of on Twitter where a lot of people are like, oh,
Speaker 3: the referendum is just coming out and rise to the
Speaker 3: city council vote, and like, no, this has been in
Speaker 3: the works for a little while. Okay, to my knowledge,
Speaker 3: it dates I mean, I know it dates back to
Speaker 3: before even the funding question was was in place, So
Speaker 3: it's been in the works for a minute. And then
Speaker 3: they decided to hold off until after the city So
Speaker 3: we're probably going to do it regardless of the city.
Speaker 3: But the referendum there there is there's a spaceport that
Speaker 3: was supposed to be built in South Georgia and basically
Speaker 3: this one woman like started a referendum question and got
Speaker 3: this spaceboard canceled. Of course, we're talking very different like municipalities.
Speaker 3: That was a much smaller one. She only had to
Speaker 3: collect fourteen hundred signatures or something like that. But there's
Speaker 3: a referendum question that is in front of the municipal
Speaker 3: clerk to kind of sign off on it and make
Speaker 3: sure that it is properly worded and all these things
Speaker 3: like just to administrate issue at this Once the clerk
Speaker 3: signs off on it, then these organizers have sixty days
Speaker 3: to collect seventy five thousand. The number they actually need
Speaker 3: is just over seventy thousand, but they're collecting a little
Speaker 3: extra because these signatures will be challenged, you know, things
Speaker 3: like that with a vote. If they're successful in doing so,
Speaker 3: it goes to city council, who again as in the
Speaker 3: administrative position, has to all the signatures, make sure everything
Speaker 3: you know is official. And then if once that passes,
Speaker 3: then it goes automatically on the November seventh, and then
Speaker 3: it will be a straight up or down question of
Speaker 3: do we cancel this twenty twenty one lease to the
Speaker 3: Atlantic Police. But there there are a couple where this
Speaker 3: comes in. I think most interestingly is the organizers of
Speaker 3: this believe that they can get an injunction to stop
Speaker 3: construction both now once the referendum campaign picks off, and
Speaker 3: then if they collect the seventy thousand signatures again until
Speaker 3: November seven. So this could significantly delay the Atlanta Folet
Speaker 3: Foundation's ability to continue destruction on the land. And like
Speaker 3: right now we are in the mass rating days of
Speaker 3: the project, which is the most environmentally damaging part of it.
Speaker 3: Now we're we're screwing with the contours of the land.
Speaker 3: So you know, they're going to have to prove that
Speaker 3: they're serious about the referendum, and the judge is going
Speaker 3: to have to believe that the referendum is at least
Speaker 3: likely to succeed in order to get this injunction. But
Speaker 3: it does look like they should be able to prove
Speaker 3: at least that they are serious and there is a
Speaker 3: good chance of the succeeding.
Speaker 2: How soon do people have to start like doing stuff
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 3: So the referendum once the clerk signs off on the paperwork,
Speaker 3: and that the clerk has seven days to validate, and
Speaker 3: then once that spends, you have the sixty days. So
Speaker 3: we're in this kind of interim period where they can't
Speaker 3: start collecting signatures, but as soon as the clerk signs
Speaker 3: off on it, they will start collecting signatures. So they
Speaker 3: anticipate the clerk to like kind of try to hold
Speaker 3: off as long as possible. So they're looking at Wednesday,
Speaker 3: which I'm going to look at my calendar because you
Speaker 3: know exactly what. So they're looking at Wednesday the fourteenth
Speaker 3: as the kickoff for the signature collecting camp. So for
Speaker 3: more information about the referendum campaign or to find ways
Speaker 3: to volunteer, or if you are an Atlanta resident who
Speaker 3: was registered to vote in the last election, you can
Speaker 3: sign the referendum. So copsity vote dot.
Speaker 2: That's copcityvote dot com.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 2: Let's see, there's one other thing that happened of note
Speaker 2: the past few weeks.
Speaker 3: One thing, one little thing.
Speaker 2: There's one other thing that happened of note the past
Speaker 2: few weeks, and that's when police rated the home of
Speaker 2: three people and this this home kind of serves as
Speaker 2: like a legal defense hub in Atlanta and arrested three
Speaker 2: people associated with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and are charging
Speaker 2: them with a variety of of of quote unquote charity
Speaker 2: fraud and like uh another other quite nonsensical financial crimes.
Speaker 2: As the bail hearing judge admitted himself, so do you
Speaker 2: wanna do you want to go over some of some
Speaker 2: of those details, because I mean, this is something that
Speaker 2: was honest. People have been expecting this to happen, Like
Speaker 2: the alne of solid already Fund themselves has said, hey,
Speaker 2: we will probably be the target of something like this
Speaker 2: in the future. During during other hearings, the prosecutors that
Speaker 2: have talked about how they're investigating the Solidarity Fund as
Speaker 2: a part of this like conspiracy they're trying to to weave.
Speaker 2: So it's definitely something that's been on on people's minds
Speaker 2: of of this type of legal this type of like
Speaker 2: state repression targeting all of like the bail funds and
Speaker 2: like legal support structures that have been set up. So yeah,
Speaker 2: this happened like late late May, I believe mast Yeah,
Speaker 2: last day of the May thirty.
Speaker 3: First, they were still asleep in their beds, they got swat,
Speaker 3: broke down their door. You know, I'm sure everyone's seen
Speaker 3: the video. Broke down their door, armored vehicle and pulled
Speaker 3: them all out of their beds in their pajamas and
Speaker 3: took them to jail in their pajamas. Just you know,
Speaker 3: utterly insane for a bail fund or a nonprofit to
Speaker 3: to have this go down. But yeah, they had been
Speaker 3: prepared for this for quite some time. Marlin, one of
Speaker 3: the organizers, had sent ACPP, you know, a statement in
Speaker 3: preparation for this, and you know, you saw how quickly
Speaker 3: they transitioned the actual running of the bail from the
Speaker 3: Atlanta Solidarity fun too, the National Bail Network been seamlessly
Speaker 3: that day so they were prepared. And then you know,
Speaker 3: someone who was talking to Marlin while he was in
Speaker 3: jail said, Marlon was pretty chill about the whole thing,
Speaker 3: which if you've ever interacted or seen Marlin, uh, that
Speaker 3: is that's that's pretty apt to describe him. But the
Speaker 3: actual charges are are insane, you know, the the charity
Speaker 3: fraud part of it. They're they're saying things like buying
Speaker 3: a cell phone, uh for for the bail fund is
Speaker 3: charity broad? Or reimbursing yourself or gas is charity broad?
Speaker 3: Or buying COVID tests is charity broad? Like all these
Speaker 3: things that that are just like overhead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was very very very standard like overhead costs
Speaker 2: for running an organization of this scale. Yeah, and as is,
Speaker 2: this was all on the website when people dot it
Speaker 2: anyway to talk to the various uses that these funds
Speaker 2: were going to have. All the charges are truly flimsy.
Speaker 2: There was a veil hearing a few few days later
Speaker 2: which I watched the whole thing, and the judge there
Speaker 2: did not think the charges had much much merit, which
Speaker 2: is the first time really during any kind of bail
Speaker 2: hearing associated with top cups standy stuff where the judge
Speaker 2: was like, okay, so this just seems very clearly fake
Speaker 2: and and and told the prosecution that they'll have to
Speaker 2: put put a much much stronger, stronger case together if
Speaker 2: they want this to go forward and at at any
Speaker 2: at any further stage. So all three got out on bail.
Speaker 2: It's it's pretty scary though. We like it's it's it
Speaker 2: fucking sucks. During the bail hearing, uh, the I believe,
Speaker 2: I believe it was it was it was the Assistant
Speaker 2: Attorney General who was there, Vowler. I believe he was
Speaker 2: talking about how police were going through the trash of
Speaker 2: Solidarity fund, how they're monitoring phone calls, other other communications.
Speaker 2: So just another another good reason to have a have
Speaker 2: a paper shutter and to have to have a burn
Speaker 2: pile in your backyard, because yeah, they're they're they're gonna,
Speaker 2: they're gonna go through your trash if they want to
Speaker 2: find things out about you. They they they they stole
Speaker 2: a journal from somebody. They were someone's someone's personal journal
Speaker 2: was was taken. And so yeah, a lot of a
Speaker 2: lot of kind of very very standard, like very standard
Speaker 2: of this type of like shady investigation police stuff, which
Speaker 2: is just it's always good to have a reminder for
Speaker 2: people about what what the police are willing to do.
Speaker 2: But still, even even with all that, it seems like
Speaker 2: they were not able to get much at all, because
Speaker 2: the most they can put together is, oh, you you
Speaker 2: you use these funds in a way that you explicitly
Speaker 2: said that you could be used on your website, which
Speaker 2: is not probably not going to be a crime, So
Speaker 2: not compelling long term, but certainly a pretty large inconvenience
Speaker 2: in the short term, and still a very like chilling
Speaker 2: like display of police repression saying that we'll, we'll, well,
Speaker 2: we'll make your life incredibly difficult if if we don't
Speaker 2: like you.
Speaker 3: But you know, and as has happened every time there's
Speaker 3: been like this massive display of police repression, it utterly backfired,
Speaker 3: right like we national media is now just harping on
Speaker 3: the fact that these charges are overblown and they're attacking
Speaker 3: bail buds, which is inconceivable to let's say, like the
Speaker 3: liberal or the liberal left wing of things. And so
Speaker 3: you you've blown this issue into another sphere of awareness.
Speaker 3: You know, You've got Chris Hayes now on MSNBC doing
Speaker 3: an entire segment on some topsity, which is not something
Speaker 3: you know, we had before, even the domestic cares and charges.
Speaker 3: And I think this was just tactically a terrible decision
Speaker 3: by the Attorney General's Office to go through with this,
Speaker 3: because the pr side of it is a nightmare, and
Speaker 3: rightfully so, like this is an insane escalation.
Speaker 2: Is the bail fund still being operated by the National
Speaker 2: Bail Organization at this point?
Speaker 3: Yes, so the bail funds is still being run out
Speaker 3: of the national network at this point in time. So
Speaker 3: secure dot act, Blue dot com, Slash donate slash Atlanta
Speaker 3: Solidarity will get you a donate page continue to support
Speaker 3: bail you know in Atlanta, which again we've got a
Speaker 3: week of action coming up. Bail funds are highly probable
Speaker 3: in terms of being used.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I means as they were used to bail out
Speaker 2: the three people who are the veil who are part
Speaker 2: of the bail fund organizers, because I think I think
Speaker 2: they all got a fifteen thousand dollars spale, which is
Speaker 2: a relatively low in terms of what we've seen in
Speaker 2: relation to this movement.
Speaker 3: And I was looking through the December warrants and bail
Speaker 3: hearings a minute ago for another story and like then
Speaker 3: there were like ten thousand dollars. The cost has ballooned
Speaker 3: dramatically in the last months, so to go back down
Speaker 3: to fifteen thousand dollars bail is terrible and awful, but
Speaker 3: that seems way more in line with expectations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so that is that is just a small
Speaker 2: glimpse of the many things that have been happening the
Speaker 2: past a month. Things do not seem to be slowing down.
Speaker 2: Things just seem to be changing in ways that makes
Speaker 2: h makes everything certainly certainly a tricky and not very
Speaker 2: not very clear, but that's kind of the way that
Speaker 2: these things go. People are still going to be showing up.
Speaker 2: There's the Week of Action happening on us starting on
Speaker 2: the twenty fourth, So that's that's going to be this month.
Speaker 2: So it's going to be a interesting lead up to
Speaker 2: July first.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the movement continues. Uh where can Where can people
Speaker 2: find your work? Matt?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can follow a c pc uh at Atlanta
Speaker 3: otherspore Press on Twitter. You can follow me at Matt
Speaker 3: a CPC on Twitter, and our website is at l Press.
Speaker 2: Collective dot com. I assume yeah, I said, oh did
Speaker 2: I cut out you did cut out. I could not
Speaker 2: hear it at all. I said, I heard. I heard
Speaker 2: at l Press Collective.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just you know, ATL Press Collection dot.
Speaker 2: Com dot com fantastic. Yeah you can.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: I'll put a link for the for the new for
Speaker 2: the new solidarity fund, uh secure dot ActBlue dot com
Speaker 2: slash don't slash a l n a solidarity because that
Speaker 2: is a long thing to type out. So I'll put
Speaker 2: a link for that in the description for the new
Speaker 2: for the new bail fund link and uh, yeah you can.
Speaker 2: You can.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 2: If you want to keep updated on plans for the
Speaker 2: Week of Action, I suppose you can look at stop
Speaker 2: cup City on Instagram and the Defending Line of Forest
Speaker 2: account on Twitter, along with the many many websites that
Speaker 2: that exists at this point. But yeah, so that's gonna
Speaker 2: be happening later. I don't know what will happen because
Speaker 2: I because I don't know, because I week, because I
Speaker 2: really have no idea what's going to happen. Because what
Speaker 2: happened to the last one was also quite quite surprising.
Speaker 2: So who who knows? Who knows what will what will
Speaker 2: what will go down? But thank you Matt for joining
Speaker 2: me to give me a give me and the listeners
Speaker 2: a bit of an update on the again, many many
Speaker 2: things that have been happening in Atlanta. I'll see you
Speaker 2: all on the other side.
Speaker 4: And welcome to a very special joint episode of two
Speaker 4: shows that you hopefully love, one the House of Pod.
Speaker 4: I'm Cave. I'm the host of that show, and it
Speaker 4: could happen here with my good friend James Stout. James, Hi, Hi, Kry.
Speaker 4: I'm very excited about this. This is a rare privilege. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I'm very excited too. We'll get straight to it. Just
Speaker 4: a quick reminder, if you're not following one of these
Speaker 4: shows and you're following the other, yeah, all of both.
Speaker 4: Why not and leave a nice review if you like
Speaker 4: the shows either way. But we're really excited, So let's
Speaker 4: get straight to the episode. How's that sound?
Speaker 3: Yep?
Speaker 9: Must get.
Speaker 4: And welcome back.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 4: I know. Every week I say this is a special episode,
Speaker 4: and I'm usually lying ninety nine percent of the time
Speaker 4: is not special. But this week is very special. It's
Speaker 4: special because I've never done this before. I'm very excited.
Speaker 4: It's a topic I really have wanted to cover for
Speaker 4: a while, but I'm going to be covering the topic
Speaker 4: with a good friend of mine who has an excellent show,
Speaker 4: and we're doing a joint show release thing and I've
Speaker 4: never done it. It's like a Marvel team up, and
Speaker 4: I'm very excited for it. James stout, James goa, introduce
Speaker 4: your first journalist podcaster host of it could happen here, which,
Speaker 4: if you're listening to this on it could happen here,
Speaker 4: you already knew that. James. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 9: Hi, thank you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I don't watch many Sweeper hero movies, so
Speaker 7: I'm now concerned as to which Marvel hero villain I
Speaker 7: would be.
Speaker 4: Well, I was thinking more of the comics. But if
Speaker 4: I have, if I have the pin you to a character,
Speaker 4: it's Moonnight. I think that's clear.
Speaker 7: Okay, it's gone straight past me, buddy, but I'm sure
Speaker 7: I hope that was take.
Speaker 4: My word for it. It's cool. It's cool, James. Can
Speaker 4: you tell us a little bit about what we're covering today.
Speaker 4: Let's talk talk to our people about what. Then we'll
Speaker 4: introduce our guests. But let's tell people kind of what
Speaker 4: we're trying to cover today.
Speaker 7: Yeah, of course, So we're talking about like healthcare and
Speaker 7: an Indigenous context and how we can both learn from
Speaker 7: and stand in solidarity within indigenous communities when it comes
Speaker 7: to healthcare.
Speaker 4: I guess excellent. And to help us with that, we
Speaker 4: have two guests. We have a medical student at a
Speaker 4: little school called Harvard I think it's a liberal arts
Speaker 4: school out in the east somewhere, named Victor Lopez Carmen.
Speaker 4: He was the prior elected co chair of the United
Speaker 4: Nations Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. He is a member of
Speaker 4: the Crow Creek Sooux tribe and also from the Yockey tribes.
Speaker 4: Is that correct, Victor? Yeah, okay, excellent, welcome to the shows.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much. I'm honestly props to pronouncing all
Speaker 5: that right.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, your stuff. I'm going to get right.
Speaker 4: Our next guest, whose name is Molly, I'm gonna probably
Speaker 4: destroy her name because that those are the names I
Speaker 4: have a hard time with. Doctor Molly Hollweaver.
Speaker 3: Is that correct? E r?
Speaker 4: Doctor at UC Davis, one of my favorite hospitals in
Speaker 4: the world. Is that also correct?
Speaker 6: That is correct? I work at you see Davis.
Speaker 9: So I guess maybe we should start, like.
Speaker 7: If we want to start out by explaining maybe how
Speaker 7: healthcare like what things that when we look at healthcare
Speaker 7: and indigenous context, what things we're looking at the differentiate
Speaker 7: it from healthcare in other context?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 7: What will be the areas that both of you guys
Speaker 7: think that folks who aren't familiar with this, because sadly,
Speaker 7: I think a lot of the United States they either
Speaker 7: don't think they know Indigenous people or maybe they really
Speaker 7: don't like and we can explain that lots of Indigenous people,
Speaker 7: most Indigenous people live off res too. I think that
Speaker 7: would be very valuable. But what sort of topics will
Speaker 7: be be looking at when we're looking at healthcare from
Speaker 7: an indigenous perspective.
Speaker 5: I think, like when you look at indigenous peoples in
Speaker 5: the US, you think of our traditional health system as well,
Speaker 5: like that was what we always had, that was what
Speaker 5: we've had for thousands of years, and the efforts to
Speaker 5: maintain the traditional health, traditional healing practices. And then you
Speaker 5: look at the Western health system, the different systems we
Speaker 5: have access to today, including Indian Health Service, which is
Speaker 5: unique to US, tribal clinics, tribal operated clinics, and hospitals
Speaker 5: everyday hospitals that anyone else uses, because, like you said,
Speaker 5: the majority of Native Americans today in the US live
Speaker 5: in cities or urban contexts.
Speaker 4: Mollie, let me ask you because people may be wondering,
Speaker 4: how did you become involved with delivery of healthcare to
Speaker 4: the Native American population.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Thanks, I am, it's great to be here. Thanks
Speaker 6: for having us.
Speaker 10: I'm excited to chat with you all.
Speaker 6: I kind of had a unique opportunity.
Speaker 10: I've always been interested in Indian health service as like
Speaker 10: a healthcare delivery system and Indigenous peoples. And when I
Speaker 10: started fellowship, I did a Global Health Fellowship and I
Speaker 10: started in twenty twenty, so it was, you know, not
Speaker 10: a great year to be a Global Health Fellow for
Speaker 10: many reasons, and so I had very you know, obviously
Speaker 10: we were on lockdown and work was hard and stressful
Speaker 10: as an YEARDOC, and so we were trying to be
Speaker 10: creative and you know, how we can do this global
Speaker 10: health fellowship. And so I got in touch with a
Speaker 10: awesome physician, Don Maggio, who is the ed director at
Speaker 10: White River, which is Apacha Nation in Arizona.
Speaker 6: It's like three hours east of Phoenix. So he went
Speaker 6: to high He was.
Speaker 10: A Highland Alum, a Highland DM alum which is in
Speaker 10: Oakland and now works full time at White River. Anyways,
Speaker 10: got connected with him and everything that was going on
Speaker 10: during the pandemic, because, as I'm sure you guys are
Speaker 10: all aware and probably a lot of our listeners, that
Speaker 10: the Navajo and Apache tribes were had much higher rates
Speaker 10: of COVID and of severe COVID, and so I went
Speaker 10: as first for kind of public health outreach. So I
Speaker 10: went and did some contact tracing and helped do They
Speaker 10: did a really cool program of outreach in the community
Speaker 10: to go and check on the locals and we would
Speaker 10: go and check pull sox, so we'd see how high
Speaker 10: their oxygen saturation was and see how people were doing
Speaker 10: to try to catch disease early.
Speaker 6: So that's how I kind of.
Speaker 10: Got into doing it, and then I loved it there
Speaker 10: and wanted to keep working, and so I continued to moonlight,
Speaker 10: which means I worked kind of as a locomes. I
Speaker 10: don't know if I need to explain that for medical
Speaker 10: Dragon Cave, but I worked, you know, every one to
Speaker 10: two months, I would fly to Arizona and work on
Speaker 10: the res for a week.
Speaker 4: Very very cool. So Victor getting back a little bit
Speaker 4: to where Native Americans are getting their health care? What
Speaker 4: is what is your interest once you're done and when
Speaker 4: you graduate from Where are you are you right now?
Speaker 11: I'm a fourth year, so I'm my last year.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, for you buddy. How are you liking it?
Speaker 5: I'm liking it less. I'm not like like I like medicine.
Speaker 5: I still maintain medical school. Like I'm ready to be
Speaker 5: done with school senioritis.
Speaker 4: Is that what you mean?
Speaker 11: Pretty much?
Speaker 6: Yeah, you're a rising fourth here or have you already matched? Uh?
Speaker 5: No, I'm a I'm a rising fourth here. I'm applying
Speaker 5: your residency now, so.
Speaker 4: So, so talk to us about where what you would
Speaker 4: like to where you like to go and what kind
Speaker 4: of medicine you'd like to practice.
Speaker 5: Honestly anywhere that will take me.
Speaker 11: Doctor.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I really I want to go into pediatrics.
Speaker 5: Always wanted to help and take care of Native kids.
Speaker 5: And back in the community for sure. I want to
Speaker 5: go back and be a community member again. I've been
Speaker 5: gone for so long. I feel like I've been only
Speaker 5: only able to go back for like you know, breaks
Speaker 5: and things like that, and it's it's it hasn't been
Speaker 5: enough for me as an Indigenous person. So I'm ready
Speaker 5: to go back, be a doctor, be part of the community,
Speaker 5: be there for ceremonies, be there to be patients.
Speaker 11: That's my ideal.
Speaker 7: I think one thing that's really interesting, especially and like
Speaker 7: we have this chance to talk to you, which we
Speaker 7: which we often don't have, is you mentioned like balancing
Speaker 7: like western medical technology with indigenous medical technologies, right, And
Speaker 7: I'm really interested in hearing how you would approach that
Speaker 7: for folks who aren't familiar or for folks who don't
Speaker 7: have the knowledge of indigenous medical technologies that you might
Speaker 7: you maybe have people who you go to for that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, well, well, I think it's important to just
Speaker 5: already start the conversation that so much indigenous medical technology
Speaker 5: has already been appropriated by western medicine as western medicine
Speaker 5: aspirin for instance, many traditional healing practices that were and
Speaker 5: are still find themselves seeping into the field of psychiatry
Speaker 5: or around parenting mental health. The way that, for instance,
Speaker 5: that Indigenous peoples. I think there's a growing understanding in
Speaker 5: the medical field about planetary health and the impacts of
Speaker 5: climate change on health, and a lot of that has
Speaker 5: already been said and fought for by Indigenous peoples for
Speaker 5: a very long time. And so there's already a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff there that we're working with, and I think
Speaker 5: it's important to give Indigenous peoples their flowers. But yeah,
Speaker 5: that I think when it comes to integrating on the
Speaker 5: clinical level, it's going to differ from community to community.
Speaker 5: You might know, but in the possible Yaki tribe, the
Speaker 5: health division employs a team of traditional healers that come
Speaker 5: up i think monthly from Sonora, Mexico, from the villages
Speaker 5: and Yacci patients can elect to see the traditional healers
Speaker 5: with or without a Western trained physician, and there's a
Speaker 5: whole room where they have all these herbs and plants
Speaker 5: that Yaki people have been using for thousands of years,
Speaker 5: and I think that's very beautiful.
Speaker 11: One reason we've been able to do that is.
Speaker 5: Because our tribe elected to run their own health division
Speaker 5: rather than having the Indian Health Service run it for them.
Speaker 5: We had the capability to do that at the time.
Speaker 5: Not all tribes do have the capability, yet we had it,
Speaker 5: and I think it's been beneficial for us because it's
Speaker 5: given us more freedom to bridge Western and traditional medicine
Speaker 5: in a way that works for us.
Speaker 7: The Yacki system is a really great one, like and.
Speaker 9: Like people.
Speaker 7: Probably that people won't be familiar with it. I guessing
Speaker 7: most people listening won't be familiar with it. But it's
Speaker 7: allowed the tribes to all kinds of cool things, like
Speaker 7: in I've been involved in a diabetes prevention cycling program
Speaker 7: there for ten years something a long time, but there
Speaker 7: are things that can be done because of that block
Speaker 7: grant or running their own system as opposed to having
Speaker 7: IOHS run the system. Could you like, because Marley, I
Speaker 7: think you're more familiar with like an IHS clinic model, right,
Speaker 7: would one of you want to explain the difference between
Speaker 7: the two of those for people who aren't familiar IHS
Speaker 7: versus the tribe. The Pascuayaki tribe run their own system.
Speaker 7: I think they get a block grant, correct me if
Speaker 7: I'm wrong. Victory, they get a block grant for my HSS,
Speaker 7: and then they spend that as they see fit.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I can speak to the IHS side, but for
Speaker 10: me this in Victory. You can correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 10: But for me it was easy to It's kind of
Speaker 10: similar to the VA for just for medical doctors to
Speaker 10: understand in that it's a set of money that the
Speaker 10: government sets aside for a certain population and v veterans
Speaker 10: for the VA and IHS for natives, but there's obviously
Speaker 10: disparity between even those two, Like per captive spending is
Speaker 10: way higher in the VA than it is on IHS.
Speaker 10: But it's a yeah, Western system, and all of the
Speaker 10: staff on the hospital, like the Reservation hospital or the
Speaker 10: Indian Hospital are all employees of IHS, so they're actually
Speaker 10: kind of like federal employees. And we can kind of
Speaker 10: get into the weeds of it later, but there's you know,
Speaker 10: a lot of turnover because it's a sometimes it's hard
Speaker 10: places to live, so and they're young. They kind of
Speaker 10: recruit young doctors, and there's a lot of turnover for
Speaker 10: the for the primary care doctors. And then in the
Speaker 10: er where I work, there's very few board certified er doctors,
Speaker 10: so it's staffed by non em certified docs.
Speaker 5: That sounds right to me. The only other thing I
Speaker 5: would add is that the Indian Health Service it's predicated
Speaker 5: on what's called the Federal trust responsibility that's built over
Speaker 5: decades of Supreme Court precedent smaller court precedents over the
Speaker 5: years that I think a lot of them were based
Speaker 5: in treaties made with Indigenous peoples. And basically this means
Speaker 5: that the government, because of the harm, the oppression, the
Speaker 5: colonization that has been dealt upon Indigenous peoples across the
Speaker 5: United States, there's a trust responsibility for the federal government
Speaker 5: to sort of to do something about the lingering impacts.
Speaker 5: They have a responsibility to provide health services to Indigenous
Speaker 5: peoples in the US. That was also in many of
Speaker 5: the treaties that were made with Indigenous nations. And I
Speaker 5: think it does go over people's heads sometimes that this
Speaker 5: is not a favor, this is not a gift, It's
Speaker 5: a responsibility based on centuries of oppression, and that that
Speaker 5: responsibility is not fully being met right now because the
Speaker 5: Indian Health Service is severely underfunded. The way that the
Speaker 5: funds are appropriated is unique to government health care programs.
Speaker 5: The way the veterans, for instance, Veterans Affairs is appropriated
Speaker 5: is much more effective than the way Indian Health Service
Speaker 5: is appropriated at the federal level.
Speaker 7: It might be worth explaining here just briefly, that not
Speaker 7: all tribes are federally recognized right and not all Indigenous
Speaker 7: people are part of federally recognized tribes, and how would
Speaker 7: that impact their access to healthcare.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, you know, federal recognition isn't perfect. It's a
Speaker 5: really arduous process, and not all tribes are federally recognized.
Speaker 5: For those tribes who aren't, they don't have access to
Speaker 5: those services like the Indian Health Service or the Bureau
Speaker 5: of Indian Education, for instance, and many other federal grants
Speaker 5: that Indigenous peoples and Indigenous nations can apply for or
Speaker 5: just automatically get. For instance, during COVID nineteen and there
Speaker 5: were specific funding allocated for tribal nations, those tribal nations
Speaker 5: who are not federally recognized, they wouldn't have that access
Speaker 5: to them.
Speaker 4: Let me shift gears a little bit here and get
Speaker 4: to a question that is I think going to be
Speaker 4: very difficult to answer, and it's one of those impossible
Speaker 4: questions because there's so many parts to it, I'm sure,
Speaker 4: and it varies so much. But I'd like to talk
Speaker 4: a little bit about the major health issues that you
Speaker 4: guys feel are facing Native Americans right now, and whether
Speaker 4: or not if they are at all different from the
Speaker 4: rest of the US population, and then we could talk
Speaker 4: about what barriers there are to care in that regards.
Speaker 4: But we'll start with you, Molly can you tell us
Speaker 4: from your experience working there, what are the major health
Speaker 4: issues that you feel may or may not be the
Speaker 4: same as the general population.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think at the end of the day is
Speaker 10: it's very similar. You're seeing the same the same disease
Speaker 10: processes that you're.
Speaker 6: Seeing in the general population, but you're.
Speaker 10: Seeing everything's a little bit more severe. I would say,
Speaker 10: like there's more there's higher rates of the chronic disorders
Speaker 10: like diabetes and hypertension, and it's kind of more severe
Speaker 10: long term effects of the diabetes and hypertension, and at
Speaker 10: younger ages. I think that was kind of what was
Speaker 10: most striking to me. You're seeing the long term, the
Speaker 10: bad effects, the long term bad effects at younger ages.
Speaker 10: You're seeing Alcoholic disorder is a problem everywhere in the
Speaker 10: United States, but on tribes alcoholics disorder.
Speaker 6: Is much higher. And again, like I was, it was shocked.
Speaker 10: It was honestly shocking to see thirty year olds who
Speaker 10: had n sage liver disease from alcohol use disorder. And
Speaker 10: I saw on some of the sickest people I've seen
Speaker 10: have been from my time there. So everything just is,
Speaker 10: you know, a little bit harder, and the reasons for
Speaker 10: that as we can talk about are like totally multifactorial,
Speaker 10: but in line with poverty. Funding is a huge like
Speaker 10: funding and poverty go hand in hand.
Speaker 6: Education and just the.
Speaker 10: Fact that yeah, they've been oppressed for centuries. But yeah,
Speaker 10: I think it's at the end of the day, it
Speaker 10: was the same. I was seeing the same things that
Speaker 10: I would see at UC Davis, but I was seeing
Speaker 10: it on a more extreme basis.
Speaker 11: I would say, Victor, Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 12: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think it's important to note to sort of say
Speaker 5: that these problems exist all across the US, because there
Speaker 5: can be stereotypes associated with health concerns like that are
Speaker 5: attributed to the way that we live, or our culture,
Speaker 5: or just inherent to who we are. Like there's this
Speaker 5: prevailing I think notion that I don't know what came first,
Speaker 5: but I think in the medical field, I still hear
Speaker 5: about it. Like in class sometimes they'll say, like Native
Speaker 5: Americans have the highest rates of diabetes or heart disease,
Speaker 5: but they won't say why, and it makes people think that, oh,
Speaker 5: like are they just not catching on? Like are they
Speaker 5: just living badly? And when you don't say why, it
Speaker 5: kind of I think it creates a lot of ignorance
Speaker 5: and a lot of room for interpretation. So I think
Speaker 5: it's really important to talk about those background reasons. For instance,
Speaker 5: with diabetes, I think a lot on a lot of reservations,
Speaker 5: there's no access to one, traditional foods which have been
Speaker 5: you know, through policy, eradicated through government policies over the
Speaker 5: decades and centuries, and no access to healthy foods. These
Speaker 5: are food deserts. And at the same time, like doctor
Speaker 5: Hallweaver mentioned, there's poverty. So if you're trying to get
Speaker 5: healthy food you don't have number one, it's not in
Speaker 5: the reservation. You might not even be able to afford it.
Speaker 5: If you can get off the reservation. Not a lot
Speaker 5: of people have, you know, not everyone has a car
Speaker 5: or the ability to mobilize, you know, hour and a
Speaker 5: half to the health food store, and so you know,
Speaker 5: a lot of the that's just one example of like
Speaker 5: some of the systemic reasons why somebody could get diabetes
Speaker 5: quite early. And there's also a lot of lingering trauma
Speaker 5: and mental health impacts that I think play into the
Speaker 5: high rates of alcoholism. A lot of you know, in policy,
Speaker 5: there was there were some early efforts to try to
Speaker 5: I think, to try to limit alcohol on reservations that
Speaker 5: we still see today on some reservations, alcohols entirely illegal
Speaker 5: on the reservation, but you'll see you'll still see businesses
Speaker 5: right on the border of the reservation just camp themselves
Speaker 5: there right on the border, knowing that these that the
Speaker 5: population is vulnerable, maybe not knowing that it's because of
Speaker 5: the historical trauma and things, but there's there's something there,
Speaker 5: you know, so there's still an aspect of being targeted
Speaker 5: there by something that that you know, the community is
Speaker 5: highly vulnerable to still to this day.
Speaker 4: It's a really interesting point that you bring up because
Speaker 4: I remember being in medical school and you know, you
Speaker 4: see in these lecture halls and some they would bring
Speaker 4: up like Native Americans being a higher risk for all
Speaker 4: these It would be like one of these little footnotes
Speaker 4: that would be in a lot of our lectures and
Speaker 4: that sort of thing. They never explained why, I mean
Speaker 4: medical school particularly then, was I wouldn't want to touch
Speaker 4: anything that they might see as an even mildly political issue,
Speaker 4: even though not discussing it made it one. Really, do
Speaker 4: you must be annoyed by this? Does this happen to you?
Speaker 4: Like are you like sitting in your lecture class and
Speaker 4: then like the teacher will mention some about naive Americans.
Speaker 4: Then all like the white students in your class just
Speaker 4: turned their heads and like look at you to see
Speaker 4: your response.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, you're like what listen, I just like find
Speaker 13: a wall and I stare at it, just just anticipating it,
Speaker 13: just looking in deep thought until it passes.
Speaker 4: Right, smart student, Molly, you're going to add something.
Speaker 6: I was going to add to that victor that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, just to highlight the food desert example, during COVID, right,
Speaker 10: the White River Reservation had one grocery store and during
Speaker 10: the lockdown it was only open, you know, from nine
Speaker 10: am to three pm on Monday, Wednesday Friday, Like it
Speaker 10: had really limited hours, and that was the one grocery
Speaker 10: store for the entire oservation, and so it was just
Speaker 10: even you know, during the pandemic, everything got a little
Speaker 10: bit worse. But yeah, they're very limited access to healthy
Speaker 10: foods for sure.
Speaker 7: One thing that I was recently educated about during a
Speaker 7: discussion about diabetes prevention was epigenetics. And like, my I'm
Speaker 7: a doctor of modern European history. So if I go
Speaker 7: off the rails at any point, I'm going to lie
Speaker 7: on one of you three to gently guide me back.
Speaker 7: But I found that fascinating. The concept of like intergenerational
Speaker 7: trauma and epigenetics and how that can impact healthcare today.
Speaker 7: Is that something either if you could explain to listeners
Speaker 7: who like me a redatively ignorant on it.
Speaker 4: And that's the I can take this one actually because
Speaker 4: actually it's interesting because I did an episode recently about
Speaker 4: the intergenerational trauma of the Persian diaspora after the revolution
Speaker 4: and how this most recent set of protests sort of
Speaker 4: reignited this trauma. And excuse me, one of the guests
Speaker 4: mentioned that there was a study in mice in which
Speaker 4: they looked at sort of epigenetics of stress response, and
Speaker 4: they had pregnant mice and they like, they would give
Speaker 4: them the scent of rose blossom or something, and then
Speaker 4: they would shock them, and then the mouse would grow
Speaker 4: to be really fearful of those shocks that were associated
Speaker 4: with the rose blossom. And then what they noticed was
Speaker 4: that like the children of the mice would also respond
Speaker 4: poor ly to like that same rose blossom scent even
Speaker 4: though they didn't have the exposure to it. And I
Speaker 4: looked into it, I mean, because the truth of it
Speaker 4: is I don't think you can inherit specific phobias. That
Speaker 4: just doesn't happen. But I kind of pushed back on
Speaker 4: that point a little bit, and I got a lot
Speaker 4: of messages from molecular pathologists who were like, so you
Speaker 4: can't stress during pregnancy. It can be it can affect
Speaker 4: the DNA. It can affect the DNA, and that can
Speaker 4: be passed down changes in the DNA, disruption of the DNA.
Speaker 4: You can't inherit specific phobias or or fears or stresses
Speaker 4: per se, but it can clearly cause genetic damage when
Speaker 4: you have that much stress. And then on top of that,
Speaker 4: of course we're talking about the psychological impact it has
Speaker 4: on someone and then how they raise their children and
Speaker 4: how their children grow up. So it is I agree,
Speaker 4: it's a very interesting subject, but I don't want to
Speaker 4: get any more molecular pathologists emails. Molly.
Speaker 10: I was going to say, I'm glad you took this
Speaker 10: epigenetics question from me.
Speaker 4: You know, one thing about your going back to what
Speaker 4: you were saying, victor about the situations that have sort
Speaker 4: of predicated this. Correct me if I'm wrong. But my
Speaker 4: understanding is most of the land that these Indian reservations
Speaker 4: are on in the United States, Like there's three hundred
Speaker 4: and twenty six if I've read that correctly, isn't on
Speaker 4: great land. It's like land that's close to like mines
Speaker 4: or places where there's some sort of radiation or there's
Speaker 4: some sort of issues not great like for growing food
Speaker 4: itself directly there is that? Is that correct? Is that
Speaker 4: part of this correct?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think a lot of it was. The intention was
Speaker 5: to put indigenous peoples on land that wasn't as fertile,
Speaker 5: and that that's kind of goes back into what I
Speaker 5: was talking about traditional foods and how it's difficult. But
Speaker 5: I think, you know, I don't know if this science
Speaker 5: was all there at the time, and I think now
Speaker 5: a lot of indigenous land, a lot of reservations actually
Speaker 5: they found out that they're yeah, they're on like on
Speaker 5: top of big mines and like things that the Western
Speaker 5: world funds really valuable. And so there's a shift almost
Speaker 5: to almost you see it in like policies and lawsuits
Speaker 5: today to start trying to grab more minerals from the
Speaker 5: land that that that they had actually put us on,
Speaker 5: which they didn't think was valuable. And now they're like, wait,
Speaker 5: there's like copper under there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's a good example of that, right exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, you know the podcaster and the rapper propaganda prop
Speaker 4: I'm James. You probably have met him, you know. He
Speaker 4: speaks about how initially they put the African Americans in
Speaker 4: the waterfront. They said, here, you're gonna live in these
Speaker 4: places by the by the the ocean where you can't
Speaker 4: really grow things that well. And then after a while
Speaker 4: they realized, oh no, that's really valuable property, and then
Speaker 4: they started trying to find ways to get them out
Speaker 4: of there. Seems to be our national m O. Can
Speaker 4: we get back to the IHS a little bit? So
Speaker 4: you guys have mentioned Indian Health Services. It's come up
Speaker 4: a couple of times. And James, I'd also want to
Speaker 4: hear your because you worked there as well. I'd like
Speaker 4: to hear like, what are some things that the IHS
Speaker 4: is doing well? What are some things that need work
Speaker 4: and how.
Speaker 5: I just want to say the IHS, I think they
Speaker 5: they they're doing what they can't a lot of it.
Speaker 11: They're doing what they well with what they have.
Speaker 5: I would say like a lot of the issues are
Speaker 5: underfunding and we don't exactly know how well, like we
Speaker 5: don't really know the potential quite yet because they just
Speaker 5: don't have enough funding. So I think, like I would
Speaker 5: just like to insert that caveat into the conversation first.
Speaker 10: Ye yeah, yeah, And I you know, I only have
Speaker 10: experience on one reservation and they're you know, every everyone
Speaker 10: is different, for sure.
Speaker 6: I think someone might know more than me.
Speaker 10: But the Alaska Health System Indian Health System is still
Speaker 10: part of the AHS, but it's like kind of its
Speaker 10: own thing, and they are the kind of the gold
Speaker 10: standard or they're they're kind of the they are doing
Speaker 10: the best with what they have. And I don't know,
Speaker 10: maybe you guys know, James or Victor that if they
Speaker 10: had more funding is probably a big part of it.
Speaker 10: If they just have more funding, But they are kind
Speaker 10: of touted as the leader in IHS right now.
Speaker 7: I know, but less about this in either of you,
Speaker 7: I'm sure. But I know I worked on an ih
Speaker 7: grant years ago with someone who'd worked with Alaska Native
Speaker 7: people and they were talking about this Promodores de Salul model,
Speaker 7: which I don't know if you guys are familiar with
Speaker 7: that it came from Oakland actually, but like it's a
Speaker 7: p mental model for health education that they had implemented there,
Speaker 7: and we were trying to get money to implement that
Speaker 7: and the Yaki Reservation didn't work shockingly, but that model
Speaker 7: that they used of like using people from the community
Speaker 7: to educate people from the community rather than like, I
Speaker 7: guess you could call it like white men and white coats,
Speaker 7: worked very well for them, and I think it's a
Speaker 7: very desirable model to replicate. It's not that expensive either,
Speaker 7: and we were doing it with beat its Prevention, right. So, like,
Speaker 7: chiefly my thing is riding bikes has been my whole life,
Speaker 7: and so it is, yeah, just a big old bike
Speaker 7: riding hippie, but like, riding bike is very good for you,
Speaker 7: as it turns out, which is which. So the thing
Speaker 7: that we've been doing with a lot of my friends
Speaker 7: on the Yaki Reservation is getting folks helping them out
Speaker 7: with a bike and helmet and lights and all the
Speaker 7: things that you need, teasing them to fix the bike right,
Speaker 7: and then having them go ahead and ride the bike,
Speaker 7: and then like it, having them bring friends and family
Speaker 7: members to come back and ride the bike and and
Speaker 7: have a goal event as part of that. And that's
Speaker 7: worked very well for us too, So that model that
Speaker 7: they implemented has been super successful within this very small
Speaker 7: context of getting Yaki folks to ride bikes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just going off of that, I mean, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 5: And I think one of the limitations of the IHS
Speaker 5: is that it's this huge bureaucracy, so it's hard to
Speaker 5: do stuff like that, Like for instance, at the Yaqui tribe.
Speaker 5: I'm sure you know, we're not the easiest chribe to
Speaker 5: work with, but but.
Speaker 11: We're probably easier than the IHS.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because.
Speaker 5: And and I think that that's a huge limitation. Like
Speaker 5: even if you want to do a study on the IHS,
Speaker 5: it has to be approved by like all of these
Speaker 5: government officials and bureaucrats and uh and I think that
Speaker 5: that makes it really difficult. And especially because you know,
Speaker 5: and there's so many branches at the government that the
Speaker 5: Indian Health Service is just one small.
Speaker 11: You know, piece of it.
Speaker 5: H and it's not necessarily one that's like heavily prioritized
Speaker 5: by the government. But there are improvements that are being made.
Speaker 5: I think in this last appropriations bill, the Indian Health
Speaker 5: Service got like funded a lot more than it had previously.
Speaker 5: So hopefully we'll see some improvements. I think they're doing
Speaker 5: really well when it comes to digital health, the integration
Speaker 5: of electronic medical systems. I think that made a significant
Speaker 5: impact when that was introduced. And then you know, I
Speaker 5: think the Indian Health Service, like the model does well
Speaker 5: in giving a lot of freedom to tribes to choose
Speaker 5: do we want to continue with the Indian Health Service
Speaker 5: or do we want to take our health system over
Speaker 5: and run it ourselves, but still use them same money
Speaker 5: that would have been used anyways. I think that's what
Speaker 5: a lot of the clinics in Alaska did in terms
Speaker 5: of having like it's called six thirty eight clinic or
Speaker 5: six thirty eight clinics or tribal health systems. It's really
Speaker 5: cool what they did in Alaska because those are some
Speaker 5: of the most remote, remote villages you know, in the US,
Speaker 5: and I think that is something that we should be
Speaker 5: paying more attention to, especially you know, when we're talking
Speaker 5: about you know, we talked about Alaska that they're remote,
Speaker 5: but a lot of tribes the parts of the US
Speaker 5: or maybe not as remote, but they're in very similar
Speaker 5: situations and that they're kind of disconnected, like on food deserts.
Speaker 11: And I think the same model can be used, but not.
Speaker 5: Every tribe is at the place where they're capable yet
Speaker 5: of taking over like the operations, the staff. There's a
Speaker 5: lot of work that needs to be done, and every
Speaker 5: tribe is kind of in a different place.
Speaker 4: I'm interesting, I'm interested. I think you were mostly tongue
Speaker 4: in cheek. But when you when you mentioned the yacky
Speaker 4: tribe is not that easy to work with? What what
Speaker 4: what do you mean? Like is it is? Is there
Speaker 4: a lot of different opinions? Is that? Why is there?
Speaker 4: Is it hard to why is it hard to manage?
Speaker 4: Or why would that be difficult?
Speaker 5: We're just very militant, and I think I think we're
Speaker 5: just you know, we're just do our own thing and.
Speaker 4: Uh, very independent and.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, we're just kind of like I think I
Speaker 5: think we're just kind of a very.
Speaker 11: Rebellious nature in us, like sort of yeah.
Speaker 5: Just really had strong and like we don't work the
Speaker 5: same on the same timeline.
Speaker 11: I think sometimes it's like, for.
Speaker 5: Instance, like like I'll tell you a story, there was
Speaker 5: this this shrimp farmer dude, our traditional one of our
Speaker 5: traditional spiritual leaders political leaders.
Speaker 11: He passed away in early two thousands.
Speaker 5: His name was on Selmo Valencia, and they were bringing
Speaker 5: down there trying to introduce shrimp farming in the traditional
Speaker 5: villages in Sonoda, Mexico. So they brought this guy all
Speaker 5: the way down. He's this businessman and you know, he's
Speaker 5: running on time, and they bounded down to the traditional
Speaker 5: authorities in one of the pueblos and then all of
Speaker 5: a sudden, right in the middle of the meeting, the
Speaker 5: snake you see this snake on the floor go by.
Speaker 5: And then also Valencia, he's like stop, wait for a second,
Speaker 5: and he grabs a snake and then he looks at
Speaker 5: it and he says, we have to stop the meeting.
Speaker 11: I have to go back to Tucson.
Speaker 5: And this business guy is like, what the hell you know,
Speaker 5: I just came from like Manhattan, and I flew all
Speaker 5: the way up in this village, like and they stopped
Speaker 5: the meeting, and this guy's like confused.
Speaker 11: I think he got really angry.
Speaker 5: Uh, and that never happened to him in a business
Speaker 5: meeting before. But there was a traditional aspect that I
Speaker 5: think we just put that above everything else, Like during
Speaker 5: even today, during time to ceremony, like no one's answering emails,
Speaker 5: no travel government official is going to get back to
Speaker 5: you within that those like three four weeks because they're
Speaker 5: doing spiritual practices and honoring that.
Speaker 9: So yeah, yeah, I get it.
Speaker 7: From my perspective, everyone is lovely and like it's nice
Speaker 7: to have a community where everyone cares about each other
Speaker 7: and like wants everyone else to be healthy, and like
Speaker 7: that's great. There are times when recently we did a
Speaker 7: live show to raise money to buy more bikes and
Speaker 7: someone from iHeart was trying to get a W nine
Speaker 7: out of us, and I was like, no, it's it's
Speaker 7: like Eastern weeks. It's not it's not gonna happen, like
Speaker 7: it's just I did. But it's fine, you explain it.
Speaker 7: And like I always attribute like I'm not fully culturally fluent, right,
Speaker 7: Like I'm a guy from England, Like it was different
Speaker 7: where I grew up, so like things you can't tell
Speaker 7: ye stout is that it's right up there with Valencia.
Speaker 7: But yeah, like I'm obviously I don't have full cultural effluency,
Speaker 7: so it's on me to kind of listen and learn
Speaker 7: at a time rather than be frustrated and build those.
Speaker 4: Ship when you're I mean obviously you're you're very good
Speaker 4: at that. In my opinion, what I've seen from you
Speaker 4: so far, but I'm very curious actually from both James
Speaker 4: and Molly, Like when you guys first started going to
Speaker 4: the reservation, what surprised you, What was different than you
Speaker 4: had envisioned? What you know, because I'm assuming you got
Speaker 4: all your knowledge of what reservations were like like from Hollywood, Like,
Speaker 4: I did you know what what was fact? What was fiction?
Speaker 10: Yeah, it was my first time like on a reservation,
Speaker 10: and I think it was.
Speaker 6: It.
Speaker 10: It sort of felt like a little bit of a
Speaker 10: different country, almost like you're in Arizona and you drive
Speaker 10: three hours and you feel like you're in a really
Speaker 10: different place. It feels just a little bit different, and
Speaker 10: just it's beautiful a the one I'm on was, or
Speaker 10: the one that I went to is in White River, Arizona.
Speaker 6: It really is beautiful in the mountains.
Speaker 10: Along a river, but it's you know, a lot of
Speaker 10: single story housing that are all kind of government cookie
Speaker 10: cutter housing. And I got to kind of go into
Speaker 10: the homes too when we were doing house visits, So
Speaker 10: that felt I felt very like privileged and it felt
Speaker 10: special to be able to do that as a very
Speaker 10: foreign person, right, I felt I felt like an outside
Speaker 10: and yeah, I mean a lot there isn't They're not
Speaker 10: central heat for these house Some of these houses, lots
Speaker 10: of the floors were dirt, like not actual flooring on
Speaker 10: the houses.
Speaker 6: So that was I think surprising to me because it
Speaker 6: seems like that is not something you think of when
Speaker 6: you think of America. But that was that probably was
Speaker 6: like the most surprising.
Speaker 10: But then like the street dogs running around everywhere, it
Speaker 10: was kind of classic. I think that my first my
Speaker 10: first drive down, I like had to stop because like
Speaker 10: a pack of dogs went by, and that was kind
Speaker 10: of out of a out of a movie.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I didn't know, Like obviously I'm not American either,
Speaker 7: so yeah, it's shocking.
Speaker 9: I actually am from Texas.
Speaker 7: I just watched the Harry Potter films on repeating that's
Speaker 7: how I learned to be a turf.
Speaker 9: No, I am not a turf.
Speaker 4: I I don't think that.
Speaker 7: I don't think that, yeah, there's people should go away.
Speaker 7: I so like I didn't maybe receive a lot of
Speaker 7: that like sort of ingrained kind of British for we
Speaker 7: fucking did settle colonialism everywhere.
Speaker 9: I don't want to.
Speaker 7: Erase that for a second, but I you know, so
Speaker 7: I just go to the restaurant by bike through it.
Speaker 7: Pascal yaki Ros has nice rose lovely bike lanes and
Speaker 7: it's much smaller than like the Tohorn Autumn Rears, which
Speaker 7: is next door. That's the sides of Connecticut for people
Speaker 7: who aren't familiar, and I know, I'm from a part
Speaker 7: of England that's very rural where people talk to each other.
Speaker 7: And that's the thing that I don't like about living
Speaker 7: in a town in California is that everyone just kind
Speaker 7: of lives in a little box and kind of moves
Speaker 7: around and doesn't talk to each other. And at least
Speaker 7: in my experience on the reservation, everyone is friendly and nice.
Speaker 7: Most of the people I run into it with friendly
Speaker 7: and nice, and so I really like that guy I
Speaker 7: ran into as a traditional artist, David Moreno, who does
Speaker 7: he runs an art program there. He's very lovely guy,
Speaker 7: and we just were chatting, I think, and I was
Speaker 7: trying to encourage. I think I was trying to encourage
Speaker 7: him to come on a bike ride with me, and like,
Speaker 7: you didn't have a bike, so then I was just
Speaker 7: trying to encourage, Like I was like, maybe I could
Speaker 7: get some bikes and come back. And I spoke to
Speaker 7: some people and diabetes prevention and we got some bikes
Speaker 7: and came back. But it like, obviously people's houses aren't
Speaker 7: super duper fancy, but they're fine. Like people have some
Speaker 7: nice houses on the res like you know, I didn't
Speaker 7: grow up in a super fancy house, and like the
Speaker 7: houses that are not that distinct from those that I
Speaker 7: see in San Diego. It's beautiful too, like especially down
Speaker 7: if you go on the Autumn Reservation further down. We
Speaker 7: did a ride there in twenty nineteen, and we went
Speaker 7: out the night before from the Yaki Reservation with the
Speaker 7: group of us and we did like a big camp
Speaker 7: out and then we did it right the next day.
Speaker 7: Their roads are not quite as nice as the yucky
Speaker 7: roads we all got. We ran out of innertube because
Speaker 7: everyone got so many punctures, like it's it's yeah, it's
Speaker 7: beautiful landscape.
Speaker 9: It's really gorgeous. I think the biggest shot to me
Speaker 9: was the donkeys.
Speaker 7: The donkeys on the outun roads or something else, like
Speaker 7: just just wild ass donkeys that like at night it
Speaker 7: sounds like there is a murder occurring. It just makes
Speaker 7: these horrendous noises and like you puncture on your bike
Speaker 7: and you go for a little bit of shade because
Speaker 7: it's very hot, and suddenly you realize like ten buddles
Speaker 7: like just chilling there too. So that was the weirdest thing.
Speaker 7: But like I know, people shouldn't just walk onto reservations
Speaker 7: and start like trying to have their cultural immersion experience
Speaker 7: or whatever.
Speaker 9: That's that's a bit cringe.
Speaker 7: But yeah, like people equally shouldn't think that it's a
Speaker 7: scary or different or dangerous, like Arizona feels foreign to me,
Speaker 7: Like I go to Phoenix and that is that is
Speaker 7: a scary experience for other reasons, but like I I've
Speaker 7: always felt very welcome and comfortable there.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I can just add one more thing. Oh sorry,
Speaker 10: just I think the other that's a great point, James.
Speaker 10: But like the striking part for me too was that
Speaker 10: I felt very Yeah, I felt very welcomed when I
Speaker 10: was there, And they like have a very soft way
Speaker 10: of speaking, and I'm like a loud, annoying American and
Speaker 10: so like have are obviously they're American as well, but
Speaker 10: I have kind of a loud voice, and they're very
Speaker 10: soft spoken and so gentle and so just like appreciative
Speaker 10: and I kind of For me, I was like, wow,
Speaker 10: this is like amazing that you have resiliency to feel
Speaker 10: appreciative when like I don't feel like you should you know,
Speaker 10: feel grateful or appreciative to me, I thought that was
Speaker 10: like my the most streaking.
Speaker 6: That I felt.
Speaker 4: Mollie's so nice. She's like trying to apologize for being Listen,
Speaker 4: you're talking to two podcasters like obnoxiouses are nature, It's
Speaker 4: like part of our You don't need to lay yourself there, Victor,
Speaker 4: You've already touched on this a little bit, But do
Speaker 4: you find yourself still still dispelling myths and stereotypes about
Speaker 4: Native Americans even at medical school?
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, all the time.
Speaker 5: You know, we talked about the medical misconceptions and and
Speaker 5: and those things. But I think there it's it's like,
Speaker 5: like I said, I feel like the American educational system
Speaker 5: it left so much room for interpretation and what it
Speaker 5: did give was and a lot of it wasn't true.
Speaker 5: But I think what I'm really battling is that people
Speaker 5: just the level of exposure they have is so minimal
Speaker 5: that they're coming into these conversations and discussions with pretty
Speaker 5: much almost nothing. And so the average American knows very
Speaker 5: very little about Native Americans. And when I say that,
Speaker 5: I don't mean Native American could culture because I don't
Speaker 5: think anyone, any Native American really cares if they know
Speaker 5: our culture or not. In fact, they might even protect it.
Speaker 5: But we're talking about what is the experience of Native
Speaker 5: Americans in this country, what happened, what were the policies,
Speaker 5: what are the issues that are still going on today.
Speaker 5: You know, there's the level of education. It's just not
Speaker 5: to the point where I find we can even have
Speaker 5: these discussions, discussions that we need to have. So I
Speaker 5: think the most taxing thing on me is that whenever
Speaker 5: I talk about Indigenous experiences or anything related to Indigenous health,
Speaker 5: I have to give so much background that every time
Speaker 5: I have to educate someone on you know, what is colonization,
Speaker 5: what happened, and the very basics of I think that
Speaker 5: should be basic in this country, all these basics, and
Speaker 5: by that time, you know, I think people have gotten
Speaker 5: so much information that maybe they didn't know before.
Speaker 11: They get overwhelmed.
Speaker 5: And these things can also be very touchy subjects, I
Speaker 5: think because we haven't been bold enough in the US
Speaker 5: to actually just talk about them.
Speaker 11: And I think.
Speaker 5: People, you know, might be a little afraid to acknowledge
Speaker 5: these things and somewhere inside. And I think what would
Speaker 5: have helped with that is if they were exposed to
Speaker 5: it in you know, starting in elementary school history, starting
Speaker 5: in middle school, high school, all of these things I
Speaker 5: think will make well, we need to start doing that
Speaker 5: in the educational system if we're really going to make progress.
Speaker 7: Yeah, as like someone who teaches history, oh, it has
Speaker 7: tour history. I think that's very true, and sadly it's
Speaker 7: only getting worse, like places like Florida, right and making
Speaker 7: it harder and harder to talk about that. But I
Speaker 7: think when people come to need so like I teach
Speaker 7: a community college course, an American history course, and I
Speaker 7: think when people come to that course, I mean California,
Speaker 7: like many of them, for instance, could not name the
Speaker 7: tribe who's the cancestral and current homelands they are sitting
Speaker 7: in and learning. And then obviously to understand those experiences,
Speaker 7: you have to have a name for them, right, And
Speaker 7: if you don't have a name for the people, then
Speaker 7: you're a long way from understanding, I guess. But it's
Speaker 7: something that's still desperately lacking in the American education system.
Speaker 7: And it doesn't seem like people are pushing hard enough
Speaker 7: to get that rectified. Like it's yeah, it's a very
Speaker 7: big gap even in places, you know, like you could
Speaker 7: be at school in Arizona, like you could be an
Speaker 7: hour from some of the biggest reservations in the United States,
Speaker 7: right the Art tim and the Navajo, and maybe not
Speaker 7: an hour. Everything's a long way away in Arizona. But
Speaker 7: and and not understand anything about those people who lived
Speaker 7: experience if you're in Scottsdale.
Speaker 4: In the Bay Area. I've grown up in the San
Speaker 4: Francisco Bay Area and I didn't I knew very little
Speaker 4: about the Native people that were here until my one
Speaker 4: of my oldest son had to do a project here
Speaker 4: in San Francisco on the Miwalk tribe. And then only
Speaker 4: then did I learn. I'm like, oh my god, they
Speaker 4: were everywhere here. You know, there's so much the lonely tribe.
Speaker 4: So even here, you know, which is a relatively progressive,
Speaker 4: not Floridian system, you know, did I not learn a
Speaker 4: lot about that? But I also, Victor, I also hear you, like,
Speaker 4: I know it must be exhausting, and we appreciate you
Speaker 4: coming on to talk to us about it. James and
Speaker 4: I have talked about this before. It's it's something that
Speaker 4: I at least grapple with sometimes, like in terms of
Speaker 4: like bringing on guests, you know, like I want people
Speaker 4: to talk about these things that are difficult and sometimes
Speaker 4: maybe even a little traumatic to like talk about. But
Speaker 4: there's this balance of like, well, I want the people
Speaker 4: who experience it know the most about it to speak
Speaker 4: about it, but also the one to keep re exposing
Speaker 4: people to like the same exhausting trauma every time, you know,
Speaker 4: it becomes a tough thing for me at least to
Speaker 4: figure out in balance, you know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely, Yeah, I think you know, these podcasts are
Speaker 5: a great way to do that, to have these discussions
Speaker 5: because it actually I think it takes away from the
Speaker 5: taxation because it hits a lot of people at once,
Speaker 5: you know, and.
Speaker 4: Listeners in the tens. We have listeners in the.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's better.
Speaker 9: We'll do a QR code so you can just be like, hey, hey,
Speaker 9: check this out.
Speaker 4: So so bit I'm sorry I have I have one
Speaker 4: last question for you. You know, you mentioned that you
Speaker 4: want to go back and practice on the reservation and
Speaker 4: be a part of the community again. Do you plan
Speaker 4: on bringing in traditional healing components to your practice, and
Speaker 4: if so, are you going to do specialty training? Is
Speaker 4: there like a version of a fellowship that you'll do
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I really want to do traditional practices. I'm not
Speaker 5: a traditional healer myself, but I want to partner with them.
Speaker 5: I feel like I have the connections to traditional people
Speaker 5: to do stuff like that. One of the things like
Speaker 5: I really want to do is try to do a
Speaker 5: lot of public health initiatives out of my practice, Like,
Speaker 5: for instance, I want to try to find ways to
Speaker 5: help people grow their own food, start their own gardens,
Speaker 5: do community gardens. I really want to get our traditional
Speaker 5: foods up and running again. And there's a lot of
Speaker 5: people are already working on this, you know, which is amazing.
Speaker 5: I just want to be of service to that effort,
Speaker 5: and I think I think that is one of the
Speaker 5: most important things right now. I also really want to
Speaker 5: do like public health initiatives around language revitalization. I think
Speaker 5: language is so important when it comes to the mental
Speaker 5: health of Indigenous youth uh Indigenous. I believe that Indigenous
Speaker 5: youth who know how to speak their language are more
Speaker 5: mentally strong during the continuing tides of colonization that they
Speaker 5: face in this Western world. If they have their language,
Speaker 5: I think that that's huge in terms of resilience as
Speaker 5: culture as well. I think, you know, finding ways to
Speaker 5: to sort of support culture as medicine, culture as prevention,
Speaker 5: participating in ceremonies, as you know, making it you know,
Speaker 5: very apparent that to to your audience and to the
Speaker 5: world that that that is protective of Indigenous health, indigenous
Speaker 5: mental health, and so that you know, there's all these
Speaker 5: facets of traditional traditional ways of life that we're all
Speaker 5: very healthy to us. And I think a huge part
Speaker 5: of the battle is that we're still having right now
Speaker 5: because the colonization is revitalizing those things, and then those things,
Speaker 5: you know, the more that they're revitalized, the more that
Speaker 5: we decolonize, the healthier we're going to be. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, recognizing that western medicine can also be
Speaker 5: very effective too, if it's just properly funded and if
Speaker 5: the service is effective. And so that's the other the
Speaker 5: other side of the coin that I want to be
Speaker 5: working on as well.
Speaker 4: Oh excellent, man.
Speaker 7: Yeah, one thing I wanted to touch on before we
Speaker 7: finish is because it seems relatively current and newsy right is.
Speaker 7: And I think Victor my next one point that like
Speaker 7: colonization isn't a thing that stopped. It's a thing that
Speaker 7: we keep doing like we not we including Victor, but
Speaker 7: you know, like we people like me.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 9: The Indian Chaid Welfare Act.
Speaker 7: Right, EQUA is a thing that the Zippering Court is
Speaker 7: like set up to take a swing at. And I
Speaker 7: know that that is an area of great concern to
Speaker 7: many people. And I was just in a tribal building
Speaker 7: last week looking at books for Yaki children right to
Speaker 7: help them stay connected with their culture if they're in
Speaker 7: a family which is not a tribal family. Can you,
Speaker 7: if you feel comfortable, explain what IQUA is and then
Speaker 7: the damage it does to young people to be pulled
Speaker 7: away from their culture and sort of get this little
Speaker 7: active conversation that happens every time that happens.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, because colonization is
Speaker 5: definitely continuing. For instance, we think about the Black Hills
Speaker 5: in South Dakota and the gold mining, the gold rush there, Well,
Speaker 5: there's still dozens of gold mining permits that are pending
Speaker 5: right now in the Black Hills. There are dozens of
Speaker 5: gold mines still operating there, and then La Coda and
Speaker 5: Dakota are still fighting for the Black Hills. Uh it's
Speaker 5: just one instance. We see that all across the United States.
Speaker 5: And I think when it comes to the Indian Child
Speaker 5: Wealth for ACT, that's another really good example. Uh So,
Speaker 5: basically the Indian Child Wealth for ACT if if a
Speaker 5: Native child is in the foster care system, and basically
Speaker 5: it helps to uh to support those children to find
Speaker 5: a placement with a family who is either who is
Speaker 5: from their tribe, from their cultural background. And the reasoning
Speaker 5: behind that is because they to number one to to
Speaker 5: stop the history of assimilation when it comes to taking
Speaker 5: Native children from their families. And we know about that,
Speaker 5: you know, through the US boarding school system. That was
Speaker 5: one example, but it kind of transitioned at a point
Speaker 5: once once boarding schools were terminated, those forced boarding schools,
Speaker 5: it kind of transitioned into the foster care system. And
Speaker 5: at one point a huge proportion of Native children were
Speaker 5: in foster care and they were being placed with white families,
Speaker 5: and those white families were not exposing them to their
Speaker 5: cultural background, and that in itself was potentiating assimilation because
Speaker 5: that's another Native child dozens of Native children, thousands of
Speaker 5: Native children who don't know their language, their culture because
Speaker 5: they've been removed from community due to systemic factors. Right,
Speaker 5: And so this bill it doesn't say, oh, you can
Speaker 5: only go with a Native family. It helps to ensure
Speaker 5: that if there is a suitable Native family from their tribe,
Speaker 5: that they will get first priority because they know that
Speaker 5: culture is also very important to Indigenous child wellbeing as well.
Speaker 5: The battle right now is being brought on by this
Speaker 5: lawsuit that primarily handles like mining and oil companies, but
Speaker 5: they're taking this Indian Child Welfare Act lawsuit pro bono
Speaker 5: because if you can get rid of the Indian Child
Speaker 5: Welfare Act on the basis that they're claiming, it's racism, right,
Speaker 5: they're claiming that Native people are getting some unjust preferential
Speaker 5: treatment when it comes to adopting Native children over white
Speaker 5: people on the basis of race. Where that falls short
Speaker 5: is that the basis of the Indian Child Welfare Act
Speaker 5: is that Indigenous peoples are not a race. They're sovereign nations.
Speaker 5: They have a political status distinct from all any other
Speaker 5: race in the US. And that is the basis that
Speaker 5: tribes are arguing for that, Hey, we have this political status.
Speaker 5: We're a tribal government. We have the rights to raise
Speaker 5: our children, we have the rights to teach our children
Speaker 5: to make sure they grow up in community with our culture.
Speaker 5: That's not a race issue. That's a political issue. That's
Speaker 5: a that that relates to our political status as a
Speaker 5: tribal nation, as a sovereign nation. And so they're going
Speaker 5: to be battling that in court. But if the Supreme
Speaker 5: Court decides that this Indian Child Welfare Act is you know,
Speaker 5: racist or discriminatory based on race, it means that a
Speaker 5: number of other bills, another under of other things in
Speaker 5: the law that that, for instance, that exist due to
Speaker 5: the political status of Indigenous nations have the potential to
Speaker 5: also be thrown out on the basis of racial discrimination.
Speaker 4: And that I.
Speaker 5: Think, will you know, will lead to a lot of
Speaker 5: a lot more land grabs, a lot more a lot
Speaker 5: less services being provided, for instance, like the Indian Health
Speaker 5: Service for ants. They might say, oh, why do Native
Speaker 5: Americans get this healthcare?
Speaker 11: Yeah, they might.
Speaker 5: They might start taking down a whole bunch of other
Speaker 5: things that are really important to us. So it's really
Speaker 5: it's a huge issue right now.
Speaker 4: It's a troubling time, and I could see how people
Speaker 4: in the past might have said, oh, don't worry, that
Speaker 4: won't happen. I think it's pretty clear that these things
Speaker 4: can happen pretty quickly, pretty aggressively.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: I think the last couple of years I've showed a
Speaker 4: lot of people that things can get worse somehow, you know,
Speaker 4: and that these things can be taken more and more
Speaker 4: can be taken from people that have already had so
Speaker 4: much taken from them.
Speaker 7: So I guess I like to finish off normally instead
Speaker 7: of just being like, here is some sad shit and
Speaker 7: just pointing to it and then kind of like dropping
Speaker 7: the mic, asking people how they can do something to
Speaker 7: stand in solidarity. So like, if either of you want
Speaker 7: to mention, I know this pass is flat. There are
Speaker 7: other attempts to appropriate and colonize indigenous land sake, it's based,
Speaker 7: it's a fucking border wall, it's bulldozing Kumii graveyards.
Speaker 9: Like, as I'm talking to you.
Speaker 7: Are there ways that people can stand the solidarity with
Speaker 7: indigenous communities.
Speaker 6: I'll go first because Victor will have a better answer
Speaker 6: than me, and he can. He can. You can jump
Speaker 6: in after.
Speaker 10: Me, but I think as like a low level entry thing.
Speaker 6: That people can do, and it kind of touches.
Speaker 10: On how trying to remove the burden on asking for
Speaker 10: education and doing the education yourself. For that what people
Speaker 10: can do is just you can read books by Native
Speaker 10: authors and that teaches you a lot of history. And
Speaker 10: there's like some incredible Native authors who are writing beautiful
Speaker 10: stories that are weaved with fact and fiction, but books,
Speaker 10: and then like Native Medias Reservation Dogs is like a
Speaker 10: TV show on Hulu that is.
Speaker 6: A really great show that everyone should watch.
Speaker 10: So I think you can do some like easy things
Speaker 10: that just takes remove some of the needing to be
Speaker 10: taught to on yourselves and you can just learn about
Speaker 10: what we're missing.
Speaker 6: So those are like very very easy.
Speaker 10: And then in terms of like just from my point
Speaker 10: of view as a as an MD, there are a
Speaker 10: lot of ways to get involved because these the reservations
Speaker 10: are chronically understaffed. They're just like rural medicine IHS or
Speaker 10: not IHS. Royal medicine is very under understaffed in in
Speaker 10: our country, and so there's always opportunities for doctors to
Speaker 10: go and work and it's like valuable and amazing for
Speaker 10: us and.
Speaker 6: For the community to be able to do so.
Speaker 10: There are ways to do that through local companies and
Speaker 10: directly through the through the IHS sites.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I think conversation. You know,
Speaker 5: I would love if white allies would talk to their
Speaker 5: family members and their friends. And I think there are
Speaker 5: a lot of moments where in these day to day
Speaker 5: personal interactions when Natives might come up to stand up,
Speaker 5: like if you hear something that is ignorant, you hear
Speaker 5: something that might be racist, to stand up to the
Speaker 5: people that you know in your own circles and say, hey,
Speaker 5: no that's not correct. To talk to your friends and
Speaker 5: family about what you learned with regard to colonization. Are
Speaker 5: the issues that Native American people face because I think
Speaker 5: some of the people that we listen to the most
Speaker 5: are the people that we love, our friends and our family,
Speaker 5: and I think there needs to be a lot more
Speaker 5: conversation in those spaces, a lot more accountability, because I
Speaker 5: know that it can be very hard when difficult things
Speaker 5: come up in those personal interactions to challenge someone. But
Speaker 5: I think that is where that sort of thing can
Speaker 5: really move the needle in the long run. And I
Speaker 5: think that sometimes people just choose to stay silent, and
Speaker 5: I would like that to change this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very well said. That seems like a fantastic place
Speaker 4: to close it here. Thank you both so much for
Speaker 4: coming on and hanging out with us. You've been listening
Speaker 4: to the House of Pod and it could happen here.
Speaker 4: Let's get some plugs in for you guys. Can you
Speaker 4: Let's start with you, Victor. Tell us where people can
Speaker 4: find you or plug anything you want to plug.
Speaker 11: Come to the rest. Just ask for me.
Speaker 4: Original Facebook.
Speaker 5: Yeah, my Instagram and Twitter are VLO Carmen v l
Speaker 5: O c.
Speaker 4: A R M E N very cool and Molly.
Speaker 10: I exited the Twitter sphere after Elon Musk took over,
Speaker 10: so I'm off, but you can find me in Sacramento.
Speaker 4: All right. You guys have been so awesome. Thank you
Speaker 4: for coming on. We hope to talk again sometime.
Speaker 12: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Welcome Dick, it happened here.
Speaker 14: I'm your host, Na Wong, and today we're going to
Speaker 14: be talking about something a little bit different. In the
Speaker 14: last half decade, a growing political focus on China has
Speaker 14: transformed a cottage industry of American China watchers into a
Speaker 14: sprawling metropolis of pseudoanalysis, A veritable machine that turns out
Speaker 14: racialized fear of the Chinese other and transforms it into
Speaker 14: economic papers that close with quote unquote policy solutions about
Speaker 14: the so called China problem. In these circles, a consensus
Speaker 14: is emerging about what they call Chinese state capitalism and
Speaker 14: its supposed risk of the United States. China's economy, they are,
Speaker 14: is not a free market economy like that of the
Speaker 14: United States. Instead, China's large array of state owned industries
Speaker 14: and its willingness to use investments to incentivize specific kinds
Speaker 14: of research while protecting companies from pure market competition means
Speaker 14: that the state, and not the market, dictates the course
Speaker 14: of the Chinese economy. Under these assumptions, the Chinese economy
Speaker 14: poses two major threats to American companies in the American
Speaker 14: security state. First, state owned industries subsidized by the state
Speaker 14: will inevitably outcompete American companies because American companies can't match
Speaker 14: the sheer quantity of capital held by the Chinese state,
Speaker 14: which violates the fairness and competitiveness of the free market
Speaker 14: by making companies compete on unequal grounds. Second, the close
Speaker 14: ties between the Chinese government and state owned industries and
Speaker 14: even private Chinese companies means that their technology will be
Speaker 14: used by the CCP to strengthen its military by stealing
Speaker 14: American technology. The problem with this consensus at a fundamental
Speaker 14: level is that it's utterly uninterested in how Chinese state
Speaker 14: oued enterprise is known as SOEs, actually functioned. And this
Speaker 14: is a real problem because Chinese soos are not what
Speaker 14: you or the people writing American forum policy think they are.
Speaker 14: So today, we're going to take a dive into the
Speaker 14: belly of the state and figure out how soos actually
Speaker 14: function and determine what this actually does to the prevailing
Speaker 14: theories about how Chinese economy works and what it means
Speaker 14: for both the American and Chinese working classes. But before
Speaker 14: we get into the structure of the SOE, we need
Speaker 14: to talk about state capitalism. State capitalism is an old term.
Speaker 14: Most of the people writing about it will trace it
Speaker 14: back to Lenin's New Economic Policy, a massive shift towards
Speaker 14: the market in the Soviet economy of the early twenties.
Speaker 14: The New Economic policy relegalized private capitalist firms, albeit in
Speaker 14: a much reduced capacity, with a a very large state
Speaker 14: sector driving the economy as a whole. A condition Lenin
Speaker 14: dubbed state capitalism, but even using state capitalism to describe
Speaker 14: both the New Economic Plan and the current situation in
Speaker 14: China reveals a profound misunderstanding of both Lenin's NEP and
Speaker 14: the modern Chinese economy. For one thing, during the NEP,
Speaker 14: state owned industries accounted for at least seventy percent of
Speaker 14: Soviet industrial output, increasing to seventy seven percent by the
Speaker 14: end of the policy. Meanwhile, despite the height behind Chinese
Speaker 14: state capitalism, china state sector represents a measly forty percent
Speaker 14: of China's economy, uniquely high for a capitalist economy, but
Speaker 14: quite literally the inverse of the relationship between capitalist frames
Speaker 14: and the state. In the USSR that sixty percent of
Speaker 14: China's GDP is private and only forty percent is generated
Speaker 14: by the state. And don't look too closely at that
Speaker 14: forty percent, because only thirty percent of it is from
Speaker 14: actual state industries. The other ten percent resulting from the
Speaker 14: regular function of the state itself. Shows what actually drives
Speaker 14: a Chinese economy, not the state at all, but the market.
Speaker 14: This is very important because the story of the Chinese
Speaker 14: economy in the last forty years is not simply the
Speaker 14: story of a state run command economy transforming into a
Speaker 14: market economy. It is also, and arguably primarily, the story
Speaker 14: of the market consuming the state from the inside out.
Speaker 14: This becomes more clear the closer you look at how
Speaker 14: state owned enterprises are actually structured, and it is here
Speaker 14: the weakness of the very term state owned enterprise comes
Speaker 14: into focus. Academics and journalists write about state owned enterprises
Speaker 14: as if the word means one specific thing, but the
Speaker 14: reality is that there are an enormous number of different
Speaker 14: kinds of sos, with different structures and different relationships to
Speaker 14: the state. When regular people think about state ownership, it
Speaker 14: tends to invoke the specter of the USSR in a
Speaker 14: Soviet style SOE, and will take as an example of
Speaker 14: Chinese SOE the Socialist period, which functions similarly. The firm
Speaker 14: is literally a government department. For example, in nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 14: China established the Bureau of Non ferest Metals and this
Speaker 14: is the best name you're going to get out of
Speaker 14: the CCP. In this entire episode, that bureau was in
Speaker 14: charge of running a luninium production. The government ministry simply
Speaker 14: ran the mines and the refineries and the factories directly
Speaker 14: and everyone working in the factory was a direct government
Speaker 14: employee paid by the state. This is also pretty close
Speaker 14: to how the American post office is structured. But Soviet
Speaker 14: SOEs crucially were not firms that competed for money in
Speaker 14: the market. They worked towards a production plan and were
Speaker 14: assigned resources based on their output. In this way, they
Speaker 14: closer to a municipal water service than most modern SOEs.
Speaker 14: Their job, in theory was to make a thing or
Speaker 14: a service, not make money. Modern Chinese soez, despite sharing
Speaker 14: the same name as or socialist period predecessors, are very different.
Speaker 14: For one thing, modern Chinese SOEs, as well as a
Speaker 14: lot of other state owned companies like the Saudi government's
Speaker 14: oil companies Saudi A Ramco, are not directly part of
Speaker 14: the government at all. Instead, they're structured as regular corporations
Speaker 14: whose stock happens to be owned by the governments. This
Speaker 14: shareholding relationship is one of the most common kinds of
Speaker 14: modern SOEs, but as we'll see, they make ownership and
Speaker 14: management structures increasingly complex. The other major difference from Soviet
Speaker 14: firms is that companies like Saudi A Ramco and modern
Speaker 14: Chinese soz are for profit companies. I don't exist to
Speaker 14: provide a service. They exist to make money. This gets
Speaker 14: very weird very quickly. For one thing, while we tend
Speaker 14: to think of state owned enterprises as belonging to the
Speaker 14: national governments, municipal, provincial, and even disher and county governments
Speaker 14: in China have their own SOEs. On a conception level,
Speaker 14: this makes sense. China's economy is the size of a continent,
Speaker 14: and individual provinces have a geographic size, population, natural resources,
Speaker 14: and economy of entire nations, which means that provincial soees
Speaker 14: can rival national firms. But this also means that state
Speaker 14: owned industries from different levels of government are directly competing
Speaker 14: with each other on the market. This is something beyond
Speaker 14: the experience of previous theorists of the state and capitalism.
Speaker 14: Frederick Engels, the close friend of Karl Marx, was able
Speaker 14: to predict the rise of capitalist state owned industries, writing quote.
Speaker 14: At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient.
Speaker 14: The official representative of the capitalist state will ultimately have
Speaker 14: to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion
Speaker 14: into state property is felt first in the great institutions
Speaker 14: for intercourse and communication, the Post office, the telegrams the railways.
Speaker 14: If the crisis demonstrates the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for
Speaker 14: managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the
Speaker 14: great establishment for production and distribution into joint stock companies
Speaker 14: and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for
Speaker 14: that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalists are
Speaker 14: now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no social
Speaker 14: function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and
Speaker 14: gambling at the stock exchange with the different capitalists to
Speaker 14: spoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalist
Speaker 14: mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces
Speaker 14: out the capitalists and reduces them, just as it reduced
Speaker 14: the workers to the ranks of the surflus population, although
Speaker 14: not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But
Speaker 14: angles imagined the state as a collective capitalist replacing the
Speaker 14: individual capitalist. What no one could have foreseen was capitalists
Speaker 14: break was capitalism breaking the collective nature of the state
Speaker 14: entirely hollowing it out until its chunks competed with each
Speaker 14: other on the market. This is the state of modern
Speaker 14: Chinese soees. These SOEs are capitalist firms to market discipline.
Speaker 14: They can and will fail and go under if they
Speaker 14: aren't making enough money, and the government can and will
Speaker 14: tear them apart and force the still state owned pieces
Speaker 14: to compete against each other. These state owned industries also
Speaker 14: largely are not supposed to be monopolies. Firms that get
Speaker 14: too large and powerful can and will be broken up
Speaker 14: and the parts once again set to compete against each other.
Speaker 14: Weirder still, these soees are also listed on the stock markets,
Speaker 14: meeting individual capitalists, and as we'll see later, even foreign
Speaker 14: firms can buy forty nine percent stakes and nominally state
Speaker 14: owned industries. Now, if the state doing market competition against
Speaker 14: itself wasn't weird enough for you, let me introduce another complication,
Speaker 14: the State Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the
Speaker 14: State Council. And know, the State Owned Asset Supervision and
Speaker 14: Administration Commission of the State Council is not a name
Speaker 14: that sounds any better in Chinese.
Speaker 9: If you have a.
Speaker 14: Bureaucer rooted in Leninism, the product is a veritable corucopia
Speaker 14: of the most absolutely dogshit name you've ever heard in
Speaker 14: your entire life. This commission is better owned for obvious reasons,
Speaker 14: as Sassak, and it is the government body that owns
Speaker 14: the shares of most of the largest firms in China,
Speaker 14: which are known as the national champions. Now you could
Speaker 14: be forgiven for thinking you now understand the structure of
Speaker 14: Chinese soez. Sasak, which is a part of the state,
Speaker 14: owns the SOEs. Bob's your uncle, Everyone goes home for
Speaker 14: the night, and the episode ends right here.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, it is.
Speaker 14: Way more convoluted than that. When I said Sasak owns
Speaker 14: the shares of the largest firms in China, that's only
Speaker 14: true in a technical sense. What Sasak actually owns are
Speaker 14: the shares of massive holding companies, companies that exist on
Speaker 14: paper but whose existence is purely dedicated to owning the
Speaker 14: shares of other companies. These holding companies own the shares
Speaker 14: of the publicly traded companies you might have heard of,
Speaker 14: like Sinopek China state owned oil companies. And this is
Speaker 14: where the simplistic narrative of the Chinese soe, a single
Speaker 14: firm owned by the state under its direct political control,
Speaker 14: completely falls apart, because again, the state doesn't really own
Speaker 14: these firms directly. What they own is a holding company
Speaker 14: that owns the stock of the soees. That holding company, however,
Speaker 14: is the actual basis of the organization of Chinese state ownership.
Speaker 14: The building blocks of the Chinese state economy aren't single
Speaker 14: state owned enterprises at all. The economy is actually composed
Speaker 14: of what are called business groups. American listeners may not
Speaker 14: be very familiar with business groups, but there are a
Speaker 14: common sight in what became known as the Tiger economies,
Speaker 14: a series of economies that's all rabid industrial development in
Speaker 14: the post World War two era, largely fueled by the
Speaker 14: demands of American military supply lines for its wars in
Speaker 14: Korea and Vietnam. The two most infamous are the Japanese Keretsu,
Speaker 14: the successor to the old Japanese Zaibatsu that dominated the
Speaker 14: word Japanese economy and which were to some extent broken
Speaker 14: up after the war, and Korean Chabel conglomerates. These massive
Speaker 14: groups of businesses are either owned by the same people
Speaker 14: or families in the case of the chabel, or linked
Speaker 14: by mutual shareholding of each other's companies. Like Keatsu, the
Speaker 14: groups cooperate and coordinate the business strategy instead of competing
Speaker 14: against each other, which allows them to carry out a
Speaker 14: level of long term planning that's sometimes difficult for individual
Speaker 14: for profit companies. Chinese economists sent to Japan to study
Speaker 14: keatsu in the seventies and eighties returned with policy in hand,
Speaker 14: but the business groups that eventually emerged in the Chinese
Speaker 14: economy after an extended process of trial and error are
Speaker 14: different than their Korean or Japanese counterparts. Where chabel are
Speaker 14: organized around families, and keatsu are organized around a commercial
Speaker 14: bank that provides financing for the companies and the group,
Speaker 14: Chinese businesses are organized by those holding companies one hundred
Speaker 14: percent owned by Sassak and therefore the Chinese State. Those
Speaker 14: holding companies, also sometimes called core companies, own the majority
Speaker 14: of the stock of a variety of public betraded companies.
Speaker 14: They also own a finance company which finances the companies
Speaker 14: and work with research institutes which carry out scientific and
Speaker 14: research development for the entire group. These research institutes, which
Speaker 14: are often university affiliated, are technically nonprofit, but take money
Speaker 14: from the core companies in exchange for the research development
Speaker 14: they do. Chinese business groups are often massive, organizing hundreds
Speaker 14: of companies who also maintain trade and supply relations with
Speaker 14: hundreds more companies. Technically outside the group. These groups are
Speaker 14: organized by what's called articles of grouping, which the core
Speaker 14: holding company who owns the stock, and the rest of
Speaker 14: the companies get those companies to sign. These articles form
Speaker 14: a top down structure for the entire group that also
Speaker 14: includes council and management bodies for the entire group, with
Speaker 14: representatives from each of the companies in the group. This
Speaker 14: truck sure in theory, is how the CCP transmits policy
Speaker 14: down from single holding companies to all of their downstream
Speaker 14: subsidiaries and allies. And this is important because, at least
Speaker 14: in theory, business groups are supposed to carry out government
Speaker 14: industrial policy and economic developments. But in the real world
Speaker 14: this is a significant challenge because again, even individual business
Speaker 14: groups comprise hundreds of companies, and the states grasp on
Speaker 14: them as often tenuous, as seen by a wave of
Speaker 14: state owned companies that theoretically are supposed to make things
Speaker 14: getting into real estate speculation a problem the CCP has
Speaker 14: been attempting to deal with since two thousand and eight
Speaker 14: and only really has gotten under control in the last
Speaker 14: two years. But you know who will not do housing
Speaker 14: speculation instead of making ads for you? It is the
Speaker 14: companies and the products and services that support this podcast,
Speaker 14: and we're back. So confronted with the enormity of the
Speaker 14: scale of Chinese business groups, how does state control over
Speaker 14: these groups actually work? In theory, regulation operates around two channels.
Speaker 14: SASAK owns the holding companies, which allows it, in theory,
Speaker 14: to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to
Speaker 14: make it a private corporation. There's also a parallel corpus
Speaker 14: structure directly run by the party, and high ranking people
Speaker 14: in the corpus structure become party members and are sent
Speaker 14: to cadre trainings at places like the Central Party School
Speaker 14: in Beijing. Meanwhile, people swap between SASSAK and high level
Speaker 14: manager positions, and the heads of large soees also have
Speaker 14: positions in the Chinese government itself. Trying to explain all
Speaker 14: of the positions they have and the councils they're on
Speaker 14: and their technical ministerial ranks is a disaster, because, oh boy,
Speaker 14: if you think the American government is confusing, try sorting
Speaker 14: out who does what in a party state. The moral
Speaker 14: of the story is that the CCP tries to keep
Speaker 14: control over the enormous number of companies it technically owns
Speaker 14: through control of who gets appointed as the head of
Speaker 14: soees through Sassak, which is directly a part of the state,
Speaker 14: and by integrating SOE heads into various government and party bodies.
Speaker 14: They also are somewhat embarrassingly given that they owe these
Speaker 14: companies forced to directly go after them through the law
Speaker 14: and through the court system, which works sometimes and also
Speaker 14: doesn't work other times, but this relationship is multidirectional. Leewen
Speaker 14: Lynn and Curtis J. Milhoft, two scholars who've written extensively
Speaker 14: about Chinese corporate structure, argue convincingly that the deep integration
Speaker 14: of the Party into soees after state owned industries have
Speaker 14: been corporatized, that is, turned from direct state industries run
Speaker 14: by state employees to profit seeking market corporations own through shares,
Speaker 14: was a way to buy the Party off and allow
Speaker 14: these firms to become more capitalists in ways that wouldn't
Speaker 14: have worked if the Party wasn't also getting rich off
Speaker 14: of it. It's not just that China has state owned industries,
Speaker 14: It's that the corportization of state owned industries has made
Speaker 14: the Party and the Chinese state increasingly capitalists, and this
Speaker 14: raises another question. As the Chinese state grows more capitalists
Speaker 14: are public and private Chinese firms. Even all that different,
Speaker 14: private firms also have links to the state through equity
Speaker 14: have joint ventures with soees, where private companies will own
Speaker 14: a part of a company and an SOE will own
Speaker 14: another part of a company. Private companies expand and get
Speaker 14: access to credit through partnering with local sos. In essence,
Speaker 14: many of the things that are supposed to make sos
Speaker 14: different from private companies are shared by both. From the
Speaker 14: profit motive to state affiliation as milhop to put it quote, functionally,
Speaker 14: SOEs and large pos private enterprises in China share many
Speaker 14: similarities in the areas commonly thought to distinguish state owned
Speaker 14: firms from privately owned firms. Market access received of state subsidies,
Speaker 14: proximity state power, and execution of the government's policy objectives.
Speaker 14: A complete account of Chinese state capitalists and much explain
Speaker 14: these similarities. Even figuring out what legally is an SOE
Speaker 14: and what's technically still a private firm gets very weird,
Speaker 14: very fast.
Speaker 2: ZTE.
Speaker 14: For example, a giant Chinese telecom telecom company is owned
Speaker 14: by a bewildering array of shell and holding companies, which
Speaker 14: are in turn owned by other companies, some of which
Speaker 14: are state owned. This is the level of ownership confusion
Speaker 14: we're working at here. If the largest stake of a
Speaker 14: company is owned by a holding company that's owned in
Speaker 14: turn by a combination of two soees who own fifty
Speaker 14: one percent of the stock and a private investors company
Speaker 14: who owns forty nine percent of the stock, is the
Speaker 14: company state owned? And it gets worse in CTEs case
Speaker 14: because even if you assume, okay, the majority stake in
Speaker 14: this company is owned by an SOE, therefore it's state owned,
Speaker 14: you would assume that the state or a state owned
Speaker 14: company would manage the corporation.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 14: Wrong. In Zte's case, the soees worked out in agreement
Speaker 14: with the other investor such that ZT is technically state
Speaker 14: owned but privately managed. And this, it turns out, is
Speaker 14: a very common arrangement. Because of laws about foreign ownership
Speaker 14: of companies operating in China, many state owned enterprises are
Speaker 14: actually joint partnerships between SOEs and foreign corporations, where the
Speaker 14: SOE owns fifty one percent of the stock and the
Speaker 14: foreign corporation owns forty nine percent of the stock while
Speaker 14: running the actual company in extracting profits from it even
Speaker 14: one hundred percent. Chinese firms, of which there are many,
Speaker 14: pose a challenge to the traditional conception of sos is
Speaker 14: run by the state for the good of the state
Speaker 14: and its political objectives. This goes back to their structure
Speaker 14: as corporations the state owns by shareholding. This means, as
Speaker 14: I've emphasized, that these sos aren't government ministries, their companies
Speaker 14: trying to make a profit and are run by their
Speaker 14: own managers. These firms have a total workforce of seventy
Speaker 14: million people, which makes direct regulation very difficult in practice.
Speaker 14: This means soez are a lot more autonomous in direct
Speaker 14: state control, even with all the state guards put in
Speaker 14: place than you'd think just from the word state owned industry.
Speaker 14: Another thing that makes soez more like private companies is
Speaker 14: that money from soez goes back to the company and
Speaker 14: not to the state, to which it pays dividends but
Speaker 14: not much else. This means that soees have their own
Speaker 14: revenue stream that's not dependent on state budget allocations. Meanwhile,
Speaker 14: private firms like soos are operated by members of symbolic
Speaker 14: party congresses, and private firms also get state subsidies and
Speaker 14: access to loans from state banks. A common canard about
Speaker 14: the unfairness of anti competitive Chinese soez it applies to
Speaker 14: private firms as well, and at this point I must
Speaker 14: point out that any company anywhere in the world can
Speaker 14: make money by allying with the state and getting access
Speaker 14: to state resources. The US does this too, especially state
Speaker 14: and local governments, who are all too happy to give
Speaker 14: enormous tax breaks and even provide prison labor to private companies. Meanwhile,
Speaker 14: tech companies like Amazon and Google are kept a float
Speaker 14: by massive government contract to say nothing of the American
Speaker 14: defense industry. In the US, we call this corruption, or
Speaker 14: at least we used to, until it became legal to
Speaker 14: literally buy senators, a thing that nat Sek dipshits always
Speaker 14: seem to forget when they talk about the uniqueness of
Speaker 14: the Chinese economy and its relation to subsidies. There are
Speaker 14: obviously differences between the US and Chinese economies, but arguing
Speaker 14: that businesses having ties to the state which they extract
Speaker 14: benefits from constitutes a unique form of capitalism as incomprehensibly absurd.
Speaker 14: None does this have stopped China watchers from the most
Speaker 14: rabid reactionaries and the most stalwart or self described style
Speaker 14: wart communists to declare that China carries out something called
Speaker 14: industrial policy through its soees, which makes it different from
Speaker 14: other neoliberal states. So what is industrial policy? In theory,
Speaker 14: industrial policy refers to the state giving subsidies and funding
Speaker 14: to specific corporations in order to pursue specific economic objectives
Speaker 14: the market wouldn't normally have pursued. These writers point the
Speaker 14: preferential treatment that Chinese SOEs have to credit and subsidies
Speaker 14: that they receive from the government as evidence of the
Speaker 14: subordination of the market to the political which they also
Speaker 14: claim is essentially a form of socialist state planning. My
Speaker 14: response to this is that I will accept that an
Speaker 14: soe getting a subsidy is socialist state planning the moment
Speaker 14: they agree that the US as a socialist state because
Speaker 14: of its coren subsidies, despite writing about China somehow turning
Speaker 14: everyone into an archical capitalist's. State subsidies in the form
Speaker 14: of direct cash transfers, tax breaks, preferential legal treatment, technology transfers,
Speaker 14: and a thousand other forms of state aid are as
Speaker 14: old as capitalism itself and are pretty normal even under neoliberalism.
Speaker 14: People describe these measures as industrial policy using state favor
Speaker 14: to promote certain industries. But corn subsidies put lie to
Speaker 14: the claim that industrial policy is some unique thing of
Speaker 14: a new era emerging in capitalism that I totally disappeared
Speaker 14: with neoliberalism. American and other agricultural subsidies are one of
Speaker 14: the largest and most expensive industrial policy regimes in the world,
Speaker 14: constituting half a trillion dollars spent since nineteen fifty five.
Speaker 14: They are also written in as exceptions to most of
Speaker 14: the world's major free trade agreements. We also need to
Speaker 14: ask what is the difference between industrial policy, which is
Speaker 14: state strategic investment in certain sectors to develop their economy,
Speaker 14: and regulatory capture, where control over agencies or even the
Speaker 14: legislature itself is taken over by specialistist groups. This question
Speaker 14: sounds silly, but the results a company in a sector
Speaker 14: getting handed a pile of money in various forms by
Speaker 14: the state looks exactly the same. Those corn subsidies arguably
Speaker 14: are industrial policy. They were technically originally designed to ensure
Speaker 14: that the US would always have a supply of cheap food,
Speaker 14: But on the other hand, the real reason they exist
Speaker 14: has nothing to do with planning whatsoever. They exist because
Speaker 14: the copala of legislatures from farming states have enough power
Speaker 14: to shut down both the House and the Senate if
Speaker 14: their demands aren't met. So every year the state bows
Speaker 14: to the corn lobby and pays them billions of dollars.
Speaker 14: So is this industrial policy or is it regulatory capture?
Speaker 14: And can the two even be distinguished? In capitalist countries?
Speaker 14: This is a question we need to take very seriously.
Speaker 14: In the Chinese case. At the same time, we ask
Speaker 14: ourselves what is the actual objective of the Chinese state?
Speaker 14: Is it decoupling in retrenchment from the West or is
Speaker 14: it making money? There is significant evidence that it's the latter.
Speaker 14: For one thing, China receives an enormous amount of foreign
Speaker 14: direct investments, something that everyone seems to conveniently forgets, even
Speaker 14: though it was one of the key elements that fueled
Speaker 14: Chinese industrialization and plays a major role in the Chinese
Speaker 14: economy to this day. Meanwhile, US affiliates in China alone
Speaker 14: had over half a trillion dollars of sales just in
Speaker 14: twenty eighteen. While the focus of most analysis has been
Speaker 14: in flashy disputes between the US and China over their
Speaker 14: attempts to produce their own semiconductors. China has also liberalized
Speaker 14: its foreign investment laws in the last few years and
Speaker 14: allowed foreign companies and industries like insurance to operate directly
Speaker 14: instead of running through joint partnerships with Chinese stakeholders. Even
Speaker 14: the chairman of Sassak gave a speech in February about
Speaker 14: how his goal was to increase the profitability of Chinese soees.
Speaker 14: China is and will remain deeply enmeshed in the global
Speaker 14: capitalist economy, and this, I think is as much as
Speaker 14: their unwillingness to grasp how sooes actually work. The fatal
Speaker 14: flaw of analysis of the Chinese economy and its obsession
Speaker 14: with formal state ownership. These analyzes are not a serious
Speaker 14: attempt to look at the actual structure of the economic
Speaker 14: system the entire world, including China, lives under. There are
Speaker 14: several kinds of arguments that we need to look beyond
Speaker 14: formal ownership to understand capitalism. More broadly, there is a
Speaker 14: somewhat complicated Marxist argument which holds that while we talk
Speaker 14: about capitalism as a system where the ruling class owns
Speaker 14: the means of production, of the working class, which owns nothing,
Speaker 14: is forced to work for them that's not all capitalists is.
Speaker 14: Capitalism is also a series of commodity production, in which
Speaker 14: objects confront each other in the market and appear as
Speaker 14: commodities with their own discrete values based on abstract labor time.
Speaker 14: Generalize commodity production, which is people producing commodities from market
Speaker 14: exchange and not for other purposes, is the other core
Speaker 14: component of capitalism. And when you're dealing with generalized commodity production,
Speaker 14: it doesn't really matter whether the company that owns the
Speaker 14: holding company that owns the company that makes the commodity
Speaker 14: is owned by the state or a hedge fund or
Speaker 14: a bank or a softeign wealth fund. It still reproduces
Speaker 14: commodity production, which means it's still just capitalism, but with
Speaker 14: more complex formal ownership mechanisms. There's also the David Graeber argument,
Speaker 14: which goes, Okay, sure, state owned property is technically the
Speaker 14: property of the people TM, but try and actually go
Speaker 14: there and see how fast the cops show up and
Speaker 14: take you away. Just like private ownership, you still don't
Speaker 14: own public property any substantive sense. It's just controlled by
Speaker 14: a different group of bureaucrats with guns and focusing purely
Speaker 14: on ownership to define an economic system gets you nowhere.
Speaker 14: And then there's my argument, which is that people are
Speaker 14: absolutely obsessed with looking at capitalism from the perspective of capital,
Speaker 14: which means that they are absolutely obsessed with the question
Speaker 14: of ownership. But what happens if you look at so
Speaker 14: called state capitalism and the nature of state ownership from
Speaker 14: the perspective of the working class, Everything suddenly becomes a
Speaker 14: lot clearer. Soe workers are a bit better off than
Speaker 14: not as we counterparts, but their jobs suck ass, their
Speaker 14: hours are long, and they don't make that much money.
Speaker 14: They are fully dependent on selling their labor to the
Speaker 14: market to survive. And all of these companies have hundreds
Speaker 14: of subsidiaries and suppliers with a variety of levels of
Speaker 14: state ownership, and people who work for those companies' lives
Speaker 14: are even shittier. Meanwhile, the means of production and the
Speaker 14: physical infrastructure of so called state capitalism was built by
Speaker 14: workers who were left with nothing but silicosis. After turning
Speaker 14: places like Shenzhen from fishingville is to a city with
Speaker 14: a population of over ten million people in less than
Speaker 14: thirty years. This is the ultimate truth of the Chinese economy,
Speaker 14: just as it is the ultimate truth of the American economy.
Speaker 14: We sell our lives for nothing, and our only reward
Speaker 14: in the end is to.
Speaker 15: Die amidst the wonders of the world that was never ours.
Speaker 1: Ah, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast. I'm Robert Evans, and with me today
Speaker 1: is Garrison Davis and James Stout.
Speaker 2: Hello, a Canadian, a British woman and a text and
Speaker 2: walk into a podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, into a podcast. Only two of them can drink
Speaker 1: in a bar.
Speaker 2: That's not true in Canada. We can all.
Speaker 1: Drink in a bar now, Garrison. A moment ago, you
Speaker 1: were holding your hand above a lit candle in a
Speaker 1: way that reminded me of g. Gordon Litty, the Nazi
Speaker 1: who masterminded the Watergate breaking, and in order to convince
Speaker 1: people that he was a hard man, would regularly burn
Speaker 1: the palm with his hand on a candle while staring
Speaker 1: at them.
Speaker 7: Gender, Great, g Gordon Letty, you don't know enough about
Speaker 7: We'll talk about g.
Speaker 1: Gordon Litty, but today we're talking about something else, problematic
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence, which is not a thing that exists anywhere.
Speaker 1: It is instead a terrible, terrible error. Going back to
Speaker 1: like the sixties. In case of terminology, when we talk
Speaker 1: about all of the things that people are like, you know,
Speaker 1: flipping out as AI is chat GPT and stable diffusion
Speaker 1: and fucking all all these other sort of like different programs.
Speaker 1: They're not intelligences. They're you know, the chat GPT is
Speaker 1: like a large language model. They're all essentially like bots
Speaker 1: that you train to understand kind of like what the
Speaker 1: likeliest thing that what the likeliest appropriate response is to
Speaker 1: like a given prompt. That's kind of like the broadest
Speaker 1: way to explain it. It's complicated, and they're you know,
Speaker 1: very useful, but obviously if you've been paying attention to
Speaker 1: the world right now, there's just a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: bullshit about them. And I think to kind of make
Speaker 1: sense of why we're seeing some of the shit around
Speaker 1: AI that we're seeing. And for a little bit of specificity,
Speaker 1: there have been like this kind of endless series of
Speaker 1: articles around this open letter signed by a bunch of
Speaker 1: luminaries in the AI feel talking about how you know,
Speaker 1: there need to be laws put in place to stop
Speaker 1: it from in the world. You know, you've seen articles
Speaker 1: about like oh x percentage of AI researchers think that
Speaker 1: it could. It could destroy the planet, destroy the human
Speaker 1: race kind of. Most recently, the biggest article, the biggest
Speaker 1: like viral hype article, was that the Pentagon had supposedly
Speaker 1: been testing an AI like missile system that blew up
Speaker 1: its operator in a simulation because the operator was trying
Speaker 1: to stop it from from firing or whatever. It was bullshit,
Speaker 1: like what was that? What actually had? Like vice ran
Speaker 1: with the article. It was very breakthive advice would do
Speaker 1: this flipping out about how horrifying, you know, our AI
Speaker 1: weapons future is and like, yeah, we shouldn't give AI
Speaker 1: the ability to like kill people, But that's not at
Speaker 1: all what happened. Basically, a bunch of army nerds or
Speaker 1: air force nerds were sitting around a table doing the
Speaker 1: D and D version of like military planning, where you say,
Speaker 1: what if we did this, what kinds of things could
Speaker 1: happen if we did this system? And another guy around
Speaker 1: the table said, oh, well, if we build the system
Speaker 1: this way, it might conceivably attack its operator, you know,
Speaker 1: in order to optimize for this kind of result, which
Speaker 1: is like not scary, Like it's just people talking through
Speaker 1: pot like a flow chart of possibilities around a fucking table.
Speaker 1: You don't need to worry about that. There's so many
Speaker 1: other things to worry about. New York City is blanketed
Speaker 1: in a layer of smogs so thick you could cut
Speaker 1: it with a butter knife. Like, don't flip out about
Speaker 1: AI weapons just yet, folks. But I wanted to kind
Speaker 1: of talk about why this shit is happening, And a
Speaker 1: lot of it comes down to the fact that when
Speaker 1: we're talking about the aspects of like the tech industry
Speaker 1: that have an impact on outside of the tech industry. Right,
Speaker 1: there's basically three jobs in big tech. One job is
Speaker 1: creating iterative improvements on existing products. These would be the
Speaker 1: teams of folks who are responsible for designing a new
Speaker 1: iPhone every year, Right, every couple of years. Lenovo puts
Speaker 1: out a new series of think pads and idea pads
Speaker 1: every couple of years. You know, you get a new
Speaker 1: MacBook every couple of years. Razor puts out a new blade.
Speaker 1: This is you know, these are the folks who kind
Speaker 1: of move along technology at a relatively like steady pace
Speaker 1: for consumer devices. And then you have the people who
Speaker 1: are responsible for kind of what you might call the
Speaker 1: moonshot products. This is a mix of the next big
Speaker 1: thing and doomed failures, and it's often pretty hard to
Speaker 1: tell you know what's going to be what ahead of time.
Speaker 1: A very good example would be back in the nineties,
Speaker 1: Apple put a bunch of resources into launching an early
Speaker 1: tablet computer called the Newton that was a fabulous disaster.
Speaker 1: And then in the mid oughts they put a bunch
Speaker 1: of resources into launching the iPad, which was a huge success.
Speaker 1: And when you kind of think about like the folks
Speaker 1: doing this, like working on the moonshot products. The most
Speaker 1: recent example would be whatever team at Apple, the team
Speaker 1: at Apple that was behind putting together these new Apple goggles,
Speaker 1: which I don't think are going to be a wildly
Speaker 1: successful product in the way that they need it to be,
Speaker 1: like a smartphone scale success. But this is an example
Speaker 1: of like a thing that didn't exist and a bunch
Speaker 1: of people had to invent new technologies or new ways
Speaker 1: to combine technologies in order to make it exist. The
Speaker 1: third kind of job that the tech industry has, broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: are conmen right. And the state that we are in
Speaker 1: in the industry right now is that every major tech
Speaker 1: company is run by some form of con man, right,
Speaker 1: Tim Cook is, you know, kind of the least conniest
Speaker 1: of the conman among them, But like Mark Zuckerberg obviously
Speaker 1: is a fucking flim flam artist, you know. And you
Speaker 1: can see this with the huge amount of money, like
Speaker 1: it's something like eleven billion dollars at least that Facebook
Speaker 1: pumped into this bullshit metaverse scheme that like Apple barely
Speaker 1: even talked about during their event unveiling, like a headset
Speaker 1: that has VR potential in it. I'm getting away from
Speaker 1: myself here. Kind of the point that I'm making is
Speaker 1: that you can often have real products. There's actual technology
Speaker 1: going into the Apple glasses marketed by conman flimflam artist.
Speaker 1: This is not always like a bad thing, right. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs was a con man, and it worked out pretty
Speaker 1: well for him because it just so happened that the
Speaker 1: tech not he had a decent enough idea of what
Speaker 1: the tech was capable of that it was able to
Speaker 1: kind of meet the promises he was making in more
Speaker 1: or less real time. An example of what happens, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty spectacularly when that's not the case is what we
Speaker 1: saw with Therehos and Elizabeth Holmes who started prison last week. Right,
Speaker 1: You've got these promises being made by the con man
Speaker 1: and the people who are responsible for the moonshots can't
Speaker 1: make it work. I'm bringing this up right now because
Speaker 1: there's a lot of folks, I think, who believe that
Speaker 1: the nate like the actual potential of AI has been
Speaker 1: proven in a spectacular way because the tools that have
Speaker 1: been released are able to do cool things. And I
Speaker 1: think those people are missing some key aspect, like some
Speaker 1: key things that like might cause one to think more
Speaker 1: critically about the actual potential the industry has and also
Speaker 1: might cause one to think more critically about how earth
Speaker 1: shattering it's all going to be. It's being taken kind
Speaker 1: of as red right now by a lot of particularly
Speaker 1: journalists and media analysts outside of the tech and or
Speaker 1: like outside of of you know, the dogged tech press
Speaker 1: that like, well, this is going to upend huge numbers
Speaker 1: of industries and put massive numbers of people out of work.
Speaker 1: And you know, that may seem if you sat down
Speaker 1: in front of this chatbot and had like a mind
Speaker 1: blowing experience, that may seem credible. There's not the evidence
Speaker 1: behind that yet if you actually look at the numbers
Speaker 1: behind some of these different companies and like how their
Speaker 1: usership has grown and how it's fallen off. One of
Speaker 1: the things you've seen is that a lot of these
Speaker 1: tools had this kind of massive surge peak in terms
Speaker 1: of the number of people adopting them and in terms
Speaker 1: of their profitability. You saw this with like stable Fusion, right,
Speaker 1: and then this kind of fairly rapid fall afterwards, not
Speaker 1: because people are like giving it up forever or whatever,
Speaker 1: but because, like, once you fucked around with it and
Speaker 1: generated some images or generated some stories, there's not a
Speaker 1: huge amount to do unless you're someone who's specifically going
Speaker 1: to be using this for your job. And most of
Speaker 1: the people that wanted to fuck around with a lot
Speaker 1: of these apps didn't have long term use cases for them.
Speaker 1: This is why while you've got like, for example, Stability,
Speaker 1: which is the company or at least the main company
Speaker 1: behind Stable Diffusion, has been valued at like four billion
Speaker 1: dollars I think last it was checked, but their annualized
Speaker 1: revenue is only about ten million dollars. So that's a
Speaker 1: pretty significant gap. And it's a pretty significant gap because
Speaker 1: the actual money in AI so far isn't with the
Speaker 1: service providers. Really, like you've got some that have made
Speaker 1: in like thee hundred million dollar range, although it's not
Speaker 1: entirely clear what their margins are are or what the
Speaker 1: kind of the long term reliability of that profit is.
Speaker 1: But the vast majority of money in AI, like almost
Speaker 1: all of it has been made by companies like in Nvidia,
Speaker 1: and Vidia jumped up to become like a trillion dollar
Speaker 1: company as a result of this, because the hardware needs
Speaker 1: of these products are so intense, and obviously that shows
Speaker 1: there's money here for somebody. But the fact that like
Speaker 1: a shitload of people got curious about these apps and
Speaker 1: use them in quick succession and then kind of dropped
Speaker 1: off is an evidence that, like we're seeing entire industries
Speaker 1: replaced as much of it as it is evidence that
Speaker 1: like a lot of people thought this was interesting briefly,
Speaker 1: and so I think kind of when you look at
Speaker 1: the data, one of the things that suggests is that
Speaker 1: we're heading towards a point in AI, and I think
Speaker 1: we're probably going to hit it within the next six
Speaker 1: months to a year. That is broadly referred to as
Speaker 1: like the trow of disappointment, And this is what happens
Speaker 1: when kind of the promises of a new technology that
Speaker 1: are being made by the hypemen or con men, as
Speaker 1: I tend to call them, meet with like the actual
Speaker 1: reality of its execution, which in some areas is going
Speaker 1: to be significant. There are places, I think medical research
Speaker 1: maybe one of them. We'll talk about that in a bit,
Speaker 1: where a lot of the promises people are making about
Speaker 1: AI will be fairly quickly realized, and then there are
Speaker 1: areas where it won't be. I think content generation is
Speaker 1: one of those things. But yeah, so that's kind of
Speaker 1: like what I'm seeing when I'm looking at the broad
Speaker 1: strokes of where this technology is here and kind of
Speaker 1: the gap between how people are talking about it and
Speaker 1: what we're actually seeing in terms of monetization. I want
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit now about kind of one
Speaker 1: of the guys I would call him kind of a
Speaker 1: con man who's been a big driver of the current
Speaker 1: AI push. He's a dude named Amad Mustock, and he's
Speaker 1: the founder of Stable Diffusion right, which is a text
Speaker 1: to image generator that was kind of like before chatscheep
Speaker 1: pt hit. This was like the first really really big
Speaker 1: mainstream AI thing. Chat GPT was was a lot larger,
Speaker 1: but Stable deviusion came first, and you know, was critical behind,
Speaker 1: among other things, a lot of the silliest n f
Speaker 1: T bullshit. And he's he's a really interesting dude. Like
Speaker 1: if you look at kind of his own claims about
Speaker 1: his background. Uh, he says that he's got an Oxford
Speaker 1: master's degree, that he was like the behind an award
Speaker 1: winning hedge fund, that he like worked for the United
Speaker 1: Nations and a really important capacity, and also that he
Speaker 1: obviously founded this this a I bought. None of that's true.
Speaker 1: He has a bachelor's degree from Oxford, not a master's
Speaker 1: degree he did.
Speaker 7: Well, that's what he's playing off a thing that happens
Speaker 7: there where like you can you you can get if
Speaker 7: you have a BA Oxen and you can you can
Speaker 7: get it to be an MA. Doesn't mean you did
Speaker 7: a master's it's just a wealthy people flex. Yeah, it's
Speaker 7: it's not a master's degree. You should if you're recording
Speaker 7: it now, you're taking the pace.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's taken the piss knowing no one's gonna call
Speaker 1: him on it, or at least knowing that people wouldn't
Speaker 1: like at large, like loudly enough for it to matter
Speaker 1: for him. Yeah, he hasn't worked with the un in
Speaker 1: quite some time and never did in a major capacity.
Speaker 1: He did run a hedge fund that was successful in
Speaker 1: its first year but then got shut down in its
Speaker 1: second year because he lost everybody's money. So like this
Speaker 1: is this is but you see with this guy, if
Speaker 1: you go through his like history, he's like he's like
Speaker 1: chasing hedge funds in the early aughts. He first gets
Speaker 1: in with stable diffusion after COVID, and he's kind of
Speaker 1: like billing it as this is gonna help with like
Speaker 1: research into trying to like you know, fight the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen pandemic, and then he kind of pivots to like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is a great way to like make NFTs and shit,
Speaker 1: you know when that hit, Like he's he's just sort
Speaker 1: of like chasing where the money is any way he
Speaker 1: kind of can. And he's not, by the way, he's
Speaker 1: not the guy who wrote any of the source code
Speaker 1: for this. That was done by like a group of researchers,
Speaker 1: and he you know, he essentially like acquired it, which
Speaker 1: is usually what happens here. Now, none of this has
Speaker 1: stopped him from getting one hundred million dollars or so
Speaker 1: in investments from various venture partners and hasn't stopped his
Speaker 1: company from getting this massive violation. It hasn't stopped the
Speaker 1: White House from inviting him to talk as part of
Speaker 1: like a federal AI safety initiative. But it is one
Speaker 1: of those like when I kind of look into this
Speaker 1: guy and kind of the gap between his claims and
Speaker 1: what's actually happened and the claims that are being made
Speaker 1: about the value of his company and what it's actually
Speaker 1: like proved to be worth so far. I think a
Speaker 1: lot about Sam Bankman Freed because a lot of like
Speaker 1: the early writing around this guy was similar, and a
Speaker 1: lot of the kind of shit that he's claiming is similar.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I'm not sure if this is a case
Speaker 1: where because Bankment Freed is one of these people who,
Speaker 1: like Elizabeth Holmes, I think backed the wrong technology because
Speaker 1: it's fine in Silicon Valley. It's fine, generally speaking in
Speaker 1: capitalism to lie about what a product can do if
Speaker 1: you can, you know, fake it till you make it.
Speaker 1: And maybe AI is there. He may have this guy
Speaker 1: may have made a good bet as to the future,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of far from certain yet, and it's
Speaker 1: it's just really clear how much of this industry is
Speaker 1: being built on or is being built by how much
Speaker 1: of like the people running sort of these AI companies
Speaker 1: are dudes who managed one way or another, either through
Speaker 1: access to VC funding or kind of like you know,
Speaker 1: just being in the right place at the right time
Speaker 1: to jump in on the bandwagon in the hopes that
Speaker 1: they'll be able to cash out very very quickly. I
Speaker 1: found a good quote from a Forbes article talking about
Speaker 1: like a big part of why guys like Mustok are
Speaker 1: so interested in AI right now from a financial perspective,
Speaker 1: And this is true, not just this was true about
Speaker 1: like crypto before, but AI because there's more to the techechnology.
Speaker 1: This is kind of even more so valid quote. Venture
Speaker 1: capitalists historically spend months performing due diligence, a process that
Speaker 1: involves analyzing the market, vetting the founder, and speaking to
Speaker 1: customers to check for red flags before investing in a startup,
Speaker 1: but start to finish my Stock told Forbes he needed
Speaker 1: just six days to secure one hundred million dollars from
Speaker 1: leading investment firms Coach You and light Speed once Stable
Speaker 1: Diffusion went viral. The extent of due diligence at the
Speaker 1: firms performed is unclear given the speed of the investment.
Speaker 1: The investment thesis we had is that we don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what all the use cases will be, but we
Speaker 1: know that this technology is truly transformative and has reached
Speaker 1: a tipping point in terms of what it can do.
Speaker 1: Garav Gupta, the light Speed partner who led the investment,
Speaker 1: told Forbes in a January interview.
Speaker 4: So again they're being.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, we're pumping tens of million dollars of dollars
Speaker 1: into this. We don't know how it'll make money. It
Speaker 1: just seems so impressive that it has to be profitable.
Speaker 1: Now that line is particularly funny, maybe the wrong word,
Speaker 1: when compared alongside this paragraph from later in the article.
Speaker 1: In an open letter last September, Democratic Representative Anna Essue
Speaker 1: urged action in Washington against the open source nature of
Speaker 1: stable Diffusion. The model, she wrote, had been used to
Speaker 1: generate images of violently beaten Asian women and pornography, some
Speaker 1: of which portrays real people. Bashara said new versions of
Speaker 1: stable Diffusion filtered data for potentially unsafe content, helping to
Speaker 1: prevent users from generating harmful images in the first place.
Speaker 1: So it's like, part of what's happening here is you've
Speaker 1: got this thing that seems really impressive, and that is
Speaker 1: to some extent because it's able to like remix stuff
Speaker 1: that exists in a way that you haven't done automatically before.
Speaker 1: But all of these kind of valuations are based number one,
Speaker 1: and ignoring the problems with monetizing this stuff, including like
Speaker 1: the still very much unsorted nature of how copyright's going
Speaker 1: to affect this, and also like the question of is
Speaker 1: this really worth that much money? Like is is this
Speaker 1: actually is being able to generate kind of weird, slightly
Speaker 1: off putting AI images a huge business, like how much
Speaker 1: of because like from where I'm seeing, one of two
Speaker 1: things is possible. Number one, this replaces all art everywhere
Speaker 1: and so there's a shitload of money in it. Or
Speaker 1: number two, this remains a way that like low quality
Speaker 1: websites and like Amazon dropship scammers who are like putting
Speaker 1: up fake books on Kindle and whatnot to trick people
Speaker 1: using keywords like that this is just like a way
Speaker 1: to fill that shit out. Like I don't see a
Speaker 1: whole lot of room in the middle there. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe I'm being like overly pessimistic there, but that's that's
Speaker 1: where I'm sitting.
Speaker 2: I mean, some of the models we've seen used is
Speaker 2: selling like subscription packs for like access to these tools
Speaker 2: and access to use them for like commercial reasons. The
Speaker 2: other thing we can see is just like corporations selling
Speaker 2: to other corporations like Base having Disney and Warner Brothers
Speaker 2: be able to use this to generate concept art and
Speaker 2: now they don't need to pay concept artists and instead
Speaker 2: they just have like pretty pretty uh pretty like nicely
Speaker 2: curated tools for them to generate this type of yeah
Speaker 2: AI imagining. Those are kind of two of the biggest
Speaker 2: use cases that at least I'm seeing right now from
Speaker 2: slightly more on like the creative filmmaking art side of things,
Speaker 2: because I mean, I don't think it's gonna replace all
Speaker 2: all art. I think nobody nobody is actually uh is
Speaker 2: actually thinking it's just going to replace all all art,
Speaker 2: just like photography did not replace all art. It just
Speaker 2: it changes the paradigm. And because this this tool does
Speaker 2: seem like specifically useful for the for the way that
Speaker 2: we're seeing, like corporations make the same a movie every
Speaker 2: five years, like it's all it's it's it's it's all
Speaker 2: built on all of the same stuff. And I think
Speaker 2: that that's how a lot of a lot of it's
Speaker 2: gonna get used. It's gonna be a lot of weird
Speaker 2: scam artists people just mess around for fun, and then
Speaker 2: people not paying like illustrators as much.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and I think that's kind of like I
Speaker 1: see this being adopted widely, but that's not the same
Speaker 1: as it like being a huge success. Like right now
Speaker 1: I'm looking at an article that's estimating the current value
Speaker 1: of AI in the US is at one hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars and that by twenty thirty it'll be worth two
Speaker 1: trillion US dollars, And it's like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like is.
Speaker 2: I mean the AI is more than just like mid
Speaker 2: journey image creation right there, is just like open AI
Speaker 2: and chat GPT, and like AI is in everything we
Speaker 2: use now, like like yeah, like AI is in your smartphone.
Speaker 2: AI is going to be in your refrigerator soon. It's
Speaker 2: like it's not just image generation by any means.
Speaker 1: That kind of gets to what I'm saying, because that's
Speaker 1: that's when you look at AI as a tool. Is
Speaker 1: more of like a paint brush than a painter. Is
Speaker 1: a tool that will like augment or be used in
Speaker 1: because I think a lot of a number of times
Speaker 1: it may be used in a way that makes the
Speaker 1: product worse and a lot of existing technologies. Well that's
Speaker 1: really different from kind of number one, the doom and gloom,
Speaker 1: like this is an intelligence on its own that could
Speaker 1: like overtake humanity. I think the worry is more like
Speaker 1: this could make get adopted on such a large scale
Speaker 1: that it like makes a lot of shit worse. Like
Speaker 1: my biggest fear with AI is that it kind of
Speaker 1: hypercharges the SEO industry and the way that that has
Speaker 1: worked to destroy search and destroy so much of Internet content.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that is very possible. Like if I
Speaker 7: look at chat GPT, like, I don't think that's going
Speaker 7: to be writing features for Rolling Stone anytime soon, but
Speaker 7: what it can probably do because SEO max copy is derivative, right,
Speaker 7: Like it's predictable, it's derivative, it's based on other stuff.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and so it can do that SEO max copy
Speaker 7: and some of that ad copy like very well, and yeah,
Speaker 7: i'd have really fuck up searches, which is quite possible,
Speaker 7: and also make the lowest kind of acceptable tier of
Speaker 7: that kind of copy. What it can generate and sort
Speaker 7: of because you can just shove that copy in front
Speaker 7: of people with seomax and then have shitty agg copy
Speaker 7: written by church GBT. Like that will change how it's
Speaker 7: certainly how we buy stuff on the internet, right, but
Speaker 7: also how we.
Speaker 9: Read news, etc. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, And I already see that, Like I've written for
Speaker 7: some big publications. You have like essentially a side. Do
Speaker 7: people know what content driven commerce is? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's why every article about stuff is now the best
Speaker 7: five x right yeah, Like.
Speaker 1: They have affiliate links and the publication will profit if
Speaker 1: you buy stuff after clicking the link.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, So like in the probably twenty sixteen era,
Speaker 7: all of the stuff. So I did a lot of
Speaker 7: previously outdoor journalism right right about climbing gear, bikes, that
Speaker 7: kind of thing, and like that whole industry went to
Speaker 7: just AFCM, like just affiliate links, and they kind of
Speaker 7: trashed any quality review stuff. And I can see like
Speaker 7: a similar change to that happening with this right where
Speaker 7: where people will just chase that SEO max copy and
Speaker 7: that will become the new cool thing to do and
Speaker 7: like a lot of outlets as a result. But that's
Speaker 7: not the like earth shattering change that people are talking
Speaker 7: about on Twitter, dot com or whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, one thing I saw recently is that more and
Speaker 2: more students are just using chat GPT to look up
Speaker 2: information like as opposed to like as a Wikipedia as
Speaker 2: opposed to Wikipedia are as supposed to Google if they
Speaker 2: have a question. The last chat GPT which has a
Speaker 2: few problems as soon as you start getting into how
Speaker 2: much of the chat GBT output is just AI hallucinations
Speaker 2: where it's not actual information, which is honest, that's not
Speaker 2: thing I should just write my own thing on in
Speaker 2: the future. But yeah, it's just it's a really weird problem.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting that the problem of like because I
Speaker 1: think it's it's very clear to me at this point
Speaker 1: that AI is a more user friendly search experience than
Speaker 1: a search engine, right because you can talk to it
Speaker 1: like a person and explain what you need explained. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it's a better option in terms of it
Speaker 1: provides people with information more effectively that it that it
Speaker 1: actually tells them what they want to know as well.
Speaker 1: But it's like easier and maybe like less kind of
Speaker 1: an imposing task to like ask an AI a question
Speaker 1: that it is to ask like a search and to
Speaker 1: especially as as much worse as Google has gotten lately.
Speaker 1: Like one of the things that I found interesting is
Speaker 1: I was kind of doing digging for this. I was
Speaker 1: looking at some AI articles that were published in like
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one. This is before
Speaker 1: the big you know AI push that like we're currently
Speaker 1: all in the middle of before chat GPT you know,
Speaker 1: got its its widespread release. And it was talking with
Speaker 1: like some people from Google who were like, Yeah, we
Speaker 1: really see AI like supercharging our search results. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of potential and like its ability to
Speaker 1: help people with search. And I'm thinking about in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty twenty nineteen, Google was a really useful tool and
Speaker 1: it's a shit show now, like it's filled with ads,
Speaker 1: Like search results have gotten markedly, whereas everyone who uses
Speaker 1: Google as part of their job will tell you that
Speaker 1: it's gotten like significantly worse in the recent past. And
Speaker 1: like I that's kind of like the thing that I
Speaker 1: see being more of a worry, And.
Speaker 9: It's one of those things.
Speaker 1: It's like, on one hand, in the hype machine you have,
Speaker 1: like AI could become like our new god king and
Speaker 1: destroy us all, and the other like AI is going
Speaker 1: to like, you know, create all. There's all this vague
Speaker 1: talk about what could be giving people the tools to
Speaker 1: create more art than ever before, to you know, make
Speaker 1: more good things faster, and I kind of feel like, well,
Speaker 1: what if neither of those things happens, which I and
Speaker 1: it just sort of allows us to continue making the
Speaker 1: Internet worse for everybody at a more rapid pace. What
Speaker 1: if that's the primary thing that we notice about AI
Speaker 1: as consumers.
Speaker 9: It's probably a reasonab assumption.
Speaker 7: I think Garrison's point was good though, when they said
Speaker 7: that like bigger companies will buy, like companies will just
Speaker 7: exist to get bought, right, which is the thing that's
Speaker 7: happened to tech for decades, because like it can't fundamentally
Speaker 7: change things, Like if AI is another means of production, right,
Speaker 7: if we want to be like a grossly materialist, if
Speaker 7: AI is another means of predic's a tool for making things.
Speaker 7: If the same people own it and benefit from it,
Speaker 7: then like it's incapable of fundamentally changing our material conditions, right,
Speaker 7: just becomes another way for them to churn out shit
Speaker 7: and say that like this is fine, this is what
Speaker 7: you'll get, you know, like churn out shit content on
Speaker 7: the Internet or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: And likewise, if AI is primarily like if it gets
Speaker 1: caught in this kind of SEO loop where it exists
Speaker 1: primary to help advertise and sell products, whether it's as
Speaker 1: a search engine or generating mass content you know, for
Speaker 1: like the Internet that's sort of optimized to appear higher
Speaker 1: in search results, and it's also being trained on that.
Speaker 1: Is there a point at which it kind of starts
Speaker 1: to lobotomize itself where it's just recycling shit other AI
Speaker 1: is written, which also seems kind of inevitable with that.
Speaker 1: This is one of those things. So one of the
Speaker 1: more famous moments, and like recent AI research, is this
Speaker 1: Google researcher timnit Gibru, who no longer works at Google,
Speaker 1: and some other very smart people put together a paper
Speaker 1: that like it was I think generally regarded by AI
Speaker 1: folks as kind of middle of the road, but it
Speaker 1: kind of it developed the term stochastic parrot, which is
Speaker 1: what people know it for as sort of trying to
Speaker 1: describe what these quote unquote AIS do in a way
Speaker 1: that's better than an AI, because like, part of what
Speaker 1: it was saying is that, like we have to look
Speaker 1: at this as kind of like a parrot that if
Speaker 1: you say enough like words around it, including enough like
Speaker 1: racial slurs, it'll start repeating a bunch of toxic shit.
Speaker 1: It doesn't know what it's doing, it doesn't have intention,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like repeating this stuff because that's
Speaker 1: what's been fed into it. But one of the things
Speaker 1: to point out in that paper is that like when
Speaker 1: you have an AI, when you have one of these
Speaker 1: lms trained on too large of a model, it becomes
Speaker 1: number one kind of impossible to avoid that toxic stuff.
Speaker 1: But it also reduces the utility of the AI in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways because like when you have so
Speaker 1: much data going in, it's very difficult for the humans
Speaker 1: to kind of tell how competent it is. This is
Speaker 1: why stuff like chat GPT involves so much human training,
Speaker 1: why they had hundreds of people spending tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of man hours like going through responses to tell if
Speaker 1: they made sense. Because when you've got like it's one
Speaker 1: thing if you're like using an if you're for example,
Speaker 1: training an AI on a bunch of different like medical
Speaker 1: data to try to determine patterns and like antibiotic research, right,
Speaker 1: which is a thing that that lllms have been like
Speaker 1: shown to be have some early utility and is like
Speaker 1: kind of helping to identity identify new paths for like
Speaker 1: antibiotics research, because like we've got a lot of data,
Speaker 1: but it's also a really focused kind of data, right,
Speaker 1: We're not like training these things on like all of
Speaker 1: you know, Wikipedia and and you know thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: and thousands of fan fiction stories about Kirk and Molder
Speaker 1: fucking each other during some sort of like Exile file
Speaker 1: Star Trek crossover. We're we're we're using a fairly focused
Speaker 1: data set to try and analyze it in a manner
Speaker 1: more efficiently than people are simply capable of. That's a
Speaker 1: lot more useful in terms of getting good data than
Speaker 1: you know, just training it on half of trillion different
Speaker 1: things out there, a lot of which you're going to
Speaker 1: be lies. But anyway, I found that interesting. It's kind
Speaker 1: of worth noting that, like Gabru and a number of
Speaker 1: other people who were responsible for that got forced out
Speaker 1: by Google and kind of attacked by the industry because
Speaker 1: I think there's a desperation And I talked about this
Speaker 1: in that episode I did last year kind of about
Speaker 1: the fundamental emptiness at the core of the modern tech industry.
Speaker 1: But I think there's this desperation, Unlike, we have to
Speaker 1: find the new thing, the thing that's going to be
Speaker 1: as big as social media was, the thing that's going
Speaker 1: to deliver the kind of stock market returns that social
Speaker 1: media did, and that doesn't exist yet. And AI is
Speaker 1: after especially several years of disasters with crypto and diminishing
Speaker 1: returns in social media and honestly diminishing returns, and like
Speaker 1: traditional tech because like smartphones have reached kind of a
Speaker 1: point of saturation. Right, you can make money sell obviously,
Speaker 1: like you can make money selling smartphones, but you can't
Speaker 1: show exponential growth, right, There's just not that many people
Speaker 1: who need new ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yeah, I think there's I feel some desperation here.
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of close by reading you all.
Speaker 1: I found a very funny article in the Financial Times
Speaker 1: that was about the potential that the head of Europe's
Speaker 1: biggest media group, Birtlesman, sees for generative AI. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it interviewed a couple of people, including a guy Thomas Rabe,
Speaker 1: who works is the chief executive of the German business
Speaker 1: that owns Penguin Random House and One of the things
Speaker 1: that he says in this is basically like I think
Speaker 1: this is, you know, uh going to be super great
Speaker 1: for authors. You know, there's a potential for copyright infringement problems,
Speaker 1: but really like it would allow you to feed your
Speaker 1: own work into an AI and then produce much more
Speaker 1: content than you were a raverable put able to put
Speaker 1: out before. Like his exact what is it's if it's
Speaker 1: your content for what you owned the copyright, and then
Speaker 1: you use it to train the software you can and
Speaker 1: theory generate content like never before, which I think is yeah,
Speaker 1: a fundamental Like you know, I don't actually even think
Speaker 1: it's going to be possible to like train them on
Speaker 1: airport novels like you've got like James Patterson and other
Speaker 1: guys who they're not They don't write their own books anymore.
Speaker 1: They have like a team of ghostwriters. But like having
Speaker 1: gone through a lot of AI's stories, they're not books,
Speaker 1: Like they're not capable of writing books. They're capable of
Speaker 1: like producing text and producing pieces of books that human
Speaker 1: beings can edit laboriously into something that might look like
Speaker 1: a book. But the use in that is not like
Speaker 1: filling up airports with kind of mid grade fiction, because
Speaker 1: I think that's even beyond these models. It's like tricking
Speaker 1: people on Amazon. There was a really funny quote in
Speaker 1: this article though, where at the end of it, Rabe
Speaker 1: is like, I asked chat GPT what the impact of
Speaker 1: chat GPT or generative AI is unpublishing it prepared a
Speaker 1: phenomenal text. Frankly, it was very detailed into the point,
Speaker 1: which he then presented at a staff event. So there
Speaker 1: is kind of evidence that the CEO jobs could be
Speaker 1: pretty easily replaced by this, Like.
Speaker 2: You don't actually have to do anything, Comrade chat GBT,
Speaker 2: we agree, it's just spinning Jenny for bosses.
Speaker 9: I love it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, that's that's what I've got right now. We have
Speaker 1: a We've been doing some research and we'll have an
Speaker 1: article out on one of the more unsettling little site
Speaker 1: industries that I think AI is going to create, which
Speaker 1: is like scam children's books that exist to make conment
Speaker 1: on the Internet money and poison the minds of little kids.
Speaker 1: But we'll get that to you next week. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: felt like it was worth coming back to this subject
Speaker 1: because it, I don't know, it's the most apocalyptic thing
Speaker 1: people in the media are talking about in a day
Speaker 1: in which like the entire Northeast is blanketed in poison smoke,
Speaker 1: which seems.
Speaker 7: Bad at well, people are talking about that now because
Speaker 7: they all live in New York and they're the fuck out,
Speaker 7: But yeah, previous.
Speaker 9: To it is yeah, good to help.
Speaker 7: Hello everyone, It's just me James again today and I'm
Speaker 7: joined by Ruth Kinner, who's going to introduce herself shortly,
Speaker 7: and we're discussing the concept of mutual aid and trying
Speaker 7: to sort of cast that in a broader perspective. We
Speaker 7: talk a lot about mutual aid, but we don't talk
Speaker 7: often about what it is and what it means and
Speaker 7: how it's been happening for a very long time. So Ruth,
Speaker 7: would you like to introduce yourself and tell us any
Speaker 7: do you think it's relevant?
Speaker 8: Yeah, thank you, James. So my name is Ruth Kinner
Speaker 8: and I work at Lufber University in the UK. Lufber's
Speaker 8: halfway between Nottingham and Leicester in the East Midlands, and
Speaker 8: I'm a political theorist and historian of ideas and I
Speaker 8: specialize in anarchist political thought. And one of the people
Speaker 8: I've spent probably most time looking at is Peter Cropotkin,
Speaker 8: and I've written about Kropotkin's life and work. I'm also
Speaker 8: the editor of the journal Anarchist Studies, and I'm a
Speaker 8: member at Lufber University of the Anarchism Research Group.
Speaker 7: I lovely. Yeah, that's a very very appropriate TV for this.
Speaker 7: So can we start off by explaining because I think
Speaker 7: people hear mutual aids sort of thrown about a lot,
Speaker 7: and they know that it's people helping people, But what
Speaker 7: would you define it as?
Speaker 9: What would be a useful definition for people to work of?
Speaker 8: So mutual aid is about people helping people. But I
Speaker 8: think crop Popkin's argument, or you know, the way that
Speaker 8: anarchists tend to think about mutual aid is that it's
Speaker 8: a way of describing a relationship that can be encouraged
Speaker 8: or discouraged according to the ways in which we organize
Speaker 8: our social relationships. So mutual aid is a kind of
Speaker 8: a response that we all have two people when it's
Speaker 8: based on empathy, I guess, but it's something that we
Speaker 8: can dampen. I suppose if we divorce ourselves from other
Speaker 8: people in our everyday lives, and particularly if we tend
Speaker 8: to think that people's well being is the concern of
Speaker 8: others rather than something which is a collective concern of
Speaker 8: all of us.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's really excellent because it's very easy,
Speaker 7: especially if you're living under sort of capitalism as it
Speaker 7: exists today, to divorce yourself from your empathy or I
Speaker 7: don't know, responsibilities the right word, but to help other people.
Speaker 7: Can We see that all the time, And I think
Speaker 7: one area where we've seen that increasingly, certainly in the
Speaker 7: two countries that we're sitting in, is with this like
Speaker 7: this bizarre I don't want to like pathologize it, but
Speaker 7: this this deeply untasteful lack of empathy for refugees and
Speaker 7: people seeking asylum. So I wanted to sort of start
Speaker 7: with the example of the Lifeboats in the UK, because
Speaker 7: I think they're great. They pop up in Crapotkin, They've
Speaker 7: been around for very long time, and they were, at
Speaker 7: least when I was living in the UK, very charitied
Speaker 7: institution that people supported. And can you explain a little
Speaker 7: bit about how they operate within that sort of mutual
Speaker 7: aid lens.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So the Lifeboat Association was prompted by it's called an
Speaker 8: appeal to the British Nation that was published in eighteen
Speaker 8: twenty five by this guy called William Hillary. And what
Speaker 8: Hillary wanted to do was to support the foundation of
Speaker 8: a kind of national institution that was going to help
Speaker 8: the victims of shipwrecks. And he couched this project actually
Speaker 8: as quite a sort of nationalistic terms, I suppose were
Speaker 8: in patriotic terms, part of the duty that British people
Speaker 8: would have as one of the great seafaring nations. But
Speaker 8: what it did was that it established the skeleton, if
Speaker 8: you like, or it produced the sort of the foundation
Speaker 8: for the Lifeboat Association, which is what we know now,
Speaker 8: which is basically a voluntary organization run by volunteers, funded
Speaker 8: by the public, with a remit to help anybody who
Speaker 8: is in distress at sea. And I guess although it
Speaker 8: was sort of the original idea of the Lifeboat Association
Speaker 8: came from this sort of rather patriotic seafaring tradition. Hillary's
Speaker 8: idea was that once you set up these organizations locally
Speaker 8: on the coast, then actually they could be replicated. So
Speaker 8: he did have a sort of internationalist perspective. He thought
Speaker 8: that these things would be would mushroom, you know, across
Speaker 8: the globe and that we would have lifeboat associations everywhere.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure if that's true, but certainly the Lifeboat
Speaker 8: Association is still alive and well in the UK and
Speaker 8: it does exactly what he wanted it to do. It
Speaker 8: looks after people in distress at sea without fear or favor,
Speaker 8: and it's an example of mutual aid, I guess, because
Speaker 8: the people who do this as volunteers are always putting
Speaker 8: themselves at risk of peril or drowning, if you like,
Speaker 8: in order to try and preserve the lives of others.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and it's a very at least from my memory,
Speaker 7: an institution. I've never really heard of anyone having negative
Speaker 7: opinions about lifeboats until relatively recently. There was always a
Speaker 7: lifeboat shaped thing that you could put money in, like
Speaker 7: a donation box, and people just put money in it
Speaker 7: and no one was like, oh, I don't.
Speaker 9: Like the lifeboats.
Speaker 7: But recently I suppose I've come under fire from Britain first,
Speaker 7: for I think they would phrase it as like encouraging
Speaker 7: people to take the risk of traveling on small boats
Speaker 7: to the United Kingdom to claim asylum. And can you
Speaker 7: characterize I don't want you to characterize that attack because
Speaker 7: it's relatively easy to characterize and it's you know, it
Speaker 7: doesn't need much explaining.
Speaker 9: It's stupid.
Speaker 7: But the response to that, because I think it has
Speaker 7: been quite It's easy for people in America to see
Speaker 7: Britain as like a parochial at island full of turfs.
Speaker 7: But I think actually most people were still like most
Speaker 7: people were pretty I guess offended by the thought that
Speaker 7: we'd allow people to drown rather than coming to our
Speaker 7: country right to claim asylum.
Speaker 9: Is that fair statement, Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 8: I mean I think it was astonishing actually, or I
Speaker 8: think it astonished people that the Lifeboat Association would be
Speaker 8: politicized in the way that was attempted by the right.
Speaker 8: The whole idea of picking and choosing who one would
Speaker 8: rescue at sea is simply preposterous. And as you say,
Speaker 8: I mean, you know, the Lifeboat Association is widely supported.
Speaker 8: I mean you tend to see offices of the Lifeboat
Speaker 8: Association at seasides, so you know, this is a you know,
Speaker 8: the environment is the holiday environment, it's the beach environment.
Speaker 8: It's part of being together in a place which is
Speaker 8: enjoyed by people together, but which also has its risks.
Speaker 8: And I mean the first time I think, you know,
Speaker 8: I came across the Lifeboat Association was was actually through
Speaker 8: an appeal that was made through a very popular and
Speaker 8: well known BBC television program for children, which was called
Speaker 8: Blue Peter. And you know, they funded a boat by
Speaker 8: asking kids to send in milk bottle tops which could
Speaker 8: be melted down and turned into an eminium or whatever
Speaker 8: it was. And then you know, this is how they
Speaker 8: funded a lifeboat. I mean, so this this, you know,
Speaker 8: lifeboats aren't deeply rooted I think, I mean, the support
Speaker 8: for lifeboats are deeply rooted in people's psyche in this country.
Speaker 8: And and as I say, I think it was it
Speaker 8: was interesting. I guess that these these calls from the
Speaker 8: rights that the Lifeboats Association was somehow doing wrong in
Speaker 8: looking after migrant boats, I mean, the small boats, really
Speaker 8: vulnerable dinghies that were being sailed across the Channel. I
Speaker 8: just think the it gained absolutely no traction because it
Speaker 8: simply didn't speak to people's public perception or or deeply
Speaker 8: held perceptions if you like, of the role of this association.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and there's been a really significant campaign to dehumanize
Speaker 7: migrants in the UK even perhaps to a degree greater
Speaker 7: than we've seen in much of the US, although there's
Speaker 7: complete bipartisan consensus that we should criminalize people coming here
Speaker 7: in the United States too. And I spent people will
Speaker 7: have heard that I spent the last week driving along
Speaker 7: the border seeing little children forced to be held in
Speaker 7: the desert with no shade and no water. It's also
Speaker 7: very brutal here. But I think it says something that
Speaker 7: that's an institution that looks like that was a line
Speaker 7: that wasn't cross I guess by the right, and this
Speaker 7: demonization of migrants. So we're having established that this is
Speaker 7: a very cherished and important institution. Can we talk about
Speaker 7: how mutual aid is something that because I think it
Speaker 7: can seem understandably to people who have been educated in
Speaker 7: the sort of neoliberal consensus, that certainly it is very
Speaker 7: common in schools and universities in both of our countries.
Speaker 7: How this has in fact been like part of human
Speaker 7: history for as long as as people have been living
Speaker 7: in societies, and how it's a natural human response to
Speaker 7: want to do this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So I mean, I think this takes us back to
Speaker 8: Kropotkins theorization, if you like, of mutual aid. So I
Speaker 8: mean talking about sort of you know, our neoliberal culture.
Speaker 8: I mean, Cropotkin's writing in a time where you have
Speaker 8: a similar kind of individualism being stoked, and it's being
Speaker 8: stoked particularly through a notion of of social Darwinism. So
Speaker 8: the idea that fitness is linked to or that the
Speaker 8: survival is linked to individual fitness, and that competition is
Speaker 8: the is the basic rule of life, and that therefore
Speaker 8: not only individuals, but states as well should be you know,
Speaker 8: pitting themselves against each other in order to gain advantage
Speaker 8: and to secure their own well being. And Kropotkin wanted
Speaker 8: to sort of challenge this argument, and so the way
Speaker 8: he did it was to say two things. One that
Speaker 8: that biological fitness is not linked to competition. It's actually
Speaker 8: linked to cooperation. So individuals in any species cannot survive
Speaker 8: unless they have support from from from others in their species.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's simply, you know, that's that's how biology works.
Speaker 8: So whatever advantage that individuals might might you know, acquire,
Speaker 8: actually their well being depends on the co operation or
Speaker 8: the collective practices that they have with others. So he
Speaker 8: recognized that there was interspecies competition, but he said, basically
Speaker 8: within species survivalist based in cooperation. And from that he
Speaker 8: then said, you know, one of the things that we
Speaker 8: can learn from this, from this sort of re under
Speaker 8: or from this sort of review of social Darwinism, is
Speaker 8: to think about how we can encourage cooperation as a
Speaker 8: moral value. And he said, you know, the way then
Speaker 8: we because that's a good thing. Surely it's it's you know,
Speaker 8: if we're biologically attuned to cooperate, then why don't we
Speaker 8: make this a principle of our lives. And he said
Speaker 8: that the way that we should do this is by
Speaker 8: configuring our social arrangements or our environments, if you like,
Speaker 8: in ways that enabled us to see that we were
Speaker 8: we were affected by the same sorts of problem, that
Speaker 8: we had affinities with each other, that there was a
Speaker 8: basic relationship that we had with each other, not only
Speaker 8: with family members and friends, but with strangers too, and
Speaker 8: that once we could understand that, then actually we could
Speaker 8: sort of organize our social lives in ways that were
Speaker 8: supportive of others when they were in positions of need
Speaker 8: or when they're in situations of need.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so how would one go about doing that? It
Speaker 7: can seem look where I live. Thousands of people live
Speaker 7: on the street, right and I can watch people every
Speaker 7: day walk past people who just need a little bit
Speaker 7: of help and not give it to them, and it
Speaker 7: can be very disheartening. And so how do we begin
Speaker 7: to organize in a way that recognizes our sort of
Speaker 7: mutual dependence.
Speaker 8: So, I mean, part of the arguments, I think is
Speaker 8: that people will fill the gaps when they see that
Speaker 8: others are in need. And that's exactly what the Lifeboat
Speaker 8: Association does, and that's exactly what happened during the pandemic
Speaker 8: for example. So you know, not surprisingly one of the
Speaker 8: things that happened in the first weeks of the pandemic
Speaker 8: was the mushrooming of groups that call themselves mutual aid
Speaker 8: societies mutual aid associations, and they were networked. I mean,
Speaker 8: somebody set up a website so that you know, people
Speaker 8: could see exactly where these groups were. They were networked
Speaker 8: in the UK. I think there were some relationships that
Speaker 8: were even transatlantic. So part of the argument is that
Speaker 8: you don't have to plan this, and in fact, mutual
Speaker 8: aid is an unplanned is best thought of as an
Speaker 8: unplanned response. But I guess the other thing is all
Speaker 8: the question that mutual aid begs is that, you know,
Speaker 8: if people get together in times to fill the gaps,
Speaker 8: if you liked to provide support for people who were
Speaker 8: in need, then how do they sustain those organizations over
Speaker 8: periods of time without suffering burnout and all the rest
Speaker 8: of it. And I think that really then depends on.
Speaker 4: You know, sort of.
Speaker 8: Establishing I guess, I mean, you know, that's again why
Speaker 8: we should take some heart. I think from the Lifeboat Association,
Speaker 8: it's been going a long time. It is possible to
Speaker 8: do these things, but it's difficult, and it does require
Speaker 8: that you learn how to cooperate with people who you
Speaker 8: might not otherwise work with, you might not otherwise think
Speaker 8: you have anything in common with, But where you find
Speaker 8: that common ground in order to undertake practical activities in
Speaker 8: collaboration with each other?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's very question. I'm always like in
Speaker 7: twenty eighteen, I don't know if you were familiar with
Speaker 7: it's been in the southern border of the United States.
Speaker 7: We had a large group of migrants coming here from
Speaker 7: Central America who became like a sort of talking point
Speaker 7: in the mid terms through no fault of their own,
Speaker 7: and they were held at the US border and then
Speaker 7: tear gas from the sort of Tommy Hilfiger gist out
Speaker 7: store in San Diego. And I was really impressed with
Speaker 7: Like I was there trying to help with my friends
Speaker 7: and sort of trying to do anarchist things, but also
Speaker 7: there were people who were older ladies from churches and
Speaker 7: people from mosques and people from synagogues and very much
Speaker 7: willing to work together, and you know, like you know,
Speaker 7: we'd go to cost go together and spend thousands of
Speaker 7: thousands on water and nappies for babies and such. But
Speaker 7: I think getting past that initial sort of I'm not
Speaker 7: a person who works for people who go to church too,
Speaker 7: like what this person wants to help and so do
Speaker 7: I was what allowed that to happen? Can you preps
Speaker 7: think of other examples that people I'm interested in things
Speaker 7: like the lifeboats, which people might not see through the
Speaker 7: lens of mutual aid because there's such established institutions that
Speaker 7: they there's an assumption. I think a lot of people
Speaker 7: probably think that there's some kind of state involvement with
Speaker 7: the lifeboats, right, and the same with lots of sort
Speaker 7: of the societies that exist to prevent cruelty to animals
Speaker 7: and children and that kind of thing, right, those aren't
Speaker 7: state funded either in the UK. Can you think of
Speaker 7: other examples of mutual aid that people might have sort
Speaker 7: of not realized are entirely driven by society and not
Speaker 7: the state.
Speaker 2: Well, I suppose.
Speaker 8: I mean, the best or one of the best examples
Speaker 8: recently in the US context is the establishment of the
Speaker 8: Common Ground Collective after Hurricane Katrina. So the aid that
Speaker 8: first went into the people who were stricken by Katrina
Speaker 8: was not provided by the state. In fact, you know,
Speaker 8: that came a lot later, but it was provided by
Speaker 8: people who, you know, by by groups of people who
Speaker 8: who thought that they, you know, they could offer medical
Speaker 8: support or set up systems of you or help set
Speaker 8: up systems of of of basic supply and rescue. And
Speaker 8: and that's exactly what happened, and the Common Ground Collective
Speaker 8: was established as a result of it. I mean, you
Speaker 8: find this sort of thing, I mean, I mean, it's
Speaker 8: it's fairly usual in times of you know, sudden emergency
Speaker 8: and crisis that actually the people who who do the
Speaker 8: hands on work of actually taking people off off you know,
Speaker 8: the how the roofs of flooded houses and all the
Speaker 8: rest of it. These are local people typically, they're not
Speaker 8: the agencies who often you know, take a lot of
Speaker 8: time to get there. I mean the other examples, I
Speaker 8: think in the American context again which are often rooted
Speaker 8: around church groups, but certainly a lot of black people's
Speaker 8: organizations which you know, who couldn't you know, where they
Speaker 8: couldn't access support services set up mutual aid societies because
Speaker 8: that was the if you like, the only alternative that
Speaker 8: they would have in order to provide you know, sort
Speaker 8: of clubs for their kids and breakfast clubs and any
Speaker 8: kind of welfare at all.
Speaker 9: That that was.
Speaker 8: The that was the root of it. The other example,
Speaker 8: I mean Kropotkin looks at, I mean these are nineteenth
Speaker 8: cent and nineteenth center example, which is sort of something
Speaker 8: that's later absorbed by the state. Are the the the
Speaker 8: the the insurance arrangements that were that were made by
Speaker 8: miners to look after are those who were injured down
Speaker 8: the mines and their families in the event of their death.
Speaker 8: So you know, they were setting up their own systems
Speaker 8: of contribution to ensure that those families would be provided
Speaker 8: for if the worst came to the worst. And you know,
Speaker 8: eventually this gets taken up by the station and it's
Speaker 8: sold back to you as national insurance. That these systems
Speaker 8: are you know, they're established essentially by local people for
Speaker 8: their own benefits.
Speaker 7: Yeah, perhaps we ought to talk about that because there's
Speaker 7: a lot of these spontaneous societal things, especially in the UK,
Speaker 7: that are corrupted by the state and then sold back
Speaker 7: to us and then gradually stripped away of the very
Speaker 7: essence of what they're supposed to be, at the National
Speaker 7: Health Service being another example. Can you talk about the
Speaker 7: danger of that kind of state maybe dangers who are
Speaker 7: on word, But there can be a state capture of
Speaker 7: mutual aid efforts which can sometimes one might argue, always
Speaker 7: like strip them of the essence of what they are.
Speaker 9: Is that fair to say?
Speaker 8: Well, it certainly changes this. Well, I mean so so
Speaker 8: state welfare changes the relationships that that people have to
Speaker 8: those institutions, and and so in one sense it's it
Speaker 8: alleviates the burden of of of running those institutions. But
Speaker 8: in the on the other hand, it it does two things.
Speaker 8: I think one is that it it tends to encourage
Speaker 8: the idea that looking after each other is somebody else's responsibility.
Speaker 8: So actually it diminishes or it disincentivizes the sort of
Speaker 8: the that that stimulus to help each other directly. So
Speaker 8: mutual aid is a kind of direct action, if you like.
Speaker 8: Whereas you know, once we give these these processes over
Speaker 8: to the state, then actually we start to see people
Speaker 8: in different in different ways. So we do start to
Speaker 8: get the language of scrounging or of you know, idle,
Speaker 8: the es, deserving, undeserving poor. All of those things come
Speaker 8: from the idea that we're paying into an institution and
Speaker 8: not necessarily being guaranteeed that we're getting value for money.
Speaker 8: So we start to see the institution slightly differently. And
Speaker 8: I think the other thing is that the I mean
Speaker 8: the worry I guess of of that sort of co
Speaker 8: optation is that it's it conceals the other things that
Speaker 8: the state does. So welfare is the last thing, if
Speaker 8: you like, that that states assume as a responsibility, and
Speaker 8: it and it provides a gloss, if you like, on
Speaker 8: the law and order function that the state serves. Uh
Speaker 8: and and somehow sort of makes the state look a
Speaker 8: bit friendlier than perhaps we should think it is. And
Speaker 8: I mean this, you know, when the I suppose that
Speaker 8: I mean the term that was used in the in
Speaker 8: the British context. In the in the the immediate post
Speaker 8: war period was not the welfare state, it was the
Speaker 8: warfare state, because the idea was that the introduction of welfare,
Speaker 8: which starts really after the after the Second World War,
Speaker 8: concealed the violence that the state was otherwise perpetuating elsewhere.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's very It's something we should consider
Speaker 7: very strongly when we're looking at these things.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 7: I think it also strips the like the person to
Speaker 7: person aspect of mutual aid from mutual aid, like the
Speaker 7: certainly the most common sort of mutual aid responses I've
Speaker 7: been part of, to health crises and then to along
Speaker 7: the border.
Speaker 9: And part of.
Speaker 7: What makes that very meaningful is people saying, like, you know,
Speaker 7: this is a this is a line between two states,
Speaker 7: but it's not a line between two people or two communities. Right,
Speaker 7: And you are welcome because I am of this community
Speaker 7: and I want you to come here, which you do
Speaker 7: not get when you know there's a man in green
Speaker 7: combat pants throwing MRIs from the back of a pickup truck, like.
Speaker 9: That doesn't that's right?
Speaker 8: And equally I suppose that, I mean, that's the other thing.
Speaker 8: I mean that's that's kind of what I was trying
Speaker 8: to get at that. You know, once you have a
Speaker 8: once you have state welfare, you have concepts of access
Speaker 8: through citizenship, and that reinforces the idea that there's a
Speaker 8: there's a right of access, and then there's a there's
Speaker 8: an exclusion that necessarily follows from that, and so you know,
Speaker 8: the relationship becomes much more transactional rather than which is
Speaker 8: the way that the mutual aid is couched in in
Speaker 8: the anarchist lexicon. You know, it's it's it's it's driven
Speaker 8: by by altruism and and and giving without without the
Speaker 8: expectation of reward.
Speaker 7: Yes, yeah, I think that's very important. It doesn't imply
Speaker 7: a power or an expectation of sort of reciprocity.
Speaker 4: It's it.
Speaker 7: I forget exactly where I read this. Terrible at these things,
Speaker 7: but like I guess you don't do it in a
Speaker 7: selfish sense. But it benefits you as well as the
Speaker 7: person you are giving too in because those people are
Speaker 7: part of your community.
Speaker 9: Is that fair?
Speaker 7: And you shouldn't be complete if people are suffering, like
Speaker 7: right next to you.
Speaker 5: Yes, So I.
Speaker 8: Suppose there's a sort of there's a there's an argument
Speaker 8: to say that, I mean that that comes from the
Speaker 8: from the notion of of of recasting what it is
Speaker 8: to be an individual. So you know, you're you're your
Speaker 8: personal enrichment actually relies on the relationships that you can
Speaker 8: cultivate with other people, so you know, the the quality
Speaker 8: of those relationships is actually something that of course benefits you.
Speaker 8: But I think the I mean, one of the things
Speaker 8: what can tells this story about a child drowning in
Speaker 8: a river, and he imagines three people standing on the
Speaker 8: river bank. One of them is a religious believer, the
Speaker 8: second one is he calls an ordinary bourgeois a mutilitarian,
Speaker 8: and the third one he doesn't describe at all. And
Speaker 8: he says, you know what what happens when they see
Speaker 8: this child in the river. And he says, well, the
Speaker 8: religious person is wondering, you know, I should go and
Speaker 8: save the child because I'll reap my reward in heaven.
Speaker 8: And the utilitarian is thinking, you know, if I if
Speaker 8: I save this child, then I'm going to feel really
Speaker 8: good about myself, and so therefore I should do it.
Speaker 8: And while they're while they're sort of going through that
Speaker 8: process of reasoning, the third person has just jumped in
Speaker 8: and saved the child, and that's mutual aid.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yes, I think that's very good. Yeah, it comes
Speaker 7: from Yeah, it doesn't need to be like overly theorized,
Speaker 7: I suppose, yeah, and it really doesn't, like I've never
Speaker 7: I think the construction of mutual aid is important because
Speaker 7: it allows us to join the dots across the world
Speaker 7: and across time and to see the relationship with the state.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't need you don't need to have read
Speaker 7: Crapotkin to like, I know a big it's sprung up
Speaker 7: here a lot in the pandemic too, right, like free shops,
Speaker 7: and certainly for older people or people who are compromised.
Speaker 7: I remember breaking thousands of loaves of bread from the
Speaker 7: pizza shop down the street wasn't able to open, so
Speaker 7: they would bring me flower and I would make bread
Speaker 7: and we would take it to people, and things like
Speaker 7: that were very spontaneous and didn't particularly need like theorizing
Speaker 7: in terms of Popkin, But sadly they sort of we
Speaker 7: lost a lot of that with the you know, with
Speaker 7: the reduction in the severity of the pandemic, I guess,
Speaker 7: and I think it's important to remember that that was
Speaker 7: a natural response on one that we should cultivate.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, I mean
Speaker 8: there were all sorts of things that were going on here.
Speaker 8: I mean there were people who were sewing up scrubs
Speaker 8: for health workers, delivering lunches to health workers, you know,
Speaker 8: as well as just you know, the checking on the neighbors,
Speaker 8: making sure that people were okay. So yeah, I mean
Speaker 8: it took you know, multiple different forms, and yeah, I
Speaker 8: mean it is difficult because you know, once real life
Speaker 8: as it were sort of returned and the and the
Speaker 8: lockdowns were relaxed, you know, people have all kinds of
Speaker 8: other demands on their time and and we sort of
Speaker 8: then get used to thinking that, you know, somebody else
Speaker 8: is going to pick up the pieces now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, I do think that that's part of that
Speaker 7: lockdown nostalgia, which is bizarrely already occurring three years down
Speaker 7: the line. But people look back and think, oh, well,
Speaker 7: it wasn't that bad, and obviously thousands of people died
Speaker 7: that we.
Speaker 9: Shouldn't overlook that.
Speaker 7: But part of what people are looking back on is
Speaker 7: that sense of community, which I think so many of
Speaker 7: us lack. The alienation is very real for a lot
Speaker 7: of us, and so those mutual aid groups or watchapp
Speaker 7: groups and things gave people a real sense of belonging.
Speaker 9: I think that's the same.
Speaker 7: A lot of people felt that way in twenty twenty,
Speaker 7: for obviously there was an uprising in the United States
Speaker 7: which gave people a sense of purpose, which maybe they
Speaker 7: they're not feeling anymore. If people are interested in I
Speaker 7: guess there's learning and there's doing, and that they can
Speaker 7: be distinct or they can be done at the same time,
Speaker 7: and we can learn by doing. And where would people
Speaker 7: start they want to start their reading? Are their texts
Speaker 7: that you'd recommend, that you know, are not the size
Speaker 7: of a breeze block that people might find approachable?
Speaker 8: Well, you can get I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm
Speaker 8: I mean Potkin's book Mutual Aid is quite long. I mean,
Speaker 8: it's the last two chapters really that are the ones
Speaker 8: to read, and that's freely available online. It's I mean,
Speaker 8: it's a very nineteenth century kind of argument.
Speaker 9: I mean.
Speaker 8: The other I mean, the other one that I really
Speaker 8: like is Cindy Milstein's Anarchism and Its Aspirations, and that's short,
Speaker 8: it's very accessible, and she has this discussion of mutual
Speaker 8: Aid where she she links it to what she calls
Speaker 8: the ethical compass, And I think that speaks really nicely
Speaker 8: to the to the you know, the principles and the sentiments,
Speaker 8: if you like, of mutual aid, that it is this
Speaker 8: kind of thick relationship that people cultivate but not necessarily
Speaker 8: a not necessarily with a view to living in sort
Speaker 8: of permanently in community with each other, but actually to
Speaker 8: change the dynamics of the of the kind of the
Speaker 8: cities we live in and the detachments that we not
Speaker 8: only have but also sometimes kind of value. We don't
Speaker 8: necessarily want to live in each other's pockets. But actually
Speaker 8: that doesn't mean to say we can't practice much alive
Speaker 8: with each other.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that'd be a great, great place for
Speaker 7: people to start if they want to read a tiny
Speaker 7: bio of Cropotkin.
Speaker 9: Dog Section Press has an excellent exit.
Speaker 7: I'm a big fan of their great Anarchist book. I
Speaker 7: think it's very approachable for Yeah.
Speaker 8: They're also they're also available online, Yes they are, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 8: and they're illustrated.
Speaker 9: Yeah, they're very beautifully illustrated.
Speaker 7: It's been a good one for me to assign to
Speaker 7: students and have them approach anarchism from a non prejudice perspective,
Speaker 7: I suppose, which is which can be hard. Like I
Speaker 7: always remember coming to the US for the first time
Speaker 7: when I was twenty one, and like, I don't think
Speaker 7: I presented in a way that was particularly affable to
Speaker 7: the Transport Security Administration. But I, what are you doing here?
Speaker 7: I'm pH d student. What are you studying political violence
Speaker 7: and the anarchist unions? I was immediately sent to the
Speaker 7: little room that you go to UH and UH. I
Speaker 7: had some more questions to answer. But I think it's
Speaker 7: it's really important to present anarchism. I think through the
Speaker 7: lens of mut because I think so often it's viewed
Speaker 7: through the lens of like a predilection for chaos and violence,
Speaker 7: which is the opposite of what you're doing when you
Speaker 7: know you're giving someone a blanket or something like it's
Speaker 7: And so I think if people listening will at least
Speaker 7: be familiar with the concept of anarchism and mutual aid
Speaker 7: and not see it in that prejudicial way. But I
Speaker 7: think if we can present it to other people, you know,
Speaker 7: you're doing anarchism. Everyone was doing getting to start the
Speaker 7: pandemic when they were sewing masks. Like you say or home,
Speaker 7: bring hand sanitizer.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think that's I think that's really important
Speaker 8: actually to to the to the argument that the mutually
Speaker 8: is for everyone, So you know, you're not Anarchists are
Speaker 8: not trying to change people's heads or get them to
Speaker 8: think in particular ways when they talk about mutual aid.
Speaker 8: What they're doing is tapping into a propensity that exists
Speaker 8: within all of us. And what anarchists are saying is
Speaker 8: that if you, you know, if you push organizations in
Speaker 8: particular directions and actually you've got a better way or
Speaker 8: a better means of a better sort of environment within
Speaker 8: which you can sustain those practices. But mutual aid itself
Speaker 8: is not about being an anarchist. It's about being a
Speaker 8: human being.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I wonder so if people want to sort of build
Speaker 7: ways of taking care of each other without the state
Speaker 7: where they are, maybe they can see a problem, right
Speaker 7: that hasn't been addressed by the state, like one of
Speaker 7: those holes that you spoke about, or a problem that
Speaker 7: the state is addressing inadequately or in an undesirable way.
Speaker 7: How would they go about, Like, do you have advice
Speaker 7: people looking to start? It can be especially if you're
Speaker 7: not on social media, which I know we've had people email,
Speaker 7: but like I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, and how
Speaker 7: do I organize mutual aid? So do you have any
Speaker 7: suggestions for that?
Speaker 8: Yeah, so, I mean there are I mean there are
Speaker 8: normally sort of in any I mean certainly where I live,
Speaker 8: which is a small market town. I mean there is
Speaker 8: a community center there.
Speaker 3: I mean there are.
Speaker 8: Churches too, but I mean there is a sort of
Speaker 8: a local civic center if you like, which has all
Speaker 8: kinds of adverts for local groups and activities. There's a
Speaker 8: I mean, we're a town of sanctuary, so we're one
Speaker 8: of the places that migrants are sent to in order
Speaker 8: to register. And the people who are involved in the
Speaker 8: town of Sanctuary, they meet them, greet them, try and
Speaker 8: give them information that's useful to them. They run English
Speaker 8: language classes, they try and get the kids into swimming pools.
Speaker 8: I mean, they're all sorts of things activities that they're doing.
Speaker 8: So I think it's a matter of sort of seeing
Speaker 8: what's there, yeah, and then sort of try. I mean
Speaker 8: often I think people don't realize the skills they have.
Speaker 8: So for example, you know, if they speak more than
Speaker 8: one language, it's often really helpful to people who are
Speaker 8: arriving in a in a foreign land or a land
Speaker 8: that they don't they're not they're not speakers of the
Speaker 8: native language, you know, to help translate, to share information,
Speaker 8: just to point people in the direction where they can
Speaker 8: get help from from other agencies. So I don't think
Speaker 8: I mean, it seems to me that you know, mutual
Speaker 8: aid is not necessarily trying to sort of say you're
Speaker 8: not going to enable people to access support services that
Speaker 8: are provided. I mean, even if they're paltry services provided
Speaker 8: by the state. What you're trying to do is to
Speaker 8: meet people's needs. And there are existing groups and associations
Speaker 8: which are which will enable you to do that. I mean,
Speaker 8: you could go if you live at the seaside, you
Speaker 8: could go down to your local lifeboat association and see
Speaker 8: if they need a volunteer to run the office. You
Speaker 8: know there are that these are the sorts of things
Speaker 8: things that keep these institutions running. That's the kind of
Speaker 8: thing that you can do.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think that's a very good, very good suggestion
Speaker 7: for people. And we don't we don't need to yet
Speaker 7: be like turn our noses up at support for the
Speaker 7: state where what little is available. We should avail ourselves
Speaker 7: and other people who need.
Speaker 8: It and empower other people to get to Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, and certainly we can't. We can't act as
Speaker 7: if the state doesn't exist at a time where it does.
Speaker 7: It's powerful and it can hurt vulnerable people.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 7: I think that's Is there anything else you'd like to
Speaker 7: say before we finish up on the topic of mutual aid.
Speaker 8: No, I think we've covered Yeah, I think we've we've
Speaker 8: sort of covered it. I mean, I just I guess
Speaker 8: it's a you know, mutual aid is a is The
Speaker 8: important thing for me is that mutual aid is a
Speaker 8: It's an easy thing and it's and it and it
Speaker 8: can build and that's the the it, and it can
Speaker 8: be sustained. That's the joy of it. And I think
Speaker 8: that's the brilliant thing about the example of the Lifeboat Association. Yeah,
Speaker 8: we can set up all kinds of things and run them.
Speaker 8: We don't need to be told to do it. We
Speaker 8: don't need to be told how to do it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I mean.
Speaker 7: One of the things that always gives me like a
Speaker 7: little spark of joy for such a venomble British institution
Speaker 7: with royal in its name, is that they celebrate for
Speaker 7: p Hopkins's birthday apparently, Yeah, exactly, they'll post on all
Speaker 7: their social media like pictures of Cropopkin, like a little
Speaker 7: birthday cake and the celebrations, which yeah, I think people should,
Speaker 7: you know, take a little moment of joy to celebrate
Speaker 7: these things that we've already achieved and I guess trying
Speaker 7: and do better. Is there is there any where people
Speaker 7: can find you on the internet. I don't know if
Speaker 7: you have social media or website.
Speaker 8: Not on social media, but I mean easily you can
Speaker 8: find me at the university at Luff University. It's lo
Speaker 8: ugh b o r g h.
Speaker 7: It's one some of my colleagues have struggled with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not easy.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so that's the easiest post to find me in.
Speaker 8: My contact information is there and if anyone wants to
Speaker 8: write to me, then I'm happy.
Speaker 7: To write back.
Speaker 9: Wonderful, Thank you so much, say share.
Speaker 12: Hey.
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 14: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 14: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 14: coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 14: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
Speaker 14: find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at
Speaker 14: coolzonemedia dot com, slash sources.
Speaker 13: Thanks for listening.