Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 88

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch. If you want, if you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Hello, welcome to weekak It Happened Here.

This is Gerson. We're going to be doing a little bit of an update on some of the things that have been happening in Atlanta, Georgia, the past few weeks in relation to the StopCop City movement. With me today to help go through the many, many happenings of the past, past few weeks is a Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. Hello. Hello, my friend. Good to see you. Yes, last time we talked on the show, it was during our very, very critically acclaimed comedy episode. So nice to... I have the comedy episode was great. I like it. I like it. I'm glad you approved as someone who was on the episode.

I might have been like the target audience for that. But yeah, there was like, there was like four jokes. It'll be like three people get. But that's all right. So this is going to be a bit of a bit of a looser episode because people are preparing for the week of action. There's a lot of things in play. It's kind of a lot of stuff still up in the air. So I don't have time to put something super, super, super scripted together. But many things have happened that are worth talking about, especially before the week of action. I guess, would the first thing on the docket be to kind of go over the stuff regarding the extra funding that the city seems to be

giving towards the cop city project even beyond the 33 million dollars. That was the target of the city council vote a few days ago, but there's a whole bunch of extra money floating around as discovered by you guys at the Atlantic Community Preschool Act of, and then who had their journalism for him, which still didn't buy every other outlet. They put our name in there and you get paid in the spotlight, right? That's how that worked. I'm only paying you an exposure for these episodes. Exactly.

Which isn't true, FWAI, but anyway. So yeah, okay. So going back to 2021, this conversation started a couple months after the lease legislation was signed. Back then, it was a conversation about like a $55 million funding package between the Atlantic Fleet Foundation and cheap operating up through the time John Queen. So that conversation has morphed over the last two years, but the key part of it was the extra money was gonna come from this lease back agreement.

So originally it was gonna be a 20 year, $1 million a year. We found out that that is actually a 30 year, $1.2 million a year, it's the $36 million going to the Atlanta Police Foundation. And part of what they had talked about using it for in 2021 was to pay down this $20 million loan, construction loan that the Adelaide Police Foundation was planning

on taking out to build the facility. So when they were talking about that $60 million philanthropic donation. They really, they've meant, or 20 of that was gonna come from alone, but the city was gonna pay back. So immediately, like these numbers were skewed from the get-go, and have been misleading for the last year and a half. And I mean, part of the original plans

for the Cops City Project and people are unaware included what like 30 million dollars of public funds being contributed. And the other 60 million for the first phase was supposed to come via like private funds with the land-based foundation doing like fundraising with Via all their big corporate backers. And then what's happened in the past few months of them trying to downscale some of the more expensive parts of the plan and cutting some of the fab in terms of the stables aren't going to be the same spot that they wanted there to be stables. And other small kind of money saving cuts and then all this increase in the amount of the project that's just being funded by taxpayers.

It seems like the APS been not as successful in being able to fund their project privately as they initially hoped. That's at least my read from what's going on here. So maybe not from what they originally hoped, but from what they originally told us, or told us that they were going to do. According to the chief financial operator of the city of advance of Muhammad Bala, he said that the Admin of Police Foundation

has raised $33.4 million in philanthropic funds for this, which their goal apparently this whole time was only $30 million in actual funds from corporations and philanthropic organizations. Including the streamer destiny who donated, I I think $20,000 to the Atlanta Philly Foundation. Which is a reference to all of you internet cells out there who are also cursed with this knowledge. So the other interesting thing is originally $10 million was supposed to come

in new market, spread its, and we're getting like really into the, we have no finances. And I'm sorry. So as you said, new market tax credits, part of my brain just like shut off. But continue, continue. We can't really continue.

I'm like 30,000 foot overview. That money is supposed to go to like revitalizing and poverty or like underserved communities. It's supposed to go to revitalizing an encouraged or underserved communities, it's supposed to go to businesses that want to open grocery stores and food deserts and things like that. So it's not $10 million anymore. Now it's $5 million, but it's still going to build

a least-training center in a predominantly black neighborhood that is under the average monthly income. So things got twisted here. This doesn't seem like a revitalization project that is supposed to improve the lives of the neighbors around it. So yeah, it seems like the amount of funding that they actually are going to end up receiving from public funds is ballooned to be much bigger than they initially promised. The net project was initially sold on, which is just another thing in the long line of APF moments.

So, this entire time, the deputy chief operating officer for the city of Atlanta, Lashonda Burs, she has been playing quarterback for the finance conversation and she was part of the finance conversation like the way back in place. So somebody, she's in the mayor's cabinet and she's privy to these conversations. So the entire time, this is happening, I'm very thickens is still out in the press, repeating this $30 million number, tell us Rose Scott, who's basically our NPR person here,

and he tells us to the AJC, the paper of record, and says that it's gonna be $30 million so that it goes over, it's going to come out of the Atlanta police foundation. And then of course, his cabinet is having conversations without way more money this entire. Well, do you know who else cares a lot about money? The products and services? The products and services?

The products and services really do want your money. And now also the, the, the Sophie is poking me to tell you the Apple premium subscription option. Also, here's a lot of it. Your money and Android version launching shortly. Anyway, here's the ads. Okay, we are back. We're going to talk about another, another, another good, a, a, a, a, staying on the topic staying on the topic of stealing your money and using

it for purposes that it's probably not very good. Let's talk about the two Atlanta City Council meetings that happened. One was during late May, right? That was the first one with public comment. That was like, it's people were going to come public comment for like seven hours. That lasted quite a while. It was a pretty, pretty long day. And then on the, then during the meeting on June 5th was even longer. Like how late were you at city council on the June, on June 5th? All right. Well, on May 15th, the first city council meeting, one where we kind of like,

we're like, hey, this is gonna come up for vote. So, and then organizers, you know, got everyone to show up. Yeah, so about seven and a half hours public comment that night, city council meeting ended up, like, think like 11 o'clock. And then there was a meeting, the finance executive committee meeting,

kind of in between it had about two hours of public comment, which for a subcommittee meeting is a lot. And then all of that, every record was blown out of the water on June 5th, where we had just over 14 hours of public comment. That includes like breaks for disruption and like a 10 minute break that city council took.

And then a lot of arguing between the city council president trying to calm people down. But overall, it was 14 and a half hours of just public comment, which is the largest public comment, in person public comment sessions. That is in modern history. Yeah. And it was basically unanimous.

There were four speakers who got up pretty early, who were in favor of the training center, and then everyone else was NC cop city. Yeah, I remember seeing some things about like APF please departments trying to like trying to push people through to give public comment? Yeah, so there was a rumor going around that the Atlanta Police Foundation and the mayor's office were trying to get 50 people. There was like this number. It was like 50 people.

I never saw anything to back up, but they did seem like the four people who showed up were kind of coordinated and like one of them brought their kids, which the stop-top to the side does the same thing. So it did seem to be some like intentional parallels. But what was not parallel to just the sheer number of people on the different sides? It was... I don't think anybody who's in favor of the facility is going to wait 14 hours to talk for two minutes. Yeah.

That's just not going to happen. The Atlanta Police Foundation hasn't shown up to defend the facility since 2021. They're the most invested. Yeah, it is striking the amount of which their work on it is just so much like backdoor lobbying. And they've really never had to defend the project like publicly and openly. It's all just these backer meetings

between city council members, between people in the mayor's office, between people in the police department. Yeah, the Atlanta police foundation lobbyist was actually running around city hall on June 5th. Yeah, not surprising. So I feel like most people are online. They probably heard the result of the vote after 14 hours of public comment, which was almost like unanimously against the facility. What was it, a 4-11?

Yeah, 4 votes against 11 in favor. So they passed the funding package allocating at least the 33 million plus the future loans. The leafback agreement, yes. Yes. And it's 31 million plus the leafback. Okay. We're not going to get more deep than that. Okay. But yes, it was like, what time was, there was like 4 a.m.

At 30. Jesus. What what time was it was like 4 a.m. at 30 Jesus I got there. There was a young Democrats like thing Against there was a press conference with the young Democrats of Georgia coming out against cups at 8 a.m So I was there at 7 30 I left city hall at 6 30 That was The wildest day

So so after probably the longest city council meeting day and quite a while, they, the history, the history, they, they, they voted to approve the funding, which I, I mean, I don't know, I wasn't, I wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed as a parent would say. I want to point out a couple of things that they did in preparation. I think City Council is prepared for an action or a Hector's video, and they had two moves to neutralize them. The first is they moved the actual vote on this to the very last thing. So the vote on the funding came at the end of the meeting. So if there was an attempt to stop the vote itself, it wouldn't have affected any city

business before that. And then they also prepared a committee room. So that if things got rowdy or there was some sort of direct action in the chambers itself, they were just gonna take the council and physically move them to a different room and let people continue to demonstrate in city council. So I think they're, they, you, they made some wise moves on their end to prepare. Yeah, and they've loaded the chamber with the cops before the vote, I know, back like during the afternoon, they were setting up kind of barricades and staging around city hall. I mean, it just seemed to be a lot of like a retic, a retic stuff happening around did not. I mean, yeah, I mean, I was unsure what was going to happen myself.

I didn't know how it would play out, what tax people would try to employ. It seemed like people mostly tried to kind of like go by the book there and see how far that would get. And then if the result was like what we got, then other things will happen in these next few months, especially with a week of action coming up. So yeah, do you think people on the, like what did people on the ground think? Like did they think that the vote would go through and do they think that the vote would be stopped?

I'm at, I am kind of, it's been, it's been a little, a little over a month since I've been in Atlanta. And I think the mood on the ground fluctuates so quickly often. Yeah, and I think that the mood on the ground fluctuates so quickly often. Yeah, I think it's kind of dependent upon which segment of the movement we're talking about. There's obviously whole sections of the movement that are opposed to electoralism. Sure. They still showed up. Like they still came and gave public comment. And I feel like they didn't expect

that this would go any other way. There's more like, electorally plugged in groups that there was a slim chance of this thing getting sent back to committee. And that was the closest that this had to not going through. City Council, that this had to not going through.

City Council, you know, the kind of the whip count that we learned was if it came to a straight up or down vote, it was always going to go through. It's never the numbers to do anything else. So there was some lobbying happening behind the scenes that with student organizers and various other organizers who are more prone to having these discussions, especially with elected officials. So they were bobbing for the Stigitz

at that community where it would be held and hopefully the way the actual funding and mess up APF funding mechanism, but that didn't happen. So there were people I who were hopeful, like even I was, you know, I said that this was the closest electorally that we'd ever come to stopping it, you know, just kind of knowing how the whip count changed over the course of like 48 hours. It got close and then it got taken away. Are the Dickens called city council members into his office Monday morning and started peeling them off?

Yeah. Well, I mean, and this was never going to be the end of the movement by any means. There was already plans for things afterwards, like the week of action at the end of June here. And I guess we can, we can talk about how some of the ways the movement might continue going forward after, after these, these, these messages from our, our lovely sponsors who endorse everything we're saying. Thank you, Ronald Reagan.

I know you agree with me on this. So we're saying. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. I know you agree with me on this. So we're back. Is it really my fight ghost? It was crazy. Yeah, I mean, most people don't. So if you're part of the... Gold me on the gold, though. Yeah, exactly. If you're part of the ghost on the community, there is a few types of ghosts

who actually really like bargaining material possessions. If they're able to give away enough of their stuff, their soul is able to give away enough of their stuff, their soul is able to actually transcend to the next level. I'm going to do a more safe, it's like a more restful place. So these are people who've been too materially driven on Earth, their soul gets trapped in that.

So they have to make sure that they get rid of their gold in order to them to go to their next place where that's like a safer version of limbo, paradise, heaven, hell, whatever. Yeah, we have to move here so I can learn more about this. I was just thinking all of that up on the fly. So let's talk about what's going to happen next.

Obviously, there was a week of action planned for June 24th to July 1st, which is going to be a very hot week. So there's that, to my understanding, in Trenton Creek Park is still closed, correct? So in Trenton Creek Park is still closed. There is a motion or there's some legislation into the cab county board commissioners that is supposed to come up again on Tuesday. The CEO is office asked for like 30 days to finish cleaning up the park.

So the 30 days will expire on Monday and then there's a board of commissioners meeting on Tuesday. So, where after that, hopefully the park is open, but we'll see. So it may or may not be open. That is still, that or may not be open. That is still, that is still to be determined. I've heard there will be another music festival of some sort, not many details as of time

of recording. So we knew that was going to happen. I talked about this during the week of action, retrospective episode, which honestly is still pretty applicable here in terms of the amount of destruction that's happened in the forest and how people are thinking about ways to continue resistance in the face of not again, I'm against the binary of like victory and defeat. I think that's not a useful way of looking at this situation at this point, but they're kind of looking down the barrel of something now. Being a lot of the lands been cleared, a lot of the trees have been cut. Pre-construction is ongoing. Construction is scheduled for this summer.

They just got approved for all the city funding, right? Things are in motion. So the ways that people are gonna choose to resist now might be different than the ways that they chose to resist like a year or two ago because it's just a very different situation. There's a different risk level. There's a lot of more surveillance around the forest. There's a lot more surveillance outside the forest. It's just a very different scenario. So I think the retrospective of episode still contains a few things about how assistance might might take forms during these next few weeks. But there's this other thing that

came up after the city council meeting, which is the referendum that some people are planning. Do you want to go over a little bit of those details? Yeah, so a lot of people I've seen kind of on Twitter where a lot of people are like, oh, the referendum is just coming out and rise to the city council vote. And like, no, this has been in the works for a little while. Okay. See, my knowledge it dates back to, I mean, I know it dates back to before even the funding question was in place. So it's been in the works for a minute. And then they decided to hold off until after the city. So we're probably decided to hold off until after the city.

So we're probably going to do it regardless of the city. But the referendum, there is a spaceport that was supposed to be built in South Georgia and basically this one woman started a referendum question and got this pay for a cancel. Of course, we're talking very different, like municipalities, that was a much smaller one than she only had a 14, 100 signatures or something like that. But there's a referendum question that is in front of the municipal clerk who had a sign off on it

and make sure that it is properly worded and all these things, like just to demonstrate issue at this. Once the clerk signs off on it, then the organizers have 60 days to collect 75,000. The number they actually need is just over 70,000, but they're collecting a little extra because the signatures will be challenged, you know, things like that with a vote. If they're successful in doing so, it goes automatically on the November 7th and then it will be a straight-up or down question of do we cancel this 2021 lease to the advantage please. But there are a couple where this comes in I think most interestingly is Where this comes in, I think, most interestingly, is the organizers of this believe that they can get an injunction to stop construction.

So now, once the referendum campaign takes off, and then if they collect the 70,000 signatures, again, until November 7th. So this could significantly delay the AbNFLE Foundation's ability to continue destruction on the land. And like right now we're in the mass grading phase of this project which is the most environmentally damaging part of it. Now we're we're screwing with the contours of the land. So you know they're going to have to prove that they're serious about the referendum, and the judge is gonna have to believe that the referendum is at least likely to succeed in order to get this injunction, but it does look like they should be able to prove

at least that they are serious and there is a good chance of this meeting. How soon do people have to start doing stuff for that? So the referendum once the clerk signs off on the paperwork and that the clerk has seven days to validate the clerk. And then once that happens, you have the 60 days. So we're in this kind of interim period where they can't start collecting signature. But as soon as the clerk signs off on it, they will start collecting signatures. So they anticipate the clerk to like, I have tried to hold off as long as possible. So they're looking at Wednesday, which I'm going to look at my calendar because you know, exactly what to read that.

So they're looking at Wednesday, the 14th as the kickoff for the signature collecting camp. So for more information about the reference campaign or to find ways to volunteer or if you are an Atlanta resident who was registered to vote in the last election, you can sign the referendum with Cops city vote dot. That's copsity vote dot com. Cool. Let's see, there's one other thing that happened of note the past few weeks. One thing one little thing.

There's one other thing that happened to note the past few weeks. And that's when police rated the home of three people. And this home kind of serves as like a legal defense hub in Atlanta and arrested three people associated with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund and are charging them with a variety of, quote unquote, charity fraud and like another quite nonsensical financial crimes

as the bail hearing judge admitted himself. So, do wanna go over some of those details because this is something that was honest, people have been expecting this to happen. Like the Atlanta Salt Solidarity Fund themselves who said, hey, we will probably be the target of something like this in the future. During other hearings, the prosecutors have talked about

how they're investigating the Solidarity Fund as a part of this conspiracy they're trying to weave. So it's definitely something that's been on people's minds of this type of legal, this type of like state repression to weave. So it's definitely something that's been on on people's minds of a tribe, of this type of legal, this type of like state repression targeting all of like the bail funds and like legal support structures that have been set up. So yeah, this set, this happened like late late may I believe? May 31st. May 31st. Yeah, last day of May 31st, they were still asleep in their beds. They got a big sort of swap broke down their door.

I'm sure everyone's seen the video. It's broke down their door, armored vehicle, and pulled them all out of their beds in their pajamas and took them to jail in their pajamas. Like, just utterly insane for a bail fund or a non-profit to have this go down. But yeah, they had been prepared for this for quite some time. Marlon, one of the organizers had sent ACPP, you know, a statement in preparation for this. And, you know, you saw how quickly they transitioned the actual running of the veil from the Atlanta Salad area, fallen to the National Veil network.

Happened seamlessly that day. So they were prepared. And then, you know, someone who was talking to Marlon while he was in jail said, Marlon, pretty chill about the whole thing, which if you've ever interacted or seen Marlon, that's pretty apt to describe him. But the actual charges are insane. The charity fraud part of it, they're saying things like buying a cell phone for the bail fund is charity broad or reimbursing yourself for gas is charity broad or buying COVID tests is charity broad like all these things that are just like overhead. Yeah, very, very standard like overhead costs for running an organization of this scale. overhead costs for running an organization of this scale. Yeah.

And as this was all on the website when people don't it anyway to talk to the various uses that these funds were going to have, the charges are extremely flimsy. There was a veil hearing a few days later, which I watched the whole thing, and the judge there did not think the charges had much, much merit, which is the first time really during any kind of bail hearing associated with stop-cups and these stuff, where the judge was like, okay, so this just seems very clearly fake.

And told the prosecution that they'll have to put a much stronger case together if they want this to go forward at any, at, at, at, at, at any further stage. So all three got out on bail. It's, it's pretty scary though. We like it, it's, it's, it's fucking sucks. During the bail hearing, the, I believe I believe it was, it was, it was the assistant attorney general, um, who was there, Jeff Fowler. I would love Fowler. He was talking about how police were going through the trash of Solidarity Fund, how they're monitoring phone calls, other other communications. So just another, another good reason to have a paper shredder and to have a to have a burn pile in your

backyard, because yeah, they're going to go through your trash if they want to find things out about you. They stole a journal from somebody. They were someone's personal journal was taken. So yeah, a lot of kind of very, very standard, like, very standard of this type of shady investigation police stuff, which is just, it's always good to have a reminder for people about what the police are willing to do. But still, even with all that,

it seems like they were not able to get much at all because the most they could put together is, oh, you use these funds in a way that you explicitly said that you could be used on your website, which is not probably not going to be a crime. So not compelling long term, but certainly a pretty large inconvenience in the short term and still a varied, like, chilling display of police repression saying that we'll make your life incredibly difficult if we don't like you. And as this happens every time there's been this massive display of police repression, it utterly backfired. Right?, we, national media is now just

harping on the fact that these charges are overgrown and they're attacking bail floods, which is inconceivable to, let's say, like the liberal or the liberal left's way of things. And so you've blown this issue into another sphere of awareness. You know, you've got Chris Hayes now on MSNBC doing an entire segment on capacity, which is not something we had before,

even though the domestic terrorism charges. And I think this was just, tactically a terrible decision by the Attorney General's office to go through with this because the PR side of it is a nightmare. And rightfully so, this is an insane escalation. Is the bail fund still being operated by the National bail organization at this point? Yes, so the bail funds is still being run out of the national

So the bail funds is still being run out of the national network at this point in time. So secure.actblue.com slash donate slash Atlanta solidarity will get you a donate page. Continue to support bail in Atlanta, which again, we've got a week of action coming up, bail funds are highly probable in terms of being used. Yeah, I mean, as they were used to bail out the three people who are the bail, who are part of the bail fund organizers, because I think they all got a $15,000 bail, which is a relatively low amount in terms of what we've seen in relation to this movement.

And I was looking through the December warrants and bail hearings a minute ago for another story and then there were like $10,000. The cost is ballooned dramatically in the last months. So to go back down to $15,000, the bail was terrible and awful, but that seems way more in mind with expectation. Yeah. Well, so that is just a small glimpse at the many things that have been happening that past a month.

Things do not seem to be slowing down. Things just seem to be changing in ways that makes everything certainly a tricky and not very clear, but that's kind of the way that these things go. People are still going to be showing up. There's the week of action happening on starting on the 24th, so that's going to be this month. So it's going to be an interesting lead up to July 1st. Yeah, the movement continues.

Where can people find your work, Matt? Yeah, you can follow ACPC at advanced on other scorepress on Twitter. You can follow me at Matt, ACPC on Twitter. And our website is atlpresscollective.com. I assume. Yeah, I could, did I cut out? You did to go that, I could not hear at all.

I say I heard it. I heard it. I heard ATL press collective. Yeah, just, you know, ATL press collective dot com dot com. Fantastic. Yeah, you can, I'll put a link for the, for the new, for the new Solidarity Fund, secure dot act blue dot com slash donate slash a Atlanta Solidarity because that, I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to

go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to

go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to

go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and I'm going to go to the website and Forest account on Twitter along with the many websites that that exist at this point. But yeah, so that's going to be happening later. I don't know what will happen because I because I don't know because I really have another fun week because I really have no idea what's going to happen because what happened in the last one was also quite, quite surprising. So who knows who knows what will, what will go down.

But thank you Matt for joining me to give me, give me the listeners a bit of an update on the, again, many, many things that have been happening in Atlanta. I'll see you all on the other side. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet suit. With the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV.

Okay, I'm going there for the A. But I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say,

can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not certified grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steal, who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know.

Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers and government cover-ups, from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full

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you know, uh-huh. Everybody not my mom. Ha ha ha. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me as I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations.

When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can. Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And welcome to a very special joint episode of two shows that you hopefully love. One, the House of Pod, I'm Kavi, I'm the host of that show, and it could happen here with my good friend James Stout, James Hi!

Hi Kavi, I'm very excited about this, this is a rare privilege. Yeah, I'm very excited too, we'll get straight to it, just a quick reminder, if you're not following one of these shows, if you're following the other, yeah follow both! Why not? And leave a nice review if you like the shows either way, but we're really excited, so what's good straight to the episode? How's that sound? Yep, nice go. And welcome back! Oh, I know every week I say this is a special episode, and I'm usually lying. 99% of the time it's not special, but this week is very special.

It's a special because I've never done this before. I'm very excited. It's a topic I really have wanted to cover for a while, but I'm gonna be covering the topic with a good friend of mine who has an excellent show and we're doing a joint show release thing and I've never done it. It's like a Marvel team up

and I'm very excited for it. James, stout, James, I'm gonna introduce your first journalist podcaster, host of It Could Happen Here, which if you're listening to this on It Could Happen, here you already knew that James Welcome to the show. Hi. Thank you. Yeah, I don't watch many superhero movies So I'm now concerned as to which model hero villain I would be

Well, I was thinking more of the comics, but if I have to I have to pin you to a character. It's moonlight I think that's clear. Okay. It's going straight past me, buddy, but I'm sure I'm sure. I take my word for it. It's cool. It's cool. James, can you tell us a little bit about what we're covering today? Let's talk to our people about what then what should we start guess, but let's tell people what we're trying to cover today. Yeah, of course. So we're talking about healthcare and indigenous context and how we can both learn from and stand in solidarity with indigenous communities when it comes to you, health care, I guess. Excellent.

And to help us with that, we have two guests. We have a medical student at a little school called Harvard. I think it's a liberal arts school out in the east somewhere. Correct. And Victor Lopez-Carman, he was the prior elected co-chair of the United Nations Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. He is a member of the Crow Creek Su tribe and also from the Yaki tribe. Is that correct? Okay, excellent. Welcome to the shows. Thank you so much. I'm honestly props to pronouncing all that right. Oh, yeah. No, your stuff I'm going to get right. Our next guest whose name is Molly

I'm going to probably destroy her name because that those are the names I have a hard time with. Dr. Molly Hallweaver is that correct? Correct. E.R. Dr. at UC Davis, one of my favorite hospitals in the world. Is that also correct? That is correct. I work at UC Davis. So I guess maybe we should start like. If we want to start out by explaining maybe how healthcare, like what things that when we look at healthcare and indigenous contacts, what are things we're looking at, the differentiated from healthcare in other contexts, right? What what would be the areas that both of you guys think that folks

who aren't familiar with this because sadly, I think What would be the areas that both of you guys think that folks who aren't familiar with this, because sadly, I think a lot of the United States, they either don't think they know Indigenous people or maybe they really don't. And we can explain the lots of Indigenous people, most Indigenous people live off res too, I think that will be very valuable. But what sort of topics will be looking at when we're looking at healthcare from an indigenous perspective? I think like when you look at indigenous peoples in the US, you think of our traditional health system as well. Like that was what we've always had. That was what we've had for thousands of years and

the efforts to maintain the traditional health, traditional healing practices. And then you look at the Western health system, the different systems we have access to today, including the Indian Health Service, which is unique to us, tribal clinics, tribal operated clinics, and hospitals, everyday hospitals that anyone else uses, because like you said, the majority of Native Americans today in the US live in cities or urban contexts.

Molly, let me ask you because people may be wondering, how did you become involved with delivery of healthcare to the Native American population? Yeah, thanks. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. I'm excited to chat with you all. I kind of had a unique opportunity. I've always been interested in Indian Health Service as a health care delivery system and indigenous peoples. When I was a I started fellowship, I did a global health fellowship and I started in 2020. So it was not a great year to be a global health fellow for many reasons.

So I had very obviously around lockdown and work was hard and stressful as an ER doc. And so we're trying to be creative in how we can do this global health fellowship. And so I got in touch with a awesome physician, Dom Maggio, who is the ED director at White River, which is a poche nation in Arizona. It's like three hours east of Phoenix. So he went to Highland, he was a Highland alum, Highland DM alum, which is an Oakland, and now works full-time at White River. Anyways, got connected with him and everything that was going on during the pandemic,

because as I'm sure you guys are all aware, and probably a lot of our listeners that the Navajo and Apache tribes were had much higher rates of COVID and of severe COVID. And so I went as first for kind of public health outreach. So I went and did some contact tracing and helped do. They did a really cool program of outreach in the community to go and check on the locals. And we would go and check Pulsak. So we'd see how high their oxygen saturation was

and see how people were doing to try to catch disease early. So that's how I kind of got into doing it. And then I loved it there and wanted to keep working. And so I continued to moonlight, which means I worked kind of as a locomotive. I don't know if I need to explain that for medical jargon, but I worked every one to two months. I would fly to Arizona and work on the res for a week. Very, very cool. So Victor, get, gain back a little bit to where Native Americans are getting their healthcare. What is, what is your interest once you're done? And when you graduate from F, where are you? What year are you right now? I'm a fourth year, so I'm in my last year.

Oh my god. I bet for you, buddy. How, how you right now? I'm a fourth year. So I'm in my last year. Oh my God. Good for you, buddy. How you liking it? I'm liking it less. You're in fourth year? No, I'm not like, like, I like medicine. I still maintain medical school. Like I'm ready to be done with school. You got senioritis, is that what you mean? Pretty much. Yeah.

You're rising fourth year or have you already matched? No, I'm a rising for fear. I'm applying to residency now. So, so talk to us about what you would like to where you'd like to go and what kind of medicine you would like to practice. Honestly, anywhere that will take me, I just want to be a doctor, but yeah, I really, I want to go into pediatrics, I always wanted to help and take care of native kids and back in the community, for sure. I want to go back and be a community member again.

I've been gone for so long. I feel like I've been only able to go back for like, you know, breaks and things like that. And it's, it's, it hasn't been enough for me as an indigenous person. So I'm ready to go back, be a doctor, be part of the community, be there for ceremonies, be there to be patients. That's my ideal. I think one thing that's my ideal. I think one thing that's really interesting, especially, and we have this chance to talk to you, which we often don't have, is you mentioned balancing

Western medical technology with indigenous medical technologies, right? And I'm really interested in hearing how you would approach that for folks who aren't familiar or for folks who don't have the knowledge of Indigenous medical technologies that you might or you maybe have people who you go to for that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's important to just already start the conversation that so much Indigenous medical technology has already been appropriated by Western medicine, as Western medicine, aspirin, for instance. Many traditional healing practices that were, and are still find themselves seeping

into the field of psychiatry, or around parenting, mental health, the way that, for instance, that indigenous peoples, I think there's a growing understanding in the medical field about planetary health and the impacts of climate change on health, and a lot of that has already been said and fought for by indigenous peoples for a very long time. And so there's already a lot of stuff that we're working with, and I think it's important to give indigenous peoples their flowers. But yeah, I think when it comes to integrating on the clinical level, it's going to differ

from community to community. You might know, but in the Pasquo-Yaki tribe, the health division employs a team of traditional healers that come up, I think, monthly from Sonora, Mexico, from the villages. And Yaki patients can elect to see the traditional healers with or without a Western trained physician. And there's a whole room where they have all these herbs and plants that Yaki people have been using for thousands of years. And I think that's very beautiful. One reason we've been able to do that is because our tribe elected to run their own health division, rather than having the Indian Health Service run for them.

We had the capability to do that at the time. Not all tribes do have the capability yet. We had it and I think it's been beneficial for us because it's given us more freedom to bridge Western and traditional medicine in a way that works for us. The the Yaki system is a really great one. Like and like people probably that people won't be familiar with it. I guess in most people listening won't be familiar with it, but it's allowed the tribe to do all kinds of cool things. Like in, I've been involved in a diabetes prevention cycling program there for a bit 10 years, something I don't know long time.

But there are things that that can be done because of that block grant or running their own system as opposed to having IHS run the system. Could you like, because Molly, I think you're more familiar with like at IHS clinic model, right? Would one of you want to explain the difference between the two of those for people who aren't familiar? IHS versus... The pass-cruarchy tribe run their own system.

I think they get a block grant, I correct me if I'm wrong, I think they get a block grant for my IHS, I certainly spend that as AC for. Yeah, I can speak to the IHS side, but for me, this, and Victor, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but for me it was easy to, it's kind of similar to the VA for just for medical doctors to understand in that it's a set of money that the government sets aside for a certain population and veterans for the VA and IHS for natives. But there's obviously disparity between those two, per capita spending is way higher

in the VA than it is on IHS. But it's a Western system and all of the staff on the hospital, like the reservation hospital or the Indian hospital are all employees of IHS, so they're actually kind of like federal employees. And we can kind of get into the leads a bit later, but there's a lot of turnover because it's, sometimes it's hard places to live, and they kind of recruit young doctors, and there's a lot of turnover for the primary care doctors. And then in the ER where I work, there's very few board certified ER doctors. So it's staffed by non-EM certified docs. That sounds right to me.

The only other thing I would add is that the Indian Health Service, it's predicated on what's called the federal trust responsibility. That's built over decades of Supreme Court precedent, smaller court precedents over the years that I think a lot of them were based in treaties made with Indigenous peoples. And basically this means that the government because of the harm, the oppression, the colonization that has been dealt upon indigenous peoples across the United States, there's a trust responsibility for the federal government to do something about the lingering impacts. They have a responsibility to provide health services to indigenous peoples in the US.

That was also in many of the treaties that were made with indigenous nations. And I think it does go over people's heads sometimes that this is not a favor. This is not a gift. It's a responsibility based on centuries of oppression and that that responsibility is not fully being met right now because the Indian Health Service is severely underfunded. The way that the funds are appropriated is

unique to government health care programs, the way that the veterans, for instance, veterans affairs is appropriated is much more effective than the way Indian Health Service is appropriated at the federal level. It might be worth explaining here just briefly that not all tribes are federally recognized, right? And not only did you as people are part of federally recognized tribes, and how would that impact their access to healthcare? Yeah, well, you know, federal recognition isn't perfect.

It's a, it's a really arduous process process and not all tribes are federally recognized for those tribes who aren't. They don't have access to those services. Like the Indian Health Service or the Bureau of Indian Education, for instance, and many other federal grants that indigenous peoples and indigenous nations can apply for or just automatically get for incendiary COVID-19, and there were specific funding allocated for tribal nations. Those tribal nations who are not federally recognized, they wouldn't have access to them. Let me shift gears a little bit here and get to a question that is I think going to be

very difficult to answer. And it's one of those impossible questions because there's so many parts to it, I'm sure, and it varies so much. But I like to talk a little bit about the major health issues that you guys feel are facing Native Americans right now and whether or not if they are at all different from the rest of the US population. And then we could talk about what barriers there are to care in that regards. But we'll start with with you Molly, can you tell us from your experience working there, what are the major health issues that you feel may or may not be the same as the general population? Yeah, I think at the end of the day, it's very similar. You're seeing the same disease processes that you're seeing in the general population,

but you're seeing everything's a little bit more severe, I would say. Like there's more, there's higher rates of the chronic disorders like diabetes and hypertension and it's kind of more severe long-term effects of the diabetes and hypertension and at younger ages. I think that was kind of what was most striking to me. You're seeing the long-term, the bad effects,

the long-term bad effects at younger ages. You're seeing alcohol use disorder is a problem everywhere in the United States, but on tribes, alcohol use disorder is much higher. And again, it was honestly shocking to see 30-year-olds who had end-stage liver disease from alcohol use disorder. And I saw some of the sickest people I've seen

have been from my time there. So everything just is a little a little bit harder and the reasons for that as we can talk about our like totally multi-fectorial but I mind with poverty funding is a huge like funding and poverty go hand-in-hand education and just the fact that yeah they've been oppressed for centuries but yeah I think it's at the end of the day it was the same, I was seeing the same things that I would see at UC Davis,

but I was seeing it on a more extreme basis, I would say. Victor? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's important to know, to sort of say that these problems exist all across the US because there can be stereotypes associated with all the concerns that are attributed to the way that we live or our culture or just inherent to who we are. There's this prevailing notion that I don't know what came first, but I think in the medical field,

I still hear about it in class sometimes. They'll say, like Native Americans have the highest rates of diabetes or heart disease, but they won't say why. And it makes people think that, oh, are they just not catching on? Like are they just living badly? And when you don't say why, it kind of, I think it creates a lot of ignorance and a lot of room for interpretation.

So I think it's really important to talk about those background reasons. For instance, with diabetes, I think on a lot of reservations, There's no access to one traditional foods, which have been, you know, through policy eradicated through government policies over the decades and centuries. And no access to healthy foods. These are food deserts. And at the same time, like Dr. Hallweaver mentioned, there's poverty.

So if you're trying to get healthy food, you don't have, number one, it's not in the reservation. You might not even be able to afford it if you can get off the reservation. Not a lot of people have, you know, not everyone has a car or the ability to mobilize, you know, hour and a half to the health food store. And so, you know, a lot of, that's just one example of like some of the systemic reasons why somebody could get diabetes quite early. And there's also a lot of lingering trauma and mental health impacts that I think play into the high rates of alcoholism. There were some early efforts to try to limit alcohol on reservations that we still see today. On some reservations, alcohol is entirely illegal on the reservation, but you'll see businesses

right on the border of the reservation just camp themselves there, right on the border, knowing that the population is vulnerable, maybe not knowing that it's because of the historical trauma and things, but there's something there, you know, so there's still an aspect of being targeted there by something that, you know, the community is highly vulnerable to, still to this day. It's a really interesting point that you bring up, because I remember being in medical school and you know, you sit in these lecture halls and some, they would bring up like Native Americans

being a high risk for all these things. There would be like, one of these little footnotes that would be in a lot of our lectures and that sort of thing. They never explained why. I mean, medical school, particularly then, was wouldn't want to touch anything that they might see as a even mildly political issue, even though not discussing it made it one, really. Do you, you must be annoyed by this?

Does this happen to you? Like, are you like singing your lecture class? And then like the teacher will mention something about Native Americans, then all like the white students in your class just turn their heads and like look at you to see your response. That's happy sometimes. You're like, what? Listen, I just like find a wall and I stare at it. Just anticipating it.

Just looking in deep thought until it passes. Right. Sorry. Smart student. Molly, you're going to add something? I was going to add to that Victor that yeah, just to highlight the food desert example during COVID, right? The White River reservation had one grocery store and during the lockdown, it was only open, you know, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It had really limited hours, and that was their one grocery store

for the entire reservation. And so it was just even during the pandemic, everything got a little bit worse, but yeah, they have very limited access to the healthy foods for sure. One thing that I was like recently educated about during a discussion about diabetes prevention was epigenetics. I'm a doctor of modern European history, so if I go off the rails at any point, I'm going to rely on one of you three to gently guide me back. But I found that fascinating, the concept of intergenerational trauma

and epigenetics and how that can impact healthcare today. Is that something either of you could explain to listeners who like me a relatively ignorant on it? And that to the... I can take this one actually, because actually it's interesting because I did an episode recently about the intergenerational trauma of the Persian diaspora after the the revolution and how this most

recent set of protests sort of reignited this trauma. And excuse me, one of the one of the guests mentioned that there was a study in mice in which they looked at sort of epigenetics of stress response. They had pregnant mice and they like, they would give them the scent of rose blossom or something and then they'd shock them. And then the mouse would grow to be really fearful of those shocks that were associated with the rose blossom.

And then what they noticed was that the children of the mice would also respond poorly to that same Rose Blossom scent, even though they didn't have the exposure to it. I looked into it, because the truth of it is, I don't think you can inherit specific phobias, that just doesn't happen, but I kind of push back on that point a little bit. And I got a lot of messages from molecular pathologists who are like, so you can stress during pregnancy. And it can be, it can affect the DNA, it can affect the DNA. And that can, that can be passed down, changes in the DNA, disruption in the DNA. You can't inherit specific phobias or, or, or fears or stresses per se, but it can clearly cause genetic damage when you have that much stress.

Then on top of that, of course, we're talking about the psychological impact it has on someone, and then how they raise their children and how their children grow up. It is, I agree, it's a very interesting subject. I don't want to get any more molecular pathologist emails. Molly, what would you say? I was going to say I'm glad you took this epigenetic expression from me. You know, one thing about you're going back to what you were saying, Victor, about the situations that have sort of predicated this, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is most of the land that these Indian reservations are on in the United States, like there's 326 if I'm read that correctly, is not on great land. It's like land that's like close to

like mines or places where there's some sort of radiation or there's some sort of issues, not great like for growing food itself directly there. Is that correct? Is that part of this? Correct. Yeah, I think a lot of it was, the intention was to put Indigenous peoples on land that wasn't as fertile, and that kind of goes back into what I was talking about traditional foods, and how it's difficult. But I think, you know, I don't know if this time was all there at the time. And I think now a lot of indigenous land, a lot of reservations. Actually, they found out that they're, yeah, they're on like on top of big mines and like things that the Western world finds really valuable. And so there's a shift almost to,

you see it in like policies and lawsuits today to start trying to grab more minerals from the land that they actually put us on, which they didn't think was valuable. And now they're like, wait, there's like copper under there. Yeah, like a flat to get example of that, right? copper under there. Yeah, like flat to get example of that, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the podcaster and the rapper propaganda prop, I'm James, you probably met him. You know, he he speaks about how initially they they put the African Americans in the the waterfront, they said,

here, you're going to live in these places by the ocean where you can't really grow things that well. And then, after a while, they realized, oh, no, that's really valuable property. And then you start trying to find ways to get them out of there. It seems to be our national MO. Can we get back to the IHS a little bit? So you guys have mentioned Indian health services. It's come up a couple times. And James, I'd also want to hear your, because you're there as well. I'd like to hear, like, what are some things

that the IHS is doing well? What are some things that need work and how? I just want to say that IHS, I think they're doing what they can't. A lot of it, they're doing what they well with what they have. I would say like a lot of the issues are under funding and we don't exactly know how well, like we don't really know the potential quite yet because they just don't have enough funding. So I think like I would just like to insert that caveat into the conversation first. Yeah. Yeah. like I would just like to insert that caveat into the conversation first.

Yeah. Yeah, and I, you know, I only have experience on one reservation and they're, you know, everyone is different for sure. I think someone might know more than me, but the Alaska Health System, Indian Health System is still part of the NHS, but it's like kind of its own thing, and they are the kind of the gold standard for, or they're kind of the, they are doing the best with what they have. And I, I don't know, maybe you guys know James or Victor that if they have more funding is probably a big part of it. If they just have more funding, but they are kind of touted as the leader in IHS right now.

I know that less about this than I did view, I'm sure, but I know I worked on it in IH grant years ago with someone who'd worked with the last good native people. And they were talking about this Promo-Doris-Disaloo model, which I don't know if you guys have any for that. It came from Oakland, actually, but it's a P.A. mentor model for health education

that they had implemented there and we were trying to get money to implement that and the YARCY reservation didn't work shockingly. And that model that they use of like using people from the community to educate people from the community rather than like I guess you could call it like white men and white coats, worked very well for them. And I think it's a very desirable model to replicate. It's not that expensive either. And we were doing it with diabetes prevention rights. So like, chiefly, my thing is riding bikes has been my whole life. And so, just a big old bike riding hippie. But like, riding bikes is very good for you as it turns out, which is which is nice.

So, and the thing that we've been doing with a lot of my friends on the Yaku reservation is getting folks helping them out with a bike and helmet and lights and all the things that you need. To each see them to fix the bike right and then having them go ahead and ride the bike and then like it, it, it, having them bring friends and family members to come back and ride the bike and, and have a goal event as part of that. And that's worked very well for us too. So that model that they implemented has been super successful within this very small context of them getting yucky folks to ride bikes. Yeah, just going off of that. I mean, that sounds awesome. And I think one of the limitations of the IHS is that it's this huge bureaucracy.

So it's hard to do stuff like that. Like, at Francis at the Yaki Tribe, I'm sure, you know, we're not the easiest tribe to work with, but we're probably easier than the IHS. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, and I think'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just I'm just that makes it really difficult. And especially because, and there's so many branches of the government that the Indian Health Service,

there's just one small piece of it, and it's not necessarily one that's heavily prioritized by the government, but there are improvements that are being made and I think in this last appropriations bill the Indian Health Service got funded a lot more than it had previously. So hopefully we'll see some improvements. I think they're doing really well when it comes to digital health, the integration of electronic medical systems. I think that made a significant

impact when that was introduced. And then, I think the Indian Health Service, like the model, does well in giving a lot of freedom to tribes to choose. Do we want to continue with the Indian Health Service, or do we want to take our health system over and run it ourselves, but still use them, say money that would have been used anyways. I think that's what a lot of the clinics in Alaska did in terms of having like, it's called 638 clinics or tribal health systems. It's really cool what they did in Alaska because those are some of the most remote villages in the US.

I think that is something that we should be paying more attention to, especially when we're talking about Alaska, that they're remote, but a lot of tribes in other parts of the US are maybe not as remote, but they're in very similar situations and that they're kind of disconnected like on food deserts. And I think the same model can be used, but not every tribe is at the place where they're capable, yet of taking over like the operations, the staff. There's a lot of work that needs to be done and every tribe is kind of in a different place. I'm interested, I think you were mostly tongue in cheek, but when you when you mentioned the Yaki

tribe is not that easy to work with. What do you mean? Is there a lot of different opinions? Is that why? Why is it hard to manage? Why would that be difficult? We're just very militant. I think we're just do our own thing and

very independent and yeah, yeah, we're just kind of like I think we'll just have a very rebellious nature in us like But yeah, just really had strong and like we don't work the same on the same timeline, I think sometimes. Like, when, for instance, like, I'll tell you a story. There was this shrimp farmer dude, our traditional, one of our traditional spiritual leaders, political leaders, he passed away in early 2000s, his name was on Salmo Valencia.

And they were bringing down, they're trying to introduce shrimp farming in the traditional villages in Sonora, Mexico. So they brought this guy all the way down. He's this businessman and you know, he's running on time and they bound down to the traditional authorities in one of the publics. And then all of a sudden in right in the middle of the meeting, the snake. You see this snake on the floor go by and then on some of Lensia, he's like, stop, wait for a second. And he grabs a snake and he looks at it and he says, we have to stop the meeting. I have to go back to Tucson. And this business guy is like,

what the hell, you know, I just came from like Manhattan and flew all the way I'm in this building and like, and they stopped the meeting and and this guy's like confused. I think he got really angry and that never happened to him in a business meeting before but it was a traditional aspect that I think we just put that above everything else. Like during, even today during time to to ceremony like no one's answering emails No travel government officials gonna get back to you within that those like three four weeks because they're doing spiritual

Practices and and honoring that so yeah, I get from my perspective everyone is lovely and and it's nice to have a community where everyone cares about each other and once everyone else to be healthy. There are times when recently we did a live show to raise money to buy more bikes and someone from I Heart was trying to get a W9 out of us and I was like, no, it's like Easter week. It's not not gonna happen. Like, yeah, it's just, but it's fine, you explain it. And like, I always attribute, like, I'm not fully culturally fluent, right? Like, I'm a guy from England, like, it was different where I grew up. So, like, things.

You're not yucky? Yeah. You can tell, yeah, stout is, it's right up there with Philensia. But yeah, like, I mean, obviously, I don't coach or Philancy, so it's on me to kind of listen to that. I haven't done it, I'm a big beef restaurant, I didn't bulldoze shit. Well, you're, I mean, obviously you're very good at that in my opinion of what I've seen

from you so far, but I'm very curious actually from both James and Molly, like when you guys first started going to the reservation, what surprised you, what was different than you had envisioned, what, you know, because I'm assuming you got all your knowledge, what reservations were like from Hollywood, like I did, you know, what was fact, what was fiction? my first time on a reservation and I think it was, it sort of felt like a little bit of a different country almost. You're in Arizona and you drive three hours and you feel like you're in a really different place. It feels just a little bit different. And just, it's beautiful, the one I'm on or the one that I went to is in White River, Arizona. It really is beautiful in the mountains along a river.

But it's a lot of single-story housing that are all kind of government cookie cutter housing. And I got to go into the homes too when we were doing house visits. So I felt very privileged and it felt special to be able to do that. As a very foreign person, right? I felt like an outsider. And yeah, I mean, a lot, there isn't, there's not central heat for these houses. Lots of the floors were dirt, like, you know, actual flooring on the houses. So that was, I think, surprising to me because it seems like that is not something you think of when you think of America.

But that was, that probably was like the most surprising. But then, like, the street dogs running around everywhere, it was kind of classic. I think that my first, my first drive down, I like had to stop because, like, a pack of dogs went by and that was kind of classic. I think my first my first drive down I like had to stop because like a pack of dogs went by and that was kind of out of a out of a movie. Yeah. I didn't like like obviously I'm not American either. So yeah it's shocking. I actually am from Texas. I just watched a Harry Potter films on repeat. That's how I learned to be a turf. No, no, I am not a turf. Uh, I, I don't think that needed. I don't think that needed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Those people should go away. Um, uh, I, so like I didn't maybe receive a lot of that, like sort of ingrained kind of, like I'm British for me, fucking did settle a colonialism everywhere. I don't want to erase that for a second. Uh, but, um, I, I, you know, I, so I do just go to the fucking did settle a colonialism everywhere. I don't want to erase that for a second. But I, you know, I just go to the res to ride my bike through it. And Pasquillacchi res has nice rows, lovely bike lanes. And it's much smaller than like the Tahon Autumn res,

which is next door. And that's the size of Connecticut for people who are familiar. And I know I, I'm from a part of England that's very rural where people talk to each other. And that's the thing that I don't like about living in a town in California is that everyone just kind of lives in little box and kind of moves around and doesn't talk to each other. And I at least in my experience on the reservation, everyone is friendly and nice. at least in my experience on the reservation, everyone is friendly and nice. Most of the people I run into are friendly and nice.

And so I really like that. First guy I ran into as a traditional artist, David Moreno, who runs an art program there, he's a very lovely guy. And we're chatting, I think And I was trying to encourage him to come on a bike ride with me. And like, you didn't have a bike. So then I was just trying to encourage like, maybe I could get some bikes and come back. And I spoke to some people and diabetes prevention. And we got some bikes and came back. But it just like, obviously, people's houses aren't super duper fancy, but they're fine.

People have some nice houses on their res. They didn't grow up in a super fancy house. The houses are not bad distinct from those I see in San Diego. It's beautiful too, especially down, if you go on the autumn reservation further down, we did a ride there in 2019 and we went out the night before from the Aki reservation with the group of us and we did like a big camp out and then we did a ride the next day. Their roads are not quite as nice as the Aki roads we all got.

We ran out of inner tubes because everyone got so many punctures. It's beautiful landscape, it's beautiful landscape. It's really gorgeous. I think the biggest shot to me was the donkeys, the donkeys on the autumn rest of something else, like just wild ass donkeys. Like at night, it sounds like they're the murder occurring. It just make these horrendous noises.

And like you puncture in your bike and you go for a little bit of shake, it's very hot. And suddenly you realize there are like 10 bottles, like just chilling there too. So that was the weirdest thing. But like, I know people shouldn't just walk on to reservations and start like trying to have their cultural immersion experience

or whatever that's a bit cringe. But yeah, like people equally shouldn't think that it's a scary or different or dangerous, but like Arizona feels foreign to me Okay, I go to Phoenix and that is that is a scary experience for other reasons But like no, I I've always felt very welcome and comfortable there Yeah, if I can just add one more thing. Oh, sorry. Just I think the other That's a great point James, but like the striking part for me too is that I felt very yeah, I felt very welcomed When I was there and I'm they like have a very soft way of speaking and I'm like allowed annoying American and so like

Obviously they're American as well, but I've kind of a loud voice and they're very soft-focusing and so gentle and so Just like appreciative and I kind of for me. I was like, oh, this is like amazing that you have resiliency to feel appreciative When like I don't feel like you should you know feel grateful or appreciative to me Um, I thought that was like my most breaking but I felt Molly's so nice. She's like trying to apologize for being, listen, you're talking to two podcasters, like obnoxious as our nature. It's like part of our DNA and why we do this. You don't need to explain yourself there. Victor, you've already touched on this a little bit, but do you find yourself still still dispelling myths and stereotypes about Native Americans even at medical school?

Yeah, yeah, all the time. You know, we talked about the medical misconceptions and those things, but I think they're, it's like, like I said, I feel like the American educational system, it left so much room for interpretation. And what it did give was, in a lot of it wasn't true. But I think what I'm really battling is that people just the level of exposure they have is so minimal that they're coming into these conversations and discussions with pretty much almost nothing. And so the average American knows very, very little about Native Americans. And when I say that, I don't mean Native American culture

because I don't think anyone, any Native American really cares if they know our culture or not. In fact, they might even protect it. But we're talking about what is the experience of Native Americans in this country? What happened? What were the policies? What are the issues that are still going on today? There's the level of education. It's just not to the point where I find we can even have these discussions, the discussions that we need to have. So I think the most taxing thing on me is that whenever I talk about indigenous experiences or anything related

to indigenous health, I have to give so much background that every time I have to educate someone on what is colonization, what happened, and the very basics of, I think that should be basic in this country. All these basics and by that time, I think people have gotten so much information that maybe they didn't know before they get overwhelmed and these things can also be very touchy subjects. I think, because we haven't been bold enough in the US to actually just talk about them.

And I think people, you know, might be a little afraid to acknowledge these things and somewhere inside. And I think what would have helped with that is if they were exposed to it in, you know, starting in elementary school history, starting in middle school, high school, all of these things, I think, we'll make... Well, we need to start doing that in the educational system, if we're really going to make progress. Yeah. As someone who teaches history, or has taught history, I think that's very true.

And sadly, it's only getting worse, like places like Florida, right? I'm making it harder and harder to talk about that. But I think when people come, certainly, so like I teach a community college course, an American history course. And I think when people come to that course, I mean, California, like many of them, for instance, could not name the tribe, who's the cancerous and current homelands, they are sitting in and learning. And then obviously to understand those experiences, you have to have a name for them, right? And if you don't have a name for the people, then you do a long way from understanding, I guess. But it's something that's still desperately lacking in the American education system. And it doesn't seem like people are pushing hard enough to get that rectified. Like it's a very big gap. Even in places

you know, like you could be at school in Arizona, like you could be an hour from some of the biggest reservations in the United States, right? The art time and the Navajo and maybe be an hour from some of the biggest reservations in the United States, right? The art time and the Navajo and maybe not an hour. Everything's a long way away in Arizona, but and not understand anything about those people's lived experience if you're in Scottsdale. Yeah, I'm the Bay Area. I've grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area and I didn't. I knew very little about the native people that were here until my, one of my oldest son had to do a project here in San Francisco

on the MiWalk tribe. And then only then did I learn, oh my God, they were everywhere here. There's so much the Alonie tribe. So even here, which is a relatively progressive, not forated in a system, did I not learn a lot about that? But I also, Victor, I also hear you, I know it must be exhausting.

And we appreciate you coming on to talk to us about it. James and I have talked about this before. It's something that I at least grapple with sometimes in terms of bringing on guests. I want people to talk about these things that are difficult and and sometimes may be even a little traumatic to like talk about, but there's a balance of like, well I want the people who've experienced it know the most about it to speak about it, but also don't want to keep re-exposing people to like the same exhausting trauma every time, you know, it becomes a tough thing for me at least to figure out in balance, you know.

Yeah, definitely. I think, um, you know, these podcasts are a great way to do that, to have these discussions, because it actually, I think it takes away from the taxation, because it hits a lot of people at once, you know, and, uh, and, you know, in the tens, we have listeners in the tens of pictures. Yeah, that's much better. Yeah, we do a QR code so you can just be like, hey, hey, check this out. Yeah, that's a good idea. So, so Victor, I'm sorry, I have one last question for you. You know, you mentioned that you want to go back and practice on the reservation.

Be a part of the community again. Do you plan on bringing in traditional healing components to your practice? And if so, are you going to do specialty training? Is there like a version of a fellowship that you will do for that? Yeah, I really want to do traditional practices. I'm not a traditional healer myself, but I want to partner with them. I feel like I have the connections to traditional people to do stuff like that. One of the things I really want to do is try to do a lot of public health initiatives out of my practice.

Like for instance, I want to try to find ways to help people grow their own food, start their own gardens, do community gardens. I really want to get our traditional foods up and running again. And there's a lot of people already working on this, what, you know, which is amazing. I just want to be of service to that effort. And I think that is one of the most important things right now.

I also really want to do public health initiatives around language revitalization. I think language is so important when it comes to the mental health of Indigenous youth. I believe that Indigenous youth who know how to speak their language are more mentally strong during the continuing tides of colonization that they face in this western world. If they have their language, I think that that's huge in terms of resilience. As culture as well, I think, you know, finding ways to sort of support culture as medicine,

culture as prevention, participating in ceremonies as, you know, making it, you know, very apparent that to your audience and to the world that that is protective of Indigenous health, Indigenous mental health. And so there's all these facets of traditional ways of life that we're all very healthy to us. And I think a huge part of the battle is that we're still having right now because of colonization is revitalizing those things. And then those things, the more that they're revitalized, the more that we decolonize, the healthier we're going to be. But at the same time, recognizing that Western medicine can also be very effective too, if it's just properly funded, and if the service is effective. And so that's the other side of the coin that I want to be working on as well. No, excellent. Yeah. One thing I wanted to touch on before we finish is because it seems

relatively current and newsy, right, is, and I think Victor made an excellent point that colonization isn't a thing that stopped. It's a thing that we keep doing but like we, people like me. Like the Indian child welfare act, right, Iqwa, is the thing that the Zippering Court is set up to take a swing at. I know that that is an area of great concern to many people. And I was just in a tribal building last week

looking at books for yucky children right to help them stay connected with their culture, if they're in a family, which is not a tribal family. And can you, if you feel comfortable, explain what Iqwai is, and then the damage it does to young people to be pulled away from their culture and sort of, like this little active colonization that happens every time that happens. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because colonization is definitely contenduring. For instance, we think about the black hills in South Dakota and the gold mining, the gold

rush there. Well, there's still dozens of gold mining permits that are pending right now in the black hills. There are dozens of gold mines still operating there, and the code and the code are still fighting for the black hills. That's just one instance, but you see that all across the United States. And I think when it comes to the Indian child welfare act,

that's another really good example. So basically, the Indian Childwell for Act, if a native child is in the foster care system, and basically it helps to support those children to find a placement with a family who is from their tribe, from their cultural background. And the reasoning behind that is because they to number one to stop the history of assimilation when it comes to taking native children from their families. And

we know about that, you know, through the US boarding school system, that was one example. But it kind of transitioned at a point once boarding schools were terminated, those forced boarding schools, it kind of transitioned into the foster care system. And at one point, a huge proportion

of native children were in foster care. And they were being placed with white families. And those white families were not exposing them to their cultural background. And that in itself was potentiating assimilation. Because that's another native child, dozens of native children, thousands of native children, who don't know their language,

their culture, because they've been removed from community due to systemic factors, right? And so this bill, it doesn't say, oh, you can only go with a native family. It helps to ensure that if there is a suitable native family from their tribe that they will get first priority because they know that culture is also very important to indigenous child well-being as well. So, the battle right now is being brought on by this lawsuit that primarily handles like mining and oil companies, but they're taking this Indian Child Welfare Act lawsuit pro bono because if you can get rid of the Indian Child Welfare Act on the basis that they're claiming it's racism,

right? They're claiming that native people are getting some unjust preferential treatment when it comes to adopting native children over white people on the basis of race. Where that falls short is that the basis of the Indian Child World for Act is that indigenous peoples are not a race. They're sovereign nations. They have a political status distinct from all other, any other race in the US. And that is the basis that tribes are arguing for. That, hey, we have this political status where tribal government, we have the rights to raise our children. We have the rights to teach our children to make sure they grow up in community with our culture. That's not a race issue.

That's a political issue. That's a, that relates to our political status as a tribal nation, as a race issue. That's a political issue. That relates to our political status as a tribal nation, as a sovereign nation. And so they're going to be battling that in court. But if the Supreme Court decides that this Indian Child Welfare Act is, you know, racist or discriminatory based on race, it means that a number of other bills, another under of other things in the law that that for instance that exists due to the political status of indigenous nations have the potential to also be thrown out on the basis of racial discrimination. And that I think will, you know, will be to a lot of a lot more land grabs, a lot more, a lot less services being provided. For instance, like the Indian Health Service,

for instance, they might say, Oh, why do Native Americans get this healthcare? They might, they might start taking down a whole, a whole bunch of other things that are really important to us. So it's really, it's a huge issue right now. It's a troubling time and I could see how people in the past might have said, oh, don't worry, that won't happen. I think it's pretty clear that these things can happen pretty quickly, pretty aggressively now. I think the last couple of years I've shown a lot of people that things can get worse somehow, you know, and that these things can be taken more and more can be taken from people

that have already had so much taken from them. So I guess I like to finish off normally, instead of just being like, here is some sad shit and supporting to it and then kind of like dropping the mic, asking people how they can do something to stand in solidarity. So like, if either of you want to mention, I know this base is like flat,

there are other attempts to expropriate and colonize indigenous land, sacred spaces, and fucking border wall is bulldozing kumi, I graveyards, like as I'm talking to you. Are there ways that people can stand solidarity with indigenous communities? I'll go first, because Victor will have a better answer than me and he can jump in after me, but I think as a low level entry thing that people can do and it kind of touches on

how trying to remove the burden on asking for education and doing the education yourself for that what people can do is just you can read books by native authors and that teaches you a lot of history and there's like some incredible native authors who are writing beautiful stories that are we've with fact and fiction book books and then like native media. Res, reservation dogs is like a TV show on Hulu that is a really great show that everyone should watch. So I think you can do some like easy things that just takes remove some of the needing to be taught to on yourselves and you can just learn about what we're missing. So those are like very, very easy. And then in terms of, like just from my point of view as an NDE, there are a lot of ways to get involved because these reservations are chronically understaffed.

They're just like rural medicine, IHS or not, IHS. Rural medicine is very understaffed in our country. And so there's always opportunities for doctors to go and work. And it's like valuable and amazing for us and for the community to be able to do. So there are ways to do that through locom companies and directly through the IHS sites. Victor? Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think conversation, you know, I would love if white allies would talk to their family members and their friends. And I think there are a lot of moments where in these day-to-day personal interactions, when natives might come up to stand up, Like if you hear something that is ignorant, you hear something that might be racist, to stand up to the people that you know in your own circles and say, hey, no, that's not correct.

To talk to your friends and family about what you learned with regard to colonization and other issues that Native American people face. Because I think some of the people that we listen to the most are the people that we love. Our friends and our family, and I think there needs to be a lot more conversation in those spaces, a lot more accountability,

because I know that it can be very hard when difficult things come up in those personal interactions to challenge someone. But I think that that is where that sort of thing can really move the needle in the long run. And I think that sometimes people just choose to say silent. And I would like that to change. Yeah, very well said. That seems like a fantastic place to close it here.

Thank you both so much for coming on and hanging out with us. You've been listening to the House of Pod and it could happen here. Let's get some plugs in for you guys. Can you, let's start with you, Victor, tell us where people can find you or plug anything you want to plug. Come to the rest. just ask for me. Yeah. Yeah, my Instagram, Twitter, or Velo Carmen, V-L-O-C-A-R, and me and. Very cool.

And Molly. I exited the Twitter sphere after Elon Musk took over, so I'm off. But you can find me in Sacramento. Alright, you guys have been so awesome. Thank you both for coming on. We hope to talk again sometime. Thank you. In the podcast, Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations.

I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet Soup with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio. But who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for see, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit.

It's like follow me and he slams down his badge in my passport. And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm steel who are the cops who are the criminals and is anyone really who they claim to be Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology?

And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs, to psychic psychic powers and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization

and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up, fam? I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker, and host of the new podcast, Flaky Biscuit. On this podcast, I'm gonna get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic

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Welcome, Jic at Append here. I'm your host, Mia Wong. And today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. In the last half decade, a growing political focus on China has transformed a cottage industry of American China watchers into a sprawling metropolis of pseudo-analysis, a veritable machine that turns out racialized fear of the Chinese author and transforms it into economic papers that close with, quote, unquote, policy solutions about the so-called China problem. In these circles, a consensus is emerging about what they call Chinese state capitalism and its supposed risk to the United States. China's economy, they argue, is not a free market economy

like that of the United States. Instead, China's large array of state-owned industries and its willingness to use investments to incentivize specific kinds of research while protecting companies from pure market competition means that the state and not the market dictates the course of the Chinese economy. Under these assumptions, the Chinese economy poses two major threats

to American companies in the American security state. First, state owned industries subsidized by the state will inevitably out-compete American companies because American companies can't match the sheer quantity of capital held by the Chinese state, which violates the fairness and competitiveness of the free market by making companies compete on unequal grounds. Second, the close ties between the Chinese government and state owned industries, and even private Chinese companies, means that their technology will be used by the CCP to strengthen its military by stealing American technology. The problem with this consensus at a fundamental level is that it's utterly uninterested

in how Chinese state-owned enterprises, known as SOEs, actually functioned. And this is a real problem, because Chinese SOEs are not what you or the people writing American foreign policy think they are. So today, we're going to take a dive into the belly of the state and figure out how us a we's actually function. And determine what this actually does to the prevailing theories about how Chinese economy works, and what it means for both the American and Chinese working classes.

But before we get into the structure of the S.O.E. we need to talk about state capitalism. State capitalism is an old term. Most of the people writing about it will trace it back to Lenin's new economic policy, a massive shift towards the market in the Soviet economy of the early 20s. The new economic policy, re-legalized private capitalist firms, albeit in a much reduced capacity, with a very large state sector driving the economy as a whole, a condition-linen dubbed state capitalism.

But even using state capitalism to describe both the new economic plan and the current situation in China, reveals a profound misunderstanding of both Lenin's NEP and the modern Chinese economy. For one thing, during the NEP, state-owned industries accounted for at least 70% of Soviet industrial output, increasing to 77% by the end of the policy. Meanwhile, despite the hype behind Chinese state capitalism, China's state sector represents a measly 40% of China's economy, uniquely high for a capitalist economy, but quite literally the inverse of the relationship between

capitalist frames in the state and the USSR. That 60% of China's GDP is private and only 40% is generated by the state, and don't look too closely at that 40% because only 30% of it is from actual state industries, the other 10% resulting from the regular function of the state itself, shows what actually drives the Chinese economy, not the state at all, but the market. This is very important because the story of the Chinese economy in the last 40 years is not simply the story of a state-run command economy transforming into a market economy.

It is also, and arguably primarily, the story of a state-run command economy transforming into a market economy. It is also an arguably primarily, the story of the market consuming the state from the inside out. This becomes more clear the closer you look at how state-owned enterprises are actually structured. And it is here the weakness of the very term state-owned enterprise comes into focus. Academics and journalists write, state-owned enterprise comes into focus. Academics and journalists write

about state-owned enterprises as if the word means one specific thing, but the reality is that there are enormous number of different kinds of SOEs with different structures and different relationships to the state. When regular people think about state ownership, it tends to invoke the specter of the USSR. In a Soviet-style SOE, and we'll take as an example of Chinese SOE, the socialist period, which functions similarly, the firm is literally a government department. For example, in 1979, China established the Bureau of Non-Ferrous Metals. This is the best name you're going to get out of the CCP in this entire episode. That Bureau was in charge of running aluminum production.

The government ministry simply ran the mines and the refineries and the factories directly, and everyone working in the factory was a direct government employee paid by the state. This is also pretty close to how the American post office is structured. But Soviet S.O.E.'s crucially were not firms that competed for money in the market. They worked towards a production plan and were assigned resources based on their output. In this way, they're closer to a municipal water service than most modern S.O.E.'s. Their job, in theory, was to make a thing or a service, not make money. Modern Chinese S.O.E.s, despite sharing the same name as their socialist period predecessors, are very different. For one thing, modern Chinese S.O.E.s, as well as a lot of other state-owned companies like the

Saudi government's oil company, Saudi Aramco, are not directly part of the government at all. Instead, the structured as regular corporations who stock happens to be owned of the government at all. Instead, the structure does regular corporations who stock happens to be owned by the governments. This share-holding relationship is one of the most common kinds of modern SOEs, but as we'll see, they make ownership and manage by structures increasingly complex. The other major difference from Soviet firms is that companies like Saudi Aramco and modern Chinese SOEs are for-profit companies.

I don't exist to provide a service, they exist to make money. This gets very weird very quickly. For one thing, while we tend to think of state owned enterprises as belonging to the national governments, municipal, provincial, and even disherking county governments in China have their own SOEs. On a conceptual level, this makes sense. China's economy is a size of a continent, and individual provinces have a geographic size, population, natural resources, and economy of entire nations, which means that provincial

SOEs can rival national firms. But this also means that stay-down industries from different levels of government are directly competing with each other on the market. This is something beyond the experience of previous theorists of the state and capitalism. Frederick Engels, the close friend of Karl Marx, was able to predict the rise of capitalist state-owned industries. Writing, quote, at a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient. The official representative of the capitalist state will ultimately have to undertake the direction

of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication, the post office, the telegrams, the real ways. If the crisis demonstrates the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishment for production and distribution into joint stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salary employees. The capitalist has no social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing

off coupons and gambling at the stock exchange, with a different capitalist to spoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists and reduces them, just as it reduces the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial or reserve army. But angles imagined the state as a collective capitalist replacing the individual capitalist. What no one could have foreseen was capitalism breaking

the collective nature of the state entirely, hollowing it out until its chunks competed with each other on the market. This is the state of modern Chinese S.O.E.'s. These S.O.E.'s are capitalist firms subject to market discipline. The can and will fail and go under if they aren't making enough money. And the government can and will tear them apart and force the still state-owned pieces to compete against each other. These state-owned industries also largely are not supposed to be monopolies. Firms they get too large and powerful can and will be broken up in the parts once again

set to compete against each other. Weeter still, these SOEs are also listed on the stock markets, meaning individual capitalists and as we'll see later even foreign firms can buy 49% stakes in nominal state-owned industries. Now if the state doing market competition against itself wasn't weird enough for you, let me introduce another complication. The state-owned asset supervision and administration commission of the state council, and no the state-owned asset supervision and administration commission of the state council is not a name that sounds any better in Chinese.

If you have a bureaucracy rooted in Leninism, the product is a veritable core copia of the most absolutely dog shit name you've ever heard in your entire life. This commission is better known for obvious reasons, a sassac. And it is the government body that owns the shares of most of the largest firms in China, which are known as the national champions. Now you could be forgiven for thinking you now understand the structure of Chinese S.O.E.'s. Sassak, which is a part of the state, owns the S.O.E.'s, bobs your uncle, everyone goes home for the night in the episode ends right here.

Unfortunately, it is way more convoluted than that. When I said Sassak owns the shares of the largest firms in China, that's only true in a technical sense. What Sassack actually owns are the shares of massive holding companies. Companies that exist on paper, but whose existence is purely dedicated to owning the shares of other companies. These holding companies own the shares of the publicly traded companies you might have heard of, like SinoPEC, China's state-owned oil companies. These holding companies own the shares of the publicly traded companies you might have heard of like SinoPak, China's state-owned oil companies. And this is where

the simplistic narrative of the Chinese SOE, a single firm owned by the state, underage direct political control, completely falls apart. Because again, the state doesn't really own these firms directly. What they own is a holding company that owns the stock of the S.O.E.'s. That holding company, however, is the actual basis of the organization of Chinese state ownership. The building blocks of the Chinese state economy aren't single-state owned enterprises at all. The economy is actually composed of what are called business groups. American listeners may not be very familiar with business groups, but there are common sight in what became known as the Tiger Economies, a series of economies that's all rabid industrial

development in the post-war war two era largely fueled by the demands of American military supply lines for its wars in Korea and Vietnam. The two most infamous are the Japanese Ketsu, the successor to the old Japanese Zybatsu that dominated the pre-war Japanese economy, and which were to some extent broken up after the war, and Korean Chable conglomerates. These massive groups of businesses are either stoned by the same people or families in the case of the Chable, or linked by mutual shareholding of each other's companies like Ketsu. The groups cooperate and coordinate the business strategy instead of competing against each other,

which allows them to carry out a level of long-term planning that's sometimes difficult for individual for-profit companies. Chinese economists sent to Japan to study Ketsu in the 70s and 80s, returned with policy in hand. But the business groups that eventually emerged in the Chinese economy after an extended process of trial and error are different than their Korean or Japanese counterparts. Where Chable are organized around families and Ketsu are organized around a commercial bank that provides financing for the companies in the group. Chinese businesses are organized by those holding companies 100% owned by Sassak and therefore the Chinese state. Those holding companies also sometimes called core companies own the majority of the stock of a variety of publicly traded companies.

They also own a finance company which finances the companies and work with research institutes which carry out scientific and research development for the entire group. These research institutes, which are often university affiliated, are technically nonprofit, but take money from the core companies in exchange for the research development they do. Chinese business groups are often massive, organizing hundreds of companies

who also maintain trade and supply relations with hundreds more companies technically outside the group. These groups are organized by what's called articles of grouping, which is the core holding company who owns the stock and the rest of the companies get those companies to sign. These articles form a top-down structure for the entire group that also includes council and management bodies for the entire group with representatives from each of the companies in the group. This structure, in theory,

is how the CCP transmits policy down from single holding companies to all of their downstream subsidiaries and allies. And this is important because, at least in theory, business groups are supposed to carry out government and dust show policy and economic developments. But in the real world, this is a significant challenge.

Because again, even individual business groups comprise hundreds of companies, and the states grasp on them is often tenuous, as seen by a wave of state-owned companies that theoretically are supposed to make things, getting into real estate speculation. A problem the CCP has been attempting to deal with since 2008 and only really has gotten under control in the last two years. But you know who will not do housing speculation instead of making ads for you, it is the companies and the products and services that support this podcast. And we're back.

So confronted with the enormity of the scale of Chinese business groups, how does state control of these groups actually work? In theory, regulation operates around two channels. Sasak owns the holding companies, which allows it in theory to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to make it a private corporation. There's also a parallel corporate structure directly run by the party, and high-ranking people in the corporate structure become party members and are sent to cadre trainings at places like the Central Party School in Beijing.

Meanwhile, people swap between Sasak and high-level manager positions, and the heads of large SOEs also have positions in the Chinese government itself. Trying to explain all of the positions they have and the councils they're on and their technical ministerial ranks is a disaster because, oh boy, if you think the American government is confusing, try sorting out who does what at a party state. The moral of the story is that the CCP tries to keep control over the enormous number of companies it technically owns through control of who gets appointed as the head of S.O.E.s through Sasak, which is directly a part of the state, and by integrating SOE heads into various government party bodies.

They also are somewhat embarrassingly given that they owe these companies forced to directly go after them through the law and through the court system, which works sometimes and also doesn't work other times. But this relationship is multi-directional. Lee when Lin and Curtis J. Millhopp two scholars who've written extensively about Chinese corporate structure argue convincingly that the deep integration of the party into SOEs after the state owned industries have been corporatized that is turned from direct state industries run by state employees to profit-seeking market corporations own a few shares, was a way to buy the party

off and allow these firms to become more capitalist in ways that wouldn't have worked if the party wasn't also getting rich off of it. It's not just that China has state-owned industries, it's that the corporatization of state-owned industries has made the party of the Chinese state increasingly capitalist. And this raises another question. As the Chinese state grows more capitalist, our public and private Chinese firms even all that different. Private firms also have links to the state, through equity, have joint ventures with SOEs, where private companies will own a part of a company, and an SOE will own another part of a company. Private companies expand

to get access to credit through partnering with local SOEs. In essence, many of the things that are supposed to make SOEs different from private companies are shared by both, from the profit motive to state affiliation. As Milhopp to put it, quote, functionally, SOEs and large POEs private enterprises, in China, share many similarities in the areas commonly thought to distinguish state-owned firms from privately-owned firms. Market access, receded state subsidies, proximity

to state power, and execution of the government's policy objectives. A complete account of Chinese state capitals and much explain these similarities. Even figuring out what legally is an SOE and what's technically still a private firm gets very weird, very fast. ZTE, for example, a giant Chinese telecom company is owned by a bewildering array of shell-on-holding companies which are in turn owned by other companies, some of which are state-owned. This is the level of ownership confusion we're working at here. If the largest stake of a company is owned by a holding company

that's owned in turn by a combination of two SOEs who own 51% of the stock and a private investors company who owns 49% of the stock is a private investor's company who owns 49% of the stock is the company state owned. And it gets worse in CTE's case because even if you assume okay the majority stake in this company is owned by an SOE therefore it's state owned, you would assume that the state or a state owned company would manage the corporation right. Wrong. In CTE's case the SOE's worked out an agreement with the other investor, such that ZTE is

technically state-owned but privately managed. And this, it turns out, is a very common arrangement. Because of laws about foreign ownership of companies operating in China, many state-owned enterprises that actually joint partnerships between SOE's and foreign corporations, with the SOE owns 51% of the stock and the foreign corporation owns 49% of the stock while running the actual company and extracting profits from it. Even 100% Chinese firms, of which there are many, pose a challenge to the traditional conception of SOE's as run by the state for the good of the state and as political objectives. This goes back to their structure run by the state for the good of the state and its political objectives.

This goes back to their structure as corporations the state owns by shareholding. This means, as I've emphasized, that these SOEs aren't government ministries. They're companies trying to make a profit and are run by their own managers. These firms have a total workforce of 70 million people, which makes direct regulation very difficult.

In practice, this means SOE's are a lot more autonomous and direct state control, even with all the staff guards. Put in place, then you'd think just from the word stay-doned industry. Another thing that makes SOE's more like private companies is that money from SOE's goes back to the company and not to the state, to which it pays dividends, but not much else. This means that SOEs have their own revenue stream that's not dependent on state budget allocations. Meanwhile, private firms, like SOEs, are operated by members of symbolic party congresses,

and private firms also get state subsidies and access to loans from state banks. A common canard about the unfairness of anti-competitive Chinese SUVs that applies to private firms as well. And at this point, I must point out that any company anywhere in the world can make money by allying with the state and getting access to state resources.

The US does this too, especially state and local governments who are all too happy to give enormous tax breaks and even provide prison labor to private companies. Meanwhile tech companies like Amazon and Google are kept afloat by massive government contracts to say nothing of the American defense industry. In the US we call this corruption, or at least we used to until it became legal to literally buy senators, a thing that not sick dipshit's always seemed to forget when I talk about

the uniqueness of the Chinese economy and the relation to subsidies. There are obviously differences between the US and Chinese economies, but arguing that businesses having ties to the state, which they extract benefits from, constitutes a unique form of capitalism is incomprehensibly absurd. None of this have stopped China watchers from the most rabid reactionaries and the most stalwart, or self-described stalwart communists, to declare that China carries out something called industrial policy through its SOEs, which makes it different from other neoliberal states. So what is industrial policy?

In theory, industrial policy refers to the state giving subsidies and funding to specific corporations in order to pursue specific economic objectives the market wouldn't normally have pursued. These writers point the preferential treatment that Chinese S.O.E.s have to credit and subsidies that they receive from the government's evidence of the subordination of the market to the political. Which they also claim is essentially a form of socialist state planning. My response to this is that I will accept that an SOE getting a subsidy is socialist state planning the moment they agree with the US as a socialist state because of its corn subsidies. Despite writing about China somehow turning everyone into an arco-capitalists, state subsidies in the form of direct cash transfers, tax breaks, preferential legal treatment technology transfers and a thousand other forms of state aid are as old as capitalism itself, and are pretty normal even under neoliberalism.

People describe these measures as industrial policy, using state-favorite to promote certain industries, but corn subsidies put light to the claim that industrial policy is some unique thing of a new era emerging in capitalism that I totally disappeared with neoliberalism. American corn and other agricultural subsidies are one of the largest and most expensive industrial policy regimes in the world, constituting half a trillion dollar spent since 1955. They are also written in as exceptions to most of the world's major free trade agreements. We also need to ask, what is the difference between industrial policy, which is state strategic investment in certain sectors to develop their economy, and regulatory capture, where control over agencies or even the legislature itself is taken over by

special list groups. This question sounds silly, but the results, a company in a sector getting handed a pile of money and various forms by the state looks exactly the same. Those corn subsidies are arguably our industrial policy. They were technically originally designed to ensure that the US would always have a supply of cheap food. But on the other hand, the real reason they exist has nothing to do with planning whatsoever. They exist because the cobalt of legislatures from farming states have enough power to shut down both the House and the Senate if their demands aren't met, so every year the state boughs to the corn lobby and pays them billions of dollars. So is this industrial policy, or is it regulatory capture? And can the two even be distinguished in capitalist countries? This is a question we need to take very seriously in the Chinese case.

At the same time, we ask ourselves, what is the actual objective of the Chinese state? Is it decoupling your metroncment from the West, or is it making money? There is significant evidence that it's the latter. For one thing, China receives an enormous amount of foreign direct investment, something that everyone seems to conveniently forgets even though it was one of the key elements that fueled Chinese industrialization and plays a major role in the Chinese economy to this day. Meanwhile, US affiliates in China alone had over half a trillion dollars of sales just in 2018. While the focus of most analysis has been in flashy disputes between the US and China

over their attempts to produce throughout semiconductors, China has also liberalized its foreign investment laws in the last few years, and allowed foreign companies and industries like insurance to operate directly instead of running through joint partnerships with Chinese stakeholders. Even the chairman of SASAC gave a speech in February about how his goal was to increase the profitability of Chinese SOEs. China is and will remain deeply en in mesh in the global capitalist economy. And this I think is, as much as there are in willingness to grasp how SOE's actually work, the fatal flaw of analysis of the Chinese economy and its obsession with formal state

ownership. These analyses are not a serious attempt to look at the actual structure of the economic system the entire world, including China, lives under. There are several kinds of arguments that we need to look beyond formal ownership to understand capitalism more broadly. There is a somewhat complicated and Marxist argument, which holds that while we talk about capitalism as a system where the ruling class owns the beans of production of the working class, which owns nothing, is forced to work for them. That's not all capitalism is.

Capitalism is also a series of commodity production, in which objects confront each other in the market, and appear as commodities with their own discrete values based on abstract labor time. Generalized commodity production, which is people producing commodities from market exchange and not for other purposes, is the other core component of capitalism. And when you're dealing with generalized commodity production, it doesn't really matter whether the company that owns the holding company that owns the company that makes the commodity, is owned by the state, or a hedge fund, or a bank, or a sovereign wealth fund. It still reproduces commodity production. Which means it's still just capitalism, but with more complex formal ownership mechanisms. There's also the David Graber argument, which goes, okay, sure, stay down property is

technically the property of the people, TM. But try and actually go there and see how fast the cops show up and take you away. Just like private ownership, you still don't own public property in any substantive sense. It's just controlled by a different group of beer crafts with guns, and focusing purely on ownership to define an economic system gets you nowhere. And then there's my argument, which is that people are absolutely obsessed with looking at capitalism from the perspective of capital, which means that they are absolutely obsessed with the question of ownership.

But what happens if you look at so-called state capitalism and the nature of state ownership from the perspective of the working class? Everything suddenly becomes a lot clearer. S.O.E. workers are a bit better off than on S.O.E. counterparts, but their jobs suck ass, their hours are long, and they don't make that much money. They are fully dependent on selling their labor to the market to survive. And all of these companies have hundreds of subsidiaries and suppliers with a variety of levels of state ownership, and people who work for those companies' lives are even shittier. Meanwhile, the means of production and the physical

infrastructure of so-called state capitalism was built by workers who were left with nothing but silicosis after turning places like sheds and from fishing villages to a city with a population of over 10 million people in less than 30 years. This is the ultimate truth of the Chinese economy, just as it is the ultimate truth of the American economy. We sell our lives for nothing, and our only reward in the end is to die amidst the wonders of the world that was never ours. In the podcast Alphabet Boys, we take you inside undercover investigations. I'm Trevor Aronson. And in our second season, we have an Alphabet suit

with the DEA, the CIA, and the FBI, all mixed up in the same case. At the center of this story is Flavio, but who is Flavio? I see movies with arm dealers on TV. Okay, I'm going there for the AI, but I'm gonna die. When I land, there's Flavio in a suit. It's like, follow me. And he slams down his badge in my passport.

And I'm like, uh, something's going on here. So you do personal security all over the world, and you have somebody call you and say, can you get grenades and guns for this guy in Colombia? Not, not specify grenades, a lot of ammunition. It's a mystery wrapped around an international arm deal. Who are the cops? Who are the criminals? And is anyone really who they claim to be? Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. There's a ton of stuff they don't want you to know. Does the US government really have alien technology? And what about the future of artificial intelligence, AI? What happens when computers learn to think? Could there be a serial killer in your town? From UFOs to psychic powers, and government cover-ups from unsolved crimes

to the bleeding edge of science, history is riddled with unexplained events. We spent a decade applying critical thinking to some of the most bizarre phenomenon civilization and beyond. Each week, we dive deep into unsolved mysteries, conspiracy theories, and actual conspiracies. You've heard about these things, but what's the full story? Listen to stuff they don't want you to know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What's up fam, I'm Brian Ford, Artisan Baker and host of the new podcast Flaky Biscuit.

On this podcast, I'm going to get to know my guests by cooking up their favorite nostalgic meal. It could be anything from Twinkies to mom's Thanksgiving dressing. Sometimes I might get it wrong, sometimes I'll get it right. I'm so happy it's good because man, if it wasn't, I'd be like, you know, everybody not my mom.

Yeah. Either way, we will have a blast. You'll have access to every recipe so you can cook and bake alongside me. As I talk to artists, musicians, and chefs about how this meal guided them to success. And these nostalgic meals, fam, they inspire one of a kind conversations. When I bake this recipe, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Does this podcast come with a therapist? He can.

Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. I'm Robert Evans. And with me today is Garrison Davis. And James Stout. Hello, a Canadian, a British man and a Texan walk into a podcast. Yeah, walk into a podcast. This is only two. Only two of them can drink in a bar. That's not true. In Canada, we could all drink in a bar. In Canada, we could all drink in a bar.

Now, Garrison, a moment ago, you were holding your hand above a lit candle, in a way that reminded me of G Gordon Litty, the Nazi who masterminded the Watergate break-in, and in order to convince people that he was a hard man, would regularly burn the bell with his hand on a candle while staring at them. Um, Jen guy. Isn't gender great.

Haven't we just a cool guy? Uh, G Gordon Liddy. You don't know enough about, we'll talk about G Gordon Liddy, but today we're talking about something else problematic, artificial intelligence, which is not a thing that exists anywhere. It is instead a terrible, terrible error going back to the 60s in case of terminology. When we talk about all of the things that people are like,

flipping out as AI, as chat GPT and stable diffusion and fucking all these other sort of like different programs. They're not intelligences. They're, you know, the chat GPT is like a large language model. They're all essentially like bots that you train to understand kind of like what the likeliest thing that what the likeliest appropriate response is to like a given prompt. Um, that's kind of like the, the, the broadest way to explain it. It's complicated and they're, you know, very useful. But obviously, if you've been paying attention to the world right now, there's

just a whole bunch of bullshit about them. And I think to kind of make sense of of why we're seeing some of the shit around AI that we're seeing and for a little bit of specificity, there have been like this kind of endless series of articles around this open letter signed by a bunch of luminaries in the AI field talking about how, you know, there need to be laws put in place to stop it from ending the world, you know, you've seen articles about like, oh, so X percentage of AI researchers think that it could destroy the planet, destroy the human race. Kind of most recently, the biggest, the biggest like viral hype article was that the

Pentagon had supposedly been testing an AI, like missile system that blew up its operator in a simulation because the operator was trying to stop it from firing or whatever. It was bullshit. What actually had vice-ran with the article, it was very bad for the vice-women to do this. Flipping out about how horrifying our AI weapons future is. We shouldn't give AI the ability to kill people, but that's not at all what happened. Basically, a bunch of army nerds or Air Force nerds were sitting around a table doing the D&D version of like military planning where you say, what if we did this, what kinds of

things could happen if we did this system. And another guy around the table said, oh, well, if we build the system this way, it might conceivably attack its operator, you know, in order to optimize for this kind of result, which is like not scary. Like it's, it's, it's just people talking through pot like a flowchart of possibilities around a fucking table. You don't need to worry about that. There's so many other things to worry about. New York City is blanketed in a layer of smog so that you could cut it with a butter knife. Don't flip out about AI weapons just yet, folks. But I wanted to talk about why this shit is happening.

A lot of it comes down to the fact that when we're talking about the aspects of the tech industry that have an impact on outside of the tech industry, there's basically three jobs in big tech. One job is creating iterative improvements on existing products. These would be the teams of folks who are responsible for designing a new iPhone every year, right? Every couple of years, Lenovo puts out a new series

of ThinkPads and idea pads every couple of years, you get a new MacBook, every couple of years Razer puts out a new blade. These are the folks who kind of move along technology at a relatively steady pace for consumer devices. And then you have the people who are responsible for what you might call the moon shot products. This is a mix of the next big thing and doomed failures. And it's often pretty hard to tell, you know, what's going to be what ahead of time. A very good example would be back in the 90s,

Apple put a bunch of resources into launching an early tablet computer called the Newton that was a fabulous disaster. And then in the mid-Aughts, they put a bunch of resources into launching the iPad, which was a huge success. And when you kind of think about like the folks doing this, like working on the moonshot products, the most recent example would be whatever team at Apple, the team at Apple that was behind putting together these new Apple goggles, which I don't think are going to be a wildly successful product in the way that they need it to be,

like a smartphone scale success. But this is an example of like a thing that didn't exist and a bunch of people had to invent new technologies or new ways to combine technologies in order to make it exist. The third kind of job that the tech industry has, broadly speaking, are con men, right? And the state that we are in in the industry right now

is that every major tech company is run by some form of con man, right? Tim Cook is, you know, kind of the least connoisse of the con men among them. But like Mark Zuckerberg obviously is a fucking flim flam artist, you know, and you can see this with the huge amount of money. Like it's something like $11 billion at least that Facebook pumped into this bullshit metaverse scheme that like Apple barely even talked about during their event unveiling like a headset that has VR potential in it.

I'm getting away from myself here. Kind of the point that I'm making is that you can often have very real products. There's actual technology going into the Apple glasses marketed by Conman, Flimflamartist. This is not always like a bad thing, right? Steve Jobs was a con man, and it worked out pretty well for him

because it just so happened that the tech, he had a decent enough idea of what the tech was capable of that it was able to kind of meet the promises he was making in more or less real time. An example of what happens pretty spectacularly when that's not the case is what we saw with Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes who started prison last week. You've got these promises being made by the con man and the people who are responsible for the moonshots can't make it work. I'm bringing this up right now because there's a lot of folks I think who believe

that the the the the Nate like the actual potential of AI has been proven in a spectacular way because the tools that have been released are able to do cool things. And I think those people are missing some key aspect like some key key things that might cause one to think more critically about the actual potential the industry has and also might cause one to think more critically about how earth shattering it's all going to be. It's being taken kind of as red right now by a lot of particularly journalists and media analysts outside of the tech or like outside of the dog at tech press, that like, well, this is going to up

in huge numbers of industries and put massive numbers of people out of work. And that may seem if you sat down in front of this chatbot and had a mind-blowing experience, that may seem credible. There's not the evidence behind that yet. If you actually look at the numbers behind some of these different companies

and how their user ship has grown and how it's fallen off, one of the things you've seen is that a lot of these tools had this kind of massive surge peak in terms of the number of people adopting them and in terms of their profitability, you saw this with like stable diffusion, right? And then this kind of fairly rapid fall

afterwards. Not because people are like giving it up forever or whatever, but because like, once you fucked around with it and generated some images or generated some stories, there's not a huge amount to do unless you're someone who's specifically going to be using this for your job. And most of the people that wanted to fuck around with with a lot of these apps didn't have long-term use cases for them. This is why while you've got like for example, stability, which is the company or at least the main company behind stable diffusion, has been valued at like four billion dollars. I think last it was checked. But their annualized revenue is only about ten million dollars. So that's a pretty significant gap. And it's a pretty significant gap because the actual money in AI so far isn't with the

service providers really. Like you've got some that have made it like the $100 million range, although it's not entirely clear what their margins are or what the kind of the long-term reliability of that profit is. But the vast majority of money in AI, like almost all of it, has been made by companies like Nvidia. Nvidia jumped up to become like a trillion dollar company as a result of this because the hardware needs of these products are so intense.

And obviously that shows there's money here for somebody, but the fact that like a shitload of people got curious about these apps and use them in quick succession and then kind of dropped off is an evidence that like we're seeing entire industries replaced, as much as it is evidence that like a lot of people thought this was interesting briefly.

And so I think kind of when you look at the data, one of the things this suggests is that we're heading towards a point in AI. And I think we're probably going to hit it within the next six months to a year that is broadly referred to as like the trow of disappointment. And this is what happens when kind of the promises of a new technology that are being made by the height men or con men as I tend to call them meet with like the actual reality of its execution, which in some areas is going to be significant. There are places I think medical research may be one of them. We'll talk about that in a bit where a lot of the promises people are making about AI will be fairly quickly realized. And then there are areas where it won't be.

I think content generation is one of those things. But yeah, so that's kind of like what I'm seeing when I'm looking at the broad strokes of where this technology is here and kind of the gap between how people are talking about it and what we're actually seeing in terms of monetization. I want to talk a little bit now about kind of one of the guys, I would call him kind of a con man, who's been a big driver of the current AI push. He's a dude named Ahmad Mostok,

and he's the founder of Stable diffusion, right, which is a text to image generator that was kind of like before ChatGPT hit. This was like the first really, really big mainstream AI thing. Chat GPT was a lot larger, but stable division came first and, you know, was critical behind a, among other things, a lot of the silliest NFT bullshit. And he's, he's a really interesting dude.

Like, if you look at kind of his own claims about his background, he says that he's got an Oxford master's degree that he was like the behind an award-winning hedge fund that he like worked for the United Nations and a really important capacity, and also that he obviously founded this AI bot. None of that's true. He has a bachelor's degree from Oxford, not a master's degree. He did. Well, that's what he's playing off the thing that happens there where like you can, you can get, if you have a BA oxen, you can, you can get it to be an MA. It doesn't mean you did a masters. It's just a wealthy people flex. Yeah. It's, it's not a master's degree.

You shouldn't call it that. If you're calling it that, you're taking the piss. Yeah. Yeah. He's taking the piss, knowing no one's gonna call him on it, or at least knowing that people wouldn't like, like loudly enough for it to matter for him. Yeah. He hasn't worked with the UN in quite some time and never did in a major capacity. He did run a hedge fund that was successful in its first year,

but then got shut down in its second year because he lost everybody's money. So like, this is, but you see with this guy, if you go through his like history, he's like chasing hedge funds in the early odds. He first gets in with stable diffusion after COVID, and he's kind of like building it as this is gonna help with like research into trying to like,

you know, fight the COVID-19 pandemic. And then he kind of pivots to like, oh, this is a great way to like make NFTs and shit, you know, when that hit. Like he's just sort of like chasing where the money is. Yeah. Anyway, he kind of can. And he's not, by the way, he's not the guy who wrote any of the source code for this that was done by like a group of researchers.

And he, you know,. He essentially acquired it, which is usually what happens here. None of this has stopped him from getting $100 million or so in investments from various venture partners, and hasn't stopped his company from getting this massive violation. It hasn't stopped the White House from inviting him to talk as part of a federal AI safety initiative. But it is one of those like when I kind of look into this guy and kind of the gap between

his claims and what's actually happened and the claims that are being made about the value of this company and what it's actually like proved to be worth so far. I think a lot about Sam Bankman freed because a lot of like the early writing around this guy was similar and a lot of the kind of shit that he's claiming is similar. And yeah, I'm not sure if this is a case where, because Bankman-Freed is one of these people who like Elizabeth Holmes, I think,

backed the wrong technology, because it's fine in Silicon Valley, it's fine generally speaking in capitalism it's fine, generally speaking in capitalism to lie about what a product can do if you can fake it till you make it. And maybe AI is there. He may have this guy, may have made a good bet as to the future, but that's kind of far from certain yet. And it's just really clear how much of this industry is being built on or is being built by how much of like the people

running sort of these AI companies are dudes who managed one way or another either through access to VC funding or kind of like, you know, just being in the right place at the right time to jump in on the bandwagon in the hopes that they'll be able to cash out very, very quickly. I found a good quote from a Forbes article talking about like a big part of why guys like Mostok are so interested in AI right now from a financial perspective. And this is true, not just this was true about like crypto before, but AI because there's more to the technology. This is kind of even more so valid. Quote, venture capitalists historically spend months performing due diligence,

a process that involves analyzing the market, vetting the founder and speaking to customers to check for red flags before investing in a startup. But start to finish, Mastoc told Forbes, he needed just six days to secure $100 million from leading investment firms, co-chew and LightSpeed once stable diffusion went viral. The extent of due diligence at the firms performed is unclear

given the speed of the investment. The investment thesis we had is that we don't know exactly what all the use cases will be, but we know that this technology is truly transformative and has reached a tipping point in terms of what it can do, Gaurav Gupta, the LightSpeed partner who led the investment told Forbes in a January interview. So again, they're being like, yeah, we're pumping tens of million dollars into this. We don't know how it'll make money. It just seems so impressive that it has to be profitable. Now, that line is particularly funny, maybe the wrong word, when compared alongside this

paragraph from later in the article. In an open letter last September, Democratic representative Anna S.U. urged action in Washington against the open source nature of stable diffusion. The model she wrote had been used to generate images of violently beaten Asian women and pornography, some of which portrays real people. Basharah said new versions of stable diffusion filter data for potentially unsafe content, helping to prevent users from generating harmful images in the first place. So it's like part of what's happening here is you've got this thing that seems really impressive. And that is to some extent because it's able to like remix stuff that exists in a way that you haven't done automatically before. But all of these kind of valuations are based.

Number one, and ignoring the problems with monetizing this stuff, including like the still very much unsorted nature of how copyright's going to affect this. And also like the question of, is this really worth that much money? Like, is this actually, is being able to generate kind of weird, slightly off-putting AI images a huge business?

Like, how much of, because like, from where I'm seeing it, one of two things is possible. Number one, this replaces all art everywhere. And so there's a shitload of money in it. Or number two, this remains a way that like low quality websites and like Amazon dropship scammers who are like putting up fake books on on Kindle and whatnot to trick people using keywords like that. This is just like a way to fill that shit out. Like I don't see a whole lot of room in the middle there. You know, maybe I'm being like overly pessimistic there, but that's that's where I'm sitting.

I mean, some of the models we've seen used is settling some subscription packs for access to these tools and access to use them for commercial reasons. Another thing we can see is just corporations selling to other corporations, having Disney and Warner Brothers be able to use this to generate concept art. And now they don't need to pay concept artists. And instead they just have like pretty pretty like nicely curated tools for them to generate this type of yeah. I imagine. Those are kind of two of the biggest use cases that at least I'm seeing right now from slightly more like the creative filmmaking art side of things. Because I mean, I don't think it's gonna replace all art.

I think nobody is actually, is actually thinking it's just gonna replace all art, just like photography did not replace all art. It changes the paradigm. And because this tool does seem like specifically useful for the way that we're seeing like corporations make the same movie every five years. Like it's all it's it's all built on all of the same stuff. And I think that will that's how a lot of a lot of it's going to get used. It's going to be a lot of weird scam artists. People

just messing around for fun. And then people not paying illustrators as much. Yeah, and I think that's kind of, like I see this being adopted widely, but that's not the same as it like being a huge success. Like right now I'm looking at an article that's estimating the current value of AI in the US at $100 billion, and that by 2030, it'll be worth $2 trillion US dollars. And it's like, I don't know, man, like, is the AI is more than just like mid-journey

image creation, right? There is just like, like, open AI and chat GPT and like, AI is in everything we use now. Like, like, like, AI is in your smartphone. AI is going to be in your refrigerator soon. It's like, it's not just image generation by any means. That kind of gets to what I'm saying, because that's when you look at AI as a tool, as more of like a paintbrush than a painter, a tool that will augment or be used in, because I think a lot of a number of times, it may be used in a way that makes the product worse and a lot of existing technologies. Well, that's really different from kind of number one,

the doom and gloom like this is an intelligence on its own that could like overtake humanity. I think the worry is more like this could make, get adopted on such a large scale that it like makes a lot of shit worse. Like the biggest fear with AI is that it kind of hypercharges the SEO industry and the way that that has worked to destroy search and destroy so much of internet content. I think that is very possible.

Like, if I look at chat GPT, like, I don't think that's going to be writing features for rolling stone anytime soon. But what it can probably do because SEO max copy is derivative, right? Like, it is predictable. It's derivative. It's based on other stuff. It's supposed to be. Yeah. And so it can do that SEO max copy and some of that ad copy, like very well. And yeah, either really fuck up searches, which is quite possible. And also make the lowest kind of acceptable tier of that kind of copy, what it can generate. And sort of because you can just shove that copy in front of people with SEO Max and then have shitty ad copy written by church,

UBT, like that will change how, certainly how we buy stuff on the internet, right? But also how we read news, etc. Yeah, absolutely. And I already see that like, I've written first and big publications. You have like essentially a site, okay, do've written first and big publications. You have, like, essentially a site, I mean, do people know what content-driven commerce is? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's why every article about stuff is now the best five X, right? Yeah. They have affiliate links and the publication will profit if you buy stuff after clicking the link. Yeah. Yeah. So. So like in the probably 2016 era, all of the stuff I did a lot of previously outdoor journalism, right? Right?

Right. Go about climbing gear, bikes, that kind of thing. And like that whole industry went to just AFCOM, like just affiliate links. And they kind of trashed any quality review stuff. And I can see like a similar change to that happening with this, right, where people will just chase that SEO max copy and that will become the new cool thing to do. And like a lot of outlets, we suffer as a result. But that's not the like earth shattering change that people are talking about on twitter.com or whatever. What one thing I saw recently is that more and more students are just using chat GPT to look up information, like as opposed to like, as opposed to Wikipedia, as opposed to

Wikipedia or as opposed to Google, if they have a question, they'll ask chat GPT, which has a few problems as soon as you start getting into how much of the chat GPT output is just AI hallucinations, where it's not actual information, which is honestly, that's not the case. I should just write my own thing on in the future. But yeah, it's just, it's a really weird problem. That's really interesting, the problem of like, because I think it's very clear to me at this point

that AI is a more user-friendly search experience than a search engine, right? Because you can talk to it like a person and explain what you need to explain. That doesn't mean it's a better option in terms of it provides people with information more effectively, that it actually tells them what they want to know as well. But it's like easier and maybe less kind of an imposing task to ask an AI a question that it is to ask a search. Especially as much worse as Google has gotten lately, one of the things that I found interesting as I was doing digging for this, I was looking at some AI articles that were published in 2019, 2020,

2021. This is before the big AI push know, AI push that like we're currently all in the middle of before chat GPT, you know, got its, it's widespread release. And it was talking with like some people from Google who were like, yeah, we really see AI like super charging our search results, you know, there's a lot of potential and like its ability to help people with search. And I'm thinking about in 2020, 2019, Google was a really useful tool. And it's a shit show now, like it's filled with ads, like search results have gotten markedly worse. Everyone who uses Google as part of their job will tell you that it's gotten like significantly worse in the recent past. And like I, uh, I, that's kind of like the thing that I see

being more of a worry. And it's one of those things. It's like, on one hand, in the hype machine, you have like AI could become like our new God King and destroy us all. And the other like AI is going to like, you know, create all there's all this vague talk about what could be giving people the tools to create more art than ever before

to, you know, make more good things faster. And I kind of feel like, well, what if neither of those things happens, which I and it just sort of allows us to continue making the internet worse for everybody at a more rapid pace. What if that's the primary thing that we notice about AI as consumers? It's probably a reasonable assumption. I think Garrison's point was good though when they said that bigger companies will buy, companies will just exist to get bought, right, which is something that's have to detect for decades.

Because like, it can't fundamentally change things. Like if AI is another means of production, right? If we want to be like a grossly materialist, and if AI is another means of prejudice at all for making things, if the same people own it and benefit from it, then like it's incapable of fundamentally changing our material conditions, right? Just becomes another way, and for them to

yeah, turn out shit and say that like, this is fine. This is what you'll get, you know, like, turn out shit content on the internet or whatever it might be. And likewise, if AI is primarily, like, if it gets caught in this kind of SEO loop, where it exists primarily to help advertise and sell products, whether it's as a search engine or generating mass content, you know, for, for like the internet that's sort of optimized to to a peer hire and search results. And it's also being trained on that, is there a point at which it kind of starts to lobotomize itself where it's just recycling shit. Other AI is written. Which also seems kind of inevitable with that.

This is one of those things. So one of the more famous moments and like recent AI research is this Google researcher, Timnett Gibru, who no longer works at Google. And some other very smart people put together a paper that like it was, I think, generally regarded by AI folks as kind of middle of the road. But it kind of middle of the road, but it developed the term stochastic parrot, which is what people know it for, as sort of trying to describe what these quote unquote, AI's do in a way that's better than an AI. Because part of what it was saying is that like, we have to look at this as kind of like a parrot that if you say enough words around it, including enough racial slurs, it'll

start repeating a bunch of toxic shit. It doesn't know what it's doing, it doesn't have intention. It's just kind of repeating this stuff because that's what's been fed into it. But one of the things that point out in that paper is that when you have one of these LLMs trained on too large of a model,

it becomes number one kind of impossible to avoid. That toxic stuff, but it also reduces the utility of the AI in a lot of ways, because like when you have so much data going in, it's very difficult for the humans to kind of tell how competent it is. This is why stuff like chat GPT involves so much human training, why they had hundreds of people spending tens of thousands of man hours like going through responses to tell if they made sense because when you've got,

like it's one thing if you're like using and if you're, for example, training an AI on a bunch of different like medical data to try to determine patterns and like antibiotic research, right? Which is the thing that that LLMs have been like shown to be have some early utility in, is like kind of helping to identify new paths for like antibiotics research.

Because like we've got a lot of data, but it's also a really focused kind of data, right? We're not like training these things on like all of Wikipedia and thousands and thousands and thousands of fan fiction stories about Kirk and Molder fucking each other during some sort of like exile file star Trek crossover. We're using a fairly focused data set to try and analyze it in a manner more efficiently than people are simply capable of. That's a lot more useful in terms of getting good data

than just training it on half of trillions different things out there, a lot of which are going to be lies. But anyway, I found that interesting. It's kind of worth noting that like Gaybrew and a number of other people who were responsible for that got forced out by Google and kind of attacked by the industry. Because I think there's a desperation and I talked about this in that episode I did last year, kind of about the fundamental emptiness at the core of the modern tech industry. But I think there's this desperation. Unlike we have to find the new thing, the thing that's going to be as big as social media was, the thing that's going to deliver the kind of stock market returns that social media did. And that doesn't exist yet. And AI is the after, especially several years

of disasters with crypto and diminishing returns in social media. And honestly diminishing returns in like traditional tech because shit like smartphones have reached kind of a point of saturation, right? You can make money sell obviously, like you can make money selling smartphones, but you can't show exponential growth, right? There's just not that many people who need new ones. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, I think there's,

I feel some desperation here. I wanted to kind of close by reading you all, I found a very funny article in the Financial Times that was about the potential that, the head of Europe's biggest media group, Bertelsman, C's for Generative AI. And yeah, it interviewed a couple of people, including AI Thomas Raib,

who works, is the chief executive of the German business that owns Penguin Random House. And one of the things that he says in this is basically like, I think this is, you know, going to be super great for authors, you know, there's a potential for copyright infringement problems, but really, it would allow you to feed your own work into an AI, and then produce much more content

than you were a ravioural able to put out before. Because if it's your content for which you are in the copyright and then you use it to train the software, you can in theory generate content like never before. Which I think is, yeah, fundamental, like, you know, I don't actually even think it's going to be possible to like train them on airport novels. Like you've got like James Patterson and other guys who they're not, they don't write their own books anymore.

They have like a team of ghost writers, but like having gone through a lot of AI stories, they're not books. Like they're not capable of writing books. They're capable of like producing text and producing pieces of books that human beings can edit laboriously into something that might look like a book. But the use in that is not like filling up airports with kind of mid grade fiction, because I think that's even beyond these models. It's like tricking people on Amazon. There was a really funny quote in this article, though,

where at the end of it, Raib is like, I asked ChatGPT what the impact of ChatGPT or Generative AI is on publishing. It prepared a phenomenal text. Frankly, it was very detailed into the point, which he then presented as a staff event. So there is was very detailed into the point, which he then presented in a staff event. So there is kind of evidence that a CEO jobs could be pretty easily replaced by this. Like you don't have to know anything.

Yeah. Yeah. Comrade Chagy VT. We agree. It's just spinning Jenny for bosses. I love it. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I've got right now. We have been doing some research and we'll have an article out on one of the more unsettling little site industries that I think AI is going to create, which is like scam children's books that exist to make con men on the internet money and poison the minds of little kids. But we'll get that to you next week. Yeah, felt like it was worth coming back to this subject because it, I don't know,

it's the most apocalyptic thing people in the media are talking about in a day in which like the entire Northeast is blanketed in poison smoke, which seems bad. Well, people are talking about that now because they all live in New York. I'm a freaking fuck out, but yeah, previous to this. Yeah. Well, people are talking about that now because they all live in New York. I'm afraid they're gonna fuck out, but yeah, previous to this. Yeah.

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Listen to Flaky Biscuit every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. It's just me, James again today. And I'm joined by Ruth Kinner, who's just me, James again today, and I'm joined by Ruth Kinner who's going to introduce herself shortly, and we're discussing the concept of mutual aid and trying to sort of cast that in a broader perspective. We talk a lot about mutual aid, but we don't

talk often about what it is and what it means and how it's been happening for a very long time. So Ruth, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us how you think this relevant? Yes. time. Ruth, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us how you think this relevant? Yeah, thank you James. So my name is Ruth Kinner and I work at Love for University in the UK. Love for us halfway between Nottingham and Lester in the East Midlands. And I'm a political theorist and historian of ideas and I specialise in anarchist political thought. And one of the people I've spent probably most time looking at is is Peter Kropokkin. And I've written about Kropokkin's life and work. I'm also the editor of the journal anarchist studies, and I remember at Laughbury University of the anarchism research group.

Oh, lovely. Yeah, that's a very, very appropriate CV for this. And so can we start off by explaining, because I think people here, Mutual Aid sort of thrown about a lot, and they know that it's people helping people. But what would you define it as? What would be a useful definition for people to work off? So Mutual Aid is about people helping people, but I think Cropocans' argument,

or the way that anarchists tend to think about mutual aid is that it's a, a way of describing a relationship that can be encouraged or discouraged according to the ways in which we organize our, our social relationship. So mutual aid is a kind of a response that we all have to people when it's based on empathy I guess. But it's something that we can dampen, I suppose, if we divorce ourselves from other people in our everyday lives. And particularly if we tend to think that people's wellbeing is the concern of others rather than something which is a collective concern of all of us.

Yeah, I think that's really excellent because it's very easy, especially if you're living under capitalism that exists today to divorce yourself from your empathy or I don't know if responsibility is the right word, but to help other people, we see that all the time. And I think one area where we've seen that increasingly, certainly in the two countries that we're sitting in is with this like, just bizarre, I don't want to like pathologize it, but this is just deeply untasteful lack of empathy for refugees and people seeking asylum. And so I wanted to sort of start with the example of the lifeboats in the UK,

and because I think they're great, they pop up in Cropoccan, they've been around for a long time, and they were at least when I was living in the UK, a very cherished institution that people supported. And can you explain a little bit about how they operate within that sort of mutual aid lens? Yeah, so the Lifeboat Association was prompted by,

it's called an appeal to the British nation and it was published in 1825 by this guy called William Hillary. And what Hillary wanted to do was to support the foundation of a kind of national institution that was going to help the victims of shipwrecks. And he couched this project actually as quite a sort of in nationalistic terms, I suppose, or patriotic terms, as sort of part of the duty that British people would have as one of the great seafaring nations. But what it did was it established the skeleton, if you like,

or it produced the foundation for the Lifeboat Association, which is what we know now, which is basically a voluntary organisation run by volunteers funded by the public with a remit to help anybody who is in distress at sea. And I guess, although it was sort of the original idea of the lifeboat association came from this sort of rather patriotic sea fairing tradition. Hillary's idea was that once you set up these organizations locally on the coast, then actually they could be replicated. So we did have a sort of international perspective. He thought that these things would be, would mushroom, you know, across the globe, and that we would have live-prone associations everywhere. I'm not sure if that's true, but certainly the live-prone association is still alive and well in the UK.

And it does exactly what he wanted it to do. It looks after people in distress at sea without fear or favour. And it's an example of mutual aid, I guess, because the people who do this, as volunteers, are always putting themselves at risk of peril or drowning, if you like, in order to try and preserve the lives of others. Yeah, and it's a very, at least from my memory,

an institution that I've never really heard of anyone having negative opinions about lifeboats until relatively recently. There was always a lifeboat-shaped thing that you could put money in, like a donation box and people would just put money in it and no one was like, oh, I don't like the lifeboats. But recently I suppose they've come under fire from Britain first. I think they would phrase it as like encouraging people to take the risk of traveling on small boats to the you know, to Kingdom to claim asylum. And can you characterise, I don't want you to characterise that attack because it's relatively easy to characterise and it's, you know, it doesn't need much explaining to be stupid, but the

response to that, like, because I think it has been quite, it's easy for people in America to see Britain as like a parochial at Lyland full of turf, but I think actually most people were still, like most people were pretty, I guess, offended by the thought that we'd allow people to drown rather than coming to our country right to claim asylum. Is that fair statement? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was astonishing actually, or I think it astonished people that the life-bode association would be politicized in the way that was attempted by the right.

The whole idea of picking and choosing who one would dress you at sea is simply preposterous. And as you say, I mean, the Lifeboat Association is widely supported. I mean, you tend to see offices of the Lifeboat Association at sea sites. So, you know, the environment is the holiday environment, it's the beach environment. It's part of being together in a place which is enjoyed by people together,

but which also has its risks. And I mean, the first time I think, I came across the lifeboat association was actually through an appeal that was made through a very popular and well-known BBC television program for children, which is called Blue Peter. And they funded a boat by asking kids to send in milk bottle tops, which could be some else down and turned into onion, or whatever it was. And then this is how they funded a life boat. So this life boats are deeply rooted, I think, I mean, the support for life boats are deeply rooted in people

psyche in this country. And as I say, I think it was interesting, I guess, that these calls from the right, that the lifeboats association was somehow doing wrong in looking after migrant boats, I mean, the small boats, really vulnerable dingus that were being sailed across the channel. I mean, the small boats really vulnerable dingy is that we're being sailed across the channel. I just think the, it gained absolutely no traction. Yeah. Because it simply didn't speak to people's public perception or deeply held perceptions, if you like, of the role of this association. Yeah.

And there's been a really significant campaign to dehumanize migrants in the UK, like even perhaps to a degree greater than we've seen in much of the US, although there's like complete bipartisan consensus that we should criminalize people coming here in the United States too. And like I spent, people will have heard that I spent that the last week

driving along the border, seeing little children like forced to be held in a desert with no shade and no water. It's also very brutal here, but I think it says something that that's an institution that was a line that wasn't crossable, I guess, by the right and this demonization of migrants. So, having established that this is a very cherished and important institution, So, having established that this is a very cherished and important institution, can we talk about how mutual aid is something that, because I think it can seem understandably to people who have been educated and with sort of neoliberal consensus, certainly it's very common in schools and universities in both of our countries, how this is in fact

being like part of human history for as long as people have been living in societies and how it's a natural human response to want to do this. Yeah, so I mean, I think this takes us back to Kropokin's theorization if you like, of Mutual Aid. So, I mean, talking about sort of, you know, our neoliberal culture, I mean, Kropokkin's writing in a time where you have a similar kind of individualism being stoked. And it's being stoked particularly

through a notion of social Darwinism. So the idea that fitness is linked or that the survival is linked to individual fitness and that competition is the basic rule of life and that therefore not only individuals but states as well should be, you know, pitting themselves against each other in order to gain advantage and to secure their own well-being. And Kropokin wanted to sort of challenge this argument. And so the way he did it was to say two things. One, that biological fitness is not linked to competition.

It's actually linked to cooperation. So individuals in any species cannot survive unless they have support from others in their species. I mean, it's simply, you know, that's that's how biology works. So whatever advantage that individuals might might, you know, acquire, actually, their wellbeing depends on the cooperation or the the collective practices that they have with others. So he recognized that there was inter species competition, but he said basically within species survival is based on cooperation. And from that, he then said, you know, one of the things that we can learn from this, from this sort of, or from this sort of review of social

Darwinism is to think about how we can encourage cooperation as a moral value. And he said, you know, the way that we, because that's a good thing, surely it's, you know, if we're biologically attuned to cooperate, then why don't we make this a principle of our lives? And he said that the way that we should do this is by configuring our social arrangements or our environments, if you like, in ways that enabled us to see that we were affected by the same sort of problems that we had a finises with each other, that there was a basic relationship that we had with each other, not only with family members and friends, but with strangers too. And that once we could understand that, then actually we could sort of organize our social lives in ways that were supportive of others when they were in positions of need or when they're

in situations of need. Yeah, so how would one go about doing that because it can seem, like where I live, thousands of people live on the street, right? And I can watch people every day walk past people who just need a little bit of help and not give it to them. And it can be very disheartening. And so how do we begin to organize in a way that, yeah, recognizes our sort of mutual dependence? So, I mean, part of the argument, I think, is that people will fill the gaps when they see that others are in need. And that's exactly what the Lifeboat Association does. And that's exactly what happened during the pandemic, for example. So, you know, not surprisingly,

one of the things that happened in the first weeks of the pandemic was the mushrooming of groups that called themselves mutual aid societies, mutual aid associations. And they were networked. I mean, somebody set up a website so that you know, people could see exactly where these groups were. They were networked in the UK. I think there were some relationships that were even transatlantic. So part of the argument is that you don't have to plan this. And in fact, mutual aid is an unplanned, is best thought of as an unplanned response. But I guess the other thing is, or the question that Mutual Aid begs is that, you know, if people get together in times, you know, to fill the gaps, if you like, to provide support for people who are in need, then how do they sustain those organisations over periods of time without suffering burn out and all the rest of it. And I think that really then depends on

you know sort of establishing I guess I mean you know that that's again why we should take some heart I think from the lifeboat association. It's been going a long time. It is possible to do these things but it's difficult and it does require that you learn how to cooperate with people who you might not otherwise work with, you might not otherwise think you have anything in common with, but where you find that common ground in order to undertake practical activities in collaboration with each other. Yeah, I think that's very pressuring. I'm always like in 2018, I don't know if you were familiar with this,

been in the Southern border in the United States, we had a large group of migrants coming here from Central America who became like a, a sort of talking point in the midterms, and through no fault of their own, right? And they were held at the US border and then tear gas from the, from the Tommy Hill figure, guest house store in San Diego. And I was really impressed with like, I was there trying to help with my friends and sort of trying to do anarchist things. But also there were people who were older ladies

from churches and people from mosques and people from silicogs and very much willing to work together and you know like we'd go to Costco together and spend thousands and thousands on water and and nappies for babies and such. But I think getting past that initial sort of, I'm not a person who works for people who go to church to like, well, this person wanted to help and so do why, was what allowed that to happen. Can you perhaps think of other examples that people, I'm interested in things like the lifeboats, which people might not see through the lens of mutual aid because they're such established institutions that they, there's an assumption, I think a lot of people probably think that there's some kind of state involvement with

the lifeboats, right? And the same with lots of sort of the societies that exist to prevent cruelty to animals and children and that kind of thing, right? Those aren't state-funded either in the UK. Can you think of other examples of mutual aid that people might have sort of not realized are entirely driven by society and not state? Well, I suppose that I mean the best or one of the best examples recently in the US context is the establishment of the common ground collective after Hurricane Katrina. So the aid that first went into the people who were stricken by Katrina was not provided by the state. In fact, you know, that came a lot later.

But it was provided by people who, you know, by by groups of people who who thought that they, you know, they could offer medical support or setup systems of, you know, help setup up systems of basic supply and rescue. And that's exactly what happened. And the common ground collective was established as a result of it. I mean, you find this sort of thing, I mean, I mean, it's fairly usual in times of, you know, sudden emergency and crisis that actually the people who do the hands-on work of actually taking people off of, you know, the the the roofs of flooded houses and all the rest of it. These are local people typically, they're not the agencies who often take a lot of time to get there. I mean the other examples, I think in the American context again which are often rooted around church groups but certainly a lot of black people's organisations which you know who couldn't

you know where they couldn't access support services, set up mutual aid societies because that was the if you like the only alternative that they would have in order to provide, you know, sort of clubs for their kids and breakfast clubs and any kind of welfare at all. That was the, that was the root of it. The other example, I mean, Kropokkin looks at, I mean, these are 19th century, 19th century example, which is sort of something that's later absorbed by the state, the insurance arrangements that were made by miners to look after those who were injured down the mines and their families in the event of their death. So they were setting up their own systems of contribution to ensure that those families would be provided for if the worse came to the worse. And eventually

this gets taken up by the station. It's sold back to you as nationally insurance. But these systems are, you know, they're established essentially by local people for their own benefits. Yeah, perhaps we ought to talk about that because there's a lot of these spontaneous societal things, especially in the UK, that are co-opted by the state and then saw back to us and then gradually stripped away of the very essence of what they're supposed to be at the National Health Service being another example.

Can you talk about the danger of that kind of state, maybe dangers are on word, but there can be a state capture of mutual aid efforts, which can sometimes, one might argue always like strip them of what the essence of what they are. Is that fair to say? Well, it certainly changes the, I mean, so state welfare changes the relationships that people have to those institutions. And so in one sense, it alleviates the burden of running those institutions, but in the other pad, it does two things, I think.

One is that it tends to encourage the idea that looking after each other is somebody else's responsibility. So actually it diminishes or it disincentivizes the sort of the that stimulus to help each other directly. So mutual aid is a kind of direct action if you like. Whereas once we give these processes over to the state, then actually we start to see people in different ways. So we do start to get the language of scrounging or of idleness, deserving, undeserving poor. All of those things come from the idea that we're paying into an institution and not necessarily being guaranteed

that we're getting value for money. So we start to see the institution slightly differently. And I think the other thing is that the, I mean, the worry, I guess, of that sort of co-optation is that it conceals the other things that the state does. So welfare is the last thing, if you like, that states assume as a responsibility. And it provides a gloss, if you like, on the law and order function that the state serves. And somehow sort of makes the state look a bit friendlier than perhaps we should think it is. I suppose the term that was used in the British context in the immediate post-war period was not the welfare state.

It was the welfare state because the idea was that the introduction of welfare, which starts really after the Second World War, concealed the violence that the state was otherwise perpetuating elsewhere. Yeah, I think that's very, that's something we should consider very strongly when we're looking at these things, right? I think it also strips the person to person aspect of mutual aid, from mutual aid. Like certainly the most common sort of Mutual Aid responses I've

been part of, to health crises and then to, and along the border. Part of what makes that very meaningful is people saying like, you know, this is a, this is a line between two states, but it's not a line between two people or community, right? And you are welcome, because I am of this community and I want you to come here, which you do not get when there's a man in green combat pants throwing MREs from the back of a pickup truck, like that doesn't. That's right.

And but equally, I suppose that, I mean, that's the other thing. I mean, that's kind of what I was trying to get at, that once you have state welfare, you have concepts of access through citizenship. And that reinforces the idea that there's a, there's a right of access and then there's there's an exclusion that necessarily follows from that. And so, you know, the relationship becomes much more transactional, rather than, which is the way that the mutual aid is couched in than which is the way that the mutual aid is couched in the anarchist lexicon, it's driven by altruism and giving without the expectation of reward.

Yes, I think it's very important. It doesn't imply a power or an expectation of sort of reciprocity. It's, I forget exactly where I read this. I'm terrible at these things, but like, I guess, you don't do it in a selfish sense, but it benefits you as well as a person you are giving to. Because those people are part of your community, is that fair? And you shouldn't be complete if people are suffering like right next to you?

Yeah, so I suppose there's a sort of there's an argument to say that, I mean that comes from the notion of recasting what it is to be an individual. So, you know, your personal enrichment actually relies on the relationships that you can cultivate with other people. So, you know, your personal enrichment actually relies on the relationships that you can cultivate with other people. So, you know, the quality of those relationships is actually something that of course benefits you. But I think the, I mean, one of the things that Kapot can tell this story about a child drowning in a river. And he imagines three people standing on the river bank. One of them sort of religious believer, the second one is he calls an ordinary bourgeois, a utilitarian, and the third one he doesn't describe at all.

And he says, what happens when they see this child in the river? And he says, well, the religious person is wondering, I should go and save the child because I'll read my reward in heaven. The utilitarian is thinking, if I save this child, and I'm going to feel really good about myself, and so therefore I should do it. And while they're sort of going through that process of reasoning, the third person is just jumped in and saved the child. And that's mutual aid.

Yeah, yes, I think that's very good. Yeah, it comes from Yahoo. It doesn't need to be like overly theorized, I suppose. Yeah. And it really doesn't like I've never I think the construction of mutual aid is important because it allows us to join the dots across the world and across time and to see the relationship with the state. But it doesn't need you don't need to have read Kropokkin to like I know a big it's sprung up here a lot in the pandemic too, right? Like free shops and certainly for older people or people who are immunocompromised, I remember breaking thousands of loaves of bread from a pizza shop down the street wasn't able to

open, so they would bring me flour and I would make bread and we would take it to people. And things like that were very spontaneous and didn't particularly need like theorizing in terms of Cropoccan. But sadly, they sort of, we lost a lot of that with the reduction in the severity of the pandemic, I guess. And I think it's important to remember that that was a natural response, someone that we should cultivate. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, there were all sorts of things that were going on here.

I mean, there were people who were sewing up strubs for health workers delivering lunches to health workers. You know, as well as just, you know, the checking on the neighbors, making sure that people were okay. So, yeah, I mean, it took, you know, multiple different forms. And, yeah, I mean, it is difficult because you know once real life as it were sort of returned and the lockdowns were relaxed you know people have all kinds of other demands on their time and and and again we sort of then get used to thinking that you know somebody else is going to pick up the pieces now. Yeah yeah I do think that that's part of that lockdown nostalgia, the WTF which is bizarrely already

occurring, like three years down the line, but people look back and think, oh, well, it wasn't that bad and like, obviously thousands of people died that we shouldn't overlook that. But part of what people are looking back on is that sense of community, which I think so many of us lack. The alienation is very real think so many of us lack. The alienation is very real for a lot of us. So those mutual aid groups or WhatsApp groups and things gave people a real sense of belonging. I think that's the same. A lot of people felt that way in

2020 for obviously there was an uprising in the United States, which gave people a sense of purpose, which maybe they're not feeling anymore. If people are interested in, I guess, this learning and there's doing, and they can be distinct, or they can be done at the same time, and we can learn by doing. Where would people start? They want to start their reading,

or their texts that you'd recommend, that you know, not the size of a breeze block that people might find approachable. Well, you can get, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm, I mean, Cropocans book mutual aid is quite long. I mean, it's the, I mean, yeah, I mean, I'm, I mean, Kropockins book Mutual Aid is quite long. I mean, it's the last two chapters really that are the ones to read. And that's freely available online.

Yeah. It's, I mean, it's a very 19th century kind of argument. I mean, the other, I mean, the other one that I really like is Cindy Milstein's anarchism and its aspirations. And that's short, it's very accessible. And she has this discussion of Mewchlaid where she links it to what she calls the ethical compass. And I think that speaks really nicely to the principles and the sentiments, if you like, of Mewchlaid, that it is this kind of thick relationship that people cultivate, but not necessarily

this kind of thick relationship that people cultivate, but not necessarily with a view to living in permanently in community with each other, but actually to change the dynamics of the cities we live in and the detachments that we not only have, but also sometimes kind of value. We don't necessarily want to live in each other's pockets, but actually that doesn't mean to say that we can't practice mutual aid with each other. Yeah, I think that would be great. Great place for people to start. If they want to read a tiny bio of Cropoc in dog section press, it has an excellent excellent, I'm a big fan of their great anarchist book. I think it's very approachable for tech. They're also available online. Yes, they are. And they're illustrated. Yes, they're very beautifully illustrated. It's been a good one for me to assign to students

and have them approach anarchism from a non-projective perspective, I suppose, which could be hard. I always remember coming to the US for the first time when I was 21. I don't think I presented in a way that was particularly affable to the transport security administration. But what are you doing here? I'm a PhD student. What are you studying? Political violence and the anarchist unions. I was immediately

sent to the little room that you go to. And yeah, I had some more questions. But I think it's really important to present anarchism. I think through the lens of me, because I think so often it's viewed through the lens of like a predelition for chaos and violence, which is the opposite of what you're doing when you're giving someone a blanket or something like it. And so I think if people listening will at least be familiar with the concept of anecdotes and mutilated and not see it in that prejudicial way, but I think if we can present it to other people, you're doing anachism. Everyone was doing it to start the pandemic when they were sewing masks, like you say,

or her brewing hand sanitizer. Yeah, and I think that's, I think that's really important actually to the, to the argument that, mutual aid is, is, is for everyone. So, you know, you're not anarchists are not trying to change people's heads or get them to think in particular ways when they talk about mutual aid. What they're doing is tapping into a propensity that exists within all of us, and what anarchists are saying is that if you push organisations in particular directions and actually you've got a better way or a better means of a better sort of environment within which you can sustain those practices. But mutual aid itself is not about being an anarchist, it's about being a human being.

Yeah, I wonder, so people want to sort of build ways of taking care of each other without the state where they are, maybe they can see a problem that hasn't been addressed by the state, like one of those holes that you spoke about, or a problem that the state is addressing inadequately or in an undesirable way. How would they go about, like, do you have advice people looking to start? It can be, especially if you're not on social media, which I know we've had people email about, like, I'm not on Facebook or Twitter and how do I organize mutual aid. So do you have any suggestions for that? Yeah, so I mean, there are, I mean, there are, there are normally sort of in,

in any, I mean, in, certainly where I live, which is a small market town. I mean, there is a community center. There are, I mean, there are churches too, but I mean, there is a, a sort of a local civic center, if you like, which has all kinds of, uh, adverts for, for local groups and activities. There's a, I mean, we're a town of sanctuary. So we're one of the places that migrants are sent to in order to register. And the people who are involved in the town of sanctuary,

they meet them, greet them, try and give them information that's useful to them. They run English language classes. They try and get the kids into swimming pools. I mean, they're all sorts of thing activities that they're doing. So I think it's a matter of sort of seeing what's there. Yeah. And then sort of trying, I mean, often I think people don't realize the skills they have.

So for example, if they speak more than one language, it's often really helpful to people who are arriving in a foreign land or a land that they don't, they're not speakers of the native language, to help translate, to share information, just to point people in the direction where they can get help from other agencies. So I don't think, I mean, it seems to me that, you know, mutual aid is not necessarily trying to sort of say, you're not going to enable people to access support services that are provided, I mean, even if they're poultry, services provided by the state, what you're trying to do is to meet people's needs. And there are existing groups and associations

which will enable you to do that. I mean, you could go, if you live at the seaside, you could go down to your local lifeboat association and see if they need to volunteer to run the office. These are the sorts of things, things that keep these institutions running. That's the kind of thing that you can do. Yeah, I think that's a very good suggestion for people. We don't need to turn on noses up at support for the state where little is available, we should avail ourselves and other people who need it all and empower other people to get to. Yep, absolutely. And certainly we can't we can't act as if the state doesn't exist a time when it does it's powerful and it can hurt vulnerable people. Yeah, I think this is there anything else you'd like to say before we finish up on the topic of mutual

aid? No, I think we've covered, yeah, we sort of covered it. I mean, I just, I guess it's a, you know, mutual aid is the important thing for me is that mutual aid is an easy thing and it can build. And that's the, and it can be sustained. That's the joy of it. And I think that's the brilliant thing about the example of the joy of it. And I think that's the brilliant thing about the

example of the Lifeboat Association. We can set up all kinds of things and run them. We don't need to be told to do it. We don't need to be told how to do it. Yeah, I remember one of the things that always gives me a little spark of joy for such a venomable British institution with royal in its name, is that they celebrate Kropotkin's birthday apparently. And yeah, exactly they'll post on all their social media, like pictures of Kropotkin, like a little birthday cake and like these celebrations.

Which, yeah, I think people should, you know, take a little moment of joy to celebrate these things that we've already achieved and I guess try to get better. Is any where people can find you on the internet? I don't know if you have social media or website. I'm not on social media but I'm easily, you can find me at the university, at Lafrey University, it's L-O-U-G-H, B-O-R-O-G-H. It's one of my colleagues have struggled with that. Yeah, it's not easy. Yeah, so that's the easiest place to find me

and my contact information is there and if anyone wants to write to me, then I'm happy to write back. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com

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