It Could Happen Here - Hacking Pharmaceuticals with The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Robert sits down with biohacker Michael Laufer to discuss the democratization of pharmaceutical drugs. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I am Robert Evans, and this is the show where we talk about how everything's kind of falling apart and how we might put it back together again in a way that works better than it did before or do something different.

That is even anyway, whatever. It's a show about the future and about the messed up present. And as a result of that, one of the things we talk about a lot is self-sufficiency. We've had a number of episodes kind of covering the values of like replacing your lawn with food, guerrilla gardening, that sort of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is people saying, well, you know, that's never going to work on a large scale. It's never going to replace industrial agriculture or whatever. And that's perfectly true. But the point we're going for here and why we encourage these kind of resilience building activities is because they do improve the ability of communities to resist when they need to resist and also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to, for example, the food supply chain or reimagine their even potentially more radical stuff, one of the big issues that any community has to confront is not just food but medicine.

I do and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends who cannot survive without medications that are very like reliant upon existing supply, and to some extent, even the stability of the government, getting your insulin, getting your medication for whatever kind of disease you have that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different reasons why people are reliant upon the medical supply lines and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's one of the big, when we talk about building more resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump. Well, today, my guest is someone who is working on bridging some of these problems. His name is Michael

Laufer, and he is the founder of an organization called the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective. They are biohackers, and they are working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals with resources that are generally available to people who are not rich or pharmaceutical companies to produce life-saving medications. The number one thing you would have heard of from Four Thieves is the EpiPencil, which we'll talk about in a bit. But first, Michael, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to chat and talk with you and all the people surrounding you who are trying to just unfuck things a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. And most of the conversation I want to have today is on the unfucking of things variety. But I do think we should start with a little bit of technical talk. First, can you give people an idea of what kind of medications you and other people in the collective have figured out how to produce and what kind of resources an individual needs to be able to do some of this stuff? Sure. So from a technical perspective, most of the things that we focus on are what's called small molecule chemistry. And to kind of describe that blanketly, if you can draw the molecule on a cocktail napkin, it probably qualifies as a small molecule.

If it's one of these things that like, you know, if you look at the diagram for the molecule, it's a protein, it's got big ribbons that are colored and stuff. That's a biochem thing and it's a whole different set of problems. Now, the main foci that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion, access to HIV medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and access to reversal of drug overdose medications. So that's been sort of our main focus, but there've been a handful of others. The things that we tend to look for are, where are there things that there's a great need and there's a huge barrier? And so you see those in those places a lot because the three main barriers that tend to pop up between somebody and access to the medication they need are either price or legality or lack of infrastructure.

And typically, the weirdness that comes up mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're poor and you're in a class of people that is seen as something not to be cared about because they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to move access away from those people and put in more barriers and raise prices becomes easier to defend. So the first drug that we focused on was an anti-parasitic toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous for most people. Yeah. It's the one you get from cats, right? Or is this not Gandhi?

Yeah. No, it is. It is the one you get from cats. And it's a really fascinating parasite too. If you ever dig into the behavioral biology of it, it's really, really fascinating parasite. I probably have it. Yeah. I have three cats. I definitely have it. Right. And so, and so it's not a big deal for those people, but if you have a massively compromised immune system, especially with people with HIV or advanced stages of cancer, and that's why it was labeled as sort of a HIV drug. It's not.

It's an antiparasitic, but it's used almost exclusively by people who are in advanced stages of cancer, people with fairly compromised immune systems from HIV or something else, and then pregnant women. And it's not that big a deal. If you have access to the medication, you can merely take it and eradicate it from the body. The difference was, is that something that was a short course of treatment, you'd take, I think, four doses the first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently for something like 10 days. And that's not a big deal when each dose, each pill was about $13 and a half dollars. And then Martin J. Crowley jacked up the price to $750 a pill. And so we're like, well, this is ridiculous.

So that was the first one that we went after. Then, of course, access to abortion drugs. That's a big one that's pretty topical lately. We released a video, I don't know, maybe three months ago on how you can make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This would be mifepristone, right? Mifepristone and misopristol. So you can do it with just misoprist, or you can do it in combination. And when you do it with just the one, with just miso, you have about an 85% chance of it working. And if you have both, it bumps it up to about 95. And what is the, like, when you're doing this, and we'll talk a little bit about the hardware, but what is the reagent that you have for this?

Because I know that's been a big part of some of the discussions is how do you get the things you make the medicines from, which is easier for some than it is for others. Sure. There are a couple different ways that you can go about that. more difficult way of course is to do the chemistry from scratch where like you say you get access to reagents you do some chemistry and you end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient which we lovingly refer to as the api and then you package it somehow into a tablet or or some other means of ingress into the body. The instructions that we distributed skip the difficult part because misoprostol is an ulcer medication. And so, for instance, if you have access to Mexico or are in Mexico,

it's kind of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication, it's over the counter. And you can just go in and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out of bed. She needs this ulcer medication. I need just a little bit of it to get her through the weekend. Um, and then no problem. Uh, not so easy in places where it's a little more controlled like the U S however, one amazing trick when looking for medicines, access to medicines that are generally blocked from people that the existing power structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and see if it's similarly used for other classes of person or being that the infrastructure does care about. So interestingly, you look for ulcer medications, you say, well,

like who else has ulcers that, you know, people might think are important people that doesn't really come up. And there are other ulcer medications that are a little bit better. However, there are a lot of really wealthy people in the United States and really wealthy people tend to keep horses and horses. Interestingly, um, 95% or something, or maybe more, some ungodly percentage of domesticated horses have ulcers.

Um, now why that is, I'm not entirely clear about, but my own theory is that it has something to do with taking a gigantic wild animal and putting it into a very small box for most of its life. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the thing that horses evolved to do. Yeah. So that said, people who are horse owners typically have to treat them constantly for ulcers. And the best thing for that is misoperstol. And so you can get misoperstol powder in a tub from places that... Yeah, a feed store or something.

Yeah, I go to a feed store every week. I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this shit. Probably. So it comes in tubs. And the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub is that it's already in with a buffer. Part of the thing about misoprostol is that the dosage is in micrograms. And that's very hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale. Even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that.

Right. drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that right so but the magic is this is in a tub with a bunch of inert powder and it's it's already mixed up to be homogenous and so what you can do is you can do a little bit of back of the envelope uh arithmetic and you can measure out much larger quantities and know how much active ingredient you have and then pack that into a tablet wow yeah um i mean that makes so much sense and is also like like the uh you have kind of the dark side and light side version it's kind of the light side version of all of those people buying up ivermectin for for nonsense it's like well no there's reasons to buy you know like ag uh uh livestock medication especially um i mean i i have a lot of friends who

took fucking fish antibiotics back in the day and this is kind of a much more um using it in a much more rigorous way to provide people with something that can be getting increasingly difficult to access in a lot of parts of the country. It's just such a smart way of approaching it, I think. about the importance of independent management of one's own health and decision-making not coming from above, there's this difficult moment that I've had kind of having to cop to the reality that if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have access to make decisions about managing their own health, part of that entails realizing that that will also lead to a lot of people making what I might think are bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it doesn't matter what I think that people should not be controlled by other people.

And if they make bad decisions, that sucks. And hopefully we can help that, but not, not lamenting the importance of, or not, not backtracking, not having some sort of retrograde.

Yeah. About offering more access, even if people misuse that access to be mismanaged their own health. Yeah. Management of health happens no matter what, right. It happens constantly and people will ignore things that seem like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And so I have to sort of retreat into this idea that more access to more tools is better and that's just the way of it.

Yeah. The problem, I mean, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The problem is not that people have access to ivermectin and so they're taking it in a way that is harmful to them. The problem is that people have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a horrible health care decision. The fact that they have access to veterinary medication is fine. Right, exactly. Exactly. And it's interesting that you say that because I have a friend at Doctors Without Borders, and they are starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and combat misinformation. Because just from a metric standpoint, they look for what's killing the greatest number of people at the greatest rate in the worst way. And currently, the thing that's killing the most people in the worst way at the greatest rate in the worst way. And currently, the thing that's killing the most people in the worst way at the greatest rate is misinformation. And so that's really the great

danger. And one of the things I find really interesting about kind of what y'all have been doing, because obviously the question of how to fight the misinformation in the medical sphere is a much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up the price by, what, 750% for this necessary medication for people – a lot of people who have HIV. What do we – the solution to that is simple. You find a way for them to get it without paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars per dose. The question, some of the work y'all have done is with very mass-needed products like the Mifepristone, like the EpiPencil, where there's large numbers of people who need it. But a lot of what I think, one of the things I think is really cool is y'all

are also working on hacking medications that are very niche, like very, very few people have this particular disease. And so the medication is, is the costs as much as a fully loaded Toyota Tacoma, you know, in order to, Oh, sometimes far worse than that, because of this orphan drug act that got passed in the U S and equivalents that exist in other places, you have all of these allowances that are granted to people who invent, I put in air quotes, because really they just purchase the rights to it. These orphan drugs where when you talk about controls, it's kind of the most tragic incidence of that entirely. Because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a very rare disease.

And in many cases, you have something that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function. And they're dealing with their life kind of moment to moment they're mostly cared for and if they have access to a particular medication then they can go through life in a fairly normal sort of way where they they don't need to be in assisted living where they can do sort of basic things for themselves and And that, that seems so much more predatory. I mean, it's important, of course, you know, to look at things with that macro lens as well and say what can what can do a lot of good for a lot of people. But then the sort of micro ethical lens needs to come out from time to time and say, all right, well, here's something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across the world, but these are people who could just go

through life normally if only they had access to a little bit of medicine. And the only reason they don't is because of misplaced avarice or all avarice is misplaced because of avarice. Yeah. And you're, you're, you're providing individuals or a way for people to, to help individuals who have this problem and who can't, couldn't possibly afford this cause they don't have healthcare or something, a way to deal with these illnesses. And oftentimes like even,

even people who are insured don't get the medication that they need or don't get it at an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical yeah um it's like oh well there's a there's a solution that's not as good but it's much less expensive so that's the only thing we're going to cover and so yeah yeah and you're saying well it should be your decision whether or not this is something you want to treat this way. And we're this is a way if you have access or this is a way for you to kind of, as you've been saying, like take your health care and your ability to get medication into your own hands and produce the things that you need without needing to beg an insurance company or GoFundMe $85,000 or whatever. Yeah, those GoFundMes break my heart so much. Yeah.

Especially when people say, oh, look how great, somebody got the money that they needed. And I say, look, I am happy that people get health care, but this should be entirely unnecessary. And the fact that this comes up is is criminal yeah we can we can as a species produce this shit for less than the cost of like a lamp you know like why why don't why isn't this available um now i i and that's what i think is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing and is that so often we kind of get stuck in this like the horror of how bad healthcare is, of how fucked up the pharmaceutical industry is. And then we get our relief from that in these stories of people like crowdfunding so they can get their medication. And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more inspiring than that is people just making – finding ways to make what they need.

Again, kind of the most popular – popular is the wrong word. The most press you all have received I think is for the EpiPencil, which is – an EpiPen is a device that you take – that is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which is when they have an allergic reaction that will kill them if untreated generally. that will kill them if untreated generally. And you inject it into your muscles or generally like an EpiPen does the injecting. You just kind of put it in place. And it is a life-saving medication. When people need it, it's the choice between that and death.

And they are very expensive. There is a company that owns the patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting. The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make, but it's unbelievably expensive, and people die as a result of lack of access. And you've provided a way using both kind of this thing called a bio lab that people – you've developed plans that people can build it for themselves

in order to make this, and also using a 3D printer, you can make an EpiP epi pencil which is a little less kind of a more analog version i think i guess you'd say uh no it's it's it's equivalent it's equivalent it works the same way the things that are different about it that um are critical the first one that you mentioned of course is that you can you can build it for a little over $30 us and you can reload it for about $3. Uh, unlike the EpiPen, which is,

uh, I think it's about $650 for, yeah. Um, and that might be for a pair, but even so, um, but the other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use.

So you can't test whether it's faulty or not until you use it. And there have been a lot of failures. In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch of years ago, and there were just these tragic, tragic stories. Some guy had to watch his little kid die. He had a pair of EpiPens. The kid went into shock. He used it.

The thing failed. He brought the other one. The other one failed, and they're in the air, and you can't land in 15 minutes, and the little kid died just and i'm sure there are dozens of dozens of stories like that that just happens to be one of the ones i know so one of the things that's great about the epi pencil is because you're putting it together yourself and it only takes four parts you can test it you can make sure that it works as many times as you need to you can dry run it with saline and just double check that it does what it's supposed to um and so it's safer

so the fact that it's you can control it yourself you can reload it yeah you can test it all these things fix a lot of these immediate problems yeah that come with and it still has the benefit that everybody wants from the epi pen which is that it doesn't require um you know measurement or like knowing how deep to press the needle before you depress the plunger all that happens automatically and it happens very quickly. And yeah, we, as you say, we got a lot of press for that because essentially a good timing.

We released that the same time that Heather Bresch was lying to Congress about why they had raised the price on the EpiPens. And so it was in the public eye. Yeah. And that's a huge one, being able to produce that, because that is, I mean, there's a tremendous number of people who rely on EpiPens. And I think the potential of that project is staggering. And there's some, you know we when we talk about kind

of the different people who are who are working on similar problems to you there's also a group of people who are working on um cracking insulin being able to produce insulin um yeah the open insulin project is an amazing group of people incredibly important yeah they're yeah they're working on probably the largest scale public health crisis. I mean, in terms of queries that we get, I think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else. And I always say, oh, yeah, they're very, very bright people who are already working on this. Go talk to the Open Insulin. And they're just amazing.

and they're just amazing. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to move on because I want to talk about kind of the more philosophical dimensions of some of this. But before we get into that, I'd like to – so like one of the things you and I have been talking about a little bit behind the scenes is i am not a technically savvy person but i'm i want to try and i'd like to be able to like produce an epi pencil i want to like understand this it kind of and and potentially be able to contribute um in a more direct sense in part because i'm curious like how how doable actually is this for i consider myself a pretty normal person when it comes to like technical understanding, right? Like I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not a chemist.

I'm not a – I haven't really – I have no prior experience 3D printing or anything like that. in terms of financial investment? And what is kind of your general estimate in terms of time to get up to, you know, a kind of the level where you can start learning how to do some of this stuff? I think the barrier to entry is pretty low depending on how you want to start.

As I said, there are different avenues to doing it. You can, of course, one of the greatest hacks, if anybody listening to this doesn't pick up anything else, here's the best hack in terms of getting access to medication. You have a medication you don't have access to for whatever reason. Assuming it comes in a capsule form, you can merely go to a chemical supplier, in a capsule form. You can merely go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active pharmaceutical ingredient, weigh it out, put it into a capsule, and you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing. That takes nothing more than being able to read a scale and scooping powder into little capsules. The next step up, there are things that you can do that are a little more involved.

If you want to build an EpiPencil, again, this is three or four parts, depending on how you count. You take a needle from one syringe needle set, and you put it onto a different syringe needle set, and then you put it into this autoinjector that's designed for needle phobic diabetics. You load it with the epinephrine and you close it up and you're done. Then if you want to step into this a little bit further, if something is so barriered for whatever reason that you can't get the actual ingredient, then you might start messing around with our micro lab. The micro lab, I would say probably takes around a hundred dollars us to build. It, but it's not super technical. Our latest version doesn't require any soldering. Everything snaps together,

which is really nice. You can plug everything in. All the wires are just screw terminals, which is really nice. You can plug everything in. All the wires are just screw terminals, which is really convenient. And it takes some time and you do have to load some code, but we're looking to release a new set of documentation in the summer that'll be very, very stripped down of, here's your bill of materials. You can order all of this stuff. Here's how you can put the disk image onto the SD card that you put in, and you should start it, and it'll wake up and work independently. We had a video of our head hardware guy actually building the micro lab from

just parts that were sitting on laid out on a table. And I think all told it took him about 45 minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but again, like granted, this guy's a hardware specialist and he, you know, designed it. So for somebody who's not done before, it might take an afternoon, but it's not a prohibitively long or involved project that would take you weeks to put together or any specialized understanding of biomedical engineering or anything like that. you know, uh, biomedical engineering or anything like that.

Now, um, I, I kind of want to move at this point, cause I think that gives people an idea of what's actually necessary and they can go to y'all's website, um, or look up, you have plans on a GitHub,

um, if they want to kind of look at what's, what's involved. And it's, um, some of it seems a little daunting to me, like looking at the construction of the bio lab, but I'm,

that, that's going to be a project that I'll be engaging in over the next couple of weeks. So we'll keep people updated on how I do there. I want to move on to talk, Michael, about what you see as kind of the, I don't know, the potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspective of actually building dual power of this project. And obviously you are in, I think, what would be called the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing and decentralizing the production of life-saving medications. Although I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind of a return to more traditional attitudes about healthcare in a lot of ways.

Yeah, there is a cyclic nature there. And in the sort of Zen mind, beginner's mind, we like to think that revolution is always in its beginning stages, right? decade roughly looking at trying to find ways to give people more independent access that doesn't require infrastructure to medicines and medical technologies. The hope really is to create a certain amount of cultural shift. I remember at one point a friend of mine who was a business school graduate asked me a very sort of like business school type question where he said,

how would you measure success of your project? And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization. And he kind of had this moment of like, what do you mean? We shouldn't be pushing this, right? The idea is that eventually the concept of managing your own health is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to be explained between people, but somebody says, oh yeah, I just, I just did that up in my micro lab. Um, in the same way that when you look at the shift that happened between, oh, you know, the mid eighties and the mid nineties where computers were this strange, scary thing that was, you know, were only accessible or usable by people who were very specialized to

something that, you know, everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody sort of use and the same sort of thing that happened between the period of time i don't know maybe 10 12 years ago and now with uh with 3d printing where like stereolithography and rapid prototyping was again the specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially out of the machine tool industry had started to spearhead. And now you say 3D printing, everybody knows what it means. when somebody is unwell, that when discussions between people happen, that instead of the, have you had that looked at,

or you might instead hear from somebody saying, well, have you read up on that? To see people actually engaged in their own health and not going through this very typical process of outsourcing responsibility. Now, that's not to say that, like, experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right? Yeah, we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals who can help you understand what your health and diagnose and stuff like, yeah. But there is, again, this drastic difference between going to a doctor and essentially just like throwing the problem on their desk and saying, fix it, call me when it's over, versus going to a doctor and saying, hey, I'd like to talk about this.

to a doctor and saying, Hey, I'd like to talk about this. I, I'd like to know more about what's wrong here. And I'd like to discuss what the options are and what seems best. Um, that would be great on a lot of levels. And, and then these questions of access to medication then become even more relevant. Because when you're talking with a doctor and the doctor says, okay, well, we could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it. It's $300,000. You can say, all right, well, let's just do a little thought experiment. And if that fell from a truck, what would I do with it? And then maybe you can go home and say, you know, I'll call you and let you know how it goes. That's really my grand hope. And there are so many different ways that that can play out.

In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards to this, which was in 2016, I guess it was, when we presented at Hope. I called Martin Shkreli's cell phone from stage to try and ask him what he thought about what we were doing, given that I was handing his drug out for free and showing people how to make it. And he didn't answer the phone when I called him then, but he called me back a few hours later, which was really hilarious. We actually chatted for a while and the guys, I mean, a little detached from reality, but he's, he's, he's no dummy. And when I sort of described what we were trying to do with the micro lab, he had some

interesting insights and he said, yeah, you know, one way I can imagine that working really well is if somebody with a little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were to maybe build one of these and serve a small community, I think that could be very efficient. And I was like, that's a good thought, you chiseling bastard. Yeah. I mean, there's a degree to which that's kind of how I see the most realistic potential.

This is not every individual making all of their medicine, but kind of like we had during the fires last year when our local and state governments during the heat wave this year completely shat the bed. We had different mutual aid collectives do things like we are providing people with like – oh, it's a blizzard. We're providing people with firewood. We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat. We are providing people with – they've just fled their houses. We have kits that have food and basic necessities so they can get through. Mutual aid collectives that are like, well, we are making, we specialize and we can produce this and this and this medication,

like these three. And we have, and here's the information you can find online about our process so you know that we know what we're doing. And if you need these things, you let us know and we get them to you. And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if you want to help engage in this mutual aid process, even if you're not someone who's going to be doing a lot of the technical stuff. Well, we need people to go pick up parts, or we need people to do this, and you can help us here. I see a lot of potential for that. All of that. And I think in a similar way, a lot of that sort of thing is already happening in other realms, where it's a sort of thing where you might be building something or you,

you see some project on GitHub or whatever. And some, there are these STL files and you go, Oh gosh, well, I don't know how to do that, but Oh right. XYZ down the street has a 3d printer. I'll go ask her. She's really good at making these things. And you say, Hey, look, I have this thing. Would this be difficult to print? And with their experience they kind of look at it and be like uh no that that shouldn't be too hard um you know i

have some time this weekend maybe i can make that for you and in the same way you say hey it looks like i i seem to have this rare infection from whatever whatever or i have this odd condition um i wanted to try this medication because it might be really helpful, but it's not legal in this country. Do you think you could put this together? Again, you know, you call somebody and whoever's on the other line says, oh yeah, I have a micro lab. I can try and put a program together for that and see if I can make it for you. That sort of thing I think is a potentially really positive avenue for that and see if I can make it for you. That sort of thing, I think, is a potentially really positive avenue for that sort of thing to proliferate. And again, eventually to have

a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical technology not being something that is comes down from above from some authority but instead is something that's managed by people who are part of your community who you already trust i mean that's why going to a doctor is so scary they seem to be the arbiter of your fate they're going to tell you whether you're well or not. And that is just the truth. And much better to have it where people are making up their own mind based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. And if there's more of that, and if it's closer to the person who's actually suffering,

that I think will be on the whole much better. Yeah, it's this, the, and this gets tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things we've seen this year, but it's this understanding that with any given problem, if individuals trying to solve that problem have more autonomy and part of autonomy is knowledge, that's nearly always better. The problem, of course, is that like we get into this situation we are now where some people take – I'm taking – some people use – I want to take control of my health care to you know do stuff that's nonsense and and that brings us back to the question of like yeah you need in for the quality of the information that you're getting is very important right because if if you're if you if

your research is some youtube video that has convinced you that you need to you know take this this horse paste or something then yeah that's good. But that doesn't change the fact that like with food, like with everything that you need to survive, the more of a role you have in understanding that, deciding what to do with that, understanding where it comes from and how it is produced, not only is that I think more satisfying as a human but it's it's also critical to to your well-being um it's critical to like on two levels right on two levels because not only when your health is taken from you yeah it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you of participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful. And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful is having a participatory role in the things that decide the trajectory of your life.

And so when you go to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen. First off, your health improves, assuming you've made good decisions and get lucky. Yeah. But second, you're also having a participatory role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful. And beyond just kind of the self-actualization benefits, from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate in the move for radical change in our society, in our society, one necessary element of that to any of the kind of things that we need is a belief in your own agency and power, and also a freedom from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless. And there is, I think, probably no feeling worse in the world than feeling completely

helpless about a treatable medical problem. I mean, it's one thing. I just went through this with my mom. When you get a disease where there's just nothing that science can do, right? We're like, yeah, you've got this cancer and there ain't shit anybody has for you, you know? That's one kind of horrible, but I think it's a lot less terrible than you. I have this thing that we can deal with, but I either can't afford it or I don't know that I'll be able to afford it. I had a horrible – I lost my job and my healthcare in 2017 and so did a person who was on my healthcare with me that I love very much. And I got this hired here in healthcare a couple of years later and it happened that a month before the – I started my healthcare at this new job, this person who was on my healthcare with me got diagnosed with a brain tumor and thankfully not a cancerous one but one that they had to take medication for that would have been – would have bankrupted us without insurance. And thankfully it worked out fine.

The timing worked out okay. But there's not a week that goes by that I don't. And it, it, it's, it's, it is something that makes you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate in, in things that, because you have in the back of your head, well, I have to, I have to keep this job. I have to keep this insurance. I have to. Oh yes. Yeah. That, that is. That's another thing that I find so heartbreaking. There are so many people that I've I've met totally outside of my activism who lament about working a job that they hate. And I think, gosh, well, you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on it and looking for something else and trying

something else. And they have this total paralysis of saying, but if I quit my job, I won't have healthcare. And, and, and mind you, like these were people who were incredibly healthy.

These were not people who had any regular visits to healthcare. They're just scared that if something comes up, they won't be able to handle it. And it's a perfectly well-grounded fear. But as you point out, what this does is it works as this sort of shadow oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring trying things as you say taking risks or or just doing things that that don't involve a an optimization toward a stable state of maybe just like,

yeah, maybe I'll start a small business and yeah, probably will fail, but that'll be a cool adventure. And most people, you know, so many people, maybe not most, but many,

many people get just terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah. And it contributes to people being afraid to take to the street to protest the police because maybe they get arrested and maybe they get fired and then maybe their kid can't afford their – like there's a thousand ways. I think honestly the fear of losing your healthcare is in some ways a greater counter-revolutionary force than any law enforcement agency could hope to be because the fear is so much more immediate to so many people nobody talks about that yeah and thank you so much for mentioning it because it's something that like oftentimes i try to bring up when i'm discussing

things in public for it and and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow at me and be like what's what's the big deal and i'm like no. Like if you look two layers deep, there's something that's really working against people being able to exercise protest. And it's this really silent, terrifying force that seems to underlie everything. And if you could alleviate that, if it could get to the point where people are like,

yeah, the hell with it. I don't need a job to take care of me. Yeah. Then all of a sudden, so many possibilities just blossom in the mind. Yeah. If you have, like, say, if you're a parent who has a child with, you know, who's insulin dependent, there's not a lot of difference in my mind between the fact that between someone holding a gun to your head and your boss being able to fire you and take away your kid's access to that insulin. There's not a tremendous moral difference to me.

Oh, there's not a moral difference. I'd say getting a gun to your head is actually more likely to survive that. Yeah. It's a lot safer. It's less inevitable. You could talk your way out of that. Yeah. Whatever. But there are any number of things that might go wrong there.

But if somebody takes away your insulin, that's the end of the story. Yeah. I guess the more salient point than the comparison is just they're both acts of violence in every way that's meaningful, I think. They're both acts of violence. And one way that when I rail against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law, the example that I give is I say if somebody were dying and you knew how to save them would you ever not tell them how and just let them die say yeah oh no that idea belongs to me and i'm not going to share unless you pay me like no human being that i think i've ever heard of would do that yeah And yet this happens every day because we've sort of carried these questions of copyright into patents. And despite the fact that they're hundreds of years old and not applicable anymore,

assuming they were ever applicable and people just die because people say, oh, well, we can make more money if we do it this way. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network.

Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There's a fascinating thing going on there when you really drill into that idea, because I suspect there are a lot of people who are integral in propping up this system both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works, people in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in some facet of keeping that going who also were they to see an individual in immediate medical distress would never think of

like getting their debit card number or whatever like asking them for would without thinking attempt because that's what people do and it's i mean this is where we get into kind of some of these more philosophical anarchist ideas about what hierarchy does and what these structures do because structures enable people to participate in evil that they never would as an individual um yeah there's this easy route that that many easy routes that pop up that allow people or force i should say force people to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of way where yes of course you you'd help somebody up off of subway tracks if they've fallen.

Yes, of course, if somebody were drowning, you'd drag them out and save them. And yet, just because it's a degree removed and it's mediated by an agency, suddenly it's so easy to forget and ignore and be sort of complicit in. Yeah. And just to go back around to what four thieves is doing and what y'all are doing it's one of the few projects going on right now that fits what my idealistic 19 year old brain thought the internet would be 16 15 like when i when it was when things were newer and a little less like oh oh, this is like one of these days, well, this kind of shit's going to happen. And that is, I think, I mean, that's not without value from, again, a revolutionary perspective, the fact that it is pretty rad, you know?

Well, I mean, I will not deny the fact that it feels good you know there i i think that uh i think that we all grew up with that sort of hope and belief that we were gonna open these new doors and there were gonna be these new possibilities and things that we had been reading about in science fiction were going to become real and and there's there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand in it. It's, there's, there's something quite satisfying about that. I will, I will admit. Well, I think that's a pretty good point to close out on today. I don't need to take up too much more of your time right now, Michael, but. But as I told people, I'm going to be trying to get into some of this,

because I find it just both fascinating and incredibly hopeful in a world where it seems like there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives. You and your colleagues in this are trying to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives. You and your colleagues in this are trying to give people opportunities to take some power back for themselves. And I just think that's, I think it's pretty dope. Thank you so much. Yeah. And to your listeners, if there are people out there who like what we're doing and you

want to support the project, please go find somebody who needs your help but doesn't deserve it and then go help them anyway. Yeah. Yeah. That's always a good thing to do. Michael, anything else? Anything else you want to kind of put? This is normally the section where people plug websites or projects or anything. You've got anything in particular you want to throw out there right now?

Sure. We're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in the summer. So look for those. In the meantime, we're always looking for help. So if you're out there and you'd like to be assisted in the project, please get in touch. There's the Contact Us page and the website. And by the way,

this do not have to be a technical person. We're looking for currently, we're looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that we need to do. So if you're out there and you have, you know, background in, in language, then that would be great. If, if you're somebody who feels that you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have any number of endless small tasks that just need to be taken care of because we don't have enough people. So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you. Please get in touch. And in the meantime, keep each other healthy,

keep each other safe. Thank you so much, Michael. Thanks so much for having me. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories

inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.