It Could Happen Here - 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 It Could Happen Here. This is Garrison. 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 Stop Cop City movement. With me today to help go through the many, many happenings of the past few weeks is Matt from the Atlantic Community Press Collective. Hello. Hello. Hello, my friend. Good to see you. Yes, last time we talked on the show was during our very, very critically acclaimed comedy episode. The comedy episode was great. Highlight. Highlight of the season. I'm glad you approve as someone who saw the episode. I might have been the target audience for that.

Yeah, there was like four jokes that only three people get. But that's alright. So, this is going to be 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 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 that uh the city seems to be uh be giving towards the cop city project even beyond the 33 million dollars um that was the that

was the target of the city council vote a few a few days ago but there's a whole bunch of extra extra money floating around as discovered by you guys at the atlantic community press collective and then uh who had who had their journalism pretty much stolen by every other outlet they put our name they put our name in there and you know there you go and you get you get paid in the spotlight right that's how that works that's how i pay my rent i i i'm only paying you an exposure for these episodes exactly which is which is which isn't true fyi but anyway um so yeah okay so going back to 2021 this conversation started uh a couple months after the lease legislation was signed. Back then, it was a conversation about a $55 million funding package between the Atlanta Police Foundation and Chief Operating Officer at 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 going to come from this leaseback agreement. So originally, it was going to be a 20-year $1 million a year. We found out that that is actually a 30-year $1.2 million a year, so $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 Atlanta Police Foundation was planning on taking out to build the facility.

So when they were talking about the $60 million philanthropic donation, they meant 20 of that was going to come from a loan, but the city was going to 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 Cop City project, if people are unaware, included what, like $30 million of public funds being contributed. And the other $60 million for the first phase was supposed to come via private funds with the Atlanta Police Foundation doing fundraising via all their big corporate backers. 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 fat in terms of the stables aren't going to be in 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 from what's going on here so maybe not uh from what

they originally hoped but from what they originally showed us or told us that they were going to do according to um the chief financial operator of the city of atlanta muhammad bala he said that the atlanta police foundation has raised 3333.4 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've donated, I think, $20,000 to the Atlanta Police Foundation. Yeah, out of spite. 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 tax credits we're getting like really into the yeah this is finances and i'm sorry as soon as

you said new market tax credits part of my brain just like shut off uh but continue continue continue um there's like 30 000 foot overview um that money is supposed to go to like revitalizing uh impoverished or like underserved communities it's supposed to go to revitalizing impoverished 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 police 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. And the project was initially sold on, which is just another, another, another thing in the long line of, of, of APF moments.

So this entire time, the deputy chief operating officer for the city of Atlanta, LaShonda Burks, she has been playing quarterback for the finance conversation. And she was part of the finance conversation a way back in 2020. So somebody... She's in the mayor's cabinet. She's privy to these conversations. So the entire time this is happening, Andre Dickens is still out in the press, repeating this $30 million number. I tell that to Rose Scott, who's basically our NPR person here. He tells it to the AJC,

the paper of record and says that it's gonna be $30 million. And if it goes over, it's gonna come out of the Atlanta Police Foundation. And then of course, you know, his cabinet is having conversations about way more money this entire time. Well, do you know who else cares a lot about money? The products and services?

The people who want to buy the products and services? The products and services really, really do want your money. And now also the, the, as Sophie is poking at me to tell you the Apple premium subscription option also cares a lot about 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 staying on the topic of, of, of stealing your money and using it for purposes that is probably not very good. Let's talk about the two

Atlanta City Council meetings that happened. One was during late May. That was the first one with public comment. People were giving public comment for like seven hours. That lasted quite a while. It was, it was a pretty, pretty long day. And then on the, then during the meeting on June 5th was even longer. You're like,

how, 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,

where we kind of like, we're like, Hey, this, this is going to come up for vote. And then organizers got everyone to show up. Yeah. So about seven and a half hours of public comment that night. City council meeting ended, I think, at 11 o'clock.

And then there was a meeting with the Finance Executive Committee meeting in between that had about 2 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 5, where we had just over 14 hours of public comment. That includes breaks for disruption and a 10- minute break that the city council took. And then a lot of arguing between Doug Shipman, 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 in-person public comment session that is in modern history. Yeah. in-person public comment sessions that is in modern history yeah and it was basically unanimous

there were there were four speakers who got up pretty early uh who were in favor of the the training center and then everyone else was anti-cop city yeah what did um i remember i remember seeing some things about like uh apf police departments trying to like trying to push people through to give public comment yeah so there was a rumor going around that 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 um i i never saw anything to back up but okay it did seem like the four people who showed up were kind of coordinated. And, you know, like one of them brought their kids, which the stop-top city side does the same thing.

So there did seem to be some like intentional parallels. But what was not paralleled was just the sheer number of people on the different sides. 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. And the Atlanta Police Foundation hasn't shown up

to defend the facility since 2021. And they're the most invested. Yeah, it is striking the amount of which their work on it is just so much like backdoor lobbying um and they've really never had to defend the project like publicly and openly um it's it's all it's all just these these these back backroom meetings between city council members between uh people people in the mayor's office between people in the police department yeah the edmonton police foundation lobbyist was actually running around uh city hall on june 5th yeah not surprising so i feel like most if people are online they probably heard the result of the vote after 14 hours of public comment,

which was almost like unanimously, uh, against the facility. Uh, what was it? Uh, four to 11. Yeah.

Four votes against 11 in favor. So they, they passed the funding package allocating at least the 33 million plus the future loans. Uh, the lease back agreement. Yeah. Yes. The, the 31 million plus the future loans. The lease back agreement. Yeah. Yes.

And it's 31 million plus the lease back. Okay. We're not going to get more deep than that. Okay. But yes, it was, it was like, what,

what time was, that was like 4 a.m. At 30. Jesus. So I got that. There was a.m. At 30. Jesus. So I got there. There was a Young Democrats like thing. Again, there was a press conference with the Young Democrats of Georgia

coming out against top city at 8 a.m. So I was there at 730. I left City Hall at 630. That was the wildest day. So so after probably the longest city council meeting day in quite a while, they... In history. In history.

For sure, in history. Single day. They voted to approve the funding, which, I mean, I don't know. I was not surprised. I wasn't surprised, but I was disappointed, as a parent would say i want to point out a couple things that that they did um in preparation uh so i think city council was prepared for like an action or a veto and they had two moves to kind of neutralize that

um 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 going to take the council and physically move them to a different room and let people continue to demonstrate in city council. So I think they made some wise moves on their end to prepare. Yeah, and they

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 um i mean it just seemed to be a lot of like erratic erratic stuff happening around did not uh i mean yeah i mean it's i 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 go by the book there and see how far that would get. And then if the result was 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, what did people on the ground think? Did they think that the vote would go through? Did they think that the vote would be stopped? It's been 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. And I think it's, you know,

kind of dependent upon which segment of the movement we're talking about. There's, there's obviously whole sections of the movement that, that are opposed to electoralism. They still showed up, like they still, you know, came and gave public comment. And I feel like they, they didn't expect that this would go any other way. There's more 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. this had to not going through.

City council, you know, the kind of the whip count that, that we learned was if it, 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. Yeah.

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 lobbying for this to get sent back to committee where it would be held and hopefully delay the actual funding and mess up APF's funding mechanism, but that didn't happen. So there were people who were hopeful. Even I was... I said that this was the closest electorally that we'd ever come to stopping it. Just knowing how the whip count changed over the course of like 48 hours it got close and then

then it got taken away uh andre 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 There was already plans for things afterwards, like the week of action at the end of June here. And I guess we can talk about how some of the ways the movement might continue going forward after these messages from our lovely sponsors who endorse everything we're saying.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan. I know you agree with me on this. So we're back. This is a really nice, like, ghost. This is crazy. Yeah, I mean, most people don't, so if you're part of, like, the... It's only on the gold, though. Yeah, exactly. If you're part of the ghost hunting 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 actually transcend to the next level and go to a more safe, 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 go to their next place, whether that's like a safer version of limbo, paradise, heaven, hell, whatever. I can't wait for you to move here so I can learn more about this. I was just making 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, Entrenchment Creek Park is still closed, correct?

So Entrenchment Creek Park is still closed. There is a motion or there's some legislation in the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners that is supposed to come up again on Tuesday. The CEO's office asked for like 30 supposed to come up again on Tuesday. The CEO's office asked for like 30 days to finish cleaning up the park. So the 30 days will

expire Monday and then there's a Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday. After that, hopefully the park is open, but we'll see. So it may or may not be open. That is still to be determined

um i've heard there will be another music festival of some sort not many details as of time of recording um and so we we knew that was going to happen i i talked about this during during the uh 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 like the barrel of something now. Being like, a lot of the land's 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 going to choose to resist now might be different than the ways that they chose to resist 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 episode still contains a few things about how, how assistance might, might, might take forms during these next few weeks.

But there's this, 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, or I've seen kind of on Twitter where a lot of people are like, Oh,

the referendum is just coming out in rise to the city council vote. No, this has been in the works for a little while. To my knowledge, it dates back to before even the funding question was in place. It's been in the works for a minute

and then they decided to hold off until after the city council vote. We're probably going to do it regardless of the city council. But the referendum... There's a spaceport that was supposed to be built in South Georgia. And basically, this one woman started a referendum question and got this spaceport canceled. Of course, we're talking very different municipalities. That was a much smaller one. She only had to collect 1400 signatures or something like that. But there's a referendum question that is in front of the municipal clerk to sign off on it and make sure that it is properly worded and all these things,

like just an administrative issue at this point. Once the clerk signs off on it, then these organizers have 60 days to collect 75,000 signatures. The number they actually need is just over 70,000, but they're collecting a little extra because the signatures will be challenged, things like that with a vote. If they're successful in doing so, it goes to city council, who again, as an administrative position has to all the signatures, make sure everything is official. And then once that passes, then 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 Atlanta Police? But there are a couple.

Where this comes in, I think, most interestingly interestingly is the organizers of this believe that they can get an injunction to stop construction. So now, once the referendum campaign kicks off, and then if they collect the 70,000 signatures again until November 7. So this could significantly delay the Atlanta Police Foundation's ability to continue destruction on the land. And right now we are in the mass grading phase of this project, which is the most

environmentally damaging part of it. Now we're screwing with the contours of the land. So they're going to have to prove that they're serious about the referendum, and the judge is going to 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 succeeding. How soon do people have to start like doing stuff for that? So the referendum, once the clerk signs off on the paperwork and that, that, um, the clerk has seven days to validate and then once that ends, you have the 60 days, so we're in this kind of interim period where they can't start collecting signatures, uh, but as soon as the clerk signs off on it, they will start collecting signatures. So they anticipate the clerk to like, kind of try to hold off as long as the clerk signs off on it, they will start collecting signatures. So they anticipate the clerk to kind of try to hold off as long as possible.

So they're looking at Wednesday, which I'm going to look at my calendar because I know exactly when to do that. So they're looking at Wednesday the 14th as the kickoff for the signature collecting campaign. So for more information about the referendum 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. So copcityvote.com. That's copcityvote.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 of note the past few weeks.

And that's when police raided the home of three people. And this, this, 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, of, of quote unquote charity fraud and like another,

quote-unquote charity fraud and other quite nonsensical financial crimes, as the bail hearing judge admitted himself. So, do you want to go over some of those details? Because this is something that was,

honestly, people have been expecting this to happen. The Atlanta Salt Salty Dairy Fund themselves has 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. This type of state repression targeting all of like the bail funds and like legal support structures that have been set up. I'm sure everyone's seen the video. They 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. Just utterly insane for a bail fund or a nonprofit 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 a statement in preparation for this. You saw how quickly they transitioned the actual running of the bail from the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to the National Bail Network. Happened seamlessly that day. So they were prepared. And then someone who was talking to Marlon while he was in jail said Marlon was 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 fraud, or reimbursing yourself for gas is charity fraud,

or buying a COVID test is charity fraud. Like all these things that are just like overhead. Yeah, very standard overhead costs for running an organization of this scale. Yeah. And this was all on the website when people doted anyway to talk to the various uses that these funds were going to have.

The charges are extremely flimsy. There was a bail hearing a few days later, which I watched the whole thing. And the judge there did not think the charges had much merit, which is the first time really during any kind of bail hearing associated with stop cops, these stuff where the judge was like,

okay, so this just seems very clearly fake. And, and, and told the prosecution that they'll have to put, put a much, much stronger, stronger case together if they want this to go forward at,

at, at, at any, at any further stage so all three got out on bail uh it's it's pretty scary though we like it it's it's it fucking sucks during the bail hearing uh the uh i believe i believe it was it was it was the assistant attorney general um who was there uh fowler i believe fowler. He was talking about how police were going through the trash of Solidarity Fund, how they're monitoring phone calls, other communications.

So just another good reason to have a paper shredder and to have a burn pile in your backyard. Because, yeah, they're, they're, they're good. They're going to go through your, your trash. If they want to find things out about you. They,

they, they, they stole a journal from somebody. They were someone's, someone's personal journal was, was taken. And so, yeah,

a lot of, a lot of kind of very, very standard, like very standard of, of this type of like shady investigation police stuff um which is just it's always good to have a reminder for people about what what the police are willing to do um but still even even with all that it seems like they were not able to get much at all because the most they can put together is, oh, you use these funds in a way that you explicitly said that it could be used onto your website, which is 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 very chilling display of police repression saying that will will will will make your life incredibly difficult um if if we don't like you but you know and as has happened every time there's been like this massive display of police repression it utterly backfired right like we national media is now just harping on the fact that these charges are overblown, and they're attacking bail funds, which is inconceivable to, let's say, like the liberal or the liberal left's wing 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 cop city, which is not something we had before, even 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,

like this is an insane escalation. Is the bail fund still being operated by the national bail organization at, at this point? Yes. So the bail funds is still being run out of the national network at this point in time. So secure.actblue.com 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 fifteen thousand dollars 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 de warrants and bail hearings a minute ago for another story. And then there were like $10,000. The cost has ballooned dramatically in the last few months. So to go back down to $15,000, bail is terrible and awful, but that seems way more in line with expectations. Yep. more in line with expectations. Yep.

Well, so that is just a small glimpse at the many things that have been happening the past month. Things do not seem to be slowing down. Things just seem to be changing in ways that makes everything certainly 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 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 Atlanta underscore press on Twitter you can follow me at

MattACPC on Twitter and our website is ATLPressCollective.com I assume Yeah I said that Oh did I cut out? You did cut out I could not hear it all 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 new solidarity fund secure.acplu.com slash donate slash Atlanta Solidarity

because that is a long thing to type out so I'll put a link for that in the description for the new bail fund link cure.acblue.com slash donate slash Atlanta solidarity. Cause that is a long thing to type out. So I'll put a link for that in the description for the new, for the new bail fund link. Um, and, uh, yeah, you can,

you can, uh, if you want to keep updated on plans for the week of action, um, I suppose you can look at, uh, stop cop city on Instagram and, the defend the Atlanta forest account on Twitter.

Um, along with the many, many websites that, that exist at this point. Uh, but yeah, so that's going to be happening later. I,

I don't know what will happen because I, because I don't know. Cause I really going to have another fun week. Cause I really have no idea what's going to happen because what happened to the last one was also quite, uh, quite surprising. Um, so who, who knows, who knows what will, what will, have no idea what's going to happen because what happened in the last one was also quite uh quite surprising um so who who knows who knows what will what will what will go down but uh thank you matt for joining me to give me uh give me and 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. run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. and get into the heart of it all.

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to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And welcome to a very special joint episode of two shows that you hopefully love. One, The House of Pod. I'm Kaveh. I'm the host of that show. And it could happen here with my good friend, James Stout. James, hi. Hi, Kaveh. 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 and you're following the other, If you're not following one of these shows and you're following the other, follow both. Why not? And leave a nice review if you like the shows either way. But we're really excited. So let's get straight to the episode. How's that sound? Yep.

Let's 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 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 going to 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 going to introduce you 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 Marvel hero or villain I would be. Well, I was thinking more of the comics, but if I have to pin you to a character, it's Moon Knight. I think that's clear. It's gone straight past me, buddy, but I'm sure. I hope that was... 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 we'll introduce our guests, but let's tell people kind of what we're trying to cover today. Yeah, of course. So we're talking about like healthcare in an Indigenous context and how we can both learn from and stand in solidarity with Indigenous communities when it comes to healthcare, 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. Named Victor Lopez Carmen. I think it's a liberal arts school out in the east somewhere. Named Victor Lopez Carmen. He was the prior elected co-chair of the United Nations Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. He is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe and also from the Yaqui Tribe.

Is that correct, Victor? 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'mcing 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 those are the names I have a hard time with. Dr. Molly Hallweaver, is that correct?

Correct. ER doctor at UC Davis, one of my favorite hospitals in the world. Is that also correct? That is correct. I work at UC Davis. 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, when we look at healthcare in indigenous context, what things are we looking at to differentiate it 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 uh 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 um like and we can explain that lots of indigenous people most indigenous people live off res too i think that would be very valuable but what what sort of topics would be be looking at what what sort of topics would be be looking at when we're looking at health care from an indigenous perspective i think like when you look at indigenous peoples in the u.s you think of uh our traditional health system as well like that was what we always had that was what uh 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 that 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 U.S. live in cities or urban contexts. Molly, let me ask you, because people may be wondering, how did you become involved with delivery of health care 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 healthcare delivery system and indigenous peoples. And when I was a, I started fellowship, I did a global health fellowship, and I started in 2020. So it was, you know, not a great year to be a global health fellow,

for many reasons. And so I had very, you know, obviously, we were on lockdown, and work was hard and stressful as an ER doc. And so we were trying to be creative in, you know, how we can do this global health fellowship. And so I got in touch with a awesome physician, Don Maggio, who is the ED director at White River, which is a Apache nation in Arizona. It's like three hours east of Phoenix. So he went to, he was a Highland alum, a Highland DM alum, which is in 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 pulse ox 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 um I loved it there and wanted to keep working and so I continued to moonlight which means I worked kind of as a locums um I don't know if I need to explain that for medical jargon cave but I worked you know every one to two months, I would fly to Arizona and work on the res for a week. Very, very cool. So Victor, getting back a little bit to where Native Americans are getting their health care. What is what is your interest once

you're done? When you graduate, what year are you right now? I'm a fourth year, so I'm in my last year. Good for you, buddy. How are you liking it? I'm liking it less. You like fourth year less? I like medicine. I still maintain. But medical school,

I'm ready to be done with school. You got senioritis? Is that what you mean? Pretty much. Yeah. So you're a rising fourth year or have you already matched? No, I'm a rising fourth year. I'm applying to residency now. So talk to us about where what you would like to where you'd like to go and what kind of medicine you'd like to practice. Honestly, anywhere that will take me. 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 only able to go back for like you know breaks and things like that and it's it's uh 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 um be there for ceremonies, be there to treat patients. 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? 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. start the conversation that so much indigenous medical technology has already been appropriated by western medicine as western medicine aspirin for instance uh many traditional healing practices that were and are still find themselves seeping into the field of psychiatry or around parenting mental health uh the way that uh 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 there that we're working with. And I think it's important to give indigenous peoples their flowers. But yeah, that 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 Pasquayaki tribe, the health division employs a team of traditional healers that come up, I think, monthly from Sonora, Mexico, from the villages. And Yaqui 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 Yaqui people have been using for thousands of years.

And I think that 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 it 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 to bridge western and traditional medicine in a way that works for us they the yaki system is a really great one like an um like people probably people won't be familiar with it i guessing most people listening won't be familiar with it i'm guessing 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 10 years something like this long time um 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 an 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 tribe the pasquareki tribe run their own system i think they get a block grant correct me if i'm wrong victor they get a block grant from ih me if I'm wrong, Victor. They get a block grant from IHS and they spend that as they see fit. Yeah, I can speak to the IHS side. But for me, this and Victor, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

But it for me 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. And but there's obviously a disparity between even those two, like per capita spending is way higher in the VA than it is on IHS. 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 weeds of it later, but there's, you know, a lot of turnover because it's a, sometimes it's hard places to live. And so, and they're 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 precedents, smaller court precedents, over the years that I think a lot of them were based in treaties made with indigenous peoples.

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 sort of to do something about the lingering impacts. They have a responsibility to provide health services to Indigenous peoples in the U.S. 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 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 healthcare programs. The way the

Veterans Affairs is appropriated is much more effective than the way the 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 all Indigenous 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 really arduous 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 instance, during COVID-19, there were specific funding allocated for tribal nations. Those tribal nations who are not federally recognized, they wouldn't have had 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'd 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 U.S. population. And then we could talk about what barriers there are to care in that regards. But

we'll start 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. 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 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, like I was, 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, you know, a little bit harder. And the reasons for that, as we can talk about, are like totally multifactorial, but are in line 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. 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 yeah i i think um it's important to note to sort of say that these problems exist all across the u.s because there can be stereotypes um associated with health concerns like that that that are attributed to the way that we live or our culture or just inherent to who we are like there's this prevailing i think notion that i don't know what came first but i think in the medical field i still hear about it like in class sometimes they'll say like native americans uh have the highest rates of diabetes or heart disease but they won't

say why and it makes people think that oh like 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 it creates a lot of ignorance and a lot of room for interpretation uh so i think it's really important to talk about those background reasons for instance with diabetes i think a lot on a lot of, 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 on 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, an hour and a half to the health food store. And so, you know, a lot of the, 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. A lot of, you know, in policy, there was, there were some early efforts to try to, I think, to try to limit alcohol on reservations that we still see today. 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 like that, 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 they would bring up like Native Americans being a high risk for all these. It would be like one of these little footnotes that would be in a lot of our lectures and that sort of thing. 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 um do you you must be annoyed by this do you does this happen to you like um

are you like sitting in 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 yeah that happens sometimes yeah um you're like what listen i just like find a wall and i stare at it just anticipating it uh just looking in deep thought until it passes right smart student uh molly you're gonna add something i was gonna 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. Like it had really limited hours.

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

and how that can impact health care today is that something either of you could explain to listeners who like me are relatively ignorant on it and that to the i 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 revolution, and how this most recent set of protests sort of reignited this trauma. And, excuse me, 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 the scent of rose blossom or something and then they'd shock them and then the the mouse would grow to be really fearful of those shocks that are associated with the rose blossom.

And then what they noticed was that like the children of the mice would also respond poorly to like that same rose blossom scent, even though they didn't have the exposure to it. And I looked into it. I mean, because the truth of it is, I don't think you can inherit specific phobias. That just doesn't happen. But I kind of pushed back on that point a little bit, and I got a lot of messages from molecular pathologists who were like, so you can't stress during pregnancy. It can affect the DNA. It can affect the DNA, and that can be passed down, changes in the DNA, disruption in the

DNA. You can't inherit specific phobias or fears or stresses per se, but it can clearly cause genetic damage when you have that much stress. And 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. So it is, I agree, it's a very interesting subject, but I don't want to get any more molecular pathologist emails. Molly, what were you going to say? I was going to say, I'm glad you took this epigenetics question from me. You know, one thing about your, 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 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 issue. It's 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 the science 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 there's a shift almost to uh almost you see it in like policies and lawsuits today to start trying to grab more uh minerals from the land that that uh 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 um yeah like a flat's a good example of that right exactly yeah yeah yeah well you know the uh podcaster and uh the rapper uh propaganda prop i'm james you probably have met him you know he he speaks about how initially they they the African-Americans in 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 they started trying to find ways to get them out of there. It seems to be our national M.O. 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 worked there as well i'd like to hear like what are some things that the ihs is doing well what are some things that uh need work and how i just want to say the ihs, I think they're doing what they can't. A lot of it, they're doing well with what they have, I would say. A lot of the issues are underfunding, and we don't exactly know how well,

we don't really know the potential quite yet because they just don't have enough funding. So I think I would just like to insert that caveat into the conversation first yeah yeah yeah and i you know i only have experience on one reservation and they're you know every 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 ihs but it's like kind of its own thing and they are the kind of the gold standard for or they're 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 um but they are kind of

touted as the the leader in ihs right now i I know less about this than either of you, I'm sure. But I know I worked on an NIH grant years ago with someone who'd worked with Alaska native people. And they were talking about this Promodores de Salud model, which I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It came from Oakland, actually. But it's a peer mentor model for health education that they had implemented there and we were trying to get money to implement that on the Yaqui reservation didn't work shockingly and but and that model that they

used 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 in white coats, and what works very well for them. And I think it's, it's a very desirable model to replicate, it's not that expensive, either. And we were doing it with diabetes prevention, right? So like, chiefly, my thing is riding bikes has been my whole life. And so just, yeah, just a big old bike riding hippie um but like it riding bikes is very good for you as it turns out which is which is nice uh so um the thing that we've been doing with a lot of my friends on the yaki reservation is getting folks uh helping them out with a bike and helmet and lights and all the things that you need teaching them to fix the

bike right and then having them uh go ahead and ride the bike and then like 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 um getting yucky folks to ride bikes yeah just going off of that i mean that sounds awesome uh 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 for instance at the yaki tribe i'm sure you know we're not the easiest tribe to work with but uh but we're probably easier than the ihs yeah and uh and i think that that's a huge limitation like even if you want to do a study on the ihs has to be approved by like all of these government officials and bureaucrats and uh and i think that

that makes it really difficult. And especially because, you know, and there's so many branches of the government that the Indian Health Service, there's just one small, you know, piece of it. And it's not necessarily one that's like 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.

I think that made a significant impact when that was introduced. And then, you know, 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 the same 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 clinic or 638 clinics or tribal health systems. It's really cool what they did in Alaska, because those are some of the most remote villages, you know, in the U.S. And I think that is something that we should be paying more attention to, especially, you know, when we're talking about, you know, we talk about Alaska, that they're remote, but a lot of tribes in other parts of the U.S. are maybe not as remote, but they're in very similar situations and that they're kind of disconnected, like on food deserts.

similar situations in that they're kind of disconnected like on food deserts um and i think the the same model can be used but not every tribe is at the place where they're capable uh yet of taking over like the 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'm interested i think you were mostly tongue-in-cheek but when you when you mentioned the Yaqui tribe is not that easy to work with what what do you mean like is it is is a is there a lot of different opinions is that why is there is it hard to why is it hard to manage or what why would that be difficult we're just very militant um and I think uh i think we just you know we just do our own thing and uh very independent and yeah yeah we're just kind of like i think i think we just have a very

uh rebellious nature in us like we're sort of uh but yeah just really headstrong and like we don't work the same on the same timeline, I think sometimes it's like, for instance, like, like, I'll tell you a story. There was this, this shrimp farmer dude, our traditional one of our traditional spiritual leaders, political leaders, he passed away in early 2000s. His name was Anselmo Valencia. And they were bringing down, they were 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 he's running on time. And they brought him down to the traditional authorities in one of the pueblos.

And then all of a sudden, right in the middle of the meeting, the snake, you see this snake on the floor go by. And then Osama Valencia, 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? I just came from Manhattan, and I flew all the way. I'm in this village, and they stopped the meeting. And this guy's confused. I think he got really angry, and that never happened to him in a business meeting before, but there was a traditional aspect that i think we just

put that above everything else um like during even today during times of ceremony like no one's answering emails no tribal government official is going to get back to you within that those like three four weeks because they're doing spiritual um practices and and honoring that so yeah yeah i get it from my perspective everyone is lovely and like it's nice to have a community where everyone cares about each other and like wants everyone else to be healthy and like that's great there are times when like recently we did a live show to raise money to buy more bikes and uh someone from iheart was trying to get a w9 out of us and i was like nah it's it's like easter week it's not it's not gonna happen

like um like it's just i did but it's fine you explain it and like i always attribute like i'm not fully culturally uh fluent right like i'm a guy from england like it was different where i grew up so like things you're not yaki you couldn't tell yeah stout is uh it's right up there with valencia but yeah like i'm obviously i don't have full cultural fluency so it's on me to kind of listen and learn over time rather than be frustrated and bulldoze shit when you're i mean obviously you're you're very good at that in my my opinion from 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 of what reservations were like, like from Hollywood, like I did. You know what? What was fact? What was fiction? Yeah, it was my first time like on a reservation. was fact what was fiction um yeah it was my first time like on a reservation um and i think it was it it it sort of felt like a little bit of a different um country almost like 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 um and just it's beautiful. The one I'm on was, 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, you know, a lot of single-story housing that are all kind of government

cookie cutter housing. And I got to kind of go into the homes too, when we were doing house visits. So that felt, I felt very like privileged and it felt special to be able to do that. Um, as a very foreign person, right. I felt, I felt like a, an outsider. Um, and yeah, I mean a lot, there isn't, they're not central heat for these houses. Some of these houses, lots of the floors were, uh, dirt, like, not actual flooring on the houses, um, so that was, I think, surprising to me, because it seems like that is not something you think of when you think of America, um, but that was, that probably was, like, the most surprising, but then, like, the street dogs running around everywhere was kind of classic, I think that my first, my first drive down, 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 don't know like obviously i'm not american either

so yeah it's shocking i actually am from texas i just watched the harry potter films on repeat uh that's how i learned to be a turf uh no um i am not a turf uh i i don't think that needs to i don't think that 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 right we did settler colonialism everywhere i don't want to erase that for a second uh but um i i you know i'll just go to the res to ride my bike through it um pasco yaki res has nice roads lovely bike lanes um and it's much smaller than like uh the tohon autumn res which is next door um that's the size of connecticut for people who aren't familiar and um 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 a 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. Most of the people I run into are friendly and nice. And so I really like that. First guy I ran into was a traditional artist, David Moreno, who runs an art program there. He's a very lovely guy.

And we just were chatting i think and uh i was trying to encourage i think i was trying to encourage him to come on a bike ride with me and like he didn't have a bike so then i was just trying to encourage like i was like maybe i could get some bikes and come back and i spoke to some people in diabetes prevention and and we got some bikes and came back but um it like obviously people's houses aren't super duper fancy but they're fine like people have some nice houses on their ears like uh you know i didn't grow up in a super fancy house and and like the houses are not that distinct from those i see in san diego um the it's beautiful too like 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 Yaqui reservation with a 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 Yaqui roads. We ran out of inner tubes because everyone got so many punctures. But like, it's beautiful landscape it's really gorgeous uh i think the biggest shock to me was the donkeys the the the donkeys on the autumn roads or something else like just just wild ass donkeys that uh like at night it sounds like there's a murder occurring it just make these horrendous noises and like you puncture on 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 uh just chilling there too so uh that was the weirdest

thing but like i know people shouldn't just walk onto reservations and start like trying to have their cultural immersion experience or whatever that's uh that's a bit cringe but um yeah like people equally shouldn't think that it's a scary or different or dangerous but like arizona feels foreign to me like i go to phoenix and that that is that is a scary experience for other reasons uh but like no i i've always felt very welcome and comfortable there yeah if i can just add one more thing i I'm 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 they like have a very soft

way of speaking. And I'm like a loud, annoying American. And so like, obviously, they're American as well. But I've kind of a loud voice, and they're very soft spoken and so gentle. And so like, obviously, they're American as well. But I've kind of a loud voice, and they're very soft spoken and so gentle and so just like appreciative. And I kind of, for me, I was like, wow, this is like amazing that you have the resiliency to feel appreciative when like, I don't feel like you should, you know, feel grateful or appreciative to me. I thought that was like my most striking that I felt. To me, I thought that was like my most striking that I felt. Molly's so nice. She's like trying to apologize for being, listen, you're talking to two podcasters. We're like obnoxious as our nature. It's like part of our DNA. You don't need to explain yourself there.

Victor, you've already touched on this a little bit, but do you find yourself 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 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? You know, there's the level of education, it's just not to the point where I find we can even have these discussions, 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, you know, what is colonization, what happened,

to educate someone on you know what is colonization what happened uh and the very basics of of i think that should be basic in this country uh the all these basics and by that time you know i think people have uh gotten so much information that maybe they didn't know before they get overwhelmed and and these things can also be very touchy subjects i think because we haven't been bold enough in the u.s to actually just talk about them uh 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 you know exposed to it uh in you know starting in elementary school history starting in middle school high school all of these things I think will make well we need to start doing that in the educational system if we're really going

to make progress yeah as like someone who teaches history or has taught history um 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'm in california like many of them for instance could not name the tribe whose ancestral 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're 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 uh yeah 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 autumn and the and the navajo and uh maybe not an hour everything's a

long way away in arizona but and 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 miwok tribe and then only then did i learn oh my oh my god they were everywhere here you know there's so much the ohlone tribe so So even here, which is a relatively progressive, not Floridian system, did I not learn a lot about that? But I also, Victor, I also hear you like, 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, like in terms of like

bringing on guests, you know, like I want people to talk about these things that are difficult and sometimes maybe even a little traumatic to like talk about, but there's this 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 and balance, you know? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I think, 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 uh and uh and you know listeners in the tens we have listeners in the tens yeah that's much better yeah we'll do a qr

code so you can just be like hey check this out yeah that's a good idea so so victor i'm sorry uh i have i have one last question for you. You mentioned that you want to go back and practice on the reservation, be 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 like 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, 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's huge in terms of resilience. As culture as well, I think, you know, as 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 very apparent that to your audience

and to the world that that is protective of indigenous health, indigenous mental health. And so, you know, there's all these facets of traditional ways of life that were 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, you know, 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 the other side of the coin that i want to be working on as well other the other side of the coin that i want to be working on as well oh excellent man 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 like colonization isn't a thing that stopped it's a thing that we keep doing uh like we not not weak including victor uh but you know like we people like me um like uh the indian child welfare act right igua um is the thing that the supreme court is is like set up to take a swing at um and 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 Yaqui children, right, to help them stay connected with their culture if they're in a family which is not a tribal family.

Can you, if you feel comfortable, explain what ICWA is and then the damage it does to young people to be pulled away from their culture and and sort of uh yeah like this little act of colonization that happens every time that happens yeah i'm glad you brought that up because colonization is definitely continuing 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 uh of gold mining permits that are pending right now in the Black Hills. There are dozens of gold mines still operating there. And the Dakota and Dakota 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 Child Welfare 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 either,

who is from their tribe, from their cultural background. And the reasoning behind that is because they, 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 U.S. 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. 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 to adopting Native children over white people on the basis of race.

Where that falls short is that the basis of the Indian Child Welfare Act is that Indigenous peoples are not a race. They're sovereign nations. They have a political status distinct from any other race in the U.S. And that is the basis that tribes are arguing for, that, hey, we have this political status. We're a 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 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 racist or discriminatory based on race. It means that a number of other bills and other under other things in the law that, that, for instance, that exist 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 lead to a lot more land grabs, 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 health care? They might start taking down 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 have 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 pointing to it and then kind of like dropping the mic uh asking people how they can do something to stand in solidarity so like if either of you want to mention i know this bears ears oak flat there are other attempts to expropriate and colonize indigenous land sacred spaces and fucking border wall is bulldozing kumeyaay graveyards like as i'm talking to you um are there ways that people can stand in solidarity with indigenous communities

i'll go first because victor will have a better answer than me and he can he can he can jump in after me but i think as um like a low level entry thing that people can do and it kind of um touches on how trying to remove the burden on asking for education and doing the education yourself um for that white 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 weaved with fact and fiction um but books and then like uh native media um 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.

about what we're missing. So those are like very, very easy. And then in terms of, um, like just from my point of view as a, as an MD, there are a lot of ways to, to get involved because these, um, the reservations are chronically understaffed. They're just like rural medicine, IHS or not IHS, rural medicine is very under, understaffed in, in country and so there's always opportunities for um doctors to go and work and it's like valuable and amazing for us and for the community to be able to do um so there are ways to do that through locum companies and directly through the through the ihs um sites victor yeah yeah um yeah i think uh i 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 or the 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 stay 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. Let's start with you, Victor. Tell us where people can find you or plug anything you want to plug. Come to the res. Just ask for me. Original Facebook. Yeah.

My Instagram and Twitter are VLOCARMEN. V-L-O-C-A-R-M-E-N. Very cool. And Molly? I exited the Twitter sphere after Elon Musk took took over so i'm off but you can find me in sacramento all right you guys have been so awesome uh thank you both for coming on we hope to

talk again sometime thank you Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories,

their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by I Heart 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. of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists

in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Nia 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 churns out racialized fear of the Chinese other, and transforms it into economic papers that close with quote-unquote policy solutions about the so-called China problem. 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 and 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 function. 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 SOEs 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 SOE, 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 Lenin 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 firms and the state in 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. 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 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 about state-owned enterprises as if the word means one specific thing.

But the reality is that there are an 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 in 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 SOEs, 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 SOEs. Their job, in theory, was to make a thing or a service, not make money. Modern Chinese SOEs, despite sharing the same name as their socialist period predecessors, are very different. For one thing, modern Chinese SOEs, 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, they're structured as regular corporations whose stock happens to be owned by the governments. This shareholding relationship is one of the most common kinds of modern SOEs, but, as we'll see, they make ownership and management structures increasingly complex. The other major difference from Soviet firms is that companies like Saudi Aramco and modern Chinese SOEs are for-profit companies. They 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 government,

municipal, provincial, and even district and county governments in China have their own SOEs. On a conceptual level, this makes sense. China's economy is the size of a continent, and individual provinces have the geographic size, population, natural resources, and economy of entire nations, which means that provincial SOEs can rival national firms. But this also means that state-owned 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,

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 railways. 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 salaried employees. The capitalist has no social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling at the stock exchange, with the different capitalists 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 reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But Engels 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 SOEs. These SOEs are capitalist firms subject to market discipline that 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 that get too large and powerful can and will be broken up and the parts, once again, set to compete against each other. Weirder still, these SOEs are also listed on the stock market, meaning individual capitalists, and as we'll see later, even foreign firms, can buy 49% stakes in nominally 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 cornucopia of the most absolutely dog shit names you've ever heard in your entire life this commission is better known for obvious reasons as SASAC, 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 SOEs. SASAC, which is a part of the state, owns the SOEs, bobs your uncle, everyone goes home for the night, and the episode ends right here. Unfortunately, it is way more convoluted than that. When I said Sassack 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 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. And this is where the simplistic narrative of the Chinese SOE, a single firm owned by the state under its 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 SOEs. 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 they're a common sight in what became known as the Tiger Economies, a series of economies that saw rabid industrial development in the post-World War II 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 Keretsu, the successor to the old Japanese Zaibatsu that dominated the pre-war Japanese economy, and which were to some extent

broken up after the war, and Korean chaebol conglomerates. These massive groups of businesses are either owned by the same people or families, in the case of the Chaebol, or linked by mutual shareholding of each other's companies, like Keretsu. The groups cooperate and coordinate their 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 keretsu 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 chaebol

are organized around families and keretsu 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 SASAC and therefore the Chinese state. 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 non-profit but take money from the core companies in exchange for the research and 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 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, industrial policy, and economic development. But in the real world, this is a significant challenge. Because, again, even individual business groups comprise hundreds of companies, and the state's 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 over these groups actually work? In theory, regulation operates around two channels. SASAC owns the holding companies, which allows it, in theory, to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to make in 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 SASAC 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 in 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 soes through sasak which is directly a part of the state and by integrating soe heads into various government and party bodies they also are somewhat embarrassingly given that they own 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 wen lin and curtis j milhopped two scholars who've written extensively about chinese corporate structure argue convincingly that the deep integration of the party into SOEs after state-owned industries have been corporatized, that is, turned from direct state industries run by state employees to profit-seeking market corporations owned through 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 and the Chinese state increasingly capitalist. And this raises another question. As the Chinese state grows more capitalist, are 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 and 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 Milhaupt put it, Functionally, SOEs and large POEs in China share many similarities in the areas commonly thought to distinguish state-owned firms from privately-owned firms. Market access, receipt of state subsidies,

proximity to state power, and execution of the government's policy objectives. A complete account of Chinese state capitalism must 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 and 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 investor's company who owns 49% of the stock, is the company state-owned? And it gets worse in ZTE'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 state-owned company would manage the corporation, right? Wrong. In ZTE's case, the SOEs 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 are actually joint partnerships between SOEs and foreign corporations,

where 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 SOEs as 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 SOEs are a lot more

autonomous from direct state control, even with all the safeguards put in place than you'd think just from the word state-owned industry. Another thing that makes SOEs more like private companies is that money from SOEs 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 SOEs 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 NatSec dipshits always seem to forget when they talk about the uniqueness of the Chinese economy and its 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 has 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 SOEs have to credit and subsidies that they receive from the government as evidence of the subordination of the market to the

political, which they also claim is essentially as 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 that the U.S. is a socialist state because of its corn subsidies. Despite writing about China somehow turning everyone into anarcho-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 favor to promote certain industries. But corn subsidies put lie to the claim that

industrial policy is some unique thing of a new era emerging in capitalism that had 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 dollars 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 interest groups.

This question sounds silly, but the results, a company in a sector getting handed a pile of money in various forms by the state, looks exactly the same. Those corn subsidies arguably are 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 a cabal 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 bows 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 and retrenchment 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 forget, 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, U.S. 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 their own 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 enmeshed in the global capitalist economy. And this, I think, is, as much as their unwillingness to grasp how SOEs 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.

more broadly. There is a somewhat complicated Marxist argument which holds that while we talk about capitalism as a system where the ruling class owns the means of production and 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 Graeber argument, which goes, okay, sure, state-owned property is technically the property of the people, TM, but trying to 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 bureaucrats 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. SOE workers are a bit better off than their non-SOE 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 Shenzhen 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 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 a world that was never ours. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire? Join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. ah welcome back to it could happen here a podcast it's a podcast uh i'm robert evans uh and with me today is garrison davis and james stout hello a canadian a britishman and a texan Garrison Davis and James Stout. Hello.

A Canadian, a Britishman, and a Texan walk into a podcast. Yeah, walk into a podcast. This is the least toxic possible. Only two of them can drink in a bar. That's not true. In Canada, we can all drink in a bar. In Canada, we can 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 Liddy, the Nazi who masterminded the Watergate break-in, and in order to convince people that he was a hard man, would regularly burn the palm of his hand on a candle while staring at them. Oh!

A cool guy. Isn't gender great? Haven't we really nailed it? Just a cool guy. Oh, G. Gordon Liddy. You don't know enough about it. 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 like the 60s in case of terminology. When we talk about all of the things that people are like, you know, flipping out as AI is 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 gbt is like a large language model they're all essentially like bots that you train uh 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 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 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 and destroy the human race. Kind of most recently, the biggest article, 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, from firing or whatever. It was bullshit. Like what was that? What actually happened? Like vice ran with the whatever. It was bullshit. Like what was that? What actually happened?

Like Vice ran with the article. It was very- Shocked that Vice would do this. Flipping out about how horrifying our AI weapons future is. And like, yeah, 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 flow chart 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 thick, you could cut it with a butter knife. Like don't, don't flip out about AI weapons just yet folks. Um, but I wanted to kind of talk about why this shit is happening. And a lot of it comes down to the fact that when we're talking about the aspects of like the tech industry that have an impact on outside of the tech industry, right? 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 IdeaPads. 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 kind of what you might call the moonshot products. This is a mix of the next big thing and doomed failures. And it's often pretty hard to tell 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. 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 conniest 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 dollars 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 con men, flim flam artists. 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, right? 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 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 things that like 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 read right now by a lot of particularly journalists and media analysts outside of the tech and or like outside of, you know, the dogged tech press that like, well, this is going to upend huge numbers of industries and put massive numbers of people out of work. And, you know, that may seem if you sat down in front of this chat bot and had like 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 like how their usership 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 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 $4 billion, I think last it was checked. But their annualized revenue is only about $10 million. 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. You've got some that have made in the $100 million range, although it's not entirely clear what their

margins are or what the long-term reliability of that profit is. But the vast majority of money in AI, 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, the, the like 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 that 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 trough of disappointment. And this is what happens when kind of the promises of a new technology that are being made by the hype 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 Mostak 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. ChatGPT was a lot larger, but Stable Diffusion came first and, you know, was critical behind, among other things, a lot of the silliest NFT bullshit. And he's a really interesting dude. If you look at his own claims about his background, he says that he's got an Oxford master's degree, that he was behind an award-winning hedge fund, that he worked for the United Nations in 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. He's playing off a thing that happens there where if you have a BA, Oxen, you can get it to be an ma it doesn't mean you did a master's it's just uh the wealthy people flex yeah 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 going to call him on it or at least knowing that people wouldn't like at large

like loudly enough for it to matter for him yeah um. 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 aughts.

He first gets in with stable diffusion after covid and he's kind of like building it as this is going to 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 he's just sort of like chasing where the money is. Yeah. Any way 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 like acquired it, which is usually what happens here. Now, none of this has stopped him from getting $100 million or so in investments from various venture partners.

It 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 when I look into this guy and the gap between his claims and what's actually happened and the claims that are being made about the value of his 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 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 like 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 Mustaq 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, Moustak told Forbes, he needed just six days to secure $100 million from leading investment firms Kochu and Lightspeed once stable diffusion went viral. The extent of due diligence that 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 millions of 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, like, compared alongside this paragraph from later in the article. In an open letter last September, Democratic Representative

Anna Eshoo 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. Beshara 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 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, on ignoring the problems with monetizing this stuff, including 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 drop ship, uh, scammers who are like putting up fake books on, on Kindle and whatnot to trick people using keywords, this is just a way to fill that shit out. I don't see a whole lot of room in the middle there. Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic there, but that's where I'm sitting. I mean, some of the models we've seen used is selling subscription packs for access to

these tools and access to use them for commercial reasons. Other 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 pretty nicely curated tools

for them to generate this type of um yeah ai image i think those those are kind of two of the biggest use cases that at least i'm seeing right now from slightly more on like the creative filmmaking art side of things um because i mean i don't think it's going to replace all all art i think nobody nobody is actually uh is actually thinking this is just going to replace all all art just like photography did not replace all art it just it changes the paradigm and because this this tool does seem like specifically useful for for the for the way that we're seeing like corporations make the same a movie every five years like it's all it's it's it's all built on all of the same stuff and i think that well 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 like illustrators as much like 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 U S is at a hundred billion dollars. And that by 2030, it'll be worth 2 trillion U S dollars. And it's like, I don't know, man, like is, I mean, the AI is more than just like mid journey image creation, right? There is like open AI and chat GPT and like AI is in everything we use now. 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, as a tool that will like augment or be used in because I think a number of times it may be used in a way that makes the product worse in 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 my 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.

Yeah. 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? It's predictable, it's derivative, it's based on other stuff. It's supposed to be. seomax copy and some of that ad copy like very well and 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 seomax

and then have shitty ad copy written by chat g, like that will change how, certainly how we buy stuff on the internet. Right. But also how we read news, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. And I already see that. Like I've written for some big publications. You have like essentially a site. Do people know what content driven commerce is? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's why every article about stuff is now the best 5x right yeah like they have they have affiliate links and the the publication will profit if you buy stuff after clicking the link yeah yeah so like in the probably 2016 era uh all of the stuff i

did a lot of previously outdoor journalism right writing about climbing gear bikes that kind of thing uh 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 will suffer as a result. But that's not the like earth shattering change that people are talking about on twitter.com or whatever. Well, one thing I saw recently

is that more and more students are just using ChatGPT to look up information. Like as opposed to Wikipedia or as opposed to Google, if to wikipedia as opposed to wikipedia or as opposed to google if they have a question they'll actually chat gbt which has a few problems but as soon as you start getting into how much of the chat gbt output is just ai hallucinations yeah it's not actual information which is honest that's something i should just write my own thing on in the future um but yeah it's, it's a really weird problem. That's really interesting that 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 explained.

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 like less kind of an imposing task to like ask an AI a question than it is to ask like a search – especially as much worse as Google has gotten lately. Like one of the things that I found interesting as I was kind of doing digging for this, I was looking at some AI articles that were published in like 2019, 2020, 2021. This is before the big, you know, AI push that like we're currently all in the middle

of before ChatGPT, you know, got its widespread release. And it was talking with like some people from Google who were like, yeah, we really see AI supercharging our search results. There's a lot of potential in 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. It's filled with ads. 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, uh, past. And like, I, uh, uh,

I, that's kind of like the, 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, it create all, there's all this vague talk about, well, it 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? 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 um it's probably a reasonable assumption i think garrison's point was good though when they said that like bigger companies will buy like companies will just exist to get bought right which is the thing that's happened in tech 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 um if ai is another means of production, right? If we want to be like a grossly materialist, if AI is another means of production, it's a tool 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? It just becomes another way for them to churn out shit and say that like, this is fine. This is what you'll get, you know, like churn 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 like the internet that's sort of optimized to appear higher in 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 has written, which also seems kind of inevitable with that. This is one of those things. So one of the more famous moments in like recent AI research is this Google researcher, Timnit Gebru, who no longer works at Google, and

some other very smart people put together a paper that was, I think, generally regarded by AI folks as 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 AIs do in a way that's better than an AI. Because like 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 like words around it, including enough like 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 like 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 like when you have an AI, when It's just 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 an if you're for example training an ai on a bunch of different like medical data to try to determine patterns and like uh 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 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, you know, Wikipedia and, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of fan fiction stories about Kirk and Mulder 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, you know, just training it on half a trillion 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 Gebru 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 on like, 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 – 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 – 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, Bertelsmann, sees for generative AI. And yeah, it interviewed a couple of people, including a guy, Thomas Rabe, 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 like it would allow you to feed your own work into an AI and then produce much more content than you were ever able to put

out before. Like his exact quote is, if it's your content for which you own 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, a 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 actually even think it's going to be possible to train them on airport novels. You've got James Patterson and other guys who they don't write their own books anymore. They have a team of ghost writers. But having gone through a lot of AI stories, they're not books.

They're not capable of writing books. They're capable of 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, article though um where at the end of it um uh rabe is like i asked chat gpt what the impact of chat gpt or generative ai is on publishing it prepared a phenomenal text frankly it was very detailed and to the point uh which he then uh presented at a staff event so there is kind of evidence that a ceo jobs could be pretty easily replaced by this. Like, you don't actually have to know how to do anything.

Comrade Chad GPT, we agree. It's a spinning Jenny for bosses. I love it. Yeah. Anyway, that's what I've got right now. We have a, we've been doing some research and we'll have an article out on one of the more unsettling little side industries

that I think AI is going to create, which is like scam children's books uh that exist to make con men on the internet money and poison the minds of little kids uh but but we'll get that to you next week um 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 yeah well people are talking about that now because they all live in new york and they're freaking the fuck out but uh yeah previous to this yeah to go to hell.

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Hello, everyone. It'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 it's relevant? Yeah, thank you, James. So my name is Ruth Kinner and I work at Loughborough University in the UK. Loughborough is halfway between Nottingham and Leicester 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 Peter Kropotkin. And I've written about Kropotkin's life and work. I'm also the editor of the journal Anarchist Studies, and I'm a member at Loughborough 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 hear 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. that anarchists tend to think about mutual aid is that it's a way of describing a relationship that can be encouraged or discouraged according to the ways in which we organize our social

relationships. 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 well-being is the concern of others rather than something which is a collective concern of all of us. Yeah, yeah, I think that's really excellent, because it's very easy, especially if you're living under sort of capitalism as it 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 there's this deeply uh 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, because I think they're great. They pop up in Kropotkin. 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. 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 in 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 that it established the skeleton, if you like, or it produced the sort of 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 seafaring tradition. Hillary's idea was that once you set up these organisations locally on the coast, then actually they could be replicated. So he did have a sort of internationalist perspective. He

thought that these things would be, would mushroom, you know, across the globe and that we would have lifeboat associations everywhere. I'm not sure if that's true, but certainly the Lifeboat 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 just put money in it and no one was like oh i don't like the lifeboats like um but recently i suppose they've

come under fire from britain first and for i think they would phrase it as like encouraging people to take the risk of traveling on small boats to the United Kingdom to claim asylum. And can you characterize, I don't want you to characterize that attack because it's, it's relatively easy to characterize and it's, it's, you know, it doesn't need much explaining. It's stupid. But the response to that, like, cause I think it has been quite, it's easy for people in America to see Britain as like a parochial little

island full of turfs. But, um, 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 Lifeboat Association would be politicised in the way that was attempted by the right. The whole idea of picking and choosing who one would rescue at sea is simply preposterous. And as you say, I mean, you know, the Lifeboat Association is widely supported. I mean, you tend to see offices of the Lifeboat Association at seasides. So,

you know, this is, 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 um but which also has its risks and i mean the first time i think i you know i came across the lifeboat association was um was actually through an appeal that was uh made through a very popular and well-known bbc television program for children which was called blue peter uh and and and you know, they funded a boat by asking kids to send in milk bottle tops, which could be melted down and turned into aluminium or whatever it was. And then, you know, this is how they funded a lifeboat. I mean, so this, you know, lifeboats are deeply rooted, I think. I mean, the support for lifeboats are deeply rooted in people's psyche in this country. And as I say, I think it was interesting, I guess,

that these calls from the right, that the Lifeboat Association was somehow doing wrong in looking after migrant boats. I mean, the small boats, really vulnerable dinghies that were being sailed across the channel. I just think it gained absolutely no traction because it simply didn't speak to people's public or deeply held perceptions, if you like, of the role of this association. in the UK, even perhaps to a degree greater than we've seen in much of the US, although there's complete bipartisan consensus that we should criminalize people coming here in the United States too.

And people will have heard that I spent the last week driving along the border seeing little children forced to be held in the desert with no shade and no water. It's also very brutal here. to be held in the 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, can we talk about how mutual aid is something that, because I think it can seem understandably to people who have been educated in the sort of neoliberal consensus, that certainly is 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 Kropotkin's theorisation, if you like, of mutual aid.

So, I mean, talking about sort of, you know, our neoliberal culture, I mean, Kropotkin'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 Kropotkin 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 simply is, you know, that's how biology works. their species i mean it simply is you know that's that's how biology works so whatever advantage that individuals might might you know acquire actually their well-being depends on the cooperation or the the collective practices that they have with others so he recognized that there was interspecies competition but he said basically within species survival is based in cooperation and from that he then said you, one of the things that we

can learn from this, from this sort of re-under, 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, 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 sorts of problems, that we had affinities 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 were in situations of need. Yeah. So how would one go about doing that? Because it can seem, look 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 um people will fill the gaps when they see that others are in need. And that's exactly what the Lifeboat Association does.

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 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 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 burnout 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'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 prescient. I'm always like, in 2018, I don't know if you were familiar with this, but in the southern border of the United States, we had a large group of migrants coming here from Central America who became like a sort of talking point in the midterms and through no fault of their own right and they were held at the U.S. border and then tear gassed from the Tommy Hilfiger gift town store in San Diego um and I was really impressed with like I was there trying to help with my friends and and sort of trying to do anarchist things but also there there were people

who were older ladies from churches and people from mosques and people from synagogues and and very very much willing to work together and you know like you know we'd go to costco together and spend thousands and thousands on water and nappies for babies and such but like i think getting past that initial sort of i'm not a person who works with people who go to church to like well this person wants to help and so do i 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 um sort of the uh the societies that exist to prevent cruelty to animals and children and that kind of thing right there's those aren't state funded either in the uk um can you think of other examples of mutual aid that people might have sort of not realized are entirely driven by society and not the state? Well, I suppose, 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 In fact, you know, that came a lot later.

But it was provided by people who, you know, by groups of people who thought that they could offer medical support or set up systems of, you know, or help set 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, 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, you know, the roofs of flooded houses and all the rest of it.

These are local people, typically. They're not the agencies who often, you know, 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 um breakfast clubs and uh any kind of welfare at all uh that that was the that was the root of it the other example i mean kropotkin looks at i mean these are 19th century 19th century example uh which is sort of something that's later absorbed

by the state uh of the um uh the the the the insurance uh 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, you know, they were setting up their own systems of contribution to ensure that those families would be provided for if the worst came to the worst. And eventually this gets taken up by the state and it's sold back to you as national insurance. But these systems are 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 sold back to us and then gradually stripped away of the very essence of what they're supposed to be, the National Health Service being another example. Can you talk about the danger of that kind of state, maybe danger is the wrong word, but there can be a state capture of mutual aid efforts, which can sometimes, one might argue, always strip them of the essence of what they are. Is that fair to say? Well, it certainly changes. 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 on the other hand, 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 actually it diminishes or it disincentivizes the sort of the um that that uh stimulus to to help each other directly so mutual aid is a kind of direct action if you like whereas you know once we give these these processes over to the state then actually we start to to see people in different in different. 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 um uh the I mean the worry I guess of of

of that sort of co-optation is that it's it conceals the other things that 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. And I mean, you know, when the, I suppose that, I mean, the term that was used in the British context in the immediate post-war period was not the welfare state, it was the warfare 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 like the person-to-person aspect of mutual aid from mutual aid like the uh like certainly the most uh common sort of mutual aid responses I've been part of to health crises and then to and along the border and 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 two communities right and you are welcome because I am of this community and I want you to come here which you do not get when you, 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, I mean, that's the other thing. I mean, that's that's kind of what

I was trying to get at that, you know, once you have a once you have state welfare, you have concepts of access through citizenship. And that reinforces the idea that there's a right of access and then 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 the anarchist lexicon, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's driven by altruism and, and, and giving without, without the expectation of reward. Yes. Yeah. I think that's very important. It doesn't imply a power or an expectation of sort of reciprocity. It's, and it, it, I forget exactly where I read this. I'm terrible at these things but like it i i guess you don't do it in a selfish sense but it benefits you as well as the person you are giving to like

it and because those people are part of your community is that fair and like 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 a there's an argument to say that um i mean that that comes from the from the notion of of of um recasting what it is to to be an individual so you know your your your personal enrichment actually relies on the relationships that you can cultivate with other people so you know know, the quality of those relationships is actually something that, of course, benefits you. But I think the, I mean, one of the things,

Kropotkin tells this story about a child drowning in a river. And he imagines three people standing on the riverbank. One of them is a 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, you know, what do the, what happens when they see this child in the river? And he says, well, the religious person is wondering, you know, um, I should go and save the child because I'll, I'll reap my reward in heaven. Uh, and the utilitarian is thinking, you know, if I, if I save this child, then I'm going

to feel really good about myself. And so therefore I should do it. And while they're, while they're sort of going through that process of reasoning, the third if I save this child, then 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 has just jumped in and saved the child. And that's mutual aid. Yeah, yes, I think that's very good. Yeah, it comes from, yeah, it doesn't need to be like overly theorized, I suppose.

Yeah. And it really doesn't. 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 and to see the relationship with the state but it doesn't need you don't need to have read kropotkin to to like i know a big it sprung up here a lot in the pandemic too right like free shops and um certainly for older people or people who are immunocompromised I remember breaking thousands of loaves of bread uh from the 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 uh things like that were very spontaneous and didn't particularly need like theorizing in terms of kropotkin 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 and one that we should cultivate. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there were all sorts of things that were going on here. I mean, there were people who were sewing up scrubs for health workers, delivering lunches to health workers, as know, as well as just, you know, the checking on the neighbours, making sure that people were OK. So, yeah, I mean, it took 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 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, which is bizarrely already occurring three years down the line. People look back and think, oh, well, it wasn't that bad.

And 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 for a lot of us. And so those mutual aid groups or WhatsApp groups and things gave people 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 there was an uprising in the united states which gave people a sense of purpose which maybe they they're not feeling anymore if people are interested in i guess it's learning and there's doing and then they can be distinct or they can be done at the

same time and we can learn by doing. And where would people start? If they want to start their reading, are there texts that you'd recommend that are not the size of a breeze block that people might find approachable? Well, you can get, I mean, yeah, I mean, Kropotkin's 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. I mean, it's a very 19th century kind of argument. 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 mutual aid 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 mutual aid, that it is this kind of thick relationship that people cultivate, but not necessarily with a view to living in sort of permanently in community with each other,

but actually to change the dynamics of the kind of 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'd be a great place for people to start. If they want to read a tiny bio of Kropotkin, Dog Section Press has an 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, for um yeah yeah they're also they're also available online yes they are yeah yeah and they're illustrated yeah it's they're very beautifully illustrated um yeah it's been a good one for me to assign to students and have them approach anarchism from a non uh prejudice perspective i suppose which is which can be hard like i always remember coming to the us for the first time when I was 21. And I don't think I presented in a way that was particularly affable to the Transport Security Administration.

But I, 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 I had some more questions to answer but I think it's 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 predilection for chaos and violence which is the opposite of what you're doing when you're giving someone a blanket or

something like it's yeah um and so i think if people listening will at least be familiar with the concept of anarchism mutual aid and not see it in that prejudicial way but i think if we can present it to other people you know you're doing anarchism everyone was doing it at the start of the pandemic when they were sewing masks like you say or homebrewing hand sanitizer yeah and i think that's i think that's really important actually to to the to the argument that the the um 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 uh what they're doing doing is tapping into a propensity that exists within

all of us. And what anarchists are saying is that if you push organizations in particular directions, then 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 but mutual aid itself is is not about being an anarchist it's it's about being a human being yeah yeah yeah i wonder so people want to sort of build ways of taking care of each other without the state where they are they maybe they can see a problem right that hasn't been addressed by the state like one of those holes that you spoke about or a problem that that the state is addressing inadequately or in an undesirable way, how would they go about, like, do you have advice for 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 organise mutual aid? So do you have any suggestions for that? Yeah, so, I mean, there are, I mean, there are normally sort of in in any i mean 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 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, there are all sorts of activities that they're doing. So I think it's a matter of sort of seeing what's there. uh and and then sort of try i mean often i think people don't realize the skills they have uh so for example you know if they speak more than one language uh it's often really helpful uh to to people who are arriving in a in a foreign land or a land that they don't they're not they speakers of the native language, you know, 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 paltry, 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 a volunteer to run the office. You know, 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.

And we don't need to be like, turn our noses up at support for the state where what little is available, we should avail ourselves and other people who need it. And empower other people to get to, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And certainly we can't act as if the state doesn't exist at 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

um no i think we've covered um yeah we i think we've we've sort of covered it i mean i i just i guess it's a you know mutual aid is a is the the important thing for me is that mutual aid is a it's an easy thing and it's and it and it can build uh and and that's the the and it and it can be sustained that's the joy of it and i think that's the the brilliant thing about the the example of the lifeboat association yeah we can set up all kinds of things and run them um 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 like a little spark of joy for such a venerable british institution with royal in its name is that they celebrate kropotkin's birthday apparently and really yeah

exactly they'll post on all their social media like pictures of kropotkin's birthday, apparently. Oh, really? Yeah. Certainly they'll post on all their social media like pictures of Kropotkin and like a little birthday cake and 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 do better. Is there anywhere 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 i'm i mean easily um yeah you can find me at the university at loughborough university it's um l-o-u-g-h-b-o-r-o-g-h it's one some of my colleagues have struggled with yeah it's not easy um 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 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 iHeart Radio 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. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

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