The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mania by George Artem

Episode Date: June 30, 2021

Mania by George Artem Born in the Soviet Union in 1987, Artom George Katkoff immigrated to the United States with his immediate family in 1991 during the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. His paternal grandfather, Vladimir Katkoff, and great-grandmother had been living in Seattle since the 1970s, where Vladimir worked as an engineer at Boeing. Artom's father, George Katkoff, subsequently returned to what is now the Russian Federation, a few years after his divorce from Nataly Kacherovsky, a research scientist at the University of Washington and Artom's mother. Artom graduated from the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in business administration and went on to work in Seattle's software industry, starting several businesses of his own and later completing a master of science in information systems from the Foster School of Business. In 2014, Artom was charged with attempted kidnapping in the second degree after showing concern for two young girls playing alone in his hometown park. He was held without arraignment for nearly eight weeks in solitary confinement at the King County Correctional Facility and suffered from a manic episode while he was incarcerated. In 2016, now George Artem, he sued King County as a pro se party on the grounds that his due process rights were violated, that solitary confinement was deliberately indifferent to the needs of a manic-depressive, and that he and others in solitary confinement were not offered equal treatment under the Americans with Disabilities Act. After years of litigation, his petition for writ of certiorari was finally denied by the United States Supreme Court in 2020. This text was originally written shortly after his release from solitary confinement and reflects the time he spent living in a halfway home, his struggle with addiction, the consequences of using drugs and alcohol, and the muse that is his manic-depressive condition.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly, oh my gosh, appreciate you guys for tuning in. Thanks for being here. We refer the show to your friends, neighbors, to youtube.com for just christmas hit that bell notification button also go to goodreads.com for just christmas see what we're reading and reviewing over there also go to our other uh platforms uh facebook linkedin instagram twitter all that sort of good stuff you can find these groups that we have over there as well today we have an amazing author who's on the show with us. He has got a new book that he put out. This was from February 18th, 2021,

called Mania. His name is George Artem, and he's going to be here to talk to us about his extraordinary book and some of the details therein. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He is born in the Soviet Union in 1987. Artem was born in the Soviet Union in 1987 and he immigrated to the United States with his immediate family in 1991 during the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. His paternal grandfather, Vladimir Khadkov, and his great-grandmother had been living in Seattle since the 1970s, where Vladimir worked as an engineer at Boeing. Artem graduated the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in business administration and went on to work in Seattle's software industry, starting several businesses of his own and later completing a Master of Science in Information Systems from the University of Washington Foster School of Business.

And here he is today to welcome him on the show. Welcome to the show, George. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Chris. There you go. And give us your plugs for people to look you up on the interwebs. The easiest way to find me is just to go to georgearden.com.

That's spelled just like my name. There you go. And then what motivated you want to write this book oh man it's a it's a long story but so i was a victim of cancel culture before cancel culture was a thing and the only way that i could get my story out after reaching out to pretty much all of the news outlets in the Seattle area was to write a book. And the way that came out was a cathartic process. And it came out through poetry. Nice. Nice. Were you a poet before? Have you been a poet all your life or did you just develop the skill recently? It's something

that came to me. Yeah. Yeah. So you've written this book, and give us an arching overview of what's inside of it and what the details are in it. So the best plug for it really is it's a lot like that raw banana that was taped to a wall. Oh, yeah. So a lot of parts of it are overwrite and they're meant to shake the reader awake. It really is a social commentary on the upside down world that we've been living in. And it represents a break between the permanent that separates the ego from the super consciousness. Oh, wow.

And so that's what the cover is about. It's interesting that the cover is a person wearing a mask. And with all the mask wearing going on over the last year and a half, I think it's very relevant to the time. Yeah, it's an interesting cover where it shows the mask being removed. And it seems like there's maybe some stuff behind it or a lot of stuff going on behind it. Is that kind of the intent? Yeah, it's the macro and the micro. What's inside everyone's head is really all of infinity. And the people that created this cover were really

great in putting that together. And the folks at Newman Springs have been really great to work with. Nice. Let's get into some of the details. You say you were a victim of cancel culture before cancel culture. You want to tell us about that? Yeah. Essentially what happened seven years ago was a gross misunderstanding. And I got thrown into solitary confinement for an extended period of time without due process. Oftentimes people think about solitary confinement as a, it is a very serious issue in our criminal justice system. And people think

about it in terms of those who have already been convicted of their crimes in this case. And it's something that many people face pre-trial within the criminal justice system across the country. And I ended up suing the local government and taking my case to court. And eventually this was as I was writing the book. But basically, I have a really tough time talking about this topic. So I guess the point that I'm trying to make when it comes to solitary confinement is the big part about it is with relation to due process and essentially punishing those accused of crimes prior to conviction. And so I took this case all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. If someone's interested in that, you can go and find the U.S. Supreme Court docket and look up the case that I was trying to make.

But meanwhile, it was impossible for me to find work. So I was living in a halfway home and doing all sorts of stupid things with substance. And without much else to do, I was driven to, and that became my outlet. And so you, you were talking in the book about your past struggles with the law, addiction, depression. It's a collection of stimulating poems about struggles with it. Do you want to give us some examples of that or give us some overview of some of the different things you've talked about in there? Yeah, there's some interesting things. Let me find you one.

And is this your first book? It is. Yeah. It's a short read. It's 76 pages. So it's a collection of poems. And then there's also some short stories in there as well. So let me go ahead and find one for you. There's one in here that really encapsulates the issues I was dealing with with drug addiction. So this is about a night after some time that I had spent in jail. It's called a relapse and release. I'm two weeks sober after being in jail, where I've somehow avoided all the drugs that float around in there. I go straight to my treatment center. They ask me how I'm doing. I just stare back at them. They give me my meds, and I spit them out when their heads are turned. They ask me what plans I have. I tell them I'm

taking it a day at a time. They say to come back tomorrow, and I nod and walk off. I go straight to the bar and order a pitcher of beer, sitting down in a booth and then another. My friend joins me and we shoot the shit about what I missed. Not much, because this game is off. We go to the bar and he orders us some shots, whiskey, I think, some kind of bourbon. I tell Jordi that I'm out and I'm sorry for not texting her. She tells me she'll join me after work and that I should try not to be drunk by the time she gets there. My friend's going to a show. He introduces me to someone he knows and they bounce out. I see my Coke dealer and I go up and talk to him. I tell him I just got out of county in the morning hoping to impress him. Next thing I know, I'm down 60 bucks and up a G. He lets me hit a blunt. He's

rolled up. I gray out. Jordi shows up and looks less than impressed with me. I put my arm around her and start blabbering something incoherent about my life. We go to the bar and order another round of drinks. I can't remember what we had. We smoked a cigarette. She pities me, so she helps walk me home. Holding my hand, we end up in my room try to make out with her but she pushes me away i push her up against the wall and put my hand up her dress and on her inner thigh she begs me to stop i don't hear her pushing myself against her harder again she tells me to stop this time she yells so it registers that she wants to go home. I open the door, letting out an exasperated sigh.

So it's kind of a dark part in my life of doing idiotic, borderline crazy things. And there's many other examples of that, but it's also juxtaposed against a poem like this one, which is called Counterclockwise, 2017. It goes something like this one, which is called Counterclockwise, 2017. It goes something like this. It's been over a month since I've stared at the blankness and waited for inspiration to string together on a page. And for some, it might come as a welcome silence that my pulse has fallen back to the more basic rhythm of life,

strung out of creation. Things must be going well, at least normally for the past six weeks, to not have summoned the guttural urge to scratch the pencil page. Spring has sprung. The cherry blossoms have been in bloom for the past several weeks, but the air is considerably warmer today than it has been, and the sun is re-raiding off the concrete in a way that hasn't for the past five months. People in shorts and t-shirts walk around the track in the familiar counterclockwise direction. The familiar eight-ounce coffee and tuna on wheat in front of me

as I sit there in the early afternoon and try something different for the sake of variety, entertainment, and the general health of my own cognition. Where if it is below as it is above, then even for our greatest efforts, we are inevitably forced into the cyclical path of history, supporting the lie, the mystery of the great pyramid, whereby its capstone cannot at once be displaced under its great weight

and repurposed as the foundation upon which we build castles in the sky. That this must be false, that the breadth of the human experience fits within the words of Plato, that the failed conquests of Hitler and within the words of Plato, that the failed conquests of Hitler and Napoleon are early models for establishing world order, that the new American century would venture down the same path, knowing that what lies at its end is nothing more than death, and that it is impossible for our world to live in peace for the next thousand years by any other means. The great geometric lie passed down from Egypt, the thrice great

Hermes entrapping us in the great celestial matrix that the Jews passed down as a tree of life for understanding. The solar organism with the spirit at its center, the familiar yellow orb in the sky as familiar and routine as my tuna on weed in the early afternoon. The heart of our macro world moving around us in its 24-hour rhythm, trumpeting spring and casting us in the shorts and t-shirts through our familiar daily motions counterclockwise around the track. That's really beautiful. Thanks so much for that. So there's a variety of stuff in there,

and it shows the breadth of my life and my experience doing stupid things and then by the grace of God being able to turn things around. And I think it's really interesting because we all do stupid things in our life. So getting some perspective that we've all been there and done some different things. And then, of course, what we've learned from it. What do you hope readers will take away from your book or read? I hope readers take it for what it is, and just my way of reintroducing myself back to society and back to the world.

Has it been pretty cathartic for you to publish your works and be able to speak, say your truth? Yeah, absolutely. It was the first taste of success that I've had in a long period of time. And that was really important for me to have a win and to get that done and have something accomplished. And that's really snowballed into so many other things. Do you find that people who struggle with addiction really resonate with your work? I hope so. Lately, I haven't spoken with a lot of people that are within the recovery community. And unfortunately, I've stepped away from the work that I've been doing in my own 12-step program. But that work is very important.

And it flips your life around into doing things for others rather than doing things for yourself. That's the number one lesson in recovery. And I would imagine this, does this help you stay on your course with your 12-step journey? Or do you still struggle? Everybody takes it a day at a time. I've been blessed to have such a great support system and great sponsors in the program. And they've been great to me. And I hope ultimately to pass that on to other people. That's awesome.

This might be a good book to be used in different circles, people that have addiction or rehab things where they can, one of the biggest challenges people find when they're struggling is sometimes you feel so alone and you're like, no one's going through this. Everyone's living this great life,

especially when you look on Instagram. Everyone's vacationing in Dubai, driving fast cars. But that realization when you find out that there's a lot of other people struggling many times with the same issues we are, it humanizes it and makes it so that it's easier for people to talk about it, easier for people to resolve it. Do you see more books that you might do out of your experiences like this? Or are you working on an X book that might come up in the future? Yeah, I've got a, actually a lot of material kind of sitting in the background and between law school and work and the businesses that I'm trying to stand up, it's just one other thing, one other thing to do. So I hope to have something out relatively soon,

hopefully by the end of my law school career to give some additional perspective. But yeah, I am noodling on something. Cool. What made you want to go to law school? Frankly, my experience sitting in solitary confinement. And you did take a case to the Supreme Court, so you have some experience. Yeah. And now I'm mired in other things that we can or decide not to get into. So my motivation was really to help others that experience that same scenario as me,

where they're stuck in pretrial solitary confinement, and to hopefully, over the course of my legal career to get something done to make a change in that area. Well, solitary confinement is no joke from what I understand, but you can really start losing your mind in there. It's not the funnest place to be. And one thing I've never understood about these justice system things, people do bad stuff, they need to be punished, but the throwaway figures sometimes they use for people and the comparative to the punishment, or in your case, you're innocent until proven guilty. The approach to that sometimes is quite extreme. And throwing some, I've heard that just a couple of days of

solitary confinement can be bad. If you're doing any length of time, you can really start losing your mind. Yeah. I want to point out that my case was, even though I did lose my mind in there, my case was very mild in comparison to the many other victims of this that are stuck for years without really any kind of recourse. out of their cell and the cell is about the size of a small parking space where typically the lights are on 24 hours a day and that's it day in and day out. It's really easy to lose track of time and the slow drip on your mental state is going to have an impact. I don't know what the solutions are to long-term solitary confinement, but I can tell you from experience, particularly when you're facing trial, there's a lot going through your head. And to be put in that kind of environment really takes a toll on somebody when they're under pressure. And the gist of my petition to the Supreme Court was that this kind of putting your thumb on the scale of someone's liberty in the due process adjudication is unlawful and un-American.

That's the bottom line. Yeah, I can see putting someone who's dangerous in solitary confinement, but it's crazy what goes on. It seems like the American people don't care too much about what goes into once people throw you in jail and half the time they just assume they must have did it, whatever it was. Did a lot of the poems that you used in the book start formulating your head while you were in solitary confinement? Yeah, there's a big part of the book in the end where I'm describing the life that I went through in county. And it's called county. And so that's several pages in the other that describes my experience with that process

and what things were like as I was sitting in jail. And then also towards the beginning, there are, it's ironic actually, because so the first time I was in jail, they put me in solitary. And then the second time I went back, because when you, what happened to me ultimately was that I pled into something called the mental health court. Over the course of the time that I was in solitary, they convinced me that I was a manic

depressive, that it was my issue that I had a manic episode while I was in solitary confinement. When somebody in authority tells you something and continues to repeat it over and over again, the average person is going to begin to believe what that person in authority is telling you. So what ended up happening was that I ended up pleading out into something called mental health court, which required ongoing medication, court-ordered medication. And I fought against that because for a long period of time, I believed, and now that this is behind me, that this diagnosis was a big crock. And so I fought this question of mandatory medication and refused to take them, as I described in the book. And they ended up throwing me back in jail.

Wow. Yeah. And what ended up happening there back in jail. Wow. Yeah. And what ended up happening there was because I was considered low risk, they gave me a job and they paid me a dollar a day. And my job was ironically was to go and clean the solitary cells of that, that I used to that that i used to be housed in wow and i would have to clean it of rotting food human excrement and things like this so this was really my low point i described it in one of the first poems in the book it's called trustee and um where i was fighting the government policy and protesting these forced medications. And ironically, they sent me back to go clean the solitary cells that I was in there to begin with. There's a lot of irony there.

And particularly now with the litigation that I'm involved with now, there's a segue to that now, so I'll just get into it, is related to forced experimental treatments and devices. Oh, really? So what we've been going through with COVID over the course of the last 15 months, a lot of the things that the government has been mandated is actually experimental and approved by the FDA only under an experimental use authorization, which has a number of ethical and regulatory requirements associated with that, that essentially boil down to the participant giving informed consent.

And that's related to vaccinations, masks, PCR tests, and all of these things. So in a way, I'm fighting the same thing I was fighting when I was protesting forced medications now in litigating against my law school for what I believe to be a discriminatory masking and social distancing policy. Yeah, everyone's doing it these days, the masking and social distancing. It's funny because the state of emergency

in Massachusetts is over. Yeah. So, yeah, this thing is largely behind us. There are some concerns out there about the Delta variant. I'll tell you, the people that I talk to are saying that this COVID variant is actually 97% similar to SARS-CoV-2. And particularly if you're vaccinated or if you've had SARS-CoV-2 in the past, you have a natural immune response to this Delta variant. So at least for the time being, Governor Baker has released us from the state of emergency as of June 15th. So anyway, we'll see what happens.

Yeah, it'll be interesting. This is what lawyers do. They fight for rights. They stand up for certain things, even though sometimes they don't feel like they're important, but they uphold certain freedoms and things they do. Yeah, that's why it's a profession. There you go.

There you go. Civil rights and freedoms and all that sort of good stuff. Anything more you want to plug on the book before we go? You can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and also on my platform called DogeDeals, where you can get an exclusive author's copy signed by exclusively in the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. That's pretty awesome. That's pretty awesome. How's that working out?

I know that crypto took a hit. I'm not in crypto, but it went way up and then came back down. In comparison to what? So when in doubt, zoom out. And Doge, where it's at today, is stronger and better than, I think, at least half of the world currencies that are out there. And at a point a month ago, I think it was in April where it hit 72 cents. That's burgeoning up against the dollar. So cryptocurrency is a very volatile marketplace.

The challenge of being a crypto retail is the price fluctuations, obviously. And so it's just something that you have to have faith in that over the long term, these things will continue to rise. Yep. I've seen a number of iterations of that. And every time I see it, it seems like Bitcoin is done or whatever people say it's done. It takes off again. So there you go. It's been wonderful to have you on the show. Give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs, George.

Yeah. Just, I just go to georgearden.com. The book is at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and my platform, Dojos. There you go.

And George, it was wonderful to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on and spending your time with us and sharing it with us. Chris, thanks so much. Thank you. And guys, check out Mania.

It's out February 18th, 2021. So it's been out for a while. You can pick it up wherever fine books are sold. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss. See everything we're reading, reviewing over there. Go to our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places. And also youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss. Refer to show your family, friends, and relatives. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here and we'll see you guys next time.