Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 188: Erosion Economics

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

This week we talk about the floods here in eastern Kentucky, and then switch to deeply diseased segment on a capitalist commune in LA If you want to support east Kentucky flood relief, you can donate to tinyurl.com/ekycommunityfund If you want to support us on Patreon, go to www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Did you hear me, Tom? When you go in Pikeville, you don't have to go in anywhere. They do it from your car. I think they do it. Yeah, a lot of places do it that way. I know UK is doing it. They're doing it at the football field where it's open air and everything. Yeah, it's a real good setup in Pikeville.

You just, like, go through all these checkpoints, and then they do it right in the car. You don't get out of the car, and then you have to sit for 15 minutes and wait to make sure you don't have any reactions i might just do that i don't know they got appointments next week i mean everyone i know has gotten an appointment the next day after they called after they filled out the online form well but when they call you could schedule it later I guess Dolly just called Dad Abumrad's dad and she hooked it up and then she made a song about it vaccine

vaccine please don't wait to take my vaccine got a dose of real medicine they said a million dollars to make you all not suffer from covid 19 again do you think she even noticed missing a million dollars she's got 600 of them

so i don't know what that day we found that out you you posted something tom about uh somebody who had just given 15 million to some away to some random thing what was it i forget now i know what you're talking about though i just it's i mean it's impossible for us to even fathom how much money these people have i wonder if it is if dolly's like the the shepherd from the bible who she has 600 600 million dollar bundles and then five she had five she left the 599 million to go find the million she gave to jad abram rod's dad for the vaccine oh my god it's powerful powerful. Think about it. I think I've asked this before,

but have we done the math about splitting all the money up? Could everybody get a meal? From what? If we just right now redistributed all the money in the U.S. Just the U.S. Tanya,

if we redistribute all the money in the U.S., the u.s tanya if we redistribute all the money in the u.s we'd get more than a million so everybody would have well more than a million dollars well uh we have a trillion dollar military so just that's just one thing so think about that hell i was just talking about personal wealth. Oh. But, yeah. Yeah, I mean, getting into the military budget is just, you know, I don't really have the mind space for that today. Well. That's like, I mean, you basically have to have a therapy appointment queued up right after that. Honestly.

I'll have one on deck. I lost you guys for a second there. But I dropped right back in when you said you better have a therapy appointment after learning about the defense budget. Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. I know you want COVID-19. Don't you dare come my way, COVID-19. I have taken the vaccine. Vaccine. Anyway, what's going on in the world today?

Well, I... Mostly erosion. Yeah, the world's falling apart. You know, I got to fully cement my ascension to old man status. I've gotten into spoon carving. Spoon carving, you say? Spoon carving, yeah. I want to be one of those guys that hangs out at, like, folk festivals and craft festivals.

And has, like, 30 spoons behind him in a goatee and ponytail. And wears extra large button-down shirts. So you basically want to be Terry? Yeah. Oh, that's my name. Terry. I guess it does work and tr is already your initials i hope we all end up really getting into the 60s and then we just quit talking here in a year or two and then like we just see each other mountain heritage festival terrence has got a

spoon carving booth. Tanya's making funnel cakes. And I'm working on the carnival rides as a carny. Excuse me. And I'm just like, didn't we go to school together or something? We don't remember each other. I'll be running a tarot booth. Thank you very much.

Well, whatever. I'll be the old witch. The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can make funnel cakes and read tarot. You're right. I'll be the old witch. The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can make funnel cakes and read tarot. You're right. I could do both. That'd probably be pretty lucrative business, honestly. I look over at Terrence, I'd be drawing off a cigarette while I'm running the tilt-a-whirl. I think I know that fellow from somewhere.

He'll be smoking a cigarette through his trach because he's convinced of self, convinced the doctor that he needs to have his throat removed. By then. They're like, sir, you don't have throat cancer. There's nothing wrong. Like, no, you don't understand. I just need it. I'm just trying to get out.

I absolutely do. Just trying to get out ahead of it. No throat can't have no cancer. Yeah, no throat can't have throat cancer. You know, you go to high school for four years, right? And then... Some of us. Give or take a few

but you know you can run into someone you went to high school with like just 10 years later and not recognize them or remember them really we've been doing this podcast for 4 years so if we did just stop tomorrow there is a possibility that in 20 years we really

could just be like I think I know them i would forget tanya's last name like tucker we did not we were friends for like four years before that we started the podcast too that's true well my mind's warped anymore i it's true i see people i went to school with and i'm like oh that's uh and it takes me a second to get their name. You know what I mean? Uh-huh. That's only been 17, 18 years ago.

I can't even remember my animals' names. My mind is completely shot. If you get your brain removed, you can't get brain cancer. Just think about it. Can't get brain cancer. I mean, I really am like my Mamaldine in here yelling sassy ruby nala trying to get the right name and sometimes i say rudy i don't even have a rudy that's what my mom sometimes calls me by my sister's name she's just oh yeah my mamaldine she'd go down she had 30 grandkids

she'd just start shouting the names hoping she got one right eventually oh shit the mind folks it's a strange thing truly it will not hold up well um way neither will the earth if you think about it on a long enough timeline absolutely not um eastern kentucky is underwater you know the thing about eastern kentucky that is um interesting is that it is constantly falling the fuck apart i mean you know people talk about mount top removal and strip mining but just just the you know there's just normal everyday shit that caught it's like death by a thousand cuts you know what i'm saying it's like this place gets terrible floods every 10 years or so maybe about maybe like every five years and there's so many ripple effects honestly we have flash flooding every year we do there's landslides every year we have flash flooding every year this is of course worse than it's been a few years probably but uh last year

when the water got high the rats came out of the river and descended on our only grocery store right i remember and they literally shut down our only grocery store during a pandemic. Our only major grocery store. I started to say, you too good for food fair there, Queenie? No. Priceless. If you remember correctly. You too good to go up to goddamn, uh, what's his name? Marlow

Tackett's where he used to do his Christmas thing. Well, it ain't Marlow's no more. No, it ain't Food World no more. It's, what is it? The fucking dollar saver or something. But as you remember, you have shamed me for taking my reusable grocery bags in there. That's the most, you know, like you hear people in the fashion world talk about the high-low thing where you wear like a Rolex, like a $20,000 watch with like a Hanes t-shirt or something.

That is like the hillbilly equivalent of that. Taking your blue Ikea bags into the goddamn dollar store. But I just want to set the record straight. That's not why we shamed you. We shamed you because the person bagging the groceries did not have your correctly arrived upon set of politics and so you made them work harder. That's why we shamed you. I did not. I did not make him work any

harder. Tanya, friend of the working class, huh? He put, he took, the man took my reusable grocery bags and folded them and put them in a plastic bag because he thought that they were just like, he justed them. They got rules. What are you talking about? Anyway

point they shut down Food City for two days because of a rat infestation. Yet the visual of just river rats crawling out of the river just like you know deformed and mutant you know what i mean just i kind of like the idea of them reclaiming their space yeah i agree you know what i mean like here's the thing about here i'm gonna let y'all cue y'all in on a little something about the grotesqueries of life that you are not easily seen but all all of us have had vermin around us at all times throughout human history.

Mm-hmm. In fact, both of you, including myself, I know myself because I've trapped them in my house, and I'm strictly catch and release when it comes to mice. I mean, I've detailed my own battles with mice on this very show about how they will get in my oven and piss and shit and so when i heat the oven up the whole house smells like piss somebody on twitter was like like just every time i'm worried i'm worried that i'm like this huge like freak hypochondriac i

always remember there's people up there worse than me because this one guy on twitter was like there's a little something called hantavirus man you want to do that faster than you know and like somebody was like man it's just a mouse and like oh is it just a mouse that causes your respiratory system to shut down and then like i looked it up of course because my first impulse is oh my god i gotta investigate this hantafirus affects like one in 70 million people and there's never been a case in kentucky it's like usually like you get like one case a year in like arizona or somewhere where like that specific mouse that carries it but there's some poor bastard out there like me that thinks that hantafirus is just lurking around every corner like everybody in the world has has had a mouse in their house.

Like, if it was that serious, like, everybody would be dropping dead from antivirus. Yeah. When I was a kid, my dad had a full-on infestation. I mean, at one point, this is so bad. Me and my sisters were literally chasing mice around my dad's house with a broom. Did you name him? No. And he was too drunk to care. He was just like,

get him, girl. Get him. This is too dark. Oh, shit. We used to have a... I used to live in the housing project, so we were no strangers to mice, but I had a cat that the housing project, so we were no strangers to mice. But I had a cat that would like, wouldn't kill them.

It would just like show up with a live mouse in their jaws and just be like, hey, here, I found it. Brutal. I will say this. There are aspects of living here that are harder than living in the desert. But I don't want to hear anybody bitch about mice until you've put your foot in a shoe and a scorpion has been inside of it. I've done that.

I've done that, too, buddy. I went out and started the car in the morning and had, like, four or five of them, motherfuckers, in your car. Yeah. What do you do? Well, you knock them off into a piece of Tupperware. You burn your shoe, burn the car.

They get everywhere. They'll be on your ceiling. But also there's tarantulas. There's a lot of shit out in the desert. I would take mice over that. Well, there's also snakes here. I mean, one time my little nephew went into my mammal's bathroom and there was a goddamn black snake in there about eight feet long yeah they'll climb up through the pipe sometimes

oh yeah just cooled up chilling my little nephew was like pissed himself i will say the snakes out west are a lot more polite than the snakes here because a lot of them have rattlers. And so they'll let you know when you're in their territory, you know. They're a lot more dangerous, too. They're very much more poisonous, for sure. But at least they give you a heads up, like, hey. There are rattlesnakes here, but I've never come up on one.

I've seen one. Go up to Bad Branch. I've been to Bad Branch a dozen times. I've never seen one up there dangerously close and didn't even know it you think i thought i figured those signs were just to like you know just just keep tourists off on the trail or something because i've never saw them or heard them no i've not seen them or heard them, but I know people that have reached back in there and, like, gotten them out and stuff.

There is a... Jesus. You could make an argument that we've... So, eastern Kentucky's economy was built on what was in the ground, coal. But you could make an argument that we reached a tipping point maybe, like, 20, 30 years ago to where the disastrous nature of the economy itself or the environment itself becomes a money-making thing.

For example, Hal Rogers, the congressman, you know, is known as the Prince of Pork. But most of his pork has been for flood control projects. And so if you live in an area that's constantly falling apart, then you get a lot of money for it. And you get contracts and, you know, good old boys get to, like, create four jobs in a community building flood walls. But another example is, speaking of Bad Branch, how those missionaries from Pennsylvania came down here, like 30 of them, and went up, tried to go up to High Rock in the middle of February and got stranded up there. And many of them got frostbite and got fucked up. And I remember the town for several weeks afterwards, people talking about how big the

hospital bill was for that entire fiasco. Like, multiple people in Whitesburg ate off of that single hospital bill for months. Yeah, it's true. It's like a catastrophe economy. Yes. You know what I mean? Whenever bad things happen, everybody eats. That's right.

It's pretty fucked up. Well, honestly, that can bring us back full circle because that that incident with all them kids from out of town literally made the boston globe like that story traveled all the way to boston remember sylvia's dad sent it to yeah it's i mean it's not often that people in the united theiguous United States, get frostbite. It doesn't happen very often. And yet. And yet.

Especially in a climate that's relatively mild compared to, say, Minnesota. Well, I was trying to bring us back to the flooding because no one even knows half of East Kentucky is underwater right now.

But I will add that there became so much lore about it because it was all about making fun of them i mean they literally maybe almost died and all and every story i've heard is just making fun of them i heard i literally i heard that they panicked so bad they burned their jackets oh dear oh my god i feel pretty bad i don't even know if it's true. I feel bad about that, too. But it's like the funny thing about that is if that happened to any of us, like. Like, I feel like we could find our way back to the trail, you know. You just walk downhill, motherfucker.

I have literally climbed out of a dark mountain twice and it was horrifying. I was terrified, but I did it. You find a stream something you just head downhill you start following the stream basically and you will eventually come to civilization daylight and dark i've climbed out of many sticky situations through a creek if you can find water you're good you're straight i mean especially up there but there was like y'all remember around that time there was like a never-ending stream of like bad bad things happened at bad branch imagine like people fought i mean i don't want to like be flipping with that

either you know what i mean but like people were like getting fucked up up there man it was like yeah it's true god i mean but you i mean i'd I'd say that's the case with any, like, big waterfall, like, big attraction like that. That's not, you know, in any other place, they would turn that into, like, a wild park, and it would be, like, around the clock surveillance, you know? Yeah. And there's just never any, there's never anyone up there. There's no authority. There's no, there's literally a book at the entrance that says, hi, sign your name. Well, so yeah, so Eastern Kentucky, I mean, there's a lot of photos that keep coming.

I mean, like there was at least two different counties. I saw people stranded and had to be essentially lifted out by helicopter because they were yeah they were they have both evacuated people from hospitals via boat and taken new nursing staff into the hospital via boat yeah i saw one story where people were um where vaccines almost got ruined because of the flood. Oh, my God. People were having to vacuum. Well, that'll be the only way we make it into national news, is if we let a bunch of fucking vaccine shots float away.

Right. Right. I can't even imagine. God. That's what we need to do is get on a damn John boat and just go around vaccinating everybody. Get on a damn John boat and just go around vaccinating everybody. Y'all, I really, I mean, you know that I have a pretty high baseline of anger at all times anyway. And I'm working on it. And I realize this to be something that is only hurting me, really.

And I'm working on it. But this week week my anger has reached levels that even i didn't understand i have just like i've just been sent sent fucking many times into pure blind rage and honestly i would sit just seething thinking about things that we've talked about on the show in the past all coming to a head this week as tarrant said every new picture or video or image that came out of the floods i mean to get my vaccine this week i drove through standing water in three separate places yeah it's just so apocalyptic um but i want what what has sent me the most and has probably been truly triggering, a word I try not to use because Tom makes fun of me. But seeing trailer parks flooded is a very particular pain.

Because I grew up in a trailer and on at least three occasions I had to, as a child, my room decide what i liked the best and put it in the top of my closet yeah that is a very that is like a very difficult thing for a kid to do when you when you like have been told go put whatever you don't want floating away in the top of the closet and you just have to look around your room and make a very quick decision okay i'm stuffing all my stuffed animals up here my favorite red shirt this coloring book like my journal like what's it gonna be and then you put some shit on your back and we've literally had to hike up the mountain behind my house over the ridge so that my aunt could come pick us up like and i've done flood relief many times in kentucky and west virginia it is brutal it's disgusting um i mean it's it and it's it literally feels like just disease has

washed up into your house that's how it feels like it's the flood waters are disgusting they're so nasty um and to watch these what we've talked about on the show before what i have said before is that trailer parks are almost always in floodplains they always get it first yeah and and they have they're always run by slumlords there are no good owners of trailer parks i don't think i don't think that's a thing um i mean some parks everyone owns their own house like my sister lived in one where everybody owned their own place um which is pretty good but um or the one in malibu where all the celebrities live in the really nice ones drive golf carts around right yeah i'll maybe i'll live there one day but just to see these

trailer bars and they're all you know we've seen this too they're all called like lake view riverside uh waterfront because they're in literal fucking flood yeah like places that get easily flood yeah and it's just to like make it you know it's just a marketing to like make it sound nice i mean we literally now have pictures of lakeside trailer park signs you know almost covered in water well there's a reason why like rich people live in high places you know like literal high places like yeah you always just like in hazard they're all up at the highest place in jackson they're all up in the highest place so i mean that's literally why they they started i don't know when this started maybe you all, but they started making their reclamation plans like upscale fucking gated communities on strip mines.

And we're trying to literally turn all these strip mines. And they have to. There are some strip mines hazard is one. And they've tried to do that over at Raven Rock here in Letcher County into literal gated rich communities. Yeah, they have. There's people, there's houses out on the golf course. Yeah, absolutely. rich communities yeah they have it right now there's people there's houses out on the golf course yeah yeah absolutely and they almost all have problems with settlement settlement underneath imagine that yeah i'll imagine but yeah imagine it's kind of like when uh

like the segregated schools in eastern kentucky like all the black kids like learn latin and physics and all this stuff and they all went on to like get phds but like they thought that the white people thought they were doing themselves a like doing that those black kids disservice by sending them to the segregated schools and stuff and then it turns out that they were the ones going to the bad schools it's kind of the same thing it's like oh we're gonna take we're gonna have this we're gonna take to the high ground and we're gonna have these little gated communities and stuff in these strip jobs. And now it's like, oh, wait. My house is sinking three inches a year.

Right. Jesus fuck. So the other thing about rich people is oftentimes they're incredibly fucking stupid, which lends some credence to the idea that you actually don't have to be very bright to amass a fortune. You just kind of have to be right one time yep that's exactly right or or birthed by someone who was right one time that's more like it that's the the better path yeah um i don't know y'all i mean do you y'all remember the um i know you do we just talked about it the other day, the episode about where we've talked about what people go to public meetings over?

And it's almost always related to water. Yeah. People literally just want erosion control. That's the number one thing in Eastern Kentucky. If you had a comprehensive plan for erosion control, you'd rule for a thousand years in eastern kentucky and a friend messaged me after that episode and said i think we're going to make buttons that say left us against erosion i mean now i wish we had that That is ultimately what local politics is.

Fixing roads, installing culverts, and controlling erosion. Listen, I'm pro-gravel, I'm pro-culvert, and I'm anti-erosion. That's all you'd have to say and you would effectively end the Friends of Coal era in one fell swoop. in one fell swoop oh y'all um do you remember when southwest virginia flooded so bad about 10 years ago i think it was maybe like 2009 do y'all remember this it was it was this bad if not worse washed out a literal entire town gone still not there yeah y'all remember they had to move the whole town to hayside uh yeah because it was flooding so bad um apparently they had a plan to move uh there's been a plan they've already like built some roads up on a higher place uh maybe paintsville one city in eastern kentucky they've had a plan to move and then they ran out of money and now it's flooded oh it was martin martin yeah you're right yeah um anyway when i i was doing flood relief in west virginia

back when that flooded so bad i think it was 2009 but um it was obviously that that was a direct causation of the coal highway they were building this like king coal highway or whatever coalfields expressway yeah yeah coalfields expressway and they were mining along the route whatever and so they had just stripped so much land for this above all these places um and so it was very obvious why these people were flooded and i shit you not masy went around and put signs in yards they went and dropped off like bottles of bleach and shit and if in order to accept the supplies they were giving which didn't amount to hill beans they put up signs in the yards that said like thank you massy for supporting our community it's disgusting literally i've got a picture somewhere i'd have

to go i don't even know where i find a 10 year old picture at this point but literally flooded out houses with fucking like campaign signs in the front yard thanking massy just the worst people it's just it's unfathomable yeah so my rage is just rich unprecedented uh levels this week yeah i mean it's not natural that i mean the thing about floods is they're mostly man-made i feel like that maybe maybe i'm wrong maybe like some hydrologist or something like that listening to this could be like you don't know anything what you're talking about but i because there are natural floods i mean sure um it's a reason why there's springtime in the mountains you're gonna have some flooding yeah really you know with the

rains coming but like things like mountaintop removal coal mine all this stuff turn it into from like you know certain like inconvenient certain places you know what i mean into like a much bigger problem and also we like build all of our homes close to the river is like you know that's another thing it's the flat land well we've divert the the kentucky river that goes through whitesburg has been diverted it's not in its original um right plane or whatever so i i mean and it's the same thing in pikeville i mean they moved a whole goddamn mountain in pikeville it was like the largest amount of land that had been moved since the Panama Canal.

And there's some stat about the amount of fresh water in Kentucky. It's got the most fresh water waterways in any other state with the exception of Alaska. They're the most mileage of fresh water. The conditions are ripe, buddy. Yeah. They are ripe for a goddamn disaster. Yeah. Well, so, you know, we can put a link in the episode description that people can donate to if they want to donate to mutual aid and flood relief.

Yeah. And I just want to point out that we are one in many of total catastrophes going on across the country. I told Terrence this yesterday. When I did yoga this week, I do yoga with a handful of other people on Zoom once a week. And the girl who leads it, a friend of mine, Leticia, lives in Houston, Texas. She just came off two weeks without power and water. And another girl, there was only four of us, and three of us are literally living in a dystopian novel. Another girl who's doing yoga is in Jackson, Mississippi.

She ain't had water in weeks. Just absolute fuckery across the board here. Well, we've been failed. That's what it is i mean it's like and we need to like even be more mad about that than we are i'm not talking about like us or like you know people online or anything i mean like just people in general need to understand it's like the conditions you face are not your fault like you are like you know you are sort of at the mercy of like the time and circumstances

and place that you're born into and like the leadership of that place and that's like one of the great lies this country is like one of the greatest tricks the devil ever pulled is making us believe that like personal responsibility is like the end all be all to like the results in life and all that kind of stuff it's like that's just a picture we know it's bullshit you know what i mean we know it's bullshit yeah with a big old b yep no um no you're right uh i mean well so let's so let's pivot to something a little more lighthearted. Cherry. Yeah. We were talking about landlords and slumlords and people who make their money in really stupid ways.

Stupid people who make their money in really stupid ways. In really stupid ways. Stupid people who make their money in really stupid ways. So I have something from the Los Angeles Times. It was published in December. It kind of made the rounds, but I don't think it got the full attention it deserved. So we're going to follow this one in the deeply diseased column. Because it's pretty diseased, but there's some good shit in here so los angeles times this capitalist commune is trying to cure la's loneliness

plus there's free coffee god damn it la is lonely Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking... Out of the gate. I'm so angry. Well, I mean, like, we're dealing with a... I think loneliness is a problem everywhere, really. I mean, if you're talking about the big cities, I mean, Los Angeles is pretty, like... It's like one of the few big cities you have to have a car to get around in. You know what I mean?

It's so spread out. I will say that living in Austin, one of the main reasons I left, living in Austin was incredibly lonely. I felt much lonelier living in a city than I do in a small town. Absolutely. I guess I could say that. I guess my knee-jerk reaction is just that there's so many fucking people I mean a woman from New York argued this with me one time and I got really pissed that her son who lives in New York City has a harder time dating than I would have in a rural place

shut the fuck up lady but it just feels like there's so many people like and and in a place like LA and New York it feels like you can literally get anything you want i mean obviously you have to have money but it's like there's just access to fucking everything is how it feels in the city i don't live living in a city it's like to me i mean it's my experience living in the city is is when i was in las vegas it's like water water everywhere not a drop to drink you know what i mean it's like i really just hung out with like the people i lived with you know what i mean and like i didn't really like know how to like i mean it came you know i mean i worked places and then you meet people and then like it kind of comes together for you but

like i understand that i don't think that's a dumb instinct. I mean, even Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Didn't Japan just create a loneliness minister or something like that? Yeah, I think that one of the great, or great in the sense, like the scale of it, I think one of the biggest effects of capitalism is this sense of profound loneliness and that you're alone in a in a increasingly chaotic and insane world uh because most of our vehicles of collective action just don't exist anymore you know people don't join political parties like the communist party they don't they don't have unions you know there's there's social

clubs and shit sure but uh and i'm not saying that we're all alienated in the sense that like none of us have any friends or anything i just i do think that that there is something about capitalism that makes makes us lonely it disconnects us from collective action i guess and it disconnects us from a larger sense of meaning or anything like that. You know what I mean? I think, too, it's like our lives get reduced to like, and I found this true of myself, so when I say this, I'm picking on myself, but I found my life being reduced to like, I need to buy these sunglasses or these shoes or this thing or like have this experience to feel complete or to feel like connected or to also just to feel like just to feel something.

You know what I mean? Right, right. you know what i mean right right and that's like that's like that's like exactly like you know and i'm not like against like having nice things or whatever by nice things whatever but it's like but it's like those things are not like what connect you to some like unifying purpose that gives you some meaning or or at least or at least a source of hope or you know uh a reason for being well i guess that makes a lot of sense i spent one day in new york city and i'm tore out of pieces because no one smiled at me no one's acknowledged my existence in any way well uh let's say you do live in one of these cities and you are lonely there's a solution for that so there is a capitalist commune in la trying to cure la's loneliness wait hold on it says

they call themselves a capitalist this is the that's the title of the piece i would imagine that's kind of an editorial choice by the um publication itself but but you as we will find out, they do kind of operate on the idea that they are a capitalist commune. So let's dig into it. On a Sunday evening in late September, with wildfire smoke hanging in the air,

a few dozen people gathered in the rooftop kitchen of a Hollywood apartment building called Treehouse for their weekly communal dinner. The building's co-founder and chief executive, Prophet Walker, stacked plates and cleaned up cutting boards behind the tiled kitchen island,

while the building's designer, Sean Nib, or Knib, I don't know how you say it, manned the pans and turmeric chicken sizzling on the stove. The rest of the residents drank wine and chatted as they waited to eat. A woman with the vibes of an Instagram astrologer waved hi at a man who seemed to leap from a Vineyard Vines catalog. One wall of the kitchen was open to the deck outside, but people were squeezed together at small tables.

Nobody was wearing a mask. It looked like a scene from the past or from the future. These people weren't friends, at least not before they moved in. They weren't family, save a few parents with their children. They were co-livers. A building-sized pod in the time of COVID, in a housing experiment with grand ambitions.

Co-living isn't a new idea or even a new target for tech money. Startups like Common, Bungalow, and WeLive, the co-living division of the smoldering office space Hindenburg WeWork, have been raising venture capital and carving up apartment buildings across the country in recent years most sell rooms to renters as a cheaper option a nouveau sro with foosball in the laundry room and catered taco tuesdays on the patio oh yeah maybe treehouse is taking a different tack walk Walker and co-founder Joe Green, a tech entrepreneur in the Facebook orbit and big booster of psychedelic research, say they want to create the togetherness of intentional communities like co-ops,

communes, or Burning Man without the anti-capitalist politics or freaking cuisine. So this is it. is this sums it up um this i mean this sums up the overall thesis uh here in an era when luxury is synonymous with isolation private jets private islands uber black versus uber pool they're betting that real community can be packaged as a premium, an amenity that keeps atomization at bay as surely as heated floors banish cold feet. So what they're selling here is community. They are packaging it as a commodity and selling it at a premium.

So that's the capitalist part of the capitalist commune. So right at the gate, that's pretty bleak, right? That's a... Yes. I mean... Correct. I mean, this feels strangely familiar to the workplace where you live and work in Sorry to Bother You. Right, right.

It is kind of like... Go ahead. I didn't know this. I was listening to an internet radio show this morning. They were talking, one of the guys that hosts it was talking about, he used to work for Adult Swim in Atlanta. And they were kind of like the redheaded stepchild of the Ted Turner empire, because Ted Turner owns everything in Atlanta. Right.

And they said that they had this Turner campus that Ted Turner himself lived in with them. And it was cultivating all of his like properties and everything had their offices there like the atlanta braves that is so weird wcw wrestling before it folded and all that stuff i mean do you think it's because these people once they reach the height of their careers they do feel like they are profoundly lonely and they don't have anybody to really connect with. I mean, that is the case with one of these founders, as we will see, but of the founders of Treehouse, the capitalist commune. But I think that that is partially why. I mean, extreme wealth breeds isolation just by the very nature of it. It is like you can't be a member of a community

and also be exploiting most of the members of the community it just doesn't work that way and yeah and think that you're going to engender some kind of goodwill and it's like these people deserve our scorn but we also have to engage the fact they are profoundly lonely and like if you want to talk class consciousness there's nobody that's more class conscious than billionaires they're than super wealthy people. You know what I mean? God damn, that's true. Yeah.

All right, so let's get into the meat of how you would get into the treehouse commune. Is it very exclusive? It's kind of exclusive, yeah. Exclusive, yeah. Rotating committee... I'm sorry. Rotating committees of residents determine which rental applicants get approved. And the process involves more checks of vibe than credit. Oh, my God.

They have checks and vibe checks. Vibe checks, baby. Professional vibe checker. Leases come with signed commitments to community values and instead of simply showing up for scheduled events residents are encouraged to create their own classes and shindigs for the rest

of the building so you have to sign a lease that essentially you agree to the community values only 10% of the union this is great this is a good line only 10 of the units are set aside as affordable for low-income tenants but all are currently occupied by poets

all of the low income are poets. This can't be real. Come on. Oh, fuck. I lost it at that line. That's too goddamn good. Listen to how much one of these rooms cost. Go for it.

I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, you go ahead. I was just gonna i was just i was just gonna say like it's funny that like in these people's minds like who are the poorest motherfuckers i know oh yes these guys that like all of our friends that spent two hundred thousand dollars to get a phd in poetry right right not like real people on the streets or anything like that. Or even just working people. The rooms are pitched at the upper middle of the rental market in central LA. With rent starting at $1,715 a month. Almost $2,000.

Plus a $210 fee to cover utilities, housekeeping, free coffee, and Sunday dinners, yoga classes, and other events. So we're talking $2,000 a month for, as you will see, they'll tell you what you're getting for your $2,000 a month. Specifically, they're pitched at people like Kimberly Archer. When Archer left Facebook for a high-ranking job at Snap in May, the 38-year-old marketing executive could have rented an upscale pad with ocean views or found a spot up in the hills. But she wanted to live with other people,

pandemic be damned. Before leaving Oakland, she Googled co-living space. A few weeks later, she moved into one of Treehouse's units, really just a bedroom and a private bathroom. Oh, my God. They don't even have kitchens they share a kitchen oh hell no two thousand dollars a month for a bedroom and a bathroom and a shared kitchen with four other suite mates god yeah there has to be better ways than this uh she shares a kitchen with four other suite mates and shares the common spaces of the building with the rest of treehouse's 40 plus residents

there's the lobby cafe or yeah lobby cafe laundry room slash art studio screening room slash japanese themed bar two-story library curated by the resident librarian and on the roof a garden a deck the communal kitchen and yes a little tree house wrapped around a 100 year old olive tree shipped in from sacramento oh my god um for ten thousand dollars a month you imagine paying ten thousand dollars a month and having to share a kitchen i can't i can't even fathom seeing ten thousand dollars in a month well to be fair it's two thousand but that's quite a bit two thousand a month i mean but what you're paying two thousand what you're paying for though

is um you're paying for the premium experience of having other people around these people are profoundly lonely it's just there's this the story at the heart of this is ultimately very sad in my opinion um it it it is listen as a man that used to belong to a college fraternity i'm no stranger to paying for your friends but uh there's something there is something profoundly sad about this and like uh i don't know i'm feeling weird feelings for people we should disdain, I feel like. You know what I mean? I hate that. Well, some of them I do.

Oh, you're feeling sorry for them? Some of them I do, but the owners, I don't really have any sympathy for. Oh, no, no. Who cares? So this is the next section. The next section is called United by Loneliness. So Walker and Green green we met them earlier these are the two that started the treehouse capitalist commune walker and green

make an odd couple of utopian housing entrepreneurs what brought them together was loneliness walker grew up in watts broke someone's jaw in a fight over a disc man, and went to Ironwood State Prison on an assault and robbery charge when he was 16. He got out and got into Loyola Marymount University, then worked on some of LA's splashiest real estate projects as a developer, attempting a run for state assembly in 2014. Green grew up in Santa Monica and went to Harvard, where he found himself sharing a dorm with Mark Zuckerberg. What?

Oh, fuck. You buried the lead. He's very nostalgic about his time living with Mark, so he wanted to reproduce that. Oh, my God. Yeah, he declined a chance to quit school and go work at the social network, Facebook, but managed to start a series of successful tech companies of his own. In 2013, he teamed up with Zuckerberg to start Ford.us, a lobbying shop that used tech money to push for immigration reform, among other issues. By the time Green and Walker met in 2016, both had reached similar conclusions.

They had found success, but felt more alone than ever. I never experienced lack of community until I made money, Walker said. He's the one who grew up in Watts and went to prison. Growing up in Watts, he said, he felt like the child of everyone on the block. Prison, if anything, was an even more intense experience of closeness with his neighbors. After his run for office, he started thinking about how L.A. bred loneliness. The skyrocketing rents. The neighbors who never met.

The way that markets and neighborhoods in the city segregate people by race, class, and interests. I mean, yeah, those are all true diagnoses. I'm not sure that the solution to them is a capitalist commune that's what i'm saying it's like like you've you've successfully diagnosed a lot of these ills and yet the thing that you've went with is like let's form a community dedicated to the ideology that perpetuates this these things we hate right right um but for green on the other hand he's the one who went to harvard and grew up in santa monica for green loneliness struck when he was on a spiritual sabbatical following the self-described failure of his

lobbying efforts alone with his thoughts he realized he had been happier as a kid first in his santa monica neighborhood with friends up and down the block, and then at Harvard's Kirkland House, where undergrads lived in separate rooms but shared common space. In 2016, mutual friends introduced the pair at the opening of Low Call. I don't know how you say that. A burger stand in Watts started by celebrity chefs with the mission of bringing healthier fast food to low-income neighborhoods.

Walker had helped build the restaurant with a construction crew drawn from the neighborhood, and he says he was looking for a new project that captured the same feeling of building community and using physical space to actually do so. They hit it off, but Treehouse wasn't fully born until Green went on a silent meditation retreat a few months later. I spent several days being... Big rich people shit right there. Yeah. Unlike most co-living companies, which reconfigure existing apartment buildings, Walker and green saw that

they needed to build from the ground up to get the mix of public versus private space they wanted to maintain the vibe of the building potential renters have to go through an extensive application process with other renters serving on the application committee everyone has to sign a commitment to the building's core values being kind present curious candid and responsible as part of their let me live man imagine having to sign a lease that says you'll be kind present curious candid and responsible yeah absolutely not um the building shares a slack for internal announcements which also plays host to the occasional call out and heated conversation they're they're calling people out in the capitalist communes too they're calling on me in tom it's calling on me in oh man to keep conflicts

to a minimum residents have set up a regular series of conversations called tree talks, where the community values are often invoked to keep things kind and candid when residents are being less than responsible. Dude, this is, I didn't understand. I had to read this sentence multiple times. A resident who washed their dog's clothes in one of the shared machines was a source of building wide tension. What? Okay. Their dog's clothes. in one of the shared machines was a source of building wide tension. What? They're dogs close. I mean, as someone who puts sweaters on their dog, I'm still very confused.

I had to read the sentence a few times myself, personally. Yeah. times myself personally um yeah uh anyways uh now after a tree talk a washer and dryer set is earmarked just for items that might have pet hair on them um for green the harvard guy santa monica guy co-life has only been a temporary change of pace. When the pandemic first swept over California, he was staying in the spacious Beverly Hills house that his dad grew up in, which he said was in certain ways the peak of what Americans think they want. But Beverly Hills got lonely. He moved into a room at Treehouse, where residents had created a building-wide bubble of viral trust after a few nervous weeks that had left the common areas mostly empty. Immediately, Green said

he could feel his isolation melt away. He could post on Slack and ten minutes later have a Settlers of Catan game going on the roof. It felt so much better because I had people to be around. Still, after several weeks, he returned to his primary home

in San Francisco. Well, I tried. still after several weeks he returned to his primary home in san francisco well i tried i like this guy has a house in beverly hills yeah jesus i got that escape button anytime go ahead i'm sorry i'm gonna catch you yeah you're right they haven't you're right no he has a house in beverly, San Francisco, and the treehouse. I'm sure he's got more. Fucking amazing, dude. Let's see. So, the next section is kind of long.

Four paragraphs, but just hang with me. It has a payoff. Between its opening in fall 2019 and the beginning of the pandemic, Treehouse had rented only a third of its rooms. In the months since, the building has nearly filled up. The pandemic showed us, if nothing else, how important community and proximity is, Walker said. We have all these massive online communities, and that's like cool, cute, but people in quarantine in New York and Italy still felt compelled to sing out their windows with their neighbors during the first lockdowns walker reached for a painful memory

from his teenage years in watts to underscore the point i watched my best friend get murdered in front of me walker said that should be like a death nail to anyone's psyche but he credits the neighborhood with saving him once again damn that's, that's fucked up, man. I mean, there are, we need to create a world where that doesn't happen. But here comes the next part. The entire block came outside, Walker said, and then when they saw what happened, every single person just about hugged me, like, you're gonna get through this, this sucks,

but we've got hope for you. His hope for Treehouse is that it can build that kind of neighborhood, where, one, where everyone knows your name and comes together in tough times, his hope for Treehouse is that it can build that kind of neighborhood, one where everyone knows your name and comes together in tough times, but for people like him who left their neighborhoods behind. And, of course, he hopes that it can make a lot of money at the same time. There it is. It just so happens that through density arbitrage, through a host of laws,

through real estate financials, the tree house business model is an incredible investment. Walker said, but truly we're trying to build a community and that's it. Everybody. Um, I, I had,

I had to include that last part, even though it's not funny and quite sad. I had to include it because it even though it's not funny and quite sad I had to include it because it just is a perfect demonstration of how the system does bring loneliness it does destroy community but there's always

someone who is trying to make a profit off of that very dynamic that very situation you know what that is true it's like I kind of had like a i mean i know this is like not treading any new ground or anything like that but i was i was thinking about like the flooding in eastern kentucky last night and how like all these vultures of like the sort of just transition moment like have exploited people's misery. The whole thing of Appalachian Harvest,

it exists because of people's misery. Yeah. You know what I mean? They piggybacked on people's misery to get somebody else to pay for them an industrial-sized greenhouse operation for the day. It's under the guise of tomatoes and like for all that bullshit but really we know it's like they just want the

infrastructure in place for when like cannabis is legalized here right i mean exactly and it's like that exists everywhere like that's not a uniquely appalachian thing or anything like that there are people that are like trying to see because capitalism teaches us it's okay to look at the world's problems figure out what a solution to the problem is and then like go innovate that and try to make some money off that and because you have presumably alleviated somebody's problem that is acceptable in that system the problem with that is like like if you're some like uber dip shit like that's one thing you know what i mean like like it is fucked up like you're fucking cab drivers over and you're basically creating like a solution to a problem that

doesn't even exist to begin with what you're trying to do is get from to and fro cheaper you know what i mean that's like that's the issue but like there is get from to and fro cheaper. You know what I mean? That's the issue. But there is a whole other, and that's slimy enough in itself, but there's a whole other layer when you're literally exploiting people's loneliness and feelings of isolation and insecurity to pad your own pockets. There's a different, I don't know, there's just a different layer there to me than just like, oh, this is just like me innovating and fixing a problem. No, I mean, to take it a step further, it breeds further loneliness and alienation. it reinforces your position in the system as an individual and pushes you away from

collective solutions to political and social problems. And so if all of these problems can be fixed with technocratic, innovative solutions, then it means that we don't need politics. It means that we don't need politics. It means that we don't need class struggle. It just means that you have to have someone with political will, someone with a little bit of capital, and someone with a little bit of technocratic and technological expertise to solve the problems.

And that just creates more and more problems. And so it gets worse and worse until before you know it, your entire fucking region is underwater because nobody could ever you know just stop saying well just just stop and say maybe we shouldn't be doing this you know yeah it's it's you know i've been thinking about that in relationship to like leadership and how like i'm and i'm not saying i'm not pining for a return to yesteryear or anything like that but like people like lyndon b johnson for example or whoever and i'm not pining for a return to yesteryear or anything like that. But, like, people like Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, or whoever. And I'm not praising LBJ, okay?

Like, I know the guy was a butcher, too, and, you know, the whole situation, Southeast Asian, all this stuff. But, like, there were politicians that pre-technocratic era, like, knew how to find power, leverage power, and knew how to engage in politics. Now, what that looks like varies from leader to leader and whatever, whatever. Leaders now have abdicated that responsibility and put it on. Really, when people are praising the market, they're really just praising people like the guy that started this. And it's like an outsourcing of, I only have ambition. I have no answers, no law of governing, no understanding of how to solve your problems or make your life better.

But there are these algorithms and these minds behind them that do. And so they've just sort of outsourced their responsibility as leaders to these people and you don't really have a thing it's a such thing as politics anymore like we're essentially being governed by like instagram stores do you know what i'm saying though oh yeah i think you're right the example of the just transition is a perfect example i mean if you look at the just transition i mean the just transition at the end of the day was ultimately an alliance between environmentalists and i don't know what the column i've been writing this thing recently and i've been calling them diversificationists

because i don't have any other word for them because they're just people that believe that the economy back then they believed that the economy shouldn't just be coal mining and you had to diversify it and create these jobs that were like teaching miners how to code or program or whatever um but what that did when you brought those two groups together it completely neutralized their effectiveness to change things from a political uh from a political angle um and it brought people into this world that was highly guarded, highly gate-kept, and shut democratic movement out of it. Because that wasn't the point. I mean, since the war on poverty ended,

it has just, in all of these places, it has just been more and more movement away from getting people together to under, because that's what happened in the war on poverty. They brought people together to start sharing their grievances, and it soon, it had the negative effect of what they intended. And you had people protesting and demanding better lives and better situations. And ever since that happened, they're like, we cannot do that anymore.

We have to have solutions that shut people out of democratic uh cooperation and political action and instead slot them into these individualized roles within you know expert driven uh you know tech hubs and in these other these other areas yeah i i don't know i this is a perfect example of that to me it's just like you're right it's capitalizing on a problem that exists and offering a solution that is similar to the problem but it tweaks it's tweaked enough to make it look like it's a solution but it's not yeah yeah yeah it's um yeah it's yeah you're right it's, yeah, you're right. It's like the whole just transition movement is like the arch example of all that. I don't know, man.

I just got, I got in such a bad way last night thinking about like, I don't know, the Brooks myths of the world and all these like sort of like Louisville gentrifiers that like made their fortunes in like surety bonds in eastern Kentucky in the coal mines and now have like gone back under the guise of like, oh, we're going to, you know, I've made I've made my life, you know need to give something back and then what do they do in the end is they just like like get in on where the federal money's at and get in on where like the you know venture capital money is at in terms of like the appearance of doing good in a place and then they go to where it can work but they don't adjust their narrative you know what i mean yeah they go they move that whole operation from pike county to moorhead and it's like yeah moorhead's technically appalachia but it's like it's

right it's conveniently right on i-64 and all this stuff and it's just like oh well are you going to give back all that money that you raised under the guise of we're going to do this on old abandoned strip mines and all that shit which was never going to work to be fair but they knew that you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah well anyway that's the problem with just transition and it's kind of the problem with the green new deal i mean the green New Deal is amorphous enough, nebulous enough to where you can make it whatever you want. But I mean, but it does have this. This is something that we think we all need to be aware of. It does have the potential to become what the just transition thing became, which was that people came in and they said, here are your problems.

You don't like these problems, right? Well, here's the solutions. At no point did they ask people what the solutions might be. At no point did they ask them, well, is there anything that we can do to provide what you need? No, it was just, this is what you want. Coal mining is bad from our perspective. So we're going to end coal mining and we're going to give you this new job. At no point did they ask them if that's what they wanted.

It was just like, well, this is what's going to happen. Right. Yeah, yeah. It's like, well, this is just the order of the day, so take it. And they try to appear all altruistic and everything, but really what it is is these vultures know that there's no shortage of federal money sinking into that. So they can just generically tailor whatever they're trying to do to have a tie-in so they can get those funds. And then once the coast is clear and the initial fervor has settled, they just dip. Yeah.

Like they've always done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. settled they just dip yeah they always like they've always done yeah yeah yeah i mean this this is like so so broad too i mean remember our old clown buddy from west virginia what's his name fuck patch adams yeah our old buddy patch he's raised millions of dollars saying that he's building a hospital in West Virginia for coal miners and the hospital is a clown school because laughter is medicine there's just no way you can't make this up wow Tony now I can never watch patch adams the same way again oh my god thanks for ruining patch adams for me yeah no hero this episode reminds me of that episode we did on

um no one agency should have all that power i don't remember the number but it reminds me of that episode where like venture capitalists and technocrats see a host of problems and their approach to it is kind of like terraforming mars you know they'll they'll like inject a little bit of venture capital there inject a little bit of grant money here and then like oh it'll all add up in the end to a a new restoration economy they slap some weird ass name on it like that and expect everyday people to walk around being like, I'm living in the restoration economy. And this is like... Creative place, maybe?

Yeah, it's stuff like that, exactly. Exactly. Well, anything else to say about the treehouse capitalist commune slash eastern Kentucky is falling apart? Strange bad fellows to thread all these things together, but it's there. There is there. There, there. I mean, it's only a matter of time before.

It's all underwater well it's yeah but it's only a matter of time before like jd vance or the other venture capitalists start saying like well we gotta start doing something about these flood about this flood issue we gotta start doing something about these flood oh yeah we're about to get a technocratic solution yeah they're gonna what they're gonna start doing they're gonna start underground tunnels but underground tunnels they're gonna start um retrofitting trailer homes into like boats so be like so your boat will just float downstream and so you know if you get what swept away you can just house boats fucking house like oh you used to live in the 41858 zip code in Whitesburg? Well, now you live in Hazard. There's nothing wrong with that.

Oh, my God. That actually sounds kind of cool. That would be kind of tough. Shit. I would kind of like to live in a houseboat. Oh, I've literally thought about buying a houseboat on Norse Lake. Absolutely, I would. I just don't know how I have dogs.

What do you do about your dogs when you live in a houseboat? You bring them with you. Take them up on the dock and walk them over to some grass and take them out. When it's potty time, you just got to go load up in the boat. There you go boat there you go um there you go well gang um i've gotta run um but i hope you enjoyed the episode this week we're over time terrence loves to just drop all the worst possible things on us and then say well gotta go eat lunch guys you know that is i

gotta go eat lunch i'm with him on this that is very not true tanya you know what i feel like most of the time every time someone accuses us of being blackpilled it's usually they they accuse me of doing it but if you look back at the vast majority of episodes it's usually done it's usually, they accuse me of doing it, but if you look back at the vast majority of episodes. It's usually Don. It's usually me. The most like, fuck it up. I'm usually the one that has some way to tie it together in a poignant, inspiring way. Well, I am not crossed over at some point.

Do what? We crossed at some point. Do what? We crossed at some point. Yeah, we did. We crossed at some point. I was very optimistic at one point in my life, and this just sets over. That's gone. Yeah, that's gone. I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic but I do

I just maybe quite haven't figured out how to do a podcast without the thing about talking for an hour is that you can't just stop in the middle of the stream and say alright well now we're going to go in a different direction that's just not how conversations work

you gotta follow things through to their natural endpoints yeah that's saying you do a good job steering this ship terrence right over the flood waters that's right that's Well, if you would like to donate to Flood Relief, like I said, we'll put a link in the episode description. If you would like to donate to our Patreon, you can go to patreon.com and sign up there. We've had some good episodes on there recently that I recommend you go check out. Oh, we also, we had a new segment on the Patreon recently.

So if you're interested, if you're curious, if you're kind, present, and curious, like the Treehouse residents, go sign up for the Patreon. That's the takeaway from all this. See, we were just, we were doing the same thing this guy is. We trying to make money that's right your curiosity after curiosity and loneliness that's correct um so anyways go to the patreon thanks for listening this week um and we

will see you over at the patreon in a few days. So have a good rest of the week. We'll see you later. See you, friends. Bye.