It Could Happen Here Weekly 88

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 the city seems to be uh be giving towards the Copsity project, even beyond like the thirty three million dollars that was the that was the target about 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 Atlantic Community Press Collective and then who had had their turnalism pretty margital in by every other outlet.

come from this lease back agreement. So originally it was going to be a twenty year, one million dollar a year. We found out that that is actually a thirty year, one point two million dollars a year paid for thirty six million dollars going to the Atlanta Police Foundation. And part of what they were what they had talked about using it for in twenty twenty one, was to pay down this twenty million dollar loan construction loan that the Atlanta Police Foundation was planning on taking out to build

the facility. So when they were talking about that, like sixty million dollar philanthropic donation. They really they meant or twenty of that was going to come from from a loan that the city was going to pay back so immediately. Like these numbers were stewed from the get go and have been misleading for the last year and a half.

like fundraising via all their big corporate backers. And then what's happened in the past few months of them trying to trying to downscale some of the more expensive parts of the plan and like cutting some of the fad in terms of like the stables aren't going to be the same spot that they wanted there to be stables, and other small kind of money saving cuts, and then all this increase in the amount of the project that's

just being funded by taxpayers. It seems like the APS been not as successful and 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.

under the average monthly income. So things got twisted here that this doesn't seem like a revitalization project that that is supposed to improve the lives of the neighbors around it.

privy to these conversations. So the entire time like this is happening, Andre Dickens is still like out in the press repeating this thirty million dollar number, like tell the to Rose Scott, who's basically our our NPR like person here detel it to the a jac the paper of record, and says that it's gonna be thirty million dollars if it goes over, it's gonna it's gonna come out of

the Atlanta Police aboutation. And then of course you know his his cabinet is having conversations about way more money.

and it's probably not very good. Let's talk about let's talk about the the the two Atlanta City Council meetings that happened. One was during late May, right, that was the first one with public comment. That was like people were being 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 fifth was even longer.

public comment, which for a subcommittee meeting is a lot. Uh. And then all of that, every like record was blown out of the water on June fifth, where we had just just over fourteen hours of public comment that includes like breaks for disruption and like a ten minute break that the City Council took and then a lot of arguing between Doug Ship and the city couple of president

trying to help people down. But you know, overall it was fourteen and a half hours of just public comment, which is the largest public in person public comment session that is in modern history. Yeah, and it was basically unanimous. There were four speakers who got up pretty early who were in favor of the training center, and then everyone else was anti cop city.

wouldn't have affected any city business before that. And then they also prepared a committee room so that if you know, 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 were they they made some wise moves on their end to prepare.

book there and see how far that would get. And then if the result was like what we got, then other other things will happen in these next few months, especially with a week of action coming up. So, yeah, do you think people on that like what did people on the ground think, Like, did did they think that that the vote would go through? And do they think the vote would be stopped? I met, I am, I

am kind of it's it's been, it's been. It's been a little little over a month since I've been in Atlanta, and I think that the mood on the ground fluctuates so quickly often.

You know, there was a slim chance of this thing getting sent back to committee, and that was the closest that this had to not going through city council. You know. The kind of the whip count that that we learned was if it if it came to a straight up or downvote, 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 uh, with student organizers and various other organizers who are more prone

to having these these discussions, especially with elected officials. So there was bobbying for the tickets sent back to community to committe where it would be I will and hopefully delay the actual funding and mess up if he had slumming mechanism. But that didn't happen. So there were people who were hopeful, Like even I was, you know, I said that this was the closest electorally that we'd ever come to stopping it. I you know, just kind of knowing how the whip count changed over the course of

like forty eight hours. It got close and then then it got taken away. Every Dickens called city council members into his office Monday morning and started feeling them off.

I mean most people don't. So as if you're part of like gold, yeah, exactly, if you're part of the ghost on the community, there is 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 souls 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 have to make sure that they get rid of their gold in orders to them to go to their next place, whether that's like that's like a safer version of Limbo, Paradise, heaven, hell, whatever. So yeah, I wait for you.

knew that was gonna happen. I talked about this during during the Week of Action retrospective episode, which honestly is still pretty applicable here in terms of the amount of destruction that's happened in the forest and how people are thinking about ways to continue resistance in the face of not again I'm against the binary of like victory and defeat. I think that's not a useful way of looking at

this situation at this point. But you're, you're, you're, 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. Preconstruction is ongoing, Construction is scheduled for this summer. They just got approved for all the city funding right Like, things are in motion. So the ways that people are going to choose to resist now might be different in the ways that they chose to resist like a year or two ago, because

it's just a very different, 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 it's just a very different scenario. So I think if the retrospective episode still contains a few things about how how systance might might take forms during these next few weeks. But there's this this this other thing that came up after the city council meeting, which is

the referendum that some people are planning. Uh, do you want to go over a little bit of those details.

But the referendum there there is there's a spaceport that was supposed to be built in South Georgia and basically this one woman like started a referendum question and got this spaceboard canceled. Of course, we're talking very different like municipalities. That was a much smaller one. She only had to

collect fourteen hundred signatures or something like that. But there's a referendum question that is in front of the municipal clerk to kind of sign off on it and make sure that it is properly worded and all these things like just to administrate issue at this Once the clerk signs off on it, then these organizers have sixty days

to collect seventy five thousand. The number they actually need is just over seventy thousand, but they're collecting a little extra because these signatures will be challenged, you know, things like that with a vote. If they're successful in doing so, it goes to city council, who again as in the administrative position, has to all the signatures, make sure everything

you know is official. And then if once that passes, then it goes automatically on the November seventh, and then it will be a straight up or down question of do we cancel this twenty twenty one lease to the Atlantic Police. But there there are a couple where this

comes in. I think most interestingly is the organizers of this believe that they can get an injunction to stop construction both now once the referendum campaign picks off, and then if they collect the seventy thousand signatures again until November seven. So this could significantly delay the Atlanta Folet Foundation's ability to continue destruction on the land. And like right now we are in the mass rating days of the project, which is the most environmentally damaging part of it.

Now we're we're screwing with the contours of the land. So you know, they're going to have to prove that they're serious about the referendum, and the judge is 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 the succeeding.

know exactly what. So they're looking at Wednesday the fourteenth as the kickoff for the signature collecting camp. 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 copsity vote dot.

As the bail hearing judge admitted himself, so do you wanna do you want to go over some of some of those details, because I mean, this is something that was honest. People have been expecting this to happen, Like the alne of solid already Fund themselves has said, hey, we will probably be the target of something like this

in the future. During during other hearings, the prosecutors that have talked about how they're investigating the Solidarity Fund as a part of this like conspiracy they're trying to to weave. So it's definitely something that's been on on people's minds of of this type of legal this type of like state repression targeting all of like the bail funds and like legal support structures that have been set up. So yeah, this happened like late late May, I believe mast Yeah, last day of the May thirty.

prepared for this for quite some time. Marlin, one of the organizers, had sent ACPP, you know, a statement in preparation for this, and you know, you saw how quickly they transitioned the actual running of the bail from the Atlanta Solidarity fun too, the National Bail Network been seamlessly

that day so they were prepared. And then you know, someone who was talking to Marlin while he was in jail said, Marlon was pretty chill about the whole thing, which if you've ever interacted or seen Marlin, uh, that is that's that's pretty apt to describe him. But the actual charges are are insane, you know, the the charity fraud part of it. They're they're saying things like buying a cell phone, uh for for the bail fund is charity broad? Or reimbursing yourself or gas is charity broad?

Or buying COVID tests is charity broad? Like all these things that that are just like overhead.

There was a veil hearing a few few days later which I watched the whole thing, and the judge there did not think the charges had much much merit, which is the first time really during any kind of bail hearing associated with top cups standy 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 and at at any

at any further stage. So all three got out on bail. It's it's pretty scary though. We like it's it's it fucking sucks. During the bail hearing, uh, the I believe, I believe it was it was it was the Assistant Attorney General who was there, Vowler. I believe he was talking about how police were going through the trash of Solidarity fund, how they're monitoring phone calls, other other communications.

So just another another good reason to have a have a paper shutter and to have to have a burn pile in your backyard, because yeah, they're they're they're gonna, they're gonna go through 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 this type of like shady investigation police stuff, which is just it's always good to have a reminder for people about what what the police are willing to do.

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 you you use these funds in a way that you explicitly said that you could be used on your website, which is not probably not going to be a crime, So not compelling long term, but certainly a pretty large inconvenience in the short term, and still a very like chilling like display of police repression saying that we'll, we'll, well,

we'll make your life incredibly difficult if if we don't like you.

You know, You've got Chris Hayes now on MSNBC doing an entire segment on some topsity, which is not something you know, we had before, even the domestic cares and 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.

So it's going to be a interesting lead up to July first.

So who who knows? Who knows what will what will what will go down? But thank you Matt for joining me to give me a 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.

the shows either way. But we're really excited, So let's get straight to the episode. How's that sound?

I'm very excited for it. James stout, James goa, introduce your first journalist podcaster host of it could happen here, which, if you're listening to this on it could happen here, you already knew that. James. Welcome to the show.

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

health fellowship. And so I got in touch with a awesome physician, Don Maggio, who is the ed director at White River, which is Apacha Nation in Arizona.

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 pull sox, so we'd see how high their oxygen saturation was and see how people were doing to try to catch disease early.

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 possible Yaki tribe, the health division employs a team of traditional healers that come up i think monthly from Sonora, Mexico, from the villages and Yacci patients can elect to see the traditional healers with or without a Western trained physician, and there's a whole room where they have all these herbs and plants that Yaki people have been using for thousands of years, and I think that's very beautiful.

IOHS run the system. Could you like, because Marley, 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 Pascuayaki tribe run their own system. I think they get a block grant, correct me if I'm wrong. Victory, they get a block grant for my HSS, and then they spend that as they see fit.

But it's a yeah, Western system, and all of the staff on the hospital, like the Reservation hospital or the Indian Hospital are all employees of IHS, so they're actually kind of like federal employees. And we can kind of get into the weeds of it later, but there's you know, a lot of turnover because it's a sometimes it's hard places to live, so and they're young. They kind of recruit young doctors, and there's a lot of turnover for

the 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.

in treaties made with Indigenous peoples. And basically this means that the government, because of the harm, the oppression, the colonization that has been dealt upon Indigenous peoples across the United States, there's a trust responsibility for the federal government to sort of to do something about the lingering impacts. They have a responsibility to provide health services to Indigenous peoples in the US. That was also in many of

the treaties that were made with Indigenous nations. And I think it does go over people's heads sometimes that this is not a favor, this is not a gift, It's a responsibility based on centuries of oppression, and that that responsibility is not fully being met right now because the Indian Health Service is severely underfunded. The way that the funds are appropriated is unique to government health care programs.

The way the veterans, for instance, Veterans Affairs is appropriated is much more effective than the way Indian Health Service is appropriated at the federal level.

just automatically get. For instance, during COVID nineteen and there were specific funding allocated for tribal nations, those tribal nations who are not federally recognized, they wouldn't have that access to them.

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 US 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.

You're seeing Alcoholic disorder is a problem everywhere in the United States, but on tribes alcoholics disorder.

about it. Like in class sometimes they'll say, like Native Americans have the highest rates of diabetes or heart disease, but they won't say why, and it makes people think that, oh, 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 creates a lot of ignorance and a lot of room for interpretation. So I think

it's really important to talk about those background reasons. For instance, with diabetes, I think a lot on a lot of reservations, there's no access to one, traditional foods which have been you know, through policy, eradicated through government policies over the decades and centuries, and no access to healthy foods. These are food deserts. And at the same time, like doctor Hallweaver mentioned, there's poverty. So if you're trying to get healthy food you don't have number one, it's not in

the reservation. You might not even be able to afford it. If you can get off the reservation. Not a lot of people have, you know, not everyone has a car or the ability to mobilize, you know, hour and a half to the health food store, and so you know, a lot of 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 on some reservations, alcohols entirely illegal on the reservation, but you'll see you'll still see businesses right on the border of the reservation just camp themselves there right on the border, knowing that these that the population is vulnerable, maybe not knowing that it's because of

the historical trauma and things, but there's there's something there, you know, so there's still an aspect of being targeted there by something that that you know, the community is highly vulnerable to still to this day.

even though not discussing it made it one. Really, do you must be annoyed by this? Does this happen to you? Like are you like sitting in your lecture class and then like the teacher will mention some about naive Americans. Then all like the white students in your class just turned their heads and like look at you to see your response.

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, and they had pregnant mice and they like, they would give them the scent of rose blossom or something, and then they would shock them, and then the mouse would grow to be really fearful of those shocks that were associated

with the rose blossom. And then what they noticed was that like the children of the mice would also respond poor ly 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 be it can affect the DNA. It can affect the DNA, and that can be passed down changes in the DNA, disruption of the DNA. You can't inherit specific phobias or 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 pathologists emails. Molly.

itself directly there is that? Is that correct? Is that part of this correct?

world funds really valuable. And so there's a shift almost to almost you see it in like policies and lawsuits today to start trying to grab more minerals from the land that that that they had actually put us on, which they didn't think was valuable. And now they're like, wait, there's like copper under there.

we get back to the IHS a little bit? So you guys have mentioned Indian Health Services. It's come up a couple of 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 need work and how.

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 and white coats, worked very well for them, and I think it's a very desirable model to replicate. It's not that expensive either, and we were doing it with beat its Prevention, right. So, like, chiefly my thing is riding bikes has been my whole life, and so it is, yeah, just a big old bike riding hippie, but like, riding bike is very good for you,

as it turns out, which is which. So the thing that we've been doing with a lot of my friends on the Yaki Reservation is getting folks helping them out with a bike and helmet and lights and all the things that you need, teasing them to fix the bike right, and then having them 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 getting Yaki folks to ride bikes.

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 them 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 six thirty eight clinic or

six thirty eight clinics or tribal health systems. It's really cool what they did in Alaska because those are some of the most remote, remote villages you know, in the US, 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 talked about Alaska that they're remote, but a lot of tribes the parts of the US or maybe not as remote, but they're in very similar

situations and that they're kind of disconnected, like on food deserts.

And then also Valencia, he's like stop, wait for a second, and he grabs a snake and then he looks at it and he says, we have to stop the meeting.

And like I always attribute like I'm not fully culturally fluent, right, Like I'm a guy from England, Like it was different where I grew up, so like things you can't tell ye stout is that it's right up there with Valencia. But yeah, like I'm obviously I don't have full cultural effluency, so it's on me to kind of listen and learn at a time rather than be frustrated and build those.

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 as a very foreign person, right, I felt I felt like an outside and yeah, I mean a lot there isn't They're not central heat for these house Some of these houses, lots of the floors were dirt, like not actual flooring on the houses.

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 at least in my experience on the reservation, everyone is friendly and nice. Most of the people I run into it with friendly and nice, and so I really like that guy I ran into as a traditional artist, David Moreno, who does

he runs an art program there. He's very lovely guy, and we just were chatting, I think, and I was trying to encourage. I think I was trying to encourage him to come on a bike ride with me, and like, you didn't have a bike, so then I was just trying to encourage, Like I was like, maybe I could get some bikes and come back. And I spoke to some people and diabetes prevention and we got some bikes and came back. But it like, obviously people's houses aren't

super duper fancy, but they're fine. Like people have some nice houses on the res like you know, I didn't grow up in a super fancy house, and like the houses that are not that distinct from those that I see in San Diego. It's beautiful too, like especially down

if you go on the Autumn Reservation further down. We did a ride there in twenty nineteen, and we went out the night before from the Yaki Reservation with the group of us and we did like a big camp out and then we did it right the next day. Their roads are not quite as nice as the yucky roads we all got. We ran out of innertube because everyone got so many punctures, like it's it's yeah, it's beautiful landscape.

But like I know, people shouldn't just walk onto reservations and start like trying to have their cultural immersion experience or whatever.

But like the striking part for me too was 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 have are obviously they're American as well, but I have 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 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 the most streaking.

very little about Native Americans. And when I say that, I don't mean Native American could 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, 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, and the very basics of I think that should be basic in this country, all these basics, and by that time, you know, I think people have gotten

so much information that maybe they didn't know before.

it harder and harder to talk about that. But I think when people come to need so like I teach a community college course, an American history course, and I think when people come to that course, I mean California, like many of them, for instance, could not name the tribe who's the cancestral 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 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 Art tim and the Navajo, and maybe not

an hour. Everything's a long way away in Arizona. But and and not understand anything about those people who lived experience if you're in Scottsdale.

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 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 experience it know the most about it to speak about it, but also the one to keep re exposing people to like the same exhausting trauma every time, you know, it becomes a tough thing for me at least to figure out in balance, you know.

foods up and running again. And there's a lot of people are already working on this, you know, which is amazing. I just want to be of service to that effort, and I think I think that is one of the most important things right now. I also really want to do like public health initiatives around language revitalization. I think language is so important when it comes to the mental

health of Indigenous youth uh Indigenous. I believe that Indigenous youth who know how to speak their language are more mentally strong during the continuing tides of colonization that they face in this Western world. If they have their language, I think that that's huge in terms of resilience as

culture as well. I think, you know, finding ways to to sort of support culture as medicine, culture as prevention, participating in ceremonies, as you know, making it you know, very apparent that to to your audience and to the world that that that is protective of Indigenous health, indigenous mental health, and so that you know, there's all these facets of traditional traditional ways of life that we're all

very healthy to us. And I think a huge part of the battle is that we're still having right now because the 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.

a family which is not a tribal family. Can you, if you feel comfortable, explain what IQUA is and then the damage it does to young people to be pulled away from their culture and sort of get this little active conversation that happens every time that happens.

And I think when it comes to the Indian Child Wealth for ACT, that's another really good example. Uh So, basically the Indian Child Wealth for ACT if if a Native child is in the foster care system, and basically it helps to uh 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 to number one to to stop the history of assimilation when it comes to taking

Native children from their families. And we know about that, you know, through the US boarding school system. That was one example, but it kind of transitioned at a point once 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 wellbeing as well.

The battle right now is being brought on by this lawsuit that primarily handles like mining and oil companies, but they're taking this Indian Child Welfare Act lawsuit pro bono because if you can get rid of the Indian Child Welfare Act on the basis that they're claiming, it's racism, right, they're claiming that Native people are getting some unjust preferential treatment when it comes to adopting Native children over white

people on the basis of race. Where that falls short is that the basis of the Indian Child Welfare Act is that Indigenous peoples are not a race. They're sovereign nations. They have a political status distinct from all any other race in the US. 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's a that that relates to our political status as a tribal nation, as a sovereign nation. And so they're going

to be battling that in court. But if the Supreme Court decides that this Indian Child Welfare Act is you know, racist or discriminatory based on race, it means that a number of other bills, another under of other things in the law that that, for instance, that exist due to the political status of Indigenous nations have the potential to also be thrown out on the basis of racial discrimination.

family about what you learned with regard to colonization. Are 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 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 this.

the so called China problem. In these circles, a consensus is emerging about what they call Chinese state capitalism and its supposed risk of the United States. China's economy, they are, is not a free market economy like that of the

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

security state. First, state owned industries subsidized by the state will inevitably outcompete 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

oued enterprise is known as SOEs, actually functioned. And this is a real problem because Chinese soos are not what you or the people writing American forum policy think they are. So today, we're going to take a dive into the belly of the state and figure out how soos 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 twenties. The New Economic policy relegalized private capitalist firms, albeit in a much reduced capacity, with a 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 seventy percent of Soviet industrial output, increasing to seventy seven percent by the

end of the policy. Meanwhile, despite the height behind Chinese state capitalism, china state sector represents a measly forty percent of China's economy, uniquely high for a capitalist economy, but quite literally the inverse of the relationship between capitalist frames and the state. In the USSR that sixty percent of China's GDP is private and only forty percent is generated by the state. And don't look too closely at that forty percent, because only thirty percent of it is from

actual state industries. The other ten percent resulting from the regular function of the state itself. Shows what actually drives a Chinese economy, not the state at all, but the market. This is very important because the story of the Chinese economy in the last forty 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 sos, 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 will take as an example of Chinese SOE the Socialist period, which functions similarly. The firm is literally a government department. For example, in nineteen seventy nine, China established the Bureau of Non ferest Metals and 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 a luninium 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 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 soez, despite sharing the same name as or 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 companies Saudi A Ramco, 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 A Ramco and modern Chinese soz are for profit companies. I don't exist to provide a service. They exist to make money. This gets

very weird very quickly. For one thing, while we tend to think of state owned enterprises as belonging to the national governments, municipal, provincial, and even disher and county governments in China have their own SOEs. On a conception level, this makes sense. China's economy is the size of a continent, and individual provinces have a geographic size, population, natural resources, and economy of entire nations, which means that provincial soees

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 quote. At a further stage of evolution, this form also becomes insufficient.

The official representative of the capitalist state will ultimately have to undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication, the Post office, the telegrams the 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 capitalists 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 surflus population, although

not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army. But angles imagined the state as a collective capitalist replacing the individual capitalist. What no one could have foreseen was capitalists break 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 soees. These SOEs are capitalist firms to market discipline.

They 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 soees are also listed on the stock markets, meeting individual capitalists, and as we'll see later, even foreign firms can buy forty nine percent stakes and 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 know, the State Owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council is not a name that sounds any better in Chinese.

owns the SOEs. Bob's your uncle, Everyone goes home for the night, and the episode ends right here.

like Sinopek China 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 soees. That holding company, however, is the actual basis of the organization of Chinese state ownership. The building blocks of the Chinese state economy aren't single

state owned enterprises at all. The economy is actually composed of what are called business groups. American listeners may not be very familiar with business groups, but there are a common sight in what became known as the Tiger economies, a series of economies that's all rabid industrial development in the post World War two era, largely fueled by the demands of American military supply lines for its wars in

Korea and Vietnam. The two most infamous are the Japanese Keretsu, the successor to the old Japanese Zaibatsu that dominated the word Japanese economy and which were to some extent broken up after the war, and Korean Chabel conglomerates. These massive groups of businesses are either owned by the same people or families in the case of the chabel, or linked

by mutual shareholding of each other's companies. Like Keatsu, the groups cooperate and coordinate the business strategy instead of competing against each other, which allows them to carry out a level of long term planning that's sometimes difficult for individual

for profit companies. Chinese economists sent to Japan to study keatsu in the seventies and eighties 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 chabel are organized around families, and keatsu are organized around a commercial bank that provides financing for the companies and the group, Chinese businesses are organized by those holding companies one hundred percent owned by Sassak and therefore the Chinese State. Those holding companies, also sometimes called core companies, own the majority of the stock of a variety of public betraded companies.

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

hundreds more companies. Technically outside the group. These groups are organized by what's called articles of grouping, which 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 truck sure 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 developments. But in the real world this is a significant challenge because again, even individual business groups comprise hundreds of companies, and the states grasp on them as 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 two thousand and eight 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. SASAK owns the holding companies, which allows it, in theory, to make decisions that a shareholder would be able to

make it a private corporation. There's also a parallel corpus structure directly run by the party, and high ranking people in the corpus structure become party members and are sent to cadre trainings at places like the Central Party School in Beijing. Meanwhile, people swap between SASSAK and high level manager positions, and the heads of large soees 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 soees through Sassak, 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 owe these companies forced to directly go after them through the law and through the court system, which works sometimes and also

doesn't work other times, but this relationship is multidirectional. Leewen Lynn and Curtis J. Milhoft, two scholars who've written extensively about Chinese corporate structure, argue convincingly that the deep integration of the Party into soees after state owned industries have been corporatized, that is, turned from direct state industries run by state employees to profit seeking market corporations own through shares, was a way to buy the Party off and allow

these firms to become more capitalists 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 corportization of state owned industries has made the Party and the Chinese state increasingly capitalists, and this raises another question. As the Chinese state grows more capitalists

are public and private Chinese firms. Even all that different, private firms also have links to the state through equity have joint ventures with soees, 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 sos. In essence, many of the things that are supposed to make sos

different from private companies are shared by both. From the profit motive to state affiliation as milhop to put it quote, functionally, SOEs and large pos private enterprises in China share many similarities in the areas commonly thought to distinguish state owned firms from privately owned firms. Market access received of state subsidies, proximity state power, and execution of the government's policy objectives. A complete account of Chinese state capitalists and much explain

these similarities. Even figuring out what legally is an SOE and what's technically still a private firm gets very weird, very fast.

company state owned? And it gets worse in CTEs case because even if you assume, okay, the majority stake in this company is owned by an SOE, therefore it's state owned, you would assume that the state or a state owned company would manage the corporation.

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 fifty one percent of the stock and the foreign corporation owns forty nine percent of the stock while running the actual company in extracting profits from it even

one hundred percent. Chinese firms, of which there are many, pose a challenge to the traditional conception of sos is 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 sos aren't government ministries, their companies trying to make a profit and are run by their

own managers. These firms have a total workforce of seventy million people, which makes direct regulation very difficult in practice. This means soez are a lot more autonomous in direct state control, even with all the state guards put in place than you'd think just from the word state owned industry. Another thing that makes soez more like private companies is that money from soez goes back to the company and not to the state, to which it pays dividends but

not much else. This means that soees have their own revenue stream that's not dependent on state budget allocations. Meanwhile, private firms like soos 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 soez it 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 a float by massive government contract 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 nat Sek 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 as incomprehensibly absurd.

None does this have stopped China watchers from the most rabid reactionaries and the most stalwart or self described style wart communists to declare that China carries out something called industrial policy through its soees, 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 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 US as a socialist state because of its coren subsidies, despite writing about China somehow turning

everyone into an archical capitalist's. 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 I totally disappeared with neoliberalism. American 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 nineteen fifty five. 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 specialistist 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 the copala 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 in 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 investments, something that everyone seems to conveniently forgets, even though it was one of the key elements that fueled Chinese industrialization and plays a major role in the Chinese economy to this day. Meanwhile, US affiliates in China alone had over half a trillion dollars of sales just in twenty eighteen. 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 Sassak gave a speech in February about how his goal was to increase the profitability of Chinese soees.

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 sooes actually work. The fatal flaw of analysis of the Chinese economy and its obsession with formal state ownership. These analyzes are not a serious attempt to look at the actual structure of the economic system the entire world, including China, lives under. There are several kinds of arguments that we need to look beyond

formal ownership to understand capitalism. More broadly, there is a somewhat complicated Marxist argument which holds that while we talk about capitalism as a system where the ruling class owns the means of production, of the working class, which owns nothing, is forced to work for them that's not all capitalists 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. Generalize 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 softeign 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 try and actually go there and see how fast the cops show up and take you away. Just like private ownership, you still don't own public property 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 not as we 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 fishingville is to a city with a population of over ten million people in less than thirty years. This is the ultimate truth of the Chinese economy, just as it is the ultimate truth of the American economy. We sell our lives for nothing, and our only reward in the end is to.

like a large language model. They're all essentially like bots that you train to understand kind of like what the likeliest thing that what the likeliest appropriate response is to like a given prompt. That's kind of like the broadest way to explain it. It's complicated, and they're you know, very useful, but obviously if you've been paying attention to the world right now, there's just a whole bunch of

bullshit about them. And I think to kind of make sense of 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 feel talking about how you know, there need to be laws put in place to stop it from in the world. You know, you've seen articles about like oh x percentage of AI researchers think that

it could. It could destroy the planet, 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 had? Like vice ran

with the article. It was very breakthive advice would do this flipping out about how horrifying, you know, our AI weapons future is and like, yeah, we shouldn't give AI the ability to like 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 and 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 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 smogs so thick you could cut

it with a butter knife. Like, don't flip out about AI weapons just yet, folks. 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 think pads and idea pads every couple of years. You know, you get a new MacBook every couple of years. Razor puts out a new blade. This is you know, these are the folks who kind of move along technology at a relatively like 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 you know what's going to be what ahead of time. A very good example would be back in the nineties, 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 oughts they put a bunch of resources into launching the iPad, which was a huge success. And when you kind of think about like the folks

doing this, like working on the moonshot products. The most recent example would be whatever team at Apple, the team at Apple that was behind putting together these new Apple goggles, which I don't think are going to be a wildly successful product in the way that they need it to be, like a smartphone scale success. But this is an example of like a thing that didn't exist and a bunch of people had to invent new technologies or new ways

to combine technologies in order to make it exist. The third kind of job that the tech industry has, broadly speaking, are conmen 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 conman 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 eleven 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 real products. There's actual technology going into the Apple glasses marketed by conman flimflam artist. 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 not 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, you know, pretty spectacularly when that's not the case is what we saw with Therehos 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 nate like the actual potential of AI has been proven in a spectacular way because the tools that have been released are able to do cool things. And I think those people are missing some key aspect, like some key 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 red right now by a lot of particularly journalists and media analysts outside of the tech and or like outside of 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 chatbot 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 Fusion, 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 four billion dollars I think last it was checked, but their annualized revenue is only about ten million dollars. So that's a

pretty significant gap. And it's a pretty significant gap because the actual money in AI so far isn't with the service providers. Really, like you've got some that have made in like thee hundred million dollar range, although it's not entirely clear what their margins are are or what the kind of the long term reliability of that profit is.

But the vast majority of money in AI, like almost all of it has been made by companies like in Nvidia, and Vidia jumped up to become like a trillion dollar company as a result of this, because the hardware needs of these products are so intense, and obviously that shows

there's money here for somebody. But the fact that like a shitload of people got curious about these apps and use them in quick succession and then kind of dropped off is an evidence that, like we're seeing entire industries replaced as much of it 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 trow of disappointment, And this is what happens when kind of the promises of a new technology that are being made by the hypemen 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

maybe 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 Amad Mustock, and he's the founder of Stable Diffusion right, which is a text to image generator that was kind of like before chatscheep pt hit. This was like the first really really big

mainstream AI thing. Chat GPT was was a lot larger, but Stable deviusion came first, and you know, was critical behind, among other things, a lot of the silliest n f T bullshit. And he's he's a really interesting dude. Like if you look at kind of his own claims about his background. Uh, he says that he's got an Oxford master's degree, that he was like the behind an award winning hedge fund, that he like worked for the United Nations and a really important capacity, and also that he

obviously founded this this a I bought. None of that's true. He has a bachelor's degree from Oxford, not a master's degree he did.

chasing hedge funds in the early aughts. He first gets in with stable diffusion after COVID, and he's kind of like billing it as this is gonna help with like research into trying to like you know, fight the COVID nineteen 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 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 one hundred million dollars or so in investments from various venture partners and hasn't stopped his company from getting this massive violation. It hasn't stopped the White House from inviting him to talk as part of

like a federal AI safety initiative. But it is one of those like when I kind of look into this guy and kind of the gap between his claims and what's actually happened and the claims that are being made about the value of 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 Bankment 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, you know, fake it till you make it.

And maybe AI is there. He may have this guy may have made a good bet as to the future, but that's kind of far from certain yet, and it's 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 Mustok 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 techechnology.

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 my Stock told Forbes he needed just six days to secure one hundred million dollars from leading investment firms Coach You and light Speed once Stable

Diffusion went viral. The extent of due diligence at the firms performed is unclear given the speed of the investment. The investment thesis we had is that we don't know exactly what all the use cases will be, but we know that this technology is truly transformative and has reached a tipping point in terms of what it can do. Garav Gupta, the light Speed partner who led the investment, told Forbes in a January interview.

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. Bashara said new versions of stable Diffusion filtered data for potentially unsafe content, helping to prevent users from generating harmful images in the first place.

So it's like, part of what's happening here is you've got this thing that seems really impressive, and that is to some extent because it's able to like remix stuff that exists in a way that you haven't done automatically before. But all of these kind of valuations are based number one, and ignoring the problems with monetizing this stuff, including like the still very much unsorted nature of how copyright's going to affect this, and also like the question of is

this really worth that much money? Like is 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, one of two things is possible. Number one, this replaces all art everywhere

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

AI imagining. 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, because I mean, I don't think it's gonna replace all all art. I think nobody nobody is actually uh is actually thinking it's 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 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 it's all built on all of the same stuff. And I think that that's how a lot of a lot of it's gonna get used. It's gonna be a lot of weird scam artists people just mess around for fun, and then people not paying like illustrators as much.

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.

like a lot of outlets as a result. But that's not the like earth shattering change that people are talking about on Twitter, dot com or whatever.

the future. But yeah, it's just it's a really weird problem.

But it's like easier and maybe like less kind of an imposing task to like ask an AI a question that it is to ask like a search and to especially as as much worse as Google has gotten lately. Like one of the things that I found interesting is I was kind of doing digging for this. I was looking at some AI articles that were published in like

twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one. This is before the big you know AI push that like we're currently all in the middle of before chat GPT you know, got its its widespread release. And it was talking with like some people from Google who were like, Yeah, we really see AI like supercharging our search results. You know, there's a lot of potential and like its ability to

help people with search. And I'm thinking about in twenty twenty twenty nineteen, Google was a really useful tool and it's a shit show now, like it's filled with ads, Like search results have gotten markedly, whereas everyone who uses Google as part of their job will tell you that it's gotten like significantly worse in the recent past. And like I that's kind of like the thing that I see being more of a worry, And.

Internet worse for everybody at a more rapid pace. What if that's the primary thing that we notice about AI as consumers.

If the same people own it and benefit from it, then like it's incapable of fundamentally changing our material conditions, right, just becomes another way 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.

This is one of those things. So one of the more famous moments, and like recent AI research, is this Google researcher timnit Gibru, who no longer works at Google, and some other very smart people put together a paper that like it was I think generally regarded by AI folks as kind of middle of the road, but it kind of 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 to point out in that paper is that like when you have an AI, when you have one of these lms trained on too large of a model, it becomes number one kind of impossible to avoid that toxic stuff. But it also reduces the utility of the AI in a lot of ways because like when you have so much data going in, it's very difficult for the humans

to kind of tell how competent it is. This is why stuff like chat GPT involves so much human training, why they had hundreds of people spending tens of thousands of man hours like going through responses to tell if

they made sense. Because when you've got like it's one thing if you're like using an if you're for example, training an AI on a bunch of different like medical data to try to determine patterns and like antibiotic research, right, which is a thing that that lllms have been like shown to be have some early utility and is like kind of helping to identity 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 and you know thousands and thousands and thousands of fan fiction stories about Kirk and Molder fucking each other during some sort of like Exile file Star Trek crossover. We're we're 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 of trillion different things out there, a lot of which you're going to

be lies. But anyway, I found that interesting. It's kind of worth noting that, like Gabru and a number of other people who were responsible for that got forced out by Google and kind of attacked by the industry because I think there's a desperation And I talked about this in that episode I did last year kind of about the fundamental emptiness at the core of the modern tech industry.

But I think there's this desperation, Unlike, we have to find the new thing, the thing that's going to be as big as social media was, the thing that's going to deliver the kind of stock market returns that social media did, and that doesn't exist yet. And AI is after especially several years of disasters with crypto and diminishing returns in social media and honestly diminishing returns, and like traditional tech because like smartphones have reached kind of a

point of saturation. Right, you can make money sell obviously, like you can make money selling smartphones, but you can't show exponential growth, right, There's just not that many people who need new ones.

biggest media group, Birtlesman, 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, uh 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 a raverable put able to put

out before. Like his exact what is it's if it's your content for what you owned the copyright, and then you use it to train the software you can and 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 write their own books anymore.

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

people on Amazon. There was a really funny quote in this article though, where at the end of it, Rabe is like, I asked chat GPT what the impact of chat GPT or generative AI is unpublishing it prepared a phenomenal text. Frankly, it was very detailed into the point, which he then presented at a staff event. So there is kind of evidence that the CEO jobs could be pretty easily replaced by this, Like.

But we'll get that to you next week. Yeah, it 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.

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 Lufber University of the Anarchism Research Group.

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.

Can 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 this bizarre I don't want to like pathologize it, but this this deeply untasteful lack of empathy for refugees and people seeking asylum. 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 Crapotkin, They've been around for very long time, and they were, at least when I was living in the UK, very charitied institution that people supported. And can you explain a little bit about how they operate within that sort of mutual aid lens.

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 organization 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 organizations 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 favor, 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.

I mean you tend to see offices of the Lifeboat Association at seasides, so you know, this is a you know, the environment is the holiday environment, it's the beach environment. It's part of being together in a place which is enjoyed by people together, but which also has its risks.

And I mean the first time I think, you know, I came across the Lifeboat Association was was actually through an appeal that was made through a very popular and well known BBC television program for children, which was called Blue Peter. And you know, they funded a boat by asking kids to send in milk bottle tops which could be melted down and turned into an eminium or whatever it was. And then you know, this is how they

funded a lifeboat. I mean, so this this, you know, lifeboats aren't deeply rooted I think, I mean, the support for lifeboats are deeply rooted in people's psyche in this country. And and as I say, I think it was it was interesting. I guess that these these calls from the rights that the Lifeboats 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 the it gained absolutely no traction because it simply didn't speak to people's public perception or or deeply held perceptions if you like, of the role of this association.

very brutal here. But I think it says something that that's an institution that looks like that was a line that wasn't cross I guess by the right, and this demonization of migrants. So we're 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 it is very common in schools and universities in both of our countries. How this has in fact been like part of human history for as long as as people have been living in societies, and how it's a natural human response to want to do this.

stoked particularly through a notion of of social Darwinism. So the idea that fitness is linked to or that the survival is linked to individual fitness, and that competition is the 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 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 from from others in their species. I mean, it's simply, you know, that's that's how biology works. So whatever advantage that individuals might might you know, acquire, actually their well being depends on the co operation or

the collective practices that they have with others. So he recognized that there was interspecies competition, but he said, basically within species survivalist based in cooperation. And from that he then said, you know, 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 then

we because that's a good thing. Surely it's 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 we were affected by the same sorts of problem, 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're in situations of need.

societies mutual aid associations, and they were networked. I mean, somebody set up a website so that you know, people could see exactly where these groups were. They were networked in the UK. I think there were some relationships that were even transatlantic. So part of the argument is that you don't have to plan this, and in fact, mutual aid is an unplanned is best thought of as an

unplanned response. But I guess the other thing is all the question that mutual aid begs is that, you know, if people get together in times to fill the gaps, if you liked to provide support for people who were in need, then how do they sustain those organizations over periods of time without suffering burnout and all the rest of it. And I think that really then depends on.

store in San Diego. And I was really impressed with Like I was there trying to help with my friends and sort of trying to do anarchist things, but also there were people who were older ladies from churches and people from mosques and people from synagogues and very much willing to work together, and you know, like you know, we'd go to cost go together and spend thousands of

thousands on water and nappies for babies and such. But I think getting past that initial sort of I'm not a person who works for people who go to church too, like what this person wants to help and so do I was what allowed that to happen? Can you preps 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 there's such established institutions that

they there's an assumption. I think a lot of people probably think that there's some kind of state involvement with the lifeboats, right, and the same with lots of sort of the societies that exist to prevent cruelty to animals and children and that kind of thing, right, those aren't state funded either in the UK. Can you think of other examples of mutual aid that people might have sort of not realized are entirely driven by society and not the state.

up systems of of of basic supply and rescue. And and that's exactly what happened, and the Common Ground Collective was established as a result of it. I mean, you find this sort of thing, I mean, I mean, it's it's fairly usual in times of you know, sudden emergency and crisis that actually the people who who do the hands on work of actually taking people off off you know, the how 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 organizations which you know, who couldn't you know, where they couldn't access support services set up mutual aid societies because that was the if you like, the only alternative that they would have in order to provide you know, sort of clubs for their kids and breakfast clubs and any kind of welfare at all.

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 you know, eventually this gets taken up by the station and it's sold back to you as national insurance. That these systems are you know, they're established essentially by local people for their own benefits.

Health Service being another example. Can you talk about the danger of that kind of state maybe dangers who are on word, But there can be a state capture of mutual aid efforts which can sometimes one might argue, always like strip them of the essence of what they are.

the that that stimulus 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 see people in different in different ways. So we do start to get the language of scrounging or of you know, idle,

the es, deserving, undeserving poor. All of those things come from the idea that we're paying into an institution and not necessarily being guaranteeed that we're getting value for money. So we start to see the institution slightly differently. And I think the other thing is that the I mean the worry I guess of of that sort of co optation is that it's it conceals the other things that

the state does. So welfare is the last thing, if you like, that that states assume as a responsibility, and it and it provides a gloss, if you like, on the law and order function that the state serves. Uh and and somehow sort of makes the state look a bit friendlier than perhaps we should think it is. And I mean this, you know, when the I suppose that I mean the term that was used in the in

the British context. In the in the 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 after the Second World War, concealed the violence that the state was otherwise perpetuating elsewhere.

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 there's a right of access, and then there's a 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 in

the anarchist lexicon. You know, it's it's it's it's driven by by altruism and and and giving without without the expectation of reward.

But I think the I mean, one of the things what can tells this story about a child drowning in a river, and he imagines three people standing on the river bank. One of them is a religious believer, the second one is he calls an ordinary bourgeois a mutilitarian, and the third one he doesn't describe at all. And he says, you know what what happens when they see

this child in the river. And he says, well, the religious person is wondering, you know, I should go and save the child because I'll reap my reward in heaven. 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 person has just jumped in and saved the child, and that's mutual aid.

But it doesn't need you don't need to have read Crapotkin to like, I know a big it's sprung up here a lot in the pandemic too, right, like free shops, and certainly for older people or people who are compromised.

I remember breaking thousands of loaves of bread from the pizza shop down the street wasn't able to open, so they would bring me flower and I would make bread and we would take it to people, and things like that were very spontaneous and didn't particularly need like theorizing in terms of Popkin, But sadly they sort of we lost a lot of that with the you know, 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 on one that we should cultivate.

making sure that people were okay. So yeah, I mean it took you know, multiple different forms, and yeah, I mean it is difficult because you know, once real life as it were sort of returned and the and the lockdowns were relaxed, you know, people have all kinds of other demands on their time and and we sort of then get used to thinking that, you know, somebody else is going to pick up the pieces now.

start they want to start their reading? Are their texts that you'd recommend, that you know, are not the size of a breeze block that people might find approachable?

a not necessarily with a view to living in sort of permanently in community with each other, but actually to change the dynamics of the of the kind of the cities we live in and the detachments that we not only have but also sometimes kind of value. We don't necessarily want to live in each other's pockets. But actually that doesn't mean to say we can't practice much alive with each other.

and the anarchist unions? I was immediately sent to the little room that you go to UH and UH. 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 mut 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 know you're giving someone a blanket or something like it's And so I think if people listening will at least be familiar with the concept of anarchism and 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 getting to start the pandemic when they were sewing masks. Like you say or home, bring hand sanitizer.

within all of us. And what anarchists are saying is that if you, you know, if you push organizations in particular directions and actually you've got a better way or a better means of a better sort of environment within which you can sustain those practices. But mutual aid itself is not about being an anarchist. It's about being a human being.

people looking to start? It can be especially if you're not on social media, which I know we've had people email, but like I'm not on Facebook or Twitter, and how do I organize mutual aid? So do you have any suggestions for that?

I mean, they're all sorts of things activities that they're doing. So I think it's a matter of sort of seeing what's there, yeah, and then sort of try. I mean often I think people don't realize the skills they have.

So for example, you know, if they speak more than one language, it's often really helpful to people who are arriving in a in a foreign land or a land that they don't they're not they're not 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 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 are 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 there are that these are the sorts of things things that keep these institutions running. That's the kind of thing that you can do.

We don't need to be told to do it. We don't need to be told how to do it.

and do better. Is there is there any where people can find you on the internet. I don't know if you have social media or website.