Hacking Pharmaceuticals with The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

we talk about a lot is self sufficiency. We've had a number of episodes kind of covering the values of like replacing your lawn with food, guerilla gardening, that sort of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is people saying, well, you know, that's never gonna work on a large scale. It's never going to replace industrial agriculture

or whatever. And that's perfectly true. But the point we're going for here and why we encourage these kind of resilience building activities is because they do improve the ability of communities to resist when they need to resist, and also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to, for example, all the food supply chain, or reimagine the relationship to their community, and the kind of things that communities provide for each other rather than having them shipped

in by Amazon. UM. And when we start talking about that, when we start talking about improving community resiliency for things like, you know, a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff. One of the big issues that any community has to

confront is not just food, but medicine. I'm I do, and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends who cannot survive without medications that are very like reliant upon existing supply chains UM and to some extent, even the stability of the government, you know, UM, getting your insulin, getting your medication for whatever kind of disease you have that that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different reasons why people are reliant upon the medical um supply

lines and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's one of the big when we talk about building more resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump. Well. Today, my guest is someone who is working on bridging some of these problems. UM. His name is Michael Lawfer, and he is the founder of an organization called the Four

Thieves Vinegar Collective. They are bio hackers UM, and they are working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals with resources that are generally available to people who are not rich or pharmaceutical companies UM to produce life saving medications. UM. The number one thing you would have heard of from four Thieves is the EPI pencil, which we'll talk about it a bit. But first, Michael, thank you for coming

on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be able to shot and talk with you and all the people surrounding you who are trying to just unfunned things a little bit. Yeah, yeah, and I most of the conversation I want to have today is on the unfucking of things variety. But I do think we should start with a little bit technical talk first.

Can you give people an idea of what kind of medications you and other people in the collective have figured out how to produce UM and what kind of resources and individual needs to be able to do some of this stuff. Sure. So, from a technical perspective, most of the things that we focus on are what's called small molecule chemistry, and to kind of describe that blanketly, if

you can draw the molecule in a cocktail napkin. It probably qualifies as a small molecule if it's one of these things that like, you know, if you look at the diagram for the molecules approaching, it's got big ribbons that are colored and stuff that's a that's a biochemic thing, and it's a whole different set of problems. Now, the mean focide that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion, access to hive medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and

access to reversal of jug overdose medications. So that's been sort of our main focus, but there's been a handful of others. The things that we tend to look for our where are there things that there's a great need and there's a huge barrier, And so you see those in those places a lot, because the three main barriers that tend to pop up between somebody and access to the medication they need are either price or legality or

lack of infrastructure. And typically the weirdness that comes up mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're if you're poor, and you're in a class of people that is seen as something not to be cared about because they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to move access away from those people and put in more

barriers and raise prices becomes easier to defend. UM. So the first drug that we focused on was a an anti parasitic um. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous for most people anybody when you get from cats, right or is this not Gandhi? It is. It is the one you get from cats, and it's really fascinating parasite too if if if you ever dig into the behavioral biology of it, it's really really fascinating parasite. UM, I probably have it. Yeah, I have three cats. I definitely

have it. So and so it's not a big deal for those people, but if you have a massively compromised immune system, especially with people with HIV or advanced stages of cancer, and that's why it was labeled sort of you know HIV drug, it's not it's a it's an anti parasitic, but it's used almost exclusively by people who are an advanced stages of cancer. Uh, people with fairly compromised immune systems from HIV or something else, and then

pregnant women. Um, And it's not that big deal. If you have access to the medication, you can merely take it and eradicates from body. Uh. The difference was is that something that was a short course of treatment you take I think for um, you know, four doses the first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently for something like ten days. Um, And that's not a big deal when each dose each was about thirteen and

a half dollars. And then Martin cry jacked up the price to seven fifty a pill, and so we're like, well, this is ridiculous. So that was the first one that we went after. Then of course access to abortion drugs, um, that's a big one. That's pretty topical lately. We released a video maybe three months ago on how you can make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This would be mythopristone, right, Uh, mithopristone and Mr Pristall. So you can do it with just Mr Purstall, or you

can do it in combination. And when you do it with just the one with just miso, you have about an eighty five percent chance of it working. And if you have both, they bumps it up to about and what is the like what when you're doing this? And we'll talk a little bit with the hardware, but like what is the re agent that you have for this? Because I know that's been a big part of some of the discussions is like how do you get the thing as you make the medicines from which is easier

for some than it is for others. Sure, there are a couple different ways that you google about that. The the interesting but more difficult way, of course, is to do the chemistry from scratch, where like you say, get access from the agents, you do some chemistry, and you end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which we lovingly referred to as the API, and then you package it somehow into a tablet or a pill or or some other means of ingress into the body. Um. The instructions

that we distributed skip the difficult part because mr. Pristal is an ulcer medication, and so for instance, if you have access to Mexico or are in Mexico, it's kind of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication, it's over the counter, and you can just go in and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out of bed. She needs this ulcer medication. I need just a little bit of it to get her through the weekend. Um, and then no problem. Uh. Not so easy in places

where it's a little more controlled, like the US. However, one amazing trick when looking for medicines, access to medicines that are generally blocked from people that the existing power structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and see if it's similarly used for other classes of person or being that the infrastructure does care about. So interestingly, you look for ulcer medication, you say, well, like, who else has ulcers that you know, people might think are

important people. That doesn't really come up, and there are other ulster medications are a little bit better. However, there are a lot of really wealthy people in the United States, and really wealthy people tend to keep horses and horses interestingly um or something or maybe more some ungodly percentage

of domesticated horses have ulcers. UM. Now why that is I'm not entirely clear about, but my own theory is that it has something to do with taking a gigantic wild animal and putting it into a very small box for most of its life. Yeah, it doesn't seem like the thing that horses evolved to do. Yeah. So, so that said, people who are horse owners typically have to treat them constantly for ulcers, and the best thing for

that is Mr. Perstal. And so you can get Mr. Crystall powder in a tub from places that, yeah, feedstore or something. Yeah, I go to a feed store every week. I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this ship probably, So it comes in tubs. And the other thing that's great about it coming in a tub is that it's already in with a buffer. Part of the thing about Mr. Crystall is that the dosages in micrograms, and that's very hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale.

Even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale that can do that. Right. So, but the magic is, this isn't a tub with a bunch of inert powder, and it's it's already mixed up to be homogeneous. And so what you can do is you can do a little bit of back of the envelope arithmetic, and you can measure out much larger quantities and know how much active ingredients you have and then pack that into a tablet. Now yeah, um, I mean that makes so much sense.

And it's also like like the you have kind of the dark side and light side version. It's kind of the light side version of all of those people buying up ivermectin for for nonsense. It's like, well, no, there's

reasons to buy, you know, like, uh, livestock medication especially. Um. I mean, I have a lot of friends who took fishing antibiotics back in the day, and this is kind of a much more um using it in a much more rigorous way to provide people with something that can is getting it will be getting increasingly difficult to access in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah, it's just such a smart way of approaching it, I think. Yeah.

And one of the things that becomes philosophically a bit sticky is when you end up talking about the importance of independent management of one's own health and decision making not coming from above. There's this difficult moment that I've had kind of having to cop to the reality that if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have access

to make decisions about managing their own health. H Part of that entails realizing that that will also lead to a lot of people making what I might think are bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it

doesn't matter what I think. That people should not be controlled by other people, and if they make bad decisions, that sucks, and hopefully we can help that, but not not lamenting the importance of or not not backtracking, not having some sort of retrograde about offering more access even if people misuse that access to the miss manage their own health. Mismanagement of health happens no matter what right. It happens constantly, and people will ignore things that seem

like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And so I have to sort of retreat into this idea that more access to more tools is better and that's just the way of it. And yeah, the problem, yeah, I mean, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The problem is that that people have access to ivermectin, and so they're taking it in a way that is harmful to them. The problem is that people have been have have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a

horrible health care decision. The fact that they have it's possessed to veterinary medication is fine, right, exactly, And and it's and it's interesting that you say that because I have a friend of Doctors Without Borders and they are starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and combat misinformation, because just from a metric standpoint, they look for sort of like, what's killing the greatest number of people at the greatest rate in the worst way, And

currently the thing that's killing the most people in the worst way at the greatest rate is misinformation. So yeah, that's that's really the great danger. And one of the things I found really interesting about kind of what you all have been doing because obviously the question of how to fight the misinformation in the medical sphere is a

much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up the price by what seven for this necessary medication for people a lot of people who have HIV UM What are we The solution to that is simple, You find a way for them to get it without paying hundreds

and hundreds of dollars per dose. UM the question. Some of the work you all have done is with very uh mass needed products like the the mythopres don't like the epipencil um, where there's large numbers of people who

need it. But a lot of what I think, one of the things I think is really cool is y'all are also working on hacking medications that are very niche like, very very few people have this particular disease, and so the medication is the costs as much as a fully loaded Toyota tacoma, you know, in order to sometimes far

worse than that. Because of this Orphan Drug Act that got past in the US and equivalence that exists in other places, you have all of these allowances that are granted to people who invent I put in air quotes m because really they just purchase the rights to it um these these orphan drugs where when you talk about controls, it's kind of the most tragic incidents of that entire because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a very rare disease, and in many cases you have something

that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function and they're dealing with their life kind of moment to moment there they're mostly cared for, and if they have access to a particular medication, then they can go through life in a fairly normal sort of way where they don't need to be an assisted living, where that they can do sort of basic things for themselves, and that that

seems so much more predatory. I mean, it's important, of course, you know, to look at things with that macro lens as well and say what can what can do a lot of good for a lot of people. But then the sort of micro ethical lens needs to come out from time to time and say, all right, well here's something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across the world. But these are people who can just go through life normally if only they had access to a

little bit of medicine. And the only reason they don't is because of misplaced average or all averice is misplaced because yeah, and you're you're you're providing individuals or a way for people to to help individuals who have this problem and who can't couldn't possibly afford this because they don't have health care or something a way to deal with these illnesses. Um and oftentimes like even even people who are ensured get the medication that they need or

don't get an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical. Yeah, it's like, oh, well there's a there's a solution that's not as good, but it's much less expensive. So that's

the only thing we're going to cover. And so yeah, and you're saying, well, it should be your decision whether or not this is something you want to treat this way, and we're this is a way if you, you know, have access, this is a way for you to kind of, as you've been saying, like take your health care and your ability to get medication into your own hands and produce the things that you need without needing to beg an insurance company or go fund me eight dollars or whatever. Yeah,

does go fund me to break my heart so much. Yeah, it's especially when people say, oh, look, how great somebody got the money that they needed, and I say, look, I am happy that people get healthcare, but this should be entirely unnecessary. And the fact that this comes up is criminal. Yeah, we can, we can as a species produce this ship for less than the cost of like a lamp, you know, Like, why why don't why isn't

this available? Um now, I And that's what I think is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing, And is that so so often we kind of get stuck in this like the horror of how bad health care is, of how funked up the pharmaceutical industry is, and then we get our relief from that in these stories of people like crowdfunding so they can get their medication. And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more inspiring than that is people just making finding ways to

make what they need. Um. Again, the kind of the most popular popular is the wrong word. The most press y'all have received, I think is for the epipencil, which is an EpiPen is a device that you take that is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which is when they have an allergic reaction that will kill them if untreated. Generally, UM and it you injected into your muscles or generally, like an EpiPen does the injecting,

you just kind of put it in place. Um and it it is a life saving medication when people need it. It's the choice between that and death. UM. And they are very expensive. There is a company that owns the patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting. The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make, but it's unbelievably expensive and people die as a result

of lack lack of access. UM, and you've provided a way using both kinds of this thing called a bio lab that people You've developed plans that people can build it for themselves in order to make this, and also using a three D printer, you can make UM an epipencil, which is a little less kind of a more analog version. I think, I guess you'd say, uh, no, it's it's it's equivalent. It's equivalent. It works the same way. The things that are different about it that UM are critical.

The first one that you mentioned, of course, is that you can you can build it for a little over thirty dollars US, and you can reload it for about three dollars, unlike the EpiPen, which is I think it's about fifty dollars for yeah, UM, and that might be for a pair, but even so to UM. But the other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use, so you can't test whether it's faulty or not until you use it, And there have been a lot of failures.

In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch of years ago, and there were just these tragic, tragic stories. Some guy had to watch his little kid die. He had had a pair of EpiPens. The kid went into shock. He used it, the thing failed, He brought the other one. The other one failed, and they're in the air and you can't land in fifteen minutes and the little kid died, which just and I'm sure there are dozens of dozens of stories like that, that just happens to be one

of the ones I know. So one of the things that's great about the epipencils because you're putting it together yourself and it only takes four parts, you can test it. You can make sure that it works as many times as you need to. You can dry running with saline and just double check that it does what it's supposed to um and so it's safer. So the fact that it's you can control yourself, you can reload it, and

you can test it. All these things fix a lot of these immediate problems that come with and it still has the benefit that everybody wants from the EpiPen, which is that it doesn't require um, you know, measurement or like knowing how deep to press the needle before you depress the plunger. All of that happens automatically, and it happens very quickly. UM. And yeah, we as you say, we've got a lot of pressed for that because essentially

a good timing. We've released at the same time that Heather Brush was lying to Congress about why they hit raised the price on the EpiPens and then so it was in the public eye. Yeah, and and that's that's a huge one, being able to produce that because that is I mean, there's a tremendous number of people who rely on UH EpiPens um and and I think the

potential of that project is staggering UM. And there's some there's some you know, we when we talk about kind of the different people who are who are working on similar problems to you, there's also a group of people who are working on UM cracking insulin, being able to produce insulin UM. And Yeah, the Open Insulin project is an amazing group of people, incredibly important. They're yeah, they're working on mm hmm probably the largest scale public health crisis.

I mean in terms of queries that we get. I think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else. And I always say, oh, yeah, they're very, very bright people already work around this. Go talk to the open insulin um and and they're just amazing. I want to move on because I want to talk about kind of

the more um philosophical dimensions of some of this. But before we get into that, i'd like to so, like, you know, one of the things you and I've been talking about a little bit behind the scenes is I am not a technically savvy person, but I'm I want to try and i'd like to be able to like produce an epipencil. I want to like understand this it kind of and and potentially be able to contribute UM in a more direct sense, in part because I'm curious,

like how how doable actually is this? For I consider myself a pretty normal person when it comes to like technical understanding, right, Like, I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not

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

I said, there are different avenues to doing it. You can, of course one of the one of the greatest hacks. If if anybody listening this doesn't pick up anything else, here's the best hack in terms of getting access to medication. You have a medication you don't have access to for whatever reason, assuming it comes in a capsule form, you can merely go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active pharmaceutical ingredient, wait out, put it into a capsule, and

you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing, you know. That takes nothing more than being able to read a scale and scooping powder into a little you know, capsules. The next step up, there are things that you can do. They're a little more involved. If you want to build an epic pencil, again, this is three or four hearts, depending on how you count. You take the needle from one syringe needle set on you put it onto a different syringe needle set, and then you put it into

this auto injector, this design for needle phobic diabetics. You load it with the up and ron and you close it up and you're done. Then if you want to step into this a little bit further, if something is so barriered for whatever reason that you can't get the actual ingredient, then you might start messing around with our micro lab. The micro lab, I would say probably takes around a hundred dollars US to build um it, but it's not super technical. Our latest version doesn't require any soldering.

Everything snaps together, which is really nice. You can plug everything in UM. All the wires are just screw terminals, which is really convenient. UM And it takes some time, and you do have to load some code. But we're looking to release a a new set of documentation in the summer that will be very very stripped down of here's your bill of materials. You can order all of this stuff. Here's how you can put the disk image onto the SD card that you put in and you

should start it and it will wake up and work independently. UM. We had a video of our head hardware guy actually building the micro lab from just parts that we're sitting on, laid out on a table, and I think all told it took him about forty five minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but again, like granted, this guy's a hardware specialist and he you know, designed it, so for somebody who's not done before, it might take an afternoon, but

it's not. It's not a pro bitively long or involved project that you know, would take you weeks to put together, or any specialized understanding of you know, biomedical engineering or

anything like that. Now, UM, I kind of want to move at this point because I think that gives people an idea of what's actually necessary and they can go to y'all's website, UM or look up you have plans on a get hub if they want to kind of look at what's what's involved, and it's um some of it seems a little daunting to me, like look looking at the construction of the bio lab, But I'm that that's going to be a project that I'll be engaging in over the next couple of weeks, so we'll keep

people updated on how I do there. UM I want to move on to talk Michael about what you see as kind of the I don't know, the the the potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspective of actually building dual power of this project. And obviously you are and I think what would would be called the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing

and decentralizing the production of life saving medications. UM. Although I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind of a return to more traditional attitudes about health care in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a cyclic nature there, and in the sort of zen mind, beginner's mind, we'd like to think that the revolution is always in its

beginning stages, right. Um. That to say, over the past decade, roughly looking at trying to find ways to give people more independent access that doesn't require infrastructure to medicines and medical technologies. The the hope really is to create a certain amount of cultural shift. I remember one point a friend of mine, who as a business school graduate, asked me a very sort of like business school type question where he said, how would you measure success of your project? Um?

And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization, and he kind of had this moment of like, what do you mean we shouldn't be pushing this right, the ideas that eventually the concept of managing your own health is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to be explained between people. But somebody says, oh, yeah, I just I just did that up in my micro lab um.

In the same way that when you look at the shift that happened between oh, you know, the mid eighties in the mid nineties, where computers were this strange, scary thing that was you know, we're only accessible or usable by people who were very specialized. Is something that you know, everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody

sort of used. And the same sort of thing that happened between the period of time I don't know, maybe ten twelve years ago and now with with three D printing, where like stereo lithography and rapid prototyping was again the specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially at the machine tool industry had started to spearhead. And now you say, three D printing, everybody knows what it means.

In the same sort of way, I'd very much like to see a cultural shift where when somebody is unwell, that when discussions between people happened, that instead of the have you had that looked at it, or you might instead here from somebody saying well have you read up on that? You know, to see people actually engaged in their own health and not going through this very typical

process of outsourcing responsibility. Now, it's not to say that like experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right, Yeah, we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals who can help you understand what your health and diagnose

and stuff like. Yeah, but there is again this drastic difference between going to a doctor and essentially just like throwing the problem on their desk and saying fixed it, call me when it's over, versus going to a doctor and saying, hey, i'd like to talk about this, I'd like to know more about what's wrong here, and I'd like to discus us what the options are and what seems best. Um that would be great on a lot

of levels. And and then these questions of access to medication then become even more relevant because when you're talking with a doctor and the doctor says Okay, well we could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it. This three hundred dollars. You can say, all right, well let's just do a little thought experiment and if that fell from a truck, what would I do with it? And then maybe you can go home and say, you know, I'll call you and let you know how it goes.

I that's that's really my my grant, Hope. And there are so many different ways that that can play out. In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards to this, which was in I guess it was when we presented it, Hope. UM. I called Martin Shakraley's cell phone from stage UH to try and ask him what he thought about what we were doing, given that I was handing his drug out for free, UM and showing people how to make it. And he didn't answer the phone when I called him then, but he called me

back a few hours later, which was really hilarious. We actually chatted for a while and the guys, I mean a little detached from reality, but he's he's no dummy, UM. And when I sort of described what we were trying to do with the micro lab, he had some interesting insights, and he said, yeah, you know, one way I can imagine that working really well is if somebody with a little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were too, maybe build one of these and serve a small community. I think

that could be very efficient. And I was like, that's a good saw it you chiseling bastard Um. Yeah, I mean that there's a degree which that's That's kind of how I see the most realistic potential. This is not every individual making all of their medicine, but kind of like you know we had during the fires last year, when when our local and state governments during the heatwave

this year like completely shut the bed. We had different mutual aid collectives do things like we are providing people with like oh it's a blizzard, We're providing people with firewood. We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat. You know, we are providing people with they've just fled

their houses. We have kits that have food and basic necessities so they can get through mutual aid collectives that are like, well, we are making we specialize and we can produce this and this and this medication like these three and we have and here's the information you can find online about our process. You know that we know what we're doing, and if you need these things, you let us know and we we get them to you.

And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if you want to help engage in this mutual aid process, even if you're not someone who's going to be doing

a lot of the technical stuff. We need people to go pick up parts, so we need people to do this, and you can help us here, you know, And I think, yeah, yeah, And I think in a similar way, right, a lot of that sort of thing is already happening in other realms right where it's the sort of thing where you you might be building something, or you you see some project on GitHub or whatever, and some there are these STL files and you go, oh, gosh, well I don't want how to do that, but oh right, x y

z down the street as a three D printer. I'll go ask her. She's really good at making these things. And you say, hey, look, I have this thing. Would this be difficult to print? And with their experience, they can kind of look at me like, I know that that shouldn't be too hard. Um, you know, I I have some time this weekend, maybe I can make that for you. And in the same way, you say, hey, it looks like I seem to have this rare infection

from whatever whatever, or I have this odd condition. Um, I wanted to try this medication because it might be really helpful, but it's not legal in this kind treat Do you think you can put this together? Again? You know, you call somebody and whoever's on the other lines, and so, oh yeah, I have a micro lab. I can try and put a program together for that and see if

I can make it for you. That sort of thing, I think is a potentially really positive avenue for that sort of thing to proliferate and again eventually to have a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical technology not being something that is comes down from above from some authority, but instead is something that's managed by people who are part of your community, who you already trust. I mean, that's why going to a doctor is so scary.

They seem to be the arbiter of your fate. They're going to tell you whether you're well or not, and and that is just the truth, and much better to have it where people are making up their own mind based on learning about their own health and consulting with people who can give them perspective. Um. And if there's more of that, and if it's closer to the person who's actually suffering, that I think will be on the

whole much better. Yeah. It's this the and this gets tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things we've seen this year, But it's this this understanding that with any given problem, if individuals trying to solve that problem have more autonomy, and part of autonomy is knowledge, that's nearly always better. Um. The problem, of course is that like we we get into this situation, we are now where some people take I'm take some people some people use I want to take control of my health

care to you know, do stuff that's nonsense. And that brings us back to the question of like, yeah, you need in for the quality of the information that you're getting is very important, right because if if you're if you if your research is some YouTube video that has convinced you that you need to you know, take this this horse paste or something, then yeah, that's not good.

But that doesn't change the fact that like with food, like with with everything, that you need to survive, the more of a role you have in understanding that, deciding what to do with that, understanding where it comes from and how it is produced. Um. Not just like, not only is that I think more satisfying as a human,

but it's it's also critical to to your well being. UM. It's critical to like on two levels, right on two levels, because not only when your health is taken from you, it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful. And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful is having a participatory role in the things that decide the trajectory of your life. And so when you go to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen.

First off, your health improves, assuming you've made good decisions and get lucky. But second, you're also having a participatory role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful. And it beyond just kind of the self actualization benefits from from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate in the move for radical change in our society. One necessary element of that to any of the kind of things that we need is a belief in your own

agent see and power. Um. And also and a freedom from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless. And there is I think probably no feeling worse in the world than feeling completely helpless about a treatable medical problem. UM. I mean, it's one thing I just went through my mom, when when you get a disease where there's just nothing that science can do, right, We're like, yeah, you've got this cancer, and there there ain't ship anybody has for you.

You know, that's one kind of horrible, but I think it's a lot less terrible than you. I have this thing that we can deal with, but I either can't afford it or I don't know that I'll be able to afford it. I had a horrible I lost my job in my healthcare in seventeen and so did a person who was on my healthcare with me that I love very much. And I got this, you know, hired

here in healthcare a couple of years later. And it happened that a month before the the I started my health care at this new job, this person who was on my healthcare with me UM diagnosed with a brain tumor and thankfully not a cancerous one, but the one that they had to take medication for that would have been would have bankrupted us, you know, without the without insurance. And thankfully it worked out fine, the timing worked out okay.

But there's not a week that goes by that I don't and it it's it's it is something that makes you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate in in things that because you have in the back of your head, well, I have to I have to keep this job, I have to keep this insurance, I have to y yeah that And that's another thing that

I find so heartbreaking. There's so many people that I've I've met totally outside of my activism who lament about working a job that they hate, and I say, gosh, for you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on it and looking for something else and trying something else. And they have this total paralysis of saying, but if I quit my job, I won't have healthcare mhm and and and mind you like, these were people who were incredibly healthy. These were not people who had any regular

visits to healthcare. They're just scared that if something comes up, they want people to handle it. And it's it's a

perfectly well grounded fear. But as you point out, what this does is it works as this sort of shadow oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring, trying things, as you say, taking risks, or or just doing things that don't involve a an optimization toward a stable state of maybe just like yeah, maybe I'll start a small business and yeah, it probably will fail, but that will be a cool adventure. And most people, you know, so many people, maybe not most, but many, many people, um get just

terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah, and it contributes to people being afraid to take to the street to protest the police because maybe they get arrested, and maybe they get fired, and then you know, maybe their kid can't afford their Like there's a thousand ways. I think, honestly, the fear of losing your health care is in some ways as great a greater counterrevolutionary force than any law enforcement agency could hope to be, because the fear is

so much more immediate to so many people. Nobody talks about that. And thank you so much for mentioning it, because it's something that like, oftentimes I try to bring up when I'm discussing things in public for it, and and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow on me and be like, that's what's the big deal, And I'm like, no, no,

Like you look two layers deep. There's something that's really working against people being able to exercise protests, and it's, uh, it's it's it's this really silent, terrifying force that seems to underlie everything. And if you could alleviate that, if you can get to the point where people are like, yeah, the hell with it, you know, I don't need a job to take care of me, then all of a sudden,

so many possibilities just blossomed in the mind. Yeah, if you have, like it, say, if you're a parent who has a child with you know who, who's insolent dependent. Uh, there's not a lot of difference in my mind between the fact that between someone holding a gun to your head and your boss being able to fire you and take away your your kids access to that insulent there's not a tremendous moral difference to me. Um, I'd say getting a gun to your head is actually more likely

to survive that for it's less inevitable. You could talk your way out of that, and yeah, whatever, but there are any number of things that might go wrong there. But if somebody takes takes away your insulin, that's the end of the story. Yeah, I guess the more salient point than the comparison issues. They're both acts of violence, and in every way that's meaningful, I think they're both

acts of violence. And one way that when I rail against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law, the example that I give is they say, if somebody were dying and you knew how to save them, would you ever not tell them how and just watch them die? Say, oh no, that idea belongs to me, and I'm not going to share unless you pay me. Like no human being that I think I've ever heard of would do that.

And yet this happens every day because we've sort of carried these questions of copy into patents and despite the fact that they are hundreds of years old and not applicable anymore, assuming they were ever applicable, and people just die because people say, oh, well, we can make more money if we do it this way. There's a fascinating thing going on there when you really drilled into that idea.

Because I suspect. There are a lot of people who have who are are integral in propping up this system, both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works people in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in some facet of keeping that going, who also, were they to see an individual and immediate medical distress, would never think of like try getting their debit card number or

whatever like asking them, would would without thinking attempt because that's what people do, and it's I mean, this is where we get into kind of some of these more philosophical anarchist ideas about what hierarchy does and what these structures do, because structures enable people to participate in evil

that they never would as an individual. Um, yeah, there's this easy route that many easy routes that pop up that allow people or force i should say force people to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of way where yes, of course, you you help somebody up off of subway tracks if they've fallen. Yes of course, if somebody were drowning, you drag them out and save them. And yet just because it's a degree removed and it's mediated by an agency. Suddenly it's so easy to forget

and ignore and be sort of complicit. And yeah, and I just to go back around to what four Thieves is doing and what y'all are doing it. It's one of the few projects going on right now that fits what my idealistic nineteen year old brain thought the Internet would be sixteen fifteen, Like when I when it was, when things were newer and a little less We're like, oh, this is like one of these days, Well, this kind

of ship's gonna happen um. And that is I think, I mean, that's that's not without value from again a revolutionary perspective, the fact that it is pretty rad. You know well, I mean I will not deny the fact that it feels good, you know. There. I think that I think that we all grew up with that sort of hope and belief that we were gonna open these new doors and they were going to be these new possibilities and things that we have been reading about in

science fiction. We're going to become real and and there's there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand in it. Uh, it's there's there's something quite satisfying about that. I will yeah, I will admit, well, I think that's a pretty good point to close out on today. I don't need to take up too much more of your

time right now, Michael. But but as I told people, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be trying to get into some of this because I find it just both fascinating and incredibly hopeful. Um. In a world where it seems like, uh, there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives, you and your your colleagues in this are trying to give people opportunities to take some some power back for themselves,

and I just think that's it's pretty dope. Thank you so much. Yeah, and see your listeners. If there are people out there who like what we're doing and you want to support the project, please go find somebody who needs your help but doesn't deserve it, and then help

them anyway. Yeah. Yeah, that's always a good thing to do. Um, Michael, anything else, any like a thing else you want to kind of put this is normally this section where people plug websites or projects or anything, you've got anything in particularly you want to throw out there right now. Uh sure, We're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in the summer um, so look for those. In the meantime, we're always looking for help, So if you're out there and you'd like to be assisted in the project, uh,

please get in touch. There's the contact us page on the website. And by the way, this do not have to be a technical person we're looking for currently, we're looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that we need to do, So if you're out there and you have you know, background in in language, then that would be great. If if you're somebody who feels that

you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have any number of endless small tasks that just need to be taken care of because we don't have enough people. So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you. Please get in touch and in the meantime, keep each other healthy, keep each other. Thank you so much, Michael, thanks so much for having me. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts

from Cool Zone Media, visit our website. Cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.