Podcasts about Bureaucracy

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya's generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present). This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya's generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present). This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya's generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present). This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya's generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present). This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

There are currently a record-setting number of forcibly displaced persons in the world. This number continues to rise as solutions to alleviate humanitarian catastrophes of large-scale violence and displacement continue to fail. The likelihood of the displaced returning to their homes is becoming increasingly unlikely. In many cases, their homes have been destroyed as the result of violence. Why are the homes of certain populations targeted for destruction? What are the impacts of loss of home upon children, adults, families, communities, and societies? If having a home is a fundamental human right, then why is the destruction of home not viewed as a rights violation and punished accordingly? From Bureaucracy to Bullets: Extreme Domicide and the Right to Home (Rutgers University Press, 2022) by Dr. Bree Akesson & Dr. Andrew Basso answers these questions and more by focusing on the violent practice of extreme domicide, or the intentional destruction of the home, as a central and overlooked human rights issue. They present a typology of extreme domicide and investigate a number of historical and contemporary case studies: the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960), domicide in Cyprus (1974), domicide and the Cherokee Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the occupation of Palestine (1945-present), Chechnya's generations of domicide (1944-2009), domicide in Bosnia (1992-1995), the Syrian War (2011-present), and the Rohingya in Myanmar (2012-present). This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

INTRODUCTION: Ifetayo Harvey is the founder and board president at the People of Color Psychedelic Collective. Ifetayo's experience of growing up with her father in prison brought her to drug policy reform work at the Drug Policy Alliance. In 2013, Ifetayo was the opening plenary speaker at the International Drug Policy Reform Conference in Denver, Colorado. Ifetayo briefly worked at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies in 2015 where she was inspired by Kai Wingo's Women and Entheogens Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. Ifetayo worked at the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) for five years because of her passion for ending the war on drugs. While at DPA, Ifetayo penned the piece Why the Psychedelic Community Is So White in 2016 and began organizing other folks of color and allies in psychedelic circles. Ifetayo comes from a family of seven children raised by her mother in Charleston, South Carolina. She has a Bachelor's degree from Smith College in history and African studies. INCLUDED IN THIS EPISODE (But not limited to):  ·      Breakdown Of What The POCPC Is·      Whiteness Controlling The Narrative ·      Racism in Drug Policy·      White Fragility ·      The Need For POC To Have Healing Spaces Apart From White People·      The Benefits Of Psychedelics – And Risks·      Stories Of Racism In The South·      Theory Vs. Real Life·      Internalized Superiority & Internalized Inferiority ·      The Student Loan Forgiveness Hypocrisy   CONNECT WITH IFETAYO: Website: https://www.pocpc.org/Website:  https://www.ifetayo.meYouTube: https://bit.ly/3FS2Z9xFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/pocpsychedelics/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pocpsychedeliccollective/Twitter: https://twitter.com/POCpsychedelicsLinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3Fx8p9H  CONNECT WITH DE'VANNON: Website: https://www.SexDrugsAndJesus.comWebsite: https://www.DownUnderApparel.comYouTube: https://bit.ly/3daTqCMFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/SexDrugsAndJesus/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexdrugsandjesuspodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TabooTopixLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devannonPinterest: https://www.pinterest.es/SexDrugsAndJesus/_saved/Email: DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com  DE'VANNON'S RECOMMENDATIONS: ·      Pray Away Documentary (NETFLIX)o  https://www.netflix.com/title/81040370o  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk_CqGVfxEs ·      OverviewBible (Jeffrey Kranz)o  https://overviewbible.como  https://www.youtube.com/c/OverviewBible ·      Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed (Documentary)o  https://press.discoveryplus.com/lifestyle/discovery-announces-key-participants-featured-in-upcoming-expose-of-the-hillsong-church-controversy-hillsong-a-megachurch-exposed/ ·      Leaving Hillsong Podcast With Tanya Levino  https://leavinghillsong.podbean.com  ·      Upwork: https://www.upwork.com·      FreeUp: https://freeup.net VETERAN'S SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS ·      Disabled American Veterans (DAV): https://www.dav.org·      American Legion: https://www.legion.org ·      What The World Needs Now (Dionne Warwick): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfHAs9cdTqg  INTERESTED IN PODCASTING OR BEING A GUEST?: ·      PodMatch is awesome! This application streamlines the process of finding guests for your show and also helps you find shows to be a guest on. The PodMatch Community is a part of this and that is where you can ask questions and get help from an entire network of people so that you save both money and time on your podcasting journey.https://podmatch.com/signup/devannon  TRANSCRIPT: [00:00:00]You're listening to the sex drugs and Jesus podcast, where we discuss whatever the fuck we want to! And yes, we can put sex and drugs and Jesus all in the same bed and still be all right at the end of the day. My name is De'Vannon and I'll be interviewing guests from every corner of this world as we dig into topics that are too risqué for the morning show, as we strive to help you understand what's really going on in your life.There is nothing off the table and we've got a lot to talk about. So let's dive right into this episode.De'Vannon: Ifetayo Harvey is the founder and board president at the People of Color, Psychedelic Collective, y'all. I love the name of that organization so much. I believe, I'll say it one more time. I said the people of color, psychedelic collective. Fat's experience of growing up with our father in prison ignited the spark that has led to this amazing individual's body of work in the area [00:01:00] of drug policy reform.Please join us today as we discuss politics, drugs, and how racism and whiteness plays into all of.Hello, all, all my beautiful souls out there. I appreciate each and every last one of you and the time that you take the tune into the sex drugs in Jesus podcast. Well, if today we're gonna be talking a lot more about drugs than we are gonna talking about the Lord, hallelujah. But I wouldn't be surprised if Jesus didn't do a little hit of something back in his day and you know what I mean?Just cuz it ain't written, don't mean it didn't happen. Hallelujah, tabernac and praise. So the day I have with me, lovely, lovely, lovely darling, lady by the name of Epi Atta darling, and she is the founder of the People of Color psychedelic Collective. Ain't that a fucking mouthful? I'm gonna say it again, [00:02:00] y'all.I'm say it again y'all. The people of color, psychedelic collective. My homeboy, Jay Schiffman, over at the Chooses Struggle podcast told me about this individual here and I felt like Dracula as we getting close to Halloween, I need to just sink my bangs into her. And today I have her. How are youIfetayo: Oh, I'm doing great now that I'm talking to you. Oh, how are you doing?De'Vannon: fan? Fucking fantastic. And you know, I'm on this whole new like drug discovery journey myself, and what I've been doing is working hard to siphon off out of my mind. The voices that I realized that were present affecting me that I didn't know. And what I mean by that, Voices from the military, voices from the church, voices from my parents' house.You know, I'm thinking, I say for instance, I used to really look [00:03:00] down upon drugs, you know, and things like that. Well, you know, I thought about it. It was like, okay, where the fuck did I get that from? Was that due to personal discovery? Was that what they told me? You know? And so many of the voices in my head I've been finding lately, even as I'm approaching 40, you know, it's still, you know, what they told me.And it's not actually my own voice. I've been angry about it. I've been pissed off about it. I've been up about it, I've been down about it. And so I love the work that you do. And it's so on tempo at the times right now, is this resurgence? You know, psychedelics is coming now. You started this back in 2017. And and so just tell us about. What in your words, the people of color psychedelic Collective is and why you started it?Ifetayo: Yeah, so people of Color Psych Collective, we are a non-profit doing education and community building for folks of color interested in learning about [00:04:00] psychedelics and ending the war on drugs. And so since we've started, we've done panel discussions, We've had a conference, we had a retreat and of course this covid started happening.We've done online workshops on varying topics. And the reason why I started was because I was tired of seeing whiteness dominate the conversation on psychedelics. And I was also tired of people trying to have conversations about race where they were afraid to speak directly on race and . Okay. I wanted to make a space for people to be able to.Talk about those things without having to worry about, Oh, what is this white person gonna think? Or, Oh, is white fragility gonna get in the way? Because a lot of times it does. So that was part of my motivation. The other part was [00:05:00] prior to me creating my organization, I worked at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is also a mouthful. People call it maps. And they do clinical research on psychedelics. And so I worked there for about eight months and I was the only black person there. And it was clear during my time that like working on, you know, racial trauma for black folks was not a priority. Working on even unpacking. The whiteness of the organization was not a priority either. And even involving black folks or other folks of color in their research wasn't our priority. And to me, in my mind, I was just like, we as black people, we have, you know, some, some of the highest rates of trauma in this country. You know, just [00:06:00] given our, how we got here, our story in this country. You know, I, I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where we have a number of plantations, old historical sites is where a lot of us were brought through, right?A lot of our ancestors. So to me it just didn't make sense. , Black people's trauma wasn't being talked about. Indigenous folks'. Trauma wasn't being talked about or centered in these conversations around trauma. A lot of times it center just white, middle classness. Right. I was just tired of our trauma and our pain and our healing being second to theirs, and I wanted to create a space where we could talk about our experiences of using these substances, but also our experiences of the war on drugs and how it impacted our communities and how, you know, this new narrative of [00:07:00] psychedelics.You know, reemerging kind of leaves us out.De'Vannon: When you, Thank you for that beautiful breakdown. So when you mention the war on drugs, I like to to talk about it a little bit so, As I understand it, something I learned. I've been watching all my documentaries. I'm a documentary whore. I was watching that one, , How To Change Your Mind on Netflix. And then there's one on PBS called The History of Mental Illnesses.And they both went over like the different psychedelics. But what they, what they made me aware of was how psychedelics were used many years ago before, I think it was fdr, Franklin d Roosevelt, I think started that initial war on drugs. Don't quote me on that, but I think it was him. You know, And then all the clinical studies shut down because of the government policy.And so, and now we're seeing this resurgence of the psyche's coming back because the war on drugs clearly hasn't worked. And I was reading Emmi [00:08:00] Lord Emily Duff's book about, what's it called? Nope. I have to look that up because it's all about like marijuana. It's called grassroots and the rise and fall of marijuana, you know, in the book, her book and then the documentary gets into how, you know, drugs are demonized and they made it seem like people were gonna like, you know, smoke the weed and then go rape the white women, you know, and shit like that.You know, all of our mental health issues was us attacking someone else as opposed to something happening to us. But this is the trap we fall into when they, like you said earlier, going snatch our ancestors up out of Africa where they were just happy bouncing around doing them. Teddy's flopping in the red wind dick swinging as it should be Then here comes some people snatching you up and lo and behold, you [00:09:00] traveling internationally when you, you probably didn't know about no fucking other nations. And so, so the narrative was controlled by the people from CaucasianIfetayo: Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: so the c cassity of it all. And so I love how it's like, I feel like we're taking more of this power back or getting it for the first time maybe.You know, and a lot of this is coming through psychedelics, so I appreciate the fact that you, that you started this and then you stuck with it all this time. Covid has come, you still got it going on, so I commend you on that.Ifetayo: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you make an interesting point about the history of drug prohibition in, in the US I will say. So it was Nixon who started the war on drugs, the official war on drugs, but even prior to Nicks and there were a lot of drug laws on the books. You know, we had alcohol [00:10:00] prohibition in the twenties and that didn't work.And lots of people die cuz they're making , you know, moon shine and other stuff. And it sometimes was poisoned or, you know and you're right, a lot of drug. Ma rooted in racism, just point blank period. I think you used the example of like the whole reefer madness talking about like the fear of you know, black men or Latino men smoking weed and going to have sex with white women.And that's pretty much, you know, the same for cocaine. Opium, It's, they've all been all these drugs have been used to build a certain narrative around racial groups, and it's all been built around white fear and white fragility. Yeah.De'Vannon: fragile though it don't take, it don't take much to piss Karen off. [00:11:00] Not at all. Not at all. And I, look, I'm not talking about all you white people out there. I've had to be so much white dick in my life. Real and I intend to have some more. So it's not all of y'all. You know who you are, Karen, probably not even listening to this type of show.maybe you are, of you're open minded. I had a dream like a couple of weeks or months ago or whatever, getting in this dream. It's like the Lord was telling me I've been a gifted dream or so It was about like four or five. That's how, that's how the spirit first revealed himself to me was it was like in this dream and I've been dreaming ever since,Ifetayo: mm-hmm.De'Vannon: but, but recently I had this dream and it was like, it was like these like conservative people, like white people were singing a song.Ifetayo: Hmm.De'Vannon: Whenever you hear music in a dream, a good thing, especially, well if it's melodious and.Ifetayo: I D.De'Vannon: but the heart song, like the heart message of it, the heart of the song was, is like they were [00:12:00] asking me like, is there a way, is there something they could do different? Is there, was there a way that they, something they could change?And I felt like, and I felt like, you know, that there is a, now we've always had like, you know, even back in slavery days, the, the white defectors, you know, the, our allies, you know, But in this dream here, these were people who have been closed minded to the struggles of minorities and people who are different from them.And it's like, in this dream, it's like the Lord is showing me that. Like, maybe he's like, he's turning their hearts or they're changing their minds, or something like that. And so I'm, I'm revealing this dream here to say that I think that the work that you're doing and stuff like that, even though these people might not, you know, go on the news, go on Fox News wherever, and say they're changing their minds. I think it's making a difference because otherwise that dream wouldn't have come to me because I don't, I don't invest a lot of energy into trying to change conservative people. I focus on the people they have hurt, [00:13:00] and so I really think that what you're doing is going a long way.Ifetayo: Well, thank you. Thank you. That's, that's, that means a lot especially, you know, caring or connecting that to your dream. Cuz I'm really into dream meetings. And yeah, it's, it sometimes feels like our country's progressing into old ideas or outdated ideas, but I, I still have hope that, you know, that's not the case for a majority of the people, even though sometimes the kids feel like.De'Vannon: Yeah, that's why it's good to take a media purge Sometimes I just don'tIfetayo: Oh yeah.De'Vannon: for like a few days and just detox a media detox.Ifetayo: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: So the services you provide, I'm gonna talk about 'em from your website, beautiful website, y'all. All that information will go in the showy [00:14:00] notes, as it always does. And then they're, they're on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, all of that will go in the showy notes. You know, you have like community building, education, arts and culture. So do kind a person like walk into like your office and receive some sort of service, or are you mainly doing outreach, like on the ground? What is it?Ifetayo: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So interesting. We are remote based. We've always been remote based since before the pandemic. I live in New York and I've been in New York for about six years, and I have folks in DC Chicago go. Colorado and California, and Portland, Oregon. So we don't provide any direct services partly because a lot of these substances are illegal. So we cannot legally, I mean, in some states, , well, I would say [00:15:00] decriminalized, but in some, in some states it would be decriminalized. But we can, we can't do like psychedelic therapy or like a healing ceremony officially under our organization. But we do connect people, you know, if someone like reaches out to us and say like, Hey, I need help.We can connect people to other services practitioners and other resources out there. And you know, before the pandemic we would go to different cities. Events and, you know, do discussions. Theres, so, like back in 2018, we did a kind of like a partnership panel with the DC Psychedelic Society and the Philadelphia Psychedelic Society.And we talked about patriarchy and psychedelics and that, I mean, much needed conversation. So we'll do, we'll do things like that. I hope in the future we're able to do more direct [00:16:00] services. We've been really focused on building our capacity as an organization. So like we recently incorporated as a non-profit and we're waiting for our 5 0 1 C three to come in and we we received our first grant last year.So yeah, we're, we're, we're slowly building toward that. And I I put emphasis on the slowly because. I think that there's this trend in the site up space for everyone to wanna start their own group and just be known for psychedelics and . That's cool, but it's not sustainable. There's a lots of, you know, different people out there and, and psychedelics are powerful substances.And I am in no rush to, you know, I don't wanna say I'm, I'm not in a rush to give people psyched dogs. I mean, I'm not doing that, but I'm just not in a rush to do that because I know that they're [00:17:00] very powerful substances and it, they take some preparation and and it's also not something to play around with. I, I believe in building a strong container of care for folks if you're going to hold space for them. And I think you do that by being. Prepared. So studying and also just being ethical. So, yeah.De'Vannon: You all, I might have to get your Portland Connect and your New York connection referral cause I'll be in Portland at the end of the month dealing about doing some on the ground research.Ifetayo: Okay.De'Vannon: And I have some jet blue miles that I need to burn. And from New Orleans down here where near where I live, they Jet Blue only goes to New York Fort Lauderdale and Boston.And I've been all three of 'em already, so I may need to come fuck with y'all in the, in the end. Why?Ifetayo: [00:18:00] Yes.De'Vannon: So, so you mentioned a couple of other organizations that you partner with.Ifetayo: Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: You had mentioned maps already. I noticed that I dropped the donation on y'all earlier. You.no. No problem honey. But, and I'm not, I'm not really bragging about that.But when I did it, the, that, like the thank you page said like maps and everything like that. So are you still connected directly with.Ifetayo: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. Funny how that works. We are fiscally sponsored by maps. So before, I would say from 2017 to 2020, we were I believe we were, yeah, we were incorporated as a non-profit. And when we got our grant, we were kind of in a time crunch because they were like, We wanna give you this money and we're going to offer you a match component, a $10,000 match. So we're like, Okay, well we don't have a 5 0 1 C [00:19:00] three, so how do we do this ? And they're like, Oh, well, if that's the case, we may not give you the money. . No, I'm just kidding. They didn't say that. But we had to figure out like, how are we gonna do this? And so maps, we looked at a couple other organizations maps had the internal infrastructure set up so we could do that quickly and be able to receive our grant fully.So in a way I kinda, I kind of look at it as like . It's kind of like, Oh yeah, y'all owe us this, you know, so it won't be forever. But you know, it's, it's for now.De'Vannon: Yeah. Well, congratulations on your 5 0 1 3 C status. I, I know it's there. I just know.Ifetayo: ThankDe'Vannon: And y'all for, for those of you who don't know, MAP stands for Multidisciplinary association folks, Psychedelic studies. I didn't know this much research in this much [00:20:00]organization, this many organizations was built around this.You let the news tell it. You know, you let the media tell it. Everything about shrooms and all the different psychedelics is just the devil. you know, that's not, that's just actually not the case at all Now. Now I mentioned earlier some of the pillars that you mentioned on your website, community building, education, arts, and culture.I love a quote that you have on there from arts and culture. Then I wanna talk about the art show you did in 2021. Now you said, quoting from the website along with policy and education, art in all its forms, brings about cultural change. End quote. What does that statement mean to you?Ifetayo: Well, to me it means that, Cultural change is just as impactful, if not more impactful than policy change. I've worked for a few organizations that do policy advocacy work, and I, I don't do policy advocacy work. That's not my day [00:21:00] job. I'm more of a digital communications person. But I'm not very motivated by policy work cause I don't like politicians. And I think, I mean, yeah, politicians aren't to be liked either, right? Like we treat politicians like celebrities and I mean, fuck celebrities too, but yeah, we treat them like they're our friends and it's like, no, like screw those people. So and I think. Honestly, Bureaucracy's gonna be the death of a lot of us.Like bureaucracy in this country just stops a lot of progress from happening. And the way that our political landscape is set up in this country is just, it's just a mess. So . So that's that. I do believe, I do believe that policy can change people's lives, but I do think cultural change can be more impactful.It can be more fun, [00:22:00] it can be more engaging. And at my day job, I work for a caregiver advocacy org. We have a culture change department. And so what they do a lot of times is work with influencers, celebrities, artists, musicians, actors, actresses, and get them to kind of look at our issue a little differently and maybe speak on our issue, work with us, some of the folks. In the culture change department. They also work in Hollywood writer's rooms, so getting our narratives on TV shows in film. And I, I do think that work like that gets people talking a lot quicker. I often find that policy is very jargony and not easily understandable by the average person. And I do think that's partly done by design But I'm also, you know, I'm a, I'm a child of music [00:23:00]education. I grew up you know, in South Carolina studying music since I was a kid. And it had a huge impact on my life. And I feel like what I've been noticing is. That's kind of fading away as a part of our education in the US music and arts education. And so something I'm, I'm very passionate about overall, I think that, you know, when we get, you know, people who, with influence speaking about our issues, whether it be a celebrity or just a community leader, people start to pay attention. People start to think about it differently. Unfortunately, that's just how our society works.We need a celebrity or someone with influence to speak on our to speak on our issue. And, you know, I, Hmm, Yeah, I think that, [00:24:00] that's all I'll say on that.De'Vannon: We'll love it. And, and y'all can check out a video that has to do with this art show on the website. There's lots of videos on the website and and, and of course, obviously on their YouTube channel. I love how, you know, your videos bring so much of your work to life. Can you talk to us about like the, the, the education leg, because on your website there's like you speaking at. These different conferences and things like that, there's the one conference that you spoke at you know, according to the website, you woke up with a stomach virus that day or in a food poisoning. You had food poisoning that instead of canceling it, you, you took a seat and you went on ahead and you let the Good times rollers, where, say, down here in the Cajun land, Leslie Le Bon. So, so, so, so talk to us about, about your, your speaking engagements and how, what it's been like to travel with your message.Ifetayo: Yeah, yeah. That particular speech you're [00:25:00] referencing was last year in Vegas at Meet Delic. And that was an interesting event because it was like very industry side. And so I was speaking about how we need to move beyond just the notion of wellness and how wellness has shortcomings. I think that along with the resurgence of psychedelics in the media and just in our communities in general, we're also seeing, you know, a lot of talk of varying healing modalities.And while important, I think we, we could sometimes use wellness as an escape from actually organizing. Improving our communities. And I think that there are a lot of people in the psychedelics space who, who think that by taking psychedelics, they're going to be more [00:26:00] involved, more liberated than other folks without any, doing any political work or community organizing or building or that kind of thing. So I'm often, you know, the person in a lot of these events and conferences, kind of reminding people that like structural oppression exists and psychedelics aren't coming to change that. Because I think that for a lot of folks, they just think like, Oh yeah, just take psyched dose and boom, that's, you know, and I wish it was that easy, but it's not.So I, I have to remind people that. Sure you could legalize, psyched dogs or decriminalize psychedelics, but are you integrating those substances into a burning house? Cause I mean, look at our healthcare system. Look at, I mean, just to say of our country in general. I've also given talks on like why the why people of color need our own intentional healing spaces away [00:27:00] from white folks.And for a lot of people, this is just common sense , obviously, we, you know, people don't wanna heal in the same places or with the same people who hurt them. And a lot of times when we do try to have complex conversations around race, whiteness gets in the way and detracts and sinners itself and makes everything about them.So a few years ago I gave a talk in Oakland, California. at the Women's Visionary Congress, this is in 2019. And so I was giving a talk about why p POC and digital healing spaces are necessary. And you know, I'm basically saying what I just said about how whiteness the tracks from our healing and all that.And it was a very powerful speech. I'm not saying that to brag, but I'm just I'm saying that to say like, I noticed people [00:28:00] had a very strong reaction to what I was saying. Like people did not, they were just like, Oh shit. Like, damn, you know, . And at first I initially, I told the some of the MCs at the event, I was like, I don't wanna do q and a, cuz I don't feel like dealing with any white nonsense.Right. And the person I'm seeing, there's a mix up and she took questions anyway. And so I was like, Okay, I'll, I'll answer one or two. And this white guy John Gilmore, I believe he's a, he's a board member at maps or donor maps, some rich white dude He basically says like, Oh, well what if I start a Whites only conference?Wouldn't that be racist? And I was like, Well, that's already how maps this conference is. So you wouldn't really be doing anything different than what you're already doing. And [00:29:00] if you want to compare POC and facial healing spaces to like whites only segregation in the us that's, that's on you. That's . And yeah, he thought he was being cute and he wasn't.He, there's actually a video of you wanna watch it, of this whole moment happening, But he felt real dumb after he said that. SoDe'Vannon: Honey, you opened the library on his ass. Mama RuPaul would be so proud of you. The library was open. So y'all, what she's talking about is like basically how, how did I learn this in college? Like it doesn't really, it's not gonna benefit us if individual parts are whole, but the sum total isn't whole. Kind of like that. So if, if a few of us are making it, but everybody else isn't making it, then we're all still fucked.OverallIfetayo: [00:30:00] Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: you know, But so like in the future, how I know. So, so psychedelics isn't gonna solve everything overnight, instantly. Is there, Can it benefit us getting further along as a.Ifetayo: Hm, mm-hmm. . I think that it can, but with a lot of caveats, I think, well there's this, okay, there's this notion in this psychedelic space, a lot of researchers, a lot of just advocates in general or over height, the benefits of psychedelics and totally under height, the risk associated with psychedelics.So I've been in meetings with people, I've been on panels with people who are like, Oh, psychedelics have a low risk profile. What does that mean? does it? Like, what does that mean? You know? There have [00:31:00] been plenty of people who've, who've been traumatized by using psychedelics. There have been people who killed themselves, or people who killed their families while using psyched.Right? So it's, it's kind of messed up to kind of present it as, oh, this, it's safe. The, the risks are low, or, Oh, it's super dangerous, like you're gonna die to do it. Like, we have to give people realistic information. And so that's why I say caveats. Psychedelics aren't for everyone. There are certain people who can't take it, whether they're pregnant, you know, they might be on a certain medication, they might have a certain disability where it's hard for them to take psychedelics.A lot of people, you know, in this country are poor. I grew up poor in the US and you know, my mom's a single parent of seven kids. She could not afford to take off a day to go do some mushrooms or go to a retreat. So those are [00:32:00] those things I just wanna acknowledge are real. But can psychedelics help people in general and with trauma and move our, move our culture forward?Some, I think, yeah, it does have that potential under the right conditions. Something that people say in the psychedelic and harm reduction space is set and setting, which is like kind of a harm reduction monster that people use or they're referring to the place you're in, the setting and the place you're in also in your mind and in life in general and who you're what to say that you should only use second of substances in a place where you're comfortable and with people you trust.And I think that also applies on a macro level too. Psychedelics have the potential to yes, move us forward create better mental health options for folks given the right set and setting. [00:33:00] If we don't have universal healthcare, how much forward is it gonna move us if psychedelic therapy's outta reach?For most folks, if psychedelic therapy's the only thing legalized and recreational use to psyched dust is still legal, then people are still going to be arrested. So I believe that we have to make the conditions right for psyched ups to have a positive impact because if not, it's just going to be, you know, done into our already existing circus. And I don't think that will necessarily make a lasting, impactful change.De'Vannon: right? So you're saying if, if you gonna do this shit, do this shit, write, know, realistically cover everybody and be sure everyone has access to it and dribble the shit around and henpeck at it.Ifetayo: Yeah.De'Vannon: [00:34:00] So, so I wanted to to echo, so, you know, when, when she says like, poc, that's like people of color, like, like that's what that the elder peopleIfetayo: Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: would tell me, like the stories of the things that white people would do to them when they were younger. Now these people were born in like, say like, teens, twenties, 19 teens, twenties, thirties, growing up in the south here in Louisiana. I got called a nigger once,Ifetayo: All right.De'Vannon: there were other, like, I got called like a, like an a or monkey by this white boy one time, you know, in school, you know, things like that.Ifetayo: Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: Didn't happen so much that I would say like, that cemented my perception of white people because I've also had a lot of white people open doors for me in my life, whereas the black people stood in my way. So I was like at a juxtaposition in a crossroads and not really understanding some of the things, you know, some of [00:35:00] the trauma that the elders still held onto.But now that I'm older, I get how hard it can be to really heal of some things. And I would tend to stick with you even if, if you don't want it to. And I never could get it, but I get it now and I don't hold that against them. And so they would tell us how they'd be walking to school because, no, the black people didn't have cars.You know, they didn't have backpacks cuz they took like strings to just tie the books together and the white people would zoom by them in their cars and run them into dishes and stuff like that, you know, and try to, you know, and just, you know, You know, just mean shit like that. That doesn't make any sense.You're already in a, in a, in a nice vehicle. They're on the street walking to the same place you're going, You're even not even gonna offer to, to r pick them up and take them. That's, that's not bad enough. You're gonna try to run them over on the way just for shits and giggles, and, and that sort of shit.And now these people are like in [00:36:00] elementary school, low grade schools when this is happening. And when they grew up into worse racism. And, and then this trickles down into people who, you know, into, even in my generation. And so this is why, you know, you know when, when my guest here says that black people don't need to be around white people sometimes when we heal, this is whyIfetayo: Yeah. Oh yeah, a hundred percent. And it's, I've been in like those racial justice trainings with white folks. And for me it's really frustrating when I have to witness a white person, like realize that black people are people for the first time. It's really frustrating. And I, and I know a lot of white people, even some black people will be like, Oh, well what's the big deal?Like, why can't you just, you know, be in this racial justice training together? And I'm like, It's no, like, this isn't, this to, for them is theory for us. It's our [00:37:00] lives. And so, you know, what you were just sharing about the elders in your family know, stuff like dealing with those races attached is something that I grew up with.You know, my mom was born in the fifties in North Georgia. and she also told me stories of, you know, the night riders or you know, white people shoot a or cops beating up family members for no reason. Even my grandma, my grandma will be 86 this year. She , Her memory is amazing. But she was telling my sister that when she was a kid, Yeah, white kids used to call the niggers too.And she's like, Yeah, we pulled our pants down at 'em . So we, I think we as black people have to realize that like, yeah, this trauma shit is real. It's in our parents, our grandparents, it's in us too. [00:38:00] And if that means, you know, letting your white friend know that, Hey, I wanna talk about this. I've had white people try to talk about, you know, mass incarceration with me or, and you know, other things that.Hit close to home to me. And I don't like talking to him about it because if it's not something you experience, you aren't gonna have the same perspective as I do. Right. Just like I don't have the same perspective as my dad is, you know, he's someone who's actually been in prison. I wasn't. So, I can only share it from my perspective, but a lot of people will use these topics like incarceration as just spotter for conversation and or to look cool.And I'm just, I'm, I don't, that's not why I do this. Yeah. And a and a lot of people will say that, you know, they're [00:39:00] against their war on drugs or they're against this, they're against that. And I think on an intellectual or academic level, a lot of folks are, But when it comes to. on the street. It's a lot different.So I, that's why I think it's so important for us as black people to have our own space. And other folks of color too, because we're at a different level when we talk about these things. We're like in the senior seminar course, the white kids are in the one on one freshman course when they talk about it. A lot of them think that they're on our level when it comes to talking about this stuff, but they're not. And even, you know, I know my organization called the POC Psyched Collective, but same goes for a lot of non-black people of color too. Some of them just, some of them are racist a lot. Some of them are more racist than the white rednecks I grew up with. [00:40:00] So, yeah.De'Vannon: Oh, those are those Mexicans for Trump and shit like that, and the damn gay Republicans and shit.Ifetayo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd be like, Why are you so damn racist? Like, what is, where is this coming from? You know? But yeah, it's, it's a real thing, so,De'Vannon: Well, I think a lot of it gets back to what I was saying at the top of the show about how like the voices, you know, in my head, they mimic themselves as being my own, but they're not, you know, a kid isn't really just born racist. Somebody taught his little as that shit, you know, You know. But they haven't yet come to a point where they go, Maybe the elders in my family were wrong about a black person only being three fourths of a person.You know, They haven't reconciled their own voice yet, you know? Cause no logical person with a heart and a soul can look at, you know, things that happened in our country now and then in the history and [00:41:00] make the, make it logical. But when people's parents tell them that a black person is less than you, that Mexican person is less than you, that gay person is less than you, that gets ingrained in them.And it's, and I and I, I've studied hypnotherapy. I'm a licensed hypnotist. It is difficult. To upo, somebody's upbringing. You know those, that those voices out of their head. Now some people, some white people I know can't fucking stand their families. They're like, I can't racist sons of bitches. You know, I know some white people who, who have such white guilt, they're just like, God damn, and I was born the wrong raise.These white people ain't worth shit. And it stars my family up. They all burn in hell.Ifetayo: Hmm.De'Vannon: Who am I to argue with them? Know they family. I do.Ifetayo: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. And I think you know what you're saying [00:42:00] about the voices in your mind, like not always being you, but maybe mimicking you. Goes to show that a lot of this stuff, whether it be drug propaganda or white supremacy, takes a lifetime to unpack. You know, like a lot of times people, when they come to like an event I'm speaking at, they're like, Oh, well how can I get involved?I wanna do something. And I'm like, I, I'll tell people to slow down. I'm like, Just, y'all need to read first. , y'all need to read and learn first, because we all have that intern. Jaga, we all have biases against people who use drugs, especially people addicted, especially black drug users. And we also have internalized white supremacy, like black people do.We have internalized inferiority and white people. They have internalized superiority. And it, it kills me when I, you know, see why people who, they don't necessarily say this, but they act like they've done the work [00:43:00] on anti-racism and they're good. And it's like, no, this is a, this is a lifetime of work.And then some, you know, so you should never stop learningDe'Vannon: Knowledge is power. And as you're saying that, I was thinking about it, I was reading this report cuz I follow like the the decriminalization of the drugs in Oregon because I think that's one of the most miraculous and great. That's happening in my fucking lifetime, and I cannot wait to get there at the end of the month to show my ass.But one of these cops was whining because they were like, The power's been taken for us. The streets are just running rampant with drugs and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm all like, Bishop, you already, they're already running rampant with drugs. Stop being a drama queen. And what he's really whining about though, is his ability to be superior over people for having a chrome of dope or a half a tablet, half a Phoenix or whatever, and throwing a black boy in jail for one fucking pill, you know, for 15 [00:44:00] months or whatever.They, they can't do that to us anymore. So they're trying to act like, you know, the, the city's just lawless outta control, but really they hurt. They bud hurt, they hurt probably just cuz they can't dominate us and they ain't got the power no moreIfetayo: Yep. Yep. That's, that's facts. That's facts. And yeah. There's, there's so many like. Unfounded Narrows being pushed right now in a lot of major cities. Here in New York, it's the homelessness and the crime epidemic apparent, like quotes around that . But yeah, people there. I, so I worked on the campaign in Oregon.My old organization, Drug Policy Alliance funded that campaign. And so I was working the night that it got found or that the bow initiative got passed. And it was really crazy because being online and seeing people's reaction to it, [00:45:00] they were just like, what? Like people could not believe that it was real.And that was so fascinating to me because for a lot of folks, like my mom who's, who's 66, she never thought that she would be able to walk into a dispensary and buy weed. That was not the thing she thought about in the seventies, but she was my age. And now it's the thing in some places. So, yeah, it's, it's interesting and I think a lot of people are losing their shit over the fact that, yeah, they don't have power over us anymore.I mean, look at how many people reacted to the whole student loan forgiveness program that Biden in and out. People are mad. People are mad that black people have a chance at getting further in. That we have less barriers to go to college, that we have less barriers to get opportunities that makes people mad.And a lot of the progress that's hindered in this country is because of that. [00:46:00] Cuz white folks do not want us to have the same opportunities as them. That's why our public transit infrastructure in the US sucks. That's why people are okay with defunding public education because anything that benefits poor black people, , they don't care about, they're okay with increasing police budgets because that means there'll be more of them to keep us in check.De'Vannon: As the Lord said, amen and amen system. I mean it in the most non churchy way. But, but as the Lord said it, you know, in the Bible, you know, freely you have received, bitch freely give, I'm adding the bitch to it. Jesus didn't say that, but he probably thinking it. it, they, people are coming from a very, very bitter place when they bitter energy, whatever you wanna call it, negative space, LDL below, whoever.The shit ain't good when you have made it and you're gonna be particular about how the fuck somebody else makes it. So maybe you didn't get your [00:47:00] student loan forgiven, but I bet you somewhere in your life somebody gave you some shit you didn't really deserve and you took that shit, scooped it on up and I throwing off into the sunset and, and, you know, and ain't never even looked back.And you may not have even said thank you. And You know, so this is how people become hypocrites and stuff. The sort of stuff Jesus preach. Again, you may not think you being hypocritical, but the Lord remembers that time when, and even though you may have forgotten it, so the fuck what? I don't care my forgiven because I'm a 100% disabled veteran.I was praying, Lord, just wipe it all out for, you know, I don't care this, just let it go because I'm not a bitter broken bitch. And so I'm not sitting around here trying to find ways to be mad at people's progress. You know? Then half the politicians bitching. I love how the White House read them forIfetayo: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was funny.De'Vannon: you wanna, wanna complain about them getting this forgiven, but you got a few hundred thousand forgiven.Ifetayo: Yeah. Right, right. [00:48:00] Yeah,De'Vannon: 10,000, but you got half a million. Bitch, go set on your ass somewhere.Ifetayo: yeah,De'Vannon: have several seeds,Ifetayo: yeah. They're proud to be hypocrites. Like they're tol. It's like no moral compass. Just, and then the crazy thing is, is that they'll say they're Christians and it's like, and you know, it's funny, I didn't grow up Christian. I grew up in South Harris, so I was around a lot of Christians, but I didn't grow up Christian.And there's so many people who give Christians a bad name like that, who I'm just like, This is not what Jesus was about. like Jesus, Jesus was about. You know, like you were saying, giving freely, he fucked with sex workers. You know, he hung out with us gays. Like he, he was not about all this shit that they make him seem about, and he probably spoke some weed too, or did some shoes, I don't know.De'Vannon: Right. That's cause it's not written. No mean it didn't happen. There's a whole [00:49:00]30, the 31st, 30 years of his life isn't really, really recorded. After he ran away from his parents in the temple, he didn't really run away, but he was like, Y'all, I got shit to do. You know, So who fuck knows what he did. And so I think he experienced life personally. Yeah.I wanna talk about before we wrap it up, I wanna talk about some of the good things. So, so what have we talked about so far? Some of the stigma surrounding psychedelics, A lot about what your organization does because I want everyone to go to your website. I'm having my assistant add your website to my resources page.Ifetayo: Well, thank you.De'Vannon: yes indeed. Any time, my dear. Because I was inspired to go on a psychedelics journey when I watched you know how to change your mind on Netflix and the history of mental illnesses on pbs. I was watching how the veterans and everything like that who have been struggling with ptsd. I'm a veteran with ptsd, you know, all this psych drugs, they give us the VA to shit don't work, it just be having us like zombies.And I'm watching these documentaries. They did two or three MDMA trips and they haven't had the [00:50:00] ptsd, PTSD problems since. So I'm here for it for the veterans. I'm here for Joe Bidens trying to get the M D M. Legalize, even if it's just at the clinic level, bitch, I will take it because I have been locked up in the mental hospital for some of these veterans before I got four felonies and I'd probably been in the mental hospital about 4, 5, 10, 50, 11 times too.You, if, if MD a is what it'll take for some of my fellow veterans to stop imagining the square tiles on the floor moving and shit like that. The shit that I witnessed when I was in there and shitting all over the floor and whatnot. Bitch give him his goddamn M D M A now. What have you witnessed in your, in like, I know y'all don't give the drugs to people cuz you can't and stuff like that, but have you heard of any stories where somebody was this way and then they got better after doing the psychedelic therapy?You know, with, with a therapist or in a safe space, any positive tells, You can tell.Ifetayo: Yeah. Yeah. I'm happy to share a little about my [00:51:00] story psychedelics, but in general, you know, I've heard people so many stories of folks saying that psychedelics have helped them with body image issues. Depression, ptsd, anxiety, O c D all kinds of things. For me personally, I got into psychedelics when I was in college. I was really depressed my senior year. And I was dealing with suicidal thoughts. I felt just passively suicidal. And it was my senior year, so, you know, when you're a senior, like turn up, you know, everybody's trying to be that . And for me, the depression hit me hard, like really, really hard that year.And it was debilitating. And, you know, I was, I had been in therapy for some time and I got prescribed like, well be shrimp. And I decided not to [00:52:00] take it cuz I, I was a little scared, I was cautious. My mom's also like a herbalist and they get a homeopathic stuff, so she's like against all that stuff.And so that's how, that was my upbringing. You know, I have a lot of friends who, Take antidepressants and it works really well for them. So I'm not, I'm not knocking it. But for me, I was, I was scared. , they said it would take away my sex drive. I was like, Oh no. Hell nowSo, so it was kind of crazy looking back at it. So basically I had interned at the Drug Policy Alliance as a media intern. I started writing about my experience of my dad going to prison and being deported, and they invited me to their conference to speak. So I spoke my first time really speaking in an audience that big. I like broke down in tears.It was [00:53:00] really cathartic for me. And, but at the same time, I knew I was under all that, I was still depressed. So I went to this panel on like end of life. End of life anxiety and p and psychedelics. So they were talking about treating people with like terminal illnesses like cancer with L S D. And I was like, Huh, this is interesting.For some reason I related to it, so I was like, I'm gonna go and do some mushrooms. So I went back to school after the conference and I was talking to my friends cuz I knew they dabbled in psychedelic. I was like how do I do mushrooms, ? At that point I only tried alcohol and wheat. I was so sonner in college.I, I still am. And so they're like, take three and a half grams, maybe put in some peanut butter cuz they taste kind of nasty. And then they're, then they're like, yeah, [00:54:00] like go in the woods or something. Like go in nature. Oh yeah. Have a sitter too. So I got my, I got my friend to, to sit for me and I ate the three and a half grams of mushrooms and went on a walk in the woods on this nature trail.It's really beautiful, overwhelming, at the same time. Experience. It lasted about eight hours for me, and it felt like a jolt that I needed in that time, like being really depressed and suicidal. I felt like I had this jolt just being like, ah, you know, like, of like release, but also happiness and beauty.Like it was showing me the beauty of life, why we're here. Yeah, it just, it, it just showed me a different side of life. It reminded me of my childhood imagination. Like we were in the woods and like the, the trees were glistening. The. The plants were talking [00:55:00] like, it, it just felt very surreal. I was, I was kind of freaking out.I was like, This is too much. So me and my friend, she took me back to my room and I felt a little bit better there. I was like, less freaked out. But yeah, it, it helped me see myself in a different context. When you are depressed, you're so used to a certain narrative that you have about yourself. It could be, Oh, I'm stupid, I'm dumb, I'm worthless, blah, blah, blah. when you take mushrooms or some other psychedelic, maybe you're seeing yourself from a, like, like, you're basically seeing yourself from a different person's perspective, like almost from the outside. And it helps you have a lot more compassion for yourself. Like you see yourself as a person, not as like,You. So I think that can be helpful [00:56:00] for anyone who's stuck in a rut, whether it be depression whether it be, you know, just bad habits that you've been trying to break for a long time. Yeah, and it, I mean, and the most important thing was that it just made me feel really happy. Like, I was laughing, like I never laughed before like giggling like a baby, you know?And that was really important because when you're depressed and down, your body forgets what it's like to laugh, like. And when you laugh like that, it's like, whoa. Like that feeling is so amazing. And when you're on Trus, you, I mean, for me at least, I laugh, I laugh a lot. things could be really, really funny.You could also go from crying to laughing, like in five seconds, , just like that. But I think that's beautiful too because that's how life can be. You know, things can be good. One minute and boom, things can change and you have to adjust and you have to [00:57:00] keep going and learn how to adapt with all those things.And for me, my, that's kind of what my work is about. You know, we're all adapting, we're all changing, but we can also use these substances as tools to change our worlds and help people like, help people with disabilities, help people who, you know, are born without certain privileges. A better place for them.De'Vannon: See the Lord is giving us everything we need right outside nature and how, how dare the white man tried to, to tell us something's wrong with these things that just grow naturally. Shrooms and weed and the, the fucking mold on the wheat that they make the fucking l s d out of and stuff like that. It's all line naturality.It's organic nun gmo, gmo, all of that. I'm sorry. You went through all those things. You went through being depressed during, during what's [00:58:00] so supposed to be such a happy time, but I'm glad you got your breakthrough. Yes. From those documentaries I watched, it seems like they were suggesting that these psychedelics have the power to rewrite like the, the neuro connectivity of the brain.So like, like you're saying, when you get, when you get sad and you get stuck in that ruck rut where you're teaching, where your mind learns how to be sad, and then these psyched dealers can remind your mind what it's like to be happy and rewire the way you process information and process life. So it can give you a whole new framework to work from. So,Ifetayo: Mm-hmm.De'Vannon: and I didn't really get into the types of psychedelics because I was watching like, I think on your YouTube channel of, I think it's in the intro video on there, you had this panel of people like y'all, y'all if Fatal, Ifta loves her panels, he loves a panel.Ifetayo: You'reDe'Vannon: It is good to have all those perspectives.But the [00:59:00] one you had, they were going over all the different psychedelics and I knew about the Melin and the, the celli and the ganja, you know, and all that. But then they started going down. He was like, But it's like, you know, designer, now you have all these different wands. And it's like, so I was like, Oh shit, I don'tIfetayo: Yeah.De'Vannon: but y'all go to the website to learn more about the different types of psyched dials. Listen to their, the information or YouTube channel she mentioned like dismantling the patriarchy. There's information and in other shows she's gone on, on her website that mentions. That, that you can access through the website that I would put in the show notes. Grief loss to death and harm reduction, things like that. You know, that you mentioned all of these are potential benefits for psychedelics when it's done right and in the right setting. I'm so happy that it's coming back around cuz all this Ritalin and shit, they got kids on calling them adhd, whatever the fuck that is.You know, all this medicine that they've had us hopped up [01:00:00] on, all it is is legal drugs. We should be able to have our shit, not just what they tell us is okay because they haven't so,So I'm gonna let you have the last word. Say whatever is you want to.Ifetayo: Oh man, you . I, I'll just say you've been an amazing host. I, I was not expecting this. You're awesome. You've like, I do a lot of podcasts, interviews and you've been the most fun. So IDe'Vannon: Well, damn. Thank you. Thank, I'll take, I'll take allIfetayo: Yes. Keep doing. You Don't change. And thank you to all your listeners. Check us out www.pocpc.org. Thank you for having me.De'Vannon: Absolutely. Thank you very much. Fat Tayo. Thank y'all so [01:01:00] much for listening and we'll see you next time on the Sex Drugs in Jesus podcast and tell them don't listen to nobody but show self.Thank you all so much for taking time to listen to the Sex Drugs and Jesus podcast. It really means everything to me. Look, if you love the show, you can find more information and resources at SexDrugsAndJesus.com or wherever you listen to your podcast. Feel free to reach out to me directly at DeVannon@SexDrugsAndJesus.com and on Twitter and Facebook as well.My name is De'Vannon, and it's been wonderful being your host today. And just remember that everything is gonna be all right. 

President and Bureaucracy review for unit 4 test

Hey Friends! Today Matt Freeman of the Statist Quo podcast comes on to do a reading of the Forward that he wrote for my book "F* BUREAUCRACY". We read that, then the introduction, and we chat about both and how we feel a year after publishing. To get a copy of the book visit UTAC.io . If you find value in any of our content, one of the best ways to support us (and to get more content!) is to support us at Patreon.com/UTAC . Anything above the $2 level gets you access to all of our after show episodes! Enjoy! -Pat

AP Gov Test review for the first part of unit 4

The review can be found on eclass.

Welcome to the Serve No Master Podcast! This podcast is aimed at helping you find ways to create new revenue streams or make money online without dealing with an underpaid or underappreciated job. Our host is best-selling author, Jonathan Green.Our guest today is Lorraine Ball, a marketing strategist and marketing educator, who left the corporate space following her unhappiness with its bureaucracies despite her love for her job. She now works independently and helps prepare new entrepreneurs for the journey ahead through the Digital toolbox and her podcast, “More Than a Few Words”. In this episode, Jonathan and Lorraine discuss the dragging, almost obtuse approach that large corporations unwittingly adopt toward new ideas, and how new entrepreneurs can anticipate this tendency while employing tactically relevant strategies to deal with it.  Episode Topics[00:56] Meet today's guest, Lorraine Ball.[01:32] How Lorraine left corporate bureaucracies to start her business. [08:38] Why do larger companies get so stuck on outdated ideas?[14:33] How entrepreneurs can create an idea-testing process; be open to ideas and set target metrics. [21:50] Finding relevant up-to-date knowledge on entrepreneurship. [34:37] Do mastermind investments pay off? [39:35] Connect with Lorraine.  Notable Quotes-       “Companies hire crazy people and then they spend the rest of the time trying to cut their corners off to get them to fit into the corporate model" - [Lorraine Ball] -       "The reason you go to college is to learn how to turn assignments in on time" - [Jonathan Green] -       "The one thing you learn in corporate is Process" - [Lorraine Ball] -       "You have to surround yourself with people who are willing to bring new ideas" - [Lorraine Ball] -       "I want to be in the mastermind where I'm the dumbest person" - [Jonathan Green] -       "We don't need to be surrounded by people that are really far ahead of us, but people that are just a little bit further ahead of us" - [Jonathan Green] -       "Nothing changes in one session or one day" - [Lorraine Ball] -       "The customer is always right in matters of taste" - [Jonathan Green]  Resources“Thriving on Chaos” book [02:25]Connect with Lorraine BallLorraine's Podcast: More Than a Few Words [39:55]The Digital Tool Box [40:08]Connect with Jonathan GreenJonathan's book: Serve No MasterPodcast Website: https://servenomaster.cConnect with Jonathan Green The Bestseller: Serve No Master Free Book on Amazon: Fire Your Boss Podcast Website: https://servenomaster.com/podcast/ Subscribe, Rate, and Review: https://servenomaster.com/itunes Video Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ServeNoMasterPodcast

We all likely want to improve the organizations we work in. We might want to improve the employee experience, improve the customer experience, or be more efficient and effective. But we all likely have had the experience of feeling like our organizations are too difficult, too entrenched, and too complex to change. Any organization—large or small, public or private—can feel like a faceless bureaucracy that is resistant to change. So what can people do who want to affect change? How do you accomplish things that can seem impossible?To answer these questions, we talked with Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai about their recently published book, Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team. Marina and Nick have deep experience in one of the largest, most complex bureaucracies in the world: the U.S. government. As technology leaders in the Obama White House, Marina and Nick undertook large change programs. Their book contains their stories and their advice for anyone who wants to affect change.We find the hacks in their book quite valuable, and we wish this book had been available early in our career when we were both in much larger organizations. We love the fact that their hacks focus on the people and working within a system for change—not the move fast & break things mentality of Silicon Valley. Above all, we appreciate that it's clear that Marina and Nick thought deeply about what they would have wanted to know when they embarked on the significant technology change programs they undertook in the White House and Veterans Administration.Marina Nitze is currently a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm that specializes in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina was most recently Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs under President Obama, after serving as Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education.Nick Sinai is a Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, a VC and private equity firm, and is also Adjunct Faculty at Harvard Kennedy School and a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Nick served as U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House, and prior, played a key role in crafting the National Broadband Plan at the FCC.If you enjoy our podcasts, please subscribe and leave a positive rating or comment. Sharing your positive feedback helps us reach more people and connect them with the world's great minds.Learn about our book Make Better Decisions and buy it on AmazonSubscribe to get Artificiality delivered to your emailLearn more about Sonder StudioThanks to Jonathan Coulton for our music This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artificiality.substack.com

Reviewing AKS 32, 33, 34, & 35 The President and the Bureaucracy

To learn more about Joe and his campaign, please visit joeforidaho.com.-Joe Alfieri's background in politics in Kootenai County-Challenges of fast growth in Joe's district-Growth of the administrative state/bureaucracy in Idaho-Election integrity - what should be done to secure elections in Idaho-Taxes - how obtain a better tax structure that lowers taxes on Idahoans-State of the Idaho Republican Party and its priorities-Joe's pledge of the transparency to the communitySponsors:For your computer repair and computer network needs, call Joe with F1 for Help at (208) 687-0183.  Visit www.f1forhelp.net for more information.Do you have something so say?  Interested in learning more about publishing on the Idaho Speaks Network?  Our nation was built on ideas and your idea could be the next political advancement for Idaho.  Call Ed at (208) 209-7170 or email hello@idahospeaks.com to start the conversation.

Welcome to Episode 46 of the Thicc Bois Podcast!(0:00) - Intro(0:30) - Dragonball(3:58) - Alone(16:45) - Bear attacks(24:58) - Human vs Nature(32:49) - Lawlessness(39:13) - Japan(46:09) - Deterioration (54:45) - Death and Taxes(59:47) - Bureaucracy(1:04:45) - Great Value Butt Plug(1:08:38) - Super Cringe Thursday(1:16:56) - Super Creepy Friday(1:20:43) - Hallucinations (1:26:30) - Instincts(1:31:35) - WWII Death Ray(1:39:06) - OutroThank you so much for the continued support! If you enjoy the podcast please leave a like, rating and subscribe on your favorite platform. If you want to connect with us you can follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ThiccBoisPodcast, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/TBPocast or email us at thiccboipodcast@gmail.comAdditionally, if you would like us to send you a pair of stickers connect with us at our Facebook account or email us 

Your more interesting friends tackle: I'm not dying Celebrating coming together Cynical political ads - Bobby Newport! Every tune everywhere all the time, and vinyl! Hip hop grandmas in Latin America Hot war time? Bureaucracy Term Limits Game Balancing Government Chip Restrictions in China Outsourcing National Safety

Would you like to share your thoughts with Ralph?  Please email your comments to ralph@idahospeaks.com or post your comments on @IdahoSpeaks on Facebook.Conservatives' Guide is a listener supported production.  Please visit conservativesguide.com/support to learn more.Do you have something so say?  Interested in learning more about publishing on the Conservatives' Guide Network?  Our nation was built on ideas and your idea could be the next political advancement for America.  Call Ed at (208) 209-7170 or email hello@conservativesguide.com to start the conversation.

Would you like to share your thoughts with Ralph?  Please email your comments to ralph@idahospeaks.com or post your comments on @IdahoSpeaks on Facebook.Idaho Speaks is a listener supported production.  Please visit idahospeaks.com/support to learn more.Do you have something so say?  Interested in learning more about publishing on the Idaho Speaks Network?  Our nation was built on ideas and your idea could be the next political advancement for Idaho.  Call Ed at (208) 209-7170 or email hello@idahospeaks.com to start the conversation.

In this episode we are discussing Franz Kafka's The Trial; written in 1914 but not published until 1925. This is an incredible and seminal work in modern literature and should be read by everyone. In this episode we talk about: - The style of a story that puts the audience in touch with the feelings of a character - If you don't know what you have done wrong than everything comes to mind and it is paralyzing and demoralizing - Bureaucracy as modern tyranny - The importance of trust in society - The bullet or the knife are never relative - Jostling and career maneuvering as the primary reason for people in these industries, not the betterment of the people they are "helping" - Irrelevancy is the bureaucrats kryptonite; and they will do anyting to avoid that - Why even have options? We really appreciate everyone who listens. Please feel free to support the show by giving a rating or review on whatever platform you listen to it.  Email: reallytruefiction@gmail.com Direct download: https://reallytruefiction.libsyn.com/  

Episode Notes Episode Summary For this episode of This Month in the Apocalypse, Brooke, Margaret, and Casandra chat about more horrible things and some fixes. They talk about supply chain shortages, corn, ways to keep your house warmer without using a ton of energy or resources, dubious debunked how warming myths that also might burn it down, and a thorough introduction to hurricane preparedness. Host Info Casandra can be found on Twitter @hey_casandra or Instagram @House.Of.Hands. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke is just great and can be found at Strangers helping up keep our finances intact and on Twitter @ogemakweBrooke Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Next Episode Hopefully will come out Friday, October 4th, and every two weeks there after. Transcript An easier to read version is available on our website TangledWilderness.org. This Month In the Apocalypse: October Brooke Hello and welcome to Live Like The World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, one of your hosts today, along with the brilliant Margaret Killjoy and the iridescent Casandra. This is October 2022 installment of your most favorite Live Like The World Is Dying sub-segment, This Month In The Apocalypse. Today, we're going to talk about the latest shortages, the looming crisis in energy, fuel sources and what can be done about the crisis, war, climate disasters and probably some shit about the economy. But first, we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other luminous podcasts on our network. Doo doo doo. Jingle Speaker 1 Kiteline is a weekly 30 minute radio program focusing on issues in the prison system, you'll hear news along with stories from prisoners and former prisoners as well as their loved ones. You'll learn what prison is, how it functions and how it impacts all of us. Margaret Behind the prison walls, a message is called a kite, whispered words, a note passed hand to hand, a request submitted the guards for medical care. Illicit or not, sending a kite means trusting that other people will bare it farther along until it reaches its destination. Here on Kiteline, we hope to share these words across the prison walls. Jingle Speaker 1 You can hear us on the Channel Zero Network and find out more at Kiteline radio.no blogs.org. Brooke And we're back. Quick introductions for those of you who might not remember each of us or might be listening for the first time. I'm Brooke an indigenous, baby anarchist woman who loves spreadsheets home remodeling and connecting with the land. And I'm going to toss to Margaret. Margaret I'm Margaret, and I am someone who writes a lot and is on podcasts a lot. And does useful stuff too. But, those are some of the things I do. And I will pass it to Casandra. Casandra I wasn't prepared for an introduction. Margaret Neither was I. Casandra My name is Cassandra. I garden and weave. Check! Margaret Yay. Brooke And do amazing art. Casandra Yeah, I make books. And drink tea. Okay. Margaret That's good tea. Casandra Yeah. Margaret Back to you, Brooke. Casandra Oh, yeah, we're supposed to remember to plug things. Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness is putting out our...Well, it's not really technically our first book is it, Margaret? Brooke Speaking of books, I feel like there's a book that you've been working on lately. I know we're supposed to plug things at the end. But this sounds great to mention it now. Margaret No, but it's our first book is a new collective. Casandra Okay, we're putting out our first book as the new collective. And also, first book in a long time, called "Try Anarchism For Life: The Beauty Of Our Circle" by Cindy Barukh Milstein. And I think I sent it to the printer yesterday. So fingers crossed. Brooke If people want to preorder that, Casandra, where can they do that? Casandra On the Stranger's site. And if you preorder it, you'll get some cute little book plates, which I didn't realize other people didn't know what book plates are. But, they're like the little stamps or stickers, you can put at the beginning of books. And it says "ex libris," which means 'from the library of,' and you can write your name so everyone knows it's your book. Brooke Nice. So check out our website for that awesome book, which is beautifully designed, and actually a really, really good read. I really enjoyed it. All right, in our very first episode of This Month In The Apocalypse, one of the things we talked about was things that were in shortage, and surprise, surprise, we are continuing to have supply chain shortages. The thing that made me recall this and want to bring it up, again, is that I saw an NPR article in the last week about the fact that Adderall is facing a shortage, which is interesting, and did a little more digging on what's going on there. And part of it is that they had labor shortages. So, they fell behind in their production. And then the part that was super interesting to me that I've never thought about, Adderall is a highly controlled substance. It's probably a well known fact, part of the part of the highly controlled portion of it is that manufacturers are regulated in how much of it they can produce. So, if they fall behind their schedule, it's not as easy as just like, "Oh, we're gonna do a double shift and make extra this month," they have to get like, special dispensation to be able to make more. So they can make the amount that they're allowed to, but not more than that without special permission. Margaret So they can't catch up? Brooke They can if like they apply for FDA approval and get, you know, temporary approval or whatever to make extra, assuming they can get the ingredients they need and workers to actually make the extra. But yeah, it's not as easy as just like, "Oh, we need to make extra." There's a whole bunch of extra stuff going on that they have to do to do that. Casandra Yay, bureaucracy. Brooke Yeah, totally. So ration your Adderall? That's probably probably not how that works. There are other medical supplies that are still in shortage too. This, I also found interesting because we haven't seen it in the headlines as much, or at least I haven't, right.? Like, it hasn't been in the news. But, there have been things that have continued to be in short supply of the throughout the whole pandemic. One of the items is gloves. There's lots of different kinds of gloves that medical providers use, you know, you've got vinyl gloves, and nitrile gloves, and powdered, and non powdered, and the thicker and thinner, and all of that kind of stuff. And so there's like several different types of specific gloves that are in short supply that.... Casandra When you said gloves, I was picturing like knitted gloves. Like why? Brooke Sorry, no, like medical gloves. Casandra That makes much more sense. Brooke Just get your grandma's to start knitting, and it'll be okay. Casandra Yep. Brooke Also, testing supplies are in short supply for medical providers. And specifically, it was like the equipment used to collect samples, store samples, transport samples, for medical tests, that portion of it. And then I guess, ventilator parts are still in short supply, as well. Margaret I guess that makes sense, since everyone wants that. Brooke Yeah. So that's the medical side of things. And then other things out in the real world, this is one I hadn't heard about, but tampons, I guess I've been in short supply. So it's good time to learn menstrual extraction. If you know somebody that can teach you that if you want to learn, or looking for other options, if you haven't previously been open to trying things like menstrual cups, might be a time to do that. Margaret, this is a fun throwback to our first one, there was this thing that was in short supply that you mentioned, and that each of us have two have on our respective homes. Margaret Um, wind...I'm trying to come up with something clever, I know the actual answer, but trying to come up with something funny. Casandra Garage doors? Margaret Yeah, it's garage doors. Brooke To the point where like, if you're a contractor, and you're going to build a house, they're recommending that before you start with anything related to the building of your house, the very first thing you do is order the garage doors, because it will take basically the whole time for them to get there. Like the last thing that will arrive and that you will install in the house is the garage door because of how long they taking. Casandra I knew it! Casandra Okay, I feel like every, like it's a running joke, and you all will always bring up garage doors. And every time I'm like, But, why is there a shortage? And then every time I forget, so I'm gonna ask again. Why? Brooke I don't think we talked about why last time. Margaret I don't think we have a 'why.' I think that there's just a lot of shit that is like, my guess is because it's so specialized that they make a certain amount. And then I don't know, but it might be something more about new homes? I don't know, The answer is I don't know, Brooke Part of it is lumber. Because remember, lumber was in short supply, like lumber mills shut down early in the pandemic. And so there was like a lot of lumber that was not being produced. And then when they started up again, because the price of lumber has gone up the price of garage doors are like two or three times higher, depending on where you live than they were pre pandemic. And part of that's because the lumber is so much more expensive. Margaret Okay, but hear me out. It'd be prettier anyway, it's instead of having the kind that rolls up above, just have like big old barn doors that swing open, and just make them out of two by fours. And it will totally work. And I'm sure there's no specific reason that people have developed a much more specialized solution. Brooke Yeah, definitely not. Casandra And there can just be like a rope from the door to your fence. So when you drive up to your fence, you can just grab the rope and pull it. Margaret Yeah, totally. Casandra And that will open the garage door. Margaret Yeah, or some sort of like system where you like knock something over as you're driving up towards your house. It like knocks over the ball, that rolls down the hill and it hits the thing and then it does the thing. And then the garage door swings open and then hits something that it shouldn't have and then starts another chain reaction and then the whole neighborhoods on fire. Casandra Yeah, totally secure Brooke I was with you till the end. So a real nice Rube Goldberg type of garage door opening. Margaret Yeah, I think that is the solution for most of these things that we're missing. Like for example, lack of gloves. Have doctors considered using knit gloves? Brooke Really great point, Margaret. Really great point. Moving on. Computer chips continue to be in short supply.That was an issue like this time last year. It got a little better. Casandra Wait, what news? Brooke Computer chips, Casandra Computer ships? I'm sorry, I... Brooke The ones that go into like everything, like not just computers, but like they go into cars now, they go into your television, they go you know... Casandra My contribution today is going to be to mishear everything. Brooke That's alright, it's going to be way more fun that way. Margaret Okay, so tortilla chips, also chips conduct electricity, probably if you put enough electricity into them. Brooke I don't know if they have any conductive materials in them, Margaret. Maybe we need to add some metal to our tortilla chips. Brooke And then they can do this. Margaret Yeah. Margaret It's good for everyone. And just mark it for anyone who has braces that they should avoid them. Brooke Okay, yeah. Excellent. Renewable too because corn. Margaret That's not something I'm going to talk about later about. Anyway. Brooke Sadly, baby formula continues to be in shortage. Again, that's not making the headlines like it was when it first started. But, that is still a major issue. So, check on your people. Do what you can to help out there. Unfortunately, that's ongoing and doesn't still doesn't have a solution in sight right now. They've been...like they ramped up production on it and stuff, but it's just still not enough. And then the raw ingredients that go into make it too, of course, have continued to have problems. Here's a really sad one for you, Margaret. It's it's one of your favorite things. And the concept of this item tends to be a sponsor of one of those other podcasts. Casandra Guns. Margaret Oh no, smiling children? Brooke No, there's plenty of them. You only really need one. So that's, that's okay. Margaret Don't tell me that there's no potatoes. Brooke Potatoes are in short supply. Margaret This has gone historically badly for my people. Brooke There was like a whole famine or something. Except there wasn't. Casandra Something. Brooke Yeah, sorry. potatoes, potatoes in short supply. Okay. Casandra But it's like harvest potato season right now? Are they just already anticipating that there won't be enough potatoes? Brooke Yeah, that's part of it. Again, we've talked about in previous episodes, how like, there have been really weird climate shit happening, especially like in the US that's affected the growth and production of things. Like here where we live, our Spring was way long and cold and wet. And it really fucked up the growing cycles of things. So, loss. Casandra Yeah, my potatoes didn't do great. Brooke Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there were losses due to that early in the season of like potato plants. And then they're not anticipating, you know, what they are getting out of the ground to be, excuse me, as plentiful as it might otherwise be. Or normally be. Yeah, that's sad. Less sad, Christmas trees are probably going to be in short supply again, this year, they're not sure. But, they were last year, and the conditions that cause that are looking to be much the same. So yeah, living things that get chopped down in order to decorate your house for a month, fewer of those. Sorry? Margaret Alternatives include decorating a living tree, or moving into a house that some old weird person left a fake Christmas tree in the attic. Or using last year's tree. Casandra I'm a big fan of rosemary trees, and then you just plant it. Brooke You can also paint a tree on your wall somewhere and then just set out presents. You can make out of cardboard with your children. Margaret Or, you can realize its pagan idols idolatry and realize that a true Christian would never celebrate Christmas. Casandra Or you can convert, and do Hanukkah, because they overlap this year. Brooke Yes, I love it when they overlap. Casandra Menorahs are pretty. Margaret There's so many options. Yeah. Brooke Okay, cool. And then our last supply chain thing, which will be a nice toss is that energy and fuel are in short supply and expected to be in even shorter supply, which means I can toss this to Margaret to talk more about that issue. Margaret Yay, everything's doomed. I mean, everything's gonna be fine. Somewhere in between these two extremes is the truth. Okay, so Europe is having a power crisis. And not the old fashioned kind where people decide they don't want kings anymore, but kinda about natural gas mostly. And, it is the worst energy crisis since World War II. And, there's a lot of causes of it. The most immediate cause, that is absolutely the most immediate cause, and it's, it's not the straw that broke the camel's back, it's like the two by four that broke the camel's back, is the is that Russia has responded...Okay, so no, I'm gonna start at the beginning instead. Okay, so for 20 years or so... Brooke No, start in the middle! Margaret So for 20 years or so, Euroupe has been trying to use fossil fuels...If I was really starting at the beginning it would be like: the economic project that is Europe was caused by stripping all of the natural resources out of the developing world. But, for the last 26 years, Europe has been like, "We want to be the seen as the people who are really good. And so we're going to use fewer fossil fuels." And so, for about 20 years, they've been trying to work on that. However, this has basically increased their dependence on other places, like Russia, primarily Russia, in this case, where natural gas imports cheap, natural gas imports from Russia have been absolutely a mainstay. However, this has been crisis for the past two Winters too, even before the Ukrainian war, basically. Because, if you're going to have renewables as the way that you're trying to make a sustainable world, it has to be coupled with degrowth, instead of just like continuing to have a growing thing, because like, actually, renewables create less power overall at the moment, right. So, increased dependence on Russia, and then Russia has not officially cut off natural gas exports to Europe, what they did instead is they stopped 89% of their natural gas exports. And, they did it by saying, "Oh, we have a leak, and we can't fix it because of the sanctions. So, I guess you have to stop the economic sanctions against us, or you don't get any natural gas." And so they're blackmailing the West, and I don't know, whatever, I mean, I don't expect better of them. They're in the middle of fucking fading and genociding Ukraine, so whatever. But, this is a problem. And also increasing drought that's been hitting Europe really badly, it fucks up a bunch of other things, too. It fucks up their hydroelectric. And then, it even fucks up their coal, because coal is transported by river. And, they can't if the rivers are too low. And so the Right wing wants to blame a lot of this on Germany's shutdown of like the completely safe nuclear power plants or whatever. But, I think that that's worth contrasting with...France is actually at half nuclear power right now, because corrosion, lagging repairs, and general lack of safety have caused the nuclear power plants about to...to have to operate at about half capacity. So nucular, actually, sometimes complicated. And the heatwave has also meant that they can't use river water to cool the plants, because there's the nuclear power plants, and the other, I think other power plants too, because they use river water to cool it. But, I think it's a combination of the river water being much hotter than it usually is. And then also much less of it. Though, the one weird thing that people are like hoping will like pull it through at the last minute is there's now this new micro nucular reactor that's supposed to be safe, because it uses molten salts and fuel rods. And it fits onto a tractor trailer and powers 1000 homes, and is not yet being produced commercially. But, it's like a thing that people say that they've developed. So, the UK has seen energy prices, the energy price increase has doubled since last year's increase. So, it's not like...energy prices aren't double, but they have grown at double the rate, protests are breaking out, people are starting to burn their utility bills. And what's kind of cool is that you'd sort of expect this kind of protest to kind of go in a Right wing direction about like, you know, fuck you, let's go frack or whatever. But, actually, it's, at least what I've seen is that the protests are mostly coming out of a Left wing and a-political position. And, a lot of is like pushing to nationalize gas, and basically say like, "This is fucked up. This is affecting the poor people more than anyone else." Gas being, in this case used for heating, but also is used for power generation, and then a lot of industrial manufacturing. And, this is not just a matter of rising costs, it's literally a potential in the next couple of weeks, there might be blackouts and power rationing. Various places are limiting power use, like businesses are being encouraged to turn off their air conditioners, and all this kind of stuff. And of course, everything happens in a vacuum with this kind of thing. So, there's no way...wait, no, no, this will cause stagnation economically and could easily trigger a recession. Margaret And the other thing that it does, is it creates this awful fucking feedback loop. We talked about last time where like the feedback loop of like, all this flooding, destroying Pakistan, causing them to get IMF loans, which cause more austerity, which cause more, you know, climate change or whatever, you have a very similar feedback cycle, in that it's the...because of this stuff that's happening, more fossil fuel production is happening, coal plants are coming back online. Fracking is no longer banned in the UK. And of course, the pipeline attack that didn't help any of this, that was probably Russia, but Russia blames it on the US, was the largest methane release in documented history. So, even though the pipes weren't even an active use, the fact that they were ruptured caused the largest methane release in documented history. And of course, it was the heatwave the summer that spiked power usage. And so, climate change causes people to get more desperate for power. So, we enter to a vicious cycle, which will definitely not have any effects anywhere but Europe, and we can probably be done with that issue unless someone else has something to say about it affecting elsewhere. Casandra Yeah, I was reading about how the domino effect is impacting the US. It sort of seems self evident, but I'll talk about it anyway. So it looks like 40% of the US of our electricity is generated by natural gas, which I didn't realize. So, you know, in the US, we either heat our homes with natural gas or electric, but natural gas prices impact electricity prices, maybe someone else can explain that to me, because I don't quite get it. But, the moral of the story is that when natural gas prices go up, all of the other prices go up as well. Yeah, they're expecting anything from a 17% increase to a third increase? I don't understand. Yeah, thank you. 33%. So that sucks. It's not as bad as Europe, like I'm looking at...I was looking at Germany in the UK, and it sounds like their prices are way, way, way, way higher, but it's still not gonna be great here. So, I was hoping we could talk about things that people can do. Like ways they can keep their home warm, and insulated and stuff like that. Brooke and I are both in the Pacific Northwest, which is known for its mild winters, but we also get lots of rain and damp and then Margaret is on the East Coast and has much harsher winters. So maybe between the three of us, we can come up with some good ideas. Brooke Let me start with what I tell my kid which is put on some socks and a goddamn sweater. Casandra And a hat. Feet and head. Margaret And then what I tell your kid which is, "If you if you make a...if you build a fire, if you build a man a fire, he's warm for a day, but if you set a man on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life. Brooke Well we do like to set men on fire in this house, so that's that's perfectly acceptable here. If any men come in, you can be set on fire for our warmth. Margaret Yeah, yeah, that's a renewable resource. Casandra Because, I mean, we know that lumber and wood prices have gotten up and you got to use something in your fireplace, Margaret And I hear that they're made out of wood. That's why we throw them in the lake to find out. Cause men are witches. Wait, hold on. Okay, so sweaters and hats, okay. Okay. Casandra Some things I learned. So clothes dryers can be up to 20% of a home's energy bill. I had no idea. And in my head, a dry...like drying racks aren't good idea where we live because it's so damp here. But maybe that's not the case. So, I'm gonna try that this winter. Checking...I've always rented so the the idea of like checking the filters and shit on my whatever way your home is heated has never occurred to me, but apparently that's super important. Right, Brooke? Brooke Absolutely. I'm gonna be totally honest, I don't know if that has anything to do with the, I guess it probably helps the efficiency of the device. Yeah, I do it every six months, because I know it helps the air quality in my house. And that's important. Casandra I don't even know how to do that. So you should come over. Margaret There's both filters in the HVAC. Sorry. Casandra Let me know, tell me more, I don't understand. Margaret As far as I understand, there's both the filters that are like the big screen filters that people are like run out and strap to their fans to do air filter cleaning, right? And then there's like, at least in my house has an oil heater and in an oil heater, there's a filter, an oil filter, and so my presumption is that it just takes more power to push things through a clogged up filter, both air filter and oil filter. That's my guess. The main thing I learned the hard way by moving somewhere with harsh winters and an oil furnace is that if you let your furnace run dry, it breaks. And so you actually have to keep it full, which is cool because my gauge is broken, so I just need to every now and then like call and be like, "Hey, can you fill it up?" And they're like, "How much do you need?" And I'm like, "I don't know. You fill it up." I did learn that heating oil and diesel are functionally the same thing, although you're not allowed to put heating oil in your car, because that they'd like stain it red so that you can get caught if you do that. Casandra Weird. Margaret Yeah, and there are some diff...please don't run out and put diesel in your home oil filter because you heard some girl who lives in the mountains tell you to. I haven't fucking done this. And but, some people I think sometimes like top off, like in a hurry. They'll do that if they keep diesel around for like their tractor or whatever the fuck. Brooke I mean, it's probably better than...may be....I'm guessing, totally guessing, that it might be better than letting it run dry, because that can be an expensive fuckup. Margaret Yeah, if you do that you have to change at very least the oil filter. And then if not the also the fucking spark plugs and all this shit and the parts are cheap, the capacity to do it without exploding things is harder. This is sort of beside the point that only applies to oil. Let's talk about other ways to heat homes. Casandra So, yeah, other ways to heat your homes or more like how to keep heat in. I was researching this anyway, because my house has lots of windows like huge, like walls of windows, which is beautiful, but they're all single pane and none of them seal. Like literally, there's no, I don't even, I still haven't figured out what this type of window's called, but it's like slats of...horizontal slats of glass sort of layered on top of each other, and you can crank it so they tilt open or crank it so they tilt shut, but there's nothing actually...like air just you know, comes in. So using that fun, classy plastic stuff that's temporary to cover your windows. That's one of my plans this year, the few windows that don't have that tilty glass, that's an official term, I'm going around the edges and caulking them. I checked on my door seals. I learned that they're like energy efficient electric blankets. Casandra I'm anticipating that if I set my set my thermostat a lot lower and like use those while I'm working during the day or even at night, maybe that will be helpful. Margaret Oh, that's cool. Brooke Heavy curtains can help too. With Windows. Casandra Yeah! Inulated curtains! Brooke That can be a real trade off if you have any like seasonal effective disorder, light issues, but like they can do a lot to keep the cold back if you have a heavy curtain that you hang over the window. Casandra Totally, yeah, those are super effective. Margaret And then you can play the fun game of opening them when the sun's out and then closing them when the sun's gone. Casandra Though here when the sun's out, it's colder. Margaret Oh, okay. Yeah. Casandra So, that's why we're all sad all winter. Margaret Yeah. Casandra Let's see, did I find anything else exciting? People are on social media right now sharing all of these like wild ideas about how to heat your house. And, I haven't tried these. I'm not going to vouch for them. But some of them are really interesting. So, one is like, when you're baking, you put very, already dry, that's important, bricks in the bottom of your oven, because they hold in heat. So, when you're done baking, you can open your oven and turn your oven off and the bricks will keep your house apparently. People are making a little like tea light and flower pot heaters. Margaret Can I talk shit on those really quick? Casandra Yeah, please do. Margaret They're bullshit. They're absolutely bullshit. Casandra I kind of figured. Also, like open flames? Margaret Yeah, no. And like actually, a lot of them the the actual clay pot can get hot enough to catch the candle wax on fire. And so, there's been like a bunch of houses, people have like burned down their houses trying to use these fucking things. And it would take like, I think it I looked this up the other day, it would take like hundreds of these to heat a small room. The time in which that this is a reasonably efficient thing to do is an emergency or survival situation. If you make...if you're in a fucking tent, if you're in, if you're in your house, you can do this, you can throw a blanket. If you're trying to heat up the space hidden under a blanket. A candle can be a meaningful part of that. But, if you're trying to heat up even a small room, they're not a meaningful part of it in terms of the trade off, but the stuff about thermal mass like these bricks, sorry, is it okay to just tangent on this? Casandra No please do. These are my like things that people are talking about that kind of sketched me out. Margaret Yeah, and so it's like in that I haven't specifically researched putting the bricks in the oven. What I would probably do, I mean, you want thermal mass thermal mass doesn't heat things. It's like a battery. It's a heat battery, right? And so like for example, what a lot of people do is if you put like...thermal mass is often like clay or something like that. Some people even historically use like stored jugs of water and stuff where the sun comes in and heats it up or wherever your passive heating comes from. Then it radiates out that heat once the heat sources gone. And so, you can keep your house cooler at night by having a lot of thermal mass. This is one reason why cob houses have some advantages in a lot of climates and adobe and all that stuff right. And concrete even, can actually act as thermal mass, although I don't know as much about the efficiency of that. Brick houses have an advantage for this. But yeah, like a lot of the hacks around like, "Oh, light a candle," are like just a really good way to burn your house down. Casandra Well, it's not even just a candle. People are like building...like constructing these like...you take a flower pot. You know what I'm talking about? Margaret Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, so and that doesn't actually amplify...Okay, so this idea where you take the candle and you put the flower pot on top of it and the terracotta flower pot is amplifies the heat, it doesn't amplify shit, you can't amplify heat. That's like one of the laws of thermodynamics. But you can't store the heat and you can centralize the, so it doesn't get lost as much, right? So in some weird ways as maybe like a handwarmer, it would like be maybe a little bit more effective, right? Because Casandra That's an expensive handwarmer. I'm gonna knit gloves. Margaret Yeah, totally. And so it, the, the flower pot itself does get so hot, and especially if you put enough candles under it to make it useful. And you can see there's a bunch of like research that people have done, where they're like, "Oh, the flower pot gets up to 170 degrees with one candle or like 400 something degrees with four candles," or something roughly like that. I don't have the numbers in front of me. But, it doesn't make enough heat to fill a space. It instead is actually specifically preventing that heat from going out into the space, which is... Casandra Which is why it gets so hot. Margaret Yeah, totally. And again, like I mean, I don't know, and there's some advantages to it. But overall, however, I think the alcohol lamps that people make, the like DIY, there's like, like the heater block, and I think it's Philly, I can't remember. Brooke Portland has one. Margaret They like make...you can make alcohol lamps, as little portable heaters. And, and when you're talking about like a tent or something in a survival situation, they are fairly effective. I actually don't know enough about the BTUs that they put out to, to in terms of heating and other spaces. That that's beyond what I know. That what's my rant about candles, sorry. Casandra No, I appreciate the rant. My contribution was gonna be like, people are talking about sketchy shit that I don't know about. So confirming that it's sketchy shit is great. Yeah, I don't know. Do y'all know any other fun ways? I'm trying to think about like, my grandparents live in a really old house, and they have a wood stove, which heats one room. And the house is very long and thin. So, it heats one room on one end of the house and their bedrooms on the other end. So, all of the weird shit I've seen them do over the years to stay warm, like the window plastic, or those like long sock things that you put at the bottom of doors, you know, I'm talking about? Margaret Oh, yeah, totally. My house. I mean, I clearly bought my house with like 'prepper' in mind, but my house has the two different wood burning stoves, or one's a pellet stove, which are more like human energy efficient, but they require electricity, so a little bit more complicated. It's like a wood burning stove, but it's a little pellets of fuel that you can buy super cheap, but you have to buy them. You can make them yourself, but it's super labor intensive and complicated. I looked into it for a while. And then I have a regular wood burning stove in the basement and the wood burning stove is actually hooked into the HVAC like vent system in my house. And so that is something you can do is you can put a wood burning stove and hook it up to...this is not a simple retrofit. Installation in general, just fucking add insulation to your house however you can, which sometimes means like, you know, tearing open the walls and putting in more insulation or putting more insulation in your attic. If you have an attic or Casandra Covering your fireplace when you're not using it, that's one I'm learning. Margaret Oh, really? Oh, that makes sense. Because it just goes up out into the...Yeah, Casandra Yeah, even when it's closed, it can still suck heat out. Not using fans for too long, which sucks. I'm thinking about like bathrooms. You know? Margaret I see Yeah, yeah. Casandra Like, above your kitchen stove. Margaret Yeah, hmm, that makes sense. Brooke One thing I've done for the last several years to conserve energy use is to consolidate where in the house I am located and or with my person, or people are located to a single room or a portion of the house and then closing up the rest of it and closing the vents that go there and all of that and just focusing the heat on wherever I am or I am with my kid or whatever it is. Casandra Oh, closing the vents you're not using as a good idea. Brooke Yeah, so like when she's off at school while I'm working, I close the door to my office, close most of the rest of the house. And then when it's like the two of us, we'll hang out in just her room with the vent open, or just our two bedrooms that are next to each other with vents open. Margaret And it's it's another advantage of people who choose to live communally is that I mean more people in a house is just going to warm things up a lot, like putting a bunch of people into a room with closed...that's like closed off and insulated is a real good way to stay warm. So like, I don't know, use this as an opportunity to get close to someone, I mean, very consensually and stuff. Brooke I was gonna say cuddling. Cuddling is a good way to provide heat. Margaret Get a dog. Brooke Or fucking Margaret I take back the part about the dog. Okay. Casandra They're also, both in Europe and I know state by state and the US, there're also energy and utility assistance programs and grants that have always been available, but it's seems like more are starting to become available. So, if you live somewhere colder than me, it's a good thing to look into. Margaret Well, and then also in Oregon, starting in 2024, Medicaid is going to cover expenses related to climate change in terms of like, generators and air filters and shit like that. Brooke That's amazing. I haven't heard that. Margaret I just read about it while I was getting ready for this episode. Brooke If you think you may qualify for one of the energy assistance programs, that's something to look into sooner rather than later, like, Now, instead of before the colds get real high, or the bills get real high. I know that one of the programs here in our town, for instance, only has a few days a month in which they accept applications. And we'll even close that, you know, for the next month if they got too many in the previous month kind of a thing. Casandra Yeah. Yeah, then, yeah. The The only other thing I wanted to bring up with all of this is that, you know, we've talked in past episodes about how expensive food is getting and how expensive everything's getting, and with rising energy costs, that's just going to contribute to inflation more because of businesses are having to pay more money to stay open. You know? Margaret Yeah. Brooke But Biden just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, so everything's gonna be fine now. Casandra Right? Brooke He did it. Casandra Okay? Brooke He solved it. Margaret Yeah, thanks, O-Biden. Casandra 'O-Biden?' is that what you said? Brooke Haven't you heard that joke? Margaret Usually, it's because you want to complain about something. The gas prices are high, like, "Thanks, O-Biden," because people always said, "Thanks, Obama." Casandra Okay. Yeah. Thanks for explaining jokes to me. Brooke Well, Biden's just Obama's puppet. I mean, haven't you heard that he's old and senile, and it's actually just secretly Obama still running the country through Biden? Margaret Who's totally not old and senile. Casandra I mean, according to Tulsi this morning, it's it's actually the elite Cabal. So. Brooke There's a whole other conversation I want to have with you about why everyone is so anti--fucking-semetic. But that's like not on our topic list. Casandra Oh, gosh, the French Revolution. Brooke If we want to do a segue I really really want to talk about it. Casandra Now we're gonna segue to talk about the French Revolution. Margaret Welcome to Mediocre People Who Made Lateral Moves, the new podcast about all the revolutions that have happened Casandra and how people blamed it all on the Jews. Margaret The only revolutions accepted are the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican Revolution kinda, yeah. Anyway, Brooke This is the thing I don't understand. Like, why why is anti-semitism been such a global thing for fucking ever? Like, I can't think of another group of people that have had it quite like the Jews. Casandra It's called the coldest hatred for a reason. Margaret I mean, everyone has it different. I think anti-blackness is also real fucking old and anti-indigenous as soon as we find y'all. Casandra There's these interesting accounts of of...We should not go on this tangent. Brooke But it's interesting. Casandra I could talk for too long. Brooke It's topical. Casandra It's always topical. Brooke Exactly. Casandra Oh, what were some of our other fun topics? Margaret Okay, let's talk about hurricanes. Can I talk about hurricanes? Casandra Hurray! Margaret Oh, wait first I wanna talk about about corn really quickly. It's like a short note. Okay, so by 2053, the Corn Belt won't be able to grow corn. Brooke What? Casandra Wow. Margaret Because there will be days 125 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. And of course, corn is already having trouble now. It's not like a switch that will be flipped in 30 years. And also, my cynical ass has been proven right every time someone's like, "All of the X will happen by 2080." I'm like, that's gonna be way sooner. And then like 2020 comes around, they're like, "Yeah, nevermind this is sooner." And then so some of the solutions that people are trying to come up with around this, some of them are like make a lot of sense about like, being a little less monocroppy and like, and people are like getting really into perennial grains. But, of course they're doing it in like weird capitalist ways. So there's like weird named ways to be less monocrappy. And there's also this perennial grain that's like trademarked called Kernza which is a plant name with a little reserved symbol after his name. So that's how you know, it's good. And basically, a lot of the existing perennial grains are actually more like hays and things are for foraging. And so intermediate wheat grass is Kernza. It's a type of intermediate wheat grass, which is not actually wheat, but has a similar grains. However, they're currently trying to hybridize it with wheat and it's hard to bake with because it's not as gluttony. Unfortunately, it still has some gluten, so it's not the solution for that problem, either. But, people are trying to do some weird shit. Then I could talk about hurricanes unless y'all wanna talk about corn. Casandra Most grass seed is edible. That's my contribution. Brooke Also tubers. So plant yourself some day-lilies, dahlias. Casandra Turnips. Brooke They're pretty and then you can eat them. Casandra We should bring back neeps as a instead of mashed potatoes, mashed neeps. Margaret Y'all are just making up things. Casandra We're listening now. Margaret Casandra's always making up plants that don't exist. There's only three plants: corn, potato, and grapes. Casandra I thought it was wheat. Margaret Oh, yeah, and wheat. Brooke I know you've seen apples. And also, I've given you kale. So. Margaret That's just fancy. It's just different forms of...okay to be fair, broccoli, kale...Can you help me list off all of these things that are the same plant? Casandra Brassicas? Margaret Yeah. Brooke Cauliflower? Brussels sprouts, cabbage, mustard. Margaret Everything is already secretly...the the secret cabal that we should be blaming is the brassicas. Casandra Plant families? Margaret No, just brassicas, because they're everything. Everywhere you look, it's brassicas. Casandra Unless it's a nightshade. Brooke I get what you're looking for. And I'm with you. Margaret Okay, so hurricanes. So, there's two things about hurricane survival. And one is like this, like promising thing, although it ties into some bougie shit is that like....cause obviously, people who are listening this...a lot of people are listening to us have dealt with hurricanes more immediately and recently than any of the three of us have. And so I don't mean to be light hearted about like, you know, like, whatever I want to say that, like people are dealing with this shit...I, I'm not trying to...It's a big fucking deal. Okay. One thing is that communities absolutely can be built to survive hurricanes. And it isn't done because people aren't rich enough. And because doing so is incentivized, and because people don't value this, right. It's like a combination of these things. Have you heard of this small town called Babcock Ranch that survived Hurricane Ian? Brooke Nope. Margaret Okay, there's this. It was built in 2015 People started moving into in 2018. It's a 2000 home community. And it's, it's sort of like actually mixed class a little bit. The houses start at 200,000 and go up to a million dollars. And it's, and they're like working on building condos and stuff. And it is meant to survive hurricanes. This is in fucking Florida. And it got hit by Ian. And so it makes sense to build things are meant to survive hurricanes. The streets are designed to absorb water. I think that they're designed to absorb water into like, basically almost a French drain system that runs underneath where there's like pipes or whatever. I know that they are capable of making this like some kind of concrete that water can just like flow right through. And I think that's what's happening. Yeah, Brooke Yeah, pervious concrete. yeah. Casandra What is that not everywhere? Brooke More expensive, Margaret Because people don't value infrastructure in this country. And and then there's, they use native landscaping everywhere to like limit flooding. They do all this stuff to like, make sure that...because flooding kills more people in hurricanes than wind. And so they do all of this stuff with native landscaping to limit flooding. The power and all the communication lines are buried, which is another thing that should just be happening everywhere, but isn't. Like where I live, I lose power all the fucking time, because like, "Oh, sorry, a tree fell on a power plant. Power Pole." Casandra Are you laughing at me Brooke? Brooke I'm picturing your backyard right now where you could like, garrote yourself with your power lines in your back yard. Casandra That my landlord is like, "This is not a problem." Yeah. Margaret Yeah, no, totally. And like, every...where I live like a tree falls on...it's like, it's like once a month, I lose power for a day, because I'm in the fucking mountains with really shallow soil, and so the trees fall over every time there's a windstorm, but we're in the fucking mountain. So there's wind storms all the time. Anyway, so they bury their power and internet lines. And the whole town has it's own solar array that powers like all of it, and 8000 other nearby homes. And so, to that 2.6 million people lost power during Hurricane Ian but not Babcock Ranch. And this was its first like trial by fire. And to be and to be fair to them they weren't total assholes about it. It wasn't like "I've got mine fuck you." They turned their school into a shelter for all the nearby folks, because it still had power even though, it like I think I think it couldn't be registered as an official storm shelter because didn't have a generator. But, it didn't need one. Casandra Cause it didn't need one? Margaret Because it had its own fucking micro grid. Casandra Wow, amazing. Bureaucracy. Margaret Yeah. So that's like, what we could be doing, right? We could have a society that like, prepares for these things, you know, and like there are ways to build things if people are able, if people are able to have the resources or like institutions are willing to give resources to make things that are appropriate to their area you know, you can have fire resistant homes you can have...I mean everything would just be concrete domes if I had my way as of the past six months, but then I'm sure get over this particular infatuation with concrete domes, but they're like everything proof. Okay, anyway. Except aesthetic proof. Okay, so actually, okay, whatever. The other thing that's... Brooke Also concrete is not great for the environment and climate change. It's really bad, actually. Margaret Yeah, but it has actually weirdly, I haven't looked in this little while, there's the embedded greenhouse gases and in terms of how long it lasts are like, compare favorably in a lot of ways. And also in terms of its insulating...Well, its insulating properties because of thickness. The way it's constructed is...the way it's made is not nice. You can you can also disagree with me about this. Brooke No, that's fair. And there's been recent research and work into putting cellulose into concrete mixtures that actually helps. I can't remember all the beneficial properties of it, but some really cool research that's out there about about mixing wood fibers. Margaret That's cool. Plus brutalism is way cooler than...anyways Okay, whatever. Now everyone's gonna hate me if I start talking about liking brutalism. Alright, so hurricanes, I have never survived a hurricane, just to be really clear. And so I'm not trying to tell everyone....okay, but I it's my disclaimer, I researched... Brooke You've also never not survived a hurricane. Margaret That's true. Oh, I see what you're saying. Every time I'm in a hurricane, I die. I've been playing this...I want...this video game I've been playing called...Okay. So, God, what if I was...the ultimate prepper would be Groundhog Day guy. That's what he really should have done. Margaret You ever seen that movie "Hurricane Day" where the person has no...groundhog, whatever, as a movie,... Casandra What? Casandra What does Groundhog Day have to do with hurricanes? Margaret Okay, but if you died and came back every single day, you could do so much research. The ultimate scientist Casandra No one can see me putting my head in my hands. Brooke They just heard the thunk of your skull on the table there. Margaret Alright, so what to do if you live in the path of a hurricane and you don't live in a little weird prepper neighborhood. First of all, if you live in a mobile home, I'm sure you already know that life sucks, because classism is real and awful, but mobile homes are in a really bad situation. And I'm sure you already know that. Hurricane timing is forcastable, but its course is less predictable. So, you can start knowing that a hurricane is possible, but you won't necessarily know where it exactly where it's going and exactly what kind of power it will have by the time it lands. Flooding kills more people than wind. And basically the best that I've been able to read and find different people have researched this is that like overall evacuating if the instructions say you should evacuate is probably the best move. And, voluntary evac happens before mandatory evac. Voluntary often comes earlier to basically give people to get a head start, because when everyone tries to leave an area all at once it fucking sucks. I'd love to at some point, talk to someone who has done more work into evac, and like talk about like what it means to transport oneself over a roads during those kinds of crises. But, and to be clear, mandatory evacuation doesn't mean they come around at gunpoint to force you out, it means that no one will help you while you stay. At least that's the official version of it. If you're going to stay or rather, if you like think that you might be stuck, consider being able to survive two weeks without outside help or without the grid. And the grid in this case means water. And it means probably the ability to heat food if you run on a municipal gas line or power, right. And that also means electricity. And so you want like for example 15 gallons of water per person in storage containers. You want two weeks of non refrigerated food that doesn't require utility cooking gas, because maybe you have a separate gas stove you know, or you're planning a cold cans of chili or whatever. You want a battery or hand crank radio, you want to get medical kit. If you're trained, you want a chainsaw, but one of the main ways that people kill themselves in the wake of disasters is using chainsaws incorrectly to try and like move down trees and stuff. One of the other main ways is like propane and propane accessories, and people trying to use like shit that you shouldn't use inside inside. Don't run a fucking generator in your house or your garage. Make sure everyone has a flashlight. When you're prepping your house. You want to bring in everything in your yard like furniture and tools. You want to get directions to local evacuation shelters and you want to have them printed out and or like saved offline in Google's maps. You want to prepare your house for internal flooding by moving shit up off the floor, and like getting everything that you don't want to get wet available. Make sure it's able to stay dry. You want to know how to shut off your utility gas, water and electric in your house. You do want to fill up your bathtubs for extra water, but don't fucking rely on this. This isn't the like "Haha," everyone's like , "Oh it's cool I got like you know this bathtub filled with water." You usually want to use bathtub water more for sanitation water. You want to turn your fridge and freezer to the coldest settings and make sure they're packed full of thermal mass like we were talking about. Thermal mass is also a battery for cold as well as heat. So for example, your freezer works way less hard if it's full of frozen bottles of water. And so, if you feel plastic water bottles like 90% full, and this is true generally speaking, right? A full fridge or freezer works way less hard. And, because you know it's not stuff that disappears every time you open the fucking door whatever. In general, your fridge or freezer can last about two days without power if they're like real packed full of thermal mass and set to the coldest. In terms of long term preparation for your house, if you live somewhere and you're trying to retrofit shit, you kind of want to go through and make sure that there's hurricane ties attaching your roof to your house. And do the same with your deck and shit, which are just basically these like metal straps that attach one piece of wood to another piece of wood. If you look up hurricane ties, you'll see pictures of them. And then you can go up to your attic or whatever and look to see if you have them. And you can you can retro actively add this, because what happens, the way that wind destroys a house, first, it like pulls off like shingles and siding and stuff that only sort of matter. And then it starts breaking out windows with debris, and doors flying open because of wind, and stuff like that. But then eventually you get to the point where the fucking roof rips off your house is like one of the main things, and then once the roof rips off your house, then the walls have nothing supporting them, so then they fall over. And so you can do a lot of stuff with your doors also to help protect them, especially if you have like double doors, you can add bolts to the inactive door, the door that doesn't open, or the door that doesn't have the handle or whatever, and you had bolts that go up into the ceiling and through the floor. It's also stuff that makes your house harder to break into, which is like cool bonus, right? And garage doors, our old friend garage doors. Casandra Why we're really talking about this. Margaret I know Margaret They they can be storm proofed, but it means you buy a new one. And, I have a feeling that they are expensive and hard to get right now. Like old articles are like "Oh, they cost between $1,000 and $5,000 for a storm proof garage door and I assume that that is not easily the case right now. Okay, and in terms of covering your windows, you want to cover all the windows in your house, not just the ones facing the water. And ideally, if you live there like long term, you want to actually get storm shutters, but those can be expensive. Worst case scenario, you can screw plywood or metal roofing over the windows and glass doors. With plywood you want to aim for about a half inch thick at least, half inch to five eighths. And particle board, don't use particle board or MDF, because probably not strong enough. I don't know and there's just like other shit right like you keep your car packed and facing outward with gas in it. However also, you might want to keep it in a garage and or at least next to a solid building, so that it doesn't fucking blow away or get destroyed by things. Fill up an extra gas can or two because fuck it there's often gonna be gas shortages after these sorts of things. Don't fucking drive through floodwater, that is another way that people die all the fucking time. Like it's about a foot or something of flood that will move a car that will like take a car away. It's way less than you think. Don't fucking drink floodwater. Most of the ways that people water filter don't filter out like gasoline and all kinds of other shit. With a generator, don't fucking run it inside. During the storm, don't go outside during the Eye of the Storm, it'll come back suddenly. Stay away from your windows and glass doors and such. Don't take a shower or a bath because of electrical risk. Kill the power of the main breaker if flooding is coming. And that is what I learned not through direct experience, because again I've died every time I've tried these...I've never been in a hurricane. I've been on the coast rain some storms, right, some tropical storms and shit. But I've never personally been through a hurricane. Brooke Full circle. Casandra We should add like Hurricane Preparedness Guide to our list along with the First Aid Guide. That'd be cool. We should talk to like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief folks or someone. Margaret Yeah. Agreed. Casandra Cool. But this isn't a Strangers meeting, so... Margaret No. Welcome to our Strangers meeting. Brooke You hurri-'can' survive. Margaret Hurri-'can't.' It's a hurri-'can', not a hurri-'can't.' But, that's...the hurricane itself can destroy houses. It can't...It's a hurri-'can' destroy houses not a hurric-'can't' destroy houses. Got it. You see what I'm getting at. It's a funny joke. Brooke You're hurri-canceled. Love it. Casandra When Margaret makes jokes... Brooke Margaret makes great dad jokes and I love it. So does my kid. Casandra It's us, not you. Margaret I say a few short things with our last five minutes. Margaret No, no, it's fine. It's fine. I mean, I'm trying to make you laugh, so you all laughing works. Okay, so I don't know, what other what other shit? I got. I got like some like little short things. Is anyone else have a major topic? We should talk about it? Should we go into short things? Margaret Okay, here's the ones I've got. Other people add them at the end. Monkeypox transmission is slowing. There's a small chance it's gonna go endemic, but like overall. monkeypox transmission is slowing. And that's cool. You should still go get fucking vaccinated, though. I should go get vaccinated. LA is installing water restrictors in houses of people who break their water limit, including like including rich people, which is great. Like basically if anyone is using more than 150% of their limit like they're going around and just like literally being like, "You get less water now." The Mississippi River is currently so low that grain and fertilizer transports are halted. Brooke And that's contributing to supply chain shortages in all kinds of ways, because they can't get stuff up here. Margaret It also fucks up China. They apparently...a lot of them...They get a lot of soybeans from the US, and 40% of the US soybean export to China comes through the Mississippi River. The Army Corps of Engineers, don't worry as dredging the river to deepen it. Brooke Great. Margaret So that they can still ship things there. Brooke I'm sure that no part of the Mississippi River is a Superfund site or anything like that, and highly toxic. Margaret Nah, it's fine. I'm sure it's good. I bet everyone who's working that job will be treated well. And a British Columbia river has dried up, and I think a bunch of British Columbia rivers have dried up. They're facing like one of the worst fucking droughts ever, which has killed 65,000 salmon, and has cut spawning by 70%, at least in this area. Bird flu in California is killing a ton of birds. I saw this thing, I was like reading oh, it's like a bird flu again. Goddamnit. And then I'm like, Oh, it's just killing birds...Wait, no, birds are good. Casandra Yeah, we need birds. Margaret Yeah. Oil prices might go up again, because OPEC countries are cutting oil production more. Thanks. O-Biden. Inflation is causing manufacturers to start using cheaper ingredients. That's like one of the main ways that like manufacturers are getting around this. And so like a lot of shit they're used to using and trust might now be made like shit. Casandra I've read about new homes they're building as well. Margaret Oh, great, because that's what we need is cheaper designed homes. Casandra Yeah, they're like, A) don't buy a home right now. But B) when you can buy a home in the future, maybe someday don't buy homes built right now. Brooke I hear that. Margaret That makes sense. Brooke But Biden passed the inflation Reduction Act, you guys, so it's gonna be fine. Margaret Yeah, the fine print is like, "Now use refined," I don't know, whatever, "corn syrup instead of..." Brooke And the Federal Reserve is raising the target interest rate. So, it's gonna be fine. Casandra Have you all seen the new like COVID antivax study that just came out? Margaret No. Brooke Nope. Oh, we were supposed to die yesterday. Casandra Apparently, I'm using air quotes, a study came out linking the risk of like heart disease with COVID vaccines in 'men' in particular, something like that. And so, you know, anti vaxxers are like, "See!" Margaret I wonder if it came out because...the the one that I had heard was that there was a study that came out and I don't have these numbers in front of me, and I'm sorry, audience. I think it's, I think that the the rate of death among Republicans is 18% higher than the rate of death among Democrats, with all other factors considered, as soon as the vaccine came out. And like, yeah, exactly just the vaccine came out people who didn't get it just fucking die more. Brooke Comparative Study. Margaret Conspiracy, to try and kill all the Republicans, by the Republican leaders. No, no, wait, go ahead, Brooke. Sorry. Brooke No, I was gonna give more details on the study. But y'all can y'all can look it up. It was definitely aninteresting study. And it's not like 100% due to COVID for sure. At least they can't like rule out... because it was like measure of excess deaths. And they don't have all the specifics on that. But yeah, a large portion of that is due to vaccine versus not vaccine. Than also there was some tweet that made the rounds that that we were all going to die on October 10 because something was gonna get activated in the vaccine. Y'all see this on Twitter at all? Margaret That explains why I died in the hurricane. Casandra I want to back up to the study I mentioned because I didn't clarify that there were like major issues with it. That's all. I didn't want. I didn't want to bring up like this study antivaxxers are using without saying like there were major issues with the study. Margaret Yeah. That makes sense. Casandra Yeah, that tracks. Margaret Well, does that do it for us this month? Casandra That was a lot. It really was a lot of bad things. Margaret Oh, one good final thing. Tankers that go around with like, all the stuff that they ship around, are starting to add sails back, and it saves about 10% of their fuel. This is a really minor thing. Brooke Sailing sails? Margaret Yeah, yeah. Brooke Math. Nice. Margaret Like all the container ships and shit. Not all of them, but they're starting to add sails to container ships to help alleviate the cost of fuel to move everything around. Whatever it is a really minor thing. I just thought was neat. This is my final note. Casandra Yay, sailboats. Margaret Yeah. The global economy that got us into this mess in the first place trudging along. Casandra Ohhhh. Well, stay warm out there, everyone. Margaret Brooke, you want to lead us out? Brooke Yeah, I do. So, I took your outro from from the last episode and transcribed it. I'm just gonna I'm gonna read it word for word, Margaret. Margaret Oh, God. Brooke Are you ready for how great this is gonna be? Margaret Yeah, let me hold on to something. Alright. Brooke And then maybe I'll do a real one after I do this. Thanks so much for listening. Algorithms suck, but if you like this podcast, please like comment, review, blah, blah, blah. It makes the algorithms give our show to more people. It's kind of the only way people end up hearing about our shows is word of mouth. All of that stuff's true. I'm not just saying it cynically, it's just that I have said it, like, whatever, I'm on Episode 50, or whatever. So I've said it like 50 times, and you can support us on Patreon by supporting our publisher, our publisher is Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness. The three of us are collective members of a collectively run publisher called Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness. It's been around for like 20 years, but it's like getting new mega forces Voltron combines version of itself lately, and it's primarily supported by Patreon. Brooke I think that was perfect. Flawless. And also, that means that Inmn doesn't have to transcribe it again. Margaret Yeah. Brooke You're welcome, Inmn. Just copy/paste. But more seriously, this podcast is produced by the anarchist publishing collective Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness. And you can connect with us on Twitter at Tangledwild. And I think we have like Instagram and stuff too. But I don't do Instagram and I think Instagram's

Marina Nitze reveals what makes bureaucracies tick and how you can work your way through them. — YOU'LL LEARN — 1) Why bureaucracies can actually be great 2) Six favorite bureaucracy hacks 3) What not to do when trying to challenge a bureaucracy Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep810 for clickable versions of the links below. — ABOUT MARINA — Marina Nitze, co-author of the new book Hack Your Bureaucracy, is a partner at Layer Aleph, a crisis response firm specializing in restoring complex software systems to service. Marina is also a fellow at New America's New Practice Lab, where she improves America's foster care system through the Resource Family Working Group and Child Welfare Playbook. Marina was the CTO of the VA after serving as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House. She lives in Seattle.• Book: Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team • Twitter: @MarinaNitze • Website: HackYourBureaucracy.com — RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW — • Book: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut• Book: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen• Book: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert• Book: The Success Principles(TM): How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Canfield and Janet SwitzerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

GUEST: John Smith, Former Head of Cadillac and Author; PANEL: Doron Levin, Seeking Alpha; Gary Vasilash, on Automotive; John McElroy, Autoline.tv

The Bureaucracy Busting Concordat, is guidance launched in August 2022 by the UK Government outlining principles to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative burdens on general practice. In particular how national and local government departments outside of the NHS can structure their process to reduce requests for information and other demands from health services.Join us as we explore the document and implications.https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/bureaucracy-busting-concordat-principles-to-reduce-unnecessary-bureaucracy-and-administrative-burdens-on-general-practice/bureaucracy-busting-concordat-principles-to-reduce-unnecessary-bureaucracy-and-administrative-burdens-on-general-practice Join the GP5T team for our fourth virtual conference offering amazing and unique content to support you as a GP trainerRegister now: https://bit.ly/GP5T4 Join the Medics Money New To GP partnership course for the leaders in finance, wellbeing, workload management, and your peers on the same journey to become a safe, effective, healthy GP partner. Join at medicsmoney.co.uk/gpcourse and reference eGPlearning

How often do you feel stifled by all the red tape? Do you ever think you could get more done if your organization wasn't so bureaucratic? Nick Sinai tells Kevin that bureaucracy is just organizations with rules and procedures. It does not have a positive or negative connotation. However, when we take the time to understand them, we can continue to improve them. Further, you don't need to be an executive to get things done. When people take change on themselves, they build the momentum for change. Nick shares some bureaucratic hacks to get unstuck. Key Points Nick Sinai defines bureaucracy.  He gives us some hacks, like watercooler rules, one pager, the power of the pilot, and understanding the real org chart. Meet Nick Name: Nick Sinai  His Story: Nick Sinai is the co-author of Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team with Marina Nitze. He is a venture capitalist, adjunct Harvard faculty, and a former senior White House official in the Obama Administration. As a Senior Advisor at Insight Partners, Nick serves on the board of Rebellion Defense, Hawkeye360, LeoLabs, and Shift5. Worth Mentioning: 

Does it feel like you're jumping through hoops to get things done? From local government to the White House, Harvard to the world of venture capital, Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai have taken on some of the world's most challenging bureaucracies—and won. In this episode, they bring their years of experience to you, teaching you strategies anyone can use to improve your organization through their own stories and those of fellow bureaucracy hackers. Change doesn't happen just because the person in charge declares it should. Regardless of your industry, role, or team, learn how to get started, take initiative on your own, and transform your ideas into impact. You don't want to miss this episode and the incredible hope (and wisdom) Marina and Nick share! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seth Siegel is a writer, lawyer, activist, serial entrepreneur, and an acclaimed public speaker. You might have read his "Troubled Water" book - and if you haven't, you should - or his international best-seller "Let there be Water," translated into 20 languages. If you recall the first episode of Season 2 of this podcast, Elango Thevar, the CEO and founder of Neer, explained how the decisive kick to start his entrepreneurial adventure was reading Seth Siegel's book: Troubled Water, what's wrong with what we drink.  Ever since, whenever I ask my guests what book was and still is influential in their water endeavors, both Troubled Water and Let there be Water regularly come on top! So when I got to meet Seth at the Rethinking Water conference recently organized by Sciens Water in New York, I thought he might have one golden nugget or two to share with all of us. And indeed, he even had a bit more, as you'll swiftly notice. So without further due, I'll let you dive into that conversation, but not without reminding you that if you like what you hear, I'd be thankful if you share it with your friends, colleagues, or LinkedIn network. Because that's the only way, I can further grow this podcast and convince speakers like Seth to further stop by my microphone and share their insights with all of us. So please, do it, and I'll meet you on the other side. Seth Siegel: 50'000+ U S Water Utilities, 500 Water Talks, 5 Decisive Truths?

Area resident Rob Anderson expresses his displeasure for the Clark County Council's decision to create a new Jail Services Department. https://bit.ly/3BMR09v #Opinion #LetterToTheEditor #Commentary #RobAnderson #ClarkCountyCouncil #CountyManager #JailServicesDepartment #ClarkCountyJail #ClarkCountySheriffsOffice #CCSO #HomeRuleCharter #Elections #Nov8GeneralElection #VancouverWa #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyNews #ClarkCountyToday

Workplace culture is created by the people on your team, your leaders, and the written and unwritten rules that guide behavior. When these “norms” result in feeling psychologically unsafe or they get in the way of your being effective, it is toxic.   Adam Grant says there are two fundamental tensions in organizational culture - the tension between results and relationship and the tension between rules and risk.  When these tensions are out of balance, it leads to a toxic workplace. Grant says the first sin of a toxic workplace is bad behavior - or toxicity. What we are talking about here is disrespectful, demeaning and abusive behavior, people who are non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat or overly competitive - and of course the list goes on.  The workplace where these negative behaviors occur prioritizes results over relationships.  This kind of behavior in the workplace is one of the drivers of the great resignation.   If a workplace goes to the other side and flips the focus from results to relationships, we have the second sin, which is mediocracy. These workplaces value relationships above results to such a degree that people are not held accountable.  There is no incentive to do a good job because whether you do a good job or a terrible job, the rewards are the same. The third deadly sin of the toxic workplace is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy helps up manage risk - and that is good. If a culture is focused on rules and procedures to manage risk, then there is no creativity, no change and no risk.  As with mediocrity, there is no reward for efficiency, innovation and collaboration.   The other side of bureaucracy is anarchy, the fourth sin of the toxic workplace.  In a culture of anarchy, there is all risk and no rules. Anyone can do whatever they want, strategy and structure be damned. No one learns from the past or lands on the same page. It's pure chaos.  Interpersonal relationships are difficult in a culture with no or few rules because everyone is on their own. Grant has some questions to ask before you take a job to determine culture - and these are great questions for us to ask ourselves about our current work situation: Tell me what happens here that does not happen in other places? Tell me about a time when people did not walk the talk here?   Tell me a story about who gets hired, fired and promoted?   Learning about workplace culture is vital before you take a job.  For those of us who are currently in jobs, these questions can help us discern our discomfort and take action to address it - whether that means leaving a job, changing our attitudes, accepting what is - or even just getting affirmation that our discomfort is valid. Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation

United Auto Workers presidential candidate Will Lehman joins us to discuss how rank-and-file workers can take control of their unions from the bureaucrats who've sold them out. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com

* UN head begins new session warning things are building to a climax and can't continue to go on this way* Pfizer & FDA knew: jab "turned breast milk blue/green", sterilized and killed* Pure Spin — Trump official on with Alex Jones, both still covering up Trump Shots, while reassuring MAGA cult* EU database shows 16x INCREASE in deaths of children as soon as jab got emergency authorization. Bureaucracy begins investigation by changing the 5 yr baseline* Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Nurseries ordered to NOT use male/female pronouns, schools evaluated on pushing LGBT propaganda* Trump & Biden TRILLIONS in "covid cash" used for CRT, UBI and other radical GreatReset agendas* Why the term "global health", like "public health", is pure nonsenseFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughZelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at:  $davidknightshowBTC to:  bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

* UN head begins new session warning things are building to a climax and can't continue to go on this way* Pfizer & FDA knew: jab "turned breast milk blue/green", sterilized and killed* Pure Spin — Trump official on with Alex Jones, both still covering up Trump Shots, while reassuring MAGA cult* EU database shows 16x INCREASE in deaths of children as soon as jab got emergency authorization. Bureaucracy begins investigation by changing the 5 yr baseline* Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Nurseries ordered to NOT use male/female pronouns, schools evaluated on pushing LGBT propaganda* Trump & Biden TRILLIONS in "covid cash" used for CRT, UBI and other radical GreatReset agendas* Why the term "global health", like "public health", is pure nonsenseFind out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.comIf you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughZelle: @DavidKnightShow@protonmail.comCash App at:  $davidknightshowBTC to:  bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Mail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Money is only what YOU hold: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silver

In this Sunday edition: A new exhibit at LACMA features Korean art shown in the U.S. for the first time, and once thought lost.  Then, There's a program in California that provides mental health services for crime victims, but some health providers say that red tape is getting in the way of crucial support. And the story of one woman who was deported to Cambodia — a place she had never even been — but recently got the rare chance to return to the United States. Now, she's speaking out about her experience. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.  Support the show: https://laist.com

Ben Maller talks about the federal government trying to slow NIL deals and why politicians are trying to meddle with college endorsement money, #AskBen, and much more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charles C. Mann is the author of three of my favorite history books: 1491. 1493, and The Wizard and the Prophet. We discuss:why Native American civilizations collapsed and why they failed to make more technological progresswhy he disagrees with Will MacAskill about longtermismwhy there aren't any successful slave revoltshow geoengineering can help us solve climate changewhy Bitcoin is like the Chinese Silver Tradeand much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Some really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy my interviews of Will MacAskill (about longtermism), Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection), and David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.Timestamps(0:00:00) -Epidemically Alternate Realities(0:00:25) -Weak Points in Empires(0:03:28) -Slave Revolts(0:08:43) -Slavery Ban(0:12:46) - Contingency & The Pyramids(0:18:13) - Teotihuacan(0:20:02) - New Book Thesis(0:25:20) - Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley(0:31:15) - Technological Stupidity in the New World(0:41:24) - Religious Demoralization(0:44:00) - Critiques of Civilization Collapse Theories(0:49:05) - Virginia Company + Hubris(0:53:30) - China's Silver Trade(1:03:03) - Wizards vs. Prophets(1:07:55) - In Defense of Regulatory Delays(0:12:26) -Geoengineering(0:16:51) -Finding New Wizards(0:18:46) -Agroforestry is Underrated(1:18:46) -Longtermism & Free MarketsTranscriptDwarkesh Patel   Okay! Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Charles Mann, who is the author of three of my favorite books, including 1491: New Revelations of America before Columbus. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, and The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World. Charles, welcome to the Lunar Society.Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be here.Epidemically Alternate RealitiesDwarkesh Patel   My first question is: How much of the New World was basically baked into the cake? So at some point, people from Eurasia were going to travel to the New World, bringing their diseases. Considering disparities and where they would survive, if the Acemoglu theory that you cited is correct, then some of these places were bound to have good institutions and some of them were bound to have bad institutions. Plus, because of malaria, there were going to be shortages in labor that people would try to fix with African slaves. So how much of all this was just bound to happen? If Columbus hadn't done it, then maybe 50 years down the line, would someone from Italy have done it? What is the contingency here?Charles C. Mann   Well, I think that some of it was baked into the cake. It was pretty clear that at some point, people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere were going to come into contact with each other. I mean, how could that not happen, right? There was a huge epidemiological disparity between the two hemispheres––largely because by a quirk of evolutionary history, there were many more domesticable animals in Eurasia and the Eastern hemisphere. This leads almost inevitably to the creation of zoonotic diseases: diseases that start off in animals and jump the species barrier and become human diseases. Most of the great killers in human history are zoonotic diseases. When people from Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere meet, there are going to be those kinds of diseases. But if you wanted to, it's possible to imagine alternative histories. There's a wonderful book by Laurent Binet called Civilizations that, in fact, does just that. It's a great alternative history book. He imagines that some of the Vikings came and extended further into North America, bringing all these diseases, and by the time of Columbus and so forth, the epidemiological balance was different. So when Columbus and those guys came, these societies killed him, grabbed his boats, and went and conquered Europe. It's far-fetched, but it does say that this encounter would've happened and that the diseases would've happened, but it didn't have to happen in exactly the way that it did. It's also perfectly possible to imagine that Europeans didn't engage in wholesale slavery. There was a huge debate when this began about whether or not slavery was a good idea. There were a lot of reservations, particularly among the Catholic monarchy asking the Pope “Is it okay that we do this?” You could imagine the penny dropping in a slightly different way. So, I think some of it was bound to happen, but how exactly it happened was really up to chance, contingency, and human agency,Weak Points in EmpiresDwarkesh Patel   When the Spanish first arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries, were the Incas and the Aztecs at a particularly weak point or particularly decadent? Or was this just how well you should have expected this civilization to be functioning at any given time period?Charles C. Mann   Well, typically, empires are much more jumbly and fragile entities than we imagine. There's always fighting at the top. What Hernán Cortés was able to do, for instance, with the Aztecs––who are better called The Triple Alliance (the term “Aztec” is an invention from the 19th century). The Triple Alliance was comprised of three groups of people in central Mexico, the largest of which were the Mexica, who had the great city of Tenochtitlan. The other two guys really resented them and so what Cortes was able to do was foment a civil war within the Aztec empire: taking some enemies of the Aztec, some members of the Aztec empire, and creating an entirely new order. There's a fascinating set of history that hasn't really emerged into the popular consciousness. I didn't include it in 1491 or 1493 because it was so new that I didn't know anything about it; everything was largely from Spanish and Mexican scholars about the conquest within the conquest. The allies of the Spaniards actually sent armies out and conquered big swaths of northern and southern Mexico and Central America. So there's a far more complex picture than we realized even 15 or 20 years ago when I first published 1491. However, the conquest wasn't as complete as we think. I talk a bit about this in 1493 but what happens is Cortes moves in and he marries his lieutenants to these indigenous people, creating this hybrid nobility that then extended on to the Incas. The Incas were a very powerful but unstable empire and Pizarro had the luck to walk in right after a civil war. When he did that right after a civil war and massive epidemic, he got them at a very vulnerable point. Without that, it all would have been impossible. Pizarro cleverly allied with the losing side (or the apparently losing side in this in the Civil War), and was able to create a new rallying point and then attack the winning side. So yes, they came in at weak points, but empires typically have these weak points because of fratricidal stuff going on in the leadership.Dwarkesh Patel   It does also remind me of the East India Trading Company.Charles C. Mann   And the Mughal empire, yeah. Some of those guys in Bengal invited Clive and his people in. In fact, I was struck by this. I had just been reading this book, maybe you've heard of it: The Anarchy by William Dalrymple.Dwarkesh Patel   I've started reading it, yeah but I haven't made much progress.Charles C. Mann   It's an amazing book! It's so oddly similar to what happened. There was this fratricidal stuff going on in the Mughal empire, and one side thought, “Oh, we'll get these foreigners to come in, and we'll use them.” That turned out to be a big mistake.Dwarkesh Patel   Yes. What's also interestingly similar is the efficiency of the bureaucracy. Niall Ferguson has a good book on the British Empire and one thing he points out is that in India, the ratio between an actual English civil servant and the Indian population was about 1: 3,000,000 at the peak of the ratio. Which obviously is only possible if you have the cooperation of at least the elites, right? So it sounds similar to what you were saying about Cortes marrying his underlings to the nobility. Charles C. Mann   Something that isn't stressed enough in history is how often the elites recognize each other. They join up in arrangements that increase both of their power and exploit the poor schmucks down below. It's exactly what happened with the East India Company, and it's exactly what happened with Spain. It's not so much that there was this amazing efficiency, but rather, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement for Xcalack, which is now a Mexican state. It had its rights, and the people kept their integrity, but they weren't really a part of the Spanish Empire. They also weren't really wasn't part of Mexico until around 1857. It was a good deal for them. The same thing was true for the Bengalis, especially the elites who made out like bandits from the British Empire.Slave Revolts Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super interesting. Why was there only one successful slave revolt in the new world in Haiti? In many of these cases, the ratios between slaves and the owners are just huge. So why weren't more of them successful?Charles C. Mann   Well, you would first have to define ‘successful'. Haiti wasn't successful if you meant ‘creating a prosperous state that would last for a long time.' Haiti was and is (to no small extent because of the incredible blockade that was put on it by all the other nations) in terrible shape. Whereas in the case of Paul Maurice, you had people who were self-governing for more than 100 years.. Eventually, they were incorporated into the larger project of Brazil. There's a great Brazilian classic that's equivalent to what Moby Dick or Huck Finn is to us called Os Sertões by a guy named Cunha. And it's good! It's been translated into this amazing translation in English called ​​Rebellion in the Backlands. It's set in the 1880s, and it's about the creation of a hybrid state of runaway slaves, and so forth, and how they had essentially kept their independence and lack of supervision informally, from the time of colonialism. Now the new Brazilian state is trying to take control, and they fight them to the last person. So you have these effectively independent areas in de facto, if not de jure, that existed in the Americas for a very long time. There are some in the US, too, in the great dismal swamp, and you hear about those marooned communities in North Carolina, in Mexico, where everybody just agreed “these places aren't actually under our control, but we're not going to say anything.”  If they don't mess with us too much, we won't mess with them too much. Is that successful or not? I don't know.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, but it seems like these are temporary successes..Charles C. Mann   I mean, how long did nations last? Like Genghis Khan! How long did the Khan age last? But basically, they had overwhelming odds against them. There's an entire colonial system that was threatened by their existence. Similar to the reasons that rebellions in South Asia were suppressed with incredible brutality–– these were seen as so profoundly threatening to this entire colonial order that people exerted a lot more force against them than you would think would be worthwhile.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. It reminds me of James Scott's Against the Grain. He pointed out that if you look at the history of agriculture, there're many examples where people choose to run away as foragers in the forest, and then the state tries to bring them back into the fold.Charles C. Mann   Right. And so this is exactly part of that dynamic. I mean, who wants to be a slave, right? So as many people as possible ended up leaving. It's easier in some places than others.. it's very easy in Brazil. There are 20 million people in the Brazilian Amazon and the great bulk of them are the descendants of people who left slavery. They're still Brazilians and so forth, but, you know, they ended up not being slaves.Slavery BanDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's super fascinating. What is the explanation for why slavery went from being historically ever-present to ending at a particular time when it was at its peak in terms of value and usefulness? What's the explanation for why, when Britain banned the slave trade, within 100 or 200 years, there ended up being basically no legal sanction for slavery anywhere in the world?Charles C. Mann   This is a really good question and the real answer is that historians have been arguing about this forever. I mean, not forever, but you know, for decades, and there's a bunch of different explanations. I think the reason it's so hard to pin down is… kind of amazing. I mean, if you think about it, in 1800, if you were to have a black and white map of the world and put red in countries in which slavery was illegal and socially accepted, there would be no red anywhere on the planet. It's the most ancient human institution that there is. The Code of Hammurabi is still the oldest complete legal code that we have, and about a third of it is about rules for when you can buy slaves, when you can sell slaves, how you can mistreat them, and how you can't–– all that stuff. About a third of it is about buying, selling, and working other human beings. So this has been going on for a very, very long time. And then in a century and a half, it suddenly changes. So there's some explanation, and it's that machinery gets better. But the reason to have people is that you have these intelligent autonomous workers, who are like the world's best robots. From the point of view of the owner, they're fantastically good, except they're incredibly obstreperous and when they're caught, you're constantly afraid they're going to kill you. So if you have a chance to replace them with machinery, or to create a wage where you can run wage people, pay wage workers who are kept in bad conditions but somewhat have more legal rights, then maybe that's a better deal for you. Another one is that industrialization produced different kinds of commodities that became more and more valuable, and slavery was typically associated with the agricultural laborer. So as agriculture diminished as a part of the economy, slavery become less and less important and it became easier to get rid of them. Another one has to do with the beginning of the collapse of the colonial order. Part of it has to do with.. (at least in the West, I don't know enough about the East) the rise of a serious abolition movement with people like Wilberforce and various Darwins and so forth. And they're incredibly influential, so to some extent, I think people started saying, “Wow, this is really bad.”  I suspect that if you looked at South Asia and Africa, you might see similar things having to do with a social moment, but I just don't know enough about that. I know there's an anti-slavery movement and anti-caste movement in which we're all tangled up in South Asia, but I just don't know enough about it to say anything intelligent.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, the social aspect of it is really interesting. The things you mentioned about automation, industrialization, and ending slavery… Obviously, with time, that might have actually been why it expanded, but its original inception in Britain happened before the Industrial Revolution took off. So that was purely them just taking a huge loss because this movement took hold. Charles C. Mann   And the same thing is true for Bartolome de Las Casas. I mean, Las Casas, you know, in the 1540s just comes out of nowhere and starts saying, “Hey! This is bad.” He is the predecessor of the modern human rights movement. He's an absolutely extraordinary figure, and he has huge amounts of influence. He causes Spain's king in the 1540s to pass what they call The New Laws which says no more slavery, which is a devastating blow enacted to the colonial economy in Spain because they depended on having slaves to work in the silver mines in the northern half of Mexico and in Bolivia, which was the most important part of not only the Spanish colonial economy but the entire Spanish empire. It was all slave labor. And they actually tried to ban it. Now, you can say they came to their senses and found a workaround in which it wasn't banned. But it's still… this actually happened in the 1540s. Largely because people like Las Casas said, “This is bad! you're going to hell doing this.”Contingency & The Pyramids Dwarkesh Patel   Right. I'm super interested in getting into The Wizard and the Prophet section with you. Discussing how movements like environmentalism, for example, have been hugely effective. Again, even though it probably goes against the naked self-interest of many countries. So I'm very interested in discussing that point about why these movements have been so influential!But let me continue asking you about globalization in the world. I'm really interested in how you think about contingency in history, especially given that you have these two groups of people that have been independently evolving and separated for tens of thousands of years. What things turn out to be contingent? What I find really interesting from the book was how both of them developed pyramids––  who would have thought that structure would be within our extended phenotype or something?Charles C. Mann    It's also geometry! I mean, there's only a certain limited number of ways you can pile up stone blocks in a stable way. And pyramids are certainly one of them. It's harder to have a very long-lasting monument that's a cylinder. Pyramids are also easier to build: if you get a cylinder, you have to have scaffolding around it and it gets harder and harder.With pyramids, you can use each lower step to put the next one, on and on, and so forth. So pyramids seem kind of natural to me. Now the material you make them up of is going to be partly determined by what there is. In Cahokia and in the Mississippi Valley, there isn't a lot of stone. So people are going to make these earthen pyramids and if you want them to stay on for a long time, there's going to be certain things you have to do for the structure which people figured out. For some pyramids, you had all this marble around them so you could make these giant slabs of marble, which seems, from today's perspective, incredibly wasteful. So you're going to have some things that are universal like that, along with the apparently universal, or near-universal idea that people who are really powerful like to identify themselves as supernatural and therefore want to be commemorated. Dwarkesh Patel   Yes, I visited Mexico City recently.Charles C. Mann Beautiful city!TeotihuacanDwarkesh Patel Yeah, the pyramids there… I think I was reading your book at the time or already had read your book. What struck me was that if I remember correctly, they didn't have the wheel and they didn't have domesticated animals. So if you really think about it, that's a really huge amount of human misery and toil it must have taken to put this thing together as basically a vanity project. It's like a huge negative connotation if you think about what it took to construct it.Charles C. Mann   Sure, but there are lots of really interesting things about Teotihuacan. This is just one of those things where you can only say so much in one book. If I was writing the two-thousand-page version of 1491, I would have included this. So Tehuácan pretty much starts out as a standard Imperial project, and they build all these huge castles and temples and so forth. There's no reason to suppose it was anything other than an awful experience (like building the pyramids), but then something happened to Teotihuacan that we don't understand. All these new buildings started springing up during the next couple of 100 years, and they're all very very similar. They're like apartment blocks and there doesn't seem to be a great separation between rich and poor. It's really quite striking how egalitarian the architecture is because that's usually thought to be a reflection of social status. So based on the way it looks, could there have been a political revolution of some sort? Where they created something much more egalitarian, probably with a bunch of good guy kings who weren't interested in elevating themselves so much? There's a whole chapter in the book by David Wingrove and David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything about this, and they make this argument that Tehuácan is an example that we can look at as an ancient society that was much more socially egalitarian than we think. Now, in my view, they go a little overboard–– it was also an aggressive imperial power and it was conquering much of the Maya world at the same time. But it is absolutely true that something that started out one way can start looking very differently quite quickly. You see this lots of times in the Americas in the Southwest–– I don't know if you've ever been to Chaco Canyon or any of those places, but you should absolutely go! Unfortunately, it's hard to get there because of the roads terrible but overall, it's totally worth it. It's an amazing place. Mesa Verde right north of it is incredible, it's just really a fantastic thing to see. There are these enormous structures in Chaco Canyon, that we would call castles if they were anywhere else because they're huge. The biggest one, Pueblo Bonito, is like 800 rooms or some insane number like that. And it's clearly an imperial venture, we know that because it's in this canyon and one side is getting all the good light and good sun–– a whole line of these huge castles. And then on the other side is where the peons lived. We also know that starting around 1100, everybody just left! And then their descendants start the Puebla, who are these sort of intensely socially egalitarian type of people. It looks like a political revolution took place. In fact, in the book I'm now writing, I'm arguing (in a sort of tongue-in-cheek manner but also seriously) that this is the first American Revolution! They got rid of these “kings” and created these very different and much more egalitarian societies in which ordinary people had a much larger voice about what went on.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. I think I got a chance to see the Teotihuacan apartments when I was there, but I wonder if we're just looking at the buildings that survived. Maybe the buildings that survived were better constructed because they were for the elites? The way everybody else lived might have just washed away over the years.Charles C. Mann   So what's happened in the last 20 years is basically much more sophisticated surveys of what is there. I mean, what you're saying is absolutely the right question to ask. Are the rich guys the only people with things that survived while the ordinary people didn't? You can never be absolutely sure, but what they did is they had these ground penetrating radar surveys, and it looks like this egalitarian construction extends for a huge distance. So it's possible that there are more really, really poor people. But at least you'd see an aggressively large “middle class” getting there, which is very, very different from the picture you have of the ancient world where there's the sun priest and then all the peasants around them.New Book ThesisDwarkesh Patel   Yeah. By the way, is the thesis of the new book something you're willing to disclose at this point? It's okay if you're not––Charles C. Mann   Sure sure, it's okay! This is a sort of weird thing, it's like a sequel or offshoot of 1491. That book, I'm embarrassed to say, was supposed to end with another chapter. The chapter was going to be about the American West, which is where I grew up, and I'm very fond of it. And apparently, I had a lot to say because when I outlined the chapter; the outline was way longer than the actual completed chapters of the rest of the book. So I sort of tried to chop it up and so forth, and it just was awful. So I just cut it. If you carefully look at 1491, it doesn't really have an ending. At the end, the author sort of goes, “Hey! I'm ending, look at how great this is!” So this has been bothering me for 15 years. During the pandemic, when I was stuck at home like so many other people, I held out what I had since I've been saving string and tossing articles that I came across into a folder, and I thought, “Okay, I'm gonna write this out more seriously now.” 15 or 20 years later. And then it was pretty long so I thought “Maybe this could be an e-book.” then I showed it to my editor. And he said, “That is not an e-book. That's an actual book.” So I take a chapter and hope I haven't just padded it, and it's about the North American West. My kids like the West, and at various times, they've questioned what it would be like to move out there because I'm in Massachusetts, where they grew up. So I started thinking “What is the West going to be like, tomorrow? When I'm not around 30 or 50 years from now?”It seems to be that you won't know who's president or who's governor or anything, but there are some things we can know. It'd be hotter and drier than it is now or has been in the recent past, like that wouldn't really be a surprise. So I think we can say that it's very likely to be like that. All the projections are that something like 40% of the people in the area between the Mississippi and the Pacific will be of Latino descent–– from the south, so to speak. And there's a whole lot of people from Asia along the Pacific coast, so it's going to be a real ethnic mixing ground. There's going to be an epicenter of energy, sort of no matter what happens. Whether it's solar, whether it's wind, whether it's petroleum, or hydroelectric, the West is going to be economically extremely powerful, because energy is a fundamental industry.And the last thing is (and this is the iffiest of the whole thing), but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the ongoing recuperation of sovereignty by the 294 federally recognized Native nations in the West is going to continue. That's been going in this very jagged way, but definitely for the last 50 or 60 years, as long as I've been around, the overall trend is in a very clear direction. So then you think, okay, this West is going to be wildly ethnically diverse, full of competing sovereignties and overlapping sovereignties. Nature is also going to really be in kind of a terminal. Well, that actually sounds like the 1200s! And the conventional history starts with Lewis and Clark and so forth. There's this breakpoint in history when people who looked like me came in and sort of rolled in from the East and kind of took over everything. And the West disappears! That separate entity, the native people disappear, and nature is tamed. That's pretty much what was in the textbooks when I was a kid. Do you know who Frederick Jackson Turner is? Dwarkesh Patel  No.Charles C. Mann So he's like one of these guys where nobody knows who he is. But he was incredibly influential in setting intellectual ideas. He wrote this article in 1893, called The Significance of the Frontier. It was what established this idea that there's this frontier moving from East to West and on this side was savagery and barbarism, and on this other side of civilization was team nature and wilderness and all that. Then it goes to the Pacific, and that's the end of the West. That's still in the textbooks but in a different form: we don't call native people “lurking savages” as he did. But it's in my kids' textbooks. If you have kids, it'll very likely be in their textbook because it's such a bedrock. What I'm saying is that's actually not a useful way to look at it, given what's coming up. A wonderful Texas writer, Bruce Sterling, says, “To know the past, you first have to understand the future.”It's funny, right? But what he means is that all of us have an idea of where the trajectory of history is going. A whole lot of history is about asking, “How did we get here? How do we get there?” To get that, you have to have an idea of what the “there” is. So I'm saying, I'm writing a history of the West with that West that I talked about in mind. Which gives you a very different picture: a lot more about indigenous fire management, the way the Hohokam survived the drought of the 1200s, and a little bit less about Billy the Kid. Gender Ratios and Silicon Valley Dwarkesh Patel   I love that quote hahaha. Speaking of the frontier, maybe it's a mistaken concept, but I remember that in a chapter of 1493, you talk about these rowdy adventurer men who outnumber the women in the silver mines and the kind of trouble that they cause. I wonder if there's some sort of distant analogy to the technology world or Silicon Valley, where you have the same kind of gender ratio and you have the same kind of frontier spirit? Maybe not the same physical violence––– more sociologically. Is there any similarity there?Charles C. Mann   I think it's funny, I hadn't thought about it. But it's certainly funny to think about. So let me do this off the top of my head. I like the idea that at the end of it, I can say, “wait, wait, that's ridiculous.“ Both of them would attract people who either didn't have much to lose, or were oblivious about what they had to lose, and had a resilience towards failure. I mean, it's amazing, the number of people in Silicon Valley who have completely failed at numbers of things! They just get up and keep‌ trying and have a kind of real obliviousness to social norms. It's pretty clear they are very much interested in making a mark and making their fortunes themselves. So there's at least a sort of shallow comparison, there are some certain similarities. I don't think this is entirely flattering to either group. It's absolutely true that those silver miners in Bolivia, and in northern‌ Mexico, created to a large extent, the modern world. But it's also true that they created these cesspools of violence and exploitation that had consequences we're still living with today. So you have to kind of take the bitter with the sweet. And I think that's true of Silicon Valley and its products *chuckles* I use them every day, and I curse them every day.Dwarkesh Patel   Right.Charles C. Mann   I want to give you an example. The internet has made it possible for me to do something like write a Twitter thread, get millions of people to read it, and have a discussion that's really amazing at the same time. Yet today, The Washington Post has an article about how every book in Texas (it's one of the states) a child checks out of the school library goes into a central state databank. They can see and look for patterns of people taking out “bad books” and this sort of stuff. And I think “whoa, that's really bad! That's not so good.” It's really the same technology that brings this dissemination and collection of vast amounts of information with relative ease. So with all these things, you take the bitter with the sweet. Technological Stupidity in the New WorldDwarkesh Patel   I want to ask you again about contingency because there are so many other examples where things you thought would be universal actually don't turn out to be. I think you talked about how the natives had different forms of metallurgy, with gold and copper, but then they didn't do iron or steel. You would think that given their “warring nature”, iron would be such a huge help. There's a clear incentive to build it. Millions of people living there could have built or developed this technology. Same with the steel, same with the wheel. What's the explanation for why these things you think anybody would have come up with didn't happen?Charles C. Mann   I know. It's just amazing to me! I don't know. This is one of those things I think about all the time. A few weeks ago, it rained, and I went out to walk the dog. I'm always amazed that there are literal glistening drops of water on the crabgrass and when you pick it up, sometimes there are little holes eaten by insects in the crabgrass. Every now and then, if you look carefully, you'll see a drop of water in one of those holes and it forms a lens. And you can look through it! You can see that it's not a very powerful lens by any means, but you can see that things are magnified. So you think “How long has there been crabgrass? Or leaves? And water?”  Just forever! We've had glass forever! So how is it that we had to wait for whoever it was to create lenses? I just don't get it. In book 1491, I mentioned the moldboard plow, which is the one with a curving blade that allows you to go through the soil much more easily. It was invented in China thousands of years ago, but not around in Europe until the 1400s. Like, come on, guys! What was it? And so, you know, there's this mysterious sort of mass stupidity. One of the wonderful things about globalization and trade and contact is that maybe not everybody is as blind as you and you can learn from them. I mean, that's the most wonderful thing about trade. So in the case of the wheel, the more amazing thing is that in Mesoamerica, they had the wheel on child's toys. Why didn't they develop it? The best explanation I can get is they didn't have domestic animals. A cart then would have to be pulled by people. That would imply that to make the cart work, you'd have to cut a really good road. Whereas they had these travois, which are these things that you hold and they have these skids that are shaped kind of like an upside-down V. You can drag them across rough ground, you don't need a road for them. That's what people used in the Great Plains and so forth. So you look at this, and you think “maybe this was the ultimate way to save labor. I mean, this was good enough. And you didn't have to build and maintain these roads to make this work”  so maybe it was rational or just maybe they're just blinkered. I don't know. As for assembly with steel, I think there's some values involved in that. I don't know if you've ever seen one of those things they had in Mesoamerica called Macuahuitl. They're wooden clubs with obsidian blades on them and they are sharp as hell. You don't run your finger along the edge because they just slice it open. An obsidian blade is pretty much sharper than any iron or steel blade and it doesn't rust. Nice. But it's much more brittle. So okay, they're there, and the Spaniards were really afraid of them. Because a single blow from these heavy sharp blades could kill a horse. They saw people whack off the head of a horse carrying a big strong guy with a single blow! So they're really dangerous, but they're not long-lasting. Part of the deal was that the values around conflict were different in the sense that conflict in Mesoamerica wasn't a matter of sending out foot soldiers in grunts, it was a chance for soldiers to get individual glory and prestige. This was associated with having these very elaborately beautiful weapons that you killed people with. So maybe not having steel worked better for their values and what they were trying to do at war. That would've lasted for years and I mean, that's just a guess. But you can imagine a scenario where they're not just blinkered but instead expressive on the basis of their different values. This is hugely speculative. There's a wonderful book by Ross Hassig about old Aztec warfare. It's an amazing book which is about the military history of The Aztecs and it's really quite interesting. He talks about this a little bit but he finally just says we don't know why they didn't develop all these technologies, but this worked for them.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. Yeah, it's kind of similar to China not developing gunpowder into an actual ballistic material––Charles C. Mann   Or Japan giving up the gun! They actually banned guns during the Edo period. The Portuguese introduced guns and the Japanese used them, and they said “Ahhh nope! Don't want them.” and they banned them. This turned out to be a terrible idea when Perry came in the 1860s. But for a long time, supposedly under the Edo period, Japan had the longest period of any nation ever without a foreign war. Dwarkesh Patel   Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, it's concerning when you think the lack of war might make you vulnerable in certain ways. Charles C. Mann   Yeah, that's a depressing thought.Religious DemoralizationDwarkesh Patel   Right. In Fukuyama's The End of History, he's obviously arguing that liberal democracy will be the final form of government everywhere. But there's this point he makes at the end where he's like, “Yeah, but maybe we need a small war every 50 years or so just to make sure people remember how bad it can get and how to deal with it.” Anyway, when the epidemic started in the New World, surely the Indians must have had some story or superstitious explanation–– some way of explaining what was happening. What was it?Charles C. Mann   You have to remember, the germ theory of disease didn't exist at the time. So neither the Spaniards, or the English, or the native people, had a clear idea of what was going on. In fact, both of them thought of it as essentially a spiritual event, a religious event. You went into areas that were bad, and the air was bad. That was malaria, right? That was an example. To them, it was God that was in control of the whole business. There's a line from my distant ancestor––the Governor Bradford of Plymouth Colony, who's my umpteenth, umpteenth grandfather, that's how waspy I am, he's actually my ancestor––about how God saw fit to clear the natives for us. So they see all of this in really religious terms, and more or less native people did too! So they thought over and over again that “we must have done something bad for this to have happened.” And that's a very powerful demoralizing thing. Your God either punished you or failed you. And this was it. This is one of the reasons that Christianity was able to make inroads. People thought “Their god is coming in and they seem to be less harmed by these diseases than people with our God.” Now, both of them are completely misinterpreting what's going on! But if you have that kind of spiritual explanation, it makes sense for you to say, “Well, maybe I should hit up their God.”Critiques of Civilization Collapse TheoriesDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, super fascinating. There's been a lot of books written in the last few decades about why civilizations collapse. There's Joseph Tainter's book, there's Jared Diamond's book. Do you feel like any of them actually do a good job of explaining how these different Indian societies collapsed over time?Charles C. Mann   No. Well not the ones that I've read. And there are two reasons for that. One is that it's not really a mystery. If you have a society that's epidemiologically naive, and smallpox sweeps in and kills 30% of you, measles kills 10% of you, and this all happens in a short period of time, that's really tough! I mean COVID killed one million people in the United States. That's 1/330th of the population. And it wasn't even particularly the most economically vital part of the population. It wasn't kids, it was elderly people like my aunt–– I hope I'm not sounding callous when I'm describing it like a demographer. Because I don't mean it that way. But it caused enormous economic damage and social conflict and so forth. Now, imagine something that's 30 or 40 times worse than that, and you have no explanation for it at all. It's kind of not a surprise to me that this is a super challenge. What's actually amazing is the number of nations that survived and came up with ways to deal with this incredible loss.That relates to the second issue, which is that it's sort of weird to talk about collapse in the ways that they sometimes do. Like both of them talk about the Mayan collapse. But there are 30 million Mayan people still there. They were never really conquered by the Spaniards. The Spaniards were still waging giant wars in Yucatan in the 1590s. In the early 21st century, I went with my son to Chiapas, which is the southernmost exit province. And that is where the Commandante Cero and the rebellions were going on. We were looking at some Mayan ruins, and they were too beautiful, and I stayed too long, and we were driving back through the night on these terrible roads. And we got stopped by some of these guys with guns. I was like, “Oh God, not only have I got myself into this, I got my son into this.” And the guy comes and looks at us and says, “Who are you?” And I say that we're American tourists. And he just gets this disgusted look, and he says, “Go on.” And you know, the journalist in me takes over and I ask, “What do you mean, just go on?” And he says, “We're hunting for Mexicans.” And as I'm driving I'm like “Wait a minute, I'm in Mexico.” And that those were Mayans. All those guys were Maya people still fighting against the Spaniards. So it's kind of funny to say that their society collapsed when there are Mayan radio stations, there are Maya schools, and they're speaking Mayan in their home. It's true, they don't have giant castles anymore. But, it's odd to think of that as collapse. They seem like highly successful people who have dealt pretty well with a lot of foreign incursions. So there's this whole aspect of “What do you mean collapse?” And you see that in Against the Grain, the James Scott book, where you think, “What do you mean barbarians?” If you're an average Maya person, working as a farmer under the purview of these elites in the big cities probably wasn't all that great. So after the collapse, you're probably better off. So all of that I feel is important in this discussion of collapse. I think it's hard to point to collapses that either have very clear exterior causes or are really collapses of the environment. Particularly the environmental sort that are pictured in books like Diamond has, where he talks about Easter Island. The striking thing about that is we know pretty much what happened to all those trees. Easter Island is this little speck of land, in the middle of the ocean, and Dutch guys come there and it's the only wood around for forever, so they cut down all the trees to use it for boat repair, ship repair, and they enslave most of the people who are living there. And we know pretty much what happened. There's no mystery about it.Virginia Company + HubrisDwarkesh Patel   Why did the British government and the king keep subsidizing and giving sanctions to the Virginia Company, even after it was clear that this is not especially profitable and half the people that go die? Why didn't they just stop?Charles C. Mann   That's a really good question. It's a super good question. I don't really know if we have a satisfactory answer, because it was so stupid for them to keep doing that. It was such a loss for so long. So you have to say, they were thinking, not purely economically. Part of it is that the backers of the Virginia Company, in sort of classic VC style, when things were going bad, they lied about it. They're burning through their cash, they did these rosy presentations, and they said, “It's gonna be great! We just need this extra money.” Kind of the way that Uber did. There's this tremendous burn rate and now the company says you're in tremendous trouble because it turns out that it's really expensive to provide all these calves and do all this stuff. The cheaper prices that made people like me really happy about it are vanishing. So, you know, I think future business studies will look at those rosy presentations and see that they have a kind of analogy to the ones that were done with the Virginia Company. A second thing is that there was this dog-headed belief kind of based on the inability to understand longitude and so forth, that the Americas were far narrower than they actually are. I reproduced this in 1493. There were all kinds of maps in Britain at the time showing these little skinny Philippines-like islands. So there's the thought that you just go up the Chesapeake, go a couple 100 miles, and you're gonna get to the Pacific into China. So there's this constant searching for a passage to China through this thought to be very narrow path. Sir Francis Drake and some other people had shown that there was a West Coast so they thought the whole thing was this narrow, Panama-like landform. So there's this geographical confusion. Finally, there's the fact that the Spaniards had found all this gold and silver, which is an ideal commodity, because it's not perishable: it's small, you can put it on your ship and bring it back, and it's just great in every way. It's money, essentially. Basically, you dig up money in the hills and there's this long-standing belief that there's got to be more of that in the Americas, we just need to find out where. So there's always that hope. Lastly, there's the Imperial bragging rights. You know, we can't be the only guys with a colony. You see that later in the 19th century when Germany became a nation and one of the first things the Dutch said was “Let's look for pieces of Africa that the rest of Europe hasn't claimed,” and they set up their own mini colonial empire. So there's this kind of “Keeping Up with the Joneses” aspect, it just seems to be sort of deep in the European ruling class. So then you got to have an empire that in this weird way, seems very culturally part of it. I guess it's the same for many other places. As soon as you feel like you have a state together, you want to index other things. You see that over and over again, all over the world. So that's part of it. All those things, I think, contributed to this. Outright lying, this delusion, other various delusions, plus hubris.Dwarkesh Patel   It seems that colonial envy has today probably spread to China. I don't know too much about it, but I hear that the Silk Road stuff they're doing is not especially economically wise. Is this kind of like when you have the impulse where if you're a nation trying to rise, you have that “I gotta go here, I gotta go over there––Charles C. Mann   Yeah and “Show what a big guy I am. Yeah,––China's Silver TradeDwarkesh Patel   Exactly. So speaking of China, I want to ask you about the silver trade. Excuse another tortured analogy, but when I was reading that chapter where you're describing how the Spanish silver was ending up with China and how the Ming Dynasty caused too much inflation. They needed more reliable mediums of exchange, so they had to give up real goods from China, just in order to get silver, which is just a medium of exchange––but it's not creating more apples, right? I was thinking about how this sounds a bit like Bitcoin today, (obviously to a much smaller magnitude) but in the sense that you're using up goods. It's a small amount of electricity, all things considered, but you're having to use up real energy in order to construct this medium of exchange. Maybe somebody can claim that this is necessary because of inflation or some other policy mistake and you can compare it to the Ming Dynasty. But what do you think about this analogy? Is there a similar situation where real goods are being exchanged for just a medium of exchange?Charles C. Mann   That's really interesting. I mean, on some level, that's the way money works, right? I go into a store, like a Starbucks and I buy a coffee, then I hand them a piece of paper with some drawings on it, and they hand me an actual coffee in return for a piece of paper. So the mysteriousness of money is kind of amazing. History is of course replete with examples of things that people took very seriously as money. Things that to us seem very silly like the cowry shell or in the island of Yap where they had giant stones! Those were money and nobody ever carried them around. You transferred the ownership of the stone from one person to another person to buy something. I would get some coconuts or gourds or whatever, and now you own that stone on the hill. So there's a tremendous sort of mysteriousness about the human willingness to assign value to arbitrary things such as (in Bitcoin's case) strings of zeros and ones. That part of it makes sense to me. What's extraordinary is when the effort to create a medium of exchange ends up costing you significantly–– which is what you're talking about in China where people had a medium of exchange, but they had to work hugely to get that money. I don't have to work hugely to get a $1 bill, right? It's not like I'm cutting down a tree and smashing the papers to pulp and printing. But you're right, that's what they're kind of doing in China. And that's, to a lesser extent, what you're doing in Bitcoin. So I hadn't thought about this, but Bitcoin in this case is using computer cycles and energy. To me, it's absolutely extraordinary the degree to which people who are Bitcoin miners are willing to upend their lives to get cheap energy. A guy I know is talking about setting up small nuclear plants as part of his idea for climate change and he wants to set them up in really weird remote areas. And I was asking “Well who would be your customers?” and he says Bitcoin people would move to these nowhere places so they could have these pocket nukes to privately supply their Bitcoin habits. And that's really crazy! To completely upend your life to create something that you hope is a medium of exchange that will allow you to buy the things that you're giving up. So there's a kind of funny aspect to this. That was partly what was happening in China. Unfortunately, China's very large, so they were able to send off all this stuff to Mexico so that they could get the silver to pay their taxes, but it definitely weakened the country.Wizards vs. ProphetsDwarkesh Patel   Yeah, and that story you were talking about, El Salvador actually tried it. They were trying to set up a Bitcoin city next to this volcano and use the geothermal energy from the volcano to incentivize people to come there and mine cheap Bitcoin. Staying on the theme of China, do you think the prophets were more correct, or the wizards were more correct for that given time period? Because we have the introduction of potato, corn, maize, sweet potatoes, and this drastically increases the population until it reaches a carrying capacity. Obviously, what follows is the other kinds of ecological problems this causes and you describe these in the book. Is this evidence of the wizard worldview that potatoes appear and populations balloon? Or are the prophets like “No, no, carrying capacity will catch up to us eventually.”Charles C. Mann   Okay, so let me interject here. For those members of your audience who don't know what we're talking about. I wrote this book, The Wizard and the Prophet. And it's about these two camps that have been around for a long time who have differing views regarding how we think about energy resources, the environment, and all those issues. The wizards, that's my name for them––Stuart Brand called them druids and, in fact, originally, the title was going to involve the word druid but my editor said, “Nobody knows what a Druid is” so I changed it into wizards–– and anyway the wizards would say that science and technology properly applied can allow you to produce your way out of these environmental dilemmas. You turn on the science machine, essentially, and then we can escape these kinds of dilemmas. The prophets say “No. Natural systems are governed by laws and there's an inherent carrying capacity or limit or planetary boundary.” there are a bunch of different names for them that say you can't do more than so much.So what happened in China is that European crops came over. One of China's basic geographical conditions is that it's 20% of the Earth's habitable surface area, or it has 20% of the world's population, but only has seven or 8% of the world's above-ground freshwater. There are no big giant lakes like we have in the Great Lakes. And there are only a couple of big rivers, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. The main staple crop in China has to be grown in swimming pools, and that's you know, rice. So there's this paradox, which is “How do you keep people fed with rice in a country that has very little water?” If you want a shorthand history of China, that's it. So prophets believe that there are these planetary boundaries. In history, these are typically called Malthusian Limits after Malthus and the question is: With the available technology at a certain time, how many people can you feed before there's misery?The great thing about history is it provides evidence for both sides. Because in the short run, what happened when American crops came in is that the potato, sweet potato, and maize corn were the first staple crops that were dryland crops that could be grown in the western half of China, which is very, very dry and hot and mountainous with very little water. Population soars immediately afterward, but so does social unrest, misery, and so forth. In the long run, that becomes adaptable when China becomes a wealthy and powerful nation. In the short run, which is not so short (it's a couple of centuries), it really causes tremendous chaos and suffering. So, this provides evidence for both sides. One increases human capacity, and the second unquestionably increases human numbers and that leads to tremendous erosion, land degradation, and human suffering.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, that's a thick coin with two sides. By the way, I realized I haven't gotten to all the Wizard and Prophet questions, and there are a lot of them. So I––Charles C. Mann   I certainly have time! I'm enjoying the conversation. One of the weird things about podcasts is that, as far as I can tell, the average podcast interviewer is far more knowledgeable and thoughtful than the average sort of mainstream journalist interviewer and I just find that amazing. I don't understand it. So I think you guys should be hired. You know, they should make you switch roles or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah, maybe. Charles C. Mann   It's a pleasure to be asked these interesting questions about subjects I find fascinating.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, it's my pleasure to get to talk to you and to get to ask these questions. So let me ask about the Wizard and the Prophet. I just interviewed WIll McCaskill, and we were talking about what ends up mattering most in history. I asked him about Norman Borlaug and said that he's saved a billion lives. But then McCaskill pointed out, “Well, that's an exceptional result” and he doesn't think the technology is that contingent. So if Borlaug hadn't existed, somebody else would have discovered what he discovered about short wheat stalks anyways. So counterfactually, in a world where Ebola doesn't exist, it's not like a billion people die, maybe a couple million more die until the next guy comes around. That was his view. Do you agree? What is your response?Charles C. Mann   To some extent, I agree. It's very likely that in the absence of one scientist, some other scientist would have discovered this, and I mentioned in the book, in fact, that there's a guy named Swaminathan, a remarkable Indian scientist, who's a step behind him and did much of the same work. At the same time, the individual qualities of Borlaug are really quite remarkable. The insane amount of work and dedication that he did.. it's really hard to imagine. The fact is that he was going against many of the breeding plant breeding dogmas of his day, that all matters! His insistence on feeding the poor… he did remarkable things. Yes, I think some of those same things would have been discovered but it would have been a huge deal if it had taken 20 years later. I mean, that would have been a lot of people who would have been hurt in the interim! Because at the same time, things like the end of colonialism, the discovery of antibiotics, and so forth, were leading to a real population rise, and the amount of human misery that would have occurred, it's really frightening to think about. So, in some sense, I think he's (Will McCaskill) right. But I wouldn't be so glib about those couple of million people.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And another thing you might be concerned about is that given the hostile attitude that people had towards the green revolution right after, if the actual implementation of these different strains of biochar sent in India, if that hadn't been delayed, it's not that weird to imagine a scenario where the governments there are just totally won over by the prophets and they decide to not implant this technology at all. If you think about what happened to nuclear power in the 70s, in many different countries, maybe something similar could have happened to the Green Revolution. So it's important to beat the Prophet. Maybe that's not the correct way to say it. But one way you could put it is: It's important to beat the prophets before the policies are passed. You have to get a good bit of technology in there.Charles C. Mann   This is just my personal opinion, but you want to listen to the prophets about what the problems are. They're incredible at diagnosing problems, and very frequently, they're right about those things. The social issues about the Green Revolution… they were dead right, they were completely right. I don't know if you then adopt their solutions. It's a little bit like how I feel about my editors–– my editors will often point out problems and I almost never agree with their solutions. The fact is that Borlaug did develop this wheat that came into India, but it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Swaminathan hadn't changed that wheat to make it more acceptable to the culture of India. That was one of the most important parts for me in this book. When I went to Tamil Nadu, I listened to this and I thought, “Oh! I never heard about this part where they took Mexican wheat, and they made it into Indian wheat.” You know, I don't even know if Borlaug ever knew or really grasped that they really had done that! By the way, a person for you to interview is Marci Baranski–– she's got a forthcoming book about the history of the Green Revolution and she sounds great. I'm really looking forward to reading it. So here's a plug for her.In Defense of Regulatory DelaysDwarkesh Patel   So if we applied that particular story to today, let's say that we had regulatory agencies like the FDA back then that were as powerful back then as they are now. Do you think it's possible that these new advances would have just dithered in some approval process that took years or decades to complete? If you just backtest our current process for implementing technological solutions, are you concerned that something like the green revolution could not have happened or that it would have taken way too long or something?Charles C. Mann   It's possible. Bureaucracies can always go rogue, and the government is faced with this kind of impossible problem. There's a current big political argument about whether former President Trump should have taken these top-secret documents to his house in Florida and done whatever he wanted to? Just for the moment, let's accept the argument that these were like super secret toxic documents and should not have been in a basement. Let's just say that's true. Whatever the President says is declassified is declassified. Let us say that's true.  Obviously, that would be bad. You would not want to have that kind of informal process because you can imagine all kinds of things–– you wouldn't want to have that kind of informal process in place. But nobody has ever imagined that you would do that because it's sort of nutty in that scenario.Now say you write a law and you create a bureaucracy for declassification and immediately add more delay, you make things harder, you add in the problems of the bureaucrats getting too much power, you know–– all the things that you do. So you have this problem with the government, which is that people occasionally do things that you would never imagine. It's completely screwy. So you put in regulatory mechanisms to stop them from doing that and that impedes everybody else. In the case of the FDA, it was founded in the 30 when some person produced this thing called elixir sulfonamides. They killed hundreds of people! It was a flat-out poison! And, you know, hundreds of people died. You think like who would do that? But somebody did that. So they created this entire review mechanism to make sure it never happened again, which introduced delay, and then something was solidified. Which they did start here because the people who invented that didn't even do the most cursory kind of check. So you have this constant problem. I'm sympathetic to the dilemma faced by the government here in which you either let through really bad things done by occasional people, or you screw up everything for everybody else. I was tracing it crudely, but I think you see the trade-off. So the question is, how well can you manage this trade-off? I would argue that sometimes it's well managed. It's kind of remarkable that we got vaccines produced by an entirely new mechanism, in record time, and they passed pretty rigorous safety reviews and were given to millions and millions and millions of people with very, very few negative effects. I mean, that's a real regulatory triumph there, right?So that would be the counter-example: you have this new thing that you can feed people and so forth. They let it through very quickly. On the other hand, you have things like genetically modified salmon and trees, which as far as I can tell, especially for the chestnuts, they've made extraordinary efforts to test. I'm sure that those are going to be in regulatory hell for years to come. *chuckles* You know, I just feel that there's this great problem. These flaws that you identified, I would like to back off and say that this is a problem sort of inherent to government. They're always protecting us against the edge case. The edge case sets the rules, and that ends up, unless you're very careful, making it very difficult for everybody else.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. And the vaccines are an interesting example here. Because one of the things you talked about in the book–– one of the possible solutions to climate change is that you can have some kind of geoengineering. Right? I think you mentioned in the book that as long as even one country tries this, then they can effectively (for relatively modest amounts of money), change the atmosphere. But then I look at the failure of every government to approve human challenge trials. This is something that seems like an obvious thing to do and we would have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives during COVID by speeding up the vaccine approval. So I wonder, maybe the international collaboration is strong enough that something like geoengineering actually couldn't happen because something like human challenge trials didn't happen.Geoengineering Charles C. Mann   So let me give a plug here for a fun novel by my friend, Neal Stephenson, called Termination Shock. Which is about some rich person just doing it. Just doing geoengineering. The fact is that it's actually not actually against the law to fire off rockets into the stratosphere. In his case, it's a giant gun that shoots shells full of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. So I guess the question is, what timescale do you think is appropriate for all this? I feel quite confident that there will be geoengineering trials within the next 10 years. Is that fast enough? That's a real judgment call. I think people like David Keith and the other advocates for geoengineering would have said it should have happened already and that it's way, way too slow. People who are super anxious about moral hazard and precautionary principles say that that's way, way too fast. So you have these different constituencies. It's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an example where these regulatory agencies have actually totally throttled something in a long-lasting way as opposed to delaying it for 10 years. I don't mean to imply that 10 years is nothing. But it's really killing off something. Is there an example you can think of?Dwarkesh Patel   Well, it's very dependent on where you think it would have been otherwise, like people say maybe it was just bound to be the state. Charles C. Mann   I think that was a very successful case of regulatory capture, in which the proponents of the technology successfully created this crazy…. One of the weird things I really wanted to explain about nuclear stuff is not actually in the book.