What compels a group of truck owners to drive in a procession down the sandy Florida coast (and how does racism relate to environmental issues)? How can you bypass the paywall to access the latest scientific papers? Why do you need an adblocker? Can the world create a co-op burger joint with vegetarian options? More importantly, what is the quickest and surest way to trigger David? These questions and more are discussed on the latest collapse chat.
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(This is an automated transcript and it sucks, we'll manually edit it to be better soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this incredible transcript!
[0:06] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:08] I'm Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:21] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:31] I love our intro music.
[0:33] Yeah. But timing was off though.
[0:37] I think, I think this cause my was slow.
[0:39] Wait, we're not supposed to do the intro music.
[0:43] Can’t we do intro music on these episodes? Is there like a rule that we're not allowed to?
[0:47] Was, it’s not a rule but we didn't do it last time, right?
[0:50] Well we’re just making it up as we go. We can buck the trend, we can set a new trend. If you want to, if you want to change the future, Daniel, you got to start with the now.
[1:00] Yeah okay, fine. I just don't want people to associate... I just feel like if you're going back to the backlog, you know, how do you know if it's a serious episode or if it's one of these chat episodes?
[1:14] Well, half of the episodes don't even have any intro music because they existed before we had our beautiful intro tune written.
[1:21] Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah, that's true. Man, there's just no consistency here.
[1:25] There is certainly no consistency in quality.
[1:29] If only, if only we could have planned all of this out before episode 1, you know?
[1:33] The only thing that's consistent is the cars and sirens driving by my apartment constantly while we try and record this.
[1:40] Yeah, music to my ears at this point. But, you know, maybe it's good the show evolved, the way we do things evolve, and the listeners who have been with us from day one, you know, they get to be a part of that journey.
[1:51] Yeah, sure, that's what we can call it.
[1:54] Okay, alright, I'm satisfied with that. So what you want to talk about today, David?
[1:58] Well, you're the guy who has this list of things written out that I'm looking at right now, so where do you want to start?
[2:04] Well, you know, I'm down here at the beach. I’m on a family vacation down in Florida.
[2:11] How environmentally irresponsible, Daniel.
[2:13] Oh, well, we didn't fly, David.
[2:16] Did you hitchhike?
[2:18] No and since we've been on the beach for about a week I haven't been driving. So I feel like the commute down here kind of cancels out with my daily commute when I'm back home.0
[2:29] I don’t even own a car, Daniel, so get on my level.
[2:32] Yeah but you also know that the land required to support a modern city is like a 200 to 1 ratio. So, you know, your 200 square foot apartment.
[2:41] Yeah, but it's still less than it takes to support a suburb, so you have nothing on me here.
[2:47] Well, let me tell you what's not environmentally friendly and that is about the second day we were down. We’re walking out on the beach and there is a line of about 100 trucks, I mean these are big pickup trucks, you know, they're souped-up, they’re on their lift kits, they got the big tires, they got the big American flag just like flying off the bed of the truck and there's about hundreds, you know hundred trucks at least as far down as you can see just rolling down the beach. And I had to find out what this was, David, cause I was really curious. And it turns out that we were walking through a Truck Lives Matter rally here at New Smyrna Beach.
[3:25] Did you say Truck Lives Matter?
[3:28] That's right, David, Truck Lives Matter.
[3:31] What? Do they think their trucks are alive for starters? Or like, what is the truck lives matter, is it like a protest or what are they saying, what matters?
[3:43] Well, it’s so interesting to me because it really is a mockery of the original and ongoing Black Lives Matter statement, right, which is you know we have black lives being shot...
[3:55] Oh my God, wait. I just pulled up the website, have you seen the trucklivesmatter.com website?
[4:01] I've seen some flyers, I don't know if I'm looking at the same thing you're looking at though.
[4:04] Wait, let me just read this summary that pops up on DuckDuckGo when you search Truck Lives Matter. It says, oh wait, no. This is truckerlivesmatter, never mind, cut this out.
[4:15] Trucker Lives Matter. Well, it's interesting, if you actually find the real Truck Lives Matter event, I saw it on Facebook, and some people are arguing in the comments. Like one person was like, “Truck Lives Matter? What about Surfer Lives Matter when you are driving down my beach and I can't catch a mad wave?” And it’s sad, I mean it's funny, but it's also really sad, right? Because this is a mockery of Black Lives Matter. And that mockery itself is an expression of deep racism, right? And you can actually go on to the New Smyrna Beach police Facebook page, and I found that they were advertising for the 2016 Truck Lives Matter meet on their page. This is on the police department Facebook page where they say, “Hey, just so everybody knows, the Truck Lives Matter meet is occurring on such-and-such date, there's going to be a lot of traffic coming through. We're going to be on the scene making sure everything's safe. Oh and by the way, if you want to find out more about this event, just click this link.” So the police are actively advertising it. And then of course if you go to the event page for that 2016 Truck Lives Matter event, you see the Confederate flag being waved off of one of the trucks.
[5:25] I still am not sure what this is about, I'm on the event page, I'm looking at it, it says one and a half thousand people went, but there's no explanation of what Truck Lives Matter is other than being able to park your truck on the beach for an afternoon.
[5:39] Well, you know, I was trying to wrap my head around that, David, I was thinking about it because, again, it's a racist conception, right? Black Lives Matter is the expression of deep pain, of deep anger and of the need for change in a society where black lives do not matter structurally. They’re not supported, black lives are murdered in the streets with no repercussions, right? This is a society that does not value black lives. And yet we have all these other groups taking that and saying: “Well, you know, I drive a truck, Truck Lives Matter!”
[6:15] But is it enough to just say that this is racism? The thing I was trying to wrap my head around is at what point does racism get embedded in a cultural identity that becomes hard to separate from the way someone lives their lives? And you're saying, what is the point of this event? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of people who drove the truck down the beach, who were not waving a Blue Lives Matter flag and who showed up simply because, “Hey, I own a truck and I love driving a truck and I want to be a part of everyone who drives a truck.” And it just so happens that the racism gets embedded in that lifestyle, at least down here for this truck rally. And, you know, there was a couple weeks ago, I think it was in Death Dealers on military sales and arms deals around the world where you kind of started the discussion by saying that sometimes you start to dissociate as you're walking about your day? And you start thinking about all the, you know, you look at a chain-link fence and you start thinking about where did those materials come from and you start imagining how it all got mined out of the earth somewhere far away and all the supply chains that brought it together, right?
[7:24] And how our physical world, our whole infrastructure, you know, comes through these complex processes that we take for granted and shape the way we live without us even realizing it. But you made a comment kind of just on the side there saying that the same thing goes on with our culture. And I was thinking about that in this context because our cultural identity is also something that can take place and emerge from underlying infrastructures that we're not aware of and which also leaves us open to manipulation. And it reminds me of episode 11 that we did a long time ago on Edward Bernays and the rise of public relations called Designing Deception. And it's clear that racist ideology is mixed in with the idea of Truck Lives Matter. But what do you think came first, David, the racism as in this event was intentionally designed to promote white nationalism or anti-racist sentiment, or could it be that this truly was just a coming together of people who love trucks and racism just happen to go along with that lifestyle that these people identify with? [Both snicker]
[8:37] Well, I mean there is definitely a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram. I'm not saying that this is one circle, but coming from the South, I mean, there's definitely a big overlap there. I've seen more than my fair share of people driving trucks on the road yelling racist things while they throw beer cans at people who are walking on the street. But if you're asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, the racism of the truck, I think it’s racism. [Both snicker]
[9:07] Well, I'm not saying that anyone who drives a truck is racist, that's not what I'm saying at all.
[9:12] No, of course not.
[9:13] But what I'm trying to say is that racism itself benefits those who are in power, those who have money. And when we live in a culture where the way we live our lives so much revolves around the things we consume, it is very easy to manipulate people into identities around what they consume and the lifestyles they live that then get infused with underlying racism or things that those in power desire us to identify with. Let's say, I'm super-rich and powerful and I wanted to make people anti- a certain group of people or hate those who live in the mountains, right? And I say, well, let me target the people on the coast and, you know, I create this big company that sells surfboards. And I make the best surfboards there are, and anyone who goes surfing, they ride my surfboards. And I say, how do I get these people to become adversarial with those who live in the mountains? Well, let me just associate my surfboard company with celebrities who speak kind of negatively of those who live in the mountains and let me use it with all these symbols and ways of living that somehow are anathema to those who live in the mountains. And then, as you grow up, if you just so happen to be born on the coast and you go surfing a bunch, you'll just naturally kind of fall into the consumption of the products that I produce and with that the kind of cultural identity that I have attached to that product. And then it becomes a point where you can't be pro-mountain people without being anti-surfer. And if surfer is your cultural identity, you can't really separate the product from the way you view other people. Does that make any sense, David?
[10:57] Yeah, I’m following what you're saying. It’s a pretty weird abstract example there of mountain people vs surfers.
[11:07] I'm on the beach, it is just what I happen to be thinking about all the time.
[David laughs]
[11:09] I get the gist of what you're driving home. So what you're saying is that we should diversify into creating racist stickers for trucks. Am I misreading this? [Both laugh]
[11:24] What I'm trying to ask you, David, is how can we think about battling social injustice and racism without making people feel like we're attacking the identity that they conform to?
[11:39] Yeah, okay, so when you’re saying it like that it makes a lot more sense. You're asking, you know, people have wrapped up these racist notions, intentionally or not, or by the machinations of groups whom it serves their interest to do this, with the identity of self. And the identity of self is often tied to a location or increasingly, as we've seen with advertising, specific brands or teams or whatever. So how can you dismantle these racist components of these things without people feeling personally attacked as they identify themselves with whatever symbols associated with this? So, you know, the Confederate flag which is, which was I guess I should say, was flown, you know, predominantly to protect the racist institution of slavery – and we don't need to get into the states rights conversation here – but now it's been associated with this like larger Southern culture, Southern pride thing.
[12:38] And if you're not from the South, maybe it's easy to just see it as a purely racist thing, but there is like a very weird Southern pride thing mixed in within.
[12:48] And so when you point out to those people that their flag is actually a symbol of racism, they take it as a direct attack on themselves even if they don't necessarily consider themselves racist – they probably are, but they probably wouldn't go round directly saying racist words to people or like advocating for racist actions against someone – but just like a larger systemic sort of racism that a lot of people, whether they support the Confederate flag or not, find themselves in kind of day today, even people who are ostensibly call themselves progressive. And so when you attack the flag and what it stood for, they see it as an attack on themselves and they double down on their psychological defenses to try and push back against you, and it almost makes it more racist in that process. And I guess it sort of expands upon the conversation we were having like two weeks ago, we were talking about what are those moments that trigger people to open up their mind and like re-examine these things. And this doesn't seem to be a great way to do it when you're like, yo man, that shit’s racist. They are like, actually, it's heritage, not hate – blah blah blah, it spirals from there. But it's a good question and I think this is something that we as our individual self-worth has gotten so wrapped up into brands and things, it's gotten so wrapped up into celebrities and teams and stuff because we've been so alienated from our communities, from our families, from our own work and products that we create that we have to find these other things that are produced for us, and sold to us, and packaged to us – and our behavior change in order to appreciate the advertising and other tools – to identify with instead. And then it's very easy, once we have that sort of way of thinking of turning it into something that can be used against us and used to serve goals and purposes of other people who don't have our best interests in mind. This is how you get things like nationalism, this is how you get things like these really weird racist, you know, All Lives Matter, Truck Lies Matter – all the spin-offs from that – Blue Lives Matter, whatever where people see themselves as like, “oh, I identify so strongly with this group, anybody that says anything negative about this group is attacking not just me but everything I care about, my way of living,” you know, blah blah blah and you can unpack it from there. So like this is how you end up with these like super crazy laws designed to protect police officers where like in some states, for example, if you spit on a police officer, it's considered assault, and assaulting an officer specifically which is a felony, you can spend a lot of time in jail.
[15:19] Of course this is often used by officers saying, “oh, they spit on me.” And then there's no proof that they did or not cause there's often no video, it's their word vs mine. And next thing you know you're in federal prison because of that, your life is ruined. There are all sorts of hate crimes that are encoded in law that are designed to only apply to police officers. There's a law introduced for hate crimes here in New York a couple years ago, it would apply to any emergency worker: fireman, EMS, of course, police officers, whatever – during their active duty if a crime is committed against them, and not only it was a crime, it was also a hate crime against that protected group. But also they wrote into this law because the police union here so strong, that if you committed any sort of crime to a retired police officer – and only police officers got this protection, didn't apply to a former fireman or an EMT, whatever, only police officers – if you committed the crime to a retired police officer, not only it was a crime, it was also a hate crime against a protected class of people. And such a weird bastardization of the law like hate crimes are really supposed to be about balancing the systemic attacks that occur because these injustices and imbalances, and the systemic issues that we see around us, you know, they would perpetrate these systems of inequality. But when you're protecting an already protected empowered class like a police officer with the same terminology and legal power used to protect disadvantaged classes, you've created even more of a lopsided power imbalance and it intensifies these sorts of problems we're already seeing. And no wonder New York has so many cops that are just blatantly abusing their powers, you know, off duty cop shooting people in road rage incidents and all sorts of things that they just lose control. We had a thing this past week where some people dump some water on some cops up in the Bronx.
[17:13] And all the Blue Lives Matter people and all sorts of MAGA people were going on about how like we basically need to go in and nuke the Bronx and go down the streets, they're like, “This is a reason that cop should be shooting, this would have been justified shooting.” Come on! They dumped water on some guys who were fucking with a bunch of people just enjoying the outside during the hot day. Nothing was going on, but people were ready to literally start a miniature genocide up in the Bronx because of this thing. And that's what I mean when we have just like ridiculously over-active imagination that intensifies the persecution complex of this already extremely power imbalanced class, but power imbalanced not in a way that we see with minority groups but the opposite way, they already have a license to kill without any repercussions for the most part, and we don’t need to be enforcing that, that should come at a price, not with all these other extra benefits with it. And I know we're way far off this beach conversation we started with. But you did mention that this was something that was heavily advertised by the police down there and I think there's a wrap up between these identities and people pushing this sort of stuff and this feeling of persecution and these largest police cultures that we see here in the United States.
[18:28] Well, I think at this point someone might be asking, wait, what are you guys talking about? You know, Ashes Ashes primarily at our core focuses on environmental destruction at the hands of economic forces that extract from our Earth. Why are we talking about racism? But it's so important to remember that the capitalistic forces of extraction and profit accumulation that are destroying the Earth, they function by marginalizing not just the Earth but people, right? That's how you exploit or that's how you acquire surpluses by exploiting some group of people. And the best people to be exploited are those who have been marginalized. And so power benefits when people are divided, in the same way, that we marginalize the Earth we marginalize ourselves in. And that's why the IPCC, you know, international organizations that are fighting things like climate change come out and say, “Hey, we need to respect indigenous land rights if we're going to combat the climate change.” Even though indigenous people represent a fraction of the global population, these organizations recognize that anytime we allow economic forces to dominate one group of people, we are approving a force that is going to dominate anything and everything. And, you know, to bring it back to the beach, being here in Florida at the moment, racism is something that runs deep through the blood of Florida. But it's important to remember that racism never occurred naturally, right, it was contrived by the ruling class. There was no such thing as black versus white, in fact, the early settlers of North America identified themselves by their country of origin, not the color of their skin.
[20:11] Well, the conception of what is white has evolved so radically in a very short period of time, if you go back a hundred, hundred fifty years, Italians weren't considered white, Irish weren't considered white. And now we would look at those people, we say of course they're white. But the point is it’s a very malleable concept that is adjusted as time goes on in order the best fit the needs of those controlling various resources and conversations.
[20:35] Yeah, exactly. And when we think of the South, you know, especially the colonial South. And I'm sure many people conjure images of plantations, right, and the slavery that was going on within those plantations. But again, we have to remember, only a small fraction of the Southern population actually owned plantations. I think it was somewhere around 1%. And after the end of slavery when we saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the majority of whites in the South were poor.
[21:04] But as we discussed an episode 36 on slavery, just because legal slavery was done away with, the new laws came about to employ black people as free labor either through mass incarceration or through the criminalization of black existence. And in that process, you had those with economic power actively pitting black labor against white labor. And you had both poor whites and poor blacks suffering at the hands of those plantation owners. But rather than seeing that common enemy, those poor whites resented those black people who were prioritized as labor and given preference for work on the fields as free labor kind of, I guess, taking the jobs of the poor white people and giving rise to these very militant white nationalist groups. And I think it's really interesting that if you look at the history of how plantation owners responded, rich white people in the South actually did not enjoy the presence of the KKK because it was disruptive to the economy. So I guess to come back to I guess the original question of this conversation of how do we address systemic racism without threatening people's identity which is separate from that? I think we just need to continue to press awareness for the fact that we all have a common enemy, we all have a common struggle. And those who divert their anger towards minorities in their neighborhoods, those who take out their anger on those who do not look like them, are not from the same area as them, they are missing the fact that there that anger should be directed at the forces of capital and power that are exploiting them and using their anger to conquer and divide us all. But, David, let's come back to the beach for real. So a couple days ago SpaceX launched a rocket into space. And it just so happened, just so happened that I was 40 miles up the coast from this launch, so my family and I, we went out to the beach and we actually got to see this bright shining rocket take off in the distance. And three and a half minutes later we heard the sound of those booming ended. It was a glorious thing to see, David.
[23:28] Well, that's not your first rocket.
[23:31] No, it was first rocket David but I do remember that time we watched the shuttle.
[23:36] That's a rocket too. Listeners, Daniel and I had known each other for a while, and after – was it right after high school that we went down there or was it college?
[23:43] It was very, it was very last space shuttle launch, when was that, what year was that?
[23:48] It wasn't the very last one, it was one of the last ones. It was the last launch of Endeavor. Anyway, whatever that year was.
[23:54] It was the last one I saw.
[23:55] We drove down to Florida to go see the space shuttle launch and stood in the river there with all these horseshoe crabs running around our feet and watched the space shuttle launch. And it was pretty awesome.
[24:13] It was awesome.
[24:13] If you ever get a chance to rocket launch, I highly recommend it, it's pretty cool.
[24:17] But David, this brings me to my point because that space shuttle launch that we watched, that was sponsored by NASA, but the rocket that I saw a couple days ago was sponsored by a Silicon Valley tech CEO. And I just want to point out here, David, just how wonderful it is that Elon Musk is saving the world.
[David laughs]
[24:37] Stop triggering me, Daniel!
[24:40] No-no-no, I'm serious here, David, here's a guy, right, who, you know, born genius, you know, IQ off the charts, right. And he looked around one day and he said, “Look, this world is failing, we've got climate change on the brink, we've got the Great plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean, right? We've got construction companies strip-mining our rivers of sand and eroding our beaches. This world needs a savior.” And he said, “I'm going to be that savior, you know, I'm going to take us to Mars but I'm going to do it through a process, right? First I'm going to revolutionize transportation and dramatically cut carbon emissions by inventing the electric vehicle,” David. I mean, Elon Musk single-handedly brought the electric vehicle onto the streets. [Both laugh]
[25:32] Daniel, you're going to give me an aneurysm.
[25:34] Onto the streets that we drive on today. And then he single-handedly learned Russian so that he could read the rocket manuals of the old Soviet area so that he goes to Russia, figure out how they build their rockets, bring that technology back to America, get a bunch of investors together to start SpaceX. And basically, radicalize and paradigm-shift our rocket technology so that we can eventually all go to Mars and start afresh with a new utopian planet.
[26:09] Ahh. [Laughs nervously] I don't even know where to start. This was the longest trigger, I don't know why I let you go on for so long. You just try to get a rise out of me and I don't appreciate this. This doesn't need to be an Elon Musk episode because I'm ready to go off for like 20-30 minutes. First off though, it is worth noting that the rocket launch so you did see actually was paid for by NASA, it was a resupply mission. So, checkmate.
[26:39] 5000 pounds to the International Space Station.
[26:42] Well, just very quickly.
[26:46] But, well, okay so maybe he gets a little funding, but he did invent the electric vehicle, David.
[26:51] Stop. Stop it. Elon Musk comes from money. You mentioned mines, that's where his family money comes from, emerald mines and other weird sources of funding. They're actually very strange and shady if you dig into it. He has all sorts of stories about bragging about how wealthy was as a child that he's later tried to retcon and rewrite and say he came to America with nothing besides, you know, the emerald in his pocket. And his weird racism that he carried over from there and then also his like weird accent, which apparently Grimes said is not even real like he puts it on like it’s a fake accent. And there's actually, he has like an Elizabeth Holmes thing going when he's like really tired and really fucked up, his accent disappears. So it looks like he's doing the same sort of like weird fake voice thing that she does, that she did before all the Theranos stuff.
[27:40] Okay, so you know, he's the guy attributed with PayPal or whatever, but really he just happened to be co-founding a company called x.com that was merged with another company with noted evil person Peter Thiel. Together they started PayPal along with several other co-founders. Musk’s company was bought primarily because they had paperwork that was pushed through earlier for financial regulation. Their software was worse. Elon Musk tried to rewrite the entire server stack of the new PayPal in Windows server, and all the engineers revolted and banned him from touching any software because his code was so bad. So whatever, he made a bunch of money on that. Then he went looking for somewhere to put his money, he found a company called Tesla started by two co-founders, he became an early investor in that, slowly kicked out the other two founders, eventually, they had to settle out of court for the large disclosed amount of money. And part of the settlement was that Elon got to rewrite himself as a founder of the company, even though he came in much after it was already started. He also had promised the first vehicle to one of the co-founders but he actually gave it to Elon Musk's friend instead. There's a whole bunch of crooked horrible fucking shit he did to those two poor guys.
[28:55] Started Tesla, made a bunch of promises with Tesla in order to get all sorts of federal funding and subsidies: for example, he promised California that they were going to make battery packs that could be swapped out very quickly with an automated machine, they built a demo, maybe you’ve seen it before. California gave them tons and tons of money in subsidies for this technology which they then never produced but they got to get the money. They are currently being sued by Germany and Canada for subsidy fraud. All sorts of horrible subsidy fraud, even with all, that the company is 17 years old at this point and has lost something like $10.5 billion which if we'd invested in renewable energy would have dramatically done way more good for the Earth than all the impact of every single car that has ever produced. So, I mean, I don't want to get into that. I can literally do a whole series on Tesla, I’m not going to, there's lots of podcasts that already covered that. Then he put obviously much money in SpaceX. SpaceX is just reusing technology developed by Lockheed in the 70s with this automated landing systems. He found an engineer, a brilliant rocket engineer who designed an amazing rocket engine in his garage, hired him, took his technology, found somebody that actually knows how to run a company, put it together.
[30:17] But he’s trying to do all these plans that seem to be economically viable. As far as we know, SpaceX has never made money, even with massive subsidies from the US government and the Military. And yes, this is a military contractor, they do a lot of horrible military work and they should be shamed as such. Their reusable rockets while very cool to watch, the economics of them don't seem to really be there, unless you can get a vast many more reuses than they've been able to achieve so far. So, like I said, the technology for doing this has been around for decades, it just didn't seem ever economically viable because of the damage done to the rocket on the process and the cost of refurbishing and the risk it introduces in reuse.
[30:57] So, he's created 2 vastly unprofitable companies so far, neither one which is doing particularly good for the world, again Tesla is a bad use of subsidies and money. It incinerated that cash in order to give rich people fancy cars instead of actually doing good with if he had them properly invested. SpaceX is a giant defense contractor making a world a worse place.
[31:20] His other investments: he bailed out his cousin's company SolarCity defrauding a huge amount of investors to attunes of billions of dollars in order to protect SpaceX and Tesla. These currently are being sued, that will go to court in the quarter one 2020 and it will probably be a 7 to 9 figure settlement that will come out of that. Course he has the Boring Company which is trying to drill tunnels in an unsafe way using an old refurbished sewage tunneling drill. And currently, they're making all sorts of plans and making ridiculous promises. And then as soon as governments look into this actually and start crunching numbers, they find it’s actually a much worse deal than anything else. But inexplicably the company get to use funding from Silicon Valley and venture capitalists who don't know where else to put the money because there's just so much money sloshing around and the alternatives are negative yield bonds or throwing it into the stock market that looks like it could blow up at any point. So why not just incinerate the cash in Elon Musk subsidies incinerator? So, they do that. Neuralink which is just in the news which is a brain interface for humans and computers, they bragged about it in the presentation about how far they are in advance of FDA-approved systems. However, they are behind cutting edge in non-FDA systems which they neglected to mention, there's a lot of things left out in the presentation, like the fact that many of the rats they've done this to have died within a couple weeks, and it's a generally problematic thing. Plus, who wants Elon Musk to have access to the brain? Only fucking sycophants and psychos.
[32:50] Like I said, I can keep on going, I'm not going to. But I don't know why, why did you do this, Daniel? Why did you trigger me, nobody wants to hear me rant for 10 minutes about Elon Musk. I’m done.
[33:00] Well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree, David. Speaking of Defense contractors and the military, David. Well, before we move on, a few people have asked us about research, not even like research methodologies but how do you access scientific papers? And, of course, if you don't know about sci-hub, you should get on that immediately. It's a way to basically read any published scientific paper for free. You just go to sci-hub.tw, that's s c i - h u b . t w. And once there, you can put in the link of any paper you want. And basically, the way it works is anytime someone asks it to look up a paper that it hasn't before, it scans it, downloads it, stores it on its server, and then displays it for you, you can download it. And then if anyone else wants to view it, they can get quick access to it. So it's really slick.
[34:03] Also, Daniel, the sci-hub.tw website is currently undergoing some issues. So sci-hub.se is actually the preferred access point right now.
[34:16] Okay, that's good to know.
[34:19] Now you know. But, I mean, maybe this is sort of interesting to talk about so more research methodology just for a second because we have so much for some of these episodes. If you look, many of them have, you know, 30-40-50-60 sources on our website ashesashes. org, so you can reaffirm all the things we say, you can send links if you want to find bits and pieces to people who don't believe it. But I mean, the way that I approach it at least, Daniel, is that I will do a general scan of the topic, I mean usually, it's something that I'm already aware of and I know where to look for the things I want. But oftentimes I’ll start really wide, search a couple of news sites to see what the current conversation about it is, search communities like Reddit or if there are other niche communities that are more appropriate to whatever the topic we're looking at. Sometimes Wikipedia, it's great if you dig into the sources at the bottom, that's a good way to find some of these papers that are considered important for the conversations about whatever topic you're on. And then from there, you know, transition to Google Scholar another scholarly search tools that allow us to really nail in and figure out where the journal articles that are important for whatever topic we're looking at are. And at that point, that's where Sci-Hub enters this, allows us to read all of these without having to have access to them via some academic institution or emailing the author which can sometimes take weeks by the time to get back to you. So it very quickly allows us to see if this paper is good or not, if it's useful. Scanning through that, and then we collect all this, we throw it into a couple different tools but typically Discord, it’s where we put all our notes, all the actual articles into Zotero, you can find our Zotero team if you search ashesashescast on Zotero.
[35:56] And that's where we generate the final bibliographies for all our pieces in via the BibTex format. And then Daniel will usually start writing out of a script, I'll start taking notes for things that I want to point out, and we’ll do that on the tool called Simplenote which is collaborative editing. And that's more or less it.
[36:15] Yeah and luckily we have gotten a fair bit of research from listeners who emailed us ideas. In fact, the paper that we interviewed Dr. Patrick Bigger on last week was sent to us by a listener just a week or two before we reached out to him. So that was a quick turnaround and a really great lead, thank you for sending that to us. And speaking of Dr. Patrick Bigger, David, you know, he sent us an email just recently, I think it was today. Finally got a chance to listen to that episode that came out last week and he sent us a paper titled the Militarization of Climate Change written in 2012 I believe. And this was a response to your comments at the end of last week's episode about how we like to frame all of our global issues in terms of war, you know, we have the War on Drugs, the War on Terror. Eventually, we’ll have the War on Climate, right? And this paper that he sent us explores that exact thing. President Obama in 2009 gave a speech about the danger climate change poses to National Security. And then the Pentagon released a report acknowledging climate change as a military concern. And coining the phrase “threat multiplier”, citing such concerns as increased terrorism, disease, forced migration and the stress that climate change will place on our ability to acquire resources like oil and even fish.
[37:39] And then countries around the world, Australia, the UK, Germany, France, military experts from many different countries, all kind of came together to jointly express the need for increased militarization as a response to climate change really framing not just our language and our words on how do we deal with climate change in military terms but quite literally fueling the militarization of the planet as a direct response to climate change which is, as we talked about last week, made worse by a heavier military presence. So very ironic there. But, you know, it's interesting, that's outlined in this paper, is that, you know, many people feel that this is a good thing to frame the climate in terms of military concern. For example here in the US, there is a deep division between the Republican and Democratic parties, they don't really agree on much, it's hard for them to collaborate and work together. But one thing they can agree on is having a strong military. And so the idea becomes, “well, if we can't get them to cooperate in fighting climate change, let's galvanize them and the public by framing the issue in militaristic terms, and therefore, you know, maybe then they'll come together in and work to fight against this environmental catastrophe.”
[38:59] But the author of this paper, Emily Gilbert, she brings up some really good points about how that's actually kind of problematic for several reasons. In the first place, attaching the military to the climate narrows our conception of security from maybe some more complex fundamental thing to just basic traditional military concern such as energy security, resource scarcity, territorial authority and dominance which does not do enough to address the more complex issue of climate change. Two, this framing reinforces the idea that we as a nation confined to a territorial boundary are fighting some external force. And that complicates our ability to think about climate change as a global community and it kind of deepens the us-versus-them mentality. Here's a quote from the paper:
“Militarism encourages the use of force against foreigners with barriers erected to exclude those who bear the immediate impact of climate change, even though they are usually the least responsible for climate change. Operation Sea Signal which the US deployed in 1994 to deal with 50,000 refugees from Haiti and Cuba offers an instructive example of how the military addresses refugees, most of whom were held at Guantanamo Bay while their cases were processed. The responses to human tragedy in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina when military priorities took hold over the immediate needs of the racialized impoverished victims speaks to the danger of concocting security threats so that abandonment is prioritized over assistance. This is part of a worrisome trend of the rise of an aide military complex and military encroachment on civilian sponsored development.”
Three, and I thought this was a good point, is that the way the military maps risk is itself in conflict with the strategies we need to address climate change. You know, the military makes use of long-term planning around worst-case scenarios and how those scenarios interact with our narrow conceptions of security like resource availability and how to preserve resources in the midst of some threat. But we need are changes to our underlying political and economic structures, not exercises around possible scenarios. From the paper:
“The military's approach to climate change does not lend itself to addressing fundamental social structures that perpetuate environmental degradation, that is oil dependency, oil colonialism and the deepening international fragmentation of rich and poor – the conditions that entrench insecurity are thus left unchallenged.”
[41:53] And that's kind of what we’ve talked about last week with Patrick, right, is like “greening” the military doesn't really solve the fact that the big military and the infrastructure needed to support that burns not just a ton of fossil fuels but it also makes dramatic land-use changes, it requires the reorientation, it requires massive agricultural output that itself is driving climate change. So how can the military in any way combat climate change when it itself is a major contributor to the problem in the first place? Lastly, speaking about “greening”, the legitimization of the military as our principal tool against climate change means that all of our funding for environmental research and investment risks becoming in a way filtered exclusively through military goals. Again from the paper:
“The question that the ‘greening’ of the military sidesteps is whether there should indeed be a military at all. Moreover, even if the military persists, should it be where climate change innovations are located? When environmental issues are filtered through the military, less money is available for innovation in other sectors unless they are working in partnership with the military. Military investment in green initiatives, for example, is not likely to develop innovations around public transport but rather focus on the kind of transportation required for military needs which will then become available to consumers, much as sports utility vehicles or SUVs are an offshoot of four-wheel-drive military vehicles."
Did you know that, David, did you know the SUVs came from military innovation?
[43:39] Well, isn’t that like the Hummer idea comes? The Jeep is obviously a military jeep. And then I guess that evolved sort of into the Jeep that we see now, but I don't know if SUVs directly came from military stuff. Isn’t there an argument that they came from trucks.
[43:57] Where the trucks did come from, David?
[43:59] Trucks been around for ages, you know, like people have been hauling stuff since we first made cars.
[44:05] Well, you're definitely right about like the Hummer, you know, H2, H3, and everything.
[44:10] Yeah, the Hummer and the Jeep are both like directly military evolved but I'm not entirely convinced SUV, especially cause most of the popular series now are built on car chassis anyways so. If you're saying that the car like came from the military thing, I mean, I guess you can make an argument for that. But I think this is a little oversimplifying all of that.
[44:29] Well, this is from 2012, David, you know, times were much simpler back then.
[44:33] Well, everyone in 2012 didn't have to worry about anything being correct cause they knew the world was going to end later that year.
[44:39] But it does remind me of what Patrick said last week about the very fact that the military builds roads to enable supply lines to reach forward operating bases. Well, once the military leaves, those roads still exist and that's what encourages local populations to use that infrastructure, right, drive down it. And then, once that infrastructure is there, you're also going to organize your future construction developments around that infrastructure.
[45:06] But what if instead, we helped the military develop like biodegradable roads that returned to prairie once they were done. Yeah, you don't have an answer for that!
[45:16] No, I did not.
[45:20] Wait, have you heard of this, Daniel? What if they were solar roads?
[45:24] What would a solar road do though? Like what do we need a road to do other than...
[45:27] Well, it’s a solar road, it's a solar panel and a road.
[45:31] We can have a solar row that also recharges based on the friction provided by the wheels that are slapping against the surface.
[45:41] [Laughs] Wheels slapping. You don't know the solar roads thing, Daniel? That’s like a pretty old, old internet meme. People got really excited about these projects, I don’t know if that’s a TED talk or Kickstarter or something. But some companies like, we're developing solar roads. And then, you know, the tech bro hopium, whatever crap. They like, oh yeah if we just build all the roads to be solar roads than we would totally solve our energy problem. And I think it’s probably because there's an equation somewhere that found that the amount of area that needs to be converted to solar panels in the United States is about equivalent to the amount of area that we currently have paved for roads. So someone’s just, if we just swapped out the roads for solar roads, well then, bro, we’ll be totally…
Anyway, people really thought it was going to like change the world and like be this big thing and then they built this like very short demo test zone of the solar roads and it is basically a huge failure as you'd expect.
[46:31] Yeah, I can't imagine how that would fail. Well, let me just read the conclusion or parts of the conclusion of this paper cause I think it's pretty interesting. She writes:
“Hiving climate change to National Security ensures that environmental issues will garner more attention. But instead of opening up questions regarding security or the environment, these are foreclosed by a military approach. It reduces the concept of security to a nationalist defensive strategy modeled on future disaster scenarios of resource conflict. Moreover, it perpetuates an externalized concept of nature that is to be commanded and controlled with no real sense of ecological prioritization, rather energy security emerges as the primary focus for innovation and investment to combat geopolitical concerns around the reliance on foreign oil and the threat to military personnel in the field.”
And real quick, what she means by that is, again, those forward operating bases that we alluded to last week that must be established in far-flung places, that need to be constantly supplied with fuel are also the sites of many casualties. In 2009, it was estimated that three-quarters of all US casualties in the war zone came from IEDs that hit fuel convoys.
[47:53] So three-quarters of those people being injured or killed in war zones were people who were just delivering fuel. So from the military perspective, if you can improve fuel efficiency, you can reduce the number of combat soldiers directed at protecting fuel supply lines and redirect them to other areas, maybe more aggressive military engagements for example. She goes on and this last part is something that really hit home on the consequences of our language.
“At the same time, increased spending on the military is legitimized as it becomes a source of green initiatives. Where does this leave politics? And more precisely, what becomes of an anti-war politics when the sphere of military action infiltrates the gray areas of everyday life, contaminating our quality of life at the most elemental level? If we support climate change initiatives, are we then pro-military? If we are anti-military, do we jeopardize climate change action? As the militarization of climate change unfolds, it is this interpretation that needs to be disrupted, both with respect to martial approaches to the environment and with respect to the troubling attempts to use the mobilization of climate change to re-moralize war and the military.”
And I guess that kind of circles back to the very first thing that we were talking about, right David?
[49:13] If a cultural identity goes so far down the road to becoming intertwined with racist, you know, ideology, can you even separate the racism from the way of life? And she's kind of warning against the exact same thing but just with the military and the environment where if we allow this idea to take hold of the military is what can battle climate change or even just the conception of climate change as a battlefield or we need to go to war on climate change, if that takes root too far and we allow the military influence to seep into, you know, our everyday lives and the technology that we invest in goes to the military, and the research we’re doing is aiding military goals. And the way we think about migration and water scarcity and energy dependence and famine and disease is all framed around our military response to that, then you can't even be anti-climate change without being pro-military and that's a dangerous place to be as a culture I think.
[50:18] Daniel, I feel like you caught me off-guard here. I didn't know there was going to be assigned reading for this episode.
[50:24] Oh, you thought chat episodes just means that we just show up and...
[50:30] I will admit I didn't think it was going to be you lecturing me the entire time on a paper that I didn't read.
[50:36] Well, I didn't know you'd be lecturing me on why you think Elon Musk is not a great guy.
[50:41] That's you, this is you, you're the fucking... you’re pulling the strings, and now the listeners have to deal with the crap. So sorry, everyone.
[50:49] Well, what's going on in your life this week, David?
[50:54] Ahhh. Well, Daniel, we did get an email that's kind of exciting from our friends over in Carbondale Springs Illinois, not Colorado like we mentioned a couple times I think erroneously on this show. And for those who are unaware, Carbondale Springs is a town in Illinois that is currently trying to rebuild the whole town to be economically and environmentally resilient in a world that is increasingly neither one of those things.
[51:21] Well, it's in Carbondale I think and the project is Carbondale Spring. We talked about them a couple months ago, at least maybe a few months ago, they're the group that is trying to build a case for the city to defund the police so that they can redirect those funds to a more compassionate relationship with each other and the Earth.
[51:43] You’re right, I keep messing up the name of this place. It is Carbondale, Illinois. The plan is called Carbondale Spring. Anyway, they wrote us recently to tell us that they were kicking off more of their plans, they’re pushing forward, their larger plan involves around building a lot of worker cooperatives, about building out renewable energy and sorting out funding for all these programs, like Daniel mentioned some of it is from defunding the police, but also some of it is from outside sources. And so one of the first initiatives that they have is the start of a worker co-op fund which is, for those who are in the activists' community probably familiar with bail funds. If you aren't, let me describe them: basically, a bunch of people donates to a fund, this becomes your bail fund, and it's used to bail people out of prison when you have actions that people get arrested – something that Extinction Rebellion could learn a lot from – and you take this money and pay someone’s bail, eventually it's paid back once the court and the case and whenever is dismissed and figured out or whatever happens and it returns back to the fund which can then contribute to someone else’s bail and keep it going. In the same way, this is a co-op fund which is initially going to be used to fund a burger restaurant that will have both traditional locally-sourced beef burgers as well as homemade vegetarian burgers and alternatives in Carbondale.
[53:02] The burger place is called Fat Patties and they've set up a GoFundMe for this project which we’ll link on the website. And the ultimate goal is that once the restaurant gets restarted cause it did start before but it was closed because of the owner's choice, it is going to restart as a workers co-op. The workers will slowly pay off the bond that they're currently raising on GoFundMe. And when that is complete, that money will be used to jump-start other co-ops around the city until eventually, they get to a point where they hope that most of the city's function is being served by these co-ops, which is pretty cool.
[53:34] Yeah, really cool.
[53:36] You can read more all the things they're trying to do in Carbondale and a Carbondale Spring plan on their website which I had open but I closed and now I can' find.
[53:46] I got it, it's carbondalespring.org. And can you imagine, David, if we like had pop-up like imagine someone was listening to this episode, right, and then all of the sudden there was a pop-up advertisement, could you imagine how frustrating that would be for the listener?
[54:05] Are you trying to segue me into this advertising stuff I wanted to talk about here?
[54:09] Well, what kind of advertising, David, I mean did you see something, did you read about something or have you just been dissociating recently?
[54:18] Well, can't it be all the above? But specifically, I was reading some stuff on the history of web advertising. So did you see these articles since I don't remember sending it to you, did you see this stuff? You’re just reading my mind here, we’re on the same wavelength? Y’all, you need to install adblockers, that's my short version of this conversation, install an ad blocker, please. Get on Firefox because Chrome and these other apps are now trying to circumvent these things, download an ad blocker called uBlock Origin, install that. If you want to really get into this, there's another app called uMatrix which does more, whatever. If you look at it, you’ll figure it out. But, man, advertising, web advertising is crooked, man!
[55:01] What do you mean? Like you mean just in the way that they kind of target, you display things you don't want to see? I watched a YouTube video the other day and I noticed that I've been seeing advertisements for the exact thing that I was watching on YouTube. I do have that adblocker that you mentioned, David, but I still find ads, you know, in random places, right.
[55:21] Yeah, they still turn up. Part of this was motivated, I read this article recently on the history of Internet advertising. I'll try and find the link but I don't know if I have it. But there are plenty of things on it if you want to search about it, you can find it. But also I was on someone else's computer that didn't have an adblock and I just couldn’t believe how many ads to were on websites and how slow these websites would open when there are all these ads are coming into it. And I just couldn't believe it. I live in like a very ad-protective bubble because I hate them so much. So I have ad-blocking on my actual browser, and then I have network ad-blocking that I've installed on my network. And then on my phone, I use, again, Firefox which I can install ad-blocking software on. I really try and insulate myself from ads because I feel they’re healthy even if, yeah you know, my brains is an ad blocker, I could ignore the ads but they slowly get in there, they adjust your behavior and it's obnoxious and it takes up my bandwidth, takes up my time, messing up websites – I don't want them there. But the larger thing, and especially how advertising has gotten so insidious, Daniel, is as you’ve mentioned, it's this tracking surveillance capitalism that is everywhere and you can't run away from it. I mean, so I'm looking at, I want to get a new pair of hiking boots, for example, so I’m researching boots and try to figure out what I want, I go to some stores, try them on, blah blah blah. And I can't do anything in any of my applications without just getting bombarded with ads for boots. And these boots – I don't want them, I already decided I don't want these things, I know they're not what I'm looking for – but these stupid ads don't know any better and they're just constantly: “Oh, look at this boot, look at this boot, look at this boot.” I don't want your boots, these aren’t even the right type of boots, you don't know anything about me, you superficially dumb ads, whatever.
[57:02] It's exhausting and it's driving me probably to purchase these hiking boots that I may or may not actually need. But I mean on a larger scale like this whole arms race is ridiculous. And we've come to this conception that we absolutely need advertising in order to allow most of the websites on the internet to exist. And we stay without ads we couldn’t have all these websites and other services online. And maybe some of that is true but a lot of times it's not. So yeah, Google Maps is powered by ads, Google’s larger powerful advertising engine. But we also have alternatives like OpenStreetMap. Google search itself is powered by advertising, that's what funds Google, but we also have alternatives like DuckDuckGo that don't do that or do it in a way that is more responsible. There are always alternatives for these systems that exist without this advertising-funded model but we pretend that this is the only way the internet could run. This podcast itself, we don't do any ads, we don't have any ads on this show. But somehow we're able to find a way to make it work and put all this time into it. And this is true for almost everything and it's frustrating that we've limited ourselves to restricting the ways that we try and fund so much content creation, whether it's websites, podcasts, application, services, whatever through this very insidious technique of trying to modify the behavior of mass amounts of people in order to serve the needs of whoever is, you know, ultimately selling whatever the product that the advertising is pushing. And I guess also sometimes necessarily selling a product but trying to adjust behavior in a way that modifies how people interact with the world or the things they believe, say we're coming up on political seasons. And when you say it like that, it just seems so crazy. And a thing is a lot of these ads, they really work, they used to anyway. So the reason that advertising, especially on the web has gotten so humongous and ubiquitous was: at first, it worked really well, the first banner ad that was created had a 42% click-through rate. Which means nothing, you don't know anything about ads, but that is insane. And mostly it was because it was novel, no one ever seen this. What was it? They didn't know how to react to this, they clicked on it. As time went on people got savvier with these banner ads, they say, “okay, well, I’m not going to click on these anymore cause I know it's just some crap that I don't need.” And so the click-through rate started to drop so they started innovating in the ad industry and that's when we came up with the idea of pop-up ads.
[59:23] We all hate pop-up ads, they were awful.
[59:26] Then we started seeing, people started closing them immediately, they developed pop-under ads and all sorts of other styles of pop-up things. Browsers were like: enough is enough, we're going to install in our browser software by default pop-up blockers. That's sorta killed the pop-up ad and the advertising industry had to innovate and they did that by trying to make more targeted ads, ads which would blend into things, that seemed integrated into paper, to trick people into actually clicking on these things. And as time went on, these trackings got more and more ubiquitous and all-knowing and all-powerful driven primarily by these very large data warehouses that are Google, that are Facebook, that are other silos that collect and knows everything about you online and use that information, not just in terms of what you're interested in, but your day-to-day moods, what you might need, the things you’ve purchased recently to try to figure out, well, what could they want now? Or more accurately, I guess, in terms of the advertisers' idea, the advertisers being Facebook, Google, whatever: what can we convince an advertiser that you want right now. So there's two sides of this: advertisers try to be connected to the person that they want to sell something to, but these companies that act as the middlemen that give access to these audiences are also trying to identify what would be most appropriate to show to various advertisers and also to audiences. And they are kind of in-between which means that really no one on either side this deal is getting exactly what they want, the advertiser or person being advertised to.
[1:00:56] And I mean I really, really loathe that. Some apps that I can't block ads with my adblockers on say Twitter, say Instagram. I go and I report every single company that advertises to me with their ad as spam. And then I block the company. I've actually got a block list on Twitter that y'all can subscribe to if you want to also be blocked from all the companies I've already blocked and there's a couple thousand in there. So my Twitter experience at this point is mostly ad-free. And ads I do get to be really weird: like just somebody decided to promote their tweet or whatever and it is not nearly as bad. I mean, it's a lot of work to try and remove yourself from this ecosystem and it is possible. But I would be very happy to pay Twitter or Facebook or whatever a dollar a month or whatever it would cost, whatever they theoretically make for me annually – which is not much, it's like $10 a user – in order to never have to look at an ad again in my entire life and for them not to mine my data in order to sell my data to these our advertisers. But that's not an option.
[1:01:57] Why do you think those are not options, do you think there's a real reason why companies wouldn't want to give you that option even if they are, I guess, technically breaking even or even making money?
[1:02:09] Well, I think it's two-fold: one, they've done the math, they don't think enough users will convert to a subscription-based model in order to fund the difference in money; and two, they’ve set up their systems in a way that we could have a divided subscription where most people get ads but some people don't, so say like the Spotify model where still have an option to pay and have your ads removed but everybody else who’s on the free plan will instead get a lot of ads. They still track all your data, they still track all your taste and all that data can still be sold to third-party advertisers outside of Spotify. And really, I don't get anything out of that outside of the mental relief of not having this cognitive pollution going on around me all the time that the ads are. So there is no winning in this process and it's extremely frustrating for me, and I'm not ready to go in a full Richard Stallman and try and live like a digital hermit. But I really wish there were easy alternatives that still had the audience cause I realize there are websites, tools like Mastodon where I can turn to for a similar experience as Twitter without all the crap that Twitter has with it, the tracking, whatever. It lacks a lot of the community and that's the chicken of the egg. So these websites have captured these communities, turned them into walled gardens and make that the product that I'm actually trying to participate in. And the cost of that is, of course, my privacy.
[1:03:27] I want to stop you right there, cause I think that's a really important point, because so many people kind of point to the free market and say, "look, no company's going to be successful if they do things people don't like because then you'll just go somewhere else," but I think that's a great example of how oftentimes, especially in digital spaces, companies aren't really offering anything of value, they just found communities to basically put a wall around, right, so that you have to pay to get in either directly or through the harvesting of your data. And how do you go somewhere else when that's where your community is, when that's where your friends are, that's the people you talk to. You can't, there's no alternative to that, right?
[1:04:08] Exactly, you're captured by your communities and this is really the tool that they hold over our heads in order to keep us within these things. I don't want to have a Facebook, I’ve deleted my Facebook in the past but now I have to maintain one if only, and I hardly use it but, if only to administer, say the webpage that Ashes has because we need to have a web presence on there for whatever reason. And people do message use on there, they do interact with our content on Facebook so we are getting something out of it. But I really hate feeling captured like that. And even worse is that Facebook has somehow also pushed themselves into being not just a social network for keeping contact with your friends but also a market for finding, say rentals or something, I know, Daniel, you're looking for places to live right now, so Facebook is actually a really good way to find people who are looking for roommates who are looking to rent out rooms and stuff. It is an important center for finding events that are going on, unfortunately, a lot of activism occurs solely on Facebook events which just seem so completely insane to me but that's just the way it is.
[1:05:10] Speaking of activism, David I've got a little bit of activism coming up: in a couple of days I'll be visiting with a friend an Immigrant Detention Facility in the southeast. It's something I was really motivated to do after speaking to a lot of people involved in the immigrant rights battle, those who work in refugee services, those who are working with advocacy or legal channels to peel back some of the very cruel policies that have been enacted towards immigrants. And I'm really looking forward to it as a way to connect with someone in person and really maybe see for myself what I've been reading about in the news.
[1:05:51] You know, it's not something I feel like going to change anything dramatically in terms of the overall infrastructure of these policies but for myself, I feel like just to connect with a person who's involved in this is going to be important for me. And I hope that it will have a positive impact on whoever it is I end up visiting. Usually what happens is these visitations or this one, in particular, is arranged through an organization that serves immigrant communities and specifically they bring the help bridge the gap between families and their loved ones who are detained in these facilities, they offer support, they offer resources. Before you meet with somebody they kind of give you advice, they say, “okay, look, when you go in there, if they need information on their case or if they need resources that they need to be connected with an attorney, if they need this or that, here are some things you can tell them or let us know and we can follow up on that.” So, it's not just a personal connection, right, it's not just a way of bringing somebody out of social isolation, you know, giving them someone to talk to which is extremely important emotionally and psychologically, but it's also serving a very practical purpose of, you know, a lot of people into detention, imprisoned basically, don't even know why or they don't even know the status of their case or they don't know where their family is. And by going to visit them you can help bridge that gap.
[1:07:20] So I don't know, I'm going to do that in a couple days and maybe I'll have something to say about it afterwards. But anyway, David, I think we’ve let this drag on long enough so why don't we close out and tell people...
[1:07:33] Yeah, this was a long rambly…I don't know, I feel like we did a better job last week. Listeners, tell us if it sucks, tell us. If we're not doing this right, let us know, there are better ways of doing this, I don't know if you want like miniature conversations about long papers like Daniel monologued for us or conversations about stuff in the news or what we're up to, the ways the show works. This format is still very much in flux, so please participate and help us figure out what works best for you and for us.
[1:08:04] Yeah, I agree with that, so that's a lot to think about.
[1:08:07] It's a lot to think about, Daniel. Well, if you want to find out more about the things we’ve talked about today, if you want to read some of these links that we've mentioned. And if we can find them then we'll add them to the website at ashesashes. org, where you can also find a full transcript of this episode.
[1:08:26] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible, particularly the ones that are not these chat episodes, but we still do some preparation for these as well. So if you would like to support us, if you'd like us to keep going in these efforts, you can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, giving us five stars on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use, or sending us some support through patreon.com/ashesashescast. We really do appreciate that and we've been able to make some equipment upgrades through your generous donations, we've also been able to send some donations to other organizations like Carbondale Spring who we believe are living out some of the solutions to the topics that we discuss on this show. So, once again, thank you so much for supporting us so that we can support ourselves and others. Also, we would like to thank our associate producers Chad Peterson and John Fitzgerald, thank you so much. Oh, and I always forget but sent us an email it's contact at ashesashes. org, we've received quite a bit of emails recently actually and we are getting back to them. I've been a little bit slow because of this family vacation but we will return your call, so to speak.
[1:09:46] Speaking of calls, we have a phone number that you can call, I think it still works, it's 31399-ashes. And if you call that, you can leave a message, we're going to integrate it into an awesome call and show at some point, so definitely we want to hear your voice so you can be a part of that. That number again is 31399-ashes, that's 313-992-7437. And if email or phone calls don't float your boat, you can find us an all your favorite social media networks: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook at ashesashescast – send us a message on there, but not Facebook, Instagram or Twitter are best, and we will get back to you, we love hearing from people on all sorts of platforms. So reach out we're easy to get in contact with and eventually, I promise, we will respond. Next week we're back into a deep dive research episode just like you came here for, so we hope you'll turn in for that and not be turned away by these conversation chats. But if you like these too, let us know, we would love like I said your recommendations on how to make this stuff as fun as possible. So don't be a stranger, come say hey in our subreddit, come say hey in our Discord chat which you can find a link to on our website or any of those other connections that we’ve already mentioned. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.