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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who's simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. 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Sports Illustrated has delivered some of the best storytelling in sports for 70 years, and now that continues on our show. Each week, we'll dive deep into the best stories from around the sports world. Sports Illustrated Weekly is available every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. NFL fans, nothing compares to being there live now. The crowd is alive and the NFL's biggest season ever is now ready for the postseason. It's playoff time. We got to win. NFL playoff tickets are on sale now. Don't miss your chance to be a part of the postseason action on the road to Super Bowl 56 visitnfl.com/tickets for a complete listing of games, that's nfl.com/tickets. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison, and today I'm going to be talking about some really big things and ideas, but hopefully I'll be talking about them in a way that contextualizes them and makes you remember that despite their magnitude, they're still very real things that you can interact with. Anyway, I'll get started and eventually it will kind of make sense. So right now, we are all living in one massive liminal space. For those less online than I am, I'll explain what I mean. Liminal spaces became an online meme around late 2019 as a term to describe a certain type of picture that features architecture or like just a place that looks off familiar, eerie, lonely, yet mesmerizing and beautiful. I've been an avid lurker on the liminal Space subreddit for a while now, and there's an undeniable allure to these dreamlike photos of buildings and rooms and the effect that they have on me. Describing what makes a liminal space photo a liminal space photo, as opposed to just any other regular photo of a building or a room, can be tricky because in part, the point is to elicit a certain feeling without thinking too much about the why. They're not spooky or scary in the traditional sense. The gist of a liminal space photo and where it gets its name, liminality, is a good place to begin to understand what type of feelings these pictures are supposed to produce. Liminal refers to a transitional phase and the ambiguity and disorientation associated with being inside of a threshold. Not on either one side per se, but somewhere in between. Now, that threshold can be many things. A literal transitionary threshold between certain places is a common one. This can include stuff like hallways and airports. One of my favorites, though, is a threshold between time and ambiguous, unspecific nostalgia that you can't quite place. But it feels awfully familiar, like a dream from childhood. Pictures of weird indoor squishy playgrounds do this for me. The other threshold is a threshold between purpose and use, like a building or room designed for a very specific special purpose. But now, no longer serving that it's empty and out of date and abandoned mall or cheery birthday party room at an arcade, photographed, desolate and in the dark. There's two other aspects of liminal space photos that complement the various thresholds we've mentioned. Usually they have no visible people, and there's a sense of artificiality, like a lot of fluorescent and artificial lighting. And even when there is a sunny outside, it looks fake, like a Windows computer screen saver. One of the most popular liminal space photos is of an underground bunker in Las Vegas that was painted and decorated to look like it's outside, despite being buried deep within the ground. It's such a great example of liminal spaces because it elicits a certain type of cognitive dissonance and a distinct lack of synchronicity that is difficult to describe otherwise. Almost never is quote UN quote nature the subject of these photos. They nearly exclusively focus on very human constructs. Particularly ones that no longer serve their intended use, or maybe never did in the first place. O what do I mean by we're all in one huge liminal space right now? Well, we are in between a historic economic and technological boom, one that's produced machines that resemble the magic of old. But on the other side of this valley is global climate catastrophe and destruction and change the likes of which humans have possibly never seen, or at least remembered. We're in the transitionary. Between these two States and that dissociation of not being fully in either one, that that cognitive dissonance can be kind of mind boggling. It's like the nervous anticipation right before the roller coaster goes over the peak, or that weird feeling of being alone in an empty church nursery at night. Similar to liminal space photos, climate change transcends our regular perception of time, space, and with that, cause and effect. It's more than just a regular thing, phenomenon, or object. While specifically thinking about climate change, philosopher Timothy Morton dubbed these massive space-time altering objects as hyper objects. Now, Morton often writes about things that can't be talked about directly, so really the only way to discuss it or get into the topic is to orbit around it, associating with adjacent ideas or words to get close enough to the topic to partially understand it, even if you can't get quite there. Other possible examples of. Paper objects, besides climate change, can include stuff like black holes, the biosphere, or the solar system. But hyper objects don't need to be just massive celestial things. They can also be the sum total of all nuclear materials on Earth, or the very long lasting product of direct human manufacture such as all of the Styrofoam or plastic bags in the world. It can also be the sum of all the whirling machinery of capitalism or the state. Hyper objects then, are hyper just in relation to some other entity, whether they're directly manufactured by humans or not. And hyper objects aren't just collections systems or assemblages of other objects. They are things in their own right, and they affect more than just humans, and they don't come into being just because humans notice them. They will have effects on the world whether or not they are observed. One of the more obvious differences between hyper objects and ordinary objects is that you can't ever actually see a hyper object in its totality. You can only ever witness a small extension or piece of a hyper object. Now, this makes thinking about them kind of intrinsically tricky. It's like only seeing a fragmented shadow of a thing and the effects that that thing has on all other things. Now, the more contrarian listeners might protest that we never see all of. Any object, even ordinary ones. Now it's obviously true that everything we see has a negative side. The part behind that we can't actually always look at, but can reasonably assume it's there. Now the difference is that hyper objects transcend not only are regular conception of physical reality, but more so our temporal reality. You can hold a coffee mug and rotate it around in a pretty short amount of time and witness each side and angle. Or if you want to get really fancy, you could make a 360 scan so you could see a projected version of the entire object. Or you know more simply just get three people in a room to all look at different sides of the mug, thus forming a consensual reality based understanding of the whole object. Now, not only can you not hold a hyper object, but even if you could, the temporal effects would make it impossible to rotate it around to witness the totality of what's being held. And it would be way too big for multiple people to ever witness all sides of the thing. Quoting from Morton's book Hyper Objects, the philosophy and ecology after the end of the world quote. Consider raindrops. You can feel them on your head, but you can't perceive the actual raindrop in itself. You can only ever perceive your particular anthropomorphic translation of the raindrops. Isn't this similar to the rift between weather, which I can feel falling on my head, and global climate? Not the older idea of local patterns of weather, but the entire system? I can think of and compute climate in this sense, but I can't directly see or touch it. The gap between the phenomenon and the thing yawns wide open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world. Humans have been aware of enormous entities, some real, some imagined, for as long as we have existed. But this book is arguing that there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. These entities directly caused us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos. Perhaps this is the most fundamental issue. Hyper objects seem to force something on us, something that affects some core idea of what it means to exist. What Earth is, what society is. There's no doubt that cosmic phenomenon such as meteors and blood, red moons, tsunamis, tornadoes and earthquakes have terrified humans in the past. Meteors and comets were known as disasters. Literally, a disaster is a fallen dysfunctional or dangerous or evil star disaster. But such disasters take place against a stable backdrop. There is the tolomatic Aristotelian machinery of the stars, which hold fixed stars in place. It it seems as if there's something about hyper objects that is more deeply challenging than these. Disasters. The worry is not whether the world will end, as in the old models of the disaster, but whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps it might have already taken place. A deep shuddering of temporality then occurs. For one thing, we are inside hyper objects like Jonah and the whale. This means that every decision we make is in some sense related to hyper objects. These decisions are not merely limited to sentences in texts about hyper objects. When I turn the key in the ignition of my car, I am relating to global warming. When a novelist writes about the immigration to Mars, they are relating to global warming. I am one of the entities caught in the hyper object. That I hear call global warming. Different hyper objects have numerous properties in common, but for our purposes we're going to discuss the five main points of similarity. Hyper objects are viscous, meaning they stick to beings that are involved with them. They are non local, in other words, and any local manifestation of the hyper object is not directly the hyper object. They involve very different temporalities than the human scale ones that we're used to. In particular, some very very large hyper objects have a genuine Gaussian temporality. They generate space-time vortexes due to general relativity, and hyper objects occupy a higher dimensional phase space that results in there being invisible to humans for stretches of time. And they exhibit their effects inter objectively. That is, they could be detected in a space. Which consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects. The hyper object is not just a function of our knowledge, it is also hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as humans. Now I'm going to go into the five different points of similarity in more detail to kind of help flush out what these things hyper objects, what they are, and how they might actually be a useful way to think about. Really big stuff. So First off, viscous hyper objects adhere to any object they touch, no matter how hard the object tries to resist. In this way, hyper objects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an object tries to resist a hyper object, the more glued to the hyper object it becomes. Now, the more you learn about any big topic, the more you'll end up noticing it in the world. This is the law of synchronicity, but the more you know. Climate change. The more you realize how perversive it is, the more you discover about evolution, the more you realize how much our entire physical being is caught in its meshwork. Immediate, intimate symptoms of hyper objects are very real, vivid, and often painful. Yet they carry with them this trace of unreality. A good example of hyper objective viscosity would be radioactive materials. The more you try to get rid of them, the more you realize you can't. They seriously undermine the notion of away. There is no away. Flushing vomit down the toilet doesn't make it disappear, it makes its way to the ocean or the water treatment facility and and eventually just back to us again. I'll quote from the book Hyper Objects quote laid itself. Is the most viscous thing of all, since nothing can surpass its speed. Radiation is Sartre's jar of honey par excellence, a luminous honey that reveals our bone structure as it seeps around us. Again, it's not a matter of making some suicidal leap into the honey, but discovering that we are already inside it. This is it, folks. This is the ecological interconnectedness. Come in and join the fun. But I see that you're already here, UN quote. Yeah, that is a that's fun. The next point of similarity we're gonna discuss is the molten or Gaussian quality. Hyper objects are time stretched to such an extent that they become impossible to hold in the mind. Hyper objects are so massive that they refute the idea that space-time is fixed, concrete and consistent. The size of hyper objects can make them basically invisible just because they're so big. It's like swimming in Crater Lake in Southern Oregon, one of the deepest lakes in the world. But it's not just deep, it's also very, very clear, so the water is so deep. Yet so clear. It's like you're swimming in the sky. It's like you're swimming in nothing. It would be like if you approach an object and more and more objects emerge because we can't see the end of them. Paper objects are necessarily uncanny. They they have to be. Just like my favorite liminal space photos. Hyper objects seem to beckon us further into themselves, making us realize that we're already lost inside them. The recognition of being caught in hyper objects. Is precisely a feeling of strange familiarity and a familiar strangeness. Next up is nonlocality. Hyper objects are massively distributed in time and space, such as any particular local manifestation never actually reveals the totality of the hyper object. For example, climate change is a hyper object that impacts meteorological conditions such as tornado formations. Objects don't feel climate change, but instead experience tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, Nonlocality describes the manner in which a hyper object becomes more substantial. Then the local manifestations that they produce, putting Morton again for a flower. Nuclear radiation turns its leaves a strange shade of red level warming for the tomato farmer rots the tomatoes plastic for the bird strangles it as it becomes entangled in a set of 6 pack rings. What we are really dealing with here are just the aesthetic effects that are directly causal. The octopus of the hyper object emits a cloud of ink as it withdrawals from access. Yet this cloud of ink is a cloud of its effects and affects these phenomenon themselves are not global warming or radiation. Action at a distance is involved. It's like confusing the map with the territory. Paper objects cannot be thought up as occupying a series of now points in time or space. They confound the social and psychic instruments we used to measure them. Even digital devices have trouble. Global warming is not just a function of our measuring devices. Yet because it's distributed across the biosphere and beyond, it's hard to see it as a unique entity. And yet there it is, raining down on us, burning down on us, quaking the earth, spawning giant hurricanes. Global warming is an object of which many things are distributed pieces. The raindrops falling on my head in Northern California, the tsunami that pours through the streets of Japanese towns, the increasing earthquake activity based on changing pressure on the ocean floor. Like a moving illusion picture. Global warming is real, but it involves a massive, counterintuitive perspective shift for us to see it convincing some people of its existence is like convincing some. Two-dimensional flatland, people of the existence of apples, based on the appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world. Next point of similarity is phasing. So our sense of being in a time and inhabiting a place depends on forms of regularity, the periodic rhythms of day and night, the sun coming up. Only now we know that it doesn't really come up. It's now common knowledge that the moon's phases are just the relationship between the earth and the moon as they circumnavigate to the sun. Hyper objects seem to phase in and out of the human world. They occupy a higher dimensional phase space that makes them impossible to see as a whole on our regular 3 dimensional human scale basis. But they might appear differently to an observer with a higher dimensional view. We can only see pieces of a hyper object at a time. The reason why they appear nonlocal and temporally foreshortened is precisely because of this transdimensional quality. We can only see pieces of them at once, like a tsunami or a taste of radiation sickness. If an apple were to invade A2 dimensional world, first the stick people would see some dots as the bottom of the apple touched their universe, and then rapid succession of shapes that would appear like an expanding and contracting. Circular BLOB diminishing into a tiny circle, possibly a point, and then disappearing. That's why you can't directly see climate change. You would need to occupy some higher dimensional space to see the hyper object unfolding explicitly. Like the people in the two-dimensional flatland. We can only see brief patches of this gigantic object as it intersects with our world. The brief patch called Hurricane destroys the infrastructure of New Orleans the brief. Match, called Drought, Burns the plains of Russia and the Midwestern United States to a crisp. Our bodies itch with yesterday's sunburn. But don't relegate hyper objects as a simple, abstract notion they gave hyper objects as transdimensional real things is valuable. Global warming is not simply a mathematical abstraction that doesn't really pertain to this world. Paper objects don't just inhabit some conceptual beyond in our heads or. Out there they are real objects that affect other objects. We tend to only think about hyper objects as they phase in and connect to other more static objects. This is a mistake in contributes to non action. Whether or not we perceive objects in hyper objects connecting doesn't affect the existence and the inevitable effects of the hyper object. What we experience as the slow periodic reoccurrence of a celestial event such as an eclipse or a comet. Is a continuous entity whose imprint simply shows up on our social and cognitive space for a while. The gaps I perceive between moments at which my mind is aware of the hyper object and moments at which it isn't do not matter in relation to the hyper object itself. OK, and now onto our final point of similarity. Inter objective hyper objects are formed by relations between more than one object. Consequently, objects are only able to perceive the imprint or footprint of a hyper object upon other objects. Revealed as information, it's all an ecological mesh of interconnectedness and inter objectivity. For example, climate change is formed by interactions between the sun, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, economic growth, among other things. Yet climate change is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature changes, and the sea level rising, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific models. Rather than connected to an object that predates its own measurements. Paper objects exist in and between objects and things we deal with every day, but it's not simply those objects. Plastic bags are not climate change, but those things are both intertwined. Hurricanes are not climate change, but they can be a shadow like local manifestation of it. Amesh consists of relationships between crisscrossing strands and the gaps between strands. Measures are a potent metaphor for the strange interconnectedness of things and interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect, lossless transmission of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born, it is instantly a meshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh, the mesh. Isn't inside of all things, but it's on the edge or floats on top of all things. Inter objective mesh is the extra connecting layer between the mass and the mask of all objects, almost like a universal skin fascia. Intersubjectivity provides a space that is ontologically in front of objects in which relational phenomenon can emerge. The massiveness and distribution of hyper objects simply force us to take note of this fact. Hyper objects provide great examples of inter objectivity, namely the way in which nothing is ever experienced directly, but only as mediated through other entities in some shared consensual space. We never hear the wind in itself, only the wind in the door, the wind in the trees. This means that for every objective system, there is at least one entity that is withdrawn from the relationship. We see the footprint of a dinosaur left in some ancient rock that was once a pool of mud. The dinosaurs reality exists into objectively, there is some form of shared space between the rock ourselves and the dinosaur. Even though the dinosaur isn't there directly, the print of a dinosaur's foot in the mud is seen as a foot shaped hole in a rock by humans 65 million years later. There is some sensuous connection then, between the dinosaur, the rock, and the human, despite their vastly differing time scales. The dinosaur footprint in fossilized mud is not a dinosaur. Rather, the footprint is a trace of the hyper object evolution that joins me, the dinosaur, and the mud together, along with the intentional act of holding them in the mind. I found the Hyper object banner as a useful tool to help my brain think about things that are just too big. Things that have effects so spaced out in time that using our ordinary models of thought are just inadequate. You can also reconcile the opposing views that cast climate change as the very real series of disasters, or a complicated interlocking mesh of systems that can feel very unreal and overwhelming. Just thinking of big things as abstract systems has the habit of divorcing you from the real world impacts things like hyper objects can cause. Sometimes we forget that climate change is a thing we interact with every day and can inform choices we make. Now, the almost impossible to comprehend totality of our situation is not great for mental well-being. You can end up tails spinning down a black hole of fate, conspiracy, coping, denial, and doom. It's very easy to trip and fall into a void of negation. Things that are hyper objects fundamentally break our conception of reality, temporality, and and it's already a really weird time to try to suss out reality. We're constantly being bombarded with products and services, trying to usurp the real. That's what marketing is. You know? First we had the Internet, with its limitless possibilities as a digital universe. Then we got the world of social media with all of its. Fractured and fractured realities. There's immersive gaming and the allure of getting lost within thousands of unique worlds, and now we have VR, AR, and the Metaverse. More layers of digital fabrication trying to be passed off as an almost hyper reality, a promise to make a reality even more real and immersive than our status quo. The Internet itself is another hyper object, and all of this extra reality can take a strain on the human mind derealization the perception that actual waking reality is an artificial construct. The feeling of being detached from your surroundings, like the world's made of cardboard or you're looking at everything through a cloud of fog, is becoming more and more common, especially among so-called Gen Z, the generation that grew up with the Internet. Being a staple of life. Now how we got here is a disassociation between humans and what we call nature or the environment. The problems aren't getting fixed because we're so disassociated from the effects, just as the effects are from the cause, and that resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. All of the worst effects of climate change aren't going to be felt for hundreds of years, and that is a weird feeling. That is cognitive dissonance that I don't know how to understand that, and that makes making decisions about our situation now feel distant yet also urgent. It's both, and it's neither, and it's confusing. The resulting alienation of all things makes this worse. It produces this lack of immediate and close in proximity consequences. We must purposely remove these layers of separation and abandoned our anthropocentric thinking. Nature isn't other from us. We are nature. It's the same thing. We are all part of this big mesh. This this secret idea of nature isn't natural and can never be naturalized. We have to learn how to have an ecology. Without nature, without nature as a separate thing, to have a genuine ecological view, we must relinquish this idea that nature being separate from us once and for all, we have to kill the Anthropocene in our own head. A quote from one of Morton's other books titled Ecology Without Nature. Putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of a woman. It's a paradoxical act of sadistic possessive admiration. UN quote. So within Morton's branch of philosophy, reification, the making of a thing into a thing, is precisely the reduction of a real object to its sensual appearance. For another object reification is reduction of 1 entity to another's fantasy about it. Nature is a reification in this sense, and that's why we need an ecology without nature. Maybe if we turn nature into something more fluid. It might work. Now, most of our modern political discourse can be boiled down to what things are real and what things are not. Hyper objects and climate change don't just play into this debate, but crash into it, decimating all the other toys in this sandbox, as Morton says, the threat of global warming is not only political but also ontological. The threat of unreality is the very sign of reality itself. And oh boy, do we be experiencing the simultaneous disillusionment of reality and the overwhelmingly real presence of hyper objects which stick to us, which are us. The worry is not whether the world will end. But whether the end of the world is already happening, or whether perhaps they might have already taken place. The idea of the end of the world is very active in environmentalism, but the way it's usually framed kind of fosters its own negation. The end of the world is coming idea is not really effective since to all kinds of purposes. The being that we are supposed to feel anxiety about and care for is actually already gone. This does not mean that there is no hope for ecological politics and ethics and a better future. Far from it. In fact, Morton and I would argue that the strongly held belief that the world's about to end unless we act now is paradoxically one of the most powerful factors that inhibit a full engagement with our ecological coexistence here on Earth. The strategy of the ecological hyper object concept is to then awaken us from this dream that the world is about to end. Because. Action on earth, like the real earth, depends on it. The end of the world has already happened. Using the hyper object idea helps sort out these overly systematic things into a package that I can actually think about. There's something about discovering the language for a feeling, being able to name it, that is empowering, a way of finding a handhold in the dim light of confusion rather than scrambling around in the dark. So how would you convince 2 dimensional flatland people of the existence of apples based on the occasional phasing appearance of a morphing circular shape in their world? Now, hyper objects can really assist in understanding the cognitive dissonance around climate denial. You can't point to something like rising sea levels and say that is climate change because yeah, that isn't climate change. The hyper object rising sea levels are just an environmental effect, and since the effects are so disattached from the cause, that fosters a lot of room for cognitive dissonance when people point at extreme weather and call it something else. It's our lack of ecology, our seeing of interconnected things as separate problems or manifestations. Missing the fact that almost all of our problems don't have a shared root cause, but instead are just part of a massive shared bungee cord like mesh network. When so many local manifesting problems, the natural disasters, are blamed on climate change, even if you believe climate change is the cause, which is you know it, it is, it still feels weird because climate change isn't just a simple thing. It's such an amorphous, shape shifting time travelling idea that for the climate denier or climate skeptic, seeing their real physical effects be blamed on such an abstract thing is hard for them and their understanding of reality. For many people, rejecting hyper Objects is a lot easier than thinking about them. Because once you start thinking about them, finding solutions to problems so displaced in time is not only difficult, but encourages procrastination. The greenhouse gas emissions up there in the air right now won't reach their full effects for decades and centuries. That's not downplaying the urgency of the problem. In fact, that should make the problem more urgent. The cause is our brief luxury, and the effect is terraforming the world. And we are right now caught in between the uncanny hyper object of all liminal spaces. The end of the world has already happened. We are on the path and about to enter. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15. Month Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. 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If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. A new world we are in the liminal space hallway of all liminal space hallways. The door behind us is closed, and at the other end of the hallway is a black hole. We cannot backtrack and re enter the door behind us already are we getting sucked forward into the hallway, but there are many doors ahead of us and we get to choose which one to open. At this point, we have passed some of the prettier doors, but don't be tricked into thinking that there are none left. We must not focus on preserving an old way of life, but instead need to carefully carve out our new reality. We need to pick our new door. Well, that is my essay. Read thing, episode and location about hyper objects, liminal spaces, and our new reality. I hope you found some of the ideas useful. Despite their kind of abstract and anti abstract nature, if you want to learn more about this, I would recommend reading Timothy Morton's book Hyper Objects. It is an academic read, but it's not that bad. I would I would recommend picking it up. If you want to learn more about these things. I'm sure I'll talk about them more in the future. Thank you for listening everybody. See you on the other side. Raffi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. The little so who is the man behind baby beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of finding Raffi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and fatherly. Listen, every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Look that your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. They're fearless, guide to this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. I'm Jake Halpern's, host of deep cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hit man walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what? He was a rat. I can say with all certainty I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did, and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around the first time my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There. Welcome to it could happen here. Podcast. I'm Robert Evans. Soby. Is that it? Unfortunately, I'm so sorry. Alright, well, just apologize really quick. That's a lot to take in. No, that was a good introduction. That was a good introduction. We got across the gist. Who else is here with you, Robert? That's a great question. Is Garrison here? Yeah, I think they are here. Is Chris here? Here is is Saint Andrew here? I am indeed. Excellent. Why don't you take over and do and do my job for me? That sounds great. Awesome actually. Good idea. Fantastic. Hey, what's happening everybody? I said. Andrew, back to guest host yet again last time we spoke about, you know? Soft climate change denial and continuing the theme of me talking about. Whatever I want to talk about as per contractual obligation today I wanted to explore a concept that I brought up one of my recent videos. Self and community actualization, yeah. Right, so first we need getting some context, of course. I mean, when most people hear self actualization, they probably think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? The famous pyramid that management staff tend to use? Yeah, I think in their offices and such. Los Angeles yoga ladies. That's the context in which I've heard self actualization the most. Yeah, yeah, that whole goop kind of vibe, you know? Yeah. But yeah, so self actualization mass was hierarchy of needs, the old psych 101 stuff, you know, I mean it's traditionally represented as a pyramid, but it was never how Maslow himself actually depicted it. It was actually something that. Later interpreters of his work ran with and popularized. And so that as a result of that pyramid, there are a lot of, you know, critiques of Maslow's theory that don't quite engage with his theory, but rather engage with like interpretations of his theory by other people. But. You know, I think it's still an interesting way to depict human needs, and I think it's a good launching point. To start thinking about and start discussing, you know, human needs. Where you'll think you're on the pyramid right now, just for posterity's sake. Oh, right up on the tippy top. I mean, I'm like, I've, I've been, I've been, I've been very lucky to do exactly like what I wanna do for a living most of my life. And and now I own goats, so. Doesn't get any better than that, including one absolute unit. Yeah, he's ******* massive. He's a chunky buddy. What about Karen, Chris? I I really don't know. I I don't spend too much time thinking about models like this and thinking about models like this, especially around kind of my own, my own goals and like where I see myself. But I don't know. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm doing like I'm, I'm, I'm relatively stable with my, like, actual physical needs. So I guess, yeah, just trying to figure out what I what I actually want out of life like a lot of younger people do, I guess. Right, right. So I guess that's more on the. Esteem or yeah more self actualization side of things. Yeah yeah. Straddling that line and it's harder because you can say like, well within the context of like what is possible. I'm I'm, I'm where I wanna be and I'm doing stuff that I, I, I want to be doing. But also everything feels like a disaster around me all the time because yeah, the times I'm in which makes it difficult to be as right. I was about to say is anybody really on the safety needs category? Of of of the pyramid. I mean, some people like, absolutely, yeah. But, like, in this group, I mean, yeah, like, we we we are really sick, right? There's like a weird. There's like a weird disassociation between what's actually going on and what we know could be going on in, like, the larger sphere. That's fair. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a very good way of thinking about it is like, yeah my immediate needs are met. Am I very concerned that large chunks of the places I love will be unlivable? And, you know, there will be a that we're kind of staring in the face of a variety of calamities that that could make everything worse for me and everybody I care about. Absolutely. But I can't do anything about that. Right. The other thing I was going to point out is that with like with like the physio needs is. That includes sleep. Ohg well, but once we get to that, I now you're talking about being the sun shining down on the pyramid and he gets up there, you know, the sleeps, the sleep. Scientists have had their pockets in big bed for far too long. That's right or wrong. Exactly. Andrew, please go. The cozy industrial complex problem. It's fine. I was just going to say something relatively. I was going to say that, you know, the pyramid, as we are discovering in this conversation, doesn't really accurately. Pop outs, you know, needs and human psychology really, because I mean, not just because our brains aren't shaped like pyramids, but also because at any point in time we can be straddling both simple sections and parts of the needs. So, for example. We could all be breathing air and drinking water and having our food and stuff met right now. And you know, you might be like. Really respected and stuff in your field and you might have a certain could let sense of self esteem and stuff but then at the same time. You know you're not in a safe place. Yeah, or you may be dealing with like a debilitating health condition, or you may be lacking certain resources that you need to like thrive. Right, so. And then, or maybe you know you have your food, water, shelter, sleep, all that and you know you're secure and you have what you need and whatever. But. You have no friends, you know, you have no intimacy, no family, no sense of connection with other people. So you're kind of like. Living in this bubble just. Floating through life, you know, I mean, your bubble is safe. It has what you need, but there's now that social aspect, yeah. And. I think what's interesting about this is because as we start to talk about matters, hierarchy of needs, we start to see the structural and societal impact on, you know, our psychology and on our needs, right? Because if you want to talk about our safety needs, for example, well, let's get straight to the, to the bottom, to the basic. If you want to talk about physiological needs. Water is now a packaged and commodified product, right? Food is something that is inaccessible to many, not because we don't have enough food, but because the distribution of it. To meet the needs of all, it's not what's prioritized under capitalism, right? There are people who are lacking in shelter, you know? And a lot of people are sleep deprived by the systems we're living in. Yeah. And same thing with safety. You know, we are literally threatened by. Climate change and. You know, we are atomized from our relationships and stuff because so much of it, so many of us have to work so hard, you know, every day, five days a week or more, 8 hours or more pretty and really just strips us of our social connections and with our esteem needs we're sort of stripped of that by, you know, these commercial messages that we get about like. You're not this unless you have this and bye bye bye kind of thing. Right, and in self actualization isn't even really a thought for a lot of people, because they're still busy trying to reach all those other things. Well, they even have the time to think about. How they can become who they are? We we get inside a bit more later on in this discussion, but they don't really have the time or the sense to think about that because they've been so restricted by. Their circumstances, right? And on top of that, restricted by like. The messages that they would have gotten, you know, whether it be in the school system or through ads or whatever the case may be. So. I think looking at the pyramid, of course it's incomplete and there issues with it, but it does illuminate some interesting things that you know we're dealing with right now. I mean yeah, like it definitely is easier to self actualize and have esteem once your needs are met. But I think definitely there's an ability to jump around, especially when you know you have like large scale depression and alienation and this association. Think it's a weird, weird sense where you can kind of hop around the pyramid quite quite often even if you have certain things met. This doesn't necessarily mean you have something you know above or below. Yeah, like, I I, I've never I when it comes to, like, actual people that I associate with, you know, all of whom are folks who have to. Like, have to work in order to live? I don't think it. I've ever heard anyone talk about happiness in terms of, like, self actualization. It's always in terms of like when I get my student loans paid off, you know, when I get my, when I'm able to take care of this health problem that I have. Like when I have enough money. It's basically everything boils down to for most people when I have enough money to not be as suffering as much from this specific thing or to not be scared about not having enough money. Which is? I think more what I get from people when they're talking about like aspirational goals than I would like to do this thing that that fulfills me as a person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like so like any any kind of actual self actualization becomes this not just a luxury, but a luxury that's just unimaginable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Some people can't even imagine. I know people who have just basically given up on, like, ever being able to repay their loans, right. Like they've just resigned themselves. Like, this is my life now for all eternity and this is, this is it, you know, and I I can't believe them. Who can really blame them when that is the reality? You know, for a lot of people, taking themselves out of debt is not possible, even if they did get a whole bunch of the money or able to, like, pay off a bit more per month, you know, this love interest rates. Just like solidly exploitative that. They're basically sooths. For the rest of our lives. Of course, we had to have that brief moment of. Down the system sucks, as is typical on. It could happen here, but. I want to switch shift our attention now to another society and. Another culture that has approached. This. Human needs and human psychology and human society thing differently, right? What's been coming to a lot more people's attention lately is that Abraham Maslow, he was actually partially inspired to develop his theory by his stay with the Siksika Blackfoot. And I went into some of the details on the video on my channel rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So a bit more in there, but. Basically what he discovers, what I got to in that video is that, well firstly some cultures view us as being born self actualized, right, like these 60 kablak foot, meaning that's the Blackfoot. Just for a little bit of context are are an indigenous people. I think Confederation is how they tend to refer to themselves in like Montana. I think Idaho. I've been to Canada as well, yeah, up in Canada, yeah, I I kind of like Idaho, Montana and parts of Canada like that's that's Blackfoot territory. There were also Maslow spent time with them. L Ron Hubbard lied about having spent a lot of time with the Blackfoot. So. Fun fact. I didn't know that I didn't know. Oh yes, there's a lot of Scientology law I have yet to catch up on. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so you know with Maslow's model, self actualization as essentially you know, self fulfillment, right? The tendency for the individuals become more and more what one is and to become everything that one is capable of becoming. So it's like fulfilling your potential as a person, as a partner, as a parent, as a talent, as a artist, as a whatever, just fulfilling your potential as a person, right. But to say that we are born. Of actualized that framing, wall looks to seeing us each as born in the world with a spark of divinity. Because of course this is tied into their spirituality, born to spark of divinity and with a great pupus embedded in us. And what self actualization is linked to in these cultures? Inextricably linked to that is is community actualization, right? So Community actualization is a concept that places the actualized individual in the context of community. So instead of just upholding the individual alone, which Maslow's hierarchy has been critiqued for, sort of doing. Community actualization incorporates the web of relationships that supports each of us as individuals. Basically, it recognizes that we cannot be self actualized solely as individuals. If there's not like a broader network or broader web that is supporting us, you know we're not. Islands. Standing alone, you know? Yeah, yeah, we were, we were, we were touching on on, on that point a bit a bit previous but less eloquently. How, yeah, it is, it is. It's it's much, much easier to have the ability to actualize your goals into into actions when you are less alienated and you have and you have all these other things around and around a community. Yeah, exactly. It is that I think, like the lack of Community self actualization is, is kind of what we were talking about in terms of like, yeah, things are seem, things are great for me in as much as things are great, you know, in the system we live in. But I I don't feel that, you know, yeah, you can look outside and you're like everything's actually really bad. I'm just kind of in my little bubble and I'm trying to expand my bubble to be around, you know, and help more people, but it can be overwhelming. Sometimes, yeah. I mean, it's only so much one person could do. And that's kind of the whole point of community, right? Our community supports our basic needs and basically equips us to manifest our purpose. So. It would. A community would be there to, for example, and we could get into this a bit more designer model of education that supports us in expressing our unique gifts, right? Another part of the 6:00 o'clock philosophy involves cultural perpetuity, where there's an important consideration of those who came before and those who are coming after 7 generations forward and seven generations backward, as I had it explained to me so. That is something that I think. Would have been useful when it came to discussions of, you know, climate change and. It's very relevant now because we are seeing the older generations basically struggling and being like, you know well, it's janz's problem now. You all could take care of it. You're the future kids, all right? Well, yeah, yeah. When they basically on the download, see? And **** them kids, you know? Yeah. Wait, can I see that or. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you can always say **** them kids. I say that to Garrison all the time without. Alright, yeah, yeah. But Speaking of kids. I think we could compare and contrast basically how childhood is approached in our society versus how it would be approached in a society that values Community actualization. I mean. And I'm just speaking from my experience here. Of course you're free. Talk about your own. I from like primary school and stuff. I rambled it constantly, feeling. Like, I had to compete with my fellow classmates. I mean, you know, I was friendly and stuff with everybody and stuff, but since I was like. Usually at or close to the top of my class, I always felt this kind of pressure to just. Beat them out and continue to be the best gifted kid ever, you know? So there was a sense of like constant competition with others that wasn't. Really balanced out with. A kind of collaborative sort of approach to like. Basically treating us from like an early age to learn to cooperate and work with people as. People and as comrades, you know, although Comrade is a weird way to put it, but yeah. I just remember there was a sort of sense of sort of atomization that. Undercoated that sort of educational approach. I feel like that's pretty, yeah universal and a lot of a lot of parts of our modern world. We definitely really embed that sense of competition into very young kids of whether that be in in school or like wherever because yeah that was that was definitely my experience even even like in private school in Canada a long time ago and I know that's that's the thing across you know across the ocean as well on. On the other side of the pond, yeah. We are back. That doesn't sound like us. Are we are we really back? Sorry, it's 10:00 AM. Robert all right. So when would you look at like? Childhood and education and stuff. In a society they would value community actualization. What sort of things do you guys think we would be seeing? In that sort of society. What sort of approaches do you think would be embedded from an early age? I'm trying to put it into words, so kind of one of the things. I I'm I'm currently in a living situation right where I have a I'm working with a group of people on a chunk of land and so every week we do projects on it to make it better, which is tremendously satisfying. And I think in a in a a society where that kind of self actualization like you've been talking about was more common. Kids would feel that way about doing things that improve their community like that that that that take care of the people around them that make. You know, wherever they live. A better place to live like that would be that would be in the same way that like I go out each weekend thinking that would be a fun thing to do, to like to improve the place that I'm living. I think that would be kind of. A common feeling like that would be a common activity as a kid to go engage in projects like that. Yeah. And I mean, we already see children doing that, right? Except they do it in Minecraft, yes. Yeah. I mean, like the impulse is being directed somewhere currently. This isn't a thing you have to. This isn't a thing you have to, like, splice into kids little brains to make them want to do it. Kids love making **** exactly like if you give a child an opportunity and you sort of facilitate that. Like they. A very. A lot of them. I can't really generalize because I know some kids were like, oh, you do what you have to do, I wanna stay in my corner. But there's a lot of kids as well who would be like very, very willing to be helpful. You know, they really like they. Just adore being a helper and being someone who can support, whether it be in the kitchen, you know, with like a little broom or whatever sweeping, whatever the case may be. So it's like kids don't want to be part of a community, you know, because we are social animals. It's just that. Right now it's directed at like. Minecraft, Suvas or whatever. Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that I would really focus on, because this is just kind of in my experience, is teaching young kids how to cook and then having them cook or at least help cook food for other people. I think it's a really great kind of skill to learn, but also it it does this weird thing to your brain when you do that. It's like you, you get very happy when you cook food for for other people. And I think it's it's a really good. Kind of emotional impulse to give kids is like, hey, this is you can make people feel good by doing things for them and because that makes you feel good and it makes them feel good. And then that really builds that whole sense of community. So I cultivate selflessness. Yeah, yeah, some kids could be little ego maniacs, like, but like both selflessness, but it also teaches you to, like, do stuff for yourself as well, right? It's a good skill to be self. Also be self-sustaining. So I think that's that's why I I really enjoy teaching kids cooking. I used to, I used to be a culinary instructor because I I'm really just passionate about that specific thing. Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I develop an aneurysm whenever anyone's in the kitchen with me. Yes, I there is definitely moments where if there's too many people in the kitchen, that is frustrating. But if if you do it right, you can get, you can get a 13 year old cooking you an entire like really, really nice holiday dinner, which is, which is what I was doing when I was 13. I was cooking all of the holiday dinners for my entire family because I just, I wanted to learn. Looking. So it's it's definitely possible if you're a parent and you want less time in the kitchen a teach your kid how to cook. Yeah. I mean, I come from a family of child cooks, right? I remember this one time I think I was making like a carrot cake with my mom. But I was used to like licking my fingers when yeah, you know, you make that cookie cookie dough and stuff. Yeah, but I lick my fingers. When the. When I cracked the egg. Oh, oh, boy. And she was like, stop, you can't do that, you know? So I just remember that was one of the experiences in the kitchen. Really stood out to me. Like a lot of other lessons, lessons will be learned about like, bacteria. Yeah. You know, it's really, it's a holistic learning experience. Knife. Yeah. You get to learn how to use knives, get to learn about heat. You know, there's a lot of, a lot of good lessons you can learn inside. I get science, safety, chemistry. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Stuff or mixed in there, you know, even math, even absolutely fractions. It's one of the only times I use fractions is in cooking and baking. Yeah, I mean. As embarrassing as it is, I I use Google when I want to convert measurements still, but I mean, it's just there. It's more convenient. But yeah, I absolutely agree that example, you know, like the use of like cooking lessons and that sort of thing to. Supports. To support like kids self actualization. I'd also like community actualization because of my experience the the thing I default to is different versions of like the youth liberation argument. But because of how people have been using that term on Twitter right now. I don't want to talk about it because it's been causing a lot of like really dumb fighting about what that term actually means and who coined it and like that kind of stuff. But that's kind of where it defaults to in terms of like what self actualization. Could be in a community setting. Youth Liberation is one of those things I'm really passionate about. And I honestly don't know who coined it or what discourse happening about it right now, but it definitely informs my approach and ends up. Influence and like a lot of the things that I discuss, like whenever I talk about like an issue or whatever in society, a lot of times it really boils down or starts from an early age or starts through the education system or it's fostered there or incubated there. So I think. A lot more discussion should be happening about you know, the police of young people and the education system and stuff alongside of course all the other struggles and discussions and discourses about struggles we've been having. Yeah, I'm trying to view like anarchistic, like liberatory frameworks is like trying to achieve that self actualization and to some degree like the the like a steam level then also like the community and. Changing level, even if you don't have all of your physical needs met all the time, is how these types of frameworks can be. Can almost just like jump around that and be like despite me not having all of these base needs met, if I if I have like a radical model of the world, I can still try to achieve that type of freedom because I can work outside the box to get it. Yeah and so I think that that that's kind of what I was trying to get at is released on you know like a like a like whether it be like a youth Lib framework or just see like general like radical anarchism in. General. Yeah. And I mean, part of thinking outside the box involves, you know, looking at other people who have thought outside the box, who have reinvented and reconsidered and sort of transformed their approach to things like education and childcare and really. All the aspects of society that we take for granted, as you know, just being a certain way, you know? When we talk about things like education and childhood and the police are please and community actualization, I tend to think a lot about, you know, all the things we can do to not fit into cap, into capital, smooth. You know, it's really facilitate folks potential, not just through the cooking classes for example, but even through, you know, workshop son. Field trips, I mean, field trips now are just kind of like this. Thing that you know kids go to from time to time when they have to walk in a single file line and. All these different things, but. What I envision when I think of, you know, learning is something more akin to like. Less restriction to just the four walls of a classroom and more the whole world is your classroom, you know. The whole world is a place where you know you can explore and you can room and you can develop yourself, you know, without. All these barriers and controls to be placed on kids end up suffocating their imagination. Of what things can be and I mean when you have that sort of educational model where, you know, the youth are able to explore different avenues and direct their own education routes, you know, you also end up which is what has happened in education models that we've seen. Throughout many different coaches, the would you see that? It facilitates relationships with the community members, right? And everybody benefits because you have for example, of course and exactly. Something like percent apprenticeships. And you have, you know, for example, people getting support from the kids in the kitchen or you know, in the workshop or in library or whatever the case may be. And not only the kids about being their skills, but they also developing relationships with different members of the community with different backgrounds, with different experiences. And it really soothes almost as. I see it as a way to guard against. They sort of. Style of parenting where they've kind of seen popularized lead where like the child is basically the exclusive property of the parent and. You can't tell anybody how to raise their child and the parent always knows best and that kind of approach, I think it's a good antidote to that because the child being exposed to a lot more. Of life and of people. Think that to me. Is. The sort of youth liberation route that I see developing. It requires of course. I talked to transmission, but, you know, no proposal could really be approached in isolation. Yeah, and it's it's easier to achieve when you're around other right? It's easier once if if you are already in a community where these things can be fostered, then it's a lot, you know, it's a lot less of a lofty goal. Yeah, I think that there's a kind of interesting. I don't know if case study is the right word, but there there's part of Italy that. Had a really, really long running like anarchist education experiments and so they were basically able to sort of reform local school systems. And and it worked but you know and they they produced a bunch of really good schools and the you know the schools are based on sort of like cooperative learning etcetera, etcetera. And you know I mean the model still exists today but the and you know it's like yeah they made some of the best schools in Europe but. The society around them didn't change and so sort of bizarrely, they ended up making these schools that like. Produced, you know, they they're very good schools, they produce extremely good students, but then they also like. Producing extremely, you know, well educated and good like capitalist cadre basically. And so I think there's a sort of. You know, if we go back to sort of. The community aspect of this is like, yeah, there's there's a center, which even even if you have. You know, you you get some form of self actualization. You get some form of sort of, you know, communal and cooperative, like education for children and stuff like that. The the the whole society has to move with it or otherwise you just wind up. Sort of. Feeding the beast more effectively. Yeah. Yeah. I mean that is that you you also see that kind of problem with like the we work guys, right. The Adam Newman and and and the the two cofounders of that came out of an Adams case, a kibbutz in Israel, which you know started with from kind of socialist foundations. And the other founder had grown up in like a commune in rural Oregon and they both wound up making like this ultra capitalist real estate company. So yeah if you it's. It's, you know, there's a lot that's said and there's there's a lot of value and kind of like carving out sections of of culture for the things you believe in to try to get shelter from the storm. But yeah, as you were kind of noting, Chris, it does, it does also just wind up kind of. Reinforcing the dominant social system if there's not. A kind of more basic upheaval of of the way things work. Yeah, if there's no, you know, political fall philosophy and the goodness and there's no connection with, you know, broader social movements and. Sort of confederation with other projects, you know. It could very easily be Co opted you know, in isolation. And I guess, I guess that's, you know, like that that's what happened to self actualization as a concept for the most part. Instead, it got taken over by kind of weird grifters, and. Yeah. Like self-care, yeah, yeah. And take these concepts and just sort of twisted and transform it into, you know, capitalist hands. It's even something like. Like with, there's been some interesting discussions happening surrounding like luxury and what luxury means around sitting within certain circles on Twitter. And. Kim, Kimberly Foster from 4. Harriet's excellent YouTube channel. She mentioned that to who, at least in this long but really good video, she spoke about how luxury to her was basically, you know, finding the the ability to rest when you need to rest and to be able to be supported. Whereas luxury now or luxurious like popular understanding is more so about consumption and consumerism. So even when you have something where like. And this is specific to the black experience, of course, because for a long time, you know, black women have been expected to like. Toil and labour and support not only their communities but also, you know, during the era of slavery also, you know, they're white masters and that kind of thing. There's there was a push for the black woman luxury movement to sort of reclaim. You know, a space for black women to just be able to enjoy themselves and, you know, be themselves. But that quickly became something that was just like or, you know, just get the bag. Just the sort of. Hyper capitalist, hyper consumerist, bougie kind of approach to luxury where the original roots of the movement, which was about finding rest, were sort of lost. And I mean, that's a bit of a tangent. So I'll try to connect that back to what we're seeing, I think when it comes to things like rest and the ability to rest. I think that that's. Can only really be found in community. And. If there is a lack of Community support to, you know, pick up the slack when you need to rest and you need to revive yourself and you just need to recharge. Barring that, of course, Rashpal can pay for a sort of a full community in the sense of having, you know, nannies and maids and butlers and tutors and all these people to basically support their lifestyles and support their freedom. But we'll see Pollack that and. So I think part of self actualization as we mentioning earlier as ability to rest and. I see that as linked with Community. If that makes sense, I yeah I think it definitely ties into our recent discussions on anti work and how anti work is a lot more feasible if you are in a community support like network right and you have people to rely on. And definitely, like you know, self actualization as the ability to. Like to just rest when you want to. It's a very it's a very powerful thing and very enticing, and that definitely plays into the whole like antiwork like idea, I guess. Yeah, I mean to connect the anti real thing to just general, you know, unitization and striking efforts, right? Like I was seeing people calling for a general strike the other day. As if we haven't learned our lesson, but. They were calling for that, but what they were not realizing was that without these structures in place to support striking efforts. It's not going to be enough, you know, if people cannot support themselves. And their families. The strike cannot last. It was only with this community and with the community coming together to support people, can they, you know, not just fight for their rights in the striking and unitization context, but also, you know, to be able to. Find leisure to find rest as with the you know, anti work discussion. And she sort of turned this to a discussion on organizing more generally. You know, we are at the end of the day. A very communal EPP. And. If we were to just focus on ourselves as individuals, I think as capitalism in its anti social nature expects us to, I think we would all suffer as a result. You know, our goal as people, as any one person. Should be not just to you know this ourselves, but also to enrich. The worlds of those around us and to cultivate. The community that. As we support. The, you know, little supports us, I mean, as we prefigure this sort of, you know. Culture of. Supports of you know. Care and. Of empathy and that sort of thing. I think our organizing efforts would, as a result, be a lot more. Powerful be a lot more potent, be a lot more enriching and a lot more imaginative. So. And that's any any of you have anything else to see to sort of bring this to a close? Umm. I just want to leave. Leave us with some food for thought in terms of how we can incorporate Community actualization in action, right? Because it's one thing to see all be wonderful to have a community, to support you and that kind of thing. But. You know, a lot of people are pretty isolated and stuff right now. Umm. So I guess. I actually put it into, sort of. Five stage kind of approach. Starting with firstly, facilitating collective belonging among diverse groups, right? So we want to look at bringing people together. Obviously they would have different backgrounds and different needs, different ones, different personalities, but bringing people together? Whether it be at work or. On the block or. At school or whatever the case would be just for a cookout or for a lime or any kind of party or interaction, obviously. Depending on where you are there really, that may not be the safest thing to do. I'm considering COVID and everything, but it's just. Bring people together, not even necessarily to proselytize to them about. Anarchism or socialism or whatever, but at the very least. So connecting the nodes and start connecting the different parts that can eventually come together to become something greater, you know, I mean you don't need to wait for a calamity for this sort of thing to happen, but of course we have seen as well where natural disasters have brought communities together that wouldn't together before. I think, however, it'd be better to like not wait for that kind of thing to happen and to just. You know, bring people together from now, start some conversations, get things going right. And then from there you want to be facilitating solidarity and struggle, right? So whether it be in solidarity is a bit of a buzzword now, or at least it's become a buzzword. But. I think whether it be with disaster relief funds or solidarity strikes and protests or, you know, with basic mutual aid support, you know, whether it's. Material or emotional solidarity in struggle. I think that is another crucial part in, you know, building Community and incorporating eventually Community actualization. Because what that does is it shows others that. I have your back and you know, others are able to see that. You know they can have mine as well. It helps to build that sense of trust. You also want to sort of cultivate probably a sense of community pride and a sense of being able to rely on Community networks. So, you know, we spoke about mutual aid networks, but also things like. Skill shares or workshops or. Material support, you know, if somebody needs food, being able to support for them to know that they have. People they can go to, to support them in their time of need. That is powerful. You know, not many people forget that. Not many people forget the time that they were at their most dire point and, you know, their community stepped up to support them. You know, if you want to see a insurrection in our lifetimes. You don't start guns blazing, you know. You start with. A creative food. You start with a helping hand. You start with. Money if people need it. Umm. And then from there you know. You get into the realm of community achievements, where your community is collectively able to celebrate the things that we've accomplished together. You know whether it be. Establishing a. Community garden that is able to supplement peoples. Fresh produce supply or whether it be that Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month and now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month, and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com. Dash behind seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. Now, a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just, you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small. They happen to be so if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better, HEL. He.com/behindbetterhelpcalm/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Many communities come together and they've fixed. Something that was broken on the streets or even that they've come together and we're able to train people with like some really helpful skills where they're now able to support themselves and bring other things to the table as well. And then from there, I think. That sort of approach would foster fulfillment in community and. Figures community actualization. Yeah, I mean, and this is, this is all, it's a big topic and it's a much bigger topic than just like what a what do you, what changes do you want to make around the edges? Like what things should people advocate for or even just like advocating that that the system be torn down. Like as as was kind of evident when you asked how could we build? A. A community in which like. Kids feel more self actualization from engaging in the community. And there was that kind of blank moment the the when you actually talking talk about like. Reconfiguring society at such a fundamental level, it's it's a big topic and it's it's one that I think it's important to introduce to people the idea that, like, hey, we really ought to be. We really got to figure this this out. This is, this is important to like everything we we say we believe answering this question is going to be key and it's it's it's a tough one. So I don't know, I think sometimes. People come into episodes we do on stuff like this, like looking for OK, well, how, how are you? What's your suggestion for how to do that? And at the moment, like, I agree with the. How imperative this is, but. In terms of actionable stuff, it's this is a a big open-ended question in my head. I mean I think I think Andrew laid out a lot of the stuff that we've we've talked about both like you know with within our kind of own community groups. Yeah in terms of the the things in terms of like like you know like connecting nodes and all like the steps that we can do to have there be like more like more connecting branches of the tree and how to strengthen those. I think that it's it's a good yeah it's like we can't we don't know what your community is like or what your what your situation is. So all we can really say is here's the broad thing is that. That you can try or have worked for other people in the past and then based on what your situation is you can apply those. Plug ruggles. Yeah. You wanna plug your plug cables, Saint Andrew. Yes, of course. Well, you can follow me on Twitter at under score St Drew, and of course on YouTube Saint Andrew resume, check out my stuff. You know, I have the video on rethinking Maslow's hierarchy of needs and some other. Fun practices see things as well. So check it out, check it out and. Stay thinking about stuff. It's yeah, thinking is good. Yeah, thinking is good. The Gangster Chronicles Podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement. We cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promotility activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. iHeartRadio is number one for podcast. But don't take our word for it. Find against The Chronicles podcast on iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. I call the Union hall, I said. It's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Doctor King. On April 4th, 1968, Doctor Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade all we found. They gone that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Doctor King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check out drink champs you're #1 music podcast on the Black Effect podcast network. Host NOREDJEFN sat down with artists and icon yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain, but when I went and did the donda thing, yay returned, and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday. On the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome **** could happen. Here a podcast about things falling apart and sort of how you can put them back together. This is again another mostly things fall apart episode here with me is Garrison. Hello, hello and joining us today to talk about. Well, a pretty wide range of things, but about the drug war in Mexico, about paramilitaries and. I guess also guess about the narco state is Alex Levinia, who is an associate professor of history at Arizona State University and has written several very, very good articles that I've read recently. Alex, how are you doing? Doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Umm. So I wanted to start by talking about. An article that you find has come out fairly recently. That is about. Essentially the transition, particularly in Guerrero, from. I guess the the the sort of 60s, seventies, uh, dirty war in Mexico. To the drug war and I I guess I wanted to start from. Because I don't. I don't think it's a story that's particularly well known. I I want to, I guess, start with sort of. An overview of how we got into this sort of dirty war in Mexico in the 60s because I think, I don't know, like, I think if anyone, if people know stuff about this, it tends to be the very dramatic sort of like massacre in 1968, but it's. And it went on for longer than that and has a sort of deeper history. So can you bring us into that? Yeah, for sure. So I'll start off by saying that generally, if when most people think about dirty wars and and and Cold War Latin America, Mexico is probably the last country that they think of having one, right? Like there's a certain exceptionalism that Mexico has enjoyed until relatively recent. And relatively recently. Academics and and especially historians right where we're in the last 1020 years we started to uncover Mexico's own version of a dirty war that we are more familiar with than other places like Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Woodway, etcetera. Mexico's dirty war though and and if people know a little bit about this. Like as you mentioned right, they know about the the infamous student massacre that the local on October 2nd, 1968. But you know, my, my research focus is on, on this, the southern state of Guerrero. It's on the Pacific Coast. It's made famous by the resort city of Acapulco. And I wrote a book in 24, published a book in 2014 that really traced the emergence of armed resistance in the state of Guerrero during the 1960s and 70s. And and that was my entrance into this idea of a of a Mexican dirty war of the Mexican state practicing systematic state terrorism against political dissidents and and and. My case armed guerrilla dissidents who enjoyed the backing of dozens of rural communities and even urban, poor working class neighborhoods and places that got couple go in the late 60s and early 1970s. It's a very regional story, right? That's another thing that kind of distinguishes that the Mexican Dirty War from from other Latin American cases is that The Dirty War was localized to a few major cities and then to to very specific locales in the countryside, Guerrero being the the most bloody theater. The way that these guerrilla movements emerged, they really began as these popular civic minded social movements in the late 50s, early 1960s, and they protested things like political authoritarianism. An economic injustice. But they did so essentially within the confines of the Mexican constitution. They followed the law. You know, Mexico has the the, you know that that that characteristic in Latin America of having the first great social revolution of the 20th century. You, you do have a post revolutionary government that emerges from the 191910 revolution that has to pay lip service to the radical traditions, to the revolutionary traditions that came out of that, that, that movement and for that reason the Mexican constitution then that was passed in 1917. In its time was the most radical Social Democratic, even constitution in the Western Hemisphere. And, you know, peasant communities, campesino communities in the state of Guerrero believed the letter of the law. So when they started to protest, you know, authoritarian state governors, a police violence, army violence, economic injustice, in the 60s they followed the rules and they followed the laws. And each time that they did so, they experienced pretty horrific instances of both state violence exercised by the military and the police, but also everyday. Forms of violence practiced by, you know, gunslingers who were working for landed elites. And that then radicalized some of these social movements into two separate guerrilla movements that were led by rural Communist school teachers and not Alaskas and Lucio Palanas and Lucia. Calanais is movement, in particular the party of the poor. They ended up creating a guerrilla force of about the high estimates, about 300 fighters. A more realistic estimate is is somewhere from 150 to 200, but the the key is that in coastal Guerrero and in some of the mountains mountain. News at all. They obtain a lot a a pretty substantial amount of popular support, which then leads the Mexican government that had been, you know, ruled by the PRI and it was ruled Mexico was ruled by the PRI for like 80 years. They sent in the military and they waged this pretty horrific counter insurgency that that did things like disappear people, torture, rape. You know, they raised entire communities and that's generally what's known as The Dirty war in Mexico. It's rural theater. It's main rural theater was in a place like Guerrero where you. We think there was almost 1000 disappearances from 1969 up until the early 1980s. Yeah. And one of the things that the interested me a lot sort of reading through this was that it's sort of weird for insurgency and that you get aspects of both kind of the the kind of like classical 70s urban guerrilla movement, but it's also, it's a very much a rural movement you have. You know, I mean, like one of the stories you telling this is about, you know, like a Group A group of people who did one of the, you know, like the the the classic urban 70s thing, which is that, you know, they they, they, they did, they did a bank robbery and then two people get tortured and the rural guerrillas sort of get hunted down. And I was wondering. About the the dynamics of this, because it seems like the like there's it seems like you have these groups that are. Kind of unusually moving back and forward between like having bases in cities and having bases in these rural areas. Yeah, that's one of the so usually when when when folks think about these these guerrilla movements and Guerrero during the 60s and 70s, they think of them primarily as as a as a, you know, very fairly typical rural guerrilla movement as as you just described. But it these two movements 1 led by Lucia Kalani as the party of the Poor, the other one by Hannah Mask is the AC and R Association Civic and National Revolucionaria. From the very onset they tried to connect the world to the city, whether it was cities in in Guerrero. Like the resort city of Acapulco, particularly working class neighborhoods on the outside of the city or the state capital in Chilpancingo which housed the State University, right. So both of these movements made pretty substantial inroads into that community and then also into Mexico City. So they tried their idea was not necessarily to start as a strictly as a strictly rural movement, but their idea was always to expand because I think to the cities and I think quite rightly they they perceive that what the Mexican. It was going to do to them was try to corral them in the state of Guerrero and prevent them from logistically and politically expanding beyond that. And in the end, they were. That's exactly what happened and that's how these movements were ruthlessly crushed. That, and it took a lot of terror to to separate these armed movements from their popular base of support. But a lot of this has to do with the fact that both Vasquez and Cabanas were school teachers and they were involved in Union movements that were national in scope. They were in move. They were in, you know, Lucanus was in the Mexican Communist Party. Right. So he had extensive urban experiences and and networks throughout the country. So their perspective was always to connect the rural to the urban, particularly because Mexico by the 70s was a rapidly urbanizing country, right. It was going, it becomes for the first time and it's just, well first time is its post colonial history. It becomes primarily an urban country. So, so they they they tried these really interesting experiments to try to connect the the two theaters. But as you as you mentioned right, they did that typical 1970s thing of. Robbing banks and their terminology was expropriation, right. But that that then exposed them to to police actions and and anytime any of their militants were captured, they were immediately tortured information, you know, that they were interrogated horrifically and that inform Intel was used to, to hunt down their, their, their, their comrades up in the mountains and get all. Yeah. And I think that that's a good place to move towards sort of the other side of this, which is partially the Mexican state response, but the the part, the part of it that was really interesting to me was. About how? You know, so part, part, part, part of what these groups are fighting are these sort of very, very local, like sort of landed elites and. I I I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how these sort of local elites merge, are able to merge with and sort of like Co opt in a lot of ways that the military units that are deployed. Yeah, that's one of the the biggest. So let me see how I can answer this question because there's, there's So what, what I what I try to do in this article and it's part of my broader ongoing research just to kind of connect the the violence, the state violence of the Mexican Dirty War as it as it happens and get in the 70s with, with, with something else that's happening simultaneously, which is like the so-called drug war and the exponentially increasing cultivation of drugs in a place like Guerrero, particularly marijuana and then opium poppies that are used to produce. Heroin. So what I try to do in the article that that you're referencing is kind of to show there's a longer history in Guerrero of of how power is exercised at the local level and how some of these local landed elites are able to weather the 1910 Mexican Revolution. They're able to weather the agrarian reform efforts that that occurred in the 1930s and 40s and and really these these families, one of the things that that captures my attention of, of Guerrero is that power. You can tell who's in power by just by almost. Looking at their last name, because there's this remarkable continuity in the state of who has it managed to exercise power at the local level. Political, social and economic power for decades now, for generations. And and you can track how power works by looking at families and and and what I do in this article is to look at a couple of landed elite families that had managed to stay in power for decades. So there's certain that landed. In this article, I focus on one municipality called Coyuca de Catalan, which is in the Hotlands region of Guerrero. During, you know, probably from about 2008 to 2015, it was in the top three in Mexico for opium and heroin production. So it becomes this massive drug producing region. So I go back in time and I kind of trace like who was in power in this region, who owned land, who owned the resources throughout the 20th century and and how they were responsible for essentially creating this little narco fiefdom as it currently exists and trying to figure out which families were involved. So on the one hand, you have these families that have been in power. From like the 1920s and 30s and they're still exercising power. And then when we get to the 1970s and you have this, this horrific, dirty war, this counter insurgency that the state and the military are waging against communities in Guerrero, that opens up new possibilities for new families to come in and to ally themselves with locally station military units. And they work together to wipe out guerrillas and and guerrilla supporters at the end. At the same time, they start to, you know, kind of dip their toe into this, this world of of narcotics production because really in Mexico in the 1970s. Especially by the mid 1970s it becomes a number one provider of of of marijuana and heroin to the United States and this is part of just a a broader global history of narcotics, right? There's US-led drug interdiction efforts in places like Turkey, Afghanistan and in the in Southeast Asia and efforts to suppress the drug. Drug production there creates this, you know what what people usually refer to as a balloon effect. It just displaces the drug production somewhere else because the demand in the US is still there and that. And that creates in Mexico the number one provider of narcotics by the mid 1970s. And that then has an impact locally in the place of Guerrero, which is again simultaneously experiencing a grill insurgency, a dirty war and then also the ramping up of drug production. One of the most interesting parts of this that I didn't know about was about how. I mean, like how? How explicitly? Because I've read a lot of. Well, not a lot, but I've read about. A lot of how? Particular like after like when when the sort of after sort of the the the various peoples 2006 in Mexico with the Wahaka uprising with his appetite is making a bunch of moves and the CP presidential election about how you get the drug war is the sort of like. Military solution to these leftist movements but I I was interested in how I mean incredibly explicit they are about this like the the the the anti guerrilla operations are like they don't call them griller operations they they they they talk about like bandits and like they they they they they they're explicitly like no no this is an anti narco operation even though you know they're going in massacring like. Essentially peasants and occasionally gorillas, but just a bunch of just random like campesinos. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's a a great quote that I got from for in this article. You know, this is wonderful. Researcher in Mexico, Carlos Flores was a really good book on kind of like the the failed state in Mexico and and drugs and military. And in that study, he managed to interview a military participant in The Dirty War in the 1970s. And he has this great quote that I included in this essay in which he says this military guy says, basically, look, with the marijuana growers we had no problem, we had no beef. But with the guerrillas we had the **** them up. And and for me like that, that direct quote kind of encapsulates, like what the drug war in Mexico has been historically and in its current form. Like. And this is something that I learned from people like sociologists and journalist Don Paley, right? Like the war on drugs is the war on poor people. And, and it be it becomes in 1970s, it becomes a really useful cover for the type of horrific violence that the state is practicing in in in a place like Guerrero, against these popularly supported guerrilla insurgencies. So publicly, and to it the international audience and to its own domestic national audience, the Mexican state is saying, look, we're not waging a dirty war. We're not waging a counter insurgency. We're fighting a war against cattle rustlers, against cattle thieves, and against criminals against drug dealers, when in reality they're waging a war against. For people who are supporting these different guerrilla insurgencies led by these rural Communist school teachers. So that's and that's in the rural theater, right. It's really interesting when you think about how the Mexican state in the 70s will criminalize urban guerrilla movements. You know, Mexico had like 38 guerrilla movements in the 1960s and 70s. Like, people don't really recognize that, right, like 38 to 40 different rural and urban guerrilla organizations, the big urban one that managed to create, I don't know, 10 to 12 different focals or fossa. Fossa. Was that legal? Comunista Ventures in September, the Communist League of the 2020, third of September. They became such a big threat in the urban theater that the Mexican President, Lisa Chavarria, devoted his 1974 state of the Union, basically the Mexican version of the state of the Union. He devoted a pretty good chunk of it to these quote UN quote terrorists, right. So for the urban guerillas, he referred to them as terrorists. And then he does this thing where he says, you know, most of these terrorists are unpatriotic. They, and I'm going to paraphrase some of his language, they reveal high indices of homosexuality, of like just basically. Othering them to the point that they're seen as like the most despicable other in Mexico in Mexican society, and that then opens them up to getting wiped out. Which is fulfills a similar function as calling the the the rural guerrillas nothing more than cattle rustlers, cattle thieves and narcos, right? So it's all this counterinsurgency like discursive strategy that that justifies the elimination of these people. But at bottom, these are just wars against the drug war is a war against poor people. And and you see that to this day, you see that, you know most one of the things that really animates my research about the history of drug wars in Mexico is that. I really want to push back against, you know, journalistic treatments that that will say, look, Mexico's war on drugs began in 2006 when President Felipe Calderon, wait, you know, launched the military against these different drug trafficking organizations. And, you know, historians like, like myself who work on this were like, wait, no, Mexico's had a series of drug wars, right. That the. There's a historian, Alec Dawson, who talks about has a really excellent book on peyote, and he talks about how the war on drugs begins in, like, the colonial era. Right. In terms of how the Spanish colonial state. Criminalized indigenous consumption of drugs like peyote for for their own ritualistic cultural practices. The 1970s is another moment where you have a form of of drug war that the Mexican state exercises. But from my perspective, it's just it's almost like a cover as a way to wage war against political dissidents and an armed guerrilla challenges to its rule in Mexico. Yeah, and and I think that's that's an important way of looking at it also, is just. A way to understand why. You know, like, if you're looking at it from the structure of like a policymakers like, Oh well, we spent all this time during the war on drugs. Like, why are there more drugs? And it's like, well, yeah, because, I mean, the point isn't really. About. Like, I mean, I think, OK, I want to make a caveat here, which is like it. It's not like there's such a thing as like a quote UN quote good war on drugs that you could wage. Like there's no, there isn't a version of this that's like, Oh no, if if if we actually just try to like, focusing on stopping these people, it would work. But it's like, no, but simultaneously, yeah, it it's that. The the The the goal isn't really about. Like, it's not about drugs, it's just about killing poor people. And yeah, I think that's that's a good way of framing it and I think also. It's an interesting way of looking. At. Why you start to see? These sort of supposedly like anti narco units just immediately start doing like immediately getting to the trade. Yeah. Well, because they're like they're positioned to make a ton of money off of it. Yeah. Like, it's. Yeah. They're not dumb. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I don't know, this interesting question about like the structure of the state here too, because you know, like in Chicago, this is another like, this is the thing that happens all the time is, yeah, you get these, you get these anti drug units that are, you know, incredibly specialized. They get a bunch of money and then they immediately turn around and start, like just do like just enter into the drug trade. And so I was one of the other things, yeah, I was just been interested in this of just. About. There's there's seems to be these these very. These these. Very interesting. Sort of. Alliances between paramilitaries, cartels. The police and the military that open up and I this this. I know this is an incredibly broad like it's a question you can like you know devote academic disciplines too. But I was wondering how how you look at the state in the context in in a context like this because. Yeah, I mean in a context where, you know, it's not, the state doesn't really have monopoly on violence. Right. Yeah. No, that's a, that's a huge question. And there's how you. I mean, essentially the question is like, what is the state, which is, yeah, that question always terrorizes me. Yeah. And how you answer that question then leads has consequences to how we think about things like the drug war or, you know, violence in Mexico or a variety of different things. Right. But So what I what I do in this article is on coyuca that Catalan is, is to just simply look at what the state looks like at the local level, right. Particularly like it's repressive apparatuses and what you see in a place like coyuca that Catalan because you know. You see kind of like it's a multi scaler issue, right, where you have generations of conflicts over land and land tenure and who gets to control rural markets? Who gets to control access to rural markets and rural production, right? So there's already like a built-in structure that's exploitative that has somehow managed to weather a big social revolution and a grain reform effort. And on top of that, then Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant family. Start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text. Those high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. In the 60s and 70s you get, you know, industrialized narcotics production placed on top of this pre-existing structure, right? So it's should be no. It's almost like no surprise then that you know, the gunslingers that used to work for landed elites will now serve as not just gunslingers for landed elites who are terrorizing campesinos, but now they're also going to work with like local narcotic, you know, narco farmers, drug farmers and and traffickers. And then at the same time they're going to do their best to Co opt to buy off, you know, military units that are stationed at the local level, police units that are stationed at the local level, local judges, local magistrates, local political officials. And and it be it creates a very dense network at the local level of people who are working together to maintain power, but at the same time make sure that this really profitable political economy of narcotics is going to thrive. And this is at the very local level, right. So in some in some ways those local interests of the quote, UN quote the state are will conflict with the state in Mexico City. Yeah. Yeah. And how to resolve those tensions and becomes a big deal. So that the guy that the military participant that I referenced earlier, he would he was actually sent in from outside of Guerrero into Guerrero to wage counterinsurgency. And you know he talks in this book about how they didn't know what to do when they see their soldier Conrads. You know, obviously collaborating with local medicals, even though the although this guy and his unit have been sent in to wipe out the nauticals. So what ends up happening is, is that the goal is never to eradicate the the the from a national level. From a state national level. The goal is never to eradicate the drug trade in Mexico in the 60s, seventies and 80s. The goal is to rationalize it. The goal is to to control it and and and the goal is for the state to be able to maintain power over it. And this is what leads us to what you know. Some scholars will refer to as a Plaza system, right that that that different narcotic organ trafficking organizations will control different parts of Mexico but the overall power you know they have to kick back to is are different state officials and. That there's a recent book, really great book by Ben Smith called the Dope that just came out. It's really like the first really good English language, big history of of the Mexican drug trade and and he essentially he says that like that that the Mexican state is is a racket. It's a racket, and it's ensuring that this drug trade exists and it's centralized and it's rationalized in the 60s, seventies and 80s. But by the 90s it starts to lose control. As the state itself is, neoliberalism becomes smaller, and its capacity to control these different groups becomes weakened. So, so that's like the big national level, right? And then we can that takes us to the scale of the international, which is a whole other thing. But at the very local level, what does this look like? It looks like if you're a drug farmer, right. Because another thing in Guerrero is that these drug farmers are like small scale, right? They're they're small scale. They have a little bit of autonomy, but they're small scale. But they're selling their product to these traffickers. And these are the traffickers usually that will have connections to local landed families who have connections to military, to police, to politicians. That will ensure that this economy will will will continue to thrive in an in a profitable way by the late 70s. And this is something else I think that I I need a little bit more research on, but you see it happen elsewhere in Mexico and I especially in the Northwest and a place like Sinaloa, which is usually seen as the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. But I think in the late 70s both in Sinaloa and Guerrero, The Dirty War and and the and the sending of the military in mass in a place like Guerrero, it not only takes out armed resistance to the Mexican state, but it will also take out small scale. Narco traffickers who don't wanna play, they don't like the rules that the Mexican state is imposing upon them in order to make money and traffic drugs. So I've seen a couple of documents where, you know, secret police spy agent documents where they say, OK, yes, you know these, these campesinos who are accused of being guerillas? Yes, we are disappearing them. But apparently some small scale drug traffickers are also being disappeared because they're not. They don't want to go along with the rules being imposed by the Mexican military. And that's something that you see in, in Sinaloa in the late 70s when something called Operation Condor gets launched and you get thousands of troops in federal police who go up there. And instead of eradicating the drug trade and getting rid of of these different traffickers, what they do is they centralized it, they rationalize it, they make it more efficient. And that actually it's so it's in, in a in a counterintuitive way, it's just state violence that actually leads to the formation of things that we think about as cartels and and not the other way around, right, because. The very trade begins within the confines of the Mexican state, and in Part 2 of this interview, we're going to drill deeper into that question and look at how the states attempt to get in on the drug trade created the cartels and how they sort of lost control of them, leading to an incredible increase in paramilitary violence and death and destruction. And on that happy note, this has been it could happen here. Join us again tomorrow for that. And in the meantime, stay safe and don't die. If you want to find us, we're at happened here pot and. Or Instagram. You can also find other work that we do at Coulson Media on Twitter. If for some reason you can, you want to continue venturing onto the health sites. Goodbye. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 9021 O. 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Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official Princess of Compton, Asia, kidding, and Asia. This is the professor we're here on Eddie while broke and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. This is it could happen here, a podcast that is often and today about state and paramilitary violence ends. We're back with part two of our interview with Alexander Avidia about the state and paramilitary violence and the cartels in Mexico. The immediate thing I was thinking about this was it. It reminds me a lot of. Some stuff I read a while back about like. Smuggling people over the border and about how the American militarization of that like destroyed because it used to like as as the US tries to like make the border more and more unsafe, it becomes harder and harder. And it means that, like the people who can actually do it like, you know, you need to have access to more resources and more. Like technical capability and that sort of like and that that also in a lot of ways helped the cartels because, you know, it was like, OK, so who actually has a bunch of organizational expertise with smuggling routes and a lot of money and it's it's I think it's like it's interesting. Way of looking at what the the the national application of state power in these like does which is that like. It's. It seems almost like what's happening is that. So when when you get these massive exertion of state power, it's not that they like flattened like, you know, it's not just sort of a wipe out our resistance. What they do is they. Yeah, it's what you were saying is like they centralized the drug trip, but they also, they centralized the sort of violent apparatuses and it means that, yeah, like, yeah, if if if you're going to survive that you have to be. Like incredibly efficient and incredibly violent and you have to also sort of start. Like you, you you have to start playing with it, like playing by the rules at the state of exception, which is, you know, and that's that's like how I guess the the violence level and the organizational centralization happens. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. No, I think you're, I think you're right and I think it's also becomes part of the. To add, I mean so to add you know fuel to the fire even more so it's it's become a strategy of like the DEA and and and counter narcotics forces in Mexico to to do what you just described but then also to sow dissension amongst the different drug trafficking organizations. Right. So that then also increases the violence, right. So if you can get you know it was it was pretty well known that the Chapel for instance the the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel until recently. Well let's not say leader, one of the most prominent traffickers of the Sinaloa Cartel. Recently, like, he was giving up people, he was giving information on rivals to the DEA and to other other counternarcotics forces. Right? And that's part of the strategy. The strategy is to fragment these groups, and that only increases the violence and and and you see that violence at the very localized level. And this is what Guerrero suffering from right now, right? Guerrero for a long time is under the control of one single drug trafficking organization, Slash family from the state of Sinaloa. The the Beltran Levas right they used, they were originally aligned with. They're actually cousins with the Chapo Guzman family. They had a falling out in the mid 2000s and they and they went to war. And they had disastrous consequences for the people of Guerrero because it fragmented the drug trafficking organizations and it forced different local groups to take sides and and. Kind of how I end the article that that you're referencing, right where different local groups start to take sides and that increases the the the level of violence at the local level and and and communities suffer greatly. And that's also a consequence of like the Kingpin strategy, right. Like this idea that if you take down the, the perceived leader of a drug trafficking organization, that's somehow going to have an impact on drug production. Yeah. No. What actually happens that it fragments the organization and it creates more violence at the local level, while at the same time it gives a chance to like X DEA agents to go on like, you know, national media and be like, Oh yes, the capture of El Chapo's gonna have a great impact. The drug trade, no will not like. It just increases the violence and and I think that the thing that that that's very clear. In this article, I think it's clear if you, you know, if you look at the drug trade is it's like, no, it's it's it's it's largely economic stuff. And like one of things you're talking about is, is you know, is that these peasants who are the people who've been able to hold on to the collective land basically get forced by the land banks to like produce sesame. And it's like they can't make any money off of it. And I, I don't, I don't know how directly it looked to me a lot like like that was directly one of the things that starts to, to lead to the shift of the drug trade there because you have all these people locked into this crop that like. Just can't support them. Yeah, yeah and it's it's just the bigger story there is, is really the failure of the the post revolutionary Mexican state to, to really help spur agricultural production at the level of of these small holding peasants and and these rural communities that are these are heroes who have received land from the Mexican state. If anything most of the state subsidies in the state structure state support for agriculture from the 40s you know up until the 80s that was all directed to big. Agro businesses that were producing export crops in places like Sinaloa, right, they're producing winter crops for the American market or winter fruit for the American market, right. So in the absence of like meaningful state support for small holding agriculture, that smallholding agricultural sector that is meant to feed Mexico. Some of these, these farmers in a place like Coyuca de Catalan, they'll say, OK, well we we're growing this thing that the, the agricultural bank is telling us to grow sesame, but we're not making a lot of money off of it. But on the other hand, by the late 60s they see that marijuana production is is really increasing due to American demand. If I can do both things, you know, I'm going to make a lot of money and and I'm going to allow my family to make a pretty good living while staying in the countryside while not having to migrate to Mexico City or while not having to migrate to these agricultural fields in northern Mexico. Or even into the United States. So because it's like really rational economic response to to to a broader macroeconomic situation that has put them in that position. The and and you still see this to this day, right. These these small farmers they they still own their land. They'll grow certain crops on it and it's almost serves as a shield for you know, the opium poppies that they're growing on the same plot of land. But in a part that's a little, you know, harder to access and it's a little bit more hidden, right. But it's it's. It's trying to find a way at a bottom to make a dignified you know how to make a life of dignity for your family when you're living in a in the countryside. When you're living in a place like where you got the Catalan and Gerardo and then you see that you know they gringos are going crazy over Acapulco gold in the late 60s and you have you know N you know gringo traffickers coming in to get rid of with new seeds or you have sinaloense sis coming into your state saying you know grow these here are some marijuana seeds grow that strain. You know, and and they can buy off, you know, local politicians and soldiers and and police. That's that's one of the ways that you get the emergence of of industrial proportion production of marijuana and opium poppies and Guerrero in the 60s and 70s and again at the same time that this massive dirty war is being waged against two different peasant guerrilla movements. Right. So it's like a really messy like social matrix that's occurring at the same time. I I guess one other thing I wanted to talk about. Was about. How the political parties sort of work into this because. I guess like my experience with this sort of like the the the kind of like narco state fusions with like 20s and 30s China and there it's like. Like you're you're. I don't know. I mean the, the, the, the, the, the Communists have an actual independent political base outside of like like the Green gang, but like the KMT. It's like like this is basically just a like like this like this is this is just like an ARCO organization with like a flag planted on it. And I'm wondering how like on what end of this scale we're working with with the PRI and also also like with other Mexican parties because it seems like. There are like parts of like a functional state app, like a a party state apparatus or like a party apparatus and then parts of it that are just like. This is a cartel. Yeah, it's it's that's a huge question. It's it's. I really resist it. No, no, it's all good. I. I've stopped understanding this within the framework of like a narco state right, because to think about a narco state. You really have to think about how a state was captured by these drug trafficking organizations. And and I historically and currently, I don't think that describes what's what's happening in Mexico. I think what you what and again it goes back to the question of what is the state, right. Like the question is going to drive me like just this guy. I'm going to be thinking about this decades now, right. But because you have, you know you it depends on what part of the Mexican state you're also referring to, right. So we're talking about the military. The military has all segments of the military have always had an important role to play. In the production and trafficking of narcotics from Mexico into the US from the from like the 1910s, right. The military governor of Baja California, this guy by the name of Colonel Esteban Cantu. He was helping traffic opium into the United States during the Mexican Revolution, right. And this has been a constant, right? The guys that I talk about in my article, this guy who ends up he leave, he's a general by the time he's, he's arrested in, in 2002. This guy, Maria Acosta Chaparro, he was like the main counterinsurgent theorist and and and and bright mind of the Mexican military that gets sent to get right on the 70s to wipe out these different gorilla movements. But he's after they wipe out the gorilla movements, he stays on. He serves as a kind of like the leader of the state police forces. And what he starts to do, he starts to buy up land. Allegedly that will start producing opium poppies and marijuana. And this guy from the late 70s up until he's arrested in 2000, it's pretty clear. Had he had been collaborating with different narco trafficking organizations, he gets arrested by his own military in 2000 because he it was pretty clear that he had been protecting and collaborating with this you have quedas cartel and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. So, you know, one of these like anti anti guerrilla, anti nautical nauticals that will, you know, actually get go to jail for about 6 years because it was pretty apparent that he had been for a long time collaborating and protecting the different narco trafficking organizations, right? So that's the military. Then you have like the the the secret police that gets formed in Mexico, the DFS in 1947 with the help of the FBI, the DFS becomes like this, political police that the Mexican president can use to tamp down on political dissent. They're the ones, you know. Spying, surveillance by the 60s and 70s are also torturing, disappearing, and with that level of impunity and power, they also get into the drug game. By the 70s and 80s, you have the federal judicial police. They're the ones who control for this during this fifty 60s and 70s, really. They're the ones who are controlling the kickbacks that they're receiving from narco traffickers until the military moves in in the 70s and takes over for them, right? So the the repressive apparatuses within the Mexican state of the 20th century play a really key role, if not the role. And helping foster create this, this political economy of narcotics. Now, how do how do we view that in relation to the PRI? Right the, the, the party that emerges from the Mexican Revolution, the party that will rule Mexico generally will say from the late 20s up until the year 2000. Well, you have pretty important, you know, political officials within the party throughout the 20th century that are directly linked to narco traffickers and directly linked to military officials who are obviously involved in the game as well. But at no level can we say it's a narco state because the narcos having captured the state, it's actually the other way around. It's the Mexican Post revolutionary state. That's trying to get its hands around this thing that's growing within its own confines and and and by and they lose control of it. Like by the late 80s and 90s, they've effectively lost control of this thing. And that's when you see the rise of of these highly centralized drug trafficking organizations like this. You have hottest cartel that's making a ton of money off of cocaine. So I guess it seems like it's almost like you're dealing with from from from the very, very local level where you have these sort of landed elites and their gunslingers. It's like. It's this almost sort of like. Like miniaturized fractal version of the state where you're getting these like very, very small, sort of like. You know, like almost like fetal domains and then they sort of expand upwards and send upwards. But yeah, and I, I guess the interesting part to me is, is how like the paramilitary dynamics of that and how. How the power of these sort of Lend Lease into power of the like how, how it's like like the the, the the power like the the use of power from the top seems to strengthen them where you know if you're looking at this from like. Like how? How this is supposed to work in theory. If you're someone who actually is like trying to eliminate the drug trade, you think it be the way around that. Like the application of power would shatter. But it sort of doesn't it. It causes these like these these buildups, these apparatuses, and then they fragment. They rebuild again. But it's you're not ever. Actually dealing with these sort of like microstate, like, yeah, yeah, no, I think that's exactly right and if anything. The parameterization is also like a, like a long. It's a process, right? So like the first. If we can use this term, the first paramilitaries were were used to wipe out agrarian reform minded campesinos in the 30s and 40s. But you don't really have like a para militarization of, of of the drug trade in Mexico? To a certain extent, because you had the military and the police to do your dirty work, right? If you're analytical, that's a more recent phenomenon that you start to see in the 90s and especially in the 2000s. So right the the case that everyone points to are these. Elite of the elite and the Mexican military, the, the Gafas, these guys are like the the the Navy seals or the special force, you know the the Army Rangers, the Mexican military, a bunch of these guys in the mid to late 90s decide, you know what, we don't want to work for the Mexican military. We're just going to, we're going to desert and we're going to go hire ourselves out to the Gulf Cartel and and they become really the first like paramilitary wing of a major drug trafficking organization. And these are guys, some of which probably most likely were trained at school of the Americas or received. American specialized training, yeah, now switching sides and and and protecting a pretty powerful drug trafficking organization like at the time in the 90s that was the Gulf Cartel. And these are the infamous setas, right? These are the seas. They're called the Zetas because that was like their military code. There was always AZ in front of a number. So Z1 was kind of like the leader, the first guy who took 12 or 13 guys with him to desert, and they hired themselves out to this drug trafficking organization, and they become like the paramilitary unit. The rest of the group see that? And they're like, oh, **** like, we got to catch up, right? Because these, like, and these guys, they got this, you know, they have counterinsurgency experience. You know, they were the ones who were fighting against us. Pieces in Chiapas in the early 90s, right. They were the ones that they were sending to. Yeah. They were the ones who were fighting against the new cycle of guerrillas that emerging Guerrero in the mid 90s, the PR. And then when they're used for counternarcotics operations, they look at the situation, they say, you know what? We're not going to fight on the side of the military. We're going to hire ourselves out to these, this Gulf cartel. We're going to make a ton of money, but they have a lot of skills, right? So the rest of the, so the rest of the drug trafficking organizations see that and like, we got to play catch up. And and and and you see the parameterization of this conflict and and in certain parts. That's what's driving. I I think has has played a really big role in driving some of the the bloodshed and violence that we've seen in Mexico, particularly since 2006, right where we can speak of. Probably 400,000 homicides since 2006, at least 100,000 disappearances. A lot of that has to do with, you know, the people who are fighting are are paramilitaries, right? They're receiving training from Colombian military advisers, they're receiving training from Israeli military officials, they're receiving training from. Guatemalan special forces, these guys called it guerrillas who committed some of the worst atrocities during the Guatemalan conflict of the of the of the 70s and 80s. My family's from Michoacan, which is a state north of Guerrero. And I remember when in probably 2005, six or seven I was down there doing research and visiting family and they reported on the arrest of two Guatemalans and two Colombians in this random far off part of me truck. And you're like, what were these two Colombians and two Guatemalans? Getting there while they were most likely like special ex special forces in those countries militaries who had been hired by local organizations to train their their their soldiers to train their their paramilitaries so that that's I think that has driven a lot of the violence, right. And you see it's in terms of the techniques they use, the weapons, the armament, the the logics of of how to take down their enemies. Yeah, I remember I read an article like. OK. I've literally lost all sense of time. I I think it was like mid last year about a cartel just. Basically running a military operation, just shutting, like just shutting down a city. God, I really wish. Yeah, that was pre pandemic. That was when it was pre pandemic. Oh my God. Yeah, I remember because I was on the day and the day after it happened. I think I spent way too much time on Twitter talking **** to people. That was when I think you're referring to when the. Detachment from the Mexican military in the city of Culiacan, which is the capital of Sinaloa. Culiacan is seen as like, if Sinaloa is the cradle of the Mexican drug trade, then like, Callaghan is the capital of it, right? I think, I think referring to when a Mexican military detachment tried to arrest one of the sons of its Chapel, right, and they actually found him, they localized it, they located him and they tried to arrest him. And like, the hills just came down on the city of Culiacan and you had hundreds of. Of narcos or or paramilitaries who came down and essentially forced. Forced the military and the state to hand over El Chapo son to them and and for and the reason why I was like you know spent way too much time on social media going after people because people said, oh, this is an example of a failed state. Oh look at the new President of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He's lost control of the of the state, like he's kowtowing to nauticos. And it was much more complicated than that and something similar had already happened in the previous administration where these different like particularly in the city of of Guadalajara where they even shot down a military helicopter or police helicopter and they and they essentially shut down the entire city because one of their leaders had been captured. OK. So one of the things you the things you talk about the end of the article was about these, this environmentalist group. That gets like they they they all get arrested, while like they're their lawyer gets killed after he starts talking about like, connections between business owners and the party and the narco trade. So I guess. What do you? How do you sort of like? Like how? How do you leftist? Movements sort of navigate this space because you have. It seems like you have. On the one hand, you know you have all these paramilitaries and then you also have a state that is. Like, incredibly violently hostile to you and I guess. I don't know, like I I guess you sort of have. Zapatista model of this combination of sort of like armed struggle and social pressure, but I guess like how, how, how do people navigate this? Sort of like it seems like a like a really disastrous like, yeah, place to be trying to do leftist politics and. Yeah, it's it's really difficult, right. And I think that's again going back to the the the thesis that the war on drugs is actually a war on poor people. It's. You know, leftist movements, dissident movements in Mexico have to well, for one, I'll say this in a place like Guerrero. It's these movements that have provided, I think the the most. Accurate, like X-ray analysis of what the state is at the local level, right. So this this guerrilla leader that I talked about in the article, Comandante Ramiro, who who was around in the late, you know, 2007, 2008, 2009, like based on his travels in the mountains of Guerrero and kind of like the the actions that he was engaged in for him, it was very clear that the military was collaborating with all narco trafficking organizations, not just the one, not just like the most powerful one, right. So at the national level, there was a lot of discourse of, well, this start drug trafficking organization is going at it. With this one in a place like Guerrero, this guerrilla leader looks at the situation. He's like, actually, they're all working together. And not only that, but they have the police and the military. And what are they doing? They are going after poor communities up in the mountains who don't want to grow opium poppies or who want to organize a different way, an alternative model of of of living, of social reproduction. What they'll say is, you know the what the military is doing in terms of drug interdiction is they'll only go and and and burn some opium poppy fields and not others. And that's because the owner of that bulk popium poppy feel that they burned didn't pay up. So you know now current movements in Guerrero, particularly indigenous moves in Guerrero there's a recent report that a that a an indigenous group just put out and they're linked to the Congress, Congress on national in the the CN. I can't remember the acronym where they talk about a criminal state existing in in the in the part of Guerrero that is known as La Montana, which is a heavily indigenous area on the border on the eastern part of the state. And what they say is what we see here is a. An alliance between Nauticos political parties, military detachments, and transnational corporations. And so and and in Guerrero, those transnational corporations are usually have something to do with mining, and they're usually Canadian. So. How do you navigate that? Like, that is like, like the the correlation of forces. If we want to use that kind of terminology, like from a perspective of a of a group that that wants to resist this, it's it's it's damn near impossible, right? Like you have everything going against you. And yet in the radio, people are still resisting, right? You have the students of Ayotzinapa. There are still protesting. They're still organizing even after the disappearance of their 43 comrades back in September of 2014. And we still don't have a clear answer as to what happened. You still have. You know you have the model of. About Tony that like that that certain indigenous communities like the community in Chardon and Michigan have have practice which is essentially they kick out all political parties, they kick out all police officers and they self organize at the communal level, almost like a community police force and you see that in Guerrero as well. There's all, you know there's there's challenges with that. There's a that usually brings on a lot of violence and and the people of children have really suffered for, for trying to go this, for trying to protect themselves, right. They've they've suffered a lot of casualties. And there you have a A this combination of, like, nauticals and illegal logging, right? And so the community there, on the one hand, is trying to protect their ecology, but they're also trying to defend themselves from nauticals who have taken over local political parties. And they don't want them in their in their town in Guerrero, you have community police forces, and you've had them since the 1980s and 1990s. But that's raised a lot of issues in terms of, you know, what happens when one community police force gets Co opted or or. Co opted or corrupted by a political party or by even a nautical and then that that group is used to hit against other community groups who are who are still trying to organize for, for, for a radical alternative. So it's it's it's on one level. It's really depressing, right? Because everything is stacked against groups and communities and organizations in a place like Guerrero, who want a better world, who want to create a better world. But in the longer scope of Guerrero's history, they still resist. They still resist. And and to me, that's one of the things that fascinates me about this place and about its people, about its communities, that the odds have always been stacked against them. And nonetheless, they still resist. They still try to. Against overwhelming odds, they still try to carve out a better, more, just more dignified existence for them and for their communities, even at great risk. You know, for their well-being and they're willing to risk everything so. They're still there, they're still there, even though the the forces that they're facing are are extremely powerful. Yeah, I think that's a surprisingly hopeful note to end on. Which is that, yeah, it's even like, you know, places with just incredible concentrations of violence and different kinds of sort. Power against you that people. People, people continue to fight. Yeah, yeah, I think that's, I think that's one of the lessons that we definitely get up from a place like Guerrero or a place like Chiapas, right, with the with the Zapatistas who are still there, who have still managed to, I mean, they've managed to reproduce themselves generationally, which is really difficult for an armed. Insurrectionary group right, like they've managed to do that and and and and to carve out at great cost as well, right? They're currently right now suffering. They've been suffering for for more than a decade at low intensity warfare that's been waged by the military and their paramilitaries. Yeah, but they're still there with their example, right? And I think part of the power of them and the people in Guerrero is is their example alone is threatening to power to the powers that be and and that's why that there's always an effort to exterminate them. So just by virtue of surviving and and and defending themselves that's like a small it seems like a small thing but but they're providing an alternative and I think that's where they're they're examples really important and and I think I think there is I think there's a real argument that the whole sort of the the whole sort of anti globalization like that wave of struggle like is something that was kicked off by the deportistas and like and not just on the sort of like they were the first people to go into revolt but it's like I mean explicitly like the the the way they brought. You know, I mean like social movements from across the world together and the way they do, you know, the way that they like had they got, the way they got people talking, the way they had people training each other, the techniques and the sort of ideas that they are changing that they like, like they they they set off like a wave of revolt that lasted for like. I don't know if you started in like 1999 and like the end of it's like 2006. Yes. Yeah. It was incredible. Yeah, no, they, I think they they're. And even if you want to go, this might take us off topic a little bit, right. But like. Scholars who focus on like Venezuela would say actually the first one was the Caracazo, right in the late 80s when you have a popular rebellion in Caracas, Venezuela against neoliberalism, against neoliberal austerity measures. Right. And then so I've had that, I've had a you know talks with friends. I'll be like, yeah this hypotheses were the first ones. They're like, no, no, no, no. It started in Caracas in 198889. I think it was the caracazo. But yeah, no, I think they're they're global example continues to be a a really powerful one. For me personally, it's like I still remember my parents had. My parents are are migrants from Mexico. They had this, this big satellite dish in our backyard so we can beam in, you know, TV stations from Mexico. And I remember January 1st, 1994, we woke up right groggily to celebrate New Years, and my parents turned on the TV to see Mexico City News. And there was Marcos, right? And there were the Zapatistas. And there were then the Mexican politicians saying, no, don't believe. What? Don't believe your eyes. This isn't. You had a guy. I remember you had a guy go on TV. I think saying something like this is not an indigenous movement, because if it was an indigenous movement, they would be using machetes, not rifles. Like something really condescending, like the level of racist condescension that came out of Mexican politicians in in in in response to this movement. Yeah, was was super high, right? But I remember I was in junior high and I remember seeing it and I'm just like. There has to be something wrong for these people to do this right. And that just led me to want to do more research and to do more reading. And and that I think is really powerful. And I think, I still think it's really powerful. So the more we can get the word out about these movements and and Guerrero and Chiapas and in other parts of Latin America, I think, I think it's still really important. And I think especially today, we really, we do need a bit more hope in these dark pandemic times. I was trying to figure out a Speaking of hope segue and I couldn't. I couldn't quite get it but. Do you do you have anything that you want to plug? Where can people find you? Yeah. Well, thank you so much for for having me on this was this is a lot of fun. You can find me on God. Like you can find me on Twitter. I think the pandemic, my Twitter consumption has really gone up. It's been awful. But you can find me at Alexander under score Avina. Yeah. I don't wanna plug no. I think if if you go on my Twitter page you'll see you'll be able to get the link to the to the article that we've been talking today about about the drug from dirty water to drug war in in Guerrero. I recently published a book review of. Of this really fascinating book on the the connection between the Israeli arms industry and like, Cold War Latin America. So you can find that on my page. But yeah, it's don't really have anything else to play. Whenever I finish this damn book on the drug wars have me back on and yeah, definitely tangible to plug, but. Right now it's just short little articles. Well, think thank you again for coming on the show. Yeah, this, this is this has been naked happened here. You can find us in the usual places if you want to venture on social media for some reason. Please don't. It's it's a bad place. But yeah, thank you and goodbye everyone. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media or more podcasts from cool Zone media. 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