Hacking Pharmaceuticals with The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective

Robert sits down with biohacker Michael Laufer to discuss the democratization of pharmaceutical drugs.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, everybody, welcome to it could happen here. I am
Robert Evans, and this is the show where we talk
about how everything is kind of falling apart and how
we might put it back together again in a way
that works better than it did before UM, or do
something different that is even anyway. Whatever. It's a show
about the future and about the messed up present UM
And as a result of that, one of the things

(00:25):
we talk about a lot is self sufficiency. We've had
a number of episodes kind of covering the values of
like replacing your lawn with food, guerilla gardening, that sort
of stuff. And one of the critiques we get is
people saying, well, you know, that's never gonna work on
a large scale. It's never going to replace industrial agriculture
or whatever. And that's perfectly true. But the point we're

(00:45):
going for here and why we encourage these kind of
resilience building activities is because they do improve the ability
of communities to resist when they need to resist, and
also provide opportunities by which people can reimagine their relationship to,
for example, all the food supply chain, or reimagine the
relationship to their community, and the kind of things that
communities provide for each other rather than having them shipped

(01:07):
in by Amazon. UM. And when we start talking about that,
when we start talking about improving community resiliency for things like,
you know, a general strike or even potentially more radical stuff.
One of the big issues that any community has to
confront is not just food, but medicine. I'm I do,
and I'm sure a lot of other people have friends

(01:27):
who cannot survive without medications that are very like reliant
upon existing supply chains UM and to some extent, even
the stability of the government, you know, UM, getting your insulin,
getting your medication for whatever kind of disease you have
that that needs constant medication. There's a bunch of different
reasons why people are reliant upon the medical um supply

(01:51):
lines and upon the kind of pharmaceutical industry. And that's
one of the big when we talk about building more
resilient communities, one of the big hurdles to jump. Well. Today,
my guest is someone who is working on bridging some
of these problems. UM. His name is Michael Lawfer, and
he is the founder of an organization called the Four
Thieves Vinegar Collective. They are bio hackers UM, and they

(02:14):
are working on cracking certain pharmaceutical medications to allow individuals
with resources that are generally available to people who are
not rich or pharmaceutical companies UM to produce life saving medications. UM.
The number one thing you would have heard of from
four Thieves is the EPI pencil, which we'll talk about

(02:36):
it a bit. But first, Michael, thank you for coming
on the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's
exciting to be able to shot and talk with you
and all the people surrounding you who are trying to
just unfunned things a little bit. Yeah, yeah, and I
most of the conversation I want to have today is
on the unfucking of things variety. But I do think

(02:58):
we should start with a little bit technical talk first.
Can you give people an idea of what kind of
medications you and other people in the collective have figured
out how to produce UM and what kind of resources
and individual needs to be able to do some of
this stuff. Sure. So, from a technical perspective, most of

(03:19):
the things that we focus on are what's called small
molecule chemistry, and to kind of describe that blanketly, if
you can draw the molecule in a cocktail napkin. It
probably qualifies as a small molecule if it's one of
these things that like, you know, if you look at
the diagram for the molecules approaching, it's got big ribbons
that are colored and stuff that's a that's a biochemic thing,

(03:42):
and it's a whole different set of problems. Now, the
mean focide that we've had have been surrounding access to abortion,
access to hive medications, access to hepatitis C medications, and

(04:04):
access to reversal of jug overdose medications. So that's been
sort of our main focus, but there's been a handful
of others. The things that we tend to look for
our where are there things that there's a great need
and there's a huge barrier, And so you see those
in those places a lot, because the three main barriers

(04:27):
that tend to pop up between somebody and access to
the medication they need are either price or legality or
lack of infrastructure. And typically the weirdness that comes up
mostly surrounds price because of intellectual property laws and marginalization

(04:51):
of people who suffer from particular ailments or seem to
suffer predominantly from particular ailments. And so if you're if
you're poor, and you're in a class of people that
is seen as something not to be cared about because
they're not a strong voter base, then the ability to

(05:12):
move access away from those people and put in more
barriers and raise prices becomes easier to defend. UM. So
the first drug that we focused on was a an

(05:32):
anti parasitic um. Toxoplasmosis is a parasite that's pretty innocuous
for most people anybody when you get from cats, right
or is this not Gandhi? It is. It is the
one you get from cats, and it's really fascinating parasite
too if if if you ever dig into the behavioral

(05:54):
biology of it, it's really really fascinating parasite. UM, I
probably have it. Yeah, I have three cats. I definitely
have it. So and so it's not a big deal
for those people, but if you have a massively compromised
immune system, especially with people with HIV or advanced stages
of cancer, and that's why it was labeled sort of
you know HIV drug, it's not it's a it's an

(06:16):
anti parasitic, but it's used almost exclusively by people who
are an advanced stages of cancer. Uh, people with fairly
compromised immune systems from HIV or something else, and then
pregnant women. Um, And it's not that big deal. If
you have access to the medication, you can merely take

(06:37):
it and eradicates from body. Uh. The difference was is
that something that was a short course of treatment you
take I think for um, you know, four doses the
first time around, and then one dose each day subsequently
for something like ten days. Um, And that's not a

(06:58):
big deal when each dose each was about thirteen and
a half dollars. And then Martin cry jacked up the
price to seven fifty a pill, and so we're like, well,
this is ridiculous. So that was the first one that
we went after. Then of course access to abortion drugs, um,
that's a big one. That's pretty topical lately. We released

(07:18):
a video maybe three months ago on how you can
make your own abortion pills without too much fuss. This
would be mythopristone, right, Uh, mithopristone and Mr Pristall. So
you can do it with just Mr Purstall, or you
can do it in combination. And when you do it
with just the one with just miso, you have about

(07:42):
an eighty five percent chance of it working. And if
you have both, they bumps it up to about and
what is the like what when you're doing this? And
we'll talk a little bit with the hardware, but like
what is the re agent that you have for this?
Because I know that's been a big part of some
of the discussions is like how do you get the
thing as you make the medicines from which is easier
for some than it is for others. Sure, there are

(08:04):
a couple different ways that you google about that. The
the interesting but more difficult way, of course, is to
do the chemistry from scratch, where like you say, get
access from the agents, you do some chemistry, and you
end up with the active pharmaceutical ingredient, which we lovingly
referred to as the API, and then you package it

(08:26):
somehow into a tablet or a pill or or some
other means of ingress into the body. Um. The instructions
that we distributed skip the difficult part because mr. Pristal

(08:49):
is an ulcer medication, and so for instance, if you
have access to Mexico or are in Mexico, it's kind
of not a big deal because as an ulcer medication,
it's over the counter, and you can just go in
and say, oh, you know, my grandmother can't get out
of bed. She needs this ulcer medication. I need just

(09:11):
a little bit of it to get her through the weekend. Um,
and then no problem. Uh. Not so easy in places
where it's a little more controlled, like the US. However,
one amazing trick when looking for medicines, access to medicines

(09:34):
that are generally blocked from people that the existing power
structure tries to disenfranchise from access is you look and
see if it's similarly used for other classes of person
or being that the infrastructure does care about. So interestingly,

(09:55):
you look for ulcer medication, you say, well, like, who
else has ulcers that you know, people might think are
important people. That doesn't really come up, and there are
other ulster medications are a little bit better. However, there
are a lot of really wealthy people in the United States,
and really wealthy people tend to keep horses and horses

(10:17):
interestingly um or something or maybe more some ungodly percentage
of domesticated horses have ulcers. UM. Now why that is
I'm not entirely clear about, but my own theory is
that it has something to do with taking a gigantic

(10:39):
wild animal and putting it into a very small box
for most of its life. Yeah, it doesn't seem like
the thing that horses evolved to do. Yeah. So, so
that said, people who are horse owners typically have to
treat them constantly for ulcers, and the best thing for
that is Mr. Perstal. And so you can get Mr.

(11:01):
Crystall powder in a tub from places that, yeah, feedstore
or something. Yeah, I go to a feed store every week.
I'm sure I could buy a bucket of this ship probably,
So it comes in tubs. And the other thing that's
great about it coming in a tub is that it's
already in with a buffer. Part of the thing about Mr.

(11:22):
Crystall is that the dosages in micrograms, and that's very
hard to weigh unless you have a really high precision scale.
Even your good drug dealers generally don't have a scale
that can do that. Right. So, but the magic is,
this isn't a tub with a bunch of inert powder,
and it's it's already mixed up to be homogeneous. And

(11:43):
so what you can do is you can do a
little bit of back of the envelope arithmetic, and you
can measure out much larger quantities and know how much
active ingredients you have and then pack that into a tablet.
Now yeah, um, I mean that makes so much sense.
And it's also like like the you have kind of

(12:07):
the dark side and light side version. It's kind of
the light side version of all of those people buying
up ivermectin for for nonsense. It's like, well, no, there's
reasons to buy, you know, like, uh, livestock medication especially. Um.
I mean, I have a lot of friends who took
fishing antibiotics back in the day, and this is kind
of a much more um using it in a much

(12:28):
more rigorous way to provide people with something that can
is getting it will be getting increasingly difficult to access
in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah, it's
just such a smart way of approaching it, I think. Yeah.
And one of the things that becomes philosophically a bit
sticky is when you end up talking about the importance

(12:53):
of independent management of one's own health and decision making
not coming from above. There's this difficult moment that I've
had kind of having to cop to the reality that
if you're building mechanisms to empower people to have access

(13:14):
to make decisions about managing their own health. H Part
of that entails realizing that that will also lead to
a lot of people making what I might think are
bad decisions, but that the important thing is that it

(13:35):
doesn't matter what I think. That people should not be
controlled by other people, and if they make bad decisions,
that sucks, and hopefully we can help that, but not
not lamenting the importance of or not not backtracking, not
having some sort of retrograde about offering more access even

(14:01):
if people misuse that access to the miss manage their
own health. Mismanagement of health happens no matter what right.
It happens constantly, and people will ignore things that seem
like they're bigger problems and don't get them addressed. And
so I have to sort of retreat into this idea

(14:22):
that more access to more tools is better and that's
just the way of it. And yeah, the problem, yeah,
I mean, the problem with ivermectin isn't the problem. The
problem is that that people have access to ivermectin, and
so they're taking it in a way that is harmful
to them. The problem is that people have been have
have been blinded by disinformation and so are making a

(14:43):
horrible health care decision. The fact that they have it's
possessed to veterinary medication is fine, right, exactly, And and
it's and it's interesting that you say that because I
have a friend of Doctors Without Borders and they are
starting a couple of pretty strong programs to try and
combat misinformation, because just from a metric standpoint, they look

(15:08):
for sort of like, what's killing the greatest number of
people at the greatest rate in the worst way, And
currently the thing that's killing the most people in the
worst way at the greatest rate is misinformation. So yeah,
that's that's really the great danger. And one of the
things I found really interesting about kind of what you
all have been doing because obviously the question of how

(15:29):
to fight the misinformation in the medical sphere is a
much larger conversation without simple answers. When it comes to
a question like, oh, hey, this pharmaceutical company jacked up
the price by what seven for this necessary medication for
people a lot of people who have HIV UM What
are we The solution to that is simple, You find
a way for them to get it without paying hundreds
and hundreds of dollars per dose. UM the question. Some

(15:54):
of the work you all have done is with very
uh mass needed products like the the mythopres don't like
the epipencil um, where there's large numbers of people who
need it. But a lot of what I think, one
of the things I think is really cool is y'all
are also working on hacking medications that are very niche like,
very very few people have this particular disease, and so

(16:14):
the medication is the costs as much as a fully
loaded Toyota tacoma, you know, in order to sometimes far
worse than that. Because of this Orphan Drug Act that
got past in the US and equivalence that exists in
other places, you have all of these allowances that are

(16:34):
granted to people who invent I put in air quotes
m because really they just purchase the rights to it
um these these orphan drugs where when you talk about controls,
it's kind of the most tragic incidents of that entire

(17:00):
because what's happening is you've got somebody who has a
very rare disease, and in many cases you have something
that's the difference between somebody who just cannot function and
they're dealing with their life kind of moment to moment
there they're mostly cared for, and if they have access

(17:21):
to a particular medication, then they can go through life
in a fairly normal sort of way where they don't
need to be an assisted living, where that they can
do sort of basic things for themselves, and that that
seems so much more predatory. I mean, it's important, of course,
you know, to look at things with that macro lens

(17:43):
as well and say what can what can do a
lot of good for a lot of people. But then
the sort of micro ethical lens needs to come out
from time to time and say, all right, well here's
something that only affects a few hundred thousand people across
the world. But these are people who can just go
through life normally if only they had access to a

(18:06):
little bit of medicine. And the only reason they don't
is because of misplaced average or all averice is misplaced
because yeah, and you're you're you're providing individuals or a
way for people to to help individuals who have this
problem and who can't couldn't possibly afford this because they

(18:26):
don't have health care or something a way to deal
with these illnesses. Um and oftentimes like even even people
who are ensured get the medication that they need or
don't get an affordable rate because it's not seen as critical. Yeah,
it's like, oh, well there's a there's a solution that's
not as good, but it's much less expensive. So that's

(18:48):
the only thing we're going to cover. And so yeah,
and you're saying, well, it should be your decision whether
or not this is something you want to treat this way,
and we're this is a way if you, you know,
have access, this is a way for you to kind of,
as you've been saying, like take your health care and
your ability to get medication into your own hands and

(19:10):
produce the things that you need without needing to beg
an insurance company or go fund me eight dollars or whatever. Yeah,
does go fund me to break my heart so much. Yeah,
it's especially when people say, oh, look, how great somebody
got the money that they needed, and I say, look,
I am happy that people get healthcare, but this should

(19:32):
be entirely unnecessary. And the fact that this comes up
is criminal. Yeah, we can, we can as a species
produce this ship for less than the cost of like
a lamp, you know, Like, why why don't why isn't
this available? Um now, I And that's what I think
is kind of so powerful about what y'all are doing,

(19:53):
And is that so so often we kind of get
stuck in this like the horror of how bad health
care is, of how funked up the pharmaceutical industry is,
and then we get our relief from that in these
stories of people like crowdfunding so they can get their medication.
And what you're saying is, well, what's actually much more
inspiring than that is people just making finding ways to

(20:14):
make what they need. Um. Again, the kind of the
most popular popular is the wrong word. The most press
y'all have received, I think is for the epipencil, which
is an EpiPen is a device that you take that
is used when people are going into anaphylactic shock, which
is when they have an allergic reaction that will kill
them if untreated. Generally, UM and it you injected into

(20:35):
your muscles or generally, like an EpiPen does the injecting,
you just kind of put it in place. Um and
it it is a life saving medication when people need it.
It's the choice between that and death. UM. And they
are very expensive. There is a company that owns the
patent because of how the EpiPen actually does the injecting.
The actual medicine is very cheap and very easy to make,

(20:56):
but it's unbelievably expensive and people die as a result
of lack lack of access. UM, and you've provided a
way using both kinds of this thing called a bio
lab that people You've developed plans that people can build
it for themselves in order to make this, and also
using a three D printer, you can make UM an epipencil,
which is a little less kind of a more analog version.

(21:17):
I think, I guess you'd say, uh, no, it's it's
it's equivalent. It's equivalent. It works the same way. The
things that are different about it that UM are critical.
The first one that you mentioned, of course, is that
you can you can build it for a little over
thirty dollars US, and you can reload it for about
three dollars, unlike the EpiPen, which is I think it's

(21:42):
about fifty dollars for yeah, UM, and that might be
for a pair, but even so to UM. But the
other two critical differences are that EpiPens are single use,
so you can't test whether it's faulty or not until

(22:06):
you use it, And there have been a lot of failures.
In fact, there was a big EpiPen recall a bunch
of years ago, and there were just these tragic, tragic stories.
Some guy had to watch his little kid die. He
had had a pair of EpiPens. The kid went into shock.

(22:27):
He used it, the thing failed, He brought the other one.
The other one failed, and they're in the air and
you can't land in fifteen minutes and the little kid died,
which just and I'm sure there are dozens of dozens
of stories like that, that just happens to be one
of the ones I know. So one of the things
that's great about the epipencils because you're putting it together
yourself and it only takes four parts, you can test it.

(22:50):
You can make sure that it works as many times
as you need to. You can dry running with saline
and just double check that it does what it's supposed
to um and so it's safer. So the fact that
it's you can control yourself, you can reload it, and
you can test it. All these things fix a lot

(23:14):
of these immediate problems that come with and it still
has the benefit that everybody wants from the EpiPen, which
is that it doesn't require um, you know, measurement or
like knowing how deep to press the needle before you
depress the plunger. All of that happens automatically, and it

(23:36):
happens very quickly. UM. And yeah, we as you say,
we've got a lot of pressed for that because essentially
a good timing. We've released at the same time that
Heather Brush was lying to Congress about why they hit
raised the price on the EpiPens and then so it
was in the public eye. Yeah, and and that's that's

(23:58):
a huge one, being able to produce that because that
is I mean, there's a tremendous number of people who
rely on UH EpiPens um and and I think the
potential of that project is staggering UM. And there's some
there's some you know, we when we talk about kind
of the different people who are who are working on
similar problems to you, there's also a group of people

(24:20):
who are working on UM cracking insulin, being able to
produce insulin UM. And Yeah, the Open Insulin project is
an amazing group of people, incredibly important. They're yeah, they're
working on mm hmm probably the largest scale public health crisis.
I mean in terms of queries that we get. I

(24:41):
think we get people asking about insulin more than anything else.
And I always say, oh, yeah, they're very, very bright
people already work around this. Go talk to the open
insulin um and and they're just amazing. I want to

(25:02):
move on because I want to talk about kind of
the more um philosophical dimensions of some of this. But
before we get into that, i'd like to so, like,
you know, one of the things you and I've been
talking about a little bit behind the scenes is I
am not a technically savvy person, but I'm I want
to try and i'd like to be able to like
produce an epipencil. I want to like understand this it

(25:23):
kind of and and potentially be able to contribute UM
in a more direct sense, in part because I'm curious,
like how how doable actually is this? For I consider
myself a pretty normal person when it comes to like
technical understanding, right, Like, I'm reasonably handy, but I'm not
I'm not a chemist. I'm not a I'm not a
I haven't really I have no I have no prior

(25:45):
experience three D printing or anything like that, what is
what is required in terms of financial investment, and what
is kind of your general estimate in terms of time
to get up to you know, a kind of the
level where you can start learning how to do some
of this stuff. I think the barrier to entry is
pretty low, depending on how you want to start. As

(26:10):
I said, there are different avenues to doing it. You can,
of course one of the one of the greatest hacks.
If if anybody listening this doesn't pick up anything else,
here's the best hack in terms of getting access to medication.
You have a medication you don't have access to for
whatever reason, assuming it comes in a capsule form, you

(26:32):
can merely go to a chemical supplier, purchase the active
pharmaceutical ingredient, wait out, put it into a capsule, and
you've made your medication. That's a very simple thing, you know.
That takes nothing more than being able to read a
scale and scooping powder into a little you know, capsules.
The next step up, there are things that you can do.

(26:54):
They're a little more involved. If you want to build
an epic pencil, again, this is three or four hearts,
depending on how you count. You take the needle from
one syringe needle set on you put it onto a
different syringe needle set, and then you put it into
this auto injector, this design for needle phobic diabetics. You

(27:14):
load it with the up and ron and you close
it up and you're done. Then if you want to
step into this a little bit further, if something is
so barriered for whatever reason that you can't get the
actual ingredient, then you might start messing around with our
micro lab. The micro lab, I would say probably takes

(27:38):
around a hundred dollars US to build um it, but
it's not super technical. Our latest version doesn't require any soldering.
Everything snaps together, which is really nice. You can plug
everything in UM. All the wires are just screw terminals,
which is really convenient. UM And it takes some time,

(28:00):
and you do have to load some code. But we're
looking to release a a new set of documentation in
the summer that will be very very stripped down of
here's your bill of materials. You can order all of
this stuff. Here's how you can put the disk image

(28:21):
onto the SD card that you put in and you
should start it and it will wake up and work independently. UM.
We had a video of our head hardware guy actually
building the micro lab from just parts that we're sitting on,
laid out on a table, and I think all told

(28:43):
it took him about forty five minutes, maybe a little
bit longer, but again, like granted, this guy's a hardware
specialist and he you know, designed it, so for somebody
who's not done before, it might take an afternoon, but
it's not. It's not a pro bitively long or involved
project that you know, would take you weeks to put together,

(29:04):
or any specialized understanding of you know, biomedical engineering or
anything like that. Now, UM, I kind of want to
move at this point because I think that gives people
an idea of what's actually necessary and they can go
to y'all's website, UM or look up you have plans
on a get hub if they want to kind of

(29:25):
look at what's what's involved, and it's um some of
it seems a little daunting to me, like look looking
at the construction of the bio lab, But I'm that
that's going to be a project that I'll be engaging
in over the next couple of weeks, so we'll keep
people updated on how I do there. UM I want
to move on to talk Michael about what you see
as kind of the I don't know, the the the

(29:50):
potential from kind of a revolutionary perspective, from a perspective
of actually building dual power of this project. And obviously
you are and I think what would would be called
the early stages of this idea of kind of democratizing
and decentralizing the production of life saving medications. UM. Although
I guess you could argue in some ways it's kind

(30:11):
of a return to more traditional attitudes about health care
in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a cyclic nature there,
and in the sort of zen mind, beginner's mind, we'd
like to think that the revolution is always in its
beginning stages, right. Um. That to say, over the past decade,
roughly looking at trying to find ways to give people

(30:37):
more independent access that doesn't require infrastructure to medicines and
medical technologies. The the hope really is to create a
certain amount of cultural shift. I remember one point a

(31:01):
friend of mine, who as a business school graduate, asked
me a very sort of like business school type question
where he said, how would you measure success of your project? Um?
And I said, well, we cease to exist as an organization,
and he kind of had this moment of like, what

(31:21):
do you mean we shouldn't be pushing this right, the
ideas that eventually the concept of managing your own health
is sufficiently normalized that it's not something that has to
be explained between people. But somebody says, oh, yeah, I
just I just did that up in my micro lab um.

(31:47):
In the same way that when you look at the
shift that happened between oh, you know, the mid eighties
in the mid nineties, where computers were this strange, scary
thing that was you know, we're only accessible or usable

(32:07):
by people who were very specialized. Is something that you know,
everybody knew about and everybody kind of had and everybody
sort of used. And the same sort of thing that
happened between the period of time I don't know, maybe
ten twelve years ago and now with with three D printing,
where like stereo lithography and rapid prototyping was again the

(32:31):
specialized thing that a bunch of people who were essentially
at the machine tool industry had started to spearhead. And
now you say, three D printing, everybody knows what it means.
In the same sort of way, I'd very much like
to see a cultural shift where when somebody is unwell,

(32:54):
that when discussions between people happened, that instead of the
have you had that looked at it, or you might
instead here from somebody saying well have you read up
on that? You know, to see people actually engaged in
their own health and not going through this very typical

(33:19):
process of outsourcing responsibility. Now, it's not to say that
like experts aren't good people with whom to consult, right, Yeah,
we're not talking about replacing the idea of medical professionals
who can help you understand what your health and diagnose
and stuff like. Yeah, but there is again this drastic
difference between going to a doctor and essentially just like

(33:43):
throwing the problem on their desk and saying fixed it,
call me when it's over, versus going to a doctor
and saying, hey, i'd like to talk about this, I'd
like to know more about what's wrong here, and I'd
like to discus us what the options are and what

(34:04):
seems best. Um that would be great on a lot
of levels. And and then these questions of access to
medication then become even more relevant because when you're talking
with a doctor and the doctor says Okay, well we
could try this therapy, but your insurance won't pay for it.

(34:27):
This three hundred dollars. You can say, all right, well
let's just do a little thought experiment and if that
fell from a truck, what would I do with it?
And then maybe you can go home and say, you know,
I'll call you and let you know how it goes.
I that's that's really my my grant, Hope. And there
are so many different ways that that can play out.

(34:50):
In fact, I'll tell you a hilarious story in regards
to this, which was in I guess it was when
we presented it, Hope. UM. I called Martin Shakraley's cell
phone from stage UH to try and ask him what
he thought about what we were doing, given that I
was handing his drug out for free, UM and showing

(35:12):
people how to make it. And he didn't answer the
phone when I called him then, but he called me
back a few hours later, which was really hilarious. We
actually chatted for a while and the guys, I mean
a little detached from reality, but he's he's no dummy, UM.
And when I sort of described what we were trying

(35:33):
to do with the micro lab, he had some interesting insights,
and he said, yeah, you know, one way I can
imagine that working really well is if somebody with a
little more knowledge of pharmaceutical medicine were too, maybe build
one of these and serve a small community. I think

(35:56):
that could be very efficient. And I was like, that's
a good saw it you chiseling bastard Um. Yeah, I
mean that there's a degree which that's That's kind of
how I see the most realistic potential. This is not
every individual making all of their medicine, but kind of
like you know we had during the fires last year,
when when our local and state governments during the heatwave

(36:18):
this year like completely shut the bed. We had different
mutual aid collectives do things like we are providing people
with like oh it's a blizzard, We're providing people with firewood.
We are providing people with cooling stations because of the heat.
You know, we are providing people with they've just fled
their houses. We have kits that have food and basic
necessities so they can get through mutual aid collectives that
are like, well, we are making we specialize and we

(36:40):
can produce this and this and this medication like these
three and we have and here's the information you can
find online about our process. You know that we know
what we're doing, and if you need these things, you
let us know and we we get them to you.
And here's different ways in which people can volunteer if
you want to help engage in this mutual aid process,
even if you're not someone who's going to be doing
a lot of the technical stuff. We need people to

(37:00):
go pick up parts, so we need people to do this,
and you can help us here, you know, And I think, yeah, yeah,
And I think in a similar way, right, a lot
of that sort of thing is already happening in other
realms right where it's the sort of thing where you
you might be building something, or you you see some
project on GitHub or whatever, and some there are these
STL files and you go, oh, gosh, well I don't

(37:22):
want how to do that, but oh right, x y
z down the street as a three D printer. I'll
go ask her. She's really good at making these things.
And you say, hey, look, I have this thing. Would
this be difficult to print? And with their experience, they
can kind of look at me like, I know that
that shouldn't be too hard. Um, you know, I I
have some time this weekend, maybe I can make that

(37:42):
for you. And in the same way, you say, hey,
it looks like I seem to have this rare infection
from whatever whatever, or I have this odd condition. Um,
I wanted to try this medication because it might be
really helpful, but it's not legal in this kind treat
Do you think you can put this together? Again? You know,

(38:02):
you call somebody and whoever's on the other lines, and so,
oh yeah, I have a micro lab. I can try
and put a program together for that and see if
I can make it for you. That sort of thing,
I think is a potentially really positive avenue for that
sort of thing to proliferate and again eventually to have

(38:24):
a cultural shift where the idea of medicine and medical
technology not being something that is comes down from above
from some authority, but instead is something that's managed by
people who are part of your community, who you already trust.

(38:46):
I mean, that's why going to a doctor is so scary.
They seem to be the arbiter of your fate. They're
going to tell you whether you're well or not, and
and that is just the truth, and much better to
have it where people are making up their own mind
based on learning about their own health and consulting with

(39:09):
people who can give them perspective. Um. And if there's
more of that, and if it's closer to the person
who's actually suffering, that I think will be on the
whole much better. Yeah. It's this the and this gets
tangled up in a lot of the more toxic things
we've seen this year, But it's this this understanding that

(39:33):
with any given problem, if individuals trying to solve that
problem have more autonomy, and part of autonomy is knowledge,
that's nearly always better. Um. The problem, of course is
that like we we get into this situation, we are
now where some people take I'm take some people some
people use I want to take control of my health

(39:54):
care to you know, do stuff that's nonsense. And that
brings us back to the question of like, yeah, you
need in for the quality of the information that you're
getting is very important, right because if if you're if
you if your research is some YouTube video that has
convinced you that you need to you know, take this
this horse paste or something, then yeah, that's not good.
But that doesn't change the fact that like with food,

(40:17):
like with with everything, that you need to survive, the
more of a role you have in understanding that, deciding
what to do with that, understanding where it comes from
and how it is produced. Um. Not just like, not
only is that I think more satisfying as a human,
but it's it's also critical to to your well being. UM.

(40:42):
It's critical to like on two levels, right on two levels,
because not only when your health is taken from you,
it doesn't deprive you of life, but it deprives you
participating in any of the acts that make life meaningful.

(41:03):
And part of that key thing that makes life meaningful
is having a participatory role in the things that decide
the trajectory of your life. And so when you go
to the lengths of managing your own health, two things happen.

(41:24):
First off, your health improves, assuming you've made good decisions
and get lucky. But second, you're also having a participatory
role in your life, and that makes life more meaningful.
And it beyond just kind of the self actualization benefits
from from a perspective of actually enabling people to participate

(41:48):
in the move for radical change in our society. One
necessary element of that to any of the kind of
things that we need is a belief in your own
agent see and power. Um. And also and a freedom
from the kind of fear that comes from feeling helpless.
And there is I think probably no feeling worse in

(42:10):
the world than feeling completely helpless about a treatable medical problem. UM.
I mean, it's one thing I just went through my mom,
when when you get a disease where there's just nothing
that science can do, right, We're like, yeah, you've got
this cancer, and there there ain't ship anybody has for you.
You know, that's one kind of horrible, but I think
it's a lot less terrible than you. I have this

(42:31):
thing that we can deal with, but I either can't
afford it or I don't know that I'll be able
to afford it. I had a horrible I lost my
job in my healthcare in seventeen and so did a
person who was on my healthcare with me that I
love very much. And I got this, you know, hired
here in healthcare a couple of years later. And it
happened that a month before the the I started my

(42:55):
health care at this new job, this person who was
on my healthcare with me UM diagnosed with a brain
tumor and thankfully not a cancerous one, but the one
that they had to take medication for that would have
been would have bankrupted us, you know, without the without insurance.
And thankfully it worked out fine, the timing worked out okay.
But there's not a week that goes by that I

(43:16):
don't and it it's it's it is something that makes
you less willing to take risks, less willing to participate
in in things that because you have in the back
of your head, well, I have to I have to
keep this job, I have to keep this insurance, I
have to y yeah that And that's another thing that
I find so heartbreaking. There's so many people that I've

(43:39):
I've met totally outside of my activism who lament about
working a job that they hate, and I say, gosh,
for you know, I mean, you consider just bailing on
it and looking for something else and trying something else.
And they have this total paralysis of saying, but if

(44:04):
I quit my job, I won't have healthcare mhm and
and and mind you like, these were people who were
incredibly healthy. These were not people who had any regular
visits to healthcare. They're just scared that if something comes up,
they want people to handle it. And it's it's a

(44:25):
perfectly well grounded fear. But as you point out, what
this does is it works as this sort of shadow
oppressive mechanism to keep people from exploring, trying things, as
you say, taking risks, or or just doing things that

(44:47):
don't involve a an optimization toward a stable state of
maybe just like yeah, maybe I'll start a small business
and yeah, it probably will fail, but that will be
a cool adventure. And most people, you know, so many people,
maybe not most, but many, many people, um get just

(45:08):
terrified into this state of inertial paralysis. Yeah, and it
contributes to people being afraid to take to the street
to protest the police because maybe they get arrested, and
maybe they get fired, and then you know, maybe their
kid can't afford their Like there's a thousand ways. I think, honestly,
the fear of losing your health care is in some
ways as great a greater counterrevolutionary force than any law

(45:32):
enforcement agency could hope to be, because the fear is
so much more immediate to so many people. Nobody talks
about that. And thank you so much for mentioning it,
because it's something that like, oftentimes I try to bring
up when I'm discussing things in public for it, and
and oftentimes people kind of raise an eyebrow on me
and be like, that's what's the big deal, And I'm like, no, no,

(45:54):
Like you look two layers deep. There's something that's really
working against people being able to exercise protests, and it's, uh,
it's it's it's this really silent, terrifying force that seems
to underlie everything. And if you could alleviate that, if

(46:16):
you can get to the point where people are like, yeah,
the hell with it, you know, I don't need a
job to take care of me, then all of a sudden,
so many possibilities just blossomed in the mind. Yeah, if
you have, like it, say, if you're a parent who
has a child with you know who, who's insolent dependent. Uh,

(46:38):
there's not a lot of difference in my mind between
the fact that between someone holding a gun to your
head and your boss being able to fire you and
take away your your kids access to that insulent there's
not a tremendous moral difference to me. Um, I'd say
getting a gun to your head is actually more likely
to survive that for it's less inevitable. You could talk

(47:02):
your way out of that, and yeah, whatever, but there
are any number of things that might go wrong there.
But if somebody takes takes away your insulin, that's the
end of the story. Yeah, I guess the more salient
point than the comparison issues. They're both acts of violence,
and in every way that's meaningful, I think they're both
acts of violence. And one way that when I rail

(47:23):
against intellectual property as a concept and intellectual property law,
the example that I give is they say, if somebody
were dying and you knew how to save them, would
you ever not tell them how and just watch them die? Say,
oh no, that idea belongs to me, and I'm not
going to share unless you pay me. Like no human

(47:46):
being that I think I've ever heard of would do that.
And yet this happens every day because we've sort of
carried these questions of copy into patents and despite the
fact that they are hundreds of years old and not
applicable anymore, assuming they were ever applicable, and people just

(48:10):
die because people say, oh, well, we can make more
money if we do it this way. There's a fascinating
thing going on there when you really drilled into that idea.
Because I suspect. There are a lot of people who

(48:31):
have who are are integral in propping up this system,
both of kind of medical intellectual property and of just
like the pharmaceutical industry, the way that it works people
in politics, huge numbers of people who are integral in
some facet of keeping that going, who also, were they
to see an individual and immediate medical distress, would never

(48:51):
think of like try getting their debit card number or
whatever like asking them, would would without thinking attempt because
that's what people do, and it's I mean, this is
where we get into kind of some of these more
philosophical anarchist ideas about what hierarchy does and what these
structures do, because structures enable people to participate in evil
that they never would as an individual. Um, yeah, there's

(49:15):
this easy route that many easy routes that pop up
that allow people or force i should say force people
to be displaced from their humanity in that sort of
way where yes, of course, you you help somebody up
off of subway tracks if they've fallen. Yes of course,

(49:36):
if somebody were drowning, you drag them out and save them.
And yet just because it's a degree removed and it's
mediated by an agency. Suddenly it's so easy to forget
and ignore and be sort of complicit. And yeah, and
I just to go back around to what four Thieves

(49:58):
is doing and what y'all are doing it. It's one
of the few projects going on right now that fits
what my idealistic nineteen year old brain thought the Internet
would be sixteen fifteen, Like when I when it was,
when things were newer and a little less We're like, oh,
this is like one of these days, Well, this kind
of ship's gonna happen um. And that is I think,

(50:19):
I mean, that's that's not without value from again a
revolutionary perspective, the fact that it is pretty rad. You
know well, I mean I will not deny the fact
that it feels good, you know. There. I think that
I think that we all grew up with that sort
of hope and belief that we were gonna open these

(50:42):
new doors and they were going to be these new
possibilities and things that we have been reading about in
science fiction. We're going to become real and and there's
there's a great satisfaction in not just witnessing your childhood
dreams become realities, but actually, you know, having a hand
in it. Uh, it's there's there's something quite satisfying about that.

(51:04):
I will yeah, I will admit, well, I think that's
a pretty good point to close out on today. I
don't need to take up too much more of your
time right now, Michael. But but as I told people,
I'm gonna be I'm gonna be trying to get into
some of this because I find it just both fascinating
and incredibly hopeful. Um. In a world where it seems like, uh,

(51:27):
there are constantly forces conspiring to strip people of their
ability to take control of critical aspects of their lives,
you and your your colleagues in this are trying to
give people opportunities to take some some power back for themselves,
and I just think that's it's pretty dope. Thank you

(51:48):
so much. Yeah, and see your listeners. If there are
people out there who like what we're doing and you
want to support the project, please go find somebody who
needs your help but doesn't deserve it, and then help
them anyway. Yeah. Yeah, that's always a good thing to do. Um, Michael,
anything else, any like a thing else you want to

(52:08):
kind of put this is normally this section where people
plug websites or projects or anything, you've got anything in
particularly you want to throw out there right now. Uh sure,
We're hoping to do a bunch of big releases in
the summer um, so look for those. In the meantime,
we're always looking for help, So if you're out there

(52:29):
and you'd like to be assisted in the project, uh,
please get in touch. There's the contact us page on
the website. And by the way, this do not have
to be a technical person we're looking for currently, we're
looking for writers. We have a lot of documentation that
we need to do, So if you're out there and
you have you know, background in in language, then that

(52:53):
would be great. If if you're somebody who feels that
you're entirely without skills, please get in touch. We have
any number of endless small tasks that just need to
be taken care of because we don't have enough people.
So if you'd like to participate, we'd love to have you.
Please get in touch and in the meantime, keep each
other healthy, keep each other. Thank you so much, Michael,

(53:18):
thanks so much for having me. It could happen here
as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts
from Cool Zone Media, visit our website. Cool zone media
dot com or check us out on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts,
you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated
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(53:40):
for listening.