Behind the Bastards - The Company that Poisoned 300,000 Babies
Aired: 2021-07-20
Duration: 01:22:57


=== Trust Your Girlfriends (06:25) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:00:13]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:00:15]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:00:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:00:19]  We always say that.
[00:00:21]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:00:24]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:00:25]  Trust me, babe.
[00:00:26]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:36]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:00:41]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:00:44]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:00:51]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[00:00:55]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:00:58]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:01:07]  Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
[00:01:12]  Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
[00:01:15]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:01:18]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:01:20]  That's so funny.
[00:01:21]  Share stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:01:29]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:37]  What's up, everyone?
[00:01:38]  I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
[00:01:40]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:01:43]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:01:46]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:01:48]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:01:55]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:01:57]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:02:04]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:02:06]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:02:07]  There's a lot of life.
[00:02:09]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:02:18]  Ah, Jesus Christ.
[00:02:20]  I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards.
[00:02:23]  Apparently.
[00:02:24]  Opening this podcast poorly.
[00:02:28]  I'm distracted right now because there are two kittens in my house.
[00:02:32]  There's two of them and they're kittens and they're playing.
[00:02:35]  And I'm also horribly allergic to cats, but I refuse to not have them in my house.
[00:02:40]  So this is going to be quite an episode, R.E. me being allergic and then being distracted by kittens.
[00:02:47]  Anyway, when I don't have a house full of kittens, this is a podcast about the very worst people in all of history.
[00:02:54]  And today we're doing one of our now classic reverse episodes where somebody reads me a terrible story about a bastard.
[00:03:01]  And to do that, to tell us another tale of woe and whimsy is our old friend Christopher.
[00:03:08]  Christopher, how are you doing today?
[00:03:10]  Doing pretty good.
[00:03:11]  We are, it's cherry season.
[00:03:14]  We're doing the cherries.
[00:03:15]  We're picking cherries.
[00:03:16]  Oh, hell yeah.
[00:03:17]  Yeah.
[00:03:18]  Well, you live in the frigid Midwest and I live in the Pacific Northwest and we both have cherry.
[00:03:23]  We're just dripping with cherries, which is a sign of the perfection of the cherry plant.
[00:03:29]  See, it's a really powerful, it's a really powerful organism.
[00:03:33]  The amazing thing about cherries is I feel like a lot of different fruit plants, you get like, you get some fruit and you're like, oh, is that it?
[00:03:38]  Is that all the work that I put in this year for this fruit?
[00:03:41]  Like, but fucking cherry trees, you get like, you're dripping with cherries.
[00:03:47]  You get too many cherries off of any given cherry tree.
[00:03:50]  And I think that's beautiful.
[00:03:51]  You know what else I think is beautiful, Christopher?
[00:03:54]  What do you think is beautiful, Robert?
[00:03:56]  I think naming kittens is beautiful.
[00:03:58]  And Sophie and I have a little bit of a disagreement here.
[00:04:00]  See, I want to call them Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend.
[00:04:04]  And Sophie says, no, that's a horrible name for two kittens.
[00:04:09]  So, you know, listeners, I guess what I'm asking you to do is find Sophie online and tell her that I'm right.
[00:04:15]  Tell her that I've picked the proper name.
[00:04:17]  I told you to name them Sophie and Sophie.
[00:04:21]  Sophie, that's a ridiculous name for a cat.
[00:04:23]  Both are both.
[00:04:24]  Saddam Hussein and Saddam Hussein's best friend, good cat names.
[00:04:27]  Both options are dictators.
[00:04:29]  Yeah, that is true.
[00:04:30]  I will say the double Sophie has the advantage of the fact that the cats are indistinguishable.
[00:04:35]  They are indistinguishable.
[00:04:36]  You cannot tell the difference between them.
[00:04:37]  They both look exactly the same.
[00:04:39]  Little black cats.
[00:04:40]  Little baby black cats.
[00:04:43]  I've put in the time.
[00:04:44]  Like, I feel like at least one should be named Sophie.
[00:04:47]  Well, we'll think about this.
[00:04:48]  I like the idea of a stranger comes over to my house and the cat does something bad and I shout, Saddam Hussein's best friend.
[00:04:55]  Get down from there.
[00:04:57]  You have to set yourself up for success is the point I'm making.
[00:05:01]  And speaking of setting ourselves up for success, I've set myself up for success today by having Chris research the episode.
[00:05:11]  So the subject of today's episode is the 2008 tainted milk scandal.
[00:05:17]  And this is going to be a fun one.
[00:05:19]  Hell yeah.
[00:05:20]  Yeah, this is an extra-looking tainted milk scandal.
[00:05:22]  Yeah.
[00:05:23]  Oh my God.
[00:05:24]  Are a lot of babies going to die?
[00:05:26]  Are we talking like serious dead baby territory here?
[00:05:29]  Okay, so we'll put this at the beginning.
[00:05:31]  I shouldn't have asked that way.
[00:05:32]  That's a horrible way to ask if a bunch of babies die.
[00:05:34]  Yeah, so the number of babies who are poisoned is extremely high.
[00:05:38]  The death toll is not as high as you would think from the number, the sheer number of babies who are poisoned, but it is a very large, it's a very large number of poisoned babies.
[00:05:49]  I mean, that sounds like the best case scenario is a horrible thing happens.
[00:05:53]  Not a lot of babies die, but we have a horrible thing to discuss.
[00:05:56]  This job has broken my brain, Chris.
[00:06:00]  Just fundamentally destroyed me as an empathetic human being.
[00:06:05]  Let's start the show.
[00:06:06]  I'm excited to learn about the spoiled milk scandal.
[00:06:10]  And I'm sure that it was caused by people acting responsibly in just a freak accident that could never have been predicted or prevented.
[00:06:21]  Yeah, we will see about that.

=== Outsourcing Agriculture (15:45) ===

[00:06:25]  So in 1956, the Chinese Communist Party's cadre and Huibei founded a dairy company called the Three Deer Company.
[00:06:32]  Well, okay.
[00:06:32]  And where's like Huibei?
[00:06:34]  Huibei?
[00:06:35]  Huibei.
[00:06:35]  Huibei is Huibei.
[00:06:38]  Okay.
[00:06:38]  Don't worry.
[00:06:39]  You got to be real basic with me because I don't know much at all about Chinese geography.
[00:06:43]  Yeah, so this is the province that Wuhan is in.
[00:06:46]  Oh, okay.
[00:06:46]  So like south, right?
[00:06:48]  It's like kind of in the middle.
[00:06:50]  Oh, okay.
[00:06:50]  I thought Wuhan was.
[00:06:52]  See, again, not a Chinese geography knower.
[00:06:55]  This is like useful.
[00:06:57]  I mean, it's in the like middle sort of, it's in like the middle of the east of the country.
[00:07:04]  The middle of.
[00:07:06]  Okay, so Chinese St. Louis is kind of what you're telling me right now.
[00:07:09]  Yeah.
[00:07:10]  Geographically.
[00:07:11]  I assume there's an arch.
[00:07:13]  All right.
[00:07:13]  So they make this milk company.
[00:07:16]  Yeah.
[00:07:16]  And, you know, for most of what's either called sort of the socialist period or the Mao period lasting from CCP taking power in 1949 to Deng Xiaoping taking power in 1979, three Deers is a, it's a relatively sleepy and sort of minor like dairy farm and like what was really a minor agricultural industry.
[00:07:35]  China does not have a lot of milk.
[00:07:37]  Like people don't drink cow milk a lot in most of this period.
[00:07:42]  You know, and you know, this is, so this, this is a state-owned industry.
[00:07:45]  And this means that, you know, it's given production targets by the state and it largely meets those targets.
[00:07:49]  And in return, the workers who work there get assigned these work points that, you know, they get resources for them out of the allotment.
[00:07:57]  Now, as the social system starts to fall apart, the relative sort of status of the three-year company starts to change.
[00:08:04]  Now, the socialist system.
[00:08:05]  When you say the social system...
[00:08:06]  Okay, you're explaining this.
[00:08:08]  All right, good.
[00:08:08]  Well, I can go into a bit more.
[00:08:11]  So, so, yeah, the socialist system, it goes through a lot of changes, but the basic principle of it is that there's no market, right?
[00:08:18]  There's no market.
[00:08:19]  Nobody's selling anything.
[00:08:20]  There's sometimes the national government, but mostly local government set these production targets and the sort of state-owned companies or the labor brigades in rural areas like work to, you know, so you get a production target, you get assigned to do it, and you make as much as you have to, you take the production target.
[00:08:37]  And you get assigned resources based on how much you can produce.
[00:08:41]  And this sort of works okay for like part of the 1950s.
[00:08:47]  And, but then there's a great leap forward and you hit the cultural revolution and that just sort of knocks whatever legs are like left out of the system.
[00:08:55]  And by the 1970s, basically the entire country and the entire economic system is just being held together by the military.
[00:09:02]  And, you know, this is, this is sort of a catastrophe.
[00:09:04]  Things are decaying.
[00:09:05]  But what's very interesting about this is that it's not actually the famines or just like the massacres or any of the weird mango cults that like actually knock off the sort of socialist period economy.
[00:09:16]  It turns out that what does it in is the class is the socialist period's class structure.
[00:09:22]  Now, socialist period economic policy basically dictates that, so you have these agricultural surpluses in the countryside.
[00:09:28]  You take all that grain and you plow into urban development in, you know, in the cities so that China can build this like moderate industrial economy.
[00:09:35]  The consequence of this is that there's basically very little or basically no investment in rural areas, which means you get this like, you get this massive economic disparity between the underdeveloped and poor countryside that the state's extracting grain from and the richer, increasingly rich cities that consume the grain.
[00:09:52]  And this whole thing is made worse by what's called the hukou system, which is this like the ecosystem is, this is, this is still in place to this day, although it's been modified somewhat.
[00:10:01]  It's this internal passport where basically like where you or your family is born, you get registered to that place.
[00:10:07]  And you can only get services like from basically the town or from the sort of local government that like you're registered to.
[00:10:13]  And I mean, and this goes everything from like housing benefits to like social security to medical care.
[00:10:19]  And it also has a lot to do with what kind of jobs you can get.
[00:10:23]  So if you have a hukou from an urban area, you get these very well-funded sort of services and jobs in the city.
[00:10:29]  But if you have a rural hukou, you're stuck with these absolutely just third-rate services, no employment opportunities.
[00:10:35]  And the other thing with this is that when the famines start, the grain goes to the cities and not the countryside.
[00:10:41]  And so this goes on for a bit, but eventually the Chinese rural workers who are doing the grain production have just had enough of this shit.
[00:10:49]  And they basically bring capitalism back.
[00:10:52]  They've sort of slowly start to introduce basically like, so they start to bring wages back into the sort of labor brigades they've been working in.
[00:11:01]  And then they turn these labor brigades and they joint stock companies.
[00:11:03]  And this is the actual beginning of sort of the return of China to capitalism.
[00:11:08]  And how do they...
[00:11:10]  I mean, there's a couple of things that are interesting for this to me.
[00:11:12]  One of them is that like with the, when the USSR was kind of in its early stage, based on some long-standing like Marxist theories, there was a lot of distrust towards like rural people, towards farmers.
[00:11:23]  Like you saw that a lot in Ukraine, because they're not the proletariat, right?
[00:11:26]  They're not like the industrial working class.
[00:11:31]  And they were seen as kind of, you know, inherently kind of more capitalistic in a lot of ways.
[00:11:37]  And it kind of seems like that's what's happening here.
[00:11:40]  And that's like, that's also what they're doing.
[00:11:43]  Well, it's weird because so the big sort of difference between like Maoism and like the earlier sort of forms of Marxism is that Maoism is like, I mean, and this, this is how Mao like becomes a leader of the Communist Party is that he's the guy who's like, we're going to organize the peasants.
[00:11:58]  And so, you know, they have this whole thing about like the peasant worker alliance or whatever, but like the people who actually put the communists in power are the peasants.
[00:12:05]  Until the Great Britain forward, they're extremely popular there.
[00:12:08]  But that, you know, but they have this whole thing about how, like, they have this whole thing they need to do industrial development.
[00:12:14]  Part of it's like, you know, they fight the Korean War and like the Chinese soldiers you get sent to Korea, like, like, they don't have shoes.
[00:12:21]  And, you know, and so.
[00:12:22]  Yeah, they're not doing great.
[00:12:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:24]  I mean, like, it's, they have like a pretty good army, but it's like, they don't have any supplies.
[00:12:27]  And so there's this whole thing about we need to do industrial buildup.
[00:12:29]  We need to do industrial buildup.
[00:12:31]  And that and the fact that there's, oh, there's also this huge concern in the CCP that like they're going to get overthrown by urban workers, which like literally does happen in 1968 when like the party gets run out of, like gets ran out of Shanghai by like an uprising.
[00:12:46]  There's all this stuff.
[00:12:46]  And so they're, they're basically trying to like, like, they think the peasantry is like restive enough that they can extract grain from them and put it into the countryside.
[00:12:54]  I'm sorry, take the grain from the countryside and put it into the cities.
[00:12:58]  And yeah, the problem is that so they don't have enough.
[00:13:02]  Okay, so if you need to improve, you want to improve agriculture, right?
[00:13:04]  You need to like increase the amount of grain you could produce.
[00:13:07]  And the thing is, the only, okay, so partially you're dealing with like Lysenkoism and all of this bunk science.
[00:13:12]  The other problem is that they don't have like modern industrial agricultural equipment.
[00:13:16]  And so the problem is in order to do that, you need like an industrial base.
[00:13:20]  But the thing is, in order to build the industrial base, you need more grain.
[00:13:22]  And so they have this trap they get caught in.
[00:13:24]  And the way that they sort of get out of this is that the peasants start bringing capitalism back.
[00:13:30]  And so in 1984, a few years after the peasants start forming joint stock companies and they start bringing wages back, Deng Xiaoping is just like, okay, all of this stuff that you guys are doing, I'm going to put my seal of approval on it.
[00:13:42]  I'm going to put out this directive.
[00:13:44]  It's like, this is all legal.
[00:13:45]  You should do more of it.
[00:13:46]  And this is why Deng gets all sort of the credit for it because he just puts his name on it.
[00:13:52]  It was like, all these economic reforms are my idea.
[00:13:55]  Yeah, I mean, and I assume there was a fight over this at a pretty high level, right?
[00:14:00]  Because you can't just say like, hey, we're going to, we're going to add some capitalism back into the mix and the central party be like, okay, without like, there was, there was some shit that went down, right?
[00:14:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:14:11]  And I mean, you know, the thing, the thing about that's important, even about Deng Xiaoping, is that in the beginning of this, like, they don't want to go back to capitalism.
[00:14:19]  What they're trying to do is reintroduce the market as just like a way to sort of stabilize the economy.
[00:14:23]  Yeah, which is something I think people mistake a lot.
[00:14:25]  Like, markets aren't necessarily capitalism.
[00:14:28]  Although that is, you know, what happens at the end of this process.
[00:14:32]  Yeah.
[00:14:32]  And, you know, there's, I mean, there's a bunch of really intense theoretical debates over like socialist markets.
[00:14:37]  And I mean, there's a very brief attempt where like they're going to try the Yugoslavia thing where everyone has like democratic workers co-ops and they just like that that doesn't happen.
[00:14:45]  Yeah, there's this whole debate about this.
[00:14:47]  It doesn't really happen in Yugoslavia, you could argue.
[00:14:49]  Yeah.
[00:14:50]  I mean, okay, for a bit, but.
[00:14:52]  And we should note, because not everyone's listened, we have two episodes on Lysenkoism.
[00:14:57]  That was this Soviet theorist who believed that you could freeze seeds to make them more cold tolerant and stuff.
[00:15:04]  And he had a bunch of wacky theories about how you could apply like kind of socialist attitudes towards people to plants and it would improve crop yields.
[00:15:14]  And it didn't.
[00:15:15]  And a lot of people starved.
[00:15:16]  And they did it in Russia and they did it in China.
[00:15:18]  And it was not a great idea, broadly speaking.
[00:15:22]  Yeah, it was not good.
[00:15:24]  Now, one of the other very important thing about the, and something that genuinely did change in this period is that in 1984, that directive I was talking about, Deng Xiaoping lets for the first time state-owned firms like our friends over at the Three Deer Dairy Company, like actually make profits by selling their goods.
[00:15:42]  And so, you know, previously, like, you're working toward production target, you hit the production target, and they give you stuff.
[00:15:46]  But now, if you have excess production, you can sell it.
[00:15:49]  And this is, this is an enormous, I mean, this is, this is, this, this hasn't, you haven't been able to do this in China since like 1940, like 1953.
[00:15:59]  It just hasn't happened.
[00:16:00]  So this is the start of this whole thing where, you know, the sad own companies start to be, instead of like producing goods in order to produce goods, they're producing goods in order to make money.
[00:16:11]  Now, our friends at Three Deer Company during this period come under new Girlboss management.
[00:16:17]  And under this new Girlbuss leadership, they start becoming the, they become the first large-scale powdered milk manufacturer in China.
[00:16:28]  And this is important because powdered milk is how you make baby formula.
[00:16:30]  And so, you know, they go grab their milk and they start making baby formula.
[00:16:33]  But this was not enough for the ambitious new leadership at Three Deers.
[00:16:37]  And, you know, with this new incentive structure that has been set up where you have an incentive to produce as much as possible and cut costs so you can make money, they start looking for ways to make production cheaper.
[00:16:48]  And the solution they land on is outsourcing.
[00:16:52]  Now, previously, yeah, this is going to go great.
[00:16:57]  One of my favorite things is when, because I'm thinking we'll at some point cover like Nestle's baby formula disaster too.
[00:17:04]  But the fact that they go right.
[00:17:06]  Yeah, they go right to outsourcing.
[00:17:09]  I love when you have what are supposed to be radically different ideologies, but they start making similar decisions that lead to similar problems.
[00:17:17]  Like it's just...
[00:17:19]  Yeah, it's very fun.
[00:17:21]  Yeah, we're going to see.
[00:17:22]  There's a lot of stuff that goes on here.
[00:17:25]  So, you know, and this is also like a huge break, though, with previous sort of the way the socialist agriculture works, where, you know, if you have a dairy farm, right, you have, there's a state-owned enterprise, they own the cows, they own the farms, they employ all the workers, and they like run the whole system from, you know, like farm and distribution center.
[00:17:41]  And Three Dears looks at this in 1986.
[00:17:44]  They start making chase and they look at this and they go, like, this is expensive.
[00:17:47]  We have to actually run the farms and we have to pay for the cows.
[00:17:51]  We have to pay wages.
[00:17:52]  So instead of doing this, they go, what if we loan our cows to farmers in the countryside?
[00:17:58]  And then, you know, they have to take out.
[00:18:00]  Jesus Christ.
[00:18:01]  It gets better.
[00:18:02]  Sharecropping cows.
[00:18:03]  Oh, yeah.
[00:18:04]  So the share cropping cows, right?
[00:18:05]  And then, you know, so to pay off the debt they incur by buying the cow, they have to like give, they pay back the debt and milk.
[00:18:13]  And then on top of that, they have to pay a yearly management fee in order so that they can like continue to be like debt peons who sell milk to this company.
[00:18:23]  Now, the other great part of this is that they're not outsourcing to like actual farms.
[00:18:27]  They're outsourcing to individual farmers.
[00:18:29]  And so these people have like two, maybe three cows.
[00:18:33]  Most of them have one cow, which means that they're completely dependent on three deer and they're middlemen because they don't have enough resources to actually run their own operation.
[00:18:42]  They only have two cows.
[00:18:43]  And if you only have two cows, you can never make enough money that you can get even like a third or a fourth cow.
[00:18:49]  So they're stuck here working for this company.
[00:18:52]  And they are, in effect, the first modern Chinese gig workers.
[00:18:56]  Oh, Jesus Christ.
[00:18:57]  Yeah.
[00:18:58]  So you can see where this is going.
[00:19:02]  Now, this model, this gig working model also spreads to the American dairy industry, where there's a bunch of farmers, quote unquote, who take out these like enormous loans to buy cows.
[00:19:11]  And, you know, they also get caught in these debt traps.
[00:19:14]  And, you know, the way this works is that by convincing these farmers that they're actually entrepreneurs, that they're small business owners and not workers, the corporations can exploit them even more than they were able to earlier by, you know, when they were just workers.
[00:19:26]  And this is essentially just how capitalism works now.
[00:19:30]  The celebrated anthropologist, Anna Singh, wrote a very, very good article called Supply Chains and the Human Condition that talks about a lot of how the supply chain and outsourcing stuff works.
[00:19:40]  And here's what she had to say about these contract growers who are the new debt peon cow farmers in the US.
[00:19:49]  Watts, another academic, concludes, contract growers thus are not independent farmers at all.
[00:19:55]  They are little more than propertied laborers, employees of a corporate producers who also dominate the chicken processing industry.
[00:20:02]  Yet this little more than makes a big difference.
[00:20:06]  It is not hard to understand, not hard to imagine the cultural commitment of the grower to independent landholding and, quote, a business of his own.
[00:20:14]  Contract farming flourishes in the imagined difference between an employee and an entrepreneur.
[00:20:18]  The contract farmer works for $5.70 an hour, $15,000 a year, even though he is a white man because he owns his own business.
[00:20:26]  Self-exploitation is essential to the cost-cutting power of the supply chain.
[00:20:31]  That sounds like some great communism to me.
[00:20:34]  Just like Mark's envisioned.
[00:20:39]  Yeah, and you know, this is the fun part about this.
[00:20:41]  This is happening both in the U.S. and in China at the same time.
[00:20:45]  And, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on here, particularly with the American side, right?
[00:20:49]  I mean, you have, you know, American agriculture is run by just undocumented, huge numbers of undocumented workers fleeing certain American atrocities in Latin America.
[00:20:57]  And, you know, their ability to sort of get a lot of people.
[00:21:00]  Yeah, you create situations of privation that make people desperate enough to labor incredibly, basically for free in conditions that are harmful to them and they can't complain because they're not.
[00:21:13]  Anyway, yes.
[00:21:14]  I mean, here's one of the things that seems to be happening here.
[00:21:16]  And this is a thing that I think people on the left get wrong a lot.
[00:21:19]  Capitalism is an extremely efficient system for doing a specific set of things.
[00:21:24]  Now, those specific set of things don't include keeping the world habitable, but it's very good at what it does, which is why people keep cribbing from it.
[00:21:33]  Its job is not to make the world habitable, but it's good at what its job is.
[00:21:37]  It's very efficient at what its job is.
[00:21:41]  Its job just has nothing to do with taking care of you.
[00:21:44]  Yeah.
[00:21:44]  And in fact, well, not only is it not of like, it's not about taking care of you.
[00:21:48]  I mean, this whole thing, you know, this is like, this is a big part of what ICE is, is this basically institutions of mass violence in order to keep people's wages down.
[00:21:56]  And, you know, and what you see is interesting in the sort of the dairy industry is, okay, so agriculture corporations like see this and are like, okay, how can we convince white people to take this amount of money?

=== The Garment Trap (10:00) ===

[00:22:10]  And the answer they come up with is just like convince them that they're business owners.
[00:22:14]  And this, this is a, you know, this is part of a larger trend.
[00:22:19]  And the larger trend here is that corporations both in China and the U.S. are essentially, they're increasingly becoming middlemen.
[00:22:27]  And there's a lot of different models of how this works.
[00:22:29]  One example is the franchise model.
[00:22:31]  McDonald's is the most famous example of this.
[00:22:33]  The way that McDonald's works is that like, you know, they don't make money from selling hamburgers.
[00:22:40]  Like 93% of McDonald's stores are franchises.
[00:22:45]  They're not run by the corporation itself.
[00:22:47]  McDonald's owns the land that the franchise opens on.
[00:22:50]  And if you pay them half a million dollars, they will lease it to you and give you the right to run the McDonald's.
[00:22:55]  And then they'll also take royalties from you.
[00:22:58]  And, you know, it's from just like extracting rents that McDonald's actually makes money.
[00:23:02]  But, but, you know, McDonald's is somewhat interesting because it's kind of a transition phase between the earlier like corporations make things and what we're seeing now, which is, you know, corporations don't make things at all.
[00:23:14]  I mean, Nike's, Nike is a really good example of this.
[00:23:17]  Yeah, so this is this is.
[00:23:18]  Nike, yeah, Nike located in my hometown of Portland, a company that has never done anything wrong famously.
[00:23:24]  Yes, I'm aware of Nike.
[00:23:26]  Yeah, I actually eat a pair of Nike shoes every single day.
[00:23:30]  It's the only source of protein in my diet.
[00:23:32]  That's very impressive.
[00:23:33]  Do you stew it?
[00:23:34]  And I know that's the traditional Russian thing.
[00:23:36]  Yeah, I watched that documentary where Werner Herzog eats his shoes and I decided this is how I want to live my life, but leather shoes are for peasants.
[00:23:44]  So I'm going to go with the much healthier, various Nike materials, which is the souls of small children in the global south.
[00:23:55]  It's delicious.
[00:23:56]  Yeah, it's fun.
[00:23:57]  And the other thing, this is, you know, what Cinga is talking has this thing about Nike.
[00:24:03]  She says, quote, Nike never produced athletic shoes.
[00:24:06]  Company founders began as distributors of Japanese-made shoes.
[00:24:09]  The additions that made for success were the invention of the Swoosh logo, advertising endorsements from well-known African-American athletes, and a transfer to cheaper Asian locations for contracting production.
[00:24:20]  Nike's vice president for Asia Pacific once explained, quote, we don't know the first thing about manufacturing.
[00:24:26]  We are marketers and designers, which is great.
[00:24:31]  They don't make shoes.
[00:24:32]  They buy shoes from other people.
[00:24:33]  And this is a sort of interesting development because Nike's clothes are made in these really, really small shops with small numbers of employees.
[00:24:44]  And this is the sweatshops from the Triangle Shirtwaist episode, except they've gone backwards to the thing that Triangle Shirtwaist was supposed to be replacing.
[00:24:52]  Yeah, they've literally been like, the problem with Triangle shirtwaist is that it was, that factory was too ethical.
[00:24:59]  We got to go back a little bit further.
[00:25:01]  Yeah.
[00:25:02]  And I think it's worth it.
[00:25:03]  I would love to see it.
[00:25:05]  Yeah.
[00:25:06]  I think it's worth asking why this happened because the consequence of going back to the system is that the garment industry loses all of the safety and wage gains they made in the 20th century in like two decades.
[00:25:18]  And this is in large part due to the sort of contractor model.
[00:25:21]  So we should ask, so why do you actually want to use the contractor model?
[00:25:26]  We've talked a little bit.
[00:25:27]  Yeah, it cuts costs and it turns workers into small business owners that like makes them easier to sort of rob by convincing them that they're actually like business owners and not just sort of permanently entrapped debt peons.
[00:25:39]  Now, another reason for this is that it makes union organizing extremely difficult because part of the workforce that would have been workers in like a triangle shirtwaist setup are actually small business owners now.
[00:25:50]  And because in the garment industry.
[00:25:52]  Yeah, which is also kind of what Triangle Shirtwaist did with the inside contractor system.
[00:25:58]  Yeah.
[00:25:59]  Yeah, except the interesting thing about this part, because the anti-contractor system doesn't work, right?
[00:26:03]  Like the contractors like side with the workers a lot.
[00:26:05]  No.
[00:26:06]  Yeah.
[00:26:07]  But in this system, like the small shop sort of system, that doesn't happen at all.
[00:26:12]  The small shop people are, you know, they are actually convinced they're small business owners.
[00:26:16]  And this, this makes it almost impossible for the garment workers to demand higher wages because the people they're working for are these contractors.
[00:26:24]  And these contractors are also extremely poor and they have no margins.
[00:26:27]  But because the workers are contractors for a contractor, right?
[00:26:31]  Like they don't have a way to directly demand wages or safety procedures from the company.
[00:26:37]  And this system is not efficient, right?
[00:26:42]  Like, you know, it's way more efficient to make the stuff in big factories.
[00:26:47]  And in order to do this, you have to have these enormous supply chains spanning multiple continents in order to move this stuff around.
[00:26:54]  But that doesn't really matter because since the 80s, what you basically see is corporations going, okay, it is better to have enormously inefficient production and these like giant logistics lines than it is for a single union to exist and take any of their money.
[00:27:09]  Or worse yet, and this is a real threat in the 60s and 70s, which is what all this decentralization stuff is a response to.
[00:27:16]  It was a real possibility in the 60s and 70s that the garment workers were going to seize the company and start running it themselves.
[00:27:22]  And so you get this enormous effort to make sure that this never happens again.
[00:27:26]  And, you know, well, yeah, I mean, if there's anything that's antithetical to the socialist experiment, it's unionization.
[00:27:33]  Yeah.
[00:27:34]  Workers owning the means of production, like capitalists?
[00:27:37]  No, thank you.
[00:27:39]  Yeah, you know, and this is, you know, this is, I think, is part of why it's interesting that like three deers, three deer is doing all of this stuff that like we look at now.
[00:27:48]  Like honest things running in 2010, right?
[00:27:51]  Three deers is doing this all in 1986.
[00:27:54]  And this is, you know, we talked about this earlier, but like, again, the people inside the communist, Chinese Communist Party, like didn't want to go back to capitalism.
[00:28:02]  Like they really didn't like capitalism.
[00:28:04]  And it just didn't matter.
[00:28:05]  Like within two years of them saying, okay, state-owned industries can like can make money now, right?
[00:28:11]  Like within two years, the state-owned industries reinvented debt peonage.
[00:28:15]  And, you know, and there's another interesting aspect of this, which is that, okay, so three deers is not just a state-owned industry.
[00:28:21]  They're also a co-op, which means the workers of Three Deers own shares in the company.
[00:28:27]  And, you know, you would think that the combination of this is a state-owned industry in a country that is still technically communist, combined with, you know, led by a woman, you would think all three of these things would like in some way make any of this better.
[00:28:43]  But no, it turns out that the incentives run exactly the other way.
[00:28:47]  And so, you know, so if you have the state-owned firm is trying to cut costs because, you know, because they're only giving the limits a lot of money by the state, they're trying to cut costs.
[00:28:55]  So the outsourcing state is the money.
[00:28:56]  And then the interesting thing about the co-op part is the co-op part feeds into this because, you know, if you're a member of the co-op, right, the less members of the co-op like there are, the more your shares are worth.
[00:29:06]  And so they have this incentive to make sure that as much of the work as possible is being done by contractors because the contractors aren't like members of the co-op.
[00:29:14]  And yeah, so this leads, yeah, and this.
[00:29:17]  They invented Uber.
[00:29:19]  Yeah, they invented Uber in 1986, two years after they legalized making money.
[00:29:24]  It's incredible.
[00:29:25]  Yeah, hell yeah.
[00:29:26]  See, that's socialist innovation right there.
[00:29:30]  Fuck you, Silicon Valley.
[00:29:33]  Oh, God.
[00:29:35]  You know, and because this is.
[00:29:36]  I mean, it's actually an old idea, but yeah.
[00:29:38]  Yeah, they're one of the first people to like bring it back, which is fairly incredible.
[00:29:44]  And, you know, because this is just like a capitalist economy now, this pays off enormously.
[00:29:49]  And, you know, three deers, you know, the entire sort of the next 10, 15 years, just massively expands.
[00:29:55]  They do this massive series of mergers and acquisitions.
[00:29:58]  And by the 90s, it is the largest dairy producer in China.
[00:30:02]  And, you know, and they continue to expand.
[00:30:05]  And, you know, But by this point, they have real political power because their company is a significant part of the local Chinese tax base.
[00:30:14]  And so this gives them the party.
[00:30:17]  And this is part of what allows them to, in 2005, form this joint partnership with the New Zealand-based Frontera Cooperative Group.
[00:30:25]  Yeah, Frontera buys 43% of the shares and they do this huge partnership thing.
[00:30:30]  And this is a huge deal.
[00:30:32]  Fonterra is the second largest dairy company in the world.
[00:30:35]  They have 30% of the world's total dairy production.
[00:30:38]  And they're the largest company in New Zealand by a margin that's like...
[00:30:42]  Okay, they are so powerful in New Zealand that several of the cables from WikiLeaks suggest that the reason that New Zealand sent troops to Iraq was that the U.S. was threatening to cut off their milk for oil deal with the Iraqi government when they knocked it off.
[00:30:59]  What the fuck?
[00:31:03]  See, but no war for milk is a terrible thing to put on a placard.
[00:31:08]  That's just not going to get you anywhere.
[00:31:10]  That is incredible.
[00:31:12]  And I love it whenever we get New Zealand gets so much credit because their government isn't just howlingly incompetent.
[00:31:20]  But they do dumb shit, guys.
[00:31:22]  Don't worry.
[00:31:22]  Don't worry.
[00:31:23]  New Zealand's government does terrible things.
[00:31:25]  It's fine.
[00:31:26]  And it's great because, again, this is a, you know, Fonterra is a group of cooperatives.
[00:31:31]  And once again, the cooperatives are not only not like making anything better, they're like pushing New Zealand into war with like into an invasion of Iraq.
[00:31:40]  It's great.
[00:31:41]  Yeah, baby.
[00:31:43]  Global capital go to war for fucking milk.
[00:31:46]  You know who else will go to war on behalf of a milk conglomerate?
[00:31:51]  Jesus, who?
[00:31:52]  All of the products that support this podcast.
[00:31:55]  We ask one question of our sponsors, and it's, will you invade the global south in order to improve the profits of a milk manufacturer?
[00:32:05]  And if they say no, or as is more common, what are you talking about?
[00:32:09]  Are you having a stroke, Robert?

=== War Over Milk (04:22) ===

[00:32:10]  Do we need to call someone?
[00:32:12]  We hang up the phone.
[00:32:13]  We don't take that goddamn money.
[00:32:15]  That's the behind the bastards guarantee.
[00:32:17]  Yeah.
[00:32:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:32:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:32:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:32:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:32:36]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:32:40]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:32:42]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:32:44]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:32:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:32:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:32:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:32:54]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:32:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:32:59]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:33:01]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:33:03]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:33:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:33:10]  Trust me, babe.
[00:33:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:33:21]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:33:26]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:33:33]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:33:40]  From power to parenthood.
[00:33:42]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:33:45]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:33:47]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:33:50]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:33:54]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:34:01]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:34:03]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:34:10]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:34:11]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:34:14]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:34:22]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:34:28]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:34:33]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:34:39]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:34:48]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:34:53]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:34:57]  He related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:34:59]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:35:01]  That's so funny.
[00:35:03]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:35:11]  Say you love me.
[00:35:14]  You know I.
[00:35:16]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:35:23]  What's up, everyone?
[00:35:24]  I'm Ego Modem.
[00:35:25]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
[00:35:36]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:35:39]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:35:44]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:35:47]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
[00:35:51]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:35:59]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:36:00]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:36:09]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:36:11]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:36:18]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:36:20]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:36:22]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:36:23]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

=== Blaming the Farmers (13:43) ===

[00:36:33]  We're back.
[00:36:34]  And Sophie just admitted that as a capitalist pig dog, she is wearing a Nike shirt shamefully.
[00:36:40]  I mean, it was a gift, but that's not an excuse.
[00:36:44]  I still wear it.
[00:36:45]  See, Sophie, that is something.
[00:36:48]  I know.
[00:36:49]  You're a monster.
[00:36:49]  You're a monster.
[00:36:50]  Unlike me, who is just surrounded by products of the international arms industry, which is completely non-problematic and has never been involved in anything.
[00:36:59]  I'm simply just gotta represent LeBron James.
[00:37:06]  And I'm representing a lot of unsettling companies.
[00:37:10]  Okay, let's get back to the show.
[00:37:13]  Chris, we're talking about milk.
[00:37:16]  Yeah, so we're...
[00:37:17]  Which is also a thing you can buy and support the global arms trade, apparently.
[00:37:20]  It's great.
[00:37:21]  It's great.
[00:37:21]  No matter what you buy, all the money goes to the arms trade.
[00:37:24]  You can't, you can't not feed money back into the global arms trade.
[00:37:28]  That's capitalism, baby.
[00:37:29]  It all winds up making guns somehow.
[00:37:31]  Also, the fun part of this is that Fontera is going to come out looking like the better party in this deal at the end of this, which is, which is an you can tell the story is going well when the people who are slightly more responsible are the people who sent troops to Iraq.
[00:37:47]  It's great.
[00:37:48]  Now, Fonterra partners with three deers under the assumption that, you know, China's largest dairy company will be selling products that are, you know, of quality and thus wouldn't get into like trouble.
[00:37:59]  But, you know, you're not going to.
[00:38:01]  Yeah.
[00:38:02]  Yeah.
[00:38:02]  The largest dairy company in China.
[00:38:03]  Like, what could possibly be going wrong?
[00:38:06]  But, you know, even before 2005, there were signs that Fontero should have been concerned.
[00:38:10]  Now, since the start of the reform period in the 1980s and sort of accelerating through a transition to capitalism in the 90s, China has had a huge food safety problem, particularly in the dairy industry.
[00:38:22]  And while obviously there's a lot of structural issues involved in this, in the dairy industry, a lot of this is directly, this is directly the fault of Three Deer's model of contract farming.
[00:38:33]  Now, as we've seen, it's crazy.
[00:38:38]  Making the Uber of massive-scale food production didn't make things as safe as Uber.
[00:38:47]  The Uber of baby formula, surprisingly, are not the good guys here.
[00:38:52]  Now, as a result of the sort of the miniature agricultural revolution that three deers kicks off in the 80s and 90s, most dairy farming, I mean, this is true to this day in the year 2021, is done by those individual farmers with like one to three cows.
[00:39:06]  And, you know, this whole system is designed so that like no one can, no one can build up enough capital to get out or to do any kind of like productivity improvements on themselves.
[00:39:16]  Because if they had that much money, they could go like start their own company and they wouldn't have to work for three deers.
[00:39:21]  And the other thing about the contract model is it means that no one is investing, you know, because these cows are being owned and maintained by these farmers, no one's investing in any sort of technological improvements.
[00:39:34]  And, you know, because all the farmers are, you know, at best, you're broke and at worst, you're hopelessly in debt, they don't have money to buy good land.
[00:39:43]  They're using essentially the land left over from the old land reform allotments.
[00:39:48]  And this means that, you know, this is this is some of the worst agricultural land in China that they're raising these cows on.
[00:39:54]  I mean, okay, so it's the worst agricultural land that you can raise a cow on and it's not literally desert or like the top of a mountain.
[00:40:01]  And so, you know, this means that the cows aren't very healthy and the milk they produce is pretty low quality.
[00:40:08]  Now, higher quality milk with more protein in it sells for more money because you can use the bake baby formula.
[00:40:15]  And this means that there's an enormous incentive for farmers, middlemen, and the dairy companies to fake the protein content of their milk to make it look higher than it actually is.
[00:40:23]  How do you, I mean, is it just like they're bribing the people whose job it is to check?
[00:40:27]  Or is there some like, are they like pro pouring whey protein into the milk?
[00:40:31]  Yeah.
[00:40:31]  So how does that actually work?
[00:40:32]  So the easiest way to do this, well, I mean, so they are bribing people, but you can't, you have to bribe an enormous number of people in order to do this.
[00:40:40]  So the easiest way to do it is by putting additives into the milk that make that make the milk look like it has more protein when on the sort of tests that companies use to like figure out how much like milk, how much protein is in the milk.
[00:40:53]  And, you know, this, this is where the middlemen come in.
[00:40:56]  And, you know, so the middlemen are people who they buy the milk from the farmers and sell it to the dairy companies.
[00:41:02]  Now, you might be wondering, you know, again, the companies sold them these cows, right?
[00:41:06]  So why are the companies like not just buying the milk from the farmers directly?
[00:41:12]  And the answer for that, there's three reasons.
[00:41:15]  The first is that the dairy companies, you know, running through these middlemen means they don't have to spend the money running their own logistics network to buy and then move supplies of milk around.
[00:41:27]  The second reason is to put a buffer in between sort of the dairy companies and the contract farmers in case the farmers get any ideas about banding together so they don't have to live in desperate poverty.
[00:41:37]  And the third reason you use middlemen is to do crime.
[00:41:40]  Hell yeah.
[00:41:41]  Now we're talking.
[00:41:42]  Yeah.
[00:41:42]  And this yeah, because if you get someone else to do a crime, then you, then you're, you're in the clear.
[00:41:47]  That's the way crime works.
[00:41:49]  Yeah.
[00:41:50]  This is literally true.
[00:41:50]  So, you know, say, for example, you are Nestle and the cocoa that you use for your chocolate is produced by child slave labor and the ivory coaster Burkina Faso.
[00:41:58]  You know, we saw.
[00:41:59]  Now you say child slave labor like it's a bad thing, Christopher.
[00:42:03]  I mean, without child slave labor, we wouldn't have, I don't know, the pyramids or England.
[00:42:09]  I'm pretty sure they didn't use child slaves amazingly.
[00:42:12]  They had slavery, but I'm pretty sure they didn't use child slaves.
[00:42:14]  They built the pyramids.
[00:42:15]  I mean, which is incredible.
[00:42:16]  A lot of them are probably 17, right?
[00:42:19]  Yeah.
[00:42:19]  But, you know, I do want to point out it's like, yeah, so like every computer, like every electronic device that's like made now has Koltar in it, which is this thing that's almost entirely mined by child slave labor and Democratic Republic of Company.
[00:42:33]  It's like, we're not even making pyramids with it.
[00:42:36]  Like we're making like headphones that break after four minutes.
[00:42:39]  It's like.
[00:42:40]  Yeah.
[00:42:40]  Yeah.
[00:42:41]  We're making iPhones that are designed to stop working after two years.
[00:42:45]  Yeah.
[00:42:47]  Yeah.
[00:42:47]  No, I mean, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:48]  So, okay.
[00:42:49]  Yeah.
[00:42:50]  And, you know, and we saw this recently with their, they're like, so people who'd been enslaved by the contract growers, you know, tried to sue Nestle in court.
[00:43:00]  But, you know, because these are, because Nestle's buying from middlemen and not buying, you know, like owning the slaves directly, they could, they, you know, in court, they were just like, ah, it wasn't us.
[00:43:10]  It was our suppliers.
[00:43:11]  Nothing we can do about it.
[00:43:12]  Yeah.
[00:43:12]  And, and, you know, the other thing, the great thing about American contract law, it is literally written into law, right?
[00:43:18]  Like, there's great examples in California, but, you know, it's written into law, American corporate law, that if you are a contractor, right, for a company, and, you know, the deals you sign that involves you becoming a contractor makes it so that if you like do slavery, you have to claim in court that it was you and not the company above you, which is yeah, this is, it's great.
[00:43:39]  Oh, that's rad.
[00:43:40]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:43:40]  And God, that's fun.
[00:43:42]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  You love to see it.
[00:43:43]  Yeah.
[00:43:44]  It's, it's great.
[00:43:45]  And, you know, and because Nestle's production is set up exactly the same way as three deers is, like, the people who Nestle enslaved lost their Supreme Court case when I tried to sue them because they couldn't prove that Nestle directly ordered the slavery.
[00:43:59]  And then, you know, because it didn't happen in the U.S., once they couldn't prove that, once that it didn't happen in the US, I didn't have any standing to sue in American courts.
[00:44:06]  So yeah, this is, yeah.
[00:44:07]  So there's this whole legal framework that's set up.
[00:44:10]  And this happens everywhere to use these contractors to do crime.
[00:44:14]  And in the Chinese case of three deers, you get exactly the same thing.
[00:44:17]  You know, you have the middlemen and contractors who are the people who are doping this milk.
[00:44:21]  And, you know, by doping, it's like they're putting additives into the milk just to fake the test to fake out the protein count.
[00:44:26]  And, you know, by getting the middlemen to do it, you have plausible deniability.
[00:44:30]  And, you know, if things go wrong, you can just blame the farmers.
[00:44:34]  Now, no, I will say this.
[00:44:36]  So some farmers are desperate enough to put additives into their milk themselves.
[00:44:41]  But, you know, and the farmers in the media are the people who get blamed for this.
[00:44:45]  But, you know, a lot of them, and even the people who are doing it, like, they don't know what they're putting into the milk.
[00:44:52]  So they just assume that it's like fine.
[00:44:54]  But, you know, this, this, this, this turns into a huge problem because, you know, the combination of sort of the incredible greed of these large small business owners and the desperation of these farmers leads to a series of really bad milk scandals.
[00:45:08]  One of the more famous instances, like the worst instance, I think, was the fake milk scandal in 2004, where a bunch of just fake baby powder was made with regular milk and not high-protein milk, was sold to a bunch of extremely poor rural farmers.
[00:45:21]  And the result of this is 50 babies die from malnutrition because the milk didn't give the nutrients that they needed.
[00:45:27]  And so they just, they starved.
[00:45:29]  Right.
[00:45:29]  And yeah, that's what babies do when you don't feed.
[00:45:31]  Yeah.
[00:45:34]  And this, you know, so this, this, this pisses off everyone because here's a bunch of dead babies who starve to death.
[00:45:41]  And there's a huge crackdown and a bunch of people, including party officials, get arrested.
[00:45:46]  And, you know, the result of this is there's a whole series of these very high-profile attempts by the party to get the problem of food safety and fake food and fake drugs under control.
[00:45:56]  And this culminates in the CCP executing the head of their food and drug administration for taking bribes from a pharmaceutical company to promote their products.
[00:46:05]  Like they kill a cabinet-level official, and it doesn't do anything because the problem isn't about just sort of individual corruption.
[00:46:12]  It's structural.
[00:46:13]  And, you know, this is just, this is sort of a structural problem with capitalism.
[00:46:16]  Like, the cheapest and easiest way to make money is just to scam people.
[00:46:20]  And, you know, it's always the best way to make money.
[00:46:23]  Yeah, we have seen this.
[00:46:25]  This is one of the running themes of Behind the Bastards is get rich scam people.
[00:46:30]  And, you know, cutting corners and even just like making fake stuff doesn't work makes you an incredible amount of money.
[00:46:35]  And, you know, the longer you can keep the scam going, the better off you are.
[00:46:39]  And, you know, this is the way the incentive structure works everywhere.
[00:46:42]  The only reason that food safety is as good as it is in like Europe is that, you know, food safety was a key demand of sort of the workers who have been a progressive reformerist who were able to get these food safety regulations put in place.
[00:46:52]  But, you know, and I kind of say this enough.
[00:46:54]  And don't worry, folks.
[00:46:55]  They're dismantling it.
[00:46:56]  They're dismantling.
[00:46:57]  Don't worry.
[00:46:57]  They'll get rid of those food safety regulations in Europe, here, everywhere.
[00:47:01]  Don't worry, people.
[00:47:02]  Yeah, well, soon you will be free to eat poison.
[00:47:06]  Oh, don't worry.
[00:47:07]  Europeans also eat poison.
[00:47:09]  Even the controls they put in place don't work all that well.
[00:47:12]  So for example, like in France, there's this massive scandal in the 80s and 90s where it's revealed the Socialist Party had been sending blood drawn from prisoners with HIV and hepatitis and selling it to Bayer Pharmaceuticals so that Bayer could make a drug for hemophiliacs with it.
[00:47:28]  Oh, you'd love to see it.
[00:47:30]  God damn, that's good.
[00:47:33]  That's what people come to Behind the Bastards for is the French Socialist Party selling HIV-tainted blood to big farmers and prisoners.
[00:47:42]  And then this has like a reverberating scandal because the British government knows that this drug is poisoned and gives it to people anyways.
[00:47:52]  Yeah.
[00:47:52]  It's curious.
[00:47:53]  Yeah.
[00:47:53]  And this is the sort of last part of the incentive structure at play with unsafe food and drugs, which is state officials trying to make money for themselves and their political clients.
[00:48:02]  And this is the cause of food safety issues in all capitalist countries.
[00:48:06]  But China in particular has, you know, it has a more intense version of this because there's this really, really fierce competition between sort of different local governments over GDP growth rates.
[00:48:17]  Because, you know, if you're a Chinese official, right?
[00:48:19]  Like the way you move up in the party is by how you're sort of your local or provincial, you know, you're a cadre, right?
[00:48:27]  You're in charge of a city.
[00:48:28]  You're in charge of the town.
[00:48:29]  The way you're evaluated and how you up in the party is mostly based on how high your GDP rate is.
[00:48:37]  Now, this means that, you know, if you think very socialists.
[00:48:42]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:48:44]  It's incredible.
[00:48:47]  It's also funny because one of the big things across the whole sort of like really 80s and 90s and is still going on today was like one of the big sort of socialist projects is about how GDP is like a completely bullshit metric of like economic growth.
[00:48:59]  And China's like, no, no, no, our cadre evaluations are all GDP now.
[00:49:04]  And this means that the countries will sign off on just literally anything that they think will just like cause any growth whatsoever.
[00:49:12]  So luckily in the US, we do not have the problem of bribery because giving money to politicians in exchange for political favors is in fact legal and thus definitionally not bribery.
[00:49:23]  But unfortunately for corporations in China.
[00:49:25]  Right.
[00:49:25]  Okay, Rad.
[00:49:26]  Yeah.
[00:49:26]  Yeah.
[00:49:27]  Unfortunately for corporations in China, China is an absolute one-party capitalist dictatorship, which means you have to bribe politicians the old-fashioned way.
[00:49:35]  Like socialism intended.
[00:49:36]  Robert, okay.
[00:49:38]  Do you know who won't bribe Chinese regulators in order to poison their milk?
[00:49:43]  I mean, definitely not our sponsors because they are actively bribing Chinese regulators as we speak.
[00:49:49]  Regulators of all nations, you know, we only go with the wocist corporations.
[00:49:54]  So they'll bribe Chinese regulators.
[00:49:56]  They'll bribe Zimbabwean regulators.
[00:49:59]  They'll bribe regulators from Latin America.
[00:50:02]  They'll bribe regulators from anywhere in the world.
[00:50:04]  That's the behind the bastards guarantee.
[00:50:07]  Everyone's getting bribed.
[00:50:10]  Here's ads.

=== Bribing Regulators (03:55) ===

[00:50:16]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:50:20]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:50:24]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:50:27]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:50:30]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:50:34]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:50:35]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:50:38]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:50:40]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:50:45]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:50:47]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:50:48]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:50:50]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:50:53]  They said, oh, hell no.
[00:50:55]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:50:57]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:51:02]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:51:04]  Trust me, babe.
[00:51:04]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:15]  I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:51:20]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:51:27]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:51:34]  From power to parenthood.
[00:51:36]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:51:39]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:51:41]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:51:44]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:51:48]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:51:54]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:51:57]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:52:03]  Find out on Mostly Human.
[00:52:05]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:52:08]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:52:16]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:52:22]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:52:27]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:52:32]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:52:42]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:52:47]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:52:50]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:52:53]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:52:55]  That's so funny.
[00:52:56]  Share each day with me each night.
[00:53:02]  Each morning.
[00:53:05]  Say you love me.
[00:53:08]  You know I.
[00:53:09]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:53:17]  What's up, everyone?
[00:53:18]  I'm Ago Monum.
[00:53:19]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:53:26]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:53:30]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:53:33]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:53:38]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:53:41]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[00:53:45]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:53:50]  Yeah.
[00:53:50]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:53:53]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:53:54]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:54:03]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:54:05]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.

=== Suspecting Powdered Milk (09:05) ===

[00:54:12]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:54:14]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:54:15]  There's a lot in life.
[00:54:17]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:54:27]  Ah, Chris, you know, it did, it did, it did occur to me that, you know, that whole system you just kind of set up whereby these Chinese farmers are essentially recreating the gig economy in order to maximize their profits at the expense of both the people receiving the milk and the people who labor for them, but aren't full partners in the endeavor.
[00:54:49]  We're kind of doing that with podcasting.
[00:54:52]  Yeah.
[00:54:52]  Yeah, it's good.
[00:54:55]  I love doing things that succeed for everybody.
[00:54:57]  So, Chris, please, please continue your podcast share.
[00:55:07]  Now, you know, so the other thing about China is that, you know, so you can bribe politicians, right?
[00:55:12]  But you can also, you can also just literally bribe the regulators directly.
[00:55:16]  And, you know, okay, so Chinese regulation.
[00:55:21]  You know, so when Chinese regulators are not literally representatives from the corporation they're supposed to be regulating, you know, you get corruption.
[00:55:28]  Like, you know, we saw like the CCP executed the dude who was their head of the state, food, and drug administration.
[00:55:33]  The corruption goes from the local level all the way to the top.
[00:55:37]  And corruption among regulators is so bad that when a Chinese state journalist like took maternity leave and wound up making a documentary in 2015 about air pollution after her baby developed the tumor while in the womb because the air quality was so bad, she like looked at the U.S. as a bottle of a country with a functioning regulatory apparatus.
[00:55:58]  And, you know, again, this is interesting because this isn't sort of just like partisan hack criticism, right?
[00:56:02]  Like this is this, this is a Chinese state, like this is a Chinese state journalist.
[00:56:06]  And, you know, the CCP thinks that the issues that she's bringing up like are valid enough that like in this document she's called Under the Dome.
[00:56:15]  And they think the issues are valid enough that they don't ban it.
[00:56:17]  This is, you know, this is a documentary that's very critical of the party.
[00:56:20]  And they don't ban it for the first week that it's released.
[00:56:23]  And, you know, this is, this is one of the ways the CCP sort of like tacitly allows criticism to be made because, you know, okay, so CCP, you can't actually just have free criticism there, right?
[00:56:32]  But, you know, they were like, eh, okay, well, we'll, we'll ban it eventually, but we'll let people see it first.
[00:56:37]  And the thing they were like, okay, we need to let people see is Chinese regulatory corruption is so bad, it makes people long for the, the, the American, the amazing safety system of the U.S.
[00:56:47]  Oh, boy.
[00:56:47]  Yeah, it's, it's, it's bad.
[00:56:49]  Yeah.
[00:56:50]  Yeah.
[00:56:51]  Now, by 2007, Chinese authorities are, you know, they're not unaware of the practice of putting additives into milk.
[00:56:57]  And this kicks off this kind of regulatory cold war between additives manufacturers and the regulators who like actually don't like care about not poisoning children.
[00:57:06]  And, you know, so the regulators change their techniques to detect like the chemicals that people are using and people change the chemicals.
[00:57:12]  And there's this whole sort of cold war.
[00:57:14]  And it starts to get worse in the late 2000s as the CCP imposes price controls on baby formulas and anti-poverty measure.
[00:57:21]  Now, this is not like a bad thing inherently, like in principle, but if you're dealing with like a state-owned firm that's designed to actually produce goods for people and not designed to make money, this can actually work.
[00:57:33]  But the price controls had these weird unintended consequences when applied to the three deer, the three deer, the contract worker co-op.
[00:57:44]  And so three deers and the other, the other milk companies just sort of pass on the added costs and the price controls down to the middlemen.
[00:57:50]  And the middlemen are like, okay, well, we'll pass the price down to the farmers.
[00:57:54]  Now, this escalates the regulatory Cold War because the price for like regular milk just implodes.
[00:58:00]  And people start adding these incredibly dangerous chemicals, like more dangerous than what they've already been using to the milk to fake these tests.
[00:58:09]  And the most notable one of this is melamine.
[00:58:12]  Now, melamine is a chemical that is normally used to make plastics.
[00:58:16]  It's common in, you know.
[00:58:17]  So that sounds like something babies need a lot of.
[00:58:19]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:19]  Because babies are basically mostly plastic.
[00:58:21]  Yeah, it's completely healthy.
[00:58:22]  It's like it's why you let them eat dishes or when the baby starts chomping on a countertop.
[00:58:27]  It's like, we got to get the melamine.
[00:58:28]  You got to let them eat this countertop.
[00:58:29]  They got to get that melamine.
[00:58:31]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:58:32]  That's why I feed babies nothing but pure plastic.
[00:58:35]  I filter out.
[00:58:36]  I get one of those facial scrubbers with the little micro beads and I filter out those micro beads and I just funnel it right into the baby's mouth and that keeps him healthy.
[00:58:44]  It's toxic though.
[00:58:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:47]  Yeah, but babies are mostly poison, by the way.
[00:58:51]  Right?
[00:58:54]  I like babies.
[00:58:56]  Yeah, so, oh boy.
[00:59:00]  So unfortunately for people who like babies, melamine, so if you ingest it, it causes you to develop kidney stones.
[00:59:07]  Oh, Jesus.
[00:59:09]  So babies are getting kidney stones.
[00:59:12]  Oh, it's so mean.
[00:59:13]  I hate that.
[00:59:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:15]  So, you know, but on the other hand, you know, it's, it's really, unless you're specifically looking for it, it's extremely hard to detect because basically what it does, so the like more refined protein tests are like testing for level of nitrogen in it because level of nitrogen in the thing tells you how much protein there is.
[00:59:32]  And this thing like boosts the level of nitrogen.
[00:59:34]  And so, you know, when people start getting desperate, they're like, ah, screw it.
[00:59:38]  We'll put plastic into this.
[00:59:39]  We'll put this chemical.
[00:59:40]  And, you know, this stuff starts getting put in milk all across China in order to pass off like shitty milk as like high-quality baby formula milk.
[00:59:48]  But it's really just causing baby kidney stones.
[00:59:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:53]  That's dark.
[00:59:54]  I don't like that at all.
[00:59:55]  Yeah, it's going to get worse.
[00:59:57]  I mean, the good news is that when you get kidney stones, doctors tend to advise, like beer is often advised because it helps you pass them.
[01:00:05]  So really, we just need to start getting those babies beer and the problem solves is just mix beer in with the milk.
[01:00:12]  Do a milk beer bong for the babies and then the babies get nutrition and they pass the kidney stones and everyone's happy.
[01:00:19]  Right?
[01:00:20]  No.
[01:00:20]  I can't think of a problem with that.
[01:00:21]  Let's continue.
[01:00:22]  No.
[01:00:23]  Oh, God.
[01:00:23]  So in November 2007, a man named Wong buys some 3D year baby formula for his young daughter.
[01:00:31]  Now, he holds on to this to the formula until early 2008.
[01:00:35]  But when he starts using it, he quickly realizes there's something wrong with his daughter.
[01:00:39]  It becomes incredibly painful for her to go to the bathroom and her urine has these weird particles in it.
[01:00:44]  And eventually he figures out the thing that's causing it is the powdered milk.
[01:00:48]  So, you know, he makes what's, you know, the normal assumption if you buy something in China and it makes you sick is that it's fake.
[01:00:55]  Yeah.
[01:00:55]  So he calls three deer service hotline to confirm that the milk is fake.
[01:00:59]  And, you know, so some time goes by.
[01:01:01]  And in late February, they're sort of like doing bureaucratic stuff.
[01:01:05]  In late February, he sends them some of the packages that he has left.
[01:01:09]  And they confirm, surprisingly, the packages are not fake.
[01:01:12]  They're real.
[01:01:13]  And they tell Wong to send the rest of the packages to the company.
[01:01:19]  Now, Wong should have been one of the big heroes of this story because he tells him to fuck off.
[01:01:24]  Because he's like, okay, I want an actual examination of what made my baby sick.
[01:01:30]  And so he goes to his local consumer association to demand one.
[01:01:33]  The problem is that the inspection to figure out what's wrong with his milk costs a third of the average salary of a Chinese worker.
[01:01:43]  And 3D is refuses to pay for it.
[01:01:45]  So he spends the entire money.
[01:01:47]  He can't.
[01:01:48]  He literally doesn't have the money for it.
[01:01:49]  So he spends the entire month of 2008 trying to fight his way through this just absolute bureaucratic nightmare trying to figure out what's happening to his daughter and it comes to nothing.
[01:01:57]  Now, Wong is interesting.
[01:02:00]  He actually posts about this online.
[01:02:02]  And the thread very quickly gets locked.
[01:02:04]  But he becomes the first documented case of poisoning from Three Deers Powdered Milk.
[01:02:10]  Now, while Wong is fighting this case, there is a massive earthquake in China that kills almost 90,000 people.
[01:02:18]  Jesus fucking Christ.
[01:02:20]  And he quickly realizes that Three Deers is sending the survivor's free baby formula.
[01:02:26]  And at this point, because nothing goes with your family being wiped out by a natural disaster like kidney.
[01:02:35]  Yeah, yeah, it's great.
[01:02:36]  And, you know, so he goes up the chain of command to try to stop it, and he gets nowhere.
[01:02:40]  And his case gets completely ignored.
[01:02:42]  Now, so this is all, this is happening in, it's happening in March.
[01:02:46]  Now, in June, Chinese doctors start to see something they've never seen before.
[01:02:53]  There's thousands of these babies or almost all of them are less than a year old who are, their bodies are completely swollen.
[01:02:59]  They can't urinate.
[01:03:00]  And they quickly realize when they start doing surgeries that they have kidney stones.
[01:03:05]  And this is a really weird thing.
[01:03:08]  Like babies do not get kidney stones.
[01:03:11]  Like this just doesn't happen.
[01:03:12]  Yeah.
[01:03:12]  This just does not happen.
[01:03:13]  Yeah.
[01:03:14]  So, you know, the doctors begin to suspect something's going wrong with powdered milk.

=== Kidney Stone Crisis (13:39) ===

[01:03:18]  And they try to go to the press.
[01:03:20]  Now, now, a few Chinese journalists have been hearing basically the same story.
[01:03:23]  And, you know, when doctors, like a few doctors start showing up and confirming that, you know, there's these babies in the hospital with kidney stones.
[01:03:31]  Some journalists try to publish a story, but the CCP's propaganda department, and yes, it is literally called the propaganda department because I guess when it started, that was still a time when people used, like, there was a period of time where the term propaganda was often used openly and not as a negative.
[01:03:50]  Yeah.
[01:03:50]  You know, well, and also like when it started, it was like a, like, you know, this starts in like 1928.
[01:03:55]  Like, this starts before the CCP is a state.
[01:03:57]  So, you know, I mean, the propaganda department is just like a bunch of people passing out pamphlets.
[01:04:00]  And now it's the state censorship agency.
[01:04:03]  Now, yeah.
[01:04:04]  And so, and the reason they kill this story in large part is because the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
[01:04:10]  Now, I don't know how many other people remember the 2008 Olympics, but that was the first Olympics I ever watched.
[01:04:14]  And it was just an enormous, this is a huge deal for the Chinese government.
[01:04:18]  Yeah.
[01:04:19]  Yeah.
[01:04:19]  And a lot of this is, so China's only.
[01:04:21]  I mean, like a lot of, a lot of American conservatives got real, real racist and scared about China because all the people drumming and stuff.
[01:04:29]  Yeah.
[01:04:31]  And, you know, yeah, it turns into this whole media debacle.
[01:04:33]  And, you know, part of what's happening, so China's only been in the World Trade Organization for like seven years, right?
[01:04:38]  And that was our sort of acceptance back into like the liberal community of states or whatever after Tiananmen, which, you know, actually, this is sort of, you know, this is one of the other weird things about history.
[01:04:47]  So China was actually like pretty popular in the US like through most of the 80s because they've been like an American ally in the Cold War.
[01:04:54]  And you know, this is why I think it's, yeah, like I'm pretty sure in Red Dawn, it's like the two countries that are left are China and the U.S. who are like fighting the Soviets.
[01:05:02]  But, you know, after Tiananmen, like all of that sort of goodwill like implodes.
[01:05:06]  And this, you know, and this means that like the C08 Olympics becomes like all the journalists call it China's Coming Out Party.
[01:05:12]  It's this huge international politics, geopolitical event.
[01:05:16]  And I cannot emphasize this enough.
[01:05:19]  International politics is just an enormous dick-waving contest that kills people for no reason.
[01:05:25]  My favorite example of this, and just to make it clear that China is not the only country that kills people for just bullshit international prestige points.
[01:05:32]  So my favorite example, it's what happens right before the partial nuclear test ban in treaty in 1963.
[01:05:40]  So, you know, by 63, everyone's has realized that testing nukes above ground is bad because you're radiating everyone.
[01:05:48]  So, you know, they sign a treaty.
[01:05:50]  It's like, don't do this.
[01:05:51]  And then the day before the treaty goes into effect, both the US and the USSR spend an entire day dropping hundreds of nukes just for no reason.
[01:05:58]  It's just like they do this giant dick waving contest just to prove that they're like, oh, hey, look, look at how many nukes we can drop.
[01:06:03]  And this kills an enormous number of people.
[01:06:05]  But, you know, it kills them slowly with cancer and sort of hard to trace.
[01:06:08]  So nobody really talks about the fact that like thousands upon thousands of people died from just the US and the USSR just like having this dick waving contest over who has the most nukes.
[01:06:18]  So, you know, and China's version of this is that they're, they're absolutely determined that everything goes perfectly and there's no PR hiccups.
[01:06:25]  And so, you know, I mean, they, they go like, okay, so they, they, they use so much steel building the facilities that there's a global steel shortage for four years afterwards.
[01:06:34]  Like they go, like they shut down factories.
[01:06:36]  They bring in like 120,000 market workers who they're paying $130 a month because socialism.
[01:06:44]  Yeah.
[01:06:44]  And they even have this thing.
[01:06:49]  I think people might remember this.
[01:06:50]  So they have these IBM supercomputers, right?
[01:06:52]  That they're using to target clouds with anti-aircraft guns.
[01:06:56]  And so they shoot these anti-aircraft guns at the clouds to make it rain so that it wouldn't rain over the event itself.
[01:07:02]  You know, this is, yeah, like they are shooting, they are shooting guns at clouds in order to make sure it doesn't rain.
[01:07:10]  Like this is, this is the level of sort of PR op you're dealing with here.
[01:07:13]  And so, you know, from the start of the games on August 8th until the Olympics finish on the 24th, there is literally no way the CCP is going to let a story about a food safety crisis spread to the Western press.
[01:07:22]  Now, unfortunately for the CCP, what they have on their hands is a massive food safety crisis.
[01:07:27]  Now, four months after the first case is reported, 3Ders begins to run tests on their own supply and they realize that basically their entire supply of baby formulas contaminated with melamine.
[01:07:39]  Now, on August 2nd, the tests come back on August 1st.
[01:07:42]  On August 2nd, 3Ders has this frantic meeting with Fontera, which is their international affiliate.
[01:07:49]  And Fonterra is like, okay, we need to do an immediate mass recall of all milk products because we don't know exactly what's back with melamine.
[01:07:58]  And 3Ders is like, no, just absolutely not under the rationale that they don't want to have a scandal like six days before the start of the Olympics.
[01:08:06]  And so they advocate for this very quiet, limited recall.
[01:08:10]  And they have this massive fight.
[01:08:11]  There's all this weird corporate maneuvering.
[01:08:13]  But 3D years is being backed by the CCP.
[01:08:16]  So they went out and they immediately set out to cover up the story of the fact that they're poisoning all these kids until the Olympics are over.
[01:08:25]  And they start planting positive stories in local newspapers and TV stations.
[01:08:32]  They have one of their PR people pretend to be a journalist and write a piece about them and then get it published, like in the like get it published in a newspaper.
[01:08:43]  And, you know, and they also...
[01:08:44]  I'm glad that stuff happens there too.
[01:08:46]  I was feeling bad about America for a while, but now I realize we're just part of a beautiful global community of PR flaks pretending to be journalists in order to sell death.
[01:08:55]  Yeah, it's great.
[01:08:57]  That is like when celebrities call the paparazzi on themselves to get a good photo.
[01:09:01]  Yeah.
[01:09:03]  The other thing they did, and this is something, well, okay, it wouldn't surprise me if Google does this, but I've never heard of them doing it.
[01:09:10]  But 3Ders buys off China's largest search engine.
[01:09:15]  The search engine has a feature where if you're a company, you're like, you're in the party, you can pay them money to manipulate the results.
[01:09:22]  And so they pay this money and the search engine ensures that if you search for melamine or sick babies, it won't get linked back to Frontera.
[01:09:30]  And this sort of media blackout works.
[01:09:33]  3Ders and Fonterra say nothing to the public until the Olympics are nearly over.
[01:09:38]  On August 22nd, it's like two days before the close of the games and 20 days after they learned about this, Fontera finally reports the contamination to the New Zealand consulate.
[01:09:47]  And then the New Zealand consulate continues to sit on it until after the games are over because they don't want to damage relations with China.
[01:09:52]  And it's not until September 8th that Helen Clark, the prime minister of New Zealand, formally and openly reports the contamination to the Chinese government.
[01:10:01]  Now, I'm emphasizing the date so much because every single day that they delay means another day where thousands of babies are drinking poison and are permanently damaging their kidneys, trying to piss out kidney stones.
[01:10:14]  And the results of the delay, again, this is this is the first case is reported in February.
[01:10:21]  They like the Chinese government finally reacts in September.
[01:10:24]  And the result of this is that 300,000 babies get sick, 50,000 are hospitalized, and six children die.
[01:10:32]  And I want to read this quote from the South China Morning Post so you can get a sense of the effect that this had.
[01:10:38]  Holding her 10-month-own son in her arms at Beijing's Children's Hospital, Zhao Shuping cries as she tells how angry and shocked she is to learn that the milk powder her son has been drinking could kill him.
[01:10:49]  I couldn't fall asleep last night, she says.
[01:10:52]  I feel so bad for having fed my baby toxic milk powder since the day he was born.
[01:10:57]  Living on the mainland, we sort of know that our food is always contaminated.
[01:11:00]  But doing this to a vulnerable baby, the greedy businessmen are shameless.
[01:11:07]  Yeah, it's people, yeah, it's it's people are incredibly pissed off.
[01:11:14]  And you know, the moment that the cat's out of the bag, the CCP starts, you know, they bring all their guns to bear on the crisis.
[01:11:20]  And they're, you know, their investigations quickly discover that it's not just three deers.
[01:11:25]  22 other milk companies have melamine in their milk.
[01:11:29]  And, you know, between three years and the 22 other companies, that is almost the entirety of China's dairy industry.
[01:11:34]  And, you know, that represents by any reasonable standard a systemic crisis.
[01:11:38]  Now, the CCP's reaction to this was to execute two dairy farmers and one manufacturer of melamine powder and put nine more people, including the now Pete Girl boss head of three deers in prison.
[01:11:50]  And they also fired a lot of the local cadre that have been involved in the cover up.
[01:11:55]  And like they fine the companies a little bit.
[01:11:57]  And yeah, so they pay the kids who get kidney stones like $290.
[01:12:02]  And then if you get more sick than that, you get $4,000.
[01:12:05]  And if you die, they'll give you $29,000.
[01:12:08]  Which...
[01:12:09]  Well, hey, that's a pretty, I mean, shit.
[01:12:11]  Yeah, but the thing is who wouldn't want to die for that kind of thing.
[01:12:13]  Yeah.
[01:12:14]  I mean, I've heard of worse payouts than that, but you know, the problem is that nothing fundamentally changes about the structure of the dairy market.
[01:12:23]  And people get extremely pissed about this because, you know, this is a scandal that affects almost the entire Chinese dairy industry.
[01:12:30]  And 12 total people get prosecuted for it.
[01:12:34]  And so, you know, the prevailing wisdom in China becomes that the CCP found a few convenient fall guys and are just, you know, trying to sweep everything else under the rug.
[01:12:42]  Yeah, it's bad.
[01:12:44]  That's depressing, honestly.
[01:12:46]  Yeah.
[01:12:47]  You know, the result of this is that.
[01:12:50]  I mean, some people wound up in prison.
[01:12:52]  Yeah, and the CCP passes a bunch of food safety laws, but, you know, this doesn't help.
[01:12:58]  Like, it doesn't solve the problem.
[01:12:59]  And so, you know, like trust in the Chinese dairy market just implodes.
[01:13:05]  And I mean, people to this day still do not trust Chinese milk products like in China from, you know, partially from the memory of the 300,000 babies with kidney stones and partially because this stuff keeps happening.
[01:13:14]  I mean, there hasn't been anything worse than the melamine crisis, like, thank God, since then.
[01:13:19]  But, you know, like last year, there was another fake milk scandal and five kids got rickets from malnutrition.
[01:13:25]  And so, you know, people are extremely skeptical of Chinese milk brands.
[01:13:30]  Now, the one exception.
[01:13:32]  Yeah, that would be too.
[01:13:33]  Yeah, yeah, it makes sense, right?
[01:13:35]  There's one interesting exception to this.
[01:13:38]  And, you know, the exception is there was one like Chinese firm that emerged from the melamine scandal unscathed.
[01:13:44]  And the reason they pulled this off are able to pull this off because they don't use contract workers.
[01:13:49]  And so that means they actually run their farms.
[01:13:52]  And with no middlemen and without contract farmers, you get much better quality, like quality control.
[01:13:58]  You get better milk.
[01:13:59]  And if you're going to run a farm like that, it's way harder to do crime.
[01:14:06]  But the problem is that this milk is more expensive.
[01:14:08]  And that leads us to the final and maybe the most devastating part about the whole food safety problem.
[01:14:13]  It affects the absolute poorest people in Chinese society.
[01:14:17]  If you're rich, you don't have to eat this shit.
[01:14:19]  You can buy more expensive food from companies who won't try to scam you.
[01:14:22]  Yeah.
[01:14:23]  And I mean, like, people go to really elaborate efforts to do this.
[01:14:27]  Like, I, so some of my family, like, works in the airline industry and they talk about how people will like, so pilots who are like, like, flying planes back from China to the U.S. will like go to American grocery stores and buy a bunch of flour and stuff so they can bring it back because they know that the American, or at least they're, well, okay, because the American food safety standards are better.
[01:14:47]  And so, you know, like, yeah, so they bring it back for their families.
[01:14:52]  But, you know, migrant workers and rural villagers who come from the same place are all forced to just roll the dice every time they buy food because they don't make enough money to buy food they know is real.
[01:15:02]  And I want to close this by talking a bit about like just how bad this problem is and how many, how many people it affects.
[01:15:08]  So China has 290 million migrant workers.
[01:15:13]  This is like, this is, you know, if you took the migrant worker population of China out and made them a separate country, it'd be the fourth largest country on earth.
[01:15:20]  And China's entire economic system is based on making sure that this migrant worker population, which is like 80% of the population of the total population of the U.S. and 60% of the industrial workforce, it's based on making sure that these people don't get insurance that the insurance that non-migrant workers get.
[01:15:36]  And the results of this, and this one was not for military Americans, people just don't go to the doctor unless they're literally dying.
[01:15:43]  Yeah.
[01:15:44]  Yeah.
[01:15:45]  So, you know, we know what that's like.
[01:15:47]  And, you know, yeah, except, you know, but it's even worse here because the people who can't afford to buy food that they know isn't fake are the people who can't afford to go to the doctor.
[01:15:58]  And in rural areas, it's even worse because the local clinics, they don't even have, they don't have doctors, they don't even have nurses because, you know, the Chinese healthcare system is enormously overstrained.
[01:16:08]  And, you know, this is how you get rural children dying of malnutrition from fake milk.
[01:16:14]  You know, if, if, you know, if, if, if the signs had been caught early enough, or like if they were in medical care, then these people wouldn't have died.
[01:16:21]  But, you know, their parents don't have access to medical care.
[01:16:23]  And so they don't know what's wrong until it's too late and the baby starve to death.
[01:16:27]  And yeah, that's where we're going to leave it today with starving babies and a reminder that China now has more billionaires than the U.S.
[01:16:34]  And yet somehow workers in both countries don't have healthcare.
[01:16:38]  I mean, they did put some of these people behind bars, which is more than happened with Nestle, I think.
[01:16:43]  So that's something.
[01:16:45]  Yeah, I mean, but it's, you know, like they're, they're doing, this is one of the things that's different about the CCP than the U.S. is that like, okay, politicians in the U.S. like do not fear us.
[01:16:57]  Like they're not afraid.

=== Starving Babies (05:59) ===

[01:16:58]  Yeah.
[01:16:58]  They just, yeah.
[01:16:59]  Whereas, you know, Chinese politicians, like, you know, like, they, they actually understand that like large numbers of people like massing and opposing them is dangerous.
[01:17:10]  And that means that, you know, they do these kind of like symbolic, like, oh, they'll arrest 12 people.
[01:17:14]  They'll shoot like a cabinet member.
[01:17:17]  But, you know, they do that so that they do that.
[01:17:19]  And then they, they, they throw enough people under the bus until people sort of stop being angry.
[01:17:23]  And then, you know, just everything goes on as normal.
[01:17:25]  And it's, it's extremely bleak.
[01:17:28]  Yeah.
[01:17:29]  That was depressing, Chris.
[01:17:32]  Yep.
[01:17:33]  Yeah.
[01:17:35]  I mean, in some ways it was depressing, but I think we do have to keep in mind that a lot of value was created for people with money.
[01:17:46]  A lot of, you know, there's a lot of, just don't just think of the dead children.
[01:17:52]  Think of the economic stimulus created by their deaths.
[01:17:56]  You know, that's the real way we can honor their sacrifice.
[01:18:01]  And their Keynesian stimulus.
[01:18:03]  Yeah, Keynesian stimulus via payouts are dead to the parents of dead babies.
[01:18:09]  This is how you look at it.
[01:18:10]  It's a perfect closed-loop economy.
[01:18:12]  Well, fun.
[01:18:13]  Okay.
[01:18:15]  Got any pluggables to plug, Chris?
[01:18:18]  If you want to see me complain more about all of this, I'm at itbchr3 on Twitter or the Ice Must Be Destroyed guy.
[01:18:28]  Yeah, I have a sub stack called The Long 21st Century.
[01:18:32]  Jesus, it has been a long century so far.
[01:18:35]  I support kind of moving up to the 22nd already.
[01:18:38]  Like, let's just do it.
[01:18:39]  I'm done.
[01:18:40]  We're done with the 21st.
[01:18:42]  Yeah, I'm down to skip.
[01:18:44]  Let's roll along.
[01:18:47]  Yeah, so I don't know.
[01:18:49]  This has been Behind the Bastards.
[01:18:50]  You can find us where you just found us because you already know where to find us.
[01:18:54]  So, why am I telling you where you can find us?
[01:18:56]  You've been here before.
[01:18:57]  You're here right now.
[01:19:01]  Yeah, I have a book called After the Revolution.
[01:19:03]  You can find it on ATRBook.com as a free EPUB.
[01:19:07]  You can find it as a podcast at After the Revolution.
[01:19:11]  So check that shit out.
[01:19:14]  And I don't know, go buy some baby formula and don't drink it because it'll make you pee rock.
[01:19:25]  Hey, everybody.
[01:19:25]  Initially, I was going to plug the GoFundMe for the sequel to my book, After the Revolution, which you can find at ATRBook.com.
[01:19:33]  But here in the Pacific Northwest, we're having an unprecedented heat wave and it's causing disastrous conditions, life-threatening conditions for a lot of houseless people, a lot of people without air conditioning, particularly in the city of Salem.
[01:19:47]  Activists everywhere have been kind of gathering to try and mitigate, set up cooling stations, hand out cold drinks, do things to help people get their temperature down.
[01:19:56]  I want to try and raise funds for the Free Fridge of Salem, which are doing cooling stations in the capital of Oregon, Salem.
[01:20:04]  So if you go to Venmo at Free Fridge Salem, that's Venmo at FreeFridge Salem, and send them a couple of bucks.
[01:20:11]  They could really use it.
[01:20:13]  Local government has destroyed a number, like police particularly have destroyed a number of water and cooling stations they've set out.
[01:20:20]  It's, you know, we're not going to be in triple-digit heats for the next couple of days after I'm recording this on Monday, but it's still going to be very hot.
[01:20:27]  People still need this.
[01:20:28]  So please, Venmo at FreeFridge Salem if you have the wherewithal and the financial resources to do.
[01:20:34]  So one more time, the Venmo is at FreeFridge Salem.
[01:20:38]  Thanks.
[01:20:42]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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[01:21:18]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:21:22]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
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[01:21:52]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:21:55]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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[01:22:21]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:22:24]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[01:22:25]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:22:32]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:22:35]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:22:42]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:22:44]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
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