Live from the Sands Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering HP Discover 2015. Brought to you by HP. And now your host, Dave Vellante. To HP Discover, everybody, this is Dave Vellante. Check out hpdiscover.social for all the social streams, the video, the content, the special access. Patrick Osborn is here from HP, CUBE alum. And he's joined by Bill Walker of 20th Century Fox. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for having us. So Discover, another Discover, a little different this year, Patrick. We got Meg talking about business outcomes. Absolutely. Uber and Airbnb and all kinds of cool stuff. The consumption models are very different. I mean, obviously you come out here every year for the past number of years and it's all about the technology. I'm always wowed by the broad portfolio that we have, but really at the end of the day, I think some of the messaging to the customers is, we're here to help you solve your problems. And part of that is technology, part of its services. So this sort of new high-level messaging around transformation and helping people achieve these business outcomes. I think it's a good fresh start. Yeah, so Bill, your business, going through some interesting transformations. Yes it is. Maybe talk about the high level, the drivers in your business.  You have sort of early on in that. So maybe talk about some of the drivers in your business. Sure, absolutely. I think for us, you really hit the nail on the head in the sense that it's really been about the physical to digital transformation that the industry's kind of going through and also Fox is. And on the infrastructure side and the IT side, we're trying to support that as best we can. And the name of the game lately has been speed to market, right? So we've partnered very tightly with HP on not only the hardware but the software side building out kind of a brand new digital supply chain environment in Las Vegas actually, right here. And one of our major data centers where we deliver all of our digital content to all of our providers. So ESTV, VOD providers like Amazon and iTunes as well as major broadcasters. So you've got a facility out here that is essentially your cloud? Is that right? Yes, we do. That's our primary place where we deliver everything out of. It's great. We're using all HP hardware and software there. So we're customers across the board in the sense that we have blades. We've got three par. We're using store once as well as the HP software stack like cloud system on top of that. Is that part of Supernap? Yes, yes. So yeah, we're in Supernap. We love it. It's a great facility. We moved there a little over two years ago and it's been an awesome experience. Has that made it into any of the movies? No. It must, right? I know. It's impressive on the outside and the inside, right? Yeah, remember the old, remember the Robocop? Oh yeah, absolutely. They had that storage tech tape library way back then. They were like, oh, what's that? They were great at properties. Today it's these impressive data centers, amazing. So talk a little bit more about, you call it the digital supply chain. That's a powerful concept. What's behind that? Yeah, so we've obviously been in the physical supply chain business for a while on the home entertainment side. So think DVDs, Blue Rays, that kind of thing. But as we transition from people buying physical media to digital media, a lot of the workflows and the supply chain aspect of it is still there, but now we're talking digital and not physical. So one of the things we've done at Fox is we've created what we call our digital supply chain. So you've got, not only things like content delivery in there, but you've got watermarking, all the hallmarks of what you would need in a digital environment to deliver that customer quality product from end to end. And protect your IP. Yeah, exactly, yeah, security's a big one. So we'll talk more about security, data protection, maybe there's a general topic and then let's dig deeper. For sure, I mean security is obviously one of our big drivers. I mean, obviously with everything that's been in the news lately, we're no different in the sense that we take it very, very seriously. You know, on the data protection front, like I said, we're big store once customers. We love the product. We're using it heavily in our data center to protect our content as well as our data. So yeah. How much, let's unpack that a little bit. What's it look like? So you said a bunch of different HP products. Can you help us to understand how much storage, you kind of servers, what kind of apps? Paint a picture of your infrastructure for us. Sure, so we've got a lot actually, several racks of gear. Three par, like I said, we're big three par customers. So we have several racks of three par that we're using kind of across the board. A lot on the database side and high IO scenarios. Store once is kind of that underpinning piece that everything funnels back to that provides data deduplication, backup, archival, that kind of thing. Okay, so can we talk more about sort of your objectives of protecting data? I mean, obviously I don't want to lose it, but there's time to recover, there's data loss. How are you approaching that? Yep, so we've got our primary facility at Switch as well as a DR facility offsite. We're using Store once, we've got them in both places. We're doing replication both ways to ensure, if we were to have an event at one facility or we didn't have data available, we can quickly recover from the other. RTO-wise it's been a great success for us because we've moved from tape-based backup and I really didn't mention that, but where we came from two, two and a half years ago, from our LA and Chandler data centers, we had very, very heavy investment in tape infrastructure and one of the things we decided when we went to this new environment in Las Vegas is we wanted it to be completely tapeless, to be flexible in that environment and we picked Store once, we went all disk-based and RTO-wise it's fantastic because as opposed to tape if you have an event, if you happen to not have the tape on site, your RTO is dictated kind of by when you can get the tape back with the- Fan exit. Yeah, exactly, as fast as it can get here. With the Store once though, it's just there, we can bring it back in minutes and in fact we actually had a kind of, not funny, but interesting incident that happened early on where we kind of had an whoops incident where somebody deleted a VM and with Store once, we already had it there and we were able to recover it in minutes and have it working again which was not something we were able to do in previous iterations. So it's really RTO is your primary driver as opposed to RPO. Yeah. And Patrick, I'm sure you see it all over the board with customers, right? Yeah, absolutely. His whole environment is based on this digital content that's the lifeblood of what they're doing as a business and what they're delivering to your customers. So what we're seeing in the data protection standpoint is that more apps are mission critical, right? They're moving from business critical to mission critical, but RTOs and RPOs are definitely more aggressive month by month, quarter by quarter. People are moving from days to hours to minutes and they want to have access to more data that's near line and online so you can basically restore that right away. So we're seeing people architecting solutions for Store once where they'd want a couple weeks, maybe a couple months of data stored on that from a backup perspective. Now we're talking, having conversations about three to five years, seven years, 10 years, right? So definitely a paradigm shift in terms of data protection. I think the clouds changed that a lot too. Let's talk about that a little bit. I think, you know, because the cloud there's not really a concept of tape per se. I mean, I know, you know, some providers have a delayed, you know, kind of recovery type mechanism, but I think in general people are assuming you've got the data on disk or, you know, available somewhere and you're able to recall it, right? And, you know, almost any cloud provider, I think today is structured that way and has some kind of object storage where you can back up to, but it's an online situation, right? And I think that's kind of become the new standard for the expectation of, you know, being able to recover. It's dumping it into an object store and being able to recover from that. Yeah, well, I like to say backup is one thing, recover is everything. So there's a software component that has to go along with that. And what about tape? You're using, I mean, you must be using tape in your business, right? We do still have tape, but I think where it makes sense, we're trying to get rid of it. You know, we obviously there's a lot of physical nature with tape, you know, for us, it's also manpower you have to have, you know, there's a lot of manpower involved in just managing tape and whatnot. So where we can, you know, especially strategically in our data centers, we're trying to get out of using tape and using, you know, disk-based. But for long-term archiving, long-term retention with your digital assets, obviously you would tape for that. We definitely have scenarios at the studio where it's still used for sure. But obviously not for backup, right? No, yeah, yeah. I think, you know, with my team, we're starting to think of the notion of backup, maybe in the traditional sense, it's kind of going away. Cause I think when people think of backup, they think tape, they think these scenarios. And I think it's, you know, it's changing to more of a, you know, having various generations on disk. So you have the concept of, you know, being able to go back in time. Near real-time recovery. You know, time machine for the enterprise. Yeah, we talk, when we talk to customers, it's usually around the areas of application, data protection or a service data protection, and then long-term preservation of assets as opposed to backup and archive, right? So they're, because they have a very different business processes around them, and then you can apply different technologies to the two of them. So in some, some technologies are appropriate for one, some are appropriate for the others. So we're, you know, we're seeing a lot of customers really focus on day one of how I'm going to protect that data, how I'm going to make data protection an automatic part of the infrastructure. So I don't have to have separate backup teams, separate, you know, specific processes. So this whole area of things being sort of automatically protected as part of the infrastructure is, it's definitely where a lot of people are going. I think that's a really important point. I mean, data protection has historically been a bolt-on, right? Oh, yeah, we got to protect the data. Yep. And so you're saying that you're finally seeing customers integrate data protection as part of the fundamental solution. Absolutely. The two things, so the two things that now I'm seeing from a fundamental part of the initial solution build out is data protection's built in, right? So you're seeing the techniques of snapshot and replication being melded with, you know, backup techniques like policy management, indexing and all that kind of stuff, right? And then the other sort of conversation we're having with people who put infrastructure in place is how am I going to get office in five years, five to seven years, right? So, because the amount, the size of the data sets are becoming so big that replicating data, data migrations, migrating your backup data are, yeah, they're difficult, they're difficult tasks. So people are doing a lot more planning ahead to understand how am I going to protect this data now, right, from a different set of scenarios and how am I going to sort of do some hardware, life cycle management from an infrastructure standpoint underneath that data as I go into the future? Are you a data protector customer? What do you use? Not currently, although we are, you know, we are looking at it for sure, yeah. Today, we're actually net backup, yeah. Yeah, okay, I mean, it's a lot of ways to skin that cap. Yeah. That's still not in your group, is it? Nope, not. Meg, just make it, I've been saying this for a decade. Data protectors should be part of the storage solution. I mean, it's, anyway. We work with them every day. It's fantastic. You guys got a tight relationship. Yeah. You know, we still get paid for it. So. Do get paid for it. That's good, okay, well, that's a start. Yeah, awesome. All right, let's see, what else? What's going on at the show this year with you? Oh, lots of stuff at the show. So obviously you heard about Flash, right? Yeah, we've heard a lot about Flash. Flash is fast. Yeah, it's great. Smoking fast. Yeah, so there's, it's fine. There's a lot of implications to Flash, even on data protection, right? So this is a big area for us. Obviously it's huge in the market. The media and the speed and what Flash brings to the table allows you to do some different things from data protection standpoint as well, right? So this concept of copy data management, you've heard this in terms of, now I can take copies of databases, copies of data sets, serve them up to UAT test development environment. So you know, your speed of development by having access to copies of that, you know, of that original production data set is being enabled by media like Flash. So Flash, you can do lots of random IO. You can, with modern architectures like 3-par for example, it's multi-tenant, right? You have quality of service on there. So now where in the past, you'd have to clone a number of data sets, copy them off, restore them from backups for the purposes of having a test data set. Now you can run all that on the same infrastructure. So Flash is great from a performance standpoint for speeding up your transactions, speeding up your database, your workflow. But there's a lot of other things that allows us to do to help the overall speed of development, which is kind of cool. So the copy data management thing's interesting. I mean, yeah, so Actifio is obviously popularizing it, Delphix is another one. The problem is they want me to rip out or not use my 3-par snapshots. And I love my 3-par snapshots. I don't want to put in a whole new infrastructure around it, so is there, I mean, the opportunity, I mean, you got a catalog in store once. I mean, maybe I could use that somehow, that technology. So that's what we're doing, right? So we're taking these techniques that you've had in traditional backup for years and then things that you have on primary storage, right? Snapshots and replication, but with the advantages of Flash, now you're able to do a lot more with it and bring in those two techniques together. We're doing it with software, we're doing it with sort of extensible protocols and SDKs on the infrastructure itself. So we're not introducing any sort of sand virtualization techniques or inline fiber channel type of virtualization technology. We're allowing you to do that as a part of the infrastructure itself. So we're combining things like 3-par with Recovery Manager Central and Store Once to provide those type of experience. I think the killer app there too is potentially is Test Dev, right? I mean, if you can take copies that are more current, give it to the, especially with Flash, give it to the developers, they're not working on N-minus three copies. Absolutely. And they're way more productive. What kind of discussions are you having internally? I mean, how do you service the developer community? Are they, what kind of pressures are they putting on you, Bill? It's probably the same things you've heard. I mean, agility, speed, I know for us, because we're big on the cloud journey right now in terms of delivering private cloud services for our customers inside Fox. One of the areas we're actively really striving for is to do some deeper integration with some of the dev teams where they've got kind of closed loop dev ops type cycles that they're developing with familiar tooling which is in the market out there, the Jenkins, et cetera. My team, we're definitely working on trying to integrate a lot of the automation we're doing around cloud with what they're doing on the Test Dev side to kind of create a nice, cohesive whole. So rather than delivering just a server to them, we can deliver an entire build environment and tear it down, build it up and tear it down dynamically. So you mentioned to store once customer, talked about RTO being really the primary metric that you're trying to optimize. So Patrick comes out to California, hits the beach, makes a quick sales call, writes it off. What do you want to know from him? What? Okay. I'm with you that half the time. So what kind of discussions do you have with Patrick around? Where do you want to go? What do you want out of the product? What do you want the road map to look like? Yeah, I think one of the things, as I said before, we're three-par and store once customers and I think where we see things headed in the future, we'd love to see even deeper integration with three-par and store once and we're actually having a discussion with my team before this and one of the things they threw out there like, hey, why can't we just combine them into one product? And I know right now they're separate, but maybe in the near future the notion of having this external device that's separate from three-par that you're moving to, maybe some of that gets melded together. And what does that do for you? It minimizes the need to manage another appliance. Absolutely. So it simplifies your infrastructure, tighter integration. So better reliability. Yeah, I mean, we're like a lot of technology shops in the sense that we're trying to squeeze as much as we can with the team that we have in terms of technology and still deliver a lot of services. So we're always looking to if we can take two and make it one or that kind of scenario for simplification, that's what we want to do. Two and more with less. But let me ask you a question. When you do more with less and you've dropped money to the CFOs, bottom line, do they carve off, do you get a lick off that cone? Do they say, hey, good, nice job. Here's a little, we'll take 20% of that savings and give it back to you. For us, it's just the slap on the back, the handshake that we did it. What do you see with that? I mean, from our product portfolio standpoint, we're simplifying, right? We want to have, I think we're in a unique position in terms of we want to be the best storage division inside of HP Enterprise, right? We don't want to be the best storage division standalone. So that affords us a lot of experiences that we can bring to the customer when you bring in the blades and compute and networking and storage. I mean, what you see up on stage with OneView and all of our element managers, it doesn't sound sexy at the end of the day, but basically having a same look and feel, the same taxonomy that you use for all of our products is like a huge simplification for customers, not having to learn new UIs and whatnot. So we have other competitors who, they're bringing seven, 10, 12 different architectures for primary storage to the table. We're consolidating that and providing customers the ability to, they can go in a cost optimized software defined deployment model. You can have appliances that are tuned in high performance. Same look and feel, same CLI, same utility, same data services, so we want choice, but it has to be simple because it's too much. Bill, what do you think about that whole software defined meme? Is that the future? Is it, as Patrick sort of implying, sort of the lower cost sort of software only model? What are you guys saying? Well, we're big believers in software defined. Like I said, we're kind of in it on the whole stack in the sense that we not only have hardware, we have software with HP, we're also doing a lot with the team around Helion OpenStack right now. And one of the big bets we're making is we think OpenStack's going to be big. I know internally when we've talked with a lot of the development teams, the idea of API defined infrastructure that's more malleable is tremendously exciting. So what are you doing with OpenStack? So right now we're actually, we're kind of in that early stages. Tick and Tire. Yeah, depth test, trying to get a feel for it. Because one of the things I always say right now with OpenStack is it's kind of a two-way street. There's the infrastructure part of it that my team has to deliver, but the other side of it is really the developers, getting their hands around it, getting a feel for it, maybe even doing some platform as a service with Cloud Foundry, that kind of thing. And they're really developing for that platform and getting the most out of it. Because in a lot of cases, you're coming from a traditional environment where you had physical servers, you've put virtualization on top of it, everybody's kind of used to that, maybe a single VM kind of scenario, but when you move to something like OpenStack, you kind of got to rethink how you approach application building. Just think. All right, Gents, we're out of time. I'm going to leave it there, but Patrick, last word for you. Why HP? Why HP? I think we've got some exciting times ahead of us this year, right? So unlocking some velocity and value for everyone with HP Enterprise. Kind of like just to echo what I said before about, you know, we're a portfolio company that brings a lot of technology services to our customers. And at the end of the day, my bet is that standalone companies that focus on one thing like storage or one thing like network or specifically compute, I don't see a path forward for that over time, right? Customers are buying solutions and systems and converged, you know, infrastructure, how you see this, you know, hyper-converged theme, right? HP's one of the few companies that can bring all those elements to our customers as part of the equation. So that, for me, that's why I stay here and why we've got such a great technology path forward. Yeah, the 80s and 90s are about disintegration of IT and creating those silos and now we're seeing the reintegration. So, Patrick and Bill, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Good to have you guys. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.


Oh boy. Canada. What doesn't it derive from a Ganyetgaewer? It's village. As Indigenous people, we are used to our stories getting a little twisted. So listen up as we set the record straight. I'm Ganyetgaewer. Please join me as we hear from dozens of Indigenous people. Together we will decolonize our words and our minds on the Telling Our Twisted Histories podcast. You can find episodes on the CBC Listen app, or wherever you get your podcasts. From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanitha Srivastava. The question is, like, how are you working towards building something else? So when it comes to pollution, it's not just documenting that pollution is colonialism, but thinking what could be a different theory of pollution that's about making the world I'd rather be in. We've all seen the images, endless streams of plastic washing up on shorelines. Those are the plastics that end up in the guts of birds and fish in our food systems and eventually settle into our bodies. Our guests today are both Indigenous scientists who say we will never get rid of industrial plastics and chemicals. Yet they are surprisingly optimistic. They both run laps to address our climate crisis and say bringing an Indigenous understanding to environmental justice is necessary to moving forward. Learning to accept, live with, and even love the parts of us infused with industrial toxins is part of it. The real key, though, comes in the redefinition of pollution and chemicals to include colonialism at its root, to understand that our rain is laced with both toxic chemicals as well as racism. Max Liebaul joins us from St. John's Newfoundland in Labrador. They are associate professor in geography at Memorial University and the author of Pollution is Colonialism. Their work focuses on plastic pollution and marine food webs. Also here is Michelle Murphy who is part of an Indigenous-led environmental justice lab at the University of Toronto. They are a professor of history and women and gender studies and a Canada research chair in science and technology studies and environmental data justice. Welcome to both of you. So this episode already feels special because we generally don't have guests that know each other as well as you two do. You two are more than just academics. I know there's a deeper relationship here.  Well, yeah, that's very true. Max was the first person in academia that I met that had a similar biography to me that kind of came from a similar place that had to overcome obstacles in a similar way. And then working in a field, science and technology studies and environmental justice, we both do that. But that field can be super white. And there were very few Indigenous people, even people of color when I was younger in these fields. And so, you know, when I met Max, it was kind of life-changing. We also kind of look alike. We're like the same height. We're collaborators. We have similar interests in like walking our talk. So like our work is not just words, but must be actions. And so I really learned so much from Max in terms of like the practice and method side of trying to do anti-colonial feminist work. And yeah, well, you know, you see kind of pictures of us. We almost look like twins or siblings or, you know, we're definitely relatives of some kind. We just don't know how. The best compliment is at conferences when people mistake us for each other. And I'm like, yes, that is methodologically appropriate. Although if you actually want to talk to Murphy, they're like over there. It's very true. Yeah. So we are, we have been on a journey together about how to run labs, how to do a kind of anti-colonial environmental justice work, and how to be a person in universities, which are very, you know, racist, and how to live as human beings in a good way. And so it's a connected and deep project. I love the story of the two of you, because at first when you hear that you guys are connected in this way, it sounds like, oh, is there a mentorship or, but the mentorship clearly goes both ways. Definitely. Yeah, I feel like we're more twins, right? Even to the point where I had health issues the other day. And I should call Murphy to see if they had the exact same symptoms for this. So talking about your work a little bit, I think everyone listening has an idea what pollution is, but both of you see it slightly differently than most. And so I'm wondering, Murphy, can you tell us what pollution is? Ooh, well, Max has really helped me understand how pollution is an expression of colonialism, how it's a disruption to land body relations. It is premised on property and the kind of we could say white supremacist claim that, you know, the state or companies can put violence into the world without responsibility for that violence when that violence hits particular kinds of people's communities, bodies, that it's kind of okay to kill up to a certain level. And maybe the other way is, you know, we're tempted to think about pollution in terms of measuring carbon dioxide in the air or a particular kind of, you know, nasty chemical. And we are kind of taught by the sciences by the predilections of a government that pretends to regulate pollution, but doesn't that pollution is, you know, small chemicals and hard to see and difficult to get a handle on? But pollution is really something that's infrastructural. It's extensive. You can see plumes in the air, people feel it intergenerationally. It is something that's in our roads, our pipelines, it's connected to our consumption, it's in the factory, it's in the refinery, it's in the laws. So, you know, pollution is also something that's very extensive. It's not just a particle in the air. It's a whole way of arranging a condition of living. And so that is also what pollution is. And over time, I've come to understand through Murphy's work that pollution isn't just, you know, the substance that is causing harm and those harms, but also the finances that that enable that and the corporations and the regulations that let certain things be seen and other things just can't be seen because the, you know, certain types of knowing can't ever see those things. And the people and the events and the spirits all tied together, not as a sort of network that has like different balls and nodes, but as the same thing, right, as the thing, not these things aren't in relationship, they are the thing. And so when we say chemical, you mean all of that, that big ball wax. And so that's why like these little tweaks like, let's decolonize data collection or like, let's change how much pollution is allowable. Like that does not impact that giant nugget at all. Right. And so you actually need a very different approach. If you're going to address those things. Well, let's talk a little bit about that approach. Like, that voice might have been the well meaning environmentalist. What do you think that well meaning environmentalist misses when they don't understand pollution in this way? So I have a big section in my book, and I know Murphy has a lot of experience in this too, which is that if you skip over colonialism, then you think things that are good and well intentioned are automatically not colonial. But if you say do a beach cleanup, and you go on to indigenous land, and you clean that beach without permission, that's not indigenous access to indigenous land for non indigenous goals, even though it's benevolent. And that is colonialism. So this, the things that count as good and well intentioned and benevolent and environmentalism are frequently almost ubiquitously also colonial, like hydroelectric power. Well, that's actually putting methylmercure into Inwood fish around here. Or right, there's all of these sort of environmental goods that are also colonial bads. You were asking about what does the kind of good environmentalists do when they, and that they don't kind of realize they're kind of implicated in colonialism. Well, that simple environmental position might be, let's go to the state, let's go to Canada, the Canadian state or the US state and try to get them to regulate companies and prevent their pollution. But what that's not thinking about is that state is a settler colonial state, that what that action is doing is affirming settler colonial jurisdiction over land and life and including indigenous land and life. And so, right, pollution becomes colonialism to by the habits of trying to fix pollution is always affirming the settler state. And that settler state along with the company, right, and, you know, here in Canada, the settler state began as a company. It began as the Hudson's Bay company. In the United States, it began as the Massachusetts company. Here in North America, the settler state is built out of colonial charter companies. And so the relationship between this the state and companies is very, very tight. The state is made to enhance and support the company. And so when these two things are kind of working together, you know, they are part of a legacy of saying they have an entitlement to disrupt land and life. The company and the state work together in their affirming their entitlement to have no accountability and their right to just disrupt land and life with their actions. And that can be genocide. That can be taking kids away. That can be all sorts of things. And it includes putting pollution into the world. But that disruption can also be helping like beach cleanups and carbon credits. And those are still disruptive interventions on the part of the state that reaffirms the settler state and what counts as good and right and true. I guess even just who you're negotiating with.  Yeah, if your invaders bring in recycling, that's not a net good. That's still you're still invaded. That's still not great. And there's a question. Who has jurisdiction? Yeah, like I live on the Great Lakes. This is Anishinaabe Hone Noshone territory. What are the laws? Who has jurisdictions? Laws aren't just rules. They're ethical systems. They're systems of responsibility. So those the way the science is in the settler state get us to think about pollution is our physical objects. We kind of regulate them with law. But you know, thinking in our territories and out of our own traditions of thinking, any relation, any physical relations also an ethical relation. It's a responsibility. It's not just an attachment. It's not just an ecological connection. It is responsibilities of between fish and water, between people and fish, between air and people, between peoples and peoples are both human and nonhuman. And so that comes out of a whole different jurisdiction, a whole different epistemology. It's a whole different way of being. And so if we're not affirming that, then I think we're not doing anti-colonial work. Murphy, listening to you talk reminds me of reading some of your work. And just how run on sentences. Well, just how poetic it is. Sometimes you have this concept, um, altar life, which is, I mean, there's just so many beautiful lines in the work that I've read of yours. And can you explain alter life? Sure. So alter life is the condition of having already been altered, but still being open to alteration. So in our particular condition right now, all of us on this conversation have been profoundly altered by colonialism. We've all been profoundly altered by heteronormativity. We all have particular persistent pollutants in our bodies that have been there since we were developing fetuses that have participated in our development as beings. So we live in a condition of being altered. And some of those alterations are incredibly injurious. Some of them kill us. But that alteration isn't only negative. So we live in community. We might persist despite colonialism. We take hormones on purpose in order to alter ourselves. So alterations both already happened, but it's ongoing. And sometimes it's consensual. Sometimes it's non-consensual. Lots of times it's happening to us and we're navigating it. So alter life is about thinking about that, but trying to think about that in a way that doesn't stigmatize for being altered. You know, in Canada, in the conditions we live in of capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy, we tend to stigmatize and render disposable or as a site of further injury, any being or land that's already been harmed.   We live in a world where certain people are rendered disposable and they have to have the burden of intensive violence is coming at them from many angles. The world hostile to their existence. So alter life also has an ethical commitment, which is to value altered life, to have a loving relation to think as sacred wasted lands, injured life, life that has been had to come into existence in relationship to colonialism or white supremacy. So of course, that's another twisting long answer. Max is really good at you know, one of the complementary things about thinking with Max is I give like really long sentences. And Max is really, really much better at putting it in a nutshell. Yeah, I make the bumper stickers. And yeah, Shell drives the truck. His concept of alter life has been really instrumental to my theory of change, my idea of how change happens and letting go of these purity politics that are very, very prevalent in mainstream activism, including environmental activism, which is like, well, if you work for the man, then you can't possibly be doing activism or if an area has been so far altered, then it becomes the best place to have a sacrifice zone or something like that. And so I use the term compromise, which is which is heavily based on Murphy's concept of alter life, which is that yeah, sometimes you reproduce the crappy system you're trying to change because there's no outside of that system. And you can just release that to Jesus or whoever looks after that thing for you, that guilt, because if there's not, I mean, that's just what's going to be. So let's go and let's flourish in that compromise as opposed to feeling guilty about it. So I do some of my best activism as a university administrator for a colonial university on a place that is at one of the only successful genocides in Canada. Right. And that is where I've done my best indigenous activism. And I do anti-colonial science in a Western scientific laboratory. And none of those are oxymorons. If you think about alter life in the way that Murphy talks about it, they just are. And you just got to get on with things. This idea that we are part of chemicals or chemicals are part of us or, you know, that it's irreversibly changed us or changed our world. I mean, all of this could sound very all of this could sound very negative. But neither of you focus on the negative. Can you talk a little bit about that? Just continuously resisting and how you do that. I don't think it's about not attending to the negative.  Super crappy. But at the same time, I don't understand plastic as this evil wayward pollutant that is run amok and we're destroying the planet, right? Which really misunderstands a lot of those relations. I understand it as really old relatives that were plants and animals that were mining their own business, thinking about, do I want to be crude oil or do I want to be a diamond? Don't worry, I have another 10,000 years to make up my mind when suddenly they're rudely ripped out of the ground, go into a cracking tower and are put into this service that is against their nature and against the sort of relations and the natural law. And now they're bad relatives. And we all have bad relatives. You can't tell me your entire extended family is warm and fuzzy and doesn't give you horrific toxic problems, right? But they're still your family. And so even if you've ostracized parts of your family, you still have obligations in relation to them. And that really changes the playing field of relations as opposed to like annihilation as a relation, which a lot of plastic pollution activism is based around. So it's not about not dealing with the bad stuff. It's about eating the bad stuff and being like, yep, that's what it tastes like. I think two are both influenced by some of the work of Eve Tuck. She talks about damage versus desire based research. And in environmental justice, it makes sense, you know, the state doesn't care. The science is not lining up right. The studies aren't serving you. So what do you do? The habit is you then try to use your body and your suffering and represent that in order to prove environmental violence is happening or colonial violence is happening. And and that mostly doesn't work either. So then what we have is community after community, documenting their pain, trying to represent it and report after report. And the university coming in and sucking those stories out of people, getting publications, getting grants, getting tenure out of the suffering of people. So desire based work is a different theory of change.  And then the question is like, how are you working towards building something else? So when it comes to pollution, it's not just documenting that pollution is colonialism, but thinking what could be a different theory of pollution? That's about making the world I'd rather be in. So that can start with how you run your lab, how you collaborate, what your research is like, how you interact, how you treat each other, all the way up to how you represent the work, how you build community, how you build actions, how you support things beyond the university, like, for example, toxic tours, or legal challenges, or alternative systems of notification, whatever it is, right, you're trying to build something else. That's better, whether it's something small or something technical, as opposed to just sticking with we're going to show this violence in particular bodies. We know pollution is happening. You said the university uses these stories or this data or this info in their kind of way to better their stature or their positions. But Murphy, you've also written about leveraging data for anti-colonial purposes. So can you explain what do you mean by that? So the Environmental Data Justice Lab is Indigenous-led, Indigenous majority of the lab. And our work focuses on an area in Ontario called Chemical Valley, which is Anishinaabe Territory, and it kind of surrounds and is on the land of Amjanang First Nation. And the lab includes community members from Amjanang First Nation. So there's a lot of data that's produced by the company in the state that is not adequate to the needs of addressing environmental violence in Chemical Valley. So one approach would be let's make more data. Let's let's extract more numbers from bodies in order to show this violence is happening. Well, you don't need to do that.  And it's every day and there's an accident, a release, a flare. So then what our lab tries to do is take this existing data that's produced by companies, the state mostly that is produced in a bad relation and try to use it to show that pollution is colonialism, show the bad relations that are attached to data. And then can we attach data like about air pollution levels or health information that's almost always treated in isolation of one another and reattach it to one another? Can we put it under the jurisdiction of indigenous law and make that data work for people in a different way?  So I'm wondering how you navigate the colonial academic scientific institutions that you're dealing with or living with. I think it's similar to all BIPOC, queer, trans people, maneuvered spaces that are not built for them and are dominated by you know, an aggressive norm of a different kite.  All of I mean, all of those things are you steal all the stuff, you give it out. There's I mean, and all of these things, you do what they ask and exactly what they ask, even though you think it's dirty, you do all of those things, right? So I think the difference for folks like Murphy and I is that the more we progress in our career and the more autonomy and stability and the better we are at recognizing the unwritten rules, the bigger our jurisdiction gets in how we can do research in a very different way. So, yeah, so one of the most anti-colonial things I do in my lab, I think, is I saw a lot of Indigenous nations in Canada cannot hold grant funds on their own because they're not recognized to have like quote unquote proper accounting. So I hold the money and I do all the reporting and I do all the administration and all that sort of stuff. And that puts money and resources back into Indigenous life and land on their terms. I don't even use the partnership model, which is one of the most exalted models for Indigenous settler and academic things where like you partner together and you're equals. I am not equals. I am their financial grant. It's a sovereignty model. You're giving them or you're allowing them to hold the power. Yeah. With the exception of extractive models, I don't think there's an inherently best way to do anti-colonial work. Yeah. And then I also, yeah, like I do research as a plastic pollution scientist with, you know, mostly Inuit plastic pollution researchers who may not have degrees and it doesn't matter. And we make data together that answers their nation's questions and needs so that they can govern their lands in ways that matter to them. For maybe 30 seconds, we could just step back because I think that many people still believe that science is neutral. There's this great article by Mario Bryan from like 1999 that's called being a scientist means taking sides. And she's writing this as a scientist. And she says, as soon as I ask one question, scientific, there's infinite numbers of scientific questions you ask. As soon as you ask this question and not that question, you're aligned with some things and not others, some powers and not others, some interests and not others. Then you choose who you work with. Are you working with industry or you're working with community groups? Are you working with nobody? All of those are political decisions. Then you choose your metrics. Are you using in the case of pollution assessments that allow certain amounts of pollution to occur through a threshold model? Or are you using alternative methods that that measure harm in different ways? Those are political decisions. Who do you publish with? Where do you publish?  Or do you open access? These are all about reproducing some goods and not reproducing other goods. There isn't a single decision you can make as a scientist that isn't political. How you deal with bias, whether you deal with bias, right? All of these things. So can we talk about your labs? You know, what does an anti-colonial lab? You mentioned a little bit about what it looks like. I'd love to hear a little bit about your labs. Great. Well, the lab that we run at the University of Toronto, which I co-run with Kristen Boss, who's another Métis Indigenous Feminist scholar, it was inspired by Max's lab in part. And we had Max come and help us set it up. And we spent like the first six months just figuring out how are we going to come together, be in good relation? What are our values? So the lab is not just like a lab where like data is collected or like there's some microscopes or something. It's about kind of claiming a space inside the university and then asking how could we make that space operate differently? Can it have different ethics? Can it refuse extractive research? Who's going to be there? Is it limited to just students and professors? Who needs to be part of research? And so I think both of our labs start with these kind of really big questions about how to do research or do study in a good way or take action in a good way. Yeah, who needs to be there is a good one. You know, the question about who needs to be there is really opening up space in a very different way. Yeah, just had a tussle with HR about hiring a 16 year old who lives in the Arctic.   And luckily, the guys now getting paid what he's worth. But same deal, he's an expert. There's no one else who knows some of the things he knows, which is more valuable than degrees. So let's pay him like an expert. And what's his expertise? His expertise is to where to get the gull eggs. We need gull eggs. Where are they? I don't know. Nobody knows he knows. It's invaluable for your work. My lab, it does three things at the same time. One is we study plastic pollution. The other is that we're a collective, which means we're bound by ethics and each other's idea like wellness, even when we don't get along. And that takes a lot of work. And this is what Murphy also does in their lab. And then third, we're a methodology lab.  How do we do that in a way that is humble and in good relations? Okay, it's time to do my budgeting. How do I do it in a way that is accountable and in good relations? Okay, it's time to hire someone. How do I we only have one research question, which is how to be in good relations when we do this thing and we do it for everything. We don't imagine that we are going to fix the relationship between colonialism and fossil fuel violence in like a week or a year or a lifetime. So it's also super important that besides the research itself, the other project is how to be together in a good way. Well, how can we on the outside support and also how do you think you can help spread this idea of anti-colonial science? Often when people ask me like, where do I start?  And that means figuring out where are you? Whose territory? What's the histories? What's the presences? What's the jurisdiction? What's the law? Who are you responsible to? And what are you responsible to that you haven't been taught? And that work of figuring out where you are is the first step, you know, and and you have to do that in order to begin the process of being in good relation and understanding your responsibilities to colonialism, which are really different across different people, different sites, different lives. Yeah, so I've been working in this province of Newfoundland Labrador for seven years, and it took me four years to get invited to Labrador, which is a mainly Inuit and Inu part of the province. And that was because I had to do my homework and I had to show up in a good way until they invited me without me bugging them or asking them. And that also involved a lot of problems where I brought Metis and First Nation ideas of indigenousness. And yeah, those are not the same as Inuit.  Right. So yeah. And that took five years. But our work is so good and so tight now because it took that time and I did that. What Murphy was talking about, I would call homework, right? Doing your homework. So it's probably about doing homework and, you know, educating oneself, but it's also about starting a relationship with, you know, the nations or the nation or the communities of where you are living. Yes and no. I mean, in many ways, those are the same things, but it's it's there. I would not say that it is necessary or even desirable to reach out to indigenous communities as an academic. In fact, I would say just don't just just work on your own discipline in your own area and how it benefits from colonialism and how it's related to local things and is already, you know, totally enwrapped in those things. That'll that'll take you at least five to seven years. And when you're done that, you will probably realize that maybe you are not the best person to go bother in a nation or something like this, right?  Or, you know, so so I mean and sort of in line with the like, actually it's not inherently good to go do indigenous partnership. I also don't think it's inherently good and I don't feel the drive to share what an anti-colonial science should look like. I model it if people want it. They knock on my door. I provide a lot of videos and blog entries and protocols and open source things so that people actually don't need to talk to me directly because I'm busy like doing the work because there's no universal recipe. Yeah, right. That's why you have to start where you are and figure out where are you and what are your responsibilities. And so, you know, when you say, Benita, about building relations, like the relations, it's not about building relationships. It's about figuring out what your responsibilities are and then beginning to act on them in a good way and then relationships emerge out of that. Yeah, I think what a lot of academics don't understand when they talk about building relations is that they already have them and they are 99% not good and they were there before you showed up and you're still participating in them. So actually, you don't have to build them. They are super strong and solid and maybe actually you want to change them. Yeah, maybe you got to stop some of them and take some apart and do some dismantling. That might be some first actions. Yeah, thank you very much for taking the time today to be here. Thank you Benita. It's good to see you, Max, as always. You too. My mind is blown after speaking with Murphy and Max not only are they brilliant, they're poetic too. I'd love to hear what you're thinking after that conversation. I'm on Twitter at right Benita that's at W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A and don't forget to tag our producers at ConversationCA. Use the hashtag, don't call me resilient. And if you'd like to read more about Indigenous environmental justice, go to theconversation.com. We have all kinds of information in our show notes with links to stories and research. Finally, if you like what you heard today, please help spread the love, tell a friend about us, or leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. It was made possible by a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Benita Sruvastava. Our producer is Susanna Ferrera. Our associate producer is Ibrahim Dyer. Reza Dyer is our incredibly patient sound producer, and our fabulous consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. Lisa Verano leads audience development for The Conversation Canada, and Scott White is our CEO. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water. Thanks for listening, everyone, and hope you join us again. Until then, I'm Benita, and please, don't call me resilient.