Welcome everybody, welcome to this year's Woldoski Forum. I'm Henry Brady, I'm Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Woldoski Forum is the premier intellectual event of our year at the Goldman School. It's a forum in which we try to bring new perspectives and new ways to think about public policy into the public limelight. We're really thrilled today that we have a superb speaker who will do just that. The forum is named in honor of Aaron Woldoski. Aaron Woldoski is the founding dean of what was then the Graduate School of Public Policy is now the Goldman School of Public Policy. I think it's fair to say that in addition to being a brilliant intellectual president of the American Political Science Association and well-known for his work on budgeting and many other matters, Aaron was a controversialist. He liked ideas that were new and novel and controversial. I'm sure that he would have been thrilled to have this presentation today that puts forth what is considered by many a controversial idea, but an idea whose time perhaps has come. We've seen just in the last week with the verdict with respect to Derek Chauvin, the problem that we face in America that 150 years after the Civil War, we are still dealing with the problem of racism in America that 50 years after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, we're still dealing with the problem of racism in America. This is in some sense, the third reconstruction we've had as Americans. And although we've made progress, we certainly have not solved the problems that we faced. Let me just tell you that you can submit questions as we go along to goldman.school-woldoski-questions and that's throughout the event on the Q&A panel, which I think appears on your screen somewhere. I hope it does. So having said that, let me introduce our speaker. Dr. Mary T. Bassett has dedicated her career to advancing healthcare and health equity. She is currently the director of the Francoise Xavier Bagmoud, or FXB, Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. And she's the FXB Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prior to joining the FXB Center, she served as New York City's Commissioner of Health from 2014 to 2018. So she brings both practical and academic experience to bear on today's topic, the case for reparations for African enslavement, time for public health, and I should say maybe public policy to join the call. Mary Bassett. Thank you very much, Dean Brady, for that kind introduction. I'm really honored to give the Woldoski lecture. It's been an eventful week. As you mentioned, Derek Chauvin was found guilty. Three people of color died during his trial. One of two of them were children. One of them, Micaiah Bryant, just hours before the verdict was announced. And today, Dante Wright's funeral is taking place. So the legacy of holding Africans and their descendants in bondage continues to cast a long shadow. So the title of my talk is the case for reparations for African enslavement. And I asked the question, is it time for public health to join the call? And my question, of course, is a rhetorical one. And I'll tell you my answer right now. The answer is yes. My goal is to bring a public health perspective to the idea that restitution is due people of African descent in the United States. And I hope to bridge some of the conversations that are happening in the health field. For example, just a week or two ago, the Centers for Disease Control declared racism as a public health threat with discussions that are happening among economists and public policy experts. It was just over a week ago that the House voted to move forward with HR 40 that would establish a commission to develop reparations proposals and recommend appropriate remedies to Congress. The Senate approval will be a real challenge, but the bill has now moved further than it has in the past three decades. So over the next 40 minutes or so, I'm gonna think out loud about how I've come to see reparations as a path to better health and not as some far-fetched ideas. And at the end, there may be more questions than answers, but I hope by linking reparations to health that we can broaden the rationale for national reparations program. And I hope that my remarks will also be valuable to you who work in public policy so that you will feel compelled or at least interested in working with public health scholars. So today, public health has not joined the reparations discussion. The debate has been kept alive by activists, journalists, and academic settings. It is explored mainly by economists, public policy scholars, philosophers, historians. In my mind, this is a problem. A health perspective could help add supporters. It might help sway public opinion to have physicians speaking for reparations. And a health analysis could also substantively influence the way reparations are conceptualized, designed and rolled out. Equally, the engagement of the medical and public health community with the brutal history of this country will strengthen research in our fields. It will help us to reject the longstanding and uncritical demographic triad of age, sex, and race as if race were as fundamental and aspect of a person as her age or sex that allows for biological and cultural explanations for racial disparities. So now is really the time as the Dean has already said for us to engage with a much more direct reckoning with the U.S. racial legacy. And this legacy would acknowledge the power, money, access to resources, good housing, better education, fair wages, safe workplaces, clean air, drinkable water, reliable transport, healthier food, all of which translate to better health have been systematically denied to people of African descent in this country. I know that I'm a rather unusual Wodowski speaker. I'm principally a public health practitioner and not a public policy scholar, but I do share something with Professor Wodowski. Both of us grew up in New York City. My first home there was the neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, where he also grew up. And it remains today an economically poor neighborhood and it continues to have, or at least today has, some of the worst health outcomes in New York City. Years later, as a health commissioner for the city, I helped establish the Brownsville Neighborhood Health Action Center, which is pictured here, to begin to address some of these deep racial inequities. While we can't guarantee to any specific person a long and healthy life, it is a sign of structural injustice that across most, if not all health outcomes, black Americans do worse than whites. Why should a black baby be two to three times more likely not to survive its first year of life than a white baby? Why should a resident of Brownsville have a life expectancy that is 10 years shorter than a resident in a wealthy part of the city? So despite decades, in fact, centuries worth of data, we are nowhere close to eliminating these racial gaps in Brownsville or anywhere in our country. There has been progress. This graph shows a dramatic decline in infant mortality rates that occurred across the 20th century. But for some important indicators like this one, as infant mortality declined, the relative racial gap widened because the rate of decline was faster in the white population than in the black population. These are maps that I often showed as health commissioner in New York City. New York City is a very racially and economically segregated city by some measures that always ranks in the top five for the most segregated city in the country. You can overlay any number of health conditions. In this slide, it's HIV infection, drug overdose, childhood asthma, diabetes. And as you can see, the same neighborhoods light up irrespective of the health or actually just about any social outcome, educational attainment, employment, incarceration rates. And these are all black and Latinx neighborhoods. The biological mechanisms of these conditions are truly unrelated. What are the common drivers? Well, these are the neighborhoods that were historically redlined. And the residents continue to experience structural racism and underinvestment in these neighborhoods. I design the health action centers and neighborhoods like Brownsville across the city with a view that we couldn't address each disease outcome, whether it was cancer or diabetes or obesity or HIV and maternal and infant mortality. We couldn't address these separately because the root cause of health inequities were structural. And I knew then, and as I know now that this, what people sometimes called targeted universalism was not enough. The magnitude, the scope, scale of the health interventions that include many that I was involved in implementing even in developing were simply not up to the task. So while today I recognize that racism will not end with reparations, I can't help but wonder what reparations could do to bring us closer to an end of racial health inequities, which for many of us working in public health has been something to which we've committed our life's work. I also want to acknowledge that the topic of today's lecture for me is personal. And I hope you'll allow me to weave in some personal stories. People push back against reparations by saying this is old history or a history in which their own ancestors may not have played any part. They see no connection between the harm committed then and the realities of today. The United States has so sanitized its history that it's left out its brutality, but the people who lived through this and told their children about it have not forgotten. For black Americans, the question of reparations can't be separated from our personal histories. It's not a forgotten history. My father was born and raised in Henry County, Virginia, and I'm named for his mother, Mary Travis, who was born in the 1890s. And my grandmother was named for her grandmother. And this first Mary Travis was born in 1835. I hope you can see that. And she was at that time, maybe it's better easier if you can see that. That time she was 25 years old, Sam Travis, that's Sam Travis there in that line, was nine and he would become my father's grandfather. She was not enslaved. She's designated as M for mulatto and she appears on a page full of white marises. A historian friend explained to me that this likely meant that she was the consort of one of these marises. The 1860 census was the last census before the Civil War. And I know Mary Travis was free because she's listed by name. And slave people were counted. It was important to count them because their numbers increased the voting block, but they were listed like livestock, no names. In 1870, the first census after the end of slavery, Mary Travis appears again now with a black husband, Riley Parker. There's a story there, but I don't know what it is. But the point I'm making here is that I knew my grandmother and when we think of slavery as being so long ago, I knew my grandmother who grew up among people who had been enslaved. So it will only be after my generation that slavery will leave living memory. Of course, living, legal segregation continued and after World War II, my father went north to pursue an education and he married my mother, who was white. My parents' marriage was illegal in the state of Virginia until it was overturned, that law was overturned and by the Supreme Court went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1967. And my parents always traveled separately to visit my grandmother. I remember as a small child, yes, that's me. I was told that I should identify one of my father's sisters as my mother when we were out in public. And to this day, I remember the fear that I felt that I might get my family into trouble by responding to a simple question, where's your mother?  And I think it's fair to say that every black American has stories like this that involve fear. In the United States, the idea of reparations also has a long history. In the 19th century, Cali Guy House waged a national campaign. It was later picked up by the Garvey Movement and more recently, reparations has been championed by black nationalist organizations and individuals like the Republic of New Africa and the formidable Queen Mother Moore and Cobra and the December 12th movements appeared in force at the United Nations 2001 World Conference against racism that was held in Durban, South Africa and they called for reparations for both the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. The low level US delegation to that meeting joined Israel in walking out. For many people though, it was the essay by Tenehisi Coates in the Atlantic that brought the conversation about reparations to the mainstream. He anchored his essay in individual stories that allowed him to look back into history and he showed the centrality of enslavement to the emergence of the United States as a global economic power. And he showed how this legacy continued with subsequent discriminatory practices where a modest hand up was always derided as an unwarranted handout. Coates, quote Rush Limbao is deriding the Affordable Care Act as an act of reparations. And of course the recent allocation of aid to black farmers in the American Rescue Act received the same retort. Early 2021 saw the publication of From Here to Equality reparations for black Americans in the 21st century by William Sandy Darity and Kirsten Mullin and they tackled some of the more nettle issues raised about reparations including who bears responsibility and how to monetize the cost of reparations. And their thinking has greatly affected my own and I'm gonna use their arc framework to help structure the rest of my talk. But of course I recognize that this is not the only framework regarding reparations. As a footnote, if any of you read the book and I hope you will, I am inclined to include as beneficiaries all people of African descent in the Americas while Darity and Mullin limit the beneficiaries to people specifically of US descent. So what is reparations? Very fair question. And what exactly is meant by it? What do I mean by it? I'm gonna quote for you a 2008 document from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. And I'm gonna read it to you. The argument that they made went that reparations programs are meant to partially address gross and systematic human rights violations not sporadic or exceptional ones. The university of potential beneficiaries is thereby large and they probably suffered various and multiple forms of abuse. Part of what needs to be addressed in cases that are of concern here is not only the number of individual violations but violations that come about in systematic ways. Reparations in these contexts must not only do justice to the victims but also contribute to reestablishing essential systems of norms including norms of justice which are inevitably weakened during times of conflict or authoritarianism. So this definition really took the legal case for reparations towards mass atrocities such as genocide. And in 1951 there was a petition titled We Charge Genocide that made this case to the United States on behalf of black Americans. Genocide not because there was a goal to eliminate black people but because group membership was enough to get killed. And theorizing on what types of harms become worthy of reparations may benefit from public health input. There's presently a Lancet commission on reparations and it may add to some of these considerations. To me, it's clear that atrocities based on group membership are key. And I must mention the indigenous people of what became the United States for whom encountering European settlers resulted in genocide and land seizure. Today, midlife life expectancy is falling for American Indians and Alaska Natives. And it has been in successive birth cohorts since 1948, the birth year of 1948. But today my focus is narrower. I certainly would support a case for reparations by the Native Americans. Reparations are necessary when harm has been done that cannot be otherwise remedied. There are a number of options for response to ongoing harms, not least that these should cease. But past events are different. In this case, justice calls for compensation for nearly 250 years of African enslavement and a century or so of legal exclusion from full citizenship often enforced by terror. Of course, it can be difficult to disentangle the lasting impact of historical injustice like the stalling of intergenerational wealth due to redlining from ongoing actions, gentrification, housing discrimination that need to be addressed by contemporary policy and law. There are importantly situations where it's possible to reverse the harm. And when this is still possible reparative action, not reparation is needed. For example, the loss of Louisiana Waterfront and Manhattan Beach properties could be addressed by returning the property. That's still possible. In contrast, I think of reparations as restitution for historical harm that cannot be undone. And of course, there are also issues of scale. Many private actors, including academic institutions, are beginning to reflect on their own benefits from enslaved labor. A few years ago, Georgetown University established a fund for monetary compensation to the descendants of 272 enslaved people who were sold by a Jesuit priest to support the university. But the scale required to match the harm inflicted by enslavement and what followed can't be addressed without action of government. It is on the federal government that Darwin and Mullen placed responsibility. And I agree with them. They proposed this acronym, ARC. And I'm sure it's an allusion to the famous quote from Martin Luther King, the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. A is for acknowledgement. R is for redress. C is for closure. Specifically, acknowledgement is the admission of responsibility for an atrocity or atrocities by the culpable party. And here I'm quoting Darity and Mullen incorporating an apology. The admission must also be accompanied by a guarantee to make restitution in as rapid a fashion as possible and to guarantee against recurrence. Redress is the provision of restitution, typically in the form of a monetary compensation enclosure. Means that there's a joint agreement by the victimized community and the culpable party that the debt has been paid and that no further group specific claims will be made unless new atrocities take place. So I'm gonna spend some time on each of these and bring a public health view to them. I'm gonna begin with acknowledgement. So acknowledgement is a form of truth telling in medicine and in public health that includes admitting our role in propagating scientific racism, which lent the sheen of science to white supremacy that still lingers. We permitted human experimentation. There are terrible stories of which many of you are probably well aware the infamous US public health service Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in the Negro male and others that are less well known. In the case of Tuskegee, despite the advent of effective antibiotic treatment in the 1940s, these black men, Alabama sharecroppers remain untreated for syphilis from 1932 to 1972. And the study ended when concerned the scientists contacted journalists. There's Marion Sims, a physician who procured enslaved women to perfect his repair of a birth injury called the vesicle vaginal fistula. He's referred to as the father of US gynecology and his statue was recently removed from Central Park by the city, but his name is chiseled in the lintel of the building that houses the New York City Health Department along with Robert Koch, who is credited with the germ theory and Moses. Yes, that Moses and many others. So there's Henrietta Lacks, whose cells founded the healer cell culture line without our knowledge and consent. And beyond this, the actions of organized medicine to maintain separate and unequal health medical care exclude black physicians from practice. The AMA, the American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and they apologized in 2008 for their decades long collusion with segregation. So atrocities are acknowledged and should be acknowledged and apologies are due. But beyond these cases of abuse, outright abuse, reparations may discussions may also find value in public health data. This is a fact. There's not been a single year in this country dating back to colonial times that black people have not been sicker and died younger than whites. These data should compel the United States to acknowledge its own culpability in this loss of health and lives. There's no intrinsic reason for this group level variation in health and life expectancy by which I mean either biology nor culture. Yet there's never been an acknowledgement and informed that Darity and Mullen would envision no admission of responsibility for government laws and policies that contributed to these health inequities. I could spend a lot of time on this slide because there's a lot here. It shows premature mortality rates from 1960 up through the early years of the knots. And it shows these separately in the solid lines are people of color. The broken lines are the white population and these largely on a non-overlapping groups are displayed separately by income quintile of county of residents. So this is a slide that enables examination of both the measure of income and a classification by race. Krieger and colleagues who put together these data quite time-consumingly, I should point out they've never updated it. They point out that it was only in 1995 that black men achieved a stable life expectancy of 65 years. The white population achieved this in the 1940s. Black women in the mid 1950s. And it was only in the early 1990s that the highest county quintile of income for the population of color achieved a premature mortality rate equivalent to the lowest county quintile of income for the white population. I still find this really shocking. But here is what's really important that these gaps have narrowed and widened in response to the policy environment between the 1960s and 1980 associated with a whole host of progressive social policies that had a racial justice effect. The gap between and premature mortality narrowed although they have since widened again and in any case have always remained too wide. This idea that blacks have adverse patterns of disease because of innate inferiority. Although the reason behind this has shifted from outright genetic inferiority to cultural inferiority is has still to be fully rejected by the field of public health. These perspectives also have a long historical resonance. These are two adversaries from the 19th century. In 1896, Frederick Lucid Hoffman, a German immigrant himself argued in his book that the high rates of disease among descendants of the enslaved was evidence of lack of fitness. He even predicted that the black race unable to cope with emancipation would become extinct. And challenging him is W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the giants of the 20th century intellectual thought who painstakingly collected data from black wards in Philadelphia, tallied them by hand and showed convincingly that it was impoverishment that drove these odds of early death rather than any innate racial propensity for ill health. This kind of tension still persists in the field. Du Bois's work now over a century old really stressed the centrality of the environment. The relationship between race, income and health has been long well-established, but in this past year, which has me here in Boston talking to you by video link has really displayed these. And I really have to say something about COVID-19, which really dramatically showed how wealth and whiteness protect health. It brought into sharp relief how a novel virus to which no humans were immune could take a stunningly unequal toll. The first case was reported in the United States in January of last year, the first death at the end of February by mid-March. Milwaukee reported that all eight deaths reported among Milwaukee residents that were African-American at the time they were 15 deaths statewide due to COVID. And across the country, the initial highest risk was among African-Americans and similar observations to Milwaukee's amplified by journalists followed from Atlanta, Chicago and Moreland's other cities. Compared to their presence in the population, black and Latinx people were overrepresented among cases, hospitalizations and deaths. And in May, when the data finally were made available by the Centers for Disease Control, it was clear that these differences in risk were large, ranging in aggregate two to four fold for black people as compared to white people. This shows younger adults had extraordinarily high risks. These rate ratios would all be one if they were the same for all groups. And you should probably ignore American Indian, Alaska Natives. Those are small numbers and they're very unstable. Lots of problems with the data there. But in any case, you can see among young to middle-aged adults, black and Latinx, mortality ranged seven to nine fold higher. There it is, nine fold higher, meaning that the difference in risk of death was nine fold higher for between 35 and 44 years for black people, regardless of gender. They didn't make the data available by gender at that time. So the fact that these differences emerged so early, just weeks after COVID had begun its lethal surge before any of us understood much about how to protect ourselves. This is before wearing face masks had been recommended, tells me that the risk was structural, not the sums of thousands of personal decisions. And the size of the disparity is really big. This is another way of putting it, if you don't like the relative measures, perhaps this way is more graphic, but just to point out that numbers of chronic diseases that do occur among black and Latinx people, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, which we know affect the outcome of COVID among people who are infected. These are really common conditions. They are common among all Americans. And the magnitude of the disparities by racial ethnic group are much smaller than the magnitudes that we saw on the risk of hospitalization and death through to COVID. And this supports the idea that it was mainly exposure to COVID-19 that drove racial disparities, not the likelihood of dying once exposed and what structured the risk of exposure? Well, what it means to be black, living in a segregated neighborhood in crowded households, working low-wage jobs that were considered essential. These racial divides in everyday life are so longstanding that they've come to be seen as natural and permanent, but they're not. And public health, we often stop right here. We hand it over to the policy people and we don't do much to say how we should redress these problems. So I'm gonna turn now to a remedy, reparations. And Darity and Mullen argue convincingly that the contemporary black-white wealth gap is the most important summary metric of the impact of many centuries of enslavement and discriminatory treatment. And the most important actor is the federal government. They assess the wealth gap at something like 10 to one. It's much bigger than the income gap. And to eliminate this gap, which can be viewed as a product of uncompensated labor, many generations of exclusion based on 2019 data, which is more recent than their books, data quoted in their book, would cost $850,000 per household in total, something like 10 to $12 trillion. It's a big number and it may be low. So what would this do for health? I ask this question because in political debates where there's a large price tag, for example, action on the climate crisis. And I forgot to mention that today is Earth Day. We see that health co-benefits, like in the case of climate, benefits from tackling air pollution, help us understand the true cost of inaction. The healthier lives that would follow a wealth transfer and either in the form described by Darity or others, may offset the large upfront financial costs. The US, of course, spends more than any other nation on healthcare, the proportion is headed to 20% of GDP. So a public health analysis would be important to designing a plan and calculating what different measures would cost after consideration of potential health benefits. There also are two recent studies that do the thought experiment of eliminating the black-white wealth gap and imagining what effect reparations would have and whether trying to look at the magnitude of the potential health dividend. Modeling transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in Louisiana, Richardson and others showed that recipients of individual reparations would be less likely to acquire COVID-19 because of reduced exposure. And further that they would be less likely to transmit to others by one to two thirds. So this analysis argues that racism both accelerated COVID transmission and that addressing the wealth gap would reduce infection and benefit the entire population regardless of racial classification. And another analysis which is still being finalized based on a longitudinal study called the Health and Retirement Study includes over 40,000 adults who enter at age 50 or older. This study permits examination of the impact of wealth that study entry to risk of subsequent death. And in this cohort of middle-aged adults, the risk of death before age 65 years was twice as high as in black participants. Some differences in wealth appear to largely account for these unequal chances. If reparations eliminated the wealth gap prior to study entry, the black, white premature mortality rate would be reduced by about two thirds. So addressing wealth earlier in the life course then at age 50 would probably have an even larger impact. So wealth has a bigger impact on health than income but controlling for wealth, income and education in this modeling experiment eliminated the racial health gap. Wealth as distinct from income underlies stability. It makes sense I think almost intuitively because that it would have a larger impact on health than income which is just about the flow of money. It protects people from economic uncertainty and so wealth is health promoting. It also has intergenerational effects. Parents can plan and pay for their children's education. It may be that failure to look closely enough at wealth differentials accounts for the fact that the more readily available indicator income not infrequently fails to account for racial differences.  So moving on to action we really are talking about an issue of political will. And now maybe 15 years ago it was estimated about 5% of the white population thought reparations might be a good idea. So it's gone up a lot. It still constitutes a real minority but reparations is a state project in the Caribbean. They Karakum established a reparations commission in 2013 that has called upon European governments to offer a formal apology, cancel the debt, support public health crisis resource to address a public health crisis in the region. And of course, there have recently been local reparations programs. Most recently Evanston, Illinois voted to create a fund to compensate black residents for policies. This was not monetary but housing vouchers for residential segregation. But many people question whether a reparations program that goes beyond apology and truth-telling to include monetary compensation is even feasible. And they argued that advocacy should focus on universal initiatives. This would include baby bonds or expanded and improved Medicaid for all that would guarantee a government run health insurance program or even basic income. These would have a larger impact on the black population because of its historical disadvantage. And crucially, these approaches might be more strategically and politically palatable. It's argued, for example, that social security and Medicare survive in part because they are universal. Darity and Hamilton proposed baby bonds in 2010 and more people are talking about them now. These are investment accounts established for all infants. The amount given at birth's key to the family wealth so that babies born into low-income families get larger grants and babies born into richer ones. And up to 50,000 may become available to that child when they reach adulthood.  And the cost is estimated about 80 billion a year. So this would reduce the racial wealth gap quite substantially. Darity and Hamilton estimated that it would go from one to 10 to one to four. And I think these are not a bad idea, but I really don't see these as mutually exclusive. Income inequality has hurt all many people, both middle and low income of all races. These universal approaches, however, are not motivated by a desire to redress the injustices done to the African, a descended population in the United States. Additionally, something else that I'm thinking about is the problem that whether action at the individual level will be enough. Even if we agree that group membership, in this case being of African descent, is it should be the target of a special reparations program. The harms that have resulted have occurred not only at the individual level and they extend beyond the inability to establish economic security. Monetary reparations, for example, wouldn't address exclusion from political power, disruption of individual connections, mass incarceration, discriminatory treatment, in access to credit, the living of penalties and fines, all of which led to blighted communities, not only deprived individuals. So I'm not sure where collective reparations would be, but in public health, we certainly take an approach to a collective view of the achievement of health. We don't create healthy populations one person at a time. And similarly, we may not be able to repair and regress the damage of slavery one person at a time. And so that is what I have to say about redress. And to be honest, I don't even know if at this particular moment we can speak about closure because of course, as I said earlier, this talks of the acknowledgement of having reached a satisfactory act of compensation and the decision that no further claims should be made, but we are still working on acknowledgement. And I'm really hopeful that there a process has begun in which we relearn our history. This was partly triggered by the execution of George Floyd and the agonizing video, which we've all now seen on loops from varying different angles, and which led to a global outpouring in which you, Dean Brady, have referred to as perhaps triggering a third reconstruction. I do acknowledge that reparations will not fix racism, but a less impoverished black America where the historical origins of its burdens are acknowledged would be better placed to protect the future of the United States. The metric for closure, in my view, should not be the racial wealth gap. I would propose that it be the racial health gap. When we have eliminated racial health disparities, we will know that at last we have mitigated the impact of racism that remains written on our bodies and this won't be quick. Damage begins before birth and extends long into adult life and it will take longer than it takes to establish a fund or write a check. But until racial disparities no longer affect the life, the length of life or the ability to be healthy, equity will remain theoretical. U.S. history was only possible because black people were viewed as less than human. The United States, sorry, the New York Times, they're beginning to be a voice for data actually, recently tallied up racism's toll in excess deaths. If black people had died at the same rate as white people since 1900, over 8 million deaths would not have occurred and many of these deaths were premature deaths at much younger ages. Today in some black neighborhoods, including Brownsville in New York, half of the deaths would not occur if they had mortality rates of higher income neighborhoods. So the question remains, can reparations be a step in the right direction? And as I began, the answer I believe is yes. I'd like to thank people at FXB with whom I've had discussions about these ideas. Also, Sandra Galeo, with whom I wrote a short piece earlier this year. And that is indeed my daughter who embraced reparations long before I did. Thank you very much. And I will stop sharing and we can begin having a conversation. Dr. Bassett, thank you for that really powerful case for reparations and the reason we should think about them. Let me ask you, how do you see this occurring? I mean, I could imagine different mechanisms. First of all, let's just note that 10 to 12 trillion dollars is about half the GDP of the United States. It's a little more actually. Current GDP is about 21 trillion. So the amount you were talking about is roughly half. So it doesn't even seem vaguely feasible. It would be all done in one year. No, the Darity and Mullen recommended be done over a 10 year period. Okay. So I mean, the 10 years is interesting number because that'd be about a trillion. We know from our recent COVID experience that a trillion dollar packages do get through the Congress for various purposes. So that seems like at least it's feasible. The second question that was how would it be done? So I could imagine an approach where you would give accounts to just adults, although perhaps maybe it would be better to give accounts to younger people and especially babies and to make sure that they grew up with the notion that there was a trust fund for them. So I could imagine different ways you could do this. Well, the goal is to reduce the black-white wealth gap. So that's the metric on which the price tag is chosen. There are other ways you could try and monetize the cost of enslaved labor over the years or the value of the enslaved population, which in other countries actually, including the United Kingdom, the owners of the Caribbean plantations continue to be compensated into the 1970s for the loss of their human beings. But I agree with you that I'm personally not sure whether it should be entirely an individual amount of money and how it should go to households, how it should be divided between adults and children is also not clear to me. But I do think that there has to be some individual monetary payment, cash payment to individuals. That's been the tradition of reparations that have been undertaken elsewhere. It's what in the US, of course, reparations were given for the Japanese population that was put into these camps. And it also was, the cash payments were made to families of people who were victims of the World Trade Center attack. So I think that has to be a cash component. And of course cash is, well, I'm talking to people who know much more about this than I do, but cash is the most valuable thing to people rather than something that has monetary value, but cash is the most flexible and readily utilized. And that I think would be appropriate, especially because of this huge wealth gap that we've seen, but there might be strategies to divide it up so that I would like to see some collective action that would help rebuild what we know is so important to communities that kind of help create a foundation for more social cohesion for communities that have resources that wealthy communities take for granted and safe parks. Government should do this, but it hasn't. Swimming pools, things like that. Yeah, let me just pursue this question about children though. I mean, we have a terrible child poverty rate in America and it's an ongoing problem and it's partly because we underinvest in young people. And so I guess the question is, is that if you gave the money to a family, it's not clear how that would get necessarily to the children. We just have a lot of experience with that. So the question is, is whether children should be made direct beneficiaries and have trust funds created for themselves? I mean, I like that idea. The question is that it would have a long run in. I guess any real program would have to include having financial advisors made available to people and giving people the resources that they need to make sensible decisions around. But I think what you're talking about is directly addressing the problem of intergenerational poverty by making a transfer to the next generation effectively. And I think that other programs like conditional cash transfers have shown the importance of tackling intergenerational poverty. And I think that that makes sense to me. So... Some of our faculty members, Hillary Hoyns and Rucker Johnson have done work which show how much it matters to invest in children and that how by investing in children in the long run you get good benefits out beyond that. Hillary Hoyns' work on food stamps. So food stamps is not just about doing something that's charitable, if you will. It's also about actually investing in people and ensuring that they can have life chances that are better than they would otherwise have. And so... But how do parents, how do you empower parents to be able to provide more for their children when the financial wherewithal to give their children a decent life is so challenged. I mean, not only the people work multiple jobs that they're not around to parent their children because they're working two jobs in order to meet the material needs of the family. One of the things that I really liked about conditional cash transfer programs is that they weren't employment programs. They weren't trying to get the adults to work. They were trying to provide resources to families so that they would invest in their children. And I'm not quite sure how a trust fund for a child would accomplish that, if you see what I mean. Well, I think, but it's an interesting design question to ask because know that that kind of investment in children... Absolutely. And by the way, just cynically speaking, if there were large sums of money that suddenly fell into the hands of the group in America, I'm sure the financial services industry would quickly have people trying to provide them with advice. And I think the question would be not whether they could get it, it's whether they could get high quality and use... Exactly, well, I would hope that there's some way for there to be government oversight to make sure that people don't get swindled. But I mean, we've seen with programs. And so again, I'm not against that. Just I'm trying to say that if we look at the history, for example, of student loan programs, there have been institutions like Trump University and others, which have tried hard to figure out ways to get that money without providing high quality services, especially to low income and minority populations. We just know that happens. Absolutely. I mean, the level of student debt in this country is terrifying, actually. Let's talk a little bit about causal mechanisms. And this is a little inside baseball, but I think it's important. Is it certainly you cite research and I'm sure it's there. I know it's there. I know that life chances are increased if your parents have money. And so the question is, is though, do we know anything about what happens when somebody gets a windfall gain? Yeah, that affects life chances. Yeah, most of them. That's a really good question. There's something called the Great Smoky Mountain Study that was about an Indigenous, it's not about black Americans, it's about an Indigenous group that got a casino and everybody got more money and the impact on mental health was substantial and good. So most of the short-term impacts have been documented for mental health. But certainly in that case, it was clear that the mental health of the whole population, children and adults improved. Well, that strikes me. It's very important evidence in favor of reparations, making the argument that those kinds of windfall games really can be change makers. So that's really important. This may not be actually directly relevant to whether it's a good or bad policy, but it's certainly a good public health policy question. We know that people's life chances have a lot to do with the decisions they make with respect to healthcare and things like that. How can we do a better job in that arena? I think this goes beyond your talk, but it's a question that somebody has. How can we find ways to help people make better choices? Well, I really, I hope that I was making clear that I really trying to get us out of the better choice power to, you know, that people, it's people's personal decision-making that's driving this. The choices available to people are not good. And in terms of healthcare, there's a lot of evidence since it's been like 15 years since then Institute of Medicine. Now it's called the National Academy of Medicine published something called unequal treatment, which shows for a whole host of diseases that African-American patients were less likely to get appropriate diagnostic evaluations and less likely to get appropriate treatments than white patients. And that in 2019, another kind of quality study was done and it continued to show large gaps in quality of care based on race ethnicity, particularly for Black, Latinx and Indigenous people. So there's been a whole lot of focus on, I guess, on biased either explicit or implicit views of healthcare providers, but that leaves out the structural ways in which the healthcare system has been problematic. Some of this is just the ways in which the public system has been so deprived of funds. And the amount of money in hospitals that serve many Black patients available for capital improvements, even for buying what we would consider standard of care equipment, like equipment to do cardiac catheterization, which can sometimes be a necessary emergent procedure. These services are less likely to be available in Black-serving hospitals. So even if people go to the hospital because they have health insurance that enables them to get care, they're less likely to get quality care, and not only because their healthcare providers have ideas about what kind of care people should be entitled to, but also because the hospital to which they more likely go just simply isn't able to provide high quality care. Of course, many people don't have adequate health coverage, even people who are insured. In fact, I don't know how many of us know how much we're gonna pay when we go to the doctor. And so, you know, this represents a real barrier in getting adequate care. And I'm sure that people are aware that the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, I think it's the leading cause is related to medical costs. So, you know, I think we should start addressing those and because those aren't things that we can get people to be educated out of. These are structural problems that make it less likely for both in urban and rural areas for people to have adequate healthcare. Well, let's play that out because I think that's a really important point. And how do you think the wealth coming to a community? You've been commissioner of public health in a city. So you have some sense of what happens that why some neighborhoods, as you were just saying, don't get good healthcare and others do. Do you have strong feelings that if a neighborhood suddenly had more wealth, that you think providers would then show up on the doorstep of that community and actually provide good, high quality care? I think a lot of things could be a lot better if people weren't so impoverished and including access to political power would likely follow the ability to demand better services. But the whole problem of privatization of really kind of draining our public sector both in education and in health has disproportionately disadvantaged low income and particularly black and Latinx communities. So I do think that a community that had more financial resources is better able to defend itself. And I can't really show you the data to show that. I mean, just in terms of certainly personal trajectory when you have a parent who can take time off to go advocate for you at school who can speak the language of the teacher and can demand respect, they're more likely to be able to defend their child. And so I don't think it would be instant, but I think it would go a long way in a way reparations is a pretty simple idea. It's saying we have these huge inequities which we've been sort of chipping at, but not getting at. And it's going to take a much more substantial reckoning which includes an understanding of what enslave labor did in terms of the wealth of this country and not any longer seeing it as a sort of antiquated labor system that was fortunately thrown out by the Civil War, but seeing the way that it really proved foundational to wealth generation in this country and that the people were given absolutely nothing when they were told that they were free. Well, and you haven't even mentioned redlining and a whole lot of other projects perpetuated a lot of these circumstances. No, I mean, that's why they use the contemporary wealth gap because that captures all of that, right? Owning a house is really important to intergenerational transfer. It's probably the most important asset that a family will have. And Boston has the biggest wealth gap I've ever heard of and these are data from the Federal Reserve Bank and the average wealth of a white household is about, and this is assets minus debt, is about $250,000 and the average wealth of a black household is $8. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. When the Boston Globe published that people thought it was a typo and for people and it was only $8 because of the Caribbean immigrant population which immigrant populations are get up and go populations and they had more, they acquired more wealth than the native born population which had negative wealth. So conservatives make the argument that entitlement programs are sort of inherently flawed because they don't really solve problems. Could you speak to that a little bit from your general public health perspective maybe talking about Medicare which is an entitlement program or Medicaid which is increasingly so through Obamacare and so forth? Yeah, I mean, I think that the best evidence is the graphs that I showed the Krieger and colleagues put together that showed that during the great society programs yielded a reduction in the premature mortality. Right, everybody believes that we should get to live to be at least 65 years old that dying before 65 is too young. So that's why it's used as that measure. And during that period up to about 1980 when a different political dispensation took charge, the black, white premature mortality rate narrowed. So these are responsive to the policy environment. And it really, if you wanna make the case that Hoffman made way back in the end of the 19th century that people's health experience is exactly what they deserve that if they were more responsible that they made better choices, they would be healthier then it's very difficult to make a case that health is determined by not only personal knowledge but by the kinds of choices that are available to you. So I mean, at the time, the newly emancipated black population was living in, I mean, we all learn about what happened to European immigrants and the squalid conditions that were, awaited them in the cities. But people don't really talk much about what was happening to the black population as it moved to cities in an effort to escape the terror of the South. And it was much worse. So, when you live in impossible circumstances, you can't, it's not easy to ensure your health. Well, I think there's a growing strain of research which shows that one of the problems of being poor is that you're faced with essentially impossible situations and you have to make decisions that from the outside look like they're poor decisions. But in fact, maybe the only decisions you can make and you can't do any blaming people for making poor decisions in that situation does not fully comprehend the position they put in. Tell us about, I was intrigued by the notion that you said public health community has not embraced anything like this idea. And I'm surprised by that. I would suspect there would be a movement within public health to do so. Oh, there is. Okay, here. Okay. But I wouldn't say it's the majority. Okay. But what do you think the pushback is? Is it very conservatism, theory about people? What is it? Well, I think one of it is that a notion of the, I mean, in the midst of COVID, it's a little hard to make this case. But the main killers that will reassert themselves are heart disease, cancer, diabetes. And these are sometimes referred to as the lifestyle diseases. So that sort of created this notion that these are diseases that people get from being slothful and not looking after themselves. And because they're not caused by a communicable disease thing like a virus or a bacteria, which government should have some role in protecting you from. Government doesn't have any role in protecting you from a food supply that is increasingly too fatty, too salty, too high calorie. And is being marketed to people as I remember as health commissioner looking at what's marketed to people as breakfast in a typical fast food place. So if you could call it breakfast, but it would be all the calories you should eat that day. And so to call that and it's cheap and I guess tasty. So people really do believe that the person who should fix that is the person who makes the decision to go and buy their breakfast there. And that there is no responsibility to rein in big food, which frankly compared to big tobacco is really a giant compared to big tobacco. And that there is no responsibility to guarantee the healthfulness of our food supply. The idea of healthy food supply hasn't extended beyond toxins and microbes. So I think that it's based on this concept that we all are this individualist concept that we all get to make the choices that make us healthy or not. And it's just not true. And as you say, I was thinking as you were talking and I hope I'm not going rattling on too much but there was a series in the New York Times about diabetes and the reporter who did it talked to a woman who turned to him and said, you try living my life. I'm worried about my kid. I'm worried about paying the rent. I'm worried about being able to put food on the table. I'm not going to worry about that donut. I want to eat that donut.  And I mean, it's not, I don't know what, it has a logic, right? It may not be a logic that promotes health but it has some logic. In these COVID times, I think many of us have faced the issue of to donut or not donut. And I think they favored the to donut approach because it's just been hard. And it seems like something we can do when we're stuck at home. I want to talk about several things. One of which is, so you're an expert in public health and Sandy Darity is an expert in economics and you're coming up with a proposal for the black community. How should the black community be involved in thinking about whether this is a good idea or a bad idea and what form it should take and what aspects of it they want or don't want and how they want it done? Right, you ask a really good question because I often ask myself when we talk about the community like what exactly are we saying? So there are community organization, activist organizations or institutions like the church, settlement houses that have been around for a long time and survive in good economic times and bad. And I'm a firm believer that a key to any enduring policy and to its embrace is to reach out and have these conversations. And when we were in New York coming up with a strategy it was called Take Care New York and how to improve health in the city there were meetings held in libraries, mainly in libraries which are still spread throughout New York City to hear from people, show them data and ask them what they think we should do about it. And you learn a lot from that. But at the same time, I think that the whole question of reparations is fundamentally one about how this country is gonna come to grips with a legacy which is still haunting us and which we have not adequately addressed as the murder of George Floyd and the ongoing deaths of young African-Americans, mainly men, sometimes boys. Well, my question though, partly reflects what my students have taught me which is that we as elites can't be just going around saying we know the answer. No. And that you really need to reach out to the communities that are affected and ask them about their problems, their needs and how they would think about solutions to the problem. We can help. Absolutely. So the question is, how do we do that? And to make sure that in fact, this is something that works. I think that I agree with your students and a big part of when I had worked in the Bloomberg administration which was very courageous in terms of really innovative policies. In fact, we even implemented a conditional cash transfer program but it was not as good at reaching out to communities the way the communities of color in New York City were experiencing administration was stopping frisk, not conversations about how to improve health. So I think that that it's not only sort of a public relations job, it's how we make policies stick because we have to believe that the people who are bearing the burden of bad policies are interested in them and want to be involved and want their opinions sought and their reasonable questions addressed. So I am with your students on that one. Yeah, no, and I think they're right. We have a program that the goal is to empower a community, let's empower a community and not infantilize it by making the decisions all ourselves. I think that's really important. Let me ask you another question. So some people have said, well, how about other alternatives? And again, it's not maybe for us to say what those alternatives should be but we can at least mention what they might be. So are there other ways to use 10 to 12 trillion dollars? It might be more efficacious and let's presume that maybe the black community would find even more useful. Well, like, I mean, that's not to say that the 10 to trillion dollars could not be used in some collective way, like setting up something I've heard spoken of as a public bank or a mortgage-type facility which was not made available to black communities because of redlining. There could be a decision to do that. But the big tension here is whether there's going to be an idea that group membership being African descendant, descendant from people brought here to work as slave labor should be a criteria for having access or whether, as I mentioned earlier, if we say there's an uneven playing field and so if we push out a universalist program, which is what happened in the 60s that it would help everyone it would probably help people of African descent more and should we do that instead because it will face a lower bar in terms of the really resistance to the idea that people who descended from the enslaved are entitled to anything other than the ability not to be enslaved. And I have my own view on that which is really based more on a concept of justice than on a public policy. I really do think that we're witnessing how this is like a wound that won't heal and it's time in my view to try and heal the wound. I never imagined I'm a child of a progressive period in the United States and many of the benefits I got going to elite schools having becoming a medical doctor made me think that I would never witness the kinds of things that we have witnessed. And so, yeah. So it's a matter of justice in my view. Let's talk about structural racism because I mean, this is really speculative but suppose we had this program and given what seems to me to be the fact that structural racism is really, really hard to change, we've talked about some ways it might change because communities would be empowered with more resources and maybe that would help things. But suppose it really remained to a large extent in full force even after this program. I just can't imagine that it would. Okay, that's, yeah. I really do think, I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about structural racism and because I witnessed it in my work, the point that I tried to convey with those maps.   And I do think that it would go, I mean, I really do, I got interested in reparations because of my growing concern about the ability to tackle structural racism. And I really do think, you know, I mean, we've talked about it before, but I don't think that it's going to change.  He, in his inaugural address, he talked about white supremacy and in this most recent week and the wake of the chauvin verdict has been very outspoken about the fact that this is not proof that the system works. It is a step towards accountability, but justice will require more. So I think it depends on lots of things, including leadership. What's your sense of the sequencing of the arc, acknowledgements, reparations and closure? Can acknowledgement, does that have to happen in that order or acknowledgement? I think so, yeah, because that's the only reason that that's the, that's so that people could understand why reparations program is being undertaken. I, you know, I'm pretty well educated, but there are many things that I'd never heard of. I didn't know that in Wilmington, North Carolina, there was basically a white mob at the end of the period of reconstruction that attacked elected offices. And, or the, what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma where that was known as the Black Wall Street that was decimated. You know, that people need to understand that this hasn't just been a matter of hurt feelings. This has been, you know, it is truly the embrace of the idea that whites have rights that people of color, particularly people of African descent can't hope to have has had, you know, enable lots of really dangerous actions to take place against people who are human beings. And I just think that we have a history that many people just don't know well enough. As I said in my remarks, it's been sanitized and people don't know how brutal it was. Let's talk about closure, because in the first reconstruction, many people felt we freed the slaves, we solved the problem and that was not true. Then in the second reconstruction, which is in the 60s, many people felt, well, we've provided for voting rights, we've provided for fair housing, we've provided for civil rights, we've solved the problem and we hadn't. Not true, yeah. Right, you're wondering why they failed. Well, are you predicating closure on the notion that this is gonna solve all of those problems that we've had for 150 years? And what would that mean? And what do we have to worry about? I mean, I would argue that it's over when it really is over. I am not somebody who supports equality of opportunity, which too often has turned out to not reflect the level of opportunity in real life. I am interested in equality and outcomes. If you believe that all people as a group are equal, that doesn't mean that I have the same capabilities that you have or whatever. Not that every individual has equal capacity, but as groups, we should not see these group level variations. Then that's when we'll know racism is gone. It won't mean that we've overcome poverty. We just won't have a disproportionate share of impoverished people who are people of African descent. And that's part of that is that there was such an unequal starting point Yeah, I guess my point is that I'm worried that it is easy for America. You really think it's, these were political defeats if you ask me. They weren't simply like a reversion to type goodness. I mean, I would just, I would have no hope if I felt that this sort of drive to continue to see communities of color get the short end of the stick was something inherent in the United States. It was part of its founding. So that makes it difficult. But I hope that people are beginning to see that our current arrangements are hurting everyone. And I think that Heather McGee put this quite eloquently in her book, The Sum of Us. And what she pointed out that when that the people who get Medicaid because why it's a numerically a larger group in the United States, there are more white people on Medicaid than people of color. When these programs are cut, white people hurt. And the fact is that the levels of income and equality that have happened in the last 40, 50 years are not natural phenomena. They're related to policy choices of power and so on. Our way out of my league as a doctor, I have to confess. Yeah, I guess I'm just saying that it seems to me that Americans are incapable of saying that they've solved a problem. And noted on one of your slides, you said that at least Dardi and Mullins said that when it's over, it's over, they'll be closed. And I'm asking, how will they know? There's another way for us to say we've solved the problem which we haven't solved. Well, I think we'll have solved it when we no longer see racial health inequities. So I haven't proposed this to Dardi and Mullin but I don't think it's just achieving, vanquishing the racial wealth gap. It would be no longer seeing these real differences in access to a healthy, long life. So you have a different standard for closure than they do? I do, so far. I just wanted to- Maybe I'll convince them. Sure, sure. But yeah. How do you think this hits up against the American belief that basically, and it is very deeply embedded in Americans that we're all responsible for our own actions and that it's not systemic racism? I mean, you've talked a little bit about this but it's our own personal decisions and it's things like that. And I just want you to say a little more about that because I've gotten a lot of questions from people who say, maybe it's not systemic racism, it's other things going on here. I wonder what they're thinking those things are, that I would guess if they're not making the case for genetic inferiority, which people still make, right? Even with COVID, there was a paper published that maybe the reason that we're seeing more African-Americans infected is because they have different nasal receptors. Which was, you know, the only reason that people would believe that without looking at it more carefully is because of this enduring belief that black people are different. These people, by the way, and the questions so cite a series of black authors, they're conservative black authors, Jason Riley, Thomas Saul, and others who have made the case that, for example, entitlement programs are actually bad for African-Americans and for Americans in general. And that's who they're citing. Okay, I have to confess I haven't read them. But I know that the argument that somehow you undermine individual initiative by giving people a safety net. And I just don't, and I've looked after patients who are in homeless shelters or who are homeless. And these are not conditions of life that somebody wants. These are conditions of life that occur to people as a result of series of events, including mental illness and drug use. But also, you know, at least in New York City, the majority of homeless people are families. They can't afford the rents. And so, I mean, I would say that if we lived in a society where people had access to the resources for a decent life on the salaries that you can make as a fast food worker, then I would agree that there's no need for people to get, you know, forms of support. But we don't have that kind of society. We have far too many people who simply can't guarantee that they have things that we all agree are part of what goes into having a dignified life. Now, you can say it's their fault, but I just don't see where that gets us as a society. We're not yet at the point where we just think that people should die on the street, but we're accepting that people have lives that have been so hampered by their inability to access, you know, what I expect.  And they think that they got it from by dentro of their hard work. This is a sort of a mythology that exists very widespread in the United States rather than by virtue of the resources that they were born into. And I think I'm proud to say that I'm part of a school which has really done a lot of research which suggests that in fact, some of the conservative perspectives don't hold up to scrutiny and that there actually are reasons to believe that entitlement programs can, as I say, with the Hilary Hoyns works, the Ruther Johnson work, others on our faculty have shown that in fact, those programs do actually help people and their life chances and that the presumption that they don't, the ideology that they don't needs careful scrutiny and is maybe just wrong.  Oh, really? Oh, gosh! Just like that. I've enjoyed this so very, very much. I've learned so very, very much. And I think you've done a fantastic job of putting forth the case here from a public health perspective. And I thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Dean Brady. It's really been wonderful. Interesting. And food for thought. So thank you to many questioners. And it couldn't come at a better time. These are things we need to think about. And I would suggest people go back and read the history of reconstruction to see exactly how we made choices as a nation, tragically and sadly, that created the conditions that we have today. And it's not because people lacked initiative. It's because they were systematically oppressed and that oppression has continued to this very day, maybe sometimes indirectly because of the lack of wealth accumulation, but sometimes directly as well. So I think it's worth reading that. Anyway, thank you to everybody for coming. Thank you to you. And there'll be a recording available at www.uctv.tv slash public dash policy. And so you can hear a recording there. Remind, I wanna remind you to sign up for the panel event, which we'll discuss this in more detail at goldman.school slash willdofsky panel. And of course it's part of a test here to see if you can spell the word willdofsky W-I-L-D-A-V-S-K-Y. So thank you so much for tuning in. Again, thank you. Dr. Bassett, it's been wonderful and I really appreciate you spending the time with us. Thank you.


Joining me now is Drew Schlissel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi. Hey Drew, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Dave, great to be here. Great to see you. All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, zero trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword. And now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate. What's Wasabi's take on zero trust? So absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention. Wasabi's take is zero trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places where the bad guys are getting in. And you know, I think of zero trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and you know, design and your zero trust. And you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure. So we're going to talk about that. There's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew about immutability and air gaps. I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics. How do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? So in terms of air gap and immutability, right? The beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right? To have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data. You need to have a copy stored offsite and that copy needs to be immutable. And we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because sometimes people don't understand.  You're not building on other people's public clouds and storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that. Tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. Yeah, I appreciate that. So there's definitely some misconception. We are our own cloud storage service. We don't run on top of anybody else, right? It's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard. We interoperate with practically hundreds of applications. Primarily in this case, right? We're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage. And so we've made it really simple. In many cases, you'll see Wasabi as listed in the primary set of available vendors and put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say, multi-factor authentication and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. I mean, we just heard from David Friend. They're my math right. He was talking about one-sixth the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that. How are you able to achieve such attractive economics? Yeah, so I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right? Less expensive than the hyperscalers. And we talked about this at Veeamon, right? There's some secret sauce there. And we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity. And the fact is we're also not having to run a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time. So we don't have to worry about overhead to support up and coming other services that are perhaps gonna be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right? They see the fact that their data is growing, 40, 80% year over year. They know they need to have some place to keep it secure. And folks are flocking to us in droves. In fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What's the feature called? Can you double click on that a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. So the term in S3 is object lock. And what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape or form. The application can't change it. The system administration can't change it. Wasabi can't change it, okay? It is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right? In adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors. And I named off a few earlier. And the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security, right? When you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right? They can't take away the data. And that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? Yeah, yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API. So if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data. Beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right? That's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right? Point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, for whatever, 30, 60, 90 days. And then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you're off and running with Wasabi. I talked to my open about the allure of object storage, historically, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? Oh yeah, absolutely. And we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up. I forgot to answer something earlier, right? You said that immutability is a feature and I wanna make it very clear that it is a feature, but it's an API request, okay? So when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right? It's typically something that the other folks charge for, right? And I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you wanna take a sip, there's no charge.  And that's an important thing because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects and you want to get a list of those objects or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data. With Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. Excellent, thank you for that. So you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? And what, you know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe a paint a picture for us an example or two? Sure. So again, we just do storage, right? That is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors whether it's, you know, Active Archive, backup and recovery, IoT surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right? Those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata. They just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right? So just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right? You literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API. Getting started is incredibly easy, right? We offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte. And most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right? It's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty. I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're a global company, right?  We did talk about sovereignty, Drew. This is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of an industry historian. When I look back to the early days of cloud, or I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud. And they would go out and for instance, I know one bought a competitor of Carbonite and couldn't figure out what to do with it. They couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud. In part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale. To see that you guys have done that is, I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower client's cost and solve really nagging problems, like ransomware, immutability and recovery. I'll give you the last word, Drew. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right? There's always going to be a need for incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, but not all data is taught all the time.  Let's take real-time analytics for maybe facial recognition. That requires submillisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, you want to store that data for a long, long time and you're going to want to also tap back into it later. So other folks are telling you that you can go to these cold glacial type of tiered storage. Yeah, don't believe the hype. You're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right? We're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that. I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear, if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. All right, Drew, thank you for that. Definitely, we see the momentum. In a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Morenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at the Hotchkiss School. Keep it right there.