The Progress Report: We’ve Got Aliens!

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the Executive Director of The Progress Network. And this is our weekly progress report, which is our shorter podcast, an adjunct to, an addendum of the other What Could Go Right? podcast, which is interview based.

And this is where we highlight some stories of the week that you almost certainly would’ve missed in the fray of negative news. And so this is our way of saying, Hey, there’s things going on in the world that are constructive. And we do this from the perspective of if we all get mired either in diversions, some diversions are great, we all need diversions.

I’m not suggesting, I’m not poo-pooing diversions, I’m just saying there has to be a balance between diversions and versions. But that if we get too mired in that, then we lose sight of other things going on in the world. And that makes it harder to believe that constructive change is possible or that we’re all agents of a better future.

And so that’s the, the spirit in which we do this and draw attention to these things. And Emma who is a good news junkie. See most, most people are a bad news junkie or they’re like a doom scrolling junkie. Emma’s a good news junkie. She just spends her days smiling and happy and walking through the streets of whatever city she’s in, with her head in the clouds, even if there are clouds.

She’s just like a, it’s just like she just lives and breathes good news, right, Emma? 

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I’m a hundred percent joyous a hundred percent of the time. Yes, correct. 

Anyway, are we ready? 

Zachary Karabell: We’re ready. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Get into the good stuff. Let’s start with New Mexico. When’s the last time we mentioned New Mexico on the podcast?

Zachary Karabell: We talk about Mexico a lot. We don’t talk a lot about the New Mexico. 

Emma Varvaloucas: The new ones, the new ones. People may or may not know this, I’m sure you know this if you live in New Mexico or maybe around New Mexico, but they became the first state in the nation to offer free childcare back in 2021, I think it was.

It’s not for every single family in New Mexico, but it’s for a little over half. They offer it for families that make up to 400% of the federal poverty line, so it’s. 

Zachary Karabell: Somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars a year. 

Emma Varvaloucas: And the Guardian just had this excellent article that was examining some of the effects of that since it’s been put into place in 2021, and it has lifted 120,000 people in New Mexico out of the federal poverty line.

So the, the poverty percent in New Mexico has dropped to around 11%. It’s around 17, 18% before. Part of the program that included the free childcare. It also included raising wages for childcare workers. So a bunch of them got lived outta poverty. The percent of poverty of child childcare workers went from around 27% to around 16%.

Still pretty high, but that’s 10% of them lifted out poverty. They also provide sort of accurate subsidies for childcare providers that have to do with the actual cost of what the providers are putting out to provide this childcare. It’s all paid for by a massive state budget surplus. It was originally paid for by pandemic era federal government money.

They had actually prepared to spend their own money on it, and then the pandemic came. They were sort of flooded with federal money. They’re like, let’s use this federal money. They put around $300 million, I believe in a trust, around then, and that ballooned about 9 billion. So they are doing well with the, the budget right now to continue offering the free childcare.

Maybe not forever, but New Mexico does have a pretty substantial state surplus from oil and gas revenues. So. 

Zachary Karabell: No other states have done this. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, I don’t think so. As far as I know next, New Mexico is the first and the only to offer free childcare. There are some states that offer free pre-kindergarten. How many other states are there that have a surplus from gas and oil revenues like Alaska?

Who else? 

Zachary Karabell: That, that, that may be it. North Dakota. Yeah. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Yeah. I was even surprised that New Mexico had a budget surplus. Like how many states have a budget surplus? Another great question that I don’t know the answer to. 

Zachary Karabell: Very, very few is clearly the answer. 

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know. Depending on where you stand on the political aisle, people will take this different ways.

Their long-term plan to pay for this, once fossil fuels are phased out is to increase tax on the wealthy, but we are some years away from that. So maybe some other plans will materialize and maybe you’re totally fine with that. Maybe you’re listening to that and you’re totally fine with that. Maybe you’re listening to that and you’re like, ah, man, they’re always trying to increase the tax on the wealthy.

Zachary Karabell: Even the Trump administration is talking about increasing the taxes on the wealthy. 

Emma Varvaloucas: They are. What is the Republican party these days? Nobody knows. 

Zachary Karabell: It’s very confusing. Cats and dogs sleeping together. Who knows, man. 

Emma Varvaloucas: The Guardian article highlighted that this current program is from 2021, but New Mexico has had like a decent social safety net from both Democratic and Republican governors.

So again, repeating for the nth time on The Progress Network podcast. There’s a lot going on below the federal level. That’s very hard to keep track of, but that might lift some of your spirits. 

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. We, we live in a federal system. Always good to be reminded states are the incubators of democracy, it has been said. 

Emma Varvaloucas: By us and many other people and us many times. 

Let’s talk about something that is happening on the federal level. Let’s talk about the FBI. 

Zachary Karabell: Ooh. 

Emma Varvaloucas: I haven’t talked about the FBI think maybe ever on the Progress Report. 

Zachary Karabell: What have you found in the news about the FBI that is also positive?

Emma Varvaloucas: So they are announcing, well, they announced actually in the beginning of April, a surge of FBI assets around the country to address unresolved violent crimes in Indian Country, if you’re someone that follows indigenous issues, there’s a large amount of missing persons and murdered indigenous people that cases that have never been solved.

So they are sending in a bunch of personnel over a six month period to FBI field offices across 10 states. It’s Albuquerque, Denver, Detroit, Jackson, Mississippi, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, and Salt Lake City. And they’re working in partnership with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Tribal Law Enforcement across these jurisdictions to try to close some of these thousands of open cases.

I believe that it’s the, the biggest amount of personnel they’ve ever dedicated to working in Indian country. So yeah, I’m here for it. 

Zachary Karabell: That’s a perfect example of if people think about the FBI at all right now, it’s either from one partisan perspective over another. You know that it’s been hopelessly politicized and it went out after Trump and was engaged in law affair, or it’s being undermined by Trump and by Kash Patel and by these changes, but the reality is there’s a huge amount of work that the FBI’s that, that it does, that it’s gonna continue to do, some of which is objectionable to the left, some of which is objectionable to the right. 

But then you have this kind of story of hard to argue with, right? That’s a good thing. And it happens, and nobody talks about it because it’s not partisan. It’s not incendiary. It’s the kind of thing you go, Oh, right, yeah. That’s kind of why there should be an FBI and there you have it. 

Emma Varvaloucas: To give Trump credit where credit is due, this is a continuation of an executive order that he did in his first term, establishing the task force on missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives.

No, no idea that that was a thing. I had no idea that he did that. So I hope that, you know, this bears fruit, obviously, just because they’re putting personnel and, and effort in doesn’t necessarily mean that something’s gonna come out of that, but certainly the effort is appreciated. And I haven’t seen this, by the way, I haven’t seen this reported like almost at all in mainstream news. Um, we actually grabbed it from a Minnesota based indigenous community based outlet, a very small outlet, as you might imagine. So I think a lot of people don’t know about this. 

Zachary Karabell: Well, now a few more people will. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes, a few more. 

Last but not least. Let’s talk about aliens, because aliens are fun. 

Zachary Karabell: Let’s talk about aliens and not the illegal kind.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Oh, geez. Oh man. Oh, Zachary, you’re gonna get canceled. 

Zachary Karabell: Oh, dear. Alright, well. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, so let’s talk about outer space aliens. 

Zachary Karabell: It was a pun. It was a pun and a joke. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Let’s give some kudos to NASA’s James Webb Telescope. They have just detected signs of life. Okay, there’s signs of life depending on who you ask, but let’s say signs of life on a giant planet, 124 light years away.

It’s two chemical compounds that only life here on Earth produces. Or rather only life, at least here on Earth, comma, produces. 

Zachary Karabell: That’s algae. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Marine phytoplankton. Yeah. 

Zachary Karabell: Excuse me. Marine phytoplankton. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Marine phytoplankton. For those of us in the know algae for you I guess. 

Zachary Karabell: Excuse me, you and your illegal alien algae.

So 124 light years away, which I believe is far away, like a ways away, although in in the greater scheme of the universe, not not that far away. It’s actually kind of in the neighbor, in the hood, right? 

Emma Varvaloucas: In relative terms, it’s a neighbor. 

Zachary Karabell: How did they identify that? Do we know? Is this too in the weeds? 

Emma Varvaloucas: We don’t know if that, in the weeds. Was that an algae joke? Yeah. 

Anyway, it’s not necessarily the phytoplankton are there. It’s just that these chemical traces, these chemical compounds that only are produced by marine phytoplankton here are over there. So like it could be, I don’t know, their version of marine phytoplankton, or it could be their version of aliens, or it could be their version of like completely something that has nothing to do with what it does here on Earth. 

It’s also not the first time that we’ve identified planets that have chemical traces that are connected to organic life here on earth. But because you know, these telescopes are getting more and more powerful, we’re pro, this probably is not gonna be the last time that we detect something like this.

And it’s just gonna be, it’s opening up a very interesting debate about like the more the evidence piles up, we get to have a debate about what it means. When will we know that we’ve crossed the threshold? Threshold of like, there’s definitely alien life out there. It’s kind of like a fun question. So I would expect more and more of this stuff to come out.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that there is life out there. It just kind of like adds to the like, small pile of evidence that we have in like the frontier of this area of science. 

Zachary Karabell: Which does lead in conclusion to the continual awareness, which I wrote about in one of my Edgy Optimist pieces recently about, there’s a lot going on in the present that will be forgotten in five years as much as it may have seemed completely the most important thing in the world, and I use the analogy of Covid in April of 2020 seemed like it was gonna change everything and it was gonna be with us in some sort of palpable, lasting way. And half the people you talked to hardly even remember that period. I mean, they remember it when you mention it, but it’s not like an active memory. 

And you know these questions of like alien life and what’s our purpose in the universe are far more transcendently important and are likely to be far more transcendently important than like, what’s Kash Patel doing at the FBI? Back to our earlier segment. And we, and that’s another thing, like we easily forget that in the maelstrom of the present, that there are things in the present that seem really important that just aren’t. And there are things in the present that are really important that we’re just not paying attention to.

So, also something to consider as you read and think and ponder and cogitate, so we will try to keep highlighting some of these things. Emma will keep walking around and in a preternaturally good mood. The rest of us will watch occasional cat videos and please tune in again for our longer form interview.

Please send us your stories and your ideas, anything interesting. We’d love to highlight that. Send it to us at hello@theprogressnetwork.org. We will be back with you next week. Thank you as always for listening. Thanks to the Podglomerate for producing and thanks to Emma and her team for doing all the actual work.

Emma Varvaloucas: And thanks everyone for listening as always. And thank you to Zachary.