The Hum
The Hum is a podcast hosted by Saul Levin about who controls the future, featuring interviews with people fighting the march of AI and data centers into every aspect of our lives.
The show is created in partnership with Rowhome Productions.
The Hum
“These sacrifice zones are manufactured”
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An interview with Memphis brothers KeShaun Pearson and Rep. Justin J. Pearson
Memphis brothers KeShaun and Justin Pearson are community leaders who have become national figures in the movement to stop data centers. They discuss their origins being directly impacted by environmental racism and their family’s efforts to protect their home from the greed of Elon Musk.
Message us on Instagram @thehumpod to get connected to resistance in your state or country. Send us stories and key dates coming up so we can share them out.
Learn more about MCAP’s campaign and uneven impacts of the Colossus data center in Memphis.
Listen to Saul’s interview on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. Read Saul’s recent Op Ed on data center resistance with Astra Taylor in the Guardian.
The Hum is produced in partnership with Rowhome Productions
Hey, Rohome Productions. You're listening to The Hung, a new podcast where we're sharing stories from people across the U.S. who are fighting the incursion of AI and data centers into every aspect of our lives. I'm Saul Levin, your host. Last week, I spoke with Kaylee Henry and Chris Sotiro, leaders at the Gen Z Group Climate Revolution Action Network, or CRAN of New Jersey. Each talked about a successful fight they helped lead in Jersey and dug into the meat and potatoes of how and why they were so successful. This week, I talked to brothers Keyshawn Pearson of the Memphis Community Against Pollution, or MCAP, and Tennessee State Representative and Congressional Hopeful Justin J. Pearson. We discussed their pathways from being directly impacted by environmental harms where they grew up to their leadership in organizing against the richest men in the world and their lawless Colossus Data Center. Kashan and Justin, thanks so much for being with us today. Thank you so much for having us.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thank you for allowing us a space and opportunity to talk about this.
SPEAKER_02Maybe we can start with Kishon. Like, how did you get into this fight in the first place? Like, when did data centers become a thing for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, data centers specifically uh became a thing on June 5th, 2024, when it was announced to me uh by Mayor Paul Young, City of Memphis, after a meeting that we were uh holding to talk about the future of environmental justice in the city of Memphis. Um and at the conclusion of that meeting, you know, he literally told the entire group of environmental justice advocates that, you know, he has an announcement to make about something that he doesn't think we're all gonna agree on and proceed to tell us about the Elon Musk announcement of the data center. And my first question was, where is it gonna be? And that was gonna tell me everything I knew. And what he said was that it was gonna be placed in South Memphis. And from that moment, I knew this project wasn't about building up our community. And if anything, I can look at the history of the fights that we've been in from the Bihali Connection Pipeline to sterilization service of Tennessee, and I can see all of these facilities, all of these environmentally racist projects always select the same area, and the same families suffer, which are our families and our community specifically. And that's when it was introduced to me on an intimate level. But prior to that, I had you know started to see a lot of the news about data centers and about you know the early data that folks were giving about the power consumption and the water consumption. So day one, when it was announced, our organization, Memphis Community Against Pollution, as well as Protect Our Aquifer, Young Gifted and Green, our other coalition partners, put out a statement saying we need to know more answers than just this is a done deal. And that's how it was presented to us is that it's here, Elon's here, and this is this is how it's moving forward.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. Justin, could you tell a little bit more? Let's say someone's listening and they vaguely heard, oh, there's some Colossus thing, Groc AI is coming to Memphis. Could you paint a little bit of the picture of like what's actually happening right now in and around Memphis?
SPEAKER_00The world's largest data center is located in Memphis, Tennessee, built by Elon Musk. Uh, this data center, when it was initially built, uh, used 35 uh gas turbines to operate. Um, and it is many lengths of football fields. Uh, it's a huge operation. And the levels of pollution that are coming out of it from the air are tons of nitrogen oxides and tons of formaldehyde into the air of the community of Boxtown and Westwood primarily, but all of Shelby County. That's called Colossus One. Then he built two more data centers, one across the border in Mississippi and one in another part of South Memphis in a community called White Haven. And those turbines were at over 59 illegally operating gas turbines. More pollution is coming out of those than the International Airport. And it's a lower-income black community, lower-income white community in South Haven that is being deeply impacted by this. And so when we talk about how we fight data centers and why, we know our air is being polluted. We know they're using 25 million gallons of drinking water, fresh drinking water, every single month to operate these data centers. And we understand that it's gonna take a multiracial movement of people who are standing up and fighting back against these billionaires who are hurting and harming our communities.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that was remarkably succinct. I was gonna say, how would you explain this to a five-year-old? But I think they might have picked that up, you know? How much is this a broader family affair? Kashan, I guess since you're older, you could start. I mean, tell us about like why are there these two brothers who are at the center of this fight that that showed up on your doorstep in the neighborhood where you're from?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's because, for one, it's always been uh family first. And so anything that we do has always included all of us. We have a large family, uh, five boys, and my my parents, and so it's always been us seven. Uh, and we've been all we got for so long that no matter what we do, everybody's included. And this is no different. And whether it's the Bahalia Pipeline fight or it's XAI and Elon Musk, my mom is involved, Dr. Kimberly Owens Pearson, my father, Reverend Jason C. Pearson, all of my brothers. Jason, uh my brother Tim had passed away uh December 1st of 2024, but he is still with us in spirit. And of course, Representative Pearson, my youngest brother Jalen. Everybody has a role to play. And the reason that you're gonna see Justin or you're gonna see me at your front door uh is that we have been given the opportunity to have the time in order to reach out to as many people as we can and be truthfully the voice of reason when you see so many people with what I believe is a co-optive voice, a voice that's been paid for. Speaking a lot of talking points from oligarchs that don't represent anything like what the people in Southwest Memphis believe about what our future should be look like or be shaped as. And so, you know, when you when you see us at the door, it's because it's people in your community who care about you and we look like you and we care like you and care for you. And my mom, my parents always told us we all we got. And that isn't just in our household, that's for our whole community. We all we got. And so we have to be educated about what's happening. We have to show up when it's time to show up, we have to march when it's time to march, and we have to protest when it's time to protest because it is ultimately gonna be on us the future that we will have. And I think sometimes that gost with thinking that we are not also co-creators, right? But we are. And it strengthened numbers every time.
SPEAKER_02I love it. Justin, do you want to jump in and tell us a little bit about the stakes? I mean, this has directly impacted your family, this data center buildup, but also a pattern of environmentally racist and harmful projects in Memphis and surrounding communities for decades and generations. What are the stakes and and how do you see the way that your childhood led you to be so active in this fight?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, for all of us, our life and from our childhood to our through to our adulthood shapes how we show up in the world. But I think our family's uh life story, we grew up financially poor but spiritually rich. Um, and we grew up uh in Westwood, where our grandmothers' homes were. And ultimately both of our grandmothers succumb to cancer, and we later learned as we were fighting two multi-billion dollar crude oil pipelines, that the cancer risk in this neighborhood of Westwood, where my wife and I uh have a home and where our parents live, um, this neighborhood has a 4.1 times increase in the national cancer average than the national cancer average. And so even the fact that we lost our grandmothers in their 60s was due in large part to the air quality and to the pollution that they were dealing with. And, you know, they often said, you know, cancer runs in your family, but it's not cancer. Environmental racism is what's running in our families, environmental injustice is what's running in our families, and a lot of the people and communities that are fighting data centers are dealing with legacy pollution. The fact that the oil refinery and the steel company and the combined cycle plant, like Tennessee Valley Authority, are all in the same neighborhood. 80% of the polluters in Shelby County are in my State House district. That's not accidental or incidental or coincidental. It is an intentional deprivation of opportunity and accessibility to voices of power that stand up and fight for our right to clean air, clean water, and clean soil. And so when we look at this fight and what's at stake, it is our lives. And there is an existential threat to humanity due to the consequences of AI data centers that we should talk about. Because when we lose our natural resources in this country and across the world, there are there is no recreation of an aquifer that's been built over millions of years. There's no way to get more clean air after it is consistently being polluted by these industries. And right now we have no way, in a tangible way, to fix the fact that 15 to 30% of the global workforce is going to be depleted by the use of artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence and bioengineering, which is why we have to have policies like a federal jobs guarantee, like we did post the Great Depression, to ensure that the dignity of work isn't something that's lost on communities that are already suffering. Because realize that the same places that are overpolluted are the same ones that are over policed. They're the same ones that are underinvested and educationally, are deprived of health care accessibility and have the least amount of economic opportunity. And it is the reality that we are dealing with, that all of those intersections are hurting our community's ability to thrive. And now we've got billionaires who are treating our communities as extractive colonies so that they can add one more billion to their total while we are dealing with the destruction.
SPEAKER_02You all are pointing to a point source of where this happened. In Memphis, Tennessee, right? Uh, you know, I've read that in in Boxtown, cancer rates are four times the national average. In Memphis overall, uh it's been named an asthma capital. Like, why are we why should there be places that are asthma capitals of the richest country in the history of the world, right? So for people who might say, oh, you know, I don't data centers aren't relevant to me. I'm not as specifically interested in environmental issues or something like that. Kashawn, can you speak a little bit to like why this is relevant to everyone, especially in the fight in Memphis?
SPEAKER_011000%. First of all, numbers mean things as well, right? And so when we look at the rate of Americans who are breathing in toxic or air that is not of good quality, you're looking at over 75% of people. And that only increases as your status changes. Whether you are a minority, whether you are a woman or identify as a woman or a black person, the numbers continue to get even worse. And so what we look at is the same people, right, who have historically suffered economically, who have historically suffered with healthcare and being provided the health that they that necessitates their longevity, these are the same people who are being targeted. And so when we look at and we overlay the maps, because in the United States, we know your zip code determines a lot about where you're going to go to school, where you're going to go to college, if you go to college. And it does also have a direct correlation to your longevity, right? And the amount of years you will see in this world. So much so that the community that we are from, right down the road, there's a community called Mallory Heights. They have the lowest life expectancy in all of Tennessee. Well, why is that? It is because it is also a red line community that is where a concentration of toxic release inventory facilities are. And the most notorious was Sterilization Services of Tennessee, who was emitting ethylene oxide at rates that were far beyond what the EPA regulation would allow. And so these sacrifice zones are manufactured. These are the places where black families could live, right? Where underprivileged families and minorities could live. And these same red line communities are now being fortified for a new era, right? So the lessons that we should have learned in the industrial era about the proximity of pollution to people, we're not learning, right? And who benefits from that? The corporations and the billionaires at the top, while we all continue to suffer. And so it cannot be that it is a one issue because it continues to spread beyond the borders that we have created and fortified. This is the most intersectional issue of our times. But when you look at data centers, you also have to pay attention to the fact that these data centers either generate pollution or they are directly connected to a power generation source that will bring even more pollution. Right here in Memphis, we have the best visual. XAI is right across the street from the Tennessee Valley Authorities combined power cycle plant. And that is where they have just gotten approval for six more methane gas turbines, and they're going to continue to do this to the communities that have continued to suffer throughout time. And that is what we are up against. It is not that only the few will suffer, all of us will suffer at the behest of these billionaires and their whims for these magical thinking types of projects. There is nothing about this product from XAI that is valuable to humanity. I've yet to see it. And truthfully, even in this moment, the stock market is responding to the inevitability of its failure.
SPEAKER_02Let's talk about that a little bit more. I mean, Elon Musk likes to come out and claim that the age of AI is going to be a time when everyone lives in penthouses and it's going to be all worth it. Justin, like, what are they talking about when they say, oh, we're going to have all of this? And what are you seeing in terms of what people are experiencing stead? Like, what's the contrast between the penthouses and the universal high basic income that Elon Musk is is promoting as part of his big marketing scheme and versus what people are experiencing?
SPEAKER_00Look, Elon Musk, uh, Peter Thiel, Kevin O'Leary, uh, these billionaires are trying to sell us on their products. And that's what they are. Uh, they're trying to sell us on products that we do not see the benefits of, but we are experiencing quite literally every single day the harms of. And that disparity is because they are trying to somehow convince the American people and people across the world that the pain that we're experiencing is somehow fabricated or it's going to be worth it. And it's not. In small towns in rural America to urban city centers in Memphis and Nashville and the like, we are seeing the truth about AI data centers outweighing the, as my brother said, the pension for magical thinking that these people have. We are experiencing them taking the drinking water out of rivers, uh, lowering the water table in communities that rely upon them. We are experiencing an increase in the number of people going to the hospital for asthma and respiratory-related illnesses and prematurely dying, costing communities hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars collectively in economic loss because of the pollution from their data centers, and that's research that we were provided by uh Harvard researchers studying XAI and the consequences of their pollution in Mississippi in particular. So, I mean, what they are trying to do is literally sell a pipe dream to us as though we are not living with the consequences of what they are doing. And let's talk about the truth of what this AI is intended to do. They are intending to replace our jobs, which is to replace people's livelihoods, white-collar jobs and blue-collar jobs. And it's so insidious and evil that they're taking our fresh drinking water to cool their plants and data centers whose only existence and primary use case is replacing jobs. So it's not even that we're going to get penthouses, people aren't going to be able to afford the houses they currently have. And in some companies, and I know this firsthand, they're being forced to use AI and they're forced to train AI who is going to replace their jobs. But they're told, well, it won't be as good as you until you know about two years from now. And so you have some form of job security. And these are people who are working, you know, in some huge financial institutions. Like that is what we are dealing with. And I think it is the responsibility of elected officials, it's the responsibility of the public public to keep our eyes wide open, to not fall for the red herrings, to not fall for the dreamy things that they're trying to sell us, but to stay focused on what we know is happening to our lives and to our neighbors.
SPEAKER_02Let's talk about that. I mean, what they're actually doing, right? From from the reading that I've done, Colossus in Memphis is powering Gemini, which is Google's AI thing that has made it impossible to search for anything on the internet, Grok, which is Elon Musk's like racist little robot on Twitter, and Anthropic, which is sort of pitching itself as woke, but then in their minute-long plus World Cup ad the other day, basically were like, what if we could have AI and that would bring us back to human thinking and picking vegetables? And it was like, this might actually be the most insidious of all. So those are the things being powered by these data centers. Kashan, could you tell us about how these huge companies who are like leasing the compute or whatever are playing into your opposition and how you're thinking about those products being served from this side of the equation?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so let me just first illustrate a couple things. XAI and Grok went from the reason that they needed to move so far so fast and the build out so much was because they were going to be a frontier model that would ultimately compete with OpenAI, compete with Google. And what we are seeing, and we got to be real honest about, is that they this is no longer a frontier model fight, right? This was a failure from the start. This was not about bringing forth some AI that would be so incredible. Now they have pivoted to selling the parts, right? And they are leasing the compute. And so they're they're building out so much infrastructure to lease it versus competing. And so I do want to recognize that Elon Musk and XAI are not a part of what we would consider to be these the frontier models. And so the premise that they came to Memphis on was flat. And we have paid the cost with our lungs, and we pay the cost financially with the tax breaks that they've gotten. With that setting, seeing how even anthropic, who has claimed to really be focused on humanity and the effects that artificial intelligence will have on humanity, seeing them be so aligned with XAI and with Elon Musk and Grok has been very disappointing. But what I do believe that it illustrates is that when the tech oligarchs have an opportunity, they are going to work collaboratively instead of constructively with the community. There still has not been a meeting or invitation by Google or Anthropic to our community to have a conversation about what is happening. Nothing. And so this continuous locking out of the community who is suffering has to end. Like this continuous practice that we're going to continue to work together. We get to build the future. We get to decide what the future is and we get to do it without you. That has to change. But what we are seeing is that they will continue to operate in this way if we do not uh bring the right amount of public pressure. And so as we move forward, as we continue to organize, one of the things that we will continue to organize against is not just one of the tech oligarchs, but now multiple of them as they continue to descend on our community. And the other thing about that is that these folks aren't coming here by whim or by chance. They are being invited here. Our greater Memphis Chamber went and recruited Elon Musk. Elon Musk is now recruiting other folks to extract resources from our community. That has to end. We are seeing institutions that were meant to build the economic mobility for us be used and weaponized against us.
SPEAKER_00And it's remarkable. Oh, yeah, go ahead. It's important to realize that part of the reason that we've seen the expansion of data centers like this in and across our country in particular is the failure of a lot of institutions. Um and let me start with the Democratic institutions, lowercase D. We see a lot of mayors who are getting corrupted, uh, whether it be Mayor Paul Young in Memphis or Mayor Muslewhite in Mississippi, who are being corrupted because they are told, well, we're going to bring tax money by having these facilities there. And that tax money should assuage any of your concerns that you have over your people's health, their welfare, or any of the negative. Outcomes of what we are experiencing. We're also seeing a failure of health departments that are supposed to protect the health and welfare and the well-being of the people in our communities who are not doing it. And so whether it be the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, the Shelby County Health Department, they're approving permits, they're sending letters in violation of the Clean Air Act and giving permission to these billionaires to hurt and harm our communities because, and this is the important thing about understanding the oligarchy, right? It isn't just that they have a lot of money. It is that they use that money to build political power and convince people who are elected officials to bend towards their will because of the money that they can give to their campaigns, because the money that they can use to run someone against them. And so you get governors, you get mayors, you get statehouse members, you get U.S. Congress members, you get health departments that choose silence and complicity in the degradation of communities over-elevating the real concerns and the real pain points that are going to be experienced by data centers. It is a active participation of people who are in elected positions and appointed positions, who are turning uh their backs on their missions and on their responsibility to serve those who are uh their responsibility, which is their constituency, not the corporations.
SPEAKER_02Could you tell me a little bit more about the money flow there? I mean, I I was reading something the other day that it's hard to even say this out loud, but Google and SpaceX signed like a $30 billion contract to like rent computer space to each other. It's like to any of us, what are those numbers of dollars or compute space even mean? Like, absolutely nothing. It, you know, a few years ago, the entire budget of the Department of Energy of the United States, if I'm not mistaken, was about $35 billion. So, like right in that ballpark. And now there's these companies throwing it around. Like, what if that benefited literally anyone in any way in the Memphis community? So, Justin, if you could just pull on that thread a little bit more, I mean, what is being funded here is not something that people are particularly interested in or benefiting from. There's huge amounts of money flowing between these companies. These monthly payments are crazy. What isn't being funded in Memphis that you would like to see funded and is, you know, while they're funding these AI weapons and creating storage for slop or whatever they're doing?
SPEAKER_00I mean, and and we could talk about that, but the Department of Justice just intervened in a lawsuit uh that some of our coalition partners have against XAI saying that they get to violate, they should be able to violate the Clean Air Act because the XAI's technology is being used, GROK, to kill people in Iran, right? And so that's what we're powering, and that's what we're supposed to be proud of right now. Um and so again, thinking about these use cases, our community would not be supportive of this overwhelmingly, even when we see some of the images that Grok is allowed to create of sexual assault victims, right? Like again, that's being powered in our backyard in our community, and we have elected officials who have been clapping and shouting and celebrating the fact that these things exist. But let's talk about money. We're told that we're supposed to accept the significant levels of pollution, premature deaths, children in hospitals, uh, parents losing their jobs because they're taking care of their kids and they'll have access to a job that gives them the time off because we're going to get $15 million in taxes for the city and $15 million in taxes for the county. And that is supposed to be worth it. Maybe that'll go up to $40 million as they continue to buy more parcels and do things like that. But here's here's what should shock everybody. Uh, for GROCTA, I have operated in Colossus 1, cost $33 million a day. So they paid their entire tax burden in a single day. This is this is how much money we're talking about that XAI uh is getting now from uh anthropic 1.25 billion a month, which is uh probably $35 million a day. If we were given that kind of money as a city, as a county, as a state, we would eradicate poverty. No child would go to bed hungry, we would house every person, we would provide health care for everybody, and we'd have a lot left over. And so what we have to realize is happening in our economy is an extrapolation of wealth from poor people in marginalized communities for the benefit of those at the top. And they do all these red herrings to distract us. They want you to fight queer people, they want you to fight black people, they want you to fight immigrants, they want you to fight this person or that person, but ultimately we don't need to look to our right or our left, we need to look up and realize that it is a billionaire class that is seeking to step on and extract all of the resources they possibly can can, including our air and our water from us so that they can make more money. And they they they you know have a little bit of a carrot in front of some of these elected officials, and that seems to be enough uh to make them you know become silently complicit in the catastrophic pain that our communities are experiencing.
SPEAKER_02That was beautifully said. I was in Louisiana recently and I learned that the same guy, uh State Senator Jay Morris, who pushed through all of the deregulation of AI data centers in the state of Louisiana, was also the person who introduced legislation to eliminate majority black districts in the state of Louisiana. Could you tell us a little bit about how this fight against the AI data centers plural in and around Memphis is related to the silencing of black voices and voters in America, um, but also the sort of attempts to undo major portions of the Civil Rights Act. How are those things connected?
SPEAKER_00I mean, the fight against data centers that's happening around the country is a fight against those who are currently in power and who want more control. It's a fight against a status quo that has always been rigged against poor people, black people, Latino folks, immigrants. It's always been uh a fight against the way that things are compared to the way that we believe that things should be. And that shows up over and over and over again in our country, those who want to construct a multiracial pluralistic democracy uh that sees everybody uh in the ideal state of this uh founding document, right, where everyone is created equal, and it is those who want to retain their power at all cost, which means the stealing, the killing, uh, the robbing, uh, the pillaging of our neighborhoods, our communities, our country, all so that they can make more money or have more positional power, as you mentioned, the person in Louisiana who put forward the legislation to take away the majority black districts and also to support billionaires in their uh continued disruption and destruction of communities. And the way that civil rights and environmental justice and climate justice rights are connected is actually quite simple. It is about who is being impacted the worst, who is being harmed. And when you look at who's being harmed by environmental injustice and environmental racism, and who's being harmed when civil rights are taken back, it's the same communities. Right? Ultimately, yes, there's a dereliction that happens to all of us and everyone is deeply interconnected in this uh constitutional democratic republic experiment, but it's really important to know that the folks who are harmed first and worst are the same. And when Memphis was cracked into three districts, their attempt, uh the State House and the Tennessee General Assembly, their attempt to dilute and destroy black people's ability to choose a candidate of our own is deeply connected with our ability to have folks who advocate for our issues and the problems that we face in this country that are very acute and very different than other people. So again, I represent a statehouse district right now that has 80% of the polluters in the county, all in my district. If I'm no longer able, because they're obviously going to come after our state house and state senate seats, but if I'm no longer able to advocate for the people who live in Boxtown and Westwood, and they connect this district with people who have no connection at all to those issues, you lose someone who's willing to be in a position of power to advocate against it. And that does what? That allows for people to have more control, to have more power, because they're reducing the amount of voices in this democracy that'll speak up for those who've been made last, lost, and least. And ultimately, if you are a white supremacist who is looking to control, if you're a billionaire who wants more silence and order silent complicity in order for you to do more harm to people who are already marginalized, the first thing you want to do is to take the voices that are currently in positions of power to fight against you, you want to take them out of the equation. Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Kishan, could you just say something for folks who want some advice? They're like, these guys are awesome. I want to be like that. What what would you tell other organizers and activists about what they could do to get involved in fights against data centers that are now happening in all 50 states and dozens of countries around the world who might be listening? What's your what's your advice and and counsel to some of those folks?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. The first thing I'll tell anybody uh is that you already have what you need. You got all the tools. All you have to do is the work, the practice, the educating of yourself. I'll be honest. When we first learned about environmental racism, I didn't know that that was even a field of work. Um, and that was over six years ago. And so we have been able to learn so much in so little time and really lean into the expertise of the people around us. That is what everybody can do. No matter where you are, no matter who you know, you are a couple keystrokes away from finding people in community around you who care about what you care about. We are online in large numbers in different communities. And so there is an opportunity for you. Find it and use the gifts that you have. Not everybody will have the same gifts, not everybody will play the same roles, but everybody can do something. And that's what the world is counting on.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much. Justin, do you want to add anything on your advice for people who are like, yo, I hate the data center in my town, but I can't be like these guys? What would you say to someone like that?
SPEAKER_00Listen, you have the opportunity, whenever there is a public meeting, to go and have your voice heard. Go to the people who are in positions of power and demand they do something. For every problem that we see in our communities, there is someone who is elected who's supposed to be working to solve it. But we don't exercise that muscle. And unfortunately, we get so caught up in a politics of voting that we don't get into caught in the politics of building democracy. And democracy is what happens in between elections. And so if you don't like the data center, go tell somebody, right? And bring somebody with you. Because I remind folks, my first march uh ever against two multi-billion dollar corporations, Valero Energy Corporation and Plains All American, had five people. One was me and one was my brother, Keishon, right here. Uh, and then we had three other folks who were with us. That's 40% for those counting. Right. Exactly. Right. And so uh it doesn't mean you don't have to start with a lot, right? Like uh truly, and we're the son of a preacher and a teacher, and yeah, you know, you can have faith the size of a mustard seed. But if you plant a mustard seed, you water it and you grow it, it becomes a huge plant. Like take your little and it can't become much. And then this moment we all have to put our little in in order that it becomes much for us to resist, but for us to also persist and to build uh the movement for justice rooted in love that we know can build the nation and the world that we want to live in.
SPEAKER_02Just gonna let that sit for a second. That was beautifully said. So you heard from them. If you remember nothing else, when you show up, bring your sibling with you so that you can have community and y'all can roast each other when you're out at the town hall about how you spoke and what you said. Koshan and Justin, thank you guys so much for your time. Thank you for everything you're doing and for the inspiration. And I look forward to being in touch. Thank you so much, and we'll be in touch with you soon.
SPEAKER_01Talk soon, my friend. All right, y'all. Thanks for having us. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Talking to you soon. Peace. Peace. That was my conversation with Memphis brothers Kishon and Justin Pearson. Kishon is traveling the country to support other data center fighters in places like DeCab County, Georgia. And Justin is bringing AI data center resistance to the national political stage. Both are inspiring new leaders to step up and claim their power against big tech. You've been listening to The Hum. We're publishing new episodes weekly, so if you enjoyed what you heard, please download every past episode of The Hum and drop a link in a group chat where it isn't quite appropriate. This was episode 10. We're taking August off, so please download the show so you'll see when number 11 pops up. Message us on Instagram at TheHumPod to get connected to organizers in your state or country. Disclaimer: This podcast is an educational project, and we're not encouraging support or endorsing any specific candidates or political parties. The Hum is produced in partnership with Rohome Productions. Rohome's creative director is Alex Lewis. Their executive producer is John Myers. Our producer is Emily Rizzo. The Hum's video producer is Adotrehan, and we partner with the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research. Special thanks to Tara Wilson for her insights for this episode. I'm Saul Levin, your host and banjo journeyman. Thanks for listening and see you in September.
