Apache Chef Nephi Craig says cooking saved his life

"It is the greatest threat to our country."

“"It is trying to tie Democrats to communism."”

" Including World War II or even 9/11." "Both he and his team feel this is resonating with his base." "Why the White House is pushing communism as a new line of attack ahead of this year's mid-terms?" "What's the now on the Ampure Politics podcast?" "This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is a leader in the movement of Native American cuisine."

"Eating, cooking, and teaching about that food saved his life."

“"He became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age."”

"After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months probation if he agreed to get and keep a job or go to college."

"He opted for attending Scottsdale Community College where he took cooking classes." "He eventually got a job, learned about restaurant kitchens, and eventually became a chef at the finest fine dining restaurant." "But he also kept getting fired from jobs for being drunk, hung over, not showing up, or being in jail." "During time in jail, he was lucky to get work in the kitchen where he learned how to design meals with whatever food they were given." "When he got out, he kept relapsing."

"He completed 9 rehabs and ran away from 5 others."

"Now he's drawing on the more hellish parts of his life, as well as his expertise, to be the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the tribe owned rainbow treatment center, working with people recovering from substance abuse." "As a behavioral health technician, he collaborates on treatment plans for the center's clients." In 2021, he opened Cafe Gojo, a restaurant on the reservation that's a place for the community to eat and talk, for members of the staff at functions as a vocational training program for the treatment center.

He also founded the Native American Culinary Association, Naka. "And now he's written a memoir called "Our Knives Will Save Us," dispatches from a white mountain Apache chef. His mother is white mountain Apache. His father is Dinna Navajo, Nephi grew up on both reservations." Nephi Craig, welcome to Fresh Air, and congratulations on your 15 years of sobriety. That was really great. So, before we get into your personal story, which is pretty interesting, let's talk a little bit about food, the foods that are indigenous to Native people and to America and to the Americas.

Let's start with tomato, because I know learning that tomato was an indigenous food really meant a lot to you.

“Yeah, it did. I had no idea that the tomato was an indigenous cultivar growing up. I think it's pretty common for a lot of people to feel that way.”

And for me as a young kid, I was studying in culinary school, and I came across this info that it was native to the Americas, and it just brought this really big smile to my face. I was like, "Wow, this tomato is not Italian, it's native like me." And that was empowering, because as you're in cooking school, you're being taught all of these other world cuisines. And as Native American, New Arizona, you don't really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum.

So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests. I want to hear about acorns, because that's a real staple, and I don't think about acorns and eating them. I see squirrels eating them all the time. And Apache's. Well, acorns are very special, because they can be eaten all over North America on the West Coast and on the East Coast and across the United States. They have to be leached, of course, which is a process to pull out the real tannic bitterness from the acorns.

It makes our acorn special is that they don't necessarily have to be leached, they suppose they could be, but they've always been harvested by our people along the Mogee on Ram and Arizona for thousands of years. And they can be eaten right out of the shell, they're ground up into powders and to like a yellow acorn flower. And it's added to a lot of different things from like sprinkled on roasted meats or especially cooked in stews. It's really really good like that. Acorns soup. We refer to as acorns stew. So it's usually a lot of bones, whether it's beef or alcohol, deer, chunks of meat, and it's simmered for a long time till it's really soft.

And then the acorn flower is sprinkled in towards the end, and sometimes squash is added, and a lot of times there'll be like flower dumplings or corn dumplings added in. It's real, real simple, real homey, but really distinct Apache flavors.

It's a traditional Apache bread. It's called racket bread because it's cooked on a tool that looks like a tennis racket.

So it has this like long metal handle, and there's this wire circle at the end of it, and there's like steel grates or wire strands woven to make it look like a long tennis racket. And that is placed directly on top of hot coals, and Apache ladies usually just stretch out the dough and put it right on the coals, and it puffs up really quick. So it's really delicious.

“A lot of people associate fry bread with indigenous culture, and you associate fry bread with colonialism. Can you explain?”

Well, it's not an indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us, and when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some beef, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar.

Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard.

And so fry bread emerges, some say in the Southwest, and there's big debates about where and who did it first, but if you look across all of Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest, to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has fried bread as a result of military food rations, and that grows into these food traditions that are part of our reality today. So as I teach it, I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to take it away, but to be aware.

I love reading about popped MRI. Can you describe that? Oh, yeah, MRI for me is one of those indigenous cultivars that I encountered later in my career. My encounters with colonization and colonialism kind of only encapsulate maybe about 300 years in the United States in the American Southwest. But as I studied MRI, it opened up this portal that took about 5, 6, 7, 800 years in Mexico and South America. There's two colors as white, and there's red, and it's one of the staple foods that's been grown all over Mexico and South America. Very high in protein, very good for you. You can eat the stems and the greens when it's small.

And you can use the fibers and the seeds are what are cultivated and popped and used in porrages, flatbreads, just for the popped seeds themselves. But then learning that it's a sacred food and then learning that you could pop it. Just really blew my mind. So you get a dry saute pan or a pan nice and hot, you know, probably about 470 degrees. Put a little few Emirant seeds in the pot and it'll pop and it'll look like popcorn and you can you got it.

It takes a lot of practice because at first you're going to be my burning, but when you pop it it looks and smells just like teeny tiny popcorn. It's really delicious.

I think most people who aren't native in America associate indigenous food with Thanksgiving, which means turkey and pumpkin and corn.

“So squash I know is really important to indigenous cuisine. Are there ways that you use it that other American cultures don't?”

Well, I'll put it this way. For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn and squash and cranberries, those are all important indigenous foods. And when people ask me what recipes or what ways do we prepare native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven't heard of a Native American restaurant or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say well, you've been eating Native American foods in cuisine since as long as you can remember it's just that the stories are not told.

All of American cuisine every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American foods and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue on the American Southwest, there's companion planting and dry farming, the hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans.

“So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it's pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them.”

Turn them into pies just like everyone else sometimes, but native foods have been to the whole time.

But you first studied cooking after your first DUI arrest when you were age 18 and the judge gave you the option of three years probation.

If you got a job or went to school, so you went to Scottsdale Community College and studied cooking there.

“And even though I think the school was located on reservation land, do I have that right?”

Yeah, the salt river in your reservation. But none of the students that you encountered were native. There were a lot of natives on campus just none in the culinary program. Oh, okay.

And you'd never heard of most of the dishes. What were some of the dishes that you'd never heard of? You had no idea what they were.

Things like risotto, the weirdest one was Visi Swaz. Hearing all the terms like mirrored pa, hearing like they didn't know what a bistro meant. And when I would ask these questions, like what does that mean? It was like everyday language, so they were the students. And it was just kind of, I felt like an odd ball. You know what I mean? So it was definitely a form of a culture shock. But it was intriguing for me. And I liked it. I didn't let it shut me down too much. But I was definitely aware that I was different, culturally from a food standpoint.

So you write that in school because your teacher was a chef that you were taught that your reply should be yes chef or no chef. Were you uncomfortable with that kind of hierarchical structure in kitchens or in school where it was like yes chef, no chef. You write it reminded you of an abusive sergeant in the movie full metal jacket. What reminded you of that? No, it didn't really throw me off. I actually liked it because it reminded me of one of our favorite movies.

“And I think he says like the only thing out of your filthy sewers is sir, yes sir.”

And everyone laughs when we watch it at home. And I knew that I needed structure. I wanted something tough. And when I got into cooking it turned out that it could be very tough.

It wasn't always very tough. But depending on what kitchen you got into, it could be like that.

And your father was in the military, right? Yeah, my father was the United States Marine. He was a sergeant and a sharpshooter. And your grandfather was a code talker. This was a group of Native Americans who used Native American languages and codes to share things that the military and intelligence needed to keep secret. Yeah, so I come from a family of United States Marines, my dad's dad, Bob at City Craig was a Navajo code talker. He served on Guam Guadalcanal and was wounded on Iwo Jima.

The Navajo code talker has created a code to send transmissions that helped to win the war. And so I grew up in that tradition in all the great men of my life were that. And so I kind of looked up to the discipline and the rigor of that lifestyle. After you're, I don't know, second or third DUI, well during that DUI, someone was seriously injured, the passenger of the car that you crashed into was seriously injured. So you did, you did time for that. You spent a few months in jail and you got to work in the kitchen.

So I'm really interested in hearing about cooking in prison. What exactly was your position? Well, it was just one of the cooks. It was, um, it was in county jail and it was nothing glamorous, but it was industrial style cooking. What made it stand out is that I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail we call it, call ourselves chiefs or somehow we didn't get that name, but the group of chiefs. And getting to meet some of the people that were cooking there, all of their different varied stories and the things that they were in for.

But also banding together to feed, all I just think it was like 7,800 inmates a day was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking and it was a cultural moment where I was reminded that no matter what, we bless our food as natives. Coming from a, you know, from a time in a place that didn't seem like that would be where it came from, I guess, you know what I mean?

“Um, you cook for 7,800 people a day because the facility you're in, I think, supply the food for all the other jails in the county, am I right?”

Yeah, I was, I think they, they called it, they nicknamed it the food factory. There was literally probably about 200 inmates on a chain gang walking to work every day to do that.

Yeah, it was a little tiny, that's why they called it the food factory. It was this little free standing big operation where they had a big cold room.

“You could probably fit to diesel trucks in and there was another cold room and then there was a meat cutting room and then a hot cook room and a big warehouse, so it was a factory.”

How big were the pots? Oh, well, they had these like huge probably like 150 gallon steam kettles, a dozen of them facing each other and they look like we could probably fit like four or five people in those pots. So you had to make do with whatever you were given and sometimes it was like expired food probably. Oh, yeah, man, it was crazy because you know, at that level, food's coming in from food banks and donation centers and whatnot and we would pull out pallets and pallets of frozen ingredients, which they were frozen, but it was still like one year, six months, three months expired.

So temperature control was really a big thing, so it had to get above certain temperatures for X amount of time. But again, it's jail, so like, you know, I don't think the staff really cared too much. It was just to feed the masses. Give me an example of what you thought was a good dish and what you thought was like, I'm really sorry I have to give this to people to eat. Oh, man. Well, we made a this really big batch of squash soup, just pallets and pallets of frozen butternut squash, but we did have a big like 10 pound 20 pound bags of pre cut onions.

So we're able to give it some depth and there was some like corn syrup laying around, so we made it kind of a sweet like almost like a butternut squash. I guess you could say, and it turned out nice. And the discussion we were having as we were cooking, it was like, man, which we had some mutton bones or some fry bread or something like that. We're just joking around.

Then another time, one thing that I didn't regret giving to the to the inmates, but it was we had this two huge pallets of like this really fresh amazing asparagus.

Jumbo isparagus that as a chef in a cook, you really like and appreciate. We had to just boil that to death. It just turned camouflage green and it was just popped into trays. It was so bad. No so sad. To see all that hard work from the farms being just, you know, killed and mashed and put into green slob.

“So what did you learn from having to make do with a kind of miscellaneous of expired food?”

Oh, I think my journey to becoming a chef and the way that I've learned, it's really anchored in a lot of moments that could be humiliating for others. And it was that for me, certainly, but it also taught me a sense of humility and that cooking is very human and no matter what's happening in the kitchens at the end of the day, we're feeding people to keep them alive. So I think that really taught a sense of humility and then being grouped in with the natives from my own tribe and regions was reinforcing that.

It's not just me that feels this way, they also feel this way. So it was really humanizing. Your specialty in the kitchen is knife work. Your memoir opens with you selling your knives. These were knives that you got while you were cooking in Japan. And you were selling them because you were broke. You were living in your mother's home. Your father had died soon before of a rare stomach cancer. So you needed money for alcohol and all you can think of doing because you didn't have a job at this point.

“All you can think of doing was selling these really special knives that you'd gotten in Japan. Like what made them so special?”

Well, addiction strips away everything slowly. It's this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings.

And as my life stripped away of people, places and things like places to live, finances, resources, the last things that I held onto were always my chef knives.

Because I knew if I had my chef knives, I could find a job anywhere in the world literally because by that time I had already traveled around the world. And so I held onto those to the very, very, very end and around 2011, those are some of the last things I was willing to pawn off or sell on the street for money. These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka.

So I had, I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai.

Things that you find very valuable, you're willing to sell off just to get high again. And that's the way that that was for me.

“Well, we have to take another break here. So let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Nephi Craig and he's the author of the new memoir, our knives will save us, dispatches from a white mountain Apache chef.”

We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air. This season of Planet Money Summer School, we go to China, one of the world's biggest economy. And what we learned is Americans are crazy. Chinese are crazy. These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers. The US and China are more like than you might think. On Planet Money Summer School, a strange lesson about success, how to handle the downsides of progress. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.

You know, every day on up first NPR's golden globe nominated morning news podcast, we bring you three essential stories.

At the heart of each story, our questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next?

“At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow a first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why.”

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Nephi Craig. His new memoirs called Our Knives Will Save Us. Dispatches from a white mountain Apache chef. He grew up on a reservation in Arizona, cooking saved his life from addiction. But it took years for sobriety to stick, resulting in him getting fired from several kitchen jobs, including as a chef at a fine dining restaurant in Phoenix. He's been sober for 15 years. He founded the Native American Cool and Area Association, and is now the executive chef at Café Gojo, which is a restaurant for people on the reservation and a vocational training program for the staff.

He's also an advanced certified relapse prevention specialist serving as the coordinator of the Rainbow Treatment Center's nutritional recovery program. That center is also on the reservation. He founded the Native American Cool and Area Association. So you, in spite of your addictions and spite of running away from some rehabs and going completing the program and nine rehabs, it took you a really long time to stay sober. But while you were going through all that, you worked your way up to a job as a chef at a resort in Phoenix, where the chef won the James beard chef of the year award, which is mighty impressive.

Describe how the kitchen was structured at that kind of high level. The restaurant that I got to opportunity work at was called Mary Elaine's at the Phoenician in Phoenix, Arizona.

It was a temple of gastronomy in the West Coast, and from my first day in culinary school, my favorite instructor would talk about that place because he had worked there as a lancor.

He used to tell all of his students that if you're going to try to work anywhere in Phoenix, work with the best and try to get into Mary Elaine's at the Phoenician. And that stuck with me. So every year from 1998 and 99, 2000, 2001, I would apply two to three to even four times a year there at the Phoenician. And in 2001, I was working for a chef who knew a guy that was in Mary Elaine's and I got a staage. I just expected it to be a one night observation where you go in the kitchen and you hang out and you watch and you see.

But I was offered a job at the end of my staage and I accepted it. But that place really built me up into a very strong young chef. I was an intermediate on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and to all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And it'd be in Arizona a very mean potato state. It was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was just a beautiful, best of everything. Best turbo, a little mayor, truffles, caviar, fine wines.

“I think Mary Elaine's had the grand award from wine spectator dozens and dozens of years. They had one of the only master, Somalia's in the whole country.”

So it really meant a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because of the relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss that I took maybe five, ten, fifteen years to process. One of the things that you kept secret from everyone and that I don't think you resolved in yourself for years was that you were molested when you were young.

What were your reasons for being afraid to tell anyone? Well, I included this part of my life, not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency, but a contributing factor. I would learn years later that sexual abuse that happens to young boys and men is just as common as it happens to girls and women.

And society gives men the message that we shouldn't talk about it. We should never mention it.

Very, very stigmatized. So I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was ten years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview was that no one's going to believe me. So I just kept it in. And when I kept it in, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse and in my story, it's not to point the finger at it. But I had to really take a long time to come to terms that I was a victim of that. And it doesn't determine who I am.

The way you started talking about it was when you were in treatment, one of the times you were in treatment.

“The psychiatrist, because you were in a, I think, as psychiatric hospital at the time, on suicide watch.”

And the psychiatrist asked you, "What are you so angry about?" And that was part of your answer talking about the sexual assault. Yeah, I think the psychiatrist that Hopkins asked me, "What are you so afraid of?" In a real firm tone, this guy was like an old school orator. And I would begin to talk and tell that I was afraid I was going to drink myself to death. That I was insane for thinking I could create a whole new cuisine. That's ancient. That I was insane because I couldn't take care of my family.

And that I was just going to lose it all. Maybe I was predisposed, like the firewater myth says. And so it just snowballed into that dimension of saying, "Yeah, I was sexually abused when I was a kid." Did you tell anyone after that? I told my father when I had the opportunity to talk with my father. I told him and he sat there tight-lipped and then he just broke out in tears and he started crying. He said, "Oh, son, I wondered if something had happened. I couldn't ask and I'm glad you told me."

And that was a really difficult moment that I remember very vividly. He was there for me. He didn't judge me, didn't get mad, didn't get afraid. He was just open to it. Did he reassure you that it wasn't your fault? Yeah, he reassured me that I was just a kid. There wasn't my fault. There was nothing to be ashamed of. And there was work to do. You know, it wasn't the end.

“I think he intuitively knew that too because my dad was also an alcoholic and addict and he was in recovery as well.”

So he was in the background. I was rooting for me as I was falling apart. And so when that moment came, it brought us together a little bit closer, but it also showed the depth of where I needed to go to get well. My guest is Nephi Craig, his new memoir is called, "Our Knives will save us. Dispatches from a white mountain Apache chef. We'll be right back. This is fresh air." Everyone wants to know if AI is conscious, but consciousness is really hard to define. It's the experience we're having right now. What it is like to eat chocolate or to look at the blue sky?

So how do we know who or what is conscious? Check out the new way scientists are finding to measure the elusive phenomenon on shortwave. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

“These days, it feels like the news changes every hour. Well, NPR has a podcast that does that too. NPR news now brings you a fresh five-minute episode every hour of the day with the latest, most important headlines.”

In episodes that are clear, fact-based and easy to digest. Listen to NPR news now on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. On NPR's wildcard podcast, writer Terry Tempest Williams on what it means to be a woman with a big voice and big ideas in our culture.

I don't know if we have to prove or not crazy, but we're always being asked if we are.

This is fresh air. Let's get back to my interview with Nephi Craig. His new memoir "Our Knives Will Save Us" is about growing up on a white mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, becoming addicted to alcohol, going in and out of rehab, while building a career as a chef.

Now he focuses on native foods as the executive chef of Cafe Gojo on the reservation while also serving as the coordinator of the Nutritional Recovery Program at the Rainbow Treatment Center.

“Have you thought a lot about why drinking a such a problem for a lot of indigenous people?”

What's your interpretation of why that is? Oh man, we need to hold another interview for that question. No, as indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism differently.

The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed to build by us, and as Native American peoples, we've inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it's not that we are different, biologically, it's that we have a different legacy and encounters with colonial violence in America.

“That's what I feel is one of the root causes of this multidimensional monster that is addiction.”

Well, indigenous people in America were forced off their land and marched someplace else where they were assigned to go at gunpoint by the military. That is massive trauma. Your father's ancestors were among the people who were displaced at gunpoint. And he was among other things, a singer-songwriter, and he wrote a song about that called "Someone drew a line." And I want to play some of that, but I'd like you to talk about that song and its place in your community.

Yeah, so that's so amazing that you're going to play a piece of it.

My, my dad, my late father Vincent Craig was a singer and songwriter and a cartoonist. He was a police officer, Marine Corps, Sergeant and Sarp Shooter. He was a Mount Rescue guy. He was a good dad. He was a sober dad. He was so many things. And one of his songs that he wrote, "Someone drew a line." It talks about reservation boundaries being created in Navajo Land. And people's reactions and elders' reactions to this new concept of land ownership that was different from how we experienced it as Navajo or didn't have people.

Okay, so this is Vincent Craig playing his own song "Someone drew a line." My grandfather used to take me to the mountains in my youth, and there he would tell me the legends of long ago. Between the four sacred mountains we lived in, harmony, and now you tell us that we've got to go. Because someone drew a line. Someone drew a line. Because someone drew a line.

And Mr. President, can't you see? What is a golden old? They've taken the heart and soul from the land. Because someone drew a line.

“What do you think about when you hear that? And what was the place of that song in your community?”

Well, first off, thank you Terry for bringing my dad into this because he is such a monumental figure in my life.

And hearing him was refreshing and my dad not only sang that song to audiences on the Navajo Nation and the Southwest, but he would travel to as far away as Alaska to communities that had suffered the same thing. So it was very much a common sentiment that our land is minimized and stolen and there's consequences for us if we cross these boundaries. And the grief that ensues. So that song was very well known. My dad also sang many happy songs and he was a humorist.

Yeah, and he also did a comic strip and it was featured in an exhibition at the Smithsonian.

“Yeah, my dad created the first Navajo superhero called "Mutton Man." "Mutton Man" got his superpowers from that uranium spill in near church rock in Mexico back in the 70s.”

And he even his sheep walked across some contaminated waters. And so "Mutton Man" was a comic strip that ran in the Navajo Times, the Ford Patchy Scout and it grew.

And he ultimately took "Mutton Man" and do an exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington DC called "Mutton Man" discovers Columbus.

[laughter] And it was a collection of all these great comics that my dad had drawn about "Mutton Man" and other comics that poked at the oppressor in funny ways and poked at colonization. And really serious topics, but they were humorous. I grew up watching him sing to "Wide Ray of Audiences" and carry his meshes through song and art and laughter. And I feel like sometimes I do that with food now. So, your first name is Nephi. And that's about NEPHI. When I saw your name on the cover of your book, I thought, "Oh, it must be an Apache name or maybe another home name because your father was another home."

“And it's not, it's a Mormon name and your parents were Mormons. How did they become Mormons?”

And I also wanted to mention that Nephi is a prophet in the book of Mormon.

Yeah, right. All my life, always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people.

And so, how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS church is when they were small, my dad is out in the Navajo Nation. There were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation and the same thing in white river on the Apache Res. And so, my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, young Native American kids were taking from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado.

Many were there was a high population of Mormon families and my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon church in a Mormon community to the graduate of high school. And so, you know, that's a big part of our life. And so, when the three of us, me and my brothers come into the picture, they decided to name me Nephi. And you know, I didn't really know what I was thinking about at the time, but it's really kind of been there. Like, I even write it in the book like this Mormon judge says, like, if you had followed your namesake, you wouldn't have been here.

You know what I mean, like, okay.

No, you wouldn't predict in the future, you'd be a prophet. You followed your namesake. Yeah, but so, it's a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms and for me, that's one dimension of how it contributes to substance use, but also freeing myself from it too. You know what I mean? So, it's an interesting thing. How I got my name. Well, congratulations on all the work you've been doing. Congratulations on your sobriety. And thank you so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me. Nephi Craig's new memoir is called Our Knives Will Save Us, Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef. After we take a short break, John Powers will review a new novel by Nathaniel Rich about the highest of a data center in protest against Big Tech. This is fresh air. Every story from shortwave and pure science podcasts starts with a question.

“Like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill?”

At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you. Follow shortwave wherever you get your podcasts, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. Every episode of it's been a minute, NPR's What's Happening in Culture Podcast starts by asking three questions. Who? How? Why now? If the culture's asking it, we're talking about it. NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and indulge your cultural curiosity. Follow it's been a minute wherever you get your podcasts.

And we'll break down the zeitgeistie topics that are filling your feed. This is fresh air. The new literary thriller Cloud Thief by Nathaniel Rich is about the reaction against Big Tech. In the novel, a struggling, eco-journalist and a brilliant young woman decide to rob a data center in Oklahoma.

George Orwell famously wrote that it takes a constant struggle to see what's in front of one's nose.

“That may be true, or than ever. These days we barely register things that 20 years ago would have seemed downright bizarre.”

Like people staring down at their phones in busy crosswalks. The unnatural comes to seem natural. Until it doesn't. This has happened with the proliferation of data centers all over America. After years of ignoring their mushrooming growth, there are over 4,000 in the US. The public now sees them clearly, and doesn't like what they represent. The at-souring energy bills or the advent of job-killing AI.

People now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life and in movies like Eddington, politicians are now pulled between their constituents desires and the devouring needs of Big Tech. The hatred of data centers ignites the action in Cloudthief, a boisterous new novel that's equal parts high thriller and cry in the digital wilderness. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Rich, who may be best known for ecological non-fiction, such as his 2019 book "Losing Earth". Setting his story back in 2014, when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls.

Cloudthief centers on a briny young man who, like the guy in the Leonard Cohen song, is just some Joseph looking for a manger. Our narrator Tim, a pseudonym, he says, is a freelance writer who's gone broke doing magazine articles about climate change. He's lonely and lost until he stumbles upon Virginia, also not her real name.

“Who could be the American cousin of Dragon Tattooed, Lisbeth-Silander?”

Tech savvy and paranoid and scarily elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini storage unit, and has plans for a blow against Big Tech.

Evidently Tim has never seen Indwar movie, because he doesn't merely fall for this 21st century fantasy of a femme fatale.

He dreamly goes along with her plans to rob a data center in prior Oklahoma, and make off of the sellable information their servers contain. Once they drive off to prior, Rich describes their road trip wonderfully, Cloudthief kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy stuff that we all love in a high story. We see the Baroque planning. We watch them case their target, a silver smoke spewing behemoth that has the majestic size of two futuristic airport terminals, but is actually as tacky as a boondock's mini mall.

And we learn how things work. While data centers contain the records of major corporations and government departments, each building contains tens of thousands of servers fat with documents.

“They're protected by a smattering of minimum wage guards.”

Nobody knows about them, Tim says if these gigantic repositories, but they are the foundation of life on Earth. If every data center went dark tomorrow, we would be plunged into the middle ages. As Virginia and the Livestruck Tim prepare for the robbery, Cloudthief is a blast. They philosophize have sex, don't silly disguises, bristle with suspicion, and constantly argue, often quite widdly. She's a guest at his amateur mistake that could get them caught. They often seem like teenagers playing at committing a crime, but committed they do.

Of course, if you've ever read or watched a high-stale, you know that things never go as planned.

And that the setup is more fun than the aftermath. And so it is here. But rather than spoil things, I'll merely note that Rich's ending earnestly tells us what we already know. No matter, filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I've read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data center nation.

The blighting of the physical landscape, the voracious use of fossil fuel energy. The way that these huge bland buildings owned by private companies like Google and Amazon, now how's and thereby control nearly all aspects of all of our lives. Leading a life of perilous desperation and powerless analysis, he's the very soul of defeated idealism. Tim could kid himself into believing that robbing the prior data center might be a meaningful gesture.

In fact, he's just chasing a woman and trying to escape his own thwarted life.

Early in the novel, Tim rumenates on The Cloud, a term whose vague innocence seduces us and is not thinking about its power.

“The goal of any technology he says is to make itself both essential and invisible like air.”

In Cloudthief rich does the opposite. He hopes to see the actual earthbound workings of the magical sounding cloud. And he gets us thinking about the perils of needing it so badly. John Powers reviewed Cloudthief by Nathaniel Rich. We end today's show with a big thank you to Joyce Lieberman, who's retiring from WHOY after more than 50 years. She played a major part in our show's development.

She was a fresh air engineer for about nine years, starting when we were a local program.

When we became a daily NPR show, Joyce became our technical director. She oversaw the creation of a new control room that enabled us to connect with NPR and member stations, which is how we managed to record interviews with guests and remote studios and to send the show to NPR. Later when she became WHOY's engineer supervisor, she was the person we called during mysterious technical emergencies. She was indispensable in our conversion to digital technology and digitizing our archive.

Early on she was kind of a pioneer. She started WHOY in 1973 as an intern, stayed as a volunteer working on the feminist show. After deciding she wanted to be an engineer, she didn't realize her timing was going to be perfect. WHOY soon received a grant that was part of a larger initiative to train and hire women engineers. Joyce had already taken engineering classes and was hired.

There were very few women engineers at the time.

“I remember when she was very pregnant with her first child, some of our male guests looked at her in confusion.”

Like, what? A woman engineer and pregnant too? Thank you Joyce for all you've done for WHOY and our show. I also have to thank Thad Kirk, who's just retired after over 35 years at WHOY. He was one of our engineers when we became a daily national program. He went on to become WHOY's chief engineer.

In that role, he continued to look out for fresh air and he knew how it worked and what we needed.

You could always count on Thad to become and know what to do, even when things were crashing all around him.

I wish Thad and Joyce a fulfilling retirement. We don't know how lucky we were to have worked with them. Fresh air is executive producer Sam Brither, our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stannishewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced in edited by Phyllis Meyers, her Berter Shorock, Enrible Denado, Lauren Crenzult, Theresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Ycundee,

Anna Bowman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesfer. They're a child or directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. From the light bulb to the internet, human history has been driven by innovation and shortwave is exploring how the technology of tomorrow will transform our future.

Would you write in a flying taxi? Will AI models fight wars? Here about the technological frontier, every Monday on Techamp. The new series from Surewave. Listen on the Empire app or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's me Peter Segal, host of Weightweight Don't Tell Me.

“It's summer and if you want to turn your pool party into a nerd fest, check out our news quiz.”

We got comedians, we got celebrities, we got games to help you laugh about the week's news. Yeah, that news. It'll be just like we're all hanging out at your backyard barbecue. Listen every week to Weightweight Don't Tell Me on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.