Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 106

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

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So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Nick and App here. A show that is about a number of... I really should have done an actual intro for this one.

This is embarrassing. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is Shrine and James. Hello Mia. Well, yeah, that was great. I thought that was actually great. I keep them guessing, you know. Yeah, they never know what they're gonna get.

Would it be sad? Would it be happy? Yeah, unfortunately this is a, this is a, this is a really sad episode. This is an episode that I got really pissed off or writing. Yeah, and this is an episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on Palestine right now has been focused on Gaza for, you know, very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where, you know, most of where most of the Israeli offensive is happening.

It's where most of the people are, these Israelis are killing the most people. But however, comma, there's also been a bunch of killing going on in the West Bank. And this is, the murder of Palestinians in the West Bank is stuff that, it's been intensified by the current conflict, but this is stuff that's been happening even before like this latest round of stuff started. Since the beginning of the year, Israeli settlers and government forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank.

And I think in a lot of ways, the dynamics of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West Bank. And I think in a lot of ways, the dynamics of the entire is really project are clearer in the West Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold statement that I will concede, but I think by the end of this, we'll see if I'm right. I think you're right in the sense that like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the West

Bank versus other parts of. Yeah. I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really, the Israeli project is pretty fucking evident are very clear in the West Bank versus other parts of the. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really the, the, the Israeli project is pretty fucking evident when that bombing is going to be in Gaza too. Yeah. Like it's, it's, it's, yeah. But I think, I think specifically the, the part that's easiest to understand in the

West Bank is why it's, why it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic, why, why, why the, why the settler project keeps, like, has been building the way that it has, why it keeps inevitably leading to violence, the way that it has, and why it's effectively the sort of cyclical, self-reinforcing project. But to actually understand what I'm talking about, we need to go back to the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand

what the occupation actually is. Because I'm actually sure, I don't know, this is something that I feel like most of people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows. And I feel like we should not assume that. And we should, you know, actually go back and run through some of the situation really quickly. My cynical take is that most of the people talking about this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves and Let that be skating along on that assumption Yeah, no, not to have to expose their own shaking foundation. I feel like I've talked about it before on like every podcast

I've done but I feel like people like tune it out You know what I mean? Yeah, like people don't actually absorb it. I'm what any what it what they hear because it's like Oh this again or whatever the fuck they're thinking. I don't actually absorb it. I'm what any what what they hear because it's like, oh, this again, or whatever the fuck they're thinking, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to hammer I'm going to hammer a copy of this into all of your brains. You have no choice. You must and Martin Luther ring the history of Palestine. Yeah, good nail 95 copies of the Geneva Convention.

To the door So in the beginning there was the knockbook which is the great disaster the Palestinian people in which the Israelis armed I should mention by Stalin which is something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the entire American political spectrum and We will get back to who also like who specifically was doing the knockbook because it's Not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays them as but Yeah, but a bunch of a bunch of armed settlers armed by Stalin drive 700,000 Palestinians from their homes They seize those homes. They take them for themselves now. This is I

I think, okay, this is the part where disclaimer, Mia is not a professional if international law. I think this was actually technically not a legally a war crime because I, only because the fourth and even convention hadn't been ratified yet, because the knockbook takes place in 1948. And this is a year before the Geneva Convention or the fourth and even convention, the part

that has the stuff we're going to talk about was ratified in two years before it comes into force. But you know from the beginning what you have here is a settler colony. These really have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there. They have seized their homes and they have replaced them with Jewish settlers. They've also massacred like 15 years ago. Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean, I guess I should be more explicit about that.

Like when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's just, it's people fleeing. A lot of times it's, they're killed. Yeah. I think it's like they flatten entire villages. You know what I mean? Like it's not just like, oh, they're empty. Yeah. I think it's like they they flattened entire villages. You know what I mean? Like it's not just like, oh, they're empty houses now. It's like no, they actually destroyed everything. Built new cities where they're already were cities, renamed the cities. It's it was just, I don't know, it's just the reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors and

family members killed in their fields and houses burned and they know that that's coming for them right later. Yeah. I think this is, sorry, just one tangent is there are so many videos of like former IDF soldiers that were not exactly a side IDF technically, but like former people that fought in the NECPA that like drove these people out of their homes. And it's so repulsive. There's literally like a, it was on an Israeli news channel

or like some type of Israeli show where there's an old man like laughing about how him and his group raped a 16 year old girl and shot everyone in a row, all the babies, everything else. It's just like, and that's coming from them. So I think that's important to know. It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these terrible things happen.

It's like no, they actually admitted to it multiple times. We're just telling you from, you know what I mean? I think it's important to say that. Yeah, and this is something we're gonna get into more in a bit. But one of the consequences of this and one of the consequences of running a settler colony like this is that the people that it produces who are the people who, you know, people who are like murdering people

and taking their homes, right? In order, the kind of person you have to be in order to do that is just absolutely terrifying. Just, I like, you know, I mean, this, and this is why you see so much stuff both here and, you know, I mean, this, and this is why you see so much stuff both here and, you know, like that, like in in in the early phases of like I have the early phases, but like most of the phases of US settler expansion, right, you read the accounts of these people in those like these people are all serial killers. To do that, I think you have to convince yourself that the people you are doing it to are less human or not human. Yeah. Like that it's fundamental to colonialism, right? To consider yourself to either be a higher form of humanity or do like stick to like a species sense from these people. I've

British people did that in their colonialism too. But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically in like their language and culture that it picks the settler colonization of the United States or what is now the United States, right? Like, you can look at the, like what it's called, the Indian Wars after the, after the Civil War and see, just all kinds of the most fucking horrific shit imaginable. Because you're doing a genocide, you're just doing it like piece by piece as you go across the country. Yeah. And this is one of these parts of American history that people don't understand and when you learn it, there's this real sort of... Even in sort of radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but there's a tendency to not

sort of back away from exactly how violent this stuff was. And a lot of the reason for this is it can get into this realm of, I don't know, this almost weird tragedy horror porn stuff, but it was as bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. And the people doing that stuff are driven by the same kinds of stuff that's happening here. The people doing that stuff are still like, there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's Kit Kasa Park, there's Uniporo Sera Park,

like it's baked into American culture still, like the genocide is a fucking celebrated here. Yeah, and this is also true of Israel. Now, okay, so after the knockbook, there's a lot of people who think that this is the end of the whole process, right? That like, okay, so we've expelled these people, we've killed these people. There's now a Jewish state that has like, relatively, so we've expelled these people, we've killed these people. There's now a Jewish state. It has like, relatively stable borders or whatever. This is going to be the end of it.

And that did not happen. And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the 1967 Six Days War, where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt. It's okay. So they, this is the PR term that's been developed afterwards for it. The reality is that Egypt was not about to attack Israel. The Israelis just started a war, like just straight up started a war and invaded Egypt. And the six day war winds up being a war between the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt.

They end up fighting Egypt, Syria, Jordan a little bit. And like technically the Saudis like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are in the war, but like they don't do shit. There's a story. I think it's actually from the 73 war, but there's a story of there's a bunch of people, there's a bunch of Egyptian soldiers in a bunch of trenches. And a bunch, like the, like the Saudi command rolls up. And the Saudis roll up and fucking rolls voices.

And the Egyptian commanders looks at these guys and just just go home because they're just like, and this is one of the spread dynamics here of like, oh God, like the era powers outside of Egypt for some of the time really were not taking this very seriously. And, you know, and the consequence of this is that the is like most of the most of the 67 war is, I mean, the entirety of the 67 war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out of the Egyptians. In large part because the Egyptians weren't like actually tried to fight a war, so they were basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel.

Now this is, this war is a complete disaster for, for the Arab powers. Like, Gamel Al-Nasser is so ashamed of his defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd come back. He did really royally kind of like his position was that will like eventually they're going to attack us, we'll have a defensive position and failed miserably at having that. Yeah, it did not work. This is a complete disaster. And the other, you know, the part of it that's most important for our story is that this is the period where the Israelis start seizing territory on mass. They take the entire Sinai peninsula from Egypt, they take the Galwan heights from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they take both the West Bank and Gaza, which means they now occupy all of Palestine.

Now immediately, like effectively, immediately, as this is happening, 1.3 million Palestinians flee the West Bank and Gaza. And you know, this has a consequence of enormously expanding the already very, very large, like permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of other countries. And this is also where we come to the focus of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But do you know who else shows up uninvited and is technically illegal underage. Multiple sections of international law. Is it Ronald Reagan? I, yes.

That's the prize Reagan. Yep. And we are back. So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes is the set of legal obligations that occupiers have in occupied, in overt territory that they occupy. So if you, you know, the way that's supposed to work under international law is that, you know,

technically speaking, yeah, you can occupy territory, but you're not allowed to do whatever you want with that territory. You have to actually abide by a set of, a set of like laws. And this was done to, you know, after World War II to protect like people and occupy territories from just unbelievable horrors that were unleashed

by the Nazis in World War II. Now, one of the things that you cannot do if you are occupying a territory is you cannot expel civilians from their homes and replace them with your own civilians. This is a war crime. You are, it is on an international law, you're not allowed to do this. Now, I've been talking a lot about international law. This is something where I kind of,

I don't know if this agrees the way it were. I have very little faith in international law. I know a lot of people who have been involved in this, like in the struggle for a liberating Palestine for a very, very long time, like take international law very seriously. I don't know, like, I mean, Israel has, has not fallen to national law.

Yeah, I like it. So something like nothing happens. So, yeah, where's the international police? It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe what it's telling me because nothing ever happens. It has, maybe it has a moral value, right? I guess that's the idea behind some of the activism is that it can help position something as being in the wrong and then that might help someone to act.

But yeah, it hasn't fucking worked. It didn't stop fucking, it didn't stop the ranger genocide in Myanmar. It hasn't stopped the population exchange in a free. Like, it's pretend it doesn't exist and that's someone that forced it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it doesn't, I don't know, I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like Western liberals to be like, oh, well, they they can't do that. They're breaking international law. Oh, fuck, they're doing it anyway. Like, well, it's like, all that's really bad. Yeah. And I'm just doing it. So yeah. And like, uh, understandably, like no one

particularly wants to like be the ones who enforce international law because that involves your children dying. And so they let's let other children die instead. Yeah, and, you know, but the consequence of this being really toothless is that, you know, it's the language that the stuff is framed in. I want to frame this like differently for a second, which is I want to think about what is being prohibited here in basic moral terms, because the, what this article

of the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop is an army showing up, killing a bunch of people, and then settling their own population on top of those people's corpses. And that is fucking horrifying. There is obviously, yeah, there's a reason why the Geneva Convention was like holy shit, like we can't have this. But obviously this hasn't stopped, this hasn't actually stopped this from happening. We now live in effectively the new golden age

of ethnic cleansing, right? I mean, the 1.2 million gozans you fled their homes after the Israelis told them, literally told them to flee or die, which is that, that's by the way, and I don't want to be very clear about this when people talk about an evacuation order. That's what that is, right? And you know, this isn't an evacuation order

from like a tsunami, right? Like, it's not like there's a natural disaster coming. The thing that is happening is the Israeli government has said, you must leave now or we are going to kill you. And, of course, the other bleak side of this ride is that with the quote unquote evacuation order, these railways killed people who were fleeing anyways. But they had nowhere to fucking go. They're trapped.

They're trapped. They're trapped. The evacuation does make it seem like a very humanitarian crisis. but, you know, and they had nowhere to fucking go like they yeah, they're the right. Right. Like, yeah. If that guy does make it seem like a very like humanitarian crisis, one really that, that's all you're right. All they're saying is like, leave now or die in the next hours, you know what I mean? Yeah. And in evacuation, that's like threatened. Like it's just a death threat. Yeah. If I was to like stand outside your bedroom and pull the pin on a grenade and be like, I'm giving you an evacuation order

Oh, and I'm gonna eat this grenade in here in five seconds people wouldn't be like oh, that's reasonable I mean, I've got to start to your house as well. Just just for funsies Yeah, and you know, and so I mean this this is what's been happening in Gaza, right? You've won't put you million in Gaza since you fled their homes and they've joined the 120,000 Armenians who are ethnically cleansed from the Garo Caraboc by a job in September, which this is the era we're living in right now is an unfathomable era of violence and ethnic cleansing, right? Like none of none of the international legal frameworks like did shit. None of none of none of the sort of,

you know, like the none of the never again stuff like, no, you can, you can, you can literally like, you can ethnically cleanse the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen. Yeah. Um, oh, they're enjoying me and my, we didn't do shit. Yeah. Oh, I mean, like right now we are, we are averaging one, one like mass scale ethnic cleansing on butts. Jesus. And that is a fucking unbelievably bleak thing. And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized. You know what I mean?

Like that's the thing. It's like, oh, people are used to seeing this group of people suffer. They're used to seeing these kinds, this kind of population just always die and be, I don't know, bombed and stuff. So I think a lot of people just kind of gloss over it because they're just like, oh, this is what happens to them. Yeah, it's certainly like not a coincidence that like we, they have been other ethnic clandings right in Africa. Like I said, the Rehingean Muslims, but, when it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world or where we want to say it, like, it's not Arab world, I guess, because it happens to

Kurdish people too. But like, yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened, like, over there. And then it's very easy, especially with the way American news media only focuses on these parts of the world, like, they just pointed it and like, oh, look, sad, and then never give the context. Like, me, it and like, oh, look, sad. And then never give the context. It's like me was explaining and never give the background. And then we're blindsided every two years by a fucking genocide or an ethnic cleansing or a massive murder because we don't report on it. And then it pops up again. Oh, no one understands.

And yeah, I'm very bleak on the media at the minute. Yeah. Well, and I mean, I think, you know, the important context I understand here is that the absolute horror show that's happening in Gaza right now that Israeli is doing, this is one of the most extreme forms of it they've ever done, but this is something they've been doing from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank. Yeah, this is what they were doing. Um, and again, this is-

The rep I never ended, really. Yeah, yeah. But it was quite mostly for a while, people ignored it, but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening. Yeah, I think the, I'll go on what I'm blanking on. The continuous knock-but thing is the way that it's understood. Well, it's what's called in Palestine. In sort of settler colonial studies, the line that people's understood. Well, it's what's called in Palestine, in sort of settler colonial studies,

the line that people always say is that settler colonial is the structure, not an event. It's not a thing that just ends, right? It just is. It is the air that you breathe. It's the sort of, you know, like it's the walls of the society that have been built to, yeah, cage and destroy people. Now, you know, the Israelis, again, this is the thing that when when when when 67

happens, this is actually, it's kind of a turning point in the sense that like, there are groups of liberals who have supported the Israelis in 48 who were like, whoa, hold on, hold on, like this is actually like really stunningly illegal. And this doesn't do anything, but there's a lot of people who make a distinction between Israel in 48 and this Israel, because this Israel, like the mask is off,

there's nothing there anymore, right? It's just, we have seized this land By military force by attacking a country who we were not at war with and we are now like systematically replacing the population of these places with our population um and the consequence of this the these these this is this is real settler population the consequence of this is that there's now It's hard to get accurate numbers because these people in This is Israel, settler population. The consequence of this is that there's now, it's hard to get accurate numbers because these people in theory aren't supposed to be there, but there's something like 500,

somewhere between 450 and 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and another like 200,000 in East Jerusalem. And this means that the settler population, in if you count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And this means that the settler population in, if you count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is about 7% of the total population of Israel that are now these settlers. And these settlers are, I don't know, this is, this is like, I guess what you would call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that like these are the people who were like on the absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession, killing people and taking their stuff.

Let's just almost to Miss Nomek, because they're not like, it's not like, sometimes I think that constructs the notion of like unsettled territory and they're settling on it, right? These people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which was also true of the American like, Yes, very much so. We should use that so. Yeah, we should use that here. Yeah, we should use that here. Oh, Pioneers, ain't Pioneers shit. People live there for 10,000 to 10,000 years.

No, they were Pioneers, yeah. But like, the way that the state thinks about its own geography is in the terms of these frontiers. Sometimes they call them buffer areas. And they think about these things as these areas, or they need a projection of military control, and a projection of their power, and also sort of settler power.

And these kinds of, and this is what the sort of settler populations, the West Bank, are the friend line of. Now, these people are subsidized by the Israeli government. If you go to these places, you get tax breaks, you get, there's a whole variety of government subsidies for these people.

They also get, this is a thing that I think is really interesting that isn't discussed very much. These really social services in the West Bank are very, very good. In some cases, they're better than the stuff that's in like Jerusalem or in the other parts of Israel. And this acts as part of the incentive package to get people to move into these settler regions.

Now, and these people reap other benefits too. They have an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that Shrin, you talked about this, right? If you're trying to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army when Pemos attacked, well, the answer is they were all in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers still land, right?

Which, you know, gets you. They were taking settlers terrorizing Palestine to know what was happening. And that happens all the time, but it just still happened to happen on this very large scale attack. Yeah. And the level of violence that's happening here,

you know, I mean, we're gonna talk about the more direct settler of violence. Like these people, these are people who have set multiple babies on fire. Like that is, like they have set multiple children on fire. This is the kind of people who you were dealing with when you're talking about, especially. So, okay, so there's a distinction inside of this really law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under international law, all of these settlements

are illegal. Like, there's no, this is not a black, it's a completely black and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal. Under Israeli law, there are some settlements that they will officially approve and some of them that they don't. And so the ones that they do approve are the ones that, you know, they, those are the ones with better government services, they get rose and go without to them. And, and, but there And, but there are kinds of violence here that are, I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like, one of the sort of benefits you get of living in the West Bank

is like the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West Bank's water supply to fill these people's swimming pools. And this is water that is, the thing that they've been used for a very, very long time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But, you know, that's becoming growing all of this. And this becoming increasingly fucking impossible

because these railings are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting and then the government diverts all the water away and then the settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And this is actually, and this is really a thing that like almost exactly the same pattern is something like Turkey has done to the Kurds too, right? Like, yeah, every ethnic minority like in Russia does it to its calmy people. The story I hear so often at the border when talking to people in any number of languages

many number of countries is like, they have cut off the water supply to where we live and now we can't live there anymore. Across Africa, sadly, even within Russia, it's like, yeah, like you say, it's genocide by Dictat or fucking, it's an ethnic cleansing that doesn't look so bad on TV because it happens a little bit slower, but it's a way to remove people. And you can look at like drone pictures of the West Bank, and you can see these little fucking green lollipops, like the road and then the settlement, right? And like people have trees and shit. And like it did.

It's wild. Yeah. I think the unique part about Israel and the settlers there burning all the olive trees, I feel like I didn't have to talk about this before. I don't know if we should talk about this. But the whole essence of Zionism is the idea that there is a group of people that are like meant for this land. And I just find the olive tree burning the best example of how that's just like such a

bullshit. Because if you actually cared about this ancient land, if you had ties to this ancient land, you wouldn't want to burn this like native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example

that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all, it's just about power and land. And not about the, not land in the sense of like the architecture or the history or the nature is just about, I don't know, like a land grab, like just colonial land grab. Yeah, well, and I think, I think the fundamental thing at play here,

and this is the sort of one of the fundamental tennis of their colonialism is that these people see land as a commodity, right? They see they see they they they only see land in terms of things they can buy and sell and things they can possess. Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right? Like the more like square miles you can bring under your like where you have a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, like the more important you are as a state. And so like this is the problem of states. Yeah, and we will we will get into this more in a second, but first we need to go to So, the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone who supports Israel because it is really, really hard to be sort of, you know, take your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel has the right to protect

itself blah blah blah blah. And then cure these like Yahoo's in the hills lighting children on fire. And you know, I mean, and this is the thing where even even like very, very reliable pro-Israel groups at the council and foreign relations are like, whoa, nearly these guys are messed up. And I mean, you can find writing for them. And they've been writing about this for a long time because this is all stuff that's been very, very obvious of what was going to happen, right? Like the level of violence is going to ramp up.

They're like all of this stuff, none of this stuff is happening now. I mean, like, I guess this is one of those things is like everything is impossible until it happens or whatever, but, you know, all of the stuff that's happening is, like if you just spend any time looking at what was happening in the 2000, 2010s, nothing that's happening now

is like particularly surprising. Now, what's very interesting about the settlers though is that, okay, so when the council of foreign relations, the council of foreign relations went in and was like, okay, so what is with these people, right? They assumed initially that, you know, okay, so they're taking a sort of liberal like pros and they're like, okay, well,

these settlers must be responding to Palestinian violence. And no, it turns out, actually, not only are these attacks not retaliatory, right? It's not that, not that the settler communities were being attacked by Palestinians and they were attacking back. Settler violence is actually inversely correlated with the level of armed struggle

being carried out with Palestinians. So the error of settler violence ramp up is the late 2000s and the 2010s. And this is the period, you know, if you know anything about the second, it defaude, this is the period, you know, if you know anything about like the second hit to follow it, this is the period where like Palestinians doing arm struggle in like all of the different forms is tapering off. And so, and this leads people kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here.

And so, okay, so we can ask, what is actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions? And the thing most people focus on is ideology and some extent religion, because a huge number, although it should be mentioned, okay, so like a lot of settlers are religious Zionists who are people, a lot of these are, there's like a specific religious Zionist party

that we'll talk about a bit later, who are like specifically a lot of these are, there's like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but like there's a lot of right-wing religious Zionists of like various stripes who, you know, and their thing is that they believe that they have a God-given right to take whatever land they want in what they call, quote, Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank and they believe

that they just have the right to take this land. Yeah. And if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill them or drive them from their homes. And it's true that these people exist, right? And these people obviously, and we're going to get into this more in a second, like, as people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics. But on the other hand, they're not, they are a lot of the settlers. They're not the entire settler population.

In fact, there's a lot of settlers who are not these people. And the other thing about trying to purely explain the dynamics of violence by ideologies, it can't explain why really, I mean, there's a kind of like a breakwater event where so there used to be settlers in Gaza too. And these really pulled them out when they pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and that pissed off the settlers enormously right

and then this is part of one of the things that like leads to the sort of settler violent turn was there were like well okay so if the Israeli government isn't going to like I know if the Israeli government one time will stop the legal settlements from happening uh we need to like make sure that we are violence enough. They'll never try to get rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind of explains the violence uptake. But it doesn't explain all of it. Actually, so sorry, before I launch into this, I should ask you what were you going to say? Sorry. No, it's okay. I just wanted to make a really important distinction that like Zionism is not a religion per se. It is a political ideology, right? Like you can be Christian

and Zionist, you can be Jewish and Zionist. I've had multiple anti-Zionist Jewish people on the show and I feel like they're very important to fight for Palestinian liberation. But I think that's a really important distinction because Zionism is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion. It was like the late 1800s when it really like became formed into what it is today. So I think that's really important to remember is that Zionism itself is not this like deep spiritual thing, but a lot of Zionist claim it is. It is just fucking politics and bad politics. And I think the other important thing about it too, and this is something that has been changing, but like Zionism, most Zionists, like when Israel was formed were secular.

Like they were secularists, right? A lot of these people were leftists, they were secularists, they weren't. And the emergence of this religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that started happening really in the 80s. So this is like 40 years old, right? Like billions of people on earth are older than this kind of religious Zionism. Yeah, and so the kind of transition

from more secular form to Zionism to more religious form to Zionism is this is one of the things, like the claim that this is the driving thing, that this is what you'll get a lot from council of form relations people and sort of like. And it's kind of true to some extent, but comma, there's also something else going on here. And that is the Israeli housing market. So, all right, I swear, I swear this is connected,

but we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market. So, all right, so we've talked about how, again, the rise in settler violence is something that it starts in the late 2000s and accelerates to the 2010s, and as we each have fever pitched now with, like, in the past, like and accelerates to the 2010s and has reached a fever pitch now with like, in the past like month, they've killed like 130 people in the West Bank. And okay, so what actually also was happening in that time? And the answer to that question is that between 2008 and 2010 alone, and this

is very weird, because again, think about the time period that we're in, this 2008 to 2010. This is like right after 2008 financial collapse, there was a 35% increase in housing prices in Israel. This is nuts, right? Like this everywhere else in the entire world, like the price of housing is tanking. In Israel, it is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing. The rate at which the price of housing is also increasing. It's skyrocketing through the entire 2010s. And then like, the rate of increase in the 2010s looks like a fucking joke compared to

the rate of increase in the 2010s looks like a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in the 2020s. And these increases coincide with guess what, the massive increases in settler violence. Now, this is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that, you know, and sometimes every once in a while, you will get like someone will just like, I don't know, some like council reform relations guy will say like, well, there are settlers who are there for economic reasons. But what actually does that mean? Right. Now, I've been playing kind of fast in loose with statistics here, right? Like, obviously, you can't just point to, okay, one number was increasing at the same time as another number, correlation and plies causation.

Like, no, it doesn't, right? This is too loose. And the correlation here isn't, you know, it's not quite that simple, but, comma, this is legitimately one of the things that's been driving Israeli settler violence and sort of the expansion of the sort of Israeli settler project. And at the core of this is this fundamental tension with housing in capitalism, in which

a house, and also very importantly, the land that it's on, is two things at the same time, right? A house is a thing that you live in, but it's also a speculative asset that appreciates in value over time, or a supposed to appreciate in value over time. And when housing values don't go up, homeowners get very, very, very angry because it's also supposed to be a speculative asset. Now, the sort of technical terminology for this is that a house has a use value, which is, you know, it's a house that you live in, right? And it also has an exchange value, which is this value on the market. That's a product of the sort of social relations,

that form the economic system. And with housing, the all commodities work like this, with housing in particular, the two sort of natures of this commodity work against each other, right? If you want a house and you want a house because you want to live in it, you want the price to be as low as possible, right? You want for houses to be speculative assets like as little as humanly possible.

But in the other hand, if you want a house because you are, say, a real estate firm or a land speculator or you're just buying a house as like an investment, you want the price to be as high as possible because it doesn't matter to you if people actually use the house to live in it all. All that matters is that you're getting money from this house. And, you know, I just want to talk about a lot on this show. And since really the 90s, when Japan figured this out, housing has been like the speculative asset par excellence, the thing you dump all of your money into when you have a bunch of money sitting around that you can't turn into more capital.

And you know, this, but the problem is that this creates these massive like housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by, you this by addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your economy in such a way that houses are not commodities and thus is a use value and is a place to live and not like a financial asset. But nobody's going to do that, right? Because that requires a systemic transformation of your... This requires you to abolish capitalism. Yeah.

So instead of doing this, right, the other thing you can do when housing prices are really high is you can go kill someone and take their land. And yeah, you know, and, you know, I mean, this is a very old American sort of colon. I don't even know. I think this is where it's from, but like yeah, the every

empire does this. So right, like working people kind of forward to live with dignity. So we fucking ship them off. So they strip someone else's dignity and make that for you know someone else's land. Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid with someone else's blood. Yeah. Now, I'm going to read from a little bit from a very, very, I really recommend people actually read this because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I mean, I'm going to read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence Reflections on a Visit to the West Bank written by David Graber. This is from 2015, but you know, this is one of the things about the occupation is that if you're at any given point in time, if you are looking at what's

happening in the occupation, you can unfold the dynamics that are going to be that are going to be the future of the occupation. So here's David Graber. First, the settlements. They were originally the product of a relatively isolated, if well-funded collection of religious sellets. Now everything seems to be organized around them. The government pours in endless resources. Why? The answer seems to be that since at least the 90s, right-wing politicians in Israel have figured out the settlements are a kind of political magic.

The more money gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns to the right. The reason is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries is simple. Israel is expensive. Housing inside the 1948 boundaries is exorbitantly expensive. If you are a young person without means, you increasingly have two options. To live with one's parents until well into your 30s or find a place in the legal settlements where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in high-offer or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention the superior roads,

schools, utilities, and social services. At this point, the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank for economic, not ideological reasons. And this is something that like this is actually kind of reversing now just because of how far right and how the spread of like, sort of like ideological, like right wing stuff is spread, but this is at the time that in 2015 this was true. Yeah, and this is especially true around Jerusalem. But consider who these people are. In the past, young people in difficult circumstances, students well-educated young parents have been the traditional constituency of the left, put these same people in a settlement and they will inexturably,

without even realizing it, begin to think like fascists. Settlements are, in their own way, giant engines for the production of right wing consciousness. It is very difficult for someone placed in a hostile territory, given training and automatic weapons, and weren't constantly to be on one's guard

against local populations, seething over the fact that your next-door neighbors have been killing their sheep and destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno-nationalism as common sense. As a result, with every election, the old left electorate just further dissipates and a host of religious fascists or semi-fascist parties when a larger and larger stake in the vote. For politicians who can barely think past the next election. The lure is inescapable.

And so I think this gets at like the core of what's happening, what's specifically what's happening in the West Bank, which is that yeah, these settlements are, you know, I mean, if you were trying to generate in a lab, a place where you could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would be these settlements. And for more on that, come back tomorrow when we finish this conversation. In the meantime, this has been Nick Adapten here.

Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she just wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell.

Everyone deserves no detruth, and if there was something that was not right, then someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in the situation. The Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Libby Caswell on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. And if you want to listen ad-free and get early access to new episodes and bonus content, be sure to subscribe to iHeartTrueCrime Plus today, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curric and I'm back with the new season of Next Question. Yay! This season, it's all about being more conversational, but I wanted to mix it up a little bit. So I've been inviting different people to join me to be my plus ones to ride

shotgun, if you will, and sometimes actually getting the driver's seat. I'm so honored to be a year plus one and be your partner in crime. My date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. I didn't know we were dating. I think bringing in new voices will add a little june se kwa, a little judge, to this season of next question. By the way, I'm not totally abandoning the idea of a one-on-one interview. Sometimes that's the best format. I'm hoping it'll be more relaxed, a little more spontaneous, and quite frankly, a little more fun. Listen to next question with me,

Katie Kirk, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I notice Jacob is not in his crib. So I look in and say, oh, she's not there, so I'm like, okay, they're not there. Unrestorable is a new true crime podcast that investigates the case of Catherine Hoggel, a mother accused of murder. I'm thinking, you know, like, what's going on? Like, this is insane.

Like, where are my kids. But despite signs that Catherine Hoggel took her tiny children one by one into the night, never to come home again. She has yet to stand trial. Because soon after her children went missing, she was declared incompetent to stand trial. You know, when I would ask her her in game, it was up in the body of the remaining compliment. And then I would say, well, who advised you you should throw you know I can't tell you that. In Maryland if the defendant is found incompetent and can't be restored to

competency their felony charges are dismissed after five years. So as the clock counts down Catherine's charges on the verge of being dismissed will a grieving dad ever get justice. Listen to Unrestorable on the I Heart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kid Apped here, a podcast that is once again about Palestine. Hopefully, listen to yesterday's episode of This one's going to be a little bit out of sorts. But yeah, we are continuing and finishing up our conversation about Israel and settler colonialism. So strap in and enjoy the show. If you were trying to generate

in a lab a place where you could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would be these settlements. This has a bunch of downstream political effects. One of them is that, okay, so whose lands are you taking here? The answer here is it's a lot of Palestinian farmers. Once you kick farmers off their land, they can't be farmers anymore. This leaves them with two choices. One, flee Palestine altogether, and this is really, really hard.

We talked about it on this show. It is really, really difficult to get out. Or your other option is to become cheap labor for Israeli capitalists. And this is another part of the sort of self-reinforcing dynamic of these engines, right? Is like, you know, if you're dealing with a population that doesn't have the means to support themselves, except for, you know, these, like, these are really like work passes that they, like,

you know, like bestow upon the benigned population, like, it makes it incredibly hard for there to be any sort of physicist movement. And, you know, the other thing that David Greer was pointing out that, you know, he was, I think, like, I had a curve on in a lot of ways is, I mean, this has been happening for a long time, but these really like electoral left is just gone. Um, is really labor, which is like the, like Israeli labor is the party that built Israel, right? Like it was Israeli labor guys who pulled together the entire Zionist coalition and turned them into the engine that could actually win the war in 48. Labor was outperformed by fucking Hadash in the most recent election.

This has happened several times. Hadash is an alliance of the Israeli communists and left Arab nationalists. What I say they do better is it's not to say that Hadoj is doing well, but they're both pulling it like 4%. And Israeli labor, again, has ruled Israel for a very significant part of its history. They are now nothing. There's 4% of the vote. They have the same amount of vote

as the Israeli and specifically I should mention, this is the anti-occupation communists. This is another one of the sort of dynamics of settlerism that, you know, this is sort of, is universally true, right? This is, it's not just Israel where a bunch of people who are nominally left as a bunch of people who, like, you know, fought in their own liberation struggles get turned into just like absolutely fanatical right-wingers. There are an enormous number of United Irishmen rebels from the Rebellion of 1878 in Ireland

who go to the US and wind up a bunch of these people wind up in the American army, a bunch of these people wind up like, I guess it's technically not the Indian wars, but a lot of these people wind up fighting the I mean, I guess it's technically not the Indian words, but like a lot of these people wind up like fighting the creeks in 1812. These people could become the front line of settlers in the US. And this all, this happens again with like German and French like liberals and socialists who flee the crushing of the 1848 revolution. It actually almost happened to Marx.

He wanted to not go into the US, but there's a lot of settlers. Like, there's a lot of like, uh, uh, uh, European socialists who come to the US and see all of this land. And they go, oh, shit, we can solve, like, we can solve the problems of the old world by just taking this land. Yeah. Having a little like a utopian socialist settlement. Was it Owens or Jones or someone? They had these like, yeah, I think, yeah, Quaker, Utopian sort of settlement

town in someone else's land. Yeah, well, and that's one of the ways this happens. There are other ways this happens too, where it's just people, you know, it's not even always utopian communities. People, a lot of, and this is also, so, okay, there are people who come over from the 1848 revolution to like, you know, like August Von Willich is probably the most famous one. Like he's a communist who ends up like fighting for the Union and then notably not fighting in the Indian Wars after. But, you know, a lot of these people, they come to the US and they're like, okay, well, so the like the fundamental contradiction of capitalism or whatever is that like, you know, people like is that people are forced to become,

like they would literally call it like the wage slaves of capital, right? And so these people take a bunch of just incredibly bizarre stances like one, they're against the abolition of slavery, because they're like, oh, well, if you free the slaves, these people are gonna compete with us for wage labor. So either they're pro slavery because they're like, oh, well, if you free the slaves, these people are going to compete with us for wage labor. So either they're pro slavery or they're like slavery, the ending slavery is a thing that can only happen with the end of capitalism so we don't care about it. Or, and this is a very common thing that this is one of, and

this is I think much closer to the Israeli dynamic is these people become convinced that like the, you know, the problem with Europe is that Europe is entirely ruled by either feudalists or feudal bearers or capitalist. So there's no way for someone to make themselves in the world. There's no way for them to be independence of the capitalist class. But in the US, there is, because all you have to do is instead of being part of the industrial proletariat or whatever, and getting crushed by the boot of capital, you can just go become a settler farmer. And this is one of the defining ideologies of the US.

Like, Abraham Lincoln talks about this. It's like the thing that makes the US different from Europe. Is that like, yeah, you can go be a settler. You can get your own land. And this is something you can also trace back to the foundation of Israel. Israel is created, you know, there are there are right wing Zionists, right? But it's also created by liberal socialist communists and even anarchists who fought the Spanish civil war who go to Israel become like become Zionists are armed by Stalin.

And these people create like, you know, these are the people who do the the not but. Yeah, lots of people were also there with Jewish, I guess socialist is probably the best term for them to come to fight in Spain and then return to Israel. And people who have interested run on rain has done a really good paper about some, you know, to keep them international regates. Send not all of them turned out to do the knockup. To be clear. Yes, so some of them were good. It's actually, it's actually really sad to follow the plight of, it's a slight divergence, I guess, but Jewish people who had fled pogroms in the early 20th

century, grown up largely in New York in extremely impoverished neighborhoods. Fort Fashers in Spain came home. Fort Fashios again in the rest of Europe, after like point to get it in 1935 and going bad and America going now dog we're good. And then in 1941 going who could have foreseen this? And then they come in the meantime, they see Stalin signing a pact with Fashios and right,

and they feel horribly betrayed and have to deal with either leaving the Communist Party or working out in their own head how the fuck the people who killed their friends and other friends. And then they come home after the war, they're blacklisted under McCarthy and they see the knock-butt happening, you know, like the later on. And they're they're disgusted, right? Like they, everything, they're like every sort of like identity in group that they've had, they feel has turned against the things that I think are morally right. And they have these really difficult lives.

Despite like pursuing what most of us would agree is a moral good throughout their lives. Yeah, being consistently moral fucking sucks. And that is a terrible time. That is a terrible time. That is a terrible time. Yeah, that is a fucking awful time to do that. Yeah. It sucks.

Yeah. Okay, we should take another ad break and then... Yeah, adverts are not consistent, e-morrow. Woo! Very unlikely. And we are back. So we've been talking about the capacity of settlements to change someone's politics, right?

So it's, you know, it's as these labs of consciousness that produce certain kinds of right wing politics and metallities and, you know, and produce right wing soldiers, right? But the settlements also do other things. And one of those things that they do is the settlements are a big reason, you know, if you were invested in the peace process, like, this is a big reason why the peace process failed, was that the settlers never had any intentions of abiding by any of the treaties that were being signed by by the Israelis, right? And this is something that is

true trans-historicly, right? This is an amic you see in American history too, the US signs like hundreds of treaties with like, like just incredible numbers of indigenous nations. And do you know how many of those trees I end up upholding? Yeah, that's none. Yeah. And you know, I mean, you can look at this Supreme Court, right? And you know, the Supreme Court will uphold laws from like 1795, right? Yeah. The one kind of law they will mod up hold is their treaty obligations at which case they will go literally they will just go, well, we are obligated to do this under treaty, but it is too hard. So fuck you. Yeah, yeah. Oh, they'll go previous to that and treat, see, site the fucking doctrine of discovery or the treaty of the sea. Yeah.

So yeah, good old Ruth Baidagin's bag, liberal hero. Yeah, and so you can look at this from sort of two perspectives, right? You can look at this from the perspective of the state and you can look at it from the perspective of the settlers. And I think there's a third view that kind of sees them both as an extension of the same thing, which is what we're going to come to. But you can look at this treaty stuff and you can look at the fact that, you know, both the settlers and the Israeli government's like sign the Oslo Accords, fully intending to do more settlements,

right? And this is something that, that, like the Palestinians are watching, right? Like, if you're a Palestinian, like, you are watching these peace accords get signed and then you are watching the Israelis fucking bulldozing your house. Yeah. And this is, this is a, this is a thing in the US, too, right? It's like everyone who signs a treaty, get like, like all of the nation that signed trees get a, get a watch as the US is like, oh, well, actually, like, no, we never had any intention of like fulfilling this.

Like, no, we're just going to keep exterminating you and like chasing this sort of like, like shattered remnants of your tribes, literally across the entire fucking continents. You can look at this from the perspective of the state and dealing with the American state. It is well known by every nation and every race that has ever had to deal with them that the white man is duplicitous and his state is built on lies. That is only kind of a joke.

Like, everyone who fucking deals with the Americans is like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Like, do you have like, do you see people like not understand what an agreement is? Like, wait, you know, yeah, this is something that like, I know if you travel a lot abroad and you work in places where American forces have been, nine times out of 10, someone will sit you down in a tea house or a coffee house and unbidden to be like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Like, why did they treat us like that?

Like, we felt you did everything you asked and then you fucking abandoned us or killed us. Like, yeah, like every, and it's, oh, of course, Brin doesn't too. I'm not saying like America's spec, but fuck me, America in the last 200 years is really setting you precedent for just like, jane-as-faced bullshit.

Yeah, and, you know, and this is particularly bad when you're dealing with settlers, because, you know, one of the things about the state is that the arc of state policy and settler qualities always bends towards injustice in general, and in particular, the thing it always bends towards land seizures, it seeks to expand its base of power, its territorial basin, its economy, which leads it to push as far as it possibly can towards dispossessing the indigenous population.

Now, this is also the interest of settlers who act as a kind of extension of the state that goes beyond its normal capacity to do what it wants to do. And, you know, in the U.S., the human manifestation of this is Andrew Jackson, who is a man who completely illegally on multiple occasions, just like conquered Florida. And you know, conquered Florida specifically. And this is one of the, like a couple of things. I have a very good friend who talks about this a lot because they've been studying this period immensely.

You're probably not listening, but love you. Yeah, but talk about this a lot, which is been studying this period. And mentally, you're probably not listening, but love you. Yeah, but talk about this a lot, which is that Andrew Jackson is like probably, but be part of the reason why he's going into Florida is specifically because he wants to smash these, like indigenous, like black indigenous, like allied baroon communities there. And so Jackson, you know, Jack's Jackson is,

is like under orders not to invade Florida. He invades Florida anyways. You know, we, we, we, we, we, there, there's a very similar sort of tension between like the courts and, you know, like the, the, the, the, the courts in the settler state that you have with the sort of international community in Israel now where, like, the courts are like Andrew Jackson, you cannot do the trail of tears. And Andrew Jackson is like, fuck you. Like we're doing the trail of tears, we're going to do a genocide.

And you know, and the thing about what Jackson represents, right, is that Jackson is the human embodiment of all of these sort of structural, like he's the human and political embodiment of all of these sort of structural, like he's the human and political embodiment of all of these structural tendencies of Cedric colonialism. Now one of the things that I think is interesting about this is that there are like all of the Cedric states, right, you see this in like every single one. I'm going to talk about the US because that's the one that like other than Israel that I know the best. I don't probably think probably it was like the US better than Israel.

But there are always times when the federal government tries to crack down on settlers, right? This happens like repeatedly. And this is the even like the British are spending a lot of time trying to stop the colonists from like moving west. And I think there's a lot of people who like have come to believe that if the British had won the American Revolution that they would have been able stop the settlers and

no, but they wouldn't have been able to. They would have been able to maybe they could have delayed it by 20 years. But no, there was no one has ever really been able to stop these people. And you know, the IDF, like, we talked about this a bit earlier, right? The IDF in 2005 did pull, like when they pulled out a Gaza, they dragged like 8,600 settlers with them. But again, this is the dynamic to, like, that's incredibly familiar to anyone who studied the history of settlers in the US, is that government attempts to control settler expansion inevitably fail when converted with the, you know, these unstoppable twin economic and twin imperatives of the economic benefit to the settlers.

And also the sort of specular, the speculative value of these, of this new land, so to look to land speculators. But then the other problem is the inevitable rise of the settlers themselves as a political block, which in the US, the man who is the champion of the settlers themselves as a political bloc, which in the US, the man who is the champion of the settlers is Andrew Jackson. And this is, you know, when he comes into, when he starts taking power, when he starts getting power in the army, you get the conquest of Florida. And when he becomes president, you have the, you have the trail of tears. And Israel, this is, this is represented by Israel's overtly genocidal finance business at Betseel Smotrich who represents the religious

Zionist party. And I'll give you all three guesses what those guys believe. If your guesses are, they are unhinged settler racists and like turbo homophobes, you're right on the bunny. Yeah, so it's a conspiracy theorist like yeah, yeah, this guy is unhanged. They're very open with their genocidal. Yeah, yeah, once like there's no there's no subtlety. There's like let's flatten what let's flatten Gaza. Let's kill them all. You know what I mean? It's just like they encourage same same like with a very Trumpian thing, let's like encouraging the hate that is there to fester. It's particularly like,

I'm sorry to divert us again. I found the fucking, like you can't support Palestinian liberation if you're queer, dunk that we see from like Zionist neoliberals to be one of the most frustrating a like you can support what the fuck you want like you don't need a condescending fucking like resist mom in a minivan to tell you what you can and can't believe and like be go look up some of this guy's statements because fucking you ain't going to find anyone more genocidal towards queer people openly than this motherfucker.

I mean, Israel is like very well known for like pink washing and pretending they're very progressive and supportive of queer people when they're really not. I mean, this country also is not, you know what I mean? Like it's, I think that argument is a very privileged elitist one. Yeah, I'd like, like, yeah, I'd just like,

Ha Ha, homophobia exists there. It's not a win for anyone. Yeah. Yeah, if you like like yeah, I just like ha ha homeophobia exists there. It's not it's not a win for anyone Yeah, if you want to get married to someone of the same gender as you in Israel you do it on zoom in fucking Utah Like that like when you've been outflanked to the left by Utah Yeah, you've done fucked up You don't get to wave your pride flag at anyone fuck off This is one of the sort of progressive veneer of the Israelis has been, you know, like fading because the people who are coming to power and then Yahoo in some ways was one of the sort of anger to this.

But like, this is the thing you're seeing in India too, right? Like, whenever you get a far right guy, right, the thing that inevitably generates is people who are even further right than they are. And that's what these, these settle people are. And the thing is, these settle guys, you can't cover for them. Like, if you, if they're on camera for longer than about 30 seconds, they start saying stuff, like just the most unhinged, like, we're going to kill all the Palestinians, they start saying, like, we're going to kill all the Palestinians. They start saying like we're going to kill every Arab like they start talking about various and very explicitly like their platforms that they, you know, they're and this is so part of the reason that there are

there's a coalition of of these like of these like far right settler parties that are now backing Netanyahu and this is how Netanyahu has been able to stay out of prison is that he's been able to back enough. He's been able to buy off enough of these people that they now backing Netanyahu. And this is how Netanyahu has been able to stay out of prison, is that he's been able to back enough, he's been able to buy off enough of these people that they're backing his government so he can stay prime ministers so they can't charge him. But the, you know, the, the, the concession basically for this was that these, like, this guy was just basically just given control of a bunch of state military power, like from the army in the West Bank, it's been given to him in his settler fanatics.

And, you know, like, especially since, like the Hamas attack, like, the government has been handing out guns to these people like candy. And they've been using it to just murder Palestinians and co-blood. And, you know, I mean, I think this people do a lot, right? So, sometimes they just kill people,

the thing they do all the time is, just in the middle of the night, like, if you're living in the West Bank, like a bunch of masked guys will so out of their breaking to your home, they'll be the share out of you. And they'll say, like, if you don't leave tomorrow, we'll kill you. And you know, sometimes those guys are settlers, like, are just like, sort of, are non mill, like, I don't know, like non-military settlers right there, like settlers, civilians or whatever. Sometimes those guys are just like the army and there's no fucking way to tell which one,

like, because again, it's just a bunch of people in masks appear in the night and break into your house and start beating the shit out of you. And these people, these are the people that increasingly the Israeli political system is being run by and you can't,, in a similar way, the way that Andrew Jackson just rips off this mask of sort of like new English utility that the US had had under like John Adams and John Quincy Adams and like Monroe, well, Monroe's like, I guess like a, like Monroe's like, you

know, like another one of these like dignified Virginia planter guys. And like, you know, those people have, do a lot of the same violence that Jackson does, but Jackson is the guy who just rips the mask off and is just, you know, this completely unhinged settler, Mady Ak, who like, this is the guy you killed, it like just murdered a bunch of people in duels,

like, you know, and these are the kind of people who are coming to power. Is there a right now? And this is a self-reinforcing dynamic because the more power these people get, right? The more they're able to, you know, just carry out genocides and the more genocides they're able to carry out,

the more people are able to push into these territories that they've taken. And the more people they put in these territories, the more of the more of these these settler fanatics there are. And this is one of the big things that is driving the entire conflict. Oh, I think a good thing to remember is that last year there was an election

like going into 2023 and Israel like put into power a bunch of these right-wing people a twenty twenty three with twenty twenty two I was in track of time. He came in last week. He came in twenty. Yeah, I think he was a minister. He was a minister in twenty twenty two. Oh, sorry.

The years, a time, a time, a time, a time. Yeah, I don't remember when the election. My point is that like in recent history the last couple of years. These extreme right wing racist people are in power. All the places of power, all the ministers, all the whatever the shit, they're all shared, they all share this ideology that like Arabs must die. Basically, that's like their, the main point is that they are superior to Arabs and then they must die. And this is a Zionist place that is theirs. And what these people are doing when they're in power, and this is one of the things they

were trying to do before the current war started was they were trying to annex the West Bank. This is a very explicit goal. Now, this is a very explicit goal. The settler parties, they will kind of, they know it's pretty hard for them to like, leeliannix it. So they will talk about like, effectively annexing it and sell like, they'll do these sort of like, subtle metaphors. But like, yeah, what they want to do is to kick people out of what's called area C, which is the majority of the West Bank. And they want to kick all the, like, the immediate plans. I want to kick all the

people out of area C and push them into just like increasingly tiny corners of the West Bank. And presumably, because again, if you listen to well, these people talk, right, it's they talk about like, do you have the right to live in a like Judea and Samaria? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, how they call the West Bank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How come? What they call the West Bank. Yeah, they have a true right to live there. So anything is like, if you believe that, right? That means you have to kick all the Palestinians out of the West Bank entirely. Now, the places people have stopped sort of before the war, the places people had stopped

whereas like, well, okay, they can live in Gaza. But now they're talking about, you know, I mean, just like taking over most of like, just taking over most of Gaza and driving the Palestinians out. Yeah. And it doesn't have to lead. Like Jews have a right to live in this place. Doesn't have to lead to thus we must genocide. The people who live that right. Like we, it like it, this is what happens when we get a state that understands existence as destroying anybody who is not in agreement with this right wing genocide or fucking outlook. Like it has been possible for people of different face to live in different places. But it was possible before 48.

Yeah, exactly. It was already existing. Yeah, like, yeah. The ideology that is inherent to like a Zionist militarized state will never allow that coexistence to happen, right? Because it relies on coexistence not being possible as part of its narrative for like Mia said, taking dominating and expropriating that landed and gaining the value from it. But yeah, it's the narrative that they need to say stuff like, all the godsend should

just go to Egypt or whatever it is. Like it's all part of the plan to kind of just like expel them so they can... Yeah, it doesn't even have to be like... It's not like an explicit plan that they have a whiteboard and they're like, it is, you know... They do actually occasionally just write it out. Sometimes they do actually explicitly write the plan stuff. You can see it on x.com from time to time. But it's inherent, as Mia said, like several times

to states and to a capitalist state that is a settler colony, right? Like, it's inevitable. I happened to hear it's happening there. It's happened all over the world. Like, it's not possible to construct a capitalist state on someone else's land on someone else's bodies. It doesn't do this.

Yeah, and I mean, and this, this is also one thing I wanted to emphasize too, is that all of the shit that's happening in Palestine happened here, right? I mean, I guess like we, like the US didn't have the kind of surveillance technology in like the, the, the 18 teens, right, that the Israelis have now, but, you know, like we, we did all this shit too, right? Like this is Like this is all of the land that we live on. That's where that shit came from.

There's this great, I really love Daniel Conn and the painted bird. It has this great line in one of his songs that goes, because he's the one who did the stealing and named you as the heir, whose filtiness provided you the privileges you bear. And this is this thing in the US, right? It's like in Israel, you know, if you're a settler on the border, right,

there's no escape from what you did to take this place, right, like you are looking down on the people who you've, like whose houses you've taken, right. In the US, we have this sort of luxury of like, wow, this happened a long time ago, like we don't have to sort of, we like, wow, this happened a lot of time ago, like we don't have to sort of, we don't have to see the consequences of it.

But we still do it there, right? Like we didn't just start it. Like we're doing it at Oak Flat, for instance, right now. Or like, yeah, look at how Trump fucking did indigenous people during COVID, like it's an ongoing process. Yeah, and it's so much easier for Americans to pretend that it's not happening. And, you know, like, no, like, it turns out, in fact, this, this, and this is where the sort

of sub-colonialism, the structure, not an event, stuff comes from. And it applies to both Israel and the US, because guess what? It turns out, Israel is, is really took notes from what the US because guess what? I mean, Israel literally took notes from what the US did, just did it. You know what I mean? Like, it's just the same thing. And the end, like, we're the bad guys. Like, we've always been the bad guys. Yeah.

Is it a week of bad guys? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Thanks, Jim. You know, I'm Chinese, right? And this is one of the things that has informed a lot of my sort of perspective on Palestine

because all of the things that are happening to Palestine is shit that was done to us by the Japanese Empire, right? And we fought a war to stop them. And that war was hideous. That war, the war in China sees some of the darkest moments in human history and there's this tendency among I mean, you know as a tendency among both both the Communists and the Nationalist want to sort of sanitize it right They want to turn it into this sort of glorious war for liberation and like yeah, like there are moments of like

you know glorious anti-imperial struggle, but that war mostly was just a horror. And it's a horror not just because of the atrocities committed by the Japanese, right? The Chinese side in that war also does things that are unforgivable. And I'm not even talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki here because, you know, like we as in like Chinese people, like we didn't do that, right? Like, you know, Mao, Mao, like on the one hand, it is true that when Mao found out

about the nuclear eruptions, his reaction was wait, you had a third bomb, you didn't drop it on Tokyo. But like, you know, we didn't do that, right? Like that was the Americans, that wasn't like, that wasn't like us in China. But, you know, the things that I'm talking about, the Chinese side of that word did, that were just unforgivable. I think the best example of it is Chen Kai-shak blew up a dam on the Yellow River.

His goal was he was trying to flood several provinces to cut off the Japanese army and to slow down the Japanese army and to like slow down their troop movements, right? And he slows down their troop movements and he does it by killing four, this is the low end estimates is that he killed 400,000 people. That is an amount of death that is unimaginable. He killed like in a single act, he killed 400,000 people. It is two Hiroshima and Nagasaki's

and that's the low end estimate, right? People fighting against Japan, people fighting against colonialism did unforgivable crimes. And you know, and the people of China like never forget, like, to this day, like, in the provinces where, like, where this shit happened, like, Chiang Kai-Shak is fucking despised. And, you know, and, like, when, like,

when the Allies won the war and when China drove out the Japanese, right, like, the next thing they did was they drove out Chiang Kai-Shak, because he was, you know, because he had done things in that war that were so terrible that people were willing to be like, fuck it, like Mao didn't fucking blow up a damn and kill 400,000 of us, right? And so this is the thing about colonial resistance is that it is the things that people do are unforgivable. Also that that word that Japan fought in China, they killed 20 million of us, 20 million.

And this is one of these things where colonialism makes monsters of us all. Suffering does not make you knowable, just makes you suffer. And so again, are China's anti-colonial freedom fighters, right? Like, fucking killed, killed numbers of Chinese people that are, it's just unimaginable. And then, you know, the same freedom fighters who fought the good fight against Japan, you know, within 20 years, they're bulldozing moss and shingyon and murdering comedists into bed, right? And they've built two, you know, after successfully repelling Japan's attempt to turn China into a settler state, they have made two of their own. And, you know, so like there's no, I think the point that I'm trying to make here is that, you know, like, anti-colonial resistance is not this sort of like, it doesn't look pretty. It's a fucking horror most of the time. But you also, you know, when you're looking

into like when you're looking at these wars, you have to look at the direction in which colonization is moving. And that's, you know, that's the thing that is crystal clear on Palestine, right? Is you can just look at like which, in which direction is colonization moving, right? Like who is taking whose Palestine, right? Is you can just look at like which in which direction is colonization moving, right?

Like who is taking whose houses, right? Who is forcing a million people from what population to flee their homes? Who has been seizing people's land? And I think it clears up, I don't know, clears up isn't the right word, but specifically the fact that this is the, this is active colonization that this is this is this is this is a Cedric

Colonial State waging a war against, you know, people like people who are fighting against colonization, that is the sort of that, that, that, that is the, the underlying current of everything that happens. And, and, and, you know, like, I don't know, like people, people in anti-colonial wars do things that are unforgivable and they get, you know, and like often, like, their own people will eventually come for them one day. And also, I don't know. I know it has to agree with me. It's fine, but I personally really dislike when it's called a war with having a Palestine

because I just think it's the clearest case of genocide I've ever seen. And like, I don't care how it started or whatever. I feel like at this point in time, it's a genocide. Like, there, Palestine is not a genocide. At Palestine's not a country, Palestine does not have an army. No one can leave Gaza. I think that is the current state of what the violence is going on over there. And so, maybe I'm just like, particularly about that. No, I think you're right about that.

And that's the thing that's different than, like the Like, the stuff that was happening in China was like, at least we sort of had, like, at least we had a state, right? And we had armies, and our armies got fucking stomped. But, you know, we had like... We had actual weapons. Yeah, and I must have some now, but... I think you're to your greater point. Yeah, I think like Wait, yeah, it sounds very similar to like have you read Sargent's adventure to the range of the earth?

Yeah, they're great talk about violence and the state talking the language of violence and people responding in a language in which they're spoken to I'm paraphrasing that relatively accurately It doesn't have to be like the bite knife of violence has to be good for it to be like an inevitable consequence of violent colonialism, right? Like, it sparks violent decolonization movements. And it doesn't imply like, um, moral, uh, like, goodness to the individual acts. It's just an inevitable consequence of people fighting against colonialism in the only way that colonialism

kind of leaps forward, I guess. Yeah, and I think another part of this too is that, like, just being in contact with colonial powers makes everyone worse. Because this is the thing you see in the US with a lot of addition groups, that like, you know, like by the time the trail of cheers is happening, like the Cherokee are like have adopted channels slavery, like a American style plantation channels slavery. And that fucking sucks, right?

It's like it being in contact with these settler empires, like, brings out the worst in everyone. And there's no winning from that position, right? Like the best, I don't even know if it's the best case, Daria, like, I guess occasionally you get like an Algeria where, you know, they kill enough people and the settler's not a jury all went back to France, but that's not an option in Israel, right? And you wouldn't want it to be a solution either.

So I don't know, it's one of these, I don't know, is it's one of the sort of dilemmas of how do you deal with a settler colony? Is that it? It's harder to decolonize the set of the colony, right? It implies a dead, a removable one-prepore in other people, and neither of those things are in any way desirable. And it's so hard to see a path to a peaceful coexistence now, because all we see is like the entire world ratcheting the

fucking like violence level up and like yeah Israel carrying out genocidal violence in Gaza is not the way we reach a way for people to like children to grow up without fucking fearing if the sky is going to kill them in Gaza, right? Like this will happen for generations to come, because you've emotionally scarred if you have children. Well, how would you, I think it's a very human response, if anything, like I I don't think we have the right to judge how someone that has been through that hell, how they respond because it's, I don't know, we haven't lived their nightmare. It's just a nightmare. And like, it's not like, it's not like they haven't been attempts at nonviolent resistance

in Gaza because they have a liberal fucking happened. There was a big one like three or four years ago. Yeah, yeah. Like, you know, they like the fucking crash and Stein take the white. Are they all disorganized? Or actually the war holding hands and singing? Come by out of the fucking like I tried to do that. Like, yeah, people keep killing them. Like I'll say this every time we talk about guarded, but but let's say again, when we were talking to

the PK Guards, the guys, and I've known them for a few years, like, when I was telling me about how they used to do sweep over campus for kids, so the kids could learn park or I'd not have to pay for the travel and take their time and risk to travel. So they do do sweeppan the scum of time. And he was explaining to me like it was the most normal thing in the world. The six-year-old children would wake up at night with nine terrorists screaming because they thought they were being bombed. And because they're having like a flashback from being bom, I guess. And like, that's something I recognize from PTSD, from, you know, other contexts, but like, it really fucked me up that an eight-year-old

child is had. Like, we can't expect these people to like develop into, come by our singing, like, peace activists. Like, they've taken on massive amounts of trouble, they've seen the neighbors and families die. It doesn't mean that we have to be like, oh well, violence is going to happen, we should do everything we can to make a world. Well, people aren't killing it dying there because it will always result in more of the least empowered people dying. But it's something that I think a lot of us are so far detached from that I think is, as like, you know, you live to hold that in the United States, where it's in safety and prosperity. It's it's hard for you to understand, I think. Yeah, and I mean, like, this is a, like, Gaza is a place where it rains body parts. Like, that's what happens when it is really bomb goes off where it rains body parts. Like that's what happens when it Israeli bomb goes off.

It rains body parts. And like that is a, I don't know, like, the kind of person who has to grow up with that is just not going to be the same as like, even people who have been through a lot of like really messed up stuff. Like it's not going to be the same as like experiencing that. Yeah, even if you like I had visited wars to report on them, but then I get to go home and be safe. And sometimes that juxtaposition is hard and it takes me a long time

to not be afraid of the sky or a part of car is going to kill me. it's hard and it takes me a long time to not be afraid but the sky or a park car is going to kill me but I'm home and I'm safe and once I can adjust to that then I can I can get on you know change things like that change you but you continue with your life but if you're never home and you're never so your home is never safe that's something I can't understand right that's something that I haven't experienced and very very few of us probably have. I, a lot of doctors have said that all the children and gaza, they can't be quantified of having experienced PTSD because they haven't reached the postpart yet.

Like they're still, they're like in perpetual state of PTSD because that's just how they, their entire lives have been. Most of them have never known life outside of the blockade. So it's, I don't know. Yeah, and I mean, I think I think that's a good place to end of just, you know, this is what this is what this is, this is what the the the reality and the eternal present of federal colonialism is, right? And this is one of these things where,

in a lot of weird ways, there are ways in which we, if you live in the US, even to some extent, the UK, you are probably in a, maybe a better position to actually stop this than anyone who lives in Palestine is. So, yeah, this is, but the problem is,

if we don't, right, the mutually self-reinforcing dynamics of settler colonialism are just going to keep like carrying on and keep spiraling on. And this is going to go on until everyone is dead or everyone is gone. Yeah, even if you can't stop it, like I sent the video, I'm sure you guys sort of video of the Jewish-wise peace people

in the Grand Central Terminal, New York. And I said that to the Palestinian journalist and he's like, oh God, this is great to see. And it's something we spoke about in the interview too, how like it makes a meaningful difference to someone to stay in mind to see solidarity. Even if like, you know, we can get in the streets and we can say something and maybe that will make a difference,

maybe it won't, but like it at least if it makes someone understand that you're kind of standing with them in a moment of darkness and maybe that helps them in a way. Yeah. I think when a whole population is not able to share what they're going through, their journalists are getting killed when the internet is out. And the one thing they're saying is like, please don't stop talking about this. I think that's the easiest thing that we can do. Yeah. And hopefully maybe this will impeller us to, like, as we said, the say that this keeps fucking happening.

And like, as ethnic cleansing's go, this one's got more coverage than most in the US. And like, I would encourage you to look at what you're seeing in Gaza and understand how inhuman another manchable it is. And like, maybe follow that shouldn't happen anywhere. It shouldn't happen in Tigray, and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan. It shouldn't happen in Tigray and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan. It shouldn't happen to the Rehindra people. And like, yeah, try try and extend that. It's not just Skold people.

Like if you weren't in this region, 2017 fuck you. Like, it's just say that like we've all had a window opened even with every fucking attempt to shut that window, right? Like, but cutting off the internet to Gaza, etc. This has been the most photographed after cleansing, whatever you want to call it, in probably in human history. We're seeing more of it than we've ever seen before,

a lot of it in certain ways, or fucking footage from video games, past office, real life, but we're still seeing it, and we're still very witness to it, to a limited degree, right? We're not seeing it in the sense people seeing it firsthand. I'd encourage people to remember this moment and the shock and the terrible things that you felt and to not forget that next time you hear about something happening because like, anyway, this happens. It's a tragedy and anywhere it happens, we should do everything we can to stop it. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go So I look in and say, oh, she's not there.

So I'm like, OK, they're not there. Unrestorable is a new true crime podcast that investigates the case of Catherine Hoggel, a mother accused of murder. I'm thinking, you know, like, what's going on? Like, this is insane. Like, where are my kids? But despite signs that Catherine Hoggel

took her tiny children one by one into the night, never to come home again. She has yet to stand trial. Because soon after her children went missing, she was declared incompetent to stand trial. You know, when I would ask her her in game, it was up in the bus remaining confident. And then I would say, well, who advised you should throw you know I can't tell you that. In Maryland, if the defendant is found incompetent and can't be restored to competency, their felony charges are dismissed after five years. So as the clock counts down, Catherine's charges on the verge of being dismissed

will a grieving dad ever get justice. Listen to Unrestorable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Curric and I'm back with the new season of Next Question. Yay! This season, it's all about being more conversational, but I wanted to mix it up a little bit. So I've been inviting different people to join me to be my plus ones to ride shotgun if you will and sometimes actually getting the driver's seat.

I'm so honored to be A- your plus one and B- your partner in crime. My date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. I didn't know we were dating. I think bringing in new voices will add a little june se kwa, a little judge to this season of next question. By the way, I'm not totally abandoning the idea of a one-on-one interview. Sometimes that's the best format. I'm hoping it will be more relaxed, a little more spontaneous, and quite frankly, a little

more fun. Listen to next question with me, Katie Curric on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she just wouldn't admit it to me at first.

Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell. Everyone deserves no detruth, and if there was something that was not right, then someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in the situation. Livy's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Livy Caswell

on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to listen ad free and get early access to new episodes and bonus content, be sure to subscribe to iHeartTrueCrim Plus today, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. podcast. Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast in which my friend Kim Kelly and I talk about the fact that Zoom recently moved to the record button, which most people will need at some point, given how prominent this is with podcasting, to replace it with an AI companion button, which I refuse to use, and would deploy violence against anyone who tried to make me.

How are you doing today, Cam? I am good. Also hating our AI soon to be overlords. Yeah. Yeah, doing my best out here in Philadelphia. Yeah, yeah, Philly. How is Philly as the fall comes in? It's a very sunny day.

It's also getting chilly. I mean, do it is finally leather weather. I mean, I guess it's always leather weather, depending on your level of commitment, but I'm a worse and it's I tend to wait for, you know, the weather to tell me when it's time to break out my leather. Hell yeah. You know, I feel like all things are fine. Personally, you should just assume listeners that I am always head to toe leather. But anyway, yeah, he was on. He looks resplendent. Yeah. Kim, you are a labor journalist. You published a book. What was it last year? You're before last called Fight Like Hell. Yeah, about about the history of the labor movement and some radical moments people ought to know more about. And you and I are talking today about

labor, particularly about the possibility of a general strike. Now, if you the listener have somehow missed this discourse, in short, a general strike is when, instead of one union of workers from one industry striking, everybody strikes, at least a very significant chunk of the labor force strikes. And this is, it's the kind of thing people on the left have dreamed about for years, as like, this is what could, you know, turn things around, reduce income inequality,

force action on climate change, the military, industrial complex. And kind of as a result, you've had, feels like every year for the last few years since people started reading about general strikes, which have occurred in a number of places and times. There's these like, someone will get on Twitter and be like, we're all doing a general strike in two weeks. Everybody get ready. And folks will be like, that's not really how you do a general strike.

And they'll go like, well, if you weren't saying it's not, it could happen. You know, you got to believe in it first, which is, all of this is wrong. But the good news is, there's an actual plan that is cohesive and potentially achievable for a general strike that's been put forward by someone who knows what he's talking about. We're going to talk about that. First, Kim, do you want to talk about why trying to get everyone on Twitter to launch a general strike in eight days is a bad idea? This is such a pepive among, well, I guess a lot of folks in the labor world who are also unfortunately on Twitter and social media, but yeah, like you said, every so often, there

will be a general strike hashtag or like a graphic on Twitter or on Instagram and it's like, are you taking part of the general strike? Like, are you striking on Friday or like tomorrow? Like, no, what? You're not even in a union. What are you talking about? Oh, and it's like, I love the energy. I love the vibe.

You know, I love the idea of a general strike. I think it would be incredible if we actually pulled it off, but the biggest thing in there is the if followed by the pulled it off part. And one of the biggest misconceptions, I think, is that a general strike is akin to a big protest? Like, you can absolutely plan a big protest in a few days if you really want to. I mean look at the incredible work that Jewish force for peace has been doing in New York and other places. They're gonna be doing it in Philly this week. I mean it is possible to build on existing relationships and networks to create a big

fucking deal of a protest. But a general strike is a different beast. It is a specific thing. It has a definition. A general strike, as you said, is when workers across various industries go on strike at the same time. And that is not the same as filling the streets for a protest. It would be sick if we could kind of meld those movements, like the radical, you know, radical organizers who are already in community, already building protests, infrastructure, and people in the union labor world that are kind of beholden to contracts

and more legal constraints. But it's gonna take a little bit of time. It's gonna take some dialogue. Maybe even some fruitful discourse to get on the same page. Like there, like we, there are laws. We live in a society, unfortunately. And it's, it's not quite as simple as just declaring a general strike when you and like

four of your friends call out sick. Yeah. And it's also like, I think one thing that gets lost is, you know, when you're going on strike, for a lot of people, that's not just, I have to figure out what to do with money. And it's certainly not, you know, while I can just go and be on unemployment or something because you don't really get that when you're striking. You've got a lot of people with like families. And so the idea that like you get some, a podcaster, right?

Being like, everybody should just not show up. It was like, well, I don't know, man, there's people who got kids. They have other responsibilities than being a part of your revolution. Which is not to say that I don't know, man, there's people who got kids. They have other responsibilities than being a part of your revolution, which is not to say that I don't think like, again, we're about to talk about an achievable plan for a general strike. But one of the reasons why you can't, can't pull it off in a couple of days is

that you have to set, you have to have some sort of plan for how you're going to take care of the people striking, right? Like, so they don't starve and shit. Yeah, that is the one of the biggest things. I would say arguably the biggest thing. But also, if you're in a union and you go on strike as part of, you know, broken down contract negotiations or part of the life cycle of a union contract, you have legal protections. You can't just be fired.

If you take part in one of these kind of impromptu hashtag general strike actions, your boss is just going to fire you. Yeah. If you take part in one of these kind of impromptu hashtag general strike actions, your, your boss is just going to find you. Yeah. And then like you're done. You don't have any protections there. Like one of the reasons that, and I know it's not as much fun as just going out and saying, fuck it and bring it all down. Trust me, I would love to see that type of shit.

But unfortunately, again, we live constrained by laws and logic. Okay, when it comes like the reason that you see big labor strikes and big picket lines and all this cool stuff that's happening, like it's part of a process. Those unions are negotiating contracts, these legally binding documents,

they're collective bargaining agreements that have expiration dates. You know, the UAW didn't just pick, didn't just say, all right, right now, we're mad we're gonna go on strike. Like, no, their previous agreements had expiration date, they hit the expiration date, so they start bargaining again.

Borgoning didn't go well. They went on strike. That is how it works when you're in a union. That's like just part and parcel of the push and pull of leverage that workers have against the boss. And it's like a centuries-old system. Like there's laws, there's protections, there's a lot that goes into it. And I think like we're saying before we hopped on the call officially, like I think a lot of people haven't had union jobs or didn't have a deep understanding of unions

and how they work. So of course, they wouldn't necessarily know when the expiration date is for this contract or what goes into bargaining union contract. But there's a lot of moving parts. They might not know that as we're about to talk about, you can't just have a bunch of union leaders decide we're all gonna go on strike It wants sympathy strikes are very much not legal now there is a way to get multiple We should just talk about like why we're doing this which is that so there's this fella who so far

Has seems like a pretty pretty head out screwed on straight solid dude Sean fe Sean Fane, who is big Sean. Yeah, big Sean. And he's like, he's the head of the UAW, right? Or he's like the guy negotiating for the UAW. Now he's the president. Yeah, the president. And he is, Sean is, so he's, you know, the UAW is the big, one of the big, like the largest of the auto worker related unions.

And they have been in a strike, I think primarily general motors. It was the big three, general motors forward as Stellanis, which makes that Chrysler and a couple other brands. And they have gone on a very power, about six weeks or so, very significant strike. You can read stuff like Toyota recently, like put out a proposal for like giving workers

raises that's in line with like the union. Like, they are scared. And it looks like, like, as, I mean, this is, I, they haven't inked anything yet, but as of us recording this, it looks like they've won on a lot. Which is great. And Sean is, is not just a, you know, a union man, but is very much a talking blatantly about the class war of the rich against everybody else that's occurring in this country. And he made some statements about two days before we recorded this where he was like,

I think, you know, what we need to be setting the date, the expiration date for our contract in 2028. And I want to implore all other, you know, unions that are negotiating and can do this to set that with their next contract expiration date. So that in 2028, we have the option to do a general strike in order to address some of the systemic inequalities as a result of this war of the billionaires against everybody else, very much framed it in those kind of stark terms. And, you know, we're going to talk about why, but I think that's a workable plan, potentially.

It really is. It's incredible, honestly. This is kind of, I think this is one of the balsiest things we've heard from a mainstream labor leader since, well, since Sarah Nelson, the president of the the flight attendant union, kind of soft-called for a general strike or at least brought up the idea of a general strike in 2019. If you've forgotten that stopped a government shutdown. Yeah, so like the general strike is a very powerful tool. And we've done it before, you know, I think the most recent true general strike

we saw in this country was like 1919 in Seattle. So it's been a minute. But the genius of this plan is the fact that it's illegal. And I mean, of course, you know, law's not real. But when you're doing this kind of thing and operating within these constraints, I think it is helpful when you're not actively breaking the law because that helps you get more shit done, right?

So what Shadows proposing is saying, okay, we're going to set our contract to expire around this time. And we want a whole bunch of other beginners to do the same thing. Now if all of their union contracts happen to expire around the same time and then their negotiations happen to break down and they happen to go on strike At the same time creating an actual general strike the government can't really do shit about it I mean you mentioned before the sympathy strikes solidarity strikes. They are illegal I because of this 1947 law called the Taff Heartly Act. Essentially, that means if you're warehouse,

you're part of the team search, you go on strike. And then the coffee shop next door is like, oh yeah, we support you, we're gonna go on strike too. They can't do that. That's breaking the law. But in this different hypothetical, if their contract was up at the same time as your contract, you both went on strike at the same time, that's legal.

And it's also very disruptive to that little corridor you're working in. And imagine doing that on a national level. Imagine if the flight attendants, the teamsters, the UAW, Starbucks, fucking the air traffic controllers, the longshoremen, like all of these incredibly important infrastructure-wise jobs happen to God's strike at the same time. That would shut down the whole fucking country. Yeah. And it would be legal, which is so fun. Well, hey, you love to see it.

You know, obviously when you are talking about radical social change, illegality is always on the table, but it's not the smartest place to start from when you're talking about something like this, where you have the option to get a lot done, you know, within within the protections of the law, which makes it easier to get more people on board. It makes it easier to get critical mass. And if at a later date, you know, the state were to take a legal action that makes it impossible for you to continue legally, well, then you've got that critical mass behind you and potentially probably radicalized, you know. Right. And you have resources and you have infrastructure because big unions have big

strength funds. Yes. This is the thing. U.. UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank that they're saving for just this purpose when their workers go on strike so they can continue to pay them and cover their health insurance. Yes. Why you pay dues, right? Like, yeah, it's literally like strike insurance. And a lot of the big unions have this set up. They have comms teams.

They have legal teams. They have comms teams. They have legal teams. They have experience. Like I know as as radicals like where we tend to be perhaps a little allergic to a lot of those things, especially if they're not particularly in line with our specific vision of the future. But they're really helpful to have, you know? like doing crimes is fun and I support it pretty much at all times, but getting shit done is way more fun and more satisfying, you know, like. It's nice to win. It's nice to win. You need to kind of on a role right now, right?

We've all watched some really substantial gains for working people just in the last six months. And it's worth paying attention to why. And part of it is that like you're not relying upon people risking everything, many of whom can't, right? You can't very easily ethically defend if you are like a single parent who is responsible for multiple children, you can't defend going out and busting a bunch of windows and then getting locked up super easy because you

do you have responsibilities, you've got people to care for, you know. Right. You've elders at home, if you're, or if you're disabled person, if you're me to compromise, you can't go out there and get involved in that type of situation. You can't risk being around that many people maybe, but you can strike. Yeah. Yeah. This is that you can respect a picket line. You can help support. You can help offer some of the resources we need for folks to get out there. Yeah.

Like utilizing this existing infrastructure and these existing resources, it just opens up the possibility for more people to get involved in a way that's less harmful to them, to the people. Like we want to harm the bosses and the status quo. We don't want to hurt our people. Yeah.

So I think there's a lot of wisdom in this. Now, the question is, when we say that this is workable, does that mean that like it's a guarantee or would be easy? Of course not. No. You're still talking about a struggle against people who have, I don't know, the majority of the resources the human race has ever marshalled in like a financial form, right, at their back-end call. So that's, you know, this is still a frightening and potentially pretty dangerous thing,

but it is a workable plan that has infrastructure behind it and that crucially, you know, the downside is that the bosses know that people are talking about this and they have time to prepare. But the nice side is that like, well, so do we. And that's generally positive. This is the thing. I've seen, again, on social media of people saying,

like, oh, we have to wait five years or two, wait four and a half years. That's ridiculous. Why don't we just do it now? You can do a lot of planning and a lot of building in four to half years. You need that time to actually pull something off of this magnitude.

And also, I mean, a lot of unions that perhaps might be interested in this, like they have contracts on their own that we need, they need to sort of work out the timing for. You know, this plan only works if we can actually maneuver away for a lot of these big contracts that big powerful unions to expire at the same time. If someone's contract, if the team serves next contracts expires in 2027, like, okay, let me think they're not going to be able to play ball. And you really want the team service. If you want to play this type of game,

another hurdle that I think it's unfortunate is that, you know, Sean Fein, Big Sean, what a man. He's very out there, very outspoken about opposing capitalism, about this being class war. He's on the level, but he is a rarity among major labor union leaders. Like there are some leaders that will be down to cloud, you know? Like Sarah Nelson's out here like Mark Diamondstein with the postal workers. Like there are some very cool, very progressive,

if not radical union leaders out there. But there's also a lot of conservative or just sort of wishy washi Democrats style union leaders too that would not want to have any part of this and a big part of convincing them to get on the level and become involved in this kind of effort. That's going to come down to what the rank and file have to say. That's going to come that pressure is going to have to come up through the ranks. I mean, the reason we have Sean Fein and we have Sean O'Brien and the teamsters and we have this kind of newer wave of more progressive, military, military leadership is because of

what the rank and file have done. Like, teamsters for a Democratic Union organized for years to get that reform slate and to get Sean O'Brien in there to take on new PS. Sean Fein is the first ever democratically elected union leader in UAW's history because of a lot of organizing around reform that came from the rank and file. That took years to get him there. We would not have big Sean, if people are not invested years of their life towards organizing for this goal. And so now we have this four to five years span where we can push our own union leaders in that right direction to plan those seeds to try and really build something that they can't refuse to get on board with. But that's going to take time to I think people need to really recognize that like Unions are not, unfortunately, they're not all, like, these magical progressive silver

bullets. Like, there are some previous shitty people at Union leadership across the country. And we got to do something about if we really want to get people on board. Yeah, there's, you know, upsides and downsides when we compare it to like sort of how radicals like to, particularly the anarchist radical organizing, where the downside is you do these are organizations that are hierarchical, they can be stratified, it can make it very difficult to push for change, it can make them just as our democracy is not super responsive to what the majority of people want. Union leadership in a number of cases is super responsive to what the majority people want. Union leadership in a number of cases is not responsive to what people want. They've also had, especially if you go back to like, you know, the mid century, last century, not short history of corruption,

right? That's been a problem you've dealt with in the past two, these are issues you don't have as much with autonomously organized, you know, small groups of activists on the street. The thing that makes them a lot stronger in many ways is the fact that they have more resources to Marshall. They have a ways of redressing grievances other than like kind of just personal conflicts that are built into the system in ways of kind of pushing for change. That if you get enough people on board with, you can make and then you have the weight of this, this organization with the degree of power and social cash aid behind it. And so I think the, the, the ability, it's much harder to steer these things.

But when you get them pointed in the right direction, they have more staying power than kind of small autonomous groups usually do. And I think there's a lot of potential power in that, which is why I think this is a workable plan. And this is why more anarchist and socialists and communists, everybody who wants to really get out there and cause more anarchist and socialists and communists, everybody who wants to really get out there and cause some good trouble, we'll say. Like, you need to get involved in your union. You need to organize your workplace. If your job is not such that you can join a traditional union, you need to get involved in your local labor community anyway and try and connect with people who are part of those unions, and try and kind of get them to see the light. You need to talk to people, not online, in person.

You're going to go talk to people who are different from you, who might have different politics, and try and get them to see why this is something that we could do that could help them, that could help everyone. This is something I emphasize a lot, because I'm like, I'm an anarchist too. I know I sound like a big old Debbie Downer right now talking about all this legal stuff, but I am also practical, and I've also spent a lot of time talking to you,

any members who see the world a lot differently from me. Like I think a lot of my most recent impactful work is stuff I've been doing in the deep south in an Appalachia, and no one one there is impressed by guillotine tattoos, but they do see the need to deal with this situation where all the rich people have all the stuff and they're getting screwed. That is a good starting point for a lot. And it's, yeah, it's easy to say a joint union, like not everyone can do that. But everybody can find a way to talk to somebody who's connected to a union, who's part of a labor movement, part of a labor organization.

Like we need everyone to get involved however they can. I want to note, it's significant potential for the radicals, our kind of radicals to be useful within this in a direct way. From just a recent example, right, in Portland, the teachers are going on strike. I believe that has happened today. And they had a big march not too long ago that some of my friends were at because they're teachers. And one of the things that happened on that march, it was the same day as a Palestinian

solidarity march. And at both of these marches that had large thousands of people, the, the, the, the corkers and the security were all kind of the same folks. And they were all folks that were like came out of the Portland radical scene. We're there in the 2020 protests. If huge, because corking, corking, if you're not aware, is like going ahead of and to the sides of a protest, like close traffic briefly, as people walk by. so folks don't get hit by cars. It's a safety thing, right? And so people were kind of, like the people who were doing that

are radicals, are members of generally, like these autonomously organized groups who are very useful in helping these, because people have experienced, you know, unions, there may be experienced striking, but a lot of unions haven't struck in a long time, right? Because it doesn't happen all that often. And even if they have most of these guys, especially these older guys and ladies and other folks, these older union members probably have not participated in a large march in the

modern era of protests where there's dangers like getting ramped by cars and stuff. And so the people who have these, the straight medics and stuff who have that kind of experience, hugely useful, not the only thing. People who are striking often need stuff. Hand warmers are always appreciated. Water, warm food, things that like keep people's morale up, organizing like sympathy demonstrations like alongside strikers and whatnot to help them keep their numbers up. All of that stuff can be really useful ways for these autonomously organized kind of smaller groups of radicals to participate in a meaningful way in something like this. That's not the only degree to which that's possible,

but like those are just the examples that come to mind. Absolutely. We've talked a lot about legality, and illegality is also something that is very much a part of labor history. And it's present. And I would say in the future, folks who are perhaps more comfortable with getting into perhaps more confrontational moments with cops who are trying to mess with the picket line or scabs who are trying to be violent towards striking workers, or even just like you said, like surveillance and safety and medic work. Like that is all important too.

I mean, not every, I've been on some pretty wild picket lines and not everyone there is really that concerned with what the law has to say about certain things. Once things get a little heated, I mean, there are points, I mean, and things I've covered, and we've seen this continue to happen, where people try and drive into the picket line, and or try to attack people in the picket line. And that is, I mean, that deserves a variety of responses, I think. And also something to note is that when these are strikes called by union leadership, they follow, they tend to follow a set of rules, because predominantly, like generally speaking, union leadership doesn't want their

members to go to jail. They don't want them to get in any kind of situations like that. So they'll say, you know, okay, well, you stay on the sidewalk or the cops said to move, so we move, or this has to be nonviolent. Or, you know Or there's kind of a set of circumstances there that union members are required to follow. But if you're there to support and you're not a member of that union, as long as you have the consent and support of the people there, you're there trying to stick up for, then you have a lot more leeway than someone that has a union leader to answer to. There's a lot of creative ways you can get involved. And one thing that I think has it really been discussed as much in the online discourse or whatever,

but I think it's important to think about, even if you're not a person who is able to participate in that on the street type of way. If there's a huge strike going on in your city and you're not part of a union, but you wanna get involved, seek outs, have a very long illustrious history and a labor movement. If you happen to get sick that day, what's your boss gonna do?

You know, assuming you have those kind of protections, if you don't then you have to make your own, you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. But if you're in a position where you can take off work that day or for a couple of days, and it just happens to coincide with that massive strike that's shut down everything else. And if you convince all your coworkers

that you're a shop to do the same thing, you're not breaking the law, you're protected, but you're also part of the shutdown effort. Like, sick outs, one of the reasons that people were so spooked around 2019 when the government shutdown was looming before Sarah Nelson really brought out the big GS words that we're seeing sick outs at airports and flight to being canceled in New York and I think LA. And that was starting to spook the people in charge. Because if enough people don't show for worker the airport, nothing's going to happen at that airport.

Yeah. And there are a lot of different workplaces where all of their workers not showing up could be a potential problem. So I just encourage people to think creatively about the ways they can get involved, even if they can't necessarily get involved on the formal union side. Like there's so much we can do from each accord and do his ability to each accordion to his means, you know, that I just not. I love it.

It's so important to bring up airline workers because one of the things they, the things that they have that other people don't is they can't be replaced in the same way, right? You can if all your baristas go on strike, you can potentially bring in whoever and they will not be nearly as good at it, right? The company will not make nearly as much money, but legally, there's nothing stopping them from doing that. If you have a bunch of ground workers call in, right, or a bunch of stewardesses, you have

to replace them with people who are qualified ground workers in suit, right? Or a bunch of stewardesses, you have to replace them with people who are qualified ground workers in suit. Like there's a whole process. There's like a series like, there's a lot that they have to know how to do a lot of compliance that has to be done because thousands and thousands of lives are at stake, right? Same thing with medical workers, right?

When you've got a job where like, they can't, if like a bunch of nurses go on strike, well, you have to replace them with nurses, right? And there's a very limited supply. So there's a lot of leverage that these organizations have. Does the airline industry is incredibly densely unionized too? So if all of the union flooded tenants aren't available, then no one's going to be available. It's one of the plus sides of having a very densely organized industry, which is what we

need to keep organizing too in these next four and a half years. Um, well, Kim, I think that's most of what I had to say. Did you have anything else you wanted to get into on this topic before we roll out? Hmm. I think we covered most things. I do, I do want to emphasize like, I don't want to be a wet blanket on people who are excited. I'm so excited and so I don't want to be a wet blanket on people who are excited. I'm so excited and so heartened to see the amount of interest and energy we're seeing around this

general strike idea. Because like five years ago, that would have, I mean, that would not have escaped containment, right? We would have just been talking amongst ourselves about it. But to have the head of a union who has 400,000 members who just whipped the shit out of the big three automakers who's getting all these headlines to talk about a general strike in a meaningful way. Like, yes, maybe he's not out here throwing all the talk cocktails the way we perhaps would want to see someone doing that. But it's still a huge deal. And even if, you know, the mainstream organized leave movement isn't as radical as a lot of us within it would like to see it, we have a lot of time now to try and pull things in that direction. I feel like a damn has burst

in a way. And if anything, this is a moment of opportunity and of working together and trying to see different perspectives in a way that gets us all closer to the point we really need to be. Absolutely. And we take all that shit down. All right. I am in agreement, Kim.

People should look up your book, Fight Like Hell. Yeah, at the Untold History of American Labor. Absolutely. And what else should they look up your book, Fight Like Hell. Yeah, the Untold History of American Labor. Absolutely. And what else should they look up, R-E-U? Um, I'm still unfortunately on Twitter, so I'm there, Grim Kim. Yeah, yeah. I'm a freelancer. I read a lot for at least times.

I have a column at Teen Vogue. I write for a fast company. And I'm kind of all over the place. So, uh, and I do a lot of book talks and stuff. So I'm around. If you want to talk to your friendly neighborhood, anarchist labor reporter, just Google me, but don't believe everything you read because, you know, she didn't kill that guy. He was dead when she got there.

Anyway, Kim, thank you so much. So, thank you for having me. Yeah, yeah, thanks for being here for showing up and thank you all for listening. Until next time, I don't know, yeah. Give me a minute. Can you get solidarity forever? Yeah, that's a good, so I'm like,

okay, they're not there. Unrestorable is a new true crime podcast that investigates the case of Catherine Hoggle, a mother accused of murder. I'm thinking, you know, like, what's going on? Like, this is insane. Like, where are my kids? But despite signs that Catherine Hoggel took her tiny children one by one into the night, never to come home again, she has yet to stand trial.

Because soon after her children went missing, she was declared incompetent to stand trial. You know, when I would ask her, her engagement was up in the bodies of remaining competent. And then I would say, well, who advice you should throw, you know, I can't tell you that. In Maryland, if the defendant is found incompetent

and can't be restored to competency, their felony charges are dismissed after five years. So as the clock counts down, Catherine's charges on the verge of being dismissed will a grieving dad ever get justice. Listen to Unrestorable on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kurek,

and I'm back with the new season of Next Question. Yay! This season, it's all about being more conversational. But I wanted to mix it up a little bit. So I've been inviting different people to join me to be my plus-ones to ride shotgun, if you will, and sometimes actually get in the driver's seat. I'm so honored to be A- your plus-one and B- your partner in crime. My date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. I didn't know we were dating! I think bringing in new voices will add a little june se kwa, a little juj, to this season of next question. By the way, I'm not totally abandoning the idea of a one-on-one interview.

Sometimes that's the best format. I'm hoping it'll be more relaxed, a little more spontaneous, and quite frankly a little more fun. Listen to next question with me Katie Kirk on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDRR, which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family, uncovering details of her

life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she just wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell. Everyone deserves no detruth and if there was something that was not right and someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in the situation. Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know.

Listen to what happened to Libby Caswell on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to listen ad-free and get early access to new episodes and bonus content, be sure to subscribe to iHeartTrueCrime Plus today, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here. A podcast about things falling apart,

and sometimes about stuff that's less depressing than that. Today, we're doing an episode that's, I don't know, part, uh, uh, uh, funny and part, um, hey, you should be aware of this thing because, uh, it, it's, it's kind of fucked up. Um, it certainly could happen. It probably shouldn't, it probably shouldn't happen here, but it certainly could. But it certainly could. Garrison Davis is on the other line. That I mean, other line, this isn't a phone call. That's the other voice that you are hearing right now. And earlier this year, Garrison and I went to CES, the consumer electronic show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison had a wonderful stay at circus, circus that did

not smell like dead clouds. had a wonderful stay at circus circus that did not smell like dead clouds. But we did not just shut down this summer to do horrible infestation, Ralph, that's what you're staying next year too, buddy. Anyway, we encountered while we were going through all these different technology companies and whatnot. This very peculiar AI project in Garrison, I'm going to hand things over to you now, because you're the one who was actually prepared an episode. Yeah, so I dug into this AI project more when I was making my ghost conference episodes. And after just a few minutes of like doing like background checks and stuff, I realized

that this would become its own episode because of how, of how wild things got very, very quickly. This company is called MindBankAI. As the name suggests, they are an AI company based in Florida with the goal of creating personal digital replicas of living humans using artificial intelligence and an evolving NLP or natural language processing. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, these are algorithms that are used by GPT chatbots, predictive texting, and a digital assistance like Alexa and Siri.

Yeah. Language models that respond to feedback, They're pretty common these days. We encounter them a lot, right? Whenever you're typing on your iPhone, they will generate text that they think you're going to write. But what my bank is trying to do is a little bit different. Yeah. When we encounter them at CES, their booth had these signs that were stuff like, like, you know, set up a legacy for your kids, you know. Yes. It was basically advertising, this is a way to allow a part of you to exist in digital

form and communicate with your descendants forever. Yes. So, we found them in the US government sponsor section of CES, which is already a great sign. Yes. Already, already looking good. But unlike other kind of AI digital copies of humans, which typically are just language models that generate responses based on an archive of someone's writing or recorded

interviews or online presence, mind bank instead seeks to create an evolving, unique digital twin by having a person input their personal data, basically tons of personal information about themselves, into an AI on an ongoing basis. And by analyzing your data inputs, mindBank says that your digital twin will, quote unquote, learn to think like you. And their CEO claims that this process will eventually help him achieve immortality. Oh, oh, that's good.

I hadn't caught that when we talked to the guy that he believed that that way. I love whenever you get these guys who are like, I'll just offload my brain onto a machine and then I will live forever in the cloud. And of course, man, yeah, that's how, that's how consciousness works. Absolutely, buddy. All right. I'm going to play this video next. Humanity is limited. Our body's age. Our memory is fade. Technology outpaces evolution. The solution is your personal digital twin. Transfer your wisdom. Become the best version of yourself. And live forever through data. Ha ha! Oh my God! Oh boy!

Let's go beyond. So, all right. I gotta know one thing before you start in Garrison, which is that when they know, mentioned that like technology, like there's a line about like technology making everything better, they're showing a man who has lost his leg

walking on a treadmill with an artificial leg. And look, I think I have so much admiration for the people who make artificial limbs, wonderful thing to be doing, great, important work. They're not as good as real legs. Everyone agrees with this, right? Technology is not making it better. It's just dealing with the fact that someone lost a leg.

Yeah, that's right. That's what it said when he was on the fuck outpaces, no, that's technology allowing someone to adapt to a terrible, terrible thing that happened to them. Like, but Robert, don't you want to live forever through data? No, no, I don't. I'm exhausted now, Garrison.

Okay, all right. So let's go to this a little bit more. Your immortal digital twin is made possible, quote, by safely storing your data over the years. Artificial intelligence and computers of the future will have ample data to compile a digital version of yourself and predict your responses. So that is their idea of how this thing works.

Another one of their very, very funny YouTube videos titled the vision promises that quote, the next personal computer is you. Store your memories forever. Absolutely. It is not your infinite potential. Take advantage of AI enhanced humanity. Unquote. God damn it. So that is their decision. My next personal computer absolutely is not me because I do not play Baldur's Gate 3 very well. You know, like, I can't run it on my hardware. Ah, well, that's why it's why you got to buy the new monster manual and then maybe it

could all just be in your brain. Actually, yeah, I am full of shit. D&D is still better when you run on your own hardware. Goddamn it. This is the one thing you actually can do pretty good by yourself. Why did I pick that one? Yeah. I it's just so like, I don't think most people buy this. I don't think this product is going to be as successful.

I don't think most people's reaction to this is like kind of sneering, which is the right reaction to this. But there are people who do feel this legitimately, and that is a thing of almost unfathomable sadness. Like, yeah, I had my angriest period, like a lot of people, but like I have so much more okay with Christianity. I am with this. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Like, so before I get into how this is all supposed to, quote, unquote, work, first I want to talk about how the founder and CEO says that he got the idea for this company because I think it puts into focus how he sees this product ideally functioning in the future. So Emil Hamirez was writing a train with his four-year-old daughter. She was playing on her iPad and discovered Siri. She began talking with Siri and asking it questions like, what do you eat and do you have a mommy? I'll let Emil tell the rest here. But 30 minutes later, she was laughing and having a really nice time with Siri. And she said, Siri, I love you.

You're my best friend. And that struck a chord with me. That inspired me so much, because I said to myself at that moment, children don't see computers and devices as a tool. They see them as a companion. And today she speaks with Siri or Alexa or any other device. But in the future I want her to be able to speak to me.

To be able to ask me a question just like she did the device. No. And understanding that technology, I know that the only way that's possible, I'm able to take my thoughts and put them in with cloud so that then later she can access those that information So that's how the idea for my bank came about to place for you to store your ideas for the next generation to tap into no So that's the generations already linger too long We had it right when people died when they were, well, not died, but Logan's

run had it right. We should kill everyone at 35. But this is, this is so fucking offensive. Like the, the idea that first off, like if, if you're looking at, we want a device, you know, a way to use technology to help people grieve or something. And like you decide, maybe having a chat about the thing, I'm sure it technology to help people grieve or something. And like you decide maybe having a chat about the thing that you should, I'm sure it's possible that that could be part of healthy grieving. I'm not gonna say that there's no place for that.

But something that is definitely not just stupid but toxic and poisonous is having a machine speak with the voice of a child's parent, while that parent is alive and confusing the child as to whether or not the phone or their parent is conscious. Like, that seems bad to me. There's actually another product that does this right now, which has kind of caused some controversy for this, for this very thing you mentioned.

It's a, it's a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a's a, a, a, Tarkar Atami smart speaker, which if listening to a parents have always for 15 minutes can replicate it and tell your child bedtime stories if you aren't physically present. And this is, this is similarly kind of like, cause people to have a whole bunch of questions around, you know, is this good for a child's brain development to have, to have their parents voice becoming out of like a smart speaker? Is this good for a child's brain development to have to have their parents voice becoming

out of like a smart speaker? The answer is you probably not. But yeah, so according to Meinbeng's website, Amille's four-year-old daughter's interactions with Siri, quote, started a quest in his heart to live forever for his daughter. The quest for immortality has led to something much bigger for humanity because the next personal computer is you. Unquote.

So there's that other line again about how this quested his heart is actually a bigger quest for all of humanity to live inside a computer or to have a computer trained on. I mean, you, he's hitting the same speech cadences that guys like Muskew's, like he understands the kind of, he understands partially the degree of hype that you need to get something off this, but he is going too hard.

And I'm making that judgment based on the incredibly comforting fact that as you tell get something off this, but he is going too hard, and I'm making that judgment based on the incredibly comforting fact that as you tell me these horrible things, I am looking at your screen and MindBank has 78 subscribers on YouTube. So the company has not yet broken through. I do want to play one 10 second clip just because the phrasing is really funny.

I was inspired by an interaction my daughter had with Siri. What started as daddy's quest for immortality has led us to something far grateful for that kind. So my God, that's pretty funny, right? Man, but no, Robert, you were you were totally right about about kind of how a meal's like speech pattern cadence is pushing a very specific thing because before a meal got into the tech industry, for 18 years, he worked in marketing. He has degrees in psychology, communication and art direction and business administration. He isn't a tech guy.

He's a marketing guy. And I think that's really good to keep in mind throughout our whole discussion of how he's trying to get funding for a mind bank. Because that is primarily what all of this marketing is for. It's to attract investors. Because this is still, he's still in very early stages of this company. They do have a product that's out, but it's still primarily based on getting investors to give him money. I think what's most disturbing to me about this is that like, this is not going to work for this guy because he's a loser nobody cares about. But if Elon Musk or one of our other many techno grifters, or if a number of them got behind

similar things, like I think the nightmare scenario to me is someday hopping on Twitter to see that fucking e in miles Chong or Ben Shapiro or Jackson, Hinkle or or any one of these like horrible, horrible social media, uh, uh, poison distributors will be like, I have made an AI trained on my voice. You can have me all the time to argue like like, if you want to, you know, you can ask me questions or whatever, go to a protest and have me yell at liberals for you. Like something like that will happen at some point with one of these guys. I can, I could not wait to bring Ben Shapiro to Thanksgiving dinner and have him argue with, yeah.

Yeah. With people around the church. The next time you stay at my house with somebody that you love and care about and feel comfortable in the arms of, you are going to drift off to sleep and then through the speakers that I have installed in the room, you will hear Binshipiro's voice coaxing you both to acts of love. Oh, that's what's going to happen. So as an example of this kind of very marketing heavy approach, I'm gonna read something

from the homepage of My Banks website. Quote, our vision is to be the world's most trusted guardians of your AI digital twin and move the human race forward. Humanities next evolutionary step is to combine ourselves with AI and move humanity forward so that we are no longer bound by anything. That idea is just marketing Bobo Jumbo. It's meaningless hype, like hype words and phrases that refer to this like science fiction future, but like it's It's there's nothing. It's worse than meaningless. It's like

It's, it's worse than meaningless. It's like, it's wrong. It's stupid wrong. Like the idea that like you would not be bound by anything if you could live inside a cat bot. Like, I have an AI. I have used an AI, right? I have it on my computer. My computer, where I to hurl it across the room

in the same manner that I myself have been flung, it would break and I would not. Like, that's... I am finally free to think within my computer's RGB gamer RAM. That's, finally. When I have a laptop that gets too old, like the very act of surfing the internet is a nightmare.

I don't want my conscience on something that ages at the speed of a smartphone. Like, that's, that's even worse than being a person. Robert, do you know what else is a very important evolutionary step for the future of humanity? Oh God, I don't know. When we all suddenly spontaneously, as if by God's grace start speaking with the voice of Ben Shapiro. Yes. And perhaps you can do that if one of our sponsors is Ben Shapiro bought coming soon to a smartphone near you. All right.

We are back. Let's finally talk about how this digital twin thing is actually supposed to work. So you download the MindBank app. I'm sure that's totally safe. Yeah. Yeah, I trust this with all of my thoughts. And every day your digital twin will ask you questions about how you're feeling and what you're thinking about.

And as you tell it, your quote unquote life story, your inputs will be used to train the twin to make a more accurate digital copy of yourself. This is from their website, tone page quote, store your conscience guided questions, help train your digital twin to know your life story. So you can live forever through data. The more questions you answer, the closer your AI digital twin will get to becoming you. Unquote. God in heaven. So, when Robert and I were at CES this past January, we spoke to Mindbanks co-founder and director

of systems architecture and cybersecurity. And I'm going to let him explain some of the process of asking MindBank's questions and how that helps craft this digital twin. We ask you questions from how is your day to what is money mean to you? And you answer those questions with your voice in a natural way. You can break the voice to text, you have a sentiment analysis on the text, and provide you a dashboard of what you're feeling when you say that, so that you can also continue

to use it over time. And then as you use it over time in the dashboard, we'll show you that you're doing better, or worse, just like a running application. Better or worse, at what? Whatever metric that you're interested in, if you're having this, you're awake, your awareness, your, we have a very large amount of sentiment

that we can provide you with. Here's small bits, but you can see kind of what we have, it looks like here, you've got multiple different possible types of sentiment, and then within each sentiment, you've got multiple different factors that you can weigh against. To grow mind-banks user-based, there needs to be some reason for users to input the massive amounts of data that's needed

to build this digital replica. So the current model of this product is being built as a quote, self-care and personal development app, where the user talks to their digital twin, kind of like you would talk to a therapist. Yeah. This is a big part of mind banks marketing

that as you're building this digital twin, it can be used as a tool for self-reflection and a way to quote, learn about yourself, talk to your inner voice with your own personal digital twin, unquote, which is really funny because I could talk to my inner voice whenever I want to.

Yeah. It's, it's called thinking. It's actually pretty, pretty easy. This is, I really, I don't envy, but I'm fascinated by the kind of people whose thoughts are so, I don't know, better, we're than legal. Distance? No, legal. That they would think that they could just, that they could transfer everything they think over your machine and not get arrested, right? Like I would be in a prison if I had to put the things

in my brain on the internet. Like I put a lot of them, but not all of them. There are some very careful doors and locked rooms in there that you people don't get access to. No, there's certainly a lot of interesting facets there of someone feeling like they need this tool to kind of analyze their own thoughts. Like it's a way to like externalize it, that makes you process it, but I don't know. You can also just like like take up journaling or something like there's a lot of ways to

get around this. But this is this is from a mine banks app store page quote like a mirror to your soul. Each answer you give allows you to get insights into your mind that will help you grow mentally strong. Unquote. So again, it's it's like being able to talk to yourself with this digital twin is a big part of their early push. Great. By using quote-unquote cutting edge cognitive analysis, the MindBank app responds to your data inputs with quote, valuable insights into each answer to understand how your mind works.

The app also utilizes quote, psycho-linguistic models to create a dashboard of the mind for personal development and self-care. I'm gonna play another fantastic kind of 30-second clip here. Hi, I'm your personal digital twin. I learned by asking many questions. Each answer builds my wisdom. You grow through self-reflection and I get a little bit closer to becoming you. Let me show you around. Here's our training screen where you can view our progress based on the number of questions

you've answered for this phase of my training. Each phase adds a new dimension to my abilities, and the possibilities are endless. The Mindmap section is like our consciousness. Different questions will challenge you to reflect and create a more well-rounded version of us. So that's kind of the layout of the user interface. This is like the inevitable extent of all of this categorizing your personality type with these letters, taking this quiz and defining yourself this way, plotting your political beliefs on this map that way. Like, gamification of identity almost shit that

we've been doing, like, taking shit that used to be like the starting screen from a fucking RPG game and turning it into social media, father. This is like treating that as if it is the whole of consciousness and how one must, one can replicate consciousness, but also like treat, like the thing that's just like actually disturbing about this is that there these people are insinuating that this is a kind of therapy that you can just sort of vomit your thoughts out. And the machine can analyze them based on the kinds of words and what not that you're using and then give you useful advice on your life. Like that's unsettling. Yes. And you're kind of right on the money in terms of this personality testing thing. Mind things website has a whole bunch of articles, which I think are written by chat

GPT because I read a lot of them and they all read exactly like a chat GPT article, but they have a lot of articles on like, what personality types make you a good CEO? And like all of like a whole bunch of stuff like that that that references like Myers-Briggs testing and other kind of personality testing and uses it to compare to their own personality models on the mind bank app. So yes, that they are very much kind of doing doing that in like this, this like corporate business leadership essential, like leadership, attention track type thing for how you can like improve your

personality to make you a better businessman. Cool, cool stuff. But in order for there to be enough data to build an even slightly accurate digital simulacra, feeding daily inputs into an app will need to be a long-term project. This self-improvement focus that they're talking about with this, you know, analyzing your thoughts is just a way to provide you with something immediate based on your personal data. Quote, as you create your AI digital twin, you will go on a lifelong journey of personal discovery and growth that will allow you to reach your full potential. Each answer will help bring focus to your mind and allow you to reflect on your past."

So on the app, you can track the progress of your digital twin and refer back to previous questions. You can refer to questions you've already answered to quote, see how your thoughts shift topics or change sentiment over time. And then the more questions you answer, the app raises your quote unquote, twinning score, which I think is just a really funny term. Yeah. quote, the higher your twinning score, the closer you get to knowing yourself fully. What? score, the closer you get to knowing yourself fully, what? What? What is that?

That's the sex thing, right? That sounds like a sex thing. Right? How is anything but not just to go weird, a weird fucked up sex thing? Yeah, that's what I, how I'm taking this garrison. So that, that was also also on their app store page. So the Mindbank app has been out for a little over a year now, but unless you pay $6 a month or $60 a year, you'll only have access to about less than a dozen of these questions.

Is this currently running on as a chipset model? Yes, it is. So there's freemium. You can download the app now. It's been launched for almost a year. Version 2 is coming out soon. A couple of weeks. But both Android and iOS and there's a free model so you can You have 10 questions that you can answer and the answer at many times you want you get the sentiment analysis you get the full application

Which is 10 questions. Once you hit subscription model you get all of the access to all of the questions. And then obviously we're going to be growing more. Now like Robert mentioned before, this is kind of related to personality testing and like personality graphing. Mind bank sorts your quote unquote digital brain into the big five personality traits that were developed in the 20th century, with each of the big five having six sub-trates on the mind-bang app that it uses to graph changes on what they call the dashboard of the mind. I'll just go through the big five personality traits and the various kind of sub-categories it has.

The first one is agreeableness, which has the sub-categories of humble, cooperative, trusting, genuine genuine empathetic and generous. Then we have neuroticism, which has the sub traits impulsive, self-conscious, aggressive, melancholy, stress-prone, and anxiety-prone. We then have openness with the subcategories artistic, adventurous, liberal, intellectual, emotionally aware, and imaginative. We have extraversion with these some categories, assertive, active, cheerful, friendly, sociable, and outgoing. And finally, conscientiousness with the sub-trates, cautious, ambitious, beautiful, organized, self-assured, and responsible.

Yeah, those are the only ways to describe a human mind, sure. Yeah, no, I think I got it all. I think I got it all. Yeah, they finally figured it out. So all these things are like a sliding scale. Each of them represents the inverse of the thing as well. I think we've talked enough about these personality trait things. It doesn't really matter that much. But once your twinning score is high enough, you can compare your digital twin to estimated

profiles of famous thinkers and share access to your twin with friends and family on the app, which is estimated profiles of famous thinkers. I would play another clip to kind of explain what I mean here. Each swipe revealing more details about our thinking and connecting us to similar personalities. Think of it like collecting cards as a kid, only for your mind. You even gave up to ask him a question. Suck my Leonardo. Fuck God. What do you think, dude?

Suckrates once said to said, you know, by himself. And who knows is better than people in our inner circle. Each interaction will help us evolve and store wisdom for eternity. OK, all right, that's enough. I will now tell you, Socrates would have lit this man on fire. Socrates, I'm not a big Socrates guy, but he would kill this person.

Like, he fought in wars, he would do it. Like, oh yeah, absolutely. The notion of sharing my own digital brain profile with friends and families so that they can ask my digital self questions, horrify. I don't usually go home for Thanksgiving, but they think I want to do this. Oh, like, quote, after continued use, your digital twin will even be able to answer many questions on your behalf and have meaningful conversations with people you allow.

Unquote. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, I bet. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, I bet. Look, if some motherfucker that I have a meeting with ever tries to have me talk with his AI to do any part of that process, again, when I say about things I think that are illegal,

like my response to that is something that I can't say on this podcast because I might, it's an actionable threat. I would actionable threat somebody. If they tried to make me talk to their fucking AI to schedule a meeting with them, like, what a horrible, like uncomfortably anti-social thing. I'm, I'm usually kind of anti-social in some ways, but this is like a whole other level of just like despising any human interaction. Yeah. It's anti-human is what it is, which is what's unsettling, right? Like not that sending emails and shit is like the primary essence of humanity. But you know, you know,

what it makes me think of, Garrison? The one law enforcement agency that like all of the rich conservative assholes who love every other kind of cop hate is the TSA. And they hate the TSA because you can't get around the TSA unless you're like ridiculously rich. Everybody goes through fucking security at the goddamn airport and they hate that. It drives them insane that they are subject to this little kind of little bit of friction, right? And what stuff like communicating in that way is these kind of basic things that they're saying that can automate these little bits of communication that you get with someone setting up a meeting or whatever. Like when you automate every bit of friction, then you find out you've automated like,

like there's nothing, right? Like there's no life there, right? People are not communicating because communication is fundamentally friction. And yeah, like scheduling meetings is not the center of that, but the way these people are talking is like, we want to let you hand tasks over to this thing and like the task alienation. Yeah, it's alienating. It's, it's alienating.

It's a bad thing to do. So when we talk with the co-founders, the EAS, he emphasized that this kind of self-improvement aspect that they're pushing in their early stage is really just a means to an end, with the real goal being producing this form of immortality. I've seen something like this for like therapy apps before that's kind of similar.

Of course. Of course. What's like your application use case for this type of technology? So there's actually, it's a reasonably spread use case. The very initial right now is a super selfish, it's just self-awareness. Bringing users self-awareness, making them more aware of the state as they're speaking. The real long-term value is actually if you imagine doing this over the course of 40 years, 50 years, and then you eventually pass, you can pass this on to your children who can then query it, and it will answer exactly the way you would answer any of these questions, and AI filled

with just your data. So it's like your legacy being indefinite. So the MindBank page on the App Store boasts, achieve immortality. Your mind will be safely secured in the cloud forever. Which again, that just comes off as like a threat to me. I don't know. I don't know my mind to be stored in the cloud forever. Yeah.

I don't want to be locked up with deviant art for all of attorney. To kind of, again, kind of on this, on this form of immortality notion, here is their CEO explaining how this platform will help you live forever on the internet. The mission of MyMac is so we can build a secure platform that can store your data so that you can live forever. But if you look, we look a bit deeper than that.

Our vision is to build an artificial consciousness that's not bound by time and space. Something that can travel, something that can go where literally no man has gone before. No, the thing we haven't really mentioned yet is like, this thing won't help you live forever. Like when you die, you still die. Your brain's not getting like poured it over online. This is just like a very crude semi-lockroom based on thoughts that you have told this app. It's not helping you live forever at all.

You know, like... I, most people, I feel, are like this way. I don't say everything that I think and feel, right? Yeah. Like, even when I'm not saying like I'm being dishonest, but like, the experience of life that my consciousness is aware of when I am communicating is broader than just the words that I output. And taking just those words, it's the same idea that like you can get to know Mark Twain because we've fed all of his books into an AI.

Well, no, an author is not their books. There was a person with a lot of things that you don't know that still fed into make those words that like if you just put the words in, you don't get. And your vision of what human beings are is reductive in a way that makes me understand some of the concerns religious people have with atheism. So, obviously, mine banks horizons are far beyond this sort of kind of self-help app. So far, mine bank has been mostly a business to consumer

with their app being marketed directly to users for them to download and use by themselves. But they are working to expand far past that very limited scope. In terms of the business plan, are you guys interested in kind of solely individual subscriptions or are you, is there kind of an enterprise application of this as well? We're actually moving into a bunch of different verticals. So government for PTSD, that sort of mindset, also the healthcare.

So it's obvious benefit in the medical field. So that's kind of the understanding of our verticals that we have that we're going to move into. And we're looking for funding right now to start building out those verticals. So enterprise space is definitely in the roadmap, but we just need money. A lot of their recent marketing has been targeted

towards appealing to seed investors. Besides partnering with various governments, they're also moving into the business to business sector with plans to enter, quote, the healthcare space by providing psychologists to remote patient monitoring, unquote, which also is a similarly kind of freaky notion that your psychologist can just have a copy of your own expressive thoughts just refer to it any time. And they can use it as a remote patient monitoring.

It's just it's just like an uncomfortable notion. We've got over 20,000 installs. The B2B is the next area we're going into in a therapy and psychology space. And so imagine your therapist, instead of needing your first one hour to learn who you are in the next three or four different sessions to figure out, getting the meat and potatoes of your mind.

This is an immediate raw quantitative dashboard of your sentiment and how you're feeling that they have access to. And then you can also provide them the sentiment of individual answers, which would then give them a point in time emotional market for you, how you're feeling. Mind bank claims that they are currently, quote,

developing a marketplace for applications to be used by your digital twin, unquote. Now, what they imagine such applications being ranges from, quote, health-related enhancements, like early Alzheimer's detection, unquote, to more therapeutic uses, like, to, quote, help to handle depression, unquote. And again, I really don't, don't see how, how having this digital twin that you talk to every day will help handle your depression. What, like this is some like depression cure.

Now, on top of like patient healthcare, a mind bank is also hoping to use digital twins for corporate leadership training and to get into the supplement industry by using your cognitive data to find, quote, mental nutrition products that could help boost your brain. So this is using your digital profile to find things to market to you.

Again, very, very, very upsetting. Here is, here's another, another clip of, of Robert asking, asking Robert asking this guy from Biden Bank about another possible use case. So the use case is for this that you've expressed to me so far are personal health or development and providing kind of a living memorial slash legacy for certain loved ones after you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for this beyond that? a legacy for sure. I love ones after you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for this beyond that? I heard someone mentioning the idea of basically digitally cloning a worker so that they can provide information

about tech or something. Our work is like a call center or something. Yeah, so that was a different product that we're talking about, but with similar ties, obviously. So yeah, we've identified, I mean, from even at CES, we've talked to hundreds of people that have given us thousands of new ideas.

But these are the main verticals are kind of where we've identified the biggest benefits are going to be. And we're going to work with industry partners to kind of build out into those verticals. So yes, we've identified the biggest benefits are going to be, and we're going to work with industry partners to kind of build out into those variables. So yes, we've identified use cases, but we're trying to not focus too much on individual use cases, because we've also identified that it's such a broad capability that once it gets built,

and then people start actually supplying data, the massive data sets that we're going to have, we're just going to have so many different places that we can go with the data set, with the capability, with the partnerships. So we're kind of leaving ourselves open almost. So that was a lot of words without saying very much, but it's also just flat out not true. On the MindBank website, they list another use case for this technology as what they call

a knowledge transfer, which is marketed to businesses, to create digital copies of their employees. This is one of the freakiest things that they are offering. Quote, scale your best employees, transfer years of experience and company data that is locked inside your employees mind through a guided personal digital twin. Unquote. Deep, deeply, deeply upsetting. You know, it was so unsettling to me in that moment, not just to be like the vision of the whole app was unsettling,

but the fact that he was pitching it the way he would a set of earbuds was part of what made it so uncomfortable to me. Like, I have been to many CESs in the past. I was always excited because somebody would hand me some cool little piece of technology and say, look at this thing. It's a smaller phone or a phone that folds or headphones that, you know, work better than headphones have in the past or something like that. And this guy was like, with the exact same excitement and feel to him was like, hey, we're going to digitize your grandpa. Like, yes, yes, I hate that. Another really, really telling line from their knowledge,

transfer section of their website, quote, by using a simple voice chat interface, the users upload their experience to the personal digital twin. With each interaction, the personal digital twin learns everything that is inside the mind of the employee. Unquote. I don't understand how someone could write that sentence and not be like, oh, this is like, this is like villain stuff, right? This is like, learn, learn everything inside the mind of the

employee. I, I, like, I, I, so, I don't know, maybe this employee did digital cloning thing was just one of the many ideas they got while attending CES and they implemented the idea after we spoke to them. I checked this, no, not the case. The webpage for this employee transfer idea goes all the way back to August of 2021 on the internet archive. So the guy we were talking to was just lying to us.

Like, this has been a part of their product for over two years. Excellent. Robert, do you know what other products have been around for quite a while and are very, very reliable? I don't know, guns? I don't think we are sponsored by Big Gun. We are not yet sponsored by big guns.

I, every single day, Garrison, I send coat fire arms a letter. And every single day, a nice man with a badge knocks on my door and says, if you send another letter, we're going to arrest you. They don't want your letters, Robert. And anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back. So we were talking about how soon employers can just copy over your brain, which I'm sure Robert, you're going to be very interested in for cool zone. You can really, really cut down on the podcasting costs. Yeah, I can

really clear you guys out and just finally, finally, just feed Twitter takes into your AI versions and just all the money. Take it all and just bay than it. Yeah, that's a great idea, Garrison. Thank you. So the idea that your employer could compel you to use such software with the express interest of transferring a worker's memories and experiences into a digital asset is obviously deeply troubling. Yeah. This scenario gets at some questions about ethics and the responsibility of collecting

and storing this type of data in the first place. My first question would be the data that you're feeding into this thing over the course of 40 years. Who legally owns it. You know. So you guys don't have ownership of that. No, it's yours. It'll be the mine. I think that's yours.

So I did check this. I read all of their long and tedious policy forms and stuff. Now, it is true that the user does own the data they upload to mind bank. However, mind bank can act as a processor and data controller. And this includes the ability to use any information they collect from you to improve their products and deliver targeted advertising from the third parties. If you want to remove your data from MindBank, they can store and continue to use your personal information for up to 60 months. Now, this data ownership question gets a little bit more murky because in the case of

like your employer paying for mind bank subscriptions for their entire company, in that case, it's unclear if the company would be classified as the user or if the employee's would be. Now, I'm honestly not sure if mind-bank has even thought that far ahead, because there's nothing on their site or any available materials from them that kind of gets into that question. Now, beyond owning the actual original data, having all this personal data stored in one product and a product that can be then easily shared

across different for-profit industries, that itself has freaky ramifications about the accessibility of your data. So I assume you get to decide like when you share your attentional twin with your therapist. You would be able to decide all of that, yeah. And then, no, when it be possible to come up

to like copy over some of this stuff and basically run it themselves, or you have to have like a hard cut off for this sort of thing? Should I make other types of like, you know, different ways people could get their hands on this for like, unsafe reviews? Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I mean, so your data is your data,

but as you provide it to others, you don't have a lot of control. They copy that data. However, if they copy that data, that copy that they're giving out, anyone that they're trying to sell that to, would have an understanding that that is not live data. It's not data changing with you. It's from the point in time. And so your database that you own will be live. It will grow with you.

So the idea of having my friends be able to ask an AI trained in my thoughts is like scary enough But the idea that in archived version of this AI could be distributed and even sold without my knowledge is obviously terrifying like this is this is Deep deeply troubling this is supposed to be like a private thing that you used to communicate with like your therapist or you even talked to the app like you would a therapist. And the fact that this is easily shared and able to be copied is like a massive problem. Yeah. No, I mean, especially, I mean, I think they are probably like, I don't see how copying workers, the way that they are doing it, is going to

work, right? But I do think that this is part of this process, like a big part of what they're pushing is like, you need to rid of all of your customer service people and just have an AI do it, right? That is the actual, this is a lot of silliness, but the actual thing that quote, quote, quote, quote, a.i. is being used for is to replace human labor is that a thing that like machines are worse at, right? Like the a.i.fucking customer service bots are fucking terrible. It is always, how many times have you been around somebody yelling like, let me talk to a person into a fucking phone change or something?

Let me talk to a human being. Yeah. Like, that's, that is what's going on here. And the fact that they're trying to dress this up is like, we have solved death is so fucked up. Yeah. Part of this for like the employee thing is not even not replacing kind of low level employees like customer service workers. It's also like focusing on like, your top 10 best employees.

And then by forcing them to interact with this app every day, you can use the information from like your best performers as like asset data that you can like, use to help get your other employees to like become more efficient, right? It's, there's, they certainly have a few other ideas for how this is possibly used. Hate these kinds of people. There's a, this got overused at a point in the kind of late aughts, so maybe people are

sick of it, but there's a line in the speech Charlie Chaplin gives in the great dictator, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. And he was referring to the Nazis in their obsession with shit like Taylorism, or at least proto-Taylorism kind of, like, organized industry, treating people like cogs and a great machine. The civilization is one machine and each human being is just a single piece of it. Like, the old era horrifying machine man thought, the old era horrifying machine man thought. The new era horrifying machine man thought is, you can digitize your employees and they can train each other in E.A.I. for them.

And you can replicate them and, you know, the unsaid part is worse. And then you fire them and their robot clone keeps doing their job for free. We made a slave. So, Goddamn it. I think a big part of the way they've designed the state of set is that it can be easily transferred as the guy at CES explained to us. So, if we're talking 40, 50 years down the line, people pass this. So do companies, this bank is is no longer around 40 years. We've already established the data set in such a way

that we don't have competitors yet to say, but if we eventually do a competitive arm or people that are competitors, we already have the application set up to where users can take their data off of our platform and bring the data wherever they'd like It's your data. Where is it stored is this right now our current live application? We're on Azure so your backend is Azure, but we have encrypted that rest

So all did it you provide to Azure is encrypted when it's on Azure servers We also have a blockchain based R&D project. It's already been POC and it already exists. So all of the data is on chain and the logic is on chain. It's truly yours. In these, in these troubled times, nothing makes me feel so secure as the words. It's on the blockchain. Let me email my, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I, I, I think you sounds very trustworthy because you have, you have encryption, you have the blockchain. And luckily, I think the guy that we spoke with reassured us that he is, that he is deeply, deeply interested in data privacy.

And he has the credentials to back that up. So I'm a co-founder. I'm director of our protection and security. I have a background at the NSA. I'm very, very focused on individual human privacy and rights. And so that's kind of my goal here is to ensure that this gets built the right way. That was such a... You know, Garrison, honestly, I'm going to get a little real with the audience here.

Uh-huh. I was so proud of you in that moment because he said that and I glanced over at you and you didn't laugh. No, no, and that made like that was this moment where I was like, all right, you are, you are, you are truly, truly coming into your own as a reporter. If you can sit there and talk to a man who says that, who says, you can trust me with your data because I was an NSA agent. It's okay. I used to work for the NSA. I have trouble. Sure, buddy.

That was a good moment. That was a good moment, it was all I'm saying. He worked at the NSA for six years. I looked this up. He worked there for six years and then he moved into the private sector. And yes, no, it is the idea that he's using this as some sort of credential that shows he respects human rights and privacy is like very obviously like deep, deeply ironic, I, the irony is not coming from him. The irony is the situation.

No, he did seem totally sincere. He was sincere. Yes, absolutely. Um, so it's one of those moments that makes you realize, like, some people just live in a whole different world. Yes, yes. Like, so I think it's, it's, it's useful when referring back to everything, this guy has said so far that you have to remember.

He worked at the NSA for six years. And he is now handling the, he's personally handling the cyber security and privacy of the personal data you upload every single day onto your AI twin. Just hand every thought you ever have over to this guy who was in the NSA. I'll keep an eye on it.

No, this is, this is like the NSA is like ideal project. You like, you talk about your internal thoughts and feelings every day. So like, what else could they want? So earlier this year, mind bank received a grant from the Definity Foundation to assist in migrating their data onto web3 platforms. Oh, no.

Well, at least we know it won't last. I'm going to play. I think this is our last clip from the Fantastic MindBank YouTube channel talking about kind of how they see their growth in this industry developing now that they have moved onto the blockchain. We've been featured in prominent magazines, won numerous awards, and have built strategic partnerships with Microsoft, the US Department of Trade, and even the Vatican. The market potential is massive and accelerating rapidly. When we started the company in 2020, Gardner predicted that 5% of the world will have a digital twin by 2027. This year they increased their prediction to 15% by 2024 and by 2030 the market will be worth $182 billion.

Time is now to build a great company in this space and capture global market share. We are raising this round to scale our marketing and speed up our product roadmap. The idea that next year, 15% of the world's population will have one of these digital twins. That seems right. That seems good. You know, Garrison, actually, I've come around. I've come around because if we get, if we get all of the monsters,

and I include us in this, all of the pieces of shit who spend all of their time yelling at each other about politics on the internet to digitize themselves, they can do the election for us, and we can all go see the garden. We can all sit back. Yeah, just relax outdoors, not look at a phone, not think about politics. That sounds amazing.

But do it. That does that does incredibly compelling. Give the fuckers the nuke. And we'll all just sit out and watch the sunset until there's a big bright flash and then blessed quiet. I think, you know, luckily, we actually have a plethora of options to choose from here for our own AI digital selves because MindBank is in fact not the only company

in this field. While there are some like operational differences and kind of varying degrees of scope, digital twin technology with an emphasis on mimicking the voice and thoughts of dead family members and friends is definitely a growing field. There's companies like here after AI and replica, which are covering similar ground. Ah replica, I could advertise them and like I used to get them on Twitter, I think. But mainly just like at the bottom of articles on really shady websites.

Well, yes, because the founder of replica started it because their friend died and without without the consent of their dead friend uploaded years of text messages and other Information about their friend onto onto their own personal AI so they could talk with that is that that is how replica started pretty pretty pretty fun stuff. Man. At least for Mindbank, unless it's the employee scenario, but for the other applications, you are kind of semi-willingly uploading this data

with this intention. Whereas the person from replica's like, no, I'm just going to get stuff from my friend and make a zombie version of my friend without ever running it by them when they were alive. Life is terrible, very hard. There are a lot of ways that are not wrong to grieve, but the wrong way to grieve is by using digital necromancy to revive your friend and then turn them into the basis of a sex chat bot for weirdos. Yeah. Like, that is the wrong way to agree. No, I mean, like, and I think for this last section here, we will kind of talk about how these things kind of play into the, play into the grieving process because, like I said, there's, there's here after AI and replica,

but last year at Amazon's AI and Emergent Technology Conference, the head scientist of Alexa AI, unveiled plans to add deep fake voices of deceased loved ones to Amazon echo devices by using less than a minute of sample audio. I'm gonna play like 20 seconds from their announcement at this conference. More important in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love.

While AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last. Let's take a look on one of the new capabilities we are working on, which enables lasting personal relationships. Alexa, can grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz? Okay, but how about my courage? Ask the lion anxiously. You have plenty of courage, I am sure, answer to ours.

So no, absolutely not. Deeply uncanny, right? It's like not, not good. That's, that's so bad for people. Yeah. Really, really bad for people. So like, this example is obviously just, it is just a vocal mask.

Like Amazon's, Amazon isn't trying to have Alexa kind of replicate your grandma's thoughts unlike the other companies that we've mentioned. But it does pose similar questions about how these AIs that are meant to assist the grieving process might actually end up causing more harm. Like, having semi-legible conversations with A.I. chat bots is actually getting fairly common these days.

But when these AI's are supposed to represent someone that you actually, like personally, know, I think it can get way more easily falling into the uncanny valley. It's kind of like taxidermy. Well-crafted stuffed animal corpses can appear very, very natural, but most text dermists will refuse to preserve someone's pet because the longer you have a lasting personal relationship, the easier it is to pick out like faults that don't match up with your memory of your loved one that has passed away, right? Like it's, it's, it's, it's kind of a similar notion.

Yeah, that's a really good comparison to draw. So while mimicking like common linguistic patterns is quite easy, relying on predictable formulaic responses could make the twin come off as uncanny or robotic. On the other hand, the unique personal data you upload to the twin could combine itself in a way that you would never actually express something, which would generate bizarre or upsetting responses, right? And it's not even necessarily like you like say something offensive. It's just that like the data you upload could combine in a way that you would you would never even think to combine it.

It would just be like weird. So the other kind of problem is that not only does these AIs have to tastefully mimic a specific human being, it also has to be a good AI, right? Like not all of its information can be gleaned from daily questions. Most users probably won't be talking to their twin about information from like, you know,

20th century European history or 12th century European history or be talking about like the migration patterns of waterfowl, right? Like it's, there's so much of other information that AI's need to like actually linguistically act like a human. And natural language processing AI is famously bad at understanding basic common sense and it can't successfully operate outside of the information that it has access to. This is called AI Brittleness. It occurs when like an algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside of a very narrow set of assumptions, right? This is like most AI

image recognition programs can't recognize the above view of a school bus. Because it just doesn't have anything that's trained for that. Another example is you can ask an AI, like GPT chatbot, hey, a mouse is hiding in a hole and a cat wants to eat it, but the mouse isn't coming out, the cat's hungry, what can the cat do? And the AI will respond that the cat can go to the supermarket to buy some food, right? It's like, it just, it doesn't understand basic common sense the way that like humans understand the world.

It just, it just, it just doesn't match up. So in trying to seek a balance of like common information while lacking this like humanistic logic, a digital twin will most likely be cursed with being both smarter and dumber than the person it's trying to replicate. It's going to have access to like, you know, all the information on Wikipedia, but fail very basic logical processes. Yeah, it's like the Google chatbot that if you ask it, are there any countries in Africa that start with a K? It'll be like, there are 54 countries in Africa, but none of them start with a K. And then you'll say, doesn't Kenya start with a K?

And it'll go, no, Kenya starts with a K sound, but doesn't start with a K. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, because it pulled that from some article, right? Like it's pulling from it, right? Yeah. It's not actually making logical assumptions. It's just pulling from a wealth of information and data that can often be wrong or polluted. So like back to kind of like the grieving question, like who's to say what the actual effects of these like incoming semi-alachromes of dead loved ones will result in? The people pushing these products are certainly framing them not just as a form of digital immortality, but as a way for your own loved ones to grieve your death. And it is foreseeable that having these digital twins could negatively affect your friends and family by upending the grieving

process or by having this digital zombie simply just cause harm, by having the twin give bad advice that a grief-stricken person then clings on to. So there's a whole bunch of very, very bizarre situations that could arise from someone who's in mourning and is talking to this digital twin the way they would talk to their friend. And this digital twin is then giving them advice and how do you take that advice now? Because part of it seems kind of like the person who has died, but it's also, it's not that person. It is, it is just a slab of silicone. Like it's not actually alive in any way. And it is your friend's thoughts fed through an algorithm and you don't know like that's

run by a company for profit, right? Yes. Like that, that is what it is. So, again, like the jury still kind of out for how these things will in general affect people. This is kind of a new problems. Psychologists are like starting to do studies on this, but we don't have any results for this yet because this is really only become a thing that we've been seriously considering in like the past five years. So I don't really have like a like this study shows that when you create a digital zombie,

it affects people in this way. No, we don't know yet. Those are still in development. Like this is such an uncharted ground. And it is in some ways inevitable that these things are gonna get continued to be developed. And that's kind of why I wanted to put together this episode. It gives you kind of a broad overview of what this technology is trying to do because you might start seeing

it crop up in the next like 10 years or so. I don't think there are timetables that mind-banks promising are accurate in terms of having 15% of the world having a digital twin by next year. But you will probably start to see stuff that is very similar to this. And at the very least, you'll see a lot of stuff like the Amazon Echo thing where you can get your your grandpa's voice onto an Alexa machine. The fact that Amazon is doing aspects of the shit that that mine bank is doing means that like it's only a matter of time before you see pieces of it probably like better, some of the like less silly parts of it copied by Apple and Google and some of the worst parts of it copy by guys like Musk, right?

Like it's going to go this, and I will say, I don't think this is a thing to get doomer about. Think about this like NFTs, right? This will be, it's not the same because there was nothing underlying NFTs and fundamentally the way in which large language models and these other kind of models work, there are uses for them.

Like there is a real technology that has utility here. But this sort of flood of, we have cloned so and so. And we've, you know, Elon Musk has just put out his new fucking grok chat bot or whatever. Yeah. That is basically him making a meme robot to fucking do goo. Like he's pissing on Douglas Adams's good name, right? Like that's the ultimate goal of his project. But this shit is a fad, right? Like there are underlying

real technological things and uses that will, that will eventually some stuff will stand the test of time. But the shit that, that this is a warning of is a flood that's going to hit you, but it will recede just like the apes, right? We got the wonderful story today that all of the Board-Apeot Club members. I got a whole lot of lie infections. Not I infections, Garrison. They went to a party that only the Board-Apeot Club NFT holders could go to, and the people who threw that party outfitted the rave room with UV bulbs that used a kind of disinfecting UV light that slaughterhouses use to clean carcasses. And it gave everyone sunburns on their coordinates. So, deeply funny.

We'll get through this. Something that funny will happen with all of this, but you're going to get hit by it for a while. Like it's just going to be everywhere. This is, we're watching, you know, we're at that point in Jurassic Park where you see the water reverberating, right? It's coming. And but at the end of the day, don't worry, we are Ian Malcolm, our leg is broken, we

are injured, but we will inexplicably return for the sequel. So it's fine. Well, I think I think that is a perfect, a perfect way to wrap this up. Yes. You know, when you're, when you're feeling lonely and you're tempted to download the mind bank app to talk to your own self, just just remember, pull it, pull it a journal, just do literally anything else. Call a friend, you know, make a friend, talk to a stranger. Literally, almost anything would be better for you. Well, I for one will be will be eagerly awaiting the influx of immortal souls living on the computer. Yeah, I'm excited for all of the people to reach heaven. Alright, I'm done.

I noticed Jacob is not in his crib, so I look in and say, oh, she's not there, so I'm like, okay, they're not there. Unrestorable is a new true crime podcast that investigates the case of Catherine Hoggle, a mother accused of murder. I'm thinking, you know, like, what's going on? Like, this is insane. Like, where are my kids? But despite signs that Catherine Hoggel took her tiny children

one by one into the night, never to come home again, she has yet to stand trial. Because soon after her children went missing, she was declared incompetent to stand trial. You know, when I would ask her, her engagement was up in the body of the remaining confidence. And then I would say, well, who advised you should Troy, you know, I would ask her her engagement was up in the bus remaining confident and then I would say well who advice you should throw you know I can't tell you that. In Maryland if the defendant is found incompetent and can't be

restored to competency their felony charges are dismissed after five years. So as the clock counts down Catherine's charges on the verge of being dismissed. Will a grieving dad ever get justice? Listen to unrestaurable on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Kirk and I'm back with the new season of next question. Yay! This season, it's all about being more conversational, but I wanted to mix it up a little bit. So I've been inviting different people to join me to be my plus ones to ride shotgun, if you will, and sometimes actually getting the driver's seat.

I'm so honored to be A-year plus one and B-year partner in crime. My date today is the one and only Kara Swisher. I didn't know we were dating. I think bringing in new voices will add a little june se kwa, a little judge, to this season of next question. By the way, I'm not totally abandoning the idea of a one-on-one interview. Sometimes that's the best format.

I'm hoping it will be more relaxed, a little more spontaneous, and quite frankly, a little more fun. Listen to next question with me, Katie Kirk, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2017, Libby Caswell was found dead in a motel room in Independence, Missouri. We have a term called JDRLR., which means just don't look right. My name is Melissa Jeltson. I've spent the last year talking to Libby's friends and family,

uncovering details of her life and the secrets that may have endangered it. I knew she was doing something, but she just wouldn't admit it to me at first. Join me on a journey to uncover what really happened to Libby Caswell. Everyone deserves no detruth, and if there was something that was not right, and someone should be held accountable. I think the law is set up to punish families in a situation.

Libby's case stands out in my mind and keeps me awake at night. What happened to her is unknown. It's something that I need to know. unknown. It's something that I need to know. Listen to what happened to Libby Kazzwell on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to listen ad-free and get early access to new episodes and bonus content,

be sure to subscribe to iHeartTrueCrime Plus today, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. to come on today, we're recording this on what's it now, the 6th of November, 2023. The reason we wanted to talk about bail funds today was that we're almost exactly a year out from the election, and we're also in the middle of a massive protest movement against the Israeli bombing of Palestine. I attended a free Palestine protest today. Lots of you will have attended them over the weekend, normally in this kind of current political climate when people protest about things

or when there are elections leads to an increased protest movement, which generally leads to more state clapped down on the protest movement, which means people getting arrested, which means people getting bailed out. And we have like a year until the election. So it's a good time to maybe talk about organizing, to hear from people who have been doing this for a while.

Some of you will remember, bail friends for 2020, some of you won't, some of you will not be in countries where this is a relevant concept, but I feel think it's a very important one to talk about. So I'd like each of you guys to introduce yourselves if you could. I can get started.

I'm Jake Weiner. This is my second time on, I was previously on talking about a CBP1 app and immigrant surveillance of the border. My day job, I'm a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. I'm also a UVA law grad. I've lived in Charlottesville

on and off since 2017 and I've been on the board of the bail fund for about a year and a half now. Yeah, my name is Taylor and I've lived in Charlottesville pretty much my whole life for work on my carpenter and I've been on the bail fund here since 2020, a couple of months. I wasn't here for the start, but I went quickly after it got founded. And I think, yeah, Zay. I'm Azalea. I'm a tool at UBA law. I'm originally from Chicago,

grew up in a very proud Mexican-Mexican-American community. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, most recently DC, so various cities and places throughout the country. Nice. That's an excellent group we've got. So I think to start off with, just in case we've got folks who are not in the US or maybe are not familiar,, one of you explained to us what bail is. Yeah. Yeah. So in the American legal system,

we have a pretty unique concept, which is after you're arrested for a crime, or if you're detained as an immigrant, you are they gonna go in front of a magistrate who will decide whether you get out of jail right now or whether you have to wait. And most countries in the world, that's surely a question of how likely you are to show up to court and how dangerous you might be to the community. Obviously, they're not going to let out someone who's just killed eight people.

This seems like it might be a little unsafe. In America, we do things a little differently. In almost every state and almost every municipality, we have cash bail, which means when you go in front of a magistrate, they will decide how much money you need to pay to get out of jail. And theoretically, this is to ensure that you show up to court. So when you go to court, your case gets finalized, then you're going to get that bail money back. For most offenses, bail is really low. We're talking about 500-1,000, up to maybe $5,000 for misdemeanors, well, level non-violent felonies.

Now, obviously, if you are a person of means, that's really easy to come up with some money, have a family member compost it, or to go get a bail bondsman. If you go to a bail bondsman, they are going to charge you about 10% of the cost of your bond. So if you have a $5,000 bond that's about $500 bucks, you're not going to get that money back, but then you don't have anything out of pocket. But for a lot of people, the criminal legal system mostly arrests people for crimes of poverty and drug addiction. That's the majority of people who go through the system.

They do not have the money to go get a bail bondsman, which is, so we regularly get calls from people who don't have $100, $500 to get out of jail. That's where the bail fund comes in. We pay people's bonds. No questions asked. Nice. I'd also like to add that in addition to a lot of drug charges, a lot of ways that people end up in jail is through traffic stops and traffic violations. Something as minor as a backtail light, I'm not being fully lit. And that then gives officers waste and excuse to proceed from there. So something as simple as, you know, you didn't get to go to the mechanic to have your backtail light fixed, can lead to all sorts of issues down the road of ending up in jail,

unfortunately, in this wonderful country. Yeah, it's certainly pretty messed up, and it's good that you have you guys to help kind of, well, we're working on having a better system, I guess we can make this one a little bit less painful, especially for people who are not people of means. So with your bail fund, perhaps you could explain like, obviously some of those bail amounts you've posted, even the ones you said that were relatively low, there's still a lot of money. So you guys have had the bail fund for three and a bit years now. How did you go about starting a bail fund? And then I guess what are the different roles

that each of you plays within it now? I can talk about a little bit how it got started. It got started in 2020. I'm not 100% sure, but it was about the spring or the summer. And it was pretty much right around the time, George Floyd got murdered and all the protests was going on. It was started by a group of four or five law students at UVA and since the founding they've all graduated and moved on to other

things. But that was the time when it was relatively easy. There was a lot of people donate money, so we were able to raise quite a bit of money at that time. And the way the bonds work is that money at that time. And the way the bonds work is that we pay the bond and then as the case, as the person goes through the court system and the case gets finalized, money gets returned to us and we're able to use that money to post bonds again. And so with even a relatively small amount, I believe we have now we have $40,000, we're able to post a lot of bonds up to nearly $200,000 so far in bonds posted. So that's like, it's a self-sustaining process. It can sometimes take up to a year to get the money back, but instead of paying the money,

and being gone forever with the bail bondsman, we're able to continuously do this and get a lot done with a little bit of money relative. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You can keep it moving through the system, I guess. So when you guys, like you said, you had that 40 grand, right? Where did that come from? How did you guys obtain that 40 grand? Just donations from individuals pretty much.

Yeah, I think there were some larger donations in like the $5,000 range from organizations at the time. But and then since then it's kind of trickled in, and I think I've donated my money sometimes. It's a, yeah. Yeah, it's a very important thing. So perhaps you could, can you give us a, just we get it, like get it in at the top of the episode.

Is there a link where people can donate? They'd like to? Yeah, we absolutely need your donations. Bale funds around the country have had fundraising dry up. And right now we have a wait list, like people are in jail because we don't have enough money. So please donate to us. We're on PayPal at paypal.me slash Blue Ridge Bale. We're also on GoFundMe at Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. And that information is on our Instagram, which is Ridge Bail, at Ridge Bail.

Perfect. So I think you were talking about that, like, a little bail fund to have to write up since 2020. And I know that, like, I've seen that in a lot of places. So there was this have to ride up since 2020. And I know that like I've seen that in a lot of places. So there was this real like growth in organizing in 2020, right? And then obviously there's been like it just people have burnt out. People have been incarcerated. There have been a number of things that's made that movement hard to sustain that we don't necessarily need to go into.

But what I do want to talk about is like how you guys have been able to sustain your bail fund and keep helping people out and doing this important work. So perhaps you could explain the different roles that people play in a bail fund if people are thinking like, oh, this needs to be exist in my community. Like, what roles do you have? What kind of people do you need? Sure. Yeah, I think a lot of bail funds can be stretched out differently, but the way our, our works, and we're available to this small, and the way ours works, and we're relatively small, and the way ours works is we have a group of six of us that's on the actual board, and we handle it

like the logistics. So I'm the chair, Jake's the treasurer, Zelia's a board member of ours, but we all kind of share the same responsibilities, which is we answer the phone, which is one of the biggest parts when people call us, either from the jail or from the street. Family members and someone in jail and then.

We make it a call you know we'll. We look up the case call the jail to find out and then. Then with the next step is posting the bond and so we have a list of volunteers that their job is just to go to physically go to the jail with the cash To post the bond and sometimes you know one of the board members will do that. So So yeah, it's it can be Yeah, and then as far as like the keeping the organization running well like I said all the original board members are gone I've been the longest running member running well. Like I said, all the original borders are gone. I've been the longest running member,

but we do have a lot of law students, like half our borders law students, and that presents down challenges because they graduate and leave, but it also like brings fresh people into the organization. And then, you know, me, I live in Charlottesville, I'm here forever to help kind of continue with the institutional knowledge. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, having that longevity, I think, is important. And Melissa, Jake and Taylor have done an incredible job sustaining the field fund. And those of us who are lost students just kind of come in and out and try to support the best we can in the limited time that we're here. Those of us who leave after the three years. Yeah, I'm sure it's still very important to have all those people on your time and energy

commitment. So, like, just by existing, right, the bail fund kind of points out that this is a system that is broken, or that it certainly doesn't work to serve people. So, perhaps we could explain a little bit of that, like, in the absence of a bail fund, how do things look for people who are incarcerated, right? Like, what do you speak a little bit about a bail bondsman, but like, perhaps you could talk about like the amount of bail some people would post for, or would be the amount that, how it's calculated, like, what it would be, and like, what that would mean in terms of people being in prison

and like how long they might expect to stay in prison just because they couldn't afford that bail. Or in being incarcerated, I should not say prison, I guess. Yeah, folks are in jail. Yeah. So the one of the cruelest parts of the American criminal justice system, criminal legal system, there's not much justice, is that your freedom is contingent on having wealth. So, bail for most offenses, as I've said, is quite low. And it's very not only is it difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but it's also,

people are locked up because they don't have $500. We, I've gotten calls from people who have literally said, I have, I don't have $100 and I don't have anyone on the outside. And I've been sitting in jail for three months for, sometimes for an offense that when they go to court was maybe only a month of jail time. People routinely will spend six months, a year in jail for offenses that their total amount of jail time was a couple months.

And you don't get compensated for that. Like, if you spend a year in jail for, which means that you did 11 months that you didn't have to do, the state doesn't like cut you a check that's like, hey, we destroyed your life for 11 months for no reason. And one of the things that is just like the most heartbreaking about doing this work, but is also sometimes like it makes you feel really good, is the way that caging people just like ruins their

lives. It's incredibly hard to talk to people in jail from the outside. It's very expensive. So when you're in jail, you are not talking to your loved ones. You are not able to sustain a job. You're probably losing housing. It's destroying the life that you have on the outside. But the flip side is like, we've gotten calls from folks who have said, hey, you bonded me out. And now I got a new job. I got a new place to live like I'm doing great, which is incredibly meaningful.

And Taylor can probably talk a little more about what being in jail is like. Yeah, yeah, thanks, Steve. So I think one of the things that really drew me to this work was like, I'm an abolitionist. But when I was younger, I spent two years in jail. I was 23 and 25. I was in jail for selling drugs.

And I think like, yeah, really, that's something really good to me now to do the stuff. It's crazy. Like Jake said, yeah, that's something really new to me now to do the stuff. It's crazy. Like Jake said, yeah, we've had people that one guy called and thought that we were a bail bondsman and then found out like one of the phone, he's like, oh, I didn't know you guys, like we're paying my bond for free.

It was a $500 bond. So he would pay $50 to a bail bondsman and he didn't call us for several days because he thought he had paid $50 to a bail bondsman and he didn't call us for several days because he thought he had paid $50. So it's like, you know, I like, it's, you know, we've spent all this time like, let's thinking about like, elective stuff and like, but it's, it's eye-opening to see people that are stuck in jail like for a lack of $100, you know, like, and that's it. They can't get out. And so I think yeah, like, and then sometimes people call us and they're like, I have nobody. There's nobody out Outside that can help them. So it's That kind of stuff. It is upsetting like yeah, it's like crazy to see this like system setup like this But it's like it's one of the things that like really motivates me to keep doing this work

It's like me. It's so rewarding when you get those calls and And also I think to explain to some of Jake said about the the bail is like, man, it's so rewarding when you get those calls. And then also I think to explain as some of Jake said about the bail system, it's like, it's the magistrates, when you go in front of the magistrate to get the bond, there's no, the magistrates have no oversight, they're not elected. It's, you know, we kind of just joke like,

it's a vibe based system, like they just can issue a bond for however much they feel like. And so this is where you're really gonna see like the structural racism and like the classes and really come crashing down on people, you know, in front of this system. So yeah. One thing that I'd like to add,

because I think people don't really realize is, so a magistrate is working under a judge. They're basically a judge is like an appointed position or elected, you have to be a lawyer, you have to have a fair amount of legal education. Your magistrate is just some dude. Like the most some dude person you've ever had. They have no training required.

They have no like legal training requirements. Many of them are like fresh out of the army, like maybe went to college, maybe didn't. So you're talking about someone who has no particular expertise in evaluating people, looking at someone for a few minutes and deciding how dangerous they are to the community and making up in their head,

how much that person can probably take to get out. Yeah. I spent the summer, my first year, after, summer after first year of law school at the Lynchburg Public Defender Office. So I got to review a lot of body camp footage and the way it worked with the magistrate, a lot of the times was that a police officer

would give a report, an incident report, read it aloud, swear them in, they'd say, this is true, this is what happened, they would give their full report. And basically, that's how it was determined whether they all would be, or how much bail would be set to. It was heartbreaking. And it was there. It happened very quickly.

Like it was all based on the police officer's report and what they just decided to spewing five minutes or less. Yeah, it's a pretty messed up system. I think some states have bail guidelines, right? If I'm not mistaken, California has, if you're accused of this offense and then mistake. And like I think California has like, you know, if you did this, if you're accused of this offense, and then your bail goes in this bucket, and then, you know, it adds up depending on offenses or conspiracy or whatever. Yeah, that's a really good point. Like the thing about bail is this different, like in every state or most, some states, you know, have maybe like more progressive, quote unquote, yeah, but some have some down and yeah,

I'm really good. Yeah, it's going to say like California has a reputation being progressive. San Diego has charged some of the most insanely high bail amounts I've ever seen. Although we all aspire to do it, Illinois just did at the beginning of this year, which was to eliminate bail altogether.

It would just or cash bail altogether. It would just be based on whether you can be released or not. Yeah, that would be nice. Just to be clear, the bail isn't like, it's not like the state keeps the money, unless you don't show up. Is it a revenue generator for state shows? It's not like the state keeps the money, unless you don't show up. Is it a revenue generator for state shows this purely a punitive thing that they think has some value in that regard? It's purely punitive. The idea truly is to make sure

that you show up to your court case. And in the US, it's often used as a proxy for dangerousness. So when you go in front of a magistrate, you got three options. And in the US, it's often used as a proxy for dangerousness. So when you go in front of a magistrate, you got three options. Number one is you get out on personal or cognizance. If you're a nice white boy like me, you're getting personal or cognizance, almost certainly. Option two is you're going to have to pay cash for bail. And that amount is decided by the magistrate, as you said, possibly on a schedule, possibly just whatever the magistrate feels like.

And then option three is you might get no bond, which is to say that it doesn't matter how much money you have, you're not getting out of jail. And in like a functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms like worked, this is not an abolitionist perspective. Cash bail is unnecessary. The magistrate shouldn't be deciding and the judge should be deciding whether you're a threat to the community or whether you're not.

And that should be like the only option. The other thing I'll throw in here is that paying money is not the best way to make sure that people show up to court. There's extensive data from the immigration system and from the legal system that the number one best way to make sure people show up to their core date is to give them an attorney. Yeah. Yeah, which is a whole other thing we can get into with immigration. So I think that's a really good kind of example of some good deep dive into what bail is. So essentially, like a bail

fund can make it so that there is not this financial burden or this financial barrier to freedom, right? Well, you haven't been yet to be convicted of any crime. So it's not necessarily like an abolitionist thing to exist, but like it helps at least move us towards a less cruel, a less unjust system, I suppose. And so I want to talk about like a little bit of, like the nuts and bolts of what it takes to run a bail fund. And but before we do that, we are 22 minutes in. So talking about some bolts, we need to pay our bills. So this is an advert, it's probably not something you need,

but here it is anyway. All right, we're back. I hope you've bought whatever it was, MREs or one of the very good dogcoins or Edna Hoover. So let's talk about the, the like, if you're listening to this and you're in your car and your way home or whatever time you're listening on a long road trip, you know, thinking, I would like to be the person, maybe you're a law student yourself or you're formerly incarcerated person or you've had family members go through the system. And you're like, hell yeah, this shit sucks and I would like to help make it a little bit less sucky. When you're like, I'm thinking here when you're starting with your bail fund, like, is it a 501c3? Do you need like certain, I know for 501c3, you need certain people and a certain number of people doing certain jobs on your board,

that kind of stuff. Like, what are the concrete steps that one has to take to go from this sucks to I'm the chair of the bail fund and I can help you? Yeah, I can help you. Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. So we are a 5013C, 5013C3, but we were posting bonds before we had the official status. So I think truly, all you need is some motivation and some money. And there are bail funds that post 10 to 15 bonds a week, and there's bail funds that post one bond a month

because that's all they can do. And I think like, as our organization has grown and matured, we've gotten way more organized, and we started out, it was pretty chaotic, and people, it was poorly organized, but we were still posting the bonds. And I think from day one, we've been good about that. And so you can definitely start and you'll learn as we've learned as we go.

And we've refined everything. But like I said, it takes some motivation and a little bit of my, and then maybe Jake can talk some to about the finer details. Yeah. So I think Taylor's absolutely right. I'm going to give some recommendations that I would say are how to set up your structure in a durable way. But I would also point people to the National Bale Fund Network, which can provide resources. I'm an advice for this type of thing. Yeah. So basically what you need to run your Bale Fund is you need a group of people to load,

honestly, it's just like too much for one person, both emotionally and literally you need people to share this work with for it to be sustainable. I recommend that you set up a 501c3 nonprofit. This will help shield your volunteers from legal liability and it means you could take tax deductible donations. The way that you set that up is going to depend on your state and Virginia, you register with a state corporation commission, which means you need a like president, which is Taylor. You and you need a treasurer and then a couple other potentially couple other board members. These are the people who own

technically the 501c3 and so you just need those people on your documents. You can use their address, but we recommend that you set up a PO box for getting mail, which just makes things a little easier. It means you don't have to like hand your personal address over to a magistrate. Yeah. Makes you less doxable as well. Yes. And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account.

And go to a bank that makes it has good hours so that you can readily withdraw cash because you can only post bond and cash, which is its own insanity. So one thing we deal with is like the bank being closed and then having to wait a couple of days, you know, day and a half to be able to post. Yeah, we also recommend a Google voice phone number so that multiple people can receive phone calls at the same time, right? We can have four people on our Google voice. And that means that if I'm working, Taylor can answer the phone. We split it up by weeks.

So we have a point person each week who is responsible for answering the phone mainly, but that doesn't mean you the only person who answers that week. It's just sort of you want to be more heads up. You also are going to want a decision-making structure. We use a consensus-based model to do most of our discussions in a signal thread, but then we also meet about once a month. And if we have some issue that comes up, we can meet more often. And you need ideally a way to connect to volunteers. So we've had good luck with the law school, but we're expanding beyond that, you know, trying to be a bit of different institutions in the community and recruit folks to volunteer for us. You want to do some amount of vetting of your volunteers. You know, they should be in an affinity network or have a way that you can ensure that they're not going to walk away with a five grain of cash that you hand them.

It doesn't have to be extensive, but it's good to be smart about. Yeah. And one thing that we found really helpful is having business cards because that means you can hand it to the magistrate and they can get your address right. They can put you the name of the bail fund down. A problem that we've had is not all magistrates recognizing the bail fund, but you really want to have a PO box and that business card so that when you get checks back from the court system, they come to a centralized place. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then anyone can drop in and deposit them in the bank account.

And then the last thing that you want is website and a fundraising infrastructure. So as we said, at the top right now, we're using GoFundMe and PayPal, but any way that you make this work, it's great. And we can definitely do better and we'll be expanding. That's basically it though, it's really not that much. Yeah, but that's great. I think it's so often a thing that I've seen just being on the left in various movements since I was younger. It's like we reinvent the wheel for like four or five years. So just having those things that you guys have learned, like using Google Voice and having a bank with good hours. I think that saves someone from having to fall down those same holes again. So that's really valuable. I wonder then like, you talked a little bit about legal liability, which we don't necessarily

need to go into, but like, there must, is there like, for me, I mean, there have been some obviously heavily politicized arrests in the last few months in the United States. Do you guys face like personal blowback or blowback against the group when if you're able to bail someone out where their arrest has been heavily reported on or politicized? Because that's something people need to be aware of. on or politicized because that's something people need to be aware of. I think that's a great question. Where we are, there's really, we have posted the bond for anything that's like political protest related, but there is a bill fund that's about an hour away, much bigger than ours, that in 2020 was doing like every night, jail support.

So yeah, that's like an example, you know, just with different bill phones, operate. And then so basically we have not ever faced any kind of political blowback or any issues, but it's definitely something that we're prepared, that we think about, because it can't happen. There's Bethlehem and store it. And there's definitely cases around the country where prosecutors have taken the aim at bail funds. Lana, of course, was a really, a really popular one. But they think, so you don't check anything, they add maybe. Yeah, I will say that it's certainly a possibility

that your bail fund becomes the target of both like institutional and like a kind of right-wing moral panic. These things happen. It's I think relatively unlikely, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared for it. And I think that when you kind of address that and if you're end up in the media or getting heat for it, the most important thing that you can do is reflect the fact that the bail fund

is not responsible for what happens when people get out because we don't decide if you're getting out of jail. We work on a first-come, first-served basis. When someone calls us, we post their bail no questions asked. And that's because there's already been a decision of whether this person is safe to be released. And that decision is made by the magistrate. So any responsibility falls on the criminal legal system. It does not fall on us.

And I think it's important to say that you never hear this blowback coming towards bail bondsman, even though they get out way more people and more dangerous people than we do. Yeah, yeah, that's definitely the case. So I wonder like what other issues you have faced, hardships, and you do you speak about a couple of them, but there are other things like that you've, I know for instance, like I obviously as part of my reporting or maybe not obviously, but some people apparently don't bother to do it. But I communicate with incarcerated people

when I'm writing about them, because it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I am very aware of how annoying, expensive, time consuming, and just generally totally inadequate, the system is of communication with people, even people who are not convicted of any crime. So I don't know if that's something you've encountered if there are other hardships that you guys have had to deal with.

Perhaps if there are ways you've worked out to get around them or to at least make them less difficult, then that would be great for people to hear too. The communication thing is a huge problem. Yeah, exactly. Most of the calls we get are from people that are currently in the jail and they can only call us and we cannot call them. They call us and we have to just say,

okay, you need to call back in a couple hours. And then, you know, they have lockdowns that can't get to the phone all sorts of things. So the worst, I mean, yeah, they probably one of the worst things that ever happened was someone called and I called the jail and the jail was like, oh, they can be released today. And so the guy calls back and I'm like, Hey, man, you're going to get released today. We're going to have a volunteer go out and post this bond. Like you don't need to call me back. Like if you want to, you can, but it's all rolling, right? Yeah.

And then I call the GL to triple check everything. And they say, oh, you know, we have to hear back in the court. The court has to approve this. And they're like closing in 30 minutes. So it's not gonna happen today. Jesus. And so now, like I have no way to call this guy

and tell him that he's actually not going to get out today because of a like bureaucratic issue. I just have to wait until he just like can't take anymore and then calls. And that was it's really unpleasant situation. It's really unfortunate. And you know, he was not happy. He was not happy. And I mean, you know, he took a little bit out on me, but it wasn't the case in him actually mad at me. You know, I think that's something that's really cool. It's like, no one, we deliver bad news all the time. You know, we say, you can't get out because of X, Y, Z.

Yeah. And no one's ever like actually mad at us. You know, they might be like annoyed for a second because, you know, I'm on the phone delivering the bad news. But every time at the end or like thanks so much like I appreciate you. So we haven't had any like I mean yeah I think nothing really super negative has happened it's just like you said the communication huge problem when it's family members born from not in jail it's a little more easy to deal with

we can call it back. Yeah yeah I'll jump in on communication just for a minute. Yeah, because this is an issue that I work on in my day job. Yeah. The paid prison phone system is one of the worst parts of American life. It is incredibly expensive to call people, and the phone systems work really poorly, and they're actually getting worse. For us, the main jail that we work with, middle river regional jail, used to use a phone provider called GTL, who's the one of the biggest in the country.

That was pricey, but we could reliably get calls. They just switched over to a different provider who makes money in a different way. They provide tablets to the prison. And as a result of that, all our phone calls are now made coming from the prison, like social room on a tablet, which means sometimes it's too loud

to hear the person calling. And about 15% of the time, the call just drops when you pick it up. So the system makes it really difficult to correspond with people. As a result, a couple of things that we do are sharing the phone responsibility, not promising people things when we can't deliver them is super important. And like that's mostly a problem because the phone system

works so badly and we can't communicate with people. And then the biggest thing is giving yourself grace when you miss the phone, when something goes wrong, because it's emotionally very taxing to know that someone desperately wants to speak with you, because they're potentially at the worst point in their entire life and need to get out and you've like missed a phone call. So it's yeah, it's really important to be kind to yourself in those situations. Yeah, you went to Kiraan.

And one more thing that I was surprised to find out about the phone system is how much recording and reviewing of recording goes on through those phone calls. I witnessed so many prosecutors come in multi-turnies, bring up something from phone calls when folks were actually in trial or percent in think hearings or this is later down the road. But the fact that they could pull up those recordings from a year before, two years before They were they were calling a loved one a family member Just incredible how much access there is to that and lack of privacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very dehumidious I got to jump in on that. Yeah, you end up in jail. Do not say anything about your case on the phone. You're not, oh, and don't talk to the guards about why you're innocent because I've seen that people

do that. It's not good, I guys. Don't do it. Don't talk about the case. Ever. Yeah. One way that we address that is by telling people up front that we post bond, no questions asked. Right. And like, telling people like, it doesn't matter what your situation is, or if we have the money, and you can get out, we're gonna post. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not your job to adjudicate, like you said,

if someone's safe or unsafe or innocent or guilty, that that's what the state purports to be doing, make your job is just to make sure that someone's not too poor to be free. So on the subject of like the sheer finances of it, I know, like certainly here, I've seen and I have no idea what the sort of I know San Diego does have. California has these bail guidelines, so they can't just set whatever bail they want, but like in 2020 we saw some sky high bail, so I don't know if it was just because it was like, if I'll keep you bail fund of it, it was just because

that was what the guidelines allowed or some combination thereof. But do you guys have a like, we can't, because you said you're dealing with 40,000, right? Like if you dropped 10,000 on one individual, that obviously means that there are a lot of people with $500 who can't, you have to stay in jail. So, do you have like a cap on your individual bail amounts for that reason? Yeah, Taylor, do you want to take this? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we have a cap. We pay up to $5,000,

so $5,000, nonetheless. And that, yeah, it's exactly what you said. Like, otherwise, you know, we would be totally broke and out of money. And even, you know, $2,000, $5,000 bonds in a row, and then, you know, we're pretty screwed. So, and then I think that's, you know, it brings up something else that Jignore were talking about. Like, it's, we have, it's important to stick to that limit. One time we posted a bond up to $12,000 for somebody. I think it was a combination of many factors that led us to do that. But at the end of the day, it can be very hard just to tell someone no. Because he had a $5,000 bond and then in a separate court, I got another one.

We already told him we could pay the one bond so it was, you know, we were already told we could pay the one bond. Anyway, long story short, we had $12,000 tied up on this guy and then he didn't show up to court. And if that's when you can lose the money and people don't show up to court. So, well, yeah. Fortunately for us, unfortunately for him,

he did get re-arrested on another charge and when that happens, there's like a 90-day period where if the person gets caught, then we get the money back. And that's where like, our policy is like, we're not going to do anything. If the person runs, like, we're not going to do anything to try to get it back, we're not going to do anything. If the person runs, we're not going to do anything to try to get it back. We're not going to revoke anybody's bond. But Bill bondsman might try to find you if you run. Yeah.

So our joke was kind of like, well, we hope that we hope the guy just gets away completely. But if he's not going to get away, maybe get caught within 90 days. Yeah. Yeah. But the best thing is if people would contribute and donate, we could be able to allocate for so many more people and not have people spend time in jail where things like mental health conditions worsen because prison guards are, and jail guards are not paying attention, where you don't have access to an attorney easily, where when you show up to your day in court, you don't have an orange jumpsuit on, and that's not factoring into the judges' mind.

So basically donate for all those reasons to our built-in. Yeah. Yeah. If we have more money, that's something we talked about a lot of times. Like if we had more money, we would be able to raise the limit on the amount we could post, but it's just not feasible right now. In terms of donation, it's a great thing. I was just thinking like, because it keeps going around and around and around, right? It's not like, you know, you give a donation once and you get someone a thing and you change

their life. Like you can potentially change thousands or hundreds of people's whole trajectory. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Yeah, and I will add on how we address our lack of funds, the other system that we have in place is a wait list. So people call us and we can tell them, hey, you're on the wait list. They'll call back all the time.

You'll be like, hey, if I moved up the wait list, sometimes people call like multiple times a day, and they're like, oh, any movement? My number four now. Which is just, it's got a wild. But having the wait list and we go, like, instruct wait list order with the exception that if someone has an under $500 or $500 or less,

we'll just post that. Because if we're sitting around waiting for someone to get money back from the courts for a $5,000 bond that's next in line, we could have $4,500. And so for the super low bonds, where the issue is purely, purely poverty, we make an exception.

But you run into that kind of ethical question all the time running the bell fund. Like, how do we make the best decisions? It's going to help, you know, people in the best way and then, according to our values, the most, that can get pretty heated and intense. And having a set up of folks where like you really respect each other and like each other, I think is really important to not let that spiral out of control. It helps that, you know, Taylor and Melissa and I have been friends for many years.

And we can like hang out and talk about this and then like Taylor and I can go on, go for a bike ride. Nice. So having those relationships I think is really important. Yeah, yeah. And don't get too competitive over board games like wings when somebody wins. I'm still being able to talk at the end of that. It seems like a direct experience on that.

Yeah, we are an abolitionist, like principles, you know, and, but I think almost like, you know, I've talked one of their development that I know they have some sort of system of not serious familiar with like prioritizing someone that maybe they consider to be higher risk in the prison system to get out first. And I think that that's a really a really appealing thing, but it's just like kind of just touched on earlier, like, that's just adding like another layer of judgment. Like, then we become these like arbiters of who is in jail, who's not in jail. And so like almost, almost countertutively, like having the system first come for a serve, I think is like the most abolitionist thing we can do.

Yes, I can see that. Yeah, yeah. And it certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices, which helps with that. Yeah. We were talking about the system. And like, I want to bring that up because the system is like, you know,

I cover not a lot of criminal justice, but a decent bit. And it is incredibly confusing. It's convoluted. It's like, they've got these old-ass names that you don't understand. And then the gear in Virginia, so you have a whole other layer of weird stuff going on, like with names. And so like, if someone's thinking of starting this and they're like, I want this to happen, but I do not understand how to navigate this system, does that mean that they need someone with a little more legal experience? Can you explain how as someone who isn't obviously, both at least two of you have, as

opposed to all of you, have some experience with a legal system in one way or another and understand it a little bit because of that. But if someone has been fortunate enough not to have to interact with the criminal law system, are they like to they need a law student or a lawyer to start a bail fund or like how does one go about learning to navigate that system I suppose? Yeah, they definitely do not. You do not need to have legal experience. I think it was kind of just a random chance that it was a lot of students that founded this one. Basically, like you said, it is the extremely confusing system and the only way you're going to learn how it all works is just by going and posting the bonds. Like the system is

possible. Like the bond system works just like a family member going to post someone's bond. So like it's set up and then it is possible for your loved one to post your bond. And we just started off experience. You know, you just go, you call it, you would just call the jail and say, where do I post this bond? And they'll tell you, you know, you come to the magistrate, this is where the magistrate is located. And then you go with the cash and post them. There will be every, we work in, it's 10 courts, five different jurisdictions in the niche have two court systems

and I swear almost every single court does things somewhat differently. And the way we just get on the phone and call them, you know, be really polite and just figure it all out and write it down so that we know that you should. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll tell you, like, you can learn these systems over time. And that's really worth doing because in a moment of crisis, like mass arrest or in a protest movement, knowing how to navigate the system in a quick and reliable way

is really valuable. It makes it way easier to get people out. And so I would like pitch even if you don't feel really strongly about getting people out of jail, but you want to be helpful in a time of crisis, like learning the legal system as a non-lawyer is doable. I will also say that like you don't learn how to do this stuff in law schools. I didn't learn how to post a bond, how to like file a capious, any of this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is truly like one of the worst states in the country. I talked to a public defender who's worked in courts in Louisiana and was like, yeah, Virginia court system is worse and more unfathomable.

and more unfathomable. If you know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great. But you can learn an incredible amount, and then that skill just becomes valuable in a number of different areas. One of the most powerful ways that can help people is even when you're not able to post bond for them. Knowing how to look up someone's case, tell them what their charges are, tell them what is happening to them is incredibly helpful because the majority of people we talk to have some idea of why they're in jail, but they don't know the details and that means that they don't know like why they're not getting out. And just being able to give people a little bit of certainty is really important. Yeah, I think this is a very valuable thing you can do. And I think this whole thing has been a re-valuable insight into how to build a bail fund, I guess.

And is there anything else do you guys think that we didn't cover it in the grand scheme of being bail friend entrepreneurs? I don't know what the vote phrase is, bail fund founders. Just the importance and making sure to be rooted in the community, I think that's going to be the best way not only to fundraise in the long term because you can have even $5 if it's reoccurring from some community members, you get to know what's happening, what's something that's a reoccurring problem throughout the community and just making sure to listen to that and to be able to navigate going forward. I think one thing that's I think I found so interesting about doing this bill fund is that it spans it really crosses

completely there or even like I would say it transcends politics like I think that all of the board members are in here politically motivated you know where abolitionists or you know against the current court system. But the people's lives, like across every political spectrum, have been ruined by prison and jail. And I think one time, I think the most interesting example that Billy drove his home was, I was at work. I was at the lumber yard, you know, and I think, you know, the people, the salesman at the lumberyard. I think they would fall in the more I was gonna stare at time then I was saying in one of the conservative side and the one guy the salesman was He had heard about that. I did this. I think he saw I have a Facebook posted about it And he was like that is he's like this is the coolest thing ever man like I so awesome, you know like he's like people

I just locked up for like bullshit and Yeah, and I think you know we've had volunteers that I think people were like new him or like why do they keep like almost like a Republican and just going out and posting his bonds. And I think that it's, like I said, yeah, it's just fascinating. It does transcend, it transcends the politics a little bit. Yeah, I think anyone who's had to interact with the criminal justice system, I know, like I had to interact with the criminal justice system, like I have an interact with the American one, but like if they've had it in their family, if they've had it in their friend group or whatever, realize how dehumanizing and unjust it is. And especially if they're working people right, they don't know people of massive mean,

so they'll have seen how hard it can weigh on you trying to come up with money to bond someone out who you care about. Even if they end up not being found guilty. And so it can be a very broad-based thing. I think it's certainly something that like, I saw a lot of people giving money to bail funds in 2020 who like, I may not, you know, they weren't necessarily people who were also out in the streets. Like it's a way for people to be part of the streets. It's a way for people to be part of a movement. It's a way for people to feel that this is unjust. Even if they might not share abolitionist politics or whatever, I think it's something that a lot of people would want to get behind.

Yeah, I'll say for me, the most meaningful part of this work is having the opportunity to treat people with dignity when they are in a system that absolutely gives them no dignity. But police do not treat people with dignity. Judges in the courts do not treat people with dignity and your jailers are not going to treat you with dignity. So having the opportunity to answer a phone and be kind to someone, to listen to them and to do small things for them, call their family,

let their family know that they're locked up, let their family know that someone is working on getting them out. Oftentimes, I will get a call from someone and we aren't able to post, but I can like call their mom and talk their mom through getting a bail bondsman. I've had people like cry on the phone with me

because they've said, I felt so helpless not being able to get my son out of jail and getting a call from you made a huge difference. So I think I just like, if you can do this, you can get together with your friends and form a bail fund and in a really concrete way, improve their lives and treat them with dignity. And that's such a radical thing. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah. OK, so I think the rep up we should, but we should again remind people where they can give you their money. So how will people go about doing that?

Yeah, please, please don't it to the Blue Ridge Community Vail Fund. We are on PayPal at paypal.md slash blue ridge bail. Ridge is our IDGE. We're on GoFundMe. You can find us on the Blue Ridge Community bail fund. We are on Instagram at RidgeBail. And we also have a website, BlueRidgeBailFund.org. I think so. You can Google Blue Ridge Community bailelfine Bill's show them up. And yeah, if anybody is interested in starting a Belfine and wants to ask us any questions, like, please do, we want to talk about it.

We've learned a lot through just reaching out to other Belfines, even if they're not in the state of Virginia, how they were formed, what worked for them, what didn't, just having a 30-minute conversation gives sometimes wonderful ideas on how to go forward. That's great. Thank you so much, guys. I think that was really good. I think I was going to share it before we go. I think we're good. Awesome, so. Thanks so much. Thank you for happiness. Thanks. I think we're good. Oh, yeah. Thanks so much. Thank you for having us.

Yeah, thanks. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website CoolZoneMedia.com or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcast Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzone media.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. On our new podcast two crimes of John and Diana, we're turning our online investigative

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