It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 106

Episode Date: November 11, 2023

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I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers

as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. compilation episode. 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 and 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 Shireen and James. Hello, Mia. Hello, Mia. That was great. I thought that was actually great. Keep them guessing, you know? Yeah, they never know what they're going to get. Will it be sad? Will it be happy? Keep them guessing, you know? Yeah, they never know what they're going to get.

Will it be sad? Will it be happy? Yeah, unfortunately, this is a really sad episode. This is an episode that I got really pissed off while writing. Yeah, and this is an episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on Palestine right now has been focused on Gaza for very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where you know most of most of the israeli offensive is happening it's where most of the people are israelis are killing the most people uh but however comma there's also been a bunch of

killing going on in the west bank and this is you know the the the the murders 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 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 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 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.

Yeah. I mean, the violent dynamic of the Israeli project is pretty fucking evident when they're bombing children in Gaza, too. Yeah. But I think specifically the part that's easiest to understand in the West Bank is why it's a mutually self-reinforcing dynamic, why the Settler Project 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 this 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'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 not actually sure i don't know this is something that like i i feel like most of the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows and i feel like we should not assume that we should you know actually go back and run through some of this history really quickly my cynical take is that most of the people talking about this

maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves and are therefore skating along on that assumption in order not to have to expose their own shaky 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? Like I feel like people don't actually absorb 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 hammer a copy of this into all of your brains. You have no choice. You must listen. Martin Luthering the history of Palestine.

Yeah. I'm going Gonna nail 95 copies of the Geneva Convention under the door. So, in the beginning, there was the Nakba, which is the great disaster

of 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 a bunch a bunch of armed settlers armed by stalin drive 700 000 palest000 Palestinians from their homes. They seize those homes. They take them for themselves. Now, this is I think, okay, this is the part where, disclaimer,

Mia is not a professor of international law. I think this was actually technically not legally a war crime because only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet because the knockbook takes place in in 1948 and this is a year before the geneva convention or the fourth

geneva convention the part that has the stuff we're going to talk about i was ratified it's two years before it comes into force but you know from the beginning what you have here is a settler colony the israelis 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 yeah they've yeah they've killed a shit 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 yeah i think it's like they they flatten 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 there already were cities renamed the cities it's it was just i don't know it's shameful the reason people are leaving is because they've seen their neighbors and family members killed and their fields and houses burned. And they know that that's coming for them, right? Yeah. I think this is, sorry, just one tangent is there are so many videos of like former IDF soldiers that were, and I think it's not IDF technically, but like former people that fought in the Nekba 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 happened. 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. one of the consequences of this and one of the consequences of running a settler colony like this is that the, the people that it produces who are the people who, you know, the 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 like, you know, I mean, this, and this is why you see so much stuff both here and you know like back like in in in in the early phases of uh like not even the

early phases but like most of the phases of u.s settler expansion right you you read the accounts of these people and it's 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. It's fundamental to colonialism, to consider yourself to either be a higher form of humanity or distinct in a species sense from these people. British people did that in their colonialism too. But yeah, you see it all the time, specifically in the language and culture that depicts the settler colonization of the united states or what is now the united states right like uh you can look at the uh like what'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, to sort of back away from exactly how violent this stuff was and you know a lot of the reason for this is like it's you know it it can get into this sort of

realm of like i don't know this almost weird like like tragedy horror porn stuff but like it was it was as bad as anything that has ever happened yes to humans yeah yeah and and and the people doing that stuff are you know driven by the same kinds of of stuff that's happening here the people doing that stuff is still like uh like there's a park named after them in san diego there's kit carson park there's uniparocera park like like it's baked into american culture still like that the genociders are fucking celebrated here yeah and this is and this is this is also true of israel now okay so so after after the nakba there's there's a lot of people who think that like 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 stateive strike on Egypt. It's okay.

So 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 technically, the Saudis, like Iraq, Kuwait, and Lebanon

are in the war, but 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 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 Saudi command

rolls up, and the Saudis roll up in fucking Rolls Royces, and the Egyptian commanders looks at these guys and just says, go home, because people just like, and this is one of the dynamics here of like oh god like the arab powers outside of egypt for some of the time really were not taking this very seriously and you know and and the consequence of this is that the the is the 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 um in large part because the egyptians weren't like actually trying 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 the Arab powers. Gamal Abdel Nasser is so ashamed of his defeat that he resigns and doesn't come back until a bunch of protests in Egypt demand that he come back. He did royally kind of... His position was that 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 – the part of it that's most important for our story is that this is the period where the Israelis start seizing territory en masse. They take the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. They take the Golan Heights from Syria. en masse. They take the entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. They take the Golan 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, effectively immediately, as this is happening, 1.3 million Palestinians flee the West Bank and Gaza. And this has the consequence of enormously expanding the already very, very large 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 under multiple sections of international law is it ronald reagan i yes surprise reagan yep and we are back so one of the things that the geneva convention establishes is this set of legal obligations that occupiers have in occupy in over territory that they occupy so if you know the way this is 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 in occupied territories from just the 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 – under international law, you are 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 disagree is the right word. I have very little faith in international law.

I know a lot of people who are – have been involved know like in in the struggle for liberating palestine for a very very long time like take international law very seriously um i don't know like i mean israel has has uh not followed international law yeah like and like nothing happens yeah 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. And it has, maybe it has a moral value, right? I guess that's the idea behind some of the activism

is that like it can help position something as being in the wrong and then that might impel someone to act. But yeah, it hasn't fucking worked. It didn't stop fucking, it didn't stop the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. It hasn't stopped the population exchange in Afrin. Like it's pretend

it doesn't exist unless someone enforces it yeah it doesn't I feel like sometimes it's a totem for like western liberals to be like oh well they can't do that they're breaking international law oh fuck they're doing it anyway it's like oh that's really bad

and then they just keep doing it yeah and like understandably like no one particularly Wants to like be the ones Who enforce international law because that involves Your children dying And so they just let other children die instead Yeah and you know

But the consequence of this being Really toothless is that It's the language of this stuff is framed in. I want to frame this differently for a second, which is I want to think about what is being prohibited here in basic moral terms. 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 you know obviously yeah there's a reason why the dengue convention was like holy shit like we can't have this yeah and but you know obviously this hasn't stopped you know this this hasn't actually stopped this from happening like we we now live in effectively the new golden age of ethnic cleansing. Right. I mean, the, the 1.2 million Gazans who fled their homes after the Israelis told them to 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, you know, and of course, the other bleak side of this, right, is that with the quote-unquote evacuation order, the Israelis killed people who were fleeing anyways. Yeah. But, you know. And they had nowhere to fucking go. Like, they're go. Yeah. They're trapped.

Evacuate does make it seem like a very humanitarian crisis when really, 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? It's not evacuation. That's like threat. 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 Yeet this grenade in here In five seconds People wouldn't be like Oh that's reasonable

Oh and I've locked all the doors To your house as well Just for funsies Yeah Yeah And you know And so I mean

This is what's been happening In Gaza right You've 1.2 million Gazans who fled their homes And they've joined The 120,000 Armenians Who are ethnically cleansed from nagarokarabakh by azerbaijan in september which this is the era we are 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 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 it's you can you can you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse the armenians again and nothing will fucking happen yeah um or the ranger in myanmar we didn't do shit yeah oh i mean like right right now we are averaging one like mass scale ethnic cleansing a month. 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 uh 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 and yeah it keeps happening yeah it's uh it's certainly like not a coincidence that like we there have been other ethnic clansings right in africa and like i said the rohingya muslims but like when it happens in in the middle east or the Arab world, wherever we want to say it, it's not the Arab world, I guess, because it happens to Kurdish people too. But yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad thing has happened over there.

And then it's very easy, especially with the way American news media only focuses on these parts of the world. They just pointed it and like oh look sad and then never give the context 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 mass murder because we don't report on it and then it pops up again and no one understands and yeah i'm i'm very bleak on the media at the minute yeah well and and i mean i think you know the important context to understand here is that the absolute horror show that's happening in gaza right now that the 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 this is what they were doing um and again this is never ended really yeah yeah kept going it was like quiet mostly for a while people ignored it but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening so yeah i mean and you know i think the the oh god what am i blanking on the like continuous nakba thing is is is is the way that it's understood well is is what it's called in palestine um in in sort of settler colonial studies the the the line that people always say is that settler colonialism is a structure not an event like it's not a thing that just ends right it just is it it is the you know it is the air that you breathe it's the sort

of you know like it's it's it's it's it's it's the walls of the society that have been built to yeah cage and destroy people yeah now you know the 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 had 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 it who make a distinction between israel in 48 and this israel because this is real like the mask is off there's nothing there's nothing there

anymore right it's just we have 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 this is Israel's 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, 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 I guess what you would call Israel's colonial frontier in the sense that these are the people who are on the absolute front lines ofian dispossession of like killing people and taking their stuff um settlers it's almost a misnomer because they're not like uh it's not like

sometimes i think that constructs a notion of like unsettled territory and they're settling on it right these people are violently colonizing someone else's land yeah which which which was also true of the american like yes yeah very much so yeah we shouldn't use that here yeah we shouldn't use that shit here or pioneers ain't pioneer shit people live there for tens of thousands of years they were they were pioneers yeah but like the way that the state thinks about its own geography is is in the terms of these frontiers sometimes they call the buffer areas and they they they think about these things as these these areas where they need you know areas of projection of military control, the projection of sort of their power and also sort of settler power.

And these kinds of – this is what the sort of settler populations, the West Bank, are the front line of. of now these people are subsidized by the israeli government that if you if you go to these places you get tax breaks um you get you know there's there's there's there's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies for these people um they also get very and this is this is a thing that i think is really interesting that isn't discussed very much the israeli like social services in the west bank are very, very good. In some cases, they're better than the stuff that's in 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, these people reap other benefits too, right?

They have an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that, Shereen, you talked, these people reap other benefits too, right? They have an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that, Shereen, you talked about this, right? If you're trying to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army when Pomas attacked, well, the answer is they were all in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers steal land, right? They were protecting settlers, terrorizing Palestinians. That was literally what was happening. And that happens all the time, but it just so happened to happen on this very large-scale attack. Yep.

And the level of violence that's happening here, you know, I mean, we're going to talk about the more direct settler violence. These people, these are people who have set multiple babies on fire. Like, that is, they have set multiple babies on fire like that is like they they they have set multiple children on fire this this is this is the kind of people who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially so okay so there's there's a distinction inside of israeli law about which these settlements are legal so again under international law all of these settlements are illegal like there's, 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 officially approve and some of them that they don't. And so the ones that they do approve are the ones that, you know, those are the ones with better government services. They get roads built

out to them and and but there there are kinds of violence here that are you know there's there's i guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like you know one of the sort of like benefits you get of living in the west bank is like the israeli government has diverted basically the entire west bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools. And this is water that is, you know, the thing that had been used for a very, very long time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture. But, you know, that's becoming, you know, growing olives. And it's becoming increasingly fucking impossible because the Israelis are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting.

And then, you know, 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 weirdly a thing that like almost exactly the same pattern as stuff like turkey has done to the kurds too right like yeah like basically every every ethnic minority like yeah russia does it to its kalmyk people like it's the story i hear so often at the border when talking to people in any number of languages from any number of countries is like oh they have cut off the water supply to where we live and now we can't live there anymore like across Africa sadly like yeah even within Russia like it's it's like uh yeah like you say it's genocide by diktat or fucking you know it's it's an ethnic cleansing

that doesn't look so bad on tv because it happens a little bit slower um but it's a way to remove people and you can look at like drone pictures of the west bank uh and you can see these little fucking like green lollipops like the road and then the settlement right and like people have trees and shit and like it's it's wild yeah i think the unique part about uh israel and the settlers there burning all the olive trees i feel like i did an episode about this before i don't know if you did yeah but um the whole essence of zionism is the idea that there's 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. the most clear example that zionism is not about uh 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 it's just about i don't know like a land grab like just colonial land grab yeah well and and i think i think the fundamental thing at play here and this is this is the sort of one of the fundamental tenets of settler colonialism is that these people see land as a commodity right they see they 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...

Where you have a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, the more important you are as a state. And so this is a problem of states. Yeah, and we will get into this more in a second, but first we need to go to ads. So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone who supports israel um because it it is it is really really hard to be sort of you know take take your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like israel has

the right to protect itself blah blah blah blah and then here are these like yahoos in the hills lighting children on fire and you know i mean this is the thing where even even like very reliably pro-israel groups at the council on foreign relations are like whoa nilly 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 it's been very very obvious of what was going to happen right like the the you know the level of violence is going to ramp up and they're like all the stuff none of the stuff that's happening now i mean like it's 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 i mean 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 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 you know they're they're taking a sort of liberal like proselytizing like okay well these these settlers must be responding to palestinian violence and no it turns out actually not only are these are these attacks not retaliatory, right?

It's not that these 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 by Palestinians. So the era of settler violence ramp up is the late 2000s and the 2010s and this is the period you know if you know anything about like the the second intifada this is the period where like palestinians doing arm struggle in like all of the different forms is tapering off and so and this leaves people kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here um and and so okay so we can ask like what is actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions and the thing most people focus on is is ideology and to some extent religion because a huge number although it

should be mentioned okay so like a lot of settlers are what are like are religious zionists who are people a lot of these are there's like a specific specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later who are specifically Orthodox Jews. But there's a lot of right-wing religious Zionists of various stripes who – 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,a 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 these people exist right and these people obviously and we're going to get into this more in a second like these 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 by ideologies it can't explain why really i mean there's a kind of like a breakwater event where so so there used to be settlers in gaza too um and the israelis pulled them out when they pulled out of gaza in 2005 and that pissed off the settlers enormously right and this is part of one of the things that like leads to the sort of settler violent turn was they were like well okay so if the israeli government isn't going to like i know if the israeli government one time will stop legal settlements from happening uh we need to like make sure that we are violent enough that it will

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 um actually so sorry before i launch into this i should ask you what were you gonna 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 um i've had multiple anti-zionist jew jewish people on the show and i feel like they're very important in the fight for palest. 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 is when it really 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 that a lot of zionists claim it is it is just fucking politics and just 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 like 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, or like the claim that this is the driving thing, that this is what you'll get a lot from like council of foreign 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 this is connected, but in the late 2000s and accelerates to the 2010s and has reached a fever pitch now with like in the past month they've killed like 130 people in the West Bank. And okay, so what actually also was happening in that time? 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 is 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 the like the the price of housing is tanking in israel is skyrocketing okay the 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 2020s and these increases coincide with guess what the massive increases in cellular 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 on foreign 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 and 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 implies causation like no it doesn't right that this this is too loose and the correlation here isn't you know it's it's not quite that simple but comma this is legitimately one of the things that's been driving uh driving israeli settler violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort's been driving uh driving israeli settler violence and sort of the the expansion of this sort of of this 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 the house is a thing that you live in, but it's also a speculative asset that appreciates in value over time, or is 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 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 – 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. house because you are, you know, say a real estate firm or land speculator, or, you know, you're just, you're 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, live in it all. All that matters is that you're getting money from this house. And, you know, it's something I've talked about a lot on this show. And since really the nineties, when Japan figured this out, housing has been like the speculative asset par excellence it's 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 know addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your economy in such a way that houses are not commodities and thus you know is a use value and is a place to live and not you know like a financial asset but nobody's going to do that right because that that requires like a systemic transformation of your like this requires you to abolish capitalism right so instead of doing this right the the other thing you can do when housing prices are really high is you can go kill someone and take their

land yeah and yeah you know and you know i mean this is this is a very old american sort of colon i don't even yeah i think this is where it's from, but like, yeah, the... Every empire does this, though, right? Like, working people can't afford to live with dignity, so we fucking ship them off so they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune on 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 i really recommend people actually read this because it's a really interesting view of of the occupation i'm gonna i'm gonna 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 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 zealots. 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 that 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 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 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 an illegal settlement where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in Hayafa or Tel Aviv.

illegal settlements where apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in hayafa 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 like how far right and how the spread of ideological right-wing stuff has spread. But at the time 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, students, well-educated young parents, have been the traditional constituency of the left. Put these same people in a settlement and they will, inexorably, 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 in automatic weapons, and worn 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 further dissipates, and a host of religious fascist or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake in the vote. For politicians, who can barely think past the next election, the lure is inescapable. And a host of religious fascist or semi-fascist parties win a larger and larger stake of the vote. For politicians who can barely think past the next election, the lure is inescapable. And so I think this gets at the core of what's happening, 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 Adapting here thanks for joining us see you tomorrow. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. rushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things

better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Kadapid here, a podcast that is once again about Palestine. Hopefully you listened to yesterday's episode.

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, right? One of them is that, okay, so whose lands are you taking here, right? The answer here is it's a lot of Palestinian farmers. And once you kick farmers off their land, they can't be farmers anymore. And this leaves them with two choices. One, flee Palestine altogether.

And this is really, really hard. We've 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 if if you're dealing with a population that doesn't have the means to support themselves except for you know these these israeli like work passes that they like you know like bestow upon the benighted population like it's it makes it incredibly hard for there to be any sort of physicist movement and you know the other thing that david was pointing out that you know he was i think like ahead of the curve on in a lot

of ways is i mean this has been happening for a long time but the israeli like electoral left is just gone um israeli labor which is like the like israeli labor is the party that built israel right like it was israeli labor guys who like pulled together the entire zionist coalition and like turned them into the engine that could actually win the war in 48 labor was outperformed by fucking hadash in the in the most recent election this has happened several times now hadash is an alliance of the israeli communists and like left arab nationalists and when i say they do better it's not to say that hadash is doing well but like that you know they're both pulling at like four percent right and israeli labor again like has ruled is ruled israel for like

a like a very significant part of its history they are now nothing right there's four percent of the vote they have they have the same amount of vote as the old as the israeli like and specifically i should mention this is this is the this is the like 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 is a bunch of people who like you know fought in their own liberation struggles get turned into just 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 a bunch of these people wind up in the American army. A bunch of these people wind up, I mean, I guess it's technically not the Indian

Wars, but a lot of these people wind up fighting – I mean, I guess it's technically not the Indian Wars, but like a lot of these people wind up like fighting the Creeks in 1812. These people could become the front line of settler expansion in the US. And 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 wound up not going to the US, but there's a lot of settlers. Like there's a lot of like European socialists who come to the US but there's a lot of settlers like there's a lot of like 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 having our little like utopian socialist settlements was it Owens or Jones or someone they had these like Quaker utopian sort of settlement towns

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 it's not even always utopian communities people a lot and and this this is also so okay there are people who come over from the 1848 revolutions who like you know like august Willitsch 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. okay well so they're like the the fundamental contradiction to capitalism or whatever is that like you know people like people people are forced to become like as 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 they're they're they're against the abolition of slavery because

they they're like oh well if you free the, these people are going to compete with us for wage labor. So either they're pro-slavery or they're like slavery – like 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 problem with Europe, right that you know europe is entirely ruled by either feudalist or like feudal barons or capitalist right so there's no way for someone to like make like make themselves in the world right there's no way for them to be independent like of the capitalist class but in but in the u.s there is because all you have to do is you know instead of being part of the like the industrial proletariat or whatever and getting like crushed by the buddha capital you can just go become a settler farmer and this is like this is one of the defining ideologies of the u.s like abraham lincoln

talks about this is like the thing that makes the u.s different from europe is that like yeah you can 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 was created you know there are there are there are right-wing zionists right but it's also created by liberal socialists communists and even anarchists who'd fought in 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 Nakba. Yeah. Lots of people were also, they were Jewish. I guess socialist is probably the best term for them who would come to fight in Spain

and then returned to Israel. People interested, Renan Rain has done a really good paper about some Jewish people in international brigades. So not all of them turned out to do the Nakba, to be clear. Yeah, some of them were good, but also... 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, fought fascism in Spain, came home, fought fascism again in the rest of Europe after pointing at 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 fascism, 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 are now their friends. And then

they come home after the war, they're blacklisted under McCarthy, and they see the Nakba happening later on and they're disgusted, right? Every sort of identity and group Like they, everything, like every sort of like identity and group that they've had,

they feel has turned against the things they 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.

The world will leave you behind. Yeah, it is a terrible time behind yeah yeah that is a fucking awful time to do that yeah it's yeah um okay we should take another ad break and then yeah our adverts are not consistently moral very unlikely and we are back so we've been talking about the capacity of settlements to change someone's politics right it's you know it's as these labs of consciousness that produce certain kinds of right-wing politics and mentalities 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 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 the Israelis, right? And this is something that is true trans-historically, right? This is a dynamic you see in American history too. The US signs like hundreds of treaties with like just incredible numbers of indigenous nations. And do you know how many of those treaties they end up upholding? Yeah, that's none. Yeah. I mean, you can look at the Supreme Court, right?

And the Supreme Court will uphold laws from like 1795, right? Yeah. The one kind of law they will not uphold 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, yeah. Or they'll go previous to that and cite the fucking doctrine of discovery or the treaty of total chaos. Yeah. Good old Ruth B ginsburg liberal hero yeah and so you 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 you know i mean and i think i think there's a there's a a third view that's kind of sees them both as an extension of the same thing which is what we're going to sort of come to but you know you you can you can look at this treaty stuff and you can look at the fact that you know both the settlers and the israeli governments like sign the oslo accords fully intending to do more settlements right and this is 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 and this is this is a this is a thing in the u.s too right it's like everyone who signs a treaty get like like all of the nations that

sign treaties get a get a watch as the u.s is like oh well actually like no we never had any intention of like fulfilling this like no we're just gonna keep exterminating you and like chasing the sort of like like shattered remnants of your tribes like literally across the entire fucking continent and you know so you can look at this from the from the perspective of the state and you know like like dealing dealing with the american state like it is well known by every nation in every race that has ever had to deal with them that the white man is duplicitous and his state is built on lies and 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 like do these people like not understand what an

agreement is like what you know yeah this is something that like i know if you travel a lot abroad uh and and you work in places where american forces have been nine times out of ten someone will sit you down in a tea house or a coffee house and unbidden just be like what the fuck is wrong with these people like like why do they treat us like that like we fucking did everything you asked and then you fucking abandoned us or killed us like like yeah like everyone of course brin does it too i'm not saying like america's spectrum but fuck me, America in the last 200 years has really set a new precedent for just Janus-faced bullshit. Yeah, and it's particularly bad when you're dealing with settlers

because one of the things about the state is that the arc of state policy in settler colonies always bends towards injustice in general, and in particular, the thing it always bends towards is land seizures. It seeks to expand its base of power, its territorial base, and 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 S the human manifestation of this is Andrew Jackson, who was 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. This is what I have. I have a very good friend who talks about this a lot because they're, they've, they've been studying this period immensely. You're probably not listening, but love you. I, yeah. But talks about this a lot because they're they've they've been studying this period immensely you're probably not listening but love you i yeah but talks about this a lot which is that andrew

jackson is like a big part of the reason why he's going into florida is specifically because he he wants to smash these uh these like indigenous like black indigenous like allied baroon communities there and so jackson you know jacks jackson like is is like under orders not to invade florida he invades florida anyways you know we we we there there's a very similar sort of tension between like the courts and you know like 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 just 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 – he's the human and political embodiment of all of these structural tendencies of senator colonialism now what and one of the things that that's i think is interesting about this is that there are like all of the settler states right you see this in like every single one i'm going to talk about the u.s because that's the one that i like other than israel that i know the best well i don't probably think probably the u.s better than israel but there are always times when the federal government tries to crack down on settlers, right? This happens repeatedly. The British spend a lot of time trying to stop the colonists from moving west. and i think that 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 to stop the settlers and no like 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 there was no one has ever really been able to stop these people and you know the the idf like you know we talked about this a bit earlier, right? The IDF in 2005 did pull, like when they pulled out of Gaza, they dragged like 8,600 settlers with them. But again, this is the dynamic that's incredibly familiar to anyone who's studied the history of settlers in the US is that government attempts to control settler expansion inevitably fail when confronted with these unstoppable twin economic and twin imperatives of the economic benefit to the settlers and also the speculative value of this new land to land speculators. But then the other problem is the inevitable rise of the

settlers themselves as a political bloc, which in the US, the man who is the champion of the settlers themselves as a political block which in the u.s the 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 uh 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 minister betziel smotrich who represents the religious zionist party and uh i'll give you all three guesses what those guys believe if your guesses are they are unhinged settler racists and like turbo homophobes uh you're you're right on the money yeah so He's also a conspiracy theorist

Yeah This guy is unhinged They're very open with their Genocidal Wants There's no Subtlety They're just like let's flatten Gaza

Let's kill them all Same like with a very Trumpian thing that'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 uh 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 gonna find anyone who's 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 i think that argument is a

very privileged elitist one yeah and like like yeah i just like haha homophobia 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 you done fucked up uh 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 these the people who are coming to power and then yahoo in some ways was one of the sort of vanguards this but like this and 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 that's that that's what these these settler people are and the thing is like these settler 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 gonna kill all the palestinians they start saying like we're gonna kill every arab like they start talking about various and very explicitly like their their platforms that they you know they're and this is this is so part of the reason that there are there's a coalition of of these likes of these like far-right settler parties that are now backing netanyahu and this is 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 minister so they can't charge

him um but the 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 that's been given to him and his settler fanatics and you know like especially since like the hamas attack like the government has been handing out guns these people like candy yes and they've been using it to just murder palestinians and cold blood and you know i mean i think these people do a lot right sometimes they just kill people thing they do all the time is just in the middle of the night like if you're if you're living in the west bank like a bunch of masked guys will show up they'll break into your home

they'll beat the shit 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 non-mil like i don't know like non-military settlers right They're like settler 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 to the way that Andrew Jackson just rips off this mask of New England gentility that the US had had under John Adams and – or John Quincy Adams and like Monroe. Well, Monroe's, I guess like a, like Monroe's like a, 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, that Jackson does. But Jackson is the guy who just rips the mask off and is just, you know, this completely unhinged settler maniac who like, this is a guy who killed it, like just murdered a bunch of people in duels.

Like, you know, and, and these are the kinds of people who are who are coming to power in israel right now and this is 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 are able to carry out the more of it they're the more people they're able to push into these territories that they've taken and the more people they put in these territories the more of the more people they're able to push into these territories that they've taken. And the more people they put in these territories, the more of these settler fanatics there are. And this is one of the big things that is driving the entire conflict. Well, I think a good thing to remember

is that last year there was an election going into 2023, and Israel put into power a bunch of these right-wing people. Was it 2023 or was it 2022? I wasn't track of time. He came in last. Yeah, I think he was appointed minister in 2022.

Okay, sorry. The election is not real. Yeah, I don't remember when the election was. My point is that in recent history, the last couple of years, these extreme right-wing racist people are in power all the 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 they're the main point is that they are superior to arabs and then they must. And that this is a Zionist place that is theirs.

And, you know, and what these people are doing when they're in power. And this is the thing that, and this is one of the things they were trying to do before the sort of like 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 of the settler parties. They will kind of, they know it's pretty hard for them to like legally annex it. So they will talk about like effectively annexing it and stuff. 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 increasingly tiny corners of the West Bank.

And presumably, because again, if you listen to all these people talk, they talk about Jews have the right to live in... Judea and Samaria. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What they call the West Bank. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What they call the West Bank. Yeah, yeah, they have a restricted right to live there. And the thing is, if you believe that, right,

that means you have to kick all the Palestinians out of the West Bank entirely. Now, the place these people have stopped, sort of, before the war, the place these people had stopped was 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. 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 there. Like we, it like, this is what happens when we get a state

that understands existence as destroying anybody who is not in agreement with this right wing genocidal fucking outlook like like it has been possible for people of different faiths to live in different places but it was possible before 48 yeah exactly yeah like this like yeah this 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 land and gaining the value from it. Yeah, it's the narrative that they need to say stuff like, oh, all the Gazans should just go to Egypt or whatever it is. It's all part of the plan to kind of just expel them so they can take control of all the territory. 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 plans down. 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 it happened here 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 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 u.s 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 this is all of the land that we live on. That's, that's where that shit came from. There's, there's this great, I really love Daniel Kahn and the painted bird. It has this great line in one of the songs that goes,

cause he's the one who did the stealing and named you as the air whose filthiness provided you the privileges you bear. And this is this thing in the U S right. It's like in Israelrael you know if you're a settler on the border right there's no there's no escape from what you did to take this place right like you are you are looking down on the people who you've like whose houses you've taken right in the u.s we have this sort of luxury, well, this happened a long time ago. We don't have to see the consequences of it. We still do it though, right? We didn't just happen.

We're doing it at Oak Flat, for instance, right now. Look at how Trump fucking did indigenous people during COVID. It's an ongoing process. I think you're right. It's so much easier for americans to pretend that it's not happening yes yeah you know like no like it turns out in fact that like this 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 u.s because guess what? It turns out-

Israel literally took notes from what the US did and just did it. You know what I mean? Like, it's just the same thing. In the end, like, we're the bad guys. Like, we've always been the bad guys. Are we the bad guys? Yeah.

Exactly. Thanks, James. 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. 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, there's a tendency among both the communists and the nationalists want to sort of sanitize it, right? They want to turn it into this sort of glorious war for liberation. And yeah, there are moments of glorious anti-imperialist 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 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 war did that were just unforgivable. I think the best example of it is Chiang Kai-shek blew up a dam on the Yellow River. And his goal was he was trying to flood several provinces to cut off 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 this is this is this is the low end estimates is that he killed 400 000 people that is a 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 of china like never forget like to this day like in the provinces where like where this shit happened like shanghai sheik is fucking despised and you know the and like when 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 shanghai sheik because he was you know because 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 dam and kill 400,000 of us.

Right. You know, and so like, and this is the thing about colonial resistance is that it is the things that people do are unforgivable. is that it is the things that people do are unforgivable. Also, that war that Japan fought in China, they killed 20 million of us. 20 million. And this is one of these things, right, where colonialism makes monsters of us all.

Suffering does not make you noble, it just makes you suffer. And so, you know, again, the are china's anti-colonial freedom fighters right like fucking killed killed numbers of like chinese people that are it's just unimaginable and then you know these same freedom fighters who fought the good fight against japan you know within 20 years they're bulldozing mosques in xinjiang and murdering communists in tibet 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 whore most of the time. But you also, when you're looking at these wars, you have to look at the

direction in which colonization is moving. And that's the thing that is crystal clear in Palestine, right? Is you can just look at like which in which direction is is colonization moving right like who is taking whose houses right who is who is forcing a million people from what population to flee their homes who was you know who who has been he was 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 a settler 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 the underlying current of everything that happens 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've no one has to agree with me it's fine but i personally really dislike when it's called a war what's happening in 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 uh it's a genocide like palestine's not a country palestine does not have an army they can't no one can leave gaza uh i think that is um the current state of what the violence is going on over there and so yeah i'm just like particular no like i think i think you're like

i think you're right about that and that's the thing that that's the thing that's different than yeah like the stuff that was happening in China was like at least we sort of had a state and we had armies and our armies got fucking stomped but you know we had like we had actual weapons

yeah I must have some now I think to your greater point yeah i think like well yeah it sounds very similar to like um have you read science introduction to the right of the earth yeah like where he talks about violence and the state talking in the language of violence and people responding in the language in which they're spoken to i think i'm paraphrasing that relatively accurately. It doesn't have to be like, neither violence has to be good

for it to be like an inevitable consequence of violent colonialism, right? Like it sparks violent decolonization movements. It doesn't imply like a moral, like a goodness to the individual acts. It's just an inevitable consequence of people fighting against colonialism in the only way that that colonialism kind of leaves for them i guess

yeah and i think i think another part of this too is that like just being in contact with colonial powers makes everyone worse like this is the thing you see in in the u.s with a lot of with a lot of indigenous groups is that like you know like like by by by by the time the trail of tears is happening like the cherokee are like have adopted chattel slavery like like american style plantation chattel slavery and that fucking sucks right it's like 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 the the best i don't even know if it's the best case scenario like i guess occasionally you get like an algeria where you know they kill enough people and the settlers in Algeria

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, it's one of the sort of dilemmas of how do you deal with a settler colony. It's harder to decolonize a settler colony, right?

Because it implies a removal of one people or another people, and neither of those things are in any way desirable. It's so hard to see a path to a peaceful coexistence now, because all see is like the entire world ratcheting the fucking like violence level up and uh 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 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. It's not like there haven't been attempts at nonviolent resistance in Gaza,

because there have, and look what fucking happened. There was a big one like three or four years ago yeah like the fucking Krasenstein take the why can't they all disorganize to arch in the war holding hands and singing Kumbaya they fucking

tried to do that but like people kept killing them like I say this every time we talk about Gaza but I'll say it again. When we were talking to the PK Gaza guys and I've known them for a few years, one of them was telling me about how they used to do sleepover camps for kids so that kids could learn parkour and not have to pay for the travel and take their time and risk to travel. So they do

do sleepover camps in the summertime. And he was explaining to me like it was the most normal thing in the world that these six, eight-year-old children would wake up at night with night terrors screaming because they thought they were being bombed and because they were having a flashback from being bombed, I guess. And that's something I recognise from PTSD,

from other contexts, but it really fucked me up that an eight-year-old child is... We can't expect these people to develop into Kumbaya singing peace activists. They've taken on massive amounts of trauma. 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 where people aren't killing and 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 if you lived your whole life in the United States, relative safety and prosperity, it's hard for you to understand, I think. Yeah. And I mean, this is a... Gaza is a place where it rains body parts. that's what happens when an 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... Even people who have been through a

lot of really messed up stuff, it's not going to be the same as experiencing that. Yeah. Even if you... I have 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 that the sky or a parked 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 are never home and you're never or 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. A lot of doctors

have said that all the children in Gaza they haven't they can't they can't be quantified of having experienced PTSD because they haven't reached the post part 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 reality and the eternal present of settler colonialism is right yeah and you know this is one of these things where in in a lot of weird ways like like there are ways in which we like people like if you live in the u.s if you like even to some extent the uk like you are probably in a like maybe a better position to actually stop this

than anyone who lives in palestine is so yeah yeah this is in but and and the problem is if we don't right the the the self 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 Yeah. Even if you can't stop it, like I sent the video, I'm sure you guys saw the video of the Jewish Voice of Peace people in the Grand Central Terminal in New York.

And I said that to the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate and they were like, oh, 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's state of 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 at least if it makes someone understand that you're kind of standing

with them in a moment of darkness and maybe that helps 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 impel us to like as Mia said at the start right this keeps fucking happening and like as ethnic cleansings go this one's got more coverage than most in the u.s and like i would encourage you to look at what you're seeing in gaza and understand how inhuman and unimaginable it is and and like maybe follow that that shouldn't happen anywhere and it shouldn't happen in tigray and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan. It shouldn't happen to the Rohingya people. And like, yeah, try and extend that. It's not to scold people, like if you weren't in the streets in 2017, fuck you. Like,

it's just to say that like, we've all had a window opened, even with every fucking attempt to shut that window right like cutting off the internet to gaza etc this has been the most photographed ethnic cleansing whatever you want to call it in in probably in human history we're seeing more of it than we've ever seen before a lot of it in sort of uncertain ways or fucking footage from video games passed off as real life but we're still seeing it and we're still bearing witness to it to a limited degree right we're not seeing it in the sense people are seeing it firsthand and I'd encourage people to like remember this moment and the shock and the terrible things that you felt and like to not forget that next time you hear about something happening because like anywhere this happens it's a tragedy and anywhere it happens we should do everything we can to stop it

welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network,

available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists

to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast in which my friend Kim Kelly and I talk about the fact that Zoom recently moved 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, Kim? I am good. Also hating our AI soon-to-be overlords. Yeah, doing my best out here in Philadelphia. Yeah, yeah, Philly. How is Philly as the fall comes in? How is Philly as the fall comes in? It's a very sunny day. It's also getting chilly.

I'm into it. It's finally leather weather. I mean, I guess it's always leather weather depending on your level of commitment, but I'm a wuss. I tend to wait for 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. Oh, yeah.

Video's on. He looks resplendent. Yeah. Kim, you are a labor journalist. You published a book. What was it? Last year? Year before 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, or at least a very significant chunk of the labor force

strikes. And this is, you know, it's the kind of thing people on the left have dreamed about for years as like, this is what could, you what could 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. You know, 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 gotta 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. But 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 pet peeve among, well, I guess a lot of folks in the labor world who are also unfortunately on Twitter and social media. Yeah. Like you said, every so often, there'll be a general strike hashtag or like a graphic on Twitter or on Instagram. And it's like, Oh, are you taking part of the general strike? Like, are you striking on friday or like tomorrow like no what you you're not even in a union what are you talking about

and it's like i 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 Voice for Peace has been doing in New York and other places they're going to be doing 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.

radical organizers who are already in community, already building protest infrastructure, and people in union labor world that are kind of beholden to contracts and more legal constraints. But it's going to take a little bit of time. It's going to take some dialogue, maybe even some fruitful discourse to get on the same page. Like there are laws. We live in a society, unfortunately. And it's not quite as simple as just declaring a general strike when you and like four of your friends call out sick. Yeah. It's also like I think one thing that gets lost is 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, well, 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 podcaster, right, being like everybody should just not show up. 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 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. know it's starving 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 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 your boss is just going to fire you. 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 burning it all down.

Trust me, I would love to see that type of shit. But unfortunately, again, we live constrained by laws and like logic. When it comes, like The reason that you see big labor strikes and big picket lines and all this cool stuff that's happening, it's part of a process. Those unions are negotiating contracts, these legally binding documents, their collective bargaining agreements that have expiration dates. their collective bargaining agreements that have expiration dates. The UAW didn't just pick, didn't just say, all right, right now we're mad, we're going to go on strike. No, their previous agreements had an expiration date.

They hit the expiration date, and so they start bargaining again. Bargaining didn't go well. They went on strike. That is how it works when you're in a union. That's 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. There's laws, there's protections, there's a lot that goes into it. And I think, like we were saying before we hopped on the call officially,

I think a lot of people haven't had union jobs or don'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. Yeah, 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 going to go on strike at once. 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 screwed on straight, solid dude, Sean Fain, who is Sean. Yeah, big Sean. And he's like he's the he's the head of is big sean yeah big sean and he's like the he's the he's the head of the uaw right or he's like the guy negotiating for the uaw yeah he's the president yeah the president and he is sean is uh so he's you know the uaw is the big one of the big auto like the largest of the auto worker like related unions and they have been in a strike, I think, primarily General Motors. It's the big three, General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, which makes Chrysler and a couple other brands. Yeah. And they have gone on a very power, about six weeks or so, very significant strike. You can read stuff like Toyota recently 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 they haven't inked anything yet. But as of us recording this, it looks like they've won on a man, but is very much 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 we need to be setting the expiration date for our contract in 2028. expiration date for our contract in 2028. And I want to implore all other 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 redress 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 we 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 ballsiest things we've heard from a mainstream labor leader since, well, since Sarah Nelson, the president of the Flight Attendants Union, kind of soft called for a general strike, or at least brought up the idea of a general strike in 2019. And 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. I think the most recent true general strike we saw in this country was in 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, laws aren't real, but when you're doing this kind of thing and operating within these constraints, it is helpful when you're not actively breaking the law because that helps you get more shit done, right? So what Sean is proposing is saying, okay, we're going to set our contract to expire around this time.

And we want a whole bunch of other big unions 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 because of this 1947 law called the taft-Hartley Act. Essentially, that means if, say, your warehouse, you're part of the Teamsters, you go on strike. And then the coffee shop next door is like, oh, yeah, we support you. We're going to 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 as your contract you both went on strike at the same time that's legal that'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 uh air traffic controllers the longshoremen, like all of these incredibly important infrastructure wise jobs happen to go on strike at the same time. That would shut down the whole fucking country. Yeah. And it would be legal, which is so fun. You'd 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 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, the state were to take illegal action that 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, you have infrastructure because big unions have big strike funds. Yes. This is the thing. 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. Yeah. It's 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 we're, 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 way more satisfying. You know, it's nice to win. It's nice to win. Unions are kind of on a roll 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. Cause you do, you have responsibilities.

You've got people to care for, you know, right. You have elders at home. If you're, or if you're a disabled person, if you're a medium compromised, 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. Like, 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 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 marshaled in like a financial form, right, at their beck and 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 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 uh and that's generally positive this is the thing i've seen um again on social media people

saying like oh we have to wait five years or to 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 and a 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 of 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 teamsters next contracts expires in 2027 like okay like they're not gonna be able to play ball And you really want the teamsters if you want to play this type of game.

And another hurdle that I think it's unfortunate is that, you know, Sean Fain, big Sean, what a man. He's very out there and very outspoken about opposing capitalism, about this being a class war. He's on the level, but he is a rarity among major labor union leaders. There are some leaders that will be down to clown. Sarah Nelson's out here, Mark Diamondstein with the postal workers. 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-washy 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 Fain and we have Sean O'Brien and the Teamsters, and we have this kind of newer wave of more progressive militant union leadership is because of what the rank and file have done. Like Teamsters for a Democratic Union organized for years to get that reform slated and to get Sean O'Brien in there to take on UPS. Sean Fain 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 had not invested years of their life towards organizing for this goal. And so now we have this four to five year span where we can push our own union leaders in that right direction to plant 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 too. 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 pretty shitty people in union leadership across the country. And we got to do something about it 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 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 unions have dealt with in the past too. 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 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 organization with a degree of power and social cachet behind it. And so I think 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 anarchists 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 got 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 anarchist too. I know I sound like a big old Debbie Downer right now talking about all this legal stuff, but I'm also practical. And I've also spent a lot of time talking to union members who see the world a lot differently from me. Like I think a lot of my most recent impactful work is, you know, stuff I've been doing in the deep south and in Appalachia. I've been doing in the deep South and in Appalachia. And no one there is impressed with my 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. Yeah. And it's easy to say, join a 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 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 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, were there in the 2020 protests of huge, because corking, corking, if you're not aware, is like going ahead of and to the sides of a protest, 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, you know, people have experienced, you know, unions, there may be experience 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 protest where there's dangers like getting rammed by cars and stuff. protests where there's dangers like getting rammed by cars and stuff. And so the people who have these, the street 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. 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. the picket line or scabs who are trying to be violent towards striking workers or or even just like you said like surveillance and safety and medic work like that is all that is all important too i mean not every uh 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 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 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, oh, the cops said to move, so we move, or this has to be nonviolent. Or, you know, 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 you're there trying to to stick up for then you have a lot more leeway

than someone that has you know a union leader to answer to like there's a lot of creative ways you can get involved and one thing that i think uh hasn't really been discussed as much in like 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 want to get involved, sick outs have a very long illustrious history in the labor movement. If you happen to get sick that day, what's your boss going to 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 days, and it just happens to coincide with that massive strike that's shutting down everything else, and if you convince all your co-workers that you're shot 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 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 word is that we're seeing sick outs at airports and flights are 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 up for work at the airport nothing's going to happen at that airport yeah and there are a lot of different workplaces where all 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

like get involved on the the formal union side like there's so much we can do from each according to his ability to each according to his means you know that that all chestnut i love 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. There's a whole process. 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 they can't, if 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. The airline industry is incredibly densely unionized too. So if all of the union flight attendants 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 why we need to keep organizing, too, in these next four and a half years. 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've covered most things. I do want to emphasize, like, I don't want to be a wet blanket on people who are excited. No. to emphasize like i don't want to be a wet blanket on people who are excited i'm not 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 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 Molotov cocktails the way we perhaps would want to see someone doing that. But it's still a huge deal. But it's still a huge deal. And even if the mainstream organized labor movement isn't as radical as a lot of us within it would like to see it, we have a lot of time 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 we take all this shit down all right i am in agreement kim uh people should look up your book fight like hell um yeah the untold history of american labor absolutely and what book, Fight Like Hell. Yeah, The Untold History of American Labor. Absolutely.

And what else should they look up? R-E-U. I'm still unfortunately on Twitter. So I'm there, Grim Kim. I know, I'm a freelancer. I write a lot for In These Times. I have a column at Teen Vogue. I write for Fast Company.

And I'm kind of all over the place. So, 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, uh, 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. Um, anyway, Kim, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for being here for showing up and thank you all 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. Solidarity forever. Yeah.

That's, that's a good, that's a good. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. as your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your 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 funny and part, hey, you should be aware of this thing because it's kind of fucked up. 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. 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 Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison had a wonderful stay at Circus Circus that did not smell like dead clowns.

That definitely did not just shut down this summer due to horrible infestation problems. Oh, that's where 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. And 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 wild things got very, very quickly.

This company is called MindBank AI. 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. Basically, these are algorithms that are used by GPT chatbots, predictive texting, and digital assistants 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 MindBank is trying to do is a little bit different. Yeah. When we encountered them at CES, their booth had all these signs that were, it was stuff like, set up a legacy for your kids, you know, um, it was basically advertising. This is a way to allow a part of you to exist

in digital form and communicate with your, with your descendants forever. Yes. So we found them in the U S government sponsored a section of CES, which is already a great sign. Yes. 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, MindBank 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, that's good. I hadn't caught that when we talked to the guy that he believed that that was. I love whenever you get these guys who are like, I will 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 bodies age. Our memories 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. Mind bank. Let's go beyond. So, I got to know one thing before you start in Garrison, which is that when they mentioned that, like, technology, like, there was 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. Yes. 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. Sorry, that's what it said when he was on the fuck. Out paces evolution. No, that's technology allowing someone to adapt to a terrible, terrible thing that happened to them. 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 get into 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. Unleash your infinite potential. Take advantage of AI enhanced humanity, unquote. God damn it. So that is their vision. My next

personal computer absolutely is not me because i do not play balder's gate 3 very well you know like i can't run it on my hardware ah well that's that's that's why it's why you gotta buy the new monster manual and then maybe it could all just be in your brain actually yeah i am full of shit dnd is still better when you run it on your own hardware. God damn it. This is the one thing you actually can do pretty good by yourself. Why did I pick that one? Yeah. It's just so, like, I don't think most people buy this.

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

with Christianity than I am with this. Oh yeah, absolutely. 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 Emil Ramirez was riding 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 like a nice time with Siri. And she said, Siri, I love you. You're my best friend. And that struck a chord with me. That was 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 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 the technology I know that the only way that's possible I'm able to take my thoughts and put them in the cloud so that then later she can access those that information so that's how the idea for MindBank came about. It's a place for you to store your ideas for the next generation to tap into.

No. 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 so fucking offensive. when they were, well, not died, but Logan's run had it right. We should kill everyone at 35. But this is so fucking offensive.

Like the idea that, first off, like if you're looking at, we want a device, a way to use technology to help people grieve or something. And like you decide maybe having a chatbot that they can chat. I'm sure it's possible that that could be part of healthy grieving. I'm not going to say that 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 that uh that does this right now which has kind of caused some controversy for this for this very thing you mentioned it's a uh it's a uh tarkara tommy smart speaker which if listening to a parent's voice for

15 minutes can replicate it and tell your child bedtime stories if you aren't physically present. And this is similarly kind of like caused people to have a whole bunch of questions around, you know, is this good for a child's brain development to have their parents' voice be coming out of like a smart speaker. The answer is probably not. But yeah, so according to MindBank's website, Emil'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 there's that other line again um about how this quest in his heart is actually part of a bigger a bigger quest for all of humanity um to live inside a computer or to have a computer trained on you. He's, he's, he, he's hitting the same speech cadences that guys like Musk use.

Like he, he understands. Yes. The kind of, he understands partially the degree of hype that you need to get something off this, but he is, he is going too hard.

And I, 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 like 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 greater for mankind. Oh my God.

That's pretty funny, right? Man. But no, Robert, you were totally right about kind of how Emil's speech pattern cadence is pushing a very specific thing. like speech pattern cadences is pushing a very specific thing because before emil 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 mind bank because that's that is primarily what all of this marketing is for it's to attract mind throughout our whole discussion of how he's trying to get funding for MindBank. Because that is primarily what all of this marketing is for.

It's to attract investors. Because 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 that the nightmare scenario to me is someday hopping on Twitter to see that fucking Ian Miles Chong or Ben Shapiro or Jackson Hinkle

or any one of these horrible, horrible social media poison distributors will be like, I have made an AI trained on my voice. You can have me all the time to argue. If you want to, you can ask me questions or whatever. If you 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 cannot wait to bring Ben Shapiro to Thanksgiving dinner and have him argue with people around

the turkey. 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 Ben Shapiro's voice coaxing you both to acts of love. Oh, God. That's what's going to happen. So as an example of this kind of very marketing-heavy approach. I'm going to read something from the homepage of MindBank's website.

Quote, Our vision is to be the world's most trusted guardians of your AI digital twin and move the human race forward. Humanity's next evolutionary step is to combine ourselves with AI and move humanity forward so that we are no longer bound by anything.

That entire sentence is just marketing mumbo jumbo. It's meaningless hype, like hype words and phrases that refer to this like science fiction future. But like it's saying nothing. 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 chatbot. Like I have an AI. I have used an AI, right? I have it on my computer. My computer, were 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- manner that I myself have been flung, it would break and I would not. Like, I am finally free to think within my computer's RGB gamer RAM.

Yeah, finally. Like 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 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 bot 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, 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's homepage. Quote, God in heaven. 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 MindBank's co-founder and director of systems architecture and cybersecurity. And I'm going to let him explain kind of some of the process of asking MindBank questions and how that helps craft this digital twin. We ask you questions from how's your day to what does money mean to you? And you answer those questions with your voice in a natural way.

You convert the voice to text, give 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, the dashboard will show you that you're doing better or worse, just like a running application would. Better or worse at what?

Whatever metric that you're interested in, your happiness, your 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 the app 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 MindBank's user base, 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 billed 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 MindBank's 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 can talk to my inner voice whenever I want to. Yeah. It's called thinking. It's actually pretty easy.

I really, I don't envy, but I'm fascinated by the kind of people whose thoughts are so, I don't know a better word than legal. No, legal. That they would think that they could just, that they could transfer everything they think over to a machine and not get arrested, like i 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 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 take up journaling or something. Like there's a lot of ways to get around this. But this is from MindBank's app store page.

Quote, like a mirror to your soul, each answer you give allows you to get insights into your mind that'll help you grow mentally strong, unquote. So again, 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, self with this digital twin is, it's a big part of their early push. Um, great.

By using quote unquote, cutting edge cognitive analysis, the mind bank app responds to your data inputs with quote, valuable insights into each answer to understand how your mind works. Unquote. Uh, the app also utilizes quote, psycho linguistic models to create a dashboard of the mind for personal development and self care.

I'm going to play another, another, another fantastic kind of 32nd 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 mind map 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 fodder. 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 like actually disturbing about this is that these people are insinuating that this is a kind of therapy, that you can just sort of vomit your thoughts out, and a machine can analyze them based on the kinds of words and whatnot 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 like personality testing thing. MindBank's website has a whole bunch of articles, which I think are written by ChatGPT, because I read a lot of them and they all read exactly like a ChatGPT article. But they have a lot of articles on like what personality types make you a good CEO. what personality types make you a good CEO? And like a whole bunch of stuff like that, that references like Myers-Briggs testing and other kinds of personality testings and uses it to compare to their own personality models on the MindBank app.

So yes, they are very much kind of doing that in like this corporate business leadership ascension track type thing for how you can improve your personality to make you a better businessman. 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, like, 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. 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, unquote. 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. Which is a sex thing, right? that sounds like a sex thing right like how is that anything but not just to go weird a weird fucked up sex thing yeah that's that's what i how i'm taking this garrison so that that was also on their app store page. So the MindBank app has been out for a little over a year now. But unless you pay six bucks 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 a subscription model? Yes, it is. So there's freemium. You can try the app. You can download the app now. It's been launched for

almost a year. Version two is coming out soon, a couple of weeks, but both Android and iOS, and there's a free model. So you have 10 questions that you can answer, and you answer as many times as you want. You get the sentiment analysis, you get the full application, just 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. MindBank 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 traits

on the MindBank app that it uses to graph changes on what they call the dashboard of the mind. I'll just go through the, the big five personality traits and the various kind of subcategories it has. The first one is agreeableness, which has the subcategories of humble, cooperative, trusting, 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 extroversion with the subcategories assertive, active, cheerful,

friendly, sociable, and outgoing. And finally, conscientiousness with the subcategories assertive, active, cheerful, friendly, sociable, and outgoing. And finally, conscientiousness with the sub traits, cautious, ambitious, dutiful, organized, self-assured, and responsible. Yeah. Those are the only ways to describe a human mind. Sure. Yeah. No, I think they got it all. They 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'm going to 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'll even be able to ask him a question suck my god what do you think dude socrates once said to know thyself and who knows better than people in our inner circle? Each interaction will help us evolve and store our wisdom for eternity. Okay, 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.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The notion of sharing my own digital brain profile with friends and family so that they can ask my digital self questions horrifying i don't usually go home for thanksgiving what makes you 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 with people you allow. Unquote. 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 antisocial thing. I'm usually kind of antisocial in some ways, but this is like a whole other level of just like despising any human interaction. Yeah, it's it's anti-human is what it is, which is what's unsettling, right? Not that sending emails and shit is the primary essence of humanity, but you know what it makes me think of,

Garrison? The one law enforcement agency that 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. 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 they 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. Yeah. 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. It's intense alienation. Yeah, it's alienating. It's a bad thing to do. Yeah, it's alienating. It's a bad thing to do. So when we talked with the co-founder at CES, 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 stuff like this for, like, therapy apps before. Of course. That's kind of similar. 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

super selfish. It's just self-awareness, bringing users self-awareness, making them more aware of their 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, an 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.

safely secured in the cloud forever. Again, that just comes off as a threat to me. I don't want my mind to be stored in the cloud forever. I don't want to be locked up with deviant art

for all of eternity. Again, 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 MindBank 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. Now, the thing we haven't really mentioned yet is like, Now, 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 ported over online. This is just like a very crude simulacrum based on thoughts that you have told this app. Yeah, it's based. Like it's not helping you live forever at all. Like you, you don't. 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 like, and I'm not saying like I'm being dishonest but like they're 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 fed all of his books into an ai well no you know an author is not 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. some of the concerns religious people have with atheism. So obviously, MindBank's horizons are far beyond this sort of kind of self-help app. So far, MindBank 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 a business plan, are you guys interested in kind of solely individual subscriptions, or 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 the healthcare space by providing psychologists remote patient monitoring, 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 at any time. And they can use it as a remote patient monitoring.

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 the 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 a sentiment of individual answers, which would then give them a point in time

emotional marker for how you're feeling. MindBank 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 see how having this digital twin that you talk to every day will help handle your depression, is some like depression cure. Now on top of like patient healthcare, MindBank 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 can 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 here's another another clip of of Robert asking asking this this guy from MindBank about another possible use case. So the use cases for this that you've expressed to me so far are personal health or health and development

and providing kind of a living memorial slash legacy for loved ones after you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for this beyond that? Like I heard someone mentioning the idea of basically digitally cloning a worker so that they can provide information about tech or something. Or a work as a call center or something like that. Yeah, so that was a different product I think they were talking about, but with similar ties, obviously. product I think they were talking about but with similar ties obviously yeah 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 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 were 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 employee's mind through a guided personal digital twin, unquote. 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 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. 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 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 and they

and they implemented the idea after we spoke to them. I checked this. No, not the case. The Web page for this employee transfer idea goes all the way back to August of 2021 on the Internet Archive. So the guy the guy we were talking to was just lying to us like this is 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. Every single day, Garrison, I send Colt Firearms 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 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 in. Just bathe in it. Yeah, that's a great idea, Garrison. Thank you.

Uh-huh. 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. transferring a worker's memories and experiences into a digital asset is obviously deeply troubling. 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 do. So you guys don't have ownership of that at all? No, it's yours. Yeah, it'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 MindBank. However, MindBank 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 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 your employer paying for MindBank subscriptions for their entire company, in that case, it's unclear if the company would be classified as the user or if the employees would be. Now, I'm honestly not sure if MindBank 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, of course, beyond owning the actual like 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 digital twin with your therapist. You would be able to decide all that. Yeah. And then, you know, would it be possible for them to

like copy over some of the stuff and basically run it themselves? Or can you have like a hard cutoff for this sort of thing? I'm just trying to think of other types of like, you know, different ways people could get their hands on this for like unsavory means. 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 if 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 that's changing with you. It's from a 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 train in my thoughts is like scary enough. But the idea that an archived version of this AI could be distributed and even sold without my knowledge is obviously terrifying. Like this is deeply troubling. This is supposed to be like a private thing that you use to communicate with like your therapist

or you even talk 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? Yeah. But I do think that this is kind of part of this process that what – like a big part of what they're pushing is like you can get rid of all of your customer service people and just have an AI do it, right? Like that is the actual – this is a lot of silliness, but the actual thing that quote-unquote AI is being used for is to replace human laborers at a thing that machines are worse at, right?

Like the AI 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 chain or some shit? Let me talk to a human being, please. Yeah. Like that is what's going on here. And the fact that they're trying to dress this up is like, we have solved death. It's 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 it, this app every day you can you can use the information from like your best performers as like asset data that you can like use to help get your other other employees to like become more efficient right it's it's there's they certainly have like a few other kind of ideas for how this is possibly used. I hate these kinds of people. There's a – this got overused at a point in like 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 and their obsession with shit like Taylorism or at least proto-Taylorism kind of organized industry, treating people like cogs in a great machine. The civilization is one machine and each human being is just a single piece of it. That's 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 ai form and you can replicate them and you know the unsaid part is of course and then you fire them and their robot clone keeps doing their job for free we made a slave so god damn it i think a big part of the way they've designed this data set is that it can

be easily transferred as the guy at ces uh explained to us so if um we're talking 40 50 years down the line people pass yes so do companies if my bank is no longer around in 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 establish 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?

Right now, our current live application we're on Azure. So your backend is Azure, but we have it encrypted at rest. So all data 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'd

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 i i i think he sounds very trustworthy because you have encryption you have the blockchain and luckily I think the guy that we spoke with reassured us that he is

deeply interested in data privacy and he has the credentials to back that up So I'm co-founder, I'm director of architecture 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.

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, 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. Sure you can sure sure buddy that was a good moment that was a good moment is 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 um and yes no it's the the idea that

that he's using this as some sort of credential that shows he respects human rights and privacy is is like very obviously like deep deeply ironic um i 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 he worked at the NSA for six years. And he is now handling, he's personally handling the cybersecurity 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. He'll keep an eye on it. No, this is like the NSA's ideal project. You talk about your internal thoughts and feelings every day.

This is like, what else could they want? So earlier this year, MindBank received a grant from the DFINITY 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, Gartner 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 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 sit in the garden. We can all sit back. Yeah. Just relax outdoors. Not look at a phone. Not think about politics. That sounds amazing. Let's do it.

That does sound 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 operational differences and 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 Hereafter AI and Replica, which are covering similar ground. Ah, Replica. I get advertised 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 Repl 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 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 like 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 was 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. Grief is is terrible. Very hard.

There's 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 play into the grieving process because um so like i said there's there's hereafter ai and replica uh but 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 going to 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? Asked the lion anxiously. You have plenty of courage, I am sure, answered Oz. So. No. Absolutely not.

Deeply uncanny, right? It's like not, not good. That's, that's so bad for people. Yeah. That's 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 kind of 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. I don't know. Having semi-legible conversations with AI chatbots is actually getting fairly common these days. But when these AIs are supposed to represent someone that you actually 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

natural, but most taxidermists 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 it would just be like weird um 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 AIs 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. It just doesn't have anything that's trained for that. of a school bus. It just doesn't have anything that's trained for that. Another example is like,

you can ask an AI, like GPT chatbot, like, 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 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 that's trying to replicate. It's going to have access to like, you know, all the information on like Wikipedia, but fail very basic logical processes. Yeah, it's like the Google chat bot 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 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. Yeah. And 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 is can often be wrong or polluted um so like back to kind of like the grieving question like who's to say what the actual effects of these like incoming simulacrums of dead loved ones will result in the 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 like 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's died, but it's also, it's not that person. It is, it is just a slab of silicon. Like it's not actually alive in any way. And 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,

we, we really 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, a, like this study shows that when you create a digital zombie, it affects people in this way no

because we don't know yet those are still in development like we we this is this is such uncharted ground and it is in some ways inevitable that these things were going to are going to get continued to be developed and that's that's kind of why i wanted to put together this 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 MindBank is 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 grandpa's voice onto an Alexa machine. The fact that Amazon is doing aspects of the shit that MindBank is doing means that

it's only a matter of time before you see pieces of it, probably some of the less silly parts of it copied by Apple and Google and some of the worst parts of it copied 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 kinds 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 – or Elon Musk has just put out his new fucking Grok chatbot or whatever.

Yeah. his new fucking grok chat bot or whatever. Yeah. That, that is basically him making a meme robot to fucking do good. Like he's, he's pissing on Douglas Adams is good name, right? Like that's the,

that's the ultimate goal of his project. But this shit is a fad, right? Like there, 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 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 Bored Ape Yacht Club members. All got horrible eye infections.

Not eye infections, Garrison. They went to a party that only the Bored Ape Yacht 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 corneas. 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, this is we're, we're watching, you know, we're, we're, we're at that, we're at that point in Jurassic park where you see like the water reverberating.

Right. It's coming. And but at the end of the day, don't worry. You know, 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 that is 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 out a journal,

just do, do literally anything else. Call a friend, you know, make a friend, talk to a journal. Just do literally anything else. Call a friend, you know, make a friend. Talk to a stranger. Literally anything is better. Almost anything would be better for you. Well, I for one 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. All right. I'm done.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry

and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, everyone. It's me today, it's James, and I'm joined by Jake, Taylor and Azalea, and they're all from the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. And we've asked them to come on today, we're recording this on, what's it now, the 6th of November, 2023. And 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 like a massive protest movement against the uh israeli bombing of palestine right i attended a free palestine protest today lots of you will have attended them over the weekend uh normally in this uh kind of current political climate, when people protest about things or when people, when there are elections,

leads to an increased protest movement, which generally leads to more state clamp 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 still 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 Wiener. This is my second time on. I was previously on talking about the CBP1 app and immigrant surveillance at the border. In my day job, I'm a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C. 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, I'm a 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 joined quickly after it got founded. And I think, yeah, Azalea. Hi, I'm Azalea. I'm a 2L at UBA Law. I'm originally from Chicago. I grew up in a very proud Mexican, Mexican-American community. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, most recently, D.C.,

so various cities and places throughout the country nice that's an excellent group that we got so i think to start off with just in case we've got folks who are not in the u.s or maybe are not familiar can one of you explain to us what bail is yeah um so in the american legal system we have a pretty unique concept, which is after you're arrested for a crime, um, or if you're detained as an immigrant, you are then going to 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, right? Obviously, they're not going to let out someone who's just like killed eight people, because that 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. 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, low-level nonviolent felonies. Now, obviously, if you are a person of means, that's really easy to come up with some money, have a family member come post it, or to go get a bail bondsman. If you go to a bail bondsman, they're going to charge you about 10% of the cost of your bonds. 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 a hundred, $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 back tail light not being fully lit.

And that then gives officers police an excuse to proceed from there. So something as simple as, you know, you didn't get to go to the mechanic to have your back tail 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 we have you guys to help kind of uh well while 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 uh 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, that'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?

Sure. 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 a time when it was relatively easy. There was a lot of people donating money. So we were able to raise quite a bit of 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 forty thousand dollars we're able to post a lot of bonds uh up to nearly two hundred thousand dollars so far in bonds posted and so that's like it's a self-sustaining process. Like it can sometimes take up to a year to get the money back, but instead of, you know,

paying the money and it being gone forever with the bail bondsman, like we're able to continuously do this and get a lot done with a little bit of money. Relatively. 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 the $5,000 range from organizations at the time. But, and then since then it's kind of trickled in, you know, and I think I've donated my own money sometimes. It's, 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 if they'd like to?

Yeah, we absolutely need your donations. Bail funds around the country have had fundraising dry up. And right now we have a wait list. 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 Bail. We're also on GoFundMe at Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. And that information is on our Instagram, which is Ridge Bail. Nice. At Ridge B Bail Fund. And that information's on our Instagram,

which is Ridge Bail. Nice. At Ridge Bail. Perfect. So I think you were talking about that, like a lot of bail funds have dried 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 but a number of things which 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 exist in my community like what roles do you have what

kinds of people do you need sure um yeah i think you know a lot of bill funds are can be structured differently but the way ours works and we're relatively small and the way ours works is we have a group of um about six of us that's on the actual board and we handle like the logistics um so i'm the chair jake's the treasurer azalea is a you know board member at large but we all kind of share the same responsibilities which is we answer the phone which is the one of the biggest parts uh when people call us either from the jail or from the street like family members and someone in jail. And then when we get a call, you know, we'll we look up the case, call the jail to find out.

And then. Then 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 or so so yeah it's uh it can be yeah and then um as far as like keeping the organization running well like i said all the original board members are gone and i've been the longest running member uh but we we do have a lot of law students like half our board is law students and that presents

some 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 which helps kind of continue with the institutional knowledge sure yeah having that longevity I think is important and Melissa Jake and Taylor have done an incredible job sustaining the bail fund and those of us who are law students just kind of come in and out and try to support the best we can in the limited time that we're here um 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 just by existing, 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. In the absence of a bail fund, how do things look for people who are incarcerated right like what you spoke a little bit about bail bondsman but like perhaps you could talk about like the amount of bail some people would post for oh it 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 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 defenses, as I've said, is quite low.

And it's very, not only is it very difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but it's also, you know, 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 a hundred dollars 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're 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 we've gotten calls from folks who have said like, 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. So I think one of the things that really drew me to this work is like I'm an abolitionist. And but when I was was younger i spent two years

in jail i was 23 23 to 25 i was in jail for selling drugs um and i think like yeah i really that's like something that really motivates me now to do this stuff uh it's uh it's crazy um 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 on the phone. He's like, oh, I didn't know you guys like would pay my bond for free. It was a $500 bond. So he would have had to pay $50 to a bail bondsman. And he didn't call us for several days because he thought he has to pay $50.

So it's like, you know, I like it's, you know, we spent all this time, like, thinking about like, leftist stuff. And like, but it's, it's eye opening to see people that are stuck in jail, like for 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 set up like this. But it's like, it's one of the things that like really motivates me to keep doing this work is like, man, it's so rewarding when you get those calls. And then also, I think to expand on something that 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 going to see like the structural racism and like the classism 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

met. They have no training require, 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 pay to get out. Yeah. I spent the summer, my first year after, or summer after first year of law school at the Lynchburg Public Defender Office. So I got to review a lot of body cam 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 bail would be or how much bail would be set to um it was heartbreaking and it was very it happened very quickly like it was all based on the police officer's report and what they just decided to spew in five minutes or less yeah that's uh yeah it's it's a pretty messed up system i think some states have like bail guidelines right if i'm not mistaken 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 if it adds up depending on offenses or conspiracy or whatever yeah that's a really good point like the thing about bail is it's different like in every state almost some states you know have maybe like more progressive quote-unquote uh but some some have some don't and yeah yeah i was going to say like california has a reputation of being progressive san diego has charged some of the most insanely high bail amounts i've ever seen although we all aspire to do what illinois just did at the beginning of this year which was to eliminate uh 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 is it is just to be clear the bail isn't like it's not like the the state keeps the money unless you don't show up like is it is it a revenue generator for state choice is purely like a sort of punitive thing that they think has some kind of 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. Number one is you get out on personal recognizance. If you're a nice white boy like me, you're getting personal recognizance, almost certainly. Option two is you're going to have to pay cash 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 doesn't matter how much money you have you're not getting out of jail um

and in like a functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms like worked this is not an abolitionist perspective um cash bail is unnecessary the magistrate should be deciding and a judge should be deciding whether you are a threat to the community or whether you're not. And that should be like the only option. Um, 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 court date is to give them an attorney yeah yeah which is a whole other thing we can get into with immigration and so i think that's a really good kind of example of some a 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. Well, you haven't been yet to be convicted of any crime. It's not necessarily an abolitionist thing to exist, but it helps at least move us towards a less cruel, less unjust system, I suppose. So I want to talk about a little bit the like nuts and bolts of what it takes

to run a bail fund and but before we do that uh we are 22 minutes in uh so talking about some bolts we need to pay our bills so this is an advert it's probably not something you need uh but here it is anyway all right we're back uh i hope you've bought whatever it was mres or ronald reagan dog coins or uh i don't know hoover um so let's talk about the the like if like if you're listening to this and you're in your car on your way home or whatever time you're listening uh on a long road trip you're 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. I'm thinking here when you establish a bail fund, is it a 501c3? Do you need 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 like 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 talk a little bit about that. Um, so we are a 501c3, 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. 15 bonds a week and there's bill of funds that post one bond a month because that's all they can do and i think like um as our organization has grown and matured we've gotten way more organized and we started out it was 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 like

you can definitely start and you'll learn as you we've learned as we go and you know we've been good about that. And so like, you can definitely start and you'll learn as you we've learned as we go. And you know, we've refined everything. But like I said, it just it takes some motivation and a little bit of money. 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 Bail Fund Network, which can provide resources and advice for this type of thing. So basically, what you need to run your bail fund is you need a group of people. The load, honestly, is just 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. In Virginia, you register with the state corporation commission, which means you need a like president which is taylor um and you need a treasurer and then a couple other potentially a couple other board members these are the people who own technically the 501c3 and you just need those people on your documents um you can use their address but we recommend that you set up a po box for getting

mail it just makes things a little easier um It means you don't have to hand your personal address over to a magistrate. Yeah, it makes you less doxable as well. Yes. And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account and go to a bank that has good hours so that you can readily withdraw cash because you can only postpone in cash, which is its own insanity.

So one thing we deal with is the bank being closed and then having to wait a couple of days, day and a half to be able to post. We also recommend a Google Voice phone number so that multiple people can receive phone calls at the same time. 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're 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, do most of our discussions in a single 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 put at 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 the five grand in 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 the name of the bail fund down. A problem that we've had is not all magistrates recognizing the bail fund um which but you really want to have a p.o 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 um 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 like so often like a thing that i've seen just being sort of on the left in various movements since i was uh younger it's like we reinvent the wheel every like four or five years you know so just having those

things that you guys have learned you know like using google voice and and having a bank with good hours i think that saves someone from having to fall down those same holes again so that's 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 i mean there have been some obviously heavily politicized arrests in the last few months in the united states uh do you guys face like personal blowback or blowback against a group when if uh 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 i think that's a great question um

where we are there's really we haven't posted the bond for anything that's like political protest related, but there is a bail fund that's about an hour away much bigger than ours that in 2020 was doing like every night bail support, jail support. So yeah, that's like an example of you know, just way different bill funds operate. And so basically, we have not ever faced any kind of political blowback or any issues um but it's definitely something that we're prepared we think about uh because it can't happen there's bad women store it and there's definitely cases around the country where like uh prosecutors have taken aim at bail funds you know lana of course was a really a really yes

yeah big one but i think um so yeah jake you have anything to 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 um 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 address that, and if you 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 serve 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 bondsmen, 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, dangerous people than we do yeah yeah that's definitely the case um so i wonder like what are the issues you have faced hardships and you spoke about a couple of them but uh are there other things like um that you've i know for instance like i've obviously as part of my reporting or maybe not obviously but some people apparently don't bother to do it but uh 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 sort of hardships that you guys have had to deal with, and 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. Uh, you know, 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 uh so you know they call us and we have to just say okay like you need to call back in a couple hours and then uh you know they have lockdowns they can't get to the phone all sorts of things so the worst I mean yeah 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 gonna get

released today we're gonna 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 it's all rolling right yeah and then I call the jail to triple check everything and they say oh you know we have to hear back from the court the court has to approve this and they're like closing in 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 gonna get out today because of a like bureaucratic issue yeah i just have to wait until he just like can't take it 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 of him actually mad at me you know i think that's something that's really cool is like, no one, we deliver bad news all the time. You know, we say you can't get out because of X, Y, Z, 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, they're 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 calling from not in jail it's a little more easy to deal with we can call them back and see yeah yeah i'll jump in on communication just for a minute 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. So for us, like our the main jail that we work with, Middle River Regional Jail, used to use a

phone provider called GTL, which is one of the biggest in the country. And 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 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. Jesus. 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 like giving yourself grace when you miss the phone, um, 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. Um, so it's it's yeah it's really important to be kind to yourself in those situations um yeah yeah you won't stick around one 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, commonwealth attorneys, bring up something from phone calls when folks were actually in trial or for sentencing 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 calling a loved one a family member um just incredible how much access there is to that and lack of privacy yeah yeah yeah it's very dehumanizing i gotta jump in on that yeah yeah you end up in jail do not say anything about your case on the phone 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 advice. Don't do it.

Don't talk about the case. Ever. Yeah. One way that we address that is by telling people upfront that we post bond, no questions asked. Um, 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 going to 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's what the state purports to be doing. Your job is just to make sure that someone's not too poor to be free. So on the subject of the sheer finances of it,

certainly here, I've seen and I have no idea what 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 bails. And I don't know if it was just because it was like, fuck you bail fund,

or 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 drop 10,000 on one individual, that obviously means that there are a lot of people with $500 who can't, who 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 or less. 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, two $5,000 bonds in a row, and then, you know, yeah, we're pretty screwed. So, and then I think that's, you know, it brings up something else that Jake and I were talking about.

Like, it's important to stick to that limit. One time we posted a bond of up to $12,000 for somebody. And, you know, 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 it was like he had a $5,000 bond and then in a separate court, I got another one. And so it was, you know, we already told him we could pay the one bond. Anyway, long story short, we had had twelve thousand dollars tied up on this guy and then he didn't show up to court um and if that's that's when you can lose the money and

people don't show up to court so uh well yeah fortunately for us unfortunately for him he did get re-arrested on another charge. Um, and when that happens, we, there's like a 90 day period where if the person gets caught, then, uh, we get the money back. And that's where like,

we, our Prince, 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 revoke anybody's bond.

Um, but like a bail bondsman might try to like find you if you run yeah but so our kind of 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 but but the best thing is if uh 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, um, in court,

you don't have an orange jumpsuit on and that's not factoring into the judge's mind. So please, please donate for all those reasons, um, to our bail fund. Yeah. If we have more money, that's something we talked about a lot of times. Like if we have 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 dozens or hundreds of people's whole trajectory. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Yeah. And I will add on how we address our lack of funds. can potentially change dozens 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're like hey have i moved up the wait list sometimes people call like multiple times a day and they're like yeah oh, any movement? My number four now, which is just kind of wild. But having the wait list and we go like in strict wait list order with the exception that if someone has an under $500, $500 or less, we'll just post that because if we're sitting around waiting for someone to

like get money back from the courts for a $5,000 bond that's next in line, we could have 4,500 bucks. 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 bail fund. how do we make the best decisions to help, you know, people in the best way and then accords with our values the most, that can get pretty heated and intense. And having a setup with 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 um and we can like hang out and talk about this and then like taylor and i can go out and go for a bike ride um 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 and still being able to talk at the end of that. Seems like a direct experience one. Yeah.

We are an abolitionist like in principles, you know, and but I think almost like, you know, I've talked one of their development fund that i know of they have a some sort of system i'm not super 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 uh thing but it's it's just like kind of jake 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 and who's not in jail and yeah as much and so like almost almost counterintuitively like having this system first come first serve i think is like the most abolitionist thing we can do yes i can see that yeah yeah and it does certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices which and it helps see that yeah yeah and it does certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices which it helps with that yeah yeah we were talking about the system and like i want to bring that up because the system is like you know i 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 they're in virginia so you have a whole other layer of weird stuff going on uh liquid 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 like can you explain how as like someone who isn't obviously some of you both uh like at least two of you have i suppose all of you have some experience with the legal system in one way or another and understand it a little better because of that but if someone has been fortunate enough not to have to interact with the uh the criminal law system are they like do 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 a just random chance that it was the law students that founded this one uh basically like you said it's an 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 the system is possible like the bond system we're just like a family member going to post someone's bond so like it's set up and then it is possible for like your loved one to post your bond um and we just learned it all with experience you know you just go you call 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's located and then you know you go with the cash and post and like there'll be every like we work in it's 10 courts five different jurisdictions and then they each 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 in the future.

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 during 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. 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'll also say that like, you don't learn how to do this stuff in law school.

I didn't learn how to post a bond, how to like file a KPIs, any of this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is truly like one of the worst States in the country. Um, 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. Um, which is not, if you know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great. Yeah. Um, but you can, you know, you can learn an incredible amount.

And then that skill just becomes valuable in a number of different areas. One of the most like powerful ways that can help people is even when you're not able to postpone 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 why they're not getting out. And just being able to give people a little bit of certainty is really important yeah i think it's a very valuable thing you can do and i yeah i think this whole thing has been a really valuable insight into how to build a bail fund i guess um is there anything else do

you guys think that we didn't cover like in the in the grand scheme of being bail friend uh entrepreneurs i don't know what the right phrase is, but 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 uh that's i think i found so interesting about doing this the 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 or abolitionists or you know against the current court system uh 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 really drove this home was I was at work. I was at the lumberyard. And I think the salesman at the lumberyard, I think they would fall in the war. If I was going to stereotype them, I would say they were on the conservative side.

And the one guy, the salesman was he had heard about that i did this i think he saw on facebook i posted about it and he was like that is he's like this is the coolest thing ever man like i think it's so awesome you know like he's like people are just locked up for like bullshit and yeah and i think you know we've had volunteers that i think people were like knew him or like why i think he why is he 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 that it transcends the politics a little bit.

Yeah, I think anyone who's had to interact with the criminal justice system, I haven't interacted with the American one, but if they've had it in their family, if they've had it in their family, if they've had it in their friend group or whatever, realizes how dehumanizing and unjust it is. And especially if they're working people,

not people of massive means, 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 uh it's certainly something that like i saw a lot of people giving money to bail funds in 2020 who like i may not have you know they weren't necessarily people who are also out in the streets like it's a way for people to be part of a movement it's a

way for people to who feel that like this is this is unjust, even if, yeah, they, 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 that 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. The police do not treat people with dignity.

The 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 call their mom and talk their mom through getting a bail bondsman. I've had people 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. All right. So I think to wrap up, we should we should again remind people where they can give you their money. So how will people go about doing that? Yeah, please.

Please donate to the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. We are on PayPal at paypal.me slash Blue Ridge Bail. Ridge is R-I-D-G-E. We're on GoFundMe. You can find us on the Blue Ridge Community Bail. Ridge is R-I-D-G-E. We're on GoFundMe. You can find us on the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. We are on Instagram at Ridge Bail. And we also have a website,

blueridgebailfund.org. I think so. You can Google Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. It'll show up. And yeah, if anybody is interested in starting a bail fund and wants to ask us any questions, please do. We would love to talk about it. We've learned a lot through just reaching out

to other bail funds, even if they're not in the state of Virginia, of 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. Anything else you want to share before we go? I think we're good. Awesome. Thanks so much. Thank you for having us. Thanks.

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