The Daily Zeitgeist - Top 10 of 2024: #4 Al + Cops = Bad As It Sounds 08.30.24

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

We are counting down the top 10 episodes of 2024, as voted by our listeners! Up next, #4: Sane-Washing Trump, Al + Cops = Bad As It Sounds 08.30.24 In episode 1735, Jack and Miles are joined by co-founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, Emily Galvin-Almanza, to discuss… Mainstream Media Actually HELPING The Trump Campaign…, AI Police Reports Are Here To Save The Police From Doing Any Work, Bad Faith NYTimes Article About Alternatives to Policing and more! Emily Galvin-Almanza's 'Project 2025' Twitter Thread Mainstream Media Actually HELPING The Trump Campaign… CNN focus group of conservative women turns out to be comprised of GOP operatives AI Police Reports Are Here To Save The Police From Doing Any Work Cops Are Using AI to Write Police Reports Axon Facing Class Action Over Alleged Monopoly on Taser, Body Camera Markets Axon reports Q1 2024 revenue of $461 million, up 34% year over year, raises outlook A firm proposes using Taser-armed drones to stop school shootings Axon’s Ethics Board Resigned Over Taser-Armed Drones. Then the Company Bought a Military Drone Maker Taser maker Axon has a moving backstory. It's mostly a myth Taser Company Axon Is Selling AI That Turns Body Cam Audio Into Police Reports Bad Faith NYTimes Article About Alternatives to Policing Congress Is Investing in Alternatives to Police. Can They Work? A study gave cash and therapy to men at risk of criminal behavior. 10 years later, the results are in. LISTEN: Selfish High Heels by Yung Bae feat. Macross 82-99 & HarrisonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Oh, hey there, it's me, Jack. You've caught me unwinding, enjoying a large goblet of delicious eggnog, untangling my brain, gaining five to fifteen pounds of eggnog. While we unwind here at Daily Zeitgeist, in addition to publishing our normal year-end episodes, and Santa's University, etc., we've decided to take the opportunity to count down the top 10 episodes of the year published over the next 10 days. The 10 days that will be off Monday through Friday, two weeks in a row. How, Jack, how did you guys determine the top 10 episodes? They were all equally incredible. Well, we used a little something called democracy.

Ever heard of it? Depending on when you listen to this episode that might not be such a rhetorical question. But anyways we let you vote on the most listened to episodes of the year to see what you liked best and you're about to hear your answers. Just 10 bangers right in a row. We've got a trending episode in the mix. We got a lot of good ones. And at number one, well, let's just say you'll find out, especially if this is the number one episode. We're putting the same bumper at the start of all 10. So we hope you enjoy it.

We hope you enjoyed listening to this year of TDZ as much as we enjoyed making it. And we will see you all in 2025. We hope you have a restful holiday. I could not fucking sleep all night. All night. I've been up like a fucking owl. Like Theo Vonn was telling Donald Trump in an interview. I should have you like an owl, homey.

Hell, man, you be your own fucking night. You be in front of street light. Like a street light, man. Just like... And that's good? No! And that's good. And that's good.

And that feeling, you like that feeling? No. No, no, no, no. I do not want to feel like a vampire with a heart condition. And yeah, for the record, it's not because I was doing cocaine. This had a bit of low grade anxiety that kept me up all night. Is that what they're calling it? Yeah.

Okay. Okay. All right. We have like an owl. We call that, uh, we call that poor people's cocaine. Anxiety. Yeah, just a little grain of anxiety. The poor man's cocaine.

Hey y'all, I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of Therapy for Black Girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January Jumpstart series for the third year running. All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't re a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty is so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were,

how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be. So a little bit of past, present and future all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It could be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets.

How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello? And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone? And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child? These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our eleventh season of Family Secrets. Some of you have been with us since season one,

and others are just tuning in. Whatever the case, and wherever you are, thank you for being part of our Family Secrets family where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to Season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone. I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York.

And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stan. Anya and I met through hockey, and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers. And on our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, we're opening up about the chaos of our daily lives between the juggle of being athletes, raising children, and all the messiness in between.

We're also turning to fellow athletes and beyond to learn about their parenthood journeys and collect valuable advice, like FIFA World Cup winner Ashlyn Harris. I wish my village would have prepared me for how hard motherhood was going to be. And Peloton instructor and Ratchet Mom Club founder, Kirsten Ferguson. And I remember going in there hot mess. So listen to Moms Who Puck, a production of iHeart Women's Sports

and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. I'm Rufus Griscombe, host of The Next Big Idea. Each week on the show, I sit down with one of the world's leading thinkers, and together we try to answer a big question.

I'm talking about people like Bill Gates. Let's not let people with male intent benefit from having a better AI. Michael Lewis. I am very self-consciously running towards pleasure. That's what draws me to material in the first place. Peter Atiyah. Exercise is the single most important drug we have. And Kim Scott.

You know, I spent a lot of my early parts of my career feeling a little bit miserable. And so to me, this is the interest in radical candor. How can we achieve things together and enjoy doing it and build great relationships while we do it? Listen to the next big idea on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos.

I'm a psychology professor at Yale. And I started to notice that a lot of my students weren't all that happy. So I created a new class. Welcome everybody to psychology and the good life. It became the biggest class in the history of Yale. I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great.

But it's not just my students who need to understand the science of well-being. And that's why we launched the Happiness Lab, so you can learn about it too. Are you ready to feel happier? Head to the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or if you like to listen. Brought to you by the 2024 Subaru Share the Love Event, now through January 2nd. Hello the internet and welcome to season 353,

episode five of- Dirt at least like I said! production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American shared consciousness. It is Friday, August 30th, 2024. Yeah. This last day? No, well, 30, there's 31 days. There's 31 days, half of August.

Exactly. Also, guess who I get to shout out today? Shout out to my dad. It's his birthday. You're 70 years old up in this place. Congrats to you. Yo, I was just at a friend of my youngest's and they have an amazing work from your dad on their wall.

Oh, they do? Yeah, yeah. Beautiful. Very white thing. My dad is internationally known and locally respected as an artist. So I appreciate the support from everybody. But also August 30th is National Beach Day, National Grief Awareness Day, National Toasted Marshmallow Day.

And for all you college fans, it's National College Colors Day. I am not wearing mine. Sadly, I should. Normally. Maybe kind of. I need some more gray. I feel like I wear like my alma mater ship because I'm like well I gave these people so much money like I have to I need to get something out of it We're like they should land to me. Yeah. Yeah Money I gave them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes

All right. Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka my, my donuts bring JD Vance to the yard. And he's like, whatever makes sense. Damn right, whatever makes sense. That one courtesy of Lakeroni on the Discord. Whatever makes sense. New JD Vance flub just dropped. I'm sure we talked about it on yesterday's trending, but his, did you see? Oh, the Hulk Hogan, I'm not gonna take my shirt off?

Don't worry, any, every, everybody, I'm not gonna don't worry any every Everybody I'm not gonna take my shirt off. Okay, it's a banger It's another certified thing was being booed by firefighters. So yeah Silence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host mister miles It's miles gray aka whale was beached yeah beheaded it with the chainsaw and strapped it to the top of the car. Whale was beached yeah cuz I'm a normal hunter and whales are, you know that they are. Oh, whales are. Boop, boop, doodoo. Okay, shout out to cleo.universe for that creep TLC, RFK, hunter.

Another creep. Yeah, a true, true creep. But yeah, that whale was beached. And hey, whale, as Michael Knowles on the Daily Wires, and whales are cool. So why wouldn't you chainsaw an arm? Whales are cool, and he's a hunter. So it's normal.

Find a new angle. Chainsawing a whale's head is normal. Find a new angle. Miles, we are thrilled. Whale juice is wonderful. We are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by a poet and a lawyer who is the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, which is designed to create a new model of collaborative public defense designed to empower.

You probably read her deep dive on Twitter into Project 2025. Please welcome to the show, Emily Galvin-Almanza! Emily! Very happy to be here. And I'm so sad that I don't have an internet-supplied jingle or joke to go along. I'm just sitting here, like, horrified at you guys

having unearthed my deep poet history. It's a little scary. Yeah. You do a little Googling. Do the math. You are a published poet. I am. Math poetry is the most marketable genre of literature. I don't know if it's a top seller. Yeah. Yeah.

You were doing math poetry? Yes. Poetry is math poetry? Yes. Poetry is math, right? Like when you have a rhythm of word, you know, the same way music is math, poetry is math. I just started with other math first and then tried to create poetic forms that adhere to that math. Again, real bank. That, yeah.

Wow. Okay. That's like some like a tool type shit. You're like, I'm using sacred geometry to write my words down. Wow. Okay. That's like some tool type shit. You're like, I'm using sacred geometry to write my words down. Yes. Yeah. If only I could be in the same category as tool. That's the height of my poetic career. You just made it right there.

Yeah. Exactly. I get it. We did reach out to you on the strength of your project 2025, Twitter thread deep dive. then we found out, we have a bunch of mutual friends and we're a big fan of your work otherwise. But the Project 2025 thing, you were just reading it because you can read and comprehend lots of text, and you're like, oh, this is worse than I imagined? Yeah.

No, what makes the Project 2025 text really, really dangerous is that it's written to sound super normal and it's also incredibly long. It's like 900 pages long. And so if you are a lay person who's just a little bit concerned about what the Heritage Foundation might be putting out there because you recognize that they were heavily influential in Donald Trump's last administration and you see that a lot of his administration cronies had contributed to this document, you want to peruse it, it might not seem as scary as it actually is, because it's written again to sound very, very normal. And that sort

of like policy speak, but having, you know, gone to law school and been forced to read lots of stuff, I think it was a good use of time to try to kind of get in there and translate for people some of the scariest aspects of the policy plan. And then I got really far in there and wrote like a 400 tweet thread about how bad it is and also how insane, like their weird obsession with boyfriends and like how scared of boyfriends they are. Oh, yeah. Wait, what is their obsession with boyfriends? Oh my God, so they think that single moms are terrible. Right. Super popular position, like let's all hate on single moms. Yeah, right.

They had this fixation on fatherhood. They're of course very, very interested in preserving the nuclear heteronormative family. Right. But from that flows this like weird paragraph where they actually talk about how dangerous like a single mom is bad, but like a single mom with a boyfriend is the worst possible outcome for children. And like this part is actually not done in like very elegant policy speak. They like actually hate on boyfriends for a while. It's just there are these twists deep within the document that are worth exploring. It's like, yeah, they're probably named Craig and like they eat your cereal and

like, and they don't even ask you when you're 12 or when maybe your kid is 12. Whatever. Uh, maybe my life is bleeding into what I'm writing here. Yeah. It's the policy equivalent of you're not my real dad. It's just that. Yeah. Which is so weird, but yeah, but I mean, so many conservative men have that energy of like,

you're not my real dad. You're like, wow, dude, you weren't even talking about anything related to that. You went with that. Okay. You just need to take it down like six notches. Yes. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we will link off to the entire thread in the footnote.

We are going to get to know you a little bit better in a moment. First, a couple of things that we're talking about later on when we get to the news. The mainstream media, it has been pointed out recently, seem to actually be for, for all the talk of there being a anti-Trump bias, they really seem to help him in a lot of ways. So we just want to cover a couple small examples. lot of ways. So we just want to cover a couple small examples. The right has their new case closed winning strategy against Harris Wallace.

This time it is taking down Harris's Donald's job story in the least convincing way possible. Oh, she's being McSwift voted? She's being McSwift voted. Yep. And then we're going to talk about a company called Axon. Now I know you're hearing the name Axon and you're like, that company sounds like they do good in the world and probably not scary. Axon is actually a terrifying fucking company that is like the private arm

of America's police and they are experimenting with using AI to help police do more damage. So we're going to talk about that and just some of the other shit that they've done. There, there is a photograph that our writer, JM put in the doc that is their CEO addressing a crowd and he is not him. Like the person addressing the crowd is in a all black suit and has a motorcycle helmet on and then an iPad strapped to the front with his face on it. But as he delivers the speech from wherever,

whatever volcanic layer he's at, the person is like gesturing with his words. So it's like a weird avatar situation. That's sick, dude. That's sick. It's just, it's all so very on the nose. Yeah. Might also talk about this New York Times article about alternative policing and just

where we're at with the mainstream media when it comes to, you know, things that aren't police, that aren't armed police and how that's being talked about these days in the mainstream. All of that, plenty more, but first, Emily, we do like to ask our guest, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?

Oh man, so it's actually really great that you guys asked me this because a few months ago, okay, so this story is gonna get weird. A deer impaled itself on my colleague's fence. Oh, no. And my colleague, of course, shared a photograph with our entire team to ask, what do I do now? There's a dead deer on my fence.

And it just so happened that I dipped into my own Google search history to demonstrate how ready for this topic I actually was. And I took a screen grab. I'm actually going to show you guys to prove that it's really a screen grab of my search results from that day, which were as follows. Wordle, how to gut a deer at home. Oh no. How to dress a deer at home.

Inflation Reduction Act rebates 2024 Massachusetts, driving directions to the magical bridge playground. That's, there you go. Wow. Wait, what's the magical bridge bridge? I'm like more like, what's the magical bridge? You know what? It's actually really cool.

In this area where I was living in California at the time, because I teach at Stanford during the winter, there is this playground that was actually designed to be really accessible for kids with disabilities. And it turned out that the playground that's accessible is actually the best playground ever made. And it's everybody's favorite playground. So that's the one I was taking my kid to. Yeah. This place looks like a fucking theme park. It's amazing. There's like three, there's more than three of them. They're, they're popping up everywhere. They're, they're the next generation of playgrounds, really Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Okay, I like to see that. And you can tell it's got that like tartan on the ground, like that makes it real soft and spongy. Squishy, yeah. I've heard their little heads on like when they were growing up and it was just all concrete. Yeah, or I'd get like wood mulch stuck under my like toenails or something, cause I like tried to go barefoot down a slide.

Yeah, it's different times. The slide burns you and then the wood impales your feet at the bottom. And that makes you stronger. And then you get that nice aroma of like smoky playground for sure. Cedar. Yeah. Safe for my kids, the tartan and also I feel like I jump higher on it. And so I like to show that off when I'm at the playground.

I'm like, look, I'm going to dunk on these monkey bars. Oh, sick. It's five feet high. The Cristiano Ronaldo of the Magical Bridge playground. Yeah. Why was your partners or the person who texted you, why is their fence so sharp? Is that a thing that is normal? Great question. I don't know.

They live in the South. I can't speak to Southern fence practices. I have a lot of fence experience. I've myself constructed a lot of four string barbed wire fence growing up in ranch culture, but never something with an impalable top. I have real questions. Right. Yeah.

Is that by design? Is he like, I'm going to leave the deer there to tell the other deer what happens when you try to come on our property or is it just like an accident? Because it was so, I'm going to go with the former. I'm going to decide that whoever installed that fence wanted it to be a place where you could impale a head. Just really.

Oh yeah. Like what, like in game of Thrones, when like Khaleesi takes over that place and all like the heads are like on pikes and stuff or bodies. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Or in real life in human history. Yeah.

Yeah, that was like everywhere. That was just interior or exterior decorating back in the day. You need like a sconce and then a head. Yeah. England was like, we like to around Christmas have poinsettias the rest of your heads, just heads decorating everything. What is, what's something you think is underrated? So I, I thought about this question a lot.

I think that tea time is underrated and I'm gonna make a defensive of tea time. Cause when I see, say tea time, people usually think of sort of like stodgy British, pinky raised, unpleasantly meticulous. Okay. Tea time is supposed to be an incredible spread at like four o'clock in the afternoon,

where if you are like me, you are most ravenous. There should be pastries and cakes and like savory things. My husband is Bolivian. And Bolivians really do tea time. Like they do though, they will fill your table at tea time. And then dinner's like a light snack. I think this is a really underrated way of living one's life

because that's when I actually want to just become a complete glutton and move my way across a full table at four o'clock in the afternoon when I've had it with the world. So I think tea time, we should bring tea time back. Wow, I didn't know like Bolivians are really, I'm just reading about these, they got Salones de Té.

Just reading about these Bolivians. These Bolivians, they love the tea time. South American Sloan Tea Time. It's a whole thing. It's very elegant. It's very comforting. I love a spread too. Love a spread.

At four o'clock is snack time for me. Like I'm just wondering, like, I feel like I basically recreated this in my own life, but with a snack drawer, because, you know, being raised Catholic, I have shame. And so like, I just have all the snacks but they're like in a drawer and I just like eat over the drawer all the different snacks but leave it in there. It's your tea drawer now. Yeah it's my tea time shame drawer. Wait what do

you wait what do you got in there like loose bread slices? Just what are you talking about? Just loose breads. All sale. Couple pieces of Wonder Bread. No. There's some mayonnaise packets. I got chips. I got some pretzels. I got cashews. Maybe some assorted nuts in there. And then I'll bring out one bag of either chips or pretzels

at a time to accompany some things from the cold cut drawer. Oh, wow. Or some, you know, salsa or hummus. How dignified. I know. Wait, what's the spread? All one at a time. What's the spread at a Bolivian teatime, Emily?

Oh my God. So you're obviously going to have different beverages, including tea, but you're also going to have both an array of savory and an array of sweet options. Okay. And I am going to state right here that asking an actual Bolivian would get you a better answer. Being here without a Bolivian on the call, I'm going to highlight like Salteñas, which are our breakfast food as one of the best Bolivian foods you can get. You can get a ton in like the DC metro area, ton of Bolivians there. You can get them sort of all across Virginia and some in California.

But Salteñas is basically like a like a savory pastry full of delicious stew. And you can kind of bite off the end and sip the stew and then eat the pastry. Oh, it's amazing. Because when I see a picture, I'm like, oh, this looks like an empanada. But it's not. Oh, my God. You will never touch another empanada. Now, like, no, Salteñas are next level. OK, you have Cunha Pesada. No, like, no, salteñas are next level. Okay.

You have cunha pes, which are like a cheese pastry that are really fluffy and delicious. They're kind of like a pao de queso, but better. Oh, better than pao de queso? Oh, shit. Way better. Okay, okay, go on, go on. I'm here to talk about Bolivian food, and I will tell you some of the best in the world. Now, they're going to have all kinds of real dishes,

like meats, prepared meats, and maybe a stew, and then you're also going to have a lot of cakes and pastries and the usual tea time stuff. So not just- Yeah, Miles just started sweating like the Jordan Peele meme. Yeah. Because I love pal de casio. When I had that the first time,

I'm like, what the fuck are we doing up here? Like I love and now seeing the other one, we say Salteña, the fact that it's sort of like a soup dumpling, but the Bolivian version was like, first you got to take the bite and then get the soup out and then keep going. I'm also intrigued by the structural integrity of the pastry that can contain a stew within it. This comes down to skill.

I mean, the pastry is like really robust and like almost has a slight sweetness and contain a stew within it. There's a lot of- This comes down to skill. I mean, the pastry is like really robust and like almost has a slight sweetness and thick chewiness to it. But it's also like, you're gonna get judged on your skill level. Some people are beginners and they need to use a utensil where they might get stew on them. Once you're a real pro, you're just holding

that Salteña in one hand and like long boarding down the road with no stew anywhere on your person. Wow. Like it's the ocean spray bottle. Yeah. With the drinkings by Fleetwood Mountain. Exactly. That guy is in my mind. Yeah. What is something you think is overrated?

I'm going to stick with my food theme. I actually think we've gotten to the point where brunch is overrated. I think just, yeah, we're thinking everybody's doing brunch every weekend and it's getting to the point where it's just flat, flabby breakfast food at a different time of day. And I'm no longer excited by it. I'm no longer inspired. I think I'm over it.

I think brunch like loses its appeal the earlier I wake up. Like when I was like younger and like, you know, going out and shit like that. And I'd wake up late and like, yeah, brunch. But yeah, let's eat at one that's breakfast. But now I'm like, no, I've already ate. Or it depends on, you know, if there's an occasion. But yeah, I get that.

I guess, is that maybe one of our latest food fads that's going away now, is brunch? Oh, it'll never go away. Yeah, maybe not. Maybe actually the right answer to how to live one's life is to only have brunch and tea. I mean, maybe breakfast, lunch and dinner are over in it. So two meals. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two meals, give me a brunch, give me a tea. Give me that tea, yeah. I mean, does the enthusiasm for tea just like make you less likely to have anything at dinner? I feel like dinner becomes an afterthought at that point. A little snack for dinner. A little snack, a little light something. A little spread for a tea.

Yeah. Okay. I like that. Yeah, brunch is not a natural time for me to be hungry. If I've eaten breakfast, then like brunch is not really- Or you do the thing where you wake up and you're like, fuck dude, brunch is in four hours. And you're like, I don't want to like go and not eat anything. So then you're like walking this tight rope of not eating before or showing up hangry and you're like, dude, this place fucking sucks, man.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Uh, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. Hey y'all. I'm Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, host of therapy for black girls. And I'm thrilled to invite you to our January jumpstart series for the third year running.

All January, I'll be joined by inspiring guests who will help you kickstart your personal growth with actionable ideas and real conversations. We're talking about topics like building community and creating an inner and outer glow. I always tell people that when you buy a handbag, it doesn't cover a childhood scar. You know, when you buy a jacket, it doesn't reaffirm what you love about the hair you were told not to love. So when I think about beauty is so emotional because it starts to go back into the archives of who we were, how we want to see ourselves and who we know ourselves to be and who we can be.

So a little bit of past, present and future, all in one idea, soothing something from the past. And it doesn't have to be always an insecurity. It could be something that you love. All to help you start 2025 feeling empowered and ready. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls starting on January 1st on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dani Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets. How would you feel if when you met your biological father for the first time, he didn't even say hello?

And how would you feel if your doctor advised you to keep your life-altering medical procedure a secret from everyone? And what if your past itself was a secret and the time had suddenly come to share that past with your child. These are just a few of the powerful and profound questions we'll be asking on our eleventh season of Family Secrets. Some of you have been with us since season one and others are just tuning in. Whatever the case and wherever you are, thank you for being part of our Family Secrets family, where every week we explore the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,

and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Listen to Season 11 of Family Secrets on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, I'm Madison Packer, a pro hockey veteran going on my 10th season in New York. And I'm Anya Packer, a former pro hockey player and now a full Madison Packer stan. Anya and I met through hockey and now we're married and moms to two awesome toddlers. And on our new podcast, Moms Who Puck, we're opening up about the chaos of our daily lives between the juggle of being athletes, raising children, and all the messiness in between. We're also turning to fellow athletes and beyond to learn

about their parenthood journeys and collect valuable advice like FIFA World Cup winner Ashlyn Harris. I wish my village would have prepared me for how hard motherhood was going to be. And Peloton instructor and Ratchet Mom Club founder, Kirsten Ferguson. And I remember going in there hot mess. So listen to Moms Who Puck, a production of iHeart Women's Sports and Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. I'm Rufus Griscombe, host of The Next Big Idea. Each week on the show, I sit down with one of the world's leading thinkers, and together we try to answer a big question. I'm talking about people like Bill Gates. Let's not let people with malintent benefit from having a better AI.

Michael Lewis. I am very self-consciously running towards pleasure. That's what draws me to material in the first place. Peter Atiyah. Exercise is the single most important drug we have. And Kim Scott. You know, I spent a lot of my early parts of my career feeling a little bit miserable. And so to me, this is the interest in radical candor.

How can we achieve things together and enjoy doing it and build great relationships while we do it? Listen to the next big idea on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. I'm a psychology professor at Yale, and I started to notice that a lot of my students weren't all that happy. So I created a new class.

Welcome everybody to Psychology and the Good Life. It became the biggest class in the history of Yale. I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great. But it's not just my students who need to understand the science of well-being. And that's why we launched the Happiness Lab, so you can learn about it too. Are you ready to feel happier? Head to the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or if you like to listen. Brought to you by the 2024 Subaru Share the Love event, now through January 2nd.

And we're back. We're back. And yeah, so there's been some talk. It's being called sane washing when it comes to the Trump campaign, like that, how the mainstream media covers. President Trump, former president Trump's long rambling press conferences. Yeah. And yeah, but it just, it does feel like there's a different standard when it comes to him, possibly because of the glut of insanity that is coming at us, or possibly just because, I don't know.

They just want to make it a good game. Everyone wants to see a good game, so we got to make sure it's close. No one likes to blow out. So we got to prop up the orange guy who's deteriorating before our eyes. But yeah, like you said, Aaron Rupar, like on a lot of his videos that he clips out and puts out on Twitter, like whenever he cut, like we've played a couple of those clips where Trump will be rambling on, he'll cut back to someone in the student. Like what he means to say is actually this, not that Hannibal Lecter was a real person and a good guy. What he means is-

The late grade Hannibal Lecter represents our democracy. He just wants to talk about all the ways that- He's a poet actually. But two recent events in the presidential race have underscored how the mainstream media tries to normalize Trump and his circus of political aid. This week,

obviously, he made headlines for insisting on taking photos and filming a TikTok video for his campaign in a section of Arlington National Cemetery that prohibits that very thing. In fact, it's a violation of federal law to use a military cemetery for campaign purposes. So while this was happening, there was a press release that came out of the Trump campaign to sort of like paper things over And journalist Brandon Friedman He pointed out on Twitter how the Trump campaign's press release had a very dumb typo in it quote in the statement campaign manager Chris LaCivita Incorrectly used the word hollowed instead of hallowed

Like on this hallowed ground out Like hollowed out. Yeah, knock on a- Or like a hollow gesture at a hallowed ground. Exactly, right, precisely. Almost like a Freudian slip. Like so Axios, the Daily Beast, they added the sort of parenthetical sick to sort of say like they misused the word, this is what they meant to say. But a few other organizations, as you pointed out,

sort of caught the misuse, but then corrected it on behalf of the Trump campaign, like CNN did. And just like they're like, they meant hallowed, dude, just change it so people don't make like, you know, point out they made a typo. The New York Times predictably ran the story with the typo unedited. And then like, so if you searched in Google, you'd be like, oh, yeah, they wrote hallowed, ha ha ha. But when you click it, they republished it and edited it

to be hallowed without any sort of reference to the fact that there was a typo and then they had, you know, dud. Basically like, we're doing some copy intern stuff for the Trump campaign. But this is like a subtle example, but like worth noting because these like small accommodations are at the very least bad journalism. And at best being like, no, we're helping them. Because like we, they, we just need them to look

a little bit more like together than they obviously are. So the other thing that has been like being pointed out across the media is from like the CNN shit, like during the DNC, they would have these panels of like, quote, undecided voters to be like, well, so what'd you think about that? You're undecided. And right after Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech, they spoke to a panel of supposedly undecided voters in Pennsylvania. And one man was clearly an outlier.

Like after the speech, he's like, I don't know. That thing was like bad. Most people were like, yeah, that was, that was pretty good. That, that wasn't, that wasn't that. Yeah, that was fine. He's like, nah, it's nothing. It was big nothing burger. And then when the panel, like the person who was hosting the panel said, has

anyone decided yet after this speech who they're going to vote for this guy immediately raises his hand is like, yeah, I'm voting for Trump. Like, oh, okay. Midas touch looked into this guy and his social media is like littered with MAGA crap. Like he's very much clearly like a Trump supporter. And when they pressed CNN and him on it, they both kind of had conflicting stories. The man said, yeah, dude, I told CNN I was a Trump, like I'm a Trump guy. And they just asked if I could keep an open mind.

And I said, yeah, I can keep an open mind. So I went and they called me undecided. CNN was like, well, technically when we spoke to him, he said he hadn't decided who he was going to support. So we invited him to speak on the panel. And that's where you're just like, what the, like, I'm always confused when they do these like undecided sort of panels. I'm like, who, like, who really are these people?

Like, are they really that undecided because they seem pretty Informed for being undecided and then I'm like what is it that you're waiting for on either side for you to be like? All right, Trump said the thing I needed to hear all right, the Democrats said it some of the thing I needed to hear and This could be like a one-off or like a you know simple mistake But so like, you know Parker Malloy pointed out that CNN has like a pattern of this shit. Like in 2015, they had a round table with Trump supporters where like a woman went on like a viral tirade against Obama.

And the issue here, it's just that this wasn't like some Fox brained normal person. This was like a sitting New Hampshire legislator birther who tried to keep Obama off the New Hampshire ballot, who was just presenting as just a citizen in New Hampshire legislator, Berther, who tried to keep Obama off the New Hampshire ballot, who was just presenting as just a citizen in New Hampshire. Then in 2018, CNN also had a discussion with, quote, five conservative women from Florida to discuss the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. And the women's responses were, yeah, here. I'll just play the supposed five conservative women from Florida talking about the allegations against Kavanaugh.

A show of hands, how many of you believe Judge Kavanaugh when he says this didn't happen? I believe him. I believe him, too. I do believe him. I believe him. How can we believe the word of a woman of something that happened 36 years ago

when this guy has an impeccable reputation? It wasn't just- Nobody, something that happened 36 years ago, when this guy has an impeccable reputation. There was nobody, nobody that has spoken ill will about him. Everyone that speaks about him, this guy's an altar boy, you know, a scout, he's, you know, because one woman made an allegation, sorry, I don't buy it. But in the grand scheme of things, my goodness, you, there was no intercourse. There was maybe a touch. Jesus Christ.

Can we really? 36 years later, She's still stuck on that had it happen I mean we're talking about a 15 year old girl, which I respect, you know, I'm a woman I respect we're talking about a 17 year old boy in high school with testosterone running high Tell me what boy hasn't done this in high school so the thing is, a few journalists looked into these people. And at least three of them are political operatives. Like one woman was hosting fundraisers for the GOP.

Another was running for, like was a candidate for office. So they had people that were part of the GOP machinery go in there to sort of provide intellectual cover for people to be like, yeah, whatever happened to Brekavanaugh's not that bad. I mean, these five normal people just said that it's nothing. So maybe, maybe it is. They just framed them as like some people. We have conservatives.

Yeah. Just as conservatives that were living in Florida and their take on it. So it's just a very, yeah, it's just an odd, odd practice, but maybe quite intentional, but I guess it depends on how you look at things. Emily, how do you see this journalism? What's your take on that? Well, it's not happening in a vacuum. When I look at this, what I see honestly is,

I'm a trial lawyer, I see the jury selection process, which is a similar space. It's a space where we're all pretending to be neutral and we have no pre-existing beliefs and we're coming here to be neutral and we have no preexisting beliefs and we're coming in here with a totally open mind. And yet everyone walked through the door, totally looked at my client and was like, I wonder what that person did.

So we also see real restrictions on who's invited to be part of that process. Like you got to look at how media put out the call for people to sign up for opportunities like this. The same way you got to look at how, you know, in the jury system, people with prior convictions are excluded, people who aren't on the voter rolls are excluded, people who may not have a driver's license can be excluded, people who don't have a mailing address are excluded.

So you get these juries that are sort of made wealthier and whiter and more conservative by the ways in which people are even invited to attend. And then that's sort of distilled into an even more pro-prosecution extract through the process of questioning people. And then if a person's like, I don't know if I can be fair, the judge is like, you can keep an open mind.

Right? Same as the CNN question. You've told us who you are and what you believe in, but you can set all that aside, can't you? Right. So I'm a cop, is the defendant a cop? Huh? I can keep an open mind here. Yeah, I think so. I think so, your honor. He's my brother, but that's not a problem for me. Brother-in-law, technically. Yeah. So yeah, like, who's, who's the producer who's setting up the process through which these people appear? And who's the person not doing like a basic social media search? And who's the person not doing like a basic social media search?

Right. Because like in that instance of the guy, like in the undecided, like, I mean, whatever that guy just there's like, I get to be on TV or whatever. Like, I mean, that that's clearly on the producers, like you're saying, of how they're selecting people and whether they they are doing it intensely or just don't care because they're like, I don't know. They said they were, man. I'm just trying to get five people in the room so they can talk. And yeah, I guess maybe it was a mistake for me to reach out to my friend who like runs the local Republican Party to ask if they knew five people who wanted to be on camera for CNN. But yeah,

what's the utility? Like, what are we really gaining? It's not a scientific process. This group of people doesn't necessarily represent or speak for the average undecided voter. Now we know that they're maybe not even undecided at all. Maybe they're just a political operative who has a good makeup face. Right. I don't understand what the average viewer is gaining from these events. Yeah. Right.

It's always meant to, I think, I don't know, like half the time when I see those panels or people undecided, like I said, they seem to know, they don't seem like low information voters. You know, like, and so then I'm like, that's where I'm like, these people sound like they're basically Democrats or Republicans who are being like, I don't know, but probably this.

Low information voters would be great. Like honestly, you put people on there who first of all, normalize being a low information voter, make it okay to be like, hey, I actually don't know about this or this issue is confusing me and I'd like a better explanation. And then present an opportunity

for the mass media audience to also receive that explanation so that people, it's the same way as a high school teacher might say like, if you have a question, somebody else probably has the same question, please ask your question. We could do that.

I don't know why we're doing this instead. Yeah, no stupid questions. The thing that every good professor will tell you or teacher who's like, no, no, ask, ask. Cause you got to know or else. Yeah. You ask weird stuff or learn weird stuff. Cause you don't ask. There's that sketch and everybody's in LA, the John Mulaney series, where they're like doing a daily show style, like interview with the guy who's like saying really stupid shit about like Trump and his support for Trump. Then they follow him home and he's like, ''Yeah, no, I'm stupid on TV for a living.

That's my thing. I actually got interviewed by Borat a couple of years ago. That was a career highlight and he's just like, ''I have this room that I keep in my house that looks like shit and has a Confederate flag up.'' But I keep that stuff separate. I actually live with my family in the kitchen. We have this nice house that, yeah.

I feel like, yeah, these are political operatives essentially. It's the real version of that, except obviously they are employed and working within these massive parties to convey what those parties need to convey. But I think it's also, yeah, it shows too how we talk about how a lot of media outlets just aren't able to reckon with real issues because of the fact that they're so entrenched in a lot of these systems themselves. It's like, yeah, I think this is good enough.

Can we actually speak objectively about that? I don't know. But I think, yeah, this is where a lot of the actually speak objectively about that? I don't know. But this is like, I think, yeah, this is where a lot of the media is falling short at a time when people really need to have the truth, which we don't get all the time. I also don't know what objective necessarily looks like. Because you're right. When you're deeply entrenched in the system, it's very, very hard to see its equilibrium from the outside. I'm a devoted NPR listener. I go running in the morning and I pop on morning edition

and I'm very happy to hear it. But even at NPR, there've been these few times where they're covering a Democratic event, a Republican event, and they'll be like, well, they talked about the economy, which is a bad issue for Democrats. And I'm like, is it? Yeah.

Because actually, listen to Bill Clinton, a person of whom I am not always a fan, but Bill Clinton, they spelled out whom I am not always a fan, but Bill Clinton like spelled out how great the economies built by Democrats over the last several decades have been. And it's weird to hear that coming from NPR. I think it's like their gesture towards equilibrium that doesn't actually speak to truth. Right. Yeah, I think that's a problem with the mainstream media that we'll also get to on, you know, policing. And you know, they there are these things that they just assume are bad for progressives that everyone disagrees

with and they just do a very surface level pass over those things, just being like, yeah, well, those things that everybody assumes about progressive ideas around this are true. And we just have to take that into account as opposed to digging into some ways that they can be proven not true. Right. Yeah. NPR drives me fucking crazy. All right. Let's take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about policing and

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now through January 2nd. And we're back. We're back. All right. So you may have seen this story that AI police reports are here to save the police from doing police work, basically. It's only a matter of time, you know, it was only a matter of time until the two of the shittier things on the planet, AI and policing, joined forces.

In this case, the AI helps them churn out recaps of incidents using body cam footage, thus sparing the officers from having to pen lengthy reports and the cops like in talking about it, the ones that they're like interviewing for these puff pieces on the technology are like, I can't write for shit. I'm basically an idiot. And this thing made me like, it, uh, this is a quote from one of the stories. It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was 100% accurate. It flowed better. Better than I could have ever written? That's... First of all, it's supposed to be a rough draft.

Like, it's not supposed to replace the reports that you're writing. The pros. It's supposed to give you a rough draft that you then, like, work backwards on. Nah, nah, I gotta cut corners. Emily, how- It's called Draft One, by the way. That's the name of the technology is Draft One. And he's like, this is the goddamn best thing,

best version of the report I've ever seen. Emily, how important are these police reports in terms of when people intersect with the justice system? How vital are these and how much room is there for dubious shit to pop into these kinds of police reports? All right, to be clear, they're already largely made of dubious shit. Like let's start from there. Okay, there we go, thank you.

These things vary really, really wildly from place to place. So when I started out as a public defender, I was in Santa Clara County, California, in which the police are trained to write reports. So when a thing happens and the police are there, they'll like write down what they saw. And then the second cop there will write down what he saw.

And then they talk to a witness and they write down what the witness said. And all in all, you get this packet, which is really, really helpful if we are going to believe that the legal system is in any way about finding truth, right? Like you want to have detailed accounts from the people who are there about what they heard and what they saw. I then went out to New York to work at Bronx Defenders. And that's when I learned that the NYPD is essentially

like, really, really, really good at not writing stuff down. When you get an NYPD discovery packet, it's like a whole bunch of pages, but all of the pages have the same one line copy pasted on them that's like at the time and place of occurrence, the incident did occur. I mean, I can't tell anything. And that is when the suspected perpetrator did occur

onto the occurrence and it would happen that at that moment in the geographical location in question here to four it's just like yeah we could have a whole conversation about like the police attraction to big words they don't quite use it like if you want to have a great time as a defense attorney ask a cop on the stand what furtive means they love saying that everybody's doing furtive movements, but like, what is furtive to you? Right, you're actually being pretty furtive right now. Indeed, this whole situation is furtive.

So when you get to a place where essentially nothing is written down, you create a systemic problem, which is in order for me to get any information to protect an accused person and protect their US constitutional rights, I'm going to need to create a legal process to find out more about what this cop's claims actually are, which means I may have to demand hearings that I don't actually need. Like I might have to file suppression hearings that I don't actually need just to get the cop on the witness stand, just so I can cross examine them about what the heck they're saying they saw and did. So it's really, really, really inefficient and it's bad for truth and it's bad for justice. Like it's very, very bad for any semblance of

accuracy in the system and it causes massive delays. So all of this is to say bad discovery is a huge driver of our system being inept at creating any semblance of truth. Right. It's also like you have to remember that police writing reports, there's kind of a double edged sword here. Because police get a ton of overtime out of writing reports. If they make an arrest at the end of their shift and they get to sit at their desk for the next three hours, like carefully inscribing documents with at the time and place of occurrence

the event did occur. Writing furtive over and over again. Incursive. Yeah, they make a ton of overtime doing that. So I think, I mean, and when I say a ton, I mean like millions and millions, wherever you are in the country, you should Google who the highest paid public employee

in your jurisdiction was, and there's like a decent chance. It was a cop who made a lot of overtime a few years ago. It was like a port authority cop in New York City. Wow. Yeah. Just like over a million bucks in overtime. And so when I think about what AI would do to this process, I think of a couple of things. One, it's less accurate because it's not giving you the police officer's impressions of what happened. It's giving you the AI's impressions of what happened. And this is even assuming the AI doesn't hallucinate, which as we know, like,

AI's make stuff up all the time. They are tripping. Yeah. So yeah, like if you're going to totally hand over your faith to a robot to tell you what happened in a video and abandon the idea that human perception is necessary to interpret what happened in a video, you're also leaving by the side of the road

things that I might need to know about the cop's ability to perceive about what the cop was focused on. What like, for example, in a police report, let's say the whole report is written about, I don't know, somebody's way of driving a car in a DUI case. And none of it's about the fact that when the person got totally furtively, furtively across, you know, when they get out of the car, maybe

everything they did at that point was fine. Maybe they're talking fine, walking fine, don't have any sort of symptoms of intoxication. If the entire report is about the driving, then I get to cross examine the cop on like, why didn't you talk about what happened after that? Like what's, like their omissions can be really, really important to a jury to decide who's lying, who's telling the truth.

You take the human perception out of that and you take away this fundamental thing. Our system is designed to have 12 people tell you if another person is lying. Right. 12 people can't tell you if an AI is lying or hallucinating. I mean, it's just, it takes us even farther from the system having utility.

And I get that in this system, we are going to consistently prioritize the efficiency of punishment over the semblance of truth. But especially with the involvement of Axon, which has a grotesque history, I'd be more than happy to check about. This is like five alarm fire. Wait, you're saying the company that used to be called Taser has a fucked up past? I like that they went from Taser, obviously, trying to cover up the fact that they're the company that invented the Taser, that for some reason has a negative connotation with

it, to Axon. It's so fucking aggressive. Yeah. Well, it's also, that's a nerve Axon is what the electrical current runs down that stimulates the next nerve cell. So it's still like, we're going to zap you. It's just, we're going to zap you for people who took APBio. That's right. Exactly. It's like the version of using furtive. They're like, what if we just clashed it up a little bit? I would just throw in the additional thing.

And this might be like not, this might be a controversial statement, but I personally don't want to get like it. So the CEO of Axon, who is the company behind this AI technology, we'll talk about other stuff there behind, bragged that the AI spares cops from the tedious work of spending half their day doing data entry. I don't want police to be like out roaming the streets more with their guns, like ready to get like suspicious about whatever comes across their plate while they're sufficiently bored.

Like I feel like this is a job that we want to have a healthy amount of like downtime where they're reflecting on what they've done and like having to think about that and account for it. And this technology seems to be designed to like, what if the police were like even more gas and less breaks like built into it? What if it was just more, they don't really even have to think about it because the machine's there to like just document what they did. We want it to be frictionless. You know? Yeah.

You know, exactly. More frictionless policing, just like out there fucking shit up more of the time. I think the other thing that's really interesting too is like to your point, Emily, you know, the overtime is where a lot of budgets go and a lot of people, they make their, they make that money. We're like, how does that cop have that fucking car and like a boat and all this other stuff? It's like, yeah, dude, the overtime is wacky. That they're never like, this will actually help cut down on costs. They're more just like, dude, it's gonna

help the cops dude, so they don't have to be bored at work, you know, and like, you think the way to sell it to people who might be more progressive, like, guess what, man, this could actually save a lot of money, because now they don't have the time to do, you know, claim as much over time. But again, that's that's part of the appeal. So they'll just be like, no, man, it just makes their job easier so they can keep you the citizen safe.

All right. Next question. You're right, though. It's also sort of exposing this terrible choice, right? We have set up policing policy so that the vast majority of police time is spent on things that most people don't actually care about. So when you ask people what are they scared of, it's like burglary, robbery, sexual assault, murder. And when you look at how police spend their time, the vast majority of it is on noise complaints and unfounded

calls and somebody was peeing outside and trespassing. And sometimes on what I sort of think of as police manufactured crime, which is like convincing someone with a substance use problem to score some drugs and also score for the undercover who will then arrest them for a felony. Right. Right. And the reason we don't want them on the street more is because they are out there on the street armed, dangerous, and not investigating the things that people really care about.

If you look at clearance rates, a lot of people don't know what clearance rates are, but it's the rate at which police are able to close cases. And in any jurisdiction, you can search for your local clearance rates and be like, all right, how many rape cases are my local police even closing? Got to be in the 90s, right? Like 13 to 20%. It's just a whole other feminist soapbox I'm happy to get. Like 13 to 20 percent. It's just a whole other feminist soapbox I'm happy to get.

And then 90s totally across the entire country, there's like at least 90 that they've closed in the past decade. Seriously. And that's because it's a policy choice. It's a choice from police leadership about what they're going to dedicate resources to. And if, yeah, if the answer was, okay, they're not going to spend their time writing trespassing reports, but instead we're going to dedicate real efforts to, uh, how about wage theft or large-scale pollution of poisoning entire towns? We're going to set the cops on that.

If they were going to investigate crimes of the powerful against the citizenry instead of writing reports, I might feel differently about it, but I don't think that's the plan. Sure, sure. Yeah. Never has been. Yeah, but I do just want to it. But I don't think that's the plan. Sure. Yeah. Never has been. Yeah, but I do just want to get a little bit more into the history of Axon.

So they were Taser. They made their initial money with selling Tasers and then body cams. When that became the solution to police brutality, corruption, they went with body cams and they basically have a monopoly for which they've been sued. They made $461 million in the first quarter of 2024 alone. They're also the same company that made headlines for endeavoring to skull solve school shootings with taser equipped drones. I remember that plan was paused when the majority of axons ethics board resigned

in protest, but I think probably the most relevant and also like I mentioned, their CEO gives speeches via remote iPad. I use an avatar man. Glued to the front of, of the motorcycle helmet. They also created an excited delirium in part. So all the deaths that are due to that. Yeah. of the motorcycle helmet. They also created an excited delirium in part. So all the deaths that are due to that. Yeah.

So I wanted to talk about that because I also think like that feels very relevant to this because this is them getting involved in police narrative and how police justify what they're doing. And they were involved. You actually have a great video on this on your Twitter, Emily, where you talk about their role in the creation of and the proliferation of the term excited delirium, which is something we covered a while back, but I think it's always worth kind of refreshing people's memory of what is excited delirium. So excited delirium is a made up medical diagnosis that was originally invented in a sort of

predictably racist way in Miami many decades ago, where a doctor claimed that people were dying of excited delirium, the sort of state of mania that caused them to behave really erratically and aggressively and dangerously, and then they perish. They just expire. And it turned out that many of the women who originally alleged to have excited delirium had actually been killed by a serial killer. But this idea that people could become so worked up that they are dangerous and then they die was seized upon by police because in police encounters where there is a need to justify use of force, it is very useful for them

to claim that the person they used force against was dangerously worked up and had this medical thing where they became a risk to everybody's safety and they had to be tased. And then, oh, when they died from a heart attack, it wasn't because they got a massive volt of electricity, it was because they died of excited delirium. Excited delirium, which is not accepted by the way by doctors.

Medical associations are like, that's totally not a thing. Psychiatric associations, same deal, not a thing. But there was that one panel that said it was a thing. I feel like we're good here. No need to look into the panel or who funded that. I think we're good. Yeah. No need to look at how many doctors on the panel were put there by Axon. No need

to connect those two. No need to also think about how much this reduces Axon's liability, right? Because if deaths are caused by excited delirium and not caused by a taser, they're not going to be able to be successfully sued. But it's actually become a serious epidemic in this country of police using excited delirium to justify not only taser use of force, but the use of paramedics as a weapon, like we saw in the Elijah McLean case, where the police had paramedics inject Elijah McLean with a lethal dose of sedatives under this false diagnosis of excited delirium.

So that seed that Axon planted in 08 in legitimizing this diagnosis has now caused many, many deaths and is continuing to cause deaths around the country. Right. Because like they'll hit people like ketamine and stuff. And then like, like I was reading a statistic that a lot of those people end up having to be intubated, because it's so severe. And the guy was excited. I mean, they also said the same thing

about George Floyd, too. Yeah, that was like very early on. Like, it's the thing excited. I don't know what you're saying, man. But let's let's just move on. Like it's the thing excited. I don't know what you're gonna say, man. But let's just move on. So then like, so Axon, for them, it's just more because they're sort of like, hey, we love what you guys do. Let's help out because this also helps justify

the use of our products. Like, is that sort of like their main motivation and like sort of pushing the excited delirium sort of craze along? I think it's also a legal shield. I mean, if I'm gonna, let's say I lose a loved one pushing the excited delirium sort of craze along. I think it's also a legal shield. I mean, if I'm gonna, let's say I lose a loved one who was tased and I wanna sue Taser

for marketing a product as non-lethal that was in fact lethal to my loved one. And they say the medical examiner's certificate doesn't say that your loved one died of an electric shock. The medical examiner's certificate says excited delirium. So you can't actually get money from us in a civil suit or settlement. So it's covering them from being financially responsible for deaths they cause. And the same thing for police.

I mean, if the police are getting, the police could be sued in the same case, right? They could sue Taser for the device, sue the police for the action. But either way, if the Emmy's certificate says this person died of excited delirium, it's a liability shield. Right. Yeah. And disproportionately applied to black men a lot of the time. Yeah. Right. It's a way for the police to justify why they're scared. It's really reliant on racist tropes, right? On the adultification of black children. First of all, this child is a risk to me because I'm perceiving this child as older because of racial bias, but also the racist myth of dangerousness of black men in an excited state.

I mean, this is totally playing on long-term American racist tropes and sanitizing them with a fake medical diagnosis. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like something you'd get at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. You're like, and a bit of excited delirium for you. You're like, ooh. That's why we had to drown him in the chocolate river. Yes, exactly.

Just a couple more details about, is it axon? Axon? I'm going to call them axon because that feels sufficiently violent and sinister. Their CEO, his founding story, I just like founding stories for companies and CEOs because they are the most full of shit things in America and most widely believed. It was founded in a, everything was founded in a garage. No, it wasn't. Founded in like their rich dad's second home that was behind his first mansion. Uh, but anyways, the CEO repeatedly told the story that he started the company because his two high school friends were shot and killed.

He played high school football with them. It's just like two guys that he like knew about who were like four or five years older than him. Yeah. So they weren't even in high school. He never went to high school with him. But for him, he's like, and man, that's the closest that I... Kids who were at your high school before you is such a stretch to be like that. Also, the workplace culture includes group tazings and tattooing sessions in which employees are inked with corporate insignia. And by the way, the drone thing, while their mouth says, all right, fine, God. Their money is saying that they're full steam ahead on the taser drones front.

Yeah. So just all sorts of wild shit there, like truly the most dystopian, like a bunch of tattoo branded, like corporate people, guy with motorcycle helmet, iPad face, like lying. Like knowing murder victims. Yeah, it's all, I mean, in a way, it all does feel very appropriate that then it's like, and now that's what I like to do is help other people lie about stuff and I get to make money.

And the institutional investment in this company is wild too. Oh yeah. It's like, cause they know they're like, wait, how much they're making Q1? Okay. Yeah. Like we're buying, but just generally, I just want to like kind of get your take. Emily, there was recently this New York times article about a, the headline is would a group opposed to police blow the whistle on its founder?

would a group opposed to police blow the whistle on its founder? And it was like this AI app that was like, we're going to like create an alternative to the police by taking people's, you know, complaints and routing them to like some of these other police alternatives. It turned out to be like the founder just like didn't have the ability to pull it off and was spending some of the money on like clothing and vacations that you know, like that I'm rifting sure you can find scams in any nonprofit like category. But the way the New York times writes about it and like frames of this article is that whole argument of like, oh, you think the police

are bad at their jobs, let's see what you say when you're being robbed is basically the whole thesis of the argument. And what it comes down to, if you read the article, is one person on the team is like, I didn't want to turn him over to the police. Cause I like, he's a black man and I fear what would happen to him. And then another person is like, yeah, but I did turn him over to the attorney general because I know that like, you don't usually call the police on white collar crime because they won't do shit. So anyways, like the attorney general is working on an investigation. It might be civil, it might be criminal.

But the way they framed it is so much like based on this bad faith reading of any criticism of the police. And it just feels generally like the tone of the mainstream media and the dem the democratic party recently is like, boy, those protests in 2020 were, you know, unpopular, let's never fight again, babe, to the police. And it's like, I don't know. It's just so fucking frustrating. Like, and meanwhile, police killings haven't have just like stayed the same or gone up.

So like where, where are we with this? Like what, you know, there were some programs that were funded that like worked really well. Like Denver had a controlled trial of a program that provides housing subsidies to people at risk of homelessness, and found a 40% reduction in arrests. Like there's all these cool examples. They get like dashed off really quickly in a New York Times article that like has a counterpoint for everything that might suggest that like there could be alternatives to our fucking terrible idea of a system that if you've been to any other country in the world, you're like, oh wow, why do we do it the way we do it? But yeah, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on like where we're at in our conversation in the mainstream. So, first of all, we're really lucky in this one way, which is that we are overrun with cool solutions. Like I'm writing a book right now. I love my book. It's coming out in 2026.

It's going to be a layperson's guide to the criminal legal system and all of its horribleness and also solutions. Like I'm gonna spend two thirds of the book on problems and then I'm gonna present a whole bunch of solutions. I had originally intended to write one chapter on solutions. I'm now at like page 88 of a hundred of all of these solutions because there are just so many fantastic things happening that have better data than the status quo.

Like, we don't have data strongly suggesting that police are a feasible preventative mechanism. Police can disappear problems. They can take people and put them in spaces where they are no longer visible to the general public and where they may be then violently harmed in ways that make them more likely to engage in crime in the future. So police may be sort of like temporarily making a problem disappear in a way that long-term makes it worse. We have that data. We have a ton of data on like the STAR program in Denver or cahoots in Oregon or you know other alternatives to police popping up around the country. Massive public support for this. Most voters would love to have mental health first responders and actually most cops if you ask them, are like, yes, I would like to also no longer be treated like I'm a trained social worker

because I'm not one and I would like that to not be part of my job. What bugs me about the perspective you just described, right? Which is like, oh, these people who don't want to use the police, what happens when they need the police? Right. Well, okay. When we on election day hear from voters that they are scared to go to their local polling place because there are proud boys outside the polling place intimidating potential voters, no one is

saying, well, it's your problem if you don't like the proud boys, don't you just have a way to work it? No, we say, okay, this is a problem because people have a legitimate fear. It is a legitimate fear of an organized effort which is intimidating and threatening harm to the general public. And because the general public is afraid,

we, the government, should probably take action to protect the general public. The blind spot with regard to when that organized, harmful force is a governmental body is obscene. So by blaming people who are like, hey, I actually, I'm nervous about calling the police on my black boss because black men get killed by police at inordinate rates.

And also not to mention that subject to illegitimate prosecutions and overcharging and charge stacking and longer sentences and the incredible damage even of a pretrial process. And by the way, I'm saying this with great care because here's a person who's accused and has not been found guilty of anything. So really weighing, hey, do I wanna subject this person to all of these risks or is there a better way

for me to seek accountability and truth without those risks of lethality, injustice, ruinousness. That's a fantastic thing for an ordinary citizen to be considering and any government that doesn't say, you know what, I'm going to consider that with you. And I'm going to acknowledge that your fears are real and the problems you highlight are real. And work on these problems to come up with something better is abrogating its duty to the public in favor of the optics of being pro-cop. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, the pro-cop turn that's happened in the Democratic Party, I mean, it's not that they were anti, but I saw you retweet an article or a thread about how the platform changed because I was definitely looking at a lot of the, I was really interested in the foreign policy stuff that was in the platform. And I was like, Oh, wow, like, you did a ton of 180s here compared to 2020. And then reading sort of the excerpts on what was happening with policing was also very like, oh, we're, we're really embracing this thing

about being like, let's not talk about the death penalty anymore. Let's I know we were talking about chokeholds. Let's like really tamp that down. And it really is wild how much it's become because I think the obviously this whole election is set up to be we have a prosecutor and a felon. And so because of that framing we're going to really lean into a lot of this like the like the prosecutorial aspects of this and also be make it feel like,

yeah, man, we're the cops again, and that's okay. That was just like, I mean, I was very cynical in 2020 when I saw the uptick and be like, yeah, we really need to do something. That's the most that will happen. I will say that we need to do something. But now to see it really formally stripped out, you're like, oh, right, this was never a real concern.

But how do you perceive that shift now, or at least now that even in their written platforms, it's just like, yeah, those are problems, but we can address them at some point later. I mean, the death penalty thing I really don't get because Harris has been against the death penalty for a lot of her career, was criticized as AG for upholding the law instead of acting on a moral objection that she has to death penalty, which is super expensive and has resulted in the death of a lot of innocent people because our system gets it wrong a lot because of things like junk science and bad eyewitness IDs and insufficient funding of public defense. So let's just like Cabin, this is like, I don't I really don't get the Democratic Party stepping away from opposing the death penalty.

I think polling on it has not changed dramatically. Like Americans are not like rabidly pro death penalty now. So I really don't get it. But here's what I'll say about the prosecutor versus felon thing. It's being treated. As a sort of vicious backing of violent force against crime. But it doesn't have to be. Prosecutors are unique among lawyers.

Rarely will you hear me say nice things about prosecutors. I'm going to now say some nice things about prosecutors. They have an ethical duty to do justice. That is a unique ethical duty. No other kind of lawyer has that duty. Now, I just got done teaching a course to some really talented law students, and in one of my exercises, I made half of them be defense lawyers and half of them be prosecutors, and I told the prosecutors in a bail argument, you have this unique ethical duty. You have to

do justice and not just justice for the people who were harmed in a crime or who you think of as part of the community, you have to do justice for everybody. That includes the accused person and their family and their kids and their loved ones. That includes everybody. When you talk for the people, you represent everybody. And when I told them that their assignment would be graded on how well they were able to consider everyone's needs,

safety and justice. They got up there on the record and did radically different things than I've ever seen a prosecutor do in real life. And largely we're thinking of restorative solutions and root causes and like how they could heal a community instead of just punishing and disappearing a person. If what prosecutor means is somebody who is enshrined

with governmental authority to do justice for everyone in the community, including people who might be opposed to that very prosecutor, I think it could actually be a very powerful encapsulation of the best version of a leader, right? A person who's going to take this seriously and care for all of our wellbeing.

And yes, stand up to abuses of people with less power, which is really what we would want prosecutors to stand up to the most, I think. Certainly, it's not being done that way. I think the rhetoric sucks. I think half of Americans have had a loved one locked up. I just think that the rhetoric doesn't have to change if it was made smarter in order to be smarter though The policy would not have to shift towards tough on crime. It would have to shift towards evidence-based root cause thinking and Solutions that shift us towards something better than our shitty status quo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah And now it just feels like now let's embrace the status quo and bring it closer and closer and closer

but yeah, that's embrace the status quo and bring it closer and closer and closer. But yeah, that's such a, the whole time I'm like, wow. Like the thing that really makes you think a lot too is like we have so many people who are prosecutors that ascend in politics. And that's how like when Kentucky Brown Jackson was like the first public defender

who had sat on the Supreme Court. I was like, is that true? Oh my God. Oh writ large, the federal bench is largely prosecutors. I actually read, I wrote a really mean email today guys. Like my local representative who I love is like moving to run for the state, a different state office.

And he endorsed, it's a two candidate race. I live in a place with major housing issues. There's just not enough housing for people, costs of housing are too high. And one of the candidates is a housing organizer, a local housing organizer, and the other candidate is a prosecutor. Guess who got the endorsement?

He endorsed the fucking prosecutor. And I wrote him a note being like, come on, housing is the issue of our region. If you are gonna make prosecution, once again, a blind path to power, you at least have to justify why you are overlooking someone whose life work is in the zone we most need. And the thing that bugs me about it the most is that it tells young people. I mean, in my work, I work with public defenders all over the country, and I help them expand their practice and expand what they

can offer their clients. And I place a lot of new professionals, usually young people, into jobs in public defense. And as they start out their careers, I'm looking at how they think of their career trajectory. They're doing great things like, I'm going to learn all about how fucked up America's public systems are and I'm going to carry that knowledge into my own change making career. But to everybody else, the vast majority of young people, future lawyers who are not like these dedicated, brilliant advocates, they think, okay, I'll be a prosecutor for like two years and then I'll get my elected office. If I just incarcerate young black men and separate families and crush people's dreams

and lives and maybe cause a few deaths, then I could be a state senator. Right. I've been vetted. Right. And I've done the work. Right. It's- And we shouldn't make change-making power reliant on willingness to harm others. Yeah. All right. Sounds like we have a lot of work to do. Emily, Galvan, Almanso, what a pleasure having you on The Daily Zeitgeist. Where can people find you, follow you, support your work, and all that good stuff? Well, if they want to support expanding and improving public defense around the country,

really transforming what we mean by public defense and getting more help for poor people with housing and employment and benefits and transportation and all the things that people actually need, they can go to www.partnersforjustice.org where they can learn all about our work to support public defenders nationally. They can also catch us on Twitter at at pfj underscore USA or Instagram at partners for justice, or they can follow and I guess I should say and they can follow my much my spicy tweets at Galvan Almanza. It's just my last name. I do a weekly video on things that are awful in our legal system. So if people want to get that spike of outrage once a week, come on Twitter with me and I will give you a spike.

Yeah. But it's not just blind outrage. You also have solutions and ideas for things to do. I do. So I highly recommend. Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Okay. I'm going to be really nerdy guys.

There was a paper that came out a couple months ago from Vita B. Johnson, who is a lawyer and she wrote a paper called, Whom Do Prosecutors Protect? And I know that most lay people are not like, you know what I'm waiting for is the next hot law paper to drop and I'm gonna just dive into that bastard and roll around. But it's really good and it's really accessible and it details every single way in which the kind of problematic incentives we've been talking about, prosecution as a path to power

and the inter-reliance between prosecutors and police, are robbing ordinary Americans of their chance at justice. And it's a really good paper. Damn, that sounds good. Amazing. Miles, where can people find you? And what is the latest legal brief that you've been enjoying? Yeah, give me a second about the legal brief.

I found this one, the Pelican brief. Oh, hell yeah, man. It's crazy too, dude. You can find me at- I love pelicans. You can find me at miles of gray. They can hold more than their belly can. Is that, oh yeah, that actually makes sense.

Huh, huh. Thanks for that little factoid. I'm gonna take that to the, take that to the bar tonight. You can find me at milesagrey on Twitter and Instagram. You can find Jack and I on the basketball podcast, milesandjackgotmadboosties. You could also find me talking about 90 day fiance

on 420 day fiance. A tweet I like, oh man. So the, you know, libs of TikTok person, TikTok person Chaya Rachik tweeted out a few days ago it said I'm looking for parents anywhere in Ohio who have kids in public schools to be eyes and ears on the ground your identity will remain anonymous and protected please DM me if you fit this criteria Patton Oswalt quote tweeted this and saidaya, I am so glad you're doing this. There's a boy in our neighborhood, Elliot, a child of divorce, who we think is hiding an alien in his closet with the help of his siblings, Gertie and Michael.

Hitler with that ET. But yeah, that is one of my favorite tweets recently. Leave Ohio public schools alone, y'all. That's, I am a product of Ohio Public Schools. They do, they do fine work every once in a while. All right. Tweet I've been enjoying. Katie at skatie420 tweeted, they should call that guy Edgar Allen Poem, because

of all those poems he did. Similarly smart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great. And then Brandy Jensen tweeted, I love when an IT guy refers to my

laptop as your machine. That is kind of cool. You're making that sound so cool. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist. On Instagram, we have a Facebook fan page and website, dailyzeitgeist.com. We post our episodes and our footnotes.

Footnotes. We link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles, what song do you think people might enjoy? I stumbled across a producer by the name of Harrison and just going through some of their tracks and there's this one track that's really popular of his that's called Selfish High Heels. And it's with him, Young Bae and Macross 8299.

But the sound of it is like 80s, like Japanese city pop kind of stuff from the 80s But like a little bit more like modern and futuristic. It's kind of trippy. So I really enjoyed it So this is selfish high heels by Young Bae and Harrison. It also creates like the next Pixar movie about anthropomorphic shoes You know funky sneakers the selfish high heels Silly slippers. I don't know you you guys do the work The kind of high high tops like they smoke a little weed, you know

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