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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president, then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

Listen to who killed JFK on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting, so not celebrities and certainly not comedians. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, listen to Toss Show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a 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.

It 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 shereen? And James?

Hello, Mia.

Hello, Mia. That was great. I thought that was actually great. Keep them.

Yeah.

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, you know, very obvious reasons. Gaza is the place where most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's where most of the people are. The Israelis are killing the most people. But however comma, there's also been a bunch of killing going on in the West Bank. And 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, I will concede, but I think by the end of this, we'll see if I'm right.

I think you're right in the sense that the systems of apartheid are very clear in the West Bank versus other.

Parts of 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 occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure.

I don't know.

This is something that most of the people talking about this kind of just assume everyone knows. And I feel like we should not assume that, and we should 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 every podcast I've done, but I feel like people tune it out. You know what I mean? 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.

To hammer I'm going to hammer a copy of this into all of your brains. You have no choice.

You must martin Luther ring the history of Palestine.

Yeah. Going to nail 95 copies of the Geneva Convention onto 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 specifically was doing the Nakba, because it's not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays them as. But, yeah, a bunch of armed settlers armed by Stalin drive 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. They seize those homes, and 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, only because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet, because the knockba took place takes place 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 was ratified. It's two years before it comes into force. But 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.

And they've also massacred like 15 yeah.

They'Ve killed a shit ton of people. Yeah, I guess I should be more explicit about that when I say drive out. Sometimes it's people fleeing. A lot of times they're killed.

They flattened entire villages. You know what I mean? 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. 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.

Sorry. Just one tangent is there are so many videos of former IDF soldiers that were it's not IDF technically, but like former people that fought in the Necbah that drove these people out of their homes. And it's so repulsive there's, literally like it was on an Israeli news channel or like some type of Israeli show where there's an old man laughing about how him and his group raped a 16 year old girl and shot everyone in a row, all the babies, everything else. 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.

Yeah.

And this is something we're going to get into more in a bit, but one of the consequences of this and one of the consequences of running a settler colony like this is that the people that it produces who are the people who the people who are murdering people and taking their homes, right. The kind of person you have to be in order to do that is just absolutely terrifying. And this is why you see so much stuff both here and in the early phases of not even the early phases, but most of the phases of US. Settler expansion. Right. You read the accounts of these people, and 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 right, 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. You can look at what it's called the Indian Wars 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 a lot of the reason for this is it can get into this sort of realm of, I don't know, this almost weird tragedy, horror, porn stuff, but it was as bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. And the people doing that stuff are driven by the same kinds of stuff that's happening here.

The people doing that stuff are still, like there's a park named after them in San Diego. There's kit Carson Park. There's uniporocero park. It's baked into American culture. Still, the genociders are fucking celebrated.

This is this is also true of so after after the Nakba, there's a lot of people who think that this is the end of the whole process, right? That, okay, so we've expelled these people. We've killed these people. There's now a Jewish state. It has relatively stable borders or whatever. This is going to be the end of it. And that did not happen. And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the 1967 Six Days War, where Israel launches what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt.

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 and 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 soldiers in a bunch of trenches, and 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, the error powers outside of Egypt for some of the time really were not taking this very seriously. The consequence of this is that most of the 67 War is I mean, the entirety of the 67 war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out of the Egyptians, in large part because the Egyptians weren't actually trying to fight a war.

So they were basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now, this war is a complete disaster for the Arab powers. Gamma Abdul 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 really royally. Kind of like his position was that eventually they're going to attack us. We'll have a defensive position and failed.

Miserably at having yeah, it did not work. This is a complete know. 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 Gullan 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 a consequence of enormously expanding the already 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 Reagan?

I surprise reagan.

Yeah.

And we are back. So one of the things that the Geneva Convention establishes is the set of legal obligations that Occupiers have over territory that they occupy. So the way this is supposed to work under international law is that 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 laws. And this was done after World War II to protect 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. 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 disagrees the right word. I have very little faith in international law. I know a lot of people who have been involved in the struggle for liberating Palestine for a very long time take international law very seriously.

I don't mean Israel has not followed international law.

Yeah.

Nothing happens where's the international police it's.

Like there's no weight to it. I don't believe what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.

Maybe it has a moral value. Right. I guess that's the idea behind some of the activism is that it can help position something as being in the wrong and then that might impel someone to act. But yeah, it hasn't fucking worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop the Rihingya genocide in Myanmar. It hasn't stopped the population exchange in Afreen. It's pretend it doesn't exist unless someone enforces.

Doesn'T.

I feel like sometimes it's a totem for Western liberals to be like, oh, well, they can't do that. They're breaking international law. Oh, fuck, they're doing it anyway.

And.

Then they just keep doing it.

Yeah. And understandably, no one particularly wants to be the ones who enforce international law because that involves your children dying and so they let other children die instead.

Yeah. The consequence of this being really toothless is that it's the language that this stuff is framed in. And 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. Because what this article of the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop is an army showing up, killing a bunch of people, and then settling their own population on top of those people's corpses. And that is fucking horrifying. Obviously. Yeah. There's a reason why the Geneva Convention was like, holy shit, we can't have this. But obviously this hasn't actually stopped this from happening. We now live in, effectively, the new golden age of ethnic cleansing, right? I mean, the 1.2 million Gazans who fled their homes after the Israelis literally told them to flee or die, which is 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? This isn't an evacuation order from like a tsunami, right? 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.

Of course, the other bleak side of this, right, is that with the quote, unquote, evacuation order, the Israelis killed the people who were fleeing anyways and they.

Had nowhere to fucking go.

Yeah. They're trapped, right?

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?

Evacuation, that's like, threat. Like it's just a death threat.

Yeah. If I was to 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 going to yeet this grenade in here in 5 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 Kunzis.

This is what's been happening in Gaza, right? You have 1.2 million Gazans who fled their homes and they've joined the 120,000 Armenians who were ethnically cleansed from the Garu Karabak by Azerbaijan in September, which the era we are living in right now is an unfathomable era of violence and ethnic cleansing, right? None of the international legal frameworks did shit. The none of the never again stuff. You can ethnically cleanse the Armenians again and nothing will fucking happen.

The Rahinian in Myanmar, we didn't do shit.

Yeah. Right now, we are averaging one 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 dehumanized. You know what mean? Like, that's the thing that's like, oh, people are used to seeing this group of people suffer. They're used to seeing this kind of population just always die and be, I don't know, bombed and stuff. So I think a lot of people just kind of gloss over it because they're just like, oh, this is what happens to them, and keeps happening.

Yeah. It's certainly not a coincidence that there have been other ethnic cleansings, right, in Africa, like I said, the Rohingya Muslims. But when it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world or where we want to say it, it's not 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 Mia 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 very bleak on the media at the.

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 the fucking moment they took the West Bank. This is what they were doing. And again, this one never ended, really.

It was, like, quiet mostly. For a while, people ignored it, but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening.

Yeah. I think the oh, God, what am I blanking on? The continuous naqba thing is the way that it's understood well is what's called in Palestine in sort of settler colonial studies, the line that people always say is that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It's not a thing that just ends. Right? It just is it is the air that you breathe. It's the 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 67 happens, this is actually it's kind of a turning point in the sense that there are groups of liberals who had supported the Israelis in 48 who were like, Whoa, hold on, hold on. This is actually really stunningly illegal. And this doesn't do anything. But there's a lot of people who make a distinction between Israel in 48 and this Israel, because this Israel the mask is off. There's nothing there anymore. Right. It's just we have seized this land by military force, by attacking a country who we were not at war with. And we are now systematically replacing the population of these places with our population. And the consequence of this, this is Israel settler population. The consequence of this is that there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers because these people, in theory, aren't supposed to be there, but there's something like 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 were on the absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession, of killing people and taking their stuff.

Settlers is almost a misnomer because sometimes I think that constructs a notion of unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right. These people are violently colonizing someone else's land.

Yeah. Which was also true of the American yes, very much.

We should write here or Pioneers ain't pioneer shit. People live there for tens of thousands of years.

Yeah, they were pioneers. Yeah. But the way that the state thinks about its own geography is in the terms of these frontiers, sometimes they call them buffer areas. And they think about these things as these areas of projection of military control and a projection of sort of their power and also sort of settler power. This is what the sort of settler populations, the West Bank are the front line of now, these people are subsidized by the Israeli government. If you go to these places, you get tax breaks. There's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies for these people. They also get very and this is the thing that I think is really interesting that isn't discussed very much. The Israeli 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. And this acts as part of the sort of incentive package to get people to move into these settler these these people reap other benefits, too. Right. They have an enormous degree of military protection. And this is one of the things that shreen, you talked about this, right?

If you're trying to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli army when Promas attacked, well, the answer is they were all in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers steal land.

Right.

Settlers terrorizing Palestinians. And that happens all the time. But just so happened to happen on this very large scale attack.

And the level of violence that's happening mean we're going to talk about the more direct settler violence. These are people who have set multiple babies on fire. They have set multiple children on fire. This is the kind of people who you are dealing with when you're talking about especially. Okay, so 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. 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 those are the ones with better government services. They get roads and build out to them. But there are kinds of violence here that there's, I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff. Like one of the sort of benefits you get of living in the West Bank is like, the Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West Bank's fucking water supply to fill these people's swimming pools. And this is water that know, the thing that had been used for for a very long time is people in the West Bank doing agriculture.

But that's becoming growing olives, and it's becoming increasingly fucking impossible because the Israelis are diverting their fucking water and then also lighting, and then the government diverts all the water away and then the settlers light the fucking olive trees on. Actually, and this is weirdly, a thing that almost exactly the same pattern as stuff that Turkey has done to the basically every every ethnic minority.

Russia does it to its Kalmic people. The story I hear so often at the border when talking to people in any number of languages, 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. Across Africa, sadly, even within yeah, like you say, it's genocide by dictat. Or it's an ethnic cleansing that doesn't look so bad on TV because it happens a little bit slower. But it's a way to remove people. And you can look at drone pictures of the West Bank and you can see these little fucking green lollipops, the road and then the settlement, right? And people have trees and shit. It's wild. Yeah.

I think the unique part about 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 this was but the whole essence of Zionism is the idea that there's a group of people that are meant for this land, and I just find the olive tree burning the best example of how that's just like such 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 native plant that's been there for thousands of years, that's been the source of all the economy for Palestinians, all this stuff. I think it's just the most clear example that Zionism is not about any kind of connection at all. It's just about power and land, and not land in the sense of 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, I think the fundamental thing at play here, and this is sort of one of the fundamental tenets of settler colonialism, is that these people see land as a commodity. Right. 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. The more square miles you could bring under your where you have a monopoly on legitimate use of violence, the more important you are as a state. This is the 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, because it is really hard to take your sort of liberal humanitarian stance on Israel has the right to protect itself, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then here are these yahoos in the hills lighting children on mean. This is the thing where even very reliably pro Israel groups like the Council on Florida and Relations are like, whoa, Nelly, these guys are messed 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, you know, the level of violence is going to ramp up all this stuff. None of the stuff that's happening now, I guess this is one of those things is like, everything is impossible until it happens, or whatever. But all of the stuff that's happening is if you just spend any time looking at what was happening in the nothing that's happening now is particularly surprising. Now, what's very interesting about the settlers, though, is that, okay, so when the Council of Formulations council of Formulations went in and was like, okay, so what is with these people?

Right? They assumed initially that, okay, so they're taking a sort of liberal pros. They're like, okay, well, these settlers must be responding to Palestinian violence. And no, it turns out actually, not only are these attacks not retaliatory right? It's not that 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 two thousand s and the two thousand and ten s, and this is the period, if you know anything about the second, it defaulted. This is the period. Where Palestinians doing armed struggle in all of the different forms is tapering off and this leaves people kind of confused as to what the fuck is happening here. Okay, so we can ask what is actually driving the violence of these sort of settler expansions? And the thing most people focus on is ideology and to some extent religion because a huge number, although it should be mentioned, okay, so a lot of settlers are religious Zionists who are people. A lot of these are there's like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about a bit later who are specifically Orthodox Jews.

But there's a lot of right wing religious Zionists of various stripes. Their, their thing is that they believe that they have a God given right to take whatever land they want in what they call, quote, Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank. And they believe that they just have the right to take this land and if anyone tries to stop them, they will kill them or drive them from their homes. And it's true that these people exist, right? And these people obviously, and we're going to get into this more in a second, like, these people have had a profound influence on Israeli politics. But on the other hand, 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 ideology is it can't explain why really. I mean, there's a kind of like a breakwater event where there used to be settlers in Gaza too, 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 leads to the sort of settler violent turn was they were like, well, okay, so if the Israeli government isn't going to like, if the Israeli government one time will stop illegal settlements from happening. We need to make sure that we are violent enough that they'll never try to get rid of another settlement again. And that kind of explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all of it. Actually, before I launch into this, I should ask what were you going to say?

Sorry. No, it's okay. I just wanted to make a really important distinction that Zionism is not a religion per se and it's a political ideology, right? Like you can be Christian and Zionist, you can be Jewish and Zionist. I've had multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show and I feel like they're very important in the fight for Palestinian liberation. But I think that's a really important distinction because Zionism is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion, the late 18 hundreds 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 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 Zionism, most Zionists when Israel was formed were secular. 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 stuff that started happening really in the 80s. So this is like 40 years old, right? Like billions of people on earth are older than this kind of religious Zionism. Yeah. And so the kind of transition from more secular forms of Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism, this is one of the things the claim that this is the driving thing, this is what you'll get a lot from. Council of Form Relations people and sort of like and it's kind of true to some extent, but comma there's also something else going on here and that is the Israeli housing market.

All right?

I swear this is connected, but we need to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market. All right? We've talked about how, again, the rise in cellular violence is something that it starts in the late two thousand s and accelerates to the has reached a fever pitch now with like in the past month they've killed 130 people in the West Bank.

Okay?

So what actually also was happening in that time and the answer to that question is that between 2008 and 2010 alone and this is very weird because again, think it think about the time period that we're in, this 2008 to 2010. This is like right after 2008 financial collapse, there is a 35% increase in housing prices in Israel. This is nuts, right? Everywhere else in the entire world, the price of housing is tanking. In Israel. It is Skyrocketed.

Okay?

The price of housing is increasing. The the rate at which the price of housing is also increasing, it's skyrocketing through the entire two thousand and ten s. And then the rate of increase in the 2010s looks like a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in the these increases coincide with, guess what? The massive increases in cellular violence. Now, this is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that sometimes, every once in a while you will get someone will just, I don't know, some council formulations 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? This is too loose. And the correlation here isn't it's not quite that simple. But comma, this is legitimately. One of the things that's been driving Israeli settler violence and sort of the expansion of 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?

A 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 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? But 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. But on the other hand, if you want a house because you are, say, a real estate firm or a land speculator or 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 it's something I've talked about a lot on this show. And since really the 90s when Japan figured this out, housing has been like the speculative asset par excellence. 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. But the problem is that this creates these massive housing bubbles that makes housing and rents increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by addressing a dual nature of the commodity and transforming your economy in such a way that houses are not commodities and thus is a use value and is a place to live and not like a financial asset. But nobody's going to do that, right? Because that requires a systemic transformation of your this requires you to abolish capitalism, right? So instead of doing this right, the other thing you can do when housing prices are really high is you can go kill someone and take their land. This is a very old American sort of colonial. I think this is where it's from. But yeah, 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. Because the cheapest land is land that's paid with someone else's blood. Yeah. Now, I'm going to read from a little bit from a very, very I really recommend people actually read this because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I'm going to read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence reflections on a Visit to the West Bank written by David Graber. This is from 2015. But this is one of the things about the occupation is that 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 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 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. Find a place in an illegal settlement 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 this is actually kind of reversing now just because of how far right and how the spread of sort 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 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 warned 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 semifascist 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 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 Adapt here. Thanks for joining us. See you tomorrow.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcast called Tosh Show, brought to you by Iheart Podcast. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to. Instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text, I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting. So not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling. But mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you, but it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid forty s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olsteen and Lance Bass. Those are words I'd hope I'd never have to say. Listen to Toss show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome. Dick had happened 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 land are you taking here?

Right?

The answer here is it's a lot of and you know, 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, if you're dealing with a population that doesn't have the means to support themselves except for these, like, work passes that they bestow upon the Benighted population, it makes it incredibly hard for there to be any sort of resistance movement. And the other thing that David Gray was pointing out, that he was, I think, ahead of the curve on in a lot of ways is, I mean, this has been happening for a long time, but the, like, electoral left is just gone. Israeli labor, which is like Israeli Labor is the party that built Israel, right? It was Israeli Labor guys who pulled together the entire Zionist coalition and turned them into the engine that could actually win the war in 48.

Labor was outperformed by fucking Hadash in the most recent election. This has happened several times now. Hadash is an alliance of the Israeli communists and left Arab nationalists. When I say they do better, it's not to say that Hadash is doing well, but they're both pulling at, like, 4%. Right? And Israeli Labor, again, has ruled Israel for a very significant part of its history. They are now nothing. Right. There's 4% of the vote. They have the same amount of vote as the oldest, as the Israeli. And specifically, I should mention, this is the anti occupation communists. This is another one of the sort of dynamics of settlerism that is universally true, right? It's not just Israel where a bunch of people who are anomaly leftists, a bunch of people who fought in their own liberation struggles get turned into just, like, absolutely fanatical right wingers. There are an enormous number of united Irishmen rebels from the rebellion of 1878 in Ireland who go to the US. And a bunch of these people wind up in the American army, and a bunch of these people wind up like I mean, I guess it's technically not the Indian Wars, but 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 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, there's a lot of European socialists who come to the US. And see all of this land and they go, oh, shit, we can solve the problems of the old world by just taking this land.

Yeah. Having our little utopian socialist settlements. Was it Owens or Jones or someone? They had these Quaker utopian sort of settlement towns in someone else's land.

Yeah, well, that's one of the ways this happens. There are other ways this happens too, where it's just people it's not even always utopian communities, okay? There are people who come over from the 1848 revolutions who, like August von Willich is probably the most famous one. He's a communist who ends up fighting for the Union and then notably not fighting in the Indian Wars. You know, a lot of these people, they come to the US. And they're like, okay, well, so the fundamental contradiction to capitalism or whatever is that people are forced to become, 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 against the abolition of slavery because they're like, oh, well, if you free the slaves, these people are going to compete with us for wage labor. So either they're pro slavery or they're like slavery. Ending slavery is a thing that can only happen with the end of capitalism. So we don't care about or. And this is a very common thing that this is, I think, much closer to the Israeli dynamic is these people become convinced that the problem with Europe, right, is that Europe is entirely ruled by either feudalist or feudal barons or capitalists, right?

So there's no way for someone to make themselves in the world, right? There's no way for them to be independent of the capitalist class. But in the US. There is, because all you have to do know, instead of being part of the industrial proletariat or whatever and getting crushed by the Buddha capital, you can just go become a settler farmer and this is one of the defining ideologies of the US. Like, Abraham Lincoln talks about this. The thing that makes the US. Different from Europe is that, yeah, you can go be a settler and you can get your own land. And this is something you can also trace back to the foundation of Israel. Israel was know there are right wing Zionists, right? But it's also created by liberal socialist communists, and even anarchists who'd fought in the Spanish Civil War, who go to Israel, become Zionists, are armed by Stalin, and these people create these are the people who do the Nakpa.

Yeah, lots of people were also there were Jewish, I guess socialists is probably the best term for them who had come to fight in Spain and then returned to Israel. People interested. Ranan Rain has done a really good paper about some Jewish people in International Brigades. Not all of them turned out to do the Nakba, to be clear. Yes, some of them were 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, like, pointing at it in 1935 and going bad and America going, Nadog, 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 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. Everything that every sort of 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 pursuing what most of us would agree as a moral good throughout their lives.

Yeah. Being consistently moral fucking sucks.

Will leave you behind.

Yeah. That is a fucking awful time to do that. Yeah. 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 has these labs of consciousness that produce certain kinds of right wing politics and mentalities 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 know, if you were invested in the peace, 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 transhistorically, right. This is a dynamic you see in American history, too. The US signs, like, hundreds of treaties with just incredible numbers of indigenous nations. And do you know how many of those treaties they end up upholding?

Yeah. That's none.

Yeah. 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 yeah.

Or they'll go previous to that and cite the fucking doctrine of discovery or the treaty of sort of yeah, good old Ruth Bader Ginsburg liberal hero.

Yeah. And so you can look at this from sort of two perspectives, right? You can look at this from the perspective of the state and you can look at it from the perspective of the settlers. I think there's a third view that kind of sees them both as an extension of the same thing, which is what we're going to sort of come to. But you can look at this treaty stuff and you can look at the fact that both the settlers and the Israeli government signed the Oslo Accords fully intending to do more settlements. Right? And this is something that the Palestinians are watching, right? Like, if you're a like, you are watching these peace accords get signed and then you are watching the Israelis fucking bulldozing your house.

Yeah.

And this is a thing in the US too, right? It's like everyone who signs a treaty, all of the nations that sign treaties get a watch as the US is like, oh, well, actually, no, we never had any intention of fulfilling this. No, we're just going to keep exterminating you and chasing the sort of shattered remnants of your tribes literally across the entire fucking continent. So you can look at this from the perspective of the state and dealing with the American state. It is well known by every nation and every race that has ever had to deal with them that the white man is duplicitous and his state is built on lies.

And that is only kind of a joke.

Everyone who fucking deals with the Americans is like, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Do these people not understand what an agreement is?

Yeah. This is something that if you travel a lot abroad 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? Why did they treat us like this? We fucking did everything you asked and then you fucking abandoned us or killed us. Of course, Brin does it too. I'm not saying, like, america's spec, but fuck me, america in the last 200 years has really set a new precedent for just, like, 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 and settler colonies always bends towards injustice in general. And in particular, the thing it always bends towards land seizures. It seeks to expand its base of power, its territorial basing, 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 in the US. The human manifestation of this is Andrew Jackson, who is a man who completely illegally, on multiple occasions, just like, conquered, you know, conquered Florida, specifically. And this is one of a couple of things. I have a very good friend who talks about this a lot because they've been studying this period immensely. You're probably not listening, but love you. Yeah, but talks about this a lot, which is that Andrew Jackson is a big part of the reason why he's going into Florida is specifically because he wants to smash these indigenous, black, indigenous, allied Baroon communities there.

So Jackson is under orders not to invade Florida. He invades Florida anyways. There's a very similar sort of tension between the courts and the courts in the settler state that you have with the sort of international community in Israel now, where the courts are like Andrew Jackson, you cannot do the Trail of Tears. And Andrew Jackson is just like, fuck you, we're doing the Trail of Tears. We're going to do a 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 colonialism. Now, and one of the things that I think is interesting about this is that there are all of the settler states, right? You see this in every single one. I'm going to talk about the US. Because that's the one that other than Israel that I know the best well, I know probably know the US. Better than Israel. But there are always times when the federal government tries to crack down on settlers, right? This happens repeatedly. And this is the thing even 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 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, they wouldn't have been able to. Maybe they could have delayed it by 20 years. But no, no one has ever really been able to stop these people. And the IDF. We. Talked about this a bit earlier, right? The IDF in 2005 did pull like when they pulled out of Gaza, they dragged like 8600 settlers with them. But again, this is the dynamic that's incredibly familiar to anyone who studied the history of settlers in the US. Is that government attempts to control settler expansion inevitably fail when confronted with these unstoppable 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 is Andrew Jackson. And this is, you know, when he starts taking power, when he starts getting power in the army, you get the conquest of Florida.

And when he becomes president, you have the trail of Israel. This is this is represented by Israel's Overtly, Genocidal finance Minister Betsyl Smotrech, who represents the Religious Zionist Party. And I'll give you all three guesses what those guys believe. If your guesses are they are unhinged settler racist and like turbo homophobes, you're right on the money.

He's also a conspiracy theorist.

Yeah.

This guy is unhinged.

They're very open with their genocidal.

Yeah.

Wants there's no subtlety. They're just like, let's flatten Gaza, let's kill them all. You know what I mean? It's just like 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 Zionist neoliberals to be one of the most frustrating. A, you can support what the fuck you want. Like you don't need a condescending fucking resist mom in a minivan to tell you what you can and can't believe. And B, go look up some of this guy's statements because fucking, you ain't going to find anyone who's more genocidal towards queer people openly than this motherfucker.

I mean, Israel is very well known for 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?

I think that argument is a very privileged elitist.

Yeah. Just like ha ha. Homophobia exists there. 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. When you've been outflanked to the left by Utah, you've done fucked up. You don't get to wave your pride flag at anyone. Fuck off.

This is one of the sort of progressive veneer of the Israelis has like fading because the people who are coming to power and netanyahu in some ways was one of the sort of vanguards this. But this is the thing you're seeing in India too, right? Whenever you get a far right guy, right? The thing that inevitably generates is people who are even further right than they are and that's what these settler people are. And the thing is, these settler guys, you can't cover for them if they are on camera for longer than about 30 seconds. They start saying stuff like just the most unhinged, like we're going to kill all the Palestinians. They start saying we're going to kill every Arab. They start talking about and very explicitly their platforms. Part of the reason there is a coalition of these far right Settler parties that are now backing Netanyahu, and this is how Netanyahu has been able to stay out of prison, is that he's been able to buy off enough of these people that they're backing his government so he can stay Prime Minister, so they can't charge him. But the concession, basically, for this was that this guy was just basically just given control of a bunch of state military power from the army in the West Bank that's been given to him and his settler.

Like, especially since the Hamas attack, the government has been handing out guns to these people like candy, and they've been using it to just murder Palestinians and cold blood and a thing, as people do a lot, right, sometimes they just kill people. Thing they do all the time is just in the middle of the night, if you're living in the West Bank, a bunch of mask guys will show up, they'll break into your home, they'll beat the shit out of you and they'll say, if you don't leave tomorrow, we'll kill. You know, sometimes those guys are just 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 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 are the people that increasingly the Israeli political system is being run by in a similar way, the way that Andrew Jackson just rips off this mask of sort of like New England gentility that the US had had under John Quincy Adams.

And Monroe, well Monroe is I guess Monroe is another one of these dignified Virginia planter, know, and those people have do a lot of the same violence that Jackson does. But Jackson is the guy who just rips the mask off and is know, this completely unhinged settler maniac who is the guy who killed, just murdered a bunch of people in and these are the kind of people who are coming to power in Israel right now. And this is a self reinforcing dynamic, because the more power these people get, right, the more they're able know, just carry out genocides. And the more genocides they're able to carry out, 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, like going into 2023 and Israel put into power a bunch of these right wing people. Was it 2023? Was 2022. I'm losing track of time.

He came in last. Yeah, I think he was appointed minister in 2022.

Okay, sorry, the election not real.

Yeah, I don't remember when the election.

My point is that, like, in recent history, the last couple of years, these extreme right wing racist people are in power. All the places of power, all the ministers, all the whatever the shit, they all share this ideology that Arabs must die. Basically, that's like the main point is that they are superior to Arabs and that they must die and that this is a die in this place that is theirs.

And what these people are doing when they're in power and this is the thing that one of the things they were trying to do before the current war started was they were trying to annex the West Bank. This is a very explicit goal. Now, this is a very explicit goal of the settler parties. They know it's pretty hard for them to legally annex it, so they will talk about effectively annexing it and stuff. They'll do these sort of subtle metaphors. But yeah, what they want to do is to kick people out of what's called Area C, which is just the majority of the West Bank, and they want to kick all the immediate plans. They want to kick all the people out of Area C and push them into just like increasingly tiny corners of the West Bank. And presumably because again, if you've listened to a lot of these people talk right, they talk about like, jews have the right to live in Judea and.

Yeah, yeah, what they call the yeah.

Yeah, they have a 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 places people had stopped was like, well, okay, they can live in Gaza, but now they're talking mean just like taking over most of just taking over most of Gaza and driving the.

Lead. Like, Jews have a right to live in this place doesn't have to lead to thus we must genocide the people who live that. This is what happens when we get a state that understands existence as destroying anybody who is not in agreement with its right wing, genocidal fucking outlook. It has been possible for people of different faiths to live in different places.

But it was possible before 48.

Yeah, exactly. The ideology that is inherent to 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.

It's the narrative that they need to say stuff like, oh, all the gazins 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 yeah, it doesn't even have to.

Be like it's not like an explicit plan that they have a whiteboard and they're like.

They do actually occasionally just write it out. Sometimes they do actually explicitly write the plan.

You can see 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. It's inevitable. It happened here, it's happening there. It's happened all over the world. 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. 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 guess the US. Didn't have the kind of surveillance technology in the 18 teens that the Israelis have now. But we did all this shit too, right? This is all of the land that we live. That's that's where that shit came. Great. I really love Daniel Kahn. The Painted Bird has this great line in one of his songs that goes because he's the one who did the stealing and named you as the heir whose filthiness provided you the privileges you bear. And this is this thing in the know. If you're a settler on the border, right, there's no escape from what you did to take this place, right? You are looking down on the people whose houses you've taken. Right. In the US, we have this sort of luxury of like, well, this happened a long time ago. We don't have to see the consequences of it.

We still do it like 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.

Yeah, I think you're right.

Yeah.

But it's so much easier for Americans to pretend that it's not. No, it turns out, in fact.

And.

This is where the sort of sub colonialism, the structure not an event stuff comes from, and it applies to both Israel and the US. Because guess what?

Turns out Israel literally took notes for what the US. Did and just did it.

You know what mean?

Like, it's just the same thing in the end, we're the bad guys. We've always been the bad guys.

Are we the bad guys?

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. That war the war in China sees some of the darkest moments in human history, and there's this tendency.

Know, 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, like, 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 we, as in Chinese people, we didn't do that. Right? 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, you know, we didn't do that was that was the Americans. That wasn't like us in China. But the things that I'm talking about that the Chinese side of that war did that were just mean. I think the best example of it is 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 the low end estimates, is that he killed 400,000 people. That is an amount of death that is unimaginable. He killed, like, in a single act, he killed 400,000 people. It is two hiroshima and Nagasakis. And that's the low end estimate, right? People fighting against Japan, people fighting against colonialism did unforgivable crimes. And the people of China never forget to this day, in the provinces where this shit happened, chen Kaichai Chek is fucking despised. When the Allies won the war, and when China drove out the Japanese, right, the next thing they did was they drove out, know, because because he had done things in that war that were so terrible that people were willing to be like, fuck it, mao didn't fucking blow up a dam and kill 400,000 of us, right? This is the thing about colonial resistance, is that 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, again, China's anticolonial freedom fighters, right, like, fucking killed numbers of Chinese people that are it's just unimaginable. And then these same freedom fighters who fought the good fight against Japan, within 20 years, they're bulldozing MoS in Xinjiang and murdering communists in Tibet, right? And they've built two. After successfully repelling Japan's attempt to turn China into a settler state, they have made two of their no, I think the point that I'm trying to make here is that anti colonial resistance is not this sort of, like, it doesn't look pretty. It's a fucking whore most of the time. But 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 in which direction is colonization moving, right? Like, who is taking whose houses? Right? Who is forcing a million people from what population to flee their homes? Who has been seizing people's land? And I think it clears up.

I don't know.

Clears up isn't the right word. But specifically the fact that this is active colonization, that this is a set of colonial state waging a war against people who are fighting against colonization. That is the underlying courage of everything that happens. I don't know. People in anticolonial wars do things that are unforgivable, and they get and often their own people will eventually come for them one day. And also I don't know.

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 I don't care how it started or whatever. I feel like at this point in time, it's a genocide. Palestine is not a country. Palestine does not have an army. No one can leave Gaza. I think that is the current state of what the violence is going on over there. And so maybe I'm just particular.

No, I think you're right about that. And that's the thing that's different than the stuff that was happening in China was like, at least we sort of had like, at least we had a state, right? And we had armies, and our armies got fucking stomped.

But.

We had actual weapons.

Yeah. I must have some now. But I think to your greater yeah, it sounds very similar to have you read Sartre's introduction to the 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. It sparks violent decolonization movements. It doesn't imply, like, a moral goodness to the individual acts. It's just an inevitable consequence of people fighting against colonialism in the only way that colonialism kind of leaves for them, I guess.

Yeah.

And I think another part of this, too, is that just being in contact with colonial powers makes everyone worse. This is the thing you see in the US. With a lot of indigenous groups. By the time the trail of Cheers is happening, the Cherokee have adopted chattel slavery, like American style plantation chattel slavery. And that fucking sucks, right? Being in contact with these settler empires brings out the worst in everyone, and there's no winning from that position, right? I don't even know if it's the best case scenario. I guess occasionally you get like an Algeria where 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 these I don't know, it's one of the sort of dilemmas of how do you deal with a.

Settler colony is that it's harder to decolonize settler colony, right? It implies a removal of one people or another people, and neither of those things are in any way desirable. And it's so hard to see a path to a peaceful coexistence now because all we see is the entire world ratcheting the fucking violence level up. And Israel carrying out genocidal violence in Gaza is not the way we reach a way for people to children to grow up without fucking fearing if the sky is going to kill them in Gaza, right? This will happen for generations to come because you've emotionally scarred the field of children.

Well, how would you I think it's a very human response, if anything. I don't think we have the right to judge how someone that has been through that hell how they respond, because 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.

Like the fucking Krassenstein. Take that. Why can't they all disorganize to arch in the war, holding hands and singing Kumbaya? I tried to do that, but people kept killing them. I say this every time we talk about Gaza, but I 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'd do these sleepover camps in the summertime, and he was explaining to me like it was the most normal thing in the world. These six, eight year old children would wake up at night with night terror screaming because they thought they were being bombed, because they were having a flashback from being bombed, I guess. And that's something I recognize from PTSD from other contexts, but it really fucked me up that an eight year old child is like, we can't expect these people to develop into Kambaya singing peace activists. They've taken on massive amounts of trauma. They've seen their 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 something that I think a lot of us are so far detached from that I think if you live your whole life in the United States of relative safety and prosperity, it's hard for you to understand, I think.

Yeah.

And I mean, Gaza is a place where it rains body parts. That's what happens when an Israeli bomb goes off. It rains body parts.

And that is a I don't know.

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 wards 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 get on. Things like that change you, but you continue with your life. But if you are never home and your home is never safe, that's something I can't understand, right? That's something that I haven't experienced and very few of us probably have.

A lot of doctors have said that all the children in Gaza, they can't be quantified of having experienced PTSD because they haven't reached the post part yet. They're like in perpetual state of PTSD because that's just how their entire lives have been. Most of them have never known life.

Outside of the blockade. So I don't know.

Yeah, and I mean, I think I think that's a good place to end of just this is what the reality and the eternal present of. And you know, this is one of these things where in a lot of weird ways, there are ways in which we people if you live in the, like, even to some, like, you are probably in maybe a better position to actually stop this than anyone who lives in Palestine is. And the problem is, if we don't right, the mutually self reinforcing dynamics of settler colonialism are just going to keep carrying on and keep spiraling on and this is going to go on until everyone is dead or everyone is gone.

Yeah. Even if you can't stop it. Like, I sent the video, I'm sure you guys saw the video of the Jewish Voice of Peace people in the Grand Central Terminal in New York, and I sent that to the Palestinian Journalist Syndicate and they were like, oh, this is great to see. And it was something we spoke about in that interview, too, how it makes a meaningful difference to someone's state of mind to see solidarity. Even if we can get in the streets and we can say something and maybe that will make a difference, maybe it won't, but 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, when 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 as ethnic cleansings go, this one's got more coverage than most in the US. And I would encourage you to look at what you're seeing in Gaza and understand how inhuman and unavangeable it is and maybe follow that that shouldn't happen anywhere. It shouldn't happen in Tigray and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan, it shouldn't happen to the yeah, try and extend that. It's not to scold people. Like, if you weren't in the streets in 2017, fuck you. It's just to say that we've all had a window opened, even with every fucking attempt to shut that window. Right. Like, but cutting off the Internet to Gaza, et cetera, this has been the most photographed, ethnic cleansing, whatever you want to call it, 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 would encourage people to remember this moment and the shock and the terrible things that you felt and to not forget that next time you hear about something happening, because anywhere this happens, it's a tragedy, and anywhere it happens, we can do everything we can to stop it.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show, brought to you by Iheart Podcast. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to. Instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text, I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting. So not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think this isn't the one for you, but it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid forty s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olstein and Lance Bask. Those are words I'd hope I'd never have to say. Listen to toss show on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

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My name is Payne Lindsay, and just like pretty much everyone else on the internet, I make podcasts. Throughout my career, I've had the chance to travel all over the place investigating true crimes, researching the unexplained. I've been able to meet some of the most truly interesting people, and I've decided to sit down with them and pick their brains. We're going to talk about life, death, unsolved crimes.

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This is talking to death. New episodes of Talking to Death are available now. Listen 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. Doing my best out here in.

Is. 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 mean, I guess it's always leather weather, depending on your level of commitment. But I am a woos, and I tend to wait for the weather to tell me when it's time to break out my leather.

Hell yeah. I feel like all things are fine. Personally, you should just assume listeners that I am always head to toe leather.

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He looks resplendent.

Yeah.

Kim, you are a labor journalist. You published a book, what was it last year, year before last called Fight, like, 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 it's the kind of thing people on the left have dreamed about for years as like, this is 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. 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 know. You got to believe in it first, which is all of this is wrong. But the good news is there's an actual plan that is cohesive and potentially achievable for a general strike that's been put forward by someone who knows what he's talking about. We're going to talk about that first. Kim, do you want to talk about why trying to get everyone on Twitter to launch a general strike in eight days is a bad idea?

This is such a 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, are you taking part of the general strike? Are you striking on Friday or like, tomorrow? No.

What?

You're not even in a union. What are you talking about? And it's like, I love the energy, I love the vibe. I love the idea of a general strike. I think it would be incredible if we actually pulled it off. But the biggest thing in there is the if followed by the pulled it off part. And one of the biggest misconceptions, I think, is that a general strike is akin to a big protest. Like you can absolutely plan a big protest in a few days if you really want to. I mean, look at the incredible work that Jewish Force for Peace has been doing in New York and other places they're 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. It would be sick if we could kind of meld those movements, like the 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 dialog, maybe even some fruitful discourse to get on the same page. 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 four 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, 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 families and so the idea that 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 again, we're about to talk about an achievable plan for a general strike. But one of the reasons why you can't pull it off in a couple of days is that you have to have some sort of plan for how you're going to take care of the people striking, right, so they don't starve and shit.

Yeah, that is 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 broken down contract negotiations or part of the lifecycle of a union contract, you have legal protections. You can't just be fired. If you take part in one of these kind of impromptu hashtag general strike actions, your boss is just going to fire you and then you're done. You don't have any protections. There 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 logic. 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, they're 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 like just part and parcel of the push and pull of leverage that workers have against the boss. And it's like a centuries old system. Like there's laws, there's protections, there's a lot that goes into it. And I think like we 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.

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 why we're doing this, which is that so there's this fella who so far seems like a pretty head, screwed on, straight, solid dude, Sean Fein, who is big Sean. Yeah. Big sean. And he's the head of the UAW, right. Or he's like the guy negotiating for the UAW now.

He's the president.

Yeah. The know, the UAW is one of the big largest of the auto worker related unions. And they have been in a strike, I think primarily General Motors.

It's the big three, general Motors, Ford, and Stellanis, 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 giving workers raises that's in line with the union. They are scared and it looks like they haven't inked anything yet. But as of us recording this, it looks like they've won on a lot, which is great. And Sean is is not just a union 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 date, the 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're going to talk about why, but I think that's a workable plan, potentially.

It really 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 forgotten that stopped a government shutdown.

Yeah. So 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 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 Shannon's 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 that 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 and you both went on strike at the same time, that's legal. And 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 air traffic controllers, the Longshoremen, all of these incredibly important infrastructure wise jobs happened to go on strike at the same time. That would shut down the whole fucking country. And it would be legal, which is so fun.

You love to see it.

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 impossible for you to continue legally, well, then you've got that critical mass behind you and potentially, probably radicalized.

Right. And you have resources and you have infrastructure because big unions have big strike funds.

Yes.

This is the thing. The 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. So why you pay dues, right?

Yeah.

It's literally like strike insurance. And a lot of the beginnings have this set up. They have comms teams, they have legal teams. They have experience. I know as radicals, 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. 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.

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 you're not relying upon people risking everything, many of whom can't. Right. You can't very easily ethically defend. If you are like a single parent who is responsible for multiple children, you can't defend going out and busting a bunch of windows and then getting locked up super easy because you have responsibilities. You've got people to care for.

Right.

You have elders at home, or if you're a disabled person, if you're immunocompromised, 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.

Listen, 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. 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 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 financial form right at their beck and call. So this is still a frightening and potentially pretty dangerous thing, but it is a workable plan that has infrastructure behind it, and that crucially. 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, well, so do we. And that's generally positive.

This is the thing I've seen again on social media. People saying like, oh, we have to wait five years. We have 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, they have contracts of their own that they need to sort of work out. The timing for this plan only works if we can actually maneuver a way for a lot of these big contracts at big powerful unions to expire. At the same time, if the Teamsters next contracts expires in 2027, okay, they're not going to be able to play ball. And you really want the Teamsters if you want to play this type of game. And then another hurdle that I think it's unfortunate is that Sean Fane, Big Sean, what a man. He's very out there and very outspoken about opposing capitalism, about this being class war. He's on the level, but he is a rarity among major labor union leaders.

There are some leaders that will be down to know, like Sarah Nelson's out here, like 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 pressure is going to have to come up through the ranks. I mean, the reason we have Sean Fein and we have Sean O'Brien of 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 Democratic Union, organized for years to get that reform slate in, to get Sean O'Brien in there to take on Ups. Sean Faint 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 unions are not unfortunately, they're not all like these magical, progressive silver bullets. There are some pretty shitty people in union leadership across the country and we got to do something about them if we really want to get people on board.

Yeah, there's upsides and downsides when we compare it to sort of how radicals like to particularly the anarchist, radical organizing, where the downside is 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 the mid century, last century, not short history of corruption, right. That's been a problem you've dealt with in the past too. These are issues you don't have as much with autonomously, organized, small groups of activists on the street. The thing that makes them a lot stronger in many ways is the fact that they have more resources to marshal. They have ways of redressing grievances other than kind of just personal conflicts that are built into the system and 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 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 an anarchist too. Even though 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 like I think a lot of my most recent impactful work is stuff 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. It's easy to say join a union. 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. 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 quirkers 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 protest. Because Corking, if you're not aware, is like going ahead of into the sides of a protest, like close traffic briefly as people walk by so folks don't get hit by cars. It's a safety thing, right? And so people were kind of like the people who were doing that are radicals, are members of generally like these autonomously organized groups who are very useful in helping these because people have experienced 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. 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 keep people's morale up, organizing 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 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 its present and I would say its future. Folks who are perhaps more comfortable with getting into perhaps more confrontational moments with cops who are trying to mess with the picket line or scabs who are trying to be violent towards striking workers or even, just like you said, like surveillance and safety and medic work. That is all important too. 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. There are points 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. That deserves a variety of responses, I think. And also something to note is that when these are strikes called by union leadership, they tend to follow a set of rules because predominantly, 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, okay, well, you stay on the sidewalk, or oh, the cop said to move, so we move, or this has to be nonviolent, or there's kind of a set of circumstances there that union members are required to follow. But if you're there to support and you're not a member of that union, as long as you have the consent and support of the people there you're there trying to stick up for, then you have a lot more leeway than someone that has a union leader to answer to. There's a lot of creative ways you can get involved. And one thing that I think hasn't really been discussed as much in the online discourse or whatever, but I think it's important to think about, even if you're not a person who is able to participate in that on. The street type of way. If there's a huge strike going on in your city and you're not part of a union, but you 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? Assuming you have those kind of protections.

If you don't, then you have to make your own caveat, caveat, caveat. But if you're in a position where you can take off work that day or for a couple of days and it just happens to coincide with that massive strike that's shutting down everything else and if you convince all your coworkers at your shop to do the same thing, you're not breaking the law. You're protected. But you're also part of the shutdown effort. 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 stickouts 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. And there are a lot of different workplaces where all of their workers not showing up could be a potential problem. So I just encourage people to think creatively about the ways they can get involved, even if they can't necessarily get involved on the formal union side, there's so much we can do from each according to his ability to each according to his means.

That old chestnut.

It's so important to bring up airline workers because one of the things, 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 groundworkers call in right. Or a bunch of stewardesses, you have to replace them with people who are qualified groundworkers. 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 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?

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. I'm so excited and so heartened to see the amount of interest and energy we're seeing around this general strike idea. Because, like, five years ago, that would not have escaped containment. Right. We would have just been talking amongst ourselves about it. But to have the head of a union who has 400,000 members who just whipped the shit out of the big three automakers, who's getting all these headlines to talk about. A general strike in a meaningful way. Like, yes, maybe he's not out here throwing Molotov cocktails the way we perhaps would want to see someone doing that, 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 now to try and pull things in that direction. I feel like a dam has burst in a way. And if anything, this is a moment of opportunity and of working together and trying to see different perspectives in a way that gets us all closer to the point we really need to be absolutely.

Where we take all this shit down.

All right, I am in agreement. Kim, people should look up your book, Fight Like Hell yeah.

The untold History of American Labor.

Absolutely. And what else should they look up? R-E-U.

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, and I do a lot of book talks and stuff, so I'm around. If you want to talk to your friendly neighborhood anarchist labor reporter, just Google me. But don't believe everything you read, because.

She didn't kill that guy. He was dead when she got there. Anyway, Kim, thank you so much.

Thank you for having 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 a good one. That's a good one.

Hi, I'm Daniel Tosh, host of new podcasts called Tosh Show, brought to you by Iheart Podcasts. Why am I getting to the podcast game now? Well, seemed like the best way to let my family know what I'm up to. Instead of visiting or being part of their incessant group text. I'll be interviewing people that I find interesting. So not celebrities and certainly not comedians. I'll be interviewing my plumber, my stylist, my wife's gynecologist. We'll be covering topics like religion, travel, sports, gambling, but mostly it will be about being a working mother. If you're looking for a podcast that will educate and inspire or one that will really make you think, this isn't the one for you, but it will be entertaining to a very select few because you don't make it to your mid forty s with IBS without having a story or two to tell. Join me as I take my place among podcast royalty like Joel Olstein and Lance Bass. Those are words I hope I'd never have to say. Listen to Toss show on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's Rob Reiner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging to me, an award winning journalist. That's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

We'll ask who had the motive to assassinate a sitting president? My dad.

Bob JFK screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban missile cris.

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I was under the impression that Lee.

Was being trained for a specific operation. Then we'll pull the curtain back on the COVID up. The American people need to know the truth.

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My name is Payne Lindsay, and just like pretty much everyone else on the Internet, I make podcasts. Throughout my career, I've had the chance to travel all over the place investigating true crimes, researching the unexplained. I've been able to meet some of the most truly interesting people, and I've decided to sit down with them and pick their brains. We're going to talk about life, death, unsolved crimes.

If Bob wrote the cadaver note in his own words, he had murdered Susan Berman.

Why do you think we're so obsessed with dark people like that?

It's maybe part of human nature, the supernatural.

There's something here, truly something going on.

Our biggest fears mental health, pop culture, just adrenaline.

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And honestly, just whatever the hell is on our minds. Wait a minute.

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This is talking to death. New episodes of Talking to Death are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio 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.

We 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 has 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 doing background checks and stuff, I realized that this would become its own episode because of how wild things got 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. Basically, these are algorithms that are used by GPT, chatbots, predictive texting, and digital assistants like Alexa and Siri, 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 Mindbake is trying to do is a little bit different.

Yeah. When we encounter them at CES, their booth had all these signs that it was stuff like, set up a legacy for your kids. It was basically advertising. This is a way to allow a part of you to exist in digital form and communicate with your descendants forever.

Yes. So we found them in the US government sponsored 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, mind bank instead seeks to create an evolving, unique digital twin by having a person input their personal data, basically tons of personal information about themselves into an AI on an ongoing basis. And by analyzing your data inputs, mind bank 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 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 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.

Mindful oh, boy. Let's go beyond.

All right, I got to know one thing before you start in Garrison, which is that when they mentioned that technology, there was a line about 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 people who make artificial limbs. Wonderful thing to be doing. Great, important work. They're not as good as real legs. Everyone agrees with this, right? Technology is not making it better.

Technology.

Yeah, that's what it said. He was on the fuck outpaces. 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 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 funny YouTube videos titled The Vision promises that, quote, the next personal computer is you. Store your memories forever.

Absolutely.

It is 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 Balders Gate Three very well. I can't run it on my hardware.

Well, that's why you got to buy the new Monster manual. And then maybe it could all just be in your brain.

Actually.

Yeah.

I am full of shit.

DND is still better when you run.

It on your own hardware. Goddamn it.

This is the one thing you actually can do pretty good by yourself.

Why did I pick that one? Yeah, 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 kind of sneering, which is the right reaction to this. But there are people who do feel this legitimately, and that is a thing of almost unfathomable sadness. I had my angry atheist period, like a lot of people, but I'm so much more okay 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 Jameirez 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 inspired me so much, because I said to myself at that moment, children don't see computers and devices as a tool. They see them as a companion. And today she speaks with Siri or Alexa or any other device. But in the future, I want her to be able to speak to me, to be able to ask me a question, just like she did the device and understanding the technology. I know that the only way that's possible is I'm able to take my thoughts and put them in the cloud so that then later she can access that information. So that's how the idea for Mind Bank came about. It's a place for you to store your ideas for the next generation to tap into. No. So 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.

The idea that, first off, if you're looking at we want a device, a way to use technology to help people grieve or something, and you decide maybe having a chat bot that they can I'm sure it's possible that that could be part of healthy grieving. I'm not going to say that there's no place for that, but something that is definitely not just stupid, but toxic and poisonous is having a machine speak with the voice of a child's parent while that parent is alive, and confusing the child as to whether or not the phone or their parent is conscious. That seems bad to me.

There's actually another product that does this right now, which has kind of caused some controversy for this very thing you mentioned. It's a Tarkaratami 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. This has similarly kind of caused people to have a whole bunch of questions around, 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 other line again about how this quest in his heart is actually part of a bigger quest for all of humanity to live inside a computer or to have a computer trained on you.

He's hitting the same speech cadences that guys like Musk use. He understands partially the degree of hype that you need to get something off this, but he is going too hard. And I'm making that judgment based on the incredibly comforting fact that as you tell me these horrible things, I am looking at your screen. And Mind Bank has 78 subscribers on YouTube, so the company has not yet broken through.

I do want to play ten 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 graceful 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. 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 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 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, I think the nightmare scenario to me is someday hopping on Twitter to see that fucking Ian Miles. Chong or Ben Shapiro or Jackson Hinkel or any one of these 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. Like, if you want to, you can ask me questions or whatever, go to a protest and have me yell at liberals for like, something like that will happen at some point with one of these guys.

I could not 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. 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 words and phrases that refer to this science fiction future, but it's saying nothing.

It's worse than meaningless. It's wrong. It's stupid wrong. Like the idea that you would not be bound by anything if you could live inside a chat bot. 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.

I am finally free to think within my computer's. RGB gamer, Ram.

Finally, when I have a laptop that gets too old, like, the very act of surfing the Internet is a nightmare. I don't want my conscience on something that ages at the speed of a smartphone. That's even worse than being a person.

Robert, do you know what else is a very important evolutionary step for the future of humanity?

Oh, God, I don't know. When we all suddenly, spontaneously, as if by God's grace, start speaking with the voice of Ben Shapiro.

Yes, and perhaps you can do that if one of our sponsors is Ben Shapiro bot coming soon to a smartphone near right. We are. We are back. Let's finally talk about how this digital twin thing is actually supposed to work. So you download the Mind Bank 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 store. Your conscience guided questions help train your digital twin to know your life story so you can live forever through data. The more questions you answer, the closer your AI digital twin will get to.

Becoming you unquote god in heaven.

So when Robert and I were at CES this past January, we spoke to 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. We convert the voice to tech 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. 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. This is a big part of Mind Bank'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 could talk to my inner voice whenever I want to. Yeah, it's called thinking. It's actually pretty easy.

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 dis. No, legal that they would think that they could transfer everything they think over to a machine and not get arrested.

Right.

I would be in a prison if I had to put the things in my brain on the Internet. I put a lot of them, but not all of them. There are some very careful doors and locked rooms in there that you people don't get access to.

No, there's certainly a lot of interesting facets there of someone feeling like they need this tool to kind of analyze their own thoughts. It's a way to externalize it that makes you process it.

But I don't know, you can also.

Just take up journaling or something. 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. It's a big part of their early push.

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. The app also utilizes, quote, psycholinguistic models to create a dashboard of the mind for personal development and self care. I'm going to play another fantastic kind of 32nd clip here.

Hi, I'm your personal digital twin. I learn by asking you 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 wellrounded 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 can replicate consciousness. But also the thing that's 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. That's unsettling.

Yes, and you're kind of right on the money in terms of this personality testing thing. Mindbank's website has a whole bunch of articles which I think are written by Chat GPT, because I read a lot of them and they all read exactly like a Chat GPT article. But they have a lot of articles on what personality types make you a good CEO and a whole bunch of stuff like that that references Myers Briggs testing and other kind 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 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 analyzing your thoughts, is just a way to provide you with something immediate based on your personal data. Quote as you create your AI digital Twin, you will go on a lifelong journey of personal discovery and growth that will allow you to reach your full potential.

Each answer will help bring focus to your mind and allow you to reflect on your past. 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. Quote the higher your Twinning score, the closer you get to knowing yourself fully.

That's a sex thing, right? That sounds like a sex thing, right?

How is that anything but not just a weird, fucked up sex thing?

Yeah, that's how I'm taking this.

Garrison so that was also on their App Store page. So the Mind Bank app has been out for a little over a year now, but unless you pay $6 a month or $60 a year, you'll only have access to about less than a dozen of these questions. Is this currently running on 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 ten questions that you can answer, and then you answer as many times as you want. You get the sentiment analysis, you get the full application, which is just ten 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 subtraits 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 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 subtraits 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 subtraits cautious, ambitious, dutiful, organized, self assured, and responsible.

Yeah, those are the only ways to describe a human mind. Sure.

Yeah.

No, 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, you dude. Socrates once said, know thyself. And who knows us 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?

Quote after continued use, your digital twin will even be able to answer many questions on your behalf and have meaningful conversations with people you allow unquote.

Yeah, 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 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.

What a horrible, 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 anti human is what it is.

Which is what's?

Unsettling. Right. Not that sending emails and shit is like 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? 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. When you automate every bit of friction, then you find out you've automated. There's nothing, right? Like, there's no life there, right? People are not communicating because communication is fundamentally friction. 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.

Alienation.

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 therapy apps before. That's kind of similar, of course. What's, like your application use case for this type of technology.

So 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 Mind Bank page on the App Store boasts, achieve immortality, your mind will be safely secured in the cloud forever. Again, that just comes off as like a threat to me. I don't want my mind to be stored in the cloud forever.

Yeah.

I don't want to be locked up with deviant art for all of eternity.

Again, kind of 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 this thing won't help you live forever. When you die, you still die. Your brain's not getting ported over online.

No.

This is just a very crude simulacrum based on thoughts that you have told this app. It's not helping you live forever at all.

Most people, I feel, are like, this way I don't say everything that I think and feel right.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying I'm being dishonest, but 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, an author is not their books. There was a person with a lot of things that you don't know that still fed in to make those words, that if you just put the words in, you don't get. And your your vision of what human beings are is reductive in a way that makes me understand some of the concerns religious people have with Atheism.

So obviously, Mindbank's Horizons are far beyond this sort of kind of self help app. So far, Mindbank has been mostly 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 to 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 medsa is obvious benefit in the medical field. So that's kind of the understanding of our verticals that we have that we're going to move into. And we're looking for funding right now to start building out those verticals. So enterprise space is definitely in the roadmap, but we just need money.

A lot of their recent marketing has been targeted towards appealing to seed investors. Besides partnering with various governments, they're also moving into the business to business sector with plans to enter, quote, the healthcare space by providing psychologists remote patient monitoring, unquote. Which also is a similarly kind of freaky notion that your psychologist can just have a copy of your own expressive thoughts to just refer to at any time and they can use it as remote patient monitoring. It's just like an uncomfortable notion.

We've got over 20,000 installs. The B to B is the next area we're going into in the therapy and psychology space. And so imagine your therapist, instead of needing your first 1 hour to learn who you are in the next three or four different sessions to figure out getting the meat and potatoes of your mind. This is an immediate raw quantitative dashboard of your sentiment and how you're feeling that they have access to. And then you can also provide them the sentiment of individual answers which would then give them a point in time emotional 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. This is some depression cure. Now, on top of patient health care, mind bank is also hoping to use digital twins for corporate leadership training and to get into the supplement industry by using your cognitive data to find, quote, mental nutrition products that can help boost your brain. So this is using your digital profile to find things to market to very upsetting. Here's another clip of Robert asking 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 and development and providing kind of a living memorial legacy loved ones after you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for this beyond that? I heard someone mentioning the idea of basically digitally cloning a worker so that they can provide information about tech or something or work as like 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 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 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're kind of leaving ourselves open almost.

So that was a lot of words without saying very much, but it's also just flat out not true. On the Mindbank website, they list another use case for this technology as what they call a knowledge transfer, which is marketed to businesses to create digital copies of their employees. This is one of the freakiest things that they are offering. Quote scale your best employees transfer years of experience and company data that is locked inside your employees mind through a guided personal digital twin. Unquote. 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 CES 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.

I hate that.

Another 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 villain stuff, right? This is like learn, learn everything inside the mind of the employee. I don't know, maybe this employee digital cloning thing was just one of the many ideas they got while attending CES and they implemented the idea after we spoke to them. I checked this. No, not the case. The web page for this employee transfer idea goes all the way back to August of 2021 on the Internet Archive. So the guy we were talking to was just lying to us. 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 reliable?

I don't know. Guns, I don't think.

We are sponsored by Big.

Not 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 coolzone, you can really cut down on the podcasting costs.

Yeah, I can really clear you guys out and just 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. 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. 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? No, it's your ability to mine it.

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 Mind bank subscriptions for their entire company, in that case, it's unclear if the company would be classified as the user or if the 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 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 when you share your digital twin with.

Your therapist, you would be able to decide all that?

Yeah.

And then would it be possible for them to copy over some of the stuff and basically run it themselves? Or can you have, like, a hard.

Cut off for this sort of thing?

I'm just trying to think of other types of different ways people could get their hands on this for unsavory means.

Yeah, for sure. 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 is not live data. It's not data 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 trained on 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. This is deeply troubling. This is supposed to be like a private thing that you use to communicate with 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, especially I think they are probably I don't see how copying workers the way that they are doing it is going to work. Right. But I do think that this is kind of part of this process that 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. This is a lot of silliness, but the actual thing that 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 let me talk to a human being, please. Yeah.

That is what's going on here. And the fact that they're trying to dress this up as like, we have solved death is so fucked up.

Yeah. Part of this for the employee thing is not even not replacing kind of low level employees, like customer service workers. It's also focusing on your top ten best employees and then by forcing them to interact with this app every day, you can use the information from your best performers as asset data that you can use to help get your other employees to become more efficient. Right. They certainly have a few other kind of ideas for how this is possibly used.

Hate these kinds of people. This got overused at a point in the kind of late aughts, so maybe people are sick of it. But there's a line in the speech Charlie Chaplin gives in The Great Dictator machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. And he was referring to the Nazis and their obsession with shit like Taylorism or at least proto Taylorism kind of organized industry treating people like cogs and a great machine. The civilization is one machine, and each human being is just a single piece of it. That's the old era horrifying machine man thought. The new era horrifying machine man thought is you can digitize your employees and they could train each other in AI form, and you can replicate them, and the unsaid part is worse. And then you fire them, and their robot clone keeps doing their job for free. We made a slave. 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 explained to us.

So if we're talking 40, 50 years down the line, people pass. So do companies. If Mind 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 your data. And where is it stored? Right now, our current live application, we're on Azure. So your back end 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 troubled times, nothing makes me feel so secure as the words, it's on the blockchain. Let me email my.

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 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.

And that was this moment where I was like, all right, you are truly coming into your own as a reporter. If you can sit there and talk to a man who says that, who says you can trust me with your data because I was an NSA agent, it's okay.

I used to work for the NSA. I had trouble. Sure, budy.

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. And yes, no. The idea that he is using this as some sort of credential that shows he respects human rights and privacy is very obviously, deeply ironic. The irony is not coming from him. The irony is the situation.

He did seem totally sincere.

He was sincere. Yes, absolutely.

It's one of those moments that makes you realize, like, some people just live in a whole different world.

Yes.

So I think it's useful when referring back to everything this guy has said so far, that you have to remember he worked at the NSA for six years and he is now handling, 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 is like ideal project. You talk about your internal thoughts and feelings every day. What else could they want? So, earlier this year, Mind Bank received a grant from the DEFINITY Foundation to assist in migrating their data onto Web Three 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 Mind Bank 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 $182,000,000,000. 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. 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.

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, 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 kind of varying degrees of scope, digital twin technology with an emphasis on mimicking the voice and thoughts of dead family members and friends is definitely a growing field. There's companies like hereafter, AI and Replica which are covering similar ground.

Replica, I get advertised them, I used to get them on Twitter, I think, but mainly just like at the bottom of articles on really shady websites.

Well, yes, because the founder of Replica started it because their friend died and without 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 how Replica started.

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, 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 terrible. Very hard. There are a lot of ways that are not wrong to grieve, but the wrong way to grieve is by using digital necromancy to revive your friend and then turn them into the basis of a sex chat bot for weirdos. Yeah, that is the wrong way to grieve.

No, I think for this last section here, we will kind of talk about how these things kind of play into the grieving process. Because, like I said, there's hereafter AI and replica. But last year at Amazon's AI and a merchant 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 Blake 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.

No, absolutely not.

Deeply uncanny, right? It's like not good.

That's so bad for people. That's really bad for like this example.

Is obviously it is just a vocal mask. Amazon isn't trying to have Alexa kind of replicate your grandma's thoughts, unlike the other kind of companies that we 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 chat bots 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 faults that don't match up with your memory of your loved one that has passed away. Right. It's kind of a similar notion.

Yeah. That's a really good comparison to draw.

So while mimicking 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. Not even necessarily like you say something offensive. It's just that the data you upload could combine in a way that you would never even think to combine it. It would just be like, weird. So the other kind of problem is that not only does these AIS have to tastefully mimic a specific human being, it also has to be a good AI. Right. Like, not all of its information can be gleaned from daily questions. Most users probably won't be talking to their twin about information from 20th century European history, or twelveTH century European history, or be talking about the migration patterns of waterfowl. Right. There's so much of other just information that AIS need to 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 an algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside of a very narrow set of assumptions. Right. This is like most AI image recognition programs can't recognize the above view of a school bus because it just doesn't have anything that's trained for that. Another example is you can ask an AI GPT chat bot 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 doesn't understand basic common sense the way that humans understand the world. It just doesn't match up. So in trying to seek a balance of common information while lacking this humanistic logic, a digital twin will most likely be cursed with being both smarter and dumber than the person it's trying to replicate. It's going to have access to all the information on 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 go, no, Kenya starts with a K sound, but doesn't start with a K because it pulled that from some article, right?

It's not actually making logical assumptions. It's just pulling from a wealth of information and data that can often be wrong or polluted. So back to kind of like the grieving question. Who's to say what the actual effects of these incoming simulacrums of dead loved ones will result in? The people pushing these products are certainly framing them not just as a form of digital immortality, but as a way for your own loved ones to grieve your death. And it is foreseeable that having these digital twins could negatively affect your friends and family by upending the grieving process or by having this digital zombie simply just cause harm by having the twin give bad advice that a grief stricken person then clings on to. So there's a whole bunch of very 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 not that person. It is just a slab of silicon.

It's not actually alive in any way.

It is your friend's thoughts fed through an algorithm and you don't know that's run by a company for profit, right? Yes, that is what it is.

So again, the jury is still kind of out for how these things will in general affect people. This is kind of a new problem. Psychologists are starting to do studies on this, but we really don't have any results for this yet because this has really only become a thing that we've been seriously considering in the past five years. So I don't really have 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. This is such uncharted ground and it is in some ways inevitable that these things are going to get continued to be developed. And that's kind of why I wanted to put together this episode. It gives you kind of a broad overview of what this technology is trying to do because you might start seeing it crop up in the next like ten years or so. I don't think there are timetables that Mind Bank 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 Mind Bank is doing means that it's only a matter of time before you see pieces of it. Probably better. 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? I will say, I don't think this is a thing to get doomer about. Think about this like NFTs, right? It's not the same, because there was nothing underlying NFTs. And fundamentally, the way in which large language models and these other kind of models work, there are uses for them. Like, there is a real technology that has utility here. But this sort of flood of we have cloned. So and Elon Musk has just put out his new fucking Grok Chat Bot, or whatever that is, basically him making a meme robot to fucking do goo. He's pissing on Douglas Adams'good name. Right. That's the ultimate goal of his project. But this shit is a right? Like, there are underlying real technological things and uses 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 Board Ape Yacht Club.

Members all got horrible eye infections.

Not eye infections, Garrison. They went to a party that only the Board 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 used to clean carcasses and it gave everyone sunburns on their gordius.

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. We're at that point in Jurassic Park where you see the water reverberating, right? It's coming. But at the end of the day, don't worry. We are Ian Malcolm. Our leg is broken. We are injured, but we will inexplicably return for the sequel. So it's fine.

Well, I think that is a perfect way to wrap this. 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 remember, pull out a journal.

Just do literally anything else.

Call a friend, make a friend, talk to a stranger. Literally anything, 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.

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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the greatest murder mystery in American history.

That's rob briner. Rob called me Soledad O'Brien, and asked me what I knew about this crime. I know 60 years later, new leads are still emerging. To me, an award winning journalist, that's the making of an incredible story. And on this podcast, you're going to hear it told by one of America's greatest storytellers.

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My name is Payne Lindsay, and just like pretty much everyone else on the internet, I make podcasts. Throughout my career, I've had the chance to travel all over the place, investigating true crimes, researching the unexplained. I've been able to meet some of the most truly interesting people, and I've decided to sit down with them and pick their brains. We're going to talk about life, death, unsolved crimes.

If Bob wrote the cadaver note in his own words, he had murdered Susan Berman.

Why do you think we're so obsessed with dark people like that?

It's maybe part of human nature, the supernatural.

There's something here, truly something going on.

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This is talking to death. New episodes of Talking to Death are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts.

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You 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 6 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 Israeli bombing of Palestine. I attended a Free Palestine protest today. Lots of you will have attended them over the weekend. Normally in this kind of current political climate, when people protest about things or when there are elections, it leads to an increased protest movement, which generally leads to more state clap 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 bailfronts 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 Weiner. This is my second time on. I was previously on talking about the CBP One app and immigrant surveillance at the border. My day job. I'm a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. I'm also a UVA law grad. I've lived in Charlotesville 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 Charlotesville pretty much my whole life for work. I'm a carpenter and I've been on the bail fund here since 2020, 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 two L at UBA law. I'm originally from Chicago, grew up in a very proud Mexican Mexican American community. I have lived in the Pacific Northwest, north Carolina. Most recently, DC. So various cities and places throughout the country.

Nice. That's an excellent group that we've got. So I think to start off with, just in case, we've got folks who are not in the US or maybe are not familiar. Can one of you explain to us what bail is? Yeah.

So, in the American legal system, we have a pretty unique concept, which is after you're arrested for a crime, or if you're detained as an immigrant, you are 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. 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. For most offenses, bail is really low. We're talking about 500 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 are going to charge you about 10% of the cost of your bond. So if you have a $5,000 bond, that's about $500, 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. So we regularly get calls from people who don't have 100 $500 to get out of jail. That's where the bail fund comes in. We pay people's bonds, no questions asked.

Nice.

I'd also like to add that in addition to a lot of drug charges, a lot of ways that people end up in jail is through traffic stops and traffic violations. Something as minor as a backTail light not being fully lit. And that then gives officers waste an excuse to proceed from there. So something as simple as you didn't get to go to the mechanic to have your back taillight 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 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 with your bail fund, perhaps you could explain obviously some of those bed 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 person goes through the court system and the case gets finalized, the 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 now that we have $40,000, we're able to post a lot of bonds, up to nearly $200,000 so far in bonds posted. And so it's a self sustaining process. It can sometimes take up to a year to get the money back.

But instead of paying the money and it being gone forever with the bail bondsman, we're able to continuously do this and get a lot done with a little bit of money.

Relatively. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You can keep it moving through the system, I guess. 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, and then since then, it's kind of trickled in, and I think I've donated my own money sometimes.

Yeah, it's a very important thing. So perhaps can you give us just we 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 waitlist. Like, people are in jail because we don't have enough money. So please donate to us. We're on PayPal at bail. We're also on GoFundMe at Blueridge Community Bail Fund, and that information is on our instagram, which is Ridgebail.

Nice.

At Ridgebail.

Perfect. So I think you were talking about that a lot of bail funds have dried up since 2020, and I know that I've seen that in a lot of places. So there was this real little growth in organizing in 2020. Right. And then obviously there's been people have burnt out, people have been incarcerated in a number of things that's made that movement hard to sustain that we don't necessarily need to go into. But what I do want to talk about is 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, what roles do you have? What kinds of people do you I.

Think, you know, a lot of bill funds 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 about six of us that's on the actual board, and we handle the logistics. So I'm the chair, Jake's the treasurer. Azalea is a board member at large. But we all kind of share the same responsibilities, which is we answer the phone, which is one of the biggest parts when people call us either from the jail or from the street, like family members and someone in jail. And then when we get a call, we look up the case, call the jail to find out, and then with the next step is posting the bond. And so we have a list of volunteers that their job is just to physically go to the jail with the cash, deposit the bond, and sometimes one of the board members will do that ourselves. And then as far as keeping the organization running, well, like I said, all the original board members are gone and I've been the longest running member. But we do have a lot of law students.

Like half our board is law students, and that presents their own challenges because they graduate and leave, but it also brings fresh people into the organization. And then me, I live in Charlotesville, 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. 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. Right. The bail fund kind of points out that this is a system that is broken or that it certainly doesn't work to serve people. So perhaps we could explain a little bit of that. In the absence of a bail fund, how do things look for people who are incarcerated? Right. You spoke a little bit about a bail bondsman, but perhaps you could talk about the amount of bail some people would post for how it's calculated, what it would be, and what that would mean in terms of people being in prison and 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 one of the cruelest parts of the American criminal justice system criminal legal system, there's not much justice, is that your freedom is contingent on having wealth. So bail for most offenses, as I've said, is quite low. And not only is it very difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but people are locked up because they don't have $500. I've gotten calls from people who have literally said, I don't have $100 and I don't have anyone on the outside. And I've been sitting in jail for three months, 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 is a couple of months. And you don't get compensated for that if you spend a year in jail, which means that you did eleven months that you didn't have to do. The state doesn't cut you a check that's like, hey, we destroyed your life for eleven months for no reason. And one of the things that is just, like, the most heartbreaking about doing this work, but is also sometimes makes you feel really good, is the way that caging people just 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, like, 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. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thanks, Jake. So I think one of the things that really drew me to this work is, like, I'm an abolitionist, but when I was younger, I spent two years in jail. I was 23, 23 to 25. I was in jail for selling drugs. And I think that's something that really motivates me now to do this stuff. It's crazy. Like, Jake said, yeah, we've had people that one guy called and thought that we were a bail bondsman and then found out, like, on the phone, he's like, oh, I didn't know you guys 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 we've spent all this time just thinking about leftist stuff, but it's eye opening to see people that are stuck in jail for lack of $100 and that's it, they can't get out. And then sometimes people call us and they're like, I have nobody. There's nobody out outside that can help them. So that kind of stuff, it is upsetting. Yeah, it's crazy to see this system set up like this, but it's one of the things that 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 Jake said about the bail system. The magistrates, when you go in front of the magistrate to get the bond, the magistrates have no oversight. They're not elected. We kind of just joke like it's a vibe based system. They just can issue a bond for however much they feel like. And so this is where you're really going to see the structural racism and the classism really come crashing down on people in front of this system.

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 legal training requirements. Many of them are fresh out of the army, 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.

I spent the summer, my first year, 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. It was heartbreaking, and 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, it's a pretty messed up system. I think some states have bail guidelines, right? If I'm not like, I think California has like, if you're accused of this offense, then your bail goes in this bucket, and then it adds up depending on offenses or conspiracy or whatever.

Yeah, that's a really good point. The thing about bail is it's different in every state. Almost. Some states have maybe more progressive, quote unquote setups, but some don't.

Yeah, I was going to say 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 aspired to do what Illinois just did at the beginning of this year, which was to eliminate bail just or cash bail altogether. It would just be based on whether you can be released or not.

Yeah, that would be nice. Just to be clear, it's not like the state keeps the money unless you don't show up. Is it a revenue generator for states, or is this purely like a sort of punitive thing that they think have 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. And in a functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms, worked. This is not an abolitionist perspective. Cash bail is unnecessary. The magistrate should be deciding and the 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. 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, which is a whole other thing we can get into with immigration. So I think that's a really good kind of example of a good deep dive into what bail is. So essentially, a bail fund can make it so that there is not this financial burden or this financial barrier to freedom. Right. While you haven't been yet to be convicted of any crime, it's not necessarily like an abolitionist thing to exist, but it helps at least move us towards a less cruel, a less unjust system, I suppose. So I want to talk about a little bit of the nuts and bolts of what it takes to run a bail fund. But before we do that, we are 22 minutes in. So talking of nuts and bolts, we need to pay our bills. So this is an advert. It's probably not something you need, but here it is anyway. We're back. I hope you've bought whatever it was, MREs. Or Ronald Reagan dog, coins or Hoover.

So let's talk about.

If you're listening to this and you're in your car on your way home or whatever time you're listening on a long road trip and you're thinking, i. Would like to be the person. Maybe you're a law student yourself or you're a 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 501? Do you need certain I know for 501 C Three, you need certain people and a certain number of people doing certain jobs on your board, that kind of stuff. What are the concrete steps that one has to take to go from this sucks to I'm the chair of the bail fund and I can help you?

Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. So we are a 501 three c 501 c three 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 ten to 15 bonds a week and there's bail funds that post one bond a month because that's all they can do. And I think as our organization has grown and matured, we've gotten way more organized and we started out, it was pretty chaotic and people it was poorly organized, but we were still posting the bonds. And I think from day one, we've been good about that. You can definitely start and you'll learn as you we've learned as we go and we've refined everything, but like, it just it takes some motivation and a little bit of money and then maybe Jake can talk to him too 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. And 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 like too much for one person, both emotionally and literally. You need people to share this work with for it to be sustainable. I recommend that you set up a 501 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 president, which is Taylor, and you need a treasurer, and then a couple other potentially a couple of other board members. These are the people who own technically, the 501 C Three, and you just need those people on your documents. You can use their address, but we recommend that you set up a PO box for getting mail. It just makes things a little easier. Means you don't have to hand your personal address over to a magistrate.

Yeah. Makes you less doxable as well.

Yes. And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account and go to a bank that has good hours so that you can readily withdraw cash, because you can only post bond in cash, which is its own insanity. So one thing we deal with is like the bank being closed and then having to wait a couple of days, a 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 signal thread, but then we also meet about once a month and if we have some issue that comes up, we can meet more often. And you need, ideally, a way to connect to volunteers. So we've had good luck with the law school, but we're expanding beyond that, trying to go to different institutions in the community and recruit folks to volunteer for us. You want to do some amount of vetting of your volunteers. They should be in an affinity network or have a way that you can ensure that they're not going to walk away with a five 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 you the name of the bail fund down. A problem that we've had is not all magistrates recognizing the bail fund, but you really want to have a PO box and that business card so that when you get checks back from the court system, they come to a centralized oh, yeah, yeah.

And then anyone can drop in and deposit them with a 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 is great and we can definitely do better and we'll be expanding. That's basically it, though it's really not that much.

Yeah, but that's great. I think it's so often a thing that I've seen, just being sort of on the left in various movements since I was younger, is like, we reinvent the wheel every four or five years. So just having those things that you guys have learned, like using Google voice and having a bank with good hours, I think that saves someone from having to fall down those same holes again. So that's really valuable.

I wonder then you talked a little.

Bit about legal liability, which we don't necessarily need to go into, but there have been some obviously heavily politicized arrests in the last few months in the United States. Do you guys face like personal blowback or blowback against a group when if you're able to bail someone out where their arrest has been heavily reported on or politicized? Because that's something people need to be aware of.

I think that's a great question. Where we are, 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 every night jail support. So yeah, that's like an example of just way different bail funds operate and then so basically we have not ever faced any kind of political blowback or any issues. But it's definitely something that we're prepared, we think about because it can't happen. There's Beth Limits story and there's definitely cases around the country where prosecutors have taken aimed at bail. Know Atlanta of course was a really big jake, do 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 institutional and a kind of right wing moral panic. These things happen. It's, I think, relatively unlikely, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be prepared for it. And I think that when you kind of address that and if you 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. 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.

Yeah, it's definitely the case. So I wonder what other issues you have faced hardships and you spoke about a couple of them, but are there other things I know, for instance, obviously as part of my reporting or maybe not obviously, but some people apparently don't bother to do it. But I communicate with incarcerated people when I'm writing about them because it seems like a reasonable thing to do. And I am very aware of how annoying expensive, time consuming and just generally totally inadequate. The system is of communication with people, even people who are not convicted of any crime. So I don't know if that's something you've encountered, if there are other sort of hardships that you guys have had to deal with, perhaps if there are ways you've worked out to get around them or to at least make them less difficult, then that would be great for people to hear too.

The communication thing is a huge problem. Yeah, exactly. Most of the calls we get are from people that are currently in the jail, and they can only call us, and we cannot call them. So they call us, and then we have to just say, okay, you need to call back in a couple of hours. And then they have lockdowns, they can't get to the phone, all sorts of things. Probably one of the worst things that ever happened was someone called and I called the jail, and the jail was like, oh, they can be released today. And so the guy calls back and I'm like, hey, man, you're going to get released today. We're going to have a volunteer go out and post this bond. You don't need to call me back. If you want to, you can. But it's all rolling, right?

Yeah.

And then I call the jail to triple check everything, and they say, oh, we have to hear back from the court. The court has to approve this. And they're like, closing in 30 minutes, so it's not going to happen today.

Jesus.

And so now I have no way to call this guy and tell him that he's actually not going to get out today because of a bureaucratic issue. And I just have to wait until he just can't take it anymore and then calls and it's a really unpleasant situation. It's really unfortunate. And he was not happy. He was not happy, and he took a little bit out on me, but it wasn't a case of him actually being mad at me. I think that's something that's really cool is like, no one we deliver bad news all the time. We say, you can't get out because of XYZ, and no one's ever actually mad at us. They might be annoyed for a second because I'm on the phone delivering the bad news, but every time at the end, they're like, thanks so much, I appreciate you. So we haven't had any. 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.

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, the main jail that we work with, middle River Regional Jail, used to use a phone provider called GTL, who's 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. 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 that's mostly a problem because the phone system works so badly and we can't communicate with people. And then the biggest thing is giving yourself grace when you miss the phone, when something goes wrong, because it's emotionally very taxing to know that someone desperately wants to speak with you because they're potentially at the worst point in their entire life and need to get out and you've missed a phone call.

It's really important to be kind to yourself in those situations.

Yeah. Or you won't stick around.

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. Just incredible how much access there is to that. And lack of privacy.

Yeah. It's very dehumanized.

I got to jump in on that. Yeah. If you end up in jail, do not say anything about your case on the phone 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 up front that we post bond, no questions asked, and telling people, it doesn't matter what your situation is, if we have the money and you can get out, we're going to post.

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, 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 because if you said you're dealing with 40,000, right? If you drop 10,000 on one individual, that obviously means that there are a lot of people with $500 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, we have a cap. We pay up to $5,000. So $5,000 or less. And it's exactly what you said. Otherwise we would be totally broke and out of money and even two $5,000 bonds in a row, and then we're pretty screwed. And then I think that's it brings up something else that Jig and I were talking about. It's important to stick to that limit. One time we posted a bond up to $12,000 for somebody, and 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 we already told him we could pay the one bond anyway. Long story short, we had $12,000 tied up on this guy, and then he didn't show up to court. And if that's when you can lose the money and people don't show up to court, fortunately for us, unfortunately for him, he did get rearrested on another charge. And when that happens, there's like a 90 day period where if the person gets caught, then we get the money back.

And that's where our policy is, like, we're not going to do anything if the person runs. We're not going to do anything to try to get it back. We're not going to revoke anybody's bond. But a bail bondsman might try to find you if you run.

Yeah.

Our joke was kind of like, well, 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 the best thing is if people would contribute and donate, we could be able to allocate for so many more people and not have people spend time in jail where things like mental health conditions worsen because prison guards are and jail guards are not paying attention, where you don't have access to an attorney easily. Where when you show up to your day in court, you don't have an orange jumpsuit on. And that's not factoring into the judge's mind. So please, please donate for all those reasons, to our bail fund.

Yeah.

If we had more money. That's something we talked about a lot of times. If we had more money, we would be able to raise the limit on the amount we could post. But it's just not feasible right now.

In terms of donation. It's a great thing. I was just thinking, because it keeps going around and around and around. Right. It's not like you give a donation once and you get someone a thing and you change their life. You could 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 waitlist. So people call us and we can tell them, hey, you're on the waitlist. They'll call back all the time and be like, hey, have I moved up the waitlist? Sometimes people call multiple times a day and they're like, oh, any movement? My number four now. Which is kind of wild, but having the waitlist. And we go, like, in strict waitlist order, with the exception that if someone has an under $500 or less, we'll just post that. Because if we're sitting around waiting for someone to get money back from the courts for a $5,000 bond, that's next in line. We could have $4,500. And so for the super low bonds, where the issue is like purely purely poverty, we make an exception. But you run into that kind of ethical question all the time. Running the bail fund, like, how do we make the best decisions going to help people in the best way? And that accords with our values the most. That can get pretty heated and intense. And having a setup of folks where you really respect each other and like each other, I think is really important to not let that spiral out of control.

It helps know Taylor and Melissa and I have been friends for many years and we can hang out and talk about this, and then Taylor and I can go out and go for a bike ride.

Nice.

So having those relationships, I think, is really important.

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, then.

Yeah. We are an abolitionist principle, and I think almost like one of their belfund that I know of. They have some sort of system I'm not super familiar with prioritizing someone that maybe they consider to be higher risk in the prison system to get out first. And I think that that's really a really appealing thing. But it's just like kind of Jake touched on earlier that's just adding another layer of judgment. Then we become these arbiters of who is in jail and who's not in jail. Almost counterintuitively. Having this system first come, first serve, I think is the most abolitionist thing we can do.

Yes, I can see that. And it certainly reduces the load on you and making those difficult choices, which.

It helps with that.

We were talking about the system and I want to bring that up because the system is I cover not a lot of criminal justice, but a decent bit. And it is incredibly confusing. It's convoluted. They've got these old ass names that you don't understand and then the gear in Virginia, so you have a whole other layer of weird stuff going on with names. If someone's thinking of starting this and they're like, I want this to happen, but I do not understand how to navigate this system, does that mean that they need someone with a little more legal experience? Can you explain how, as someone who isn't obviously 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 criminal law system, do they need a law student or a lawyer to start a bail fund or how does one go about learning to navigate that system?

I suppose, yeah, they definitely do not you do not need to have legal experience. I think it was kind of just random chance that it was a lawsuit that founded this one. Like you said, it is 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. The system is possible. The bond system, we're just like a family member going to post someone's bond. So it's set up and then it is possible for your loved one to post your bond. And we just learned it all through experience. You would just call the jail and say, where do I post this bond? And they'll tell you, you come to the magistrate, this is where the magistrate is located. And then you go with the cash and post. And we work in it's. Ten 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, be really polite and just figure it all out and write it down so that we know in the future.

Yeah, I'll tell you, 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. And so I would like pitch, even if you don't feel really strongly about getting people out of jail, but you want to be helpful in a time of crisis, learning the legal system as a non lawyer is doable. I'll also say that you don't learn how to do this stuff in law school. I didn't learn how to post a bond, how to file a Capious, any of this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is truly one of the worst states in the country. I talked to a public defender who's worked in courts in Louisiana and was like, yeah, the Virginia court system is worse and more not. If you know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great, but you can learn an incredible amount and then that skill just becomes valuable in a number of different areas. One of the most powerful ways that can help people is even when you're not able to 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 that's a very valuable thing you can do. Yeah, I think this whole thing has been a really valuable insight into how to build a bail fund, I guess. Is there anything else, do you guys think that we didn't cover, like, in the grand scheme of being Bailfund entrepreneurs? I don't know what the right phrase is. Bail fund founders, just the importance and.

Making sure to be rooted in the community. I think that's going to be the best way not only to fundraise in the long term, because you can have even $5 if it's reoccurring from some community members. You get to know what's happening, what's something that's a reoccurring problem throughout the community and just making sure to listen to that and to be able to navigate going forward.

I think one thing that I think I found so interesting about doing this bail fund is that it really crosses completely or even like I would say, it transcends politics. I think that all of the board members are in here politically motivated or abolitionists or against the current court system. But the people's lives 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 lumber yard. And I think the salesman at the lumberyard, I think they would fall into more if I was going to stereotype them. I would say they do more 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, this is the coolest thing ever, man. I think it's so awesome. He's like, people are just locked up for bullshit. And I think we've had volunteers that I think people knew him or like, why think he's almost like a Republican and just going out and posting these bonds?

And I think that, like I said yeah, it's just fascinating that it does transcend it transcends the politics a little bit.

Yeah. I think anyone who's had to interact with the criminal justice system I haven't interacted with the American one, but 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 like if they're working people, not people of massive means, they'll have seen how hard it can wear on you. Trying to come up with money to bond someone out who you care about, even if they end up not being found guilty. And so it can be a very broad based thing. I think it's certainly something that I saw a lot of people giving money to bail funds in 2020 who may not have they weren't necessarily people who are also out in the streets. It's a way for people to be part of a movement. It's a way for people to who feel that this is unjust, even if they might not share abolitionist politics or whatever. I think it's something that a lot of people would want to get behind.

Yeah.

I'll say 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 was 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. So I think to wrap up, we should again remind people where they can give you their money. So how will people go about doing that? Yeah.

Please donate to the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund. We are on PayPal at Ridge is R-A-D-G-E. We're on GoFundMe. You can find us under the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund.

We.

Are on Instagram at Ridgebail. And we also have a website, Blueridgebailfund.org.

I think, so you can Google Blueridge 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, like, 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 minutes 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.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes. Every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It could happen. Here is a production of Coolzone Media. For more podcasts from Coolzone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly@coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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