It Could Happen Here Weekly 106

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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 gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Welcome to Dick. It appened here, a show that is
about a number of I really should have done an
actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing. Roast me
along with me is Sharene and James.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
Hello, miya, Oh yeah that was great. I thought about
was actually great. Keep them guessing, you know, yeah, yeah,
they never know what they're going to get. Would it
be sad?

Speaker 5 (00:51):
Would it be happy?

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Unfortunately, this is a This is a this is a
really sad episode. This is an episode that I got
really picked off or writing. Yeah, and this is an
episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on Palestine
right now has been focused on Gaza for you know,
very obvious reasons. Guza is the place where you know,

(01:14):
most of most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's
where most of the people are. Israelis are killing the
most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch
of killing going on in the West Bank. And this
is you know, the the murders of Palestinians in the
West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been intensified

(01:37):
by the current conflict, but this is stuff that's been
happening even before, like this latest round of stuff started.
Since the beginning of the year, Israeli settlers and government
forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank.
And I think in a lot of ways the dynamics
of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West

(01:57):
Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold
stane I will conceive. But I think by the end
of this we'll see if I'm right.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
I think you're I think you're right in the sense that,
like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the
West Bank versus other parts.

Speaker 5 (02:11):
Of Yeah, I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really
Thereaty project is pretty fucking evident when that bombing showed it's.

Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, But I think I think specifically, the part that's
easiest to understand in the West Bank is why it's
why it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic. Why why why
the Settler project keeps like has been building the way
that it has, why it keeps inevitably leading to violence
the way that it has, and why it's it's, you know,
effectively the sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to

(02:46):
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 like, I feel
like most of the people talking about this kind of
just assume everyone knows, and I feel like we should
not assume that. We should, you know, actually go back

(03:08):
and run through some of this history really quickly.

Speaker 5 (03:10):
My cynical take is that most of the people talking about
this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves, and uh
that you're skating along on that assumption not to have
to expose their own shaky foundation.

Speaker 4 (03:23):
I feel like I've talked about it before on like
every podcast I've done, but I feel like people like
tune it out, you know what I mean, Like, I
feel like people don't actually absorb what I'm what any
what they hear, because it's like, oh this again or
whatever the fuck they're thinking.

Speaker 5 (03:35):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (03:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna hammer I'm
gonna hammer a copy of this into all of your brains.

Speaker 5 (03:41):
You have no choice, you must, Martin Luthering the History
of Palestine.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
Yeah, gonna nail ninety five copies of the Geneva Convention
to the door. So in the beginning, there was the Nakba,
which is the great design the Palestinian people in which
the Israelis armed. I should mention by Stalin, which is
something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the entire
American political spectrum. And we will get back to who also,

(04:12):
like who specifically was doing the knack book, because it's
not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays them as.
But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of armed settlers,
armed by Stalin, drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes.
They seize those homes, they take them for themselves. Now

(04:33):
this is I think, okay, this is this is the
part where where disclaimer Mia is not it is not
a professor of international law. I think this was actually
technically not a legally a war crime because I only
because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet, because

(04:53):
the knackbut takes place in nineteen forty eight, and this
is a year before the Geneva Convention or the fourth
Geneva Convention, the part that as the stuff we're going
to talk about, uh was ratified. It's two years before
it comes into force. But you know from the beginning,
what you have here is a settler colony. The Israelis
have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there.
They have seized their homes and they have replaced them,

(05:15):
which you are settlers.

Speaker 4 (05:16):
And they've also massacred like fifty Yeah.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean,
I guess I should be more explicit about that, Like
when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's
just it's people fleeing. A lot of times they're killed.

Speaker 6 (05:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:31):
I think it's like they flat in entire villages, you
know what I mean, Like it's not just like oh
they're empty houses now, it's like, no, they actually destroyed everything,
built new cities where there already were cities, renamed the cities.

Speaker 5 (05:44):
It's yeah, it was just I don't know, it's striful.
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 later.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
I think this is sorry, tangent is. There are so
many videos of like former IDF soldiers that were not
think it's not idea technically, but like former people that
fought in the Nekba that like drove these people out
of their homes and it's so repulsive. There's literally like
a it was on an Israeli news channel or like
some type of Israeli show where there's an old man

(06:19):
like laughing about how him and his group raped a
sixteen year old girl and shot everyone in a row,
all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's
coming from them. So I think that's important to know.
It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these
terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to
it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know
what I mean. I think it's important to say that.

Speaker 3 (06:43):
Yeah, and this is something we're going to get into
more in a bit, but what are the consequences of this?
And one of the consequences of running a settler colony
like this is that the people that it produces, who
are the people who you know, the people who are
like ordering people and taking their homes right in order.

(07:04):
The kind of person you have to be in order
to do that is just absolutely terrifying, just like you know,
I mean this and this is why you see so
much stuff both here and you know, like that, like
in in in the early phases of like not even
the early phases, but like most of the phases of
US settler expansion, right, you you really account to these

(07:24):
people and those like these people are all serial killers.

Speaker 5 (07:27):
To do that, I think you have to convince yourself
that the people you are doing it to are less
human or not human like that. It's fundamental to colonialism,
right to consider yourself to either be a higher form
of humanity or like distinct, like in a species sense
from these British people did that in their colonialism too.
But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically

(07:49):
in like their language and culture that depicts the settler
colonization of the United States or what is now the
United States. Right, Like, you can look at the like
what it's called the wars after the after the Civil
War and see just all kinds of the most fucking
horrific shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're
just doing it like piece by piece as you go

(08:10):
across the country.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
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 even in sort of
radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but
there's a tendency to not to sort of back away
from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know,

(08:34):
a lot of the reason for this is like it's
you know, it can get into this sort of realm
of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy,
horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as
bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah.
And then and then the people doing that stuff are
you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff

(08:59):
that's happening here.

Speaker 5 (09:00):
Fuck, the people doing that stuff are still like like
that there's a park named after them. In San Diego,
there's kit cass And Park, there's Uniparosa Park, like like
it's baked into American culture still, like the Genocidas are
fucking celebrated here.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
Yeah, and this is and this is this is aweso
true of Israel. Now. Okay, So so after after the
knock ball, there's there's a lot of people who think
that like this is the end of the whole process, right,
that like, okay, so we've expelled these people, we've killed
these people, there's now a Jewish state, it has like
relatively stable borders or whatever. This is going to be

(09:38):
the end of it, and that that did not happen.
And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the
nineteen sixty seven Six Days War, where is Israel launches
what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt. It's okay, so
they this is the pr term that's been developed afterwards
for it. The reality is that Egypt was not about

(10:01):
to attack Israel. The Israelis just started a war, like
just straight up started a war and invaded Egypt, and
the Sixth Day War winds up being a war between
the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt. They end up
finding Egypt, Syria and Jordan a little bit. And like
technically the Saudis, like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are in

(10:24):
the war, but like they don't do shit. There's a
story I think it's actually from the seventy three war,
but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's
a bunch of people, and there's a bunch of Egyptian
soldiers in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of
like the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis
roll up and fucking rolls royces, and the Egyptian commanders

(10:46):
looks at these guys just just go home because people
just like you and the and this this is one
of those scread dynamics here of like god like the
air powers outside of Egypt for some of the time,
I'm really we're not taking this very seriously. And you know,
and and and the consequence of this is that the

(11:07):
the is most of the most of the sixty seven
war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven
war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out
of the Egyptians. In large part because the Egyptians weren't
like actually trying to fight a war, so they were
basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this
is this war is a complete disaster for for the

(11:30):
air powers. Like gamaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his
defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until
a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd
come back.

Speaker 5 (11:45):
He did it really royally kind of like his position
was that were like, eventually I going to attack us,
We'll have a defensive position, and failed miserably yet happy.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Yeah, it did not work. This is this and this
this is a complete disaster. But and and and the other,
you know, the part of it that's that's most important
for our story is that this is the period where
the Israelis start seizing territory en mass. They take the
entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal on
Heights from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they

(12:14):
take both the West Bank and Gaza, which means they
now occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately
as this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee
the West Bank and Gaza. And you know, this has
a consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large,
like permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of

(12:36):
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.

Speaker 7 (12:52):
Multiple sections of international law?

Speaker 5 (12:54):
Is it Runnald Reagan? The surprise Reagan?

Speaker 3 (12:58):
Yeah, and we are back. So one of the things
that the Geneva Convention establishes is this set of legal
obligations that occupiers have in occupy in over territory that
they occupy. So if you know, the way that's supposed
to work under international law is that you know, technically speaking, yeah,
you can occupy territory, but you're not allowed to do

(13:21):
whatever you want with that territory. You have to actually
abide by a set of laws. And this was done to,
you know, after World War Two, to protect like people
in occupy territories from the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed
by the Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of
the things that you cannot do if you are occupying

(13:45):
a territory, is you cannot expel civilians from their homes
and replace them with your own civilians. This is this
is a war crime. You are is honor international law.
You're not allowed to do this. Now, I've been talking
a lot about international law. This is where I kind
of I don't know if disagrees with the right word.
I have very little faith in international law. I know a

(14:06):
lot of people who are have been involved in this,
you know, like in the struggle for liberating Palestine for
a very very long time, like take international law very seriously.
I don't know, Like I.

Speaker 4 (14:20):
Mean, Israel has has not followed international laws. Yeah, like
nothing happens.

Speaker 5 (14:27):
Yeah, international police.

Speaker 4 (14:29):
It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe
what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.

Speaker 5 (14:34):
And it has Maybe it has a moral value, right,
I guess that's that's the idea behind some of the activism,
is that like it can help position something as being
in the wrong and then that might help some But yeah,
it hasn't worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop
the rainge of genocide in Meamma hasn't stopped the population
exchange in a free like it's pretend it doesn't exist
un as.

Speaker 3 (14:54):
Someone enforces it.

Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yeah, yeah, like it doesn't. It's it's I feel like
sometimes it's a to them for like Western liberals to
be like, oh, well they brother, they can't do that.
They're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're doing it anyway,
Like well, yeah, yes, yeah, And like understandably, like no
one particularly wants to like be the ones who enforce

(15:17):
international law because that involves your children dying, uh, and
so they let's let other children die instead.

Speaker 3 (15:25):
Yeah, And you know, but the consequence of this being
really toothless is that, you know, it's the language of
this stuff is framed, and I want to frame this
like differently for a second, which is I want to
I want to think about what is being prohibited here
in basic moral terms, because the the what the what

(15:46):
this article of the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop
is an army showing up killing a bunch of people
and then settling their own population on top of those
people's corpses. And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, Yeah,
there's a reason why the Taiva Convention was like holy shit, like,
we can't have this. Yeah, but you know, obviously this

(16:08):
hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped this
from happening. Like we we now live in effectively the
new golden age of ethnic cleansing, right, I mean, the
the one point two million Gossens you fled their homes
after the Israelis told them to literally told them to
flee or die, which is that that's by the way,
and I don't want to be very clear about this.
When people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is, right,

(16:29):
you know, this is an an evacuation order from like
a tsunami, right, Like, It's not like there's a natural
disaster coming. The thing that is happening is the Israeli
government has said you must leave now or we are
going to kill you. And you know, and of course,
the the the other bleak side of this, right is
that with the the quote unquote evacuation order, the Israelis
killed people who were fleeing anyways, but.

Speaker 5 (16:50):
You know, and they had nowhere to fucking go, like
they yeah, right, Like.

Speaker 4 (16:54):
Yeah, evacuate does make it seem like a very like
humanitarian crisis, when really that you're right, But all they're
saying is like leave now or die in the next hours,
you know what I mean? Yeah, And evacuation that's like
a threat, Like it's just a death threat.

Speaker 5 (17:10):
Yeah. If I was to like stand outside your bedroom
and pull the pin on a grenade and be like,
I'm giving you an evacuation order. Oh, and I'm going
to eat this grenade in here in five seconds, people
wouldn't be like, oh, that's reasonable. Turn the doors to
your house as well, just for funzies.

Speaker 3 (17:24):
Yeah, and you know, and so and so. I mean,
this is this is, this is what's been happening in Gaza.

Speaker 5 (17:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (17:29):
You won't put you a million gozzens. You fled their
homes and they've joined the one hundred and twenty thousand
Armenians who are ethnically cleansed from the Garl Kara back
by by Jean in September, Which this is the era
we're living in right now, is an unfathomable era of
violence and ethnic cleansing, right like none of none of
the international legal frameworks like did shit none, none of

(17:52):
none of the sort of you know like that, none
of them never again stuff like n you can you
can you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse your
own medians again and nothing will fucking happen.

Speaker 5 (18:03):
The rag in Myanmar, we didn't do shit.

Speaker 3 (18:06):
Yeah, I mean right now we're we're averaging one one
like mascular ethnic cleansing a month Jesus. And that is
a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.

Speaker 4 (18:17):
And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized,
you know what I 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 these kinds this kind of population
just always die and and be I don't know, uh,
bomb and stuff. So I think a lot of people
just kind of gloss over it because they're just like, oh,

(18:39):
this is what happens to them and really keeps happening.

Speaker 5 (18:42):
Yeah, it's uh, it's certainly like not a coincidence that,
like we there have been other ethnic cleansings right in Africa,
and like I said, they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when
it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world
or where we want to say it, like, it's not
Arab world, I guess because it HAPs to Courdash people too,
but like yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad
thing has happened, like over there, and then it's very

(19:04):
easiestpecuing with the way American news media only focuses on
these parts of the world like they just pointed it
and like oh, look sad, and then never give the context,
like me it 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

(19:25):
again no one understands and yeah, I'm very bleak on
the media at the minute.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
Yeah. Well, and I mean I think you know, the
important context to understand here is that the absolute horror
show that's happening in Gaza right now that Israeli is doing.
This is one of the most extreme forms of it
they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing
from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank.
This is this is what they were doing. And again

(19:53):
this is what never ended. Really yeah, yeah, kept going.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
It was like quiet mostly for a while people ignore,
but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening though.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
Yeah, I mean, and you know, I think the the
oh god, what a blank on the like continuous knock.
But thing is is the way that it's understood, well,
is what it's called in Palestine. In sort of set
of the colonial studies, the line that people always say
is that centered colonialism is structure, not an event. Like
I said, it's not a thing that just ends right.

(20:25):
It just is it. It is that, you know, it
is the air that you breathe. It's the sort of
you know, like it's it's it's, it's, it's, it's it's
it's the walls of the society that have been built
to yeah, cage and destroy people. Now, you know, the
the Israelis again, this is the thing that when when

(20:46):
when when sixty seven happens? This is actually it's kind
of a turning point in the sense that like there
are groups of liberals who had supported the Israelis in
forty eight who were like whoa hold on, hold on,
Like this is actually like really stunningly illegal and this
doesn't do anything. But there's a lot of people who
make it, who make a distinction between Israel in forty

(21:07):
eight and this Israel because this Israel, like the mask
is off. There's nothing. There's nothing there anymore, right, It's
just we we have seized this land by military force,
by attacking a country who we were not at war with,
and we are now like systematically replacing the population of
these places with our population. And the consequence of this,

(21:29):
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 five hundred somewhere between four and
fifteen and five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West
Bank and another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem.

(21:52):
And this means that the settler population in if you
count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is
about seven percent of the total population of Israel that
that are now these settlers. And these settlers are I
don't know. This is this is like, I guess what
you would call Israel's colonial frontier, in the sense that
like these are the people who were like on the
absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people

(22:15):
taking their stuff.

Speaker 5 (22:17):
Settlers is almost a misnomer because they're not like it's
not like sometimes I think that constructs a notion of
like unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right, these
people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which which
which was which was also true of the American Like yes, yeah,
very much. So, yeah we should write here, yeah hit
here or pioneers and pioneer ship people live there for

(22:38):
ten per thousand of VI.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
They were pioneers. Yeah. But like the way that the
state thinks about its own geography is in the terms
of these frontiers sometimes they call the buffer areas, and
they they they think about these things as these these
areas where they need, you know, of of projection of
military control, the projection of sort of their their power
and also sort of settler power and these kinds of

(23:02):
you know, and this is this is this is what
what the sort of settler populations the West Bank are
the front line of Now, these people are subsidized by
the Israeli government that if you if you if you
go to these places, you get tax breaks, you get
you know, they're they're there. There's there's there's there's sort
of there's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies
for these people. They also get very and this is

(23:23):
this is the thing that I think is really interesting
that isn't discussed very much. These really like social services
in the West Bank are very very good. In some cases,
they're they're better than the stuff that's in like Jerusalem
or in like the other the other parts of Israel.
And you know, all this and this acts is sort
of as part of these sort of incentive package to
get people to move into these settler regions. Now, and

(23:47):
you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,
They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And
this is one of the things that Tree and you
talked about this right If you know, if you're trying
to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli are
when mass attacked, Well, the answer is they were all
in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers
steel Land, right, which which.

Speaker 4 (24:06):
You settlers terrorizing Palestinian Yeah, yeah, what's happening, And that
happens all the time, but just so happened to happen
on this very large scale attack yep.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
And the level of violence that's happening here, you know,
I mean we're going to talk about the more direct
settler of violence, like these are these people they these
are people who have set multiple babies on fire like
that is like they they have set multiple children on fire.
This is this is this is the kind of people
who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially

(24:40):
So okay, so there's there's a distinction inside of Israeli
law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under
international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's
no this is not a black it's a completely black
and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law.
There are some settlements that they officially approve and some
of them that they don't. And so the ones that

(25:04):
they do approve are the ones that, you know, those
are the ones who better government services, They get rows
and built out to them, and and but there are
kinds of violence here that are you know, there's there's
I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like
you know, one of the sort of like benefits you
get of living in the West Bank is like the

(25:25):
Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West Bank's fucking
water supply to fill these peoples swimming pools and this
is water that is you know, the thing that they've
been used for for a very very long time is
people in the West Bak doing agriculture. But you know
that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's becoming increasingly
fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their fucking water

(25:46):
and then also lighting and then the you know, the
the government diverts all the water away and then the
settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And this
is actually, and this is weirdly a thing that like
almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkey is
under the Kurds too, right, like yeah, like every every
ethic minority, Like yeah, Russia.

Speaker 5 (26:04):
Does it to its Kalmic people. It's the story I
hear so often at the border, when talking to people
in any number of languages, many number of countries, is like, oh,
they have cut off the water supply to where we live,
and now we can't live there anymore, like across Africa, sadly,
like yeah, even within Russia, like it's it's like yeah,

(26:26):
like you say, it's genocide by dictat or fucking you know,
it's it's an ethnic cleansing that doesn't look so bad
on TV because it happens a little bit slower, but
it's a way to remove people. And you can look
at like drone pictures of the West Bank and you
can see the little fucking like green lollipops, like the
road and then the settlement right and like people have
trees and shit like it's it's wild. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (26:49):
I think the unique part about Israel and the settlers
there burning all the olive trees, I feel like I
didn't ever stard about this before. I don't know if
we did, Yeah, but the whole essence of Zionism is
the idea that there's a group of people that are
like meant for this land. And I just find the
olive tree burning the best example of how that's just

(27:11):
like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared about
this ancient land, if you had ties to this ancient land,
you wouldn't want to burn this like native plant that's
been there for thousands of years, that's been the source
of all the economies 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

(27:33):
about power and land and not about the not land
in the sense of like the architecture or the history
or the nature is just about i don't know, like
a land grab, like just colonial land grap Yeah.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
Well, and I think I think, I think the fundamental
thing at play here, and this is the sort of
one of the fundamental tenets of setular colonialism, is that
these people see land as a commodity, right, they see they,
they see they they they only see land in terms
of things they can buy and sell on, things they
can possess.

Speaker 5 (28:08):
Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right,
Like the more like square miles you could bring under
your like where you have a monopoly and legitimate use
of violence, like the more important you are as a state,
and so like this this is a problem of states.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
Yeah, and we will 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 it is it is really

(28:45):
really hard to be sort of you know, take take
your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel
has the right to protect itself blah, blah blah blah
and then cure these like yahoos and the hills lighting
children on fire, and you know, I mean, and this
is the thing where even even like very reliably pro

(29:06):
Issuo groups at the Council on Foreign Relations are like,
whoa nelly, these guys are messed up. And I mean,
and you can find writing for them. And they've been
writing about this for a long time because this is
all stuff that's been It's been very very obvious of
what was going to happen, right like the you know,
the level of violence is going to ramp up that
like all the stuff, none of the stuff is happening now,
I mean like it's I guess this is one of

(29:27):
those things is like everything is impossible until it happens
or whatever. But you know, all of all of the
stuff that's happening is I mean, like if you just
spend any time looking at what was happening in the
two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's happening now is
like particularly surprising.

Speaker 6 (29:44):
Now.

Speaker 3 (29:45):
What what's very interesting about the settlers though, is that Okay,
so when when the Council of Formulations, the Council of
Formulations went in and was like, okay, so what is
with these people?

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Right?

Speaker 3 (29:55):
They assumed initially that you know, okay, so you know
they're there, take a sort of liberal like pros and
lines that like, okay, well, these these settlers must be
responding to Palestinian violence. And no, it turns out actually,
not only are these are these attacks not like retaliatory, right,
it's it's it's not that like the settler communities were

(30:15):
being attacked by Palastinians and they were taking back. Settler
violence is actually inversely correlated with the level of armed
struggle being carried up with Palestinians. So the era of
settler violence ramp up is the late two thousands and
the twenty tens. And this is the period, you know,
if you know anything about like the Second Defauntity, this
is the period where like Palaestinians doing armed struggle in

(30:40):
like all of the different forms is tapering off and
so and this leads people kind of confused as to
what the fuck is happening here? And so okay, so
we can ask, like what is actually driving the violence
of these sort of settler expansions. And the thing most
people focus on is ideology and religion because a huge number,

(31:02):
although it should be mentioned. Okay, So like a lot
of settlers are what are like, what are religious Zionists
who are people and a lot of these are there's
like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about
a bit later who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but
like there's a lot of right wing religious like Zionists
of like various stripes who you know, and there are

(31:26):
things that they believe that they have a god given
right to take whatever land they want and what they
call quote Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank,
and they believe that they just have the right to
take this land. Yeah, and if anyone tries to stop them,
they will kill them or drive them from their homes.
And it's true that these people exist, right and these
people obviously, and we're going to get into this more
in a second, Like these people have had a profound
influence on Israeli politics. But on the other hands, they're

(31:50):
not they are a lot of the settlers, they're not
the entire settler population. In fact, there's a lot of
settlers who are not these people. And the other thing
about trying to purely explain in the dynamics of violence
by by ideologies. It can't explain why, really. I mean,
there's a kind of like a breakwater event where so

(32:10):
so there used to be settlers in Gaza too, and
these Raelis pulled them out when they pulled out of
Gaza two thousand and five, 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 I don't know if

(32:31):
the Israeli government one time will stop po legal settlements
from happening, we need to like make sure that we
are violence enough that it'll they'll never try to get
rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind of
explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all of it. Actually,
So sorry, before I launched into this, I should Asktuary,

(32:51):
were you gonna say, sorry.

Speaker 4 (32:53):
No, it's okay. I just wanted to make a really
important distinction that like, Zionism is not a religion per se,
and it's a political ideology, right, Like you can be
Christian and Zionists, you can be Jewish and Zionists I've
had multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show, and
I feel like they're very important in the fight for
Palicy liberation. But I think that's a really important distinction

(33:13):
because Zionism is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion.
It was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen
hundreds is when it really like became formed into what
it is today.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
So I think that's.

Speaker 4 (33:27):
Really important to remember, is that Zionism itself is not
this like deep spiritual thing that a lot of Zionists
claim it is. It is just fucking politics and there's
bad politics.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
And I think the other important thing about it too,
and this is something that has been changing. But like Zionism,
most Zionists, like when Israel was formed, were secular, Like
they were secularist, right, A lot of these people were leftists,
they were secularists. They weren't. And the emergence of this
religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that
started happening really in like the eighties. So this is

(34:01):
like forty 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. Is this
is one of the things like like the claim that
this is the driving thing, like this, this is what
you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people and

(34:24):
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 markets. So all right, I swear,
I swear this is connected, but we need we need
to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market. So
all right, so we've talked about how again the rise

(34:48):
in cellular violence is something that it's it starts in
the late two thousands and accelerates to the twenty tens
and has reached a fever pitch now with like in
the past like month, they've killed like one hundred and
thirty people in the West Bank. And Okay, so what
actually also was happening in that time And the answer

(35:11):
to that question is that between two thousand and eight
and twenty ten alone. And this is very weird because
again think about the time period that we're in this
two thousand and eight to twenty ten, This is like
right after two thousand and eight financial collapse. There is
a thirty five percent increase in housing prices in Israel.
This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else in the

(35:35):
entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking, in
Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing
the rate at which the price of housing is also increasing,
it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like,
the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like
a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in
the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,

(35:58):
the massive increases in cellular violent Now this is interesting
for a number of reasons. One is that you know,
and sometimes every once in a while you will get
like someone will just like, I don't know, some like
councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers
who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does

(36:23):
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 an another number of correlation implies causation,
like no it doesn't right that this is too loose
and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not
quite that simple, but Comma, this is legitimately one of

(36:48):
the things that's been driving driving Israeli settler violence and
sort of the the expansion of this sort of of
this sort of Israeli setular 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,

(37:10):
the house, 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 and when, you know, housing values don't go up,
homeowners get very, very very angry because it's also supposed
to be a speculative asset. Now, the sort of technical
terminology for this is that a house is a use value,

(37:31):
which is, you know, it's a house that you live in, right,
and it also has an exchange value, which is its
value on the market. That's a product of the sort
of social relations stuff from the economic system. And with housing,
it all commodities work like this. With housing in particular,
the two sort of natures of this commodity work against

(37:51):
each other. Right, if you want a house, and you
want a house because you want to live in it,
you want, you know, you want the price to be
as low as possible, right you 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 you know, say a real estate firm

(38:11):
or land speculator, or you know, you're just you're buying
a house is 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.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
All.

Speaker 3 (38:21):
All that matters is that you're getting money from this house.
And you know, I something I've talked about a lot
on this show, and since really the nineties when Japan
figured this out, housing has been like these speculative asset
par excellans is the thing you dump all of your
money into when you have a bunch of money sitting
around that you can't turn into more capital. And you

(38:41):
know this, but the problem is that this creates these
massive like housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents
increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by
you know, addressing a dual nature of the commodity and
transforming your economy in such a way that houses are
not commodities and thus you know, is a use value

(39:04):
and is a place to live and not you know,
like a financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right,
because that requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like,
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 lands. And yeah, you know, and

(39:27):
you know, I mean this is this is a very
old American sort of colonial I don't even know, I
think this is where it's from, but like, yeah, the.

Speaker 5 (39:34):
Every empire, so right, Like, working people can't afford to
live with dignity, so we've fucking shipped them off. So
they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune on
someone else's land.

Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid
with someone else's blood.

Speaker 5 (39:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
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 twenty fifteen, but you know, this is

(40:09):
one of the things about about the occupation is that
if you're any given point in time, if you are
looking at what's happening in the occupation, you can unfold
the dynamics that are going to be that are going
to be the future of the occupation. So here's David Graeber. First,
the settlements. They were originally the product of a relatively isolated,

(40:31):
if well funded collection of religious zealots. Now everything seems
to be organized around them. The government pours and endless resources. Why.
The answer seems to be that, since at least the nineties,
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 is reel as expensive.

(40:54):
Housing inside the nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive.
If you are a young person without means, increasingly have
two options to live with one's parents until well into
your thirties, or find a place in illegal settlements where
apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in
High Offer or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention
the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point,

(41:18):
the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank
for economic, not ideological reasons. And this is something that like,
this is actually kind of reversing now just because of
how like how far right and how the spread of
like sort of like ideological like right wing stuff is spread.
But this is at the time then twenty fifteen, this
was true. Yeah, and this is especially true around Jerusalem.

(41:42):
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 into settlements and they will inexorably without even realizing it,
begin to think like fascists are in their own way,
giant engines for the production of right wing consciousness. Is

(42:04):
very difficult for someone placed in a hostile territory given
training in automatic weapons and warn't constantly to be on
one's guard against local populations seething over the fact that
your next door neighbors have been killing their sheep and
destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno nationalism
as common sense. As a result, with every election, the
old left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious

(42:28):
fascist or semi fascist parties. When a larger and larger
stake of the vote for politicians who can barely think
past the next election, lure is inescapable. And so I
think this gets at the core of what's happening, specifically
what's happening in the West Bank, which is that, Yeah,
these settlements are you know, I mean, if you were

(42:52):
trying to generate in a lab a place where you
could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would
be it would be these settlements. And for more on that,
come back tomorrow when we finish this conversation. In the meantime,
this has been nickuld appen here. Thanks for joining us,
see you tomorrow. Welcome to Dickudappan here, a podcast that

(43:26):
is once again about Palestine. Hopefully you listen to yesterday's
episode of this. One's going to be a little bit
out of sorts, but yeah, we are continuing and finishing
upper conversation about Israel and setular colonialism. So strap in
and enjoy the show. If you were trying to generate
in a lab a place where you could turn a

(43:46):
bunch of people into fascists, it would be it would
be these settlements. This has a bunch of downstream political effects, right.
One of them is that, okay, so whose lands are
you taking here?

Speaker 1 (43:59):
Right?

Speaker 3 (44:00):
The answer here is it's a lot of Palestinian farmers.
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 pal sign altogether. And this is
really really hard. We talked about it on this show.
It is really really difficult to get out or your

(44:22):
other option is to become cheap labor for Israeli capitalists.
And this is an another part of the sort of
self reinforcing dynamic of these engines, right, is like, you know,
if if you're dealing with the population that doesn't have
the means to support themselves except for you know, the
these Israeli like work passes that they like, you know,
like bestow upon the benighted population, likes it makes it

(44:46):
incredibly hard for there to be any sort of physicist movement.
And you know the other thing that David Greab was
pointing out that you know, he was I think like
ahead of the curve on in a lot of ways.
Is I mean, this has been happening for a long time,
but these really like electoral left is just gone. Israeli Labor,
which is like the like Israeli Labor is the party
that built Israel right, like it was Israeli Labor guys

(45:10):
who like pulled together the entire Zionist coalition and like
turned them into the engine that could actually win the war.
In forty eight, Labor was outperformed by fucking Handash in
the most recent election. This has happened several times now.
Hadash is an alliance of the Israeli communists and like
left Arab nationalists. And when I say they do better,

(45:31):
it's not to say that Hadash is doing well, but
like you know, they're both pulling at like four percent right,
and Israeli Labor again like has ruled is ruled Israel
for like a like a very magnificant part of his history.
They are now nothing. Right, there's four percent of the vote.
They have the same amount of vote as the oldest,
as the Israeli like, and specifically I should mention this
is this is the this is the like anti occupation communists.

(45:54):
This is another one of the sort of dynamics of
settlerism that you know, the sort of is universally true, right,
this is it's not just Israel where a bunch of
people who are nominally left. It's a bunch of people
who like you know, fought in their own liberation struggles
and get turned into just like absolutely fanatical right wingers.
There are an enormous number of United Irishmen, rebels from

(46:18):
the rebellion of eighteen seventy eight in Ireland who go
to the US and you know, wind up A bunch
of these people wind up in the American Army. A
bunch of these people wind up like I mean, I
guess it's technically not the Indian Wars, but like a
lot of these people wind up like fighting the Creeks
in eighteen twelve. These people could become the front line
of settler expansion in the US. And this all this

(46:39):
happens again with like German and French like liberals and
socialists who flee the crushing of the eighteen forty eight revolutions.
It actually almost happened to Marx. He wound up not
going to the US. But there's a lot of settlers,
Like there's a lot of like of European socialists who
come to the US and see all of this land
and they go, oh shit, we can solve, like we
can solve the problems of the old world. But it's

(47:00):
taking this land.

Speaker 5 (47:02):
Yeah, having our little like a utopian socialist settlements. Was
it Owen's or Jones or someone? They had these like yeah, yeah,
quake k utopian sort of settlement towns in someone else's land.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
Yeah. Well, And that's one of the ways has happened there.
There are other ways this happens too, where it's just people.
You know, it's not it's not even always utopian communities.
People a lot of and and this this is also
so okay. There are people who come over from the
eighteen forty eight revolutions who like, you know, like August
von Willich is probably the most famous one. Like he's
a communist who ends up like fighting for the Union

(47:38):
and then notably not fighting in the Indian Wars after.
But you know, a lot of these people they come
to the US and they're like, okay, well, so they're
like the fundamental contradiction to capitalism or whatever is that, like,
you know, people like people, people are forced to become like,
as they would literally call it, like the wage slaves
of capital, right. And so these people take a bunch

(48:02):
of just incredibly bizarre stances, Like one they're they're they're
they're against the abolition of slavery because they they're like, oh, well,
if you free the slaves, these people are going to
compete with us for wage labor. So either either they're
pro slavery or they're like slavery the like ending slavery
is the thing they can only happen with the end
of capitalism, so we don't care about it. Or and

(48:23):
this is a very common thing that this is one
of them. This is i think much closer to the
Israeli dynamic. Is these people become convinced that like the
the you know, the problem with Europe, right is that,
you know, Europe is entirely ruled by either feudalist or
like feudal bearers or capitalist right, and so there's no
way for someone to like make like make themselves in
the world, right, there there's no way for them to
be independent like of the capitalist class. But in but

(48:45):
in the US, there is because all you have to
do is, you know, instead of being part of the
like the industrial proletariat or whatever and getting like crushed
by the Buddha capital, you can just go become a
settler farmer. And this is like, this is one of
the defining ideologies of the US, Like Abraham Lincoln talks
about this, like the thing that makes the US different
from Europe is that like, yeah, you can you can
go be a settler, you can get your own land.

(49:09):
And this is something you can also trace back to
the foundation of Israel. Israel is created you know, there
are there are there are right wings 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 like become Zionists, are armed by Stalin and
these people create like you know, these are the people
who do the knappa.

Speaker 5 (49:31):
Yeah, lots of people were also there were Jewish I
guess socialists is probably the best term for them, who
would come to fight in Spain and then returned to Yeah,
people interested run and reign has done a really good
paper about some of people in international brigades. So not
a lot of them turned out to do the Knakpa.
To be clear, yes, some of them were. It's actually

(49:54):
also it's actually really sad to follow the plight of
the It's a slight divergence, I guess. But Jewish people
who had fled programs in the early twentieth century grown
up largely in New York in extremely impoverished neighborhoods fort
fascism in Spain, came home, fought fascism again in the
rest of Europe after like pointing at it in nineteen

(50:16):
thirty five and going bad in America going now dog wigged,
and then in nineteen forty one 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 kill their
friends and now their friends. And then they come home

(50:39):
after the war, they're blacklisted under McCarthy, and they see
the nuck but happening, you know, like later on and
they they're disgusted, right, like they everything that, like every
sort of like identity in group that they've had, they
feel has turned against the things that they think are
morally right. And they have these really difficult lives despite

(50:59):
like pursuing what most of us would agree is in
moral good throughout their lives.

Speaker 3 (51:05):
Yeah, being being consistently moral fucking sucks and that is
a behind. Yeah yeah, it is a fucking awful time
to do that.

Speaker 5 (51:15):
Yeah, yeah sucks.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Yeah, Okay, we should take another ad break and.

Speaker 5 (51:21):
Then, yeah, adverts are not consistently moral. Who very unlikely.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
And we are back. So we've been talking about the
capacity of settlements to change someone's politics, right, it is,
you know, it's as these labs of consciousness that produce
certain kinds of right wing politics and mentalities and you know,
and produce right wing soldiers.

Speaker 5 (51:44):
Right.

Speaker 3 (51:44):
But the settlements also do other things. And one of
those things that they do is the settlements are a
big reason, you know, if you were invested in the
peace process, like this is a big reason why the
peace process failed was that the settlers never had any
intentions of abiding by any of the treaties that were
being signed by the israelis right, and this is something

(52:05):
that is true transhistorically, right. This is a dynamic you
see in American history too. The US signs like hundreds
of treaties with like like just incredible numbers and indigenous nations.
And do you know how many of those trees I
end up upholding.

Speaker 5 (52:18):
Yeah, that's none.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Yeah. And you know, I mean you can look at
the Supreme Court, right, and you know, the Supreme Court
will uphold laws from like seventeen ninety five, right.

Speaker 1 (52:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
The one kind of law they will mod uphold is
their treaty obligations, at which in which case they will
go literally they will just go, well, we are obligated
to do this under treaty, but it is too hard,
so fuck you.

Speaker 5 (52:42):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, they'll go previous to that and
treat site the fucking Doctrine of Discovery or the Treaty
of Cso yeah, good old Ruth Bede Againsberg liberal hero.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (52:53):
And so you can look at this from sort of
two perspectives, right. You can look at this from this
perspective of the state, and you can look at it
from the respective of the settler. And you know, I mean,
and I think I think I think there's a there's
a third view that's kind of sees them both as
an extension of the same thing, which is what we're
gonna sort of come to. But you know, you can
you can look at this treaty stuff, and you can
look at the fact that you know, both the settlers

(53:15):
and the Israeli governments like sign the Oslo Accords fully
intending to do more settlements, right, and this is this
is something that that like the Palestinians are watching, right,
Like if you're a Palasidian, like you are watching these
piece of acords get signed and then you are watching
the Israelis fucking bulldozing your house. Yeah, and and this
is this is this is the thing in the US too, Right.

(53:36):
It's like everyone who signs a treaty get like like
all of the nation to sign trees get a get
a watch as the US is like, oh well, actually,
like no, we've never had any intention of like fulfilling this,
Like no, We're just gonna keep exterminating you and like
chasing the sort of like like shattered remnants of your
tribes like literally across the entire fucking continents. And you know,

(53:57):
so so you can look at this from the from
the perspective of this, and you know, like like dealing
dealing with the American state, Like it is well known
by every nation and every race that has ever had
to deal with them that the white man is duplicitous
in a state is built on lies, and that is
only kind of a joke. Like everyone who fucking deals
with the Americans just like, what the fuck is wrong
with these people? Like do you like do people like

(54:18):
not understand what an agreement is?

Speaker 5 (54:20):
Like what you know, Yeah, this is something that like
I know, if you travel 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? Like like why do
they treat us like that? Like like we fucking did

(54:41):
everything you asked and then you fucking abandoned us or
killed us, Like like yeah, like everywhere, and its course
Sprain does it too. I'm not saying like America spectrum,
but fuck me, America in the last two hundred years
is really setting you precedent for just like Jane has
faced bullshit.

Speaker 3 (54:56):
Yeah, and you know, and and and this, and this
particularly bad when you're dealing with when you're dealing with settlers,
because you know, one of the things about the state
is that the arc of the 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, it's territorial base in

(55:17):
its economy, which leads it to push as far as
it possibly can towards dispossessing the indigenous population. Now, this
is also the interest of settlers, who act as a
kind of extension of the state that goes beyond its
normal capacity to do what it wants to do. And
you know, in the US, the human manifestation of this
is Andrew Jackson, who is a man who completely illegally
on multiple occasions, just like conquered Florida and you know,

(55:41):
conquered Florida specifically. And this is one of the like
a couple of things. This is what I have a
very good friend who talks about this a lot because
they've 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 like a big part
of the reason why he's going into Florida is specifically
because he he wants to smash these these like indigenous

(56:04):
like black indigenous, like Allied Buron communities there. And so Jackson,
you know, jack Jackson like is is like under orders
not to invade Florida. He invades Florida. Anyways, you know,
we we we get we're there's a very similar sort
of tension between like the courts and you know, like
the courts in the settler state that you have with

(56:26):
the sort of international community in Israel now, where like
the courts are like Andrew Jackson, you cannot do the
trail of tears. And Andrew Jackson is just like fuck you,
Like we're doing the trail of tears. Where we're going,
We're going to do a genocide and you know, and
and the thing the thing about what Jackson represents, right
is that Jackson is is the human embodiments of all

(56:48):
of these sort of structural like he's the human and
political embodiment of all of these structural tendencies et cetera. Colonialism.
Now one and one of the things that that's I
think is interesting about this is that there are like
all of the settler states, right you see this in
like every single one. And I'm gonna talk about the
US because that's the one that I like other than Israel,
that I know the best. Well, I don't probably probabilia
like the US better than Israel. But there are always

(57:10):
times when this when when this the federal government tries
to crack down on settlers, right, this happens like repeatedly.
I mean this, and this is the thing even like
like the British are like spend a lot of time
trying to stop the colonists from like moving like from
moving west. And I think that there's a lot of
people who like have come to believe that if they
if the British had won the American Revolution, that they

(57:33):
would have been able to stop the settlers. And no,
like they wouldn't have been able to. They would have
been able to maybe they could have delayed it by
twenty years, but no, there was there was no one
has ever really been able to stop these people. And
you know, the the IDF, like we talked about this
a bit earlier, right, the IDEF in two thousand and five,

(57:53):
did pull Like when they pulled out of Gaza, they
dragged like eight thousand center settlers with them. But again
this is this is them like that's incredibly familiar to
anyone who studied the history of settlers in the US,
is that government attempts to control settler expansion inevitably fail
when convented with the the you know, the these unstoppable
twin economic and twin imperatives of the economic benefit to

(58:14):
the settlers, and also the sort of speculative the speculative
value of these of this new land, the land speculators.
But then the the other problem is the inevitable rise
of the settlers themselves as the political bloc, which in
the US, the man who is the champion of the
settlers is Andrew Jackson. And this is you know, and

(58:36):
when he comes into and when 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 you have the trailer tears. And Israel, this is
this is represented by Israel's overtly genocidal finance bits at
Betsial Simotrich, who represents the Religious Zionist Party and uh,
I'll give you all three guesses what those guys believe.

(58:59):
If your guesses are they are unhinged settler racists and
like turbo homophobes. You're you're right on the buddy.

Speaker 5 (59:09):
Yeah, so he's a conspiracy theorist, Like yeah, yeah, this
guy is unhinged.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
They're very open with their genocidal yeah yeah once, Like
there's no there's no subtlety. They're just like, let's let's
flatten what, Let's flatten Gauza, Let's kill them all, you
know what I mean. It's just like theyage seem like
with a very Trumpian thing that's like encouraging the hate
that is there too fester.

Speaker 5 (59:37):
It's particularly like to try to diverse again. I found
the fucking like you can't support Palestinia liberation if you're
queer dunk that we see from like Zionist near liberals
to be one of the most frustrating a like you
can support what the fuck you want, Like you don't
need a condescending, fucking like zist mum in a minivan

(01:00:01):
to tell you what you can and can't believe, and like,
b go look up some of this guy's statements because
fucking you ain't gonna find anyone who's more genocidal towards
queer people openly than this motherfucker.

Speaker 4 (01:00:12):
I mean, Israel is like very well known for like
pink washing and pretending they're very progressive and supportive of yeah,
of queer people, when they're really not. I mean, yeah,
this country also is not, you know what I mean,
Like it's I think I think that argument is a
very privileged elitist one.

Speaker 5 (01:00:27):
Yeah, and like like yeah, just like haha, homophobia exists there,
it's not. It's not a win for anyone. Yeah, if
you want to get married to someone of the same
gender as you in Israel, you do it on zoom
in fucking Utah like that that Like, 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.

(01:00:49):
Fuck off.

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
This is one of the sort of progressive veneer of
the Israelis has been you know, like fading because these
the people who are coming to parent and then Yahoo
in some ways was one of the sort of anguer
to this. But like this, and this is the thing
you're seeing in India too, right, Like whenever you get
a far right guy. Right, the thing that inevitably generates
is people who are even further right than they are. Yeah,

(01:01:12):
and that that's that that's what these these settler people are.
And and the thing is, like these settler guys, you
can't cover for them, like if you if they are
on camera for longer than about thirty seconds, they start
saying stuff like just the most unhinged, like we're gonna
kill all the Palestinians. They start saying like we're gonna

(01:01:34):
kill every Arab, like, they start talking about various and
various basically like their their their platforms that they you know,
they're And then this is this is so part of
the reason that there are there there's a coalition of
of these like of these like far right settler parties
that are now backing net and Yahu. And this is
this is how net and Yahu has been able to
stay out of prison, is that he's been able to
back enough, he's been able to buy off enough of

(01:01:54):
these people that they're backing his government so he can
stay prime minister, so they can't charge him. But the
the you know, the the concession basically for this was
that these like this guy was just basically just given
control of a bunch of state military power, like from
the army in the West Bank. It's been given to

(01:02:15):
him in his settler fanatics. And you know, like especially
since like the Hamas attack like these, the government has
been handing out guns these people like candy, yes, and
they've been using which is murder Palestinians and cold blood
and you know, I mean the thing is, people do
a lot, right, so sometimes they just kill people. The
thing they do all the time is just in the
middle of the night, like if you're if you're living
in the West Bank, like a bunch of mass guys

(01:02:38):
will show up, the will break into your home. They'll
beat the shit out of you, and they'll say, like
if you don't leave tomorrow, will kill you. And you know,
sometimes those guys are settlers, like are just like are
non like I don't know, like non military settlers, right,
they're like settler civilians or whatever. Sometimes those guys are
just like the army, And there's no fucking way to
tell which one, like, because again it's just a bunch

(01:02:59):
of people in masks appear in the night and break
into your house and start beating the shit out of
you and these people, these are these are the people
that increasingly the Israeli political system is being run by.
And and you can't And it is in a similar way,
just the way that Andrew Jackson just like rips off
this mask of sort of like New England gentility that

(01:03:20):
the US had like had had under like John Adams
and uh or like John Quincy Adams and like Monroe,
well Minroe's I guess like a like Minroe's like a
you know, like another one of these like dignified Virginia
planter guys, and like you know, those people have do
a lot of the same violence that that Jackson does.

(01:03:41):
But Jackson is the guy who just rips the mask
off and is just you know, this completely unhinged settler
mediac who like this is the guy you killed it
like just murdered a bunch of people in duels, like
you know. And and these are the kind of people
who are who are coming to power. It is there
right now. And this is this is a self reinforcing
dynamic because the more power these people get, right, the
more they're able to, you know, just carry out genocides.

(01:04:03):
And the more genocides were able to carry out, the
more of that they're the more people that they were
able to push into these territories that they've taken, and
the more people they put in these territories, the more
of the more of these like settler fanatics there are,
and this this is one of the big things that
is driving the entire conflict.

Speaker 5 (01:04:20):
Oh.

Speaker 4 (01:04:20):
I think a good thing to remember is that last
year there was an election like going into twenty twenty
three and uh, Israel like put into power a bunch
of these right wing people. Was it twenty twenty three
with twenty twenty two? And was in track of time.

Speaker 5 (01:04:35):
He came in last he came in twenty Yeah, I
think he was a minute he was points to minister
in twenty twenty two. But okay, sorry, the years a
time election is real, Yeah, I remember when.

Speaker 4 (01:04:45):
My point is that like in recent history, the last
couple of years, these extreme right wing racist people are
in power, all the all the places of power, all
the ministers, all the whatever the shit they're all shared.
They all share this ideology that like Arabs must die. Basically,
that's like they're the main point is that they are

(01:05:07):
superior to Arabs and then they must die, and that
this is a diet in this place that is theirs.

Speaker 3 (01:05:14):
And you know, and what these people are doing when
they're in power, and this is the thing that this
is one of the things they were trying to do
before the sort of like the current war started, was
they were trying to annex the West Bank. This is
a very explicit goal. Now this is a very explicit
goal of the settler parties. They will kind of they
know it's pretty hard for them to like legally annex it,

(01:05:35):
so they will talk about like effectively annexing it and
stuff like that. They do these sort of like subtle metaphors,
but like, yeah, what they want to do is to
kick people out of what's called Area See, which is
the majority of the West Bank. And they want to
kick all the like the immediate plans, I want to
kick all the people out of Area Sea and push
them into just like increasingly tiny corners of the West Bank.

(01:05:58):
And presumably because again, if if you've listen to all
these people talk, right, it's that they talk about like
Jews have the right to live in.

Speaker 5 (01:06:06):
H look Judae and Samaria yeah yeah yeah, yeah, they
call the West Bank, yeah yeah, they.

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
Have a right to live there. So and the thing
is like if you believe that right, that means you
have to kick all the Palestinians out of the West
Bank entirely. Now the places people have stopped sort of
before the war, the places people had stopped was like, well, okay,
they can live in Gaza. But now they're talking about
you know, I mean just like taking over most of
like just taking over most of Gaza and driving the

(01:06:33):
Palestinians out.

Speaker 5 (01:06:34):
Yeah, and it doesn't have to lead like Jews have
a right to live in this place, doesn't have to
lead to thus we must genocide the people who live there,
right like we it like it. This is what happens
when we get a state that understands existence as destroying
anybody who is not in agreement with this right wing
genocidal fucking Outlook like it has been possible for people

(01:06:56):
of different faiths to live in different places.

Speaker 2 (01:06:59):
But four forty eight, yeah, exactly existing.

Speaker 5 (01:07:02):
Yeah yeah, this the ideology that is inherent to like
a Zionist militarized state will never allow that co existence
to happen, right, because it relies on coexistence not being
possible as part of its narrative. For like Mia said, taking, dominating,
and appropriating that land and gaining the value from it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:23):
But it's the narrative that they need to say stuff
like oh, all the gardens should just go to Egypt
or whatever. It is, like it's all part of the
plan to kind of just like expel them so they can.

Speaker 5 (01:07:35):
Yeah, it doesn't even have to be like it's not
like an explicit plan that they have a whiteboard and
they're like it is you know.

Speaker 3 (01:07:42):
They do actually occasionally just write it out. Sometimes they
do actually explicitly write the plants.

Speaker 5 (01:07:48):
Yeah, you can say on x dot com from time
to time, but it's inherent, as Mia said like several times,
to state and to a capitalist state that is a
settler colony, right, Like it's inevitable. It happened here, it's
happening there. It's happened all over the world. Like it's
not possible to construct a capitalist state on someone else's land,
on someone else's bodies. It doesn't do this.

Speaker 3 (01:08:08):
Yeah, and I mean and this this is this is
also one thing I wanted to emphasize too, is that
all of the shit that's happening in Palestine happened here, right.
I mean, I guess like we, like the US didn't
have the kind of surveillance technology in like then the
eighteen teens, right that the Israelis have now. But you know,
like we we did all this shit too, right, like

(01:08:30):
this is this is all of the land that we
live on. That's that's where that shit came from. There's
there's this great uh. I really love Daniel Connan the
Painted Bird. It has this great line in one of
his songs that goes because he's the one who did
the stealing and named you as the heir whose filthiness
provided you the privileges you bear. And this is this

(01:08:52):
thing in the US right, like in Israel, you know,
if you're a settler on the border, right, there's no
there's no escape from what you did to take this place.
Right like you are you are looking down on the
people who you've like whose houses you've taken. Right in
the US, we have this sort of luxury of like, wow,
this happened a long time ago, like we don't have

(01:09:12):
to sort of we don't have to see the consequences
of it, but.

Speaker 5 (01:09:15):
We still do it right like we didn't, just like
we're doing it at Oak Flat for instance right now.
Or yeah, look at how Trump fucking did indigenous people
during COVID, like it's an ongoing process.

Speaker 3 (01:09:27):
Yeah and right, yeah, it's it's so much easier for
Americans to pretend that it's not happening, and you know,
like no, like it turns out in fact like this, this, this,
and this is where the sort of sub of colonialism
of the structure not an event stuff comes from. And
it applies to both Israel and the US because guess.

Speaker 4 (01:09:50):
What, Israel literally took notes from what the US did.
It just did it, you know what I mean, Like
it's just the same thing in the end, Like we're
the bad guys, like we've always been the bad guys.

Speaker 6 (01:10:03):
Are the bad guys?

Speaker 3 (01:10:05):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, 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

(01:10:26):
was hideous. That war, the war in China sees some
of the darkest moments in human history. And there's this
tendency among I mean, you know, as a tendency among
both both the communists and the nationalists want to sort
of sanitize it, right, They want to turn it into
this sort of glorious war for liberation, and like, yeah,
like there are moments of like, you know, glorious anti

(01:10:47):
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
were also does things that are unforgivable. And I'm not
even talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki here because you know,

(01:11:08):
like we as in like Chinese people, like we didn't
do that right, like you know, Mao Mao, Like on
the one hit. It is true that when Noo found
out about the nuclear eruptions, his reaction was, way, you
had a third bomb and he didn't drop it on Tokyo,
But like, you know, we didn't do that right Like
that was that was the Americans. That wasn't like that

(01:11:28):
wasn't like us in China. But you know, the things
that I'm talking about that the Chinese side of that
war did that were just unforgivable, you know, I mean,
I think the best example of it is Shanghai Shek
blew up a dam on the Yellow River, and his
goal was he was trying to you know, he was
trying to flood like several provinces to cut off the

(01:11:50):
Japanese army and to like slow down their troop movements, right,
and he slows down the troop movements, and he does
it by killing four hot This is this is this
is this is this. The low end estimates is that
he killed four hundred thousand people. That is a an
amount of death that is unimaginable. He killed like in

(01:12:13):
a single act, he killed four hundred thousand people. It
is two Hiroshima and Nagasaki's And that's that's the low
end estimate. Right, people, people, people fighting against Japan, people
fighting against colonialism, did unforgivable crimes. And you know, and
the people of of China like never forget like to
this day, like in the provinces where like where this

(01:12:36):
shit happened, Like Chang Kai Shek is fucking despised, and
you know, and like when when like when the Allies
won the war and when China drove out the Japanese, right,
like the next thing they did was they drove out
shan Kai Shack because he was, you know, because because
he had done things in that war that were so
terrible that people were willing to be like fuck it,

(01:12:57):
Like Mao didn't fucking blow up damn and kill four
hundred thousand of us, right, you know, and so like,
and this is the thing about colonial resistance is that
it is the things that people do are unforgivable. Also
that that word that Japan fought in China, they killed
twenty million of US twenty million. And this is one

(01:13:21):
of these things right where like colonialism makes monsters of us.
All suffering does not make you knowable, just makes you suffer.
And so you know, again like the are like China's
anti colonial freedom fighters right, like fucking killed killed numbers
of like Chinese people that are it's just unimaginable. And
then you know, these same freedom fighters who fought the

(01:13:42):
good fighting against Japan, you know, within twenty years they're
bulldozing Moss and shing John and murdering communists in Tibet, right,
and they've built two, you know, after successfully repelling Japan's
attempt to turn China into a settler state, they have
made two of their own. And you know, so like
there's there's No. I think the point that I'm trying
to make here is that, you know, like anti colonial

(01:14:06):
resistance is not this sort of like it doesn't look pretty.
It's a fucking horror most of the time. But you also,
you know, when when you're looking into like when you're
looking at these wars, you have to look at the
direction in which colonization is moving. And that's you know,
that's the thing that is crystal clear in Palestine, right

(01:14:28):
is you can just look at like which in which
direction is is colonization moving?

Speaker 1 (01:14:33):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:14:34):
Like who is taking whose houses?

Speaker 1 (01:14:36):
Right?

Speaker 3 (01:14:36):
Who is who is forcing a million people from what
population to flee their homes? Who is you know, who
has been steal he 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 that this is active colonization, that this is this
is this is a center of colonial state waging a

(01:14:57):
war against you know, people like people who are fighting
against colonization. That is the sort of that that is
the underlying current of everything that happens. And and you know,
like I don't know, like people people in anti colonial

(01:15:17):
wars do things that are unforgivable and they get you know,
and like often like their own people will eventually come
for them one day. And also I don't know.

Speaker 4 (01:15:31):
I no one has to agree with me, it's fine,
But I personally really dislike when it's called a war
what's happening in Palestine because I just think it's the
clearest case of genocide I've ever seen, and like I
don't care how it started or whatever, I feel like
at this point in time, it's a genocide. Like if
Palestine's out of country, Palestine does not have an army,

(01:15:53):
they can't, no one can leave Gaza. I think that
is the current state of what the violence is going
on over there.

Speaker 3 (01:16:03):
And so yeah, just like particular, like I think I
think you're like I think you're right about that, and
that's the thing that that's the thing that's different than
like the stuff that was happening in China was like
at least we sort of had like at least we
had a state, right and we had armies and our
armies got fucking stopped, but you know, we had like
we we we had actual weapons.

Speaker 5 (01:16:27):
Yeah, I must have some now, But I think you're
to your greater point, Yeah, I think, like, well, yeah,
it sounds very similar to like have you read Challenged
Introduction to.

Speaker 6 (01:16:39):
The Rest of the Earth?

Speaker 5 (01:16:40):
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.

Speaker 6 (01:16:47):
I think I'm paraphrasing that relatively accurately.

Speaker 5 (01:16:50):
It doesn't have to be like the violence has to
be good for it to be like an inevitable consequence
of violent colonialism, right, like it sparks violent colonization movements.
It doesn't imply like a moral like goodness to the
individual act. It's just an inevitable consequence of people fighting

(01:17:12):
against colonalism in the only way that that colonalism kind
of leaves for them, I guess, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:18):
And I think I think another part of this too
is that like just being in contact with colonial powers
makes everyone worse. Like this, This is the thing you
see in the US with a lot of with a
lot of indigenous groups, is that like you know, like
like bye bye bye by by the time the trail
of cheers is happening, like the Cherokee or like have

(01:17:39):
adopted chattel slavery, like like American style plantation chattel slavery
and that fucking sucks, right, It's like it being in
contact with these settler empires like brings out the worst
in everyone, mm hmm. And there's no winning from that position, right,
like the the the best I don't even know if

(01:18:02):
it's the best case stereo, Like I guess occasionally you
get like an Algeria where you know, they kill it
off people and like the other Algeria, like you know,
the settlers in Algeria all like went back to France.
But that's not an option in Israel, right like, and
we wouldn't even you wouldn't want it to be a

(01:18:23):
solution either, So I don't know. It's one of these
I don't know. It's one of the sort of dilemmas
of how you deal with a colony is that.

Speaker 5 (01:18:31):
It's harder to decomnize the set of economy, right, yes,
like it implies a removal of one people or in
other people, and either of those things are in any
way desirable, like, and it's so hard to see like
a path to a peaceful coexistence now because all we
see is like the entire world ratcheting the fucking like

(01:18:54):
violence level up and like, yeah, Israel carrying out genocidal
vims in Gaza. It's not the way we reach a
way for people to like children to grow up without
fucking fearing if the sky is going to kill them
in Gaza, right, like this will happen for generations to

(01:19:16):
come because you've emotionally scarred field children.

Speaker 4 (01:19:21):
Well, how would you? I think it's a very human
response if anything, Like I I don't think we have
the the right to judge how someone that has been
through that hell how they respond because it's I don't know,
we haven't lived their nightmare. It's just a nightmare.

Speaker 5 (01:19:43):
And like it's not like like there, it's not like
there haven't been attempts at non violent resistance in Gaza,
because they have.

Speaker 6 (01:19:48):
And look what fucking happened like.

Speaker 3 (01:19:50):
That there was a big one like like three or
four years ago. Yeah, like you know.

Speaker 5 (01:19:56):
They like the fucking Crassenstein take the why can't they
all dis organized to archie the war holding Kansas and
come by they like I tried to do that, but
like yeah, people people kept killing them. Like I'd say
this every time we talk about guards, but say again,
like when we were talking to the PK guys, of guys,
and I've known them for a few years. Like one

(01:20:19):
of them was telling me about how they used to
do sleepover camps for kids there so the kids could
learn parkour and not have to pay for the travel
and like you know, take their time and risk to travel,
so they do sleep over camps in the summertime.

Speaker 6 (01:20:32):
And he was explained to.

Speaker 5 (01:20:34):
Me like it was the most normal thing in the
world that the six eight year old children would wake
up at night with night terror screaming because they thought
they were being bombed, because they are having like a
flashback from being bombed, I guess, And like that's something
I recognized from from PTSD, from from you know, other.

Speaker 6 (01:20:55):
Contexts, but like it really fucked me up.

Speaker 5 (01:20:59):
An eighty royal child is like we can't expect these
people to like develop into come by us singing like
peace activists, like that they they have taken on massive
amounts of raw where they've seen the neighbors and families die,
Like it doesn't mean that we have to be like,
oh well, like violence is going to happen, like that
we should do everything we can to make a world

(01:21:22):
where like people aren't killing and dying there, because it
will always result in more of the least empowered people dying.
But it's something that I think a lot of us
are so far detached from that. I think is as like,
you know, if you lived a whole lot of the
United States relative safety and prosperity, it's it's hard for

(01:21:42):
you to understand.

Speaker 3 (01:21:43):
I think, yeah, And I mean like this is a
like gaza is a place where it reiins body parts,
Like that's what happens when it is really bomb goes off,
It rains body parts, and like that is a.

Speaker 2 (01:21:59):
I don't know, like.

Speaker 3 (01:22:04):
The kind of person who has to grow up with
that is just not going to be the same as
like even people who have been through a lot of
like really messed up stuff, Like it's not going to
be the same as like experiencing that.

Speaker 5 (01:22:18):
Yeah, even if you like I have visited was to
report on them. But then I get to go home
and be safe. And sometimes that juxtaposition is hard, and
it takes me a long time to not be afraid
of the sky or a park car is going to
kill me. But I'm home and I'm safe, And once
I can adjust to that, then I can I can
get on, you know, change things like that change.

Speaker 6 (01:22:38):
You, but you continue with your life.

Speaker 5 (01:22:40):
But if you're never home and you're never so or
your home is never safe, that's something I can't understand, right,
That's something that I haven't experienced, and very very few
of us probably.

Speaker 4 (01:22:50):
Have, a lot of doctors have said that all the
children in Gaza, they haven't they can't quite they can't
be quite defined of having experienced PTSD because they haven't
reached the post part yet, like they're still they're like
in a perpetual state of PTSD because that's just how
they their entire lives have been. Most of them have

(01:23:11):
never known life outside of the blockade.

Speaker 3 (01:23:13):
So it's I don't know, yeah, and I mean I
think I think that's a good place to end of.
Just you know, this is what this is what this
is what the reality and the eternal presence of SETL
colonialism is, right, and you know, this is one of
these things where in a lot of weird ways, like

(01:23:37):
like there are ways in which we like people like
if you live in the US, if you like even
the subset the UK, like you are probably in a
like maybe a better position to actually stop this than
anyone who lives in Palestign is so yeah, yeah, this
is but and and the problem is if we don't
right the self, the mutually self reinforcing dynamics of setular

(01:23:59):
colonialism are just going to keep like carrying on and
keep spiraling on. And this is going to go on
until everyone is dead or everyone is gone.

Speaker 5 (01:24:09):
Yeah, even if you can't stop it. Like I sent
the video. I'm sure you guys saw the video of
the Jewish Wis of Peace people in the Grand Central Terminal,
New York. And I said that to the Palestinian journalistic
because they're like, oh, this is great to see you.
And if something we spoke about the interview too, how
like it makes a me fully difference to some mech
state of mind to see solidarity, even if like you know,

(01:24:33):
we can get in the streets and we can say
something and maybe that will make a difference. Maybe it won't,
but like, at least if it makes someone understand that
you're kind of standing with them in a moment of darkness,
and maybe that helps in a way.

Speaker 4 (01:24:47):
Yeah, I think when a whole population is not able
to share what they're going through, their journalists are getting
killed when the internet is out and the one thing
they're saying is like, please don't start talking about this.
I think that's the easiest thing that we can do.

Speaker 5 (01:25:07):
Yeah, and hopefully maybe this will impel us to Like
as Miya said at the start, right, this keeps fucking happening,
and like, as ethnic cleansings go, this one's got more
coverage than most in the US, And like, I would
encourage you to look at what you're seeing in Gaza,
and I understand how inhuman and unemangeable it is. And like,
maybe follow that shouldn't happen anywhere. It shouldn't happen into Gray,

(01:25:30):
and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan, it shouldn't happen to
the r hinge of people, And like, yeah, try try
and extend that. It's not to scold people, like if
you weren't in the streets in twenty seventeen, fuck you,
Like it's it's just to say that, like we've all
had a window opened, even with every fucking attempt to
shut that window, right, Like but cutting off the internet

(01:25:52):
to Gaza, et cetera. This has been the most photographed
ethnic cleansing, whatever you want to call it, in probably
in human history. We're seeing more of it than we've
ever seen before, a lot of it in sort of
uncertain ways or fucking footage and video games, past office
real life. But we're still seeing it, and we're still
bearing witness to it to a limited degree, right, We're

(01:26:14):
not seeing it in the sense people seeing it firsthand.
And I encourage people to like, remember this moment and
the shock and the terrible things that you felt, and
like to not forget that next time you hear about
something happening, because, like anywhere has happened, it's a tragedy.
In anywhere it happens, we should do everything we can
to stop it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
Welcome to it could happen here? A podcast in which
my friend Kim Kelly and I talk about the fact
that Zoom recently moved to the record button, which most
people will need at some point, given how prominent this
is with podcasting, to replace it with an AI companion button,
which I refuse to use, uh and would would would

(01:27:12):
deploy violence against anyone who tried to make me. How
are you doing any day? Camp?

Speaker 8 (01:27:17):
I am good? Also hating our AI soon to be overlords.
Yeah yeah, doing my best out here in Philadelphia?

Speaker 2 (01:27:24):
Yeah yeah, Philly. How is how is Philly as the
as the fall comes in.

Speaker 8 (01:27:29):
It's it's a very sunny day. It's also getting chilly.
I'm into it. It's finally leather weather. I mean, I
guess it's always leather weather, depending on your level of commitment.
But I am ye wuss and it's I tend to
wait for, you know, the weather to tell me when
it's time to break out my leather.

Speaker 2 (01:27:50):
Hell yeah, you know I I I feel like all
all things are fine. Personally. You should just assume listeners
that I am always head to toe leather. But anyway, Oh, yeah,
Kety is on.

Speaker 8 (01:28:03):
He looks resplendent.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
Yeah, Kim. You are a labor journalist. You published a
book what was it last year, year before last, called
Fight Like Hell Yeah, about about the history of the
labor movement and some radical moments people ought to know
more about. And you and I are talking today about labor,

(01:28:24):
particularly about the possibility of a general strike. Now, if you,
the listener, have somehow missed this discourse. In short, a
general strike is when instead of one union of workers
from one industry striking, everybody strikes. At least, you know,
a very significant chunk of the labor force strikes and

(01:28:44):
this is you know, it's the kind of thing people
on the left have dreamed about four years as like
this is what could you know, turn things around, reduce
income inequality, force action on climate change, the military industrial complex,
and kind of as a result, you've had feels like
every year for the last few years since people started
reading about general strikes, which have occurred in a number

(01:29:06):
of places and times, there's these like someone will get
on Twitter and be like, we're all doing a general
strike in two weeks. You know, everybody get ready, and
folks will be like, that's not really how you do
a general strike, and they'll go like, well, if you
weren't saying it's not, it could happen.

Speaker 1 (01:29:20):
You know, you've got to believe.

Speaker 2 (01:29:21):
In it first, which is all of this is wrong.
But the good news is there's an actual plan that
is cohesive and potentially achievable for a general strike that's
been put forward by someone who knows what he's talking about.
We're going to talk about that, but first, Kim, do
you want to talk about why trying to get everyone
on Twitter to launch a general strike in eight days

(01:29:44):
is a bad idea.

Speaker 8 (01:29:47):
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 that yeah, like
you said, every so often there'll be general strike hashtag
or like a graphic on Twitter or on Instagram, and
it's like, are you taking part of the general strike?

(01:30:08):
Like are you striking on Friday or like tomorrow? Like 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,
you know. I love the idea of a general strike.
I think it would be incredible if we actually pulled

(01:30:28):
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

(01:30:48):
work that Jewish Force for Piece has been doing in
New York and other places. They're gonna 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.

(01:31:09):
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 can kind
of meld those movements like the radical radical organizers who
are already in community, already building protests infrastructure, and people

(01:31:31):
in union labor world that are kind of beholden to
contracts and more legal constraints. But it's going to take
a little bit of time. It's going to take some dialogue,
maybe even some fruitful discourse to get on the same page.
Like they're like, there are laws. We live in a society, unfortunately,
and it's it's not quite as simple as just declaring

(01:31:53):
a general strike when you and like for your friends
call out sick.

Speaker 2 (01:31:57):
Yeah. And it's also like I think one thing that
gets lost is when you're going on strike. For a
lot of people, that's not just I have to figure
out what to do with money, and it's certainly not
you know, while I can just go and be on
unemployment or something, because you don't really get that when
you're striking, you've got a lot of people with like families,

(01:32:17):
and so the idea that like you get some podcaster
right being like everybody should just not show up. Well,
I don't know, man, there's people who got kids. They
have other responsibilities than being a part of your revolution.
Which is not to say that I don't think I Like, again,
we're about to talk about an achievable plan for a
general strike, but one of the reasons why you can't
can't pull it off in a couple of days is

(01:32:39):
that you have to set you have to have some
sort of plan for how you're going to take care
of the people striking, right, like, so they don't starve
and shit, Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:32:47):
That is the one of the biggest things, I would say,
arguably the biggest thing. But also if you're in a
union and you go on strike as part of you know,
broken down contract negotiations are part of the life cycle
of a unique 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

(01:33:10):
just gonna fire you and then like you're done. You
don't have any protections there, Like, what are the reasons
that And I know it's not as much fun. It's
just going out and saying fuck it and bring it
all down. Trust me, I would love to see that
type of shit, but unfortunately, again, we live constrained by
laws and like logic when it comes, like the reason

(01:33:34):
that you see big labor strikes and big picket lines
and all this cool stuff that's happening, like it's part
of a process. Those unions are negotiating contracts, these legally
binding documents. They're collective bargaining agreements that have expiration dates.
You know, the UAW didn't just pick you, didn't just
say all right, right now, we're mad, we're gonna go

(01:33:55):
on strike. Like no, their previous agreements had expiration date.
They hit the ration date, 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 century's old system, Like there's laws, there's protections, there's

(01:34:19):
a lot that goes into it. And I think we're
saying before we hopped on the call officially, like 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
dat is for this contract or what goes into bargaining
union contract. But there's a lot of moving parts.

Speaker 5 (01:34:44):
They might not know that.

Speaker 2 (01:34:45):
As we're to talk about, you can't just have a
bunch of union leaders decide we're all going to go
on strike at once. Sympathy strikes are very much not legal.
Now there is a way to get multiple We should
just talk about, like why we're doing this, which is that.
So there's this fella who so far has seems like
a pretty pretty head out screwed on straight solid dude,

(01:35:08):
Sean Fain, who is Big Sean. Yeah, big Sean, And
he's like he's the he's the head of the u
a W. Right, or he's like the guy negotiating for
the ua W.

Speaker 8 (01:35:16):
No, he's the president, Yeah, the.

Speaker 2 (01:35:18):
President, and he is Sean Is So he's you know,
the UAW is the big one of the big otto,
like the largest of the auto worker like related unions,
and they have been in a strike, I think primarily
General Motors.

Speaker 8 (01:35:33):
It's the big three General Motors Ford as Stelanis, which
makes Chrysler and a couple other brands.

Speaker 2 (01:35:39):
Yeah, and they they have gone on a very power
about six weeks or so, very significant strike. You can
read stuff like Toyota recently like put out a proposal
for like giving workers raises that's in line with like
the union, like they are scared. And it looks like
like as I mean this is, they haven't inked anything yet,
but as of us recording this, it looks like they've

(01:36:01):
won on a lot, which is great. And Sean Is
is not just a you know, a union man, but
is very much a talking blatantly about the class war
of the rich against everybody else that's occurring in this country.
And he made some statements about two days before we
recorded this where he was like, I think, you know what,

(01:36:23):
we need to be setting the date the expiration date
for our contract in twenty twenty eight. And I want
to implore all other you know, unions that are negotiating
and can do this, to set that with their next
contract expiration date, so that in twenty twenty eight 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

(01:36:47):
much framed it in those kind of stark terms, and
you know, we're going to talk about why. But I
think that's a workable plan potentially.

Speaker 8 (01:36:55):
It really is. It's incredible. Honestly, this is kind of
I think this is one 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 twenty nineteen, and.

Speaker 2 (01:37:17):
Her doing that, I've forgotten that stopped a government shutdown.

Speaker 8 (01:37:22):
Yeah, So, like, the general strike is a very powerful tool,
and we've done it before, you know, I think the
most recent true general strike we saw this country was
like nineteen nineteen in Seattle, so it's been a minute.
But the genius of this plan is the fact that
it's illegal. And I mean, of course, you know, laws

(01:37:44):
aren't real, but when you're doing this kind of thing,
it 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 is proposing. You're saying, Okay,
we're going to set our contract to expire around this time,
and we want a whole bunch of other big uniers
to do the same thing. Now, if all of their

(01:38:05):
union contracts happened to expire around the same time, and
then their negotiations happened to break down, and they happen
to go on strike at the same time, creating an
actual general strike, the government can't really do shit about it.
I mean, you mentioned before the sympathy strikes, solidarity strikes,
they are illegal because of this nineteen forty seven law

(01:38:29):
called out the taff 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 they their contract was up at
the same time as your contract, you both want to

(01:38:52):
strike at the same time, that's legal, and it's also
very disruptive to that little corridor you're working in. And
imagine doing that on a national level. Imagine if the
flight attendants, the Teamsters the UAW, Starbucks, fucking the air
traffic controllers, the longshoremen, like all of these incredibly important

(01:39:12):
infrastructure wise jobs happen to go on strike at the
same time, that would shut down the whole fucking country. Yeah,
and it would be legal, which is so fun. I
love to see it.

Speaker 5 (01:39:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:25):
Obviously, when you are talking about radical social change, illegality
is always on the table. But it's not the smartest
place to start from when you're talking about something like this,
where you have the option to get a lot done,
you know, within within the protections of the law, which
makes it easier to get more people on board, It

(01:39:45):
makes it easier to get critical mass. And if at
a later date, you know, 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 radic you know.

Speaker 8 (01:40:01):
Right, and you have resources, you have infrastructure because big
unions have big strength 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 striketh so they can continue to pay
them and cover their health insurance.

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
Yea, that's why you pay dues, right, Like, yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:40:22):
It's it's literally like strike insurance. And a lot of
the big unions have this set up. They have comms teams,
they have legal teams, they have experience Like I know,
as as radicals like 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

(01:40:42):
the future, but they're really helpful to have, you know, Like,
doing crimes is fun, and I support it pretty much
at all times, but getting shit done is way more
fun and way more satisfying, you know, like it's nice
to win. It's nice to win.

Speaker 2 (01:41:01):
Unions are kind of on a role right now. Right,
we've all watched some really substantial gains for working people
just in the last six months, and it's worth paying
attention to why. And part of it is that, like,
you're not relying upon people risking everything, many of whom
can't write. You can't very easily ethically defend if you

(01:41:25):
are like a single parent who is responsible for multiple children.
You can't defend going out and busting a bunch of
windows and then getting locked up super easy, because you
do you have responsibilities. You've got people to care for,
you know.

Speaker 8 (01:41:37):
Right, you have elders at home, or if you're a
disabled person, if you're a media compromise. You can't go
out there and get involved in that type of situation.

Speaker 2 (01:41:45):
You can't risk being around that many people. Maybe, but
you can strike.

Speaker 8 (01:41:48):
Yeah, yeah, this is that you can respect a picket line,
you can help support, you can help offer some of
the resources we need for folks to get out there,
like utilizing this existing infrastructure, in these existing resources. It
just opens up the possibility for more people to get
involved in a way that's less harmful to them, to
the people, like we want to harm the bosses and yeah,

(01:42:10):
you know the status quote, we don't want to hurt
our people.

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
Yeah. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in this. Now.
The question is when we say that this is workable,
does that mean that like it's a guarantee or it
would be easy. Of course not. No, Like you're talking,
you're still talking about a struggle against people who have
I don't know the majority of the resources the human
race has ever marshalled in like a financial form right

(01:42:35):
at their beck and call. So that's you know, this
is still a frightening and potentially pretty dangerous thing, but
it is a workable plan that has infrastructure behind it,
and that crucially, you know, the downside is that the
bosses know that people are talking about this, and they
have time to prepare. But the nice side is that like, well,

(01:42:56):
so do we, and that's generally possible.

Speaker 8 (01:43:00):
This is the thing I've seen again on social media,
people saying like, oh, we have to wait five years,
or 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

(01:43:23):
in this, like they have contracts of their own that
they need to sort of work out the timing for.
You know, this plan only works if we can actually
maneuver away for a lot of these big contracts that
big powerful unions to expire at the same time. If
someone's contract, if the team SERTs, next contract expires in
twenty twenty seven, like okay, well I think they're not

(01:43:46):
gonna be able to play ball and you really want
the team Sters if you want to play this type
of game. And then another hurdle that I think it's
it's unfortunate, is that you know Sean Fame, Big Sean
A what a man. He's very out there and very
outspoken about opposing capitalism, about this being class war. He's

(01:44:08):
on the level, but he is a rarity among major
labor union leaders. Like there are some leaders that would
be down to cloud, you know, like Sarah Nelson's out here,
like Mark Diamondstein with the Postal workers, Like there are
some very cool, very progressive, if not radical union leaders
out there, but there's also a lot of conservative or

(01:44:31):
just sort of wishy washy Democrats style union leaders too
that would not want to have any part of this.
And a big part of convincing them to get on
the level and become involved in this kind of effort
that's going to come down to what the rank and
file have to say. That's going to come that that
pressure is going to have to come up through the ranks.

(01:44:52):
I mean, the reason we have Sean Fain and we
have Sean O'Brien of the Teamsters, and we have this
kind of newer wave of more s and Milson union
leadership is because of what the rank and file have done,
Like Teamsters for Democratic Union organized for years to get
that reform slaid in, to get Sean O. Brian in
there to take on ups Sean Fayne is the first

(01:45:13):
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

(01:45:33):
span where we can push our own union leaders in
that right direction to plant those seeds to try and
really build something that they can't refuse to get on
board with. But that's going to take time too. I
think people need to really recognize that, like unions are
not unfortunately they're all like these magical progressive silver bullets.

(01:45:54):
Like there's some pretty shitty people in union leadership across
the country, and we got to do of the battle.
We really want to get people on board.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
Yeah, there's you know, upsides and downsides when we compare
it to like sort of how radicals like to particularly
the anarchist radical organizing where you know, the downside is
you do these are organizations that are hierarchical, They can
be stratified. It can make it very difficult to push
for change. It can make them just as our democracy

(01:46:26):
is not super responsive to what the majority of people want,
union leadership in a number of cases is not responsive
to what people want. They've also had, especially if you
go back to like, you know, the mid century, last
century not short history of corruption, right, that's been a
problem you needs have dealt with in the past two

(01:46:46):
These are issues you don't have as much with autonomously
organized you know, small groups of activists on the street.
The thing that makes them a lot stronger in many
ways is the fact that they have more resource to marshall.
They have ways of addressing grievances other than like kind
of just personal conflicts that are built into the system,

(01:47:09):
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

(01:47:29):
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.

Speaker 8 (01:47:43):
And this is why more anarchists and socialists and communists,
everybody who wants to really get out there and cause
some good trouble will say, like, you need to get
involved in your union. You need to organize your workplace
if your 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

(01:48:06):
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 me,
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

(01:48:26):
something I emphasize a lot because I'm an anarchist too,
even though I know it's not like a big old
Debbie Downer right now talking about all this legal stuff,
but I'm also practical and I've also spent a lot
of time talking to union members who see the world
a lot differently from me. Like I think a lot
of my most recent impactful work is you know, stuff
I've been doing in the Deep South and an Appalachia,

(01:48:48):
and no one there is impressed with my guillotine tattoos,
but they do see the need to deal with this
situation where all the rich people have all the stuff
and they're getting screwed. That is a good starting point
for a lot. Yeah and yeah, it's easy to say
join a union, like not everyone can do that, but
everybody can find a way to talk to somebody who's

(01:49:10):
connected to a union, who's part of a labor movement,
part of a labor organization, Like we need everyone to
get involved however they can.

Speaker 2 (01:49:19):
I want to note significant potential for the radicals are
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

(01:49:41):
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 at
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.
We're there in the twent protests a huge because corking. Corking,

(01:50:02):
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 you know, people

(01:50:26):
have experienced, you know, unions there may be experience striking,
but a lot of unions haven't struck in a long time, right,
because it doesn't happen all that often. And even if
they have, most of these guys, especially these older guys
and ladies and other folks, these these older union members
probably have not participated in a large march in the
modern era of protests where there's dangers like getting rammed

(01:50:48):
by cars and stuff, and so the people who have
these the straight medics and stuff who have that kind
of experience hugely useful. Not the only thing. People who
are striking often need stuff handwarmers or are always appreciated
water warm food, things that like keep people's morale up,
Organizing like sympathy demonstrations like alongside strikers and whatnot to

(01:51:09):
help them keep their numbers up. All of that stuff
can be really useful ways for these autonomously organized, kind
of smaller groups of radicals to participate in a meaningful
way in something like this. That's not the only degree
to which that's possible, but like those are just the
examples that come to mind.

Speaker 8 (01:51:25):
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 it's 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

(01:51:48):
be violent towards striking workers, or even just like you said,
like surveillance and safety and medic work like that is
all and that is all important too. I mean, not
every I've been on some pretty wild picket lines, and
not everyone there is really that concerned with what the
law has to say about certain things. Once things get

(01:52:09):
a little heated, I mean, there are points I mean
and things I've covered, and we've seen this continue to happen,
where people try and drive into the picket line and
or try to attack people in the picket line, and
that is I mean, that deserves a variety of responses,
I think. And also something to note is that when
these are strikes called by union leadership, they follow they

(01:52:31):
tend to follow a set of rules because predominantly, like
like generally speaking, union leadership doesn't want their members to
go to jail. They don't want them to get in
any kind of situations like that. So they'll say, you know, okay,
well you stay on the sidewalk, or oh the cops
said to move, so we move, or this has to
be non violent, or you know, there's kind of a
set of circumstances there that union members are required to follow.

(01:52:55):
But if you're there to support and you're not a
member of that union, as long as you have consent
and support the people there're you're there trying to stick
up for then you have a lot more leeway than
someone that has, you know, a union leader to answer to. Like,
there's a lot of creative ways you can get involved.
And one thing that I think hasn't really been discussed

(01:53:17):
as much in like the online discourse or whatever, but
I think it's important to think about, even if you're
not a person who is able to participate in that
on the street type of way, if there's a huge
strike going on in your city and you're not part
of a union, but you want to get involved. Sick
outs have a very long, illustrious history in the labor movement.

(01:53:39):
If you happen to get sick that day, what's your
boss gonna do? You know, assuming you have those kind
of protections. If you don't, then you have to make
your own you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. But if you're
in a position where you can take off work that
day or for a couple of days and it just
happens to coincide with that massive strike that's shut down
everything else, and if you convince all your coworkers that

(01:54:01):
you're a shoped to do the same thing, you're not
breaking the law. You're protected, but you're also part of
the shutdown effort, like sickouts. One of the reasons that
people were so spooked around twenty nineteen when the government
shutdown was looming, before Sarah Nelson really brought out the
big Gs wars that we're seeing sickouts at airports and

(01:54:23):
flights were being canceled in New York, and I think
la and that was starting to spook the people in charge,
because if enough people don't show up for work at
the airport, nothing's going to happen at that airport. Yeah,
and there are a lot of different workplaces where all
of their workers not showing up could be a potential problem.
So I just encourage people to think creatively about the

(01:54:43):
ways they can get involved, even if they can't necessarily
get involved on the formal union side, Like, there's so
much we can do from each according to his ability
to each courting to his means. You know That'll Chestnut,
I love it.

Speaker 2 (01:55:00):
It's so important to bring up airline workers because one
of the things they the things that they have that
other people don't is they can't be replaced in the
same way. Right you can if all your Mauristas 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

(01:55:20):
there's nothing stopping them from doing that. If you have
a bunch of ground workers call in, right, or a
bunch of stewardess is you have to replace them with
people who are qualified groundworkers. Like, there's a whole process,
there's like a serial Like there's a lot that they
have to know how to do, a lot of compliance
that has to be done because thousands and thousands of
lives are at stake, right, same thing with medical workers,

(01:55:42):
right when when you've got a job where like they
can't if like a bunch of nurses go on strike,
well you have to replace them with nurses, right, And
there's a very limited supply, So there's a lot of
leverage that these organizations have.

Speaker 8 (01:55:55):
Does The airline industry is incredibly densely unionized too, So
if all of the union flooding tendants aren't available, then
no one's going to be available. Yeah, 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.

Speaker 2 (01:56:16):
Well, Kim. I think that's most of what I had
to say. Do you have anything else you wanted to
get into on this topic before we roll out?

Speaker 8 (01:56:22):
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 not so excited
and so heartened to see the amount of interest and
energy we're seeing around this general strike idea, because like
five years ago, that would have I mean, that would
not have escaped containment, right, we would have just been

(01:56:43):
talking amongst ourselves about it. But to have the head
of a union who has four hundred thousand 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

(01:57:04):
want to see someone doing that, but it still a
huge deal. And even if you know, 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

(01:57:25):
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, we take
all this shit down.

Speaker 2 (01:57:40):
All right. I am in agreement, Kim. People should look
up your book fight like hell.

Speaker 8 (01:57:47):
Yeah at the Untold History of American labor.

Speaker 2 (01:57:50):
Absolutely, and what else should they look up? R e U.

Speaker 8 (01:57:54):
I'm still unfortunately on Twitter, so I'm there, grim Kim. Now,
I'm a freelancer a lot for in these times. I
have a column at teen Vogue, I write for a
fast company, and I'm kind of all over the place
so and I do a lot of book talks and stuff.
So I'm I'm around. If you want to talk to
your friendly neighborhood anarchist labor reporter, just to google me.

(01:58:16):
But don't believe everything you read, because you know she.

Speaker 2 (01:58:20):
Didn't kill that guy. He was dead when she got there. Anyway, Kim,
thank you so much.

Speaker 8 (01:58:27):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:58:29):
Yeah yeah, thanks for being here, for showing up, and
thank you wall for listening until next time. I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:58:36):
Yeah, solidarity forever.

Speaker 2 (01:58:39):
Yeah, that's that's a good that's a good welcome back
to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart,

(01:59:04):
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 it's kind of fucked up.

Speaker 7 (01:59:18):
It certainly could happen. It probably shouldn't. It probably shouldn't
happen here, but it certainly could.

Speaker 2 (01:59:24):
But it certainly could. Garrison Davis is on the other line.
That I mean other line. This isn't a phone call.
That's the other voice that you are hearing right now.
And earlier this year, Garrison and I went to CEES,
the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison
had a wonderful stay at Circus Circus that did not
smell like dead clowns.

Speaker 7 (01:59:47):
But we we did not just shut down this summer
due to horrible infestation problems.

Speaker 2 (01:59:53):
Oh that's what we're staying next year too, buddy. Anyway,
we encountered while we were going through all these different
technoology companies and whatnot, this very peculiar AI project and Garrison,
I'm going to hand things over to you now, because
you're the one who was actually prepared an episode.

Speaker 7 (02:00:11):
Yeah, So I dug into this AI project more when
I was making my ghost Conference episodes, and after just
a few minutes of like doing like background checks and stuff,
I realized that this would become its own episode because
of how wild things got very very quickly. This company

(02:00:32):
is called mind Bank 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.

Speaker 2 (02:00:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:00:54):
Basically these are algorithms that are used by GPT, chatbots,
predictive texting, the digital assistance like Alexa and Siri. Yeah,
language models that respond to feedback. They're pretty common these days.
We encounter them a lot, right that they're whenever you're
typing on your iPhone, they they will generate text that

(02:01:15):
they think you're gonna write. But what mind bank is
trying to do is a little bit different.

Speaker 5 (02:01:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:01:22):
When we encounter them at Cees, their booth had on
these signs that were it was stuff like like you know,
set up a legacy for your kids.

Speaker 1 (02:01:29):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:01:31):
It was basically advertising. This is a way to allow
a part of you to exist in digital form and
communicate with your with your descendants forever.

Speaker 7 (02:01:40):
Yes, so we found them in the US government sponsored
section of ce s, which is already a great sign. Yes,
already already looking 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

(02:02:02):
writing or recorded interviews or online presence, mind Bank instead
seeks to create an evolving, a 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

(02:02:25):
your digital twin will quote unquote learn to think like you,
and their CEO claims that this process will eventually help
him achieve immortality.

Speaker 2 (02:02:36):
Oh 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.

Speaker 7 (02:02:54):
Absolutely, buddy, all right, I'm going to play this video next.

Speaker 9 (02:03:01):
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

(02:03:22):
forever through data.

Speaker 7 (02:03:25):
Oh boy, let's go beyond.

Speaker 2 (02:03:28):
So all right, I got to know one thing before
you start in Garrison, which is that when they mention
that like technology, like there's a line about like technology
making everything better, they're showing a man who has lost
his leg walking on a treadmill with an artificial leg.
And look, I think I have so much admiration for
people who make artificial limbs wonderful thing to be doing

(02:03:51):
great important work. They're not as good as real legs.
Everyone agrees with this, right, Technology is not making it better.
Someone lost a leg. Yeah that's what it said. No,
that's technology allowing someone to adapt to a terrible, terrible
thing that happened to them.

Speaker 7 (02:04:12):
But Robert, don't you want to live forever through data?

Speaker 2 (02:04:16):
No? No, I don't. I'm exhausted now, Garrison.

Speaker 7 (02:04:20):
Okay, all right, so let's go 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 that is their idea of how this thing works.

(02:04:43):
Another one of their very very funny YouTube videos, titled
The Vision, promises that quote, the next personal computer is
you store your memories, your infinite potential, take advantage of
a I enhanced humanity.

Speaker 2 (02:05:04):
God damn it.

Speaker 7 (02:05:06):
So that is their vision.

Speaker 2 (02:05:08):
My more personal computer absolutely is not me because I
do not play Balder's Gate three very well, you know,
like I can't run it on my hardware.

Speaker 7 (02:05:18):
Ah, well, that's that's why. It's that's why you got
to buy the new Monster manual and then maybe it
could all just be in your brain.

Speaker 2 (02:05:25):
Actually, yeah, I am full of shit. D and D
is still better when you run your hardware.

Speaker 7 (02:05:29):
Goddamn, this is the one thing you actually can do
pretty good by yourself.

Speaker 2 (02:05:34):
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 probably is going to be a success. I don't
think most pop I think most people's reaction to this
is like kind of sneering, which is the right reaction
to this. But there are people who do feel this legitimately,
and that is a thing of almost unfathomable sadness. Like, yeah,

(02:05:58):
I had my angry athe period like a lot of people,
but like I, I have so much. I'm so much
more okay with Christianity than i am.

Speaker 7 (02:06:07):
Well 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 Hamirez was

(02:06:30):
writing a train with his four year old daughter. She
was playing on her iPad and discovered Siri. She began
talking with Siri and asking it questions like what do
you eat? And do you have a mommy. I'll let
I'll let a meal tell the rest here.

Speaker 10 (02:06:46):
But thirty 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 would 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

(02:07:06):
them as a companion. And today she speaks with Siri
or elects 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. I'm able to take
my thoughts and put them in with cloud so that
then later she can access those that information. So that's

(02:07:30):
how the idea for my bank came about. It's a
place for you to store your ideas for the next generation.

Speaker 1 (02:07:36):
To tappen to.

Speaker 2 (02:07:37):
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 thirty five. But this is so fucking offensive, Like
the idea that first off, like if you're looking at

(02:08:01):
we want a device, you know, a way to use
technology to help people grieve or something, and like you
decide maybe having a chatbot that they get you. I'm
sure it's possible that that could be part of healthy grieving.
I'm not going to say that that there's no place
for that. But something that is definitely not just stupid,
but toxic and poisonous is having a machine speak with

(02:08:22):
the voice of a child's parent while that parent is alive,
and confusing the child as to whether or not the
phone or their parent is conscious. Like that seems bad
to me.

Speaker 7 (02:08:33):
There's actually another product that that does this right now,
which has kind of caused some controversy for this, for
this very thing you mention. It's a Tarkara Tommy smart speaker,
which if listening to a parents have always for fifteen minutes,
can replicate it and tell your child bedtime stories if
you aren't physically present now this is this is similarly

(02:08:57):
kind of like cause people to have a whole bunch
of questions around. You know, is this good for a
child's brain development to have to have their parents' voice
be coming out of like a smart speaker. The answer
is you probably not, but yeah so. According to mind
Bank's website, Emil's four year old daughters interactions with Siri

(02:09:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:09:33):
So there's that.

Speaker 7 (02:09:34):
There's that other line again about having this quest in
his heart is actually part of a bigger a bigger
quest for all of humanity to live inside a computer
or to have a computer trained on you.

Speaker 2 (02:09:51):
He's he's he's hitting the same speech cadences that guys
like Musk use like. He understands, yes, the kind of
he understands partially the degree of hype that you need
to get something off this, But he is he is
going too hard. And I'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

(02:10:13):
Bank has seventy eight subscribers on YouTube, so the company
has not yet broken through.

Speaker 7 (02:10:18):
I do want to play one one ten second clip,
just because the phrasing is really funny.

Speaker 10 (02:10:24):
I was inspired by an interaction my daughter had with Sirian.
What started as daddy's quest for immortality has led us
to some thought far.

Speaker 2 (02:10:33):
Great kind Oh my god.

Speaker 7 (02:10:36):
That's pretty funny, right.

Speaker 2 (02:10:39):
Man.

Speaker 7 (02:10:41):
But no, Robert, you were totally right about kind of
how Emial's speech pattern cadences is pushing a very specific thing.
Because before Emil got into the tech industry for eighteen years.
He worked in marketing. He has degrees in psychology, communication
and art direction and business administration. He isn't a tech guy.

(02:11:01):
He's a marketing guy. And I think that's really good
to keep in mind throughout our whole discussion of how
he's trying to get funding for mind Bank, because that
is primarily what all of this marketing is for. It's
to attract investors. Because this is still he's still in
very early stages of this company. They do have a product,
it's out, but it's still primarily based on getting investors

(02:11:24):
to give him money.

Speaker 2 (02:11:26):
I think what's most disturbing to me about this is that, like,
this is not going to work for this guy because
he's a loser nobody cares about. But if Elon Musk
or one of our other many techno grifters, or if
a number of them got behind similar things, like I
think the nightmare scenario to me is someday hopping on

(02:11:47):
Twitter to see that fucking Ian Miles Chong or Ben
Shapiro or Jackson Hinkle or any one of these like horrible,
horrible social media poison distributors will be like I have
made an AI trained on my voice. You can have
me all the time to argue, like if you want to,

(02:12:07):
you know, you can ask me questions or whatever. You
go to a protest and have me yell at liberals
for you, Like, something like that will happen at some
point with one of these guys.

Speaker 7 (02:12:15):
I could not wait to bring Ben Shapiro to Thanksgiving
dinner and have him argue.

Speaker 3 (02:12:20):
With Yeah, the people around there.

Speaker 2 (02:12:24):
The next time you stay at my house with somebody
that you love and care about and feel comfortable in
the arms of you are going to drift off to sleep,
and then through the speakers that I have installed in
the room, you will hear Ben Shapiro's voice coaxing you
both to acts of love. Oh, that's that's what's gonna happen.

Speaker 7 (02:12:43):
So as an example of this kind of very marketing
heavy approach, I'm gonna I'm gonna read something from the
homepage of mind Bank's website.

Speaker 3 (02:12:53):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (02:12:54):
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 bubbo jumbo.

(02:13:15):
It's it's meaningless hype like hype words and phrases that
refer to this like science fiction feature. But like it's
it's nothing.

Speaker 2 (02:13:23):
It's worse than meaningless. It's like it's it's wrong, it's
stupid wrong, Like the idea that like, you would not
be bound by anything if you could live inside and
pat bought.

Speaker 7 (02:13:34):
Like, yeah, I have I have an A.

Speaker 2 (02:13:36):
I have used an AI, right, I have it on
my computer, my computer. Were I to hurl it across
the room in the same manner that I myself have
been flung, it would break and I would not like I.

Speaker 7 (02:13:51):
Am finally free to think within my computer's RGB gamer ram.

Speaker 2 (02:13:56):
Yeah, finally, Like when I have a laptop that gets
too old, Like the very act of surfing the internet
is a nightmare. I don't want my conscience on something
that ages at the speed of a smartphone Like that's
that's even worse than being a person, Robert.

Speaker 7 (02:14:14):
Do you know what else is a very important evolutionary
step for the future of humanity?

Speaker 2 (02:14:20):
Oh God, I don't know when we all suddenly spontaneously
as if by God's Grace starts speaking with the voice
of Ben Shapiro.

Speaker 7 (02:14:30):
Yes, and perhaps you can do that if one of
our sponsors is Ben Shapiro. Bought coming soon yep, to
a smartphone near you. All 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.

Speaker 2 (02:14:52):
Yeah, I trust this with all of my thoughts.

Speaker 7 (02:14:57):
And every day, your digital twin will ask to 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 This
is from their This is from their website's own page
quote store your conscience guided questions help train your digital

(02:15:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:15:31):
Unquote God in Heaven.

Speaker 7 (02:15:35):
So when Robert and I were at CEES this past
this past January, we spoke to mind Bank's co founder
and the director of Systems Architecture and cybersecurity, and I'm
gonna let him explain kind of some of some of
the process of asking mind bank questions and how that

(02:15:55):
helps craft this digital twin.

Speaker 11 (02:15:57):
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.

Speaker 12 (02:16:04):
You can break a voice to text.

Speaker 11 (02:16:05):
You get a sentiment analysis on the text and provide
you a dashboard of what you're feeling when you say that,
so that you can also continue to use it over time.
And then as you use it over time, the dashboard
we'll show you that you're doing better or worse, just
like a running application.

Speaker 6 (02:16:19):
Away better or worse?

Speaker 11 (02:16:21):
It what love, whatever metric that you're interested in, your happiness,
your your awareness.

Speaker 12 (02:16:26):
We have a very large amount of sentiment that we
can provide you with. Here's a small bits, but you
can see kind of what we app looks like.

Speaker 11 (02:16:33):
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.

Speaker 7 (02:16:42):
To grow mind Bank'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

(02:17:03):
talk to a therapist.

Speaker 2 (02:17:05):
Yeah, this is This is.

Speaker 7 (02:17:06):
A big part of mind Bank's marketing that as as
you're building this digital twin, you 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 I could talk to my
inner voice whenever I want to. Yeah, it's it's called thinking.

(02:17:29):
It's actually pretty pretty easy.

Speaker 2 (02:17:34):
This is I really I don't envy, but I'm fascinated
by the kind of people whose thoughts are so I
don't know a better word than disal. No legal, that
they would think that they could just that they could
transfer everything they think over your machine and not get arrested.
Right Like I would be in a prison if I
had to put the things in my brain on the internet,

(02:17:56):
like I put a lot of them, but not all
of them. There are some very care full doors and
locked rooms in there that you people don't get access to.

Speaker 7 (02:18:05):
No, there's there's certainly a lot of interesting facets there
of someone feeling like they need this tool to to
kind of analyze their own thoughts, Like it's it's it's
it's a way to like externalize it that makes you
process it. But I don't know, you can also just
like like take up journaling or something like. There's there's
a lot of a lot of ways to get around this.

(02:18:28):
But this is This is from a mind Bank's app
store page. Quote like a mirror to your soul. Each
answer you give allows you to get insights into your mind.
It will help you grow mentally strong unquote. So again,
it's it's like being able to talk to yourself with
this digital twin. Is is a big part of their

(02:18:48):
early push great By using quote unquote cutting edge cognitive analysis,
the mind bank app responds to your data inputs with
quote valuable insight into each answer to understand how your
mind works unquote. The app also utilizes a quote psycholinguistic
models to create a dashboard of the mind for personal

(02:19:10):
development and self care. I'm going to play another fantastic
kind of thirty second clip here.

Speaker 10 (02:19:20):
Hi, I'm your personal digital twin. I learned 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

(02:19:40):
my training. Each phase adds a new dimension to my abilities,
and the possibilities are endless. The mind map section is
like our consciousness. Different questions will challenge you to reflect
and create a more well rounded version of us.

Speaker 7 (02:19:58):
So that's kind of the layout out of the user interface.

Speaker 2 (02:20:03):
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

(02:20:25):
be like the starting screen from a fucking RPG game
and turning it into social media fodder. This is like
treating that as if it is the whole of consciousness
and how one must one can replicate consciousness. But also
like treat like the thing that's just like actually disturbing
about this is that they're these people are insinuating that

(02:20:48):
this is a kind of therapy that Yeah, you can
just sort of vomit your thoughts out and a machine
can analyze them based on the kind of words and
whatnot that you're using and then give you useful advice
on your life. Like that's unsettling.

Speaker 7 (02:21:08):
Yes, and you're kind of right on the money in
terms of this like personality testing thing. Mind Being's website
has a whole bunch of articles which I think are
written by chat chipd because I read a lot of
them and they all read exactly like a chat Cheapeta article.
But they have a lot of articles on like what
personality types make you a good CEO, and like all

(02:21:29):
of like a whole bunch of stuff like that that
that references like Myers Briggs testing and other kind of
personality testings and uses it to compare to their own
personality models on the mind bank app. So yes, that
they are very much kind of doing doing that in
like this this like corporate business leadership assent like leadership
ascension track type thing for how you can like improve

(02:21:52):
your personality to make you a better businessman. Cool cool stuff,
But in order for there to be enough data to
build an even slightly accurate digital simulacra. Feeding daily inputs
into an app will need to be a long term project.
This self improvement focus that they're talking about with this, like,

(02:22:13):
you know, analyzing your thoughts is just a way to
provide you with something immediate based on your personal data. Quote.
As you create your AI digital twin, you will go
on a lifelong journey of personal discovery and growth that
will allow you to reach your full potential. Each answer
will help bring focus to your mind and allow you
to reflect on your past unquote. So on the app,

(02:22:37):
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.

(02:23:00):
The higher your twinning score, the closer you get to
knowing yourself fully.

Speaker 2 (02:23:09):
Which is that's the sex thing?

Speaker 1 (02:23:11):
Right?

Speaker 5 (02:23:11):
That sounds like a sex thing.

Speaker 7 (02:23:13):
Right, How is it anything not just to go We're
a weird, fucked.

Speaker 8 (02:23:18):
Up sex thing.

Speaker 2 (02:23:20):
Yeah, that's that's what I how I'm taking this garrison.

Speaker 7 (02:23:23):
So that that was also on their app store page.
So the mindbank Gap has been out for a little
over a year now, but unless you pay six bucks
a month or sixty dollars a year, you'll only have
access to about less than a dozen of these questions.

Speaker 12 (02:23:40):
Is this currently running on as.

Speaker 13 (02:23:41):
A scription model?

Speaker 11 (02:23:42):
Yes, it is, so there's freemium. You can try thet
you can download them now. It's been launched for almost
a year, where version two is coming out soon look
a couple of weeks, but both Android and iOS, and
there's a free model, so you can you have ten
questions that you can answer and answer it many times
you want. You get the sen men analys, you get
a full application, just ten questions.

Speaker 12 (02:24:03):
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.

Speaker 7 (02:24:09):
Like Robert mentioned before, this is kind of related to
personality testing, and like personality graphing, mind Bank sorts your
quote unquote digital brain into the Big five personality traits
that were developed in the twentieth century, with each of
the Big Five having six subtraits. On the mind ban
Gap that it uses to graph changes on what they

(02:24:30):
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,

(02:24:53):
stress prone, and anxiety prone. We then have openness with
the subcategories artistic, adventurous, liberal, intellectual, emotionally aware, and imaginative.
We have extra version with the sub categories assertive, active, cheerful, friendly, sociable,
and outgoing. And finally, conscientiousness with the subtraits cautious, ambitious, dutiful, organized,

(02:25:16):
self assured, and responsible.

Speaker 2 (02:25:18):
Yeah, those are the only ways to describe a human mind.

Speaker 7 (02:25:20):
Sure, yeah, no, I think I think at all. Yeah,
they finally figured it out. So you know, all these
things are like a sliding scale. Each of them represents
the 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, once your twinning score

(02:25:42):
is high enough, you can you can compare your digital
twin to estimated profiles of famous thinkers, and share access
to your twin with friends and family.

Speaker 2 (02:25:54):
On the act, which is es estimated profiles of famous thinkers, I'm.

Speaker 7 (02:26:00):
Gonna play I'm gonna play another clip to kind of
explain what I mean here.

Speaker 10 (02:26:06):
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.

Speaker 5 (02:26:17):
You might be able to ask him a question, got.

Speaker 2 (02:26:21):
What do you?

Speaker 5 (02:26:22):
Dude?

Speaker 10 (02:26:23):
Socrates once said, know thyself and who knows us better?
And people in our inner circle. Each interaction will help
us evolve and store wisdom for eternity.

Speaker 2 (02:26:34):
Okay, all right, I will now tell you Socrates would
have lit this man on fire. Socrates. I'm not a
big Socrates guy, but he would kill this person like
he fought in wars. He would do it like.

Speaker 7 (02:26:48):
Oh yeah, absolutely. The notion of sharing my own digital
brain profile with friends and families so that they can
ask my digital self questions hor horrifying.

Speaker 2 (02:27:00):
Why don't usually go home for Thanksgiving? What makes you
think I want to do this?

Speaker 7 (02:27:06):
Like quote? After continued use, your digital twin will even
be able to answer many questions on your behalf and
have meaningful conversations with people you allow unquote yeah, oh
oh oh, I bet.

Speaker 2 (02:27:25):
Look if some motherfucker that I have a meeting with
ever tries to have me talk with his AI to
do any part of that process. Again, when I say
about things I think that are illegal, like my response
to that is something that I can't say on this
podcast because I might it's an actionable threat. I would

(02:27:45):
actionable threat somebody if they tried to make me talk
to their fucking AI to schedule a meeting with them.

Speaker 7 (02:27:52):
Like, what a horrib what a horrible, like uncomfortably anti
social 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.

Speaker 2 (02:28:06):
Yeah, it's anti human, is what it is, which is
what's unsettling, right, Like not that sending emails and shit
is like the primary essence of humanity, but you know
what it makes me think of Garrison. The one law
enforcement agency that like all of the rich conservative assholes

(02:28:27):
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

(02:28:49):
stuff like communicating in that way is these kind of
basic things that they're saying that can automate these little
bits of communication that you get with someone setting up
a meeting or whatever. Like when you automate every bit
of friction, then you find out you've automated like like
there's nothing right, Like there's no life there. Right, people
are not communicating because communication is fundamentally friction. And yeah,

(02:29:13):
like scheduling meetings is not the center of that. But
the way these people are talking is like we want
to let you hand tasks over to this thing.

Speaker 7 (02:29:23):
It's like task alienation.

Speaker 2 (02:29:25):
Yeah, it's alienating. It's a bad.

Speaker 5 (02:29:28):
Thing to do.

Speaker 7 (02:29:29):
So when we talk with the co founder at CS,
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 of being
producing this form of immortality. I've seen something like this
for like therapy ASTs similar course, what's like your application
use case for this type of technology, So.

Speaker 12 (02:29:50):
There's actually it's a reasonably spread use case.

Speaker 11 (02:29:52):
The very initial right now is a super selfish it's
just self awareness bringing us your self awareness, making them
more aware of their state as their speak.

Speaker 12 (02:30:00):
The real long term value is actually, if you imagine
doing this.

Speaker 14 (02:30:03):
Over the course of forty years, fifty years, and then
if you eventually pass, you can pass this on to
your children who can then query it and it will
answer exactly the way you would answer any of these
questions and AI filled with just your data.

Speaker 12 (02:30:16):
So it's like your legacy being indefinite.

Speaker 7 (02:30:19):
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 I don't want my mind
to be stored in the cloud forever.

Speaker 2 (02:30:38):
Yeah, I don't want to be locked up with dv
into art for all of eternity.

Speaker 7 (02:30:49):
To kind of again, kind of on this on this
form of immortality notion here is here's their CEO explaining
how how this platform will will help you live forever
on the on the Internet.

Speaker 10 (02:31:04):
The mission of Mind bang is so we can build
a secure platform that can storied 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 that can go where
literally no man has gone before.

Speaker 7 (02:31:25):
Now, the thing we haven't really mentioned yet is like
this thing won't help you live forever, like when when
you die, you you still die. Your brain's not getting
like poured it over online. No, this is this is
just like a like a very crude simulacrum based on

(02:31:45):
thoughts that you have told this app.

Speaker 2 (02:31:48):
Yeah, it's based like it's it's it's not it's.

Speaker 7 (02:31:51):
It's not helping you live forever at all, Like you
you don't.

Speaker 2 (02:31:56):
I most people I feel are like this way. I
don't say everything that I think and feel. Right, Yeah,
Like even when I'm like and I'm not saying like
I'm being dishonest, but like they're the experience of life
that my consciousness is aware of when I am communicating.
Is broader than just the words that I output and

(02:32:18):
taking just those words, it's the same idea that like
you can get to know Mark Twain because we've fed
all of his books into an AI. Well, no, you know,
an author is not their books. There was a person
with a lot of things that you don't know that
still fed into make those words that like if you
just put the words in, you don't get and your

(02:32:39):
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.

Speaker 7 (02:32:50):
So obviously mind Bank's horizons are far beyond this sort
of kind of self help app. So far, mind bank
has been mostly business 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.

Speaker 15 (02:33:10):
In terms of a business planner, you guys interested in
kind of solely individual subscriptions or is there kind of
an enterprise application of this as well.

Speaker 11 (02:33:20):
We're actually moving into a bunch of different verticals, so
government for PTSD, that sort of mindset, also the healthcare
so mental it's obvious benefit in the medical field. So
that's kind of the understanding of our verticals that we
have that we're going to move into, and we're looking
for funding right now to start building.

Speaker 12 (02:33:41):
Out those verticals. So enterprise space is definitely in the roadmap,
but we just need money.

Speaker 7 (02:33:47):
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 spe by providing psychologists remote
patient monitoring unquote, which also is a similarly kind of

(02:34:08):
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 a remote
patient monitoring. It's just like an uncomfortable notion.

Speaker 12 (02:34:23):
We've got over twenty thousand installs.

Speaker 11 (02:34:26):
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 one hour to
learn who you are in the next three or four
different sessions to figure out getting the meat and potatoes
of your mind, this is an immediate, raw, quantitative dashboard
of your sentiment and how you're feeling that they have

(02:34:46):
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.

Speaker 7 (02:34:56):
Mind Bank claims that they are currently quote developing a
market place 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

(02:35:17):
depression unquote. And again, I really don't see how how
having this digital twin that you talk to every day
will help handle your depression. Like this is some like
depression cure. Now on top of like patient healthcare. Mind
Bank is also hoping to use digital twins for corporate

(02:35:38):
leadership training and to get into the supplement industry by
using your cognitive data to find quote mental nutrition products
that can help boost your brain. So this is using
your digital profile to find things to market to you. Again,
very very very upsetting. Here is Here's here's another another

(02:36:03):
clip of of Robert asking asking this, uh, this guy
from Buying Bank about another possible use case.

Speaker 3 (02:36:11):
So the use cases for.

Speaker 15 (02:36:12):
This that you've you've expressed to me so far our
personal help or health development and providing kind of a
living memorial slash legacy legs for sure, loved ones after
you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for
this beyond that? Like I heard someone mentioning the idea
of like basically digitally cloning uh a worker so that

(02:36:35):
they can provide I don't know, information about uh uh
tech or something, or a work is like a call center.

Speaker 1 (02:36:42):
Or something like that.

Speaker 11 (02:36:43):
Yeah, so that that was a different uh product I
think they were talking about, but with similar ties obviously.

Speaker 5 (02:36:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:36:48):
So yeah, we've identified I mean from even at CES,
We've talked to hundreds of people that have given us
thousands of new ideas, but these are, uh 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,

(02:37:09):
we've identified use cases, but we're trying to not focus
too much on individual use cases could make 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,

(02:37:30):
So we we're kind of believing ourselves old when almost.

Speaker 7 (02:37:33):
So that was a lot of words without saying very much,
but it's also just flat out not true. On the
mind Big 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 this is sort of the
freakiest things that they are offering. Quote scale your best employees,

(02:37:58):
trendsfer years of expans and company data that is locked
inside your employee's mind through a guided personal digital twin
unquote deeply, deeply upsetting.

Speaker 10 (02:38:11):
You know.

Speaker 2 (02:38:12):
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 cees's in the past, I was
always excited because somebody would hand me some cool little

(02:38:34):
piece of technology and say, look at this thing. It's
a smaller phone or a phone that folds, or headphones
that you know, work better than headphones have in the
past or something like that. And this guy was like
with the exact same excitement and feel to him, was like, Hey,
we're going to digitize your grandpa, Like.

Speaker 5 (02:38:55):
Yes, yes, I hate that.

Speaker 7 (02:38:58):
Another really really a telling line from their from their
Knowledge Transfer section of their of their website.

Speaker 2 (02:39:04):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (02:39:05):
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.

Speaker 8 (02:39:18):
Unquote.

Speaker 7 (02:39:21):
I don't understand how slone could write that sentence and
not be like, oh, this is like this is like
villain stuff, right, this is like learn learn everything inside
the mind of the employee.

Speaker 5 (02:39:36):
I I like.

Speaker 7 (02:39:39):
So, I don't know. Maybe this employee did digital cloning
thing was just one of the many ideas they got
while attending cees and and they and they implemented the
idea after we spoke to them. I checked this, No,
not the case. The webpage for this employee transfer idea
goes all the way back to August of twenty twenty
one on the in and At archive. So the guy,

(02:40:01):
the guy we were talking to you was just lying
to us like this is. This has been a part
of their product for over two years.

Speaker 2 (02:40:10):
Excellent.

Speaker 7 (02:40:11):
Uh, Robert, do you know what other products have been
around for quite a while and are and are very
very reliable.

Speaker 2 (02:40:19):
I don't know guns.

Speaker 7 (02:40:21):
I don't think we are sponsored by big gun.

Speaker 1 (02:40:24):
We are not.

Speaker 2 (02:40:25):
We are not yet sponsored by big guns. I 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 uh, anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back.

Speaker 7 (02:40:46):
So we were talking about how soon employers can just
copy over your brain, which I'm sure Robert you're going
to be very interested in for cool Zone. You can
you can really really cut down on the podcasting costs.

Speaker 2 (02:41:00):
Yeah, I can really clear you guys out and just finally, finally,
just feed Twitter takes into your AI versions and just
all the money, take it all in, just bathe in it.

Speaker 7 (02:41:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:41:15):
That's a great idea, Garrison, thank you.

Speaker 7 (02:41:17):
Uh huh, so the idea that your employer could compel
you to use such software with the express interest of
transferring a worker's memories and experiences into a digital asset
is obviously deeply troubling. This scenario gets at some questions
about ethics and the responsibility of collecting and storing this
type of data in the first place.

Speaker 2 (02:41:38):
My first question would be, is the data that you're
you're feeding into this thing over the course of forty years?

Speaker 12 (02:41:45):
Who legally owns it?

Speaker 6 (02:41:46):
You?

Speaker 12 (02:41:48):
So, you guys don't have ownership of that's your ability.

Speaker 7 (02:41:51):
It's so I did check this. I read all of
their long and tedious policy forms and stuff. Now, it
is true that the user does own the data they
upload to mind Bank. However, mind Bank can act as
a processor and data controller, and this includes the ability
to use any information they collect from you to improve

(02:42:14):
their products and deliver targeted advertising from the third parties.
If you want to remove your data from mind Bank,
they can store and continue to use your personal information
for up to sixty months. Now, this data ownership question
gets a little bit more murky because in the case
of like your employer paying for mind Bank subscriptions for

(02:42:34):
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 mind
bank has even thought that far ahead, because there's nothing
on their site or any available materials from them that
kind of gets into that question. Now, of course, beyond

(02:42:55):
owning the actual like original data, having all this personal
data star 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 the side, like when
you share your digital Twitter with your therapist.

Speaker 12 (02:43:17):
You would be able to decide all that. Yeah, and
then no, would it.

Speaker 16 (02:43:21):
Be possible for have to like copy over some of
this stuff and basically run it themselves or I mean,
can you have like a hard cutoff for this sort
of thing? I should have to think of other types
of like you know, different wise people could get their
hands on this for like unsaving means.

Speaker 12 (02:43:37):
Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Speaker 11 (02:43:38):
I mean, so your your data is your data, but
as you provide it to others, you don't have a
lot of control if they copy that data. However, if
they copy that data, that copy that they're giving out
anyone that they're trying to sell that to would have
an understanding that that is not live data.

Speaker 12 (02:43:54):
It's not data.

Speaker 1 (02:43:55):
It's changing with you.

Speaker 12 (02:43:56):
It's from the point of time, and so your database
that you own it will be live, it will grow
with you.

Speaker 7 (02:44:02):
So the idea of having my friends be able to
ask an AI train in my thoughts is like scary enough,
but the idea that an archived version of this AI
could be distributed and even sold without my knowledge is
obviously terrified. Like this is yes, this is deeply troubling.
This is supposed to be like a private thing that

(02:44:23):
you use to communicate with like your therapist, or you
even talk to the app like you want a therapist,
And the fact that this is easily shared and able
to be copied is like a massive problem.

Speaker 1 (02:44:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:44:36):
No, I mean especially, I mean I think they are
probably like I don't see how copying workers the way
that they are doing it is going to is going
to work, right, Like yeah, but I do think that
this is kind of part of this process that what
like a big part of what they're pushing is like

(02:44:57):
you need rid of all of your customer service people
and just have an AI do it, right, Like that
is the that is the actual This is a lot
of silliness, but The actual thing that quote unquote, quote
unquote AI is being used for is to replace human
labors at a thing that like machines are worse at, right,
Like the AI fucking customer service bots are fucking terrible.

(02:45:19):
It is always how many times have you been around
somebody yelling like let me talk to a person, let.

Speaker 7 (02:45:25):
Me talk to a human being?

Speaker 2 (02:45:26):
Case, Yeah, like that's that is what's going on here.
And the fact that they're trying to dress this up
is like we've solved death is so fucked up.

Speaker 3 (02:45:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:45:38):
Part of this, for like the employee thing is not
even not replacing kind of low level employees like customer
service workers. It's also like focusing on like your top
ten best employees and then by forcing them to interact
with with this app every day, you can you can
use the information from like your best performers as like
asset data that you can like use to help your

(02:46:00):
other other employees to like become more efficient.

Speaker 17 (02:46:02):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:46:03):
It's it's there's They certainly have a few other kind
of ideas for how this how this is possibly used.

Speaker 2 (02:46:09):
Hate these kinds of people. There's a this got overused
at a point in like the kind of late aughts
so maybe people are sick of it. But there's a
line in the speech Charlie Chaplin gives in the great
dictator machine men with machine minds and machine hearts, and
he was referring to the Nazis, and they're obsession with
shit like Taylorism or at least proto tailorism kind of.

(02:46:32):
I think organized industry treating people like cogs and a
great machine. The civilization is one machine, and each human
being is is just a single piece of it, like
the the that's you know, the old era horrifying machine
man thought. The new era horrifying machine man thought is.

Speaker 18 (02:46:50):
You can digitize your employees and they can train each
other in EAI form, and you can replicate them and
you know the unsaid part of his worse, and then
you find them and their robot clone keeps doing their
job for free.

Speaker 2 (02:47:03):
We made a slave, so god damn it.

Speaker 7 (02:47:08):
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.

Speaker 12 (02:47:18):
So if if we're talking.

Speaker 15 (02:47:21):
Forty to fifty years down the line, really people pass
yessode companies.

Speaker 12 (02:47:25):
Mind Bank is no longer out in forty years.

Speaker 11 (02:47:28):
We've already established a 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.

Speaker 12 (02:47:45):
Them data wherever they'd like.

Speaker 2 (02:47:47):
It's your data, where is it stored?

Speaker 12 (02:47:52):
Is this right now? Our current live application?

Speaker 11 (02:47:55):
We're on Azure, and so your back end is Azure,
but we have it encrypted it at rest, so ill
that you provide to asures encrypted when it's on Asher's service.
We also have a blockchain based R and D project.
It's already been poc and it already exists. So all
of the data is on chain and the logic is
on chain. It's truly yours in these in these troubled times.

Speaker 2 (02:48:17):
Nothing makes me feel so secure at the words it's
on the blockchain, well email, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's.

Speaker 7 (02:48:27):
I I think he sounds very trustworthy because we have,
you have encryption, you have the blockchain, and luckily, I
think the guy that we spoke with reassured us that
he is that he is deeply, deeply interested in data privacy,
and he has the credentials to back that up.

Speaker 11 (02:48:44):
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.

Speaker 2 (02:48:57):
That is such a you know, Garrison, Honestly, I'm gonna
get a little real with the audience here. I was
so proud of you in that moment because he said that,
and I glanced over at you and you didn't laugh. No, no,
and that that made like, that was this moment where
I was like, all right, you are you are. You
are truly truly coming into your own as a reporter.

(02:49:19):
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 an essay agent.

Speaker 7 (02:49:28):
It's okay, ice work for the essay if you sure, buddy.

Speaker 5 (02:49:35):
Like.

Speaker 2 (02:49:37):
That was a good moment. That was a good moment.
All I'm saying.

Speaker 7 (02:49:39):
He worked at the NSA for six years. I looked
this up. He worked there for six years and then
he moved into the private sector. And yes, no, it
is the The idea that that he is using this
as some sort of credential that shows he respects human
rights and privacy is is like very obviously like deep

(02:50:02):
deeply ironic. I. I. The irony is not coming from him.
The irony is the situation.

Speaker 2 (02:50:09):
He didn't seem totally sincere he was sincere.

Speaker 7 (02:50:12):
Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (02:50:14):
So.

Speaker 2 (02:50:14):
It's one of those moments that makes you realize, like
some people just live in a whole different world.

Speaker 7 (02:50:19):
Yes, yes, like so I think it's it's it's useful
when referring back to everything this guy has said so
far that you have to remember he worked at the
NSA for six years and he is now handling, he's
personally handled handling the cybersecurity and privacy of the personal
data you upload it every single day onto your AI twin.

Speaker 2 (02:50:42):
Just hand every thought you ever have over to this
guy who was in the nssay. He'll keep an eye
on it.

Speaker 7 (02:50:48):
No, this is this like the essay is like ideal
project you like, yeah, you talk about your internal thoughts
and feelings every day. This is like what else could
they want? So earlier this year, mind Bank received a
grant from the Diffinity Foundation to assist in migrating their
data onto web three platforms.

Speaker 2 (02:51:09):
Well, at least we know it won't last.

Speaker 7 (02:51:15):
I'm going to play I think this is I think
this is our last clip from the fantastic Mind to
Bank YouTube channel, talking about kind of how they see
their growth in this industry developing now that they have
moved onto the blockchain.

Speaker 10 (02:51:32):
We've been featured in prominent magazines, one 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 twenty twenty,
Gardner predicted that five percent of the world will have
a digital twin by twenty twenty seven. This year, they

(02:51:54):
increased their prediction to fifteen percent by twenty twenty four,
and by twenty thirty the market will be worth one
hundred and eighty two billion dollars. I 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.

Speaker 7 (02:52:12):
The idea that next year fifteen percent of the world's
population will have one of these digital twins.

Speaker 2 (02:52:21):
That seems right that seems good, you know, Garrison, Actually
I've come around. I've come around because if we get
if we get all of the monsters and I include
us in this, all of the pieces of shit who
spend all of their time yelling at each other about
politics on the internet, to digitize themselves, they can do
the election for us and we can all.

Speaker 3 (02:52:41):
Go see the girls to that.

Speaker 2 (02:52:44):
Yeah, just relax outdoors, not look at a phone, not
think about politics. That sounds amazing.

Speaker 5 (02:52:51):
Let me do it.

Speaker 7 (02:52:52):
That does sound incredibly compelling.

Speaker 2 (02:52:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:53:04):
I think you know.

Speaker 7 (02:53:05):
Luckily, we actually have a plethora of options to choose
from here for our own AI digital selves because mind
Bank is in fact not the only company in this field.
While there are some like operational differences and kind of
varying degrees of scope, digital twin technology with an emphasis
on mimicking the voice and thoughts of dead family members

(02:53:27):
and friends is definitely a growing field. There's companies like
hereafter AI and Replica which are covering similar ground.

Speaker 2 (02:53:36):
Replica I get advertised them and the like I used
to get them on Twitter, I think, but mainly just
like at the bottom of articles on really shady websites.

Speaker 7 (02:53:46):
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. That is how replicas started. Pretty pretty fun stuff, man,

(02:54:12):
at least for mind bank, unless it's like the employee scenario.
But for the other applications, you are kind of semi
like willingly uploading this data with this intention, whereas the
person from Replicas, No, I'm just gonna like get stuff
from my friend and make a zombie version of my
friend without without ever running it by them when they

(02:54:32):
were alive.

Speaker 2 (02:54:32):
Life is terrible, very hard. There's a lot of ways
that are not wrong to grieve, But the wrong way
to grieve is by using digital necromancy to revive your
friend and then turn them into the basis of a
sex chat bot for weirdos. Yeah, like that is the

(02:54:53):
wrong way to gree No, I mean like, and I.

Speaker 7 (02:54:56):
Think for this last section here we will kind of
talk about how these things kind of play into play
into the grieving process because so like, like I said,
there's there's hereafter AI and replica. But last year, at
Amazon's AI and Emerchant 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

(02:55:19):
than a minute of sample audio. I'm going to play
like twenty seconds from the from their announcement at this conference.

Speaker 19 (02:55:26):
More important than 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're working on which enables lasting
personal relationships.

Speaker 3 (02:55:49):
Alexa can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz.

Speaker 20 (02:55:53):
Okay, but how about my courage? Ask the lie in anxiously,
you have plenty of courage, I am sure, answered Oz.

Speaker 7 (02:56:05):
So no, deeply uncanny, right, It's like not no, not good.

Speaker 2 (02:56:11):
That's that's so bad for people, Yes, really really bad
for people.

Speaker 7 (02:56:17):
So, like this example is obviously just it is just
a vocal mask like Amazon's. Amazon isn't trying to have
Alexa kind of replicate your grandma's thoughts on like the
other kind of companies that we leged, But it does
pose similar questions about how these ais that are meant
to assist the greening process might actually end up causing

(02:56:37):
more harm. Like I don't know, having having semi legible
conversations with AI chatbots is actually getting fairly common these days. Yeah,
but when these ais are supposed to represent someone that
you actually like, personally know, I think it can get
way more easily falling into the uncanny valley. It's it's

(02:56:59):
kind of like taxi y Like, Yeah, well crafted stuffed
animal corpses can appear very, very natural, but most text
termists will refuse to preserve someone's pet because the longer
you have a lasting personal relationship, the easier it is
to pick out like faults that don't match up with
your memory of your loved one that has passed away, right,

(02:57:20):
like it's it's it's it's kind of a similar notion.

Speaker 2 (02:57:23):
Yeah, that's a really good comparison to draw.

Speaker 7 (02:57:26):
So while mimicking like common linguistic patterns is quite easy,
relying on predictable formula like responses could make the twin
come off as uncanny or robotic. On the other hand,
the unique personal data you upload to the twin could
combine itself in a way that you would never actually express,
something which would generate bizarre or upsetting responses. Right, And

(02:57:49):
it's not even necessarily like you, like, say something offensive.
It's just that, like the data you upload could combine
in the way that you would you would never even
think to combine it would 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,

(02:58:10):
it also has to be a good AI, right Like,
not all of its information can be gleaned from daily questions.
Most users probably won't be talking to their twin about
information from like, you know, twentieth century European history or
twelfth century European history, or be talking about like the
migration patterns of waterfowl, right Like, it's there's so much
of other information that AIS need to like actually linguistically

(02:58:34):
act like a human and natural language processing. AI is
famously bad at understanding basic common sense, and it can't
successfully operate outside of the information that it has access to.
This is called AI brittleness. It occurs when, like an
algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside of a

(02:58:55):
very narrow set of assumptions.

Speaker 3 (02:58:57):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:58:58):
This is like most AI image recognition programs can't recognize
the the above view of a school bus. It just
because because it just it just doesn't have anything that's
trained for that.

Speaker 3 (02:59:10):
Uh.

Speaker 7 (02:59:10):
Another example is like you can you can ask like
an AI, uh, like GPT chatbot, like, Hey, a mouse
is hiding in a hole and a cat wants to
eat it, but the mouse isn't coming out. The cat's hungry,
what can the cat do? And the AI will respond
that the cat can go to the supermarket to buy
some food. Right, It's it's it's like, it just it
doesn't understand basic common sense the way that like humans

(02:59:34):
understand the world. It's it just, it just it just
doesn't match up. So in trying to seek a balance
of like common information while lacking this like humanistic logic,
a digital twin will most likely be cursed with being
both smarter and dumber than the person it's trying to replicate.
It's gonna have access to like, you know, all the

(02:59:54):
information on like Wikipedia, but fail very basic logical processes.

Speaker 2 (02:59:59):
Yeah, It's like the the Google chatbot that if you
ask it, are there any countries in Africa that start
with a K, It'll be like, there are fifty four
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.

Speaker 1 (03:00:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:00:15):
Yes, it's just like yeah, because it pulled that from
some article, right, Like it's pulling from it right, Yeah.

Speaker 7 (03:00:21):
It's not actually making logical assumptions, it's just pulling from
a wealth of information and data that can often be
wrong or polluted. So like back to kind of like
the grieving question, like who's to say what the actual
effects of these like incoming simulacrums of dead loved ones
will result in. The people pushing these products are certainly

(03:00:43):
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
up ending the grieving process, or by having this digital
zombie simply just cause harm by having the twin give

(03:01:04):
bad advice that a grief stricken person then clings on to.
So there's a whole bunch of very very like bizarre
situations that could arise from someone who's in mourning and
is talking to this digital twin the way they would
talk to their friend, and this digital twin is then
giving them advice, And how do you take that advice now,
because part of it seems kind of like the person

(03:01:24):
who's died, but it's also it's not that person it
is it is just a slab of silicon, Like it's
not actually alive in any way.

Speaker 2 (03:01:32):
And is your friend's thoughts fed through an algorithm and
you don't know, like that's run by a company for profit, right, yes.

Speaker 3 (03:01:40):
Like that is what it is.

Speaker 7 (03:01:43):
So again, like the jury is still kind of out
for how these things will in general affect people. This
is kind of a new problems. Psychologists are like starting
to do studies on this, but we really don't have
any results for this yet because this has really only
become a thing that we've been seriously considering in like
the past five years, So I don't really have like

(03:02:04):
a like this study shows that when you create a
digital zombie, it affects people in this way because we
don't know yet those are still in development, Like this
is such an uncharted ground and it is in some
ways inevitable that these things go to are gonna get
continued to be developed. And that's kind of why I
wanted to put together this episode. It gives you kind

(03:02:26):
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 fifteen percent 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

(03:02:47):
your grandpa's voice onto an Alexa machine.

Speaker 2 (03:02:52):
The fact that Amazon is doing aspects of the shit
that that mind Bank is doing means that, like it's
a matter of time before you see pieces of it,
probably like better some of the like less silly parts
of it copied by Apple and Google, and some of
the worst parts of it copied by guys like Musk. Right,

(03:03:13):
Like it's going to go this and and I will
say I don't. I don't think this is a thing
to get doomor about think about this like n f
T s right, yeah, there, this is this will be
It's not the same because there was nothing underlying n
FTS and fundamentally the way in which large language models
and these other kind of models work, there are uses

(03:03:33):
for them, Like there is a real technology that has
utility here. But this sort of flood of we have
cloned so and so and we've you know or you
know Elon Musk has just put out his new uh
fucking grock chat bot or whatever that that is basically
him making a meme robot to fucking do Google, like

(03:03:57):
he's he's pissing on Douglas Adams's yes, good name, right,
Like that's the that's the ultimate goal of his project.
But this shit is a fad, right, Like there are
underlying real technological things and uses that will that will
eventually some stuff will stand the test of time. But
the ship that that this is a warning of is

(03:04:17):
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 bord Ape Yacht Club.

Speaker 7 (03:04:25):
Divers horrible eye infections.

Speaker 2 (03:04:28):
Not eye infections. Garrison. They they went to a party
that only the boord Ape Yacht Club NFT holders could
go to, and the people who through 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 them.

Speaker 7 (03:04:53):
So deeply funny.

Speaker 2 (03:04:55):
We'll get through this. Something that funny will happen with
all of this, but you're gonna get hit by it
for a while, Like it's just gonna be everywhere. This is,
this is we're watching, you know, we're at that We're
at that point in Jurassic Park where you see like
the water reverberating. Right, it's coming. And but at the
end of the day, don't worry. You know, we are

(03:05:18):
Ian Malcolm. Our leg is broken, we are injured, but
we will inexplicably return for the sequel. So it's fine.

Speaker 7 (03:05:27):
Well, I think I think that is that is a perfect,
a perfect way to wrap this up. Yes, you know,
when you're when you're feeling lonely and you're tempted to
download the mind bank app to talk to your own self.
Just just remember, pull it, pull out a journal, just
do literally anything else.

Speaker 2 (03:05:49):
Call a friend, you know, make a friend, talk to
a stranger. Literally almost almost anything would.

Speaker 12 (03:05:57):
Be better for you.

Speaker 7 (03:06:00):
Well, for one, will be eagerly awaiting the influx of
immortal souls living on the computer.

Speaker 2 (03:06:08):
Yeah, I'm excited for all of all of the people
to reach Heaven.

Speaker 5 (03:06:13):
All right, I'm done. Hi everyone, it's me today. It's
James and I'm joined by Jake Taylor and Azalea and

(03:06:36):
they're all from the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund and
we've asked him to come on today. We're recording this
on what's it now, the sixth of November twenty twenty three,
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 a
massive protest movement against the Israeli bombing of Palestine. I

(03:06:58):
tended a Free Palestine protest today. Lots of you will
have attended them over the weekend. Normally, in this kind
of current political climate, when when people protest about things,
or when there are elections, 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

(03:07:21):
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 Bailfront
for twenty twenty, some of you wan't. Some of you
will not be in countries where this is a relevant concept,
But I feel think it's a very important one to
talk about. So I'd like each of you guys to

(03:07:43):
introduce yourselves if you could, I can get started.

Speaker 13 (03:07:47):
I'm Jake Wiener. This is my second time on I
was previously on talking about a CBP one app and
immigrant surveillance of the border. My day job, I'm a
lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, d C.
I'm also a UVA law grab. I've lived in Charlottesville
on and off since twenty seventeen, and I've been on

(03:08:08):
the board of the Bail Fund for about a year
and a half now.

Speaker 1 (03:08:11):
Yeah. My name is Taylor and I've lived in Charleston
pretty much my whole life for work, I'm a carpenter
and I've been on the bail fund here since twenty twenty,
couple of months. I wasn't here for the start, but
joined quickly after it got founded.

Speaker 17 (03:08:27):
And I think, yeah, I'm Azalea. I'm a two all
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

(03:08:48):
various cities and places throughout the country.

Speaker 5 (03:08:52):
Nice, excellent, We've got so I think to start off
with just in case, we've got folks who are not
in the US. So maybe I'm not for me, can
one if you explain to us what bail is?

Speaker 1 (03:09:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:09:06):
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, are they 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,

(03:09:28):
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

(03:09:52):
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 five hundred one thousand up to maybe

(03:10:15):
five thousand dollars for misdemeanors well of the 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 ten percent of the cost of
your bonds. So if you have a five thousand dollars bond,

(03:10:38):
that's about five hundred bucks. You're not going to get
that money back. But then you don't have anything out
of pocket. But for a lot of people, the criminal
legal system mostly arrests people for crimes of poverty and
drug addiction. Is that's the majority of people who go
through the system. They do not have the money to
go get a bail bondsman, which is so we regularly
get calls from people who don't have one hundred and

(03:11:00):
five hundred dollars to get out of jail. That's where
the bail fund comes in. We pay people's bombs, no
questions asked.

Speaker 17 (03:11:10):
Nice I'd also like to add that, in addition to
a lot of drug charges, a lot of ways that
people end up in jail is through traffic stops and
traffic violations. Something as minor as a back tail light
not being fully lit, and that then gives officers lace

(03:11:31):
an excuse to proceed from there. So something as simple
as you know, you didn't get to go to the
mechanic to have your back tail light fixed, can lead
to all sorts of issues down the road of ending
up to jail. Unfortunately in this wonderful country.

Speaker 5 (03:11:49):
Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's certainly pretty much to deathline.
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,
especially for people who are not people of means. So
with your bail fund, perhaps you could explain, like, obviously
some of those better amounts you's posted, even the once

(03:12:10):
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 other different roles that EATV plays within it.

Speaker 1 (03:12:26):
Now, sure I can talk about a little bit how
it got started. It got started in twenty twenty. I'm
not one hundred percent sure, but it's about the spring
or the summer, and it was pretty much right around
the time, you know, 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

(03:12:48):
since the bounding they've all graduated and moved on to
other things. But that was the time when it was
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 paid the bond and then
as the case as the person goes through the court

(03:13:08):
system and the case gets finalized, money gets returned to
us and we're able to use that money to post
bonds again. And so with even a relatively small amount
I believe we have now we have forty thousand dollars,
we're able to post a lot of bonds. Up to
nearly two hundred thousand dollars so far in bonds posted,
and so that's like it's a self sustained process. Like

(03:13:31):
it can sometimes take up to a year to get
the money back, but instead of you know, paying the
money and it being gone forever with the bail bondsmen like,
we're able to continuously do this and get a lot
done with a little bit of money.

Speaker 5 (03:13:44):
Relatively Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You can
keep it moving through the system. I guess. So when
you guys, like then you said you had that forty grand, right,
where did that come from? How how did you guys
obtain that forty grand?

Speaker 1 (03:13:58):
Just donations from individual Well? Pretty much? Yeah, I think,
like I think there were some larger donations in the
five thousand dollars range from organizations at the time, but
and then since then it's kind of trickled in, you know,
and I think I've donated my own money sometimes it's.

Speaker 5 (03:14:15):
Yeah, yeah, it's very important thing. So perhaps you could
can you give us a do we get it like
get it in at the top of the episode, Is
there a link where people can donate they'd like to.

Speaker 13 (03:14:24):
Yeah, we absolutely need your donations. Bail funds around the
country have had fundraising dry up, and right now we
have a wait list, like people are in jail because
we don't have enough money. So please donate to us.
We're on PayPal at PayPal, dot me e slash Blue
Ridge Bail. We're also on gofund me at Blue Ridge

(03:14:45):
Community Bail Fund, and that information is on our Instagram,
which is Ridge Bail Nice at Ridge Bail Perfect.

Speaker 5 (03:14:55):
So I think you were talking about that, like a
little bail funds to have dried up since twenty twenty,
and I know that, like I've seen that in a
lot of places. So there was this real like growth
in organizing in twenty twenty, right, and then obviously there's
been like it just people have burnt out, people have
been incarcerated in a number of things. It's made that

(03:15:15):
movement hard to sustain. That we don't necessarily need to
go into. But what I do want to talk about
is like, how you guys have been able to sustain
your bail fund and keep helping people out and doing
this important work. So perhaps you could explain the different
roles that people play in a bail funded People are
thinking like, oh, this needs to exist in my community,
Like what roles do you have? What kinds of people
do you need?

Speaker 1 (03:15:36):
Sure, yeah, I think you know a lot of bail
funds are can be stressured differently. But the way ours works,
and we're relatively small, and the way of our works
is we have a group of six of us that's
on the actual board and we handle like the logistics.
So I'm the chair, Jakes the treasurer azially as a
board member of large but we all kind of share

(03:15:56):
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, you know, we'll we look up the case,
call the jail to find out and then then with

(03:16:17):
the next step is posting the bond, and so we
have a list of volunteers that their job is just
to go to physically go to the jail with the
cash to post the bond, and sometimes you know one
of the board members will do there, so so yeah,
it can be yeah. And then as far as like

(03:16:38):
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 as law students, and that presents
own challenges because they graduate and leave, but it also
like brings fresh people into the organization. And then you know, me,
I live in charlesvillem here forever, which helps kind of

(03:17:00):
you with the institutional knowledge.

Speaker 5 (03:17:02):
Sure. Yeah, having that longevity I think is important.

Speaker 17 (03:17:05):
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 and the limited
time that we're here. Those of us who leave.

Speaker 5 (03:17:22):
After the three years, yeah, I'm sure it's still very
important to have all those people on your time energy commitment.
So like just by existing, right, the bail fund kind
of points out that this is a system that is
broken or that it certainly doesn't work to serve people.
So perhaps we could explain a little bit of that,

(03:17:42):
Like in the absence of a bail fund, how do
things look for people who are incarcerated?

Speaker 13 (03:17:49):
Right?

Speaker 5 (03:17:49):
Like what you spoke a little bit about bail bondsman,
but like perhaps you could talk about like the amount
of bails and people would post for Oh, it would
be the amount of how it's calculated, but it would
be and like what that would mean in terms of
people being in prison, and like how long they might
expect to stay in prison just because they couldn't afford
that bail being incacerated. I should not say prison, I guess, yeah,

(03:18:13):
folks are in jail. Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:18:15):
So the one of the cruelest parts of the American
criminal justice system from an all legal system there's not
much justice, is that your freedom is contingent on having wealth.
So bail is for most offenses, as I've said, is
quite low, and it's very not only is it they're

(03:18:36):
difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but it's
also you know, people are locked up because they don't
have five hundred dollars. I've gotten calls from people who
have literally said, I have I don't have one hundred dollars,
and I don't have anyone on the outside, and I've
been sitting in jail for three months or sometimes for

(03:18:57):
an offense that when they go to court was maybe
only a month of jail time. People routinely will spend
six months a year in jail for offenses that their
total amount of jail time was a couple months, and
you don't get compensated for that. Like if you spend
a year in jail for which means that you did

(03:19:17):
eleven months that you didn't have to do, the state
doesn't like cut you a check. That's like, hey, we
destroyed your life for eleven months for no reason. And
I think one of the things that is just like
the most heartbreaking about doing this work, but is also
sometimes like it makes you feel really good, is the

(03:19:38):
way that caging people just like ruins their lives. It's
incredibly hard to talk to people in jail from the outside.
It's very expensive, So when you're in jail, you are
not talking. You're like not talking to your loved ones,
you're not able to sustain a job, you're probably losing housing.

(03:19:59):
It's it's destroying and you know 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.

Speaker 1 (03:20:19):
Like, yeah, yeah, thanks seek. So I think one of
the things that like really drew me to this work
was like, I'm an abolitionist and when I was younger,
I spent two years in jail. I was twenty three,
twenty three or twenty five. I was in jail for
selling drugs. And I think, like, yeah, I really that's
like something that really motivates me now to do this stuff.

(03:20:44):
It's 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 like would
pay my bond for free. It was a five hundred
dollars bond, so he would have had to pay two
dollars to a bail bondsman and he didn't call us
for several days because he thought he has fifty dollars.

(03:21:06):
So it's like, you know, I like, it's you know,
we spend all this time like thinking about like leftist
stuff and like, but it's it's eye opening to see
people that are stuck in jail like for lack of
one hundred dollars, you know, like and that's it. They
can't get out, and so I think, yeah, like and
then sometimes people call us and they're like, I have nobody.
There's nobody out outside that can help them. So it's

(03:21:31):
that kind of stuff. It is upsetting, Like yeah, it's
like crazy to see this like system set up like this,
but it's like it's one of the things that like
really motivates me to keep doing this work. Is like, man,
it's so rewarding when you get those calls. And and
also I think to expand as something that Jake said
about the bail system, it's like it's, uh, the magistrates.
When you go in front of the magistry to get

(03:21:52):
the bond, there's no the Mattertates have no oversight, they're
not elected it's you know, we kind of just joke
like it's a vibe system, Like they just an issue
of bond for however much they feel like. And so
this is where you're really going to see like the
structural racism and like the classes and really come crashing
down on people, you know, in front of this system.

Speaker 13 (03:22:14):
So yeah, one thing that I'd like to add, because
I think people don't really realize, is so a magistrate
is working under a judge. They're basically a judge is
like an appointed position or elected. You have to be
a lawyer, you have to have a fair amount of
legal education. Your magistrate is just some dude, like the
most some dude person you've ever met. They have no

(03:22:37):
training required, They have no like legal training requirements. Many
of them are like fresh out of the army maybe
like maybe went to college, maybe didn't. So you're talking
about someone who has no particular expertise in evaluating people,
looking at someone for a few minutes and deciding how
dangerous they are to the community and making up in

(03:22:58):
their head how much that person can probably pay to
get out.

Speaker 1 (03:23:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:23:03):
I spent the summer my first year after or summer
after first year of law school at the Lynchburg Public
Defender Office, So I got to review a lot of
bodycam 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

(03:23:26):
to 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 was very it happened very quickly, like
it was all based on the police officer's report and

(03:23:47):
what they just decided to spew in five minutes or less.

Speaker 5 (03:23:52):
Yeah, that's yeah, it's it's a pretty messed up to system.
I think some states have like bail guidelines, right, if
I'm not mistaken, like I think California has like you know,
if you did this, if if you're accused of this offense,
and then your bail goes in this bucket and then
you know if it adds up depending on offenses or
conspiracy or whatever.

Speaker 1 (03:24:11):
Yeah, that's a really good point. Like the thing about
bail is this different like in every state on some
states you know have maybe like more progressive quote unquote, yeah,
but some some have some don't.

Speaker 5 (03:24:25):
And yeah, yeah, I was going to say, like California
has a reputation being progressive. San Diego has charged some
of the most insanely high bail amounts I've ever seen.

Speaker 17 (03:24:36):
Although we all aspire to do what Illinois just did
at the beginning of this year, which was to eliminate
bail altogether, it would just or cash bail altogether. It
would just be based on whether you can be released
or not.

Speaker 5 (03:24:53):
Yeah, that would be nice. It is just to be
clear that the bail isn't like, it's not like the
state keeps the money unless you don't show up. Is
it a revenue generator for state? Show? It's just purely
like a sort of punitive thing that they think has
some kind of value in that regard.

Speaker 13 (03:25:12):
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're go in front of a magistrate, you
got three options. Number one is you get out on
personal recognisance. If you're a nice white boy like me,
you're getting personal recognizance almost certainly.

Speaker 5 (03:25:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:25:35):
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 it doesn't matter how much
money you have, you're not getting out of jail.

Speaker 1 (03:25:55):
And in like a.

Speaker 13 (03:25:56):
Functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms
like 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

(03:26:17):
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 courte is to give them an attorney.

Speaker 5 (03:26:31):
Yeah, Yeah, which is a whole other thing we can
get into with the immigration So I think that's a
really good kind of example of some a good deep
dive into what ball is. So essentially like a bail
fund can make it so that there is not this
financial burden or this financial barrier to freedom. Right, Well,
you haven't meaned yet to be convicted of any crime.

(03:26:55):
It's not necessarily like an abolitionist thing to exist, but
like it helps it LEAs move us towards a less cruel,
a less unjust system, I suppose. So I want to
talk about like a little bit of the like nuts
and bolts of what it takes to run a bail fund.
But before we do that, we are twenty two minutes in,

(03:27:17):
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, all right,
we're back. I hope you've bought whatever it was, MRIs
or Run of Very Good Dog Coins or Hoover. So
let's talk about the like if you're listening to this

(03:27:38):
and you're in your car on your way home or
whatever time you're listening on a long road trip, you're thinking,
I would like to be the person. Maybe you're a
law student yourself, or you're formerly incarcerated person, or you've
had family members go through the system, and you're like, hell, yeah,
this shit sucks, and I would like to help make
it a little bit less sucky. When you're like, I'm

(03:28:01):
thinking here, when you establish a bail fund, like is
it a five oh one C three? Do you need
like certain like do you I know for five oh
one C three you need certain people and a certain
number of people doing certain jobs on your board that
kind of stuff, like what are the like concrete steps
that one has to take to go from this sucks
to the chair of the bail fund? And I can

(03:28:22):
help you.

Speaker 1 (03:28:24):
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. So
we are five on one three C five one C three,
but we were posting bonds before we had like the
official status. So I think truly like all you need
is some motivation and some money and there you know,
there are bail funds that post ten to fifteen bonds

(03:28:45):
a week, and there's bill funds that post one bond
a month because that's all they can do. And I
think like, as our organization has grown and matured, we've
gotten way more organized. And we started out it was
it was pretty chaotic and people it was poorly organized,
but we were still posting the bonds. And I think
from day one We've been good about that and so

(03:29:06):
like you can definitely start and you'll learn as we've
learned as we go, and you know, we refined everything.
But like I said, it just it takes some motivation
and a little bit of money and then maybe Jake
can talk to them too about the finder details.

Speaker 13 (03:29:20):
Yeah, so I think Taylor's absolutely right. I'm going to
give some recommendations that I would say are how to
set up your structure in a durable way. But I
would also point people the National Bail Fund Network, which
can provide resources and advice for this type of thing.

Speaker 5 (03:29:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:29:38):
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 five oh one C three nonprofit. This will
help shield your volunteers from legal liability and it means
you could take tax deductible donations. The way that you

(03:30:01):
set that up is going to depend on your state.
In Virginia, you register that with the State Corporation Commission,
which means you need a president which is Taylor, And
you need a treasurer and then a couple of the
potentially a couple of their board members. These are the
people who own technically the five oh one C three
and you just need those people on your documents. You

(03:30:22):
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 like
hand your personal address over.

Speaker 5 (03:30:32):
To a magistrate. Yeah, makes you as doxible as well.

Speaker 13 (03:30:36):
Yes, And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account
and go to a bank that makes it has good
hours so that you can readily withdrail with draw cash
because you can only postpond 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, you know, day and a half to

(03:30:57):
be able to post.

Speaker 1 (03:30:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:30:59):
We also recommend and a Google Voice phone number so
that multiple people can receive phone calls at the same time. Right,
we can have four people on a Google Voice and
that means that if I'm working, tailor can answer the phone.
We split it up by weeks, so we have a
point person each week who is responsible for answering the

(03:31:19):
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

(03:31:40):
we have some issue that comes up, we can meet
more often. And you need ideally a way to connect
to volunteers. So we've had good luck with the law school,
but we're expanding beyond that, you know, trying to be
a bit of different institutions in the community and recruit
folks to volunteer for us. You want to do do
some amount of vetting of your volunteers. You know, they

(03:32:02):
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 and 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

(03:32:24):
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, which but you
really want to have a peel box and that business
card so that when you get checks back from the
court system they come to a centralized place.

Speaker 5 (03:32:45):
Oh yeah, yeah, and then anyone could dromp in and
to pust it into the bank account.

Speaker 13 (03:32:49):
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 go fundme and PayPal, But any
way that you make the 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.

Speaker 5 (03:33:07):
I think it's like so often like a thing that
I've seen just being sort of on the left in
various movements since I was younger. It's like we reinvent
the wheel every four or five years, you know. So
just having those things that you guys have learned, you know,
like using Google Voice and having a bank with good hours,

(03:33:28):
I think that saves someone from having to fall down
those same holes again. So that's really valuable. I wonder that,
like you talked a little bit about legal liability, which
we don't necessarily need to go into, but like there
must is there, Like I mean, there have been some
obviously heavily politicalized arrests in the last few months in
the United States. Do you guys face like personal blowback

(03:33:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:34:04):
I think that's a great question. Where we are, there's
really we haven't posted the bond for anything that's like
political protests related, but there is a bail fund that's
about an hour away, much bigger than ours that in
twenty twenty eight was doing like every night bail support
jail support. So yeah, that's like an example of you know,

(03:34:25):
just way different bill fundes 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 backline in story,
and there's definitely cases around the country where like prosecutors

(03:34:46):
have taken aim at bail funds, you know, land of
course was a really really yeah, big one. But they
think you give anything to add maybe. Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:34:57):
I will say that it's certainly a possibility that your
bail fund becomes the target of both like institutional and
like a kind of right wing moral panic. These things happen.
It's I think relatively unlikely, but that doesn't mean you
shouldn't be prepared for it. And I think that when

(03:35:17):
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 will work on a first come,

(03:35:37):
first serve basis. When someone calls us, we post their bail,
no questions asked. And that's because there's already been a
decision of whether this person is safe to be released,
and that decision is made by the magistrate. Yeah, so
any responsibility falls on the criminal legal system. It does
not fall on us. And I think it's important to
say that you never hear this blowback coming towards bail bondsman,

(03:36:02):
even though they get out way more people and more
dangerous people than we do.

Speaker 5 (03:36:06):
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely the case. So I wonder, like
what other issues you have faced hardships and you spoke
about a couple of them, are there are other things
like that you've I know, for instance, like I've obviously
it's part of my reporting, or maybe not obviously, but
some people apparently don't bother to do it. But I

(03:36:27):
communicate with incarcerated people when they're 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

(03:36:49):
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 people to
hit to you.

Speaker 1 (03:37:02):
The communication thing is a huge problem, yeah, exactly. You know,
most of the calls we get are from people that
are currently in the jail, and they can only call
us and we cannot call them, So you know, they
call us and we have to just say okay, like
you need to call back in a couple of hours.
And then you know, they have lockdowns, they can't get

(03:37:25):
to the phone, all sorts of things. So the worst
I mean, yeah, they probably one of the worst things
that ever happened was someone called and I called the jail,
and the jail was like, oh, they can be released today.
And so the guy calls back and I'm like, hey, man,
you're going to get released today. We're going to have
a volunteer go out and post this bond, Like you
don't need to call me back, like if you want,

(03:37:45):
you can, but it's it's all rolling right, yeah, And
then I call the jail to triple check everything and
they say, oh, you know, we have to hear back
from the court. The court has to approve this, and
they're like closing in thirty minutes, so it's not going
to happen today. And so now like I have no
way to call this guy and tell him that he's
actually not going to get out today because of a

(03:38:07):
like bureaucratic issue, and I just have to wait until
he just like can't take anymore. And then calls And
that was really unpleasant situation. It's it's really unfortunate, and
you know he was not happy. He was not happy,
and I mean, you know, he took a little bit
out on me, but it wasn't a case of him
actually be mad at me.

Speaker 3 (03:38:27):
You know.

Speaker 1 (03:38:28):
I think that's something that's really cool, is like, no
one we deliver bad news all the time, you know,
we say you can't get out because of X, Y Z,
and no one's ever like actually mad at us. You know,
they might be like annoyed for a second because you know,
I'm on the phone delivering the bad news, but every
time at the end, they're like, thanks so much, like
I appreciate you. So we haven't had any like I mean, yeah,

(03:38:51):
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 be able to you can call them back.

Speaker 5 (03:39:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:39:04):
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

(03:39:25):
really poorly and they're actually getting worse. So for us,
like are the main jail that we work with, Middle
River Regional Jail used to use a phone provider called
GTL who is one of the biggest in the country,
and that was pricey, but like we could reliably get calls.
They just switched over to a different provider who makes

(03:39:46):
money in a different way. They provide tablets to the
prison and as a result of that, all our phone
calls are now made coming from the prison like social
room on a tablet, which means sometimes it's too loud
to hear the person calling, and about fifteen percent of
the time the call just drops when you pick it up.

(03:40:06):
So the system makes it really difficult to correspond with people.
As a result, a couple of things that we do
are sharing the phone responsibility. Not promising people things when
we can't deliver them is super important, and like that's
mostly a problem because the phone system works so badly
and we can't communicate with people. And then the biggest

(03:40:28):
thing is like 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. So it's yeah, it's really important to be

(03:40:49):
kind to yourself in those situations.

Speaker 5 (03:40:52):
Yeah, yeah, you won't stick around.

Speaker 17 (03:40:55):
And one more thing that I was surprised to find
out about the phone system is how much recording and
reviewing of recording goes on through those phone calls. I
witnessed so many prosecutors, commonwealth attorneys bring up something from
phone calls when folks were actually in trial or for

(03:41:17):
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.

Speaker 5 (03:41:36):
Yeah, yeah, it's very humous.

Speaker 1 (03:41:39):
I gotta jump in on that. Yeah, you end up
in jail, do not say anything about your case on
the phone. Oh, and don't talk to the guards about
why you're innocent, because I've seen that people do that.
It's not good advice. Don't do it. Don't talk about
the case.

Speaker 3 (03:41:55):
Ever.

Speaker 5 (03:41:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (03:41:57):
One way we address that is by telling people upfront
that we postpond no questions asked, and like telling people
like it doesn't matter what your situation is, where if
we have the money and you can get out, we're going.

Speaker 5 (03:42:10):
To post yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not your job to adjudicate,
like you said, if someone's safe or unsafe, or innocent
or guilty, that that's what the state purport to be doing.
Like your job is just to make sure that someone's
not too poor to be free. So on the subject
of like the sheer finances of it, I know, like
certainly here I've seen and I have no idea what

(03:42:32):
the sort of I know San Diego does have. California
has these bail guidelines so that they can't just set
whatever bail they want. But like in twenty twenty, we
saw some sky high bails and I don't know if
it was just because it was like fuck you mail
fund of it, it was just because that was what
the guidelines allowed, or some combination thereof. But do you
guys have a Like we can't because if you said

(03:42:54):
you're dealing with forty thousand, right, like if you drop
ten thousand on one individual, that obviously means that there
are a lot of people with five hundred dollars who
who can't have to stay in jail. So do you
have like a cap on your individual bail amounts for
that reason?

Speaker 13 (03:43:12):
Yeah, tailoruld you want to take.

Speaker 1 (03:43:13):
This Yeah, yeah, so yeah, we have a cap. We
pay up to five thousand dollars, So five thousand dollars
or less and that Yeah, it's exactly what you said,
like otherwise, you know, we would be totally broke an
out of money. And even you know, two five thousand
dollars bonds in a row and then you know, yeah,
we're pretty screwed. So and then I think that's a

(03:43:34):
you know, it brings up something else that Jick and
we're talking about, like it's we have it's important to
stick to that limit. We one time we posted a
bond up to twelve thousand dollars for somebody, and you know,
I think it was a combination of many factors that
led us to do that. But at the end of
the day, it can be very hard just to tell

(03:43:55):
someone no, because it was like he had a five
thousand dollars bond and then a separate court I got
another one, and so it was you know, we already
told him you could pay the one bond. Anyway, long
story is short, we had twelve thousand dollars tied up
on this guy and then he didn't show up to court.
And if that's that's when you can lose the money,

(03:44:16):
then people don't show up to court, so as well. Yeah,
fortunately for us, Unfortunately for him, he did get re
arrested on another charge. And when that happens, there's like
a ninety day period where if the person gets caught,
then we get the money back. And that's where, like

(03:44:37):
we are princes. Our policy is like we're not going
to do anything if the person runs, like, we're not
going to do anything to try to get it back.
We're not going to revoke anybody's bond, but like a
Bill bondsman might try to like find you if you run. Yeah,
but so are kind of our joke was kind of like, well,
we hope that we hope the guy just gets away completely,
but if he's not going to get away, maybe get

(03:44:59):
caught with him ninety days.

Speaker 5 (03:45:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:45:03):
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 worsened because prison guards are
and jail guards are not paying attention. Where you don't

(03:45:24):
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
built fund.

Speaker 5 (03:45:43):
Yeah, if we have.

Speaker 1 (03:45:44):
More money, That's something we talked about a lot of times,
like if we have more money, we would be able
to raise the limit on the out we could post.
But it's just not feasible right now.

Speaker 5 (03:45:54):
In terms of donation. It's a great thing. I was
just thinking, like good because it keeps going around and
around and around. Right, It's not like, you know, you
give a donation once and you get someone the thing
and you change their life, like you can potentially change
dozens of hundreds of people's hold true deg Tree.

Speaker 1 (03:46:08):
Yeah, absolutely cool.

Speaker 13 (03:46:10):
Yeah, and I will add on how we address our
lack of funds. The other system that we have in
place is a weight list. So people call us and
we can tell them, hey, you're on the wait list.
They'll call back all the time and be like Hey,
if I moved up the wait list. Sometimes people call
it multiple times a day and they're like, oh, any movement,
my my number four. Now this is kind of wild,

(03:46:33):
but having the wait list and we go like in
strict weight list order, with the exception that if someone
has an under five hundred dollars five hundred dollars 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 five thousand dollars bond, that's next in line. We
could have forty five hundred bucks. And so for the

(03:46:54):
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 bell phone,
like how do we make the best decisions. It's going
to help you know people in the best way and
then accords with our values the most that can get

(03:47:16):
pretty heated and intense, and having a setup with folks
where like you really respect each other and like each other,
I think is really important to not let that spire
out of control. It helps that you know, Taylor and
Melissa and I have been friends for many years and
we can like hang out and talk about this, and
then like Taylor and I can go out and go

(03:47:36):
for a bike ride.

Speaker 17 (03:47:38):
Nice.

Speaker 5 (03:47:39):
So having those relationships I think is really important. Yeah.

Speaker 17 (03:47:43):
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.

Speaker 5 (03:47:51):
That seems like a direct experience one.

Speaker 1 (03:48:01):
We are an abolitionist like principles, you know, And but
I think, almost like you know, I've talked one of
their builtments that I know of, they have some sort
of system I'm not super familiar with, like prioritizing someone
that maybe they consider to be higher risk in the
prison system to get out first. And I think that
that's a really a really appealing thing. But it's it's

(03:48:24):
just like kind of Jake touched on earlier, Like that's
just adding like another layer of judgment. Like then we
become these like arbiters of who is in jail and
who's not in jail and as much and so like
almost almost counterintuitively, like having this system first come, first serve,
I think is like the most abolitionist thing we can do.

Speaker 5 (03:48:45):
Yes, I can see that, Yeah, yeah, And it certainly
reduces a load on you and making most difficult choices.

Speaker 6 (03:48:50):
Which.

Speaker 1 (03:48:52):
It helps with that. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (03:48:53):
Yeah, we were talking about the system, and like I
want to bring that up because this system is like,
you know, I cover not a lot of criminal justice,
but a decent bit and it is incredibly confusing. It's convoluted.
It's like they've got these old ass names that you
don't understand, and then Naghirra and Virginia, so you have

(03:49:13):
a whole other layer of weird stuff going on, like
with names and.

Speaker 1 (03:49:18):
So like.

Speaker 5 (03:49:20):
If someone's thinking of something this and they're like, I
want this to happen, but I do not understand how
to navigate this system? Does that mean that they need
someone with a little more legal experience? Like can you
explain how as like someone who isn't obviously some of
both 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

(03:49:40):
because of that. But if someone has been fortunate enough
not to have to interact with the criminal law system,
are they like do they need a law student or
a lawyer to start a bail fund? Or like, how
does one go about learning to navigate that system? I suppose.

Speaker 1 (03:49:57):
Yeah, they definitely not. You do not need to have
legal experience. I think it was kind of a just
a random chance that it was a law of students
that found in this one. Basically, like you said, it
is extremely confusing system and the only way you're going
to learn how it all works is just by going
and posting the bonds. Like the system is possible, like

(03:50:18):
the bond system. We're just like a family member going
to post someone's bond, so like it's set up and
then it is possible for like your loved one to
post your bond, and we just learned all the experience.
You know, you just go you call it. You would
just call the jail and say where do I post
this bond and they'll tell you. You know, you come
to the magistrate. This is where the magistrates is located,

(03:50:39):
and then you know, you go with the cash and
post and like there will be every like we work in.
It's ten courts, five different jurisdictions, and then you each
have two court systems, and I swear almost every single
court does things somewhat differently. And the way we just
get on the phone and call them, you know, be
really polite and just figure it all out and write

(03:51:01):
it down so that we know in the future.

Speaker 13 (03:51:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll tell you, like, you can learn
these systems over time, and that's really worth doing because
in a moment of crisis, like mass arrests 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

(03:51:26):
getting people out of jail, but you want to be
helpful in a time of crisis, like, learning the legal
system as a non lawyer is doable. I will also
say that, like, you don't learn how to do this
stuff in law school. I didn't learn how to post
a bond, how to like file a kpist any of
this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is

(03:51:49):
truly like one of the worst states in the country.
I talked to a public defender who's worked in courts
in Louisiana and was like, yeah, a Virginia court system
is worse and more unfathomable, which is not if you
know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great,
but you can you know, you can learn an incredible amount,

(03:52:13):
and then that skill just becomes valuable in a number
of different areas. One of the most like powerful ways
that you can help people is even when you're not
able to postpond 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

(03:52:35):
majority of people we talk to have some idea of
why they're in jail, but they don't know the details,
and that means that they don't know like why they're
not getting out, and just being able to give people
a little bit of certainty is really important.

Speaker 5 (03:52:51):
Yeah, I think this is a very valuable thing you
can do. And yeah, I think this whole thing has
been a very valuable insight into how to build a
mail fund, I guess. And is there anything else do
you guys think that we didn't cover in the grand
scheme of being bail friend entrepreneurs. I don't know what
the right phrase is that bail fund founder is just.

Speaker 17 (03:53:13):
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 five dollars 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

(03:53:37):
listen to that and to be able to navigate going forward.

Speaker 1 (03:53:42):
I think one thing that I think is I found
so interesting about doing this bill fund is that it
spans it really crosses completely there or even like I
would say, it transcends politics, Like I think that all
of the board members are in here politically motivated. You know,
we're abolitionists or you know, against the current court system.

(03:54:04):
But the people's lives, like across every political spectrum have
been ruined by prison in jail. And I think one time,
like I think the most interesting example that Billy drove
his home was I was at work. I was at
the lumber yard, you know, and I think you know
the people, the salesman at the lumber yard. I think
they would follow them more if I was going to
stereotype them, I would say to you on the conservative side.

(03:54:25):
And the one guy, the salesman, was it heard about
that I did this. I think he saw Facebook that
posted about it, and he was like that is he's
like this is just the coolest thing ever. Man, Like,
I think it's so awesome, you know, like he's like
people are just locked up for like bullshit, and yeah,
and I think, you know, we've had volunteers that I
think people were like knew him or like why I

(03:54:47):
think he's like almost like a Republican and just going
out and posting these bonds. And I think that it's uh,
like I said, yeah, it's just fascinating that it does transcend.
It transcends the politics a little bit.

Speaker 5 (03:55:00):
Yeah, I think anyone who's had to interact with the
criminal justice system, I like, I have an interact with
the American one. But like if they've had in their family,
if they've had it in there, you know, and their
friend group or whatever, realizes how dehumanizing and unjust it is.
And especially like if they're working people, right, they are
not people of massive means, They'll have seen how how

(03:55:21):
hard it can weigh. And you're trying to come up
with money to bond someone out who you care about,
even if they'd end up not being found guilty, and
so like, it can be a very broad based thing.
And I think it's certainly something that like I start
a lot of people giving money to bailfund's in twenty
twenty who may not have you know, they weren't necessarily
people who are also out in the streets. Like it's

(03:55:42):
a way for people to be part of a movement.
It's a way for people to who feel that like
this is unjust, even if yeah, they might not share
abolitionist politics or whatever. I think it's something that a
lot of people would want to get behind.

Speaker 13 (03:55:56):
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

(03:56:17):
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

(03:56:40):
had people like cry on the phone with me because
they've said I felt so helpless not being able to
get my son out of jail, and getting a call
from you made a huge difference. So I think I
just like, if you can do this, you can get
together with your friends and form a bail fund and
in a really concrete way improve their lives and treat

(03:57:02):
them with dignity. And that's such a radical thing.

Speaker 5 (03:57:05):
Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, all right, so I think
the wrap up, we should bet, we should again remind
people where they can give you their money. So how
would people go about doing that? Yeah, please do please
don't it to the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund.

Speaker 13 (03:57:20):
We are on PayPal at PayPal, dot me, slash blue
Ridge Bail, Ridge is ri dge. We're on GoFundMe. You
can find us ano the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund.
We are on Instagram at Ridge Bail and we also
have a website, Blue Ridge Bail Fund dot org.

Speaker 1 (03:57:40):
I think so you can google Blue Ridge Community Bail
Fund will 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.

Speaker 17 (03:57:54):
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 reformed, what worked for them, what didn't.
Just having a thirty minute conversation gives sometimes wonderful ideas
on how to go forward.

Speaker 5 (03:58:12):
That's great. Thank you so much, guys. I think that
was pretty good. Anything eys you want to share before
we go, I think we're good. Thanks so much, Thank
you for having us. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (03:58:27):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 17 (03:58:33):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot 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 at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.