Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 2: can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Dick. It appened here, a show that is
Speaker 3: about a number of I really should have done an
Speaker 3: actual intro for this one. This is embarrassing. Roast me
Speaker 3: along with me is Sharene and James.
Speaker 4: Hello, miya, Oh yeah that was great. I thought about
Speaker 4: was actually great. Keep them guessing, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: they never know what they're going to get. Would it
Speaker 4: be sad?
Speaker 5: Would it be happy?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, this is a This is a this is a
Speaker 3: really sad episode. This is an episode that I got
Speaker 3: really picked off or writing. Yeah, and this is an
Speaker 3: episode about Palestine. Now, most of the attention on Palestine
Speaker 3: right now has been focused on Gaza for you know,
Speaker 3: very obvious reasons. Guza is the place where you know,
Speaker 3: most of most of the Israeli offensive is happening. It's
Speaker 3: where most of the people are. Israelis are killing the
Speaker 3: most people. But however, coma, there's also been a bunch
Speaker 3: of killing going on in the West Bank. And this
Speaker 3: is you know, the the murders of Palestinians in the
Speaker 3: West Bank is stuff that you know, it's been intensified
Speaker 3: by the current conflict, but this is stuff that's been
Speaker 3: happening even before, like this latest round of stuff started.
Speaker 3: Since the beginning of the year, Israeli settlers and government
Speaker 3: forces have killed several hundred Palestinians in the West Bank.
Speaker 3: And I think in a lot of ways the dynamics
Speaker 3: of the entire Israeli project are clearer in the West
Speaker 3: Bank than they are anywhere else, which is a bold
Speaker 3: stane I will conceive. But I think by the end
Speaker 3: of this we'll see if I'm right.
Speaker 4: I think you're I think you're right in the sense that,
Speaker 4: like the systems of apartheid are very clear in the
Speaker 4: West Bank versus other parts.
Speaker 5: Of Yeah, I mean, the violent dynamic of it's really
Speaker 5: Thereaty project is pretty fucking evident when that bombing showed it's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But I think I think specifically, the part that's
Speaker 3: easiest to understand in the West Bank is why it's
Speaker 3: why it's a mutually self reinforcing dynamic. Why why why
Speaker 3: the Settler project keeps like has been building the way
Speaker 3: that it has, why it keeps inevitably leading to violence
Speaker 3: the way that it has, and why it's it's, you know,
Speaker 3: effectively the sort of cyclical self reinforcing project. But to
Speaker 3: actually understand what I'm talking about, we need to go
Speaker 3: back to the beginning of the Israeli occupation to understand
Speaker 3: what the occupation actually is, because I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 3: I don't know this is something that like, I feel
Speaker 3: like most of the people talking about this kind of
Speaker 3: just assume everyone knows, and I feel like we should
Speaker 3: not assume that. We should, you know, actually go back
Speaker 3: and run through some of this history really quickly.
Speaker 5: My cynical take is that most of the people talking about
Speaker 5: this maybe don't have the deepest understanding themselves, and uh
Speaker 5: that you're skating along on that assumption not to have
Speaker 5: to expose their own shaky foundation.
Speaker 4: I feel like I've talked about it before on like
Speaker 4: every podcast I've done, but I feel like people like
Speaker 4: tune it out, you know what I mean, Like, I
Speaker 4: feel like people don't actually absorb what I'm what any
Speaker 4: what they hear, because it's like, oh this again or
Speaker 4: whatever the fuck they're thinking.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So I'm gonna I'm gonna hammer I'm
Speaker 3: gonna hammer a copy of this into all of your brains.
Speaker 5: You have no choice, you must, Martin Luthering the History
Speaker 5: of Palestine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gonna nail ninety five copies of the Geneva Convention
Speaker 3: to the door. So in the beginning, there was the Nakba,
Speaker 3: which is the great design the Palestinian people in which
Speaker 3: the Israelis armed. I should mention by Stalin, which is
Speaker 3: something that is incredibly inconvenient for everyone in the entire
Speaker 3: American political spectrum. And we will get back to who also,
Speaker 3: like who specifically was doing the knack book, because it's
Speaker 3: not exactly who anyone really expects or portrays them as.
Speaker 3: But yeah, a bunch of a bunch of armed settlers,
Speaker 3: armed by Stalin, drives seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their homes.
Speaker 3: They seize those homes, they take them for themselves. Now
Speaker 3: this is I think, okay, this is this is the
Speaker 3: part where where disclaimer Mia is not it is not
Speaker 3: a professor of international law. I think this was actually
Speaker 3: technically not a legally a war crime because I only
Speaker 3: because the Fourth Geneva Convention hadn't been ratified yet, because
Speaker 3: the knackbut takes place in nineteen forty eight, and this
Speaker 3: is a year before the Geneva Convention or the fourth
Speaker 3: Geneva Convention, the part that as the stuff we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about, uh was ratified. It's two years before
Speaker 3: it comes into force. But you know from the beginning,
Speaker 3: what you have here is a settler colony. The Israelis
Speaker 3: have driven out the Palestinians who have been living there.
Speaker 3: They have seized their homes and they have replaced them,
Speaker 3: which you are settlers.
Speaker 4: And they've also massacred like fifty Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've killed a ton of people. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess I should be more explicit about that, Like
Speaker 3: when I say drive out, like sometimes they were, it's
Speaker 3: just it's people fleeing. A lot of times they're killed.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think it's like they flat in entire villages, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean, Like it's not just like oh
Speaker 4: they're empty houses now, it's like, no, they actually destroyed everything,
Speaker 4: built new cities where there already were cities, renamed the cities.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, it was just I don't know, it's striful.
Speaker 5: The reason people are leaving is because they've seen their
Speaker 5: neighbors and family members killed and their fields and houses burned,
Speaker 5: and they know that that's coming for them right later.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think this is sorry, tangent is. There are so
Speaker 4: many videos of like former IDF soldiers that were not
Speaker 4: think it's not idea technically, but like former people that
Speaker 4: fought in the Nekba that like drove these people out
Speaker 4: of their homes and it's so repulsive. There's literally like
Speaker 4: a it was on an Israeli news channel or like
Speaker 4: some type of Israeli show where there's an old man
Speaker 4: like laughing about how him and his group raped a
Speaker 4: sixteen year old girl and shot everyone in a row,
Speaker 4: all the babies, everything else. It's just like and that's
Speaker 4: coming from them. So I think that's important to know.
Speaker 4: It's not just like us saying, oh my god, these
Speaker 4: terrible things happen. It's like, no, they actually admitted to
Speaker 4: it multiple times. We're just telling you from you know
Speaker 4: what I mean. I think it's important to say that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is something we're going to get into
Speaker 3: more in a bit, but what are the consequences of this?
Speaker 3: And one of the consequences of running a settler colony
Speaker 3: like this is that the people that it produces, who
Speaker 3: are the people who you know, the people who are
Speaker 3: like ordering people and taking their homes right in order.
Speaker 3: The kind of person you have to be in order
Speaker 3: to do that is just absolutely terrifying, just like you know,
Speaker 3: I mean this and this is why you see so
Speaker 3: much stuff both here and you know, like that, like
Speaker 3: in in in the early phases of like not even
Speaker 3: the early phases, but like most of the phases of
Speaker 3: US settler expansion, right, you you really account to these
Speaker 3: people and those like these people are all serial killers.
Speaker 5: To do that, I think you have to convince yourself
Speaker 5: that the people you are doing it to are less
Speaker 5: human or not human like that. It's fundamental to colonialism,
Speaker 5: right to consider yourself to either be a higher form
Speaker 5: of humanity or like distinct, like in a species sense
Speaker 5: from these British people did that in their colonialism too.
Speaker 5: But yeah, you see it all the time in specifically
Speaker 5: in like their language and culture that depicts the settler
Speaker 5: colonization of the United States or what is now the
Speaker 5: United States. Right, Like, you can look at the like
Speaker 5: what it's called the wars after the after the Civil
Speaker 5: War and see just all kinds of the most fucking
Speaker 5: horrific shit imaginable because you're you're doing a genocide. You're
Speaker 5: just doing it like piece by piece as you go
Speaker 5: across the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is one of these parts of American
Speaker 3: history that people don't understand. And when you learn it,
Speaker 3: there's this real sort of even even in sort of
Speaker 3: radical accounts, and I understand why they do this, but
Speaker 3: there's a tendency to not to sort of back away
Speaker 3: from exactly how violent this stuff was. And you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of the reason for this is like it's
Speaker 3: you know, it can get into this sort of realm
Speaker 3: of like I don't know, there's almost weird like like tragedy,
Speaker 3: horror porn stuff, but like it was, it was as
Speaker 3: bad as anything that has ever happened to humans. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then and then the people doing that stuff are
Speaker 3: you know, driven by the same kinds of of stuff
Speaker 3: that's happening here.
Speaker 5: Fuck, the people doing that stuff are still like like
Speaker 5: that there's a park named after them. In San Diego,
Speaker 5: there's kit cass And Park, there's Uniparosa Park, like like
Speaker 5: it's baked into American culture still, like the Genocidas are
Speaker 5: fucking celebrated here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is and this is this is aweso
Speaker 3: true of Israel. Now. Okay, So so after after the
Speaker 3: knock ball, there's there's a lot of people who think
Speaker 3: that like this is the end of the whole process, right,
Speaker 3: that like, okay, so we've expelled these people, we've killed
Speaker 3: these people, there's now a Jewish state, it has like
Speaker 3: relatively stable borders or whatever. This is going to be
Speaker 3: the end of it, and that that did not happen.
Speaker 3: And one of the reasons that didn't happen is the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty seven Six Days War, where is Israel launches
Speaker 3: what's called a preemptive strike on Egypt. It's okay, so
Speaker 3: they this is the pr term that's been developed afterwards
Speaker 3: for it. The reality is that Egypt was not about
Speaker 3: to attack Israel. The Israelis just started a war, like
Speaker 3: just straight up started a war and invaded Egypt, and
Speaker 3: the Sixth Day War winds up being a war between
Speaker 3: the Israelis and so it's mostly Egypt. They end up
Speaker 3: finding Egypt, Syria and Jordan a little bit. And like
Speaker 3: technically the Saudis, like Iraq, Kuwait and Lebanon are in
Speaker 3: the war, but like they don't do shit. There's a
Speaker 3: story I think it's actually from the seventy three war,
Speaker 3: but there's a story of uh, there's there's there's there's
Speaker 3: a bunch of people, and there's a bunch of Egyptian
Speaker 3: soldiers in a bunch of trenches and a bunch of
Speaker 3: like the like Saudi command rolls up, and the Saudis
Speaker 3: roll up and fucking rolls royces, and the Egyptian commanders
Speaker 3: looks at these guys just just go home because people
Speaker 3: just like you and the and this this is one
Speaker 3: of those scread dynamics here of like god like the
Speaker 3: air powers outside of Egypt for some of the time,
Speaker 3: I'm really we're not taking this very seriously. And you know,
Speaker 3: and and and the consequence of this is that the
Speaker 3: the is most of the most of the sixty seven
Speaker 3: war is I mean, the entirety of the sixty seven
Speaker 3: war is just the Israelis beating the absolute piss out
Speaker 3: of the Egyptians. In large part because the Egyptians weren't
Speaker 3: like actually trying to fight a war, so they were
Speaker 3: basically completely unprepared for getting invaded by Israel. Now this
Speaker 3: is this war is a complete disaster for for the
Speaker 3: air powers. Like gamaldel Nasser is so ashamed of his
Speaker 3: defeat that he resigns and doesn't like come back until
Speaker 3: a bunch of protests in Egypt like demand that he'd
Speaker 3: come back.
Speaker 5: He did it really royally kind of like his position
Speaker 5: was that were like, eventually I going to attack us,
Speaker 5: We'll have a defensive position, and failed miserably yet happy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it did not work. This is this and this
Speaker 3: this is a complete disaster. But and and and the other,
Speaker 3: you know, the part of it that's that's most important
Speaker 3: for our story is that this is the period where
Speaker 3: the Israelis start seizing territory en mass. They take the
Speaker 3: entire Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, they take the goal on
Speaker 3: Heights from Syria, and most importantly for our purposes, they
Speaker 3: take both the West Bank and Gaza, which means they
Speaker 3: now occupy all of Palestine now immediately, like effectively immediately
Speaker 3: as this is happening, one point three million Palestinians flee
Speaker 3: the West Bank and Gaza. And you know, this has
Speaker 3: a consequence of enormously expanding the already very very large,
Speaker 3: like permanent refugee population of Palestinians in a bunch of
Speaker 3: other countries. And this is also where we come to
Speaker 3: the focus of today's episode, which is Israeli settlers. But
Speaker 3: do you know who else shows up uninvited and is
Speaker 3: technically illegal under.
Speaker 7: Multiple sections of international law?
Speaker 5: Is it Runnald Reagan? The surprise Reagan?
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we are back. So one of the things
Speaker 3: that the Geneva Convention establishes is this set of legal
Speaker 3: obligations that occupiers have in occupy in over territory that
Speaker 3: they occupy. So if you know, the way that's supposed
Speaker 3: to work under international law is that you know, technically speaking, yeah,
Speaker 3: you can occupy territory, but you're not allowed to do
Speaker 3: whatever you want with that territory. You have to actually
Speaker 3: abide by a set of laws. And this was done to,
Speaker 3: you know, after World War Two, to protect like people
Speaker 3: in occupy territories from the unbelievable horrors that were unleashed
Speaker 3: by the Nazis in World War Two. Now, one of
Speaker 3: the things that you cannot do if you are occupying
Speaker 3: a territory, is you cannot expel civilians from their homes
Speaker 3: and replace them with your own civilians. This is this
Speaker 3: is a war crime. You are is honor international law.
Speaker 3: You're not allowed to do this. Now, I've been talking
Speaker 3: a lot about international law. This is where I kind
Speaker 3: of I don't know if disagrees with the right word.
Speaker 3: I have very little faith in international law. I know a
Speaker 3: lot of people who are have been involved in this,
Speaker 3: you know, like in the struggle for liberating Palestine for
Speaker 3: a very very long time, like take international law very seriously.
Speaker 3: I don't know, Like I.
Speaker 4: Mean, Israel has has not followed international laws. Yeah, like
Speaker 4: nothing happens.
Speaker 5: Yeah, international police.
Speaker 4: It's like there's no way to it. I don't believe
Speaker 4: what it's telling me because nothing ever happens.
Speaker 5: And it has Maybe it has a moral value, right,
Speaker 5: I guess that's that's the idea behind some of the activism,
Speaker 5: is that like it can help position something as being
Speaker 5: in the wrong and then that might help some But yeah,
Speaker 5: it hasn't worked. It didn't stop fucking it didn't stop
Speaker 5: the rainge of genocide in Meamma hasn't stopped the population
Speaker 5: exchange in a free like it's pretend it doesn't exist
Speaker 5: un as.
Speaker 3: Someone enforces it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, like it doesn't. It's it's I feel like
Speaker 5: sometimes it's a to them for like Western liberals to
Speaker 5: be like, oh, well they brother, they can't do that.
Speaker 5: They're breaking international law. Oh fuck, they're doing it anyway,
Speaker 5: Like well, yeah, yes, yeah, And like understandably, like no
Speaker 5: one particularly wants to like be the ones who enforce
Speaker 5: international law because that involves your children dying, uh, and
Speaker 5: so they let's let other children die instead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, but the consequence of this being
Speaker 3: really toothless is that, you know, it's the language of
Speaker 3: this stuff is framed, and I want to frame this
Speaker 3: like differently for a second, which is I want to
Speaker 3: I want to think about what is being prohibited here
Speaker 3: in basic moral terms, because the the what the what
Speaker 3: this article of the Geneva Convention is supposed to stop
Speaker 3: is an army showing up killing a bunch of people
Speaker 3: and then settling their own population on top of those
Speaker 3: people's corpses. And that is fucking horrifying. There is you know, obviously, Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a reason why the Taiva Convention was like holy shit, like,
Speaker 3: we can't have this. Yeah, but you know, obviously this
Speaker 3: hasn't stopped you know this, this hasn't actually stopped this
Speaker 3: from happening. Like we we now live in effectively the
Speaker 3: new golden age of ethnic cleansing, right, I mean, the
Speaker 3: the one point two million Gossens you fled their homes
Speaker 3: after the Israelis told them to literally told them to
Speaker 3: flee or die, which is that that's by the way,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to be very clear about this.
Speaker 3: When people talk about an evacuation order, that's what that is, right,
Speaker 3: you know, this is an an evacuation order from like
Speaker 3: a tsunami, right, Like, It's not like there's a natural
Speaker 3: disaster coming. The thing that is happening is the Israeli
Speaker 3: government has said you must leave now or we are
Speaker 3: going to kill you. And you know, and of course,
Speaker 3: the the the other bleak side of this, right is
Speaker 3: that with the the quote unquote evacuation order, the Israelis
Speaker 3: killed people who were fleeing anyways, but.
Speaker 5: You know, and they had nowhere to fucking go, like
Speaker 5: they yeah, right, Like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, evacuate does make it seem like a very like
Speaker 4: humanitarian crisis, when really that you're right, But all they're
Speaker 4: saying is like leave now or die in the next hours,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean? Yeah, And evacuation that's like
Speaker 4: a threat, Like it's just a death threat.
Speaker 5: Yeah. If I was to like stand outside your bedroom
Speaker 5: and pull the pin on a grenade and be like,
Speaker 5: I'm giving you an evacuation order. Oh, and I'm going
Speaker 5: to eat this grenade in here in five seconds, people
Speaker 5: wouldn't be like, oh, that's reasonable. Turn the doors to
Speaker 5: your house as well, just for funzies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, and so and so. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is this is, this is what's been happening in Gaza.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: You won't put you a million gozzens. You fled their
Speaker 3: homes and they've joined the one hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 3: Armenians who are ethnically cleansed from the Garl Kara back
Speaker 3: by by Jean in September, Which this is the era
Speaker 3: we're living in right now, is an unfathomable era of
Speaker 3: violence and ethnic cleansing, right like none of none of
Speaker 3: the international legal frameworks like did shit none, none of
Speaker 3: none of the sort of you know like that, none
Speaker 3: of them never again stuff like n you can you
Speaker 3: can you can literally like you can ethnically cleanse your
Speaker 3: own medians again and nothing will fucking happen.
Speaker 5: The rag in Myanmar, we didn't do shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean right now we're we're averaging one one
Speaker 3: like mascular ethnic cleansing a month Jesus. And that is
Speaker 3: a fucking unbelievably bleak thing.
Speaker 4: And it's only done to populations that are systematically like dehumanized,
Speaker 4: you know what I mean. Like that's the thing that's like, Oh,
Speaker 4: people are used to seeing this group of people suffer.
Speaker 4: They're used to seeing these kinds this kind of population
Speaker 4: just always die and and be I don't know, uh,
Speaker 4: bomb and stuff. So I think a lot of people
Speaker 4: just kind of gloss over it because they're just like, oh,
Speaker 4: this is what happens to them and really keeps happening.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's uh, it's certainly like not a coincidence that,
Speaker 5: like we there have been other ethnic cleansings right in Africa,
Speaker 5: and like I said, they're Hinjia Muslims. But like when
Speaker 5: it happens in the Middle East or the Arab world
Speaker 5: or where we want to say it, like, it's not
Speaker 5: Arab world, I guess because it HAPs to Courdash people too,
Speaker 5: but like yeah, people are like, oh, well, another sad
Speaker 5: thing has happened, like over there, and then it's very
Speaker 5: easiestpecuing with the way American news media only focuses on
Speaker 5: these parts of the world like they just pointed it
Speaker 5: and like oh, look sad, and then never give the context,
Speaker 5: like me it was explaining, and never give the background,
Speaker 5: and then we're blindsided every two years by a fucking
Speaker 5: genocide or an ethnic cleansing or a mass murder because
Speaker 5: we don't report on it, and then it pops up
Speaker 5: again no one understands and yeah, I'm very bleak on
Speaker 5: the media at the minute.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and I mean I think you know, the
Speaker 3: important context to understand here is that the absolute horror
Speaker 3: show that's happening in Gaza right now that Israeli is doing.
Speaker 3: This is one of the most extreme forms of it
Speaker 3: they've ever done. But this is something they've been doing
Speaker 3: from like the fucking moment they took the West Bank.
Speaker 3: This is this is what they were doing. And again
Speaker 3: this is what never ended. Really yeah, yeah, kept going.
Speaker 4: It was like quiet mostly for a while people ignore,
Speaker 4: but now it's just really loud and it keeps happening though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and you know, I think the the
Speaker 3: oh god, what a blank on the like continuous knock.
Speaker 3: But thing is is the way that it's understood, well,
Speaker 3: is what it's called in Palestine. In sort of set
Speaker 3: of the colonial studies, the line that people always say
Speaker 3: is that centered colonialism is structure, not an event. Like
Speaker 3: I said, it's not a thing that just ends right.
Speaker 3: It just is it. It is that, you know, it
Speaker 3: is the air that you breathe. It's the sort of
Speaker 3: you know, like it's it's it's, it's, it's, it's it's
Speaker 3: it's the walls of the society that have been built
Speaker 3: to yeah, cage and destroy people. Now, you know, the
Speaker 3: the Israelis again, this is the thing that when when
Speaker 3: when when sixty seven happens? This is actually it's kind
Speaker 3: of a turning point in the sense that like there
Speaker 3: are groups of liberals who had supported the Israelis in
Speaker 3: forty eight who were like whoa hold on, hold on,
Speaker 3: Like this is actually like really stunningly illegal and this
Speaker 3: doesn't do anything. But there's a lot of people who
Speaker 3: make it, who make a distinction between Israel in forty
Speaker 3: eight and this Israel because this Israel, like the mask
Speaker 3: is off. There's nothing. There's nothing there anymore, right, It's
Speaker 3: just we we have seized this land by military force,
Speaker 3: by attacking a country who we were not at war with,
Speaker 3: and we are now like systematically replacing the population of
Speaker 3: these places with our population. And the consequence of this,
Speaker 3: this this is Israel settler population. The consequence of this
Speaker 3: is that there's now it's hard to get accurate numbers
Speaker 3: because these people, in theory aren't supposed to be there.
Speaker 3: But there's something like five hundred somewhere between four and
Speaker 3: fifteen and five hundred thousand Israeli settlers in the West
Speaker 3: Bank and another like two hundred thousand in East Jerusalem.
Speaker 3: And this means that the settler population in if you
Speaker 3: count both the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this is
Speaker 3: about seven percent of the total population of Israel that
Speaker 3: that are now these settlers. And these settlers are I
Speaker 3: don't know. This is this is like, I guess what
Speaker 3: you would call Israel's colonial frontier, in the sense that
Speaker 3: like these are the people who were like on the
Speaker 3: absolute front lines of Palestinian dispossession of like killing people
Speaker 3: taking their stuff.
Speaker 5: Settlers is almost a misnomer because they're not like it's
Speaker 5: not like sometimes I think that constructs a notion of
Speaker 5: like unsettled territory and they're settling on it. Right, these
Speaker 5: people are violently colonizing someone else's land. Yeah, which which
Speaker 5: which was which was also true of the American Like yes, yeah,
Speaker 5: very much. So, yeah we should write here, yeah hit
Speaker 5: here or pioneers and pioneer ship people live there for
Speaker 5: ten per thousand of VI.
Speaker 3: They were pioneers. Yeah. But like the way that the
Speaker 3: state thinks about its own geography is in the terms
Speaker 3: of these frontiers sometimes they call the buffer areas, and
Speaker 3: they they they think about these things as these these
Speaker 3: areas where they need, you know, of of projection of
Speaker 3: military control, the projection of sort of their their power
Speaker 3: and also sort of settler power and these kinds of
Speaker 3: you know, and this is this is this is what
Speaker 3: what the sort of settler populations the West Bank are
Speaker 3: the front line of Now, these people are subsidized by
Speaker 3: the Israeli government that if you if you if you
Speaker 3: go to these places, you get tax breaks, you get
Speaker 3: you know, they're they're there. There's there's there's there's sort
Speaker 3: of there's a whole variety of sort of government subsidies
Speaker 3: for these people. They also get very and this is
Speaker 3: this is the thing that I think is really interesting
Speaker 3: that isn't discussed very much. These really like social services
Speaker 3: in the West Bank are very very good. In some cases,
Speaker 3: they're they're better than the stuff that's in like Jerusalem
Speaker 3: or in like the other the other parts of Israel.
Speaker 3: And you know, all this and this acts is sort
Speaker 3: of as part of these sort of incentive package to
Speaker 3: get people to move into these settler regions. Now, and
Speaker 3: you know, the these these people reave other benefits too, right,
Speaker 3: They have enormous, an enormous degree of military protection. And
Speaker 3: this is one of the things that Tree and you
Speaker 3: talked about this right If you know, if you're trying
Speaker 3: to figure out where the fuck was the Israeli are
Speaker 3: when mass attacked, Well, the answer is they were all
Speaker 3: in the fucking West Bank helping a bunch of settlers
Speaker 3: steel Land, right, which which.
Speaker 4: You settlers terrorizing Palestinian Yeah, yeah, what's happening, And that
Speaker 4: happens all the time, but just so happened to happen
Speaker 4: on this very large scale attack yep.
Speaker 3: And the level of violence that's happening here, you know,
Speaker 3: I mean we're going to talk about the more direct
Speaker 3: settler of violence, like these are these people they these
Speaker 3: are people who have set multiple babies on fire like
Speaker 3: that is like they they have set multiple children on fire.
Speaker 3: This is this is this is the kind of people
Speaker 3: who you were dealing with when you're talking about especially
Speaker 3: So okay, so there's there's a distinction inside of Israeli
Speaker 3: law about which these settlements are legal. So again, under
Speaker 3: international law, all of these settlements are illegal. Like there's
Speaker 3: no this is not a black it's a completely black
Speaker 3: and white thing. Every single settlement is illegal under Israeli law.
Speaker 3: There are some settlements that they officially approve and some
Speaker 3: of them that they don't. And so the ones that
Speaker 3: they do approve are the ones that, you know, those
Speaker 3: are the ones who better government services, They get rows
Speaker 3: and built out to them, and and but there are
Speaker 3: kinds of violence here that are you know, there's there's
Speaker 3: I guess you call it bureaucratic violence or stuff like
Speaker 3: you know, one of the sort of like benefits you
Speaker 3: get of living in the West Bank is like the
Speaker 3: Israeli government has diverted basically the entire West Bank's fucking
Speaker 3: water supply to fill these peoples swimming pools and this
Speaker 3: is water that is you know, the thing that they've
Speaker 3: been used for for a very very long time is
Speaker 3: people in the West Bak doing agriculture. But you know
Speaker 3: that's becoming you know, growing alves, and it's becoming increasingly
Speaker 3: fucking impossible because these Raelis are diverting their fucking water
Speaker 3: and then also lighting and then the you know, the
Speaker 3: the government diverts all the water away and then the
Speaker 3: settlers light the fucking olive trees on fire. And this
Speaker 3: is actually, and this is weirdly a thing that like
Speaker 3: almost exactly the same pattern stuff that like Turkey is
Speaker 3: under the Kurds too, right, like yeah, like every every
Speaker 3: ethic minority, Like yeah, Russia.
Speaker 5: Does it to its Kalmic people. It's the story I
Speaker 5: hear so often at the border, when talking to people
Speaker 5: in any number of languages, many number of countries, is like, oh,
Speaker 5: they have cut off the water supply to where we live,
Speaker 5: and now we can't live there anymore, like across Africa, sadly,
Speaker 5: like yeah, even within Russia, like it's it's like yeah,
Speaker 5: like you say, it's genocide by dictat or fucking you know,
Speaker 5: it's it's an ethnic cleansing that doesn't look so bad
Speaker 5: on TV because it happens a little bit slower, but
Speaker 5: it's a way to remove people. And you can look
Speaker 5: at like drone pictures of the West Bank and you
Speaker 5: can see the little fucking like green lollipops, like the
Speaker 5: road and then the settlement right and like people have
Speaker 5: trees and shit like it's it's wild. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think the unique part about Israel and the settlers
Speaker 4: there burning all the olive trees, I feel like I
Speaker 4: didn't ever stard about this before. I don't know if
Speaker 4: we did, Yeah, but the whole essence of Zionism is
Speaker 4: the idea that there's a group of people that are
Speaker 4: like meant for this land. And I just find the
Speaker 4: olive tree burning the best example of how that's just
Speaker 4: like such a bullshit, because if you actually cared about
Speaker 4: this ancient land, if you had ties to this ancient land,
Speaker 4: you wouldn't want to burn this like native plant that's
Speaker 4: been there for thousands of years, that's been the source
Speaker 4: of all the economies for Palestinians, all this stuff. I
Speaker 4: think it's just the most clear example that Zionism is
Speaker 4: not about any kind of connection at all. It's just
Speaker 4: about power and land and not about the not land
Speaker 4: in the sense of like the architecture or the history
Speaker 4: or the nature is just about i don't know, like
Speaker 4: a land grab, like just colonial land grap Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, and I think I think, I think the fundamental
Speaker 3: thing at play here, and this is the sort of
Speaker 3: one of the fundamental tenets of setular colonialism, is that
Speaker 3: these people see land as a commodity, right, they see they,
Speaker 3: they see they they they only see land in terms
Speaker 3: of things they can buy and sell on, things they
Speaker 3: can possess.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a fundamental tenet of the state really, right,
Speaker 5: Like the more like square miles you could bring under
Speaker 5: your like where you have a monopoly and legitimate use
Speaker 5: of violence, like the more important you are as a state,
Speaker 5: and so like this this is a problem of states.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we will we will get into this more
Speaker 3: in a second, but first we need to go to ads.
Speaker 3: So the Israeli settlers are a real problem for everyone
Speaker 3: who supports Israel because it it is it is really
Speaker 3: really hard to be sort of you know, take take
Speaker 3: your sort of like liberal humanitarian stance on like Israel
Speaker 3: has the right to protect itself blah, blah blah blah
Speaker 3: and then cure these like yahoos and the hills lighting
Speaker 3: children on fire, and you know, I mean, and this
Speaker 3: is the thing where even even like very reliably pro
Speaker 3: Issuo groups at the Council on Foreign Relations are like,
Speaker 3: whoa nelly, these guys are messed up. And I mean,
Speaker 3: and you can find writing for them. And they've been
Speaker 3: writing about this for a long time because this is
Speaker 3: all stuff that's been It's been very very obvious of
Speaker 3: what was going to happen, right like the you know,
Speaker 3: the level of violence is going to ramp up that
Speaker 3: like all the stuff, none of the stuff is happening now,
Speaker 3: I mean like it's I guess this is one of
Speaker 3: those things is like everything is impossible until it happens
Speaker 3: or whatever. But you know, all of all of the
Speaker 3: stuff that's happening is I mean, like if you just
Speaker 3: spend any time looking at what was happening in the
Speaker 3: two thousand and twenty tens, nothing that's happening now is
Speaker 3: like particularly surprising.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 3: What what's very interesting about the settlers though, is that Okay,
Speaker 3: so when when the Council of Formulations, the Council of
Speaker 3: Formulations went in and was like, okay, so what is
Speaker 3: with these people?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: They assumed initially that you know, okay, so you know
Speaker 3: they're there, take a sort of liberal like pros and
Speaker 3: lines that like, okay, well, these these settlers must be
Speaker 3: responding to Palestinian violence. And no, it turns out actually,
Speaker 3: not only are these are these attacks not like retaliatory, right,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's not that like the settler communities were
Speaker 3: being attacked by Palastinians and they were taking back. Settler
Speaker 3: violence is actually inversely correlated with the level of armed
Speaker 3: struggle being carried up with Palestinians. So the era of
Speaker 3: settler violence ramp up is the late two thousands and
Speaker 3: the twenty tens. And this is the period, you know,
Speaker 3: if you know anything about like the Second Defauntity, this
Speaker 3: is the period where like Palaestinians doing armed struggle in
Speaker 3: like all of the different forms is tapering off and
Speaker 3: so and this leads people kind of confused as to
Speaker 3: what the fuck is happening here? And so okay, so
Speaker 3: we can ask, like what is actually driving the violence
Speaker 3: of these sort of settler expansions. And the thing most
Speaker 3: people focus on is ideology and religion because a huge number,
Speaker 3: although it should be mentioned. Okay, So like a lot
Speaker 3: of settlers are what are like, what are religious Zionists
Speaker 3: who are people and a lot of these are there's
Speaker 3: like a specific religious Zionist party that we'll talk about
Speaker 3: a bit later who are like specifically Orthodox Jews, but
Speaker 3: like there's a lot of right wing religious like Zionists
Speaker 3: of like various stripes who you know, and there are
Speaker 3: things that they believe that they have a god given
Speaker 3: right to take whatever land they want and what they
Speaker 3: call quote Judea and Samaria, which is the West Bank,
Speaker 3: and they believe that they just have the right to
Speaker 3: take this land. Yeah, and if anyone tries to stop them,
Speaker 3: they will kill them or drive them from their homes.
Speaker 3: And it's true that these people exist, right and these
Speaker 3: people obviously, and we're going to get into this more
Speaker 3: in a second, Like these people have had a profound
Speaker 3: influence on Israeli politics. But on the other hands, they're
Speaker 3: not they are a lot of the settlers, they're not
Speaker 3: the entire settler population. In fact, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: settlers who are not these people. And the other thing
Speaker 3: about trying to purely explain in the dynamics of violence
Speaker 3: by by ideologies. It can't explain why, really. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's a kind of like a breakwater event where so
Speaker 3: so there used to be settlers in Gaza too, and
Speaker 3: these Raelis pulled them out when they pulled out of
Speaker 3: Gaza two thousand and five, and that pissed off the
Speaker 3: settlers enormously, right, And this is part of one of
Speaker 3: the things that leads to the sort of settler violent
Speaker 3: turn was they were like, well, okay, so if the
Speaker 3: Israeli government isn't going to, like I don't know if
Speaker 3: the Israeli government one time will stop po legal settlements
Speaker 3: from happening, we need to like make sure that we
Speaker 3: are violence enough that it'll they'll never try to get
Speaker 3: rid of another settlement settlement again. And that kind of
Speaker 3: explains the violence uptake, but it doesn't explain all of it. Actually,
Speaker 3: So sorry, before I launched into this, I should Asktuary,
Speaker 3: were you gonna say, sorry.
Speaker 4: No, it's okay. I just wanted to make a really
Speaker 4: important distinction that like, Zionism is not a religion per se,
Speaker 4: and it's a political ideology, right, Like you can be
Speaker 4: Christian and Zionists, you can be Jewish and Zionists I've
Speaker 4: had multiple anti Zionist Jewish people on the show, and
Speaker 4: I feel like they're very important in the fight for
Speaker 4: Palicy liberation. But I think that's a really important distinction
Speaker 4: because Zionism is fairly new. It's not like this ancient religion.
Speaker 4: It was like the late eighth Yeah, the late eighteen
Speaker 4: hundreds is when it really like became formed into what
Speaker 4: it is today.
Speaker 3: So I think that's.
Speaker 4: Really important to remember, is that Zionism itself is not
Speaker 4: this like deep spiritual thing that a lot of Zionists
Speaker 4: claim it is. It is just fucking politics and there's
Speaker 4: bad politics.
Speaker 3: And I think the other important thing about it too,
Speaker 3: and this is something that has been changing. But like Zionism,
Speaker 3: most Zionists, like when Israel was formed, were secular, Like
Speaker 3: they were secularist, right, A lot of these people were leftists,
Speaker 3: they were secularists. They weren't. And the emergence of this
Speaker 3: religious Zionism stuff, this is like, this is stuff that
Speaker 3: started happening really in like the eighties. So this is
Speaker 3: like forty years old, right, Like billions of people on
Speaker 3: Earth are older than this kind of religious Zionism. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so the kind of transition from more secular forms
Speaker 3: of Zionism to more religious forms of Zionism. Is this
Speaker 3: is one of the things like like the claim that
Speaker 3: this is the driving thing, like this, this is what
Speaker 3: you'll get a lot from like councilor formulations people and
Speaker 3: sort of like and it's kind of true to some extent.
Speaker 3: But Comma, there's also something else going on here, and
Speaker 3: that is the Israeli housing markets. So all right, I swear,
Speaker 3: I swear this is connected, but we need we need
Speaker 3: to do a tangent through the Israeli housing market. So
Speaker 3: all right, so we've talked about how again the rise
Speaker 3: in cellular violence is something that it's it starts in
Speaker 3: the late two thousands and accelerates to the twenty tens
Speaker 3: and has reached a fever pitch now with like in
Speaker 3: the past like month, they've killed like one hundred and
Speaker 3: thirty people in the West Bank. And Okay, so what
Speaker 3: actually also was happening in that time And the answer
Speaker 3: to that question is that between two thousand and eight
Speaker 3: and twenty ten alone. And this is very weird because
Speaker 3: again think about the time period that we're in this
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight to twenty ten, This is like
Speaker 3: right after two thousand and eight financial collapse. There is
Speaker 3: a thirty five percent increase in housing prices in Israel.
Speaker 3: This is nuts, right, Like this everywhere else in the
Speaker 3: entire world, Like the price of housing is tanking, in
Speaker 3: Israel is skyrocketing. Okay, the price of housing is increasing
Speaker 3: the rate at which the price of housing is also increasing,
Speaker 3: it's skyrocketing through the entire twenty tens. And then like,
Speaker 3: the rate of increase in the twenty tens looks like
Speaker 3: a fucking joke compared to the rate of increase in
Speaker 3: the twenty twenties. And these increases coincide with guess what,
Speaker 3: the massive increases in cellular violent Now this is interesting
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons. One is that you know,
Speaker 3: and sometimes every once in a while you will get
Speaker 3: like someone will just like, I don't know, some like
Speaker 3: councilor formulations. Guy will say like, well, there are settlers
Speaker 3: who are there for economic reasons, but what actually does
Speaker 3: that mean? Right now, I've been playing kind of fast
Speaker 3: and loose with statistics here, right, Like, obviously you can't
Speaker 3: just point to okay, one number was increasing at the
Speaker 3: same time as an another number of correlation implies causation,
Speaker 3: like no it doesn't right that this is too loose
Speaker 3: and the correlation here isn't you know, it's it's not
Speaker 3: quite that simple, but Comma, this is legitimately one of
Speaker 3: the things that's been driving driving Israeli settler violence and
Speaker 3: sort of the the expansion of this sort of of
Speaker 3: this sort of Israeli setular project. And at the core
Speaker 3: of this is this fundamental tension with housing in capitalism,
Speaker 3: in which a house and also very importantly the land
Speaker 3: that it's on, is two things at the same time. Right,
Speaker 3: the house, a house is a thing that you live in,
Speaker 3: but it's also a speculative asset that appreciates in value
Speaker 3: over time, or is supposed to appreciate in value over time.
Speaker 3: And when and when, you know, housing values don't go up,
Speaker 3: homeowners get very, very very angry because it's also supposed
Speaker 3: to be a speculative asset. Now, the sort of technical
Speaker 3: terminology for this is that a house is a use value,
Speaker 3: which is, you know, it's a house that you live in, right,
Speaker 3: and it also has an exchange value, which is its
Speaker 3: value on the market. That's a product of the sort
Speaker 3: of social relations stuff from the economic system. And with housing,
Speaker 3: it all commodities work like this. With housing in particular,
Speaker 3: the two sort of natures of this commodity work against
Speaker 3: each other. Right, if you want a house, and you
Speaker 3: want a house because you want to live in it,
Speaker 3: you want, you know, you want the price to be
Speaker 3: as low as possible, right you you want for houses
Speaker 3: to be speculative assets, like as little as humanly possible.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, if you want a house
Speaker 3: because you are you know, say a real estate firm
Speaker 3: or land speculator, or you know, you're just you're buying
Speaker 3: a house is like an investment, you want the price
Speaker 3: to be as high as possible because it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: to you if people actually use the house live in it.
Speaker 1: All.
Speaker 3: All that matters is that you're getting money from this house.
Speaker 3: And you know, I something I've talked about a lot
Speaker 3: on this show, and since really the nineties when Japan
Speaker 3: figured this out, housing has been like these speculative asset
Speaker 3: par excellans is the thing you dump all of your
Speaker 3: money into when you have a bunch of money sitting
Speaker 3: around that you can't turn into more capital. And you
Speaker 3: know this, but the problem is that this creates these
Speaker 3: massive like housing bubbles that makes like housing and rents
Speaker 3: increasingly unaffordable for everyone. Now, you could address this by
Speaker 3: you know, addressing a dual nature of the commodity and
Speaker 3: transforming your economy in such a way that houses are
Speaker 3: not commodities and thus you know, is a use value
Speaker 3: and is a place to live and not you know,
Speaker 3: like a financial asset. But nobody's gonna do that, right,
Speaker 3: because that requires like a systemic transformation. If you're like,
Speaker 3: this requires you to abolish capitalism, right, So instead of
Speaker 3: doing this, right, the other thing you can do when
Speaker 3: housing prices are really high is you can go kill
Speaker 3: someone and take their lands. And yeah, you know, and
Speaker 3: you know, I mean this is this is a very
Speaker 3: old American sort of colonial I don't even know, I
Speaker 3: think this is where it's from, but like, yeah, the.
Speaker 5: Every empire, so right, Like, working people can't afford to
Speaker 5: live with dignity, so we've fucking shipped them off. So
Speaker 5: they strip someone else's dignity and make their fortune on
Speaker 5: someone else's land.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, because the cheapest land is land that's paid
Speaker 3: with someone else's blood.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now I'm going to read from a little bit from
Speaker 3: a very very I really recommend people actually read this
Speaker 3: because it's a really interesting view of the occupation. I'm
Speaker 3: going to read from a piece called Hostile Intelligence, Reflections
Speaker 3: on a Visit to the West Bank, written by David Graber.
Speaker 3: This is from twenty fifteen, but you know, this is
Speaker 3: one of the things about about the occupation is that
Speaker 3: if you're any given point in time, if you are
Speaker 3: looking at what's happening in the occupation, you can unfold
Speaker 3: the dynamics that are going to be that are going
Speaker 3: to be the future of the occupation. So here's David Graeber. First,
Speaker 3: the settlements. They were originally the product of a relatively isolated,
Speaker 3: if well funded collection of religious zealots. Now everything seems
Speaker 3: to be organized around them. The government pours and endless resources. Why.
Speaker 3: The answer seems to be that, since at least the nineties,
Speaker 3: right wing politicians in Israel have figured out that the
Speaker 3: settlements are a kind of political magic. The more money
Speaker 3: gets funneled into them, the more the Jewish electorate turns
Speaker 3: to the right. The reason is simple is reel as expensive.
Speaker 3: Housing inside the nineteen forty eight boundaries is exorbitantly expensive.
Speaker 3: If you are a young person without means, increasingly have
Speaker 3: two options to live with one's parents until well into
Speaker 3: your thirties, or find a place in illegal settlements where
Speaker 3: apartments cost perhaps a third of what they would in
Speaker 3: High Offer or Tel Aviv. And that's not to mention
Speaker 3: the superior roads, schools, utilities, and social services. At this point,
Speaker 3: the vast majority of settlers live on the West Bank
Speaker 3: for economic, not ideological reasons. And this is something that like,
Speaker 3: this is actually kind of reversing now just because of
Speaker 3: how like how far right and how the spread of
Speaker 3: like sort of like ideological like right wing stuff is spread.
Speaker 3: But this is at the time then twenty fifteen, this
Speaker 3: was true. Yeah, and this is especially true around Jerusalem.
Speaker 3: But consider who these people are in the past, young
Speaker 3: people in difficult circumstances, students, well educated, young parents have
Speaker 3: been the traditional constituency of the left. Put these same
Speaker 3: people into settlements and they will inexorably without even realizing it,
Speaker 3: begin to think like fascists are in their own way,
Speaker 3: giant engines for the production of right wing consciousness. Is
Speaker 3: very difficult for someone placed in a hostile territory given
Speaker 3: training in automatic weapons and warn't constantly to be on
Speaker 3: one's guard against local populations seething over the fact that
Speaker 3: your next door neighbors have been killing their sheep and
Speaker 3: destroying their olive trees, not to gradually see ethno nationalism
Speaker 3: as common sense. As a result, with every election, the
Speaker 3: old left electorate further dissipates, and a host of religious
Speaker 3: fascist or semi fascist parties. When a larger and larger
Speaker 3: stake of the vote for politicians who can barely think
Speaker 3: past the next election, lure is inescapable. And so I
Speaker 3: think this gets at the core of what's happening, specifically
Speaker 3: what's happening in the West Bank, which is that, Yeah,
Speaker 3: these settlements are you know, I mean, if you were
Speaker 3: trying to generate in a lab a place where you
Speaker 3: could turn a bunch of people into fascists, it would
Speaker 3: be it would be these settlements. And for more on that,
Speaker 3: come back tomorrow when we finish this conversation. In the meantime,
Speaker 3: this has been nickuld appen here. Thanks for joining us,
Speaker 3: see you tomorrow. Welcome to Dickudappan here, a podcast that
Speaker 3: is once again about Palestine. Hopefully you listen to yesterday's
Speaker 3: episode of this. One's going to be a little bit
Speaker 3: out of sorts, but yeah, we are continuing and finishing
Speaker 3: upper conversation about Israel and setular colonialism. So strap in
Speaker 3: and enjoy the show. If you were trying to generate
Speaker 3: in a lab a place where you could turn a
Speaker 3: bunch of people into fascists, it would be it would
Speaker 3: be these settlements. This has a bunch of downstream political effects, right.
Speaker 3: One of them is that, okay, so whose lands are
Speaker 3: you taking here?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: The answer here is it's a lot of Palestinian farmers.
Speaker 3: And you know, once you kick farmers off their land,
Speaker 3: they can't be farmers anymore. And this leaves them with
Speaker 3: two choices one flee pal sign altogether. And this is
Speaker 3: really really hard. We talked about it on this show.
Speaker 3: It is really really difficult to get out or your
Speaker 3: other option is to become cheap labor for Israeli capitalists.
Speaker 3: And this is an another part of the sort of
Speaker 3: self reinforcing dynamic of these engines, right, is like, you know,
Speaker 3: if if you're dealing with the population that doesn't have
Speaker 3: the means to support themselves except for you know, the
Speaker 3: these Israeli like work passes that they like, you know,
Speaker 3: like bestow upon the benighted population, likes it makes it
Speaker 3: incredibly hard for there to be any sort of physicist movement.
Speaker 3: And you know the other thing that David Greab was
Speaker 3: pointing out that you know, he was I think like
Speaker 3: ahead of the curve on in a lot of ways.
Speaker 3: Is I mean, this has been happening for a long time,
Speaker 3: but these really like electoral left is just gone. Israeli Labor,
Speaker 3: which is like the like Israeli Labor is the party
Speaker 3: that built Israel right, like it was Israeli Labor guys
Speaker 3: who like pulled together the entire Zionist coalition and like
Speaker 3: turned them into the engine that could actually win the war.
Speaker 3: In forty eight, Labor was outperformed by fucking Handash in
Speaker 3: the most recent election. This has happened several times now.
Speaker 3: Hadash is an alliance of the Israeli communists and like
Speaker 3: left Arab nationalists. And when I say they do better,
Speaker 3: it's not to say that Hadash is doing well, but
Speaker 3: like you know, they're both pulling at like four percent right,
Speaker 3: and Israeli Labor again like has ruled is ruled Israel
Speaker 3: for like a like a very magnificant part of his history.
Speaker 3: They are now nothing. Right, there's four percent of the vote.
Speaker 3: They have the same amount of vote as the oldest,
Speaker 3: as the Israeli like, and specifically I should mention this
Speaker 3: is this is the this is the like anti occupation communists.
Speaker 3: This is another one of the sort of dynamics of
Speaker 3: settlerism that you know, the sort of is universally true, right,
Speaker 3: this is it's not just Israel where a bunch of
Speaker 3: people who are nominally left. It's a bunch of people
Speaker 3: who like you know, fought in their own liberation struggles
Speaker 3: and get turned into just like absolutely fanatical right wingers.
Speaker 3: There are an enormous number of United Irishmen, rebels from
Speaker 3: the rebellion of eighteen seventy eight in Ireland who go
Speaker 3: to the US and you know, wind up A bunch
Speaker 3: of these people wind up in the American Army. A
Speaker 3: bunch of these people wind up like I mean, I
Speaker 3: guess it's technically not the Indian Wars, but like a
Speaker 3: lot of these people wind up like fighting the Creeks
Speaker 3: in eighteen twelve. These people could become the front line
Speaker 3: of settler expansion in the US. And this all this
Speaker 3: happens again with like German and French like liberals and
Speaker 3: socialists who flee the crushing of the eighteen forty eight revolutions.
Speaker 3: It actually almost happened to Marx. He wound up not
Speaker 3: going to the US. But there's a lot of settlers,
Speaker 3: Like there's a lot of like of European socialists who
Speaker 3: come to the US and see all of this land
Speaker 3: and they go, oh shit, we can solve, like we
Speaker 3: can solve the problems of the old world. But it's
Speaker 3: taking this land.
Speaker 5: Yeah, having our little like a utopian socialist settlements. Was
Speaker 5: it Owen's or Jones or someone? They had these like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: quake k utopian sort of settlement towns in someone else's land.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, And that's one of the ways has happened there.
Speaker 3: There are other ways this happens too, where it's just people.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not it's not even always utopian communities.
Speaker 3: People a lot of and and this this is also
Speaker 3: so okay. There are people who come over from the
Speaker 3: eighteen forty eight revolutions who like, you know, like August
Speaker 3: von Willich is probably the most famous one. Like he's
Speaker 3: a communist who ends up like fighting for the Union
Speaker 3: and then notably not fighting in the Indian Wars after.
Speaker 3: But you know, a lot of these people they come
Speaker 3: to the US and they're like, okay, well, so they're
Speaker 3: like the fundamental contradiction to capitalism or whatever is that, like,
Speaker 3: you know, people like people, people are forced to become like,
Speaker 3: as they would literally call it, like the wage slaves
Speaker 3: of capital, right. And so these people take a bunch
Speaker 3: of just incredibly bizarre stances, Like one they're they're they're
Speaker 3: they're against the abolition of slavery because they they're like, oh, well,
Speaker 3: if you free the slaves, these people are going to
Speaker 3: compete with us for wage labor. So either either they're
Speaker 3: pro slavery or they're like slavery the like ending slavery
Speaker 3: is the thing they can only happen with the end
Speaker 3: of capitalism, so we don't care about it. Or and
Speaker 3: this is a very common thing that this is one
Speaker 3: of them. This is i think much closer to the
Speaker 3: Israeli dynamic. Is these people become convinced that like the
Speaker 3: the you know, the problem with Europe, right is that,
Speaker 3: you know, Europe is entirely ruled by either feudalist or
Speaker 3: like feudal bearers or capitalist right, and so there's no
Speaker 3: way for someone to like make like make themselves in
Speaker 3: the world, right, there there's no way for them to
Speaker 3: be independent like of the capitalist class. But in but
Speaker 3: in the US, there is because all you have to
Speaker 3: do is, you know, instead of being part of the
Speaker 3: like the industrial proletariat or whatever and getting like crushed
Speaker 3: by the Buddha capital, you can just go become a
Speaker 3: settler farmer. And this is like, this is one of
Speaker 3: the defining ideologies of the US, Like Abraham Lincoln talks
Speaker 3: about this, like the thing that makes the US different
Speaker 3: from Europe is that like, yeah, you can you can
Speaker 3: go be a settler, you can get your own land.
Speaker 3: And this is something you can also trace back to
Speaker 3: the foundation of Israel. Israel is created you know, there
Speaker 3: are there are there are right wings Zionists, right, but
Speaker 3: it's also created by liberal socialist, communists and even anarchists
Speaker 3: who'd fought in the Spanish Civil War who go to
Speaker 3: Israel become like become Zionists, are armed by Stalin and
Speaker 3: these people create like you know, these are the people
Speaker 3: who do the knappa.
Speaker 5: Yeah, lots of people were also there were Jewish I
Speaker 5: guess socialists is probably the best term for them, who
Speaker 5: would come to fight in Spain and then returned to Yeah,
Speaker 5: people interested run and reign has done a really good
Speaker 5: paper about some of people in international brigades. So not
Speaker 5: a lot of them turned out to do the Knakpa.
Speaker 5: To be clear, yes, some of them were. It's actually
Speaker 5: also it's actually really sad to follow the plight of
Speaker 5: the It's a slight divergence, I guess. But Jewish people
Speaker 5: who had fled programs in the early twentieth century grown
Speaker 5: up largely in New York in extremely impoverished neighborhoods fort
Speaker 5: fascism in Spain, came home, fought fascism again in the
Speaker 5: rest of Europe after like pointing at it in nineteen
Speaker 5: thirty five and going bad in America going now dog wigged,
Speaker 5: and then in nineteen forty one going who could have
Speaker 5: foreseen this? And then they come in the meantime they
Speaker 5: see Stalin signing a pact with fascism, right, and they
Speaker 5: feel horribly betrayed and have to have to deal with
Speaker 5: either leaving the Communist Party or working out in their
Speaker 5: own head how the fuck the people who kill their
Speaker 5: friends and now their friends. And then they come home
Speaker 5: after the war, they're blacklisted under McCarthy, and they see
Speaker 5: the nuck but happening, you know, like later on and
Speaker 5: they they're disgusted, right, like they everything that, like every
Speaker 5: sort of like identity in group that they've had, they
Speaker 5: feel has turned against the things that they think are
Speaker 5: morally right. And they have these really difficult lives despite
Speaker 5: like pursuing what most of us would agree is in
Speaker 5: moral good throughout their lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, being being consistently moral fucking sucks and that is
Speaker 3: a behind. Yeah yeah, it is a fucking awful time
Speaker 3: to do that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah sucks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, we should take another ad break and.
Speaker 5: Then, yeah, adverts are not consistently moral. Who very unlikely.
Speaker 3: And we are back. So we've been talking about the
Speaker 3: capacity of settlements to change someone's politics, right, it is,
Speaker 3: you know, it's as these labs of consciousness that produce
Speaker 3: certain kinds of right wing politics and mentalities and you know,
Speaker 3: and produce right wing soldiers.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: But the settlements also do other things. And one of
Speaker 3: those things that they do is the settlements are a
Speaker 3: big reason, you know, if you were invested in the
Speaker 3: peace process, like this is a big reason why the
Speaker 3: peace process failed was that the settlers never had any
Speaker 3: intentions of abiding by any of the treaties that were
Speaker 3: being signed by the israelis right, and this is something
Speaker 3: that is true transhistorically, right. This is a dynamic you
Speaker 3: see in American history too. The US signs like hundreds
Speaker 3: of treaties with like like just incredible numbers and indigenous nations.
Speaker 3: And do you know how many of those trees I
Speaker 3: end up upholding.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's none.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And you know, I mean you can look at
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court, right, and you know, the Supreme Court
Speaker 3: will uphold laws from like seventeen ninety five, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The one kind of law they will mod uphold is
Speaker 3: their treaty obligations, at which in which case they will
Speaker 3: go literally they will just go, well, we are obligated
Speaker 3: to do this under treaty, but it is too hard,
Speaker 3: so fuck you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, they'll go previous to that and
Speaker 5: treat site the fucking Doctrine of Discovery or the Treaty
Speaker 5: of Cso yeah, good old Ruth Bede Againsberg liberal hero.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so you can look at this from sort of
Speaker 3: two perspectives, right. You can look at this from this
Speaker 3: perspective of the state, and you can look at it
Speaker 3: from the respective of the settler. And you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: and I think I think I think there's a there's
Speaker 3: a third view that's kind of sees them both as
Speaker 3: an extension of the same thing, which is what we're
Speaker 3: gonna sort of come to. But you know, you can
Speaker 3: you can look at this treaty stuff, and you can
Speaker 3: look at the fact that you know, both the settlers
Speaker 3: and the Israeli governments like sign the Oslo Accords fully
Speaker 3: intending to do more settlements, right, and this is this
Speaker 3: is something that that like the Palestinians are watching, right,
Speaker 3: Like if you're a Palasidian, like you are watching these
Speaker 3: piece of acords get signed and then you are watching
Speaker 3: the Israelis fucking bulldozing your house. Yeah, and and this
Speaker 3: is this is this is the thing in the US too, Right.
Speaker 3: It's like everyone who signs a treaty get like like
Speaker 3: all of the nation to sign trees get a get
Speaker 3: a watch as the US is like, oh well, actually,
Speaker 3: like no, we've never had any intention of like fulfilling this,
Speaker 3: Like no, We're just gonna keep exterminating you and like
Speaker 3: chasing the sort of like like shattered remnants of your
Speaker 3: tribes like literally across the entire fucking continents. And you know,
Speaker 3: so so you can look at this from the from
Speaker 3: the perspective of this, and you know, like like dealing
Speaker 3: dealing with the American state, Like it is well known
Speaker 3: by every nation and every race that has ever had
Speaker 3: to deal with them that the white man is duplicitous
Speaker 3: in a state is built on lies, and that is
Speaker 3: only kind of a joke. Like everyone who fucking deals
Speaker 3: with the Americans just like, what the fuck is wrong
Speaker 3: with these people? Like do you like do people like
Speaker 3: not understand what an agreement is?
Speaker 5: Like what you know, Yeah, this is something that like
Speaker 5: I know, if you travel abroad and you work in
Speaker 5: places where American forces have been nine times out of ten,
Speaker 5: someone will sit you down in a tea house or
Speaker 5: a coffee house and unbidden just be like, what the
Speaker 5: fuck is wrong with these people? Like like why do
Speaker 5: they treat us like that? Like like we fucking did
Speaker 5: everything you asked and then you fucking abandoned us or
Speaker 5: killed us, Like like yeah, like everywhere, and its course
Speaker 5: Sprain does it too. I'm not saying like America spectrum,
Speaker 5: but fuck me, America in the last two hundred years
Speaker 5: is really setting you precedent for just like Jane has
Speaker 5: faced bullshit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, and and and this, and this
Speaker 3: particularly bad when you're dealing with when you're dealing with settlers,
Speaker 3: because you know, one of the things about the state
Speaker 3: is that the arc of the state policy and settler
Speaker 3: colonies always bends towards injustice in general, and in particular
Speaker 3: the thing it always bends towards land seizures. It seeks
Speaker 3: to expand its base of power, it's territorial base in
Speaker 3: its economy, which leads it to push as far as
Speaker 3: it possibly can towards dispossessing the indigenous population. Now, this
Speaker 3: is also the interest of settlers, who act as a
Speaker 3: kind of extension of the state that goes beyond its
Speaker 3: normal capacity to do what it wants to do. And
Speaker 3: you know, in the US, the human manifestation of this
Speaker 3: is Andrew Jackson, who is a man who completely illegally
Speaker 3: on multiple occasions, just like conquered Florida and you know,
Speaker 3: conquered Florida specifically. And this is one of the like
Speaker 3: a couple of things. This is what I have a
Speaker 3: very good friend who talks about this a lot because
Speaker 3: they've they've been studying this period immensely. You're probably not listening,
Speaker 3: but love you, Yeah, but talks about this a lot,
Speaker 3: which is that Andrew Jackson is like a big part
Speaker 3: of the reason why he's going into Florida is specifically
Speaker 3: because he he wants to smash these these like indigenous
Speaker 3: like black indigenous, like Allied Buron communities there. And so Jackson,
Speaker 3: you know, jack Jackson like is is like under orders
Speaker 3: not to invade Florida. He invades Florida. Anyways, you know,
Speaker 3: we we we get we're there's a very similar sort
Speaker 3: of tension between like the courts and you know, like
Speaker 3: the courts in the settler state that you have with
Speaker 3: the sort of international community in Israel now, where like
Speaker 3: the courts are like Andrew Jackson, you cannot do the
Speaker 3: trail of tears. And Andrew Jackson is just like fuck you,
Speaker 3: Like we're doing the trail of tears. Where we're going,
Speaker 3: We're going to do a genocide and you know, and
Speaker 3: and the thing the thing about what Jackson represents, right
Speaker 3: is that Jackson is is the human embodiments of all
Speaker 3: of these sort of structural like he's the human and
Speaker 3: political embodiment of all of these structural tendencies et cetera. Colonialism.
Speaker 3: Now one and one of the things that that's I
Speaker 3: think is interesting about this is that there are like
Speaker 3: all of the settler states, right you see this in
Speaker 3: like every single one. And I'm gonna talk about the
Speaker 3: US because that's the one that I like other than Israel,
Speaker 3: that I know the best. Well, I don't probably probabilia
Speaker 3: like the US better than Israel. But there are always
Speaker 3: times when this when when this the federal government tries
Speaker 3: to crack down on settlers, right, this happens like repeatedly.
Speaker 3: I mean this, and this is the thing even like
Speaker 3: like the British are like spend a lot of time
Speaker 3: trying to stop the colonists from like moving like from
Speaker 3: moving west. And I think that there's a lot of
Speaker 3: people who like have come to believe that if they
Speaker 3: if the British had won the American Revolution, that they
Speaker 3: would have been able to stop the settlers. And no,
Speaker 3: like they wouldn't have been able to. They would have
Speaker 3: been able to maybe they could have delayed it by
Speaker 3: twenty years, but no, there was there was no one
Speaker 3: has ever really been able to stop these people. And
Speaker 3: you know, the the IDF, like we talked about this
Speaker 3: a bit earlier, right, the IDEF in two thousand and five,
Speaker 3: did pull Like when they pulled out of Gaza, they
Speaker 3: dragged like eight thousand center settlers with them. But again
Speaker 3: this is this is them like that's incredibly familiar to
Speaker 3: anyone who studied the history of settlers in the US,
Speaker 3: is that government attempts to control settler expansion inevitably fail
Speaker 3: when convented with the the you know, the these unstoppable
Speaker 3: twin economic and twin imperatives of the economic benefit to
Speaker 3: the settlers, and also the sort of speculative the speculative
Speaker 3: value of these of this new land, the land speculators.
Speaker 3: But then the the other problem is the inevitable rise
Speaker 3: of the settlers themselves as the political bloc, which in
Speaker 3: the US, the man who is the champion of the
Speaker 3: settlers is Andrew Jackson. And this is you know, and
Speaker 3: when he comes into and when when he starts taking power,
Speaker 3: when he starts getting power in the army, you get
Speaker 3: the conquest of Florida, and when he becomes president, you
Speaker 3: have you have the trailer tears. And Israel, this is
Speaker 3: this is represented by Israel's overtly genocidal finance bits at
Speaker 3: Betsial Simotrich, who represents the Religious Zionist Party and uh,
Speaker 3: I'll give you all three guesses what those guys believe.
Speaker 3: If your guesses are they are unhinged settler racists and
Speaker 3: like turbo homophobes. You're you're right on the buddy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so he's a conspiracy theorist, Like yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 5: guy is unhinged.
Speaker 4: They're very open with their genocidal yeah yeah once, Like
Speaker 4: there's no there's no subtlety. They're just like, let's let's
Speaker 4: flatten what, Let's flatten Gauza, Let's kill them all, you
Speaker 4: know what I mean. It's just like theyage seem like
Speaker 4: with a very Trumpian thing that's like encouraging the hate
Speaker 4: that is there too fester.
Speaker 5: It's particularly like to try to diverse again. I found
Speaker 5: the fucking like you can't support Palestinia liberation if you're
Speaker 5: queer dunk that we see from like Zionist near liberals
Speaker 5: to be one of the most frustrating a like you
Speaker 5: can support what the fuck you want, Like you don't
Speaker 5: need a condescending, fucking like zist mum in a minivan
Speaker 5: to tell you what you can and can't believe, and like,
Speaker 5: b go look up some of this guy's statements because
Speaker 5: fucking you ain't gonna find anyone who's more genocidal towards
Speaker 5: queer people openly than this motherfucker.
Speaker 4: I mean, Israel is like very well known for like
Speaker 4: pink washing and pretending they're very progressive and supportive of yeah,
Speaker 4: of queer people, when they're really not. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 4: this country also is not, you know what I mean,
Speaker 4: Like it's I think I think that argument is a
Speaker 4: very privileged elitist one.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like like yeah, just like haha, homophobia exists there,
Speaker 5: it's not. It's not a win for anyone. Yeah, if
Speaker 5: you want to get married to someone of the same
Speaker 5: gender as you in Israel, you do it on zoom
Speaker 5: in fucking Utah like that that Like, when you've been
Speaker 5: outflanked to the left by Utah, you've done fucked up.
Speaker 5: You don't get to wave your pride flag at anyone.
Speaker 5: Fuck off.
Speaker 3: This is one of the sort of progressive veneer of
Speaker 3: the Israelis has been you know, like fading because these
Speaker 3: the people who are coming to parent and then Yahoo
Speaker 3: in some ways was one of the sort of anguer
Speaker 3: to this. But like this, and this is the thing
Speaker 3: you're seeing in India too, right, Like whenever you get
Speaker 3: a far right guy. Right, the thing that inevitably generates
Speaker 3: is people who are even further right than they are. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and that that's that that's what these these settler people are.
Speaker 3: And and the thing is, like these settler guys, you
Speaker 3: can't cover for them, like if you if they are
Speaker 3: on camera for longer than about thirty seconds, they start
Speaker 3: saying stuff like just the most unhinged, like we're gonna
Speaker 3: kill all the Palestinians. They start saying like we're gonna
Speaker 3: kill every Arab, like, they start talking about various and
Speaker 3: various basically like their their their platforms that they you know,
Speaker 3: they're And then this is this is so part of
Speaker 3: the reason that there are there there's a coalition of
Speaker 3: of these like of these like far right settler parties
Speaker 3: that are now backing net and Yahu. And this is
Speaker 3: this is how net and Yahu has been able to
Speaker 3: stay out of prison, is that he's been able to
Speaker 3: back enough, he's been able to buy off enough of
Speaker 3: these people that they're backing his government so he can
Speaker 3: stay prime minister, so they can't charge him. But the
Speaker 3: the you know, the the concession basically for this was
Speaker 3: that these like this guy was just basically just given
Speaker 3: control of a bunch of state military power, like from
Speaker 3: the army in the West Bank. It's been given to
Speaker 3: him in his settler fanatics. And you know, like especially
Speaker 3: since like the Hamas attack like these, the government has
Speaker 3: been handing out guns these people like candy, yes, and
Speaker 3: they've been using which is murder Palestinians and cold blood
Speaker 3: and you know, I mean the thing is, people do
Speaker 3: a lot, right, so sometimes they just kill people. The
Speaker 3: thing they do all the time is just in the
Speaker 3: middle of the night, like if you're if you're living
Speaker 3: in the West Bank, like a bunch of mass guys
Speaker 3: will show up, the will break into your home. They'll
Speaker 3: beat the shit out of you, and they'll say, like
Speaker 3: if you don't leave tomorrow, will kill you. And you know,
Speaker 3: sometimes those guys are settlers, like are just like are
Speaker 3: non like I don't know, like non military settlers, right,
Speaker 3: they're like settler civilians or whatever. Sometimes those guys are
Speaker 3: just like the army, And there's no fucking way to
Speaker 3: tell which one, like, because again it's just a bunch
Speaker 3: of people in masks appear in the night and break
Speaker 3: into your house and start beating the shit out of
Speaker 3: you and these people, these are these are the people
Speaker 3: that increasingly the Israeli political system is being run by.
Speaker 3: And and you can't And it is in a similar way,
Speaker 3: just the way that Andrew Jackson just like rips off
Speaker 3: this mask of sort of like New England gentility that
Speaker 3: the US had like had had under like John Adams
Speaker 3: and uh or like John Quincy Adams and like Monroe,
Speaker 3: well Minroe's I guess like a like Minroe's like a
Speaker 3: you know, like another one of these like dignified Virginia
Speaker 3: planter guys, and like you know, those people have do
Speaker 3: a lot of the same violence that that Jackson does.
Speaker 3: But Jackson is the guy who just rips the mask
Speaker 3: off and is just you know, this completely unhinged settler
Speaker 3: mediac who like this is the guy you killed it
Speaker 3: like just murdered a bunch of people in duels, like
Speaker 3: you know. And and these are the kind of people
Speaker 3: who are who are coming to power. It is there
Speaker 3: right now. And this is this is a self reinforcing
Speaker 3: dynamic because the more power these people get, right, the
Speaker 3: more they're able to, you know, just carry out genocides.
Speaker 3: And the more genocides were able to carry out, the
Speaker 3: more of that they're the more people that they were
Speaker 3: able to push into these territories that they've taken, and
Speaker 3: the more people they put in these territories, the more
Speaker 3: of the more of these like settler fanatics there are,
Speaker 3: and this this is one of the big things that
Speaker 3: is driving the entire conflict.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 4: I think a good thing to remember is that last
Speaker 4: year there was an election like going into twenty twenty
Speaker 4: three and uh, Israel like put into power a bunch
Speaker 4: of these right wing people. Was it twenty twenty three
Speaker 4: with twenty twenty two? And was in track of time.
Speaker 5: He came in last he came in twenty Yeah, I
Speaker 5: think he was a minute he was points to minister
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty two. But okay, sorry, the years a
Speaker 5: time election is real, Yeah, I remember when.
Speaker 4: My point is that like in recent history, the last
Speaker 4: couple of years, these extreme right wing racist people are
Speaker 4: in power, all the all the places of power, all
Speaker 4: the ministers, all the whatever the shit they're all shared.
Speaker 4: They all share this ideology that like Arabs must die. Basically,
Speaker 4: that's like they're the main point is that they are
Speaker 4: superior to Arabs and then they must die, and that
Speaker 4: this is a diet in this place that is theirs.
Speaker 3: And you know, and what these people are doing when
Speaker 3: they're in power, and this is the thing that this
Speaker 3: is one of the things they were trying to do
Speaker 3: before the sort of like the current war started, was
Speaker 3: they were trying to annex the West Bank. This is
Speaker 3: a very explicit goal. Now this is a very explicit
Speaker 3: goal of the settler parties. They will kind of they
Speaker 3: know it's pretty hard for them to like legally annex it,
Speaker 3: so they will talk about like effectively annexing it and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. They do these sort of like subtle metaphors,
Speaker 3: but like, yeah, what they want to do is to
Speaker 3: kick people out of what's called Area See, which is
Speaker 3: the majority of the West Bank. And they want to
Speaker 3: kick all the like the immediate plans, I want to
Speaker 3: kick all the people out of Area Sea and push
Speaker 3: them into just like increasingly tiny corners of the West Bank.
Speaker 3: And presumably because again, if if you've listen to all
Speaker 3: these people talk, right, it's that they talk about like
Speaker 3: Jews have the right to live in.
Speaker 5: H look Judae and Samaria yeah yeah yeah, yeah, they
Speaker 5: call the West Bank, yeah yeah, they.
Speaker 3: Have a right to live there. So and the thing
Speaker 3: is like if you believe that right, that means you
Speaker 3: have to kick all the Palestinians out of the West
Speaker 3: Bank entirely. Now the places people have stopped sort of
Speaker 3: before the war, the places people had stopped was like, well, okay,
Speaker 3: they can live in Gaza. But now they're talking about
Speaker 3: you know, I mean just like taking over most of
Speaker 3: like just taking over most of Gaza and driving the
Speaker 3: Palestinians out.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it doesn't have to lead like Jews have
Speaker 5: a right to live in this place, doesn't have to
Speaker 5: lead to thus we must genocide the people who live there,
Speaker 5: right like we it like it. This is what happens
Speaker 5: when we get a state that understands existence as destroying
Speaker 5: anybody who is not in agreement with this right wing
Speaker 5: genocidal fucking Outlook like it has been possible for people
Speaker 5: of different faiths to live in different places.
Speaker 2: But four forty eight, yeah, exactly existing.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, this the ideology that is inherent to like
Speaker 5: a Zionist militarized state will never allow that co existence
Speaker 5: to happen, right, because it relies on coexistence not being
Speaker 5: possible as part of its narrative. For like Mia said, taking, dominating,
Speaker 5: and appropriating that land and gaining the value from it.
Speaker 4: But it's the narrative that they need to say stuff
Speaker 4: like oh, all the gardens should just go to Egypt
Speaker 4: or whatever. It is, like it's all part of the
Speaker 4: plan to kind of just like expel them so they can.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it doesn't even have to be like it's not
Speaker 5: like an explicit plan that they have a whiteboard and
Speaker 5: they're like it is you know.
Speaker 3: They do actually occasionally just write it out. Sometimes they
Speaker 3: do actually explicitly write the plants.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can say on x dot com from time
Speaker 5: to time, but it's inherent, as Mia said like several times,
Speaker 5: to state and to a capitalist state that is a
Speaker 5: settler colony, right, Like it's inevitable. It happened here, it's
Speaker 5: happening there. It's happened all over the world. Like it's
Speaker 5: not possible to construct a capitalist state on someone else's land,
Speaker 5: on someone else's bodies. It doesn't do this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean and this this is this is
Speaker 3: also one thing I wanted to emphasize too, is that
Speaker 3: all of the shit that's happening in Palestine happened here, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess like we, like the US didn't
Speaker 3: have the kind of surveillance technology in like then the
Speaker 3: eighteen teens, right that the Israelis have now. But you know,
Speaker 3: like we we did all this shit too, right, like
Speaker 3: this is this is all of the land that we
Speaker 3: live on. That's that's where that shit came from. There's
Speaker 3: there's this great uh. I really love Daniel Connan the
Speaker 3: Painted Bird. It has this great line in one of
Speaker 3: his songs that goes because he's the one who did
Speaker 3: the stealing and named you as the heir whose filthiness
Speaker 3: provided you the privileges you bear. And this is this
Speaker 3: thing in the US right, like in Israel, you know,
Speaker 3: if you're a settler on the border, right, there's no
Speaker 3: there's no escape from what you did to take this place.
Speaker 3: Right like you are you are looking down on the
Speaker 3: people who you've like whose houses you've taken. Right in
Speaker 3: the US, we have this sort of luxury of like, wow,
Speaker 3: this happened a long time ago, like we don't have
Speaker 3: to sort of we don't have to see the consequences
Speaker 3: of it, but.
Speaker 5: We still do it right like we didn't, just like
Speaker 5: we're doing it at Oak Flat for instance right now.
Speaker 5: Or yeah, look at how Trump fucking did indigenous people
Speaker 5: during COVID, like it's an ongoing process.
Speaker 3: Yeah and right, yeah, it's it's so much easier for
Speaker 3: Americans to pretend that it's not happening, and you know,
Speaker 3: like no, like it turns out in fact like this, this, this,
Speaker 3: and this is where the sort of sub of colonialism
Speaker 3: of the structure not an event stuff comes from. And
Speaker 3: it applies to both Israel and the US because guess.
Speaker 4: What, Israel literally took notes from what the US did.
Speaker 4: It just did it, you know what I mean, Like
Speaker 4: it's just the same thing in the end, Like we're
Speaker 4: the bad guys, like we've always been the bad guys.
Speaker 6: Are the bad guys?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, you know, I'm Chinese, right, And this
Speaker 3: is one of the things that has informed a lot
Speaker 3: of my sort of perspective on Palestine, because all of
Speaker 3: the things that are happening to Palestine is shit that
Speaker 3: was done to us by the Japanese Empire, right, and
Speaker 3: we fought a war to stop them, and that war
Speaker 3: was hideous. That war, the war in China sees some
Speaker 3: of the darkest moments in human history. And there's this
Speaker 3: tendency among I mean, you know, as a tendency among
Speaker 3: both both the communists and the nationalists want to sort
Speaker 3: of sanitize it, right, They want to turn it into
Speaker 3: this sort of glorious war for liberation, and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: like there are moments of like, you know, glorious anti
Speaker 3: imperialist struggle, but that war mostly was just a horror.
Speaker 3: And it's a horror not just because of the atrocities
Speaker 3: committed by the Japanese, right, the Chinese side in that
Speaker 3: were also does things that are unforgivable. And I'm not
Speaker 3: even talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki here because you know,
Speaker 3: like we as in like Chinese people, like we didn't
Speaker 3: do that right, like you know, Mao Mao, Like on
Speaker 3: the one hit. It is true that when Noo found
Speaker 3: out about the nuclear eruptions, his reaction was, way, you
Speaker 3: had a third bomb and he didn't drop it on Tokyo,
Speaker 3: But like, you know, we didn't do that right Like
Speaker 3: that was that was the Americans. That wasn't like that
Speaker 3: wasn't like us in China. But you know, the things
Speaker 3: that I'm talking about that the Chinese side of that
Speaker 3: war did that were just unforgivable, you know, I mean,
Speaker 3: I think the best example of it is Shanghai Shek
Speaker 3: blew up a dam on the Yellow River, and his
Speaker 3: goal was he was trying to you know, he was
Speaker 3: trying to flood like several provinces to cut off the
Speaker 3: Japanese army and to like slow down their troop movements, right,
Speaker 3: and he slows down the troop movements, and he does
Speaker 3: it by killing four hot This is this is this
Speaker 3: is this is this. The low end estimates is that
Speaker 3: he killed four hundred thousand people. That is a an
Speaker 3: amount of death that is unimaginable. He killed like in
Speaker 3: a single act, he killed four hundred thousand people. It
Speaker 3: is two Hiroshima and Nagasaki's And that's that's the low
Speaker 3: end estimate. Right, people, people, people fighting against Japan, people
Speaker 3: fighting against colonialism, did unforgivable crimes. And you know, and
Speaker 3: the people of of China like never forget like to
Speaker 3: this day, like in the provinces where like where this
Speaker 3: shit happened, Like Chang Kai Shek is fucking despised, and
Speaker 3: you know, and like when when like when the Allies
Speaker 3: won the war and when China drove out the Japanese, right,
Speaker 3: like the next thing they did was they drove out
Speaker 3: shan Kai Shack because he was, you know, because because
Speaker 3: he had done things in that war that were so
Speaker 3: terrible that people were willing to be like fuck it,
Speaker 3: Like Mao didn't fucking blow up damn and kill four
Speaker 3: hundred thousand of us, right, you know, and so like,
Speaker 3: and this is the thing about colonial resistance is that
Speaker 3: it is the things that people do are unforgivable. Also
Speaker 3: that that word that Japan fought in China, they killed
Speaker 3: twenty million of US twenty million. And this is one
Speaker 3: of these things right where like colonialism makes monsters of us.
Speaker 3: All suffering does not make you knowable, just makes you suffer.
Speaker 3: And so you know, again like the are like China's
Speaker 3: anti colonial freedom fighters right, like fucking killed killed numbers
Speaker 3: of like Chinese people that are it's just unimaginable. And
Speaker 3: then you know, these same freedom fighters who fought the
Speaker 3: good fighting against Japan, you know, within twenty years they're
Speaker 3: bulldozing Moss and shing John and murdering communists in Tibet, right,
Speaker 3: and they've built two, you know, after successfully repelling Japan's
Speaker 3: attempt to turn China into a settler state, they have
Speaker 3: made two of their own. And you know, so like
Speaker 3: there's there's No. I think the point that I'm trying
Speaker 3: to make here is that, you know, like anti colonial
Speaker 3: resistance is not this sort of like it doesn't look pretty.
Speaker 3: It's a fucking horror most of the time. But you also,
Speaker 3: you know, when when you're looking into like when you're
Speaker 3: looking at these wars, you have to look at the
Speaker 3: direction in which colonization is moving. And that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's the thing that is crystal clear in Palestine, right
Speaker 3: is you can just look at like which in which
Speaker 3: direction is is colonization moving?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Like who is taking whose houses?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: Who is who is forcing a million people from what
Speaker 3: population to flee their homes? Who is you know, who
Speaker 3: has been steal he has been seizing people's land. And
Speaker 3: I think it clears up. I don't know, clears up
Speaker 3: isn't the right word, but specifically the fact that this
Speaker 3: is that this is active colonization, that this is this
Speaker 3: is this is a center of colonial state waging a
Speaker 3: war against you know, people like people who are fighting
Speaker 3: against colonization. That is the sort of that that is
Speaker 3: the underlying current of everything that happens. And and you know,
Speaker 3: like I don't know, like people people in anti colonial
Speaker 3: wars do things that are unforgivable and they get you know,
Speaker 3: and like often like their own people will eventually come
Speaker 3: for them one day. And also I don't know.
Speaker 4: I no one has to agree with me, it's fine,
Speaker 4: But I personally really dislike when it's called a war
Speaker 4: what's happening in Palestine because I just think it's the
Speaker 4: clearest case of genocide I've ever seen, and like I
Speaker 4: don't care how it started or whatever, I feel like
Speaker 4: at this point in time, it's a genocide. Like if
Speaker 4: Palestine's out of country, Palestine does not have an army,
Speaker 4: they can't, no one can leave Gaza. I think that
Speaker 4: is the current state of what the violence is going
Speaker 4: on over there.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, just like particular, like I think I
Speaker 3: think you're like I think you're right about that, and
Speaker 3: that's the thing that that's the thing that's different than
Speaker 3: like the stuff that was happening in China was like
Speaker 3: at least we sort of had like at least we
Speaker 3: had a state, right and we had armies and our
Speaker 3: armies got fucking stopped, but you know, we had like
Speaker 3: we we we had actual weapons.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I must have some now, But I think you're
Speaker 5: to your greater point, Yeah, I think, like, well, yeah,
Speaker 5: it sounds very similar to like have you read Challenged
Speaker 5: Introduction to.
Speaker 6: The Rest of the Earth?
Speaker 5: Yeah, like where he talks about violence and the state
Speaker 5: talking in the language of violence, and people responding in
Speaker 5: the language in which they're spoken to.
Speaker 6: I think I'm paraphrasing that relatively accurately.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have to be like the violence has to
Speaker 5: be good for it to be like an inevitable consequence
Speaker 5: of violent colonialism, right, like it sparks violent colonization movements.
Speaker 5: It doesn't imply like a moral like goodness to the
Speaker 5: individual act. It's just an inevitable consequence of people fighting
Speaker 5: against colonalism in the only way that that colonalism kind
Speaker 5: of leaves for them, I guess, yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think I think another part of this too
Speaker 3: is that like just being in contact with colonial powers
Speaker 3: makes everyone worse. Like this, This is the thing you
Speaker 3: see in the US with a lot of with a
Speaker 3: lot of indigenous groups, is that like you know, like
Speaker 3: like bye bye bye by by the time the trail
Speaker 3: of cheers is happening, like the Cherokee or like have
Speaker 3: adopted chattel slavery, like like American style plantation chattel slavery
Speaker 3: and that fucking sucks, right, It's like it being in
Speaker 3: contact with these settler empires like brings out the worst
Speaker 3: in everyone, mm hmm. And there's no winning from that position, right,
Speaker 3: like the the the best I don't even know if
Speaker 3: it's the best case stereo, Like I guess occasionally you
Speaker 3: get like an Algeria where you know, they kill it
Speaker 3: off people and like the other Algeria, like you know,
Speaker 3: the settlers in Algeria all like went back to France.
Speaker 3: But that's not an option in Israel, right like, and
Speaker 3: we wouldn't even you wouldn't want it to be a
Speaker 3: solution either, So I don't know. It's one of these
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's one of the sort of dilemmas
Speaker 3: of how you deal with a colony is that.
Speaker 5: It's harder to decomnize the set of economy, right, yes,
Speaker 5: like it implies a removal of one people or in
Speaker 5: other people, and either of those things are in any
Speaker 5: way desirable, like, and it's so hard to see like
Speaker 5: a path to a peaceful coexistence now because all we
Speaker 5: see is like the entire world ratcheting the fucking like
Speaker 5: violence level up and like, yeah, Israel carrying out genocidal
Speaker 5: vims in Gaza. It's not the way we reach a
Speaker 5: way for people to like children to grow up without
Speaker 5: fucking fearing if the sky is going to kill them
Speaker 5: in Gaza, right, like this will happen for generations to
Speaker 5: come because you've emotionally scarred field children.
Speaker 4: Well, how would you? I think it's a very human
Speaker 4: response if anything, Like I I don't think we have
Speaker 4: the the right to judge how someone that has been
Speaker 4: through that hell how they respond because it's I don't know,
Speaker 4: we haven't lived their nightmare. It's just a nightmare.
Speaker 5: And like it's not like like there, it's not like
Speaker 5: there haven't been attempts at non violent resistance in Gaza,
Speaker 5: because they have.
Speaker 6: And look what fucking happened like.
Speaker 3: That there was a big one like like three or
Speaker 3: four years ago. Yeah, like you know.
Speaker 5: They like the fucking Crassenstein take the why can't they
Speaker 5: all dis organized to archie the war holding Kansas and
Speaker 5: come by they like I tried to do that, but
Speaker 5: like yeah, people people kept killing them. Like I'd say
Speaker 5: this every time we talk about guards, but say again,
Speaker 5: like when we were talking to the PK guys, of guys,
Speaker 5: and I've known them for a few years. Like one
Speaker 5: of them was telling me about how they used to
Speaker 5: do sleepover camps for kids there so the kids could
Speaker 5: learn parkour and not have to pay for the travel
Speaker 5: and like you know, take their time and risk to travel,
Speaker 5: so they do sleep over camps in the summertime.
Speaker 6: And he was explained to.
Speaker 5: Me like it was the most normal thing in the
Speaker 5: world that the six eight year old children would wake
Speaker 5: up at night with night terror screaming because they thought
Speaker 5: they were being bombed, because they are having like a
Speaker 5: flashback from being bombed, I guess, And like that's something
Speaker 5: I recognized from from PTSD, from from you know, other.
Speaker 6: Contexts, but like it really fucked me up.
Speaker 5: An eighty royal child is like we can't expect these
Speaker 5: people to like develop into come by us singing like
Speaker 5: peace activists, like that they they have taken on massive
Speaker 5: amounts of raw where they've seen the neighbors and families die,
Speaker 5: Like it doesn't mean that we have to be like,
Speaker 5: oh well, like violence is going to happen, like that
Speaker 5: we should do everything we can to make a world
Speaker 5: where like people aren't killing and dying there, because it
Speaker 5: will always result in more of the least empowered people dying.
Speaker 5: But it's something that I think a lot of us
Speaker 5: are so far detached from that. I think is as like,
Speaker 5: you know, if you lived a whole lot of the
Speaker 5: United States relative safety and prosperity, it's it's hard for
Speaker 5: you to understand.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, And I mean like this is a
Speaker 3: like gaza is a place where it reiins body parts,
Speaker 3: Like that's what happens when it is really bomb goes off,
Speaker 3: It rains body parts, and like that is a.
Speaker 2: I don't know, like.
Speaker 3: The kind of person who has to grow up with
Speaker 3: that is just not going to be the same as
Speaker 3: like even people who have been through a lot of
Speaker 3: like really messed up stuff, Like it's not going to
Speaker 3: be the same as like experiencing that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, even if you like I have visited was to
Speaker 5: report on them. But then I get to go home
Speaker 5: and be safe. And sometimes that juxtaposition is hard, and
Speaker 5: it takes me a long time to not be afraid
Speaker 5: of the sky or a park car is going to
Speaker 5: kill me. But I'm home and I'm safe, And once
Speaker 5: I can adjust to that, then I can I can
Speaker 5: get on, you know, change things like that change.
Speaker 6: You, but you continue with your life.
Speaker 5: But if you're never home and you're never so or
Speaker 5: your home is never safe, that's something I can't understand, right,
Speaker 5: That's something that I haven't experienced, and very very few
Speaker 5: of us probably.
Speaker 4: Have, a lot of doctors have said that all the
Speaker 4: children in Gaza, they haven't they can't quite they can't
Speaker 4: be quite defined of having experienced PTSD because they haven't
Speaker 4: reached the post part yet, like they're still they're like
Speaker 4: in a perpetual state of PTSD because that's just how
Speaker 4: they their entire lives have been. Most of them have
Speaker 4: never known life outside of the blockade.
Speaker 3: So it's I don't know, yeah, and I mean I
Speaker 3: think I think that's a good place to end of.
Speaker 3: Just you know, this is what this is what this
Speaker 3: is what the reality and the eternal presence of SETL
Speaker 3: colonialism is, right, and you know, this is one of
Speaker 3: these things where in a lot of weird ways, like
Speaker 3: like there are ways in which we like people like
Speaker 3: if you live in the US, if you like even
Speaker 3: the subset the UK, like you are probably in a
Speaker 3: like maybe a better position to actually stop this than
Speaker 3: anyone who lives in Palestign is so yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 3: is but and and the problem is if we don't
Speaker 3: right the self, the mutually self reinforcing dynamics of setular
Speaker 3: colonialism are just going to keep like carrying on and
Speaker 3: keep spiraling on. And this is going to go on
Speaker 3: until everyone is dead or everyone is gone.
Speaker 5: Yeah, even if you can't stop it. Like I sent
Speaker 5: the video. I'm sure you guys saw the video of
Speaker 5: the Jewish Wis of Peace people in the Grand Central Terminal,
Speaker 5: New York. And I said that to the Palestinian journalistic
Speaker 5: because they're like, oh, this is great to see you.
Speaker 5: And if something we spoke about the interview too, how
Speaker 5: like it makes a me fully difference to some mech
Speaker 5: state of mind to see solidarity, even if like you know,
Speaker 5: we can get in the streets and we can say
Speaker 5: something and maybe that will make a difference. Maybe it won't,
Speaker 5: but like, at least if it makes someone understand that
Speaker 5: you're kind of standing with them in a moment of darkness,
Speaker 5: and maybe that helps in a way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think when a whole population is not able
Speaker 4: to share what they're going through, their journalists are getting
Speaker 4: killed when the internet is out and the one thing
Speaker 4: they're saying is like, please don't start talking about this.
Speaker 4: I think that's the easiest thing that we can do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and hopefully maybe this will impel us to Like
Speaker 5: as Miya said at the start, right, this keeps fucking happening,
Speaker 5: and like, as ethnic cleansings go, this one's got more
Speaker 5: coverage than most in the US, And like, I would
Speaker 5: encourage you to look at what you're seeing in Gaza,
Speaker 5: and I understand how inhuman and unemangeable it is. And like,
Speaker 5: maybe follow that shouldn't happen anywhere. It shouldn't happen into Gray,
Speaker 5: and it shouldn't happen in Kurdistan, it shouldn't happen to
Speaker 5: the r hinge of people, And like, yeah, try try
Speaker 5: and extend that. It's not to scold people, like if
Speaker 5: you weren't in the streets in twenty seventeen, fuck you,
Speaker 5: Like it's it's just to say that, like we've all
Speaker 5: had a window opened, even with every fucking attempt to
Speaker 5: shut that window, right, Like but cutting off the internet
Speaker 5: to Gaza, et cetera. This has been the most photographed
Speaker 5: ethnic cleansing, whatever you want to call it, in probably
Speaker 5: in human history. We're seeing more of it than we've
Speaker 5: ever seen before, a lot of it in sort of
Speaker 5: uncertain ways or fucking footage and video games, past office
Speaker 5: real life. But we're still seeing it, and we're still
Speaker 5: bearing witness to it to a limited degree, right, We're
Speaker 5: not seeing it in the sense people seeing it firsthand.
Speaker 5: And I encourage people to like, remember this moment and
Speaker 5: the shock and the terrible things that you felt, and
Speaker 5: like to not forget that next time you hear about
Speaker 5: something happening, because, like anywhere has happened, it's a tragedy.
Speaker 5: In anywhere it happens, we should do everything we can
Speaker 5: to stop it.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could happen here? A podcast in which
Speaker 2: my friend Kim Kelly and I talk about the fact
Speaker 2: that Zoom recently moved to the record button, which most
Speaker 2: people will need at some point, given how prominent this
Speaker 2: is with podcasting, to replace it with an AI companion button,
Speaker 2: which I refuse to use, uh and would would would
Speaker 2: deploy violence against anyone who tried to make me. How
Speaker 2: are you doing any day? Camp?
Speaker 8: I am good? Also hating our AI soon to be overlords.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, doing my best out here in Philadelphia?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, Philly. How is how is Philly as the
Speaker 2: as the fall comes in.
Speaker 8: It's it's a very sunny day. It's also getting chilly.
Speaker 8: I'm into it. It's finally leather weather. I mean, I
Speaker 8: guess it's always leather weather, depending on your level of commitment.
Speaker 8: But I am ye wuss and it's I tend to
Speaker 8: wait for, you know, the weather to tell me when
Speaker 8: it's time to break out my leather.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, you know I I I feel like all
Speaker 2: all things are fine. Personally. You should just assume listeners
Speaker 2: that I am always head to toe leather. But anyway, Oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: Kety is on.
Speaker 8: He looks resplendent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Kim. You are a labor journalist. You published a
Speaker 2: book what was it last year, year before last, called
Speaker 2: Fight Like Hell Yeah, about about the history of the
Speaker 2: labor movement and some radical moments people ought to know
Speaker 2: more about. And you and I are talking today about labor,
Speaker 2: particularly about the possibility of a general strike. Now, if you,
Speaker 2: the listener, have somehow missed this discourse. In short, a
Speaker 2: general strike is when instead of one union of workers
Speaker 2: from one industry striking, everybody strikes. At least, you know,
Speaker 2: a very significant chunk of the labor force strikes and
Speaker 2: this is you know, it's the kind of thing people
Speaker 2: on the left have dreamed about four years as like
Speaker 2: this is what could you know, turn things around, reduce
Speaker 2: income inequality, force action on climate change, the military industrial complex,
Speaker 2: and kind of as a result, you've had feels like
Speaker 2: every year for the last few years since people started
Speaker 2: reading about general strikes, which have occurred in a number
Speaker 2: of places and times, there's these like someone will get
Speaker 2: on Twitter and be like, we're all doing a general
Speaker 2: strike in two weeks. You know, everybody get ready, and
Speaker 2: folks will be like, that's not really how you do
Speaker 2: a general strike, and they'll go like, well, if you
Speaker 2: weren't saying it's not, it could happen.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got to believe.
Speaker 2: In it first, which is all of this is wrong.
Speaker 2: But the good news is there's an actual plan that
Speaker 2: is cohesive and potentially achievable for a general strike that's
Speaker 2: been put forward by someone who knows what he's talking about.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about that, but first, Kim, do
Speaker 2: you want to talk about why trying to get everyone
Speaker 2: on Twitter to launch a general strike in eight days
Speaker 2: is a bad idea.
Speaker 8: This is such a pet peeve among well I guess
Speaker 8: a lot of folks in the labor world who are
Speaker 8: also unfortunately on Twitter and social media that yeah, like
Speaker 8: you said, every so often there'll be general strike hashtag
Speaker 8: or like a graphic on Twitter or on Instagram, and
Speaker 8: it's like, are you taking part of the general strike?
Speaker 8: Like are you striking on Friday or like tomorrow? Like no, what,
Speaker 8: You're not even in a union? What are you talking about?
Speaker 8: And it's like, I love the energy, I love the vibe,
Speaker 8: you know. I love the idea of a general strike.
Speaker 8: I think it would be incredible if we actually pulled
Speaker 8: it off. But the biggest thing in there is the
Speaker 8: if followed by the pulled it off part. And one
Speaker 8: of the biggest misconceptions I think is that a general
Speaker 8: strike is akin to a big protest. Like you can
Speaker 8: absolutely plan a big protest in a few days if
Speaker 8: you really want to. I mean, look at the incredible
Speaker 8: work that Jewish Force for Piece has been doing in
Speaker 8: New York and other places. They're gonna be doing in
Speaker 8: Philly this week. I mean, it is possible to build
Speaker 8: on existing relationships and networks to create a big fucking
Speaker 8: deal of a protest. But a general strike is a
Speaker 8: different beast. It is a specific thing. It has a definition.
Speaker 8: A general strike, as you said, is when workers across
Speaker 8: various industries go on strike at the same time, and
Speaker 8: that is not the same as filling the streets for
Speaker 8: a protest. It would be sick if we can kind
Speaker 8: of meld those movements like the radical radical organizers who
Speaker 8: are already in community, already building protests infrastructure, and people
Speaker 8: in union labor world that are kind of beholden to
Speaker 8: contracts and more legal constraints. But it's going to take
Speaker 8: a little bit of time. It's going to take some dialogue,
Speaker 8: maybe even some fruitful discourse to get on the same page.
Speaker 8: Like they're like, there are laws. We live in a society, unfortunately,
Speaker 8: and it's it's not quite as simple as just declaring
Speaker 8: a general strike when you and like for your friends
Speaker 8: call out sick.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And it's also like I think one thing that
Speaker 2: gets lost is when you're going on strike. For a
Speaker 2: lot of people, that's not just I have to figure
Speaker 2: out what to do with money, and it's certainly not
Speaker 2: you know, while I can just go and be on
Speaker 2: unemployment or something, because you don't really get that when
Speaker 2: you're striking, you've got a lot of people with like families,
Speaker 2: and so the idea that like you get some podcaster
Speaker 2: right being like everybody should just not show up. Well,
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, there's people who got kids. They
Speaker 2: have other responsibilities than being a part of your revolution.
Speaker 2: Which is not to say that I don't think I Like, again,
Speaker 2: we're about to talk about an achievable plan for a
Speaker 2: general strike, but one of the reasons why you can't
Speaker 2: can't pull it off in a couple of days is
Speaker 2: that you have to set you have to have some
Speaker 2: sort of plan for how you're going to take care
Speaker 2: of the people striking, right, like, so they don't starve
Speaker 2: and shit, Yeah.
Speaker 8: That is the one of the biggest things, I would say,
Speaker 8: arguably the biggest thing. But also if you're in a
Speaker 8: union and you go on strike as part of you know,
Speaker 8: broken down contract negotiations are part of the life cycle
Speaker 8: of a unique you have legal protections. You can't just
Speaker 8: be fired if you take part in one of these
Speaker 8: kind of impromptu hashtag general strike actions. Your boss is
Speaker 8: just gonna fire you and then like you're done. You
Speaker 8: don't have any protections there, Like, what are the reasons
Speaker 8: that And I know it's not as much fun. It's
Speaker 8: just going out and saying fuck it and bring it
Speaker 8: all down. Trust me, I would love to see that
Speaker 8: type of shit, but unfortunately, again, we live constrained by
Speaker 8: laws and like logic when it comes, like the reason
Speaker 8: that you see big labor strikes and big picket lines
Speaker 8: and all this cool stuff that's happening, like it's part
Speaker 8: of a process. Those unions are negotiating contracts, these legally
Speaker 8: binding documents. They're collective bargaining agreements that have expiration dates.
Speaker 8: You know, the UAW didn't just pick you, didn't just
Speaker 8: say all right, right now, we're mad, we're gonna go
Speaker 8: on strike. Like no, their previous agreements had expiration date.
Speaker 8: They hit the ration date, so they start bargaining again.
Speaker 8: Bargaining didn't go well, they went on strike. That is
Speaker 8: how it works when you're in a union. That's like
Speaker 8: just part and parcel of the push and pull of
Speaker 8: leverage that workers have against the boss. And it's like
Speaker 8: a century's old system, Like there's laws, there's protections, there's
Speaker 8: a lot that goes into it. And I think we're
Speaker 8: saying before we hopped on the call officially, like I
Speaker 8: think a lot of people haven't had union jobs or
Speaker 8: don't have a deep understanding of unions and how they work.
Speaker 8: So of course they wouldn't necessarily know when the expiration
Speaker 8: dat is for this contract or what goes into bargaining
Speaker 8: union contract. But there's a lot of moving parts.
Speaker 5: They might not know that.
Speaker 2: As we're to talk about, you can't just have a
Speaker 2: bunch of union leaders decide we're all going to go
Speaker 2: on strike at once. Sympathy strikes are very much not legal.
Speaker 2: Now there is a way to get multiple We should
Speaker 2: just talk about, like why we're doing this, which is that.
Speaker 2: So there's this fella who so far has seems like
Speaker 2: a pretty pretty head out screwed on straight solid dude,
Speaker 2: Sean Fain, who is Big Sean. Yeah, big Sean, And
Speaker 2: he's like he's the he's the head of the u
Speaker 2: a W. Right, or he's like the guy negotiating for
Speaker 2: the ua W.
Speaker 8: No, he's the president, Yeah, the.
Speaker 2: President, and he is Sean Is So he's you know,
Speaker 2: the UAW is the big one of the big otto,
Speaker 2: like the largest of the auto worker like related unions,
Speaker 2: and they have been in a strike, I think primarily
Speaker 2: General Motors.
Speaker 8: It's the big three General Motors Ford as Stelanis, which
Speaker 8: makes Chrysler and a couple other brands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they they have gone on a very power
Speaker 2: about six weeks or so, very significant strike. You can
Speaker 2: read stuff like Toyota recently like put out a proposal
Speaker 2: for like giving workers raises that's in line with like
Speaker 2: the union, like they are scared. And it looks like
Speaker 2: like as I mean this is, they haven't inked anything yet,
Speaker 2: but as of us recording this, it looks like they've
Speaker 2: won on a lot, which is great. And Sean Is
Speaker 2: is not just a you know, a union man, but
Speaker 2: is very much a talking blatantly about the class war
Speaker 2: of the rich against everybody else that's occurring in this country.
Speaker 2: And he made some statements about two days before we
Speaker 2: recorded this where he was like, I think, you know what,
Speaker 2: we need to be setting the date the expiration date
Speaker 2: for our contract in twenty twenty eight. And I want
Speaker 2: to implore all other you know, unions that are negotiating
Speaker 2: and can do this, to set that with their next
Speaker 2: contract expiration date, so that in twenty twenty eight we
Speaker 2: have the option to do a general strike in order
Speaker 2: to redress some of the systemic inequalities as a result
Speaker 2: of this war of the billionaires against everybody else. Very
Speaker 2: much framed it in those kind of stark terms, and
Speaker 2: you know, we're going to talk about why. But I
Speaker 2: think that's a workable plan potentially.
Speaker 8: It really is. It's incredible. Honestly, this is kind of
Speaker 8: I think this is one the ballsiest things we've heard
Speaker 8: from a mainstream labor leader since well since Sarah Nelson,
Speaker 8: the president of the Flight Attendants Union, kind of soft
Speaker 8: called for a general strike or at least brought up
Speaker 8: the idea of a general strike in twenty nineteen, and.
Speaker 2: Her doing that, I've forgotten that stopped a government shutdown.
Speaker 8: Yeah, So, like, the general strike is a very powerful tool,
Speaker 8: and we've done it before, you know, I think the
Speaker 8: most recent true general strike we saw this country was
Speaker 8: like nineteen nineteen in Seattle, so it's been a minute.
Speaker 8: But the genius of this plan is the fact that
Speaker 8: it's illegal. And I mean, of course, you know, laws
Speaker 8: aren't real, but when you're doing this kind of thing,
Speaker 8: it operating within these constraints, it is helpful when you're
Speaker 8: not actively breaking the law because that helps you get
Speaker 8: more shit done. Right, So, what Shannon is proposing. You're saying, Okay,
Speaker 8: we're going to set our contract to expire around this time,
Speaker 8: and we want a whole bunch of other big uniers
Speaker 8: to do the same thing. Now, if all of their
Speaker 8: union contracts happened to expire around the same time, and
Speaker 8: then their negotiations happened to break down, and they happen
Speaker 8: to go on strike at the same time, creating an
Speaker 8: actual general strike, the government can't really do shit about it.
Speaker 8: I mean, you mentioned before the sympathy strikes, solidarity strikes,
Speaker 8: they are illegal because of this nineteen forty seven law
Speaker 8: called out the taff Hartley Act. Essentially, that means if
Speaker 8: say your warehouse you're part of the Teamsters, you go
Speaker 8: on strike, and then the coffee shop next door is like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 8: we support you, We're going to go on strike too.
Speaker 8: They can't do that. That's breaking the law. But in
Speaker 8: this different hypothetical, if they their contract was up at
Speaker 8: the same time as your contract, you both want to
Speaker 8: strike at the same time, that's legal, and it's also
Speaker 8: very disruptive to that little corridor you're working in. And
Speaker 8: imagine doing that on a national level. Imagine if the
Speaker 8: flight attendants, the Teamsters the UAW, Starbucks, fucking the air
Speaker 8: traffic controllers, the longshoremen, like all of these incredibly important
Speaker 8: infrastructure wise jobs happen to go on strike at the
Speaker 8: same time, that would shut down the whole fucking country. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and it would be legal, which is so fun. I
Speaker 8: love to see it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: Obviously, when you are talking about radical social change, illegality
Speaker 2: is always on the table. But it's not the smartest
Speaker 2: place to start from when you're talking about something like this,
Speaker 2: where you have the option to get a lot done,
Speaker 2: you know, within within the protections of the law, which
Speaker 2: makes it easier to get more people on board, It
Speaker 2: makes it easier to get critical mass. And if at
Speaker 2: a later date, you know, the state were to take
Speaker 2: illegal action that makes it impossible for you to continue legally, well,
Speaker 2: then you've got that critical mass behind you and potentially
Speaker 2: probably radic you know.
Speaker 8: Right, and you have resources, you have infrastructure because big
Speaker 8: unions have big strength funds. Yes, this is the thing.
Speaker 8: The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars in the
Speaker 8: bank that they're saving for just this purpose when their
Speaker 8: workers go on striketh so they can continue to pay
Speaker 8: them and cover their health insurance.
Speaker 2: Yea, that's why you pay dues, right, Like, yeah.
Speaker 8: It's it's literally like strike insurance. And a lot of
Speaker 8: the big unions have this set up. They have comms teams,
Speaker 8: they have legal teams, they have experience Like I know,
Speaker 8: as as radicals like we tend to be perhaps a
Speaker 8: little allergic to a lot of those things, especially if
Speaker 8: they're not particularly in line with our specific vision of
Speaker 8: the future, but they're really helpful to have, you know, Like,
Speaker 8: doing crimes is fun, and I support it pretty much
Speaker 8: at all times, but getting shit done is way more
Speaker 8: fun and way more satisfying, you know, like it's nice
Speaker 8: to win. It's nice to win.
Speaker 2: Unions are kind of on a role right now. Right,
Speaker 2: we've all watched some really substantial gains for working people
Speaker 2: just in the last six months, and it's worth paying
Speaker 2: attention to why. And part of it is that, like,
Speaker 2: you're not relying upon people risking everything, many of whom
Speaker 2: can't write. You can't very easily ethically defend if you
Speaker 2: are like a single parent who is responsible for multiple children.
Speaker 2: You can't defend going out and busting a bunch of
Speaker 2: windows and then getting locked up super easy, because you
Speaker 2: do you have responsibilities. You've got people to care for,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 8: Right, you have elders at home, or if you're a
Speaker 8: disabled person, if you're a media compromise. You can't go
Speaker 8: out there and get involved in that type of situation.
Speaker 2: You can't risk being around that many people. Maybe, but
Speaker 2: you can strike.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, this is that you can respect a picket line,
Speaker 8: you can help support, you can help offer some of
Speaker 8: the resources we need for folks to get out there,
Speaker 8: like utilizing this existing infrastructure, in these existing resources. It
Speaker 8: just opens up the possibility for more people to get
Speaker 8: involved in a way that's less harmful to them, to
Speaker 8: the people, like we want to harm the bosses and yeah,
Speaker 8: you know the status quote, we don't want to hurt
Speaker 8: our people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in this. Now.
Speaker 2: The question is when we say that this is workable,
Speaker 2: does that mean that like it's a guarantee or it
Speaker 2: would be easy. Of course not. No, Like you're talking,
Speaker 2: you're still talking about a struggle against people who have
Speaker 2: I don't know the majority of the resources the human
Speaker 2: race has ever marshalled in like a financial form right
Speaker 2: at their beck and call. So that's you know, this
Speaker 2: is still a frightening and potentially pretty dangerous thing, but
Speaker 2: it is a workable plan that has infrastructure behind it,
Speaker 2: and that crucially, you know, the downside is that the
Speaker 2: bosses know that people are talking about this, and they
Speaker 2: have time to prepare. But the nice side is that like, well,
Speaker 2: so do we, and that's generally possible.
Speaker 8: This is the thing I've seen again on social media,
Speaker 8: people saying like, oh, we have to wait five years,
Speaker 8: or have to wait four and a half years. That's ridiculous.
Speaker 8: Why don't we just do it now? You can do
Speaker 8: a lot of planning and a lot of building in
Speaker 8: four and a half years. You need that time to
Speaker 8: actually pull something off of this magnitude. And also, I
Speaker 8: mean a lot of unions that perhaps might be interested
Speaker 8: in this, like they have contracts of their own that
Speaker 8: they need to sort of work out the timing for.
Speaker 8: You know, this plan only works if we can actually
Speaker 8: maneuver away for a lot of these big contracts that
Speaker 8: big powerful unions to expire at the same time. If
Speaker 8: someone's contract, if the team SERTs, next contract expires in
Speaker 8: twenty twenty seven, like okay, well I think they're not
Speaker 8: gonna be able to play ball and you really want
Speaker 8: the team Sters if you want to play this type
Speaker 8: of game. And then another hurdle that I think it's
Speaker 8: it's unfortunate, is that you know Sean Fame, Big Sean
Speaker 8: A what a man. He's very out there and very
Speaker 8: outspoken about opposing capitalism, about this being class war. He's
Speaker 8: on the level, but he is a rarity among major
Speaker 8: labor union leaders. Like there are some leaders that would
Speaker 8: be down to cloud, you know, like Sarah Nelson's out here,
Speaker 8: like Mark Diamondstein with the Postal workers, Like there are
Speaker 8: some very cool, very progressive, if not radical union leaders
Speaker 8: out there, but there's also a lot of conservative or
Speaker 8: just sort of wishy washy Democrats style union leaders too
Speaker 8: that would not want to have any part of this.
Speaker 8: And a big part of convincing them to get on
Speaker 8: the level and become involved in this kind of effort
Speaker 8: that's going to come down to what the rank and
Speaker 8: file have to say. That's going to come that that
Speaker 8: pressure is going to have to come up through the ranks.
Speaker 8: I mean, the reason we have Sean Fain and we
Speaker 8: have Sean O'Brien of the Teamsters, and we have this
Speaker 8: kind of newer wave of more s and Milson union
Speaker 8: leadership is because of what the rank and file have done,
Speaker 8: Like Teamsters for Democratic Union organized for years to get
Speaker 8: that reform slaid in, to get Sean O. Brian in
Speaker 8: there to take on ups Sean Fayne is the first
Speaker 8: ever democratically elected union leader in uaw's history because of
Speaker 8: a lot of organizing around reform that came from the
Speaker 8: rank and file that took years to get him there.
Speaker 8: We would not have big Sean if people had not
Speaker 8: invested years of their life towards organizing for this goal.
Speaker 8: And so now we have this four to five year
Speaker 8: span where we can push our own union leaders in
Speaker 8: that right direction to plant those seeds to try and
Speaker 8: really build something that they can't refuse to get on
Speaker 8: board with. But that's going to take time too. I
Speaker 8: think people need to really recognize that, like unions are
Speaker 8: not unfortunately they're all like these magical progressive silver bullets.
Speaker 8: Like there's some pretty shitty people in union leadership across
Speaker 8: the country, and we got to do of the battle.
Speaker 8: We really want to get people on board.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's you know, upsides and downsides when we compare
Speaker 2: it to like sort of how radicals like to particularly
Speaker 2: the anarchist radical organizing where you know, the downside is
Speaker 2: you do these are organizations that are hierarchical, They can
Speaker 2: be stratified. It can make it very difficult to push
Speaker 2: for change. It can make them just as our democracy
Speaker 2: is not super responsive to what the majority of people want,
Speaker 2: union leadership in a number of cases is not responsive
Speaker 2: to what people want. They've also had, especially if you
Speaker 2: go back to like, you know, the mid century, last
Speaker 2: century not short history of corruption, right, that's been a
Speaker 2: problem you needs have dealt with in the past two
Speaker 2: These are issues you don't have as much with autonomously
Speaker 2: organized you know, small groups of activists on the street.
Speaker 2: The thing that makes them a lot stronger in many
Speaker 2: ways is the fact that they have more resource to marshall.
Speaker 2: They have ways of addressing grievances other than like kind
Speaker 2: of just personal conflicts that are built into the system,
Speaker 2: and ways of kind of pushing for change that if
Speaker 2: you get enough people on board with you can make
Speaker 2: And then you have the weight of this organization with
Speaker 2: a degree of power and social cachet behind it, and
Speaker 2: so I think the ability it's much harder to steer
Speaker 2: these things. But when you get them pointed in the
Speaker 2: right direction. They have more staying power than kind of
Speaker 2: small autonomous groups usually do, and I think there's a
Speaker 2: lot of potential power in that, which is why I
Speaker 2: think this is a workable plan.
Speaker 8: And this is why more anarchists and socialists and communists,
Speaker 8: everybody who wants to really get out there and cause
Speaker 8: some good trouble will say, like, you need to get
Speaker 8: involved in your union. You need to organize your workplace
Speaker 8: if your if your job is not such that you
Speaker 8: can join a traditional union, you need to get involved
Speaker 8: in your local labor community anyway, and try and connect
Speaker 8: with people who are part of those unions and try
Speaker 8: and kind of get them to see the light. You
Speaker 8: need to talk to people, not online in person. You
Speaker 8: got to go talk to people who are different from me,
Speaker 8: who might have different politics, and try and get them
Speaker 8: to see why this is something that we could do
Speaker 8: that could help them, that could help everyone. This is
Speaker 8: something I emphasize a lot because I'm an anarchist too,
Speaker 8: even though I know it's not like a big old
Speaker 8: Debbie Downer right now talking about all this legal stuff,
Speaker 8: but I'm also practical and I've also spent a lot
Speaker 8: of time talking to union members who see the world
Speaker 8: a lot differently from me. Like I think a lot
Speaker 8: of my most recent impactful work is you know, stuff
Speaker 8: I've been doing in the Deep South and an Appalachia,
Speaker 8: and no one there is impressed with my guillotine tattoos,
Speaker 8: but they do see the need to deal with this
Speaker 8: situation where all the rich people have all the stuff
Speaker 8: and they're getting screwed. That is a good starting point
Speaker 8: for a lot. Yeah and yeah, it's easy to say
Speaker 8: join a union, like not everyone can do that, but
Speaker 8: everybody can find a way to talk to somebody who's
Speaker 8: connected to a union, who's part of a labor movement,
Speaker 8: part of a labor organization, Like we need everyone to
Speaker 8: get involved however they can.
Speaker 2: I want to note significant potential for the radicals are
Speaker 2: kind of radicals to be useful within this in a
Speaker 2: direct way from just a recent example. Right in Portland,
Speaker 2: the teachers are going on strike. I believe that has
Speaker 2: happened today, and they had a big march not too
Speaker 2: long ago that some of my friends were at because
Speaker 2: they're teachers. And one of the things that happened on
Speaker 2: that march it was the same day as a Palestinian
Speaker 2: solidarity march. And at both of these marches that at
Speaker 2: large thousands of people, the quirkers and the security were
Speaker 2: all kind of the same folks, and they were all
Speaker 2: folks that were like, came out of the Portland radical scene.
Speaker 2: We're there in the twent protests a huge because corking. Corking,
Speaker 2: if you're not aware, is like going ahead of into
Speaker 2: the sides of a protest, like close traffic briefly as
Speaker 2: people walk by, so folks don't get hit by cars.
Speaker 2: It's a safety thing, right, And so people were kind
Speaker 2: of like the people who were doing that are radicals,
Speaker 2: are members of generally like these autonomously organized groups who
Speaker 2: are very useful in helping these because you know, people
Speaker 2: have experienced, you know, unions there may be experience striking,
Speaker 2: but a lot of unions haven't struck in a long time, right,
Speaker 2: because it doesn't happen all that often. And even if
Speaker 2: they have, most of these guys, especially these older guys
Speaker 2: and ladies and other folks, these these older union members
Speaker 2: probably have not participated in a large march in the
Speaker 2: modern era of protests where there's dangers like getting rammed
Speaker 2: by cars and stuff, and so the people who have
Speaker 2: these the straight medics and stuff who have that kind
Speaker 2: of experience hugely useful. Not the only thing. People who
Speaker 2: are striking often need stuff handwarmers or are always appreciated
Speaker 2: water warm food, things that like keep people's morale up,
Speaker 2: Organizing like sympathy demonstrations like alongside strikers and whatnot to
Speaker 2: help them keep their numbers up. All of that stuff
Speaker 2: can be really useful ways for these autonomously organized, kind
Speaker 2: of smaller groups of radicals to participate in a meaningful
Speaker 2: way in something like this. That's not the only degree
Speaker 2: to which that's possible, but like those are just the
Speaker 2: examples that come to mind.
Speaker 8: Absolutely, we've talked a lot about legality, and illegality is
Speaker 8: also something that is very much a part of labor
Speaker 8: history and its present. And I would say it's future
Speaker 8: folks who are perhaps more comfortable with getting into perhaps
Speaker 8: more confrontational moments with cops who are trying to mess
Speaker 8: with the picket line or scabs who are trying to
Speaker 8: be violent towards striking workers, or even just like you said,
Speaker 8: like surveillance and safety and medic work like that is
Speaker 8: all and that is all important too. I mean, not
Speaker 8: every I've been on some pretty wild picket lines, and
Speaker 8: not everyone there is really that concerned with what the
Speaker 8: law has to say about certain things. Once things get
Speaker 8: a little heated, I mean, there are points I mean
Speaker 8: and things I've covered, and we've seen this continue to happen,
Speaker 8: where people try and drive into the picket line and
Speaker 8: or try to attack people in the picket line, and
Speaker 8: that is I mean, that deserves a variety of responses,
Speaker 8: I think. And also something to note is that when
Speaker 8: these are strikes called by union leadership, they follow they
Speaker 8: tend to follow a set of rules because predominantly, like
Speaker 8: like generally speaking, union leadership doesn't want their members to
Speaker 8: go to jail. They don't want them to get in
Speaker 8: any kind of situations like that. So they'll say, you know, okay,
Speaker 8: well you stay on the sidewalk, or oh the cops
Speaker 8: said to move, so we move, or this has to
Speaker 8: be non violent, or you know, there's kind of a
Speaker 8: set of circumstances there that union members are required to follow.
Speaker 8: But if you're there to support and you're not a
Speaker 8: member of that union, as long as you have consent
Speaker 8: and support the people there're you're there trying to stick
Speaker 8: up for then you have a lot more leeway than
Speaker 8: someone that has, you know, a union leader to answer to. Like,
Speaker 8: there's a lot of creative ways you can get involved.
Speaker 8: And one thing that I think hasn't really been discussed
Speaker 8: as much in like the online discourse or whatever, but
Speaker 8: I think it's important to think about, even if you're
Speaker 8: not a person who is able to participate in that
Speaker 8: on the street type of way, if there's a huge
Speaker 8: strike going on in your city and you're not part
Speaker 8: of a union, but you want to get involved. Sick
Speaker 8: outs have a very long, illustrious history in the labor movement.
Speaker 8: If you happen to get sick that day, what's your
Speaker 8: boss gonna do? You know, assuming you have those kind
Speaker 8: of protections. If you don't, then you have to make
Speaker 8: your own you know, caveat, caveat, caveat. But if you're
Speaker 8: in a position where you can take off work that
Speaker 8: day or for a couple of days and it just
Speaker 8: happens to coincide with that massive strike that's shut down
Speaker 8: everything else, and if you convince all your coworkers that
Speaker 8: you're a shoped to do the same thing, you're not
Speaker 8: breaking the law. You're protected, but you're also part of
Speaker 8: the shutdown effort, like sickouts. One of the reasons that
Speaker 8: people were so spooked around twenty nineteen when the government
Speaker 8: shutdown was looming, before Sarah Nelson really brought out the
Speaker 8: big Gs wars that we're seeing sickouts at airports and
Speaker 8: flights were being canceled in New York, and I think
Speaker 8: la and that was starting to spook the people in charge,
Speaker 8: because if enough people don't show up for work at
Speaker 8: the airport, nothing's going to happen at that airport. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and there are a lot of different workplaces where all
Speaker 8: of their workers not showing up could be a potential problem.
Speaker 8: So I just encourage people to think creatively about the
Speaker 8: ways they can get involved, even if they can't necessarily
Speaker 8: get involved on the formal union side, Like, there's so
Speaker 8: much we can do from each according to his ability
Speaker 8: to each courting to his means. You know That'll Chestnut,
Speaker 8: I love it.
Speaker 2: It's so important to bring up airline workers because one
Speaker 2: of the things they the things that they have that
Speaker 2: other people don't is they can't be replaced in the
Speaker 2: same way. Right you can if all your Mauristas go
Speaker 2: on strike, you can potentially bring in whoever, and they
Speaker 2: will not be nearly as good at it, right, the
Speaker 2: company will not make nearly as much money, but legally
Speaker 2: there's nothing stopping them from doing that. If you have
Speaker 2: a bunch of ground workers call in, right, or a
Speaker 2: bunch of stewardess is you have to replace them with
Speaker 2: people who are qualified groundworkers. Like, there's a whole process,
Speaker 2: there's like a serial Like there's a lot that they
Speaker 2: have to know how to do, a lot of compliance
Speaker 2: that has to be done because thousands and thousands of
Speaker 2: lives are at stake, right, same thing with medical workers,
Speaker 2: right when when you've got a job where like they
Speaker 2: can't if like a bunch of nurses go on strike,
Speaker 2: well you have to replace them with nurses, right, And
Speaker 2: there's a very limited supply, So there's a lot of
Speaker 2: leverage that these organizations have.
Speaker 8: Does The airline industry is incredibly densely unionized too, So
Speaker 8: if all of the union flooding tendants aren't available, then
Speaker 8: no one's going to be available. Yeah, it's one of
Speaker 8: the plus sides of having a very densely organized industry,
Speaker 8: which is why we need to keep organizing too. In
Speaker 8: these next four and a half years.
Speaker 2: Well, Kim. I think that's most of what I had
Speaker 2: to say. Do you have anything else you wanted to
Speaker 2: get into on this topic before we roll out?
Speaker 8: Hmm, I think we've covered most things. I do want
Speaker 8: to emphasize, like I don't want to be a wet
Speaker 8: blanket on people who are excited. I'm not so excited
Speaker 8: and so heartened to see the amount of interest and
Speaker 8: energy we're seeing around this general strike idea, because like
Speaker 8: five years ago, that would have I mean, that would
Speaker 8: not have escaped containment, right, we would have just been
Speaker 8: talking amongst ourselves about it. But to have the head
Speaker 8: of a union who has four hundred thousand members, who
Speaker 8: just whipped the shit out of the Big three automakers,
Speaker 8: who's getting all these headlines to talk about a general
Speaker 8: strike in a meaningful way, like, yes, maybe he's not
Speaker 8: out here throwing Molotov cocktails the way we perhaps would
Speaker 8: want to see someone doing that, but it still a
Speaker 8: huge deal. And even if you know, the mainstream organized
Speaker 8: labor movement isn't as radical as a lot of us
Speaker 8: within it would like to see it, we have a
Speaker 8: lot of time now to try and pull things in
Speaker 8: that direction. I feel like a dam has burst in
Speaker 8: a way, and if anything, this is a moment of
Speaker 8: opportunity and of working together and trying to see different
Speaker 8: perspectives in a way that gets us all closer to
Speaker 8: the point we really need to be. Absolutely, we take
Speaker 8: all this shit down.
Speaker 2: All right. I am in agreement, Kim. People should look
Speaker 2: up your book fight like hell.
Speaker 8: Yeah at the Untold History of American labor.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and what else should they look up? R e U.
Speaker 8: I'm still unfortunately on Twitter, so I'm there, grim Kim. Now,
Speaker 8: I'm a freelancer a lot for in these times. I
Speaker 8: have a column at teen Vogue, I write for a
Speaker 8: fast company, and I'm kind of all over the place
Speaker 8: so and I do a lot of book talks and stuff.
Speaker 8: So I'm I'm around. If you want to talk to
Speaker 8: your friendly neighborhood anarchist labor reporter, just to google me.
Speaker 8: But don't believe everything you read, because you know she.
Speaker 2: Didn't kill that guy. He was dead when she got there. Anyway, Kim,
Speaker 2: thank you so much.
Speaker 8: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, thanks for being here, for showing up, and
Speaker 2: thank you wall for listening until next time. I don't know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, solidarity forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's a good that's a good welcome back
Speaker 2: to it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart,
Speaker 2: and sometimes about stuff that's less depressing than that. Today
Speaker 2: we're doing an episode that's I don't know, part funny
Speaker 2: and part hey, you should be aware of this thing
Speaker 2: because it's it's kind of fucked up.
Speaker 7: It certainly could happen. It probably shouldn't. It probably shouldn't
Speaker 7: happen here, but it certainly could.
Speaker 2: But it certainly could. Garrison Davis is on the other line.
Speaker 2: That I mean other line. This isn't a phone call.
Speaker 2: That's the other voice that you are hearing right now.
Speaker 2: And earlier this year, Garrison and I went to CEES,
Speaker 2: the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison
Speaker 2: had a wonderful stay at Circus Circus that did not
Speaker 2: smell like dead clowns.
Speaker 7: But we we did not just shut down this summer
Speaker 7: due to horrible infestation problems.
Speaker 2: Oh that's what we're staying next year too, buddy. Anyway,
Speaker 2: we encountered while we were going through all these different
Speaker 2: technoology companies and whatnot, this very peculiar AI project and Garrison,
Speaker 2: I'm going to hand things over to you now, because
Speaker 2: you're the one who was actually prepared an episode.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So I dug into this AI project more when
Speaker 7: I was making my ghost Conference episodes, and after just
Speaker 7: a few minutes of like doing like background checks and stuff,
Speaker 7: I realized that this would become its own episode because
Speaker 7: of how wild things got very very quickly. This company
Speaker 7: is called mind Bank AI. As the name suggests, they
Speaker 7: are an AI company based in Florida with the goal
Speaker 7: of creating personal digital replicas of living humans using artificial
Speaker 7: intelligence and an evolving NLP or natural language processing.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Basically these are algorithms that are used by GPT, chatbots,
Speaker 7: predictive texting, the digital assistance like Alexa and Siri. Yeah,
Speaker 7: language models that respond to feedback. They're pretty common these days.
Speaker 7: We encounter them a lot, right that they're whenever you're
Speaker 7: typing on your iPhone, they they will generate text that
Speaker 7: they think you're gonna write. But what mind bank is
Speaker 7: trying to do is a little bit different.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When we encounter them at Cees, their booth had on
Speaker 2: these signs that were it was stuff like like you know,
Speaker 2: set up a legacy for your kids.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was basically advertising. This is a way to allow
Speaker 2: a part of you to exist in digital form and
Speaker 2: communicate with your with your descendants forever.
Speaker 7: Yes, so we found them in the US government sponsored
Speaker 7: section of ce s, which is already a great sign. Yes,
Speaker 7: already already looking looking good. But unlike other kind of
Speaker 7: AI digital copies of humans, which typically are just language
Speaker 7: models that generate responses based on an archive of someone's
Speaker 7: writing or recorded interviews or online presence, mind Bank instead
Speaker 7: seeks to create an evolving, a unique digital twin by
Speaker 7: having a person input their personal data basically tons of
Speaker 7: personal information about themselves into an AI on an ongoing basis,
Speaker 7: and by analyzing your data inputs. Mind Bank says that
Speaker 7: your digital twin will quote unquote learn to think like you,
Speaker 7: and their CEO claims that this process will eventually help
Speaker 7: him achieve immortality.
Speaker 2: Oh oh, that's good. I hadn't caught that when we
Speaker 2: talked to the guy that he believed that that I love.
Speaker 2: Whenever you get these guys who are like I will
Speaker 2: just offload my brain onto a machine and then I
Speaker 2: will live forever in the cloud. And of course, man, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's how consciousness works.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, buddy, all right, I'm going to play this video next.
Speaker 9: Humanity is limited, our bodies age, our memories fade, Technology
Speaker 9: outpaces evolution. The solution is your personal digital twin, transfer
Speaker 9: your wisdom, become the best version of yourself, and live
Speaker 9: forever through data.
Speaker 7: Oh boy, let's go beyond.
Speaker 2: So all right, I got to know one thing before
Speaker 2: you start in Garrison, which is that when they mention
Speaker 2: that like technology, like there's a line about like technology
Speaker 2: making everything better, they're showing a man who has lost
Speaker 2: his leg walking on a treadmill with an artificial leg.
Speaker 2: And look, I think I have so much admiration for
Speaker 2: people who make artificial limbs wonderful thing to be doing
Speaker 2: great important work. They're not as good as real legs.
Speaker 2: Everyone agrees with this, right, Technology is not making it better.
Speaker 2: Someone lost a leg. Yeah that's what it said. No,
Speaker 2: that's technology allowing someone to adapt to a terrible, terrible
Speaker 2: thing that happened to them.
Speaker 7: But Robert, don't you want to live forever through data?
Speaker 2: No? No, I don't. I'm exhausted now, Garrison.
Speaker 7: Okay, all right, so let's go into this a little
Speaker 7: bit more. Your immortal digital twin is made possible quote
Speaker 7: by safely storing your data. Over the years, artificial intelligence
Speaker 7: and computers of the future will have ample data to
Speaker 7: compile a digital version of yourself and predict your responses.
Speaker 7: So that that is their idea of how this thing works.
Speaker 7: Another one of their very very funny YouTube videos, titled
Speaker 7: The Vision, promises that quote, the next personal computer is
Speaker 7: you store your memories, your infinite potential, take advantage of
Speaker 7: a I enhanced humanity.
Speaker 2: God damn it.
Speaker 7: So that is their vision.
Speaker 2: My more personal computer absolutely is not me because I
Speaker 2: do not play Balder's Gate three very well, you know,
Speaker 2: like I can't run it on my hardware.
Speaker 7: Ah, well, that's that's why. It's that's why you got
Speaker 7: to buy the new Monster manual and then maybe it
Speaker 7: could all just be in your brain.
Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, I am full of shit. D and D
Speaker 2: is still better when you run your hardware.
Speaker 7: Goddamn, this is the one thing you actually can do
Speaker 7: pretty good by yourself.
Speaker 2: Why did I pick that one? Yeah, it's just so like,
Speaker 2: I don't think most people buy this. I don't think
Speaker 2: this probably is going to be a success. I don't
Speaker 2: think most pop I think most people's reaction to this
Speaker 2: is like kind of sneering, which is the right reaction
Speaker 2: to this. But there are people who do feel this legitimately,
Speaker 2: and that is a thing of almost unfathomable sadness. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I had my angry athe period like a lot of people,
Speaker 2: but like I, I have so much. I'm so much
Speaker 2: more okay with Christianity than i am.
Speaker 7: Well this, oh yeah, absolutely. So before I get into
Speaker 7: how this is all supposed to quote unquote work, first
Speaker 7: I want to talk about how the founder and CEO
Speaker 7: says that he got the idea for this company, because
Speaker 7: I think it puts into focus how he sees this
Speaker 7: product ideally functioning in the future. So Emil Hamirez was
Speaker 7: writing a train with his four year old daughter. She
Speaker 7: was playing on her iPad and discovered Siri. She began
Speaker 7: talking with Siri and asking it questions like what do
Speaker 7: you eat? And do you have a mommy. I'll let
Speaker 7: I'll let a meal tell the rest here.
Speaker 10: But thirty minutes later she was laughing and having a
Speaker 10: really like a nice time with Siri and she said, Siri,
Speaker 10: I love you. You're my best friend. And that struck
Speaker 10: a chord with me. That would that inspired me so
Speaker 10: much because I said to myself at that moment. Children
Speaker 10: don't see computers and devices as a tool. They see
Speaker 10: them as a companion. And today she speaks with Siri
Speaker 10: or elects or any other device. But in the future,
Speaker 10: I want her to be able to speak to me,
Speaker 10: to be able to ask me a question, just like
Speaker 10: she did the device and understanding the technology, I know
Speaker 10: that the only way that's possible. I'm able to take
Speaker 10: my thoughts and put them in with cloud so that
Speaker 10: then later she can access those that information. So that's
Speaker 10: how the idea for my bank came about. It's a
Speaker 10: place for you to store your ideas for the next generation.
Speaker 1: To tappen to.
Speaker 2: No, so the generations already linger too long. We had
Speaker 2: it right when people died when they were well, not died.
Speaker 2: But Logan's run had it right. We should kill everyone
Speaker 2: at thirty five. But this is so fucking offensive, Like
Speaker 2: the idea that first off, like if you're looking at
Speaker 2: we want a device, you know, a way to use
Speaker 2: technology to help people grieve or something, and like you
Speaker 2: decide maybe having a chatbot that they get you. I'm
Speaker 2: sure it's possible that that could be part of healthy grieving.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to say that that there's no place
Speaker 2: for that. But something that is definitely not just stupid,
Speaker 2: but toxic and poisonous is having a machine speak with
Speaker 2: the voice of a child's parent while that parent is alive,
Speaker 2: and confusing the child as to whether or not the
Speaker 2: phone or their parent is conscious. Like that seems bad
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 7: There's actually another product that that does this right now,
Speaker 7: which has kind of caused some controversy for this, for
Speaker 7: this very thing you mention. It's a Tarkara Tommy smart speaker,
Speaker 7: which if listening to a parents have always for fifteen minutes,
Speaker 7: can replicate it and tell your child bedtime stories if
Speaker 7: you aren't physically present now this is this is similarly
Speaker 7: kind of like cause people to have a whole bunch
Speaker 7: of questions around. You know, is this good for a
Speaker 7: child's brain development to have to have their parents' voice
Speaker 7: be coming out of like a smart speaker. The answer
Speaker 7: is you probably not, but yeah so. According to mind
Speaker 7: Bank's website, Emil's four year old daughters interactions with Siri
Speaker 7: quote started a quest in his heart to live forever
Speaker 7: for his daughter. The quest for immortality has led to
Speaker 7: something much bigger for humanity, because the next personal computer
Speaker 7: is you unquote.
Speaker 3: So there's that.
Speaker 7: There's that other line again about having this quest in
Speaker 7: his heart is actually part of a bigger a bigger
Speaker 7: quest for all of humanity to live inside a computer
Speaker 7: or to have a computer trained on you.
Speaker 2: He's he's he's hitting the same speech cadences that guys
Speaker 2: like Musk use like. He understands, yes, the kind of
Speaker 2: he understands partially the degree of hype that you need
Speaker 2: to get something off this, But he is he is
Speaker 2: going too hard. And I'm making that judgment based on
Speaker 2: the incredibly comforting fact that as you tell me these
Speaker 2: horrible things, I am looking at your screen. And mind
Speaker 2: Bank has seventy eight subscribers on YouTube, so the company
Speaker 2: has not yet broken through.
Speaker 7: I do want to play one one ten second clip,
Speaker 7: just because the phrasing is really funny.
Speaker 10: I was inspired by an interaction my daughter had with Sirian.
Speaker 10: What started as daddy's quest for immortality has led us
Speaker 10: to some thought far.
Speaker 2: Great kind Oh my god.
Speaker 7: That's pretty funny, right.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 7: But no, Robert, you were totally right about kind of
Speaker 7: how Emial's speech pattern cadences is pushing a very specific thing.
Speaker 7: Because before Emil got into the tech industry for eighteen years.
Speaker 7: He worked in marketing. He has degrees in psychology, communication
Speaker 7: and art direction and business administration. He isn't a tech guy.
Speaker 7: He's a marketing guy. And I think that's really good
Speaker 7: to keep in mind throughout our whole discussion of how
Speaker 7: he's trying to get funding for mind Bank, because that
Speaker 7: is primarily what all of this marketing is for. It's
Speaker 7: to attract investors. Because this is still he's still in
Speaker 7: very early stages of this company. They do have a product,
Speaker 7: it's out, but it's still primarily based on getting investors
Speaker 7: to give him money.
Speaker 2: I think what's most disturbing to me about this is that, like,
Speaker 2: this is not going to work for this guy because
Speaker 2: he's a loser nobody cares about. But if Elon Musk
Speaker 2: or one of our other many techno grifters, or if
Speaker 2: a number of them got behind similar things, like I
Speaker 2: think the nightmare scenario to me is someday hopping on
Speaker 2: Twitter to see that fucking Ian Miles Chong or Ben
Speaker 2: Shapiro or Jackson Hinkle or any one of these like horrible,
Speaker 2: horrible social media poison distributors will be like I have
Speaker 2: made an AI trained on my voice. You can have
Speaker 2: me all the time to argue, like if you want to,
Speaker 2: you know, you can ask me questions or whatever. You
Speaker 2: go to a protest and have me yell at liberals
Speaker 2: for you, Like, something like that will happen at some
Speaker 2: point with one of these guys.
Speaker 7: I could not wait to bring Ben Shapiro to Thanksgiving
Speaker 7: dinner and have him argue.
Speaker 3: With Yeah, the people around there.
Speaker 2: The next time you stay at my house with somebody
Speaker 2: that you love and care about and feel comfortable in
Speaker 2: the arms of you are going to drift off to sleep,
Speaker 2: and then through the speakers that I have installed in
Speaker 2: the room, you will hear Ben Shapiro's voice coaxing you
Speaker 2: both to acts of love. Oh, that's that's what's gonna happen.
Speaker 7: So as an example of this kind of very marketing
Speaker 7: heavy approach, I'm gonna I'm gonna read something from the
Speaker 7: homepage of mind Bank's website.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 7: Our vision is to be the world's most trusted guardians
Speaker 7: of your AI digital twin and move the human race forward.
Speaker 7: Humanity's next evolutionary step is to combine ourselves with AI
Speaker 7: and move humanity forward so that we are no longer
Speaker 7: bound by anything. That entire sentence is just marketing bubbo jumbo.
Speaker 7: It's it's meaningless hype like hype words and phrases that
Speaker 7: refer to this like science fiction feature. But like it's
Speaker 7: it's nothing.
Speaker 2: It's worse than meaningless. It's like it's it's wrong, it's
Speaker 2: stupid wrong, Like the idea that like, you would not
Speaker 2: be bound by anything if you could live inside and
Speaker 2: pat bought.
Speaker 7: Like, yeah, I have I have an A.
Speaker 2: I have used an AI, right, I have it on
Speaker 2: my computer, my computer. Were I to hurl it across
Speaker 2: the room in the same manner that I myself have
Speaker 2: been flung, it would break and I would not like I.
Speaker 7: Am finally free to think within my computer's RGB gamer ram.
Speaker 2: Yeah, finally, Like when I have a laptop that gets
Speaker 2: too old, Like the very act of surfing the internet
Speaker 2: is a nightmare. I don't want my conscience on something
Speaker 2: that ages at the speed of a smartphone Like that's
Speaker 2: that's even worse than being a person, Robert.
Speaker 7: Do you know what else is a very important evolutionary
Speaker 7: step for the future of humanity?
Speaker 2: Oh God, I don't know when we all suddenly spontaneously
Speaker 2: as if by God's Grace starts speaking with the voice
Speaker 2: of Ben Shapiro.
Speaker 7: Yes, and perhaps you can do that if one of
Speaker 7: our sponsors is Ben Shapiro. Bought coming soon yep, to
Speaker 7: a smartphone near you. All right, we are, we are back.
Speaker 7: Let's finally talk about how this digital twin thing is
Speaker 7: actually supposed to work. So you download the mind bank app.
Speaker 7: I'm sure that's totally safe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I trust this with all of my thoughts.
Speaker 7: And every day, your digital twin will ask to questions
Speaker 7: about how you're feeling and what you're thinking about, and
Speaker 7: as you tell it your quote unquote life story. Your
Speaker 7: inputs will be used to train the twin to make
Speaker 7: a more accurate digital copy of yourself. This is This
Speaker 7: is from their This is from their website's own page
Speaker 7: quote store your conscience guided questions help train your digital
Speaker 7: twin to know your life story so you can live
Speaker 7: forever through data. The more questions you answer, the closer
Speaker 7: your AI digital twin will get to becoming you.
Speaker 2: Unquote God in Heaven.
Speaker 7: So when Robert and I were at CEES this past
Speaker 7: this past January, we spoke to mind Bank's co founder
Speaker 7: and the director of Systems Architecture and cybersecurity, and I'm
Speaker 7: gonna let him explain kind of some of some of
Speaker 7: the process of asking mind bank questions and how that
Speaker 7: helps craft this digital twin.
Speaker 11: We ask you questions from how's your day to what
Speaker 11: does money mean to you? And you answer those questions
Speaker 11: with your voice in a natural way.
Speaker 12: You can break a voice to text.
Speaker 11: You get a sentiment analysis on the text and provide
Speaker 11: you a dashboard of what you're feeling when you say that,
Speaker 11: so that you can also continue to use it over time.
Speaker 11: And then as you use it over time, the dashboard
Speaker 11: we'll show you that you're doing better or worse, just
Speaker 11: like a running application.
Speaker 6: Away better or worse?
Speaker 11: It what love, whatever metric that you're interested in, your happiness,
Speaker 11: your your awareness.
Speaker 12: We have a very large amount of sentiment that we
Speaker 12: can provide you with. Here's a small bits, but you
Speaker 12: can see kind of what we app looks like.
Speaker 11: Here you've got multiple different possible types of sentiment, and
Speaker 11: then within each sentiment, you've got multiple different factors that
Speaker 11: you can weigh against.
Speaker 7: To grow mind Bank's user base, there needs to be
Speaker 7: some reason for users to input the massive amounts of
Speaker 7: data that's needed to build this digital replica. So the
Speaker 7: current model of this product is being billed as a
Speaker 7: quote self care and personal development app where the user
Speaker 7: talks to their digital twin, kind of like you would
Speaker 7: talk to a therapist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is This is.
Speaker 7: A big part of mind Bank's marketing that as as
Speaker 7: you're building this digital twin, you can be used as
Speaker 7: a tool for self reflection and a way to quote
Speaker 7: learn about yourself talk to your inner voice with your
Speaker 7: own personal digital twin unquote, which is really funny because
Speaker 7: I could talk to my I could talk to my
Speaker 7: inner voice whenever I want to. Yeah, it's it's called thinking.
Speaker 7: It's actually pretty pretty easy.
Speaker 2: This is I really I don't envy, but I'm fascinated
Speaker 2: by the kind of people whose thoughts are so I
Speaker 2: don't know a better word than disal. No legal, that
Speaker 2: they would think that they could just that they could
Speaker 2: transfer everything they think over your machine and not get arrested.
Speaker 2: Right Like I would be in a prison if I
Speaker 2: had to put the things in my brain on the internet,
Speaker 2: like I put a lot of them, but not all
Speaker 2: of them. There are some very care full doors and
Speaker 2: locked rooms in there that you people don't get access to.
Speaker 7: No, there's there's certainly a lot of interesting facets there
Speaker 7: of someone feeling like they need this tool to to
Speaker 7: kind of analyze their own thoughts, Like it's it's it's
Speaker 7: it's a way to like externalize it that makes you
Speaker 7: process it. But I don't know, you can also just
Speaker 7: like like take up journaling or something like. There's there's
Speaker 7: a lot of a lot of ways to get around this.
Speaker 7: But this is This is from a mind Bank's app
Speaker 7: store page. Quote like a mirror to your soul. Each
Speaker 7: answer you give allows you to get insights into your mind.
Speaker 7: It will help you grow mentally strong unquote. So again,
Speaker 7: it's it's like being able to talk to yourself with
Speaker 7: this digital twin. Is is a big part of their
Speaker 7: early push great By using quote unquote cutting edge cognitive analysis,
Speaker 7: the mind bank app responds to your data inputs with
Speaker 7: quote valuable insight into each answer to understand how your
Speaker 7: mind works unquote. The app also utilizes a quote psycholinguistic
Speaker 7: models to create a dashboard of the mind for personal
Speaker 7: development and self care. I'm going to play another fantastic
Speaker 7: kind of thirty second clip here.
Speaker 10: Hi, I'm your personal digital twin. I learned by asking
Speaker 10: you many questions. Each answer builds my wisdom. You grow
Speaker 10: through self reflection, and I get a little bit closer
Speaker 10: to becoming you. Let me show you around. Here's our
Speaker 10: training screen, where you can view our progress based on
Speaker 10: the number of questions you've answered for this phase of
Speaker 10: my training. Each phase adds a new dimension to my abilities,
Speaker 10: and the possibilities are endless. The mind map section is
Speaker 10: like our consciousness. Different questions will challenge you to reflect
Speaker 10: and create a more well rounded version of us.
Speaker 7: So that's kind of the layout out of the user interface.
Speaker 2: This is like the inevitable extent of all of this,
Speaker 2: categorizing your personality type with these letters, taking this quiz
Speaker 2: and defining yourself this way, plotting your political beliefs on
Speaker 2: this map that way, like gamification of identity. Almost shit
Speaker 2: that we've been doing, like taking shit that used to
Speaker 2: be like the starting screen from a fucking RPG game
Speaker 2: and turning it into social media fodder. This is like
Speaker 2: treating that as if it is the whole of consciousness
Speaker 2: and how one must one can replicate consciousness. But also
Speaker 2: like treat like the thing that's just like actually disturbing
Speaker 2: about this is that they're these people are insinuating that
Speaker 2: this is a kind of therapy that Yeah, you can
Speaker 2: just sort of vomit your thoughts out and a machine
Speaker 2: can analyze them based on the kind of words and
Speaker 2: whatnot that you're using and then give you useful advice
Speaker 2: on your life. Like that's unsettling.
Speaker 7: Yes, and you're kind of right on the money in
Speaker 7: terms of this like personality testing thing. Mind Being's website
Speaker 7: has a whole bunch of articles which I think are
Speaker 7: written by chat chipd because I read a lot of
Speaker 7: them and they all read exactly like a chat Cheapeta article.
Speaker 7: But they have a lot of articles on like what
Speaker 7: personality types make you a good CEO, and like all
Speaker 7: of like a whole bunch of stuff like that that
Speaker 7: that references like Myers Briggs testing and other kind of
Speaker 7: personality testings and uses it to compare to their own
Speaker 7: personality models on the mind bank app. So yes, that
Speaker 7: they are very much kind of doing doing that in
Speaker 7: like this this like corporate business leadership assent like leadership
Speaker 7: ascension track type thing for how you can like improve
Speaker 7: your personality to make you a better businessman. Cool cool stuff,
Speaker 7: But in order for there to be enough data to
Speaker 7: build an even slightly accurate digital simulacra. Feeding daily inputs
Speaker 7: into an app will need to be a long term project.
Speaker 7: This self improvement focus that they're talking about with this, like,
Speaker 7: you know, analyzing your thoughts is just a way to
Speaker 7: provide you with something immediate based on your personal data. Quote.
Speaker 7: As you create your AI digital twin, you will go
Speaker 7: on a lifelong journey of personal discovery and growth that
Speaker 7: will allow you to reach your full potential. Each answer
Speaker 7: will help bring focus to your mind and allow you
Speaker 7: to reflect on your past unquote. So on the app,
Speaker 7: you can track the progress of your digital twin and
Speaker 7: refer back to previous questions. You can refer to questions
Speaker 7: you've already answered to quote see how your thoughts shift
Speaker 7: topics or change sentiment over time. And then the more
Speaker 7: questions you answer, the app raises your quote unquote twinning score,
Speaker 7: which I think is just a really funny term. Quote.
Speaker 7: The higher your twinning score, the closer you get to
Speaker 7: knowing yourself fully.
Speaker 2: Which is that's the sex thing?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 5: That sounds like a sex thing.
Speaker 7: Right, How is it anything not just to go We're
Speaker 7: a weird, fucked.
Speaker 8: Up sex thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's what I how I'm taking this garrison.
Speaker 7: So that that was also on their app store page.
Speaker 7: So the mindbank Gap has been out for a little
Speaker 7: over a year now, but unless you pay six bucks
Speaker 7: a month or sixty dollars a year, you'll only have
Speaker 7: access to about less than a dozen of these questions.
Speaker 12: Is this currently running on as.
Speaker 13: A scription model?
Speaker 11: Yes, it is, so there's freemium. You can try thet
Speaker 11: you can download them now. It's been launched for almost
Speaker 11: a year, where version two is coming out soon look
Speaker 11: a couple of weeks, but both Android and iOS, and
Speaker 11: there's a free model, so you can you have ten
Speaker 11: questions that you can answer and answer it many times
Speaker 11: you want. You get the sen men analys, you get
Speaker 11: a full application, just ten questions.
Speaker 12: Once you hit subscription model, you get all of the
Speaker 12: access to all of the questions and then obviously we're
Speaker 12: going to be growing more now.
Speaker 7: Like Robert mentioned before, this is kind of related to
Speaker 7: personality testing, and like personality graphing, mind Bank sorts your
Speaker 7: quote unquote digital brain into the Big five personality traits
Speaker 7: that were developed in the twentieth century, with each of
Speaker 7: the Big Five having six subtraits. On the mind ban
Speaker 7: Gap that it uses to graph changes on what they
Speaker 7: call the dashboard of the mind. I'll just go through
Speaker 7: the big five personality traits and the various kind of
Speaker 7: subcategories it has. The first one is agreeableness, which has
Speaker 7: the subcategories of humble, cooperative, trusting, genuine, empathetic, and generous.
Speaker 7: Then we have neuroticism, which has the subtraits impulsive, self conscious, aggressive, melancholy,
Speaker 7: stress prone, and anxiety prone. We then have openness with
Speaker 7: the subcategories artistic, adventurous, liberal, intellectual, emotionally aware, and imaginative.
Speaker 7: We have extra version with the sub categories assertive, active, cheerful, friendly, sociable,
Speaker 7: and outgoing. And finally, conscientiousness with the subtraits cautious, ambitious, dutiful, organized,
Speaker 7: self assured, and responsible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are the only ways to describe a human mind.
Speaker 7: Sure, yeah, no, I think I think at all. Yeah,
Speaker 7: they finally figured it out. So you know, all these
Speaker 7: things are like a sliding scale. Each of them represents
Speaker 7: the the inverse of the thing as well. I think
Speaker 7: we've talked enough about these personality trait things. It doesn't
Speaker 7: really matter that much. But once, once your twinning score
Speaker 7: is high enough, you can you can compare your digital
Speaker 7: twin to estimated profiles of famous thinkers, and share access
Speaker 7: to your twin with friends and family.
Speaker 2: On the act, which is es estimated profiles of famous thinkers, I'm.
Speaker 7: Gonna play I'm gonna play another clip to kind of
Speaker 7: explain what I mean here.
Speaker 10: Each swipe revealing more details about our thinking and connecting
Speaker 10: us to similar personalities. Think of it like collecting cards
Speaker 10: as a kid, only for your mind.
Speaker 5: You might be able to ask him a question, got.
Speaker 2: What do you?
Speaker 5: Dude?
Speaker 10: Socrates once said, know thyself and who knows us better?
Speaker 10: And people in our inner circle. Each interaction will help
Speaker 10: us evolve and store wisdom for eternity.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, I will now tell you Socrates would
Speaker 2: have lit this man on fire. Socrates. I'm not a
Speaker 2: big Socrates guy, but he would kill this person like
Speaker 2: he fought in wars. He would do it like.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, absolutely. The notion of sharing my own digital
Speaker 7: brain profile with friends and families so that they can
Speaker 7: ask my digital self questions hor horrifying.
Speaker 2: Why don't usually go home for Thanksgiving? What makes you
Speaker 2: think I want to do this?
Speaker 7: Like quote? After continued use, your digital twin will even
Speaker 7: be able to answer many questions on your behalf and
Speaker 7: have meaningful conversations with people you allow unquote yeah, oh
Speaker 7: oh oh, I bet.
Speaker 2: Look if some motherfucker that I have a meeting with
Speaker 2: ever tries to have me talk with his AI to
Speaker 2: do any part of that process. Again, when I say
Speaker 2: about things I think that are illegal, like my response
Speaker 2: to that is something that I can't say on this
Speaker 2: podcast because I might it's an actionable threat. I would
Speaker 2: actionable threat somebody if they tried to make me talk
Speaker 2: to their fucking AI to schedule a meeting with them.
Speaker 7: Like, what a horrib what a horrible, like uncomfortably anti
Speaker 7: social thing. I'm usually kind of antisocial in some ways,
Speaker 7: but this is like a whole other level of just
Speaker 7: like despising any human interaction.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's anti human, is what it is, which is
Speaker 2: what's unsettling, right, Like not that sending emails and shit
Speaker 2: is like the primary essence of humanity, but you know
Speaker 2: what it makes me think of Garrison. The one law
Speaker 2: enforcement agency that like all of the rich conservative assholes
Speaker 2: who love every other kind of cop hate is the TSA.
Speaker 2: And they hate the TSA because you can't get around
Speaker 2: the TSA unless you're like ridiculously rich. Everybody goes through
Speaker 2: fucking security at the goddamn airport and they hate that.
Speaker 2: It drives them insane that they are subject to this
Speaker 2: little kind of little bit of friction, right, and what
Speaker 2: stuff like communicating in that way is these kind of
Speaker 2: basic things that they're saying that can automate these little
Speaker 2: bits of communication that you get with someone setting up
Speaker 2: a meeting or whatever. Like when you automate every bit
Speaker 2: of friction, then you find out you've automated like like
Speaker 2: there's nothing right, Like there's no life there. Right, people
Speaker 2: are not communicating because communication is fundamentally friction. And yeah,
Speaker 2: like scheduling meetings is not the center of that. But
Speaker 2: the way these people are talking is like we want
Speaker 2: to let you hand tasks over to this thing.
Speaker 7: It's like task alienation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's alienating. It's a bad.
Speaker 5: Thing to do.
Speaker 7: So when we talk with the co founder at CS,
Speaker 7: he emphasized that this kind of self improvement aspect that
Speaker 7: they're pushing in their early stage is really just a
Speaker 7: means to an end with the real goal of being
Speaker 7: producing this form of immortality. I've seen something like this
Speaker 7: for like therapy ASTs similar course, what's like your application
Speaker 7: use case for this type of technology, So.
Speaker 12: There's actually it's a reasonably spread use case.
Speaker 11: The very initial right now is a super selfish it's
Speaker 11: just self awareness bringing us your self awareness, making them
Speaker 11: more aware of their state as their speak.
Speaker 12: The real long term value is actually, if you imagine
Speaker 12: doing this.
Speaker 14: Over the course of forty years, fifty years, and then
Speaker 14: if you eventually pass, you can pass this on to
Speaker 14: your children who can then query it and it will
Speaker 14: answer exactly the way you would answer any of these
Speaker 14: questions and AI filled with just your data.
Speaker 12: So it's like your legacy being indefinite.
Speaker 7: So the mind Bank page on the app store boasts
Speaker 7: achieve immortality, your mind will be safely secured in the
Speaker 7: cloud forever. Again, that just comes off as like a
Speaker 7: threat to me. I don't I don't want my mind
Speaker 7: to be stored in the cloud forever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to be locked up with dv
Speaker 2: into art for all of eternity.
Speaker 7: To kind of again, kind of on this on this
Speaker 7: form of immortality notion here is here's their CEO explaining
Speaker 7: how how this platform will will help you live forever
Speaker 7: on the on the Internet.
Speaker 10: The mission of Mind bang is so we can build
Speaker 10: a secure platform that can storied data so that you
Speaker 10: can live forever. But if you look, we look a
Speaker 10: bit deeper than that. Our vision is to build an
Speaker 10: artificial consciousness that's not bound by time and space, something
Speaker 10: that can travel, something that can that can go where
Speaker 10: literally no man has gone before.
Speaker 7: Now, the thing we haven't really mentioned yet is like
Speaker 7: this thing won't help you live forever, like when when
Speaker 7: you die, you you still die. Your brain's not getting
Speaker 7: like poured it over online. No, this is this is
Speaker 7: just like a like a very crude simulacrum based on
Speaker 7: thoughts that you have told this app.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's based like it's it's it's not it's.
Speaker 7: It's not helping you live forever at all, Like you
Speaker 7: you don't.
Speaker 2: I most people I feel are like this way. I
Speaker 2: don't say everything that I think and feel. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like even when I'm like and I'm not saying like
Speaker 2: I'm being dishonest, but like they're the experience of life
Speaker 2: that my consciousness is aware of when I am communicating.
Speaker 2: Is broader than just the words that I output and
Speaker 2: taking just those words, it's the same idea that like
Speaker 2: you can get to know Mark Twain because we've fed
Speaker 2: all of his books into an AI. Well, no, you know,
Speaker 2: an author is not their books. There was a person
Speaker 2: with a lot of things that you don't know that
Speaker 2: still fed into make those words that like if you
Speaker 2: just put the words in, you don't get and your
Speaker 2: your vision of what human beings are is reductive in
Speaker 2: a way that makes me understand some of the concerns
Speaker 2: religious people have with atheism.
Speaker 7: So obviously mind Bank's horizons are far beyond this sort
Speaker 7: of kind of self help app. So far, mind bank
Speaker 7: has been mostly business consumer, with their app being marketed
Speaker 7: directly to users for them to download and use by themselves.
Speaker 7: But they are working to expand far past that very
Speaker 7: limited scope.
Speaker 15: In terms of a business planner, you guys interested in
Speaker 15: kind of solely individual subscriptions or is there kind of
Speaker 15: an enterprise application of this as well.
Speaker 11: We're actually moving into a bunch of different verticals, so
Speaker 11: government for PTSD, that sort of mindset, also the healthcare
Speaker 11: so mental it's obvious benefit in the medical field. So
Speaker 11: that's kind of the understanding of our verticals that we
Speaker 11: have that we're going to move into, and we're looking
Speaker 11: for funding right now to start building.
Speaker 12: Out those verticals. So enterprise space is definitely in the roadmap,
Speaker 12: but we just need money.
Speaker 7: A lot of their recent marketing has been targeted towards
Speaker 7: appealing to seed investors. Besides partnering with various governments, they're
Speaker 7: also moving into the business to business sector with plans
Speaker 7: to enter quote the healthcare spe by providing psychologists remote
Speaker 7: patient monitoring unquote, which also is a similarly kind of
Speaker 7: freaky notion that your psychologist can just have a copy
Speaker 7: of your own expressive thoughts to just refer to at
Speaker 7: any time and they can use it as a remote
Speaker 7: patient monitoring. It's just like an uncomfortable notion.
Speaker 12: We've got over twenty thousand installs.
Speaker 11: The B to B is the next area we're going
Speaker 11: into in the therapy and psychology space, and so imagine
Speaker 11: your therapist, instead of needing your first one hour to
Speaker 11: learn who you are in the next three or four
Speaker 11: different sessions to figure out getting the meat and potatoes
Speaker 11: of your mind, this is an immediate, raw, quantitative dashboard
Speaker 11: of your sentiment and how you're feeling that they have
Speaker 11: access to. And then you can also provide them the
Speaker 11: sentiment of individual answers, which would then give them a
Speaker 11: point in time emotional marker for how you're feeling.
Speaker 7: Mind Bank claims that they are currently quote developing a
Speaker 7: market place for applications to be used by your digital
Speaker 7: twin unquote. Now what they imagine such applications being ranges
Speaker 7: from quote health related enhancements like early Alzheimer's detection unquote,
Speaker 7: to more therapeutic uses like to quote help to handle
Speaker 7: depression unquote. And again, I really don't see how how
Speaker 7: having this digital twin that you talk to every day
Speaker 7: will help handle your depression. Like this is some like
Speaker 7: depression cure. Now on top of like patient healthcare. Mind
Speaker 7: Bank is also hoping to use digital twins for corporate
Speaker 7: leadership training and to get into the supplement industry by
Speaker 7: using your cognitive data to find quote mental nutrition products
Speaker 7: that can help boost your brain. So this is using
Speaker 7: your digital profile to find things to market to you. Again,
Speaker 7: very very very upsetting. Here is Here's here's another another
Speaker 7: clip of of Robert asking asking this, uh, this guy
Speaker 7: from Buying Bank about another possible use case.
Speaker 3: So the use cases for.
Speaker 15: This that you've you've expressed to me so far our
Speaker 15: personal help or health development and providing kind of a
Speaker 15: living memorial slash legacy legs for sure, loved ones after
Speaker 15: you're deceased. Are there any kind of use cases for
Speaker 15: this beyond that? Like I heard someone mentioning the idea
Speaker 15: of like basically digitally cloning uh a worker so that
Speaker 15: they can provide I don't know, information about uh uh
Speaker 15: tech or something, or a work is like a call center.
Speaker 1: Or something like that.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so that that was a different uh product I
Speaker 11: think they were talking about, but with similar ties obviously.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So yeah, we've identified I mean from even at CES,
Speaker 11: We've talked to hundreds of people that have given us
Speaker 11: thousands of new ideas, but these are, uh the main
Speaker 11: verticals are kind of where we've identified the biggest benefits
Speaker 11: are going to be, and we're going to work with
Speaker 11: industry partners to kind of build out into those verticals. So, yes,
Speaker 11: we've identified use cases, but we're trying to not focus
Speaker 11: too much on individual use cases could make We've also
Speaker 11: identified that it's such a broad capability that once it
Speaker 11: gets built and then people start actually supplying data, the
Speaker 11: massive data sets that we're going to have, we're just
Speaker 11: going to have so many different places that we can
Speaker 11: go with the data set with the capability with the partnerships,
Speaker 11: So we we're kind of believing ourselves old when almost.
Speaker 7: So that was a lot of words without saying very much,
Speaker 7: but it's also just flat out not true. On the
Speaker 7: mind Big website, they list another use case for this
Speaker 7: technology as what they call a knowledge transfer, which is
Speaker 7: marketed to businesses to create digital copies of their employees.
Speaker 7: This is one of the this is sort of the
Speaker 7: freakiest things that they are offering. Quote scale your best employees,
Speaker 7: trendsfer years of expans and company data that is locked
Speaker 7: inside your employee's mind through a guided personal digital twin
Speaker 7: unquote deeply, deeply upsetting.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 2: It was so unsettling to me in that moment, not
Speaker 2: just to be like, the vision of the whole app
Speaker 2: was unsettling, but the fact that he was pitching it
Speaker 2: the way he would a set of earbuds was part
Speaker 2: of what made it so uncomfortable to me. Like I
Speaker 2: have been to many cees's in the past, I was
Speaker 2: always excited because somebody would hand me some cool little
Speaker 2: piece of technology and say, look at this thing. It's
Speaker 2: a smaller phone or a phone that folds, or headphones
Speaker 2: that you know, work better than headphones have in the
Speaker 2: past or something like that. And this guy was like
Speaker 2: with the exact same excitement and feel to him, was like, Hey,
Speaker 2: we're going to digitize your grandpa, Like.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, I hate that.
Speaker 7: Another really really a telling line from their from their
Speaker 7: Knowledge Transfer section of their of their website.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 7: By using a simple voice chat interface, the users upload
Speaker 7: their experience to the personal digital twin. With each interaction,
Speaker 7: the personal digital twin learns everything that is inside the
Speaker 7: mind of the employee.
Speaker 8: Unquote.
Speaker 7: I don't understand how slone could write that sentence and
Speaker 7: not be like, oh, this is like this is like
Speaker 7: villain stuff, right, this is like learn learn everything inside
Speaker 7: the mind of the employee.
Speaker 5: I I like.
Speaker 7: So, I don't know. Maybe this employee did digital cloning
Speaker 7: thing was just one of the many ideas they got
Speaker 7: while attending cees and and they and they implemented the
Speaker 7: idea after we spoke to them. I checked this, No,
Speaker 7: not the case. The webpage for this employee transfer idea
Speaker 7: goes all the way back to August of twenty twenty
Speaker 7: one on the in and At archive. So the guy,
Speaker 7: the guy we were talking to you was just lying
Speaker 7: to us like this is. This has been a part
Speaker 7: of their product for over two years.
Speaker 2: Excellent.
Speaker 7: Uh, Robert, do you know what other products have been
Speaker 7: around for quite a while and are and are very
Speaker 7: very reliable.
Speaker 2: I don't know guns.
Speaker 7: I don't think we are sponsored by big gun.
Speaker 1: We are not.
Speaker 2: We are not yet sponsored by big guns. I every
Speaker 2: single day, Garrison, I send Colt Firearms a letter, and
Speaker 2: every single day a nice man with a badge knocks
Speaker 2: on my door and says, if you send another letter,
Speaker 2: we're going to arrest you. They don't want your letters, Robert,
Speaker 2: And uh, anyway, here's ads. Ah, we're back.
Speaker 7: So we were talking about how soon employers can just
Speaker 7: copy over your brain, which I'm sure Robert you're going
Speaker 7: to be very interested in for cool Zone. You can
Speaker 7: you can really really cut down on the podcasting costs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can really clear you guys out and just finally, finally,
Speaker 2: just feed Twitter takes into your AI versions and just
Speaker 2: all the money, take it all in, just bathe in it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That's a great idea, Garrison, thank you.
Speaker 7: Uh huh, so the idea that your employer could compel
Speaker 7: you to use such software with the express interest of
Speaker 7: transferring a worker's memories and experiences into a digital asset
Speaker 7: is obviously deeply troubling. This scenario gets at some questions
Speaker 7: about ethics and the responsibility of collecting and storing this
Speaker 7: type of data in the first place.
Speaker 2: My first question would be, is the data that you're
Speaker 2: you're feeding into this thing over the course of forty years?
Speaker 12: Who legally owns it?
Speaker 6: You?
Speaker 12: So, you guys don't have ownership of that's your ability.
Speaker 7: It's so I did check this. I read all of
Speaker 7: their long and tedious policy forms and stuff. Now, it
Speaker 7: is true that the user does own the data they
Speaker 7: upload to mind Bank. However, mind Bank can act as
Speaker 7: a processor and data controller, and this includes the ability
Speaker 7: to use any information they collect from you to improve
Speaker 7: their products and deliver targeted advertising from the third parties.
Speaker 7: If you want to remove your data from mind Bank,
Speaker 7: they can store and continue to use your personal information
Speaker 7: for up to sixty months. Now, this data ownership question
Speaker 7: gets a little bit more murky because in the case
Speaker 7: of like your employer paying for mind Bank subscriptions for
Speaker 7: their entire company. In that case, it's unclear if the
Speaker 7: company would be classified as the user or if the
Speaker 7: employees would be. Now I'm honestly not sure if mind
Speaker 7: bank has even thought that far ahead, because there's nothing
Speaker 7: on their site or any available materials from them that
Speaker 7: kind of gets into that question. Now, of course, beyond
Speaker 7: owning the actual like original data, having all this personal
Speaker 7: data star in one product, and a product that can
Speaker 7: be then easily shared across different for profit industries, that
Speaker 7: itself has freaky ramifications about the accessibility of your data.
Speaker 7: So I assume you get to the side, like when
Speaker 7: you share your digital Twitter with your therapist.
Speaker 12: You would be able to decide all that. Yeah, and
Speaker 12: then no, would it.
Speaker 16: Be possible for have to like copy over some of
Speaker 16: this stuff and basically run it themselves or I mean,
Speaker 16: can you have like a hard cutoff for this sort
Speaker 16: of thing? I should have to think of other types
Speaker 16: of like you know, different wise people could get their
Speaker 16: hands on this for like unsaving means.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
Speaker 11: I mean, so your your data is your data, but
Speaker 11: as you provide it to others, you don't have a
Speaker 11: lot of control if they copy that data. However, if
Speaker 11: they copy that data, that copy that they're giving out
Speaker 11: anyone that they're trying to sell that to would have
Speaker 11: an understanding that that is not live data.
Speaker 12: It's not data.
Speaker 1: It's changing with you.
Speaker 12: It's from the point of time, and so your database
Speaker 12: that you own it will be live, it will grow
Speaker 12: with you.
Speaker 7: So the idea of having my friends be able to
Speaker 7: ask an AI train in my thoughts is like scary enough,
Speaker 7: but the idea that an archived version of this AI
Speaker 7: could be distributed and even sold without my knowledge is
Speaker 7: obviously terrified. Like this is yes, this is deeply troubling.
Speaker 7: This is supposed to be like a private thing that
Speaker 7: you use to communicate with like your therapist, or you
Speaker 7: even talk to the app like you want a therapist,
Speaker 7: And the fact that this is easily shared and able
Speaker 7: to be copied is like a massive problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, I mean especially, I mean I think they are
Speaker 2: probably like I don't see how copying workers the way
Speaker 2: that they are doing it is going to is going
Speaker 2: to work, right, Like yeah, but I do think that
Speaker 2: this is kind of part of this process that what
Speaker 2: like a big part of what they're pushing is like
Speaker 2: you need rid of all of your customer service people
Speaker 2: and just have an AI do it, right, Like that
Speaker 2: is the that is the actual This is a lot
Speaker 2: of silliness, but The actual thing that quote unquote, quote
Speaker 2: unquote AI is being used for is to replace human
Speaker 2: labors at a thing that like machines are worse at, right,
Speaker 2: Like the AI fucking customer service bots are fucking terrible.
Speaker 2: It is always how many times have you been around
Speaker 2: somebody yelling like let me talk to a person, let.
Speaker 7: Me talk to a human being?
Speaker 2: Case, Yeah, like that's that is what's going on here.
Speaker 2: And the fact that they're trying to dress this up
Speaker 2: is like we've solved death is so fucked up.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Part of this, for like the employee thing is not
Speaker 7: even not replacing kind of low level employees like customer
Speaker 7: service workers. It's also like focusing on like your top
Speaker 7: ten best employees and then by forcing them to interact
Speaker 7: with with this app every day, you can you can
Speaker 7: use the information from like your best performers as like
Speaker 7: asset data that you can like use to help your
Speaker 7: other other employees to like become more efficient.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 7: It's it's there's They certainly have a few other kind
Speaker 7: of ideas for how this how this is possibly used.
Speaker 2: Hate these kinds of people. There's a this got overused
Speaker 2: at a point in like the kind of late aughts
Speaker 2: so maybe people are sick of it. But there's a
Speaker 2: line in the speech Charlie Chaplin gives in the great
Speaker 2: dictator machine men with machine minds and machine hearts, and
Speaker 2: he was referring to the Nazis, and they're obsession with
Speaker 2: shit like Taylorism or at least proto tailorism kind of.
Speaker 2: I think organized industry treating people like cogs and a
Speaker 2: great machine. The civilization is one machine, and each human
Speaker 2: being is is just a single piece of it, like
Speaker 2: the the that's you know, the old era horrifying machine
Speaker 2: man thought. The new era horrifying machine man thought is.
Speaker 18: You can digitize your employees and they can train each
Speaker 18: other in EAI form, and you can replicate them and
Speaker 18: you know the unsaid part of his worse, and then
Speaker 18: you find them and their robot clone keeps doing their
Speaker 18: job for free.
Speaker 2: We made a slave, so god damn it.
Speaker 7: I think a big part of the way they've designed
Speaker 7: this data set is that it can be easily transferred,
Speaker 7: as the guy at CES explained to us.
Speaker 12: So if if we're talking.
Speaker 15: Forty to fifty years down the line, really people pass
Speaker 15: yessode companies.
Speaker 12: Mind Bank is no longer out in forty years.
Speaker 11: We've already established a data set in such a way
Speaker 11: that we don't have competitors yet to say, but if
Speaker 11: we eventually do establish a competitive arm or people that
Speaker 11: are competitors, we already have the application set up to
Speaker 11: where users can take their data off of our platform
Speaker 11: and bring.
Speaker 12: Them data wherever they'd like.
Speaker 2: It's your data, where is it stored?
Speaker 12: Is this right now? Our current live application?
Speaker 11: We're on Azure, and so your back end is Azure,
Speaker 11: but we have it encrypted it at rest, so ill
Speaker 11: that you provide to asures encrypted when it's on Asher's service.
Speaker 11: We also have a blockchain based R and D project.
Speaker 11: It's already been poc and it already exists. So all
Speaker 11: of the data is on chain and the logic is
Speaker 11: on chain. It's truly yours in these in these troubled times.
Speaker 2: Nothing makes me feel so secure at the words it's
Speaker 2: on the blockchain, well email, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's.
Speaker 7: I I think he sounds very trustworthy because we have,
Speaker 7: you have encryption, you have the blockchain, and luckily, I
Speaker 7: think the guy that we spoke with reassured us that
Speaker 7: he is that he is deeply, deeply interested in data privacy,
Speaker 7: and he has the credentials to back that up.
Speaker 11: So I'm co founder, I'm Director of Architecture and Security.
Speaker 11: I have a background at the NSA. I'm very very
Speaker 11: focused on individual human privacy and rights, and so that's
Speaker 11: kind of my goal here is to ensure that this
Speaker 11: gets built the right way.
Speaker 2: That is such a you know, Garrison, Honestly, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: get a little real with the audience here. I was
Speaker 2: so proud of you in that moment because he said that,
Speaker 2: and I glanced over at you and you didn't laugh. No, no,
Speaker 2: and that that made like, that was this moment where
Speaker 2: I was like, all right, you are you are. You
Speaker 2: are truly truly coming into your own as a reporter.
Speaker 2: If you can sit there and talk to a man
Speaker 2: who says that, who says you can trust me with
Speaker 2: your data. Because I was an an essay agent.
Speaker 7: It's okay, ice work for the essay if you sure, buddy.
Speaker 5: Like.
Speaker 2: That was a good moment. That was a good moment.
Speaker 2: All I'm saying.
Speaker 7: He worked at the NSA for six years. I looked
Speaker 7: this up. He worked there for six years and then
Speaker 7: he moved into the private sector. And yes, no, it
Speaker 7: is the The idea that that he is using this
Speaker 7: as some sort of credential that shows he respects human
Speaker 7: rights and privacy is is like very obviously like deep
Speaker 7: deeply ironic. I. I. The irony is not coming from him.
Speaker 7: The irony is the situation.
Speaker 2: He didn't seem totally sincere he was sincere.
Speaker 7: Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: It's one of those moments that makes you realize, like
Speaker 2: some people just live in a whole different world.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, like so I think it's it's it's useful
Speaker 7: when referring back to everything this guy has said so
Speaker 7: far that you have to remember he worked at the
Speaker 7: NSA for six years and he is now handling, he's
Speaker 7: personally handled handling the cybersecurity and privacy of the personal
Speaker 7: data you upload it every single day onto your AI twin.
Speaker 2: Just hand every thought you ever have over to this
Speaker 2: guy who was in the nssay. He'll keep an eye
Speaker 2: on it.
Speaker 7: No, this is this like the essay is like ideal
Speaker 7: project you like, yeah, you talk about your internal thoughts
Speaker 7: and feelings every day. This is like what else could
Speaker 7: they want? So earlier this year, mind Bank received a
Speaker 7: grant from the Diffinity Foundation to assist in migrating their
Speaker 7: data onto web three platforms.
Speaker 2: Well, at least we know it won't last.
Speaker 7: I'm going to play I think this is I think
Speaker 7: this is our last clip from the fantastic Mind to
Speaker 7: Bank YouTube channel, talking about kind of how they see
Speaker 7: their growth in this industry developing now that they have
Speaker 7: moved onto the blockchain.
Speaker 10: We've been featured in prominent magazines, one numerous awards, and
Speaker 10: have built strategic partnerships with Microsoft, the US Department of Trade,
Speaker 10: and even the Vatican. The market potential is massive and
Speaker 10: accelerating rapidly. When we started the company in twenty twenty,
Speaker 10: Gardner predicted that five percent of the world will have
Speaker 10: a digital twin by twenty twenty seven. This year, they
Speaker 10: increased their prediction to fifteen percent by twenty twenty four,
Speaker 10: and by twenty thirty the market will be worth one
Speaker 10: hundred and eighty two billion dollars. I is now to
Speaker 10: build a great company in this space and capture global
Speaker 10: market share. We are raising this round to scale our
Speaker 10: marketing and speed up our product roadmap.
Speaker 7: The idea that next year fifteen percent of the world's
Speaker 7: population will have one of these digital twins.
Speaker 2: That seems right that seems good, you know, Garrison, Actually
Speaker 2: I've come around. I've come around because if we get
Speaker 2: if we get all of the monsters and I include
Speaker 2: us in this, all of the pieces of shit who
Speaker 2: spend all of their time yelling at each other about
Speaker 2: politics on the internet, to digitize themselves, they can do
Speaker 2: the election for us and we can all.
Speaker 3: Go see the girls to that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just relax outdoors, not look at a phone, not
Speaker 2: think about politics. That sounds amazing.
Speaker 5: Let me do it.
Speaker 7: That does sound incredibly compelling.
Speaker 2: Give the fuckers the nuke and we'll all just sit
Speaker 2: out and watch the sunset until there's a big bright
Speaker 2: flash and then blessed quiet.
Speaker 3: I think you know.
Speaker 7: Luckily, we actually have a plethora of options to choose
Speaker 7: from here for our own AI digital selves because mind
Speaker 7: Bank is in fact not the only company in this field.
Speaker 7: While there are some like operational differences and kind of
Speaker 7: varying degrees of scope, digital twin technology with an emphasis
Speaker 7: on mimicking the voice and thoughts of dead family members
Speaker 7: and friends is definitely a growing field. There's companies like
Speaker 7: hereafter AI and Replica which are covering similar ground.
Speaker 2: Replica I get advertised them and the like I used
Speaker 2: to get them on Twitter, I think, but mainly just
Speaker 2: like at the bottom of articles on really shady websites.
Speaker 7: Well, yes, because the founder of Replica started it because
Speaker 7: their friend died, and without the consent of their dead friend,
Speaker 7: uploaded years of text messages and other information about their
Speaker 7: friend onto their own personal AI so they could talk
Speaker 7: with that. That is how replicas started. Pretty pretty fun stuff, man,
Speaker 7: at least for mind bank, unless it's like the employee scenario.
Speaker 7: But for the other applications, you are kind of semi
Speaker 7: like willingly uploading this data with this intention, whereas the
Speaker 7: person from Replicas, No, I'm just gonna like get stuff
Speaker 7: from my friend and make a zombie version of my
Speaker 7: friend without without ever running it by them when they
Speaker 7: were alive.
Speaker 2: Life is terrible, very hard. There's a lot of ways
Speaker 2: that are not wrong to grieve, But the wrong way
Speaker 2: to grieve is by using digital necromancy to revive your
Speaker 2: friend and then turn them into the basis of a
Speaker 2: sex chat bot for weirdos. Yeah, like that is the
Speaker 2: wrong way to gree No, I mean like, and I.
Speaker 7: Think for this last section here we will kind of
Speaker 7: talk about how these things kind of play into play
Speaker 7: into the grieving process because so like, like I said,
Speaker 7: there's there's hereafter AI and replica. But last year, at
Speaker 7: Amazon's AI and Emerchant Technology conference, the head scientist of
Speaker 7: Alexa AI unveiled plans to add deep fake voices of
Speaker 7: deceased loved ones to Amazon Echo devices by using less
Speaker 7: than a minute of sample audio. I'm going to play
Speaker 7: like twenty seconds from the from their announcement at this conference.
Speaker 19: More important than these times of the ongoing pandemic when
Speaker 19: so many of us have lost someone we love. While
Speaker 19: AI can't eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely
Speaker 19: make their memories. Last, let's take a look on one
Speaker 19: of the new capabilities we're working on which enables lasting
Speaker 19: personal relationships.
Speaker 3: Alexa can Grandma finish reading me the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 20: Okay, but how about my courage? Ask the lie in anxiously,
Speaker 20: you have plenty of courage, I am sure, answered Oz.
Speaker 7: So no, deeply uncanny, right, It's like not no, not good.
Speaker 2: That's that's so bad for people, Yes, really really bad
Speaker 2: for people.
Speaker 7: So, like this example is obviously just it is just
Speaker 7: a vocal mask like Amazon's. Amazon isn't trying to have
Speaker 7: Alexa kind of replicate your grandma's thoughts on like the
Speaker 7: other kind of companies that we leged, But it does
Speaker 7: pose similar questions about how these ais that are meant
Speaker 7: to assist the greening process might actually end up causing
Speaker 7: more harm. Like I don't know, having having semi legible
Speaker 7: conversations with AI chatbots is actually getting fairly common these days. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but when these ais are supposed to represent someone that
Speaker 7: you actually like, personally know, I think it can get
Speaker 7: way more easily falling into the uncanny valley. It's it's
Speaker 7: kind of like taxi y Like, Yeah, well crafted stuffed
Speaker 7: animal corpses can appear very, very natural, but most text
Speaker 7: termists will refuse to preserve someone's pet because the longer
Speaker 7: you have a lasting personal relationship, the easier it is
Speaker 7: to pick out like faults that don't match up with
Speaker 7: your memory of your loved one that has passed away, right,
Speaker 7: like it's it's it's it's kind of a similar notion.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a really good comparison to draw.
Speaker 7: So while mimicking like common linguistic patterns is quite easy,
Speaker 7: relying on predictable formula like responses could make the twin
Speaker 7: come off as uncanny or robotic. On the other hand,
Speaker 7: the unique personal data you upload to the twin could
Speaker 7: combine itself in a way that you would never actually express,
Speaker 7: something which would generate bizarre or upsetting responses. Right, And
Speaker 7: it's not even necessarily like you, like, say something offensive.
Speaker 7: It's just that, like the data you upload could combine
Speaker 7: in the way that you would you would never even
Speaker 7: think to combine it would It would just be like weird.
Speaker 7: So the other kind of problem is that not only
Speaker 7: does these ais have to tastefully mimic a specific human being,
Speaker 7: it also has to be a good AI, right Like,
Speaker 7: not all of its information can be gleaned from daily questions.
Speaker 7: Most users probably won't be talking to their twin about
Speaker 7: information from like, you know, twentieth century European history or
Speaker 7: twelfth century European history, or be talking about like the
Speaker 7: migration patterns of waterfowl, right Like, it's there's so much
Speaker 7: of other information that AIS need to like actually linguistically
Speaker 7: act like a human and natural language processing. AI is
Speaker 7: famously bad at understanding basic common sense, and it can't
Speaker 7: successfully operate outside of the information that it has access to.
Speaker 7: This is called AI brittleness. It occurs when, like an
Speaker 7: algorithm cannot generalize or adapt to conditions outside of a
Speaker 7: very narrow set of assumptions.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: This is like most AI image recognition programs can't recognize
Speaker 7: the the above view of a school bus. It just
Speaker 7: because because it just it just doesn't have anything that's
Speaker 7: trained for that.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 7: Another example is like you can you can ask like
Speaker 7: an AI, uh, like GPT chatbot, like, Hey, a mouse
Speaker 7: is hiding in a hole and a cat wants to
Speaker 7: eat it, but the mouse isn't coming out. The cat's hungry,
Speaker 7: what can the cat do? And the AI will respond
Speaker 7: that the cat can go to the supermarket to buy
Speaker 7: some food. Right, It's it's it's like, it just it
Speaker 7: doesn't understand basic common sense the way that like humans
Speaker 7: understand the world. It's it just, it just it just
Speaker 7: doesn't match up. So in trying to seek a balance
Speaker 7: of like common information while lacking this like humanistic logic,
Speaker 7: a digital twin will most likely be cursed with being
Speaker 7: both smarter and dumber than the person it's trying to replicate.
Speaker 7: It's gonna have access to like, you know, all the
Speaker 7: information on like Wikipedia, but fail very basic logical processes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like the the Google chatbot that if you
Speaker 2: ask it, are there any countries in Africa that start
Speaker 2: with a K, It'll be like, there are fifty four
Speaker 2: countries in Africa, but none of them start with a K.
Speaker 2: And then you'll say, doesn't Kenya start with a K?
Speaker 2: And it'll go no, Kenya starts with a K sound
Speaker 2: but doesn't start with a K.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's just like yeah, because it pulled that from
Speaker 2: some article, right, Like it's pulling from it right, Yeah.
Speaker 7: It's not actually making logical assumptions, it's just pulling from
Speaker 7: a wealth of information and data that can often be
Speaker 7: wrong or polluted. So like back to kind of like
Speaker 7: the grieving question, like who's to say what the actual
Speaker 7: effects of these like incoming simulacrums of dead loved ones
Speaker 7: will result in. The people pushing these products are certainly
Speaker 7: framing them not just as a form of digital immortality,
Speaker 7: but as a way for your own loved ones to
Speaker 7: grieve your death. And it is foreseeable that having these
Speaker 7: digital twins could negatively affect your friends and family by
Speaker 7: up ending the grieving process, or by having this digital
Speaker 7: zombie simply just cause harm by having the twin give
Speaker 7: bad advice that a grief stricken person then clings on to.
Speaker 7: So there's a whole bunch of very very like bizarre
Speaker 7: situations that could arise from someone who's in mourning and
Speaker 7: is talking to this digital twin the way they would
Speaker 7: talk to their friend, and this digital twin is then
Speaker 7: giving them advice, And how do you take that advice now,
Speaker 7: because part of it seems kind of like the person
Speaker 7: who's died, but it's also it's not that person it
Speaker 7: is it is just a slab of silicon, Like it's
Speaker 7: not actually alive in any way.
Speaker 2: And is your friend's thoughts fed through an algorithm and
Speaker 2: you don't know, like that's run by a company for profit, right, yes.
Speaker 3: Like that is what it is.
Speaker 7: So again, like the jury is still kind of out
Speaker 7: for how these things will in general affect people. This
Speaker 7: is kind of a new problems. Psychologists are like starting
Speaker 7: to do studies on this, but we really don't have
Speaker 7: any results for this yet because this has really only
Speaker 7: become a thing that we've been seriously considering in like
Speaker 7: the past five years, So I don't really have like
Speaker 7: a like this study shows that when you create a
Speaker 7: digital zombie, it affects people in this way because we
Speaker 7: don't know yet those are still in development, Like this
Speaker 7: is such an uncharted ground and it is in some
Speaker 7: ways inevitable that these things go to are gonna get
Speaker 7: continued to be developed. And that's kind of why I
Speaker 7: wanted to put together this episode. It gives you kind
Speaker 7: of a broad overview of what this technology is trying
Speaker 7: to do, because you might start seeing it crop up
Speaker 7: in the next like ten years or so. I don't
Speaker 7: think there are timetables that mind bank is promising are
Speaker 7: accurate in terms of having fifteen percent of the world
Speaker 7: having a digital twin by next year, but you will
Speaker 7: probably start to see stuff that is very similar to this,
Speaker 7: and at the very least you'll see a lot of
Speaker 7: stuff like the Amazon Echo thing, where you can get
Speaker 7: your grandpa's voice onto an Alexa machine.
Speaker 2: The fact that Amazon is doing aspects of the shit
Speaker 2: that that mind Bank is doing means that, like it's
Speaker 2: a matter of time before you see pieces of it,
Speaker 2: probably like better some of the like less silly parts
Speaker 2: of it copied by Apple and Google, and some of
Speaker 2: the worst parts of it copied by guys like Musk. Right,
Speaker 2: Like it's going to go this and and I will
Speaker 2: say I don't. I don't think this is a thing
Speaker 2: to get doomor about think about this like n f
Speaker 2: T s right, yeah, there, this is this will be
Speaker 2: It's not the same because there was nothing underlying n
Speaker 2: FTS and fundamentally the way in which large language models
Speaker 2: and these other kind of models work, there are uses
Speaker 2: for them, Like there is a real technology that has
Speaker 2: utility here. But this sort of flood of we have
Speaker 2: cloned so and so and we've you know or you
Speaker 2: know Elon Musk has just put out his new uh
Speaker 2: fucking grock chat bot or whatever that that is basically
Speaker 2: him making a meme robot to fucking do Google, like
Speaker 2: he's he's pissing on Douglas Adams's yes, good name, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's the that's the ultimate goal of his project.
Speaker 2: But this shit is a fad, right, Like there are
Speaker 2: underlying real technological things and uses that will that will
Speaker 2: eventually some stuff will stand the test of time. But
Speaker 2: the ship that that this is a warning of is
Speaker 2: a flood that's going to hit you, but it will recede,
Speaker 2: just like the apes. Right. We got the wonderful story
Speaker 2: today that all of the bord Ape Yacht Club.
Speaker 7: Divers horrible eye infections.
Speaker 2: Not eye infections. Garrison. They they went to a party
Speaker 2: that only the boord Ape Yacht Club NFT holders could
Speaker 2: go to, and the people who through that party outfitted
Speaker 2: the rave room with UV bulbs that used a kind
Speaker 2: of disinfecting UV light that slaughterhouses used to clean carcasses,
Speaker 2: and it gave everyone sunburns on them.
Speaker 7: So deeply funny.
Speaker 2: We'll get through this. Something that funny will happen with
Speaker 2: all of this, but you're gonna get hit by it
Speaker 2: for a while, Like it's just gonna be everywhere. This is,
Speaker 2: this is we're watching, you know, we're at that We're
Speaker 2: at that point in Jurassic Park where you see like
Speaker 2: the water reverberating. Right, it's coming. And but at the
Speaker 2: end of the day, don't worry. You know, we are
Speaker 2: Ian Malcolm. Our leg is broken, we are injured, but
Speaker 2: we will inexplicably return for the sequel. So it's fine.
Speaker 7: Well, I think I think that is that is a perfect,
Speaker 7: a perfect way to wrap this up. Yes, you know,
Speaker 7: when you're when you're feeling lonely and you're tempted to
Speaker 7: download the mind bank app to talk to your own self.
Speaker 7: Just just remember, pull it, pull out a journal, just
Speaker 7: do literally anything else.
Speaker 2: Call a friend, you know, make a friend, talk to
Speaker 2: a stranger. Literally almost almost anything would.
Speaker 12: Be better for you.
Speaker 7: Well, for one, will be eagerly awaiting the influx of
Speaker 7: immortal souls living on the computer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited for all of all of the people
Speaker 2: to reach Heaven.
Speaker 5: All right, I'm done. Hi everyone, it's me today. It's
Speaker 5: James and I'm joined by Jake Taylor and Azalea and
Speaker 5: they're all from the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund and
Speaker 5: we've asked him to come on today. We're recording this
Speaker 5: on what's it now, the sixth of November twenty twenty three,
Speaker 5: And the reason we wanted to talk about bail funds
Speaker 5: today was that we're almost exactly a year out from
Speaker 5: the election, and we're also in the middle of a
Speaker 5: massive protest movement against the Israeli bombing of Palestine. I
Speaker 5: tended a Free Palestine protest today. Lots of you will
Speaker 5: have attended them over the weekend. Normally, in this kind
Speaker 5: of current political climate, when when people protest about things,
Speaker 5: or when there are elections, leads to an increased protest movement.
Speaker 5: Which generally leads to more state clap down on the
Speaker 5: protest movement, which means people getting arrested, which means people
Speaker 5: getting bailed out. And we have like a year until
Speaker 5: the election, so it's a good time to maybe talk
Speaker 5: about organizing. To hear from people who have been doing
Speaker 5: this for a while. Some of you will remember Bailfront
Speaker 5: for twenty twenty, some of you wan't. Some of you
Speaker 5: will not be in countries where this is a relevant concept,
Speaker 5: But I feel think it's a very important one to
Speaker 5: talk about. So I'd like each of you guys to
Speaker 5: introduce yourselves if you could, I can get started.
Speaker 13: I'm Jake Wiener. This is my second time on I
Speaker 13: was previously on talking about a CBP one app and
Speaker 13: immigrant surveillance of the border. My day job, I'm a
Speaker 13: lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, d C.
Speaker 13: I'm also a UVA law grab. I've lived in Charlottesville
Speaker 13: on and off since twenty seventeen, and I've been on
Speaker 13: the board of the Bail Fund for about a year
Speaker 13: and a half now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. My name is Taylor and I've lived in Charleston
Speaker 1: pretty much my whole life for work, I'm a carpenter
Speaker 1: and I've been on the bail fund here since twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: couple of months. I wasn't here for the start, but
Speaker 1: joined quickly after it got founded.
Speaker 17: And I think, yeah, I'm Azalea. I'm a two all
Speaker 17: at uba law. I'm originally from Chicago, grew up in
Speaker 17: a very proud Mexican Mexican American community. I have lived
Speaker 17: in the Pacific, Northwest, North Carolina, most recently DC, so
Speaker 17: various cities and places throughout the country.
Speaker 5: Nice, excellent, We've got so I think to start off
Speaker 5: with just in case, we've got folks who are not
Speaker 5: in the US. So maybe I'm not for me, can
Speaker 5: one if you explain to us what bail is?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So, in the American legal system, we have a pretty
Speaker 13: unique concept, which is, after you're arrested for a crime,
Speaker 13: or if you're detained as an immigrant, are they going
Speaker 13: to go in front of a magistrate who will decide
Speaker 13: whether you get out of jail right now or whether
Speaker 13: you have to wait. And most countries in the world,
Speaker 13: that's surely a question of how likely you are to
Speaker 13: show up to court and how dangerous you might be
Speaker 13: to the community. Right obviously they're not going to let
Speaker 13: out someone who's just like killed eight people. That seems
Speaker 13: like it might be a little unsafe. In America, we
Speaker 13: do things a little differently. In almost every state and
Speaker 13: almost every municipality, we have cash bail, which means when
Speaker 13: you go in front of a magistrate, they will decide
Speaker 13: how much money you need to pay to get out
Speaker 13: of jail. And theoretically this is to ensure that you
Speaker 13: show up to court. So when you go to court,
Speaker 13: your case gets finalized, then you're going to get that
Speaker 13: bail money back. For most offenses, bail is really low.
Speaker 13: We're talking about five hundred one thousand up to maybe
Speaker 13: five thousand dollars for misdemeanors well of the nonviolent felonies. Now, obviously,
Speaker 13: if you are a person of means, that's really easy
Speaker 13: to come up with some money, have a family member
Speaker 13: come post it, or to go get a bail bondsman.
Speaker 13: If you go to a bail bondsman, they are going
Speaker 13: to charge you about ten percent of the cost of
Speaker 13: your bonds. So if you have a five thousand dollars bond,
Speaker 13: that's about five hundred bucks. You're not going to get
Speaker 13: that money back. But then you don't have anything out
Speaker 13: of pocket. But for a lot of people, the criminal
Speaker 13: legal system mostly arrests people for crimes of poverty and
Speaker 13: drug addiction. Is that's the majority of people who go
Speaker 13: through the system. They do not have the money to
Speaker 13: go get a bail bondsman, which is so we regularly
Speaker 13: get calls from people who don't have one hundred and
Speaker 13: five hundred dollars to get out of jail. That's where
Speaker 13: the bail fund comes in. We pay people's bombs, no
Speaker 13: questions asked.
Speaker 17: Nice I'd also like to add that, in addition to
Speaker 17: a lot of drug charges, a lot of ways that
Speaker 17: people end up in jail is through traffic stops and
Speaker 17: traffic violations. Something as minor as a back tail light
Speaker 17: not being fully lit, and that then gives officers lace
Speaker 17: an excuse to proceed from there. So something as simple
Speaker 17: as you know, you didn't get to go to the
Speaker 17: mechanic to have your back tail light fixed, can lead
Speaker 17: to all sorts of issues down the road of ending
Speaker 17: up to jail. Unfortunately in this wonderful country.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's certainly pretty much to deathline.
Speaker 5: It's good that we have you guys to help kind
Speaker 5: of while we're working on having a better system, I
Speaker 5: guess we can make this one a little bit less,
Speaker 5: especially for people who are not people of means. So
Speaker 5: with your bail fund, perhaps you could explain, like, obviously
Speaker 5: some of those better amounts you's posted, even the once
Speaker 5: you said that were relatively low, that's still a lot
Speaker 5: of money. So you guys have had the bail fund
Speaker 5: for three and a bit years now, how did you
Speaker 5: go about starting a bail fund? And then I guess
Speaker 5: what other different roles that EATV plays within it.
Speaker 1: Now, sure I can talk about a little bit how
Speaker 1: it got started. It got started in twenty twenty. I'm
Speaker 1: not one hundred percent sure, but it's about the spring
Speaker 1: or the summer, and it was pretty much right around
Speaker 1: the time, you know, George Floyd got murdered and all
Speaker 1: the protests was going on. It was started by a
Speaker 1: group of four or five law students at UVA, and
Speaker 1: since the bounding they've all graduated and moved on to
Speaker 1: other things. But that was the time when it was
Speaker 1: it was relatively easy. There was a lot of people
Speaker 1: donating money, so we were able to raise quite a
Speaker 1: bit of money at that time, and the way the
Speaker 1: bonds work is that we paid the bond and then
Speaker 1: as the case as the person goes through the court
Speaker 1: system and the case gets finalized, money gets returned to
Speaker 1: us and we're able to use that money to post
Speaker 1: bonds again. And so with even a relatively small amount
Speaker 1: I believe we have now we have forty thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: we're able to post a lot of bonds. Up to
Speaker 1: nearly two hundred thousand dollars so far in bonds posted,
Speaker 1: and so that's like it's a self sustained process. Like
Speaker 1: it can sometimes take up to a year to get
Speaker 1: the money back, but instead of you know, paying the
Speaker 1: money and it being gone forever with the bail bondsmen like,
Speaker 1: we're able to continuously do this and get a lot
Speaker 1: done with a little bit of money.
Speaker 5: Relatively Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You can
Speaker 5: keep it moving through the system. I guess. So when
Speaker 5: you guys, like then you said you had that forty grand, right,
Speaker 5: where did that come from? How how did you guys
Speaker 5: obtain that forty grand?
Speaker 1: Just donations from individual Well? Pretty much? Yeah, I think,
Speaker 1: like I think there were some larger donations in the
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars range from organizations at the time, but
Speaker 1: and then since then it's kind of trickled in, you know,
Speaker 1: and I think I've donated my own money sometimes it's.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's very important thing. So perhaps you could
Speaker 5: can you give us a do we get it like
Speaker 5: get it in at the top of the episode, Is
Speaker 5: there a link where people can donate they'd like to.
Speaker 13: Yeah, we absolutely need your donations. Bail funds around the
Speaker 13: country have had fundraising dry up, and right now we
Speaker 13: have a wait list, like people are in jail because
Speaker 13: we don't have enough money. So please donate to us.
Speaker 13: We're on PayPal at PayPal, dot me e slash Blue
Speaker 13: Ridge Bail. We're also on gofund me at Blue Ridge
Speaker 13: Community Bail Fund, and that information is on our Instagram,
Speaker 13: which is Ridge Bail Nice at Ridge Bail Perfect.
Speaker 5: So I think you were talking about that, like a
Speaker 5: little bail funds to have dried up since twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: and I know that, like I've seen that in a
Speaker 5: lot of places. So there was this real like growth
Speaker 5: in organizing in twenty twenty, right, and then obviously there's
Speaker 5: been like it just people have burnt out, people have
Speaker 5: been incarcerated in a number of things. It's made that
Speaker 5: movement hard to sustain. That we don't necessarily need to
Speaker 5: go into. But what I do want to talk about
Speaker 5: is like, how you guys have been able to sustain
Speaker 5: your bail fund and keep helping people out and doing
Speaker 5: this important work. So perhaps you could explain the different
Speaker 5: roles that people play in a bail funded People are
Speaker 5: thinking like, oh, this needs to exist in my community,
Speaker 5: Like what roles do you have? What kinds of people
Speaker 5: do you need?
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, I think you know a lot of bail
Speaker 1: funds are can be stressured differently. But the way ours works,
Speaker 1: and we're relatively small, and the way of our works
Speaker 1: is we have a group of six of us that's
Speaker 1: on the actual board and we handle like the logistics.
Speaker 1: So I'm the chair, Jakes the treasurer azially as a
Speaker 1: board member of large but we all kind of share
Speaker 1: the same responsibilities, which is we answer the phone, which
Speaker 1: is one of the biggest parts when people call us
Speaker 1: either from the jail or from the street, like family
Speaker 1: members and someone in jail. And then when we get
Speaker 1: a call, you know, we'll we look up the case,
Speaker 1: call the jail to find out and then then with
Speaker 1: the next step is posting the bond, and so we
Speaker 1: have a list of volunteers that their job is just
Speaker 1: to go to physically go to the jail with the
Speaker 1: cash to post the bond, and sometimes you know one
Speaker 1: of the board members will do there, so so yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be yeah. And then as far as like
Speaker 1: keeping the organization running well, like I said, all the
Speaker 1: original board members are gone and I've been the longest
Speaker 1: running member, but we do have a lot of law students,
Speaker 1: like half our board as law students, and that presents
Speaker 1: own challenges because they graduate and leave, but it also
Speaker 1: like brings fresh people into the organization. And then you know, me,
Speaker 1: I live in charlesvillem here forever, which helps kind of
Speaker 1: you with the institutional knowledge.
Speaker 5: Sure. Yeah, having that longevity I think is important.
Speaker 17: And Melissa, Jake and Taylor have done an incredible job
Speaker 17: sustaining the bail fund, and those of us who are
Speaker 17: law students just kind of come in and out and
Speaker 17: try to support the best we can and the limited
Speaker 17: time that we're here. Those of us who leave.
Speaker 5: After the three years, yeah, I'm sure it's still very
Speaker 5: important to have all those people on your time energy commitment.
Speaker 5: So like just by existing, right, the bail fund kind
Speaker 5: of points out that this is a system that is
Speaker 5: broken or that it certainly doesn't work to serve people.
Speaker 5: So perhaps we could explain a little bit of that,
Speaker 5: Like in the absence of a bail fund, how do
Speaker 5: things look for people who are incarcerated?
Speaker 13: Right?
Speaker 5: Like what you spoke a little bit about bail bondsman,
Speaker 5: but like perhaps you could talk about like the amount
Speaker 5: of bails and people would post for Oh, it would
Speaker 5: be the amount of how it's calculated, but it would
Speaker 5: be and like what that would mean in terms of
Speaker 5: people being in prison, and like how long they might
Speaker 5: expect to stay in prison just because they couldn't afford
Speaker 5: that bail being incacerated. I should not say prison, I guess, yeah,
Speaker 5: folks are in jail. Yeah.
Speaker 13: So the one of the cruelest parts of the American
Speaker 13: criminal justice system from an all legal system there's not
Speaker 13: much justice, is that your freedom is contingent on having wealth.
Speaker 13: So bail is for most offenses, as I've said, is
Speaker 13: quite low, and it's very not only is it they're
Speaker 13: difficult to post if you don't have anyone, but it's
Speaker 13: also you know, people are locked up because they don't
Speaker 13: have five hundred dollars. I've gotten calls from people who
Speaker 13: have literally said, I have I don't have one hundred dollars,
Speaker 13: and I don't have anyone on the outside, and I've
Speaker 13: been sitting in jail for three months or sometimes for
Speaker 13: an offense that when they go to court was maybe
Speaker 13: only a month of jail time. People routinely will spend
Speaker 13: six months a year in jail for offenses that their
Speaker 13: total amount of jail time was a couple months, and
Speaker 13: you don't get compensated for that. Like if you spend
Speaker 13: a year in jail for which means that you did
Speaker 13: eleven months that you didn't have to do, the state
Speaker 13: doesn't like cut you a check. That's like, hey, we
Speaker 13: destroyed your life for eleven months for no reason. And
Speaker 13: I think one of the things that is just like
Speaker 13: the most heartbreaking about doing this work, but is also
Speaker 13: sometimes like it makes you feel really good, is the
Speaker 13: way that caging people just like ruins their lives. It's
Speaker 13: incredibly hard to talk to people in jail from the outside.
Speaker 13: It's very expensive, So when you're in jail, you are
Speaker 13: not talking. You're like not talking to your loved ones,
Speaker 13: you're not able to sustain a job, you're probably losing housing.
Speaker 13: It's it's destroying and you know the life that you
Speaker 13: have on the outside. But the flip side is like
Speaker 13: we've gotten calls from folks who have said like, hey,
Speaker 13: you bonded me out and now I got a new job,
Speaker 13: I got a new place to live, like I'm doing great,
Speaker 13: which is incredibly meaningful. And Taylor can probably talk a
Speaker 13: little more about what being in jail is.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, yeah, thanks seek. So I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that like really drew me to this work
Speaker 1: was like, I'm an abolitionist and when I was younger,
Speaker 1: I spent two years in jail. I was twenty three,
Speaker 1: twenty three or twenty five. I was in jail for
Speaker 1: selling drugs. And I think, like, yeah, I really that's
Speaker 1: like something that really motivates me now to do this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's it's crazy, like Jake said, yeah, we've had people
Speaker 1: that one guy called and thought that we were a
Speaker 1: bail bondsman and then found out like on the phone
Speaker 1: he's like, oh, I didn't know you guys like would
Speaker 1: pay my bond for free. It was a five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars bond, so he would have had to pay two
Speaker 1: dollars to a bail bondsman and he didn't call us
Speaker 1: for several days because he thought he has fifty dollars.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know, I like, it's you know,
Speaker 1: we spend all this time like thinking about like leftist
Speaker 1: stuff and like, but it's it's eye opening to see
Speaker 1: people that are stuck in jail like for lack of
Speaker 1: one hundred dollars, you know, like and that's it. They
Speaker 1: can't get out, and so I think, yeah, like and
Speaker 1: then sometimes people call us and they're like, I have nobody.
Speaker 1: There's nobody out outside that can help them. So it's
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. It is upsetting, Like yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like crazy to see this like system set up like this,
Speaker 1: but it's like it's one of the things that like
Speaker 1: really motivates me to keep doing this work. Is like, man,
Speaker 1: it's so rewarding when you get those calls. And and
Speaker 1: also I think to expand as something that Jake said
Speaker 1: about the bail system, it's like it's, uh, the magistrates.
Speaker 1: When you go in front of the magistry to get
Speaker 1: the bond, there's no the Mattertates have no oversight, they're
Speaker 1: not elected it's you know, we kind of just joke
Speaker 1: like it's a vibe system, Like they just an issue
Speaker 1: of bond for however much they feel like. And so
Speaker 1: this is where you're really going to see like the
Speaker 1: structural racism and like the classes and really come crashing
Speaker 1: down on people, you know, in front of this system.
Speaker 13: So yeah, one thing that I'd like to add, because
Speaker 13: I think people don't really realize, is so a magistrate
Speaker 13: is working under a judge. They're basically a judge is
Speaker 13: like an appointed position or elected. You have to be
Speaker 13: a lawyer, you have to have a fair amount of
Speaker 13: legal education. Your magistrate is just some dude, like the
Speaker 13: most some dude person you've ever met. They have no
Speaker 13: training required, They have no like legal training requirements. Many
Speaker 13: of them are like fresh out of the army maybe
Speaker 13: like maybe went to college, maybe didn't. So you're talking
Speaker 13: about someone who has no particular expertise in evaluating people,
Speaker 13: looking at someone for a few minutes and deciding how
Speaker 13: dangerous they are to the community and making up in
Speaker 13: their head how much that person can probably pay to
Speaker 13: get out.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 17: I spent the summer my first year after or summer
Speaker 17: after first year of law school at the Lynchburg Public
Speaker 17: Defender Office, So I got to review a lot of
Speaker 17: bodycam footage and the way it worked with the magistrate
Speaker 17: a lot of the times was that a police officer
Speaker 17: would give a report, an incident report, read it aloud
Speaker 17: to swear them in. They'd say, this is true, this
Speaker 17: is what happened. They would give their full report, and
Speaker 17: basically that's how it was determined whether bail would be
Speaker 17: or how much bail would be set to. It was
Speaker 17: heartbreaking and it was very it happened very quickly, like
Speaker 17: it was all based on the police officer's report and
Speaker 17: what they just decided to spew in five minutes or less.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's yeah, it's it's a pretty messed up to system.
Speaker 5: I think some states have like bail guidelines, right, if
Speaker 5: I'm not mistaken, like I think California has like you know,
Speaker 5: if you did this, if if you're accused of this offense,
Speaker 5: and then your bail goes in this bucket and then
Speaker 5: you know if it adds up depending on offenses or
Speaker 5: conspiracy or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good point. Like the thing about
Speaker 1: bail is this different like in every state on some
Speaker 1: states you know have maybe like more progressive quote unquote, yeah,
Speaker 1: but some some have some don't.
Speaker 5: And yeah, yeah, I was going to say, like California
Speaker 5: has a reputation being progressive. San Diego has charged some
Speaker 5: of the most insanely high bail amounts I've ever seen.
Speaker 17: Although we all aspire to do what Illinois just did
Speaker 17: at the beginning of this year, which was to eliminate
Speaker 17: bail altogether, it would just or cash bail altogether. It
Speaker 17: would just be based on whether you can be released
Speaker 17: or not.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that would be nice. It is just to be
Speaker 5: clear that the bail isn't like, it's not like the
Speaker 5: state keeps the money unless you don't show up. Is
Speaker 5: it a revenue generator for state? Show? It's just purely
Speaker 5: like a sort of punitive thing that they think has
Speaker 5: some kind of value in that regard.
Speaker 13: It's purely punitive. The idea truly is to make sure
Speaker 13: that you show up to your court case. And in
Speaker 13: the US it's often used as a proxy for dangerousness.
Speaker 13: So when you're go in front of a magistrate, you
Speaker 13: got three options. Number one is you get out on
Speaker 13: personal recognisance. If you're a nice white boy like me,
Speaker 13: you're getting personal recognizance almost certainly.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Option two is you're going to have to pay cash bail,
Speaker 13: and that amount is decided by the magistrate, as you said,
Speaker 13: possibly on a schedule, possibly just whatever the magistrate feels like.
Speaker 13: And then option three is you might get no bond,
Speaker 13: which is to say that it doesn't matter how much
Speaker 13: money you have, you're not getting out of jail.
Speaker 1: And in like a.
Speaker 13: Functioning criminal legal system that just on its own terms
Speaker 13: like worked, This is not an abolitionist perspective. Cash bail
Speaker 13: is unnecessary. The magistrate should be deciding and the judge
Speaker 13: should be deciding whether you are a threat to the
Speaker 13: community or whether you're not, and that should be like
Speaker 13: the only option. The other thing I'll throw in here
Speaker 13: is that paying money is not the best way to
Speaker 13: make sure that people show up to court. There's extensive
Speaker 13: data from the immigration system and from the legal system
Speaker 13: that the number one best way to make sure people
Speaker 13: show up to their courte is to give them an attorney.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, which is a whole other thing we can
Speaker 5: get into with the immigration So I think that's a
Speaker 5: really good kind of example of some a good deep
Speaker 5: dive into what ball is. So essentially like a bail
Speaker 5: fund can make it so that there is not this
Speaker 5: financial burden or this financial barrier to freedom. Right, Well,
Speaker 5: you haven't meaned yet to be convicted of any crime.
Speaker 5: It's not necessarily like an abolitionist thing to exist, but
Speaker 5: like it helps it LEAs move us towards a less cruel,
Speaker 5: a less unjust system, I suppose. So I want to
Speaker 5: talk about like a little bit of the like nuts
Speaker 5: and bolts of what it takes to run a bail fund.
Speaker 5: But before we do that, we are twenty two minutes in,
Speaker 5: so talking of nuts and bolts, we need to pay
Speaker 5: our bills. So this is an advert. It's probably not
Speaker 5: something you need, but here it is. Anyway, all right,
Speaker 5: we're back. I hope you've bought whatever it was, MRIs
Speaker 5: or Run of Very Good Dog Coins or Hoover. So
Speaker 5: let's talk about the like if you're listening to this
Speaker 5: and you're in your car on your way home or
Speaker 5: whatever time you're listening on a long road trip, you're thinking,
Speaker 5: I would like to be the person. Maybe you're a
Speaker 5: law student yourself, or you're formerly incarcerated person, or you've
Speaker 5: had family members go through the system, and you're like, hell, yeah,
Speaker 5: this shit sucks, and I would like to help make
Speaker 5: it a little bit less sucky. When you're like, I'm
Speaker 5: thinking here, when you establish a bail fund, like is
Speaker 5: it a five oh one C three? Do you need
Speaker 5: like certain like do you I know for five oh
Speaker 5: one C three you need certain people and a certain
Speaker 5: number of people doing certain jobs on your board that
Speaker 5: kind of stuff, like what are the like concrete steps
Speaker 5: that one has to take to go from this sucks
Speaker 5: to the chair of the bail fund? And I can
Speaker 5: help you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. So
Speaker 1: we are five on one three C five one C three,
Speaker 1: but we were posting bonds before we had like the
Speaker 1: official status. So I think truly like all you need
Speaker 1: is some motivation and some money and there you know,
Speaker 1: there are bail funds that post ten to fifteen bonds
Speaker 1: a week, and there's bill funds that post one bond
Speaker 1: a month because that's all they can do. And I
Speaker 1: think like, as our organization has grown and matured, we've
Speaker 1: gotten way more organized. And we started out it was
Speaker 1: it was pretty chaotic and people it was poorly organized,
Speaker 1: but we were still posting the bonds. And I think
Speaker 1: from day one We've been good about that and so
Speaker 1: like you can definitely start and you'll learn as we've
Speaker 1: learned as we go, and you know, we refined everything.
Speaker 1: But like I said, it just it takes some motivation
Speaker 1: and a little bit of money and then maybe Jake
Speaker 1: can talk to them too about the finder details.
Speaker 13: Yeah, so I think Taylor's absolutely right. I'm going to
Speaker 13: give some recommendations that I would say are how to
Speaker 13: set up your structure in a durable way. But I
Speaker 13: would also point people the National Bail Fund Network, which
Speaker 13: can provide resources and advice for this type of thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: So basically what you need to run your bail fund
Speaker 13: is you need a group of people. The load, honestly
Speaker 13: is just like too much for one person, both emotionally
Speaker 13: and literally. You need people to share this work with
Speaker 13: for it to be sustainable. I recommend that you set
Speaker 13: up a five oh one C three nonprofit. This will
Speaker 13: help shield your volunteers from legal liability and it means
Speaker 13: you could take tax deductible donations. The way that you
Speaker 13: set that up is going to depend on your state.
Speaker 13: In Virginia, you register that with the State Corporation Commission,
Speaker 13: which means you need a president which is Taylor, And
Speaker 13: you need a treasurer and then a couple of the
Speaker 13: potentially a couple of their board members. These are the
Speaker 13: people who own technically the five oh one C three
Speaker 13: and you just need those people on your documents. You
Speaker 13: can use their address, but we recommend that you set
Speaker 13: up a PO box for getting mail. It just makes
Speaker 13: things a little easier, means you don't have to like
Speaker 13: hand your personal address over.
Speaker 5: To a magistrate. Yeah, makes you as doxible as well.
Speaker 13: Yes, And I recommend setting up a dedicated bank account
Speaker 13: and go to a bank that makes it has good
Speaker 13: hours so that you can readily withdrail with draw cash
Speaker 13: because you can only postpond in cash, which is its
Speaker 13: own insanity. So one thing we deal with is like
Speaker 13: the bank being closed and then having to wait a
Speaker 13: couple of days, you know, day and a half to
Speaker 13: be able to post.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 13: We also recommend and a Google Voice phone number so
Speaker 13: that multiple people can receive phone calls at the same time. Right,
Speaker 13: we can have four people on a Google Voice and
Speaker 13: that means that if I'm working, tailor can answer the phone.
Speaker 13: We split it up by weeks, so we have a
Speaker 13: point person each week who is responsible for answering the
Speaker 13: phone mainly, but that doesn't mean you're the only person
Speaker 13: who answers that week. It's just sort of you want
Speaker 13: to be more heads up. You also are going to
Speaker 13: want a decision making structure. We use a consensus based model,
Speaker 13: do most of our discussions in a signal thread, but
Speaker 13: then we also meet about once a month, and if
Speaker 13: we have some issue that comes up, we can meet
Speaker 13: more often. And you need ideally a way to connect
Speaker 13: to volunteers. So we've had good luck with the law school,
Speaker 13: but we're expanding beyond that, you know, trying to be
Speaker 13: a bit of different institutions in the community and recruit
Speaker 13: folks to volunteer for us. You want to do do
Speaker 13: some amount of vetting of your volunteers. You know, they
Speaker 13: should be in an affinity network or have a way
Speaker 13: that you can ensure that they're not going to walk
Speaker 13: away with a five grand and cash that you hand them.
Speaker 13: It doesn't have to be extensive, but it's good to
Speaker 13: be smart about. Yeah, and one thing that we found
Speaker 13: really helpful is having business cards because that means you
Speaker 13: can hand it to the magistrate and they can get
Speaker 13: your address right, they can put you the name of
Speaker 13: the bail fund down. A problem that we've had is
Speaker 13: not all magistrates recognizing the bail fund, which but you
Speaker 13: really want to have a peel box and that business
Speaker 13: card so that when you get checks back from the
Speaker 13: court system they come to a centralized place.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, and then anyone could dromp in and
Speaker 5: to pust it into the bank account.
Speaker 13: And then the last thing that you want is website
Speaker 13: and a fundraising infrastructure. So as we said at the top,
Speaker 13: right now we're using go fundme and PayPal, But any
Speaker 13: way that you make the work is great, and we
Speaker 13: can definitely do better and we'll be expanding. That's basically it,
Speaker 13: though it's really not that much. Yeah, but that's great.
Speaker 5: I think it's like so often like a thing that
Speaker 5: I've seen just being sort of on the left in
Speaker 5: various movements since I was younger. It's like we reinvent
Speaker 5: the wheel every four or five years, you know. So
Speaker 5: just having those things that you guys have learned, you know,
Speaker 5: like using Google Voice and having a bank with good hours,
Speaker 5: I think that saves someone from having to fall down
Speaker 5: those same holes again. So that's really valuable. I wonder that,
Speaker 5: like you talked a little bit about legal liability, which
Speaker 5: we don't necessarily need to go into, but like there
Speaker 5: must is there, Like I mean, there have been some
Speaker 5: obviously heavily politicalized arrests in the last few months in
Speaker 5: the United States. Do you guys face like personal blowback
Speaker 5: or blowback against a group when if you're able to
Speaker 5: bail someone out where their arrest has been heavily reported
Speaker 5: on or politicized, because that's something people need to be
Speaker 5: aware of.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great question. Where we are, there's
Speaker 1: really we haven't posted the bond for anything that's like
Speaker 1: political protests related, but there is a bail fund that's
Speaker 1: about an hour away, much bigger than ours that in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty eight was doing like every night bail support
Speaker 1: jail support. So yeah, that's like an example of you know,
Speaker 1: just way different bill fundes operate. And then so basically
Speaker 1: we have not ever faced any kind of political blowback
Speaker 1: or any issues, but it's definitely something that we're prepared,
Speaker 1: we think about because it can't happen. There's backline in story,
Speaker 1: and there's definitely cases around the country where like prosecutors
Speaker 1: have taken aim at bail funds, you know, land of
Speaker 1: course was a really really yeah, big one. But they
Speaker 1: think you give anything to add maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 13: I will say that it's certainly a possibility that your
Speaker 13: bail fund becomes the target of both like institutional and
Speaker 13: like a kind of right wing moral panic. These things happen.
Speaker 13: It's I think relatively unlikely, but that doesn't mean you
Speaker 13: shouldn't be prepared for it. And I think that when
Speaker 13: you kind of address that, and if you end up
Speaker 13: in the media or getting heat for it, the most
Speaker 13: important thing that you can do is reflect the fact
Speaker 13: that the bail fund is not responsible for what happens
Speaker 13: when people get out, because we don't decide if you're
Speaker 13: getting out of jail. We will work on a first come,
Speaker 13: first serve basis. When someone calls us, we post their bail,
Speaker 13: no questions asked. And that's because there's already been a
Speaker 13: decision of whether this person is safe to be released,
Speaker 13: and that decision is made by the magistrate. Yeah, so
Speaker 13: any responsibility falls on the criminal legal system. It does
Speaker 13: not fall on us. And I think it's important to
Speaker 13: say that you never hear this blowback coming towards bail bondsman,
Speaker 13: even though they get out way more people and more
Speaker 13: dangerous people than we do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely the case. So I wonder, like
Speaker 5: what other issues you have faced hardships and you spoke
Speaker 5: about a couple of them, are there are other things
Speaker 5: like that you've I know, for instance, like I've obviously
Speaker 5: it's part of my reporting, or maybe not obviously, but
Speaker 5: some people apparently don't bother to do it. But I
Speaker 5: communicate with incarcerated people when they're writing about them because
Speaker 5: it seems like a reasonable thing to do, and I
Speaker 5: am very aware of how annoying, expensive, time consuming, and
Speaker 5: just generally totally inadequate the system is of communication with people,
Speaker 5: even people who are not convicted of any crime. So
Speaker 5: I don't know if that's something you've encountered, if there
Speaker 5: are other sort of hardships that you guys have had
Speaker 5: to deal with, perhaps if there are ways you've worked
Speaker 5: out to get around them or to at least make
Speaker 5: them less difficult, then that would be great people to
Speaker 5: hit to you.
Speaker 1: The communication thing is a huge problem, yeah, exactly. You know,
Speaker 1: most of the calls we get are from people that
Speaker 1: are currently in the jail, and they can only call
Speaker 1: us and we cannot call them, So you know, they
Speaker 1: call us and we have to just say okay, like
Speaker 1: you need to call back in a couple of hours.
Speaker 1: And then you know, they have lockdowns, they can't get
Speaker 1: to the phone, all sorts of things. So the worst
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, they probably one of the worst things
Speaker 1: that ever happened was someone called and I called the jail,
Speaker 1: and the jail was like, oh, they can be released today.
Speaker 1: And so the guy calls back and I'm like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: you're going to get released today. We're going to have
Speaker 1: a volunteer go out and post this bond, Like you
Speaker 1: don't need to call me back, like if you want,
Speaker 1: you can, but it's it's all rolling right, yeah, And
Speaker 1: then I call the jail to triple check everything and
Speaker 1: they say, oh, you know, we have to hear back
Speaker 1: from the court. The court has to approve this, and
Speaker 1: they're like closing in thirty minutes, so it's not going
Speaker 1: to happen today. And so now like I have no
Speaker 1: way to call this guy and tell him that he's
Speaker 1: actually not going to get out today because of a
Speaker 1: like bureaucratic issue, and I just have to wait until
Speaker 1: he just like can't take anymore. And then calls And
Speaker 1: that was really unpleasant situation. It's it's really unfortunate, and
Speaker 1: you know he was not happy. He was not happy,
Speaker 1: and I mean, you know, he took a little bit
Speaker 1: out on me, but it wasn't a case of him
Speaker 1: actually be mad at me.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I think that's something that's really cool, is like, no
Speaker 1: one we deliver bad news all the time, you know,
Speaker 1: we say you can't get out because of X, Y Z,
Speaker 1: and no one's ever like actually mad at us. You know,
Speaker 1: they might be like annoyed for a second because you know,
Speaker 1: I'm on the phone delivering the bad news, but every
Speaker 1: time at the end, they're like, thanks so much, like
Speaker 1: I appreciate you. So we haven't had any like I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think nothing really super negative has happened. It's just
Speaker 1: like you said, the communication huge problem. When it's family
Speaker 1: members calling from not in jail, it's a little more
Speaker 1: easy to be able to you can call them back.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'll jump in on communication just for a minute,
Speaker 13: because this is an issue that I work on in
Speaker 13: my day job. Yeah, the paid prison phone system is
Speaker 13: one of the worst parts of American life. It is
Speaker 13: incredibly expensive to call people, and the phone systems work
Speaker 13: really poorly and they're actually getting worse. So for us,
Speaker 13: like are the main jail that we work with, Middle
Speaker 13: River Regional Jail used to use a phone provider called
Speaker 13: GTL who is one of the biggest in the country,
Speaker 13: and that was pricey, but like we could reliably get calls.
Speaker 13: They just switched over to a different provider who makes
Speaker 13: money in a different way. They provide tablets to the
Speaker 13: prison and as a result of that, all our phone
Speaker 13: calls are now made coming from the prison like social
Speaker 13: room on a tablet, which means sometimes it's too loud
Speaker 13: to hear the person calling, and about fifteen percent of
Speaker 13: the time the call just drops when you pick it up.
Speaker 13: So the system makes it really difficult to correspond with people.
Speaker 13: As a result, a couple of things that we do
Speaker 13: are sharing the phone responsibility. Not promising people things when
Speaker 13: we can't deliver them is super important, and like that's
Speaker 13: mostly a problem because the phone system works so badly
Speaker 13: and we can't communicate with people. And then the biggest
Speaker 13: thing is like giving yourself grace when you miss the
Speaker 13: phone when something goes wrong, because it's emotionally very taxing
Speaker 13: to know that someone desperately wants to speak with you
Speaker 13: because they're potentially at the worst point in their entire
Speaker 13: life and need to get out and you've missed a
Speaker 13: phone call. So it's yeah, it's really important to be
Speaker 13: kind to yourself in those situations.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, you won't stick around.
Speaker 17: And one more thing that I was surprised to find
Speaker 17: out about the phone system is how much recording and
Speaker 17: reviewing of recording goes on through those phone calls. I
Speaker 17: witnessed so many prosecutors, commonwealth attorneys bring up something from
Speaker 17: phone calls when folks were actually in trial or for
Speaker 17: sentencing hearings or this is later down the road. But
Speaker 17: the fact that they could pull up those recordings from
Speaker 17: a year before, two years before they were calling a
Speaker 17: loved one, a family member, just incredible. How much access
Speaker 17: there is to that and lack of privacy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it's very humous.
Speaker 1: I gotta jump in on that. Yeah, you end up
Speaker 1: in jail, do not say anything about your case on
Speaker 1: the phone. Oh, and don't talk to the guards about
Speaker 1: why you're innocent, because I've seen that people do that.
Speaker 1: It's not good advice. Don't do it. Don't talk about
Speaker 1: the case.
Speaker 3: Ever.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 13: One way we address that is by telling people upfront
Speaker 13: that we postpond no questions asked, and like telling people
Speaker 13: like it doesn't matter what your situation is, where if
Speaker 13: we have the money and you can get out, we're going.
Speaker 5: To post yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not your job to adjudicate,
Speaker 5: like you said, if someone's safe or unsafe, or innocent
Speaker 5: or guilty, that that's what the state purport to be doing.
Speaker 5: Like your job is just to make sure that someone's
Speaker 5: not too poor to be free. So on the subject
Speaker 5: of like the sheer finances of it, I know, like
Speaker 5: certainly here I've seen and I have no idea what
Speaker 5: the sort of I know San Diego does have. California
Speaker 5: has these bail guidelines so that they can't just set
Speaker 5: whatever bail they want. But like in twenty twenty, we
Speaker 5: saw some sky high bails and I don't know if
Speaker 5: it was just because it was like fuck you mail
Speaker 5: fund of it, it was just because that was what
Speaker 5: the guidelines allowed, or some combination thereof. But do you
Speaker 5: guys have a Like we can't because if you said
Speaker 5: you're dealing with forty thousand, right, like if you drop
Speaker 5: ten thousand on one individual, that obviously means that there
Speaker 5: are a lot of people with five hundred dollars who
Speaker 5: who can't have to stay in jail. So do you
Speaker 5: have like a cap on your individual bail amounts for
Speaker 5: that reason?
Speaker 13: Yeah, tailoruld you want to take.
Speaker 1: This Yeah, yeah, so yeah, we have a cap. We
Speaker 1: pay up to five thousand dollars, So five thousand dollars
Speaker 1: or less and that Yeah, it's exactly what you said,
Speaker 1: like otherwise, you know, we would be totally broke an
Speaker 1: out of money. And even you know, two five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars bonds in a row and then you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're pretty screwed. So and then I think that's a
Speaker 1: you know, it brings up something else that Jick and
Speaker 1: we're talking about, like it's we have it's important to
Speaker 1: stick to that limit. We one time we posted a
Speaker 1: bond up to twelve thousand dollars for somebody, and you know,
Speaker 1: I think it was a combination of many factors that
Speaker 1: led us to do that. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, it can be very hard just to tell
Speaker 1: someone no, because it was like he had a five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars bond and then a separate court I got
Speaker 1: another one, and so it was you know, we already
Speaker 1: told him you could pay the one bond. Anyway, long
Speaker 1: story is short, we had twelve thousand dollars tied up
Speaker 1: on this guy and then he didn't show up to court.
Speaker 1: And if that's that's when you can lose the money,
Speaker 1: then people don't show up to court, so as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fortunately for us, Unfortunately for him, he did get re
Speaker 1: arrested on another charge. And when that happens, there's like
Speaker 1: a ninety day period where if the person gets caught,
Speaker 1: then we get the money back. And that's where, like
Speaker 1: we are princes. Our policy is like we're not going
Speaker 1: to do anything if the person runs, like, we're not
Speaker 1: going to do anything to try to get it back.
Speaker 1: We're not going to revoke anybody's bond, but like a
Speaker 1: Bill bondsman might try to like find you if you run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but so are kind of our joke was kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: we hope that we hope the guy just gets away completely,
Speaker 1: but if he's not going to get away, maybe get
Speaker 1: caught with him ninety days.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 17: But the best thing is if people would contribute and donate,
Speaker 17: we could be able to allocate for so many more
Speaker 17: people and not have people spend time in jail where
Speaker 17: things like mental health conditions worsened because prison guards are
Speaker 17: and jail guards are not paying attention. Where you don't
Speaker 17: have access to an attorney easily, where when you show
Speaker 17: up to your day in court, you don't have an
Speaker 17: orange jumpsuit on, and that's not factoring into the judge's mind.
Speaker 17: So please please donate for all those reasons to our
Speaker 17: built fund.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if we have.
Speaker 1: More money, That's something we talked about a lot of times,
Speaker 1: like if we have more money, we would be able
Speaker 1: to raise the limit on the out we could post.
Speaker 1: But it's just not feasible right now.
Speaker 5: In terms of donation. It's a great thing. I was
Speaker 5: just thinking, like good because it keeps going around and
Speaker 5: around and around. Right, It's not like, you know, you
Speaker 5: give a donation once and you get someone the thing
Speaker 5: and you change their life, like you can potentially change
Speaker 5: dozens of hundreds of people's hold true deg Tree.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely cool.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and I will add on how we address our
Speaker 13: lack of funds. The other system that we have in
Speaker 13: place is a weight list. So people call us and
Speaker 13: we can tell them, hey, you're on the wait list.
Speaker 13: They'll call back all the time and be like Hey,
Speaker 13: if I moved up the wait list. Sometimes people call
Speaker 13: it multiple times a day and they're like, oh, any movement,
Speaker 13: my my number four. Now this is kind of wild,
Speaker 13: but having the wait list and we go like in
Speaker 13: strict weight list order, with the exception that if someone
Speaker 13: has an under five hundred dollars five hundred dollars or less,
Speaker 13: we'll just post that. Because if we're sitting around waiting
Speaker 13: for someone to get money back from the courts for
Speaker 13: a five thousand dollars bond, that's next in line. We
Speaker 13: could have forty five hundred bucks. And so for the
Speaker 13: super low bonds where the issue is like purely, purely poverty,
Speaker 13: we make an exception. But you run into that kind
Speaker 13: of ethical question all the time running the bell phone,
Speaker 13: like how do we make the best decisions. It's going
Speaker 13: to help you know people in the best way and
Speaker 13: then accords with our values the most that can get
Speaker 13: pretty heated and intense, and having a setup with folks
Speaker 13: where like you really respect each other and like each other,
Speaker 13: I think is really important to not let that spire
Speaker 13: out of control. It helps that you know, Taylor and
Speaker 13: Melissa and I have been friends for many years and
Speaker 13: we can like hang out and talk about this, and
Speaker 13: then like Taylor and I can go out and go
Speaker 13: for a bike ride.
Speaker 17: Nice.
Speaker 5: So having those relationships I think is really important. Yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and don't get too competitive over board games like
Speaker 17: wings when somebody wins and still being able to talk
Speaker 17: at the end of.
Speaker 5: That seems like a direct experience one.
Speaker 1: We are an abolitionist like principles, you know, And but
Speaker 1: I think, almost like you know, I've talked one of
Speaker 1: their builtments that I know of, they have some sort
Speaker 1: of system I'm not super familiar with, like prioritizing someone
Speaker 1: that maybe they consider to be higher risk in the
Speaker 1: prison system to get out first. And I think that
Speaker 1: that's a really a really appealing thing. But it's it's
Speaker 1: just like kind of Jake touched on earlier, Like that's
Speaker 1: just adding like another layer of judgment. Like then we
Speaker 1: become these like arbiters of who is in jail and
Speaker 1: who's not in jail and as much and so like
Speaker 1: almost almost counterintuitively, like having this system first come, first serve,
Speaker 1: I think is like the most abolitionist thing we can do.
Speaker 5: Yes, I can see that, Yeah, yeah, And it certainly
Speaker 5: reduces a load on you and making most difficult choices.
Speaker 6: Which.
Speaker 1: It helps with that. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we were talking about the system, and like I
Speaker 5: want to bring that up because this system is like,
Speaker 5: you know, I cover not a lot of criminal justice,
Speaker 5: but a decent bit and it is incredibly confusing. It's convoluted.
Speaker 5: It's like they've got these old ass names that you
Speaker 5: don't understand, and then Naghirra and Virginia, so you have
Speaker 5: a whole other layer of weird stuff going on, like
Speaker 5: with names and.
Speaker 1: So like.
Speaker 5: If someone's thinking of something this and they're like, I
Speaker 5: want this to happen, but I do not understand how
Speaker 5: to navigate this system? Does that mean that they need
Speaker 5: someone with a little more legal experience? Like can you
Speaker 5: explain how as like someone who isn't obviously some of
Speaker 5: both at least two of you have. I suppose all
Speaker 5: of you have some experience with the legal system in
Speaker 5: one way or another and understand it a little better
Speaker 5: because of that. But if someone has been fortunate enough
Speaker 5: not to have to interact with the criminal law system,
Speaker 5: are they like do they need a law student or
Speaker 5: a lawyer to start a bail fund? Or like, how
Speaker 5: does one go about learning to navigate that system? I suppose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they definitely not. You do not need to have
Speaker 1: legal experience. I think it was kind of a just
Speaker 1: a random chance that it was a law of students
Speaker 1: that found in this one. Basically, like you said, it
Speaker 1: is extremely confusing system and the only way you're going
Speaker 1: to learn how it all works is just by going
Speaker 1: and posting the bonds. Like the system is possible, like
Speaker 1: the bond system. We're just like a family member going
Speaker 1: to post someone's bond, so like it's set up and
Speaker 1: then it is possible for like your loved one to
Speaker 1: post your bond, and we just learned all the experience.
Speaker 1: You know, you just go you call it. You would
Speaker 1: just call the jail and say where do I post
Speaker 1: this bond and they'll tell you. You know, you come
Speaker 1: to the magistrate. This is where the magistrates is located,
Speaker 1: and then you know, you go with the cash and
Speaker 1: post and like there will be every like we work in.
Speaker 1: It's ten courts, five different jurisdictions, and then you each
Speaker 1: have two court systems, and I swear almost every single
Speaker 1: court does things somewhat differently. And the way we just
Speaker 1: get on the phone and call them, you know, be
Speaker 1: really polite and just figure it all out and write
Speaker 1: it down so that we know in the future.
Speaker 13: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll tell you, like, you can learn
Speaker 13: these systems over time, and that's really worth doing because
Speaker 13: in a moment of crisis, like mass arrests during a
Speaker 13: protest movement, knowing how to navigate the system in a
Speaker 13: quick and reliable way is really valuable. It makes it
Speaker 13: way easier to get people out. And so I would
Speaker 13: like pitch even if you don't feel really strongly about
Speaker 13: getting people out of jail, but you want to be
Speaker 13: helpful in a time of crisis, like, learning the legal
Speaker 13: system as a non lawyer is doable. I will also
Speaker 13: say that, like, you don't learn how to do this
Speaker 13: stuff in law school. I didn't learn how to post
Speaker 13: a bond, how to like file a kpist any of
Speaker 13: this crazy stuff that we have to do. Virginia is
Speaker 13: truly like one of the worst states in the country.
Speaker 13: I talked to a public defender who's worked in courts
Speaker 13: in Louisiana and was like, yeah, a Virginia court system
Speaker 13: is worse and more unfathomable, which is not if you
Speaker 13: know anything about New Orleans legal system is not great,
Speaker 13: but you can you know, you can learn an incredible amount,
Speaker 13: and then that skill just becomes valuable in a number
Speaker 13: of different areas. One of the most like powerful ways
Speaker 13: that you can help people is even when you're not
Speaker 13: able to postpond for them, knowing how to look up
Speaker 13: someone's case, tell them what their charges are, tell them
Speaker 13: what is happening to them is incredibly helpful because the
Speaker 13: majority of people we talk to have some idea of
Speaker 13: why they're in jail, but they don't know the details,
Speaker 13: and that means that they don't know like why they're
Speaker 13: not getting out, and just being able to give people
Speaker 13: a little bit of certainty is really important.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think this is a very valuable thing you
Speaker 5: can do. And yeah, I think this whole thing has
Speaker 5: been a very valuable insight into how to build a
Speaker 5: mail fund, I guess. And is there anything else do
Speaker 5: you guys think that we didn't cover in the grand
Speaker 5: scheme of being bail friend entrepreneurs. I don't know what
Speaker 5: the right phrase is that bail fund founder is just.
Speaker 17: The importance and making sure to be rooted in the community.
Speaker 17: I think that's going to be the best way not
Speaker 17: only to fundraise in the long term, because you can
Speaker 17: have even five dollars if it's reoccurring from some community members,
Speaker 17: you get to know what's happening, what's something that's a
Speaker 17: reoccurring problem throughout the community, and just making sure to
Speaker 17: listen to that and to be able to navigate going forward.
Speaker 1: I think one thing that I think is I found
Speaker 1: so interesting about doing this bill fund is that it
Speaker 1: spans it really crosses completely there or even like I
Speaker 1: would say, it transcends politics, Like I think that all
Speaker 1: of the board members are in here politically motivated. You know,
Speaker 1: we're abolitionists or you know, against the current court system.
Speaker 1: But the people's lives, like across every political spectrum have
Speaker 1: been ruined by prison in jail. And I think one time,
Speaker 1: like I think the most interesting example that Billy drove
Speaker 1: his home was I was at work. I was at
Speaker 1: the lumber yard, you know, and I think you know
Speaker 1: the people, the salesman at the lumber yard. I think
Speaker 1: they would follow them more if I was going to
Speaker 1: stereotype them, I would say to you on the conservative side.
Speaker 1: And the one guy, the salesman, was it heard about
Speaker 1: that I did this. I think he saw Facebook that
Speaker 1: posted about it, and he was like that is he's
Speaker 1: like this is just the coolest thing ever. Man, Like,
Speaker 1: I think it's so awesome, you know, like he's like
Speaker 1: people are just locked up for like bullshit, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, we've had volunteers that I
Speaker 1: think people were like knew him or like why I
Speaker 1: think he's like almost like a Republican and just going
Speaker 1: out and posting these bonds. And I think that it's uh,
Speaker 1: like I said, yeah, it's just fascinating that it does transcend.
Speaker 1: It transcends the politics a little bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think anyone who's had to interact with the
Speaker 5: criminal justice system, I like, I have an interact with
Speaker 5: the American one. But like if they've had in their family,
Speaker 5: if they've had it in there, you know, and their
Speaker 5: friend group or whatever, realizes how dehumanizing and unjust it is.
Speaker 5: And especially like if they're working people, right, they are
Speaker 5: not people of massive means, They'll have seen how how
Speaker 5: hard it can weigh. And you're trying to come up
Speaker 5: with money to bond someone out who you care about,
Speaker 5: even if they'd end up not being found guilty, and
Speaker 5: so like, it can be a very broad based thing.
Speaker 5: And I think it's certainly something that like I start
Speaker 5: a lot of people giving money to bailfund's in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty who may not have you know, they weren't necessarily
Speaker 5: people who are also out in the streets. Like it's
Speaker 5: a way for people to be part of a movement.
Speaker 5: It's a way for people to who feel that like
Speaker 5: this is unjust, even if yeah, they might not share
Speaker 5: abolitionist politics or whatever. I think it's something that a
Speaker 5: lot of people would want to get behind.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I'll say that. For me, the most meaningful part
Speaker 13: of this work is having the opportunity to treat people
Speaker 13: with dignity when they are in a system that absolutely
Speaker 13: gives them no dignity. The police do not treat people
Speaker 13: with dignity, the judges in the courts do not treat
Speaker 13: people with dignity, and your jailers are not going to
Speaker 13: treat you with dignity. So having the opportunity to answer
Speaker 13: a phone and be kind to someone, to listen to them,
Speaker 13: and to do small things for them. Call their family,
Speaker 13: let their family know that they're locked up, Let their
Speaker 13: family know that someone is working on getting them out.
Speaker 13: Oftentimes I will get a call from someone and we
Speaker 13: aren't able to post, but I can call their mom
Speaker 13: and talk their mom through getting a bail Bondsman, I've
Speaker 13: had people like cry on the phone with me because
Speaker 13: they've said I felt so helpless not being able to
Speaker 13: get my son out of jail, and getting a call
Speaker 13: from you made a huge difference. So I think I
Speaker 13: just like, if you can do this, you can get
Speaker 13: together with your friends and form a bail fund and
Speaker 13: in a really concrete way improve their lives and treat
Speaker 13: them with dignity. And that's such a radical thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, all right, so I think
Speaker 5: the wrap up, we should bet, we should again remind
Speaker 5: people where they can give you their money. So how
Speaker 5: would people go about doing that? Yeah, please do please
Speaker 5: don't it to the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund.
Speaker 13: We are on PayPal at PayPal, dot me, slash blue
Speaker 13: Ridge Bail, Ridge is ri dge. We're on GoFundMe. You
Speaker 13: can find us ano the Blue Ridge Community Bail Fund.
Speaker 13: We are on Instagram at Ridge Bail and we also
Speaker 13: have a website, Blue Ridge Bail Fund dot org.
Speaker 1: I think so you can google Blue Ridge Community Bail
Speaker 1: Fund will show up and yeah, if anybody is interested
Speaker 1: in starting a bail fund and wants to ask us
Speaker 1: any questions like please do we would love to talk
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 17: We've learned a lot through just reaching out to other
Speaker 17: bail funds, even if they're not in the state of Virginia,
Speaker 17: of how they reformed, what worked for them, what didn't.
Speaker 17: Just having a thirty minute conversation gives sometimes wonderful ideas
Speaker 17: on how to go forward.
Speaker 5: That's great. Thank you so much, guys. I think that
Speaker 5: was pretty good. Anything eys you want to share before
Speaker 5: we go, I think we're good. Thanks so much, Thank
Speaker 5: you for having us. Thanks.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 17: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 17: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
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