Oh hey, there, it's me Jack. You've caught me unwinding, enjoying a large goblet of delicious eggnog, untangling my brain, gaining five to fifteen pounds of eggnog while we unwind. Here at Daily Zeitgeist, in addition to publishing our normal year end episodes and Santo's University, etc. We've decided to take the opportunity to count down the top ten episodes of the year published over the next ten days. The ten days that will be off Monday through Friday, two
weeks in a row. How Jack, how did you guys determine the top ten episodes? They were all equally incredible. Well, we used a little something called democracy. Ever heard of it? Depending on when you listen to this episode, that might not be such a rhetorical question. But anyways, we let you vote on the most listened to episodes of the year to see what you liked best. And you're about to hear your answers. Just ten bangers right in a row.
We've got a trending episode in the mix. We got a lot of good ones and at number one, well, let's just say you'll find out, especially if this is the number one episode we're putting this same bumper at the start of all ten, so we hope you enjoy it. We hope you enjoyed listening to this year of TDZ as much as we enjoyed making it. And we will see you all in twenty twenty five. We hope you have a RESTful holiday. I couldnot fucking sleep all night, all night.
I've been up like a fucking owl, like THEO Vaughn was telling Donald Trump interview. I should I'll have you like an owl, man, you'd be your own fucking not you being a street light light, just like and that's good.
No, that's good, that's good. And that feeling you like that feeling.
No, no, no, I do not want to feel like a vampire with a heart condition. And yeah, for the record, it's not because I was doing cocaine. This had a been a low grade anxiety that kept me up all night.
Is that what they're calling it? Yeah, okay, okay, all right, and I'm like an Now.
We call that, we call that poor people's cocaine anxiety.
Yeah, it's just a low great anxiety, the poor man's cocaine. Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season three, fifty three, Episode five of dirt Ally's Like I Say, production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American share consciousness. And it is Friday, August thirtieth, twenty twenty four. Yeah, yes, last day.
No, well thirty, they're thirty one days. They're thirty one days half August exactly. Also, Hey, guess guess who I get to shout out today? Shout up to my dad is his bay, seventy years old up in this place.
Congrats to you. I was just at a friend of my youngests and they have an amazing work from your dad on their wall. Oh they do? Yeah?
Yeah, oh well you know, yeah, you're very white. My dad is internationally known and locally respected as an artist. So I appreciate, appreciate the support from everybody. But also August thirtieth is National Beach Day, National Grief Awareness Day, National Toasted Marshmallow Day, and for all you college fans,
it's National College Colors Day. I am not wearing mine, Sadly I should normally maybe kind of I need, I need some more gray, But I feel like I wear like my Alma matership because I'm like, well, I gave these people so much money, like I have to. I need to get something out of it. We're like, they should brand me.
Yeah, yeah, the amount of money I gave them. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Yes, all right, Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka my Doughnuts. Bring jd Vance to the yard and he's like, whatever makes sense, damn right, whatever makes sense? That one courtesy and Macaroni on the discord new jd Vance flub just dropped. I'm sure we talked about it yesterday's trending, but his uh.
Did you did you see?
Don't worry any every everybody. I'm not gonna take my shirt off. Okay, it's a banger.
It's another was being booed by firefighters, so he just silence. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyways, I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host, mister Miles Gras.
It's Miles Gray aka whale was beached.
YEA be headed it with the chainsaw and it strapped it to the top.
Of the car.
Whale was beached ya because I'm a normal hunter and whales are cool.
You know that they are? Oh wales? Okay, shout out to clearly Dot Universe for that creep.
Tlc RFK hunter. Another creep.
Yeah, a true, true creep. But yeah, that whale was beached and hey whale. As Michael Knowles on the Daily Wires and whales are.
Cool and he's a hunter, so it's normal. Find a new angle exactly, chainsong of whales head does normal? Find a new angle? Mis whales juice? Thrill Whale juice is wonderful. We are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by a poet and a lawyer who is the co founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, which is designed to create a new model of collaborative public defense designed to empower You probably read her deep dive on
Twitter into Project twenty twenty five. Please welcome to the show. Emily Galvin.
O'monza very happy to be here, and I'm so sad that I don't have an Internet supplied jingle or joke to go along. I'm just sitting here like horrified at you guys having unearthed my deep poet history.
Yeah, you do a little googling. Do the math is a public you are a published poet.
I am math. Poetry is the most marketable genre of literature. I don't know if it's the top seller. Yeah.
Yeah, you were doing math poetry.
Yes, poetry is math, right, like when you have a rhythm of word, you know, the same way music is math. Poetry is math. I just started with other math first and then tried to create poetic forms that adhere to that math again.
Real bang Yeah wow, Okay, that's like some like tool type shit you like, I'm using sacred geometry to write down.
Yeah.
Yeah. If only I could be in the same category as tool, I would be. I mean, that's that's the best. That's the that's the height of my poetic career. You just you just made it right there.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I get it. I get it. I get it. So we we did reach out to you on this length of project, your project twenty twenty five Twitter thread, Deep Dive, and then we found out, like we have a bunch of mutual friends and we're a big fan of your work otherwise, but the project twenty twenty five thing, you were just like kind of reading it because you can read and comprehend lots of text, and you're like, oh, this is worse than I imagined.
Yeah, No, what makes the project twenty twenty five texts really really dangerous is that it's written to sound super normal, and it's also incredibly long. It's like nine hundred pages long.
And so if you are a layperson who's just a little bit concerned about what the Heritage Foundation might be putting out there, because you recognize that they were heavily influential in Donald Trump's last administration, and you see that a lot of his administration cronies had contributed to this document, you want to peruse it. It might not seem as scary as it actually is because it's written again to sound very very normal and that sort of like policies.
But having you know, gone to law school and been forced to read lots of stuff, I think it was a good use of time to try to kind of get in there and translate for people some of the scariest aspects of the policy plan. And then I got really far in there and wrote like a four hundred tweet thread about how bad it is and also how insane, like they're weird obsession with boyfriends and like how scared of boyfriends they are?
Yeah, wait, what is their obsession with boyfriends? Oh?
My yead, So they think that single moms are terrible, right, super popular parsil like, let's all hate on single moms. They had this fixation on fatherhood. They're of course very very interested in preserving the nuclear, heteronormative family. But from that flows this like weird paragraph where they actually talk about how dangerous like a single mom is bad, but like a single mom with a boyfriend it's the worst possible outcome for children and the like. This part is
actually not done in like very elegant policies. They like actually hate on boyfriends for a while. It's just there are these twists deep within the document that are working.
It's like, yeah, they're probably named Craig, and like they eat your cereal and like and they don't even ask you when you're twelve or when maybe your kid is twelve whatever. Maybe my life is bleeding into what I'm writing.
Here's the policy equivalent. If you're not my real dad, it's just right.
Yeah, which is so weird, but yeah, but I mean so many conservative men have that energy of like you're not my real dad, and you're like, wow, dude, we weren't even talking about anything related to that, and you went with that.
Okay, okay, you just.
Needed to take it down like six notches.
Yes, right, yeah, yeah, absolutely, all right, Well, we will link off to the entire thread in the footnotes. We are going to get to know you a little bit better in a moment. First, a couple of things that we're talking about later on when we get to the news. The mainstream media, it has been pointed out recently, seem to actually be for all the talk of there being a anti Trump bias, they really seem to help him in a lot of So we just want to cover
a couple small examples. The right has their new case closed winning strategy against Harris Waltz. This time it is taking down Harris's Donald's job story in the least convincing way possible.
Oh, she's being mixed Swift voted to.
Be mix Swift voted yep. And then we're gonna talk about a company called Axon. Now, I know you're hearing the name Axon and you're like, that company sounds like they do good in the world and probably not scary. Axon is actually a terrifying fucking company that is like the private arm of America's police, and they are experimenting with using AI to help police do more damage. So we're gonna talk about that and just some of the
other shit that they've done there. There is a photograph that our writer JM put in the doc that is their CEO addressing a crowd, and he is not him, Like the person addressing the crowd is in a all black suit and has a motorcycle helmet on and then an iPad strapped to the front with his face on it, but is like gesture as he delivers the speech from wherever,
bun whatever, like volcanic layer he's at. The person is like gesturing with his words too, So it's like a weird avatar situation that is just it's all so very on the nose. Might also talk about this New York Times article about alternative policing and just where we're at with the mainstream media when it comes to, you know, things that aren't police, that aren't armed police, and how that's being talked about these days in the mainstream all
that plenty more. But first, Emily, we do like to ask our guest, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?
Oh man, So it's actually really right that you guys asked me this because a few months ago Okay, so the story is gonna get weird. A deer impaled itself on my colleague's fence, oh no, and my colleague, of course, shared a photograph with our entire team to ask Jesus, what do I do now there's a dead deer on
my fence. And it just so happened that I dipped into my own Google search history to demonstrate how ready for this topic I actually was, and I took a screen grap I'm actually going to show you guys to prove that it's really a screen grab of my search results from that day, which were as follows wordle how to gut a deer at home, Oh no, how to dress a deer at home? Inflation Reduction Act Rebates twenty twenty four Massachusetts driving directions to the Magical Bridge Playground. That's there.
You go, wait, what's the Magical Bridge break? I'm like, more like, what's the Magical Bridge?
You know, it's actually really cool. In this area where I was living in California at time, because I teach at Stanford during the winter, there is this playground that was actually designed to be really accessible for kids with disabilities. And it turned out that the playground that's accessible. Is actually the best playground ever made, and it's everybody's favorite playground. So that's the one I was taking my kid too.
Yeah, this place looks like a fucking theme park.
It's amazing. There's like three, there's more than three of them. They're they're popping up everywhere. They're they're the next generation of playgrounds.
Really wow wow wow wow.
Okay. I like to see that.
And you can tell it's got that like tartan on the ground, Like that makes it real soft and sunshine.
Like, yeah, you hurt their little heads on like when they've grown up and it was just all concrete.
Yeah, or i'd get like wood moults stuck under my toenails or something because like try to go barefoot down the slide.
Yeah, the slide burns you, and then the wood impales at the bottom and that.
Makes them stronger, and then you get that nice aroma of like smoky playground for sure.
Read yeah, safe for my kids. The tartan. And also I feel like I jump higher on it, and so I like to show that off when I'm at the playground. Well, I'm gonna dunk on these monkey bars. Oh it's five feet high.
Cristiana Ronaldo of the of the Mugical Bridge Playground.
Yeah, why was your partners or the person who texted you, Why was their fence so sharp? Is that a thing that is normal?
Great question. I don't know. They live in the South. I can't speak to Southern fence practices. I don't I have a lot of fence experience. I've myself constructed a lot of four string barb wire fence grown up in ranch culture, but never something with an impalable top.
I have real questions, right, yeah, yeah.
Like it is that by design? Is he like I'm gonna leave the deer there to tell the other deer what happens when you try to come on our property? Or is it just like an accident because it was so I'm.
Gonna go with the former. I'm gonna decide that whoever install that fence wanted it to be a place where you could impale ahead just really.
Yeah, oh yeah, like what like in Game of Thrones when like Kalisi takes over that place and like the heads are like on pikes and stuff or body Yeah yeah, I.
Guess, or in real life in human history.
Yeah, yeah, that was like everywhere that was just interior or exterior decorating.
Back in the day, need like a wisconce and then a head.
Yeah, it was like we like to around Christmas, have points set as the rest of your heads, just heads decorating everything. What is? What's something you think is underrated?
So I I thought about this question a lot. I think that tea time is underrated. And I'm gonna make a defensive of tea time because when I see say tea time, people usually think of sort of like stodgy, British, pinky raised, unpleasantly meticulous. Okay, tea time is supposed to be an incredible spread at like four o'clock in the afternoon, where if you are like me, you are most ravenous. There should be pastries and cakes and like say everythings.
My husband is Bolivian. Bolivians really do tea time like they do They will fill your table at tea time and then dinner is like a light snack. I think this is a really underrated way of living one's life because that's when I actually want to just become a complete glutton and move my way across a full table at four o'clock in the afternoon, when I'm just when I've had it with the world. So I think tea time, we should bring tea time back.
Wow, I didn't know.
Like Bolivians are really I'm just reading about these they got salon reading about these Bolivia, these Olivions.
They love the tea time.
It comes on tea time.
It's a whole.
It's very elegant, it's very comforting.
Yeah, four o'clock is snack time for me. Like I'm just wondering, Like I feel like I basically recreated this in my own life, but with a snack drawer because you know, being raised Catholic, I have shame and so like I just have all the snacks, but they're like in a drawer, and I just like eat over the drawer all the different snacksave it in there. It's my tea time shame drawer. Wait, what do you wait? What do you got in there?
Like loose bread slices or just loose breads all scale, a couple of pieces of wonderbread.
No, I got got chips, I got some some pretzels, I got cashews, maybe maybe some sorted nuts in there, and then you know, I'll bring out one bag of either chips or pretzels. At a time to accompany you know, some things from the cold cut drawer, Oh wow, or some you know or hummus, how dignified. Wait, what's this one at a time?
What's the spread out of Bolivion tea time?
Emily?
Oh my god. So you're obviously gonna have different beverages, including tea, but you're also going to have both an array of savory and an array of sweet options. Okay, And I am going to state right here that asking an actual Bolivion would get you a better answer, being of course being there, you know, here without a Bolivion on the call, I'm gonna highlight like something which are a breakfast food as one of the best Bolivian foods
you can get. You can get a ton in like the uh DC metro area, a ton of Bolivian's there. You can get them sort of all across Virginia and some in California. But Southanias is basically like a like a savory pastry full of delicious stew and you can kind of bite off the end and sip the stew and then eat the pastry.
Oh it's souping.
Because like when I see a picture, I'm like, oh, this looks like anada.
But oh my god, you will never touch another.
No.
South is our next level. We have which are like a like a cheese pastry that are really fluffy and delicious. They're kind of like a powdered casual but better better, Oh way better, way better.
Okay, okay, go on, go on.
Will I'm here to talk about Lyvian food and I will tell you some of the best in the world. No, they're gonna have all kinds of like real dishes, like meats, prepared meats, and and maybe a stew. And then you're also going to have a lot of like cakes and pastries and the sort of usual.
Like just started sweating, like.
Yeah, because I love pald occasual. Like when I first had that the first I'm like, my god, what the fuck are we doing up here? Like I love and now seeing the other one we say is the fact that it's sort of like a soup dumpling, but the Bolivian version was like first you got to take the bite and then get the soup out and then keep going. I'm also intrigued by the structural integrity of the pastry that can contain a stew within it.
This comes down to scale.
I mean the pastry is like really robust and like almost has a slight sweetness and thick chewiness to it. But it's also like you're gonna get judged on your skill level, Like some people are beginners and they need to use a utensil or they might get stew on them once they're real pro. You're just holding that saltania in one hand and like longboarding down the road, no stew anywhere on.
Your person bottle. Yeah, what is something you think is overrated?
I'm gonna stay with my food theme. I actually think we've gotten to the point where where brunches is overrated. I think, yeah, like everybody's doing brunch every weekend, and it's getting the point where it's just like flat, flabby breakfast food at a different time of day, and I'm no longer excited by it. I'm no longer inspired over it.
I think brunch like loses its appeal the earlier I wake up. Like when I was like younger and like like you know, going out and shit like that, and I'd wake up lane, I'm like, yeah, brunch, but yeah, let's eat at one that's breakfast. But now I'm like, not already eight or it's depends on you know, if there's an occasion.
But yeah, I get that.
I guess is that is that maybe one of our latest food fads that's going away now it is a brunch.
Oh, it'll never go away.
Yeah maybe maybe.
Actually the right answer to how to live one's life is to only have brunch and tea. I mean maybe breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Or two meals. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, two meals. Give me a brunch, give me a tea, give me that tea. I mean, does the enthusiasm for tea just like make you less likely to have anything at dinner? I feel like dinner becomes an afterthought at that point. Well, snack dinner like spread for tea. Okay, I like that. Yeah, brunch is not a natural time for me to be hungry. If I've eaten breakfast, then like brunch is not.
Real, or you do the thing where you wake up you're like, fuck, dude, brunch is in four hours and you're like I don't want to like go and not eat anything. So then you're like walking this tightrope of not eating before or showing up. Hangary, You're like this, show up me.
Yeah, Yeah, all right, let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. And we're back. We're back. And yeah. So there's been some talk it's being called sane washing when it comes to the Trump campaign, like that how the mainstream media covers President Trump former President Trump's long
ramble laying press conferences. Yeah and yeah, but it just it does feel like there's a different standard when it comes to him, possibly because of the glut of insanity that is like coming at us, or possibly just because I don't know that you want to make it a good a good game. Everyone wants to see a good game, so we gotta we gotta make sure it's close.
No one likes to blow out, so we got to prop up the orange guy who's deteriorating before our eyes. But yeah, like you, like you said Aaron Rupar, like on a lot of his videos that he clips out and puts out on Twitter, like whenever he cut Like we've we've played a couple of those clips where trumb will be rambling on they'll cut back to someone in the student like what he means to say is actually this not that Hannibal elector was a real person and a good guy.
What he means a late great Hannibal elector represents our democracy. He just wants to talk about all the ways.
He's a poet actually. But like two recent events in the presidential race have kind of underscored how the mainstream met tries to normalize Trump and like his circus of political aids. So this week, obviously he made headlines for insisting on taking photos and filming a TikTok video for his campaign in a section of Arlington National Cemetery that prohibits that very thing. In fact, it's a violation of federal law to use a military cemetery for campaign purposes.
So while this was happening happening, there was a press release that came out of the Trump campaign to sort of like paper things over, and journalist Brandon Friedman he pointed out on Twitter how the Trump campaign's press release had a very dumb typo in it.
Quote.
In the statement, campaign manager Chris Losovita incorrectly used the word hollowed instead of hallowed. On this hollowed hallowed out, Yeah, knock on a hollowed gesture, hallowed ground exactly right, precise precisely Fridian slip like so axios the Daily Beasts, they added the sort of parenthetical sick to sort of say, like if they misused the word, this is what they
meant to say. But if few other organizations, as you pointed out, sort of caught the misuse but then corrected it on behalf of the Trump campaign, like CNN did, and just like they're like, they meant hallowed, dude, just change it so people don't make like, you know, point out they made a typo. The New York Times predictably ran the story with the typo unedited, and then but like so if you searched in Google, you'd be like, oh, yeah,
they wrote hollowed haha. But when you click it, they republished it and edit it, edited it to be hallowed without any sort of reference to the fact that there was a typo. And then they had, you know, dud you basically like, we're doing some copy intern stuff for
the camp the Trump campaign. But this is like a subtle example, but like worth noting because these like small accommodations are at the very least bad journalism and at best being like, no, we're helping them because like we they we just need them to look a little.
Bit more like together than they obviously are.
So the other thing that has been like being pointed out across the media is from like the CNN shit, Like during the DNC, they would have these panels of like quote undecided voters to be like, well, so what did you think about that you're undecided? And right after Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech, they spoke to a panel of supposedly undecided voters in Pennsylvania, and one man was clearly an outlier, Like after the speech, he's like, I.
Don't know, that thing was like bad.
Most people are like, yeah, that was that was pretty good. That that wasn't that wasn't fun? That yeah, that was fine. He's like, nah, there's nothing. There's a big nothing burger. And then when the panel, like the person who was hosting the panel said, has anyone decided yet after this speech who they're going to vote for? This guy immediately raised his hand. He's like, yeah, I'm voting for Trump.
They're like, oh, okay. Midas Touch looked into this guy and his social media is like littered with MAGA crap, Like he's very much clearly like a Trump supporter.
And when they pressed.
CNN and him on it, they both kind of had conflicting stories. The man said, yeah, dude, I told CNN I was a Trump like, I'm a Trump guy, and they just asked if I could keep an open mind, and I said, yeah, I can't keep an open mind. So I went and they called me undecided. CNN was like, well, technically, when we spoke to him, he said he hadn't decided who he was gonna support, so we invited him to
speak on the panel. And that's where you're just like, what the Like, I'm always confused when they do these like undecided sort of panels. I'm like, who, like, who really are these people? Like are they really that undecided? Because they seem pretty informed for being undecided. And then I'm like, what is it that you're waiting for on either side? For you'd be like, all right, Trump said the thing I needed to hear, all right, the Democrats
said the thing I needed to hear. And this could be like a one off or like a you know, simple mistake, but like, you know, Parker macloy pointed out that CNN has like a pattern of this shit, Like in twenty fifteen, they had a roundtable with Trump supporters where like a woman went on like a viral tirade against Obama and the issue here. It's just that this
wasn't like some fox brained normal person. This was like a sitting New Hampshire leg Just later Bertha who tried to keep Obama off the New Hampshire ballot, who's just
presenting as just a citizen in New Hampshire. Then in twenty eighteen, CNN also had a discussion with quote five conservative women from Florida to discuss the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, and the women's responses were, yeah, here, I'll I'll just play the supposed five conservative women from Florida talking about the allegations against Kavanaugh a.
Show of hands. How many of you believe Judge Kavanaugh when he says this didn't happen?
Abaleena Believa, believe Abalea. How can we believe the word of a woman or something that happened thirty six years ago? When this guy has an impeccable reputation. It wasn't nobody nobody that has spoken.
Ill will about him.
Everyone that speaks about him. This guy's an altar boy, you know, a scout.
He's you know, because one woman made an allegation.
Sorry I don't buy it, but in the grand scheme of things, my goodness you there was no intercourse.
There was maybe a time. Can we really thirty six years later she still step on that had it happened.
I mean, we're talking about a fifteen year old girl, which I respect, you know, I'm a woman. I respect. We're talking about a seventeen year old boy in high school with a stots ll running high Tell me what boy hasn't done this in high school.
So the thing is a huge Journalists looked into these people, and at least three of them are political operatives, like like one woman like was hosting fundraisers for the GOP. Another was running for like was a candidate for office. So they had people that were like part of like the GOP, like machinery go in there to sort of provide intellectual cover for people to be like, yeah, whatever happened to our kabnall was not that bad. I mean, these five normal people just said that it's nothing, so
maybe maybe it is. They just framed them as like some people with conservatives, Yeah, just as conservatives that were living in Florida and their take on it. So it's just a yeah, it's just an odd, odd practice, but may be quite intentional. But I guess it depends on how you look at things, Emily, how do you sort of see this kind of journalism with what's your take on that?
Well, it's not happening in a vacuum. When I look at this, what I see, honestly is I'm a trial lawyer. I see the jury selection process, right, which is a similar space.
Right.
It's this space where we're all pretending to be neutral, and we have no pre existing beliefs, and we're coming in here with a totally open mind. And yet everyone walked through the door totally looked at my client was like, I wonder what that person did? Right, So we also see real restrictions on who's invited to be part of
that process. Like you got to look at how media put out the call for people to sign up for opportunities like this, the same way you got to look at how you know in the jury system, people with prior convictions are excluded, People who aren't on the voter
rolls are excluded. People who may not have a driver's license can be excluded, people who don't have a mailing address are excluded, So you get these juries that are sort of made wealthier and wider and more conservative by the ways in which people are even invited to attend. And then that's sort of distilled into an even more sort of pro prosecution extract through the process of questioning people.
And then if a person's like, I don't know if I can be fair, the judge is like, you can keep an open mind, right, same, it's the CNN question, right, right. You've told us who you are and what you believe in, but you can sett all that aside, can't you.
Right, So I'm as huh, I can keep an open mind here? Yeah, I think so.
I think so.
But that's not a problem for me brother in law technically.
But yeah.
So yeah, Like who's who's the producer, who's setting up the process through which these people appear, and who's the person not doing like a basic social media.
Search, right, because like in that instance of the guy like in the undecided, like I mean whatever, that guy just there's like I get to be on TV or whatever, Like I mean that that that's clearly on the producers, like you're saying, of how they're selecting people and whether they they are doing it intentionally or just don't care because they're like, I don't know, they said they were, man, I'm just trying to get five people.
In the room so they could talk.
And yeah, I guess maybe it was a mistake for me to reach out to my friend who like runs the local Republican party to ask if they knew five people who wanted to be on camera for CNN.
But yeah, it's also like what's the utility, Like, what are we really gaining? It's not a scientific process. This group of people doesn't necessarily represent or speak for the average undecided voter. Now we know that they're maybe not even undecided at all. Maybe they're just a political operative who has a good, you know, makeup face. Right, I don't understand what the average viewer is gaining from these events.
Yeah, right, it's always meant to I think I don't know, like half the time when I see those panels or people undecided, like like I said that, they seem to know. They don't seem like low information voters, you know, like, and so then I'm like, I that's where I'm like, these people sound like they're basically Democrats or Republicans who are being like I don't know, but probably this.
Low information voters would be great. Like, honestly, you put people on there who first of all normalize being a low inform voter, make it okay to be like, hey, I actually don't know about this or this issue is confusing me, and I'd like a better explanation, and then present an opportunity for the mass media audience to also receive that explanation, so that people It's the same way as high school teacher might say, like, if you have
a question, somebody else probably has the same question. Please ask your question. We could do that. I don't know why we're doing this instead.
Yeah, no stupid questions. The thing that every good professor will tell you or teacher who's like no, no ask, ask because you got to know, or else, yeah, you ask weird stuff or learn weird stuff because you don't ask.
There's that sketch and everybody's in la the John Mulaney series where they're like doing a daily show style like interview with a guy who's like saying really stupid shit about like Trump and his support for Trump, and then they like follow him home and he's like, yeah, no, I'm stupid. On TV for a living that's like my thing.
I actually got interviewed by Borat a couple of years ago that was a career highlight, and like he's just like I have this like room that I keep in my house that looks like shit and has like a Confederate flag up and then but like I keep that stuff separate, like I actually live with my family and the kids, like we have this nice house that Yeah, I feel like, yeah, these are political operatives essentially, Like it's the real, the real version of that, except you know,
obviously they are employed and like working within these massive parties too write convey what those parties need conveyed.
But I think it's also yeah, it sort of shows too how we talk about how like a lot of media outlets just aren't able to reckon with real issues because of the fact that they're so entrenched in a lot of these systems themselves.
They're like, yeah, I think this is this is good enough. Can we actually speak objectively about that?
I don't know, but you know, this is like I think, yeah, this is where a lot of the media is falling short at a time when people really need to have like the truth, which we don't get all the time.
I also don't know what objective necessarily looks like, because you're right, when you're deeply entrenched in the system, it's very, very hard to see it's equilibrium from the outside. I'm a like devoted NPR listener. I go running in the morning and I pop on Morning Edition and I'm very
happy to hear it. But like, even on NPR, there have been these few times where they're covering, you know, a democratic event, a Republican event, and they'll be like, well, they talked about the economy, which is a bad issue for Democrats, and I'm like, is it, Yeah, it is actually like listen to Bill Clinton, a person of whom I am not always a fan, but with Bill Clinton, who like spelled out how great the economy is built by Democrats over the last several decades have been, and
it's weird to hear that coming from NPR. I think it's like their gesture towards equilibrium that doesn't actually speak to truth.
Right, Yeah, I think that's a problem with the mainstream media that we'll also get to on you know, policing, and you know, they there are these things that they just assume are bad for progressives that everyone disagrees with and they just do a very surface level pass over those things, just being like, yeah, well those things that everybody assumes about progressive ideas around this are true, and like we just have to take that into account as
opposed to like digging into some ways that they can be proven not true. Right, Yeah, MPR drives me fucking crazy. All right, let's take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about policing and Axon finally find out a little bit more about this cool company named Axon, and we're back. We're back, all right. So that you may have seen this story that AI police
reports are here to save the police from doing police work. Basically, it's only a matter of time, you know, it was only a matter of time until the two of the shittier things on the planet, AI and policing joined forces. In this case, the AI helps them churn out recaps of incidents using bodycam footage, thus sparing the officers from
having to pen lengthy reports. And the cops like in talking about it, the ones that they're like interviewing for these puff pieces on the technology are like, I can't write for shit, come basically an idiot and this thing made me like it. This is a quote from one of the stories. It was a better report than I could have ever written, and it was one hundred percent accurate. It flowed better, better than I could have ever written.
That's first of all, it's supposed to be a rough draft, Like, it's not supposed to be replaced the reports that you're writing the post to give you a rough draft that you then like work backwards on. Nah, gotta cut corners. How it's called draft one, by the way, that's the name of the technology as draft one. And he's like, this is the goddamn best thing, best version of a report I've ever seen. EI.
How important are these like police reports in terms of, you know, like what people intersect with the justice system, Like is it how vital are these and how much like how much room is there for you know, dubious shit to pop into these kinds of police reports.
All Right, to be clear, they're already largely made of dubious shit. Like let's let's start from there.
Okay, there we go, Thank you. Things.
These things vary really really wildly from place to place. So when I started out as a public defender, I was in Santa Clara County, California, in which the police are trained to write reports. So when a thing happens and the police are there, they'll like write down what they saw, and then the second top there will write
down what he saw. And then they talked to a witness and they write down with the witness set, and all in all you get this packet, which is really really helpful if we are going to believe that the legal system is in any way about finding truth, right, Like, you want to have detailed accounts from the people who are there about what they what they heard, and what
they saw. I then went out to New York to work at Bronx Defenders, and that's when I learned that the NYPD is essentially like really really really good at not writing stuff down. When you get an NYPD discovery packet, it's like a whole bunch of pages, but all of the pages have the same one line copy pasted on them. It's like, at the time and place of occurrence the incident did occur.
Anything, and that is when the suspected perpetrator did occur onto the occurrence and it happened that at that moment in the geographical location in question, heretofore it's just like it's ill.
Yeah, we can have a whole conversation about like the police attraction to big words. They don't quite use it. You want to have a great time. They've got the defense attorney ask a cop on the stand what furtive means? They love saying every doing furtive movements, But like, what what is what is furtive to you?
Now?
Indeed, this whole situation is furtive. So when you get to a place where essentially nothing is written down, you had you create a systemic problem, which is, in order for me to get any information to protect an accused person and protect their US constitutional rights, I'm going to need to create a legal process to find out more about what this CoP's claims actually are, which means I may have to demand hearings that I don't actually need, Like I might have to file suppression hearings that I
don't actually need, just to get the cop on the witness stand just so I can cross examine them about what the heck they're saying they saw and did. So it's really really really inefficient, and it's bad for truth and it's bad for justice, Like it's very very bad for any semblance of accuracy in the system, and it causes massive delays. So all of this is to say bad discovery is a huge driver of our system being inept at creating any semblance of truth.
Right.
It's also like you have to remember that police writing reports. There's kind of a double edged sword here because police get a ton of overtime out of writing reports if they make an arrest at the end of their shift and they get to sit at their desk for the next three hours like carefully inscribing documents with at the time and place of occurrence the event and again very I cursive. Yeah, they make a ton of overtime doing that. So I think I mean when I say a ton,
I mean like millions and millions. Wherever you are in the country. You should google who the highest paid public employee in your jurisdiction was, and there's like a decent chance it was a cop who made a lot of overtime a few years ago. It was like a port authority cop in New York City.
Wow.
Yeah, just like over a million bucks in overtime. And so when I think about what AI would do to this process, I think of a couple of things. One it's less accurate because it's not giving you the police officers impressions of what happened. It's giving you the AIS impressions of what happened. And this is even assuming the AI doesn't hallucinate, which, as we know, like AIS make
stuff up all the time. So yeah, like, if you're going to totally hand over your faith to a robot to tell you what happened in a video and abandon the idea that human perception is necessary to interpret what happened in a video, you're also leaving by the side of the road things that I might need to know about the CoP's ability to perceive about what the cop
was focused on. What like, For example, in a police report, let's say the whole report is written about I don't know, somebody's way of driving a car in a DUI case, and none of it's about the fact that when the person got totally furtively furtively across you know, when they get out of the car, maybe everything they did at that point was fine. Maybe they're talking, fine, walking fine,
don't have any sort of symptoms of intoxication. If the entire report is about the driving, then I get to cross examine the cop On, Like why why didn't you talk about what happened after that? What's like, their omissions can be really really important to a jury to decide who's lying, who's telling the truth. You take the human perception out of that, and you take away this fundamental thing.
Our system is designed to have twelve people tell you if another person is lying, right, twelve people can't tell you if an ai is lying or hallucinating. I mean, it's just it takes us even farther from the system having utility. And I get that in the system we are going to consistently prioritize the efficiency of punishment over the semblance of truth. But especially with the involvement of Axon, which has a grotesque history, I'd be more than happy to Yeah, this is like five alarm fire.
Wait, you're saying a company that used to be called Taser.
I like that they went from Taser obviously like trying to cover up the fact that they're the company that invented the taser that for some reason as a negative connotation with it to Axon is like so fucking aggressive.
Well, it's also you know, that's a nerve. Axon is what the electrical current runs down that stimulates the next nerve cell. So it's still like we're gonna zapia. It's just we're gonna zapA for people who took ap bio.
That's right exactly. It's like the version of using furtive. They're like, what if we just clashed it up?
I would you throw in the additional thing? And this might be like not this might be a controversial statement, but I personally don't want to get like it. So the CEO of Axon, who is a company behind this AI technology, will talk about other stuff there behind brag that the AI spares cops from the tedious work of
spending half their day doing data entry. I don't want police to be like out roaming the streets more with their guns, like ready to get like suspicious about whatever comes across their plate while they're sufficiently bored, Like I feel like this is a job that we want to have a healthy amount of like downtime where they're reflecting on what they've done and like having to think about
that and account for it. And this technology seems to be designed to like what if the police were like even more gas and less breaks like built into it. What if it was just more they don't really even have to think about it. The machines there to like just document what they did. We want to beless now, you know, yeah, you know exactly more frictionless policing aka just like out there fucking shit up more of the time. I think.
The other thing that's really interesting too is like to your point, Emily, you know, the overtime is where a lot of budgets go, and a lot of people they make their they make that money. We're like, how does that cop have that fucking car and like a boat and all this other stuff. It's like, yeah, dude, the overtime's wacky that they're never like this will actually help
cut down on costs. They're more just like, dude, it's gonna help the cops, dude, so they don't have to be bored at work, you know, and like you think the way to sell it to people who might be more progressive, like guess what, man, this could actually save a lot of money because now they don't have the time to do, you know, claim as much overtime. But again,
that's that's part of the appeal. So they'll just be like, no, man, it just makes their job easier so they can keep you the citizen safe, all right, next question, You're right.
Though, it's also sort of exposing this terrible choice.
Right.
We have set up policing policy so that the vast majority of police time is spent on things that most people don't actually care about. So when you ask the people what are they like scared out, it's like burglary, robbery,
sexual assault, murder. And when you look at how police spend their time, the vast majority of it is on like noise complaints and unfounded calls and like somebody was peeing outside and trespassing, and sometimes on what I sort of think of as like police manufactured crime, which is like convincing someone with a substance use problem to score some drugs and also score for the undercover who will then arrest them for a felony.
Right right.
And the reason we don't want them on the street more is because they are out there on the street, armed, dangerous, and not investigating the things that people really care about. If you look at clearance rates, a lot of people don't know what clearance rates are, but it's the rate at which police are able to close cases. And in any jurisdiction, you can search for your local clearance rates. You'd be like, all right, how many rape cases are
my local police even closing? Got most places thirteen to twenty percent. This is a whole other feminist sobeb.
Ninety is totally across the entire country. There's like at least ninety that they've closed in the past decade.
Seriously, and that's because it's a policy choice. It's a choice from police leadership about what they're going to dedicate resources to. And if, yeah, if the answer was, okay, they're not going to spend their time writing trespassing reports, but instead, we're going to dedicate real efforts to how about wage theft or large scale pollution of poisoning entire towns.
We're going to set the cops on that. If they were going to investigate crimes of the powerful against the citizenry instead of writing reports, I might feel differently about it, But I don't think that's the plan.
Yeah, never has been. Yeah, But I do just want to get a little bit more into the history of ACXON. So they were taser. They made their initial money with selling tasers and then body cams. When that became the solution to police brutality corruption, they went with body cams, and they basically have a monopoly for which they've been sued. They made four hundred and sixty one million dollars in
the first quarter of twenty twenty four alone. They're also the same company that made headlines for endeavoring to solve school shootings with Taser equipped drones. That plan was paused when the majority of Axon's ethics board resigned in protests. But I think probably the most relevant and also, like I mentioned, their CEO gives speeches via remote iPad, I use an avatar man glued to the front of the motorcycle helmet.
They also created excited delirium in parts that are due to.
That, Yes, so I wanted to talk about that because I also think like that feels very relevant to this, because this is them getting involved in police narrative and how police justify what they're doing, and they were involved.
You actually have a great video on this on your Twitter, Emily, where you talk about how about their role in the creation of and the proliferation of the term excited delirium, which is something we covered a while back, but I think it's always worth kind of refreshing people's memory of what is excited delirium.
So excited delirium is a made up medical diagnosis that was originally invented in a sort of predictably racist way in Miami many decades ago, where a doctor claimed that people were dying of excited delirium, the sort of state of mania that caused them to behave really erradically and aggressively and dangerously and then they perish, They just expire. And it turned out that many of the women who are originally alleged to have excited delirium had actually been
killed by a serial killer. But this idea that people could become so worked up that they are dangerous and then they die was seized upon by police because in police encounters where there is a need to justify use of force, it is very useful for them to claim that the person they used force against was dangerously worked up and had this medical thing where they became a risk to everybody's safety and they had to be taste and then oh, when they died from a heart attack,
it wasn't because they got a massive vault of electricity. It was because they died of excited delirium. So excited delirium, which is not accepted by the way by doctors, like medical associations are like, that's totally not a thing. Psychiatrical associations the same deal, not a thing.
But there was that one panel that you feel like, we're good here. No need to look into the panel or who funded that. I think we're good.
Yeah, No need to look at how many doctors on the panel were put there by Axon to no need to connect this to no need to also think about how much this reduces Axon's liability right, because if deaths are caused by excited delirium and not caused by a taser, they're not going to have they're not going to be
able to be successfully sued. But it's actually become a serious epidemic in this country of police use excited delirium to justify it, not only taser use of force, but the use of paramedics as a weapon, like we saw in the Elijah McClain case, where the police had paramedics inject Elijah McLain with a lethal dose of sedatives under this false diagnosis of excited delirium, so that that seed that Axon planted in eight in legitimizing this diagnosis has
now caused many many deaths and is continuing to cause deaths around the country.
Right because like they'll hit people like ketamine and stuff, and then like they like I was reading a statistic that a lot of those people end up having to be intubated because it's so severe, and they're like, I don't know, man, wait, the guy was excited. I mean then they also said the same thing about George Floyd too.
Yeah, that was like very early on, like it's excited.
I don't know what you want to say, man, let's let's just move on. So then like so axin for them, it's just more because they're sort of like, hey, we love what you guys do. Let's help out because this also helps justify the use of our products. Like is that sort of like their main motivation and like sort of pushing the excited delirium sort of craze along.
I think it's also a legal shield. I mean, if I'm good to Let's say I lose a loved one who was taste and I want a sue Taser for marketing a product as non lethal that was in fact lethal to my loved one. And they say the medical examiner certificate doesn't say that your loved one died of an electric shock. The medical examiner certificate says excited delirium, So you can't actually get money from us in a civil suit or settlement. So it's it's covering them from
being financially responsible for deaths they cause. And the same thing for police. I mean, if the police are getting the police could be sued in the same case, right, the pe taser for the device to the police for the action. But either way, if the EMMYS certificate says this person died of excited delirium, it's a liability.
Shield, right, Yeah, and disproportionately applied to Black men.
Yes a lot of the time. Yes, it's a way for the police to justify that why they're scared.
It's really reliant on racist tropes right on the adultification of black children. First of all, this this child is a risk to me because I'm perceiving this child as older because of racial bias, but also the racist myth of dangerousness of black men in an excited state. I mean, this is totally playing on long term American racist tropes and sanitizing them with a fake medical diagnosis.
Right yeah, Yeah, it sounds like something you'd get at like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and excited delirium for you and you're like.
Right, ooh yeah, and that's why, and that's why we had to drown him in the chocolate river. Yes, exactly. Just a couple more details about is it Axin Axon. I'm gonna call them Axon because that feels sufficiently violent and sinister. Their CEO is like founding story. I just like founding stories for companies and CEOs because they are like the most full of shit things in America and like most widely believed people. It was founded in the
like everything was founded in a garage. No, it wasn't founded in like their rich dad's second home that was behind you his first mansion. But anyways, the CEO repeatedly told the story that he started the company because his two high school friends were shot and killed. He played high school football with them. It's just like two guys that he like knew about who were like four or five years older than him. Yeah, they weren't even he
never went to high school with him. Yeah, but like it's just you know, for him, he's like and man like, that's the closest that I like kids who were at your high school before you, is like such a stretch to be like that's also they the workplace culture includes group tasings and tattooing sessions in which employees are inked with corporate insignia. And by the way, the drone thing.
While they were like all right fine when their entire ethics board resigned, they did by a drone company recently. So there it seems like what well their mouth says, all right, fine, god, their their money is saying that they're full, full steam ahead on the taser drones front. Yeah, so just all sorts of wild shit there, like truly the most dystopian, like a bunch of tattoo branded like corporate people, guy with motorcycle helmet, iPad face.
Like righting, like knowing murder victims. Yeah, it's all I mean, they're in a way, it all does feel very appropriate. That then it's like and now that's what I like to do is help other people lie about stuff and I just make money. And the institutional investment in this company is wild too. Oh yeah, it's like because they know they're like wait, how much they make in Q one?
Okay? Yeah, yeah, but just generally I just want to like kind of get your take, Emily. There was recently this New York Times article about a The headline is what a group of posed to police blow the whistle on its founder, And it was like this AI app that was like, we're gonna re like create an alternative to the police by taking people's you know, complaints and routing them to like some of these other police alternatives.
It turned out to be like the founder just like didn't have the ability to pull it off and was spending some of the money on like clothing and vacations that you know, like that I'm drifting. Sure you can find scams in any nonprofit like category, but the way the New York Times writes about it and like frames this article is that whole argument of like, oh, you think the police are bad at their jobs, Let's see what you say when you're being robbed, is like basically
the whole thesis of the argument. And what it comes down to if you read the article is like one person and on the team is like I didn't want to turn him over to the police because I like, he's a black man, and I fear what would happen to him? And then another person is like, yeah, but I did turn him over to the attorney general because I know that, Like you don't usually call the police on white collar crime because they won't do shit. So anyways,
like the attorney general is working on investigation. It might be civil, it might be criminal, but the way they framed it is so much like based on this bad
faith reading of any criticism of the police. And it just feels generally like the tone of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party recently is like, boy, those protests in twenty twenty were you know, unpopular, let's never fight again, babe to the police, and it's like, I don't know, it's just so fucking frustrating, Like and meanwhile, police killings haven't have just like stayed the same or gone up,
so like, where where are we with this? Like what you know, there were some programs that were funded that like worked really well, Like Denver had a controlled trial of a program that provides housing subsidies to people at risk of homelessness and found a forty percent reduction and arrests.
Like there's all these cool examples they get like dashed off really quickly in a New York Times article that like has a counter point for everything that might suggest that, like there could be alternatives to our fucking terrible idea of a system that if you've been to any other country in the world, you're like, oh, wow, why do we do it the way we do it? But yeah, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on like where we're at in our conversation in the mainstream.
So first of all, we're really lucky in this one way, which is that we are overrun with cool solutions. Like I'm writing a book right now, Like my book it's coming out in twenty twenty six. It's going to be a layperson's guy to the criminal legal system in all of its horribleness, and also solutions, Like I'm going to spend two thirds of the book on problems, and then I'm going to present a whole bunch of solutions. I
had originally intended to write one chapter on solutions. I'm now at like page eighty eight of one hundred of all of these solutions because there are just so many fantastic things happening that have better data than the status quo, Like we don't have data strongly suggesting that police are
a feasible preventative mechanism. Police can disappear problems. They can take people and put them in spaces where they are no longer visible to the general public and where they may be then violently harmed in ways that make them more likely to engage in crime in the future. So police may be sort of like temporarily making a problem disappear in a way that long term makes it worse.
We have that data, have a ton of data on like the Star program in Denver, or cahoots in Oregon, or you know, other alternatives to police popping up around the country. Massive public support for this. Most voters would love to have mental health first responders, and actually most cops, if you ask them, are like, yes, I would like to also no longer be treated like I'm a trained social worker, because I'm not one, and I would like
that to not be part of my job. What's really what bugs me about the perspective you just described, right, which is like, Oh, these people who don't want to use the police, what happens when they need the police? Well, okay, when we on election day hear from voters that they are scared to go to their local polling place because there are proud Boys outside the polling place, intimidating potential voters.
No one is saying, well, it's your problem if you don't like the proud Boys, don't you just have a way to work out. No, we say, okay, this is a problem because people have a legitimate fear. It is a legitimate fear of an organized effort which is intimidating and threatening harm to the general public. And because the general public is afraid, we the government should probably take action to protect the general public. The blind spot with regard to when that organ harmful force is a governmental
body is obscene. So by blaming people who are like, hey, I actually I'm nervous about calling the police on my black boss because black men get killed by police at ignordinate rates, and also not to mention that subject to illegitimate prosecutions and overcharging and charge stacking and longer sentences and the incredible damage even of a pretop process. And by the way, I'm saying this with great care because here's a person who's accused and has not been found
guilty of anything. So really weighing, hey, do I want to subject this person to all of these risks, or is there a better way for me to seek accountability
and truth without those risks of lethality, injustice, ruinousness. That's a fantastic thing for an ordinary citizen to be considering in any government that doesn't say, you know what, I'm going to consider that with you, and I'm going to acknowledge that your fears are real and the problems you highlight are real and work on these problems to come up with something better. Is abrogating its duty to the public in favor of the optics of being pro cop.
Right, Yeah, yeah, the pro cop turn that's happened in like the Democratic Party. I mean it's not that they were anti but like, just I saw you retweet an article or a thread about how the platform changed, because I was like, I was definitely looking at a lot of the I was really interested in the foreign policy stuff that was in the platform, and I was like, oh, wow, like you just a ton of one eighties here compared
to twenty twenty. And then reading sort of the excerpts on what was happening with policing was also very like, Oh, we're really embracing this thing about being like, let's not talk about the death penalty anymore. Let's I know we were talking about choke holds. Let's like really tamp that down.
And it really is wild how much it's become because I think obviously this whole election is set up to be we have a prosecutor and a felon, and so because of that framing, we're going to really lean into a lot of this, like the like the the prosecutorial aspects of this and also be make it feel like yeah, man,
like we're the cops again and that's okay. That was just kind of like, I mean, I was very cynical in twenty twenty when I saw this sort of like uptaking me, like, yeah, we really need to do something, and that's the most that will happen. I will say that we need to do something. But now to see like really forimally stripped out, you're like, oh, right, right, right,
this was never a real concern. But I'm how do you sort of perceive that sort of like shift now or at least now that you know, even in their written platforms, it's just sort of like, yeah, those are those are those are problems, but you know we can address them at some point later.
I mean, the death penalty thing, I really don't get because Harris has been against the death penalty for a lot of her career, was criticized as ag for upholding the law instead of acting on a moral objection. That she has to death penalty which is super expensive and has resulted in the death of a lot of innocent people because our system gets it wrong a lot, because of things like junk science and bad eyewin as ideas
and insufficient funding of public defense. So let's just like Cavin, this is like, I don't I really don't get the Democratic Party stepping away from opposing the death penalty. I think polling on it has not changed dramatically, Like Americans are not like rabidly pro death penalty now. So I really don't get it. But here's what I'll say about the prosecutor versus pellent thing. It's being treated as a sort of vicious backing a violent force against crime, but
it doesn't have to be. Prosecutors are unique among lawyers. Rarely will you hear me say nice things about prosecutors. I'm going to now say some nice things about prosecutors. They have an ethical duty to do justice. That is a unique ethical duty. No other kind of lawyer has that duty.
Now.
I just got done teaching a course to some really talented law students, and in one of my exercises, I made half of them be defense lawyers and half of them be prosecutors. And I told the prosecutors in a bail argument, you have this unique ethical duty. You have to do justice, and not just justice for the peace people who were harmed in a crime or who you think of as part of the community. You have to do justice for everybody. That includes the accused person and
their family and their kids and their loved ones. That includes everybody. When you talk for the people, you represent everybody. And when I told them that their assignment would be graded on how well they were able to consider everyone's needs safety and justice, they got up there on the record and did radically different things than I've ever seen
a prosecutor do in real life. And largely we're thinking of restorative solutions and root causes and like how they could heal a community instead of just punishing and disappearing a person. If what prosecutor means is somebody who is enshrined with governmental authority to do justice for everyone in the community, including people who might be opposed to that
very prosecutor. I think it could actually be a very powerful encapsulation of the best version of a leader, right person who's going to take this seriously and care for all of our well being and yes, stand up to abuses of people with less power, which is really what we would want prosecutors to stand up to the most. I think certainly it's not being done that way. I think the rhetoric sucks. I think half of Americans have had a loved one locked up. I just think that
the rhetoric doesn't have to change. If it was made smarter. In order to be smarter, though, the policy would not have to shift towards tough on crime. It would have to shift towards evidence based, root cause thinking and solutions that shift us towards something better than our shitty status quo.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and now it just feels like, now let's embrace the status quo and bring it closer and closer and closer. But yeah, that's a yeah, such a the whole time, I'm like, wow, it Like. The thing that really makes you think a lot too, is like, we have so many people who are prosecutors that ascended politics, and that's why when Kantazi Brown Jackson was like the first public defender who had sat on the Supreme Court. I was liked, is that true?
Oh my god, Oh writ large the federal bench is largely prosecuted. I actually read. I wrote a really meant email today Guys like my local representative, who I love, is like moving to run for the state a different state office, and he endorsed. It's a two candidate race. I live in a place with major housing issues. There's just not enough housing for people, cost of housing or
too high. And one of the candidates is a housing organizer, a local housing organizer, and the other candidate is a prosecutor. Guess who've got the entressment prosecutor? And I wrote them a note being like, like, come on, this housing is the issue of our region. If you are going to make prosecution once again a blind path to power, you at least have to justify why you are overlooking someone whose life work is in the zone we most need. And the thing that bugs me about it the most
is that it tells young people. I mean, in my work, I work with public defenders all over the country, and I help them expand the practic their practice and expand what they can offer their clients, and I place a lot of new professionals, usually young people, into jobs in public defense, and as they start out their careers, I'm
looking at how they think of their career trajectory. They're doing great things, like I'm going to learn all about how fucked up America's public systems are and I'm going to carry that knowledge into my own change making career.
Right.
But to everybody else, the vast majority of young people, future lawyers, who are not like these dedicated, brilliant advocates, they think, Okay, I'll be a prosecutor for like two years and then I'll get my elected office. If I just incarcerate young black men and separate families and crush people's dreams and lives and maybe cause a few deaths, then I could be a state senter.
Right.
I've been betted right, and I've done the work right, And it's we shouldn't.
We shouldn't make change making power reliant on willingness to harm others.
Yeah, all right, sounds like we have a lot of work to do. Emily Galvin Almansa, what a pleasure having you on the daily zeitgeist? Where can people find you? Follow you, support your work and all that good stuff.
Well, if they want to support expanding and improving public defense around the country, really transforming what we mean by public defense and getting more help for poor people with housing and employment and benefits and transportation and all the things that people actually need, they can go to www. Dot Partners for Justice dot org where they can learn
all about our work to support public defenders nationally. They can also catch us on Twitter at at PFJ Underscore USA or Instagram at Partners for Justice, or they can follow and I guess I should say, and they can follow my much spicy tweets at Galvin Almonza it's just my last name. Do a weekly video on things that are awful in our legal system. So if people want to get like that, like spike of outrage once a week, come on Twitter with me and I will I will give you a spike.
Yeah, but it's not just blind outrage. You also have solutions and ideas for things to do, so I do I highly recommend. Is there work of media that you've been enjoying.
Okay, I'm gonna be really nerdy, guys. There was a paper that came out a couple months ago from Vida B. Johnson, who is a lawyer, and she wrote a paper called Whom do Prosecutors Protect? And I know that mostly people are not like you know, what I'm waiting for is the next hot law paper to drop. And I'm going to just dive into that, bastard and roll it on.
But it's really good and it's really accessible, and it details every single way in which the kind of problematic incentives we've been talking about prosecution as a past, the power and the inter reliance between prosecutors and police, are robbing ordinary Americans of their chance at justice. And it's a really good paper.
Damn that sounds good. Amazing. Miles, Where can people find you? And what is the latest legal brief that you've been enjoyed?
Yeah, let me give me a second about the legal brief. I just found this one, the Pelican Brief.
Oh hell yeah too, dude.
You can find me, you can find men?
Is that? Oh yeah, that actually makes sense? Huh huh.
Thanks for that little factoid. I'm gonna take that to the take that to the bar tonight. Umm. You can find me at Miles of Great on Twitter and Instagram. You can find Jack and I on the basketball podcast Miles and Jack got mad boosties. You could also find me talking about ninety day fiance on four to twenty day Fiance a tweet I like, oh man, so uh the you know libs of TikTok person Chiachik tweeted out
a few days ago. It said, I'm looking for parents anywhere in Ohio who have kids in public schools to be eyes and ears on the ground. Your identity will remain anonymous and protected. Please DM me if you fit this criteria. Patton Oswalt quote tweeted this and said, Chaia, I am so glad you're doing this. There's a boy in our neighborhood, Elliott, a child of divorce who we think is hiding an alien in his closet with the help of his siblings Gertie and Michael.
Me hitting her with that et.
But yeah, that is one of my favorite tweets recent Leave Ohio public schools.
Alone, y'all. That's I am. I am a product of Ohio public schools. They do. They do fine work every once in a while, all right, tweet I've been enjoying Katie at Skatie for twenty tweeted they should call that guy Edgar allan poem because of all those poems he did similarly smart yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah great. And then Brandy Jensen tweeted, I love when an it guy refers to my laptop as your machine is kind of cool here it makes it sound so cool. You can
find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeigeist, where at the Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page. On website Dailyzeikeist dot com. We post our episodes and our footnotes no link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as the song that we think you might enjoy, Hey Miles with long do you think people might enjoy?
I stumbled stumbled across a producer by the name of Harrison and just going through some of their tracks, and there's this one track that's really popular of his that's called Selfish High Heels and it's with him Young Bay and mac Ross eighty two ninety nine. But the sound of it is like eighties like Japanese city pop kind of stuff from the eighties, but like a little bit more like modern and futuristic. It's kind of trippy. So
I really enjoyed it. So this is Selfish high Heels by Young Bay and Harrison and.
It also creates like the next pixeart movie about the answer Fromorphic Shoes. Yeah, and you got the you know, funky sneakers, the selfish high heels silly slippers. I don't know, you guys do the work. I waste any more of your time. The kind of high high tops like they smoke a little weed, you know.
Oh.
The DAILIESE Guy is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this week. We are back on Tuesday after Labor Day to tell you what was trending over the long weekend and we will talk to you all then. Bye.
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