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Wisconsin judge arrested by the FBI, Kehlani performance cancelled by Cornell University due to anti-war stance, and Mexico’s president bans U.S. ads targeting migrants. Myles interviews Alphonzo Terrell, CEO of Black-owned social media platform SPILL.

 

News

Wisconsin judge arrested by FBI, charged with obstructing immigrant arrest

Mexico’s president wants to ban U.S. ads warning against migration

Kehlani Responds After Having Cornell University Performance Canceled Due to Stance on Israel

NFL is “reviewing” Jeff Ulbrich’s role in the Shedeur Sanders prank call

Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Reinstates Commonsense School Discipline Policies

 

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TRANSCRIPT

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, this is DeRay, and welcome to Pod Save the People. In this episode, it’s me, Myles and Sharhonda, talking about the news that you might not have heard or maybe you did hear, but just didn’t hear our take on it with regard to race, justice, and equity from the past week. And then Myles sits down with the CEO of SPILL, the incredible Black-owned social media platform. His name is Alphonzo Terrell. Here we go. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Another wild week in these United States, but we are happy to be here. This is DeRay at @deray on Twitter. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: This is Myles E. Johnson at @Myles_E_Johnson on Instagram. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: And this is Sharhonda Bossier, BossierS on Spill. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Bossier at, come on, Spill. I have a Spill account too, and I’m just DeRay over there. I need to Spill more. Um. But let’s um, let’s start off where we ended last week, which was Sharhonda seeing Sinners because she had not seen Sinners. It seems like a lot of Black America has also seen Sinners alongside you since we last recorded. Ryan Coogler, you know, hit it out of the park in terms of, what a beautiful word of mouth campaign. I mean, they’ve been doing a good press run, too, but it seems like Black Word of Mouth has really made this film something that people feel like they had to see, had to talk about. I have not seen Black Twitter engaged in a piece of media like this in a long time and Instagram. Like I’ve seen a million takes. People like dissecting all types of things, which is really cool. But Sharhonda, since you’ve seen it, let’s start with you. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so one, thanks y’all for pushing me to see it. I uh as you know, initially said I wasn’t going to because I was worried that I would be terrified because I’m a little scaredy cat. Uh. And when I showed up to crash my friend’s planned screening, they ended up in the row behind me because I bought my ticket later. And they later shared with me that they were having a conversation among the three of them, like, does Sharhonda know this is a scary movie? Should one of us go and sit up there with her? Because I really am just, I’m a weenie when it comes to stuff like this. I um still had nightmares that night, not gonna lie to you, but um I thought the film was beautiful and I walked away really impressed with the actor who plays Sammy. Um and had some concerns, to be honest with you, like Michael B. Jordan is like an actor that many of us have seen in things, but I don’t think of him as an actor actor, if that makes sense, and so I was like, how is this man gonna pull off playing two roles in the same film? Am I gonna be like you know watching this and find it painful? I thought he did a beautiful job. I always enjoy seeing Wunmi on screen. I think she’s gorgeous, and I think Ryan Coogler does an amazing job of like helping that shine through. The elements and like the way that he sort of got beneath the surface around the nuances of identity right uh around the inclusion of Chinese characters at that place and time around the inclusion and like specificity of one of the white characters being Irish and what that meant I thought was also very beautiful and I think the other thing that people um really didn’t give him credit for was the research that went into it, right? He’s borrowing from multiple faith traditions. He’s borrowing from multiple traditions around like how we tell stories around vampires and other spirits, et cetera. But it’s so clear to me that he did his research and it just shows through in the film. And so if you haven’t seen it, well worth it for sure. You can sleep with your nightlight on, but I think worth pushing through for the opportunity to just see a beautiful piece of art that is a different way of telling a story of place and time and of our people. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Myles, is there anything, you know, we saw it right when it came out, then we recorded, but now there’s been a week of commentary in the public about it. Are you more in love, still as in love? Moved by anything that’s happened in the past week in the pubic conversation about it? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Unfortunately, because I’m a little bit of a tragic hipster, an ex-outfitter employee, ex-Afropunk employee, now that it’s so popular, a part of the cool has ran out for me. But what I will say. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Oh God. It’s like eight days in. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I know, I’m already on to a next thing. I’m sorry, I’m like I’m like I’m, ugh the normies like it. But it’s still a cool film. [indistinct banter]

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Damn, you invited me to the party. I’m here now. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. No, that’s a part of it. And I’m gonna go find the new thing to give to the normies. And then y’all, yeah, its just its the circle of life. But what I will say um about my reflections on Sinners since we last talked about it. So that I was watching um an interview that Ole did with Omar Miller, and he’s the actor who plays Cornbread. And what he offers is something that I’ve always believed, and I love that he said it about this film, is that audience often don’t know what they want. If you tell an audience to tell you what they want, they usually want things that are gonna make them comfortable, things that are what has already happened. And what I think that has, what I see has happened with Sinners is that two opposing things forces have come together to make something new. So um I think in in quantum science or in science its called novelty when two thought forms that have not or two things that have not come together make something new that has happened. And I think that is the alchemy if there’s anything to study about what Ryan Coogler is doing is that he took two things have never sat together and never talked together and made them entertainment and that has captivated the audience. And I think often Black audiences are fed something that is newly marketed, maybe newly produced, but not newly created. It doesn’t feel new. A lot of things feel rehashed. And I think you know if Ryan Coogler wanted just to make a lot of money, he would have just made Madea Ghost of Wakanda. But I think what’s so interesting is that he took the Hoodoo traditions, the vampire stories, b-movie, um even even if we sit in Saul Williams being in it. Like, Saul Williams is is is, to me, a real Black astronaut. When you listen to [?] and his consciousness, what he speaks about. Even interjecting him into the conversation and making somebody who is maybe even symbolic for the freedom from Black belief and thought or the expansion of Black belief and thought um be the police, be the pastor of Black belief and thought and be the symbolic representation of um patriarchal religions. That feels genius and new. So I feel like there was just a lot of alchemy in the film that excites people. And I hope that movies and people who make movies are paying attention to what excites people. And I really hope Black creators are making sense of what excites Black people. And it’s usually when two, it’s not gonna be what people tell you what they want. You know, maybe Black people, some Black folks, me included might tell you, I’m gonna tell you I wanna reboot of girlfriends and I want brown sugar too. But don’t give it to me. Give me something that comes from the depths of your soul and the expansive outer edges of your mind. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I’m still hopeful and I think it’ll happen that there’s like a syllabus that comes together around this. There’s been so much, so much beautiful thought that I’ve seen online. And I just wanted to note that it’s going to come out of this first initial run in 10 days with a global haul of $161 million with a reported budget of $90 million. How amazing. And, you know, shout out to Ryan Coogler for for just doing something beautiful. I thought that it was, you know, I was nervous about it being cheesy, like you said, Sharhonda, with Michael playing two characters. You know, just like, I’m like, is the technology there to make that even look right? And nailed it. I was like, you now, because the only experience most of us have is Lindsay Lohan and the Parent Trap. And that was so long ago that it was like uh what’s going on? So I thought this is beautiful. You know another thing that I wanted to talk about in in pop culture is Shannon Sharpe has been in the news a lot of late because he’s been accused of sexual assault and there’s a lawsuit. His team said that they attempted to do a settlement of $10 million. There’s been released audio. Shannon recorded a video anticipating that there’d be a video that’s coming out. So I just wanted to bring it here to see what you all thought about it. You know one of the topics that has been a big topic is certainly about the age gap that Shannon Sharpe is you know over 50. This young woman is seems to have been 19 when the allegations would have happened. So I bring it here just because it was has been a huge topic in the news in the past week. And as you know, Shannon Sharpe has temporarily stepped away from his role at ESPN, or he has said it’s temporary. Everybody said it is temporary, I don’t know, but he’s not there right now. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I started with Sinners, baby, I got the easy one today. [laughter]

 

Myles E. Johnson: I was like I’m trying to be polite. I’m over here hiding from the response to this story. So what I’ll say about the Shannon Sharpe thing is I’ve been pulling out what I’ve been liking um that this conversation has been producing. Is honest conversations around um sexuality, race, how even in our moments of desire and sexuality, it’s still being informed by something, it’s still political. And I think seeing a 50 year old big ass Black man with a 19 year old little ass white girl and saying things that are racially charged in a sexual manner makes it undeniable that what we want to express in our erotic lives often um is a symbolic of what we are going through in our political lives. Like it’s an illusion that those things are separate. And I this moment has made more people put the pieces together. And I think, and you know, I say this often with just with a lot of our performers, our Black performers now, and I will say even to some of our white performers, a lot of people unbeknownst to them, I think, because it’s not, you know, people don’t study and read and and and look back past 20 years from now. A lot of people are are trafficking and performing and things that are like um the aftershock of racial performances, like, or the after shock of racialized performances. So what I mean is when I look at Shannon Sharpe and how he speaks. And in the stereotypes, he kind of smoothly occupies. It’s like, if you only were able to have a bit of objective perspective to your performance in the public media, you would already have kind of maybe even self-warned yourself about what you’re being into. Like, it just seems like. [sigh] It just feels like maybe, I don’t know, Negro psychoanalysis 101, like, oh, this Black man finds himself rich. So now that you’re a Black man who finds yourself rich, and you might have had to be nice to white men, you might’ve had to say good things because they owned the people on your team. What is the ultimate patriarchal, Negro male straight fantasy? It’s to take that daughter, take that wife and be able to fuck her. And that’s what we’re seeing happen. That and and and it’s it’s it’s it feels complex to me and rich, but when I really sit to it, I’m like, this is 100 years old. This this dynamic, this idea, this fantasy is 100 years old, and it shows you, even though it’s happening in ’25, we’re still swimming in waters that are old and that are stale, and um you know there’s pee and lynch mobs in the water, y’all. We need to stop swimming in this and we need to educate ourselves about the waters we’re swimming in once we step into media and not just be so focused on the bag because if we were just focused on the bag, we’re gonna recreate the things that are successful in America, which are um racialized tropes and performances. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, I mean I think the only well I have lots of actually I want to add, but I think the first thing I’ll add is you know I’ve been really disappointed to see some of the commentary from Black women in the comments, right, where they’re like, well, y’all, this ain’t got nothing to do with us because the women involved are are white. Right? Um. And this sense both of that like those women deserve this treatment but also that if Black men want to quote unquote “go over there” then they must deal with the consequences of that, right? And it feels I think Myles to your point like a version of the story we’ve heard over and over again like if I think back to my first sort of awareness around how these issues show up in dynamics where abuse has been alleged or proven you know, I think back to the OJ Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson stuff, right? And I think about how little sympathy people had for the abuse that Nicole Brown Simpson endured at the hands of OJ and how much of that was also like, she was also a teenager when they met, you know what I mean? But there was this sense that like, as a white woman, she should not have quote unquote, “taken this Black man anyway,” right? And then also, OJ, as this Black men, you should have known better than to know that you could go over there and then not find yourself at some point caught up in some legal stuff, right? And I think sometimes the way that we talk about these these issues or these incidents in real time absolves the Black men of the agency and responsibility they have in the dynamic. Right. And so I think people have been making a lot of Shannon Sharpe’s, um let’s call them previous exploits, right, like the sort the leaking of the sex tape audio and you know all of that other stuff. And very little about the fact that you know a previous partner of his had a restraining order. Right, he has a history of of like documented right abuse of women and like that is actually the issue here and I think in some ways Myles to your point layering on a lens of like race and racial analysis which I don’t think you can’t not do right but I think also ignores the fact that in this moment this is a grown man who has every tool available to him to get his stuff together and is still choosing to abuse and exploit women, you know, and is in some ways, because he is a Black man in the public eye, hoping that like the broader Black community and the broader public will close rank and like in defense of him. And that has been really interesting and in some way disgusting to watch. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Everything you said was absolutely right to me. I do want to just tease out that one of the reasons why when we see um white women or white people um in the justice system, how come Black people react, or I shouldn’t say all Black people, but why a lot of Black people react the way they do is because–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It is um said that, oh, no, if you’re a white woman, and you’ve been offended and you want to um uh go after a Black man, you’re going to be protected and supported in the only way and this is true from what we’ve seen in the fame game with things like OJ. The only way that this Black person has a chance to win is if the Black community, the culture, the Black culture kind of turns it into a personal moment, into a bigger political moment, right? So O.J. wasn’t just, you know, we all seen the documentaries, we’ve read the books. So um Johnnie Cochran was very intentional about changing how–

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: O. J.’s house looked and changing why this thing is happening. I think um is true when we look at what Jonathan Majors is doing and how he’s um seducing Black people back into his good graces, but he’s also tapping on things that stir us in a cultural sense. And and and whether it be love or a Black woman redeeming him. And I think that the same thing um could happen to Shannon Sharpe, but I also think that was the response of like, oh, we know how to help somebody swim in these these rough waters when you’re in legal trouble and we’re not going to extend that gaze to you. We are gonna let the waters you chose to swim in to drown you. And I think that that’s not that’s not necessarily um always I’m against other women, but it’s the knowing that, oh, this white woman got it, she’ll be fine. I think we even seen a difference with Cassie. I think there was this registered knowing that oh, Cassie might do better than your average Black woman, but she still might need that kind of cultural solidarity in order to win this case in that way. And I’m thinking before um the videotape, of course. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Before we go into politics, which Lord knows there’s enough wildness happening in the world, I wanted to talk about the last cultural thing, which was Pete, Mayor Pete, Secretary Pete, presidential candidate Pete, was on the Andrew Schulz podcast. I saw some of it, and um and it seemed like he did really well. Like there was like a storytelling around the I didn’t watch the whole thing. I saw some of the clips that surfaced on Twitter. Now I will say, Andrew Schulz has no, you know, Andrew Schulz, I can’t think of anything positive to say about him. So that is, that makes this hard because anything I could say positive was about Pete, but I don’t really know why Andrew Schulz has a platform. I am worried about the way he talks about Black people, the way he jokes about Black people and the way he’s been co-signed by Black people to make that seemingly okay. So that is my struggle with Andrew Schulz. Mayor Pete did well, story told well, I thought Pete did well. I’d be interested to see what y’all think about how Pete did, but um I do think Pete, you know we have a deficit of storytellers over here on the left right now. AOC and Bernie are holding it down. You know, we’ve talked about Jasmine’s also, Representative Crockett is doing some stuff. And there really is, you know Corey had his moment. I don’t know if you saw Representative Jeffries and Corey and somebody else in Congress that I can not remember, sat on the steps of the Capitol and they recorded a podcast this weekend. So Pete is one of the storytellers we have over in on the left. But what did you all think about Mayor Pete and Andrew Schulz? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I agree with you that um you know that that Pete Buttigieg is an effective communicator um for for the left. I you know sometimes read the comments on our episodes and sometimes people are like, what y’all got against AOC and Bernie, right? And you’re like, it’s not personal. I think they’re speaking to a specific demographic that just happens to be a demographic I’m not part of, right. And I think similarly um around Buttigieg, what I can’t figure out honestly is this line between like going where the people are and trying to like demonstrate your ability to like stand in spaces that are not already inclined to agree with you um and whether or not your presence on those platforms and in those spaces validates them. You know what I mean? And I think to your point, DeRay, right, most of what I know about Schulz has been the resulting commentary and controversy around how he talks about and jokes about Black people. Right? And so I’m like, ooh, this doesn’t feel this feels very akin to when Newsom was on the Charlie Kirk or invited Charlie Kirk onto his podcast, right? Where I’m like, there is something about staying in conversation with these people that validates them. And I don’t know why we keep doing that. Like, is there another place? And maybe there’s something about Schulz’s base that I don’t understand that, you know, why we would want to court them, why we think they’re winnable. Um. But so much of this just feels like um you know, uh we’ve referenced that Boondocks episode before, but like when the cameras go off, all these people are friends and the rest of us are really left out here to deal with the consequences of what they’re advocating for and talking about. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Democrats don’t deserve Black votes. Um. I don’t understand how demented or disgusting you have to be as a party to hear somebody make, not even six months ago, a rape joke about one of our best Black male figures. And then you think that you’re going to grow out your beard and go talk to them like you’re having beer and talk about Afghanistan in order to court the same, in order to court their audience. The audience doesn’t care. The audience still thinks you’re a F word. And now you’re also showing that you have no moral center. You have no cultural competence around and strategy to like navigate these kind of terrains. And the terrain is, if you’re Pete Buttigieg and you want to sit down with somebody to make yourself feel real, or why are you then sitting down with a person who just made the rape joke about the Black man. And not just, you know, I hate making it a hierarchy because a rape joke about any Black man is not funny. But a rape about Kendrick Lamar? And you’re gonna and you’re gonna sit down with him? To me, again, these are these little cultural moments, these are these little things and these little weeds that kind of sprout up that let me know that there is a bigger rot inside of the Democratic Party and a bigger misunderstanding. And I don’t I don’t see why. I don’t see how anybody can continue to vote and support them or to um be in concert with them. So I was kind of thinking, well, you kind of got to do some things and do other things. But now I’m like, oh no, you’re just, you all are corporately bought and you’ll sit down with anybody who doesn’t go against your corporations if you think so, because the real person I want to see you sit down with, go sit down Cori Bush. We ain’t never gonna see that, but you’re gonna sit down somebody who thought it was funny to um to make a joke about a Black man getting raped, right? Right? And then you’re going to want to talk to me as somebody who both sits here as Black, seen as man and seen as gay, and you’re going to say, oh, I’m a shoe in you should vote for me, right? No, no. And if he and if they and if he gets even close to the ticket, I’m getting even louder about it, because that to me shows such a um uh a degree of um of callous towards the Black male community, both gay and straight. That is not funny. Um. I guess the last thing that I want to say is that I’m not against AOC. I’m not against um any of Bernie, anybody, individually. I’m against the Democratic Party project. I think the whole project has led us into what we might call neoliberal fascism versus conservative fascism. And I’m tired of both of it because I don’t want either one. And I am seeing that y’all are playing the same song with different instruments. And I’m like, I am not into that no more. And when it comes to um AOC, and once again, I would just suggest that you figure out a strategy to part with those people, because it might look like Trump’s polls are down now, or, oh, he’s not being liked. That is the same song that was played his first um, the first administration. Like, Trump has surpassed polls. He’s Jesus in the way that Jesus is somebody’s homeboy, right? So people are okay with disliking him. They ain’t still ain’t never gonna vote for you. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, I’ve not given up on the party, but I hear you. I think those pushes are right. And I will say, you know, there are things that people said were silly before that now seem totally fine. So, you know, abolish ICE seemed like a wild idea just a couple of years ago. And now that ICE has gone into courtrooms and arresting judges and deporting toddlers who had cancer and making two-year-olds go to their own hearings alone, I think people actually are like, okay, maybe that demand wasn’t so wild. This is not even in defense of AOC, but this is a new poll just came out of New York City voters. AOC’s favorability amongst Black New York city voters is higher than Schumer’s. So she is at 55% and Schumer is at 53%. So I do think AOC actually does have resonance with Black people in in New York City at least, or the poll has suggested that is true. Whether that translates across the country is to be to be understood, but Black people are listening to her in a way that’s that is really cool. And Myles, to your point, and I only know this because I just saw it on Twitter last week, but AOC is interesting because when she ran, she said, I’m not running from the left, I’m running from the bottom. And she did this whole thing that was like, this is a bottom up, like the elites have taken over the party, da da da, but don’t think about me as running from the left. I’m a bartender who’s running from the bottom, and that’s how I think about my work. And I, she will win her district as long as she wants to win that district. But she, to me, is a shining star of the party. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It’s really, it’s almost as I just want to scream to her because I think she’s a shining, A, I think anything that’s going on in New York City is just not telling the whole story when it comes to Black people. That is something I’ve always felt. And it’s only been more certified now that if you’re a Black person in New York City, you are living a different life than a Black person in the Midwest, um then a Black person in the South. And that goes across class, a person in New York City. Even if they’re poor, even poor Black people are having different politics. So, I-I-I, I, I… that stat doesn’t really bring me hope, like doesn’t bring me that hope. But I think when it comes to AOC, I’m like, well, don’t go around talking about Trump because you can’t do nothing about that. We see that. Talk about AIPAC right now. Talk about the disruption, talk about the corruption in your own party right now and actually remove yourself. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: But it’s not true that they Congress can’t do anything about Trump. That’s not true.  I mean, they’re not doing anything [?]. That’s true. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: They can’t do it alone. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that obviously with these rallies and stuff like that, there’s a limit to what is what is possible. There is um there is only so much without sounding alarmist, it’s to me obvious that there’s um there’s impeding authoritarianism that makes any type of move that you want to do as Congress. It just seems shaky. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I did want to ask you all about the NFL, Shedeur. What a great name. Black people’s creativity around names. Shedeur, Shiloh. I’m like, come on. Shiloh’s not that unique, but Shedeur is. Shedeur as you know did not, was not a first round draft picked in the NFL. He did get picked. I think he was like pick 144. He was in a much later round. That’s not what I want to talk about, even though I do think that, you know the NFL commentary is very different around Deion  Sanders kids. And it was around the Manning boys, Which you know, their father steered their careers. Um. But the prank phone call really struck me. So if you didn’t remember, NFL players get a phone number specifically for draft day, only NFL executives, or prospective NFL players, only NFL execs have the phone numbers. Shedeur gets a prank phone call offering him a draft pick. It’s a group of kids, white kids. The kids actually videotape themselves doing the prank phone call and post that online. Both the videos, you know we’ve seen both, they were both in our chat. The kids have not been identified yet, but they have to have some relationship to the NFL, otherwise how would they have gotten the phone numbers? And I just am, I don’t know why this really struck me. I was really struck by the attempt to humiliate Shedeur additionally even like he already it already was tough that he wasn’t a first round draft pick but to humiliate him in this way and you know Shedeur posted the video on his side. His team at least knows how to get in front of the drama so they can like control some of the narrative, I thought that was smart and he’s been gracious about being thankful about being in the NFL but I don’t know why the prank phone call really stung me I didn’t like that. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Whew, I do want to say something about like Deion  first, right. And I think it’s that we have gotten so wrapped up in this like phase of Deion ‘s life and career that we forget that the man was a once in a generation talent at two sports, right? Like you could not deny that he understood and was like a standout at the professional level in two sports and understood the business and visuals and marketing around that, right? And there is a little bit that feels like um keeping him in his place that is happening by proxy through his sons, which I think is to, you know, to your point, like just truly disgusting. Watching the prank video. You know, my first thing was like, the first thing I noticed actually was the Ole Miss sweater that one of the young men is wearing. It just like, it struck me. I was like oh, okay, this makes sense. Right. The choice to pretend to call and also be from a football team in the South also was like a thing that, you know um stood out to me. And like, there are lots of rumors circulating around how these young men got access to his phone number. Apparently, the giant’s GM’s daughter goes to Ole Miss. And so, you know, but who knows, right? And like I don’t like to talk about young people, you know um like at this stage. But I do think that there is something to be said about um. It feels like a collective cultural effort to humble Deion and his children, right? Where they are just like, there we will never allow this man to stand in his greatness. We will never allow his children to feel like they are worthy of what they are actually entitled to, which their father earned and which their talents also have earned them, right. And just this like, this constant need for people to put them in their places. I just like and we think about the fact that many of us grew up believing, at least I did anyway, right, because this was all of the talk around being part of the MTV generation, that eventually racism would like go away, right? We would all listen to the same music or we would all party together and like we were all just going to one day be this like amorphous blob of brownness and like love, right. And then you’re like, if these are kids who are now 20, 25 years younger than I am, doing this really hateful shit that is deeply rooted in racism and deeply rooted in wanting to understand, or excuse me, their understanding that their job is to keep this young Black man in his place, then it’s just like we have never fully confronted what is at the root of that. And it’s terrifying to me that you have young people who have this level of power and privilege and access, because everybody can’t get this phone number, you understand? Like who are leveraging it in this way and who are taking up the mantle of upholding white supremacy and of humiliating a young Black man in this way and I wish that that were more of the conversation and not people asking well how did he fall for it how couldn’t he tell etc etc right? When you are at the height of your anxiety and your anticipation when you think you’ve done everything to prevent this from happening, because only NFL teams are supposed to have this contact information, it’s really hard to spot a prank, you know, because it shouldn’t be that easy to get to you. And so it feels like many people, not just these young people conspired to make this happen. And it’s disgusting. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I don’t like football um and often I think, obviously my opinions are informed by just my kind of my neutrality on football. Um. I’ll start with the dudes, the white dudes. I think that’s, I think that is like um a uh, oftentimes, unfortunately, a sport for um uh white men younger is the humiliation of another person. Sometimes Black, sometimes queer, sometimes all those things. I think that is a part of the culture to prove your manhood. So if you if you have access to humiliate somebody who is um as powerful as um as these boys were and as important as they were, then you would take it because that is a part of the kind of like silent agreement of white manhood is to um, if you can humiliate a other or to overpower another, then do it. And if you can do it publicly and make it a postcard, then why not? Um. The other thing is, you know, Deion just just Black person to Black person. I would think that it would be obvious to somebody that what is happening in football is very parallel to what happens in chattel slavery. It’s the risk of the body for money. And I would think that even if you participated in something like that, it would be your business to make it so none of your children have to risk their bodies, their brains, and their spines in order to make money. It was a way to get yourself economically free enough so nobody else in your bloodline would do it. So if I’m being honest with you, I don’t care if NFL didn’t draft your kids. I want to know why did you put your kids up to be drafted? Why once free did you say, you know what, we are free and we made it to the north and we got out of that and that was scary. But you know, what my two youngest need to go back to Mississippi to make a coin. I don’t get that. I don’t get it. I don’t respect it. And probably because I don’t like football. I don’t appreciate it. I think that it’s something that people probably need to let go too. So I think that uh the universe was saving those kids by letting them keep their brains and their spines. So, you know, go to school. Y’all got money for that. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Myles, go to school. [laughter] Okay, well, in that vein, talking about school and, you know, the bodies of young people and how we treat them, there was an executive order recently by Trump that is rolling back restrictions on corporal punishment in schools. Sharhonda, you have been closer to the school conversations than I have been recently. So I want to pass this off to you to see if you can help us understand what’s going on better.

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah, so, you know, I think in the same way that we’ve been having broader cultural conversations about how we think about crime and punishment and consequence, those same conversations have been happening in schools, and lots of school communities have noticed a few things. One, is that historically disciplinary practices have resulted in less instructional time for young people, particularly young people of color, when we’ve moved to like exclude them from school through suspension or expulsion, right, that that often will follow them into the criminal justice system, etc. And so there had been a push to think about more restorative practices in schools, how you keep young people who’ve committed infractions in school communities connected to that school community, et cetera. And under the Obama administration in particular, there was a push to disaggregate disciplinary data by race so that the schools and school systems could really understand who they were punishing. And then to try and mitigate some of those like disproportionate impacts or outcomes on particularly Black and Latino students. This week, the Trump administration issued a set of executive orders that were meant to roll back some of that progress and sort of pull us back from a move in a more restorative justices, more restorive practices direction. And so, you know, in the sort of education spaces that I’m in, people are really worried about what this means, especially given the stepped up presence of police and immigration officers on school campuses, right? Where you might now have a young person engage in an infraction that is pretty typical for where they are developmentally, and then have that result in outsized, either criminal or immigration consequences for them or their families. And so  I think if people are thinking about what’s happening, and I know there’s been a lot of focus on you know disciplinary actions aimed at college students or graduate students, particularly those who have been involved in pro-Palestinian causes and protests. But much of that energy is now moving into the K-12 space, where the children are even, or the people right are children, they’re even younger, and where people are definitely worried about what it means for stamping these young people as criminals really early in their lives and all of the opportunities that they will then be locked out of, so yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: My favorite video I saw in response to this is that there was a Black mom who was voicing it over. She was like, let me tell you if you are a teacher of my children, do not play. She used much spicier words, but she was like play with my child if you want to. I’m not worried about this executive order, but you’re gonna be worried about me. And I was like I hear that. Um. I hear that. We talked about Trump’s EO around the Smithsonian, the Blacksonian, but did you see that they are, he is literally having them return artifacts? Did you see this? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Oh, I missed that.  Mm mm. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yeah, so the Greensboro, like one of the lunch counters. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: The museum is giving it back to the place that they got it from. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Wow. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: They’ve like, they sent it back. They were like, hey, thank you for donating this to the museum. We don’t want it no more. I’m like, what? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So I went to a high school called Hiram High School. That’s H-I-R-A-M. If you look up Hiram um and look up Grand Wizard, um you’ll see that there was a Grand Wizard of the KKK named um with the name Hiram and the colors for um the Grand Wizard are purple and gold and the colors for my high school are purple and gold. And I bring that up is because I think how I’ve always seen it is most of the men, the white men who were in non-teacher principal leadership roles at my school, it was very obvious. It was talked about how they were in it for the cruelty. How they were in those positions and pursuing those positions because they got a perverse satisfaction from disciplining Black kids, looking and measuring the skirts of all girls, of all races. And that was just known. And I think what I’m happy about is that the kind of Pollyanna rose-colored film about who always participates in education is being lifted and that this has always been a pathway and a bridge into political power, and um if nothing more. This has been a pathway much like the police’s. Of um exercising some type of like racialized catharsis on on a community and on people. And I think that we have to start uh presenting it like that and presenting it like, oh, there’s there’s some folks want to go into churches and do some things. Some people want to go into um police uh and do some things. Some people wanna be president and do some things. But white supremacy and the ideas and the people who are ambassadors of white supremacy also go into your schools and also make it so those schools transform from places of education to places  of um for plantation. And I think that even when Trump is no longer in office and hopefully we have a more liberal president, if that’s possible, I’m doubting, but but if that does happen, I think that that narrative around our public spaces being places that uh white supremacists go to get their own kind of cultural catharsis and power from has to remain and people need to be aware of it because by the time stuff like this happens, it seems as though, yes, we can protest, yes, so we can resist, yes, yes we can do all that other stuff, but we just have to wait. So I think the story before it even happens need to be clearer and and and bolder.

 

DeRay Mckesson: Hey, you’re listening to Pod Save the People. Stay tuned, there’s more to come. 

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Myles E. Johnson: So my news is about singer Kehlani. Um. I love Kehlani, Kehlani is, she’s an interesting figure to me musically. I think as her music as she sits in culture more, she originally came out as maybe peers with people I would say like Summer Walker and Janae Aiko. But as things have gotten um a little bit more political, she has been one of the few celebrities who have said things specifically around wanting a free Palestine. So I wanted to talk about the trouble Kehlani has got has gotten into. Um. This is from Pitchfork. It reads, earlier this month, it was announced that Kehlani will perform at Slope Day, Cornell University’s annual spring concert to celebrate the final days of undergraduate classes. Her concert invitation has now been rescinded however, due to her opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. Slope day is a cherished tradition at Cornell, a time for our community to come together to celebrate the end of classes. For decades, students leaders have taken the helm in organizing this event, hiring performers they hope will appeal to the student body. The university’s president, Michael Kotliffkoff wrote an email to students that was posted online. Unfortunately, although it was not the intention, the selection of Kehlani as this year’s headliner has injected division and discord into Slope Day. He continued, for that reason, I am rescinding Kehlani’s invitation and expecting a new lineup for a great 2025 Slope day to be announced shortly. A Kehlani, and I’m sure the AGR producer is gonna cut in um her response to this happens. She stands 10 toes down as you should around wanting a free Palestine as well as a free Congo. And my big thing with this happening at Cornell University is it disgusts me yet again to see people who did not care about this before Trump was elected, did not care to talk about it, did not care to demonstrate against it, did not care about any of it. But now, often, it’s being weaponized to get certain people riled up in order to act. And then also, it does an untruthful work of making it seem as though this decision to protect Zionism at Cornell University and to punish somebody for speaking up against the genocide, it makes it seem as though that this is a conservative Republican decision where this decision was made by conservative neoliberals underneath the Democratic party. This was made where, again, I’m gonna bring it up, when Cory Booker was telling members of AIPAC how to best court and um get Black leaders a part of AIPAC and the Zionist project. That’s when those moments happen. So I’m kind of disgusted and also reject this kind of positioning of these decisions as look what happens when Republicans get in office, look what happens when authoritarianism and conservatism happens. Yeah, what happens when it. Yeah look at it. It started happening when Biden was in office. It started happening when either nobody would talk about it or when people were taking money to totally gut the careers of people who did decide to talk about it, because people were so run by AIPAC dollars. And um yeah, that’s why I wanted to bring to the news, because, A,  I like her, um but B, it just really boggles my mind to see groups of people pretend to care. It boggles my mind to see people pretend that that Zionist conservative project wasn’t already underway when Biden was there and there are people who are gleefully protecting it. It really boggles my mind. The only thing that went different was they did not anticipate the public’s reaction. They did not rightly anticipate the temperature around people seeing a genocide, and that seems to be a pattern with the Democratic Party. They don’t seem to be able to predict much, hence, you know Vice President Harris losing. So I just wanted to bring this to the news as, as an offering to let us know what’s going on, but also to not be so locked into bipartisan politics, to think that this is all Trump’s fault, or this is all the Republicans. This is the bigger conservativeapparatus that we find ourselves in for, no matter if you’re on the neoliberal side or the more conservative side. What say you? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I watched their double down video, right? Uh and I and what was striking to me about that video was that they felt it necessary to point out that they have Jewish friends, right, because of the conflating of critiques of the state of Israel with antisemitism, right. And so needing to already start from a posture of saying like, I’m not an antisemite because I have Jewish friends. I was like, oh baby, we are on our back foot here, right? Like we have we have totally lost control of the narrative, which is that what we are calling out is the attempted extermination of a people, right. And there’s a state actor that we are calling out and that is different than calling out a people right. And the conflating of those two things in popular like American political discourse, I think really um prevents us from keeping the main thing, the main thing. And that is that in this country, we believe, at least we say we do, that all people have a right to self-determination, right? And that we are denying the Palestinian people that because of this project, right, of trying to ensure that there’s a state and I think that or a particular state, right. And I think that like states don’t have a right to exist. People have a right to exist, right? And like those states have a write to exist when they derive their like their ability to exist through consent of the people that they govern, right. But Palestinian people have no pathway to that. And absent a pathway to that and absent a serious conversation about what a pathway to that looks like, every quote unquote “solution” that we come up with is going to result in the dehumanizing of a particular population and in attempts at exterminating them. And so when you see people as a problem. The only thing that you come up with is a solution to that problem. And I think it’s really interesting to me in a moment when we could be talking about never again, meaning never again for everyone, when we be talking about building bridges, we are instead having to like fight these fights that are not rooted in reality, right? Anyone who tells me that my critique of the state of Israel is rooted in anti-Semitism is not serious about engaging on the issues, I’m sorry. And it’s a distraction from engaging on the issues, right. And so my reaction when I watched their response video was like, damn, you know like you shouldn’t have to talk about the relationships you have with Jewish people or with Jewish causes or with the Jewish organizers to feel like you have standing, to stand up in defense of people who are being seen as a problem to the rest of the world. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: I will say one of the things that I said when this first started, I think this is true and I think we are not at the end of it yet, is I think that there are people who went from literally knowing nothing about Israel and Palestine, knew nothing, had never thought about it. It was like the conflict in the Middle East was a sort of topic that a few insiders really understood, blah, blah. To now it is a something that everybody understands, at least in some capacity, and people who otherwise wouldn’t have a dog in the fight are like, mm you can’t like kill everybody in Palestine. You know, people who don’t have a geopolitical analysis and don’t need one are like yeah, but I think like the basic, you can’t blow up hospitals, you know, it’s like, I think there is actually like a pretty big consensus of people who otherwise did not even think about this, who are like hmm like, you know. I don’t know what to say about Israel, but I know you can’t like tell people that there’s a ceasefire and then bomb every place they eat like that feels wrong, right? And I think that the I think when the dust settles, whenever that is, and when we look up, I think that this will be the darkest moment in Israel’s like public image since the state was founded. Now, obviously, It is there for the Palestinians and people in the Middle East there has always been a conflict, but I think the world image, because what you see now, and Kehlani, I think is a great example of it, is that they are no longer making arguments about a two state solution or why somebody might be right or wrong. They literally are like, if you don’t just fall in line, banished. And you’re like, well, that is what happens when you’re losing the argument. You only do stuff like this when you have completely lost the actual argument. So you just want to make sure that people literally can’t even talk. And it’s like, well if that’s not a sign of losing the argument, I don’t know what is. And Kehlani is a great example. I and I look at, you know, I didn’t know the students at Cornell. But I’m like cancel the week, whatever, cancel the thing. No, it’s no concert. If it’s not the person we chose as students, ain’t no concert up in here. And I think about that when I think about a lot of the college campuses. I was just in another college campus where the administration did something that was like a little like just dramatic and you’re like, that was unnecessary. And I’m like, y’all just wait. You know what I would be doing? DeRay, the student leader, would be at the admissions office in front of every tour with the sign saying, I’m the student body president. Do not come here. I would be causing all types of hell on the tour route. I’d be talking like, you know, like make it hard for these institutions to think about a long-term future when they do stuff that just like, you’re like, this is not tenable. I don’t know if you saw the story about Amherst. Amherst is a peer college to Bowdoin, small school, and this is not related to Palestine and Israel directly. But Amherst went from having 11% Black kids to 3%. And there’s a story in the New York Times being like, you know the people at Amherst are like, oh, what are you, you know it’s already small. It’s already 500, you know, max 600 kids a class. What do you do when the population of kids of color declines so dramatically? Like that is a thing that you, and I do think that, so that, what is happening in Amherst is not about Palestine and Israel, but I do think that soon people will continue to vote with their feats. And some people will just be like, I’m not going to a Columbia. Like I would never tell somebody to go to Columbia today. What Columbia has done to the student protesters is so wild, in good conscious I could never tell you to go there. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: My news uh is about a set of ads that the U.S. Government has been paying to run on Mexican television. They feature the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and they broadcast a message in which she says, if you’re thinking about coming to the United States illegally, don’t. Um, and the president of Mexico wants to ban those ads, uh, from running and prevent them from running on, uh on Mexican state television. Uh, and so what I wanted to, why I wanted it to bring this to the pod was a few reasons. Right? One is, um, thinking about how much you absolutely like have to hate people to want to pay to broadcast ads in their country. Number one. Two, the choice to run the ads in English, I think is also pretty interesting because it raises questions to for me about who the audience is for those ads. And then three, if you’ve watched the ads, there is um uh like a short segment where they flash mug shots of people who have been detained, right? And all of the faces are of people of color, right. They are all Black, Asian, or Latino people. And I also think that that is telling. Um. Another reason I wanted to bring this to the pod is because in my personal life, I have been having a set of conversations with a bunch of Black Americans who want to move to Mexico, right? They are part of the exodus of folks who are moving to Mexico to set up lives because they’re like, it’s so great here, it’s so affordable, da da da. They have no ties to the culture, no ties to the country, and in most instances, don’t speak the language, right. And so I’m also thinking about like who is actually migrating where and who gets to migrate where um as part of this. And you know, the US and Mexico have always had, let’s call it a special relationship around immigration. But I think in this moment, um you know the movement of people in both directions across the US Mexico border is showing up both in like politics and in my personal life. And so wanted to bring that to the pod for discussion. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It alarmed, not alarmed me, but it piqued my curiosity too that um that it was in English. I was like, oh, this is obviously something that is being played in Mexico to scare that community, but also something that is almost as double agent work as um viral media uh internet fodder in order to have more red meat to feed to that to that base. And of course, the ad is disgusting. Of course everything um around this situation is disgusting, but I think again, I want people to hold on to the disgust after the moment. I want people to be able to say this is white supremacy. I want people to be able to talk about how um our president chose to terrorize brown people and to use media in order to terrorize them back, and how so much of what makes good politics now is around humiliation, is around um racialized stereotypes, is around not creating actual solutions, but creating more fear. So the solutions that you do come up with that are heinous and anti-human [laugh] can um can be seen as can be seen as corrective and common sense. I really want people to be able to use these moments past the news cycle. Does that make sense? Like past past the moment of the news cycle that it happens. Cause it feels like things happen and people don’t always place it together or people are so scared to say the thing. I think that’s how come I get so um not even annoyed but it just doesn’t matter when I hear oligarchy because I’m like, no, it’s grand wizardry. It’s grand wizardry. It is the completion of a promise that white supremacists who have been in the White House and who have been a part of governments before had always had. And it’s a recalcification process. I stole that um idea from Frank B. Winderson Wilderson, the Afro pessimist. So um and just been listening to him talk about Afro pessimism and talk about certain things that are happening now and how he describes it as this is a recalcification of what was always dreamed of by certain people. So there’s always gonna be two American dreams. It’s gonna be Martin’s dream and there’s gonna to be the dream of the person who owned the slave. And then those dreams are always gonna get certain types of momentum and and what we’re seeing now is one winning. And it’s a dream that develops and gets bigger and the last thing that I’ll say is it’s these type of moments that make the next moment more comfortable. I think that’s how come I want people to remember now because the next moment might, because this feels really far, you know? What’s happening to the immigrant population feels really, really far. But now it’s the normal. But you know what happened last administration? The kids were in cages. So even though this feels really far, I guess in my spirit, in my psyche, I’m ready to see this. Even though I don’t like it, I’m ready to see it. And I just want people to know that we are on a walk towards white supremacist authoritarianism, and that if it’s not accomplished and that dream is not accomplished by Trump, it’s going to be accomplished by somebody. That is the ultimate plan. And the only thing that they’re wanting to do is to keep you using words like oligarchy to confuse the waters of what’s really happening and to make it so muddy that you don’t know what’s happening until you too are in your own cage, until you too are in Venezuela trying to learn Spanish because you got a cellmate who done kill 15 to 20 people. That’s what they want. By the time you understand what the bullshit is around you, you already swimming in manure, so. That’s my thoughts. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Myles. Okay. Um. This is also, I think, a really interesting failure of storytelling that who is the single biggest bringer of fentanyl into the United States? It is American citizens. So in 2021, US citizens were 86.3% of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers for the four years for the four most recent years of data. Every year, it was over 80% were US citizens. So this idea that like Mexican nationals are hopping the border and smuggling fentanyl in is not true. The idea that the majority of people are somehow here illegally. So whether they were here legally and are not or no longer here legally, that’s also not true that people that are smuggling drugs in are US citizens, that is what’s happening. It is. People of all races are going to Mexico, getting fentanyl and bringing it in. Like that’s not just Mexico. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: The border, also Canada. But, you know, the public imagination is like, whew, look at those people from Mexico. And you’re like, this is crazy. The other thing is you think about how many problems we actually have to fix. And I know that they’re not interested in fixing problems, but you’re, like Secretary Noem, you ain’t got nothing else to do, to but record– 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: She need to be worried about how somebody stole her purse with–

 

DeRay Mckesson: Yes! [laughter] Like, because somebody took $3,000 out of your purse and you have, forget that you even greenlit a commercial, which would be like, okay, that’s annoying. But the idea that you were like making them is so crazy. You’re like, y’all, we got real things to do. That’s how I feel about Kash Patel, who I’m going to talk about in a second who runs the FBI, the secretary of defense Pete who is installing a separate computer so he can use signal even though he’s not supposed to use signal. But he’s leaking war plans to his wife and everybody else on Signal. It’s just such a joke. And again, Obama wore a brown suit and it was a field day and these people are up here like playing hopscotch in the middle of the day at work and we’re paying for it. And that is just, it is funny only because if you don’t laugh, you just cry because you’re like, this is so crazy. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I was just thinking about how you said, don’t you have something else to worry about? But cynically, but also just realistically, it’s like, no, this is the biggest thing she could worry about if she wants to advance in her political career. So also when you see people who are kicking out these people that that that big dude who, um… But anywho, there’s just so many different brands of white supremacy that when I look at them, I’m like, oh, if you want to be president one day, you know you wanna be a part of this. You know that you wanna be a of when people recall um seeing the country being taken back and America sticking  up for himself, you wanna a part this. So it’s like, oh, there is nothing more important to do and to think about and to proliferate if that is your goal. Which is that to me is like the bad news is that they’re doing something that is this evil, but also it’s helping them ensure their future political power. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So my news is a continuation of evil. This is about the FBI. We found out that this was happening through a tweet that the director of the FBI, the one and only Kash Patel, he tweeted that a judge in Milwaukee had been arrested for, quote, “intentionally misdirecting federal agents away from somebody that ICE was trying to detain in her courtroom.” And that led to a whole host of news articles about, did they really arrest a judge? And then of course, Kash Patel deleted the tweet where he talked about the judge being arrested and you’re like, okay, this is interesting. So what we know is that Flores Ruiz was in the courthouse last Friday and was there for a misdemeanor battery charges tied to domestic abuse. He was not there for an immigration hearing. Judge Dugan told the agents to talk to the chief judge, and she allowed the undocumented immigrant to exit through a jury door. Now, they later went and picked up the they went and picked him up in the hallway. But it was the exiting throughout through the jury door that they said was like essentially aiding and abetting. And the immigration agents showed up to arrest him, but they showed up without a judicial warrant outside of her courtroom. And because there was no judicial warrant for arrest, you know she didn’t have to let them just be arrested. So this is where we are. And I was just really shocked by this. Um. Because it looks like she’s actually been charged with obstructing a government proceeding and concealing an individual to prevent arrest. She was released and scheduled, she ended up plea on May 15th, so. Really interested in this, you know, the moment that it becomes okay to arrest judges who simply just don’t work with you all, didn’t violate a law, like, and you know how this works, is that there’s no suggestion that the judge would be a flight risk. So in a normal circumstance, just like with Eric Adams, Eric Adams was allowed to turn himself in when he got indicted, da-da-da. They could have just, they could have charged her and said, like you need to come down and da-dah, but they like did the arrest. They did the whole pomp and circumstance of it. Whole thing and I it just is really scary when a judge can be arrested in this way. This is, they know that she won’t get convicted. So that’s not a worry, but this is to send a message to other judges is what this feels like. And, you know, Dick Durbin, who’s a senior Democrat on the Senate judiciary, you know, he gave a quote that’s like the Trump administration continues to test the limits of our constitution and it’s like, no, y’all need to be one of y’all need to be in Milwaukee at this woman’s hearing raising hell about, you can’t do this to judges. John Roberts, the Supreme Court needs to go, you know if you can’t kick them off the court, get Sotomayor, get all our people down there. Like people should be making this feel like World War V, that like this is how it happens. And I think, Myles, to your point, it’s like you let the little thing become normal and then you look up and the big wild thing is no longer as wild as you thought it was. And that is what I worry is just happening before our eyes on every front. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I feel like my only response to all these news stories is like, terrifying, disgusting. I’m like, I’m going to have to expand my vocabulary because I don’t have anything else to say about like how truly, truly terrifying this is, right? And this is meant to have a chilling effect on any of us who might even think about supporting somebody who might be in the country undocumented, right. Like that’s actually the thing that this is about. This is not about what this judge did, right? This is about if you have undocumented immigrants in your family in your friend group in your church in your school community right and you think for a second about not turning them over if we show up to ask about them or to detain them please know that we will throw your ass in jail too look what we did to this judge, right? And that is like, I know everybody has been talking about on tyranny and everybody has been talking about how we look for these signs of like, you know, authoritarianism or fascism, etc. Right? But like the the fact that we are to your point, not marching, that the Democrats are doing things that are still not really demonstrating their power or their ability to show up and to resist, right, or that judges on the Supreme Court or justices on the supreme court are not, you know, to your, they don’t have anything to risk, right? Like just just do the thing. It’s like I want to be able to say that I left it all on the field in defense of our democracy. Right? And the people who can do that and should be doing that just are not. And the statements are falling flat. The press conferences aren’t changing anyone’s minds. And I don’t think that people understand that also to a point we’ve been talking about and we’ve making over the last few weeks that like you are next. You know, and that is a thing that’s really terrifying for me. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Speaking of, I guess like, what was the phrase that I used? Ooh, it was really good. The echoes of racialized performance. It’s also been interesting to watch somebody like Kash Patel occupy a place that I’ve only maybe seen occupied by Black people. So I’m thinking about Black Republicans who not only participate in these kinds of conservative white supremacist projects, but also. Uh, by participating, walk their people into their own, um, personal, uh, types of destruction. And that’s what’s, um fascinating with me, like, even when I look at, um Kash Patel’s Wikipedia page, um in order for me to figure out that he’s Indian at all, it doesn’t happen until you get to that early education. He’s only listed as an American, but then when you look at his history, you see that his father was somebody who had, uh who, who had suffered because of ethnic persecution. And it just seems so interesting because we saw that moment, again, another tiny moment, but we saw that moment of critiquing white American intelligence, essentially, and white American culture. And we saw the anti-Indian sentiment that was birthed and the anti immigration sentiment that was birthed um uh birthed because of those judgments. And it has to be studied what America does to one’s mind. It has to be studied that America is a place where the things that make you complicated or complex or should really make you arrive at thoughts that put you at the outer edges of justice, the most innovative places of justice and thinking. Often people come and participate in the thing that makes them release all that complexity, all that nuance, and let them participate in the very thing that also is responsible for torturing and harming their own families and when you see in 20 years or 30 years when there’s maybe even a bigger anti-Indian sentiment because you know whatever the language is, they’re the ones with the jobs, they only got this rich because of on the backs of white middle Americans, whatever the language, is and when we see that anti-indian sentiment be produced you will have to understand that you are part of that making of that violence And I just don’t understand how somebody can sit with themselves and participate at all. It’s just disgusting is the word disgusting disgusting, it’s disgusting. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: I’m gonna have to pull my thesaurus off the shelf so I have something new to say. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I don’t even want to give them nothing new because like I said I get pissed off about the oligarchy stuff I’m like no you are gross you need to get my switch Kash Patel get my get my switch thank you what are you thinking? 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: And there’s so many ways that you can see the assimilation from like the choice to go by Kash instead of his full name. You know what I mean? And it’s one of the reasons that I focus on names so much is that there are ways that we try to make it easier for white people to deal with us, right? And names are one of the first places and first ways that we do that, you know? And names are one of the first places and first ways that many of us um like try to invisibilize parts of who we are right and the choice to go by Kash instead of making people say your full name right and like contend with who you really are you can’t exist in that kind of space of erasure over and over again for years and years and years and not internalize some of it. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Nikki Haley. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: That’s what I’m saying! 

 

DeRay Mckesson: Your name is not Nikki, girl. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: At all. Bobby Jindal.

 

DeRay Mckesson: It’s not even Nicole, I was like, oh, it’s Nicole. 

 

Sharhonda Bossier: Bobby Jindal, same thing, right? And yeah, anyway, I just, yeah, yeah. 

 

DeRay Mckesson: So I said this at the beginning of the pod, I’ll say it here, is that if you want to know what you can do, remember you can go to Vote Save America. Vote Save America is a cool platform for you to go if you wanna door knock near you, do phone calls, get involved with the campaign. We talked about North Carolina a couple weeks ago with the Supreme Court debacle that’s happening in North Carolina. If you want to get involved in North Carolina and be a part of that work, Go to Vote Save America, but all hope is not lost on the organizing front. There are things to do. And the more informed you are about what’s going on in the world will make you better, when you door knock. [music break] Don’t go anywhere. More Pod Save the People is coming. [music break]

 

Myles E. Johnson: Today I’m speaking with Alphonzo Terrell, co-founder and CEO of Spill, an app that positions itself as the next evolution of social media, especially for communities that have been long underserved or outright exploited by traditional platforms. Before founding Spill, Alphonzo led global social and editorial at Twitter, giving him a front row seat to the ways these platforms shape public discourse and also where they fail. Spill arrived with bold promises to center culture, to protect Black users, to offer something new in a landscape dominated by disinformation and algorithmic erasure. But with every new platform comes a set of questions. What does it really mean to serve Black communities online? How do you build a sustainable space that doesn’t just replicate the same issues we’ve seen on platforms past? And in an increasingly unstable digital ecosystem can any app, no matter how well intentioned, deliver on that mission? Hi, Phonz. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Hey, Myles. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: How are you doing? First of all, this is a lot, you gotta ask somebody how they doing before we go into anything. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Thank you for asking. I am doing. [laughter] I am doing that is my genuine answer to that question. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: My little Wendy Williams ears are popping up. What do you mean? Is it something, give me the scoop, Phonz, is something going on? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: However, what isn’t going on, Myles. What isn’t happening right now? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Is it mainly being a CEO? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: You know, that is a huge part of it, no doubt. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: But yeah what we’re at in the world and you know–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: –what we’re doing and how all this connects and you know obviously personal things as well. It is a moment of trial and endurance, but we’re here. We’re not backing down. So I’m excited to be alive. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Amen. Amen. Um. Is leading Spill what you thought it was going to be? Like, I guess I’m just interested in your journey between what you were doing at Twitter to now being a CEO. Is it what you imagined because you had some proxy kind of witnessing or you’re like, oh, no, I couldn’t have even imagined it. Is something you don’t know about until you do it?

 

Alphonzo Terrell: It’s a bit of both, to be honest. My prior experience working at companies like Twitter, and before that, I was at HBO leading social media. For those that don’t know what doing social media for a company is like, it’s one of these really unique, I think, misunderstood occupations where you’re kind of a jackknife of all trades, you’re doing strategy, you’re doing content making, you’re during paid acquisition, you’re driving the business, you’re trying to explain to people what even these tools do, what they are, right? And at the same time, they’re so powerful. You’re reaching millions of people every day at the push of a button with just whatever thought is in your head maybe at that moment or what you think is gonna resonate with someone or you know, be a funny joke that they can send to their friends that gets them through their day. And so you’re juggling all these things constantly, but you’re working within a company structure, right? There’s a lot of people. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: There’s big teams and working in entertainment, right, you know the whole world over there. It’s very much, you know high intelligence, high cultural literacy. You gotta know what’s going on. You gotta be so plugged into the nervous system of the culture at all times, otherwise you’re gonna misstep and you don’t ever wanna do that. That has been a huge transition to going to running a startup where we’re a lean team, we’re a handful of renegade individuals that have decided to challenge some pretty gnarly problems that have flummoxed trillion dollar companies for many, many years. We’re talking about hate speech. We’re talking about creator credit and rewards and especially for communities of color, Black folks, queer folks, other underserved communities who over index on social media, like we use these platforms more than anyone. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And we experience the lion’s share of hate speech, abuse, um you know just being disregarded in general and not being credited for our contributions. We’re really focused on tackling these massive problems. And so it’s exciting, it’s thrilling, especially when you start to see that you’re making progress and it’s resonating with people, but it’s relentless. You know you really have a different you know piece of your brain operating at all times and you never really sleep. If I can be honest. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: So there’s a lot of difference between the two of them for sure. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, as you were speaking, it made me think of, I had a brief time at Fader, emphasis on brief. So I was doing social media management at FADER, like part-time, that just wasn’t my thing. Um, but then I went on with like Afro punk and even now I’m mainly doing like digital consulting for just different schools and their veteran population. But to your point, I think that until you are in that situation, I’ve always been really reckless with my social media because I was born in ’91. So I just didn’t see the social media plan when I was 25. But now I’m like, oh, I didn’t know. They were gonna be professional life and social media life were gonna be so married as they were. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Right. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But um it’s a unique thing to know that whatever you decide to say is gonna go to so many different people. And for that moment, the story of that company or that brand is within your power. Um. So I’m excited. I have a lot of questions like for you because I’m just curious about the digital cultural Black space. Not even curious, I care a lot about it. Um. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Same. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But the most respect to you and your team. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Thank you. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Because the eyes that are on you by simultaneously being a Black person, Black people doing it, and then also being in the digital space and just where we are when it comes to culture and kind of how we like to tear things up in order to see what they are. It takes some brave souls to do that. So I just wanted to say that, and also say that you–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Thank you. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –kind of re-triggered me. With you [laughter] with you, with you–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Um I was reading, so you said Spill is a safe and expressive space for culture. But for those just tuning in, how would you describe Spill in your own words beyond just a Twitter alternative? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, I really reject the Twitter alternative narrative holistically. And I know coming from Twitter, it’s hard for people to kind of parse that. But we describe Spill as visual conversation at the speed of culture. And our purpose has really been to create a safer, more rewarding, and more enjoyable way to stay informed and connected. That’s been the purpose from day one. Where we actually started from the product perspective, if you haven’t actually been on Spill before. We started building around memes and meme culture. One of my favorite experiences when I was at HBO, I was there during the peak of Game of Thrones and Insecure and Westworld and the beginning of Euphoria was the conversations that would happen in real time when people were watching the show. It was always memes. You know when you watch Game of Thrones. And then you were part of the Dem Throne’s conversation. And you know people are putting durags on the dragon and all kinds of stuff. I was like, this is amazing. Like this is the best part of the Internet. So we started by building Spill as a meme machine where you can add text to an image, a GIF, a video really, really easily. And then we built out from there to actually have products and tools so that you could watch your favorite show or watch a sporting event or just have a great conversation through audio, through live video, through you know really a dynamic chat. We have like big, bold text and huge gifs that make it look very cinematic. And–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: That really was the inspiration. And then it started to really evolve based on the community, right? And that’s one of my favorite parts about being an entrepreneur and kind of moving from building communities on platforms to actually building the platforms themselves. You get so many great suggestions. And one of them was, we would, you know, Spill feels like the cookout or whatever it is. We got a lot of that. So people were like, I would love to play spades on here. And we were like–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. I don’t know if I’ve seen, you know, the spades card game actually in a social app before. So we went ahead and built that and launched that last year around Juneteenth and over half a million minutes of spades have been played on Spill since that time. That’s like a year. 24 hours. [?]

 

Myles E. Johnson: That is very impressive. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: It’s crazy. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s very impressive, but I’m afraid it has nothing on my grandma’s porch. I’m sure we have about five million minutes by now, but no, that is just super impressive. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: We’re working on it. We got to get to it. When we hit grandma’s porch–

 

Myles E. Johnson: You knew, my grand–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: When you got Spill on the iPad on grandma’s porch, then we made it. Then we made it.

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay, okay that’s I love that Afrofuturist vision it just gave me. Um. So why did you create Spill now in this specific cultural and digital moment? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: So the problems that I was talking about with the hate speech, the harassment, you really can’t get a sense of how bad that problem is until you get to the platforms themselves. And I led social media at Twitter for about three and a half years so I could see all these conversations happening around the world. And universally again, Black folks, queer folks, other underserved communities use social media the most because it’s so hard to find solidarity in real life. Right? And especially if you’re from a small town or whatever, that these tools are essential. And at the same time, it’s masochistic almost because you’re in this environment that’s abusing you, but you have to be there because there’s no other way to find your people, your tribe. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right, right, right, right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And so that just had always bothered me. And that was a problem on so many platforms kind of since the beginning of social and the leadership of these platforms kind of look at the problem academically. They’re like, well, if we can reduce the percentage amount of blah, blah, but they don’t feel it viscerally. It’s not part of their life experience. They don’t know or haven’t experienced that type of abuse themselves. And when you go through it, right? Even on this, you know, even if it’s just one comment, you know it can really affect you psychologically. Like it’s really damaging. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh my goodness. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: It hits the same spot in our brain actually, the science on it. It hits the same spot in our brain, the same pain center that getting punched in the face gives you, right? Like, it’s really bad and should be treated–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Wait, is this scientific, or is this an analogy or is that, like, scientific? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: No, it’s true. It’s true. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh wow. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: All that hate speech and comments, like those types of things actually hit the same part of our brain, the same nerve center that getting punched in the face will hit at the same time.

 

Myles E. Johnson: I’ve been punched so many times.

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, it’s awful, right? And you see it like the data on the mental health impacts, especially on younger folks who are coming up and they’ve only known social media and they’ve only known it to be kind of a violent space, right, where you’re going in there and you got to put your dukes up, right. It just shouldn’t be like that. Like we’re so used to that, that this is criminal. And actually it’s a solvable problem in our experience. So that was number one. And then number two, when we’re seeing like Black creators on TikTok or previously Vine or whatever, having to like protest you know their–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: –participation because they weren’t getting credited. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: The July Harmon example, things of that nature. So all those things led up to when you know the acquisition was looking like it was gonna happen, right? You know Elon starts talking about you know buying up the company and you know there’s the back and forth for the whole year, but finally when it happened, me and some colleagues were like, this is the time and if we don’t build something, nobody else is gonna build something to solve these problems. And that was really the thing that inspired me to say, hey, not only is this needed, but now is the the time. And then the last thing that I’ll say that’s really been sticking with me as I’ve gone through the CEO journey. Was when I watched some of these other leaders at these companies and really got to know them. I was like, they don’t know this better than us. In fact–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: We know this way better. Like there’s nothing that they, they’re not smarter than us, the only difference is the audacity. They just have the audacity. So all we need to do is just kind of like, have the guts to go out there and say, let’s build something and we’re gonna do this. And that’s proven true, right? That’s why I’m sitting here today. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: So many things that I want to comment on based off of what you did. My first thing is shallow because I’m a culture person and a culture nerd, but it made me wonder, did you see Adolescence yet? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I have, yeah, I have. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: How did you feel about it? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I think, unfortunately, it’s just not shocking to me. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Right? It just wasn’t shocking, because we’ve seen real-life versions of that. And you know you have to deal with that, particularly when you’re designing you know first of all, it underscores the need for a much more thoughtful approach to how you build these tools and the impact that it’s having, particularly on younger and younger folks, right, like kids are getting you know access to these tools basically from infancy at this point. This wasn’t true like when I was a kid or you know you’re a bit younger than me, right but like in the ’90s. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I’m not sure. How old are you Phonz? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: We didn’t have these ’90s. You know. I’m in my you know [?–

 

Myles E. Johnson: 50s, 60s, 70s. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Slightly older than you era. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I was about to say, Black people just don’t, I’m like [?]–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: 45, you know, that’s what we call it. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay, looking, Phonz looks 29, for everybody who can’t see, I was like, I think we’re I’m 34, so I’m like, I thought we were. Yeah.

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Listen, listen, I appreciate that, you know. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Oh no problem. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I try to stay moisturized, but the um–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: But yeah, like understanding that what’s happening to these kids now, there’s no protection for them. Nobody’s really prioritizing their safety and the effects of that are and have been and will continue to be so detrimental if we don’t fundamentally innovate around these problems and solve for them, it’s going to be so bad, right, it is going to get way worse than Adolescence. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I agree. I’ve been kind of sounding the alarm on the incel and like kind of just like what was happening in the underbelly of social media for a long time. The reason why I wanted to bring that up and get your opinion on it, too, was because, you know, culture is just a huge thing when it comes to social media. So the culture of um, Twitter changed when it became X. So the, so, so to me, I always liked the name change because I’m like, yeah, it’s a totally different thing. And what I think is interesting about Spill is because there is this kind of, um, sunnier Black positive disposition, it automatically kind of seeps through certain things culturally. I’m sure you still, there’s a lot of still bullshit that comes along with running an app and, and, and and bad actors, but it seems as though that could be mitigated just because the vibe is different. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: It feels like if you go there just to start stuff or be, if you just have bad intentions, it feels like the vibe of Spill would intercept that, which I think–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: 100%. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –Twitter doesn’t do. You can do everything you want to do with the numbers, but the app itself, it incentivizes toxicity. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Exactly. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Um. My second question, because you graze over it, so you were in the building when Elon was acquiring Twitter, you were still?

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, so I was at the company, I wasn’t in the San Francisco office at the time, I was in the LA office, but I was there right up until the first big wave of layoffs, right? That happened, I believe it was like November 4th. He had been there about a week and you know, it was just crazy, chaotic. I mean, layoffs in general are just difficult to deal with. There’s no good layoffs right from a– 

 

Myles E. Johnson: This is how I see it in my head, right? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Is this is happening. You get the Black people, you pat everybody down, make sure it’s not wired. And you ask the Black people, what the hell are we going to do? Is it is it–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah. This had been going on for quite some time. And the so for the context, right, the journey of, without getting too deep into the story, the journey of whether this acquisition was going to happen or not played out over the course of a full year. This was very well documented in the press. You know there was initially buying up portions of Twitter from Elon’s perspective and then was he gonna join the board? And then he wasn’t gonna join the board, he made an offer, is the offer real? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So we have been on this rollercoaster for quite some time. So leading up to the actual week, we actually didn’t think the deal was going through, like the wisdom was that this deal was not gonna happen, and then suddenly it did. And we had to figure out not just what are we gonna do, but also, how do we take care of each other? How do we understand the transition, you know, the psychological transition from like, okay, I was here and I’m fighting for my team and my own existence. You know, if you’re in like restructuring territory, anybody that’s been through that, it’s awful, right? Cause everybody’s kind of trying to justify their existence. And we quickly transitioned from that to like, oh no, we are the resistance. I was like–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: I was like, I’m stepping out there, and you know it was a pretty risky thing to do. I think a lot of people naturally wouldn’t be like, let me step out and go build something and go talk about it publicly. But I just felt, and maybe this is just why I’m uniquely weird like that is if we don’t do that, especially for those of us that are in positions to be able to step out and say we have the credibility, we can pull together the resources, we have the expertise to really solve a problem that’s out there and we don’t do that. Then I think the world really suffers. Like we don’t really reward that behavior, I think, enough. And especially for Black folks in tech or in any professional situation or anytime you just have a job you like, you don’t want to lose that. In many cases, you might be the first person, like I was definitely the first in my family to ever make like six figures. It’s like, I can’t mess that up, right? That’s crazy. So we’re not necessarily incentivized to be risk-taking like that. And to see those moments as opportunities. But the truth is, that’s what they are. Anytime there’s a great shift or there’s you know these what looks like really negative forces maybe, there’s actually tremendous opportunity inside of it. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay, Phonz, I would like to listen to your book because that is an interesting place to be in, right? And I do think that you have to have a little bit of, I can’t think of better language, so I’m going to use bad language, but you have a little bit of insanity in order to find yourself. I believe that I’m a spiritual, faithful person, so I always feel like in order to fly while you’re falling, it takes that kind of–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Courage. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Delusion. I was going to say delusion. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Oh yeah and the delusion. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But yeah, it’s courage. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, you have to be delulu at some point. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Faith maybe is the word, too. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That’s the word too, okay, yes, faith is the word too. Um. Just kind of going back to the app, Spill uses AI to moderate content and elevate voices. Can you walk us through how that works, especially how it’s trained to center Black language nuance and culture? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, so we looked at how do you create a safer online environment quite deeply and thought about this for a while. And we worked with some of the top trust and safety experts and got a bunch of feedback. And we really settled on a three sort of tiered process that has proven pretty effective. The first is policy. So when you’re building these platforms from the ground up, it’s kind of like designing a new nation. You’ve got to come up with the laws and the structures and all of that and your policies are actually really powerful because it says these are the terms of engagement that everybody agrees to when they join. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Your values. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, exactly. It codifies your values. It says this is what we’re here for. This is what you can do. This is you can’t do. And if you go against these, you know these are the consequences. And you really got to think through that. And now that we have 20 years of social media to learn from, it’s like when you don’t do that, you end up with the crap that we have now. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And so we spend a lot of time on the community values. You can go to spill.com and look at them, forward slash community guidelines. You can see exactly, we don’t mince words. We say it with our chests. Like, don’t come here messing with Black folks, queer folks, women, like anybody really. Like this isn’t the place where you’re gonna get your rocks off, you know, stepping on people’s toes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: The second piece was the tech. And you mentioned the AI, and AI is like a really fascinating subject, of course. But I really only think it’s useful when applied to specific problems that it’s really good at solving. So content moderation is a really inexact science, and these companies, Meta and some of these other ones, they employ tens of thousands of people around the world who manually are looking at the darkest parts of the Internet every day and pulling stuff down. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And we saw this, it was also just like not effective. Right because context matters, who’s saying what matters and so–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: This was a perfect problem for AI to improve upon and have a better solution for. So we custom train large language models. Everybody knows chat GBT and everything, but without getting super dorky, we just feed it information from the communities that are getting the most hate speech, right because we understand the language, we understand how it’s changing constantly. This is not a one size, you do it once and it’s solved, right? You got to constantly be updating the language and then we pair that with the data that we get on who’s saying what. So when you join Spill, you have the option to share your background, right. I’m from this community. These are my intersections, all of that. And people really do do this and they know that they trust us with that information because we know we’re using it to keep them safe. So that has been a really effective and we have data to back this up that when you combine this policy with this technology, you get a really strong sort of result in not having as much crap on the feed that you even have to pull down, right? 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right, right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And then the last piece I’ll say is the community. So policy, technology, community, community. Everybody knows now that like, these are the rules. This is my platform. I got the tech behind me. Y’all not gonna come in my house and put mud all over the floor. You better take off your shoes–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: –when you come in the house. You gotta behave yourself. So if you come on Spill and try and just rabble, get people roused up or whatever, nine times out of 10 people will just ignore you. Like you’re not gonna get the motion. And that’s what a lot of troll psychology is about. Like even when it’s a negative response, it’s a response. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Still a response yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: So the dopamine gets triggered and you’re like, oh yeah, I’m having a battle, I’m whatever. And that’s just not an experience you’re gonna have successfully on Spill. So we’re really proud of where we are and we’re actually really excited because this model policy technology and community actually really does scale as the platform grows. And that’s really where we want it to be at this point. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah, I love that. Um. Specifically the part about the technology and the AI, because I think I was, and you kind of, my second question was about more clarity around the AI. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Sure. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: But it sounds like it sounds like you’re um feeding into more like you’re creating models that like are specifically made to–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yes. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: –understand how a Black queer person’s targeted by hate groups or people who are solo actors but who look to do these things. And it seems that though simultaneously if I’m hearing you right, that if like so if I’m at the kitchen table, at my own kitchen table I will not say this in front of Phonz in his nice blazer. But if I’m at my own kitchen table I might use a little N word or I might use the F word, you know? Cause I’m both of those things. So I feel like I have the space to use those things. It seems like you’re creating AI that understands those nuances. Is what I’m hearing.

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Exactly. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, because we wanted it, of course, to be a place for you to feel comfortable expressing who you are. And we’ve had a lot of interesting debates about those words in particular. And ultimately, when that type of speech, right, we call it reclaimed speech, reclaimed in you know from the people who are experiencing these, you know whatever these terms were used for, right? When it’s used as a term of endearment or that kind of thing. It’s very different right than someone coming in as a bad actor and saying, hey, I’m going to deliberately try and just you know be an awful person or trigger people just so I can get my dopamine response. So the way we do that is it’s constantly updating. Right. All that feedback, the reporting, the way the people communicate on the platform, it feeds back into our system so it gets smarter and smarter and smarter over time. And also understands who’s saying what, so it’s not just like putting a muzzle on everything. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I love that. And then because spill is not so confrontational, but I do think dissent and debate and argument and conversation are so essential parts of um just social, but specifically Black social life. I am so curious about like, or maybe it’s already happened and I missed it in my research, but would you ever do like some type of like spill town hall. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Oh yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And getting like your users to speak about like you said, speech, because those subject matters are so interesting because even in our community, um and specifically in the Black queer community, we use fish to talk about women sometimes. And then when, now that we’re on a space where cis women are also a part of that conversation, they’re like, don’t call me a fish, and don’t call me sis, like, and I’m like, that is such a um, when I watch Ts Madison, Funky Dineva, when I watch people who are really plugged into the Black community, that is something that matters to people. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Right. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That is a conversation that will reoccurs, happens, people feel passionate about it. And I’m, like wait, Spill should probably, I don’t know, have that conversation, but you also might say, I don’t want no, no blood on my hands. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: No, no, I think that’s exactly why, you know, first and foremost, this is an ongoing conversation and language evolves tremendously. I was actually having this conversation with a friend in regards to RuPaul’s Drag Race, right like this most recent season, the way they are even communicating about the trans community that’s so different from like seasons one, two, and three, right? Has shown how even inside the queer community, language has changed and evolved like tremendously. And so that is absolutely why we want to pay attention to this and build tech and tools that has that cultural literacy. Because ultimately if these tools are effective, it is allowing people to connect better, right? And find their tribes, especially when you’re growing up in these environments where everything is against you. Everything’s against you, let’s have a space where the technology is designed to help you. Like so to answer your question directly, yes, we do do regular town halls on Spill. We have a function called a Tea Party where it’s a scheduled event essentially inside the platform. We go live with audio and video. Me and several of the team members will also be there. And we always take questions. And truthfully, people are adding me all day on Spil and sending us emails to our support. So we hear everything. We read everything. And we can’t get to everything necessarily as quickly as we want to, but it actually goes into a really structured thought process on, okay, wait, how can we make this better? We had a lot of these conversations around the pronouns being included in people’s profiles. This was something that when we had launched wasn’t in the product right away, and everybody was very vocal like, how could you have forgotten this? And I was like. No, there’s just a lot to build. But yes, we hear you. And so we actually tried to think about, how can we make this better? So instead of just like, OK, your pronouns are in your profile, we actually have your pronouns pop up next to your handle whenever somebody is at mentioning you. So if they forgot your pronouns or if they are unfamiliar with how to address you, that information is right there. Or if they just didn’t know, right, so that we can have more value creating conversations and avoid issues that happen a lot where, you know, people are you know misgendering someone or anything, um hopefully by accident, right? Like they–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: They will have the information there so they don’t end up in that situation. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I love that answer. And then I know we, I feel like I’ve known you for so long, Phonz. Um. But I think it’s, I deeply, deeply believe in um uh I think in Buddhism, it’s Buddhist loving-kindness of being a of having that inside of you, having that inside of and letting the things that you sprout and things that spring from you come from that space and to your point, I think we can feel that. And it’s hard to talk about it when you’re talking about social, political things and there’s almost this like atheistic perspective you wanna have on things in order to be taken seriously intellectually. But what’s true and what you kind of can see is that no people’s energy and what people think and how people, what they got going on inside, it touches everything. And I think sometimes we could be so manipulated by money. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Right. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: That if the person’s rich and has the money, then he must be doing the good thing where we’re kind of seeing that, no, the money part is not the moral part. The money part, is not the energy part. That’s that’s that’s that’s not it. So I love hearing that you were so conscious of that. Um. So what exactly happens when spill messes up? Who holds you accountable? Is there a Black lead oversight board? Is that something you would consider? Like what’s, what, what? How do we make sure that we got, you know, if United States is not going to have equal branches. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah totally. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Is spill gonna have equal branches? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: My gosh, where have we got to? Yeah. It’s an interesting conversation. The first thing that I’m proud to say is we, again, really listen to the community. The community is the first line. They will tell us exactly when something’s really off, if the mission that we’ve set forth for ourselves to accomplish if we’re veering so far from that, right? If we’re not protecting the communities we set out to protect, if folks are feeling, whether it’s not just unsafe in a abstract sense but like we’re seeing you know widespread hate speech or just some of the same behaviors that we see everywhere else and we’re not addressing them right they let us know like it’s pretty instant right we our oversight board is the hundreds of thousands of people using the platform every single day. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: So that’s number one i think the other thing is we have a great set of advisors I work really closely with some of my colleagues uh formerly from twitter some senior leadership. Nick Caldwell, I want to shout him out. April Reign is one of our advisors who created Oscars So White. We have so many unofficial advisors that are in my DMs and my texts every single day, like, hey, what are you guys thinking about this? So we’re actually pretty well structured to be not only held accountable because quote unquote, “the product is the experience you’re having on Spill.” And if you’re not having a great experience, we’re going to know about it. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And that is like our business model is built around that. So like going counter to that is actually not even something that we’re incentivized to do. And that’s by design, right? When we’re successful, the communities that we’ve set out to center are thriving. They’re connecting. They’re able to get recognized for their contributions. And ultimately, you know and this is gonna come down the line with the product build out, you’re gonna be able to monetize yourself, right? You’re gonna to be able to monetize your community. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Or some of your content or things like that. That’s something we’re really focused on because we believe that the creator economy you know is the next great wave. You know there’s gonna be another 50 million, 100 million entrepreneurs that use tools like Spill to be to make their living and to thrive. And so that all is tied into keeping us accountable. Otherwise it won’t work. Right?

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yes, Phonz, I know you are busy. Can I ask you one, one, one more question? 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Okay. In a digital landscape that is erasing Black voices through algorithm bias and shadow banning or flat-out censorship, how is Spill working to preserve and amplify the Black digital archive? This is like such an important question to me. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah. Important to us as well, the practical side of it is first and foremost, again, coming back to where can we share this information in a space that is not going to be subject, frankly, to whatever the shifting political landscape may be. Right we go when you study history, right, there’s been phases of you know different types of styles of leadership, right? I’m you know what I’m getting at here. I’m trying to be somewhat diplomatic here. And you know, and there’s been phases where there’s be very progressive styles of leadership, right, and what we are really focused on is building a platform that can withstand the changing tides and that really truly is powered by the community and self-sustained by what’s happening from, not just a um a policy standpoint, but from a business standpoint as well. And one of the things I’m proud of is that, you know, in this moment, right, I was at Twitter when, you, know, George Floyd was murdered and we saw sort of that outpouring of like, oh, we all need a DE and I strategy and, you know, businesses that you would had never seemed to care about communities of color was suddenly like we’re, you know. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Donating to the NAACP or whatever whatever. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Juneteenth ice cream.

 

Alphonzo Terrell: [?] You know. And then a few years later, they’re like, we’re canceling all of that, just kidding, right like and all this. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: We just playing. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: And I think building business models around that is you know challenging and treacherous. But what we are really focused on is like having a sense of autonomy for the platform that will allow us to be able to weather whatever these storms are and continue to just serve the mission. Right. And let’s just talk about the data, Black folks, Hispanic folks, Asian-American folks are the fastest growing communities in this country. We will be the collective majority right in you know a decade or two. And that is probably one of the things that is challenging folks in this moment, right? And we need to be able to say, there’s no need to fear any of this. It’s just overdue to super serve these communities that have not been paid attention to the way they should have been for so, so many years. And when this is successful, guess what? It actually benefits everyone. We pay taxes like everybody else. We’re going to you know participate in a variety of different institutions, you know all of this. And I think that that ultimately is what’s going to be you know allowing us to you know really build that like future. Like and for me, the future of social media, that was the focus of Spill. I don’t want to replicate anything that’s happened before. I want to push this medium forward and really make it what I can see and I think we all know we need is a space where it maximizes the benefits of these tools, where you really improve your life as a result of them versus just continuing to exacerbate the harms and ultimately it being a net negative, which it’s largely become for many people. So I think that’s ultimately how we see the moment, and in and of that, that is inherently going to be a space where you share your stories, you share your backgrounds, we’re going to be a trusted source of information. You know we have tons of partnerships with really credible news and information sources, so you know when you get a push notification, and we do a lot of push notifications for those that have the app, that you can trust it, right? That is all part of creating this irrefutable sense of, okay, I can I can get my information here, I can plug into the community, and nothing’s gonna disrupt that because our incentives are aligned with that model versus we gotta play all these different games in order to survive. So I hope that helps. I know it was wordy as hell but. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: No, that was great, Phonz. You’re really interesting. Like, I have 50 more questions that I could ask you, literally like I wrote so many questions, and um thank you for being so generous with your time, but also your answers. And and and and, you know, it’s scary for all of us. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And when you see a new digital space happen, and I think because of the political environment we’re in, sometimes I get afraid that things are just gonna go into entertainment land and Zeus and Tubi land, even though it has that space. And I think after this conversation, I’m even more interested in spill. But then also I have a lot more trust in you as a leader. If I’m being honest and you as somebody with taste and somebody who has a kind of like moral center of like where you think this should go and not for just this descent into whatever is the most profitable. So that’s my long way winded answer of saying, thank you for being generous with your time and talking to me. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Of course. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Yeah. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Could I share one more thing? Because as you were–

 

Myles E. Johnson: Of course. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: –talking to me, there was one other thing that I think was really important, both about the accountability piece and also preserving these digital commons right? One of the things that they never talk about in our communities that I’m really trying to make sure this story and our experience can be a touch point for many people is fundraising. And particularly how Black entrepreneurs who raise less than 1% of all venture capital every year can get these opportunities to build these tools, because we have the capabilities and there are so many worthy problems that are venture scale that deserve the opportunity and we’re starting to see more of it, but there’s not nearly enough. And we were really fortunate to raise venture capital pretty early in our journey. So again, me going from fired to being able to raise $3 million to launching a product that went number one in the Apple App Store within like six months is pretty unprecedented. Like this isn’t a normal journey, but there–

 

Myles E. Johnson: God’s plan. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: –should be much more on ramps, right, for entrepreneurs and creatives to have this type of experience and have access to it. And one of the things that we were asked when we first launched was, hey, how can I invest in Spill? Which was a crazy idea, I was like, we just started, what are you talking about? But I actually did a lot of the research on it and I think this was something that started to make more and more sense and we’ve been working on it for the past year, which was if we could give our community members the ability to actually not only use the product and you know benefit that way, but actually have a ownership stake in the company, right, if they want it. And I caveat this with like, this isn’t about like crypto, get-rich-quick schemes or any of that wild stuff. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Right. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Like really thinking long-term about, okay, if part of my investment portfolio, how can we make this accessible? So just three weeks ago, we finally figured this out. It took a long time because we have to work with our venture partners and make sure everybody feels good. Um. But people can actually invest in Spill now and if you go to wefunder.com/spill You can learn all about it. But more importantly the investment minimum is only $250 you do not have to be a millionaire. In fact, I encourage you not to you know, this isn’t about like investing your rent hoping it’s gonna turn around in a in a month or two. But if you really care about the future of our digital commons, if you really care about the future of where our media spaces are going. And you know you get to know this product and this team and really say, this is exciting. I want to be a part of it. Now you can. And I think that that’s also pretty revolutionary and what the moment calls for, that our digital commons should also benefit the people that are using it the most. So that’s also something I wanted to mention and I think is really exciting. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I love that specifically on the face of what Target’s doing or not doing. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Exactly. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: And how we don’t want to always be wrapped up in advertisers and limited because of advertisers. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Exactly. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: I think that is a really smart thing to do. But um again, thank you, Phonz, you’ve been–

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Yeah. 

 

Myles E. Johnson: Just really interesting and and generous. And I know you’re super busy, but if you ever have time for 75 more questions, please come back to the podcast because you are such an interesting space you’re occupying right now. 

 

Alphonzo Terrell: Would love to, would love to. Thank you, Myles. Appreciate your time as well. [music break]

 

DeRay Mckesson: Well that’s it, thanks so much for tuning into Pod Save the People this week tell your friends to check it out and make sure you rate it wherever you get your podcast, whether it’s Apple Podcasts or somewhere else. And we’ll see you next week. Pods Save the People is a production of Crooked Media. It’s produced by AJ Moultrié and mixed by Evan Sutton, executive produced by me, and special thanks to our weekly contributors, Kaya Henderson, De’Ara Balenger, and Myles E. Johnson.