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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ohh boy podcasts. Which one is this, Robert now, Sophie, scholars have debated for years how to tell what podcast you're introducing, when you're introducing your podcast. And I think I hold with Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University when he said it is impossible to know the name or the hour of the podcast that you host. Sophie, this is behind the ********. Argo, is it. Our guest today is the lovely Bridget. Todd. Hi, Bridget. Hello. I'm so happy to be here with you all. I'm happy to have you here. How are you doing today, Bridget? I am doing well. I am in DC where it is hot as balls, but I'm doing well. It's like still winter here, basically. So it's like 60 and rainy, which is dope. But I remember you and I met in DC when it was hot as balls. That's right. The swamp, as they say. Yeah, it's all his balls in Los Angeles today, too. So, yeah, it's hot as balls everywhere but where I am. And now, Bridget, you're an East Coast girl. That's right. Born and bred. That's not how. How do you. How do you how do you how do you how do you like the Big Apple, the, the, the, the, the new, the new of Yorks. Oh, I love New York. I lived there for two years. I loved it. I'm. I'm a I'm an East Coast girl. Sassy mouth, you know, yelling in traffic, etcetera. Yeah, yeah, I'm walking here. That kind of stuff. Well, say it everyday. The most famous thing about New York culture is that scene where what's his name is that rock? That's not De Niro, is it? Let's say Dustin Hoffman. Oh yeah, Dustin Hoffman. Cut from midnight Cowboy right where he's, like, walking across the street with the other guy and, like, that dude nearly hits him. He's like, I'm walking here. Well, that's a famous New York moment. It's the thing everybody jokes about when they pretend to be a New Yorker. And of course it is a moment. What's what's depicted in that scene is a man having an aggressive interaction with someone in a car. Right. Because New York has famously heinous traffic problems. Not quite Los Angeles. Bad, although the parking is worse than it is in LA, but pretty bad traffic. And today we're going to talk about the guy who's responsible for that. Bridget, have you ever heard of Robert Moses? I have not. Oh, Bobby moes. Yeah. This is this guy's important. If you're not, if you've never been to New York, his, the, the lingering impacts of the, the, the things that he did are like, almost incomprehensibly Titanic. But he is also known as the man who built New York City. Like all a huge number of the landmarks that are most famous about that town. Were the result of this guy's direct work. And spoilers, he was a gigantic racist with a weird car fetish. Ohh yeah. I guess it wouldn't be ******** if it was like, oh, he was a really nice guy and he was a cool dude. He liked to cook, like, salads for people and hand them out. This is just a podcast about a guy who made salads for free. Frigid. I feel like they were all right, Bridget, we should have done this before we did cool people who did cool stuff with Margaret Childres so you could have the proper lens for. What's interesting is for a long time, people called this guy a cool person who had done cool stuff. And notably, the folks who did were rich. Right. People like, I guess he was a cool person, depending on who you ask. But he for some perhaps he was cool in that way, that like if you have a movie and you have like the bad guy who's this like figure in government who's incredibly good at like wielding power and like carrying out. Like you could have made a good House of Cards, like a Netflix series about how good this guy was at like running, like pulling the levers of government. Like I guess he's cool in that regard, but he is. Part of the reason why we're all going to choke to death on exhaust fumes. So that part, I would say, is probably bad. Bridget, how do you feel about choking to death on exhaust fumes? I don't love it. I don't love it. Not not pro choking. OK, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put. I keep a little, I keep a little tally by the desk of people who want to choke to death on exhaust fumes. So I'm gonna mark you and know which is the first big disagreement you and Jamie Loftus have had. Oh, she's she's like, yeah, she's she's huge fan of choking on exhaust. Huge. That's why she spent so much time in Florida. Recently. The Ghost Church podcast was just a cover. Listen to Ghost church now on the iHeartRadio network. OK, we should talk about Robert Moses. What? Sophie, come on. You're gonna plug it? Please plug the network it's on, which is hours, which is called cool zone media. Yeah, that doesn't sound like us. Really? That doesn't sound like us. So, Bridget. Bobby Moses. Robert Moses. Armos. Rob Moses was born in New Haven, CT on December 18th, 18. 88 His father Emmanuel was descended from Spanish Jewish immigrants. His mother, Isabella was German Jewish, and her father, Bernard Cohen, was a wealthy New York businessman. For 9 years, he and his parents lived in Connecticut, just a couple of blocks from Yale. And based on the fact that they lived next door to to Yale, you will not be surprised to hear they were comfortable and quite affluent, right? Like not a lot of poor kids grow up in the shadow of Yale University. Yeah, I mean, the Yale is a dead giveaway. That you've got some money? Yeah. No, it was a rough neighborhood. Skull and bones. Guys robbed us every night, beat us with diplomas. Yeah. So he grows up next to Yale and his dad, the family business that his dad is into. His dad owns a department store and is also a real estate speculator in Connecticut. And he was successful enough at these endeavors that in 1897 he sold his business, he sold his real estate holdings, and he retired. He retires, like pretty young. He's not a. He's not a he's like kind of early middle age when he does this. And the reason he retires is that his wife's father, Robert Moses, is Grandpa Bernard. Had died that year and he had willed his daughter and her family his mansion in New York City. So Robert Moses's dad retires because their grandpa died and left them a mansion. So they're like, well, we have all this cash and now we have a mansion. Why are we? We don't need to really do anything else, you know? So they moved to the mansion in New York City and they become fancy New York socialite people, right? So pretty easy run of it, you would say, at this stage. Yeah, just being given mansions sounds sounds pretty sweet. She has the upbringing of like of a of a teenage girl and like a hallmark original movie where it's like, ohh, we have this surprise family mansion. Now we're going to live in New York and be sudden socialites. Yeah, that's very much his background. It's giving like what's that Adam Sandler movie where he becomes wealthy? Mr Deeds, yes, a little bit of a Mr Deeds. It's a Mr Deeds, but we all wish it was a Billy Madison. So here his mom like, well, now that they're in New York, they're fancy socialite people. You know, they're, they're, they're living it up, drinking tea with, like all of their fingers extended, all that, that fancy **** his mom gets involved in what's called the settlement house movement. Now, again, they are rich, but they are, they are the kind of descendants of some of the first Jewish people to come to the United States and given like, again because they have money, like a lot of their their ancestors or some of the first Jewish folks who immigrate out of Europe and into the northeast. Their ancestors are doing pretty well. But obviously by the 1890s, most of the Jews who are coming to the United States are not people with money, right? If you remember your history and you think about why a lot of Jewish people are fleeing to New York in the 1890s, think back to our episodes on the Czars. They they are having trouble, right? So these are are mainly immigrants from like Eastern Europe from Slavic countries and they're seen by. So the kind of established Jewish community in New York at this time is primarily German Jewish and a lot of them are are are kind of upper class and so they have deep sympathy for their Eastern European Co religionists. But they also are kind of bigoted against them, right, because #1 slobs are are again, this is the attitude of like rich Germans kind of unkempt and like dirty and stuff, right? Make their poor, you know and they they come from this like less civilized part of Europe and the attitudes of these people and also a lot of them are dangerously socialist, right. A lot of like Jewish refugees in the 1890s have left wing leanings and again these the established Jewish community in New York, like a lot of them have money, right? Like Robert Moses's family and their mansion are not socialists. You know I would be very surprised if they were. So there's this, there's this mix of things and some of it's self preservation, right because. People like Bella Moses who's who's Roberts mom and other kind of wealthy diaspora Jews in the United States, both are like, well we don't like this socialism and we're not really fans of a lot of these peoples like Slavic customs. But also it's potentially dangerous if Jewish people in the United States develop a reputation for being like left wing radicals because that **** has been very dangerous for Jewish people in in Europe, right? So there's this decision among kind of the great and good in the Jewish community that like we need to Americanize. These folks ******* ASAP, right? So settlement houses provide new immigrants with a place to live where they can learn English and like American customs, like not talking about socialism or unionizing in your workplace, right? So these settlement houses are in a lot of ways very positive things. These people are desperate refugees coming to the United States. They need shelter, they need food, they need job opportunities, clothing, all that kind of stuff. And the settlement houses provide that. But they're also deeply paternalistic, as this quote from a write up by the by Virginia Commonwealth. Diversity makes clear quote underneath the giving of money and time was an assumption that the givers knew what was best for the recipients. The recipients did not always appear grateful. Some had been leaders in their own Jewish communities, some were educated, some were professionals and some have been political activists. But almost everyone had pride and could sense when they were being patronized. So you get what's kind of like, there's some. Yeah, this is, this is what Bob Moses's family is involved in. They're the ones doing the patronizing. Yeah. It's interesting that so that that. Bit that you just read. Also shout out to VCU. My parents yeah. Both taught there. Yeah. It's interesting to me that like, they knew they they know when they're being patronized. It's I I feel like we often pathologize people of like, oh, like, they don't really know what's going on. Like you can just say whatever. But like, I really like that point that like, oh, they they they knew what time it was. They knew, you know, what the vibe was and how they were being treated. Yeah, they're aware of what's going on. But it's also like, what are you going to do? Turn down the free food and the place to stay? Like, it's hard landing in America. With nothing but the clothes on your back, you know, you need something. And so this is the community, the people who are, again, doing the patronizing. That's where young Bob Moses grows up as this rich kid watching his mom, and she's fundraising. She's setting up these facilities where, like, rich people plot out life paths for poor people. And he and his brother Paul attend several fancy private schools in a military school. You know, they have kind of the most privileged upbringing you can within this community. And in 1905 at age 17. Robert Moses starts classes at Yale. So again, doing great. How do you think he got in? You think he strings or. No? No, he said his test scores were just like good as hell. Yeah. No, no, I think it was Aunt Becky from full house. Oh no, I mean, no. They these people. I think these guys have the money that you don't need to. Aunt Becky, it right like you. You've got the family. Now, that said, we are going to talk about it. It's actually not. There's a little bit because again, he is Jewish, right? Which is a a you are not really white as a Jewish person in in ******* 1905, you know, like that has not come around yet. So he, uh, he's moderately athletic, he's, he's a good competitor. He's he's a runner, he's a swimmer. And he also, from an early age takes on his mom's activism bent. But of course, since he's a Yale kid, his activism is like rich kid activism. So, like, the first thing he organizes is a fight to take some of the money budgeted for the school's football program and divert it to what? Are called minor sports, which in the US was everything but football. Umm, so that's like his first piece of, like, community organizing. My God, I feel like I know I, I feel like I I know so much about him just having having that information that that was his foray into organizing of like, we need to be funding lacrosse and squash and other sports too. He he's the kind of guy where, if you'd like, met him a couple of decades later at a party and then like, Oh yeah, I've been organizing a food bank. He'd be like, yes, I have community organizing experience too. Let me tell you about the squash. Team we funded. He did not have a British accent, but I can't like, if you're doing posh, you just have to go English. So yeah, he's a he's a good student. He wins awards for his performance in Latin, mathematics, public speaking. He writes for the uh, the current, which is their newspaper. He edits the volume of poetry. Now, obviously he's doing just fine, right? This is not a kid who is struggling tremendously in his early life. But again, he's he is Jewish in this. Which means he's not insulated entirely. From how ******* racist upper class society is, one of my sources for his early life is an article in the Atlantic from 1939. It extremely tactfully notes because it's not, it's 1939. The Atlantic doesn't view racism as bad. It notes quote a non fraternity man could hardly get further at Yale. So it's basically saying like he did as good as a man with in not enough fraternity could do in Yale. And you may be wondering why wasn't he a fraternity man? Because he's again very wealthy. Well, because he's Jewish. And Jewish men in 1905 were not allowed to be in fraternities at Yale, right? You could attend, but you could not. It's the same way that, like, up until pretty recently, there were quite a few. There's probably still are, like country clubs and golf courses that, like, wouldn't let Jewish people in, you know? Right. So while there had been Jewish people at Yale since the 1700s, they kept an official cap on Jewish admission to the school, like they had a maximum number of Jewish people who were allowed to attend. And I want to quote now from a New York Times article written in 1986. Not until the early 1960s did Yale University end an informal admissions policy that restricted Jewish enrollment to about 10%. Not know that. 60s, I mean, and obviously there's they're racist in other ways. Jewish people are not the most discriminated group of folks at Yale. But like, they kept that **** going until the 60s, as much later than I would have assumed. Like, like officially on the books, right, like it it's an in for like, they don't have a law bylaw, but there was a book published by the Yale University Press being like, yeah, we found based on like, letters between people running the school that like, yeah, they didn't allow more than 10% of the classes to be Jewish for up until the 60s. Umm, it's pretty, pretty cool. I found a book joining the club, which began as a sophomore term paper by a guy named Dan A Oren, who's a 1979 Yale grad that documents anti-Semitism, reaching from fraternity brothers to board trustees at Yale. A lot of the the research is based on university documents and quote here from again from that write up in the New York Times. One document, a folder now in the university archives labeled Jewish problems, contains a memo from the admissions chairman of 1922 urging limits on the alien and unwashed elements. The next year, the Admissions Commission enacted the limitation of numbers policy, an informal quota. Jewish enrollment was held to about 10% for four decades. So. Part of what's happening here, he's allowed in again because he is not seen as, he's not seen as like a fully a white person, but he he's not seen us because he's rich, fully Jewish, right. The thing they're trying to keep out is Jewish people from Eastern Europe is like slobs, right? And that's that's like the the alien and unwashed element. Again, 1922. That's how Yale is describing these kids, although I love that the text is called Jewish problems. Oh yes, like, just be real explicit, real clear. At least they didn't call it the Jewish question, right? But not that far off, right? So that's that's the world our boy Robbie comes up and he's simultaneously on the very top of the social hierarchy in New York City, right? You don't get a lot more privileged than he is. And he and his family, you could almost look at them as kind of like feudal Lords and respect to a lot of poor immigrant Jews, right, who are kind of dependent on their largesse. And so he's able to exist in the rarefied levels of white Christian society, but he's also permanently othered from it, right? He's not fully accepted in it either. This is an interesting like way to grow up, and you might think because he he couldn't not be aware of the injustices of the era, that he would be extra sympathetic to other people struggling against bigotry. That is not what you might think, that that's not how it goes down. But we're building to that. So after Yale, he goes to Oxford, where the Atlantic recalls this occurrence. In his early background, a terrific outspokenness with never counts. The odds against him appeared in one Oxford experience when he was selected to represent his college at a World Congress on racial problems. His frankness so infuriated some of the intense nationalist groups that once he had to free from the platform and escape through a rear exit. One of the delegates and as an assistant to the Cadivi of Egypt, was so impressed that he offered Moses. Position as secretary to the Kadiev, Moses declined, but later he and a classmate visited Egypt to study what was being done under Kitchener and developed a profound admiration for British colonial administration. So that carries a **** load of ground, right? He's going to this, like Congress thing at Oxford and talking about racism, probably you have to assume racism against, like, Jewish people because it's the period of time that it is. And he gets chased away by by fascists, right? He gets chased off states by fascists for talking about how racism is bad. And then he impresses the government of Egypt, which at this point is like the British Empire. And he goes and he said, boy, these British sure know how to govern a multiracial society fairly. Like that's an incredible degree of like. **** to cover, right. Wow. I mean it. It really is so interesting how like if if I didn't know where this was going, I would think like this is going to turn out to be somebody who like is this like great leftist person who you know understands why being you know, actively anti racist is a good thing. And it's so interesting how it's like Nope, hard pivot. Actually it is a hard and it's interesting because he he clearly sees the problems of nationalism and racism. But also we're going to talk about this more in a second. He he looks at. The government of Egypt under the British and he's like, this is how you run a multiracial society. So he's, he's. He's only looking at it. He's looking at the problems of race and is able to see them as far as they affect people like him who are like upper class but kept out of the highest level of the upper class because of an accident of birth. But he's not able to see it anywhere below that level, right? That's going to be the guy Bobby Moses grows up into. But first, Bridget, you know who does see the problems of racism? Who? The products and services that support this podcast. That's why on the island where you can hunt children, they don't see race. They don't see race at all. They kidnap kids from every continent, from every, from every Financial Group. You know if if you're a child, you might wind up. Child hunting island, and it doesn't matter what your background is, you know, that's the beauty of. Bridget, this is a master. This was a masterful thank you. Thank you. Sophie says that all the time, but I appreciate the the additional support. She loves it. I hate her favorite bed. She's so, so on board because you have. Then you love it. No, it's because I have to make edit notes for editor to bleep the name. It's very funny. And people, people keep being like. People think he's being real. They sure do. It's so funny. I'm never going to stop anyway. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. 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I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ohh, we're back now Bridget. If you were going to eat a kid, right. Oh my God, what do you the ribs, right. Like that's where the softest meets gonna be I would say. So I this just, I just finished watching that show on Netflix alone and it turned into a conversation of if I had to eat somebody, how would I go about it? I think ribs, I think some some kind of a fatty cut of meat. So like thighs, **** area because. Yeah yeah. But you're going to have a lot of a lot of fattiness on you. You'd want to slow cook it. Eight. I kind of ate people once. I ate a fish that had just been eating human corpses, and it was pretty good, but that's as close as I've gotten. I haven't just, like, had it straight. What? Sophie, how are we doing? I don't know. How are you doing, buddy? I'm kind of worried about you today. I'm feeling fine. I'm feeling fine. So you said some wild **** today. Everyone's having a good time on the old internet.com so. We're at an interesting point in Bob Moses's background here. Robbie Moses, because we've seen him both like get chased off the stage by fascists for their bigotry and also he goes to Egypt and he develops this deep appreciation for what is an extremely racist caste system imposed by the British and their colonial project in North Africa. Now we should talk a little bit about what's going on here because So what you kind of. So the Ottoman Empire still exists, right? This is prior to World War One, you know, and if you're not aware, the Ottoman Empire, they're the ones who kind of end. The Eastern Roman Empire, very powerful for a few 100 years and then like the sick man of Europe is the term used for them for like 500 years, right, because they're kind of like this failing empire, but they govern basically the whole modern Middle East, right? And they technically are in charge in North Africa, but they're bad at projecting power. And so the British kind of come in and are running Egypt in a chunk of it. That this is the, the whole history here is more complicated, but technically this area is is under the government of the Ottoman Empire. But the British are like helping them maintain control through force of arms and it it's effectively a British colonial project, right. And the the guy who was responsible in this. For imposing colonial rule by the British on North Africa is a dude named Lord Kitchener. The reason Kitchener is in charge is he had there had been this some. We'll talk about this one day. It's a fascinating piece of history. So there's this guy. In the late 1800s, who uh, early 1900s, who calls himself the Mahdi, right and Madi is an Islamic term it means. Messianic Messiah, basically. Right. So like the Mahdi is like supposed to be the Islamic Messiah and there's this dude who claims to be the Mahdi and he creates, it's kind of like the Islamic State, right. And an early version of it he creates like this. We're going to finally go back to true Islam and he wins a bunch of battles against the the colonial forces. He he massacres several British armies. It's a really fascinating piece of history. We've talked about this a bit when we talk about the Maxim gun and some other stuff, but so he this Mahdi. It has this big uprising in Sudan and there's this, this vicious war and Kitchener. Kitchener crushes the war brutally in this battle called Omdurman with a where Winston Churchill shows up and shoots a bunch of people too. So this is like an important piece of, like colonial history. Kitchener is also the guy who by this point had orchestrated the war against the Boers in Africa, where he had pioneered the military use of concentration camps. He was really the first guy since like the Spanish to to use them in a really modern way. So that's who Kitchener is, right? He's this guy who crushes the modest uprising. He's this guy who puts concentration camps in South Africa. He's a he's a pretty ****** ** dude. We'll talk about him more at some point in the future. What's relevant now is that after he takes over after like he crushes the modestos, he's in charge in North Africa for a while. He's like running things for the Brits and he helps them establish a framework for governing Egypt that because again, they don't on paper control Egypt the way they do India. Right. Like, India is like a possession of the crown, right? Right. That's not entirely what's going on. So they have to have this illusion of native rule, but they don't want, like, obviously they're not going to let ******* Egyptians run Egypt. Like, that's not going to think, of course, not Africans in charge in Africa. It is the early 1900s. That ****** not happening. Determination. Why? No, no, no. So Kitchener creates something called the condominium, and under this he basically carves out an Arabic. Empire run by the British from the hindquarters of the dying Ottoman Empire, and I'm gonna I'm gonna read a quote from the book, a piece to end all piece that describes how this functioned in practice. The cabinet, which is like the governing agency of the condominium in this instance, allowed kitcheners agency to establish the prototype of the form of rule that the field Marshall and his staff eventually wanted Britain to exercise throughout the Arabic speaking world. It was not to be direct rules such as was practiced in parts of India and Kitcheners Egypt, a hereditary Prince and native cabinet members and governors went through the motions of governing. They promulgated under their own name, decisions recommended to them by the British advisers attached to their respective offices. That was the form of protectorate government favored by the Kitchener. So they build like a fake shadow government that is supposed to, on paper, exercise all the power, but then kind of extra legally it's it's white people pulling all the strings and actually running everything, you know, always. So this is what Bob Moses looks at as as a young man, he goes to Egypt. He sees the way this is set up, and he's like, this is the ideal way to run a multiracial society. This is how you do it, right? Like, this is a good call. You know, they've built, the British have built a perfect society free of racial conflict in northern Africa. It was stunning how I think it's exactly what you said. We're like the, the, the, the, the ability to sort of like, understand and contend with racism really does stop insofar as it, like, no longer directly centers him in this situation. He's just like, oh, this is great. Like, we need to, we need to like, build on this model. What a great system. Yeah. And it's obviously the tour as this, like, upper class kid who gets like, recognized by the Khedive for his courage at the speaking engagement, the tour he's getting of Egypt. He's not like. Backpacking around and talking to the common people he's visiting like the folks who are running, he's visiting like the Arabs who are working with the British Empire and and living very well as a result. And they're telling him like, Oh no, our people like, people love living this way, like this whole everyone's very happy, like you have this perfect division and nobody wants anything to change. This is an idea. It's that kind of vision of the Middle East. This is that, that. Like when you watch **** like. The like a lot of the the media that comes out pre World War One or kind of inter World War One and World War Two where it's like white people vacationing or traveling around like the Middle East and northern Africa and it's this very like this like colonial kind of **** basically totally you get bits of that in the Kenneth Branagh Poirot series. Although I I do think he I mean it's not primarily focused on that but like there's pieces of that in it like it's it this is this is forever the period. Like, a certain kind of white person will look back on and be like, oh, it was so much nicer back then. Oh yeah, that's even today. People still romanticize that ****. And, like, I like, I've seen some pretty atrocious, you know, rightly panned sexy theme. Weddings were like, oh, the theme is essentially colonialism. Pretty gross thing to romanticize. And Bobby Moses is, like, romanticizing it while it's happening. So he goes, he comes back from Egypt, you know, he's he's studied law at Yale and Oxford. He does a postgraduate course on political science at Columbia when he gets back, and he gets his first job in government in 1913. He's 25 years old. He'll receive his doctorate in political science a year later. And this initial gig is with the New York City Municipal Research Bureau, which at the time is focused on reforming the city's civil service. If you remember your American history, right, Tammany Hall and **** is is big in this. New York is like one big cesspit of graft and corruption. You know? Everybody is bribing everybody. The police are just like hired goons for different, like elected leaders who are basically gangsters. So it's it's the same as it is today, but they we use different terms to describe it. I mean, you're not wrong and you're joking, but you're you're really not. I'm not really joking. It's, I'll say it's probably in terms of the actual political corruption. It's broadly speaking worse than it is now, although it is different. Like I guess at this point one of the big differences is the police are literally just hired goons as opposed to now the police are a power block in their own right that controls the city with like an iron grip that is different right at this period of time that does not has not like the. NYPD is not like a massive power in its own right, you know? So in a lot of ways it kind of sounds like it's worse. Yeah, it might be like, that's really gonna be a matter of opinion. But elections and stuff like, it's all basically decided by, you know, you have these bosses who, like, wrangle votes together based on, like, the different things that they're able to hand out. And, like, that's what determines who gets elected on the local level. And it's it's not really democratic in any meaningful way. And this has started to change in the early 1900s. American cities are kind of starting to embrace the idea that local government should be slightly different from a mafia. And and Robert Moses is kind of one of these big reformers. In terms of the way the Civil Service works and the specific thing he pushes is a massive reform of the hiring system. He thinks that people should be picked for jobs in civil service because of personal merit and their qualifications, not because their uncle runs a numbers racket and owns a bunch of police officers, right? That's his attitude, which is like, fine, so he pushes this, like, let's hire people who know how to do the jobs we want them to do. Thing. And this doesn't go well because Tammany Hall is still quite powerful in this. And the people who don't want. This patronage system to change and want to keep handing out jobs like candy, they fight back and they win. And Moses quits his his first gig in government. But the fact that he had suggested such a bold reimagining of civil service earns him attention. From belle. Moskowitz and Bell is a reform advocate who advised a politician named Alfred Smith. Now, in 1918, four years into Roberts government career, Smith is elected governor of New York State. So Bob starts, like, advising him and whatnot on reform and Smith campaigns and becomes governor of the entire state. Miss Moskowitz, who'd gotten him the job, like basically helps bring him further and further into the halls of Democratic Party power as like Alfred Smith starts his career actually running the state and Robert Moses, he kind of gravitates towards the park system. So he's he again. This is all very much how rich people take. And and you could say also and not democratic because nobody ever lets Bob Moses like some rich lady who's advising the guy who becomes governor, likes him, brings him in. He starts going to parties. With these people and talking to them about his ideas on government and they start giving him jobs, right. And because he's really interested, he he's fascinated by the park system, which at that point, New York doesn't have a park system. There's like this chaotic mess of wildlife preservation areas and like parks that rich people had donated and local projects that like a neighborhood put together. But there's no park system, right? And like in broad for the state or for the city of New York. And he feels like that should be changed, right? We need like to centralized it. We need to have like a more efficient. They have managing and taking care of our parks. And he he talks the governor Smith into doing this right. He. And again, none of this is different. Nobody elects this. They don't like, go for a plebiscite. He's just like, hey, I think this is a good idea and Smith is like, you're right, that is a good idea. And he creates the Long Island Commission on parks and the State Council on parks. And these positions are invented by Bob Moses with Smith Smith's backing. And he's just put in charge of them. So he doesn't necessarily have any background in this, just a just an interest. No, he has, he has, he has like his. ADHD and stuff like, he's like interested in public service, but he's not. He has no like parks now that, to be fair, nobody really does because there's not like a Parks Department that, like, this is like the era in which we start to have an idea that there should be a park system. Like nationally. There's not like, this is all coming together in the early 1900s, you know, Teddy Roosevelt's hiking with John Muir in the West and ****. So this is all pretty new. So to be fair to him, there's not really like no one has much experience. But he is like, as this guy fighting against corruption and like patronage and people just like getting handed jobs. He's just handed this job because he's like friends with the governor, you know, like that's why he and he's, he's going to be the, he's going to be the chairman of the Long Island Commission on parks and the State Council on Parks in New York State for 40 years. Yeah, yeah. For 40 years he will be in charge of both of these things. And this is like, you know, the 1920s when he gets these positions, the early 20s. So up until through the 60s he's going to be running the whole State Park system. He never gets elected, so. Smith, who's again the governor, comes to know Robert Moses as the absolute best bill drafter in politics. That's the thing that like, really gets him popular among other people in power, is that he's able to, like, write these bills for things that should be to basically basically to craft what's going to be the administrative state of of the of the state of New York up until the present day. Like he is the one building the legal basis of everything that exists in New York today, really, by putting out these bills, saying, hey, we should be in charge of this. Hey, the government should be regulating this. Hey, we should be. Building this kind of thing, hey, we should be in like over time. Building again. What is New York's? Probably like one of the most centralized state governments in the United States right now. Bob Moses builds it with Albert Smith and and together they create what is certainly at the time the most centralized government in the United States. In 1927, Smith makes Moses the Secretary of State for New York. Now, this doesn't last for long. Franklin Roosevelt gets elected governor the next year to meet, defeating Smith. And as he leaves, Smith makes one request of FDR, which is keep Bob Moses as Secretary of State. And Roosevelt actually declines. And this is due to the fact that this is not due to any good reason on Roosevelt's part. Bob Moses had refused to hire Roosevelt secretary Lois Howe to a position in the Council of Parks. So after I was like, **** that guy. So he loses his. He's not Secretary of State for very long, but Moses continues to be the chairman of basically the whole Parks Department and FDR. When he comes in sees how effective and powerful this this is centralized political machine that Bob Moses and and Smith have created is and he kind of he falls in love with it and the the government of the state of New York becomes the model of the New Deal government that that FDR is going to build when he becomes president, right. He's very consciously using the state government of New York that Moses and Smith built as like this. This is how to centralized and exercise power as an executive because it it works really well. For that kind of thing, right. There's as we're going to talk about a lot of criticisms from it, but it's very easy for an executive to exercise power and the government that Moses and Smith build and that's what I mean, you know, FDR, right, like that's what he does, you know. Yeah, it is, it is fascinating to me that this guy could sort of just luck his way into these positions by being wealthy and well connected and then have these, this decades long impact on these on a city like New York? Like it's just that is so that is so fascinating to me that like that's how power is. Yeah, I'm asked. And the influence that it has, I mean, that's still, to a significant extent, how it's amassed, right at the highest levels. You know, it is about, like, who you know and who your friends are. It's why you get these. It's why you get Joe Biden saying that. Like, hey, you know what? I I've talked a lot. I've known Mitch McConnell for years. He's an honest man. He means what it like, right. It's because they're like, they're friendly, you know, even though, I mean, I don't know that Mitch McConnell is capable of friendship. But that's like how everything works. And Moses is the thing that he's good at. We're going to talk about his many shortcomings in a bit. He's really good at centralizing power and building an apparatus through which the state connects. Exercise power over geography, right? He's very good at that. Like, this is not a thing where he's like incompetent. He knows what. That's why FDR's like, we should, we should take this model and expand it across the country. And Moses, again, he gets kind of pushed out of potentially what might have been more of a political career. But nobody ever stops him from being chairman of the Park Commission, and he grows more and more comfortable overtime exercising power in this unelected position. He realizes early on that people like him, right, because he's building parks, you know, and being seen as the champion of people who like parks, who want green spaces, who want like nice areas where they can go like walk around and like sit and stuff. He he realizes that like being the guy who's building that gives him this tremendous amount of soft power that can allow him to to exercise. Actually a lot of control over New York. Even though he's unelected, and I'm going to quote now from Robert Caro's the power broker, which is a book about Bob Moses, quote, this lesson Moses would often recite to associates. He would put it this way. As long as you're fighting for parks, you can be sure of having public opinion on your side. And as long as you have public opinion on your side, you are safe. As long as you're on the side of parks, he would say, you're on the side of the angels. You can't lose. Oh my gosh. That is also so interesting because I think it's still true today that yeah, you know, there are some, there are some things that do give you this. Development of soft power where people are always going to sort of be on your side. And I think it's interesting that like we as we know that like you know, green spaces and conservation, like all of all those things are great. But they can also historically have been used to sort of usher in like a little bit of racism or like a little bit of you know, they're used to wall people off as we talk and they're used to. There was just an article that like people I think it might have been I don't think it was the times, but it was it was about in in here in California or not here in California but. And in California and the Bay Area, this woman who, like, described yourself as a NIMBY and who'd been a community activist for 40 years to, like, stop new housing from being built. And she's like, look, I just think people need to think before they build new housing. You know, ecology is important. We have to, like, care about the environment. I don't want this hill near my house to, like, be covered in, like, developments because that. And it's like, yeah, nobody wants green spaces to be replaced with, like, condos, but also because of the way you have fought this and weaponized the value of green spaces. You've actually like done tremendous harm to the state and made it impossible for people to afford living there and like ratcheted up the and like forced people out. And actually, if you just built bigger, denser urban areas with more housing, less in total of the state maybe would be being used and you you would have a much more efficient use of the land that exists. And overall it could even be significantly friendlier on the environment, but because you fought to keep to keep like these sprawling suburban developments. Be the only way people can live. Nobody can afford to live there, and these sprawling suburban developments keep pushing further and further and further out every year anyway. So yeah, it's it's that, like, that's that's how that's Bob Moses is like the start of that. He's the first guy who's gonna figure this out. And yeah, he's going to use it for racism. So one of his tactics in order to like, again, this is part of how he exercised his power. He can't, he can't like force people to fund him, but he can ask for funding for a public works project like a park, and he can ask for much less money than he actually needs to build it, right? That's one of the things he always does because it's easy to get people to agree to pay, to suffer. Like a park or something for barely any money. And once the government has agreed to start funding the construction of this park, this playground, the swimming pool, they kind of have to continue funding it even if it turns out he's like, oh, by the way, it's going to cost three times as much. Like, I need a lot more money now, but we've already started. What, do you not want us to finish this thing? Well, that's a good tactic. I'm going to quote again from Kairos, the power broker. Once they had authorized that small initial expenditure and you would spend it, they would not be able to avoid giving you the rest when you asked for it. How could they? If they refused to give you the rest of the money, what they had given you would be wasted. And that would make them look bad in the eyes of the public. And if they said you had misled them, well, they were not supposed to be misled. If they had been mistitled, that would mean they hadn't investigated the projects thoroughly and had therefore been derelict in their own duty. The possibilities for a polite but effective form of political blackmail were endless. Once the legislature gave you money to start a project, it would be virtually forced to give you the money to finish it. The stakes you drove should be thin, pointed, wedge shaped. In fact, on the end. Once you got to the end of the wedge for a project into the public treasury, it would be easy to hammer in the rest. It's like a polite shakedown. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's it. This is like, this is like an upper class white people shakedown, right? Like, OK, so you like this, you like this little Parkway, but unfortunately, it's going to take another, like, $6 million to finish it. But you're good for that, right? Like, you don't want to just leave this unfinished, right? That's kind of an eyesore in the middle of this neighborhood, you know? That's how he's able to like, again, he's able to exercise power over state spending. As an unelected leader, by doing **** like this, right, even though he doesn't actually have the power to like, you know, Commission taxes or take money out of like the government treasury, he's able to make the situation while by the people who are elected will look bad and maybe not get reelected if they don't agree with him. Because he's smart. Yeah, and this is more or less the way that Robert Moses, unelected chairman of a parks Board, is able to exercise power over generations of elected leaders. Now, before we discuss what he did with that power, we should probably talk about the New York subway system in this. And I'm going to quote from a write up in curbed on March 24th, 1900, New York Mayor Robert A. Van which broke ground on the city's first subway line, which today corresponds to the 4-5 and six lines it traveled from City Hall in lower Manhattan to W 145th St in Harlem and construction. Four years, six months, and 23 days, a timeline that is inconceivable today. The newest subway extension, the 2nd Ave Line, opened nearly a decade after its most recent official groundbreaking, though construction on subsequent rail lines would rarely move that quickly if the city had a very specific attitude towards rail development in the four decades following that groundbreaking to never stop building. As Joe Raskin, author of the Routes not taken, puts it, the idea was to allow the subway system to expand and let the city go around it, he says. And so subway. Mind stretched quickly, by today's standards anyway, into undeveloped areas of Manhattan and the outer boroughs, with the assumption that housing and commercial development would follow despite setbacks, financial shortfalls, the clashing agendas of mayors and borough presidents, and battles with local community groups. It's how New York City got the expansive, complex rail infrastructure that's now seen on modern subway maps. This period of major growth lasted until the late 1940s, when annual ridership steadily increased year over year, and hit its peak in 1948 with just over 2 billion passengers. So. That's all good, right? Yeah. I mean it's so I've lived in many big cities and I will say I will sing the praises of New York subway system all day long. When I lived in New York, I lived on the L The Montrose stop it, it kept I feel like no other city I've ever lived and can compete. So they definitely did something right there in my book. They did a lot right? It's it's ****** ** in a lot of ways now is they kind of pointed out you to add like a mile is going to cost billions of dollars and take 10 years, right, where they built most of it and like this very rapid. Right? And, like, we're gonna talk about why it's so hard to expand the subway and why it's so hard to maintain it. Right. Because this is another complaint people have today. Is that, like, yeah, we built this great subway system, and we're not properly maintaining it, right? So that's definitely a thing. That is the story. What I just read is the story of, like, how New York subway got to be such an impressive piece of public works. And now we're gonna talk about how it got ****** over. But first, you know who else got ****** over? Bridget, tell me the products and services that support this podcast. Sophie seems fine with us. OK, we're going. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. Ohh boy. How you doing, Bridget? I'm doing well. You're doing well. I'm doing well. Let's talk about the subway. So the period in which the subway is growing at its fastest rate is also the period. This is like the 30s and in the early to mid 40s in which Bob Moses is centralizing power around him within the increasingly influential Parks Department. And the chief triumphs that he carries out in this. Are well known to anyone who lives in or is even. Visited New York City today. Uh, particularly the well loved Jones Beach State Park. He's the guy who builds that ****. But here's the thing, they spent many a fun evening there. It's a lovely park. Here's the thing, Bob Moses hated the subway system and he hates public transit and generally doesn't like buses either. He never learned to drive himself, but since he's again, he's rich. He always has like a driver, and that's how he prefers to get around. And he doesn't really think people should have public transportation, doesn't think it's a great idea. So when he starts work on Jones. Beach in the late 1920s. It opens in 1929. Subway and this is that. Again in which subway and public transit access is massively expanding in New York. But inside Jones's Moses's plans for Jones Park is contained a major strike against the idea that poor citizens should have access to the same parts of the state as wealthy ones. And I'm going to quote now from a write up in the Yale Law Journal. Moses set forth specifications for bridge overpasses on Long Island, which were designed to hang low so that the 12 foot tall buses in use. At the time, could not fit under them. One consequence was to limit the access of racial minorities and low income groups who often use public transit to Jones Beach. Moses is widely acclaimed public park. Moses made doubly sure of his result by vetoing a proposed extension of the Long Island Railroad to Jones Beach. Moses biographer suggest that his decision to favor upper and middle class white people who owned cars at the expense of the poor and African Americans was due to his social class bias and racial prejudice. So he built this park and then makes it very difficult for black people to get there. Well, it's exactly like what you were saying how like land use and public parks sound really great and everybody can get behind them, but they are also so effectively weaponized to, you know, further racism and classism and all those other isms that we all hate. Like it's such a, it's such a effective way of, you know, consolidating power and keeping people out. And it's it's also you can see how smart what he's doing is because he's like. I'm not banning people from the park, right. This is not a segregated, this is New York. You know, you're not gonna it's not segregated here. Like, this is not a park in which black people are not allowed, nor is it a park that poor people are not allowed. But it is a park that I'm going to veto train access to, and I'm going to make it physically impossible for buses to reach it. And thus, as a result, it becomes a park that only middle class and upper class people can get to because they have the cars, you know? And that's smart. That way you get to be like, well, here in New York, we're not like, we're not like they are and and and and in Atlanta or Dallas or anything, like segregated racist Southern States and people in the North, people in New York love to say that **** like, ohh, like, yeah, the South, they're so racist. They're not here in New York. No. And every now and then you're gonna get, like, you know, some a black family who who does well and has a car and it's like, look, they could go to Jones Beach. Of course they could go to Jones Beach. You know, it's like, so there's no problem here. Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. So instead of garnering support to pass a law banning poor people or people of color from the places where he did not want them, Moses used his power as an architect to make it difficult for individuals to reach the places that he desired to exclude them from. In his creation of Jones Beach Park Park, Robert Moses becomes the founder of a discipline that is today called Exclusionary Architecture. The basic idea is this if the government cannot legally stop people from being somewhere, city planners can accomplish that same goal by designing communities in such a way. That it inherently excludes undesirable people. So in Portland right now, there's a couple of parks that, like, homeless people have been camping in. And after the cops beat them up and cleared them out, rich people in the neighborhood have illegally been putting out like planters and stuff and filling them with like gravel and dirt in areas where, like, otherwise it would be possible to lay down to kind of like, no, we're just trying to beautify our neighborhood by putting in like, plants and stuff. And it's like, no, no, no, you guys are illegally adding a bunch of infrastructure to the park. In order to make it more difficult, it's like putting in a bench and then like illegally at or like adding in like those things in the middle of it to stop people from sleeping on it or something totally hearing DC. They have this thing they do where they install sprinklers, but there's not really green space. It'll be like on concrete plazas where unhoused people just happened together and it's like, no, no, we're just watering the concrete sidewalk constantly. Nothing. Nothing to see here. It's just a normal sprinkler, not on grass. And it's obviously. Exclusionary architecture? Who knows? Like, it's impossible to say. Like, we're the first people whoever did it. I'm sure you could find examples of this in many societies throughout history, but Robert Moses is the one who kind of, like, turns it into an art form. You know, because he's good at this ****. This is not this is not putting out a planter. This isn't crude. This is, like, artful designing of a city in such a way that you both expand its green spaces and, like, beautify it while also locking certain people into areas where you want to keep the poor, you know? He's very good at this thing that he's going to do. Now, I should note here that Moses's biographer, Robert Caro, is the first person who starts making these claims about Moses. He writes this massive books, like 1400 pages called the Power Broker, which is like, after Moses's retirement kind of blows a hole in the guy's legacy because he had been seen as like, the man who built New York. And then Caro writes this book, he wins a Pulitzer for it. It's a pretty groundbreaking piece of reporting, and if you have the time to go through 1300 pages about, like, this guy's life. It's. It's pretty interesting read. Now, in recent years, some individuals have sought to rehabilitate Robert Moses and and critique. And because Carol again wins a Pulitzer, there's very little that they can kind of criticize. So they'll kind of poke around the edges of his research to claim that, like, he's exaggerating the degree to which this guy was like, to which this guy they're not. You can't argue that he wasn't racist, but you can, like, be like, well, actually, the consequences of his racism weren't as bad as Cairo claims. And one claim that these folks will make trying to defend Robert Moses today is that Moses is bridges. We're not too low for buses to pass underneath, and it is true that a number of the bridges on the route to Jones Beach Park are tall enough for 12 foot tall buses to pass underneath. But Thomas J Campanella, a Cornell University historian of City Planning, wrote an article for Bloomberg in 2017 where he tests all these theories once and for all. He studied 20 bridges, viaducts and overpasses on other parkways built elsewhere in New York State at the time, and compared them to the 20 original bridges and overpasses that Moses built for the southern state. Parkway, which is kind of on the way to the Jones Beach Park, and he finds that the clearances on all of the bridges Moses had built in the Southern State Parkway are way lower. Quote. The parkways I looked at were built in roughly the same era as the southern state, especially sawmill and Hutch. In fact, the Westchester parkways set most of the standards for Parkway design for years in the United States. The lower overpasses on the Southern State Parkway are a substantial deviation from precedent. So he's like, if you actually look at these like, the bridges he builds in this specific area are notably lower. Now the Washington Post quotes a guy named Bernward Georges, a German sociology professor, arguing back against this. And and Georgia's initially had claimed like, this. This Washington Post article is funny because it's talking about the guys who are defending Moses and then like the people who have repeatedly proved that no, no, no, he did do this in in an exclusionary way. And like, first, the post quotes him as saying that, like, Moses didn't build any bridges lower than his colleagues did at the time. Like, that's a lie. He built the same sized bridges as everyone. They were just shorter back then. And then when the Washington Post brings up campanella's research and was like, no, like, this guy studied them and his bridges are way shorter. When they tell George is that he responds, quote, OK, true, the bridges were low, but each had to be built low differently. Moses took great care that each and every bridge was individually fitted into its natural context. Standardized unicity, as it were, was part of an artfully laid out nature. One can show more generally that when it came to Parkway building bridge, building culture was connected to a specific politics of nature. So first he's like his bridges weren't any lower than anyone else's. That's a myth. And then when people are like, well, they were though he's like, well, he had to because it was pretty right. Like he had to because it looked good. And I think, I mean like, you're talking about how, I mean the word artful is the only word I could really use to describe it. But you know, I think it was, I can't remember who it was, but some ****** right wing politician was like, oh, they're saying that the the highways are racist and the plausible deniability here of what he's doing of like, you know. Like you have to come out and outright say I am trying to keep poor people and black people and brown people out but it because of the way that it's it's done even now people deny that the reality of what's going on and it's so easy to deny. I think it really it really is an art form. Yeah it's he's very good at it and again like when you actually challenge people and like do the reason like again you can you can show yes he obvious like these these were built with racism in mind and they just keep moving the goal posts like they do. Reverend, like, the argument of these, like bigots always comes down. And again, not all of them are racially bigoted. Some of them just hate the poor. But the argument always comes down to like, well, it's prettier this way, right? It's prettier if we keep certain people out and don't we deserve we? We've spent so much money on our homes, we we deserve to have our home values increased. We deserve to live this way. It we deserve to have it be prettier. And maybe that means other people can't afford houses. Maybe it means the homeless crisis expands. Maybe it means that, like, folks are, like, forced into certain neighborhoods. Where they lack access to grocery stores and other kind of like necessities. But don't we deserve to have pretty things? You know? And it's not pretty. If they're here, it's not pretty. If they have housing they can afford, it's not, you know, like, that's the thing. Anyway, Bridget, you got any plegables to plug? That's part one. I guess I should plug my podcast. There are no girls on the Internet. You can check it out on iHeartRadio. Yeah. You can follow me on social media at Bridget Marie in DC or at Bridget Marie on Twitter. Well, you can follow her and you can check out her podcasts, and eventually you're going to be able to hear Bridget in a new podcast. But where? Where? We are bound by sacred oaths to keep that silent. Until now. The CIA. Has a gun to my head. I'm not allowed to say anything else but the CIA being Sophie. The the face that Sophie just made. I knew it was coming. That's why I was like, alright, somehow this is my fault. Got it. Next. Like all powerful men behind me as a woman that I'm blaming for things for no reason. How are we doing, Sophie? I'm I'm gonna need like three weeks of therapy to process. Thought that was a lot. Well, thank you for coming on, Bridget. I'm excited to tell you more about Bobby Moe's S in Part 2, but thank you all for listening. I have a novel after the revolution. You can find it on a K press. If you go to their website, you can find it on Amazon. You just just Google after the revolution novel and you'll be able to buy it some ******* wear anyway. Go to hell. **** sorry. Behind the ******** is a production of cool zone media from more from cool zone media. Visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. And Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio this is la Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy, the story about the man who simply become known as. La monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Roy Wood, junior, host of The Daily Show podcast beyond the scenes and we are back for season 2. Beyond the scenes is the podcast where we take the topics and segments that were on The Daily Show and give them a little more love. 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