🆕 Never Post! Posting from Inside

Listeners! Hello. And guess what? A new podcast for you this day! In this episode of Never Post, Dexter Thomas of the tech podcast kill switch interviews Jeremy Busby about his work as a journalist from solitary confinement, within a maximum security facility.

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Intro Links

• Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings
• Pew, Striking findings from 2025
• Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy
• The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Reach Landmark Agreement to Bring Beloved Characters from Across Disney’s Brands to Sora
• Michael Weinberg on Bluesky
• Michael Weinberg website

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social media reveals life behind bars. prisons want to block it

• kill switch podcast
• kill switch episode about prison tablets
• Dexter Thomas
• Freedom of the Press Foundation

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Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

this is too much to carry, he thought.
i have ascertained how far our minds
made up. drift like a crow now, or a gorge
or a brain. so like slow
water. depending on rain, depending
on ice, declines the slope, distributing
what verse gets, what talk, whose motion
of whose hand, what pressure, what tensile,
what upholds. the center stuck out
like a sick thumb.

on what the hard map depends, the going
price, eventualities. the entry said,
be careful. scattered walls of the wrecked
city would soon come into view. to him returned,
a car rests on wet sand. read it inside many times
before it actually came to pass. in the very middle
of resting, of approaching. just being there
certainly one of those things that would come
to pass. this ham bends to greet you.

Excerpt of A Map Folded by Bill Tuttle

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. This intro was written on Monday, 12/15/2025 at 09:06PM eastern, and we have a remarkable show for you this week. Recently, Neverpost had the opportunity to introduce the folks at the tech podcast kill switch hosted by journalist Dexter Thomas to Jeremy Busby, a writer, journalist, and activist who has served over twenty five years of a seventy five year sentence at a maximum security facility in Beaumont, Texas. In this episode, we've included the entirety of Dexter's conversation with Jeremy about the work Jeremy's done advocating for both prisoners and prison guards using his contraband mobile phone largely from solitary confinement.

It is an incredible conversation that we're really happy to have had a small part in co producing. Right now, we're gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. Sweet dreams are made of this.

Who am I to disagree? I travel the world in the seven seas. Everybody's looking for four stories this week. Zillow has removed climate risk scores from more than a million listings according to the New York Times. The online real estate aggregator previously displayed information about property's susceptibility to fire, flood, heat, wind, and air quality disaster, but no longer.

After complaints from the California regional multiple listing service from which Zillow aggregates data properties for sale. Agents had also noted that the ratings were hurting sales as perhaps they should. But what do I know? Zillow will continue to link to sources of the data, namely First Street, a climate and financial risk modeling start up. And insurers will likely continue to use their data when considering coverage, but scores will no longer be displayed directly on listings.

Young men hate gambling. This according to Pew Research's surprising findings for 2025. Quote, forty three percent of US adults say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society. Continuing, one of the biggest shifts in attitudes has occurred among men 30. In this group, forty seven percent say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society, an increase from 22% in 2022.

Americans aren't buying smartphones as often as they used to. In 2016, Americans would get a new phone every two years. These days, about every two and a half. The Federal Reserve warns that an extended timeline for upgraded technology could mean productivity losses. And when it comes to institutional upgrades at schools or businesses, shifted investment patterns that could harm the economy as if anyone looking contentedly at their iPhone 14 gives a shit.

Oh, no.

Disney, in our last story today, has struck a surprising deal with OpenAI to bring its IP into Sora, their video generation model. According to a press release quote, Sora will be able to generate short user prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. And a selection of these fan inspired Sora short form videos will be available to stream on Disney plus, end quote. Disney CEO Bob Iger said, bringing together Disney's iconic stories and characters with OpenAI's groundbreaking technology puts imagination and creativity directly into the hands of Disney fans in ways we've never seen before, giving them richer and more personal ways to connect with the Disney characters and stories they love. A surprising thing to hear from a company whose copyright stance up until this point could best be summed up as hands off the mouse punks.

Oh, no.

For more on this surprising partnership, Hans talked with Michael Weinberg, the executive director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law.

Thanks, Mike. Michael, so glad to have caught you. Where where am I catching you?

Where are

you right now?

I am currently in Berlin, Germany.

On the road, but, like, this is critical. Let's figure this out together.

Let's figure it out.

Okay. This surprising ass three year deal in which, as far as I can tell, OpenAI gets 200 Disney characters to put into their AI video engine, and Disney gets the opportunity to pay OpenAI $1,000,000,000 as an investment, plus a promise from OpenAI that the character voices won't be used. And don't worry, kids are forbidden by OpenAI from using Sora, so no kids allowed in this Disney product. So my first question is, are we in the literal upside down? Like, understanding of copyright law is that, like, 80% of modern copyright law is in service of keeping Disney characters out of the grimy hands of a greedy public.

The reason there is so little in the public domain is them wanting to control Mickey. So, like, is this a reversal?

It certainly is a change. They are in the business of no when it comes to using their intellectual property, their characters, their shows, their anything. And so, yes, this was a this was a super surprise to see Disney, which basically defines pulling things back to be kind of opening things up potentially a little bit unclear. Maybe they're just not doing anything. We don't know.

We know very little. We have this one press release and not a lot other information. So since we don't have a lot of answers right now, let's outline some of the questions that you, as a copyright expert, have when you read this announcement and you hear the details of it.

I have so many I have so many questions, none of which are gonna be answered in the short term. Some of which will be answered when they roll out the terms and service, and some of them will be answered with them in the month afterwards when people do all their crazy stuff. But Yeah. Lots of questions. But the first one is is kind of a meta question.

Right? Like, whatever Disney is doing here, they are not saying do whatever you want with whatever characters we're we're putting in here. What safeguards have they written in? Where are their bright lines? And where are their bright lines in the agreement with OpenAI?

Right? There's some sort of contract. What are their bright lines gonna be in the user agreement? And then what are the technical systems they're putting in place to enforce those bright lines? We've all seen the Internet take take these kinds of rules and be like, thank you for these rules.

I'm gonna go in every possible direction that no one who was cutting the deal anticipated. Disney knows that. Right? That's not a mystery. That's not a a thing that people don't understand.

And so what are their contingency plans? What are they doing? Even if they're gonna be using this as a learning experience, to get better at understanding what's coming out of these AI models, what are they gonna do when the first weird things start coming out? What are they gonna because you're gonna get a lot of traffic if you are the first person who has some, un Disney approved activities happening with Disney characters

That's right. Coming out There's

a huge incentive for people to be working on it.

So then what happens? Right? Are there things in place in this agreement?

Yeah. If there are, who is in charge of of doing something about it? I mean, what can you do? Once the video exists, then it exists. And so if it's pulled out and it's floating around the Internet, well, okay, OpenAI can shut down that person's account.

If they wanted to go kind of nuts, they could potentially sue the user for violating the terms and conditions. That seems like a bad idea. We have had we learned about that. Yeah. Disney could do the same thing.

I assume Disney is not excited about that prospect. And so do they just eat the rep what they see as reputational damage when the first weird things come out and just say this is the cost of doing business? Yeah. And if that's the case, why this time? Right?

There have been rounds and rounds of technologies where there's been sort of, you know, user generated content. Right? People fan fiction, all these things Right. Where there's been an Internet community built up around properties that they love, characters they love, stories they love, and Disney's reaction historically has been no. What is it about generative AI that caused someone at Disney to say, well, maybe this time, why not?

What could possibly go wrong?

What happens when we start to see the first user generated things to come out? What happens with outputs? Like, when people start making Disney things, who owns those things?

Yeah. So here's one of the the kind of the crazy things about these generative AI models that that people I think we're just beginning to kind of wrap our minds around. When you use a model to create something, to to generate an output, in The US, no one owns the copyright in that output. So you as the prompter have no copyright interest in the output. Now, doesn't mean it's totally free of copyright.

Right? If you, you know, whatever. If you if you have Darth Vader in your output, you don't own any copyright on whatever you've created.

Okay.

But Disney still owns the copyright of Darth Vader. It doesn't erase existing copyright, but there's no new copyright. And so this, like, new fan video exists in the public domain. And so there's this very weird right situation where if you if you wrote fanfic or you made a a video and uploaded it to YouTube, right, you would own the copyright in the video. You would own the copyright in the, you know, the the fanfic writing that you did, and Disney would own the copyright in the characters.

And so there'd be some kind of tension between, you know, the two of you. In this case, at least legally, there's no real tension. You own nothing. Disney owns something. Now there are non legal reasons that Disney might want might wanna, you know, work something out with you before they feature it on Disney plus or whatever.

But the legal posture is very weird and very different.

Do you think this is

gonna affect the terms of service of using Sora and OpenAI?

I mean, it may. I you know, on some level, I assume that I I would expect that there's gonna be some kind of path that if you use SOAR and OpenAI and use Disney characters, you are explicitly giving Disney rights to do some number of things. Even if you don't have any rights to give them, Disney's lawyers are conservative. They're gonna make sure there's an additional layer of the agreement there. And so this is another thing that we don't know.

Mhmm.

Right? We don't know what you are giving to Disney in return for being able to incorporate their characters into whatever you generate.

What is gonna be your first prompt that you're gonna put into Sora?

I don't mean, you know, like, I just wanna you really gotta you, like, look down the list of the characters and find the deepest cut and then the weirdest thing and really kind of go nuts. I mean, the beauty of this, the beauty of the Internet, when we're still thinking about the positive parts of the Internet, is there's gonna be a lot of people who stress test us better than I would. So I can just kinda sit back and watch what happens for a while. I don't have to drive the train. I can just watch it go by.

It's gonna be fascinating to see what happens when Disney shuts down with the full force that Disney comes at something, something the Internet has fallen in love with.

Totally. I mean, this is this is going to be I mean, we see this we see this regularly with things on YouTube. Right? Where there's a community that is built up, people love it. You know, Disney has has no real experience with the fan community in this way.

And if Disney starts changing its position, it's gonna take time for everyone to renormalize around it. And a thing that you see sometimes in these fan communities is a sense of exploitation. Right?

Mhmm.

We are generating all these things. We're generating the energy. We're generating the new ideas. We have this new stuff. Disney, you swoop in and you take what you want, and then you say no to other things.

Yeah. And that could be a moment for people to really kind of reevaluate how they think about the fairness of that relationship and how Disney is as a steward of what is a shared cultural property in a lot of ways.

Well, Michael Weinberg, in terms of fandoms, I'm a fan of yours. And I really appreciate you popping in from Berlin emergency style to help us understand what to look for as this thing develops. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Alright, Mike.

Back to you.

Alright. That's the news we have for you this week. In this episode, Dexter Thomas from Killswitch talks with Jeremy Busby about his tenuous connection to the outside world via the internet from prison. Dexter, thank you so much for joining us. We're huge fans of yours and of the show, so it's great to have you on Neverpost.

Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for having me on here. This is amazing.

We're gonna hear a Killswitch episode, essentially, as a Neverpost episode. Just so folks sort of like know what they're about to hear and have some context, I just wanna ask you a few, like, really broad questions both about yourself and about the story that we're about to hear. Sure. Because you mentioned in what we're about to hear that you're a journalist, you've reported on prisons in the past, you've reported on the Internet in the past. So I'm just curious like, what has that work been for you and how did it lead you eventually to Killswitch?

Yeah. Killswitch, the podcast we work on now, is basically a podcast about living in the future and how the future has arrived. Nobody wants it. It sucks. But how did we get here, and is there anything we can do about it?

So the back end of that is that I used to work at Vice, and a lot of my reporting was broadly speaking, it was like culture reporting. So, you know, I'd be in China hanging out with rappers. I'd be in South Africa talking to people about elections. I'd be in Ohio talking about opioid epidemics. So for me, all of that is culture.

And increasingly, you know, a lot so much culture is online where even saying that is kind of redundant, like saying online culture, like, of course, everybody's online. Who doesn't have a phone? For me, I've always been really interested in technology. You know, I'm one of those people who, like, I daily drive Linux. If you don't know what that means, good.

Your life is you're living a healthy, normal adjusted life. I don't recommend that as a life choice for anybody.

Not a rabbit hole to fall into. Just stay away from the edge of that one. Yeah.

Yeah. It's fine. You you don't you don't need to do that to yourself. But I'm just really interested in how people use technology to do unexpected things. And Killswitch, we were really clear that, alright, this isn't just gonna be like iPhone reviews.

This is gonna be what does technology mean in every part of your life for everybody. And I mean, and this is actually the second episode we've done about what we're gonna talk about about prisons, and people who were incarcerated also use technology whether they're supposed to or not.

Yeah. What you mentioned, you know, people doing strange things with technology, but you also do a lot of stories about technology appearing or unexpected pieces of technology appearing in maybe what for a lot of people are unexpected places.

Yeah.

And that's actually the next thing I wanted to ask was, you mentioned in the story previous reporting that you did about tablets in prison. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that was.

Yeah. So that was actually a colleague of mine, Gabby Kaplan, who we interviewed about this, and basically, I talked to her about the fact that there have been tablets. I mean, just think of very, very cheap, not very well equipped iPads that are available for purchase

Of course.

In some prisons. Right? In some prisons and in some jails, and they cost a bunch of money, but you could pay money to, for example, send a message to the outside world and receive a message, you know, with their mom on the outside Yeah. Or their kids on the outside. And then all of a sudden that's shut down with no real explanation.

And if you look at it, this is kind of like a consumer technology story, which is like, yo, you bought this product and then the company disabled the main feature. But then also, what does it mean when you've got a population of people who because the jails, you know, and the prisons keep going on lockdown, which means that you're not able to leave your cell. These people have to come home at some point. Yeah. They do ten years in a completely different society, a very violent and dangerous society, and they come back outside and they haven't spoken to anybody, do you think they're going to be able to reintegrate into society very well?

It's gonna be very difficult for them. So this is a safety issue even for the people on the outside, really.

Yeah. It's a consumer technology issue that has a lot of ripple effects.

Yes. Yes.

So we heard this story and we had just to provide some background for the audience, Neverpost has an open line of communication. We go back and forth with the Freedom of the Press Foundation. And they had actually mentioned to us, they were like, hey, we know this guy, Jeremy Busby. Would you be interested in talking to him? He's a journalist that is incarcerated on a seventy five year sentence.

And we were like, we would love to hear what conversation Jeremy would have with Dexter, which is sort of how how we ended up doing like 2% of co production for this. Much more than that. I'm so excited for everybody to hear it. So this is what everybody is about to hear. It's this conversation between you and Jeremy who has already served is it twenty five years?

I think in about there. Yeah.

Yeah. And while being incarcerated during this time, he's become a journalist, which he's really only been able to do because of what is effectively an illicit Internet connection that he has in prison. And I was wondering if you could just like paint a little bit of a picture for us about what what internet access tends to look like in prison, and just maybe the smallest little teaser about how it's different for Jeremy or or how he fits into that.

Yeah. Well, the funny thing is Internet access in prison has changed a lot. You know, one of the things that we don't talk about in this particular episode is what people call prison talk as in like TikTok and prison talk. So, you know, you got like book talk, which is book, you know, people making TikToks about books.

The sort of subgenre marker.

Yeah. Exactly. There's this prison talk, which is all over the place, but a lot of people know it as somebody will have a phone on the inside, which again, they're not supposed to do this, but they make it inside anyway. And people are doing all the things that you would expect somebody to do on TikTok normally. There's people doing dance challenges.

There's people cooking is really common, people showing how they cook a ramen, make burritos, make anything. But then also talking about conditions on the inside. What is more unique though is what Jeremy is doing, which is actually functioning as he's he's just a journalist. Realistically speaking, he and I are colleagues. We're colleagues, and he's just doing it under much much more difficult conditions than I've ever had to deal with.

But he also has a degree of access that I could never have. Listen, I've tried. I have I've gone through all of the proper outlets. I've done the things where you ask the warden, where you write an email, where you make phone calls and you say, hey, we would like to report on this, we'd like to interview this person and it's oh, hey, this isn't a good time, hey, we're short staffed, hey, we're busy, hey, just no.

Yeah, I'm sure.

What Jeremy is able to do, and I really want people to understand this, some of the things that Jeremy has exposed and some of the things that Jeremy has genuinely changed about the inside and for people, not only himself, but other people who are in the system, including the guards, potentially improving the lives of the guards, not just people who are incarcerated. These are things that I could never do. If you're listening to this, more than likely you could never do.

And I mean, this comes through in the in the story, but like, it really seems like he's got a force of will that is unparalleled. Mhmm. He is doing things in just unthinkable conditions that like are unbelievable. It's unbelievable to hear what he pulls off.

Yeah. There are a couple moments. It gets super real super quick because just the conditions you were made aware of it a couple of times. This what it's like when you communicate with somebody who's locked up, is you're constantly being interrupted and you're constantly being reminded that, for me, this is just a this is a phone call, But for them, this is much more dire than that.

Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm excited for everybody to hear this conversation.

Same. So let's

Yeah.

Let's let's stop keeping them from it. Yeah.

The first time I've seen social media, I was at the wind unit in Huntsville, Texas. I think it's like around 2011.

Jeremy Busby is 48 years old. We talked back in October about the Internet and social media, but what's different about this interview is that Jeremy's calling me from a prison in Huntsville, Texas. Jeremy's been in prison since 1999. Back then, the internet was a different place.

I didn't know anything about Facebook or Twitter, but I knew about Myspace. Because when I was a free society, Myspace was just becoming a thing. So I knew about that.

Jeremy didn't really have any contact with social media until the early twenty tens. A few years after Facebook was already popular.

A friend of mine had a contraband cell phone. He was fresh from the free society. He had just come to prison. And so this was his whole entire livelihood, social media. It was all about social media.

Since Jeremy's been locked up, social media has gone through a few different phases. It went from this weird hobby that college kids and computer nerds were into, to this new hopeful way to spread democracy, to now a more pessimistic view of this thing that gives us short attention spans, causes addictive behavior, and makes politics more polarized. But in prison, the situation is a little different.

In 2020, when the pandemic hit, Texas prison system had no protocol on how to deal with the COVID nineteen pandemic. My cellmate had two cell phones. He was like, man, listen. You can use another phone. He's just sitting right there, man.

I pay the bill. You can use it if you wanna use it. And so, finally, man, I grabbed the phone, and the first thing I did is I went to YouTube, and I googled how do you set up a Facebook page. So I learned Facebook. I learned Instagram.

I learned Twitter. I learned how to edit videos. I learned how to make slides. I learned how to get the message out on Instagram, how to get the message out on YouTube. And that's how me and Trey end up on live.

In 2020, during the peak of the COVID nineteen pandemic, Jeremy went live on Instagram with a rapper named Trey the truth to talk about the conditions inside the Texas state prison. That put a lot more eyes on what was happening in there.

What unit is can't tell you the unit, bro, but I can tell you I'm in Texas. It's getting serious down here, man. Brother, you know, they dying from this corona, man. You said they cut the phones off. They're not dangling y'all car home?

No. They got everything racked up, man. They got I think it's, like, 35 units on lockdown. For everybody on here, what's the what's the best way for us to do? We need to write Huntsville.

We need to call Huntsville.

Social media is giving us unfiltered access into prisons, something that we'd never had before. But we may not have it for much longer.

You gotta look at prison like in the same context as you look at the slavery. Not only do these people try to control what goes out the prison, they try to control what comes into the prison.

Before we get into Jeremy's experiences with social media, we should probably do some backstory. The reason that Jeremy's in prison starts when he was 21 years old. It was 10/01/1998 at a motel in Dallas County. Here's how Jeremy explains it.

I pulled up in a motel about four or 05:00 in the morning. There was a couple of guys out in the motel selling drugs, and so they tried to sell me some drugs. And so we got into an argument in the middle of the parking lot because they was persistent. The argument turned into threats, he took his shirt off like he was gonna try to assault me or whatever the case may be. His friend tried to hold him back.

He wasn't able to. And so when he ran towards me, I pulled a gun. I shot him one time, and that was in 1998 and that resulted in me getting a seventy five year prison sentence for murder.

Jeremy is now on his twenty seventh year of a seventy five year sentence.

My mistake was I left the scene of the crime. When it happened, I panicked and I fled. And that was the biggest mistake that I could have made because when they came down to my trial, that's pretty much what the DA relied upon was the fact that, you know, if mister Busby really felt like that this theft defense, why he didn't just wait for the police to come, why did he flee and all of that, how the kid is from the hood. And, you know, we don't really deal with the police too much when something like that happen. It's just a natural reaction to flee.

But nevertheless, instead of crying out with spilled milk, I decided to come to prison and identify the areas where I went wrong that possibly led me to come into prison for the sentence and then making all of the necessary steps that I needed to make to ensure that this doesn't ever happen to me again. Right? Which includes my problem solving skills, my conflict resolution skills, my coping mechanisms, all of these things that I wasn't taught during my youth.

Pretty soon after Jeremy arrived in prison, he realized that he had something that the other incarcerated men around him didn't have.

When I first got to prison, one of the things that I noticed despite the fact that I had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, I could read and write and comprehend better than the majority of the people that was in Texas prison. And so as a result of that, I became like a person that would help people write letters to their families. I was going down to the La La Berry to help people because I'm working on my own personal case. But as I was learning, I'm helping them interpret and learn the law. And then finally, I got in contact with an attorney named Dunya Witherspoon.

Poon. We became real good friends. And she started writing me because she had heard about my case and she wanted to help me out. And so all of these letters that I was writing to her, she eventually say, Jeremy, listen. I wanna take some of these letters and start sending them to the newspaper because you're a real good writer and the stuff that you're writing me is about prisons.

And a lot of people on the outside don't understand everything that you understand and you do such a good job articulating this.

So with Danya's encouragement, Jeremy began the next phase of his life as a journalist, just one who's reporting from inside the prison. In general, even if a journalist like me tries to go and observe things, prison officials can be very restrictive of what you can do. So having a journalist on the inside like Jeremy means the people in the outside world can get a more unfiltered look at a world that was almost invisible to most of us before.

They already have this tedious tedious process of of open records act like a person like you wanted to file to get something on me. They'll put you through so much stuff to try to get it, and then you might not even get it. And then they might repack whatever you get and all of that crap. And so it's all a universal game of censorship.

Jeremy knew that he could provide information to people on the outside. He just didn't know if anyone would care what he was saying. It turned out, some people did.

Back in, 2003, I wrote an article for the San Francisco Review about the heat in Texas prison system and how we don't have any air condition here. They don't give us any type of relief as far as, like, cold water or any type of cold showers or anything like that to negate the extensive heat in the prison system. Of course, everyone knows detectives has very hot summers. And most of these structures that we have was built in the mid eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. They're all out of brick and steel, and they don't have any type of modern ventilation or anything of that nature.

And so if you don't have family members on the outside that can send you money to buy a t shirt or buy a pair of gym shorts or buy a pair of tennis shoes, then you gotta wear your state uniform the whole entire time. It makes you even hotter. There's been temperatures recorded inside of the cell block inside of these buildings sometimes that have exceeded over a 165 degrees in certain places. In order to combat the heat, this is what I used to have to do. I go in my cell, and I have to put, like, maybe a couple of gallons of water on the floor.

And I had to strip all the way down to my boxer shorts, and I had to lay in that water. And you have to repeat that process over and over and over and over again just to maintain a body temperature that prohibits you from having a heat stroke. And you have some guys that are, like, put their shirts in the water, they and wear their shirt while it's wet because we don't have a shower that you can just go walk and get into the shower. It's like one shower per day room. I think we was averaging something close to, like, ten to fifteen heat related deaths every single summer in Texas prison.

Oh my gosh.

It felt like the numbers can be a lot more because they'll come back after the autopsy or whatever and say, this guy died from complications of diabetes or he died from complications of hypertension. But the truth of the matter is there was the heat that triggered all of it and it was the heat related illness that caused death. And so I had wrote this long article to the San Francisco Bayview, and I basically said, listen. There's nothing for these people to bring down coolers and fill them up with ice every morning and allow us to be able to drink cold water throughout the day. And that could possibly save one, two, maybe ten, maybe a hundred lives.

Right? When I wrote that, some days later, they came with a whole big cart full of yellow igloo coolers that was filled up with ice, and they put one on every single set of block.

Wow. That immediate.

Yeah. That immediately. And then my editor at the time was Mary Ratcliffe at the San Francisco Bayview, and she told me that they politely sent her a letter asking her if she can retract my article because they had solved the problem.

We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about Jeremy saying that they'd asked for his article to be retracted. They declined to comment. After Jeremy wrote his article on the heat inside prisons, he's also reported on overdoses and suicide in prison, experiencing executions happening near his cell, and what happens when the prison goes on lockdown. His works appeared in places that specialize in reporting on prisons like the Marshall Project, but it's also been in publications that the general public reads, like Slate Magazine or the Columbia Journalism Review. But getting those articles out isn't always easy.

As an incarcerated journalist, I have this hill that I have to climb with these legacy media outlets. I have to cross all of my t's. I have to dot all of my i's. I damn near have to put them in contact with the warden for the warden to say, yeah. Everything that Jeremy wrote is legit.

And so a lot of times, some of the stuff that the people write being incarcerated, they write to these media outlets, that stuff never gets to the press because some editor somewhere saying, hey, man. I can't find what we can substantiate this. I don't know if this really is going on or whatever the case may be. So it ends up in somebody's shredder. Now as you know from being on the outside in journalism, when you got social media, you can skip the whole entire legacy media outlet process.

You have a a unobstructed avenue to put the information out that you wanna put out.

The ability to communicate directly with the outside world is crucial for Jeremy. But how does he do it? So there are two main ways that incarcerated people can communicate through social media. The first one is directly through a contraband cell phone. These are against the rules, but they make their way into prisons all the time.

The other way is to call or write to someone who's on the outside and have them post on your behalf. Jeremy's done both. Either way, social media gives Jeremy a way to show his perspective from prison directly without being filtered through prison officials or waiting for a local media outlet who believes his reporting or hoping that some outside reporter would take interest and cover it for him. The best example of this is when COVID hit. His cellmate had a contraband cell phone, and so Jeremy was able to directly broadcast what was actually happening and get immediate responses to help the incarcerated people around him.

I'm researching this COVID nineteen coronavirus and all of the precautions that we need in order to safeguard ourselves from contracting it. One of the main two things that they ask you to do, well, it's really three things. They ask you to social distance, to wear our n 95 mask, and to properly sanitize your hands. Right? So Texas prison system, what they did, they cut up a bunch of sheets and put little springs on the side of the sheets, and they was issuing those sheets out to us.

It's like an n 95 mask. It's a cut up sheet.

It's bed sheets. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. It's bed sheets. Secondly, they wasn't passing out any type of sanitation chemicals, like hand sanitizer or anything of that nature. And then thirdly, it was impossible for us to social distance because they got us locked in a cell with another person. So my reporting on all of that and social media got us the n 95 mask.

They got us the bleach. They started passing us real food out for our nutrition like bananas and apples and grilled milk.

Again, we asked the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about this and they declined to comment. Ask most people what they think about social media and they'll tell you that there's good parts, but also a lot of bad parts. Echo chambers, misinformation, all that. Jeremy's aware of this stuff, but he's also aware that social media is how a lot of people get their news. For him, that's an opportunity to speak, but also to learn.

One of the things that social media did for me is that when I even had an idea of an article or if I wrote the article out itself, all different type of people will start sending me additional information to either support or negate or to advance the topic matters that I found interesting. Right? And what I realized about social media is that I can reach people all around the world just opposed to, like, if I write for a local publication, I might reach people right here in Texas. If I write for a national publication, I might get 30 to 35% of the nation. But when I post something on social media, I can circulate that all over the world and even translate it into all different type of languages.

I was talking to people as far away as Switzerland about the situation in Texas prison. I know now that I don't necessarily have to put one of my articles in a publication. I can just drop it in the thread on egg, and it'd have the same value that it would have if I had dropped it in competition like the Imperial.

Once Jeremy found a way to use social media, he suddenly had access to a whole world that he didn't before. But that's starting to change. Cell phones have always been contraband, but now prisons across the country are really cracking down on social media access. We'll get into how and why after the break.

One of the first things that they told me when I became a journalist in prison, the warden called me up, and he talked to me about those two fence that surround the prison, the perimeter fence with the barbed wire. And he asked me, he said, Buster, why do you think we got those two fence out there with the barbed wire? And I said, well, that's to keep people from escaping. He said, no. That's the wrong answer.

We're not worried about anybody escaping. That's to keep the public out of here. And when you write what you write and give these people entry to come into my prison, you're bringing them over my damn fence, and I don't like that. That's what the warden told me. And so the social media ban prohibits people from bringing the general public over the fence.

In 2016, the state of Texas where Jeremy's incarcerated added a brand new rule to the state's prison handbook. The rule essentially banned incarcerated people from having any personal social media pages run-in their name, meaning that no one outside of prison is supposed to even run an account on Jeremy's behalf. Similar bans have also been put in places in other states like Alabama and Iowa. And last year, the US Federal Bureau of Prisons proposed a rule like the one in Texas, but that would apply across the entire federal prison system. If an incarcerated person was found to have a social media account, that violation would be treated as a high severity level offense.

That's the same category that's applied to things like fighting in prison.

That barrier that the prison administration had to continue the status quo no longer exist for them. And so therefore, they gotta do whatever they gotta do to put that back in place. So they got their social media bans.

Back in 2016, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice put their social media ban in place, they told Vice News that, quote, offenders have used social media accounts to sell items over the Internet based on the notoriety of their crime, harass victims or victims' families, and continue their criminal activity. The department went on to say that they would, quote, take all of the necessary steps to prevent that from happening. We contacted them to ask whether that's still the reason for the ban today. They declined to comment. But, again, there's another side of this.

If we wanna talk about criminal activity, we have to acknowledge that social media is exposing allegedly unlawful activity that the outside world should know about.

Now you can take a picture or shoot a video about what's going on here at the prison system and put that on Facebook or Instagram, and it's gonna go viral, and it's gonna cost people their jobs. So that scares the hell out of prison officials. It scares the hell out of them. Right? Because now, like, what happened with me, the No Way Out documentary when I worked with Carrie Blackinger behind the COVID You have one minute left.

Okay. Damn. When I went live with Tray the Truth, I was able to do all of that unrestricted without having to wrestle with any type of mega media outlet or anything like that. We just dropped it. And it caused a whole bunch of backlash.

Let me call you back one more time.

Okay. Phone calls in Jeremy's unit are limited to thirty minutes, so we had to reconnect a few times during the interview. That's why you might hear Jeremy rush through sentences sometimes. He's just trying to get out as much as possible before he gets cut off. But what he's getting at here is important.

When word gets out about conditions on the inside, it can make things hard for the officials who work there. Jeremy thinks that the bans are partially there to stop that from happening. But banning stuff from making rules is one thing. The next step is the current Trump administration wants to make it physically impossible to communicate directly with the outside.

Brandon Carr now from the FCC, they're going around trying to pass this new law where they can put cell phone jammers up outside of privilege.

Cell phone jammers are devices that can block cell phone signals within a certain range. These devices in general are illegal, partially because they're dangerous. I mean, think about it. If cell signals can't get through, you can't call the paramedics or they can't find you. So obviously, the general public can't have them.

But for that same reason, in general, even state and local law enforcement can't legally use them. But recently, the FCC is considering letting prisons use these jammers to block contraband cell phone use.

They want people to think that people utilizing these phones to organize criminal activity. And you might have a handful of people that might utilize the country band cell phone organized criminal activity. But from being incarcerated almost thirty years, I'm a tell you that the majority of the people that using country band cell phones are trying to connect with long lost family members, loved ones, childhood friends, and other people like myself are utilizing it to report on the conditions of the prison. And then you got third demographic of people that just wanna watch porn and movies and videos and things of that nature. Right?

There's very few people that utilize the phone to organize criminal activity, but the prison officials, they're that the person that's incarcerated is gonna take the phone and expose them, and so that's the reason why they're pushing this.

Despite all these attempts to block incarcerated people's access to social media, Jeremy's been able to report out what's going on in prison. But when he has, he says he's been retaliated against.

The nature of my career is when I write something, it don't take very long for them to come down and talk to me or try to or intimidate or, you know, and all of that. I'm public enemy number one with these people. If you say anything that people don't like, they can go look through your files and possibly subject you to some type of political prosecution or or file a lawsuit on you or smear your name or come kick in your door or or lock you up and spray you with chemical agents and all that. I've been through all of that. But you don't have as many people like myself that's really speaking out against these people because they're come after you.

Right? They're take all of your property. They're gonna transfer you to different units. They're gonna put you in solitary confinement. Last year, I've been transferred to four different units.

Each time I get to the unit, I'm spending days in the cell with no mattress, no sheets, no blankets, no basic necessities like soap, toothpaste, and deodorant. This is the stuff that you go through. And so for the majority of the people in prison here, hey, man. Just put your head down and don't say nothing. And they don't come after you.

I have never took that approach because I understand what that approach does to a person. When you put your head down for so many times after so many years, that becomes an intricate part of your character and who you are. And I don't wanna live like that. And so I resist. And I do it in the best of manners.

Right? I don't never write anything ever that I don't try to work with administration first on and say, here's the problem right here. I'm thinking about writing this, but if we can solve this problem, will I forget about writing it? It's only when they're not interested in solving a problem that I know I can write and get the problem solved. So as a result of that, Jeremy Busby is public enemy number one.

I'm the number one agitator, whatever they wanna call me, but, you know, I I don't really, you know, I don't really call it agitation. Right? I call it's like good trouble, like John Lewis called it good trouble. Right? This is good trouble.

Earlier this year, when the Columbia Journalism Review asked Texas prison officials about Jeremy's claims that he's being retaliated against, they denied it. When we asked them, they declined a comment. Right now, as we record this episode, Jeremy's in solitary confinement for what he says is a response to his reporting. More on that after the break. So hold on.

Jimmy, you're in solitary right now?

Yeah. I'm in solitary confinement right now. I'm talking to you from a solitary confinement cell. My cell is about the size of your king-size mattress. That's the whole size of my cell.

I got a toilet and a sink a steel combo right here. I got a desk, and I got a metal bunk that I lay on. And I'm confined to this cell twenty four hours a day. There are no windows. I can't tell you if it's nighttime or daytime.

The only thing that I can see is directly in front of myself when somebody walked past. It's got a solid steel door with two plexiglass windows on the front of it and a solid steel door that goes all the way down to the bottom, so I can't even slide anything out of the bottom. I don't even have any communication with anybody except for the guard. So it's mentally crippling, and everybody understands that it's mentally crippling because it cuts you all the way off from human to human contact.

If you remember our episode on tablets in prison, Jeremy says that they were recently given one of those state issued tablet devices that lets them watch religious and educational programming. And from 2PM to 8PM daily, he can pay to make phone calls if it's to a number that has registered to receive a call from the prison. How long you been in there?

I've been in Sanitary confinement since June 2024.

Over a year?

Over a year. No disciplinary cases. Nothing. The guards always ask me all the time, hey, man. Why they got you in here buzzed me?

And I tell them just Google me. And then they come back and say, okay. I know why they got you in here. Right? Then I even had a have someone come to me say, hey, man.

Won't you just quit being a journalist so they can let you out of here? And I'm like, you know, there's certain trade offs that I'm just not willing to make. Right? And these people, they they continue to try to harass me and police and, you know, do a lot of things that they do because of of my journalism then, hey. That's just to hear that I'm a down.

Right? That's to hear that I'm down. Because I didn't have very much Dexter when I came to prison. You know, I grew up. My mom I lost my mom when I was four.

My dad has always been a deadbeat. I dropped out of school when I was eight, and I was running the streets and all of that. And so all of the meaningful things that I was able to obtain for myself during my incarceration, I'll be damned if I'm a give that back to anybody.

You were talking about the Was somebody knocking back there?

Hey. No. I ain't got it.

So in the middle of our interview, we were interrupted by a guard knocking on Jeremy Seldor.

Hey. Hey. Look out. Hold on. Shut up, screaming for a minute.

Hey, man. I wish you would quit doing that. I'm on the telephone. I asked you I asked you to quit doing that, but I'm on the telephone. You what?

I asked you to quit beating on the door because I'm on the telephone. You're in the rest of my telephone call. I asked you that privilege. That's the fifth time you did that today, and I asked you to quit doing that. I I know you didn't get that the time.

Okay. I'm stupid. I'm sorry about that. Now you got you got some officers that he's sitting here, he's shit as long as the phone, so he just gonna come and just beat on the door, beat on the door, beat on the door. But anyway, I'm sorry about that.

It's all good. It's all good, man. Who was that? What happened just now?

That's a guard. No. He's a guard. Right? What they do is they come by every five, ten, fifteen minutes and just beat on the door with the bar thing that they got.

He done that times today. He's trying to antagonize me. He's trying to get the reaction that he just got to know that he's getting up under my skin. They do stuff like that. And so but I talked to him politely, you know, first couple of times.

I say, hey, sir. If you don't mind, and you come to the door, you can see me in the door, my light is on. I'm moving around in my cell. Why do you feel like you have to beat on the door for five minutes? He has a language barrier.

His English is not very good. And so he came back and did it again. And I said, hey, man. Do you understand you disturb people's peace when you're doing all of this? But, anyway, so here it is.

He came to work at 07:00 this morning. It's 03:00, and this is the fifth time that he's been to my cell and done this crap.

Oh my gosh.

I'm sorry about that Dexter, Rick.

No. You don't got to apologize to me.

Alright.

Hearing what Jeremy has to go through just to survive is a lot. I can't imagine what it's like to be doing journalistic reporting. And then on top of that

We did a no kings protest real quick. So I don't have to deny the No Kings protest. Right?

You know Jeremy, you organized a No Kings protest in there?

Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Jeremy. Hey, man. This this stuff is serious, bro.

I'm a tell you how I organize it. Okay? Because I like the dudes that's down the road from me, he sent me a letter and telling me that his niece came home and her mom and her dad had been picked up by ice. No. So his niece came home from school and her parents was gone.

Then I got this other guy. He's telling me about how his mom been working for the federal government in Houston at NASA for all of these years and the government shutdown then furloughed her. Right? So she's not able to send any money for his commissary and put money on his phone. So when I got thinking about all of this, I'm telling all of these dudes over here where I'm at, like, hey, man.

This thing that Trump got going on is affecting all of us. And we need to protest and stand in solidarity with the people on our side. Okay, Jeremy, what you got in mind? Okay. Listen.

For this Saturday, we're gonna not accept our food. If anybody need food, let me know. I'll send you some food to eat, And we're put signs on our door that say no food, no talk, no keys.

Wow.

We did that.

Oh my gosh.

So it was peaceful all the way up to about 08:00 at night. They wanted the guys that we recruited. He's not all the way there. And so he started talking like, you know, man, damn. Just deny my food.

I'm ready to split it off. So he said there's, like, three alarm fire in his cell. Right? And this other guy manipulated the lock on his cell, and he bust out the cell and just started ripping the TVs off the wall. But what I'm showing you is this.

Okay. These guys the guy that ripped the TV off the wall, that don't hurt the prison officials. Those TVs are for us. And so now all the TVs that you'd have ripped off, people can't watch the news or whatever it is that they wanna watch. You're hurting the whole community.

It it it they just tells you the mental deficiency that most majority of the people could have and it's not mild. According

to Jeremy, the conditions of the system only exacerbate the problems that he sees in prison. Along with mental illness, he says that the prison system in Texas suffers from problems with violence, drugs, and suicides. And to him, these problems and the social media bans that they wanna put in place, it's all related.

It always been my position that when you destroy family bonds and make it impossible for the families to communicate, then that puts the person in bad situation. And sometimes, in order to get out of that situation because of what's going on in prison, you have to turn the door. My whole thesis is, like, instead of putting money into further destroying family ties, as far as taking people's own privileges away, and putting them in a position to where they can become more depressed and become more mentally disturbed to where they have to increase their drug usage. Let's take that same energy, those same resources, that same money as let's put it towards trying to repair family bonds. Let's put it towards trying to help people accumulate meaningful things like so they can receive substance use.

Let's put it towards like putting people through rehabilitation.

I'm just gonna say this as a journalist who's reported on prisons. I would never be able to bring you this kind of insight. Jeremy's work provides something that's really rare. It's a look at what's actually happening inside this prison. But also, his work isn't just on behalf of the incarcerated people.

There's one of your pieces that I was reading earlier today, and it was an article, this is for the Chronicle. I wanna quote you here. You said, for nearly three decades, I've watched this broken system break people, both staff and the incarcerated. Instead of returning prisoners back to their communities a better version of themselves, prisons return them more psychologically damaged, disenfranchised, and poor than when they entered. I've seen staff members lose their families, their drive to succeed, and even with suicide, their lives.

I think people might be surprised to hear that you're also advocating for staff members, for the guards.

Yeah.

Like the person who just came by and beat on your door.

Yeah. And that comes from my mentor is a retired senior warden, Vernon Pitman. And one of the things that Warren Pitman taught me about is that, hey, listen, gentlemen, we all are human beings, whether if you made a mistake and you in prison or if you made a mistake and you worked for the prison, because everybody that worked for the prison, they made a mistake. The people that work in prison and the people that are in prison all come from the same socioeconomic demographics. The majority of them either made it through high school and went to the military and couldn't make it.

Some of them dropped out of high school and got their GED and started working at a low local fast food restaurant or something. But it's very few people inside a prison that has a college degree that works here. Very few people.

I mean, it it really could be people who would have been neighbors otherwise, and I guess they're neighbors now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course they're neighbors. They of course they're neighbors.

And I'm telling y'all, let's just say this. The people that work here are not the brightest people that you're find on earth. So they easily manipulate it. And the same deficiencies that I came to prison with, which is a lack of coping skills, no conflict resolution, no constructive decision making processes, or any of that. The same things that I came to prison with the majority of these guards worked in the prison with those same deficiencies.

I gotta ask you this. Are you concerned about talking to me about this?

No. No. No. No. No.

Because I talk about this every chance that I get. None of this is any secret. These people know what's going on. These people done so much to me. There's nothing else that they can do.

I'm not worried about them killing me physically. Right? There's nothing else that they can do to me for my journalism that haven't already been done.

So my conversation with Jeremy had me thinking about another conversation I had a few months ago with Gabby Kaplan. She's the journalist who's reported on the tablets that have been issued in prisons across the country and the federal government's efforts to limit the communication abilities on those tablets. If you haven't heard that episode yet, definitely check it I'll leave a link in the show notes. But if you look at the comments online about her reporting, you might see people arguing that, well, if you're in prison, having a tablet or social media is a luxury. You shouldn't be able to have that kind of luxury period.

Okay. That's an opinion. But I can read you an argument that Jeremy Busby himself wrote in a recent article, and I'm just gonna quote him here. Regulations that rob incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent. Just ask those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cell phones.

And then he closes that article with a request. Quote, give journalists meaningful access records. Give incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world and document abuses without censorship and retaliation, and I'll never use a contraband cell phone again. Or better yet, don't commit those abuses at all, end quote. Special thanks this week to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and to the Never Post podcast who introduced us to Jeremy and helped make this whole episode possible.

And thank you once again for listening to Kill Switch. Kill Switch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darlauk Potts, and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdock, and Kyle also mixed the show. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Osvalashin, Mangesh Hadigador, and Kate Osborne.

From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Itur.

Thank you for using Securus. Goodbye.

That is the show we have for you this week. We're gonna be back here in the main feed once more in 2025 and when we are, it will be with the return of Never Posts Post Mortem. That's right folks. Post Mortem 2025, your favorite year end Internet themed game show returns. So keep an eye on your feed that will show up at some point before the end of the year.

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So arguably, this sale makes more sense than our normal pricing structure. The sale is on through the end of the year at neverpo.st, become a member and help support your favorite local internet podcast. Neverpost's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious, doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike McNetta.

Oh, hold on. I gotta go find a poem.

Will Tuttle. Bill Tuttle? Here we go.

This is too much to carry, he thought. I've ascertained how far our minds made up. Drift like a crow now or a gorge or a braid. So like slow water, depending on rain, depending on ice declines the slope, distributing what verse gets, what talk, whose motion, of whose hand, what pressure, what tensile, what upholds. The center stuck out like a sick thumb on what the hard map depends, the going price eventualities.

The entry said be careful. Scattered walls of the wrecked city would soon come into view. To him returned, a car rests on wet sand. Read it inside many times before it actually came to pass. In the very middle of resting, of approaching, just being there.

Certainly, one of those things that would come to pass. His hand bends to greet you. Excerpt of a map folded by Bill Tuttle. Never Post is a production of charts and leisure and it's distributed by Radiotopia.