Casper was sent to prison at a young age for manslaughter after intervening in an argument between a man and his girlfriend which had turned nasty. And whilst in prison, he joined a white supremacist group and became actually a very active member and propagandist and recruiter for that group. And the podcast is the story of how he got involved in the white supremacy movement and how he exited that movement and became part of a group called the former. So people who are once white supremacists who are persuading others to leave the group. And in the course of that you talk a lot about the failures of the criminal justice system, also the prevalence of white supremacist ideology in the police prison service and among the incarcerated. I would just add that for

me the importance of it and the relevance of his story goes beyond just racism and white supremacy and extremism, especially at a time when there's so much polarization of so many kinds and people are having difficulty reaching across divides and building bridges and changing people's minds and making connections. And so a big part of his story that speaks to that is just the question of what works in reaching someone who disagrees with you, what works in changing someone's mind and what doesn't work because I think right now so many things that people try things that are instinctive to try to talk to people to debate people to reason with people don't work and often not only do they not work but they backfire and make the situation even worse. What led you to him and how

did you persuade him to tell you his story.

So I first ran across Casper in the online atheist community, I myself am a former evangelical missionary and stopped believing and then, you know, started getting involved in some online atheist communities and I saw him. I saw this guy there and he was, you know, in addition to just talking about religion and atheism. He was also frequently posting things debunking white supremacist ideology. And so I just started following him and he followed me back and we just kind of interacted every once in a while. And was this on Twitter. Yeah, this was on Twitter and he has since left Twitter and I've since pretty much stopped using Twitter myself but that was that was initially where we connected. And I was promoting a book that I'd written about my own deconversion experience. And so he knew that I was a writer. And after a while he was asking around, he wanted someone to help him tell his story. I scheduled a phone call with him and we talked for about an hour and just the more he told me about his story the more fascinated I became in it and the more I thought that I really want to work on this project, even if it doesn't go anywhere just because his experiences were just so fascinating, having gone from a person who he actually had been an evangelical himself had been planning on becoming a preacher. He also had been trying to become a pro MMA fighter and wanted to. He wanted that to be his sort of brand was the toughest preacher in America who would go around doing fights and evangelizing and then ended up going to Trenton State Prison in New Jersey after intervening and killing a man. He eventually got that overturned as self defense and then getting involved, not just in the white supremacy movement, not just in becoming a leader of this gang, but even in an atheist church they call themselves an atheist church that is a white supremacist organization that's now called the creativity movement at the time they call themselves the world church of the creator. So, you know, basically an atheist white supremacist cult. And then eventually when he finally got out of prison, left his gang left the white supremacy movement entirely and then started trying to help other people get out to and it was just, you know, such an amazing powerful story. And I had always been deeply interested in human conflict and conflict resolution. Because I see humanity as our own greatest threat, you know, we can look at the problems that threaten all of humanity. And I think any individual one of them could be solved if we would work together. But, you know, we have all these tribalistic divisions and disagree often about very petty things. Why was it that you decided to create a

podcast series rather than writing his story opposite book.

If I have time, I would like to do it as a book. It's just that initially while I was doing the writing and I would take quotations of things that he said and write them down on the page. They just seem so sterile when I read them. But when you hear his voice telling the story and he's, you know, hear all the emotion in it. It's just so much more impactful that way. I was wondering, as I was listening to what extent you trust his story. There were little things about that. In a lot of cases, he was recalling things that happened over 30 years ago.