It Could Happen Here Weekly 165
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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hi everyone, welcome to It Can Happen Here. It's me, James, today with a terrible cold, as you can probably tell. But still very important to listen today because I'm talking to Andreina, an organizer from K-Town for All up in LA. And we're going to talk about the fires in LA and the mutual aid response and what you can do to help. So welcome to the show, Andreina. Thank you for having me, James. Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now.

So to begin with, like in case this has missed people and there's a lot of news happening right now, can you explain what's been going on in LA with respect to the fires for the last two or three days? So about three or four days ago, we got a warning that we were going to be experiencing high winds up to 50 miles per hour, which is nuts. And they were going to be coming from the desert.

So this is just like a barrage of hot wind. So we were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because, you know, man-made structures that people are surviving with can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear that wind here in Southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly, because any little...

you know, a cigarette butt, an electrical spark, you know, like when it's this dry, it's enough to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened. There are about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread massively by these giant winds everywhere. So the embers are being picked up

Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but the wind itself has prevented, you know, the big water tankers from flying, which has led to the massive devastation that you saw in the Palisades and other areas. You know, the entire water fleet being grounded for a while just meant that

It was burning with no control, relying on on the ground firefighters. So what we've seen is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think there is a death tally, thankfully, very low in about 10 ish. I think I've heard from this morning with with confirmation. But yeah, that's that's what we're facing right now.

Yeah, it's pretty devastating. Like whole neighborhoods are gone, right? I think I saw like 2000 structures have already been burned. And like, as you said, if people aren't in the United States or unfamiliar with how fire is for like out here in the Western United States, it

It's a lot of air dropping fire retardant and air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to get enough water to where it needs to be. And I believe at one point they actually ran out of water in water towers right up in Palisades.

Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which is terrifying to think of. And we were warned, I'm in the Koreatown neighborhood, we were warned about low water pressure. And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles, particularly in that region, are being warned to boil water and that their water is unsafe to drink right now. Yeah, I've seen that too. There was a water boil warning for, yeah, lots of places. So as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused,

I think I saw, was it 150,000 odd people have been displaced now? Is that right? Is that a good number? I saw something large like that of just the people that have been evacuated. Right north of me was the Sunset Fire, and that was very concerningly close to the Korea 10 neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires because we're so in the concrete jungle, like we're so insulated. I think that's the closest we've come to displacement.

devastation and we were really stressed out last night just keeping an eye on the news because that's you know not even two miles away from the core of the densest neighborhood of los angeles right yeah i guess again if people aren't familiar like fires destroy property and kill people every year here and the climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse but

In the middle of a city, you're generally not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property, right? Like this is a very unique situation to see huge parts of a city burning down.

Yeah, particularly the Palisades, which is historically a significantly wealthy neighborhood. You know, a den of celebrity and Hollywood elites. And seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point that, you know, you have wealth that insulates you from the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes so far. I saw that there was a couple of wealthy people on Twitter begging for private fire...

fighting forces to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that are talking about tax evasion and how smart they are to do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into the social system that helps in these times. Clearly, we're severely underfunded and severely undermanaged when it comes to the government stepping in during these emergencies. Yeah, and like, that's something I want to address because I think

In every natural disaster that I've covered, the reason it becomes a disaster, I guess, is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people. And in almost every case, it's people who have to step up and look after one another. So...

We should talk about the response of the LA city and county governments. And then I'd love to talk about the mutual aid response after that. Yeah. From what we've seen here in K-Town, if you weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks that were out talking to all of our unhoused neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds, first of all, didn't know what was going on. They

They saw the sky. They assumed there was a fire nearby, but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and that we were generally threatened as well. They didn't have any supplies. And in some areas of Los Angeles, we've heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued. So the city has continued throwing away tents from the people living on the streets. And then for the house people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that they've

They've set up Pan Pacific Park is one of them for Hollywood. There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like. But it seems to be, you know, a hodgepodge of, you know, disorganization and a lot of, you know, mutual aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct people and gather the supplies, you know.

I have not heard of, you know, a very formalized system. There is no word on any kind of significant assistance for people who have lost their homes at the moment. I don't know if the Red Cross is going to set a staging zone up or anything, but I do know that the people who are setting up, you know, places for people to go, you

food, water, even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers. You know, I'm in this chat group, Mutual Aid LA, that spurred, you know, literally just on Signal the day that the fire started that has a thousand people on it mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one area of the city to the other. You know, I have this person who needs a place to stay, like who's got a list of places that are open? And

Because when you have disasters this big, you need help quickly. And bureaucracy just doesn't, you know, that's not built for that. Yeah, it's not. And like, we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond, like in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to. And it's really, it's wonderful to see people picking up slack. Like, of course it is. It's really beautiful that people respond.

show up for each other in these times. There's something about that that I obviously like find really affirming. That's maybe why I do this for a living. But yeah, it's really beautiful to see. It doesn't mean that we should forget that like the state has capacity that it is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused. It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people, to bring food to people, to create shelter for people. It's not. It's choosing to harass people who live on the streets.

Yeah. And this is something we see repeatedly, you know, it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but when it did rain, we had historical rains. Last year in particular, we had a cold front where folks die every time. And we know folks are going to die every time it rains here in LA. We have more people that die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than New York and San Francisco combined every year because hypothermia actually doesn't

require it to be freezing to set it. And it just requires you to be in around 60 degrees and be wet, which is very common on the streets here of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while it's raining. And our electeds know this. When I first started doing this work,

There was a slogan that we were chanting for a day in LA, and that was the number of unhoused people that died every day. And now we're at about six or seven. We request, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, request the coroner's report every year of how many people died. And that number is only growing.

And the government knows this. They know every time we have a heat wave that there are 70,000 people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars. They know that during the winter, you know, people are out there in the cold and the rain. And I talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and they ask me like, well, aren't there, you know, insert service here that you think there should be?

You know, right now during the fires, like, aren't there vans picking people up and taking them to shelter? And it's like, that would be wonderful when there's not, there's never any vans picking people up, you know? Even when they open up cooling shelters and warming shelters, the number one barrier we hear from people on the streets is how would I get there? And when I get there, they make me not bring my stuff in. So it's all going to get stolen. Yeah.

There's just all of these barriers that the city is just completely, you know, purposely neglecting. They could talk to any of us on how to run a successful, you know, warming or cooling shelter. They don't, you know, they have no interest in what we have to say. In fact, our city council person here in K-Town doesn't respond to any of our inquiries at all.

She just flat out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been, you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't have the support of this agency. And in fact, they're our opposition. You know, we're the ones having to organize around them and what they're doing. Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here. Like every time it rains, people will die. Every time we have a heat wave, people

I remember they found the remains of an unhoused person a couple of years ago and they thought the person had been burned, like by fire. And it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, just to give an anecdote, it was, I think, above 100 degrees in town. It was so hot. And I was in the riverbed. I had this big insulated backpack to give people cold water and water.

Just like dozens of people were in terrible distress. And yeah, there was no presence of police, fire, anyone to help, right? Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities and people are still unsafe and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because these government agencies, the same ones that you say that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto, you know, like a better situation in life.

Yeah. And I think there's this sense of like apathy that has built and rightfully so from the people that live on the streets where we've, you know, relayed messages that we've heard like, hey, 2-1-1 says they have a hundred shelter beds tonight. Call and see if you can get in. And they're like, OK, you know, like, I'll give it a shot, you know, and it's very well received because we understand that.

the amount of disappointment these people have gone through. When they do the Care Plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name for when they throw all their stuff away, when they show up and they do Care Plus, they show up with a social worker first, which if I was a social worker, I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is that right before they throw away everything that a non-house person owns, they send in

a lone social worker to write their names and maybe their numbers down and tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get back to them. And then they have all of their belongings thrown away. Right. I can't imagine the harm that has done for just the,

trusting services, even when they're available, you know, accessing them and then giving them your information. I have one person who rightfully so told me they have trauma about filling out forms because they've done this 300 times. You know, they said something incredible. They've been counting about how many times they've filled the same forms out to have it lead nowhere. And I can't imagine, you know, that kind of resilience. Now with this devastation,

There's going to be a lot of homeowners who are going to experience that firsthand. I'm seeing a lot of people that are homeless for the first time ever in their lives, like in their late fifties. And these are people that have owned homes that have worked careers that have, you know,

lived their whole life as you're supposed to in the United States, and then in their elder years befalls some sort of disaster or Social Security doesn't pay anymore. And they are severely shocked when I tell them what the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've had people ask me, like, where do I go to sign up for free housing?

And I have to tell them, you know, the wait list for vouchers is 15 years long and it's a lottery. The list is closed because it's so full. You can apply to a senior housing, but that's about a 10 year wait. You know that I have to be the one to tell them that. And that's sort of shock, I think, is going to be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried to access services before. Yeah, definitely. Let's take a little break here for some advertisements and then we'll come back.

All right, we're back. So yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in Southern California will understand that there is not a safety net. And that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people. Let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another, because I think that's what always happens in these situations. So,

Let's talk about the mutual aid effort. Maybe you could talk about some of the groups, talk about some of the things you've been doing. And then I want to get on to how people can help if they're in town and how people can help if they are a long way away. Yeah. In L.A., we have a very robust network of mutual aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via this government. I think a lot of them have started up

to step in. Just, there's no denying all over LA that there's this crisis because you walk outside of your house and there are people sleeping on your street. You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've seen this, this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city. And we, in times of crisis, you know, we'll spark up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands of people overnight and

that are willing to jump in and get their hands dirty to coalesce and find resources. You know, here's where we're buying masks. This store is out. Don't go to this one. Go to that one. Who's reimbursing people for gas, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know,

It's normal people. I have a full-time job. My friends here in K-Town for All, some are teachers, some are in the movie industry, some are random lawyers that will take their time out to do this work. And I think that it's beautiful in the sense that we get people the help they need and it's never enough.

which is crushing. Here in K-Town, we give supplies to about 400 or so unhoused people a week minimum, and that is hygiene supplies, tents, blankets. We

connect them to any services that they might ask us to connect them to, driving them to the hospital, etc. And this has been going on for the last five years. And K-Town for All specifically started as a counter-protest because there was an attempt to build a shelter here in Koreatown and some homeowners organized against it. They marched down Wilshire and shut it down. And our founders found each other because they were the only five people holding up "We want shelter" signs.

And just started doing distribution themselves. And I think that's one thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's not as intimidating as it seems to start one of these projects. It's literally you and a couple friends who decide that you're going to do something. And you acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never be able to meet the need because...

what we need is a government who cares about people. But in the meanwhile, we're going to do the best we can. And the lives of the, you know, now 400 or so people that we see every week are a little better because we decide to do that. Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, like, it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I get almost every week. Like, how do I start a mutual aid group? But like,

if you can make a sandwich, then you can start a mutual aid group. Like, just go and feed people who are hungry. If someone's cold, give them a blanket. Like, it doesn't have to be, like, you don't have to read 17 books, you know, and be, like, starting a 501c3 and stuff. You just need to do things. And I think especially, like, we're going into a new administration. We're going to see the state being more hostile to people who are already marginalized. And, like,

the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and to get into the streets and just do something it doesn't matter as you say you won't be able to do everything not right away maybe one day we will but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing and I guarantee it is also much better for you and your like I feel so much better when I'm able to help people I wouldn't be able to do the job I do at the border if I wasn't also able to help people like it it helps me feel like I'm

I'm not part of the problem, I guess. Or like we're doing something about it at least. What are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fires? Like what are the needs that are arising and how are people meeting them? Yeah, well, K-Town for All focuses here in the K-Town neighborhood. And what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People are sitting in

It's literally raining ash in some areas and are sitting in the soot. So there's that. There's basic tent and tarp gathering, meals. So many emergency services shut down during disasters that, you know, makes sense.

But a lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from are not open right now. So it's getting people food, getting people water, just enough to survive. In other areas, folks are gathering supplies. There's All Power Books that is a big distribution site right now. Puma Mutual Aid out in the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work. The South Bay got swept last night. So South Bay Mutual Aid Club is replacing tents this morning.

There's a lot of the pet mutual aid groups who are gathering pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of the found dogs and cats. It's just, I mean, I can't even list the amount of people right now that are like in their vehicles doing drop-offs to, you know, the sidewalk project. There's a big skid row distribution point that is building up.

crowdsourcing insulin, things that like you don't think about that people ran out of their house that they need to live. They don't have time to go get a prescription. Right. You know, at a primary care provider, like that we need albuterol that people are having asthma attacks. So there's these kind of burdens that mutual aid projects get around because people, A, don't have to fill out any forms. They don't have to wait. If we have it, you're going to be handed it. And, you know, even medical providers, you

as part of our projects, have become a really big support as people on the streets are often very disabled. We have a lot of folks with diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has a free clinic called All Power Clinic, and they offer free medical care and come with us on our routes here in K-Town to offer free treatment for folks. And I think that's

Something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs, homelessness rose 18% in the last year. And that's only been the case every year since we started counting.

There is no way this administration is going to institute rent control or anything that keeps people from being displaced. One mutual aid project that I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the L.A. Tenants Union, mobilizing to care for their members, checking in on their disabled members. These kind of community-based organizations where people know people, they know who to check up on, they know who's vulnerable, those kind of

organizations are invaluable in emergencies like these yeah definitely and like i hope one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities right and we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves dependent on mutual aid for the first time can realize that like they can participate in that and i know there are folks already right who have like lost their homes who are still out there helping other people driving around rescuing people and stuff

Yeah. And I think we say this all the time in the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being homeless than you are to be a billionaire. And I think this is one of the most direct examples. Like these people...

might have been well off maybe a month or two ago. And then now they have zero, you know, they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe five years, you know, if some of them and hopefully, you know, they end up recovering, but I hope they don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a great equalizer. And the people that show their faces, they're not the politicians. They're not the lobbyists. They're not

you know, the Democratic Party, you know, TM, it's your neighbor who has a mask for you. It's me, someone random from down the block who got a couple friends together who has water for you, you know, like that's who comes through and that's who you need to care for all the time, including your unhoused neighbors that are around you all the time.

who live in your community and who face this emergency every day. You know, they don't know where they're going to sleep every night. They don't know where the next meal is coming from every day. They get their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if not once a week, very frequently. And I hope this is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter. You know, the basics.

Yeah. Talking of food, water and shelter, those are things I need as well. And so to pay for them, I have to pivot to ads now. Okay, we're back.

I think that was a really good plug for why mutual aid is important. And hopefully there are people who are listening, right? Or people who are finding themselves for the first time interested in helping, seeing a crisis. A lot of people will ask me if they can come help at the border. And of course you can, but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there. And obviously that's very true in L.A. right now. So I want to give some resources, some ways people can help. If people are listening in L.A.,

What are some, like, I know there are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete things they could do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people?

What are some things they could do? You're free to follow Ktown4all on Instagram. We are constantly uploading on our stories year-round, fundraisers, resource requests, GoFundMes, etc. We really try to stay connected with the LA Mutual Aid Network. And honestly, once you follow one of us, you kind of follow all of us because we're very supportive of each other's efforts. Mutual Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine that gets published every month that has a list of

mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come out on physical outreach with us, which we do on Saturdays, every Saturday except the first Saturday of the month when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us, you know, connect with others. You're free to help us financially. But we also, you know, funny you mentioned this, James, but I

If you DM us and you're like, hey, I want to talk to someone about starting a project in my region, I'm so happy to hop on Zoom with you, tell you how we do our distribution, tell you how we make our maps of encampments, tell you how we fund and crowdsource.

Always happy to find that knowledge. And people message us all the time, can we start a Neighborhood for All chapter? And we're like, we're so honored that you would do that. Please don't ask, but you're totally welcome to. And so we have Pasadena for All that is doing great work. And Pasadena for All is definitely always in need of support. They are in a huge disaster zone. Altadena, Pasadena, like all those areas have been evacuated.

Palms Mutual Aid. But yeah, if you want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram, Ktown4all. Same Twitter, same on Blue Sky, and we'll hopefully be your input into the LA mutual aid scene. We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work. And while we focus in the Ktown neighborhood, LA is a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention, you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.

Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that we share. One of my friends, when we were doing border stuff, made a website where we documented all the stuff we did so that it was open source and available to people, like how we built shelters and how we cooked. But yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. We can all help each other get that start and not make the mistakes that we all made. So that's really cool that people can reach out to you. What about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money? They want to help and they've got money they want to share. Yeah.

Yeah, you're always welcome to Venmo us, Ktown4all. Same on Venmo, we have a PayPal link. We have a website, ktown4all.org. We are 501c3. If you'd like to donate in our...

you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way, feel free to DM us. We just got that figured out. But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on material goods. We don't have any employees. We don't have any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks in baby wipes usually when we get, you know, sock donations and things like that. And honestly, we prefer it that way just because, you know, we know what nonprofit requirements are like and

that kind of burden that that places on Mutual Aid projects and we're trying to avoid them. So every dime still goes to supplies. And I know every Mutual Aid project, J-Town Action in Japantown as well, operates in a very similar model. I would just suggest people get plugged in to Mutual Aid LA. They follow us on Instagram. Feel free to send any money. We're constantly on our stories uploading GoFundMes and Venmos and stuff.

I really appreciate their help, you know, out of the country and hope that one day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we live in a great world. Yeah, that'd be nice. Is there anything else? Like, do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe help you with?

We're always looking for staples. So those are tents and tarps constantly. Those are often the most expensive items people have to purchase. Tents go about $30 to $40 each.

each one, and the government throws a lot of them away every week. So those items, feel free to always DM me if you have some that you would like to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs are really good at building connections directly with vendors. And we usually get like a discount in buying in bulk.

So I would really love to shake people from their fear of donating cash. Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an item because you know that that's the item that's given out. But sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand of those tents and your dollar goes farther.

So, you know, tents, blankets. And again, don't be afraid to do this by yourself. Like you can go to Home Depot and buy a tent and hand it to someone. You can go to Home Depot and buy masks right now and hand them to someone. You don't have to wait for a group like this to be around and to help, particularly if your neighborhood needs you.

Yeah, I think that's a really good message. It's a good place to end. Just to remind everyone, it's at Ktown4all on Instagram and Ktown4all on Venmo, right? Yep. Great. Thanks so much. Thank you so much.

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Oh, it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show 2025. I am here with my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis. We have been

Trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention Center all day. Garrison, today you started earlier than I did because I was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk with a priest last night. We had a nice dinner and then we set out to experience a fresh new hell. And in this case, that fresh new hell was what the AI bros have ready for your children. No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products for kids.

like the same day during the exact same time. Yeah, it really is remarkable that like, yeah, I guess in part just because like that is such a focus. I think it has something to do with what you saw some of yesterday where, and I had caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah, they don't really like this stuff. We're going to have to get around it. Like, obviously this is inevitable, but like people really also seem to not enjoy it very much.

No one can explain why. But I think that this may be like, okay, well, if we get them when they're young enough, if we train these kids, we can force this on them and they'll have no choice but to like it. And it's interesting you say that because the first thing I did today was go to a panel at the Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly.

Which is maybe the best title for any single panel. Yeah, that's fucked up. The description was, a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment, and socialization?

Which is a good question. Yeah, we should be asking that. More people should. There was four people on the panel. Karen Ruth Wong from Ido Play Lab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and Joshua Garrett from Readyland.

And I'll talk about all these different companies and people in a sec. Yeah, so the panel started with Karen Ruth Wong from IDO, which is the company that first partnered with Sesame Workshop to start making online apps. So, you know, that was interesting to me because Sesame Workshop generally puts a lot of care into, like, you know, making media for children. This is a company that works with them. So I was interested in what she was going to say. And basically, she talked...

Not about any products that her company's making, but instead research into how AI is affecting Gen Z, how Gen Z wants to interact with AI, and talking about a whole bunch of research that her company has been doing for the past few years on what people my age and younger, what their attitudes are towards this thing that has become an increasingly encroaching part of their lives. I'm just going to play a series of clips. Couldn't be more excited.

I'll be sharing this morning a little bit about what we're learning. That question is, what if the tech-savvy generation isn't buying it anymore? We have a lot of really interesting opinions and assumptions in our heads that these are the ones that are going to be the first users and the first viewers. And in many ways they are, but they're the ones that also come with the most informed opinions, not just about how badly the tech feels, how cringy some of it might be landing, but also how it's affecting their sense of humanity.

That's fascinating. Yeah, the very first thing, this is literally like minutes into the panel, this is like after they do their introductions, the first thing they talk about is how Gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most AI critical. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cringey. Yeah, like how it feels cringey, and not just that, how it's affecting people's sense of humanity.

And viewing this, like, you know, in some ways as like an obstacle to get over. But also this is, I'm not sure how I feel about, about like, you know, Karen and the company she's representing here. Because in some ways I felt like she was probably actually good. She just had to frame all of the things she was saying as like shocking revelations to

to all these tech bros, be like, actually, it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run by AI. Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI. I actually like what she was saying. It's just her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because of who the audience was. Do you get the feeling that she was like a bad person trying to help like other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who was trying to like

in a way that these guys would listen to, tell them that what they're doing isn't working. Maybe like 2080. So like a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this. But mostly it felt like trying to inform people about how this isn't really what people want. And, you know, it has a lot of actual like drawbacks. Here's a clip of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're asking kids to, you know, get data on how they feel about AI.

Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions of what it would be like to interact with a potential AI tool. And so we ask questions like, okay, you recently had a friend breakup. What kind of intervention do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you through that process? Or do you want someone to kind of replace that friend for the time being just so you can...

back yourself up from that relationship. So by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front of youth, we were able to co-design to few insights.

This one always gets all audience members. We put out a provocational expression of imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live your life for you. Imagine they could swipe your Tinder for you, they would have the icky conversations, or they would go through the awkward introductions, you know, new person in school. And we heard some really interesting things. I want to go on a bad date for myself and I want to have that bad vacation.

There was a really interesting sign that being able to live life for yourself at Bajauana

Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor. Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace them in such drudgery as the search for love and human connection. Incredible that teens aren't interested in letting a robot go on dates for them. No, it's super interesting. And even the first thing she said about, you know, you lost some friends. Do you want an AI to counsel you or talk about your feelings? Or do you want a friend replacement? Right.

And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this even like odder question of like, you know, like, like AI swiping your Tinder for you trying to figure out what your preferences are. And no, like Gen Z wants to live life for themselves. It's like, it's odd because like, because that's what being a person is, right? But like, it's odd how that's framed as like a surprising revelation. Wow, these kids want to live lives. So yeah, it was it was a kind of an odd panel to go to.

She highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for Gen Z is twofold, creative expression and human relationships. These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about is how it will affect your ability to make art, be creative, and what it means for relationships as a human being, right? Especially if you're being asked questions about, would you let an AI meet someone that you want to date first? Have...

Have them go through like a first like fake AI date to like to like get through like icebreaker questions or something. The amount of people I meet who feel that way about like their digital twins or like who take pride in having like an AI trained off of their social media posts at events like these. It's shocking to me because like.

Do you feel good about saying that a chat bot, you feel like it is you that you have trained a chat bot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself? Do you feel good about thinking that? Does that make you happy about yourself? Well, and,

The data that this person was talking about showed no. People actually don't want these things. No, absolutely not. This actually isn't what anyone wants out of life. This isn't what anyone wants out of this technology. We use AI all the time, like autocomplete. It has a whole bunch of pretty basic uses. Yeah, it saves me from having to spell certain words too many times. Yeah, but we don't want it to go on dates for us. And the whole part of being human is having a degree of bad experiences. And that helps shape us as people.

And this isn't like a hurdle to get over, this is like a part of what it means to be human. And she kind of talked about that a little bit more in this last clip that I'll play. - The next one here. I prefer to give opportunities to people over technology. I think these are the ones, again, they have seen what it's like when people feel replaced.

I'll definitely share a lot more, but starting off with a few key learnings. Gen Z is about advice and perspective from lived experience. There's something about designing for friction. I'm gonna do it again, designing for friction. In our age of optimization, in our age of assuming that everything should move as fast as possible to make life as smooth as possible, there's something about the challenge and that come back to play, right? Why would we spend so much time to hit a ball several hundred yards away?

There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy of overcoming challenge, the joy of moving through your first friend breakup, your boyfriend or girlfriend breakup, that makes you into a person. And as many times as helicopter parents or as people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best possible path, there's some pushback there. Some pushback. Some pushback. To the idea that, like, you should live a life...

Your one precious life should be lived. No, but there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah. You know, like having, having like a workforce replacement.

Gen Z prefers to actually like make connections and network with other people our age and actually like share opportunities. Yeah. In previous panels, this was something that was also talked about how millennials were way more like selective about like sharing like employment opportunities because they were like so focused on like making sure that they make it. And there's a lot more like open collaboration and sharing opportunities. It's harder. So you guys have to be better about that. Yeah. Yeah.

No, talking about, you know, like designing for friction. Like there's value in something being challenging. That was very interesting because the surprise about that, because it is this kind of, I'm sure most of these people were born to wealth and privilege. And the first thing that people do with money, the primary reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact that that's surprising to anyone, they're like, no, like friction.

Friction's necessary, otherwise you're not a person. I mean, it's like the ghoul we saw the other night, right? Like, you know, they're just not really people, you know? Yeah.

One thing she kind of closed on in this section is talking about how Gen Z does not trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives, especially in this age of tech optimization. That misses a part of what it means to feel proud of yourself and the work that you've done. Something she talked about at the very end of the panel was how they hadn't factored in Gen Z, and people in general, will feel proud about making a piece of art. Yeah. And

they don't have that same sense of pride for an AI generated image. No. Whether it's like a screenplay, whether it's whatever. Someone gave an example of like, you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff. They edit videos, right? And there is AI tools that make editing videos like easier. But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that. Like they, they, they,

they don't feel proud. They don't feel like they've actually achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the work that you've done. So like, there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create.

An exact quote was, quote, you can't eliminate life formative aspects, unquote. Which is like, yes. We can just call life, yeah, if you don't ever do anything. I'm happy someone at CES is saying this. The fact that it needs to be said at all. Very bleak, very sad. It's really bleak. Yeah. Dating people, making friends, being social, bleak.

doing whatever it is you do for a living as yourself is what life is. Yeah, I think the last thing that she talked about was like, Gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries. Yeah, good. And they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with, you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams, like everything, you know, TikTok, social media. So we have strong like boundaries on how tech like integrates

into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to like become more invasive. We are not super into. No, like all they're offering people is like, this machine will do everything that you actually want to do with your time. And also you won't have a job. Like that's what big tech is promising Gen Z. Yeah. So that's how I started my day. Speaking of Gen Z, Z stands for zillions of dollars that we'll get if you listen to these ads. And we're back.

So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also had two other people from AI products. The first one that I'll mention is called ReadyLand, which I think partnered with Amazon to some degree. It at least uses...

like Amazon Alexa's. It's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure storybook with an actual physical copy that Alexa will read to you, and you can talk to it. So you can talk to characters and choose different pathways. I was more skeptical out of that at first because I just don't like AIs reading books to kids. But this became more of an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind of good at what it was doing. And then the guy behind it clarified, ReadyLand is not using AI to generate new content for kids.

It's all pre-programmed human paths, just with so many variables already built in. If you're making food in one of these books, or a kid wants to go on a weird side quest, the AI already has stuff for how to handle that. It knows how to say these words, it knows how to stitch together these things. But it's not actually generating new content itself. If everything is pre-baked, it can just be assembled in many different ways. So every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different.

because the kid will respond to certain plot elements. The kid can talk to characters, ask questions. So this was actually pretty interesting. The fact that it's simply just not even generating new content makes it miles better than any of these other AI kids' products. That it's actually just kind of using some of the tech that makes up AI to allow you to make

something humans wrote more reactive. Exactly, yeah. So it's actually a pretty interesting piece of technology. And it's not just Alexa reading a storybook. It has a large interactive element, which that makes the Alexa part actually useful. And then there was this other product. What was this one called?

It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys. Poe the AI teddy bear or something like that. Yeah. Poe the AI bear, which does generate live content with guardrails, he did say. Oh, good. But the AI content both comes from the input and the output. He talked about guardrails. You know, he said, you know, ChatGPT does have internal guardrails, but the reliability is suspect. Right.

Which there certainly is, considering just last week there was a piece of news about ChatGPT helping someone build a bomb. Yeah, yeah. Which they used in just this magical city. Yes. So he did say that guardrail reliability can be suspect, but there is a difference when you have certainly more child-friendly features turned on. But he admitted that moderation is part of the challenge. I don't know. Basically...

How this works is you have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear that talks with a not very pleasing voice. Oh, I got to hear it. Do you want me to pull this up? Yes, absolutely. Okay. But basically, you put in a whole bunch of story inputs being like, I want the story set in this place. I want it featuring these types of characters. I want this archetype to be the villain. It has like dozens, if not hundreds of like archetypal things that you can like click and

And then the teddy bear will generate a new story. So it is generating new content, but with pre-baked characters, essentially. So then it'll stitch together the story. The weirder you make the variables, the weirder the story's going to be. Let me play a clip for Robert here. Bright and shiny January morning.

So they'll pull in real world events and places based on the setting they choose? There's excitement in the

That guy, like, sitting there talking, almost rolling his eyes at his own product while it yaps in his lap is a perfect... Like, he clearly didn't think about how that would look, because it does not make an appealing ad for the product. No, so it doesn't sound good.

So yeah, they generated a story set in CES in Las Vegas. And he would occasionally interrupt the mayor to explain what it was doing. So that was the other product. Not nearly as polished or really as thoughtful as the AI storybook. But, you know, maybe if you are tired of having to, you know,

talk to your kid. You can just get one of these teddy bears to throw in front. Raise it. I mean, it looks like you could probably handle all of the physical contact they need too. So you don't even need to ever touch your child. And in fact, you can just have chat GPT, root that through the bear and never even see your own flesh and blood. Like I think ideally you would have them cut out of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know, a month or two early. And that way you can kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you ever spend in contact with your spawn.

One other thing I will add is that the ReadyLand guy, the AI storybook, specifically when talking about the importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety, right? An AI kid's robot that swears, right, is one thing that's pretty easy to avoid, actually. Like, that's...

That's pretty easy. There's a limited number of swear words, right? And you can just block out certain things from happening. You can build that in. But another aspect that's really important to safety is the accuracy of the things it's saying. What if it's saying something that's supposed to be some factual statement about the world that just isn't true or could actually lead to danger? What if it tells your kid to do something which is actually kind of dangerous? Or what if it says...

Not even directly telling them, but it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous. And this is why their storybook program does not generate new content. So everything it says is already pre-approved. It already is going to have verified content.

Like, verified, safe, you know, sentences. Versus this AI teddy bear, because it is generating new content, you know, it could, if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk about drinking bleach, you know, theoretically, you know, just like something, you know, like, things can go wrong. So it's not just about, you know, avoiding bad words or talking about sex or, you know, those types of, like, inappropriate things. It's also...

making sure it's not like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations. Right. Well, the good news is that I don't think these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean, I guess we'll see, but these are super expensive. And like, did you get a price point for that bear? I did not hear a price point for the bear. I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this stuff really does take off, but,

I wouldn't consider it optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like they don't seem like great products to me. So I guess we'll see. I read something very interesting that is related exactly. It probably was. He might have been talking about like that weird bear or something. I read something very interesting on the subject of like AI children's toys from a guy who was like an AI developer. This was from a post on Twitter by Alex Volkov.

I got my six-year-old daughter an AI toy for her birthday that arrived for Christmas instead. She unpacked it all excited. I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it. She, of course, knows what AI is, has seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with ChatGBT in Santa mode, knows that Daddy is doing AI, etc.,

So a very interesting experiment happened after Magical Toys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below. She started playing with this dino, chatted with it, and then learned to turn it off and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together, but every time I ask her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no. A few times it turned it back on, and she did speak with it for a bit, and then she just turned it off again, not wanting to engage.

I gently asked why, and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance. It's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending the dino was a baby and was turned on. So I told her, let's ask it to pretend to be a baby. And it obliged and said, okay. So we asked it to cry.

Granted, they don't have an amazing advanced voice mode like OpenAI, so it did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking. And also, there are still technical issues. The voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this didn't connect with my six-year-old. Because it's creepy! Because it's... People... They don't like it. Nobody wants this. Yeah. Ick. Yeah, ick.

I know this is a sample size of one kid here, and I'm sure many, many things will change as she'll grow and learn to interact with more AIs in different forms. But the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.

That is interesting. Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating. Yeah, no one wants this. Even six-year-olds are like, eh, I would prefer just a regular toy I can play with. I would prefer, I'll pretend it's a robot, but I don't want it to be a robot that talks to me. So Poe the AI Bear is $50 on Amazon. Oh, that's not bad, actually. No? That's good, okay, good. All right, well, maybe. We can even maybe order one and see what we can get out of it. Yeah.

All right, we're going to go on another break and return to talk once again about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back. So we went and saw something else today. While you were at a different chunk of the event talking to yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the ease with which we can all do 911s. Super excited for that future, by the way. I stumbled upon the booth for a company called TCL.

A pretty big company. A fairly large, yeah. Large company, make a lot of TVs, stuff like that. They had a couple of things. They had an AI laundry machine. So many AI laundry bots. Yeah. This one was the worst because it's like this little, almost a soft, rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry. They say they can't do folding yet. So it just sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.

It just suspends it in the air. It suspends it in the air inside of itself, and also it can only do a kilogram of laundry. The only thing they had in there was like

handkerchiefs and scarves. So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but you can, AI can clean your, your handkerchiefs and scarves. As opposed to my regular washing machine. Yeah. And they had a washing machine that it can identify and count exactly what clothes are in it and how many of them there are. And it'll tell you the soil level and yada, yada, yada, yada. Like I'm sure some people will want this shit, but it's like, yeah, only people who have,

a lot of money and want to spend it on a laundry machine. 'Cause I don't see that it actually reduces the amount of work you need to do at this point. But the thing they had at the booth that caught my eye was a robot toy for kids. AI space me is the name of the robot.

Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because like... Furby? Yeah, there's some Furby. There's some Porg in there. It's a two-part toy. The interior part is like a swaddled up, almost looking little Porg thing with a cute face. And the eyes are reasonably good. Like they did a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy.

but like that blink and change color and contract and expand. And then it's got like two little flapper arms that can like wiggle. And it's seated inside, almost like the aliens in Independence Day. It's seated inside like this large rolling body frame that allows it to move around on the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your child's friend. And the first thing that was upsetting to me, because they had this video ad that would play every so often. And it was ridiculous.

Very creepy. And, you know, I thought back to when we were doing the interview with the guy who had like the robot for old people. He was like, it's very important that it not tell them it loves them, that it like always reiterate that it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid, I love you. Like, I care for you. When the lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy that actually knows and cares about your child. And like, no, it's not. No, it's not. Don't say that. That shouldn't be legal for you to say that. For you to sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent being that loves them.

is like deeply abusive in my opinion. Like that is actually child abuse because it's not alive. Anyway, so I had to bring Garrison over because you needed to see it. Oh, and saw it, I did. Yeah, and I'm going to play a little clip from the ad. So I want you to hear the way this thing sounds. A heartwarming moment shared in Rome with Amy reminds us that this is what we call love.

Oh my God. I found that profoundly upsetting. Disturbing. Yeah. Your kid can like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll like talk to them. It'll make up stories. It'll like,

look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them into like live AI videos. You can put a pin on and it will record stuff that your kid does and play it back to you at night as a video. So again, absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have to spend with your child. It's in the car. Yeah. It takes over your car so that like it's talking to you from the screens in your car. Like the video, like taking this thing everywhere the kid goes. It's like the kid's main interaction with the world. Yeah.

Yeah. Is with this little rolling, like, plastic Furby. Mm-hmm. And yeah, like, talking about, like, expressing, like, love. And, like, how damaging this must be for, like, a four-year-old to have, like, the first thing that it constantly expressed, like, love and affection for is this little rolling robot that you're gonna throw in the garbage in, like, you know, four years when you're, like, too old for it. How, like, traumatizing and, like, deeply fucked up that's gonna be for your sense of self and, like, love and affection. Yeah.

The mix of things that we're trying to have this do, like the other ones were billed as toys. This was billed as like a friend for your child. As well as like a home assistant. Yeah, it's supposed to also act as like it'll change that you can hook it into your smart home so it can change the temperature. Like they did a little in-person demo where like a woman pretending to be a mom...

Yeah. Yeah.

wild stuff. No, it's, it was honestly, I've seen a few like disturbing things, you know, all of like the, the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad. But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing. It really like viscerally upsets me.

Yeah. And I think probably very bad for children. Everything they showed us was incredibly curated. Like when we watched this live thing where she was having a very fluid conversation with it, that was clearly scripted. Yes. And so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice. We never got an

actual like live demo. No, because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly recognizing like what's in their, you know, little kid drawings and stuff, what it's supposed to be to make beautiful, creepily shiny AI moving versions and stuff. So like, I wonder how much less good it's going to be in reality than the thing that they've showed us. But it's definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already.

And part of why I think that is like we went to check out the booth that this other the South Korean company just called, I think, SK had like a they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled. And then thinking about how like in the ads, it always like recognize the kid and its parents in a drawing accurately. Well, this one, when I flipped off the camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up.

Like, I'm really curious for when these things hit the market and people start buying them, like what sort of fucked up stuff it'll do and how kind of big the seams are.

I don't expect a long life for this thing, which is going to be even funnier because like there was already a big $800 like children's companion AI toy that failed last year and the company shut off access to them. And like so parents had to explain to their kids who had bonded with this thing that it was dying forever. And that's especially exciting to me because they've built a robot that talks to your kid and tells it it loves them. And eventually that robot is going to be taken away from the child.

by the company when it no longer becomes profitable. And that's, I'm excited for that. Like new ground and how to fuck up kids.

Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison. What an uplifting CES adventure once again. You got anything else? Yeah. No, that's all. Yeah. That's all. Great. All right, everybody. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. No, it's not. Or, no, it's not. What is this? This has been It Could Happen Here, a podcast by somebody who is slowly going insane. Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now. We still have one more day of CES. I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken. Uh.

Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like on the ground coverage with our, with our CES best in show. Yeah. So maybe a high note. So see you there. Hey DC, looking to amp up how you enjoy your favorite sports, then register with bed MGM to get instant access to a fun variety of parlay selection features like the new look, same game parlay live betting options and more.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly about it having happened. We have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second Trump administration is going to mean for trans people. And, you know, go listen to those episodes. The short version is that it's going to be very, very bad. We're facing care bans. We're facing federal funding bans. Things are about to get unbelievably bleak.

But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of almost a decade's worth of fighting by the right. And I think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as something abstract, right? As a sort of abstract political debate. Or even if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment as sort of these distant famous figures. But the issue with looking at it this way is that

This harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people with real names and faces who live lives exactly like yours. The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right-wing journalists discover who you are. So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far-right campaign against trans people who has seen...

Basically, the entire campaign against trans people evolved specifically in the far-right harassment against them. And that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out of L.A. Welcome to the show. I wish it was under better circumstances. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Mia. Glad to be here. Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you. I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my God, this stuff sucks. But...

Well, you know, it's our lives. What can we do? Yeah. What will we do? Wow. Yes, that's the question for the end of the episode, is what are we going to do about all of this shit? But let's go back to sort of the beginning. Can you sort of talk about your first encounter with, I guess at that point, what was a not especially mainstream part of the religious right back around 2018? Yeah, so I've

I've been making music as Precious Child for almost a decade. And it was my very first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that had this track on it titled Phantom. And that was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals. It wasn't a song per se, it was experimental. And I put out a music video with it and it was pretty...

It's pretty creepy. There's flashing lights. If you think of movies from the 80s, like Hellraiser, it's kind of like that. Evocative of some type of greater supernatural horror movie.

And the far right at that time, the far right vintage 2018, they found it and started reporting it en masse and tagging their friends and saying, report this, report this. And this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well. And that video, like, as I said, you know, it's creepy, but there's nothing political in it. And there's a little bit of like,

Of blood, but there's no gore. But they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic. That's what they said. It's satanic. And that was my first brush with the right. Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically the satanic angle that they're taking because it's like...

In this early enough phase that they're still sort of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite metastasized transphobia as their driving thing. So they're reaching back into this kind of satanic panic era. The weird 90s and 2000s stuff that... When I was growing up, the town that I grew up was super religious. We had to have...

lists of like, if you were inviting like a friend in high school to a party whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about witches. It's like that kind of thing, which I don't know. It feels like almost quaint now, even as stuff's escalated. Yeah, it was, as you said, it was a moral panic. And their point was that I was amoral for making art like this.

And it was, this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm, I'm a moral for, for the art that I make. And it's not just my art, but it's me. It's me. Yeah. And, and I think that's perhaps what has changed as well. Like before they were saying that this is a satanic evil person because they're making this art. And now they're saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.

Yeah. And I think part of the focus on art here, right, is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of, I mean, of the original Nazis, right? Like one of their big things was just like cracked down on quote unquote degenerate art. And they had like these like quote unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and people whose art they didn't like. And it was, you know, like what a thing that was like a significant factor in their rise. And I think there's a sort of mirror of it here, but it's,

I don't know, starting in a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out of this very, very weird, like Christian moral panic shit. That's, I guess, if you want to look at how this plays out, like that's kind of where it is in like 2018, right? This is the first bathroom bill has been passed by 2018. It was Carolina, but there's, you know, there's a huge backlash to it.

And that's something that's, I think, very different than now where, like, all of this anti-trans shit is happening and everyone's just kind of going, eh. So do you want to talk about the second time that you became a target of the far right? Yeah, I mean...

Realistically, this has been pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. And there was another track on that album that was also targeted. One called My Little Problem, Violet Door. That has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom. It has some nudity and a bit of collaboration between myself and an artist who is trans themselves, Kate.

out of Brazil. And that has, again, some body horror in it. There's commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a surreal body horror video. And that was Brigade reported not in 2018, but in 2019, and actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.

And that video is notable because as a result of what's going on today, YouTube took that down despite it being up for five years without the problem. It had tens of thousands of views and now it's gone. So that was the second time. Yeah. And that one I think is interesting too in the sense of like, that one's like a lot more...

It's more overtly trans. It's also, I think, the more trans you are, the more, like, very obviously trans it is. And this is, I guess, something that's very common among trans artists is this kind of, like, art that's an exploration of sort of body horror and, you know, I mean, I'm not going to...

project onto it i don't know if this is what you specifically are doing but like you know there's there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria and like as this way of sort of thinking about the things that are happening to your body things that have been done to your body and the things that you're doing back to it yeah yeah absolutely you know i i didn't really think too much about the concepts in that direction uh when i made it or when i

And I know Kate didn't either at that time. However, the truth is for much of my young life, I felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And that was something I struggled with for years.

Quite a long time. When I was young, I didn't have access to the information and communities that are out there now that support trans people. And I have had some gender-confirming procedures done, but not as many as I think I would have when I was younger. I did feel existential discordance. And I don't know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm going to coin it because...

Pretty sure it is. I didn't feel in concordance with my flesh. And so, you know, I came to experiment with the boundaries were of my fleshy identity and my existence in my art. Yeah. And I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of queer artists are where there's, you know, this isn't to say that all queer artists like this, but there's definitely like,

an edge to it. There's stuff going on. There's body horror things happening. There's like 80s aesthetic-y stuff. And I think it conflicts with this kind of weird Kincaid, everything is like happy and cozy sort of kitsch aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into. They use a kind of aesthetic sensibility as

as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose for more overtly political reasons, they can do this kind of like, hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera, kind of attack on queer art as a result of this kind of like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this, you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society. And I think,

I haven't 100% worked out the political implications of this, but I think there's this kind of connection between their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like horror-y that they kind of like use as a political attack.

Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying, period. Yeah. Not just for queer people, but also for cis people. Like, I'm going to defend cis people here for a second. So cis people struggle with gender dysphoria. I think maybe, I won't say every bit as much as trans people, but they sure as fucking struggle with it. Yeah. For instance, an example I will give is facial hair. Lies.

Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they fret and worry over their facial hair. Is it too much? Is it too little? Then people that are assigned female at birth, if they have facial hair, they fret over it. Will people see it? Do I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret over their freaking jawlines. If you search online masculine jawline, how do I get? There's a huge community out there of

assigned male at birth cis men that are trying to get more defined jawlines because they feel that their genetics are presenting them as a non-optimal male quote unquote and of course same thing for quote unquote females like do i have the female feminine body is it is it curvy enough in the right ways is my waist slim enough you know yeah am i just uh brick shaped

And then all the industries around that. And that, I think, is horrifying. And everyone goes through that and struggles with it. And very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves. And to me, that is a tragedy. Yeah. And I think that sort of like fear and that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to like

a gender in a certain way. Well, okay, I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars are going to get extremely mad at me. But the way in which you're forced to sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense, I think it gets to this thing where, you know, you could either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can and

you can attempt to fight it or you can get extremely bad at everyone else who's trying to do something about it. And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option. Yeah. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads, which is another thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards. But, you know, who knows? Ad people are wizards. They'll find a way. Brought to you by Maybelline.

And we are back. I mean, I guess the Washington State Highway Patrol does enforce gender norms on people. They sure do. May I give another example of a

hideous gender norms. So you, listener, you're hearing me, right? And you're hearing my voice. And this is another thing that all people fret about. It's not just trans people. Lots of AFABs I know. I'm just going to say AFAB and AMAB, okay? Lots of AFABs I know. They have pretty darn deep voices, actually. I've talked with them privately and they say that they worry about how husky their voice is when they just relax and

And then same thing for AMAPs. They talk about worrying if their voice is squeaky and thin. Talk like a freaking wrestler from WWE, you know. Like people, like the cis people struggle with that too. So, you know, just something as simple as our appearance and our voice. You know, we're just torturing ourselves.

And ultimately, I gotta say, Nia, you know, I'm a trans woman. However, ultimately, I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks. Yeah. It's not great. It's not a good time for anyone involved. Yeah. Speaking of bad times, this isn't even an ad pivot. I just do this now. It's really bad. I do it to people in my daily life. They're like, why are you ad pivoting me? And I'm like, oh, God. But...

Yeah, I guess, God, this and the sort of racialization aspect and, I don't know, sort of the aspect of zones of gender performance. God damn it, I keep saying performance and I literally mean that you were performing it as in you were acting and not the butler thing of your performing it to make it real. Please don't yell at me in the comments. I had the guy who wrote...

A writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter one time, so now I'm paranoid. Okay, sorry, I'm about to rail this enough. Partially because this next part is really depressing, but...

So a while back on this show, my co-host Garrison, who is, I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far-right panic that became known as the WeSpot controversy. Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ. Yeah. So, you know, in 2018, as I said, I put out this album and then I put out another and I was touring the country and

Canada and stuff, doing shows pretty much constantly. And then 2020 happened and I became involved in the George Floyd uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting. And so I began to live stream those protests and marches with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was going on on the streets to people watching because

a lot of people you know regardless of their politics did not understand what the issues were and the thing is in la there were a lot of like continual police murders even through the riots and by police murders i mean the cops shooting unarmed black people in the back as they were running away or executions you know shooting them in the car that that type of thing yeah and

So I was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is why people are in the streets. This is a specific issue. These are the laws surrounding it and why these actions by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal. And so I was doing that and I became pretty darn visible and popular. Like, I was maybe one of the top five best known activists or racial justice voices around

And I was targeted by a right-wing activist who was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium. Specifically because I was visible, because I was trans. And so she went for me and posted and said that I was a transgender individual who was in the women's spa.

a wee spa, and I was sexually harassing people. And that went viral on social media. It was covered on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant death threats. And, you know, I was doxxed. It was pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in the spa. And I was only picked up because I was...

freaked out for my visibility. My response to that was, I didn't immediately say, yeah, it wasn't me, it wasn't me, leave me alone, leave me alone. I didn't do that because I knew that if I said that, then they would just pick and attack some other trans person. Yeah. And, you know, I know that, like, the shit that the right-wing machine enacts, if it happens to one of us, it can happen to all of us, and it likely will.

Yeah, and I mean, I think the thing that it reminds me the most, something we've also covered on this, this is one of the problems with talking about this. It's like doing this for so long that like there's very few things that I can say that I can't be like I've said this on the show before, but we spent a lot of time, specifically Garrison, spent a lot of time covering this.

the way that every time there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks a random trans person and goes, it was this person. Yeah. And this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although this is a more targeted, like we've invented a fake controversy about a trans person. And then we're going to like,

Also just pick a random famous, well, not even famous, but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like. It's my understanding that this 2021 WeSpot controversy that I was targeted for became something of a right-wing playbook. It was after that that they started saying, oh, this and that person is trans.

And before that, they didn't have a real moral panic around trans people, unless you look all the way back to the North Carolina, South Carolina bathroom, man. Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's an interesting intermediary thing, too, where so my my friend Vicky Osterweil, who, depending on when this episode comes out, you will either you'll be hearing from either right before this episode or right after this.

I had another version of this where she wrote a book on in-defense of looting. It came out in 2020 and just for like three months became, I don't know, three months, two months, like became the like the giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising was just like taking shit out on. So like, like sitting Congress people, like,

We're like denouncing this book that you wrote. Every mainstream media outlet like specifically had their editorial people going like this book is evil. Vicky is evil. And I think that was also like this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti-trans uprisings because the people who, you know, are trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system are

Like, intimately themselves, even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand that these things are preserving the same systems of violence. And so they picked us as sort of the wedge point to break this thing apart. And I think with Vicky, they hadn't really figured out how to do it.

And I think it was, like, specifically your case, the Wii Spa, like, with you being put in as a figure of the Wii Spa, is where they, like, actually really figured out how to do the whole thing. And, yeah, there's just something really bleak about both how effective it was and the fact that it's, like, these are just people. I don't know. Like, this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of, like, abstract figures. It's just, like, yeah, people I'm having conversations with are how they did this. It's just...

I don't know. I wish I had more analysis of it. Yeah, I think that trans people to greater America, to a lot of America, I'll say, are sensational. People imagine chicks with dicks and dudes without dicks. So I think that's really exciting for a lot of people, for better or for worse.

I think for worse. Yeah. I think that's just like people and their bodies, right? Like, you know, I guess some people walk around thinking all the time about other people's crotches. I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. Crotch sniffers, you are seen. Okay. You know, but on the other hand, right, there's this aspect of which like,

you know, there's this transnationalism, but then there's also the experience of being a trans person is like, I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent. Like that's like, I don't know. Yeah.

So back to, back to WeSpa. Yeah, that was a pretty terrible experience for me. I'm not going to lie about it. You know, I, I, I'm glad that I stood up for, for myself. I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I didn't pass the buck. It was also really difficult and traumatic. And I didn't appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate being doxxed.

And people have come after me my whole life. I present, I think, just naturally, physically, like I present as being genderqueer. I've been pretty, veering, looking femme my entire life. That had nothing to do with my internal identity. I've been weird my entire life. I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested in things that were provocative. And so I've been harassed my whole life.

However, until we spa, I hadn't experienced strangers by the hundreds saying that they're going to hunt me down and fucking shoot me. I never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy, I know you. Yeah, and it's one of these things where the more of a target on you, the more...

likely it is to happen and even people who don't have targets on them like i know people you know who've never experienced anything like this that have still just like had attacks on them and it's fucking terrifying it is an absolutely terrible way to have to live in a terrible sort of thing to have to experience especially as it's just getting intensifying so yeah that was that was 2021 and that changed me that experience of being targeted and just picked on out of the freaking blue

That changed me as an artist. Yeah. And at the same time, it also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity. And I want to speak to that because there's different tiers of celebrity, you know, at the, yes, at the, at the top, there's the tier that's known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year. Yeah. And that's an actual thing. And, um,

That's the A-list. And you know you're on the A-list because Tom Cruise sends your Christmas card.

And at the bottom is me, who's been in mass media many times now, but has none of the benefits. I make very little money as an artist. And I don't have an entourage. I can tour and I play some shows and some of them are sold out. I'm playing a show in LA that's sold out. But I'm not playing large venues. I maybe play like 300, 500 capacity tops sometimes.

Most of the places I play are small clubs, like 150 or so. So I don't have the protection that most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals. I don't have movie deals. I don't even have an Asia. I don't even have a record label. Yeah. So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier. And they're coming after me.

Yeah, and that's the thing about this status of niche D-tier internet micro-celebrity. I feel like I got the best possible version of it, where I got a job that pays slightly... I think I might have hit... No, I'm still below the median salary of a cis man in the US, but...

I'm approaching it. We're getting closer every year. Every union fight we approach median cis man salary. But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right? Like this is about the best you could possibly hope for if you're a trans person and you get famous. Like, yeah, I mean, like I get that threats too, right? Like nothing anywhere near the scale that you get. And mostly what happens is like,

I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people in the U.S. have the kind of protection that actual celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity is just another it's just a giant target painted on you. And yes, you have you have none of the benefits and all of the sort of, hey, here is 150 million people who absolutely hate you and who have been primed and targeted like specifically at you.

Yeah. It's something that I wonder about. Like, why? Why would they do something like this? Why would Fox News be talking about me? Why would the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, did a whole video about me? Proud Boys is a terrorist group, if you don't know. Listener, they were recognized as a terrorist group by Canada. Not here, because we're just cool with that shit here.

their white supremacist terrorist group yeah so why why me uh why why would a congress person come after me yeah and my own hypothesis is that they punch down because they secretly believe that they themselves are weak and attacking me attacking people like me is a fight that they can win and

My view is that it's not a fight that they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small, small ways, in false ways, in my opinion. They're trying to get money, first of all. They want money. They want their views. They want their donations. And that's the entire top of the pyramid for them. And for me, though, I'm a fucking artist. Empower is something that

that I've always been developing because I've sought to know myself. I've sought to understand who I am and why. And that extends to myself as a queer person to come to understand myself, who I am as a queer person. That's not something they'll ever have. So I've already fucking won. And same with all the other queer people that are under attack, all you other DCT or queer celebrities out there. We fucking won.

Hopefully. And I think part of this is also like the reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to stop the tide from coming in and they saw how far in the tide had already come. And now they're trying to like damn off the tide. And, you know, like probably it's not going to work, but the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here, does nothing and lets them just keep building and building and building more walls. Yeah.

It's something that is within our power to resist. We just have to actually do it, right? You have to actually organize. You have to talk to the people around you. You have to go get them to do things to resist this. And if we do, yeah, the things that we've already won, the things that we are going to win are going to stick. But if not, things are going to get really, really bad really quickly. Yeah, and speaking of things getting very bad very quickly, here are some more ads before we get back to things getting worse.

We are back. Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a sitting U.S. congresswoman, Nancy Mace, who is the person who... Actually, I don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti-trans...

figure in Congress. Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put in men's jails, which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in men's prisons. And she specifically came after Hughes. You want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of

a congresswoman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding? Yeah. So right at the end of 2024, I think it was on December 28th, I was doxxed by a right-wing troll Nazi that has doxxed multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends,

And they pointed out in a tweet how my art was on YouTube, specifically my music videos were on YouTube, calling for violence and how I was an evil trans person. And they added like at symbol YouTube and said that,

these videos are in violation of your terms of service. Why are they still up? And Nancy Mace saw that because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just docs and trans people and perpetual rage bait about the queer menace, the trans menace. And so she saw that and retweeted it and said, YouTube, this clearly violates your terms of service. Why haven't you done anything? And then immediately following that,

my videos were taken down. The ones that were mentioned in these tweets. And as I said before, one of these videos was titled My Little Problem that's been up for seven years. Yeah. Real long time. Yeah. And...

And YouTube terms of service, they're very clear. And I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service so my work doesn't get taken down. And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity, that is allowed within the context of art, within the context of music videos. And so my videos, you know, they weren't designed to... This is from the terms of service. They weren't designed to...

uh sexually titillate or gratify that's exactly what it says in in the in the terms you know they weren't recreations of real life violence and they weren't real life violence but they were still they were still removed at the behest at the easy click press of nancy mace yeah and i think there's there's a couple of things going on here one of which is you know so we've seen this with

in the last, I guess when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago, but, you know, Facebook has instated policies that allow you to basically say slurs against queer people and allow you to call queer people mental illnesses and stuff like that. That's very specifically you can only do to queer people. You can't do it to anyone else.

And I think there's this sort of trend here of, I don't know, with Facebook, I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with the sort of new Trump regime because like this is just who Facebook is, right? Like they did the Rohingya genocide, like they did the genocide into gray too. That was also a Facebook thing. So they've always just been evil and have been sort of looking for the excuse that they need to like drop the hammer on us. But I think...

YouTube, to some extent, too, what we're seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming off moment where people are realizing that with Trump in power, they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because specifically like on a trans artist, because now they have this sort of like backing to do this stuff. And the right has, you know, realized that they can be like YouTube, take this video down and they'll do it. And that's a really terrifying thing.

in a lot of ways. And also it's very, you know, I was like, yeah, obviously, because appointing a hypocrisy does nothing. But like, I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of censorship than a member of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down. It's like, it's really something. Yeah, you know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because, you know, before I was a victim of a moral panic,

And now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare. So,

what's gonna happen next? What will we see just made invisible and unseen? And I know that in this country, I have freedom of speech, but that's really bullshit. We all know that. Like I'm not gonna reach many people if I stand on a street corner at the park and yell at people. What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that these social media platforms control that are themselves controlled now by the Republican Party.

And what happens when our freedom of reach is annihilated? And then suddenly, you know, trans people are actually invisible. We're very close to that, I think. Fancy prove that. Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people. Yeah, art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak and speak.

I know that's why she came after my art. There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen. And then like the next tweet is again, a sitting member of the U S government saying that trans women should be put in men's prisons. And it's like, okay, one of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine. And one of them isn't. Yeah. Does she even actually do work for the people of South Carolina? Like I saw all she does is just like start shit with trans people. Like she's,

she's just another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's just a knockoff Prada of a bootleg Trump. That's what she is. And she's not doing good on her fucking politics. Like,

She's tried to get this bathroom ban for disallowing trans people to use a bathroom at the U.S. Capitol. And her own freaking party kicked the bill out of the bylaws for this year. So she couldn't even get that. Yeah. So I guess she thinks she can get a win by harassing me, harassing my art.

Yeah. Try to get people to come after me. You know, these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe, right? A lot of their stuff just fails. But they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them. And that's the thing that's needed in this moment is organization is...

you know, like is, is organization. It is action. It is, it is now, it is now the time to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like, ah, should I be organizing a union? Should I be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, yep, it's time. It's time to go because otherwise, you know, and I think this is something that like,

every trans person now understands intimately and i think most people don't which is that right now it's us but you know in two years assuming we're all still alive there's a very good chance that it's going to be you like showing up on this show because a fucking congressperson has deliberately intervened to destroy your life and i i would rather we had stopped this before it got to any of us but they're going to come for you too unless we stop them

Thank you so much for coming on the show. And where can people find you and find your art and support you? Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I really like talking with you. It's been very good.

And listeners, you can find my work on Spotify. You can also check out my website at preciouschild.com. And please sign up for my mailing list there as well. That is the best and most direct way for me to stay in touch with my friends and fans. I'm also preciouschild on Instagram. On TikTok, I am the last precious child.

I also will be doing live shows this spring and summer in the U.S., and so follow me on my website and on social media to stay up to date on that and come say hi in person. Hell yeah. We will have links to all of that in the description, so yeah, go check it out and resist the creep of fascism. There's one thing I want to add about

I said earlier about personal power and how I've developed my own personal power by getting to know myself. I want to tell you trans people out there, you queer people and your allies,

that first thing is getting to know yourself and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, fuck these fucking lawmakers. Yeah. Get to know each other and strengthen our bonds with each other because those are bigger than any type of oppressive laws that they may put upon us. And it's only by the strength that we develop with each other, within each other, that we will persevere.

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, the consumer electronics show, happening here to everyone. And of course, it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chatbot that was trained on Reddit. So

So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed Ongueso Jr. Ed, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me on. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not going to say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less. But you're contractually obligated to not mind. Yes, thank you, boss. LAUGHTER

Great to be here, as always. Very natural. Very natural. Zai? Hi, hi. Hello. Hello. Hello, hello. Thank you. This is your first CES as well. That's right. Your first time being a journalist. Also true. How do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes? I love wearing a dress shirt and tie and just getting very drunk.

Yeah. You were very surprised when I gave you your gun, but you can't be a journalist without one. Yeah. Yeah. I love playing with it. I love dealing with it. Without the safety. Remember. And last, but certainly not least, in fact, maybe better than some people in the room. Again, I'm not going to say who. You can wonder that for yourself. Feel insecure. Thanks, Robert. David Roth. Thanks. I agree that I'm pretty good. Yeah.

How much better I am than how many people in this room? I'm not even really like talking about it. Yeah, exactly. Because we haven't gotten those numbers back from OpenAI. Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate at the minute. We've got to wait for 03.

So what I want to do here, I think this is kind of our roll up. We've spent our last day on the floor. I want to go around and I'll start first. You guys have a second to get your thoughts together. What comes to mind immediately is like, this is the thing that I had the most positive reaction to. And this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to.

I think is a solid way for us to start out. And I think my most negative reaction, obviously, was the Amy artificial child best friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable. And I hated both that, like, I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, probably

pretty good design. Like it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute. And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint, it felt like a replacement for the love of adults and the life of a small child, which I thought was like evil in a profound way. And I guess the best thing that I saw was,

I'm not perfectly competent at this point to like analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with in a QI, Naki's basically reads facial micro motions in order to let people control a computer. Not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. Like I thought that was really interesting and it's the kind of thing that

Because honestly, I might loop that in with there was a AI-assisted cane for people who were blind. There was another device that led you to control a computer through facial movements in your mouth that was like a retainer. All of the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a toy. Ed, you're in the hot seat next.

You know, the thing I loved the most was obviously the global pavilion for connecting Web3 businesses across crypto, blockchain, DeFi, fintech, CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, and legal advocacy. You know, this made my heart flutter because you know what? Even when you...

Think they're down? Crypto finds a way to swarm into your life. It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah. Because it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying to crawl back. Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous now. Yes, exactly. It's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out what's the vampire, but specifically crypto is the zombie. Yeah, when I first read the line, that is not dead,

which can eternal lie. And with strange eons, even death may die. When I think of, you know, 28 years later trailer where they use that poem, six, you know, like I'm just guessing where the price of Bitcoin is going to go. I think we're, we're at the beginning of a golden age, not for us, but for the grifters, you know, God next week,

when our dear golden boy gets, our orange boy gets elected. So I, or inaugurated because he already won the election. He sure did. Well, that's debatable. I think there was some very curious irregularities in multiple swing states. Straightforward from here. We don't need to be encouraging the blue and on stuff here. People have no ability. Let them have it. Let them have it.

You're right. He wasn't shot at all. That was all an AI trick. Yeah, that was too. That was an op. An AR-15 would blow your whole head off that way.

You know, the thing I actually did like the most, similar to you, I really did like the assistive tech. I mean, the stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able-bodied, or experiencing either cognitive decline or, you know, neurodegenerative things or paralyzed. Like, this is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment and development in. I assume maybe to scale up production of it and figure out...

that it can be offered to people in a variety or in a spectrum of use cases, right? I think the stuff that I did not like, you know, I didn't really care for a lot of the luxury surveillance stuff, you know, the fake CGMs that, you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me, it was a medical device that when I asked, she looks at my tag and goes, no. No.

That's not a medical device. Not in any legally binding sense. We had a beautiful moment where it was this like, it was like a set of smart goggles, which there were a lot of that had like night vision, but also it had like threat assessment. So the specific thing they bragged is like, it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun.

Right. Oh, boy. Right after we had gone to an A.I. security camera that I had flipped off with both hands and it had identified as a man giving the thumbs up. And I don't feel great about it. Identify the guns. Luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for recognition. Also, like they had it in litter boxes and shit. Don't need that. Really don't fucking need that. Why does the litter box need to be connected to the Internet? And why does it need a camera in it?

You know, that does make me think of a better world where we have exactly as much money and focus on A.I., but it's all integrating it into cat focused products like 50 billion dollars being poured into cat. Translate whatever your cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make deals with Chinese. And by the way, we've hooked him up to venture capital. He has an open line to SoftBank.

Siri, why? You know that? I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make some deals. Help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door. You know, things like this. But what we get now? Bullshit. I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs be like, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat.

a cat they now understand their mortality just meowing you see that like common ad where he's talking about ai but he's like we taught proust to a dog got a turtleneck on what a dog would think about just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette the future garrison you're up

Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth at the park where they had big traffic cones on their head wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks. They were dressed as wizards. They were dressed as wizards and we walked up to them and...

Let's start. VLC, folks, if you don't know this, this was especially relevant to those of us who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of video file or audio file, and now it will automatically give you subtitles too using local AI that's not like reaching to the cloud or anything to do it. Because...

Putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard. So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching and we will put subtitles up for you. We walked off

And we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything. We have nothing to sell you. And it's beautiful. They're French. So it was in this like, yeah. Wonderful accent. I'm not going to fake it. The degree of like, I don't give a fuck about anything else in this stupid goddamn show that they gave off. They exuded it. And they're by far the coolest because of something, Robert, you said to them. I walked up and I was like, VLC is a very popular app. They just crossed 6 billion downloads. I've been using them for,

almost as long as you've been alive. And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for 15 years in order to pirate media. And they said very nonchalantly, keep going. Keep going. Keep going.

Keep doing that. Keep doing that. I'm obsessed. That's amazing. I feel bad about this too because it's a good app. I have also used it. I saw the guy in the hat and I was like, oh, it's the VLC from on your desktop. And then I was like, that's stupid. I don't need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist, pushed aside your instinct to be like, do not approach a stranger in a cape.

Garrison does not have that instinct. No, no, no. Quite the contrary. I feel a magnetic attraction. This is why I keep an air tag on them. Great way to get abducted. I think...

Similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing that's like kind of like the worst is so much what you said, Ed, like a level of surveillance tech.

I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture. And this is really tricky. There was one at Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered, I believe, by Samsung with money. And also they have access to their training data. They're called Visomatic.

And specifically, why this exists, it is a camera that you can put on a computer. It will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists is for online test taking.

It's so people don't look at their phone to cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving. And if your eyes look down too much, it's going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic. There's a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of online exams that they as a company will put on, whether it's for people, students, employees, etc.

But they also had other features where you could switch it. I assume it's doing all the same work. It just displays differently on the monitor. Instead, it can do object detection, what you're wearing,

And the general, like, behavior analysis, if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also is a Korean company, for their own, like, surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic, like, what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test taking? And they're like, yeah, general surveillance. Like, yeah, we want to learn how to, like, predict or, like, analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version, one quite funny thing is...

As I walked by, it first identified me as a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty neat. Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook. Yeah. It could sense the pronouns. It's like, hmm, maybe not a woman. Maybe not a blonde person. But...

But yes, that was, you know, something that was like quite well done, specifically the vis-a-matic stuff, like very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone, it could tell from like various, various angles, like what, what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed. It's like, it was, it was very well done. It was very accurate, but you know, possibly scary.

Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast don't know who they are. Could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you, boys, for your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying that because I got pulled over the other week and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now. I would never do that. Anyway, thanks, guys. And we're back.

Is it my turn? It is your turn. Okay, so I'm going to introduce our special white woman correspondent, Zai, to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world. Okay, so the first one is positive for context. I'm a trans woman, and one of the boosts that was pretty interesting, it was this group of

Were they French? Garrett, do you remember? I, I, uh, you know, they're, they're European. They're called Ellie, Ellie Health. That's E-L-I. Anyways, this is a at-home hormone tester. So it is saliva based. It's like a little disposable package. Currently, they only advertise cortisol and progesterone.

but they have plans for estradiol and other hormones. Testosterone as well. Testosterone as well. Sorry. And yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening, and then you wait, what was it, like 15 minutes? 20 minutes. 20 minutes. And then you scan this little QR thing

on the device and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications for like the DIY like hormone market or use case. I started DIY and did my own like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that. So this is a

It's a good idea. If it's actually effective, like we don't have hands-on yet. We haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this.

Very interesting, very intriguing. Yeah, we will certainly, as soon as possible, test this compared to the regular mail-in blood tests, which is the current way to do it. But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory, and that's maybe not always the best or even convenient. So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really, really cool. Right. There's no insurance involved. This is completely...

Supposedly close source. From what y'all were telling me earlier today when you explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherent particularly to the trans community and why they might want to use this and a focus on privacy for that reason. I didn't press them on that because, I don't know, I felt a little weird. It's CES, you know. Yeah, it's CES. A wide variety of, yeah. No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are.

but not specifically in that level. But privacy, they seemed like they had a reasonably good understanding. Of course, because it is your own DNA and hormones. I do not know if this company is even thinking about trans people, if it is trans-friendly, but it could be used by trans people regardless. Yeah, much like a Glock.

Exactly. Exactly. The potential is great. And then probably my least favorite booth, I have to call out some other white women. My SoCal Boho white woman is Evjects.

How is that spelled? E-V-J-E-C-T. Okay. And what this is... Oh, God, yes. This is a special plug for your charging port of your EV charger.

So the idea is a nefarious party sees you in your fancy EV and approaches you and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words. Their words, by the way. Like, they see your fancy car and you're at targets. So this device will, like...

ejects you can just drive away from the charging it ejects the power cord it ejects the power cord by the way leaving broken pieces of plastic on both the charger itself and your car like this is not reusable it's single use one time use yes

So, yeah, all those people targeting SoCal white women in their AVs. This is finally someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip tie on your car door handle, MS-13 is going to take you. That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away. I was like, this product wins the Cool Zone Media Award for the most white woman product. It specifically reminded me of like, if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already...

already targeted. This is this is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in like your local like Olive Garden parking lot. Gang stalked Americans in the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California, where the average income is like in the eight figures. I

I got to say, though, you're being very unfair to them. It was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok to look at all of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted and talk to you about this product. You know, they're like, finally, someone's going to do something about it. Create a disposable piece of plastic.

You notice that guy is always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station. This is so he doesn't get you. Gotta be careful. I feel like I could have upsold him and like, what if we put some explosives in this? You know, really like keep him off of the car, like blow it away. Like a flashbang? Create a diversion. An agent inside of it called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it. Someone scared a lady driving a Vibe.

That's one of the electric cars, right? It's like a crocodile tail. As soon as it ejects, it whips around, immobilizing anyone in the vicinity. We're calling it the iguana, and it does spin with enough force to break a grown man's thigh.

Yes. Okay. David Roth. So there's a lot of, I guess I gather less than in years past that this was at one point, like basically a car show. There was not a lot of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to see very much of it, but I did have, I guess this is both my best and my worst experience, the most powerful transit experience of my life. So I live in New York City. I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go.

And, you know, it has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good. It moves like 1,200 people through a tunnel at 30-odd miles an hour. And for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone or, you know, watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way. And at the Las Vegas Convention Center...

I got to experience it. You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah. So he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour. And it takes, there's someone has to drive it. And also someone has to help you get into the car. But you can fit up to three additional people into the car. So that ratio. That's everyone I know. Yes. Right. So yeah, you got two people moving three people.

200 yards at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades ago. Right, exactly. I mean, this was the sort of thing that there had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles, miners. Yes, right. Yeah, and that was mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently. Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing. It was more of like a place where you would go if you needed to

get copper. Of course. But in this case, so this is like where it's good to have, and I guess every CES is like, this was my first, to be reminded of

that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if you put car through hole? What if, uh, instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move that number of people slightly more than one person. Yeah. So that was cool. I mean, it's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars, uh,

on the streets of american cities uh you know like it could be okay dave uh i mean most of the obvious is the something we've gone last there's like three or four good things you all said them i thought the uh accessibility tech stuff was the the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here and there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on you're up to and including like the surveillance stuff

Beyond the advanced Samsung-powered snitch tech so that nobody... Whatever, your boss can tell if you're really looking at the Zoom that you're on. Don't really love that, personally. But for me, a lot of the smart home stuff is real drag. Just in the sense that it clearly... First of all, beyond being sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make...

you know, human life, human life, and just being like, I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah. Just fucking grim, actually. Like, didn't really care for it. I feel like you gotta, like, what are you using that time to do? Yeah. What are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of, like the thing that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I wonder how you feel about this, because you and I have been going to CES for, I'm going to guess, a broadly similar number of years. I've never been to CES. Oh, really? This is your first one? No, I'm a fucking sports writer, man. Oh, man. I'm out here because Ed got me a folding bed. You have the dead-eyed veteran look to your face. Oh, yeah, well, I'm very tired. This is the thing with, I think, as far as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop where you more or less, you start out, it's too much, you get big eye right away, and then you just sort of feel zombified. But then we have talked to people

over the last few days that are like, you know, I remember like 14 CES is ago. That was pretty good. Like, and they're also tired and also deranged by this point. The first time someone showed me a tablet computer, I was like, Oh man, science has given me everything I want. Like, and I guess it's, I don't know. Do you remember like when the last one was that you felt like even sort of that stirring? Yeah. Uh,

2011 or 12 when I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time. And it was so big. The Las Vegas Convention Center is like the size of a city. And seeing the lights in that whole convention center dim as they were doing this, it was very inefficient. Not out of reverence, but because power was going to go out. Yeah. But that was like, oh, wow, this is kind of amazing that this is even possible. But yeah, not really since then.

Not really since. That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the Hyperloop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be... Unless something goes wrong. Would have started to seem kind of grim otherwise. Well, the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been, as long as I've been going to these, they've been trying to sell people on smart homes. Right.

And I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want, right? One of them is it would be nice if like, I didn't have to think about playing music. I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted and it would play the music and I could hear it everywhere. And I didn't have to futz with a bunch of shit. And the second is what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold, it would be nice to turn on the heater like an hour before I get home. And, um,

One of those things you'd use every day, and one of those things that's not really viable to base a business off of, but they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house. And I don't know, does anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking smart home? No, I mean, it's not an accident that my apartment is basically going to be in the year 2005 forever. I mean, it's expensive to do all this stuff. This was the bit that, with so many of these demos, you start to notice how...

incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful is it's like

The like Lexus December to remember sales event type energy. Just a big fucking. What lives do you live? Yeah. This also, we've talked about this on Ed's show that like, there's a lot of stuff here that feels like, like the first 15 minutes of a George Romero movie, like just getting you set for eventually there's going to be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous shambling zombies. Yeah. And a smart home, not a bad horror movie concept. I don't think it's a great,

consumer concept. Yeah. Speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast. All right, we're back. And I want to close this out by asking everybody a question, which is how do you feel about where tech is going? I think we're going to hell. I think we are speeding wrapped it up very fast into a sweet abyss. I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance and

around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics. I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going, but also I don't know what to do about it because so much of it is driven by private interests. It's like venture capitalists,

Well-capitalized individuals and the firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed. And these corporations, you know. Yeah. The nature of like, you can really tell that a lot of like the health products are very optimized for like rich tech executives. Yeah.

Like, there was a lot of sleep products that all relied on you being willing to, like, bathe yourself in speakers playing binaural beats while you slept. And, like, different devices measure your, like, doing ECG. And it's like, I don't know. My aunt's not going to do that. Yeah, you know, like, I was, you know, I was...

with my partner about this, they have type one diabetes, they have a CGM, they use it constantly. And we've been talking about and thinking about writing about how there've been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto you this idea that you need to have close monitoring of it to preempt if you are going to be pre-diabetic or to optimize what you're eating throughout the day. But that, you know, when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like,

part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, well, you know, if your sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of. And you can be your best self, which is really just like not large, you know? And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot of the biometric,

surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that. Yeah. You know, it's kind of focused on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing. We spent a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest. And I do feel like several tech companies were the ones trying to sell us indulgences. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Gare. There's small improvements for consumer tech, right? This is a very consumer based where it's supposed to be a consumer based tech show. There's products like the shocks headphones, right?

which every year get a little bit better. I tried out bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good. They work underwater. If you're deaf in an ear, you can listen to your music the way you used to be able to. Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it if you're standing like two, three feet away. There's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head.

despite having to not put an earbud actually in my ear. They're super useful. They work great. Really good sound quality. They're durable. I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day. Sweat, rain, great product. Like small improvements, right? It's not necessarily revolutionizing hearing, but it's very small improvements.

Whereas the other kind of big, big trend, which isn't necessarily like wholly consumer-based, it's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards, is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship.

With this form of technology and AI-enabled technology, you used to have friends. To get recommended new music, you used to have friends to tell you about new stuff that they're interested in. No longer. Now you have an AI agent that can do that for you. You don't need friends to help talk about you had a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short-term replacement using AI. You can have a friend replacement, a girlfriend replacement, etc.

It's all these things that are trying to replace the core concept of friendship. Even as like a baby, even as a toddler, your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside. It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell you what to do, tell you what you need on your shopping list, roll around your house the middle of the night with cameras. And that could be your first friend.

It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, make it as smooth as possible, that completely ignores what it means to be human. It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot, LEQ, which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people, and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device

to remove the need for human empathy. Like I went to a, there was a vet app called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians. And they were like, yeah, you know what? Most of it we focused initially on like technical questions. So like if I have these symptoms, what can that mean? But what vets kept asking us is like, we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are going to die. And I was like, do you,

are vets not getting out of vet school? Cause that's like, that's a big part of being a vet. Like, do they need chat GPT for this? I saw this other company that was like, it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet where you could, you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this, into this AI device.

into this AI generator and it will generate new images. And this is proven to help you move on from loss, which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago. It's seven years ago. And like, no, you should talk with your friends about that. That's why you are a human. That's how you can move on from loss. You have to make new connections. Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to help you move on. Like why? Why?

Anyway, replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do. Maybe because they don't really understand real human relationships that aren't innately transactional. I'm not sure, but that is a huge trend that I've seen multiple people mention. All right. Zai? So I've worked in this industry for three years now, and this is my first big convention ever.

And I would say this is just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world. And most of it's just nonsense. And maybe the post-civ people are on to some stuff.

Well, you say that, but I really do think Viridox is going to revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of people. I'm just slandering these people. Maybe, maybe. But don't name it something so sinister. Yeah, if you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great. I would just don't. Call it apple fresh. Yes, but don't. Call it apple fresh.

By the way, you should listen to Better Offline to hear context for Veridox, which we discussed in the last episode of our daily CES coverage over there with the wonderful Ed Zitron. But essentially, Veridox is this mist that gets sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps it stay shelf-stable for a few more days. 33%. 33%. Exactly.

And so maybe that shelf-stable mist will also translate to waking up the dead. Possibly, but you don't know that it's going to do, you don't know that it's not going to do that either. Right, right. We just know it keeps things fresh. Yes. As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions. And we discuss that way more in depth on Better Offline. Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red leaf lettuce back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones. David. Oh, it's me. Sorry. Yeah.

A lot of good points. I mean, I think Gary and Edward both made the point about the sort of sociopathic thread of a lot of this, just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel comfortable

I mean, there probably are people. I imagine that's like, if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards, you know, he's like... Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson. We love Brian. Oh, yeah, yeah. We love Brian. But he, like, I feel like he would have been walking through this clapping his hands with delight. Clapping his hands, eating his 400 pills a day. Drinking his son's blood. Yeah. Time for, yeah. It's a...

In fairness, I drink his son's blood pretty regularly. It's not bad. It's a high-quality platter. But it felt like it was that, that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all. And I don't think – I mean, again, there probably are people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't imagine that – I think what most people would like – I mean, you don't expect technology to make you feel more human, but –

Something I've been thinking about a lot, we've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline, but there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like sort of things are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient. And I don't think that I want that. I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the market that I think they're aiming for with this, but

It's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music. Like that's a thing that, you know, your friends tell you about it. And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit. Like there's the distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed to something like you're a foie gras goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being. And I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of agency of having some sense of,

doing the things that you want to do. Like I would imagine that, well, I don't have to imagine it technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you. I think that I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking matrix pod. And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the, uh, matrix pod dwelling community. Yeah. I think that's, that's about the best line we could go out on. Like that's, that's,

Yeah, you nailed it. Thanks. I thought I crushed that one. Yeah, you did. You did. Great job, Dave. Where can people find your work, Dave? Defector.com. Let me do that without crushing my water bottle. No, no, no, no. That's a load-bearing piece of content. Defector.com is the website. And Ed? BigBlackJackabit on Twitter and Blue Sky. This Machine Kills is my podcast. TechBubble.Substack.com is the newsletter. Hell yeah.

Do you want to tell people how to find you, Zai? At Neo Woman on Twitter with zeros. Zeros for Neo. Zeros. All right, everybody. Well, that's going to do it for us here at It Could Happen Here and our week at CES. You know, just try to hug your loved ones until the Viridox sweeps through all of their homes, neighborhoods. Oh, no, it's in the room! It's in the room!

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Listen to The Daily Show, ears edition on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

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Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Nick and Appet Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. Returned for the holidays, returned rejuvenated, returned refreshed, returned to do something a little bit different.

In the coming weeks, we're going to be doing a lot of nitty-gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism. But what we haven't really been doing as much, what I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now, and also talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up in a cyborg truck outside of a Trump building.

And with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so many different things that like, I don't know, someone's going to write a great biography in like a hundred years. It is the one and only Vicky Osterweil. Thank you. Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you find people could hear me. I'm glad to have you here. And part of this podcast,

The initial thing that was like, okay, we need to do this was I saw you called all of this the years of lead paint. And that is just it is stuck in my mind every for every single second of every day since then.

Yeah, yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, Kaa, go check this out. But I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Hotel. Then about, you know, as we were about to talk about Matthew Livelsberger, I think is how it's pronounced. Yeah, yeah.

who's the Green Beret, then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but the purging of Democratic politicians. Is that what we think his vision was now? That seems to be it. Like politicians and like

It's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants Democrats gone from like the army and right, right, you know, so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rope from the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race worry or like less anti-semitic.

versions of it. Yes. And that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by. Exactly. Blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a truck. I...

So basically, this guy, despite being a Green Beret, which like, say what you will, arguably some of the most trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else you say about them. And this is important, you know, like, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like Green Beret to like former Green Beret. This guy was active duty. So like, yes, yes, yes, exactly. Exactly.

This wasn't even like a cooked vet. This is a guy who is like in the shit. And we know that he was drinking the Kool-Aid because he used chat GPT, as we just found out today, to help plan his attack. But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise, which is undeniable, Cybertruck, like all Teslas, is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans.

And what I really mean, of course, is that they have terrible safety protocols. And the Cybertruck, which is like a 12-year-old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly, incredibly firm stainless steel body, which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that your frail human body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside. But the car doesn't take damage. And that means that if you leave a bomb in it,

The sides of the car were fine. So the explosion went straight up, right? So it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage to the hotel. Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine.

So, anyway, all this is to say, you have this guy who's like an active duty Green Beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an Elon Musk car will somehow lead to the murder of Democrats, but he's so tech-pilled that he takes a Cybertruck, which doesn't even work as a bomb, and dies in it and just leaves this, like,

horrible image. And I mean, I'm being flippant about this. It's an awful thing, obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was everywhere on social media for the last three days of that cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that, basically.

Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are, because I imagine some of you, like, there's probably, like, I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and, like, know the name of every single guy who was implicated for these car bombings, but...

For everyone else who's normal, and I kept myself among the non-normal people because I spent about two years going down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. Same. But the years of lead were this thing in roughly the 70s and the 80s in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings in 1968, and Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because...

In Italy, you know, in France, for example, France has this huge uprising in May 68. Like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils have seized control of the factories. Like they lose a sort of body. You know, the president's like fleeing in a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind of never seriously threatened the French government again. In Italy, that is not true. Like 68 in Italy, there's a very similar thing going on. But like the seizure of the factories has been going on since 1868.

like, I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the 50s, and it really only stops in 1977, when, like, they have one last big push-up rising, and it fails. So, as a way to contain this, the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right-wing terror groups, and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups, and by terror groups, I mean, like, the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing in 1980 that kills 85 people, wounds, like, 290, like, it

it's a really, really horrific attack and it's immediately blamed on an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an anarchist group. It is a state-backed, like, fascist group. And, yeah, like, there are other ones. I will pass over to Vic to talk about, like, the other terrible shit that they did. Well, that bombing kind of ends, in some ways, ends the years of lead. You could end it there. It's sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing, the event that, like, sort of after 68 kind of starts it is this thing called the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which is, like, at a

at an agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just like, but 17 people are killed. Almost 100 people are wounded. And the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in 68 as well. And there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pinelli who is arrested. And then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death.

Yep. It has still never been proven that he was pushed. The police claimed he jumped out after they interrogated him really hard. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. There's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Fo called The Death of an Anarchist. So anyways, they blame the anarchist. They literally murder a leading anarchist

printer and organizer. And then of course it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordine Nuovo, who was, you know, this neo-fascist group that had, let's say significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think like one way of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it is that it's, it's like a very low level civil war.

It's, I think the closest thing we can maybe think of is the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeah. And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas like the, you know, the movement was in Ireland. But this is very similar, which is like, there's these armed wings, both on the right and the left that are like both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally fighting

both paying for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks. Yeah, and there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here. I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in, if you go to the Halloween episode we did where we talked about conspiracies, I've explained that whole thing. But the goal of this, right, the reason that they're giving all of these weapons to these stay-behind networks that were designed to fight a Soviet invasion and having all these bombings

Was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea was, and this seems to have worked, you know, you scare people enough by the fact that there's, you know, there's bombs going off all the time. People are getting killed. People are getting kidnapped. There's all of this just like horror stuff.

And the goal is to get people to turn to the state for, you know, sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need, you know, we need to sort of terror to end. And it was extremely effective. And the sort of knowledge of this has, I guess, proliferated through the American left in the last like decade. And that has led to a lot of.

I think kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is those to stay behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo-fascist groups. And like to refer to this sort of like...

I don't know, like what's happening in the U.S. And that's not really what's happening. And this is where I want to pass it to Vicky to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the years of lead paint and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones. Yeah. In classic American fashion, everything is more chaotic and autonomous. Yes. And widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America. Products and services. Did I do good? Let's support this podcast. Thank you.

We are back. All right. Years of blood and paint. Let's go. Yes. Right. So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio, and it's not Gladio because that was very conscious and it was like these stay-behind networks that were organized explicitly. But the U.S. state defunds

defense of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the U.S. the sort of home for military surplus because obviously like the military industrial complex sells lots of guns it's a very helpful thing that producing a reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of years of lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension way I think might actually be close but

But you can tell that that's very disorganized. It's very distributed through the social. It's done by volunteers, right? Yeah, and also the people who are doing the years of lead are

Unbelievably cynical about it right like They don't they don't believe any of this Shit right yes yes no exactly We're second amendment guys like that Stuff is driven a lot by sort of like Hardline true believers who aren't trying To sort of like fuel a Bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards Extreme like increasingly right wing politics that's sort Of like not

what they were trying to do, but that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff. Yeah, it wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's just a similar thing. The years of lead paint, which is obviously a joke about

there's this big reactionary myth from like the Freakonomics guys I think that like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms which is really funny because for the Freakonomics guy that is a downright left wing theory like by his standards yeah yeah yeah exactly or maybe it was a

correcting it? I don't even remember now. Anyway, so it became a meme to talk about boomers and Generation X people having the lead paint in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff. Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of ableist insult when I talk about this. It's a mimetic way of making fun of that concept. But

All of that to say, they have completely drunk the Kool-Aid, right? The fascists, as you're saying, Mia, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They were making it up. But a lot of people on the right... In Italy. Yeah, yeah, in Italy. Excuse me, in Italy in the 60s, in the actual years of lead. Years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January 6th was Antifa.

Like people whose friends were there, you know? Yeah. Like stuff like Q. And the other thing that the reason this is years of lead pain and not the first Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration, there was actually pretty, pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements. And they could, they could certainly come back in the U S right now. There's no reason they couldn't. Yeah. And, and it's also worth talking about, we'll be covering this on the show, like,

At some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents, but there's recently a massive from distributed denial of secrets, a massive drop of stuff on the militia movement from a guy who infiltrated it. There's a very good ProPublica story talking about the guy that will link in the show notes. So like like the militia movement has survived. But the kind of stuff that like we saw in like 2017, 2018, 2020, like is not the problem.

The Proud Boys, QAnon, the folks who made up J6 and the folks who made up the alt-right, you know, broadly, were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street. And then the people who remained, QAnon folks who were, I think, you know, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-Nazis, obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right? And like, those people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repressions, I think, successfully sort of put the end to that organized Q stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and, and, and also, and also we've talked about on the show, the other thing that put an end to that was that the daily wire figured out that you could use the literally the exact same structure of QAnon, but make it about trans people. Yes. And that has been unbelievably effective. No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued. Yeah.

But as an on-the-ground organizing principle, it's not that functional right now. Yeah, it's not. Which is really lucky. But what that means is that Trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015, 2016. Like, that was a real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His rallies this election, people left early. You know, it was like going to see a losing team at their last home game of the season, you know, was the vibe. Yeah.

at those rallies. Yeah. To do a very specific example, it's like the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out to before for their owner moved into Las Vegas. Exactly. Where like they've had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner who decided to make who

made a bad team so people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to LA. Like it's like that kind of shit. Those were the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats in their infinite, infinite capacities lost the election. And so what that means though, is that, is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government as it's ever had. You know, the resistance is, you know, they, you know, they're very proud of legally handing power to the man and ending all of his charges or whatever. But,

The street movement is disorganized. So you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus, Fox News, Truth Social, X, the everything app. All of these places where the fascist... And I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today when we're recording this. So it's just...

There's this huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organizing. So you get people like this green beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing, not even the Trump hotel up, which wouldn't be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump hotel up in an attempt to start the race war by getting Democrats hung and

So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right? The imagination of, as you said, the Turner Diaries or the sort of like, you know, the right-wing terror networks in the U.S., you know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grids, right? They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world of all against all and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart, whatever. It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family. Step two, question mark, question mark. Step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying. I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea. Yeah.

But that's happening in these groups that have really, really, they believe, I think genuinely, that, like, I think the right does not understand the difference between, like, Nancy Pelosi and Assata Shakur. Like, they see them both as equally dangerous, right? They hate Liz Cheney. Yeah. Like, in the final days of the election, she was the person they were saying, we're going to go after her. Like, Liz Cheney? Like, really? Yeah.

Like, yeah, it's like, like, the closest parallel I can think of this is, like, there was a faction of people during the Cold War who thought that, like, the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was, like, faked. And, like, there were literally guys murdering each other. Like, Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other, like, on the border, like, in 69, right? Like, and there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War, even as, like, as China is invading Vietnam, right?

are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that, like, and that's the secretly, like, the USSR and the PRC are working together. And these are not, like, you know, some random guys on the street. Like, these are, these are, like, the guys at, like, the peak of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is, I think, yeah, like, this is the kind of thing we're in now with just, like,

these people are completely cooked. They don't have any analytical ability whatsoever. They actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid. There was a scoop, sorry, I'm just going to drop this really quick. There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of Project 2085, their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia. They want to take down Wikipedia. Like, because that's a place you can verify facts at, right? Yeah. They've already got the post, they've got the times. Like, what are they going to do? They've got to go after Wikipedia. This is the kind of, like...

level of unreality they're trying to build. Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world of unreality and then attempts to sell it to you? Ooh! Products and services? That's a fourth of this podcast. Yes! We are back. I'm very proud of that one. That's one of the best ones I've ever done, and I just completely off the top of my head just came back better than ever. That was really good, yeah. She's never been so bad. So...

I want to move a little bit from the just what is the state look like, how pilled are these people kind of thing to... I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here because I think part of what's happening here, and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like

the chips act and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But I think actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is like going back to your David Graeber. And he has this line talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote it. I think it might be from

The Shock of Victory, but he has this line about how neoliberalism, when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like any alternative to neoliberalism is impossible, it will always choose making the alternative seem impossible because that's what neoliberalism is, right? This is, you know, the sort of maxim of Margaret Thatcher is there is no alternative. It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the, you know, and this includes the possibility of a future. Hmm.

And the goal of this, and this is, I think, the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint, is this induced helplessness. Yeah, there's something, Vicky, I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.

Yeah, yeah. I was sort of vibing with what you were saying. But yeah, I think a lot of people online have accepted sort of, you know, don't give in in advance, right? But like, I think one big thing that has been part of the Biden, like strategy of counterrevolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years, but indeed over the last four decades as well, as sort of part of neoliberalism is like the idea that you actually really can't do stuff yourself.

You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice, right? And any choice made otherwise, you know, is doomed to failure, right? And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut. I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserablest thing

strategy of the previous 30 years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like 12% one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right. So that's sort of like, there's, there's that sense, but then on the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity. Right. Because,

Part of what the 60s was, and the reason the 60s lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the last, in Western Europe, they had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up from Sicily. So they had this massive, massive factories that had these crazy strikes over and over again. So the distribution of labor with globalization, neoliberalism, blah, blah, blah, breaking down labor workforce, like

we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces. Right. And like, we go to the HR department to get help. Right. Or we, we sort of get self care. We like work on ourselves. We get therapy, you know, that our boss offers us, you know, thoughts and prayers. Right. When, when things are hard, but like, there's a big attempt to, to,

allow people to define themselves. Sort of the carrot of the 60s was like, you know, you get to have an identity. Like, okay, we won't be officially racist. Yeah, quote unquote. You know, okay, we won't be officially sexist, they claim. Okay, whatever. None of that's true, but they sort of sell that. And then they say, but in return, you have to do all of the self-work. You have to be an identity in the marketplace.

So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both a, an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces. Right. Like, and so that in, you know, spoony world, we call that sort of choice paralysis. Right. And I think that's probably accepted as well, but like,

you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless in the face of it. You can't do anything. And so that produces a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right? That's another thing people want is like someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this. Yeah. And that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of...

everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you, to free you from this, just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy and shit like that. Oh my God. And the right has a bunch of alternatives here, right? Like this is the fantasy of what Treadwives is. It's like, what if someone else did your thinking for you? It's also...

The entire logic behind AI, right? And just find this sort of AI agents thing that they're like pushing right now. Go listen to our CES coverage and you'll hear a bunch about it. Is like, what if someone just like planned your life for you, right? What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and it would tell you how to live? And this is...

You know, this is also the structure of how cults work. Like, this is why cults have been able to attract people that, like, I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them. This is why there's so many engineers in cults. Because it's like a bunch of people who have to make choices constantly. And the cult is like, hey, what if I just, like, made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on with, like, Trumpism, right? Because Trump is...

Also, to some extent, like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore. You just, you know, here is the guy. The guy is going to do the thing for you. This is also if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism. Right. It's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual, the single heroic individual, like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you. And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis of

And exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety. Also, and this is something that is very well documented that, you know, we're not going to get into it in full here, but all of the stuff we've been talking about, about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense that's designed specifically not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening and to make you just give up.

And when you're refusing to make a choice between like, was there a gas attack in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as a false flag? Right. You're refusing to make the choice has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action.

And this has been a really important part of this to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gap it was, right? Was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them. And, you know, now Tulsi Gabbard is like one of the big people in Trump world. Right. I think, what's his name?

I disrespect him by not remembering his name, but I should for the podcast. Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the zone with shit, right? It's sort of the strategy. You just release so much energy

terrible information that it doesn't matter. And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of his, you know, many scandals is he would just like say the next most outrageous thing. And, you know, you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing. And it was just a sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and, and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it. You get exhausted. And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets and I think like that's really, um,

That's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic. We're in the midst of a pandemic. COVID has, is in another wave that like no one has named right now. And no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic during the election of 2024. Yeah. So part of what's been going on too, is that there has been this mass push by the Biden administration and the Democrats to make us forget what happened in 2020 in terms of the uprising and to make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which, you know,

continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy, right? It was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be forced back to work. How do you force people back to work who, uh,

care about each other and their own safety, you lie to them. You confuse them about what's actually going on, right? So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work. So we had to get over the cognitive dissonance of that. So

So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which like people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know, whatever. And,

Yeah, but on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy born of strength, right? The years of lead paint. This is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power, right? The actual base that put Trump in power, right? And their actual political base is incredibly brittle, right? They are about to tank the entire global economy.

like through by, by putting like 50% tariffs on like every single country in the world, they, okay, let's, let's be accurate here on, on, on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like I'm going to, I'm going to ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the U S imports things from. Um,

Right. So like, you know, this is how you resist. This is how you resist your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself. But, you know, they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right. These fucking arrogant bastards have sown the wind and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwind. The

The basis of this fucking... Of this entire strategy... You know... And I ask you this... Like, dear listener... Do you think these people can hold... 330 million people in line by sheer force? No. Of course not. There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population... That has ever existed in human history. Right? This strategy...

Is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance. Yes. If they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation, right? They need you scared. They need you confused. They need you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you to forget that as the old song says, in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded golds.

greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold. They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old where the union makes us strong. This is the entire fucking thing, right? If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization. Yeah, exactly.

And the thing is, right, the thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma, that means that you, just literally any random person, can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing.

The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what? It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do, for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things.

And they are fucking terrified of this. Their entire strategy is to make sure that you simply do not do this. And every single one of you has the power to do this. And I know this because I also was just some random dipshit. Like, I was just literally a random college student, right? Like, I was just some asshole. And I just started doing things, right? And I got together with my friends and we fucking, we made a tenants union. And we did anti-ice stuff. We did all of this shit.

And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you. We just, you know, decided one day we were going to do it and it happens. To return one last time to David Graeber, one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently. And together we can do that.

Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important.

And actually, when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices and to make decisions. Yeah. Because you would know what you need for the next step or you'll have an idea of it. You might make a mistake. You might be wrong. But each step along that way, like it's an easier way to do this and to feel the power of real choices rather than the false choices of like, do you want your AI from Grok?

Or do you want it from chat GPT? Right. And obviously like that's a joke, but, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped. We get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very, very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the reason that

that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution and the guillotines which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French when the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Haiti and it has been punished ever since.

The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, this flooding, the zone was shit as Mia says, is a, is from a position of weakness because when they were strong, they,

When they were strong, Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country, and he can just go on hope. And he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular. Even through a huge economic collapse, right? That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence. And I use the phrase advisedly. And there are a lot of holes. And they have drunk the Kool-Aid. The right has drunk the Kool-Aid. They don't know...

The difference between Democrats and anarchists. Not really. They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do. Their philosophers do. But the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move.

That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them. And that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness in many ways. The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were in previous times. And they're going to have to be of necessity because MAGA is basically, you know, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands on you, like you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like you...

you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any, any trouble, like you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that, but there's a lot to do and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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