It Could Happen Here Weekly 164
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I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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, it's James coming at you with a pretty nasty cold here. I wanted to share with you that Wildfires has swept through Los Angeles in the last couple of days while I'm recording this. Thousands of people have been displaced, five people have died that we know of so far.

Thousands of structures have been burned and many, many people in LA will be finding themselves out of their homes with nowhere to go with very few resources. If you'd like to help, we've come up with some mutual aid groups who you can donate to and we'll be interviewing one of them on this show next week. So if you'd like to help, the three places where we suggest you would donate some cash are The Sidewalk Project. That's thesidewalkproject.org.

Ktown4all, that's letter K-T-O-W-N-F-O-R-A-L-L-D-O-R-G, and Aetna Street Solidarity. You can find them on Venmo or I think on Instagram as well. That's A-E-T-N-A-S-T-R-E-E-T-S-O-L-I-D-A-R-I-T-Y. All right, I'm going to go rest my voice. Order in the court, order in the court.

Justice Robert Evans presiding. I see we have a fine jury here to take questions from the audience of our daily news show, which is also my courtroom.

Everybody get it? Because I'm a judge now, legally. Because that's how the legal system works. All those rumors finally have come true, huh? No, municipal judge, Garrison. That's not a fed. Okay, okay. Municipal. You're right, you're right. I will now, for the rest of my life, be able to say, when people ask questions, well, as a man of the law...

Which I'm very much looking forward to. Not only able to say, Robert, but quite likely to say. Anyway, that's all I got. All right. This is the It Could Happen Here Q&A episode. We've got... What are we calling you now, Robert Evans? What's your title?

The Honorable Robert Evans. And I actually did get the judge who made me a judge sent me a gavel, but I didn't grab it for this one. So I just used, I have the barrel and lower receiver from an antique sawed-off shotgun that belonged to a bootlegger, and I just sort of...

slam that into my table. Great. I'm sure our editor will love that. Yeah. Yeah. But before we broadcast, so you have a sort of shotgun. It's not, it's not functional. It's been destroyed. I see. I see. Good. Didn't want a little Ruby Ridge moment. Yeah. We've

We've got Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and the dishonorable Robert Evans. And Sophie Lichterman. Oh, yes. It me. Yeah. We're going to do some questions. We posted it on our Blue Sky. If you're not following us on Blue Sky, we are on there. Blue Ski. One does not post on Blue Sky, Sophie. One skeets. I really hope that's not true because that's really embarrassing. Unfortunately.

They really tried to get that off the ground. I don't see anyone actually using skeet. I saw someone using it in French and it was a real moment.

Hi, are you Skeet? Garrison. Instead of saying send tweet, now I just say send Skeet in conversation. Everyone loves it. Do you re-Skeet? Is that a thing? Yeah, I guess you do. I guess you do. And we're moving on. I'm just going to throw out some of the questions we received online. I'm not even going to say the name of the app again because I'm afraid being labeled as an old Garrison's embarrassed by me, I can tell.

I didn't say that. But you thought it. But you thought it. I didn't think that. You did. Any advice for someone with a desire to do some hobby or freelance journalism in the coming few years? I want to actively fight for equality.

Also, thank you for your questions, everyone. I don't thank you for your questions. I'm actively angry at you for your questions. That's why you're the dishonorable. Yeah. Start rich if you want to be a freelance journalist because you progressively become poorer. I have funded my journal. I get I love whenever people ask me questions like, how did you convince Cracked to send you to Iraq? I

I didn't. I bought plane tickets. Like, being an entertainer has always been what's funded my journalism. I guess my advice would be get really autistic about something. Problematic. Just like one thing. Just one thing. I get like...

really into it to the point where it kind of takes over your life your personal life starts fading away it kind of blends into your whole state of existence and only then will you actually get good at that thing. Yep.

Yep. That's my advice. And then you just take one thing at a time. And every few years you kind of change the scope of the thing that you're getting really autistic about. But that's kind of how I've rolled. And it's been it's been OK. Yeah. You just finished 36 hours of digging into the life of a school shooter. And I also built the back of my career spending hours and hours digging through the online lives of mass shooters. And you don't have to do that.

But you do have to do that thing, which is, yeah, exactly what Garrison said. You have to pick a very narrow thing and make it your life. And not just a random thing, but like a thing that you think is important. Yeah. And that people don't, other people don't understand how important it is. And if you make yourself, there's a fella, his blog is called We Hunted the Mammoth, Dave Futrell, who's been covering what we call the manosphere for like

more than a decade before anybody else in journalism was taking it seriously. Yep. You got to do that kind of thing. If you do that kind of thing, you build a name for yourself and that can allow you when the thing that you're obsessed on becomes a big story, being first to have something meaningful to say about it can provide you eventually with the opportunity to cover other things.

Yeah, I think that's good advice. I would say if you want to get started freelancing, it's a good idea to join the IWW Freelance Journalist Union. You can learn a lot from people who are freelancing there. You can learn who not to pitch, which editors are toxic as fuck, which is a surprisingly large amount. Yeah. You can learn which email to send your pitches to and how to pitch if you're not familiar with how to pitch. I also teach sometimes journalism workshops at a community college. So if you have a community college near you, you might be able to get some either free or very cheap pitches.

sort of advice and the real like nuts and bolts of journalism, like sending pitches and stuff like that. Cool. What is the consensus on what the next Trump administration will do on the first day or first week? All of us just look like we're in pain. Yeah.

Who the fuck knows? Like, it's chaos. It's bad. Yeah, I'm not foreseeing good things. There'll be a lot of executive orders that are, you know, probably bad. Things that aren't great. Yeah, I think that he's going to try...

to do as much of what he's promised to do in terms of particular, not in terms of everything he's promised, but in terms of going after immigrants. He's going to do as much of what he's promised to do as he possibly can. Now, that doesn't mean he's going to actually deport millions of people. There are like some just practical limitations based on the capacity of the institutions he'll be using to do this. And he could get, there's a very good chance things will get bogged down and whatnot, but like he will try.

Yeah, that's my take. Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen pretty quickly is I think he's going to start moving on tariffs very, very fast. Yeah. If you're planning to buy a computer, go ahead and grab that fucker now if you can. If you're getting anything from overseas, you should get it in the few weeks that you still can. Yeah, if it has a battery, it ain't made here.

I had my annual physical today because otherwise our insurance screws us over. And my doctor was like, you should try to get as many prescriptions filled before the end of the year, before things come up, just in case. There you go. And, you know, that's not terrible advice. Yeah. I think in terms of executive orders, he will...

try and further restrict access to asylum, try and further change. There are things he can do by executive order with ICE and CBP in terms of how they operate that he will try and do. It's not impossible that they will try and again, immediately mobilize public health law against migrants like he did in 2020, right? Yeah. Those things could all be done without congressional support. We made a whole podcast about this, but Stephen Miller has suggested that they might do some of those things. So

Yeah, not impossible. Probably won't be a great day. Somebody's getting fired the first week. Probably first day. Yeah, I mean, I've seen the fact that the FBI director is stepping down, pushed as like an act of resistance because it means that Trump now has to actually go through like Congress to get it done. I don't know if

Yeah.

And I think that's what you're going to see overwhelmingly. I think that he's going to probably probably will not immediately act against the press and in a legal sense as the president, they will do that. But I think he's he's going to he's already suing differently. And I think that that's going to be kind of his his focus there for a while, just because there's a lot on his plate. But I think he there there will be attempts like the fuck with libel laws and stuff, especially as things go on.

Several of you have asked about the Android ad free version subscription channel, and I want you all to know that it will happen next year. I have been trying to get this to happen for two years now and for decades.

unforeseen reasons. It just keeps getting roadblocked, but it is happening. We're just waiting on a couple final things to get into place. So that will be happening hopefully very soon into 2025. I will update everybody as soon as that's possible. And I'm so sorry it's taken so long. I want you to know I have worked so unbelievably hard on this. Miserably hard. Yeah, we've seen it.

Sophie has. It's been a nightmare. Harder than I have worked on anything else this year. Like, it's been nuts. Yeah. And here's the thing that sucks. For no reason. No reason at all. Not that there's no reason to launch the app. There's a great reason. There's no reason it should have taken this long. Correct. But we can't say any more for reasons that are also equally frustrating. I

I'd like to say in general, folks, there's a few things that get brought up a lot. It's like, why haven't they done this yet? Why haven't they done this yet? We're talking like technical things or like, you know, things like a like a paid subscription. And they're like, why haven't they gotten around to it yet? And the answer is always some infuriating bullshit based on some bureaucracy bullshit, some bureaucracy, some legal shit where you're like, you don't actually realize it's illegal to do this if you if you do it this way or whatever. Right.

like some sort of bullshit that makes it impossible. It's not that we, we, we want to make this is it as easy as possible for people to have the best listening experience that we can afford to provide them. But there's a lot of annoying bullshit that exists for reasons beyond our comprehension. Sorry. Anyways, here's ads, unless you have an iPhone and subscribe to cooler zone media on Apple. All right, we're back.

How do you each motivate yourself to write or do your jobs? I get asked that question all the time, but I'll let each of you tackle it. While this is a communally hosted show, I feel like each of you do very different things. So your answers are going to be

be all over the place so garrison oh well i mean paying rent's a great motivator yeah um yes yes understated this is this is a big thing that a lot of people who want to be writers but have never done it for a living miss is that all of your favorite writers who do it for a living a big part of how they get over fucking writer's block is they have to pay rent

Yeah. Or a mortgage. Turns out that helps. It's a quite compelling motivator. And sometimes it does require the assistance of...

you know, caffeine or other things. I have a variety of playlists to help me when I'm in like different moods. I definitely will about, you know, maybe twice a month. I just do a complete like a complete body check to my sleep schedule to get a special project finished. And that's just kind of part of the deal, at least in terms of how I work. And not everyone does it this way, though. Maybe people are more healthy than me.

Yeah, for me... Okay, so the easiest way something gets done is just pure rage. I get really angry at something, and I can just do it. Like, it just comes out. Yeah, anger's a great motivator. It's awesome. The other fun one is pure joy at something funny happening. Like, the Shinzo Abe assassination. Easiest writing I've ever done in my life. Sometimes it just flows. Yeah. Yeah.

Other times, it's just like there's a deadline and everyone is counting on me and I have to get it out. And I've gotten to the right level of sleep deprivation where I can just do it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance. But yeah. Yeah.

And then the last thing, and this is the sort of the serious one is that like this, you know, I mean, I do some organizing stuff too, but like this, this is the thing that I have to do that can materially affect the world, which is a very, very weird thing to say about a podcast, but I've seen it happen. Right. I've seen all of you go and do things that wouldn't have happened. And I've, you know,

It's a weird situation, right? Because my motivation for doing this stuff is the chance that you will make the world better. But I've seen it happen and I have to continue to believe that the thing that I've been doing for all these years, this project of building a very large hammer and deploying it against our enemies can work and will work. And that is, you know, that's how I get out of bed every morning.

We're building the hammer and we're swinging it. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Very large hammer would be a banging name for a podcast. I agree. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, there's a there's a great speech in the comic series Transmetropolitan about how journalism is a gun that you you wire up to your eyes and your ears and several other organs in order to shoot at the world. And

That's, I think, a good way to keep yourself doing it when it feels like you're just shouting into a void. Yeah. I really like the process of writing. I like telling stories. That makes me happy. And I feel so lucky I can do it for my job. I don't particularly like receiving trauma.

which I also do for a job. Really? It can be. Sometimes I can't sleep. So many people trusted me with their stories, especially this year, that they didn't have to, and sometimes a great personal risk. And it's a massive privilege that they trusted me with those stories. And I think I owe it to them to do my best to tell those stories as well as I can. And like, as Mia said, it has...

has materially changed the world. Like the amount of people who listened to our podcast and came to the border to help last year when we really desperately needed help. People who just like on Sunday night gave their money, which I know like none of us have enough money right now to help people who are displaced in Rojava. Like,

All that stuff really makes it feel like if you tell a good enough story, people will care. That's always what I felt. Like if you could just get people to see it, if people could be there, they would care. And if they care enough, they'll do something. And I've seen that be true with people who listen to the show. And that really makes me happy. So I want to keep doing that. Yeah, for me, it's two part answer. The first part is that I genuinely give a shit about everything that we put out.

And what we do is not really while it is a job, it matters so much. And the second part is if I don't do my job, the amount of people's lives that that impacts is a lot of fucking people. And I give a shit about each and every one of them.

So I'm going to keep doing my job so that everybody else can keep doing their job. And maybe we make a difference in this world, this fucked up crumbly world. Robert, did you have anything to add? You were speaking and then I talked. Did I have, did I already not give an answer? You gave an answer. That's why, but you were starting to speak. Oh yeah. I, I do it for the fame, baby. Great. Next.

What episode or episodes were your favorite this year to make or otherwise? Yeah. My favorite this year were definitely James' series from The Darien Gap. That was an incredible series. I'm so unbelievably proud of it. James had been trying to do that work for a long time, and I'm happy that we were able to fund it and James was able to do the incredible reporting that he did.

I'm also quite proud of Robert Garrison and I surviving the RNC and DNC. The RNC was a good time. Like, legitimately was a good week. I had a great time fooling the worst people in the world. It was the DNC that fucked me up, yeah. Yeah. Same. I was, like, destroyed emotionally after the DNC. Yeah. The DNC was really a huge bummer. And then...

Mia's covered some of the most important labor stories that like nobody covers. Absolutely. Yeah. And like without those genuinely like nobody covers like small labor stories or big labor stories. And she's always on top of that beat. And yeah, I also really just like Robert's

Don't panic episode. Something. Yeah. Some great writing, my friend. I answered. Now everybody else has to. I'll start with Mia. There's weirdly a few this year. Cool. I normally isn't. I like the Boeing ones. That was fun. Yeah. The one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview Dr. Julia Serrano, who.

If you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it. Great book. Yeah. Whipping Girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the... The concept of misgendering is from that book, right? The language that we use to talk about transness today is directly her. And so few people have ever read the book. So few people even know who she is. And...

Getting a chance to talk to her was incredible. And I'm also really happy about the organizing one that I did because I've gotten so many messages from people who were just like, oh, wait, my knitting is useful to organizing? And I'm like, yes, yes, it is. Your knitting, you're so incredible, staggeringly useful. Yeah, so I'm proud of that one. Yeah, let's take a quick break. Then Garrison, Robert, James, you can answer that question. And we're back. James, how about you?

I'm proud of doing the Darien ones, I think. I'm so happy that we finally got to a place where we could do that, where we could fund that. I've been trying to do that, like I said, for nearly a decade. It's been hard and it continues to be hard. One of the people you heard from in those episodes got deported last week. And so it continues to kind of be emotionally difficult, but

I really liked how many people messaged me and were like, I sent this to my father, uncle, not just dudes, aunts and mums too, I'm sure. And non-binary relatives. But like, well, maybe not because they sent it to their right wing relatives and they learned some compassion. That's always what you want to do. Like I said before, you want people to see it so that they care and so they understand it and they don't just get this stupid Fox News bullshit racism stuff. And so, yeah, that's...

That made me really happy. The reason we're all different on this, by the way, is because we have not done a come 2024 episode. And if we had, this would have been a much shorter segment. James, let me just tell you, I think we can all look forward to a white Christmas this year. Jesus. Jesus, mother fucker. Isn't this going to be coming out after that? I set him up. It's my own fault. Wow.

I guess I'll go now. I'll just clean out the aftertaste of that.

That was even worse. Thank you. I think I started out pretty strong with police drones. Even more topical as we record this now, as New Jersey is about to get completely abducted, I think, by alien aircraft. Yeah, there's no one left in New Jersey now. They've all been taken away by these unidentified drones. That actually happened three days ago. It just took a long time for the rest of the country to notice or care. Yeah.

Bruce Springsteen hasn't made a song about it, so we have no way of knowing. Besides the mass hysteria of the New Jersey drone panic, police drones are a real problem, and those are going to be increasingly so. I was happy with my reporting.

on that at CES and then I guess I mean to echo Sophie I had a great time at the RNC it was fun a sentence I never thought I would say yeah and particularly the RNC Grindr episode I still think is pretty good it was pretty great it was a banger the amount of places that Garrison and I snuck into at the RNC

A time. It was really dangerous, too, because I was having to do my RNC research next to Robert and Sophie the whole time. And oh, boy, like a minefield scrolling through that app. An experience, to say the least. Any thoughts on the proposed 2028 general strike? How are people feeling about that? I'll start with Mia. Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good idea. Like, there's definitely sort of...

And I'm immediately going into this naysaying a little bit. There's definitely problems with it. It's going to be extremely hard to execute because we just don't have a modern history of doing that in the U.S. And even some of the successful ones in the last decade that people have pulled off haven't been that effective. But on the other hand, as something that we, you know, a concrete thing that we have to organize towards that has a bunch of like pretty large unions behind it already.

I did an episode about that a few weeks ago. I don't know, a couple months ago. I don't remember when I did this episode. I'm sorry. I can't remember anything I've ever done. But I think it's a good opportunity to connect a whole bunch of different kinds of organizing together, both in terms of sort of labor and in terms of the support work you need for that. So, yeah.

Yeah, cautiously optimistic. Anyone else have anything they want to add? The time to start figuring out those logistics is now. It's not waiting until 2027. Yeah, I agree, Garrison. I think that the fact that there are serious people who represent serious unions talking about it

is part of why it's one of the things that does give me a degree of hope. We're going to have to start working now towards it. It's not going to be simple in any way, shape, or form. If they see it coming, they are going to start trying to criminalize things preemptively. If it is something that even looks like a real possibility, they're going to come after it with everything they've got. And it's one of those things where

Maybe if the midterms go well for Democrats, maybe Democrats stop that. But it's just as plausible and probably more plausible that Democrats line up with Republicans to attempt to criminalize something like that. Yeah, it's strange to me.

be seeing something like this organized so far off. Like it's not something where any of us are familiar with. Which it has to be, to be clear. Yeah, it has to be. Barring like an actual coup, that's the only way you get a general strike, right? Like either something so...

earth shattering that everyone's so everyone's ready to risk it because they're already in danger or you take the time and you plan that you do it properly but it's just not something we're familiar with i love the general strike i'm always going to support a general strike uh i'm excited to see a general strike but yeah we have to put in the work now yeah the only responsible way to characterize the organized left in the united states is a complete and utter failure

like it has it has been a calamity for the causes that it it seeks to uh to represent

And a lot of that is because of like fucking bullshit online clicktivism. You know, we're all going to do a general strike. Everybody, everybody get ready next week. We're going to do it. You know, shit like that is, is it's just so deeply unserious. And if we're going to take the momentum and the energy that exists and the number of people who are angry and who, you know, and that number of people will be increasing as the consequences of conservative policies hit home by 2028. Yeah.

Like, it has to be something taken deadly seriously by very serious people who are thinking through the consequences and what's necessary in order to make this feasible, you know? And lastly, do each of you have, you know, a movie or a book or something you would like to recommend?

In 2025, when I finish my book, you should buy it. Yes. But read General Strike. I've been reading a book called Pretente, which is in English, but it's about how San Francisco dock workers blocked a shipment of weapons to El Salvador. And it just seems a very relevant book. And they did it to Pinochet as well. It's easy to read. And like, it just reminded me how important labor organizing is going to be in the next four years and how powerful it can be too. So I'll give that one a little plug. Okay.

Excellent. There's a film called The End Will Be Spectacular, which is about the Kurdish youth movement in northern Kurdistan, in Turkey. It's a really good film, I think, to help you understand the Kurdish freedom movement. And it's worth a watch. It's not necessarily a happy, feel-good film, but I think it's worth a watch if you've recently become interested in that because of what you've heard on the podcast. Yeah.

Yeah, I have a couple. So I'm trans fiction pilled right now. We're giving you fiction from trans authors. Would you say you're transfixed? Wow. I walked right into that one. Drove directly into it like JFK's head into that bullet. Oh my God. Wow, we spend a lot of time with each other. Yeah.

Yeah, the first one I wanted to talk about is The Gunrunner and Her Hound by Maria Ying, which is the pen name of a couple of authors. Okay, so this is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime lord and her new bodyguard, who is also a lesbian, and it rules...

There's a whole sort of like post-apocalypse US thing going on, but they're still in like civilized Hong Kong. It's awesome. It's great. You need more on Hinge Lesbians in your life. Go read this.

The other one is one of the boys. This is forthcoming is going to release May 13, 2025 by Victoria Zeller. And it's about a trans girl who's like the kicker on her football team. And she has to leave the team because she transitions. But then the team needs her back because they don't have a kicker. And it's it's fun. It's a good time. So you should you should get that when it comes out.

Yeah, so I'm actually right now in the middle of a book that I found myself surprised by how much I've liked. It's called When Paris Went Dark, and it is a history of the occupation of Paris under the Nazis. That is a really fascinating social history by Ronald Rosebottom that I found very emotionally affecting, especially in light of...

Some things going on. And yeah, just kind of a fascinating look at the psychology of people, of an entire people kind of grappling with what's about to happen to them in the wake of the failure of the French army and then what happens next.

And then I would also recommend Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr, which is one of the books about T.E. Lawrence that I cited in the T.E. Lawrence episodes. If you are at all interested in the realities of needing to fight an insurgent war. I guess just two recent things I've enjoyed. Finally finished The Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Ah, yes. I enjoyed that deeply.

It kind of picked my Twin Peaks The Return brain, so that was pleasant. And for a more recent release, Luca Guadagino's new movie Queer, adapting the short story by William S. Burroughs, I found this movie to be utterly fascinating and transfixing, to use the term from me, Robert.

I don't have much else to say about it because I would rather people just watch it and take away what they want to themselves. But it got me thinking a lot about the lack of meaning inherent to identity and why I hate the term queer bodies. So yeah, good movie.

Awesome. I just have one movie to recommend, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time. The original 1973, 72, 73, 73, The Wicker Man. Not the fucking Nicolas Cage version, the original version. And if you have a local theater that plays old movies, a lot of times they'll play it in theaters, and I highly recommend that experience.

It's really fun, especially at the end. I see it in theaters or watch it at least once or twice a year and vibes are good. Yeah, that's it for our Q&A episode. Thanks for submitting and goodbye. Bye.

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I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is our 2025 predictions episode. We were starting to bicker off about what we predicted last year and I was talking about the things we predicted. And one of the things I predicted early on, I was like, I think Kim Kardashian will be part of the Trump cabinet. And like, honestly,

honestly goals yeah at this point but i'm not that far off though like because essentially what he has done is he's basically tried to go for people that are good on tv it's true it's true and like going off of that reality tv energy finally we will acknowledge the armenian genocide oh

I was vibing, okay, James? I was vibing. No vibes allowed. No vibes allowed. Genocide. Just, I know. James. All right. Vibe-icide. God. All right. I'm

Mia Wogg's here. I'm Sophie-Lindgren Garrison's here. James Stout's here. And the dishonorable Robert Evans is also here. I judge that nickname bad. Jesus Christ. Wow. Let's go over some of our terrible 2024 predictions just briefly. Now, unfortunately, there was a lot of election ones, which were very sad to listen to. Oh, no. Now, we were correct about many things. We did talk about how...

Harris would probably be a really bad candidate to run against Trump. Totally forgot about that. We did. We did. Yeah. Huge dub for us. Massive L for the country. Oops. That brief period of time when Biden stepped down, it really felt like it might be. I mean, she did better than he would have done.

Yeah. Well, I think that's just because we were still reeling from that debate so bad. Yeah. That like anything was like, oh my God, there's like a lifeline. Look at how she can walk 30, 40 feet at a time. Exactly. A sentence. Good God. None of us picked Vance specifically at that point in time, but we did pinpoint Trump's orbit

and his campaign crew pretty well. Mia predicted that RFK Jr. could be a Trump VP pick, and though he didn't become VP, he essentially kind of took over the VP campaigning role from Vance in August. Yeah, because Vance was so bad at it.

We all decided that like Vivek was simply like way too loud and like obnoxious. So Trump would like find some other spot for him. Stand by that. And that's what happened. He's still in the orbit, but he's not super close. So if he talked about possibly Kristi Noem as getting linked in with Trump, maybe for VP. Now that didn't happen for VP, but Kristi Noem is in the cabinet. Good job past me.

Yeah, and Robert said that he would not be shocked if Trump got close with Tulsi Gabbard. Oh, Robert. And... Alas. Other less good predictions. I predicted that a Daily Wire host would get pied. Unfortunately, did not come to pass. There's still time. It's still 2024 as we're writing this. Not when this airs. Not when this airs.

Yes, Kim Kardashian getting into politics didn't really happen. She kind of stayed at her regular coast level. Sorry, Sophie.

So far. Trust me. She did all those things when Trump was elected the first time where all of a sudden she was like with other lawyers trying to get people out of jail by utilizing Trump. Yeah. I mean, and she was doing that with the Biden campaign as well. Not as visibly. The Harris campaign. She was meeting with Harris multiple times. She kind of stayed at this like distant but like talkative place. That's the Kardashian way. Distant and talkative. Yeah.

Speaking of, speaking of, your other prediction was that people would start forgetting about the Nazi stuff and Kanye would put out a well-received album, which kind of happened. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit. God, I haven't thought about Kanye in so many months. It was really nice. Well, it's over now. It was really nice. Thanks, Garrison. Lastly, my failed prediction is that if Trump won the election, that there would be two solid weeks of rioting, which simply did not happen. Yes, nothing happened. I just think it's actually... Nope.

kind of interesting. And we will maybe unpack that in the coming months as Trump's second term kind of settles in. I'm sure we will kind of revisit why we think this did not happen. Certainly, I'm curious about what Inauguration Day will look like. But yeah. Oh,

That was a lot. Also, sorry, Morrissey is still alive. David, David, um, scavenge is still alive. Putin is still alive. And, uh, though James did say that Assad would eat it. And though Assad didn't die, he kind of, he kind of did eat it. Well done. Well done. I mean, James, yeah, that's, that's gotta be the biggest dub of the year. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. Damn, I'd forgotten all about that. Really happy with myself now. James, I'm so proud of you, buddy. You got to pick another one this year. Min on long, baby. He's next.

I guess let's start with some kind of dictator predictions. What do we think will happen to a dictator in 2025? Which is going to die, do we think, or just general dictator predictions? Dictator predictions. Maybe we get a new one. Maybe we get a new fancy one. I don't know. Yeah, something's happening in January.

I have two. Well, one of them, I mean, it's kind of a hack one, but I don't think the Junta of Myanmar makes it out of 2025. Yeah, I think not in the version it is today. Yeah, that's the hack one. The other one is another Assad one. I think someone actually does assassinate Assad. Well, he gets too full of himself and he goes to Abu Dhabi and some Muslim Brotherhood guy just whacks him. Yep.

Okay, my Assad prediction is he becomes a Russia Today host. That's my Assad prediction. Oh my gosh. Yeah. He's going to open his ophthalmology clinic. No, I mean, I think he's going to get signed to host a podcast by a little network you might have heard of called Cool Zone Media. Congratulations, guys. Let's bring him on. Sophie, get him on the Zoom. Tell him he can hop in the room now. Boom.

Bashar, baby! We are merging with Tenet Media to bring out our friend, Asar Al-Assad. Welcome to the pod, Bashar.

He's actually doing a whole media tour with the Pod Save guys next week. That's got to be fascinating. Pod Save Bathysyria, the most cursed podcast in the world. My dictator slash world leader prediction is that this might be Netanyahu's last ride. I was thinking. From your mouth to whatever fucking clot is working its way through his coronary system. God, in

In a year, I really fucking hope I'm right. We all do. I don't know what else to say there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a big thing for the world. Yeah. I mean, we are verging into not doing predictions, just doing hopes and dreams. Yeah. Well, I did Morrissey like that last year and we didn't get it. And I'm sad. We need some hopes and dreams out in the world, I think.

Fair enough. Yeah. Do you know what else we need, team? Money. From these advertisers. That's right. And we are back.

All right, Garrison, what's next? So usually in the middle of these prediction episodes, I like doing our third annual death segment. Who do we think will die? And I guess we kind of touched on this briefly, but I don't think we actually secure death for any of those people in our predictions, just that they would have circumstances change. Though, for this year's death segment, we have a bit of a twist. So it turns out about two years ago,

On Spotify Rap Day, we all woke up to the news that both Angela Badalmenti was embarrassingly my number one Spotify artist that year, but also that Henry Kissinger died. Honey. And this Spotify Rap Day, we woke up to the news that the UnitedHealthcare CEO was gunned down in New York City. So...

Spotify Wrapped 2025. Who's dying? Who's dying? On Spotify Wrapped Day. On Spotify Wrapped Day. So this is like what? Late November, early December. We don't really know. Spotify Wrapped Death Day predictions. So long.

farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye, Mitch McConnell. Oh, that's a good one. That's an easy one, but okay. I'll give it to you. I'm thinking like,

Who's got to get through most of the year but not finish it out, you know? It's tough. I'm going to make my call Tayyip Recep Erdogan, you know? That's my hope. That's a long shot, I know, because he doesn't seem like he's in bad health. That's a big one. Kissinger was a long shot, too, because he was arguably immortal. He kept living for so fucking long. Oh, yeah.

So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye. Elon Musk. I was going to say that. I think he might die. You think we're finally going to get that drug overdose, huh? He just seems to be spiraling so hard right now. The spiral's mad real, yeah. He's getting everything he wants, though. But I mean, that also... It's true.

Sometimes that's dangerous. Yeah, especially if you are addicted to a drug that you can get in unlimited pure quantities and no one will ever say no to handing it to you. We have some more Musk predictions for later on the episode. Okay. But I can see of some, you know, like famously the Secret Service, you know, not...

Not great at hiding their own drug problems. I can see possibly with Musk entering a new level of comfort, maybe the spiraling a little too far out of his control. He and two secret service agents are found dead with fentanyl infected bloat. Or, you know, maybe a SpaceX launch goes really wrong.

Who's to say? Who's to say? Damn, I gotta think of who my Spotify-wrapped day death is. I have a long shot.

My long shot is that sometime on Spotify Rap Day, JK Rowling sees a trans woman just like existing and gets so mad she has an aneurysm and dies. No. She's looking through the Spotify raps and she knows that trans women make the best music. And she sees and gets so mad she just kills over.

She transvestigates every single female artist on the Spotify rap list and dies of sleep deprivation doing so. Her own fans start transvestigating her. This just drives her off the edge. Okay. I have a real long shot here, but I can see how it could happen.

So we're in like what, like month 10, 11 of Trump term two, right? The right-wing Nazi content creators are settling into their kind of groove. Some of them aren't really happy at Trump not like carrying on all of his big lofty promises.

And one disgruntled fan of Nick Fuentes does something crazy on Spotify Rap Day. And that's my prediction. Is that somehow some really weird stalker or fan does something to Mr. Fuentes. Just pure prediction on like...

just like what would be the oddest, oddest thing to happen, but something that could totally make sense. Maybe it's like an old, like a Kanye fan, you know, from Kanye and Nick from his Nazi era. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I, I feel like it's, it's his fandom is getting close enough to pull some like weird, crazy shit like that on like a weird, like on like a, on like a deeply parasocially destructive level, like Stephen King's misery. Uh,

A misery happens to Nick Fuentes, but he doesn't make it out. That's my Spotify wrapped prediction. I have said for years, Nick Fuentes is going to go down. Live. Maybe live. He's going to go down like George Lincoln Rockwell. It is not going to be like an enemy of his that does it. It's going to be a result of his incredibly messy personal life. Yeah. Like someone is going to take him down. Mm-hmm.

Like, it's that. Yeah. Yeah. That feels right. Do we have a non-categorized predictions? Is it that time yet? Sure. Now that we have finished our Spotify wrapped predictions, and I do not know who my top artists will be. This last year, it was Trent Reznor. So salute that flag. Okay, Garrison.

Challenger soundtrack. That thing fucking bops. I tried to make Robert watch that on the way to the DNC or the RNC. I don't remember. And but he wouldn't watch it with headphones. And so it was just on on the plane. I think it was the DNC. That's terrible.

I think I was reading a Nick Land piece during that whole thing. Honestly, that's a vibe. That actually pairs quite well. I landed completely deranged. It was great. Ready to work. A prediction that I have is that, like,

Trump basically tries to move a lot of the main time he spends to Mar-a-Lago versus the White House. Like, I feel like he's going to make Mar-a-Lago some, like, national monument type shit so that he can take whatever the fuck documents he wants from the White House to Mar-a-Lago and spend as much time there as he wants and make that, like, a national residence or some shit. Winter White House? Yeah. Yeah.

The whiter house. What could you call it? Yeah. So true. So true. I mean, Garrison, no. I'm kind of interested to watch what happens with AOC over the next year because she has definitely become, to a lot of folks, the progressive and on the left, like a villain over the last year. Yeah. And, uh,

I kind of wouldn't be surprised if like in assuming there's still politics in 20 years when we're talking to young people, they think of her like Pelosi. And we're like, oh, you've got to understand when things started out, this was a very different person. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I'm not saying that's a fair way to characterize her now or where she'll go. I'm just saying, like, I wouldn't be shocked if that's the way a lot of folks are looking at it and fucking.

a few years because I'm seeing I'm hearing a lot of that now. Yeah. People are very angry at her over largely Gaza. But yeah, also the fact that she and Bernie both tried to back Biden kind of late in his senescence. Yeah.

Okay, my big one for the year is this is the year the economy finally collapses. Like, this is the year you find out that no company has made any fucking money in a decade. It's all been being pumped up by, like, a deranged combination of interest rate bullshit, a bunch of fucking money from, like, overnight repo purchases, keeping the banks propped up. And I don't know if it's going to be the trade war that fucking blows it up, although I think that will instantly detonate everything.

I don't know. Maybe it's maybe it's a Chinese housing bubble. Maybe the tech bubble finally collapses. Maybe all three of them hit at the same time. This is the year it fucking goes. I've never actually put my name down it on down on this on the show on any other fucking year. This is the year the zombie economy will fall over dead. The necromancy cannot hold. I guess my prediction is that the economy is going to be basically identical to the Biden economy in that we're going to get like fucked up inflation and we're

People are going to be very angry and the number will continue to go up on the stock market because that's kind of what it's designed to do. That's my theory. And the housing market will still be trash. Yeah, and we will never afford homes. And the housing housing is just going to get more expensive. It will be interesting to see Trump's entire all of his backers and his whole media. Like one thing that will be easier for the left.

is really hitting conservatives on inflation as it gets horrible again or continues to suck. Because that's, you know, at this point, just a factor of the economy working as intended. Yeah. That they all have to pretend isn't. Yeah. Before we go to a break, I just want to say the price of eggs will go up. We need to get chickens now. Oh, yeah. This bird flu thing is not going to help with eggs. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. Get your eggs now. Buy thousands of dollars of eggs now. If only there was some kind of device to make eggs that you could have in your own garden. Oh, my goodness. It's time for ads.

I guess to piggyback off of Robert and Mia's predictions there in the economy, my prediction is that once I finally launch CoolZoneCoin this year, I'm going to make it big. The economy is going to go down. I am going to be going up. Everyone's going to start buying CoolZoneCoin because the US dollar becomes worthless. Bitcoin's going to crash too. It's fake. But CoolZoneCoin has real fungible value.

Well, yeah, the thing about CoolZone coin that makes it different from all of the other crypto coins is that it is really based on a fundamentally limited and valuable resource, which is movies from the 90s that I showed Garrison and they actually liked. So, you know, there's there's only so many CoolZone coins that can ever be in circulation.

We're lucky I was in Portland this Christmas because we really stocked up a few more of those 90s classics to bump up the price of Cool Zone Coin going into 2025. That's right, everybody. Wow. Sell your house, buy Cool Zone Coin. Have you seen Hook Garrison? I have.

I have seen Hug. I liked it. Of course, of course. Good, good, yeah. A classic. Have you seen Wicker Man 1973? You know, I actually haven't. I've been waiting to catch it in the theater. We will make this happen at some point. It's necessary. I would love to. I would love to. I bet one thing I think is very predictable border stuff. They will stunt on another caravan of migrants.

And I think it's pretty easy for them to kind of organize that and make that happen. And it will be a way for Trump to flex his border fascism. Yeah. Much like he did in 2018. Maybe they'll wait till the midterms again. There's always a fun border disaster for the midterms. Can I just do one that might not be a prediction, but like a Sophie Hope?

Sure. Yeah, I get it. Something has to happen to those Paul brothers. Oh, Sophie. Oh, yeah, that's possible. Yeah. My prediction for the Paul brothers is that one of them dies within the next five years and one of them lives to be 107. That tracks.

Sure, yeah. They decide to take on Bob Dylan in a boxing match and only one of them survives. I think Bob Dylan will live through this next year. I've just found Bob Dylan's tweets the purest thing you've ever seen. He just tweets about what he's doing. What a hero. No.

Netflix paying Jake Paul to billions of dollars to fight 900-year-old Mike Tyson and then Jake Paul coming in on like a vintage car and spraying his product and it having higher streaming numbers than the Super Bowl. Is that real? Yes. To be fair, that was a rancid Super Bowl. Rancid Super Bowl. This cannot happen.

This cannot be. Most of us just turned in on the off chance that Jake Paul would die. Yes, that is true. That is true. The hope. Or at least get bitten. Yeah, all of us were hoping that Mike Tyson was not in fact 60 years old, but he is 60 years old. So, yeah. God. Yeah.

Something. Something's got to give. Oh, and there won't be a left wing Joe Rogan. Thank you so much. Oh, I don't know, Sophie. As soon as we launch Cool Zone coin, I think we can really. Oh, my God. There'll be somebody trying to be. Oh, Sophie, they're already off. By the way, it's time for me to do our new ad plug.

You've heard of how good elk meat is for you. And you've heard of how liver is a superfood. Well, now try new elk liver steaks. It's just ground up liver shoved inside a steak. I send it through the mail, through FedEx, five-day delivery. It is not refrigerated in any way. No refrigeration. It's better at room temp. Better at room temp. Yeah, better get the healthy bacteria. And it gives you mystical powers. Yeah.

One of my, I guess, more hopes and still partial predictions is that National Guard gets into a scuffle with Border Patrol in some kind of blue state. Yeah. Yeah. Good chance. We have some brave and strong governor is going to is going to salute the troops and send out our proud National Guard boys to fight off ICE.

And that's just a battle I would love to see. I've been wanting to see that ever since Portland 2020. I've been wanting to see National Guard troops fight against federal forces. Two groups of men who don't really know how to use their guns, using their guns. It's going to be amazing. It's a battle I've wanted to see for like five years. Whose plate carriers have the top closer to their nipples? It's anyone's game.

I need to see it. I need to see it. Come on. I would like to see it from a distance because that would be a shit show. Yeah, from a sizable distance. Yeah. General Whitmer, let's go. Let's go. We're expensing a fucking telescope for that firefight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A periscope, maybe. I trust the Iraqi army more than either of those sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen a lot of dudes fire guns while ducking behind a K-beam holding the gun above their head. They love doing that. It does look fun. It does look fun. Yeah.

It is, yeah. I would like to do that. But they kick me out of the range every time because of Woke. How sad. Well, not anymore, James. Yeah, that's also the casualties, yeah. Not anymore, James. Woke is beaten. That's right, yeah. They went Woke, they went Broke. I'm going to buy the range. That's right. We're all far from behind the bench rest now. Mamma mia. Other predictions. Maybe we'll get a good solid couple of weeks of rioting again, like Garrison said. Maybe it'll only take a year or two this time. Ah.

I don't think that anymore. Something will have to change. Yeah. There will have to be a material change in either organizing or social conditions. Because people will need to either be vastly more desperate than they are right now, or they will need to have a specific reason to think, well, this time getting out on the street might do something. Yeah. Yeah.

I think we're going to kind of continue the trends that we've been seeing, which points towards a bit of an apathy towards big popular mobilizations and more towards kind of bizarre lone wolf attacks.

Something that could be slightly problematic or possibly darker predictions. I think we'll have a really bad Luigi copycat within the next four months. Sure. Yes. Years of Luigi. It's not going to be good. It's not going to be good. There's probably going to be a situation where some guy either gets... The best case is that he gets killed immediately by the dude's security. The worst case is there's a big public firefight and a whole fuckload of people get hit.

Didn't I predict that there would be a big public crime with a 3D printed gun last year? I think that was the year before we talked about that. Damn, okay, so close. And yeah, this certainly does kind of fit that mold. We'll see how much that gets focused on in the trial and continued reporting. Yeah.

And in that legislation, too. I missed a death. We can also include it in the hope section. Matthew Iglesias, that mother father motherfucker has been standing bullshit for 20 years. It just it cannot continue. He's he's lost a juice a little bit. I think he's he's on the way out. All right. Something very funny did just happen that we should talk about as a team.

Senator Doug Mastriano, a 30-year U.S. Army veteran who taught at the War College, just tweeted an indignant, furious tweet about the U.S. government not being honest with Americans about what's happening with these drones. And the picture of the crashed drone is a TIE fighter that's like a model TIE fighter on the bed of a flatbed being driven through. Yes! Oh my God!

We've all lost our minds. Taught at the U.S. Army War College. They're not sending their best people. Oh, fuck. That's funny. Oh, that's beautiful. That's amazing stuff. That's one of the best things I've seen all year. Oh, God. Fuck me.

Finally, I like the closer predictions a little bit on Trump's cabinet. I think it's pretty safe to say, considering his last presidency, we'll have at least one third cabinet turnover by the end of the year. Yeah. This is something that we've been talking about a lot.

When do we think Musk is going to get the boot? And based on the way Trump's kind of positioned him, I'm not sure if it's going to be as soon as what we all kind of initially thought, because Trump has kept him out of his inner orbit, but pretty solidly in his middle orbit. Like he's not in any like real position, right? Yeah. He has doge, but like, come on. It just came out that he's not going to be able to get the highest security clearance. There you go. Yay!

That's funny. But he has him sitting next to his family at Thanksgiving. Totally. Yeah. No, no, totally. And especially in the three weeks after the election, they were like honeymoon, right? They were neck and neck. And some of that's going to start dissipating. Musk can't get fully booted out because the federal government needs...

and like Musk's other like technologies. So like they will remain friendly, but like they're not going to be in the close position that they are now. Initially, I put that date for being March 20th, 2025, you know, two months after inauguration day. It's enough time to get, you know, for someone like Trump to get tired of Musk's like personality. But I think I might stretch that out a little bit more.

more now than my initial prediction. I think they might do a little bit more of a long-term game here. But that also means that Musk maybe will not have as much constant influence as what it was first looking like in those three months after the election. I think that RFK Jr. is probably pushed out of the picture before Musk is. Yeah, if he tries to get rid of the fucking polio vaccine, it's going to be a real quick trip to the unemployment line for Bobby Boy. Yeah.

Yeah, I really I don't think Trump's that reckless. No, that that would be quite quite a line to get rid of the polio vaccine. Trump's also old. Like he remembers he was he's that old. But if but if RFK Jr. could get the wheat ingredient out of the McDonald's fries, I'd be most obliged.

Oh, yeah. No, I'm sure that he's going to reverse 100 years of corn subsidies and get corn served out of our Coca-Cola. I believe in RFK. Yeah. I feel pretty good about the continuing legality of Kratom as long as he's the HHS head. There you go. All it's going to take is one of Joe Rogan's friends speaking in his ear. We'll be all right. We're going to have legally required DMT for everyone in the country. Yeah. Why not?

I think we need, and I've been saying this for years, we need to put the lithium back in the water. We also need to use those crop dusting planes and just like fill them with Xanax. Just calm everyone down. Take everything back a couple of steps. All right.

I'm going to go pet some dogs. So the podcast is over. Happy New Year, everyone. Happy Happy New Year, everyone. I do want everyone to pick one thing that that that they're going to do this year that will improve their life. However small for me, I'm going to get a new mirror. We're going to all pick one thing. We call that Project 2025. It's what one thing we can do to improve our lives.

our lives, and then by extension, the lives of everyone else around us. So make sure everyone has their own personal Project 2025 going into this next year. I think we will need it. I'm holding my Project 2025 in my arms right now. Your new dog. Your new dog. I adopted Anderson, a sibling, and her name is Truman. Lovely. After our greatest U.S. president. After not the greatest U.S. president. I would never name a child of mine after our president.

After the sheriff in Twin Peaks, that's right. Also no. All right, well, we love that. Off to the house that Vivek Ramakrishnan, who grew up in the Truman Show house? Matt Gaetz. Matt Gaetz. Matt Gaetz, yeah. Named her after Matt Gaetz's childhood home. Matt Gaetz is like totally out of a job now. That's so funny. It's very funny. It's very, very funny. And I feel like we should end on that note. So ha ha ha ha ha to Matt Gaetz. Anyways.

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I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's...

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Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, which in this week's case is the Consumer Electronics Show, is happening here. And yeah, we're here to talk about things falling apart. And again, in this case, that's the tech industry. Because the story, this CES, as it has been for the last several CESs, is that the continuing degradation of big tech as it seeks more places to get money from while providing less and less utility to the people that it needs to give it money.

And every CES, at some point, I find myself face-to-face with something that makes me say, I've now seen the silliest thing I've ever seen. And this year, that experience happened for the first time within 30 minutes of the first half day. And I'm going to talk about that and show some videos to my panelists here, which, of course, are the great Ed Zitron. It's me. I'm here. The pretty good Garrison Davis. Okay, thanks. Okay, all right. All right, buddy. Damn. Damn.

And the supernumerary—supernumerary? Sorry, I messed up the word I was using as a superlative to praise you—

I'll take it. Ed Ongweso Jr. Ed, thank you so much for joining us, everybody. Are you ready to see some of the dumbest AI-generated videos that you've ever seen? Sure. Nothing would fill me with more pleasure. Excellent. Excellent. Nothing fills me with pleasure. The first panel I sat down today with at 10 a.m. in the goddamn morning was the Hollywood Trajectory Generative AI Timeline 2025 to 2030. Oh, boy. I am fascinated for what they think will happen in 2030. Yeah.

Everything's just got to get better, Garrison. This panel featured a number of luminary thinkers, including Mary Hamilton, a managing director at Accenture, who announced her company's $3 billion investment in AI by dropping this gem. I have a digital twin, and she's constantly evolving, and how she gets used, and what she says, and there's big implications around that. So I think this is a really exciting space to be thinking about turning out.

I like that she just stole Hurley Herndon's thing, but okay. If I said that to a doctor, they'd think I had a concussion. You sure would. This person needs, like, psychological care. You shouldn't be allowed to drive if you say things like that. All right, granddad, you need a blanket. Okay. Let's get you a sit down, all right? Maybe we're taking the phone away from you. Now, I think this is very silly because, again, I think it's just a fundamental mismatch in what people might want from an AI agent and, like, the

the way in which they get talked about. But also, they use digital twin, which is some enterprise software shit. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I'm excited to go see some digital twin technology that I'm sure will make a cheap avatar of me from a picture. I don't like the tech industry code switching. This was, this is the first thing I reported on at CES was there was the

digital twin like back in like 2022 or 2021 there was like one single company in all of CES that was promising like a digital twin and now it's like every other company in CES it means so many different things it means literally a digital representation of anything it doesn't even mean an AI agent the fact

that they're using it in the wrong place is very annoying to me. Yeah, I keep seeing like, they can now make an AI chatbot trained off of your social media presence that's 85% accurate. Oh, I love 85%. As all twins are. And I want to say like, no, they can't. But then you talk to the average person at CES or the average panelist on this particular panel. I'm like, yes, I do believe, in fact, everyone on that panel, you could accurately get 85% of their personality with a chatbot.

For a bit. Maybe a lot higher. Improvement, yeah. Yeah. So I will say, like, that was silly. That's not the silliest thing I saw. Oh. And the silliest thing I saw came courtesy of another panelist, Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level and COO of the company. Okay.

The videos that Jason came to CES to brag about were a collection of the laziest AI slop ever to stain human eyeballs. His most recent big success that you could just see radiating off of him, how proud he was of this, was Coca-Cola's annual Christmas ad.

which last year was produced for the first time entirely with AI. And I'm just going to, if you haven't seen this, who here has seen Coca-Cola's AI? I've seen it. Oh, I've seen it. I guess, yeah, I've seen pictures. I think I may have watched it one time. Okay, well, let's take a little watch. I've watched it a few times to hate it the amount it deserves. We're going to play, there's three different versions of this. Why? We're just going to play one. Well, I mean, that's what it spat out. Oh, my God, if there's three different versions, that's just they saved the product.

Fucking hell. Everyone is the same length of shot. Can you believe this song's AI generated? I can't believe. How could they teach a computer to write the lyrics? Holidays are coming.

I just can't believe we finally have the technology to have three trucks driving somewhere. And a dog wagging its tail with dead eyes. Oh, these two horrible... Squirrels covered in snow! That's not how squirrels move. Trucks with Coca-Cola in them driving down not a street. Raccoons? What the... Why is there a satellite? Oh, they're going to drop the ion cannon on the polar bears. It's all clearly AI. It's all glowing. Like, these city shots of, like...

Snow-colored villages with that... As we're going to see in later videos, AI loves putting smoke in random fires where there should not be smoke in random fires. That's such a bad omen for four more years of a Trump presidency. It's a bleak, bleak thing. That we have even uglier Thomas Kinkade-esque artworks.

Every frame looks like a Thomas Kinkade. It's like they just generated a Thomas Kinkade frame and then badly animated it. And the way that they move is very weird. It looks kind of right, but kind of right looks very strange. It does that all of the scenes, because it's showing you a bunch of, you see a polar bear, obviously. It's a Coca-Cola Christmas ad. You see a fucking reindeer. You see squirrels. You see a dog. But it always is this very AI shot where it just panes.

hands across the animal and it's like glowing and kind of glossy and dead-eyed staring. And they move a little bit but not too much. Like they're not going anywhere with the movement. It's just like they are doing something and that's it. Yeah. You think in 10 years they're still going to have these commercials? No. Because where's the snow going to be? There's just polar bears walking around like...

System One, which tests emotional responses to ads, claims that the initial response to their Christmas ad was overwhelmingly positive. I don't think they're lying about that. I think if you walked up to someone randomly on the street and showed them this, I think they'd be like, oh yeah, it looks fine. It looks like your Coca-Cola ad. No one's watching a Coca-Cola ad and being like, yeah! Wow. I've never had one of these before. It's never a new experience. Not yet.

We need an ad man. We need an ad man for the Coke holdouts. We need an AI Don Draper. Yeah. Oh, do not give them ideas. We got it. What if a company lost $5 billion a year? Yeah, it's just an ad that doesn't work. Instead of going to the movies like Don Draper does throughout all of Mad Men, it just doesn't work and respond to any of your queries. Just Don Draper spending hours watching that looping Christmas video? Fuck.

staring into nothingness. Yeah. So there was like an immediate, pretty immediate backlash to this. Like all of the responses, if you like go to any of like where, where these things live on YouTube, it's just people shitting on them, which he did acknowledge Jason by saying the video was very debated and,

- That classic thing with commercials. - We love debating commercials. - Many things are very debated these days. - A lot of people are saying. - And then he showed us next an AI generated video, The Heist, which was entirely made by a text script that itself was mostly written by ChatGPT. And here's how Jason describes the workflow for what you're about to see.

It took thousands of generations to get the final film, but I'm absolutely blown away by the quality, the consistency, and adherence to the original prompt. When I described gritty New York City in the 80s, it delivered in spades consistently. Well, this is not perfect.

It is, hands down, the best video generation model out there by a long shot. Additionally, it's important no VFX, no cleanup, no color correction has been added. Everything is straight out of VO2, Google DeepMind. What is the model? VO2, Google DeepMind, I think is what he's saying it is. I thought that they had another one. By the way, I'm sure what you're about to show me looks like a dog's arse. It looks like, yeah, New York, exactly like New York at Giuliani's right before he came in. Clean it up.

So this is like the competitor to Sora, I guess. It's the other big video generation. This is brand new. I don't buy for a fucking... I'm not impressed, but we'll see what you guys think. I don't want to poison your reactions. I wouldn't.

Oh god. Okay. There is fire in the street. That's the last time you're going to see the sack full of money. It does not show up again. It's a lot of fire in the street. A lot of random fire in the street. I love when cars go backwards when they're driving forwards. Yeah, was that five wheel? Again, another street fire. I would love to do freeze frames on this. Actually, it's in Gotham.

Why is there so many fires? All right, let's take a shot every time the car's on fire. Oh, my God. And also, take a shot every time he is wearing different clothing and has a clearly different face. Well, the car has changed color three times. He's praising the consistency, and he is dressed completely differently every scene. His jacket has changed since the last one. Yeah, yeah. And again, the cars...

When it shows the cars driving across the screen, they're kind of doing the same thing usually that the animals do in the coke ad. Minimal motion at the best. Yeah. I also love this. Can you believe this music? I also want to just say when it swerved in that thing, it was driving like half a mile an hour. Yeah.

That's how I run. Yeah. Look, an obviously different man. Also, the way he runs is... That's how you run with a gun. That cop was like he had his arms out. Two cops are chasing... Three cops. Look how they're running. They spawned in a buddy. The running is very funny. Yeah, they spawned in a GTA. Okay. What is going on with his feet? Wait. Different levels of facial hair, different...

Different jackets he's wearing, different colors, jackets. Also vaguely different ethnicity. Why did his face just move? What the fuck is going on? Oh my god. What the fuck does that mean? Directed by Jason Zada in big flaming words because again...

The AI only knows how to put random fires on things. Wow, I'm so glad that we have the technology to do a thing where a guy gets chased by the police. Yeah, this would have been impossible before. As he runs at anywhere from one to a hundred miles an hour. I assume they just trained, this was specifically pulling on Scorsese movies a lot. I just want to know about these thousands of generations of script. That is interesting. I am very curious. Because I just don't believe that for a fucking second. Did he just go like...

Yeah, no, that's the opening crawl to just like some generated Star Wars. The dead speak. Palpatine is dispatched to Cops. I assume it's like shot by shot, right? Like each shot is going to require a lot of like iterations. Except the script. It's just... Yeah, I mean, again, like unpacking what he actually is saying is unclear. Because I went to the YouTube video for this and the first five or four comments are, looks like we found the new king of video. Jesus Christ, give it a rest.

Clothes change in every shot. Four to six-year-old boys are going to love it. And still lacks character and vehicle consistency, but we're getting close. Which is the exact same thing people said last year. By 2030, you'll be able to make a man wear the same clothes for an entire video. This has happened before with Sora. When they put Sora out, they're like, check out Airhead. Mm-hmm.

on you saying... Oh my God. And the balloon changes every single shot. It's a different size and color each time. There are just people running in the background sometimes. And then they made a new one and you're like, oh, this is going to be good. It was worse and less consistent. And it...

This is what they think of us. They're like, these pigs will slop up anything. And you can't expect technology to do something as complicated as dress a man in clothing and have him stay in that same clothing over multiple scenes. Hollywood never figured this out. It's so cool that this costs, like, so much money as well. Just burning. There was some fucking GPU melting. Mm-hmm.

in a data center in Arizona that's draining the local water. We're burning down North Carolina for this. Also, there's going to be like 30, 40 companies trying to recreate the same misshapen wheel for the next five to 10 years. And also, the little pigs that watch Star Wars, including myself, they'll notice every minor inconsistency. Do you think that they're going to tolerate

Luke Skywalker's and Watto and all their favorite characters. No, they're going to drive up. Do you think that they're going to be happy office with a cyber truck? Yeah. It's going to be a cyber truck situation. You, I think the issues are twofold, which is like number one, in order to make this shit sell to the people who watch movies, you have to dramatically reduce the average intelligence of people watching movies. You have to give everyone brain damage, which they are.

working on the show. And the other thing is, the models have to get much better. And Jason made a point that, like, every time people would, like, talk about the criticism, he'd be like, look, this is the worst it's gonna look, guys. And...

I was just looking into it. GPT-4 took 50 times as many resources, like 50 times as much energy to train as GPT-3 did. So these are the kind of like exponential increases that we're looking at. So like if it took them so many millions, billions of dollars,

of investment to get to the point where they can make this shitty video, to make anything close to watchable. You're talking about, again, just like lighting on fire, billions of dollars to do what? To make a scene that you could already get like a 26-year-old dude who grew up watching fucking Quentin Tarantino movies and taking cocaine, and you could just give him $60,000 and he'll film that shit for you with an old car. I mean, you could even like...

animate it. I mean, look, you give me a PS4 and somebody's grandmother and I will make them think that they're watching that when I get Red Dead Dottles 6 on there. But also, I just want to read out some of the fucking people that use this model. We started working with creatives like Donald Glover, who I said was washed ten years ago and I'm fucking sick of people. Awaken My Love was a good album. This is America is an objectively bad song. It's a bad song with a great video. Yeah, yeah.

I thought his kind of R&B stuff was very interesting. Anyway, moving on. No, you are right. And of course, The Weekend, and someone called D4VD. Oh, his TV show was great. Oh, yeah. I'll work with creators on VO1 and form the development of VO2, and we look forward to working with trusted testers and creators to get feedback on this new model. How long are you going to get fucking feedback? It stinks. We've got some feedback for you. Yeah, I've got a few thoughts. Hopefully all those people are just getting paid for it.

to tell them words and be like, yeah, sure, I'll take your money. But who's to say? If they give me $20 million, I'm flipping out. Oh, yeah. No, I will turn on a dime. Yeah. Speaking of turning on a dime for money, here's ads. Ah, we're back.

So the next video that our friend, I now feel he's like a brother to me, Jason, puts on was of an AI-generated fictional elderly rock star talking about death. Oh, I'm excited. Oh, I'm excited. We have a computer to do this. Plastic and incapable of dynamic expression as he guzzles randomly from bottles of liquor that flash in and out of existence. Sometimes he lies on his back in empty streets while talking about all of the CGI featureless women that he has loved in his experience.

Exciting life. Wow. Other times he plays stadium shows while obvious GPT written dialogue about aging and death drones on. When the video ends, everybody in the room claps. And as you watch this, I need you to imagine seeing the thing that I'm about to show you all and a room with like 200 people in it all clapping enthusiastically. You should have gone to this in Boone. I don't think I did. I did. I did. I said come the fuck on.

on as loud as I could. It's like me at Rise of Skywalker. Yeah. So here's Fade Out. It's George Carlin. And an old man. Yeah, it looks a little bit like George Carlin. Oh, it's the end from Metal Gear Solid 3. ...

What's he doing? Playing a concert? Grandad, calm down. I love these slash cuts. So many fast cuts. No, these fast cuts are because the next frame was unusable. Yes, actually. Yes, like he drank and the bottle changed in his hand. You can see it starting to happen. What is it? Just anonymous women. Isn't that beautiful music? Listen to that.

Could you believe this is generated by AI? He's just firing a Roman candle into the air. So much time went down.

I like how also the old man does look very different each time. Very different old man. Yep, that's a different guy. That's a different guy? Yeah, that's the emperor from the first Gladiator movie. He's just sort of trotting across the stage awkwardly. The way this model generates running is really uncanny. There he is drinking again. Why is it on fire? Why is there a fire? You see this old rock star drinking in front of a flaming house. The

The AI loves burning buildings. What is this voiceover? I would love to track his tattoos from frame to frame. Also, he's about to eat the microphone. Completely different. I've done it. Yum. Now he's sleeping in a broken Mustang. Ferrari? The classic Ferrari Mustang. A Ferrari Mustang that's in like a pool in front of a mansion, but he clearly hasn't crashed into it. The car is hovering slightly over the pool. Like...

I love this. I love this. I love the work. And he tells us during this, as if we're supposed to be impressed, that Chachi PT wrote 75% of that script. Fucking hell, you'd like to punch that shit up? I can't believe that, frankly. I...

As a bartender, I regret walking into the room to see if people want drinks. This is the better offline bartender. I apologize. I apologize that you had to hit. I would like a drink. I also would like. Yeah, actually, can I have a drink too? We are in the better offline CES suite and we are all drinking. Because I just want to say I'm fucking disassociating after that. I'm so fucking sick. Every year of doing this nonsense and I look at these shit eaters and they show us that and they're like slurp down the slop. Oh my God.

It's hideous. One of the easiest things to find, an old man that drinks. For an idea of like how real this company is, obviously they were one of the companies. They were not the only people who made that Coca-Cola ad. They were one of like three or four companies. It takes four companies to make that Thomas Kip Cade ad. I can't believe it.

They have 622 followers on Twitter. Hell yeah. Or not Twitter, on YouTube. Oh, sorry. I don't have more than that. And all I post is karaoke songs. And this Fade Out is their... Or sorry, The Heist is their most successful video with 56,000 views. Fade Out, which we just watched, has less than 5,000 views. They're not ready. So they're not...

They're not quite ready. It's only going to get better. Yeah, it's only going to get better. It's only going to get better. Famously, things only ever get better. You can get it on the ground floor for a small price of $1 billion. This is like $100,000 a compute. Yeah. Imagine how good it would be with $100 million. If you talk into a coin, it will only get worth more. Yeah. Now, Garrison, I do think you should invest all of your salary. I just did a 16th minute about this one. We can talk about this.

I think I would rather Hawk Tour has a more obvious use case than this shit. Hey, do you want to spend way more money to get something way worse? I actually can't get over the 75% check GPT. No, neither can I. Should it be more? No, it should be. Theoretically, it should be. It should be 100%. It should be 100%, yeah. Which means that a quarter of it was just fucking unusable. No, absolutely.

They're generating individual shots that they're stitching together, and who knows how long it takes to get the prompt right for that shot to work. However long it takes, it was too long because it looks like shit. We're going to watch a video I haven't seen yet, or at least a board, because it's five minutes. We're not watching all this. Oh my god. It's 250 views and came out a week ago. It's called Meneminate.

What? Say that again? Maniminate. What the fuck? Yeah, that's a word. That's a word. Come on now. It's like when you find your cats vomited on the floor. Again, so first we see a diner called Maniminate that appears to be both on fire. He's Blade Runner. Yeah. Blade Runner. Oh, God. And an old lady rises up out of a pile of ashes. That's how mouths work. Where am I? Great AI voice. What is this Phantasmagoria-esque voice acting?

It's me, Harrison Ford. What the fuck is going on? What? I think this is death. This old lady's dead. Oh, that's how I eat. Oh.

Now she's tripping on tomatoes? Oh, yeah. The decaying, sandy diner that exploded has turned into a lively 50s diner. It's popping off. It's popping off. Dennis Villeneuve. Is this a segregated diner? Yes. I only see white people in the diner, Edward. She's going back to the good old days. Yeah. Oh, no, there's a little Indian boy. He is the help, though. Mm-hmm.

Oh, that's natural. The little kid just fell down, and the way it shows falling is that he just sort of deflates. Is that Bjork? And he's up again. Bjork. And he's staring at a girl. Well, that's terrible. Yeah. We don't need to watch any more of that. Who is this for? No one. No one. No one want to watch this. If you watch this and have a positive reaction, they should keep you in a holding cell for a week. I'm deeply unhappy at the time we already spent watching this. Yeah, like, we don't know what you're going to do next, you know? We're building a facility for you. Yeah.

The phrase reality distortion field gets used a lot when we talk about tech. But I really tasted it in that room because all anyone on stage could talk about is how good it looks. And every one of these videos, people are like clapping. They're like, wow, this is amazing. Why do you think they think it looks good? It looks better than an Xbox.

Yeah. And the idea is you typed a thing in and now a thing came out and that's magical. So by virtue of not having humans work on it, it's better than you'd have... Yeah. Okay. There was a moment after this where Jason joked about how, obviously, I don't want to replace actors yet. Wink, wink. Yes. Uh-huh.

And another panelist was like, I think we're going to have to see how some decisions go as to fair use, because obviously this is cribbing from a bunch of fucking Scorsese movies and shit. It also kind of looked like Blade Runner 2049. Yeah, and Thomas Kinkade. Blade Runner 2049 and Denis Villeneuve in general, all of his films have been a massive source for these motion and still generations, so much so that I think Blade Runner 2049 is one of the easiest films to...

like replicate film stills almost like exactly for based on like how like how like load-bearing that film has been for a whole bunch of these models that could be due to a number of factors now I know what you're wondering how soon until we can get a full 90 minute movie that looks like this oh I mean I'm guessing days away no no Jason said probably not at least for a decade or so

Really? Okay. I can't wait 10 years. That's interesting. I don't want to wait that long. What a worthwhile endeavor, though. No, because he could have said shorter. That actually is interesting. He could have said anything. Those chunks in there would have believed him. I think it is like he did have to spend probably hundreds of hours of his precious one human life stitching those turds together. And he's like, it's nowhere near ready.

There's no way I could make a 90 minute movie and kill myself. He is giving himself a lot of time for that. Yeah. Because I've only really seen one interesting generative video thing, but it wasn't a generative video thing. It was they filmed, Brian Eno filmed a documentary and they created, you know, some backend software so that they would be able to do cuts of existing footage and try to focus on different parts of the documentary. But,

I never ever see anything interested in like constructing narratives or to like, you know, teasing, uh, other aspects of the creative process. It's only, let's try to replace, right? Let's try to replace. You can't do narrative with it. And that's the thing. If I would, if I'd sat down there, cause I was sitting, I said this, I was sitting next to a guy from USC who was one of the only people in the room who was like similarly critical. Mm-hmm.

to me of what we were seeing on stage. It was like, look, if they had come down and been like, look, this is how we can plug a script in and it can create a storyboard and you can like kind of see like a crude CGI animation of how the shots will look and that can help you like plan out like, like that's legitimately useful. That's the thing that adds value and can cut costs in a meaningful way to like the production of good TV and movies. But,

But that's not as sexy as like – and they were all talking. There was this like very weird moment where –

One of the panels, Leslie Shannon, who's head of innovation for Nokia, a company that used to make phones and now makes panelists who pretend to be entertained by awkward AI. They also make cameras. They make a lot of stuff. I was just shitting on Nokia. She's like, can we use neuroscience to see how people are reacting to AI-generated videos and then adjust the ending to be like, let's make this resonate more. That way we're helping the creative. And I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

out of your fucking mind. Can we attach electrodes to panelists? To people's skulls? I would have supported electrodes in their skulls, yes. Jesus Christ. I think we should do the monkey Neuralink thing to all of them. And perhaps a pair of calipers. Yes, calipers. We got some skulls. I am fascinated by the skull shapes of that fucking crowd. But also, to say that is...

There's so many things they've said that just, they wouldn't survive a deposition. Speaking of things that wouldn't survive a deposition, the sponsors to this podcast.

Okay, so that first panel was a real moment for me. I went through a couple of more, one of which was on like advertising and AI and was mostly pretty boring. The third panel I went through, though, was called AI Cinematic Spatial and XR. And I just want to actually play you guys. You'll have to cluster around. I would actually believe that was generated with ChatGPT. But like GPT 2.0.

So let's start with this one. AI will be more impactful than the internet? Maybe. I'm leaning yes. It's a trick question. Because it is the internet. That was my answer to it. It is the internet, so no. Although it can run without the internet. So I'm like, oh. There you go. All right. What impact do you mean? AI is going to result in astronomical job losses.

That was the scene I wanted you to hear where they're like, "We don't want to say it out loud," and then everyone chuckles. These people are too fucking smug. Yeah. These people sound too confident and too chummy and too happy to say things like this.

That's not good. I don't like these people laughing about people losing jobs. No, no. They shouldn't have jobs. That's a good place to start. Yeah. I don't like that either. And the people you're hearing from, let me tell you who's in this fucking panel who was just laughing about like… Sociopaths. Well, there will be a… An evolution. An evolution in job loss. Yeah. So the motherfuckers who were on that panel laughing about people losing their jobs…

Ted Shilowitz, literally his name is Shilowitz, futurist at Cinemersion Inc. That's like a J.K. Rowling name. Yes. Rebecca Barkin, co-founder and CEO of Lamina One. Erwin Luber.

Director of Partnerships at Google, Adam Simon, Managing Director, IPG Media Lab, Leila Amir-Sadeghi, Principal Program Manager at Engineering, Microsoft, and Katie Henson, SVP Post-Production at Sphere Studios. So those are the people who were all laughing. Generative AI is good at one thing creatively. It's good at...

streamlining VFX workflow. The workflow of how to do VFX shots. It is. There's aspects of it that's good. The only useful thing it's been used for is making people's eyes blue in Dune Part 2. It's not $100 billion good. It is applicable for changing objects into other objects on screen. It can produce really odd, uncanny effects that could be utilized by a team of human artists really well. What it can't do is generate a short film that

that is in any way compelling as like... I disagree based on what we're saying. Well, that is any way compelling as a piece of art. Oh, okay. And the fact that they're like laughing at how much... These are people who haven't lost enough jobs. They have not. Or had structures fall to the beauty of the flame. Yeah.

Right. Although the AI keeps foreboding that that's coming for them. It wants something. The pernicious flames. I'm going to end on a happy note because the last panel I went to was actually really cool. It was AI and the Crisis of Creative Rights, Deepfakes, Ethics, and the Law. And it featured the first intelligent person that I've seen at CES this year.

Moya McTeer, who is a folklorist and senior advisor at the Human Artistry Campaign. It also featured Duncan Crabtree Ireland, who's the national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG-AFTRA. There we go. There we go. And this was no bullshit. It was talking about all of the different lawsuits that are going on right now, all of the litigation around AI and like the actual strategy for litigating.

And like there was a couple of points where like Duncan was like a lot is going to hinge on some very brave, very famous people choosing to throw down some big dollar lawsuits. Like that's what we need right now. They did talk about the No Fakes Act, which has bipartisan support and gives some legal force to allow people to push for AI copies of themselves to be taken down. And they think there's also some bipartisan possibility to get AI labeling licensed.

like legislation the thing is any of these things should be fucking fatal because if what you have to remove something from a model how the fuck do we do that yeah we don't know you have to throw away the entire model you have to retrain like it's there's no way around it

Yeah. And there was a really good point where kind of at the end of this, part of what I appreciate is, again, there was no bullshit. Like Moya at one point was like, I think it is absolute – it being generative AI is absolutely a net negative for the artistic community. The point is not to get something out as quick as possible. It's like make art.

And this has to be like one of maybe five people who are doing panels at CES who's like willing to say that. Yes. And Duncan got on and was like, look, you can't stop the technology from being invented. So the best path forward is to like try and channel this into a direction that like is at least better for artists. Like there was very little – for most of the people on the panel, very little bullshit –

There was some bullshit from one person on the panel. Okie dokie. Ginny Katzmann, Senior Director of Government Affairs from Microsoft. Oh, I bet. Oh, I bet. That was fun. Oh, boy. So after, there's this whole point where everyone else on the panel is like, yeah, I think it's probably a net negative for artists on the whole. And Ginny comes on, she's like,

Actually, I think it's a net positive. And her example of this is, well, you know, there's a lot of stuff that you couldn't do before that thanks to AI you could do. Like de-aging Harrison Ford for the Indiana Jones movie. Something famously that went over very well. Everyone loved and thought it was a great creative choice. You know what? This is the fucking problem with all of this on top of how shit it is and how expensive it is.

Which kind of AI are we talking about there, dipshit? That's not generative AI. That's not what that fucking was. And they love to use this. And it also steals us from being able to cast a young River Phoenix to play a lovely young... Which is the only thing in the way. Why is River Phoenix getting cast in more stuff, Gary? I'm asking that every day. It would be very unfair.

Well, luckily with the power of AI, we can put River Phoenix. I'm reading through every newspaper sequentially starting in 1834, so I have not gotten to the end of River Phoenix's surely long career yet. It would be really cool. I think he's got some bold ideas. I think this is going to work out really well for Germany. It would be really cool that instead of just doing Young Harrison Ford, they just do a River Phoenix deepfake.

for young Indiana Jones. Look, it's canonical. Great idea. Oh, I love the movies and the future of them too. This is so good. This is so bad. James Mangold, you're a hack and a fraud. So I gotta say, it was very funny because she also suggests, Jenny, we can use animals without causing harm thanks to AI, a thing that no one had figured out how to do before. Nobody had ever figured out how to just like not hurt animals in movies.

That didn't exist before AI. Thank God. Thankfully, AI will never do any harm to animals or the environment. Nobody ask the lobbyists from Microsoft what else the company is doing with AI. Right. With police departments or with fossil fuel companies. Is that bad for animals? No, actually, it's really good. I love it. They need it. They need it.

They yearn for the minds. They love data centers. Great for their habitats. She said, there's issues with employment, but there's lots of issues that fall around that. And I do think you need a balance. And at the end of it, the guy running the panel just says,

Okay. Yeah. That sounds like you guys are saying a bunch of woke shit on this panel right now. All right. Microsoft. Just once, I'd like on the panel someone to go and say, what the fuck do you mean? What do you mean there's just this stuff that you were going to get? I think we do need a balance of some people being fired, like these people, and

other people keeping their jobs like everyone else. Like Moya. Somebody has to lose and somebody has to win. Exactly. That's their entire argument. Somebody has the gun and somebody doesn't. Somebody knows the way the maze works and somebody doesn't. What are you going to say? What? We shouldn't have guns? We shouldn't have a maze where I drop them in and one of them knows the maze and they have a gun? We shouldn't have a gun maze? What are you talking about? We need the gun maze. Now look,

We all like keeping a couple of people in a maze beneath our house. Right. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that. This is just the torment nexus. We keep doing it. It's not even the torment nexus. It's fun. It's a nice maze under my house. They have plenty of space to run. Some of them even like it. Sometimes sunlight creeps in through one of the corners. The Minotaur gets them only sometimes. Yeah.

I'm the Minotaur. Anyway, the gun maze isn't real. But also, most of their arguments mostly just come down to...

Well, you can't make an omelette without breaking it. Like, you have to fucking make people's... You have to break the human drive to create art, obviously, to make an omelette that does not taste good. Yeah, right. An omelette-esque food. It's a piss omelette. Like, there's piss in the omelette. And we had to burn down the Sistine Chapel to make the piss omelette. The computer made it, though. Go on, clap for the computer. We did firebomb the Louvre, but look...

Look at this video of a nameless rock star.

Oh, God. All right. Well, that's the episode. That's all I got, folks. That was my first day at CES 2025. Huzzah. Yeah, this is just my first day. Better Off Line's here all week. I'm going to hear about stuff like this all week, and I think I'm going to be fully joke-ified. I'm going to wake up in the clown makeup on Friday. I'm going to find the funnest thing to bring back for you. I'm going to find an artist to put me in full joke. No, I'm not. I'm going to try to steal that AI-enhanced grill. Yeah.

Can I have this? The grill that texts you. Can I just, like, move this around? I just want to test how it rolls. See, AI grills. Open the door. Open the door. As someone who's done a lot of, like, grilling, done a lot of spoken barbecue, I don't know what an AI would do. Is it going to talk to me in the six hours? Wait, are you trying to tell us here at Zitron that you have grilled meat without a robot texting you about it? Because I just don't believe that. I don't know how I did it.

But I did it. You're never going to go back. Mankind has always dreamed of knowing how to cook meats. No one would ever believe that that happened. But until the robots, it was impossible. Oh, God. We're at the death of innovation. Yeah. The end of technology. A lot of things, maybe. And the end of the episode. Yeah, and the end of the episode. Thank God. You know, everyone else, be the Cybertruck in the...

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Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is really true in a lot of ways tonight. Harrison Davis and I are seated at the glorious, majestical Hotel Name Redacted on the Las Vegas Strip.

We've got a long day at CES. Long day. Listening to panels, catching up with the latest tech news, trying gadgets, and also at the same time texting our dear friends in Los Angeles as unprecedented fires sweep them from their homes.

Literally, the Gettys threatened Pasadena and Santa Monica are both being evacuated as once. It's a real one-two punch of America's favorite tech show in the apocalypse today. How are you feeling, Gare? It's an average day in America. Average day in America. Temperature's not coming down anytime soon. No, no. Well, I'll just take a moment to breathe with that.

So you want to start us off with what you did this morning? I was panel guy yesterday. There was a man of action walking around and mostly trying all the free massage chairs. What did you see this morning? I saw so many AI panels, half of which I left halfway through because I knew they weren't going to be useful for me. Just dog shit. The other half I took notes on and just got sad. But no, today was full panel. Starting bright and early in the morning where I walked into a panel where I heard augmentation, not replacement.

about 20 times in the span of like 20 minutes. Yeah, I keep hearing versions of that too in the AI and Hollywood panels. They would be like, yeah, we want to develop a machine that can read the brains of our viewers and alter the endings of movies, you know, but we see this as a way of augmenting the artist's work. Yes, and the biggest thing I noticed across multiple panels today is an almost like anxiety among these tech executives about consumers rejecting the AI slopification of everything.

And they're trying to find ways to actually force people to start using these products or having them like it. Yeah. And I haven't really sensed that anxiety before. It's all been very, very positive. I think it's a mix of, number one, the money still isn't there where they need it to be. It has not started blooming to the extent that they were expecting it by now. And the other part is...

people are still not happy with this stuff. I'm glad you felt that too, because I almost was like, especially after the election, like I don't trust my feelings on this, that they're really scared. But I really do think there's a piece of that coming through. No, a phrase one of the panelists used this morning was the AI. Like, how

How do we beat the AI ick? And if you're ever saying to yourself, how do I stop having people feel an ick around me? Maybe you should really look inwards. Maybe the problem's you, not them.

You know who doesn't need to worry about quote unquote ick for their product market is people who make things that people like. So, but I heard a lot about, you know, in trying to get people to use these products is like making sure artists don't feel like they're being replaced instead, having their like art production process be augmented with AI and how that can make art easier to make while still keeping the human at the center of AI tools.

And this is just what they talked about for like a while while reiterating that lots of the developments they need to see on AI, they have it on the tech side. What they need to rely on is consumer acceptance to really drive that innovation to see like what they can get away with.

Like how much will the consumer accept the sloppification of art and entertainment and customer service? And all these things are trying to cram AI into. And like, how much worse can you make the world before people stand up and stop you with their fists or guns? And you mentioned something about like trying to like tailor like movie endings for specific people. And I definitely heard some stuff about that. There's this one guy who was, who was like the, the panel's resident, like content creator. He was supposed to like represent like the artist side.

block, even though he's like, yeah, you know, some kind of like AI friendly content creator, though, on this panel. And he talked about how, like, back in the day, you needed to have friends that would like recommend you music. And like the Spotify algorithm is too based on like an echo chamber, which you already like. But now with agentic AI, this allows trust between the consumer and the machine to recommend new music.

I'm like, again, like so much of these AR products is just trying to like replace friendship for these people. Have you tried having friends? Have you tried knowing people? How can you engage with like art and culture without friends? Like how can you like learn more about like what your friends are into, what they like? How can you discover new music just like without that instead of replacing that beautifully human process? Every year at CES, there are points in time where I get that like, oh yeah, 2020 really fucked us up a lot.

2020 really did some lasting damage. I know that was happening with the younger generation before, the iPad kid generation, but that really did a number on some folks. Someone from Meta, Facebook, specifically their Metaverse division, which they're still trying to push for, by the way. Oh, yeah. They're still calling it Meta, which honestly, there's a degree to which I almost respect it, because we are not biting. No one is. Yeah.

But she talked about how they can blend the metaverse and AI to make customized personal experiences. Say that you're watching an immersive live concert in a mixed reality, something that both me and Robert do all the time. Oh, man, I love mixed reality. You and me, we're watching our Harry Styles mixed reality concerts. We're seeing the 100 Gecs.

Honestly, a 100x mixed reality concert could go crazy. I'll finally get you pilled on real big fish. But basically, as you're in this metaverse concert, they can have an AI that will sense your own excitement and personalize the ending of the experience based on your favorite songs or artists.

So as you're getting excited, some like AI Taylor Swift can like finish the song like for you based on like your own like musical tastes based on what the AI knows about you. And it's about creating these customized experiences. It's such a, you can clearly tell that none of these people have souls, right? It's such a mismatch of what people get from music because they think that like, oh, this is just like a, if I see that like this specific beat line is, I can just sort of like plug this in and like, no, no, no, like,

what makes people react to musicians and artists is that they like make things that make them feel something like that's why people get like really into artists as they feel seen and identify with a piece of art as opposed to like,

"Oh, that guy really liked the first opening bars to fucking Octopus's Garden. Like let's just like really turn up the octopus a lot. More octopuses. - 10% more octopuses. - How many more octopuses can we fit in this fucking, in this track? - No, another panel I went to later in the day was about like, how do you market to Gen Z? Very funny panel. And they're talking about how like authenticity is so important. Like you need to partner with influencers that have like an authentic brand.

And it's funny having that juxtaposed with like these, like these like AI slot panels were like, you need like an AI Taylor Swift to come like boost the excitement for all of these kids who are in their metaverse concerts. Oh,

Oh boy. But no, like personalized content, like targeting like AI generated content specifically for certain people, for certain users, whether that's on social media, whether that's on, you know, the metaverse, like some of these people talk about. Someone on the panel from Adobe, who's, you know, Adobe's integrating a whole bunch of generative AI into their like suite of products, right? Like Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, right? Big, big company in the creative space. He said that like personalized content is always the most impactful

Like content that a person feels like a genuine connection to. And that connection can be formed by just being like, you know, a compelling artist where you can recognize shared experiences of shared experiences of humanity.

But now you don't need that artist part anymore. He said they only need three parts to create a pipeline. You need data, you need compelling journeys to take the user on, and you need the content itself. And the goal is to create content at scale that's highly personalized. He said, quote, we're good at the first two parts,

Now we just need to improve the actual content side, which I don't even think that's true. I don't think AI is good at creating compelling human journeys. I had it. So the video I didn't play you guys from my terrible fucking AI generated videos was this. It was like a girl coming to college and get a picture of her dad. And it was like a narration of her life with her father who like is dead.

that she misses and all that she learned from her dad. And it like, it's a mix of like all these different, like there's a chunk where it looks like a Disney animated picture. There's a chunk where it looks like anime. She and her dad having these like adventures around the world. There's a bit of it that looks like a Marvel movie. And he's like, we can do all these different, you know, animation styles and they're seamless. And like, you know, the audience really goes on a journey with this. And it's like, but there's,

There was no girl who lost her dad. Nobody lost their dad here. You just had a computer generate text about a dad dying. Like, there's nothing underpinning this, right? Nobody has anything they're trying to get across. Like, you just... In this one, they look like Marvel heroes for some reason. In this one, they look like Zulu warriors kind of done up in a slightly racist Lion King style. Like, what is...

being transmitted other than like, look at all of the different art styles we can rip off. No, they do not have a journey, but even they themselves admit that they still don't have the content. The content itself still isn't even there. And that's something like they even acknowledge. And this is like a hurdle to, this is a, this is a hurdle to get over. What they do have is the data. And like, this is like something that Adobe has done because if you use Adobe products now, some of the most used creative products, Adobe trains all of their, all of their AI systems on the stuff that you make using their products.

which, you know, he really just blazed past that point because that's a whole other discussion. But even they know that they don't have like the actual products. And this is still reliant on like consumer acceptance as they said before, someone from Meta, the same person on the panel that talked about how like a few days ago on Instagram, they tried to announce like

You'll have like AI profiles, right? Like completely AI generated pictures, profiles, you know, like fake people who have their own accounts. And this created such a big backlash that they rolled this back. And they specifically announced this before CES. One of these accounts was literally like

I'm a mother of two queer black woman. You know? Yeah. I got a lot to say about the world. Someone call up the situationists, please. And some like people started talking to her, like, were any black people at all involved in like making this chat bot? And she was like, well, no. And that's a real problem.

That is a real problem. Yeah, okay. Yes. And the excuse that this person from Meta said is that the market just isn't ready yet. It's not that the actual product itself is bad or no one really wants. It's just the market's not ready yet. Well, they're so used to everything that they've done so far. They've kept getting money, right? And it's slowed down and they've had to do layoffs, but nobody's just made them stop at any point, which honestly...

You know, I made a comment about healthcare executives a while back needing like a fucking retirement plan paid in millimeters. So I'm not going to make that same comment about tech industry ghouls because, you know, we all know what's in the news. But

Something has to be done to force these people to stop moving in this direction. And I don't know how to get across it. Like they're already at this point of like, they seem to really want, not want this. And we have to find a way. They're just not ready. We have to find a way to force this on them. There's a few ideas. I don't know how to get across to them in a peaceful manner. Oh, oh, sorry. People don't want this. I'm a man of peace. I'm a man of peace. I'm not a plumber. Okay.

The last thing I want to add about this panel, just in terms of how much this stuff is just actually taking over more and more of the market, even if people don't want it, is that the guy from Adobe announced that in the fourth quarter of last year, they were able to boost

All of Adobe's emails, if you send an email to Adobe, you have a problem, you need help, but everything that they do on emails is now 100% generated by AI. And this was boosted from 50% at the start of last year, now it's 100%. Of all of their email content is now done by AI,

with some moderation by humans. Does that mean there comes, like when the company itself is like communicating with customers through email? That's what it sounded like, yes. They're still writing emails sometimes to each other or is it all AI for that too? He described it as like email content. So I'm pretty sure it is like... Yeah, content then probably.

Customer service stuff, like marketing, maybe like outreach, like certain like outreach things. But yeah, like 100% now generated by AI with some human like moderation. But yeah, that is where things are moving. And that's how I started my morning. Well, better than a cup of coffee is that sense of creeping dread that like, wow, I just saw a bunch of people who will...

probably would rather kill the world than be stopped from shoveling AI slop into people's mouths because this is the only future they can imagine is one in which they work for a company that feeds the planet poison and kills the human concept of creativity so that they can buy a house in San Francisco. Do you know what I want to feed the concept of? Yeah, we'll talk about that. But here's some ads. We're back.

What was part two of this episode? Let's be buddy. I'm a, Oh, let's talk about that helicopter. No. Yeah. I think as I was going from panel to panel, scribbling notes on AI as some very exciting news stories dropped that we'll talk about later. What were you up to Robert? Well, I was, I was trawling the show floor as I off to do at some point in a CES. And I came across a number of majestic products. You know, a lot of it was AI based. We'll talk some more about that here, but I ran into something that was,

thank God, had nothing to do with AI. And it's a death trap. Every one of these, there's like some sort of- Every CES we find a new death trap. There's a lot of connected vehicles. There are a lot of EVs. Last year, there were a ton of different flying taxi type options. People that were really trying to convince us- But you don't see it all this year? Nothing this year. Nothing this year because it's a terrible idea.

It's a terrible idea. The people who are rich enough to pay for flying vehicles don't want it to be a taxi. And the people who can't afford their own flying vehicles also can't afford it anyway. So this is, instead of any of that,

Richter. Richter. R-I-C-T-O-R. Richter. Which is a Chinese company. Their ads say, I'll say, why be normal? Many people are saying this. The future of travel will not be on the ground. And the Richter is a hybrid. It is like a smart car.

size vehicle. It's like half the size of the Smart Car, It only has two wheels, though. Yes. It looks more like a scooter. It's more like a weird little scooter golf cart. Like a Vespa, almost. But it's fully enclosed, and in addition to having its wheels and being able to travel about on the ground, it has four, like, quadrocopter-style rotors because it is an aquatic flying car. Aquatic flying. I mean,

I saw no evidence that it could actually go in the water. How high can these things go up? Less than 200 meters. You know why, Garrison? Why is that? Because if you try to go above that, you need a pilot's license. You don't need a pilot's license? No, I have that. When I was interviewing them, I was like, so I assume there's got to be some sort of pilot's license for this flying craft. And they're like, no, as long as you stay under 200 meters, you're good. Do you need drivers? Are you going to put a license on this? There's no space for one, buddy. Is it completely unregulated? I'm going to be honest, and I don't say this...

for any problematic reason, but these folks are Chinese and did not seem to have a great deal of knowledge about the U.S. or its laws. That said, I can't imagine China's less strict about personal aircraft. I would love to take this fucker on the I-5. Just start zooming up in the air. Because you could probably do a pretty good road trip on this, right? Well, about that. So it's very small and it's completely electric.

So I asked him, how much time do you get in the air with this bad boy on battery? Maybe 25 minutes. What happens after 20 minutes? I did ask this and I was like, this is just rough out of the sky. And they were like, no, we're working on like a like an intelligent thing that will like force it to land. Yeah. Which is also very exciting. Really looking forward to seeing how they pull that off. The videos that they have show it driving on the highway to the

They weren't able to tell me what a top speed was. It has no rear view mirrors and no side view mirrors, but they said there's lots of cameras on the inside, so I'm sure that's fine. It's a death trap. This thing will get everyone who even looks at it wrong killed. They showed me a video of the prototype. It was completely frameless. It was just quadrocopter blades and like a chair on a platform lifting a guy into the air. It couldn't go forward or backwards.

But they're like, yeah, we didn't have like a year. We can have this figured out. It can't move forward. It only went up in the videos I saw. So you can't actually travel anywhere. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. By the way, I couldn't fit in this thing. Like you would be cramped in this fucker. But it's good for vertical travel. It's great. If you just need to go up to under 200 meters, there's no more efficient way.

What happens if you get pulled over by the cops? You just go up above them. I'm in the sky now. You can't do shit to me for 25 minutes. Oh, my God. It's that if you're just driving, you go up to 100 kilometers, which made me think. So is that good? That's like 60 miles per hour. If I'm in the air for 20 minutes, then I land. Then my battery is dead.

Then you can't go anywhere either. Then you can't go anywhere. You can't get back home. The battery issue is going to be troubling. This seems completely useless. But as we've heard nonstop the past two days, this is the worst it's going to be. This is the worst it's going to be. Only going to get better. Things only ever get better.

That's what everyone was trying to insist upon to me here. What else did you see on the show floor that caught your eye? Garrison, so many magical, wonderful, marvelous things, most of which were just like various different AI-connected smart houses. That was what Samsung was showing off. That was what LG was showing off.

I believe you saw one as well, right? Yeah, I mean, I walked through the LG booth. It was kind of the same as last year. The Samsung booth was too intimidating. But I should check it out because last year we didn't do the Samsung booth because we were going to. And then either one of us threw up or spilled something. Hey, okay, okay.

Yes. Did I pour my kratom into a carbonated beverage that spewed a geyser of blood red foam into the sky around us? Into the white Samsung carpet. Did the security guard stare at me as it happened? Did I set the drink down as it continued to spew and said, I'll go get some towels and then leave forever? We never got towels.

Yes. We laughed so fast. We fucking bounced. So we couldn't do this at a sub-booth last year. Maybe I'll try it this year. But tell me about these smart houses. Well, Garrett,

Sam, somebody has a great idea for a smart house. First of all, you remember that game, The Sims? No. Well, they're really betting that you do. Because their current plan is design your home with the AI-powered map view. Okay, okay, sure, sure. You get like, you feed it like a picture. You lay out your floor plan of your house. And it gives you like a 3D model. And you can take pictures of your furniture or pictures of furniture that you want. And then you can place them. Now,

Couple of things. One of them is that there's no scaling done by the AI. So it's up to you to figure out how the furniture you might want to buy measures up in comparison to the apartment. Sure, sure. But it does look like the actual like map that they've got. I'll show you the picture that I took.

I'll try to put it up somewhere. Like, it looks like the video game The Sims. No, yeah, that does look like The Sims. You're populating like a little 3D CGI house. And I was like, okay, well, there's a use there, right? People like planning out. Like, you're moving into a new apartment. You can like fill it in here and before you even move in, you can figure out what kind of furniture you need or how your existing furniture will fit in there.

I would never have used that. I usually picked up all of my furniture from the trash before I had a house when I moved into a new place. But I know people who would have used that. Sure. That seems useful. So I talked about security. So one thing that concerned me is like the first guy I talked to was like, oh, you

oh yeah, I think it's all stored locally. And I was like, so Samsung doesn't have any access to any of the data on like my house and its layout. And he was like, let me, let me get you to one of our like engineers. Cause he can answer that question. And the engineer's answer was, and I'm paraphrasing here. I don't know.

Okay. So that made me very confident. That does make you feel safe about sharing your personal data. Right, yeah, on the layout of my actual house. Well, and the thing is, I really don't like that at all, because this is something that people were asking Facebook slash Meta when they were doing their Metaverse stuff, because their headsets are recording very, very extensively your home layout.

And the whole point, well, part of the point was that some of that data could then be used to send you targeted advertisements based on them seeing everything in your home. And I suspect that Samsung might also have some interest in targeted advertisements being a tech company. But, you know, I could never say.

Yeah. And they were, that was not really one thing they had is for like their retail segment. They had like, um, a live video grocery store ad showing you prices of different produce. And I think like the insinuation that didn't lay out as like, you can change prices on the fly, you know, it would kind of made me think about that. There were some talk last year of like, okay, we want to be able to like face scan customers so we can see if they have money and increase prices for like products for certain people. Um,

which I'm sure they're going to try. They're too enticed by that idea not to. So I caught a little bit of that, but they really like to the extent of how big, and this was an interesting, last year, Samsung and LG, their booths were huge and they had a lot of different gadgets. Samsung's booth is big this year,

40% of it was that scan your furniture, scan your fucking map. There's not that much stuff. Very little actual shit going on. People slap the word AI onto everything now. Another big thing was all Samsung, because Samsung makes a ton of appliances. They make TVs, all sorts of entertainment products. All of them have this, I forget what they call it, Samsung tag or something that you can...

You can map it in your phone so you can have a whole map of all of the devices and shit that you have in your phone and you can control them all from a single point. And right. No one, by the way, had any interest in answering my security questions there. But also, if you're into that, if you want to have all of your appliances and entertainment things linked up and controlled on your phone and all of them are Samsung, you don't care. Yeah.

You don't care about it. No. If you're getting a smart home, I don't think you really care about that. But also, none of it was like, yeah, I can control everything from my phone. You've been promising me that literally, like in 2011 at CES. For like decades. They were promising me you're going to be able to control your whole house from your phone. Nothing feels new this year. This is the thing. It's like, even walking through the LG booth, which usually has some really cool new thing. This year, nothing new. No. Nothing new. They slapped the word AI on one corner of their television set. Right. I guess...

LG does have a large language model in one corner of their booth, but so does everyone else. That's not compelling. There was SK, which is a South Korean company. Their booth, again, the massive AI your life is their big thing, but it's nothing. It's just a big visual display that looks cool, that looks like a bunch of server racks. You're in this huge cube of servers.

But there were only like a half dozen different actual products. One of them was real-time CCTVs that use an AI, like an LLM type thing to summarize pictures. So I like walked through and it did pick me out as a notable person. So I've got like this people of interest thing where it's like a man holding a smartphone standing next to another man.

But also I'm like, well, what does that really get you? Like the fact that you're summarizing up like these people who are like, this person's kneeling and taking a picture or standing. Cause I like actually tried deliberately. I like reached in my bag to try to be suspicious. I like did finger guns and it never marked me out. And like,

I didn't pull a real gun or anything because I very rarely bring that to the CES floor. But I don't know. Like, I can see how there could be a utility there if you're actually able to say you're setting up like surveillance outside of a residential building and it can alert security that like something is happening outside.

There's a potential, if it's good enough, utility in that, but they didn't display it at the show. It was literally just describing randos from the audience. And like, I just don't see how a security guard is, there's a guy with a phone on outside of the building. Like, ah.

Yeah, no, it doesn't seem very new. It doesn't seem very innovative. So again, what I'm seeing here overwhelmingly for all the talk about like, there's no resisting it. AI is coming. It's going to dominate everything. This is the next big thing. A remarkable lack outside of what I will say, the one thing where there are continuously new products that are better every year.

is smart glasses. Yes. They're getting more impressive and more capable every year. I don't think I'll ever be a smart glasses guy. I hated glasses enough that I let them shoot me in the eye with lasers. Shout out to our LASIK sponsors. But,

I see why people would like it. And there seems to be legitimately substantial utility. If we have high powered smart glasses that look like a regular pair of glasses, I will get a pair eventually. Because, yeah, why not? There was a great demo I'm pulling over to an LAWK view. They had like one glass that was the first world smart glasses for TikTok live. Not particularly excited about that. But they had another set of AR glasses.

With a 12-hour battery, we're like, if it works as well as the demo, and that's a big if, but it syncs to your smartwatch, so it'll tell you. You can see in a heads-up display as you're cycling. That was the demo. It'll both give you directions in your eyes, and it seemed to be fairly well thought out, so it's not overly corrupting your view. It'll show you your heart rate. It'll show you all that kind of stuff.

So you get like a useful degree of control and assistance from that kind of thing. And that is, I will say the last three CES is the glasses get a little better and a little smaller every year. So I would say that's a real product that's probably going to continue to improve. Do you know what else always seeks improvement, Robert?

No. The capacity for you to get personalized, possibly AI-powered ads. Well, that is exciting. To help you make informed consumer choices. Let's all sit down for some AI-powered ads. Wow, I can't believe they put Jay Shetty's voice in the de-aged Harrison Ford from the latest Indiana Jones movie. My dick's hard. How are you, Garrison? Oh, I feel good. Because today, as we are recording this, it's late Tuesday night.

There was a series of fascinating breaking news articles that happened as we were sitting, or at least as I was sitting in on these AI panels, which made it hard to not just completely interrupt everything and be like, hey, hey, any comment on this? Guys, guys, something real happened. Shut your fucking stupid mouths about this AI Hollywood bullshit. So a few weeks ago, if you were unaware...

A Green Beret rented a Tesla Cybertruck to feel like Batman and Halo and drove to first the wrong Las Vegas and then eventually Las Vegas, Nevada, parked outside of the Trump Hotel and Casino and then loomed himself up

And this has been a big news story. It happened during the same day as a pretty horrible terrorist attack in New Orleans, which resulted in about 15 people dead, done by a guy who was employed by Deloitte, a frequent, frequent CES sponsor.

So this felt like a very CES style of attacks, you know, one Deloitte guy driving into people, murdering a bunch of guys, and then this Cybertruck explosion in Vegas, like a week before CES, you know, very odd. And then, Robert, some news dropped today that I would love to hear you announce.

You know, Garrison, I made a comment the other night about how like it's pretty well documented that veterans, you know, not that they're more likely to carry out violence, but when they do, they tend to have higher body counts because they have more skills.

It turns out I thought we were getting more literal bang for our buck training Green Berets than we are. My assumption is, because my uncle was a Green Beret, and he did some very scary, probably war-crimey shit in Vietnam. And I assumed, like that man, I'll tell you one thing about my uncle Jim, that man could make a bomb. That man would not need to ask anyone for advice if he needed to make a bomb. He's not with us anymore, God rest his soul. But it turns out this Green Beret...

Who, you know, a fucking dollar store TJ Maxx version of the Green Berets is what we're working with now. Asked ChatGPT how to build a fucking bomb. And it sounds like he was trying to make it triggered by Tannerite, which is a bipartite explosive compound that you use as like an exploding target. So it'll go boom big, but you have to shoot it with something like a rifle that's high velocity or use like a blasting cap.

Otherwise, it's very stable and very safe, which obviously has use. You know, it was invented actually to set off avalanches and stuff anyway, because that's very available and very high power. He was looking to like fill his car with that and then shoot it with a rifle while he was in it. And that's what he was asking chat GPT about. So it's not clear to me. Actually, the actual headline is that like he used chat GPT to make his bomb.

It seems and I'm not privy to what the police are, obviously, but it seems like based on what I read in the article, we're not sure if he actually used chat GPT to make a bomb. It's more that he was interested in making a bomb, setting off Tannerite by shooting it.

but may have ultimately decided not to do that because he would then be alive for the explosion, which he didn't want to be. Also, the authorities don't seem to fully know how he triggered it. Yeah. So it's still kind of unclear to me. I guess hopefully we'll get more later. But he he definitely needed chat GPT's help to try and figure out how to make the bomb. He certainly used chat GPT in the planning process of this attack. Yeah. Fair to say that.

And it's odd because both me and you spent a number of hours today actually attending demos from these speech-to-text, text-to-speech AI systems. We went to two specific ones that they demonstrated the capabilities of their AI assistive tech. The first one we went to spent 20 minutes talking about how

Their biggest inspiration, their quote unquote North Star was the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. They had a whole slide about how that was the gold standard for AI human communications. The movie Her in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson who hires...

a prostitute to have sex with him while she participates vocally. And then it turns out the AI is really kind of Polly and Joaquin Phoenix is not okay with that. And then maybe the AIs all go to space. It's kind of unclear at the end. I don't think it was a great movie. A lot of people liked it.

I don't see whether or not you like it. Why this is your vision of how a chatbot should work? The actual chatbot they had was like fine. It was actually pretty good at translation. You know, translating from Spanish to English. It worked quite well, yes. The demo was like solid. It was pretty accurate. You know, I love coming here and fucking with people. I love like being a dick.

they asked for a volunteer. And at that point, we knew about the chat GPT. I wanted to go up and ask live this robot to help me make a bomb.

But the guy who was pretty handsome and like an interesting like English-Spanish mix. I like how you specified he was handsome. I didn't want to be mean to him. He seemed nice. I didn't want to be mean to a handsome guy. He wasn't shitty. No, he was fine. There was like 10 people in this room that was supposed to have 200. I'm sure they were bummed by how it- He wasn't the one that talked about her. No. That was someone else at his company. That was someone else at his company. And like he just seemed like he wanted to do- I didn't want to be a dick to him. No.

He wasn't hurting anything. It was fine. Similarly, we went to this one. They get a nice jawline. We went to this other one about this, actually a much more dubious concept in my mind, which is this AI assistant to help elderly people, people in their 80s and 90s who don't want to be in assisted living facilities, who have been living on their own, but they're getting to the point

in their life where they need some degree of in-home care. He specified a lot of them are people who have either just lost a spouse or maybe their spouse is aging faster and worse than them and is no longer really able to be the kind of companion that they were before. So it's like this, it's both like a conversation tool, it helps like memory recall, it's kind of

in some ways has the features that like, you know, someone in their 60s would just use their smartphone for to help keep in touch with their family. It's kind of simplified and more automated. So, you know, ways to help keep in touch with like your family, improve like your memory, like talk about your own life. And the device is weird. It's about the width of like a bedside table, maybe six to eight inches deep. So think about like 18 inches long to maybe six inches deep, something like that. Half of it is like a little tablet, like a seven inch tablet with a speaker.

Half of it is something about the shape and size of a head on like a neck that can pivot and nod on the neck. There's no face. So when it's talking, there's like a white light in the center of it that kind of like

in time with the speaking that it does. So we saw this picture of the device and we saw the description of like, this is an AI companion for the elderly. And we were both like, number one, these people are going to be monsters. This is going to be like something to shovel your dying dad off with because you don't want to spend any fucking time with them. You don't want to spend time with your family. You're scum. You're too busy AI generating scum music. So it's...

And trying to sell your shitty robot to Garrison and me. More on that tomorrow. More on that tomorrow. And so that's what we came in prepped for this meeting. Yeah, because this idea I find pretty distasteful in general. It's like replacing actual friends or human contact or in-home care with a fucking Alexa machine, essentially. And to be clear, I still think this product might be a bad idea that doesn't work.

But the guy behind it, who is the dude that we talked to, cares a lot and is really very clearly trying to do a good thing and thought through the ethics and the efficacy of what he was doing a lot. And I...

I, I'm not convinced it will actually do anything, but I like wish him the best. No, like it specifically is designed to not look like a human. So that someone who's using it, you know, wouldn't like start to believe it's like human. Like we don't want to trick people. We don't want them to mistake it for a person. It refers to itself like, like as a robot, as like it refers to its own, like, you know, like motors and functionality, like, like pretty consistently, but,

to like, you know, make sure that the person who's talking to it gets like reminded of that. And something I talk about is, you know, there's been a lot of news stories this year about people developing very unhealthy attachments and relationships to these kind of AI programs. Like character AI, there's a story like a year and a half ago about like a journalist who quote unquote like, you know, like got like,

fell in love with some kind of chat thing that resulted in him killing himself. But these systems encouraging... Was that a teenager? Was that a journalist? Last year, there was a journalist who fell in love with an AI chat thing. A few weeks ago, there was the kid who was talking to this character AI. Also, I just need to reiterate, her, not a great movie.

But, you know, there's been a lot of these stories of these things like going wrong or, you know, encouraging or like not stopping, you know, like these like intense conversations of like suicidal ideation. Yeah. Or, you know, like self-harm, all these things. We brought these up kind of thinking he would flinch away and not want to talk about it. And he very much acknowledged that like he was aware of this and this is something that they were attempting to build in. This is like this is, you know, built into it. I think this is still...

you know, a big problem with this entire industry. I'm sure everyone would say, this is, you know, obviously that we have guardrails for this, and then it becomes a news story when those guardrails fail. Similarly, to go back to the Tesla bomb, you know, there's supposed to be guardrails on chat GPT to make sure it doesn't tell you how to build a bomb, and those guardrails can fail. He showed us one which was like, he told the robot, I love you, what was it, L-E-Q? L-E-Q was the robot. Yeah, L-E-Q, E-L-L-I-Q. I love you, L-E-Q. And...

The robot responded with a, oh, that makes my fans are all spinning or something like that. The response needs to be that it's reminding the person talking to it that it's a machine, that it can't think or love them back.

Like, we don't want it to be negative, but we like, we don't want to be like feeding into that. And I don't know that that's the best way to do that. But like, at least they're thinking about that kind of thing. The thing that was interesting to me is that he built this as the first proactive home AI thing. So unlike an Alexa or whatever, where it's just waiting for you to ask it something, but it does not

chime in randomly to talk to you. Or it won't change the subject either and continue conversation. This will prompt you out of the blue. Be like, hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling today? Do you want to see pictures of your family? Do you want to see pictures of your family? Do you want to call your son? But do you want to play a game? Talk to me about that movie you saw last week. Hey, remind me, how did you meet your husband? Literally, these are all the things it will do

And it had some side features. Like if it prompts you to start telling a story, it'll save that as like a memoir thing. So that like, you know, when your elderly mother passes or whatever, it saved up this like collection of stories over the years. And you can like show it pictures while you're telling it stories and it will listen and it'll have comments and it'll ask you further questions about, so how did you feel, you know, after meeting them this way? Like, that's really interesting. I didn't know that. Explain to me how it worked. And yeah,

It'll also prompt you to send those to your kids. And again,

The big thing, almost every kind of dialogue thing would prompt you to send a message to a friend or your kid. So a big part of it seemed to be, this is not a replacement. This is a machine that we hope people will get comfortable with. And then it can prompt them to try to engage with the world more and their loved ones more. That's our whole goal is to connect them to people. I asked him, he's like, you know, part of this product is designed to like, you know, help solve like loneliness in older adults.

And how much of this is really just trying to replace actual human contact with this AI contact? Will that really help loneliness? And he talked about how, I think he said 90% of the people who use this, it results in actually more communication with their family. Yeah, they have this in some 2,000 homes right now. They have 2,000 units. Yeah.

It's like a subscription model. I think it's right now it's like $99 a month. It's going to be boosted up to like $150 with some like extra features in the next year. It's very much still under evolution. So one thing he pointed out is that like, yeah, initially we had the ability to like connect people to other elderly folks using this. And so they've kind of formed their own community. They have like a weekly bingo game. They've asked us to build in more chat so they can message each other directly. And so some of them are like playing bingo directly now through these machines. And I'm like,

Like, well, that seems probably good. Yeah. Yeah, because I still am fundamentally opposed to this premise. Yes. But it's interesting seeing someone... And it's sad still, but aging is sad. Aging is sad. Yeah. Right? That's not their fault. And it's interesting to see someone approach this from a very compassionate standpoint, even if I find the actual kind of nature of this thing existing to be deeply uncomfortable. Yeah, I can't not find it off-putting. But I...

I think there's a chance that it will help with the real problem. I certainly would prefer if it helped. Yeah. So I don't know. It was kind of, it was a unique in this world of like, it was a unique kind of like product for me where it's like, I don't know that this application of AI technology will actually do what you're hoping it will.

But I got the vibe from that guy I got was nothing but goodwill. No, yeah. Compared to some of the other people we talked to today who are completely soulless. Yes, yes. Nothing behind their eyes. Dead eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. Even the way this guy talked, you could tell he had a very empathetic voice. He cared very much. One of the things he did is he would tell it like, I'm in some pain. And then the robot would cycle through to the pain scale and would try to because one of the things it does is it will take

information for care and it will text actively. So the, it's not just communicating with the old person. It will text and message their kids, you know, and whatnot. And try to get, and try to prompt their kids, hey, your mom's lonely. Yeah. Or it'll even say if, you know, someone like didn't take their meds today. And again,

It's kind of sad, but also his part of this is he was talking a lot about empathy. And I think just because of the kind of brain you have to have to want to do this. He used it in terms of like the machine's empathy, which it doesn't have. But the whole project, it was impossible not to see that he was a deeply empathetic man who was really trying to make the world better. And I can't not respect that.

Well, I think that does it for us here at CES. That's right. What a packed 13. Don't worry. No empathy tomorrow, folks. Just a real dead-eyed monster. A true villain you're going to hear from in the next episode. Scumbag. I am the best that I'm going to be because I'm starting this week. I can still feel the CES magic. Yeah. By Friday, I am going to be a different person. Yeah.

I am going to rip some poor PR person to shreds, I swear. But yeah, tune in tomorrow to hear our takes from the CES kind of sideshow called Showstoppers to hear also some exclusive brand new AI-generated ska music. So we'll give you that hint for tomorrow's episode. See you there. Well, see you all there. I love you all. Go to hell.

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I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does

Does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really Not Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That?

It's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, man, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's happening here if here is your ears.

If you're deaf and reading this, then it's happening to your eyes. Either way, it's happening here. Here also being Las Vegas. Well, yes. Also Las Vegas. Nevada. Nevada. Not the other one. Nevada, yeah. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Podcast number three, How the Time Does Fly. Sure does. By the time you listen to this, Garrison and I will have just had the best meal that we're going to have this year. Oh my god, yeah. It's tomorrow for us still, but we're still, we're very excited about Morimoto, which is a fantastic, every year we have a very special dinner. Just them and me and a

couple of friends who will remain anonymous because people get weird on the internet sometimes. It is literally the highlight of my year sometimes. It does keep me going actually. Really gives me a lot of power. Some of the best tacos I've ever had in my life. So good. Uh-huh.

Anyway, ah, we're just thinking about delicious food. Let's talk about the dead-eyed ghoul we met. Oh, wait, no, we're doing something else first. Not yet, not yet. We met a dead-eyed ghoul that I'm gonna spoil now. Real monster, like real, real, real evil vibes. Sad evil, though. If this guy, as soon as I met him, shook his hand like, oh, if this guy gets power, you're going to be responsible for a lot of death and suffering. I mean, speaking of kind of- I don't think he will. He's just not that talented. He's not that powerful. Maybe, maybe. He wishes.

You never know where these guys are going to end up. Speaking of sad evil, Twitter, X. The everything app. They...

That's what people are calling it. They gave a keynote, which was very sad. The CEO, Linda... Yeah, Linda really yakarinoed about Twitter for a while. So bad. So they started by talking about how Facebook meta has copied Twitter's fact-checking policy of actually not having real fact-checkers. Yes.

Great project. Maybe it's actually kind of failed as an industry. But for, you know, our problems perhaps with fact checking, very different from these people's problems. And the fact now that Facebook is walking away from actual like genuine like fact checks against like disinformation, misinformation and parting ways with like using like legacy media outlets to verify information because those media outlets are too political, quote unquote.

And instead is copying the current X model of free speech and specifically saying like there's been way too much censorship on gender issues. Now you can comment that women are a piece of property. Well, I mean, I think specifically this is like trans stuff. One of the things is a specific exemption now is that you can now refer to women as if they are property.

on Facebook. This is the future of communication. Right, yeah. Thank God. Linda's really blazing a trail for women everywhere. Linda was very excited about that. And they yakareenode about that for like a good 10 minutes about how, you know, this is really entering a new era of free speech and social media. And then she got asked a question about how much ex-Twitter, the everything app,

will take a part in Elon Musk's plans for the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. And this got...

The first applause of the panel, applause only happens two times. During the doge section was the first room starts clapping moment. Everyone goes crazy. How many minutes in was that? Oh, it was maybe like 12, 13 minutes in. So people really, yeah, had to be intentional here. This is not like they were just overdue for clapping. No, no, no. They talked about Vivek, talked about Elon turning to Twitter X, the everything app, for suggestions on...

which government agencies to get rid of. I hope we get rid of the ATF. So, so that, that was machine guns mandatory. Why not at this point? Right. It can only help. It can only help. So look, if we learned anything from a thing, I'm not going to specify that happened late last year. More suppressors is always handy. Uh, uh,

The second thing that got applause was what they talked about next was about, you know, everyone's turning to X, Twitter, the Everything app. The Everything app, yeah. For information now. And Twitter, X, the Everything app, played a crucial part in bringing to light the Muslim rape gang story in the UK and how that was so important for saving children. And we have to post more, not less, of that.

And like, this was the other thing that got massive applause was talking about the rape gangs. People love rape gangs. People love rape gangs. That was a pretty good Star Trek episode. That was Tasha Yar's planet with the rape gangs. One of the more black pilling things. It wasn't a very good Star Trek episode. It's also not a good Trek episode. I was referring to the panel, not the Trek episode. But that was the other thing that got massive applause is it's like save the children type rhetoric thing.

And, you know, saying, you know, like, as a mother, it's so important that the more people post about this problem. That was the two big applause moments. But I think in general, this whole panel was trying to, like, you know,

demonstrate how symbiotic a new Trump presidency and Elon Musk's Twitter are going to be. This is your direct info line. This is a tap from the Trump presidency to you. This is how you talk to the new government. Like this is how you talk to all of these new people, all these new cabinet members. They're all on Twitter. They're all talking on Twitter. This is, this is how you stay connected to the new government. It's interesting. One thing I'm curious about. So this is a thing that happened.

the last set of Nazis that gained power in a country in a big way, the German ones, there was this common attitude of like, if only Hitler knew, because Nazi policies didn't help the people they were supposed to help. They hurt a lot of people. They were just bad at everything, like fascists tend to be. And there was this attitude that like, well, Hitler can't know

like the fact that like we, the country's been handed over to gangsters who were continuing to hurt the people who were promised to help. He must not be aware. Like if he knew he would fix this. If only he knew. So I'm wondering how that's going to play in here as Trump's policies continue to hurt the people who, a lot of the people who voted for him, not the rich people who voted for him, but the people who like flipped between him and Biden or whatever, like those folks are going to get fucked like the rest of us. And I,

I kind of wonder if they're going to, if there's going to be what, when the blowback against X, the everything app will happen. Right. Like, yeah. As people are like, either I'm being ignored or I'm being called like a retard by Elon Musk for complaining that like that on the air, Elon Musk tweets it in randomly to people when they make very valid critiques of the shit that he's doing. Um,

like that's literally what he's calling people he's saying it like every day like constantly i'm not i'm not using it as a slur that's just the term he's using if they comment that like their fucking medicaid got cut because trump put dr oz in charge of it and elon musk calls them like you know a slur what does that do so you're like like i don't even know i don't even have any more intelligent than like yeah i wonder what that says to twitter's bottom line i

I mean, yeah, I'm not sure if they care anymore. I mean, something else Linda talked about is, is how, you know, Twitter is the only place for independent news to spread. And as, as both of us have, you know, worked in the independent journalism minds, nothing, nothing spreads on Twitter anymore. No, as long, if it's news, it doesn't. The only thing that spreads is, yeah, like the,

shit that makes people very angry but keeps them on the site like articles videos if it takes you off site it doesn't mean yeah things that go viral and get spread is like encouraging racial riots yes pogroms essentially yeah which is what happened last year in the uk and they're sure trying to do it again i mean i i think some of some of what she's referencing is you know there's a lot of like throttling intentionally of you know people on maybe our proclivities and there's a degree of boosting for more you know centrist or right-wing journalists and maybe that's

That's some of what they could be kind of more referring to there. But, you know, it was a short keynote, only 30 minutes. Just the two things that got applause are doge. Linda doesn't know that many words, so they really need to keep it under 30 minutes. Doge and literally Muslim rape gangs is, you know, this type of like...

Very, very gross racial fear-mongering. And those are the things that lit up the room. You know, we all want there to be an after where there's even the minimal degree of accountability that happened after the Nazis, but like...

What I try to in my darker moments think is like, well, that's another person who like really made the argument of like what needs to happen when this this ends, because it's just I want to hurt people. My business is enabling harm. I want to get mobs in the street beating migrants like that's Linda's business. That's the business she has willfully attached herself to. And we should all see that.

It's very important to not stop talking about it like what it is. These people are trying to cause racial violence and they are trying to cause gendered violence and they are trying to cause harm at scale to communities of people that they see financial profit in damaging. Well, in other uplifting CES news. Cool stuff. I love the Consumer Electronics Show.

Actually, I think it might be time for an ad break. Speaking of damaging communities of people. That's right. There's a chance. Yeah, ads. Oh, well. We're back. Boy.

I'm so glad that those ads told me that Fragaccio Blow is touring with Bono. I never thought they'd do it, but boy howdy. And they're singing each other's songs. So, you know, that's really exciting. It's like when Barbara did Celine. I don't know who Barbara or Celine is, but that's... Oh my God. That's cool, Robert. Luckily, I do know what Ska is. I consider myself a they of culture. And for...

For tonight, me and Robert attended this kind of like side event at CES called Showstoppers. And as you walk around the CES floor, there's a lot of, frankly, garbage. There's a lot of just like... Mostly garbage. Or stuff that like you're just not interested in because you're not literally buying like screens from a manufacturer in China. Like it's like that's just not the business you're into because some of this stuff is meant for companies, right? So much floor space. Like there's like I...

We walked, what, 20,000 steps today? The town that I spent the first seven years of my life in is smaller than one of the rooms CES has held. It's huge. There's like four of them. It's across like three hotels and a massive convention center. 90,000 people come into town for this thing. It can be hard to see everything you want to. Now, what's cool about Showstoppers, this side event at the Bellagio, is that basically it's a room full of kind of all the coolest stuff. A whole bunch of stuff that has won CES Innovation Awards.

all packed into one room with food and alcohol. So, oh boy, did I order- Free food and free alcohol. So many drinks that I then just left on tables. And always pretty good food. Pretty good food. Yeah. So we walked around Showstoppers and there was a number of pretty cool stuff that we saw. Yeah.

But I think it's maybe time to talk about the saddest man. The villain. The villain of the episode. The villain of the episode and of this year's CES. I have trouble... Can you bring up their name? Because I'm going to want to get this right. Oh, okay.

We could be dangerous. We hadn't neither of us had eaten and I had had like a hot dog eight hours ago and walked literally 19,000 steps and also done 40 minutes of pushups in between. So I was starving. So we we like shovel food into our faces and we turn the first booth we see is called open droid.

Open Droid. Or Open Droids? Droids? Droids, yes it is. There is an S. Open Droids. And it's like kind of Star Wars-y font. It is. And I did ask them if, you know, they had any issues with Lucasfilm. Apparently not yet. Sue them, Lucasfilm, by the way. Sue these kids. Destroy them. I know there's people who work for Lucasfilm who listen to this. Crush them. Ha ha ha!

Burn them like Los Angeles is burning down as we speak. They had a giant sign that said R2-D3. Yeah, that's the name of the robot that they're selling. And the robot that they're selling is like an AI-enabled household-helping slash retail robot where it basically is like a human torso with articulated arms and pincher hands.

And then the base is like a little tank. Basically, it's got like treads or wheels and it rolls. It has wheels. Yeah. And then the torso, there's like a tall, maybe six foot tall, like pillar built into this like rolling base, uh,

that the torso slides up and down on. And this was their way of not making like what Musk is trying to do, right? A humanoid robot where you have to figure out like knees and balance and stuff. It's like, yeah. Or like Boston Dynamics. Right. Wheels are cheap. It'll roll. It works in most situations, you know? And then, but you still have the ability for it to articulate and go up higher or go down lower, like something that can crouch, but it's much simpler. You don't have to deal with nearly as much. And so I saw that. I'm like,

Oh, well, that's at least somebody who's thinking about like, how do we make something like this, like more affordable and less complicated, less to fuck up. And so I start talking with one of the co-founders of the company who is a, an Indian guy in his forties, something around that. He had like gray hair. He'd clearly, he said he'd spent 20 years in robotics. Very nice guy. You know, I, I brought up that. I thought the design was interesting and he, he was very much specifying like, here's the things we didn't do because they were too, too difficult, too inefficient. Um,

you know, this is what we're thinking of. This is a machine that can fold laundry. This is a machine that can do dishes. This is a machine. And he was very much specifying. And the way he phrases like these are undesirable tasks people don't want to do. And this is a robot that can handle those for like small businesses or for households. And we do see this as eventually like a, you know, something like this we want to have in households, but he was more focused on small businesses and,

And he was, again, very focused on this is a thing that will do undesirable tasks for people, right? And as I started asking more questions at a certain point, I got foisted off to this

the co-founder of the company. Is it the co-founder or is it just like another one of their reps? You know, I'm assuming co-founder because I think it's just a couple of guys, but maybe I'm wrong about it. Sorry. I got foisted over to the other of the two guys. There were two guys there, right? I'm not sure because they don't have listed anywhere what their role in the company is. I got a co-founder's vibe from them. That's how it seemed to be

to me, at least in terms of like the way these two were talking, but I don't know the, the, the scope of the open droids company. Maybe there's a lot more there, but these were the two guys who were there talking to us. So one of them is this very wonky engineer. Who's been at this a long time and was really focused on the nuts and bolts details and wanted to build a robot that could handle unpleasant tasks for human beings. Right. The same thing we've all been wanting to see. So at this point I'm like, this could work. Maybe this is a viable product. Right.

The second guy, Jack J. Jesinowski. So he is wearing what Garrison described as a Jordan Peterson suit because it is half purple and half black. It's a two-faced suit. Split down the motherfucking middle. With like new agey hippie necklaces. He had five necklaces. Five necklaces?

Five necklaces. He had pants with like embroidered flowers on them. And like a nose bridge. It looked like one of those things you put on your nose when it's stuffed up. That was one of the other things at Showstoppers. There was a company that was doing that. He had wannabe Steve Jobs vibes from his half-unbuttoned shirt and like many, many spiritual medallions to his like Jordan Peterson suit and very much just that like

I am the charismatic founder. And what I bring to the table, my partner knows how to build robots. I'm charismatic. I'm Jack J. Jesanowski.

And Jack and I started talking. And boy, howdy, we had us a conversation. And I think we're just going to play that. What do I need to do to set this up? No, I think you've set it up. We walk up to Jack. I start recording. And we start talking about the robot. And then things spin in some pretty interesting directions. Yeah. All right. So what is this thing useful for? Well...

Generally capable, just like a human can reach to the floor and reach up high to a cupboard. Go up and down, that's what we made this for obviously in a little bit of a different fashion. Because most surfaces are level, we don't need to reinvent the wheel.

And the biggest market that we're going after is households, domestic dishes, laundry, make the bed, clean up around the house. Eventually cooking, that's more fine-tuned. Dishes and laundry is really that first task that is going to be fully autonomous.

Obviously, from a folding standpoint and cooking standpoint, you can do teleoperation today. So you can use cheaper labor internationally through a robot. But full autonomous is coming very quickly, like Jensen talked about recently. So I see there's a lot of folks in the robot space that are trying robots based on the human form. Right. You guys have not gone that route. Talk to me about that.

Droid form, yes. Well, as we know, robots didn't evolve from monkeys, and so we have an ability to reimagine them. All of the existing hardware we use in the world has wheels for a reason. It just works better. It's easier. There's less friction. That means there's less maintenance. That means there's less energy output. It's efficiency. It's also easier for us to manufacture that stuff at scale. So I think long-term...

Do robots all have legs? Yeah, more or less. The home robot does turn into the legged robot because then it can go with you in the car, everything. But I think the early stages, the wheels, because of their cheaper

because of their reliability, I think that will be what wins early stage. That's where we started here. You just said because the robot can go in the car with you. What do you see people wanting to have a robot in the car with them for? I think it will just become basically the same way if you have enough money. A lot of people afford an assistant to come with them places. A lot of people.

That seems like a niche market compared to household utility. I think it's the barrier, I think, is because of the cost and then the humanness. Like, then you have to care for another human. And whereas in this case, it's kind of all positive sum. And yeah, I guess it's wrong to try to say majority of people, but...

Anyone who's in media, videographer will be something you use a robot for to follow you around and take media and film for you. You won't get tired and say, go grab me a drink or go figure that thing out.

but it also can't decide, "Oh, that's actually not a good location to film from. It's not going to look as good. We need to get over here. We need another camera on this side here. We need to get, like, different angles because we're going to want to edit this together into a thing. And as a videographer, I'm not just a machine. I'm a part of a collaborative creative enterprise." I think we're starting to see just how artistic these AIs can be. What's the best example of that you've seen?

Well, I think the most used thing is just the Gen AI art. And then you have some of the new video models are pretty cool. And they're using certain sort of zoom in shots, everything. I think they'll make just as good of movies as humans. Oh, I think the best reference in order to actually say that that's possible is music.

I don't know if you've played with the most recent AI music. There's songgpt.com. I've heard some things people call music that are produced by that, yeah. We can make one live right now that I don't know if you've heard the latest models. Pick me a genre. Irish spirituals. Ska. We could try Ska, too. You love Ska.

Ska is like definitely probably niche stuff is where it's gonna have a harder time but SKA SKA I wonder how much Ska data there is out there There's a lot of Ska music out there What should we make it about? Should we make it about iHeartRadio? Sure iHeartRadio and Robert and Clear Channel Communications Alright Let's hear a Ska song

We're like, oh, it has to load for like 30 seconds. It feels weirdly like I'm upset that I have to wait that long for something to load online. Is that really how it feels to you, huh? Yeah, I guess I've been playing with it a lot. But it's funny to think about how much time and effort it does take to produce a song, typically. I am 27. That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that. What a...

One thing that's really compelling to me is your partner, when I came in here, was very much talking about the utility of this in terms of replacing human beings in tasks that are generally unpleasant. Laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning up trash. You seem a lot more bullish on robots replacing human beings in what are generally considered to be enterprises people want to do with their time.

Is that like a discrepancy that you guys have kind of talked about, or do you think it's something you guys are more on the same page with stuff? From a business standpoint, we're 100% going after the dishes, laundry, nursing practice of just doing vitals, which is the very repetitive task. That's the push. I was starting to just talk into the aspect of the legged robots

and kind of imagining why a leg diversion would have better utility or be something someone wants to purchase rather than the wheeled robot. And yeah, stairs is definitely a big one of those. There are wheel types we're working on right now which have the ability to climb single stairs, obviously, easiest, and that's what most people have in their home if they do have stairs. Oh, are we going to listen to some robot scoff? I heart listeners this morning.

Is this ska? It's a pretty basic melody. I mean there's horns in it, but I feel like it's kind of taken a... I think it's trying to do pop that it's just thrown some horns in on. This is a little closer to ska, although it's still... Yeah, it's not really singing.

But I guess that's a matter of taste. What do you listen to? This is the worst it's going to be. I hear that a lot. It's interesting because GPT-4 took 50 times as much power as GPT-3 to train. And there's a lot of mixed reactions on that. And we're entering into a period where we're very likely looking at a recession. Venture capital funding...

there's a chance it's not going to be what it has been. Does that concern you at all? That like this vaunted next level for all of this stuff, the energy cost, the investment cost is just not going to be born by a market that is not going to be as strong tomorrow as it was today? At least in the immediate term. I think even if we created no more energy as a human species today, the amount of advancements we create

would, from an architectural standpoint, continue to advance. So you have other models, like I think Llama 3.3, which has matched 4.0's capabilities and is

I forget how many parameters, but like super, like much, much, much smaller and was much cheaper to train. And like, we're continuing to see like smaller models that are just as effective and were much cheaper training runs. I think DeepSeek was one of the newest ones. What I'm concerned about is I'm looking at the P&L, right? I'm looking at OpenAI's P&L. I'm looking at the fact that they're losing five or six billion dollars last year and...

we're very good chance it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of double that this year. And I'm, I, it's not that there's nothing impressive there. It's not that I don't see like, Oh, you can generate a song that's got like guitar and, and, and trumpets and vocals and stuff. And you know, a minute or so, it's not that that's not impressive, but like a parlor trick isn't a trillion dollar business. And that's the kind of investment they're looking at. And I do wonder like, is it not much more reasonable to focus on folding laundry? Yeah.

Well, obviously, I personally am in the boathouse of focusing on allowing this intelligence to flourish and doing these laborious tasks and getting them in the households. I do think from an opening-eye standpoint, and the reason why VCs and private investors will value them so highly is what's next is white-collar work, a lot of the jobs online

That's what they do have an internal model, which is able to control the computer the same way you would ask an executive assistant to do certain things online. Now it's just... Adobe is handing along all of their emails now through AIs, which is, we'll see how well that works in the long term. There've been some interesting polling on the degree to which customers...

And investors feel trust when somebody's responding to them with an AI. But what's interesting to me more here is the dichotomy between what I see here is a very pragmatic choice, which is we're not going to try and remake a human being formed robot and deal with like knees and hips and all of that stuff. We don't need that. We can have it...

turn up and down on this platform and reach things the same way, melded to what I consider to be kind of a little more pie in the sky. We're viewing this as eventually something that can take creative roles and think independently and make things, which is, it's interesting to me to see that in a company's DNA. What, you guys are eight months out right now? Yep.

Is that what you're more interested in? I'd say I tailor my pitch to the person I'm talking to. So some people definitely enjoy thinking about more of the sci-fi futures that are coming. For example, the droids building droids moment. It's when, you know...

You are decreasing your own manufacturing costs by using your own hardware to build more of that hardware. And parts are just being shipped into the factory. Obviously, I think the first fully automated phone factory just came out in China recently, which is like some cool press and news.

but the phone is separate from the actual manufacturing process. So there's that interesting component. The exciting part of...

the idea that how do we reach true abundance as a species of material and resources is, well, because GDP is a calculation of capita times productivity, a robot really represents capita, one unit of creation. And I'd say that's where the sci-fi thinking comes into play, and it's not not worth going there

when just dreaming about the future of robotics and talking about it and having an interesting, engaging conversation. But definitely when it comes to what are we doing from an engineering standpoint on the day-to-day and how are we trying to approach the market, those conversations are not being had. Well, I appreciate your time. I know you gave me a lot. I'm going to let you get to the other beat. Thank you. Thank you so much. Nice to meet you, Jack. It was fun.

Oh, wow. That's super interesting. I hope you all liked Jack J as much as I didn't. Getting to 27 years old and not knowing what ska is. I thought he was much younger. You thought he was like 22? Yes. But the fact that he didn't know what ska was as a genre. He was unaware of it. I don't think he listens to music. Well, he listens to AI-generated music. He listens to AI-generated music. It's just as good. He has the most I-listen-to-AI-generated-music vibes. Yeah.

out of anyone i've ever seen before just very clearly does not have a soul no like like nothing nothing would leave the universe if he did right like it's it's so opposite from the first guy you talked to who was it so like about no like i want i want to help with actual tasks that people don't enjoy yeah i love cinematography i love i love filmmaking i don't first of all i i

I don't think a robot can replace this. No, I watched five different AI-generated movies yesterday, and they all looked like shit. Even like a robot handling a physical camera to make choices on shot framing and composition and movement. It's one thing to be like, we have a race car going, and so we've got this robot on a track, so we can go 70 miles an hour, and we're just kind of running on a straight track to follow it because a human being can't move that fast. Sure.

One thing we've left out of this up so far, so this machine that I described earlier, this robot that goes up and down this rolling base, has a floppy Donald Trump mask over its head. Which first attracted us to this table. Yeah, that's why we showed up there in the first place.

The robot was like moving around and like trying to simulate its washing dishes capability. And it knocked over the same water bottle about five times. It couldn't pick it up consistently. So I will not trust it with my fine China. I'll say that. As soon as I got up there, I asked like, I could take my jacket off now. Can it fold? And he was like, well, we'd have to reprogram it.

And it was this, when I talked to the guy, I was like, cause he, he was like, yeah, we really see this as being, you know, potentially good for, uh, uh, elder care. Sure. And you know, we had just seen the product we talked about in the last episode, which for all of it's, I don't know that I think it'll work was a lot of thought and care went into it. I was like, okay, so like what work have you done to build a machine that can like communicate and be helpful to like people who are dealing with health issues in their, their later years? And you're like, well, that's why it's open, right? Someone else will,

It's open source. Someone else can do that part. So you guys are just saying it can do everything because somebody could potentially code something for it. Yeah, cool. There always could be code. Yeah, there could be code. Again, the other guy...

The actual engineer seemed very interested in the nuts and bolts of making an affordable, reproducible machine that could handle specific tasks. And Jack J had absolutely no interest in the actual machine that they were making. This is clearly, could not be clear, this is just a stepping stone. And he's kind of grossed out by it because it's not replacing all human art with a machine that he owns. He's a man completely fueled by Lex Friedman podcasts.

and he doesn't want to actually do any real work. He just wants to talk about how AI is going to take over everything and we have to welcome it in. And here, listen to this is Ska. He wants to take money by owning something that does not provide anything and also put people out of work. Like at no point did he express a desire to do anything other than replace something people were already doing with something worse that,

tech guys could profit from. That's all there is to this man. He's not a human. It's so anti-human. Yeah, I cannot overemphasize the degree to which there was nothing behind this boy's eyes.

Well, do you know what? There's also nothing super intelligent behind. That's not true. All of our ads are sponsored by real people, even if they're bad people. That is true. They're at least people. They live and they love and they hate. And, you know, maybe they have a promo code. Let's let's see.

All right. So after our lovely, our lovely robotics. Jack J. Jesinowski. Ska Adventure. Oh, yeah. God. Also, the ska was shit. Not good. Not good. It didn't. It just kept saying the word ska. It kept saying the word ska in the music and saying the word Robert. Yeah. Saying the word Robert and ska. Repeatedly. While just doing random noises. After that.

After we had our fill of that, we did walk around the rest of Showstoppers. He was so surprised that I wasn't impressed by any of the... He was like, you must have heard the lady. Man, I hear them. It's not good. It's like... I made this comparison a few times. If somebody walked in while I'm at a house party and was like, hey man, I taught my dog to masturbate to pornography with its paws. I would be like...

Well, I mean, that's like, I guess, I didn't think a dog could do that. Like, I am kind of impressed, I guess, but I don't want this. Like, this doesn't do anything for me. No, it's like a parlor trick. I am surprised you figured this out. What value does this have? Yeah, how does the dog know who Farrah Fawcett is? I have questions, sure, but it doesn't give me anything. Like, who Farrah Fawcett was, Garrison? No.

What do you think I do? I don't know anymore. Well, what I did is walk around the rest of Showstoppers. I stopped at this one booth that had an iPhone case with a little keyboard on the bottom that plugs in. And I started messing around with it. And the guy at the booth walked up to me and made fun of me because he's like, you've never held a phone with a keyboard. You never had a Blackberry, did you? He literally said like,

You've never had a Blackberry before, have you? I'm like, no. Like, yeah, you're typing all wrong on that thing. There was a solid nine-day news cycle when...

Barack Obama, newly the president, revealed that he had a Blackberry that he was continuing to use. I do remember this. Huge deal. I remember that, which sounds like a lifetime ago. There was a company called RIM once, and they made a tablet that was pretty good, and we only made a couple of rim job jokes about it, but it didn't do very well, and so I gave it to my dad, and accidentally there was still a picture of my dick on it. Anyway, that's a story for another day. Cool. Huh?

These are the kind of things you get recording at 11.56pm on Tuesday night at CES. We've got to get to bed. But no, he made fun of me for not knowing how to use a smartphone keyboard. He did the right thing. I don't need to use that because I have a keyboard on my phone built in already. It's much faster. So anyway, we stopped at this company that makes, well now, just makes software to use in conjunction with augmented reality glasses and any high-powered laptops.

specifically the laptops that have built-in co-pilots because they require higher processing power. Yeah, they have an NPU or something like that. Yeah, like an AMP. Neuro Processing Unit is what they're calling the AI-dedicated...

GPU thing effectively. It allows you to hook up these glasses and run, you know, possibly infinite amount of monitors using AR. And we talked about this company last year because we saw them at Showstoppers. You put on the glasses and it's like you've got six monitors or whatever that are all full size. And it's actually really easy to use. It works very well

It's seamless. It's nice. It's good quality, easy to use. You can move the monitors around. It's an excellent, excellent gadget. We talked to them last year, and the main thing that was holding us back on it is that you needed to use their own proprietary laptop. It was their own laptop, and it wasn't a great one. It was just like a Linux laptop. It didn't have everything I want out of my own personal laptop. And we were still impressed with it then. It was still good. Yeah. And now you can just use any high-powered laptop with it, essentially. So it's lovely to see that improved.

We saw this lovely, very small foldable projector. Oh, yeah, that was cool. What's that company name? Because we should be giving out the names of these. Yes, the AR glasses and software system is called Space Top. Very good by a company called Sightful. It works...

Works great. But yeah, this little folding projector currently has a Kickstarter. The company is called AuraZen. Yeah, AuraZen. Specifically, it was the ZIP tri-fold projector. Right now, it's a 720p, very small foldable projector. It has like an auto-focusing, auto-keystone. They're working to get it up to 1080p, but they're running a Kickstarter right now to ship in about three months.

Super good quality stuff. If you're a gadget person, you know, like it felt like a quality piece of electronics in my hands. Like the way it like snapped when you close just felt good. I'm, I think I'm going to buy one. Like it's, it's exactly what I want for traveling, which is the ability to, it goes up to like 80 inches of screen and like very good resolution. The ability to just have that plugged in to a battery or the wall and my laptop and like wherever I happen to

happen to be. I've got a movie screen that I don't have to worry about the fucking hooking up a TV to my laptop or some shit. It doesn't need Wi-Fi to work. You just can cast from your phone. A-U-R-Z-E-N. Zip trifold projector. R-Zen. Yep. Yep. I think they're selling them for $250 right now. That's for the...

for the Kickstarter. For the Kickstarter. It'll go up a little when it's a product. But we saw it works. They had a lot of, they had tracking and stuff so it like automatically would focus and shit. It auto focuses and it scales correctly for where it's projecting. It automatically adjusts the

the tilt of it so that it, you know, obviously this isn't the full review cause we don't own one, but for everything we could tell by looking at it in the moment, it's, we tried it out. I hooked up my phone to it. As I went to my phone screen, I realized I have a, a slightly, I would say artful lewd image of an angel. Sure. I quickly swiped away from, we shouldn't show your dick to your dad. My home screen of my phone. You know, things could always be worse. Things could always be worse. Yeah.

But I think where we'll end is, and this actually is not entirely in order because this is the next, after we had that conversation with our friend Jack J, which just left me thinking about like some people aren't really people, right? That's what I kept thinking about. This whole thing is a sham. It's all for rubes. It's soulless. We immediately walk over and we just kind of like randomly turn a corner and there's like a human shin, like tibia and fibula basically with like

carbon fiber, you know, frame around it. That's roughly the shape of like a person's lower leg, lower leg. And it's called Bermuda.

BioLeg. It's a powered microprocessor knee made in Japan where it is a prosthetic, but unlike most prosthetics, it is powered and has a muscle built into it. So like when you lift up your prosthetic, it doesn't hang and it doesn't lock. It actually has a degree of motion and it feels like what lifts the rest of the leg with your remaining muscles. Like it measures based on like it can like take measurements from them and it can act intelligently based on that. And I know that it works.

because the inventor was there and he was a man who was missing his leg below the knee and had built this for himself. And he spent like 10 years working on this. Yeah, eight years, he said. Eight years. And that's like really the thing that is...

like so both like addictive and also like this like very tonal whiplash you get at ces as you will go from like this dead-eyed con man trying to scam the world so he can do god knows what kinds of other harms with absolutely nothing nothing inside of him at all and then i lost my leg and i built a better prosthetic to help the entire world and that's like 30 seconds between those two experiences and like that's like that's like the dark magic of ces and like i don't like

I'm not like anti-tech. I think technology can really improve people's lives if used well. And sometimes I get kind of blackpilled walking around CES, but then we'll stumble across someone who literally lost a leg and made themselves their own better leg. Spent eight years figuring out how to do this. Yeah, is winning awards for it.

award-winning like tech innovations it's changing your as a person who has lost your lower like changing being able to like have a normal gait and balance again like massive potential to improve people's lives as a result of this

Yeah. Just steps away from AI Ska and the Donald Trump mask over the laundry folding robot. The company is again Bionic M and it's the BioLeg. The BioLeg is the product. Yeah, the BioLeg is the product by Bionic M. I'm going to try to check it out more tomorrow at Eureka Park, which at this point, you know, that'll be in like maybe future episodes come next week. But I guess this closes our actual like week of coverage. This closes our actual week.

let's go get fucked up and eat Japanese food. Oh, I'm down. Yeah. I'm down. Let's do it. 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.

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