All Episodes

January 18, 2025 172 mins

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. 

  1. Mutual Aid & the LA Fires

  2. CES 2025: AI Toys Are Coming For Your Kids

  3. From Anti-Satanic Crusaders to Congresswoman: Tracing an Anti-Trans Harassment Campaign 

  4. CES 2025: The Best And Worst Tech Products Coming Soon

  5. The Years of Lead Paint (Or Why There Will Be More Tesla Car Bombs)

You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today!

http://apple.co/coolerzone 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. 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

(00:23):
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hi, everyone, welcome, Vick can have it here. It's me
James today with a terrible cold as you can probably tell,
but still very important to listen today because I'm talking
to Andreina, an organizer from Ktown for All Up in LA,
and we're going to talk about the fires in LA
and the meat fade response and what you can do
to help.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
So welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 (00:43):
Andrena, thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
James.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are
really busy right now. So to begin with, like in
case this has missed people, and there's a lot there's
a lot of news happening right now, can you explain
what's been going on in LA with respected to fires
for the last two three days, So.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
About three or four days ago, we got a warning
that we were going to be experiencing high winds up
to fifty miles per hour, which is nuts, and they
were going to be coming from the desert. So this
is just like a barrage of hot wind. So we
were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because
you know, man made structures that people are surviving with

(01:21):
can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear
that wind here in southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly,
because any little you know, a cigarette, but an electrical spark,
you know, like when when it's this dry, it's enough
to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened. There are
about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of

(01:42):
Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread
massively by these giant winds everywhere, so the embers are
being picked up. Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but
the wind itself has prevented, you know, the big water
tankers from flying, which is led to the massive deaths
s that you saw in the Palisades and other areas.

(02:03):
You know, the entire water we being grounded for a
while just meant that it was burning with no control,
relying on on the ground firefighters. So what we've seen
is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think
there is a death tally, thankfully very low, in about tennish.
I think I've heard from this morning with confirmation. But yeah,

(02:26):
that's all we're facing right now.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, it's pretty devastating, Like whole neighborhoods have gone right,
I think I thought like two thousand structures have already
been burned. And like, as you said, if people aren't
in the United States or nut familiar with how fire
is for like out here in the Western United States,
it's a lot of air dropping fire retired in and
air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to

(02:51):
get enough water to where it needs to be. And
I believe at one point that actually ran out of
water in water towers right up in Palisades.

Speaker 4 (02:58):
Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which
is terrifying to think of. And we were warned. I'm
in the Koreatan neighborhood. We were warned about low water pressure.
And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles,
particularly in that region, are being worn to boil water
and that their water is unsafe to drink right now.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
Yeah, I've seen that too. Dare was a water boil
warning for yeah, lots of places. So as a result
of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I
think I saw it was it one hundred and fifty
thousand odd people have been displaced now, is that?

Speaker 3 (03:32):
Is that right? Is that a good number?

Speaker 4 (03:33):
I saw something large like that of just the people
that have been evacuated. Right north of me was the
Sunset fire, and that was very concerningly close to the
Korea Ten neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires
because we're so in the concrete jungle, like, we're so insulated.
I think that's the closest we've come to devastation, and

(03:54):
we were really stressed out last night just keeping an
eye on the news because that's, you know, not even
two miles away away from the core of the densest
neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Right, yeah, I guess again, people aren't familiar like fires
destroy property and kill people every year here, and the
climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
But in the middle of a city.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
You're Germany not worried about fires because the resources will
be spent to defend that property, right, Like this is
this is a very unique situation to see huge parts
of a city burning down.

Speaker 4 (04:27):
Yeah, particularly the Palisades, which is historically a significantly wealthy neighborhood. Yeah,
you know, a den of celebrity in Hollywood elites, and
seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point
that you know, you have wealth that insulates you from
the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes

(04:48):
so far. I saw that there was a couple of
wealthy people on Twitter begging for private fired fighting forces
to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that
are talking about activation and how smart they are to
do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into
the social system that helps in these times. Clearly we're

(05:10):
severely underfunded and severely undermanaged when it comes to the
government stepping in during these emergencies.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
Yeah, and like that's something I want to address because
I think in every natural disaster that I've covered, the
reason it becomes a disaster, I guess is because the
state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people,
and in almost every case it's people who have to step.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Up and look after one another.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
So we should talk about the response of the LA
City and county governments, and then I'd love to talk
about the mutial aid response after that.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
Yeah, from what we've seen here in Kaytown, if you
weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks
that were out talking to all of our un house
neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds,
first of all, didn't know what was going on. They
saw the sky, they assumed there was a fire nearby,
but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and

(06:07):
that we were generally threatened as well. They didn't have
any supplies, and in some areas of Los Angeles we've
heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued.
So the city has continued throwing away tents from the
people living on the streets. And then for the house
people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that

(06:27):
they've set up. Pan Pacific Park is one of them
for Hollywood. There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like.
But it seems to be you know, a hodgepodge of
you know, disorganization and a lot of you know, mutual
aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct
people and gather the supplies. I have not heard of,

(06:48):
you know, a very formal eyed system. There is no
word on any kind of significant assistance for people who
have lost their homes at the moment. I don't know
if the Red Cross is gonna set a staging zone
up or anything, but I do know that the people
who are setting up you know, places for people to go, food, water,
even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers.

(07:11):
You know. I'm in this chat group Mutual ADLA that
spurred you know, literally just on signal the day that
the fire started, that has a thousand people on it
mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one
area of the city to the other. You know, I
have this person who needs a place to stay, Like,
who's got a list of places that are open, because

(07:32):
when you have disasters as big, you need help quickly. Yeah,
and bureaucracy just doesn't you know that that's not built
for that.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
And like we've definitely seen that there was just a
failure of the state to respond like in the way
that it needed to as quickly as it needed to.
And it's really it's wonderful to see people picking up slack,
like of course it is. It's really beautiful that people
show up for each other in these times. There's something
about that that I obviously, like find really affirming. That's

(08:04):
maybe why I do this for a living. But yeah,
it's really beautiful to see. It doesn't mean that we
should forget that, Like the state has capacity that it
is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused.
It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people,
to bring food to people, to create shelter for people.
It's not it's choosing to harasp people who live on

(08:24):
the street.

Speaker 4 (08:25):
Yeah, and this is something we see repeatedly. You know,
it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but
when it did rain, we had historical rains last year,
in particular, we had a cold front where folks die
every time, and we know folks are going to die
every time it rains here in LA. We have more
people that die of hypothermia and Los Angeles than New

(08:45):
York and San Francisco. Combined every year because hypothermia actually
doesn't require it to be freezing this set end. It
just requires you to be in around sixty degrees and
be wet, which is very common on the streets here
of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their
skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while

(09:05):
it's raining, and our electeds know this. When I first
started doing this work, there was a slogan that we
were chanting for a day in LA and that was
the number of unhoused people that died every day. And
now we're at about six or seven. We request, you know,
through the Freedom of Information Act, requests the coroner's report
every year of how many people died, and that number

(09:27):
is only growing. And the government knows this. They know
every time we have a heat wave that there are
seventy thousand people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars.
They know that during the winter, you know, people are
out there in the cold and the rain. And I
talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and
they asked me like, well, aren't there you know, insert
service here that you think there should be, you know,

(09:49):
right now during the fires, Like aren't there vans picking
people up and taking them to shelter, and it's like
that would be wonderful, when there's not. There's never any
vans picking people up. Know, even when they open up
cooling shelters and warming shelters. The number one barrier we
heard from people in the streets is how would I
get there? And when I get there, they make me

(10:10):
not bring my stuff in, so it's all going to
get stolen. There's just all of these barriers that the
city is just completely you know, purposely neglecting. They could
talk to any of us on how to run a
successful you know, warming or cooling shelter, they don't, you know,
they have no interest in what we have to say.
In fact, our city council person hearing Kytown doesn't respond

(10:32):
to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat
out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with
concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been,
you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't
have this support of this agency, and in fact they
are opposition. You know, we're the ones having to organize
around them and what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here, Like every time
it rains, people will die.

Speaker 3 (10:59):
Every time we have heat wave.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
I remember they found the remains of an in house
person a couple of years ago, and they thought the
person had been burned like like by fire, and it
turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts
of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago,
just like give an anecdote, it was I think above
one hundred degrees in town. It was so hot, and
I was in the river bed like I had this
big insulated backpack to give people cold water, and just

(11:24):
like dozens of people were in terrible distress. And yeah,
there was no presence of police fire and anyone to help.
Right Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments
in these cities, and people are still unsafe and they
don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because
these government agencies are the same ones that you say

(11:46):
that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little
things that they've been trying to build up to get onto,
you know, like a better situation in life.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
Yeah, and I think there's this sense of like apathy
that has built and rightfully so, from the people that
live on the streets where we've you know, relayed messages
that we've heard like hey, two one one says they
have one hundred shelter beds tonight, call and see if
you can get in, and they're like, okay, you know,
like I'll give it a shot, you know, And it's

(12:14):
very well received because we understand the amount of disappointment
these people have gone through when they do the care
plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name, yea,
when they throw all their stuff away when they show
up and they do care Plus, they show up with
a social worker first, which if I was a social worker,
I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is

(12:36):
that right before they throw away everything that an non
house person owns, they send in a loan social worker
to write their names and maybe their numbers down and
tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get
back to them, and then they have all of their
belongings droven away. I can't imagine the harm that has
done for just trusting services even when they're available, you know,

(12:58):
accessing them and then giving them your information. Have one
person who rightfully so told me they have trauma about
filling out forms because they've done this three hundred times,
you know, they said something incredible. They've been counting about
how many times they've filled the same forms out to
have it lead nowhere. And I can't imagine, you know,
that kind of resilience. Now, with this devastation, there's going

(13:22):
to be a lot of homeowners who are going to
experience that firsthand. I'm seeing a lot of people that
are homeless for the first time ever in their lives,
like in their late fifties. And these are people that
have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have you know,
lived their whole life as you're supposed to you in
the United States, and then in their elder years, befall
some sort of disaster or social Security doesn't pay anymore,

(13:45):
and they are severely shocked when I tell them what
the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've
had people ask me like where do I go to
sign up for free housing? And I have to tell them,
you know, the wait list for vouchers is fifteen years,
is long, and it's a lottery. The list is closed
because it's so full. You can apply to senior housing,

(14:06):
but that's about a ten year wait, you know, that
I have to be the one to tell them that,
and that's sort of shock I think is going to
be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried
to access services before.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
Yeah, definitely, let's take a little break here for some
advertisements and then we'll come back. All right, we're back.
So Yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation

(14:39):
facing unhoused people in southern California will understand that there
is not a safety net, and that's about to become
more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people. Let's
talk about the way that people are helping to take
care of one another, because I think that's that's what
always happened to these situations. So let's talk about the

(15:00):
mutual aid effort. Maybe you could like talk about some
of the groups, talk about some of the things you've
been doing, and then I want to get onto how
people can help if they're in town, and how people
can help if they are a long way away.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (15:11):
In LA, we have a very robust network of mutual
aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via
this government. I think a lot of them have started
up to step in just there's no denying all over
La that there's this crisis because you walk outside of
your house and there are people sleeping on your street.

(15:34):
You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've
seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city,
and we in times of crisis, you know, will spark
up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands
of people overnight that are willing to jump in and
get their hands dirty to coalesce and find resources. You know,

(15:57):
here's where we're buying masks. This star is out, don't
go to this one. Go to that one who's reimbursing
people for a gas et cetera, et cetera. And it's
normal people. You know, I have a full time job.
My friends here in Ktown for all. Some are teachers,
some are in the movie industry, you know, some are
random lawyers you know that will take their time out

(16:20):
to do this work. And I think that it's beautiful
in the sense that we get people the help they
need and it's never enough, which is crushing. Here in Ktown.
We give supplies to about four hundred or so on
house people a week minimum, and that is hygiene supplies

(16:41):
tense blankets, We connect them to any services that they
might ask us to connect them to, driving them to
the hospital, et cetera. And this has been going on
for the last five years. And Ktown for All specifically
started as a counter protest because there was an attempt
to build a showter here in Koreatown and some homeowners

(17:03):
organized against it. They marched down Wiltshire and shut it down.
And our founders found each other because they were the
only five people holding up we Want Shelter Science and
just started doing distribution themselves. And I think that's one
thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's
not as intimidating as it seems to start one of
these projects. It's literally you and a couple of friends

(17:25):
who decide that you're going to do something, and you
acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never
be able to meet the need because what we need
is a government who cares about people. But in the meanwhile,
we're going to do the best we can, and the
lives of the you know, now four hundred or so
people that we see every week are a little better

(17:46):
because we decide to do that.

Speaker 2 (17:48):
Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, Like
it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I
get almost every week, like how do I start a
mutual aid group? Like if you can make a sandwich,
then you and you can start a mutual aid group.
Like just go and feed people who are hungry. If
someone's cold, give them a blanket. Like it doesn't have
to be like you don't have to read seventeen books,

(18:10):
you know, and be like starting a five H one,
C three and stuff.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
You just need to do things.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
And I think, especially like we're going into a new administration,
we're going to see the state being more hostile to
people who already marginalized. And like, the best advice I
have for people is to get off the internet and
to get into the streets and just do something. It
doesn't matter if you say you won't be able to
do everything, not right away, maybe one day we will,

(18:35):
but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing,
and I guarantee it is also much better for you
and you're met, Like I feel so much better when
I'm able to help people. I wouldn't be able to
do the job I do at the border if I
wasn't also able to help people like it. It helps
me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess,
or like we're doing something about it at least. What

(18:56):
are people doing right now to help people who are
impacted by the fire. What are the needs that are
arising and how people meeting them?

Speaker 4 (19:03):
Yeah, well, Ktown for all focuses here in the Ktown neighborhood,
and what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People
are sitting and it's literally raining ash in some areas
and are sitting in the suot, So there's that. There's
basic tent and tarp gathering meals. So many emergency services
shut down during disasters, you know, makes sense, but a

(19:26):
lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from
are not open right now. So it's getting people food,
getting people water just enough to survive. In other areas,
folks are gathering supplies. There's all Power Books that is
a big distribution site right now. Po Mutuoid out in
the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work.

(19:47):
The South Bay got swept last night, so South Bay
Mutuo Aid Club is replacing tents this morning. There's a
lot of the Pet Mutuo Aid groups who are gathering
pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of
the found dogs and cats. It's just I mean, I
can't even list the amount of people right now that
are like in their vehicles doing drop offs to you know,

(20:09):
the sidewalk project. There's a big skid row distribution point
that is building up crowdsourcing insulin things that like you
don't think about that people ran out of their house
that they need to live. They don't have time to
go get a prescription right you know at a primary
care provider like that, we need albuterol that people are
having asthma attacks. So there's these kind of burdens that

(20:30):
mutuoid projects get around because people a don't have to
fill out any forms, they don't have to wait. If
we have it, you're going to be handed it. And
you know, even medical providers as part of our projects
have become a really big support as people on the
streets are often very disabled. We have a lot of

(20:50):
folks at diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very
horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has
a free clinic, All Power Clinic and they offer free
medical care and come with us on our roots here
in Katown to offer free treatment for folks. And I
think that's something that is going to only grow, as

(21:11):
you said, as this administration occurs. Homelessness rose eighteen percent
in the last year, and that's only been the case
every year since we started counting. There is no way
this administration is going to institute rent control or anything
that keeps people from being displaced. One mutuoid project that
I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the

(21:33):
LA Tenants Union mobilizing to care for their members, checking
in on their disabled members. These kind of community based
organizations where people know people, they know who to check
up on, they know who's vulnerable. Those kind of organizations
are invaluable in emergencies like these.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
Yeah, definitely, And like I one good thing that can
come out of this is that we can build stronger communities,
right and we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves
depending on mutual aid for the first time can realize that,
like they can participate in that. And I know there
are folks already why who have lost their homes who
are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing
people and stuff.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
Yeah, And I think we say this all the time.
In the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being
homeless than you are to be a billionaire. And I
think this is one of the most direct examples, Like
these people might have been well off maybe a month
or two ago, and then now they have zero. You know,

(22:32):
they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe
five years, you know, if some of them, and hopefully,
you know, they end up recovering. But I hope they
don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a
great equalizer. And the people that show their faces, they're
not the politicians, they're not the lobbyists, they're not you know,

(22:55):
the Democratic Party. You know, TM, it's your neighbor who
has a mask for you. It's me, someone random from
down the block, who got a couple friends together, who
has water for you. You know, like that's who comes through,
and that's who you need to care for all the time,
including your un housed neighbors that are around you all

(23:17):
the time, who live in your community and who face
this emergency every day. You know, they don't know where
they're going to sleep every night, they don't know where
their next meal is coming from. Every day, they get
their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if
not once a week, very frequently, And I hope this
is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy

(23:38):
in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this
context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter,
you know, the basics.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
Yeah, talking food, water, and shelter the things I need
as well, and so to pay for them, I have
to pivot to ads. Now, Okay, we're back. I think

(24:07):
that was a really good plug for like why Muti
Lady is important and hopefully there are people who are
listening right or people who are finding themselves for the
first time interested in helping seeing a crisis. A lot
of people like will ask me if they can come
help at the border, and of course you can, but
you should also help in your own community because there
are people who need you there, and obviously that's very
true in LA right now. So I want to give

(24:30):
some resources some ways people can help if people are
listening in LA, what are some like I know there
are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete
things they can do or some places they can go
if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted
by the fires and they want to help other people.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
What are some things they can do?

Speaker 4 (24:49):
You're free to follow kitown for all on Instagram. We
are constantly uploading on our stories year round. Fundraisers, resource requests,
go fundmes, et cetera. We really try to stay connected
with the LA Mutual Aid network, and honestly, once you
follow one of us, you kind of follow all of
us because we're very supportive of each other's effort. Mutual

(25:11):
Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine
that gets published every month that has a list of
mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come
out on physical outreach with us, which we do on
Saturdays every Saturday except the first Saturday of the month
when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us,
you know, connect with others. You're free to help us financially.

(25:33):
But we also you know, funny you mentioned this, James,
But if you DM us and you're like, hey, I
want to talk to someone about starting a project in
my region, I'm so happy to hop on a zoom
with you. Tell you how we do our distribution, tell
you how we make our maps, of encampments, tell you
how we you know, fund and routsource always happy to

(25:54):
find that knowledge and people messages all the time. Can
we start a Neighborhood for All chapter? And we're like,
we're so honored that you would do that. Please don't ask,
but you're totally welcome to. And so we have Pasadena
for All that is doing great work, and Pasadena for
All is definitely always in need of support. They are
in a huge disaster zone Altadena, Pasadena, like all those

(26:16):
areas are been evacuated. Palms Mutoid. But yeah, if you
want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram,
Ktown for All, same Twitter, same on Blue Sky and
will hopefully be your input into the La Mutoid scene.
We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work.
And while we focus in the Ktown neighborhood, LA is

(26:38):
a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in
Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention,
you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that
we share.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Like one of my friends when we were doing border stuff,
made a website where we documented all the stuff we
did so that it was open source and available to people,
like how we built shelters and how we could But yeah,
we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Like
we can all help each other get that start and
not make the mistakes so we all make So that's
really cool that people can reach out to you. What
about if they're a long way away and they just

(27:11):
want to send some money, They want to help and
they've got money they want to share.

Speaker 4 (27:15):
Yeah, you're always welcome to venmo us kton for all.
Same on venmo. We have a PayPal link, We have
a website, kton for all dot org. We are five
oho and C three. If you'd like to donate in
our you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way,
feel free to dm us. We just got that figured out.
But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on

(27:38):
material goods. We don't have any employees, we don't have
any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks and
baby wipes usually when we get you know, sock donations
and things like that, And honestly, we prefer it that
way just because you know, we we know what nonprofit
requirements are like and that kind of burden that that
place is on mutuoid projects and we're trying to avoid them,

(28:01):
so every time still goes to supplies, and I know
every mutoid project. Jaytown Action in Japantown as well operates
in a very similar model. I would just suggest people
get plugged in to mutuoid La. They follow us on Instagram,
feel free to send any money, work constantly on our stories,
uploading gofundmes and venmos and stuff. I really appreciate their

(28:25):
help you out of the country and hope that one
day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we
live in a great world.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
Yeah, yeah, that'd be nice.

Speaker 2 (28:36):
Is there anything else, like, do you have any bottlenecks
or particular shortages that you want to shout out that
the audience can maybe.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Help you with.

Speaker 4 (28:42):
We're always looking for staples, so those are tents and
tarps constantly. Those are often the most expensive items people
have to purchase. Tents go about thirty to forty dollars
each one, and the government throws a lot of them
away every week. So those items. Feel free to always

(29:03):
DM me if you have some that you would like
to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs
are really good at building connections directly with vendors and
we usually get like a discount and buying in bulk.
So I would really love to shake people from their
fear of donating cash.

Speaker 1 (29:18):
Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 4 (29:19):
Know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an
item because you know that that's the item that's given out.
But sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand
of those tenths, and your dollar goes farther. So you know,
tense blankets, and again, don't be afraid to do this
by yourself. Like you can go to home depot and
buyotent and hand it to someone. You can go to

(29:39):
home depot and buy masks right now and hand them
to someone. You don't have to wait for a group
like this to be around and to help, particularly if
your neighborhood needs you.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, and it's a really good message. It's a good
place to end.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Just to remind everyone, it's at Ktown for All on
Instagram and k Town for All on Venmo.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Right, yep, great, thanks so.

Speaker 4 (30:00):
Much, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Oh it could happen here. A podcast from CEES The
Consumer Electronics Show twenty twenty five. I am here with
my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis. We have been
trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention
Center all day. Garrison, today, you started earlier than I

(30:39):
did because I was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk
with the priest last night. Yeah, we had a nice
dinner and then we set out to experience a fresh
new hell. And in this case, that fresh new hell
was what the AI bros Have ready for your children.

Speaker 5 (30:54):
No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products
for kids like the same day, during the exactly same time.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Uh huh. Yeah, it really is remarkable that, Like, yeah,
I guess in part just because like Betty is such
a focus. I think it has something to do with
what you saw some of yesterday where and I had
caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah,
they don't really like this stuff. We're gonna have to
get around it. Like obviously this is inevitable, but like
people really also seem to not enjoy it very much.

(31:21):
No one can explain why, but I think that this
may be like, Okay, well, if we get them when
they're young enough, if we train these kids. We can
force this on them and they'll have no choice but
to like it.

Speaker 5 (31:31):
And it's interesting to say that because the first thing
I did today was go to a panel at the
Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the
best title for any single panel.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
Yeah, that's that's fucked up.

Speaker 5 (31:47):
The description was a new generation of kids are being
brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives.
How does this affect their learning, entertainment and socialization? Which
is a good question. Yeah, we should be asked that,
more people should. There was four people on the panel,
Karen Ruth Wong from Ido, Play Lab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick

(32:09):
from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and
Joshua Garrett from a Ready Land. And I'll talk about
all these all these different companies and people in a
sec Yeah. So the panel started with Karen Ruth Wang
from Ido, which is the company that first partnered with
sessing me a Workshop to start making online apps. So,
you know, that was interesting to me because sess me

(32:30):
a Workshop generally puts a lot of care into, like
you know, making media for children. This is a company
that works with them, so I was interested in what
she was going to say, and basically she talked not
about any products that her company's making, but instead research
into how like AI is affecting gen Z, how gen
Z wants to like interact with AI, and talked about

(32:52):
a whole bunch of research that her company has been
doing for the past few years on like what people
you know, my age and you know younger, what they're
attitudes are towards this thing that has become like an
increasingly encroaching part of their lives. I'm just going to
play a series of clips.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Couldn't be more excited. So I was sharing this.

Speaker 6 (33:11):
Morning a little bit about what we're learning.

Speaker 7 (33:14):
That question is what if the tech savvy generation isn't
buying anymore? We have a lot of one of the
interesting opinions and assumptions in our heads that these are
the one they are going to be the first users
and the first viewers, and in many ways they are,
but then the ones that also comes the most informed
opinions not just about how badly the tech feels, how
cringey some of them imp be landing, but also how

(33:35):
it's affecting their sense of humanity.

Speaker 1 (33:38):
That's fascinating yeah.

Speaker 5 (33:39):
The very first thing this is literally like the minutes
into the panels, is like after they do their introductions,
the first thing to talk about is how gen Z
is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're
also kind of the most AI critical.

Speaker 8 (33:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, yeah, it's cringey.

Speaker 5 (33:53):
Yeah, like how it feels cringy and not just that,
how it's affecting people's sense of humanity and viewing them like,
you know, in some ways, as like an obstacle to
get over. But also this is I'm not sure how
I feel about about, like, you know, Karen and the
company she's representing here, because in some ways I felt
like she's probably actually good. She just had to frame

(34:13):
all of the things she was saying as like shocking
revelations to all these tech bros, be like, yeah, actually,
it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run
by AI.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI.

Speaker 5 (34:25):
I actually liked what she was saying, it is just
her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times
because because of who the audience is.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Do you get see do you get the feeling that
she was like a bad person trying to help like
other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who
was trying to like in a way that these guys
would listen to tell them that what they're doing is in.

Speaker 5 (34:45):
Work maybe like twenty eighty so like like a little
bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this,
but mostly it felt like trying to inform people about
how this isn't really what people want and you know,
it has a lot of actual drawbacks. Here's a clip
of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're
asking kids to you know, get data on how they
feel about AI.

Speaker 7 (35:06):
Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions
what it.

Speaker 6 (35:10):
Would be like to interact with.

Speaker 7 (35:12):
A potential AI tool, And so we asked questions like, Okay,
you've recently had a friend breakup. What kind of intervention
do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you
through that process or do you want someone to kind
of replace their friend for the time being, just you
can you know, back yourself out from that relationship. So
by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front

(35:32):
of youth, we were able to co design to view
insights at this one always gets all audience members. We
put out a provocational expression of Imagine you could have
an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live
your life for you. Imagine they can swipe your tender
for you. They would have the any conversations or they

(35:55):
would go through the awkward introductions you know, new person
in school.

Speaker 6 (35:58):
And we heard some really interesting things.

Speaker 7 (36:01):
I want to go on a bad day for myself
and I want to have that davcation.

Speaker 6 (36:05):
There was a really interesting sign that be able to
live life for yourselves at badge of want.

Speaker 5 (36:12):
Being able to live life for yourself is a badge
of honor.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace
them in such drudgery as the search for love and
human connection. Incredible that that teens aren't interested in letting
a robot go on dates for them.

Speaker 5 (36:28):
No, it's super interesting and like even like the first
thing she said about you know you like lost some friends.
Do you want an AI to like, you know, like
counsel you or like you know, like like like talk
about your feelings or do you want a friend replacement?
And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this
even like honor question of like you know, like AI
swiping your Tinder for you trying to figure out what

(36:50):
your preferences are. No, like gen Z wants to live
life for themselves. It's like it's odd because I.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
Because that's what being a person, that's to be a person.

Speaker 5 (36:59):
That's right, But like it's all how that's framed as
like a surprising revelation.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Wow, these kids want to live lives.

Speaker 5 (37:05):
So yeah, it was it was a kind of an
odd pedal to go to. She highlighted that the key
areas of tension in AI for for gen Z is
twofold a creative expression and human relationships. These are the
two biggest things that people are concerned about is how
how will affect your ability to you know, make art
be creative and what it means for like, you know,

(37:26):
relationships as a human being, right, especially if you're being
asked questions about you know, would you let an AI
like meet someone that you want to date first, have
have them go through like a first like fake AI
date to like to like get through like icebreaker questions
or something.

Speaker 1 (37:43):
The amount of people I meet who feel that way
about like their digital twins or like who take pride
in having like an ai trained off of their social
media posts at events like these. It's shocking to me
because like, do you feel good about saying that a
chat bought you feel like it is you that you
have trained to chatbot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself.

(38:04):
Do you feel good about thinking that? Does that make
you happy about yourself?

Speaker 9 (38:10):
Well?

Speaker 5 (38:10):
And the data that person was talking about showed no, like, yeah,
people actually don't want these things, Like no, that's actually
is it what anyone wants out of life? This isn't
what anyone wants out of this technology, right, Like we
use AI all the time, you know, like like you know,
like auto complete. It has a whole bunch of like
you know, pretty basic uses.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
Yeah, it saves me from having dispel certain words too
many times.

Speaker 5 (38:30):
Yeah, but we don't want it to like go on
dates for us. And the whole part of being human
is having you know, a degree of bad experiences and
that that helps shape us as people. And this isn't
like a hurdle to get over. This is like a
part of what it means to be human. And then
she kind of talked about that a little bit more
in this last clip that I'll play.

Speaker 6 (38:50):
The next one here. I prefer to give opportunities to
people over technology.

Speaker 7 (38:55):
I think these are the ones, and again they've seen
what it's like full overplaced. I'll definitely share a lot more,
but starting off with a few key learnings gen Z's
value advice and perspective from lived experience.

Speaker 6 (39:10):
There's something about designing for friction.

Speaker 7 (39:12):
I'm gonnay like a design for friction in our age
of optimization and our age of assuming that everything should
move as fast as possible to make life as smooth
as possible. There's something about the challenge and that comes
back to play, right, Why would we spend so much
time to hit a ball several hundred yards away.

Speaker 6 (39:31):
There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy.

Speaker 7 (39:33):
Of overcoming challenge, the joy of bringing through your first
friend break up, your boyfriend or girl friend breakup.

Speaker 6 (39:39):
That makes you to a person.

Speaker 7 (39:41):
And as many times as helicopter parents or as people
who are designed technology assume that the smoothest possible path
is the best possible path.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
There's some push back there, some pushback, some pushback to
the idea that like you should live a life, your
one precious life should be lived.

Speaker 5 (39:59):
No, there's a a bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen
Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah, you know,
like having like workforce replacement gen Z prefers to actually
like make connections and network with other people our age
and actually like share opportunities.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (40:14):
In previous panels, this was something that was also talked
about how millennials were way more like selective about like
sharing like employment opportunities because they were like so focused
on like making sure that they make it and there's
a lot more like like open collaboration and sharing sharing opportunities.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
It's harder, so you guys have to be better about that.

Speaker 5 (40:29):
Yeah, yeah, no talking about you know, like designing for friction.
There's like there's value in something being challenging.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
That was very interesting because the surprise about that because
it is it is this kind of I'm sure most
of these people were born to wealth and privilege and
the first thing that people do with money, the primary
reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact
that that's surprising to anyone that like, no, like friction's
necessary otherwise you're not a person. I mean, it's like that.

(40:56):
It's like the Gooule we saw the other night, right,
like you know, they're just not really people, you know.

Speaker 5 (41:04):
One thing she kind of closed on in this section
is talking about how gen Z does not trust AI
to understand the nuance of their lives, especially in this
age of like tech optimization. Like that misses a part
of what it means to, like, you know, feel proud
of yourself and the work that you've done.

Speaker 4 (41:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (41:19):
Something she should talk about at the very end of
the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like
like gen Z, you know and people in general, right,
will will feel proud about, you know, making a piece
of art, yeah, and they don't have that same sense
of pride for an AI generated image, no, whether it's
like a screenplay, whether it's whatever. Someone gave an example of, like,

(41:39):
you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff.
They edit videos, right, and there is AI tools that
make editing videos like easier, But if the AI does
all the work, they don't feel happy about that, Like
they don't feel proud, They don't feel like they've actually
achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the
work that you've done, so like there's actually a sense
of like ownership over like the art that we create.

Speaker 7 (42:00):
Eight.

Speaker 5 (42:00):
An exact quote was quote you can't eliminate life formative aspects.

Speaker 1 (42:06):
Which which is like, yes, it is called life. Yeah,
you don't ever have anything.

Speaker 5 (42:10):
I'm happy someone at CS is saying this, the fact
that it needs to be said.

Speaker 1 (42:14):
At all very bleak, very sad. It's really bleak. Yeah,
dating people, making friends, being social, doing whatever it is
you do for a living as yourself is what life
is like.

Speaker 10 (42:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (42:29):
I think last thing that you talked about is like
gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries.

Speaker 11 (42:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (42:35):
Good, and they have to reinforce their own sense of
self because we're constantly being bombarded with you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts,
live streams, like everything you know, TikTok social media. So
we have strongly boundaries on how tech it like integrates
into our lives. And a lot of the way these
tech bros want AI to like become more invasive. We
are not super into no.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
Like all they're offering people is like this this machine
will do everything that you actually want to do with
your time, and also you won't have a job, like
that's what big tech is promising gen Z.

Speaker 5 (43:08):
Yeah, so that's how I started my day speaking.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
Of gen z. Z stands for zillions of dollars that
will get if you listen to these ads and we're back.

Speaker 5 (43:29):
So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids
maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also
had two other people from AI products. The first one
that I'll mention is called ready Land, which I think
I think partnered with Amazon ors to some degree. It
at least uses like Amazon Alexa's essentially a chooser own
adventure story book with like a natural physical copy that

(43:50):
Alexa will read to you and you can talk to
it so you can talk to characters and choose different pathways.
I was more skeptical out of that first, because I
just don't like AI's reading books to kids. Became more
like an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind
of good at what it was doing. And then the
guy behind it clarified ready Land is not using AI

(44:11):
to generate new content for kids. It's all like pre programmed,
like human paths, you know, just with so many variables
already built in based on you know, like if you're
making food in one of these books, or like you know,
a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest.
The AI already has like stuff for how to handle that. Yeah,
he knows how to say these words and knows how
to stitch together these things. But it's not actually generating

(44:31):
new content itself. It's if everything is like pre baked,
it can be assembled in many different ways. Okay, so
every time you read a book to the kid, it'll
be slightly different because the kid will respond to certain
plot elements. The kid can like talk to talk to characters,
ask questions. So like this was this was actually pretty interesting.
The fact that it's simply not even generating new content

(44:52):
makes it miles better than any of these other AI
Kids products.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
That it's actually just kind of using some of the
tech that makes up AI exactly allow you to make
something humans wrote more reactive exactly.

Speaker 5 (45:04):
Yeah, So like it's it's it's it's actually like a
pretty interesting piece of technology, and it's not just Alexa
reading a story book. It has like a large interactive
element which you know that makes the Alexa part, you know,
actually useful. And then there was this other product what
was this what what was this one called? It's from
coming called Skyrocket Toys, Hoe the AI Teddy Bear or

(45:24):
something like that, pokay Hoe the AI Bear, which does
generate live content with with guardrails. He did say, oh good,
but the AI content both comes from the input and
the output. You talked about guardrails, you know, he said.
You know, chat gpt does have internal guardrails, but the

(45:44):
reliability is suspect, which there certainly is, considering just last
week there was a piece of news about chat gpt
helping someone build a bomb.

Speaker 1 (45:53):
Yeah, yeah, which they used in just this magical city.

Speaker 5 (45:56):
Yes, so he didn't say that like guardrail reliability can
be so, but there is a difference when you have
certainly like like more like child's friendly features turned on.
But he admitted that like moderation is part of the challenge.
I don't know. He basically how this works is you
have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear
that talks with a not very pleasing voice.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
Oh I got to hear it.

Speaker 5 (46:17):
Do you want me to pull this up? Yes?

Speaker 1 (46:19):
Absolutely?

Speaker 5 (46:20):
Okay, yeah, But basically you put in a whole bunch
of story inputs, being like I want the story set
in this place, I want it featuring these types of characters.
I want this archetype to be the villain, or it
has like dozens or not hundreds of like eve like
archetypal things that you can like click and then the
teddy bear will will generate a new story. So it
is generating new content, but with like pre baked characters. Okay,

(46:40):
so then it'll sit together the story. The weirder you
make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be. Well,
let me play a clip for Robert here.

Speaker 12 (46:49):
It's a bright and shiny January morning, the perfect time
for another story. Did you know that in Las Vegas,
where our story takes place, they haven't gigantic called the
high Rowler.

Speaker 6 (47:02):
It's taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Speaker 1 (47:04):
So the whole in the real world events in places
based on the setting achieves What if I told.

Speaker 12 (47:10):
You there's a mystery waiting to be unround at the
consumer Electronic Shoe.

Speaker 1 (47:15):
There's excitement here and these that guy like sitting there
talking almost rolling his eyes at his own product while
it yaps in his lap is a perfect like he
clearly didn't think about how that would look because it
does not make an appealing ad for the product.

Speaker 5 (47:33):
No, so it doesn't sound good. So yeah, they generated
a story set in cees in Las Vegas and he
would occasionally interrupt the bear to like explain what it
was doing. So that was the other product, not nearly
as polished or like really really as thoughtful as like
the AI story book. But you know, maybe if you
are tired of having to, you know, talk to your kid,

(47:55):
you can just get one of these teddy bears to
yeah throw thrown front raise it.

Speaker 1 (47:59):
I mean it looks I think it could probably handle
all of the physical contact they need too, so you
don't even need to ever touch your child. And in fact,
you can just have chat GPT root that through the
bear and never even see your own flesh and blood.
Like I think ideally you would have them cut out
of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know,
a month or two early, and that way you can

(48:19):
kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you
ever spend in contact with your spawn.

Speaker 5 (48:24):
One other thing I will add is that the ready
Land guy the AI story book particlarly when talking about,
you know, the importance of guardrails, he said that there's
multiple levels to safety. Right, an AI Kid's robot that
swears right, it's one thing that's it's pretty easy to
avoid actually, Like that's that's pretty easy.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
There's a limited number of swear words, right.

Speaker 5 (48:41):
And you could just like you could just block out
certain things from happening. Yeah, you can build that in.
But another aspect that's really important to safety is like
the accuracy of the things it's saying, right, Like, what
if it's saying something that's supposed to be you know,
some like factual statement about the world that's just that
just like isn't true or can actually like lead to danger, Right,
what if it tells your kid to do something which
is actually kind of dangerous, or what if it says

(49:02):
like not even not even directly telling them, but you know,
it says something that if the kid then tries to
do that, it's really dangerous. And like this is why
their storybook program, you know, does not generate new content.
So everything it says is like it's like already pre approved,
Like it already is going to have you know, like
verified like verified safe you know sentences versus this ai

(49:23):
teddy Bear. Because it is generating new content, you know,
it could if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk
about drinking bleach. You know. Yeah, theoretically, you know, it's
just just like something you know, like things can go wrong.
So it's not just about you know, avoiding bad words
or talking about sex or you know those types of
like like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not
like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to

(49:44):
like dangerous situations.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Right, Well, the good news is that I don't think
these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean,
I guess we'll see. But these are super expensive and like,
did you get a price point for that bear?

Speaker 5 (50:01):
I did not hear her price point for the bear.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging
for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this
stuff really does take off. I wouldn't consider it an
optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like, they
don't seem like great products to me, so I guess
we'll see. I read something very interesting that is related exactly,
and it probably was he might have been talked about
like that weird bear or something. I read something very

(50:24):
interesting on the subject of like AI children's toys from
a guy who was like an AI developer. This was
from a post on Twitter by Alex Volkov. I got
my six year old daughter an AI toy for her
birthday that arrived for Christmas instead, she unpacked it all excited.
I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this
one has AI in it. She of course knows what
AI is, seeing the things I've built and interacted with them,

(50:46):
chatted with chat GBT and Santa Mode, knows that Daddy
is doing AI, et cetera. So a very interesting experiment happened.
After Magical Toys reached out and fixed the issue reference below.
She started playing with this dino, chatted with it, and
then learned to turn it off and wanted to talk anymore.
She still loves playing with it, dressed it up. It
now has paper shoes in the top hat that we
made together. But every time I asked her if she

(51:07):
liked to chat with it, she says no. A few
times it turned it back on and she did speak
with it for a bit, and then she just turned
it off again, not wanting to engage. I gently asked why,
and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance.
It's not weird to her. In fact, at one point
she was pretending that Dinah was a baby and was
turned on. So I told her, let's ask it to
pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said okay,

(51:28):
So we asked it to cry. Granted, they don't have
an amazing advanced voice mode like open AI, so it
did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her
laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking,
and also there are still technical issues. The voice is
sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny
for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect
of this didn't connect with my six year old.

Speaker 5 (51:49):
Because it's creepy, because it's people.

Speaker 1 (51:51):
They don't like it. Nobody wants this. Yeah, ick, yeah, ick.
I know this is a sample size of one kid here,
and I'm sure many many things will change. I shall
grow and learn to interact with more AIS and different forms.
But the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.

Speaker 5 (52:09):
That is interesting.

Speaker 1 (52:11):
Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating.

Speaker 5 (52:13):
Yeah, No one wants this, even six year olds. You're like, hey,
I would prefer to a regular toy you can play with.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
I would prefer all pretend it's a robot, but I
don't want it to be a robot. That talks to me, Poe.

Speaker 5 (52:26):
The AI bear is fifty dollars on Amazon.

Speaker 1 (52:28):
Oh that's not bad. Actually, no, that's good. Okay, good,
all right, Well maybe maybe we can.

Speaker 5 (52:32):
Even maybe order one and see and see what we
can get out of it. Yeah, all right, we're gonna
go on another break and return to talk once acaind
about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back.

Speaker 1 (52:57):
So we went and saw something else today while you
were at a different chunk of the event talking to
yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the
ease with which we can all do nine to elevens.
Super excited for that future. By the way, I stumbled
upon the booth for a company called TCL, a pretty
big company, fairly large, Yeah, large com and make a

(53:18):
lot of TVs stuff like that. They had a couple
of things. They had an AI laundry machine.

Speaker 5 (53:22):
So many air laundry bots.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
Yeah, this one was the worst because it's like this
little almost a soft rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry.
They say they can't do folding yet, so it just
sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.

Speaker 5 (53:38):
Like it just suspends it in the air.

Speaker 1 (53:39):
It suspends it in the air inside of itself. And
also it can only do a kilogram of laundry. The
only thing they had in there was like handkerchiefs and scarfs,
So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but
you can AI can clean your handkerchiefs and scarfs.

Speaker 5 (53:54):
As opposed to my regular washing machine.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Yeah, and they had a washing machine that it can
identify and count exactly what clothes are in it, how
many of them there are, and it'll tell you the
soil level and YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Like I'm sure
some people changing will want this shit, but it's like, yeah,
only people who have a lot of money and want
to spend it on a laundry machine, because I don't
see that it actually reduces the amount of work you

(54:18):
need to do at this point. But the thing they
had at the booth that caught my eye was a
robot toy for kids. AI Space Me is the name
of the robot. Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because
like Ferby, Yeah, poor Ferby, there's some porg in there.
It's a two part toy. The interior part is like
a swaddled up almost looking little porg thing with acute

(54:42):
face and the eyes are reasonably good, Like they did
a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy, but
like that blink and change color and contract and expand,
and then it's got like two little flapper arms that
can like wiggle, and it's seated inside almost like the
Aliens and independence stay. It's seated inside like this large
rolling body frame that allows it to move around on

(55:04):
the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your
child's friend. And the first thing that was upsetting to
me because they had this video ad that would play
every so often and it was very creepy, and you know,
I thought back to when we were doing the interview
with the guy who had like the robot for old people.
He was like, it's very important that it not tell
them it loves them. That it like always reiterate that

(55:26):
it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid,
I love you, like I care for you. When the
lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy
that actually knows and cares about your child and like, no,
it's not, No, it's not don't say that. That shouldn't
be legal for you. To say that for you to
sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent
being that loves them is like deeply abusive in my opinion,
Like that is actually child abuse because it's not alive anyway.

(55:50):
So I had to bring Garrison over because you needed
to see it.

Speaker 5 (55:55):
Oh and saw it, I did.

Speaker 1 (55:56):
Yeah, And I'm going to play a little clip from
the ad, so I want you to hear the way
this thing sounds.

Speaker 12 (56:05):
Everywhere learning shut and growingly amy you reminds us sound.

Speaker 5 (56:22):
Oh my god.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
I found that profoundly upsetting disturbing. Yeah, your kid can
like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll
like talk to them, It'll make up stories. It'll like
look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them
into like live AI videos. You can put a pin
on and it will record stuff that your kid does
and play it back to you at night as a video.
So again absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have

(56:46):
to spend with your child.

Speaker 10 (56:47):
It's in the car.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Yeah, it takes over your car, so that like it's
talking to you from the screens in your car.

Speaker 5 (56:55):
Like the video like taking taking this thing every like
everywhere the kid goes It's like the kid's main interaction
with the world, Yeah, is with this little rolling like
plastic furbie and yeah, like like talking about like like
expressing like love and like how damaging this must be
for like a four year old to have. Like the
first thing that it constantly expressed like love an affection

(57:16):
for is this little rolling robot that's that you're gonna
throw in the garbage in like you know, four years
when you're when you're like too old for it. How
like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up. That's gonna be
for your for like your sense of self and like
love and affection.

Speaker 1 (57:31):
The mix of things that we're trying to have this do.
Like the other ones were build as toys, this was
built as like a friend for your child as well
as like a home assistance. Yeah, it's supposed to also
act as like it'll change that you can hook it
into your smart home so it can change the temperature.
Like they did a little in person demo where like
a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it
about like planting, planned a birthday party for her kid

(57:53):
with it, Yeah, and it like put food in her
Amazon cart and like change the temperature inside because more
people were coming over. One of the things they advertise
is is security mode, where it like travels around your
house at night and acts as a sentry watching your
home like wild stuff.

Speaker 5 (58:10):
No, it's it was Honestly, I've seen a few like
disturbing things, you know, all of like the the new
drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can
stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad,
But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing.
It really like viscerally upsets me.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
Yeah, and I think probably very bad for children. Everything
they showed us was incredibly curated, Like I when we
watched this live thing where she was having a very
fluid conversation with it that was clearly scripted. Yes, and
so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice.

Speaker 5 (58:45):
We never got an actual like live down, No.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly
recognizing like what's in their you know, little kid drawings
and stuff. What it's supposed to be to make beautiful,
creepily shiny AI moving version some stuff. So like I
wonder how much less good it's going to be in
reality than the thing that they've showed us, but it's
definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already. And

(59:10):
part of why I think that is, like we went
to check out the booth that this other the South
Korean company just called I think sk had like a
they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled,
And then thinking about how like in the ads, it
always like recognized the kid and its parents and a
drawing accurately, Well, this one when I flipped off the
camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up

(59:30):
a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up.
Like I'm really curious for when these things hit the
market and people start buying them, like what sort of
fucked up stuff it'll do, and how kind of big
the seams are. I don't expect a long life for
this thing, which is going to be funnier because like
there was already a big eight hundred dollars like Children's
Companion AI toy that failed last year and the company

(59:53):
shut off access to them, and like so parents had
to explain to their kids who had bonded with this
thing that it was dying forever. And that's especially excited
to be because they They've built a robot that talks
to your kid and tells it it loves them, and
eventually that robot is going to be taken away from
the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable.
And that's I'm excited for that, like new ground and

(01:00:16):
how to fuck up kids. Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison.

Speaker 5 (01:00:20):
What an uplifting adventures again?

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Yeah? No, that's all. Yeah, it's all great. All right, everybody,
Well this has been behind the bastards. No it's not,
or no it's not.

Speaker 5 (01:00:31):
What is this?

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
This has been? It could happen here? A podcast by
somebody who is slowly going insane.

Speaker 5 (01:00:36):
Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now we
still have one more day.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken.

Speaker 5 (01:00:43):
Uh. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like
on the ground coverage with our with our cees best
in show. Yeah so and always going to be maybe
a high note.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
So see you there who.

Speaker 13 (01:01:07):
Welcome Dick It appen here a podcast increasingly about it
having happened. We have spent a long time on this
show talking about what the second Trump administration is going
to be for trans people and you know, go listen
to those episodes. The short version is that it is
going to be very very bad. We're facing care bans,
we're facing federal funding bands. Things are about to get

(01:01:29):
unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.
It is the combination of almost a decades worth of
fighting by the right, And I think we have a
tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as
something abstract right, as a sort of abstract political debate,

(01:01:50):
or even if it affects us, we tend to treat
the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment, as sort
of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking
at it this way is that the harassment, the hatred,
the violence is happening to real people, with real names
and faces, who live lives exactly like yours. The difference
between you sitting in your house right now and someone

(01:02:12):
whose face is on TV is about the difference between
whether a few right wing journalists cover who you are.
So today we're going to be talking to someone who
has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range
of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people,
who have seen basically the entire campaign against trans people

(01:02:35):
evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them, and
that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out
of La Welcome to the show. I wish it was
under better circumstances.

Speaker 11 (01:02:47):
Thank you, Thank you for having me mea.

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
I glad to be here. Yeah, and I'm excited to
talk to you.

Speaker 13 (01:02:52):
I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my god, this
stuff sucks.

Speaker 11 (01:02:58):
But yeah, oh you know, it's it's our lives. What
can we do?

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Yeah?

Speaker 11 (01:03:04):
What will we do?

Speaker 8 (01:03:06):
Wow?

Speaker 13 (01:03:07):
Yes, that's the question for the end of the episode,
is what are we going to do about all of
this shit? But let's go back to sort of the beginning.
Can you can you sort of talk about your first
encounter with I guess at that point what was a
not especially mainstream part of the religious right back in
night around twenty eighteen.

Speaker 8 (01:03:27):
Yeah, so I've been I've been making music as Precious
Child for almost a decade and it was my very
first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that
had this track on it titled Phantom, and that was
an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals.

Speaker 5 (01:03:46):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:03:46):
It wasn't a song per se. It was experimental and
I put on a music video with it, and it
was pretty It's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights. You know,
if you think of movies from the eighties like hal Raiser,
it's kind of like that, you know, like kind of
evocrative of some type of greater supernatural horror. And the

(01:04:08):
far right at that time, the far right, vintage twenty eighteen,
they found it and started reporting it on mess and
tagging their friends and saying report this, report this. And
this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well.
And that video, like, as I said, you know, it's creepy,

(01:04:29):
but it's there's nothing political in it. There's a little
bit of like of blood, but there's no gore. But
if they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic, that's what
they said.

Speaker 11 (01:04:43):
It's is satanic. And that was my first brush with
the right.

Speaker 13 (01:04:49):
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically
the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like it's
like in this early enough phase that they're still sort
of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite
like metastasized transphobia as like they're driving things, so they're
kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic

(01:05:10):
panic era, like the weird nineties and two thousand stuff
that like when when I was growing up, the town
that I grew up with super religious, and like you know,
we had to have lists of like if you were
inviting like a friend in high school to a party
whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party
and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about

(01:05:30):
which is it's like that kind of thing, which I
don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even even
as the stuff's escalated.

Speaker 8 (01:05:37):
But yeah, it was, as I said, it was a
moral panic. And their point was that that I was
a moral for making art like this, and it was
this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm a
moral for the art that I make.

Speaker 1 (01:05:53):
And it's not just my art, but it's me.

Speaker 10 (01:05:55):
It's me.

Speaker 8 (01:05:56):
Yeah, And I think that's perhaps what has changed as well,
Like before they were saying that this is a satanic
evil person because they're making this art, and now they're
saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.

Speaker 13 (01:06:10):
Yeah, And I think part of the focus on art here, right,
is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of
I mean of the original Nazis, Right, Like one of
their big things was just like cracked out on quote
unquote degenerate art, and they had like these like quote
unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and
people whose art they didn't like it. It was, you know,

(01:06:32):
like what a thing that was like a significant factor
in their rise. And I think there's this sort of
mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in
a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out
of this very very weird like Christian moral panic shit.
That's I guess if you want to look at how this,

(01:06:55):
you know, plays out, like that's kind of where it
is in like twenty eighteen, Right, this is the first
bathroom in past By twenty eighteen it was Carolina. But
there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it, and
that's something that's I think very different than now, where
like all of this city transhit is happening and everyone's
just kind of going eh, So, do you want to
talk about the second time he became Tarken a.

Speaker 8 (01:07:18):
Far right Yeah, I mean realistically, like this has been
pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. And
there was another there was another track on that album
that was also targeted. One call it titled My Little
Problem Violet Door, that has some more provocative imagery than

(01:07:39):
the track Phantom, has some nudity, and that was the
collaboration between myself and a artist who is trans themselves,
Kid out of Brazil, and that has again some body
horror in it. There's a commentary about gender norms and
plastic surgery and identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again,

(01:08:03):
it was kind of a surreal body horror video. And
that was Brigade reported not in twenty eighteen, but in
twenty nineteen and actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.
And that video is notable because as a result of
what's going on today, YouTube took that down despite it

(01:08:24):
being up for five years without a problem that you know,
I'd had tens of thousands of views and now it's gone.

Speaker 11 (01:08:32):
So that was the second time.

Speaker 13 (01:08:35):
Yeah, and that one I think is interesting to in
the sense of like that one's like a lot more,
it's more overtly trans and it's also I think the
more trands you are, the more the more like very
obviously trans it is. And this is I guess something
that's very common among trans artists is this kind of

(01:08:58):
like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror it.
You know, I mean, I'm not going to project onto it.
I don't know if this is ucifically are doing, but like,
you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror
as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria, and like it's
this way of sort of thinking about the things that
are happening to your body, things that have been done
to your body, and the things that you're doing back

(01:09:19):
to it.

Speaker 11 (01:09:20):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 8 (01:09:22):
You know, I didn't really think too much about the
concepts in that direction when I made it or when
or and I okay didn't either at that time. However,
the truth is, for much of my young life, I
felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to
match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And

(01:09:44):
that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.

Speaker 11 (01:09:48):
When I was young.

Speaker 8 (01:09:49):
I didn't have access to the information and communities that
are out there now that sup portraans people. Yeah, and
I have had some gender confirming procedures done, but not
as many as I think I would have when I
was younger. I did feel existential discordance, and I don't

(01:10:09):
know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm
going to coin it because pretty sure I didn't. I
didn't feel feel in concordance with my flesh, and so
you know, I came to experiment what the boundaries were
of of my fleshy identity in my existence in my art.

Speaker 13 (01:10:30):
Yeah, And I think there's something about the way that
your art works and the way that a lot of
Curtis are where there's you know, and this isn't to
say that all currotas like this, but there's definitely like
an edge to it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
There's stuff going on.

Speaker 13 (01:10:40):
There's body horror things happening, There's like eighties aesthetic stuff,
and I think it conflicts with this kind of weird
concaid everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitch
aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of
fascism is really into. They use the kind of a
kind of aesthetic sensibility as as a weapon to go
after stuff that they opposed for more oftly political reasons

(01:11:04):
they can do this kind of like hey, look at
this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera kind of attack
on queer art as a result of this kind of
like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this this,
you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society.
And I think I have I haven't one worked out
the political inplication of this, but I think there's this

(01:11:24):
kind of connection between their their weaponization of like revulsion
and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind.

Speaker 1 (01:11:32):
Of like horror that they kind of like use as
the political attack.

Speaker 11 (01:11:37):
Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period.

Speaker 8 (01:11:40):
Yeah, not just for queer people, but also for CIS people,
Like I'm gonna defend CIS people here for a second.

Speaker 11 (01:11:48):
So SIS people struggle with gender dysphoria.

Speaker 8 (01:11:53):
I think maybe I would say every bit as much
as trans people, but they sure fucking struggle with that.

Speaker 4 (01:11:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:11:59):
For instance, an example I will give is facial hair.
Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they
fret and earn worry over their facial hair.

Speaker 11 (01:12:09):
Is it too much? Is it too little?

Speaker 8 (01:12:12):
Then people that are signed female at birth, you know,
if they have facial hair, you know, they thread over it.
You know, well, people see it. Do I have to
bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret
over like they're freaking jaw lines. Like, you know, if
you search online like masculine jawline, how do I get?
There's a huge community out there of assigned male at
birth SYS men that are trying to get more defined

(01:12:34):
jaw lines because they feel that their genetics are presenting
them as a non optimal male quote unquote, and of course,
same thing for quote unquote females, like do I have
the female feminine bodies?

Speaker 11 (01:12:47):
Is it curvy enough in the right way? Is my
waist slim enough? You know? Is am I just brick shaped?

Speaker 8 (01:12:54):
And then all the industries around that, and that I
think is horrifying, and everyone goes through the struggles with it,
and very few people are lucky enough to embody the
ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves.

Speaker 11 (01:13:09):
And to me, that is a tragedy.

Speaker 13 (01:13:11):
Yeah, And I think that sort of like fear and
that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to
like perform a gender in a certain way. Well, okay,
I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars
are going to get extremely.

Speaker 1 (01:13:22):
Mad at me.

Speaker 5 (01:13:23):
But the.

Speaker 13 (01:13:26):
Way in which are forced to sort of live up
to these standards that are sort of nonsense. I think
it gets to this thing where you know, you could
either sort of like muddle through it and try to
ignore the distance as much as you can. You can
attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely bad
at everyone else is trying to do something about it,
and I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option. Yeah,

(01:13:48):
Unfortunately we need to go to ads, which is another
thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these
are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards.
But you know who knows people are wizards. Sty'll find
a way brought to you by Mabeline.

Speaker 1 (01:14:14):
And we are back.

Speaker 13 (01:14:15):
I mean, I guess the way should stay. Highway patrol
does for skinder dorms on people.

Speaker 8 (01:14:21):
Oh, they sure do MAKEI another example of hideous gender
and arms.

Speaker 1 (01:14:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:14:28):
So you listener, you're hearing me right, and you're hearing
my voice. And this is another thing that all people
fret about. It's not trust trans people. Lots of a fabs.
I know, I'm just gonna say a fab and amap Okay,
lots of a fabs, I know. You know, they have
pretty darned deep voices naturally, and they I've talked with

(01:14:49):
them privately and they say that they worry about how
husky their voice is when they just relax. And then
same thing for amaps, they talk about worrying if their
voice is squeaky and thinner. I'm talk like a freaking
wrestler from w WE, you know, like people people like that.

Speaker 11 (01:15:07):
People struggle with that too.

Speaker 8 (01:15:09):
Just so yeah, just something as simple as our appearance
and our voice, you know, we're just torturing ourselves. And ultimately,
I gotta say Nia, you know, I'm I'm a trans woman. However,
ultimately I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks.

Speaker 5 (01:15:26):
Yeah, it's it's not it's not great. It's not a
good time for any way.

Speaker 13 (01:15:30):
It fauld Yeah, speaking of bad times, this isn't even
an activate. I just do this now, which really bad.
I do it to people my daily life. They're like,
why are you anpivoting me? And I'm like, oh God,
but yeah, I guess God. This and the sort of
racialization aspect, and I don't know this is the aspect

(01:15:51):
of zones of gender performance. God damn, I keep saying
performance that I literally mean that you were performing it,
as in you were acting and not the butler thing
of your perform to get to make it real.

Speaker 5 (01:16:03):
Please don't yell at me.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
Of the comments I had.

Speaker 13 (01:16:06):
I had the guy who wrote a writer on the
Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter.

Speaker 6 (01:16:13):
What times.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
It's really okay.

Speaker 13 (01:16:17):
Sorry, I about to rail this enough, partially because this
next part is really depressing. But so a while back
on this show, my my co host Garrison, who is
I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at
the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far
right panic that became don as the we spat contraversia.

(01:16:39):
Do you want to talk about how the right stuck
you into that shit, because Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (01:16:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:16:45):
So you know, in twenty eighteen, as I said, I
put out this album, and then I put out another,
and I start I was touring the country and Canada
and stuff and doing shows pretty much constantly, and then
twenty happened and I became involved in the George Floyd
uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting, and

(01:17:07):
so I began to live stream those protests and marches
with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was
going on on the streets to people watching, because a
lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did
not understand what the issues were. And the thing is,
in LA there were a lot of continual police murders

(01:17:30):
even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean
the cops shooting on armed black people in the back
as they were running away, or executions are shooting them
in the car, that type of thing. And so I
was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is why
people are in the streets, this is a specific issue,
these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions

(01:17:52):
by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.
And so I was doing that and I became pretty
darn visible and popular, like I was maybe one of
the top five best known activist or racial justice voices.
And I was targeted by a right wing activist who

(01:18:15):
was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium
specifically because I was visible, because I was trans, and
so she went for me and posted and said that
I was a transgender individual who was in the women's
spa of we Spa and I was sexually harassing people,

(01:18:36):
and that went viral on social media. It was covered
on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant
death threats, and you know, I was docksed. It was
pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in
the spa and I was only best picked up because
I was picked up for my visibility. My response to

(01:18:59):
that was no, I didn't immediately say yeah, it wasn't
mean it wasn't me, leave me alone, Leave me alone.
I didn't do that because I knew that if I
said that, then they would just pick and attack some
other trans person. Yeah, and you know, I know that
like the ship that the that the right wing machine

(01:19:19):
and acts, if it happens to one of us, it
can happen to all that's end, it likely will.

Speaker 13 (01:19:24):
Yeah, And I mean, I think the thing that it
reminds me the most something we've also covered on the
This is one of the problems with talking about this.
It's like doing this for so long that like there's
very few things that I can say that I can't
be Like I've said this on the show before. But
we spent a lot of time, typically Garrison, I spend
a lot of time covering the way that every time
there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks

(01:19:44):
a random transperson and goes, it was this person. Yeah,
and this reminds me a lot of the same thing,
although this isn't more targeted, Like we've invented a fake
controversy about a trans person and then we're going to
like also just pick a random famous rand well not
your favous, but like a random trans person that we
know about and don't like.

Speaker 8 (01:20:04):
It's my understanding that this twenty twenty one we saw
a controversy that I was targeted for became something of
a right wing playbook.

Speaker 4 (01:20:15):
Yep.

Speaker 8 (01:20:15):
It was after that that they started saying, oh, this
and that person's trans, and before that they didn't have
a real moral panic around trans people unless you look
all the way back to the North Carolina South Carolina
bathroom man.

Speaker 13 (01:20:30):
Yeah, I mean I think I think there's an interesting
intermediary thing too. Where so my friend Vicky ashterwhile who
depending on when this episode comes out, you'll be hearing
from either right before this episode or right after. I
had another version of this where she wrote a book
called In Defensive Looting. It came out in twenty twenty
and just for like three months became all the rest

(01:20:54):
of it. Really two months, like became the like the
giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising
was just like taking it out on, so like like
sitting in Congress, people were like denouncing this book that
you wrote. Every base re media outlet like specifically had
their editorial people going like, this book is evil.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
Vicky's evil.

Speaker 13 (01:21:14):
And I think that was also like this moment of
deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the
anti trans uprisings, because the people who you know are
trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves,
even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level,
understand that they're that these things are preserving the same
systems of violence, and so they picked us as sort

(01:21:37):
of like the wedge point to to break this thing apart.
And I think with Vicky they hadn't really figured out
how to do it. And I think it was like
specifically your case, the the we spaw like with you
being put in as the figure of the we spause.
This is where they like actually really figured out how
to do the whole thing, And yeah, there's just something

(01:21:59):
really bleak up with how effective it was and the
fact that it's like these are just people I don't know,
like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of
like astrak figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having
conversations with are how they.

Speaker 1 (01:22:13):
Did this Just I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:22:16):
I wish I had more and ELS's but yeah, I
think the trends people like to to greater America, to most,
to a lot of America, I'll say, are are sensational.

Speaker 11 (01:22:29):
You know, people people imagine.

Speaker 8 (01:22:32):
Chicks with dicks and dudes with dudes without dicks, and
so I think that's really exciting for a lot of people, for.

Speaker 11 (01:22:40):
Better or for worse. I think for for worse.

Speaker 8 (01:22:43):
But yeah, I think that's just like people and their bodies, right, Like,
you know, I guess some people walk around think all
the time about other people's crotches.

Speaker 11 (01:22:53):
I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. Crush
the first of your scene.

Speaker 13 (01:23:00):
Okay, you know, But on the other hand, right, there's
this there's this aspect of which like you know, there's
a serisacialism, but then there's also the experience of being
a trans person is like I too am trying to
find a way to not pay rent, Like that's like,
I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:23:16):
Yeah, so back to back to Wei SPA. Yeah, that
was a pretty terrible experience for me, and I'm not
going to lie about it.

Speaker 5 (01:23:23):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:23:24):
I I'm glad that I stood up for for myself.
I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I
didn't pass the buck. It was also really difficult and traumatic,
and I didn't appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate
being docs and you know, people have come after me
my my whole life, like I present, I think just

(01:23:47):
naturally physically, like I present as being gender queer, like
I've been pretty like fearing like looking fem my entire life.
That had nothing to do with my internal identity. I've
been weird my entire life. I've perpetually been curious and
provocative and interested in things that were provocative, and so

(01:24:08):
I've been harassed my whole life. However, UNTI was SPA
and to experience strangers by the hundreds saying that they're
gonna hunt me down, and fucking shoot me. Yeah, I
never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out
and be like, hey buddy.

Speaker 5 (01:24:23):
I know you.

Speaker 13 (01:24:24):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where like the
more of a target on you, the more likely it
is to happen. And even people who don't have targets
on them, like I know people you know who've never
experienced anything like this that have still just like had
attacks on them, And it's fucking terrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
It is an absolutely terrible.

Speaker 13 (01:24:42):
Way to have to live in, a terrible sort of
thing to have to experience, especially is it's just intensifying.

Speaker 1 (01:24:49):
So yeah, that was That was twenty twenty one, and
that changed me.

Speaker 8 (01:24:52):
That experience of being targeted and just picked on out
of the freaking blue that changed me as an artist.
And at the same time it also firmly established me
as a sort of celebrity. And I want to speak
to that because there's different tiers of celebrity, you know.
At that yes, at the top, there's the tier that's

(01:25:17):
known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise
every year, and that's an actual thing, and that's the
A List. And you know you're on the A List
because Tom cruise since your Christmas card. And at the
bottom is me who's been in mass media many times
now but has none of the benefits.

Speaker 5 (01:25:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:25:38):
You know, I make very little money as an artist,
and I don't have an entourage. I can tour and
I play play some shows, and you know, some of
them are sold out. I'm playing a show in LA
that's sold out, but I'm not playing large venues. No,
I maybe play like you know, three hundred, five hundred
capacity tops, and most of the places I play like

(01:26:00):
small colabs that one hundred and fifty or so. Yeah,
And so I don't I don't have the protection that
most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals. I
don't have movie deals. I don't even have an asia.
I don't even have a record label.

Speaker 5 (01:26:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:26:19):
So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier,
and they're coming after me.

Speaker 10 (01:26:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (01:26:26):
And it's I mean, and that's the thing about the
sort of like this status of like niche D tier
internet micro celebrity is like I don't like I feel
like I got the best possible version of it, where
like I got a job that pays slightly. I think
I might have hit no I'm still I'm still below
the median salary of assists man in the.

Speaker 1 (01:26:45):
US, but I'm approaching it.

Speaker 13 (01:26:47):
We're getting closer every year, every union fight, we approach
median cis man salary. But like, yeah, the situation I
got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right,
Like this is about the best you could possibly hope
for if you're a transperson and you get famous, Like yeah,
I mean, like I get that threats too, right, Like
nothing anywhere near the scale that you get, And mostly

(01:27:10):
what happens is like I mean, like single digit numbers
of trans people in the US have the kind of
protection that actual celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity
is just another It's just a giant target painted on you.
And yes, you have none of the benefits and all
of the sort of Hey, here is one hundred and

(01:27:31):
fifty million people who absolutely hate you and who've been
primed and targeted like specifically at you.

Speaker 8 (01:27:38):
Yeah, It's something that I wonder about, Like why why
would they do something like this? Why would Fox News
we talk about me? Why would the founder of the
Proud Boys, Gavin mccinnis that old video about me bad
Boys is a terrorist group if you don't now listener
to ever recognize as a terrorist group by Canada, not here,

(01:27:58):
because like we're just cool with that.

Speaker 11 (01:28:00):
Should hear? They're white supremacist terrorist group? So why me?
Why why would a congress person come after me?

Speaker 8 (01:28:10):
And my own hypothesis is that they punched down because
they secretly believe that they themselves are weak and attacking me,
attacking people like me, is a fight that they can win.
And my view is that it's not a fight that

(01:28:30):
they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to
get power in small, small ways and false ways, in
my opinion, and they're trying to get money. First of all,
they want money, you know, they want their views, they
want their donations, and that's the entire top of the
pyramid for them and for me though, I'm a fucking artist,

(01:28:53):
and power is something that I've always been developing because
I've sought to know myself. I've sought to understand who
I am and why that extends to myself as a
queer person. To come to understand myself who I am
as a queer person, that's not something they'll ever have.
So I've read a fucking won. And same with all

(01:29:16):
the other queer people that are under attack, all you
other DCER queer celebrities out there, we fucking won.

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
Hopefully well.

Speaker 13 (01:29:26):
And I think part of this is also like the
reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to
stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how
far in the tide had already come, and now they're
trying to like dam off the tide. And you know, like,
probably it's not going to work. But the only way

(01:29:47):
that it can is if everyone just like sits here
does nothing and let's to just keep building and building
and building more walls. It's something that is within our
power to resist. We just have to actually do it, right.
You have to actually organize, You have to talk to
the people around you, you have to go get them
to do things to resist this. And if we do, yeah, well,
like with the things that we've already won, the things

(01:30:09):
that we are going to win are going to stick.
But if not, like things are going to get really
really bad really quickly. And yeah, and speaking of things
getting very bad very quickly, I carre some more ats
before we get back to these getting wars. We are back, Yeah,

(01:30:37):
You've been specifically targeted by a sitting US Congresswoman, Nancy Mace,
who is the person who actually I don't know if
we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's
the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans
people to not be able to use the bathroom on
Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti trans figure in Congress.

(01:30:57):
Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about
trans women and how they should be put in men's jails,
which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a
bunch of people get horribly braved and killed, which is
one of the predominant things that happens when we get
put in ben's prisons. And she specifically came after years,
you want to talk about how that happened and the

(01:31:19):
latest sort of a congress woman tweets and a fucking
social media company does their bidding.

Speaker 8 (01:31:27):
Yeah, so right at the end of twenty twenty four,
I think it was on December twenty eighth, I was
doxed by a right wing control nazi that has docked
multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends, and

(01:31:48):
they pointed out in a tweet how my art was
on YouTube, specifically, my music videos were on YouTube calling
for violence and how I was in evil trans person
and they added like at symbol YouTube and said that
these videos are in violation of your terms of service?

Speaker 11 (01:32:10):
Why are they still up?

Speaker 8 (01:32:11):
And Nancy May saw that because if you look at
her Twitter, it's all just the stocks and trans people
and perpetual like rage bait about the queer menace, the
trans menace, and so she saw that retweeted and said, YouTube,
this squarly violates your terms of service. Why haven't you

(01:32:32):
done anything? And then immediately following that, my videos were
taken down, the ones that were mentioned in these tweets.
And as I said before, some one of these videos,
what was that of my little problem that's been up
for seven years?

Speaker 1 (01:32:49):
Yeah, for a long time.

Speaker 6 (01:32:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:32:53):
And YouTube terms of service they're very clear, and I
do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service
so my work doesn't get taken down.

Speaker 11 (01:33:04):
And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity that is.

Speaker 8 (01:33:11):
Allowed within the context of art, within the context of
music videos, and so my videos, you know, they weren't
designed to this is from the terms of service. They
weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify. That's exactly what
it says in the in the terms. Now they weren't
recreations of real life violence, and they weren't real life violence,

(01:33:35):
but they were still they were still removed at the
behest at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.

Speaker 13 (01:33:43):
Yeah, And I think there's there's a couple of things
going on here, one of which is, you know, so
we've seen this with Facebook and the last I guess
when this comes out will be like a week ago.
But you know, Facebook has in stated policies that allow
you to basically stay slurs against queer people, allowed you
to call core people the illnesses and stuff like that
that's very specifically you could only do to queer people.

(01:34:04):
You can't do it to anyone else. And I think
there's this sort of trend here of I don't know
with Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with
the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is
just your Facebook is right, like they did the Row
Higg the genocide, like the genocide into Gray too, that
was also a Facebook thing. So they've always just been
evil and they have been sort of looking for the

(01:34:26):
excuse that they needed to like drop the hammer on us.
But I think YouTube, to some extent to what we're
seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming
off moment where people are realizing that with Trump and power,
they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist
because specifically like on a trans artist, because now they
have this sort of like backing to do this stuff,

(01:34:49):
and the right has you know, realized that they can
feel like YouTube, take this video down, and they'll do it.
And that's a really terrifying p residents in a lot
of ways. And also it's very you know, I was like, yeah, obviously,
because a point of a hypocrisy does nothing. But like,
I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of

(01:35:10):
censorship than a member of the government says that something
should be taken down and it's taken down.

Speaker 10 (01:35:15):
It's like, it's really so you.

Speaker 8 (01:35:18):
Know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because you know,
before I was a victim of a moral panic, and
now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare.
So you know, what's what's going to happen next? What
will we see just made invisible and unseen? And I

(01:35:41):
know that in this country, I have freedom of speech,
but that's that's really bullshit. We all know that, Like,
I'm not going to reach many people if I stand
on a street corner at the park and yell at people.

Speaker 11 (01:35:51):
What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that.

Speaker 8 (01:35:55):
These social media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now
by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom
of reach is annihilated and then suddenly trans people are
actually invisible.

Speaker 11 (01:36:10):
We're very close to that. I think Fancy proved that.

Speaker 13 (01:36:15):
Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first
step for how you destroy a people.

Speaker 5 (01:36:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:36:21):
Art art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak,
and I know that's why she came after my art.

Speaker 13 (01:36:33):
There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen.
And then like the next tweet is again a sitting
member of the US government saying that trans women should
be put in men's prisons, and it's like, Okay, one
of these is considered violence fight sort of the media machine.

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
One of them isn't.

Speaker 8 (01:36:47):
Yeah, does she even actually do work for the people
of South Carolina? Like I saw, all she does is
just like start shit with trans people, like, she says,
another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's
just a knockoff product of a bootleg Trump, that's what
she is. And she's not even good at her fucking politics.

(01:37:08):
Like she's tried to get this bathroom band for disallowing
trans people to use a bathroom methaiost Capital and her
own freaking party kicked the bill out of the out
of the bylaws for this year, so she couldn't even
get that. And yeah, so I guess she thinks you
can get a get a win by harassing me, harassing

(01:37:31):
my art. Yeah, try to get people to come after me.

Speaker 13 (01:37:34):
You know, these people are not as powerful as they
want you to believe. Right, A lot of their stuff
just fails. But they will only fail if people are
willing to resist and people are willing to stop them.
And that's the thing that's needed in this moment. Is
organization is you know, like is an organization. It is action,
it is it is now. It is now the time

(01:37:56):
to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being
like a should I be organizing a union? Should I
be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations?
It's like, yeah, it's time, it's time to go because otherwise,
you know, and I think this is something that like
every trans person now understands intimately, and I think most
people don't. Which is that right now it's us, But

(01:38:20):
you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive,
there's a very good chance that it's going to be
you like showing up on this show because a fucking
congress person is deliberately interviewed to destroy your life. And
I would rather we had stopped this before it got
to any of us. But they're going to come for
you too unless we stop them. Thank you so much

(01:38:41):
for coming on the show. And where can people find
you and find your art? And yeah, support you?

Speaker 8 (01:38:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me. May I really like talking
with you. It's been very good and listeneris You can
find my work on Spotify. You can also check out
my website at precious Child dot com and please sign
up for my mailing list there as well. That is
the best and best direct way for me to stay

(01:39:09):
in touch with my friends and fans. I'm also Precious
Child on Instagram on TikTok. I am the last Precious Child.
I also will be doing live shows this spring and
summer in the US, and so follow me on my
website and on social media to stay up to date
on that and come say him in person.

Speaker 13 (01:39:31):
Hell yeah, we will have thanks to all of that
in the description. So yeah, go check it out and
resist the creep of fascism.

Speaker 8 (01:39:42):
That's one thing I want to add about I said
earlier about personal power and how I have to develop
plan personal power by getting to down myself. I want
to toil trans people out there, you queer people and
your allies. That first thing is getting today's and then
next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, Fuck these

(01:40:03):
fucking lawmakers. Yeah, good to know each other and strengthen
our bonds with each other, because those are bigger than
any type of oppressive laws then we put upon us.
And it's only by the strength that we developed with
each other, within each other that we will persevere.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it,
the Consumer Electronics Show happening here to everyone, And of
course it is in fact happening to everyone because over
the course of the day, all of our subjects here,
all of our experts here, have watched different kinds of
dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to
replace with a chatbot that was trained on redit it.

(01:41:00):
So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce
our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed
Angwaiso Junior. Ed, thank you for being here, Thanks for
having me on. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great,
but I'm not gonna say it at the same time
because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less.
But you're contractually obligated to not mind.

Speaker 5 (01:41:21):
Yes, thank you boss. Great to be here, as always.

Speaker 1 (01:41:29):
Very natural, very natural. Zi hi hi, Hello, Hello, hello, hello,
thank you. This is your first cees as well. That's right,
your first time being a journalist? Also true. How do
you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just
reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble,
perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes.

Speaker 14 (01:41:50):
I love wearing a dress, shirt and tie and just
getting very drunk.

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
Yeah, you were very surprised when I gave you your gun,
but you can't be a journalist without one. Yeah, yeah,
I'm playing with it without the safety and last but
certainly not least in fact, maybe better than some people
in the room. Again, I'm not going to say who.
You can wonder that for yourself. Feel in.

Speaker 4 (01:42:16):
Rath.

Speaker 15 (01:42:16):
Thanks, I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better
I am than how many people in this room?

Speaker 1 (01:42:22):
I'm not. I'm not even really like something that was
not like talking about Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten
those numbers back from open AI. Yeah, it would be
irresponsible to speculate at the mind. Yeah, I got away
for three So what I want to do here? I
think this is kind of our roll up. We spent
our last day on the floor. I want to go
around and I'll start first. You guys have a second
to get your thoughts together. What comes to mind immedia

(01:42:44):
is like, this is the thing that I had the
most positive reaction to, and this is the thing that
I had the most negative reaction to. I think it
is a solid way for us to start out, and
I think my most negative reaction, obviously was the Amy
artificial child best Friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable,
and I hated both that. Like I could tell from
an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design, Like it looked

(01:43:07):
like something like oh, Kitt'll think that's cute and from
a this is our intent for this product standpoint, it
felt like a replacement for the love of adults in
the life of a small child, which I thought was
like evil in a profound way. And I guess the
best thing that I saw. I'm not perfectly competent at
this point to like analyze how well it worked, but

(01:43:27):
from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with
Naqi Knakis basically reads facial microemotions in order to let
people control the computer, not exclusively, but especially if they're
quadriplegic or whatever. Like, I thought that was really interesting,
and it's the kind of thing because honestly, I might
loop that in with There was a AI assisted like
Caine for people who were blind. There was another device

(01:43:49):
that led you to control a computer through like facial
movements in your mouth. It was like a retainer all
the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people
care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to
utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's
like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a
toy ed. You're in the hot seat next.

Speaker 4 (01:44:09):
You know.

Speaker 16 (01:44:09):
The thing I loved the most was obviously the Global
Pavilion for connecting Web three businesses.

Speaker 1 (01:44:17):
Across crypto botching.

Speaker 16 (01:44:19):
Oh yeah, DeFi fintech cb DC's, which are central bank
digital currencies and legal advocacy. You know, this made my
heart flutter because you know what, even when you think
they're down, Crypto finds a way to squirm into your life.

(01:44:41):
It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah,
because it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying
to crawl that.

Speaker 1 (01:44:50):
Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous. Now, yeah, exactly,
it's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out
what's the vampire, but specifically Crypto is the zombie.

Speaker 13 (01:45:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:45:01):
Yeah. When I first read the line that is not dead,
which can eternal lie and with strange eons, even death
may die. Yeah, it would.

Speaker 16 (01:45:10):
When I think of, you know, twenty eight years later
trailer where they used that poem.

Speaker 1 (01:45:19):
Three six.

Speaker 16 (01:45:20):
You know, like, I'm just guessing where the price of
bitcoin is gonna go. I think we're we're at the
beginning of a golden age, not for us but for
the grifters. Oh God, next week, when are dear Golden
Boy gets or Orange Boy gets elected. So I are inaugurated?
Has he already won the election?

Speaker 1 (01:45:39):
You did?

Speaker 4 (01:45:40):
Right?

Speaker 5 (01:45:41):
Well, that's that's that's debatable. I think there was some
very curious irregularities in days right straightforward from here.

Speaker 1 (01:45:50):
To be encouraging the Blue and one people let him,
let him have it, Let him have it. You're right,
he wasn't shot at all. That was all an AI trick. Yeah,
fifteen would blow your whole head off that way.

Speaker 5 (01:46:05):
You know.

Speaker 16 (01:46:06):
The thing I actually did like the most, similar to you,
I really did like the assistive tech. I mean the
stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able
body either experiencings either cognitive decline or you know, the
nerodegenitive things or paralyzed.

Speaker 7 (01:46:20):
Like.

Speaker 16 (01:46:21):
This is actual stuff that we need a lot more
investment in development and I assume maybe the scale up
production of it and figure out ways that it can
be offered to people in a variety or in a
spectrum of use cases.

Speaker 5 (01:46:34):
Right.

Speaker 16 (01:46:35):
I think the stuff that I did not like, hmm,
you know, I didn't really care for a lot of
the luxury surveillance stuff, you know, the fake cgms that
you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right
next to me, it's a It was a medical device

(01:46:55):
that when I asked, she looks at my attack and goes, no,
it's not a medically.

Speaker 1 (01:47:05):
We had a beautiful moment where it was this like
it was like a set of smart goggles, which there
were a lot of that had like night vision, but
also it had like threat assessments. So the specific thing
they bragged is like it can help a police officer
identify if somebody has a gun. Right, And this this
was right after we had gone to an AI security
camera that I had flipped off with both hands and

(01:47:26):
it had identified as a man giving the thumbbat And
I don't feel great about it identifying the gun.

Speaker 16 (01:47:34):
Luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for a recognition. Also
like they had it in litter boxes and shit, don't
need that.

Speaker 10 (01:47:40):
I really don't need that.

Speaker 16 (01:47:41):
Why does the letterbox need to be connected to the internet.
Why does it need a camera?

Speaker 1 (01:47:46):
You know that does maybe think of a better world
where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI,
but it's all integrating it into cat focused products like
fifty billion dollars being poured into cattle. Translate whatever you're
cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make
deals with Chinese and by the way, we've hooked him

(01:48:07):
up to venture capital. He has an open line of
soft bank. Siri, why you know that?

Speaker 16 (01:48:13):
I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make
some deals. Help me figure out why or how he
learned to open my door, you know, things like this,
But what we get an am bullshit.

Speaker 1 (01:48:24):
I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs
be like ladies and gentlemen. We have finally done it.
We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat,
and I understand there.

Speaker 15 (01:48:33):
Mortalent actually that like common ad where he's talking about AI,
but he's like, we taught proofs to a dog.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
Got turtleback on what a dog would think about It's
just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette.
The future. Mm hmm, Garrison, you're up.

Speaker 5 (01:49:01):
Best of CS I think was definitely the VLC media
booth at the park where they they had like they
had big, big traffic cones on their head, wearing them
like wizard hats with huge cloaks.

Speaker 1 (01:49:14):
They were dressed as wizards.

Speaker 5 (01:49:15):
They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to
them and they said.

Speaker 1 (01:49:19):
Let's let's start VLC folks, if you if you don't
know this, this was especially relevant to those of us
who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows
you to basically play any kind of like any video Fi, idiophile, yes,
or audio file, and now it will automatically give you
subtitles to using local AI. That's not like reaching to
the cloud or anything to do.

Speaker 5 (01:49:36):
It, because putting some titles on pirated media can sometimes
be really hard. So they said, we have something that
analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching,
and we will put some titles up for you. We
walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like,
we are not selling anything, We have nothing to sell you.

Speaker 1 (01:49:55):
In this beautiful they're fringe. So it was in this
like yeah, yeah, wonderful access. I'm not going to the
degree of like I don't give a fuck about anything
else of this stupid goddamn show that they gave off.
They exuded it and.

Speaker 5 (01:50:07):
They're they're they're by far the coolest because of something
Robert You said to them.

Speaker 1 (01:50:11):
I walked up and I was like, VLC is a
very popular app. They just crossed six billion downloads. I've
been using them for almost as long as you've been alive.
And I walked up and I was like, I've been
using your product for fifteen years. In ordered a pirate
media and they said, very nonchalantly, keep going, keep keep going,
keep doing that, keep doing that. I'm obsessed.

Speaker 3 (01:50:32):
Yeah, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:50:33):
About this too, because, like I, it's a good app.
I have also used it. I saw the guy in
the hat and I was like, Oh, it's the VLC
from you know, from on your desktop.

Speaker 15 (01:50:41):
And then I was like, that's that's stupid. I don't
need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat
and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through.
As a journalist pushed aside your instinct to be like,
do not approach stranger in a cape?

Speaker 1 (01:50:52):
Garrison does not have that answer.

Speaker 5 (01:50:55):
No, no, At some point the contrary, I feel a
magnetic attraction.

Speaker 1 (01:51:01):
This is why I keep an air tag on them.
A great way to get abducted.

Speaker 5 (01:51:07):
I think similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids,
all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad.
We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing
that's like kind of like the worst is similar to
what you said, ed like the level of surveillance tech.
I tried out multiple a systems that are supposed to
like detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or

(01:51:28):
gesture and this is really tricky. There was one at
Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered I
believe by Samsung with money and also they've access to
like their training data. They're called Visomatic And specifically why
this exists. It is a camera that you can put
on a put on a computer. It will it will
detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes

(01:51:50):
are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists
is for online test taking. It's so people don't like
look at their phone to like cheat, so it tracks
where your eyes are moving and if your eyes look
down too much, it's gonna flag it as someone's possibly cheating.
So this was obviously like introduced after the pandemic. There's
a lot a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses
this tech themselves for any kind of like online exams

(01:52:12):
that they as a company will put on, you know,
whether it's like for people students, employees. But they also
had like other features where you could switch it. I
assume what it's doing all the same work, it just
is placed differently on the monitor and instead of can
you know, do like object detection you know what you're wearing,
and the general like behavior analysis if you seem like
you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at

(01:52:33):
the SK booth, which also South Korean company for their
own like like surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic like like,
what kind of use cases do you see for this
beyond test tick? You know, like yeah, general surveillance, Like yeah,
we want to learn how to like predict or like
analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by
the SK version. One quite funny thing is as I

(01:52:56):
walked by, it first at first identified me as a
blonde war holding a cup. It then changed and said
blonde person, which I think is pretty it's pretty deep.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook.

Speaker 5 (01:53:09):
Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like hmm, maybe
maybe not maybe not a woman, maybe not a blonde person,
but but yes, that was you know, something that was
like quite well done. Specifically the visomatic stuff like very functional.
It could tell when I was looking at the screen,
when I was looking at my phone, it could tell

(01:53:30):
from like various various angles, like what I was holding,
what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.

Speaker 14 (01:53:35):
Like it was.

Speaker 5 (01:53:36):
It was very well done. It was very accurate, but
you know, possibly scary.

Speaker 1 (01:53:40):
Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast
don't know who they are, could be the Washington State
Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you boys for
your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying
that because I got pulled over the other week and
I'm really trying to fight a case right now. I
would never do that anyway. Thanks guys, and we're back.

Speaker 11 (01:54:15):
Is it my turn?

Speaker 1 (01:54:16):
It is your turn?

Speaker 5 (01:54:17):
Okay, So I'm going to introduce our special white woman
CORRESPONDENTSI to give us some exciting breaking news in the
white woman tech development world.

Speaker 14 (01:54:27):
Okay, so the first one is positive for contexts, I'm
a trans woman. And one of the boosts that was
pretty interesting it was this group. Were they French, Garrett,
you remember I, I you know they're they're they're European.
They're called Ellie Ellie Health.

Speaker 10 (01:54:46):
It's E l I.

Speaker 14 (01:54:47):
Anyways, this is a at home hormone tester, So it
is saliva base. It's like a little disposable package. Currently
they only advertise cortisol and progress rone, but they have
plans for estrade, isle and other hormones, testoster as well,
testosterone as well. Sorry, and yeah, so you swab your

(01:55:11):
mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait,
what was it, like, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and then
you scan this little like QR thing on the device
and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this
has very interesting implications for like the DIY hormone market

(01:55:33):
or use case. I started DIY and did my own
like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids
don't have access to that.

Speaker 3 (01:55:42):
So this is a it's a good idea if it's actually.

Speaker 14 (01:55:47):
Effective, Like we an't have hands on yet, we haven't
tested it yet, but I would love to do a
comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying
this very interesting, very intriguing.

Speaker 5 (01:55:58):
Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible. Has this
compared to the regular like mail in blood tests, which
is like the current way to do it, but that
requires shipping your blood to a laboratory, and that's maybe
not always the best or even like convenient. So being
able to test this just at home without shipping any
of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really

(01:56:18):
really cool.

Speaker 14 (01:56:19):
Right, There's no insurance involved. This is completely supposedly close source.

Speaker 1 (01:56:25):
From what y'all were telling me earlier today, when you
explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the
people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherent,
particularly to the trans community, and why they might want
to use this, and a focus on privacy. For that reason,
I didn't press them on that because I don't know.
I follow ces you know, wide variety of Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:56:48):
No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible
about kind of what their future plans are, but not
specifically like in that level.

Speaker 1 (01:56:55):
But privacy, like they seemed like they had of coursably
good understand.

Speaker 5 (01:56:59):
Of course, it's because it's because it is your own
like DNA and hormones, you know, Like, I do not
know this company is even thinking about trans people if
it is trans friendly, but it could be used by
trans people regardless.

Speaker 1 (01:57:10):
Yeah, much like a glock exactly exactly.

Speaker 14 (01:57:15):
The potential is great.

Speaker 11 (01:57:16):
And then probably my least favorite goofs.

Speaker 14 (01:57:20):
I have to call out some other white women my
so call boho white women is ebjects.

Speaker 1 (01:57:28):
And has that spelled ev ev J E C t okay?

Speaker 4 (01:57:33):
And what this is?

Speaker 1 (01:57:34):
Oh god?

Speaker 14 (01:57:34):
Yes, this is a special plug for your charging port
of your EV. So the idea is a nefarious party
sees you and your fancy EV and approaches you and
you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words, their words,
by the way, like they see your fancy car and

(01:57:56):
your targets. So this device will like e jacks, you
can just drive away from the charge the power cart.

Speaker 1 (01:58:07):
Leaving broken pieces of plastic both yes, the charger way
like this is not reusable, single use, one time use.

Speaker 3 (01:58:16):
Yes.

Speaker 14 (01:58:17):
So yeah, all those all those people targeting so call
white women.

Speaker 15 (01:58:23):
This is finally someone is serving the community of people
that think that if you find a zip.

Speaker 5 (01:58:27):
Tie on your car door handle MS thirteen. That was
the first thing I said. As soon as soon as
we walked away, I was like, this product wins the
Coolson Media Award for the most white woman product. It's
specifically right, like if you see a slice of cheese
on your windshield, you're already targeted. Way this is this
is that exact demographic of people who think they're going

(01:58:48):
to get trafficked in like your local like olive garden
parking lots.

Speaker 1 (01:58:53):
Gangs stalked Americans in the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California,
where they average incomes like in the eight figures. I
gotta say, though, you're being very unfair to them. It
was so nice of them to put down the phone
where they were doom scrolling TikTok, to look at all
of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted.

Speaker 15 (01:59:12):
We're talking about this product. You know, they're like some
finally someone's gonna do something about it. Create a disposable
piece of plastic.

Speaker 16 (01:59:20):
You notice that guy is always sitting down at the
gym and the coffee shop and the gas station.

Speaker 1 (01:59:27):
This is what he doesn't get.

Speaker 3 (01:59:28):
Be careful.

Speaker 1 (01:59:28):
I feel like I could have upsold them, and like
what if we put some explosives in this, you know,
really like keep them off of the.

Speaker 16 (01:59:34):
Car, like blo, create a diversion inside of it, called
the police station and took a picture of him.

Speaker 1 (01:59:42):
And someone scared. A lady driving a Vibe that's one
of the electric.

Speaker 5 (01:59:46):
Cars, right, It's like a crocodile tail as as as
it whips around, mobilizing anyone in the vicinity.

Speaker 1 (01:59:56):
We're calling it the iguana, and it does with enough
force to break a grow man. Yeah, yes, Okay, David Roth.

Speaker 15 (02:00:04):
So there's a lot of I guess I gathered less
than in years past that this was at one point
like basically a car show. There is not a lot
of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to
see very much of it, but I did have. I
guess this is both my best and my worst experience,
the most powerful transit experience of my life.

Speaker 1 (02:00:22):
So I live in New York City. I take the
subway pretty much everywhere I go, and you know, it
has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good.

Speaker 15 (02:00:28):
It moves like twelve hundred people through a tunnel of
thirty odd miles an hour, and for the most part,
everybody leaves everybody else alone, or you know, watches videos
on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there
had to be a better way, and at the Las
Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.

Speaker 1 (02:00:44):
You're familiar Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur.

Speaker 15 (02:00:48):
Yeah, so he invented something called the hyper loop which
is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the
exact same size as the car at eleven miles an hour,
and it takes there's someone has to drive it, and
also someone has to help you into the car. But
you can fit up the three additional people into the car,
so that ratio everyone, I know, Yes, right, So yeah,
you got two people moving three people two hundred yards

(02:01:13):
at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David,
this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades, right, exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:01:19):
I mean, this was the sort of thing. Though there
had been tunnels, they were mostly used by animals, voles miners, yes, right,
and thought yeah, and that was mostly for pirates in
at least one movie I saw recently, Yes, but no
one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing.

Speaker 15 (02:01:32):
It was more of a like a place where you
would go if you needed to get copper. And of course,
but in this case, so this is like where it's
good to have and this I guess every ces is
like this. This was my first to be reminded that
there are visionaries out there who are like, what if
you put car through hole? What if instead of a

(02:01:53):
thing that moves multiple people at once. You had a
thing that took exactly the same number of people to
move a number of people slightly more than Yes, Yeah,
so that was cool. I mean it's just like fun
to see like where this stuff is going. And I
really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things
like cars on the streets of American cities, you know,

(02:02:13):
like it could be okay, David, I mean most of
the obviously this is something we'd go on. Last yere
was like three or four good things you all said them.
I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the the stuff
that made me feel good about what was going on here,
and there was a great deal of stuff that made
me feel like pretty bad about what was going on. Yeah,
up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the

(02:02:35):
you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that
nobody whatever your boss can tell if you're really looking
at the zoom that you're on. I don't really love
that personally, But for me, the a lot of the
smart home stuff is real drag like just in the
sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being like
sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving

(02:02:58):
over your agency over the small moments that make you
know human life human life, and just being like I
would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence
could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply
stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah, just fucking
grim actually, like didn't really care for it. I feel
like you gotta like, what are you using that time

(02:03:20):
to do?

Speaker 1 (02:03:21):
Yeah? What are you getting? What are you optimizing from
yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing
that a human being does, which is like pick your
clothes right? Yeah, I wonder how you feel about this
because you and I have been going to sees from
and I guess a broadly similar number of years. Like
I've never been to CEO. Oh really this is your No,
I'm a fucking sports writer man, Like, this is a
lot of out here because Ed got me a folding head.

(02:03:43):
I have like the dead eyedes veterans. Oh yeah, well
I'm very tired. Yeah.

Speaker 15 (02:03:47):
This is the thing with like I think, as far
as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop
where you more or less like you start out it's
too much, you get big eye right away, and then
you just sort of feel zombiefied. But then we have
talked to people over the last few days that are like,
you know, I remember like fourteen cess ago that was
pretty good, like and they're also tired and also arranged

(02:04:08):
by this point.

Speaker 1 (02:04:08):
Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer,
I was like, oh man, science has given me everything
I want, like, and I guess it's I don't know.
Do you remember like when the last one was that
you felt like even sort of that stirring. Yeah, twenty
like eleven or twelve when they did. I got to

(02:04:29):
see inductive charging of a car for the first time,
and it like was so big. The Las Vegas Convention
Center is like as the size of a city, and
seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim
as they were doing it was very inefficient because our
wild Yeah, but that was just like that was like,
oh wow, this is kind of like amazing that this

(02:04:51):
is even possible. But yeah, not really sense, not really sense.
That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the
hyper loop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be unless something goes wrong,
would it started to seem kind of grim? Otherwise? Well,
I the smart home stuff is interesting because that has
been as long as I've been going to these they've
been trying to sell people on smart homes, and I

(02:05:12):
don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what
a smart home is that I think a person would want.
I can think of two things a person would want right.
One of them is, it would be nice if, like
I didn't have to think about playing music. I could
just like tell my house to play the music I wanted,
and it would play the music and I could hear
it everywhere and I didn't have to fuss with a
bunch of shit. And the second is, what if I'm

(02:05:33):
coming home from vacation and my house is cold, it
would be nice to turn on the heat or like
an hour before I get home. And one of those
things you'd use every day, and one of those things
it's not really viable to base a business off of.
But like, they keep trying to find new ways to
stick computers in my house, and I don't know, does
anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking
smart home?

Speaker 5 (02:05:53):
No?

Speaker 15 (02:05:53):
I mean, I like, it's not an accident that my
apartment is basically going to be in the year two
thousand and five forever means it's expensive to do all
this stuff. This is the bit thatit with so many
of these demos, like just you start to notice how
incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff
is being sort of like postulated as being useful. Is
It's like the like Lexus December to remember sales event

(02:06:17):
type energy just a.

Speaker 1 (02:06:18):
Big fuck what lives do you live?

Speaker 16 (02:06:20):
Yeah?

Speaker 15 (02:06:20):
This also we've talked about this on Ed's show that
like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like
like the first fifteen minutes of a George Romero movie,
like just getting you set for Eventually there's going to
be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous
shambling zombies. Yeah, and smart home not a bad horror
movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept.

Speaker 1 (02:06:39):
Yeah, speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast.
All right, we're back, and I want to close this
out by asking everybody a question, which is, how do
you feel about where tech is going?

Speaker 16 (02:07:02):
I think we're going to hell. I think we are
getting wrapped it up very fast into the sweet abyss.
I'm worried about the fact that so much of the
tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping,
around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that

(02:07:26):
rhyme with eugenics. I'm like, I don't like the direction
that a lot of this stuff is going, but also
there I don't know what to do about it because
so much of it is driven by private interest, right,
It's like venture capitalists, well capitalized individuals and firms that
they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed

(02:07:48):
and these corporations, you.

Speaker 1 (02:07:49):
Know, yeah, the nature of like you can you can
really tell that a lot of like the health products
are very optimized for like rich tech executives. Like there's
a lot of sleep products that are relied on you
being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers, playing benaural
beats while you slept, and like at different devices measure
You're like do an ECG and it's like I don't know,

(02:08:09):
my aunt's not going to do that.

Speaker 16 (02:08:11):
Oh yeah, you know, like I was, you know, I was.

Speaker 11 (02:08:13):
I took with my partner about this.

Speaker 16 (02:08:15):
They have type one diabetes, they have a CGM, they
use it constantly, and they're We've been talking about and
thinking about writing about how there's been a crop of
devices that are like trying to push onto this idea
that you need to have close monitoring of it to
preempt if you are going to be prediabetic, or to
optimize what you're eating throughout the day, but that you know,
when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like

(02:08:37):
part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, wow,
you know, if you're sugar slightly goes out, it's because
you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the
way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing
or character failing there that this tech can help purify
you of and you can be your best self, which
is really just like not.

Speaker 1 (02:08:53):
Large, you know.

Speaker 16 (02:08:54):
And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a
lot of the bi metric surveillance stuff, even though there
are applications that are not that.

Speaker 1 (02:09:04):
Yeah, you know, it's kind of focused on like the sin,
the health sins that you're committing. We spend a decent
amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest,
and I do feel like several tech companies were the
ones trying to sell us indulgences, right, yeah, yeah, all
right gear.

Speaker 5 (02:09:20):
There's small improvements for consumer tech.

Speaker 4 (02:09:23):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:09:23):
This is a very consumer based where it's supposed to
be a consumer based tech show. There's products like the
Shocks headphones, which every year get a little bit better.
I try to bone conducting headphones last year, which are
very good. They work underwater.

Speaker 1 (02:09:38):
If you're deaf in an ear you can listen to
your music the way you used to be able to.

Speaker 5 (02:09:42):
Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they
called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works,
but it does work. I can hear it if you're
standing like two three feet away. There's no sound bleed,
but I hear music in the middle of my head
despite having to not put an earbud actually like in
my ear. They're super useful, work, great, really good sound quality, durable.

Speaker 1 (02:10:02):
I'm on year two of the same pair that I
run with every single day, like sweat rain. Great products.

Speaker 5 (02:10:08):
It's like small improvements, right, It's not it's not necessarily
like revolutionizing hearing, but it's it's very very small improvements.
Where as the other kind of big, big trend, which
isn't necessarily like holly consumer based. It's kind of what
these larger companies are trying to move towards is I
feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form

(02:10:32):
of like technology and like AI enable technology. You used
to have friends to get recommended new music. You used
to have like friends to like tell you about new
stuff that they're interested in. No longer. Now you have
an AI agent that can do that for you. You
you don't need you don't need friends to help kind
of talk about, you know, you had a rough breakup. Instead,

(02:10:52):
you can have a short term replacement. Using AI, you
could have a friend replacement of a girlfriend replacement. It's
all these things are trying to replace the core concept
of friendship, even as like as even as like a baby,
even as a toddler. Your first friend doesn't need to
be people you meet outside. It can be this little
hovering robot you have in the living room that can
also organize your fridge, tell you what to tell you what.

(02:11:17):
We'll roll around your house in the middle of the
night with cameras, and that could be your first friend.
It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move
towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life. Because
as smooth as possible, that completely ignores like what it
means to be human.

Speaker 1 (02:11:33):
It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot elie Q,
which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of
empathy trying to design a device to help people, and
what I usually see with AI, which is trying to
design a device to remove the need for human empathy.
Like I went to a there was a vet app
called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians, and they

(02:11:53):
were like, yeah, you know what, most of it we
focused initially on like technical questions, so like if I
have these symptoms, what can that mean? But that's asking
us is like we would really like advice on how
to talk to people that their pets are going to die?
And I was like, do you are Vett's not getting
out of that school, because that's like that's a big
part of being an a vet, Like do they need
chet GPT for this?

Speaker 5 (02:12:13):
I saw this other company that was like it was
designed to help you get over the loss of your pet,
where you could you could pump tons of photos of
your pet into this AI into this AI generator and
it will generate new images and this is proven to
help you move on from loss, which is literally a
Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago, seven years ago,

(02:12:37):
and like, no, you should talk with your friends about that.
That's why you are a human. That's how you can
move on from loss. You have to make new connections.
Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to
help you move on, Like what why? Anyway, Replacing friendship
is the thing that I see a lot of the

(02:12:58):
tech world wanting to do, maybe because they don't understand
real human relationships that aren't like innately transactional. I'm not sure,
but that is like a huge trend that I've seen
multiple multiple people mention.

Speaker 14 (02:13:09):
All right, Zi, So I've worked in this industry for
like three years now and this is my first big convention,
and I would say, uh, this is just affirmed pretty
much all of my disillusions with the tech world, and
most of it's just nonsense. And maybe the postive people

(02:13:29):
are onto some stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:13:32):
Well you say that, but I really do think via
dox is kind of revolutionize the way in which mysterious
fogs kill large numbers of the Maybe, but don't name
it something so sinister. Yeah, yeah, it's if you were
to be like this is the thing that keeps your
apples fresh for a long time. That would be great.
I would just don't call it apple fresh, yes, but
call it apple fresh.

Speaker 5 (02:13:53):
By the way, you should listen to You should listen
to Better Offline to hear context for veradox, which we
discussed in the last episode of our daily Cees coverage
over there with the wonderful Edixitron. But essentially baradox is
this missed. They get sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps
it stay shelf stable for a few more days.

Speaker 1 (02:14:14):
Exactly. So maybe that shelf stable mist will also translate
to waking.

Speaker 15 (02:14:18):
Up the dead possibly, But you don't know that it's
gonna do You don't know that it's not going to
do that, right right.

Speaker 1 (02:14:25):
As a journalist, that's sorry, you have to ask these questions.

Speaker 5 (02:14:28):
And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.

Speaker 15 (02:14:31):
Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red
leaf led us back to life does have any repercussions
in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly
dead loved ones.

Speaker 1 (02:14:41):
David, it's me sorry. A lot of good points.

Speaker 15 (02:14:45):
I mean, I think garyin ever both made the point
about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot
of this just sort of like an inability to understand
not just what people might want from a technology, I think,
which is to fuel not I mean, they're probably our people.

Speaker 1 (02:15:00):
I imagine that. It's like if you were the guy,
the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards. You know,
he's like Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson. We love Brian's.

Speaker 15 (02:15:09):
Yeah, but he like I feel like he would have
been walking through this clapping his hands with delight.

Speaker 5 (02:15:17):
A day, drinking his son's blood time for Yeah, it's a.

Speaker 1 (02:15:21):
It's I drink his son's blood pretty rights and it's
not bad.

Speaker 15 (02:15:25):
The high quality plot, but that it felt like it
was that that there was a lot of this sort
of like an optimization onto like transcending being human at all.
And I don't think I mean again, there probably are
people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't
imagine that. I think what most people would like. I mean,
then you don't expect technology to make you feel more human.

(02:15:47):
But something I've been thinking.

Speaker 1 (02:15:49):
About a lot. We're talking about this a lot on Better.

Speaker 15 (02:15:51):
Offline, But there's a passivity that a lot of this
sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're
just like sort of are happening to you that make
your life more efficient and convenient.

Speaker 1 (02:16:03):
And I don't think that I want that.

Speaker 15 (02:16:06):
I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the you
know market that I think they're aiming for with this,
But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said,
like finding music, like that's a thing that yeah, you know,
your friends tell you about it. And in my case,
I mean again just being in my middle age, you
like go to a store and you flip through shit,
like there's a distinction between finding something and being given

(02:16:28):
something or being fed to something like you're a foa
grag goose and it's just getting sort of piped into
your brain and life and being.

Speaker 1 (02:16:35):
And I think it's an important distinction. I think that
little bit of.

Speaker 15 (02:16:38):
Agency of having some sense of doing the things that
you want to do, like I would imagine that, well,
I don't have to imagine it technology that helps you
do that as opposed to doing it for you.

Speaker 1 (02:16:49):
I think that.

Speaker 15 (02:16:51):
I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human.
I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like
I'm in a fucking matrix pod and I think that
a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed
targeted towards the.

Speaker 1 (02:17:04):
Matrix pod dwelling community. I think that's that's about the
best line we could go out on, like, that's that's yeah,
you nailed it.

Speaker 4 (02:17:12):
Thanks.

Speaker 1 (02:17:12):
I thought I crushed that one. Yeah you did. You did,
great job, Dave. Where can people find your workday defector
dot com? Why let me do that without crushing my water? No, no, no, no,
that's okay.

Speaker 5 (02:17:21):
Let me.

Speaker 1 (02:17:22):
That's a load bearing piece of content. Defector dot com
is the website and at.

Speaker 16 (02:17:27):
Big black Jack a bit on Twitter and Blue Sky.
This Machine Kills is my podcast. Tech Bubble dot Soapstack
dot com is the newsletter.

Speaker 1 (02:17:35):
Hell yeah, do you want to tell people how to
find you?

Speaker 14 (02:17:39):
Zi hat new old woman on Twitter with okay zeros.

Speaker 5 (02:17:44):
Zeros for neo.

Speaker 1 (02:17:45):
Zeros, All right, everybody, Well, uh, that's going to do
it for us here at It could happen here and
are week at cees. You know, just try to hub
hug your loved ones until the Viera ox sweeps through
all of their homes neighborhoods. Yeah, it's in the room,
It's in the room.

Speaker 13 (02:18:16):
Welcome to ninkadappan here a podcast about things falling apart,
how to put them back together again. I am your host,
Mia Long Return for the holidays, Returned, rejuvenated, returned, refreshed,
Return to do something a little bit different.

Speaker 1 (02:18:30):
In the coming weeks.

Speaker 13 (02:18:31):
We're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty
analysis of the coming wave of fascism.

Speaker 1 (02:18:35):
But what we haven't really been doing as much.

Speaker 5 (02:18:38):
What I want to take some time to do today
is to talk about fascism atic sort of macro level
and what it looks like right now, and also talk
about an extremely cooked guy.

Speaker 9 (02:18:49):
Who blew himself up in a cyb outside of Trump Building,
and with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator,
doer of so many different things that like, I don't
know someone's going to write a great biography in like
one hundred years.

Speaker 5 (02:19:09):
It is.

Speaker 1 (02:19:10):
It is the one and only Vicky Oshtawhile.

Speaker 10 (02:19:13):
Thank you.

Speaker 17 (02:19:14):
Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for
you to get to the intro before you're you find
people could hear me.

Speaker 1 (02:19:22):
Oh, I'm glad to have you here.

Speaker 13 (02:19:23):
And part part of this the initial thing that was like, okay,
we need to do this was I saw you called
all of this the years of lead paint, and that
is just it has stuck in my mind every for
every single second of every day since then.

Speaker 17 (02:19:40):
Yeah, yeah, I was writing for the journal that I
am working and fundraising for CA Go chext us out,
but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk
dystopia is in the face of you know, that sort
of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside
the Trump Hotel. Then about you know, as we were
about to talk about Matthew Livelsburger, I think is how
it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan

(02:20:03):
who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the
Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like
the purging of democratic politicians.

Speaker 13 (02:20:10):
Is that what we think his yeah, version was, Now
that seems to be it like politicians, and like it's
kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep
state thing where he wants democrats gone from like the
army and right right, you know, so it's the kind
of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi
fantasy of the day of the rope from the Turner
Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right

(02:20:32):
wing culture where they have their own sort of like
less race worry or like less anti Semitic versions of it. Yes,
and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start
off by exactly blowing himself up with a.

Speaker 5 (02:20:46):
Truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.

Speaker 17 (02:20:50):
So basically, this guy that the spaping a Green Beret, which,
like say what you will, arguably some of the most
trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever
else you say about and this is important.

Speaker 13 (02:21:01):
You know, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in
the world that is greater than the drop from like
green Beret to like former Green Beret.

Speaker 1 (02:21:09):
This guy was active duty, so like right, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
This wasn't even like a cooked vet.

Speaker 17 (02:21:15):
This is a guy who is like in the shit
and we know that he was drinking the kool aid
because he used chat GPT.

Speaker 10 (02:21:22):
He've just turned out today to help plan his attack.

Speaker 17 (02:21:24):
But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise which undeniable, cyber truck,
like all Tesla's, is designed mostly to endanger the people
inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already
huge super fans, And what I really mean, of course,
is that they have terrible safety protocols. And the cyber truck,
which is like a twelve year old's idea of a

(02:21:46):
good idea, which is an incredibly incredibly firm, stainless steel
body which does not crumple and does not take damage,
which means that your frail human body inside it in
an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal, very
dangerous to be inside. But the car doesn't take damage,
and that means that if you leave a bomb in it,

(02:22:07):
the sides of the car were fine, so the explosion
went straight up right, so it did no damage to
the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but
it seems like he probably wanted to do a.

Speaker 10 (02:22:16):
Little damage at the hotel.

Speaker 17 (02:22:17):
Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I
would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you
know this guy who's like an active duty green beret
who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel
in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the
murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he

(02:22:37):
takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a
bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like
horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant
about this, Like it's awful thing obviously, but no one
else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was
everywhere on social media for like the last three days
of that of that cyber truck on fire outside of
the Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of

(02:22:58):
a thing I had already been thinking of as the
years of life. So I wrote an essay around that basically.

Speaker 13 (02:23:03):
Yeah, So I want to start talking about this by
getting a little bit into what the years of lead are,
because I imagine it's some of you, like there's probably,
like I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you
who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and
like know the name of every single guy he was
implicated for these car bombings, but for everyone else who's normal.

(02:23:23):
And I caught myself among the non normal people because
I did. I spent about two years going down the
years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But
the years of lead were this thing in roughly the
seventies and the eighties, in Italy, where as a response
to the sort of rising power of the left through
the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.
And Italy's kind of different from the rest of Europe

(02:23:44):
because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example,
France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight,
like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils
have seized control of the factories, like they lose this
our bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing
at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind
of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy,
that is not true.

Speaker 5 (02:24:05):
Like sixty eight.

Speaker 13 (02:24:05):
In Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but
like the seizure of the factories has been going on
since Like I mean, stuff like this has been happening
since the fifties, and it really only stops in nineteen
seventy seven when like they have one last big push
uprising and it fails. So as a way to contain this,
the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right wing

(02:24:25):
terror groups and then also orchestrating left wing terror groups
and by terror groups I mean, like the most famous
thing in this is called the Bolognia train bombing in
nineteen eighty. It kills eighty five people, wounds like two
hundred and ninety. Like it's a really really horrific attack,
and it's immediately blamed that an anarchist group. It turns
out it's not an anarchist group. It is a state
back like fascist group. And yeah, like there are other

(02:24:47):
ones I will pass over to VICTI you talk about,
like the other terrible shit that they did.

Speaker 17 (02:24:52):
Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends
the years of lad you could end it there.

Speaker 10 (02:24:57):
It's sort of the last big terrorist month.

Speaker 17 (02:24:58):
The first thing, the event that like sort of after
sixty eight kind of starts at as this thing called
the Piazza Fontana bonding in Milan, which is like an
agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just
like but seventeen people are killed, almost one hundred people
are wounded, and the first thing that the police do
is they blame anarchists in sixty eight as well, And
there's a famous there's a famous case of this anarchist

(02:25:19):
organizer named Pinelli who is arrested and then while he
is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the
police department to his death.

Speaker 1 (02:25:28):
Yep.

Speaker 17 (02:25:29):
It has still never been proven that he was pushed.
The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him
really hard.

Speaker 1 (02:25:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:25:36):
Sure.

Speaker 17 (02:25:37):
Oh Like here's a very famous Italian play about it
by Dario Foe called the Death of an Anarchist. So anyways,
they blame the anarchists, They literally murder a leading anarchist
printer and organizer, and then of course it turns out
that it was this terrorist group called ordinay Nuovo, who was,
you know, this neo fascist group that had let's say
significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I
think like one way of understanding the years of Lead,

(02:25:58):
I think that might be easy forople who aren't familiar
with it, is that it's it's like a very low
level civil war. It's it's I think the closest thing
we can maybe think of as the troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeah,
and the reason those were a little different was because
a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas
like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But
this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings,

(02:26:19):
both on the right and the left that are like
both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other.
But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that
they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying
for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the
left for these attacks.

Speaker 13 (02:26:36):
Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're
not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here.
I have explained this on the show at some point.

Speaker 1 (02:26:43):
I think it's in.

Speaker 13 (02:26:44):
I think it's in if you go to the Hall
of Weed episode we did where we talk about conspiracies.
I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right,
the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of
these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it's
designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and
having all these bombings was specifically something they call the
strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort

(02:27:04):
of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to
drive people back towards the state. Because the idea was
and this and this seems to have worked. You know,
you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know,
there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed,
people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like
horror happening, and the goal is to get people to
turn to the state for you know, sort of order

(02:27:26):
insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff
because we need you know, we need to sort of
terror to end.

Speaker 5 (02:27:31):
And it was.

Speaker 13 (02:27:32):
Extremely effective, and the sort of knowledge of this has
I guess proliferated through the American left in the last
like decade, and that has led to a lot of
I think kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people
sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is
those those state behind networks that were armed by the

(02:27:52):
Italian state and used as sort of the basis of
these neo fascist groups, and like to refer to this
sort of like I don't like what's happening in the US,
and that's not really what's happening. And this is where
I want to pass it to VICKI to talk about
sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the Years
of Lead Paint and how they're sort of different from
the Italian ones.

Speaker 17 (02:28:10):
Yeah, in classic American fashion. Everything is more chaotic and autonomous, yes,
and widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America
products and services.

Speaker 10 (02:28:21):
Did I do again?

Speaker 1 (02:28:22):
Let's support this podcast. That's a good one. We are back,
all right, Years of Blood Paint. Let's go.

Speaker 17 (02:28:40):
Yes, Right, So I actually think, you know, as you
were saying that, I think actually a thing that might
be the closest to Gladio And it's not Gladio, because
that was very conscious and it was like these stay
behind networks are organized explicitly but the US state defense
of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability
and making the US the sort of home for military

(02:29:01):
surplus because obviously, like the military industrial complex sells lots
of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing a
reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort
of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension way,
I think might actually be close. But you can tell
that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the
social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.

Speaker 4 (02:29:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:29:22):
And also the people who are doing the Years of
Lead are unbelievably cynical about it right, Like they don't
they don't believe any of this shit, right, yes, yes,
no exactly, we're the Second Amendment guys. Like that stuff
is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true
believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a
bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme
like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not

(02:29:44):
what they were trying to do, but that's sort of
you know, that's the effect of a lot of this stuff.

Speaker 10 (02:29:48):
Yeah, it wasn't.

Speaker 17 (02:29:49):
It wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also
not the years of lead paint. That's just like a
similar thing, the years of lead paint, which is obviously
like which is a joke about. There's this big reactionary
myth from like the freakonomics guys. I think that like
the rise in crimes like correlated to like the use
of lead paint in children's bedrooms, which is.

Speaker 13 (02:30:08):
Really funny because for the freakonomics guy that that is
a down right left wing theory standard.

Speaker 10 (02:30:14):
Yeah exactly, or maybe it was a dude directing it.

Speaker 17 (02:30:17):
I don't even remember now anyway, So it became it
became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers
and generation acts people you know, having the bled paint
in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff.
Obviously I'm not advocating that kind of like ablest insult
when I talk about this, and is a memetic way
of making fun of that concept.

Speaker 10 (02:30:37):
But all of that to say, they.

Speaker 17 (02:30:40):
Have completely drunk the kool aid, right, the fascists, as
you're saying, Yah, they knew what they were doing. They
knew they were framing the left. They were like making
it up. But like a lot of people on the
right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy, excuse me, in
Italy in the sixties and in the actual years of lead,
years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing
that January was Antifah, like people whose friends were there,

(02:31:03):
you know, yeah, like stuff like Q and the other
thing that the reason that this is years of lead
pain and not the first Trump administration is because during
the first Trump administration there was actually pretty pretty well
organized on the ground fascist movements and they could they
could certainly come back in the US right now.

Speaker 10 (02:31:19):
There's no reason they couldn't.

Speaker 13 (02:31:21):
Yeah, And it's also worth talking about we'll be covering
this on the show, like at some point in the
future when we've had time to go through the documents.
But there was recently a massive from distributed to Nile Secrets,
a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from
a guy who infiltrated it. It's a very good Republic
of story talking about the guy that will link in
the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived,

(02:31:44):
but the kind of stuff that like we saw in
like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty.

Speaker 9 (02:31:48):
Like is not.

Speaker 17 (02:31:49):
Yeah, the Proud Boys Q and on, the folks who
made up J six and the folks who made up
the alt right, you know, broadly were largely defeated by
anti fascists in the street. And then the people who
remained QAnon folks who were I think, you know, some
of those people were pretty hardcore neo Nazis obviously, but
a lot of those folks were confused Internet boomers, right,

(02:32:10):
and like those people mostly got discouraged by the repression.
The repression I think successfully sort of put the ends
to that organized Q stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:32:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:32:18):
Well, and also, and I also have talked about on
this show The other thing they put an end to
that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you
could use the literally the exact same structure of Q
and on, but they make it about trans people. Yes,
and that has been unbelievably effective.

Speaker 17 (02:32:31):
Now the strategy as a media strategy has continued, but
as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not that functional.

Speaker 10 (02:32:38):
Yeah, it's not, which is very lucky. But what that
means is that Trump has come to.

Speaker 17 (02:32:42):
Power without a ground movement in the same way that
he had in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Like that was
a real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His
rallies this election. People left early. You know, it was
like it was like going to see a losing team
and their last home game of the season. You know,
was the vibe at those rallies.

Speaker 13 (02:32:58):
Yeah, to do a very specific example, it's like the
vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics
before they were fucking run out to be for their
owner move in the last bag exactly where like they've
had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner
who decided to make who made a bad team? So
people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to La
like it's like that kind of.

Speaker 17 (02:33:19):
Hyeah, those are the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats,
in their infinite infinite capacities, lost the election. And so
what that means, though, is that is that you have
this moment where actually the right has as much power
in the federal government as it's ever had. You know,
the resistance is you know, they you know, they're very
proud of legally handing power to the man and ending

(02:33:40):
all of his charges or whatever.

Speaker 10 (02:33:42):
But the street movement is disorganized.

Speaker 17 (02:33:45):
So you have this gap between the two where there's
this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth, Social X,
the Everything app you know, all of these like all
these places where the fascists you know, and I guess
Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to
remove all content restrictions or whatever today.

Speaker 10 (02:34:03):
I mean, you know when we're recording this. So it's
just there's this.

Speaker 17 (02:34:06):
Huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organization.
You get people like this Green beret who has been
really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not
even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical
thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the
Trump Hotel up in an attempt to start the race

(02:34:29):
war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of
strategy of tension stuff, right, the imagination of as you said,
the Turner Diaries or this sort of like you know,
the right wing terror networks in the US. You know,
there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grits.

Speaker 10 (02:34:45):
Right, they think of the cause enough chaos, like.

Speaker 17 (02:34:47):
You will return everything to the hobbsy and world of
all against all, and you'll get a race war and
everything will fall apart. Whatever it's you know, it's step one,
kill my family, step two, question mark question marks, step three,
white supremacist revolution.

Speaker 10 (02:34:59):
It's horrifying. I mean, it's horrifying, horrifying idea, But.

Speaker 17 (02:35:02):
That's happening in these groups that have really really they
believe I think genuinely that, Like I think the right
does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and
Asana Shakur, Like they see them both as equally dangerous.

Speaker 5 (02:35:15):
Right.

Speaker 10 (02:35:15):
They hate Liz Cheney.

Speaker 17 (02:35:16):
Yeah, Like in the final days of elections, she was
the person they were saying we're gonna go after her,
like Liz Cheney like.

Speaker 13 (02:35:22):
Really like yeah, it's like like the closest parallel could
think of this as like there was a faction of
people between the Cold War who thought that like the
Sino Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked,
and like there were literally guys murdering each other, like
Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other
like on the border like in sixty nine, right, like

(02:35:43):
and there were people who were convinced for the entire
Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam,
are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy
and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR
and the PUERC are working together, and these are not
like you know, some random guys that's like, these are
these are like the guys that like like the peak
of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true.

(02:36:06):
And this is I think, yeah, like this this is
the kind of thing we're in now. Just like these
people are completely cooked. They don't they don't have any
analytical building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their
own kool aid.

Speaker 10 (02:36:16):
There was just a scoop. Sorr jop is really quick.

Speaker 17 (02:36:18):
There was a scoop right before we got on to
record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of products Many
day five.

Speaker 10 (02:36:23):
Their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.

Speaker 17 (02:36:26):
They want to take down Wikipedia, like because because that's
a place you can verify facts at right, They've already
got the Post, They've got the Times, Like, what are
they gonna do? They gotta GoF to Wikipedia. This is
the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build.

Speaker 5 (02:36:39):
Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world
of unreality and that attempts to sell it to you?

Speaker 1 (02:36:43):
Ooh, prox and services. That's a fourth this podcast.

Speaker 13 (02:36:47):
Yes we are back. I'm very proud of that one.
That that's one of the best ones I've ever done.
And I just completely off the top of my head,
just came back better than ever.

Speaker 1 (02:37:07):
She's never been so bad.

Speaker 13 (02:37:09):
So I want to move a little bit from the
just what does the state look like? How pilleda these
people kind of thing to I want to talk a
bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on
here because I think part of what's happening here and
it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about
neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act

(02:37:31):
and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But
I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going
on here, a good place to go is like going
back to here David Graver, and he has this line
talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should
have actually looked up where this quote is from before
I quote it. I think it might be from the
Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism,

(02:37:55):
when given a choice between making their system actually work
and making it seem like alternative and neoliberalism is impossible,
it will always choose making me alternatives seem impossible, because
that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the
sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the reason of alternative.
It is a system that is designed to destroy all
alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility

(02:38:16):
of a future and the goal of this And this
is I think that the sort of dominant affect of
the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah,
this is some thing thicky I would ask you about
the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.

Speaker 10 (02:38:32):
Yeah, yeah, I was sort of vibing with what you're saying.

Speaker 17 (02:38:34):
But yeah, I think a lot of people online have
accepted sort of you know, don't give in an advance, right.
But like, I think one big thing that has been
part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and
part of what's been going on over the last four years,
but indeed over the last four decades as well as
sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that
you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market,

(02:38:56):
you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an
expert to make a choice, right, and any choice made otherwise,
you know, is doomed to failure.

Speaker 4 (02:39:05):
Right.

Speaker 17 (02:39:05):
And I think part of why Trump feels like to people,
some people like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no,
I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone
except my gut. I just do what I want. The
incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years
of politics, which is you get a ton of expert
reviews and then you do a political change that moves

(02:39:27):
things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics
as like Barack Obama loved or whatever.

Speaker 10 (02:39:32):
Right, So that's sort of like there's there's that sense.
But then on the individual sense, it's.

Speaker 17 (02:39:37):
Also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility
of labor solidarity, right, because part of what the sixties
was and the reason the sixties lasted so long in
Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had
the like the last in Western Europe. They had the
last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up
from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories

(02:39:58):
that had these like crazy strikes over over again. So
the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism and
blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like, we also
are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right, and like
we go to the HR department to get help, right.

Speaker 10 (02:40:13):
Where we sort of get self care. We like work
on ourselves.

Speaker 17 (02:40:16):
We get therapy, you know that our boss offers us
you know, thoughts and prayers right when when things are hard.
But like there's a big attempt to allow people to
define themselves sort of the carrot. The carrot of the
sixties was like, you know, you get to like have
an identity, like, Okay, we won't be officially racist.

Speaker 10 (02:40:36):
Yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we won't be officially sexist.

Speaker 17 (02:40:39):
And they claim, okay, whatever, none of that's true, but
they but they sort of sell that, and then they say,
but in return, you have to like do all of
the self work.

Speaker 10 (02:40:48):
You have to be an identity in the marketplace.

Speaker 17 (02:40:51):
So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what
shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question
and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces, right,
like yeah, and so that in you know, spoony world
becalled that sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think
that's probably accepted as well, that like you have so

(02:41:13):
much choice that you feel absolutely helpless on the face
of it. You can't do anything, and so that produces
a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing
people want is like.

Speaker 10 (02:41:22):
Someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this.

Speaker 13 (02:41:25):
Yeah, And that's I think been one of the most
important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is
this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for
someone else to make choices for you, to free you
from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying
to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy
and shit.

Speaker 5 (02:41:41):
Like that and oh my god, you know, and the
right has a bunch of alternatives here right with like
this is the fantasy of what treadwives is. It's like
what if someone else did your thinking for you.

Speaker 13 (02:41:50):
It's also the entire logic behind AI right and betwinding,
this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like pushing
right now, go listen towards see ES coverage and you'll
care much about it.

Speaker 1 (02:42:00):
Is like what if someone just like planned your life
for you?

Speaker 4 (02:42:03):
Right?

Speaker 13 (02:42:03):
What if you could talk to a machine and it
would plan all your trips and it would tell you
what to eat, and we would tell you how to live.

Speaker 5 (02:42:07):
And this is you know, this is also the structure
of how cults work.

Speaker 1 (02:42:11):
Like this is why colts have been able to.

Speaker 13 (02:42:13):
Attract people that, like, I think the media conception of
cults you wouldn't think would be in them, as why
there so many engineers in cults because there's like a
once of people who have to make choices constantly, and
the cult is like, hey, what if I just like
made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately,
you know, we talked about this a little bit before.
This is ultimately part of what's going on with like
trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to some extent,

(02:42:36):
like if you're in this movement, like you no longer
have to choose anymore.

Speaker 1 (02:42:38):
You just you know, here is the guy. The guy
is going to do the thing for you.

Speaker 13 (02:42:41):
This is also if you go back to your original
sort of conceptions of fascism, right, it's about the sort
of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual,
and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the
bonds of the system in order to preserve it and
like does all this stuff for you. And I think
there's a compa of that with this sort of paralysis

(02:43:04):
and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety also, and this
is something that is very well documented that you know,
we're are going to get into a foll here. But
all of the stuff we've been talking about about the
information space, where there's this constant deluge of just nonsense.
And that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you
that something is true, but to convince you that it's
impossible to figure out what is happening and to make

(02:43:24):
you just give up. And when you're refusing to make
a choice between like was there a gas attack in
Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as
the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice,
has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also
removes you from sort of the field of play of action.
And this has been a really important part of this
to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of

(02:43:45):
what the sort of Tulsi gabberd Gabit was right, was
that you could take a bunch of this sort of
like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just
do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi
Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world, right,
I think, what's his name? I disrespect him by not
remembering his name, but I should. For the podcast, Steve
Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the

(02:44:06):
zone with shit, right, it's sort of the strategy. You
just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter.
And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of
his you know, many scandals, as he would just like say,
the next most outrageous thing, and you know, you'd have
to commit to responding to one, but he was already
at the next thing. And it was just a sort
of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and nonsense

(02:44:30):
that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it,
you get exhausted, And I think, you know, you mentioned
healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really
telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in
another wave that like no one has named right now,
and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic
during the election of twenty twenty four. Yeah, So part

(02:44:52):
of what's been going on too is that there has
been this mass push by the Biden administration of the
Democrats to make us forget what happened in twenty twenty
in terms of the uprising YEA, and then make us
forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing
to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy. Right,
it was already pretty bad for it, and it would

(02:45:13):
have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be
forced back to work.

Speaker 17 (02:45:16):
How do you force people back to work who evidently
care about each other and their own safety. You lied them,
You confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So
there's been this huge priming of the pump for this
strategy by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own
exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had
to go back to work, so we had to get
over the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these

(02:45:38):
factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which
people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands
and going, I don't know whatever.

Speaker 14 (02:45:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 13 (02:45:50):
But on the other hand, the strategy of the Years
of Lead was a strategy born of strength, right, the
years of Lead paint This is not a strategy built
by people who haven't credibly solid grasp on power.

Speaker 6 (02:46:01):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:46:02):
The actual base that put Trump in power, right, and
their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right, they are
about to tank the entire global economy like through by
by putting like fifty percent taria of some like every
single country in the world. They okay, let's let's be
accurate here. That on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods,
which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you,

(02:46:23):
as an exercise to the reader to go look up
the places that the US imports things from.

Speaker 5 (02:46:29):
Right, So, like, you know, this is how you resist.
This is this how you resist.

Speaker 13 (02:46:34):
Here you're learned helplessness is by going and research and
things for yourself. But you know they're about to annihilate
the entire economy when the thing that brought into power
was fury at rising prices. Right, these fucking arrogant bastards
have sown the winds and they are going to reap
the fucking whirlwinds. The basis of this fucking of this
entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this, like,
dear listener, do you think these people can hold three

(02:46:57):
hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force?

Speaker 1 (02:47:01):
No, of course not.

Speaker 13 (02:47:01):
There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed
population that has ever existed in human history.

Speaker 1 (02:47:05):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:47:07):
This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting
your compliance. Yes, And if they can't get your compliance
by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to
get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation.

Speaker 6 (02:47:19):
Right.

Speaker 13 (02:47:20):
They need you scared, They need you confused, They need
you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you
to forget that, as the old song says, in your
hands is placed to power greater than their hoarded gold,
greater than the might of armies magnified one thousandfold. They
need you to forget the next line of the song,
which goes, we can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old when the union makes

(02:47:42):
us strong. And this is the entire fucking thing, right,
If these people were actually strong, they would not need
an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.

Speaker 10 (02:47:52):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 (02:47:53):
And the thing is right.

Speaker 13 (02:47:55):
The thing about this moment is that basically everyone is
incredibly disorganized. However, that means that you just literally any
random person can just take the things that you know
how to do and start organizing. The system is designed
to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what,
it's not very hard for you to pick up the

(02:48:16):
things that you know how to do for you, to
use the relationships in people you know in your life
to get together with them and to go do things.
And they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire
strategies to make sure that you simply do not do this.
And every single one of you has the power to
do this. And I know this because I also was
just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a

(02:48:38):
random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole,
and I just started doing things right. And I got
together with my friends and we fucking we made a
tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we
did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like
any of us are any different than you. We just
you know, decided one day we were going to do it.
And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber.
One of one of his most famous quotes is theultimate

(02:49:00):
hidden truth of this world is that it is something
that we make and could just as easily make differently.
And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely
terrified of the idea of you making this world differently,
and together we can do that.

Speaker 10 (02:49:13):
Yes, that's exactly right.

Speaker 17 (02:49:15):
And another thing that I think is really powerful about
getting started in that way is that all of those
false choices they become so much less important. And actually,
when you have a real goal that you and your
friends have made together, that you're building towards, it's actually
a lot easier to make choices as to make decisions, yeah,
because you would know what you need for the next step,
or you'll have an idea of it. You might make

(02:49:36):
a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along
that way, like, it's an easier way to do this
and to feel the power of real choices rather than
the false choices of like do you want your AI
from grock or do you want it from CHATGBT, Right,
And obviously like that's a joke, but it's true that

(02:49:56):
they aren't offering us anything anymore. They they have decided,
they have decided that what we get is stomped We
get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us.
Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always
what they wanted to give us in the past, but
they might learn very very quickly and reaping the whirlwind
that the reason that a century of American politicians have

(02:50:20):
tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really
hard to preserve the niceties of the government. Is because
they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution
and the guillotines which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution,
which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of
the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose up and destroyed
the sugar plantation of Heiti and it has been punished

(02:50:42):
ever since.

Speaker 10 (02:50:43):
The point being that.

Speaker 17 (02:50:45):
These things that they are overwhelming. This flooding the zone
was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of
weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong,
they had Obama was a sign of strength. We can
elect a black person, a black man in this racist country,
and he can just go on hope and he can
actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular,

(02:51:08):
like even through a huge economic collapse. Right, that was
a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of
real senescence. That I use the phrase advisably. And there
are a lot of holes.

Speaker 10 (02:51:20):
And they have drunk the kool aid. The right has
drunk the kool aid.

Speaker 17 (02:51:23):
They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists, not really,
they genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do,
their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street
have no idea about the difference. That gives us a
lot of space to move, That gives us a lot
of space to take action, to build things that are
invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media,

(02:51:46):
which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In
many ways, the strategies we have to take will be
less visible in many ways, I think, than they were
in previous times, and they're going to have to be
of necessity because maga is basically, you know, it's the
eye of sore on and if it lands on you like,
you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can

(02:52:06):
just kind of move, and if you don't, you know,
run into any any trouble like, you can get a
lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say
about that. But there's a lot to do, and there's
a lot of movements to make and a lot of
building to do that will both give you a sense
of power and solve these big problems for you and
your community. And if enough people start doing that, then

(02:52:26):
they will take away all their power.

Speaker 1 (02:52:30):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 4 (02:52:36):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources for It Could Happen Here, listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Behind the Bastards News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Robert Evans

Show Links

StoreAboutRSS

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

The Bobby Bones Show

The Bobby Bones Show

Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.