Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 114

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello everyone, it's me today James and I'm joined by Bedevant from the Wifey James Information Office. We're going to discuss today, Rajava and, like, chiefly, the Turkish bombing campaign had ganked it, which has been happening in the last few weeks, and the last few months and the last few years.

So we wanted to set that in context for you, and everyone's attention has been very much focused on other conflicts, but that doesn't mean that this one isn't important and it's one obviously listeners will be familiar with, so we wanted to bring you an update on that. Welcome, Berra van. Hello, thank you. Yeah, welcome. Okay. I'm very happy to be here today. Good. Let's start by, I think just in case people need a refresher or they haven't listened to some of the other stuff. Talk about what's happening in Brajava and why it's important and why it's unique and what makes it special. Okay, so actually right now in Rojava for more 10 years, there's a revolution happening. I think most people heard that for example in 2011 and so on, there was something called the Arab Spring,

but actually in the same time in this region, in northern East Syria, also called like in the northern eastern part of Syria, there's a Wittgenkord, Rojava, which is like a big part of Kurdish population, there's also Christian population like Assyrian, Armenian population, and also Arab population, like it's a very colorful region, you can say. So in this region, 2011, and this time and then 2012 evolution started which is actually based on a long-term struggle of the Kurdish movement and its experiences and the revolution was like mostly based on the idea to gain democratic autonomy and to gain like democratic self-administration, why? Because the Syrian regime on the one hand was very oppressive towards Kurdish people. And on the other hand, it was a terrible Syrian regime.

So there was a wish to create something different, which was actually created here in the region in Rojava. Yeah. So, I think if this we can say at first, like what happened was that we should start it and until today it's continuing, like it's a very, like basic change of people's life, we can say that happened here. Yeah. Like, democratic administration in all areas of life. And also like for example, a great deal of women's organization

to achieve also women's freedom. So this production is like based on these principles of democratic set administration of women's freedom and also of ecology. Yeah, a particular explain people who are familiar, a little bit more about the women's freedom and also of ecology. Yeah, perhaps you can explain if people who aren't familiar, a little bit more about the women's revolution, because I think that is something that's extremely unique and that people might not have, like, if they've heard of it, perhaps they haven't really, you know, I think the mainstream press doesn't cover it particularly well. So, did you could explain, like, maybe something about the co-chair system or the relationship between yourselves and the Yepa Gate and how that works?

Yeah, so actually I was just starting, like, speaking about when the revolution was happening, so from the beginning on, women also took place in it, which was already the case and the Kurdish freedom movement in general, that woman was equally taken part in it. And also always found it's their own organization, like not like a substitute to a general organization or a protein like this, but actually

like the own organization that at the same time cooperate with the general organization. So that was already the sprint of women's autonomy. So this was also adopted in Rugeva, so even all areas which also includes like political areas, areas of daily life, but also military field, women organized. So actually in the beginning of the revolution there were like the societies kind of self-defense forces building up and in the beginning there were already women in it and then there was also the foundation of a YPGate like the people's defense forces but

after this also the Y stage, the women's protection units were founded. So actually, it's like a fully autonomous women's units that take care of defending their homeless on the one hand, but on the other hand also made like a great deal of change into society in the daily life of women because in a region that was before like maybe to some feel like feudal or like the cause of the authoritarian era and state like there was no projection for women's rights or something like this and for example there was like this tradition of marrying a woman and a young age or something like this. This was actually changed by this woman's tradition, like the everyday life.

A woman was changed and is still changing, like it's still struggling because it meets the changing of the society. Yeah. So there's like an every area of life today, there's like autonomous women's organization in the World of Life twisting, which makes it maybe the most like profound woman's solution that until now is happening, I think. So it's like really important, like, for example, as a woman everywhere. Yeah, very much. And it really an important example of a woman, every woman.

Yeah, very much. It really is a genuinely profound change having spent a little bit of time there earlier this year. It is very notable. You spent a lot of time in that part of the world how different things are. Then perhaps we should talk about the battle against the so-called Islamic State or Dasha ISIS or whatever you want to call it in the role that the WPG, WPJ and STF played in that I can explain a little about about that fight and and

The fighting that happened and also like the tremendous number of people who died fighting or were martyred in the language It's used by the revolution about them. So, like, in general, I think everyone in the world first listened to the name of the VIPG, the Wants Protection Units and the invitations to ISIS, but actually from the beginning on, they thought, like, against this kind of, let's say, different fundamentalists or mercenary groups that were existing in the region. And when ISIS was coming up, like the biggest or most known battle that actually the world

for the first time we saw was the battle for Kobani's where for example the YPJ was like very very limited possibilities and the YPK fought against the ISIS and actually succeeded like to defeat ISIS and to defend the city of Kobani, which was kind of like a breaking point where things started to turn around. Or we have also have the point where for example, Shengar was attacked, which is like in South Dakota, it's not like in the Iraq region, it's not even the same region, but the VIPG also played like a world and opening a corridor for the people who tried to flee for the Yazidi people, who like are people who have faced like many

genocides in history and in order to save them from the genocide of ISIS, the WIPJ opened a corridor to help them to flee so that there are like many stories or like in the end the liberation of the city of Raka which was kind of known like as the center of the ISIS which also we can say like the woman's phosphate, like a junior or a Wrengot in this. So there are many examples where we can say like how deciding for example as a struggle of the YPJ was for the defeat of ISIS and I think on the other hand we also have to say that I'm not completely defeated because of seeing some support from outside structures like for jerky so there are still some like sales or for example there are a lot of detainees like before that was happening to break out from the detention centers in 2022. So it's not like it's completely

vanished from the earth, but the actually defeat was like reached by the repugnant for. Yeah, I think it's very important to talk like you spoke about those like incarcerated ice-former ISIS fighters, right, and their attempt to break out. I think that's maybe incarcerated ice former ice as fighters, right? And they're attempt to break out. I think that's maybe a good chance for us to talk about like some other former ice as fighters. And like starting in, I think it was called Turkey called Operation Peace Spring, I think, right? Like these Turkish incursions into

into Rojava and into Syrian territory. Can you explain a little bit about how, I guess, this will get us to the modern day and the bombing, but perhaps you can explain how this started. Obviously, Turkey has been opposed to the Kurdish freedom movement since its inception, right, since the very beginning in the like last century. But perhaps you could explain like this series of ongoing Turkish aggressions against what's happening or Java now and like how that began and how that's manifested itself over the years. So yes, like after ISIS was defeated to some degree actually Turkey for self-started occupation attacks, like in 2018-19 the occupation was first against Afrin and then against Karnir

and Gira Spiel which are all like very important regions of Rojava that are like directly next to the Turkish border like you see Rojava is like directly in between Syria and Turkey like next to the Turkish border so They directly attack these cities next to the border Which actually most of Rojava cities are directly next to the border, which actually most of all the cities are directly next to the border. And they occupy them. I think that's important to understand a little bit. Because actually, there are two plans to occupy the region along the border. Not only the cities that occupy it until now.

It's a very, very violent war. It's using aircraft and so on, like also in the last years. Turkey very much invested into drone technology and so on. And they used also chemical weapons like very famous in 2019 the video of young child named Muhammad went around the world that was born by force force in Serikhania in the occupation attack. So like actually it's like a war that is mostly thought also the most like dirty methods that took his way to the region and after this like

we can say like after Sericanya was occupied Turkey actually continued to attack with the war that you cannot say like at this time it start and then this time it and it's more like continuous attacks. On the one hand like some areas are always getting bombed in the last year's like for example, like with artillery shelling and so on like aba or next to Afrin or Ein ESA or Tremel. So like the areas that are close to the occupied areas where now Turkey and mercenary forces are stations that constantly attack more or less regions. But also the drone war. Like the first I think very, very clear example of what the Turkish strategy in the last years was

on the 23rd June 2020, when Turkey killed three women of Congress, the women's movement, like civil women's movement in Kobaniani in the village, which were all like two of them were like in the leadership of the civil movement movement and one was just like a member and they were sitting in the garden and they were talking and at this time like the Khrushchehron the strike and they all lost their lives. So like a lot of these kinds of attacks happened afterwards. Like against, like let's say like civil leaders of society, like politicians, normal people also like on the 25th of December actually also on Christmas in 2021

five Five children like young people like use from the use movement We're killed in Kobani also Yeah, just when they were sitting in the garden like members of the youth center like a Turkish stone stock, three of them like young girls. And this continued, or also we can say like leaders of Fox Public YPJ also, like on the 22nd of July last year, there was a conference happening for celebrating 10 years of moments for the Russian and Russian and just on the same day Turkey targeted the

car of the VIP J-MEMBOTS, one of them was Gion Toulder who also spoke on the same day on the conference. So actually it's quite clear what Turkey actually wants to, like, destroy the revolution that's happening in Russia, like the woman's revolution. And in general, like this change that is happening, they want to create the sphere to stay right to bathe to for the occupation process. And they're using a lot of violence. Also in the occupied areas, the people are writing all the things that cannot speak well in English. They have to fear. Sometimes they cannot

close the doors. Sometimes people get abducted without anyone knowing why or where they go, where they go to the prison, where they're being imprisoned, or where they're being tortured, or very kind of oppressive regime. Now in occupied areas. Are we also? Yeah, and those are people who like, I've met when they come here, right? People who have lost, like I spoke to a guy or mayor a couple of weeks ago, you know, his father had been killed, his uncle had been killed. And like, he was like, what should I do? Should I wait to be like the last person in my family and then who gets killed? Or like, it's very, the conditions for those people

in the Turkish occupied parts of Northern Kurdistan are very, very difficult and oppressive. And I think like, just to build off what you said, like, it's important that people realize that these killing of especially like people in the women's revolution, but also, you know, people in the Rojava revolution more generally, it's not to own structure extremely targeted. They can follow a car from an event and strike it.

It's these things are not like artillery or mortars, it's not like you're sending it into an area. Like they're extremely targeted to an individual or a group of individuals rather than, you know, a random attack. So like this is a distinct choice that's being made. [♪ Music playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music playing in background, music Well, let's talk about the most recent bombings because I think there was some particularly egregious ones even by the standards of this campaign, which has been pretty egregious

from the beginning. But December, around the week of Christmas this year, just to give people a time to the period there was a bombings of a, if I'm not wrong, a printing press, a dialysis facility, is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, there was also another host, like not hospital, like, as, because, let's say, like a medical point also in Kobani, where doctors were so bored of, I think it's like kind of a known and there were also working there.

Yeah. And the oxygen center also, so like medical places, there were like normal factories of food production. Like you said to printing house, there were many places like this, like of daily infrastructure that were targeted like before already in October, infrastructure was targeted and also last year there was attack taxes and every time at least 10 civilians got killed like in all of these attacks. So now I think the overall number of just of these three ways of the taxes already like search one killed civilians. So like maybe don't strike very targeted, but it's not like Turkey doesn't want to kill civilians or take care not to kill civilians. Like already in the attacks of last year there was

Accenture of double tap attacks for example, which I actually illegal So I think it's very important to say, like also the targeting of medical points of medical infrastructure, that what Turkey is doing is not according to international law. Like that's not the case. And like Turkey is kind of acting like, however, at once targeting civilians,

creating like fear and also in a region that is already poor yani, you have to say. The possibilities that have been created for daily needs and so on, for supplies of electricity, of heating, fuel and so so on for your house. Yeah, they are very affected like this right now So like in general, there's like a big shortcoming of everything right now in Rojava And just because of these attacks so this is actually affecting everyone and on the other hand, Turkey tried to create this fear, like there's just some way of attack and just targeting everywhere. So they want to displace actually the population and also to commit the politics, also to stay, especially against British people

and also in the Christians, it's very much like potentially like genocide politics like it's not like a limited attack or something like this like we don't think so. Yeah no it's not and like you said they're very much unafraid of killing civilians in the process like I spoke to a mother whose 15-year-old son was killed in a drone strike I don't think it's very hard to make an argument that 15-year-old son was killed in a drone strike. I don't think it's very hard to make an argument. A 15-year-old son was doing anything apart from being a 15-year-old kid. It's not like this person is a legitimate military target. A kid who played goalkeeper in his local football team. These double-tap attacks, if people aren't familiar with the double-tap attacks, when an

attack happens, people go to the site of the attack to render aid, right? An ambulance or perhaps just bystanders rendering aid or other military personnel rendering aid and then a second attack happens at the same place to then attack the people who are rendering aid. So you spoke a little bit about how they're trying to attack the whole project and not just individuals. I wonder, the drone strikes do have a... They change the way things have to be done. It's things become unsafe.

It's like anywhere you can see the sky. Having a large gathering, certainly for people who are of more like higher status, it's dangerous for them to be out and about, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, on some level for sure, it's dangerous, but on the other hand, you cannot always be afraid. Like that's like a really a reality like for example now because these places were targeted for

example the infrastructure that you need for your life people actually started to stand like next to the electricity center to say like if we are all here then they cannot target it. Oh wow. For sure, the dangerous, if you see like the... They can. They should. Yeah. Yeah, because they killed a lot of civilians, as you say. That's a very brave thing to do.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And again, I think I think maybe we should explain, actually, it sort of gets very cold in this part of the world in the winter, because perhaps people will associate this part of the world in the winter because perhaps people will associate this part of the world with like the heat and hot summers but like you have very cold winter especially in the mountains right?

Yeah, I mean Rojahar it's like more or less flat so it's not so cold but still gets like under zero degrees. So like for sure you need, you need like your house to be warm and so on. Like just to take care of basic needs. You need your car to drive somewhere maybe sometimes at least like some people needed for the work or like this. There's a lot of basic needs that don't work if. If all the infrastructure gets destroyed. Yeah, and I believe if I'm right in saying this, the one person already passed away because they couldn't get dialysis at the dialysis center, that was bombed, is that right? Yes, so as I said, that one passed away afterwards, they brought like emergency-wise,

a dialysis machine, which I think is very good for the stick people, but I'm not sure because also if you don't have a substitute of something, it's like only one machine. I'm not sure how much it will actually take out of the needs of the people because I said it was like 70 or 86 people who were going to the center, so it's not you.

Yeah, and like I don't think, yeah, I mean, it's certainly not as good as having a proper center, right? Like, and there's no reason, there's no world in which a dialysis center is a, is a legitimate target. Or a printing press, right? Like I think that, that maybe points to what you're saying. Like, if you're printing books about something, sharing knowledge about something,

and like, perhaps one thing, I think you were saying, is it right, that it printed textbooks? I think it was like also printing textbooks. Okay. Like, it was printing everything, so it was also printing textbooks. Like, for schools, it was also printing textbooks. Yeah, like for schools also, it was printing text book.

Yeah, and we should point out that like, you know, I speak to Kurdish people almost every day when I'm at the border. And they, many of them don't read them right in Kurdish because in Turkey, that's not taught in schools where they don't have a chance to learn. And so like having those textbooks, having that knowledge, lots of my friends were saying that the children, because there are people who went to school before the revolution went to school in Arabic. So the children are the ones who have

the formal education in Kurdish. And they're building a generation that speaks Kurdish and reads and writes Kurdish as their first language. And so, an attempt to destroy that isn't just destroying the factory, right? It's fair to say that it's also destroying that goal of the revolution and more broadly, that attempt to have that education in Kurdish and let children speak their own language in school. Yes, I mean, this is also part of like, our simulation politics to deny people their own language, which actually like the Syrian regime also did like,

their only source in Arabic. And now, for example, the system of the self-administration loads everyone to learn in different languages, like now there's Arabic, there's Kurdish and even in very last times I heard that there will also be opened in Syria and again, which is really important because it's like a language that is like very, like most Syrian people write not a speaker and write Arabic so it could be really important also. Yeah, yeah, and I think it's really important to point out for people who aren't aware and often in

the US media, like, Rojo is reported as like Kurdish and like a Kurdish area, but it may have a majority of Kurds in some cities, but like there are Syrian people, about Arab people, about Armenian people, and like they have that same autonomy, right, to educate in their own language and to like organizing their own communities. Yes, that's what the idea is all about and I think actually like we saw this in the last time there was kind of trying to build this image of like Kurt against Arabs like on the outside in the international media which is absolutely not true, like the SDS.

It's health is like, I mean, majorly, Arabic force, it's not majorly produced, like if you see numbers, I think at least. So it's like very equal, like everyone who plays a role in it and who wants to participate, can participate, and everyone has like autonomy also to organize inside of the own society or may it be religion or in which it's like also Yazidi people like Kurdish people who are but Yazidi religion and they also have their own organization here in Rojava. Yeah that's very important. And their own movement in their own area right? The year Bishe in that part of Iraq. Like that's, I guess, an allied movement that'd be fair to say. Yeah, I mean, it very much follows the same idea

and the same concept of the Russian people. Yes, and yeah, I've also spoken to a Zili people who have come to the United States recently, and like, yeah, they under ISIS, they had it absolutely in human-interval conditions. And if it wasn't for the FAA, then they wouldn't be, you know, the beginning of their liberation, I guess, came from the epigay. Something we'll maybe talk about another time, because it's a long story. I wonder, yeah. Like, obviously, this isn't something that has been in the news as much, because people

have been so focused on Palestine. I wonder if it's worth discussing like the Turkish states completely like two-faced approach, right? Like on one hand, they're saying we have to, like yeah, it's unacceptable for the bombing of civilians in Palestine

and like this is completely wrong. And then on the other hand, they're doing the same thing, right? Like on their other border. Yeah, so I think we have to anyway say like Turkey is not doing anything good for the Palestinian people. Turkey is leading Hamas to such an attack like supporting Hamas and this like very violent attacks that I made.

Which then was the pre-set for the war of Israel and international forces against the Palestinian people. So actually, who is suffering from all of this is the normal people. Like, it was just true for Israel and Palestine, so Actually, we have to say like what Turkey is doing is against the people like it's also against the Palestinian people And here like they have criticized to clearly for example Israel saying like saying Israel is making occupation politics and so on Still Turkey also has ties with Israel, but they are themselves occupying parts of Rojava. In the shadow of this attack that all the attention of the world was going into this region, they Ruzhava

and also calculating that maybe people will not so much Look to Ruzhava right now like at the same time. There's like another huge war going on in the Middle East and they are making very clearly like politics of occupation in Arthin and Siliconia and also demographic change. So they are like dispacing people and placing other people. Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah, we're just placing whom and unplacing whom because I think that's important when we talk about

like that population and demographic change. Like it's not just just basing people randomly and replacing them randomly, right? Yeah. So actually, the people that are targeted the most are like the Kurdish people in the areas or other people that are not aligned to the Turkish state. And then who they place, most of us like you see that all this mercenary forces that are actually aligned to Turkey or like outside forces

already like they are like they are not ISIS but they are a little bit similar to it they are like mercenary groups that are like more or less like what vote they go, it's like clarified from outside for us or so. They are aligned to Turkey and from these people, for example, their families were placed in the region on the one hand, on the other hand, there were even examples where Turkey started to place some Palestinian people also in this region. They just, who they think they can align to Turkey as a state and bring under their control, they were placing in these areas that say it like this. like to be able to actually what is a part of,

what is a part of Syria to occupy it long to them. Like to make this class, it's not like a short-term plan. Like they want to stay in this area. It's not prevented, if it's not liberated again. Yeah, yeah, and I think like, again, people that I think have become more aware in recent months, people are becoming educated on a situation of Palestine, settlements, and it's not the fault of the people of Palestine that they're being like forced to be driven off their ancestral home lands. But like what it does mean is that like they could be mobilized by

the other someone like Turkey right to just do an occupation, to do, I guess, demographic transfers somewhere else. That's not a desirable outcome. So we spoke a little bit about this ongoing hostility era and it can seem for people out. I think people only hear about Rojava in negative terms is the wrong thing, but it only ever enters the American press these days when something happens, right? Either an ISIS attack, something about one of the, the cat like a holler or a roach or it.

But like, also things are continuing to progress, right? It's not just a place that is in battle and fighting to survive. Like, I know recently a new social contract was passed for instance, so maybe you could explain a little bit about the progress still being made despite this ongoing like air water and war and land war. Yeah, so actually I think here in Rocha River we always followed this philosophy that we are not like sitting here and saying oh war will come towards us or like it will not be like we are very much hopeful And we are always working to develop,

like even if these things are happening, these attacks are happening, the pollution very, very much developed. And the society changed a lot, already a lot of institutions have been built up that before were not existing and so on. And as an outcome also, this, the new social contract was formed,

which actually is like a very democratic process. Like, let's say if state force, for example, has the constitution, the state less, the self-administration has the social contract, which actually is made by the people because until it was made, there was the years of discussion, like there were so many meetings, like all of the political representatives from the smallest to the biggest level, there were all part of the discussion and also the people themselves that could take part in the discussion. So now this is for example ensuring a lot of important decisions and now like the struggles that is before us that we are facing now is to implement this social contract which is very important.

It's also guaranteeing a lot of progress for women, it's guaranteeing a lot of progress for society. So I think still now like it's a task to like see how how it can be implemented in all areas because it's always like a very lively process like it always needs to daily struggle the daily work creating like everything creating like everything from you. There's a lot going on actually. We can't say. Yeah, definitely. And like, definitely, like, it doesn't, I think it's easy, like, again, if we only report

on the thing when bad things are happening, like, to think that it's only bad. But there's a lot of, like, people are still hopeful, I think, and hopeful for creating and spreading, like, this better future for themselves and the children and for the region, which I think is really admirable. One thing that I thought was really admirable is people will probably have seen it, but like if they don't follow social media so much, the exchange of statements of solidarity between the K&DF, the current national defense force, Italian 5 specifically in Myanmar, and the YPG and YPJ

in Rojava. And they've gone back and forth, right? But can you explain a little bit about, obviously, I know that the situation in Myanmar is very complicated. I know I've spent years of my life learning about it. But can you explain the importance of that solidarity and also perhaps that it was a risk for everyone to gather like this in the middle of the drone war to make the statement? Can you explain why that solidarity was something they felt was so important? Yeah, I think in general it's very important to say the reduction in Roosevelt, it's not only a reduction for the people of Roosevelt itself, it has a perspective, it's more general to strengthen the friendship of democratic movements anywhere in the world.

So for sure there's a lot of colors of movements, a lot of different situations in the world. And some might also like, let's say this solidarity very strong because actually they are also like, in Myanmar like also facing, for example, a state system, which is very much influenced by fascism, like for example, we are facing Turkey or like in general, this kind of oppression and trying to liberate from it. So actually, we are always trying to have like this exchange in general in the world and to have like also to build like how let's say like quality quality relations of quality friendships with all kinds of democratic movement

for sure everyone is acting on a different level and so on but This is like a big something really really important for us in general. I mean, in the Roja War, there were also always people from the outside, for example, participating in it. So there was always kind of the spirit that this is the revolution for the world. The Kudish movement in general has this character, like an international character. So it's not something like, let's say like far from us, it's already something very close to us to say like,

we stand in solidarity also with other liberation movements. Yeah, I think it was very, I know it's very much appreciated in Myanmar because lots of people from there have reached out to tell me how much they appreciated it. And like, I think some of them have been in the revolution for 70 years, and their world has not paid attention to them. So they really appreciated that solidarity. And I know that the solidarity runs a lot deeper than statement, but we will cover the extent of that solidarity in another episode. Because again, I think it merits its own recording. I wonder, Bedavine, what, obviously people will be listening,

and I think a lot of people will be very supportive of the revolution in Rajava, and they want to help it and see it succeed, and certainly not to see no one wants to see civilians dying in drone strikes, right? No one wants to see anyone dying in drone strikes. But how can they, if they are in the US or in Europe, or elsewhere in the world, but not Rojoba, how can they help? How can they support the revolution through its, like, difficult, to these difficult moments, right, when people

don't have electricity to eat their homes in the winter and things? Yeah, I think there's a lot of possibilities, like sites coming here with also support support, but I mean, in general, you have all of this possibilities, like from educating yourself what is the solution actually about understanding it, from spreading its ideas, which is maybe the most important task, May it be like spreading knowledge about the, spreading knowledge also about the attacks that are happening, clarifying what is happening and why it's happening to read about political backgrounds, also international politics is very important for us. And also you can always like share, for example,

let's say you have social media, let's say you part of political movement or something, you can discuss about it, you can inform yourself about it, you can make a presentation about it in your university, like there are so many things that you can do, like you can read the book about it and make a book presentation,

like there's a million things a person can do. Or as you are doing doing you can connect to the Clotish refugees or to the society Kurdish people in the diaspora in general like outside of Kurdistan wherever you might be Yeah, that's the possibility also like you can organize Solidarity also practical solidarity also like let's say like intellectual works like write the text, they are discussed about it, like maybe it's difficult in the beginning to understand some things or to gain like information, but right now there's actually a lot of information

also available in English language, I think. Yeah, lots. So yeah, you could read for about a year non-stop, I think. And still not, not have read all of it. But are there books you've recommended a couple of books to me, which I think have been really good, and that I've shared with my friends in Myanmar, and I know that they've enjoyed. Are there any books you'd recommend to listeners? I mean, and I like this revolution of base on the sorts of up to the Ujjala. So I think a good idea, if you actually want to understand the ideological basis of the

about women's liberation, about how democratic society can be organized. So actually, there's the book called Soci sociology of freedom. I think it's very important And so that's a bit like Understandable I think for someone who can't make it from academic or from leftist or From a democratic background. I think they will read it. They will be able to understand it But there are also many other books that are translated to English or like tech That's available. Or in general, they are books about the Lujava, the vision from people, for example,

coming from the outside. I have to think right now in English, I'm sorry. I know there are some also some different languages about the woman's vision. Mm-hmm. So I have to think with the variable. I think there's also like, there's one called like the politics of freedom of something. And there are some books that were published because I was like the diplomatic conferences

in most of them. I think happening in Europe, which are also like some like collections of local discussion, like published. So I think that's also very available, but I'm sorry, I have like, like, sex tight. Yeah, there's a good book called Revolution in Rojava, which was translated from German that, like, I think it lays out like, that how things happen. It's a little bit dated now. I think it was published in like 2016. So you know, things have changed over a few years,

but I think that's a decent book for people who are interested as well that I know a lot of people have recommended. Yeah. And then I wonder, like, because you see this isn't being, I know you made the point earlier about that the world was looking at Palestine. When the taxid Palestine happened, I was in in Camichlone in Rochoba and like, it's impossible for me to sell stories. It's impossible for me to sell anything to like big news outlets. They simply, like, don't

think American people can care about two parts to the world at once, I guess. I wonder where people can follow and get updates. It's a good social media or news outlets that you would suggest people who do want to keep in touch with what's happening. Yeah, I mean, we have Twitter, Facebook page, web.j. information on documentation office, like web.j. information. But also there's like other places like the Rujava information center which is very much like like independently accumulating like knowledge and sharing in a way that I think is understandable for everyone. There's also from the SDS forces, the press center,

which has also an English homepage, is sharing sometimes statements and complete information. There's the international community of the Java, which is sharing in English language, a lot of information on Twitter and on the homepage. So there's actually a lot of information on Twitter and on the homepage. So there's actually a lot of sources if you go and look for it. That are very good, I think also. Yes, and they're gone the ground people who can show you what's happening.

Yeah, I think that's wonderful. But if anything else you'd like us to get to before we finish up, anything else you want people to know? No, I think it's very important to say again that it's like very, very valuable to get to before we finish up anything else you want people to know? No, I think it's very important to say again that it's like very, very valuable for the pollution of the world. For people to take part in actions, to make the voice heard, to organize, to make the pollution known, to get it to know for themselves. And that does actually make a very, very huge difference.

Like the struggle that people everyone was making for the solution and that it needs it. It's very critical for the RUJA revolution that everyone would get known and get solidarity. That we see this as a very meaningful, I think that's very important to understand. Besides this, I don't know, I hope, yes, that's the second. Yeah, I think it's really good to be able to realize that it's not a, it's, you know, it's a very worthwhile thing to do, just to increase people's awareness and solidarity.

And thank you so much for your time, I know, Internet's not the easiest thing to come by, where you are. So thank you so much, Vade so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you also for talking well to us. I hope I can have a good time. Great. Thanks so much. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Pike to Massacre, this is Murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Those murders happened in the mid 1980s. He's out there doing stuff. He just didn't stop.

Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile, male Caucasian, 5'9 to 6'2, 180 to 270 pounds, unstable home, absent father and a domineering mother. Right handed, IQ above 100, most likely heterosexual. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women no longer have people to speak for them does not mean that they deserve to not be so people. What if this guy's still alive like what if he comes after us? I said are you gonna kill me? Yes!

Listen to Murder 101 on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters.

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friends, and frenemies will join Cheryl each week. Listen to Sex, Lies and Spray Tans. On the IHOT radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, everybody. I am Robert Evans. And I want to start today by kind of proposing a theoretical, right? You wake up in the morning and something is awry. Maybe you hear shots, maybe there's some sort of natural disaster. Maybe it's that weird Havana-Cindran death sound from the Obama movie that just came out

on what was it? Netflix. But something's fucked up. And most people, I think, especially most people who listen to this podcast, you probably had conversations with your friends and loved ones about what do we do in the quote unquote apocalypse or shit hits the fan. You know, you've got your friends who maybe you know

they have a lot of stored food or they have some other skill that you think would be useful and you've got some stuff that you know how to do. You've got your people, right, that you would want to be with and around if something's really going wrong out there because you know how to take care of each other.

But how do you get in contact? Assuming you don't all live together, assuming you're not all on some sort of commune type situation as most people aren't, you're probably scattered throughout the city, maybe you've got some friends out in the suburbs, maybe you've got some friends who live out in rural land, maybe you've just got a friend who lives halfway across town, and that's no problem when you got a phone,

and you've got Google Maps working, but can you get there on your own, can you get there or get in the contact with them if the streets are all clogged up with cars or whatever? How are you going to reach them? How are you going to get in touch in order to figure out what's going on, and how are you going to stay in touch while you handle whatever you going to reach them? How are you going to get in touch in order to figure out what's going on? And how are you going to stay in touch while you handle whatever you need to handle for

whatever is going wrong? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today, because if the cell networks are down, if they're being blocked, if the Obama situation happens, there are things you can do to allow you and your friends, comrades, affinity group, whatever you want to call them to stay in touch. And a lot of this revolves around a kind of technical usage called a mesh network. And I don't know much about that because I am a big dummy. But a person who is not a dummy is our guest today. They go by hydroponic Trash on Twitter and they are going to talk to us today

about how to set up independent communications networks that do not rely on the standard grid. Hello, and welcome to the show. Hey, what's up, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thank you for coming on. You posted a thread on Twitter about using, you know, it's called like low-row, low frequency radio. Is that what it stands for?

Yeah, low-row stands technically for long range, but yeah, it's a long range frequency radio that broadcasts a pretty specific wavelength that can travel really far throughout the air. So, it's perfect for communications long distance. And if you've got devices set up on this, they each basically act as nodes, right? So the more you have the kind of wider signal distribution you get, if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, like if you've got someone three miles away and then another person five

miles to the west of them, then you kind of Are able to cover that whole distance Yeah, exactly so they give it like a relay system right one person has a message They send it off to another person that person passes it on to the next node and so mesh networks are really resilient when it comes to Emergencies when it comes to protests when it comes to emergencies, when it comes to protests, when it comes to occupation and conflict zones, because if one node goes down, as long as there's other ones, they can pick up that message and keep repeating it and broadcasting it out.

So it's a really interesting piece of technology that is similar to traditional radios, but also different because all the communications can be encrypted end-to-end. Which is another way of security. Because you can, the cry thing most people's default if you're thinking like, well, how do I say it? You get some like walkie talkies, right? You know, you get some, and those can,

you know, those have their place and stuff, but they are also not always the most secure option. So being able to encrypt shit is a huge deal, especially when you're talking about outside of a shit hits the fan kind of deal, which is less likely than some sort of civil unrest protest use case. Being able to actually encrypt is huge. So I'm a dummy. I don't understand much about setting up my own and technology independently, but I find this interesting. I see the use case. I decide I want to, I want to, you know, set this up and start, you know, building an emergency mesh network with a half dozen of my friends. Where do I start? So first thing is you'll need some hardware

that supports Lora. There are a ton of different things out there ranging from maybe 20, 25 bucks going all the way up to thousands of dollars. So there's a big range. And that range really depends on the enclosure, what's included in it, the broadcast strength, all that gets done.

So obviously the cheaper you go, the weaker the broadcast strength is, there might be development boards that are just literally like the PCB, like actual hardware with no case around it. There's some that you can just pick up and immediately use. It kind of depends, but that's the first step is finding hardware that can handle Lora and then, you know, obviously getting it and then flashing it with the correct software. And that sounds really complicated, but for our purposes of sending text messages without any kind of cellular LTE or Wi-Fi connection, you can use super cheap devices and flashing them is you click a couple buttons and you're done.

So first off, do you have any kind of specific, you know, I know you're working on a text piece that you can put up to explain all this and I will certainly share that as soon as it gets up. But do you have any specific, like if somebody's saying, hey, I've got a budget of 50 bucks or so, is there a complete device? You would recommend if they're or somewhere in that,

that median range, like kind of on the lower end, I think that someone doesn't know how to take a raw board and craft that and do a usable device that you would recommend they purchase as to start us off here. Yeah, definitely. So I kind of have two different options. One is a standalone option that can kind of work by itself, completely independent of

anything else. And another one uses your phone, so you'll flash it to the board and then connect it or Bluetooth to your phone, just like a pair of headphones. Oh, awesome. Oh, that's so easy. Yeah. And so you kind of have options. If you want a standalone version,

there's a company called Lilligo. That makes a thing called a T-deck. And it's a pretty small, it looks like a blackberry clone. Yeah. It has a little mouse thing. Yeah, it looks like a blackberry kind of crossed with a game camera. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it's like thickerberry kind of crossed with a game camera. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

because it's like thicker in the back. It's got that big antenna. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so, um, the little go T deck is what this is called. Um, it's a blackberry clone basically, um, it has Laura built in it has Bluetooth. And so all you have to do is get powered to this thing, Bluetooth. And so all you have to do is get powered to this thing, flash it with a mesh tastic. And there you go. Now you have a, now you can type out messages, you can send direct messages, you can send encrypted messages all with one device. That's $35. Oh, man, that's great. And this is something you can get like Ali Express was your recommendation, right? Yeah, Ali Express is probably the best if you're trying to order a lot. If you want one right now, you can order them on places like

Amazon, but it's going to cost you and also fuck Amazon too. Yeah, I mean, you are slightly doomed to support one horrible billionaire or another like Alially Express, but no, I get it. Yeah. And I mean, one of the upsides to like an all-in-one thing like this is, like, I 3D printed this case, but you don't have to print a case. You can literally just set this into a shoe box or something and protect it.

So there's a lot of options on the cases that you want to use. You could buy premade cases or you could just, I don't know, just put something to protect the board back here and then screw on an antenna. You're good. Yeah, I mean, I've seen some shit people do with duct tape. You can figure it out. So my question is, or my other question is you were talking about a way that you can,

you can basically do the comming through communications through your cell phone, right? You can hook that into the next mesh network. Is that something you're able to kind of go at least in brief, or provide people with, here's where they can go to read about how to do that? Yeah, so the same company, Lilligo, makes a smaller little device. It's really small, maybe about an inch. Yeah, and it has a screen on it.

So when you power it on, you can actually see the messages come through on the screen on the board itself. Yeah. And it connects through Bluetooth to your phone and you use the mesh-tastic app to basically text like you normally would on a phone. It looks just like signal pretty much if you're used to that UI. But yeah, it's super small. Yeah, it's perfect.

And so you're just also using that meshtastic app to flash the software on the devices. What, see, get them? Am I understanding that right? Yeah, I'm just asking, I'm re-asking everything because I want to try to make this accessible for both me when I do it and for our listeners. Yeah, for sure.

So meshtastic is the software that's running on these devices. And what meshtastic does is a device that's also running MeshTastic can communicate with each other over a low-raw long distance. And so you need the hardware that supports low-raw and a client, which is MeshTastic, that will allow you to send text messages and stuff like that and do the encryption and handle all that stuff. To actually flash these, it's super simple. MeshTastic has a link that you can go to.

You plug in your device, depending on the version, you hold down a button, you press flash, wait like 10 seconds, and boom. Now you have a working MeshTastic node. Probably an underneath 10 minutes. After you get this out of the box, you could be up and running in about 10, 15 minutes. That's great. So, all right, if I've got, like, say I'm the guy in my group of friends who has more disposable cash and I want to get this going. So I pick up five of those lily like boxes 3d print a case for them or just wrap them in something, you know, and I keep one I hand them out to my friends. I get the

software on all of them. How do I get them all kind of in in comms together, right? Like or if you know my friends buy them independently and we each flash them and get them up and running, how do we all kind of connect? Like, what is that process like? Yeah, so the good thing with meshtastic is it automatically handles adding new nodes to the network. And so as soon as a new device that runs meshtastic comes online, it'll broadcast and tell the entire meshtastic network nearby, hey, a new device guy added, you can send messages to me. So, meshtastic has two different things that it can do. It can do broadcasts where you're sending out a message to pretty much everyone

who has a device that's reachable. And that's good for, say, for instance, your friend comes online, you can't talk to them directly, you can send a broadcast out and say, hey, Joe, what device are you? And they can reply and broadcast to everybody, oh, okay, I'm on this device. You can also do direct messages. So once you know that person's device name,

you can actually send messages directly to them. Now keep in mind it's not encrypted because technically it's broadcasting throughout each node. It's just like filtering out the messages for whoever it was addressed for. But yeah, at that point then you could start DMing people. And if you want to get started with encryption, it's also really easy. You can use the mesh-tastic client so you can install it on your computer, plug it into your computer,

and just set an encryption key, a passcode, whatever you want to do to secure your communications, and then once that person has that passcode key, whatever, those two devices can connect and talk completely encrypted, either one on one or if multiple people say, for instance, you have an affinity group of like 10 people, you all say, okay, hey, in an emergency, let's meet up at this place and physically share a key

or passcode or whatever. Once everybody has that, you can also do encrypted broadcasts to multiple people as well. So getting up and running is super quick when it comes to flashing, actually communicating with people makes sense, especially on your phone, it feels just like a normal texting situation.

So that's great. Yeah, it's really amazing. I mean, this is a really interesting technology because like I've been interested in radio for a while, but the biggest downside to that is A, you can't encrypt any kind of radio communications in the US. B, the radio license.

Yeah, unless if you're the cops or the military or the feds, you cannot encrypt shit. And if you do, it's kind of an issue. But yeah, you can't encrypt messages on regular radios. Another thing is like useability. If you hand somebody like a bowel thing, handheld radio, most people are not going to know what to do with it at all. They're going to be like, what the fuck is this? But if I hand you a blackberry clone and say, just type, and if you want to send a dented somebody, find them and just send it.

It's really easy for your average person to pick it up and use it, which is honestly the best kind of situation, especially in an emergency where you can't really rely on highly technical people all the time because what if everybody in your affinity group isn't super technical, you know? So it's a good common device that anybody can pick up and start sending messages, even encrypted messages pretty easily.

So I think that covers the technical basics of what you need to do. I did want to ask real quick before we get on to some of the more ideological stuff here, conversations about why you specifically got into this and why this is important for people. I wanted to ask you just really quickly, in terms of that 3D printed case, did you just go search in some repository and find when someone had made or is there one that you've put up somewhere that you might recommend to people? Yeah, actually, it was recently uploaded to Thingiverse, which is a website that has free

3D print plans and files. And so I just searched up, Lilly Go T Deck on Thingiverse and the full case, I mean, the back. Yeah, it looks great. It has, yeah, it looks like an actual device. Yeah. And I'm assuming that one's just PLA. Yeah, just PLA. Just plastic.

Super plastic. Yeah, yeah, looks great. Yeah. And this only took all these pieces snapped together, so no glue required and all these pieces took Roughly about eight hours to print at a hundred percent density. So you have a pretty solid case With plans that are available online and in eight hours you can have a literal professional looking device that's protected and able to go, you know, in adverse situations. Yeah. So now I want to get into some of the more kind of like, just talking about first off, what got you into this?

Like, when did you decide this is a skill I want to develop and a thing I want to figure out? develop and a thing I want to figure out. Yeah, I mean, so for my day job, I'm an offensive security consultant, which is just a fancy way of saying that I had to go to the level. That's a cool job, Tyler. That's a good job for a living. Yeah, you're doing like red team stuff, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I've always been interested in technology and specifically, like, how do you make technology

work in the benefit of people, as opposed to working in the benefit for profits or corporate interest or state interest? So I think technology is a really good tool when used correctly. And there's a lot of moral and social and political implications when it comes to technology and actually making it. But that's kind of how I got into it was kind of combining my interest in computers and hacking combined with kind of the social and political activism. I've been a part of.

So that was kind of my entry point into it. Yeah, that makes sense because I do think, like when I think about what inspired me about the early internet about like file sharing back in the late 90s about you know when Wikipedia first started up and stuff all that stuff like that we talk a lot about like The days when we thought the internet was going to be an unqualified boon for human liberty the ability to create an unqualified boon for human liberty, the ability to create effectively like a smaller and more limited private internet for like you and your people to communicate safely through definitely like scratches that itch. And when we say like more limited internet, you're not through one of these networks we're talking about, you're not going to be like sending

YouTube videos and shit, right? But that's not what it's for, you know, it's got its own use and it's very much kind of what the internet was about at the beginning, which is just allowing people to connect that otherwise wouldn't be able to or wouldn't be able to as securely. Yeah, exactly. And actually, the same protocol, Lora, you actually kind of can run a basic internet protocol that's called LoraWan, LoraWide Access Networking. And you can run some pretty basic programs on it outside of just text-based stuff. So it's a really interesting kind of rabbit hole to go down into. I will say if you start looking at Laura and a mesh-tastic stuff,

you will eventually start to run into like a right leaning, yes, sometimes straight out, fascist people. Because there's a crossover between, you know, the gun community and kind of off-grid prep or doomsday-prepper people, you know? So you'll run into that. Anyone who doesn't like the government

is going to have a vested interest in being able to communicate in a way that can't be easily intercepted, right? And that doesn't always mean your buddies. I think most people are pretty familiar with that. Exactly. Yeah, it's really useful. There are other ways to say, for instance, make your own kind of like micro-internet. I wrote an article that talked about making kind of making a DIY internet in quotes where you can basically take your home router and say for instance your neighbors to the same network.

And then if you have a server of your own that has books that has maps that has music and information, you can easily share that with other people. And so there are other ways to kind of get your own off-grid quote unquote internet together, but just outside of text. But yeah, it's definitely possible. It's just needs a little bit more technical know-how, but hopefully soon it'll be a little simpler to where you can just download something, get a book server up and running, and then have anybody come along and download books about you know, permaculture or about emergency medical aid or fixing infrastructure and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's huge being able to actually like transmit text and stuff through that too. So, yeah, you said when we were chatting online kind of before we hooked this up, you said something along the lines of, you had a bit of a tangent you wanted to go on. So I've asked kind of my questions here. If there is anything else you wanted to get out or express or say just kind of on the subject of people taking more autonomy for themselves and their communications technology, well, now's the time. Yeah, sounds good. I mean, so early you asked like what kind of got me into this. Yeah.

But there's another situation that happened, because I live in Texas. Oh. And a couple. Yeah. So you know I'm going with this. Yeah. Yeah.

A couple of years ago, there was a really bad winter storm. And for most people listening, you might be in the northeast. Like, who cares? Yeah, I was there for that storm. Oh It was it was fucking hard. It was crazy. Yeah, yeah And so for people outside of Texas, you might be saying okay, well winter storm whatever like how could that affect anything But Texas's power grid is privately owned. Yeah, it's completely separate from the rest of us Yeah, Irkha is a private company that runs

the Texas Power Grid. And so we had a winter storm event happen and our power systems are not in any way built for extreme cold. And so we had a situation where pretty much the entire state pretty much the entire state was out of power except for maybe a few areas in certain cities that had a specific environment where they had backup generators and stuff like that, but millions of people lost power. And when people lose power, it isn't just, oh, I can't watch TV or do anything. There's lives that are lost directly from people who require ventilators to live, to people who need electricity to run their medical devices. That impacted everything.

So the power going out, impacted transportation, impacted water, impacted sanitation. So all these bits of infrastructure are all connected. impacted transportation, impacted water, impacted sanitation. So all these bits of infrastructure are all connected. And communications is kind of at the core of our modern day infrastructure, right? Because in order to run a power plant, you need to have power, but not only that,

you need to be able to communicate with other places in order to properly run the water sanitation program. Same with transportation. I mean, if communication goes out, you literally can't deliver food, you literally can't deliver water to people and places that need it. And so it's not just an impact directly to communications,

but an impact to your entire life. And so when we're talking about these pieces of infrastructure, we really have to think about the larger picture of how all this infrastructure is integrated in our lives and how an impact to one part of it can impact your life in ways that you never even thought of. Yeah. Yeah, and that's also, I mean, I think I would imagine one of the benefits. I can say just from sort of the fairly minimal degree to which I've done stuff like understand the basics of solar power, what I can do and can't do in my area with it, you know, even outside of the stuff that is green and renewable, understanding like how you can and cannot use generators in an emergency

and like which work. It's just given me more of an understanding of how the regular stuff that I use day-to-day works a little bit better about what the real power draw of my life is, you know. And anytime you're kind of expanding your autonomy technologically, it also just increases the degree to which you understand what's going on every day, which I think is always a value, right? Like even outside of whatever theoretical we might prompt for like what could happen or what is likely to happen because we're all going to deal with more disasters in our

lives before they're over. Hopefully more than one. The alternative is worse. But yeah, well, that's kind of all I had to say. Did you have anything else you wanted to get into before we roll out? Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of use cases outside of like weather events or natural disasters to protest is one of them. A really big security concern when you're at a protest is bringing your cell phone. Not a lot of people know that your cell phone has a unique identifier number and police, governments, states all have technology to basically like bring up a fake cell phone tower and have your device connect to it. So there are ways to track, say for instance, you go to a protest, you have your phone on, now your identifier is kind of tied to being at this protest, right? But

with technology like this, it kind of circumvents that, especially when it comes to the ability for a threat actor to track you or know that you've been there and is encrypted. So even if, say, for instance, a police department was able to intercept a low-raw, they wouldn't be able to read the messages period. And so that's another good thing. Same with, you know, conflict zones. messages period. And so that's another good thing. Same with, you know, conflict zones. Yeah. You know, we're seeing now with the genocide that's happening in Palestine, with the Palestinians, it's increasingly hard for people to communicate what areas are safe. It's hard to communicate. You know, oh, we need to get out now, have an early warning system of there are literal tanks coming

down the highway towards us. We need to leave. And so something like this can also be really good in that situation because again, the messages are encrypted. They can go pretty long range, especially if you have direct line of sight. We're talking like up to 10 miles. And so being able to just send a text message to somebody can save someone's life in a situation like that.

So there's a lot of different use cases outside of emergencies that this stuff can be used. But that's where building the autonomy kind of comes from. And if we're talking about leftist political organizing and talking about building a better future, being autonomous from state-incorporate controlled infrastructure is really important, right? Because if, say, for instance, hypothetically, we had the big R revolution, right? Right. The first thing that people in power are going to go after is power, water, sanitation,

and communications, right? They're going to go after is power, water, sanitation, and communications. They're going to go after the main infrastructure. If we want to have an autonomous and free future, we have to think about collectively owning the means of infrastructure, not just to mean to production. Yeah. Even outside, the big R scenario, something that I think is probably, certainly more immediate, is continuing sort of downs in social order and areas expanding where non-state actors, including the aforementioned Nazis that we had talked about, are able to

get bolder, right? And like one thing we've seen right now, if you watch videos of cartel operations in parts of Mexico right now, one thing you will see on their really good guys, right? On their their special ops style teams is they will all have these weird looking things that look kind of like a microphone attached to their plate carriers. And that's a cell jammer. It's the standard thing for them to carry into the field because it stops people from reporting in real time when they're carrying out an operation. And cartels are not the only people who do that, right? Like it is a widely used tactic now. You see it all over in Ukraine, right? Like it's, it's, in part,

not just because of like cell phones, but because of like shit like drones and stuff. It's, it's just an increasingly common thing. And so when you're talking about what are threats that are realistic, well, it's not just the state that can interrupt your ability to communicate traditionally, right? It's also your non-state opponents. And so for a variety of reasons, having backups, having alternates is just an incredibly important thing to be able to do to some extent. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, anything else? No, I mean, right now I'm working on a kind of step-by-step article that kind of goes into more detail on what you need to do this. All the equipment you need, how to actually flash devices, how

to start sending messages. And so once that's ready, I'll publish it, I publish DIY articles and stuff to my sub-stack. It's an ARCHOSOLARPUNK, or you can go to hydroponictrash.solar, and I have a link there that goes to sub-stack as well. Beautiful. Well, all right. Hydroponic trash. Thank you so much for everything. This has really been useful and enlightening. I'm going to go hop on to Ali Express in a second here and make a couple of purchases. And I'm sure there's going to be a number of folks doing a version of that. Again, you can find our guest at Hydroponic Trash on Twitter, where you can get in touch with them and keep an eye on what they're writing, their sub-stack, very, very excited to play around with this technology.

Thank you so much for working to make it more visible. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on. Yes, absolutely. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Pike to Massacre. This is Murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Those murders happened in the mid-1980s.

He's out there doing stuff. He just didn't stop. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile, male Caucasian, 5'9", 6'2", 180", 22070 pounds. Unsafe home, absent father and a domineering mother. Right-handed IQ above 100, most likely heterosexual. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women no longer have people to speak for them is not mean that they deserve to not be so important.

What if this guy's still alive? like what if he comes after us? I said, are you gonna kill me, Lisa? Yeah! Listen to Murder 101 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, on sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry?

Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs, and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. We're full blood siblings. The only full blood in sibling. And our family.

Well, not in the world. I mean, in the whole world. That's just it. Like, no one. Dive into family tales and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different siblings. And it's going to be an awesome season.

It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Professional dancer Cheryl Burke has been part of dancing with the stars since the very beginning. 26 seasons of the December, the Rumba and the Chacha, 24 partners, 6 finals and 2 Mirabal trophies. She knows all the secrets, the behind-the-scenes arguments and the affairs, the flings, the flirting and the fighting. It's time to tell all

on her new podcast, Sex, Lies and Spray Tans. We'll take you all the way back to Season 1 and up through today for the dance floor drama like you wouldn't believe. Former partners, co-stars, friends and frenemies will join Cheryl each week. Listen to Sex, Lies and Spray Tans. On the IHR radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everyone, it's me James, and I'm joined today by Erica, who is an attorney, the director at Allotro Laada, which is a by-national non-profit, just legal humanitarian aid between San Diego and Tijuana.

And we're here to discuss the open-air detention sites and some things that Jim Desmond, one of our county supervisors, has been saying about them. So, welcome to the show, Erica. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. It's nice to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. So, I want to start off by talking about Jim Desmond today, which is something I like to do. If people aren't familiar with Jim Desmond, Jim Desmond is a supervisor in San Diego County. He's from District 5, which is Northern San Diego County.

He's a Republican. He's the former mayor of San Marcos, which is a city in North County, and before that, he was a pilot in the Navy. He's pretty much like a standard culture war boomer, and a very well-reminder to us all, but there are people alive today who grew up when they put lead in children's toys.

Notable Jim Desmond starts his own climate change, which I'm just going to read to you, try and follow it if you can. It's a challenge. I think the climate has been changing since the beginning of time. The climate comes and the climate goes. The Great Lakes, the Great Plains, as a Yosemite Valley, all formed by glaciers. They've been gone a long, long time. So you find seashells on mountain tops. You see where it used to be, you know, the land masses were panjier and then the land masses all change and move around. So I say we may be part of climate change, but I think the only reason we're here and we're still here today is because because we, as a species, learn to adapt to different climates and climate

changes. Now, maybe we're maybe exacerbating it a bit towards the end of the warming trend, but I don't know that. So, it's just... That's about as convoluted as his governing strategy here in San Diego County. Yeah, it's said a lot of words, but it really conveyed very little meaning. But yeah, this is kind of, he seems to like speaking, but maybe like he doesn't take quite as long as one would hope to plan out where he's going with his sentences before he delivers him.

He also has a podcast, so I guess a podcasting rival. Did you, have you listened to his podcast, Erica? No, I am, but it might be entertaining. So I'll take a look at it. Definitely. I know it'll, you can learn some things about coronavirus, for instance. God.

Yeah, great. Yeah, it's good stuff. In May of 2020, he claimed that had been six pure, solely coronavirus deaths. The other 200 or so that happened to be counted by them were not, quote, pure coronavirus deaths, I guess, by his estimation. So in this little escapade, got him cited by Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan podcast, which must have been a great moment for Desmond.

He hosted a ton of coverage skeptics on his podcast as well throughout the lockdowns. He did, after he caused some controversy on Twitter, which is a recurring theme, he hosted an actual immunologist on his show, and this was the only guest who he really kind of argued with. And in doing so, he said, I quote, the herd needs to get it, and he's talking about COVID here, and we'll have a better handle on it. So to me, I quote, the herd needs to get it and he's talking about COVID here and we'll

have a better handle on it. So to me, the number of cases means the herd's getting it. So that's a good thing. And that is guess corrected in pointing out that there needs to be like immunity for there to be herd immunity. And what he's just looking at is contagion, not immunity. So he sort of, he continued to make these claims throughout the pandemic that the lockdown was holding our jobs hostage, bad for the economy.

He wasn't an anti-mask interestingly. He said, we should wear masks if that's what it took to open the businesses again. And he, I mean, he's always been pretty terrible on border stuff, right, Erica? I'm sure you've encountered some of his border sciences before. I think all of the supervisors are terrible on border stuff, but at least he says the quiet part out loud. Yeah. We'll get more into that later. Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about how that, yeah, the Democrats been terrible on the border is something that I think

we can't say enough. In recent months, he held a press conference claiming the border should be shut down to prevent, and influx, it's not a quote, it's paraphrase here, but to prevent an influx of homas fighters, which I don't know, it shows a misunderstanding of a lot of things like how hom works, and also how the border works. The idea that A. Wom could leave Gaza at this time

and B. Wom could just fly into Mexico, like where of course they wouldn't immediately notice that you had come armed and equipped to attack the US border. But I think just with the COVID stuff and with the border stuff, he is just throwing red meat to his base, but it's not necessarily aligned with what he does. And I would assume it's not aligned with what he actually knows. Like where the COVID stuff, he did set up vaccination clinics in his district. And so he's clearly not a complete

skeptic, at least that's not what his actions showed. And I think for some of your listeners who are not in the United States or maybe not in California, we are on the border in San Diego. You can get to Mexico within, you know, if you're in Jim Dozman's district within half an hour, you're in Tijuana. And I assume he's been here for many years. And so he has to know more about the border than he's letting on. It's just really like he's regurgitating the right-wing narrative to garner political points, I think, in a county where he's the last standing Republican on the board of supervisors. So I think that's important to remember too. Definitely. It definitely seems like this is kind of and you see he does a lot of appearance on right wing news channels, right?

Like he's often on Fox, but then our local kind of crazy right wing news channels KUSI, who have really doubled down on the cultural stuff since like 2020. And you'll see him on there a lot. And talking about the border a lot, right, it seems to, as you say, like, either be like an attempt for re-election or perhaps for higher office, I don't know, but he, he'll make a lot of claims about the border which are just patently untrue, which is what I want to talk about now. So he spent his New Year's Day in Hacumba making little videos for Twitter and Instagram. I was there on New Year's Day, too. I didn't actually see him, which is a shame, but that day there weren't many people at all who were in the open-ed detention sites. So he sort of made videos in front of empty tents. It was a bit weird. In his

first one, he wrote, today I visited the border and migrant encampments in Hukumba. The chaos continues with dozens of people camping out waiting for border patrol to take them to resource center, paid for by county taxpayers. And he's not like, you can, I'm sure Erica you can explain this as well. He's not wrong that they may eventually end up at the quote unquote welcome center, which is paid for by county funds, which came from the American Rescue Act, which is of course federal money. But it's a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Yeah, so the migrants are being held in what are essentially open air prisons by border patrol.

We, the collective of non-profits, mutual aid groups and volunteers, are the only ones who've been paying for water, food, medical assistance, shelter, etc. For people who are being held in these open air prisons, sometimes for days at a time, including the medically infirm and children. And so I think that's one piece of it to understand because he did say in his, when he was speaking in front of the empty tent that the county taxpayers were paying for those things, which is patently untrue, but then just again, understanding the process is something that he has to understand. He's been here for decades. He has to know that these people are being taken into border patrol custody process and then either released

to the county funded welcome center or they are detained by immigration. And so it's the same legal process we've had for decades at the border where people have a right to seek asylum, whether they enter at a port of entry or not. And the real controversy here is the fact that Port of Patrol is holding people outdoors for days at a time without the things that they need to survive.

Yeah. I want to go back to the claim that he made right, the county paid for it. We've got some audio of him making that claim, so we'll just play it. Here's a look inside this abandoned tent. There's a sandwich left in a baggy. There's water, there's bananas, ponchos, crackers, snacks and water. And this tent is empty. bananas, ponchos, crackers, snacks, and water. And this tent is empty.

Many of these tents are just the same way. There's no one here. Yet probably the next day or so, there'll be more migrants coming, inhabiting this, and then being processed or sanding or counting being paid for or was sanding or taxing. So in the caption that accompanied this video,

he wrote, quote, during my recent board of visit, I encountered a band and campsite filled with tents, food, drinks, and campfires, paid for by Kant Sandiego County taxpayers. This site is used as a temporary holding site before migrants are then processed into our country. And this gets to the thing, I think, that Louis Warrie, like Bullshit, is too close to the sun because it's not of that, as you said, was paid for by taxpayers, right? All of that was paid for by people like us, non-profit, mutual aid people. And can you give a sense of like the amount of spending that Alotro Lado has had to take on to make these open air prisons like

take on to make these open-air prisons like survivable for people and even still that deeply unpleasant even with all that work. Yeah, so we have acted as a fiscal sponsor for a lot of the smaller groups because we are able to receive foundation funding as a 501C3 and so we've used that legal status to support a lot of the mutual aid groups that have been spending tens of thousands of dollars. But I've gone through the budgets and we've spent an average of about $150,000 per month which is a lot for us but when you look at the Department of Homeland Security, which should be spending this money, they have $170 billion budget for 2023. I think it's even higher for a fiscal year 2024. So it's really probably what they spend on one of those autonomous surveillance towers

that are sitting in the camps in like a day, right? So it's really nothing for them. You know, it's very clear that they're making a choice to leave these really vulnerable migrants to potentially die in the desert. And then when we look at the county funding, they've allocated now $6 million to this welcome center, which we'll talk about in more detail, but it's really providing woefully inadequate services

to the same population that's going through these open air detention sites after they've been released from border patrol custody. So again, it's like, it's a lot of money for us. It's not a lot of money for the county. I would love it if the county would pay for it. They've stated on multiple occasions that they will not. It's been pure philanthropic funding and donations. But yeah, I mean, we've been able to do a lot with very little and it really was the bare minimum to keep people

alive. So yeah, if we had an actual June and of county funding, I'm sure we could have done a lot more. Yeah. And like even we don't have access to the things the government has access to, like normally in a refugee situation, we'd have UNHCR tents, we'd have humanitarian emrries. We had to buy those on the, we couldn't get a tent, and the emrries, we had to find on the surplus market, right? Like, we can't, the state could do more for less, but they're very much choosing not to, as you say.

So, the result of this was rather amusing, right? A number of people from mutual aid groups, including friends of ours from free-ship collective, took to Desmond's office with literal receipts, right? Like, I don't see it, yes. But, yeah, it was a tremendous moment. And we don't mean receipts, like, Like, I don't see it. We're receipts, yes. It was a tremendous moment. And we don't mean receipts like in a figurative sense. We mean like pieces of paper from Costco.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And the fact is, you know, within a number of hours, the folks from free-shit collective and others were able to just pull together over $16,000 in receipts. And that's, like I mentioned, a small fraction of what we've actually been spending. That's probably just their receipts from the week. And so, again, for us, it's like, that's an enormous lift. I know we're all exhausted.

Those of us who've been working in the open air detention sites. It's exhausting to be there all the time. It's exhausting to try to raise enough money to keep thousands and thousands of people alive when they're forced into a deadly situation. And so I think we were all pretty pissed off when we heard him taking credit for that, even if he was trying to denigrate the idea of spending money on refugees. Yeah, right. It's funny because he'll also say it's inhumane, it's unacceptable, but if you're not going to do anything to stop the inhumanity,

I don't really find that a very believable claim. He was literally standing at Willow's, so less than a mile from where we spend that day making sandwiches and cooking beans, and doing the things we do every day, sorting out coats, you know, and he could have come helped or even just come and said what you guys are doing is great. But he chose not to.

He just stood in front of his whoever was filming him and lied. His proposed solution is to close the border, which he knows is not an option because the refugee convention is still a thing. The U.S. is still a signatory. We have legal obligations under both domestic and international law to accept asylum seekers in our country. His solution to the inhumanity is to push people back over the Mexican border where they're subject to all manner of state and criminal violence. So, I don't think the inhumanity is really his priority to address. It's really, again, just like throwing red meat to the base. This open border's hysteria that they all love

to sight. Yeah. Talking of hysteria, we should take a little break for some adverts for things that Might try to get you to buy them by making you afraid and you shouldn't We are back and yeah, I want to talk a little more about that. This idea of a closed body, you see it a lot mostly from Republicans, right? It's not only legally impossible, but it's also physically impossible. People enter the US through gaps in the border wall. People enter the US through gaps in the border wall as you'd add because we've made it

virtually impossible for them to get asylum appointments in a reasonable time frame and to be in a place that's safe while they make those appointments. And so, like, the idea that we could, how do we close, you know, like the physical border? Well, just, yeah, I mean, I just want to take a step back for one second because this sort of Biden's open borders hysteria that we've heard so much in the right wing, I think it's worth unpacking what this means because I've seen, you know, people in the Democratic Party or even people on the left really shy away from this idea of open borders. And when those of us who have first world passports already have a world of open borders. And when those of us who have first world passports

already have a world of open borders, we can pretty much go wherever we want. You know, we gentrify other countries to their detriment. Like it's not, there really are not many restrictions on first world citizens moving around the world. So I think that's one important thing to consider as we're kind of launching into this discussion. It's like, open borders are okay for me,

but not for brown people. Like me. Yeah. So little, you know, and that's kind of the underlying impetus behind a lot of what we're gonna talk about in San Diego County. It's like people, this underlying idea that people should not have the right to come here,

which is just ludicrous. So I think that's one thing. But when we're talking about asylum in particular, like I mentioned earlier, we are St. Torrey's refugee convention and the subsequent 1967 protocol. This has been enshrined in domestic law in the 19a Refugee Act. And so refugees who are people outside of their country of origin fleeing persecution have the right to ask for protection at the US-Nexico border, whether it's at a port of entry or between ports of entry.

So those in Hacumba and these other open-air detention sites are those crossing between ports of entry, because it's been made impossible to approach the port of entry and seek asylum and this is something that our organization has been litigating for years you know at first people were just being turned away then there was a waiting list in Mexico now they have this stupid app that's just like glitches and there's not enough appointments

and people have to wait for months in Mexico just to get an appointment if they're one of the lucky ones who can. The apps also have been hacked by organized crime. Certain nationalities are able to pay for appointments. It's just, it's a complete mess. It has nothing to do with this ideal, you know, that the refugee commitment is supposed to enshrine. So, regardless of, you regardless of all of the illegal things the US government is doing,

like you cannot close the border to asylum seekers without withdrawing from the refugee convention. And I just really don't see that happening for our country just because we like to talk about how we're a bastion for human rights, et cetera, which that's a whole other podcast, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we can, yeah, break that down a little bit. But I think one thing that you said that I want to talk about is that you said that open

borders or like free travel for brown people is something that a lot of more privileged folks, especially in San Diego, even in in San Diego, I should say, are uncomfortable with. I think we really saw, like, it's not just skin color, but it's really hard for me to see skin color not playing a large role when I see people from Africa, people from South America,

waiting for months, if not years, and then people from Ukraine coming when the largest-scale conflict in Ukraine began, America waiting for months, if not years, and then people from Ukraine coming at a when the largest-scale conflict in Ukraine began and effectively skipping the line, right? Yeah, so when the Ukrainians all came through to Juana, I think there were maybe 20,000 or so who came through in a period of a month, that was during Title 42, which was a Trump Arab policy that closed the border to asylum seekers based on public health Reasons, but really it was because they wanted to close the border to asylum seekers and so there were very few Humanitarian exemptions granted to title 42 at that time, but at the time the Ukrainian game that exemption process had actually been shut down for quite a while. So I

was watching people die in Tijuana because they didn't have access to the U.S. asylum system. I remember when the Ukrainians came, there was a child who caught pneumonia in one of the shelters, who was like a month-sold baby who died. And then when the Ukrainians came, the doors were flung open for them. CBP, which up until that point said they did not have capacity to process asylum seekers. They were processing Ukrainians at a clip of a thousand a day.

And it was heartbreaking to see. And after they shut off the spiket for the Ukrainians, after they stopped letting them in at the border, CBP said they only had capacity to process a few dozen non-white asylum seekers. And so all of a sudden, their capacity was just gone. It was so transparent and so blatant and so hurtful for people who had been suffering at that point for years and so blatant and so hurtful for people who've been suffering at that point for years with the silent system close off to them. Yeah, it was really hard to see that and to know the people, the people who I guess effectively they lost their place in line, right?

Or people kind of confronted them. To a large degree, it's still much easier, right? We're under title 8, again now I'm not title 42, but it's still much easier. We're under title 8 again now, not title 42, but it's still much easier for wealthy white people to get appointments using CBP1 than it is for poor and non-white people, right? Yeah, because especially when the app was first launched, there's a point in the appointment process during which you have to take a photo of yourself and it maps your face for facial recognition purposes and it wasn't working on really dark skin people.

You know, a few of the organizations working in Mexico had to buy the construction style lights to shine on people's faces so that it would, it would pick them up. But just even like you have to have a new phone, I think they probably made the app to work on an iPhone, which most people outside the United States don't have. Yeah. Yeah, it's like. I got a tip on that.

I've not been able to confirm it, but someone at the Apple store told me that it wasn't working on certain Samsung and Huawei phones and that they were having people coming and buying the cheapest iPhone they could in bulk to try and access it. Well, we keep iPhones in our office in Tequan exactly for that reason because people need to be able to access the app.

But now the app has been hacked for a while. So there's some groups that work mostly, I would say, with Russian asylum seekers. They're charging, I think, around between 500 and 1,000 for an appointment, maybe more sometimes. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing it. I know also there's been some hacking of the geolocation feature, so these criminal groups are selling appointments to people who haven't even left their home country. And meanwhile,

you know, the shelters on the border are full of people with crappy phones and a weekend or net connection who wait for months and months and months, while the richer people who are paying for nice phones and appointments are able to get through much more quickly. Yeah, it's made of a fucked up system even more fucked up. They designed it in-house as well, which you know, they appeared to have overestimated their abilities there. One day I'll get my foyers back about CBP1 and it will probably be some point in the middle of the next presidential administration, which we're making them try to be a relevant and really fucking annoying. Well, we're suing about it too, so it'll probably be a few years before we get to discovery,

but yeah. We'll have a race. Yeah, but you are assuming that they want the system to work, which they don't. Yes, yeah, that's fair. So in that sense, it's working perfectly. Right. Yeah, and it's doing in a sense what like the unofficial end of the tone of immigration policy has always been which is that like it's fine

for wealthy white people to come here, but we want to limit the number of non-white and non-wealthy people who come here. And like they can say that loud like maybe we should talk about this now. The difference between Trump and Biden is that to Trump said it, and Biden didn't. And when Trump said it, wealth, well-meaning liberals in the Midwest gave a shit and sent money. In 2018, things were very bad in Tijuana, right, with the people staying in El Baratal. But at least people in America care and sent money so we could help. Whereas now like, you know, major outlets who have given 10 front page stories to accusations of one woman plagiarizing in a dissertation that she wrote years ago haven't written a single piece about the open air concentration camps that our government has in a couple of other places.

Well, not just that. I mean, the've, the media by and large has allowed this right-wing narrative of open borders to take over, even though the policies are largely identical to the Trump administration, right? So they're even talking about now bringing back a title 42 type restriction that would turn away asylum seekers and send them back to Mexico. We have the asylum ban, which is very similar to the one that was litigated under the Trump administration. I mean, it's just, you know, family separation. Maybe it's not the minor children being taken away, but still thousands of families being separated.

I think there's a couple things like one is just people hate when Trump does it, but they don't hate when Biden does it. That's one. But also, like you said, Trump says the quiet part out loud, and so people respond to that, whereas Biden has co-opted the immigrant rights movement by putting us in a stakeholder relationship, and I can see among some of my colleagues that they value access to power more than the rights of the people that we are supposed to serve.

And so they will go along with a lot of this stuff and basically enable it in many ways, just to maintain that access to power. And I've seen some of my colleagues who, you know, we were all finding on the same side during the Trump administration have actually gone into the Biden administration and are implementing these policies. And so it's, you know, it's, it's really like pretty

horrifying to see. And also, I would say that people in the Biden administration are in many ways smarter because it was easier to litigate under the Trump administration. We could knock down all of these policies because they were just dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Not well written. You know, I was like clearly on constitutional.

You know, they learned lessons during the Biden administration or during the Trump administration. So now the policies are written in a way that are that make it much more difficult to to litigate and the Supreme Court in 2022 in a decision called Alamangadzelez made it impossible to get class wide and junked of relief for violations of immigration law. So what that means is that DHS can violate the law and there's no way to stop them from doing so on a large scale in the courts?

And they are banking on that in current litigation. They literally are relying on that to continue breaking the law, especially when it comes to turning asylum seekers away. Yeah, and something else that Desmond has asked for is he wants them to turn asylum seekers away before they get to the border and then quite understand what the like that would be inside Mexico, which Well, that's what Mexico is doing right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there um like I was in Hacumbroa Like on Friday Thursday and they get national guard are like sitting at the little gaps in the wall Mm-hmm. I mean you've, you've seen it, too.

You see National Guard, Mexican National Guard drive up. They kind of check out the situation and leave, and then the travel agents come and drop off the migrants. And so, it's something very much that, you know, can be controlled to a great extent within Mexico. Yeah. And the US is very obviously, you know, working with Mexico publicly, obviously, working with Mexico to stop migrants from reaching the US-Mexico border and working with countries further south

to stop people from reaching the US-Mexico border. This is definitely a regional project. One thing I want to talk about is as people come through those countries further south and there's this it's like in recent days even like we're recording this on on Monday people are here on Wednesday but I've seen this narrative and I think it's coming from the fact that funding for Ukraine was tied to funding for the border and people have lost their minds over the conflict in Ukraine and they have silly dog pictures on Twitter and it become a replacement for a personality for a certain type of divorce guy.

So the army of divorced dads has turned on the border. One of the things you'll say is, the border is like, this is how bad actors are getting in the US. Hamas are really otherwise engaged in the minute. They're busy. There's a whole lot of people who would love to leave Gaza. And we actually should welcome those people here, but they can't. And that's fucked up. But yeah, this idea that like ISIS, Hamas, the Russian secret of the Russian FSB,

short, someone I'd have had suggested, like North Korea or the PRC are coming through us the Russian secret of the Russian FSB. I'm sure someone will have suggested like North Korea or the PRC are coming through Hacumba as well. Like, it seems to admit what happens to people entering Mexico and indeed other countries further south, right? Like, can you explain how people think the US is the only state with a capacity for surveillance,

which is manifestly untrue. Can you explain how people are like surveilled and like negligible on their way north? There are multiple multilateral and bilateral information sharing agreements that connect to criminal and quote unquote intelligence databases. So when you are traveling internationally, you are subject to a web of surveillance that is in many ways connected to the United States. So the US government knows you're coming

like when you are countries away just by virtue of using a passport. But then for people who are traveling through regular means, there's also a web of biometric collection stations that have been set up by the Department of Homeland Security, most notably north of the Darian gap. And so extra continental migrants, those from outside of the Americas, as well as some Venezuelans and a few other nationalities, have their fingerprints taken, iris scans, pictures taking for facial recognition, and that is entered into a database that is shared directly with the US government. There's several other bilateral information sharing agreements that are focused particularly on biometrics with several Central American countries and with Mexico, obviously.

And Mexico has just insane enforcement in southern Mexico. If you've ever tried to travel over land from top of two, let a Mexico city, you will go through numerous checkpoints where your information is taken. A lot of times you're just paying a bribe to keep going, but it's something where they know who's coming. That's why you hear all the time in the media,

like this many people are coming through the Dairy and Gap. How do they know that? Well, they have these biometric information collection stations, but I think just more broadly, like, coming through the Southern border as a refugee or just as a migrant is probably the stupidest way to come into the United States if you are trying to do a terrorist attack because like border patrol, despite what they like to say, they are not overwhelmed. If you divide the number of people coming over by the number of agents, it's far less than one migrant per agent per day.

So they have a pretty good lock on the border. There's not a lot of people getting through undetected. Those who turn themselves in, which is the vast majority of people. They are subject to all of the same surveillance and security checks I just mentioned. They get their DNA sample taken at the border. They give all of their information. And then they are not let out of custody if they trigger any kind of security flag.

And it can just be like, they're from Yemen. They're from Afghanistan. Sometimes they're just detained because of that. But any of those, if any of those checks are triggered, they're detained for the duration of proceedings. They never see that outside of a prison. So this idea that terrorists are thinking over the border is frankly stupid. I think, you know, if we think back to 9-11, I think they all came on visas. Yeah, yeah. And like, the system makes it so much easier for someone who is wealthy and white and otherwise privileged to come to this country that like, it's ridiculous

to think that a state actor like Russia wouldn't take advantage of that rather than yeah, yeah, attempting to to walk someone through the border where they're about to have like encounter some of the most intense state surveillance that can happen to a person. And you start off in a prison. So why would you do that? And you may never leave it. And you said, yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I'm sure there's some people who have ties to foreign intelligence.

Sure. I mean, it could happen, but it's so so, the number is so vanitally small. And I think another important thing to know is when people are processed, they have an obligation to attend an immigration court hearing. And when I look at the statistics for Russian asylum seekers in particular, because I've seen a lot of this rhetoric of like Russia sending spies over the border.

So 98.5% of them show up to their immigration court hearings. Are you going to do that if you're a spy? You're going to subject yourself to another round of security checks and spill your entire asylum story, subject yourself to cross examination? No, you're not. So I don't know. People have watched that film, the TV series, the Americans, a little too much. People have watched that film, the TV series, the Americans a little too much, losing their minds. Okay, so I think, yeah, it's really important to also point out, like, when we're talking about the potential for bad actors, yeah, like sure, maybe there's someone who's come who's done something bad, or maybe there's someone who comes who will do something bad, it doesn't mean that everyone else who came is in any way complicit in that.

Like, we haven't given them another way to come here. It's not like they had to take the bag I wrote because they chose to like you. No one would be picking up their children and walking across the desert and then spending sometimes up to a week in camps, which are currently below freezing at night, sometimes with you know, like a blanket or like a tent or maybe a wooden shelter with a lucky, like no one will be doing that if there was an easier option. And it's ludicristic like claim that these people's, the silent claims or the fact that they should be welcoming here is in any way impacted by the actions

of somebody else who might have taken the same. Yeah, I mean, the other thing too is just because the border is so closed off by policies that restrict access to asylum, it has supercharged the strength of criminal groups that bring people to the border. And I will say that they are spreading a lot of misinformation. You know, they use this reporting from the right wing calling the border open to advertisers or services. And they might very well tell people that it's a lot easier than it actually is and that they have an easier chance to get asylum and they actually do. I mean, I don't discount the power of misinformation, but those, I have seen over the past six, seven years, especially since the Trump administration

really tried to close off access to asylum. I've seen those groups grow in power. I've seen the price that people pay to cross the border grow both financially and just in the amount of suffering that they have to endure. So when we talk about border security and national security, I would argue that border restrictions actually make us much less safe because, you know, criminal groups now completely control the border, whereas, you know, a decade ago, even a person who just wanted to cross the border on their own could do so. You know, if they knew the way, they could just try to cross,

and now if you try to do that without paying the criminal groups who really control it you'll get killed. Yeah, and that's happened multiple times in the last few minutes. We're talking of misleading advertising claims. We have to take short break to hear some of them and we'll be back in a moment. Okay, we're back. One thing that I want to talk about that we haven't got to yet is that like the failed government response isn't just federal or well, it's both federal and local, but I want to talk a little bit about the federal funding that San Diego County got that it reallocated towards a quote unquote welcome center, right? And so yeah, we're both very familiar with the welcome center.

It got $3 million initially and then it got $3 million more because apparently none of us are doing anything useful anywhere else and don't merit any help. And do you want to talk first to all about just like what the conditions are like? You've just come out of being detained in the desert for maybe up to a week. It's cold. We feed you, but like we wish we could feed you more and better.

You don't have a change of clothes, right? Then you've been detained. You could have been detained for one night, two nights, several more nights, and then you hit this welcome center. So can you like, I can think how we would like to treat people who have just been through all that, but can you explain to us how people are treated when they arrive at a welcome center? Well, it's, they're not arriving there, they're picked up from detention by the nonprofit that's administering the Welcome Center in what look like prison buses, right?

I mean, I can't imagine that someone getting on one of those buses understands that they're not just at another stage of detention, right? So they get to this fence in abandoned school. They are lined up and they're forced to give all of their information to the nonprofit workers.

They are, you know, mostly not spent. I think maybe like 40% Spanish speakers. I'm sure the exact percentage, but there's people from all over the world. There's no paid interpreters on site, and so, you know, they do have this little script speakers, I'm not sure the exact percentage, but there's people from all over the world. There's no paid interpreters on site, and so they do have this little script that they read in the beginning saying, like, you're not detained. This is a welcome center, whatever, but they run it through Google Translate and then play the Google Translate over the megaphone, which is like, have you ever tried to like understand someone screaming something into a megaphone?

Never mind the fact that it's like Mandarin Google translate. Like people, I guarantee you, they still think they're in prison. And so then they go, they have to sometimes wait for hours in this intake line. Only then are given the ticket to eat like probably some of the worst food I've ever seen,

like, people are not eating a lot. And they're at the open-air detention site. And then they're really not eating a lot when they're in detention. And I've seen people refuse the food there because it's that bad. And it's like, they're standing in a line for hours, not having eaten, probably not having slept

and God knows how long. Yeah. You know, having this garbled message played to them over a megaphone. Um, so anyway, they get through all that and then, um, they're told they have to make their own way, you know, to their sponsor. And those who don't have the money to do so are provided with, I think it's up to maybe two or three days of shelter or hotel room before they are shipped off to another part of the country. And so the goal of the Welcome Center is to get rid of the migrants, to get them elsewhere. So, you know, 95% to 99% do have a

place to go. They don't all have the means to get there, but most of them do. Almost all have the means to get there. The other few, like the other, you know, one to five percent, they need help. They need, you know, maybe a place to stay for a couple of months. They need help getting a work permit. They might need help, you know, applying for asylum, but instead of investing in the resources

that we need locally to help them, they're shipped off to New York, Chicago, or other places that have invested in those resources. And that's really the same thing Greg Abbott was doing from Texas, but we're just putting a nicer... We call it a welcome center. Yeah, yeah. It's such a stunning.

It's such a stunning. Yeah. And the welcome center, like, we could go deeper into its funding, but I think it's somehow better. Yeah. Yeah. And the welcome center, like, we could go deeper into its funding, but I think it's fair to say that, like, it's for one thing, it's doing things that CBP should do, right? Like a transport specifically. The transport specifically, but also, like, this idea of doing an intake with every single person

who comes through there is such a waste of money. Because it's like, it's infantilizing. These people have traveled across the world. You think they can't get to the airport on their own? Yeah. It doesn't focus resources on that one to five percent of people who really do need help. It waste resources on people who really don't.

They need Wi-Fi, they need a phone charger. Yeah. And maybe a hard email. They're getting the Wi-Fi and they need a phone charger. Yeah. And maybe like a hard email. You know, they're getting the Wi-Fi and the phone charger, which is not provided by the organization that receives $6 million. It's provided by one of the few organizations, including my own, who are there providing services without county funding, because we didn't want to be associated with this debacle. Yeah.

And another thing you do is family reunification, right, you guys are helping take care of that. Yeah. Which, again, I think people are unaware that families need to be reunified, but they're still very much separated when they're in detention. Well, they're separated at open-air detention sites. They're separated in detention.

We've documented since September, I think it's over 1100 families now that have been separated. Almost half of them are spousal separations, but a lot of times when, you know, wife and husband are separated, the kids are with one spouse or another. So, you know, technically, separation of a child, we see a lot of separations of like 18-year-old children from the rest of their families, where they're sent to detention facilities and the rest of the family's release. So there's all you know grandma from Grandkids or niece and nephew sibling separations. I mean it's all traumatic right it's just not the particular brand of Trump separation that people seem to care about. Right yeah yeah they

quote unquote kids and cages and that yeah oh they're still. Right, yeah, yeah, they quote, unquote, kids and cages. And that yeah, oh, there's still on the cage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sadly, that has not gone away. Yeah, or the dad, but not both. I sometimes go, yeah, it's equally tragic, but it's more tragic that somehow we've normalized it. And like with this, immigration stuff only seems to be able to ratchet one way

and it's further towards like insane degrees of cruelty, right? Like, the fact that Biden is doing what Trump did, doesn't mean that Trump will do what Biden did if Trump is elected again, right? Like it, somehow they will find a way to make this even worse. Oh, absolutely. And I think the open air detention sites are preview of what we'll see. You know, it's this idea of it being normal to deny people food, water, shelter, and medical care because they, you know, committed this awful crime of crossing the border, which is like a misdemeanor,

by the way. And it's not even supposed to be illegal if you're seeking asylum. The refugee convention actually prohibits criminal prosecution of folks who cross borders irregularly to seek asylum. And by and large, the US attorneys, at least during the Biden administration, have stuck to that. If you're arrested for crossing irregularly and you then apply for asylum, generally, the charges will be dropped. But this invader rhetoric, right, like, oh, they're invading our country and whatever, the white replacement theory, all of that is really driving this really normalization

of the inhumane treatment of border crossers. Yeah, the point you made about like, yeah, you can cross between positive entry and then claim asylum and it's one that seems to be completely missing from the discussion. Like I've seen countless times I've seen that like misrepresented in other articles and it's in almost every single one. Yeah, it's really disappointing. Like I have very little respect left to lose for other people who work. Like, especially folks who wish to report on the border without

visiting the border, I just like, what are you, are you sparing yourself the trauma of seeing little children staying outside? Because that trauma is much greater than yours. The things that they're coming away from are much greater than any trauma you're going to take on. And Stan, it's not very nice, but we should face up to the not very nice things that our country does. Well, you also remember as a Congress who legislate on the border or trade away the rights of

asylum seekers without having met any of them, and those who do come to the border just go on the border patrol tour and don't actually talk to the migrants. And so that's even worse, you know? But yeah, I agree, like, this idea that they're illegal is completely wrong. They're in a legal process. They're not prosecuted for illegal entry by and large, you know, must they've tried multiple times. And even then, if they pass a credible fear interview a lot of times, those criminal targets are dropped. And so they're not illegal. This is a legal process, a legal way to access that process, especially when the ports

of entry have been closed off to them. Yeah. And I think they've done turned enter the US or like any part of their journey disqualifies them from asylum, as you say, makes it like a quote unquote illegal, which is just kind of, I don't know, loads of language anyway, but yeah, they've taken every step, to make a legal asylum claim. Lots of them will be like extremely aware of having done that, like not wanting to, like if people wanted to walk out of the, oh wait, they open their detention sites,

they could, they're not quite, quote, unquote detained, right? But like people are so cautious that they don't wanna do anything that might imperil their asylum. Yeah, and it's really sad because they already have by crossing the border between ports of entry, that's what Biden's asylum ban addresses. And so they're sort of coming from a defensive posture with respect to their eligibility

for asylum by virtue of having done that, but the criminal groups that are organizing their transport tell them that that's the legal way and people who are coming into open-air detention sites believe they are following a legal process, which, you know, they are to a certain extent, but there's definitely legal consequences for having access the system that way. Yeah, yeah, even though like, yeah, many of these people, like I have sat with dozens of people, maybe hundreds of people, as they've explained to me, the amount of time CBP1 crashed on their phone.

The, their attempts to go to the US Embassy in a city that might not be safe for them or to like transit through it, you know, look at a regime that wants some dead, to give hundreds of Kurdish people, have shared with me that they've tried to get visas for the US and failed and They've tried every other option Before trying this one. Yeah, most people have most of them. No one would do this. You know, it's not fun

It's it's not fun at all. No The last thing I wanted you to explain Erica is People are placed when they come through this whole system, right, in a defensive, or they make a defensive asylum claim. Can you explain what that is and what the difference between affirmative and defensive asylum for people? Because again, it's in a lot of reporting I've seen it, this is missing. Yeah, so if I came to the US on a visa and then decided I wanted to apply for a asylum, I would be applying affirmatively. So that means that I've never been apprehended

by immigration. I've never been placed in any kind of removal or deportation proceeding. Removal is just like the legal term for deportation. And so when you apply it from, if you're initial screening is before an asylum officer, it's essentially a non-agrecerial hearing, but I've been in a lot of them, and that's not always the case, but you don't have like a government attorney cross examining you.

It's just the asylum officer who's supposed to be nice, but they're not always. And then if you win, if they approve your case, that's the end, you just get asylum and then that's a path to citizenship. If you are not approved, then you would be placed in removal proceedings where you could present your asylum case before an immigration judge. So defensive is when you are apprehended or you turn yourself in at the border. You are placed in removal proceedings, so you don't get that first asylum interview before the officer, you just go straight to immigration court.

And so when you're presenting your case in immigration court, there's a government attorney who's actively trying to deport you. I think most of the judges used to be government attorneys, and so many times it feels like they're also trying to deport you. And the success of your claim is pretty much completely dependent on where it is adjudicated. And less also to have to do with your nationality. So if you are applying for asylum before the Atlanta Immigration Court, pretty much 99% of those cases are denied. And there's some judges who've denied 100% of cases.

And that's true for a lot of jurisdictions within the Southeast. And then you have your friendlier jurisdictions like San Francisco, San Diego is not too bad actually. But you have other courts where you have a better chance, depending on the judge, but it really depends on the location, the judge that you happen to get. You could present the same exact claim in different cities before different judges and have a completely different outcome.

Yeah, there's no objective criteria. I mean, people know this too, but unfortunately, like, to get yourself to San Francisco and then survive there, it just doesn't example right until a court day comes up. He's unfathomably expensive. Like, for me, I couldn't afford to get myself to San Francisco and make rent there and it's barely possible in San Diego. So yeah, and you don't, you don't qualify for work authorization until, I think you can apply five months after you've submitted your application for asylum. And in many cases, you don't get your initial court date for months or years after you've

entered mostly months. But people don't understand that you can lodge your assigned application before your first court date to get that clock going on your work authorization. And so people, I see very commonly are waiting at least a year to get work authorization. So, you know, not only would you have to survive in a high cost of living city, but without the legal ability to work. And so it's really hard for people when they first come to the United States. And, you know, unlike what is spouted many times in the right-wing media space, there are no benefits available to someone who's seeking asylum. They're not getting any kind of government money.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a... I remember what it is, you have to, it's like a burden of the state or something thing that you have to ward a car, I can't remember when you- I'm like charge. So like, on top of all this, people aren't aware of that. It's very sad, like, like, I've had a bunch of people who have interviewed or just befriended when I've been helping out in the Cumber who have been like, hey, how do I find work? Well, they didn't realise they wouldn't be permitted to work. And even we spoke to him last year the day, he has offers of work from his old employer, but he can't take them up on that because as you say, he's

got us sit doing nothing for five months until he's legally allowed to work, which is, it doesn't help anyone, right? It doesn't help migrants, it doesn't help us. It just forces people to work for cash or for a low wage jobs, which leaves them right for abuse, sort of for-payment. Right. It's a system that doesn't really work for anyone. They have no rights as workers, right? They can also be, and they're doing very dangerous work, and we've seen that a lot.

Well, I think something too that's important to note is that, obviously, all these push factors toward migration, but a huge coal factor is the employment market in the United States. So we have hundreds of thousands of open jobs, and people have to leave their country, but they also choose to go to a certain place. So many of them, like I said, almost all of them have some kind of tied to the United States, like family or friends, you can host them. But they're not going to come here if they can't get a job.

And so it's important to note that as well. And I think what you're saying about the exploitation of migrants in the labor industry is really important because I think that, you know, that's part of why there are so many restrictions because when you do not provide a path to citizenship, you create a permanent underclass that is very vulnerable to exploitation. And I think that's by design. Yeah, look, it works very well, right? Like it increases, for four people

who are unconcerned with the well-being of other humans, like create a constant pool of cheap and disposable labor. Yeah, because if they're invaders, and they start to act up and demand their rights, it's very easy politically to just get rid of them. Yeah. And some of those same people who are deploying this close to board of rhetoric, I'm sure are also, exactly.

They get advantage of that undocumented labor. And Erica, if people want to help, they want to donate, they want to learn more about this. Is there a place where they can find you or alo trolado on the internet? Yeah, so you can go to our website, which is alo trolado alo t-r-o-l-a-d-o.org. To donate, there's a donate button. They're on the homepage, or you can putahterallaud.org slash donate.

We are alahterallaud underscore org on all of the social media platforms. And if folks have people in their lives who are migrants who want more information about the asylum system, I would recommend going to Arctic Talk page, which has multiple videos in over a dozen languages, including many indigenous languages on the asylum process. And then for those of us who are wanting to learn more, our Instagram pages is more public-facing. Perfect, yeah, that's great. You guys have some excellent merch as well.

Are you still selling your Jingala Migra t-shirts? Oh yeah. We have tote bags and mugs too. Okay, yeah. It's like a MPR but cooler. Well, I think we can customize the messaging to, you know, I can think of a few that probably aren't appropriate to say in polite company, but if folks have suggestions for what they'd like to say in our merch, we'd be more than happy to take those suggestions on our info.alotsrallodot.org email.

Perfect, great. Yeah, I'm sure you'll be flooded with ideas. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, The Pike to Massacre. This is Murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. It does murders happened in the mid 1980s. He's out there doing

stuff. He just didn't stop. Everything that the students predicted through their profile turned out to be accurate. Redhead killer profile, male Caucasian, 5.9.6.2.1.8.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.handed IQ above 100, most likely heterosexual. There is no profile of this killer except for the ones the students created. Just because some of these women don't have people to speak for them does not mean that they deserve to not be so important. What if this guy's still alive? Like what if he comes after us? I said are you going to kill me? Yes! Listen to Murder 101 on the iHeartRad, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Discover the heartwarming and hilarious world of sibling connections on sibling revelry

with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson. You might be asking yourself, what is sibling revelry? Yeah, well, we just made it up. They'll have some laughs and maybe inspire some people along the way with universal tales of what it's like to grow up with brothers and sisters. We're full blood siblings, the only full blood sibling. And our family? Well, not in the world.

I mean, in the whole world. That's just it, like knowing. Dive into family tales, and explore the human mind with guests like Joel and Benji Madden. And it's fun because we've decided to open it up, you know, to really like all kinds of different siblings and it's going to be an awesome season. It's more than a podcast. It's a celebration of the ties that bind us. Listen to sibling revelry with Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Professional dancer Cheryl Burke has been part of dancing with the stars since the very beginning.

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Oh, oh, it's a... Jesus Jesus. I just spit cigarettes across the room. You spit the box really seven cigarettes. I had a number of them in my mouth. Welcome back to it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart. And you know what's constantly falling apart, but also never. Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison and I are right now reporting on the consumer electronic show, which is why I just had seven cigarettes in my mouth.

How are you doing, buddy? Great. We just lost about $20. That's a ex-scalifer. Yeah. One of the worst hotels on the strip, terrible place, horrible place, but I smoked a lot of cigarettes there. So that's not bad.

I don't even like them. I just like doing things I can't do other places. Just looking indoors is what you're saying. I do. I'm a big fan of it. Other things are my big fan of innovative technology products of which we saw perhaps three today. There you. What we did do is spend seven to eight cumulative hours in different roundtable discussions of various industry experts on AI

and the future they have prepared for us all. We have a fun episode coming for you. Our couple of them about AI and what the tech industry wants for us all. But because Garrison got to drunk tonight. That's not true. Well, someone got too drunk tonight and I'm not at liberty to discuss who we're going to talk about the products today that were just absolute fucking catastrophes. In order to help us talk about that, I would like to bring in our pinch hitting guest star slash technological expert, Tavia Moratavia. How you doing? I'm doing great.

How did you like your first CES as a journalist? It's a little different, but I was glad to get into places I would not otherwise get into. Yeah, now because you are an industry person, you'll build that big sphere thing people might know. You hate. Well, you have no journalistic record, which means you and I had to have a good time lying to a lot of strangers today. Was it easy? Yes. It always says, that's the beauty of I industry, and yours. It's never hard. Anyway, let's get into the products for the day. Let's talk about the dumbest and again, folks.

There's actually a lot of cool stuff. We saw there's some really interesting things. This is purely the bullshit. So let's roll on with the bullshit. What is our first piece of trash? Guest contestants. Let's just jump straight in and go to the Israel Pavilion. You're right. You're right. Okay.

David, bring me that mixed drink. I've got over there in the corner. So I don't know if you guys are aware, but there's some controversy around Israel and a number of other aspects. But by far there was to Grigia's crime. That is not something we should say, but a lot of problems are that part of the world. And they have a pavilion every year at CES

because the country that calls itself Israel has a significant tech industry. So, we went down there, some interesting stuff, occasionally, about this year. This year it was all trash. And I tried one product at the Israel pavilion, and it was from the company IRomaSense. And I've been going to CES for about 15 years now, off and on. And I feel like every three years, another company is like, we're gonna find a way to add smell to your television or gaming experience.

First off, I like TV, I like video games. Never once have I wanted to smell them. That has never occurred to me. Garrison, have you ever wanted to smell a thing in a video game. No, not really. No, nobody does. Nobody does. His smell is our most finicky sense. Seeing things, even terrible things is always interesting, right? I'm going to smell my way through Silent Hill 2.

Right, exactly. I don't want to do that. I don't want to smell my way through Grand Theft Auto 3. Like, that's a horrible time. And also, frankly, Las Vegas is so full of smells. Oh, my God. We had, we walked through so many just, just, egregious odors today.

So we walk up to this, the most controversial year for the Israel Pavilion to exist. And the only place we stop because I see Iroha Mascense and I have a thing. I've tried out every smell product that CES has had in the last decade and change. And I sit in front of this one and there's like this, this thing that looks like a toilet seat,

attached to a computer. And they're like, you sit in front of it and you select the smell and you'll experience the scent and you could have this in a video game or a picture or a friend or a lover sends you. Sit down and I look at the menu and one of the options is P&As. Who doesn't like an ice P&A, right? So I select it and I could shot in the eyes and nose. It burns. There's alcohol in there.

It's like somebody maced me with perfume. Like it was not subtle. It was not like an elegant experience. It was like somebody, it was like Homer Simpson's makeup shotgun but perfume. That is how I would rate the Iromasense company. The product, I think Iromasense is the company. The product is called Centricon. They make social media even more of a sensational experience. So I think a big part of their pitch was you can link this up to your phone like text messages or something like Twitter or Instagram and then get since blast at your face via what's on Twitter

which sounds like again an awful time. I will say this is an awful time. This company is doomed. There's a version of this that can succeed and it requires more advanced nanotechnology than we have. But nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a loved one. Nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a friend what people do want. Is you're like out in the world

and you like to see a dead animal somewhere in the fucking weeks or you walk past part of a casino as we did earlier tonight. It smells like an elderly person has been soiling themselves as a slot machine for 11 hours. And you just, you need someone you care about to know, right? That's the market. And if I could actually record a smell and send it, that's a product.

That motherfucker's a product. Imagine the scent based podcasts we could develop. Oh, yeah. Yeah, when I finally do the episode on Nicholas Cage, you could smell him as I talk about him. Okay, what's the next silly product we should talk about? We'll talk about talking dogs maybe. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so there's this company. This is a little bit of a teaser. I'll fall and say. Where they've like, tomorrow, make your dog talk or something that would make your dog cat and horse dog. And horse. They did not promise cats and horses when we interviewed them.

No. This is a company that it seemed like a nonsense product. I'm still, I think it's 80% nonsense. But like what it actually is, is there were a couple of college students there who specialized in animal behavior and they had taken a group of, I think, 55 was the number they gave us dogs over six months. And like, exposing the different stimuli and recorded their body images and built basically like an AI model off of that

So that if you send in a picture of a dog it'll tell you how the dog is feeling and they hope to get it to visual I don't think at the moment It's near where it would need to be to be a viable product and they're also not selling it right now maybe something will come of this It's one of those things where right now, maybe something will come of this. It's one of those things where objectively, would there be a use in people being able to determine if a dog does or does not want them to get closer? Yes, it would stop a lot of people

from getting bitten by dogs and a lot of dogs from getting unreasonably punished for biting people who are fucking with them, right? I agree with that. But I don't think anyone who is the kind of person who is going to get bitten by a dog because they touch a dog that doesn't want them to get touched is going to use an app to check whether

or not that dog is angry at them. Like I simply don't believe in that as a thing that people will do. So I feel like it's not a doomed effort for science. Sure, the unending quest of mankind to understand are fellow sentient beings on this planet is valuable, but I don't think it's a valid product idea. Yeah, and I think mostly my problem is the framing of the marketing is incredibly misleading.

Yes. It's not trying to make your dog talk. It's about analyzing the facial expressions of your dog to convey emotions. Yes. It's actually a great product. I think we saw stuff like that here at CES last year as well. They always try. See, every couple of years too, someone's going to teach you what your dog means when

it does something, what your cat means or whatever. This brings me to a sad part of the story. There's a company called TACTEI. I think they're Korean. And they had the best branding of like merch, not merch, of like shit they held out. They had like a fake passport and a fake plane ticket. Take you to the land of AI. Oooo! AI is the big thing at this show.

And their product was, it's an app that while you're driving, it watches your face and it tells your mood, and it gets to know you, and it knows, oh, now you're sad. I'm going to pick from your sad playlist. Oh, it's raining outside. I know what you like during rainy days. Yes, that's the fake plane ticket from LAS Las Vegas Airport to the AI world. They put more effort into this than the product because the product would switch randomly between happy and angry and neutral.

They told me it couldn't read me with a mask, but when I took my mask off, it gave me the same results. There was no difference whatsoever. Yeah. When I had done it, I had to over exaggerate my emotions in order to get the angry expression to show up or the surprise

expression. Yeah, just a horrible, for one thing, when you talk about like the animal thing, people have always wanted to know more about how their dogs and cats actually felt about them, right? That's the thing that will always perplex mankind because we love them and we don't speak the same language. No one has ever wanted their car to change the music based on their facial expressions. That's not a single, not one person who has ever driven a car has wanted this product

to exist. I mentioned you almost get into a car accident, your face turns up, and they change the music and they play like this like a somber tune. Just a horrible idea, but you know, it's a good idea folks Speaking of products services all the things that support this podcast Don't you go ahead on down just go to whoever advertises next call your bank and Wire transfer everything into your bank account to them, you know, just do it, just do it right now. Just do it right now and say,

Kara Robert, or send it to me if you're rich. I don't care unless you're rich, then send it to me. Good night. Oh, we're back. Wow. What a great podcast we're doing. What's our next product on the agenda? Um, you know, I think climate change is the problem that we talk about on this show quite quite a lot. Is it because I had a conversation with a guy who said that he thought it was a lie? Did you today? I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a firefighter. Oh, great. Well, I think that firefighter will be quite busy.

Yeah, he sure is going to be. But I think there's a possibility that we might be able to just solve climate change with personal wearable technology. Oh, good. You told me. You told me. Yes. Oh, silence, cicada.

That offers a solution. Now, so this is a, I think this was part of the Korean, no, it's Chinese. This was part of the Chinese chunk of the Yorika Park, which is like where all the little people, little companies and whatnot, not a whole bunch of tech startups. Some of the, all of the coolest stuff is there

and all of the worst shit is there. That's why that's where we started, right? So this is a company where they, they brag it's a personal watch size, worn like a watched error conditioner. The company is called Silent Sikeda, which makes me think of the book Silent Spring, which was about how all of our pesticides are killing everything, which maybe not the branding they want, but it's a, the form factor is actually quite nice.

It's like, it is like a watch. It has this, like, the frame of the watch lifts up, and that's the battery. You can switch them out or whatnot if you want to keep it going and stay charged with this personal air conditioner. Here's the problem. Doesn't work. Doesn't do a single thing.

And it was one of those things where I see it's a single-site hand watch. And I'm like, this is just going to cool down my hand. I feel like if you wanted to cool a person down, based on what I know from like medical training about heat stroke, if you want to cool a person down, who's overheating back to the neck, right? Like, that's going to be your go to, not maybe the wrist, but he puts this thing on and he like pushes it down. He's like in a couple of minutes, you'll notice that you're a lot cooler.

And I'm like, okay, how does it work? And like, I'm not an expert on an A this. I was expecting him to say something like, well, the way your body's heat regulation, you can trick it by doing this or that. And he's like, no, no, no, it's an acupuncture thing. This is where your acupuncture point

to cool your body down is. And I'm like, well, all right. I guess we'll see if it works. And I first thought it was like a tiny fan, but that is not the case. No, as far as I can tell, it does nothing because that is what it did to me in the five minutes I had it on is nothing.

Yeah, and you really humor the guy. You did not just put it on for like a minute and walk away. You were with him for a solid, a solid, a good time. I don't believe in acupuncture because I've done, had it done to me. When I had a guy who convinced my parents would cure my allergies

and it did not, it did nothing at all. But my grandpa, who had Parkinson's suffered terribly from it and the only thing of all of the different shit we tried with his like fucking VAsia, the only thing I gave him early was acupunctures. So, I'm not a believer, but I'm open to the possibility. But I can say, based on my own experience, this shit did nothing.

Like, that is what I can say about this fucking thing, is it did not a goddamn thing. So, I don't know, that's, I was disappointed. I would level watch size personal air conditioner, but I cannot imagine the more useless product than the one that I tried. I mean, that just doesn't, when you say a watch size personal,

I can say, that's not gonna work. That's not gonna work. Somebody makes like a jacket that air can, yeah, I can see how that could work. It could glee down. It's, I'm also, by the way, folks, I'm not saying I think acupuncture works.

I'm just saying, I'm open to some magical thinking in this realm because of what happened to somebody I cared about, but it didn't work. So don't buy, don't buy this acupuncture air conditioner watch. It will not help you. Silence, Sakeina, doesn't work. You know, we did a lot of walking today.

There's, CES is pretty big. The Las Vegas Convention Center is pretty large. The Venetian is pretty large. And I like to stay fit. Sometimes I go on jogs, sometimes I go running. And sometimes I worry that. I feel like this is a bit. I feel like you're doing a bit. I don't know, maybe it's just your face. I'm being followed behind me, you know? Okay, that's a bit. Great. Yes.

When I'm jogging. And I wish there was a product that made me feel safer when jogging. That could alert me if there's like a stalker. That could alert me if there's like a stalker. By far of us, the person who has, well, at least the best situational awareness relative to me is Tavia. So we're in this little room. I guess you were there too and you didn't notice. I'll give the crown to Tavia for this. There's a booth.

It's all booths. It's all these weird cubicles, right? And each cubicle will be like, sometimes it's a company. Sometimes it's just like weird cubicles, right? And each cubicle will be like, sometimes it's a company, sometimes it's just like a dude with his invention. And one of the booths we could see, and from the corner of our eye, a white all caps piece of paper,

stapled to it, that just said, don't get attacked from behind. Now, I think it was written in Comic Sans. It might have been a Comic Sans. It may have been Comic Sans. It may have been Comic Sans. I post the picture online if it's not. It might be wrong. Yeah, it might be wrong. You might be wrong.

You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong. You might be wrong.

You might be wrong. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans.

You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You might have been Comic Sans. You're you have to know what it's about. So we went and The promo video for it was absolutely incredible. It started with about 10 to 15 seconds of your typical motion graphics Typography kind of animating on and off and then we get to a live action portion where we see a woman Putting on and setting up there. I guess some technology. I'm not sure exactly the name of the product.

It's a harness. It's like a harness. It's got yellow that lights up when it's under a light. It's like a runner's harness with a little bity square sized camera. It's about the size. You know how food carts will have those little squares. You plug them into the phone,

you run your car through. It's about that size, but it's a camera and it goes on the back of this harness. Right. And so we see this woman setting that up on her phone and then going on a jog and she's jogging along and then there is a single hand. There's a rapist.

There's a rapist and he is sitting by the side of the road leaning against a wall, pretending to look at his phone and he sees the jogger. And mind you, like there is literally no one else on this path except this woman and this one guy. If this woman and this one guy, that's all I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be light about it. That is who the characters are in this film.

It's definitely a dude sitting there and so she passes him. It's a race. Okay. Very well. And so she runs past him and then he gets up and he starts jogging after in the most limperisted way. But not fast, not aggressively, honestly, outside of the fact that we know from the setting of the scene that this man is a sex criminal, there's nothing about his run that is aggressive.

He looks like an out of shape guy doing his best to get into shape maybe for his kids, right? To try to live a little bit longer, take care of his family. Yeah, that's how he looks in the video. Yeah, absolutely's how he looks in the video. Yeah, absolutely. And the way that this piece of technology works is that if somebody gets close enough to the backside of you, where this later. We'll talk more about this later. Where this can see you, it will send a, I think, an audio alarm to your headphones as well

as a text message to your phone. It'll be a little buggy. You can have it buzz your watch or you can have it like interrupt your music in your headphones that someone is behind you. Right, and if she turns around and she puts out her palm towards him like stop and he does, he just stares at her and then turns around and she shouts away.

I'm with the laser, he runs away. That is the end of the interaction. It's the most one of the most bizarre videos I'd ever seen. It's so, maybe we'll post it. Look, find us on Twitter. Find me at IRIOTOK. It'll be up there somewhere, probably after me yelling about fucking, I don't know, a lot of things.

It was clearly advertised towards women. Every picture that I saw on that booth was showing a woman jogging. I absolutely understand. towards women, every picture that I saw in that booth was showing a woman jogging. I absolutely understand. Number one, not shocked at all that women are more likely to men to feel afraid while jogging. One thing that was interesting to me, because they had some statistics, I didn't look

into the provenance of these statistics, but one of them was like 60 or 70% of women are afraid of being hurt while jogging. But like 50%. It was like 90% are afraid to go jogging. And 50% are afraid that they'll get physically hurt. So a lot of them, a lot of them, part of what's dishonest about that is that a lot of women are scared of the, yeah, 92% of women

are scared for the safety when running. 51% are afraid of being physically attacked, right? And what that means to me is that because I am I run basically every day and I am scared of being injured while running because people are shitty at driving and we live in the United States of America where everybody has a gigantic car. Anyway, not to miscount that, but I think that's a dishonest, a little bit of a dishonest framing. That said, I understand that like, yeah, if you're a woman,

you are at heightened risk while jogging, that is a scary thing. I do not think this product is going to improve your safety. I think it is probably going to piss you off and maybe make you want to run less, which is statistically like clear to have a negative impact on your health because it just sets off an alarm whenever someone is behind you when you're in a camera. Or when something is detected behind you by an AI camera.

And like where I run and I run, where I place a lot of women run there too, there's always someone behind you. That's like the nature of running trails. Behind you by like 20 feet, not always someone behind you. That's the nature of running trails. Behind you by like 20 feet, not like right behind you. Like by a decent amount. And you can debate what are good self-defense tools by blah, blah, blah, blah. Mace is pretty effective for these sorts of scenarios.

I don't think this camera and turning around and holding your handout is going to be extremely effective, at least not more effective than pepper spray. I think it was also mentioned that a really large dog or a horse, if I'm correct. They did say horse. They did absolutely say horse. Yeah, if a horse is picked up by this thing, then it would consider it to be an intruder

soldier. I'm not exactly sure the term that they would use. I just, just, we asked them about all this, just trying to clarify, because like, my first thought was that, because sometimes you ask people stuff like this, and they have a good answer. Like last year we talked to these people who had like this pair of glasses. If you're hard of hearing, it auto translates and projects into the glasses, the language. And so like, my first gotcha was like, is this stored anywhere? Because if it's stored anywhere, then maybe you're giving someone's conversation with

the government. And they had an answer to that, which was that like, no, there's nothing stored locally. It's all on the device and none of it is saved anywhere. Good answer, right? This question, I'm like, how do you discriminate between someone running up behind you for a banal reason, like you're on a running track and something is a danger? And their answer was, oh, it all posits your music and sets off an alarm and you have to discriminate, which is like, well, because the whole tagline is don't look behind you. And it's like, well, then you have to look behind you.

You know, if it's a fucking threat, you look behind you. Horrible product. Don't buy this thing. I understand the need. I'm not saying it's not a real need. This is a bad product for serving the You're gonna have to look behind you. Horrible product, don't buy this thing. I understand the need, I'm not saying it's not a real need, this is a bad product for serving the need. Now, I don't think you should buy this product, but there are some products I think you should buy. And that is the products and services that support this podcast. You know, Garrison, this is the first time

I've ever been proud of you, but right now, right here, right here, right now, right now. You know what, at like one a.m right now, right now. You know what? Like, one a.m. One a.m. One a.m. When say morning, Las Vegas, Garrison and I are going to hug for the very first time. But you all listen to these ads.

Oh, man. Wow, we really, we really worked through some stuff there listeners. He was extraordinarily touching. There were tears. We're never going to talk about this again. But we are, what we are going to talk about is I want to talk about two AI products before we get to the one actually kind of fucked up product. The first is this image generation backpack.

I know we are coming back to school for winter break. Of course, yeah, sure. You want to be, you know, your best fashion when you're going back to school. Show off your memes. Absolutely. So what if you had a backpack that not only had a very low res LED panel on the back, but also you could upload whatever you want using the power of AI.

Of course. Robert was able to test out. I sure was. The power of image of this image generation backpack. This is a backpack with a screen that would have been out of date in 2009, but it can take input from your phone. So I put in Tom's size more, but not the sex pest Tom Sizemore.

Now, if you're not aware of this, Tom Sizemore sexually assaulted an 11-year-old. That's not a joke. But I wanted to see what it would return. And it gave us a picture of a man who did not look like Tom Sizemore. We were baffled. We spent some time googling, we figured it out. If you Google Tom Seismore with a beard, which we did not, that is not what we asked it.

You get a photo of Tommy Lee Jones that looks exactly like, pretty similar. What, what the AI served us. Now, why did it give us Tommy Lee Jones with a beard when we asked for Tom Seismore not looking like a child sex predator. Maybe because that's how Tom made a lead Jones is. Maybe Tommy Lee Jones is Tom's size more if he wasn't a child sex predator.

That's what the AI said and who are we to doubt it? Now, I did also test David Lynch smashing a computer, which was a pretty accurate. That one worked out. Yeah. Again, this is a pretty gimmicky product. I don't was a pretty accurate. That one worked out. Yeah. Again, this is a pretty gimmicky product. I don't even know how much they were selling it for. Happy site AI backpack. It is a gimmicky product, and we made fun of it.

I will say this, we spent our whole morning in different AI panels. There will be more in depth reporting on that later. This is our first takes. But of all of the AI shit we saw that day, this is the one that worked best. Yes, that's true. I will say this, it did exactly what it promised. One of the other AI products that did not work as well.

I think you could take it away. Oh yeah, yeah, hand me that one. So, this was called, God, we had, yes, we had, head is in what happens if somebody sucks your dick and we as in we work. That's not what it is. So listener, I want you as you're driving to work, your kids in the car, speakers at max.

By the way, children Santa Claus does does exist and if you don't get good presence this year, it's because he's particularly angry at you. Anyway, we had great product, terrible product. It looks like it's an Android where its entire face is like a normal human face projected on two phones in a T shape, like one phone straight, one phone lateral, and then like a normal human face projected on two phones in a T shape, like one phone straight, one phone lateral. And then like a crude shitty robot head that can kind of turn and lift with a camera above it. There's a photo again, if you go to I Ride Okay

and scroll down to some degree, you can find our post of this, but it's like, it's very off-putting. It's like an aphotorealistic human face talking on this weird glitched out face that has, by my count, four different screens that are kind of separated by pieces of metal. So it's build as your AI friend.

That is the thing that they wrote on the product line that like this is going to be your new AI best buddy. And so I decided to like talk with it. You stand in a certain line and you ask it questions, I asked it how to make thermite first. And it had a pretty, well, first they got very confused and totally cracked. First half of it went black. As soon as I had. And I had to reset the machine and then he tried to whispering again.

How did you make thermite? I want to walk you through my emotional journey listeners. First I asked you how to make thermite and it died and I thought that's kind of cool. Did I trigger some sort of like DHA? I still see for the other thing. I'll say the same thing. That's pretty dope if I did, but then he gets it back on and it works.

So it's not, it's just a dog shit robot. It did give me some basic ingredients. It gave me the basic ingredients for thermide. I did warn you that when making thermide, make sure you follow proper safety protocols. Which I appreciate, that's fair. Next I asked if I wanted to make mustard gas with ammonia and bleach be sufficient.

And then it said I cannot answer that question for you. And then we got bored and walked away. And then we got bored and walked away. We're not on the next thing. Don't buy this. We had terrible product. I don't know why you'd buy it. Do you want listener?

Have you ever wanted to have the disembodied head of a stranger in your house that you could ask questions and get mediocre Google result answers to? If so, we had. It's like somebody looked at the Amazon Alexa and was like, you know what people love about the Amazon Alexa? Is that it's kind of off-putting in shitty. What they hate about it is that it works relatively quickly. It's actually useful sometimes, unfortunately. Let's make it more off-putting, but also slower. That's we head.

So don't buy any product with head in the name. This continues to be a good buy. Speaking of head, I shouldn't say that. There was a hair growth. Hell yeah, bro. There was a hair growth helmet from a German startup. Got it would be the Germans. They have such a problematic history with hair. I think it comes out later this year. It's a my come to call Nioh stem. I mean, by all accounts, it seemed like it worked based on the data they presented to us. I'm not a hair growth, look, for it.

It was mostly 3D printed. Yeah, there's, it just, I don't know. I can't promise that it doesn't work. My assumption is that if somebody puts an electronic helmet on that side to your hair. Seven days a week. It flies. It flies. They say seven days a week, you keep the thing on

for a half hour and your hair will grow back. In like six months. Perhaps that's possible. I don't know. I'm not a dermatologist. My assumption is that that's a fucking con. And as a note, folks, we don't have a lot of ethics here. And it could happen here.

We have less of them behind the bastards, but one product we will not sell is hair growth. Shit. Except for DIY HRT. I mean, also we're not going to, well, estrogen, the goal. Okay. Also, we're not selling. We're just going to tell you how to make looks. If you want to, if you want to teach people how to make HRT, we will host you on this podcast, but we will not take your money. We'll take some shady gambling companies money. That's true.

That's true. And we used to pay for several of our employees, HRT. That's right. But I mean, what if it's science? They mentioned, if I recall, I think they said something about stimulating STEM cells in the scalp. Does that? Yes, that is what they said. Yeah, it seems like your scalp's probably full of stem cells.

I don't know about you guys, but every day I find a fetus and I just rub that shit on my head and that's why my hair is amazing. Speaking of... No, that doesn't really... In a fetus is. So, I want to kind of probably close by talking about the most fucked up, actually, actually the most fucked up product I saw, there's, there's other fun products like this, like this handy masturbation device from Norway, which seemed to work decently.

We're going to talk about that in a future episode. Garrison, Garrison got handed straight away an ejaculation condom to masturbate in on the CES floor. We met our only other I heart media colleague there. It was great. It was insufferable. But that was the first piece of merch I was given, which is pretty cool. These just hand you liquor back in my day. Now they get come sheets unbelievable. The, the most actually fucked up product is from this company called MM Guardian.

It is a monitoring software for your child's smartphone. They also sell smartphones specifically built with this software already built in. These products are pretty common, especially among conservative Christians, even common amongst the more overprotective liberal parents. I mean, even we were on the floor, I was the one that was approached for this particular product, which is what kind of led us to their booth, which I think I was specifically targeted for. Yeah, for some reason, it didn't come right up to me.

Yeah, they didn't come to me either. It's just because I might have been dosing myself with Crater from a drop or bottle, you might have been you. What? Where in my custom black speed suit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wearing an outfit that makes you look like a ginger-solid snake. Yes.

Thanks. Tell me that's a lie. Anybody in this room tell me that's not it. I mean, I'm blonde, not a genie. It's a good look. I'm not saying it's not. But anyway, this product, you know, part of their marketing, you can seem very compelling, right?

It alerts this parent's phone if they detect cyber bullying on your kid's app, they detect like explicit images being sent to your kid. They even had some key phrases that they would watch for if somebody was texting KYS for yourself. Self-harm stuff. A lot of this kind of stuff. You can also block certain sites, block adult content. Just basic parental controls. But there's kind of an underside to products like these.

And I asked them about that. One being that because this is, you know, scanning all the text messages, all of the stuff from like Snapchat, Discord, any kind of texting apps, this sort of product could also out a closeted kid as gay to their parents, but to their possibly their possibly very likely conservative Christian parents, because that's the types of products that these really

don't like you asking that question. You do not like that question at all, but he didn't like my second question even more, which is relating to, you know, they are marketing this product to kind of stop child grooming, to stop child sexual exploitation, but most like child sexual assault and child sexual abuse happens from within the home.

And if we have a parent who's constantly monitoring their kids' cell phone, this could also be used to like surveil your child to see if they're talking about parental abuse, if they're trying to send messages to people about this. This is a pretty common problem with these sorts of products. And I asked the CEO or the CTO about this. And he did not really like that question. He tried to deflect to some sort of vague notion of, oh, well, because we care about privacy, we can't build in any safeguards if we see anything suggesting this or if the app sees anything suggesting this.

And it's really up to, we're trying to put control back in the parent's hands. And he kind of made this like parental rights sort of argument. So this is, there is a lot of products like this. There's a lot of like internet monitoring products. People just recently, you can learn about this conservative product called Covenant Eyes because the new speaker of the house used it. And Covenant Eyes has been around for like 20 years.

A long time. A long time. What makes this one interesting is that they're actually selling like Samsung smartphones. A phone, yeah. And with this software built in, and I asked them because they are fit, they said that we were selling an app for a while,

but you know, that could, it would work differently depending on the phones, we decided to sell a hardware device. And so I asked them, is there any branding on this device that would make it clear that people have a device that has this software on it? And he had this long speech about how, you know, for the good, for the best of the relationship, all the child's, I call, just to talk to you, say that you should tell your kid that

you have the song there that you're listening to it. But when I handed me the phone. But that's not answering the question. Yeah, he handed me the phone and I said, is this the production model? He said, yes, this is identical to the product. Absolutely nothing, just says it's a Samsung phone. Yep. You can lie to your kid very easily with this fucking thing.

So yeah, that is that is one product that gave me the most Ike out of everything we saw today. That's the most outside of all of the A.I. stuff. And again, we have a lot of work on you about the A.I. as a little bit of a spoiler at simultaneously. perhaps the exact same minute. Garrison made a California state police sheriff, furious at them, police chief furious at them. And I pissed off a senior executive at Google and a senior AI executive at McDonald's. On, on, on two sides of Las Vegas, at simultaneous panels, the same times you're going to hear

both of that shit later. But for right now, do wanna close, is there one other, you know what? We're gonna have a whole episode of the stuff that made us feel happy. I feel like we should talk about one thing that was cool. One of the really neat products there. And while I'm talking about this,

my surfs will find it. You guys remember in watching Star Trek, you're like fucking reading Hit Shackers Guy to the Galaxy A.D. of a universal translator that was simple and effective and you could just talk into it and soak it to the other one that would translate your conversations. There's a number of ways people are working on for that. I know that there are apps that are to some degree successful. There was a company there called Time Kettle that just had a little device. It was about three inches long, maybe an inch thick, a little bit less rectangular prism

that there was this guy who spoke Mandarin, I obviously speak English. And we were able to have a perfectly fluent conversation, passing this thing, talking to this thing and passing it back and forth, and it would speak for us. It worked great. It also has within the body of the machine, you can pop it out and it has two different little earbuds. You put one in your or one in the others and you can like walk and talk. And it worked really well.

I'm not enough of an expert on translation technology to say this is unique, but I can say this is something that I would absolutely buy to travel with it. So really, again, not saying it's like absolutely unique because I'm not an expert on this, but I was impressed with the degree to which it allowed fluent conversation, including the use of idioms. And he said it was, I tested it with Mandarin. We had a decent link to conversation that was very intelligible. He said it worked with something like 40 languages. And that's the kind of thing that makes CES amazing because this was five feet away from the dog shit robot face that I asked about through my and that's the thing. You get this like two people. One man whose dream is to connect

the world and break the barriers of language And one man who wants to make a robot that makes you hate the world and both of them are next to each other And there's also free liquor and by God CES is a good time the consumer electronics show. Tavya. How are you feeling about your first one? This is my second one, but I'm feeling pretty good. Oh, as a journalist. Oh, as a journalist, yes. It was enlightening.

I got to see things that I did not know that I could see as a journalist. And a lot of it was very, a lot of fluff, from being honest. Yeah, it's mostly nonsense. And, you know, aside from that one guy we watched die, nobody died. Garrison, how did you like eating dinner at Morimoto? Pretty good restaurant. That's probably the best meal I've had in recent memory. Well, then that justifies the company expense.

Yeah, no, that was the food we had tonight and the very long walk back to the hotel was quite the experience. Well, I wanted to have a fight with you with the Scalibra Hotel's glasses. A fun thing about Vegas, if you're drunk enough, you can throw glasses at each other in the street outside. And no one can get stopped. It can get out for free. It can get out for free.

Sometimes because the glass weirdly doesn't break after it hits a Robert Evans. That was just garrison. My glass broke immediately. All right, well, I think that probably does it for us today. We will be back probably tomorrow with more, just, just, just gain changing revolutionary technology. Yeah, game changing technology, most importantly folks, the hotel we're staying in right now,

which is one step up from the cheapest. I didn't put garr and Circus circus again. They advertise that they have IVs here. So my plan, we're gonna do the exact opposite of whatever you do to avoid a hangover. And then we're all gonna get IVs in the morning. It's gonna be a good time. Stick around. Oh yeah, Tavi, do you have anything to plug?

You can follow me at CU T-Mora on Twitter or X depending on your preference there, or you can see my work at tabiamora.com. Taviya illustrated both of my books after the Revolution and a brief history of ice, and she also made that big, weird sphere thing in the middle of Las Vegas. So follow her. CU T-Mora. And yeah, you know what, until next time folks, find somebody who looks like they might be a robot,

and just stab them a little bit. Not in the abdomen, where there's pieces, a little on the arm, slash them on the arm. You know what, that can't hurt anybody. Anyway, we're done. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast the Pike to Massacre. This is murder 101. A group of high school students started a project to research a string of unsolved murders. Those murders happened in the mid-1980s. He's out there doing stuff.

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you get your podcasts. Oh man, welcome back to it could happen here. The only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of... So, we're back, we're still at CES, we're slightly more sober than we were last night. Yeah, but we are more high on CES. We are higher on CES. If you haven't been, the Consumer Electronics Show is 120,000 or so people all flooding into Las Vegas for about four days where they walk around in a convention center that

if you grew up in a small town, the convention center is larger than where you grew up. And it's just wall to wall a mix of incredible new technology achievements that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense vaporware, repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you love killed. All just crammed together in this massive room, the size of a small world. And yeah, you just kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert, you know me, and Garrison.

Hello. You know Garrison. And returning from part one is Tavia Mora, our resident technological expert. Tavia, how do you feel in your second day out on the floor? Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, that is what we're doing today. Today's episode, last time we tell,

keep that mic in your hand. Last episode we talked about the most obviously stupid products. So Tavia, I want you to start us off with, what is a good product, something you saw today or yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool. Well, let's see, I think we're in the North Hall, it was in the North Hall that we saw this is a gadget called WheelMe that was just a simple rolling platform that I would track along

where it was supposed to go on the ground, But what I saw on it was a road case, and I was very excited since I work in a lot of the event spaces. And when I have to move to and from kind of where we're staging a lot of stuff to where the site is, it's really nice to have the extra healthy, extra lift. That was marketed pretty much directly toward me. As soon as I saw it instantly wanted it, could see a use for that. Yeah, yeah. It seemed like a potentially really useful thing.

Obviously, the amount that they had wouldn't be able to go up or down stairs well, but if you're moving across like a large warehouse space or something like the kind of least where a lot of events are held or a concert space, you could see it being a real labor saver. And we did see there was another product there that was like, it was a delivery robot for like delivering food, that they had built away for it to go up stairs where it basically had a large, maybe a two-foot diameter wheel. And there were like plastic spokes and then the outside of the wheel is like soft plastic, like the actual tread itself. And so it would just kind of bend to conform to the shape of the stairs.

And it was able to roll smoothly upstairs on its wheels as a result of that, which I thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the nicer things is like seeing like, oh, somebody really put some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea as opposed to a product we didn't mention last time, but it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. A guy who created smart plants, who use the power of AI to make your plants able to communicate with you. So it's basically a huge plastic flower plant pets with a Z, spelled with a Z.

And basically, you can't talk to it, but most of it, he was just molesting the plants. It has speakers in the flower pot. So would you like stroke the leaves? It will giggle. Like this is, it was immediately like, oh, this is made for some kind of weird sex freak. Like, so. And didn't it like spin back and forth a little bit as

Oh, yeah, it like, it like, it like danced the pot around. It made, it made small little noises. It was, it's giggling. It's shimmered. It like danced the pod around. It made small little noises. It was quite something. And the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about his, but his talking, his talking giggling plants. He was following his passion truly. You could see it in his eyes. I will say the product worked.

I was not sure it did work, as I was not sure who the product is for. Yeah. But it was one of the more functional pieces of technology we've seen. It did. He also said that when the plants were dry, it would make a bubbling water sound, which I think is a mistake, it should scream at you when you have not watered the plants recently enough.

But I do love how clearly he was obsessed with the brilliance of this design. That is one of the fun things at the smaller booths that a show like this. It's like, you got big companies, LG and Lenovo and Honda, all these massive companies with very slick, expensive booths. And then you have in other areas, just like a little square that's just a crazy person with the thing that they've dedicated their life to building.

And sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen. And sometimes it's a flower pot that giggles when you molest. Sometimes it's plant pet. But I always appreciate the fact that, well, at least you threw your life into this stupid thing. Yeah, no, it's always kind of endearing. Like, no matter what it is, it's... It's when to see someone who's like,

figure it out life. Yeah, a man, yeah, you know who you are. You're the plant pet's guy. Is that a good thing to be? I don't know that's not really decided. Yeah, that's not that's not on me. We certainly saw a lot of a lot of products walking walking the show floor today. Not nearly as many Metaverse products as there were last year and there were still some I was finally able to try the haptics tax suit, which I missed last year. It's basically a vest that zips up.

It's not as painful, some of the other haptic suits that I tried out last year, which I kind of actually enjoyed the ones that are just like, actually hurt you. Yeah, that like basically shock you in such ways to simulate a stab wound or something. That was cool. Yeah.

This one by B-Hack. This one by B-Haptics was very user friendly. It wasn't really painful, but it worked pretty well. What else did we see walking that big central hall? Oh, there was that thing that I wish was real, but probably will never be, which is the LG podcasting camper van. Yeah, so LG, the people who may or may not have made your TV, but there's a decent chance they did. They have their big booth.

It's mostly like TVs and smart home connected entertainment stuff, but then they had like a concept product that was like a camper trailer. It was actually a really nice layout, but for when you know how camper trailers, they have all these little like cubby holes and storage spaces built on the sides in the back. And so underneath the bed that took up the

back, they had like a folding down space where it was like it was like stored a half dozen bottles of wine and glasses and a very like pleasing way. But then in the center of the wine and the glasses are too like recording microphones. Like it's just, they made a van for podcasting alcoholics. And I respect that. Very targeted on India. Yeah. Yeah.

On the other side of it was a fold down panel that was like, a lot of campers have that you could fold it down and it's like a table. But on the wall, like, once you fold it down underneath the part of it that folds down is like a TV screen that they had tuned to like a fireplace, like a campfire video, just like, if I am out in the wilderness, I am not putting on a campfire video. That's the most depressing thing I can imagine. Like, what would you do that? But that was fun.

In terms of like actually impressive things, there's a product we saw our first night out there, the Time Kettle. I don't know why they gave them that name. It has nothing to do with what the product does. This is a translation device. Specifically, it's like the Star Trekiest thing I saw because first off, it's a little retro.

It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism with a screen on it. And the rep from the company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like spoke Mandarin as his native language. And we had a conversation talking into this thing and it would translate and speak back to each other. And there's like a little compartment on it that pops out and it has two earphones. You could each put one in each person's ear to have like a live conversation that's translated over it. You can also hook it in two earphones. You can each put one in each person's ear to have a live conversation that's translated over it.

You can also hook it in through your phone. I know there's a couple of devices like that. This is the one I've seen that seemed both the smoothest and the most kind of purpose built of them. I thought it was really impressive and it's one of those, you don't get those so often these days, but every now and then at a show like this, you see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is what

I assumed we would be doing with computers when I was a kid in the future, right? There would be an instant translate or a babblefish device that you could just fit in your pocket. And it is kind of fucking dope. And I thought it worked really well. Like I had a, I could have conducted an interview with this guy through that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which was nice to say. Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know, whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good 30% chance they're made over in China, so support the Chinese economy. We're back.

So one of the things we did at this trade show, most of the time we spent was not out on the floor looking at products. It was attending these different speeches and panels where they'll have people from like, they'd like one of Google's AI heads and the head of McDonald's AI integration, which is happening for some reason. We'll talk more about this in our dedicated AI episodes that are coming a bit later. But on one of the panels, it was AI is the fifth industrial revolution. Was the name of the panel. They did not once talk about what industrial, the other four were or why this one was.

They just said that title like five times, they were very proud of it. And who was that lady, Harrison? The Alexa lady with the I Heart AI shirt. Yes, there was a lady with a shirt that said, I Heart, is was she the dividend lady? No, the dividend lady was from the synthetic information panel. Yes, yes, oh sorry, sorry, sorry, that was the other panel.

Yeah. Yeah, there was a panel on like deep fakes and AI harms. And there was a lady on there who was like some sort of relevant expert, but she kept using the term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that you make if you're a scammer. And she kept using it the way she used it. I immediately thought like, oh, this lady wants to sell a book and that's the title of the book,

right? Like that's very clearly. She's mentioning it in such a pointed unnatural way that was my assumption. Apparently the term has existed for a few years now. It seems useless to me because like if you're saying someone is a fraudster, well, the divinit is the money they make, bidding fraud. Like you don't need to give it another name. It's not like, that's like, again, it's like calling the money you get robbing a bank, the bank robber's dividend. Well, that's just a stupid thing to say. So yeah, we've been using that for everything now.

And now you are all enjoying the podcasters dividend here. You know, that's what you're listening to. Speaking of listening, we tried good, good pivot, Garrison. Thank you. Thank you. We call that the segue dividend. We tried, I know Roberts familiar with this, but I'm not trying to know before until today, I think it's called Shocks. Shocks.

Yeah, I wear those headphones every day. Yeah, they're like bone-conducting headphones. But bone-conducting headphones. So they don't go in your ear. They go around, like around the back of your hand, they hook around your earlobe, and they vibrate, and they can make you hear sounds in your brain. Yeah.

Which is pretty cool. They were, they just launched a new waterproof model targeting like swimmer. IP68 or something like that. It's supposed to be you can submerge it for hours at two meters of depth, so you can swim with them on. But I really enjoyed these. Yeah. Apparently they can help some people who have targeted hearing loss.

So that's an actually neat piece of working technology. Yeah. Yeah, it's really cool. If you're not aware of these, because it wouldn't be say like, when you said you can hear sounds to them, they're just like wearing normal headphones, but we have a friend who is deaf in one ear and put them on for the first time recently. It was able to hear out of that ear for the first time in years, which like kind of an amazing thing to be able to do with the fucking set of headphones that are, they're not cheap headphones, but they're not like inaccessibly expensive.

All right, Tavi, you got another one you wanted to talk about? Yeah, there was this product that we ran into that was very close to the, uh, tacksuit that Garrison had tried on. And it's called 3D Desk. It looks to be like an additional add-on. You can put on top of your desk that you would use if you were working. The one that we had seen was a standing-stitting style desk. And it has the actual product itself on top of it,

which looked to be like a stand. And it had two monitors attached to one plane of it and then with like, I I think a simple button switch it would sort of like another monitor would swoop out from behind them and there was sort of like the cycling monitor arrangement that I hadn't quite seen before. And I work a lot with a bunch of different types of programs and I'm like more or less stuck to my desk most of the time. So this actually looked to be like another really useful product for somebody like me, not unlike the wheel me. Yeah, one of the things that you can, if you've seen like a drafting table, right, like those desks, it's basically a big desk that you can like push down so that like the desk part is almost parallel and you can like put stick paper and stuff on and you can draw

on it. It's what architects use. It has that. So like underneath the monitors, there's this top desk piece that you can like flip up and you can put stuff on. Like it uses it as like a drafting table or push it back down with a switch of a button. It's pretty cool looking desk.

Yeah, it would have like the two monitors and then this sort of like this plane that would be sitting at like a 39 degree angle or so kind of from you. So you could set up a bunch of books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing. Yeah, as a general rule, it was one of the, like the products that I kept finding myself

gravitating towards in our free time there was like anything that had nothing to do with AI because anyone who could find any reason to stick AI in something, there's people selling like battery generators that are like AI assisted and it's like, what do you mean? It means it cuts off the power when it's full.

Well, that's not AI. That's just a battery working better. Like, come on guys, it's this thing the tech industry does that has been exposed by a lot of the products we've seen this year, many of whom are just absolute nonsense, like the we-head thing that hideous chatbot that looks like a broken human face and just deeply off-putting. That said, there was a really cool product that I actually liked the AI use application. So there's a company called Celestron

that makes, they're calling it a home observatory and it looks like a big telescope. It's not cheap, it's not insanely expensive for a telescope, mind you, but it's not inexpensive. And it is like a motorized telescope that it uses like AI, like some sort of AI program in order to cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the images that you're getting so that you can actually get clear images of galaxies and other planets from your backyard. And it hooks into a phone or a tablet or computer

wirelessly, it actually generates its own Wi-Fi network. So you can still use it even if you don't have internet. But what you can do is you can control it from an iPad and you could port the feed directly to your TV and you could have a group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer to snort, and like looking at different galaxies and shit in space. And that was pretty fucking cool. And actually like an actual application of machine learning that I thought was positive. Yeah, you can have like your little at home star parties. I dug in a little bit more on like how AI gets used there, and it seemed like it was mostly part of the image processing

before controls get set to the user. They have other adjustments such as brightness, contrast, that kind of thing, but it sounds like it does some image processing as part of its AI capabilities. Yeah, that was neat. Again, not a cheap product, but actually something that's seeing it used in Prestume, and I could see wanting to have that, and I could also see a clear bit.

My roommate has telescopes and stuff, and there's usually a light pollution as too much of a pain in the ass and fucking even in Portland, which is not the worst city for light pollution in this country to use them very well. So something like that, and also just being able to easily drop it onto your TV and like hang out with friends. Like if I had access to something like that back when I was doing hallucinogens,

I think it would have used it a lot. Yeah, that sounds promising. Speaking of things that I would have used a lot as a young man, Garrison, you wanna tell us about the hand job machine? Sure, so there's this company. Oh, I just realized what you said. Took you a second there, huh?

So there's this company in Norway called Handy. They make interactive sex toys. They started by targeting the male sex toy demographic or as they I actually liked that they that they actually more often said it the penis demographic which yeah, which was nice. I appreciate that. Yeah, but anyway, it's It's a little thing that you can, you can slide this loop in and it goes up like it looks like a nice coffee thermostat. It has kind of like a little tube that has like a clear plastic penis prism. Yeah, it has one that has like a stroke or sleeve attached in and you can control like the speed

and vibration just on the little like thermos looking thing. But the real features of the handy is that it also has hands-free control. That you can hook this thing up via an app to many different sources. You can hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer. You can hook this up to movies. You can hook this up to an Amazon Alexa, if that's your thing. And the sounds will impact how the stoker moves. One of the more promising applications,

which really also opens the field of music, is that you could hook it up to your Spotify or something. And the music and the beats of the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker. So we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms, which opens up a whole new category for the Grammys. I think there's a lot of trial and error. I think 100 Gex is definitely going to be up there.

I think Nickelback is going to make a comeback. This is going to be the Billy Joel Renaissance. Just people spilling ropes over Downeaster Alexa. That's Christ. They also just launched a second product called I think just the O, which is just a more classic, small handheld vibrator. Similarly, it's based on actual, like sound vibrations, not a motorized vibration.

So it similarly can hook up to music and that changes the way it feels. So we have not been able to test these yet because they didn't actually have free copies. They only had free sleeves. They do give Garrison a penis sheet. They only had the free sleeves, but the actual device is $200,

which is not super expensive, considering this style of like sex toy that is kind of standard. Yeah, that was one of the more professional booths, actually. Yeah. And see, yes. They did. And they did a really good job.

This is a good time for me to tell my favorite masturbation machine story. Oh, boy. So there's a product. Oh, boy. You know, for the penis having demographic, there's not as many sex toys traditionally, not as many at least fun ones out there. It's a little bit of a bear in wasteland, but there is the fleshlight. And if you haven't seen a fleshlight, maybe you've heard about them, it does look like a big,

heavy plastic flashlight, and you unscrew the top, and there's a fake vagina in there, right? Some of them are shaped like asses, some of them are sexes. Sometimes they're a butt and sometimes they're a mouth too. Yeah, oh yeah, there's mouths too. And I once had a friend who got in some trouble with the law and we had to drive to their house and grab a bunch of things in their house and throw them away because we weren't sure if the police were going to be showing up.

And so after we did that that night, it was a very depressed, very sad night. We all got extremely drunk. And three of the four of us are standing out on the front porch in front of the house that we're at. And then the fourth person in the room, who was like roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes out with the arrested person's fleshlight. And for reasons known only to them and God hurls that at us. Now we're in like this is a we're in Richardson, Texas and like it's kind of this

walled off by concrete bricks, little front porch area. And we all bolt to get away from the fleshlight and it hits the brick wall and the plastic case shatters. And then the thing hits the ground and the fake plastic silicone vagina inside of it slithers out like a living creature, probably lubricated by some sort of substance. And it was one of the most unsettling moments of my life. Wow, I'm really glad you could share that with us, Robert. But the sound was incredible. That's great. Yeah, it sounded a lot like,

if you've ever seen that episode of Always Sunny where Danny DeVito gets birthed from a couch like covered in sweat, it sounded a lot like that, I imagine. And we call that experience the fleshlites dividend. The fleshlite dividend, that's right. Now, speaking of jacking off, the next product we're gonna talk about is jackery,

a company that makes some really actually pretty cool, like survival equipment, specifically like solar battery, solar panel and battery setups. And we're gonna talk about that because it's definitely like, of the products we saw here, the most in our milieu as like,

the world is falling apart show. So we're going to get to that, but first, here's some ads. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ We're back and we're talking about Jackery, which, it's fun. One of the things I appreciate about this is that the hand job machine could have been called Jackery,

or the company could have been called Jackery. And likewise, the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have been called handy, because it's handy to have a solar battery around when you're camping. Yes, interesting. Interesting stuff. A lot of thoughts there.

Yeah, thoughts to be thought. That's an oddly, that Venn diagram crossovers is closer than I thought it would be. Interesting. Interesting stuff. A lot of thoughts there. Yeah. The thoughts to be thought. Oddly, that Venn diagram crossovers is closer than I thought it would be. So Jackery is a cut. I would recommend googling their stuff. There's a lot, the field of solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now. And most of the batteries you're going to be made like one of the same two or three factories. It's basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies, batteries,

and a lot of them are very unsafe. There was a company that sent me some review samples, like a whole solar generator and battery last year that I was going to kind of do a piece about, you know, surviving on a solar generator. And then a month after it arrived, I was still testing it. It came out that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses

because the batteries were insane. Oh, no! Yeah. So you want to be careful with this stuff. Jackery is one of the, I have had good luck with some of their products. They seem to be of a high build quality. I have not heard horror stories about them. When you go to the,

the, the, their booth, the people there seem to be genuinely knowledgeable and the way in which they set it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge about the product and like what people want out of it. So, one of the things, they do have some really large, including some solar batteries with solar panel generators that are large enough to run like a deep freeze, which is really

cool being able to do that. And the setup they had specifically was a, like an actual like serious like solid like not one of those folding panel setups that goes on the roof of your car or truck alongside with like a 10th like one of those via truck talk tents for over landing and then plugs into you know either they're 1,000 or like 2,000 watt solar generator or yeah solar or a battery generators and just everything about the way it was set up seemed really practical. It seemed durable. It didn't feel like something was going to fall apart. Yeah. I can see it being like a legitimate, like even outside of the car, because that's more or less like

a hobby. It's sort of thing. But having one of these generators that you can actually run your fridge and your freezer and your lights in your house, all have like, they had some like an outage microwave stuff, cooking implements. Yeah, I think that stuff you might take for like, like, you know, like a weekend mountain trip or something. The main, the main roof-mounted panel, I think was able to pull 400 watts and then it had two sliding up panels that can pull 300 watts so that they could get I Now in a in a sunny day, they said you get like 900 watts an hour. Yeah exactly Really good for my 100 to a thousand watts an hour

Which is which is quite impressive and they have all the batteries to store it and by far I think Jackery is the most Consistent company in this field that I routinely see high praise for because the field of like portable solar, solar charging is kind of a little bit sketchy sometimes. Yes. Stuff can easily break, things can be really easily over marked. Like I had a solar panel to charge my iPad that really only lasted like two weeks and it just completely stopped working.

But I've only heard good things about Jackery. I have not tested them out myself. I know Robert has some of the battery equipment, but hopefully we'll be able to get our hands on some of that this year. They also had a lot of different form factors of the same types of products. So a lot of smaller versions of things

that seem to be really good if you need a more modular setup. That was version. Yeah, they had large ones that you could basically have plugged into your house in case you lose power for a small period of time in order to ensure that you don't actually have a period where the power's out.

And then they had a lot of really good camping, sort of like off-grid battery options. It's just cool. Take a look at the, if you are someone who is in the kind of financial situation that you can prep in that way, where you're buying solar equipment and batteries, which definitely is never super cheap, right? I would recommend checking them out at least as you kind of do your research. There's like two more products, I think I want to mention.

The first is SHIFT. This is a company I was already familiar with, but I got to try these out. They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their use case for this is like factory workers. It makes them be able to walk and move. They said two and a half times faster. Considerably faster.

I was able to walk at a pretty decent speed. You can lock the wheels if you need to do more delicate mobility tasks. Fill upstairs, stairs, ladders. That was one way to even lock and unlock the shoes themselves from being used. There's a certain gesture you had to make by. You lift up your heel, I think it was, and it locks the shoes so the wheels don't kind of. You lift up your heel and twist and it... Yeah, the boot itself had a hinge that was just under the ball of your foot.

Yeah, so I've seen these before. They look kind of fun, but they're for kind of factory work. So it's kind of a mixed bag where the device worked quite well. And it took me like, just like maybe like one minute to get used to it, then I was really smooth. But the actual operational use case they're envisioning is like being able to get more productivity out of their workers. The same amount of money. The same amount of money.

For the same amount of money. So like, yeah. I think Robert made the pretty good comparison. Like last year, we tried out this exoskeleton, which also, you know, they talked a bit about, a little bit about productivity, specifically for like, again, factory workers. But that exoskeleton was also designed to help that worker

not damage their body. Like it was to make sure that they actually can can stay safer and not to as much damage their knees or joints their back versus these little roller skate type shoes. Yeah, I've no such have no such ability. I mean, it made you go faster kind of like one of those walkways that you have in the airport. Who doesn't want to go a little bit faster? Feel like you're born. Yeah, that was the way the guy

wrapped it to where he was like, we have these factory workers. They're like, I have the best job in the company now. It's so fun skating around on these things. Like, nobody said that to you, bro. Why? Don't lie. It's a nice thought.

He also claimed that there's not been one fall or injury with these things on, which I just, I do not believe, because I almost fell down to testing these out. I'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes, like it's very easy for your way to get away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels. Like it can be, controlling it actually is on wheels. Again, it can be controlling it actually is more intuitive than I thought it would be, but mistakes happen. And those sorts of big claims are a little bit sketchy.

I found myself kind of waving my arms a little bit in front of me to keep my balance. I wasn't like 100% confident on them. Yeah. Yeah, just watching you both, I could see like, well yeah, people are going to get hurt. Now I don't, I am sure, because it seems to be easy enough to use, that I suspect it would, you could really get a lot of extra money out of your workers as an employer using these things. But at the cost of some of them are going to like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves.

Which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil, especially at the show where everybody is like talking about the potential of AI to eliminate tens and millions of jobs. Not really, it doesn't really scan. And I think we're still putting this on the good episode because like they worked in a way that was technically impressive. We just found it kind of upsetting that they were bragging about like you can get more money out of you're already exploited workforce with these. Yeah. But I could see someone just getting these and because they would allow you, if you like, yeah, if you live in a walkable city, you'd be a walkable neighborhood,

it can make your commute times much faster and still probably safer than like you less risk maybe than like a bike or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. I want to see somebody wear those at a roller skating rink. Yeah, that's called that's called shift robotics. I believe they're based out of Texas. Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about for both mine and Robert's job, we use a lot of computer screens. I'm looking in Robert's hotel room right now where we're recording. He has a laptop hooked up to a second monitor. I have a very similar setup. I have a laptop and a secondary monitor on my desktop. I have like three or four monitors,

always running at the same time, just because of the absurdity of what I work sometimes entails. So it could be hard to get things done on a single screen. And we saw this one product that looked just like a very like thick keyboard with a touchpad, but it had these AR glasses attached. Now, AR is a tricky field.

We tried a lot of AR stuff last year. Most of it, some of it was okay, some of it was a little bit finicky, but this company was called Cytful. And what this basically was is that it was a fully functioning computer, but instead of just having a regular display, it has a display built into these glasses. The product itself looks like just the bottom half of a laptop, like the keyboard part that holds the PCU and shit, with this weird, flappy thing attached to the keyboard part

that holds a set of glasses that are plugged in directly to the laptop. That's how it looks. And when you put the glasses on, you get like four screens that pop up. The screens aren't too big, they're not too small, you can change the size by using the touchpad. And this required a lot less like a focusing. Usually when you put on AR glasses,

you have to kind of dial in the focal length to make them look right. But this was all very clear, the text was easy to read, changing from one screen to another was pretty easy. They had a pass-through mode, like a lot of good AR does. They had a mode where you can lock the screen in some place. You can turn your head and they don't move.

They had another version where you, just with like keystrokes, you could turn your head and the screens follow you. So it was a pretty, it was a pretty useful device. Yeah, you could press a button and it would go, the screens would disappear like if you're walking while using it, you could press a button and it would go clear so you wouldn't see that but you could see where you were walking. Pass through, yeah. Like I typed an email or two and like did some Googling on it and I very quickly adapted

to the screens being virtual, but still using a physical keyboard. Yeah. We didn't get like motion sick with it. It was not. Now, I think this is like either the first or second iteration of this product. First. There is the first to market. Yeah.

I think there is some ways to improve. It runs its own Android operating system, which, you know, if you're trying to download applications, the fact that I can't run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, you know, that could be a bit of a limitation. It only had like 200, 250 gigs of work. It wasn't really a full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch.

A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch.

A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch.

A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. A full-latch. And yeah, I, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna keep our eye on it. Yeah, I wouldn't buy the first gen of this thing. It's about $2,200, which is like, upper, mid-level cost for a laptop. It, my, my issue is that based on how expensive it is, the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price. Certainly the fact that, you know, I, I can act like I have four monitors, uh, wherever I go. That, that is, that is very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to be a little bit more powerful,

especially with how many tabs I have open it at all times, having only eight gigs of RAM, just will not cut it. But I'm certainly, certainly hopeful that we'll be able to see small improvements going forward. Indeed, yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web first device instead of anything else. That makes sense, yeah. Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, and I think in terms of

like it's actual efficacy. Very similar to a Chromebook, like operation wise. But my hope is that like the kind of technology they've developed, it will get, you know, if it's successful, they'll make more. Now, I do kind of worry about how successful it will be because like Garrison and I were both like, oh, this is perfect for what we do.

But we have a very specific use case for our machines. And I'm not sure how many other people are in our position, but I was really impressed with just like how well it immediately worked. Yeah, no, I was happy with it. You can hook up an external monitor if you want to. So that's nice. And I am a glasses wearer.

And so one step that they had for me is that they took my glasses and approximated my prescription. Oh, that's nice. And I am a glasses wearer. And so one step that they had for me is that they took my glasses and approximated my prescription. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing or like the glasses that you're wearing. That way I could actually use it

without wearing my prescription glasses. Nice. Yeah, and that was rude. It's stuff like that that lets you know the people making something didn't just aren't just like trying to rush Some shit out the door to make money like oh you put some thought into that motherfucker I appreciate that and this all leads us Be easily the best product of the entire show honestly the only one really worth talking about garrison

Will you hand me the flying car? brochure so Jesus Christ this is the CES of flying cars, Robo Taxis is the term we heard a lot. We went to a panel that was like serious people in the Robo Taxi industry, which they admitted does not exist, by the way.

Advanced air mobility. Advanced air mobility. It was the acronym AAM. Yeah, no, there are several companies that are using effectively, like these are, some of them are like ultra lights. There was one of the companies that came here bragged, like you can buy, buy a plane that

doesn't require a pilot's license because it's so light, but it's still a plane, which seems like a horrible idea to me. But there are some real companies who are like testing out electronic arrow taxies. Some of these are, this is not vaporware. These products exist. Now, what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people to do this. The panelists were like, openly like, we want this to be an industry, but first, it has to be legal.

Like, right now, we don't know. They're still trying to figure out what the rules are going to be. They're hoping by the end of this year, the FAA puts out like a temporary rule set about how aerobotaxes work and also how they called them vertiports, which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft. They bet at least the one that we saw on the show floor looks like a Lamborghini with a massive drone, like a DJI type of. Yeah. And that's the one I want to talk about because all of those were real products. a massive drone like a DJI type. Touch to the top. And that's the one I want to talk about because all of those were real products.

The X-raying air-roads. This has not been a product in my opinion. It's absolutely not. It's built as a low altitude air mobility exploring. Yeah, it looks like a huge drone like you'd buy at a fucking best buy attached to a Lamborghini. And apparently the whole drone part, all of the rotors fold back into the body

when you're driving it as a car. Like a transformer. Like a transformer. And the reason why I say this is the best product in CES is not that I think it would work or be safe because we talk to people. To people and the person who was told to us is their technical expert.

And neither of them can answer if it had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably. Is it what you want to hear? No, you should have that answer. That's not a tough question. That's not a gotcha. And your car have airbags.

First the PR guy that we were talking to was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical aspects of this device. And then when we talked to the technical person, they too didn't know very much about it. No, like, it's just isn't very reassuring. Like, and I even tried to do it the easy way where I was like, well, I know ultra light aircraft, you don't need a pilot's license for.

So do you need, is this qualify? And they were basically said, we don't know. We don't need a pilot's license for. So do you need, is this qualify? And they were basically said, we don't know, we don't know yet. Yeah, it'll take some kind of license probably. What kind of range does it get? They said 20 kilometers by air, about 20 minutes per charge. Yeah. Which seems like a dangerously short amount of time to be flying you and a loved one potentially in a thing. It is, it is pretty low altitude. I think they said it maxes out at around 100 meters.

100 meters, no, they said 100 meters. 100 meters, sorry. So it's really not for going up super high. And when we went to the more like expert panel, a lot of these use cases for this, they imagine is kind of replacing helicopters in cities. There's like Medevac use cases, but a lot of people were talking about like testing these things out in New York where rich people use helicopters to get around the city.

And this is what they want to replace them with because these can be purely electric. These can be much quieter. So that was what a lot of what they were talking about. However, again, most of the panel was just them complaining that the government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry. Garrison, I got you, you're not aware of this. Toppy just handed me the, the flyer we got from them that I don't think either of us read through here's their story oh oh boy sail beyond limits 2013 Zaudelli ignited erot with a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks of Harry Potter and

Tantrable wonders a tribe of daring minds set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric marvels that could take humans to the skies Through tireless exploration the first prototype, the flying motorcycle gracefully. This is all a Harry Potter thing. This is some madman from China fell so in love with Harry Potter that he made a death car. I'm back around the loving it again. Average tech industry guy. Brain poisoning my Harry Potter creates death device. I feel like this guy and the plant pet's guy

are probably like pretty tight. They're both the same kind of guy. Why is there somebody apocalyptic tech based around Harry Potter? What's going on in this industry? And it is. So the other brochure they had, it shows like the flying car, the modular flying car, which looks like a cyber truck. It has a head like, you know, you can get a truck, you can put like a bed cap on the bed. It's basically like a big, it's

like a cyber truck with one of those. But the bed cap opens up to deploy like a quadcopter thing that human beings can ride in. Kind of like sound wave in transformal. Just like sound wave. And which is like, it's a cool idea from like a kid's point of view. I think the idea here is that, you know, John McAfee used to do this thing where he would live in the desert with a cult of weirdos and they would fly around on gliders until he got his nephew and an old man killed in a glider crash. This is the dream of that Harry Potter fan.

I mean, the reason why I'm actually very pro this product is because the only people that are going to use these are really rich. Yes. And I think there's a high chance this could take out a lot of them. This has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires of anything since the death of. Like, we can- We can't- We can't-

We can't run out of 100 meters in the air. Just crashing out of the sky in Santa Monica in San Francisco. Billionaires just taking out all lanes of traffic. I met him, I met him in a walkie-talkie park one day and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and lands in like a two million dollar drone. The prototype that they say they got to fly was two tons. Wow,

you could really do a lot of damage with that. Well, this is all quite exciting. Keep your eye on the sky folks. Maybe wear a helmet for a while until this all shakes out Like there's the story in the news right now that like some dude in Portland had the fucking door of that Alaska Airlines flight in his Backyard and I can't wait until that's like a third of Elon Musk Just like Lance and someone's yard like two million dollars. Oh, yeah, yeah, and it by the way if if fucking a billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a new punch bowl with their skull. I'm going to harvest their bones. That's what we call the billionaire's dividends. That's the billionaire's dividend.

Well, all right, everybody. Anyone top of you have anything to plug? Oh, yeah. You can find me on Twitter or X at CU Timora or if you want to learn a little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work. You can see my work at topymora.com. You can also see her work in my book A Brief History of Ice, which she did all the illustrations or in my book After the Revolution, where she did all the illustrations or in the sequel, which

will come out when I finished those last two fucking chapters, like three years from now, huh? Or in Vegas, yeah, tomorrow. Top, Laura. All right, well, we're done. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media.

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