Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 165

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  Mutual Aid & the LA Fires CES 2025: AI Toys Are Coming For Your Kids From Anti-Satanic Crusaders to Congresswoman: Tracing an Anti-Trans Harassment Campaign  CES 2025: The Best And Worst Tech Products Coming Soon The Years of Lead Paint (Or Why There Will Be More Tesla Car Bombs) You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going to go on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference. Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025. I'll be joined by David Roth at Defecta and the writer Edward Ongweiso Jr. with guest appearances from Behind the Bastards Evans, it could happen here's Gare Davis and a few surprise guests throughout the show.

Listen to better offline on the I heart radio app, apple podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. John Stewart is back at the Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the show's correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives

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Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Coolzone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hi everyone. Welcome to It Can Happen Here. It's me, James, today with a terrible cold,

as you can probably tell. But still very important to listen today because I'm talking to Andreina, an organizer from K-Town for All up in LA. We're going to talk about the fires in LA and the mutual aid response and what you can do to help. So welcome to the show, Andreina. Thank you for having me, James. Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now. So to begin with, like in case this has missed people and there's a lot of news happening right now, can you explain what's been going on in LA with respect to the fires for the

last two or three days? So about three or four days ago, we got a warning that we were going to be experiencing high winds up to 50 miles per hour, which is nuts. And they were going to be coming from the desert. So this is just like a barrage of hot wind. So we were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because you know, manmade structures that people are surviving with can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear that wind here in Southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly because any little, you know, a cigarette butt, an electrical spark, when it's this dry,

it's enough to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened. There are about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread massively by these giant winds everywhere. So the embers are being picked up. Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but the wind itself has prevented the big water tankers from flying, which has led to the massive devastation that you saw in the palisades and other areas. The entire water fleet being grounded for a while just meant that it was burning with no control, relying on on the ground firefighters. So what we've seen is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think there is a death tally, thankfully very low in

about 10 ish. I think I've heard from this morning with confirmation, but yeah, that's that's what we're facing right now. Yeah, it's pretty devastating, like whole neighborhoods are gone, right? I think I thought like 2000 structures have already been burned. And like, as you said, if people aren't in the United States or unfamiliar with how fire is fought, like out here in the Western United States, it's a lot of air dropping fire retardant and air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to get enough water to where it needs to be. And I believe at one point they actually ran out of water in water towers, right? I've been palisades. Carly Sussman Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which is terrifying to think of. And we were warned, I'm in the Koreatown neighborhood,

we were warned about low water pressure. And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles, particularly in that region, are being warned to boil water and that their water is unsafe to drink right now. Matthew 10 Yeah, I've seen that too. There was a water boil warning for lots of places. So as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I think I saw 150,000 odd people have been displaced now? Is that right? Is that a good number? I saw something large like that of just the people that have been evacuated.

Right north of me was the Sunset Fire, and that was very concerningly close to the Korea 10 neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires because we're so in the concrete jungle, like we're so insulated. I think that's the closest we've come to devastation. And we were really stressed out last night, just keeping an eye on the news, because that's, you know, not even two miles away from the core of the densest neighborhood of Los Angeles. Right. Yeah. I guess, again, if people aren't familiar, like fires destroy property and kill people every year here. And like climate change has meant that they have become worse and

worse. But in the middle of a city, you're generally not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property, right? This is a very unique situation to see huge parts of a city burning down. Yeah, particularly the Palisades, which is historically a significantly wealthy neighborhood, a den of celebrity and Hollywood elites, seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point that you have wealth that insulates you from the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes so far. I saw that there was a couple of wealthy people on Twitter begging for private firefighting forces to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that are talking about tax evasion and how smart they are to do real estate, you know, maneuvering

to not pay into the social system that helps in these times. Clearly, we're severely underfunded and severely under managed when it comes to the government stepping in during these emergencies. Yeah. And like, that's something I want to address because I think in every natural disaster that I've covered, the reason it becomes a disaster, I guess, is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people. And in almost every case, it's people who have to step up and look after one another. So we should talk about the response of the LA city

and county governments, and then I'd love to talk about the mutual aid response after that. Yeah, from what we've seen here in K-Town, if you weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks that were out talking to all of our on-house neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds, first of all, didn't know what was going on. They saw the sky, they assumed there was a fire nearby, but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and that we were

generally threatened as well. They didn't have any supplies. And in some areas of Los Angeles, we've heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued. So the city has continued throwing away tents from the people living on the streets. And then for the house people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that they've set up. Pan Pacific Park is one of them for Hollywood. There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like, but it seems to be, you know, a hodgepodge of, you know, disorganization and a lot of, you know, mutual aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct people and gather the supplies. I have not heard of, you know, a very formalized system.

There is no word on any kind of significant assistance for people who have lost their homes at the moment. I don't know if the Red Cross is going to set a staging zone up or anything, but I do know that the people who are setting up places for people to go, food, water, even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers. I'm in this chat group, Mutual Aid LA, that spurred literally just on signal the day that the fire started that has a thousand people on it mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one area of the city to

the other. I have this person who needs a place to stay, who's got a list of places that are open. Because when you have disasters this big, you need help quickly. And bureaucracy just doesn't, you know, that's not built for that. Yeah, it's not. And like we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond like in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to. And it's really, it's wonderful to see people picking up Slack. Like, of course it is.

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

Yeah. And this is something we see repeatedly, you know, it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but when it did rain, we had historical rains. Last year in particular, we had a cold front where folks die every time. And we know folks are going to die every time it rains here in LA. We have more people that die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than New York and San Francisco combined every year, because hypothermia actually doesn't require it to be freezing this set in. It just requires you to be in around 60 degrees and be wet, which is very common on the streets here of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their skin against cold concrete, you know,

over the night while it's raining. And our electeds know this. When I first started doing this work, there was a slogan that we were chanting for a day in LA, and that was the number of unhoused people that died every day. And now we're at about six or seven. We request, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, request the coroner's report every year of how many people died. And that number is only growing. And the government knows this. They know every time we have a heat wave that there are 70,000 people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars. They know that during the winter, you know, people are out there in the cold and the rain. And I talk to people who aren't

into the organizing space and they ask me like, well, aren't there, you know, insert service here that you think there should be? You know, right now during the fires, like, aren't there vans picking people up and taking them to shelter? And it's like, that would be wonderful when there's not, there's never any vans picking people up, you know. Even when they open up cooling shelters and warming shelters, the number one barrier we hear from people on the streets is how would I get there? And when I get there, they make me not bring my stuff in, so it's all going to get stolen. There's just all of these barriers that the city is just completely, you know, purposely

neglecting. They could talk to any of us on how to run a successful, you know, warming or cooling shelter. They don't, you know, they have no interest in what we have to say. In fact, our city council person here in K-Town doesn't respond to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been working,

just with the knowledge that we don't have the support of this agency. And in fact, they're our opposition. We're the ones having to organize around them and what they're doing. Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here. Like every time it rains, people will die every time we have a heat wave. I remember they found the remains of an unhoused person a couple of years ago and they thought

the person had been burned like by fire and it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, just to like give an anecdote. It was, I think above a hundred degrees in town. It was so hot. And I was in the river bed. Like I had this big insulated backpack to give people cold water and just like dozens of people were in terrible distress.

And yeah, there was no presence of police, fire, anyone to help. Right? Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities, and people are still unsafe and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies, because these government agencies, the same ones that you say that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto, you know, like a better situation in life. Yeah, and I think there's this sense of like apathy that has built. or the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto a better situation in life. Yeah. And I think there's this sense of apathy that has built, and rightfully so, from the people

that live on the streets where we've relayed messages that we've heard like, hey, 211 says they have 100 shelter beds tonight. Call and see if you can get in. And they're like, okay, you know, like, I'll give it a shot, you know, and it's very well received because we understand the amount of disappointment these people have gone through. When they do the Care Plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name for when they throw all their stuff away, when they show up and they do Care Plus, they show up with a social worker first, which if I was a social worker, I'd

be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is that right before they throw away everything that a non-house person owns, they send in a lone social worker to write their names and maybe their numbers down and tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get back to them and then they have all of their belongings thrown away. I can't imagine the harm that has done for just trusting services, even when they're available, accessing them and then giving them your information. I have one person who, rightfully so, told me they have trauma about filling out forms because they've done this 300 times.

They said something incredible, they've been counting about how many times they've filled the same forms out to have it lead nowhere. And I can't imagine, you know, that kind of resilience. Now with this devastation, there's going to be a lot of homeowners who are going to experience that firsthand. I'm seeing a lot of people that are homeless for the first time ever in their lives, like in their late 50s. These are people that have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have lived their

whole life as you're supposed to in the United States. And then in their elder years, some sort of disaster or social security doesn't pay anymore. And they are severely shocked when I tell them what the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've had people ask me, like, where do I go to sign up for free housing? And I have to tell them, you know, the wait list for vouchers is 15 years long and it's a lottery. The list is closed because it's so full.

You can apply to a senior housing, but that's about a 10-year wait. You know, I have to be the one to tell them that. And that's sort of shock, I think, is going to be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried to access services before. Yeah, definitely. Let's take a little break here for some advertisements and then we'll come back. All right, we're back. So yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in Southern California will understand that there is not a safety net.

And that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people. Let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another because I think that's what always happens in these situations. So let's talk about the mutual aid effort. Maybe you could talk about some of the groups, talk about some of the things you've been doing, and then I want to get onto how people can help if they're in town and how people can help if they are a long way away. Yeah. In LA, we have a very robust network of mutual aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via this government. I think a lot of them have started up to step in.

There's no denying all over LA that there's this crisis because you walk outside of your house and there are people sleeping on your street. You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city. And we, in times of crisis, you know, will spark up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands of people overnight that are willing to jump in and get their hands dirty, to coalesce and find resources.

Here's where we're buying masks, this store is out, don't go to this one, go to that one. Who's reimbursing people for gas, et cetera, et cetera. And it's normal people. I have a full-time job. My friends here in K-Town for All, some are teachers, some are in the movie industry, some are random lawyers that will take their time out to do this work. I think that it's beautiful in the sense that we get people the help they need, and it's never enough, which is crushing. Here in K-Town, we give supplies to about 400 or so unhoused people a week minimum, and that is hygiene supplies, tents, blankets.

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

because they were the only five people holding up We Want Shelter signs, and just started doing distribution themselves. And I think that's one thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's not as intimidating as it seems to start one of these projects. It's literally you and a couple friends who decide that you're going to do something. And you acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never be able to meet the need because what we need is a government who cares about people. But in the meanwhile, we're going to do the best we can. And the lives of the, you know, now

400 or so people that we see every week are a little better because we decide to do that. Yeah, I think that's really important to say that like, it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I get almost every week, like, how do I start a mutual aid group? But like, if you can make a sandwich, then you can, you can start a mutual aid group, like just go and feed people who are hungry. If someone's cold, give them a blanket. Like it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to read 17 books, you know, and be like starting a 501c3 and stuff. You just need to do

things. And I think especially like we're going into a new administration, we're going to see the state being more hostile to people who are already marginalized. And like, the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and to get into the streets and just do something. It doesn't matter as you say, you won't be able to do everything. Not right away. Maybe one day we will, but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing and I guarantee there's also much better for you and your like, I feel so much better when I'm able to help people.

I wouldn't be able to do the job I do at the border if I wasn't also able to help people like it, it helps me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess, or like we're doing something about it at least. What are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fires? Like what are the needs that are arising and how are people meeting them? Yeah. Well, K-Town for All focuses here in the K-Town neighborhood. And what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People are sitting and it's literally raining ash in some areas and are sitting in the soot. So there's that. There's basic tent and tarp gathering, meals. So many emergency services shut down during disasters, you know, makes

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

homes for a lot of the found dogs and cats. It's just, I mean, I can't even list the amount of people right now that are in their vehicles doing drop-offs to the sidewalk project. There's a big skid row distribution point that is building up crowdsourcing insulin, things that you don't think about that people ran out of their house that they need to live. They don't have time to go get a prescription at a primary care provider. We need albuterol that people are having asthma attacks.

So there's these kind of burdens that mutual aid projects get around because people, A, don't have to fill out any forms. They don't have to wait. If we have it, you're going to be handed it. And you know, even medical providers as part of our projects have become a really big support as people on the streets are often very disabled. We have a lot of folks with diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has a free clinic called All

Power Clinic, and they offer free medical care and come with us on our routes here in K-Town to offer free treatment for folks. And I think that's something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs. Homelessness rose 18% in the last year, and that's only been the case every year since we started counting. There is no way this administration is going to institute rent control or anything that keeps people from being displaced. One mutual aid project that I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the LA tenants union mobilizing to care for their members,

checking in on their disabled members, these kind of community based organizations where people know people, they know who to check up on, they know who's vulnerable. Those kinds of organizations are invaluable in emergencies like these. Yeah, definitely. And like, I hope one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities, right? And we can, hopefully folks who are finding themselves dependent on mutual aid for the first time

can realize that they can participate in that. And I know there are folks already who have lost their homes, who are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing people and stuff. Yeah, and I think we say this all the time in the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being homeless than you are to be a billionaire. And I think this is one of the most direct examples. Like these people might have been well off maybe a month or

two ago, and then now they have zero. They're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe five years, if some of them. And hopefully, they end up recovering, but I hope they don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a great equalizer. And the people that show their faces, they're not the politicians, they're not the lobbyists, they're not the Democratic Party, you know, TM. It's your neighbor who has a mask for you, it's me, someone random from down the block who got a couple friends together who has water for you, you know. Like that's who comes through and that's who you need to care for all the time including your unhoused neighbors That are around you all the time who live in your community and who face this emergency every day

You know, they don't know where they're gonna sleep every night They don't know where the next meal is coming from every day. They get their stuff destroyed by the state You know regularly if not once a week, very frequently. And I hope this is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter, you know, the basics. Yeah. Talking of food, water, and shelter, those are things I need as well. And so to pay for them, I have to pivot to ads now.

OK, we're back. I think that was a really good plug for like why mutual aid is important. And hopefully there are people who are listening, right? Or people who are finding themselves for the first time interested in helping seeing a crisis. A lot of people like will ask me if they can come help at the border and of course you can, but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there.

And obviously that's very true in LA right now. So I want to like give some resources, some ways people can help. If people are listening in LA, what are some, like I know there are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete things they could do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people. What are some things they can do?

You're free to follow Ktown4all on Instagram. We are constantly uploading on our stories year round, fundraisers, resource requests, GoFundMe's, et cetera. We really try to stay connected with the LA Mutual Aid Network. And honestly, once you follow one of us, you kind of follow all of us because we're very supportive of each other's efforts. Mutual Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine that gets published every month that has a list of mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come out on physical outreach with us, which we do on Saturdays, every Saturday except

the first Saturday of the month when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us, you know, connect with others. You're free to help us financially. But we also, you know, funny you mentioned this, James, but if you DM us and you're like, hey, I want to talk to someone about starting a project in my region, I'm so happy to hop on Zoom with you, tell you how we do our distribution, tell you how we make our maps of encampments, tell you how we fund and outsource. Always happy to find that knowledge. And people message us all the time, can we start a neighborhood for all chapter?

And we're like, we're so honored that you would do that. Please don't ask, but you're totally welcome to. So we have Pasadena for All that is doing great work. And Pasadena for All is definitely always in need of support. They are in a huge disaster zone. Alta Dina, Pasadena, like all those areas are been evacuated. Palms Mutroid. But yeah, if you want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram, Ktown for all.

Same Twitter, same on Blue Sky, and we'll hopefully be your input into the LA Mutroid scene. We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work. And while we focus in the K-town neighborhood, LA is a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention, we'll always be the ones to uplift those. Yeah, that's really cool.

I think it's really important that we share. One of my friends, when we were doing border stuff, made a website where we documented all the stuff we did so that it was open source and available to people like how we built shelters and how we cooked and yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Like we can all help each other get that start and not make the mistakes that we all made. So that's really cool that people can reach out to you. What about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money? They want to help and they've got money they want to share. Yeah, you're always welcome to Venmo us Ktown4all. Same on Venmo. We have a PayPal link. We have

a website Ktown4all.org. We are 501c3. If you'd like to donate in our, you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way, feel free to DM us. We just got that figured out. But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on material goods. We don't have any employees. We don't have any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks in baby wipes usually when we get stock donations and things like that. And honestly, we prefer it that way just because, you know, we know

what nonprofit requirements are like and that kind of burden that that places on mutual aid projects and we're trying to avoid them. So every dime still goes to supplies. And I know every mutual aid project, JTown Action in Japantown as well operates in a very similar model. I would just suggest people get plugged in to mutual aid LA. They follow us on Instagram. Feel free to send any money. We're constantly on our stories, uploading GoFundMe's and Venmo's and stuff. I really appreciate their help, you know, out of the country and hope that one day

orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we live in a great world. Yeah, that'd be nice. Is there anything else, like do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe help you with? We're always looking for staples. So those are tents and tarps constantly. Those are often the most expensive items people have to purchase. Tents go about $30 to $40 each one, and the government throws a lot of them away every week. So those items, feel free to always DM me if you have some that you would like to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs are really good at building connections directly with vendors, and we usually get like a discount in buying in bulk.

So I would really love to shake people from their fear of donating cash. Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an item because you know that that's the item that's given out, but sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand of those tents and your dollar goes farther. So, you know, tents, blankets, and again, don't be afraid to do this by yourself. Like you can go to Home Depot and buy a tent and hand it to someone. You can go to Home Depot and buy masks right now and hand them to someone. You don't have to wait for a group like this to be around and to help, particularly

if your neighborhood needs you. Yeah. I think that's a really good message. It's a good place to end. Just to remind everyone, it's at Ktown4ALL on Instagram and Ktown4ALL on Venmo, right? Yep. Great, thanks so much.

Thank you so much. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference. Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews and special panels covering everything

from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Rothert Defecta and the writer Edward Ongweiso Jr. with appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from.

And check out betteroffline.com. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with the Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more joined by the sharp voices of the shows, correspondents and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups,

this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed? Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl, would you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shape-shifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

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purpose. We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose. We make it this big pie in the sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself? There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and

rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast from CES, the Consumer Electronic Show 2025. I am here with my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis. We have been trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention Center all day. Garrison, today you started earlier than I did because I was catastrophically hungover

after getting very drunk with the priest last night. Yeah. We had a nice dinner and then we set out to experience a fresh new hell. And in this case, that fresh new hell was what the AI bros have ready for your children. No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products for kids, like the same day during the exact same time. Uh-huh. Yeah, it really is remarkable that like, yeah, I guess in part just because like that is

such a focus. I think it has something to do with what you saw some of yesterday where, and I had caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah, they don't really like this stuff. We're going to have to get around it. Like obviously this is inevitable, but like people really also seem to not enjoy it very much. No one can explain why. But I think that this may be like, okay, well, if we get them when they're young enough,

if we train these kids, we can force this on them and they'll have no choice but to like it. And it's interesting you say that because the first thing I did today was go to a panel at the Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the best title for any single panel. Yeah, that's that's fucked up. The description was, a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies

as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment and socialization? Which is a good question. Yeah, we should be asking that. More people should. There was four people on the panel. Karen Ruth Wong from EIDO Playlab Partnerships, Neelo Luik from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network,

and Joshua Garrett from Ready Land. And I'll talk about all these different companies and people in a sec. and Joshua Garrett from a ready land. And I'll talk about all these different companies and people in a sec. Yeah, so the panel started with Karen Ruth Wong from EIDO, which is the company that first partnered with Sesame Workshop to start making online apps. So that was interesting to me because Sesame Workshop generally puts a lot of care into making media for children. that her company has been doing for the past few years on what their attitudes are towards this thing that has become an increasingly encroaching part of their lives. I'm just going to play a series of clips.

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

This is like after they do their introductions. The first thing to talk about is how Gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most A.I. critical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cringy. Yeah, like it feels cringy and not just that, how it's affecting people's like sense of humanity and viewing this and not just that, how it's affecting people's like sense of humanity and viewing this like, you know, in some ways as like an obstacle to get over, but also this is,

I'm not sure how I feel about like, you know, Karen and the company she's representing here because in some ways I felt like she was probably actually good. She just had to frame all of the things she was saying as like shocking revelations to all these tech bros be like, actually, it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run by AI. Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI I actually like what she was saying is just her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because of because of who the audience

Do you get the do you get the feeling that she was like a bad person trying to help like other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who was trying to like in a way that these guys would listen to tell them that what they're doing isn't working. Maybe like 2080. So like a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this. But mostly it felt like trying to inform people about how this isn't really what people want. And you know, it has a lot of actual drawbacks.

Here's a clip of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're asking kids to get data on how they feel about AI. Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions of what it would be like to interact with a potential AI tool. And so we ask questions like,

okay, you recently had a friend break up, what kind of intervention do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you through that process? Or do you want someone to kind of replace that friend for the time being, just so you can, you know, back yourself out from that relationship? So by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front of youth,

we were able to co-design to view insights. This one always gets all audience members. We put out a provocational expression of, imagine if you could have an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live your life for you. Imagine they could swipe your Tinder for you, they would have the icky conversations, or they would go through the awkward introductions,

you know, new person in school. And we heard some really interesting things. I want to go on a bad day for myself and I want to have that bad vacation. There was a really interesting sign that being able to live life for yourself set badge one. Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor. Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace them in such drudgery as the search for love and human connection. Incredible that teens aren't interested in letting a robot go on dates for them. No, it's super interesting.

And like even like the first thing she said about, you know, you like lost some friends. Do you want an AI to like, to, you know, like counsel you or like, you know, like, like talk about your feelings? Or do you want an AI to, you know, counsel you or, you know, talk about your feelings? Or do you want a friend replacement? And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this even, like, otter question of, like, AI swiping your Tinder for you, trying to figure out what your preferences are. No, like, Gen Z wants to live life for themselves.

It's odd, because... Yeah, well, because that's what being a person is. That's what being a person is, right. But it's odd how because like. Yeah, well, because that's what being a person is. That's what being a person is, right. But it's odd how that's framed as like a surprising revelation. Wow, these kids want to live lives. So yeah, it was kind of an odd panel to go to. She highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for Gen Z is twofold, creative expression and human relationships.

These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about, the creative expression and human relationships. These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about, is how it will affect your ability to make art, be creative, and what it means for relationships as a human being. Especially if you're being asked questions about, would you let an AI meet someone that you want to date first, have them go through a first fake AI date to get through icebreaker questions or something? The amount of people I meet who feel that way about their digital twins or who take pride in having an AI trained off of their social media posts at events like these, it's

shocking to me because do you feel good about saying that a chatbot You feel like it is you that you have trained a chatbot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself Do you feel good about thinking that does that make you happy about yourself? Well, and the data that this person was talking about showed no like yeah people actually don't want these things Like no, it's actually isn't what anyone wants out, this actually isn't what anyone wants out of life. This isn't what anyone wants out of this technology, right? Like, we use AI all the time, you know, like, you know, like auto-complete. It has a whole bunch of, like, you know, pretty basic uses.

Yeah, it saves me from having to spell certain words too many times. Yeah, but we don't want it to, like, go on dates for us. And the whole part of being human is having, you know, a degree of bad experiences that helps shape us as people. And this isn't like a hurdle to get over, this is like a part of what it means to be human. And she kind of talked about that a little bit more in this last clip that I'll play. The next one here.

I refer to give opportunities to people over technology. I think these are the ones, again, they have seen what it's like when people feel replaced. I'll definitely share a little bit of my experience with this. I think it's a little bit of a challenge, but I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge.

I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think it's a challenge. I think these are the ones, and again, they have seen what it's like when people feel replaced. I'll definitely share a lot more, but starting off with a few key learnings, Gen Z's valid advice and perspective from lived experience. There's something about designing for friction. I'm gonna do it again, designing for friction.

In our age of optimization, in our age of assuming that everything should move as fast as possible to make life as smooth as possible, there's something about the challenge and that comes back to play, right? Why would we spend so much time to hit a ball several hundred yards away? There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy of overcoming challenges, the joy of moving through your first friend break-up, your boyfriend or girlfriend breakup that makes you into a person. And as many times as helicopter parents

or as people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best possible path, there's some pushback there. Some pushback. Some pushback. To the idea that like, you should live a life, your one precious life should be lived.

No, but there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen Z has great fears about being replaced, like having a workforce replacement. Gen Z prefers to actually make connections and network with other people our age and actually share opportunities. In previous panels, this was something that was also talked about,

how millennials were way more selective about sharing employment opportunities because they were so focused on making sure that they make it. And there's a lot more open collaboration and sharing opportunities. It's harder, so you guys have to be better about that. Yeah, yeah. No, talking about designing for friction, there's value in something being challenging. That was very interesting because the surprise about that, because it is this kind of,

I'm sure most of these people were born to wealth and privilege, and the first thing that people do with money, the primary reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact that that's surprising to anyone, they're like, no, like, friction's necessary, otherwise you're not a person. I mean, it's like the ghoul we saw the other night, right? Otherwise you're not a person.

It's like the ghoul we saw the other night. They're just not really people. One thing she kind of closed on in this section is talking about how Gen Z does not trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives. Especially in this age of tech optimization. Like that misses a part of what it means to like, you know, feel proud of yourself and the work that you've done. Something she talked about at the very end of the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like Gen Z, and people in general, right? Will feel proud about making a piece of art. And they don't have that same sense of pride for an AI generated image. Whether it's like a screenplay, whether it's whatever.

Someone gave an example of like, you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff. They edit videos, right? And there is AI tools that make editing videos like easier. But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that. They don't feel proud. They don't feel like they've actually achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the work that you've done. So like there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create. An exact quote was quote, you can't eliminate life formative aspects unquote, which is like,

yes, like life. Yeah. You don't ever do anything. I'm happy someone at CES is saying this. The fact that it needs to be said at all. Very bleak, very sad. It's really bleak. Yeah, dating people, making friends, being social, doing whatever it is you do for a living,

as yourself is what life is. Yeah, I think the last thing that you talked about was like Gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries. Yeah, good. And they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with, you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams,

like everything, you know, TikTok, social media. So we have strong boundaries on how tech integrates into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to become more invasive, we are not super into. No. Like all they're offering people is like, this machine will do everything that you actually want to do with your time and also you won't have a job.

Like that's what Big Tech is promising, Jin Z. Yeah, so that's how I started my day. Speaking of Jin Z, Z stands for zillions of dollars that we'll get if you listen to these ads. And we're back. So unfortunately that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also had two other people from AI products. The first one that I'll mention is called Ready Land, which I think partnered with Amazon

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

It's all like pre-programmed like human paths, you know, just with so many variables already built in based on, you know, like if you're making food in one of these books or like, you know, a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest, the AI already has like stuff for how to handle that. He knows how to say these words, he knows how to stitch together these things. But it's not actually generating new content itself. If everything is like pre-baked, it can be assembled in many different ways. So every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different, because the kid will respond to certain plot elements, the kid can talk to characters, ask questions. So this was actually pretty interesting.

The fact that it's simply not even generating new content makes it miles better than any of these other AI kids' products. That it's actually just kind of using some of the tech that makes up AI to allow you to make something humans wrote more reactive. Exactly, yeah. So it's actually a pretty interesting piece of technology. And it's not just Alexa reading a storybook.

It has a large interactive element which that makes the Alexa part actually useful. And then there was this other product, what was this one called? It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys. the Alexa part actually useful. What was this one called? It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys. Po the AI Teddy Bear, which does generate live content with guardrails, he did say. But the AI content both comes from the input and the output. He

talked about guardrails, you know, he said you know chat GPT does have internal guardrails but the reliability is suspect. Which there certainly is considering just last week there was a piece of news about chat GPT helping someone build a bomb. Yeah yeah which they used in just this magical city. Yes so he did say that like guardrail reliability can be suspect, but there is a difference when you have certainly like more like child-friendly features turned on. But he admitted that like moderation is part of the challenge. I don't know. Basically, how this works is you have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear that talks with a not very pleasing voice.

Oh, I gotta hear it. Do you want me to pull this up? Yes, absolutely. Okay, but basically you put in a whole bunch of story inputs being like, I want the story set in this place. I want it featuring these types of characters. I want this archetype to be the villain.

All right, it has like dozens, if not hundreds of like archetypal things that you can like click and then the teddy bear will generate a new story. So it is generating new content, but with like pretty big characters as I'm showing. So then it will generate a new story. So it is generating new content, but with pre-baked characters essentially. So then it'll sit together the story. The weirder you make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be.

Well, let me play a clip for Robert here. So they'll pull in real world events and places based on the setting they choose. That guy like sitting there talking almost rolling his eyes at his own product while it yaps in his lap is a perfect like he clearly didn't think about how that would look because it does not make an appealing ad for the product. No, so it doesn't sound good. So yeah, they generated a story set in CES in Las Vegas. And he would occasionally interrupt the bear to explain what it was doing. So that was the other product. Not nearly as polished or really as thoughtful as the AI storybook.

But you know, maybe if you are tired of having to talk to your kid, you can just get one of these teddy bears to throw in front. Raise it, I mean, it looks like you could probably handle all of the physical contact they need too, so you don't even need to ever touch your child. And in fact, you can just have chat GPT, route that through the bear, and never even see your own flesh and blood.

Like I think ideally, you would have them cut out of there, really surgically remove that baby a month or two early, and that way you can kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you ever spend in contact with your spawn. One other thing I will add is that the Readyland guy, the AI storybook, specifically when talking about, you know, the importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety, right? An AI kids robot that swears, right, is one thing that's pretty easy to avoid, actually. That's pretty easy.

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

Or what if it says, not even directly telling them, but it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous. And this is why their storybook program does not generate new content. So everything it says is already pre-approved. Verified safe sentences versus this AI teddy bear, because it is generating new content. It could, if things go horribly wrong, talk about drinking bleach, theoretically.

Just something, things can go wrong. So it's not just about avoiding bad words or talking about sex or those types of inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not just about, you know, avoiding bad words or talking about sex or, you know, those types of like, like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations. Right. Well, the good news is that I don't think these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean, I guess we'll see, but these are super expensive. And like, did he get a price point for that bear? I did not hear a price point for the bear. I'm curious as to what they're gonna be charging for it.

I mean, we'll see if any of this stuff really does take off. I wouldn't consider it optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like they don't seem like great products to me. So I guess we'll see. I read something very interesting that is related exactly. It probably was, he might've been talking about like that weird bear or something. I read something very interesting on the subject

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

Chatted with chat GBT in Santa mode knows that daddy is doing AI etc So a very interesting experiment happened after magical toys reached out and fixed the issue reference below She started playing with this dyno chatted it, and then learned to turn it off and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up, it now has paper shoes and the top hat that we made together, but every time I asked her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no. A few times it turned it back on and she did speak with it for a bit and then she just turned it off again, not wanting to engage. I gently asked why and I wasn't really able to understand where

there's the resistance. It's not weird to her. I gently asked why, and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance. It's not weird to her. In fact, at one point she was pretending the dyno was a baby and was turned on. So I told her, let's ask it to pretend to be a baby. And it obliged and said, okay. So he asked it to cry. Granted, they don't have an amazing advanced voice mode like OpenAI, so it did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard.

It was basically making crying sounds like talking. And also there are still technical issues. The voice is sometimes choppy. So it could be that it's still uncanny for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this didn't connect with my six-year-old. Because it's creepy! Because it's gr- people, they don't like it! Nobody wants this! Yeah. Ick. Yeah, ick.

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

Yeah, no one wants this. Even six year olds are like, I would prefer just a regular toy I can play with. I would prefer, I'll pretend it's a robot, but I don't want it to be a robot that talks to me. So, Poe the AI Bear is $50 on Amazon. Oh, that's not bad, actually. No.

That's good, okay, good. All right, well, maybe, maybe. We can even maybe order one and see what we can get out of it. Yeah. All right, we're going to go on another break and return to talk once again about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back. So we went and saw something else today while you were at a different chunk of the event

talking to yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the East with which we can all do 9-elevens. Super excited for that future, by the way. I stumbled upon the booth for a company called TCL. A pretty big company. A fairly large, yeah, large company make a lot of TVs, stuff like that. They had a couple of things. They had an AI laundry machine.

So many AI laundry bots. Yeah, this one was the worst because it's like this little, almost a soft, rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry. They say they can't do folding yet. So it just sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it. Like- It just suspends it in the air. It suspends it in the air inside of itself

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

but it's like, yeah, only people who have a lot of money and wanna spend it on a laundry machine. Cause I don't see that it actually reduces the amount of work you need to do at this point. But the thing they had at the booth that caught my eye was a robot toy for kids. AI space me is the name of the robot. Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration.

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

but like that blink and change color and contract and expand. And then it's got like two little flapper arms that can like wiggle. And it's seated inside, almost like the aliens in Independence Day, it's seated inside like this large rolling body frame that allows it to move around on the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your child's friend.

And the first thing that was upsetting to me, because they had this video ad that would play every so often and it was very creepy. And I thought back to when we were doing the interview with the guy who had like the robot for old people, he was like, it's very important that it not tell them it loves them, that it like always reiterate that it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid, I love you, like I care for you. When the lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy that actually knows and cares about your child. And like, no, it's not.

No, it's not. Don't say that. That shouldn't be illegal for you to say that, for you to sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent being that loves them is like deeply abusive in my opinion. Like that is actually child abuse, because it's not alive. Anyway, so I had to bring Garrison over because you needed to see it.

Oh, and saw it, I did. Yeah, and I'm gonna play a little clip from the ad. So I want you to hear the way this thing sounds. Every heartwarming moment shared and grown with Amy reminds us that this is what we call love. And this is what we call AI. Oh my God. I found that profoundly upsetting.

Disturbing. Yeah, your kid can like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll like talk to them. It'll make up stories. It'll like look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them into like live AI videos. You can put a pin on and it will record stuff that your kid does and play it back to you at night as a video.

So, again, absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have to spend with your child. It's in the car. Yeah, it takes over your car so that like it's talking to you from the screens in your car. The video actually like taking taking this thing taking this thing everywhere the kid goes. It's like the kid's main interaction with the world. Yeah. Is with this little rolling like plastic Furby. And yeah, like talking about like expressing like love and like how damaging

this must be for like a four year old to have like the first thing that it constantly express like love and affection for is this little rolling robot that's that you're gonna throw in the garbage in like you know four years when you're when you're like too old for it how like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up that's gonna be for your for like your sense of self and like love and affection the mix of things that we're trying to have this do like the other ones were build as toys this was build as like a friend for your child as well as like a home assistant yeah toys. This was billed as like a friend for your child. As well as like a home assistant.

Yeah, it's supposed to also act as like, it'll change that you can hook it into your smart home so it can change the temperature. Like they did a little in-person demo where like a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it about like planning, planned a birthday party for her kid with it. Yeah.

And it like put food in her Amazon cart and like changed the temperature inside because more people were coming over. One of the things they advertise is a security mode where it like travels around your house at night and acts as a sentry watching your home. Like wild stuff. No, it's it was honestly I've seen a few like disturbing things, you know, all of like the the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad. But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing. It really like viscerally upsets me.

Yeah. And I think probably very bad for children. Everything they showed us was incredibly curated. Like when we watched this live thing where she was having a very fluid conversation with it, that was clearly scripted. Yes. And I, so I wonder how well this thing

actually works in practice. We never got an actual like live demo. No, because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly recognizing like what's in their, you know, little kid drawings and stuff, what it's supposed to be to make beautiful, creepily shiny AI moving versions and stuff, what it's supposed to be to make beautiful, creepily shiny AI moving versions and stuff. So like, I wonder how much less good it's going to be

in reality than the thing that they've showed us, but it's definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already. And part of why I think that is like, we went to check out the booth that this other, the South Korean company just called, I think SK, had like a, they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled.

And then thinking about how like in the ads, it always like recognized the kid and its parents in a drawing accurately. Well, this one, when I flipped off the camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up. Like I'm really curious for when these things hit the market

and people start buying them, like what sort of fucked up stuff it'll do and how kind of big the seams are. I don't expect a long life for this thing, which is going to be even funnier because like there was already a big $800 like children's companion AI toy that failed last year and the company shut off access to them.

And like, so parents had to explain to their kids who had bonded with this thing that it was dying forever. And that's especially excited to me because they've built a robot that talks to your kid and tells it, it loves them. And eventually that robot is going to be taken away from the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable.

And that's, I'm excited for that. Like new ground and how to fuck up kids. Anyway, that's what I got garrison. What an uplifting CES adventure. Yeah. No, that's all. Yeah. Great. All right, everybody. Well, this has been behind the bastards No, it's not or no, it's not. What is this? This has been it could happen here a podcast by somebody who is slowly going insane Yeah, cuz we're like four days in Vegas now. We still have one more day of CES.

I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like on the ground coverage with our CES Best in Show. Yeah. So end on maybe a high note. So see you there.

Cool. So see you there. biggest conference. Better offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on the ground interviews and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta

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in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs How-To Season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly about it having happened. We have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second Trump administration is going to mean for trans people and, you know, go listen to those episodes. The short version is that it's going to

be very, very bad. We're facing care bans. We're facing federal funding bans. Things are about to get unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere. It is the combination of almost a decade's worth of fighting by the right. And I think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as something abstract, right? As a sort of abstract political debate. Or even if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subjects of the harassment as sort of these distant famous figures.

But the issue with looking at it this way is that this harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people with real names and faces who live lives exactly like yours. The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right-wing journalists discover who you are. So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people who has seen basically the entire campaign against trans people evolve specifically in the far right harassment against them. And that person is the artist and musician precious child out of LA. Welcome to the show. I wish it was under better circumstances. Thank you.

Thank you for having me, Mia. Glad to be here. Yeah. And I'm excited to talk to you. I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my God, this stuff sucks. But... Well, you know, it's our lives. What can we do? Yeah. What will we do? Well, you know, it's our lives. What can we do?

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

Yeah. So I've been making music as Precious Child for almost a decade. And it was my very first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that had this track on it titled Phantom. And that was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals you know it wasn't a song per se it was experimental and I put out a music video with it and it was pretty it's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights you know if you think of movies from the 80s like Hellraiser it's

kind of like that you know like kind of evocative of some type of greater supernatural horror. And the far right, at that time, the far right Vintage 2018, they found it and started reporting it en masse and tagging their friends and saying, report this, report this. And this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well. And that video, like as I said, you know, it's creepy, but it's there's nothing political in it. And there's a little bit of like, of blood, but there's no gore. But if they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic, that's what they said. This is satanic.

And that was my first brush with the right. Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically the satanic angle that they're taking because it's like in this early enough phase that they're still sort of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite like metastasized Transphobia is like they're driving things. So they're kind of they're reaching back into

this kind of satanic panic era like the weird 90s and 2000s stuff that like when I was growing up the town that I grew up with super religious and like, you know, we had to have Lists of like if you were inviting like a friend in high school to a party whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about witches. It's like that kind of thing, which I don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even as stuff escalated. But yeah, it was, as you said, it was a moral panic. And their point was that that I was a moral for making art like this.

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

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

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

And that's something that's, I think, very different than now where all of this anti-trans shit is happening and everyone's just kind of going, eh. So do you want to talk about the second time you became a target of the far right? Yeah. I mean, realistically, this has been pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. Yeah. And there was another track on that album that was also targeted, one called titled My Little Problem, Violet Door. That has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom has some nudity and that was a collaboration between myself

and a artist who is trans themselves, Kate, out of Brazil. And that has, again, some body horror in it. There's commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a surreal body horror video. And that was Brigade reported not in 2018, but in 2019. And actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated. And that video is notable because as a result of what's going on today,

YouTube took that down despite it being up for five years without a problem. But it had tens of thousands of views and now it's gone. So that was the second time. Yeah, and that one I think is interesting too in the sense of like, that one's like a lot more, it's more overtly trans it's also I think the more trans you are the more like very obviously trans it is and

this is I guess something that's very common among trans artists is this kind of like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror and you know I mean I I'm not gonna Project onto it. I don't know if this is what you specifically are doing but like, you know, there's there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria and like as this way of sort of Thinking about the things that are happening to your body and things that have been done to your body and the things that you're doing Back to it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely You know, I I didn't really think too much about the concepts

in that direction when I made it or when, and I know K didn't either at that time. However, the truth is for much of my young life, I felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And that was something I struggled with for quite a long time. When I was young, I didn't have access to the information and communities that are out there now that support trans people. And I have had some gender-confirming procedures done, but not as many as I think I would have when I was younger.

I did feel existential discordance. And I don't know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm going to coin it because I didn't feel in concordance with my flesh. And so, you know, I came to experiment with the boundaries were of my fleshy identity and my existence in my art. Yeah, and I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of queer artists are where there's, you know, this isn't to say that all queer artists like this, there's definitely like an edge to it. There's stuff going on. There's

body horror things happening. There's like 80s aesthetic-y stuff. And I think it conflicts with this kind of weird, concave, everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitsch aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into. They use a kind of aesthetic sensibility as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose for more overtly political reasons. They can do this kind of like, hey, look at this disgusting thing, etc, etc. Kind of attack on queer art as a result of this kind of like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this, you know, the sort of like cultural norm in our society. And I think I haven't 100% worked out the political implications of this,

but I think there's this kind of connection between their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like horror-y that they kind of like use as the political attack. Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period. Yeah. Not just for queer people, but also for cis people. Like, I'm going to defend cis people here for a second. So, cis people struggle with gender dysphoria.

I think maybe, I don't want to say I rebid as much as trans people, but they sure fucking struggle with it. Yeah. For instance, an example I will give is facial hair. Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they fret and worry over their facial hair. Is it too much? Is it too little?

Then people that are assigned female at birth, if they have facial hair, they fret over it. Will people see it? Do I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret over their freaking jaw lines. Like, you know, if you search online like masculine jawline, how do I get? There's a huge community out there of assigned male at birth cis men that are trying to get more defined jawlines because they feel that their genetics are presenting them as a non-optimal male, quote unquote. And of course, same thing for, quote unquote,

females, like do I have the female feminine body? Is it curvy enough in the right ways? Is my waist slim enough? You know, am I just a brick shaped? And then all the industries around that. And that I think is horrifying. And everyone goes through that and struggles with it. And very few people are lucky enough to embody the

ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves and to me that is a tragedy yeah, and I think that's sort of like fear and that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to like perform a gender in a certain way well, okay, I'm not gonna say perform because the Butler scholars are gonna get extremely mad at me, but the way in which you're forced to sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense, I think it gets to this thing where, you know, you could either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can.

You can attempt to fight it or you can get extremely mad at everyone else who's trying to do something about it And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option Yeah, unfortunately, we need to go to ads which is another thing that drives a whole bunch of this luckily These are audio ads. So hopefully they're not Driving beauty standards, but you know who knows and people are wizards. They'll find a way. Brought to you by Maybelline. And we are back. I mean, I guess the Washington State Highway Patrol does enforce gender norms on people.

Oh, God. They sure do. May I give another example of hideous gender norms? Yeah. So you, listener, you're hearing me, right? And you're hearing my voice. And this is another thing that all people fret about. It's not just trans people.

Lots of AFABs I know. I'm just going to say AFAB and AMAB, okay? Lots of AFABs I know, I'm just going to say AFAB and AMAB, okay? Lots of AFABs I know, you know, they have pretty darn deep voices naturally, and I've talked with them privately, and they say that they worry about how husky their voice is when they just relax. And then same thing for AMABs, they talk about worrying if their voice is squeaky, and then... They're totally going to have to be like, talk like a freaking wrestler from WWE, you know? Like, people, like the cis people struggle with that too. So, you know, just something as simple as our appearance and our voice, you know, we're

just torturing ourselves. And ultimately, I gotta say, Mia, you know, I'm a trans woman. However, ultimately, I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks. Yeah, it's not great. It's not a good time for anyone involved. Speaking of bad times, this isn't even an ad pivot. I just do this now. It's really bad. I do it to people my daily life. They're like, why are you ad pivoting me? I'm like, oh god. But yeah, I guess, god, this and the sort of racialization aspect and I don't know, sort of the aspect of zones of gender performance.

God damn it, I keep saying performance and I literally mean that you were performing it as in you were acting and not the butler thing of your performing it to make it real. Please don't yell at me in the comments I had I had the guy who wrote a Writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter one time, so I'm paranoid Okay, sorry about the rail this enough partially because this next part is really depressing but Partially because this next part is really depressing, but So a while back on this show my co-host garrison who is I don't know probably having an absolutely terrible time At the consumer electronics show right now

Covered a specific far-right panic that became known as the we spot controversy Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit because Jesus Christ? Yeah, so, you know, in 2018, as I said, I put out this album and then I put out another and I started touring the country and Canada and stuff doing shows pretty much constantly. And then 2020 happened and I became involved in the George Floyd uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting. And so I began to live stream those protests and marches with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was going on on the streets to people watching. Because a lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did not understand what the issues were.

And the thing is in LA, there were a lot of continual police murders even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean the cops shooting unarmed black people in the back as they were running away, or executions, you know, shooting them in the car, that type of thing. Yeah. or executions, you know, shooting them in the car, that type of thing. And so I was explaining that to the viewers, like this is why people are in the streets, this is a specific issue, these are the laws surrounding it and why these actions by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal. And so I was doing that and I became pretty darn visible and popular. Like, I was maybe one of the top five best known activists

or racial justice voices. And I was targeted by a right-wing activist who was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium, specifically because I was visible, because I was trans. And so she went for me and posted and said that I was a transgender individual who was in the women's spa of Wee Spa and I was sexually harassing people. And that went viral on social media. It was covered on Fox News for a week.

I was getting constant death threats. And I was doxxed. It was pretty terrible. Especially because I was not that person in the spa. And I was only picked up because I was picked up for my visibility. My response to that was, I didn't immediately say, yeah, it wasn't me, it wasn't me, leave me alone, leave me alone. I didn't do that because I knew that if I said that, then they would just pick and attack some other trans person. Yeah. And, you know, I know that like the shit that the right-wing machine enacts, if it happens

to one of us, it can happen to all of us, and it likely will. Yeah, and I mean, I think the thing that it reminds me the most, something we've also covered on the show, this is one of the problems with talking about this, it's like, doing this for so long that like, there's very few things that I can say that I can't be like I've said this on the show before, but we spent a lot of time, specifically Garris has spent a lot of time covering the way that every time there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks a random trans person and goes, it was this person.

And this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although this is a more targeted, like we've invented a fake controversy about a trans person. And then we're going to like, also just pick a random famous trans, well, not even famous, but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like? It's my understanding that this 2021 WeSpa controversy that I was targeted for became something of a right-wing playbook. It was after that that they started saying,

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

I came out in 2020 and just for like three months became I don't know, two months, like became the like the giant figure with which Everyone who didn't like the uprising was just like taking shit out on so like like sitting congress people Were like denouncing this book that you wrote every mainstream media outlet like specifically had their editorial people going like this book is evil Vicky's evil and I think that was also like this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti-trans uprisings because the people who You know are trying to maintain a white supremacy gender system, like intimately themselves, even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand that these things are preserving the same

systems of violence. And so they picked us as sort of like the wedge point to break this thing apart. And I think with Vicky, they hadn't really figured out how to do it. And I think it was like specifically your case, the we spot like with you being put in as a figure that we spots with this is where they like actually really figured out how to do the whole thing. And yeah, there's just something really bleak about both how effective it was and the fact that it's like, these are just people. I don't know, like this was and the fact that it's like these are just people

I don't know like it this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of like abstract figures It's just like yeah people I'm having conversations with Are how they did this just I don't know Which had more analysis, but yeah, I think that trans people like to to greater America to most to a lot of America, I'll say, are sensational. You know, people, people imagine chicks with dicks and dudes with dudes without dicks. And so I think that's really exciting for a lot of people. Now, for better or for worse, I think for for worse.

But yeah, I think that's just just people and their bodies, right? Like, I guess some people walk around thinking all the time about other people's crotches. I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. Crotch sniffer's your scene. But on the other hand, right, there's this aspect of which, like, you know, there's this sensationalism, but then there's also the experience of being a trans person is like I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent. Like that's like, I don't know.

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

I didn't appreciate being doxxed. And you know, people have come after me my whole life like I present I think just naturally physically like I present as being genderqueer I like I I've been pretty like veering like looking femme my entire life that had nothing to do with my internal identity I've been weird my entire life I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested in things that were provocative and so I've been harassed my whole life. However, until we spa and experienced strangers by the hundreds saying that they're gonna hunt me down and fucking shoot me. Yeah.

I never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy, I know you. Yeah. It's one of these things where the more of a target on you, the more likely it is to happen. Even people who don't have targets on them, I know people who've never experienced anything like this and have still just had attacks on them and it's fucking terrifying. It is an absolutely terrible way to have to live in a terrible sort of thing to have to experience, especially as it's just fucking intensifying.

So yeah, that was that was 2021 and that changed me. That experience of being targeted and just picked on out of the freaking blue. That changed me as an artist. Yeah. And at the same time, it also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity and I want to speak to that because There's different tiers of celebrity. No, I thought yes at the top There's the tier that's known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year yeah, and that's an actual thing and

Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year. And that's an actual thing. And that's the A list. And you know you're on the A list because Tom Cruise sends your Christmas card. And at the bottom is me, who's been in mass media many times now, but has none of the benefits. Yeah. I make very little money as an artist. And I don't have an entourage.

No, I can tour and I play play some shows and some of them are sold out. I'm playing a show in L.A. that's sold out, but I'm not playing large venues. No, I maybe play like, you know, 300, 500 capacity tops. And most of the places I play are like small clubs, like 150 or so. I mess with places I play at like small clubs like 150 or so. Yeah. And so I don't have the protection that most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals. I don't have movie deals.

I don't even have an Asia. I don't even have a record label. Yeah. So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier. And they're coming after me. Yeah, and it's I mean and that's the thing about the sort of like this status of like niche D tier internet microcelebrity is like I don't like I feel like I got the best possible version of it where like I got a job that pays slightly I know I think I might have hit no

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

in the US have the kind of protection that actual celebrity gives you. And everyone else, celebrity is just another, it's just a giant target painted on you. And yeah, so you have none of the benefits and all of the sort of, hey, here is 150 million people who absolutely hate you and who've been primed and targeted like specifically at you. Yeah.

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

Why would a congress person come after me? And my own hypothesis is that they punch down because they secretly believe that they themselves are weak and attacking me, attacking people like me, is a fight that they can win. And my view is that it's not a fight that they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small, small ways, in false ways in my opinion. They're trying to get money first of all. They want money, you know. They want their views, they want their donations, and that's the entire top of the pyramid for them.

And for me, though, I'm a fucking artist, and power is something that I've always been developing because I've sought to know myself, I've sought to understand who I am and why. And that extends to myself as a queer person to come to understand myself who I am as a queer person. That's not something they'll ever have. So I've already fucking won. And same with all the other queer people that are under attack. All you other DCT or queer celebrities out there, we fucking won. Hopefully. And I think part of this is also like, the reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to stop the tide from coming in and they saw how far in

the tide had already come and now they're trying to like, damn off the tide. And, you know, like probably it's not going to work. But the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here, does nothing, it lets them just keep building and building and building more walls. It's something that is within our power to resist, we just have to actually do it, right? You have to actually organize, you have to talk to the people around you, you have to go get them to do things to resist this. And if we do, yeah, the things that we've already won, the things that we're going to win are going to stick.

But if not, things are going to get really, really bad really quickly. And speaking of things getting very bad very quickly, here are some more ads before we get back to things getting worse. ["We Are Back"] We are back. Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a sitting US Congresswoman, Nancy Mace, who is the person who,

actually I don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti-trans figure in Congress. Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put

in men's jails, which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in men's prisons. And she specifically came after you. So you want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of a congresswoman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding? Yeah, so right at the end of 2024 I think it was December

28th I was doxxed by a right-wing troll nazi that has doxxed multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends. And they pointed out in a tweet how my art was on YouTube, specifically my music videos were on YouTube, calling for violence and how I was an evil trans person. And they added, like added like at symbol YouTube and said that

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

And then immediately following that, my videos were taken down, the ones that were mentioned in these tweets. And as I said before, before, one of these videos, what was titled My Little Problem, that's been up for seven years. Yeah, for a long time. Yeah. And YouTube's terms of service, they're very clear.

And I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service so my work doesn't get taken down. And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity, that is allowed within the context of art, within the context of music videos. And so my videos, they weren't designed to, this is from the term as a service, they weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify, that's exactly what it says in the terms.

Now they weren't recreations of real-life violence and they weren't real life violence, but they were still removed at the behest, at the easy-click press of Nancy Mace. Yeah and I think there's a couple of things going on here. One of which is, you know, so we've seen this with Facebook in the last, I guess when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago, but you know, Facebook has instated policies that allow you to basically stay slurs against queer people and allow you to call queer people mental illnesses and stuff like that. That's very specifically you can only do to queer people.

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

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

And also, it's very obvious. Yeah, obviously, because pointing out hypocrisy does nothing, but like, I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of censorship than a member of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down. It's like, it's really something.

Yeah, you know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because, you know, before I was a victim of a moral panic, and now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare. So you know, what's going to happen next? What will we see just made invisible and unseen? And I know that in this country, I have freedom of speech. But that's really bullshit. We all know that.

Like, I'm not gonna reach many people if I stand on a street corner at the park and yell at people. What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that these social media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom of reach is annihilated? And then suddenly, trans people are actually invisible.

We're very close to that, I think. Nancy proved that. Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people. Yeah, art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak. And I know that's why she came after my art. There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen. And then like the next tweet is again, a sitting member of the US government saying that trans

women should be put in men's prisons. And it's like, okay, one of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine and one of them isn't. Yeah. Does she even actually do work for the people of South Carolina? Like, I saw all she does is just like start shit with trans people. Like she's just another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's just a knockoff Prada of a bootleg Trump. That's what she is.

And she's not doing good on her fucking politics. Like she's tried to get this bathroom ban for disallowing trans people to use a bathroom at the US Capitol and her own freaking party kicked the bill out of the out of the bylaws for this year. So she couldn't even get that. And yeah, so I guess she thinks you can get a win by harassing me. Harassing my art. Yeah.

Try to get people to come after me. You know, these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe, right? A lot of their stuff just fails, but they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them. And that's the thing that's needed in this moment is organization is, you know, like is organization it is action it is it is now it is now the time to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like, I should have been organizing a union, should I be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, ah, should I be organizing a union? Should I be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations?

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

Thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people find you and find your art and yeah, support you. Yeah, thanks for having me, man. I really like talking with you. It's been very good. And listeners, you can find my work on Spotify. You can also check out my website at preciouschild.com and please sign up for my mailing list there as well. That is the best and best direct way for me to stay in touch

with my friends and fans. I'm also preciouschild on Instagram, on TikTok. I am the last precious child. I also will be doing live shows this spring and summer in the US. And so follow me on my website and on social media to stay up to date on that and come say hi in person. Hell yeah.

We will have links to all of that in the description. So yeah, go check it out and resist the creep of fascism. There's one thing I want to add about, I said earlier about personal power and how I've developed my own personal power by getting to know myself. I want to tell you trans people out there, you queer people and your allies, that first thing is getting to know yourself

and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, fuck these fucking lawmakers. Yeah. Good to know yourself and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, fuck these fucking lawmakers. Good to know each other and strengthen our bonds with each other because those are bigger than any type of oppressive laws that we put upon us. And it's only by the strength that we develop with each other, within each other, that we will persevere. And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference. Better offline CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything

from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongweiso Jr. with appearances from Behind the Bastards' Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And check out betteroffline.com.

John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the shows, correspondents, and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else. Ready to laugh and stay informed?

Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters... ...to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Ah!

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Ah! Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRad radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Lari Santos, and to welcome the new year, my podcast, The Happiness Lab,

is releasing a series of happiness how-to guides to help you in 2025. I'll distill the wisdom of world-class experts into easy toest actionable tips. It's about never feeling good enough. I feel like I'm always failing. You'll learn how to handle relationships, how to be inspiring, and how to find your purpose.

We make it this big pie-in-the-sky thing, and then of course we're all frustrated because no one knows how to get there. Struggling with tough emotions? We have a how-to guide. Worried that you're not enough? We got you. Self-obsessed and want to get over yourself?

There's a guide for that too. The ability to approach somebody and make them experience desire for you in minutes or even hours is a rare and rather unnecessary skill, historically speaking. The Happiest Labs how-to season starts January 1st. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, the consumer electronics show

happening here to everyone. And of course, it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chat bot that was trained on Reddit. So I'm gonna go around a circle and introduce our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed Angueso Jr. Ed, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me on.

We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not going to say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less, but you're contractually obligated to not mind. Yes, thank you, boss. Great to be here as always. Very natural, very natural. Zai? Hi, hi, hello. Hello, hello, hello.

Thank you. This is your first CES as well. That's right. Your first time being a journalist. Also true. How do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes. I love wearing a dress shirt and tie and just

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

How much better I am than how many people in this room I'm not. I'm not even really like, that's not something I like talking about. Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten those numbers back from OpenAI. It would be irresponsible to speculate at the men. You gotta wait for 03. So what I wanna do here, I think this is kind of our roll up,

we spent our last day on the floor. I wanna go around and I'll start first, you guys have a second to get your thoughts together. What comes to mind immediately is like, this is the thing that I had the most positive reaction to, and this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to, and this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to. I think is a solid way for us to start out.

And I think my most negative reaction obviously was the Amy artificial child best friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable. And I hated both that like, I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design. Like it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute. And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint, pretty good design. Like it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute. And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint,

it felt like a replacement for the love of adults and the life of a small child, which I thought was like evil in a profound way. And I guess the best thing that I saw, I'm not perfectly competent at this point to like analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with NAQI,

Nokia basically reads facial micro-emotions in order to let people control the computer. Not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. I thought that was really interesting, and it's the kind of thing, because honestly, I might loop that in with, there was an AI-assisted cane for people who were blind,

there was another device that led you to control a computer through facial movements in your mouth, that was like a retainer. All of the stuff that's like, oh, these are like, really, people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents

with a toy. Ed, you're in the hot seat next. You know, the thing I loved the most was obviously the global pavilion for connecting Web3 businesses across crypto, blockchain, DeFi, FinTech, CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, and legal advocacy, you know this Legal made my heart flutter because you know what even when you?

Think they're down crypto finds a way to Swarm into your life. It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah, because it's dead and yet it's Undead it's it's constantly trying to crawl back somehow the fact that it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying to crawl back Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous now It's it's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out. What's the vampire but but specifically crypto is the zombie Yeah, yeah when I first read the line that is not dead which can't eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die can eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die. Hock toot coin.

I did not guess that it would be referring to Hock toot coin. When I think of, you know, 28 years later trailer where they use that poem for the Kimpley poem. Yeah, the Kimpley poem, yeah. Three, six, you know, like them just guessing where the price of Bitcoin is gonna go. I think we're at the beginning of a golden age,

not for us, but for the grifters You know God next week when our dear golden boy gets our orange boy gets elected So I are inaugurated because he already won the election That's debatable I think there was some very curious irregularities Right straightforward from here to be encouraging the blue and on You're right he wasn't shot at all that was all an AI trick Yeah, that was two dozen are they are 15 would blow your whole head off that way You know the thing I actually did like the most similar to you, I really did like the

assistive tech. I mean, the stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able-bodied, they're experiencing either cognitive decline or, you know, neurodegenerative things or paralyzed. Like, this is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment and development in, I assume maybe to scale up production of it and figure out ways that it can be Offered to people in a variety or in a spectrum of use cases, right? I need the stuff that I did not like hmm you know, I didn't really care for a lot of the

Luxury surveillance stuff. Yeah, you know the fake CGMs that, you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me, it was a medical device, and when I asked, she looks at my tag and goes, no. It's not a medical device. Not in any legally binding sense. We had a beautiful moment where it was this like it was like a set of smart goggles Which there were a lot of that had like night vision, but also it had like threat assessment So the specific the specific thing they bragged is like it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun, right?

Oh, and this was right after we had gone to an AI security camera that I had flipped off with both hands And it had identified as a man giving the thumbs up to the camera. And I was like, I don't feel great about it identifying guns. You know? So luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for AI recognition, also like they had it in litter boxes and shit. They don't need that. Really don't fucking need that. Why does the litter box need to be connected to the internet? And why does it need a camera in it? You know? That does make me think of a better world where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI

But it's all integrating it into cat focused products like 50 billion dollars being poured into cat Translate whatever your cat is saying into French Perfectly your cat can make deals with Chinese And by the way, we've hooked him up to Venture Capital. He has an open line to SoftBank. Siri, why, you know, that, I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make some deals.

Help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door. You know, things like this. But what we get now, bullshit. I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs be like, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat She that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like we taught Proust to a dog Sitting at a table smoking his cigarettes. The future.

Garrison, you're up. Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth at Goethe Park, where they had big traffic cones on their head wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks. They were dressed as wizards. They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to them and they said- Let's start. VLC folks, if you don't know this,

this was especially relevant to those of us who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of- Any video file. Or audio file, and now it will automatically give you subtitles too, using local AI that's not reaching to the cloud or anything to do it. Because putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard.

So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put subtitles up for you. We walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything. We have nothing to sell you. And it's beautiful, they're French. So it was in this like, yeah. Wonderful accent.

I'm not gonna fake it. The degree of like, I don't give a fuck about anything else in this stupid goddamn show that they gave off, they exuded it. And they're by far the coolest because of something, Robert, you said to them. I walked up and I was like, VLC's a very popular app, they just crossed six billion downloads,

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

I'm obsessed. That's amazing. I feel bad about this too, because it's a good app. I have also used it. I saw the guy in the hat and I was like, oh, it's the VLC from, you know, from on your desktop. And then I was like, that's stupid.

I don't need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist. Push aside your instinct to be like, do's wearing a hat and a cape and I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist push aside your instinct to be like do not approach stranger in a cape. Garrison does not have that in. No no no I feel a magnetic attraction. This is why I keep an air tag on them. Great way to get abducted. I think similarly obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of the AI slop is obviously bad.

We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing that's kind of like the worst is similar to what you said, Ed. Like, a level of surveillance tech. I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture. And this is really tricky. There was one at Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered, I believe, by Samsung with money. And also they've access to like their training data.

They're called Visomatic. And specifically why this exists, it is a camera that you can put on a computer. It will it will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists is for online test taking. It's so people don't look at their phone to cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving. And if your eyes look down too much, it's going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic.

There's a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of like online exams that they as a company will put on, you know, whether it's like for people, students, employees. But they also had like other features where you could switch it. I see what's doing all the same work. It just is placed differently on the monitor. And instead, you know, do like object detection, you know, what you're wearing and the general behavior analysis if you seem like you detection, you know, what you're wearing and the general like behavior analysis. If you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also is South Korean company for their own surveillance detection.

But I asked a systematic like what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test taking? Yeah, general surveillance like, yeah, we want to learn how to, like, predict or, like, analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version, one quite funny thing is, as I walked by, it first identified me as a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty neat. Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook

Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like Person But but yes, that was you know something that was like quite well done Specifically the visimatic stuff like very functional it could tell when I was looking at the screen when I was looking at my phone It could tell from like various various angles like what what I was holding what I was looking at where my attention Was being directed like it was it was very well done is very accurate, but you know possibly scary Well speaking of possibly scary the sponsors of this podcast Don't know who they are could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again in which case

Thank you boys for your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying that because I got pulled over the other week and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now. I would never do that. Anyway, thanks guys. ["The New York Times"] And we're back. Is it my turn?

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

I, you know, they're European. They're called ELE. ELE Health. That's E-L-I. Anyways, this is a at-home hormone tester. So it is saliva-based. It's like a little disposable package. Currently, they only advertise cortisol and progesterone, but they have plans for estradiol and other hormones. Testosterone as well.

Testosterone as well. Sorry. And yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait, what was it, like 15 minutes? 20 minutes. And then you scan this little QR thing on the device and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications for like the DIY like hormone market or use case. I started DIY and did my own like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that. So this is a, it's a good idea.

If it's actually effective, like we don't have hands on yet, we haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this. Very interesting, very intriguing. Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible test this compared to the regular like male in blood tests, which is like the current way to do it. But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory and that's maybe not always the best or even like convenient. So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really really cool. Right. There's no insurance involved. This

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

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

Exactly, exactly. The potential is great. And then probably my least favorite booth, I have to call out some other white women. My SoCal Boho white women is Evject. And how's that spelled? E-V. E-V. J-E-C-T.

Okay. And what this is... Oh god, yes. This is a special plug for your charging port of your E-V. So the idea is a nefarious party sees you in your fancy E-V and approaches you and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words. Their words, by the way.

Like, they see your fancy car and you're at targets. So this device will, like, ejects, you can just drive away from the charging cord. It ejects the power cord? It ejects the power cord, by the way. Leaving broken pieces of plastic on both the charger itself and your car. Non-reusable, by the way.

This is not reusable. It's single use. One time use. Yes. So yeah, all those people targeting SoCal white women in their AV case. Finally, someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip tie on your car door handle,

MS-13 is gonna take you. That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away. I was like, this product wins the Cool Zone Media Award for the most white woman product. It's specifically right if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted, what a way. This is that exact demographic of people who think they're gonna get trafficked

in your local Olive Garden parking lot. Gang stalked Americans. In the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California, where the average income is in the eight figures. I gotta say though, you're being very unfair to them. It was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok to look at all of the different reasons

their kids are going to be abducted and talk to you about this product. You know? They're like, finally, someone's gonna do something about it. Create a disposable piece of plastic. You notice that guy's always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station. This is so he doesn't get shot.

Gotta be careful. I feel like I could have upsold them and like, what if we put some explosives in this? You know, really like keep them off of the car. Like blow it away. Like a flashbang? Create a diversion. An agent inside of it called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it.

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

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

And you know, it has its ups and downs for the most part. It's good. It moves like 1200 people through a tunnel at 30 odd miles an hour. And for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone or watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way. And at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.

You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah, so he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour. And it takes, there's someone has to drive it, and also someone has to help you get into the car. But you can fit up to three additional people into the car. So that ratio of-

That's everyone I know. Yes, right. So yeah, you got two people moving, three people, 200 yards at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades ago. Right, exactly. I mean, this was the sort of thing that...

There was, though. There had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles. Miners. Yes, right. Anderthal. Yeah, and that was mostly for... Pirates in at least one movie I saw recently.

Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing. It was more of a place where you would go if you needed to get copper. Of course. But in this case, so this is where it's good to have, and I guess every CES is like, this was my first, to be reminded that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if

you put car through hole? What if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move that number of people. But that's slightly more than one person. So that was cool. It's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities. You know, like it could be...

Okay, Dave. I mean, most of the obvious is the something we've gone last. There's like three or four good things. You all said them. I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here. And there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on here up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the you know like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody is so whatever your boss can tell if you're really looking at the zoom that you're

on yeah don't really love that personally but for me the a lot of the smart home stuff is a real drag yeah but just in the sense that it clearly zoom that you're on. Don't really love that personally, but for me, the, um, a lot of the smart home stuff is a real drag. Like just in the sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being like sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make, you know, human life, human life and just being like, I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen. Just fucking grim, actually.

Didn't really care for it. I feel like you gotta, what are you using that time to do? Yeah, what are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of, like the thing that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes. Right. Yeah. I wonder how you feel about this,

because you and I have been going to CES from, and I guess a broadly similar number of years. I've never been to CES. Oh really, this is your first time? No, I'm a fucking sports writer, man. Like this is, I'm out here because Ed got me a folding bed. I sleep in the- You have like the dead eyed veteran look to your face. Oh yeah, well I'm very tired.

Yeah. This is the thing with like, I think- Shocking. As far as I Oh yeah, well I'm very tired. Yeah. This is the thing with like, I think, as far as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop where you more or less like you start out, it's too much, you get big eye right away and then you just sort of feel zombified. But then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like, you know, I remember like 14 CESs ago,

that was pretty good. Like, and they're also tired and also deranged by this point in time. Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer, I was like, oh man, science has given me everything I want. And I guess, I don't know, do you remember when the last one was that you felt even sort of that stirring?

Yeah. 20, like 11 or 12, when they did, I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time. And it was 2011 or 12 when I, I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time. And it was so big. The Las Vegas Convention Center is the size of a city. And seeing the lights in that whole convention center dim as they were doing this, it was very inefficient.

Not out of reverence, but because. Yeah. This was wild. Yeah. But that was just like, oh wow, this is kind of amazing that this is even possible. But yeah, not really since. Not really since.

That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the Hyperloop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be, unless something goes wrong. Would have started to seem kind of grim otherwise. Well, the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been, as long as I've been going to these, they've been trying to sell people on smart homes. And I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want, right?

One of them is it would be nice if like I didn't have to think about playing music. I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted and it would play the music and I could hear about playing music. I could just tell my house to play the music I wanted, and it would play the music, and I could hear it everywhere. And I didn't have to futz with a bunch of shit. And the second is, what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold? It would be nice to turn on the heater like an hour before I get home. And one of those things you'd use every day,

and one of those things is not really viable to base a business off of, but they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house. And I don't know, does anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking smart home? No, I mean, like it's not an accident that my apartment is basically going to be in the year 2005 forever. Like, I mean, it's, it's expensive to do all this stuff.

This was the bit that with so many of these demos, like just you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful is. It's like the Lexus December to remember sales event type energy, just a big fucking. What lives do you live? Yeah, this also, we've talked about this on Ed's show that like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like

the first 15 minutes of a George Romero movie. Like just getting you set for eventually there's gonna be be a lot of disembowelings and hideous shambling zombies. And Smart Home, not a bad horror movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept. Yeah. Speaking of great consumer concepts, right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast.

We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast.

We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast.

We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. We'll be right back with another podcast. I think we are speeding. Wrapped it up. Very fast into sweet abyss. I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics. I'm like, I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going, but also I don't know what to do about it

because so much of it is driven by private interests, right? It's like venture capitalists, well-capitalized individuals, and the firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed, and these corporations. Yeah, the nature of like, you can really tell that a lot of the health products are very optimized

for like rich tech executives. Like, there's a lot of sleep products that all relied on you being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers playing banal beats while you slept, and like a different devices measure your, like do an ECG, and's like I don't know my Aunt's not gonna do that. Yeah, you know like I was you know I was I took with my partner about this they have type 1 diabetes

They have a CGM they use it constantly and they're in we've been talking about and thinking about writing about how There's been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto you this idea that you need to have close monitoring of it To preempt if you are gonna be diabetic or to optimize what you're eating throughout the day. But that, you know, when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, whoa, you know, if your sugar slightly goes out,

it's because you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of and you can be your best self, which is really just like not large. And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking

behind a lot of the biometric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that. Yeah. It's kind of focusing on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing. We spent a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest, and I do feel like several tech companies

were the ones trying to sell us indulgences. Right, yeah. All right, Gare. There's small improvements for consumer tech. This is a very consumer-based, or it's supposed to be a consumer-based tech show. There's products like the Shox headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I tried a bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good.

They work underwater. If you're deaf in an ear, you can listen to your music the way you used to be able to. Yeah, very cool stuff. This year, they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it if you're standing like two, three feet away. There's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head despite having to not put an earbud

actually in my ear. They're super useful, they work great, really good sound quality. They're durable. I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day, like sweat, rain, great product. It's like small improvements, right? It's not necessarily revolutionizing hearing,

but it's very small improvements. Whereas the other kind of big trend, which isn't necessarily wholly consumer-based, it's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards, is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form of like technology and like AI enabled technology. You used to have friends to get recommended new music. You used to have like friends to like tell you about new stuff that they're

interested in no longer. Now you have an agent that can do that for you. You don't need you don't need friends to help kind of talk about, you know, you had a you had a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short term replacement using AI. You can have a friend replacement of a girlfriend replacement. It's all these things that are trying to replace the core concept of friendship. Even as like a even as even as like a baby, even as a toddler, your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside. It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell you what to do, tell you what you need on your shopping list. Surveil your house.

Roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras, and that can be your first friend. It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, making it as smooth as possible, that completely ignores what it means to be human. It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot, LEQ, which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device to remove the need for human

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

that their pets are going to die. And I was like, are vets not getting out of vet school? No, because that's like, that's a big part of being a vet. Do they need chat GPT for this? I saw this other company that was like, it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet. Where you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this AI generator,

and it will generate new images, and this is proven to help you move on from loss, which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago. It's seven years ago. And like, no, you should talk with your friends about that. That's why you are a human. That's how you can move on from loss.

You have to make new connections. And poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to help you move on. Like, why? Why? Anyway, that's bleak. Replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do, maybe because they don't really understand real human relationships that aren't like innately transactional. I'm not sure, but that is like a huge trend that I've seen multiple, multiple

people mention. All right. Zai? So I've worked in this industry for like three years now, and this is my first big convention. And I would say this is just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world, and most of it's just nonsense, and maybe the post-Civ people are on to some stuff. Well, you say that, but I really do think Viridox is gonna revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of people.

I'm just slandering these people. But don't name it something so sinister. Yeah, if you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great. I would just don't. Call it apple fresh.

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

will also translate to waking up the dead. Possibly, but you don't know that it's gonna do, you don't know that it's not going to do that. Right, right. We just know it keeps things fresh. Yes. As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions. And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.

Yeah, we did discuss whether the ability to bring red leaf lettuce back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones. David. Oh, it's me, sorry. Yeah. A lot of good points. I mean, I think Gary and Edward both made the point

about the sort of sociopathic thread of a lot of this, just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel not... I mean, there probably are people, I imagine, that's like, if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards, you know, he's like... Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson. We love Brian. Oh, yeah, yeah. we have him on the show. Yeah, but he, like I feel like he would have been walking through this clapping his hands with delight. Clapping his hands, eating his 400 pills a day.

Yep, drinking his son's blood. Yep, time for, yeah. It's a, it's. In fairness, I drink his son's blood pretty right. It's not bad. It's a high quality platter. But that, it felt like it was that, that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all. And I don't think I mean, again, there probably are people that want that.

They certainly have money. I don't imagine that I think what most people would like. I mean, you don't expect technology to make you feel more human. But something I've been thinking about a lot, we've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline, that there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like sort of things are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient. And I don't think that I want that. I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the, you know, market that I think

they're aiming for with this. But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music. Like that's a thing that, you know, your friends tell you about it. And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit. Like there's the distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed to something like you're a foie gras goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being and I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of agency of having some sense of doing the things that you want to do. Like I would imagine that well I don't have to imagine it. Technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you, I think that I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human.

I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking Matrix pod. And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the Matrix pod dwelling community. Yeah, I think that's that's about the best line. We could go out on like that's that's Yeah, you nailed it. Thanks. I thought I crushed that one. Yeah, you did you did I'm a great job Dave where can people find your work Dave defector calm why let me do that without crushing my no no no no That's okay. Let me that's a load-bearing piece of content defector comm is the website and

Defector.com is the website. And Ed? Big Black Jack a bit on Twitter and Blue Sky, This Machine Kills is my podcast. Techbubble.substack.com is the newsletter. Hell yeah. Do you want to tell people how to find you, Zy? At Neo Woman on Twitter with zeros. Zeros for Neo.

Zeros, all right everybody. Well, that's going gonna do it for us here and it could happen here and our week at CES, just try to hug your loved ones until the Viridox sweeps through all of their homes, neighborhoods. They're gonna be coming soon. Yeah.

Oh no, it's in the room, it's in the room! What? What? Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And this January, we're going on the road to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, Tech's biggest conference. Better Offline's CES coverage won't be the usual rundown of the hottest gadgets or the biggest trends, but an unvarnished look at what the tech industry plans to sell or do to you in 2025, interrogating

their narratives alongside a remarkable cast of industry talent and award-winning journalists. We'll have daily episodes, on-the-ground interviews, and special panels covering everything from the BS of AI to the ways in which race and gender play into how people are treated in the tech industry and at these conferences. I'll be joined by David Roth of Defecta and the writer Edward Ongweiso Jr. with appearances from Behind the Bastards Robert Evans, It Could Happen Here's Gare Davis, and a few surprise guests throughout the show. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts from. And check out betteroffline.com.

podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts from and check out betteroffline.com. John Stewart is back at The Daily Show and he's bringing his signature wit and insight straight to your ears with The Daily Show Ears Edition podcast. Dive into John's unique take on the biggest topics in politics, entertainment, sports, and more. Joined by the sharp voices of the shows, correspondents, and contributors. And with extended interviews and exclusive weekly headline roundups, this podcast gives you content you won't find anywhere else.

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Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Nick and Appet here a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host Mia Wong returned for the holidays returned rejuvenated returned refreshed returned to do something a little bit different. In the coming weeks, we're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism But what we haven't really been doing as much what I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now and also talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up inside were trapped outside a Trump building

and with me to talk about this is writer organizer agitator doer of so many different things that like I don't know someone's gonna write a great biography in like 100 years it is it is the one and only Vicky Osteweil Thank you. Sorry. I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you're you find people could hear me I'm glad to have you here and part part of this The initial thing that was like, okay, we need to do this was I saw you called all of this the years of lead paint and That it's just it is stuck in my every, for every single second of every day since

then. Yeah. Yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump hotel. Then about, you know, as we are about to talk about Matthew levels burger, I think is how it's pronounced. Who's the green beret, then

big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump hotel would start not a race war, but like the purging of democratic politicians. Is that what we think his yeah, that seems to be it like politicians and like it's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants democrats gone from like the army and right right you know so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of nazi fantasy of the day of the rope from the turner diaries is kind of like metastasized into all of right wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race worry or like less anti Semitic versions of it.

Yes. And that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by exactly blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump. So basically this guy that is maybe a green beret, which like say what you will, arguably some of the most trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever else you say about them. And this is important, you know, like I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like green beret to like former green beret. This guy was active duty.

So like, yes, yes, yes,, exactly This wasn't even like a cooked vet This is a guy who is like in the shit and we know that he was drinking the kool-aid because he used to chat GPT It's just not today to help plan his attack. But unfortunately despite his murder expertise, which Undeniable the cyber truck like all Tesla's is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans. And what I really mean, of course, is that they have just terrible safety protocols and the cyber truck, which is like a 12 year old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly, incredibly firm stainless steel body, which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that

your frail human body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal. It's very dangerous to be inside, but the car doesn't take damage. And that means that if you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine. So the explosion went straight up, right? So it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage to the hotel. Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine. So anyway, all of this is to say, you have this guy who's like an active duty green beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an Elon Musk car will somehow

lead to the murder of Democrats, but he's so tech-pilled that he takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like horrible image. And I mean, I'm being flippant about this, like it's awful thing obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself. And the image was everywhere on social media

for like the last three days of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that basically. Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are because I imagine some of you like there's probably like, I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like know the name of every single guy He was implicated for these car bombings But for everyone else who's normal and I kept myself among the non-normal people because I did I spent about two years

Going down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain same but the years of lead were this thing in Roughly the 70s and the 80s in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings 1968 and Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, in France for example, France has this huge uprising in May 68, like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils have seized control the factories like they lose this robot Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing in a helicopter, but then after that like they kind of never Seriously threatened the French government again in Italy. That is not true like 68 in Italy

There's a very similar thing going on But like the seizure of the factories has been going on since like I mean stuff like this has been happening since the 50s again It really only stops in 1977 when like they have one last big push uprising and it fails so as a way to contain this the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right-wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups and by terror groups I mean like the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing 1980 that kills 85 people wounds like 290 like it's a really really horrific attack and it's immediately blamed that an anarchist group turns out

It's not an anarchist group. It is a state-backed like fascist group and Yeah, like there are other ones. I will pass over to Vicky to talk about like the other thing terrible shit that they did Well that bombing kind of ends in some ways, ends the years of lead. You could end it there. It's sort of the last big terrorist month. The first thing, the event that like sort of after 68 kind of starts it as this thing called

the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which is like at an agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just like, but 17 people are killed. Almost a hundred people are wounded. And the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in 68 as well. And there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer

named Pennelli who is arrested. And then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death. It has still never been proven that he was pushed. The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him really hard. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh.

Like there's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Faux called The Death of an Anarchist. So anyways, they blame the anarchists. They literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer. And then of course it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordonee Nuovo, who was, you know, this neo-fascist group that had, let's say significant

overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think one way of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it, is that it's like a very low level civil war. It's, I think, the closest thing we can maybe think of is the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas the movement was in Ireland. But this is very similar, which is like, there's these arms wings, both on the right and the left that are like, both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks.

Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here. I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in I think it's in if you go to the Halloween episode we did, we talked about conspiracy is I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this right, the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks So it's designed to like fight a soviet invasion and like in having all these bombings

Was specifically something they call the strategy of tension Which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror As a strategy to drive people back towards the state because the idea was and this and this seems to have worked You know you you scare people enough by the fact that There's you know, there's bombs going off all the time. People are getting killed. People are getting kidnapped There's all of this just like horror happening and the goal is to get people to turn to the state for you know, sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need you know, we need to sort of terror to end and

It was extremely effective. And the sort of knowledge of this has, I guess, proliferated through the American left in the last, like decade. And that has led to a lot of, I think, kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is gladiose, those those stay behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo-fascist groups and Like to refer to this sort of like I don't like what's happening in the u.s And that's not really what's happening

And this is where I want to pass it to Vicky to talk about sort of the the characteristics of what we're calling the years Of lead paints and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones Yeah in classic American fashion everything is more chaotic and autonomous. Yes. And widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America. Products and services. Did I do good? That's support.

This podcast. That's a good one. Thank you. We are back. All right. Years of blood paint. Let's go. Yes. Right. So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio and it's not Gladio because that was very conscious and it was like these stay behind networks that were organized explicitly, but the U S state defense of the second amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the U.S. the sort of home for military surplus, because obviously like the military industrial complex sells

lots of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing a reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of years of led terroristic sort of strategy of tension way, I think might actually be close, but you can tell that that's very disorganized. Yeah, very distributed through the social. It's done by, you know, volunteers. Right? Yeah. And also the people who are doing the years of lead are unbelievably cynical about it. Right? Like they don't they don't believe any of this shit. Right? shit, right? Yes. Yes. No, exactly. We're a second amendment guys. Like that stuff is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what they were trying to do. But that's sort of, you know, that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff. Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also not the years of lead paint. That's just like a similar thing the years of lead paint Which is obviously like it which is a joke about there's this big reactionary myth from like the Freakonomics guys I think yeah Like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms Which is really funny because for the Freakonomics guy that is a downright left-wing theory

Exactly a freaking comics guy that is a downright left wing theory. Exactly. Or maybe it was a dude directing it. I don't even remember now. Anyway, so it became it became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers and Generation X people, you know, having the blood paint in their gasoline and in their walls, cause all this stuff. Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of like ableist insult when I talk about this and is a mimetic way of making fun of that concept. But all of that to say they have completely drunk the Kool-Aid, right? Yeah. The fascist, as you're saying Mia, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left. They were like making it up. But like a lot of people on the right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy, excuse me, in Italy in the sixtiess in the actual years of lead Years of lead paint you've got people genuinely probably believing that January 6 was Antifa

Like people whose friends were there, you know Yeah like stuff like Q and and the other thing that the reason that this is years of lead pain and not the first Trump administration is Because during the first Trump administration There was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements and they could, they could certainly come back in the US right now. There's no reason they couldn't. Yeah. And it's also worth talking about, we'll be covering this on the show, like at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents, but there was recently a massive from distributed denial secrets, a

massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from a guy who infiltrated it. There's a very good ProPublica story Talking about the guy that will link in the show notes. So like like the militia movement has Survived but the kind of stuff that like we saw in like 2017 2018 2020 like is not the proud the proud boys Q and on the folks who made up j6 and the folks who made up the alt-right, broadly, were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street. And then the people who remained, QAnon folks who were, I think, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-Nazis, obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right? And those people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repressions, I think, successfully sort of put the end to that organized Q stuff.

Yeah, well, and also, and also we've talked about on this show, the other thing that put an end to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you could use the literally the exact same structure of QAnon, but they make it about trans people. Yes. And that has been unbelievably effective. No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued. But as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not that functional right now. Yeah, it's not. Which is really lucky. But what that means is that Trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015, 2016.

Like that was a real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His rallies this election, people left early. You know, it was like going to see a losing team in their last home game of the season, you know, it was like it was like going to see a yeah losing team And their last home game of the season, you know was the vibe at those rallies. Yeah, I should do a very specific example It's like the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out So before for their owner move into Las Vegas exactly We're like they've had an incredibly disappointing season like deliberately by the owner who decided to make who made a bad team So people wouldn't fight him like moving the team to LA like it's like that kind of yeah

Those were the vibes and yet of course the Democrats in their infinite infinite capacities lost the election And so that means though is that is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government As it's ever had. The resistance is, they're very proud of legally handing power to the man and ending all of his charges or whatever, but the street movement is disorganized. So you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus, Fox News, Truth Social X, the everything app, all know, all of these like all these places where the fascist, you know, and I guess meta has now just officially announced

they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean, you know, when we're recording this, so it's, it's just, there's this huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organ in this. You get people like this Green Beret, who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which wouldn't be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump hotel up in an attempt to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right? The imagination of, as you said, the Turner diaries, or the sort of like, you know, the right wing terror networks in the US, you know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking

electrical power grids, right? They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world of all against all, and you'll get a race war, and everything will fall apart, whatever. It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family, step two, question mark, question mark, step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying. I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea, but that's happening in these groups that have really, really, they believe, I think genuinely that like, I think the right does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur. Like see them both as equally dangerous right they hate Liz Cheney yeah like in the final days the election she was the person they were saying we're gonna go

after her like Liz Cheney like really like yeah it's like like the the closest parallel I can think of this is like there was a faction of people during the Cold War who thought that like the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked and like there were literally guys murdering each other like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in 69 right like and there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War even as like as China is invading Vietnam are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that like and that's the secret lead like the USSR and the PRC are working

together and these are not like, you know, some random guys that's really like these are these are like the guys that like the peak Of conservative power or absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is I think yeah, like this is the kind of thing We're in now just like these people are completely cooked. They don't have they don't have any analytical ability whatsoever They just they actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid. There was a scoop. Sorry, I'm just going to drop this really quick. There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of Project 2085,

their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia. They want to take down Wikipedia. Like, because that's a place you can verify facts at, right? They've already got the post, they've got the times. Like, what are they going to do? They've They gotta go after Wikipedia. This is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build. Yeah. And do you know what else builds a world of unreality and then attempts to sell it to you? Ooh, products and services. That supports this

podcast. Yes. We are back. I'm very proud of that one. That's one of the best ones I've ever done and I just completely off the top of my head just came back better than ever. That was a good one. She's never been so bad. So I want to move a little bit from from the just what is the state look like how pill Do these people kind of thing too? I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here because I think part of what's what's happening here and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like The chips act and like the capacity of the state or whatever

But I think actually if you want to understand what's going on here a good place to go is like you going back to your David Graber And he has this line talking about neoliberalism I think this might god I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote I think it might be from the shock of victory, but he has this line about how neoliberalism when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like any alternative, the neoliberalism is impossible. It will always choose making the alternative

seem impossible because that's what neoliberalism is, right? This is, you know, the sort of maxim of Margaret Thatcher is there is no alternative. It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the you know And this includes the possibility of a future hmm, and The goal of this and this is I think that the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint is This induced helplessness. Hmm. Yeah, there's something I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment

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

is the idea that you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice. Right. And any choice made otherwise, you know, is doomed to failure. Right. And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut. I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and miserable list strategy of the previous 30 years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like 12% one way,

you know, nudge politics is like Barack Obama loved or whatever. Right. So that's sort of like there's, there's that sense, but then on the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity. Right. Because part of what the sixties was and the reason the sixties lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe, they had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories that have these like crazy strikes over and over again.

So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism, blah, blah, blah, breaking down labor workforce, like we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right? And like we go to the HR department to get help, right? Or we sort of get self care, we like work on ourselves, we get therapy, you know, our boss offers us, you know, thoughts and prayers, right? When things are hard.

But like there's a big attempt to allow people to define themselves, sort of the carrot, the carrot of the sixties was like, you know, you get to like have an identity, like, okay, we won't be officially racist. Yeah. Quote unquote. You know, okay, we won't be officially sexist. They claim, okay, whatever. None of that's true. But they, but they sort of sell that. And then they say, but in return, you have to like do all of the self work. You have to be an identity in the marketplace. So basically

you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both an identity in the marketplace. So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces. Right? Like, and so that in, you know, spoonie world, we call that sort of choice paralysis. Right. And I think that's probably accepted as well that like you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless in the face of it, you can't do anything. And so that produces a craving for authoritarianism for authority, right? That's another thing people want is like someone else decide for me, I'm sick of thinking about this.

Yeah. And that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you To free you from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which health care plan You're supposed to buy and shit like that And oh my god, and you know and the right has a bunch of alternatives here, right? We like this is the fantasy of what tread wives is it's like what if someone else did you're thinking for you? It's also the the entire logic behind AI, right? And to find this

sort of AI agents thing that they're like pushing right now, go listen to our CS coverage and you'll hear a bunch about it is like, what if someone just like planned your life for you, right? What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and we would tell you how to live. And this is, you know, this is also the structure of how cults work. Like this is why cults have been able to attract people that like I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them. This is why there's so many engineers in cults. Because it's like once people who have to make choices constantly and the cult is like,

hey, what if I just like made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on with like Trumpism, right? Because Trump is also to some extent, like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore. You just, you know, here is the guy, the guy is going to do the thing for you. This is also, if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right? It's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual, the single heroic individual like acts outside of the

bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you. And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety. Also, and this is something that is very well documented that, you know, we're not going to get into it full here, but all of the stuff we've been talking about the information space where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you that something is true're refusing to make the choice has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action and This has been a really important part of this to sort of to mobilize the left like it's part of what the the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gabbit was yeah, right was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising Nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them and you know now Tulsi Gabbard is like one of the

big people in Trump world. Right I think um what's his name I disrespect him by not remembering his name but I should for the podcast Steve Bannon put it well when he said just flood the zone with shit right it's sort of the strategy you just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter and this is how Trump also kept ahead of his many scandals is he would just say the next most outrageous thing. And you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing. And it was just a sort of amplifying wave of chaos and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it,

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

and to make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy, right? It was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be forced back to work. How do you force people back to work

who evidently care about each other and their own safety? You lied to them. You confused them about what's actually going on, right? So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work. So we had to get over the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which like people

are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know, whatever. Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy born of strength, right? The years of lead paint, this is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power, right? The actual base that put Trump in power, right? Their actual political base is incredibly brittle, right? They are about to tank the entire global economy like through by by putting like 50% tariffs of like every single country in

the world they okay let's be accurate here that on on on Chinese Mexican and Canadian goods which is like okay like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the u.s. imports things from right so like you know this is how you resist this is how you resist your your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself.

But, you know, they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought them to power was fury at rising prices, right? These fucking arrogant bastards have sown the winds and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwinds. The basis of this fucking, of this entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this like dear listener Do you think these people can hold? 330 million people in line by sheer force No, of course not. There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history, right? This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance Yes

If they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation, right? They need you scared. They need you confused. They need you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you to forget that as the old song says, in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousandfold. They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world

from the ashes of the old, where the union makes us strong. This is the entire fucking thing, right? If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, right, the thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma, that means that you, just literally any random person, can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing. The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what? It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you don't do that and guess what? It's not very hard

No for you to pick up the things that you know how to do for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things and They are fucking terrified of this Yes their entire strategy is to make sure that you simply do not do this and every single one of you has the power to Do this and I know this because I also was just some random Dip shit like I was just literally a random college student

Right like I was just some asshole and I just started doing things right and I got together with my friends and we fucking we Made a tenets union and we did anti ice stuff We did all of this shit and it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you We just you know decided one day we were going to do it and it happens. To return one last time to David Graeber, one of one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you

making this world differently and together we can do that. Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important. And actually when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together

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

that they aren't offering us anything anymore. They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stopped. We get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very, very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them or the Haitian Revolution which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the

French. Yeah. When the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Haiti and it has been punished ever since. The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, this flooding, the zone was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong, they had Obama was a sign of strength. We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country, and we and he can just go on hope, like, and he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular. Like even through a, you know, a huge economic collapse, right? That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence.

Then I use the phrase advisably, and there are a lot of holes and they have drunk the Kool-Aid. The right has drunk the Kool-Aid. They don't know the difference between Democrats and anarchists. Not really. They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do, their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move. That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them. And that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness in many ways. The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways I think than they were in previous times. And they're going to have to be of necessity because Maga is basically, you know, it's the, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands

on you, like you're, you're in trouble, but if it doesn't, like you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any, any trouble, like you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that. But there's a lot to do and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that then they will take away all their power. Hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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