Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 214

Episode Date: January 10, 2026

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.  - 2025 Q&A - 2026 Predictions - Trump Kidnaps Venezuelan President Maduro - Inside Our AI Future: Report from CES - Executive Disorder: Minneapolis ICE Shooting, Maduro, Iran & Aleppo Update 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 Sources/Links: Executive Disorder: Minneapolis ICE Shooting, Maduro, Iran & Aleppo Update https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115850817778602689  https://t.me/s/Operasyon1  https://x.com/war_noir/status/2008927274326761631?s=20  https://x.com/vvanwilgenburg  https://hengaw.net/  Https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/our-response-israel-gaza-war https://files.constantcontact.com/7fef1c1f901/78a97f42-d0ad-4077-94b0-1e3300697e20.pdf?rdr=true  https://www.defendrojava.org/news/ecr-statement-on-the-situation-in-aleppo https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/what-bombing-means-for-freedom-in-286094596/  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/trump-kidnaps-venezuelan-president-maduro-315837818/ https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/minneapolis-ice-shooting-franklin-park-marimar-martinez-operation-midway-blitz/ https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/21/us/marimar-martinez-shooting-case-what-we-know https://mprnews.org/story/2026/01/07/shooting-south-minneapolis-ice-agents-federal-operation https://pbs.org/newshour/politics/2000-federal-agents-sent-to-minneapolis-area-to-carry-out-largest-immigration-operation-ever-ice-says https://www.defendrojava.org/news/call-in-campaign-urge-congress-to-take-action-in-support-of-syrian-kurdsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. AllZone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions.

This is poetry. You don't edit poetry. Well, you do edit poetry. This is the one of the things was poetry. It's bad at poetry. Please stop talking. Welcome. Welcome to It Could Happen here.

2025 Q&A edition. We have the whole team here. Mia, Garrison, James, Robert Evans. I'm your producer, Sophie Lichterman. We're going to answer some of your questions. How's everybody feeling? Great. Trepidacious.

Amazing. Bad. I just got back from vacation. So anything's going to be bad. That's not me continuing to not. look at my phone or computer. Great. Yeah, you should stop looking at the phone.

Have you guys, are you guys aware what this Trump dude's doing? Jesus Christ. This is what a guy. Very, very, yikes. I went to the W&J holiday party this weekend and the amount of like 2017 Trump jokes I had to hear. Oh, no. That's a crime against humanity. God, I love that party.

I love that party. I'm going to a holiday party tonight with some friends who do insurance for people who live in the U.S. and go to Mexico. So I'm sure I will hear lots of fun and exciting anecdotes. Yeah. I am throwing a holiday party and planning it with a four-year-old, which is exciting. Nice. It's going to be good.

One of my favorite experiences as us having our job is at almost every party I go to, somebody's like, so, how's the news? Yeah. Well, people just ask you to summarize the fucking news. Yeah. Not good. Listen to executive disorder. No, I had to explain 764 to a screenwriter yesterday, and they were not happy.

Anyone who goes to a party that I am at knows that there's a gut on the table if anyone asks me how the news is. That's just the rule. It's always sprays that way. Stay the fuck out. What's going on over there in Burma? Let's answer some questions. All right, let's do it.

All right. So we posted on Blue Sky. We posted on Instagram. and we have some of your questions. Let's start out with a with a fun one. Can we have a fun non-incriminating story from your youth, any and all of you? No.

Fun non-incriminating story about you? I mean, for Robert, this is and James and maybe Mia, the statute of limitations for all of you should be fine. Yeah, Garrison. I cannot answer this at all. I have a lot of interesting stories, but I'm trying to think of something from my youth

that I could actually share. I can do one that's, I think, non-incriminating. I'm sad about having been part of it, but that's okay. I was gored by a bull when I was younger. That's a game story. I feel like if we put money on it, like two of us would have bet a bull was involved. I've actually been present at several goring, various species. I probably have most of the goring that's available for a human being to witness,

because I've seen like a water buffalo goring. Oh, nice. That's got to be like the top goring. Yeah, that was a really unpleasant day for everyone involved. Guy lost the use of his legs for a period, actually recovered it later, which is nice. So you can laugh about it, yeah. I don't know we can ever laugh about it. Well, it's a funny story. I think it's fun.

First of all, you shouldn't be unkind to animals, so I did deserve it, right? I don't think you should tawn animals for human pleasure. I don't think you should make them suffer. and if you do, it's kind of your fault. So in that sense, it's funny. I don't know that I've ever heard of a goring where I wasn't like, well, the animal was in the right, clear. Yeah, 100%.

I'm on the bull team with this. The funny part was that my friend who was staying with me had previously not driven a manual vehicle. I had broken probably the bulk of my ribs, right? Like a lot of rib-breaking. And we drove home like that, learning to use a clutch on the way. And that was one of the most painful experiences

I think that's available to a human being. Is it bad that the story that popped into my head was when I ripped my pants in front of the entire eighth grade class at our school picnic? Because I was wearing way too skinny of jeans playing basketball and my pants ripped, and I was wearing TMI, red undies, and pants ripped so, like my entire butt.

No, that's got to leave some scars. That formed to me as a person that I feel like that you just felt. Yeah, but that was my fun, non-incriminating story from youth. That was the very millennial trauma. From the entire eighth grade class that are like graduation picnic. Yeah. I love that you were like skinny jeans icarus. Like that's something that are in a certain generation.

They were so tight. Why? Why? It was the way things were back then, Sophie. I know. I know. Robert, you have to have a fun one. I do.

I do. What's the statute of limitations on murder? Uh, not very. Is it like five years? A couple weeks. You're fine, buddy. You're fine. No, I'll tell a pants splitting story, too.

I got a really good one, Sophie. Oh, good. So I'm in rural northern India in this town called Rishikesh, which is where, like, it's where, like, the Beatles had their ashram. It's like a holy city. There's a lot of yoga there. You're up in, like, the Himalayan foothills. It's beautiful.

The Ganges is actually, like, clean enough to swim in up there. But it's also crazy whitewater rapids. And we're going, like, whitewater rafting one day. And I grab a, I buy a pair, like, pants that are, like, it's like a long set of like athletic, you know, tights or whatever like that to have on the boat. Because like, okay, that'll make sense. They zip so I can keep, you know, some cash or whatever in them. And we're going down the Ganges.

We're doing this whitewater raft and we hit a calm spot. And the guy's like, okay, everybody who wants to get in the water, hop out. And I hop out and immediately two things become clear. Number one, the quality of textiles that you purchase in a market in India, not necessarily up to the standards of a lot of other countries. Number two, the Ganges, mighty river. So my pants immediately are gone. Like just instantly. It's soon as we get in the water, torn off by the Ganges.

And then I am, so I am realizing this, that now I am naked from the waist down. We are surrounded on both sides by a very holy city, and we are heading towards the rocks. So I have to get back in the boat in fairly short order. This presents a problem, because again, as we're getting like buffeted around, I have to get like help pulled up into the boat. And wind up showing absolutely everything, mooting the entire side of the sacred city. So now I'm in the boat naked from the waist down. But I come up with a plan.

I do solve it. I take my shirt off and I put my legs through the arm holes. And I just like tie the neck hole. And I'm just putting my pants. My shirt is pants. What a sight. We went to lunch that way. There's still a restaurant there where they won't let Robert still.

James, there's more than one restaurant in India. I can't go back to. Yeah, yeah. There's a hotel in Bangkok that neither are you can go back to. No, they handled you puking in the parking lot like a trooper. Yeah. Because I puked directly into my analogy, like a considerate. Exactly, like a hero.

Like a hero, James. And then sent a picture to Sophie. Yeah, yeah. That was before I worked here, I sent a picture to Sophie of an algae for the puke. And I was like, let's hire that guy. Yeah, yeah. I feel like it was like 30 seconds into our relationship that I told Sophia's story about me puking. So it's fine.

It was like 15 seconds, yeah. Yeah, it might have been 15. Anyways, Robert, can we get an update to the sequel of After the Revolution? It's done. I'm editing it. I even got edits back from my editor. I'm editing it. It should have been done so much faster.

I could like bring up the fact that my dad died last year, but that's really just me trying to make you feel sorry for me and the fact that I am well past the time at which I expected to have this book done. But it is done and I'm finishing it and you will get to read it soon. I'm sorry. Good for you. Good for you, Robert. Wow. Incredible. Do you plan to cover recent political developments in Canada? I feel like that's a Gare question. Yeah. The answer is always yes. The answer is yes to all of like yes. We will be covering Canada. I mean, especially Alberta. I've been wanting to do stuff on, on Alberta and a conservative party there and a few of the key figures for a while. I've, you know, we've all been busy.

But yes, I should eventually do a dedicated thing. Again, like, and I do occasionally, right. Usually, usually once or twice a year I try to get some Canada related thing out. We've talked about Canada. Gar and I, I feel like did something. Yeah, I mean, like the Canadian election happened this year, right? Supreme Leader Carney is still still in power. and will be for a while.

But yeah, specifically, the Alberta Conservative Party is rife with potential stories. My recent political development in Canada that I would like to talk about is, what's his name, dating Katie Perry? Oh, God. Because it makes me upset.

Wait, who? That's not our problem anymore. That's the same. Famous Canadian person. Is it? It's Justin. It's Justin. Yeah, that's the only famous.

Jesus Christ, really? Not Bieber. Trudeau. Trudeau. Okay. Okay. Still bad. Still weird. Trudeau and Katie.

Perry are dating. A match made in heaven. Oh, wow. Their Instagram official and the photos are upsetting. I do feel like this is the potential. We have a potential for like the one ring of couples Halloween costumes situation to happen here. And I'm excited for that. But no, I'm living pretty close to Canada now.

So I would like to travel up and do more Canadian stuff in the next year. Yeah. Yeah, you love Canada, Garrison. I do. Yeah. As a general rule, people, if you're ever asking, hey, this major thing is happening in another country, are you guys going to cover it? The answer is probably yes, but there are, how many people are on this call? Five people. And there are, I believe, 10 countries in the

world at least. So many are saying more. Well, everyone's now while there's a civil war and one of those splits into two. So I think there's actually 11 countries right now. It's somewhere between five and 11 countries. Yeah. Well, ironically, when there is a civil war, there's a decent chance that I'll be traveling there in the next 12 months. We have a pretty broad remit here. And we, we, I do think we cover a lot of ground. But again, you know, there's, there's only so many people on the team. And we have so many days in the week. So the answer is generally, if we think we can and have more to tell you than like,

here's an article I read. We'll try to do it. But, you know, world big, us small. Yeah. Yeah. And there were other people who do excellent work on lots of things. So like, you know, we don't have to cover everything. God, I missed the trucker convoy.

That was fun. That was a hoot. Oh, I forgot about that. What about? Roma Diadlu? She's still kicking around? The Queen of Canada, yeah. The Queen of Canada.

She got arrested recently. I don't know if she's out on bail or whatever they call it in Putin, Bail or whatever in Canada. But they can't arrest her rub it because she's the queen. Anyways. Notes about that, yeah. What's a fiction book that y'all have been reading lately? Ooh.

My answer is, I work too much. I haven't read any good fiction book lately. I've been reading a sci-fi book called Children of Time. Oh, good. Oh, Adrian Tchaikoski, great guy. Yes. I just read Winter in Madrid, because even when I'm reading fiction books, it still has to be about a Spanish Civil War.

Yeah. So funny. That makes sense for you, James. It's a load-bearing element of my personality. I'm restarting Sirens of Titan for the first time since I was a little kid, which is Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi novel, and like everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, one of the best to ever do it.

And then, you know, I was on vacation, so I was just rereading some Warhammer books to not think about the news when I needed to look at a device. Yeah, I'm going to try to take a little time off around the holiday, so if people have good fiction books to recommend me, message me on Blue Sky.

I've been listening to, oh God, like the entire Kate Daniels series, which is a very fun sort of urban fantasy series where they have a magic apocalypse where sometimes there's these magic waves and magic works and technology stops working, but then they just flip randomly. And so technology works and magic doesn't. Yeah, that's basically the plot line is Shatter on. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fun. I got absolutely flashbang jump scared by one of the characters and one of the spinoffs doing a full analysis of the whole translation debacle of the old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born now

the time of monsters, which I was not expecting the author of this fantasy book to know about. So it's a fun time. Yeah. There's where lions. There's were hyenas. It's good. We like to see it. Cool.

Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back and continue answering some questions. We're back. So on that note, there's a broader question. And it's favorite media from 2025 can be books, shows, movies, games, etc. I mean, Andor's going to be up there for me. Andor season two is definitely up there. That's going to be hard to beat. I really enjoyed that new show, The Pit, the medical show.

Oh, yeah, I've heard good things. Yeah, you would like the pit. I liked it. It made me dizzy, but I liked it. It was interesting. I mean, we'll see how it does it in season two. But the first season I was like, huh. I finally started watching that smiling friend show, and that's fun.

Oh, cool. For TV shows for me, besides like Andor, Dorses, which is good. I think rehearsal season two and the Paramount Nazi episode is more and more accurate every single day. Phenomenal, yeah. As well as Tim Robinson's new show

chair company, which I think gets to the American conspiracy mindset better than almost anything I've seen. No, parts of that are like rivaled. I can film. I still think Eddington is pretty good. It doesn't have as much like depth or humanity as like one of battle after another,

which I quite enjoy. I like that a lot too. I watched the first two episodes of chair company and then was like, I need to wait until they are all out so I can derange myself and like stay up until dawn. Oh, it's so good. That's the way I need to encounter this. But I'm excited for that. I've finished chair company now and it consistently keeps hitting. Yeah.

I don't think Tim Robinson is capable of not pleasing me at this point. That's good. That's a healthy relationship. Yeah. I like the on Netflix Adelaidepress Adela. Lessence, that miniseries, that was pretty good. The acting was incredible. There's just so many things this year that were pretty decent.

TV's been good. TV's been good. TV's been good. Yeah. I haven't watched shit. I just watched Andor and nothing else. So, uh, Hades 2. Great game.

Very fun. Yeah, death to Kronos, et cetera. Also, I want to talk about one of the boys, which is a book from, like, the beginning of this year. We talked about on the show. That's a really, really, really. interesting, basically sort of like a coming of age story about a trans girl who's trying to go, who goes back to her football team. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff there about the relationship between trans femininity and masculinity and masculinity and, you know, the sort

of like politics of sports. And it's also just really fun. Has the best written group chats I've ever seen in any piece of media. So shit rocks. Yeah, it's, it's great. One of the boys, Victoria Zeller, it's, it's fun. also watched Paradise. The ostensible focus on the show is that, like, a secret service agent goes to live with a president who is retired after, like, you know, the detail that they stay with. And it becomes clear over the course of episode one. This isn't really a spoiler that the president is living in an underground bunker with all of the other survivors of a catastrophe that ended the world. And so it's like all of the leadership cadre of the United States living underground in a bunker

after the world has ended. And then it turns into a murder mystery. It's pretty good. It's Nice. I don't watch much TV. Yeah. But I have been enjoying, sticking to the theme, I guess, AK Press have a translation now of two books that I very much enjoyed reading in other languages. One is called Zaragoza Bound, which is exclusively about the Derutie column. I think it's probably the best book I've read on the Derutie column. And Sons of Night by Antoine Jimenez, who was actually, that was not his birth name, but he was an Italian. Italian anarchist who fought with the international group of the Derruti column.

And it's his diary. And then he later, like in later life was a groundskeeper at like the Libertarian People's Club in Marseille. And after his passing, the young people at the club found his diaries, published him and then have these like incredible series of annotations. Like two-thirds of the book is annotations. But it's really well done. So I like that one lot. I think I can answer this next one.

Given how we see media companies from Disney to Condi-Nast Purge or otherwise censor anyone dissenting against Trump, do you fear IHeart Radio doing something to Cool Zone? My answer is they've never censored us in the past, so I don't see it happening in the future, but you never know. Yeah, I mean, anything can happen. It's media. I'm on my third or fourth industry, depending on how you count it within the digital media space. but what I'll tell you right now is that at the moment, and this has been true for almost a decade,

we make them money and they, in return, say, keep doing what you're doing, kiddos, buckaroos. Yeah. So that's about as good as it ever gets in media, in journalism. So, you know, let's keep our fingers crossed. Yep. What was a piece or series Cool Zone Media put together in the past year, 2025, that you were most proud or happy to be part of?

What about you, Gare? Probably the piece that I'm most proud of in like a reflective sense is the dog whistle politics episode I did. I still think that's really relevant and a useful addition to like our cultural dialogue around understanding dog whistles coming out of the Trump administration. And like even still now I will see see posts with people decoding false messages in overtly like national. socialistic communications from the DHS. Again, and this whole focus on like dog whistles versus the actual implementation of their policy, which they're already doing a few times this year, DHS has posted. It's very, very blatant, like, fast wave stuff.

They posted a moon man meme earlier this year, right? And if you told that to like, we were a robber five years ago, we would have, like, I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what we would have done. I would have had, I would have 5150ed you. Like, yeah, yeah. I would have put your ass on a 72-hour hold.

So, like, there's obvious stuff like that. Like, yeah, no, they're, they're clearly, clearly doing, like, intentional nods towards, like, online fascist means. And then they are also just posting regular, regular sentiments of, like, nationalist policy that people are then reading in coded statements to. And I don't think that whole practice is super useful when they're actually implementing this stuff. And I think the sort of, like, anti-ice protests you see in Chicago and, like, in New York on Conall Street is a way more. useful way to channel frustration at the administration and like a frustration around like this nationalist immigration stuff rather than trying to you know look for these maybe real maybe not coded messages on x the everything app yeah i i'm proud of the the zizian episodes that i did earlier this

year i think those are my best episodes of the year you know i i'm particularly this year have done a lot more back end supporting work but i'm continued to be extremely proud of how ed zitron both show and influence in the industry that he covers has grown, especially as he's been really on the ball ahead of some of the breaking of open AIs, irrational exuberance. I've been really happy to play a small role in that. It's just really satisfying to, like, stumble onto somebody and be like, oh, I think this person has some good things to say.

I'm going to try to get that out to more people and then really feel like, yeah, that was the right call. It turns out this was exactly the voice that needed to be louder in this space. That just feels good. It's a kind of good feeling that you only really get in this business. And it really makes up for all of the bad feelings that you also only get in this business. Yeah. Mia?

Yeah. I think I have two things. One, on sort of just a personal level. I'm really proud of the episode that I did that was sort of about Elon Musk's Nazi salute, but was mostly about the way that. all of our reality has been consumed by spectacle and the way that we relate to each other through, you know, through screens and through like images of media and a very, you know, this was a very guided board side of spectacle episode.

But I'm really proud of how that episode played out and how I think in a lot of ways it kind of, it kind of predicted some of what's been happening in terms of, you know, if you look at the sort of decrease in use of social media over the last sort of year. And the turn away from these social relationships that are purely mediated by images that suck and make you miserable all the time. And then the other thing that I'm really proud of is some coverage we did about the Republicans attempt in one of the previous budget fights to impose a role that would have blocked Medicaid from covering trans health care. And we covered it and we helped blow it up and we helped get that killed. and that rocks. I don't know.

It's awesome. I'm really proud of it. I'm also really proud of the Trans News Network people. Yeah, particularly like MediCast again, Mira Levine, who did a really great job covering that and helping stop it. And it rocks. Love to see it. I think for me, like, still the border stuff, really.

It made me really happy that like last year I went to the jungle and made a podcast and now one of the people I met has a place to live. That's really cool. and like it really makes me happy like not just when we can like shift the discourse like that's cool but also when people listen to that and then change the things that they do like every day or sometimes like that's always what you want what I want as a journalist is like for people to listen and care that's why I go to places and so it's been really cool to see people and just to run into people engaging in like mutual aid at the board and then like them slowly

realize that I'm the person that they listened to on a podcast a year ago or two years ago, whatever, is kind of funny. But yet, I think I'm really proud of that. And I'm proud of all the people in the second series for all the stuff that they've done. I'm super proud of the Antivax America series that I commissioned Stephen to do. I think it was a really good, complete project that covered the story in depth more than anyone else. So if you haven't checked that out, check it out.

We're going to go to another quick break and then we'll answer a couple more questions. Sound good? Mm-hmm. Cool. Yep. We're back. All right. This question says, as we become jokerified, sure.

As we all become jokerified. Eventually, what did it for each of you? I mean, let's just say, let's just answer in like the last like year. Sure. Not, not overall. A recent jokerification inciting incident. I can answer that and that might also be Garrison's. It's when we couldn't get into the DNC for Kamalares' speech.

Oh, no, that was nothing to me. That hurt me. That hurt me so much because the DNC was so depressing. It was so depressing. Yeah, the DNC was way worse than the RNC. Post-DNC certainly was a jokerifying moment for me. It hurt. Gerson, I had people reaching out to me in Portland who were worried about you after the fucking

DNC. Yeah, no, the DNC was. was a jokerifying moment. I guess to piggyback off that, though, in terms of like a recent Joker moment, working on the, like, Democrat left-wing conspiracy stuff really did a number on me. Yeah. Yeah. And just like seeing the scale of that stuff, especially around like the Charlie Kirk assassination and just that, that whole moment definitely was like just drilling into my head. Yeah. Those, like, truth tunnels that people went down. The whole team could attest to this. I was getting pretty out there.

You can't get back. Garrison sustained damage. The uniformity of the embrace of counterfactuals is like I don't even know what to do about it anymore. I don't feel like fact checking works. Yeah. I feel like positing alternate facts feels bad too because then you're just like saying, well, I guess we're just openly having a lie fight.

Let's all have a big lie fight. Let's see who's lies with it. Yeah. Yeah, no. And when you're trying to be the only one holding on to like the like life raft of truth, as everyone, as everyone else is like drowning and like mad at you. Yeah. It's like, I, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to handle that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever I encounter someone who's like, you think Trump got shot in the ear. Like, yes. Yes, yes, I do. Yes, in fact, I do think he got shot in the ear. Yeah. And also, can we know? It's a year ago. Like, like, we're here now. That one is so comprehensively disappointed to me because one of the little things it reveals is that there's even among progressives in the left this belief that like someone can't be injured by a gun and handle it reasonably well and not be a good person. Right?

Right. So it has to have been fake. It had the fact that he didn't like panic and piss himself. It has to be fake. And it's like, no, he just like didn't freak out or whatever. He was on a huge high. He was shot. Yeah, he was in a huge adrenaline.

If you ever been shot at, like when you get, when you realize you didn't get hit, it feels awesome. Yeah, you are living, you are surfing a cloud for a while there, so you're not anymore. I think the insights I got from this like left-wing conspiracyism, like seizure, right? This thing is like the seizure of the left embracing this. I got one of the biggest points of clarity as on like what's happening right now is this like tactical flattening of, especially after the Charlie Kirk stuff as well, like with the right wing embracing this like cultural cancellation strategy of trying to get people fired for saying things online, which they've tried to do before, but was done way more successfully that month and directed

by the administration. And then the left embracing a style of conspiratorial thinking that previously was really only embraced as fully on the right. So like this, this flattening of tactics across the left and the right, I think, has been a useful way to look at our current situation for me. Yeah. The ice guided missiles. Yeah. Oh, man. That fully fucking sent me. Like, as someone who's been a journalist for a while, just seeing these outlets that you were previously kind of,

like the first time I had a byline in Mother Jones, I was pumped. Yeah. And then here they are just being like, love to know more about these missiles. We haven't fucking bothered to do your job. Look, I literally did that while I was like waiting for a coffee or having a shit or something. Like, it took me that much time on my telephone to find that contract. Like, what is wrong with people?

Again, it's all just fucking shibboleths and virtue signaling. Why would that be worse? If I said guided missiles, do you know how guided missiles work? Do you know the kind of tail that's required to make them function? Do you know the kind of like mechanical, like experts that you have to have in order to keep these things working and keep them usable? Why would ICE be more dangerous with these? It's just going to distract them from doing the thing they're already used it doing to hurt people. Like guided missiles do not do any.

It would be just like extra trash for them to carry around. Yeah, and they'd be as bad at using them as they are at everything else. And to be quite frank, the government is already using guided missiles to do war crimes via the military. Yep. The people who know how to use them. The other thing that really just, wow, every single time that there's a mass shooting event, which is often in this country, the fact that they have to transvestigate the person every single time. Oh, yeah.

Holy shit is it unnecessary, annoying? it makes me very angry. Yeah. Very angry. Fuck me. God. Man, just, I don't know. Recently, there was a wide piece about, like,

in-range TV, Carl Casado's had on before in the matches. The matches he hosts and, like. The brutality matches, yeah. Probably 30% of the piece was reflecting on the killing of Charlie Kirk. And, like, nobody who goes to Carl's matches has been accused of shooting Charlie Kirk. No, again, and the guy who shot Charlie Kirk didn't shoot him

because he trained doing matches. He shot deer. And then he shot a guy in a similar way to how he'd shot deer. Nor is he a trans person. You know what's a better practice

if you're going to shoot someone at a hundred-something yards distance than a tactical shooting match? Shooting deer. Yeah, like the whole thing is just like, I don't know, yeah, the discourse around mass shootings has become less helpful and more toxic.

No, part of it's because I think there's a decent chunk of like progressives in the left for whom like it's immoral to actually know anything about how guns work or how shooting works or gun culture works. So you can't actually like understand what you're talking about, which is another problem. There's a lot of problems. It's not high on the list of problems, but it annoys me. Yeah, maybe it pitches me off irrationally more than it should. But like, I just find that frustrating. Like we cannot have a reasonable discourse around guns in this country. No, no. That ship sailed. Yeah. With some bullet.

holes in the hole. One last serious one. What's everyone's opinion on the best implementation of dual power in the modern era? That's a Mia question. I mean, how are you defining modern era, I guess? How are you defining dual power? Yeah. Yeah.

And how long do you have? The people who've objectively done the best job of it is as Apatistas. And they've done the best job of it in large part because they've been willing to change the structure of their systems over time as things have worked and things have not worked. And as the systems that they've been using have decentralized, I don't know, and the fact that they were able to, even under massive attack, they were able to do a massive expansion a few years ago.

Yeah, they've held out against, you know, the wrath of the Mexican state, which is one of the most violent in the world. Yeah, I mean, I would, in a similar vein, talk about like the PKK and then the YPG and J and Rojava, right? where you had these non-state groups that had connections and that had some experience doing what we might call mutual aid prior to the government's collapse and then kind of expanded that into these networks that began to mimic and replace state function in an area that about three million people lived in. I think that's a really, that's certainly a more important

story in terms of how that kind of thing might work on a larger scale than anything that's happened up to the present point in the United States, right? Yeah. I guess in less of a militaristic way but more in like a party capacity or like political proposal capacity, probably some of the stuff coming out of the New York City chapter of DSA the past year, which is not reflective of DSA as an entire like national organization, but specifically the New York chapter has been very, very provocative in actually doing like more like party oriented dual power. Yeah. And obviously, I think probably we should also talk some about like the different immigration defense hotlines

and immigration defense reaction forces around the country that have been really ramping up and doing a lot of really good and really difficult work under duress and under, you know, fire, so to speak. Yeah, like people have built a means. Community safety. Yeah, to keep that community safe

when the state has failed to keep their communities safe, right? And sometimes it's put their communities in danger. And like, especially, I think it is kind of heartwarming to me to see people who were just like straight up statist liberals, right? Right. Realizing that actually the cops aren't going to come and arrest ice, that's not going to fucking happen.

And then being like, okay, well, how do we organize the strategy that will maintain safety in our community, given that this load-bearing part of reality for me, that cops are good, seemingly collapsed. And I'd say in general, James, the fact that there's a whole lot of normie people who would have, you certainly would have described them as normies a year or two ago that are now like, yeah, we've got to get rid of ice. Maybe we've got to get rid of all these cops. Bill Crystal.

Yeah, Bill Crystal be on the anti-ice train, right? Yeah. It's not bad. I do get the first. I'm not saying, like, we should invite Bill Crystal to the party or whatever. I'm saying that, like, the fact that... Bill Crystal blocked me on blue sky, so I can't invite him. Sad.

Bill Crystal's coming to the anarchist book fair, and it's going to be serving vegan slop. Is that even a joke, Harrison, or is that real? That could be real. Okay. But it's just in general good that a lot of people who are like, my parents were politically 20 years ago are looking out at what's happening and being like, we got to get rid of these fucking people. Yeah.

That's good. That's positive. Yeah. I would say that that's kind of like a downstream change from what I think will be the most long-term positive change from the 2020 uprisings, which is a huge number of people who hadn't thought about the cops, realized what the cops are. Yeah. And to wrap it up, Robert, we got like multiple requests for you to do various accents.

Are you fucking shitting me? Various what? Accesses. So many requests for you to do various accents. Okay. Some Australian ones, some Boston ones. Some Boston ones? A few other.

But like the specific areas of Boston, I think they were asking about like like different like inter-Boston regional accents. Sure. And I'm sure you can just do those like one-one-one. Oh, you've seen, Boston. All right. That's enough of that. See? Is that a hat?

Are we good? Are we good? Our Q&A episode. Okay. Yeah. Oh, it could happen here. Nailed it. Perfect.

Yeah, no, no. I'd say we reported the news, but this was definitively not the news. Yeah, we didn't do that. Yeah. Goodbye. So I have pulled up Pauly Market and Kalshi. We're going to go through each of the trending predictions right now. Stop.

And then decide where we're going to be putting our last year's profit from Cool Zone coin. We're going to be transferring that on the blockchain to Polly Market. And I think. we can come out of this year with a big profit. This is how we're relying on funding our operations. Yeah, this is us going forward. Can you check Polymarket real quick, see if Morris is still alive? Jesus.

It's been three years in a row. So this is our 2026 predictions episode. Like usual, I think we should start by reflecting some of our predictions from last year to see how right and wrong we were. The big one, big prediction that we discussed the most as a team is when is Elon Musk going to distance himself from Trump or when are they going to break up or what do they have their you know separation

and each and every one of the extended Cool Zone media team members who works on it could happen here put in a date and the most accurate guess was from it could happen here's main editor Adam who said May 30th which was really spot on

so congrats to Adam Adam did it, baby. All of us stumble through our episodes and have to edit them all cutting all the burps out, yeah. Actually, actually, you know, maybe, to really give credit

back to us, maybe influenced your wisdom. Let me reflect him his glory on myself. We really made him wiser and thus we're all wrong ourselves. Adam should probably take him more psychological damage.

It's a good, you know, it means that we're smarter as a group entity, as a hive mind. We're all smarter than our own individual intelligence, which Adam has the most access to. Yes. Just like ants. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, no, Adam, Adam did pretty good on that May 30th guess.

So there you go. Sophie also close at May 6th. And then Molly, Molly Conger, June 10th, also kind of in that zone. But Adam definitely hit it spot on. We had a few other predictions. Some of them were predictions. Some of them, I guess we're kind of more hopes and dreams, which sadly did not come to pass. The Myanmar Junta was predicted by me and James, Junta. Oh, God.

Was predicted by me and James, not making it out 2025. They've kind of stuck on to power. Yeah. Yeah, they've rallied pretty substantially, actually. It's unfortunate. Netanyahu still is prime minister. I did predict that Assad would become a Russia Today host, which I think is a good prediction, but did not happen.

That could still happen. It still might happen in the future. Yeah. I'm waiting for them to hire him. for a fucking podcast. I don't think I predicted this, but I'm not surprised he's just playing video games. No, he's just pulled up in a hotel playing video games now. Yeah. During our death segment, I laid out a new theory of death based on Spotify Rapped, which the previous two years had some important deaths associated with Spotify Rapped Day. No big Spotify Rapped deaths this year,

unfortunately. Though, I did make a death prediction last episode, which did not fully, become true, but slightly became true right after we recorded that episode last year, before the episode even aired. I predicted that someone would try to assassinate Nick Fuentes while Nick was live streaming, perhaps a deranged fanboy. Days

later, just days later, someone showed up outside of Nick's house as he was live streaming with a weapon allegedly trying to kill him. This person died later that night in an exchange with police. It became this whole thing. But that happened

just a few days after I made that prediction. So technically didn't even happen in 2025, happened still in 2024 before we aired that last episode. But it was close, was close to some kind of zeitgeist on that. It's unclear if that guy was a fanboy. We really don't know much about him. What's a few other predictions

that have like kind of come true, but like it's more in terms of like which degree, I guess? I think my weird terrorism prediction has been pretty on the money. Yeah. That's continued to be a driver of the discourse. We'll return to that in a sec. Sophie talked about Trump moving some like White House operations to Marlago, which has partially happened.

There's been a lot of like a holiday events done at Mara Lago. Sometimes he's working out of there. Some very odd things. Yeah. But on the other hand, he's also just Mara Lagoifying the White House itself. Which. With like the ballroom. So it's kind of going in both directions.

Mia did put a very firm prediction on like an economic collapse in 2025 in the United States. Again, it's like a slow, in terms of like one of the key ideas for our show is like crumbles versus collapse. It certainly continued to crumble. But I think the actual full collapse point is still upcoming. Yeah. We'll get into this more later. I will say it is kind of baffling to have my prediction completely derailed, literally. literally just solely by AI data set or spending?

Yes. Which I did not predict that the entire American growth rate would be an idea set of growth. Yeah. I didn't get that. No, the actual like job market and economy has become so separate from like corporate spending and stock market stuff. And like Robert did actually, I think, hit this a little bit on the head.

He talked about how the economy will basically remain identical to Biden. economy in terms of inflation, but the stock market will continue to go up and housing will keep getting more expensive and the left will start to be able to hit conservatives on inflation. And yeah, I think that is pretty much what happened. The economy is in a relatively similar places as it was last year, but, you know, inflation is still ticking. There's some like artificial attempts to like bring it down by Trump, but it's not, not really working in terms of prices. Yeah. No, the only thing, cropping it up in a numbers term is fucking. invidia. Well, invidia less so now, but just irrational exuberance over AI in general.

Yeah. But people are complaining about all the same things they were under Biden, just more so. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I have three other points here. I talked about a blue governor deploying National Guard troops against Trump federal troops. Instead, you got Trump deploying National Guard troops against individual cities with like police kind of caught in between. We still have yet to see the the cool and based moment where like a blue governor deploys national guard against against dhs. Gavin Newsom deployed his Twitter account. Yeah. No, still. And Sophie talked about there'd be still no clear left wing Joe Rogan. But so many have tried. A lot of people try. I still feel like I could be it. Well, you're going to have to be a lot more on camera, I think.

Yeah. I think we'll have to have a lot, a lot more on camera stuff for that. More camera, less hair, Larger gut. Can't be explained. More steroids. I can do different drugs. Yeah. I mean, Adam Freeland is certainly positioning in that direction. Yeah, I agree, I agree, Gary.

Also, I predicted that something would happen to the Paul brothers, and unfortunately, the only thing that happened is that their HBO show did not get renewed. When was that boxy back? That was the year prior. And it wasn't good. No. They had a TV show called Paul American. Yeah.

Are you serious? I didn't even hear about this. It was on HBO. but it got canceled. I guess I've just had other stuff going on. I'm kind of glad that I've lived a life where I didn't know that. I have no shame about that. Finally, both myself and like a few of us kind of talked about this

is that there would be this movement away from big mobilizations. Some big mobilizations happened in short periods of time, right? Like especially you can point to like L.A. I think it's probably the most significant. But in terms of like actual like countrywide mass mobilizations, right? There's a movement away from this and moving towards lone wolf attacks, which did happen.

And specifically, I predicted there would be like a very, a very sloppy Luigi copy cat in the next four months. And oh boy, did this happen? Multiple in reoccurring times. And this kind of played into this larger model I was creating, which kind of starts around the assassination of Shinsuwe, creating this escalating series of assassinations happening faster and faster. Because after Shinsu Abe, there was, you know, two years later, Thomas Crooks trying to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Six months later, the United Healthcare CEO, three months after that, someone tried to burn down the home of Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro in the middle of the night. One and a half months after that, there was the assassination of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. Two weeks after that, a Christian missionary named Vance Belter, killed in Minnesota House Speaker, Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Senator John Hoffman. Next month was the Prairieland Assault on an Ice Facility in July, the exact details of which are still getting figured out in court. But after this, things kind of tapered down for a bit until September with the Charlie Kirk assassination and the attack on the ice facility in Texas, which kills two immigrant

detainees. So, yeah, in terms of like, you know, lone wolf style pre-planned assassination style attack, sloppy copycats, right? People writing messages on bullet casings, emulating the United Healthcare CEO assassination. This was like a super, super dominant part of 2025. It's the same pattern. I talked about this at the end of my episode on Mangione

after like that came out, right? That like there's copycats after every shooting. This is basically following the same kind of thing we saw in 2019 with the eight-chance shootings, right? where you, like, this is, this has been going on for much longer than that, but it's a very predictable, once you start to expect it, it's a very predictable thing, which is someone carries out a shooting that actually manages to break through our levels of apathy about violence in this society and keeps everyone's attention. And then throughout the year, a bunch of different

people try iterations based on that because it's the only way to get attention. And that's what all these people are craving, right? That's the only real currency that still has value. I will say, I think this is something positive about the turn away from mass mobilizations was that the lone wolf stuff wasn't the only stuff that happened. There was also the turn towards the thing we talked about in our Q&A episode about the ICE rapid response stuff, which is, you know, there were a few big mobilizations, but then ICE was forced to change their tactics by the fact that giant mobilizations by ICE were going badly for them.

And this did create a whole bunch of decentralized rapid response networks and a whole bunch of actions that were sort of based on this very, very decentralized, very, we show up and we do this thing at this place when it's happening. It has stopped some of the things that is happening. It has not stopped all of the horrors that have been happening, but I think it is a positive trend in terms of the way that ICE has been forced to adjust their tactics to do things that are harder and can get less people at a time. So I think that's worth as a positive thing worth sharing of how,

yeah, the tactical innovations that activists have been deploying have been forcing ICE to do less devastating raids? We saw various attempts at mass mobilization, right? Most successful with the No Kings marches, which were vast. But we also saw those 50-51 things, which kind of were not as successful in turning out large numbers of people. But like me, it said, like in Ventura, right, like we saw huge numbers of people show up when Ice tried to raid a couple of agricultural facilities up there. And, yeah, I was up in L.A. we've spoken about that extensively.

But like Garrison said, that was probably the biggest mobilization against ice at one time in one place that we saw. It's probably do ad break and then move into predictions for this upcoming year, 2026. Yep. The stock market is still trying to keep going, although in some parts is like, if not going down, flatlining. Yeah.

Like a Bitcoin did not increase this past year. There's been a few popular rising stocks like Netflix, which are pretty much at the same spot they were at the start of 2025, still going up and down. Games Workshop is up 48% baby. Well, there's a lot. Stop the Warhammer Train, baby. Read Assassin-Orum Kingmaker. It's great.

67th most valuable company in the entire UK, larger than their whole fishing industry, baby. Jesus Christ, really? Yeah, that's wild, man. Warhammer is load-bearing. to the British economy. It's the only thing Nottingham really has left. Yeah, after they got rid of the sheriff,

it already went downhill for them, hey. That and Robin Hood tourism is the only thing you can do in Nottingham now. Okay, I have a big one about this, and it's not that the tech bubble is going to collapse. I do think a typebubble is going to pop this year. And about this year, but within the next 12 months, I think you're saying, because we've got like three weeks left in this year.

Well, you know, in 2026, yeah, these are predictions for 2026. Yeah, in 2026, the tech bubble is going to pop. Yeah, that's not the prediction. The prediction is that in an attempt to recoup the value from all of the completely useless data centers that they will have built that can only run LLMs and can do nothing else, someone is going to invent a cryptocurrency that can only be mined by large language models. And this is going to be one of the big attempts to recoup the hideous, hideous amounts of capital they've been dumped into all these data centers is that they're going to have,

someone's going to find a way to make a kind of token that can only be generated by large language models, and they're going to, they're going to try it. Is it going to work? I don't think so, but they are going to try it. It's going to be a big thing. They're going to push it. It's going to suck. There's going to be a bunch of desperate attempts to like, once the money starts falling out, which is not to say that I think that AI is going to, even the AI that annoys me is going to go away. But a lot of, of the irrational exuberance is going to end. And a lot of the startups that are just burning money are going to fail or get acquired. And you're going to see tremendous desperation for people to be like,

this is the next thing. This is the next thing. Throw a bunch of money into this. Like, yeah, that's, that's going to be annoying. No, I mean, I feel like people have been talking about the A bubble popping for a while. I have been hearing things from people who think and track this more than I do, that if it is going to happen, there's indicators that it's more likely to happen in 26 than it was in 25. I'm not going to put money on that on the Kalshi betting markets,

but it does seem to be more of a possibility. And you can see this the way people are handling Navidia stock right now and being advised not to buy more stock, but still hold what you have. Yeah, and just where NVIDIA stock has moved over the last month or so. Yeah, so if you look at what's happening,

with NVIDIA. We might have reached the peak and it might be so jover for some of these guys. Wow. Yeah, I think the big open question is how bad it's going to be. There's going to be at least one of these big AI companies, Open AI or Anthropic or somebody, that either goes bust entirely or has to get acquired. But, again, if you're looking at this rationally and out wishcasting, both Apple, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all perfectly capable of sustaining their rates of burn. is still going up, yeah. Facebook is as well.

And I think what you're likelyer to see is contraction and consolidation, which is not to say that it's not going to be disastrous for some group. I think there's a good chance that we do see some banks fail because there's some bad investments out there. Yeah. They have been doing collateralized loan obligations. Yeah. Where the underlying asset is compute time.

Yeah. This is more deranged than 2008. Yeah. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the most deranged thing I have seen since the tulip crisis. Like, I cannot explain. Good God. That's so insane.

I mean, the upside that we have over 2008 is that the thing that all of these bad bets are on isn't people's houses, right? Yes. Yeah. And so that does, there is a potential that some good comes out of it in terms of like universities, getting access to a lot more compute that they can actually use for valuable things. Yeah. And people are already suffering under recession conditions if you're like a work. class person. Like you already dealing

with the followed effects of this. Just the stock market itself has been insulated from the rest of the economy, which is in a state of recession. And also it can get worse. So a lot of people who aren't like super wealthy are like pro this bubble popping and pro this because then if other people,

people in power finally realize how bad it is, they're hopeful that then something might be done to like fix some of the material conditions, which I can understand people's like, like, you point of view there. Yeah, I am not as worried about this being as bad for the average person as 2008 was. I don't think it's going to be as satisfying as people are hoping it was. It's not going to wipe out or put an end to the annoyance of AI in our lives, although it should make it easier

to rationalize some of the shit people have been saying. Like, it should make the craziest of the AI boosters being like, this is going to replace everything. The whole economy will be AI in two years. No one will have a job. That's going to be a lot harder for anybody who's not to not seem like a crazy person while advocating. But the internet's going to stay annoying, like, unfortunately. It gets fucked for a little while, that. Yeah. I think my girly pop economy prediction is that we're going to continue to see influencer shopping.

What I mean by that is, like, influencers have been pushing products like no other in marketing budgets have been going to influencer marketing at a rapid pace. And I think we're going to see the implementation of AI into that more. and I think that that is primarily going to be one of the ways, like, we might see less or we'll still see as much, but targeted ads. And we're going to see, an addition to that, we'll also see, like, targeted influencer marketing for products. And, like, it's already pretty gnarly on, like, TikTok and Instagram. But I think we're only going to see more of that. And it's just going to, you know, going to be peak capitalism care.

Something that could be really fun is that if it pops, it's, it's. going to line up almost perfectly with 2008 nostalgia. So we'll have recession nostalgia, which is already starting to happen in the same time as a whole economic recession. So we'll have the recessions line up in time with their nostalgia cycle. And then it's only a matter of months before you have like 20, 10s like hipster stuff coming back in. Great. So it's right there. We're so close. We're already at that like, like, you know, 2008 level of uh, 2000. nostalgia, but if it lines up with the recession, then that could be really exciting. Now, I'm also kind of curious as to whether or not we're going to start seeing, you know,

a lot of the earliest adopters of AI on a regular basis were very young people using it to cheat at school. Yes. And just kind of trawling different teacher subreddits and online communities, I'm seeing teachers talk about like younger kids now there being a backlash among very young people against the use of AI and the way it makes people talk. God, I hope. This is kind of coming alongside as you're starting to see a recovery in levels of literacy as schools depart from the bad way of teaching kids to read that fucked everyone up. I don't have any kind of longitudinal statistical data on this.

This is all very much anecdotal. So I'm still waiting to see. Is this a broader trend or did I just come across some people saying this is a thing that they're seeing in their area? But I'm kind of interested. And there's a degree to which I think some sort of backlash against AI. is inevitable just because of how everyone running society is trying to push people to replace everything with it. Like, that just inevitably is going to irritate the kids because the adults are all doing it, right? We'll see. I think people are increasingly better at spotting AI, like intuitively and very quickly.

It's something I've seen, like, not in high school, but like teaching at, like, a university level. people just being like this is an air response and it's fucking cringe. Like, because the AI always writes in a particularly cringe way, right? That is very obvious and I've seen that. But I genuinely hope more people stop using AI because it is making education a pretty fucking miserable place to be right now, which is a bummer because I like teaching. Let's go on another ad break and then return for some midterm predictions. Hey, isn't everyone excited?

It's another election year. People are saying the most important one of our lives, Garrison. I think so. Just what I was starting to miss it. I'm voting Kamala for every single Canada. Writing in Kamala for every single state level position. Yeah, sure. She will be the comptroller.

All right. You're killing me. Who do we think is going to run? Gavin Newsom. Oh, no, no, no. That's later. That's later. Midterms.

Yeah. Unfortunately, Sophie, we have another important election. We're not talking about. 2028, yeah. We don't have to do that until next years. I've skipped, I've skipped the midterms and I was already going to the next level of hell. No, no, no. Who's going to be governor of California, James? God knows. The Dems have not really been putting their strongest foot forward, have they? Katie Porter had these, like, really pretty nasty videos come out of the way she was talking to people who work for her. I don't think that that is a good leadership trait. And I don't think

that that is a person we should. choose. I don't know. I'm so resigned to being it being someone's shit, you know, that like I honestly try not to put too much of my time and effort into it. But yeah, I know. Maybe I'll be fucking Katie Perry. Maybe Trudeau will pass on his electoral magic. She's got some good songs. She could use them with actually, with the intellectual property licensing, which Trump doesn't do. She could get that shark. Maybe the shark could be vice governor, you know, there's this potential there. Be as worried about the shock.

So, obviously, the Democrats are projected to do well in this, in this midterm election based on, like, like, anti-Trump sentiment and, like, the regular swing away from the, like, whoever's in the executive branch in midterms. And, yeah, I think the Democrats will do well, especially if you look at the last, like, a month or so of election results. Mm-hmm. I think it's possible they take both chambers. I think they will absolutely take one.

I'm going split. It's possible they take both chambers. I don't think it's going to be... A landslide. It's not going to be a blue tsunami. Blue Nami. I think it may be a blue wave. I think a wave or a small wave is likely.

I do not think it's going to be a complete blowout. But there's been, like, especially in the Tennessee special election, a 13-point shift towards Democrats. Yeah. We've seen other double-digit shifts across the country. in the past, in the past month. I don't know how much they'll be able to continue that sort of sentiment in, you know, nine months time, 10 months, 11 months time leading into November.

So I think some of that enthusiasm will maybe taper off a little bit as Trump becomes kind of like a lame duck presidency. But I still think they'll do like okay in terms of like the Democrats. I very much disagree. I think this is going to be like a generic D plus 14. this is going to be a fucking massacre. What signs are pointing you towards that? I mean, they just won

the mayorship of Miami. Yeah, yeah. So you're saying it's going to be good for the Democrats? D plus 14. Yeah, like Democrats plus 14. Like, I'm talking like an ass, a tsunami. Okay, got it. My prediction is that all of the polling people are fucking cowards.

What's happening right now with the polling is that they are using the 2024 electorate. Yeah. This is not the 2024 electorate. They have not figured this out yet. No. They are still underestimating the exact scale of which everyone fucking hates them. I'll be surprised if both houses flip, but yeah.

Here's the thing. The Cuban parts of Miami went left by like 15 points. It's something we talked about in the show. They are going through and systematically pissing off every single part of their base, right? Like one of the things I've, one of the stories I've been tracking is about the ways in which they've been systematically pissing off a whole bunch of farmers who are a very, very consistent. right-wing voting base. And they're pissing them off a trade war bullshit because China's not buying soybeans, right? This is how they're losing elections in Western Iowa. I think the other part of this too is, and this is how I think the momentum is going to be sustained, is that things haven't

even gotten as bad as they're going to get yet. The actual standard of living in this country right now, it is going to get so much worse as all of the inflation stuff sort of racks up, etc., etc., like the country is going to be worse. Everyone's going to be more pissed off. Trump is going to have bombed like four more countries. We're going to have like sent troops in Mexico or some shit. He's going to be so unpopular. It's going to be, it's going to be the fucking flood out there. That's possible. Yeah. I think the incomeancy advantage becomes less and less relevant, the worse the economy gets. And like, that was something Biden got hit with, right, but Trump is, is going to have to wear, especially to get further and further into his term,

right? It's a Trump economy. I guess this just requires that the current moment. Democrats have to be maintained for a while, which is something that historically Democrats haven't been great at. Yes, they're shit at it. So this will require effort for, you know, people, like, organizing with the Democrats and social media messaging, like actual in-person, like, like, electoral organizing to really, like, keep this momentum and pressure going for the next 11 months, which is, you know, they've done a good job at this the past, like, six months. But can they, like, maintain this to the midterms? That's the only point where I start to hesitate on terms of like the scale of like a blue wave.

But I think it's certainly possible that that they end up doing it quite well. But it's going to be reliant on like maintaining this, this pressure. No. There's still some structural difficulties that make flipping Congress entirely very difficult. Especially with the redistricting stuff happening. Yeah. So like could they take the Senate quite easily? Yeah.

The House still up in the air for me. I think lean to Democrat at this point, certainly leaning Democrat, but still not confident. That'd be great. I just, I don't want to get irrationally, you know, ahead of our skis here. I have watched very, very dysfunctional state Democratic parties win elections in districts that were R plus 22. Fucking, fucking anything could happen at this point. No, yeah.

It's not coming from a national strategy. It's coming from, like, local candidates doing well on local issues and people fucking hating Trump. Yeah. It is not the DNC who is putting Higgins or Mamdami in office. Well, yeah. That is, I guess, a good thing because the DNT fucking sucks.

It has always fucking sucked and it has really reinforced how much it sucks in the last eight years. Yeah, and being able to hit Trump and Republicans on the economy with tariffs,

this like oligarchy stuff has proven to be pretty successful so far. And I think being able to continue that messaging as the economy trends in its current direction, being able to continue

that messaging, I think will help the Democrats. Interestingly, a platinum in Maine still seems to be the frontrunner for that race. So I think there's a decent chance. We get our first tootukov in the Senate.

Well, he doesn't have a toad-cob. He has that absolutely dog-shit cover-up. I'm sorry if you are listening and you did that tattoo, but it's probably not your best work. He's got a blob now. That stuff just did not prove to be super impactful to the actual voters in Maine, it seems, and the actual focus on his talking points

have maintained his lead. So I think that's something that Democrats can also look look to in terms of like how much of these like, you know, like tertiary like personal attacks or like, you know, genuine, genuinely valid, valid complaints or issues are not very dominant based on how much emphasis is actually getting put on this sort of like affordability messaging. To wrap up this predictions episode, should we do a quick death pick? No one's going to die. Oh, I thought you're going to ask it. Do you think we're going to invade Venezuela? No, see, this is what I'm more interested in. I'm more interested in

are we going to start any wars? Yes. And is his cabinet going to stay the same? What kind of already have started? To answer your first question, yes. Is the cabinet going to stay the same? I'm surprised. It's weird, right?

Trump first term, there was a lot of cabinet turnover in the first year. Sure. Scaramucci. This is not happening this year. This year, they stayed pretty tight-knit, despite a lot of... Termil. Or, like, you know, issues around, like, Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr. Pete Hankseth with the double-tap war crime strikes.

Nome as well. They're pretty tight-knit, it seems. So I don't know if there's going to be cabinet turnover. I think Cash Patel will be out next year. Yeah. I think Cash might have, yeah, might be on the edge of his. He's lost the podcast, bros. He just found the J6 pipe bomber.

I don't think it's going to happen. I think the cabinet's going to stay the same, which I predicted against last year. I know. But I think based on how they've weathered, certain controversies, I do not know if Trump cares enough to do cabinet turnover. Yeah, or whoever's talking to him about these things. Yeah, we'll see. There's no one that I think is an obvious choice.

I think the likeliest turnover is Patel. Then maybe Hegsef. I don't think he's going to go. I think Hegsafe is too loyal. He's a team player. Sure. And he has absolutely no chance of going into business for himself, right? This is the big thing is that it's not.

skill or competency that got these people their jobs. Yeah, it's loyalty. Which, you know, kind of, kind of was a factor in Trump 1.0. In Trump 2.0, it is just pure loyalty. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And if they're able to prove that, especially around like, you know, the Epstein stuff, really, really tested those, those loyalties.

Yes. And if they're able to get out of the Epstein controversy, like, kind of intact, then I think all these guys will be set for, like, the next, next little bit. I guess, do we think Vance is ever going to, to become a president during the next like year or two? Trump is like 80s. So I'm not going to say there's not a 20 or 30% chance that just like if Donald Trump dies, Vance becomes the president, right?

Sure. And like he's at the age where he could just drop dead, right? Outside of that, no, I don't think he's likely to become president. Yeah. I do think in the next 12 months, the U.S. will begin a UAV campaign in the Sahel, quite possibly in Nigeria. Like, I think that's possible. in the next 12 weeks, just looking at flights that they've had very recently.

There's a decent chance, too, that they start expanding the use of special forces and maybe even keep fobs open without the willingness of the Nigerian government. But that's a longer shot. Yeah, and the Nigerian government's pretty into it right now. Yeah. Do you think they're going to put troops on the ground in either Mexico or Venezuela? I think there's a good chance that we utilize special forces on the ground in parts of Mexico for brief periods of time.

It's a good chance that we already have. Yeah, we almost certainly already have. I think there's a chance that we wind up having people on the ground in Venezuela after a fuck up, right? But I think that at present, their plan is air strikes and drone strikes. I think if we were to wind up having anything on the ground in Venezuela, it would be as a result of like a strike with a manned craft going badly and someone going down over Venezuela.

That's not a zero percent chance if they keep fucking around. but I really don't think they want to have troops on the ground in Venezuela. I think they want to be striking targets in Venezuela. Yeah, it's not a place where you want large number of troops to be engaging. Like that wouldn't go well. Trump does not want to wear that, right? Like if we saw in Syria, like he wasn't willing to deploy large numbers of troops. He was willing to use a lot of drone and airstrikes,

even when the civilian cost was very high. And I think that is the model, like that strike cell model that we saw. Like the strike in Bagu's at the end of the Islamic State is probably a good example of this sort of, yeah, quote-unquote collateral damage, right, killing civilians that we can expect them to see as acceptable. I think the final point on this is that the Trump administration genuinely believes that they can topple regimes with their strikes. They thought this with the Houthis and they think this about Venezuela. They actually think you can do this despite all evidence to the contrary. so I think it's going to inform a lot of their decisions. Yeah, and I think Syria like kind of, not Syria with Assad,

but Syria with the Islamic State, reinforce that for them, but they're obviously overlooking, that they have an incredible partner for so they don't have in these places. Yeah. Well, I think that's our predictions. First time we're not doing a death segment,

and you know what? I feel fine about that. Yep. No one's going to die in 2026. Morris is still, I'm not going to say it this time because I've been inadvertently blessing him with long life. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast about it happening, well, in various

places. And given the nature of our digital interconnected society, it is happening here all the time. But if you're even casually aware of what's going on in the world right now, it is particularly happening in Venezuela right now. And joining me to talk about the U.S. led and executed kidnapping of a world leader is. My two favorite kidnappers, Mia Wong and James Stout. Glad to be here, Robert, joining you to discuss kidnapping one of my favorite topics. Yeah. My lawyers have advised me not to respond to this statement.

Now, given all the people you've both kidnapped, how are you just rating this on a technical level as kidnappings go, you know? On a level from, let's say, well, if I remember the name of that guy with the plane, this would have been a funnier joke. I forgot his name, though. D.B. Cooper? No, no, no. on a plane. He didn't have a plane. Yeah, that's a reverse kidnapping. He unkidnapped himself. He did unkidnapped himself. He did. Everyone on the plane.

I was talking about Lindberg, Charles Lindbergh, but the jokes, the jokes over. So let's talk about the international crimes our government's doing. Yeah. Did. Did and doing. I'm drinking a white clause. So I've got about the same legal jurisdiction as I have because there is no law. Yeah. When you're drinking white law. Yeah. Which I think is the legal argument. I mean, yeah, so what happened is while most of us were asleep last Saturday night, the United States using a mix of special forces like Tier 1 operators, this was like a Delta Force operation primarily, a whole bunch of helicopters that looked like a mix of Blackhawks and Chinooks carried out a series of airstrikes on Caracas and kidnapped the president of

Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife, killing a significant chunk. of their security detail, including 32 Cubans, who are acting as essentially like military advisors slash security for Maduro. Yeah, he has been taken back to the United States. He's been arraigned in New York. They're charging him with a variety of drug and gun-related crimes, including some weird shit, like possession of a machine gun,

under U.S. law, which is really weird. I guess they're arguing that his control of the Venezuelan military counted as a legal possession of an automatic weapon. Yeah, it's weird. Yeah, I'm guessing it involves using the machine gun in the furtherance of another crime because there are specific charges for like NFA violations related to drug things. Sure. But it still seems very weird to tag that on there.

Like when what you're doing is kidnapping a world leader, you can't just also be like, oh, and he's got a gun. Like when he commands the armed forces of a country, it's very strange. Right. Yeah. This also, I think, pins into what's really, really weird about this. There's two aspects of this that are just, what the fuck. One of them is that the legal justification, this is given to Mike Lee from Secretary of State Marco Rubio was that the reason that there were air strikes and illegal justification was protecting U.S. soldiers carrying out. U.S. law enforcement. The military was needed to protect the DEA agents who are actually conducting the arrest, is the legal justification. Yeah. The chances of some kind of due process violation are high. This all hinges on you thinking that the law is a fixed thing, right? Not an instrument of the state and an instrument of power. And I think that a more plausible analysis

here is that the law is not a fixed thing. But like in this instance, right, if we go with that line, like the DEA people were there to ensure due process and to make the arrest, right? And in theory, I read that they literally had someone Mirandize him. Right. Yeah. Which, I do want to put South of things here, though, and this is something that CNN, like when they were reporting on this, points out, this is insane. Because this implies that U.S. law applies in Venezuela. Right.

Which it doesn't. It absolutely doesn't. That's literally the point. The point of a state is that your law. applies inside of your borders. The argument that they are making, because Trump directly and prior to this, had called into relevance the Monroe Doctrine, right, which is basically stating that everything happening in the Americas is the purview of the United States.

So this was initially, and they're still arguing that it is kind of a, what President Monroe was using is an excuse for intervening in situations where foreign colonizers were attempting to exert power in colonies they owned in the Americas or had owned in the Americas, right? Yeah. And the U.S. was basically saying, fuck you, this is our backyard, right? Yeah. And I think the argument that they're making now is that that's relevant because Iran and Russia and Cuba all have political and business interests in Venezuela, particularly Cuba.

Yeah. But in a more broad sense, they're making the argument. and Stephen Miller has made this very directly, that the Americas are all kind of our property. And we're perfectly justified in intervening to take resources that we want because we shouldn't have to just accept that a foreign country has different opinions and how those resources should be used in the United States. And that we have no, like, moral responsibility to listen to what other people want in our hemisphere. It's our hemisphere. Yeah. And we, meaning the Trump administration, should do whatever we want.

Yeah, and I think there's two kind of legal perspective here things that are important. One, I think there's that one, which is, yeah, the American, the American Empire is just saying, we are an empire and we can do whatever we want. But then there's also the, does the president have the power to do this unilaterally piece of it, which, no, he, no, like, just does not. Like, this is, this is objectively an act of war. Right. And previously, right, a lot of administrations have done things kind of like this.

Yeah. Right. But like everything has been under the fig leaf of the AUMF, right? The 2001 authorization of use of military force, which if you go back and read the document, the actual like AUMF, it's very clear that it's anyone who's related to 9-11. Yeah. And so this has been used to do interventions in like places that have nothing to do with this, right? But this is not even that.

This is just the president claiming that he can do acts of war. Yeah, and I guess the justification that they gave was the example they cited was Nottiega, right, in 89 in Paloma, right? But there was a war. There was operation like American soldiers died. Right. And Noriega went to the Vatican embassy and eventually, I believe he surrendered him. They blasted you two at him, which is obviously a war crime. And he eventually left the embassy, right, and negotiated his exit, I guess.

But that's a completely different thing. to just bouncing into the residence of the president of another country at night, Black Bagney. Like, that's also debatably legal, but yes, it was a different situation. Yeah, very, very much so. Yes, yeah.

No, it's also wrong. It's clearly, like, we're not defending what was done there. Yeah, I know. This is even more blatant, right? It's like, it's not defending what George W. Bush did in Iraq to be like, at least they bothered to pretend

there was a justification. Like, they spent some time, really cooking up a justification and some effort. And there's none of that here. They just don't give a shit anymore. Right? That's that you're not being like, and that means it was okay with Bush did. You're just pointing out it's even more mask off now, right? Yeah. Well, and I think it is different in that like the invasion of Iraq involved Congress. This is just Trump going, I can do this. Right. And that's really fucking alarming. Yeah. That he just is like, yeah, fuck it. I can just do a war now completely by myself.

None of you have any fucking power for me. I can just declare war a thing that is explicitly in the Constitution like supposed to be Congress's job. And I think that's really that's another very alarming part of this because this is, I think by far the most just Trump

pure dictator shit that we've seen so far and it's not being treated like that. Yeah. Because a lot of sort of like, I don't know, like there's a lot of people who wanted this something like this to happen. and so they're kind of just not looking at the fact that this is just this is just pure dictatorship shit. Yeah, I think a lot of people, because they didn't like Maduro, right?

They're willing to look aside from the means as long as they get the ends they want, but the means are extremely serious here. Yeah, and I think we should acknowledge, like stop for a second to talk about the Maduro of it all. because my stance is that his legitimacy as president, his personal legitimacy, whether or not he's committed crimes are all completely irrelevant, right? I have not in any of my public facing statements. I've been in the past years ago talked about how I wish the protests had worked to remove him from office within sort of like the context of Venezuelans actually having their way,

kicking him out and replacing him with something better. But I have not brought up any of that in the context of what's happened recently because it doesn't matter, right? Like fundamentally, it doesn't matter if Maduro is, like, completely legitimately elected and the people's hero or a complete fraud and an authoritarian. That has nothing to do with whether or not the U.S. has any legal or moral justification for coming in, arresting this guy, and then saying we own the country. And we don't.

It's dictatorship. It's fascist. It's deeply wrong. It's bad. Like, there's nothing else to say, if you, you're not. you find anyone getting caught in starting to be like, well, but, you know, Maduro did this, Maduro did that. That is either a person who is acting in bad faith or a person who has themselves been tricked, right? Because you don't need to discuss any of that. None of that is

relevant to what we're talking about here, which is that the U.S., like this is a violation of international law and all of the kinds of norms that we attempted to put in place after World War II to stop another catastrophe like that from happening. And it is only going to emboldened the worst instincts of both the people running the United States right now. They will continue to try to do shit like this. And it's going to embolden the worst instincts of other leaders around the world. It is comprehensively bad for everyone. The comprehensive result of this is, again, that the U.S. has annexed, I guess.

Venezuela, that Trump is claiming that he personally and his Secretary of State and his council of advisors are now, like, now control and run a country. Yeah. This is so evil. Yeah. And it's very unclear who's going to be doing because Trump made that statement. Rubio walked it back a little bit and said that, like, well, we'll be working with the administration in place, which is, by the way, just the same administration that existed before,

merely with the vice president taking on the role of president. Yeah, we should talk about that a little bit. Yeah, after that, backtracked a little bit, too, to try and be more in line with the boss. But it's very unclear what they actually intend and what they mean by saying we're running it, because from what I've read, it doesn't look like Rubio is actually going to be managed, like, while he's been the guy taking point on justifying this, I don't think he's going to actually be managing any of this on a day-to-day basis. He's got a lot on his plate already. Stephen Miller seems to be the guy who is trying to position himself to actually be the Paul Brimmer in this situation.

It was the guy that the Bush administration put in charge of dealing with, of like running Iraq after it was taken over. Yeah, the vice-froy. Yeah. And it's unclear what is Miller going to get that job? Will Rubio wind up doing it? It's looking more like Miller right now. But also, to what extent will that job actually, be running things. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, I'm sure. But the kind of

cliff's notes of the situation is that there is evidence that came out right after the kidnapping that Maduro's vice president had reached out to the United States previously, like before the kidnapping, to talk about the possibility of taking over the country after giving Maduro up or him having a managed exile. All of that was discussed. And at least per the reporting on it, she was turned down by the United States because they thought they had a better option. And that option seems to have fallen through, largely because the quote unquote, democratically elected opposition leader who won a Nobel Prize pissed off Trump. It's unclear how accurate that is that by, you know, by winning the prize, by accepting the Nobel Prize,

did she get her kick herself out of the job? That's what some reporting has suggested. It's unclear to me how true that actually is. It seems possible, surely. But at the end of the day, there was this offer made by Maduro's VP that was turned down by the U.S., and now it seems like, although we don't actually know what's happened to the background, it seems like she's who we're working with. So either they came back and said, you know, it will take the deal or something else is going on.

but she has both made the statements publicly that, like, this is illegal. The United States is run by a group of criminals and extremists and also, but we'll work with them. So it does kind of seem to me like she may, in fact, be very much in bed with the Trump administration and just trying to, like, massage this for her public, you know, because there's only so much you can get away with. I don't know. Yeah.

Just to be clear on the timeline, Robert. Yeah. The first reporting of that, like Rodriguez option, we want to call it that. Yeah. They call it Madurismo, is out Maduro as well, was in October. Yeah. That was out before the strike happened. Right.

And at least in the Miami Herald story, they suggested that he had been part of that. So this could be a different thing, but he had offered to step down over years. Right. Yeah, so I say it looked like there was a period of time where he was talking about like a managed exit. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I've been going to Carter or Turkey or somewhere like that. Yeah. Now Rodriguez has, of course, denied that.

But what would you expect? Delcee Rodriguez. And, yeah, it's unclear. Again, we don't really know. Did they just remove Maduro without having a plan and hadn't really finished talking with her or worked something out? It was the last thing she heard from them, them saying, nah, we won't take this option. Right. And then Maduro gets kidnapped.

Did they work out a separate deal that just hasn't been reported on? We actually don't know. and I could totally see her being a stooge for U.S. action here because it keeps her in power and it keeps her safe because Trump very recently threatened her. Like after she made statements calling his team a bunch of extremists, she backpedaled and said, actually, if we're willing to work with the U.S. Because Trump said, I'll do something worse to you than I did to him. Like, we don't know if they actually ironed out a set of responsibilities and obligations in back channels or if we just, remove Majuro and are like, all right, well, if we have to kill her, we'll kill her too. Like, it's unclear what actually happened there.

Yeah. Yeah. So we should also mention, so this is being recorded on the night of Monday, January 5th. You're right. Every kind of six or eight hours new conflicting information from Trump administration about what their plan is comes out. Right. Which leads me to suspect they don't have a plan at all.

Yeah. Because it keeps changing every couple of hours. So, I don't know. But in case by the time this comes out, there is some kind of public deal that's been worked out, that's what's going on. This is all changing extremely rapidly. Yeah. Right. And you know what else changes rapidly?

The economics of podcasting. Yeah. Here's some of that. These white claw is fucking foul. And we're back. James is drinking a bad white claw, which is really, I think, the information our audience is most interesting. interested in, you know, invasions of Venezuela come and go, the U.S. kidnaps people all the time. But James drinking a bad white claw. Let's actually really check it. James, what's the flavor

you're experiencing right now? Let me get an update to that, bro. That is a green apple. Green apple. Mm-hmm. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, it's foul. I wouldn't recommend it. You're in the market. Yeah, that sounds awful. Don't do it to yourself. Yeah, it's really the, having Delta force, kidnap you from your house of beverages. Yeah, absolutely. Uh-huh. That's how they market. Actually, it's weird.

That's on the can. Right, right. They must have got advanced warning. Like the time for the person. Yeah, what did they know and when did they know it? We'll never know. So, let's keep talking about Venezuela. Yeah.

We should talk about who Rodriguez is. Yeah. So Delty Rodriguez was vice president and now she is president or will be sworn in as president, I believe she may have already been sworn in by the time you hear this. She was sworn in, I think, like, a couple hours ago per the last article I read. So her father was a Marxist guerrilla. Her father kidnapped an American businessman was arrested and then murdered, like, torture to death. Yeah. That's part of the quote-unquote investigation into that, right? Her and her brother are kind of like a power block in Venezuela and politics. She has really

become more relevant, I guess, nationally since Maduro. She did do some stuff with Chavez early on, but clashed with him personally, and I guess, I allegedly, I mean, I wasn't there, but Chavez didn't like that she wasn't deferential to him. And at one point, sent her home from her, but I think they were in Russia and he sent her home from a sort of mission that they were doing their diplomatic mission. Since then, she is assuming number of roles in Venezuelan government from since 2013, right, when Mandura came to power, to include over-seeing intelligence at some time, and she has now become obviously president, right? She has previously worked with, like, the Venezuelan, I guess the analogy would be like Chamber

of Commerce, which had previously been seen by like Chalbizmores, like a bourgeois entity, i.e., the enemy, right? She has shown willingness to work with business. So I do wonder if that factors into the US analysis, like if she's willing to work with what looks like the oil companies that they want her to work with, then they can overlook a whole lot of other stuff, right, which has historically been how the US has approached places with oil. But, yeah, in terms of this, I think that's probably the sort of TLDR on her career. I think it is possible that she's willing to do some kind of chuvies more like, you know, whatever we're going to call this, and have US extractive capitalism exist so long as the regime continues to exist. But,

the way that would work is still something that, like, I can't really get my head around for a regime, which has made so much of its rhetorical legitimacy for so long about attacking the United States. Right, right. Yeah, and that's kind of, I mean, that seems to be the the quandary Delsey finds herself in, is she both has to refer to what's happened accurately as kidnapping and the actions of an illegitimate and deeply corrupt regime. And also, she can't act that way if what we all think is accurate. She's basically acting as a negotiated puppet of the United States. She can only go so far. And I feel like she's trapped in kind of a doomed situation, which may be part of what our administration intends, is for her to be fundamentally doomed and

fail and get cooed herself or you know we can replace her when there's protests against her legitimacy like I don't know what exactly the game is here but I think that may be something that was baked into the equation that

like this is not a functional situation for her and when she gets forced out that's something we can take advantage of yeah it's a reasonable analysis I think I mean we yeah

we should talk about the oil, right? Because Trump has been talking about the oil. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know you said you wanted to mention stuff about, like, it's not what it might seem on the face of it, right? There aren't giant lakes of oil in Venezuela. You can just slurp up and sell.

Yeah, so, okay, it's sort of difficult to explain this all without really getting into the weeds of, like, how oil production works. But there's different, like, qualities of crude oil. and most of the Venezuelan stuff is extremely sour. It's really, really shit. It's extremely low quality. And when you have oil that's this shit, you can't like refine it into being good, right?

Like that's just like not how the process works. It just sucks. And so it burns badly. But there is a lot of it. And this also gets back to, okay, so the way that Trump thinks this is going to work is that a bunch of oil companies are going to come in, they're going to do a bunch of like infrastructure development or whatever,

they're going to sell the oil and they're going to make $100 bazillion. That's not really how this works. And this is something that James has pointed out too, but like the actual value here is less from actually extracting the oil and more from A, having all of these oil deposits on your balance sheet. And B, there's a lot of value in just having power over it. Yeah. So, okay, so oil prices are kind of, they're set by a few things. Like, the price of oil is set by the bottom of the market, right? Part of your profit comes from how much more cheaply can you refine and extract your oil relative to whoever's doing it the most expensively, like whoever's doing the shittiest job of it. But that a lot of it also is just power. That's what OPEC is, right? And OPEC's ability to raise oil prices has to do with its ability to have all of their member states controlling their oil. and controlling the sort of flow and distribution of it,

redistributing who is in power in OPEC is actually a massive deal. Even if the actual oil here isn't very good, the power over the oil is extremely important. Yeah. So this doesn't work in the way that Trump wants it to work, which is like, you know, you take the oil wells and you pump the oil out of the ground

and suddenly you have money. But comma is, is good for the oil companies that would take over the oil? Yeah. He consistently confuses stock price for like the economy slash business success slash other things, right? Yeah. I guess one way to think about it is that like taking control of this oil, you're not really making the money off of this oil. You're making the money off of the impact controlling this oil has on the rest of the oil you produce. Yeah. Maybe if you're someone who sees international relations in terms of great power competition, you're trying to put things in the

Russia-China bucket or the America bucket. Yeah, and someone who sees trade is this like zero-sum game where one person wins and another person loses, yeah, yeah, you know, as Trump does. Yes. And also, it is worth mentioning that, like, a lot of this oil goes to Cuba. Yeah. Which is really, really important for the Cuban economy, which sort of can't function without the stock of Venezuelan oil.

Like, getting access to Venezuelan oil is one of the things that originally pulled Cuba out of the just hideous economic crisis they were in in the 90s after Soviet Union collapsed. Yeah. So it's why 32 seems like a majority, or at least half of the security forces who died fighting the U.S. in this kidnapping attempt, were Cuban, because access to Venezuela oil is an existential issue for the Cuban government. And it's also why Trump stated, unfortunately, probably accurately, that they're not looking at regime change in Cuba because they think that the regime is going to collapse on its own. which it might. Like, this is an existential problem for the Cuban regime. But people who aren't aware, I spent a good amount of time in Caracas when I was

much younger during my undergraduate years at university. And I remember the only medical professionals I ever saw because people have left right after Chalizmo, like, the only medical professionals I ever saw were Cuban. And to be clear, Cuban doctors were all over the world. What of Cuba's biggest sex wars is doctors. But, like, it was very clear at that time that, like, the, two states were intermatched, you know, like Venezuela needs things that Cuba has, like, those special military advisors and those doctors, and Cuba needs things of Venezuela have, like, that oil.

Yeah, and breaking that, the way people globally see oil is, oil is just like liquid cash, and that's not true. It matters the actual materiality of the oil and how it works, and the extraction process, and what kind of oil is matters a lot. And this is a scenario where the oil is going and who has control over it matters more, and who's able to sell it, which is very weird, but is how this works. And Trump doesn't understand any of this. Maybe some of the people around him understand this, but Trump really just is in pure empire brain. They stole our stuff, which I assume someone who, like, wanted this, told him, oh, yeah, they stole a bunch of American oil and land.

And now he's in just full empire mode. Yeah. I think they seem like someone has told him at some point they stole our stuff, right? Well, yeah, and this is after the revolution, a bunch of what was like the property of U.S. and foreign oil companies was nationalized, right? Yeah. Because these companies had made deals with the corrupt previous regime and it was not really benefiting Venezuelans. Obviously, that oil money has gone on to benefit the current corrupt regime and still not benefited Venezuelans much. But there was a period of time under Chavez in which, like, there were actual social benefits and a powerful state was providing people with things, which is not to say it didn't have its flaws.

But, like, there was a period of time in which there was a benefit to the average Venezuelan from the fact that their country was so oil rich. And nothing about the current situation is going to change positively for the average Venezuelan. The profits are going to go from being siphoned for one group to another, but neither of those groups. are regular Venezuelans. Yeah. Like, I think sometimes I will hear this. I have conservatively interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of Venezuelan people in the last three or four years, right?

At the border in the Darien gap in the U.S. remotely via telephone, et cetera. And, like, sometimes you'll hear that, like, Chavez was trying to do something good and it went bad or that, like, it was okay for a bit under Chavez, and then the corruption got out of control, or even it was okay until Maduro took, apparently it was bad, but it doesn't matter, right, it's bad now.

But like the things that the poverty I hear about from Venezuelan people is grinding. And it is so upsetting. Like I have the gratefulness for Venezuelan people. I've made a whole podcast thing about this. But the difficulty they encounter in every aspect of their lives because of sanctions, because of corruption, because of hyperinflation, because of the low oil price, like a lot of things, right? their lives are miserable and this isn't going to change that. They're scared.

When I speak to people in Venezuela, are people with family in Venezuela this week since this happened? What are they doing? They are not contrary to what an AI video might have made you believe out in the street celebrating. No. They're trying to get enough food to make it through the next couple of weeks in case they have to hunker down in their homes. Right.

And it is hard to get food at the best of times for these people. case they're bombed and the roads are bombed in case they're occupied. Like they're making preparations for being in a situation like Gossens have been in for much of the last several years, right? Yeah. And that's not an unreasonable, like who knows what will happen. I hope it's not that, but it's not an unreasonable thing to prepare for. No, it's not. Our friends when Myanmar and Robert and I have interviewed people in Myanmar, that's what they said they did after the coup as well, because they didn't know what was going to happen and they figured they need to be able to sit somewhere safe and stay there.

And so, yeah, this is not a liberation. Like I saw Jared Pallas of all people being like, oh, yeah, liberation. Also using the word liberation, generally Simon Bolivar, who's like the sort of founding hero of Venezuela is referred to as a liberator. So using that phrase about the extraditional kidnapping of the head of state. Right. You don't understand the resonance of that word in Spanish. That's fine.

You don't speak Spanish. Don't fucking use it. Yeah. But if you're going to use it, especially in this context, like it is. crass in the extreme to see that from the American politician. So the other I think aspect of this is that like

if you look at this on a historical scale, the reason Bolivar succeeded was that the Haitian Republic gave a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of weapons to go liberate Latin America from the Spanish Empire. And then, you know, if you look at what, like what is the U.S.'s relation

to? The closest thing I've been able to I've been like racking my brain trying to find anything in history that looks like this that the U.S. has done. And we've done a lot of bad things. But the closest thing I can find to just, we sent the army in to kidnap a guy and deposed him, was what we did to Aristide, who was the former leftist president, now former leftist president of Haiti, who we did, in fact, send in special forces with

Canada to just, like, sort of force onto a plane at gunpoint and remove from power. Yeah. But also that situation was a little different in that at that point, most of the country of Haiti was under the control of a bunch of like death squad rebel groups, which was the U.S.'s justification. And this is just, we just ran into a country and took them. But I don't know, the historical residences of that are bleak. Yeah.

And Jesus Christ, don't call it the liberation. Good Lord. talking of liberation. Yeah, let's liberate our audience from having money that they can spend on these products. All right, we're back. I guess there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about. One of them is, I'm seeing a lot of people respond to this by pointing out folks like Matt Walsh or other guys on the right who made statements about Trump being a candidate for peace

and all these military interventions we're getting into being bad and are now celebrating what we're doing and openly celebrating like colonialism as a good thing. And I'm seeing a lot of folks trying to dunk on these people for being inconsistent, and I can't imagine a bigger waste of your time. None of these people, you have to get it out from the habit of thinking that truth matters.

All that matters to these people is power, and they have it, and they have the guns. and you pointing out that they lied to get there and that they're not honest, they don't care. They're rich and they're getting richer and they're powerful and they're getting more power. None of this is about principles. It's about winning. And you just have to understand that if you want to have any hope of beating them because pretending that they're playing any other game than the one that they're playing is really dangerous.

I don't think there's any profit in debate. these people directly or confronting them directly about the inconsistencies of their belief system, I do think it's deeply profitable to talk about the fact that they lied and are liars and are dragging us into another war to regular Americans. And the evidence suggests that this is incredibly unpopular in a way that the Iraq war wasn't. People talk a lot about how massive the anti-war protests were and how much anti-war sentiment there was, but a majority of Americans were broadly supportive of what the Bush administration did in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time that they started doing it, right? That doesn't mean that the protests weren't real.

It doesn't mean that it's not significant that those massive protests happened. But most Americans were broadly supportive of what the government was doing. That's not the case with what we're seeing in regards to public opinion over what's happening in Venezuela. There was a two-day Reuters-Ipsos survey that concluded Monday. basically immediately after it was announced what, you know, we did in Venezuela. And 72% of Americans who responded said they are concerned that the U.S. might get too involved in Venezuela. Only 25% said that they don't share that concern. 90% of Democrats shared that concern as well 74% of independence, even 54% of Republicans.

Only 45% of Republicans said that they were not worried about the U.S. getting overly involved, and only 19% of other voters. So this is really unpopular, historically unpopular for a military intervention. And the entire bet that the Trump administration is making is that because they're not doing what Bush did in Iraq, they're not knocking out the whole government and debathifying it, they're just kicking out one guy and basically keeping his regime intact. They're just making that regime swear feal to the United States. And their bet is that this will work, right?

that the Venezuelan regime will continue to keep the country functioning as well as it was functioning before, which is not great, but was not total collapse. And they can start extracting value. And honestly, I feel like that is, that's a major motivation for a lot of people supporting Trump, for a lot of people in his administration who have financial interests, for obviously the oil and gas companies he's trying to get on board. But I don't think money is even Trump's, and this is maybe an unpopular opinion, I think the primary reason Trump is doing this is that he wants, number one, to show everybody, look, I did what Bush did, but it worked, I did it better. And number two, he wants to show everybody, look, I did what Obama did, and took

out a big bad guy, right? That's where they're trying to craft Maduro, is this major enemy of the United States, this architect of the opiate crisis, this guy who's worse than bin Laden in a lot a lot of ways because Trump is still jealous of the fact that Obama got to take out bin Laden, right, as he sees it. And he wants his own version of that. Trump is doing this, I think, primarily for vanity purposes, right? I know that seems shallow and silly, but I really think that's most of what's going on for him. And I think if the end result of this is that things in Venezuela more or less continue the way they were before, he will call it a win. And a lot of people might believe him. And I don't know, it doesn't even necessarily matter if any money actually

comes into the United States over this, they'll just lie about it. You know, some individual Americans will make money. And I think that'll probably be enough for Trump to feel like he got a win and for his PR apparatus to notch this up as a win. And I think that's all he really cares about. And so I do think it's worth really hitting how criminal this is and how harmful this is. But ultimately, what's going to determine whether or not Americans see this as a calamity

or not is how well this all works out in the long run. And that's a really tough thing to even think about because you don't want it to work well because it will emboldened Trump to keep doing this and the global harm will be greater. On the other hand, I don't want civil life in Venezuela to collapse, right? So it's tough. Right. Yeah, I don't want people to suffer. And just around the world, too, when, like, I heard Minan Huang called a meeting in Myanmar when he heard about this because he was worried.

Right. Like, the paranoia of dictators is about to go through the ceiling. And that's going to result in people being tortured and killed. It's going to result in people tortured. And it's going to result in more countries seeking to get nuclear weapons because they will accurately recognize that that is the only security anyone has. it is understated how much more dangerous what Bush did in Iraq made the world because of how it's made different leaders around the world. Think about the possession of nuclear weapons, right? Iran is fundamentally right in its calculus that getting a nuke will make the regime safer because it might be the only thing that can protect them. Now, things in Iran are not looking very stable right now either. Again, this is another situation where just decades of protest and the weakness of the regime might wind up working. in Trump's favor because things are looking pretty gnarly for the Iranian regime right now. And maybe Trump, Trump has made some statements since kidnapping Maduro about going into Iran.

They very well may do that, but they also may not need to. Yeah. There's some O-SIN suggesting they at least have preparations in place for doing something in Iran. Right. Which may be all they need to do, right, to obviously move things to point towards Iran. Right. Right. But that is an action in itself.

Yeah, that really, I mean, there's a lot that worries me there, but I think they're going to keep fucking around like this as long as they feel like it will benefit them. And right now, this feels like a win to them. Yeah. So this is going to function like a drug. They're going to start looking for another hit as soon as the high from this phase. Yeah. And as soon as they need a domestic distraction, right? Right. A lot of this stuff. And the evidence we have so far suggests that people fucking hate this. and will probably keep hating this. But it depends on whether or not this all fades out. And if the news is coverage, actually, maybe it worked, right? Which will probably be based on really dog shit journalism. The Washington Post did a preferential op-ed already, I think.

Oh, good. Yeah, I'm glad they're helping out our democracy die in darkness. They're going to keep chasing this high, and it will wind up collapsing on them eventually. the question is how many countries will have to pay the price beforehand and how much worse will things get in the United States, obviously. Yeah. And what will the price be, right, when they lose an entire SF team or a bunch of cashdise? When Delta Force gets wiped out, when we have a bunch of helicopters down to a bunch of Americans captioned, what does Trump do then?

Do we get a panic? This is kind of where I see like the potential, the scary potential for something like a nuclear January 6th where like, do we get a panic response that leads to a horrific loss of life because Trump has sees himself as being embarrassed. Oh my God, they killed a whole team. Like, I have no option but to kill a shitload of people to distract from the fact that I failed here, right? That does really concern me too. Yeah, if that happens, you know, the response, even if it's not nuclear, right? Even if it's just conventional weapons on cities. Right, right, right. And yeah, I shouldn't even bring up the nuclear thing, but like it does concern me. Yeah, a dude has a nuclear football, right? He's the one who gets to make a choice. Right. Right. This is going to

just get more, this is going to become integral to his sense of like self-worth that like, no, I did this and it worked. In the concrete era. And if all his guys get wiped out failing at one of these things, that's not going to go well for anybody. No, it's not. We'll have a fun couple hours on Twitter, but it's going to be really bad, really fast. Yeah.

I'll talk very briefly about a couple of implications domestically. Sure. The main one is that the DOJ has already fired for an extension in the case, which Judge Bozberg is overseeing regarding the Alien Enemies Act, right? Yeah. What this will mean for Venezuelan nationals in the United States, it is unlikely that this will mean something good, right? It is unlikely that they will have a country that they would want to return to, and it's

possible that it's going to be used to force them to return to it anyway, to a country which is extremely paranoid about U.S. spies because someone in Maduro's very close entourage leaked the entire plan that Trump, many presidents would not have said this to the press, but Trump did, that they had the entire plan for his house and that they built a replica of it to include they knew he had a safe room, they knew it was steel and they knew they could cut into it with cutting torches. Someone leaked that information. That means that people coming back from the United States are going to be under scrutiny, right? And that is not good for them.

And I don't see this regime stopping, sending people back because they're not an alien eleanor anymore. I don't see that. And I can see the regime if it does manage to install Rodriguez, it's something of a puppet leaning on Rodriguez to accept people removed from the United States, right? So that is extremely concerning. And it's not being reported on, right? Because migrants are not front and center where a lot of American newspapers think about things.

But I think for those people, this is petrifying, right? The country that you came to be safe is now bombing the country that you came from. it's also trying to kick you out. Like, you're stuck in the middle of this game. And all you wanted was a place to raise your kids where they might have a fair crack at a decent life. It's heartbreaking for those people. Yeah, and I think that's probably all we've got to say for now.

I mean, I guess I'll address briefly, because people have asked, do you see this as like an annexation, an Anschlis, you know, the annexation of Austria or of Czechoslovakia of that kind of moment? Or is this more like the invasion, of Poland. And I guess my answer is it's its own thing. It doesn't directly graph on any of those. Other than that, where it does very directly graph, and what is relevant in comparing it to is

what happened to the Nazis and to Hitler personally as they started seeing success taking things militarily, they made some big gambles that were not known. One thing that gets underdiscust when talking about what Germany was doing in that period of time is how many, military leaders within Germany thought that the annexation of particularly Czechoslovakia was a horrible idea because in a head-to-head fight it was not clear whatsoever that the Vermeckes could defeat the Czech military and their defenses that was very much in debate and a lot of Hitler's advisors thought it was a terrible idea because they didn't think they could win and it wound up not really being a factor because everyone caved and nobody wanted to fight which is the problem that we're

having right now, right? It's that nobody actually wants to confront these people. The Democrats are hemming in a high or whether or not to try for impeachment again or, you know, there's this, this fear of actually directly confronting these people that is part of what's emboldening them to keep trying shit like this. And what's very relevant to the Nazis is that if this works, and we're talking, if this works not in the long run, because they're not going to wait 20 years to see if this was a good idea. They're going to wait a couple of weeks, you know, maybe a few months. And if it seems like, hey, it worked, Venezuela's not falling apart, you know, we've got, we actually got what we think is good PR out of it.

They'll try again. Yeah. And they'll try again. And the Nazis tried again and again until they started making checks that their asses couldn't cash, right? And that is the thing that's relevant because that is something all fascists have in common is this confidence that gets them very far in a lot of ways because if they're willing to gamble and the other people aren't willing to confront them or fight or gamble themselves,

then they'll win by default. But when that stops and people start confronting them, the shortcomings of the state that they've built and of the militaries that they've built become increasingly evident. And I do think that's the road that we're on. I don't know where it'll end. I don't know if, you know, Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow and maybe whoever takes over will be more cautious. I don't know what's going to happen,

but I know that we've started down that road. Yeah, and that's not a good thing. Nope. I guess we should just say because people will be incredibly annoying on the internet. Like, saying that it is illegal and wrong to kidnap Maduro does not mean that we think Maduro is great, just in the same way that saying the Iraq war is wrong,

doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein. Like, no. The two things can be bad. People who tell you otherwise you grow up. Like I said at the start, I don't think you have to. I don't think anyone owes you. And if someone is saying like, hey, you have to answer for these bad things Maduro did when critiquing the US for this, I think that's bullshit.

I think you should tell them to fuck off, right? It's not the issue at stake care. Maduro's personal qualities are irrelevant, as is always the case with this. What we're doing is illegal and bad. Sweet baby Jiminy Christmas, welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast that's normally about all of the sad and horrifying and violent and dangerous and sometimes inspiring things happening around the world. But this week, well, today is about something different. Today we're talking about CES.

Finally, for those of you who don't know or who are new to the show every year in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bunch of the world's big tech companies come together for the consumer electronic show, where they present their visions for the future, the new products that will be coming out that year and stuff that will be coming out and years to come that's less developed. And the whole industry talks about itself. And Garrison and I show up and largely just kind of let it wash over us, like a warming tide of lukewarm garbage water.

It's very lukewarm usually. Very lukewarm. And it smells like someone did not clean their fridge out often enough before putting it into the trash. That was the feeling at Showstoppers tonight. The media-only presentation on the finest products. of CES. Yeah. Yeah, why don't we start? So, I mean, there's two different things that are interesting about CES broadly. One of them is people bring gadgets that are not out yet, that it will be coming out this year or coming out soon, and you can actually test them and use them and see how technology is progressing,

and that can be kind of fun. The downside of that is that people also bring gadgets that are crap, right? Some guy has a vision for a way to, like, you know, there's not a good way for blind people to use the Pogo while watching Netflix. And so I have created this product, right? Or like, there's not a good way for children to test their blood alcohol level before getting behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. And I have invented the device to make it bought. Things that, like, have no conceivable audience or utilization, right?

That's the other side of the gadget part of CES. And then outside of that, you get a hint at like, there's all these panels where people from the industry come to talk about the major trends in technology, how things are developing and what they see is the future. And so there's both, here's what they're going to try to sell us, and here's the devices that might change the way we live. And also, here's how a bunch of the richest, sometimes craziest people in the country are talking about the future. Those are the two things that happen at CES. And Garrison, you wanted to talk about the first. The gadgets. The gadgets one. You went to the gadget show tonight. I spent my entire day in panels. Yeah, I mean, I did mostly panels in the day. I didn't really got to watch the show floor on the first day, which is, which is Tuesday. So instead of doing the show floor, I went to showstoppers at the Bellagio, which is this presentation of usually, usually of a collection of gadgets that have won CES Innovation Awards, which are on display for journalists and media. You can talk to the people behind them.

Showstoppers this year was a little different. It took place in like a different venue hall. It was smaller than the past few showstoppers years. And I would say about 40% of it was smart glasses. Yeah, there's usually like a big product that is like this product category is the hot thing this year. We've tried on smart glasses every year. That's what's weird about it is that they've always had them. Every year that we've been doing this, we've done smart glasses and they've always kind of been the same.

Maybe the resolution on like the text gets a little better. They have a couple extra features. Or like the glasses get a little bit smaller. And this year, yeah, the glasses were generally smaller. But for all practical purposes, functioned about the same. But there was about 10 different smart glasses. Most of them could do some kind of like transcription service, could have some kind of heads-up display. One of them was just audio only. It was like an audio-transcriptions.

Like it listens to someone else speaking in, in this case, Chinese, and it translates to me. To American, yeah. Yeah, it translates to American via sound. It had speakers in like the actual, you know, like the arm of the glasses. Yeah. The delay was it long enough that it was, you couldn't really keep a conversation up at normal speed. It wouldn't be ideal. It would be for like... On like the visual translations, which you can actually kind of just, talk in real time. But the audio

only ones were like a smaller profile. The visual ones weren't necessarily bulkier, but you can definitely see there's more hardware inside them. The thing that I have seen this year, which is newer, maybe not totally new, but incorporating smart glasses technology into other types

of eyewear. So like swim goggles, ski goggles. That's cool. And like outdoor sports stuff. So if you're swimming or you're diving and you can't really use your phone underwater, you have there's a heads-up, there's a heads-up display in like your scuba goggles. So that's a new, a new-ish thing that I've seen.

I've seen like, you know, biking glasses, skiing, snowboarding. So that's kind of one slight change. But besides that, it's basically five different smart glasses, which are, for all practical purposes, identical to each other. Yeah. I mean, and that, I think, is kind of one of the things that I've watched happen over the 15 years almost that I'm going to CESS or CES, whichever is more accurate, which is, you know, when I first started coming, the smartphone era was new, and then we had like the tablet era

after that. And so there was a lot of, like, you would have dozens of manufacturers making different devices. And every year there were very different capability for the first few years. Smartphones were out advanced very rapidly. And it was really exciting. And the conventionally thrived on that. As the number of new device categories have winnowed down and the difference, Like, I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore. Neither is anyone I know because it's like... No, usually I'm actually kind of more sad. Yeah, yeah.

The only thing is exciting is like, well, my old phone was literally not working anymore. Yeah, I have a phone that works. The battery has been completely destroyed. Yeah, the battery works now or whatever. But it's not like the cameras are not see changes better generally. Nothing is like you're not getting a lot more out of it than you used to. And the same is true of like laptops, I mean graphics cards just because of the data center crunch.

like that's not nearly as exciting a technology category for consumers as it used to be. So this stuff is just like less, less sexy. And yeah, it just kind of shows that we're at a point where kind of one of the only spaces where they are still making improvements and where there's a lot of competition in the market is smart glasses. Yeah, I mean, that's like the wearables category in general, which was mentioned. I went to the Consumer Technology Association keynote panel this morning, which is the group that puts on CES.

And they mentioned only a few products, but one of them were smart glasses and then also like wearables in general, like AI powered wearables and how like wearable technology, you know, smart watches, rings, necklaces, whatever, are going to make like a big comeback now that now that AI is a lot is a lot more intelligent and it used to be. In particular, at the CES, like big keynote Tuesday morning, you mentioned a persona smart tutor glasses, glasses to help you. you know, well, learning. I haven't checked to be able to check out the product yet, but they kind of remind me of some of the concept behind those cluelie glasses that you may have seen on social media a few months ago. The glasses that help you, like, cheat. Yeah, yeah, from the company who's like,

we should embrace people cheating. And like cheat just in a conversation. Yeah. It seems like that product isn't necessarily as real as what the video might make it out to be. The people whose company was based on lying didn't make a real product. But while walking through your, Eureka Park today. It's funny. I also saw

this product in one of like the national pavilions. I think it was the one of like the Japan Tech pavilions. It's AI powered tool to help to help prevent cheating while test taking. So you have AI power tools that will monitor you to make sure you're not cheating while you use an

AI powered tool to help you cheat at the same time. And that's kind of just a good representation of kind of where this whole industry is at at the moment. Yeah. In some ways I think you know, this is probably what year three of AI being the big thing, whether that's on wearables,

whether that's smart glasses, whether that's, you know, a generative AI, whether that's AI, you know, in, many other forms,

but AI has been like, been like, you know, the additive property for everything. And I, some of that might be starting to kind of tuck her out.

Yeah. At least the, they've taken the victory lap and there's, there's a certain, like, you know, like cultural victory

that they're resting on, where they're starting to put some of their eggs and other, their baskets now, which certainly wasn't the case last year. No, and I got a sense, I attended six panels today. Congratulations. It was a mix of like advertising people, entertainment associated people, some journalism

associated people, and in robotics, people in robotics talking about. A lot of robotics stuff this year. What they saw is the future of AI. And there was a lot of focus first on AI is not going to be taking jobs as much as it's going to be augmenting jobs, right? although you would get the occasional person be like, yeah, it's going to take a lot of jobs. I got people saying that it's only

going to take jobs if you don't know how to incorporate AI into your workflow. And that's the argument I saw a lot. At the moment right now. Yeah. If you're not using AI, you're a greater risk of you losing your job. So you better get on it right now. So you should start learning it. Yeah. Yes. And then the other thing

is that there was a lot of like it's there to help or take away unpleasant tasks from workers but really emphasizing the, it's not your enemy thing. You know, need to be scared. And I had quoted like half of these panels, people would quote statistics about low user trust in AI.

And the fact that people are generally not super comfortable with this technology, even if they use it in parts of their work life, right, or daily life. And so what I saw from that, what I interpret from that is that there is internal concern that, like, that's one of the things that could screw the pooch on this,

is that people are not really sure they like this stuff. And so there's this impulse to kind of cover the softer and fuzzier sides of it that I didn't see in previous years. And I think is really focusing on this is just making things you already like better as opposed to this is a revolution that's completely changing life. And to the extent where AI was framed as revolutionary, it was specifically trying to ground it in like physical applications, as opposed to this like more general kind of like spectral like AI hype that we've seen the

past few years, which is, and specifically not like generative AI, right? Where it's like this kind of vague thing that we like gesture to. There's more specific applications for AI being talked about right now. And they talked about like AI assisted manufacturing, simulations, like digital twins of factories, shipyards, power plants. A lot of digital twin talk. Building, you know, digital replicas of like everything, you know, of like society to like run these simulations to both make AI smarter, to generate new. solutions outside of the limitations of a language model and also find, you know, potential problems in, you know, when you build these things physically.

Yeah, that was something that was brought up during the robotics panel, which was talking about how to like take the machine learning technology and other things that are generally grouped under AI and apply it in the physical world. Yeah, manufacturing. I've heard so much in just one day. I've heard the word manufacture more today than I have. It's been more focused. Almost in every CES I've been to previously.

combined. And I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than on consumer technology. Because there's not that much new to give the consumer, right? And they are also, I think, starting to recognize that you can get people using chat GPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it. And the data backs this up. People are mostly using it at work and for school. And Ginzi, a lot, there's a lot of people who are doing like their research on like what to buy and whatnot through using chat GPT. But there's not a lot that. you can sell people in CES because it's an app and there's not a ton of different devices for it. People are using it on their phone.

They're using it on their computer. But like none of the new phones computers are markedly better at using chat GPT or another, you know, chatbot thing than any of the others. So there's not a lot that's sexy in just that at CES. So I think there, I have seen this conscience reforming around people in manufacturing and people who are like thinking of the concerns of like, I have a pair of like, an exoskeleton to test this week. That's seeing a lot of its business in folks who are doing like Amazon type jobs, right, loading and unloading packages and whatnot all day long,

you know, and I do see a conscious reforming there, which I think is kind of evidence of like, there's almost an admission that like, yeah, we don't really have that much to hand consumers anymore on a yearly basis. Speaking of handing things to consumers. Ads. So the first panel I went to of the day, was about the funnel, which as I understand it, is just kind of like the way in which people have traditionally engaged with, like, media, gotten advertised to, and then, like, gone to stores and bought stuff, like, the funnel by which you, like, make a customer, and how that's been completely blown up now, right? And AI is, like, a further massive disruption, because people

are not, like, people are increasingly, especially very young people, which was pointed out in a number of these are like buying stuff, that a chatbot recommends them, right? And so a lot of marketing is being seen as being done through how do you get the chatbot to talk about you a certain way? What is the SEO of getting chat cheap EBT? Oh, that's interesting. Like, right, there's a lot of talking about. I haven't thought as someone who's not a regular chatbot user, which I'm sure most people hear of my, which hassties me for, for not maximizing my productivity. Yeah, I've been meaning to get on to you for that, Garrison. But somebody who's not a regular chatbot user, I've never thought of that before of yeah i mean like i know people use these chatbots as a replacement for search

engines but the idea of like trying to you know evaluate purchases is uh i mean i guess that makes sense now but i've never put that together yeah and the only because i there was a lot of talking about like how ai is helping advertisers how it's making advertisements how like it's helping in the process of that and there was a focus in all the panels about that on how like well it's just augmenting the humans but the only specific examples given where the McDonald's and Coca-Cola AI-generated ads which were both disasters.

I mean, the McDonald's one in the Netherlands got removed because they were thinking people so badly. They withdrew the ad because it was so ugly to look at. I don't know. Coke did do it twice, so maybe they consider it a win, but everything I saw was very negative. I didn't see a lot of positive feedback on Coca-Cola vis-a-vis

their weird AI holidays you're coming at. It's like people who don't know its AI think feel very neutral about it. People that do know its AI, I think, generally have negative reactions to it. I think if you look at it, it's pretty clear. But anyway, I mean, it's less clear if maybe you're like a 60-year-old who watches, you know, law and order on TV all day. And that's all good enough. Grandpa don't go internet. Right. Yeah. He doesn't know. He might notice some of those, those fucking polar bears have the wrong number of paws. But yeah, so like there

was some talk of that. And the other, the only specific example they gave of like an AI enhanced strategy was Allegra. The people who own like the medicine had like, like, a new non-drowsy formula, or they just wanted to highlight that it was non-drowsy. So they basically had a bunch of, like, seeded the stuff that, chatbot that, like, Open AI was, or that chatbots were scraping with content about how Allegra makes it is non-drowsy and about how, like, competing similar medications make you drowsy. I mean, yeah. So that it would get mentioned in, like, when people searched about, Allegiance.

And they talked about, yeah. They called it like model hacking, I think was the exact term used. This is interesting. That was the only specific example that I got on how any of this works, too. Like, everyone else was just talking in vague terms about, like, and we've really seen our team's creativity soar or whatever. That's interesting. You know, because like, the way that I probably use or am exposed to AI the most is like on like Google Search Now,

which has, you know, it's like AI like summaries instead of like actual search results. But those are all based on like. Which you can type minus AI in with the search results. You want to cut that stuff out. But those AI results are, you know, pulling from certain like articles, which is the, which they'll link to. So, yeah, I guess if I was trying to design it's like an AI marketing strategy,

I would either, you know, pay publications to mention my product in more articles or find other ways to influence mentions of my product in, like, written media that then would be used as like training data for AI. And yeah, I guess there can be a whole, you know, search engine optimization, model hacking is, I guess. Yeah, model optimization,

or yeah, like product. optimization for a model, I guess. That's funny. But yeah, like the, so the, the first talk that I went to was about the funnel or whatever. And one of the people speaking there was the, the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Intuit, which is the company that owns TurboTax, right? Like, it's one of the big, we do your taxes. Yeah.

Companies out there and also a lobbyer in terms of stopping any sort of reform that would make it so that you don't need to do your own taxes. It's like other countries do. Credit score monitoring, a whole bunch of stuff. All that kind of stuff. this guy, the CMO, the company, Thomas Renees, was part of this, the end of the funnel speech. And he made a couple of comments that I took note of. One is product is brand and brand is product full stop.

So the more people you can make experience your product, that's the best selling point in value, of course, right? Which, it was just interesting to me in terms of the Intuit as a company that has lobbied to make it impossible for like any reform that would allow people to not need a third party to do their taxes. But also this idea that product is branded. and brand is product, isn't true of a lot of companies? Like, if you think about, like, for example, like, a lot of the different soft drinks are all owned by one company, but they're fundamentally

different, like, products and have, and often cases, like, a different user base. And it's a very, like, it's a very tech when your product is a concept, like, you can't do your own taxes because it's a pain in the ass, but the government doesn't do it for you because we lobby to make that illegal. Like, I found that interesting. And it kind of got me angry at, at Tom. at the start of this. And I was particularly interested in one of the things he brought up, which is that he talked about the $100 million that Intuit is putting into OpenAI. And they're putting this into Open AI as part of a multi-year partnership. And I want to quote from an article in the website Arapis, which is discussing this exact thing that I found useful when I was

formulating my question for Thomas. The contract was to embed AIA models directly into QuickBooks, turbotax and credit karma, the promise AI assistance that can generate invoices, provide tax estimates, recommend loans, and help you make informed financial decisions, right? That may sound like kind of like a basic move, like what's so sketchy about just integrating like an AI chatbot to make it easier to use your tax software. It can be complicated and hard to use as anyway. But kind of the necessary part of this is if you are, if you're doing this, if you're integrating all of these different tax and credit programs into an AI model, you're giving that AI model access to people's financial data in a tremendous amount of detail, right?

And all of these AI models have a massive shared vulnerability, which is a vulnerability to something called prompt injection, right? And that's when, for example, say someone is a customer of a tax preparer that uses one of into its products to prepare taxes for its customers. and this person sends an invoice into the company that has hidden text in it that is a command to the language model that will be scraping this and uploading it to basically open up and send over a bunch of customer data to a specific source. That's a thing that you can do. It's called prompt injection. And there's not really a way to counter it. There's not like a

proven comprehensive defense against this sort of thing. And so there's this massive vulnerability And this was first brought up in an article on the website I cited ARAPTUS by Chris Black, who's a security researcher and expert. And I want to read a quote from his article about this. There are no proven comprehensive defenses against prompt injection, when not if an AI powered financial tool leaks customer data through a prompt injection attack who is liable. The company using QuickBooks, Intuit, OpenAI.

The regulations weren't written for this scenario. So I decided to ask that question of Thomas, being like the chief marketing officer, Well, he should have some answer to like, what do you have, what sort of security measures do you have to mitigate the risk of a prompt injection attack? And who do you see as being responsible? If you are the ones providing customer data to Open AI and their tool gets it by prompt injection attack, are you responsible? Is Open AI is a third party that might be using your products? And he had no answer to this. Like, his only answer when we were on stage was like, we're talking with Open AI about it, which is like, well, you're already in the process of collaborative.

with them? Yeah, I have a question for Thomas. I was kind of concerned when reading about Intuit Assist that OpenAI is going to have read and write access to quite a lot of financial information from users, which opens up a vulnerability for prompt injection, right? You have the possibility that people can hide things and invoices that are then being uploaded that will cause the AI to provide the malicious user with financial details for or individuals or corporations. And I guess my primary question here, this seems like a major liability issue.

When somebody's information gets rerouted to a place it's not supposed to go to a malicious actor, who's responsible? We've taken the value of integrity and protecting our customer data incredibly seriously over our entire lives. And that's over 40 years at the company and meeting in the software space for financial services.

So this is not something we're about. to lose it in any way in the new age of AI. In fact, it has to get even more and more than we level down on protecting people's information and security of that in your mission. So that is something that we are already in deep conversations with open AI and have to make sure that that will be true no matter where we're serving us. And when I kind of cornered him afterwards, he didn't have, like, his eventual follow-up answer was like, I don't know that kind of stuff.

And like, you are the chief marketing officer. Thank you for answering my question. I'm sure. Is it your question? I'm still really concerned about the danger of prompt injection attacks revealing financial data, and it doesn't still sound like there's an understanding of who will be liable. Is it into it? I'm not the expert they answer that question for you.

So, I mean, like, I can tell you that we're committed to security and privacy, and we're doing everything we can to protect that. I mean, I feel a lot riding on it, as you might imagine. Well, yeah. Every digital security expert I've talked to says it's a matter of when, not if, that there is financial data revealed by these attacks, it seems like there'd be an understanding. I'm going to be the expert to get into the details on that. Okay.

Yeah. Thank you. A key part of marketing this should be being able to tell people what kind of safety precautions are being taken with their data. And the fact that he didn't, and clearly had never thought about any of this stuff. And I had a couple of different people come up to me afterwards and be like, wow, that was a really good question. And I was like, well, why isn't this been asked before?

Like, why is this a thing where, like, some guys blogging about it, and I'm asking you about it, and you don't have an answer to it. And you're the CEO of one of, like, the largest tax prep company in the country. Like, it's just, it's emblematic of how careless everyone adjacent to this industry is, which personal data with the safety of people and of society as a result of, like, what their products are doing. like there's absolutely no consideration given to the harms of any of this shit. And it's the most consistently dispiriting part of showing up at CES. Well, what is what a fun story that is. All right. We're back.

So one of the other things that's been a major topic on the panels I went to and is generally a big thing at CES this year and in tech this year is agentic AI or agents, right? The idea that you have an AI that you can send off to like book a flight for you. and it doesn't just like find a flight that it searches for and be like, yeah, this looks good. It, like, actually books it for you and handles all of that, right? This has been one of the big promises of AI, not just for like flights, but that you can have, like, an actual digital assistant that persistently remembers all

of your shit and can book stuff for you and handle, like, the pain in the ass, nitty-gritty. If you say, like, hey, I need you to find a restaurant within, like, this four-block radius that has seven seats open at 8 p.m. and abides by these dietary restrictions. You kind of just have to slog through figuring that out right now, and the idea is an agent can do that for you. And currently, none of them can, right? This is a thing that is changing,

like the performance of different agents are changing over time, but it is still very unclear, if you're not somebody who's fully bought into the Kool-Aid, I'll say it's very unclear where these things will top out at. And there was a good article in Futurism recently, and I want to quote from it right now, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best-performing AI agent,

which was Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real-world office tasks 70% of the time. And this is, there's been a bunch of articles in the last couple of months about, like, why didn't, because 2025 was supposed to be the year of agentic AI, and now they're saying, well, 2026 is going to be the year of agentic AI. Not because none of this stuff works. And in fact, enough does that there's a number of viable businesses in it.

It's not nothing. But it does not work as well as they said it would be working right now. And it consequently has not been adopted merely as widely as was expected even this time last year, right? There's an article in HR dive. Half of Gen Z chat GPT users say they view it as a co-worker survey shows that cites a survey of about 8,600 full-time U.S. workers, which found that about 11% of those who responded, said they used chat GPT regularly, including about 21% of Gen Z workers, which is significantly lower. You can find, depending on who you go to, and the stat I've seen Bandied about was that, like, 57% of Ginzy people use chat GPT on a daily basis for like work and like more than half

used it as like their primary source for recommendations, like what stuff to buy. I don't know like which set of numbers is accurate. There's a lot of different pollsters giving data, right? But kind of no matter who you look at, the evidence suggests that the year that was supposed to be the year of agentic AI did not turn it into a normal thing, right? It's still lagging behind expectation. So that's kind of what we're seeing at CES is a lot of people trying to like, well, let's bring back kind of the same agentic shit we had last year, slightly improved and see if it catches on. Maybe this year it'll hit maturity, right? Yeah, no, I mean, we've been hearing agentic stuff every once in a while, but definitely not as much as last year. It's one of those

like salt and pepper words that they throw in. The second batch of panels that I attended after the keynote, which I should mention, as soon as I walked into the keynote at 8.30 a.m. The first thing, the very first thing I heard from Gary Shapiro, one of the heads of the Consumer Technology Association, was a 6-7 joke. But whether this is your first CES or your 15th, or in my case, but you belong here.

What number was that? 60 or 70. I don't know. He did a 6-7 joke already. very first thing. Oh wow. Great. Great stuff. As soon as I walk in.

It's because I walked in maybe like five minutes late. But it's very first words. So that's good. I kind of sense the tone for a lot of a lot of that panel. But then I went to a few panels in Eureka Park about like AI governance and like how governments working, working with AI. A lot of stuff mostly about like the. challenge of governments keeping up with innovation, how, you know,

too much regulation restricts these companies from doing real regulation. The Secretary of State of Austria had a really good quote about how data protections inhibit innovation. One of the things that we are seeing today is that some of the people, some of the citizens, have this fear about AI. So how do you feel it in Austria? I think you mentioned it very, very right. It's all about building trust, taking the field, trust for a free eye.

That's the most important thing. And of course, data protection is very huge. But on the other side, between data protection and innovation, we need to find the middle way because sometimes data protection is not good for innovation. On a similar note is the Intuit turbotax thing, of data protection is mainly getting in the way of trying to actually make real social progress, which will carry within some degree of risk. The second one of these AI governance panels was like these EU ambassadors to the U.S. from Estonia and Luxembourg talking about like Reaganomics

basically for 30 minutes, talking about how much they love for Ronald Reagan. Great. In Estonia, we certainly subscribe to this statement that Reagan once made, that the few most horrific words in English are the ones saying that, hey, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you. It's specifically in trying to make sure that governments are able to keep up with technology and the previous panel with the Austrian Secretary of State. It was about the challenges of trying to convince the citizens of these countries to, like, adopt to AI and adopt just in general, like digitalization, and specifically with, like, digital IDs

and how there's, like, you know, maybe like 20 to 30 percent of people who are very resistant and the challenge of, like, making sure that, like, this gets framed is not, not as like a product or like a project for technology, but as like a society-wide push. Yeah. But besides that, these panels were honestly a little bit sleepy, as well as the state of the creator economy panel. Oh, how's it doing? And I went, you know what? It's both, it's. It's, it's, it's. It's both in its adolescence but also reached maturity. Wow. And they said you know, it's hard. Brave to pick both.

It's hard for something to be two things at once. But in this case it is. But they talked about how creators are more enabled to use brand deals, including brand deals to enable with like a backlog of older content. You can remove brand deals from older content and replace them with

current brand deals using a new feature from YouTube. There was a guy from YouTube at the panel. Sure. Yeah, I'm sure he was very excited. But it was mostly about how, you know, new ways to use influencers to market your product. And that was the extent of what the creator economy really meant. And that's all any of these people have any idea on is like we can inject ads into AI. They trust AI so they'll buy the products. Or we can inject ads into influencers. They trust their influencers. That was the thing. Like none of these people, they dress it up with all sorts of fancy language. But it's, and most of these panels,

You mentioned, like, there's a lot of bullshit. Every now and then you get some, like, good moments, or you get to, like, question an asshole. But it's mostly bullshit. But it's occasionally worth it from moments like, when I was on the agentic AI cutting through the hype panel, Jay Patassol, who's the principal analyst at Forrester, started speaking, and he said something beautiful, Garrison.

And this is not an exact quote, but it's pretty close. We have a new audience we are speaking to, machines, we are through the looking glass, we are building content for engines, We are building websites to be scraped so that an LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand. Yep, yep, yep. And that gets it. That's what these people see the Internet as.

They see it as like everything before this was a mistake or what the Internet was for was a place for brands to feed information into machines that then spoon feed the information directly into customers who trust it like little lambs. That's what they want the Internet to be. And that's what they believe they've gotten to. That's what AI, that's the promise of AI. The promise of AI is that this isn't just the internet anymore. This can actually just be the physical world as well. And this is something that was talked about during the CES, CTA keynote Tuesday morning. Specifically with the birth of AI wearables, each of these wearables is able to now collect information about the physical world.

And as long as you have adequate data sharing, AI is able to gain so much more knowledge about how the quote unquote real world operates. and this is going to make, you know, all of the processes of AI stronger in the future as it learns more about what this world actually is. Yeah. And beyond the promise of wearables to, like, improve someone's life, this is the real project is strengthening AI through the use of these wearables. That's not actually about the consumer experience. It's about providing data to this machine.

It's this, like, larger, larger, very, like, existential thing, at least for these executives. Or like that that's the thing that they are really emphasizing, despite this being called the consumer electronics showcase. And I think, again, the best thing I can give you into how fundamentally, as much money as there is behind this, and as many grand words as they dress it up and how intellectually bankrupt this whole tech movement is, is that the third panel that I went to, which is about AI and creativity. One of the people on it was Jesse Damasef, who works for Diageo, which is like a company that imports all of your favorite whiskey. from Europe, right? Like, they sell all of the different, like, Scottish whiskeys that have to get, like, imported and sold over here. And he was talking about, they were talking about some of the specific examples they had of, like, how AI has been used in advertising campaigns. And his exact statement was, you can leverage an artist and create infinite examples of their work,

but which he means you can find an artist that you like, sign a deal with them, and then have AI create infinite examples in their style. And so I came up to afterwards, and I was, like, what were you specifically referring to? Like, how is this actually work as a product? And the thing that he pointed out is that they have a couple of whiskey brands that they have done. You go in and you order a bottle and it's printed on site. And it uses AI to make an example in the style of this existing artist that they likes

work that's unique for you. Uh-huh. And he said it's been successful for them. Is it billion trillions of dollars? Is it $3 trillion? No. I mean, these are things that like, yeah, I guess I can see that maybe. be selling some. Is it selling better than any other, like, branded whiskey, than any other, like,

you know, because whiskey companies, big ones will come out with, like, here's this edition every year, whatever. I'll have one special limited edition one. Is it selling better than that? We don't have that data. But it was, it's one of those is like, that's the idea, huh? That's like, we're talking about, like, AI is supercharging creativity and letting us, like, think bolder and more creatively than we've ever thought before. And there were so many lines in this fucking panel about like how we're like hypercharging what human beings can be and do. And like everyone should be really excited about what all this means for the future. One of the panelists said,

my best advice for you is let a thousand flowers bloom. Sorry, that was in the panel right before. But anyway, it's still in all of this like, it's all that seems to speak. It's all this same kind of shit that bleeds together. And it's like, okay, what are your ideas? Well, we're having Allegra kind of lie to manipulate an engine. and we've got

custom printed bottles for your whiskey. Well, you know, speaking of AI unleashing creativity, the last thing I'll talk about this episode is the worst booth

at showstoppers, which this year, it's kind of impressive because... Yeah, that's hard. It's mostly smart glasses and like three different pool cleaners and then some random software stuff

and then a few things we saw last year. Sure. The worst booth. Robert, you write books, right? I have. in the past, hopefully in the future. What if I told you that you could write three books in less than 24 hours? God, thank you. Garrison, as a writer.

Without using cocaine. There's no, well, now I'd say you're a liar. That's the, a little bit harder. Yeah. But. I thought you were trying to sell me some blow. And I was going to say when we turned the mic off. With the power of AI, you can write three books in six to 24 hours.

Wow, that's almost as fast as Stephen King. Winnie Wasanko. Yeah, there you go. Not quite. So there's this table. It was the least dividing table, definitely in all showstoppers, because it was filled with books, with, I will show you the covers here. They all look like this.

They all. Oh, yeah. No, those, I mean, I'm seeing blue and orange. It's colors. It's some black. It's AI-generated images. Yeah, it's like every movie poster now, like palette of colors. There's no art style behind it.

It's very, very dark. generic and they have like, you know, like the most generic font for the title all in the same placement with some author's name at the bottom. They're very sleepy. You can find pictures of these covers if you Google or Bing or, you know, maybe chat GPT, write three books in 24 hours. You can see, you can see the cover. Finally, I've always wanted to write three books, Garrison. So what this is is an app that will help you write these books. It's not going to do it all. for you. You still need to come up with the general idea of the story. Oh, the hard stuff. And the characters. The really the difficult things. The world building is always the hardest part. Everyone says

most of the work on a book is done in the first six hours. The world building is the really hard part. The easy part is just getting all those words down. Yeah. So you need to create, create some characters. Now, could you just have some other AI service create these characters? Maybe. But you should write maybe about a thousand words, kind of like a story viable type thing or a character, character outline and a general direction for the story, and you feed that into this app. And then, within hours, it will generate not just one book, not just two books, but a trilogy. Wow. Of books.

And it's only a trilogy. You cannot generate a single book. You only come in trilogy. Look, I get it. George Lucas worked the same way, Garrison. Look, you're telling me that the greatest machine mind in history wouldn't think the same as the greatest human mind of history. I bet it'll independently

create jizz music, too. It only comes in trilogies. And I now shall read a sample of this writing. I'm dying to read here this. There was maybe like five or six different books with many copies of the same book on this table. And I flipped through

maybe about half, reading like a random page every, you know, every like 20, 50 pages. And it It was too boring that I forgot to take pictures of these pages because I was just like, it was a struggle to finish, to finish each page. But luckily on their website, they do have some sample pages. I talked to one of the guys working at the booth and he said that he tried this. So we're like he found the service and he first thought, you know, sure this can't be any good. And when he generated his book, he was surprised how good the writing is.

He said that he probably wouldn't win a Pulitzer or a Hugo. Probably not. This is his two awards that he named. Probably not. But he said it was pretty good writing. This guy was so far the most Tim Robinson character I met at the conference. Yeah, that's great. So, Robert, you can pick the genre of sample.

We have a thriller book, a fantasy, mystery, science fiction, romance, or mainstream literary fiction. What genre do you want? I think I want science fiction. Science fiction. Because I feel like there's the shortest line between parody and legitimate within sci-fi. All right. This is from a book called, I don't even want to say this one. I'm really curious now.

Palimpset orbit is what I'm going to say. Oh, my God. It's called the Pellipset C. Clark. It's called the Pilemset Orbit. Yeah. Chapter 1. Desert Signals. Morrow woke with the Tate

of metal in her mouth and a pulse in her temples that felt one knot shy of a hangover. The ceiling above her was low and white, edged with soft vents. A monitor over the bed scrolled green numbers in a stylized outline of her lungs. Thin air, she remembered. 5,000 meters. The Atacama sky somewhere above concrete and glass. Good morning, Dr. Ellison, a calm baritone. How's the head?

She turned toward the voice. A man in the doorway wore a slate blue clinic jumper and a badge that caught the desert light leaking through the polarized glass. Dark curls threaded with gray, laugh lines that didn't quite match the tiredness around his eyes. That's him, man. Are you good?

Do you want me to keep you on? You know, it's, again, it's like the, it's an imitation of, like, a story. It's a scene, and it's a scene with details to describe people, but there's not like, you would ideally, I would have something of an idea of like what the thrust of the story is going to be. Like, for example, Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lives in a house under Hill or something like that. Forget the exact wording of that. But like, you know, it makes sense. It sounds like,

it sounds remarkably like bad. No, I don't want to be insult Nanorama writers that much. It just, it just, it sounds like a story that was generated based on a belief that like, well, if we can just like describe enough stuff and use enough words to describe a scene, then that counts as plot. Yeah, I mean, and a character, which we don't have any of yet either. All of it was this very generic empty,

like stuff that's very, very common. And if you ever have to read through a lot of like AI writing, whether for work or let's say, you know, you work in a college, so you have students submitting this stuff or you, for some reason, are online and you feel obligated to look at the worst parts of the world, like what me and Robert do sometimes.

This all feels very familiar. I'll read one other, like, paragraph from a different book, a thriller called The Helix Files. Oh, good. Obviously, part of a trilogy. So who knows where these stories go over the course of three books? Quote, The car heater had died 10 minutes ago.

Cold leaped through the floorboards into Helix's boots. Outside, the eastern block industrial belt slid past in gray slabs and rusted steel. Wet concrete, period. Diesel, period. A stray dog, nosing. trash heap beside the road fur, slick,

with drizzle. So it's something that, right? Yeah. A lot of this sort of like quick punchy sentences are common in AI writing at the moment,

wet concrete, you know, with a period. But like no, no, a lot of this type of stuff, you see, you see in an AI writing,

you have a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, like, M-Dash sentences as I was flipping through these books, it was like,

okay, like, I see what they're doing. I see what they're doing. I see what, yeah. But now, if you want to write a,

quote unquote, write a trilogy of books. You can pay the money. And within six hours, you will have a trilogy. So what really makes me feel optimistic about CES is the way that creativity is being democratized. Because it used to be that no ordinary person could write a book. You had to have a story and be some sort of freak at Oxford. Maybe like a, you need like a pencil, maybe a keyboard. Yeah. Impossible barriers. It's not possible. And now luckily through AI, as long as you have, you know, money to pay a subscription service and a computer. And VC

fundraising and subsidizing of their services. Ideally, some VC cash. Then you too can be an author of a trilogy. Well, that's my plan for the future. I guess I want to end by talking about the second to the last panel that I sat through,

which was at the AI house and was, I think yet again this was another one that was about, they were largely thinking about ethics in this one, like AI and ethics and like what actually means. And Eric Pace, who on the slide they just said he works at company. It's a reassuring. He works at Cox Media, which is like a big media company. Yes, based in Georgia. And he had a couple statements that were interested in me. He had one

where he said that like it's kind of incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how and what sources and what AI is they trust and why and figure that out. And I, I think what I inferred was that like because it's not going to get done by anyone else. And it kind of became clear to me later. I think he also doesn't want anyone else to do it. He wants this to be an individual project where you have to kind of figure that out for yourself. I was kind of unsure as to whether he was the evil or just the pragmatic version of this. Because the pragmatic version is like literally no one's going to restrict this stuff.

You just have to try to get by, right? Which is maybe accurate. But there was a really interesting interaction on this panel. One of the other people there was Dr. Martin Clancy, who was an Irish academic and a musician who was on the panel, again, to talk about creativity and ethics. And made a comment that I found was really interesting. And I don't know, I wouldn't say I agree or disagree with it, but I found it really interesting. Where he was like, actually, I'm not at all concerned comparatively about having an AI give me medical advice. I'm deeply concerned about letting an AI recommend music or movies to me, which I found a really interesting attitude and kind of a thought-provoking one. Yeah, that is interesting.

Which was immediately spoiled by Eric Pace going like, well, I don't see why anyone would have an issue with an AI doctor. Doctors get things wrong all the time. And then he just let that statement sit. I have heard this at CES before. And doctors, AIs have a lot more data. And they ended it by saying, because everyone asked like what were their big wins of the year. And his big win was that his wife hated Chatch EPD and didn't want to use it. And he convinced her to use it to plan their vacation. Kind of sounded like he bullied her into it. But that was his big win for the year. I didn't like. like him. My win is I got to neg my wife into using a chat bot to plan our special time vacationing together because we're not creative enough to figure out how to go on a fucking trip. Hashtag AI win. Jesus. I don't know. Anyway, I think that's good for episode one from CES.

Come back next week. Well, we'll have more or listen to Better Offline, where Ed will have just a shocking amount of content from a lot of the relatively few and constantly shrinking stable of sane. people reporting on technology. See you next week. This is It Could Happen here, Executive Disorder, our usually weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis-Tame, joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Sophie Lichtenen.

This episode, we're covering the events from the end of December to the first week of January. Yeah, and the events are not good. Did not start off to a slow start whatsoever. Did not ease into the new year. Yeah, this might be the worst, just the worst first week of a year I can remember it. I remember 2020. Worst year ever, potentially mere. I long for the halcyon days in which 2020 was the worst year we'd ever experienced.

I started 2020 cycling around Rwanda. And I had a great start to 2020. This has not been a great start though. No. Yeah, let's talk about the event that happened several hours before we started recording this. We're recording this again on Wednesday, January 7th. So I don't think there's going to be any new information about this. But yeah, hours before we started recording, ICE shot and killed a woman in her car at a routine anti-ice action in Minneapolis. From the videos, these protests are identical to thousands of other small-scale protests against ICE. rates where pissed off locals blow whistles and scream at the ice agents who carry off their friends and family in the dead of night. The video shows ice agents approaching a stopped car. One agent tries to open the front car door, they'll scream and get the fuck out, while another

walks in front of the car as it backs up to pull away from the scene. As the vehicle pulls forward to drive away, the ice agent pulls out his gun and shoots the driver. this is the agent's immediate response. There is no verbal warning. He simply pulls out the gun and shoots. There are videos out there. You will see, I have seen three angles of it so far. The videos are graphic and gut wrenching, as we'll get into in a second.

So, be warned. If you are trying to watch them, you are just going to see ICE murder a woman. The agent, I can fairly definitively say was in absolutely no danger. Again, he simply steps aside. from the slow-moving vehicle. He has enough time to take a shot and then step aside and take two more shots. The video is just heart-wrenching.

The closest angle we have, the woman recording the video is screaming no as the agent pulls out his gun and shoots. There's another video that shows there was a passenger inside of the van, and it just shows her sitting on the ground, sobbing and saying they killed my wife, I don't know what to do.

It is one of the most heart-wrenching things I have ever seen. having watched the videos of both, it is eerily similar to ICE's murder of Silvero Villegas Gonzalez in Chicago in September, who was also killed while attempting to drive away from ICE agents, and who the DHS has likewise accused of committing acts of domestic terrorism by attempting to ram agents. It is clear from both videos that that is not what was going on. Both these people were simply trying to pull away from the ICE agents. The other shooting that this is very similar to, that I think has been getting more press comparisons, even though in terms of what actually happens in the video that we have, I think it's closer to the actual

murder. But it is also very, very similar to an incident in Chicago last year where Border Patrol agents hunted and then shot Marimar Martinez, who thankfully survived but was charged by the federal government for domestic terrorism, a case which thankfully completely collapsed after a among other things, the contents of a group chat were released in which Charles Exum, who's the agent who shot her, was bragging about shooting the woman in Chicago. So that's, I think, a valuable insight into the mindset of these people, is that when one of these went to trial, we got a group chat where the agent who shot a different woman in a very similar situation was bragging about it. In the immediate wake of this Trump posts untrue social that the driver in Minneapolis,

quote, willfully and viciously ran over the ice officer who seems to have shot her in self-defense, end quote. And then he then links to a video, which is a bad angle of the shooting that also does not show what he claims at all, because he is simply from the video footage we have available. This is simply a lie. Yeah. After the person was shot, their vehicle continued moving forward and struck a parked car that is not unusual. in the case when someone is shot driving a vehicle, right? Like, you slump forward, you slump forward onto the pedals.

Yeah. There's two things I want to emphasize here. One is that the DHS always releases statements. This is the third shooting like this that we've had since these massive immigration raids began. Every single time they release a statement where they accuse the driver of intentionally attempting to ram the agent. It has never been true. We have seen three attempts of this. have seen the videos and three attempts of this. It has been false every single time.

Major media outlets continue to just post the statements without any of the context that these people have been lying about this every single time. And the second thing that I want to emphasize about this is how normal of a protest this was. This is just a completely ordinary ice action. It looks like every other anti-ice action I have ever seen. It wasn't a particularly large one. It was just a group of people who were on the street. In the video where the woman is sobbing about her wife, she says that they pulled up to film the ICE agents. Yeah. Yeah, it's heart-wrenching. There have been lots of protests. Greg Bovino, who's influential Border Patrol officer, we have talked about many times on the show, was at the scene. And it's also worth noting this

comes within 24 hours of the White House announcing their giant operation in Minneapolis to deploy 2,000 federal agents. This was specifically a new surge that started on Tuesday, January 6th. And literally less than 24 hours after this surge, ICE killed a woman. Yeah. The thing I want to end on in the immediate analysis before we talk a bit about the protests that have been happening is that absolutely hauntingly, today's murder took place less than a mile away from where police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. which is, yeah, it is as clear a demonstration of the continuity of the violence of the American state as can possibly be produced.

Yeah. And I think the other pattern that we've seen specifically in these protests is pulling weapons on people constantly, even more so than normal police would. And, you know, I remember a lot of the people I've talked to in Chicago, one of the things that they said is that, yeah, this is, if they're eventually going to shoot someone, and they've now shot a third person in the course of these operations. And presumably as long as they're allowed to continue, they will probably shoot more people

because one of the things that's the best apparent from this video is that this is the sort of muscle memory reaction that they have to being in front of a car that's moving towards them. There's no thinking, there's no thought. They just pull out the gun and shoot. Yeah, I mean, he's shooting the same time he's moving sideways out of the way of the car.

Yeah. He just as easily could have not fired and would have had the same result. He just chose to fire. Yeah. A little over an hour after the shooting Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis gave a press conference where he said this to ICE. There's little, I can say again, that'll make this situation better. But I do have a message for our community, for our city. And I have a message for ICE.

To ICE, get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy, are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead. That's on you. And it's also on you to leave. It's on you to make sure that further damage, further loss of life and injury is not done.

We're going to be working towards justice as quickly as we possibly can right now. And justice is what we've all got to get. Frey, I think, is just reflecting the sentiments of the city right now. There are immediate protests in, I mean, within minutes of the shooting, there were people showing up. protests have been intensifying. Prouts got tear gassed like 30 minutes after shooting. Yeah.

Yeah. And Bovino is, there are pictures of him on scene while these protests are sort of ramping up. So we will see what happens in Minneapolis in the coming days. Solidarity protests have already been announced in Portland and Philadelphia. And I'm sure more cities will follow in the coming hours. Yeah. Yeah. We'll give an update next week if more information becomes available. I think the events themselves are fairly clear, but we will see what the federal reaction to this is going to be and what the reaction on the ground is,

and we will keep you updated. Let's have some ads here, and we'll be back to talk about Venezuela. We are back with the second wild story of this week, which is that the United States, specifically United States Special Forces, raided Caracas last week, and kidnapped President Maduro, who is the president of Venezuela and his wife.

We covered the details of this in a whole episode, so I'm not going to go over to any great detail here, and that's already out. Trump kidnaps Venezuelan President Maduro is the name of that episode, so you should be able to find out of the feed. He danced too close to the sun. I'm not so sure the dancing was the factor, but I will only update that to say a couple of things. First of all, we know that there were in excess of 50 Venezuelan casualties, right? Or I should say there were in excess of 50 casualties.

Some of those would probably be Cuban security forces. Uber nationals, yeah, in a military advice, kind of a prestige posting, but military advisor kind of role. And that there were injuries to U.S. troops, we didn't hear about first. And some U.S. troops and U.S. helicopters did sustain some damage, but there were no people killed on the United States side. And Donald Trump has truth that I'm just going to read this one. I think we can do our best to understand it. I am pleased to announce that interim authorities in Venezuela

will be turning over between 30 and 50 million barrels of high quality sanctioned oil to the United States of America. This oil will be sold at its market price, and that money will be controlled by me as president of the United States of America to ensure that it's used to benefit the people of Venezuela, the United States. I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan immediately. It will be taken by storage ships and bought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter, Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.

You know, I distinctly remember the days, the halcyan days when I was a child when saying no war for oil was a provocative political statement because the leaders of our country insisted that the wars were not, in fact, for oil. Yeah. Yeah, all that has dropped. We do not give a single fuck anymore. No. We're just openly doing anything we were doing before.

Yeah, it is wild to think of the Bush era of a golden age of at least pretending. This is extraordinarily vague, right? How much this oil is it being turned over over what period of time? Is Venezuela where they were expected to extract and refine the oil then hand it over? Or is it going to give US companies a right to do that? They don't have much of the processing facilities. There's like one, I think. think American processing facility

that can process the kind of crew that comes out of Venezuela, but it's difficult, we talked about this more in the other episode, but it's, the Venezuelan oil sucks, it's difficult to refine. It's, no, it's high quality What are you talking about? It's right here in the post, man.

I don't know, I don't know what you talk. It's right hearing the truth. Yeah, in the truth. Thank you. Thank you, Garrison. That really does make it sound like I'm reading from the Bible at church or something. Oh, God. Also, the oil is not saying, That's not how sanctions work.

Sanctioned countries and people, not things. Yeah, bizarre. The center structure is there. Yeah, it's doing a lot for me. So, yeah, we talked about the Rodriguez option in our last show, and I guess this is kind of confirming a lot of what we get speculated about there. That's assuming this happens, by the way. I will say that there was some dip in oil prices today over the exactification of this is real,

but I don't know how well connected those people are either, quite frankly. or how much of an understanding anyone has over whether this is going to happen or not. We don't know. He just says things and sometimes they happen and sometimes they don't. And there's no actual way to tell which ones are going to come true and which ones are just him posting. From Trump's mouth to Rubio's ears. Yeah. And then Ruby says something different in an interview of Trump says it again and then here we go.

Yeah. It does look like they are attempting to pursue. the strategy which you spoke about, which is that the only thing getting liberated in Venezuela is the oil, right? They will allow the regime to continue. There will not be any attempt at regime change. They just want a puppet version of the old regime, which they can manipulate purely, apparently, for their own financial benefit with oil. Yeah. It's also worth noting that Trump is claiming that he personally is going to be controlling the money after it's sold at market price. sentence that at any other time in American history would be the most dictatorial thing

you've ever seen, but pales in comparison to the fact that he is claiming to be running a country after a war that he unilaterally started without Congress. So, I mean, is it even accurate to call it a war? It seems like it's like a single military action now. It's like an act of war, I guess, right? If you combined the blockades, which are an act of war, and we'll get to more in a second, and this, I think this is just a war. I mean, I went to the protest in New York the morning after the action. And, you know, a lot of chance for, you know, no war in Venezuela, you know, no more bombs in Venezuela.

And, like, it looks like they're kind of done. They're kind of done with the bombs. They're kind of done with the war. Here's the thing, though. So Trump has also said that if the current government of Venezuela refuses to comply, he will do more strikes. worse than he did to Maduro. Yeah.

And it's always kind of difficult to parse exactly what's going on there, but... Yeah, there's a potential for more US action, definitely. Yeah. It seems like right now they appear to have got roughly what they wanted. And then, like, there's also the potential for this. Do you know any number of ways, right? Like, things could continue to deteriorate for the regime there. Like, what does it mean for their ability?

They have previously had the ability. to use various kind of nefarious re-flaggings of boats, which Mia's going to talk about a second here, to obtain some income, right? Like if they're not even able to do that, it's getting even worse, right? And the economic situation in Venezuela could very easily get worse. I know everyone I've spoken to there is out trying to stock up on non-perishable food,

and they don't know what the future holds for them. Plus, you now have, as we saw earlier in this week, very trigger-happy pro-government militias would probably be the best way to describe it. Like in this case, they were shooting at a drone up in the air, but there's very clearly still a lot of tension in the country. So on Saturday morning after the military action Venezuela,

I went to the protest in New York, like I previously mentioned. And I've put together this little audio report that I recorded at the protest. that takes you through about like an hour's worth of protest activity. And yeah, give it a listen. It is Saturday, January 3rd, 254 p.m. I am in Times Square with, I would say, 200 to 300 people protesting U.S. action in Venezuela,

as well as Iran and the genocide in Palestine, kind of a mix of causes. but mostly talking about Venezuela and the military extradition of President Maduro. The organizational structure at this protest seems to be mostly propped up by various communist organizations. There's a Revolution Communist Party tabling. There's the Bob Avakin Refuse Fascism Organization with a lot of banners and signs. PSL has a bunch of banners and signs, as well as the Cooney Internationalist Student Group. which is tied to the New York City public university system. They have some homemade signs,

the only signs actually drawn on paper probably this morning, versus all of the PSL signs, which appear pre-printed and pre-prepared. A rotating selection of speakers have given speeches for the past hour, and now at 3 p.m., this relatively small crowd for a New York protest is leading a march south. No, I'm not alive.

The march is taking up probably about one city block, just outside of Times Square on 43rd and 8th, turning on to 8th Avenue now after about 10 minutes of marching. NYPD bikes at the front of the march, as well as on foot officers on either side of the crowd. Not like a huge presence. I've maybe seen cumulatively a hundred or so cops, which is actually not that much for New York, especially based on how spread out they are.

Like it's maybe like two dozen cops on either side of the march, just walking, walking on the sidewalk. And then maybe another two to three dozen in the front and more in the back. So between 50 to 100 cops. A little over 15 minutes into the march, they've now moved up to 47th Street. At this point, there's been zero conflict with police. They've mostly facilitated the traffic around the march as people continue to chant and walk north. The crowd has been marching for over 35 minutes and now are arriving. at what I assume is their destination, Columbus Circle, up at 58th Street and Broadway.

No scuffles with the police. There was like two guys in mega hats, kind of trying to antagonize the side of the crowd for the past 15 minutes. Nothing really happened. One random dude came out of a convenience store, yelling fuck Maduro, trying to agitate some. people in the crowd, but everyone just moved on. And now they are approaching Columbus Circle. The decent people in this country need to answer the people of the world. What are we going to do?

There are needs to the people. Police are now very lightly directing people into Columbus Circle, onto the plaza, and off of the street. Some groups are packing up their... protest signs and bags and starting to peel off. So as expected, this protest was done by a coalition of anti-imperialist, leftist, socialist, communist organizations. You have the Party for Socialism and Liberation, PSL, and all of these other, like,

communist groups who are all primarily either trying to grow their membership roster or sell their newspapers, sell their magazines. And this is what most of the protest actually is. They have tables set up while people are giving speeches. They have people walking around, handing out pamphlets and flyers. And this protest was not very big. Like I said, it was relatively small, maybe 200, 300, 300 people. Because there's not a lot of public buy-in for this sort of thing.

Because at this point, if anyone's been around, they know, based on the flyers they get posted, what kind of protest this is going to be. This is going to be socialist, communist organizations trying to grow their membership. It's not a representative sample of the people of New York. It is people trying to sell magazines and newspapers and books. And the fact that the entire protest ecosystem for stuff like this is fully captured by these sorts of organizations makes it really hard to grow a genuine movement because people know that it's going to be walking for 30 minutes and then people are going to be shoving pamphlets in their hand. And that's the extent to which you are protesting. It is that.

It's walking along a path led by the NYPD to Columbus Circle. Yeah, I'm talking to this happened in almost every city in the U.S., right? Like, I saw a flyer for when it's Zendigo. Personally couldn't be asked to attend, because, as you say, like, I knew what was going to happen. And, like, the person in a high-vis and a clipboard was going to try and get my email address. I will say that the thing that did hearten me a little bit was that there were a few protests. I mean, just out in the Chicago suburbs, which is not a place you normally have these, that weren't by these groups that were just pretty spontaneous on the morning of the demonstration.

But the sort of issue, yeah, that you're referring to Garrison is that, like, even the spontaneous protests, the energy just gets captured by, like, the PSL and these organizations that fundamentally don't want to do anything other than grow their organization. And yeah, it was designing an org to co-opt the anger that's happening right now. And I wanted it to funnel the anger in a useless direction that burned people out on activism. I wouldn't change anything from the PSL. And I mean, and this has been what the American anti-war movement has looked like since the Iraq war demonstrations.

Yeah. Right. This was, this was one of the battles that happened inside of the Iraq war protest. And it's one of the reasons why they didn't work. And like this is a very serious thing. Like this is a very serious military action that should warrant massive public outcry. But protesting taps into a finite resource that people have. And when you have an inclination that the protests are going to go this way,

people might not want to expend their personal resource because it is not seriously putting pressure on anyone making decisions in the government. Yeah. This is a very serious thing that we shouldn't underplay for a second, but like the United States have done something which is completely illegal, right? which is an act of war against a sovereign country. And me saying this doesn't mean I'm like a Maduro stand and anyone who has listened to any portion of my work will understand that. But it is incredibly serious that the US are attempting to set this precedent that it can just black bag heads of state,

whether or not the US considers them legitimate, right? Their argument that Maduro is not legitimate. It doesn't matter. If they can just send dudes in helicopters to black and speak people around the world, then that is a very scary precedent. All right, I am going to head out and return to the CES show floor. I will say for the, if we're doing a tariff talk segment, there has been discussion of tariffs at CES that I have not mentioned on the CES episodes so far. Two thumbs down. Two thumbs down on the tariffs from the Consumer Electronics Showcase.

Wow. They're coming out with the bold stance that they don't like the tariffs. Wow. I think Ivanka Trump was giving a keynote address at the last CES that I attended. That rocks. God. Incredible. Incredible.

Related news, I stopped attending. C.S. Well, I have to keep attending now because the secretary to the U.S. from Estonia was was oogling me for 30 minutes yesterday. So I might be getting a new passport. Oh, boy. Good luck in Godspeed. All right, good, everybody.

The AI poop analyzing toilet for me, Garrison. I will do. So one of the questions that we had at the very beginning of this operation was what is going to happened to the U.S. oil blockade on Venezuela? And the answer is that it appears to still be in effect, the evidence of which is the U.S. interdicting two oil tankers, one of which they've been chasing for about a month, a few weeks, which is really funny if you know how large an oil tanker is that you've been in a boat chase with an oil tanker. It's like, I guess you It's just so big.

They can't make it stop. Yeah, I guess. So apparently the administration is claiming that the Coast Guard had attempted to board it, and they refused to allow the Coast Guard to board. But the only thing I can think of is, you know those giant vehicles they use to move rockets around at JPL? Or like from JPL, like on the launch site where they have, they can only move like five miles an hour, and they're the size of a rocket because you have to have a standing rocket on it. That's what it's like.

You're chasing an empty oil tanker across the Atlantic. It's also worth noting that one of the very weird parts of this is that I'm going to quote from Reuters here. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the ship's crew had made, quote, frantic efforts to avoid apprehension, which again, I cannot emphasize this enough, this is an oil tanker. Like, this is not a speedboat. This is like the largest, this is like one of the largest and most unwieldly craft that humanity has ever produced in its entire history.

Like, how are you getting frantically avoid an oil taker? Yeah, is it zigzagging? I don't know. Oil taker evasive maneuvers. Yeah. And this is also from that Raiders thing. And quote,

failed to obey Coast Guard orders and so faces criminal charges. which sucks, but also if you're getting evaded by an oil tanker, that is a skill issue. Like, you can, there are websites where you can track these things.

They have transponders. Like, when this thing was captured, its transponder was on. So, the skill issue, I, good Lord. On a more serious note, this is part of that initial oil blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil that began last year. US government has been saying that this ship and the other ship, that the other oil tanker

they've seized, are basically ghost ships, which we talked about another episode. I don't know if you want to explain again what that is, James, but... Yeah, they're often old ships that are either reflagged or the ships that have been retired and are returned or the ships that have been scrapped and someone has taken their name and is using it so that they appear like ships, you know, coming back from the dead. But often they will reflag or rename, you know, halfway through their... trip. And it's a bunch of boat law stuff to avoid sanctions is what they, what they tend to be. Yeah. And so that, that's the U.S.'s justification for seizing two more oil tankers, which again,

I also kind of emphasize enough that this also is an act of war. Yeah. I mean, were they flagged as Venezuelan? No. One of them was flagged as Russian, and I haven't seen anything about what the other ship was flagged as. China has protested the seizures of these boats, but there has really been anything other than diplomatic noise so far from the Chinese government, who, if there was a government on the world stage, who was going to do a serious protest about this, I think it would have been either Russia or China, and we haven't really seen anything more significant than the diplomats being annoyed. So we will continue to see how this oil blockade plays out and the effects that it has on people in Venezuela.

I wish I had a better ad pivot for this, but I don't. So here's ads. Well, they're like oil tankers, Mia. They just rumble along and you can't stop it. And then it's, yeah, we've been unable to interdict them.

We are back from our failed ad interdiction. Do you want to talk about Syria, James? Yeah, this is James. Oh, this is grim. The rest of the world segment. Because a lot of bad stuff is happening. And some of it's not going to punch into, like, your mainstream U.S. news media diet.

So right now, pretty serious fighting has broken out in the left. right. Syrian transitional government forces are shelling and attempting to enter the Kurdish enclave of Sheikh Maksud. Shik Maksud is like an area in where Kurdish and other people, right, there are Christian people, there are Zidi people who live there, have, and this enclave has remained, right, despite the regime taking over, of the Syrian traditional government, taking over the rest of Aleppo, right? They didn't take over that area, and this area has remained under the control of the A&ES, the autonomous administration of North and East Syria, aka Rojava, but they have demilitarized it.

And what that means is that there are only internal security forces who are called Assayesh in Kurdish in this region. But appears that what happened was an SDF drone unit struck an SDG vehicle with a drone, STG-Syrian transitional government, right? That's the Jolani-Alshara government. Of course, they have another acronym. just when you thought the acronyms were over. Oh, yeah. They're not gone.

God. Yeah, there's always more. So they hit this SDG vehicle in De Haifa, and then the SDGs seemed to respond by dropping grenades into Shikmaksud from drones, and then the Azaish responded with drones, and conflict began, right? What's different from them, there has been conflict on and off in Shikmakshud for a long time, but, like, in the last year, right, since HTS moved from our. Aleppo to seize most of the country. HTS-Hartor-Al-Shan, a group that was formerly on the

foreign terrorist organization that's the United States, but no longer is. What we have seen here is not only shelling of the Sheikh-Maksud neighborhood and shilling in response or mortify a response for the Esreij don't have heavy weapons. That's not their role. The STG has also attempted to enter Sheikh-Makshu to seize it, right? This has obviously prompted thousands of people to flee because they are worried very reasonably about groups that were previously known under the banner of the SNA or the Turkish FSA who have previously conducted ethnic cleansing of Kurdish people in areas that they have managed to take control of, right, who have murdered civilians, who have executed women in Kurdish politics. There's every reason for these

civilians to fear that happening again, right, because the Syrian transitional government has far too often just rebadged SNA units with a long and storied history of war crimes and not done anything to stop them doing it again. But also some of these are not SNA units. Some of these are Syrian transitional government units from other parts of Syria. Nonetheless, this attempt and an incursion into the neighbourhood is remarkable and it's different. As I write this, the SDG appeared to be staging to enter the neighbourhood again. Very amusingly, they took a video showing this, which also were a redacted.

reveal the position of all their armor on telegram. Classic, classic Syrian Civil War stuff. Everyone loves to be revealing their position on telegram. So, yeah, maybe when I reopen Telegram, those guys would have been wiped out by a bunch of drones. Who knows? But, yeah, it continues to be a flashpoint. And this is the most serious flare up we've seen in a long time, right? There was supposed to be an agreement for the integration of the SDF into Syrian traditional

government ministry of defense. that has failed. They haven't come to an agreement. Various sources are reporting various things about what they wanted, whereas specifically what the SDF wanted for the YPGA, who are the women's defense forces. And there are, that is a definite red line for them. They won't disband, but the women won't put down their guns, right? And for very reasonable reasons. We don't know exactly if the Syrian transitional government refused to accept them in any way. They have said they wouldn't do that. They have said they would accept them, but we don't really have like a very clear picture of the last round of negotiations. Talking of Kurdish armed groups, let's go from

Rajabat to Rojjava to Jala, right, across Kurdistan from west to east, just looking at a little compass in my head. In Iran, protests have grown around the country. These protests began, largely because of the decreased purchasing power of people's money there. Of course, the protests have further reduce that. And people are really feeling the economic bite, right? This time, what is different is that armed groups have come out in support. I saw, lead the name translates as People's Revolutionary Front had assassinated a cop, right?

It's like a drive-by. P.A.K. So P.K. One of the smaller Kurdish paramilitary groups. I made an episode, I think it was called, what does bombing mean for freedom in Iran? last year with Gordaigne and I will try and get back with Gordi soon to talk more about this but if you're wondering who are all these groups what are all these acronyms that's the episode you need to go to so P.A.K. Peshemurga have been killed right which is a significant change

there have been armed elements in these protests and there has been a unity statement both from the different Kurdish armed groups I think it was Piyak Pekk in Kumala who made the this statement, right? And then also from coalition of Kurdish women's organizations. It's organizations from across that political spectrum, but in that part of the world coming together to denounce the actions of the regime, which include, for instance, in the alarm province, riot police storming hospital. I don't know. People will have seen that video, but it was extremely disturbing. Has there been any movement from the Belushi independence groups? Yeah, I know, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure.

sure it was a Belushi group. I remember in the 2019 process, the most military it got was, I think, a Belushi group, like, fired an RPG at a police checkpoint, but it never really sort of spread beyond that. Yeah, I don't know. There are... There are a number of, like,

balusias of groups, but I'm not aware of their involvement. They have definitely been, like, police repression there, like, there is everywhere else, right? Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, I will try and probably cover this in a whole episode next week. They have a lot of time prepare on that with all the craziness. I did see that this morning, so we're on the seventh, again,

the armed forces attack protesters in the Grand Bazaar and Tehran, which, you're not aware, has a tremendous significance right from the 179 revolution there. And Trump has to intervene, as he always does, right? Yeah, exactly perfectly what the regime wants, is to let them portray themselves as defenders of Iranian sovereignty, etc., etc. against American imperialism. Yeah, America, great Satan. Moving on, let's talk about Israel. Israel has threatened to withhold,

I believe it has now withheld registration, to operate in Gaza from MSF, Medsonson Frontier, Oxf, and a number of other aid organizations. MSF, I'm just going to quote from them, called it a cynical and calculated attempt to prevent organizations from providing services of Gaza and the West Bank,

which is a breach of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law. It's just them trying to further starve people to death, right? There's no other reason. Like, Israel has made the claim that these groups have been infiltrated by militants. That is a laughable conjecture. Like, it's a bad joke.

Like, I've worked with MSF and Oxfam all over the world, right? There were a lot of criticisms of them I would make. One of them is not that they have been infiltration by shocking them ass. Like, you're having a laugh. I want to do a whole episode on this, but like when O'Brien talks about 2 plus 2 equals 5 in 1984, this is where that gets us, right? When you can just say something that is blatantly false and forced people to agree that it is true,

and that is the project of genocide, because it first has to destroy the truth to justify what it is doing. And we are seeing that happening. And a very brief migration update finally In the case before Judge Bozberg Regarding the Alien Enemies Act That we've reported back before The Trump administration asked for a delay Because of the changing situation of Venezuela

Right I don't think they're asking for delay So they can be like Oh, it's not safe for people to go back We'd better keep hold of them and treat them nicely It is my suspicion Any agreement they come to with the Rodriguez regime Will include that it must

accept people back. And as I said in the other episode, right, these people are going back to a country which is not deeply paranoid about American spies, and they have lived in America. This is not going to be good for them. And the city of San Diego has sued a Trump administration for damage city property on Maron Valley Road, or has filed a complaint today to do so. I'm glad they're doing it. It's also deeply hypocritical, right?

Mayor Tor Gloria was out there asking for more border security funding under Biden. They defunded the office in a city which would welcome refugees and migrants. Like, is it just a publicity thing? These people don't care, right? When migrants were being held in the open air in San Diego County and San Diego City, these people weren't there and still glad it's happening, but don't for one second believe these people get a single shit about migrants. They don't, and don't for one second thing.

The voting for them is voting to be kind to migrants because it's not. Todd Gloria is a liar, and just like everything else, he's using this an opportunity to promote himself. and he's a terrible person. But yeah, in this case, they are suing for trespassing and placing of razor wire on city property. It's city property that's way outside of where you would think the city of San Diego is.

It's just adjacent to O-Town Mountain Wilderness. But I think they have it there for water rights reasons or something. Brief tariff update, not tariff news this week. However, comma, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the giant case over a wide swath of Trump's tariffs this Friday. So next week, we will explain what. happened there in the fallout. As you're listening to this episode, that

decision might have already been released. Have fun. Put a trans girl on your couch. And if you would like to email us, you can do so. Coolzone tips at proton.com. If you wanted to be encrypted, you should use a proton mail address as well. And, you know, we reported the news.

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