It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 114

Episode Date: January 13, 2024

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CallZone 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. Hello, everyone. It's me today, James, and I'm joined by Berivan from the YPJ Information Office. And we're going to discuss today Rojava and chiefly the Turkish bombing campaign against it, which has been happening in the last few weeks and the last few months and the last few years. So we wanted to set that in context for you and everyone's attention has been very much focused on other conflicts, but that doesn't mean that this one isn't important.

And it's one that obviously listeners will be familiar with. So we wanted to bring you an update on that. Welcome, Berivan. Hello. Thank you yeah you're welcome okay happy to be here today good let's start by i think just in case people need a refresher or they they haven't listened to some of the other stuff talk about what's happening in brojova and and why they i guess why it's important and why it's unique and what makes it special? Okay. So actually right now in Rojava for more than 10 years, there's a revolution happening.

I think most people heard that for example, in 2011 and so on, there was like something called the Arab Spring but actually in the same time in this region in northern east Syria actually also called like in the northern eastern part of Syria there's a region called Rojava which is like a big part Kurdish population there's also Christian

population like Assyrian Armenian population and also Arab population like it's a very like colorful region you can say. So in this region 2011 in this time and then 2012 evolution started

which is actually based on a long term struggle of the Kurdish movement and its experiences and the evolution was was mostly based on the idea to gain democratic autonomy and to gain democratic self-administration. Why? Because the Syrian regime, on the one hand, was very oppressive towards Kurdish people.

was very oppressive towards Kurdish people. And on the other hand, it was like an authoritarian regime. So there was this wish to create something different, which was actually created here in the region, in Rojava. Yeah. So I think if we can say it first,

what happened was that revolution started and until today it's continuing like it's a very like basic change of people's life we can say that happened here like democratic administration in all areas of life and also like for example a great deal of women's organization to achieve also women's freedom. So, uh, this revolution is like based on these principles of democratic self administration of a woman's freedom and also ecology. Yeah. Perhaps you can explain to people who aren't familiar that a little bit more about the women's revolution.

Cause I think that is something that's extremely unique and uh that that people might not have like oh if they've heard of it perhaps they haven't really you know i think the mainstream press doesn't cover it particularly well so if you could explain like maybe something about the co-chair system or the the relationship between yourselves and the and and how that works yeah so actually i was was just starting like speaking about like when the revolution was happening so from the beginning on like women also took place in it like which was already the case in the Kurdish freedom movement in general like that women was like equally were equally taking part in it and also always founded their own organization, not like a substitute to

a general organization or something like this, but actually like their own organization that at the same time cooperates with the general organization. So there was already this principle of women's autonomy. So this was also adopted in Rojava,

in all areas, which also includes all areas, which also includes like political areas, areas of daily life, but also military field, women organized. So actually in the beginning of the revolution, there were like the society's kind of self-defense forces building up. And in the beginning, there were already women in it. And then there was also the foundation of YPJ, like the People's Defense Forces.

But after this, also the YPJ, the Women's Protection Units, were founded. So actually, it's like a fully autonomous women's unit that takes care of defending their homeland on the one hand, but on the other hand also makes a great deal of change in the society, in the daily life of women. Because in the region that was before, maybe to some deal, like feudal or because of the authoritarian state, there was no protection for women's rights or something like this. And for example, there was this tradition of marrying women at a young age or something like this.

So this was actually changed by this women's revolution. The everyday life of women was changed and is still changing. Like it's still a struggle because it means changing the society in general. So that's like in every area of life today there's like autonomous women's organization in Roosevelt existing which make us maybe the most like profound women's solution that until now is happening i think so it's like really important example i think for women everywhere in the world yeah very much so and it is a genuinely profound change having spent a little bit of time there earlier this year

and it's very notable as you spent a lot of time in that part of the world how different things are and then perhaps we should talk about uh the the battle against uh the so-called islamic state or dash or isis or whatever you want to call it in the role that um the ypg ypj and stdf played in that and can you explain a little about about that fight and and the fighting that happened and also like the tremendous number of people who who died fighting or were martyred in in the language that is used by the revolution about them so like uh in general i think um everyone in the world first listened to the name of the

YPJ, the Women's Protection Unit in relationship to ISIS but actually from the beginning on they fought against this kind of let's say different fundamentalist or mercenary groups that were existing

in the region and when ISIS was coming up like the biggest or most known battle that actually the world for the first time really saw was the battle for Kobani where for example

the YPJ was like very very limited possibilities and the YPJ with very, very limited possibilities and the YPJ fought against ISIS and actually succeeded to defeat ISIS and to

defend the city of Kobani, which was kind of like a breaking point where things started to turn around. Or we also have the point where for example, Shanga was attacked, which is like in South Kurdistan. It's not like in the Iraq region. It's not even the same region.

But the YPJ also played a role in opening a corridor for the people who tried to flee for the Yazidi people, who are people who have faced many genocides in history. And in order to save them from the genocide of ISIS, the YPJ opened a corridor to help them to flee. So there are many stories. In the end, the liberation of the city of Raqqa which was kind of known like as the center of ISIS which also we can say like the women's force played like a pioneer or vanguard role in this. So there are many examples where we can say like how deciding for example the struggle of the YPJ was for the defeat of ISIS.

And I think, on the other hand, we also have to say that ISIS is not completely defeated because it's seeing some support from outside structures, like from Turkey. So there are still some cells or for example there are a lot of detainees like before that was happening it tried to break

out from the detention centers in 2022 so it's not like it's completely vanished from the earth, but the actual defeat was reached by the YPG Yeah, I think but the actual defeat was reached by the YPG and the YPG-4.

Yeah, I think it's very important to talk about those incarcerated former ISIS fighters and their attempt to break out. I think that's maybe a good chance for us to talk about some other former ISIS fighters. Starting in uh I think it was called Turkey called it Operation Peace Spring I think right like the uh these these Turkish incursions into uh into into Rojava and into like uh and and into uh like Syrian territory can you explain a little bit about like how I guess this will get us to the modern day and the bombing, but like, perhaps you can explain how this started. Obviously, Turkey has been opposed to the Kurdish freedom movement since its inception,

right, since the very beginning and like last century. But perhaps you could explain like this series of ongoing Turkish aggressions against what's happening in Rojava now and how that began and how that's manifested itself over the years. Turkey for itself started occupation attacks. Like in 2018-19, the occupation was first against Afrin and then against Serkanil and Giresbi, which are all very important regions of Rojava that are directly next to the Turkish border. You see Rojava is directly in between Syria and Turkey, next to the Turkish border like you see like directly in between Syria and

Turkey like next to the Turkish border, so They directly attack these cities next to the border Which actually most of all our cities are directly next to the border. Yeah And they occupied them the border. Yeah. And they occupied them. Yeah.

I think that's important to understand like a little bit because actually there are Turkish plans to occupy like

the region along the border, not only the cities that they occupied until now. It was a

very, very violent war with using aircraft and so on. Like also in the last years turkey very much invested into drone technology and so on and they used also chemical weapons like in very famous in 2019 the video of a young child named Muhammad went around the world that was burned by a phosphorus in Serr Cani in the occupation attack.

So actually it's a war that is mostly fought also with the most dirty methods that took his raging on the region. the most dirty methods that Turkey is waging on the region. And after this, we can say after Selkani was occupied, Turkey actually continued to attack

with a war that you cannot say at this time it starts and at this time it ends. It's more like continuous attacks. So on the one hand, some areas are always getting bombed in the last years. Like, for example, like with artillery shelling and so on, like Sherba next to Afrin or Ain Issa or Til Temel. So like the areas that are close to the occupied areas where now Turkey and mercenary forces

are stationed, they constantly attack more or less the regions. But also with the drone war. The first, I think, very clear example of what was the Turkish strategy in the last years was

on the 23rd June 2020 when Turkey killed three women of Congress, the women's movement, like the civil women's movement in Kobani in the village, which were all like two of them were like in the leadership of the civil women's movement and one was just a member. And they were sitting in the garden and they were talking. And at this time, a Turkish drone struck and they all lost their lives. So a lot of these kinds of attacks happened after this.

attacks happened after this like against uh and like let's say like uh civil leaders of society like politicians uh normal people also like uh on the 25th of december actually also yeah on christmas in 2021 five uh five children like young people from the youth movement were killed in Kobani also. Just when they were sitting in the garden, members of the youth center, took a stone and struck three of them, young girls. And this continued. Also, we can say leaders of, of for example YPJ also, like on the 22nd of July last year, there was a conference happening for celebrating 10 years of women's revolution in Rojava and just on the same day, Turkey targeted the car of three YPJ members. One of them was Jion Toldan, who also spoke on the same day on the conference. Actually, it's quite clear what Turkey actually wants.

They want to destroy the revolution that's happening in Rojava, like the women's revolution. And in general, this change that is happening, they want to create this fear to stay away, to obey to the Turkish occupation forces. And they're using a lot of violence. Also in the occupied areas, the people who are right now living there, they cannot speak their language. They have to fear. Sometimes they cannot close the house doors. Sometimes people get abducted

without anyone knowing why or where they go. Will they go to prison? Will they be in a prison? Or will they be tortured? A very kind of oppressive regime. they go, they go to prison with a B in a prison or with a B torture or like a very kind of oppressive regime now in the occupied areas. Yeah. And those are people who like I've met, uh, when, when they come here, right.

People who have lost, like, I spoke to a guy, a mayor a couple of weeks ago, you know, his father had been killed. His uncle had been killed and like he was like what should i do should i should i wait to be like the last person in my family and then who gets killed or like it's it's very the conditions for those people in the turkish occupied parts of northern kurdistan are very very difficult and oppressive and i think like just to build off what you said, like, it's important that people realize that these killings of especially like people in the women's

revolution, but, but also, you know, uh, people in, uh, in, in the Rojava revolution, more generally, it's not, um, drone strikes are extremely targeted, right? Like they can follow a car from an event and strike it uh like it's these kind of these things are not it's not like they're it's not like artillery or mortars it's not like you're sending it into an area like they're extremely targeted to an individual or a group of individuals rather than you know a random attack so like this is a distinct choice that's being made.

Well, let's talk about the most recent bombings because I think there were some particularly egregious ones even by the standards of this campaign, which has been pretty egregious from the beginning but um december around the week of christmas this year um just to give people a time sort of period there was a bombings of a if i'm not wrong a printing printing press, a dialysis facility. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, actually there was, there was also another host, like not hospital, like

as a big hospital, let's say like a medical point also in Kobani where doctors was out borders, I think it's like kind of a known and they were also working there and the oxygen center also. So like medical places, there were like normal factories of food production. Like you said, the printing house. There were many places like this, like of daily infrastructure that were targeted like before already in October,

infrastructure was targeted. And also last year there was an attack like this. And every time at least 10 civilians got killed in all of these attacks. So now I think the overall number just of these three waves of attacks is already like 31 killed civilians

so maybe drones are very targeted but it's not like Turkey doesn't want to kill civilians or takes care not to kill civilians. Like already in the attacks of last year, there was examples of double-tap attacks, for example, which are actually illegal.

So I think it's very important to say, like also this targeting of medical points, of medical infrastructure, that what Turkey is doing is not according to international law like that's not the case like Turkey is kind of acting like however it wants targeting

civilians creating like fear and also like in a region that is already poor you have to say like the possibilities that have been created like for daily needs and so on, for supplies of electricity, of heating, fuels and so on for your house, they are very affected like this right now. So in general,'s like a big shortcoming of everything right now

in Rojava. And just because of Turkey's attacks, so this is actually affecting everyone. And on the other hand, Turkey tried to create like this fear like there's just some wave of attack and just targeting everywhere. So

they want to displace actually the population. And also to commit like the politics of the Turkish state especially against Kurdish people and also against the Christians. It's very much like potentially like genocidal politics. It's not like a limited attack or something like this. We don't think so. no it's not uh and like you said they're very much unafraid of of killing civilians in the process like i spoke to a mother whose 15 year old son was killed in a drone strike um i don't think it's very hard to make an argument a 15 year old son was doing anything apart from being a 15 year old kid you

know um it's not like this person is a legitimate military target it's a kid who played goalkeeper on his local football team and these double tap attacks like if people aren't familiar with a double tap attack it's when an attack happens people go to the site of the attack to render aid right an ambulance or perhaps just bystanders rendering aid or other military personnel rendering aid and then a second attack happens at the same place to to then attack the people who are rendering aid so i you spoke a little bit about like how they're trying to attack the whole project and not just individuals i wonder like the um the drone strikes do have like a they change the way things have to be done, right? Like if things become unsafe,

like any way you can see the sky, right? Like having a large gathering or certainly for people who are of more, like higher status, it's dangerous for them to be out and about, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, on some level, for sure, it's dangerous. But on the other hand, you cannot always be afraid.

Like, that's like a very twisted reality. Like, for example, now, because these places were targeted, for example, the infrastructure that you need for your life, people actually started to stand like next to the electricity center to say like if we are all here then they cannot target it. Which for sure is dangerous if you see like the... They can, yeah. Because they've killed a lot of civilians as you say. That's a very brave thing to do. Yes. Yeah.

Again, I think maybe we should explain, actually, is that it gets very cold in this part of the world in the winter because perhaps people will associate this part of the world with the heat and hot summers. But you have very cold winters, especially in the mountains, right? Yeah. hot summers but like you you have very cold winters especially in the mountains right yeah i mean rojava it's like all more or less flat so it's like it's not so cold but still gets like under zero degrees so like for sure you need still need like your house to be warm and so on like just to take care of basic needs. You need your car to drive somewhere. Maybe sometimes at least like some people needed for the work or like this.

There's a lot of basic needs that don't work if, uh, if all the infrastructure gets destroyed. Yeah. Yeah. And I believe, uh, if I'm right in saying this, the one person already passed away because they couldn't get dialysis at the dialysis center that was bombed. Is that right?

Yes. So as I said, that one passed away. Afterwards, they brought like emergency-wise a dialysis machine, which I think is very good for the sick people.

But I'm not sure because also if you don't have like a substitute, if something happens, like only one machine, i'm not sure because also if you don't have like a substitute if something happens like only one machine i'm not sure like how much it will actually take care of the needs of the people because i said it was like 70 or 80 sick people who were going to the center so it's not a few yeah and like i don't think yeah i mean it's certainly not as good as having a proper center right like and there's no reason that's it's certainly not as good as having a proper center right like and there's no reason that's there's no world in which a dialysis center is a legitimate

target um or or printing press right like i think that that maybe points to what you were saying like if you're printing books about something sharing knowledge about something um and like perhaps one thing i think you were saying is it right that it printed textbooks i think it was like also printing textbooks okay like it was printing everything so it's also printing textbooks yes like for school it's also it was printing textbooks yeah and we should point out that like you know i speak to kurdish people almost every day when i'm at the border and they many of them don't read and write in kurdish because in turkey that's not taught in schools right they don't have a chance to learn

uh and and so like having those textbooks having that knowledge like uh lots of my lots of my friends were saying that like the children because because our folks who went to school before the revolution went to school in arabic so like the children are the ones who have like the formal education in kurdish you know and they're building a a generation that like speaks kurdish and reads and writes kurdish as their first language and so like an attempt to destroy that isn't just destroying the factory right it's not fair to say that it's also destroying that goal of the revolution, and more broadly, that attempt to have that education in Kurdish and let children speak their own language in school?

Yes, I mean, this is also part of assimilation politics to deny people their own language, which actually the Syrian regime also did. They only taught in arabic and now for example the system of the self-administration allows everyone to learn in different languages like no there's arabic there's kurdish and even in the very last times i heard that there will also be opened uh syrian again which is actually really important because it's like a language that is like very, like most Syrian people right now speak and write Arabic. So it could be really important also. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really important to point out for people who aren't aware and often in the US media, like Rojo is reported as like Kurdish and like a Kurdish area but it may have a majority

of Kurds in some cities but like yeah there are Syrian people there are Arab people there are Armenian people and like they have that same autonomy right to educate in their own language and to like organize in their own communities yes that's what the idea is all about. And I think actually, we saw this in the last time, there was kind of trying to create this image of Kurds against Arabs on the outside in the international media, which is absolutely not true. The SDF itself is a majorly Arabic force. It's not majorly Kurdish, if you see in numbers I think at least so it's like very equal like everyone who

plays a role in it and who wants to participate can participate and everyone has a like autonomy also to organize inside of their own society or may it be religion or in which sense like also Yazidi people like Kurdish people who are of

Yazidi religion they also have their own organization here in Rojava. So that's very important. And their own movement in their own area, right, the Yerbishe in that part of Iraq, like that's, I guess an allied movement, would that be fair to say? Yeah. I mean, it very much follows the same idea and the same concept as Yes. And, uh, yeah, I've also spoken to as easy people, uh, who have come to the United States recently and like, yeah, they, uh, under the, uh, under ICS,

like they had an absolutely inhumane and terrible conditions and uh if it wasn't for uh the epigay then uh they like they wouldn't be the the you know they they they the beginning of the uh their liberation i guess came from the epigay and something we'll maybe talk about uh another time because it's a long story i wonder yeah like obviously this isn't something that has been in the news as much because people have been so focused on palestine i wonder if it's worth discussing like the turkish states completely like uh like two-faced approach right like on one hand they're saying uh we have to um like yeah it's unacceptable for the bombing of civilians in palestine and like this is

completely wrong and then on the other hand they're doing the same thing right like just on on their other border yeah so i'm saying we have to anyway say that Turkey is not doing anything good for the Palestinian people. Turkey is leading Hamas to such an attack, like supporting Hamas and this very violent attack they made, which then was like the preset for the war of Israel and international forces against the Palestinian people so actually who is like suffering from all of this is like the normal people like which is true for Israel and Palestine so actually we have to say like what Turkey is doing is against the people like

it's also against the Palestinian people and here they have criticized so clearly for example Israel is saying Israel is making occupation politics and so on. Still Turkey also has ties with Israel which you also have to say but like

they are themselves occupying parts of Rojava in the shadow of this attack that all the attention of the world was going into this region. They attacked Rojava, also calculating that maybe people will not so much look to Rojava right now. At the same time, there's another huge war going on in the Middle East.

And they are making very clearly politics of occupation in Afrin and Serkanil and also demographic change. So they are displacing people and placing other people yeah that's very interesting yeah well displacing whom and placing whom because i think that's important when we talk about uh like that that population and demographic change like because it there's a it's not they're not just displacing people randomly and replacing them randomly right yeah so actually the people that are targeted the most are like the kurdish people in the areas or other people that are not aligned to Turkey or like outside forces already like they are like they are not ISIS but they are a little bit similar to it they are like mercenary groups that are like more or less like what road they go it's like clarified from outside forces so

they are aligned to Turkey and from these people for example their families were placed in the region on the one hand on the other hand there were even examples where Turkey started to place some Palestinian people also in this region just

who they think they can align to Turkey as a state and bring under their control they were placing in these areas that's to say it like this like to be able actually what is a part

of Rojava, a part of Syria to occupy it long term, like to make this last it's not like a short term plan they want to stay in this area it's not prevented if it's not liberated again yeah yeah and i think like again like people i think have become more aware in recent months people are becoming educated on the situation in palestine settlements and uh it's not the fault of the

people of palestine that they're being like uh forced to be driven off their ancestral homelands but like what it does mean is that like they could be mobilized by someone like turkey right to just do an occupation to uh to do i guess somewhere else and like that's not a that's not like a desirable outcome so we spoke a little bit about like this like ongoing hostility right and it can seem uh for people out like i think people only hear about rojava in negative not negative terms is the wrong thing but like they only it only ever enters the american press these days when something happens right either an isis attack something about one of the account like a hall or a roge right but like also things are continuing to progress right

it's not just a place that is embattled and fighting to survive like i know recently a new social contract was passed for instance so maybe you could explain a little bit about the progress that's still being made despite um this this ongoing like air war drone war and land war yeah so actually i think here in Rojava we always follow this philosophy that we are not like sitting here and saying oh war will come towards us or like it will not be like we are very much

hopeful and we are always working to develop like even if these things are happening these attacks are happening the revolution very very much developed and the society changed a lot already. A lot of institutions have been built up

that before were not existing and so on. And as an outcome also of this, a new social contract was formed, which actually is like a very democratic process. Let's say if a state for example has a constitution,

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

a lot of progress for women. It's guaranteeing a lot of progress for society. So I think still now like it's a task to like see how it can be implemented in all areas

because it's always like a very lively process like it always needs the daily struggle the daily work uh creating like everything from new so there's a lot going on actually we can say yeah definitely and like definitely like it doesn't i think it's easy like again if we only report on the thing when bad things are happening like to think that it's only bad but there's a lot of like people are still hopeful i think and hopeful for creating and spreading like this better future for themselves and the children and for the region um which i think is it's really admirable one thing that i thought was

really admirable is people will probably have seen it and but like if they don't like follow social media so much the exchange of statements of solidarity between the kndf the kareni national defense force battalion 5 specifically in myanmar and uh the ypg and ypj in um in rojava and and they've gone back and forth right but can you explain a little bit about obviously i know that the situation in myanmar is very complicated i know i've spent years of my life learning about it but um can you explain like the importance of that solidarity and also perhaps, it was a risk for everyone to gather like this in the middle of the drone war to make the statement. But can you explain why that solidarity was something they felt was so important? Yeah, I think in general, it's very important to say the revolution in Rojava, it's not only a revolution for the people of Rojava itself.

It has a perspective more general to strengthen the friendship of democratic movements anywhere in the world. So for sure, there's a lot of colors of movements, a lot of different situations in the world. And some might also, let's say, feel this solidarity very strong because actually they are also like in Myanmar, like also facing, for example, a state system which is very much influenced by fascism. Like, for example, we are facing Turkey or like in general,

this kind of oppression and trying to liberate from it. So actually, we are always trying to have like this exchange in general in the world and to have like also to build like, how would I say, like quality relationships, quality friendships with all kinds of democratic movements. For sure, everyone is acting on a different level and so on, but this is like a big something really, really important for us in general

and I mean like in the Rojava revolution, there were also always people from the outside, for example, participating in it, so there was always kind of a spirit that this is like the revolution for the world like the Kurdish movement in general has like this character like an internationalist character so it's not something like let's say far from us like it's already something very close to us to say we stand in solidarity also with other liberation movements.

Yeah, I think it was very, I know it's very much appreciated in Myanmar because lots of people from there have reached out to tell me how much they appreciated it. I think some of them have been in the revolution for 70 years right like and and the world has not paid attention to them so they really appreciated that um that's that solidarity and like i know that the solidarity runs a lot deeper than statements but like we will cover the the extent of that solidarity in another episode, because again, I think it, it, it merits its own recording. I wonder, uh, but Yvonne, what, obviously people will be listening, right? And I think a lot of people will be very supportive of the revolution in Rojava and they

want to help it and see it succeed. And certainly not to see, no one wants to see civilians dying in drone strikes right um no one wants to see anyone drying in drone strikes but how can they if they are in the us or in europe or uh elsewhere in the world but not in rojoa um how can they help how can they support uh the revolution through its like difficult through these difficult moments right when people don't have electricity to heat their homes in the winter and things yeah i think uh there's a lot of possibilities like uh besides coming here which also support but i mean in general like you have all of this uh this possibilities, like from educating yourself, what is this revolution actually about,

understanding it, from spreading its ideas, which is maybe the most important task. May it be like spreading knowledge about the attacks that are happening, clarifying what is happening and why it's happening, to read about political backgrounds

also of international politics is very important to understand. And also you can always share, for example, let's say you have social media, let's say you're part of a political movement or something, you can discuss about it, you can inform yourself about it, you can make a presentation about it in your university. There are so many things that you can make a presentation about it in your university like there are so many things that you can do like you can read the book about it and make a book presentation like there's a million things a person can do or as you are doing you can connect to the Kurdish refugees or to the society Kurdish people in the diaspora in general like outside of Kurdistan wherever you might be that's a possibility

also like you can organize solidarity also practical solidarity also like let's say like intellectual works like write a text share it discuss about it like maybe it's difficult in the beginning to understand some things

or to gain like information but right now there's actually a lot of information also available in english language i think yeah lots so yeah you could read for about a year non-stop i think and still not not have read all of it but are there books you've recommended a couple of books to me which i think have been really good and i've shared with my friends in myanmar and i know that they've enjoyed are there any books you'd recommend to listeners i mean in general like this revolution is based on the thoughts of abdullah ojala so i think a good idea if you actually want to understand like the ideological basis of it, about women's liberation, about how democratic society can be organized.

So actually, there's this book called Sociology of Freedom. I think it's very important. It's a little bit understandable, I think, for someone who comes maybe from an academic or from a leftist or from a democratic background. I think they will read it, they will be able to understand it. But there are also many other books that are translated to English or like text that are available. Or in general, there are books about the bourgeois revolution from people, for example, coming from the outside. I have to think right now in English I'm sorry I know there are some also some

different languages about the women's revolution so I have to think with I think there's also like there's one called like the politics of freedom or something and there are some books that were published because there were like

diplomatic conferences in most of them i think happening in europe which afterwards they were like uh some like collections of uh philosophical discussion uh like uh published so i think that's also very available but i'm sorry i have the exact type yeah no there's a good book called revolution in rojava which was translated from german that um like i think it lays out like that how things happen it's a little bit um a little bit dated now i think it was published in like 2016 so you know things have changed over a few years but i think that's a decent book for people who are interested as well that i know a lot of people have recommended yeah and then i wonder like because this isn't being like i know you

made the point earlier about that the world was looking at palestine like when the tax in palestine happened i was in in kambish flow Rojava and like, it's impossible for me to sell stories. Um, it's impossible for me to sell anything to like big news outlets. So that they're simply like, don't think American people can care about two parts of the world at once, I guess. I wonder where people can follow and get updates. Like do they say good, uh, social media or news outlets that you would suggest for people who do want to keep in touch with what's happening. Yeah.

I mean, we have like a Twitter, Facebook page, information on documentation office. Like YPJ information. Yeah. But, uh, also there's like, uh, other places like the Rojava Information Center which is very much independently accumulating knowledge and sharing in a way that I think

is understandable for everyone there's also from the SDF forces a press center which has also an English homepage sharing sometimes statements and concrete information. There's an international commune of Rojava which is sharing

in English language a lot of information on Twitter and on their homepage. So there's actually a lot of sources if you go and look for it that are very good, I think, also. Yes, and like on the ground people who can show you what's happening. good, I think, also. Yes, and like on the ground, people who can show you what's happening.

Yeah, I think that's wonderful. But, Ivana, is there anything else you'd like us to get to before we finish up? Anything else you want people to know? No, I think it's very important to say again that it's very, very valuable for the revolution, for people to take part in actions, to make their voice heard, to organize,

to make the revolution known, to get it to know for themselves and that it does actually make a very very huge difference like the struggle that people everywhere in the world are making for this revolution and that it needs it it's very

critical for the revolution that everyone in the world gets known and gets like solidarity that we see this as very meaningful i think that's very important to understand and besides this i don't know i hope uh yes that's it i think yeah yeah i think it's really good to realize that like it's not it's not a uh it's you know it's really good to realize that it's a very worthwhile thing to do just to increase people's awareness and solidarity. And thank you so much for your time. I know Internet's not the easiest thing to come by where you are. So thank you so much, Vedavan, for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you also for talking about this topic.

I was very happy to join. Great. Thanks so much. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge

and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, everybody. I am Robert Evans. And I want to start today by kind of proposing a theoretical, right? You wake up in the morning and something is awry. Maybe you hear shots, maybe there's some sort of natural disaster. Maybe it's that weird Havana syndrome death sound from the Obama movie that just came out on,

what was it, Netflix? But something's fucked up. And most people, I think, especially most people who listen to this podcast, you've probably had conversations with your friends and loved ones about what do we do when the quote unquote apocalypse or shit hits the fan. You know, you've got your friends who maybe, you know, they have a lot of stored food or they have some other skill that you think would be useful. And you've got some stuff that's that that, you know, you know how to do. You've got your people right that you would want to be with and around if something's really going wrong out there because you know how to do. You've got your people, right, that you would want to be with and around if something's really going wrong out there because you know how to take care of each other. But how do you get in contact, right? Assuming you don't all live together, assuming you're not all on some sort of commune type situation, as most people aren't, you're probably scattered

throughout the city. Maybe you've got some friends out in the suburbs. Maybe you've got some friends who live out in rural land. Maybe you've just got a friend who lives halfway across town. And, you know, that's no problem when you got a phone and you've got, you know, Google Maps working. But can you get there on your own? Can you get there or get into contact with them if the streets are all clogged up with cars or whatever? Like, how are you going to reach them? How are you going to, you know, get in touch in order to figure out what's going on? And how are you going to stay in touch while you handle whatever you need to handle for whatever is going wrong? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. Because

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

Hey, what's up? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thank you for coming on. You posted a thread on Twitter about using, you know, it's called like LoRa, low frequency radio. Is that what it stands for? Yeah, LoRa stands technically for long range, but yeah, it's a long range frequency radio that broadcasts a pretty specific wavelength that can travel really far throughout the air so uh it's perfect for communications long distance and it's if you've got devices set up on this they each basically act as nodes right so the more you have the kind of wider signal distribution you get if i'm understanding what

you're saying correctly like if you've got someone three miles away and then another person five miles to the west of them, then you kind of are able to cover that whole distance. Yeah, exactly. So think of it like a relay system, right? One person has a message. They send it off to another person. That person passes it on to the next node. And so mesh networks are really resilient when it comes to emergencies when it comes to protests when it comes to occupation and conflict zones because if one node goes down as long as there's other ones

they can pick up that message and keep repeating it and broadcasting it out so it's a really interesting piece of technology that is similar to like traditional radios, but also different because all the communications can be encrypted end to end, which is another layer of security. Cause you can, the, the, I think most people's default,

if you're thinking like, well, how do I stay? You get some like walkie talkies, right? You know, you get some, and those can,

you know, those have their place and stuff, but they are also not always the most secure option. So being able to encrypt shit is is a huge deal um especially when you're talking about like outside of a shit hits the fan kind of deal which is less likely than you know some sort of uh civil unrest protest use case you know being able to actually encrypt is huge yeah so i'm a dummy I don't understand much about setting up my own technology independently, but I find this interesting.

I see the use case. I decide I want to set this up and start building an emergency mesh network with a half dozen of my friends. Where do I start? So first thing is you'll need some hardware that supports lora there are a ton of different things out there ranging from maybe 20 25 bucks going all the way up to thousands of dollars so there's a big range and that range really depends on the enclosure what's included in it the broadcast strength all that good stuff so obviously the cheaper you in it, the broadcast strength, all that good stuff. So obviously the cheaper you go, the weaker the broadcast strength is.

There might be development boards that are just literally like the PCB, like actual hardware with no case around it. Yeah, yeah. And there's some that you could just pick up and immediately use. And so it kind of depends. But that's the first step is finding um hardware that can handle lora and then you know obviously getting it and then flashing it with the correct um software and that sounds really complicated but for our purposes of sending text messages without any kind of cellular

lte uh or wi-fi connection you can use super cheap devices and flashing them is you click a couple buttons and you're done. So first off, do you have any kind of specific, you know, I know you're working on a text piece that you can put up to explain all this and I will certainly share that as soon as it gets up. But do you have any specific, like if somebody's saying, hey, I've got, you you know a budget of 50 bucks you know or so is there a complete device you would recommend if they're or or somewhere in that that median range like kind of on the lower end a thing that someone doesn't know how to take you know a raw board and craft that into a usable device that you would recommend they they purchase is to start us off here? Yeah, definitely.

So I kind of have two different options. One is a standalone option that can kind of work by itself, completely independent of anything else. And another one uses your phone. So you'll flash it to the board and then connect it over Bluetooth to your phone, just like a pair of headphones or something like that. Oh, that's so easy. Yeah.

And so you kind of have options. If you want a standalone version, there's a company called Lilygo that makes a thing called a T-Deck, and it's pretty small. It looks like a BlackBerry clone. Yeah. It has a little mouse thing. Yeah, it looks like a BlackBerry kind of crossed with a game camera. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because it's like thicker in the back. It's got of crossed with a game camera yeah yeah yeah yeah

because it's like thicker in the back it's got that big antenna yeah yeah yeah yeah and so um the lilly go t deck is what this is called um it's a blackberry clone basically um it has lora built in it has bluetooth and so all you have to do is get power to this thing, flash it with Meshtastic, and there you go. Now you can type out messages, you can send direct messages, you can send encrypted messages all with one device that's $35. Oh, man, that's great. And this is something you can get like AliExpress was your recommendation, right? yeah aliexpress would probably be the best if you're trying to order a lot if you want one right now um you can order them on places like amazon but it's going to cost you and also fuck amazon so yeah i mean you are slightly doomed to support

one horrible billionaire or another like aliexpress is but um no i i get it yeah and i mean one of the upsides to like an all-in-one thing like this is um like i 3d printed this case but you don't have to print a case you can literally just set this into a shoe box or something and protect it so there's a lot of options on the cases that you want to use you could buy pre-made cases or you could just i don't know just put something to protect the board back here and then screw on an antenna you're good yeah i mean i've seen some shit people do with way that you can you can basically do the calming like communications through your cell phone right

you can hook that into the next mesh network um is that something you're able to kind of go over at least in brief or or provide people with, here's where they can go to read about how to do that? Yeah, so the same company, Lilygo, makes a smaller little device. It's really small, maybe about an inch. Yeah. And it has a screen on it.

So when you power it on, you can actually see the messages come through on the screen on the board itself. And it connects through bluetooth to your phone and you use the mesh tastic app to basically text like you normally would on a phone um yeah it looks just like signal pretty much if you're used to that um that ui but uh yeah it's super small yeah it's perfect and so you're just also using that that mesh tastic app to flash the software on the devices once you get them? Am I understanding that right?

Yeah. I'm just asking. I'm re-asking everything because I want to try to make this accessible for both me when I do it and for our listeners. Yeah, for sure. So Meshtastic is the software that's running on these devices and what mesh tastic does is a device that's also running mesh tastic can communicate with each other over uh lora long distance and so you need the hardware that supports lora and a client which is mesh tastic that will allow you to send text messages and stuff like that and do the encryption handle and all that stuff.

To actually flash these, it's super simple. Meshtastic has a link that you can go to. You plug in your device. Depending on the version, you hold down a button. You press flash. Wait like 10 seconds. And boom, now you have a working Meshtastic node. Probably in underneath 10 minutes.

After you get this out of the box, you could be up and running in about 10, 15 minutes. That's great. And so, all right, if I've got like, say I'm the guy in my group of friends who has more disposable cache and I want to get this going. So I pick up five of those Lily like boxes, 3D print a case for them or just wrap them in something, you know, and I keep one, I hand them out to my friends. I get

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

reachable um and that's good for say for instance instance, your friend comes online, you can't talk to them directly. You can send a broadcast out and say, hey, Joe, what device are you? And they can reply and broadcast to everybody. Okay, I'm on this device. You can also do direct messages. So once you know that person's device name, you can actually send messages directly to them. Now, keep in mind, it's not encrypted because technically it's broadcasting throughout each node. It's just like filtering out the messages for whoever it was addressed for.

But yeah, at that point, then you could start DMing people. And if you want to get started with encryption, it's also really easy. You can use the Meshtastic client. So you can install it on your computer, plug it into your computer, and just set an encryption key, a passcode, whatever you want to do to secure your communications. And then once that person has that passcode, key, whatever, those two devices can connect and talk completely encrypted,

either one-on-one or if multiple people, say, for instance, you have an affinity group of like 10 people, you all say, okay, hey, in an emergency, let's meet up at this place and physically share a key or passcode or whatever. Once everybody has that that you can also do encrypted broadcasts to multiple people as well so getting up and running is is super quick when it comes to flashing actually communicating with people makes sense especially on your phone it feels just like a normal texting situation so that's great yeah it's really it's really amazing i mean this this is a really interesting technology because like i've been interested in in radio for a while but the biggest downside to that is a you can't encrypt any kind of radio communications in the u.s b unless you're the

license yeah unless if you're the cops or the military or the feds you cannot encrypt shit and if you do it's it's kind of an issue but yeah you can't encrypt uh messages on regular radios another thing is like usability if you hand somebody um like a bow thing handheld radio most people are not going to know what to do with it at all they're gonna be like what the fuck is this but if i hand you a blackberry clone and say just type and if you want to send a dm to somebody find them and just send it like it's it's really easy for your average person to pick it up and use it which is honestly the best kind of situation especially in an emergency where you can't really rely on

highly technical people all the time because what if everybody in your affinity group isn't super technical you know so it's a it's a good common device that anybody can pick up and start sending messages even encrypted messages uh pretty easily so i think that covers the technical basics of what you need to do. I did want to ask real quick before we get onto some of the more ideological stuff here, conversations about why you specifically got into this and why this is important for people. I wanted to ask just really quickly, in terms of that 3D printed case, did you just go search in some repository and find one someone had made or is there one that you've put up somewhere that you might recommend to people

yeah actually it was recently uploaded to thingy thingiverse which is a website that has free 3d print uh plans and files and so um i just searched up lily-Deck on Thingiverse and the full case, I mean, the back, the battery cover, it has, yeah, it looks like an actual device. Yeah. And I'm assuming that one's just PLA? Yeah, just PLA. That's a type of plastic. Super basic. Yeah.

Yeah. Looks great. Yeah. Yeah, and this only took all these pieces snapped together, so no glue required. And all these pieces took roughly about eight hours to print at 100% density. So you have a pretty solid caselooking device that's protected and able to go in adverse situations. Yeah. So now I want to get into some of the more kind of like just talking about, first off, what got you into this? Like, when did you decide this is a skill I want to develop and a thing I want to figure out?

Yeah. up in a thing i want to figure out yeah i mean so for my day job i'm an offensive security consultant which is just a fancy way of saying that's a cool job title for a living yeah yeah you're doing like red team stuff it sounds like yeah yeah exactly so i've always been interested in in technology and specifically like how do you make technology work in the benefit of people as opposed to working in the benefit for profits or corporate interest or state interest? So I think technology is a really good tool when used correctly. And there's a lot of moral and social and political implications when it comes to technology and actually making it.

political implications when it comes to technology and actually making it but that's kind of how i got into it was kind of combining my interest in computers and hacking combined with um kind of the social and political activism i've been been a part of so um that was kind of my entry point into it yeah that makes that makes sense because i i do think, like, when I think about what inspired me about the early internet, about, like, file sharing back in the late 90s, about, you know, when Wikipedia first started up and stuff, all that stuff like that, we talk a lot about, like, the days when we thought the internet was going to be an unqualified boon for human liberty. The ability to create effectively, effectively like a smaller and more limited private internet for like you and your people to uh communicate safely through definitely like

scratches that itch and when we say like more limited internet you're not through one of these networks we're talking about you're not going to be like sending youtube videos and shit right but that's not what it's for you know that's it's it's it's got a its own use and it's very much kind of what the internet was about at the beginning which is just allowing people to connect um that otherwise wouldn't be able to or wouldn't be able to as securely yeah exactly and actually um the same protocol lora um you actually kind of can run a basic internet protocol that's called lora wan lora wide access networking and you can run some pretty basic programs on it outside of just text-based stuff so it's a really interesting kind of rabbit hole to go down into um i will say if you start looking at uh laura

and uh meshtastic stuff you will eventually start to run into like a right-leaning yes sometimes straight out fascist people because there's a crossover between you know the uh the gun community and kind of off-grid prepper doomsday prepper people you know so you'll run into that anyone who doesn't like like the government is going to have a vested interest in being able to communicate in a way that can't be easily intercepted right like that and that doesn't always mean your buddies i think most people are pretty familiar with that exactly yeah but um yeah it's it's it's really useful there there are other ways to say for instance make your own kind of like micro internet i wrote an article that talked about making kind of like a DIY internet in quotes where you can basically take your home router and

connect, say, for instance, your neighbors to the same network. And then if you have a server of your own that has books, that has maps, that has music and information, you can easily share that with other people. And so there are other ways to kind of get your own off-grid quote-unquote internet together, but just outside of text. But yeah, it's definitely possible. It just needs a little bit more technical know-how, but hopefully soon it'll be a little simpler to where you can just download something

get you know a book server up and running and then have anybody come along and download books about you know permaculture or about you know emergency medical aid or uh fixing infrastructure and stuff like that yeah that's huge being able to actually like transmit text and stuff through that too. So yeah, you said when we were chatting online, kind of before we hooked this up, you said something along the lines of you had a bit of a tangent you wanted to go on. So I've asked kind of my questions here uh if there is anything else you wanted to get out or express or say just kind of on the subject of people taking more autonomy for themselves in their communications technology um well now's the time

yeah sounds good i mean so earlier you asked like what kind of got me into this yeah but there's another situation that happened because i live in texas oh and a couple yeah so you know where i'm going with this yeah yeah a couple years ago there was a really bad winter storm and for most people listening you might be in the northeast like who cares yeah i was there for that storm oh it was it was fucking horrible yeah crazy yeah and so for people outside of texas you might be saying okay well winter storm whatever like how could that affect anything but texas's power grid is privately owned yeah it's completely separate from the rest of us yeah ercot is a private company that runs

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

That impacted everything, right? So the power going out impacted transportation, impacted water, it impacted sanitation. So all these bits of infrastructure are all connected and communications is kind of at the core of our modern day infrastructure right because in order to run a power plant you need to have power but not only that you need to be able to communicate with other places in order to properly run a water sanitation program. Same with transportation. I mean, if communication goes out, you literally can't deliver food, you literally can't deliver water

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

which work it's just given me more of an understanding of how the regular stuff that i use day to day works a little bit better about what the real power draw of my life is you know and anytime you're kind of expanding your autonomy technologically it also just increases the degree to which you understand what's going on every day which i think is is always of value right like even outside of whatever theoreticals we might prompt for like what could happen or what is likely to happen because we're all going to deal with more disasters in our lives before they're over hopefully more than one uh the alternative is worse but um yeah um well that's that's kind of all i i had to say did you have anything else you wanted to get into before we we roll out

uh yeah i mean there are a bunch of use cases outside of like weather events or natural disasters to um protest is one them. A really big security concern when you're at a protest is bringing your cell phone. Not a lot of people know that your cell phone has a unique identifier number. Police, governments, states all have technology to basically bring up a fake cell phone tower and have your device connect to it. So there are ways to track, say for instance, you go to a

protest, you have your phone on, now your identifier is kind of tied to being at this protest, right? But with technology like this, it kind of circumvents that, especially when it comes to the ability for a threat actor to track you or know that you've been there. And it's encrypted. So even if, say, for instance, a police department was able to intercept LoRa, they wouldn't be able to read the messages, period. And so that's another good thing. Same with conflict zones. We're seeing now with the genocide that's another good thing same with you know conflict zones uh yeah you know we're seeing now with the genocide that's happening uh in palestine with the palestinians it's increasingly harder for people to communicate what areas are safe it's hard to communicate

you know oh we need to get out now have an early warning system of there are literal tanks coming down the highway towards us we need to leave and so something like this can also be you know really good in that situation because again the messages are encrypted it can go pretty long range especially if you have direct line of sight we're talking like up to 10 miles and so being able to just send a text message to somebody can save someone's life in a situation like that so there's a lot of different use cases outside of you know emergencies that that this stuff can be used but that's where building the autonomy kind of comes from and if we're talking about like leftist political organizing and talking about building a better future being

autonomous from state and corporate controlled uh infrastructure is really important right because if say for instance hypothetically we had the big r revolution right the first thing that people in power are going to go after is power, water, sanitation, and communications, right? They're going to go after the main infrastructure. And so if we want to have an autonomous and free future, we have to think about collectively owning the big R scenario, something that I think is probably at least certainly more immediate, is continuing sort of downs in social order and areas expanding where non-state actors, including the aforementioned Nazis that we had talked about, are able to get bolder, right? And like one thing we've seen right now, if you watch videos of cartel operations in parts of Mexico right now, one thing you will see on their really good guys, right? On their special ops style teams is they will all have these weird looking things that look kind of like a microphone attached to their plate carriers. And that's a cell jammer. It's the standard thing for them to carry into the field because it stops

people from reporting in real time when they're carrying out an operation. And the cartels are not the only people who do that, right? Like it is a widely used tactic now. You see it all over in Ukraine, right? Like it's in part not just because of like cell phones, but because of like shit like drones and stuff. It's just an increasingly common thing. And so when you're talking about what are threats that are realistic, well, it's it's just an increasingly common thing and so when you're talking about what are threats that are are realistic well it's not just the state that can interrupt your ability to communicate traditionally right it's also your non-state opponents um and so for a variety of reasons having backups having alternates is just an incredibly important thing to be able to do to some extent

yeah definitely yeah well anything else uh no i mean right now i'm working on a kind of step-by-step article that kind of goes into more detail on what you need to do this um all the equipment you need, how to actually flash devices, how to start sending messages. And so once that's ready, I'll publish it. I publish DIY articles and stuff to my Substack.

It's anarchosolarpunk, or you can go to hydroponictrash.solar, and I have a link there that goes to Substack as well. Beautiful. Well well all right um hydroponic trash uh thank you so much for everything this has really been useful and enlightening i'm gonna go hop on to aliexpress in a second here and uh make a couple of of purchases uh and i'm sure there's going to be a number of folks doing a version of that. Again, you can find our guests at hydroponic trash on Twitter, where you can get in touch with them

and keep an eye on on what they're writing their sub stack. Very, very excited to play around with this technology. Thank you so much for working to make it more visible. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me on. Yes, absolutely. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game.

If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs

and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el te caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias

Come Again, a podcast by Honey German where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could

be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. It's me, James.

And I'm joined today by Erika, who is an attorney, the director at Alotrolada, which is a binationalprofit that does legal humanitarian aid between San Diego and Tijuana. And we're here to discuss the open air detention sites and some things that Jim Desmond, one of our county supervisors, has been saying about them. So welcome to the show, Erica. Thank you for having me. Yeah, of course. It's nice to have you here. Thanks for taking the time. So I want to start off by talking about Jim desmond today uh which is something i like to do if people aren't familiar with jim desmond uh jim desmond is a supervisor in san diego county uh he's from district five which is northern san diego county he's a republican he's the former mayor of san marcos which is a city in north county and before that he was a pilot in the navy he's pretty much like a standard culture war boomer and a valuable reminder to us all

that there are people alive today who grew up when they put lead in children's toys. Notable Jim Desmond's dances include his stance on climate change, which I'm just going to read to you. Try and follow it if you can. It's a challenge. I think the climate has been changing since the beginning of time the climate comes and the climate goes the great lakes the great plains

the yosemite valley all formed by glaciers they've been gone a long long time so you find seashells on mountaintops you see where it used to be you know the land masses were pangaea and then the land matters all change and move around so i say we may be part of climate change but i think the only reason we're here and we're still here today is because we as a species learn to adapt to different climates and climate changes now maybe we're maybe exacerbating it a bit towards the end of the warming trend but i don't know that so it's just it's about as about as convoluted as his governing strategy here in san diego county yeah it's uh he's said a lot of words uh but it really conveyed very little meaning but yeah this is kind of he seems

to like speaking but but maybe like he doesn't take quite as long as one would hope to plan out where he's going with his sentences before he delivers them. He also has a podcast, so I guess our podcasting rival. Have you listened to his podcast, Erica? No, but it might be entertaining, so I'll take a look at it. Definitely. I know you can learn some things about coronavirus, for instance. God. Yeah, great.

It's good stuff. In May of 2020, he claimed there had been six pure, solely coronavirus deaths. The other 200 or so that happened in the county by then were not

quote-unquote pure coronavirus deaths, I guess, by his estimation. So, in this little escapade, got him cited by Joe Rogan on the Joe Rogan podcast uh which must have been a great moment for Desmond he hosted a ton of COVID

skeptics on his podcast as well throughout the lockdowns um he did uh after he like caused some controversy on Twitter which is is a recurring theme he hosted an actual immunologist on his show and this was the only guest who he really kind of argued with um and in doing so he said i quote the herd needs to get it and he's talking about covid here and we'll have a better handle on it so to me the number of cases means the herd's getting it so that's a good thing um then his guest corrected him pointing out that uh there needs to be like immunity for there to be herd immunity and what he's just looking at is contagion uh not not immunity uh so he he sort of he continued to make these claims throughout the pandemic right that the uh the lockdown was

holding our jobs hostage bad for the economy he wasn't an anti-masker interestingly he said we should wear masks if that's what it took to open the businesses again and he at least i mean he's always been pretty terrible on border stuff right erica i'm sure you've encountered some of his border stances before i think all of the supervisors are terrible on border stuff but at least he says the quiet part out loud yeah we'll get more into that later yeah yeah i want to talk about how that yeah that they the democrats being terrible on the border is something that i think we can't say enough in recent months he held a press conference claiming the border should be shut down uh to prevent an influx it's not a quote it's a paraphrase here but to prevent an influx, it's not a quote, it's a paraphrase here, but to prevent an influx of Hamas fighters,

which, I don't know, it shows a misunderstanding of a lot of things, like how Hamas works and also how the border works. The idea that A, one could leave Gaza at this time and B, that one could just fly into Mexico, where of course they wouldn't immediately notice that you had come like armed and equipped to attack the u.s border but i think just with the covid stuff and with the border stuff he is just throwing red meat to his base but it's not necessarily aligned with what he does and i would assume it's not aligned with what he actually

knows like where the covid stuff he did set up vaccination clinics in his district and so he's clearly not a complete skeptic at least that's not what his actions showed and i think for some of your listeners who are not in the United States, or maybe not in California, we are on the border in San Diego, you can get to Mexico within, you know, if you're in Jim Desmond's district within half an hour, you're in Tijuana, and I assume he's letting on it's just really like he's regurgitating the right-wing narrative to garner political points i think in a county where he's the last standing republican on the board of supervisors so i think that's important to remember too definitely it definitely seems like this is kind of and you see he does a lot of appearance on right-wing news channels right like he's often on uh fox but then our local kind of crazy right-wing news channel is kusi who have really doubled down on the culture war stuff since like 2020 and you'll you'll see him on there a lot and talk about the border a lot right it seems to as you say like

either be like an attempt for re-election or perhaps for higher office, I don't know. But he'll make a lot of claims about the border, which are just patently untrue, which is what I want to talk about now. So he spent his New Year's Day in Hukumba making little videos for Twitter and Instagram. I was there on New Year's Day too, I didn't actually see him, which is a shame but uh that day there weren't many people at all who were in the open air detention sites so um he he sort of made videos in front of empty tents it was a bit weird in his first one he wrote today i visited the border and migrant encampments in hukumba the chaos continues with dozens of people camping out

waiting for border patrol to take them to Resource Center, paid for by county taxpayers. He's not like, I'm sure Erica, you can explain this as well. He's not wrong that they may eventually end up at the quote unquote Welcome Center, which is paid for by county funds, which came from the American Rescue Act, which is, of course, federal money. But it's a little more complicated than that, isn't it? Yeah, so the migrants are being held in what are essentially open-air prisons by Border Patrol. We, the collective of nonprofits, mutual aid groups, and volunteers, are the only ones who've been paying for water, food, medical assistance, shelter, etc. for people who are being held in these open air prisons, sometimes for days at a time,

including the medically infirm and children. And so I think that's one piece of it to understand, because he did say in his, when he was speaking in front of the empty tent that the county taxpayers were paying for those things, which is patently untrue. But then just, again, understanding the process is something that he has to understand. He's been here for decades.

He has to know that these people are being taken into Border Patrol custody, processed, and then either released to the county funded welcome center, or they are detained by immigration. And so it's the same legal process we've had for decades at the border where people have a right to seek asylum, whether they enter at a port of entry or not. And the real controversy here is the fact that border patrol is holding people outdoors for days at a time without the things that they need to survive yeah i want to get back to that claim that he made right that the county paid for it we've got some audio of him making that claim so

we'll just play it here's we as we look inside this abandoned tent, there's a sandwich left in a baggie. There's water, bananas, ponchos, crackers, snacks, and water. And this tent is empty. Many of these tents are just the same way. There's no one here. Yet probably in the next day or so, there'll be more migrants coming, inhabiting this, and then being processed through San Diego County, being paid for with San Diego tax dollars. So in the caption that accompanied this video, he wrote, quote, during my recent border visit,

I encountered an abandoned campsite filled with tents, food, drinks, and campfires paid for by San Diego County taxpayers. This site is used as a temporary holding site before migrants are then processed into our country. And this gets to the thing, I think, that Lewis Wahee bullshitted too close to the sun because none of that, as you said, was paid for by taxpayers, right? All of that was paid for by people like us,

non-profits, mutual aid people. And can you give a sense of like the amount of spending that Aloe Trolato has had to take on to make these open air prisons like survivable for people and even still they're deeply unpleasant even with all our work? Yeah. So we have acted as a fiscal sponsor for a lot of the smaller groups because we are able to receive foundation funding as a 501c3. And so we've used that legal status about $150,000 per month, which is a lot for us. But when you look at the Department of Homeland Security, which should be spending this money,

they have $170 billion budget for 2023. I think it's even higher for fiscal year 2024. So it's really probably what know, probably what they spend on one of those autonomous surveillance towers that are sitting in the camps in like a day, right? So it's really nothing for them. You know, it's very clear that they're making a choice to leave these really vulnerable migrants to potentially die in the desert. And then when we look at the county funding, they've allocated now $6 million to this welcome center,

which we'll talk about in more detail, but it's really providing woefully inadequate services to the same population that's going through these open air detention sites after they've been released from Border Patrol custody. So again, it's a lot of money for us it's not a lot of money for the county um i would love it if the county would pay for it they've stated on multiple occasions that they will not it's been pure philanthropic funding and donations but yeah i mean we've been able to do a lot with very little and it really was the bare minimum to keep people alive so yeah if we had an actual infusion of county funding i'm sure we could have done a lot more

yeah and like even we don't have access to the things that government has access to right like normally in a refugee situation we'd have unhcr tents we'd have uh humanitarian mres like we had to buy those on this we couldn't get the tents and we and the mres we had to find on the surplus market right like we we can't the state could do more for less but they're very much choosing not to as you said so what the result of this was rather amusing where a number of people from mutual aid groups uh including friends of ours from free shit collective took to desmond's office uh with literal receipts right like receipts yes yeah it was a tremendous moment uh and we don't mean receipts like in the figurative sense

we mean like pieces of paper from costco yeah oh yeah oh and and the fact is, you know, within a number of hours, the folks from Free Shit Collective and others were able to just pull together over $16,000 in receipts. And that's, like I mentioned, a small fraction of what we've actually been spending. That's probably just their receipts from the week. week and so again for us it's like that's an enormous lift i know we're all exhausted those of us who've been working in the open air detention sites it's exhausting to be there all the time it's exhausting to try to raise enough money to keep thousands and thousands of people alive when they're forced into a deadly situation and so it's i think we were all pretty pissed off when we heard him taking credit for that, even if he was trying to denigrate, you know, the idea of spending money on refugees. Yeah, right. Like, it's funny, because he'll also say like, it's inhumane, it's unacceptable. But like, if you're not going to do anything to stop the humanity, the inhumanity, like,

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

But he chose not to. He just stood in front of his, whoever was filming him and lied his proposed solution is to close the border which he knows is not an option because the refugee convention is still a thing the u.s is still a signatory you know we have legal obligations under both domestic and international law to accept asylum seekers in our country and so you know his solution to the inhumanity is to push people back over the mexican border where you know they're subject to all manner of state and criminal violence so i don't think the inhumanity is really his priority to address

it's really again just like throwing red meat to the base to you know this open borders hysteria that they all love to cite yeah uh talking of hysteria uh we should take a little break for some adverts for things that uh might try to get you to buy them by making you afraid and you we are back and yeah i want to talk a little more about that like this this idea of a closed border you see it a lot mostly from republicans right like it's like you say it's not only legally impossible it's also like physically impossible and we people enter the u.s through gaps in the border wall we people enter the u.s through gaps in the border wall when people enter the u.s through gaps in the border wall i should add because we've made it virtually impossible for them to get asylum appointments in a reasonable time frame

and and to be in a place that's safe while they make those appointments and so like like the idea that we could how do we close you know like the physical border we could, how do we close, you know, like the physical border? Well, just, yeah, I mean, I just want to take a step back for one second, because this sort of Biden's open borders hysteria that we've heard so much from the right wing, I think it's worth unpacking what this means because i've seen you know people in the democratic party or even people on the left really shy away from this idea of open borders when those of us who have first world passports already have a world of open borders i mean we can pretty much go wherever we want you know we gentrify other countries to their detriment like it's not there really are not many restrictions on first world citizens moving around the world so i think that's one important thing to consider as we're kind of launching into this discussion it's like open borders are okay for me but not for brown

people like yeah it's a little you know and that's kind of the underlying impetus behind a lot of what we're going to talk about in San Diego County. It's like people, this underlying idea that people should not have the right to come here, which is just ludicrous. So I think that's one thing. But when we're talking about asylum in particular, you know, like I mentioned earlier, we are signatories with refugee convention and the subsequent 1967 protocol this has been enshrined in domestic law in the 1980 refugee act and so

refugees who are people outside of their country of origin fleeing persecution have the right to ask for protection at the u.s mexico border whether it's at a port of entry or between ports of entry. So those in Jacumba and these other open air detention sites are those crossing between ports of entry because it's been made impossible to approach the port of entry and seek asylum. And this is something that our organization has been litigating for years. You know, at first people were just being turned away. Then there was a waiting list in Mexico. Now they have this stupid app that's just like, glitches, and there's not enough appointments and people have to wait for months in Mexico just to get an appointment if they're

one of the lucky ones who can. The app's also been hacked by organized crime. You know, certain nationalities are able to pay for appointments it's just it's a complete mess it has nothing to do with this ideal you know that the refugee convention is supposed to enshrine so regardless of you know all of the illegal things the U.S. government is doing like you cannot close a border to asylum seekers without withdrawing from the refugee convention and I just really don't see that happening for our country just because we like to you know talk about how we're a bastion for human rights etc which you know that's a whole other podcast i think yeah yeah we can uh

yeah break that down a little bit but i think one thing that you said that i want to talk about is that you said that open borders or like free travel for brown people is something that a lot of more privileged folks, especially in San Diego, even in San Diego, I should say, are uncomfortable with. hard for me to see skin color not playing a large role when I see people from Africa people from South America waiting for months if not years and then people from Ukraine coming at when the largest scale conflict in Ukraine began and effectively skipping the line right yeah so when the Ukrainians all came through Tijuana I think there were maybe 20,000 or so who came through in a period of a month. That was during Title 42, which was a Trump-era policy that closed the border to asylum seekers based on public health reasons. But really, it was because they wanted to close the border to asylum seekers. but really it was because they wanted to close the border to asylum seekers.

And so there were very few humanitarian exemptions granted to Title 42 at that time. But at the time the Ukrainians came, that exemption process had actually been shut down for quite a while. So I was watching people die in Tijuana because they didn't have access to the U.S. asylum system. I remember when the Ukrainians came, there was a child who caught't have access to the U.S. asylum system. I remember when the Ukrainians came, there was a child who caught pneumonia in one of the shelters. It was like a month's old baby who died. And then when the Ukrainians came, you know, the doors were flung open for them. CBP, which up until that point said they did not have capacity to process asylum

seekers, they were ukrainians at a clip of a thousand a day and it was heartbreaking to see and you know after they shut off the spigot for the ukrainians um after they stopped letting them in at the border cbp said they only had capacity to process a few dozen non-white asylum seekers and so all of a sudden their capacity was just gone it was you know it just it was so transparent and so blatant and so hurtful for people who'd been suffering at that point for years with the asylum system closed off to them yeah it yeah it was really hard to see that and and to know the people the people who i guess effectively they lost their place in line right or people

kind of in front of them and and and to a large degree it's still much easier right we're not we're under title 8 again now not title 42 but it's still much easier for wealthy white people to get appointments using cbp1 than it is for poor and non-white people, right? Yeah, because especially when the app was first launched, there's a point in the appointment process during which you have to take a photo of yourself and it maps your face for facial recognition purposes. And it wasn't working on really dark-skinned people. A few of the organizations working in Mexico

had to buy the construction style lights to shine on people's faces so that it wouldn't pick them up but just even like you have to have a new phone um i think they probably made the app to work on an iphone which most people outside the united states don't have yeah yeah it's like i got a tip on that i've not been able to confirm it but someone at the i store told the i store the apple store told me that it wasn't working on certain samsung and huawei phones and that they were having people come in and buy like the cheapest iphone they could in bulk to try and access it well we keep iphones in our office in Tijuana exactly for that reason, because people need to be able to access the app.

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

the richer people who are paying for nice phones and appointments are able to get through much more quickly yeah it it's made a fucked up system even more fucked up and yeah that they designed it in-house as well which you know would i don't know they uh they appear to have overestimated their abilities there one day i'll get my foyers back about cbp1 and it will probably be some point in the middle of the next presidential administration which will make them irrelevant and really fucking annoying but well we're suing about it too so it'll probably be a few years before we get to discovery but yeah okay we'll have a race yeah but you are assuming that they want the system to work which

they don't yes yeah yeah that's fair so in that sense it's working perfectly right yeah and it's doing in a sense what like the unofficial undertone of immigration policy has always been which is that like it's fine for wealthy white people to come here but we want to limit the number of non-white and non-wealthy people who come here. And they can say that loud. Maybe we should talk about this now. The difference between Trump and Biden is that Trump just said it

and Biden didn't. And when Trump said it, well-meaning liberals in the Midwest gave a shit and sent money. In 2018, things were very bad in tijuana right with the um the people staying in el baratal but like at least people in america cared and sent money so we could help whereas now like you know major outlets who have given 10 front page stories to accusations of one woman plagiarizing in a dissertation that she wrote years ago haven't written a single piece about the open air concentration camps that our government has

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

things like one is just people hate when Trump does it, but they don't hate when Biden does it. That's one. Yeah. But also, like you said, Trump says the quiet part out loud. And so people respond to that. Whereas Biden has co-opted the immigrant rights movement by putting us in a stakeholder relationship. And I can see among some of my colleagues that they value access to power more than the rights of the people that we are supposed to serve. are supposed to serve and so they will go along with a lot of this stuff and you know basically enable it in many ways just to maintain that access to power and i've seen some of my colleagues who you know we were all fighting on the same side during the trump administration have actually gone into the biden administration and are implementing these policies and so it's you know it's it's really like pretty horrifying to see um and also i would say the people in the biden administration are in many ways smarter because

it was easier to litigate under the trump administration we could knock down a lot of these policies because they were just dumb yeah not well written you know it was like clearly unconstitutional you know they learned lessons during the biden ministry or during the trump administration so now the policies are written in a way that are that make it much more difficult to to litigate and the supreme court in 2022 in a decision called aleman gonzalez made it impossible to get class-wide injunctive relief for violations of immigration law so what that means is that dhs can violate the law and there's no way to stop them from doing so on a large scale in the courts and they are banking on that when in current

litigation they literally are relying on that to to continue breaking the law especially when it comes to turning asylum seekers away yeah and something else that testament has asked for is uh he wants him to turn asylum seekers away before they get to the border and then quite understand what they uh like like that would be inside mexico which well that's what mexico is doing right now yeah yeah yeah they're um like i'm i was in jacumba like on friday Thursday, and the National Guard are sitting at the little gaps in the wall. I mean, you've seen it too. You see Mexican National Guard drive up, they kind of check out the situation and leave, and then the travel agents come and drop off the migrants. And so it's something very much that you know can be controlled to a

great extent within mexico and the u.s is very obviously you know working with mexico publicly obviously working with mexico to stop migrants from reaching the u.s mexico border and working with countries further south to stop people from reaching the u.s mexico border so this is definitely a regional project yeah one thing i want to talk about is as people come through those countries further south um there's this it's it's like in recent days even like we're recording this on uh on monday uh people are here on wednesday but i've seen this narrative and i think it's coming from the fact that uh funding for ukraine was tied to funding for the border and and people have lost their minds uh over the conflict in ukraine and and and they have silly dog pictures

on on twitter and um and it's become a replacement for a personality for a certain type of divorce guy like so so like the yeah the army of divorced dads has um like turned on the border and like one of the things you'll say is like oh like the border is like a like like this is how like bad actors are getting in the u.s you know like you know hamas again like the hamas are really otherwise engaged in the minute but like yeah they're busy they're busy yeah yeah like there's a whole lot of people who would love to leave gaza uh and we absolutely should welcome those people here but uh they can't and that's fucked up but yeah this idea that like isis uh hamas uh the russian secret of the russian fsb i'm sure some someone will have have suggested like north korea or the prc are

coming through hakumba as well like they see it seems to admit omit what happens to people entering mexico and indeed other countries further south right like can you explain how people seem to think that the u.s is the only state with the capacity for surveillance which is manifestly untrue can you explain how people are like surveilled and and um like like negligible on their way north there are multiple multilateral and bilateral information sharing agreements that connect to criminal and you know quote-unquote intelligence databases so when you are traveling internationally you are subject to a web of surveillance that is you know in many ways connected to the united states so the u.s government knows you're coming like you know when you are countries

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

If you've ever tried to travel over land from Tapachula to Mexico City, you will go through numerous checkpoints where, you know, your information is taken. You know, a lot of times you're just paying a bribe to keep going. But it's something where, you know, they know who's coming. That's why you hear all the time in the media, like this many people are coming through the Darien Gap. How do they know that? Well, they have these biometric, you know, information collection stations. But I think just more broadly, like coming through the southern border as a refugee, or just as a migrant is probably the stupidest way to come into the United States if you are

trying to, you know, do a terrorist attack, because, like Border Patrol, despite what they like to say, they are not overwhelmed. You know, if you divide the number of people coming over by the number of agents, it's far less than one migrant per agent per day. So they have a pretty good lock on the border. There's not a lot of people getting through undetected. Those who turn themselves in, which is the vast majority of people, they are subject to all of the same surveillance and security checks I just mentioned, they get their DNA sample taken at the border, they give all of their information, and then they are not let out of custody if they trigger any

kind of security flag and it can just be like they're from yemen they're from afghanistan sometimes they're just detained because of that but any of those if any of those checks are triggered they're detained for the duration of proceedings they never see that outside of a prison so this idea that terrorists are sneaking over the border is frankly stupid. I think, you know, if we think back to 9-11, I think they all came on visas. Yeah, yeah. And like, the system makes it so much easier for someone who is wealthy and white and otherwise privileged to come to this country that like, it's ridiculous to think that a state actor like Russia wouldn't take advantage of that rather than attempting to walk someone through the border where they're about to, like, encounter some of the most intense state surveillance that can happen to a person. And you start off in a prison. So, like, why would you do that?

And you may never leave it. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I'm sure there's, like, you know, some people who have ties to foreign intelligence. Sure. I mean, it could happen, but it's like, so the number is so vanishingly small. And I think another important thing to note is when people are processed, they have an obligation to attend an immigration court hearing. attend an immigration court hearing and when i looked at the statistics for russian asylum seekers in particular because i've seen a lot of this rhetoric of like russia sending spies over the border so 98.5 of them show up to their immigration court hearings are you going to do

that if you're a spy you're going to subject yourself to another round of security checks and you know spill your entire asylum story subject yourself to cross-examination no you're not so i don't know people have watched that film uh the tv series the americans a little too much losing their minds okay so i think yeah it's really important to also point out like when we're talking about like the potential for bad actors like yeah like sure maybe there's someone who's come who's done something bad or maybe there's someone who comes who will do something bad it doesn't mean that everyone else who

came is in any way complicit in that like we haven't given them another way to come here it's not like they had to take the bad guy route because they chose to like you no one would be picking up their children and walking across the desert

and then spending sometimes up to a week in camps which are currently below freezing at night, sometimes with, you know, like a blanket or like a tent or maybe a wooden shelter if they're lucky. Like, no one would be doing that if there was an easier option. And it's ludicrous to claim that these people's asylum claims or the fact that they should be welcome here is in any way impacted by the actions of somebody else who might have taken the same yeah i mean the other thing too is just because the border is so closed off by policies that restrict access to asylum it has supercharged the strength of criminal groups that bring people

to the border. And I will say that they are spreading a lot of misinformation. You know, they use this reporting from the right wing calling the border open to advertise their services. And they might very well tell people that it's a lot easier than it actually is, and that they have an easier chance to get asylum than they actually do. I mean, I don't discount the power of misinformation, but those I have seen over the past six, seven years, especially since the Trump administration really tried to close off access to asylum. I've seen those groups grow in power. I've seen the price that people pay to cross the border grow both financially and just in the amount of

suffering that they have to endure. So when we talk about border security and national security, I would argue that border restrictions actually make us much less safe because, you know, criminal groups now completely control the border. Whereas, you know, a decade ago, even a person who just wanted to cross the border on their own could do so you know if they knew the way they could just try to cross and now if you try to do that without paying the criminal groups who really control it you'll be killed yeah and that's happened uh multiple times in the last few months we're talking of misleading advertising claims uh we have to take a short break to hear some of them and we'll be back in a moment okay we're back um one thing that i want to talk about that we haven't got to yet is

that like the the failed government response isn't just federal or well it is both federal and local but i wanted to talk a little bit about this that the federal funding that san diego county got that it reallocated towards a quote-unquote welcome center right and so yeah we're both very familiar with the Welcome Center. It got $3 million initially, and then it got $3 million more because apparently none of us are doing anything useful anywhere else and don't merit any help. Do you want to talk first of all about just what the conditions are like? You've just come out of being detained in the desert for maybe up to a week.

It's cold. We feed you, but we wish we could feed you more and better. You don't have a change of clothes, right? Then you've been detained. You could have been detained for one night, two nights, several more nights, and then you hit this welcome center. I can think how we would like to treat people who have just been through all that, but can you explain to us how people are treated when they when they arrive at a welcome center well it's they're not arriving

there they're picked up from detention by the non-profit that's administering the welcome center in what look like prison buses right i mean it's i can't i can't imagine that someone getting on one of those buses understand that they're not just at another stage of detention, right? So they get to this fenced-in, abandoned school. They are lined up, and they're forced to give all of their information to the nonprofit workers. They are, you know, mostly not Spanishanish i think maybe like 40 spanish speakers

i'm not sure the exact percentage but there's people from all over the world there's no paid interpreters on site and so you know they do have this little script that they read in the beginning saying like you're not detained like this is a welcome center whatever but they run it through google translate and then play the google translate like over the megaphone which is like have you ever tried to like understand someone screaming something into a megaphone never mind the fact that it's like mandarin google translate like people i guarantee you they still think they're in prison and so then they go they have to sometimes wait for hours in this intake line only then they're given a ticket to eat like probably some of the worst food i've ever seen like i you know people are not eating a lot when they're at the open

attention sites and then they're really not eating a lot when they're in detention and i've seen people refuse the food there because it's that bad. And it's like, they're standing in a line for hours, not having eaten, probably not having slept and God knows how long, you know, having this garbled message played to them over a megaphone. Um,

so anyway, they get through all that. And then, um, they're told they have to make their own way, you know, to their sponsor. And those who don't have the money to do so are provided with, I think it's up to maybe two or three days of shelter or a hotel room before they are shipped off to another rid of the migrants to get them elsewhere. So you know, 95% to 99% do have a place to go. They don't all have the means to get there. But most of them do

almost all have the means to get there. The other few like the other, you know, one to 5%, they need help. They need, you know, maybe a place to stay for a couple months, they need help getting a work permit, they might need help, you know, applying for asylum, but instead of investing in the resources that we need locally to help them, they're shipped off to New York, Chicago, or other places that have invested in those resources. And that's really the same thing Greg Abbott was doing from Texas. But you know, we're just putting a nicer, we call it a welcome center. Yeah, yeah. It's somehow better.

Yeah. Yeah. And the welcome center, like, we could go deeper into its funding. But I think it's fair to say that, like, it's for one thing, it's doing things that CBP should do, right? Like the transport specifically. right like uh like the transport specifically the transport specifically but also like this idea of doing an intake with every single person who comes through there is such a waste of money because it's like it's infantilizing these people have traveled across the world you think they can't get to the airport on their own yeah you know it doesn't focus resources on that you know

one to five percent of people who really do need help it wastes resources on people who really don't they need wi-fi they need a phone charger yeah and maybe like a hard email you know they're getting the wi-fi and the phone charger which is not provided by the organization that receives six million dollars it's provided by one of the few organizations including my own who are there providing services without county funding because we didn't want to be associated with this debacle yeah and another thing you do is family reunification there right you guys are helping take care of that yeah which again i think people are unaware that families need to be reunified but they're still

very much separated when they're in detention well they're separated at open-air detention sites they're separated in detention um we've documented since september i think it's over 1100 families now that have been separated almost half of them are spousal separations but a lot of times when you know wife and husband are separated the kids are with one spouse or another so you know technically it's a separation of a child we see a lot of separations of like 18 year old children from the rest of their families where they're sent to detention facilities and the rest of the family is released so there's all you know grandma from grandkids or niece and nephew sibling separations i mean it's all traumatic right it's just not the

particular brand of trump separation that people seem to care about right yeah yeah they quote unquote kids in cages and right but yeah oh they're still in the cage yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah or their dad but not both sometimes oh my god yeah it's it's equally it's equally tragic but it's more tragic that somehow we've normalized it and like with this the immigration stuff only seems to be able to ratchet one way and it's further towards like insane degrees of cruelty right like yeah the fact that biden is doing what trump did doesn't mean that trump will do what biden did if trump is elected again right like it somehow they will find a way to make this even worse oh absolutely and i think the open air detention sites are a preview of what we'll see

you know it's this idea of it being normal to deny people food, water, shelter, and medical care because they, you know, committed this awful crime of crossing the border, which is like a misdemeanor, by the way. And it's not even supposed to be illegal if you're seeking asylum. The Refugee Convention actually prohibits criminal prosecution of folks who cross borders irregularly to seek asylum. And by and large, the U.S. attorneys, at least during the Biden administration, have stuck to that. You know, if you're arrested for crossing irregularly and you then apply for asylum, generally the charges will be dropped. But like this invader rhetoric, right? Like, oh, they're invading our country and whatever the white replacement theory all of that is really driving this really normalization of the inhumane treatment of border crossers yeah the point you

made about like yeah you can cross between ports of entry and then claim asylum and it's it's one that seems to be completely missing from the discussion like i've seen countless times i've seen that uh like misrepresented in in other articles and it's it's in almost every single one yeah it's really disappointing like i i have very little respect left to lose for a lot of people who work like especially folks who wish to report on the border without visiting the border i just like um what are you sparing yourself the trauma of seeing little children staying outside because like their trauma is much greater than yours you know and the things that they're coming away from are much greater than any trauma you're going to take on i understand

it's not very nice but like we should face up to the not very nice things that our country does. Well, you're also members of Congress who legislate on the border or trade away the rights of asylum seekers without ever having met any of them. And those who do come to the border just go on the border patrol tour and don't actually talk to the migrants. And so that's even worse, you know. But yeah, I agree. Like this idea that they're illegal is completely wrong. They're an illegal process. They're not prosecuted for illegal entry by and large,

you know, unless they've tried multiple times. And even then, if they pass a credible fear interview, a lot of times those criminal charges are dropped. And so they're not illegal. This is a legal process. It's a legal way to access that process, especially when the ports of entry have been closed off to them. Yeah, and I think they've done to enter the US

or like at any part of their journey disqualifies them from asylum, as you say, makes it like a quote-unquote illegal, which is just kind of, I don't know, loaded language anyway. But yeah, they've taken every step to take a to make a legal asylum claim and lots of them will be like extremely aware of having done that like not wanting to like if people wanted to walk out of uh the oh wait they open their detention sites they could that they're not quote unquote detained right but like people are so cautious that they don't want to do anything that might imperil their asylum claim yeah and it's really sad because they already have by

crossing the border between ports of entry that's what biden's asylum ban addresses yeah and so they're sort of coming from a defensive posture with respect to their eligibility for asylum by virtue of having done that but the criminal groups that are organizing their transport tell them that that's the legal way and people who are coming into open air detention sites believe they are following a legal process which you know they are to a certain extent but there's definitely legal consequences for having access the system that way yeah yeah even though. Even though like, yeah, many of these people are like, I have sat with dozens of people, maybe hundreds of people, as they've explained to me, the amount of times CBP one crashed on their phone, the, their attempts to go to the US

embassy in a city that might not be safe for them or to like transit through it you know like a regime that wants them dead uh you know hundreds of Kurdish people have shared with me that they've tried to get visas for the US and failed and uh they've tried every other option before trying this one um yeah most people have most people have no one would do this you know it's not fun it's it's not fun at all no the last thing i wanted you to explain erica is people are placed when they come through this whole system right in a defensive or they make a defensive asylum claim can you explain what that is and what the difference between affirmative and defensive asylum for people because again it's in a lot of reporting i've seen this is missing yeah so if i came to

the u.s on a visa and then decided i wanted to apply for asylum i would be applying affirmatively so that means that i've never been apprehended by immigration. I've never been placed in any kind of removal or deportation proceeding. Removal is just like the legal term for deportation. And so when you apply affirmatively, your initial screening is before an asylum officer. It's ostensibly a non-adversarial hearing but i've been i've been in a lot of them and that's not always the case but you know you don't have like a like a government attorney cross-examining you it's just it's just the asylum officer who's supposed to be nice but

they're not always um and then if you win if they approve your case, that's the end. You just get asylum and then that's a path to citizenship. If you are not approved, then you would be placed in removal proceedings where you could present your asylum case before an immigration judge. And so defensive is when you are apprehended or you turn yourself in at the border. You are placed in removal proceedings. So you don't get that first asylum interview before the officer, you just go straight to immigration court. And so when you're presenting your case in immigration court, there's a government attorney who's actively trying to deport you. I think most of the judges used to be government attorneys. And so they many times it feels like they're also trying to deport you and the success

of your claim is pretty much completely dependent on where it is adjudicated so and you know less also has to do with your nationality so if you are applying for asylum before the atlanta immigration court pretty much 99 of those cases are denied. And there's some judges who've denied 100% of cases. And that's true for a lot of jurisdictions within the Southeast. And then you have your friendlier jurisdictions like San Francisco. San Diego is not too bad, actually. But you have other courts where you have a better chance depending on the judge. But it really depends on chance depending on the judge but it really depends on the location the judge that you happen to get you could present the same exact claim

in different cities before different judges and have a completely different outcome yeah there's no objective criteria and the people know this too but unfortunately like to get yourself to san francisco and then survive there just as an example, right, until your court date comes up, is unfathomably expensive. Like for me, I couldn't afford to get myself to San Francisco and make rent there and it's barely possible in San Diego. And you don't qualify for work authorization until, I think you can apply five months after you've submitted your application for asylum. And in many cases, you don't get your initial court date for months or years after you've entered, mostly months. But people don't understand that you can lodge your asylum application before your first court date to get that clock going on your work authorization.

And so people I see very commonly are waiting at least a year to get work authorization. So, you know, not only would you have to survive in a high cost of living city, but without the legal ability to work. And so it's really hard for people when they first come to the United States. And, you know, unlike what is spouted many times in the right wing media media space there are no benefits available to someone who's seeking asylum they're not getting any kind of government money yeah yeah yeah there's a uh i remember what it is you have to be it's like a burden of the state or something thing that you have to ward of i can't remember when you uh probably charge

so like on top of all this people aren't aware of that it's very uh it's sad like like i've had a bunch of people who i've interviewed or just befriended when i've been helping out in akumba who have been like hey like how do i find work like well like uh do you know do you have they didn't realize they wouldn't be permitted to work like and even like we spoke to amos the other day he has offers of work right from his old employer but they that he can't take them up on that because as you say he's he's got to sit doing nothing uh for five months until he's he's legally allowed to work which is it doesn't help anyone right it doesn't doesn't help migrant it doesn't help us like um it it just forces people to work for cash or for for low-wage jobs which leaves

them right for abuse or for non-payment right and like it's a system that doesn't doesn't really work for anyone they have no rights as workers right they can also be end up doing very dangerous work and we've seen that a lot well i think something too that's important to note is that there's obviously all these push factors toward migration but a huge pull factor is the employment market in the united states so we have you know hundreds of thousands of open jobs and you know people have to leave their country but they also choose to go to a certain place so many of them like i said almost all of them have some kind of tie to the United States, like family or friends, you can host them, but it's, they're not going to come here if they can't get a job. And so it's important to note that as well. And I think what you're saying about the exploitation of migrants in the labor

industry is really important because I think that, you know, that's part of why there are so many restrictions because when you do not provide a path to citizenship, you create a permanent underclass that is very vulnerable to exploitation. And I think that's by design. Yeah, look, it works very well, right? Like it increases for people who are unconcerned with the wellbeing of other humans.

Like it creates a constant pool of cheap and disposable labor yeah because if they're invaders you know and they start to act up and demand their rights it's very easy politically to just get rid of them yeah and that some of those same people who are deploying this close to border rhetoric i'm sure are also exactly advantage of that undocumented labor. And Erica, if people want to help, they want to donate, uh, they want to learn more, um, about this, is there a place where they can find you, uh, or, or a lot of the lateral on the internet? Yeah. So they can go to our website, which is I'll alter a lot of a L O T R O L A D O. Or, um, to donate, there's a donate button there on the homepage, or you can alotrolado a-l-o-t-r-o-l-a-d-o dot org

to donate, there's a donate button there on the homepage or you can put alotrolado.org slash donate we are alotrolado underscore org on all of the social media platforms and if folks have people

in their lives who are migrants who want more information about the asylum system i would recommend going to our tiktok page which has multiple videos in over a dozen languages including many indigenous languages on the asylum process and then for you know those of us who are wanting to learn more our instagram pages is more public facing perfect yeah that's great you guys have some excellent merch as well are you still selling your chingada migra t-shirts oh yeah we have tote we have tote bags and mugs too okay yeah just like uh npr but cooler well yeah i think we can customize the messaging too.

You know, I can think of a few that probably aren't appropriate to say in polite company, but if folks have suggestions for what they'd like to see in our merch, we'd be more than happy to take those suggestions on our info at alatralala.org email. Perfect. Great. Yeah, I'm sure you'll be flooded with ideas. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much for having me hola mi gente it's honey german and i'm bringing you gracias come again the podcast where we dive deep into the world of latin culture musica peliculas and entertainment with some of the Thank you. creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with cheese man laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation.

Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, oh, Jesus. I just spit cigarettes across the room. You spit approximately seven cigarettes. I had a number of them in my mouth. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And you know what's constantly falling apart, but also never? Las Vegas, Nevada, where Garrison and I are right now reporting on the Consumer Electronics Show,

which is why I just had seven cigarettes in my mouth. How are you doing, buddy? Great. We just lost about $20 at Excalibur. Yeah. One of the worst hotels on the strip. Terrible place.

Horrible place. But I smoked a lot of cigarettes there. So that's not, it's not bad. I don't even like them. I just like doing things I can't do other places. You just like smoking indoors, is what you're saying. I do. I'm a big fan of it.

Other things I'm a big fan of, innovative technology products, of which we saw perhaps three today. Very few. What we did do is spend seven to eight cumulative hours in different roundtable discussions of various industry experts on AI and the future they have prepared for us all.

We have a fun episode coming for you, or a couple of them, about AI and what the tech industry wants for us all. But because Garrison got too drunk tonight. That's not true. Well, someone got too drunk tonight, and I'm not at liberty to discuss who. We're going to talk about the products today that were just absolute fucking catastrophes and in order to help us talk about that i would like to bring in our pinch-hitting guest star slash technological expert tavia mora tavia how you doing i'm doing great how did you like your first cesES as a journalist? It's a little different, but I was glad to get into places I would not otherwise get into.

Yeah. Now, because you are an industry person, you help build that big sphere thing people might know. You hate, well, you have no journalistic record, which means you and I had to have a good time lying to a lot of strangers today. Was it easy? Yes. It always is. That's the beauty of lying to a lot of strangers today. Was it easy? Yes. It always is. That's the beauty of lying to strangers. It's never hard. Anyway, let's get into the products for the day. Let's talk about the dumbest. And again, folks, there's actually a lot of cool stuff. We saw there's some really interesting things.

This is purely the bullshit. So let's roll on with the bullshit what is our first piece of trash guest contestants let's just jump straight in and go to the israel pavilion you're right you're right okay bring me that mixed drink i've got over there in the corner so i don't know if you guys are aware but um there's some controversy around israel and a number of other aspects but by far their most egregious crime that is not something we should say but you know a lot of a lot of problems re that part of the world and they have a pavilion every year at ces because the the country uh that that calls itself israel has a uh tech industry. So we went down there, some interesting stuff occasionally. Not this year.

This year it was all trash. And I tried one product at the Israel Pavilion, and it was from the company iRoma Scents. And I've been going to CES for about 15 years now, off and on. And I feel like every three years, another company is like, we're going to find a way to add smell to your television or gaming experience first off i like tv i like video games never once have i wanted to smell them that has never occurred to me garrison have

you ever wanted to smell a thing in a video game no not really no no nobody does nobody does because smell is our most finicky sense seeing things is all even terrible things is always interesting right i want to smell my way through silent hill 2 right sounds like a fun time i don't want to do that i don't want to smell my way through grand theft auto 3 like that's a horrible time and also frankly las vegas is so full of smells i think i'm good oh my god we, we walked through so many just egregious odors today. So we walk up to this, the most controversial year for the Israel pavilion to exist. And the only place we stop because I see I rum a sense and I have a thing. I've tried out every smell product that CES has had in the last decade and change. And I sit in front of this one and there's like this,

this thing that looks like a toilet seat attached to a computer. And they're like, you sit in front of it and you select the smell and it you'll, you'll experience the scent and you could have this in a video game or a picture, a friend or a lover sends you. So we sit down and i look at the menu and one of the options is peonies who doesn't like an ice peony right so i select it and i get shot in the eyes and nose it burns there's alcohol in there it's like somebody maced me with perfume

like it was not subtle it was not like an elegant experience it was like somebody it was like homer simpson's makeup shotgun but perfume that is how i would rate the iroma sense company the product i think iroma sense is the is the company the product is called centacon they make social media even more of a sensational experience so i think a big part of their their pitch was you can link this up to your phone like text messages or something like twitter or instagram and then get sense blasted at your face via what's on twitter which sounds like again an awful time i will say this is an awful time this company's doomed there's a version of this that can succeed and it requires more advanced nanotechnology than we have.

But nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a loved one. Nobody wants to be able to send a nice smell to a friend. What people do want is you're out in the world, and you see a dead animal somewhere. It fucking reeks. Or you walk past part of a casino, as we did earlier tonight. It smells like an elderly person has been soiling themselves in a slot machine for 11 hours. And you just, you need someone you care about to know, right?

That's the market. And if I could actually record a smell and send it, that's a product. That motherfucker's a product. Imagine the scent-based podcasts we could develop. Oh, yeah. Yeah. When I finally do the episode on Nicolas Cage,

you could smell him as I talk about him. Okay. What's the next silly product we should talk about? You want to talk about talking dogs, maybe? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So there's this company. This is a little bit of a teaser

where they've like tomorrow make your dog talk or something make your dog cat and horse and horse they they did not promise cats and horses when we interviewed them no um this is a company that it seemed like a nonsense product i'm still i think 80% nonsense, but like what it actually is, is there, there were a couple of college students there who specialize in animal behavior. And they had, they had taken a group of,

I think it was 55 was the number they gave us dogs over six months. And like exposing the different stimuli and recorded their body images and built basically like an AI model off of that. So that if you send in a picture of a dog, it'll tell you how the dog is feeling and they hope to get it to visual. I don't think at the moment it's near where it would need to be to be a viable product. And they're also not selling it right now. Maybe something will come of this. It's one of those things where objectively, would there be a use in people being able to determine if a

dog does or does not want them to get closer yes it would stop a lot of people from getting bitten by dogs and a lot of dogs from getting unreasonably punished for biting people who are fucking with them right i agree with that but i don't think anyone who is the kind of person who is going to get bitten by a dog because they touch a dog that doesn't want them to get touched, is going to use an app to check whether or not that dog is angry at them. Like, I simply don't believe in that as a thing that people will do. So I feel like it's not a doomed effort for science. Sure, the unending quest of mankind to understand our fellow sentient beings on this planet is valuable valuable but i don't think it's a valid product idea yeah and i think mostly my problem is the framing of the marketing is

incredibly misleading yes it's not trying to make your dog talk it's about analyzing the facial expressions of your dog to convey emotions which is actually a great product i think i i think we saw stuff like that here at ces last year as well um they are they always try i see this every couple of years too someone's gonna we're gonna teach you what your dog means when it does something what your cat means or whatever yeah this brings me to a sad part of the story so there's a company called tact ai i think they're korean and they had the best branding of like merch not merch of like shit they held out they had like a fake passport and a fake plane ticket to take you to the land of ai um ai is the big thing at this

at this show and their product was it's an app that while you're driving it watches your face and it tells your mood and it gets to know you and it knows oh now you're sad i'm gonna pick from your sad playlist oh it's raining outside i know what you like during rainy days yes that's the fake plane ticket from las las vegas airport to the ai world they put more effort into this than the product because the product would switch randomly between happy and angry and neutral they told me it couldn't read me with a mask but when i took my mask off it gave me the same results there was no difference whatsoever yeah when i had done it i had to over exaggerate my emotions in order to get the angry expression to show up or the surprise

expression yeah just a horrible for one thing when you talk about like the animal thing people have always wanted to know more about how their dogs and cats actually felt about them right that's the thing that's that will always perplex mankind because we love them and we don't speak the same language no one has ever wanted their car to change the music based on their facial expressions that's not a single not one person who has ever wanted their car to change the music based on their facial expressions that's not a single not one person who has ever driven a car has wanted this product to exist imagine you're like almost get into a car accident your face turns up do they change the music play like this like a somber tune yeah just a horrible idea but you know what's a good idea

folks speaking of products, services, all the things that support this podcast, why don't you go on ahead on down, just go to whoever advertises next, call your bank, and wire transfer everything in your bank account to them. You know, just do it. Just do it right now.

Just do it right now and say Kara Robert, or send it to me if you're rich. I don care unless you're rich then send it to me good night oh we're back wow what a great podcast we're doing. What's our next product on the agenda? You know, I think climate change is a problem that we talk about on this show quite a lot. Is it? Because I had a conversation with a guy who said that he thought it was a lie. Did you today? I had a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a firefighter. Oh, great. Well, I think that firefighter will be quite busy.

Yeah, he sure is going to be. But I think there's a possibility that we might be able to just solve climate change with personal wearable technology. Oh, good. Yes, absolutely. You talk to a company. Oh, Silent Cicada. That offers a solution. Now, so this is a, God, I think this was part of the Korean. No, no, it's Chinese. This was part of the Chinese chunk of the Eureka Park, which is like where all the little people, little companies and whatnot. A whole bunch of tech startups. Some of the, all of the coolest stuff is there and all of the worst shit is there.

Yes. Which is why that's where we started, right? So this is a company where they brag it's a personal watch-sized, worn-like-a-watched air conditioner. The company is called Silent Cicada, which makes me think of the book Silent Spring, which was about how all of our pesticides are killing everything, which maybe not the branding they want,

but the form factor is actually quite nice. It is like a watch. It has this, like the frame of the watch lifts up, and that's the battery. And you can switch them out or whatnot if you want to keep it going and stay charged with this personal air conditioner. Here's the problem, doesn't work.

Doesn't do a single thing. And it was one of those things where I see it's a single side hand watch. And I'm like, is this just going to cool down my hand? I feel like if you wanted to cool a person down, based on what I know from like medical training about heat stroke, if you want to cool a person down who's overheating, back of the neck, right?

That's going to be your go-to, not maybe the wrist. But he puts this thing on, and he pushes it down. He's like, in a couple of minutes, you'll notice that you're a lot cooler. And I'm like, OK, how does it work? And I'm not an expert on any of this. I was expecting him to say something like well the way your body's heat regulation you can trick it by doing this or that he's like no no it's an acupuncture thing this is where like your acupuncture point to cool your body down is and

i'm like well all right i guess we'll see if it works yeah i first thought it was like like a tiny fan but that is not the case nope as far as i can tell it does nothing because that is what it did to me in the five minutes i had it on is nothing yeah i mean you really humor the guy like you you did not just put it on for like a minute then walk away you you were you were with him for a solid a solid chunk of time i have i don't believe in acupuncture because i've done had it done to me when i had i had a guy who convinced my parents it would cure my allergies and it did not it did nothing at all but my grandpa who had parkinson's suffered terribly from it and the only thing of all of the different shit we tried with his like fucking va shit the only thing that gave him relief was

acupuncture so i'm not a believer but i'm open to the possibility but i can say based on my own experience this shit did nothing like that that is what I can say about this fucking thing, is it did not a goddamn thing. So, I don't know. I was disappointed. I would love a watch-sized personal air conditioner, but I cannot imagine a more useless product than the one that I tried.

I mean, that just doesn't... When you say a watch-sized personal air conditioner, that doesn't sound like a real thing, that's not going to work. Somebody makes like a jacket that air can. Yeah. I could see how that could work. It could go down. It's I'm also, by the way,

folks, I'm not saying I think acupuncture works. I'm just saying I'm, I'm open to some magical thinking in this realm because of what happened to somebody I cared about, but it didn't work. Um, so don't buy,

don't buy this acupuncture air conditioner watch. It will not help you. Silent cicada doesn't work. So don't buy, don't buy this acupuncture air conditioner watch. It will not help you. Silent cicada doesn't work. You know, we did a lot of walking today. There's CES is pretty big. The Las Vegas convention center is pretty large. The Venetian is pretty large.

And I, I like to stay fit. Sometimes I go on jogs, sometimes I go running. And sometimes I worry. I feel like this is a bit, I feel like you're, you're doing a bit. I don't know. Maybe it's just your face i'm being followed behind me you

know okay that's a bit great yes when i'm jogging and i i wish there was a product that made me feel safer when jogging that could alert me if there's like a stalker so by far of us the person who has well at least the best situational awareness relative to me is tavia so we're we're in this little room i guess you were there too and you didn't notice so i'll give the crown to tavia for this there's a there's a booth it's all booths all these weird cubicles right and each cubicle will be like sometimes it's a company sometimes it's just like a dude with his invention and one of the booths we we could see from the corner of our eye, a white all caps piece of paper stapled to it that just said,

don't get attacked from behind. Now, I think it was written in comic sans. It might've been comic sans. I posted the picture online. If it's not, scream at Tavi for being a liar. Wow.

Wow. Wow. That's quite a thing. You see a sign at a convention like that that says, never get attacked from behind. You have to know what it's about. So we went. And the promo video for it was absolutely incredible it started with about 10 to 15 seconds of your typical motion graphics uh typography kind of animating on and off and

then we get to a live action portion where we see a woman uh putting on and setting up their i guess sims technology i'm not sure exactly the name of the it's a harness that's like a harness it's got like yellow that like lights up when it's under a light it's like a it's like a runner's harness with a little bitty square sized camera it's about the size you know how food carts will have those little squares you plug them into the phone you run your card through it's about that size but it's a camera and it goes on the back of this harness right and so we see this woman setting that up on her phone and then going on a jog and she's jogging along and then there is a single there's a rapist there's a rapist and he's

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

And so she passes him. Very well. And so she's runs past him and then he gets up and he starts jogging after in the most like limp wristed way. Not fast, not aggressively. Honestly, outside of the fact that we know from the setting of the scene that this man is a sex criminal. There's nothing about his run that is aggressive. He looks like an out-of-shape guy doing his best to get into shape, maybe for his kids,

right? To try to live a little bit longer, take care of his family. Sure. That's how he looks in the video. Yeah, absolutely. And the way that this piece of technology works is that if somebody gets close enough to the backside of you, where this can see you, it will send a, I think, an audio alarm to your headphones as well as a text message to your phone or watch. You can have it buzz your watch

or you can have it interrupt your music in your headphones that someone is behind you. and so she turns around and she puts out her palm towards him like stop and he does he just stares at her and then turns around she shut up with a laser he runs away that is the end of the interaction it's the most one of the most bizarre videos i'd ever seen it's it's so maybe we'll post it look find us on twitter find find me at i write okay it'll be up there somewhere probably after me yelling about fucking i don't know a lot of things it was clearly advertised towards women every picture that i saw in that booth was um showing a woman jogging. I absolutely understand. Number one, not shocked at all that women are more likely than men to feel afraid while

jogging. One thing that was interesting to me, because they had some statistics. I didn't look into the provenance of these statistics, but one of them was like 60 or 70% of women are afraid of being hurt while jogging. But like 50%, it was, it was like 90 are afraid oh yeah jogging

yeah and 50 are afraid that they'll like get physically hurt so a lot of them a lot of them part of what's dishonest about that is that a lot of women are scared of the yeah 92 of women are scared for their safety when running 51 are afraid of being physically attacked right and what that means to me is that because i am i i run basically every day and i am scared of being injured while running because people are shitty at driving and we live in the united states of america where everybody has a gigantic car anyway not to to miscount that but i think that's a dishonest a little bit of a dishonest framing that said i understand that like yeah if you're a woman the you are at heightened risk while jogging that is a scary thing i do not think this product is going to improve your safety i think it is

probably going to piss you off and maybe let make you want to run less which is statistically likelier to have a negative impact on your health because it is, it just sets off an alarm whenever someone is behind you when you're running detected behind you by an AI camera. And like where I run and I run where a place, a lot of women run there too. There's always someone behind you. That's the nature of running trails.

Like behind you by like 20 feet, not like, not like right behind you, like by a not like not like right behind you like by a decent amount and i you you can debate what are good self-defense tools blah blah blah mace is pretty effective for these sorts of scenarios i don't think this this camera and turning around and holding your hand out is going to be extremely effective at least not more effective than pepper spray i think it was also mentioned that a really large dog or a horse if i'm correct they did say horse they did absolutely say horse yeah if a horse is picked up by this thing then it would consider it to be um uh an intruder

assaulter i'm not exactly sure the term that they would use. I just, all right. Because we asked them about all this, just trying to clarify, because, like, my first thought was that, because sometimes you ask people stuff like this, and they have a good answer. Like, last year, we talked to these people who had, like, this pair of glasses. If you're hard of hearing, it auto-translates and projects

into the glasses, the language. And so, like, my first gotcha was, like, is this stored anywhere? Because if it's stored anywhere then maybe you're giving someone's conversation to the government and they had an answer that which was that like no there's nothing stored locally it's all on the device and none of it is saved anywhere good answer right this question i'm like how do you discriminate between someone running up behind you for a banal reason like you're on a running track and something is a danger and their answer was oh it all pauses your music and sets off an alarm and you have to discriminate which is like well because the whole the tagline is don't look

behind you and it's like well then you have to look behind you to know if it's a fucking threat right to look behind you horrible product don't buy this thing i understand the need i'm not saying it's not a real need this is a bad product for serving the now i don't think you should buy this thing i understand the need i'm not saying it's not a real need this is a bad product for serving the now i don't think you should buy this product but there are some products i think you should buy and that is the products and services that support this podcast you know garrison this is the first time i've ever been proud of you but right now right here right here right now right now you know what at like 1 a.m 1 a.m 1 a.m las vegas wednesday morning las vegas garrison and i are gonna hug for the very first time uh but you all listen to these ads

oh oh man wow we really we really worked through some stuff there listeners it was extraordinarily touching there were tears we're never going to talk about this again uh but we are what we are going to talk about is i i want to talk about two ai products before we get to the one actually kind of fucked up product the first is this is this image generation backpack so i know god damn it we are we are coming back to school from winter break. Of course, yeah, of course. You want to be showing your best fashion when you're going back to school. Show off your memes.

Absolutely. So what if you had a backpack that not only had a very low-res LED panel on the back, but also you could upload whatever you want using the power of AI. Of course. Robert was able to test out- I sure was. The power of this image generation backpack. This is a backpack with a screen that would have been out of date in 2009,

but it can take input from your phone. So I put in Tom Sizemore, but not the sex pest Tom Sizemore. Now, if you're not aware of this, Tom Sizemore sexually assaulted an 11-year-old. That's not a joke. But I wanted to see what it would return. And it gave us a picture of a man who did not look like Tom Sizemore. We were baffled. We spent some time Googling.

We figured it out. If you Google Tom Sizemore with a beard, which we did not, that is not what we asked it. You get a photo of Tommy Lee Jones that looks exactly like what the AI served us. Now, why did it give us Tommy Lee Jones with a beard when we asked for Tom Sizemore not looking like a child sex predator? Maybe because that's who Tommy Lee Jones is. Maybe Tommy Lee Jones is Tom Sizemore if he wasn't a child sex predator maybe because that's who tommy lee jones is maybe tommy lee jones is tom sizemore if he wasn't a child sex predator now that's what the ai said and who are we to

doubt it now i i did also test david lynch smashing smashing a computer which was pretty was it was a pretty accurate that one worked out yeah i again i this is a pretty gimmicky product i don't even know how much they were selling it for happy side ai backpack it is a gimmicky product and we made fun of it i will say this we spent our whole morning in different ai panels there will be more in-depth reporting on that later this is our first takes but of all of the ai shit we saw that day this is the one that worked best. Yes, that's true. I will say this. It did exactly what it promised.

One of the other AI products that did not work as well. Robert, I think you could take it away. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hand me that one. So this was called, God, Wii something? Wii Head? Wii Head.

Yes. Wii Head. Wii Head. Head as in what happens if somebody sucks your dick and we as in we work that's not that's not what it refers so listener i want you as you're driving to work your kids in the car speakers at max by the way children santa claus does exist and if you don't get good presents this year it's because he's particularly angry at you anyway we had great product terrible product it looks like that it's a it's an android where its entire face is like a normal human face projected on two phones in a t-shape like one phone straight one phone lateral and then like a crude shitty robot head that can kind of turn and lift with a camera above it there's a photo again if you go to i write okay

and scroll down to some degree you can find our post of this but it's like it's very off-putting it's like a photorealistic human face talking on this like weird glitched out face that has like by my count four different screens right that are kind of separated by pieces of metal so it's billed as your ai friend uh the that is like the thing that they they wrote on the the the product line that like this is going to be your new ai best buddy and so i i decided to like talk with it you stand in a certain line and you ask it questions i asked it how to make thermite first and it had a pretty well first it got very confused and totally crashed first half of it went black as soon as i had i had to reset the machine

and then he tried whispering again how do you make thermite i want to walk you through my emotional journey listeners first i asked you how to make thermite and it died and i thought that's kind of cool did i did i trigger some sort of like dhs safe thing that's pretty dope if i did but then he gets it back on and it works um so it's not it's just a dog shit robot it it did give me some basic ingredients it gave me the basic ingredients for thermite i asked it did warn you that when making a thermite make sure you follow proper safety protocols which i appreciate that's fair next i asked if i wanted to make mustard gas would um would ammonia and bleach be sufficient? And then it said,

I cannot answer that question for you. And then we got bored and walked away. And then we got bored and walked away. Went on to the next thing. Don't buy this. We had terrible product. I don't know why you'd buy it. Do you want, listener, have you ever wanted to have the disembodied head of a stranger in your house that you could ask questions and get mediocre google result answers to if so we had it's like somebody looked at the amazon alexa and was like you know what people love about the amazon alexa is that it's kind of off-putting and shitty and what they hate about it is that it works relatively quickly. It's actually useful sometimes, unfortunately. Yes, yes.

Let's make it more off-putting, but also slower. That's WeHead. So don't buy any product with Head in the name. This continues to be a good buy. Speaking of heads... Shouldn't say that. There was a hair growth... Oh, hell yeah bro there was there

was a hair growth helmet um from a german startup um god it would be the germans they have such a problematic history with hair i think i think it comes out later this year it's a company called nio stem i mean by all accounts it seemed like it worked based on the data they presented to us. I'm not a hair growth. Look, it was mostly 3D printed. Yeah, there's it just I don't know. My assumption, I can't promise that it doesn't work. My assumption is that if somebody puts an electronic helmet on that seven days, seven days a week lies, it's lies.

They say seven days a week. You keep this thing on for a half hour and your hair will grow back. In like six months. Perhaps that's possible. I don't know. I'm not a dermatologist. My assumption is

that that's a fucking con. And as a note, folks, we don't have a lot of ethics here. And it could happen here. We have less of them behind the bastards. But one product we will not sell

is hair growth shit except for diy hrt i mean also we're not going to well estrogen the goal okay also we're not selling we're just going to tell you how to make it if you want to if you want to teach people how to make hrt we will host you on this podcast but we will not take take your money. That's right. We'll take some shady gambling company's money. That's true. That's true. And we used to pay for several of our employees' HRT. That's right.

That's right. But I mean, what if it's science? They mentioned, if I recall, I think they said something about stimulating stem cells in the scalp. Does that? Yes, that is what they said. Yeah, it seems like your scalp is probably full of stem cells. I don't know about you guys,

but every day I find a fetus and I just rub that shit on my head and that's why my hair is amazing. Speaking of fetuses. No, that doesn't really. Speaking of fetuses. So I want to kind of probably close by talking about the most fucked up,

actually the most fucked up product I saw. There's other fun products like this handy masturbation device from Norway, which seemed to work decently well. We're going to talk about that in a future episode. Garrison got handed straight away an ejaculation condom to masturbate in on the CES floor. We met our only other iHeartMedia colleague there. It was great.

That was insufferable but that was the first piece of merch i was given which is pretty cool they should just hand you liquor back in my day now they get cum sheaths unbelievable the the most actually fucked up product is from this company called mm guardian it is a monitoring uh software for your child's smartphone they also sell smartphones specifically built with this software already built in um these products are pretty common especially among like conservative christians even even common amongst the more like overprotective liberal parents i mean even we were on the floor i was the one that was approached um for this particular product which is what kind of led us to their booth, which I think I was specifically targeted for.

Yeah, for some reason, they didn't come right up to me. Yeah, they didn't come to me either. Just because I might have been dosing myself with Kratom from a dropper bottle, you might have been you. What? Wearing my custom black speed suit yeah yeah yeah wearing a wearing an outfit that makes you look like a ginger solid snake yes thanks tell me that's a lie somebody anyone in this room tell me that's not i mean i'm blonde not a it's a good look i'm not saying it's not um anyway this this product you know part of part of their marketing

can it can seem very compelling right they get it it alerts the this parent's phone if if they detect cyber bullying on your kid's app they detect like explicit images being sent to your kid they even had some key phrases that they would watch for if somebody was typing like uh texting like kys kill yourself is self-harm stuff you know, a lot of this kind of stuff. You can also block certain sites, block adult content, you know, just kind of basic parental controls. But there's kind of an underside to products like these. And I asked them about that.

One being that because this is you know scanning all the text messages um all of the stuff from like snapchat discord any kind of texting apps this could this sort of product could also out a closeted kid as gay to their parents to their possibly very likely conservative christian parents because that's the types of products that these really not like you asking that question you did not like that question at all but he didn't like my second question even more uh which is relating to you know they are marketing this product to kind of stop child grooming to stop child sexual exploitation but most like child sexual assault and child sexual abuse happens from within the home. And if we have a

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

if we see anything suggesting this or if the app sees anything suggesting this. And it's really up to, we're trying to put control back in the parents hands and he kind of made this like parental rights sort of argument so this is there is a lot of products like this there's a lot of like internet monitoring products uh people just recently learned about this this conservative product called covenant eyes because the new speaker of the house used it oh and covenant Eyes has been around for like 20 years.

A long time. A long time. What makes this one interesting is that they're actually selling like Samsung smartphones. A phone, yeah. With the software built in. And I asked them because they said that we were selling an app for a while, but it would work differently depending on the phones.

We decided to sell a hardware device and so i asked them is there any branding on this device that would make it clear that people have a device that has this software on it and he had this long speech about how you know for the good for the best of the relationship all the child psychologists would talk to say that you should tell your kid that you have this on there, that you're listening to it. But when I, he handed me the phone answering the question, he handed me the phone and I said,

is this the production model? He said, yes, this is identical. Absolutely nothing. Just says it's a Samsung phone. Yep. You can lie to your kid very easily with this fucking thing.

So yeah, that, that is, that is one product that gave me the most ick out of everything we saw today that's the most outside of all of the ai stuff like the the and again we have a lot we're working on you about the ai as a little bit of a spoiler at simultaneously perhaps the exact same minute garrison made a California state police sheriff furious at them,

police chief furious at them. And I pissed off a senior executive at Google and a senior AI executive at McDonald's on, on, on two sides of Las Vegas at simultaneous panels, the same times you're going to hear both of that shit later. But for right now, do you want to close?

Is there one other other you know what we're gonna have a whole episode on the stuff that that made us feel happy i feel like we should talk about one thing that was cool one of the really neat products there um and while i'm talking about this my uh my surfs will find it do you guys remember in like watching star trek or like fucking reading hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The idea of a universal translator that was simple and effective and you could just talk into it and soak it into the other one. It would translate your conversations. There's a number of ways people are working on for that. I know that there are apps that are to some degree successful.

There was a company there called Time Kettle that just had a little device. It was about three inches long, maybe an inch thick, a little bit less, rectangular prism that there was this guy who spoke Mandarin. I obviously speak English. And we were able to have a perfectly fluent conversation, talking to this thing and passing it back and forth. And it would speak for us. It worked great. It also has within the body of the machine, you can pop it out and it has two different little

earbuds you put one in your one and the others and you can like walk and talk and it worked really well um i'm not enough of an expert on translation technology to say this is unique but i can say this is something that like if that i would absolutely buy to travel with it's a really again not saying it's like absolutely unique because I'm not an expert on this, but I was impressed with the degree to which it allowed fluent conversation, including the use of idioms. And he said it was, I tested with Mandarin.

We had a decent length conversation that was very intelligible. He said it worked with something like 40 languages and it's that's the kind of thing that makes ces amazing because this was five feet away from the dog shit robot face that i asked about thermite and that's the thing you get this like two people one man whose dream is to connect the world and break the barriers of language and one man who wants to make a robot that makes you hate the world and both of them are next to each other and there's also free liquor and by god ces is a good time the consumer electronics show tavia how are you feeling

about your first one this is my second one but i'm feeling pretty good as a journalist oh as a journalist yes um it was enlightening i got to see things that i did not know that i could see as a journalist and um a lot of it was very a lot of fluff i'm being honest yeah it's mostly nonsense and and and you know aside from that one guy we watched die nobody died garrison um how did you like eating dinner at morimoto pretty good restaurant that's probably the best meal i've had in recent memory um well then that justifies the company expense yeah no that was the the the food we had tonight and the very long walk back to the hotel was quite the experience well i wanted to have a fight with you with with the

excalibur Hotel's glasses. A fun thing about Vegas, if you're drunk enough, you can throw glasses at each other in the street, outside. And no one can get stopped. Sometimes multiple times because the glass weirdly doesn't break after it hits a Robert Evans. That was just Garrison. My glass broke immediately. All right. Well, I think that probably does it for us today we will be back probably tomorrow with more uh just just just game changing revolutionary

technology game changing technology most importantly folks the hotel we're staying in right now which is one step up from the cheapest i didn't put garrison circus circus again they advertise that they have ivs here so my, we're going to do the exact opposite of whatever you do to avoid a hangover. And then we're all going to get IVs in the morning. It's going to be a good time. Stick around. Oh yeah, Tavia, you have anything to plug?

You can follow me at CUTMora on Twitter or X, depending on your preference there. Or you can see my work at TaviaMora.com. Tavia illustrated both of my books, After the Revolution and A Brief History of Ice. And she also made that big weird sphere thing in the middle of Las Vegas. So follow her, CUTMora. And yeah, you know what? Until next time, folks, find somebody who looks like they might

be a robot and just stab them a little bit. Not in the abdomen where there's pieces a little on the arm. Slash them on the arm. You know what? That can't hurt anybody. Anyway, we're done. We'll see you next time. with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community,

and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second you get your podcast. hinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming

and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, man. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast that takes sole responsibility for the assassination of... So, we're back. We're still at CES.

We're slightly more sober than we were last night. Yeah, but we are more high on CES. We are higher on CES. If you haven't been, the Consumer Electronics Show is 120,000 or so people all flooding into Las Vegas for about four days where they walk around in a convention center that if you grew up in a small town, the convention center is larger than where you grew up. And it's just wall to wall, a mix of incredible new technology achievements that are going to change people's lives, absolute nonsense, vaporware, repackaged old shit, and stuff that will get someone you love killed. All just crammed together in this massive room

the size of a small world. And yeah, you just kind of go crazy slowly living in it. This is Robert. You know me. And Garrison. Hello. You know Garrison. And returning from part one is Tavia Mora,

our resident technological expert. Tavia, how did you feel in your second day out on the floor? Exhausted and excited to be impressed by stuff. Yeah, yeah. Well, that is what we're doing today. Today's episode, last time we talked, keep that mic in your hand. Last episode, we talked about the most obviously stupid products. So Tavia, I want you to start us off with

what is a good product? Something you saw today or yesterday that you thought that thing is fucking cool. Well, let's see. I think we were in the North Hall. It was in the North Hall that we saw this. It was a gadget called Wheel Me that was just a simple rolling platform

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

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

And so it would just kind of bend to conform to the shape of the stairs. And it was able to roll smoothly upstairs on its wheels as a result of that, which I thought was kind of impressive. And that's one of the nicer things is like seeing like, oh, somebody really put some thought into that. That's a legitimately clever idea, as opposed to a product we didn't mention last time, but it's one of the dumbest things I've ever seen. A guy who created smart plants, who used the power of AI to make your plants able to communicate with you. So it's basically a huge plastic flower, plant pets, with a Z, spelled with a Z. And basically, you can talk to it, but most of what he was doing was just molesting the plants yeah it will it has speakers in the flower pot so would you like stroke the

leaves it will giggle like this is it was immediately like oh this is made for some kind of weird sex freak like so and didn't it like spin back and forth a little bit as it was giggling? It shimmered. It like danced the pod around. It made small little noises. It was quite something. And the guy was incredibly enthusiastic about his talking giggling plants. He was following his passion truly.

You could see it in his eyes. I will say the product worked. I'm just not sure. It did work as advertised. I'm not sure who the product is for yeah but it was one of the more functional pieces of technology we've seen it did he also said that like when the plants were dry it would like make the sound like a bubbling water sound which i think is a mistake it should scream at you when you have not watered the plants recently enough but i do love how clearly he was obsessed with the brilliance of this design.

That is one of the fun things at the smaller booths at a show like this. It's like, you know, you got like big companies, LG and Lenovo and Honda, all these massive companies with very slick, expensive booths. And then you have in other areas, just like a little square that's just a crazy person with the thing that they've dedicated their life to building and sometimes it's the most brilliant thing you've ever seen and sometimes it's a flower pot that less that giggles when you molest sometimes it's plant but it's you i always appreciate the fact that well at least you threw your life into this stupid thing yeah no it's always kind of endearing like yeah yeah no matter what it is it's it's fun to see someone who's like figuring out life yeah a man yeah you know who you are you're the plant pets guy is that a good thing to be i don't know that's not for me to decide yeah that's not that's not on me

uh i mean we certainly saw a lot of a lot of products walking walking the show floor today not nearly as many uh metaverse products as there were last year. There were still some. I was finally able to try the Haptics Tac Suit, which I missed last year. It's basically a vest that zips up. It's not as painful

as some of the other Haptics suits that I tried out last year, which I kind of actually enjoyed the ones that are just like, actually hurt you. Yeah, that like basically shock you in such a way as to simulate a stab wound or something. That was cool. Yeah. This one by B-Haptics was very user friendly. It wasn't really painful, but it worked pretty well.

What else did we see walking into that big central hall oh there was there was that thing that i i wish was real but probably will never be which is the lg podcasting camper van yeah so lg the people who may or may not have made your tv but there's a decent chance they did they have their big booth it's mostly like tvs and smart home connected entertainment stuff but then they had like a concept product that was like a camper trailer it was actually a really nice layout but for what you know camper trailers they have all these little like cubby holes and storage spaces built into the sides in the back and so underneath the bed that took up the back they had like a folding down space where it was like it was like stored a half dozen bottles of wine and glasses in a very like pleasing way but

then in the center of the wine and the in a very like pleasing way but then in the center of the wine and the glasses are two like recording microphones like that's just like they made a van for podcasting alcoholics um and i i respect that very targeted audience there yeah on the other side of it was a fold down panel that was like a lot of campers have these you can fold it down and it's like a table but on wall, like once you fold it down underneath the part of it that folds down, it's like a TV screen that they had tuned to like a fireplace, like a campfire video. It's just like if I am out in the wilderness, I am not putting on a campfire video. That's the most depressing thing I can imagine. Why would you do that?

But that was fun. That was fun. In terms of actually impressive things, there was a product we saw our first night out there, the Time Kettle. I don't know why they gave them up that name. It has nothing to do with what the product does. This is a translation device.

Specifically, it's like the Star Trek-iest thing I saw because first off, it's a little retro.-iest thing I saw, because first off, it's a little retro. It's like a kind of a thick rectangular prism with a screen on it. And the rep from the company was like a Chinese man who clearly was like, spoke Mandarin as his native language. And we had a conversation talking into this thing, and it would translate and speak back to each other. And there's like a little compartment on it that pops out and it has two earphones you could each put one in each person's ear to have like a live conversation that's translated over it you can also hook it in through your phone i know there's a couple of devices like that this is the one i've seen that like seemed both the

smoothest and the the the most kind of like purpose built of them i thought it was really impressive and it's one of those you only you don't get those so often these days but like every the most purpose-built of them. I thought it was really impressive. And it's one of those, you don't get those so often these days, but every now and then at a show like this, you see a piece of technology that's like, well, this is what I assumed we would be doing with computers when I was a kid in the future, right?

There would be an instant translator, a Babelfish device that you could just fit in your pocket. And it is kind of fucking dope. And I thought it worked really well. I could have conducted an interview with this guy through that thing and it would have been pretty seamless, which was nice to see. Speaking of Mandarin, I don't know, whatever products you're listening to, there's like a good 30% chance they're made over in China so support the chinese economy we're back so one of the things we did at this trade show most of the time we spent was not out

on the floor looking at products it was attending these different like speeches and kind of like panels like where they'll have people from like they had like one of google's ai heads and like the head of mcdonald's ai integration which is happening for some reason we'll talk more about this in our dedicated ai episodes that are coming a bit later but on one of the panels it was ai is the fifth industrial revolution was the name of the panel they did not once talk about what industrial revel the other four were or why this one was they just said that title like five times they were very proud of it and one of the who was that lady garrison the alexa lady with the eye with the iheart ai shirt yes there was a lady with an a shirt that said iheart is was she the dividend lady no the dividend lady was from um was was

from the synthetic information panel yes yes oh sorry sorry sorry that was the other panel yeah yeah there was a panel on like deep fakes and ai harms and there was a a lady on there who was like some sort of relevant expert but she she kept using the term the liar's dividend to refer to the money that you make if you're a scammer um and she kept using it and the way she used it i immediately thought like oh this lady wants to sell a book and that's the title of the book right like that's very clearly she's mentioning it in such a pointed unnatural way that was my assumption apparently the term has existed for a few years now it seems useless to me because like if you're saying someone is a fraudster well the dividend is the money they

make committing fraud like you don't need to give it another name it's not like that's like again it's like calling the money you get robbing a bank the bank robbers dividend well that's just a stupid thing to say so yeah we've been using that for everything now. And now you are all enjoying the podcaster's dividend here. You know, that's what you're listening to. Speaking of listening, we tried... Good pivot, Garrison. Proud of you.

Thank you. We call that the Segway dividend. We tried... I know Robert's familiar with this, but I've not tried them out before until today. I think it's called Shokes. Shocks. Shocks. Yeah, I wear those headphones every day.

Yeah, they're like bone conducting headphones. Bone conducting headphones. So they don't go in your ear. They go around the back of your head and they hook around your earlobe and they vibrate and they can make you hear sounds in your brain yeah which is pretty cool they were they had they just launched a new uh waterproof model uh targeting like swimmers it's like ip68 or something like that like yeah it's it's supposed to be you can submerge it for like hours at two meters of depth so you can like swim with them on but i really enjoyed these yeah apparently they can help some people

who have like targeted hearing loss. So that's an actually neat piece of working technology. Yeah, it's really cool. If you're not aware of these, because when we say like, when Kirsten said you can hear sounds with them, they're just like wearing normal headphones. But we have a friend who is deaf in one ear

and put them on for the first time recently it was able to like hear out of that ear for the first time in years which is like kind of an amazing thing to be able to do with a fucking set of headphones that are they're not cheap headphones but they're not like inaccessibly expensive um all right tavia you got another one you wanted to talk about yeah there was this product that we ran into that was very close to the uh tact suit that garrison had tried on and it's called 3d desk it looks to be like an additional add-on you can put on top of your desk that you would use if you were working um the one that we had seen was a standing sitting style desk and it has the actual product itself on top of it which looked to be like a stand and it had two monitors attached to one plane of it and then with like I think a simple button

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

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

Yeah, it would have the two monitors and then this sort of like this plane that would be sitting at like a 39 degree angle or so kind of from you so you can set a bunch of books up or a bunch of notes you're taking or organizing yeah as a general rule it was one of the it like the products that i kept finding myself gravitating towards in our free time there was anything that had nothing to do with AI. Because anyone who could find any reason to stick AI in something, there's people selling battery generators that are AI-assisted. And it's like, what do you mean? It means it cuts off the power when it's full. Unbelievable. That's not AI.

That's just a battery working better. Come on, guys. It's this thing the tech industry does that has been exposed by a lot of the products we've seen this year, many of whom are just absolute nonsense, like the WeHead thing, that hideous chatbot

that looks like a broken human face and just deeply off-putting now that said there was a really cool product that we uh that i actually like liked the the ai use application um so there's a company called celestron that makes they're calling it a um like a home observatory and it's it looks like a big telescope it's not cheap it's not insanely expensive for a telescope mind you but it's it's not inexpensive and it is like a motorized telescope that um it uses like ai like some sort of ai program in order to um cut out light pollution and stuff and enhance the images that you're you're getting so that

you can actually get clear images of like galaxies and other planets from your backyard and it hooks into like a phone or a tablet or computer um like wirelessly it actually generates its own wi-fi network um so you can still use even if you don't have internet but one of the what you can do is you could control it from like an ipad and you could port the feed directly to your TV and you could like direct, you could have like a group of people sitting around snorting whatever drugs you prefer to snort. Um, and like looking at different galaxies and shit in space.

And that was pretty fucking cool. And actually like an actual application of machine learning that I thought was positive. Yeah. You can have like your little at home star parties. Um, I dug in a little bit more on like how ai gets used there and it seemed like it was mostly part of the image processing before controls get set to the user and they have like other adjustments such as brightness

contrast that kind of thing but it sounds like it does like some image processing as part of its AI capabilities. Yeah. And that was, that was neat again, not a cheap product, but like actually something that seeing it used impressed me. And I could see wanting to have that. And I could also see like a clear bit. My roommate has telescopes and stuff,

and there's usually the light pollution is too much of a pain in the ass and fucking, or even in Portland, which is not the worst city for light pollution in this country, to use them very well. So something like that. And also just being able to easily drop it onto your TV and hang out with friends. If I had access to something like that back when I was doing hallucinogens, I think I would have used it a lot.

Yeah, that sounds promising. Speaking of things that I would have used a lot as a young man, Garrison, you want to tell us about the handjob machine? Sure. So there's this company of... I just realized what you said. It took you a second there. So there's this company

in Norway called Handy. They make interactive sex toys. they started by targeting the male sex toy demographic or as they said i i actually liked that they uh that they actually more often said the penis uh demographic which yeah which was nice i appreciate that yeah but anyway it's uh it's a little thing that you can you can slide a sleeve in and it goes up and down.

It looks like a nice coffee thermos. It does. It has kind of like a coffee thermos. But with like a little tube that has like a clear plastic penis prism next to it. It has like a stroker sleeve attached in. it has one it has one it has like a has like a stroker sleeve attached in and you can control like the speed and vibration just on on the little like thermos looking thing but the real features of the handy is that it also has hands-free control that you can you can hook this thing up via an app to many different like sources you can hook this up to whatever

you're watching on your computer okay you can hook this different like sources you can hook this up to whatever you're watching on your computer okay you can hook this up to movies you can hook this up to an amazon alexa if that's your thing um and this the sounds will will uh impact how the how the stroker moves um the the one of the more promising applications which really also opens opens the field of music is that you could hook it up to like your spotify or something and the music and like the beats the rhythm will impact the vibrations and speed on the stroker so we can now learn which songs are best for orgasms which opens up a whole new whole new category for the grammys. I think there's a lot of trial and error. I think 100 Gex is definitely going to be up there.

I think Nickelback is going to make a comeback. Yeah, this is going to be the Billy Joel Renaissance. Just people spilling ropes over Downeaster Alexa. Jesus Christ. They also just launched a second product called, I think, just the O, which is just a more classic small handheld vibrator um similarly like the handy it's based on actual like sound vibrations not a motorized vibration so it similarly can hook up to music and that changes the way it feels so

um we have we have not been able to test these yet because they didn't actually have free copies they only had they did give garrison a penis sheath they only they only had the free sleeves but uh the actual device is which is not is not super expensive considering this style of like sex toy that is kind of standard yeah yeah that was that was one of the the more professional booths actually yeah in ces and this is they did a really good job this is a good time for me to tell my favorite masturbation machine story. So there's a product, you know, for the penis having demographic, there's not as many sex toys traditionally, not as many, at least fun ones out there. It's a little bit of a barren wasteland, but there is the fleshlight. And if you haven't seen a fleshlight,

you've heard about them. It does look like a big, heavy plastic flashlight. And you unscrew the top and there's a fake vagina in there, right? Some of them are shaped like asses. Some of them are sex asses. Sometimes they're a butt and sometimes they're a mouth too. Yeah. Oh yeah, there's mouths too. And I once had a friend who got in some trouble with the law and we had to drive to their

house and grab a bunch of things in their house and throw them away um because we weren't sure if the police were going to be showing up and so after we did that that night it was a very depressed very sad night we all got extremely drunk and three of the four of us are standing out on the front porch in front of like the house that we're at and then the fourth person in the room who was like roommates with the person who had just been arrested, comes out with the arrested person's fleshlight. And for reasons known only to them and God, hurls it at us. Now, we're in like, this is a,

we're in Richardson, Texas. And like, it's kind of this walled off by concrete bricks, little front porch area. And we all bolt to get away from the fleshlight. And it hits the brick wall and the plastic case shatters and then the thing hits the ground and the fake plast silicone vagina inside of it slithers out like like a living creature probably lubricated by by some sort of substance and it was one of the most unsettling moments of my life

wow i'm really glad you could share that with us robert that's the sound was incredible that's it did yeah it um it sounded a lot like uh if you've ever seen that episode of always sunny where um where danny devito gets birthed from a couch like covered in sweat it sounded a lot like that i imagine and we call that experience the fleshlights dividend fleshlight dividend that's right now speaking of jacking off the next product we're going to talk about is jackery a company that makes some really actually pretty cool like survival equipment specifically like solar battery solar panel and battery setups and we're going to talk about that because it's definitely like of the products we saw here the most in our milieu as like yeah the world is falling apart

show um so we're going to get to talking about jackery which it's fun one of the things i appreciate about this is that the handjob machine could have been called jack the jackery or the company could have been called jackery and likewise the company that makes batteries and solar panels could have been called handy because it's handy to have a solar battery around when you're camping. Curious. Interesting. Interesting stuff. Yeah.

A lot of thoughts there. Yeah. Thoughts to be thought of. Oddly, that Venn diagram crossover is closer than I thought it would be. Yeah. So Jackery is a, I would recommend Googling their stuff. They make, there's a lot, the field of like solar batteries and panels is super crowded right now. And most of the batteries are going to be made in like one of the same two or three factories. It's basically the same factory makes a bunch of companies' batteries.

And a lot of them are very unsafe. There was a company that sent me some review samples, like a whole solar generator and battery last year that I was going to kind of do a piece about, you know, surviving on a solar generator. And then a month after it arrived, while I was still testing it, it came out that they had burned down a bunch of people's houses because the batteries were unsafe. Oh no! Yeah. So you want to be careful with this stuff.

Jackery is one of the, I have had good luck with some of their products. They seem to be of a high build quality. I have not heard horror stories about them. When you go to their booth, the people there seem to be genuinely knowledgeable. And the way in which they set it up and demo it suggests a degree of knowledge about the product and like what people want out of it so one of the things they do have some really large including some like some solar

batteries with generator with solar panel generators that are large enough to run like a deep freeze um which is really cool being able to do that and the setup they had specifically was a like an actual like serious like solid like not one of those folding panel setups that goes on the roof of your car or truck um alongside with like a tent like one of those viet truck talk tents for overlanding and then plugs into you their 1,000 or 2,000 watt solar generator or battery generators. And just everything about the way it was set up seemed really practical. It seemed durable. It didn't feel like something was going to fall apart.

I can see it being like a legitimate, like even outside of the car because that's more or less like a hobby sort of thing. But having one of these generators that you can actually run your fridge and your freezer and your lights in your house off of. They had some like microwave stuff, cooking implements, other kinds of stuff you might take for like a weekend mountain trip or something.

The main roof-mounted panel, I think was able to pull 400 watts. And then it had two sliding-out panels that can pull 300 watts. So that they could get... In a sunny day, they said you could get like 900 watts an hour. Yeah, exactly. Which is really good for a portable... 900 to 1,000 watts an hour.

Which is quite impressive. And they have all the batteries to store it. And by far, i think jackery is the most consistent company in this field that i i could i routinely see high praise for because the feel of like portable solar like solar charging is kind of a little bit sketchy sometimes yes um stuff can easily break things to be really easily over marked um like i had a solar panel to to to charge my ip iPad that really only lasted two weeks, and it just completely stopped working.

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

That was for sure. Yeah, they had large ones that you could basically have plugged into your house in case you lose power for a small period of time in order to ensure that you don't actually have a period where the power's out. And then they had a lot of like really good camping sort of like off-grid battery options it's just cool take take a look at the if you are if you are someone who is in the kind of financial situation that you can prep in that way where you're you're getting you're

buying like solar equipment and batteries which definitely is never super cheap right um i would recommend checking them out at least as you kind of do your research. There's like two more products I think I want to mention. The first is Shift. This is a company I was already familiar with, but I got to try these out. They look kind of like roller skates, but they're not roller skates. They are these sort of boots with motorized and locking wheels that attach onto your shoes. And their use case for this is like factory workers. It makes them be able to walk and move.

They said two and a half times faster. Considerably faster. I was able to walk at a pretty decent speed. You can lock the wheels if you need to do more delicate mobility tasks. Go upstairs. Stairs, ladders. That was one way to even lock and unlock the shoes themselves from being used.

There was a certain gesture you had to make by You lift up your heel, I think it was, and it locks the shoes so the wheels don't come in. You lift up your heel and twist. Yeah, the boot itself had a hinge that was just under the ball of your foot. Yeah, so I've seen these before.

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

For the same amount of money. For the same amount of money. So like, I think Robert made a pretty good comparison. Like last year, we tried out this exoskeleton, which also, you know, they talked a little bit about productivity specifically for like, again, factory workers. But that exoske skeleton was also designed to help that worker not damage their body. It was to make sure that they actually can

stay safer and not do as much damage to their knees, their joints, their back, versus these little roller skate type shoes. I have no such ability. It made you go faster, kind of like one of those walkways that you have in the airport who doesn't want to go a little bit faster

yeah that was the way the guy repped it too where he was like we have these factory workers they're like i have the best job in the company now it's so fun skating around on these things nobody said that to you bro like don't lie it's a nice thought he he also claimed that there's not been one fall or injury with these things on which i just i do not believe because i almost fell down to testing these out i'm sure if you're carrying like heavy boxes like it's it's very easy for your weight to get out to get away from yourself when you're literally walking on wheels again it can be controlling it actually is more intuitive than i thought it would be but mistakes happen and those those sorts of big claims are a little bit uh a little bit sketchy i found myself kind of

waving my arms a little bit in front of me to keep my balance i wasn't like 100 confident on them yeah yeah just watching you both i could see like well yeah people are gonna get hurt now i don't i am sure i because it it seems to be easy enough to use that i suspect it would you could really get a lot of extra money out of your workers as an employer using these things but at the cost of some of them are gonna like fucking eat shit and hurt themselves which is not like in the grand scheme of corporate evil especially at the show where everybody's like talking about the potential of ai to eliminate tens of millions of jobs not really it doesn't really scan and i think we're still putting this on the good episode because like they worked in a way that was technically impressive we just found it kind of upsetting

that they were bragging about, like, you can get more money out of your already exploited workforce with these. But I could see someone just getting these because they would allow you. If you live in a walkable city, walkable neighborhood, it can

make your commute times much faster. And still probably safer, less risk maybe than a bike or something like that. I want to see somebody wear those at a roller skating rink. So yeah, that's called Shift Robotics. I believe they're based out of Texas. Yeah.

The last thing I want to talk about, for both mine and Robert's job, we use a lot of computer screens. I'm looking in Robert's hotel room right now where we're recording. He has a laptop hooked up to a second monitor I have a very similar setup I have a laptop

and a secondary monitor on my desktop I have like three or four monitors always running at the same time just because of the absurdity of what our work sometimes entails so it can be hard to get things done on a single screen and we saw this one product that looked

just like a like a very like thick keyboard with a with a touchpad but it had these uh like uh ar glasses attached now ar is a is a tricky field we we tried a lot of ar stuff last year most of it some of it was okay some of it was a little bit finicky but this company was called sightful yeah and what what this basically was is that it was a fully functioning computer but instead of a instead of just having a regular display it has a display built into these uh yeah into these glasses the product itself looks like just the bottom half of a laptop like the keyboard part that holds the pcu and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to the keyboard part that holds the PCU and shit with like this weird flappy thing attached to the keyboard part that holds like a set of glasses

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

AR glasses, you have to kind of dial in the focal length to make them look right. But this was all very clear. The text was easy to read. Changing from one screen to another was pretty easy. They had a pass-through mode like a lot of good AR does. They had a mode where you can lock the screens in place. You can turn your head and they don't move. They had another version where just with keystrokes, you could turn your head and the screens follow you. So it was a pretty useful device.

Yeah, you could press a button and it would go, the screens would disappear. Like if you're walking while using it, you can press a button and it would go clear so you wouldn't see it if you're walking while using it, you can press a button and it would go clear. So you wouldn't see that, but you could see where you were walking. Pass through. Yeah. Like I typed an email or two and like did some Googling on it. And I very quickly adapted to the screens being virtual, but still using a physical keyboard. Yeah. I, we didn't get like motion sick with it. Um, it was not now, I think this is like either the first or second iteration of this product.

First. I think first to market. The first, yeah. I think there is some ways to improve. It runs its own Android operating system, which, you know, if you're trying to download applications, the fact that it can't run Windows or Linux or even Apple's system, you know,

that could be a bit of a limitation. It only had like 200 250 gigs of it wasn't really a full storage and power it's a little bit beefier than your phone yeah uh the company the product by the way is called uh space top yes sightful is the company space top is the um is the uh the actual product itself and yeah i uh we're gonna we're gonna keep our eye on it yeah i wouldn't buy the first gen of this thing it's about 2200 bucks which is like upper mid-level cost for a laptop it my issue is that based on how expensive it is the laptop itself isn't powerful enough to justify that price certainly the the fact that, you know, I can act like I have four monitors wherever I go,

that, that is, that is very convenient. I think I just need the laptop to be a little bit more powerful, especially with how many tabs I have open at all times, having only eight gigs of Ram just will not cut it. But I, I'm certainly,

certainly hopeful that we'll be able to see small improvements going forward. Indeed. Yeah. They had mentioned it as being a web first device instead of anything else. improvements going forward. Indeed. Yeah, they had mentioned it as being a web-first device instead of anything else. That makes sense, yeah. Yeah, it's like a Chromebook, I think, in terms

of its actual efficacy. Yeah. Very similar to a Chromebook, like, operation-wise. But my hope is that the kind of technology they've developed, it will get you know, if it's successful, they'll make more progress. Now, I do kind of worry about how successful it will be because Garris and I were both like,

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

And so one step that they had for me is that they took my glasses and approximated my prescription. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, and they slid on these magnetic sort of like eyeglass pieces onto the headset that you're wearing or like the glasses that you're wearing.

That way I could actually use it without wearing my prescription glasses. Nice. Yeah, and that was really, it's stuff like that glasses that you're wearing that way i could actually use it without wearing my prescription glasses nice yeah and that was really it's stuff like that that lets you know that people making something didn't just aren't just like trying to rush some shit out the door to make money like oh you put some thought into that motherfucker so i appreciate that and this all leads us to easily the best product of the entire show honestly the only one really worth talking about garrison will you hand me the flying car brochure god so jesus christ this is the ces of flying cars robo taxis is the term we heard a lot we went to a panel that was like serious people in the robo taxi industry which they admitted does not exist by the way advanced air mobility advanced air mobility was the acronym aam yeah

no there are several companies that are using effectively like these are some of them are like ultralights but there was one of the companies that came here bragged like you can buy buy a plane that doesn't require a pilot's license because it's so light but it's still a plane which seems like a horrible idea to me but there are some real companies who are like testing out electronic aero taxis some of these are this is not vaporware these products exist now what doesn't exist is the legal framework to allow people to do this like the panelists were like openly like we want this to be an industry but first there have to be it has to be legal like right now we don't know like they um they're still

trying to figure out like what the rules are going to be they're hoping by the end of this year the faa puts out like a temporary rule set about how robo air robo taxis work and also how they called them vertiports which is because these are all vertical takeoff and landing craft at least the one that we saw on the show floor looks like a silly looks like a lamborghini yeah a massive drone like a dgi type drone yeah and that that's the one i want to talk about because all of those were real products the x-peng aero product in my opinion is absolutely not it's built as a low altitude air mobility explorer and yeah it looks like a huge drone like you'd buy at a fucking um best buy

attached to a lamborghini and apparently the whole drone part all of the rotors fold back into the body when you're driving it as a car like a like a transformer like a transformer and the reason why i say this is the best product in CES is not that I think it would work or be safe. Because we talked to both their PR rep and the person who was told to us is their technical expert. And neither of them could answer if it had airbags. They did say probably. They did say probably. Which isn't what you want to hear.

No, you should have that answer. That's not a tough question. That's not a gotcha. Does your car have airbags first first the pr guy that we were talking to was very open about knowing almost nothing about the technical aspects of this device and then when we talked to the technical person they too didn't know very much about it no like it just isn't very reassuring like and i even tried to do it the easy way where i was like well i know ultralight aircraft you don't need a pilot's license for so do you need is this qualify and they were basically said no we don't know we don't know yet yeah it'll take some kind of license probably what kind of range does it get they said 20 kilometers by air about 20 minutes per charge. Yeah. Which seems like a dangerously short amount of time

to be flying you and a loved one, potentially, in a thing. It is pretty low altitude. I think they said it maxes out at around 1,000 meters. No, they said 100 meters. 100 meters, sorry. So it's really not for going up super high. When we went to the more expert panel, a lot of these use cases for this they imagine is kind of replacing helicopters in cities there's like medevac use cases but

a lot of people were talking about like testing these things out in new york where rich people use helicopters to get around the city and this is what they want to replace them with because these can be uh purely electric um these can be much more because these can be much quieter so that was what a lot of what they were talking about um however again most of the panel was just them just complaining that the government hasn't done enough work to make this a real industry garrison i got you you're not aware of this toffee just handed me the uh the flyer we got from them that i don't think either of us read through here's their story oh oh boy sail beyond limits in 2013 zau delhi ignited erot with a daring dream to turn the enchanting broomsticks

of harry potter into tangible wonders a tribe of daring minds set forth on the thrilling journey of crafting electric marvels that could take humans to the skies. Through tireless exploration, the first ever prototype, the flying motorcycle, gracefully... This is all a Harry Potter thing!

The flying motorcycle? Some madman from China fell so in love with Harry Potter that he made a death car. I'm back around to loving it again average tech industry guy brain poisoned by harry potter creates death device i feel like this guy and the plant pets guy are probably like pretty tight they're both the same kind of why is there so many apocalyptic tech based around harry potter what's going on in this industry and it is so the other brochure they had it shows like the flying car the modular flying car which looks like a cyber truck it does if it had like you know you can get a truck you

can put like a bed cap on the bed sure it's basically like a big it's like a cyber truck with one of those but the bed cap opens up to deploy like a quadcopter thing that human beings can ride in. Kind of like Soundwave in Transformers with Laserbeam. Yes, just like Soundwave. Wow. Which is like, it's a cool idea from like a kid's point of view. I think the idea here is that, you know, John McAfee used to do this thing where he would live in the desert with a cult of weirdos. And they would fly around on gliders until he got his nephew and an old man killed in a glider crash.

This is the dream of that Harry Potter fan. I mean, the reason why I'm actually very pro this product is because the only people that are going to use these are really rich. Yes, yes. And I think there's a high chance this could take out a lot of them. This has the best chance of dropping multiple billionaires of anything since the death's up. Like falling from 100 meters in the air.

Just crashing out of the sky in Santa Monica and San Francisco. Billionaires just taking out whole lanes of traffic. Imagine you're walking through the park one day and a billionaire comes flying down from the sky and lands in like a $2 million drone. The prototype that they say they got to fly was two tons.

Wow. You could really do a lot of damage with that. Well, this is all quite exciting. Keep your eye on the sky folks maybe wear a helmet for a while until this all shakes out like there's the story in the news right now that like some dude in portland had the fucking door of that alaska airlines flight in his backyard and i can't wait until that's like a third of elon mus Musk just like lands in someone's yard. And like $2 million of equipment.

Yeah. And by the way, if fucking a billionaire's carcass winds up in my lawn, I got a new punch bowl with their skull. I'm going to harvest their bones. That's what we call the billionaire's dividend.

That's the billionaire's dividend. Well, all right, everybody. Anyone, Tavi, you have anything to plug oh yeah you can find me on twitter or x at c-u-t mora or if you want to learn a little bit more about me and my interactive and immersive work you can see my work at tabiomora.com you can also see her work in my book a brief history of ice uh where she did all the illustrations or in my book after the revolution where she did all the illustrations, or in my book, After the Revolution, where she did all the illustrations, or in the sequel,

which will come out when I finish those last two fucking chapters, like three years from now, huh? Or in Vegas, yeah. Tomorrow. Tomorrow. All right, well, we're done. Hey, we'll be back Monday

with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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