It Could Happen Here Weekly 165

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Speaker 48 Hi, everyone. Welcome to Ickin Hubbard here.

Speaker 48 It's me, James, today with a terrible cold, as you can probably tell, but still very important to listen today because I am talking to Andrena, an organizer from K-Town for All up in LA.

Speaker 48 And we're going to talk about the fires in LA and the mutual aid response and what you can do to help. So welcome to the show, Andrina.

Speaker 1 Thank you for having me, James.

Speaker 48 Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now.

Speaker 48 So to begin with, like in case this has missed people and there's a lot of, there's a lot of news happening right now, can you explain what's been going on in LA with respect to the fires for the last two or three days?

Speaker 1 So about three or four days ago, we got a warning that we were going to be experiencing high winds up to 50 miles per hour, which is nuts. And they were going to be coming from the desert.

Speaker 1 So this is just like a barrage of hot wind.

Speaker 1 So we were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because, you know, man-made structures that people are surviving with can't survive that kind of wind.

Speaker 1 But when we hear that wind here in Southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly, because any little, you know, a cigarette butt, an electrical spark, you know, like when it's this dry, it's enough to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened.

Speaker 1 There are about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread massively by these giant winds everywhere.

Speaker 1 So the embers are being picked up.

Speaker 1 Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but the wind itself has prevented the big water tinkers from flying, which has led to the massive devastation that you saw in the Palisades and other areas.

Speaker 1 The entire water fleet being grounded for a while just meant that it was burning with no control, relying on the ground firefighters.

Speaker 48 so what we've seen is just uh mass devastation thousands of homes lost i think there is a death tally thankfully very low in about 10-ish i think i've heard from this morning with with confirmation but yeah that's that's what we're facing right now yeah it's pretty devastating like whole neighborhoods are gone right i think i thought like 2 000 structures have already been burned and like as you said if people aren't in the united states or aren't familiar with how fire is fought like out here in the western United States, it's a lot of air dropping fire retardant and air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to get enough water to where it needs to be.

Speaker 48 And I believe at one point, they actually ran out of water in water towers right up in palisades.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which is terrifying to think of. And we were warned, I'm in the Koreatown neighborhood.

Speaker 50 We were warned about low water pressure.

Speaker 1 And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles, particularly in that region, are being warned to boil water and that their water is unsafe to drink right now.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I've seen that too. There was a water boil warning for, yeah, lots of places.

Speaker 48 So as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I think I saw, was it 150,000 odd people have been displaced now?

Speaker 48 Is that right? Is that a good number?

Speaker 1 I saw something large like that of just the people that have been evacuated.

Speaker 1 Right north of me was the Sunset Fire, and that was very concerningly close to the careitan neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires because we're so in the concrete jungle like we're so insulated i think that's the closest we've come to devastation and we were really stressed out last night just keeping an eye on the news because that's you know not even two miles away from the core of the densest neighborhood of los angeles right yeah i guess again if people aren't familiar like Fires destroy property and kill people every year here.

Speaker 48 And climate change has meant that they have become worse worse and worse but in the middle of a city you're generally not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property right like this is this is a very unique situation to see huge parts of a city burning down yeah particularly the palisades which is historically a

Speaker 1 significantly wealthy neighborhood yeah you know a den of celebrity and hollywood um elites and seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point that, you know, you have wealth that insulates you from the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes so far.

Speaker 1 I saw that there was a couple of wealthy people on Twitter begging for private firefighting forces to come save their homes.

Speaker 1 Famously the same ones that are talking about tax evasion and how smart they are to do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into the social system that helps in these times.

Speaker 1 Clearly, we're severely underfunded and severely undermanaged when it comes to the government stepping in during these emergencies.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 48 And like, that's something I want to address, because I think in every natural disaster that I've covered, the reason it becomes a disaster, I guess, is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people.

Speaker 48 And in almost every case, it's people who have to step up and look after one another.

Speaker 48 We should talk about the response of the LA city and county governments, and then I'd I'd love to talk about the mutual aid response after that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, from what we've seen here in K-Town, if you weren't immediately evacuated,

Speaker 1 there's nothing. All of our outreach folks that were out talking to all of our unhealth neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds, first of all, didn't know what was going on.

Speaker 1 They saw the sky. They assumed there was a fire nearby, but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and that we were generally threatened as well.
They didn't have any supplies.

Speaker 1 And in some areas of Los Angeles, we've heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued. So the city has continued throwing away tents from the people living on the streets.

Speaker 1 And then for the housed people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that they've set up. Penn Pacific Park is one of them for Hollywood.

Speaker 1 There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like, but it seems to be, you know, a hodgepodge of, you know, disorganization and a lot of, you know, mutual aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct people and gather the supplies.

Speaker 1 I have not heard of, you know, a very formalized system. There is no word on any kind of significant assistance for people who have lost their homes at the moment.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the Red Cross is going to set a staging zone up or anything, but I do know that the people who are setting up, you know, places for people to go, food, water, even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers.

Speaker 1 You know, I'm, I'm in this chat group, group mutual a la that spurred you know literally just on signal the day that the fire started that has a thousand people on it uh mobilizing and distributing and uh volunteering to move people from one area of the city to the other um you know i have this person who needs a place to stay like who's got a list of places that are open because when you when you have disasters this big you need help quickly yeah and bureaucracy just doesn't

Speaker 1 you know that's not built for that yeah it's it's not.

Speaker 48 And like, we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond like in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to.

Speaker 48 And it's, it's really, it's wonderful to see people picking up slack. Like, of course it is.
It's really beautiful that people show up for each other in these times.

Speaker 48 There's something about that that I obviously like find really affirming. That's maybe why I do this for a living.
But Yeah, it's really beautiful to see.

Speaker 48 It doesn't mean that we should forget that like the state has capacity that it is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused.

Speaker 48 It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people, to bring food to people, to create shelter for people. It's not, it's choosing to harass people who live on the street.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And this is something we see repeatedly.
You know, it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but when it did rain, we had historical rains. Last year in particular, we had a cold front.

Speaker 1 where folks die every time. And we know folks are going to die every time it rains here in LA.

Speaker 1 We have more people that die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than New York and San Francisco combined every year, because hypothermia actually doesn't require it to be freezing this set in.

Speaker 1 It just requires you to be in around 60 degrees and be wet, which is very common on the streets here of LA.

Speaker 1 We've seen people get frostbite from having their skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while it's raining. And our electeds know this.

Speaker 1 When I first started doing this work, there was a slogan that we were chanting for a day in LA. And that was the number of unhoused people that died every day.
And now we're at about six or seven.

Speaker 1 We request, you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, request the coroner's report every year of how many people died. And that number is only growing.
And the government knows this.

Speaker 1 They know every time we have a heat wave that there are 70,000 people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars.

Speaker 1 They know that during the winter, you know, people are out there in the cold and the rain.

Speaker 1 And I talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and they ask me, like, well, aren't there, you know, insert service here that you think there should be, you know, right now during the fires, like, aren't there vans picking people up and taking them to shelter?

Speaker 1 And it's like, that would be wonderful, wouldn't it?

Speaker 1 There's not, there's never any vans picking people up, you know, even when they open up cooling shelters and warming shelters, the number one barrier we hear from people on the streets is how would I get there?

Speaker 1 And when I get there, they make me not bring my stuff in. So it's all going to get stolen.

Speaker 1 There's just all of these barriers that the city is just completely, you know, purposely neglecting. They could talk to any of us on how to run a successful, you know, warming or cooling shelter.

Speaker 1 They don't. You know, they have no interest in what we have to say.
In fact, our city council person here in K-Town doesn't respond to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat out.

Speaker 1 doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been, you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't have the support of this agency.

Speaker 1 And in fact, they're our opposition. You know, we're the ones having to organize around them and what they're doing.

Speaker 48 Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here. Like every time it rains, people will die every time we have a heat wave.

Speaker 48 I remember they found the remains of an unhoused person a couple of years ago and they thought the person had been burned like by fire.

Speaker 48 And it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago, just to give an anecdote.
It was, I think, above 100 degrees in town.

Speaker 55 It was so hot.

Speaker 48 And I was in the riverbed. Like, I have this big insulated backpack to give people cold water.
And

Speaker 48 just like dozens of people were in a terrible distress. And yeah, there was no presence of police, fire, anyone to help, right?

Speaker 48 Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities and

Speaker 48 people are still unsafe and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government government agencies because these government agencies are the same ones that you say that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto, you know, like a better situation in life.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think there's this sense of like apathy that has built and rightfully so from the people that live on the streets where we've, you know, relayed messages that we've heard like, hey, 211 says they have 100 shelter beds tonight.

Speaker 1 Call and see if you can get in.

Speaker 1 And they're like, okay, you know, like, I'll give it a shot, you know, and it's very well received because we understand the amount of disappointment these people have gone through.

Speaker 1 When they do the care plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name for

Speaker 1 when they throw all their stuff away, when they show up and they do care plus, they show up with a social worker first, which if I was a social worker, I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is that right before they throw away everything that an unhoused person owns, they send in a lone social worker to write their names and maybe their numbers down and tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get back to them.

Speaker 1 And then they have all of their belongings thrown away. Right.

Speaker 1 I can't imagine the harm that has done for just trusting services, even when they're available, you know, accessing them and then giving them your information.

Speaker 1 I have one person who rightfully so told me they have trauma about filling out forms because they've done this 300 times. You know, they said something incredible.

Speaker 1 They've been counting about how many times they've filled the same forms out to have it lead nowhere.

Speaker 1 And I can't imagine, you know, that kind of resilience. Now, with this devastation, there's going to be a lot of homeowners who are going to experience that firsthand.

Speaker 1 I'm seeing a lot of people that are homeless for the first time ever in their lives, like in their late 50s. And these are people that have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have, you know,

Speaker 1 lived their whole life as you're supposed to in the United States.

Speaker 1 And then in their elder years, befall some sort of disaster disaster or social security doesn't pay anymore.

Speaker 1 And they are severely shocked when I tell them what the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've had people ask me, like, where do I go to sign up for free housing?

Speaker 1 And I have to tell them, you know, the wait list for vouchers is 15 years long and it's a lottery. The list is closed because it's so full.

Speaker 1 You can apply to senior housing, but that's about a 10-year wait. You know, that I have to be the one to tell them that.

Speaker 1 And that sort of shock, I think, is going to be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried to access services before.

Speaker 52 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 48 Let's take a little break here for some advertisements and then we'll come back.

Speaker 53 All right, we're back.

Speaker 48 So, yeah, I think Anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in Southern California will understand that there is not a safety net.

Speaker 48 And that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people.

Speaker 48 Let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another, because I think that's, that's what always happens in these situations. So let's talk about the mutual aid effort.

Speaker 48 Maybe you could talk about some of the groups, talk about some of the things you've been doing.

Speaker 48 And then I want to get on to how people can help if they're in town and how people can help if they are a long way away.

Speaker 1 Yeah. In LA, we have a very robust network of mutual aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via this government.
I think a lot of them have started up to step in.

Speaker 1 Just, there's no denying all over LA that there's this crisis because you walk outside of your house and there are people sleeping on your street.

Speaker 1 You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city.

Speaker 1 And we, in times of crisis, you know, will spark up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands of people overnight that are willing to jump in and get their hands dirty to coalesce and find resources.

Speaker 1 You know, here's where we're buying masks. This door is out.
Don't go to this one, go to that one. Who's reimbursing people for gas, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's normal people.

Speaker 1 You know, I have a full-time job.

Speaker 1 My friends here in K-Town for All, some are teachers, some are in the movie industry, you know, some are random lawyers, you know, that will take their time out to do this work.

Speaker 1 And I think that it's beautiful in the sense that we get people the help they need and it's never enough, which is crushing.

Speaker 1 Here in K-Town, we give supplies to about 400 or so unhoused people a week minimum. And that is hygiene supplies, tents, blankets.

Speaker 52 We

Speaker 1 connect them to any services that they might ask us to connect them to, driving them to the hospital, etc.

Speaker 1 And this has been going on for the last five years. And K-Town for All specifically started as a counter protest because there was an attempt to build a shelter here in Koreatown.

Speaker 1 And some homeowners organized against it. They marched down Wilshire and shut it down.

Speaker 1 And our founders found each other because they were the only five people holding up we want shelter signs and just started doing distribution themselves.

Speaker 1 And I think that's one thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's not as intimidating as it seems to start one of these projects.

Speaker 1 It's literally you and a couple of friends who decide that you're going to do something.

Speaker 1 you acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never be able to meet the need because what we need is a government who cares about people.

Speaker 1 But in the meanwhile, we're going to do the best we can. And the lives of the, you know, now 400 or so people that we see every week are a little better because we decide to do that.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, like, it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I get almost every week.
Like, how do I start a mutual aid group?

Speaker 48 But, like, if you can make a sandwich, then you can, you can start a mutual aid group. Like, just go and feed people who are hungry.
If someone's cold, give them a blanket.

Speaker 48 Like, it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to read 17 books, you know, and be like starting a 501c3 and stuff. You just need to do things.

Speaker 48 And I think especially like we're going into a new administration, we're going to see the state being more hostile to people who are already marginalized.

Speaker 47 And like

Speaker 48 the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and to get into the streets and just do something. It doesn't matter as you say, you won't be able to do everything, not right away.

Speaker 48 Maybe one day we will, but like. Doing something is a lot better than doing nothing.
And I guarantee it is also much better for you.

Speaker 48 And your mental, like, I i feel so much better when i'm able to help people i wouldn't be able to do the job i do at the border if i wasn't also able to help people like it it it helps me feel like i'm not part of the problem i guess or like we're doing something about it at least what are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fires like what are what are the needs that are arising and how are how are people meeting them Yeah, well, K-Town for All focuses here in the K-Town neighborhood.

Speaker 1 And what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People are sitting in, it's literally raining ash in in some areas and are sitting in the soot.
So there's that.

Speaker 1 There's basic tent and tarp gathering, meals. So many emergency services shut down during disasters that, you know, makes sense.

Speaker 1 But a lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from are not open right now. So it's getting people food, getting people water, just enough to survive.

Speaker 1 In other areas, folks are gathering supplies. There's All Power Books that is a big distribution site right now.
Puma Mutual Aid out in the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work.

Speaker 1 The South Bay got swept last night. So South Bay Mutual Aid Club is replacing tents this morning.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of the pet mutual aid groups who are gathering pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of the found dogs and cats.

Speaker 1 It's just, I mean, I can't even list the amount of people right now that are like in their vehicles doing drop-offs to, you know, the sidewalk project.

Speaker 1 There's a big Skid Row distribution point that is building up, crowdsourcing insulin, things that like you don't think about that people ran out of their house that they need to live.

Speaker 1 They don't have time to go get a prescription

Speaker 1 at a primary care provider. Like we need albuterol, that people are having asthma attacks.
So there's these kind of burdens that mutual aid.

Speaker 1 projects get around because people a don't have to fill out any forms they don't have to wait if we have it you're going to be handed it and you know even medical providers as part of our projects, have become a really big support as people on the streets are often very disabled.

Speaker 1 We have a lot of folks with diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very horrible injuries that need constant care.

Speaker 1 All Power Bookstore has a free clinic called All Power Clinic, and they offer free medical care and come with us on our routes here in K-Town to offer free treatment for folks.

Speaker 1 And I think that's something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs.

Speaker 1 Homelessness rose 18% in the last year, and that's only been the case every year since we started counting.

Speaker 1 There is no way this administration is going to institute rent control or anything that keeps people from being displaced.

Speaker 1 One mutual aid project that I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the LA tenants union mobilizing to care for their members, checking in on their disabled members.

Speaker 1 These kind of community-based organizations where people know people, they know who to check up on, they know who's vulnerable, those kind of organizations are invaluable in emergencies like these.

Speaker 48 Yeah, definitely. And like, I hope one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities, right?

Speaker 48 And we can, hopefully, folks who are finding themselves dependent on mutual aid for the first time can realize that like. they can participate in that.

Speaker 48 And I know there are folks already, right, who have like lost their homes, who are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing people and stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And I think we say this all the time in the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being homeless than you are to be a billionaire.
And I think this is one of the most direct examples.

Speaker 1 Like these people might have been well off maybe a month or two ago, and then now they have zero.

Speaker 1 You know, they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe five years, you know, if some of them.

Speaker 1 And hopefully, you know, they end up recovering. But I hope they don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a great equalizer.

Speaker 1 And the people that show their faces, they're not the politicians. They're not the lobbyists.
They're not, you know, the Democratic Party, you know, TM.

Speaker 1 It's your neighbor who has a mask for you. It's me, someone random from down the block who got a couple of friends together who has water for you.

Speaker 1 You know, like that's who comes through and that's who you need to care for all the time, including your unhoused neighbors that are around you all the time, who live in your community and who face this emergency every day.

Speaker 1 You know, they don't know where they're going to sleep every night. They don't know where their next meal is coming from every day.

Speaker 1 They get their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if not once a week, very frequently.

Speaker 1 And I hope this is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter.

Speaker 1 You know, the basics.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 48 Talking of food, water, and shelter, those are things I need as well. And so to pay for them, I have to pivot to ads now.

Speaker 48 Okay, we're back.

Speaker 57 I think.

Speaker 48 That was a really good plug for like why mutual aid is important. And hopefully there are people who are listening, right?

Speaker 48 Or people who are finding themselves for the first time interested in helping, seeing a crisis. A lot of people like will ask me if they can come help at the border.

Speaker 48 And of course you can, but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there. And obviously that's very true in LA right now.

Speaker 48 So I want to like give some resources, some ways people can help.

Speaker 48 If people are listening in LA, what are some, like, I know there are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete things they could do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people, what are some things they can do?

Speaker 1 You're free to follow K-Town for All on Instagram. We are constantly uploading on our stories year-round, fundraisers, resource requests, GoFundMes, etc.

Speaker 1 We really try to stay connected with the LA Mutual Aid Network. And honestly, once you follow one of us, you kind of follow all of us because we're very supportive of each other's efforts.

Speaker 1 Mutual Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine that gets published every month that has a list of mutual aid programs all over LA.

Speaker 1 If you can't come out on physical outreach with us, which we do on Saturdays, every Saturday, except the first Saturday of the month when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us, you know, connect with others.

Speaker 1 You're free to help us financially. But we also, you know,

Speaker 1 funny you mentioned this, James, but if you DM us and you're like, hey, I want to talk to someone about starting a project in my region, I'm so happy to hop on a Zoom with you, tell you how we do our distribution, tell you how we make our maps of encampments, tell you how we

Speaker 1 fund and crowdsource. Always happy to find that knowledge.
And people message us all the time, can we start a neighborhood for all chapter? And we're like, we're so honored that you would do that.

Speaker 1 Please don't ask, but. you're totally welcome to.
And so we have Pasadena for All that is doing great work. And Pasadena for All is definitely always in need of support.

Speaker 1 They are in a huge disaster zone. Al Tadena, Pasadena, like all those areas have been evacuated.
Palms Mutual Aid.

Speaker 1 But yeah, if you want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram, K-Town for All,

Speaker 1 same Twitter, same on Blue Sky, and we'll hopefully be your input into the LA mutual aid scene. We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work.

Speaker 1 And while we focus in the K-Town neighborhood, LA is a giant place.

Speaker 1 And if you have any neighborhoods in Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention, you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.

Speaker 48 Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that we share.

Speaker 48 Like, one of my friends, when we were doing border stuff, made a website where we documented all the stuff we did so that it was open source and available to people, like how we built shelters and how we cooked.

Speaker 48 And yeah, we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Like we can all help each other get that start and not make the mistakes that we all made.

Speaker 48 So that's really cool that people can reach out to you. What about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money? They want to to help and they've got money they want to share.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're always welcome to Venmo us, K Town for All. Same on Venmo.
We have a PayPal link. We have a website, ktownforall.org.
We are 501c3. If you'd like to donate in our,

Speaker 1 you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way, feel free to DM us. We just got that figured out.
But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on material goods. We don't have any employees.

Speaker 1 We don't have any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks in baby wipes usually when we get, you know, stock donations and things like that.

Speaker 1 And honestly, we prefer it that way just because, you know, we know what nonprofit requirements are like and

Speaker 1 that kind of burden that that places on mutual aid projects. And we're trying to avoid them.
So every dime still goes to supplies.

Speaker 1 And I know every MutualAid project, J Town Action in Japantown as well, operates in a very similar model. I would just suggest people get plugged in to MutualAid LA.
They follow us on Instagram.

Speaker 1 Feel free to send any money. We're constantly on our stories uploading GoFundMes and Venmos and stuff.

Speaker 1 I really appreciate their help, you know, out of the country and hope that one day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we live in a great world.

Speaker 48 Yeah, yeah, that would be nice. Is there anything else? Like, do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe help you with?

Speaker 1 We're always looking for staples. So those are tents and tarps constantly.
Those are often the most expensive items people have to purchase. Tents go about $30 to $40

Speaker 1 each one. And the government throws a lot of them away every week.
So those items. Feel free to always DM me if you have some that you would like to drop off.

Speaker 1 But I will say mutual aid orgs are really good at building connections directly with vendors. And we usually get like a discount in buying in bulk.

Speaker 1 So I would really love to shake people from their fear of donating cash. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an item because you know that that's the item that's given out, but sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand of those tents and your dollar goes farther.

Speaker 1 So, you know, tents, blankets. And again, don't be afraid to do this by yourself.
Like you can go to Home Depot and buy a tent and hand it to someone.

Speaker 1 You can go to Home Depot and buy masks right now and hand them to someone. You don't have to wait for a group like this to be around and to help, particularly if your neighborhood needs you.

Speaker 48 Yeah, I think that's a really good message. It's a good place to end.
Just to remind everyone, it's at K Town for All on Instagram and K Town for All on Venmo, right?

Speaker 56 Yep.

Speaker 48 Great. Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much.

Speaker 15 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 21 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 22 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 2 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster: Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now.

Speaker 33 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 62 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 65 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.

Speaker 66 I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 68 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 69 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 44 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 73 The men and woman who were hurt had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 74 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 76 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 77 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 78 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Speaker 61 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 82 Hey Hey there, I'm Kyle McLaughlin.

Speaker 84 You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex in the City, or just the internet's dad.

Speaker 90 I have a new podcast called What Are We Even Doing?, where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.

Speaker 48 Daddy's looking good.

Speaker 82 Each week, I invite someone fascinating to join me.

Speaker 94 Actors, musicians, creatives, highly evolved digital life forms.

Speaker 96 And we talk about what they love.

Speaker 97 Sometimes I'll drizzle a little honey in there too if if I'm feeling sexy in the worry. What keeps them going?

Speaker 98 And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.

Speaker 99 Like when a kid says brought a meat.

Speaker 88 And how they're navigating this high-speed roller coaster we call reality.

Speaker 102 In Australia, you're looking out for snakes, spiders, and boys.

Speaker 104 Right.

Speaker 105 Hey, he's no train with two gold.

Speaker 106 This is like the comments section of my Instagram.

Speaker 11 Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday, and let's get weird together in a good way.

Speaker 83 Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 117 32 lost nuclear weapons.

Speaker 117 Wait, stop?

Speaker 38 What? Yes.

Speaker 3 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 10 Who still wore knee pads?

Speaker 118 Yes.

Speaker 36 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

Speaker 10 The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 55 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 120 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 121 What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Speaker 108 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 123 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 124 Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

Speaker 125 So

Speaker 118 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 126 Listen to season four of Snaf Foo with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 126 Oh,

Speaker 7 it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast from CES, the Consumer Electronic Show 2025. I am here with my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis.

Speaker 7 We have been trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention Center all day.

Speaker 7 garrison today you started earlier than i did because i was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk with the priest last night yeah um we had a nice dinner and then we we set out to experience a fresh new hell and in this case that fresh new hell was what the ai bros have ready for your children no it's funny how we both stumbled across ai products for kids like the same day during the exact same time uh-huh yeah it really is remarkable that like yeah i guess in part just because like that is such a focus i think it has something to do with what you saw some of yesterday, where, and I had caught a little the day before, where they're like, yeah, they don't really like this stuff.

Speaker 7 We're going to have to get around it. Like, obviously, this is inevitable, but like, people really also seem to not enjoy it very much.
No one can explain why.

Speaker 7 But I think that this may be like, okay, well, if we get them when they're young enough, if we train these kids, we can force this on them and they'll have no choice but to like it.

Speaker 41 And it's interesting you say that because the first thing I did today was go to a panel at the Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the best title for any single panel.

Speaker 46 Yeah, that's fucked up.

Speaker 41 The description was, a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment, and socialization?

Speaker 41 Which is a good question. Yeah, we should be asking that.

Speaker 41 More people should. There was four people on the panel.

Speaker 41 Karen Ruth Wong from Ido Play Playlab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and Joshua Garrett from Ruddy Land.

Speaker 41 And I'll talk about all these, all these different companies and people in a sec.

Speaker 41 Yeah, so the panel started with Karen Ruth Wong from Ido, which is the company that first partnered with Sesame Workshop to start making online apps.

Speaker 41 So, you know, that was interesting to me because Sesame Workshop generally puts a lot of care into like, you know, making media for children. This is a company that works with them.

Speaker 41 So I was interested in what she was going to say.

Speaker 41 And basically, she talked not about any products that her company's making, but instead research into how AI is affecting Gen Z, how Gen Z wants to interact with AI, and talked about a whole bunch of research that her company has been doing for the past few years on what people, you know, my age and younger, what their attitudes are towards this thing that has become an increasingly encroaching part of their lives.

Speaker 41 I'm just going to play a series of clips.

Speaker 7 Couldn't be more excited.

Speaker 132 So I'll be sharing this morning a little bit about what we're learning. That question is: what if the tech savvy generation isn't buying it anymore?

Speaker 132 We have a lot of really interesting opinions and assumptions in our heads that these are the ones that are going to be the first users and the first viewers.

Speaker 132 And in many ways, they are, but they're the ones that also come with the most informed opinions, not just about how badly the tech feels, how cringy some of them might be landing, but also how it's affecting their sense of humanity.

Speaker 7 That's fascinating.

Speaker 41 Yeah, the very first thing, this is literally like the minutes into the panel, this is like after they do their introductions, the first thing to talk about is how Gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most AI critical.

Speaker 52 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 7 It's cringy.

Speaker 41 Yeah, like how it feels cringy. And not just that, how it's affecting people's like sense of humanity.

Speaker 41 And viewing this, like, you know, in some ways as like an obstacle to get over, but also this is, I'm not sure how I feel about like, you know, Karen and the company she's representing here.

Speaker 41 Because in some ways, I felt like she was probably actually good. She just had to frame all of the things she was saying as like shocking revelations to all these tech bros.

Speaker 41 Be like, actually, it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run by AI.

Speaker 7 Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI.

Speaker 41 I actually liked what she was saying. It's just her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because of who the audience is.

Speaker 7 Do you get the feeling that she was like a bad person trying to help like other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who was trying to like, in a way that these guys would listen to, tell them that what they're doing isn't working?

Speaker 41 Maybe like 2080. So like

Speaker 41 a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this. But mostly it felt like trying to inform people about how this isn't really what people want.
And it has a lot of actual drawbacks.

Speaker 41 Here's a clip of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're asking kids to get data on how they feel about AI.

Speaker 132 Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions of what it would be like to interact with a potential AI tool.

Speaker 132 And so we asked questions like, okay, you've recently had a friend breakup. What kind of intervention do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you through that process?

Speaker 132 Or do you want someone to kind of replace that friend for the time being just so you can

Speaker 132 back yourself out from that relationship? So by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front of youth, we were able to co-design to view insights.

Speaker 132 This one always gets all audience members. We put out a provocational expression of, imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live your life for you.

Speaker 132 Imagine they could swipe your tender for you, they would have the icky conversations, or they would go through the awkward introductions, you know, new person in school.

Speaker 132 And we heard some really interesting things. I want to go on a bad date for myself and I want to have that bad vacation.

Speaker 132 There was a really interesting sign that being able to live life for yourself is that badge of honor.

Speaker 41 Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.

Speaker 7 Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace them in such drudgery as the search for love and human connection.

Speaker 7 Incredible that teens aren't interested in letting a robot go on dates for them.

Speaker 41 No, it's super interesting. And even the first thing she said about, you know, you like lost some friends.

Speaker 41 Do you want an AI to like, you know, like counsel you or like, you know, like talk about your feelings? Or do you want a friend replacement? And no, people don't want a friend replacement.

Speaker 41 And this even like otter question of like, you know, like, like AI swiping your Tinder for you, trying to figure out what your preferences are. And no, like, Gen Z wants to live life for themselves.

Speaker 41 So it's odd.

Speaker 8 Yeah, well, I mean, because that's what being a person is.

Speaker 41 Yeah, that's what being a person is right. But like, it's odd how that's framed as like a surprising revelation.

Speaker 7 Wow, these kids want to live lives.

Speaker 41 So yeah, it was a kind of an an odd panel to go to. She highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for Gen Z is twofold: creative expression and human relationships.

Speaker 41 These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about is

Speaker 41 how it will affect your ability to make art, be creative, and what it means for

Speaker 41 relationships as a human being, right? Especially if you're being asked questions about,

Speaker 41 would you let an AI like meet someone that you want to date first?

Speaker 41 Have them go through a first like fake AI date to like, to like get through like icebreaker questions or something.

Speaker 7 The amount of people I meet who feel that way about like their digital twins or like who take pride in having like an AI trained off of their social media posts at events like these, it's shocking to me because like, do you feel good about saying that a chat bot, you feel like it is you, that you have trained a chat bot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself?

Speaker 41 Do you feel good about thinking that does that make you happy about yourself well and the data that this person was talking about showed no like yeah people actually don't want these things like no this actually isn't what anyone wants out of life this isn't what anyone wants out of this technology right like we use ai all the time you know like like you know like autocomplete it has a whole bunch of like you know pretty basic uses yeah it saves me from having to spell certain words too many times yeah but we don't want it to like go on dates for us and the whole part of being human is having you know a degree of bad experiences.

Speaker 41 And that helps shape us as people. And this isn't like a hurdle to get over.
This is a part of what it means to be human.

Speaker 41 And she kind of talked about that a little bit more in this last clip that I'll play.

Speaker 132 The next one here. I prefer to give opportunities to people over technology.
I think these are the ones,

Speaker 132 again, they've seen what it's like when people feel replaced.

Speaker 132 I'll definitely share a lot more, but starting off with a few key learnings. Gen Z is about advice and perspective from lived experience.
There's something about designing for friction.

Speaker 132 I'm going to say it again, designing for friction.

Speaker 132 In our age of optimization, in our age of assuming that everything should move as fast as possible to make life as smooth as possible, there's something about the challenge and that comes back to play, right?

Speaker 132 Why would we spend so much time to hit a ball several hundred yards away?

Speaker 132 There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy of overcoming challenge, the joy of moving through your first friend breakup, your boyfriend or girlfriend breakup, that makes him to a person.

Speaker 132 And as many times as helicopter parents or as people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best possible path, there's some pushback there.

Speaker 59 Some pushback.

Speaker 4 Some pushback.

Speaker 7 To the idea that like

Speaker 7 you should live a life.

Speaker 7 Your one precious life should be lived.

Speaker 41 No, but there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff there.

Speaker 41 Gen Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah.
You know, like having like a workforce replacement.

Speaker 41 Gen Z prefers to actually like make connections and network with other people our age and actually like share opportunities. Yeah.

Speaker 41 In previous panels, this was something that was also talked about, how millennials were way more like selective about like sharing like employment opportunities because they were like so focused on like making sure that they make it.

Speaker 41 And there's a lot more like open collaboration and sharing, sharing opportunities.

Speaker 7 It's harder, so you guys have to be better about that.

Speaker 41 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 41 No, talking about, you know, like designing for friction, you know, there's like there's value in something being challenging.

Speaker 7 That was very interesting because the surprise about that, because it is, it is this kind of, I'm sure most of these people were born to wealth and privilege.

Speaker 7 And the first thing that people do with money, the primary reason to have money, is to reduce friction.

Speaker 7 The fact that that's surprising to anyone, that, like, no, like, friction's necessary, otherwise, you're not a person. I mean, it's like that, it's like the ghoul we saw the other night, right?

Speaker 7 Like, you know, they're just not really people, you know.

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

Speaker 41 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Something she just talked about at the very end of the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like Gen Z, you know, and people in general, right, will feel proud about, you know, making a piece of art.

Speaker 41 Yeah. And they don't have that same sense of pride for an AI generated image.
No. Whether it's like a screenplay, whether it's whatever.

Speaker 41 Someone gave an example of like, you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff. They edit videos, right? And there is AI tools that make editing videos like easier.

Speaker 41 But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that. Like they don't feel proud.
They don't feel like they've actually achieved something.

Speaker 41 And you have to feel proud about the work that you've done. So there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create.

Speaker 41 An exact quote was, quote, you can't eliminate life-formative aspects, unquote.

Speaker 51 Which is like, yes,

Speaker 57 you don't ever have anything.

Speaker 41 I'm happy someone at CES is saying this. The fact that it needs to be said at all.

Speaker 52 Very bleak.

Speaker 7 Very sad.

Speaker 41 It's really bleak.

Speaker 134 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Dating people, making friends, being social,

Speaker 7 doing whatever it is you do for a living as yourself is what life is.

Speaker 41 Yeah. I think the last thing that she talked about was like, Gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries.
Yeah, good.

Speaker 41 And they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with, you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams, like everything, you know, TikTok, social media.

Speaker 41 So we have strong boundaries on how tech integrates into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to like become more invasive, we are not super into.

Speaker 7 No, like all they're offering people is like, this machine will do everything that you actually want to do with your time. And also you won't have a job.
Like that's what big tech is promising Gen Z.

Speaker 41 Yeah, so that's how I started my day.

Speaker 7 Speaking of Gen Z,

Speaker 7 Z stands for zillions of dollars that we'll get if you listen to these ads.

Speaker 7 And we're back.

Speaker 41 So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also had two other people from AI products.

Speaker 41 The first one that I'll mention is called Readyland, which I think partnered with Amazon to some degree. It at least uses like Amazon Alexa's.

Speaker 41 It's essentially a choose your own adventure storybook with like an actual physical copy that Alexa will read to you and you can talk to it.

Speaker 41 So you can talk to characters and choose different pathways. I was more skeptical at it at first because I just don't like AI's reading books to kids.

Speaker 41 But this became more of like an interactive story thing and it actually seemed kind of good at what it was doing.

Speaker 41 And then the guy behind it clarified: Readyland is not using AI to generate new content for kids.

Speaker 41 It's all like pre-programmed, like human paths, you know, just with so many variables already built in based on, you know, like if you're making food in one of these books, or like, you know, a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest, the AI already has like stuff for how to handle that.

Speaker 41 It knows how to say these words, it knows how to stitch together these things, but it's not actually generating new content itself.

Speaker 41 If everything is like pre-baked, it can just be assembled in many different ways.

Speaker 41 So every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different because the kid will respond to certain plot elements. The kid can talk to characters, ask questions.
So

Speaker 41 this was actually pretty interesting. The fact that it's simply just not even generating new content makes it miles better than any of these other AI kids' products.

Speaker 7 That it's actually just kind of using some of the tech that makes up AI to allow you to make something humans wrote more reactive.

Speaker 41 Exactly. Yeah.
So

Speaker 41 it's actually a pretty interesting piece of technology. And it's not just Alexa reading a storybook.

Speaker 41 It has a large interactive element, which, you know, that makes the Alexa part, you know, actually useful. And then there was this other product.

Speaker 41 What was this? What was this one called? It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys. Poe the AI Teddy Bear or something like that.

Speaker 56 Yeah,

Speaker 41 Poe the AI Bear,

Speaker 41 which does generate live content with guardrails, he did say.

Speaker 4 Oh, good.

Speaker 41 But the AI content both comes from the input and the output.

Speaker 41 He talked about guardrails. You know, he said, you know, ChatGPT does have internal guardrails, but the reliability is suspect.

Speaker 41 Which there certainly is, considering just last week there was a piece of news about ChatGPT helping someone build a bomb.

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, which they used in just this magical city.

Speaker 41 Yes. So he did say that like guardrail reliability can be suspect, but there is a difference when you have certainly like more like child-friendly features turned on.

Speaker 41 But he admitted that like moderation is part of the challenge. I don't know.
Basically,

Speaker 41 how this works is you have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear that talks with a not very pleasing voice.

Speaker 7 Oh, I gotta hear it.

Speaker 45 Do you want me to pull this up?

Speaker 136 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 41 Okay, but basically, you put in a whole bunch of story inputs being like, I want the story set in this place. I want it featuring these types of characters.
I want this archetype to be the villain.

Speaker 41 It has like dozens, if not hundreds, of like even archetypal things that you can like click. And then the teddy bear will generate a new story.

Speaker 41 So it is generating new content, but with like pre-baked characters, essentially. So then it'll stitch together the story.
The weirder you make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be.

Speaker 41 Well, let me play a clip for Robert here.

Speaker 41 Hey there, Nilo. It's a bright and shiny January morning, the perfect time for another story.

Speaker 41 Did you know that in Las Vegas, where our story takes place, they have a gigantic Veris wheel called the High Roller? It's taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Speaker 128 So

Speaker 132 noble in real-world events and and places based on the setting that you choose. What if I told you? There's a mystery waiting to be unraveled at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Speaker 132 There's excitement in the air, and Ho is on the case.

Speaker 7 That guy, like, sitting there talking, almost rolling his eyes at his own product while it yaps in his lap is a perfect, like, he clearly didn't think about how that would look, because it does not make...

Speaker 7 an appealing ad for the product.

Speaker 41 No, so it doesn't sound good.

Speaker 41 So yeah, they generated a story set in CES in Las Vegas and he would occasionally interrupt the bear to like explain what it was doing. So that was the other product.

Speaker 41 Not nearly as polished or like really, really as thoughtful as like the AI storybook.

Speaker 41 But you know, maybe if you are tired of having to, you know, talk to your kid, you can just get one of these teddy bears to

Speaker 52 throw in front of you.

Speaker 7 Raise it. I mean, it looks like it could probably handle all of the physical contact they need too.
So you don't even need to ever touch your child.

Speaker 7 And in fact, you can just have ChatGPT GPT root that through the bear and never even see your own flesh and blood.

Speaker 7 Like I think ideally, you would have them cut out of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know, a month or two early.

Speaker 7 And that way you can kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you ever spend in contact with your spawn.

Speaker 41 One other thing I will add is that the Readyland guy, the AI story book, specifically went talking about, you know, the importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety, right?

Speaker 41 An AI kids robot that swears, right, is one thing that's pretty easy to avoid, actually. Like that's, that's pretty easy.

Speaker 7 There's a limited number of swear words.

Speaker 41 Well, right. And you could just like, you could just block out certain things from happening.
Yeah. You can build that in.

Speaker 41 But another aspect that's really important to safety is like the accuracy of the things it's saying, right?

Speaker 41 Like, what if it's saying something that's supposed to be, you know, some like factual statement about the world

Speaker 41 that just like isn't true or could actually like lead to danger, right? What if it tells your kid to do something which is actually kind of dangerous?

Speaker 41 Or what if it says, like, not even, not even directly telling them, but, you know, it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous.

Speaker 41 And, like, this is why their storybook program, you know, does not generate new content. So everything it says is like, it's like already pre-approved.

Speaker 41 Like, it already is going to have, you know, like verified.

Speaker 41 Like, verified safe, you know, sentences versus this AI teddy bear, because it is generating new content, you know, it could, if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk about drinking bleach, you know,

Speaker 41 theoretically, you know, just like something, you know, like things can go wrong.

Speaker 41 So it's not just about, you know, avoiding bad words or talking about about sex or, you know, those types of like, like inappropriate things.

Speaker 41 It's also making sure it's not like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations.

Speaker 49 Right.

Speaker 80 Well,

Speaker 7 the good news is that I don't think these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean, I guess we'll see, but these are super expensive.
And

Speaker 7 like, did you give it a price point for that bear?

Speaker 41 I did not hear a price point for the bear.

Speaker 7 I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this stuff really does take off

Speaker 7 i wouldn't consider it optimism to hope this stuff takes off but like they don't seem like great products to me so i i guess we'll see i read something very interesting that is related exactly and it probably was he might have been talking about like that weird bear or something i read something very interesting on the subject of like ai children's toys from a guy who was like an ai developer this was from a post on twitter by alex volkov i got my six-year-old daughter an ai toe for her birthday that arrived for Christmas instead.

Speaker 7 She unpacked it all excited. I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it.

Speaker 7 She, of course, knows what AI is, has seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with ChatGBT in Santa mode, knows that daddy is doing AI, etc.

Speaker 7 So a very interesting experiment happened after magical toys reached out and fixed the issue referenced below.

Speaker 7 She started playing with this dyno, chatted with it, and then learned to turn it off and doesn't want it to talk anymore. She still loves playing with it, dressed it up.

Speaker 7 It now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together, but every time I asks her if she'd like to chat with it, she says no.

Speaker 7 A few times it turned it back on and she did speak with it for a bit and then she just turned it off again, not wanting to engage.

Speaker 7 I gently asked why and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance. It's not weird to her.

Speaker 7 In fact, at one point she was pretending the dino was a baby and was turned on, so I told her, let's ask it to pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said okay, so we asked it to cry.

Speaker 7 Granted, they don't have an amazing advanced voice mode like OpenAI, so it did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking.

Speaker 7 And also, there are still technical issues. The voice is sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny for her.

Speaker 7 I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this didn't connect with my six-year-old.

Speaker 67 Because it's creepy! Because it's people, they don't like it.

Speaker 4 Nobody wants this.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 6 Ick.

Speaker 52 Yeah, ick.

Speaker 7 I know this is a sample size of one kid here, and I'm sure many, many things will change as she'll grow and learn to interact with more AIs in different forms.

Speaker 7 But the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.

Speaker 117 That is interesting.

Speaker 135 Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating.

Speaker 41 Yeah, no one wants this.

Speaker 67 Even six-year-olds are like, eh, I would prefer just a regular toy I can play with.

Speaker 7 I would prefer, I'll pretend it's a robot, but I don't want it to be a robot that talks to me.

Speaker 41 So, Poe, the AI Bear, is $50 on Amazon.

Speaker 7 Oh, that's not bad, actually.

Speaker 55 No, that's good. Okay, good.

Speaker 6 All right. Well, maybe.

Speaker 41 We can even maybe order one and

Speaker 41 see what we can get out of it.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 41 All right, we're going to go on another break and return to talk once again about AI products for your children.

Speaker 53 Okay, we're back.

Speaker 7 So we went and saw something else today while you were at a different chunk of the event talking to yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the ease with which we can all do 9-11s.

Speaker 7 Super excited for that future, by the way. I stumbled upon the booth for a company called TCL.

Speaker 59 A pretty big company. A fairly large.

Speaker 7 Yeah, large companies make a lot of TVs, stuff like that. They had a couple of things.
They had an AI laundry machine.

Speaker 41 So many AI laundry bots.

Speaker 7 Yeah. This one was the worst because it's like this little, almost a soft, rounded pyramid shape.
It hangs your laundry. They say they can't do folding yet.

Speaker 7 So it just sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.

Speaker 41 It just suspends it in the air.

Speaker 7 It suspends it in the air inside of itself. And also, it can only do a kilogram of laundry.
The only thing they had in there was like handkerchiefs and scarfs.

Speaker 7 So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but you can, AI can clean your handkerchiefs and scarfs.

Speaker 41 As opposed to my regular washing machine.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and they had a washing machine that it can identify and count exactly what clothes are in it and how many of them there are. And it'll tell you the soil level and yada, yada, yada, yada.

Speaker 7 Like, I'm sure some some people changing will want this shit, but it's like, yeah, only people who have a lot of money and want to spend it on a laundry machine.

Speaker 7 Because I don't see that it actually reduces the amount of work you need to do at this point. But the thing they had at the booth that caught my eye was a robot toy for kids.

Speaker 7 AI Space Me is the name of the robot. Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because, like, Furby, yeah,

Speaker 7 Furby. There's some porg in there.
It's a two-part toy. The interior part is like a swaddled up, almost looking little porg thing with a cute face.
And the eyes are reasonably good.

Speaker 7 Like they, they did a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy, but like that blink and change color and contract and expand. And then it's got like two little flapper arms that can like wiggle.

Speaker 7 And it's seated inside, almost like the aliens in Independence Day. It's seated inside like this large rolling body frame that allows it to move around on the ground.

Speaker 7 And so it's supposed to like be your child's friend. And the first thing that was upsetting to me because they had this video ad that would play every so often.
And it was very creepy.

Speaker 7 And, you know, I thought back to when we were doing the interview with the guy who had like the robot for old people, he was like, it's very important that it not tell them it loves them, that it like always reiterate that it's a false thing.

Speaker 7 This robot just keeps telling the kid, I love you, like I care for you. When the lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy that actually knows and cares about your child.
I'm like, no, it's not.

Speaker 7 No, it's not. Don't say that.
That shouldn't be legal for you to say that.

Speaker 7 For you to sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent being that loves them is like deeply abusive, in my opinion. Like, that is actually child abuse because it's not alive.

Speaker 7 Anyway, so I had to bring Garrison over because you needed to see it.

Speaker 4 Um, oh, and saw it, I did.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and I'm gonna play a little clip from the ad.

Speaker 7 So, I want you to hear the way this thing sounds.

Speaker 7 Every heartwarming moment shared and groaned with Amy reminds us that

Speaker 7 this is what we call love.

Speaker 7 Nobody's ancient.

Speaker 7 Somebody.

Speaker 7 And this is what we call AI.

Speaker 52 Oh my God.

Speaker 7 I found that profoundly upsetting.

Speaker 41 Disturbing. Yeah.

Speaker 7 Your kid can like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll like talk to them.
It'll make up stories.

Speaker 41 It'll like look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them into like like live ai videos you can put a pin on and it will record stuff that your kid does and play it back to you at night as a video so again absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have to spend with your child it's in the car yeah it takes over your car so that like it's talking to you from the screens in your car like the video like taking taking this thing every like everywhere the kid goes it's like the kid's main interaction with the world yeah is with this little rolling like plastic furbie And yeah, like like talking about like expressing like love and like how damaging this must be for like a four-year-old to have like the first thing that it constantly expressed like love and affection for is this little rolling robot that's that you're gonna throw in the garbage in like, you know, four years when you're when you're like too old for it.

Speaker 41 How like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up that's gonna be for your for like your sense of self and like love and affection.

Speaker 7 The mix of things that we're trying to have this do, like the other ones were built as toys. This was built as like a friend for your child, as well as like a home assistant.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's supposed to also act as like it'll change that you can hook it into your smart home so it can change the temperature.

Speaker 7 Like they did a little in-person demo where like a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it about like planning, planned a birthday party for her kid with it. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And it like put food in her Amazon cart and like changed the temperature inside because more people were coming over.

Speaker 7 One of the things they advertise is security mode where it like travels around your house at night and acts as a sentry watching your home like

Speaker 41 wild stuff no it's it was honestly i've seen a few like disturbing things you know all of like the the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad but like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing it really like viscerally upsets me

Speaker 7 yeah and i i think probably very bad for children Everything they showed us was incredibly curated. Like

Speaker 7 when we watched this live thing where she was having a very fluid conversation with it, that was clearly scripted.

Speaker 136 Yes.

Speaker 7 And I, so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice.

Speaker 41 We never got an actual live demo.

Speaker 7 No, because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly recognizing like what's in their little kid drawings and stuff, what it's supposed to be to make beautiful, creepily, shiny AI moving versions and stuff.

Speaker 7 So I wonder how much less good it's going to be in reality than the thing that they've showed us, but it's definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already.

Speaker 7 And part of why I think that is like we went to check out the booth that this other, the South Korean company, just called, I think, SK, had like a, they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled.

Speaker 7 And then, thinking about how like in the ads, it always like recognized the kid and its parents in a drawing accurately.

Speaker 7 Well, this one, when I flipped off the camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up.

Speaker 7 Like, I'm really curious for when these things hit the market and people start buying them. Like what sort of fucked up stuff it'll do and how kind of big the seams are.

Speaker 7 I don't expect a long life for this thing, which is going to be even funnier because like there was already a big $800 like children's companion AI toy that failed last year and the company shut off access to them.

Speaker 7 And like so parents had to explain to their kids who had bonded with this thing that it was dying forever.

Speaker 7 And that's especially exciting to me because they've built a robot that talks to your kid and tells it it loves them.

Speaker 7 And eventually that robot is going to be taken away from the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable. And that's, I'm excited for that.
Like new ground and how to fuck up kids.

Speaker 7 Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison.

Speaker 41 What an uplifting CES adventure.

Speaker 128 Anything else? Yeah. No, that's all.
Yeah. That's all.

Speaker 134 Great.

Speaker 138 All right, everybody.

Speaker 7 Well, this has been Behind the Bastards. No, it's not.
Or no, it's not. What is this? This has been It Could Happen Here, a podcast by somebody who is slowly going insane.

Speaker 4 Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now.

Speaker 45 We still have one more day.

Speaker 7 I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken.

Speaker 41 Hopefully, tomorrow we'll have our final of our like on-the-ground coverage with our CES Bestin Show. Yeah.
So, and always,

Speaker 41 maybe a high note.

Speaker 137 So, see you there.

Speaker 14 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 21 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 22 So, why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 2 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster: Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now.

Speaker 33 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 62 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 65 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.

Speaker 5 I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 64 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 69 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 44 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 73 The men and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 74 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 76 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more than it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 77 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 78 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Speaker 61 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 82 Hey there, I'm Kyle McLaughlin.

Speaker 84 You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex in the City, or just the internet's dad.

Speaker 89 I have a new podcast called What Are We Even Doing?

Speaker 90 where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.

Speaker 48 Daddy's looking good.

Speaker 82 Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me.

Speaker 93 Actors, musicians, creatives, highly evolved digital life forms.

Speaker 96 And we talk about what they love.

Speaker 97 Sometimes I'll drizzle a little honey in there too if I'm feeling sexy in the morning.

Speaker 82 What keeps them going?

Speaker 98 And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.

Speaker 99 Like when a kid says bra to me.

Speaker 100 And how they're navigating this high-speed roller coaster we call reality.

Speaker 102 In Australia, you're looking out for snakes, spiders, and boys.

Speaker 104 Right.

Speaker 106 Hey, he's no training too, but this is like the comments section of my Instagram.

Speaker 11 Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way.

Speaker 83 Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 117 32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop?

Speaker 38 What?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 3 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 10 Who still wore knee pads?

Speaker 118 Yes.

Speaker 36 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

Speaker 10 The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 55 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 120 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 121 What was that like for you to soft-launch into the show?

Speaker 108 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 123 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 124 Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

Speaker 125 So

Speaker 118 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 126 Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast increasingly about it having happened.

Speaker 4 We have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second Trump administration is going to mean for trans people. And, you know, go listen to those episodes.

Speaker 4 The short version is that it's going to be very, very bad. We're facing care bans.
We're facing federal funding bans. Things are about to get unbelievably bleak.

Speaker 4 But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of almost a decade's worth of fighting by the right.

Speaker 4 And I think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as

Speaker 4 something abstract, right?

Speaker 51 As a sort of abstract political debate.

Speaker 4 Or even if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment as sort of these distant, famous figures.

Speaker 4 But the issue with looking at it this way is that this harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people with real names and faces who live lives exactly like yours.

Speaker 4 The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right-wing journalists discover who you are.

Speaker 4 So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far-right campaign against trans people, who has seen basically the entire campaign against trans people evolve specifically in the far-right's harassment against them.

Speaker 4 And that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out of LA. Welcome to the show.
I wish you were under better circumstances.

Speaker 139 Thank you. Thank you for having me, Mia.

Speaker 58 Glad to be here.

Speaker 51 Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you.

Speaker 4 I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my God, this stuff sucks.

Speaker 49 But

Speaker 141 well, you know, it's our lives.

Speaker 139 What can we do?

Speaker 52 Yeah. What will we do?

Speaker 47 Wow.

Speaker 4 Yes,

Speaker 4 that's the question for the end of the episode.

Speaker 142 What are we going to do about all of this shit?

Speaker 4 But let's go back to sort of the beginning.

Speaker 4 Can you sort of talk about your first encounter with, I guess, at that point, what was a not especially mainstream part of the religious rite back around 2018?

Speaker 59 Yeah. So

Speaker 145 I've been making music as Precious Child for almost a decade.

Speaker 146 And it was my very first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that had this track on it titled Phantom.

Speaker 7 And that was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals.

Speaker 145 You know, it wasn't a song per se. It was experimental.

Speaker 148 And I put out a music video with it.

Speaker 140 And it was pretty, it's pretty creepy.

Speaker 141 And there's flashing lights.

Speaker 59 You know, if you think of movies from the 80s, like Hellraiser, it's kind of like that, you know, like kind of evocative of some type of greater supernatural horror.

Speaker 145 And

Speaker 133 the far right at that time, the far right vintage 2018, they found it and started reporting it en masse and tagging their friends and saying, report this, report this.

Speaker 140 And this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well.

Speaker 142 And that video, like, as I said, you know, it's creepy, but it's, there's nothing political in it.

Speaker 145 And there's a little bit of like

Speaker 147 of blood, but there's no gore.

Speaker 152 But they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic.

Speaker 129 That's what they said.

Speaker 59 It's the satanic.

Speaker 144 And that was my first brush with the right.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically the satanic angle that they're taking because it's like it's it's like in this early enough phase that they're still sort of developing their reasons to be angry.

Speaker 4 They haven't quite like metastasized transphobia as like their driving thing. So they're kind of, they're reaching back into

Speaker 4 this kind of satanic panic era, like the weird 90s and 2000s stuff that like

Speaker 4 when I was growing up, the town that I grew up was super religious.

Speaker 4 And like, you know, we had to have lists of like, if you were inviting like a friend in high school to a party, whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about witches.

Speaker 4 It's like that kind of thing, which I don't know.

Speaker 52 It feels like almost quaint now, even as this stuff's escalated.

Speaker 148 Yeah, it was, as you said, it was a moral panic.

Speaker 58 And their point was that I was amoral for making art like this.

Speaker 148 And it was, this is the same thing that's happening today.

Speaker 150 I'm amoral for the art that I make.

Speaker 59 And it's not just my art, but it's me.

Speaker 58 It's me. Yeah.

Speaker 151 And

Speaker 145 I think that's perhaps what has changed as well.

Speaker 59 Like before they were saying that this is a satanic evil person because they're making this art.

Speaker 143 And now they're saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I think part of the focus on art here, right, is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of, I mean, of the original Nazis, right?

Speaker 4 Like one of their big things was this like cracked out on quote unquote degenerate art.

Speaker 4 And they had like these like quote unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and people whose art they didn't like.

Speaker 4 And it was, you know, like what a thing that was like a significant factor in their rise.

Speaker 4 And I think there's this sort of mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out of this very, very weird, like

Speaker 4 Christian moral panic shit. That's, I guess, if you want to look at how this.

Speaker 4 you know, plays out. Like, that's kind of where it is in like 2018, right?

Speaker 4 This is the first bathroom bill has been passed by 2018 it was curlina but there's you know there's a huge backlash to it and that's something that's i think very different than now where like all of this anti-trans is happening everyone's just kind of going eh so do you want to talk about the second time that you became a target of the far right yeah i mean

Speaker 59 realistically like this has been pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist.

Speaker 144 Yeah.

Speaker 143 And there was another, there was another track on that that album that was also targeted.

Speaker 52 One titled My Little Problem, Violet Door.

Speaker 155 That has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom has some nudity.

Speaker 152 And that was a collaboration between myself and a artist who is trans themselves, Cade,

Speaker 145 out of Brazil.

Speaker 156 And that has, again, some body horror in it.

Speaker 147 There's commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, identity, but it wasn't explicitly political.

Speaker 58 Again, it was kind of a surreal body horror video.

Speaker 145 And that was Brigade reported not in 2018, but in 2019,

Speaker 147 and actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.

Speaker 147 And that video is notable because as a result of what's going on today, YouTube took that down despite it being up for for five years without a problem.

Speaker 147 It had tens of thousands of views and

Speaker 147 now it's gone.

Speaker 155 So that was the second time.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and that one I think is interesting too in the sense of like, that one's like a lot more,

Speaker 4 it's more overtly trans. And it's also, I think, the more trans you are, the more

Speaker 4 the more like very obviously trans it is. And this is, I guess, something that's very common among trans artists is this kind of like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I mean,

Speaker 135 I'm not going to project onto it.

Speaker 4 I don't know if this is what you specifically are doing, but like, you know, there's, there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria and like as this way of sort of thinking about the things that are happening to your body, the things that have been done to your body and the things that you're doing back to it.

Speaker 150 Yeah.

Speaker 155 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 143 You know, I didn't really think too much about the concepts in that direction

Speaker 146 when I made it or when, or, and I know Kate didn't either at that time.

Speaker 137 However, the truth is, for much of my young life, I felt out of body, and I wanted my flesh to match my personal vision of myself and my identity.

Speaker 145 And that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.

Speaker 148 When I was young, I didn't have access to the information and communities that are out there now that support trans people.

Speaker 148 And I have had some gender-confirming procedures done,

Speaker 147 but not as many as I think I would have when I was younger.

Speaker 141 I did feel existential discordance.

Speaker 142 And I don't know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm going to coin it because

Speaker 145 I didn't

Speaker 59 feel in concordance with my flesh.

Speaker 156 And so, you know, I came to experiment what the boundaries were of my fleshy identity and my existence and my art.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And I I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of queer artists are, where there's, you know, and this isn't to say that all queer artists like this, but there's definitely like an edge to it.

Speaker 4 There's stuff going on. There's body horror things happening.
There's like 80s aesthetic-y stuff.

Speaker 4 And I think it conflicts with this kind of weird, Kincaid, everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitsch aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into.

Speaker 4 They use a kind of a kind of aesthetic sensibility as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose for more overtly political reasons.

Speaker 4 They can do this kind of like, hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera,

Speaker 4 kind of attack on queer art as a result of this kind of like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this, you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society. And I think

Speaker 4 I haven't 100% worked out the political implications of this, but I think there's this kind of connection between their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like horror-y that they kind of like use as a political attack yeah you know i think gender is horrifying period yeah not just for queer people but also for cis people like i'm i'm gonna defend cis people here for a second so cis people struggle with gender dysphoria I think maybe I won't say every bit as much as trans people, but they sure fucking struggle with it.

Speaker 59 For instance, an example I will give is facial hair.

Speaker 127 Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they fret and worry over their facial hair.

Speaker 143 Is it too much?

Speaker 59 Is it too little?

Speaker 148 Then people that are assigned female at birth, if they have facial hair,

Speaker 58 they fret over it.

Speaker 144 Will people see it?

Speaker 149 Do I have to bleach it?

Speaker 144 Do I have to pluck it?

Speaker 142 People fret over their freaking jawlines.

Speaker 146 If you search online, like masculine jawline, how do I get?

Speaker 149 There's a huge community out there of assigned male at birth cis men that are trying to get more defined jawlines because they feel that their genetics are presenting them as a non-optimal male, quote unquote.

Speaker 148 And of course, same thing for quote unquote females.

Speaker 141 Like, do I have the female feminine body?

Speaker 146 Is it curvy enough in the right ways?

Speaker 59 Is my waist slim enough?

Speaker 152 You know,

Speaker 144 am I just brick-shaped?

Speaker 59 And then all the industries around that.

Speaker 150 And that, I think, is horrifying.

Speaker 142 And everyone goes through that and struggles with it.

Speaker 156 And very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves.

Speaker 148 And to me, that is a tragedy.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I think that sort of like fear and that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to like

Speaker 4 perform a gender in a certain way. Well, okay, I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars are going to get extremely mad at me.

Speaker 55 But

Speaker 4 the way in which you're forced to sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense, I think it gets to this thing where, you know, you can either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can, you can attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely mad at everyone else just trying to do something about it.

Speaker 4 And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Unfortunately, we need to go to ads, which is another thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards.

Speaker 99 But, you know, who knows?

Speaker 44 Ad people are wizards.

Speaker 4 wizards, they'll find a way.

Speaker 59 Brought to you by Maybelline.

Speaker 52 And we are back.

Speaker 4 I mean, I guess the Washington State Highway Patrol does

Speaker 49 enforce gender norms on people.

Speaker 55 They sure do.

Speaker 156 May I give another example of

Speaker 148 hideous gender norms?

Speaker 140 Yeah.

Speaker 52 So you, listener, you're hearing me, right?

Speaker 148 And you're hearing my voice.

Speaker 150 And this is another thing that

Speaker 144 all people fret about.

Speaker 149 It's not just trans people.

Speaker 148 Lots of AFABs I know.

Speaker 155 I'm just going to say AFAB and AMAB, okay?

Speaker 137 Lots of AFABs I know, you know, they have pretty darn deep voices naturally.

Speaker 144 And they, I've talked with them privately and they say that they worry about how husky their voice is when they just relax.

Speaker 148 And then same thing for AMABs.

Speaker 58 They talk about worrying if their voice is squeaky and thin.

Speaker 85 Talk like a freaking wrestler from WWE, you know?

Speaker 58 Like people, people like the cis people struggle with that too.

Speaker 149 So, you know, just something as simple as our appearance and our voice, you know, we're just torturing ourselves.

Speaker 153 And

Speaker 146 ultimately, I got to say, Mia, you know, I'm a trans woman.

Speaker 59 However, ultimately, I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks.

Speaker 52 Yeah,

Speaker 51 it's not great.

Speaker 4 It's not a good time for anyone involved.

Speaker 4 And speaking of bad times, this isn't even an ad pivot. I just do this now.
It's really bad. I do it to people in my daily life.
They're like, why are you ad pivoting me?

Speaker 6 And I'm like, oh, God.

Speaker 4 But yeah, I guess, God, this and the sort of racialization aspect and,

Speaker 4 I don't know, sort of the aspect of zones of gender performance.

Speaker 4 God damn it. I keep saying performance and I literally mean that you were performing it as in you were acting and not the Butler thing of you're performing it to make it real.

Speaker 4 Please don't yell at me in the comments. I had I had the guy who wrote a writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter one time.

Speaker 50 So now I'm paranoid.

Speaker 4 Okay, sorry. I haven't derailed this enough.

Speaker 48 Partially because this next part is really depressing.

Speaker 4 So a while back on this show, my co-host Garrison, who is, I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far-right panic that became known as the WeSpa controversy.

Speaker 4 Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 152 So, you know, in 2018, as I said, I put out this album and then I put out another.

Speaker 49 And so I was touring the country and Canada and stuff, doing.

Speaker 147 doing shows pretty much constantly.

Speaker 59 And then 2020 happened and I became involved in the George Floyd uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting.

Speaker 145 And so I began to live stream those protests and marches with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was going on on the streets to people watching because a lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did not understand what the issues were.

Speaker 148 And the thing is in LA, there were a lot of like continual police murders even through the riots.

Speaker 148 And by police murders, I mean the cops shooting unarmed black people in the back as they were running away or executions, you know, shooting them in the car, that type of thing.

Speaker 141 And so I was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is why people are in the streets.

Speaker 140 This is a specific issue.

Speaker 59 These are the laws surrounding it and why these actions by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.

Speaker 137 And so I was doing that and I became pretty darn visible and popular.

Speaker 145 Like I was maybe one of the top five best known

Speaker 149 activist or racial justice voices.

Speaker 147 And I was targeted by a right-wing activist who was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium,

Speaker 149 specifically because I was visible, because I was trans.

Speaker 147 And so she went for me and posted and said that I was a transgender individual who was in the women's spa of we spa and I was sexually harassing people.

Speaker 127 And that went viral on social media.

Speaker 147 It was covered on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant death threats.

Speaker 151 And,

Speaker 147 you know, I was doxxed.

Speaker 59 It was pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in the spa.

Speaker 147 And I was only just picked up.

Speaker 137 because I was picked up for my visibility.

Speaker 59 My response to that was, you know, I didn't immediately say, yeah, it wasn't me. It wasn't me.
Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

Speaker 140 I didn't do that because I knew that if I said that, then they would just pick and attack some other trans person.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 52 And, you know, I know that like the shit that the, that the right-wing machine enacts, if it happens to one of us, it can happen to all of us and it likely will.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I mean, I think that the thing that it reminds me the most, something we've also covered on this, this is one of the problems with talking about this.

Speaker 4 It's like doing this for so long that, like, there's very few things that I can say that I can't be like, I've said this on the show before, but we've spent a lot of time, particularly Garrison, spent a lot of time covering the way that every time there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks a random trans person and goes, it was this person.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And this reminds me a lot of the same thing.
Although this is a more targeted, like, we've invented a fake controversy about a trans person, and then we're going to like

Speaker 4 also just pick a random, famous trans, well, not even famous, but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like.

Speaker 148 It's my understanding that this 2020 loot one We Spa controversy that I was targeted for became something of a right-wing playbook.

Speaker 149 It was after that that they started saying, oh, this and that person is trans.

Speaker 137 And before that, they didn't have a real moral panic around trans people, unless you look all the way back to the, what, North Carolina, South Carolina bathroom man.

Speaker 4 yeah i mean i think i think there's an interesting intermediary thing too where so my my friend vicky osterwell who depending on when this episode comes out you will either you'll be hearing from either right before this episode or right after

Speaker 4 had another version of this where she wrote a book on indefensive looting that came out in 2020 and just for like three months became oh three months maybe like two months like became the like the giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising was just like taking shit out on.

Speaker 4 So like sitting Congress people

Speaker 4 were like denouncing this book that she wrote. Every mainstream media outlet like specifically had their editorial people going like this book is evil, Vicki is evil.

Speaker 4 And I think that was also like this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti-trans uprisings because the people who

Speaker 4 are trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves,

Speaker 4 even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level understand that they're that these things are preserving the same systems of violence and so they picked us as sort of like the wedge point to to break this thing apart and I think with Vicki they hadn't really figured out how to do it

Speaker 4 and I think it was like specifically your case the the we spa like with you being put in as the figure the we spa is is where they like actually really figured out how to do the whole thing and yeah there's just something really bleak about both how effective it was and the fact that it's like, these are just people.

Speaker 4 I don't know. Like, this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of like abstract figures.
It's just like, yeah, people I'm having conversations with

Speaker 6 are

Speaker 51 how they did this.

Speaker 4 Just, I don't know.

Speaker 58 I wish I had more analysis of it.

Speaker 145 Yeah, I think that trans people like to greater America, to most, to a lot of America, I'll say, are

Speaker 144 sensational.

Speaker 58 You know, people,

Speaker 52 imagine chicks with dicks and

Speaker 58 dudes without dicks. And

Speaker 144 I think that's really exciting for a lot of people.

Speaker 157 For better or for worse.

Speaker 58 I think for worse, but

Speaker 146 I think that's just like people and their bodies, right?

Speaker 148 Like, you know, I guess some people walk around thinking all the time about other people's crotches.

Speaker 59 I'm not going to say that's a bad thing.

Speaker 59 Crush sniffers, you are seen.

Speaker 4 But on the other hand, right, there's this aspect of which, like,

Speaker 4 you know, there's this sort of sensationalism, but then there's also the experience of being a trans person is like, I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent.

Speaker 52 Like, that's like, I don't know.

Speaker 47 Yeah.

Speaker 59 So back to back to Wispa.

Speaker 146 Yeah, that was a pretty terrible experience for me.

Speaker 155 I'm not going to lie about it.

Speaker 153 You know, I,

Speaker 148 I'm glad that I stood up for myself.

Speaker 147 I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I I didn't pass the buck.

Speaker 153 It was also really difficult and traumatic.

Speaker 151 And I didn't appreciate the death threats.

Speaker 149 I didn't appreciate being doxxed.

Speaker 151 And

Speaker 155 people have come after me my whole life.

Speaker 148 Like, I present, I think, just naturally, physically, like I present as being genderqueer.

Speaker 137 Like, I've been pretty, like, veering, like, looking femme my entire life. That had nothing to do with my internal identity.

Speaker 155 I've been weird my entire life.

Speaker 148 I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested in things that were provocative.

Speaker 58 And so I've been harassed my whole life. However, until WeSpa, I hadn't experienced strangers by the hundreds saying that they're going to hunt me down and fucking shoot me.

Speaker 145 Yeah. I never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy, I know you.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and it's one of these things where like the more of a target on you, the more likely it is to to happen.

Speaker 4 And even people who don't have targets on them, like I know people, you know, who've never experienced anything like this that have still just like had attacks on them. And it's fucking terrifying.

Speaker 4 It is an absolutely terrible way to have to live and a terrible sort of thing to have to experience, especially as it's just intensifying.

Speaker 141 So yeah, that was 2021.

Speaker 156 And that changed me.

Speaker 148 That experience of being targeted.

Speaker 147 and just picked on out of the freaking blue. That changed me as an artist.

Speaker 147 And at the same time, it also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity.

Speaker 146 And I want to speak to that because

Speaker 140 there's different tiers of celebrity.

Speaker 6 You know, at the yes.

Speaker 149 At the top, there's the tier that's known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year.

Speaker 142 Yeah. And that's an actual thing.

Speaker 151 And

Speaker 146 That's the A list.

Speaker 147 And you know you're on the A list because Tom Cruise sends your Christmas card.

Speaker 58 And at the bottom is me, who's been in mass media many times now, but has none of the benefits.

Speaker 127 I make very little money as an artist and I don't have an entourage.

Speaker 148 I can tour and I play some shows and

Speaker 149 some of them are sold out.

Speaker 147 I'm playing a show in LA that's sold out, but I'm not playing large venues.

Speaker 137 I maybe play like

Speaker 147 300, 500 capacity tops.

Speaker 147 And most of the places I play are like small clubs like 150 or so yeah and uh so i don't i don't have the the protection that most celebrities inherently have um i don't have book deals i don't have movie deals no i don't even have an agent i don't even have a record label yeah

Speaker 134 so i'm i'm the freaking d tier i'm the d tier

Speaker 152 and they're coming after me

Speaker 4 yeah and it's i mean and that's the thing about the sort of like this status of like niche D tier internet microcelebridge is like, I don't know, like, I feel like I got the best possible version of it where like I got a job that pays slightly, no, I think I might have hit, no, I'm still, I'm still below the median salary of a cisman in the U.S., but I'm approaching it.

Speaker 6 We're getting closer. Every year, every union fight, we approach median cisman salary.

Speaker 4 But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right?

Speaker 4 Like, this is about the best you could possibly hope for if you're a trans person and you get famous. Like, yeah, I mean, like, I get that threats too, right?

Speaker 4 But like, nothing anywhere near the scale that you get. And mostly what happens is, like,

Speaker 4 I mean, like single-digit numbers of trans people in the U.S.

Speaker 4 have the kind of protection that actual celebrity gives you. And everyone else, celebrity is just another, it's just a giant target painted on you.

Speaker 4 And yeah, so you have, you have none of the benefits and all of the sort of, hey, here is 150 million people who absolutely hate you and who've been primed and targeted like specifically at you.

Speaker 147 Yeah, it's something that I wonder about, like, why, why would they do something like this? Why would Fox News be talking about me?

Speaker 157 Why would the founder of the Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes, did an old video about me?

Speaker 149 Proud Boys is a terrorist group.

Speaker 58 If you don't know, listener, they were recognized as a terrorist group by Canada.

Speaker 144 Not here, because like we're just cool with that shit here.

Speaker 149 They're a white supremacist terrorist group.

Speaker 149 So

Speaker 153 why me?

Speaker 149 Why would a Congress person come after me?

Speaker 59 And my own hypothesis is that they punch down because they secretly believe that they themselves are weak.

Speaker 141 And attacking me, attacking people like me is a fight that they can win.

Speaker 127 And my view is that it's not a fight that they can win because they've already lost.

Speaker 157 They're trying to get power in small, small ways, false ways, in my opinion.

Speaker 137 They're trying to get money, first of all. They want money.

Speaker 145 They want their views.

Speaker 147 They want their donations.

Speaker 156 And that's the entire top of the pyramid for them.

Speaker 127 And for me, though, I'm a fucking artist.

Speaker 153 And power is something that

Speaker 137 I've always been developing because I've sought to know myself.

Speaker 59 I've sought to understand who I am and why.

Speaker 141 Now that extends to myself as a queer person to come to understand myself, who I am as a queer person.

Speaker 155 That's not something they'll ever have.

Speaker 127 So I've already fucking won.

Speaker 59 And same with all the other queer people that are under attack.

Speaker 137 All you other DCT or queer celebrities out there, we fucking won.

Speaker 51 Hopefully.

Speaker 4 Well, and I think part of this is also like the reason this campaign is happening is because they're they're trying to stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how far in the tide had already come.

Speaker 4 And now they're trying to like

Speaker 4 dam off the tide.

Speaker 4 And, you know, like, probably it's not going to work, but the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here, does nothing and lets them just keep building and building and building more walls.

Speaker 4 It's something that is within our power to resist. We just have to actually do it, right? You have to actually organize.
You have to talk to the people around you.

Speaker 4 You have to go get them to do things to resist this.

Speaker 4 And if we do, yeah, like the things that we've already won, the things that we are going to win are going to stick.

Speaker 44 But if not, like things are going to get really, really bad really quickly.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 yeah, and speaking of things getting very bad very quickly,

Speaker 51 here are some more ads before we get back to things getting worse.

Speaker 4 We are back.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, Nancy Mace, who is the person who.

Speaker 4 Actually, I don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 4 She's become a leading anti-trans

Speaker 4 figure in Congress. Literally, every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put in men's jails, which is

Speaker 4 just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in men's prisons.

Speaker 4 And she specifically came after you. So, you want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of

Speaker 4 a congresswoman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding?

Speaker 140 Yeah.

Speaker 148 So, right at the end of 2024, i think it was on december 28th

Speaker 145 i was doxed by a right-wing troll nazi that has doxed uh multiple friends of mine the activist friends artist friends and they pointed out in their in a tweet how my art was on YouTube, specifically my music videos were on YouTube, calling for violence and how I was an evil trans person.

Speaker 147 And they added like at symbol YouTube and said that these videos are in violation of your terms of service.

Speaker 157 Why are they still up?

Speaker 147 And Nancy May saw that because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just dox and trans people and perpetual like rage bait about the queer menace, the trans menace.

Speaker 148 And so she saw that and retweeted it and said, YouTube, this clearly violates your terms terms of service.

Speaker 153 Why haven't you done anything?

Speaker 59 And then immediately following that, my videos were taken down, the ones that were mentioned in these tweets.

Speaker 145 And as I said before, some,

Speaker 58 you know, one of these videos, what was titled My Little Problem, that's been up for seven years.

Speaker 6 Yeah,

Speaker 55 for a long time. Yeah.

Speaker 156 And

Speaker 140 YouTube's terms of service, they're very clear.

Speaker 141 And I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service so my work doesn't get taken down and they state that stuff like uh violence minimal nudity

Speaker 155 that is allowed within the context of art within the context of music videos and so my my videos you know they weren't designed to this is from the terms of service they weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify.

Speaker 145 That's exactly what it says

Speaker 155 in the terms.

Speaker 137 They weren't recreations of real life violence and they weren't real life violence, but

Speaker 52 they were still removed at the behest, at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things going on here.

Speaker 4 One of which is, you know, so we've seen this with Facebook in the last, I guess when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago, but you know, Facebook has stated policies that allow you to basically say slurs against queer people, allow you to call queer people mental illnesses and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 That's very specifically you can only do to queer people. You can't do it anyone else.

Speaker 4 And I think there's this sort of trend here of, I don't know, with Facebook, I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with the sort of new Trump regime because like, this is just who Facebook is, right?

Speaker 4 Like they did the Rohingya Genocide, like they did the genocide into grade two. That was also a Facebook thing.
So they've always just been evil.

Speaker 4 and have been sort of looking for the excuse that they need to like drop the hammer on us.

Speaker 4 But I think YouTube to some extent too, what we're seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming off moment where people are realizing that with Trump in power, they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because, or specifically like on a trans artist, because now they have this sort of like backing to do this stuff.

Speaker 4 And the right has, you know, realized that they can be like, YouTube, take this video down and they'll do it.

Speaker 4 And that's a really terrifying precedent in a lot of ways.

Speaker 4 And also, it's very, you know, I was like, yeah, obviously, because pointing out hypocrisy does nothing, but like, I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of censorship than a member of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down.

Speaker 6 It's like,

Speaker 6 it's really something.

Speaker 139 You know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because,

Speaker 55 you know, before I was a victim of a moral panic, and now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare.

Speaker 47 So,

Speaker 144 you know, what's going to happen next?

Speaker 140 What will we see just made invisible and unseen?

Speaker 147 And I know that in this country, I have freedom of speech, but that's really bullshit.

Speaker 153 We all know that.

Speaker 148 Like, I'm not going to reach many people if I stand on a street corner at the park and yell at people.

Speaker 147 What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach.

Speaker 145 that these social media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now by the Republican Party and what happens when our freedom of reach is annihilated and then suddenly you know trans people are actually invisible

Speaker 58 we're very close to that I think

Speaker 140 Nancy proved that yeah and and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people yeah art art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak

Speaker 143 and I know that's why she came after my art.

Speaker 4 There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen. And then like the next tweet is again a sitting member of the U.S.

Speaker 4 government saying that trans women should be put in men's prisons. And it's like, okay, one of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine and one of them isn't.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 137 Does she even actually do work for the people of South Carolina?

Speaker 51 Like,

Speaker 149 all she does is just like start shit with trans people.

Speaker 142 Like she's just another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer.

Speaker 157 And she's just a knockoff Prada of a bootleg Trump.

Speaker 142 That's what she is.

Speaker 58 And she's not even good at her fucking politics. Like, she's tried to get this bathroom ban for

Speaker 137 disallowing trans people to use a bathroom at the U.S. Capitol.

Speaker 157 And her own freaking party kicked the bill out of the out of the bylaws for this year.

Speaker 144 So she couldn't even get that.

Speaker 58 And

Speaker 144 so I guess she thinks you can

Speaker 59 get a win by harassing me, harassing my art.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 143 Trying to get people to come after me.

Speaker 4 You know, these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe, right? A lot of their stuff just fails.

Speaker 4 But they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them. And that's the thing that's needed in this moment is organization is,

Speaker 4 you know, like is organization. It is action.
It is

Speaker 4 it is now it is now the time to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like, ah, should I be organizing a union? Should I be like setting up strikes?

Speaker 4 Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, yep, it's time. It's time to go because otherwise, you know, and I think this is something that like

Speaker 4 every trans person now understands intimately. And I think most people don't, which is that right now

Speaker 55 it's us.

Speaker 4 But, you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a very good chance that it's going to be you like showing up on this show because a fucking congressperson is deliberately intervened to destroy your life.

Speaker 4 And I would rather we had stopped this before it got to any of us, but they're going to come for you too, unless we stop them.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much for coming on the show. And where can people find you and find your art and

Speaker 51 yeah, support you?

Speaker 147 Yeah, thanks for having me, man.

Speaker 143 I really like talking with you.

Speaker 156 It's been very good.

Speaker 152 And

Speaker 146 listeners, you can find my work on Spotify.

Speaker 125 You can also check out my website at preciouschild.com and please sign up for my mailing list there as well.

Speaker 147 That is the best and most direct way for me to stay in touch with my friends and fans.

Speaker 153 I'm also Precious Child on Instagram, on TikTok.

Speaker 149 I am the last Precious Child.

Speaker 141 I also will be doing live shows this spring and summer in

Speaker 150 the US.

Speaker 143 And so follow me on my website and on social media to stay up to date on that and come say hi in person.

Speaker 54 Hell yeah.

Speaker 4 We will have links to all of that in the description. So yeah, go check it out and resist the creep of fascism.

Speaker 157 There's one thing I want to add about I said earlier about personal power and how I have to develop my own personal power by getting to know myself.

Speaker 148 I want to tell you trans people out there, you queer people and your allies, that, you know, first thing is getting to know yourself.

Speaker 141 And then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, fuck these fucking lawmakers. Yeah.

Speaker 146 Get to know each other and strengthen our bonds with each other because those are bigger than any type of oppressive laws that they may put upon us.

Speaker 147 And it is only by the strength that we develop with each other, with in each other, that we will persevere.

Speaker 15 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 21 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 22 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 2 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now.

Speaker 33 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 63 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 65 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.

Speaker 5 I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 64 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why?

Speaker 69 She received received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 44 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 73 The men and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 74 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 76 The timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more that it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 77 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 78 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Speaker 61 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 82 Hey there, I'm Kyle McLachlan.

Speaker 84 You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex in the City, or just the internet's dad.

Speaker 89 I have a new podcast called What Are We Even Doing?

Speaker 90 where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.

Speaker 48 Daddy's looking good.

Speaker 82 Each week, I invite someone fascinating to join me.

Speaker 93 Actors, musicians, creatives, highly evolved digital life forms.

Speaker 96 And we talk about what they love.

Speaker 97 Sometimes I'll drizzle a little honey in there too from feeling sexy in the morning.

Speaker 109 What keeps them going?

Speaker 98 And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.

Speaker 99 Like when a kid says bra to me.

Speaker 88 And how they're navigating this high-speed roller coaster we call reality.

Speaker 102 In Australia, you're looking out for snakes, spiders, and fruit boys.

Speaker 104 Right.

Speaker 105 Hey, he's no training too.

Speaker 106 This is like the comments section of my Instagram.

Speaker 11 Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday, Thursday, and let's get weird together in a good way.

Speaker 83 Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 112 Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

Speaker 115 On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

Speaker 117 32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop?

Speaker 38 What? Yes.

Speaker 3 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 10 Who still wore knee pads?

Speaker 118 Yes.

Speaker 36 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

Speaker 10 The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 55 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 120 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 121 What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Speaker 108 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 123 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 124 Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

Speaker 125 So

Speaker 118 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 126 Listen to season four of Snaf Foo with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7 Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast about it, the consumer electronic show, happening here to everyone.

Speaker 7 And of course, it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chat bot that was trained on Reddit.

Speaker 7 So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed Angueso Jr.
Ed, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 7 We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not going to say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less. But you're contractually obligated to not mind.

Speaker 41 Yes, thank you, boss.

Speaker 41 Great to be here, as always.

Speaker 7 Very natural, very natural.

Speaker 53 Zay?

Speaker 46 Hi, hi, hello.

Speaker 7 Hello, hello, hello. Thank you.
This is your first CES as well. That's right.
Your first time being a journalist.

Speaker 46 Also true.

Speaker 7 How do you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble, perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes?

Speaker 129 I love wearing a dress shirt and tie and just getting very drunk.

Speaker 138 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You were very surprised when I gave you your gun, but you can't be a journalist without one.

Speaker 52 Yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 6 I love playing with it. I love dealing with it.

Speaker 128 Without the safety.

Speaker 7 And last but certainly not least, in fact, maybe better than some people in the room. Again, I'm not going to say who.
You can wonder that for yourself. Feel insecure.

Speaker 52 David Rothers.

Speaker 6 David Roth. Thanks.

Speaker 7 I agree that I'm pretty good.

Speaker 7 How much better I am than how many people in this room?

Speaker 138 I'm not even really like something.

Speaker 135 That's not something I like talking about.

Speaker 7 Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten those numbers back from OpenAI.

Speaker 128 Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate at the men.

Speaker 52 I got to wait for 03.

Speaker 7 So, what I want to do here, I think this is kind of our roll-up. We've spent our last day on the floor.
I want to go around, and I'll start first. You guys have a second to get your thoughts together.

Speaker 7 What comes to mind immediately is like, this is the thing that I had the most positive reaction to, and this is the thing that I had the most negative reaction to.

Speaker 7 I think is a solid way for us to start out. And I think my most negative reaction, obviously, was the Amy artificial child best friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable.

Speaker 7 And I hated both that, like, I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design. Like, it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute.

Speaker 7 And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint, it felt like a replacement for the love of adults in the life of a small child, which I thought was like evil in a profound way.

Speaker 7 And I guess the best thing that I saw, I'm not perfectly competent competent at this point to like analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with in a'I Naki's basically reads facial micro-motions in order to let people control a computer.

Speaker 7 Not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. Like I thought that was really interesting.
And it's the kind of thing.

Speaker 7 Because honestly, I might loop that in with there was an AI-assisted like Kane for people who are blind.

Speaker 7 There was another device that allowed you to control a computer through like facial movements in your mouth. It was like a retainer.

Speaker 7 All of the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world.

Speaker 7 That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a toy. Ed, you're in the hot seat next.

Speaker 159 You know, the thing I loved the most was obviously

Speaker 158 the global pavilion for connecting Web3 businesses across crypto, blockchain, oh, yeah, DeFi, FinTech,

Speaker 158 CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, and legal advocacy.

Speaker 160 You know, this

Speaker 158 made my heart flutter because, you know what? Even when you

Speaker 131 think they're down, crypto finds a way to squirm into your life.

Speaker 41 It really is the zombie of the tech world.

Speaker 49 Yeah.

Speaker 41 Because it's dead and yet it's undead.

Speaker 41 It's constantly trying to crawl back.

Speaker 7 Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous.

Speaker 59 No, dude.

Speaker 128 Exactly.

Speaker 41 it's it's it's specifically a zombie i will try to figure out what's the vampire but but specifically crypto is the zombie yeah yeah when i first read the line that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die

Speaker 6 i did not guess who would be referred to hawk to a coin when i think of um

Speaker 6 you know 28 years later trailer where they use that poem for the kimono poem

Speaker 131 yeah six you know like i'm just guessing where the price of bitcoin is gonna go I think

Speaker 158 we're at the beginning of a golden age, not for us, but for the grifters, you know, God. Next week, when our dear golden boy gets, our orange boy gets elected.

Speaker 131 So, I think, or inaugurated because he already won the election.

Speaker 158 He sure did.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 41 that's debatable. I think there were some very curious irregularities in multiple swing states.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 6 Straightforward from here.

Speaker 7 To be encouraging the blue and aunts.

Speaker 128 Yeah.

Speaker 130 People have no ability. No, No,

Speaker 130 let them have it.

Speaker 6 Let them have it.

Speaker 130 You're right.

Speaker 131 He wasn't shot at all.

Speaker 7 That was all an AI trick.

Speaker 158 Yeah, that was too. That was an odd.

Speaker 6 And AR-15 would blow your whole head off that way.

Speaker 138 You know, the thing I actually did like the most, similar to you, I really did like the assistive tech.

Speaker 158 I mean, the stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able-bodied, or experiencing either cognitive decline or, you know, neurodegenerative things or paralyzed.

Speaker 158 Like, this is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment and development.

Speaker 158 And I assume maybe to scale up production of it and figure out ways that it can be offered to people in a variety or in a spectrum of use cases, right? I think the stuff that I did not like, hmm,

Speaker 160 you know, I didn't really care for a lot of the

Speaker 158 luxury surveillance stuff,

Speaker 158 you know, the fake CGMs that, you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me, it's a, it it was a medical device. And when I asked, she looks at my tag and goes, no.

Speaker 6 It's not a medical device. Not in any legally binding sense.

Speaker 7 We had a beautiful moment where it was this like, it was like a set of smart goggles, which there were a lot of, that had like night vision, but also it had like threat assessment.

Speaker 136 So

Speaker 7 the specific thing they bragged is like, it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun, right?

Speaker 7 Oh, and this was like, this goes right after we had gone to an AI security camera that i had flipped off with both hands and it had identified as a man giving the thumbs up

Speaker 158 and i was like i don't feel great about it identifying guns you know for luxury surveillance for health luxury surveillance for ai recognition also like they had it in litter boxes and shit don't need that really don't need that why does the litterbox need to be connected to the internet and why does it need a camera in it you know that does make me think of a better world where we have exactly as much money and focus on ai but it's all integrating it into cat focused products

Speaker 7 Like $50 billion being poured into cat AI.

Speaker 6 Translate whatever your cat is saying into French perfectly.

Speaker 7 Your cat can make deals with Chinese audiences.

Speaker 130 And by the way, we've hooked him up to venture capital.

Speaker 6 He has an open line with SoftBank.

Speaker 160 Siri, why? You know, that I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make some deals.

Speaker 160 Help me figure out why or how he learned to open my door.

Speaker 4 You know, things like this.

Speaker 161 But what we get now?

Speaker 159 Bullshit.

Speaker 7 I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs be like: ladies and gentlemen, we have finally done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat.

Speaker 130 They now understand their mortality just meowing.

Speaker 7 You see that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like, we taught Proust to a dog.

Speaker 6 Got a turtleneck on.

Speaker 52 What a dog would think about

Speaker 7 just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette.

Speaker 6 The future.

Speaker 138 Garrison, you're up.

Speaker 41 Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth at

Speaker 161 the park, where

Speaker 41 they had big, big traffic cones on their head, wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks.

Speaker 59 They were dressed as wizards.

Speaker 41 They were dressed as wizards. And we walked up to them and they said,

Speaker 41 let's start.

Speaker 7 VLC folks, if you don't know this, this was especially relevant to those of us who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of like

Speaker 7 any audio file, yes. Or audio file, and now it will automatically give you subtitles too, using local AI that's not like reaching to the cloud or anything to do it.

Speaker 41 Because putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard.

Speaker 41 So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put subtitles up for you.

Speaker 41 We walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything.

Speaker 41 We have nothing to sell you.

Speaker 7 In this beautiful, they're French.

Speaker 128 So it was in this like

Speaker 6 wonderful accent. So I'm not going to bake her.

Speaker 7 Like the degree of like, I don't give a fuck about anything else in this stupid goddamn show that they gave off. They exuded it.

Speaker 41 And they're by far the coolest because of something, Robert, you said to them. I walked up and I was like, VLC is a very popular app.

Speaker 7 They just crossed 6 billion downloads. I've been using them for almost as long as you've been alive.
And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for 15 years in order to pirate media.

Speaker 7 And they they said very nonchalantly, keep going.

Speaker 6 Keep going. Keep going.

Speaker 130 Keep doing that.

Speaker 128 Keep doing that.

Speaker 141 I'm obsessed.

Speaker 128 That's amazing.

Speaker 138 I feel bad about this too. Cause like,

Speaker 7 it's a good app. I have also used it.
I saw the guy in the hat and I was like, oh, it's the VLC from, you know, from on your desktop. And then I was like, that's, that's stupid.

Speaker 7 I don't need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat and a cape.
And I'm glad that you followed through as a journalist. pushed aside your instinct to be like, do not approach a stranger in a cape.

Speaker 7 Garrison does not have that instinct.

Speaker 52 no, no, no, no.

Speaker 6 Quite the contrary.

Speaker 41 I feel a magnetic attraction.

Speaker 7 This is why I keep an air tag on them.

Speaker 52 Great way to get abducted.

Speaker 6 I think

Speaker 41 similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids, all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already.

Speaker 41 The other thing that's like kind of like the worst is similar to what you said, Ed, like the level of surveillance tech.

Speaker 41 I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to detect detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or gesture and this is really tricky there was one at eureka park it's a south korean company that's powered i believe by samsung with money and also they've access to like their training data they're called visomatic and specifically why this exists it is a camera that you can put on a put on a computer it will it will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to and the reason why this exists is for online online test taking.

Speaker 41 It's so people don't like look at their phone to like, to like cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving.

Speaker 41 And if your eyes look down too much, it's going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic.
There's a lot of online test taking.

Speaker 41 Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of online exams that they as a company will put on, whether it's for people, students, employees.

Speaker 41 But they also had other features where you could switch it. I assume it's doing all the same work.
It just displaced differently on the monitor.

Speaker 41 And instead I can you know, do like object detection, you know, what you're wearing.

Speaker 41 And the general like behavior analysis, if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also South Korean company, for their own surveillance detection.

Speaker 41 But I asked Visomatic, like, what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test tick? And they're like, yeah. general surveillance.
Like, yeah,

Speaker 41 we want to learn how to like predict or like analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by the SK version, one quite funny thing is as I walked by,

Speaker 41 it first identified me as a blonde woman holding a cup. It then changed and said blonde person, which I think is pretty, is pretty neat.

Speaker 7 Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook.
Yeah.

Speaker 41 It could sense the pronouns. It's like, hmm,

Speaker 49 maybe not a woman. Maybe not a woman.

Speaker 50 Blonde person.

Speaker 41 But

Speaker 41 yes, that was something that was like quite well done, specifically the visimatic stuff, like very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone.

Speaker 41 It could tell from like various, various angles, like what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed. So it was very well done.

Speaker 41 It was very accurate, but possibly scary.

Speaker 7 Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast.

Speaker 7 Don't know who they are. Could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you, boys, for your noble service on our nation's roads.

Speaker 7 I'm not saying that because I got pulled over the other week and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now.

Speaker 55 I would never do that.

Speaker 7 Anyway, thanks guys.

Speaker 7 And we're back.

Speaker 129 Is it my turn? It is your turn.

Speaker 41 Okay, so I'm going to introduce our special white woman correspondent, Zai,

Speaker 41 to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world.

Speaker 129 Okay, so the first one is positive for context. I'm a trans woman and one of the booths that was pretty interesting, it was this group.

Speaker 58 Were they French?

Speaker 129 Garrett, do you remember?

Speaker 52 I, I,

Speaker 41 you know, they're, they're European. They're called Ellie, Ellie Health.
That's E-L-I.

Speaker 129 Anyways, this is an at-home hormone tester. So it is saliva-based.
It's like a little disposable package.

Speaker 129 Currently they only advertise cortisol and progesterone, but they have plans for estradiol and other hormones. Testosterone as well.
Testosterone as well. Sorry.

Speaker 129 And yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait, what was it, like 15 minutes? 20 minutes. 20 minutes.
And then you scan this little like QR thing

Speaker 129 on the device and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this has very interesting implications for like the DIY like hormone market or use case.

Speaker 129 I started DIY and did my own like blood test, but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that.

Speaker 46 So this is a

Speaker 129 it's a good idea if it's actually effective.

Speaker 129 We don't have hands-on yet. We haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this.

Speaker 129 Very interesting, very intriguing.

Speaker 41 Yeah, we will certainly, as soon as possible, test this compared to the regular like mail-in blood tests, which is like the current way to do it. But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory.

Speaker 41 And that's maybe not always the best or

Speaker 41 even like convenient. So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really, really cool.

Speaker 129 Right. There's no insurance involved.

Speaker 41 This is completely supposedly closed source.

Speaker 7 From what y'all were telling me earlier today when you explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherent, particularly to the trans community and why they might want to use this and a focus on privacy for that reason.

Speaker 49 I didn't.

Speaker 41 press them on that because i don't know i felt a little weird it's ces you know yeah it's a wide variety of yeah no we tried to extract as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are but uh but not specifically like in that level, but privacy, like they seemed like they had a reasonably good understanding, of course, because it's because it's because it is your own like DNA and hormones.

Speaker 41 Um, you know, like, I do not know if this company is even thinking about trans people, if it is trans-friendly, but it could be used by trans people regardless, yeah, much like a Glock.

Speaker 128 Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 129 The potential is great.

Speaker 129 And then, probably, my least favorite booth, I have to call out some other white women. My SoCal Boho white woman is Evject.

Speaker 148 How's that spelled?

Speaker 52 E-V. E-V.
J-E-C-T.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 7 And what this is.

Speaker 128 Oh, God, yes.

Speaker 129 This is a special plug for your charging port of your EV.

Speaker 129 So the idea is a nefarious party sees you and your fancy EV and approaches you and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words.
Their words, by the way.

Speaker 129 Like, they see your fancy car and you're a target.

Speaker 129 So this device will, like,

Speaker 7 eject. You can just drive away from the charger.

Speaker 49 It ejects the power cord?

Speaker 54 It ejects the power cord, by the way.

Speaker 50 Leaving broken pieces of plastic on both the chargers.

Speaker 141 It's non-reusable, by the way.

Speaker 49 Like, this is not reusable. It's single use.

Speaker 41 One-time use.

Speaker 54 Yes.

Speaker 142 So, yeah,

Speaker 129 all those people targeting SoCal white women in their AVs.

Speaker 7 This is finally someone is serving the community of people that think that if you find a zip tie on your car door handle, MS-13 is that they use

Speaker 7 it.

Speaker 41 That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away. I was like, this product wins the CoolZone Media Award for the most white woman product.

Speaker 41 Specifically to my people, like, if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted right away.

Speaker 41 This is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in like your local like olive garden parking lot.

Speaker 4 Gang stalked American.

Speaker 7 In the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California, where the average income is like in the eight figures.

Speaker 7 I got to say though, you're being very unfair to them.

Speaker 7 It was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling TikTok to look at all of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted and talk to me about this product.

Speaker 6 You know?

Speaker 7 They're like, finally, someone's going to do something about it. Create a disposable piece of plastic.

Speaker 158 Did you notice that guy's always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station?

Speaker 58 This is so he doesn't get that.

Speaker 55 I gotta be careful.

Speaker 134 I feel like I could have upsold him.

Speaker 7 I'm like, what if we put some explosives in this?

Speaker 6 You know, really like keep them off of the car, like blow.

Speaker 4 Like a flashbay.

Speaker 52 Created diversion.

Speaker 158 Inside of it, called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it.

Speaker 7 Someone scared a lady driving a vibe.

Speaker 130 That's one of the electric cars, right?

Speaker 41 It's like a crocodile tail. As soon as it ejects, it whips around.

Speaker 41 I'm mobilizing anyone in the vicinity.

Speaker 7 We're calling it the iguana, and it does spin with enough force to break a grown man's thigh.

Speaker 52 David Roth. So there's a lot of,

Speaker 7 I guess, I gather less than in years past that this was at one point, like basically a car show. There was not a lot of transit stuff this time around.

Speaker 7 I didn't get to see very much of it, but I did have,

Speaker 7 and I guess this is both my best and my worst experience, the most powerful transit experience of my life. So I live in New York City.
I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go.

Speaker 7 And, you know, it has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good.
It moves like 1,200 people through a tunnel at 30 odd miles an hour.

Speaker 7 And for the most part, everybody leaves everybody else alone or, you know, watches videos on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there had to be a better way.

Speaker 7 And at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it. You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 7 So he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour.

Speaker 7 And it takes, there's someone who has to drive it, and also someone has to help you get into the car. But you can fit up to three additional people into the car.
So that ratio. That's everyone I know.

Speaker 131 Yes, right.

Speaker 135 So yeah, you got two people moving three people 200 yards at the speed of like a brisk walk.

Speaker 7 Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades ago. Right, exactly.

Speaker 55 I mean, this was the sort of thing that

Speaker 7 there had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles, miners.
Yes, right.

Speaker 6 Seanderthal.

Speaker 7 Yeah, and that was mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently. Yes, but no one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing.

Speaker 7 It was more of a like a place where you would go if you needed to get copper.

Speaker 6 Of course.

Speaker 7 But in this case, so this is like where it's good to have, and this, I guess every CES is like this. This was my first, to be reminded that there are visionaries out there.

Speaker 7 who are like, what if you put car through hole?

Speaker 7 What if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move that number of people?

Speaker 6 Slightly more than one person.

Speaker 131 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So that was cool.

Speaker 7 I mean, it's just like fun to see like where this stuff is going. And I really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things like cars on the streets of American cities.

Speaker 7 You know, like it could be.

Speaker 128 Okay, Dave.

Speaker 7 I mean, most of the, obviously, this is the tough thing with going last. There was like three or four good things.
You all said them.

Speaker 7 I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here.

Speaker 7 And there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on here, up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the, you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody, so that whatever, your boss can tell if you're really looking at the Zoom that you're on.

Speaker 7 Don't really love that personally. But for me, a lot of the smart home stuff is a real drag.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Like just in the sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being like sort of unnecessary, there is a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make, you know, human life, human life, and just being like, I would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day.

Speaker 7 I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen.

Speaker 134 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Just fucking grim, actually, like didn't really care for it.

Speaker 41 I feel like you got to.

Speaker 7 Like, what are you using that time to do?

Speaker 7 Yeah. What are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing that a human being does, which is like pick your clothes?

Speaker 136 Right. Yeah,

Speaker 7 I wonder how you feel about this because you and I have been going to CES from, I guess, a broadly similar number of years. Like, I've never been to CES.

Speaker 45 Oh, really?

Speaker 59 This is your no, I'm a fucking sportswriter, man.

Speaker 4 Like, this is, I'm out here because Ed got me a folding bed.

Speaker 140 You have like dead-eyed veteran.

Speaker 87 Oh, yeah. Well, I'm very tired.

Speaker 7 Yeah, this is the thing with, like, I think

Speaker 7 as far as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop where you more or less like you start out, it's it's too much, you get big eye right away, and then you just sort of feel zombified.

Speaker 7 But then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like, you know, I remember like 14 CESs ago. That was pretty good.
Like, and they're also tired and also deranged by this point.

Speaker 7 Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer, I was like, oh man, science has given me everything I want.

Speaker 7 Like, and I guess it's, I don't know, do you remember like when the last one was that you felt like even sort of that stirring?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 20 like 11 or 12 when I they did a I got to see inductive charging of a car for the first time and it like was so big. The Las Vegas Convention Center is like

Speaker 7 the size of a city and seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim as they were doing this. It was very inefficient.
Not out of reverence, but because

Speaker 6 our wild car.

Speaker 7 Yeah. But that was just, that was like, oh, wow, this is kind of like amazing that this is even possible.
But yeah, not really sense. Yep.
Not really sense.

Speaker 7 That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the Hyperloop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be

Speaker 7 unless something goes wrong. It would have started to seem kind of grim otherwise.

Speaker 7 Well, the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been as long as I've been going to these, they've been trying to sell people on smart homes.

Speaker 7 And I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want, right?

Speaker 7 One of them is it would be nice if like I didn't have to think about about playing music.

Speaker 7 I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted and it would play the music and I could hear it everywhere and I didn't have to futz with a bunch of shit.

Speaker 7 And the second is, what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold? It would be nice to turn on the heater like an hour before I get home.

Speaker 7 And one of those things you'd use every day and one of those things is not really viable to base a business off of, but like they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house.

Speaker 7 And I don't know, does anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking smart home? No, I mean, I like, it's not an accident that my apartment is basically going to be in the year 2005 forever.

Speaker 7 Like, I mean, it's, it's expensive to do all this stuff.

Speaker 7 This is the bit that with so many of these demos, like, just you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful is.

Speaker 7 It's like the like Lexus December to Remember sales event type energy, just a big fucking.

Speaker 131 What lives do you live? Yeah.

Speaker 7 This also, we've talked about this on Ed's show that like, there's a lot of stuff stuff here that feels like the first 15 minutes of a George Romero movie, like, just getting you set for eventually there's going to be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous, shambling zombies.

Speaker 7 Yeah. And Smart Home, not a bad horror movie concept.
I don't think it's a great consumer concept. Yeah.
Speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast.

Speaker 7 All right, we're back, and I want to close this out by asking everybody a question: which is: how do you feel about where tech is going?

Speaker 160 I think we're going to hell.

Speaker 6 I think we are getting

Speaker 91 very fast into a sweet abyss.

Speaker 158 I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance,

Speaker 158 around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics.

Speaker 159 I'm like, I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going,

Speaker 158 but also that I don't know what to do about it because so much of it is driven by private interest, right? It's like venture capitalists,

Speaker 158 well-capitalized individuals, and the firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed. And these corporations, you know.

Speaker 7 Yeah, the nature of like, you can, you can really tell that a lot of like the health products are very optimized for like rich tech executives.

Speaker 7 Like there was a lot of sleep products that all relied on you being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers playing banaral beats while you slept.

Speaker 7 And like a different devices measure your, like do an ECG. And it's like, I don't know, my aunt's not going to do that.

Speaker 158 Yeah, you know, like I was, you know, I was, I talked with my partner about this. They have type 1 diabetes.

Speaker 4 They have a CGM.

Speaker 158 They use it constantly.

Speaker 158 And we've been talking about and thinking about writing about how there have been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto you this idea that you need to have close monitoring of it to preempt if you are going to be pre-diabetic or to optimize what you're eating throughout the day.

Speaker 158 But that, you know, when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, whoa, you know, if your sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being a bad person.

Speaker 158 It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't.

Speaker 158 It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of, and you can be your best self, which is really just like not large, you know?

Speaker 55 and

Speaker 158 I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot of the biometric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that.

Speaker 159 Yeah.

Speaker 7 You know, it's kind of focused on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing.

Speaker 7 We spent a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest, and I do feel like several tech companies were the ones trying to sell us indulgences.

Speaker 6 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 87 All right, Gare.

Speaker 41 There's small improvements for consumer tech, right? This is a very consumer-based work. It's supposed to be a consumer-based tech show.

Speaker 41 There's products like the Shox headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I tried out bone-conducting headphones last year, which are very good.
They work underwater.

Speaker 7 If you're deaf in an ear, you can listen to your music the way you used to be able to.

Speaker 41 Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they called air conductive.
I don't quite know how it works, but it does work. I can hear it.

Speaker 41 If you're standing like two, three feet away, there's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle middle of my head despite having to not put an earbud actually like in my ear.

Speaker 41 They're super useful. They work great.

Speaker 41 Really good sound quality.

Speaker 7 They're durable. I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day.
Like sweat, rain, great product.

Speaker 41 It's like small improvements, right?

Speaker 41 It's not necessarily like revolutionizing hearing, but it's very, very, very small improvements.

Speaker 41 Whereas the other kind of big, big trend, which isn't necessarily like wholly consumer-based, it's kind of what these larger companies are trying to move towards.

Speaker 41 Is I feel like they're trying to replace

Speaker 41 friendship with this form of like technology and like AI-enabled technology. You used to have friends to get recommended new music.

Speaker 41 You used to have like friends to like tell you about new stuff that they're interested in.

Speaker 41 No longer. Now you have an AI agent that can do that for you.

Speaker 41 You don't need friends to help kind of talk about, you know,

Speaker 41 you had a rough breakup. Instead, you can have a short-term replacement using AI.
You can have a friend replacement, a girlfriend replacement.

Speaker 41 It's all these things that are trying to like replace the core concept of friendship.

Speaker 41 Even as like a baby, even as a toddler, your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside.

Speaker 41 It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge,

Speaker 41 tell you what to do.

Speaker 41 Roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras. And that could be your first friend.

Speaker 41 It's replacing the core concept of friendship.

Speaker 41 It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, make it as smooth as possible that completely ignores like what it means to be human.

Speaker 7 It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot LEQ, which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device to remove the need for human empathy.

Speaker 7 Like I went to a, there was a vet app called Leica that's like chat GPT for veterinarians. And they were like, yeah, you know what? Most of it we focused initially on like technical questions.

Speaker 7 So like, if I have these symptoms, what can that mean? But what vets kept asking us is like, we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are going to die.

Speaker 7 And I was like, do you, are vets not getting out of vet school?

Speaker 130 No one, because that's like, that's a big part of being a vet.

Speaker 7 Like, do they need chat GPT for this?

Speaker 41 I saw this other company that was like, it was designed to help you get over the loss of your pet, where you could pump tons of photos of your pet into this into this AI, into this ai generator and it will generate new images and this this is proven to help you move on from loss which is literally a nathan fielder joke from like seven years ago yeah it's seven years ago and like no you should talk with your friends about that that's why you are a human that's how you can move on from loss you you have to make new connections poorly ai generated images of your cat aren't gonna help you move on like what why

Speaker 41 anyway Oh, that's bleak. Replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do.

Speaker 41 Maybe because they don't really understand real human like relationships that aren't like innately transactional.

Speaker 41 I'm not sure, but that is like a huge trend that I've seen multiple people mention.

Speaker 6 All right. Zai?

Speaker 129 So I've worked in this industry for like three years now, and this is my first big convention. And I would say

Speaker 129 this has just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world. and most of it's just nonsense.

Speaker 46 And

Speaker 129 maybe the post-civ people are on to some stuff.

Speaker 7 Well, you say that, but I really do think Viradox is going to revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of people.

Speaker 43 I'm just slandering these people.

Speaker 7 But don't name it something so sinister.

Speaker 52 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 If you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great. I would just don't.

Speaker 6 Call it apple fresh. Yes.
Call it apple fresh.

Speaker 41 By the way,

Speaker 41 you should listen to Better Offline to hear context from Veradox, which we discussed in the last episode of our daily CES coverage over there with the wonderful Ed Desittron.

Speaker 41 But essentially, Veradox is this mist that gets sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps it stay shelf-stable for a few more days.

Speaker 4 33%.

Speaker 49 33%.

Speaker 46 Exactly.

Speaker 7 And so maybe that shelf-stable mist will also translate to waking up the dead. Possibly, but you don't know that it's going to do.
You don't know that it's not going to do that.

Speaker 55 Right, to be fair.

Speaker 49 We just know it keeps things fresh.

Speaker 52 Yes.

Speaker 128 As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions.

Speaker 41 And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red leaf lettuce back to life does have any repercussions in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly dead loved ones.

Speaker 55 David.

Speaker 52 It's me. Sorry.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 A lot of good points.

Speaker 7 I mean, I think Gary and Edward both made the point about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot of this, just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel not, I mean, there probably are people, I imagine that's like, if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards, you know, he's like, Brian Johnson, Brian Johnson, we love Brian.

Speaker 52 He's the best.

Speaker 49 We love Brian.

Speaker 7 But he, like, I feel like he would have been walking through this, clapping his hands with delight, clapping the whole time, eating his 400 kills a day.

Speaker 41 Drinking his son's blood.

Speaker 52 Yeah.

Speaker 59 Time for, yeah. It's a, it's

Speaker 7 in fairness. I drink his son's blood blood pretty regular.
It's not bad.

Speaker 7 It's a high quality plow, but, but that, it felt like it was that, that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all.

Speaker 7 And I don't think, I mean, again, there probably are people that want that. They certainly have money.
I don't imagine that, I think what most people would like,

Speaker 7 I mean, you don't expect technology to make you feel more human, but.

Speaker 7 Something I've been thinking about a lot.

Speaker 7 We've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline, but there's a passivity that a lot of this sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're just like sort of things are happening to you that make your life more efficient and convenient.

Speaker 7 And I don't think that I want that. I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the, you know, market that I think they're aiming for with this, but

Speaker 7 certainly old enough to remember, as you said, like finding music. Like that's a thing that, you know, your friends tell you about it.

Speaker 7 And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you like go to a store and you flip through shit.

Speaker 7 Like there's a distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed something, like you're a foie gras goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being.

Speaker 7 And I think it's an important distinction. I think that little bit of agency of having some sense of doing the things that you want to do, like I would imagine that, well, I don't have to imagine it.

Speaker 7 Technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you. I think that

Speaker 7 I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking Matrix pod.

Speaker 7 And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the

Speaker 7 matrix pod dwelling community. Yeah, I think that's about the best line we could go out on.
Like that's, that's, yeah, you nailed it. Thanks.
I thought I crushed that one.

Speaker 130 Yeah, you did. You did.

Speaker 130 Great job, Dave.

Speaker 41 Where can people find your work, Dave?

Speaker 7 Defector.com. Let me do that without crushing my water.
No, no, no, no. That's cool.

Speaker 7 That's a load-bearing piece of content.

Speaker 158 uh defector.com is the website and ed uh big black jacobin on twitter and blue sky this machine kills is my podcast techbubble.substack.com is the newsletter hell yeah

Speaker 7 do you want to tell people how to find you zai at neo woman on twitter with okay zeros

Speaker 7 zeros for neo zeros all right everybody well uh that's going to do it for us here at it could happen here uh and our week at ces you know just try to hug hug your loved ones until the Viridox sweeps through all of their homes, neighborhoods.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 130 Oh no, it's in the room.

Speaker 6 It's in the room.

Speaker 15 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers.

Speaker 18 But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.

Speaker 21 The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 23 So why did it take so long to catch him?

Speaker 2 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now.

Speaker 33 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 63 May 24th, 1990, a pipe bomb explodes in the front seat of environmental activist Judy Berry's car.

Speaker 65 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.

Speaker 5 I felt it rip through me with just a force more powerful and terrible than anything that I could describe.

Speaker 64 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 69 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 44 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 73 The men and woman who were heard had planned to lead a summer of militant protest against logging practices in Northern California.

Speaker 74 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 76 The timber timber industry, I mean, it was the number one industry in the area, but more that it was the culture, it was the way of life.

Speaker 77 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 78 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Speaker 61 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 82 Hey there, I'm Kyle McLachlan.

Speaker 84 You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex in the City, or just the Internet's dad.

Speaker 89 I have a new podcast called What Are We Even Doing?

Speaker 90 where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.

Speaker 48 Daddy's looking good.

Speaker 82 Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me.

Speaker 94 Actors, musicians, creatives, highly evolved digital life forms.

Speaker 96 And we talk about what they love.

Speaker 97 Sometimes I'll drizzle a little honey in there too from feeling sexy in the morning.

Speaker 82 What keeps them going?

Speaker 98 And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.

Speaker 99 Like when a kid says brought a meat.

Speaker 101 And how they're navigating this high-speed roller coaster we call reality in australia you're looking out for snakes spiders and

Speaker 108 right hey he's no train mctugle this is like the comments section of my instagram join me and my delightful guests every thursday and let's get weird together in a good way listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 112 Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.

Speaker 115 On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

Speaker 117 32 lost nuclear weapons.

Speaker 117 Wait, stop?

Speaker 38 What? Yes.

Speaker 3 Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Speaker 10 Who still wore knee pads?

Speaker 118 Yes.

Speaker 36 It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.

Speaker 10 The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.

Speaker 55 I'm like, oh, wow.

Speaker 120 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.

Speaker 121 What was that like for you to to soft launch into the show?

Speaker 108 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

Speaker 123 I forgot whose podcast we were doing.

Speaker 124 Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.

Speaker 125 So

Speaker 118 let's see how it goes.

Speaker 126 Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 Welcome to Nick Adappet here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.

Speaker 4 I am your host, Mia Wong, returned for the holidays, returned rejuvenated, returned refreshed, returned to do something a little bit different.

Speaker 4 In the coming weeks, we're going to be doing a lot of nitty-gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism.

Speaker 4 But what we haven't really been doing as much, what I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now, and also

Speaker 4 talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up in a cyber truck outside of a Trump building.

Speaker 4 And with me to talk about this is

Speaker 4 writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so many different things that like, I don't know, someone's going to write a great biography in like a hundred years.

Speaker 4 It is the one and only Vicki Ostenweil.

Speaker 8 Thank you.

Speaker 8 Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before before you find people could hear me.

Speaker 52 Oh, I'm glad to have you here.

Speaker 4 And part of this,

Speaker 4 the initial thing that was like, okay, we need to do this was

Speaker 4 I saw you call all of this the years of lead paint.

Speaker 4 And that is just, it has stuck in my mind for every single second of every day since then.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, Kaw, go check this out.

Speaker 8 But I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Hotel.

Speaker 8 Then about, you know, as we were about to talk about, Matthew Livelsberger, I think is how it's pronounced.

Speaker 8 Who's the Green Beret, then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but the purging of Democratic politicians.

Speaker 8 Is that what we think his

Speaker 128 motivation was now?

Speaker 4 That seems to be it. Like politicians and like

Speaker 4 it's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants Democrats gone from like the army and right, right?

Speaker 4 You know, so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rote from the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right-wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race war-y or like less anti-Semitic versions of it.

Speaker 4 Yes. And that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by

Speaker 4 blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of of a truck i

Speaker 8 so basically this guy despite being a green beret which like say what you will arguably some of the most trained and experienced murderers in the world you know whatever else you say about them and and this is important you know like i i'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like green beret to like former green beret this guy was active duty so like

Speaker 8 yes yes exactly this wasn't even like a cooked vet this is a guy who is like in the shit And we know that he was drinking the Kool-Aid because he used chat GPT we've just found out today to help plan his attack.

Speaker 8 But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise, which undeniable, Cybertruck, like all Teslas, is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it

Speaker 8 because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans. And what I really mean, of course, is that they have just terrible safety protocols.

Speaker 8 And the Cybertruck, which is like a 12-year-old's idea of a good idea, which is an incredibly, incredibly firm, stainless steel body, which does not crumple and does not take damage, which means that your frail human body inside it in an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal.

Speaker 8 It's very dangerous to be inside, but the car doesn't take damage. And that means that if you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine.
So the explosion went straight up, right?

Speaker 8 So it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage to the hotel.

Speaker 8 Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine.

Speaker 8 So anyway, all of this is to say, you know, this guy who's like an active duty green beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an Elon Musk car will somehow lead to the murder of Democrats, but he's so tech-pilled that he takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a bomb, and dies in it.

Speaker 8 and just leaves this like horrible image. And I mean, I'm, you know, I'm being flippant about this.
Like it's an awful thing, obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself.

Speaker 8 I mean, the image was everywhere on social media for like the last three days of that, of that cyber truck on fire outside the Trump Towers.

Speaker 8 Yeah, it was the perfect image of a thing I had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint. So I wrote an essay around that, basically.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so I want to start. talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are, because I imagine

Speaker 4 some of you, like there's, there's probably like, I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and like know the name of every single guy who was implicated for these car bombings.

Speaker 4 But for everyone else who's normal and I count myself among the non-normal people because I did, I spent about two years going down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain.

Speaker 135 Same.

Speaker 4 But the years of lead were this thing in

Speaker 4 roughly the 70s and the 80s in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings in 1968.

Speaker 4 And Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example, France has this huge uprising in May 68.

Speaker 4 Like, they nearly knock off the government, like, workers' councils have seized control of the factories, like, they lose this robot.

Speaker 4 Like, there's, you know, the president's like fleeing in a helicopter. But then, after that, like, they kind of never seriously threaten the French government again.

Speaker 4 In Italy, that is not true.

Speaker 4 Like, 68 in Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but like the seizure of the factories has been going on since, like, I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the 50s.

Speaker 4 And it really only stops in 1977 when they have one last big push uprising and it fails.

Speaker 4 So as a way to contain this, the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right-wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups.

Speaker 4 And by terror groups, I mean like the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing in 1980. It kills 85 people, wounds like 290.

Speaker 4 It's a really, really horrific attack and it's immediately blamed on an anarchist group. It turns out it's not an anarchist group.
It is a state-backed fascist group.

Speaker 135 And yeah, like there are other ones.

Speaker 4 I will pass pass over to Vicki to talk about the other terrible shit that they did.

Speaker 8 Well, that bombing kind of ends, in some ways, ends the years of Lead. You could end it there.
It's sort of the last big terrorist month.

Speaker 8 The first thing, the event that like sort of after 68 kind of starts it is this thing called the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan, which is like at an agriculture bank, I think is what it's called.

Speaker 8 It's just like, but 17 people are killed, almost 100 people are wounded. And the first thing that the police do is they blame anarchists in 68 as well.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 8 there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named pinelli who is arrested and then while he is under interrogation falls out of the window of the police department to his death yep it has still never been proven that he was pushed the police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him really hard yeah sure uh-huh like there's a very famous italian play about it by dario foe called the death of an anarchist yeah so anyways they blame the anarchists they literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer and then of course it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordene Nuovo, who was, you know, this neo-fascist group that had, let's say, significant overlap with parts of the Italian state.

Speaker 8 And I think, like, one way of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it, is that it's like a very low-level civil war.

Speaker 8 It's, it's, I think, the closest thing we can maybe think of is the troubles in Northern Ireland.

Speaker 53 Yeah.

Speaker 8 And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas like the, you know, the movement was in Ireland.

Speaker 8 But this is very similar, which is like, there's these armed wings both on the right and the left that are like both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other.

Speaker 8 But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for, arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks.

Speaker 48 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And there's, I mean, there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here.

Speaker 4 I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in, I think it's in, if you go into the Halloween episode we did, where we talked about conspiracies, I've explained that whole thing.

Speaker 4 But like the goal of this, right?

Speaker 4 The reason that, you know, they're, they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay-behind networks that were designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and having all these bombings was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state because the idea was, and this, and this seems to have worked, you know, you scare people enough by the fact that there's, you know, there's bombs going off all the time.

Speaker 4 People are getting killed. People are getting kidnapped.

Speaker 135 There's all of this just like horror happening.

Speaker 4 And the goal is to get people to turn to the state for, you know, sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need, you know, we need the sort of terror to end.

Speaker 4 And it was extremely effective. And the sort of knowledge of this has, I guess, proliferated through the American left in the last like decade.

Speaker 4 And that has led to a lot of,

Speaker 4 I think, kind of unhelpful comparisons.

Speaker 4 You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is gladio is those stay-behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo-fascist groups.

Speaker 4 And like to refer to this sort of like, I don't know, to like what's happening in the US. And that's not really what's happening.

Speaker 4 And this is where I want to pass it to Vicki to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the years of lead paint and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.

Speaker 8 Yeah. In classic American fashion, everything is more chaotic and autonomous.
Yes.

Speaker 8 And widely proliferated. And also widely proliferated all over America.
Products and services.

Speaker 91 Did I do good? Let's support this podcast.

Speaker 52 That's a good one.

Speaker 6 Thank you.

Speaker 4 We are back. All right.
Years of blood paint. Let's go.

Speaker 42 Yes.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 8 So I actually think, you know, as you're saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio, and it's not Gladio, because that was very conscious and it was like these stay-behind networks that were organized explicitly but the u.s state defense of the second amendment and of like assault rifle availability and making the u.s the sort of home for military surplus because obviously like the military industrial complex sells lots of guns it's a very helpful thing that producing a reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort of years of led terroristic sort of strategy of tension way, I think might actually be close.

Speaker 8 But you can tell that that's very disorganized.

Speaker 4 It's very distributed through the social it's done by you know volunteers right yeah and also the people who are doing the years of lead are unbelievably cynical about it right like they don't they don't believe any of this right yes yes no exactly whereas second amendment guys like that stuff is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like

Speaker 8 fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like increasingly right-wing politics that's sort of like not what they were trying to do but that's sort of you know that's the dead effect of a lot of the stuff yeah it wasn't it wasn't a conscious effort at all but that's also not the years of lead paint that's just like a similar thing the years of lead paint um which is obviously like which is a joke about there's this big reactionary myth from like the freakonomics guys i think yeah that like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms which is really funny because for the freakonomics guy that that is a downright left-wing theory like

Speaker 8 standards yeah exactly or maybe it was a dude directing it i don't even remember now. Anyway, so

Speaker 8 it became, it became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers and Generation X people, you know, having the blood paint in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff.

Speaker 8 Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of like ableist insult when I talk about this. And it's a memetic way of making fun of that concept.
But

Speaker 8 all of that to say, they have completely drunk the Kool-Aid, right? The fascists, as you're saying, Mia, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were framing the left.

Speaker 8 They were like making making it up. But like a lot of people on the right.

Speaker 4 In Italy. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 8 In Italy. Excuse me.
In Italy in the 60s and in the actual years of led. Years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January 6th was anti-Fah.

Speaker 8 Like people whose friends were there, you know? Yeah. Like stuff like Q.

Speaker 8 And the other thing that the reason that this is Years of Lead Paint and not the first Trump administration is because during the first Trump administration, there was actually pretty, pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements.

Speaker 8 And they could certainly come back in the U.S. right now.
There's no reason they couldn't.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and it's also worth talking about. We'll be covering this on the show

Speaker 4 at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents.

Speaker 4 But there was recently a massive, from Distributed Denial of Secrets, a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from a guy who infiltrated it.

Speaker 4 There's a very good ProPublica story talking about the guy that we'll link in the...

Speaker 82 the show notes.

Speaker 4 So like the militia movement has survived, but the kind of stuff that like we saw in like 2017, 2018, 2020 is not.

Speaker 8 Yeah, the proud, the Proud Boys, the QAnon, the folks who made up JSIC and the folks who made up the alt-right, you know, broadly were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street.

Speaker 8 And then the people who remained, QAnon folks who were, I think, you know, some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-Nazis, obviously, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right?

Speaker 8 And like, those people mostly got discouraged by the repression. The repression, I think, successfully sort of put the end to the organized Q stuff.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, and also, and also what we've talked about on this show, the other thing that put an end to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you could use literally the exact same structure of QAnon, but make it about trans people.

Speaker 43 Yes.

Speaker 4 And that has been unbelievably effective.

Speaker 8 No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued. Yeah.
But as an on-the-ground organizing principle, it's not that functional.

Speaker 52 Yeah, it's not.

Speaker 8 Which is really lucky. But what that means is that Trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015, 2016.
Like that was a real movement.

Speaker 8 His rallies were really well attended. His rallies, this election, people left early.

Speaker 8 You know, it was like, it was like going to see a losing team in their last home game of the season, you know, was the vibe at those rallies.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I should do a very specific example. It's like, the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out

Speaker 4 before their owner moved them to Las Vegas.

Speaker 135 Exactly.

Speaker 4 Where like they've had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner who decided to make, who made a bad team so people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to LA.

Speaker 8 Like, it's like that kind of shit yeah those were the vibes and yet of course the Democrats in their infinite infinite capacities lost the election

Speaker 8 and so what that means though is that is that you have this moment where actually the right has as much power in the federal government as it's ever had you know the resistance is you know they you know they're very proud of legally handing power to the man um and ending all of his charges or whatever but the street movement is disorganized so you have this gap between the two where there's this really powerful media apparatus, Fox News, Truth Social, X, the everything app, you know, all of these, like, all of these places where the fascist, you know, and I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today.

Speaker 8 I mean, you know, when we're recording this, so it's, it's just, there's this huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on-the-ground organizing. So you get people like this Green Beret,

Speaker 8 who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump hotel up in an attempt to start the race war by getting Democrats hung.

Speaker 8 So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right?

Speaker 8 The imagination of, as you said, the Turner diaries or the sort of like, you know, the right-wing terror networks in the U.S., you know, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grids, right?

Speaker 8 They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world of all against all and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart, whatever.

Speaker 8 It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family. Step two, question mark, question mark.
Step three, white supremacist revolution. Yeah.
It's horrifying. I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea.

Speaker 8 But that's happening in these groups that have really, really, they believe, I think genuinely, that like, I think the right does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and Asada Shakur.

Speaker 8 Like they see them both as equally dangerous, right? They hate Liz Cheney. Yeah.
Like in the final days of the elections, she was the person they were saying, we're gonna go after her.

Speaker 8 Like Liz Cheney, like really, like,

Speaker 4 yeah, it's like the closest parallel I can think of this is like there was a faction of people during the Cold War who thought that like the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked.

Speaker 4 And like there were literally guys murdering each other. Like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in 69, right?

Speaker 4 Like and there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War, even as like China is invading Vietnam, are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy. And

Speaker 4 that's the secretly the USSR and the PRC are working together.

Speaker 135 And these are not like, you know, some random guys in the street.

Speaker 4 Like, these are like the guys at the peak of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true. And this is, I think, yeah, like this is the kind of thing we're in now.

Speaker 4 These people are completely cooked.

Speaker 50 They don't have any analytical ability whatsoever.

Speaker 4 They actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid.

Speaker 8 There was just a scoop. Sorry, I'm just going to drop this really quick.

Speaker 8 There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of Project 2085, their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.

Speaker 8 They want to take down Wikipedia, like because, because that's a place you can verify facts at, right? Yeah, they've already got the post, they've got the times. Like, what are they going to do?

Speaker 52 They got to go after Wikipedia.

Speaker 8 This is the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And do you know what else builds a world of unreality and then attempts to sell it to you?

Speaker 8 Ooh, products and services?

Speaker 4 That supports this podcast.

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 4 we are back i'm very proud of that one that that's one of the best ones i've ever done and i just completely off the top of my head like just came back better than ever that was really cool yeah she's never been so back

Speaker 4 so

Speaker 4 I want to move a little bit from the just what does the state look like, how pilled are these people kind of thing, to

Speaker 4 I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here, because I think part of what's happening here, and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like

Speaker 4 the CHIPS Act and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But I think actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is like going back to your David Graeber.

Speaker 4 And he has this line talking about neoliberalism.

Speaker 4 I think this might, God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before i quote it i think it might be from the shock of victory but he has this line about how neoliberalism when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like any alternative to neoliberalism is impossible it will always choose making the alternative seem impossible because that's what neoliberalism is right this is you know the sort of maxim of of margaret thatcher is there is no alternative It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives.

Speaker 4 And this includes the possibility of a future.

Speaker 4 And the goal of this, and this is, I think, the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint, is this induced helplessness.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's something, Vicky, I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah. I was sort of vibing with what you were saying.
But yeah, I think a lot of people online have accepted sort of, you know, don't give in in advance, right?

Speaker 8 But like, I think one big thing that has been part of the Biden like strategy of counterrevolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years, but indeed over the last four decades as well, as sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that you actually really can't do stuff yourself.

Speaker 8 You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to make a choice, right? And any choice made otherwise, you know, is doomed to failure, right?

Speaker 8 And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut.

Speaker 8 I just do what I want.

Speaker 8 The incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous 30 years of politics, which is you get a ton of expert reviews and then you do a political change that moves things like 12% one way, you know, nudge politics as like Barack Obama loved or whatever, right?

Speaker 8 So that's sort of like, there's, there's that sense. But then on the individual sense, it's also about...
distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right?

Speaker 8 Because part of what the 60s was, and the reason the 60s lasted so long in Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had the like the last in Western Europe, they had the last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up from Sicily.

Speaker 8 So they had this like massive, massive factories that had these like crazy strikes over and over again.

Speaker 8 So the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism, blah, blah, blah, breaking down labor, workforce, like we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right?

Speaker 8 And like we go to the HR department to get help, right? Or we sort of get self-care, we like work on ourselves, we get therapy, you know, that our boss offers us you know

Speaker 8 thoughts and prayers right when we're when things are hard but like there's a big attempt to

Speaker 8 allow people to to define themselves sort of the carrot the carrot of the 60s was like you know you get to like have an identity like okay we won't be officially racist yeah quote unquote um you know okay we won't be officially sexist they claim okay whatever none of that's true but they but they sort of sell that and then they say but in return you have to like do all of the self-work self-work you have to be an identity in the marketplace so basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what shoes to wear becomes like both a an identity defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces right like and so that in you know spoony world we call that sort of choice paralysis right and i think that's probably accepted as well that like you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless on the face of it you can't do anything and so that produces a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right?

Speaker 8 That's another thing people want is like someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you to free you from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy and shit like that.

Speaker 48 And

Speaker 4 anyway, and the right has a bunch of alternatives here, right? With like, this is the fantasy of what Tradwives is. It's like, what if someone else did your thinking for you?

Speaker 4 It's also the entire logic behind AI, right? And behind the sort of AI agents thing that they're like pushing right now. Go listen to our CES coverage and you'll hear a bunch about it.

Speaker 4 It's like, what if someone just like planned your life for you, right?

Speaker 4 What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and it would tell you how to live?

Speaker 4 And this is, you know, this is also the structure of how cults work.

Speaker 4 Like this is why cults have been able to attract people that like, I think the media conception of cults, you wouldn't think would be in in them.

Speaker 4 This is why there's so many engineers in cults because there's like a bunch of people who have to make choices constantly and the cult is like, hey, what if I just like made all of these choices for you?

Speaker 4 And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before, this is ultimately part of what's going on with like Trumpism, right?

Speaker 4 Because Trump is also to some extent, like if you're in this movement, like you no longer have to choose anymore. You just, you know, here is the guy.
The guy is going to do the thing for you.

Speaker 4 This is also,

Speaker 4 if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right? It's about

Speaker 4 the sort of populace delegates their will into a single heroic individual and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you.

Speaker 4 And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety.

Speaker 4 Also, and it's something that is very well documented that, you know, we're not going to get into in full here, but all of the stuff we've been talking about about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense, and that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you that something is true but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening and to make you just give up and when you're refusing to make a choice between like

Speaker 4 was there a gas attack in syria or was it like staged by the rebels as a false flag right you refusing to make the choice has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action And this has been a really important part of this to sort of demobilize the left.

Speaker 4 Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gambit was, right?

Speaker 4 Was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them.

Speaker 4 And, you know, now Tulsi Gabbard is like one of the big people in Trump world.

Speaker 8 Right. I think what's his name? I disrespect him by not remembering his name, but I should for the podcast.
Steve Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the zone with shit, right?

Speaker 8 It's sort of the strategy. You just release so much.
terrible information that it doesn't matter.

Speaker 8 And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of his, you know, many scandals is he would just like say the next most outrageous thing.

Speaker 8 And, you know, you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing.

Speaker 8 And it was just a sort of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and, and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it. You get exhausted.

Speaker 8 And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets. And I think like that's really.

Speaker 8 That's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic. We're in the midst of a pandemic.
COVID has is in another wave that like no one has named right now.

Speaker 8 And no one even mentioned health care let alone the pandemic during the election of 2024 yeah so part of what's been going on too is that there has been this mass push by the biden administration and the democrats to make us forget what happened in 2020 um in terms of the uprising and to make us forget the pandemic which is so unpopular and which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy right it was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse so everyone had to be forced back to work how do you force people back to work who evidently care about each other and their own safety?

Speaker 8 You lie to them, you confuse them about what's actually going on, right?

Speaker 8 So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work.

Speaker 8 So we had to get over the cognitive dissonance of that.

Speaker 8 So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which like people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know, whatever.

Speaker 4 Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy born of strength, right?

Speaker 4 The years of lead paint, this is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power, right? The actual base that put Trump in power, right?

Speaker 4 And their actual political base is incredibly brittle, right? They are about to tank the entire global economy.

Speaker 4 Like through by putting like 50% tariffs of like every single country in the world, they okay, let's let's be accurate here on Chinese, Mexican, and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the U.S.

Speaker 56 imports things from.

Speaker 4 Right. So like, you know, this is how you resist

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 44 resist your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself.

Speaker 59 But, you know.

Speaker 4 They're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices, right?

Speaker 4 These fucking arrogant bastards have sown the wind and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwind.

Speaker 4 The basis of this fucking, of this entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people can hold 330 million people in line by sheer force? No, of course not.

Speaker 4 There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history, right?

Speaker 4 This strategy...

Speaker 4 is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance.

Speaker 4 And if they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation, right? They need you scared.

Speaker 4 They need you confused.

Speaker 135 They need you completely convinced of your own helplessness.

Speaker 4 They need you to forget that as the old song says, in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand fold.

Speaker 4 They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. When the union makes us strong.

Speaker 4 This is the entire fucking thing, right? If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.

Speaker 54 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 And the thing is, right? The thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized.

Speaker 4 However, comma, that means that you, just literally any random person, can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing.

Speaker 4 The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what?

Speaker 4 It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do, for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things.

Speaker 4 And they are fucking terrified of this.

Speaker 4 Their entire strategy is to make sure that you simply do not do this. And every single one of you has the power to do this.
And I know this because I also was just some random dipshit.

Speaker 4 Like I was just literally a random college student, right? Like I was just some asshole. And I just started doing things, right?

Speaker 4 And I got together with my friends and we fucking, we made a tenants union and we did anti-ice stuff and we did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you.

Speaker 4 We just, you know, decided one day we were going to do it and it happened.

Speaker 4 To return one last time to David Graeber, one of, one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.

Speaker 4 And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified at the idea of you making this world differently. And together we can do that.

Speaker 8 Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important.

Speaker 8 And actually, when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices and to make decisions because you would know what you need for the next step, or you'll have an idea of it.

Speaker 8 You might make a mistake, you might be wrong.

Speaker 8 But each step along that way, like it's an easier way to do this and to feel the power of real choices rather than the false choices of like, do you want your AI from Grok or do you want it from chat GPT?

Speaker 8 Right. And obviously, like, that's a joke, but, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore.
They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped. We get stomped on.

Speaker 8 That's what they've agreed to give us is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past.

Speaker 8 But they might learn very, very quickly and reaping the whirlwind that the reason that a century of American politicians have tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really hard to preserve the niceties of the government is because they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution and the guillotines, which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution, which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of the French when the slaves rose up and destroyed the sugar plantation of Haiti, and it has been punished ever since.

Speaker 8 The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, this flooding the zone with shit, as Mia says, is from a position of weakness. Because when they were strong,

Speaker 8 when they were strong, they had Obama was a sign of strength.

Speaker 8 We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country, and he can just go on hope, like, and he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular, like even through a huge economic collapse, right?

Speaker 8 That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence.
And I use the phrase advisedly.

Speaker 45 And there are a lot of holes.

Speaker 8 And they have drunk the Kool-Aid. The right has drunk the Kool-Aid.
They don't know the difference between Democrats and anarchists. Not really.
They genuinely don't really know the difference.

Speaker 8 Some of them do. Their philosophers do.
But the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference. That gives us a lot of space to move.

Speaker 8 That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them.

Speaker 8 And that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness in many ways.

Speaker 8 The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were in previous times.

Speaker 8 And they're going to have to be of necessity because MAGA is basically, you know, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands on you, like you're in trouble.

Speaker 8 But if it doesn't, like, you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any

Speaker 8 trouble, like you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that.

Speaker 8 But there's a lot to do and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community.

Speaker 8 And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power.

Speaker 7 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 162 It Could Happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 162 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 162 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 25 I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer.

Speaker 29 The investigation into the most notorious killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 30 Available now.

Speaker 33 Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 35 The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 36 Merica, y'all better wake the hell up.

Speaker 37 Bad things happen to good people in small towns.

Speaker 35 Listen to Graves County on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 6 Join me, Danny Trejo, in Nocturnal.

Speaker 39 Tales from the Shadows.

Speaker 9 An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America.

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Speaker 9 on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 65 I knew it was a bomb the second that it exploded.

Speaker 5 I felt it rip through me.

Speaker 68 In season two of Rip Current, we ask who tried to kill Judy Berry and why.

Speaker 74 They were climbing trees and they were sabotaging logging equipment in the woods.

Speaker 69 She received death threats before the bombing.

Speaker 44 She received more threats after the bombing.

Speaker 77 I think that this is a deliberate attempt to sabotage our movement.

Speaker 78 Episodes of Rip Current Season 2 are available now.

Speaker 61 Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.