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Hi everyone, welcome to It Can Have It Here. It's me, James, today with a terrible cold, as you can probably tell.
But it's still very important to listen today because I'm talking to Andreina, an organizer from K-Town for All up in LA. 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, Andreina. Thank you for having me, James.
Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are really busy right now.

So to begin with, in case this has missed people and there's a lot of news happening right now,

can you explain what's been going on in LA with respect to the fires for the last two or three days?

So about three or four days ago, we got a warning that we were going to be experiencing high winds up to 50 miles per hour,

which is nuts, and they were going to be coming from the desert. So this is just like a barrage of hot wind.
So we were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because, you know, man-made structures that people are surviving with can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear that wind here in Southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly, because any little, you know, a cigarette butt, an electrical spark, you know, like when it's this dry, it's enough to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened.
There are about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread massively by these giant winds everywhere. So the embersbers are being picked up.
Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but the wind itself has prevented, you know, the big water tinkers from flying, which has led to the massive devastation that you saw in the Palisades and other areas. You know, the entire water fleet being grounded for a while just meant that it was burning with no control, relying on on the ground firefighters.
So what we've seen is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think there is a death tally, thankfully very low in about 10-ish, I think I've heard from this morning with confirmation.
But yeah, that's what we're facing right now. Yeah'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 for like out here in the western united states it's a lot of air dropping fire retardant and air dropping water which which without that, it's very hard to get enough water to where it needs to be.
And I believe at one point they actually ran out of water in water towers right up in Palisades. Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which is terrifying to think of.
And we were warned, I'm in the Koreatown neighborhood, we were warned about low low water pressure and i do know that some areas in los angeles particularly in that region are being warned to boil water and that their water is unsafe to drink right now yeah i've seen that too there was a water boil warning for yeah lots of places so as a result of these fires and all the destruction they've caused i think i saw it, was it 150,000 odd people have been displaced now? Is that right? Is that a good number? I saw something large like that of just the people that have been evacuated. Right north of me was the Sunset Fire, and that was very concerningly close to the Koreatan neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires because we're so in the concrete jungle, like we 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 kill people every year here.
And the climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse. But in the middle of a city, you're generally not worried about fires because the resources will be spent to defend that property.
Right. 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 significantly wealthy neighborhood, you know, a den of celebrity and Hollywood 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.
I saw that there was a couple of wealthy people on Twitter begging for private fire fighting forces to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that are talking about tax evasion and how smart they are to do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into the social system that helps in these times clearly were were severely underfunded and severely undermanaged uh when it comes to the government stepping in during these emergencies yeah and like that's something i want to address because i think in every natural disaster that i've covered the reason it becomes a disaster i guess is because the state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people.
And in almost every case, it's people who have to step up and look after one another. So we should talk about the response of the LA city and county governments.
And then I'd love to talk about the mutual aid response after that. Yeah.
From what we've seen here in K-Town, if you weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks that were out talking to all of our unhoused neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds, first of all, didn't know what was going on.
They saw the sky, they assumed there was a fire nearby, but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and that we were generally threatened as well. They didn't have any supplies.
And in some areas of Los Angeles, we've heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued. So the city has continued throwing away tents from the people living on the streets.
And then for the house people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that they've set up. Pan Pacific Park is one of them for Hollywood.
There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like. But it seems to be, you know, a hodgepodge of, you know, disorganization and a lot of, you know, mutual aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct people and gather the supplies.
I have not heard of, you know, a very formalized system. There is no word on any kind of significant assistance for people who have lost their homes at the moment.
I don't know if the Red Cross is going to set a staging zone up or anything, but I do know that the people who are setting up, you know, places for people to go, food, water, even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers. You know, I'm in this chat group, Mutual Aid LA, that spurred, you know, literally just on Signal the day that the fire started that has a thousand people on it, mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one area of the city to the other.
You know, I have this person who needs a place 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 you know that it's not built for that yeah it's not and like we've definitely seen that there was just a failure of the state to respond like in the way that it needed to as quickly as it needed to and it's it's really it's wonderful to see people picking up slack like of course it is it's really beautiful that people show up for each other in these times there's something about that that i obviously like find really affirming that's maybe why i do this for a living but yeah it's really beautiful to see it doesn't mean that we should forget that like the state has capacity that it is using as you said to displace people who are unhoused it could be using that capacity to bring masks to people to bring food to people to create shelter for people it's not it's choosing to harass people who live on the street yeah and this is something we see repeatedly you know um it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but when it did rain, we had historical rains. Last year in particular, we had a cold front where folks die every time.
And we know folks are going to die every time it rains here in LA. We have more people that die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than New York and San Francisco combined every year because hypothermia actually doesn't require it to be freezing to set in.
It just requires you to be in around 60 degrees and be wet, which is very common on the streets here of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while it's raining.
And our electeds know this. When I first started doing

this work, there was a slogan that we were chanting for a day in LA, and that was the

number of unhoused people that died every day. And now we're at about six or seven.
We request,

you know, through the Freedom of Information Act, request the coroner's report every year

of how many people died. And that number is only growing.
And the government knows this. They know every time we have a heat wave that there are 70,000 people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars.
They know that during the winter, you know, people are out there in the cold and the rain. And I talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and they ask me like, well, aren't there, you know, insert service here that you think there should be, you know, right now during the fires, like, aren't there vans picking people up and taking them to shelter? And it's like, that would be wonderful when there's not, there's never any vans picking people up, you know, even when they open up cooling shelters and warming shelters, the number one barrier we heard from people on the streets is how would I get there? And when I get there, they make me not bring my stuff in.
So, it's all going to get stolen. There's just all of these barriers that the city is just completely, you know, purposely neglecting.
They could talk to any of us on how to run a successful, you know, warming or cooling shelter. They don't, you know, they have no interest in what we have to say.
In fact, our city council person here in K-Town doesn't respond to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with concerns or questions.
And that's kind of how we've been, you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't have this support of this agency. And in fact, they're our opposition.
We're the ones having to organize around them and what they're doing. Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here.
Every time it rains, people will die. Every time we have a heat wave.
I remember they found the remains of an unhoused person a couple of years ago and they thought the person had been burned by fire and it turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts of heat and uh yeah i remember a couple of years ago just to like give an anecdote it was i think above 100 degrees in town it was so hot and i was in the riverbed like i had this big insulated backpack to give people cold water and uh just like dozens of people were in a terrible distress and yeah there no presence of police fire and anyone to help right like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments in these cities and and people are still unsafe and and they don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because these government agencies the same ones that you say that throw away their shit that destroy all the little things that they've been trying to build up to get onto, you know, like a better situation in life. Yeah, and I think there's this sense of like apathy that has built 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.
Call and see if you can get in. And they're like, okay, you know, like, I'll give it a shot, you know, and it's very well received, because we understand the amount of disappointment these people have gone through.
When they do the Care Plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name for when they throw all their stuff away, When they show up and they do care plus,

they show up with a social worker first, which if I was a social worker, I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is that right before they throw away everything that 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. And then they have all of their belongings thrown away.

Right.

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. 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 they've been counting, about how many times they've filled the same forms out to have it lead nowhere.
And I can't imagine that kind of resilience. Now with this devastation, there's going to be a lot of homeowners who are going to experience that firsthand.
I'm seeing a lot of people that are homeless for the first time ever in their lives, like in their late 50s. And these are people that have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have, you know, lived their whole life as you're supposed to in the United States.
And then in their elder years, befall some sort of disaster or social security doesn't pay anymore. And they are severely shocked when I tell them what the landscape of our social safety net looks like.
I've had people ask me, like, where do I go to sign up for free housing? And I have to tell them, you know, the wait list for vouchers is 15 years long and it's a lottery. The list is closed because it's so full.
You can apply to senior housing, but that's about a 10 year wait wait. You know, I have to be the one to tell them that.

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

Yeah, definitely.

Let's take a little break here for some advertisements, and then we'll come back. all right we're back so yeah i think anyone who's familiar with the situation facing unhoused people in southern california will understand that there is not a safety net and that's about to become more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people let's talk about the way that people are helping to take care of one another because i think that's that's what always happens in these situations so let's talk about the mutual aid effort maybe you could you could like talk about some of the groups talk about some of the things you've been doing 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.
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 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.
There's people digging through your garbage. So, we've seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city.
And we, in times of crisis, we'll 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. 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, etc., etc.
And it's normal people, you know, I have a full-time job. My friends here in K-Town for All, some are teachers, some are in the movie industry, some are random lawyers that will take their time out to do this work.
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. Here in K-Town, we give supplies to about 400 or so unhouse people a week minimum.
And that is hygiene supplies, tents, blankets. We connect them to any services that they might ask us to connect them to, driving them to the hospital, etc.

And this has been going on for the last five years, and K-Town for All specifically started as a counter-protest because there was an attempt to build a shelter here in Koreatown, and some homeowners organized against it. They marched down Wilshire and shut it down, and our founders found each other because they were the only five people holding up We Want Shelter signs and just started doing distribution themselves.
And I think that's one thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's not as intimidating as it seems to start one of these projects. It's literally you and a couple of friends who decide that you're going to do something and you acknowledge acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never be able to meet the need because what we need is a government who cares about people.
But in the meanwhile, we're going to do the best we can. And the lives of the, you know, now 400 or so people that we see every week are a little better because we decide to do that.
Yeah. I think really important to say that like it can seem really overwhelming this is an email i get almost every week like how do i start a mutual aid group but like if you can make a sandwich then you can you can start a mutual aid group like just go and feed people who are hungry if someone's cold give them a blanket like it doesn't have to be like you don't have to read 17 books and be like starting a 501c3 and stuff.
You just need to do things. And I think especially like we're going into a new administration, we're going to see the state being more hostile to people who are already marginalized.
And like the best advice I have for people is to get off the internet and to get into the streets and just do something it doesn't matter as you say you won't be able to do everything not right away maybe one day we will but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing and I guarantee there's also much better for you and your like I feel so much better when I'm able to help people I wouldn't be able to do the job I do at the border if I wasn't also able to help people. It helps me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess, or we're doing something about it at least.
What are people doing right now to help people who are impacted by the fires? What are the needs that are arising and how are people meeting them? Yeah, well, K-Town for All focuses here in the K-Town neighborhood and what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People are sitting and it's literally raining ash in some areas and are sitting in the soot.
So there's that. There's basic tent and tarp gathering, meals.
So many emergency services shut down during disasters that, you know, make sense. But a lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from are not open right now.
So it's getting people food, getting people water just enough to survive. In other areas, folks are gathering supplies.
There's All Power Books. That is a big distribution site right now.
Puma Mutual Aid out in the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work. The South Bay got swept last night, so South Bay Mutual Aid Club is replacing tents this morning.

There's a lot of really great work. The South Bay got swept last night.
So South Bay Mutual Aid Club is replacing tents this morning. There's a lot of the pet mutual aid groups who are gathering pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of the found dogs and cats.
It's just, I mean, I can't even list the amount of people right now that are in their vehicles doing drop-offs you know the sidewalk project 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 they don't have time to go get a prescription right you know at a primary care provider like that we need albuterol that people are having asthma attacks so there's these kind of burdens that mutual aid projects get around because people, A, don't have to fill out any forms.

They don't have to wait. If we have it, you're going to be handed it.
And, you know, even medical

providers as part of our projects have become a really big support as people on the streets are

often very disabled. We have a lot of folks with diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just

Thank you. become a really big support as people on the streets are often very disabled.
We have a lot of folks with diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has a free clinic called All Power Clinic, and they offer free medical care and come with us on our routes here in K-Town to offer free treatment for folks.
And I think that's something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs,

homeless. K-Town to offer free treatment for folks.
And I think that's something that is going to only grow, as you said, as this administration occurs. Homelessness rose 18% in the last year, and that's only been the case every year since we started counting.
There is no way this administration is going to institute rent control or anything that keeps people from being displaced. One mutual aid project that I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the LA tenants union mobilizing to care for their members, checking in on their disabled members.
These kind of community-based organizations where people know people, they know who to check up on, they know who's vulnerable, those kind of organizations are invaluable in emergencies like these. Yeah, definitely.
And one good thing that can come out of this is that we can build stronger communities, right? And we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves dependent on mutual aid for the first time can realize that they can participate in that. And I know there are folks already who have lost their homes, who are still out there helping other people driving around rescuing people and stuff yeah and i i think we say this all the time in in the homelessness space you know you're closer to being homeless than you are to be a billionaire and i think this is one of the most direct examples like these people might have been well off maybe a month or two ago and And then now they have zero, you know, they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe five years, you know, if some of them.
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.
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. It's your neighbor who has a mask for you.
It's me, someone random from down the block who got a couple friends together who has water for you, you know, like that's who comes through and that's who you need to care for all the time, including your unhoused neighbors that are around you all the time who live in your community and who face this emergency every day. You know, they don't know where they're going to sleep every night.
They don't know where the next meal is coming from every day. They get their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if not once a week, very frequently.
And I hope this is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter. You know, the basics.
Yeah. Talking of food, water, and shelter, those are things I need as well need as well and so to pay for them i have to pivot to ads now okay uh we're back i think that was a really good plug for like why mutual aid is important and hopefully there are people who are listening right or people who are finding themselves for the first time interested in helping seeing a crisis a lot of people like will ask me if they can come help at the border and of course you can but you should also help in your own community because there are people who need you there and obviously that's very true in la right now so I want to like give some resources some ways people can help if people are listening in LA what are some like I know there are all kinds of efforts but what are some concrete things they could do or some places they can go if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted by the fires and they want to help other people but what are some things they can do? 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. We really try to stay connected with the LA Mutual Aid Network.
And honestly, once you follow one of us, you kind of follow all of us because we're very supportive of each other's efforts. Mutual Aid LA is a good hub.
They have a magazine that gets published every month that has a list of mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come out on physical outreach with us, which we do on Saturdays, every Saturday except the first Saturday of the month when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us, you know, connect with others.
You're free to help us financially. But we also, you know, funny you mentioned this, James, but if you DM us and you're like, hey, I want to talk to someone about starting a project in my region, I'm so happy to hop on Zoom with you, tell you how we do our distribution, tell you how we make our maps of encampments, tell you how we, you know, fund and outsource.
Always happy to find that knowledge. And people message us all the time, can we start a Neighborhood for All chapter? And we're like, we're so honored that you would do that.
Please don't ask, but you're totally welcome to. And so, we have Pasadena for All that is doing great work.
And Pasadena for all is definitely always in need of support. They are in a huge disaster zone, Altadena, Pasadena, like all those areas are been evacuated palms mutual aid.
But yeah, if you want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram, K town for all 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.
And while we focus in the K-Town neighborhood, LA is a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention, you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.
Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's it's really important that we share 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 and but yeah we don't 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 so we all made so that's really cool that people can reach out to you what about if they're a long way away and they just want to send some money they want to help and and they've got money they want to share 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 you know in some kind of corporate fancy way feel free to DM us

we just got that figured out

but yeah all of our money

gets spent directly on

material goods we don't have any employees

we don't have any overhead

our volunteers are up to their necks in baby

wipes usually when we get

you know sock donations and things like

that and honestly we prefer it that way just, you know, sock donations and things like that. And honestly,

we prefer it that way just because, you know, we know what nonprofit requirements are like and that kind of burden that that place is on mutual aid projects and we're trying to avoid them. So every dime still goes to supplies.
And I know every mutual aid project, J-Town in Japantown as well, operates in a very similar model.

I would just suggest people get plugged in to Mutual Aid LA.

They follow us on Instagram.

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

I really appreciate their help out of the country and hope that one day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we live in a great world. Yeah, that'd be nice.
Is there anything else? Do you have any bottlenecks or particular shortages that you want to shout out that the audience can maybe help you with? We're always looking for staples. So those are tents and tarps constantly.
Those are often the most expensive items people have to purchase. Tents go about $30 to $40 each one, and the government throws a lot of them away every week.
So those items, feel free to always DM me if you have some that you would like to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs are really good at building connections directly with vendors.
And we usually get like a discount in buying in bulk. So I would really love to shake people from their fear of donating cash.
Yeah, yeah. I know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an item because you know that that's the item that's given out.
But sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand of those tents and your dollar goes farther. So, you know, tents, blankets.
And again, don't be afraid to do this by yourself. Like you can go to Home Depot and buy a tent and hand it to someone.
You can go to Home Depot and buy masks right now and hand them to someone. You don't have to wait for a group like this to be around and to help, if your neighborhood uh needs you yeah i think

that's a really good message it's a good place to end just to remind everyone it's at k-town

for all on instagram and k-town for all on venmo right yep great thanks so much thank you so much Oh, it's It Could Happen Here, a podcast from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show 2025. I am here with my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis.
We have been trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention Center all day. Garrison, today you started earlier than I did because I was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk with a priest last night.
Yeah. We had a nice dinner, and then we set out to experience a fresh new hell.
And in this case, that fresh new hell was what the A.I. bros have ready for your children.
No, it's funny how we both stumbled across A.I. products for kids like the same day during the exact same time.
Uh-huh. Yeah, it really is remarkable that like, yeah, I guess in part just because like that is such a focus.
I think it has something to do with what you saw some of yesterday where, and I had caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah, they don't really like this stuff. We're going to have to get around it.
Like, obviously this is inevitable, but like people really also seem to not enjoy it very much. No one can explain why.
But I think that this may be like, okay, well, if we get them when they're young enough, if we train these kids, we can force this on them, and they'll have no choice but to like

it.

And it's interesting you say that, because the first thing I did today was go to a panel

at the Venetian titled, Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the best title for any single

panel.

Yeah, that's fucked up.

The description was, a new generation of kids are being brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives. How does this affect their learning, entertainment, and socialization? Which is a good question.
Yeah, we should be asking that. More people should.
There was four people on the panel. Karen Ruth Wong from IDO PlayLab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and Joshua Garrett from ReadyLand.
And I'll talk about all these different companies and people in a sec. 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.
So that was interesting to me because Sesame Workshop generally puts a lot of care into making media for children. This is a company that works with them.
So I was interested in what she was going to say. 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 talk about a whole bunch of research that her company has been doing for the past few years on what people, my age and younger, what their attitudes are towards this thing that has become an increasingly encroaching part of their lives.
I'm just going to play a series of clips. That's fascinating.
Yeah, the very first thing, this is literally like minutes into the panel, this is like after they do their introductions, the first thing to talk about is how Gen Z is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're also kind of the most AI critical. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's cringy. Yeah, like how it feels cringy.
And not just that, how it's affecting people's sense of humanity. And viewing this in some ways as an obstacle to get over.
But also, I'm not sure how I feel about Karen and the company she's representing here. Because in some ways, I felt like

she was probably actually good.

She just had to frame all of the

things she was saying as shocking revelations

to all these tech bros.

Actually, it turns out

kids, surprisingly, don't want their

lives run by AI.

Don't want to communicate only with AI.

I actually like what she was saying.

Her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times because of who because of who the audience was. Do you get the, do you get the feeling that she was like a bad person trying to help like other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who was trying to like in a way that these guys would listen to tell them that what they're doing isn't working? Maybe like 2080.
So like a little bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this.

But mostly it felt like trying to inform people

about how this isn't really what people want.

And, you know, it has a lot of actual like drawbacks.

Here's a clip of Karen talking about

the sort of questions that they're asking kids

to, you know, get data on how they feel about AI.

Here's a few provocative ones.

We really put tangible expressions of what it would be like to interact with a potential AI tool. feel about AI.
replace that friend for the time being, just so you can back yourself out from that relationship. So by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front of youth, we were able to co-design to view insights.
This one always gets all audience members. We put out a provocational expression of, imagine you could have an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live your life for you.
Imagine they could swipe your Tinder for you, they would have the icky conversations, or they would go through the awkward introductions, you know, new person in school, and they heard some really interesting things. I want to go on a bad day for myself, and I want to have that bad vacation.
There was a really interesting sign that being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor. Being able to live life for yourself is a badge of honor.
Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace them in such drudgery as the search for love and human connection. Incredible that teens aren't interested in letting a robot go on dates for them.
No, it's super interesting. And even the first thing she said about, you know, you lost some friends.
Do you want an AI to counsel you or talk about your feelings? Or do you want a friend replacement? And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this even like otter question of like, you know, like AI swiping your Tinder for for you trying to figure out what your preferences are then no like gen z wants to live life for themselves it's like it's odd because like because that's what being a person is right but like it's odd how that's framed as like a surprising revelation wow these kids want to live lives so yeah it was it was a kind of an odd panel to go to she highlighted that the key areas of tension in AI for Gen Z is twofold, creative expression and human relationships.
These are the two biggest things that people are concerned about is how it will affect your ability to make art, be creative, and what it means for relationships as a human being, right? Especially if you're being asked questions about, would you let an AI meet someone that you want to date first? Have them go through a first fake AI date to get through icebreaker questions or something? The amount of people I meet who feel that way about their digital twins or who take pride in 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? 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 people actually don't want these things.
Like this actually isn't what anyone wants out of life. This isn't what anyone wants out of this technology, right? Like we use AI all the time, you know, like, you know, like 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 go on dates for us.
The whole part of being human is having a degree of bad experiences. That helps shape us as people.
And this isn't a hurdle to get over. This is a part of what it means to be human.
And she kind of talked about that a little bit more in this last clip that I'll play.

The next one here.

I prefer to give opportunities to people over technology.

I think these are the ones, and again, they've seen what it's like when people feel replaced.

I'll definitely share a lot more, but starting off with a few key learnings, Gen Z's value advice and perspective from lived experience.'s something about designing for friction I'm gonna say again designing for friction in our age of optimization in our age of assuming that everything should move as fast as possible to make life as smooth as possible there's something about the challenge and that comes back to play right why would we spend so much time to hit a ball several hundred yards away? There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy of overcoming challenge, the joy of moving through your first friend breakup, your boyfriend or girlfriend breakup that makes you into a person. And as many times as helicopter parents or as people who are designing technology assume that the smoothest possible path is the best possible path.

There's some pushback there.

Some pushback.

Some pushback.

To the idea that, like, you should live a life.

Your one precious life should be lived.

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

Gen Z has great fears about being replaced.

Yeah. You know, like, having, like, workforce replacement.

Gen Z prefers to actually, like, make connections and network with other people our age and actually like share opportunities. Yeah.
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. And there's a lot more like open collaboration and sharing opportunities.
It's harder. So you guys have to be better about that.
Yeah, yeah. No, talking about, you know, like designing for friction, like there's value in something being challenging.
That was very interesting because the surprise about that, because it is this kind of, I'm sure most of these people were born to wealth and privilege, and the first thing that people do with money, the primary reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact that that's surprising to anyone, 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? Like, you know, they're just not really people, you know? One thing she kind of closed on in this section is talking about how Gen Z does not trust AI to understand the nuance of their lives, especially in this age of tech optimization. That misses a part of what it means to feel proud of yourself and the work that you've done.
Something she talked about at the very end of the panel was how they hadn't factored in Gen Z and people in general will feel proud about making a piece of art.

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.

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 easier.

But if the AI does all the work, they don't feel happy about that. Like they, they, they don't feel proud.
They don't feel like they've actually achieved something and you have to feel proud about the work that you've done. So like there, there's actually a sense of like ownership over like the art that we create.
An exact quote was quote, you can't eliminate life formative aspects, unquote, which is like, yes, like all life. Yeah.
You don't't ever do anything. I'm happy someone at CES is saying this.
The fact that it needs to be said at all. Very bleak.
Very sad. It's really bleak.
Yeah. Dating people, making friends, being social, doing whatever it is you do for a living as yourself is what life is.
Yeah. I think the last thing that she talked about was like, Gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries.
Yeah, good. And they have to reinforce their own sense of self because we're constantly being bombarded with, you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts, live streams, like everything, you know, TikTok, social media.
So we have strong boundaries on how tech integrates into our lives. And a lot of the way these tech bros want AI to become more invasive, we are not super into.
No. Like, all they're offering people is like, this machine will do everything that you actually want to do with your time, and also you won't have a job.
Like, that's what big tech is promising, Gen Z. Yeah, so that's how I started my day.
Speaking of Gen Z, Z stands for zillions of dollars that we'll get if you listen to these ads. And we're back.
So unfortunately that panel wasn't just talking about how kids maybe don't want ai to run their lives it was it also had two other people from ai products the first one that i'll mention uh is called ready land which i think i think partnered with amazon or to some degree it at least uses like amazon alexa's it's essentially a choose your own adventure storybook with with an actual physical copy that Alexa will read to you, and you can talk to it. So you can talk to characters and choose different pathways.
I was more skeptical at it at first because I just don't like AIs reading books to kids. But this became more of an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind of good at what it was doing.
And then the guy behind it clarified, ReadyLand is not using AI to generate new content for kids. It's all pre-programmed human paths, just with so many variables already built in based on if you're making food in one of these books or a kid wants to go on a weird side quest, the AI already has stuff for how to handle that.
It knows how to say these words. It knows how to stitch together these things.
But it's not actually generating new content itself. If everything is pre-baked, it can be assembled in many different ways.
So every time you read a book to the kid, it'll be slightly different. Because the kid will respond to certain plot elements.
The kid can talk to characters, ask questions. 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. That it's actually just kind of using some of the tech that makes up AI to allow you to make something humans wrote more reactive.
Exactly, yeah. It's actually a pretty interesting piece of technology.
And it's not just Alexa reading a storybook.

It has a large interactive element,

which that makes the Alexa part actually useful.

And then there was this other product.

What was this one called?

It's from a company called Skyrocket Toys.

Poe the AI Teddy Bear or something like that.

Poe the AI Bear,

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

Oh,

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

Oh,

I got to hear it.

Do you want me to pull this up?

Yes,

absolutely.

Okay.

But basically you put in a whole bunch of story inputs being like,

I want the story set in this place.

I want it featuring these types of characters.

I want this archetype to be the villain.

It has like dozens

if not hundreds of like archetypal

things that you can like click

and then the teddy bear will generate a new

story. So it is generating new content

but with like pre-baked characters.

So then it'll stitch together the story.

The weirder you make the variables, the weirder

the story is going to be. Let me play a clip

for Robert here.

Hey there Nilo! It's a bright

and shiny January morning.

The perfect time for another

Thank you. story is going to be.
Let at the consumer electronics show? There's excitement in the air and Poe is on the case. That guy, like, sitting there talking, almost rolling his eyes at his own product while it yaps in his lap is a perfect, like, he clearly didn't think about how that would look because it does not make an appealing ad for the product no so it doesn't sound good so yeah they generated a story set in ces in las vegas and he would occasionally interrupt the bear to like explain what it was doing so that was the other product not nearly as polished or like really really as thoughtful as likebook.
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 throw in front. Raise it.
I mean, it looks like you could probably handle all of the physical contact they need, too. So you don't even need to ever touch your child.
And in fact, you can just have chat GPT, root that through the bear and never even see your own flesh and blood. Like I think ideally you would have them cut out of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know, a month or two early.
And that way you can kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you ever spend in contact with your spawn. One other thing I will add is that the Readyland guy, the AI storybook, specifically went talking about, importance of guardrails, he said that there's multiple levels to safety.
An AI kid's robot that swears is one thing that's pretty easy to avoid, actually. That's pretty easy.
There's a limited number of swear words. And you can just block out certain things from happening.
You can build that in. But another aspect that's really important to safety is the accuracy of the the things it's saying, right? Like what if it's saying something that's supposed to be, you know, some like factual statement about the world 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? Or what if it says, like not even directly telling them, but you know, it says something that if the kid then tries to do that, it's really dangerous.
And this is why their storybook program does not generate new content.

So everything it says is already pre-approved.

It already is going to have verified safe sentences versus this AI teddy bear.

Because it is generating new content, it could, if things go horribly wrong, talk know, talk about drinking bleach, you know, theoretically, you know, just like something, you know, like things

can go wrong. So it's not just about, you know, avoiding bad words or talking about sex or, you

know, those types of like, like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not like

hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to like dangerous situations. Right.
Well,

the good news is that I don't think these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean, I guess we'll see, but these are super expensive, and did you get a price point for that bear? I did not hear a price point for the bear.
I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this stuff really does take off.
I wouldn't consider it optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like they don't seem like great products to me. So I guess we'll see.
I read something very interesting that is related exactly. It probably was he might 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 toy for her birthday that arrived for Christmas instead. She unpacked it all excited.
I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this one has AI in it. She of course knows what AI is, has seen the things I've built and interacted with them, chatted with ChatGBT in Santa mode, knows that daddy is doing AI, etc.

So a very interesting experiment happened after Magical Toys reached out and fixed the issue reference below. She started playing with this dino, 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. It now has paper shoes and a top hat that we made together.
But every time I ask her if she'd like to chat with it, she says. A few times I turned it back on, and she did speak with it for a bit, and then she just turned it off again, not wanting to engage.
I gently asked why, and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance. It's not weird to her.
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 he asked it to cry. Granted, they don't have an amazing advanced voice mode like open AI.
So it did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking.
And also there are still technical issues. The voice is sometimes choppy.
So it could be that it's still uncanny for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect of this didn't connect with my six-year because it's creepy because it's people they don't like it nobody wants this yeah ick yeah ick i know this is a sample size of one kid here and i'm sure many many things will change as she'll grow and learn to interact with more ais in different forms but the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.
That is interesting. Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating.
Yeah, no one wants this. Even six-year-olds are like, eh, I would prefer just a regular toy I can play with.
I would prefer, I'll pretend it's a robot, but I don't want it to be a robot that talks to me. Poe the AI Bear is $50 on Amazon.
Oh, that's not bad, actually.

No?

That's good.

Okay, good.

All right, well, maybe.

We can even maybe order one

and see what we can get out of it.

Yeah.

All right, we're going to go on another break

and return to talk once again

about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back.
So we went and saw something else today. While you were at a different chunk of the event talking to yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the ease with which we can all do 911s.
Super excited for that future, by the way. I stumbled upon the booth for a company called TCL.
A pretty big company. A fairly large, yeah, large company, make a lot of TVs, stuff like that.
They had a couple of things. They had an AI laundry machine.
So many AI laundry bots. Yeah.
This one was the worst because it's like this little, almost a soft, rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry.
They say they can't do folding yet. So it just sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.
It just suspends it in the air. It suspends it in the air inside of itself.
And also it can only do a kilogram of laundry. The only thing they had in there was like handkerchiefs and scarves.
So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but you can, AI can clean your, your handkerchiefs and scarves. As opposed to my regular washing machine.
Yeah. And they had a washing machine that it can identify and count exactly what clothes are in it and how many of them there are.
And it'll tell you the soil level and yada, yada, yada, yada. Like I'm sure some people will want this shit, but it's like, yeah, only people who have a lot of money and want to spend it on a laundry machine 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. AI space me is the name of the robot.
Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because like Furby. Yeah, there's some Furby.
There's some Porg in there. It's a two part toy.
The interior part is like a swaddled up almost looking little Porg thing with a cute face. And the eyes are reasonably good.
Like they did a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy, but like that blink and change color and contract and expand. And then it's got like two little flapper arms that can like wiggle and it's seated inside almost like the aliens in Independence Day.
It's seated inside like this large rolling body frame that allows it to move around on the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your child's friend.
And the first thing that was upsetting to me, cause they had this video ad that would play every so often. And it was very creepy.
And, you know, I thought back to, um, when we were doing the interview with the guy who had like the robot for old people, he was like, it's very important that it not tell them it loves them, that it like always reiterate that it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid, I love you.
Like I care for you. When the lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy that actually knows and cares about your child.
And like, no, it's not. No, it's not.
Don't say that. That shouldn't be legal for you to say that.
For you to sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent being that loves them is like deeply abusive in my opinion. Like that that is actually child abuse.
Because it's not alive.

Anyway, so I had to bring Garrison over.

Because you needed to see it.

Oh, and saw it, I did.

Yeah, and I'm going to play a little clip from the ad.

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

Every heartwarming moment shared in Rome with Amy reminds us that this is what we call love and this is what we call AI oh my god I found that profoundly upsetting disturbing yeah your kid can like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll like talk to them.
It'll make up stories. It'll like look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them into like live AI videos.
You can put a pin on and it will record stuff that your kid does and play it back to you at night as a video. So again, absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have to spend with your child.
It's in the car. Yeah.
It takes over your car. So that, like, it's talking to you from the screens in your car.
Like, the video lecture, like, taking this thing, like, everywhere the kid goes. It's, like, the kid's main interaction with the world.
Yeah. Is with this little rolling, like, plastic Furby.
Mm-hmm. And, yeah, like, talking about, like, expressing, like, love.
and like how damaging this must be for like a four year old for to have like the first thing that it constantly expressed like love and affection for is this little rolling robot. That's great.
That you're going to throw in the garbage and like, you know, four years when you're, when you're like too old for it, how like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up. That's going to be for your, for like your sense of self and like love and affection.
The mix of things that we're trying to have this do, like the other ones were billed as toys. This was billed as like a friend for your child.
As well as like a home assistant. Yeah, it's supposed to also act as like it'll change that you can hook it into your smart home so it can change the temperature.
Like they did a little in-person demo where like a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it about like planning, planned a birthday party for her kid with it. Yeah.
And it like put food in her Amazon cart and like change the temperature inside because more people were coming over. One of the things they advertise is a security mode where it like travels around your house at night and acts as a sentry watching your home.
Like wild no it's it was honestly i've seen a few like disturbing things you know all of like the the new drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad but like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing it really like viscerally upsets me yeah and i I think probably very bad for children. Everything they showed us was incredibly curated.
Like, when we watched this live thing where she was having a very fluid conversation with it, that was clearly scripted. Yes.
And so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice. We never got an actual, like, live demo.
No, because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly recognizing 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. 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.
And part of why I think that is like, we went to check out the booth that this other, the South Korean company just called, I think SK had like a, they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled. And then thinking about how like in the ads, it always like recognize the kid and its parents in a drawing accurately.
Well, this one, when I flipped off the camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up. I'm really curious for when these things hit the market and people start buying them, like what sort of fucked up stuff it'll do and how kind of big the seams are.
I don't expect a long life for this thing, which is going to be even funnier because like there was already a big $800 like children's companion AI toy that failed last year and the company shut off access to them.

And like, so parents had to explain to their kids who had bonded with this thing that it was

dying forever. And that's especially exciting to me because they, they, they've built a robot that

talks to your kid and tells it it loves them. And eventually that robot is going to be taken away from the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable.
And that's, I'm excited for that. Like new ground and how to fuck up kids.
Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison. What an uplifting CES adventure once again.
No, that's all. Yeah, great.
All right, everybody. Well, this has been Behind the Bastards.
No, it's not. Or, no, it's not.
What is this? This has been, it could happen here. A podcast by somebody who is slowly going insane.
Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now. We still have one more day of CES.
I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken.
Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our, like, on the ground coverage with our CES Best in Show. Yeah, that's always going to be exciting.
So end on maybe a high note. So see you there.
Cool. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly about it happened we have we have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second trump administration is going to mean for trans people and you know go listen to those episodes the short version is going to be very very bad we're facing care bans we're facing federal funding bans things are about to get unbelievably bleak.
But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.

It is the culmination of almost a decade's worth of fighting by the right and i think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as something abstract right as a sort of abstract political debate or if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment as sort of these distant famous figures. But the issue with looking at it this way is that this harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people with real names and faces who live lives exactly like yours.
The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right-wing journalists discover who you are. So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far-right campaign against trans people who has seen basically the entire campaign against trans people evolve specifically in the far-right harassment against them.
And that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out of LA. Welcome to the show.
I wish you was under better circumstances. Thank you.
Thank you for having me, Mia. Glad to be here.
Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you. I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that my god, this stuff sucks.
But... Well, you know, it's our lives.
What can we do? Yeah. What will we do? Well, yes.
That's the question for the end of the episode is what are we going to do about all of this shit but let's go back to sort of the beginning can you can you sort of talk about your first encounter with i guess at that point what was a not especially mainstream part of of the religious right back in around 2018 yeah so i've been've been making music as Precious Child for almost a decade, and it was my very first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that had this track on it titled Phantom. And that was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals.
You know, it wasn't a song per se, it was experimental. And I put out a music video with it and it was pretty it's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights you know if you think of movies from the 80s like hellraiser it's kind of like that you know like kind of evocative of some type of greater supernatural horror and the far right at that time the far right vintage 2018 they found it and started reporting it en masse and tagging their friends and saying report this report this and this was on instagram and facebook and on youtube as well and that video like as i said it's creepy, but there's nothing political in it.
And there's a little bit of

like... tube as well and that video like as i said it you know it's creepy but it's there's nothing political in it and there's a little bit of like of blood but there's no gore but they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic that's what they said this is satanic and uh that was my my first brush with the right yeah and 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 they haven't quite like metastasized transphobia as like they're driving things so they're kind of they're reaching back into

this kind of satanic panic era

like the weird

90s and 2000s stuff that like when i was growing up the town that i grew up was super religious and like you know we had to have lists of like if you were inviting like a friend in high school to a party whose parents could know that it was a halloween party and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about witches.

It's like that kind of thing, which

I don't know. It feels like

almost quaint now, even

as stuff's escalated.

Yeah, it was, as you

said, it was a moral panic and

their point was that I

was amoral for making art like

this and this is

the same thing that's happening today. I'm amoral for the art that I make.
And it's not just my art, but it's me. It's me.
And I think that's perhaps what has changed as well. Before they were saying that this is a satanic evil person because they're making this art.
And now they're saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art. Yeah, and I think part of the focus on art here, right, is this kind of mirrored reflection of the original Nazis, right? One of their big things was this crackdown on quote-unquote degenerate art, and they had these these like quote unquote degenerate art festivals of

just like jewish artists and people whose art they didn't like and it was you know like what

a thing that was like a significant factor in their rise and i think there's a sort of mirror

of it here but i don't know starting in a weirder place in some ways like starting more out of this

very very weird like christian moral panic shit that's i guess if you want to look at how

I love you. more out of this very, very weird like Christian moral panic shit.
That's, I guess, if you want to look at how this plays out, that's kind of where it is in 2018, right? The first bathroom bill has been passed by 2018 in North Carolina, but there's a huge backlash to it. And that's something that's, I think, very different than now where all of this anti-trans shit is happening and everyone's just kind of going, eh.
So, do you want to talk about the second time you became a target of the far right? Yeah, I mean, realistically, this has been pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. And there was another track on that album that was also targeted.
One called, titled My Little Problem, Violet Door. That has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom.
It has some nudity. And that was a collaboration between myself and an artist who is trans themselves, Kate, out of Brazil.
And that has, again, some body horror in it. There's commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and

identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a surreal body horror video.

And that was Brigade reported not in 2018, but in 2019. And actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.
And that video is notable because as a result of what's going on today, YouTube took that down, despite it being up for five years without the problem. It had tens of thousands of years and you know it's gone so that was the second time yeah and that one i think is interesting too in the sense of like that one's like a lot more it's more overtly trans it's also i think the more trans you are the more you the more like very obviously trans it is and this is i guess something that's very common among trans artists is this kind of like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror and you know i mean i i i'm not gonna project onto it i don't know if this is what you specifically are doing but like you know there's there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria.
And like, as this way of sort of thinking about the things that are happening to your body and things that have been done to your body and the things that you're doing back to it. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, I didn't really think too much about the concepts in that direction, uh, when I made it, and I know Kate didn't either at that time.
However, the truth is, for much of my young life, I felt out of body, and I wanted my flesh to match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.
When I was young, I didn't have access to the information and communities that are out there now that support trans people. And I have had some gender confirming procedures done, but not as many as I think I would have when I was younger.

I did feel existential discordance. And I don't know if that's a word, if it's not i'm going to coin it because pretty sure i didn't i didn't feel uh feel in concordance with my flesh and so you know i came to experiment uh what the boundaries were of of my fleshy identity and my existence in my art yeah and I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of queer artists are where there's, you know, and this isn't to say that all queer artists like this, but there's definitely like an edge to it.
There's stuff going on. There's body horror things happening.
There's like 80s aesthetic-y stuff. And I think it conflicts with this kind of weird, Kincaid, everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitsch aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into.
They use a kind of aesthetic sensibility as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose for more overtly political reasons. They can do this kind of like, hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera, et 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 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 going to defend cis people here for a second so cis people struggle with gender dysphoria i think maybe i don't say every bit as much as trans people but they sure as fucking struggle with it yeah for instance uh an example i will give is facial hair lots of people that were assigned male at birth they fret and and worry over their facial hair is Is it too much? Is it too little? Then people that are assigned female at birth, if they have facial hair, they fret over it. Will people see it? Do I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret over their freaking jawlines.
If you search online masculine jawline, how do I get? There's a huge community out there of assigned male at birth, cis men that are trying to get more defined jawlines because they feel that their genetics are presenting them as a non-optimal male, quote unquote. And of course, same thing for quote unquote females.
Like, do I have the female feminine body? Is it curvy enough in the right ways? Is my waist slim enough? You know, am I just brick shaped? And then all the industries around that. And that, I think, is horrifying.
And everyone goes through that and struggles with it. And very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves.
And to me, that is a tragedy. Yeah, and I think that sort of fear and that sort of grinding experience of being forced to 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. But the way in which your forces sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense, I think it gets to this thing where, you know, you could either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can.
You can attempt to fight it or you can get extremely bad at everyone else who's trying to do something about it. And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option.
Unfortunately, we need to go to ads,

which is another thing that drives a whole

bunch of this. Luckily, these are audio

ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards, but who knows? Ad people are you, listener, you're hearing me, right? and you're hearing my voice and this is another thing that uh that all people fret about it's not just trans people lots of afabs i know i'm just gonna say afab and amab okay lots of afabs i know you know they they have pretty darn deep voices naturally and they i've talked them privately, and they say that they worry about how husky their voice is when they just relax. And then same thing for AMAPs.
They talk about worrying if their voice is squeaky and thin. I talk like a freaking wrestler from WWE, you know? People, like the cis people struggle with that, too.
So, you know, just something as simple as our appearance and our voice. You know, we're just torturing ourselves.
And ultimately, I got to say, Mia, you know, I'm a trans woman. However, ultimately, I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks.
Yeah, it's not great. It's not's not a good time for anyone involved yeah 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 and they're like why are you ad pivoting me and i'm like oh god but yeah i guess god this and the sort of racialization aspect and I don't know, sort of the aspect of zones of gender performance.

God damn it. I keep saying performance and I literally mean that you were performing it as in you were acting and not the Butler thing of your performing it to make it real.
Please don't yell at me in the comments. I had the guy who wrote a writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter one time, so now I'm paranoid.
Okay, sorry. I'm about to rail this enough, partially because this next part is really depressing.
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 WeSpot controversy. Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ.
Yeah. So, you know, in 2018, as I said, I put out this album and then i put out another and i so i was touring the country and canada and stuff doing doing shows pretty much constantly and then 2020 happened and i became involved in the george floyd uprising and the black lives matter marches and protesting and so i began to live stream those protests and marches with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was going on on the streets to people watching.
Because a lot of people, regardless of their politics, did not understand what the issues were. And the thing is, in LA, there were a lot of continual police murders even through the riots and by police murders i mean the cops shooting unarmed black people in the back as they were running away or executions you know shooting them in the car that that type of thing yeah and so i was explaining that to the viewers like this is why people are in the is a specific issue, these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.

and so I was doing that and I became pretty darn visible and and popular like I was maybe one of the top five best known activist or racial justice voices. And I was targeted by a right-wing activist who was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium, specifically because I was visible, because I was trans.
And so she went for me and posted and said that I was a transgender individual who was in the women's spa of We Spa, and I was sexually harassing people. And that went viral on social media.
It was covered on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant death threats.
And I was doxed. It was pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in the spa.
And I was only picked up because I was picked up for my visibility. My response to that was, you know, I didn't immediately say, yeah, it wasn't me.
It wasn't me. Leave me alone.
Leave me alone. I didn't do that because I knew that if I said that, then they would just pick and attack some other trans person.
Yeah. And, you know, I know that, like, the shit that the right-wing machine enacts, if it happens to one of us, it can happen to all of us, and it likely will.
Yeah, and I mean, I think the thing that it reminds me the most, something we've also covered this this is one of the problems with talking about this it's like doing this for so long that like there's very few things that i can say that i can't be like i've said this on the show before but we spent a lot of time 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 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 also just pick a random famous trans well not even famous but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like it's my understanding that this 2021 one, we spot a controversy

that I was targeted for

became something of a right-wing playbook. It was after that that they started saying, oh, this and that person is trans.
And before that, they didn't have a real moral panic around trans people, unless you look all the way back to the North Carolina, South Carolina bathroom man man. Yeah.
I mean, I think there's an interesting intermediary thing too where, so my friend Vicky Osterwal, who depending on when this episode comes out, you will be hearing from either right before this episode or right after, had another version of this where she wrote a book called Indefensive Looting it came out in 2020 and just for like three months became i don't know three months 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 so like like sitting congress people were like denouncing this book she wrote every mainstream media outlet like specifically had their editorial people going like this book is evil vicky's evil and i think that was also like this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti-trans uprisings because the people who you know are trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves 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 vicky they hadn't really figured out how to do it and i think it was like specifically your case the the we spot like with you being put in as a figure that we spawn so this is where they like actually really figured out how to do the whole thing and yeah there's just something really bleak about both how effective it was and the fact that it's like these are just people i don't know like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of like abstract figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having conversations with are how they did this.
Just, I don't know. I wish I had more analysis, but, but yeah, I think that trans people like to, to greater America, to most people, to a lot of America, I'll say are, are sensational.
You. You know, people imagine chicks with dicks and dudes without dicks.
And so I think that's really exciting for a lot of people, you know, for better or for worse. I think for worse, but...
Yeah. I think that's just like people and their bodies, right? Like, you know, I guess some people walk around thinking all the time about other people's crotches.
I'm not going to say that's a bad thing.

Crotch sniffers, you are seen.

you know but on the other hand right there's this there's this aspect of which like you know there's this sensationalism but then there's also the experience of being

a trans person

is like I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent.

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

Yeah.

So back to WeSpa.

Yeah, that was a pretty terrible experience for me.

I'm not going to lie about it.

You know, I'm glad that I stood up for myself.

I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I didn't pass the buck. It was also really difficult and traumatic.
And I didn't appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate being doxxed.
And people have come after me my whole life. I present, I think, just naturally, physically.
I present as being gender queer i like i've been pretty like veering like looking femme my entire life that had nothing to do with my internal identity i've been weird my entire life i've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested in things that were provocative and so i've been harassed my whole life. However, until WeSpa, I hadn't experienced strangers by the hundreds saying that they're going to hunt me down and fucking shoot me.
I never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy, I know you. Yeah, and it's one of these things where the more of a target on you, the more likely it is to happen.

And even people who don't have targets on them.

I know people who've never experienced anything like this and have still just had attacks on them.

And it's fucking terrifying.

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

So yeah, that was 2021. And that changed me.
That experience of being targeted and just picked on out of the freaking blue, that changed me as an artist. And at the same time, it also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity.
And I want to speak to that because there's different tiers of celebrity you know at the yes at the at the top there's the tier that's known as i get a christmas card from tom cruise every year yeah and that's an actual thing and that's the a-list and you know you're on the a-list because tom Cruise sends your Christmas card and at the bottom is me who's been in mass media many times now but has none of the benefits yeah I you know I make very little money as an artist and I don't have an entourage you know I can tour and I play play some shows and you and some of them are sold out.

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

I maybe play like 300, 500 capacity tops.

Most of the places I play are like small clubs, like 150 or so.

So I don't have the protection that most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals.
I don't have movie deals. I don't even have an Asia.
I don't even have a record label. Yeah.
So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier.
And they're coming after me. Yeah.
And that's the thing about this status of, like, this status of, like, niche D tier internet microcelebrity 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. I think I might have hit.
No, I'm still below the median salary of a cis man in the US. But I'm approaching it.
We're getting closer. Every year, every union fight, we approach media and cis man salary.
But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right? Like, this is about the best you could possibly hope for if you're a trans person and you get famous. Like, yeah, I mean, like, I get that threats too, right? But like, nothing anywhere near the scale that you get.
And mostly what happens is like, I mean, like I get that threats to write like nothing anywhere near the scale that you get.

And mostly what happens is like, I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people in the U.S. have the kind of protection that actual celebrity gives you.
And everyone else celebrity is just another is just a giant target painted on you. 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 giant target painted on you and yes 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 yeah it's something that i wonder about like why why would they do something like this why would fox news be talking about me why would the founder of the proud boys Gavin McInnes did a whole video about me

Proud Boys is a terrorist group

if you don't know listener they were recognized as a terrorist group by by canada not here because like we're just cool with that shit here uh they're white supremacist terrorist group yeah so why why me uh why why would a congressperson come after me?

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

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

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

Yeah, there are... It's a fight that they can win.
And my view is that it's not a fight that they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small, small ways, in false ways, in my opinion.
They're trying to get money, first of all. They want money.
They want their views. They want their donations.
And that's the entire top of the pyramid for them. for me I'm a fucking artist and power is something that I've always been developing because I've sought to know myself I've sought to understand who I am and why that extends to myself as a queer person to come to understand myself who I am as a queer person that's not something they'll ever have so I've already fucking won and uh same with all the other queer people that are under attack all the other dct or queer celebrities out there we fucking won hopefully well and I think part of this is also like the reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to stop the tide from coming in and they saw how far in the tide had already come and now they're trying to like damn off the tide and you know like probably it's not going to work but the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here does nothing and lets them just keep building and building and building more walls it's something that is within our power to resist we just have to actually do it right you have to actually organize you have to talk to the people around you you have to go get them to do things to resist this and if we do yeah we're, yeah, the things that we've already won,

the things that we are going to win are going to stick.

But if not,

things are going to get

really, really bad really quickly.

Yeah, and speaking of things

getting very bad very quickly,

here are some more ads

before we get back

to things getting worse. we are back yeah uh you've been specifically targeted by a sitting u.s congresswoman nancy mace who is the person who actually i don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet but she she's the the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill.
She's become a leading anti-trans figure in Congress. Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put in men's jails, which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly raped and killed,

which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in men's prisons. And she specifically came after you.
So you want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of a congresswoman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding? yeah so right at at the end of 2024, I think it was on

December 28th, I was doxed by a right-wing troll Nazi that has doxed multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends,

and they pointed

out in a tweet

how my art

was unusual. 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.

And they added

like at symbol YouTube and said

that these videos are in

violation of your terms of service.

Why are they still up?

And Nancy Mace that because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just docs and trans people and perpetual rage bait about the queer menace, the trans menace. And so she saw that and retweeted it and said, this clearly violates your terms of service.
Why haven't you done anything? And then immediately following that, my videos were taken down. The ones that were mentioned in these tweets.
And as I said before, one of these videos was titled My Little Problem that's been up for seven years. Yeah, a real long time.
Yeah, and YouTube Terms of Service, they're very clear. And I do my best to stay within YouTube Terms of Service so my work doesn't get taken down.
And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity, that is allowed within the context of art, within the context of music videos. And so my videos, you know, they weren't designed to, this is from the service, they weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify.
That's exactly what it says in the terms. You, they weren't recreations of real-life violence, and they weren't real-life violence, but they were still removed at the behest, at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.
Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things going on here, one of which is, you know, so we've seen this with Facebook in the last, I guess when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago, but, you know, Facebook has instated policies that allow you to basically say slurs against queer people and allow you to call queer people mental illnesses and stuff like that. That's very specifically you can only do to queer people.
You can't do it to anyone else. And I think there's this sort of trend here of I don don't know with facebook i wouldn't say that it's like compliance with the sort of new trump regime because like this is just who facebook is right like they did the rohingya genocide like the genocide into gray too that was also a facebook thing so they've always just been evil and have been sort of looking for the excuse that they need to like drop the hammer on us but i think youtube to some extent too what we're seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming off moment where people are realizing that with trump and power they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because specifically like on a trans artist because now they have this sort of like backing to do this stuff and the right has has, you know, realized that they can be like YouTube, take this video down and they'll do it.
And that's a really terrifying precedent in a lot of ways. and also it's very you know it's like yeah obviously disappointing hypocrisy does nothing but like I'm trying to think of a more

explicit

demonstration of censorship than a member

of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down it's like it's really something yeah you know it makes me kind of afraid honestly because yeah you know before i was a victim of a moral panic and now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare so you know what's what's going to happen next what will we see just made invisible and unseen and i know that in this country i have freedom of speech but that's a that's really bullshit we all know that like i'm not going to reach many people if I stand on a street corner at the park

and yell at people.

What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach

that these social media platforms control,

that are themselves controlled now

by the Republican Party.

And what happens when our freedom of reach

is annihilated,

and then suddenly,

trans people are actually invisible? We're very close to that, I think. Nancy proved that.
Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people. Yeah, art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak.
And I know that's why she came after my art. There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen.
And then like the next tweet is again, a sitting member of the US government saying that trans women should be put in men's prisons. And it's like, okay, one of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine and one of them isn't.
Yeah. Does she even actually do work for the people of South Carolina? Like, I saw all she does is just like start shit with trans people.
Like, she's just another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's just a knockoff Prada of a bootleg Trump.
That's what she is. And she not doing good at her fucking politics.
She's tried to get

this bathroom ban for

disallowing trans people

to use a bathroom at the US Capitol.

And her own freaking party kicked

the bill out of the

bylaws for

this year. So she couldn't even get that.

Yeah.

So I guess she thinks she can get a win

by harassing me. Harassing my art yeah try to get people to come after me you know these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe right a lot of their stuff just fails but they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them and that's the thing that's needed in this moment is organization is, you know, like is organization, it is action, it is 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? Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, yep, it's time.
It's time to go because otherwise, you know, and I think this is something that, like, every trans person now understands intimately and I think most people don't, which is that right now it's us, but, you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a very good chance that it's going to be you, like, showing up on this show because a fucking congressperson has deliberately intervened to destroy your life and I would rather we had stopped this before it got to any of us but they're going to come for you too unless we stop them thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people find you and find your art and yeah support you yeah thanks for having me I really like talking with you it's been very good and uh listeners you can find my work on spotify you can also check out my website at preciouschild.com and please sign up for my mailing list there as well that is the best and best direct way for me to stay in touch with my friends and fans i'm also precious child on instagram on tiktok i am the last precious child i also will be doing live shows this spring and summer in uh in the u.s and so follow me on my website and on social media to stay up to date on that and come say hi in person. Hell yeah.

We will have links to all of that in the description so yeah go check it out and resist the creep of fascism. There's one thing I want to add about I said earlier about personal power and how I have to develop my own personal power by getting to know myself i want to tell you trans people out there you queer people and your allies that you know first thing is getting to know yourself and then next thing is like fuck these fucking laws fuck these fucking lawmakers yeah get to know each other and strengthen our bonds with each other because those are bigger than any type of

oppressive laws that may put upon us

and it's only by the strength

that we develop with each other

within each other

that we will persevere. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, the consumer electronic show happening here to everyone.
And of course, it is in fact happening to everyone because over the course of the day, all of our subjects here, all of our experts here have watched different kinds of dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to replace with a chatbot that was trained on Reddit. 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. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great, but I'm not going to say it at the same time because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less, but you're contractually obligated to not mind.
Yes, thank you, boss. Great to be here as always.
Very natural, very natural. Z hello hello hello hello thank you uh this is your first ces as well that's right your first time being a journalist also true how do you 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 endeavor only practiced by heroes.
I love wearing a dress shirt and tie and just getting very drunk. You were very surprised when I gave you your gun, but you can't be a journalist without one.
Yeah, yeah. I love playing with it.
I love dealing with it. Without the safety.
And last but certainly not least, in fact, maybe better than some people in the room.

Again, I'm not going to say who.

You can wonder that for yourself.

Feel insecure.

Thanks, Robert.

David Roth.

Thanks.

I agree that I'm pretty good.

How much better I am than how many people in this room.

I'm not even really like,

that's something I like talking about.

Yeah, exactly.

Because we haven't gotten those numbers back from OpenAI.

Yeah, it would be irresponsible to speculate. We'll at the men.
We've got to wait for 03. 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. 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.
I think it's a solid way for us to start out. And I think my most negative reaction, obviously, was the Amy artificial child best friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable.
And I hated both that, like, I could tell from an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design. Like, it looked like something like, oh, a kid will think that's cute.
And from a, this is our intent for this product standpoint, 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. And I guess the best thing that I saw, I'm not perfectly competent at this point to like analyze how well it worked, but from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with NAQI, Naki's basically reads facial micro emotions in order to let people control a computer.
Not exclusively, but especially if they're quadriplegic or whatever. Like I thought that was really interesting.
And it's the kind of thing, because honestly, I might loop that in with, there was a AI assisted like cane for people who are blind. There was another device that led you to control a computer through facial movements in your mouth that was like a retainer.
All of the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a toy.
Ed, you're in the hot seat next. You know, the thing I loved the most was obviously the global pavilion for connecting Web3 businesses across crypto, botching, DeFi, fintech, CBDCs, which are central bank digital currencies, and legal advocacy.
You know, this made my heart flutter because you know what?

Even when you think they're down, crypto finds a way to squirm into your life.

It really is the zombie of the tech world.

Yeah.

Because it's dead and yet it's undead.

It's constantly trying to crawl back. Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous now.
Yes, exactly. It's specifically a zombie.
I will try to figure out what's the vampire, but specifically Crypto is the zombie. Yeah, when I first read the line, that is not dead, which can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die.
Hawk to a coin. I did not guess that it would be referring to Hawk to a coin.
When I think of, you know, 28 years later trailer where they use that poem. Oh, yeah.
The Kipling poem. The Kipling poem, yeah.
Six, you know, like them just guessing where the price of Bitcoin is going to go. I think we're at the beginning of a golden age, not for us, but for the grifters.
Oh, God. Next week, when our dear golden boy gets, our orange boy gets elected, or inaugurated, because he already won the election.
He sure did. Well, that's debatable.
I think there was some very curious irregularities in multiple swing states. Right.
Straightforward from here. We don't need to be encouraging the blue and on stuff here.
People have no ability. Let them have it.
Let them have it. You're right.
He wasn't shot at all. That was all an AI trick.
Yeah, that was too. That was an off.
And AR-15 would blow your whole head off that way. You know, the thing I actually did like the most, similar to you, I really did like the like the assistive tech 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 like this is actual stuff that we need a lot more investment and development and i assume maybe the scale 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 you know i didn't really care for a lot of the uh luxury surveillance stuff you know the fake cgms that you know I'll never forget this woman telling someone right next to me, it's a, it was a medical device.
And when I asked, she looks at my tag and goes, no, it's not a medical device. Not in any legally binding sense.
We had a beautiful moment where it was this, like, uh, it was like a, a set of smart goggles, which there were a lot of that had like night vision but also it had like threat assessment so the specific thing they bragged is like it can help a police officer identify if somebody has a gun right oh and this was right after we had gone to an ai security camera that i had flipped off with both hands and it had identified as a man giving the thumbs up and I was like I don't feel great about it identifying guns so 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 fucking need that why does the litter box need to be connected to the internet and why does it need a camera in it you know that does make me think of a better world where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI, but it's all integrating it into cat-focused products. Like $50 billion being poured into cat AI.
Translate whatever your cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make deals with Chinese.
And by the way, we've hooked him up to Venture Capital. He has an open line

to SoftBank. Siri, why?

You know, that, I would love this translation.

Let's help my cat make some deals.

Help me figure out

why or how he learned to open my

door. You know, things like this.

But what we get now? Bullshit.

I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs

be like, ladies and gentlemen, we have finally

done it. We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat.

They now understand their mortality.

Just meowing loud.

You see that like common ad where he's talking about AI, but he's like, we taught Proust to a dog.

He's got a turtleneck on.

Never thought what a dog would think about Proust. Just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette.
The future. Garrison, you're up.
Best of CES, I think, was definitely the VLC media booth at Caritha Park. where they had big traffic cones on their head, wearing them like wizard hats with huge cloaks.
They were dressed as wizards. They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to them, and they said...
Let's start. VLC, folks, if you don't know this, this was especially relevant to those of us who pirated a lot.
It's a media app that allows you to basically play any kind of... Any video file audio file, and now it will automatically give you subtitles too, using local AI that's not reaching to the cloud or anything to do it.
Because putting subtitles on pirated media can sometimes be really hard. So they said, we have something that analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching, and we will put subtitles up for you.
We walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like, we are not selling anything. We have nothing to sell you.
In this beautiful, they're French. So it was in this like- Yeah, wonderful accent.
I'm not gonna fake it. The degree of like, I don't give a fuck about anything else in this stupid goddamn show that they gave off, they exuded it.
And they're by far the coolest because of something, Robert, you said to them. I walked up and I was like, VLC's a very popular app.
They just crossed six billion downloads. I've been using them for almost as long as you've been alive.
And I walked up and I was like, I've been using your product for 15 years in order to pirate media. And they said very nonchalantly, keep going.
Keep doing that. Keep doing that.
I'm obsessed. That's amazing.
I feel bad about this too because like I 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. 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 garrison does not have that no no no it's quite the contrary i i feel a magnetic attraction this is why i keep an air tag on them great way to get abducted I think similarly obviously all of the AI stuff for kids

all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad. We've talked about that a lot already.
The other thing that's like kind of like the worst is so much what you said, Ed, like a level of surveillance tech. I tried out multiple AI systems that are supposed to like 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 have access to their training data.
They're called Visomatic. And specifically, why this exists, it is a camera that you can put on a computer.
It will detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists is for online test taking.
It's so people don't look at their phone to cheat. So it tracks where your eyes are moving.
And if your eyes look down too much, it's going to flag it as someone's possibly cheating. So this was obviously introduced after the pandemic.
There's a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses this tech themselves for any kind of online exams that they as a company will put on, whether it's for people, students, employees.
But they also had other features where you could switch it. I assume it's doing all the same work.
It just is placed differently on the monitor. Instead, it can do object detection, what you're wearing, and the general behavior analysis if you seem like you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at the SK booth, which also is a South Korean company, for their own surveillance detection.
But I asked VisoMatic, what kind of use cases do you see for this beyond test taking? Yeah, general surveillance. Yeah, we want to learn how to predict or analyze potentially suspicious

human behavior. As we were walking

by the SK version, one

quite funny thing is

as I walked by, it first

identified me as a blonde woman

holding a cup. It then

changed and said blonde

person, which I think is pretty

neat. Very progressive.
It's doing

the opposite of a Facebook.

It could sense the pronouns. It's like, hmm.

Maybe not

I don't know. person, which I think is pretty neat.
Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook.
It can sense the pronouns. It's like, hmm, maybe not a woman.
Maybe not a blonde person. But yes, that was something that was quite well done, specifically the Vizomatic stuff.
Very functional. It could tell when I was looking at the screen, when I was looking at my phone, it could tell from like various, various angles, like what I was holding, what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.
So like, it was very well done. It was very accurate, but you know, possibly scary.
Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast, don't know who they are, could be the Washington State Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you, boys, for your noble service on our nation's roads.

I'm not saying that because I got pulled over the other week and I'm really trying to fight a court case right now.

I would never do that. Anyway, thanks, guys.
And we're back. Is it my turn? It is your turn.
Okay, so I'm going to introduce our special white woman correspondent, Zai, to give us some exciting breaking news in the white woman tech development world. Okay, so the first one is positive.

For context, I'm a trans woman.

And one of the

booths that was pretty interesting,

it was this group, were they

French? Gare, do you remember?

I, I, uh, you know,

they're called... They're European.
They're called

Ellie. Ellie Health.

That's E-L-I. Anyways,

this is a at-home

hormone tester.

So, it is saliva-based

Thank you. Ellie.
Ellie Health. That's E-L-I.
Anyways, this is a at-home hormone tester. So it is saliva-based.
It's like a little disposable package. Currently, they only advertise cortisol and progesterone, but they have plans for estradiol and other hormones.
Testosterone as well. Testosterone as well.
Sorry. And yeah, so you swab your mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait what was it like 15 minutes 20 minutes and then you scan this little QR thing on the device and your phone calculates what your levels are and this has very interesting implications for like the diy like hormone market or use case i started diy and did my own like blood test but a lot of like trans kids don't have access to that so this is a it's a good idea if it's actually effective like we don't have hands- yet.
We haven't tested it yet, but I would love to do a comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying this. Very interesting, very intriguing.
Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible test this compared to the regular like mail-in blood tests, which is like the current way to do it. But that requires shipping your blood to a laboratory.
And that's maybe not always the best or even like convenient. So being able to test this just at home without shipping any of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really, really cool.
Right. There's no insurance involved.
This is completely, supposedly closed source. From what you 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.
I didn't press them on that because, I don't know, I felt a little weird. Did CES? Yeah, it did CES.
Wide variety of, yeah. No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible about kind of what their future plans are, but not specifically, like, in that level.
But privacy, like, they seemed like they had a reasonably good understanding. Of course, because it is your own, like, DNA and hormones.
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.
Exactly, exactly. The potential is great.
And then probably my least favorite booth, I have to call out some other white women. My SoCal boho white women is Evject.
How's that spelled?

E-V-E-V.

J-E-C-T.

Okay.

And what this is... Oh, God, yes.

This is a special plug for your charging port of your EV.

So the idea is a nefarious party sees you in your fancy EV and approaches you, and you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words, their words, by the way, like they see your fancy car and your targets.
So this device will like ejects. You can just drive away from the charge.
It ejects the power cord. It ejects the power cord, by the way.
Leaving broken pieces of plastic on both the charger

itself and your car. Non-reusable, by the way.

This is not reusable. It's single

use. One-time use.

Yes. So,

yeah, all those people targeting

SoCal white women

in their AVs. 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 going to take you. That was the first thing I said as soon as we walked away.
I was like, this product wins the Cool Zone Media Award for the most white woman product. It's specifically right to be like, if you see a slice of cheese on your windshield, you're already targeted right away.
This is that exact demographic of people who think they're going to get trafficked in like your local like olive garden parking lot gang stalked americans in the tesla charging station in brentwood california where the average income is like in the eight figures i gotta say though you're being very unfair to them it was so nice of them to put down the phone where they were doom scrolling tikt TikTok to look at all of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted and talk to you about this product. They were like, finally, someone's going to do something about it.
Create a disposable piece of plastic. You notice that guy's always sitting down at the gym and the coffee shop and the gas station.
This is so he doesn't get you. Gotta be careful.
I feel like I could have upsold them and like, what if we put some explosives in this? You know, really like keep them off of the car. Like blow it away.
Like a flashbang? Create a diversion. An agent inside of it called the police station and took a picture of him and sent it.
Someone scared a lady driving a Vibe. That's one of the electric cars, right? It's like a crocodile tail.
As soon as it ejects, it whips around. Yep.
Immobilizing anyone in the vicinity. We're calling it the iguana and it does spin with enough force to break a grown man's thigh.
Yes. Yes.
Okay. David Roth.
So there's a lot of, I guess I gather less than in years past that this was at one point like basically a car show there was not a lot of transit stuff this time around I didn't get to see very much of it but I did have I guess this is both my best and my worst experience the most powerful transit experience of my life so I live in New York City I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go and you know it has its ups and downs for the most part it's good it moves like 1200 people through a tunnel at 30 odd 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. 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. And at the Las Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.
You're familiar, Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur. Yeah.
So he invented something called the Hyperloop, which is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the exact same size as the car at 11 miles an hour. And it takes, there's someone has to drive it.
And also someone has to help you get into the car, but you can fit up to three additional people into the car. So that ratio of everyone I know.
Yes. Right.
So yeah,, you got two people moving three people 200 yards at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David, this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades.
Right. Exactly.
I mean, this is the sort of thing that there had been tunnels. They were mostly used by animals, voles, miners.
Yes. Right.
And that was mostly for pirates in at least one movie I saw recently

But no one had thought about it as a transit

It was more of a place where you would go

If you needed to get

Copper

But in this case

This is where it's good to have

I guess every CES is like

This was my first

To be reminded that there are visionaries

Out there who are like

What if you put car through hole

What if instead of a thing that moves

Let's go. first to be reminded that there are visionaries out there who are like, what if you put car through a hole? What if instead of a thing that moves multiple people at once, you had a thing that took exactly the same number of people to move that number of people slightly more than yes.
Yeah. So that was cool.
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 uh you know like it could be okay dave uh i mean most of the obvious is the something we've gone last there's like three or four good things you all said them i thought the uh accessibility tech stuff was the the stuff that made me feel good about what was going on here and there was a great deal of stuff that made me feel like pretty bad about what was going on here up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the, you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that nobody, whatever your boss can tell if you're really looking at the zoom that you're on.
Don't really love that personally. But for me, the, a lot of the smart home stuff is a real drag.
Yeah. Just in the sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving over your agency over the small moments that make human life human life and just being like, I would really love it if just an artificial intelligence could pick my pants out for the day.
I'll simply stand here waiting for that to happen. Just fucking grim, actually.
Like, didn't really care for it. I feel like you gotta, like, what are you using that time to do? Yeah.
What are you getting? What are you optimizing from yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing that a human being does, which is like, pick your clothes i wonder how you feel about this because you and i've been going to ces from and i guess a broadly similar number of years like i've never been to see you oh really this is your no i'm a fucking sports writer man like this is i'll be out here because ed got me a folding bed you have like the dead-eyed veteran oh yeah well i'm very tired yeah this is the thing with like i think as far as i can tell it seems like it's a loop where you more or less like you start out it's too much you get big eye right away and then you just sort of feel zombified but then we have talked to people over the last few days that are like you know i remember like 14 ces's ago that was pretty good like and they're also tired and also deranged by this point yeah the first time someone showed me a tablet computer i was like oh man science has given me everything i want 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 yeah uh 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 was so big. The Las

Vegas Convention Center is like

the size of a city

and seeing the lights in that

whole convention center dim as they

were doing this. It was very inefficient.
Not out of

reverence but because

power was going to go out.

But that was like, oh wow, this is kind of

amazing that this is even

possible. But yeah, not really since

Let's do this. Yeah.
Power was going to go out. Yeah.
But that was just like, oh, wow, this is kind of like amazing that this is even possible. But yeah, not really since.
Yeah. Not really since.
That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the Hyperloop tunnel. Yeah.
Otherwise, it'd be... Unless something goes wrong.
Would have started to seem kind of grim otherwise. Well, the smart home stuff is interesting because that has been, as long as I've been going to these, they've been trying to sell people on smart homes.
And I don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what a smart home is that I think a person would want. I can think of two things a person would want, right? One of them is it would be nice if like, I didn't have to think about playing music.
I could just like tell my house to play the music I wanted and it would play the music and I could hear it everywhere. And I didn't have to futz with a bunch of shit.
And the second is what if I'm coming home from vacation and my house is cold? It would be nice to turn on the heater like an hour before I get home. And one of those things you'd use every day.
And one of those things is not really viable to base a business off of, but like they keep trying to find new ways to stick computers in my house. And I'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 like i mean it's it's expensive to do all this stuff this was the bit that with so many of these demos like just you start to notice how incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff is being sort of like postulated as being useful is it's like the like lexus december to remember sales event type energy just a big fucking what lives do you live yeah this also we've talked about this on ed's show that like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like 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 disembowelings

and hideous shambling zombies.

Smart Home, not a bad horror

movie concept. I don't think it's a great

consumer concept.

Speaking of great consumer concepts,

the ads for this podcast. 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? I think we're going to hell. I think we are getting very fast into the sweet abyss.
I'm worried about the fact that so much of the tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping, around very soft forms of perfection and optimization that rhyme with eugenics. I don't like the direction that a lot of this stuff is going, 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, well-capitalized individuals and the firms that they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed and these corporations, you know?.
Yeah, the nature of like, you can really tell that a lot of like the health products are very optimized for like rich tech executives. Like there was a lot of sleep products that all relied on you being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers playing binaural beats while you slept.
And like a different devices measure your like doing ECG. And it's like, I don't know.
My gonna do that yeah you know like i was you know i was i talked with my partner about this they have type 1 diabetes they have a cgm they use it constantly and they're in we've been talking about and thinking about writing about how there's been a crop of devices that are like trying to push onto 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. 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, well, you know, if your sugar slightly goes out, it's because you're being a bad person.
It's because you're eating the way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing or character failing there that this tech can help purify you of and you can be your best self, which is really just like not large, you know? And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a lot of the biometric surveillance stuff, even though there are applications that are not that.
Yeah. It's kind of focused on like the sin, the health sins that you're committing.
We spent a decent amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest, and I do feel like several tech companies were the ones trying to sell us indulgences. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
All right, Gare. There's small improvements for consumer tech, right? This is a very consumer-based, or it's supposed to be a consumer-based tech show.
There's products like the Shox headphones, which every year get a little bit better. I tried a bone conducting headphones last year, which are very good.
They work underwater. If you're deaf in an ear, you can listen to your music the way you used to be able to.
Yeah. Very cool stuff.
This year they have what they called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works, but it does work.
I can hear it. If you're standing like two, three feet away, there's no sound bleed, but I hear music in the middle of my head, despite having to not put an earbud actually like in my ear.
They're super useful. They work great.
Really good sound quality. They're durable.
I'm on year two of the same pair that I run with every single day, like sweat, rain, great product. It's like small improvements, right? It's not necessarily like revolutionizing hearing, but it's very, very small improvements.
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, is I feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form of technology and AI-enabled technology. You used to have friends to get recommended new music.
You used to have friends to tell you about new stuff that they're interested in. No longer.
Now you have an AI agent that can do that for you. You don't need friends to help kind of talk about, you know, you had a rough breakup.
Instead, you can have a short-term replacement using AI. You can have a friend replacement, a girlfriend replacement.
It's all these things that are trying to like replace the core concept of friendship. Even as like a baby, even as a toddler, your first friend doesn't need to be people you meet outside.
It can be this little hovering robot you have in the living room that can also organize your fridge, tell you what you need on your shopping list, roll around your house in the middle of the night with cameras, and that can be your first friend. It's replacing the core concept of friendship.
It's this move towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life, being as smooth as possible, that completely ignores what it means to be human.

It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot, L.E.Q., which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of empathy trying to design a device to help people, and what I usually see with AI, which is trying to design a device to remove the need for human empathy.

Like I went to a – there was a vet app called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians.

And they were like, yeah, you know what? a device to remove the need for human empathy. Like I went to a, there was a vet app called Laika.

That's like chat GPT for veterinarians.

And they were like,

yeah, you know what?

Most of it,

we focused initially on like technical questions.

So like,

if I have these symptoms,

what can that mean?

But what vets kept asking us is like,

we would really like advice on how to talk to people that their pets are

going to die.

And I was like,

do you,

are vets not getting out of vet school?

No,

cause that's like,

that's a big part of being a vet. Like, do they need chat GPT for this? I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I was like, are vets not getting out of vet school? Because that's a big part of being a vet.

Do they need

JetGPT for this?

I saw this other company that was

designed to help you get over

the loss of your pet.

You could pump tons of photos of your pet

into this AI

generator and it will

generate new images and this

is proven to help you move on from loss. which is literally a Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago.
It's seven years ago. And like, no, you should talk with your friends about that.
That's why you are a human. That's how you can move on from loss.
You have to make new connections. Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to help you move on.
Why? Anyway, replacing friendship is the thing that I see a lot of the tech world wanting to do. Maybe because they don't really understand real human relationships that aren't innately transactional.
I'm not sure, but that is a huge trend that I've seen multiple people mention. Alright, Zai? So I've worked in this industry for like three years now and this is my first big convention and I would say this has just affirmed pretty much all of my disillusions with the tech world and most of it's just nonsense and maybe the post-civ people are on to some stuff.
Well, you say that, but I really do think Viridox is going to revolutionize the way in which mysterious fogs kill large numbers of people. I'm just slandering these people.
But don't name it something so sinister. Yeah, if you were to be like, this is the thing that keeps your apples fresh for a long time, that would be great.
I would just don't. Call it apple fresh.
Yes. Call it apple fresh.
By the way, you should listen to Better Offline to hear context from Varadox, which we discussed in the last episode of our daily CES coverage over there with the wonderful Ed Zitron. But essentially, Varadox is this mist that gets sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps it stay shelf-stable for a few more days.
33%. Exactly.
Maybe that shelf-stable mist will also translate to waking up the dead. Possibly, but you don't know that it's not going to do that either.
We just know it keeps things fresh. As a journalist, it's our job to ask these questions.
And we discuss that way more in depth on Better Offline. 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.
David. It's me.
Sorry. Yeah.
A lot of good points. I mean, I think Gary and we both made the point about the sort of sociopathic thread of a lot of this.
Just sort of like an inability to understand not just what people might want from a technology, I think, which is to feel not. I mean, there probably are people.
I imagine that's like if you were the guy, the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards. You know, he's like.
Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson.
We love Brian. Oh, yeahrian he's oh yeah but he like i feel like he would have been walking through this clapping his hands with delight clapping his hands eating his 400 pills a day drinking his son's blood yeah time for yeah it's a it's in fairness i drink his son's blood pretty right it's not bad the high quality plot but but that it felt like it it was that that there was a lot of this sort of like an optimization unto like transcending being human at all and i don't think i mean again there probably are people that want that they certainly have money i don't imagine that i think what most people would like i mean you don't expect technology to make you feel more human but something i've been thinking about a lot we've been talking about this a lot on Better Offline 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 and I don't think that I want that I mean I'm older than and poorer than the market that I think they're aiming for with this.
But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said, finding music. That's a thing that your friends tell you about it.
And in my case, I mean, again, just being in my middle age, you go to a store and you flip through shit. There's a distinction between finding something and being given something or being fed something, like you a foie gras goose and it's just getting sort of piped into your brain and life and being and i think it's an important distinction i think that little bit of agency of having some sense of doing the things that you want to do like i would imagine that well i don't have to imagine it technology that helps you do that as opposed to doing it for you, I think that...
I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human. I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like I'm in a fucking Matrix pod.
And I think that a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed targeted towards the Matrix pod dwelling community. Yeah, I think that's about the best line we could go out on.
That, that's, yeah, you nailed it. Thanks, I thought I crushed that one.
Yeah, you did, you did. Great job, Dave.
Where can people find your work, Dave? Defector.com. Let me do that without crushing my water.
No, no, no, no. That's a load-bearing piece of content.
Defector.com is the website. And Ed? Big Blackjackabit on Twitter and Blue Sky.
This Machine Kills is my podcast, techbubble.soapstor.com is the website. And Ed, uh, big blackjackabit on Twitter and blue sky.
This machine kills is my podcast. Tech bubble.
Soapstack.com is the newsletter. Hell yeah.
Do you want to tell people how to find you? Zy? At new woman on Twitter with zeros. Zeros for Neo.
Zeros. All right, everybody.
Well, that's going to do it for us here.

It could happen here.

And our week at CES,

you know,

just try to hug,

hug your loved ones until the viridocs sweeps through all of their homes,

neighborhoods.

Yeah.

Oh no,

it's in the room.

It's in the room.

What? Welcome to Dink and Appet Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong.
Returned for the holidays, returned rejuvenated, returned refreshed, returned to do something a little bit different. in the coming weeks we're going to be doing a lot of nitty-gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism but what we haven't really been doing as much what i want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now and also talk about uh an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up in a cyber truck outside of a trump building and with me to talk about this is writer organizer agitator doer of so many different things that like i don't know someone's gonna write a great biography in like a hundred years it is it

is the one and only vicky ostewile thank you uh sorry i couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for you to get to the intro before you're you find people could hear me well i'm glad to have you here and part part of this the initial thing that was like okay we need to do this this was I saw you call all of this the years of lead paint. And that is just, it is stuck in my mind every single second of every day since then.
Yeah, yeah. I was writing for the journal that I am working and fundraising for, but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk dystopia is in the face of, you know, that sort of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside the Trump hotel.
Then about, you know, as we are about to talk about Matthew Livelsberger, I think is how it's pronounced. Who's the Green Beret, then big Trump fan who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the Trump hotel would start not a race war, but like the purging of democratic politicians is that what we think his yeah vision was now that that seems to be it like politicians and like it's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants democrats gone from like the army and right right you know so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of nazi fantasy of the day of the rope from the the Turner Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race worry or like less anti-Semitic versions of it.
Yes. And that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by.
Exactly. Blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.
So basically this guy, 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 this is important, you know, like, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like green beret to like former green beret this guy

was active duty so like right yes yes yes exactly this wasn't even like a cooked vet this is a guy who is like in the shit and we know that he was drinking the kool-aid because he used chat gpt we've just found out today to help plan his attack but unfortunately despite his murder expertise which, undeniable,

Cybertruck, like all Teslas,

is designed mostly to endanger the people inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already huge super fans. And what I really mean, of course, is that they have terrible safety protocols.
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. It's very dangerous to be inside, but the car doesn't take damage, and that means that if you leave a bomb in it, the sides of the car were fine.
So the explosion went straight up, right? So it did no damage to the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but it seems like he probably wanted to do a little damage to the hotel.
Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I would imagine. So anyway, all of this is to say, you have this guy who's like an active duty Green Beret who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel in an Elon Musk car will somehow lead to the murder of Democrats.
But he's so tech pilled that he takes a Cybertruck, which doesn't even work as a bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like horrible image. And I mean, I'm being flippant about this.
Like it's an awful thing, obviously, but no one else was hurt except himself 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 yeah it was the perfect image of a thing i had already been thinking of as the years of lead paint so i wrote an essay around that basically yeah so i want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are because i imagine i it's some some 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 but for for everyone else who's normal and i i kept myself among the non-normal people because i did i spent about two years going down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain same but the years of lead were this thing in roughly the 70s and the 80s in italy where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings 1968 and italy is kind of different from the rest of europe because in italy you know like in france for example france has this huge uprising in May 68. Like they nearly knock off the government.
Like workers' councils have seized control of the factories. Like they lose this for a bottle.
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.
In Italy, that is not true. Like 68 in Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but, like, the seizure of the factories has been going on since,

like, I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the

50s, and it really only stops

in 1977,

when, like, they have one last big push uprising

and it fails. So, as a way

to contain this, the Italian government develops

this strategy of

backing right-wing terror

groups, and then also orchestrating left-wing

terror groups, and by terror groups, I mean, like, the

most famous thing in this is called the Bologna

train bombing in 1980 that kills

I'm sorry. backing right-wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups.
And by terror groups, I mean, like, the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing in 1980 that kills 85 people, wounds, like, 290. Like, 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, like, fascist group.
And, yeah, like, there are other ones. I will pass over to Vicky to talk about like the other thing terrible shit that they did well that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends the years of lead you could you could end it there it's sort of the last big terrorist month the first thing the event that like sort of after 68 kind of starts it is this thing called the piazza fontana bombing in milan which is like at a at an agriculture bank i think is what it's called it, 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.
And there's a famous case of this anarchist organizer named Pennelli who is arrested. And then while he is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the police department to his death.
It has still never been proven that he was pushed. The police claimed he jumped out after they interrogated him really hard.
Yeah, sure. There's a very famous Italian play about it by Dario Fo called The Death of an Anarchist.
So anyways, they blame the anarchist. They literally murder a leading anarchist printer and organizer.
And then, of course, it turns out that it was this terrorist group called Ordone Nuovo, who was this neo-fascist group that had, let's say, significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I think one way of understanding the years of lead, I think that might be easy for people who aren't familiar with it, is that it's a very low-level civil war.
I think the closest thing we can maybe think of is the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And the reason those were a little different was because a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas the movement was in Ireland.
But this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings both on the right and the left that are both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other. But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the left for these attacks.

Yeah, and there's other stuff too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Morrow here.
I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in, if you go to the Halloween episode we did where we talked about conspiracies, I've explained that whole thing.
But like the goal of this, right, the reason that, you know, they're they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks. So it's designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like in having all these bombings was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state.
the idea was and this and this seems to have worked you know you you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know there's bombs going off all the time people are getting killed people are getting kidnapped there's all of this just like horror happening and the goal is to get people to turn to the state for you know sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need you know we need to sort of terror to end and it was extremely effective and the sort of knowledge of this has i guess proliferated through the american left in the last like decade and that has led to a lot of i think kind of unhelpful comparisons you will hear people sometimes talk about like american gladio which which is Gladio is those to stay behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo-fascist groups. And like to, to refer to this sort of like, I don't know, like what's happening in the U S and that's not really what's happening.
And this is where I want to pass it to Vicki to talk about sort of the, the characteristics of what we're calling the years of lead paints and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones. Yeah.
In classic American fashion, everything is more chaotic and autonomous. Yes.
And widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all

over America, products and services. Did I do good? Let's support this podcast.
That's a good one.

Thank you. We are back.
All right. Years of blood paint.
Let's go. Yes.
Right. So I actually think, you know, as you were saying that, I think actually a thing that might be the closest to Gladio, and it's not Gladio because that was very conscious and it was like these stay-behind networks

that were organized explicitly,

but the U.S. state defense of the Second Amendment

and of assault rifle availability

and making the U.S. the sort of home for military surplus,

because obviously the military-industrial complex

sells lots of guns, it's a very helpful thing,

that producing a rain of mass shooters

who also operate in a sort of years-of-led terroristic sort of strategy of tension way, I think might actually be close, but you can tell that that's very disorganized. 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 shit, yes yes no exactly where the second amendment guys like that stuff is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme like increasingly right-wing politics that's sort of like not what they were trying to do but that's sort of you know that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff yeah Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't a conscious effort at all, but that's also not the years of lead paint.
That's just like a similar thing. The years of lead paint, which is obviously like, which is a joke about, there's this big reactionary myth from like the Freakonomics guys, I think, that like the rise in crime is like correlated to like the use of lead paint in children's bedrooms.
Which is really funny because for the Freakonomics guy, that is a downright left-wing theory by his standards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Or maybe it was a dude correcting it. I don't even remember now.
Anyway, so it became a meme to talk about boomers and Generation X people having the lead paint in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff. Obviously, I'm not advocating that kind of like ableist insult when I talk about this and is a memetic way of making fun of that concept.
But 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.
They were like making it up. But like a lot of people on the right...
In Italy. Yeah, yeah.
In Italy. Excuse me.
In Italy in the 60s and in the actual years of lead. Years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing that January 6th was Antifa.
Like people whose friends were there, you know? Yeah. Like stuff like Q.
And the other thing that, the reason this is years of lead pain and not the first trump administration is because during the first trump administration there was actually pretty pretty well organized on the ground fascist movements and they could they could certainly come back um in the u.s right now there's no reason they couldn't yeah and and it's also worth talking about we'll be covering this on the show like at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents but there's recently a massive um from distributed denial of secrets a massive drop of uh stuff on the militia movement yes from a guy who infiltrated it there's a very good propublica story talking about the guy that will link in the the show notes so like like the militia movement has survived but the kind of stuff that like we saw in like 2017 2018 2020 like is not yeah the proud the proud boys q and on the folks who made up j6 and the folks who made up the alt-right you know um broadly were largely defeated by anti-fascists in the street and then the the people who remained q and on folks who were i think you know some of those people were pretty hardcore neo-nazis, but a lot of those folks were confused internet boomers, right?

And those people mostly got discouraged by the repression.

The repression, I think, successfully sort of put the end to that organized Q stuff.

Yeah, well, and also, and also we've talked about on this show, the other thing that put an end to that was that

the Daily Wire figured out that you could use literally the exact same structure of QAnon, but make it about trans people.

Yes.

And that has been unbelievably effective. No, the strategy as a media strategy has continued yeah but as an on the ground organizing principle it's not that functional yeah it's not um which is really lucky but what that means is that trump has come to power without a ground movement in the same way that he had in 2015 2016 like that was a real movement his rallies were really well attended his rallies this election people left early you know it was like it was like going to see a losing team and their last home game of the season you know was the vibe at those rallies yeah to 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 to before for their owner moved into las vegas exactly 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 like it's like that kind of yeah those were the vibes and yet of course the democrats in their infinite infinite capacities lost the election and so 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 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 these places where the fascist, you know, and I guess Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to remove all content restrictions or whatever today. I mean, you know, when we're recording this, so it's, it's just, there's this huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organizing.
So you get people like this green beret who has been really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing, not even the Trump hotel up, which wouldn't be a nonsensical thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the Trump hotel up in an attempt to start the race war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of strategy of tension stuff, right? The imagination of, as you said, the Turner diaries or the sort of like, you know, the, the right wing terror networks in the U S you know, they, there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grids, right? They think if you cause enough chaos, like you will return everything to the Hobbesian world of all against all and you'll get a race war and everything will fall apart, whatever.
It's, you know, it's step one, kill my family. Step two, question mark, question mark.
Step three, white supremacist revolution. It's horrifying.
I mean, it's a horrifying, horrifying idea, but that's happening in these groups that have really, really, they believe, I think genuinely that like, I think the right does not understand the difference between like nancy pelosi and assada shakur like they see them both as equally dangerous right they hate liz cheney yeah like in the final days of the election she was the person they were saying we're gonna go after her like liz cheney like really like yeah it's like like the the closest parallel i think of this is like there was a faction of people during the Cold War who thought that like the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked.

And like there were literally guys murdering each other like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in 69. Right.
Like and there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam, are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy. And that like and that's the secretly like the USSR and the PRC are working together.
And these are not like, you know, some random guys. Like these are these are like the guys that like 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. It's just like, these people are completely cooked.
They don't have any analytical ability whatsoever. They just, they actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid.
There was just a scoop, sorry, I'm just going to drop this really quick. There was a scoop right before we got on to record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of Project 285, their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.
They want to take down Wikipedia because that's a place you can verify

facts at, right? They've already got

the post, they've got the times.

What are they going to do? They've got to go after Wikipedia. This is the kind of

level of unreality

they're trying to build. Yeah, and do you know

what else builds a world of unreality

that attempts to sell it to you?

Products and services? That support this

podcast. Yes! products and services that support this podcast yes 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 just came back better than ever that was really good She's never been so bad so i i want to move a little bit from from the just what is the state look like how pilled are these people kind of thing to i want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here because i think part of what's what's happening here and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act and like the capacity of the state or whatever.
But I think actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is like going back to your David Graber. And he has this line talking about neoliberalism.
I think this might. God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote 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 the sort of maxim of of margaret thatcher is there is no alternative it is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the you know and this includes the possibility of a future 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 yeah there's something vicky i would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment yeah yeah um i was sort of vibing with what you're saying but yeah i think a lot of people on online have accepted sort of you know don't give in in advance right but like i think one big thing that has been part of the biden like strategy of counter-revolution and part of what's been going on over the last four years but 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.

You need a market, you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an expert to

make a choice, right?

And any choice made otherwise, you know, is doomed to failure, right?

And I think part of why Trump feels like to people, some people, like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no, I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone except my gut.
I just do what I want. The incredibly exhausting and 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? So that's sort of like, there's that sense.
But then on the individual sense, it's also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility of labor solidarity, right? Because part of what the 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. So they had this massive, massive factories that had these crazy strikes over and over again.
So the distribution of labor with globalization, neoliberalism, blah, blah, blah, breaking down labor workforce, we also are very helpless individually in our workplaces. Right.
And like, we go to the HR department to get help. Right.
Or we, we sort of get self-care. We like work on ourselves.
We get therapy, you know, that our boss offers us, you know, uh, thoughts and prayers, right. When we're, when things are hard, but like, there's a big attempt to allow people to, to define themselves sort of the carrot,

the carrot of the sixties was like,

you know,

you get to like have an identity like,

okay,

we won't be officially racist.

Yeah.

Quote unquote,

you know,

okay,

we won't be officially sexist.

They claim,

okay,

whatever.

None of that's true,

but they,

but they sort of sell that.

And then they say,

but in return,

you have to like do all of the self work.

You have to be an identity in the marketplace.

So basically you get exhausted because all of the self-work. You have to be an identity in the marketplace.
So basically, you get exhausted because even choosing what shoes to wear becomes both an identity-defining question and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces. And so that in Spoonie world, we call that sort of choice paralysis, right? And I think that's probably accepted as well, that like, you have so much choice that you feel absolutely helpless in the face of it.
You can't do anything. And so that produces a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right? That's another thing people want is like, someone else decide for me.
I'm sick of thinking about this. Yeah.
And that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you to free you from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which health care plan you're supposed to buy and shit like that and oh my god and the right has a bunch of alternatives here right with like this is the fantasy of what trad wives is it's, what if someone else did your thinking for you? It's also the entire logic behind AI, right? And behind this sort of AI agents thing that they're, like, pushing right now, go listen to our CES coverage and hear a bunch about it, is like, what if someone just, like, planned your life for you, right? What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and it would tell you how to live? And this you know this is also the structure of how cults work like this is why cults have been able to attract people that like i think the the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them is why there's so many engineers in cults because it'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 and this is ultimately you know we talked about this a little bit before this is ultimately part of what's going on with like trumpism right because trump is also to some extent like if you're in this movement like you no longer have to choose anymore you just you know here is the guy the guy is going to do the thing for you this is also if you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism right it's about the the sort of populace delegates their will into the the single heroic individual the single heroic individual like acts outside of the the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you and i think there's there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and an exhaustion particularly like exhaustion and anxiety also and there's something that well documented that, you know, we're not going to get into it full here.

But all of the stuff we've been talking about, about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense.

That's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, 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, was there a gas attack in Syria. Or was it like staged by the rebels as a false flag right.
You're refusing to make the choice. Has the effect of legitimizing both of them.
And also removes you from sort of the field of play of action. And this has been a really important part of this.
To sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gambit was.
Yeah. Right.
Was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them and you know now tulsi gabbard is like one of the big people in trump world right i think um what's his name i disrespect him by not remembering his name but i should for the podcast steve bannon put it well when he said just flood the zone with? It's sort of the strategy. You just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter.
And this is how Trump also kept ahead of his many scandals, is he would just say the next most outrageous thing. And you'd have to commit to responding to one, but he was already at the next thing.
And it was just a sort of amplifying, amplifying wave of chaos and nonsense that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it. You get exhausted.
And I think, you know, you mentioned healthcare markets. And I think like, that's really, that's really telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
We're in the midst of a pandemic. COVID has, is in another wave that like no one has named right now.
And no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic, during the election of 2024. So part of what's been going on too is that there has been this mass push by the Biden administration and the Democrats to make us forget what happened in 2020 in terms of the uprising and to make us forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy, right? It was already pretty bad for it and it would have continued to get worse.
So everyone had to be forced back to work. How do you force people back to work who evidently care about each other and their own safety? You lied to them.
You confused them about what's actually going on, right? So there's been this huge priming of the pump for this strategy by Biden and the Democrats and by our own exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had to go back to work. So we had to get over the cognitive dissonance of that.
So all of these factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands and going, I don't know, whatever. yeah.
But on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy born of strength, right? The years of lead paint, this is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power, right? The actual base that put Trump in power, right? And their actual political base is incredibly brittle, right? they are about to tank the entire global economy like through by by putting like 50 percent tariffs like every single country in the world they okay let's let's be accurate here that on on on chinese mexican and canadian goods which is like okay like i'm gonna i'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the u.s imports things from um right so like you know this is how you resist this is this how you resist your your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself but you know they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices right these fucking arrogant bastards have sown the wind and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwind. 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 three hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force? No, of course not.
There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history.
Right. This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance yes if they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation right they need you scared they need you confused they need you completely convinced of your own helplessness they need you to forget that as the old song says in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold they need you to forget the next line of the song which goes we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old where the union makes us strong this is the entire fucking thing right if these people were actually strong they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.
Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, right, the thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized.
However, comma, that means that you just literally any random person can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing. The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that.
And guess what? It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do, for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things. And they are fucking terrified of this.
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. Like, I was just literally a random college student, right? Like, I was just some asshole.
And I just started doing things, right? And I got together with my friends. And we fucking, we made a tenants union.
And we did anti-ice stuff. We did all of this shit.
And it wasn't that, like,'t that like any of us are any different than you we just you know decided one day we were going to do it and it happens to return one last time to david graber one of one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently and everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently. And together we can do that.
Yes, that's exactly right. And another thing that I think is really powerful about getting started in that way is that all of those false choices, they become so much less important.
And actually when you have a real goal that you and your friends have made together that you're building towards, it's actually a lot easier to make choices and to make decisions because you would know what you need for the next step or you'll have an idea of it. You might make a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along that way, 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 ChatGPT, right? And obviously like that's a joke, but it's true that they aren't offering us anything anymore.
They have decided, they have decided that what we get is stomped. We get stomped on.
That's what they've agreed to give us is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always what they wanted to give us in the past, but they might learn very, very quickly in 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.
The point being that these things that they are overwhelming, this flooding, the zone was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of weakness. Because when they were strong, when they were strong, Obama was a sign of strength.
We can elect a black person, a black man in this racist country, and he can just go on hope. And he can actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular.
Even through a huge economic collapse, right? That was a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of real senescence, and I use the phrase advisedly, and there are a lot of holes.
And they have drunk the Kool-Aid. The right has drunk the Kool-Aid.
They don't know the difference between Democrats and anarchists. Not really.
They genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do.
Their philosophers do. But the main ones on the street have no idea about the difference.
That gives us a lot of space to move. That gives us a lot of space to take action, to build things that are invisible to them.
And that might be invisible to social media, which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness in many ways.

The strategies we have to take will be less visible in many ways, I think, than they were

in previous times. And they're going to have to be of necessity because MAGA is basically,

you know, it's the eye of Sauron. And if it lands on you, like you're in trouble.

But if it doesn't, like you can just kind of move. And if you don't, you know, run into any

trouble, like you can get a lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say about that.
But there's a lot to do and there's a lot of movements to make and a lot of building to do that will both give you a sense of power and solve these big problems for you and your community. And if enough people start doing that, then they will take away all their power.
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