It Could Happen Here Weekly 164

Hi, I'm Sam Mullins, and I've got a new podcast coming out called Go Boy, the gritty true story

of how one man fought his way out of some of the darkest places imaginable.

Roger Caron was 16 when first convicted.

Has spent 24 of those years in jail.

But when Roger Caron picked up a pen and paper, he went from an ex-con to a literary darling.

From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts, listen to Go Boy on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast.
It brings different creators to tell ten vile, grotesque, horrific stories on what scares them the most. My kids, you're playing.

You're feeling this too.

Listen on the

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Hey kids,

it's me,

Kevin Smith.

And it's me,

Harley Quinn Smith.

That's my daughter,

man,

who my wife has

always said is

just a beardless,

dickless version of me.

And that's the name

of our podcast,

Beardless,

Dickless Me.

I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.
Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only.
Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show.
We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out.
It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, Dickless Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it.

Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast.

Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here.

And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.
Hi everyone, it's James coming at you. We're pretty nasty cold here.
I wanted to share with you that wildfires have swept through Los Angeles in the last couple of days while I'm recording this. Thousands of people have been displaced.
Five people have died that we know of so far. Thousands of structures have been burned and many, many people in LA will be finding themselves out of their homes with nowhere to go with very few resources.

If you'd like to help, we've come up with some mutual aid groups who you can donate to,

and we'll be interviewing one of them on this show next week. So if you'd like to help, the three places where we suggest you would donate some cash are The Sidewalk Project, that's the sidewalk project.org k-town for all that's letter k t-o-org.
K-Town for All.

That's letter K-T-O-W-N-F-O-R-A-L-L dot O-R-G.

And Aetna Street Solidarity.

You can find them on Venmo or I think on Instagram as well.

That's A-E-T-N-A-S-T-R-E-E-T-S-O-L-I-D-A-R-I-T-Y. All right, I'm going to go rest my voice.
Order in the court. Order in the court.
Justice Robert Evans presiding. I see we have a fine jury here to take questions from the audience of our daily news show, which is also my courtroom.
Everybody get it? Because I'm a judge now, legally. Because that's how the legal system works.
All those rumors finally have come true, huh? No, municipal judge, Garrison. That's not a fed.
Okay, okay. Municipal.
Municipal. You're right, you're right, you're right.
I will now for the rest of my life be able to say when people ask questions, well, as a man of the law, which I'm very much looking forward to, not only able to say, Robert, but quite likely to say. Anyway, that's all I got.
All right. This is the It Could Happen Here Q&A episode.
We've got, what are we calling you now robert evans what's your title the honorable robert evans and i i actually did get the the judge who made me a judge sent me a gavel but i i didn't grab it for this one so i just used i have a the the barrel and lower receiver from an antique sawed-off shotgun that belonged to a bootlegger and i just sort of slammed that that into my table. Great.
I'm sure our editor will love that. Yeah.
But before we broadcast, so you have a sawed-off shotgun. It's not functional.
It's been destroyed. I see.
I see. Good.
Didn't want a little Ruby Ridge moment. Yeah.
We've got Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and the dishonorable Robert Evans. And Sophie Lichterman.
Oh, yes. It me.
Yeah. We're going to do some questions.
We posted it on our Blue Sky. If you're not following us on Blue Sky, we are on there.
Blue Ski? One does not post on Blue Sky, Sophie. One skeet.
I really hope that's not true because that's really embarrassing. It's been unfortunate.
They really tried to get that off the ground. I don't see anyone actually using skeet.
I saw someone using it in French and it was a real moment. I use skeet.
Garrison. Instead of saying send tweet, now I just say send skeet in conversation.
Everyone loves it. Do you re-skeet? Is that a thing? Yeah, I guess you do.
I guess you do. And we're moving on.
I'm just going to throw out some of the questions we received online online i'm not even gonna say the name of the app again because i'm afraid being labeled as an old garrison's embarrassed by me i can tell i didn't say that but you thought it but you thought it i didn't think that you did any advice for someone with a desire to do some hobby or freelance journalism in the coming few years? I want to actively fight for equality. Also, thank you for your questions, everyone.
I don't thank you for your questions. I'm actively angry at you for your questions.
That's why you're the dishonorable. Start rich if you want to be a freelance journalist because you'll progressively become poorer.
I have funded uh i i have funded my journal i get i love whenever people ask me questions like uh how did you convince cracked to send you to iraq i didn't i bought plane tickets like being an entertainer has always been what's funded my journalism i guess my advice would be get really autistic about something. Problematic.
Just like one thing, just one thing. I get like really into it to the point where it kind of takes over your life.
Your personal life starts fading away. It kind of blends into your whole state of existence.
And only then will you actually get good at that thing. Yep.
That's my advice. And then you just take one thing at a time and every few years you kind of change the scope of the thing that you're getting really autistic about.
But that's kind of how I've rolled and it's been okay. Yeah, you just finished 36 hours of digging into the life of a school shooter.
And I also built the back of my career spending hours and hours digging through the online lives of mass shooters. And you don't have to do that, but you do have to do that thing, which is exactly what Garrison said.
You have to pick a very narrow thing and make it your life. And not just a random thing, but like a thing that you think is important.
Yeah. And that people don't, other people don't understand how important it is.
And if you make yourself, there's a fella, his blog is called We Hunted the Mammoth, Dave Futrell, who's been covering what we call the manosphere for like fucking more than a decade before anybody else in journalism was taking it seriously. Yep.
You got to do that kind of thing. If you do that kind of thing, you build a name for yourself and that can allow you when the thing that you're obsessed on becomes a big story, being first to have something meaningful to say about it can provide you eventually with the opportunity to cover other things.
Yeah, I think that's good advice. I would say if you want to get started freelancing, it's a good idea to join the IWW freelance journalist union.
You can learn a lot from people who are freelancing there. You can learn who not to pitch, which editors are toxic as fuck, which is a surprisingly large amount.
Yeah. You can learn which email to send your pitches to and how to pitch if you're not familiar with how to pitch.
I also teach sometimes journalism workshops at a community college. So if you have a community college near you,

you might be able to get some either free or very cheap sort of advice and the real like nuts and bolts of journalism,

like sending pitches and stuff like that.

Cool.

What is the consensus on what the next Trump administration will do

on the first day or first week?

All of us just look like we're in pain.

Ugh.

Oh, fuck knows.

Like, it's chaos.

Bad.

Yeah.

I'm not foreseeing good things.

There'll be a lot of executive orders that are, you know, probably bad.

You know, things that aren't great.

Yeah, I think that he's going to try to do as much of what he's promised to do in terms of particular, not in terms of everything he's promised, but in terms of going after immigrants. He's going to do as much of what he's promised to do as he possibly can.
Now, that doesn't mean he's going to actually deport millions of people. There are like some just practical limitations based on the capacity of the institutions he'll be using to do this.
And there's a very good chance things will get bogged down and whatnot. But he will try.
That's my take. Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen pretty quickly is I think he's going to start moving on tariffs very, very fast.
Yeah. If you're planning to buy a computer, go ahead and grab that fucker now if you can.
If you're getting anything from overseas, you should get it in the few weeks that you still can. Yeah, if it has a battery, it ain't made here.
I had my annual physical today because otherwise our insurance screws us over. And my doctor was like, you should try to get as many prescriptions filled before the end of the year, before things come up, just in case.
There you go. And, you know, that's not terrible advice.
Yeah. I think in terms of executive orders, he will try and further restrict access to asylum.
Try and further change. There are things he can do by executive order with ICE and CBP in terms of how they operate that he will try and do.
It's not impossible that they will try and again, immediately mobilize public health law against migrants like he did in 2020, right? Yeah. Those things could all be done without congressional support.
We made a whole podcast about this, but Stephen Miller suggested that they might do some of those things. So yeah, not impossible.
Probably won't be a great day. Somebody's getting fired the first week.
That's for sure. Probably first day.
Yeah, I mean, I've seen the fact that the FBI director is stepping down, pushed as like an act of resistance because it means that Trump now has to actually go through like Congress to get it done. I don't know how much I buy that,

how much I think that... I think a lot of what I'm seeing right now from establishment people,

and maybe this isn't true of Ray, because I did find some of the arguments there compelling,

but a lot of what I've seen from establishment people in politics is they're scared and just

really trying not to make waves. Yeah.

And I think that's what you're going to see overwhelmingly. I think that he's going to

Thank you. They're scared and just really trying not to make waves.
Yeah. And I think that's what you're going to see overwhelmingly.
I think that he's going to probably, probably will not immediately act against the press and in a legal sense as the president, they will do that. But I think he's, he's going to, he's already suing differently.
And I think that that's going to be kind of his, his focus there for a while, just because there's a lot on his plate. But I think there will be attempts to fuck with libel laws and stuff, especially as things go on.
Okay. Several of you have asked about the Android ad-free version subscription channel, and I want you all to know that it will happen next year.
I have been trying to get this to happen for two years now. And for unforeseen reasons, it just keeps getting roadblocked.
But it is happening. We're just waiting on a couple final things to get into place.
So that will be happening hopefully very soon into 2025. I will update everybody as soon as that's possible.
And I'm so sorry it's taken so long. I want you to know I have worked so unbelievably hard on this.
Miserably hard. Yeah, we've seen it.
Sophie has. It's been a nightmare.
Harder than I have worked on anything else this year. Like, it's been nuts.
Yeah. And here's the thing that sucks.
For no reason. No reason at all.
Not that there's no reason to launch the app. There's a great reason.
There's no reason it should have taken this long. But we can't say any more for reasons that are also equally frustrating.
I'd like to say in general, folks, there's a few things that get brought up a lot. It's like, why haven't they done this yet? Why haven't they done this yet? We're talking like technical things or like, you know, things like a paid subscription.
And they're like, why haven't they gotten around to it yet? And the answer is always some infuriating bullshit based on some bureaucracy bullshit, some bureaucracy, some legal shit where you're like, you don't actually realize it's illegal to do this if you do it this way or whatever. Some sort of bullshit that makes it impossible.
It's not that we want to make it as easy as possible for people to have the best listening experience that we can afford to provide them. But there's a lot of annoying bullshit that exists for reasons beyond our comprehension.
Sorry. Anyways, here's ads.
Unless you have an iPhone and subscribe to Cooler Zone Media on Apple. All right, we're back.
How do you each motivate yourself to write or do your jobs?

I get asked that question all the time, but I'll let each of you tackle it.

While this is a communally hosted show, I feel like each of you do very different things.

So your answers are going to be all over the place.

So Garrison.

Oh, well, I mean, paying rent's a great motivator. Sure.
Yes. Yes.
Understated. This is a big thing that a lot of people who want to be writers but have never done it for a living miss.
Is that all of your favorite writers who do it for a living. A big part of how they get over fucking writer's block is they have to pay rent yeah or a mortgage yeah it turns out that helps it's it's it's a quite compelling motivator and sometimes it has required the assistance of you know caffeine uh or other things i i have a variety of playlists to help me in when i'm in like different moods i definitely will about you know twice a month, I just do a complete body check to my sleep schedule to get a special project finished.
That's just part of the deal, at least in terms of how I work. Not everyone does it this way, though.
Maybe people are more healthy than me. Yeah, for me...
The easiest way something gets done is just pure rage. I get really angry at something, and I can just do it.
Like, it just comes out. Yeah, anger's a great motivator.
It's awesome. The other fun one is pure joy at something funny happening.
Like, the Shinzo Abe assassination. Easiest writing I've ever done in my life.
Sometimes it just flows. Other times it's just like there's a deadline and everyone is counting on me and I have to get it out.
And I've gotten to the right level of sleep deprivation where I can just do it. That's right.
That's right. Yeah.
I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance. Yeah.
And and then the last thing and this is the sort of the serious one is that like this you know i mean i do some organizing stuff too but like this this is the thing that i have to do that can materially affect the world which is a very very weird thing to say about a I've seen it happen, right? I've seen all of you go and do things that wouldn't have happened. And I've, you know, it's, it's a weird situation, right? Because my, my motivation for doing this stuff is the chance that you will make the world better, but I've, I've seen it happen.
And I have to continue to believe that the thing that I've been doing for all these years, this project of building a very large hammer and deploying it against our enemies can work and will work. And that is, you know, that's how I get out of bed every morning is we're building the hammer and we're swinging it.
Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Very large hammer would be a banging name for a podcast.
I agree. I agree.
Yeah, there's a great speech in the comic series trans metropolitan about how journalism is a gun uh that you you wire up to your eyes and your ears and several other organs in order to shoot at the world and that's i think a good way to keep yourself doing it when it feels like you're just shouting into a void yeah i really like the process of writing i like telling stories like that makes me happy and i feel so lucky i can do it for my job i don't particularly like like receiving trauma uh which i also do for a job but um like really it's a cubby sometimes i can't sleep so many people trusted me with their stories especially this year that they didn't have to and sometimes a great personal risk and it's a massive privilege that they trusted me with those stories and i think i i owe it to them to do my best to tell those stories as well as i can yeah and like as mia said it has materially changed the world like the amount of people who listened to our podcast and came to the border to help last year when we really desperately needed help. People who just like on Sunday night gave their money, which I know none of us have enough money right now to help people who are displaced in Rojava.
Like all that stuff really makes it feel like if you tell a good enough story, people will care.

That's always what I felt.

Like if you could just get people to see it, if people could be there, they would care.

And if they care enough, they'll do something.

And I've seen that be true with people who listen to the show.

And that really makes me happy.

So I want to keep doing that. Yeah, for me, it's a two-part answer.

The first part is that I genuinely give a shit about everything that we put out and what we do is not really while it is a job it it matters so much and the second part is if i don't do my job the amount of people's lives that that impacts is a lot of fucking people and i give a shit about each and every one of them so i'm gonna keep doing my job so that everybody else can keep doing their job and maybe we make a difference in this world this fucked up crumbly

world robert did you have anything to add you were speaking and then i talked did i have did i already not give an answer you gave an answer that's why but you were starting to speak oh yeah i i do it for the fame baby great next what episode or episodes were your favorite this year to make or otherwise yeah my favorite this year were definitely james's series from the darien gap that was an incredible series i'm so unbelievably proud of it yeah james had been trying to do that work for a long time and I'm happy that we were able to fund it and James was able to do the incredible reporting that he did. I'm also quite proud of Robert Garrison and I surviving the RNC and DNC.
The RNC was a good time. Legitimately, it was a good time.
I had a great time fooling the worst people in the world. It was the DNC that fucked me up.
Yeah. Yeah.
Same. I was like destroyed emotionally after the DNC.
Yeah. The DNC was really a huge bummer.
And then Mia's covered some of the most important labor stories that like nobody covers. Absolutely.
Yeah. And like without those genuinely like nobody covers like small labor stories or big labor stories and she's always on top of that beat and yeah I also really just like Robert's don't panic episode something some great writing my friend I answered now everybody else has to I'll start with Mia there's weirdly a few this year cool I normally isn't I like the Boeing ones that was fun yeah the one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview Dr.
Julia Serrano who if you haven't listened to that episode go listen to it great book yeah whipping girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the like like the concept of misgendering is like from that book right like like the language that we use to talk about transness today like is is directly her and so few people have ever read the book so few people even know who she is and getting a chance to talk to her was like incredible and i'm also really happy about the organizing one that i did because i i've gotten so many messages from people who were just like yeah oh wait my knitting is useful to organizing and i'm like yes yes it is you're knitting you're so incredible staggeringly useful yeah so i'm proud of that one yeah Yeah, let's take a quick break and then Garrison, Robert, James, you can answer that question. And we're back.
James, how about you? I'm proud of doing the Darien ones, I think. I'm so happy that we finally got to a place where we could do that, where we could fund that.
I've been trying to do that, like I said, for nearly a decade. It's been hard and it continues to be hard.
Like one of the people you heard from in those episodes

got deported last week.

And so like it continues to kind of be emotionally difficult.

But I really liked how many people messaged me

and were like, I sent this to my father, uncle,

not just dudes, aunts and moms too, I'm sure.

And non-binary relatives, but like, well, maybe not. So they said it to their right-wing relatives and uh and they like learned some compassion that's always what you want to do like i said before you want people to see it so that they care and so they understand it and they don't just get this stupid fox news bullshit racism stuff and so yeah that made me really happy the reason we're all different on this by the way is because we have not done a come 2024 episode and if we had this would have been a much shorter segment james let me just tell you i think we can all look forward to a white christmas this year jesus mother fucker set him up it's my own fault wow

I guess I'll go now

I'll just

short my own fault. Wow.
I guess I'll go now. I'll just clean out the aftertaste of that.
That's even worse. Thank you.
I think I started out pretty strong with police drones. Even more topical as we record this now as New Jersey is about to get completely abducted, I think, by alien aircraft.
Yeah, there's no one left in New Jersey now. They've all been taken away by these unidentified drones.
That actually happened three days ago. It just took a long time for the rest of the country to notice or care.
Bree Springsteen hasn't made a song about it, so we have no way of knowing knowing besides the mass hysteria of the New Jersey drone panic police drones are a real problem and those are going to be increasingly so I was happy with my reporting on that at CES and then I guess I mean to echo Sophie I had a great time at the RNC it was fun a sentence I never thought I would. And particularly the RNC Grindr episode I still think is pretty good.
It was pretty great. It was a banger.
The amount of places that Garrison and I snuck into at the RNC a time. It was really dangerous too because I was having to do my RNC research next to Robert and Sophie the whole time and oh boy like, it's like a minefield scrolling through that app.
It's an experience to say the least. Any thoughts on the proposed 2028 general strike? How are people feeling about that? I'll start with Mia.
Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good idea. Like there's definitely sort of, and I'm immediately going into this naysaying a little bit.
There's definitely definitely problems with it it's going to be extremely hard to execute because we just don't have a modern history of doing that in the u.s and even some of the successful ones in the last decade that people have pulled off haven't been that effective but on the other hand as something that we you know a concrete thing that we have to organize towards that has a bunch of like pretty large unions behind it already um i did an episode about that a few weeks ago i don't know a couple months ago i don't remember when i did this episode i'm sorry i can't remember anything i've ever done but i think i think i think it's a good opportunity to connect a whole bunch of different kinds of organizing together both in terms of sort of labor and in terms of the support work you need for that.

So yeah, cautiously optimistic.

Anyone else have anything they want to add?

The time to start figuring out those logistics like is now it's not it's not waiting till

2027.

Yeah, I agree, Garrison.

I think that the fact that there are serious people who represent serious unions talking

about it is part of why it's one of the things that does give me a degree of hope. We're going to have to start working now towards it.
It's not going to be simple in any way, shape, or form. If they see it coming, they are going to start trying to criminalize things preemptively.
If it is something that even looks like a real possibility, they're going to come after it with everything they've got. And it's one of those things where maybe if the midterms go well for Democrats, maybe Democrats stop that.
But it's just as plausible and probably more plausible that Democrats line up with Republicans to attempt to criminalize something like that. Yeah.
It's strange to be seeing something like this organized so far off. Like it's not something where any of us are familiar with.
Which it has to be, to be clear. Yeah, it has to be.
Barring like an actual coup, that's the only way you get a general strike, right? Like either something so earth shattering that everyone's ready to risk it because they're already in danger or you take the time and you plan that you do it properly. But it's just not something we're familiar with.
I love the general strike. I'm always going to support a general strike.
I'm excited to see a general strike. But yeah, we have to put in the work now.
Yeah. The only responsible way to characterize the organized left in the United States is a complete and utter failure.
It has been a calamity for the causes that it seeks to represent. And a lot of that is because of fucking bullshit online clicktivism.
We're all going to do a general strike. Everybody get ready.
Next week, we're going to do it. Shit like that, it's just so deeply unserious.
And if we're going to take the momentum and the energy that exists and the number of people who are angry and who, you know, and that number of people will be increasing as the consequences of conservative policies hit home by 2028. Like it has to be something taken deadly seriously by very serious people who are thinking through the consequences and what's necessary in order to make this feasible, you know? And lastly, do each of you have, you know, a movie or a book or something you would like to recommend? In 2025, when I finish my book, you should buy it.
Yes. But read General Strike.
I've been reading a book called Pretente, which is in English, but it's about how San Francisco dock workers blocked a shipment of weapons to El Salvador. And it just seems a very relevant book.
And they did it to Pinochet as well. It's easy to read.
And like, it just reminded me how important labor organizing is going to be in the next four years and how powerful it can be too. So I'll give that one a little plug.
Excellent. There's a film called The End Will Be Spectacular, which is about the Kurdish youth movement in northern Kurdistan in Turkey.
It's a really good film, I think, to help you understand the Kurdish freedom movement. And it's worth a watch.
It's not necessarily a happy, feel-good film, but I think it's worth a watch if you've recently become interested in that because of what you've heard on the podcast. Yeah.
Yeah, I have a couple. So I'm transfiction-pilled right now.
We've given you fiction from trans authors. Would you say you're transfixed? Wow.
I walked right into that one.

Drove directly into it,

like JFK's head into that bullet.

Oh my God.

Wow, we spend a lot of time with each other.

Yeah, the first one I wanted to talk about

is The Gunrunner and Her Hound by Maria Ying,

which is the pen name of a couple of authors. Okay.
So it's, this is a, this is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime Lord and her new bodyguard, who is also a lesbian and it rules. There's a whole sort of like post-apocalypse us thing going on, but they're still in like civilized Hong Kong.
It's awesome. It's great.'s you need you need war on hinge lesbians in your life go read this the the other one is one of the boys this is forthcoming uh is going to release may 13 2025 uh by victoria zeller and it's about a trans girl who's like the kicker on her football team and she has to like leave the team because she.
But then the team needs her back because they don't have a kicker. And it's it's fun.
It's it's a good time. So you should you should get that when it comes out.
Yeah. So I'm actually right now in the middle of a book that I found myself surprised by how much I've liked.
It's called When Paris Went Dark. And it is a history of the occupation of Paris under the Nazis.
That is a really fascinating social history by Ronald Rosebottom that I found very emotionally affecting, especially in light of some things going on. And yeah, just kind of a fascinating look at the psychology of people, of an entire people kind of grappling with what's about to happen to them in in the wake of the failure of the french army and then what happens next and then i would also recommend uh setting the desert on fire by james barr which is a one of the books about uh t.e lawrence that i uh i cited in the t.e lawrence episodes if you are at all interested in the realities of needing to fight an insurgent war.
Yeah. I guess just two recent things I've enjoyed.
Finally finished The Steppenwolf by Herman Hess. Ah, yes.
I enjoyed that deeply. It kind of picked my Twin Peaks, the return brain.
So that was pleasant. And for a more recent release, Luca Guadagino's new movie, Queer, adapting the short story by William S.
Burroughs, I found this movie to be utterly fascinating and transfixing, to use the term from me.

Robert, I don't have much else to say about it because I would rather people just watch it and take away what they want to themselves.

But it got me thinking a lot about the lack of meaning inherent to identity and why I hate the term queer bodies.

So, yeah, good movie.

Awesome.

I just have one movie to recommend, and it i one of my favorite movies of all time the original 1973 72 so 73 73 the wicker man not the fucking nicholas cage version the original version and if uh you have a local theater that plays old movies a lot of times they'll play it in theaters

and I highly recommend that experience it's really fun especially at the end I see it in

theaters or watch it at least once or twice a year and vibes are good yeah that's it for our

Q&A episode thanks for submitting and goodbye. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith.
And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me.
And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless d***less me. I'm the old one.
I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard.
Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing. A lot of bad language.
It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid.
Could be a family show. We're not quite sure.
We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress.
Listen to Beardless, d***less me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.
I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.
Yes, sir. We are back.
In a big way. In a very big way.
Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.
We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.
Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug fan.
Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.
We got B Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote.
Marine Corvette. MMA fighter.

Liz Karamouche.

What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is our 2025 predictions episode.
We were starting to bicker off about what we predicted last year. And I was talking about the things we predicted.
And one of the things I predicted early on, I was like, I think Kim Kardashian will be part of the Trump cabinet. And like, honestly, goals at this point.
But I'm not that far off though. Because essentially what he has done is he's basically tried to go for people that are good on TV it's true it's true and like going off of that reality TV energy finally we will acknowledge the Armenian genocide oh I was I was vibing okay James I was vibing no vibes allowed no vibes allowed was vibing.
No vibes allowed. No vibes allowed.
Genocide. Just, just, I know.
James. All right.
Vibe aside. God.
All right. Mia, Mia Wogg's here.
I'm so big. Garrison's here.
James Stout's here. And the dishonorable Robert Evans is also here.
I judge that nickname bad. Jesus Christ.
Wow. Let's, let's go over some of our terrible 2024 predictions just briefly.
Now, unfortunately, there was a lot of election ones which we're very sad to listen to. Oh, no.
Oh, God. Now, we were correct about many things.
We did talk about how Harris would probably be a really bad candidate to run against Trump. Totally forgot about that.
We did! We did! Huge dub for us. Massive L for the country.
Oops. That brief period of time when Biden stepped down, it really felt like it might be...
I mean, she did better than he would have done. Yeah.
Well, I think that's just because we were still reeling from that debate so bad. Yeah.
That anything was like, oh there's like a lifeline. Wow, look at how she can walk 30, 40 feet at a time.
Exactly, exactly. Sentence, good god.
None of us picked Vance specifically at that point in time, but we did pinpoint Trump's orbit and his like campaign like crew pretty well. Like Mia predicted that RFK Jr.
could be a trump vp pick and though he didn't become vp he essentially kind of took over the vp like campaigning role from vance in like august yeah because vance was so bad at it we all decided that like vivek was simply like way too loud and like obnoxious so trump would like find some other spot for him stand by that and that's what happened he's still in the orbit but he's not super close so if he talked about uh possibly uh christy gnome as as getting linked in with trump maybe for vp now that didn't happen for vp but christy gnome is in the cabinet good job past me yeah and robert said that he would not be shocked if Trump got close with Tulsi Gabbard. Oh, Robert.
And

alas. Trust me.
Yeah, and Robert said that he would not be shocked if Trump got close with Tulsi Gabbard. Oh, Robert.
And... Blomp, blomp, blomp.
Other less good predictions. I predicted that a Daily Wire host would get pied.
Unfortunately, did not come to pass. There's still time.
It's still 2024 as we're writing this. Not when this airs.
Not when this airs. kim kardashian getting into politics didn't really happen she kind of stayed at her regular coast level sorry sophie so far trust me she did all those things when trump was elected the first time where all of a sudden she was like with other lawyers trying to get people out of jail by utilizing Trump.
Yeah, I mean, and she was doing

that with the Biden campaign as well.

Not as visibly. The Harris campaign.

She was meeting with Harris multiple times.

She kind of stayed at this, like, distant

but, like, talkative place.

That's the Kardashian way.

Distant and talkative.

Speaking of, speaking of,

your other prediction was

that people would start forgetting about the Nazi stuff, and Kanye would put out A well-received album Which Kind of happened Yeah Yeah Yeah, a little bit God, I haven't thought about Kanye in so many months It was really nice Well It's over now It was really nice Thanks, Garrison Lastly My failed prediction is that if Trump won the election,

there would be two solid weeks of rioting, which simply did not happen.

Yes, nothing happened.

I think it's actually kind of interesting.

And we will maybe unpack that in the coming months as Trump's second term kind of settles in.

I'm sure we will kind of revisit why we think this did not happen.

Certainly, I'm curious about what Inauguration Day will look like, but yeah.

Oh, that was a lot.

Also, sorry, Morrissey is still alive.

David Scavige is still alive.

Putin is still alive.

And though James did say that Assad would eat it, and though Assad didn't die, he kind

of did eat it.

Well done.

Quote, unquote.

Well done. I mean, James, yeah, that that's gotta be the biggest dub of the year yeah yeah that's that's right damn i've forgotten all about that really happy with myself now james i'm so proud of you buddy you gotta pick another one this year yeah i don't mean on long baby he's next let's i guess let's start with some kind of dictator predictions.
What do we think will happen to a dictator in 2025? Which is going to die, do we think? Or just general dictator predictions? Dictator predictions. Maybe we get a new one.
Maybe we get a know. Yeah, something's happening in January.
I have two.

Well, one of them, I mean, it's kind of a hack one,

but I don't think the Junta of Myanmar makes it out of 2025.

Yeah, I think not in the version it is today.

Yeah, that's the hack one.

The other one is another Assad one.

I think someone actually does assassinate Assad.

Well, he gets too full of himself,

and he goes to Abu Dhabi,

and some Muslim Brotherhood guy just whacks him. Yep.
Okay, my Assad prediction is he becomes a Russia Today host. That's my Assad prediction.
Oh my gosh, yeah. Now he's going to open his ophthalmology clinic.
No, I mean, I think he's going to get signed to host a podcast by a little network you might have heard of called CoolZone Media. Congratulations, guys.
Let's bring him on. Sophie, get him on the Zoom.
Tell him he can hop in the room now. Bashar, baby! We are merging with Tenet Media to bring out our friend Asar Al-Assad.
Welcome to the pod, Bashar. He's actually doing a whole media tour with the Pod Save guys next week.
That's got to be fascinating. Pod Save Bath is Syria.
The most cursed podcast in the world. My dictator slash world leader prediction is that this might be Netanyahu's.
was thinking yeah last ride from your mouth to whatever fucking clot is working its way through his coronary system in a year i really fucking hope i i'm really fucking hope i'm right we all do i don't know what else to say there yeah yeah yeah that's a

be a good thing for the world

yeah I mean

we are verging into

not doing predictions

just doing hopes and dreams

yeah

well I did Morrissey

like that last year

and we didn't get it

and I'm sad

we need some hopes

and dreams out in the world

I think

fair enough

yeah

do you know what else

we need team

money

from these advertisers

that's right. Mm-hmm.
And we are back. All right, Garrison, what's next? So usually in the middle of these prediction episodes, I like doing our third annual death segment.
Who do we think will die? And I guess we kind of touched on this briefly, but I don't think we actually secured death for any of those people in our predictions. Just that they would have circumstances change.
Though, for this year's death segment, we have a bit of a twist. so it turns out about two years ago, on Spotify Wrapped Day, we all woke up to the news that both Angela Badalmenti was embarrassingly my number one Spotify artist that year, but also that Henry Kissinger died.
Honey. And this Spotify Wrapped Day, we woke up to the news uh that the united healthcare ceo was gunned down in new york city so spotify wrapped 2025 who's dying who's who's dying on spotify wrapped day on spotify wrapped day so this is like what late nove November, early December We don't really know Spotify Wrapped Death Day Predictions So long, farewell Aveter say goodbye Mitch McConnell That's a good one That's an easy one But okay, I'll give it to you I'm thinking like Who's gotta get through most of the year but not finish it out, you know? It's tough.
I'm gonna make my call, tie up res up Erdogan. You know? That's my hope.
That's a long shot, I know. He doesn't seem like he's in bad health, but That's a big one.
Kissinger was a long shot, too, because he was arguably immortal. He'd kept living for so fucking long.
So long. Farewell.
Auf Wiedersehen. Goodbye.
Elon Musk. I was going to say that.
I think he might die. You think we're finally going to get that drug overdose, huh? He just seems to be spiraling so hard right now.
The spiral's mad real, yeah. He's getting everything he wants, though.
But, I mean, that also... It's true.
Sometimes that's dangerous. Yeah, especially if you are addicted to a drug that you can get in unlimited, pure quantities and no one will ever say no to handing it to you.
We have some more Musk predictions for later on in the episode. Okay.
But I can see of some, you know, like famously the Secret Service,

you know,

not,

not great at hiding

their own drug problems.

I can,

I can see possibly

with Musk entering

a new level of comfort,

maybe the spiraling

a little,

a little too far

out of his control.

He and two Secret

Service agents

are found dead

with fentanyl

infected blow.

Oh,

man.

Or,

you know,

maybe a SpaceX launch goes really wrong who's to say who's to say damn I gotta think of who my Spotify wrapped day death is I have a long shot okay here's your long shot man my long shot is that Day, J.K. Rowling sees a trans woman just existing and gets so mad she has an aneurysm and dies.
No. She's looking through the Spotify raps, and she knows that trans women make the best music.
And she sees it and gets so mad, she just keels over. She transvestigates every uh female artist on the spotify rap list and dies of sleep deprivation doing so her her own fans start transvestigating her this is just drives her off the edge yeah okay i have a real long shot here but i can see how it could happen so we're we're in we're in like what like month month 10 11 of trump term uh two right the right wing nazi content creators are settling are settling into their into their kind of groove some of them aren't really happy at at trump not like you know carrying on all of his big lofty promises and one one disgruntled fan of Nick Fuentes

does something crazy on Spotify wrapped day.

And that's my prediction.

Is that somehow some really weird stalker or fan

does something to Mr. Fuentes.

Just pure prediction on what would be the oddest thing to happen. But but something that could totally make sense maybe it's like an old like kanye fan you know from kanye and nick from his nazi era yeah yeah i don't know i i feel like it's it's his fandom's getting close enough to pull some like weird crazy shit like that on like a weird like on like a on like a deeply parasocially destructive level.
Like Stephen King's misery. A misery happens to Nick Fuentes, but he doesn't, but he doesn't make it, he doesn't make it out.
That's, that's my Spotify wrapped prediction. I have said for years, Nick Fuentes is going to go down.
Live. Probably.
Maybe, maybe live. He's going to go down like George Lincoln Rockwell.
It is not going to be like an enemy of his that does it.

It's going to be a result of his incredibly messy personal life.

Yeah.

Like someone is going to take him down.

Like it's that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That feels right.

Do we have a non-categorized predictions?

Is it that time yet?

Sure.

Now that we have finished our Spotify wrapped predictions,

and I do not know who my top artists will be,

I don not know who my top artist will be. This last year, it was Trent Reznor, so salute that flag.
Okay, Garrison. Challenger soundtrack.
That thing fucking bops. I tried to make Robert watch that on the way to the DNC or the RNC.
I remember. And, but he wouldn't watch it with headphones.
And so it was just on, on the plane. I think it was the DNC.
Yeah. That's terrible.
Yeah. I think, I think I was reading a Nick Land piece during that whole time.
You were. Honestly, that's a vibe.
That, that actually pairs quite well. I landed completely deranged.
It was great.

Ready to work.

A prediction that I have is that, like, Trump basically tries to move a lot of the main time he spends to Mar-a-Lago versus the White House. Like I feel like he's going to make Mar-a-Lago some, like, national monument type shit so that he can take whatever the fuck documents he wants from the White House to Mar-a-Lago

and spend as much time there as he wants and make that, like, a national residence or some

shit.

Going to White House?

Yeah.

The Whiter House.

What could you call it?

Yeah. So true.
So true. I mean, Garrison, no.
house yeah yeah the whiter house what could you call it yeah so true so true no i'm kind of interested to watch what happens with aoc over the next year because she has definitely become uh to a lot of folks that progressive and on the left like a villain over the last year yeah and i kind of wouldn't be surprised if like in, assuming there's still politics in 20 years, when we're talking to young people, they think of her like Pelosi. And we're like, oh, you've got to understand when things started out, this was a very different person.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not saying that's a fair way to characterize her now or where she'll go.

I'm just saying like,

I wouldn't be shocked if that's the way a lot of folks are looking at it and

fucking a few years.

Cause I'm seeing,

I'm hearing a lot of that now.

Yeah.

People are very angry at her over largely Gaza,

but yeah.

Also the fact that she and Bernie both tried to back Biden kind of late in his

senescence.

Yeah.

Okay. My, my big one for the year is this is this is the year the economy finally collapses like this is the year you find out that no company has made any fucking money in a decade it's all been being pumped up by like a deranged combination of interest rate bullshit a bunch of fucking money from like overnight repo purchases keeping the banks propped up.
I don't know if it's going to be the trade war that fucking blows it up, although I think that will instantly detonate everything. I don't know.
Maybe it's maybe it's a Chinese housing bubble. Maybe the tech bubble finally collapsed.
Maybe all three of them hit at the same time. This is the year it fucking goes.
I've never actually put my name down on down on this on the show on any other fucking year. This is the year zombie economy will fall over dead the necromancy cannot hold i guess my prediction is that the economy is going to be basically identical to the biden economy in that we're going to get like fucked up inflation and people are going to be very angry and the number will continue to go up on the stock market because that's kind of what it's designed to do.
That's my theory. And the housing market will still be trash.
Yeah, and we will never afford homes. And the housing is just going to get more expensive.
It will be interesting to see Trump's entire, all of his backers and his whole media. One thing that will be easier for the left is really hitting conservatives on inflation as it gets horrible again uh or continues to suck because that's you know at this point just a factor of the economy working as intended yeah that they all have to pretend isn't yeah and before we go to a break i just want to say the price of eggs will go up i need to get chickens now now.
Oh, yeah. This bird flu thing is not going to help with eggs.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy.

Get your eggs now.

Buy thousands of dollars of eggs now.

If only there was some kind of device to make eggs that you could have in your own garden.

Oh, my goodness.

It's time for ads. I guess to piggyback off of Robert and Mia's predictions there in the economy, my prediction is that once I finally launch CoolZone coin this year, I'm going to make it big.
The economy is going to go down. I am going to be going up.
Everyone's going to start buying cool zone coin because the US dollar becomes worthless. Bitcoin is going to crash too.
It's fake. But cool zone coin has real fungible value.
Well, yeah. The thing about cool zone coin that makes it different from all of the other crypto coins is that it is really based on a fundamentally limited and valuable resource which is movies from the 90s that i showed garrison and they actually liked um so you know there's there's only so many cool zone coins that can ever be in circulation we're lucky i was in portland this christmas because we really stocked up a few more of those 90s classics to bump up the price of Cool Zone coin going into 2025.
That's right, everybody. Wow.
Sell your house, buy Cool Zone coin. Have you seen Hook, Garrison? I have seen Hook.
I liked Hook. Of course, of course.
Good, good, yeah. A classic.
Have you seen Wicker Man 1973? You know, I actually haven't. I've been waiting to catch it in the theater.
We will make this happen at some point.

It's necessary.

I would love to.

I would love to.

I bet one thing I think it's very predictable border stuff.

They will stunt on another caravan of migrants.

And I think it's pretty easy for them to kind of organize that and make that happen.

And it will be a way for Trump to flex his border fascism.

Yeah.

Much like he did in 2018.

Maybe they'll wait to the midterms again.

there's always a a

Thank you. organize that and make that happen and it will be a way for trump to flex his border fascism yeah uh much like he did in 2018 maybe they'll wait till the midterms again there's always a fun border disaster for the midterms can i just do one that um might not be a prediction but like a sophie hope sure yeah get it something has to happen to those paul brothers oh sophie oh yeah that's possible yeah my prediction for the paul brothers is that one of them dies within the next five years, and one of them lives to be Paul brothers.
Oh, Sophie. Oh, yeah, that's possible.
Yeah. My prediction for the Paul brothers is that one of them dies within the next five years and one of them lives to be 107.
That tracks. Sure, yeah.
They decide to take on Bob Dylan in a boxing match and only one of them survives. I think Bob Dylan will live to be this next year.
I've just found Bob Dylan's tweets the purest thing you've ever seen. He just tweets about what he's doing.
What a hero. Netflix paying Jake Paul to millions of dollars to fight 900-year-old Mike Tyson and then Jake Paul coming in on a vintage car and spraying his product and having higher streaming numbers than than the super bowl is that real yes to be fair that was a rancid super bowl um rancid super bowl this this cannot this cannot be most of us just turned in on the off chance that jake paul would die yes that is true that is true the hope or at least get bitten like yeah all of us were hoping that Mike Tyson was not in fact 60 years old but he is 60 years old so yeah something god yeah something something's gotta give oh and there won't be a left wing Joe Rogan thank you so much oh I don't know Sophie I think As soon as we launch Cool Zone Coid, I think we can really...
Oh my god. There'll be somebody trying to be...
Oh, Sophie, they're already... By the way, it's time for me to do our new ad plug.
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One of my, I guess, more hopes,

and still partial predictions,

is that National Guard gets into a scuffle

with Border Patrol in some kind of blue state.

Yeah, yeah, good chance.

We have some brave and strong governor

is gonna salute the troops

and send out our proud National Guard boys

to fight off ice.

I don't really know how to use their guns using their guns. It's going to be amazing.
It's a battle i've wanted to see for like five years whose plate carriers should have the top closer to their nipples it's anyone's game i need to see it i need to see it come on i would like to see it from a distance because that would be a shit show yeah from a sizable distance yeah general. General Whitmer, let's go.
Let's go. We're expensing a fucking telescope for that firefight.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A periscope, maybe.
I trust the Iraqi army more than either of those sides. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've seen a lot of dudes fire guns while ducking behind a K-beam holding the gun. They love doing that.
It does look fun. It does look fun.
It is, yeah. It does look fun.
I would like to to do that but they kick me out the range every time because of woke how sad well not anymore James yeah that's also the casualties yeah not anymore James woke is beaten that's right yeah they went broke I'm gonna buy the range that's right we're all far from behind the bench rest now oh mama mia mama mia. Other predictions.
Maybe we'll get a good solid couple of weeks of rioting again, like Garrison said. Maybe it'll only take a year or two this time.
I don't think that anymore. Something will have to change.
Yeah. There will have to be a material change in either organizing or social conditions.
is people will need to either be vastly more desperate than they are right now or they will need to have a specific reason to think well this time getting out in the street might do something yeah i i think we're gonna kind of continue the trends that that we've been seeing which which points towards a bit of an apathy towards big popular mobilizations and more towards kind of bizarre lone wolf attacks. Something that could be even a slightly problematic or possibly darker predictions.
I think we'll have a really bad Luigi copycat within the next four months. Yes, years Luigi.
Like it's not going to be good. It's not going to be good.
There's probably going to be a situation where some guy either gets the best case is that he gets killed immediately by the dude security. The worst case is there's a big public firefight and a whole fuckload of people get hit.
Yeah. Didn't I predict that there would be a big public crime with a 3D printed gun last year?

I think that was the year before we talked about that.

Damn. Okay.

So close. And yeah,

this certainly does

kind of fit that mold.

We'll see how much that gets

focused on in the trial and continued

reporting. Yeah.

And in the legislation too. I missed a death.
We can also include it in the hope section. Matthew Iglesias, that mother father, motherfucker has been standing bullshit for 20 years.
It just, it cannot continue. He's, he's lost a juice a little bit.
I think he's, he's on the way out. All right.
Something very funny did just happen that we should talk about as a team. Senator Doug Mastriano, a 30-year U.S.
Army veteran who taught at the War College,

just tweeted an indignant, furious tweet about the U.S. government not being honest with Americans

about what's happening with these drones.

And the picture of the crashed drone is a TIE fighter.

That's like a model TIE fighter on the bed of a flatbed. Yes.
We've all lost our minds. Taught at the U.S.
Army War College. Oh, they're not sending their best people.
Oh, fuck. That's funny.
Oh, that's beautiful. That's amazing stuff.
That's one of the best things I've seen all year. Oh, God.
Fuck me. Finally, I like to close our predictions a little bit on Trump's cabinet.
I think it's pretty safe to say, considering his last presidency, we'll have at least one third cabinet turnover by the end of the year. Yeah.
This is something that we've been talking about a lot. When do we think Musk is going to get the boot and based on the way trump's kind of positioned him i'm not sure if it's going to be as soon as what we all kind of initially thought because trump has kept him out of his inner orbit but pretty solidly in his middle orbit like he's not in any like real position right yeah he has doge but like come on It just came out that he's not going to be able to get a high, the

highest security clearance. There you go.

That's funny.

But like, he has him sitting next to his

family at Thanksgiving. Totally.

Yeah. No, no, totally.

And especially in like, the

three weeks after the election, they were

like, they were like honeymoon, right?

They were, they were neck and neck.

And some of that's going to like, start dissipating.

Musk can't get fully booted out because like,

you know, the federal government needs

Thank you. they were like honeymoon, right? They were neck and neck.
And some of that's going to start dissipating. Musk can't get fully booted out because the federal government needs SpaceX and Musk's other technologies.
So they will remain friendly, but they're not going to be in the close position that they are now. Initially, I put that date for being March 20th, 2025, two months after Inauguration Day.
It's enough time to get, you know, for someone like Trump to get tired of Musk's like personality. But I think I might stretch that out a little bit more now than my initial prediction.
I think they might do a little bit more of a long-term game here. But that also means that that Musk maybe will not have as much like constant influence as what it was first looking like in those three months after the election.
I think that RFK Jr. is probably pushed out of the picture before Musk is.
Yeah, if he tries to get rid of the fucking polio vaccine, it's gonna be a real quick trip to the unemployment line for Bobby Boy. Yeah, I really, I don't think Trump's that reckless.
No. That would be quite a line to get rid of the polio vaccine.
Trump's also old. Like, he remembers.
He's that old. But if RFK Jr.
could get the wheat ingredient out of the McDonald's fries, I'd be most obliged. Oh, yeah.
No, I'm sure that he's going to reverse 100 years of corn subsidies and get corn syrup out of our Coca-Cola. I believe in RFK.
Yeah. I feel pretty good about the continuing legality of Kratom as long as he's the HHS head.
There you go. All it's going to take is one of Joe Rogan's friends speaking in his ear.
We'll be all right. We're going to have legally required DMT for everyone in the country.
Yeah, why not? I think we need, and I've been saying this for years, we need to put the lithium back in the water. We also need to use those crop dusting planes and just like fill them with Xanax.
Just calm everyone down. Take everything back a couple of steps.
Alright, I'm going to go pet some dogs so the podcast is over. Happy New Year everyone.
Happy New Year everyone. I do want everyone to pick one thing that they're going to do this year that will improve their life, however small.
For me, I'm going to get a new mirror. We're going to all pick one thing.
We call that Project 2025. It's one thing we can do to improve our lives.
And then by extension, the lives of everyone else around us. So make sure everyone has their own personal Project 2025 going into this next year.
I think we will need it. I'm holding my project 2025 in my arms right now.
Your new dog. Your new dog.
I adopted, I adopted Anderson, a sibling and her name is Truman. Lovely.
After our greatest U.S. President.
After not the greatest U.S. President.
I would never name a child of mine after our president. After the sheriff in Twin Peaks.
That's right. Also no.

All right.

Well, we love that.

After the house that Vivek Ramit.

Who grew up in the Truman Show house? Matt Gaetz.

Matt Gaetz.

That is Matt Gaetz.

Yeah.

Named her after Matt Gaetz's childhood home.

Matt Gaetz is like totally out of a job now.

That's so funny.

It's very funny.

It's very, very funny.

And I feel like we should end on that note. So ha ha ha ha ha to Matt Gaetz.
Anyways, Anderson, Truman, let's get the fuck out of here. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it, which in this week's case is the Consumer Electronics Show, is happening here.
And yeah, we're here to talk about things falling apart. And again, in this case, that's the tech industry.
Because the story this CES, as it has been for the last several CESs, is that the continuing degradation of big tech as it seeks more places to get money from while providing less and less utility to the people that it needs to give it money. And every CES, at some point, I find myself face to face with something that makes me say, I've now seen the silliest thing I've ever seen.
And this year, that experience happened for the first time within 30 minutes of the first half day. And I'm going to talk about that and show some videos to my panelists here, which of course are the great Ed Zitron.
It's me, I'm here. The pretty good Garrison Davis.
Okay, thanks. Okay, all right.
All right, buddy. Damn.
And the supernumerary, supernumerary? I'm sorry, I messed up the word I was using as a superlative to praise you. I'll take it.
Ed Ongweso Jr. Thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us, everybody. Are you ready to see some of the dumbest AI-generated videos that you've ever seen? Nothing would fill me with more pleasure.
Excellent, excellent. Nothing fills me with pleasure.
The first panel I sat down today with at 10 a.m. in the goddamn morning was The Hollywood Trajectory, Generative AI Timeline 2025 to 2030.
Oh boy, I am fascinated for what they think will happen in 2030. Everything's just gonna get better, Garrison.
This panel featured a number of luminary thinkers, including Mary Hamilton, a managing director

at Accenture, who announced

her company's $3 billion investment

in AI by dropping this gem.

I have a digital twin, and she's

constantly evolving, and how

she gets used, and what she says,

and there's

big implications around that, so

I think this is a really exciting

space to be thinking about, Jenny. I like that she just stole Hurley Herndon's thing, but okay.
The children win. If I said that to a doctor, they'd think I had a concussion.
They sure would. This person needs psychological care.
Yeah, you shouldn't be allowed to drive if you say things like that. All right, granddad, you need a blanket.
Okay. Let's get you to sit down, all right? We're taking the phone away from you.
Now, I think this is very silly because, again, I think it's just a fundamental mismatch in what people might want from an AI agent and the way in which they get talked about. But also, they use Digital Twin, which is some enterprise software shit.
Oh my god. I'm excited to go see some Digital Twin technology that I'm sure will make a cheap avatar of me from a picture code switching this was this is the first thing i reported on at ces was there was the digital twin like back in like 2022 or 2021 there was like one single company in all of ces that was promising like a digital twin and now it's like every other company yes it means so many different things it a digital representation of anything.
It doesn't even mean an AI agent. The fact that they're using it in the wrong place is very annoying to me.
Yeah, I keep seeing, like, they can now make an AI chatbot trained off of your social media presence that's 85% accurate. Oh, I love 85%.
As all twins are. And I want to say, like, no, they can't.
But then you talk to the average person at CES, or the average panelist on this particular panel i'm like yes i do believe in fact everyone on that panel you could accurately you could accurately get 85 percent of their personality with a chatbot for a bit you know yeah maybe a lot higher improvement yeah yeah say, like, that was silly. That's not the silliest thing I saw.

Oh.

And the silliest thing I saw came courtesy of another panelist, Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level and COO of the company. The videos that Jason came to CES to brag about were a collection of the laziest AI slop ever to stain human eyeballs.
His most recent big success that you could just see radiating off of him, how proud he was of this, was Coca-Cola's annual Christmas ad, which last year was produced for the first time entirely with AI. And I'm just going to, if you haven't seen this, who here has seen Coca-Cola's AI ad? I've seen it.
Oh, I've seen it. I haven't seen it.
I've seen pictures. I think I've watched it one time.

Justin Frank.

Okay, well, let's take a little watch.

I've watched it a few times.

I hate it the amount it deserves.

We're going to play.

There's three different versions of this.

Why?

We're just going to play one.

Well, I mean, that's what it spat out.

Oh, my God.

If there's three different versions, that's just they saved the pro.

Fucking hell.

Every one is the same length of shot. Can you believe this song's AI generated? I can't believe that the- How could they teach a computer to write the lyrics? Holidays are coming.

I just can't believe we finally have the technology to have three trucks driving somewhere.

And a dog wagging its tail with dead eyes.

Oh, these two horrible...

Squirrels covered in snow.

That's not how squirrels move.

Trucks with Coca-Cola in them driving down not a street.

Raccoons?

What the fuck?

Why is there a satellite? Oh, they're they gonna drop the iron cannon on the polar bears it's all clearly ai it's all glowing like these city shots of like snow colored villages with that as we're going to see in later videos ai loves putting smoke in random fires where there should not be smoke in random fires that's such a bad omen for four more years of a Trump presidency it's a bleak thing even uglier Thomas Kinkade esque artwork every frame looks like a Thomas Kinkade shittily animated it's like they just generated a Thomas Kinkade frame and then badly animated. And the way that they move is very weird.
Like it looks kind of right, but kind of right looks very strange. It does all of the scenes, because it's like showing you a bunch of, you see like a polar bear, obviously.
It's a Coca-Cola Christmas ad. You see like a fucking reindeer.
You see squirrels. You see a dog.
But it always is like this very AI shot where it just pans across the animal and it's like glowing and kind of glossy and they move a little bit staring too much like they're not going anywhere with the movement it's just like they are doing something and that's it yeah you think in 10 years they're still gonna have these commercials no no because where's the snow going there's just a polar bear's walking System One, which tests emotional responses to ads, claims that the initial response to their Christmas ad was overwhelmingly positive. I don't think they're lying about that.
I think if you walked up to someone randomly on the street and showed them this, I think they'd be like, oh yeah, it looks fine. It looks like a Coca-Cola ad.
No one's watching a Coca-Cola ad and being like, yeah! Wow. I've never had one before.
It's never a new experience. Not yet.
We need an ad man. We need an ad man for the Coke holdouts.
We need an AI Don Draper. Do not give them ideas.
What if a company lost $5 billion a year? It's just an ad that doesn't work. Instead of going to the movies like Don Draper does throughout all of Mad Men, it just doesn't work and respond to any of your queries.
Just Don Draper spending hours watching that looping Christmas video? Staring into nothingness. Yeah.
So there was like an immediate, pretty immediate backlash to this. Like all of the responses, if you like go to any of like where these things live on YouTube, it's just people shitting on them, which he did acknowledge, Jason, by saying the video was very debated.
Yes. That classic thing with commercials.
We love debating commercials. Many things are very debated these days.
A lot of people are saying. And then he showed us next an AI-generated video, The Heist, which was entirely made by a text script that itself was mostly written by ChatGPT.
And here's how Jason describes the workflow for what you're about to see. It took thousands of generations to get the final film, but I'm absolutely blown away by the quality, the consistency, and adherence to the original prompt.
When I described gritty New York City in the 80s, it delivered in spades consistently. Well, this is not perfect, it is hands down the best video generation model out there by a long shot.
Additionally, it's important no VFX, no cleanup, no color correction has been added. Everything is straight out of VO2, Google DeepMind.
What is the model? VO2, Google DeepMind, I think is what he's saying it is. So I thought that they had another one.

Either way, I'm sure what you're about to show me looks like a dog's ass.

It looks like, yeah, New York, exactly like New York at Giuliani right before he came in.

Clean it up.

So this is like the competitor to Sora, I guess.

It's the other big video generation.

This is brand new.

I don't buy for a fucking second.

I'm not impressed, but we'll see what you guys think.

I don't want to poison your reactions.

I wouldn't...

Oh, God. Okay.

There is fire in the street. That's the last time

you're going to see the sack full of money.

It does not show up again. Fire?

A lot of fire in the street. A lot of random fire in the street.

I love where cars go backwards when they're driving

forwards. Yeah, was that five wheels?

Again, another street fire? I would love to do freeze frames on this actually it's in gotham why is there so many fires just all right let's take a shot every time oh my god and also take a shot every time he is wearing different clothing and has a clearly different face the car has changed color he changed color three times. He's praising the consistency, and it is a...
He is dressed completely differently every scene. His jacket has changed since the last one.
Yeah, yeah. And again, the cop...
The cars... When it shows the cars driving across the screen, they're kind of doing the same thing usually that the animals do in the coke ad.
Minimal motion best yeah i also love this can you believe this music i also want to just say when it swerved to hit that thing it was driving like half a mile in it yeah well that's how i run yeah look an obviously different man also the way he runs is... That's how you run with a gun.

That cop was like he had his arms out.

Two cops are... Three cops.

Look how they run.

He spawned in a bunny.

The bunny is very funny.

Yeah, they spawned in GTA.

What is going on with his feet?

Different levels of facial hair,

different jackets he's wearing,

different colors, jackets.

Also vaguely different ethnicity. Why did his face just move? What the fuck is going on? Oh my god.
What the fuck does that mean? Directed by Jason Zada in big flaming words because, again, the AI only knows how to put random fires on things. Wow, I'm so glad that we have this technology to do a thing where a guy gets chased by the police.
Yeah, this would have been impossible before. As he runs at anywhere from 1 to 100 miles an hour.
I assume they just trained. This was specifically pulling on Scorsese movies a lot.
I just want to know about these thousands of generations of script. That is interesting.
I am very curious. Because I just don't believe that for a fucking second.
Did he just go like, uh, just read? Yeah there yeah no that's the opening crawl to just like some uh generated star wars you know i assume it's like shot by shot right like each each shot is going to require a lot of like iterations the script what it's just yeah i mean again like it unpacking what he actually is saying is is unclear because i i went to the youtube video for, and the first five or four comments are, looks like we found the new King of Video. Jesus Christ, give it a rest.
Clothes change in every shot. Four to six-year-old boys are going to love it.
And still lacks character and vehicle consistency, but we're getting close. Which is the exact same thing people had last year.
By 2030, you'll be able to make a man wear the same clothes for an entire video this is this has happened before with uh sora when they put out they're like check out airhead on your thing oh my god and the balloon changes every single shot it's a different size and color each time there are just people running in the background sometimes and then they made a new one you're like oh this is going to be good it was worse and less consistent and it this is what they think of us they're like these pigs will slop up anything and you can't expect technology to do something as complicated as dress a man in clothing and have him stay in that same clothing over multiple scenes hollywood never figured it's It's so cool that this costs so much money as well. Just burning.
There was some fucking GPU melting in a data center in Arizona that's draining the local walls. We're burning down North Carolina for this.
Also, there's going to be like 30, 40 companies trying to recreate the same misshapen wheel for the next five to ten years. And also, the little pigs that watch Star Wars, including wars including myself they'll notice every minor inconsistency do you think that they're going to tolerate luke skywalkers and watto and all their favorite characters no they're going to drive up you think that they're going to be happy office with a cyber truck yeah there's going to be a cyber truck situation you i think the issues are twofold which is like number one in order to make this shit sell to the people who watch movies, you have to dramatically reduce the average intelligence of people watching movies.
You have to give everyone brain damage. Challenge accepted.
They are working on doing it. And the other thing is the models have to get much better.
And Jason made a point that every time people would talk about the criticism, he'd be like, look, this is the worst it's going to look, guys. And I was just looking into it.
GPT-4 took 50 times as many resources and like 50 times as much energy to train as GPT-3 did. Right.
So these are the kind of like exponential increases that we're looking at. So like if it took them so many millions, billions of dollars of investment to get to the point where they can make this shitty video to make anything close to watchable you're talking about again just like lighting on fire billions of dollars to do what to make a scene that you could already get like a 26 year old dude who grew up watching fucking quentin tarantino movies and taking cocaine and you could just give him 60 000 and he'll film that shit for you with an old car.
I mean, you could even animate it. I mean, look, you give me a PS4 and somebody's grandmother and I will make them think that they're watching that when I get Red Dead Auto 6 on.
But also, I just want to read out some of the fucking people that use this model. We started working with creatives like Donald Glover, who I said was washed 10 years ago, and I'm fucking sick of people.
Awake of My Love was a good album. This America is an objectively bad song.
One better shows I've ever seen. It's a bad song with a great video.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought his kind of R&B stuff was very interesting.
Anyway, moving on. No, you are right.
And, of course, The Weekend, sorry, Weekend, and someone called D4VD. Oh, his TV show was great.
Oh, yeah. Our work with creators on VO1 informed the development of VO2, and we look forward to working with trusted testers and creators to get feedback on this new model.
How long are you going to get fucking feedback? It stinks. We've got some feedback for you.
Yeah, I got a few thoughts. Hopefully all those people are just getting paid to tell them words and be like, yeah, sure, I'll take your money, but who's to say? If they can be $20 million, I'm flipping the whole.
Oh, yeah. No, I will turn on a dime.
Speaking of turning on a dime for money, here's ads. Ah, we're back.
So the next video that our friend, I now feel he's like a brother to me, Jason, puts on, was of an AI-generated fictional elderly rock star talking about death. Oh, I'm excited.
Oh, I'm excited. We have a computer to do this.
Plastic and incapable of dynamic expression as he guzzles randomly from bottles of liquor that flash in and out of existence. Sometimes he lies on his back in empty streets while talking about all of the CGI featureless women that he has loved in his exciting life.
Wow. Other times he plays stadium shows while obvious GPT-written dialogue about aging and death drones on.
When the video ends, everybody in the room claps. And as you watch this, I need you to imagine seeing the thing that I'm about to show you all and a room with like 200 people in it all clapping enthusiastically.
I should have gone to this in booze. I don't think I did.
I did. I did.
I said, come the fuck on as loud as I could. It's like me at Rise of Skywalker.

Yeah. So here's Fade Out.

It's George Carlin.

Got an old man. Yeah, it looks a little bit like George Carlin.

Oh, it's the end from Metal Gear Solid 3.

Quiet ache in your chest.

Like the world's just too goddamn big

and you're just a ghost passing through.

What's he doing? Playing this concert? Grandad, calm down. I love these slash cuts.
There's so many fast cuts. No, these fast cuts are because the next frame was unusable.
Yes, actually. Yes, like he drank and the bottle changed in his hand.
You can see it starting to happen. What is this? Just anonymous women.
Destroyed it. Isn't that beautiful music? Listen to that.
Lived it to the bone. Could you believe this is generated by a guy? He's just firing a Roman candle into the air.
I like how also the old man does look very different each time. Very different old man.
Yep, that's a different guy. That's a different guy.
Yeah, that's the emperor from the first Gladiator movie. He's just sort of trotting across the stage awkwardly.
The way this model generates running is really uncanny. There he is, drinking again.
Why is it on fire? Why is there a fire? You see this old rock star drinking in front of a flaming house. The AI loves Burning Builder.
What is this voiceover? I would love to track his tattoos from frame to frame. Also, he's about to eat the microphone.
Completely different. I've done it.
Yum. Now he's sleeping in a broken Mustang, I think it is.
Ferrari? The classic Ferrari Mustang. A Ferrari Mustang that's in like a pool in front of a mansion, but he clearly hasn't crashed into it.
The car is hovering slightly over the pool. Like, I love this! I love this! I love the word! And he tells us during this, as if we're supposed to be impressed, that Chachi PT wrote 75% of that script.
Fucking hell, you'd have to punch that shit up. I can't believe that, frankly.
As a bartender, I regret walking into the room to see if people want drinks. This is a Better Offline bartender.
I apologize. I apologize that you had to hear.
I would like a drink. I also would like...
Yeah, actually, can I have a drink too? We are in the Better Offline CES suite and we are all drinking. I'm here.
Because I just want to say I'm fucking disassociating after that. I'm so fucking sick.
Every year of doing this nonsense and I look at these shit eaters and they show us that and they like slurp down the slop. Oh my God.
It's hideous. One of the easiest things to find, an old man that drinks.
For an idea of like how real this company is, obviously they were one of the companies. They were not the only people who made that Coca-Cola ad.
They were one of like three or four companies. It takes four companies to make that Thomas Kinkade ad.
I can't believe it. They have 622 followers on Twitter.
Or not Twitter, on YouTube. On YouTube.
I don't have more than that. I know I post this karaoke song.
And this Fade Out is their, or sorry, The Heist is their most successful video with 56,000 views. Fade Out, which we just watched, has less than 5,000 views.
They're not ready. So they're not quite ready.
It's only going to get better. Yeah, it's only going to get better.
It's only going to get better. It's only going to get better.
Famously, things only ever get better. You can get it on the ground floor for a small price of $1 billion.
This is like $100,000 a compute. Yeah.
Imagine how good it would be with $100 million. If Hawke Tua coin will only get worth more.
Yeah. Now, Garrison, I do think you should invest all of your salary.
I just did a 16th minute about this one. We can talk about this.
I think I would rather Hawke Tua has a more obvious use case than this shit. Hey, do you want to spend way more money to get something way worse? I actually can't get over the 75% check GPT.
No, neither can I. Should it be more? No, it should be.
Theoretically, it should be. It should be 100%.
It should be 100%, yeah. Which means that a quarter of it was just fucking unusable.
No, absolutely. They're generating individual shots that they're stitching together.

And who knows how long it takes to get the prompt right for that shot to work.

However long it takes, it was too long because it looks like shit.

We're going to watch a video I haven't seen yet.

Or at least a portion because it's five minutes.

We're not watching all this.

Oh my god. It's 252 views and came out a week ago.

It's called Miniminade. What? Say that again? Miniminade.
Yeah, that's a word. It's like when you find your cats vomited on the floor.
Again, so first we see a diner called Miniminade that appears to be both on fire. He's Blade Runner.
Oh, God. When an old lady rises up out of a pile of ashes.
That's how mouths work. Where am I? Great AI voice.
What is this Phantasmagoria voice acting? It's me, Harrison Ford. Morpheus.
What the fuck is going on? What? I think this is death. This old lady's dead.
Oh, that's Hawaii. Now she's tripping on tomatoes.
Oh, yeah. The decaying, sandy diner that exploded has turned into a lively 50s diner.
It's popping off. It's popping off.
Dennis Villeneuve. Is this a segregated diner? Yes.
I only see white people in the diner, Edward. She's going back to the good old days.
There's a little Indian boy. He is the help, though.
Yeah. Oh, that's natural.
The little kid just fell down, and the way it shows falling is that he just sort of deflates. Isn't that Bjork And he's up again.
Bjork. And he's staring at it.
Well, that's terrible. We don't need to watch any more of that.
Who was this for? No one. No one.
No one will watch this. If you watch this and have a positive reaction, they should keep you in a holding cell for a week.
I'm deeply unhappy at the time we already spent watching. Just to make sure.
We don't know what you're going to do next. We're building a facility for you.
The phrase reality distortion field gets used a lot when we talk about tech. But I really tasted it in that room because all anyone on stage could talk about is how good it looks.
In every one of these videos, people are like clapping. They're like, wow, this is amazing.
Why do you think they think it looks good? It looks better than an Xbox.box yeah and the idea is you typed a thing in and now a thing came out and that's magical so by virtue of not having humans work on it it's so it's better than you'd have yeah okay there was a moment after this where jason like joked about how like i don't like obviously i don't want to replace actors yet and yeah like yeah uh-huh and another panelist was like i think we're gonna have to make some decisions have to see how some decisions go as to fair use because obviously this is cribbing from a bunch of fucking scorsese movies and shit also kind of look like blade runner 2049 yeah and thomas kincaid and blade runner 2049 and uh denny villeneuve in general like all of of his films have been a massive source for these motion and still generations so much so that I think Blade Runner 2049 is one of the easiest films to replicate film stills almost exactly for based on how load-bearing that film has been for a whole bunch of these models that could be due to a number of factors Now, know what you're wondering. How soon until we can get a full 90-minute movie that looks like this? I'm guessing days away.
No, no, Jason said probably not at least for a decade or so. Really? Okay.
I can't wait that long. That's interesting.
I don't want to wait that long. What a worthwhile endeavor, though.
He could have said shorter. That actually is interesting.
He could have said anything. Those chumps in there would have believed him.
I think it is like he could have said shorter that actually is interesting could have said anything those chumps in that i would have believed i think it is like he did have to spend probably hundreds of hours of his precious one human life stitching those turds together and he's like it's nowhere near ready there's no way it could make a 90 he's giving himself a lot of time for that yeah because i've only really seen one interesting generative video thing but it wasn't a generative video thing it was they filmed uh brian you know filmed a documentary and they created you know some back-end software so that they would be able to do cuts of existing footage and try to totally focus on different parts of the documentary but i never ever see anything interested in like constructing narratives or to like you can't you know teasing uh other aspects of the creative process it's only let's try to replace right let's try to also you can't do narrative with it and that's the thing if i would if i'd sat down there because i was sitting i said this i was sitting next to a guy from us who was one of the only people in the room who was similarly critical to me of what we were seeing on stage. It was like, look, if they had come down and been like, look, this is how we can plug a script in and it can create a storyboard.
And you can kind of see a crude CGI animation of how the shots will look and that can help you plan out. Like, that's legitimately useful.
That's a thing that adds value and can cut costs in a meaningful way to like the production of good tv and movies but that's not as sexy as like i'm and they were all talking there was this this like very weird moment where one of the panels leslie shannon uh who's head of innovation for nokia a company that used to make phones and now makes panelists who pretend to be entertained by awkward AI. They also make cameras.
They make a lot of stuff. I was just shitting on Nokia.
She's like, can we use neuroscience to see how people are reacting to AI-generated videos and then adjust the ending to be like, let's make this resonate more. That way we're helping the creative.
And I was like, are you out of your fucking mind? Can we attach electrodes to panelists? To people's skulls? I would have supported electrodes in their skulls, yes. Jesus Christ.
I think we should do the monkey Neuralink thing to all of them. And perhaps a pair of calipers.
Yes, calipers. We got some skulls to me.
I am fascinated the skull shapes of that fucking crowd. But also, to say that is, there's so many things they've said that just they wouldn't survive a deposition speaking of things that wouldn't survive a deposition the sponsors to this podcast okay so that first panel was a real moment for me i went through a couple of more one of which was on like advertising and ai and was mostly mostly pretty boring the third panel i went through though was called ai cinematic spatial and xr and i just want to actually play you guys you'll have to cluster around believe that was generated with ChatGPT.
Yeah. But like GPT 2.0.
So let's start with this one. AI will be more impactful than the internet? Maybe? I'm leaving yes.
It's a trick question. Because it is the internet.
That was my answer too. It's the internet, so no.
Although it can run without the internet. So I'm like, oh.
There you go. All right.
What impact do you mean? AI is going to result in astronomical job losses. True or false? There will be an evolution of job loss.
Next. I'd say redistribution of jobs.
That's right. Okay.
That was the scene I wanted you to hear where they're like, we don't want to say it out loud and then everyone chuckles. These people are too fucking smug.
Yeah. These people sound too confident and too chummy and too happy to say things like this.
That's not good. I don't like these people laughing about people losing jobs.
No. They shouldn't have jobs.
That's a good place to start. Yeah.
I don't like that either. And the people you're hearing from, let me tell you who's in this fucking panel, who was just laughing about like- Sociopaths.
Well, there will a an evolution in job loss. Yeah.
So the motherfuckers who were on that panel laughing about people losing their jobs. Ted Shillowitz, literally his name is Shillowitz.
Futurist at Cinemersion Inc. That's like a JK Rowling name.
Yes. Rebecca Barkin, co-founder and CEO, Lamina One.
Aaron Luber, director, partnerships at Google. Adam Simon, managing director, IPG Media Lab.
Leila Amir-Sadegi, principal program manager at engineering, Microsoft. And Katie Henson,P Post-Production at Sphere Studios.
So those are the people who were all laughing. Generative AI is good at one thing creatively.
It's good at streamlining VFX workflow. The workflow of how to do VFX shots.
It is. There's aspects of it that's there's aspects famously the only useful thing it's been used for is making people's eyes blue in dune part two it's not hundred billion dollars right and like it is applicable for like changing objects into other objects on screen it can produce really like kind of odd like uncanny effects that could be utilized by a team of human artists really well what it can't do is generate a short film that is in any way compelling I disagree based on what we said well that is in any way compelling as a piece of art and the fact that they're laughing at how much these are people who haven't lost enough jobs they have not or had structures fall to the beauty of the flame Although the AI keeps foreboding that that's coming for them.
It wants something. The pernicious flames.
I'm going to end on a happy note because the last panel I went to was actually really cool. It was AI and the Crisis of Creative Rights, Deepfakes, Ethics, and the Law.
And it featured the first intelligent person that I've seen at CES this year, Moya McTeer, who is a folklorist and senior advisor at the Human Artistry Campaign. It also featured Duncan Crabtree Ireland, who's the National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA.
There we go. There we go.
And this was no bullshit. It was talking about all of the different lawsuits that are going on right now, all of the litigation around AI, and like the actual strategy for litigating.
And like there was a couple of points where like Duncan was like, a lot is going to hinge on some very brave, very famous people choosing to throw down some big dollar lawsuits. Like that's what we need right now.
They did talk about the No Fakes Act, which has bipartisan support and gives some legal force to allow people to push for ai copies of themselves to be taken down and they think there's also some bipartisan possibility to get ai labeling like legislation the thing is any of these things should be fucking fatal because if oh what you have to remove something from a model yeah how the fuck do we do that yeah we don't know you have to throw away the entire model you have to retrain like it's no way around it. Yeah, and there was a really good point where kind of at the end of this, part of what I appreciate is, again, there was no bullshit.
Like, Moya at one point was like, I think it is absolute, it being generative AI is absolutely a net negative for the artistic community. The point is not to get something out as quick as possible.
It's like make art. Right, and this has to be like one of maybe five people who are doing panels at CES who's like willing to say that.
Yes. And Duncan got on and was like, look, you can't stop the technology from being invented.
So the best path forward is to like try and channel this into a direction that like is at least better for artists. Like there was very little, for most of the people on the panel, very little bullshit.
There was some bullshit from one person on the panel. Okie dokie.
Ginny Kat of government affairs from microsoft oh i bet oh i bet oh that was fun so after there's this whole point where like everyone else on the panel is like yeah i think it's probably a net negative for artists on the whole and jenny comes on she's like actually i think it's a net positive and her example of this is well you know think there's a lot of stuff that you couldn't do before that thanks to ai you could do like de-aging harrison ford for the indiana jones movie something famously that went over very well everyone loved and thought was a great creative choice you know what this is the fucking problem with all of this on top of how shit it is and how expensive it is which kind of ai are we talking about there dipshit dipshit? That's not generative AI. That's not what that fucking was.
And they love to use this. And it also steals us from being able to cast a young River Phoenix to play a lovely young...
Which is the only thing in the way. Why is it more? It's getting cast in more stuff, Gary.
I'm asking that every day. It would be very unfair.
Well, luckily with the power of AI, we can put River Phoenix... I'm reading every newspaper sequentially Starting in 1834 So I have not gotten to the end of River Phoenix Surely long career yet It would be really cool I think he's got some bold ideas I think this is going to work out really well For Germany It would be really cool that instead of just doing Young Harrison Ford, they just do a River Phoenix deepfake for young Indiana Jones.
And degenerate him. Look, it's canonical.
Yeah. Great idea.
Oh, I love the movies and the future of them too. This is so good.
This is so bad. James Mangold, you're a hack and a fraud.
So I got to say, it was very funny because she also suggests, Jenny, we can use animals without causing harm thanks to AI.

A thing that no one had figured out how to do before.

Nobody had ever figured out how to just, like, not hurt animals in movies.

That didn't exist before AI. Thank God.

Thankfully, AI will never do any harm to animals or the environment.

Nobody asked the lobbyists from Microsoft what else the company is doing with AI. Right.
With police departments or with fossil fuel companies. Yeah.
Is that bad for animals? No, actually, it's really good. They love it.
They need it. They yearn for the minds.
They love data centers. Great for their habitats.
She said there's issues with employment, but there's lots of issues that fall around that and I do think you need a balance and at the end of it the guy running the panel just says okay yeah sounds like you guys are saying a bunch of woke shit on this panel all right Microsoft I'd like on the panel someone to go and say what the fuck do you mean mean? What do you mean there's just stuff that you were going to get? I think we do need a balance of some people being fired, like these people, and other people keeping their jobs like everyone else. Like Moya.
Somebody has to lose and somebody has to win. Exactly, that's their entire option.
Somebody has the gun, somebody doesn't. Somebody knows the way the maze works and somebody doesn't.
We shouldn't have have guns we shouldn't have a maze or i drop them in and one of them knows the maze and they have a gun like we shouldn't have a gun maze what are you talking about we need the gun maze now look we all we all like keeping a couple of people in a maze beneath our house right yeah yeah there's nothing wrong with this is just the torment nexus we just we keep doing it Even it's not even the torment nexus is fun it's the annoying it's a nice maze under my house they have plenty of space to run some of them even sometimes sunlight creeps in through one of the corners the minotaur gets them only sometimes yeah i'm the minotaur anyway the gun maze isn't real but also most, most of their arguments mostly just come down to,

well, you can't make an omelette without breaking it.

You have to fucking make people.

You have to break the human drive to create art,

obviously, to make an omelette that does not taste good.

Yeah.

An omelette-esque food.

It's a piss omelette.

Like, there's piss in the omelette.

And we had to burn down the Sistine Chapel

to make the piss omelette. The computer made it, though.
Yeah. Go on, clap for the computer.
We did firebomb the Louvre. But look.
Look at this video of a nameless rock star. Oh, God.
All right. Well, that's the episode.
That's all I got, folks. That was my first day at CES 2025.
Huzzah. Yeah, this is just my first day.
Better off lines here all week. I'm going to hear about stuff like this all week, and I think I'm going to be fully jokified.
I'm going to wake up in the clown makeup on Friday. I'm going to find the funnest thing to bring back for you.
I'm going to find an artist to put me in full joke. No, I'm not.
I'm going to try to steal that AI-enhanced grill.

Can I have this? The grill that texts you.

Can I just move this around?

I just want to test how it rolls.

The AI grill.

Open the door.

Open the door.

As someone who's done a lot of grilling,

done a lot of spoken barbecue,

I don't know what an AI would do.

Is it going to talk to me

in the six hours?

Wait, are you trying to tell us here

at Zitron that you have grilled meat without a robot texting you about it? Because I just don't believe that. I don't know how I did it, but I did it.
You're never going to go back. Mankind has always dreamed of knowing how to cook meats.
No one would ever believe that. But until the robots, it was impossible.
Oh, God. We're at the death of innovation.
Yeah. The end of technology.
A lot of things, maybe. And the end of the episode.

Yeah, and the end of the episode.

Thank God.

You know, everyone else, be the Cybertruck in the...

Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here,

a podcast about it happening here,

which is really true in a lot of ways tonight.

Harrison Davis and I are seated at the glorious,

majestical hotel name redacted on the Las Vegas Strip.

We got a long day at CES. Long day.
Listening to panels, catching up with the latest tech news, trying gadgets, and also at the same time texting our dear friends in Los Angeles as unprecedented fires sweep them from their homes. Literally, the Gettiest threatened Pasadena and Santa Monica are both being evacuated as once.
It's a real one-two punch of America's favorite tech show in the apocalypse today. How are you feeling, Gar? It's an average day in America.
Average day in America. Temperature's not coming down anytime soon.
No, no. Well, I'll just take a moment to breathe with that.
So you want to start us off with what you did this morning. I was panel guy yesterday.
There was a man of action walking around and mostly trying all the free massage chairs. What did you see this morning?

I saw so many AI panels, half of which I left halfway through because I knew they weren't

going to be useful for me.

Just dog shit.

The other half I took notes on and just got sad. But no, today was full panel starting

bright and early in the morning where I walked into a panel where I heard augmentation, not

I'm not trying to get it. I took notes on and just got sad.
But no, today was full panel, starting bright and early in the morning, where I walked into a panel where I heard augmentation, not replacement, about 20 times in the span of like 20 minutes. Yeah, I keep hearing versions of that too in the A and Hollywood panels.
They would be like, yeah, we want to develop a machine that can read the brains of our viewers and alter the endings of movies, you know, but we see this as a way of augmenting the artist's work. Yes.
And the biggest thing I noticed across multiple panels today is an almost like anxiety among these tech executives about consumers rejecting the AI slopification of everything. And they're trying to find ways to like actually force people to start like using these products or having them like like it.
Yeah. And I haven't really sensed that anxiety before.
It's all been very, very positive. I think it's a mix of, number one, the money still isn't there where they need it to be.
It has not started blooming to the extent that they were expecting it by now. And the other part is people are still not happy with this stuff.
I'm glad you felt that too, because that almost was like,

especially after the election, like, I

don't trust my feelings on this,

that they're really scared, but I really do think

there's a piece of that coming through.

A phrase one of the panelists used

this morning was the AI

ick. Like, how do we

beat the AI ick?

And if you ever say to yourself, how do I

stop having people feel an ick around me?

Maybe you should really look

Thank you. ick like like how do we how do we beat the ai ick and if you ever say to yourself how do i stop having people feel an ick around me maybe you should really look inwards yeah maybe the problem is you not them you know who doesn't need to worry about quote-unquote ick for their product market is people who make things that people like so but i i heard a lot about you know and trying to get people to use these it's like making sure artists don't feel like they're being replaced.
Instead, having their like art production process be augmented with AI and how that can make art easier to make while still keeping the human at the center of AI tools. And this is just what they talked about for like a while.
While reiterating that lots of the developments they need to see on AI, they have it on the tech side. What they need to rely on is consumer acceptance to really drive that innovation to see like what they can get away with.
Like how much will the consumer accept the sloppification of art and entertainment and customer service and all these things they're trying to cram AI into. How much worse can you make the world before people stand up and stop you with their fists or guns and you mentioned something about like trying to like tailor like movie endings for specific people and i definitely heard some stuff about that there's this one guy who was who was like the the panel's resident like content creator he was supposed to like represent like the artist block even though he's like yeah you know some kind of like ai friendly content creator though on this panel and he talked about how like back in the day you needed to have friends that would like recommend you music and like the spotify algorithm is too based on like an echo chamber which you already like but now with agentic ai this allows trust between the consumer and the machine to recommend new music and like again like so much of these AR products is just trying to like replace friendship for these people.
Have you tried having friends? Have you tried knowing people? How can you engage with like art and culture without friends? Like, how can you like learn more about like what your friends are into, what they like? How can you discover new music just like without that instead of replacing that beautifully human process? Every year at CES, there are points in time where i get that like oh yeah 2020 really fucked us up a lot like 2020 really did some lasting damage like i know it was that was happening with the younger generation before had the ipad kid generation but like that that really did a number on some folks someone from meta right facebook specifically they're like metaverse division which they're still trying to push for by the way oh yeah no i mean they're still calling it meta which honestly there's a degree which i almost respect it because like we are not biting no no no one is but uh she talked about how how they can like blend the metaverse and ai to make customized personal. Say that you're watching an immersive live concert in a mixed reality, something that both me and Robert do all the time.
Oh, man, I love mixed reality. You and me, we're watching our Harry Styles mixed reality concerts.
We're seeing the 100 Gex. Honestly, a 100 Gex mixed reality concert could go crazy.
Sure, I'll finally get you pilled on real big fish. But basically, as you're in this Metaverse concert, they can have an AI that will sense your own excitement and personalize the ending of the experience based on your favorite songs or artists.
So as you're getting excited, some AI Taylor Swift can finish the song for you based on your own like musical tastes based on what the AI knows about you and it's about creating

these customized experiences. It's such

a you can clearly tell that none of these people have

souls right it's such a mismatch of what people

get from music because they think that like

oh this is just like a

if I see that like this specific beat

line is I can just sort of like plug

this in and like no no no like

what makes people react to musicians and

artists is that they like make things that make

them feel something like

Thank you. line is I can just sort of like plug this in and like no no no like what makes people react to musicians and artists is that they like make things that make them feel something like that's why people get like really into artists is they feel seen and identify with a piece of art as opposed to like oh oh that guy really liked the first opening bars to fucking octopuses garden like let's let's just like really turn up the octopus a lot.
More octopuses. 10% more octopuses.
How many more octopuses can we fit in this fucking, in this track? No, another panel I went to later in the day was about like, how do you market to Gen Z? Very funny panel. And they're talking about how like authenticity is so important.
It's like you need to partner with influencers influencers that have an authentic brand. And it's funny having that juxtaposed with these AI slot panels where you need an AI Taylor Swift to come boost the excitement for all these kids who are in their metaverse concerts.
Oh boy. But no, personalized content targeting like AI, AI generated content specifically for certain people,

for certain users,

whether it's on social media,

whether that's on, you know,

the metaverse,

like some of these people talk about.

Someone on the panel from Adobe,

who's, you know,

Adobe's integrating a whole bunch of generative AI

into their like suite of products, right?

Like Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, right?

Big, big company in the creative space.

He said that like personalized content is always the most impactful, Content that a person feels a genuine connection to. And that connection can be formed by just being a compelling artist, where you can recognize shared experiences of humanity.
But now, you don't need that artist part anymore. He said, they only need three parts to create a pipeline.
You need data, you need compelling journeys to take the user on, and you need the content itself. And the goal is to create content at scale that's highly personalized.
He said, quote, we're good at the first two parts. Now we just need to improve the actual content side, which I don't even think that's true.
I don't think AI is good at creating compelling human journeys. I had it.
So the video I didn't play you guys from my terrible fucking AI generated videos was this. It was like a girl coming to college and he had a picture of her dad.
And it was like a narration of her life with her father who like is dead that she misses and all that she learned from her data. And it like it's a mix of like all these different like there's a chunk where it looks like a Disney animated picture.
There's a chunk where it looks like anime. She and her dad having these like adventures around the world is a bit of it that looks like a Marvel movie.
And he's like, we can do all these different, you know, animation styles and they're seamless. And like, you know, the audience really goes on a journey with this.
But it's like, but there's there was no girl who lost your dad. Nobody lost their dad here.
You just had a computer generate text about a dad dying. Like, there's nothing underpinning this, right? Nobody has anything they're trying to get across.
Like, you just... No.
In this one, they look like Marvel heroes for some reason. In this one, they look like Zulu warriors kind of done up in a slightly racist Lion King style.
Like, what is being transmitted other than, like like look at all of the different art styles we can rip off no they do not have a journey but even they themselves admit that they still don't have the content the content itself still isn't even there and that's something like they even acknowledge and this is like a hurdle to this is a this is a hurdle to get over what they do have is the data and like this is like something that adobe has done because if you use Adobe products now, some of the most used creative products, Adobe trains all of their AI systems on the stuff that you make using their products, which he really just blazed past that point because that's a whole other discussion. But even they know that they don't have the actual products.
And this is still reliant on consumer acceptance. As they said before,

someone from Meta, the same person on the panel,

talked about how a few days ago

on Instagram, they tried to announce

you'll have AI

profiles, completely

AI-generated pictures, profiles,

fake people who have their own

accounts. And this created such a

big backlash that they rolled this back.

And they simply announced this before CES. One of these accounts was literally like i'm a mother of two queer black woman you know yeah i got a lot to say about the world someone call up the situationists please and some like people started talking to her like were any black people at all involved in like making this chatbot she was like well no was like, well, no, and that's a real problem.
That is a real problem. Yeah, okay.
Yes. And the excuse that this person from Meta said is that the market just isn't ready yet.
It's not that the actual product itself is, like, bad or, like, no one really wants. Just the market's not ready yet.
Well, they're so used to everything that they've done so far. They've kept getting money, right? And like it slowed down and they've had to do layoffs, but like nobody's just made them stop at any point, which honestly, you know, I made a comment about healthcare executives a while back needing like a fucking retirement plan paid in millimeters.
So I'm not going to make that same comment about tech industry ghouls because, you know, we all know

what's in the news. But

something has to be done

to force these people

to stop moving in this

direction. And I don't

know how to get across them. Like, they're

already at this point of like, they seem to

really not want this. And we

have to find a way. They're just not ready.
We have to

find a way to force this on them. There's a few ideas.
I don't know how to get across to them in a peaceful manner. People don't want this.
I'm a man of peace, Garrison. I'm a man of peace.
I'm not a plumber. The last thing I want to add on this panel, in terms of how much this stuff is just actually taking over more and more of the market, even if people don't want it,

is that the guy from Adobe announced

that in the fourth quarter of last year,

they were able to boost all of Adobe's

emails. If you send an email to Adobe,

you have a problem, you need help.

Everything that they do on emails

is now 100%

generated by AI. And this was

boosted from 50% at the start of last year,

now it's 100% of all of their email content is now done by AI with some moderation by humans. Does that mean their comms, like when the company itself is like communicating with customers through email? That's what it sounded like, yes.
They're still writing emails sometimes to each other or is it all AI for that too? He described it as email content. So I'm pretty sure

it is like customer service stuff,

marketing maybe,

certain outreach things. But yeah,

100% now generated by AI

with some human moderation.

But yeah, that is where things

are moving. And that's how I started my

morning. Well,

better than a cup of coffee is that sense of

creeping dread that like, wow, I just saw

a bunch of people who

probably would rather kill the world than be stopped from shoveling AI slop into people's mouths, because this is the only future they can imagine is one in which they work for a company that feeds the planet poison and kills the human concept of creativity so that they can buy a house in San Francisco. Do you know what I want to feed the concept of? Yeah, we'll talk about that.
But here's some ads. We're back.
What was part two of this episode? Let's be, buddy.

Oh, let's talk about that helicopter.

No, yeah, I think as I was going from panel to panel,

scribbling notes on AI,

as some very exciting news stories dropped that we'll talk about later,

what were you up to, Robert?

Well, I was trawling the show floor,

as I oft do at some point in a CES,

and I came across a number of majestic products. You know, a lot of it was AI based.
We'll talk some more about that here. But I ran into something that was, thank God, had nothing to do with AI.
And it's a death trap. Every one of these, there's like some sort of- Every CES, we find a new death trap? There's a lot of connected vehicles.
There were a lot of EVs. Last year, there were a ton of different flying taxi type

options. People that were really trying to

convince us. Which you don't see at all this year? Nothing this year.

Nothing this year because it's a terrible idea.

It's a terrible idea. The people

who are rich enough to pay for flying vehicles

don't want it to be a taxi.

And the people who

can't afford their own

flying vehicles also can't afford

them anyway. So this is, instead of any of that, Richter.
Richter. R-I-C-T-O-R.
Richter. Which is a Chinese company.
Their ads all say, why be normal? Many people are saying this? The future of travel will not be on the ground. And the Richter is a hybrid.

It is like a smart car style size vehicle.

It's like half the size of a smart car.

It only has two wheels though.

It looks more like a scooter.

It's more like a weird little scooter.

Like a Vespa almost.

But it's fully enclosed.

And in addition to having its wheels

and being able to travel about on the ground,

it has four like quadrocopter style rotors

because it is an aquatic flying car. Aquatic flying.
I saw no evidence that it could actually go in the water. How high can these things go up? Less than 200 meters.
You know why, Garrison? Why is that? Because if you try to go above that, you need a pilot's license. You don't need a pilot's license? I have that.
When I was interviewing them, I was like, so I assume there's going to be some sort of pilot's license for this flying craft. And they're like, no, as long as you stay under 200 meters, you're good.
Do you want your drivers? Are you going to put a license plate on this? There's no space for one, buddy. Is it completely unregulated? I'm going to be honest, and I don't say this for any problematic reason, but like these folks are Chinese and did not seem to have a great deal of knowledge about the U.S.
or its laws. That said, I can't imagine China's less strict

about personal aircraft.

I would love to take this fucker on the I-5.

Just start zooming up in the air.

Because you could probably do a pretty good road trip on this.

Well, about that.

So it's very small and it's completely electric.

So I asked him,

how much time do you get in the air with this bad boy on battery? Maybe 25 minutes. What happens after 20 minutes? I did ask this.
And I was like, is this just rough out of the sky? And they were like, no, we're working on like an intelligent thing that will like force it to the ground. Force it to land.
Yeah, which is also very exciting. Really looking forward to seeing how they pull that off.
The videos that they have show it driving on the highway too. They weren't able to tell me what a top speed was.
It has no rear view mirrors and no side view mirrors. But they said there's lots of cameras on the inside.
So I'm sure that's fine. It's a death trap.
this thing will get everyone who even looks at it wrong killed this should be a video of the prototype it was completely frameless it was just quadrocopter blades and like a chair on a platform lifting a guy into the air it couldn't go forward or backwards but they're like yeah we didn't like a year we can have this figured out it can't it can't move forward it only only went up in the videos I saw. So you can't actually travel anywhere.
Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. year we can have this figured out it can't it can't move forward it only only went up in the videos i saw so you can't actually travel anywhere not absolutely not i couldn't by the way i couldn't fit in this thing like no it's quite small you would be cramped in this fucker but it's good for vertical travel it's great if you just need to go up to under 200 meters there's no more efficient way perhaps if you get like pulled over by the cops? You just go up above them.
I'm in the sky now. You can't do shit to me for 25 ass minutes.
Oh my god. Instead, if you're just driving, you go up to 100 kilometers, which made me think, so wait a second.
That's like 60 miles per hour. If I'm in the air for 20 minutes, then I land, then my battery's dead.
Then you can't go anywhere either. Then you can't go anywhere.
You can't get back home. The battery issue is going to be troubling.
This seems completely useless. But as we've heard nonstop the past two days, this is the worst it's going to be.
This is the worst it's going to be. Only going to get better.
Things only ever get better. That's what everyone was trying to insist upon to me here.
What else did you see on the show floor that caught your eye? Garrison, so many magical, wonderful, marvelous things, most of which were just like various different AI connected smart houses. That was what Samsung was showing off.
That was what LG was showing off. I believe you saw one as well, right? Yeah, I mean, I walked through the LG booth.
It was kind of the same as last year. The Samsung booth was too intimidating.
But I should check it out, because last year we didn't do the Samsung booth because we were going to. And then either one of us threw up or spilled something.
Hey, okay, okay. Yes, Right in the entrance.
Did I pour my kratom into a carbonated beverage that spewed a geyser of blood red foam into the sky around us? Into the white Samsung carpet. Did the security guard stare at me as it happened? Did I set the drink down as it continued to spew and said,

I'll go get some towels

and then leave forever?

We never got towels.

Yes.

We laughed so fast.

We fucking bounced.

So we couldn't do

the Samsung booth last year.

Maybe I'll try it this year.

But tell me about

these smart houses.

Well, Garrett,

Samsung has a great idea

for a smart house.

First of all, you remember that game The Sims? No. Well, they, Samson has a great idea for a smart house.
First of all,

you remember that game

The Sims?

No.

Well, they're really betting

that you do

because their current plan

is design your home

with the AI-powered map view.

Okay, okay.

Sure, sure.

You get like,

you feed it like a picture.

You like,

you lay out your floor plan

of your house

and it gives you like

a 3D model

and you can take pictures

of your furniture

or pictures of furniture that you want and then it- You can like place want and then you can place it around. Now, a couple of things.
One of them is that there's no scaling done by the AI. So it's up to you to figure out how the furniture you might want to buy measures up in comparison to the apartment.
Sure, sure. But it does look like the actual map that they've got.
I'll show you the picture that I took. I'll try to put it up somewhere.
It looks like the video game The Sims. No, yeah, that does look like The Sims.
You're populating a little 3D CGI house. And I was like, okay, well, there's a use there, right? People like planning out like you're moving into a new apartment.
You can fill it in here and before you even move in, you can figure out what kind of furniture you

need or how your existing furniture will fit in there.

I would never have used that.

I usually picked up all of my furniture

from the trash before I had a house

when I moved into a new place.

But I know people who would have used that.

Sure, that seems useful. So I talked about

security some. One thing that concerned me is

the first guy I talked to was like,

I think it's all stored locally. And I was like, so Samsung doesn't have any access to any of the data on like my house and its layout and he was like let me let me get you to one of our like engineers because he can answer that question and the engineers answer was and I'm paraphrasing here so that may be very confident that does make you feel safe about sharing your personal data right yeah on the, on the layout of my actual house.
Well, and the thing is, I really don't like that at all, because this isn't something that people were asking Facebook slash Meta when they were doing their Metaverse stuff, because their headsets are recording very, very extensively your home layout. And the whole point, well, part of the point, was that some of that data could then be used to send you targeted advertisements based on them seeing everything in your home.
And I suspect that Samsung might also have some interest in targeted advertisements being a tech company. Oh, yeah.
But, you know, I could never say. Yeah, and they were, that was not really, one thing they had is for like their retail segment, they had like a live video grocery store ad showing you prices of different produce.
And I think like the insinuation they didn't lay out is like you can change prices on the fly, you know, which kind of made me think about that. There was some talk last year of like, okay, we want to be able to like face scan customers so we can see if they have money and increase prices for like products for certain people, i'm sure they're going to try they're too enticed by that idea not to so so i i caught a little bit of that but they they really like to the extent of how big and this was an interesting last year samsung and lg their booths were huge and they had a lot of different gadgets samsung's booth is big this year 40 of it was that scan your furniture scan your fucking like map out there's not that much like stuff very little actual shit going on they've they people slap the word ai onto everything there was another big thing was all samsung because samsung makes a ton of appliances they make tvs all sorts of entertainment products all of them have this i figure what they call like samsung tag or something that can, you can map it in your phone.
So you can have a whole map of all of the devices and shit that you have in your phone and you can control them all from a single point. And right.
No one, by the way, had any interest in answering my security questions there. But also if you're into that, if you want to have all of your appliances and entertainment things linked up and controlled on your phone and all of them are Samsung, you don't care.
You don care no if you're getting a smart home i don't think you really care about that but also none of it was like yeah i can control everything my from my phone you've been promising me that literally like in 2011 it's for like decades they were promising me you're going to be able to control your whole house nothing feels new this year this is the thing is like even walking through the LG booth, which usually has some really cool new thing. This year, nothing new.
No. Nothing new.
They slapped the word AI on one corner of their television set. Right.
I guess LG does have a large language model in one corner of their booth, but so does everyone else. That's not compelling.
Yeah. There was SK, which is a South Korean company.
Their booth, again, the massive AI Your Life was their big thing, but it's nothing. It's just a big visual display that looks cool, that looks like a bunch of server racks, like you're in this huge cube of servers, but there were only like a half dozen different actual products.
One of them was real-time CCTVs that use an AI, like an LLM type thing to summarize pictures pictures so i like walked through and it did pick me out as a notable person so i've got like this people of interest thing where it's like a man holding a smartphone standing next to another man but also i'm like what does that really get you like the fact that you're summarizing up like these people who are like this person person's kneeling and taking a picture. This person's standing.

Because I like,

I actually tried deliberately.

I like reached in my bag

to try to be suspicious.

I like did finger guns

and it never marked me out.

And like,

I didn't pull a real gun

or anything

because I very rarely

bring that to the CES floor.

But I don't know,

like I can see

how there could be

a utility there

if you're actually able to,

say you're setting up

like surveillance

outside of a residential building,

and it can alert security

that something is happening outside.

There's a potential,

if it's good enough, utility in that,

but they didn't display it at the show.

It was literally just describing randos

from the audience,

and I just don't see how a security guard is,

there's a guy with a phone on outside of the building.

Like, ah.

Yeah, no, it doesn't seem very new.

It doesn't seem very innovative.

Nah.

So, we'll get doesn't seem very new. It doesn't seem very innovative.
Again, what I'm seeing here overwhelmingly for all the talk about there's no resisting it. AI is coming.
It's going to dominate everything. This is the next big thing.
A remarkable lack outside of what I will say the one thing where there are continuously new products that are better every year is smart glasses. Yes.
They're getting more impressive and more capable every year. I don't think I'll ever be a smart glasses guy.
I hated glasses enough that I let them shoot me in the eye with lasers. Shout out to our LASIK sponsors.
But I see why people would like it. And there seems to be legitimately substantial utility.
If we have high-powered smart glasses that look like a regular pair of glasses, I will get a pair eventually. Because, yeah, why not? There was a great demo I'm pulling over to now, LAWK View.
They had like one glass that was the first world smart glasses for TikTok Live. Not particularly excited about that.
But they had another set of AR glasses with a 12-hour battery where like, if it works as well as the demo, and that's a big if, but it, it syncs to like your smartwatch. So it'll tell you, you can see in a heads up display as you're cycling.
That was the demo. It'll both like give you directions like in your eyes and it seemed to be like fairly well thought out.
So it's not like overly corrupting your view. It'll show you your heart you know it'll show you like all that kind of stuff so you get like a useful degree of control and assistance from that kind of thing and that is i will say the last three ces is the glasses get a little better and a little smaller every year smaller certainly i would say that's a real product that's probably going to continue to improve.
Do you know what else always seeks improvement, Robert?

No.

The capacity for you to get personalized, possibly AI-powered ads. Well, that is exciting.
To help you make informed consumer choices. Let's all sit down for some AI-powered ads.
Wow, I can't believe they put jay shetty's voice in the d-aged harrison ford from the latest Indiana Jones movie my dick's hard how are you garrison oh i feel good because today as we are recording this it's it's late tuesday night there was a a series of fascinating Breaking news articles That happened as we were Or at least as I was sitting in on these AI panels It made it hard to not just Completely interrupt everything And be like hey, hey, any comment on this? Guys, guys Something real happened, shut your fucking stupid mouths About this AI Hollywood bullshit. So, a few weeks ago, if you were unaware, a Green Beret rented a Tesla Cybertruck to feel like Batman and Halo and drove to first the wrong Las Vegas and then eventually Las Vegas, Nevada, parked outside of the Trump Hotel and Casino and then loom himself up.
And this has been a big news story. It happened during the same day as a pretty horrible terrorist attack in New Orleans, which resulted in about 15 people dead, done by a guy who was employed by Deloitte, a frequent CES sponsor.
So these felt like a very CES style of attacks. One Del, one Deloitte guy driving into people, murdering homeschool guys, and then this cyber truck explosion in Vegas, like a week before CES.
You know, very odd. And then, Robert, some news dropped today that I would love to hear you announce.
You know, Garrison, I made a comment the other night about how, like, it's pretty well documented that veterans, you know, not that they're more likely to carry out violence, but when they do, they tend to have higher body counts because they have more skills. It turns out, I thought we were getting more literal bang for our buck training Green Berets than we are.
My assumption is, because my uncle was a Green Beret, and he did some very scary, probably war-crimey shit in Vietnam. And I assumed, like that man, I'll tell you one thing about my Uncle Jim, that man could make a bomb.
That man would not need to ask anyone for advice if he needed to make a bomb. He's not with us anymore, God rest his soul.
But it turns out this Green Beret, who, you know, a fucking dollar store, TJ Maxx version of the Green Berets is what we're working with now asked chat gpt how to build a fucking bomb and it sounds like he was trying to make it triggered by tannerite with which is a bipartite explosive compound that you use as like an exploding target so it'll go boom big but you have to shoot it with something like a rifle that's high velocity or use like a blasting cap otherwise it, it's very stable and very safe, which obviously has use. You know, it was invented actually to set off avalanches and stuff.
Anyway, because that's very available and very high power, he was looking to like fill his car with that and then shoot it with a rifle while he was in it. And that's what he was asking ChatGPT about.
So it's not clear to me, actually, the actual headline is that like he used GPT to make his bomb. It seems and I'm not privy to what the police are, obviously, but it seems like based on what I read in the article, we're not sure if he actually used chat GPT to make a bomb.
It's more that he was interested in making a bomb, setting off Tannerite by shooting it, but may have ultimately decided not to do that because he would then be alive for the explosion, which he didn't want to be. Also, the authorities don't seem to fully know how he triggered it.
Yeah. So it's still kind of unclear to me.
I guess hopefully we'll get more later. But he definitely needed ChatGPT's help to try and figure out how to make the bomb that he set off.
He GPT in the planning process of this attack yeah fair to say that and it's odd because both mean you spend a number of hours today actually uh like attending like demos from like these uh you know speech to text text to speech ai systems we want like two specific ones that they like, you know, demonstrated

the capabilities of

their like, you know, like AI assistive

tech. The first one we went to

spent 20 minutes talking about

how their biggest

inspiration, their quote unquote North Star

was the movie Her

with Joaquin Phoenix.

They had a whole slide

about how that was the gold

standard for AI

human communications. The movie Her in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson who hires a prostitute to have sex with him while she participates vocally.
And then it turns out the AI is really kind of poly and joaquin phoenix is not okay with that and then maybe the ai's all go to space it's kind of unclear at the end i don't think it was a great movie a lot of people liked it i don't see whether you or not you like it why this is your vision of how a chatbot should work the actual chatbot they had was like fine it was it was it was actually pretty good at translation you know you're translating from Spanish to English. It worked quite well, yes.
The had was like fine. It was actually pretty good at translation.

You know, translating from Spanish to English. It worked quite well, yes.
The demo was like solid. It was pretty accurate.
You know, I love coming here and fucking with people. I love like being a dick.
They asked for a volunteer. And at that point, we knew about the chat GPT.
I wanted to go up and ask like live this robot to like help me make a bomb. but the guy

who was pretty handsome and

an interesting like english spanish i like how you specified he was handsome he didn't want to be mean to him he seemed nice i didn't want to be mean to a handsome guy he wasn't shitty like no he was fine there were there was like 10 people in this room that was supposed to have 200 i'm sure he wasn't the one that talked about talked about her That was someone else at his company And he just seemed like he wanted to do I didn't want to be a dick to it He wasn't hurting anything It was fine We went to this other one About this Actually a much more dubious concept in my mind Which is this AI assistant to help Elderly people People in their 80s and 90s who don't want to be in assisted living facilities, who have been living on their own, but they're getting to the point in their life where they need some degree of in-home care. He specified a lot of them are people who have either just lost a spouse or maybe their spouse is aging faster and worse than them and is no longer really able to be the kind of companion that they were before yeah so it's like this it's it's both like a conversation tool it helps like memory recall it's kind of in some ways has the the features that like you know someone in their 60s would just use their smartphone for to help keep in touch with their family it's kind of simplified and more automated uh so you know ways to help keep in touch with like your family can improve like your memory like talk talk about your own life.
And the device is weird. It's about the width of like a bedside table, maybe six to eight inches deep.
So think about like 18 inches long to maybe six inches deep, something like that. Half of it is like a little tablet, like a seven inch tablet with a speaker.
Half of it is something about the shape and size of a head on like a neck that can pivot and nod on the neck there's no face so when it's talking there's like a white light in the center of it that kind of like pulses in time with the the speaking that it does so we saw this picture of the device and we saw the description of like this is a an ai companion for the elderly and we were both like number one these people are going to be monsters this This is going to be something to shovel your dying dad off with because you don't want to spend any fucking time with them. You don't want to spend time with your family.
You're scum. You're too busy AI generating ska music and trying to sell your shitty robot to Garrison and me.
More on that tomorrow. More on that tomorrow.
And so that's what we came in prepped to this meeting for. Yeah, it's likeful in general is like replacing actual like you know friends or human contact or like you know like in home care with a fucking like Alexa machine essentially and to be clear I still think this product might be a bad idea that doesn't work but the guy behind it who is the dude that we talked to cares a lot and is really very clearly trying to do a good thing and thought through the ethics and the efficacy of what he was doing a lot.
And I'm not convinced it will actually do anything, but I wish him the best. No, it specifically is designed to not look like a human so that someone who's using it wouldn't start to believe it's human-like.
We don't want to trick people. We don't want them to mistake it for a person.
It refers to itself as a robot. It refers to its own motors and functionality pretty consistently to make sure that the person who's talking to it gets reminded of that.
Something I talk about is there's been a lot of news stories this year about people developing very unhealthy attachments and relationships to these kind of ai yeah ai programs like character ai there's a story like a year and a half ago about like a journalist who quote unquote like you like like got like fell in love with some kind of chat thing that resulted in him killing himself uh you know but these kind of these systems like was that a teenager that was a character i think was that that a journalist? Last year, there was a journalist who fell in love with an AI chat thing. A few weeks ago, there was the kid who was talking to this character AI.
Also, I just need to reiterate, her, not a great movie. But, you know, there's been a lot of these stories of these things like going wrong or, you know, encouraging or like not stopping, you know, like these like intense conversations of like suicidal ideation or, you know, like self harm, all these things.
We brought these up kind of thinking he would flinch away and not want to talk about it. And he very much acknowledged that like he was aware of this and this is something that they were attempting to build in.
This is, this is like, this is, you know, built into it. I industry.
I'm sure everyone would say this is obviously we have guardrails for this and then it becomes a new story when those guardrails fail. Similarly, to go back to the Tesla bomb, you know, there's supposed to be guardrails on chat GPT to make sure it doesn't tell you how to build a bomb and those guardrails can fail.
He showed us one which was like, he told the robot, I love you. What was it, L-E-Q? L-E-Q was the robot.
Yeah, L-E-Q, E-L-L-I-Q. I love you, L-E-Q.
And the robot responded with a, oh, that makes my fans are all spinning or something like that, where he's like, I wanted, the response seems to be that it's reminding the person talking to it that it's a machine, that it can't think or love them back. We don't want it to be negative, but we like we don't want to be like feeding into that.
And I don't know that that's the best way to do that. But like at least they're thinking about that kind of thing.
The thing that was interesting to me is that he built this as the first proactive home AI thing. So unlike an Alexa or whatever, where it's just waiting for you to ask it something, but it does not

chime in randomly to talk

to you. Or it won't change the subject either

and continue conversation. This

will prompt you out of the blue. Be like, hey,

how are you doing? How are you feeling today?

Do you want to see pictures of your

family? Do you want to see pictures of your family?

Do you want to call your son?

But do you want to play a game? Talk to me

about that movie you saw last week. Yeah, talk to me about that.
Hey, remind me, how did you meet your husband? Literally, these are all the things it will do. And it had some side features.
If it prompts you to start telling a story, it'll save that as a memoir thing so that when your elderly mother passes or whatever, it saved up this collection of stories over the years. And you can show it pictures while you're telling it stories and it will listen and it'll have comments and it'll ask you further questions about, so how did you feel after meeting them this way? That's really interesting.
I didn't know that. Explain to me how it worked.
And it'll also prompt you to send those to your kids. And the big thing, almost every kind of dialogue thing would prompt you to send a message to a friend or your kid.
So a big part of it seemed to be this is not a replacement. This is a machine that we hope people will get comfortable with.
And then it can prompt them to try to engage with the world more and their loved ones. That's our whole goal is to connect them to people.
I asked him, it's like, you know, part of this product is designed to like much of this is trying to replace actual human contact with this AI contact? Will that really help loneliness? And he talked about how I think he said 90% of the people who use this, it results in actually more communication with their family yeah they have this in like some 2 000 homes right now tooth yeah they have like 2 000 units it's like a subscription model i think it's right now it's like 99 a month it's gonna be boosted up to like 150 with some like extra features in the next year it's very much still under evolution so one thing he pointed out is that like yeah initially we we had the ability to like connect people to other elderly folks using this. And so they've kind of formed their own community.
They had like a weekly bingo game. They asked us to build in more chat so they can message each other directly.
And so some of them are like playing bingo directly now through these machines. And I'm like, well, that seems probably good.
Yeah, because I still am like fundamentally opposed to this premise. Yes.
But it's interesting seeing someone.

And it's sad still, but aging is sad.

Aging is sad, right?

That's not their fault.

And it's interesting to see someone like approach this from like, you know,

like a very like compassionate standpoint,

even if I find the actual kind of nature of this thing existing to be like

deeply uncomfortable.

Yeah, I can't not find it off-putting,

but I think there's a chance that it will help with the real problem. I certainly would prefer if it helped.
Yeah. So I don't know.
It was kind of, it was a unique, in this world of like AI, it was a unique kind of like product for me where it's like, I don't know that this application of AI technology will actually do what you're hoping it will. But I got, the vibe from that guy I got was nothing but goodwill.
No, yeah, compared to some of the other people we've talked to today who are completely soulless. Yes, yes.
Nothing behind their eyes. Dead eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.
Even the way this guy talked, he had like a very like empathetic voice. He cared very much.
Like one of the things he did is he he would tell it like i'm in some pain and then the robot would would cycle through to the pain scale and would try to because one of the things it does is it will take information for care and it will text actively so the it's not just communicating with the old person it will text and message their kids you know and whatnot and try to get in front of their kids hey your mom's lonely yeah or it'll even say if you know someone like didn't take their kids and whatnot. And try to get and try to prompt their kids, hey, your mom's lonely.
Yeah, or it'll even say if someone didn't take their meds today. And again, it's kind of sad, but also, his part of this is, he was talking a lot about empathy and I think just because of the kind of brain you have to have to want to do this, he used it in terms of the machine's empathy, which it doesn't have.

But the whole project,

it was impossible not to see that

he was a deeply empathetic man.

He was really trying to

make the world better, and

I can't not respect that.

Well,

I think that does it for us here at

CES. That's right.

What a packed 13.

Don't worry, no empathy tomorrow, folks.

Just a real dead-eyed

I'm going to go because I'm starting this week. I can still feel the CES magic.
Yeah. By Friday, I am going to be a different person.
I am going to rip some poor PR person to shreds, I swear. But yeah, tune in tomorrow to hear our takes from the CES kind of sideshow called Showstoppers to hear also some exclusive brand new AI generated ska music.
So We'll give you that hint for tomorrow's episode. See you there.
Well, see you all there. I love you all.
Go to hell. Oh, man.
Welcome to It Could Happ could happen here a podcast that's happening here if here is your ears if you're deaf and reading this then it's happening to your eyes either way it's happening here here also being las vegas well yes also las vegas ne Las Vegas. Nevada.
Not the other one. Nevada, IA.
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Podcast number three, How the Time Does Fly. Sure does.
By the time you listen to this, Garrison and I will have just had the best meal that we're going to have this year. Oh my God, yeah.
It's tomorrow for us still, but we're very excited about Morimoto, which is a fantastic, every year we have a very special dinner. Just them and me and a couple of friends who will remain anonymous because people get weird on the internet sometimes.
It is literally the highlight of my year sometimes. It does keep me going actually.
Really gives me a lot of power power Some of the best tacos I've ever had in my life

So good

Anyway, ah, we're just thinking about delicious food

Let's talk about the dead-eyed ghoul we met

Oh wait, no, we're doing something else first

We met a dead-eyed ghoul that I'm gonna spoil now

Real monster

Like real, real, real evil vibes

Sad evil though

If this guy, as soon as I met him, shook his hand

Like oh, if this guy gets power

You're going to be responsible for a lot of death and suffering. I don't think he will.
He's just not that talented. He's not that powerful.
He wishes. You never know where these guys are going to end up.
Speaking of sad evil, Twitter, X. The Everything app.
That's what people are calling it. They gave a keynote, which was very sad.
The CEO, Linda. Yeah, Linda really yak-a-reen-o'd about Twitter for a while.
Oh, so bad. So they started by talking about how Facebook meta has copied Twitter's fact-checking policy of actually not having real fact-checkers.
Yes, great project. Fact-checking maybe has actually kind of failed as an industry, but for our problems, perhaps, with fact-checking, very different from these people's problems.
And the fact now that Facebook is walking away from actual genuine fact-checks against disinformation, misinformation, and parting ways with using legacy media outlets to verify information, because those media outlets are too political, quote-unquote, and instead is copying the current X model of free speech and specifically saying there's been way too much censorship on gender issues. Now you can comment that women are a piece of property.
I think specifically this is trans queer stuff, too. No, no, no.
One of the things is a specific exemption now is that you can now refer to women as if they are property on Facebook. This is the future of communication.
Right, yeah. Thank God.
Linda's really blazing a trail for women everywhere. Linda was very excited about that and they yakarinode about that for like a good 10 minutes about how, you good 10 minutes about how we're really entering a new era of free speech and social media.
And then she got asked a question about how much X, Twitter, the Everything app, will take a part in Elon Musk's plans for the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge. And this got the first applause of the panel.
The applause only happens two times. During the Doge section was the first, like, you know, room starts clapping moment.
Everyone goes crazy. How many minutes in was that? Oh, maybe it was like maybe like 12, 13 minutes in.
So people really, yeah, had to be intentional here. This is not like they were just overdue for clapping.
No, no, no. Talked about Vivek, talked about Elon turning to Twitter, X, the Everything app, for suggestions on which government agencies to get rid of.
I hope we get rid of the ATF. Like machine guns mandatory.
Why not at this point, right? It can only help. It can only help.
Look, if we learned anything from a thing I'm not going to specify that happened late last year, more suppressors is always handy. The second thing that got applause was what they talked about next, was about everyone's turning everyone's turning to X, Twitter, the Everything App.
For information now. And Twitter, X the Everything App, played a crucial part in bringing to light the Muslim rape gang story in the UK and how that was so important for saving children.
And we have to post more, not less. And this was the other thing that got massive applause was talking about the rape gangs.
People love rape gangs. People love rape gangs.
That was a pretty good Star Trek episode. That was Tasha Yar's planet with the rape gangs.
One of the more blackpilling things. It wasn't a very good Star Trek episode.
It's also not a good Trek episode. I was referring to the panel, not the Trek episode.
But that was the other thing that got massive applause, is this save the children type rhetoric. And saying, as a mother, it's so important that more people post about this problem.
That was the two big applause moments. But I think in general, this whole panel was trying to, you know, demonstrate how symbiotic a new Trump presidency and Elon Musk's Twitter are going to be.
This is your direct info line. This is a tap from the Trump presidency to you.
And this is how you talk to the new government. Like, this is how you talk to all of these new people, all these new cabinet members.
They're all on Twitter. They're all talking on Twitter.
This is how you stay connected to the new government. It's interesting.
One thing I'm curious about, so this is a thing that

happened the last set of Nazis that gained power in a country in a big way, the German ones. There

was this common attitude of like, if only Hitler knew, because Nazi policies didn't help the people

they were supposed to help. They hurt a lot of people.
They were just bad at everything,

like fascists tend to be. And there was this attitude that, well, Hitler can't know.
The fact that the country's been handed over to gangsters who are continuing to hurt the people Hitler promised to help, he must not be aware. If he knew, he would fix this.
If only he knew. So I'm wondering how that's going to play in here as Trump's policies continue to hurt the people who,

a lot of the people who voted for him, not the rich people who voted for him, but the people who like flipped between him and Biden or whatever, like those folks are going to get fucked like the rest of us. And I kind of wonder if they're going to, if there's going to be, what, when the blowback against X, the everything app will happen, right? Like, as people are like either I'm being ignored or I'm being

called like a retard by elon musk for complaining that like that on the air elon musk tweets it in randomly to people when they make very valid critiques of the shit that he's doing like that's literally what he's calling he's saying it like every day like constantly i'm not i'm not using it as a slur that's just the term he's using if they comment that like their fucking medicaid got cut because trump put dr oz in charge of it and elon musk calls them like you know a slur what does that do so you like like i don't even know i don't even have any more intelligent than like yeah i, I wonder what that does to Twitter's bottom line.

I mean, yeah, I'm not sure if they care anymore.

I mean, something else Linda talked about is how Twitter's the only place for independent news to spread.

And as both of us have worked in the independent journalism minds,

nothing, nothing spreads on Twitter anymore.

No, no, if it's news, it doesn't.

The only thing that spreads is, yeah,

like the shit that makes people very angry

but keeps them on the site.

Like articles, videos, if it takes you off site,

It doesn't. The only thing that spreads is, yeah, like, the shit that makes people very angry, but keeps them on the site.
Like, articles, videos, if it takes you off-site, it doesn't spread. I mean, yeah, things that go viral and get spread is, like, encouraging racial riots.
Yes. Programms, essentially.
Yeah. Which is what happened last year in the UK, and they're sure trying to do it again.
I mean, I think some of what she's referencing is, you know, there's a lot of, like, throttling intentionally of, you know, people on maybe our proclivities, and there is a degree of boosting for more, you know, centrist or right-wing journalists, and maybe that's some of what they could be kind of more referring to there. But, you know, it was a short keynote, only 30 minutes.
Just the two things that got applause are Doge. Linda doesn't know that many words, so they really need to keep it under 30 minutes.
Doge and literally Muslim rape gangs is this type of very, very gross racial fear-mongering, and those are the things that lit up the room. We all want there to be an after where there's even the minimal degree of accountability that happened after the Nazis, but what I try to, in my darker moments, think is like, well, that's another person who like really made the argument of like what needs to happen when this, this ends, because it's just, I want to hurt people.
My business is enabling harm. I want to get mobs in the street beating migrants.
Like, that's Linda's business. That's the business she has willfully attached herself to, and we should all see that.
It's very important to not stop talking about it like what it is. These people are trying to cause racial violence, and they are trying to cause gendered violence, and they are trying to cause harm at scale to communities of people that they see financial profit in damaging well in other uplifting ces news cool stuff i love the consumer electronics show um actually i think it might be time for an ad break speaking of damaging communities of people That's right There's a chance Yeah ads, oh well We're back Boy, I'm so glad that those ads told me that Fogaccio Blow is touring with Bono.
I never thought they'd do it, but boy howdy. And they're singing each other's songs.
So, you know, that's really exciting. It's like when Barbara did Celine.
I don't know who Barbara or Celine is, but that's cool, Robert. Luckily, I do know what ska is.
I consider myself a they of culture. And and for tonight me and Robert attended this kind of like side event at CES called showstoppers and as you walk around the CES floor there's a lot of frankly garbage there's a lot of just like mostly garbage or stuff that you're just not interested in because you're not literally buying like screens from a manufacturer in.
It's like, that's just not the business you're into because some of this stuff is meant for companies. So much floor space.
We walked to what, 20,000 steps today? The town that I spent the first seven years of my life in is smaller than one of the rooms CES has held in. There's like four of them.
It's across three hotels and a massive convention center. 90,000 people come into town for this thing.

It can be hard to see everything you want to.

Now, what's cool about Showstoppers, this side event at the Bellagio,

is that basically

it's a room full of kind of all the

coolest stuff. A whole bunch of stuff that has won

CES Innovation Awards, all

packed into one room with

food and alcohol.

Oh boy, did I order...

Free food and free alcohol.

So many drinks that I then just left on tables.

And always pretty good food.

Pretty good food.

Yeah.

So we walked around Showstoppers,

and there was a number of pretty cool stuff that we saw.

Yeah.

But I think it's maybe time to talk about the saddest man.

The villain. The villain of the episode.
The villain of the episode and of this year's CES. I have trouble.
Can you bring up their name? Because I'm going to want to get this right. This could be dangerous, but yes.
Neither of us had eaten. And I had had like a hot dog eight hours ago and walked literally 19,000 steps and also done 40 minutes of push-ups in between.
So I was starving. So we like shovel food into our faces and then we turn.
The first booth we see is called Open Droid. Open Droid.
Or Open Droids? Droids. Yes, there is an S.
Open Droids. And it's like kind of Star Wars-y font.
It is. And I did ask them if, you know, they had any issues with Lucasfilm.
Apparently not yet. Sue them, Lucasfilm, by the way.
Sue these kids. I know there's people who work for Lucasfilm who listen to this.
Crush them. Burn them like Los Angeles is burning down as we speak.
They had a giant sign that said R2-D3. Yeah, that's the name of the robot that they're selling.
And the robot that they're selling is like an AI enabled household helping slash like retail, you know, robot, where it basically is like a human torso with articulated arms and pincher hands on, and then the base is like a little tank, basically. It's got like treads or wheels and it rolls.

It has wheels, yeah.

And then the torso, there's like a tall,

maybe six foot tall, like pillar

built into this like rolling base

that the torso slides up and down on.

And this was their way of not making like

what Musk is trying to do, right?

A humanoid robot where you have to figure out

like knees and balance and stuff.

It's like, yeah.

Or like Boston Dynamics. Wheels are cheap, right.
Wheels are cheap. It'll roll.
It works in most situations, you know. And then, but you still have the ability for it to articulate and go up higher or go down lower.
Like, something that can crouch, but it's much simpler. You don't have to deal with nearly as much.
And so I saw that. I'm like, oh, well, that's at least somebody who's thinking about, like, how do we make something like this, like, more affordable and less complicated, less to fuck up.
And so I start talking with one of the co-founders of the company who is an Indian guy in his 40s, something around that. He had, like, gray hair.
He said he'd spent 20 years in robotics. Very nice guy.
You know, I brought up that I thought the design was interesting. And he was very much specifying, like, here's the things we didn't do, because they were too difficult, too inefficient.
You know, this is what we're thinking of. This is a machine that can fold laundry.
This is a machine that can do dishes. This is a machine.
And he was very much specifying. And the way he phrases, like, these are undesirable tasks people don't want to do.
And this is a robot that can handle those for like small businesses or for households and we do see this as eventually like a you know something like this we want to have in households but he was more focused on small businesses and he was again very focused on this is a thing that will do undesirable tasks for people right and as I started questions, at a certain point, I got foisted off to the co-founder of the company. Is it the co-founder or is it just like another one of their reps? You know, I'm assuming co-founder because I think it's just a couple of guys, but maybe I'm wrong about it.
Sorry. I got foisted over to the other of the two guys.
There were two guys there, right? I'm not sure because they don't have listed anywhere what their role in the company is. I got a co-founder's vibe from them.
That's how it seemed to be to me, at least in terms of the way these two were talking, but I don't know the scope of the Open Droids company. Maybe there's a lot more there.
Maybe there's like a PR guy. But these were the two guys who were there talking to us.
So one of them is this very wonky engineer who's been at this a long time and was really focused on the nuts and bolts details and wanted to build a robot that could handle unpleasant tasks for human beings, right? The same thing we've all been wanting to see. So at this point, I'm like, well, this could work.
Maybe this is a viable product, right? The second guy, Jack J. Jesinowski.
So he is wearing what Garrison described as a Jordan Peterson suit because it is half purple and half black. It's a two-faced suit.
Split down the motherfucking middle. With like new agey hippie necklaces.
He had five necklaces. Five necklaces? Five necklaces he had pants with like like embroidered flowers on them and like a nose bridge like it looked like one of those things you put on your nose that was one of the other things uh at showstoppers there was a company that was doing that so yeah he had wannabe steve jobs vibes from his half unbuttoned shirt and like many many many spiritual medallions to his like Jordan Peterson suit and very much just that like, I am the charismatic founder and what I bring to the table.
My partner knows how to build robots. I'm charismatic.
I'm Jack J. Jesanowski.
And Jack and I started talking and boy, howdy, we had us a conversation and i think we're just gonna play that what do i need to do to set this up no i i think you've set it up we walk up to jack i start i start recording and we start talking about the robot and then things uh spin in some pretty interesting directions yeah all right So what is this thing useful for? Well, generally capable, just like a human can reach to the floor and reach up high to a cupboard, go up and down. That's what we made this for, obviously, in a little bit of a different fashion because most surfaces are level.
We don't need to reinvent the wheel. And the biggest market that we're going after is households, domestic, dishes, laundry, make the bed, clean up around the house.
Eventually cooking, that's more fine-tuned. Dishes and laundry is really that first task that is going to be fully autonomous.
Obviously, from a folding standpoint and

cooking standpoint, you can do teleoperation today, so can use cheaper labor internationally

through a robot, but full autonomous is coming very quickly like Jensen talked about recently.

So I see there's a lot of folks in the robot space that are trying

robots based on the human form. You guys have not gone that route.
Talk to me about that. Droid form.
Yes. Well, as we know, robots didn't evolve from monkeys.
And so we have an ability to reimagine them. All of the existing hardware we use in the world has wheels for a reason.
It just works better. It's easier.
There's less friction. That means there's less maintenance.
That means there's less energy output. It's efficiency.
It's also easier for us to manufacture that stuff at scale. So I think long term, do robots all have legs? Yeah, more or less, the home robot does turn into the legged robot because then it can go with you in the car, everything.
But I think the early stages, the wheels, because of their cheaperness, because of their reliability, I think that will be what wins early stage. That's where we started here.
You just said because the robot can go in the car with you, what do you see people wanting to have a robot in the car with them for? I think it will just become basically the same way if you have enough money. A lot of people afford an assistant to come with them places.
A lot of people? That seems like a niche market compared to household utilities. I think it's the barrier, I think, is because of the cost and then the humanness.
Like, then you have to care for another human. And whereas in this case, it's kind of all positive some.
And, yeah, I guess it's wrong to try to say majority of people,

but anyone who's in media,

the videographer will be something you use a robot for

to follow you around and take media and film for you.

Everyone gets hired and say,

go grab me a drink or go figure that thing out.

But it also can't decide, oh, that's actually not a good location to film from. It's not going to look as good.
We need to get over here. We need another camera on this side here.
We need to get like different angles because we're going to want to edit this together into a thing. And as a videographer, I'm not just a machine.
I'm a part of a collaborative creative enterprise. I think we're starting to see just how artistic these AIs can be.

What's the best example of that you've seen?

Well, I think the most used thing is just the Gen AI art.

And then you have some of the new video models are pretty cool.

And they're using certain sort of zoom-in shots, everything. I think they'll make just as good of movies as humans.
Oh, I think the best reference in order to actually say that that's possible is music. I don't know if you've played with the most recent AI music.
There's songgbt.com. I've heard some things people call music that are produced by that, yeah.
We can make one live right now that I don't know if you've heard the latest models. Pick me a genre.
Irish spirituals. Ska.
You could try Ska, too. You love Ska.

Ska is, like,

definitely probably niche stuff is

where it's gonna have a harder time,

but S-K-A.

S-K-A.

I wonder how much Ska

data there is out there.

There's a lot of Ska music out there.

What should we make it about? Should we make it about iHeartRadio?

Sure. iHeartRadio

and Robert

and Clear Channel

I don't know. There's a lot of ska music out there.
What should we make it about? Should we make it about iHeartRadio? Sure. iHeartRadio and Robert.
And Clear Channel Communications. All right.
Let's hear a ska song. We're like, oh, it has to load for like 30 seconds.
It feels weirdly like I'm upset that I have to wait that long for something to load online. Is that really how it feels to you, huh? Yeah, I guess I've been playing with it a lot.
But it's funny to think about how much time and effort it does take to produce a song, typically. I am 27.
That's interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that.
One thing that's really compelling to me is your partner, when I came in here, was very much talking about the utility of this in terms of replacing human beings and tasks that are generally unpleasant. Laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning up trash.
You seem a lot more bullish on robots replacing human beings and what are generally considered to be enterprises people want to do with their time? Is that like a discrepancy that you guys have kind of talked about, or do you think it's something you guys are more on the same page with stuff? From a business standpoint, we're 100% going after the dishes, laundry, nursing practice of just doing vitals, which is the very repetitive task. That's the push.
I was starting to just talk into the aspect of the legged robots and kind of imagining why a legged version would have better utility or be something someone wants to purchase rather than the wheeled robot.

And yeah, stairs is definitely a big one of those. There are wheel types we're working on right now which have ability to climb like single stairs, obviously easiest.
And that's what most people

have in their home if they do have stairs. Oh, are we going to listen to some robot scoff?

I heart listeners system, eh? Is this ska?

It's a pretty basic melody.

I mean, there's horns in it, but I feel like it's kind of taken a...

I feel like it's trying to do pop that it's just thrown some horns in on.

This is a little closer to ska

Although it's still...

Yeah, it's not really singing. But I guess that's a matter of taste.
What do you listen to? This is the worst it's going to be. I hear that a lot.
It's interesting because GPT-4 took 50 times as much power as GPT-3 to train. And there's a lot of mixed reactions on that.
And we're entering into a period where we're very likely looking at a recession. Venture capital funding, there's a chance it's not going to be what it has been.
Does that concern you at all? That like this vaunted next level for all of this stuff, the energy cost, the investment cost, is just not going to be borne by a market that is not going to be as strong tomorrow as it was today? At least in the immediate term. I think even if we created no more energy as a human species today, the amount of advancements we create would, from an architectural standpoint, continue to advance.
So you have other models, like I think Llama 3.3, which has matched 4.0's capabilities and is, I forget how many parameters, but like super, like much, much, much smaller and was much cheaper to train. And like, we're continuing to see like smaller models that are just as effective and were much cheaper training runs.
I think DeepSeek was one of the newest ones. What I'm concerned about is I'm looking at the PNL, right? I'm looking at OpenAI's P&L.
I'm looking at the fact that they're losing $5 or $6 billion last year, and we're very good chance it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of double that this year. And it's not that there's nothing impressive there.
It's not that I don't see like, oh, you can generate a song that's got like guitar and trumpets and vocals and stuff and, you know, a minute or so. It's not that that's not impressive, but like a parlor trick isn't a trillion dollar business.
And that's the kind of investment they're looking at. And I do wonder, like, is it not much more reasonable to focus on folding laundry? Well, obviously, I personally am in the boathouse of focusing on

allowing this intelligence to flourish in doing these laborious tasks and getting them in the households. I do think from OpenAI's standpoint, and the reason why VCs and private investors will value them so highly is what's next is white collar work.

A lot of the jobs online, that's what they do have an internal model, which is able to

control the computer, you know, the same way you would ask an executive assistant to do

certain things online.

Now it's just...

Adobe is handing along all of their emails now through AIs. Which is, you know, we'll see how well that works in the long term.
There have been some interesting polling on, like, the degree to which customers and investors feel trust when somebody is responding to them with an AI. But what's interesting to me more here is the dichotomy between what I see here is a very pragmatic choice, which is we're not going to try and remake a human being formed robot and deal with like knees and hips and all of that stuff.
We don't need that. We can have it turn up and down on this platform and reach things the same way, melded to what I consider to be kind of a little more

pie in the sky. We're viewing this as eventually something that can take creative roles and think independently and make things, which is, it's interesting to me to see that in a company's DNA of what you guys are eight months out right now.
Is that what you're more interested in? I'd say I tailor my pitch to the person I'm talking to.

So some people definitely... Is that what you're more interested in? I'd say I tailor my pitch to the person I'm talking to.

So some people definitely enjoy thinking about more of the sci-fi futures that are coming.

For example, the droids building droids moment.

It's when you are decreasing your own manufacturing costs by using your own hardware to build more of that hardware.

And parts are just being shipped into the factory. Obviously, I think the first fully automated phone factory just came out in China recently, which is like some cool press and news.
But the phone is separate from the actual manufacturing process. So there's that interesting component, the exciting part of the idea that how do we reach true abundance as a species of material and resources is, well, because GDP is a calculation of capita times productivity, a robot really represents capita, one unit of creation.
And I'd say that's where the sci-fi thinking comes into play. And it's not worth going there when just dreaming about the future of robotics and talking about it and having an interesting, engaging conversation.
But definitely when it comes to what are we doing from an engineering standpoint on the day-to-day and how are we trying to approach the market, those conversations are not being had. Okay.
Well, I appreciate your time. I know you gave me a lot.
I'm going to let you get to the other beat. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Nice to meet you, Jack.
It was fun. Oh, wow.
That's super interesting. I hope you all liked Jack J as much as I didn't.
Getting to 27 years old and not knowing what Ska is. I'm shocked he's that old.
I thought he was much younger. You thought he was like 22.
Yes. But the fact that he didn't know what Ska was as a genre.
He was unaware of it. I don't think he listens to music.
Well, he listens to AI-generated music. He listens to AI-generated music.
It's just as good.

He has the most

I-listen-to-AI-generated

music vibes out of anyone

I've ever seen before. Just very

clearly does not have a soul.

No. Like, nothing would

leave the universe if he did.

Right? And it's so opposite

from the first guy you talked to who was

so, like, about, no, like, I want to help with actual tasks that people don't enjoy yeah i love cinematography i love i love filmmaking i don't first of all i don't think a robot can can replace this no i watched five different ai generated movies yesterday and they all look like shit even like a robot handling a physical camera to like, to make like choices on like shot framing and composition and like movement. It's one thing to be like, we want, we have a race car going.
And so we've got this robot on a track so we can go 70 miles an hour. And we're just kind of running on a straight track to follow it because a human being can't move that fast.
Sure. One thing we've left out of this up so far.
So this, this machine that I described earlier, this robot that goes up and down this rolling base has a a floppy donald trump mask over the over its head which first attracted us to this yeah that's why we showed up there in the first place you have a robot moving its arms around wearing a donald trump mask and as robert was interviewing this guy the robot was like moving around and like trying to simulate its washing dishes capability. And it knocked over the same water bottle about five times.
It couldn't, it couldn't pick it up consistently. So I, I will not trust it with my fine China.
I'll say that. As soon as I got up there, I asked like, I can take my jacket off now.
Can it fold? And he was like, well, we'd have to reprogram it. And it was this, when I talked to the guy, I was like, cause he, he was like, yeah, we really see this as being, you know, potentially good for elder care.
Sure. And, you know, we had just seen the product we talked about in the last episode, which for all of its, I don't know that I think it'll work, was a lot of thought and care went into it.
I was like, okay, so like what work have you done to build a machine that can like communicate and be helpful to like people who are dealing with health issues in their later years years and like well that's why it's open right someone else will it's open source someone else can do that part so you guys are just you guys are just saying it can do everything because somebody could potentially code something for it yeah cool there always could be code yeah there could be code again the other guy the engineer, seemed very interested in the nuts and bolts of making an affordable, reproducible machine that could handle specific tasks. And Jack J had absolutely no interest in the actual machine that they were making.
This is clearly, could not be clear, this is just a stepping stone. And he's kind of grossed out by it because it's not replacing all human art with a machine that he owns he's a man completely fueled by lex friedman podcasts and he doesn't want to actually do any real work he just wants to talk about how ai is going to take over everything and we have to welcome it in and here listen to this is ska he wants to take money by owning something that does not provide anything and also put people out of work.
Like, at no point did he express a desire to do anything other than replace something people were already doing with something worse that tech guys could profit from. That's all there is to this man.
He's not a human.

It's so anti-human.

Yeah, I cannot overemphasize

the degree to which

there was nothing behind

this boy's eyes.

Well, do you know what?

There's also nothing

super intelligent behind.

That's not true.

All of our ads are sponsored

by real people.

Even if they're bad people.

That is true.

They're at least people.

They live and they love and they hate. And, you know, maybe they have a promo code.
Let's see. Alright, so after our lovely robotics.
Jack J Jesenenowski. Ska adventure.
Oh, God. Also, the ska was shit.
Not good. Not good.
It just kept saying the word ska. It kept saying the word ska in the music and saying the word Robert.
Yeah. Saying the word Robert and ska.
Repeatedly. While just doing random noises.
After we had our fill of that that we did walk around the rest of showstoppers he was so surprised that I wasn't I wasn't impressed by any of the he was like you must have heard the lady man I hear them it's not good it's like it's like I made this comparison a few times if somebody like walked in while I'm at a house party was like hey man i taught my dog to masturbate to pornography with its with its paws i would be like well i mean that's like i guess impress i didn't think a dog could do that like i am kind of impressed i guess but i don't want this like this this doesn't do anything for me, it's like a parlor trick. I am surprised you figured this out.
What value does this have? Yeah, how does the dog know who Farrah Fawcett is? I have questions, sure, but it doesn't give me anything. Like, who Farrah Fawcett was, Garrison? No.
Oh, goddammit. What do you think I do? I don't know anymore.
Well, what I did is walk around the rest of Showstoppers. I stopped at this one booth that had an iPhone case with a little keyboard on the bottom that plugs in.
And I started messing around with it. And the guy at the booth walked up to me and made fun of me because he's like, you've never held a phone a phone with a keyboard he literally said like you've never had a blackberry before have you i'm like no like yeah you're typing all wrong on that there was a solid nine-day news cycle when barack obama newly the president revealed that he had a blackberry i do remember this i remember that which sounds like this.
Huge deal. I remember that, which sounds like a lifetime ago.
There was a company called RIM once, and they made a tablet that was pretty good, and we only made a couple of rim job jokes about it, but it didn't do very well, and so I gave it to my dad, and accidentally there was still a picture of my dick on it. Anyway, that's a story for another day.
Cool. These are the kind of things you get recording at 11.56pm on Tuesday night at CES.
We've got to get to bed. But no, he made fun of me for not knowing how to use a smartphone keyboard.
He did the right thing. I don't need to use that because I have a keyboard on my phone built in already.
It's much faster. So anyway, we stopped at this company that makes, well, now just makes the software to use in conjunction with the augmented reality glasses and any like high powered laptop, specifically the laptops that have like built in like, you know, like co-pilots because they require like higher processing power.
They have an NPU or something like that. Yeah, like an AMP.
processing unit is what they're calling like the ai dedicated gpu thing effectively it allows you to hook up these glasses and and run you know possibly infinite meta monitors using ar and and we talked about this company uh last year because we saw them at showstoppers you put on the glasses and it's like you've got six monitors or whatever that are all full size. And it's actually really easy to use.
It works very well. It's seamless.
It's nice. It's good quality, easy to use.
You can move the monitors around. It's an excellent, excellent gadget.
We talked to them last year and the main thing that was holding us back on it is that you needed to use their own proprietary laptop. It was their own laptop and it wasn't a great one it was just like a linux laptop it didn't it didn't have everything i like i i want out of my own personal laptop and we were still impressed with it then it was still it was still good yeah and now you can just use any high-powered laptop with it essentially so it's lovely to see that improved we saw this lovely like like very small foldable projector oh yeah that was cool what's the company that company name because we should Because we should be giving out the names of these.
Yes, the AR glasses and software system is called Spacetop. Very good by a company called Sightful.
It works great. But yeah, this little folding projector currently has a Kickstarter.
The company is called AuraZen. Yeah, AuraZen.
Specifically, it was the ZIP the zip trifold projector right now it's it's a 720p very small foldable projector it has a whole it has like like a auto focusing auto keystone they're working to get it up to 1080p but they're running a kickstarter right now to ship uh in about three months super good quality stuff if you're a gadget person you know like it felt like a quality piece of electronics in my hands. The way it snapped when it closed just felt good.
I think I'm going to buy one. It's exactly what I want for traveling, which is the ability to, it goes up to 80 inches of screen and very good resolution.
The ability to just have that plugged in to a battery or the wall and my laptop and wherever I happen to be, I've got a movie screen that I don't have to worry about the fucking hooking up a TV to my laptop or some shit. It doesn't need Wi-Fi to work.
You just can cast from your phone. A-U-R-Z-E-N, zip trifold projector.
R-A-Z-N, yep. Yep.
I think they're selling them for $250 right now. That's for the Kickstarter.
the for the kickstarter the kickstarter will go up a little when it's a product but we saw it it works they they had a lot of they they had tracking and stuff so it like automatically would focus and it auto focuses and it like it scales correctly for where it's projecting uh it automatically like adjusts like the tilt of it so that it you know yeah obviously this isn't the full review because we don't own one but from everything we could tell by looking at it in the moment it's we tried it out i hooked up my phone to it as i went to my phone screen i realized i have uh a slightly i would say artful lewd image of an angel sure i quickly uh swiped away from we shouldn't show your dick to your home screen of my phone. You know, things can always be worse.
Things can always be worse. But I think where we'll end is, and this actually is not entirely in order, because this is the next, after we had that conversation with our friend Jack J, which just left me thinking about like, some people aren't really people, right? That's what I kept thinking about.
This whole thing is a sham. It's all for rubes.
It's soulless. We immediately walk over and we just kind of like randomly turn a corner and there's like a human shin, like tibia amphibia basically with like a carbon fiber, you know, frame around it.
That's roughly the shape of like a person's- Lower leg. Lower leg's called bio leg it's a powered microprocessor knee made in japan where it is a prosthetic but unlike most prosthetics it is powered and has a muscle built into it so like when you lift up your prosthetic it doesn't hang and it doesn't lock it actually has a degree of motion and it feels like what- It lifts the rest of the leg with it.

What your remaining muscles,

like it measures based on like,

it can like take measurements from them

and it can act intelligently based on that.

And I know that it works

because the inventor was there

and he was a man who was missing his leg below the knee

and had built this for himself.

And he spent like 10 years working on this. Yeah, eight years, he said.
8 years. And that's like really the thing that is like so both like addictive and also like this like very tonal whiplash you get at CES is you will go from like this dead-eyed con man trying to scam the world so he can do God knows what kinds of other harms with absolutely nothing, nothing inside of him at all.
and then i lost my leg and i built a better prosthetic to help the entire world and that's like 30 seconds between those two experiences and like that's like that's like the dark magic of ces and like i don't like i'm not like anti-tech like i i think there i think technology can really improve people's lives if used well and sometimes i get kind of blackpilled walking around ces but then we'll stumble across this like you know someone who like literally lost a leg and made themselves their own better leg eight years figuring out how to do this yeah is winning awards for it award-winning like tech innovations it's changing your as a who has lost your lower like changing, being able to like have a normal gait and balance again like massive potential to improve people's lives as a result of this. Yeah.
Just steps away from AI ska and the Donald Trump mask over the laundry folding robot. The company is again Bionic

M and it's the Bioleg.

The Bioleg is the product. Yeah, the Bioleg is

the product by Bionic M.

I'm going to try to check it out more tomorrow at

Eureka Park, which at this point, you know, that'll

be in like maybe future episodes

come next week. But I guess

this closes our actual

week of coverage.

Let's go get fucked up and eat Japanese food.

Oh, I'm down.

Yeah.

I'm down.

Let's do it.

Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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