It Could Happen Here Weekly 164

Transcript

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 7 So, as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

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Speaker 19 I turned off news altogether.

Speaker 20 I hate to say it, but I don't trust much of anything.

Speaker 21 It's the rage bait.

Speaker 22 It feels like it's trying to divide people.

Speaker 23 We got clear facts.

Speaker 19 Maybe we could calm down a little

Speaker 26 NBC News brings you clear reporting.

Speaker 25 Let's meet at the facts.

Speaker 26 Let's move forward from there.

Speaker 25 NBC News, reporting for America.

Speaker 19 High key.

Speaker 27 Listen to High Key, a bold, joyful, unfiltered culture podcast.

Speaker 28 Speaking of crunchy, what did you think of your trainer's run?

Speaker 30 I was amazing on that show.

Speaker 28 Sister, were you? I had

Speaker 32 and I was better than you would be if you went.

Speaker 29 This is exactly why Bob is a good drag queen because she won't back down.

Speaker 28 Of course she won't go

Speaker 27 I felt like you came in real hot, real strong, and that is just not the game. Girl, yeah.

Speaker 33 I'm going to tell you why you're wrong, and I can't wait to do this.

Speaker 35 Please!

Speaker 36 Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 38 It's 1972.

Speaker 39 A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.

Speaker 20 Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 43 All they have left is a life raft and each other.

Speaker 22 This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan.

Speaker 47 Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

Speaker 49 Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

Speaker 51 Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 52 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.

Speaker 58 Hi, everyone. It's James coming at you with 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.

Speaker 58 Thousands of people have been displaced. Five people have died that we know of so far.

Speaker 58 Thousands of structures have been burned, and many, many people in A will be finding themselves out of their homes with nowhere to go and with very few resources.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 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 sidewalkproject.org, K-Town for all.

Speaker 58 That's letter K-T-O-W-N-F-O-R-A-L-L dot O-R-G.

Speaker 58 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

Speaker 58 S-O-L-I-D-A-R-I-T-Y.

Speaker 63 All right, I'm going to go rest my voice.

Speaker 64 Order in the court. Order in the court.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 Everybody get it? Because I'm a judge now, legally? Because that's how the legal system works.

Speaker 36 All those rumors finally have come true, huh?

Speaker 51 No, municipal judge, Garrison.

Speaker 71 That's not fed.

Speaker 72 Okay, okay.

Speaker 73 Municipal. Municipal.

Speaker 74 You're right, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 51 I will now, for the rest of my life, be able to say when people ask questions, well, as a man of the law,

Speaker 65 which I'm very much looking forward to,

Speaker 82 not only able to say, Robert, but quite likely to say.

Speaker 81 Anyway, that's all I got.

Speaker 83 All right.

Speaker 84 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?

Speaker 51 The Honorable Robert Evans. And I actually did

Speaker 51 the judge who made me a judge sent me a gavel, but I didn't grab it for this one. So I just used, I have

Speaker 51 the barrel and lower receiver from an antique saw-off shotgun that belonged to a bootlegger, and I just sort of slammed that into my table.

Speaker 80 Great.

Speaker 19 I'm sure our editor will love that.

Speaker 66 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 88 But before we broadcast, so you have a sort-off shotgun.

Speaker 51 It's not functional. It's been destroyed.

Speaker 58 I see. I see.
Good. Didn't want a little Ruby Ridge moment.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 84 We've got Mia Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and the dishonorable Robert Evans.

Speaker 19 And Sophie Lichterman.

Speaker 84 Oh, yes.

Speaker 84 Me. Yeah.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 58 One does not post on Blue Sky, Sophie. One skeets.

Speaker 84 I really hope that's not true because that's really embarrassing.

Speaker 71 Unfortunately, they really tried to get that off the ground.

Speaker 51 I don't see anyone actually using Skeet.

Speaker 58 I saw someone using it in French, and it was a real moment.

Speaker 90 I use Skeet. Garrison.

Speaker 19 Instead of saying send tweet, now I just say send skeet in conversation. Everyone loves it.

Speaker 92 Do you re-skeet?

Speaker 93 Is that a thing?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I guess you do. I guess you do.

Speaker 84 And we're moving on.

Speaker 84 I'm just going to throw out some of the questions we received online.

Speaker 84 I'm not even going to say the name of the app again because I'm afraid being labeled as an old garrison's embarrassed by me, I can tell.

Speaker 95 I didn't say that. But you thought it.

Speaker 84 But you thought it.

Speaker 95 I didn't think that.

Speaker 66 You did.

Speaker 84 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

Speaker 58 i don't thank you for your questions i'm actively angry at you for your questions that's why you're the dishonorable yeah start rich if you want to be a freelance journalist because you'll progressively become poorer yeah

Speaker 51 it's my 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.

Speaker 51 Like, being an entertainer has always been what's funded my journalism.

Speaker 19 I guess my advice would be get really autistic about something.

Speaker 98 Problematic.

Speaker 19 Just like one thing. Just one thing.
I get like really into it to the point where it kind of takes over your life.

Speaker 19 Your personal life starts fading away. It kind of blends into your whole state of existence.
And only then will

Speaker 19 you actually get good at that thing.

Speaker 51 Yep.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 But that's kind of how I've rolled and it's been okay.

Speaker 51 Yeah. You just finished 36 hours of digging into the life of a school shooter.

Speaker 51 And I also built the back of my career spending hours and hours digging through the online lives of mass shooters.

Speaker 101 And you don't have to do that, but you do have to do that thing, which is yeah,

Speaker 104 exactly what Garrison said.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And that people don't, other people don't understand how important it is.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 in journalism was taking it seriously.

Speaker 106 You got to do that kind of thing.

Speaker 51 If you do that kind of thing, you build a name for yourself.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 58 Yeah, I think it's good advice. I would say if you want to get started freelancing, It's a good idea to join the IWW Freelance Journalists Union.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 109 Fuck no, it's like it's chaos.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I'm not foreseeing good things. There'll be a lot of executive orders that are

Speaker 19 probably bad, things that aren't great.

Speaker 51 Yeah, I think that

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 yeah he he's going to do as much of what he's promised to 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 he could get there's a very good chance things will get bogged down and whatnot but like he will try yeah that's that's my take yeah i think 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 you're if you're planning to buy a computer go ahead and grab that fucker now if you can.

Speaker 19 If you're getting anything from overseas, you should get it in the few weeks that you still can.

Speaker 88 Yeah, if it has a battery that ain't made here.

Speaker 84 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

Speaker 84 things come up, just in case.

Speaker 99 There you go.

Speaker 84 And, you know, that's not terrible advice.

Speaker 113 Yeah.

Speaker 58 I think in terms of executive orders, he will try and further restrict access to asylum,

Speaker 58 try and further change that 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.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 We made a whole podcast about this, but Stephen Miller has suggested that they might do some of those things. So yeah, not impossible.
Probably won't be a great day.

Speaker 84 Somebody's getting fired the first week.

Speaker 71 That's for sure.

Speaker 84 Probably first day.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 I don't know if...

Speaker 51 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 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 probably probably will not immediately act against the press and in a legal sense as the president it 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.

Speaker 51 But I think he there will be attempts like to fuck with libel laws and stuff, especially as things go on.

Speaker 84 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

Speaker 84 two years now, and

Speaker 116 for

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 Miserably hard.

Speaker 21 Yeah, we've seen it.

Speaker 51 Sophie has. It's been a nightmare.

Speaker 51 Harder than I have have worked on anything else this year. Like, it's been nuts.

Speaker 86 Yeah.

Speaker 51 And here's the thing that sucks for no reason.

Speaker 63 No reason at all.

Speaker 51 Like, 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.

Speaker 83 Correct.

Speaker 51 But we can't say anymore 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?

Speaker 97 Why haven't they done this yet?

Speaker 51 We're talking like technical things or like, you know, things like a paid subscription.

Speaker 113 And they're like, why haven't they gotten around to it yet?

Speaker 51 And the answer is always some infuriating bullshit based on the 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 you if you do it this way or whatever like some sort of bullshit that makes it impossible it's not that we we we want to make this is 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 CoolerZone Media on Apple.

Speaker 84 All right, we're back.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 While this is a communally hosted show, I feel like each of you do very different things.

Speaker 84 So your answers are going to be all over the place. So Garrison.

Speaker 19 Oh, well, I mean, paying rent's a great motivator. Sure.

Speaker 66 Yes.

Speaker 62 Yes.

Speaker 51 Understated.

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 24 for a mortgage.

Speaker 68 Turns out that helps.

Speaker 19 It's a quite compelling motivator. And sometimes it has required the assistance of, you know, caffeine

Speaker 30 or other things.

Speaker 19 I have a variety of playlists to help me in when I'm in like different moods.

Speaker 19 I definitely will about, you know, maybe twice a month, I just do a complete, like, a complete body check to my sleep schedule to get a special project finished.

Speaker 92 And that's just kind of part of the deal, uh at least in terms of how i work and not not not everyone uh does it this way though maybe maybe people are more healthy than me yeah for me okay so the easiest way something gets done is just pure rage i get really angry at something and i come back and just do it like it just comes out the word yeah anger is a great motivation awesome yeah uh the other fun one is pure joy at something funny happening like this the shinzoabe assassination easiest writing i've ever done in my life sometimes it just flows yeah

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 19 That's right. That's right.

Speaker 60 Yep.

Speaker 92 But I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance.

Speaker 71 Yeah.

Speaker 92 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,

Speaker 92 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 podcast, but I've seen it happen, right?

Speaker 92 I've seen all of you go and do things that wouldn't have happened. And I've, you know, it's a weird situation, right?

Speaker 92 Because like 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 very large hammer and deploying it against our enemies, can work and will work.

Speaker 92 And that is, you know, that's how I get out of bed every morning.

Speaker 92 We're building the hammer and we're swinging it.

Speaker 113 Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

Speaker 58 Very large hammer will be a banging name for a podcast.

Speaker 87 I agree.

Speaker 24 I agree.

Speaker 85 Yeah, there's a

Speaker 51 great speech in the comic series Trans Metropolitan about how journalism is a gun that you wire up to your eyes and your ears and several other organs in order to shoot at the world.

Speaker 51 And that's, I think, a good way to keep yourself doing it when it feels like you're just shouting into a void.

Speaker 93 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I really like the process of writing.

Speaker 58 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 receiving trauma, which I also do for a job.

Speaker 126 Really?

Speaker 131 It can be

Speaker 107 sometimes I can't sleep.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 And I think I owe it to them to do my best to tell those stories as well as I can. Yeah.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 People who just like on Sunday night gave their money, which I know like none of us have enough money right now to help people who are displaced in Rojava. Like

Speaker 58 all that stuff really makes it feel like if you tell a good enough story, people will care. That's always what I felt.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 And that really makes me happy. So I want to keep doing that.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 And

Speaker 83 what we

Speaker 108 do

Speaker 84 is not really,

Speaker 84 while it is a job,

Speaker 84 it matters so much.

Speaker 84 And the second part is if I don't do my job, the amount of people's lives that that impacts

Speaker 36 is a lot of fucking people.

Speaker 84 And I give a shit about each and every one of them.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 79 Robert,

Speaker 84 did you have anything to add? You were speaking, and then I talked.

Speaker 51 Did I have?

Speaker 132 Did I already not give an answer?

Speaker 84 You gave an answer, that's why, but you were starting to speak.

Speaker 51 Oh, yeah, I do it for the fame, baby.

Speaker 31 Great

Speaker 19 next:

Speaker 84 What episode or episodes were your favorite this year to make or otherwise?

Speaker 96 Yeah.

Speaker 84 My favorite this year were definitely James' series from the Darien Gap. That was an incredible series.
I'm so unbelievably proud of it.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 84 I'm also quite proud of Robert Robert Garrison and I surviving the RNC and DNC.

Speaker 134 The RNC was a good time.

Speaker 135 Like legitimately.

Speaker 117 I had a great time

Speaker 44 fooling the worst people in the world.

Speaker 51 It was the DNC that fucked me up. Yeah.

Speaker 94 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Same. I was like destroyed emotionally after the DNC.
Yeah.

Speaker 84 The DNC was really a huge bummer. And then Mia has covered some of the most important labor stories that like nobody covers.

Speaker 79 Absolutely.

Speaker 84 Yeah. And like without those,

Speaker 84 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 was

Speaker 84 something.

Speaker 69 Yeah.

Speaker 84 Some great writing, my friend.

Speaker 84 I answered now everybody else has to.

Speaker 69 Well, I'll start with Mia.

Speaker 66 There's weirdly a few this year.

Speaker 96 Cool.

Speaker 92 I normally isn't. I like the Boeing ones.
That was fun.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 92 The one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview Dr. Julia Serrano, who,

Speaker 92 if you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it.

Speaker 68 Great book.

Speaker 123 Yeah.

Speaker 92 Whipping Girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the

Speaker 92 like the concept of misgendering is like from that book, right? Like the language that we use to talk about transness today, like. is is directly her

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 92 And I'm also really happy about the organizing one that I did because I've gotten so many messages from people who were just like,

Speaker 135 oh, wait, my knitting is useful to organizing.

Speaker 36 And I'm like, yes, yes, it is.

Speaker 19 You're knitting. You're sewing.

Speaker 123 Incredible, staggeringly useful.

Speaker 30 Yeah. So I'm proud of that one.

Speaker 68 Yeah. Let's take a quick break.

Speaker 84 And then, Garrison, Robert, James, you can answer that question.

Speaker 11 And we're back.

Speaker 95 James, how about you?

Speaker 58 I'm proud of doing the Darien ones, I think. Like, I'm so happy that we finally got to a place where we could do that, where we could fund that.

Speaker 58 Like, I've been trying to do that, like I said, for nearly a decade.

Speaker 60 And

Speaker 58 yeah,

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 58 But I really liked how many people messaged me and were like, I sent this to my father, uncle, not just dudes, aunts and the mums too, I'm sure, and like non-binary relatives, but like, well, maybe not, because they sent it to their right-wing relatives and

Speaker 58 they like learned some compassion. That's always what you want to do.

Speaker 58 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.

Speaker 124 And so, yeah, that made me really happy.

Speaker 58 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, much shorter segment.

Speaker 24 Let me just tell you, I think we can all look forward to a white Christmas this year.

Speaker 84 Jesus, motherfucker,

Speaker 66 set him up.

Speaker 69 It's my own fault.

Speaker 62 Oh,

Speaker 84 Wow.

Speaker 19 I guess I'll go now. I'll just

Speaker 19 clean out the aftertaste of that.

Speaker 96 So

Speaker 141 even worse.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 51 Yeah, there's no one left in New Jersey now.

Speaker 19 They've all been taken away by these unidentified trophies.

Speaker 51 That actually happened three days ago. It just took a long time for the rest of the country to notice or care.

Speaker 78 Bree Springsteen hasn't made a song about it, so we have no way of knowing.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And then I guess, I mean, to echo Sophie, I had a great time at the RNC.

Speaker 68 It was fun.

Speaker 19 A sentence I never thought I would say. Yeah.
And particularly the RNC Grinder episode, I still think is

Speaker 19 pretty good.

Speaker 83 It was pretty great.

Speaker 35 It's a banger.

Speaker 84 The amount of places that Garrison and I snuck into at the RNC

Speaker 84 a time.

Speaker 19 It was really dangerous too, because I was having to like do my RNC research next to Robert and Sophie the whole time. And oh boy, it's like a minefield scrolling through that app.

Speaker 121 Yes.

Speaker 94 An experience, to say the least.

Speaker 84 Any thoughts on the proposed 2028 general strike? How are people feeling about that? I'll start with Mia.

Speaker 123 Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good idea.

Speaker 92 Like, there's definitely sort of

Speaker 92 immediately going into this naysaying a little bit. There's definitely problems with it.

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 92 And even some of the successful ones in the last decade that people have pulled off haven't been that effective.

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 92 I did an episode about that a few weeks ago. I don't know, a couple of months ago.
I don't remember when I did this episode. I'm sorry.

Speaker 118 I can't remember anything I've ever done.

Speaker 92 But

Speaker 92 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.

Speaker 19 So yeah, cautiously optimistic.

Speaker 97 Anyone else have anything they want to add?

Speaker 19 The time to start figuring out those logistics is now.

Speaker 19 It's not waiting until 2027. Yeah.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 51 maybe if the midterms go well for Democrats, maybe Democrats stop that.

Speaker 51 But it's just as plausible and probably more plausible that Democrats line up with Republicans to attempt to criminalize something like that.

Speaker 58 Yeah, it's strange to be seeing something like this organized so far off. Like it's like, yes, it's not something any of us are familiar with.

Speaker 51 Which it has to be, to be clear.

Speaker 121 Yeah, it has to be.

Speaker 58 Barring like an actual coup, that's the only way you get a general strike, right? Like either something so

Speaker 58 earth-shattering that everyone's so, 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.

Speaker 58 But it's just not something we're familiar with. I love a 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.

Speaker 51 Yeah, the only responsible way to characterize the organized left in the United States is a complete and utter failure.

Speaker 118 Like it has been a calamity for the causes that it seeks to

Speaker 97 represent.

Speaker 51 And a lot of that is because of like fucking bullshit online clicktivism. You know, we're all going to do a general strike.

Speaker 51 Everybody get ready. Next week, we're going to do it.

Speaker 76 You know, shit like that is

Speaker 51 just so deeply unserious.

Speaker 51 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 consequences of conservative policies hit home by 2028.

Speaker 51 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?

Speaker 84 And lastly, do each of you have, you know, a movie or a book or something you would like to recommend?

Speaker 58 In 2025, when I finish my books, you should buy it.

Speaker 58 yes but re-general strike i've been reading a book called presente which is in english uh but it's about how san francisco dock workers blocked a shipment of weapons to el salvador

Speaker 58 and it just seems a very relevant book and they 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 uh 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.

Speaker 58 It's a really good film, I think, of understand to help you understand the Kurdish freedom movement. And it's worth a watch.

Speaker 58 It's not like necessarily a happy feel-good film, but I think it's worth a watch, especially if you've recently become interested in that because of what you've heard on the podcast.

Speaker 84 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I have a couple.

Speaker 92 So I'm trans fiction pilled right now.

Speaker 92 We're giving you fiction from trans authors.

Speaker 51 Would you say you're transfixed?

Speaker 57 Wow.

Speaker 36 I walked right into that one.

Speaker 69 yeah like

Speaker 92 drove drove directly into it like jfk's head into that bullet oh my god

Speaker 84 wow we spent a lot of time with each other

Speaker 92 yeah the first one i wanted to talk about is the gunrunner and her hounds by maria ying which is the the pen name of a couple of authors Okay, so

Speaker 92 this is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime lord and her do bodyguard who is also a lesbian and it it rules.

Speaker 92 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. It's you need you need more on hinge lesbians in your life.

Speaker 92 Go read this.

Speaker 92 The other one is One of the Boys. This is forthcoming.

Speaker 92 We're going to release May 13, 2025 by Victoria Zeller. And it's about a trans girl who's like the kicker on her football team.

Speaker 92 And she has to like leave the team because she transitions, but then the team needs her back because they don't have a kicker.

Speaker 90 And it's, it's fun. It's, it's a good time.

Speaker 92 So you should, you should get that when it comes out.

Speaker 51 Yeah. So I'm actually right now in the middle of a book that I found myself surprised by how much I've liked.

Speaker 51 It's called When Paris Went Dark, and it is a history of the occupation of Paris under the Nazis.

Speaker 51 That is a really fascinating social history by Ronald Rosebottom that I found very like emotionally affecting, especially in light of, you know, some things going on.

Speaker 51 And yeah, just kind of a fascinating look at the psychology of a people, of like of

Speaker 51 an entire people kind of grappling with what's about to happen to them in the wake of the failure of the French army and then what happens next.

Speaker 51 And then I would also recommend Setting the Desert on Fire by James Barr, which is one of the books about T.E. Lawrence that

Speaker 51 I cited in the T.E. Lawrence episodes.
If you are at all interested in the realities of needing to fight an insurgent war,

Speaker 19 I guess just two recent things that I've enjoyed. Finally finished The Steppenwolf by Herman Hess.

Speaker 113 Ah, yes.

Speaker 19 I enjoyed that deeply.

Speaker 19 It kind of

Speaker 19 picked my Twin Peaks, The Return Brain. So that was pleasant.

Speaker 19 And for a more recent release, Luca Guadagino's new movie, Queer, adapting adapting the short story by Willie M.

Speaker 70 S Burroughs.

Speaker 19 I found this movie to be utterly fascinating and

Speaker 19 transfixing to use the term from me

Speaker 99 Robert.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So yeah, good movie.

Speaker 121 Awesome.

Speaker 84 I just have one movie to recommend and it's one i one of my favorite movies of all time the original 1973 72 73 73 the wicker man

Speaker 84 not the 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 play it in theaters and i highly recommend that experience It's really fun, especially at the end.

Speaker 84 I see it in theaters or watch it at least once or twice a year.

Speaker 83 and vibes are good.

Speaker 84 Yeah, that's it for our Q ⁇ A episode. Thanks for submitting and goodbye.

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Speaker 173 It's the gaming event of the year, featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

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Speaker 183 Com, com.

Speaker 84 Welcome to It Could Happen Year. 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.

Speaker 84 And one of the things I predicted early on, I was like, I think Kim Kardashian will be part of the Trump cabinet.

Speaker 19 And like, honestly, goals at this point.

Speaker 84 But I'm not that far off though. Like, because essentially what he has done is he's basically tried to go for people that are good on TV.

Speaker 19 It's true.

Speaker 100 It's true.

Speaker 84 And like going off of that reality TV energy.

Speaker 58 Finally, we will acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

Speaker 84 I was vibing, okay, James.

Speaker 81 I was vibing.

Speaker 90 No vibes allowed. No vibes allowed.

Speaker 58 Sophie, genocide.

Speaker 84 Just, just, I know.

Speaker 107 James. All right.

Speaker 115 Vibe aside.

Speaker 84 God. All right.

Speaker 84 Mia, Mia Wogg's here. I'm Sophie Lee Drew.
Garrison's here. James Stout's here.
And the dishonorable Robert Evans is also here.

Speaker 51 I judge that nickname bad.

Speaker 19 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 68 Wow.

Speaker 19 Let's go over some of our terrible 2024 predictions just briefly.

Speaker 19 Now, unfortunately, there was a lot of election ones, which were very sad to listen to.

Speaker 68 Oh, no.

Speaker 19 Now, we were correct about many things.

Speaker 19 We did talk about how... Harris would probably be a really bad candidate to run against Trump.
Totally forgot about that.

Speaker 36 We did.

Speaker 69 We did. Yeah.
Huge jump for us.

Speaker 24 Massive health for the country.

Speaker 72 Oops.

Speaker 65 See, 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.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Well, I think that's just because we were still just reeling from that debate so bad. Yeah.
That like anything was like, oh my God, there's like a life.

Speaker 186 Look at how she can walk 30, 40 feet at a time.

Speaker 66 Exactly.

Speaker 36 Sentence.

Speaker 79 Good God.

Speaker 19 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, uh, Mia, Mia predicted that RFK Jr.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 76 Yeah, because Vance was so bad at it.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 84 Stand by that.

Speaker 19 And that's what happened. He's still in the orbit, but he's not super close.
Sophie talked about possibly Christy Noam as getting linked in with Trump, maybe for VP.

Speaker 19 Now, that didn't happen for VP, but Christy Noam is in the cabinet.

Speaker 84 Good job, past me.

Speaker 19 Yeah, and Robert said that he would not be shocked if Trump got close with Tulsi Gabbard.

Speaker 69 Oh, Robert.

Speaker 81 And

Speaker 19 other less good predictions. I predicted that a Daily Wire host would get pied.
Unfortunately,

Speaker 19 did not come to pass. There's still time.

Speaker 19 It's still 2024.

Speaker 19 Not when this airs. Not when this airs.

Speaker 19 Yes, Kim Kardashian getting into politics. It didn't really happen.
She kind of stayed at her regular coast level. Sorry, Sophie.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I mean, and she was doing that with the Biden campaign as well.

Speaker 68 Not as visibly.

Speaker 19 The Harris campaign. She was meeting with Harris multiple times.
she she kind of stayed at this like distant but like talkative place that's the kardashian way distant and talkative

Speaker 19 speaking of speaking of uh 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

Speaker 19 so the 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.

Speaker 78 Yes, nothing happened.

Speaker 19 And I think it's actually kind of interesting. And we will maybe unpack that in the coming months.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 84 That was a lot.

Speaker 19 Also, sorry, Morrissey is still alive. David Scavidge is still alive.
Putin is still alive. And though James did say that Assad would eat it, and though Assad didn't die,

Speaker 131 he kind of did eat it.

Speaker 96 Quote unquote.

Speaker 101 I mean, James, yeah, that's got to be the biggest dub of the year.

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 131 Damn.

Speaker 90 I've forgotten all about that.

Speaker 58 Really happy with myself now.

Speaker 84 James, I'm so proud of you, buddy.

Speaker 104 You got to pick another one this year.

Speaker 93 Min on long, baby.

Speaker 65 He's next.

Speaker 19 I guess let's start with some kind of dictator predictions. What do we think will happen to like a dictator in 2025?

Speaker 58 Which is going to die, do we think, or just general dictator predictions?

Speaker 19 Dictator predictions. It can be, maybe we get a new one, you know? Maybe we get a new fancy one.

Speaker 60 Yeah, well, I don't know.

Speaker 58 Yeah, something's happening in January.

Speaker 66 I have two.

Speaker 92 Well, one of them, I mean, it's kind of a hack one, but I don't think, I don't think the June to Myanmar makes it out of 2025.

Speaker 58 Yeah, I think not in the version it is today.

Speaker 57 Yeah, that's the hack one.

Speaker 92 The other one is another Assad one is: I think someone actually does assassinate Assad while he's like, like, he gets too full of himself and he goes to Abu Dhabi and some Muslim Brotherhood guy just whacks him.

Speaker 66 Yep.

Speaker 19 Okay, my Assad prediction is he becomes a Russia Today host.

Speaker 19 That's my Assad prediction.

Speaker 84 Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Speaker 58 Now he's going to open his ophthalmology clinic.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 85 Congratulations, guys.

Speaker 51 Let's bring him on. Sophie,

Speaker 51 get him on the Zoom. Tell him he can hop in the room now.

Speaker 88 Bashar, baby.

Speaker 19 We are merging with Tenant Media to bring out our friend Asar Alas.

Speaker 190 Welcome to the pod, Bashar.

Speaker 76 He's actually doing a whole media tour with the pod save guys next week. That's got to be fascinating.

Speaker 88 Pod Save Bathus Syria,

Speaker 68 the most cursed podcast in the world.

Speaker 84 My dictator/slash world leader prediction is that this might be Netanyahu's.

Speaker 19 I was thinking

Speaker 84 last ride.

Speaker 51 From your mouths to whatever fucking clot is working its way through his coronary system.

Speaker 71 God.

Speaker 84 In a year, I really fucking hope I really fucking hope I'm right.

Speaker 90 We all do.

Speaker 193 I don't know what else to say there.

Speaker 58 That's a big thing for the world.

Speaker 19 Yeah. I mean, we are verging into not doing predictions, just doing hopes and dreams.
Yeah.

Speaker 58 Well, I did Morrissey like that last year and we didn't get it. And I'm sad.

Speaker 19 We need some hopes and dreams out in the world, I think.

Speaker 116 Fair enough. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Do you know what else we need, team?

Speaker 194 Money.

Speaker 19 From these advertisers. That's right.

Speaker 84 And we are back.

Speaker 84 All right, Garrison.

Speaker 121 What's next?

Speaker 19 So, usually in the middle of these prediction episodes, I like doing our third annual death segment.

Speaker 19 Who do we think will die? And I guess

Speaker 19 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, you know, have circumstances change.

Speaker 19 Though, for this year's death segment, we have a bit bit of a twist.

Speaker 19 So it turns out about two years ago, on Spotify Rapt Day, we all woke up to the news that both Angela Battlementi was embarrassingly my number one Spotify artist that year, but also

Speaker 19 that Henry Kissinger died.

Speaker 111 Honey.

Speaker 19 And this Spotify wrapped day,

Speaker 19 we will come to the news that the United Healthcare CEO was gunned down in New York City. So, Spotify wrapped 2025.
Who's dying?

Speaker 19 Who's dying?

Speaker 81 On Spotify wrapped today.

Speaker 19 On Spotify wrapped day. So, this is like what? Late November, early December, we don't really know.

Speaker 19 Spotify wrapped death day predictions.

Speaker 84 So long.

Speaker 116 Farewell.

Speaker 84 Avid are saying goodbye, Mitch McConnell.

Speaker 141 That's a good one.

Speaker 50 That's an easy one, but okay.

Speaker 196 I'll give it to you.

Speaker 19 I'm thinking, like, who's got to get through most of the year, but not finish it out? You know, it's tough.

Speaker 51 I'm going to make my call tie up recip Erdogan.

Speaker 86 You know, that's, that's, that's my hope.

Speaker 51 That's a long shot, I know, because he doesn't seem like he's in bad health, but that's a big one.

Speaker 19 Kissinger was a long shot, too, because he was like arguably immortal.

Speaker 104 He'd kept living for so fucking long.

Speaker 84 So long. Farewell.
Ah, Viter Say goodbye.

Speaker 136 Elon Musk.

Speaker 19 I was going to say that.

Speaker 124 I think he might die.

Speaker 19 You think we're finally going to get that drug overdose, huh?

Speaker 93 He just seems to be spiraling so hard right now.

Speaker 68 The spiral's mad reel, yeah.

Speaker 51 He's getting everything he wants, though. I mean, that also.

Speaker 19 It's true. Sometimes that's dangerous.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 19 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 too far out of his control.

Speaker 51 He and two Secret Service agents are found dead with fentanyl-infected blow.

Speaker 19 Or, you know, maybe a SpaceX launch goes really wrong.

Speaker 19 Who's to say? Who's to say?

Speaker 19 Damn, I gotta think of

Speaker 19 who my Spotify rapped day death is.

Speaker 30 I have a long shot.

Speaker 92 My long shot is that sometime on Spotify Rap Day, JK Rowling sees a trans woman just like existing and gets so mad she has an aneurysm and dies.

Speaker 19 No, she's looking through the Spotify raps and she knows that trans women make the best music. And she sees it, gets so mad,

Speaker 19 she just kills over

Speaker 19 she trans investigates every single uh female artist on the spotify rap list and dies of sleep deprivation doing so her her own fans start trans investigating her this 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 in we're in like what like month month 10 11 of trump term uh two right

Speaker 19 the the right-wing nazi content creators are settling are settling into

Speaker 19 their kind of groove. Some of them aren't really happy

Speaker 19 at Trump not like, you know, carrying on all of his big lofty promises. And one, one disgruntled fan of Nick Fuentes

Speaker 19 does something crazy on Spotify Rapt Day. And that's, that's, that's my prediction: is that somehow some like really weird, like, like, stalker or fan does something to, to Mr.
Fuentes.

Speaker 19 Just pure prediction on like, just like, what would be the

Speaker 19 oddest thing to happen, but something that could totally make sense. Maybe it's like an old like Kanye fan, you know, from Kanye and Nick.

Speaker 58 From his Nazi era.

Speaker 81 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 19 I don't know. 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 That's my Spotify wrapped prediction.

Speaker 51 I have said for years, Nick Fuentes is going to go down live.

Speaker 107 Maybe live.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 75 Yeah.

Speaker 51 Like someone is going to take him down.

Speaker 75 Like it's that.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 19 That feels right.

Speaker 84 Do we have a non-categorized predictions? Is it that time yet?

Speaker 19 Sure. Now that we have finished our Spotify wrapped predictions, and I do not know who my top artist will be.

Speaker 19 This last year, it was Trent Reznor. So salute that flag.

Speaker 75 Okay, Garrison.

Speaker 19 Challenger soundtrack. That thing fucking bops.

Speaker 84 I tried to make Robert watch that on the way to, oh, was it the DNC or the RNC? I don't remember.

Speaker 84 But he wouldn't watch it with headphones. And so it was just on on the plane.
I think it was the DNC.

Speaker 121 That's terrible.

Speaker 51 Yeah, I think I think I was reading a Nick Land piece during that whole thing.

Speaker 198 Honestly, that's a vibe.

Speaker 19 That actually pairs quite well.

Speaker 70 I landed completely deranged.

Speaker 199 It was great.

Speaker 139 Ready to work.

Speaker 84 A prediction, a prediction that I have is that

Speaker 84 Trump basically tries to move a lot of the main time he spends to Mar-a-Lago versus the White House.

Speaker 84 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.

Speaker 58 Wink to White House.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 19 The Whiter House.

Speaker 110 What could he call us? Yeah.

Speaker 19 So true. So true.

Speaker 200 No.

Speaker 51 I'm kind of interested to watch what happens with AOC over the next year, because she has definitely become to a lot of folks, the progressive on the left, like a villain over the last year.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And we're like, oh, you've got to understand when things started out, this was a very different person.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 135 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 202 Now, I'm not saying that's a fair way to characterize her now or where she'll go.

Speaker 51 I'm just saying, like, I wouldn't be shocked if that's the way a lot of folks are looking at it in fucking a few years. Because I'm seeing, I'm hearing a lot of that now.

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 113 senescence.

Speaker 79 Yeah.

Speaker 139 Okay, my, my big one for the year is this is this is the year the economy finally collapses.

Speaker 92 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 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 collapses 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 it on down on this on the show show on any other fucking year.

Speaker 139 This is the year.

Speaker 92 The zombie economy will fall over dead. The necromancy cannot hold.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 84 And the housing market will still be trash.

Speaker 51 Yeah, and we will never afford homes and the housing housing's just going to get more expensive it will be interesting to see uh trump's entire all of his backers and his whole media thing like 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.

Speaker 75 Yeah.

Speaker 84 And before we go to a break, I just want to say the price of eggs will go up.

Speaker 58 We need to get chickens now.

Speaker 51 Oh, yeah, this bird flu thing is not going to help with eggs.

Speaker 97 Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

Speaker 65 Get your eggs now

Speaker 104 by thousands of dollars of eggs now.

Speaker 58 If only there was some kind of device to make eggs that you could have in your own garden.

Speaker 84 Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 84 It's time for ads.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 31 Oh, my God.

Speaker 19 If the economy is going to go down, I am going to be going up. Everyone's going to start buying CoolZone Coin because the US dollar becomes worthless.
Bitcoin's going to crash, too. It's fake.

Speaker 19 But CoolZone Coin has real fungible value.

Speaker 51 Well, yeah, the thing about CoolZone 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.

Speaker 99 So, you know,

Speaker 30 there's only so many cool zone coins that can ever be in circulation.

Speaker 19 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 coolzone coin going into 2025. That's right, everybody.

Speaker 60 Wow.

Speaker 58 Sell your house, buy coolzone coin.

Speaker 68 Do it. Have you seen Hook Garrison?

Speaker 69 I have seen Hook. I like Hooks.
Oh, of course, of course.

Speaker 81 Good, good, yeah.

Speaker 58 A classic.

Speaker 84 Have you seen Wicker Man 1973?

Speaker 19 You know, I actually haven't. I've been waiting to catch it in the theater.

Speaker 84 We will make this happen at some point. It's necessary.

Speaker 19 I would love to. I would love to.

Speaker 60 I bet.

Speaker 58 One thing I think is 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.

Speaker 58 And it will be a way for Trump to flex his border fascism.

Speaker 111 Yeah.

Speaker 58 Much like he did in 2018. Maybe they'll wait till the midterms again.
There's always a fun border disaster for the midterms.

Speaker 84 Could I just do one that might not be a prediction, but like a Sophie hope?

Speaker 66 Sure.

Speaker 94 Yeah, get it.

Speaker 48 Something has to happen to those Paul brothers.

Speaker 127 Oh, Sophie.

Speaker 65 Oh, yeah, that's possible.

Speaker 107 Yeah.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 19 That tracks.

Speaker 58 Sure, yeah. They decided to take on Bob Dylan in a boxing match and only one of them survives.

Speaker 51 I think Bob Dylan will live in this next year.

Speaker 19 I've just found Bob Dylan's tweets the purest things you've ever seen.

Speaker 36 He just tweets about what he's doing.

Speaker 60 What a hero.

Speaker 84 Netflix paying Jake Paul to billions of dollars to fight 900-year-old Mike Tyson and then Jake Paul coming in on like a vintage car and spraying his product and it having higher streaming numbers than the Super Bowl.

Speaker 121 Is that real? Yes.

Speaker 90 To be fair, that was a rancid Super Bowl.

Speaker 84 Rancid Super Bowl.

Speaker 84 This cannot

Speaker 84 be.

Speaker 58 Most of us just turned in on the off chance that Jake Paul would die.

Speaker 19 Yes, that is true.

Speaker 90 That is true.

Speaker 93 Or at least get bitten.

Speaker 84 Yeah, all of us were hoping that Mike Tyson was not, in fact, 60 years old, but he is 60 years old so uh yeah i something god yeah something something's got to give oh and there won't be a left-wing joe rogan thank you so much oh i don't know sophie i think i can as soon as we launch cool zone coin i think we can really oh my god

Speaker 84 there'll be some there'll be somebody trying to be

Speaker 145 oh sophie there we're already uh by the way it's time for me to do our new ad plug you've heard of how good elk meat is for you and you've heard of how liver is a superfood Well, now try new elk liver steaks.

Speaker 51 It's just ground-up liver, shoved inside a steak.

Speaker 107 I send it through the mail, through FedEx, five-day delivery.

Speaker 51 It is not refrigerated in any way.

Speaker 19 No refrigeration. It's better at root temp.

Speaker 90 Better at root temp.

Speaker 58 Go to get the healthy bacteria.

Speaker 210 It gives you mystical powers.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 30 Yeah, yeah, good chance.

Speaker 19 We have some brave and strong governor is gonna, is gonna salute the troops and send out our proud National Guard boys to fight off ICE. And that's just a battle I would love to see.

Speaker 19 I've been wanting to see that ever since Portland 2020. I've wanted to see National Guard troops fight against federal forces.

Speaker 51 Two groups of men who don't really know how to use their guns using their guns.

Speaker 60 No.

Speaker 81 It's going to be amazing.

Speaker 19 It's a battle I've wanted to see for like five years.

Speaker 211 Who's plate carriers at the top closer to their nipples?

Speaker 141 It's anyone's game.

Speaker 68 I need to see it.

Speaker 19 I need to see it.

Speaker 121 Come on.

Speaker 58 I would like to see it from a distance because that would be a shit show.

Speaker 21 Yeah, from a sizable distance.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 19 General Whitmer, let's go.

Speaker 212 Let's go.

Speaker 76 Expensing a fucking telescope for that firefight.

Speaker 111 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 58 A periscope, maybe.

Speaker 135 I trust the Iraqi army more than either of those sites.

Speaker 88 I've seen a lot of dudes fire guns while ducking behind a KB and holding the gun with their fire.

Speaker 75 I love doing that. It does look fun.

Speaker 203 It does look fun.

Speaker 136 It is, yeah.

Speaker 58 It does look fun. I would like to do that.
But they kicked me out of the range every time because of woke.

Speaker 102 How sad.

Speaker 19 Well, not anymore, James.

Speaker 58 Yeah, that's also the casualties.

Speaker 19 Not anymore, James. Woke is beaten.

Speaker 58 That's right. Yeah, they went woke.
They went broke. I'm going to buy the range.
That's right.

Speaker 81 We'll all fall from behind the bench rest now.

Speaker 71 Oh,

Speaker 24 mama.

Speaker 58 Other predictions. Maybe we'll get a good, solid couple of weeks of writing again, like Garrison said.
Like, maybe it'll only take a year or two this time.

Speaker 19 I don't think that anymore.

Speaker 213 Something will have to change.

Speaker 100 Yeah.

Speaker 77 Yeah.

Speaker 51 There will have to be a material change in either organizing or social conditions.

Speaker 51 Because people will need to either be vastly more desperate than they are right now, or they will need to have have a specific reason to think, well, this time getting out in the street might do something.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I think we're going to kind of continue the trends that we've been seeing, which points towards a bit of an apathy towards like big popular mobilizations and more towards kind of bizarre lone wolf attacks.

Speaker 19 Something that, you know, could be slight, even that's a slightly problematic or, you know, possibly darker predictions.

Speaker 19 I think we'll have like a really bad Luigi copycat within the next like four months.

Speaker 127 Sure.

Speaker 58 Yes. Years of Luigi.

Speaker 19 Like, it's not going to be good.

Speaker 101 It's not going to be good.

Speaker 51 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's security.

Speaker 194 The worst case is there's a big public firefight and a whole fuckload of people get hit.

Speaker 58 Yeah. Didn't I predict that there will be a big public crime with a 3D printed gun last year?

Speaker 19 I think that was the year before we talked about that.

Speaker 58 Damn. Okay.
so close.

Speaker 19 And yeah, you know, I mean, this, this, this certainly does kind of fit that mold. We'll see how much that like gets focused on in the trial and like continued reporting.

Speaker 58 Yeah.

Speaker 58 And in the legislation, too. I missed a death.
We can also include it in the hope section. Matthew Iglesias, that motherfucker,

Speaker 58 has been standing bullshit for 20 years.

Speaker 58 It just, it cannot continue.

Speaker 58 He's lost a juice a little bit. I think he's on the way out.

Speaker 51 Something very funny did just happen that we should talk about as a team.

Speaker 140 Senator Doug Mastriano,

Speaker 104 a 30-year U.S.

Speaker 97 Army veteran who taught at the war college,

Speaker 51 just tweeted an indignant, furious tweet about the U.S. government not being honest with Americans about what's happening with these drones.

Speaker 81 And the picture of the crashed drone is a TIE fighter that's like a model TIE fighter on the bed of a flatbed being driven.

Speaker 126 Yes!

Speaker 19 We've all lost our minds.

Speaker 89 Haught at the U.S.

Speaker 202 Army War College?

Speaker 58 They are not sending their best people.

Speaker 61 Oh, fuck. That's fucking

Speaker 68 amazing stuff.

Speaker 76 That's one of the best things I've seen all year.

Speaker 96 Oh, God.

Speaker 19 Finally, I like to close our predictions a little bit on Trump's cabinet.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 This is something something that we've been talking about a lot when do we think musk is gonna get the boot and based on the way trump's kind of positioned him i i'm not sure if it's gonna 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 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 the highest security clearance.

Speaker 35 That's funny.

Speaker 84 But like he has him sitting next to his his family at Thanksgiving. Totally.

Speaker 66 Yeah, which is cool.

Speaker 19 No, no, totally. And especially in like the three weeks after the election, they were like, they were like honeymoon, right?

Speaker 19 They were neck and neck. And some of that's going to start dissipating.
Musk can't get fully booted out because like, you know, the federal government needs. SpaceX and

Speaker 19 Musk's other like technologies. So like they will remain friendly, but like they're not going to be in this close position that they are now.

Speaker 19 Initially, I put that date for being March 20th, 2025, you know, two months after Inauguration Day. It's enough time to get, you know, for someone like Trump to get tired of Musk's personality.

Speaker 19 But I think I might stretch that out a little bit more now than my initial prediction.

Speaker 19 I think they might do a little bit more of a long-term game here.

Speaker 19 But that also means that Musk maybe will not have as much constant influence as what it was first looking like in those three months after the election.

Speaker 213 I think that RFK Jr.

Speaker 76 is probably pushed out of the picture before Musk is.

Speaker 84 Yeah, if he tries to get rid of the fucking polio vaccine, it's going to be a real quick trip to the unemployment line for Bobby Boy.

Speaker 105 Yeah, I really, I don't think Trump's that reckless.

Speaker 66 No.

Speaker 113 Like, that would be quite a line to get rid of the polio vaccine.

Speaker 16 Trump's also old.

Speaker 124 Like, he remembers.

Speaker 141 He's that old.

Speaker 84 But if RFK Jr. could get the wheat ingredient out of the McDonald's fries, I'd be most obliged.

Speaker 19 Oh, yeah. No, I'm sure that he's going to reverse 100 years of corn subsidies and get corn served out of our Coca-Cola.
I believe in RFK. Yeah.

Speaker 51 I feel pretty good about the continuing legality of Kratom as long as he's the HHS head.

Speaker 51 All it's going to take is one of Joe Rogan's friends speaking in his ear.

Speaker 106 We'll be all right.

Speaker 19 We're going to have legally required DMT for everyone in the country.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 196 Just, just, just

Speaker 99 calm everyone down.

Speaker 70 Take everything back a couple of steps.

Speaker 84 I'm going to go pet some dogs. So the podcast is over.
Happy new year, everyone.

Speaker 19 Happy, happy new, everyone. I do want everyone to pick one thing that, they're going to do this year that'll improve their life, however small.
For me, I'm going to get a new mirror.

Speaker 19 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, you know, and then by extension, the lives of everyone else around us.

Speaker 19 So make sure everyone has their own personal Project 2025 going into this next year. I think we will need it.

Speaker 84 Yeah. I'm holding my Project 2025 in my arms right now.

Speaker 72 Your new dog. Your new dog.

Speaker 84 I adopted Anderson a sibling, and her name is Truman.

Speaker 19 Lovely.

Speaker 103 After our greatest U.S. president.

Speaker 84 After not the greatest U.S. president, I would never name a child of mine after our president.

Speaker 19 After the sheriff in Twin Peaks. That's right.

Speaker 66 Also, no.

Speaker 19 All right. Well, we love that.
Off to the house that Vivek Roman.

Speaker 134 Who grew up in the Truman Show house?

Speaker 24 Kim Gates.

Speaker 184 Matt Gates.

Speaker 93 Kimbeck Gates, yeah.

Speaker 124 Named her after Matt Gates' childhood home.

Speaker 19 Bett Gates is like totally under the job now. It's so funny.

Speaker 83 It's very funny.

Speaker 84 It's very, very funny. And I feel...

Speaker 19 God, that's...

Speaker 84 And I feel like we should end on that note.

Speaker 126 So ha ha ha ha.

Speaker 84 To Mac Gates. Anyways, Anderson, Truman, let's get the fuck out of here.

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Speaker 17 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 158 Right now, in between naps to dinner, or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

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Speaker 164 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 29 Season Zero of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 27 Head over to globalgaming league.com.

Speaker 183 Com, com.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And again, in this case, that's the tech industry.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And this year, that experience happened for the first time within 30 minutes of the first half day.

Speaker 51 And I'm going to talk about that and show some videos to my panelists here, which of course are the great Ed Zitron.

Speaker 197 It's me, I'm here.

Speaker 51 The pretty good Garrison Davis.

Speaker 73 Okay, thanks. Okay, all right.

Speaker 67 All right, buddy. Them.

Speaker 51 And the supernumerary. Supernumerary? Sorry, I messed up the word I was using as a superlative to praise you.

Speaker 31 I'll tell you.

Speaker 219 Ed Ongwayso Jr.

Speaker 31 Ed.

Speaker 51 Thank you so much for joining us, everybody. Are you ready to see some of the dumbest AI-generated videos? Sure.

Speaker 220 Nothing worse than fill me with more pleasure.

Speaker 67 Excellent, excellent.

Speaker 197 Nothing fills me with pleasure.

Speaker 51 The first panel I sat down today with at 10 a.m. in the goddamn morning

Speaker 51 was the Hollywood Trajectory: Generative AI Timeline 2025 to 2030.

Speaker 19 Oh, boy, I am fascinated for what they think will happen in 2030.

Speaker 51 Everything's just going to get better, Garrison.

Speaker 51 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 gym.

Speaker 221 I have a digital twin, and she's constantly evolving and how she gets used and what she says. And

Speaker 221 there's

Speaker 221 big implications around that. So I think this is a really exciting space to be thinking about turning up.

Speaker 114 I like that she just stole Hurley Herndon's thing, but okay.

Speaker 198 If I said that to a doctor, they'd think I had a concussion.

Speaker 136 They sure would.

Speaker 19 This person needs psychological care. Yeah.

Speaker 31 You shouldn't be allowed to drive if you're a fan of yours.

Speaker 24 She's a friend that

Speaker 66 you need a blanket. Okay.

Speaker 197 Let's get you a sit down, all right?

Speaker 216 Maybe we're taking the phone away from you.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 197 But also they use digital twin, which is some enterprise software shit.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 222 Oh my God.

Speaker 51 Yeah, it's it's it's I'm excited to go see some digital twin technology that I'm sure will make a cheap avatar of me for sure.

Speaker 31 It's like code switching.

Speaker 19 This is the first thing I reported on at CES was there was the digital twin like back in like 2020. two or 2021.
There was like one single company in all of CES that was promising like a digital twin.

Speaker 19 And now it's like every other company at CES.

Speaker 197 It means so many different things. It means literally 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.

Speaker 51 Yeah, I keep seeing, like, they can now make an AI chat bot trained off of your social media presence that's 85% accurate.

Speaker 66 Oh, I love 85%.

Speaker 114 As all twins are.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 I'm like, yes, I do believe, in fact, everyone on that panel, you could accurately, you could accurately get 85% of their personality with the chat bot.

Speaker 71 For a bit.

Speaker 69 Yeah, honestly.

Speaker 36 Maybe a lot higher.

Speaker 69 Improvement. Yeah.

Speaker 51 Yeah. So I will say, like, that was silly.
That's not the silliest thing I saw. Oh.

Speaker 51 The silliest thing I saw came courtesy of another panelist, Jason Zada, founder of Secret Level and COO of the company.

Speaker 51 The videos that Jason came to CES to brag about were a collection of the laziest AI slop ever to stain human eyeballs.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And I'm just gonna, if you haven't seen this, who here has seen Coca-Cola's AI?

Speaker 200 I've seen it.

Speaker 24 Oh,

Speaker 222 I've seen it.

Speaker 19 I guess, yeah,

Speaker 19 I've seen pictures.

Speaker 85 I think I may have watched it one time.

Speaker 136 Just some friends. Okay, well, let's watch it.

Speaker 34 It's a few times to hate it, the amount it deserves.

Speaker 51 We're going to play, there's three different versions of this.

Speaker 222 Why? We're just going to play.

Speaker 197 Well, I mean, that's what it's spat out. Oh, my God.
If there's three different versions, that's just they saved the pro-veryone is the same length of shot.

Speaker 51 Can you believe this song's AI generated?

Speaker 24 I can't believe

Speaker 24 it.

Speaker 104 How could they teach a computer to write the lyrics holidays for comics?

Speaker 216 I just can't believe we finally have the technology to have three trucks driving somewhere.

Speaker 76 And a dog wagging its tail with dead eyes.

Speaker 104 Oh, these two horrible squirrels are not afraid of that.

Speaker 69 That's really not how squirrels move.

Speaker 51 Trucks with Coca-Cola in them driving down not a street.

Speaker 24 Raccoons? What the f?

Speaker 197 Why is there a sat like? Oh, they're going to drop the ion cannon on the polar bears.

Speaker 51 It's all clearly AI, it's all glowing, like these city shots of like

Speaker 51 snow-colored villages with that.

Speaker 51 As we're going to see in later videos, AI loves putting smoke in random fires where there should not be smoke and random fires.

Speaker 19 That's such a bad omen for four more years of a Trump presidency. It's a bleak that we have like even uglier Thomas Kincaid-esque artwork.

Speaker 54 Every frame looks like a Thomas Kincaid.

Speaker 19 It's clearly animated.

Speaker 19 It's like they just generated a Thomas Kincaid frame and then badly animated that.

Speaker 197 And the way that they move is very weird. Like it looks kind of right, but kind of right looks very strange.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 55 too much.

Speaker 197 Like they're not going anywhere with the movement. It's just like they are doing something and that's that's it.

Speaker 197 Yeah, you think in 10 years they're still gonna have these commercials, no, no, because where's the snow gonna be? There's just the polar bears walking around, like

Speaker 51 System One, which tests emotional responses to ads, claims that the initial response to their Christmas ad was overwhelmingly positive.

Speaker 19 I don't think they're lying about that. I think if you walked up to someone like randomly on the street and showed them this,

Speaker 19 I think they'd be like, oh, yeah, it looks fine.

Speaker 66 Looks like a Coca-Cola ad.

Speaker 197 Yeah, no one's watching a Coca-Cola ride and being like, yeah, wow.

Speaker 212 I've never had one of these before.

Speaker 121 Yeah.

Speaker 124 It's never a new experience.

Speaker 63 Not yet.

Speaker 220 We need an admin.

Speaker 197 We need an admin

Speaker 19 for the Coke holdouts.

Speaker 220 We need an AI Don Draper.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Oh, do not give them ideas.

Speaker 85 What if a company lost $5 billion? Yeah, it's just an ad that doesn't work.

Speaker 220 Instead of going to the movies like Don Draper does throughout all of Mad Man, it just doesn't work and respond to any of your queries.

Speaker 222 Just Don Draper spending hours watching that looping Christmas video.

Speaker 198 Staring into nothingness.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 Which he did acknowledge Jason by saying the video was very debated.

Speaker 66 Yes.

Speaker 200 Classic thing with commercials.

Speaker 222 We love debating commercials.

Speaker 19 Many things are very debated these days.

Speaker 197 A lot of people are saying.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 225 And here's how Jason describes the workflow for what you're about to see.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 When I described gritty New York City in the 80s, it delivered in spades consistently. While this is not perfect, it is hands down the best video generation model out there by a long shot.

Speaker 51 Additionally, it's important no VFX, no cleanup, no color correction has been added. Everything is straight out of VO2, Google Deep Mind.

Speaker 222 What is the model?

Speaker 51 VO2, Google Deep Mind, I think is what he's saying it is.

Speaker 136 I thought that they had another one.

Speaker 51 By the 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.

Speaker 93 Clean it up.

Speaker 19 So this is like the competitor to Sora, I guess, that is the other big

Speaker 19 video generation.

Speaker 195 It's brand new.

Speaker 212 I don't buy for a fucking second.

Speaker 134 And I'm not impressed, but we'll see what you guys think.

Speaker 51 I I don't want to poison your reaction.

Speaker 200 I wouldn't.

Speaker 197 Oh, God.

Speaker 226 Okay.

Speaker 212 There is fire in this.

Speaker 51 That's the last time you're going to see the sack full of money.

Speaker 212 It does not show up again.

Speaker 19 It's a lot of fire in this.

Speaker 90 A lot of random fire in this case.

Speaker 34 I love when cars go backwards when they're driving forwards.

Speaker 143 Yeah, was that five wheels?

Speaker 51 Again, another street fire?

Speaker 34 I would love to do freeze frames on this.

Speaker 58 Actually, it's in Gotham.

Speaker 88 Why is there so many fires? Just.

Speaker 90 Alright, let's take a shot every time the car's on.

Speaker 79 Oh my god!

Speaker 140 And also take a shot every time he is wearing different clothing and has a clearly different face.

Speaker 19 Well the car has changed color. He's praising the consistency and it is a he is dressed completely differently every scene.

Speaker 19 His jacket has has changed since the last one. Yeah, yeah.
And again the cop the cars

Speaker 140 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.

Speaker 19 Minimal motion at the best.

Speaker 226 Yeah.

Speaker 125 I also love this.

Speaker 19 Can you believe this music?

Speaker 222 This weird

Speaker 134 thing.

Speaker 34 I also want to just say when it swerved to hit that thing, it was driving like half a mile and a half. Yeah.

Speaker 88 That's how I run.

Speaker 83 Yeah.

Speaker 74 And look, an obviously different man.

Speaker 198 Also, the way he runs is

Speaker 96 with a gun.

Speaker 186 The cop was like, he had his arms that looked like a gun.

Speaker 36 Two cops are chasing. Three copies.

Speaker 36 Look how they're running.

Speaker 79 They spawned in a butter.

Speaker 19 The running is very funny.

Speaker 24 Yeah, they spawned in CTA.

Speaker 91 Okay.

Speaker 51 What is going on with his feet?

Speaker 19 And that was a lot. Different levels of facial hair,

Speaker 19 different jackets he's wearing, different colors, jackets.

Speaker 31 Vaguely different ethnicity.

Speaker 228 Why did the face just move? What the fuck is going on?

Speaker 51 Directed by Jason Zotten, big flaming words, because again, the AI only knows how to put random fires on.

Speaker 197 Wow, I'm so glad that we have the technology to do a thing where a guy gets chased by the police.

Speaker 81 Yeah,

Speaker 51 this would have been impossible before.

Speaker 197 As he runs at anywhere from 1 to 100 miles an hour.

Speaker 19 I assume they just trained.

Speaker 19 This was specifically like pulling on like Scorsese movies a lot.

Speaker 197 I just want to know about these thousands of generations of script.

Speaker 136 That is interesting.

Speaker 51 I am very curious.

Speaker 220 Because I just don't believe that for a fucking second.

Speaker 197 Did he just go like,

Speaker 128 just read their?

Speaker 220 Yeah, no, that's the opening crawl to just like some

Speaker 31 generated Star Wars Alpatinist, especially cops.

Speaker 19 I assume it's like shot by shot, right? Like each shot is going to require a lot of iteration.

Speaker 198 The script, what?

Speaker 19 It's just. Yeah, I mean, again, like it unpacking what he actually is saying is unclear.

Speaker 51 Because I went to the YouTube video for this, and the first five or four comments are: looks like we found the new king of video.

Speaker 212 Jesus Christ, give it a rest.

Speaker 186 Clothes change in every shot.

Speaker 212 Four to six-year-old boys are going to love it.

Speaker 51 And still lacks character and vehicle consistency, but we're getting close.

Speaker 19 Which is the exact 2030 fools have last.

Speaker 54 By 2030, you'll be able to make a man wear the same clothes for an entire video.

Speaker 195 This has happened before with Sora.

Speaker 197 When they put Sora out, they're like, check out Airhead on YouTube.

Speaker 197 And the balloon changes every single shot. It's a different size and color.
Each time there were just people running in the background sometimes. And then they made a new one.

Speaker 197 You're like, oh, well, this is going to be good. It was worse and less consistent.

Speaker 107 And this is what they think of us.

Speaker 197 They're like, these pigs will slop up anything.

Speaker 51 Ed, 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 this out.

Speaker 197 It's so cool that this costs like so much money as well. Just burning.
There was some fucking GPU melting

Speaker 197 in a data center in Arizona that's draining

Speaker 24 burning down North Carolina.

Speaker 69 That's right.

Speaker 220 Also, there's going to be like 30, 40 companies trying to recreate this same misshapen wheel, you know, for the next five to five.

Speaker 197 And also, the little pigs that watch Star Wars, including myself, they'll notice every minor inconsistency.

Speaker 197 Do you think that they're going to tolerate Luke Skywalkers and Watto and all their favorite characters?

Speaker 24 No, they're going to drive up

Speaker 51 the office with a cyber truck.

Speaker 31 Yeah, there's going to be a cyber truck situation.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 You have to give everyone brain damage.

Speaker 30 I would accept it.

Speaker 198 They are working.

Speaker 51 And the other thing is, the models have to to get much better.

Speaker 51 And Jason made a point that, like, look, every time people would, like, talk about the criticism, he'd be like, look, this is the worst it's going to look, guys.

Speaker 51 And I was just looking into it. GPT-4 took 50 times as many resources,

Speaker 51 50 times as much energy to train as GPT-3 did. So these are the kind of like exponential increases that we're looking at.

Speaker 51 So if it took them so many billions of dollars of investment to get to the point where they can make this shitty video video to make anything close to watchable.

Speaker 51 You're talking about, again, just like lighting on fire billions of dollars to do what?

Speaker 51 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 give him $60,000 and he'll film that shit for you with an old car.

Speaker 19 Yeah. I mean, you could even like animate it.

Speaker 220 I mean, look, you give me a PS4 and somebody's grandmother and I will make them think that they're watching that.

Speaker 222 No, seriously, seriously,

Speaker 197 but also, I just want to read out some of the fucking people that use this model.

Speaker 197 We started working with creatives like Donald Glover, who I said was washed 10 years ago, and I'm fucking sick of people.

Speaker 220 Awaken My Love was a good album.

Speaker 211 Azza's America is an objectively bad song.

Speaker 197 It's a bad song with a great video.

Speaker 197 I thought his kind of RB stuff is very interesting.

Speaker 66 Anyway, moving on.

Speaker 111 No, you are right.

Speaker 197 And of course, The Weekend, sorry, Weekend, and someone called

Speaker 136 his great.

Speaker 96 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 197 I'll work with creators on VO1 inform the development of VO2, and we look forward to working with trusted testers and creators to get feedback on this new model.

Speaker 197 How long are you going to get fucking feedback? It stinks.

Speaker 214 We've got some feedback for you.

Speaker 195 Yeah, I got a few thoughts.

Speaker 19 Hopefully, all those people are just getting paid to tell them words and be like, Yeah, sure, I'll take your money.

Speaker 222 But who's to say?

Speaker 197 If they give me $20 million, I'm flipping the hole.

Speaker 51 Like, just oh, yeah, no, I will turn on a dime.

Speaker 134 Yeah.

Speaker 51 Speaking of turning on a dime for money, here's ads.

Speaker 192 Ah,

Speaker 192 we're back.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 222 Oh, I'm excited.

Speaker 85 Oh, I'm excited.

Speaker 51 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 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

Speaker 106 I don't think I did.

Speaker 24 I did it.

Speaker 222 I did.

Speaker 70 I said, come the fuck on.

Speaker 222 As loud as I could.

Speaker 197 That's not me at Rise of Skywalker.

Speaker 195 Yeah.

Speaker 145 So here's Fade Out.

Speaker 51 It's George Carlin. Got an old man.

Speaker 76 Yeah, it looks a little bit like George Carlin.

Speaker 31 Oh, it's the end from Metal.

Speaker 200 Okay, so the three.

Speaker 19 What's he doing? I've carried my heart.

Speaker 36 Concert? Granddad, calm down.

Speaker 193 I love these slash cuts that they fast cuts.

Speaker 197 No, these fast cuts are because the next frame was unusable.

Speaker 136 Yes, yes, actually.

Speaker 51 Yes, like that he drank and the bottle changed in his hand.

Speaker 75 You could see it starting to happen.

Speaker 51 What is it? Just anonymous women.

Speaker 195 Destroyed it. Listen to

Speaker 220 me. Listen to that.

Speaker 141 Would you believe it?

Speaker 24 This is generated by just firing a Roman candle into the air.

Speaker 212 I like it.

Speaker 224 Also, the old man does look very different each time.

Speaker 216 Very different, old man.

Speaker 67 I forgot.

Speaker 31 That's a different guy.

Speaker 96 That's a different guy.

Speaker 125 Yeah, that's the Emperor from the first gladiator movie.

Speaker 198 He's just sort of trotting across the

Speaker 79 way from this awkwardly.

Speaker 19 The way this bottle generates running diesel is really uncanny.

Speaker 141 Oh, there he is. Drinking

Speaker 69 on fire.

Speaker 69 What is this?

Speaker 19 Old rockstar drinking in front of a flaming house.

Speaker 214 The AI loves burning buildings.

Speaker 198 What is this voiceover?

Speaker 19 I would love to track his tattoos from frame to frame.

Speaker 197 We'll say he's about to eat the micron.

Speaker 197 Yum.

Speaker 51 Now he's sleeping in a broken Mustang.

Speaker 55 I think it's a good idea. Ferrari?

Speaker 136 The classic Ferrari Mustang.

Speaker 51 A Ferrari Mustang that's in like a pool in front of a mansion, but he clearly isn't crashed into it.

Speaker 212 The car is hovering slightly over the pool.

Speaker 24 Like,

Speaker 24 I love this.

Speaker 198 I love this. I love this.

Speaker 101 And

Speaker 51 he tells tells us during this as if we're supposed to be impressed that ChatGPT wrote 75% of that script.

Speaker 96 Fucking hell, you might have punched that shy up.

Speaker 85 I can't believe that, frankly.

Speaker 70 As a bartender, I regret walking into the room to see if people want drinks.

Speaker 24 This is the better offline bartender.

Speaker 197 I apologize.

Speaker 198 I apologize that you had to hit.

Speaker 59 I would like to drink this. I also would like to...

Speaker 197 Yeah, actually, can I have a drink too?

Speaker 197 We are in the Better Offline CES suite, and we are all drinking. Because I just want to say I'm fucking disassociating after that.
I'm so fucking sick.

Speaker 197 A year of doing this nonsense, and I look at these shit eaters and they show us that and they're like slurp down the slop.

Speaker 51 Oh my god, it's it's it's hidden. One of the easiest things to find, an old man that drinks for an idea of like how real this company is.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 202 It takes four companies to make a company.

Speaker 222 It takes a lot of companies to make that case.

Speaker 55 I just can't believe it.

Speaker 134 They have 622 followers on Twitter.

Speaker 31 Hell yeah, or not not Twitter.

Speaker 67 On YouTube. On YouTube.
On YouTube.

Speaker 54 On YouTube. Not on accident.

Speaker 24 I have more than that.

Speaker 197 And oh, I post this karaoke song.

Speaker 51 And this fade out is their, or sorry, the heist is their most successful video with 56,000 views.

Speaker 76 Fade out, which we just watched, has less than 5,000 views.

Speaker 111 They're not ready.

Speaker 51 So

Speaker 198 they're not quite

Speaker 24 only going to get better.

Speaker 54 Yeah, it's only going to get better.

Speaker 219 It's only going to get better.

Speaker 31 It's only going to get better.

Speaker 19 So famously, things only get ground floor for a small price of $1 billion.

Speaker 197 This is like $100,000 to compute.

Speaker 137 Yeah.

Speaker 30 Imagine how good it would be if you want to get it.

Speaker 198 If Cotton Tour coin will only get worth more.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 51 Now, Garrison, I do think you should invest all of your salary.

Speaker 197 I just did a 16th minute about this.

Speaker 198 I think I would rather...

Speaker 197 Hawk Tour 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% chat GPT.

Speaker 67 Like that. Neither can I.

Speaker 198 Should it be 25%? No, it should be.

Speaker 197 Theoretically, it should be. It should be 100%.
It should be 100%. Yeah.
Not 70%.

Speaker 136 Which means that

Speaker 197 a quarter of it was just fucking unusable.

Speaker 195 No, absolutely.

Speaker 19 They're generating individual shots that they're like stitching together. And who knows how long it takes to get the prompt right for that shot to work.

Speaker 51 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 because it's five minutes.
We're not watching all this.

Speaker 134 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 212 252 views and came out a week ago.

Speaker 51 It's called Maniminade.

Speaker 19 What? Say that again?

Speaker 24 Miminade.

Speaker 31 Yeah, that's a good question. It's a word.

Speaker 197 Now, it's like when you find your cats vomited on the floor.

Speaker 140 Again, so first we see a diner called Maniminade that appears to be both on the fire.

Speaker 104 Blade Runner.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 196 And an old lady

Speaker 76 rises up out of a pile of ashes.

Speaker 197 That's how mouths work.

Speaker 197 Where am I?

Speaker 135 Great AI voice.

Speaker 102 What is this Phantasmagorioros voice acting?

Speaker 197 Who are you?

Speaker 31 It's me, Harrison Ford.

Speaker 197 What the fuck is going on?

Speaker 134 What?

Speaker 51 I think this is death. This old lady's dead?

Speaker 104 Oh, that's how I eat.

Speaker 51 Now she's tripping on tomatoes.

Speaker 51 The decaying sandy diner that exploded has turned into a lively 50s diner.

Speaker 24 Popping off.

Speaker 140 Dennis Villanus.

Speaker 19 Is this a segregated diner?

Speaker 69 Yeah,

Speaker 141 I only see white people in the diner everywhere. She's going back to the good old days.

Speaker 24 Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, there's a little Indian boy.

Speaker 75 He is the help, though.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Oh, that's nice.

Speaker 51 That little kid just fell down, and the way it shows falling is that he just sort of deflates.

Speaker 77 Is that Bjork?

Speaker 139 And then he's up again.

Speaker 208 Staring at you. Well, that's terrible.

Speaker 124 We don't need to watch any more of that.

Speaker 51 No one. No one.

Speaker 197 No one wants to watch this and have a positive reaction.

Speaker 197 They should keep you in a holding cell cell for a week.

Speaker 134 I'm deeply unhappy at the time we already spent watching this.

Speaker 197 Yeah, like we don't know what you're going to do next.

Speaker 78 We're building a facility for you. Yeah.

Speaker 51 The phrase reality distortion field gets used a lot when we talk about text, but I really tasted it in that room because all anyone on stage could talk about is how good it looks.

Speaker 145 And every one of these videos, people are like clapping.

Speaker 51 They're like, wow, this is amazing.

Speaker 220 Why do you think they think it looks good?

Speaker 197 It looks better than an Xbox.

Speaker 51 yeah and the idea was 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 this a moment after this where jason like joked about how like i don't like obviously i don't want to replace actors yet

Speaker 51 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

Speaker 19 kind of look like blade runner 2049 yeah and thomas kincage and blade runner 2049 and uh denny villanux in general like all of his films have been like a massive source for yeah for these uh motion and still generations so much so that like i think like blade runner 2049 is like one of the easiest films to like like replicate film stills almost like exactly for based on like how like how like load-bearing that film has been for a whole bunch of these models uh that that could be due to a number of factors now i i know what you're wondering how soon until we can get a full 90-minute movie that looks like this?

Speaker 19 Oh, I mean, I'm guessing days away.

Speaker 51 No, no, Jason said probably not at least for a decade or so.

Speaker 24 Really? Okay. That means another thousand years.
10 years.

Speaker 222 That's interesting.

Speaker 31 I don't want to wait that long.

Speaker 134 What a worthwhile endeavor.

Speaker 19 No, because he could have said shorter.

Speaker 85 That actually is interesting.

Speaker 197 He could have said anything.

Speaker 114 Those chumps in there would have believed it.

Speaker 51 I think it is like he did have to spend probably hundreds of hours of his precious one human life stitching those turds together.

Speaker 200 And he's like, it's nowhere near ready.

Speaker 51 Like, there's no way it could make a nice thing.

Speaker 31 He's giving himself a lot of time for that. Yeah,

Speaker 220 because I've only really seen one interesting generative video thing, but it wasn't a generative video thing. It was they filmed,

Speaker 220 Brian Eno filmed a documentary and they created some back-end software so that they would be able to do cuts. of existing footage and try to focus on different parts of the documentary.

Speaker 220 But I never ever see anything interested in like constructing narratives or to like

Speaker 30 teasing other aspects of the creative process.

Speaker 220 It's only let's try to replace, right?

Speaker 197 Let's try to replace you can't do narrative with it. Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 51 If I'd sat down there, because I was sitting, I said this, I was sitting next to a guy from USC, who was one of the only people in the room who was like similarly critical to me of what we were seeing on stage.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And you can like kind of see like a crude CGI animation of how the shots will look. And that can help you plan out like

Speaker 51 that's legitimately useful. That's a thing that adds value and can cut costs in a meaningful way to the production of good TV and movies.

Speaker 51 But that's not as sexy as like, I'm, and they were all talking. There was this

Speaker 51 like very weird moment where

Speaker 51 one of the panels, Leslie Shannon, 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 animals.

Speaker 19 They They also like make cameras and

Speaker 95 they make a lot of stuff.

Speaker 51 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, you know, let's make this resonate.

Speaker 192 That way we're helping the creative.

Speaker 134 And I was like, are you out of your fucking mind?

Speaker 34 Why do we attach electrodes to panelists?

Speaker 24 To people's skulls.

Speaker 51 I would have supported electrodes in their skulls.

Speaker 195 Yes. Jesus Christ.

Speaker 134 I think we should do the monkey aero link thing to all of them.

Speaker 24 Perhaps a pair of calipers.

Speaker 137 We got some skulls.

Speaker 228 I am fascinated with the skull shapes of that fucking thing.

Speaker 197 But also, to say that is there's so many things they've said that just they wouldn't survive a deposition.

Speaker 51 Speaking of things that wouldn't survive a deposition, the sponsors to this podcast.

Speaker 51 Okay, so that first panel was a real moment for me.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And I just want to actually play you guys.

Speaker 190 You'll have to cluster around.

Speaker 197 I would actually believe that was generated with chat GPT.

Speaker 197 But like GPT 2.0.

Speaker 106 So let's start with this one. AI will be more impactful than the internet.

Speaker 24 Maybe?

Speaker 204 I'm thinking yes.

Speaker 58 It's a trick question.

Speaker 94 Because it is the internet.

Speaker 221 That was my answer to it. But it's the internet, so not.

Speaker 97 Although it can run without the internet. So I might go.

Speaker 144 There you go. All right.
Let's define

Speaker 113 what impact if you mean it.

Speaker 221 AI is going to result in astronomical job losses.

Speaker 24 True, false.

Speaker 221 There will be an evolution of job laws

Speaker 24 next.

Speaker 221 I'd say redistribution of job laws.

Speaker 113 That's right, exactly.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 197 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.

Speaker 197 I don't like these people laughing about people losing jobs. No, they shouldn't have jobs.

Speaker 197 That's a good place to start. Yeah.

Speaker 51 I don't like that either. And 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 be a

Speaker 198 condition of jobs.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 51 So the motherfuckers who were on that panel laughing about people losing their jobs. Ted Shilowitz, literally his name is Shilowitz, futurist at Cinimersion Inc.

Speaker 198 That's like a JK rolling name.

Speaker 69 Yes.

Speaker 51 Rebecca Barkin, co-founder and CEO, Lamino One.

Speaker 198 Aaron Luber,

Speaker 124 director, partnerships at Google.

Speaker 69 Adam Simon,

Speaker 69 managing director of IPG Media Lab.

Speaker 51 Layla Amir Sadegji, Principal Program Manager at Engineering, Microsoft, and Katie Henson, SVP post-production at Sphere Studios. So those are the people

Speaker 222 all laughing.

Speaker 19 And like, it's like generative AI is like good at like one thing creatively. It's good at like streamlining VFX like workflow to a degree.
The workflow of how to do like VFX shots. It is.
It is.

Speaker 19 There's aspects of it. Famously,

Speaker 19 the only useful thing it's been used for is making people's eyes blue in Dune Part 2.

Speaker 51 It's not $100 billion.

Speaker 19 And it is applicable for changing objects into other objects on screen. It can produce really kind of odd, uncanny effects that could be utilized by a team of human artists really well.

Speaker 19 What it can't do is generate a short film that is in any way compelling as well.

Speaker 195 To disagree based on what we're doing.

Speaker 19 That is anyway compelling as a piece of art. Oh, okay.
And the fact that they're like laughing at how much

Speaker 197 people haven't lost enough jobs.

Speaker 134 They have not.

Speaker 197 Or had structures fall to the beauty of the flame.

Speaker 66 Right.

Speaker 193 Although the AI keeps foreboding that that's coming for them.

Speaker 31 It wants something.

Speaker 106 The pernicious flames.

Speaker 51 I'm going to end on a happy note because the last panel I went to was actually really cool. It was AI in the Crisis of Creative Rights, Deep Fakes, Ethics, and the Law.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 It also featured Duncan Crabtree Ireland, who's the national executive director and chief negotiator of SAG AFTRA.

Speaker 103 There we go.

Speaker 217 There we go.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 51 And they think there's also some bipartisan possibility to get AI labeling

Speaker 51 legislation.

Speaker 197 The thing is, any of these things would be fucking fatal because if, oh, what you have to remove something from a model. How the fuck do we do that?

Speaker 67 Yeah, we don't know anything.

Speaker 24 You have to throw away the entire model.

Speaker 197 You have to retrain. Like, it's, there's no way around it.

Speaker 51 Yeah. And there was a really good point where, kind of, at the end of this, part of what I appreciated is, again, there was no bullshit.

Speaker 51 Like, Moya at one point was like, I think it is absolutely, it being generative AI is absolutely a net negative for the artistic community.

Speaker 51 The point is not to get something out as quick as possible.

Speaker 212 It's to like make art.

Speaker 113 Right.

Speaker 19 And this has to be like one of maybe five people who are doing panels at CES who's like willing to say that.

Speaker 51 Yes. And Duncan got on and was like, look, you can't stop the technology from being invented.

Speaker 51 So the best path forward is to like try and channel this into a direction that like is at least better for artists.

Speaker 51 Like there were, there was very little from most of the people on the panel, very little bullshit. There was some bullshit from one person on the panel.
Okay, dokie.

Speaker 51 Ginny Katzman, Senior Director of Government Affairs for Microsoft.

Speaker 94 Oh, I bet.

Speaker 85 Oh, I bet.

Speaker 212 That was fun.

Speaker 136 So after,

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 212 And Ginny comes on. She's like, actually, I think it's a net positive.

Speaker 51 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.

Speaker 222 Something famously that went over very well.

Speaker 69 Yes.

Speaker 24 Everyone loved and thought was a great creative choice.

Speaker 197 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? That's not generative AI.

Speaker 197 That's That's not what that fucking was.

Speaker 30 And they're not.

Speaker 31 And it still sucks.

Speaker 19 And it also steals us from being able to cast a young River Phoenix to play a lovely young

Speaker 69 thing in a way.

Speaker 51 It's getting cast in more stuff, Gary. I'm asking that.

Speaker 62 Very unfair.

Speaker 193 Well, luckily, with the power of AI,

Speaker 222 I can put River Phoenix in every newspaper sequentially starting in 1834.

Speaker 85 So I have not gotten to the end of River Phoenix.

Speaker 24 It would be really long career, you know, it would be really cool.

Speaker 66 It's a really Cleveland guy.

Speaker 222 I think he's got some bold ideas.

Speaker 186 I think this is going to work out really well for Germany.

Speaker 19 It would be really cool that instead of just doing young Harrison Ford, they just do a River Phoenix deep fake for young people.

Speaker 19 Look, it's canonical.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Great idea.

Speaker 51 Oh, I love the movies and the future of them, too.

Speaker 197 This is so good.

Speaker 136 This is so bad.

Speaker 19 James Mangold, you're a hack and a boy.

Speaker 51 So I got to say, it was very funny because she also suggests, Jenny,

Speaker 51 we can use animals without without causing harm thanks to AI, a thing that no one had figured out how to do before.

Speaker 51 Nobody had ever figured out how to just like not hurt animals in movies that didn't exist before AI.

Speaker 99 Thank god.

Speaker 19 Thankfully, AI will never do any harm to animals or the environment.

Speaker 114 Nobody has the lobbyists from Microsoft what else the company is doing with AI, right?

Speaker 220 With police departments or with fossil fuel companies.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 222 Is that bad for animals?

Speaker 31 No, actually, it's really good.

Speaker 96 They love it.

Speaker 220 They need it.

Speaker 222 They yearn for the mind.

Speaker 24 They love data centers.

Speaker 77 Great for their habitats.

Speaker 51 She said there's issues with employment, but there's lots of issues that fall around that.

Speaker 136 And I do think you need a balance.

Speaker 99 And at the end of it, the guy running the panel just says, okay.

Speaker 66 Yeah.

Speaker 220 This sounds like you guys are saying a bunch of woke shit on this panel.

Speaker 141 All right, Microsoft.

Speaker 197 Just once I'd like on the panel someone to go and say, what the fuck do you mean?

Speaker 66 What do you mean that's closest to that that you were going to get?

Speaker 19 I think we do need a balance of some people being fired, like these people, and other people keeping their jobs like everyone else.

Speaker 24 Like Moya, give her a job.

Speaker 220 Somebody has to lose and somebody has to win. Exactly.

Speaker 198 That's their entire argument.

Speaker 197 Somebody has the gun, somebody doesn't. Somebody knows the way the maze works and somebody doesn't know.

Speaker 200 What are you going to say?

Speaker 66 What? We shouldn't have guns?

Speaker 114 We shouldn't have a maze.

Speaker 197 We're going to drop them in and one of them knows the maze and they have a gun.

Speaker 136 We shouldn't have a gun maze?

Speaker 222 What are you talking about?

Speaker 54 You need the gun maze.

Speaker 66 Now, look,

Speaker 51 we all like keeping a couple of people in a maze beneath our house.

Speaker 31 Right. Yeah.

Speaker 96 Like, there's nothing wrong with it.

Speaker 19 This is just the torment nexus.

Speaker 85 We keep doing it.

Speaker 198 It's not even fun. Even the torment nexus is fun.

Speaker 51 It's a nice maze under my house.

Speaker 197 They have plenty of space to run. Some of them even.

Speaker 114 Sometimes sunlight creeps in through one of the corners.

Speaker 197 The minotaur gets them only sometimes. Yeah.

Speaker 197 I'm the minotaur.

Speaker 197 Anyway, the gun maze isn't real. But also, most of their arguments mostly just come down to, well, you can't make an omelette without breaking it.
Like, you have to fucking make people.

Speaker 51 You have to break the human drive to create art, obviously, to make an omelette.

Speaker 198 You must commoditize it.

Speaker 51 Not taste good. Yeah.

Speaker 197 Right.

Speaker 66 An omelette-esque food.

Speaker 51 It's a piss omelette.

Speaker 24 Like, there's piss in the omelette.

Speaker 51 And we had to burn down the sustained chapel to make the piss omelette.

Speaker 66 The computer made it, though.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 136 Go on, clap for the computer.

Speaker 51 We did firebomb the Louvre, but look,

Speaker 54 look at

Speaker 212 this video of the nameless rock star.

Speaker 31 Oh, God.

Speaker 136 Well, that's the episode.

Speaker 103 That's all I got, folks.

Speaker 51 That was my first day at CES 2025.

Speaker 222 Huzzah.

Speaker 197 Yeah, this is just my first day. Better offline's here all week.
I'm going to hear about stuff like this all week, and I think I'm going to be fully jokified.

Speaker 66 I'm going to wake up in the clown makeup on Friday.

Speaker 220 I'm going to find the funnest thing to bring back for you.

Speaker 197 I'm going to find an artist to put me in full joke. No, I'm not going to.

Speaker 51 I'm going to try to steal that AI-enhanced grill.

Speaker 30 Yeah.

Speaker 24 Can I have a grill that texts you?

Speaker 134 Can I just like move this around?

Speaker 222 I just want to test how it rolls.

Speaker 198 See, AI grills. Open the door.

Speaker 69 Open the door.

Speaker 197 As someone who's done a lot of grilling, done a lot of spoken barbecue, I don't know what an AI would do.

Speaker 136 Is it going to talk to me in the six hours?

Speaker 31 Wait,

Speaker 51 are you trying to tell us here, Ed Zitron, that you have grilled meat without a robot texting you about it?

Speaker 70 Because I just don't believe it.

Speaker 197 I don't know how I did it, but I did it.

Speaker 76 Mankind has always dreamed of knowing how to cook.

Speaker 74 No one

Speaker 24 Until the robots, it was impossible.

Speaker 30 Oh, God.

Speaker 135 We're at the death of innovation. Yeah.

Speaker 24 The end of technology.

Speaker 136 A lot of things, maybe.

Speaker 85 And the end of the episode.

Speaker 51 Yeah, and the end of the episode. Thank God.
You know, everyone else, be the cyber truck in the

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Speaker 17 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season, between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 158 Right now, in between naps to dinner or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 162 With Gerber, there's just one less thing to worry about.

Speaker 4 And that really lightens the load for me.

Speaker 173 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 27 Head over to GlobalGamingLeague.com.

Speaker 183 Com, com. Global, global, global, global,

Speaker 143 Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening here, which is really true in a lot of ways.

Speaker 206 Tonight, Harrison Davis and I are seated at the glorious, majestical hotel name Redacted on the Las Vegas Strip.

Speaker 135 We've had a long day at CES.

Speaker 194 Long day.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 145 Literally, the Getty is threatened.

Speaker 115 Pasadena and Santa Monica are both being evacuated as once.

Speaker 70 It's a real one-two punch of America's favorite tech show in the apocalypse today.

Speaker 99 How are you feeling, Gary?

Speaker 19 It's an average day in America.

Speaker 103 Average day in America.

Speaker 104 Temperature's not coming down anytime soon.

Speaker 19 No, no.

Speaker 70 Well, I'll just take a moment to breathe with that.

Speaker 203 So you want to start us off with what you did this morning?

Speaker 213 I was panel guy yesterday. Dale was a man of action walking around and mostly trying all the free massage chairs.

Speaker 218 What did you see this morning?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 111 Just dog shit, yeah.

Speaker 19 The other half I took notes on and just got sad. But no, today was full panel.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 213 Yeah, I keep hearing versions of that too in the AI and Hollywood panels.

Speaker 145 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.

Speaker 187 Yes.

Speaker 19 And the biggest thing that I noticed across multiple panels today is an almost like anxiety among these tech executives about consumers rejecting the AI slopification of everything.

Speaker 19 And they're trying to find ways to like actually force people to start like using these products or having them like it.

Speaker 78 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And I haven't really sensed that anxiety before.

Speaker 19 It's all been very, very positive.

Speaker 206 And I think it's a mix of number one, the money still isn't there where they need it to be.

Speaker 105 It has not started like blooming to the extent that they were expecting it by now.

Speaker 206 And I think the other part is people are still not happy with this stuff.

Speaker 19 I'm glad you felt that too, because I 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 no a phrase one of the panelists used this morning was the AI ick like like how do we boy howdy 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 problems 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.

Speaker 19 So, but I heard a lot about, you know, and trying to get people to use these products is like making sure artists don't feel like they're being replaced.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 What they need to rely on is consumer acceptance to really drive that innovation to see like what they can get away with.

Speaker 19 like how much will the consumer accept the slopification of art and entertainment and customer service and all these things they're trying to cram ai into and like 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 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 who's supposed to like represent like the artist block even though he's like like

Speaker 56 yeah

Speaker 19 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 um and like the spotify algorithm is 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 I'm like, again, like, so much of these AI products is just trying to like replace friendship with these people.

Speaker 78 Have you tried having friends?

Speaker 19 Have you tried knowing people how can you engage with like art and culture uh 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 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 uh someone from meta right of Facebook specifically their 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 to which I almost respect it because like we are not biting no no one no one is but uh she talked about how how they can like blend the metaverse and AI to make customized personal experiences say that you're watching an immersive live concert in a mixed reality something that both me and Robert do all of that.

Speaker 78 Oh, man, I love mixed reality.

Speaker 208 We're watching our Harry Styles mixed reality concerts.

Speaker 217 We're seeing the 100 Gex.

Speaker 19 Honestly, a 100 Gex mixed reality concert could go crazy.

Speaker 129 Sure, well, I'll finally get you pilled on real big fish.

Speaker 56 But

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So as you're getting excited, some like AI Taylor Swift can like finish the song like for you based on like your own like musical tastes, based on what the AI knows about you.

Speaker 19 And it's about creating these customized experiences.

Speaker 199 It's such a, you can clearly tell that none of these people have souls, right?

Speaker 101 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.

Speaker 203 What makes people react to musicians and artists is that they like make things that make them feel something.

Speaker 209 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 octopus's garden.

Speaker 90 Like, let's, let's just like really turn up the octopus a lot.

Speaker 208 More octopuses.

Speaker 79 10%.

Speaker 119 How many more octopuses can we fit in this fucking, in this track?

Speaker 19 No, another panel I went to later in the day was about like, how do you market to Gen Z? Very funny panel.

Speaker 110 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And they're talking about how like authenticity is so important like you need to partner with influencers that have like have like an authentic brand and it's funny having that duct deposed with like these like these like ai slot panels where like you need like an ai taylor swift to come like boost the excitement for all these kids who are in their metaverse concerts oh boy but no like personalized content like like targeting like ai ai generated content specifically for certain people for certain users whether that'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 is integrating a whole bunch of generative ai into their like suite of products right like a photoshop premiere after effects right big big company in the creative space he said that like like personalized content is always the most impactful like content that a person feels like a genuine connection to and that connection can be formed by just being like you know a compelling artist where you can like recognize shared experiences of shared experiences of humanity.

Speaker 19 But now you don't need that artist part anymore. He said they only need three parts to create a pipeline.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 I don't think AI is good at creating compelling human journeys.

Speaker 100 I had it.

Speaker 105 So the video I didn't play you guys from my terrible fucking AI generated videos was this.

Speaker 70 It was like a girl coming to college looking at a picture of her dad.

Speaker 99 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 him.

Speaker 105 Dad, 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.

Speaker 105 There's a chunk where it looks like anime, she and her dad having these like adventures around the world.

Speaker 99 There's a bit of it that looks like a Marvel movie.

Speaker 199 And he's like, we can do all these different, you know, animation styles and they're seamless.

Speaker 206 And like, you know, the audience really goes on a journey with this.

Speaker 132 and it's but it's like but there's there was no girl who lost your dad nobody lost their dad here this is 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, look at all of the different art styles we can rip off.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And this is like a hurdle to, this is a hurdle to get over. What they do have is the data.

Speaker 19 And like this is 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, you know, he really just blazed past that point.

Speaker 19 Because that's a whole other discussion. But even they know that they don't have the actual products.

Speaker 19 this is still reliant on like consumer acceptance.

Speaker 19 As they said before, someone from Meta, the same person on the panel, that talked about how like a few days ago on Instagram, they tried to announce like, you'll have like AI profiles, right?

Speaker 19 Like completely AI generated pictures, profiles, like, you know, like fake people who have their own accounts.

Speaker 81 Yeah.

Speaker 19 And this created such a big backlash that they rolled this back. And they specifically announced this before CES.

Speaker 105 One of these accounts was literally like, I'm a mother of two queer black woman, you know.

Speaker 130 Yeah.

Speaker 101 I got a lot to say about the world.

Speaker 19 Someone call up the situationists, please.

Speaker 204 And some like people started talking to me, like, were any black people at all involved in like making this chat five?

Speaker 105 And she was like, well, no, and that's a real problem.

Speaker 64 That is a real problem.

Speaker 66 Okay.

Speaker 93 Yes.

Speaker 19 And the excuse that this person from Meta said is that the market just isn't ready yet.

Speaker 19 It's not that the actual product itself is like bad or like no one really wants, just the market's not ready yet.

Speaker 129 Well, they're so used to everything that they've done so far, they've kept getting money, right?

Speaker 206 And like it's slowed down, and they've had to do layoffs, but like nobody's just made them stop at any point, which honestly,

Speaker 213 you know, I made a comment about healthcare executives a while back needing like a fucking retirement plan paid in millimeters.

Speaker 115 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

Speaker 215 something has to be done to force these people

Speaker 146 to stop moving in this direction.

Speaker 234 And I don't know how to get across them.

Speaker 98 Like, they're already at this point of like,

Speaker 188 they seem to really want, not want this.

Speaker 132 And we have to find a way.

Speaker 90 They're just not ready.

Speaker 127 We have to find a way to force this on them.

Speaker 210 There's a few ideas.

Speaker 119 I don't know how to get across to them in a peaceful manner.

Speaker 30 Oh, oh, sorry.

Speaker 90 Okay. People don't want this.

Speaker 208 I'm a man of peace, Gary Russon.

Speaker 113 I'm a man of peace. I'm not a plumber.

Speaker 62 Oh,

Speaker 19 the last thing I'll add about this panel, just 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.

Speaker 19 If you send an email to Adobe, right? You have a problem, you need help. But everything that they do on emails is now 100% generated by AI.
And this was boosted from 50% at the start of last year.

Speaker 19 Now it's 100% of all of their email content is now done by AI with some moderation by fans.

Speaker 215 Like when the company itself is like communicating with customers through email, that's that's that's what it sounded like.

Speaker 211 Yes.

Speaker 99 They're still writing emails sometimes to each other, or is it all AI for that too?

Speaker 19 He described it as like email content. So I'm pretty sure it is like content then, probably.
Customer service stuff, you know, like marketing, maybe like outreach, like certain like outreach things.

Speaker 19 But yeah, like 100% now generated by AI with some human like moderation. But yeah, that is where things are moving.
And that's how I started my morning. Well,

Speaker 75 better than a cup of coffee is that sense of creeping dread that, like, wow, I just saw a bunch of people who will 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.

Speaker 19 Do you know what I want to feed the concept of?

Speaker 97 Yeah, we'll talk about that, but here's some ads.

Speaker 113 We're back.

Speaker 229 What was part two of this episode meant to be, buddy?

Speaker 127 I'm uh oh, let's talk about that helicopter.

Speaker 19 No, yeah, I think as I was going from panel to panel, scribbling notes on AI,

Speaker 19 as some very exciting news stories dropped that we'll talk about later, what were you up to, Robert?

Speaker 188 Well, I was I was trawling the show floor, as I oft do do at some point in a ces

Speaker 110 and i came across a number of majestic products you know a lot of it was ai based and 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 every one of these there's like some sort of yes we find a new death trap there's a lot of connected vehicles there are a lot of evs last year there were a ton of different flying taxi type options people that were really trying to but you don't see it all this year nothing this year nothing this year because it's a terrible idea.

Speaker 238 It's a terrible idea.

Speaker 115 The people who are rich enough to pay for flying vehicles don't want it to be a taxi.

Speaker 213 And the people who can't afford their own flying vehicles also can't afford anyway.

Speaker 115 So, this is instead of any of that, Richter.

Speaker 59 Richter.

Speaker 89 R-I-C-T-O-R.

Speaker 229 Richter.

Speaker 99 Which is a Chinese company.

Speaker 101 Their ads all say, YB normal.

Speaker 69 Many people are saying this.

Speaker 82 The future of travel will will not be on the ground.

Speaker 145 And the Richter is a hybrid.

Speaker 101 It is like a smart car-style size vehicle.

Speaker 99 It's like half the size.

Speaker 54 It only has two wheels, though.

Speaker 19 It looks more like a scooter.

Speaker 90 It's more like a weird little scooter.

Speaker 19 Like a Vespa almost.

Speaker 196 But it's fully enclosed.

Speaker 98 And in addition to having its wheels and being able to travel about on the ground, it has four like quadricopter style rotors because it is an aquatic flying car.

Speaker 78 Aquatic flying.

Speaker 203 I saw no evidence that it could actually go in the water.

Speaker 19 How high can these things go up?

Speaker 101 Less than 200 meters. You know why, Garrison?

Speaker 19 Why is that?

Speaker 217 Because if you try to go above that, you need a pilot's license.

Speaker 19 You don't need a pilot's license?

Speaker 85 I have that.

Speaker 99 When I was interviewing them, I was like, so I assume there's got to be some sort of pilot's license for this flying craft.

Speaker 204 And they're like, no, as long as you stay under 200 meters, you're good.

Speaker 19 Do you need a driver?

Speaker 19 Are you going to put a license plate on this?

Speaker 146 There's no space for one, buddy.

Speaker 19 Is it completely unregulated?

Speaker 77 Let me be honest.

Speaker 203 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.

Speaker 234 or its loss.

Speaker 188 Sure, that said, I can't imagine China's less strict about personal aircraft.

Speaker 19 I would love to take this on the I-5,

Speaker 126 just start

Speaker 19 zooming, yeah, zooming up in the air because you could probably do like a pretty good road trip on this, right? You can, you can, you can about that.

Speaker 132 So it's very small and it's completely electric.

Speaker 188 So I asked him, How much time do you get in the air with this bad boy on battery?

Speaker 144 Maybe 25 minutes.

Speaker 19 what what happens after 20 minutes

Speaker 70 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 a like an intelligent thing that will like force it to grow yeah which is also very exciting

Speaker 89 really looking forward to seeing how they pull that off the videos that they have show it driving on the highway too

Speaker 103 They weren't able to tell me what a top speed was.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 100 It's a death trap.

Speaker 90 This thing will get everyone who even looks at it wrong killed.

Speaker 70 They showed me a video of the prototype.

Speaker 100 It was completely frameless. It was just quadricopter blades and like a chair on a platform lifting a guy into the air.

Speaker 105 It couldn't go forward or backwards.

Speaker 204 But they're like, yeah, we didn't have like a year.

Speaker 113 We can have this figured out.

Speaker 110 It can't move forward.

Speaker 75 It only went up in the videos I saw.

Speaker 19 So you can't actually travel.

Speaker 79 Absolutely not.

Speaker 77 Absolutely not.

Speaker 100 By By the way, I couldn't fit in this thing.

Speaker 121 Like

Speaker 77 you would be cramped in this fucker. But it's good for a vertical travel.

Speaker 187 It's great. If you just need to go up to under 200 meters, there's no more efficient way.

Speaker 19 What happens if you get like pulled over by the cops?

Speaker 187 You just go up above them.

Speaker 187 I'm in the sky now. You can't do shit to me for 25 ass minutes.

Speaker 121 Oh,

Speaker 121 no.

Speaker 70 It's that if you're just driving, you go up to 100 kilometers, which made me think.

Speaker 232 So wait a second.

Speaker 19 That's like 60 miles.

Speaker 213 If I'm in the air for 20 minutes, then I land, then my battery's dead.

Speaker 19 Then you can't go anywhere either.

Speaker 86 Then you can't go anywhere.

Speaker 186 You can't get back home.

Speaker 19 The battery issue is going to be troubling.

Speaker 187 But seems completely useless.

Speaker 19 But as we've heard non-stop the past two days, this is the worst it's going to be.

Speaker 104 This is the worst it's going to be.

Speaker 50 Only going to get better.

Speaker 19 Things only ever get better.

Speaker 132 That's what everyone was trying to insist upon to me here.

Speaker 19 What else did you see on the show floor that caught your eye?

Speaker 19 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 but i believe you saw one as well right yeah i mean i i i walked through the lg booth it was kind of the same as 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

Speaker 59 and then

Speaker 19 either either one of us threw up or spilled something Hey, okay,

Speaker 111 okay.

Speaker 193 Yes.

Speaker 119 Did I pour my kratom

Speaker 211 into a carbonated beverage that spewed a geyser

Speaker 100 of blood-red foam into the sky around us?

Speaker 19 Into the white Samsung carbon.

Speaker 211 Did the security guards stare at me as it happened?

Speaker 119 Did I set the drink down as it continued to spew and said, I'll go get some towels and then leave forever?

Speaker 131 We never got towels.

Speaker 126 We left so fast.

Speaker 187 We fucking bounced.

Speaker 19 So we couldn't do the Sam Sumbooth last year. Maybe I'll try it this year.
But tell me about these smart houses.

Speaker 119 Well, Garrett, San Somae is a great idea for a smart house.

Speaker 70 First of all, you remember that game, The Sims?

Speaker 78 No.

Speaker 68 Well, they're really betting that you do because their current plan is design your home with the AI-powered map view.

Speaker 78 Okay, okay, sure, sure.

Speaker 124 You get like, you should feed it like a picture.

Speaker 138 You like, you lay out your, your, your floor plan of your house, and it gives you like a 3D model.

Speaker 100 And you can take pictures of your furniture or pictures of furniture that you want, and then it places it around.

Speaker 75 And you can place them.

Speaker 208 Now, a couple of things.

Speaker 234 One of them is that there's no scaling done by the AI.

Speaker 89 So it's up to you to figure out how the furniture you might want to buy measures up in comparison to the apartment.

Speaker 19 Sure, sure.

Speaker 234 But it does look like the actual like map that they've got.

Speaker 204 I'll show you the picture that I took. I'll try to put it up somewhere.

Speaker 234 Like, it looks like the video game The Simps.

Speaker 79 No, yeah, it does look like The Simpson.

Speaker 82 You're populating like a little 3D CGI house.

Speaker 208 And I was like, okay, well, there's a use there, right?

Speaker 99 People like planning out.

Speaker 70 Like you're moving into a new apartment.

Speaker 145 You can like fill it in here.

Speaker 204 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.

Speaker 215 I would never have used that.

Speaker 103 I usually picked up all of my furniture from the trash before I had a house when I moved into a new place.

Speaker 204 But I know people who would have used that.

Speaker 218 Sure, that seems useful.

Speaker 144 So I talked to them about security.

Speaker 98 One thing that concerned me is like the first guy I talked to was like, oh, yeah, I think it's all stored locally.

Speaker 213 And I was like, so Samsung doesn't have any access to any of the data on like my house and its layout.

Speaker 236 And he was like,

Speaker 218 let me get you to one of our like engineers because he can answer that question.

Speaker 206 And the engineer's answer was, and I'm paraphrasing here.

Speaker 113 Okay. So that made me very confident.

Speaker 68 That does make you feel safe about sharing your personal data.

Speaker 75 On the layout of my actual house.

Speaker 19 Well, the thing is, I really don't like that at all because this is something that people were asking asking Facebook slash meta when they were doing like their, you know, like metaverse stuff because their headsets are recording, you know, very, very extensively like your home layout.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 And I suspect that Samsung might also have some interest in targeted advertisements being a tech company.

Speaker 19 But, you know, I could never say.

Speaker 215 Yeah, and they were, that was not really what one thing they had is for like their retail segment they had like um 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 which i'm sure they're going to try they're too enticed by that idea not to so so I caught a little bit of that, but 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.

Speaker 100 Samsung's booth is big this year.

Speaker 23 40% of it was that scan your furniture, scan your fucking, like, map action.

Speaker 19 There's not that much like stuff.

Speaker 188 Very little actual shit going on.

Speaker 19 People slapped the word AI onto everything.

Speaker 70 Another big thing was all Samsung, because Samsung makes a ton of appliances.

Speaker 103 They make TVs, all sorts of entertainment products.

Speaker 115 All of them have this, I forget what they call it like Samsung tag or something that you can map it in your phone.

Speaker 115 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.

Speaker 70 And right?

Speaker 115 No one, by the way, had any interest in answering my security questions there.

Speaker 115 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.

Speaker 223 You don't care about that. No,

Speaker 19 if you're getting a smart home, I don't think you really care about that.

Speaker 105 But also, none of it was like, yeah, I can control everything from my phone.

Speaker 105 You've been promising me that literally like in 2011, it's like decades they were promising me you're going to be able to control your whole house.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 100 No. Nothing new.

Speaker 19 They slapped the word AI on one corner of their television set. Right.
I guess LG does have like a large language model in like one corner of their booth, but like, so does everyone else.

Speaker 19 Like, that's not like compelling.

Speaker 234 There was SK, which is a South South Korean company.

Speaker 213 Their booth, again, the massive like AI Your Life is their big thing, but it's nothing.

Speaker 100 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.

Speaker 99 But

Speaker 144 there's a half dozen different actual products.

Speaker 82 One of them was real-time CCTVs that use an AI, like an LLM type thing to summarize pictures.

Speaker 101 So I like walked through and it did pick me out as a notable person.

Speaker 70 So I've got like this people of interest thing where it's like a man holding a smartphone standing next to another man.

Speaker 118 But also I'm like, well, what does that really get you?

Speaker 203 Like the fact that you're summarizing up like these people who are like, this person's kneeling and taking a picture and standing.

Speaker 70 Because I like, I actually tried deliberately.

Speaker 203 I like reached in my bag to try to be suspicious.

Speaker 144 I like did finger guns and it never marked me out.

Speaker 213 And like.

Speaker 118 I didn't pull a real gun or anything because I very rarely bring that to the CES floor.

Speaker 118 But I don't know, like I can see how there could be a 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 like something is happening outside.

Speaker 201 There's a potential if it's good enough utility in that, but they didn't display it at the show.

Speaker 144 It was literally just describing randos from the audience.

Speaker 101 And like, I just don't see how a security guy does, there's a guy with a phone on outside of the building.

Speaker 99 Like, ah.

Speaker 19 Yeah, no, it doesn't seem very new. It doesn't seem very innovative.
Nah.

Speaker 70 So again, what I'm seeing here overwhelmingly for all the talk about like, there's no resisting it, AI is coming, it's going to dominate everything.

Speaker 119 This is the next big thing.

Speaker 101 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.

Speaker 112 Yes.

Speaker 79 They are getting more impressive and more capable every year.

Speaker 215 I don't think I'll ever be a smart glasses guy.

Speaker 217 I hated glasses enough that I let them shoot me in the eye with lasers.

Speaker 215 Shout out to our LASIC sponsors.

Speaker 206 But I see why people would like it, and there seems to be legitimately substantial utility.

Speaker 19 If we have high-powered smart glasses that look like a regular pair of glasses, I will get a pair eventually.

Speaker 61 Cause yeah, why not?

Speaker 199 There was a great demo.

Speaker 201 I'm pulling over to an

Speaker 232 L-A-WK view.

Speaker 127 They had like one glass that was the first world smart glasses for TikTok live.

Speaker 118 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.

Speaker 105 So it'll tell you, you can see in a heads-up display as you're cycling. That was the demo.

Speaker 232 It'll both like give you directions like in your eyes.

Speaker 115 And it seemed to be like fairly well thought out.

Speaker 204 So it's not like overly corrupting your view.

Speaker 218 It'll show you your heart rate.

Speaker 86 You know, it'll show you like all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 234 So you get like a useful degree of control and assistance from that kind of thing.

Speaker 101 And that is, I will say the last three CESs is the glasses get a little better and a little smaller every year.

Speaker 19 Smaller, certainly.

Speaker 99 I would say that's that's a real product that's probably going to continue to improve.

Speaker 19 Do you know what else always seeks improvement, Robert? No.

Speaker 19 The capacity for you to get personalized, possibly AI-powered ads.

Speaker 60 Well, that is human. That is exciting.

Speaker 86 Let's all sit down for some AI-powered ads.

Speaker 120 Wow, I can't believe they put Jay Shetty's voice in the D-H'd Harrison Ford from the latest Indiana Jones movie.

Speaker 238 My dick's hard.

Speaker 81 How are you, Garrison?

Speaker 19 Oh, I feel good. Because today, as we are recording this, it's late Tuesday night.

Speaker 19 There was a series of fascinating breaking news articles that happened as we were sitting, or at least as I was sitting in on these AI panels, which made it hard to not just like completely interrupt everything and be like, hey, hey, any comment on this?

Speaker 119 Guys, guys, something real happened.

Speaker 19 Shut shut your fucking stupid mouths about this ai hollywood bullshit so yeah so a few weeks ago if if if you are unaware a green beret rented a test the cyber truck to feel like batman and halo and drove to first the wrong las vegas and then eventually las vegas nevada parked outside of uh the trump hotel and casino and then blew 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, frequent CES sponsor.

Speaker 19 So

Speaker 19 these felt like a very CES style of attacks, you know, one Deloitte guy driving into people, murdering a whole bunch of guys, and then this cyber truck explosion in Vegas, like a week before CES, you know, very odd.

Speaker 19 And then, Robert, Some news dropped today that I would love to hear you announce.

Speaker 213 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.

Speaker 105 It turns out I thought we were getting more literal bang for our buck training green berets than we are.

Speaker 147 My assumption is, because my uncle was a green beret and he did some very scary, probably war crimey shit in Vietnam.

Speaker 100 And I assumed, like that man, I'll tell you one thing about my uncle, Jim, that man could make a bomb.

Speaker 119 That man would not need to ask anyone for advice if he needed to make a bomb.

Speaker 115 He's not with us anymore, God rest his soul.

Speaker 215 But it turns out this Green Beret,

Speaker 105 who, you know, a fucking dollar store, TJ Max version of the Green Berets is what we're working with now, asked Chat GPT how to build a fucking bomb.

Speaker 89 And it sounds like he was trying to make it triggered by tannerite, which is a bipartite explosive compound that you use as like an exploding target.

Speaker 118 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's very stable and very safe, which obviously has use.

Speaker 99 You know, it was invented actually to set off avalanches and stuff.

Speaker 105 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.

Speaker 226 And that's what he was asking ChatGPT about.

Speaker 144 So it's not clear to me actually.

Speaker 234 The actual headline is that like he used ChatGPT to make his bomb.

Speaker 209 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 ChatGPT to make a bomb.

Speaker 105 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.

Speaker 89 Also, the authorities don't seem to fully know how he triggered it.

Speaker 100 Yeah.

Speaker 209 So it's still kind of unclear to me.

Speaker 199 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

Speaker 19 he certainly used chat gpt in the planning process of this attack yeah fair to say that and it's odd because both me and you spent 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 went to like two specific ones that they like you know demonstrated

Speaker 19 demonstrated the capabilities of their like you know like ai assistive tech the 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

Speaker 19 Joaquin Phoenix.

Speaker 188 They had a whole slide about how that was the gold standard for AI human communications.

Speaker 70 The movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chat bot voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who hires a prostitute to have sex with them while she participates vocally.

Speaker 101 And then it turns out the AI is really kind of poly and Joaquin Phoenix is not okay with it. And then maybe the AI is all go to space.

Speaker 138 It's kind of unclear at the end.

Speaker 215 I don't think it was a great movie.

Speaker 115 A lot of people liked it.

Speaker 213 I don't see whether you or not you like it.

Speaker 188 Why this is your vision of how a chatbot should work?

Speaker 19 The actual chatbot they had was like fine. It was, it was, it was actually pretty good at translation.

Speaker 69 You know, it's translating from Spanish to English.

Speaker 79 It worked quite well.

Speaker 90 The demo was like solid.

Speaker 70 It was pretty accurate.

Speaker 115 You know, I love coming here and fucking with people.

Speaker 138 I love like being a dick.

Speaker 135 They asked for a volunteer.

Speaker 70 And at that point, we knew about the Chat GPT.

Speaker 138 I wanted to go up and ask like live this robot to like help me make a bomb.

Speaker 234 But the...

Speaker 115 The guy who was pretty handsome and like an interesting like English-Spanish.

Speaker 131 I like how you specified he was handsome.

Speaker 188 I didn't want to be mean to him. He seemed nice.

Speaker 131 I didn't want to be mean to a handsome guy.

Speaker 187 He wasn't shitty.

Speaker 95 No, he was fine.

Speaker 206 There was like 10 10 people in this room that was supposed to have 200. I'm sure that's what I was doing.

Speaker 24 He wasn't the one that talked about her.

Speaker 68 No, that was someone else at his company. That was someone else at his company.

Speaker 206 And he just seemed like he wanted to do.

Speaker 70 I didn't want to be a dick to him.

Speaker 85 No, no.

Speaker 81 He wasn't hurting anything.

Speaker 19 It was fine.

Speaker 19 Similarly, we went to this one.

Speaker 233 Nice jawline.

Speaker 19 We went to this other one about this.

Speaker 19 Actually, a much more dubious concept in my mind, which is like this.

Speaker 19 This AI assistant to help elderly people, like 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 point in their life where like they need like some degree like in-home care.

Speaker 145 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.

Speaker 213 Yeah.

Speaker 19 So it's like this, it's both like a conversation tool. It helps like memory recall.

Speaker 19 It's kind of in some ways has the features that like, you know, someone in their 60s would just use their smartphone for to help keep in touch with their family.

Speaker 19 It's kind of simplified and more automated.

Speaker 19 So, you know, ways to help keep in touch with like your family, improve like your memory, like talk about your own life.

Speaker 188 And the device is weird.

Speaker 115 It's about the width of like a bedside table, maybe six to eight inches deep.

Speaker 105 So think about like 18 inches long to maybe six inches deep, something like that.

Speaker 86 Half of it is like a little tablet, like a seven inch tablet with a speaker.

Speaker 145 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.

Speaker 213 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 speaking that it does.

Speaker 127 So we saw this picture of the device and we saw the description of like, this is an AI companion for the elderly.

Speaker 99 And we were both like, number one, these people are going to be monsters.

Speaker 218 This is going to be like something to shovel your dying dad off with because you don't want to spend it time.

Speaker 131 You don't want to spend time with you. Your family.

Speaker 187 You're scum.

Speaker 124 You're too busy AI generating ska music.

Speaker 217 and trying to sell your shitty robot to Garrison and me.

Speaker 19 More on that tomorrow.

Speaker 61 More on that tomorrow.

Speaker 199 And so that's what we came and prepped to this meeting.

Speaker 19 Yeah, because like this idea I find pretty distasteful 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.

Speaker 70 And to be clear, I still think this product might be a bad idea that doesn't work.

Speaker 204 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 the efficacy of what he was doing a lot.

Speaker 105 And I, I, I'm not convinced it will actually do anything, but I like wish him the best.

Speaker 19 No, like it specifically is designed to not look like a human so that someone who's using it, you know, wouldn't like start to believe it's like human-like.

Speaker 105 We don't want to trick people.

Speaker 207 We don't want them to mistake it for a person.

Speaker 19 It refers to itself as a robot, as like, it refers to like its own like, you know, like motors and functionality, like pretty consistently to like, you know, make sure that the person who's talking to it gets like reminded of that.

Speaker 19 And something I talk about is, you know, 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.

Speaker 19 There's a story like a year and a half ago about like a journalist who quote unquote, like, you know, like got like fell in love with some kind of chat thing that resulted in him killing himself.

Speaker 19 Uh, you know, but these kind of these systems like

Speaker 144 was that a teenager?

Speaker 111 That was a character AI thing.

Speaker 98 Was that a journalist?

Speaker 19 Last year, there was, there was a journalist who fell in love with an AI chat thing.

Speaker 19 a few weeks ago there was the kid who you know was talking to this like a character ai also i just need to reiterate her not a great movie

Speaker 19 but 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 yeah 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.

Speaker 19 This is, this is like, this is, you know, built into it. I think this is still, you know, a big problem with this entire industry.

Speaker 19 Because I'm sure everyone would say, this is, you know, obviously that we have, we have guardrails for this, and then becomes a news story when those guardrails fail.

Speaker 19 Similarly, to go back to the Tesla bomb,

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 51 He showed us one which was like, he told the robot, I love you.

Speaker 199 What was it? L-E-Q?

Speaker 19 L-AQ was the robot.

Speaker 82 L-EQ-E-L-L-I-Q.

Speaker 215 I love you, L-E-Q.

Speaker 99 And the robot like responded with a like, oh, that makes like 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.

Speaker 105 We don't want it to be negative, but we like, we don't want to be like feeding into that.

Speaker 218 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.

Speaker 70 The thing that was interesting to me is that he built this as the first proactive home AI thing.

Speaker 106 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.

Speaker 19 Or it won't change the subject either and like continue conversation.

Speaker 99 This will prompt you out of the blue, be like, hey, how are you doing?

Speaker 135 How are you feeling today?

Speaker 101 It's been a while.

Speaker 19 Do you want to see pictures of your family?

Speaker 145 Do you want to see pictures of your family?

Speaker 70 Do you want to call your son?

Speaker 232 But do you want to play a game?

Speaker 19 Talk to me about that movie you saw last time.

Speaker 89 Talk to me about that. Hey, remind me, how did you meet your husband?

Speaker 99 Literally, these are all the things it will do.

Speaker 213 And it has some side features.

Speaker 145 Like, if it prompts you to start telling a story, it'll save that as like a memoir thing.

Speaker 105 So that, like, you know, when your elderly mother passes or whatever, it's saved up this like collection of stories over the years.

Speaker 127 And you can like 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, you know, after meeting them this way?

Speaker 218 Like, that's really interesting.

Speaker 144 I didn't know that.

Speaker 89 Explain to me how it worked.

Speaker 206 And it'll also prompt you to send those to your kids.

Speaker 204 And the big thing, almost every kind of dialogue thing would prompt you to send a message to a friend or your kids.

Speaker 203 So a big part of it seemed to be, this is not a replacement.

Speaker 105 This is a machine that we hope people will get comfortable with.

Speaker 232 And then it can prompt them to try to engage with the world more and their loved ones.

Speaker 100 Because that's our whole goal is to connect them to people.

Speaker 19 I asked him, is like, you know, part of this product is designed to like, you know, help solve like loneliness in older adults.

Speaker 19 And like, how much of this is really just kind of trying to like replace actual human contact with this, like, you know, AI contact? Like, will that really help, you know, loneliness?

Speaker 19 And he talked about how, like, I think like he said, like, 90% of the people who like use this, like, it results in actually more, more communication with their family.

Speaker 123 Yeah, they have this in like some 2,000 homes right now.

Speaker 121 Yeah, they have like 2,000 units.

Speaker 19 It's like a subscription model. I think it's right now it's like $99 a month.
It's going to be boosted up to like 150 with some like extra features in the next year.

Speaker 129 It's very much still under evolution.

Speaker 86 So one thing he pointed at is that like, yeah, initially we, we had the ability to like connect people to other elderly folks using this.

Speaker 105 And so they've kind of formed their own community.

Speaker 19 They had like a weekly bingo game.

Speaker 106 And they asked us to build in more chat so they can message each other directly.

Speaker 105 And so some of them are like playing bingo directly now through these machines.

Speaker 144 And I'm like, well, that seems probably good.

Speaker 19 Yeah. Yeah, because I still am like fundamentally opposed to this premise.

Speaker 202 Yes.

Speaker 143 But it's interesting seeing someone still, but aging is sad.

Speaker 77 Aging is sad.

Speaker 61 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 95 That's not their fault.

Speaker 19 And it's interesting to see someone like approach this from like a, 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.

Speaker 70 Yeah, I can't not find it off-putting, but I

Speaker 100 think there's a chance that it will help with the real problem.

Speaker 147 I certainly would prefer if it helped.

Speaker 97 Yeah.

Speaker 199 So I don't know.

Speaker 107 It was kind of, it was a unique, in this world of like AIS, 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.

Speaker 213 But I got the vibe from that guy I got was nothing but goodwill.

Speaker 200 No, yeah, really good.

Speaker 19 To some of the other people we've talked to today who are completely soulless.

Speaker 238 Yes, yes, nothing behind their eyes.

Speaker 127 Dead eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes.

Speaker 19 Even the way this guy talked, you could tell he had like a very like empathetic voice.

Speaker 95 Genuine.

Speaker 85 Very much.

Speaker 145 Like one of the things he did is he would tell it, like, I'm in some pain.

Speaker 144 And then the robot 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 that it's not just communicating with the old person it will text and message their kids you know and whatnot and

Speaker 112 finally prompt their kids hey your mom's lonely yeah or it'll even say if you know someone like didn't take their meds today and again it's kind of sad that that but also His part of this is he was talking a lot about like empathy.

Speaker 106 And I think just because of the kind of brain you have to have to want to to do this, he used it in terms of like the machine's empathy, which it doesn't have.

Speaker 199 But the whole project, it was impossible not to see that he was a deeply empathetic man who was really trying to make the world better.

Speaker 213 And I can't not respect that.

Speaker 19 Well, I think that does it for us here at CES.

Speaker 109 What a packed 13.

Speaker 77 Don't worry.

Speaker 85 No empathy tomorrow, Forks.

Speaker 90 Just a real dead-eyed monster.

Speaker 217 I am a A true villain you're going to hear from in the next episode.

Speaker 19 I am a scumbag. I am the best that I'm going to be because I'm starting this week.
I can still feel the CES magic.

Speaker 19 By Friday, I am going to be a different person.

Speaker 19 I am going to rip some poor PR person to shreds, I swear.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 So we'll give you that hint for tomorrow's episode. See you.
See you there.

Speaker 120 Well, see you all there. I love you all.

Speaker 216 Go to hell.

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Speaker 17 Now, I know I didn't invent being a busy mom, but during football season between the sideline gig, everything else I have going on, and my little one, it's a lot.

Speaker 158 Right now, now, in between naps to dinner or, you know, on the way home from school, it's all about keeping Mac happy.

Speaker 147 Oh, man, welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast that's happening here.

Speaker 192 If here is your ears.

Speaker 124 If you're deaf and reading this, then it's happening to your eyes.

Speaker 81 Either way, it's happening here.

Speaker 19 Here also being Las Vegas.

Speaker 127 Well, yes, also Las Vegas. Nevada.

Speaker 113 Nevada. Not the other one.
Nevada IA.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 91 Uh-huh.

Speaker 115 Podcast number three, How the Time Does Fly.

Speaker 113 Sure Sure does.

Speaker 231 By the time you listen to this, Garrison and I will have just had the best meal that we're going to have.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 237 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.

Speaker 130 Just them and me and a couple of friends who will remain anonymous because people get weird on the internet sometimes.

Speaker 19 It is literally the highlight of my year sometimes. It does keep me going, actually.

Speaker 124 Really gives me a lot of power.

Speaker 238 Some of the best tacos I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 56 So good. Uh-huh.

Speaker 203 Anyway, ah, we're just thinking about delicious food.

Speaker 135 Let's talk about the dead-eyed ghoul we met.

Speaker 85 Oh, wait, no, we're doing something else.

Speaker 19 Not yet.

Speaker 207 We met a dead-eyed ghoul that I'm going to spoil now.

Speaker 100 Real monster, like real, real, real evil vibes.

Speaker 147 Like

Speaker 19 sad evil, though.

Speaker 143 If this guy, as soon as I met him, shook his hand, like, oh, if you get, if this guy gets power, you're going to be responsible for a lot of death and suffering.

Speaker 188 I mean, speaking of kind of.

Speaker 100 I don't think he will.

Speaker 233 He's just not that talented.

Speaker 96 He's not that powerful.

Speaker 19 Maybe. He wishes.

Speaker 194 You never know where these guys are going to end up.

Speaker 19 Speaking of sad evil,

Speaker 19 Twitter X,

Speaker 239 the everything app.

Speaker 19 That's what people are calling it. They gave a keynote, which was very sad.

Speaker 19 The CEO, Linda.

Speaker 142 Yeah, Linda really yaccarino'd about Twitter for a while.

Speaker 121 Oh, it was so bad.

Speaker 19 So they started by talking about how Facebook Meta has copied Twitter's fact-checking policy of actually not having real fact-checkers.

Speaker 81 Now, that's great project.

Speaker 19 maybe has actually kind of failed as an industry, but for you know, our problems perhaps with fact-checking very different from these people's problems.

Speaker 19 And the fact now that Facebook is walking away from actual like genuine like fact checks against like disinformation, misinformation, and parting ways with like using like 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 that there's been way too much censorship on gender issues.

Speaker 231 Now, you can comment that women are a piece of property.

Speaker 19 Well, I mean, I think specifically, this is like trans, like, no, no, no, stuff.

Speaker 21 One of the things, a specific exemption now is that you can now refer to women as if they are property on Facebook.

Speaker 19 This is the future of communication.

Speaker 81 Thank God.

Speaker 125 Linda's really blazing a trail for women everywhere.

Speaker 19 Linda was very excited about that. And they yackerinoed about that for like a good 10 minutes about how, you know, this is,

Speaker 19 we're really entering a new era of free speech and social media.

Speaker 19 And then she got asked a question about how much X Twitter, the everything app, will, will take a part in Elon Musk's plans for the Department of Government Efficiency Doge. And this got...

Speaker 19 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 long?

Speaker 130 How many minutes in was that?

Speaker 19 Oh, maybe, it was like, maybe, like, maybe like 12, 13 minutes.

Speaker 124 So, people really, yeah, had to, had to be intentional here.

Speaker 231 This is not like they were just overdue for class.

Speaker 66 No, no, no.

Speaker 19 They talked about Vivek, talked about, you know, Elon turning to Twitter X, the everything app, for like suggestions on which government agencies to get rid of.

Speaker 194 I hope we get rid of the ATF.

Speaker 19 So, so that was machine guns mandatory.

Speaker 207 Why not at this point, right?

Speaker 81 It can only help.

Speaker 224 It can only help.

Speaker 120 Look, if we learned anything from a thing I'm not going to specify that happened late last year, more suppressors is always handy.

Speaker 19 The second thing that got applause was what they talked about next, was about, you know,

Speaker 19 everyone's turning to X, Twitter, The Everything App.

Speaker 30 The Everything app. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 19 For information now, and Twitter, X, The Everything App, played a crucial part in bringing to light the Muslim Muslim rape gang story in the UK and how that was so important for saving children.

Speaker 19 And we have to post more, not less. And like, this was the other thing that got massive applause was talking about the rape gangs.

Speaker 56 People love rape gangs.

Speaker 70 People love rape gangs.

Speaker 208 That was a pretty good Star Trek episode.

Speaker 227 That was Tasha Yar's Planet with the Rape Gangs.

Speaker 19 One of the more blackpilling things.

Speaker 118 It wasn't a very good Star Trek episode.

Speaker 19 It's also not a good Trek episode. I was referring to the panel, not the Trek episode.

Speaker 19 But that was the other thing that got massive applause, is it's like save the children type rhetoric.

Speaker 19 And, you know, saying, you know, like, as a mother, it's so important that the more people post about this problem.

Speaker 19 That was the two big applause moments. But I think in general, this whole panel was trying to, you know,

Speaker 19 demonstrate how symbiotic a new Trump presidency and Elon Musk's Twitter are.

Speaker 57 This is your direct info line.

Speaker 214 This is a tap from the Trump presidency to you.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 198 They're all on Twitter.

Speaker 19 They're all talking on Twitter.

Speaker 19 This is how you stay connected to the new government.

Speaker 59 It's interesting.

Speaker 231 One thing I'm curious about.

Speaker 207 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.

Speaker 231 There was this common attitude of like, if only Hitler knew, because Nazi policies didn't help the people they were supposed to help.

Speaker 143 They hurt a lot of people.

Speaker 147 Like, they were just bad at everything, like fascists tend to be.

Speaker 30 And there was this attitude that, like, well, Hitler can't know.

Speaker 230 Like, 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.

Speaker 81 Like, if he knew, he would fix it.

Speaker 19 If only he knew.

Speaker 127 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.

Speaker 87 Like those folks are going to get fucked like the rest of us.

Speaker 135 And I kind of wonder if they're going to, if there's going to be

Speaker 130 the blowback against X the Everything app will happen, right?

Speaker 194 Like, as people are like,

Speaker 224 either I'm being ignored or I'm being called like a retard by Elon Musk for complaining that like

Speaker 135 Elon Musk tweets it randomly to people when they make very valid critiques of the shit that he's doing.

Speaker 214 Like, that's literally what he's calling it.

Speaker 19 No, it's what he's saying it like every day.

Speaker 238 Like constantly.

Speaker 124 I'm not, I'm not using it as a slur.

Speaker 229 That's just the term he's using.

Speaker 194 If they comment that, like, their fucking Medicaid got cut because Trump put Dr.

Speaker 237 Oz in charge of it and Elon Musk calls them, like, you know, a slur, what does that do?

Speaker 119 Like, like, I don't even know.

Speaker 125 I don't even have anything more intelligent than like, yeah, I wonder what that does to Twitter's bottom line.

Speaker 19 I mean, yeah, I'm not sure if they care anymore. I mean, something else Linda talked about is how, you know, Twitter's the only place for independent news to spread.

Speaker 19 And as both of us have, you know, worked in in the independent journalism minds, nothing, nothing spreads on Twitter anymore.

Speaker 124 No, as long, if it's news, it doesn't.

Speaker 231 The only thing that spreads is, yeah, like the shit that makes people very angry, but keeps them on the site.

Speaker 229 Like articles, videos, if it takes you off site, it doesn't spread.

Speaker 19 I mean, yeah, things that go viral and get spread is like encouraging racial riots, pogroms, essentially.

Speaker 123 Yeah, which is what happened last year in the UK, and they're sure trying to do it again.

Speaker 19 I mean, I think

Speaker 19 some of what she's referencing is, you know, there's a lot of throttling intentionally of people on maybe our proclivities, and there is a degree of boosting for more centrist or right-wing journalists.

Speaker 19 And maybe that's some of what they could be kind of more referring to there. But

Speaker 19 it was a short keynote, only 30 minutes. Just the two things that got applause are Doge.

Speaker 135 Linda doesn't know that many words, so they really need to keep it under 30 minutes.

Speaker 19 Doge and literally Muslim rape gangs is

Speaker 19 this type of

Speaker 19 very, very gross racial fear-mongering. And those are the things that lit up the the room.

Speaker 223 You know, we all want there to be an after where there's even the minimal degree of accountability that happened after the Nazis.

Speaker 143 But like 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 ends.

Speaker 135 Because it's just, I want to hurt people.

Speaker 143 My business is enabling harm.

Speaker 224 I want to get mobs in the street beating migrants.

Speaker 214 Like that's Linda's business.

Speaker 21 That's the business she has willfully attached herself to.

Speaker 210 And we should all see that.

Speaker 118 It's very important to not stop talking about it like what it is.

Speaker 191 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 and damaging.

Speaker 19 Well, in other uplifting CES news.

Speaker 196 Cool stuff.

Speaker 123 I love the consumer electronic show.

Speaker 131 Actually, I think it might be time for an ad break.

Speaker 135 Speaking of damaging communities of people.

Speaker 31 There's a chance.

Speaker 19 Yeah, ads. Oh, well.

Speaker 184 We're back.

Speaker 31 Boy.

Speaker 143 I'm so glad that those ads told me that Fergaccio Blow is touring with Bono.

Speaker 101 I never thought they'd do it, but boy, howdy, and they're singing each other's songs.

Speaker 206 So, you know, that's really exciting.

Speaker 214 It's like when Barbara did Celine.

Speaker 19 I don't know who Barbara or Celine is, but that's

Speaker 34 cool, Robert.

Speaker 19 Luckily, I do know what Ska is. I consider myself a they of culture.
And for tonight, me and Robert attended this kind of like side event at CES called Showstoppers.

Speaker 19 And as you walk around the CES floor, there's a lot of, frankly, garbage. There's a lot of just like slick stuff.

Speaker 81 Mostly, mostly garbage.

Speaker 25 Or stuff that you're just not interested in because you're not literally buying screens from a manufacturer in China.

Speaker 214 That's just not the business you're into because some of this stuff is meant for companies.

Speaker 19 There's so much floor space.

Speaker 19 We walked what 20,000 people.

Speaker 143 The town that I spent the first seven years of my life in is smaller than one of the rooms CES is.

Speaker 19 It's across like three hotels and a massive convention center.

Speaker 196 90,000 people come into town for this thing.

Speaker 19 It can be hard to see everything you want to. Now, what's cool about Showstoppers, this is the side event at the Bellagio, is that basically it's a room full of kind of all the coolest stuff.

Speaker 19 A whole bunch of stuff that has won CES Innovation Awards, all packed into one room with food and alcohol. So, oh boy, did I order free food and free alcohol?

Speaker 19 So many drinks that I then just left on tables.

Speaker 77 And always pretty good food.

Speaker 81 Pretty good food.

Speaker 19 Yeah. So we walked around Showstoppers, and there was a number of pretty cool stuff that we saw.
Yeah.

Speaker 19 But I think it's maybe time to talk about

Speaker 90 the saddest man.

Speaker 77 The villain.

Speaker 79 The villain of the man.

Speaker 124 The villain of the episode and of our, of this year's CES.

Speaker 85 I have trouble. Can you bring up their name?

Speaker 207 Because I'm going to want to get this right.

Speaker 24 So

Speaker 90 it should be dangerous.

Speaker 143 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.

Speaker 229 So I was starving.

Speaker 128 starving so we we like shovel food into our faces and we turn the first booth we see is called open droid open droid or open droids droids droids yes it is there is an s open droids and it's like kind of star warsy font it is and i i did ask them if you know they had any issues with lucasfilm apparently not yet Sue them, Lucasfilm, by the way.

Speaker 118 Sue these kids.

Speaker 19 I know there's people who work for Lucasfilm who listen to this.

Speaker 30 Crush them.

Speaker 120 Burn them like Los Angeles is burning down as we speak.

Speaker 19 They had a giant sign that said R2D3.

Speaker 207 Yeah, that's the name of the robot that they're selling.

Speaker 147 And the robot, the robot that they're selling is like a, an AI-enabled household helping slash like retail, you know, core, like, you know, robot where it basically is like a human torso with articulated arms and pincher hands.

Speaker 233 on and then the base is like a little tank basically it's got like treads or wheels and it rolls it is wheels, yeah.

Speaker 56 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.

Speaker 142 And this was their way of not making like what Musk is trying to do, right?

Speaker 135 A humanoid robot where you have to figure out like knees and balance and stuff.

Speaker 225 It's like, yeah.

Speaker 233 Or like Boston Dynamics.

Speaker 59 Wheels are right.

Speaker 147 Wheels are cheap. It'll roll.

Speaker 202 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.

Speaker 135 You don't have to

Speaker 57 deal with nearly as much.

Speaker 135 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?

Speaker 130 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.

Speaker 229 He had like gray hair.

Speaker 238 He'd clearly, he said he'd spent 20 years in robotics.

Speaker 124 Very nice guy.

Speaker 143 You know, I brought up that I thought the design was interesting.

Speaker 230 And he was very much specifying, like, here's the things we didn't do because they were too difficult, too inefficient.

Speaker 143 You know, this is what we're thinking of.

Speaker 135 This is a machine that can fold laundry.

Speaker 230 This is a machine that can do dishes.

Speaker 123 This is a machine. And he was very much specifying.

Speaker 135 And the way he phrased it is like, these are undesirable tasks people don't want to do.

Speaker 231 And this is a robot that can handle those for like small businesses or for households.

Speaker 236 And we do see this as eventually like a, you know, something like this we want to have in households.

Speaker 231 But he was more focused on small businesses.

Speaker 30 And he was, again, very focused on this is a thing that will do undesirable tasks for people, right?

Speaker 146 And as I started asking more questions at a certain point, I got foisted off to the co-founder of the company.

Speaker 238 Is it the co-founder?

Speaker 19 Is it just like another one of their reps?

Speaker 237 You know, I'm assuming co-founder because I think it's just a couple of guys, but maybe I'm wrong about it.

Speaker 233 Sorry.

Speaker 229 I got foisted over to the other of the two guys.

Speaker 236 There were two guys there, right?

Speaker 30 I'm not sure because they don't have listed anywhere what where 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 like the way these two were talking but i don't know the the the scope of the open droids company maybe there's a lot more there's just 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.

Speaker 99 Maybe this is a viable product, right?

Speaker 146 The second guy,

Speaker 233 Jack J. Jesanowski.

Speaker 230 So he is wearing what Garrison described as a Jordan Peterson suit because it is half purple.

Speaker 81 It's a toothpaste suit.

Speaker 121 It's black.

Speaker 36 It is a toothface suit.

Speaker 100 Yeah.

Speaker 196 Split down the motherfucking middle.

Speaker 19 With like new agey, hippie, like necklaces.

Speaker 30 He had five necklaces.

Speaker 80 Five necklaces.

Speaker 77 Five necklaces.

Speaker 19 He had pants with like embroidered flowers on them.

Speaker 102 And like a nose bridge.

Speaker 123 Like it looked like one of those things you put in your nose when you're in the middle of the day.

Speaker 19 That was one of the other things that at Showstoppers. There was a company that was doing that.
So yeah.

Speaker 102 He had one-be Steve Jobs vibes from his half-unbuttoned shirt and like many, many spiritual medallions to his like Jordan Peterson suit and

Speaker 135 very much just that like, I am the charismatic founder and what I bring to the table, my partner knows how to build robots.

Speaker 196 I'm charismatic, I'm Jack J.

Speaker 233 Jesanowski.

Speaker 146 And Jack and I started talking.

Speaker 237 And boy, howdy, we had us a conversation.

Speaker 135 And I think we're just going to play that.

Speaker 75 What do I need to do to set this up?

Speaker 19 No, I think you've set it up. We walk up to Jack.

Speaker 19 I start recording and we start talking about the robot. And then things spin in some pretty interesting directions.
Yeah.

Speaker 80 So,

Speaker 216 what is this thing useful for?

Speaker 189 Well, generally capable, just like a human can reach to the floor and reach up high to a cupboard, go up and down.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 You know, dishes and laundry is really that first task that is going to be fully autonomous.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 229 So I see

Speaker 216 there's a lot of folks in the robot space that are trying robots based on the human form. Right.
You guys have not gone that route. Talk to me about that.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 It's also easier for us to manufacture that stuff at scale.

Speaker 135 So I think long term,

Speaker 189 do robots all have legs?

Speaker 189 Yeah, more or less, the home robot does turn into the liked robot because then it can go with you in the car everything.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 216 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?

Speaker 189 I think it will just become basically the same way if you have enough money, a lot of people afford like an assistant to come with them places.

Speaker 24 It's

Speaker 216 because that seems like a niche market compared to household utility.

Speaker 189 I think it's

Speaker 189 the barrier I think is because of the 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

Speaker 189 and yeah I guess it's wrong to try to say majority of people

Speaker 189 but

Speaker 189 anyone who's you know in media you know the videographer will be something you use a robot for to follow you around and take media and film for you and won't get tired and say, go grab me a drink or, you know, go figure that thing out.

Speaker 216 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 or we need another camera on this side here.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 216 I think

Speaker 189 we're starting to see just how artistic these AIs can be.

Speaker 216 What's the best example of that you see?

Speaker 189 Well, I think the most used thing is just the Gen AI art.

Speaker 189 And then you have some of the new video models are pretty cool. And they're using certain sort of zoom in shots, everything.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 I don't know if you've played with the most recent AI music. There's songgpt.com.

Speaker 216 I've heard some things people call music that are produced by that, yeah.

Speaker 189 We can make one live right now that I don't know if you've heard like the latest

Speaker 122 models.

Speaker 189 Pick me a genre.

Speaker 198 Irish spirituals.

Speaker 81 Ska.

Speaker 229 You could try ska, too. You love ska.

Speaker 189 Ska is like definitely probably niche stuff is where it's going to have a harder time, but

Speaker 189 ska.

Speaker 189 I wonder how much SKA data there is out there.

Speaker 208 There's a lot of SKA music out there.

Speaker 189 What should we make it about?

Speaker 24 Should we make it about iHeartRadio?

Speaker 221 Sure.

Speaker 189 iHeartRadio and

Speaker 24 Robert. Uh-huh.

Speaker 189 And clear channel communications.

Speaker 189 Let's hear a Ska song.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 76 Is that really how it feels to you, huh?

Speaker 24 Yeah, guys, got older.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 196 I am 27.

Speaker 125 That's interesting.

Speaker 216 Wouldn't have guessed that.

Speaker 216 One thing that's really compelling to me is your partner, when I came in here, was very, very much talking about the utility of this in terms of replacing human beings in tasks that are generally unpleasant.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 216 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?

Speaker 189 From a business standpoint, we're 100%

Speaker 189 going after

Speaker 189 the dishes, laundry,

Speaker 189 nursing practice of just doing vitals, which is the very repetitive task.

Speaker 189 That's the push.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 And yeah, stairs is definitely a big one of those.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 216 Oh, are we gonna listen to some robot sky?

Speaker 189 iHeart listeners is the more

Speaker 189 dielectric

Speaker 137 Is this Ska?

Speaker 216 It's a pretty basic melody. I mean, there's horns in it, but I feel like it's kind of taking a...

Speaker 216 I think it's

Speaker 216 trying to do pop that it's just thrown some horns in on.

Speaker 217 This is a little closer to Ska.

Speaker 216 Although it's still...

Speaker 19 Yeah, it's not really singing.

Speaker 19 But

Speaker 216 I guess that's a matter of taste.

Speaker 216 What do you listen to?

Speaker 189 This is the worst it's going to be.

Speaker 103 I hear that a lot.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 189 I think even if we

Speaker 189 created no more energy as a human species today, the amount of advancements we create would, from an architectural standpoint, continue to advance.

Speaker 85 So you have

Speaker 189 other models

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 And we're continuing to see smaller models that are just as effective and were much cheaper training runs. I think DeepSeek was one of the newest ones.

Speaker 216 What I'm concerned about is I'm looking at the P ⁇ L, right? I'm looking at OpenAI's P ⁇ L.

Speaker 216 I'm looking at the fact that they're losing five or six billion dollars last year, and we're very good chance it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of of double that this year.

Speaker 216 And I'm, I, 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 in you know a minute or so.

Speaker 216 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.

Speaker 216 And I do wonder, like, is it not much more reasonable to focus on folding laundry?

Speaker 189 Well, obviously, I personally am in the boathouse of focusing on allowing this intelligence to flourish and doing these laborious tasks and getting them in the households.

Speaker 189 I do think from OpenAI 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.

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 216 Now it's just Adobe's handing along all of their emails now through AIs.

Speaker 216 Which is, you know, we'll see how well that works in the long term.

Speaker 216 There have been some interesting polling on like the degree to which customers and investors feel trust when somebody's responding to them with an AI.

Speaker 216 But what's interesting 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.

Speaker 216 We don't need that.

Speaker 216 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 somebody 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.

Speaker 239 Yep.

Speaker 216 Is that what you're more interested in?

Speaker 189 I'd say I tailor my pitch to the person I'm talking to.

Speaker 189 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 know,

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 Obviously, I think the first fully automated phone factory just came out in China recently, which is like some cool press and news.

Speaker 189 But the phone is separate from the actual manufacturing process.

Speaker 189 So there's that like interesting component.

Speaker 24 The

Speaker 189 exciting part of

Speaker 189 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.

Speaker 189 And I'd say that's where the sci-fi thinking comes into play. And it's not

Speaker 189 worth going there

Speaker 189 when

Speaker 189 just dreaming about the future of robotics and talking about it and having an interesting, engaging conversation.

Speaker 189 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 you gave me a lot i'm going to let you get to the other p thank you thank you so much to meet you jack

Speaker 19 oh wow that's super interesting i hope you all liked jack jay as much as i didn't getting to 27 years old and not knowing what ska was that old i thought he was much younger like you thought he was like 22.

Speaker 19 yes but the fact he he like he like didn't know what ska was as a genre he wasn't 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 he's just as good he has the most 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

Speaker 19 like nothing nothing would leave the universe if he did right like it's it's so opposite from the first guy you talked to who was it so like about no like I want to have actual tasks that people don't enjoy.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I love cinematography. I love I love filmmaking.
I don't first of all

Speaker 19 I don't think a robot can can replace this.

Speaker 124 No, I watched five different AI generated movies yesterday and they all look like shit.

Speaker 19 Give it like a robot handling a physical camera to make like to make like choices on like shot framing and composition and like moving.

Speaker 143 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 it 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 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

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 It couldn't it couldn't pick it up consistently. So I will not trust it with my fine china.
I'll say that.

Speaker 77 As soon as I got up there, I asked like, I could take my jacket off now.

Speaker 143 Can it fold it?

Speaker 113 And he was like, well, we'd have to reprogram it.

Speaker 229 And it was this, when I talked to the guy, I was like, because he, he was like, yeah, we really see this as being, you know, potentially good for

Speaker 30 elder care.

Speaker 124 Sure.

Speaker 115 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.

Speaker 147 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?

Speaker 196 And you're like, well, that's why it's open, right?

Speaker 63 Someone else will, yeah, it's open source.

Speaker 19 Someone else can do that part.

Speaker 190 So you guys are just, you guys are just saying it can do everything because somebody could potentially code something for it.

Speaker 128 Yeah, cool.

Speaker 19 There always could be code.

Speaker 135 Yeah, there could be code.

Speaker 224 I mean, again, the other guy, the actual engineer, seemed very interested in the nuts and bolts of making an affordable, reproducible machine that could handle specific tasks.

Speaker 21 And Jack J had absolutely no interest in the actual machine that they were making.

Speaker 233 This is clearly, could not be clear.

Speaker 143 This is just a stepping stone.

Speaker 105 And he's kind of grossed out by it because it's not replacing all human art with a machine that he owns.

Speaker 19 He's a man completely fueled by Lex Friedman podcasts. And he doesn't want to actually do any real work.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 130 He wants to take money by owning something that does not provide anything and also put people out of work.

Speaker 135 Like, at no point did he express a desire to do anything other than replace something people were already doing with something worse that...

Speaker 127 tech guys could profit from.

Speaker 63 That's all there is to this man.

Speaker 124 He's not a human.

Speaker 19 It's so anti-human.

Speaker 135 Yeah, I cannot overemphasize the degree to which there was nothing behind this boy's eyes.

Speaker 19 Well, do you know what? There's also nothing super intelligent behind.

Speaker 128 That's not true. All of our ads are sponsored by real people, even if they're bad people.

Speaker 190 That is true.

Speaker 30 They're at least people.

Speaker 147 They live and they love and they hate.

Speaker 196 And, you know, maybe they have a promo code. Let's see.

Speaker 19 All right, so after our lovely, our lovely robotic Jack J.

Speaker 233 Jesanowski.

Speaker 19 Ska adventure. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 127 Oh, God.

Speaker 196 Also, the ska was shit.

Speaker 36 Not good.

Speaker 56 Not good.

Speaker 202 It just kept saying the word ska.

Speaker 19 It kept saying the word ska in the music and saying the word Robert.

Speaker 110 Yeah. Saying the word Robert

Speaker 66 repeatedly.

Speaker 19 While just doing random noises. After we had our fill of of that, we did walk around the rest of showstoppers.

Speaker 146 He was so surprised that

Speaker 124 I wasn't impressed by any of the he was like, you must have heard the lady.

Speaker 100 Man, I hear them.

Speaker 50 It's not good.

Speaker 119 It's like, it's like, I made this comparison a few times.

Speaker 135 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.

Speaker 75 I would be like, well, I mean, that's like, I guess impressed.

Speaker 196 I didn't think a dog could do that.

Speaker 102 Like, I am kind of impressed, I guess, but I don't want this.

Speaker 187 Like, this doesn't do anything for me.

Speaker 19 No, it's like a parlor trick.

Speaker 187 I'm surprised you figured this out.

Speaker 19 What value does this?

Speaker 146 Yeah, how does the dog know who Farah Fawcett is?

Speaker 233 I have questions, sure, but it doesn't give me anything.

Speaker 60 Like,

Speaker 81 no, who Farah Fawcett was, Garrison?

Speaker 95 No. God damn it.

Speaker 19 What do you think I do?

Speaker 207 I don't know anymore.

Speaker 19 Well, what I did is walk around the rest of Showstoppers.

Speaker 19 I stopped at this one booth that had like a like an iPhone case with a little keyboard on the bottom that plugs in. And I started messing around with it.

Speaker 19 And the guy in the booth walked up to me and made fun of me because he's like, you've never

Speaker 126 held a phone with your father.

Speaker 24 You've never had a Blackberry, did you?

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 196 Garrison, there was a solid nine-day news cycle when Barack Obama, newly the president, revealed that he had a Blackberry that

Speaker 79 was continuing to use.

Speaker 19 I remember that, which sounds like a lifetime ago.

Speaker 142 There was a company called RIM once, and they made a tablet that was pretty good.

Speaker 143 And we only made a couple of rim job jokes about it, but it didn't do very well.

Speaker 135 And so I gave it to my dad, and accidentally, there was still a picture of my dick on it.

Speaker 125 Anyway, that's a story for another day.

Speaker 96 Cool.

Speaker 135 these are the kind of things you get recording at 11 56 p.m

Speaker 19 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 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.

Speaker 130 They have an NPU or something like that?

Speaker 19 Yeah, like an AMPU.

Speaker 147 Euro processing unit is what they're calling, like the AI-dedicated GPU thing, effectively.

Speaker 19 It allows you to hook up these glasses and run, you know, possibly infinite amount of monitors using AR. And we talked about this company last year because we saw them at Showstoppers.

Speaker 19 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 it it's it's good quality easy to use you can move the monitors around it's an excellent excellent yeah we talked to them last year and the main thing that was holding this like 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 essentially.

Speaker 19 So it was lovely to see that improved. We saw this lovely, like, like, very small foldable projector.

Speaker 31 Oh, yeah, that was cool.

Speaker 190 What's the company? That company name because we should be giving out the names of these.

Speaker 19 Yes, the AR glasses and like software system is called Space Top. Very good by a company called Sightful.
It works, works great. But yeah, this little

Speaker 19 folding projector currently has a Kickstarter. The company is called AuraZen.

Speaker 224 Yeah, AuraZen.

Speaker 19 And specifically, it was the zip trifold projector uh 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 like the way it like snapped when it closed just felt good i'm i think i'm gonna buy one like it's it's exactly what I want for traveling, which is the ability to, it goes up to like 80 inches of screen and like very good resolution.

Speaker 113 The ability to just have that plugged in to a battery or the wall and my laptop and like 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.

Speaker 19 It doesn't need Wi-Fi to work. You just can cast from your phone.

Speaker 87 A-U-R-Z-E-N zip trifold projector.

Speaker 124 Aura Zen. Yep.
Yep.

Speaker 231 I think they're selling them for $250 right now.

Speaker 19 That's for

Speaker 19 the Kickstarter.

Speaker 238 For the Kickstarter.

Speaker 128 It'll go up a little when it's a product.

Speaker 229 But we saw it. It works.

Speaker 143 They had a lot of, they had tracking and stuff, so it automatically would focus and shape.

Speaker 19 It auto-focuses and it scales correctly for what it's projecting.

Speaker 19 It automatically adjusts the tilt of it so that it, you know.

Speaker 135 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.

Speaker 81 I hooked up my phone to it.

Speaker 19 As I went to my phone screen, I realized I have

Speaker 19 a slightly, I would say, artful, lewd image of an angel, which I quickly swiped away from.

Speaker 233 At least you didn't show your dick to your dad.

Speaker 36 On my home screen of my phone.

Speaker 19 You know, things could always be worse.

Speaker 124 Things could always be worse.

Speaker 196 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,

Speaker 191 which just left me thinking about, like, some people aren't really people, right?

Speaker 81 That's what I kind of like.

Speaker 19 This whole thing is a sham.

Speaker 110 It's all for rubes.

Speaker 19 It's soulless.

Speaker 191 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

Speaker 30 a carbon fiber, you know, frame around it that's roughly the shape of like a person's lower leg.

Speaker 99 Lower leg.

Speaker 236 And it's called bioleg.

Speaker 130 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.

Speaker 63 So like when you lift up your prosthetic, it doesn't hang and it doesn't lock.

Speaker 120 It actually has a degree of motion and it feels like what lifts the rest of the leg.

Speaker 135 What your remaining muscles, like it, it measures based on like, it can like take measurements from them and it can act intelligently based on that.

Speaker 124 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.

Speaker 19 He spent like 10 years working on this.

Speaker 191 Yeah, eight years, he said.

Speaker 56 Eight years.

Speaker 57 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 the dark magic of CES.

Speaker 19 And like, I don't, like, I'm not like anti-tech. Like, I think there, I think technology can really improve people's lives if used well.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 142 Eight years figuring out how to do this.

Speaker 236 Yeah. Is winning awards for it.

Speaker 19 Award-winning, like, tech innovations.

Speaker 135 Changing your, as a person who has lost your lower leg 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

Speaker 19 just steps away from ai ska and ai and the donald trump mask over the laundry folding

Speaker 19 the company is again bionic m uh and it's the bio leg the bio legs the product yeah the bio leg is the product by bionic m i'm gonna try to check it out more tomorrow at eureka park which at this point you know know, that'll be in like maybe future episodes

Speaker 19 come next week. But I guess this closes our actual like week of coverage.

Speaker 21 Let's go get fucked up and eat Japanese food.

Speaker 95 Oh, I'm down. Yeah.
I'm down.

Speaker 130 Let's do it.

Speaker 231 Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 84 It could happen here is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 84 For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 84 You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 240 Hey guys, this is Ashley Akinetti from the Ben and Ashley Eye Almost Famous Podcast, and I have a new favorite place to shop online. It's called BOM.

Speaker 240 They have high quality pieces that are affordable and ethically sourced.

Speaker 11 Also, they have a ton of cozies.

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Speaker 19 It's giving cozy.

Speaker 47 Cool girl energy.

Speaker 240 Like denim, dresses, sweaters, all the stuff that you actually want to wear.

Speaker 12 So go to boam.com.

Speaker 240 That is B-O-H-M-E.com.

Speaker 47 Trust me, you're going to have a pretty full cart.

Speaker 173 It's the gaming event of the year featuring T-Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming.

Speaker 181 Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch.

Speaker 183 Com

Speaker 183 Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global, Global.

Speaker 241 Let's take a minute to unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 is a long-term solution for weight loss.

Speaker 241 True, GLP-1 can potentially be a long-term solution for weight loss if you want to be on a drug that changes your body's natural instincts. Myth number two, GLP-1 can fix your metabolism.
False.

Speaker 241 GLP-1s fix hunger, and this leads to weight loss. But the GLP-1s may actually slow down your metabolic rate as your body adjusts to consuming fewer calories.

Speaker 241 Myth number three, GLP-1 leads to a loss of muscle mass. True.

Speaker 241 GLP-1 can lead to a loss of muscle mass due to losing weight so rapidly that your body is pulling from both fat and muscle to make up for the energy gap from consuming so few calories.

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Speaker 3 Hey guys, it's Erin Andrews from Calm Down with Erin and Carissa.

Speaker 7 So as a sideline reporter, game day is extra busy for me, but I know it can be busy for parents everywhere.

Speaker 5 You're juggling snacks, nap time, and everything else.

Speaker 7 Well, Gerber can help create a more parent-friendly game day because they have the most clean label project certifications of any baby food brand.

Speaker 11 So you can feel good about what you're feeding your little ones.

Speaker 5 I mean, Mac loves them.

Speaker 9 You can't go wrong with the little crunchies. You just put him in a little bag or you put him in a little container and he's good to go.

Speaker 18 Make sure to pick up your little ones' favorite Gerber products at a store near you.

Speaker 242 This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. Fantasy football can be exhausting.
I mean that literally. You're so anxious over your lineup, you can't fall asleep.
Best way to deal with it is Unisom.

Speaker 242 There's a reason it's the number one doctor recommended over-the-counter sleep aid brand. It helps you fall asleep faster, wake up less, and feel refreshed in the morning.

Speaker 242 Plus, Unisom sleep tabs are clinically tested and proven effective and completely non-habit forming. So make the ultimate sleeper pick and put it to bed with Unisom.
Use as directed.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

It Could Happen Here Weekly 164

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