Speaker 1: Also media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode, So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
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Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, welcome, Vick can have it here. It's me
Speaker 2: James today with a terrible cold as you can probably tell,
Speaker 2: but still very important to listen today because I'm talking
Speaker 2: to Andreina, an organizer from Ktown for All Up in LA,
Speaker 2: and we're going to talk about the fires in LA
Speaker 2: and the meat fade response and what you can do
Speaker 2: to help.
Speaker 3: So welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Andrena, thank you for having me.
Speaker 3: James.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for being here. I know you guys are
Speaker 2: really busy right now. So to begin with, like in
Speaker 2: case this has missed people, and there's a lot there's
Speaker 2: a lot of news happening right now, can you explain
Speaker 2: what's been going on in LA with respected to fires
Speaker 2: for the last two three days, So.
Speaker 4: About three or four days ago, we got a warning
Speaker 4: that we were going to be experiencing high winds up
Speaker 4: to fifty miles per hour, which is nuts, and they
Speaker 4: were going to be coming from the desert. So this
Speaker 4: is just like a barrage of hot wind. So we
Speaker 4: were preparing to have to replace tents and tarps because
Speaker 4: you know, man made structures that people are surviving with
Speaker 4: can't survive that kind of wind. But when we hear
Speaker 4: that wind here in southern California, we immediately think fire, sadly,
Speaker 4: because any little you know, a cigarette, but an electrical spark,
Speaker 4: you know, like when when it's this dry, it's enough
Speaker 4: to cause devastation, which is exactly what's happened. There are
Speaker 4: about seven fires right now spread around the perimeter of
Speaker 4: Los Angeles County that have been started and then spread
Speaker 4: massively by these giant winds everywhere, so the embers are
Speaker 4: being picked up. Thankfully, the wind has settled down, but
Speaker 4: the wind itself has prevented, you know, the big water
Speaker 4: tankers from flying, which is led to the massive deaths
Speaker 4: s that you saw in the Palisades and other areas.
Speaker 4: You know, the entire water we being grounded for a
Speaker 4: while just meant that it was burning with no control,
Speaker 4: relying on on the ground firefighters. So what we've seen
Speaker 4: is just mass devastation, thousands of homes lost. I think
Speaker 4: there is a death tally, thankfully very low, in about tennish.
Speaker 4: I think I've heard from this morning with confirmation. But yeah,
Speaker 4: that's all we're facing right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty devastating, Like whole neighborhoods have gone right,
Speaker 2: I think I thought like two thousand structures have already
Speaker 2: been burned. And like, as you said, if people aren't
Speaker 2: in the United States or nut familiar with how fire
Speaker 2: is for like out here in the Western United States,
Speaker 2: it's a lot of air dropping fire retired in and
Speaker 2: air dropping water, which without that, it's very hard to
Speaker 2: get enough water to where it needs to be. And
Speaker 2: I believe at one point that actually ran out of
Speaker 2: water in water towers right up in Palisades.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the fire hydrants ran dry in some areas, which
Speaker 4: is terrifying to think of. And we were warned. I'm
Speaker 4: in the Koreatan neighborhood. We were warned about low water pressure.
Speaker 4: And I do know that some areas in Los Angeles,
Speaker 4: particularly in that region, are being worn to boil water
Speaker 4: and that their water is unsafe to drink right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've seen that too. Dare was a water boil
Speaker 2: warning for yeah, lots of places. So as a result
Speaker 2: of these fires and all the destruction they've caused, I
Speaker 2: think I saw it was it one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: thousand odd people have been displaced now, is that?
Speaker 3: Is that right? Is that a good number?
Speaker 4: I saw something large like that of just the people
Speaker 4: that have been evacuated. Right north of me was the
Speaker 4: Sunset fire, and that was very concerningly close to the
Speaker 4: Korea Ten neighborhood that is generally never concerned about fires
Speaker 4: because we're so in the concrete jungle, like, we're so insulated.
Speaker 4: I think that's the closest we've come to devastation, and
Speaker 4: we were really stressed out last night just keeping an
Speaker 4: eye on the news because that's, you know, not even
Speaker 4: two miles away away from the core of the densest
Speaker 4: neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, I guess again, people aren't familiar like fires
Speaker 2: destroy property and kill people every year here, and the
Speaker 2: climate change has meant that they have become worse and worse.
Speaker 3: But in the middle of a city.
Speaker 2: You're Germany not worried about fires because the resources will
Speaker 2: be spent to defend that property, right, Like this is
Speaker 2: this is a very unique situation to see huge parts
Speaker 2: of a city burning down.
Speaker 4: Yeah, particularly the Palisades, which is historically a significantly wealthy neighborhood. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, a den of celebrity in Hollywood elites, and
Speaker 4: seeing it devastated just kind of sends home the point
Speaker 4: that you know, you have wealth that insulates you from
Speaker 4: the worst of what we're facing, but that only goes
Speaker 4: so far. I saw that there was a couple of
Speaker 4: wealthy people on Twitter begging for private fired fighting forces
Speaker 4: to come save their homes. Famously, the same ones that
Speaker 4: are talking about activation and how smart they are to
Speaker 4: do real estate, you know, maneuvering to not pay into
Speaker 4: the social system that helps in these times. Clearly we're
Speaker 4: severely underfunded and severely undermanaged when it comes to the
Speaker 4: government stepping in during these emergencies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like that's something I want to address because
Speaker 2: I think in every natural disaster that I've covered, the
Speaker 2: reason it becomes a disaster, I guess is because the
Speaker 2: state's incapable of responding in a way that protects people,
Speaker 2: and in almost every case it's people who have to step.
Speaker 3: Up and look after one another.
Speaker 2: So we should talk about the response of the LA
Speaker 2: City and county governments, and then I'd love to talk
Speaker 2: about the mutial aid response after that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, from what we've seen here in Kaytown, if you
Speaker 4: weren't immediately evacuated, there's nothing. All of our outreach folks
Speaker 4: that were out talking to all of our un house
Speaker 4: neighbors here in the area, which are in the hundreds,
Speaker 4: first of all, didn't know what was going on. They
Speaker 4: saw the sky, they assumed there was a fire nearby,
Speaker 4: but they didn't know the swath of the devastation and
Speaker 4: that we were generally threatened as well. They didn't have
Speaker 4: any supplies, and in some areas of Los Angeles we've
Speaker 4: heard as of this morning and yesterday that sweeps have continued.
Speaker 4: So the city has continued throwing away tents from the
Speaker 4: people living on the streets. And then for the house
Speaker 4: people that have been displaced, there are shelter designations that
Speaker 4: they've set up. Pan Pacific Park is one of them
Speaker 4: for Hollywood. There's one in Pasadena, you know, and the like.
Speaker 4: But it seems to be you know, a hodgepodge of
Speaker 4: you know, disorganization and a lot of you know, mutual
Speaker 4: aid folks on the ground being the ones to direct
Speaker 4: people and gather the supplies. I have not heard of,
Speaker 4: you know, a very formal eyed system. There is no
Speaker 4: word on any kind of significant assistance for people who
Speaker 4: have lost their homes at the moment. I don't know
Speaker 4: if the Red Cross is gonna set a staging zone
Speaker 4: up or anything, but I do know that the people
Speaker 4: who are setting up you know, places for people to go, food, water,
Speaker 4: even pet care, things like that have been just random volunteers.
Speaker 4: You know. I'm in this chat group Mutual ADLA that
Speaker 4: spurred you know, literally just on signal the day that
Speaker 4: the fire started, that has a thousand people on it
Speaker 4: mobilizing and distributing and volunteering to move people from one
Speaker 4: area of the city to the other. You know, I
Speaker 4: have this person who needs a place to stay, Like,
Speaker 4: who's got a list of places that are open, because
Speaker 4: when you have disasters as big, you need help quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and bureaucracy just doesn't you know that that's not built
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2: And like we've definitely seen that there was just a
Speaker 2: failure of the state to respond like in the way
Speaker 2: that it needed to as quickly as it needed to.
Speaker 2: And it's really it's wonderful to see people picking up slack,
Speaker 2: like of course it is. It's really beautiful that people
Speaker 2: show up for each other in these times. There's something
Speaker 2: about that that I obviously, like find really affirming. That's
Speaker 2: maybe why I do this for a living. But yeah,
Speaker 2: it's really beautiful to see. It doesn't mean that we
Speaker 2: should forget that, Like the state has capacity that it
Speaker 2: is using, as you said, to displace people who are unhoused.
Speaker 2: It could be using that capacity to bring masks to people,
Speaker 2: to bring food to people, to create shelter for people.
Speaker 2: It's not it's choosing to harasp people who live on
Speaker 2: the street.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is something we see repeatedly. You know,
Speaker 4: it hasn't rained in LA for about eight months, but
Speaker 4: when it did rain, we had historical rains last year,
Speaker 4: in particular, we had a cold front where folks die
Speaker 4: every time, and we know folks are going to die
Speaker 4: every time it rains here in LA. We have more
Speaker 4: people that die of hypothermia and Los Angeles than New
Speaker 4: York and San Francisco. Combined every year because hypothermia actually
Speaker 4: doesn't require it to be freezing this set end. It
Speaker 4: just requires you to be in around sixty degrees and
Speaker 4: be wet, which is very common on the streets here
Speaker 4: of LA. We've seen people get frostbite from having their
Speaker 4: skin against cold concrete, you know, over the night while
Speaker 4: it's raining, and our electeds know this. When I first
Speaker 4: started doing this work, there was a slogan that we
Speaker 4: were chanting for a day in LA and that was
Speaker 4: the number of unhoused people that died every day. And
Speaker 4: now we're at about six or seven. We request, you know,
Speaker 4: through the Freedom of Information Act, requests the coroner's report
Speaker 4: every year of how many people died, and that number
Speaker 4: is only growing. And the government knows this. They know
Speaker 4: every time we have a heat wave that there are
Speaker 4: seventy thousand people sleeping on the streets, sleeping in their cars.
Speaker 4: They know that during the winter, you know, people are
Speaker 4: out there in the cold and the rain. And I
Speaker 4: talk to people who aren't into the organizing space and
Speaker 4: they asked me like, well, aren't there you know, insert
Speaker 4: service here that you think there should be, you know,
Speaker 4: right now during the fires, Like aren't there vans picking
Speaker 4: people up and taking them to shelter, and it's like
Speaker 4: that would be wonderful, when there's not. There's never any
Speaker 4: vans picking people up. Know, even when they open up
Speaker 4: cooling shelters and warming shelters. The number one barrier we
Speaker 4: heard from people in the streets is how would I
Speaker 4: get there? And when I get there, they make me
Speaker 4: not bring my stuff in, so it's all going to
Speaker 4: get stolen. There's just all of these barriers that the
Speaker 4: city is just completely you know, purposely neglecting. They could
Speaker 4: talk to any of us on how to run a
Speaker 4: successful you know, warming or cooling shelter, they don't, you know,
Speaker 4: they have no interest in what we have to say.
Speaker 4: In fact, our city council person hearing Kytown doesn't respond
Speaker 4: to any of our inquiries at all. She just flat
Speaker 4: out doesn't respond to us whenever we email her with
Speaker 4: concerns or questions. And that's kind of how we've been,
Speaker 4: you know, working just with the knowledge that we don't
Speaker 4: have this support of this agency, and in fact they
Speaker 4: are opposition. You know, we're the ones having to organize
Speaker 4: around them and what they're doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's sadly not that dissimilar here, Like every time
Speaker 2: it rains, people will die.
Speaker 3: Every time we have heat wave.
Speaker 2: I remember they found the remains of an in house
Speaker 2: person a couple of years ago, and they thought the
Speaker 2: person had been burned like like by fire, and it
Speaker 2: turned out they had just been exposed to massive amounts
Speaker 2: of heat. And yeah, I remember a couple of years ago,
Speaker 2: just like give an anecdote, it was I think above
Speaker 2: one hundred degrees in town. It was so hot, and
Speaker 2: I was in the river bed like I had this
Speaker 2: big insulated backpack to give people cold water, and just
Speaker 2: like dozens of people were in terrible distress. And yeah,
Speaker 2: there was no presence of police fire and anyone to help.
Speaker 2: Right Like we have these sometimes billion dollar police departments
Speaker 2: in these cities, and people are still unsafe and they
Speaker 2: don't feel safe reaching out to any government agencies because
Speaker 2: these government agencies are the same ones that you say
Speaker 2: that throw away their shit, that destroy all the little
Speaker 2: things that they've been trying to build up to get onto,
Speaker 2: you know, like a better situation in life.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think there's this sense of like apathy
Speaker 4: that has built and rightfully so, from the people that
Speaker 4: live on the streets where we've you know, relayed messages
Speaker 4: that we've heard like hey, two one one says they
Speaker 4: have one hundred shelter beds tonight, call and see if
Speaker 4: you can get in, and they're like, okay, you know,
Speaker 4: like I'll give it a shot, you know, And it's
Speaker 4: very well received because we understand the amount of disappointment
Speaker 4: these people have gone through when they do the care
Speaker 4: plus sweeps, which is in itself such an evil name, yea,
Speaker 4: when they throw all their stuff away when they show
Speaker 4: up and they do care Plus, they show up with
Speaker 4: a social worker first, which if I was a social worker,
Speaker 4: I'd be kicking and screaming about how damaging that is
Speaker 4: that right before they throw away everything that an non
Speaker 4: house person owns, they send in a loan social worker
Speaker 4: to write their names and maybe their numbers down and
Speaker 4: tell them that the shelters are full, but they'll get
Speaker 4: back to them, and then they have all of their
Speaker 4: belongings droven away. I can't imagine the harm that has
Speaker 4: done for just trusting services even when they're available, you know,
Speaker 4: accessing them and then giving them your information. Have one
Speaker 4: person who rightfully so told me they have trauma about
Speaker 4: filling out forms because they've done this three hundred times,
Speaker 4: you know, they said something incredible. They've been counting about
Speaker 4: how many times they've filled the same forms out to
Speaker 4: have it lead nowhere. And I can't imagine, you know,
Speaker 4: that kind of resilience. Now, with this devastation, there's going
Speaker 4: to be a lot of homeowners who are going to
Speaker 4: experience that firsthand. I'm seeing a lot of people that
Speaker 4: are homeless for the first time ever in their lives,
Speaker 4: like in their late fifties. And these are people that
Speaker 4: have owned homes, that have worked careers, that have you know,
Speaker 4: lived their whole life as you're supposed to you in
Speaker 4: the United States, and then in their elder years, befall
Speaker 4: some sort of disaster or social Security doesn't pay anymore,
Speaker 4: and they are severely shocked when I tell them what
Speaker 4: the landscape of our social safety net looks like. I've
Speaker 4: had people ask me like where do I go to
Speaker 4: sign up for free housing? And I have to tell them,
Speaker 4: you know, the wait list for vouchers is fifteen years,
Speaker 4: is long, and it's a lottery. The list is closed
Speaker 4: because it's so full. You can apply to senior housing,
Speaker 4: but that's about a ten year wait, you know, that
Speaker 4: I have to be the one to tell them that,
Speaker 4: and that's sort of shock I think is going to
Speaker 4: be hitting a lot of folks that have never tried
Speaker 4: to access services before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, let's take a little break here for some
Speaker 2: advertisements and then we'll come back. All right, we're back.
Speaker 2: So Yeah, I think anyone who's familiar with the situation
Speaker 2: facing unhoused people in southern California will understand that there
Speaker 2: is not a safety net, and that's about to become
Speaker 2: more profoundly obvious than ever for thousands of people. Let's
Speaker 2: talk about the way that people are helping to take
Speaker 2: care of one another, because I think that's that's what
Speaker 2: always happened to these situations. So let's talk about the
Speaker 2: mutual aid effort. Maybe you could like talk about some
Speaker 2: of the groups, talk about some of the things you've
Speaker 2: been doing, and then I want to get onto how
Speaker 2: people can help if they're in town, and how people
Speaker 2: can help if they are a long way away.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: In LA, we have a very robust network of mutual
Speaker 4: aid groups that have been built by force, honestly, via
Speaker 4: this government. I think a lot of them have started
Speaker 4: up to step in just there's no denying all over
Speaker 4: La that there's this crisis because you walk outside of
Speaker 4: your house and there are people sleeping on your street.
Speaker 4: You know, there's people digging through your garbage. So we've
Speaker 4: seen this blossoming of mutual aid groups all over the city,
Speaker 4: and we in times of crisis, you know, will spark
Speaker 4: up a signal group that grows from zero to thousands
Speaker 4: of people overnight that are willing to jump in and
Speaker 4: get their hands dirty to coalesce and find resources. You know,
Speaker 4: here's where we're buying masks. This star is out, don't
Speaker 4: go to this one. Go to that one who's reimbursing
Speaker 4: people for a gas et cetera, et cetera. And it's
Speaker 4: normal people. You know, I have a full time job.
Speaker 4: My friends here in Ktown for all. Some are teachers,
Speaker 4: some are in the movie industry, you know, some are
Speaker 4: random lawyers you know that will take their time out
Speaker 4: to do this work. And I think that it's beautiful
Speaker 4: in the sense that we get people the help they
Speaker 4: need and it's never enough, which is crushing. Here in Ktown.
Speaker 4: We give supplies to about four hundred or so on
Speaker 4: house people a week minimum, and that is hygiene supplies
Speaker 4: tense blankets, We connect them to any services that they
Speaker 4: might ask us to connect them to, driving them to
Speaker 4: the hospital, et cetera. And this has been going on
Speaker 4: for the last five years. And Ktown for All specifically
Speaker 4: started as a counter protest because there was an attempt
Speaker 4: to build a showter here in Koreatown and some homeowners
Speaker 4: organized against it. They marched down Wiltshire and shut it down.
Speaker 4: And our founders found each other because they were the
Speaker 4: only five people holding up we Want Shelter Science and
Speaker 4: just started doing distribution themselves. And I think that's one
Speaker 4: thing that I would really suggest to folks is it's
Speaker 4: not as intimidating as it seems to start one of
Speaker 4: these projects. It's literally you and a couple of friends
Speaker 4: who decide that you're going to do something, and you
Speaker 4: acknowledge that you can't do everything and that you'll never
Speaker 4: be able to meet the need because what we need
Speaker 4: is a government who cares about people. But in the meanwhile,
Speaker 4: we're going to do the best we can, and the
Speaker 4: lives of the you know, now four hundred or so
Speaker 4: people that we see every week are a little better
Speaker 4: because we decide to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's really important to say that, Like
Speaker 2: it can seem really overwhelming. This is an email I
Speaker 2: get almost every week, like how do I start a
Speaker 2: mutual aid group? Like if you can make a sandwich,
Speaker 2: then you and you can start a mutual aid group.
Speaker 2: Like just go and feed people who are hungry. If
Speaker 2: someone's cold, give them a blanket. Like it doesn't have
Speaker 2: to be like you don't have to read seventeen books,
Speaker 2: you know, and be like starting a five H one,
Speaker 2: C three and stuff.
Speaker 3: You just need to do things.
Speaker 2: And I think, especially like we're going into a new administration,
Speaker 2: we're going to see the state being more hostile to
Speaker 2: people who already marginalized. And like, the best advice I
Speaker 2: have for people is to get off the internet and
Speaker 2: to get into the streets and just do something. It
Speaker 2: doesn't matter if you say you won't be able to
Speaker 2: do everything, not right away, maybe one day we will,
Speaker 2: but like doing something is a lot better than doing nothing,
Speaker 2: and I guarantee it is also much better for you
Speaker 2: and you're met, Like I feel so much better when
Speaker 2: I'm able to help people. I wouldn't be able to
Speaker 2: do the job I do at the border if I
Speaker 2: wasn't also able to help people like it. It helps
Speaker 2: me feel like I'm not part of the problem, I guess,
Speaker 2: or like we're doing something about it at least. What
Speaker 2: are people doing right now to help people who are
Speaker 2: impacted by the fire. What are the needs that are
Speaker 2: arising and how people meeting them?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, Ktown for all focuses here in the Ktown neighborhood,
Speaker 4: and what we've particularly focused on is mass distribution. People
Speaker 4: are sitting and it's literally raining ash in some areas
Speaker 4: and are sitting in the suot, So there's that. There's
Speaker 4: basic tent and tarp gathering meals. So many emergency services
Speaker 4: shut down during disasters, you know, makes sense, but a
Speaker 4: lot of food kitchens that people would get meals from
Speaker 4: are not open right now. So it's getting people food,
Speaker 4: getting people water just enough to survive. In other areas,
Speaker 4: folks are gathering supplies. There's all Power Books that is
Speaker 4: a big distribution site right now. Po Mutuoid out in
Speaker 4: the Palms area is doing a lot of really great work.
Speaker 4: The South Bay got swept last night, so South Bay
Speaker 4: Mutuo Aid Club is replacing tents this morning. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of the Pet Mutuo Aid groups who are gathering
Speaker 4: pet food and finding foster homes for a lot of
Speaker 4: the found dogs and cats. It's just I mean, I
Speaker 4: can't even list the amount of people right now that
Speaker 4: are like in their vehicles doing drop offs to you know,
Speaker 4: the sidewalk project. There's a big skid row distribution point
Speaker 4: that is building up crowdsourcing insulin things that like you
Speaker 4: don't think about that people ran out of their house
Speaker 4: that they need to live. They don't have time to
Speaker 4: go get a prescription right you know at a primary
Speaker 4: care provider like that, we need albuterol that people are
Speaker 4: having asthma attacks. So there's these kind of burdens that
Speaker 4: mutuoid projects get around because people a don't have to
Speaker 4: fill out any forms, they don't have to wait. If
Speaker 4: we have it, you're going to be handed it. And
Speaker 4: you know, even medical providers as part of our projects
Speaker 4: have become a really big support as people on the
Speaker 4: streets are often very disabled. We have a lot of
Speaker 4: folks at diabetes, like diabetic open wounds, like just very
Speaker 4: horrible injuries that need constant care. All Power Bookstore has
Speaker 4: a free clinic, All Power Clinic and they offer free
Speaker 4: medical care and come with us on our roots here
Speaker 4: in Katown to offer free treatment for folks. And I
Speaker 4: think that's something that is going to only grow, as
Speaker 4: you said, as this administration occurs. Homelessness rose eighteen percent
Speaker 4: in the last year, and that's only been the case
Speaker 4: every year since we started counting. There is no way
Speaker 4: this administration is going to institute rent control or anything
Speaker 4: that keeps people from being displaced. One mutuoid project that
Speaker 4: I think people overlook often is the tenants unions, the
Speaker 4: LA Tenants Union mobilizing to care for their members, checking
Speaker 4: in on their disabled members. These kind of community based
Speaker 4: organizations where people know people, they know who to check
Speaker 4: up on, they know who's vulnerable. Those kind of organizations
Speaker 4: are invaluable in emergencies like these.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, And like I one good thing that can
Speaker 2: come out of this is that we can build stronger communities,
Speaker 2: right and we can hopefully folks who are finding themselves
Speaker 2: depending on mutual aid for the first time can realize that,
Speaker 2: like they can participate in that. And I know there
Speaker 2: are folks already why who have lost their homes who
Speaker 2: are still out there helping other people, driving around, rescuing
Speaker 2: people and stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think we say this all the time.
Speaker 4: In the homelessness space, you know, you're closer to being
Speaker 4: homeless than you are to be a billionaire. And I
Speaker 4: think this is one of the most direct examples, Like
Speaker 4: these people might have been well off maybe a month
Speaker 4: or two ago, and then now they have zero. You know,
Speaker 4: they're going to be fighting with insurance companies for maybe
Speaker 4: five years, you know, if some of them, and hopefully,
Speaker 4: you know, they end up recovering. But I hope they
Speaker 4: don't forget that climate change and emergency disasters are a
Speaker 4: great equalizer. And the people that show their faces, they're
Speaker 4: not the politicians, they're not the lobbyists, they're not you know,
Speaker 4: the Democratic Party. You know, TM, it's your neighbor who
Speaker 4: has a mask for you. It's me, someone random from
Speaker 4: down the block, who got a couple friends together, who
Speaker 4: has water for you. You know, like that's who comes through,
Speaker 4: and that's who you need to care for all the time,
Speaker 4: including your un housed neighbors that are around you all
Speaker 4: the time, who live in your community and who face
Speaker 4: this emergency every day. You know, they don't know where
Speaker 4: they're going to sleep every night, they don't know where
Speaker 4: their next meal is coming from. Every day, they get
Speaker 4: their stuff destroyed by the state, you know, regularly, if
Speaker 4: not once a week, very frequently, And I hope this
Speaker 4: is really sad, but I hope it forces some empathy
Speaker 4: in people who otherwise don't think about themselves in this
Speaker 4: context of being a human that needs food, water, and shelter,
Speaker 4: you know, the basics.
Speaker 2: Yeah, talking food, water, and shelter the things I need
Speaker 2: as well, and so to pay for them, I have
Speaker 2: to pivot to ads. Now, Okay, we're back. I think
Speaker 2: that was a really good plug for like why Muti
Speaker 2: Lady is important and hopefully there are people who are
Speaker 2: listening right or people who are finding themselves for the
Speaker 2: first time interested in helping seeing a crisis. A lot
Speaker 2: of people like will ask me if they can come
Speaker 2: help at the border, and of course you can, but
Speaker 2: you should also help in your own community because there
Speaker 2: are people who need you there, and obviously that's very
Speaker 2: true in LA right now. So I want to give
Speaker 2: some resources some ways people can help if people are
Speaker 2: listening in LA, what are some like I know there
Speaker 2: are all kinds of efforts, but what are some concrete
Speaker 2: things they can do or some places they can go
Speaker 2: if they're in a situation where they're not massively impacted
Speaker 2: by the fires and they want to help other people.
Speaker 3: What are some things they can do?
Speaker 4: You're free to follow kitown for all on Instagram. We
Speaker 4: are constantly uploading on our stories year round. Fundraisers, resource requests,
Speaker 4: go fundmes, et cetera. We really try to stay connected
Speaker 4: with the LA Mutual Aid network, and honestly, once you
Speaker 4: follow one of us, you kind of follow all of
Speaker 4: us because we're very supportive of each other's effort. Mutual
Speaker 4: Aid LA is a good hub. They have a magazine
Speaker 4: that gets published every month that has a list of
Speaker 4: mutual aid programs all over LA. If you can't come
Speaker 4: out on physical outreach with us, which we do on
Speaker 4: Saturdays every Saturday except the first Saturday of the month
Speaker 4: when we do our planning meeting, you're free to help us,
Speaker 4: you know, connect with others. You're free to help us financially.
Speaker 4: But we also you know, funny you mentioned this, James,
Speaker 4: But if you DM us and you're like, hey, I
Speaker 4: want to talk to someone about starting a project in
Speaker 4: my region, I'm so happy to hop on a zoom
Speaker 4: with you. Tell you how we do our distribution, tell
Speaker 4: you how we make our maps, of encampments, tell you
Speaker 4: how we you know, fund and routsource always happy to
Speaker 4: find that knowledge and people messages all the time. Can
Speaker 4: we start a Neighborhood for All chapter? And we're like,
Speaker 4: we're so honored that you would do that. Please don't ask,
Speaker 4: but you're totally welcome to. And so we have Pasadena
Speaker 4: for All that is doing great work, and Pasadena for
Speaker 4: All is definitely always in need of support. They are
Speaker 4: in a huge disaster zone Altadena, Pasadena, like all those
Speaker 4: areas are been evacuated. Palms Mutoid. But yeah, if you
Speaker 4: want to stay connected, you know, follow us on Instagram,
Speaker 4: Ktown for All, same Twitter, same on Blue Sky and
Speaker 4: will hopefully be your input into the La Mutoid scene.
Speaker 4: We're always so happy to support anyone else doing this work.
Speaker 4: And while we focus in the Ktown neighborhood, LA is
Speaker 4: a giant place. And if you have any neighborhoods in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles that you feel passionate about or need extra attention,
Speaker 4: you know, we'll always be the ones to uplift those.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's really cool. I think it's really important that
Speaker 3: we share.
Speaker 2: Like one of my friends when we were doing border stuff,
Speaker 2: made a website where we documented all the stuff we
Speaker 2: did so that it was open source and available to people,
Speaker 2: like how we built shelters and how we could But yeah,
Speaker 2: we don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Like
Speaker 2: we can all help each other get that start and
Speaker 2: not make the mistakes so we all make So that's
Speaker 2: really cool that people can reach out to you. What
Speaker 2: about if they're a long way away and they just
Speaker 2: want to send some money, They want to help and
Speaker 2: they've got money they want to share.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you're always welcome to venmo us kton for all.
Speaker 4: Same on venmo. We have a PayPal link, We have
Speaker 4: a website, kton for all dot org. We are five
Speaker 4: oho and C three. If you'd like to donate in
Speaker 4: our you know, in some kind of corporate fancy way,
Speaker 4: feel free to dm us. We just got that figured out.
Speaker 4: But yeah, all of our money gets spent directly on
Speaker 4: material goods. We don't have any employees, we don't have
Speaker 4: any overhead. Our volunteers are up to their necks and
Speaker 4: baby wipes usually when we get you know, sock donations
Speaker 4: and things like that, And honestly, we prefer it that
Speaker 4: way just because you know, we we know what nonprofit
Speaker 4: requirements are like and that kind of burden that that
Speaker 4: place is on mutuoid projects and we're trying to avoid them,
Speaker 4: so every time still goes to supplies, and I know
Speaker 4: every mutoid project. Jaytown Action in Japantown as well operates
Speaker 4: in a very similar model. I would just suggest people
Speaker 4: get plugged in to mutuoid La. They follow us on Instagram,
Speaker 4: feel free to send any money, work constantly on our stories,
Speaker 4: uploading gofundmes and venmos and stuff. I really appreciate their
Speaker 4: help you out of the country and hope that one
Speaker 4: day orgs like ours are not needed anymore because we
Speaker 4: live in a great world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that'd be nice.
Speaker 2: Is there anything else, like, do you have any bottlenecks
Speaker 2: or particular shortages that you want to shout out that
Speaker 2: the audience can maybe.
Speaker 3: Help you with.
Speaker 4: We're always looking for staples, so those are tents and
Speaker 4: tarps constantly. Those are often the most expensive items people
Speaker 4: have to purchase. Tents go about thirty to forty dollars
Speaker 4: each one, and the government throws a lot of them
Speaker 4: away every week. So those items. Feel free to always
Speaker 4: DM me if you have some that you would like
Speaker 4: to drop off. But I will say mutual aid orgs
Speaker 4: are really good at building connections directly with vendors and
Speaker 4: we usually get like a discount and buying in bulk.
Speaker 4: So I would really love to shake people from their
Speaker 4: fear of donating cash.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Know a lot of folks feel comfortable like buying an
Speaker 4: item because you know that that's the item that's given out.
Speaker 4: But sometimes we get a better deal buying a thousand
Speaker 4: of those tenths, and your dollar goes farther. So you know,
Speaker 4: tense blankets, and again, don't be afraid to do this
Speaker 4: by yourself. Like you can go to home depot and
Speaker 4: buyotent and hand it to someone. You can go to
Speaker 4: home depot and buy masks right now and hand them
Speaker 4: to someone. You don't have to wait for a group
Speaker 4: like this to be around and to help, particularly if
Speaker 4: your neighborhood needs you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a really good message. It's a good
Speaker 3: place to end.
Speaker 2: Just to remind everyone, it's at Ktown for All on
Speaker 2: Instagram and k Town for All on Venmo.
Speaker 1: Right, yep, great, thanks so.
Speaker 4: Much, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Oh it could happen here. A podcast from CEES The
Speaker 1: Consumer Electronics Show twenty twenty five. I am here with
Speaker 1: my friend and work partner, Garrison Davis. We have been
Speaker 1: trotting the boards, the boards being the Las Vegas Convention
Speaker 1: Center all day. Garrison, today, you started earlier than I
Speaker 1: did because I was catastrophically hungover after getting very drunk
Speaker 1: with the priest last night. Yeah, we had a nice
Speaker 1: dinner and then we set out to experience a fresh
Speaker 1: new hell. And in this case, that fresh new hell
Speaker 1: was what the AI bros Have ready for your children.
Speaker 5: No, it's funny how we both stumbled across AI products
Speaker 5: for kids like the same day, during the exactly same time.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. Yeah, it really is remarkable that, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess in part just because like Betty is such
Speaker 1: a focus. I think it has something to do with
Speaker 1: what you saw some of yesterday where and I had
Speaker 1: caught a little the day before where they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they don't really like this stuff. We're gonna have to
Speaker 1: get around it. Like obviously this is inevitable, but like
Speaker 1: people really also seem to not enjoy it very much.
Speaker 1: No one can explain why, but I think that this
Speaker 1: may be like, Okay, well, if we get them when
Speaker 1: they're young enough, if we train these kids. We can
Speaker 1: force this on them and they'll have no choice but
Speaker 1: to like it.
Speaker 5: And it's interesting to say that because the first thing
Speaker 5: I did today was go to a panel at the
Speaker 5: Venetian titled Raising AI Kids Responsibly, which is maybe the
Speaker 5: best title for any single panel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's fucked up.
Speaker 5: The description was a new generation of kids are being
Speaker 5: brought up with AI technologies as a part of their lives.
Speaker 5: How does this affect their learning, entertainment and socialization? Which
Speaker 5: is a good question. Yeah, we should be asked that,
Speaker 5: more people should. There was four people on the panel,
Speaker 5: Karen Ruth Wong from Ido, Play Lab Partnerships, Nilo Lewick
Speaker 5: from Skyrocket Toys, Melissa Hunter from Family Video Network, and
Speaker 5: Joshua Garrett from a Ready Land. And I'll talk about
Speaker 5: all these all these different companies and people in a
Speaker 5: sec Yeah. So the panel started with Karen Ruth Wang
Speaker 5: from Ido, which is the company that first partnered with
Speaker 5: sessing me a Workshop to start making online apps. So,
Speaker 5: you know, that was interesting to me because sess me
Speaker 5: a Workshop generally puts a lot of care into, like
Speaker 5: you know, making media for children. This is a company
Speaker 5: that works with them, so I was interested in what
Speaker 5: she was going to say, and basically she talked not
Speaker 5: about any products that her company's making, but instead research
Speaker 5: into how like AI is affecting gen Z, how gen
Speaker 5: Z wants to like interact with AI, and talked about
Speaker 5: a whole bunch of research that her company has been
Speaker 5: doing for the past few years on like what people
Speaker 5: you know, my age and you know younger, what they're
Speaker 5: attitudes are towards this thing that has become like an
Speaker 5: increasingly encroaching part of their lives. I'm just going to
Speaker 5: play a series of clips.
Speaker 1: Couldn't be more excited. So I was sharing this.
Speaker 6: Morning a little bit about what we're learning.
Speaker 7: That question is what if the tech savvy generation isn't
Speaker 7: buying anymore? We have a lot of one of the
Speaker 7: interesting opinions and assumptions in our heads that these are
Speaker 7: the one they are going to be the first users
Speaker 7: and the first viewers, and in many ways they are,
Speaker 7: but then the ones that also comes the most informed
Speaker 7: opinions not just about how badly the tech feels, how
Speaker 7: cringey some of them imp be landing, but also how
Speaker 7: it's affecting their sense of humanity.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating yeah.
Speaker 5: The very first thing this is literally like the minutes
Speaker 5: into the panels, is like after they do their introductions,
Speaker 5: the first thing to talk about is how gen Z
Speaker 5: is both an early adopter of new tech, but they're
Speaker 5: also kind of the most AI critical.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's cringey.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like how it feels cringy and not just that,
Speaker 5: how it's affecting people's sense of humanity and viewing them like,
Speaker 5: you know, in some ways, as like an obstacle to
Speaker 5: get over. But also this is I'm not sure how
Speaker 5: I feel about about, like, you know, Karen and the
Speaker 5: company she's representing here, because in some ways I felt
Speaker 5: like she's probably actually good. She just had to frame
Speaker 5: all of the things she was saying as like shocking
Speaker 5: revelations to all these tech bros, be like, yeah, actually,
Speaker 5: it turns out kids surprisingly don't want their lives run
Speaker 5: by AI.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't want to communicate only with AI.
Speaker 5: I actually liked what she was saying, it is just
Speaker 5: her presentation of it felt kind of odd at times
Speaker 5: because because of who the audience is.
Speaker 1: Do you get see do you get the feeling that
Speaker 1: she was like a bad person trying to help like
Speaker 1: other bad people sell poison to children or somebody who
Speaker 1: was trying to like in a way that these guys
Speaker 1: would listen to tell them that what they're doing is in.
Speaker 5: Work maybe like twenty eighty so like like a little
Speaker 5: bit of like, yeah, we have to sell some of this,
Speaker 5: but mostly it felt like trying to inform people about
Speaker 5: how this isn't really what people want and you know,
Speaker 5: it has a lot of actual drawbacks. Here's a clip
Speaker 5: of Karen talking about the sort of questions that they're
Speaker 5: asking kids to you know, get data on how they
Speaker 5: feel about AI.
Speaker 7: Here's a few provocative ones. We really put tangible expressions
Speaker 7: what it.
Speaker 6: Would be like to interact with.
Speaker 7: A potential AI tool, And so we asked questions like, Okay,
Speaker 7: you've recently had a friend breakup. What kind of intervention
Speaker 7: do you want? Do you want someone to counsel you
Speaker 7: through that process or do you want someone to kind
Speaker 7: of replace their friend for the time being, just you
Speaker 7: can you know, back yourself out from that relationship. So
Speaker 7: by asking really tangible questions, by putting prototypes in front
Speaker 7: of youth, we were able to co design to view
Speaker 7: insights at this one always gets all audience members. We
Speaker 7: put out a provocational expression of Imagine you could have
Speaker 7: an AI trained on your preferences, on your personalities, live
Speaker 7: your life for you. Imagine they can swipe your tender
Speaker 7: for you. They would have the any conversations or they
Speaker 7: would go through the awkward introductions you know, new person
Speaker 7: in school.
Speaker 6: And we heard some really interesting things.
Speaker 7: I want to go on a bad day for myself
Speaker 7: and I want to have that davcation.
Speaker 6: There was a really interesting sign that be able to
Speaker 6: live life for yourselves at badge of want.
Speaker 5: Being able to live life for yourself is a badge
Speaker 5: of honor.
Speaker 1: Amazing that human beings don't want a robot to replace
Speaker 1: them in such drudgery as the search for love and
Speaker 1: human connection. Incredible that that teens aren't interested in letting
Speaker 1: a robot go on dates for them.
Speaker 5: No, it's super interesting and like even like the first
Speaker 5: thing she said about you know you like lost some friends.
Speaker 5: Do you want an AI to like, you know, like
Speaker 5: counsel you or like you know, like like like talk
Speaker 5: about your feelings or do you want a friend replacement?
Speaker 5: And no, people don't want a friend replacement. And this
Speaker 5: even like honor question of like you know, like AI
Speaker 5: swiping your Tinder for you trying to figure out what
Speaker 5: your preferences are. No, like gen Z wants to live
Speaker 5: life for themselves. It's like it's odd because I.
Speaker 1: Because that's what being a person, that's to be a person.
Speaker 5: That's right, But like it's all how that's framed as
Speaker 5: like a surprising revelation.
Speaker 1: Wow, these kids want to live lives.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it was it was a kind of an
Speaker 5: odd pedal to go to. She highlighted that the key
Speaker 5: areas of tension in AI for for gen Z is
Speaker 5: twofold a creative expression and human relationships. These are the
Speaker 5: two biggest things that people are concerned about is how
Speaker 5: how will affect your ability to you know, make art
Speaker 5: be creative and what it means for like, you know,
Speaker 5: relationships as a human being, right, especially if you're being
Speaker 5: asked questions about you know, would you let an AI
Speaker 5: like meet someone that you want to date first, have
Speaker 5: have them go through like a first like fake AI
Speaker 5: date to like to like get through like icebreaker questions
Speaker 5: or something.
Speaker 1: The amount of people I meet who feel that way
Speaker 1: about like their digital twins or like who take pride
Speaker 1: in having like an ai trained off of their social
Speaker 1: media posts at events like these. It's shocking to me
Speaker 1: because like, do you feel good about saying that a
Speaker 1: chat bought you feel like it is you that you
Speaker 1: have trained to chatbot to be a reasonable simulacrum of yourself.
Speaker 1: Do you feel good about thinking that? Does that make
Speaker 1: you happy about yourself?
Speaker 9: Well?
Speaker 5: And the data that person was talking about showed no, like, yeah,
Speaker 5: people actually don't want these things, Like no, that's actually
Speaker 5: is it what anyone wants out of life? This isn't
Speaker 5: what anyone wants out of this technology, right, Like we
Speaker 5: use AI all the time, you know, like like you know,
Speaker 5: like auto complete. It has a whole bunch of like
Speaker 5: you know, pretty basic uses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it saves me from having dispel certain words too
Speaker 1: many times.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but we don't want it to like go on
Speaker 5: dates for us. And the whole part of being human
Speaker 5: is having you know, a degree of bad experiences and
Speaker 5: that that helps shape us as people. And this isn't
Speaker 5: like a hurdle to get over. This is like a
Speaker 5: part of what it means to be human. And then
Speaker 5: she kind of talked about that a little bit more
Speaker 5: in this last clip that I'll play.
Speaker 6: The next one here. I prefer to give opportunities to
Speaker 6: people over technology.
Speaker 7: I think these are the ones, and again they've seen
Speaker 7: what it's like full overplaced. I'll definitely share a lot more,
Speaker 7: but starting off with a few key learnings gen Z's
Speaker 7: value advice and perspective from lived experience.
Speaker 6: There's something about designing for friction.
Speaker 7: I'm gonnay like a design for friction in our age
Speaker 7: of optimization and our age of assuming that everything should
Speaker 7: move as fast as possible to make life as smooth
Speaker 7: as possible. There's something about the challenge and that comes
Speaker 7: back to play, right, Why would we spend so much
Speaker 7: time to hit a ball several hundred yards away.
Speaker 6: There's something about the joy of achieving, the joy.
Speaker 7: Of overcoming challenge, the joy of bringing through your first
Speaker 7: friend break up, your boyfriend or girl friend breakup.
Speaker 6: That makes you to a person.
Speaker 7: And as many times as helicopter parents or as people
Speaker 7: who are designed technology assume that the smoothest possible path
Speaker 7: is the best possible path.
Speaker 1: There's some push back there, some pushback, some pushback to
Speaker 1: the idea that like you should live a life, your
Speaker 1: one precious life should be lived.
Speaker 5: No, there's a a bunch of interesting stuff there. Gen
Speaker 5: Z has great fears about being replaced. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 5: like having like workforce replacement gen Z prefers to actually
Speaker 5: like make connections and network with other people our age
Speaker 5: and actually like share opportunities.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: In previous panels, this was something that was also talked
Speaker 5: about how millennials were way more like selective about like
Speaker 5: sharing like employment opportunities because they were like so focused
Speaker 5: on like making sure that they make it and there's
Speaker 5: a lot more like like open collaboration and sharing sharing opportunities.
Speaker 1: It's harder, so you guys have to be better about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, no talking about you know, like designing for friction.
Speaker 5: There's like there's value in something being challenging.
Speaker 1: That was very interesting because the surprise about that because
Speaker 1: it is it is this kind of I'm sure most
Speaker 1: of these people were born to wealth and privilege and
Speaker 1: the first thing that people do with money, the primary
Speaker 1: reason to have money is to reduce friction. The fact
Speaker 1: that that's surprising to anyone that like, no, like friction's
Speaker 1: necessary otherwise you're not a person. I mean, it's like that.
Speaker 1: It's like the Gooule we saw the other night, right,
Speaker 1: like you know, they're just not really people, you know.
Speaker 5: One thing she kind of closed on in this section
Speaker 5: is talking about how gen Z does not trust AI
Speaker 5: to understand the nuance of their lives, especially in this
Speaker 5: age of like tech optimization. Like that misses a part
Speaker 5: of what it means to, like, you know, feel proud
Speaker 5: of yourself and the work that you've done.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Something she should talk about at the very end of
Speaker 5: the panel was like how they hadn't factored in like
Speaker 5: like gen Z, you know and people in general, right,
Speaker 5: will will feel proud about, you know, making a piece
Speaker 5: of art, yeah, and they don't have that same sense
Speaker 5: of pride for an AI generated image, no, whether it's
Speaker 5: like a screenplay, whether it's whatever. Someone gave an example of, like,
Speaker 5: you know, I have a kid who does creative stuff.
Speaker 5: They edit videos, right, and there is AI tools that
Speaker 5: make editing videos like easier, But if the AI does
Speaker 5: all the work, they don't feel happy about that, Like
Speaker 5: they don't feel proud, They don't feel like they've actually
Speaker 5: achieved something. And you have to feel proud about the
Speaker 5: work that you've done, so like there's actually a sense
Speaker 5: of like ownership over like the art that we create.
Speaker 7: Eight.
Speaker 5: An exact quote was quote you can't eliminate life formative aspects.
Speaker 1: Which which is like, yes, it is called life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't ever have anything.
Speaker 5: I'm happy someone at CS is saying this, the fact
Speaker 5: that it needs to be said.
Speaker 1: At all very bleak, very sad. It's really bleak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dating people, making friends, being social, doing whatever it is
Speaker 1: you do for a living as yourself is what life
Speaker 1: is like.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think last thing that you talked about is like
Speaker 5: gen Z aren't technophobes, but they do have strong boundaries.
Speaker 11: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Good, and they have to reinforce their own sense of
Speaker 5: self because we're constantly being bombarded with you know, slop content, influencers, podcasts,
Speaker 5: live streams, like everything you know, TikTok social media. So
Speaker 5: we have strongly boundaries on how tech it like integrates
Speaker 5: into our lives. And a lot of the way these
Speaker 5: tech bros want AI to like become more invasive. We
Speaker 5: are not super into no.
Speaker 1: Like all they're offering people is like this this machine
Speaker 1: will do everything that you actually want to do with
Speaker 1: your time, and also you won't have a job, like
Speaker 1: that's what big tech is promising gen Z.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's how I started my day speaking.
Speaker 1: Of gen z. Z stands for zillions of dollars that
Speaker 1: will get if you listen to these ads and we're back.
Speaker 5: So unfortunately, that panel wasn't just talking about how kids
Speaker 5: maybe don't want AI to run their lives. It also
Speaker 5: had two other people from AI products. The first one
Speaker 5: that I'll mention is called ready Land, which I think
Speaker 5: I think partnered with Amazon ors to some degree. It
Speaker 5: at least uses like Amazon Alexa's essentially a chooser own
Speaker 5: adventure story book with like a natural physical copy that
Speaker 5: Alexa will read to you and you can talk to
Speaker 5: it so you can talk to characters and choose different pathways.
Speaker 5: I was more skeptical out of that first, because I
Speaker 5: just don't like AI's reading books to kids. Became more
Speaker 5: like an interactive story thing, and it actually seemed kind
Speaker 5: of good at what it was doing. And then the
Speaker 5: guy behind it clarified ready Land is not using AI
Speaker 5: to generate new content for kids. It's all like pre programmed,
Speaker 5: like human paths, you know, just with so many variables
Speaker 5: already built in based on you know, like if you're
Speaker 5: making food in one of these books, or like you know,
Speaker 5: a kid wants to go on like a weird side quest.
Speaker 5: The AI already has like stuff for how to handle that. Yeah,
Speaker 5: he knows how to say these words and knows how
Speaker 5: to stitch together these things. But it's not actually generating
Speaker 5: new content itself. It's if everything is like pre baked,
Speaker 5: it can be assembled in many different ways. Okay, so
Speaker 5: every time you read a book to the kid, it'll
Speaker 5: be slightly different because the kid will respond to certain
Speaker 5: plot elements. The kid can like talk to talk to characters,
Speaker 5: ask questions. So like this was this was actually pretty interesting.
Speaker 5: The fact that it's simply not even generating new content
Speaker 5: makes it miles better than any of these other AI
Speaker 5: Kids products.
Speaker 1: That it's actually just kind of using some of the
Speaker 1: tech that makes up AI exactly allow you to make
Speaker 1: something humans wrote more reactive exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So like it's it's it's it's actually like a
Speaker 5: pretty interesting piece of technology, and it's not just Alexa
Speaker 5: reading a story book. It has like a large interactive
Speaker 5: element which you know that makes the Alexa part, you know,
Speaker 5: actually useful. And then there was this other product what
Speaker 5: was this what what was this one called? It's from
Speaker 5: coming called Skyrocket Toys, Hoe the AI Teddy Bear or
Speaker 5: something like that, pokay Hoe the AI Bear, which does
Speaker 5: generate live content with with guardrails. He did say, oh good,
Speaker 5: but the AI content both comes from the input and
Speaker 5: the output. You talked about guardrails, you know, he said.
Speaker 5: You know, chat gpt does have internal guardrails, but the
Speaker 5: reliability is suspect, which there certainly is, considering just last
Speaker 5: week there was a piece of news about chat gpt
Speaker 5: helping someone build a bomb.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, which they used in just this magical city.
Speaker 5: Yes, so he didn't say that like guardrail reliability can
Speaker 5: be so, but there is a difference when you have
Speaker 5: certainly like like more like child's friendly features turned on.
Speaker 5: But he admitted that like moderation is part of the challenge.
Speaker 5: I don't know. He basically how this works is you
Speaker 5: have an app synced up with this AI teddy bear
Speaker 5: that talks with a not very pleasing voice.
Speaker 1: Oh I got to hear it.
Speaker 5: Do you want me to pull this up? Yes?
Speaker 1: Absolutely?
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, But basically you put in a whole bunch
Speaker 5: of story inputs, being like I want the story set
Speaker 5: in this place, I want it featuring these types of characters.
Speaker 5: I want this archetype to be the villain, or it
Speaker 5: has like dozens or not hundreds of like eve like
Speaker 5: archetypal things that you can like click and then the
Speaker 5: teddy bear will will generate a new story. So it
Speaker 5: is generating new content, but with like pre baked characters. Okay,
Speaker 5: so then it'll sit together the story. The weirder you
Speaker 5: make the variables, the weirder the story is going to be. Well,
Speaker 5: let me play a clip for Robert here.
Speaker 12: It's a bright and shiny January morning, the perfect time
Speaker 12: for another story. Did you know that in Las Vegas,
Speaker 12: where our story takes place, they haven't gigantic called the
Speaker 12: high Rowler.
Speaker 6: It's taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Speaker 1: So the whole in the real world events in places
Speaker 1: based on the setting achieves What if I told.
Speaker 12: You there's a mystery waiting to be unround at the
Speaker 12: consumer Electronic Shoe.
Speaker 1: There's excitement here and these that guy like sitting there
Speaker 1: talking almost rolling his eyes at his own product while
Speaker 1: it yaps in his lap is a perfect like he
Speaker 1: clearly didn't think about how that would look because it
Speaker 1: does not make an appealing ad for the product.
Speaker 5: No, so it doesn't sound good. So yeah, they generated
Speaker 5: a story set in cees in Las Vegas and he
Speaker 5: would occasionally interrupt the bear to like explain what it
Speaker 5: was doing. So that was the other product, not nearly
Speaker 5: as polished or like really really as thoughtful as like
Speaker 5: the AI story book. But you know, maybe if you
Speaker 5: are tired of having to, you know, talk to your kid,
Speaker 5: you can just get one of these teddy bears to
Speaker 5: yeah throw thrown front raise it.
Speaker 1: I mean it looks I think it could probably handle
Speaker 1: all of the physical contact they need too, so you
Speaker 1: don't even need to ever touch your child. And in fact,
Speaker 1: you can just have chat GPT root that through the
Speaker 1: bear and never even see your own flesh and blood.
Speaker 1: Like I think ideally you would have them cut out
Speaker 1: of there, you know, really surgically remove that baby, you know,
Speaker 1: a month or two early, and that way you can
Speaker 1: kind of absolutely minimize the amount of time that you
Speaker 1: ever spend in contact with your spawn.
Speaker 5: One other thing I will add is that the ready
Speaker 5: Land guy the AI story book particlarly when talking about,
Speaker 5: you know, the importance of guardrails, he said that there's
Speaker 5: multiple levels to safety. Right, an AI Kid's robot that
Speaker 5: swears right, it's one thing that's it's pretty easy to
Speaker 5: avoid actually, Like that's that's pretty easy.
Speaker 1: There's a limited number of swear words, right.
Speaker 5: And you could just like you could just block out
Speaker 5: certain things from happening. Yeah, you can build that in.
Speaker 5: But another aspect that's really important to safety is like
Speaker 5: the accuracy of the things it's saying, right, Like, what
Speaker 5: if it's saying something that's supposed to be you know,
Speaker 5: some like factual statement about the world that's just that
Speaker 5: just like isn't true or can actually like lead to danger, Right,
Speaker 5: what if it tells your kid to do something which
Speaker 5: is actually kind of dangerous, or what if it says
Speaker 5: like not even not even directly telling them, but you know,
Speaker 5: it says something that if the kid then tries to
Speaker 5: do that, it's really dangerous. And like this is why
Speaker 5: their storybook program, you know, does not generate new content.
Speaker 5: So everything it says is like it's like already pre approved,
Speaker 5: Like it already is going to have you know, like
Speaker 5: verified like verified safe you know sentences versus this ai
Speaker 5: teddy Bear. Because it is generating new content, you know,
Speaker 5: it could if things go horribly wrong, you know, talk
Speaker 5: about drinking bleach. You know. Yeah, theoretically, you know, it's
Speaker 5: just just like something you know, like things can go wrong.
Speaker 5: So it's not just about you know, avoiding bad words
Speaker 5: or talking about sex or you know those types of
Speaker 5: like like inappropriate things. It's also making sure it's not
Speaker 5: like hallucinating or saying things that could like lead to
Speaker 5: like dangerous situations.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, the good news is that I don't think
Speaker 1: these are going to be wildly successful products. I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess we'll see. But these are super expensive and like,
Speaker 1: did you get a price point for that bear?
Speaker 5: I did not hear her price point for the bear.
Speaker 1: I'm curious as to what they're going to be charging
Speaker 1: for it. I mean, we'll see if any of this
Speaker 1: stuff really does take off. I wouldn't consider it an
Speaker 1: optimism to hope this stuff takes off, but like, they
Speaker 1: don't seem like great products to me, so I guess
Speaker 1: we'll see. I read something very interesting that is related exactly,
Speaker 1: and it probably was he might have been talked about
Speaker 1: like that weird bear or something. I read something very
Speaker 1: interesting on the subject of like AI children's toys from
Speaker 1: a guy who was like an AI developer. This was
Speaker 1: from a post on Twitter by Alex Volkov. I got
Speaker 1: my six year old daughter an AI toy for her
Speaker 1: birthday that arrived for Christmas instead, she unpacked it all excited.
Speaker 1: I explained that this isn't like other toys, that this
Speaker 1: one has AI in it. She of course knows what
Speaker 1: AI is, seeing the things I've built and interacted with them,
Speaker 1: chatted with chat GBT and Santa Mode, knows that Daddy
Speaker 1: is doing AI, et cetera. So a very interesting experiment happened.
Speaker 1: After Magical Toys reached out and fixed the issue reference below.
Speaker 1: She started playing with this dino, chatted with it, and
Speaker 1: then learned to turn it off and wanted to talk anymore.
Speaker 1: She still loves playing with it, dressed it up. It
Speaker 1: now has paper shoes in the top hat that we
Speaker 1: made together. But every time I asked her if she
Speaker 1: liked to chat with it, she says no. A few
Speaker 1: times it turned it back on and she did speak
Speaker 1: with it for a bit, and then she just turned
Speaker 1: it off again, not wanting to engage. I gently asked why,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't really able to understand where there's the resistance.
Speaker 1: It's not weird to her. In fact, at one point
Speaker 1: she was pretending that Dinah was a baby and was
Speaker 1: turned on. So I told her, let's ask it to
Speaker 1: pretend to be a baby, and it obliged and said okay,
Speaker 1: So we asked it to cry. Granted, they don't have
Speaker 1: an amazing advanced voice mode like open AI, so it
Speaker 1: did its best, but it sounded weird, which made her
Speaker 1: laugh really hard. It was basically making crying sounds like talking,
Speaker 1: and also there are still technical issues. The voice is
Speaker 1: sometimes choppy, so it could be that it's still uncanny
Speaker 1: for her. I'm honestly fascinated about why the AI aspect
Speaker 1: of this didn't connect with my six year old.
Speaker 5: Because it's creepy, because it's people.
Speaker 1: They don't like it. Nobody wants this. Yeah, ick, yeah, ick.
Speaker 1: I know this is a sample size of one kid here,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure many many things will change. I shall
Speaker 1: grow and learn to interact with more AIS and different forms.
Speaker 1: But the first toy contact was interestingly almost a complete failure.
Speaker 5: That is interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I find that fucking fascinating.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No one wants this, even six year olds. You're like, hey,
Speaker 5: I would prefer to a regular toy you can play with.
Speaker 1: I would prefer all pretend it's a robot, but I
Speaker 1: don't want it to be a robot. That talks to me, Poe.
Speaker 5: The AI bear is fifty dollars on Amazon.
Speaker 1: Oh that's not bad. Actually, no, that's good. Okay, good,
Speaker 1: all right, Well maybe maybe we can.
Speaker 5: Even maybe order one and see and see what we
Speaker 5: can get out of it. Yeah, all right, we're gonna
Speaker 5: go on another break and return to talk once acaind
Speaker 5: about AI products for your children. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we went and saw something else today while you
Speaker 1: were at a different chunk of the event talking to
Speaker 1: yet another flying car company that promises to revolutionize the
Speaker 1: ease with which we can all do nine to elevens.
Speaker 1: Super excited for that future. By the way, I stumbled
Speaker 1: upon the booth for a company called TCL, a pretty
Speaker 1: big company, fairly large, Yeah, large com and make a
Speaker 1: lot of TVs stuff like that. They had a couple
Speaker 1: of things. They had an AI laundry machine.
Speaker 5: So many air laundry bots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this one was the worst because it's like this
Speaker 1: little almost a soft rounded pyramid shape. It hangs your laundry.
Speaker 1: They say they can't do folding yet, so it just
Speaker 1: sort of like picks up dry laundry and holds it.
Speaker 5: Like it just suspends it in the air.
Speaker 1: It suspends it in the air inside of itself. And
Speaker 1: also it can only do a kilogram of laundry. The
Speaker 1: only thing they had in there was like handkerchiefs and scarfs,
Speaker 1: So it's like probably a couple of thousand dollars, but
Speaker 1: you can AI can clean your handkerchiefs and scarfs.
Speaker 5: As opposed to my regular washing machine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they had a washing machine that it can
Speaker 1: identify and count exactly what clothes are in it, how
Speaker 1: many of them there are, and it'll tell you the
Speaker 1: soil level and YadA YadA, YadA YadA. Like I'm sure
Speaker 1: some people changing will want this shit, but it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: only people who have a lot of money and want
Speaker 1: to spend it on a laundry machine, because I don't
Speaker 1: see that it actually reduces the amount of work you
Speaker 1: need to do at this point. But the thing they
Speaker 1: had at the booth that caught my eye was a
Speaker 1: robot toy for kids. AI Space Me is the name
Speaker 1: of the robot. Baby Yoda was a partial inspiration because
Speaker 1: like Ferby, Yeah, poor Ferby, there's some porg in there.
Speaker 1: It's a two part toy. The interior part is like
Speaker 1: a swaddled up almost looking little porg thing with acute
Speaker 1: face and the eyes are reasonably good, Like they did
Speaker 1: a decent job of the eyes not looking creepy, but
Speaker 1: like that blink and change color and contract and expand,
Speaker 1: and then it's got like two little flapper arms that
Speaker 1: can like wiggle, and it's seated inside almost like the
Speaker 1: Aliens and independence stay. It's seated inside like this large
Speaker 1: rolling body frame that allows it to move around on
Speaker 1: the ground. And so it's supposed to like be your
Speaker 1: child's friend. And the first thing that was upsetting to
Speaker 1: me because they had this video ad that would play
Speaker 1: every so often and it was very creepy, and you know,
Speaker 1: I thought back to when we were doing the interview
Speaker 1: with the guy who had like the robot for old people.
Speaker 1: He was like, it's very important that it not tell
Speaker 1: them it loves them. That it like always reiterate that
Speaker 1: it's a false thing. This robot just keeps telling the kid,
Speaker 1: I love you, like I care for you. When the
Speaker 1: lady did a demo, she was like, it's a toy
Speaker 1: that actually knows and cares about your child and like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not, No, it's not don't say that. That shouldn't
Speaker 1: be legal for you. To say that for you to
Speaker 1: sell this to children and tell them it's an intelligent
Speaker 1: being that loves them is like deeply abusive in my opinion,
Speaker 1: Like that is actually child abuse because it's not alive anyway.
Speaker 1: So I had to bring Garrison over because you needed
Speaker 1: to see it.
Speaker 5: Oh and saw it, I did.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I'm going to play a little clip from
Speaker 1: the ad, so I want you to hear the way
Speaker 1: this thing sounds.
Speaker 12: Everywhere learning shut and growingly amy you reminds us sound.
Speaker 5: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: I found that profoundly upsetting disturbing. Yeah, your kid can
Speaker 1: like pick it up and like walk with it. It'll
Speaker 1: like talk to them, It'll make up stories. It'll like
Speaker 1: look at pictures your kid draws and then generate them
Speaker 1: into like live AI videos. You can put a pin
Speaker 1: on and it will record stuff that your kid does
Speaker 1: and play it back to you at night as a video.
Speaker 1: So again absolutely minimizing the amount of time you have
Speaker 1: to spend with your child.
Speaker 10: It's in the car.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes over your car, so that like it's
Speaker 1: talking to you from the screens in your car.
Speaker 5: Like the video like taking taking this thing every like
Speaker 5: everywhere the kid goes It's like the kid's main interaction
Speaker 5: with the world, Yeah, is with this little rolling like
Speaker 5: plastic furbie and yeah, like like talking about like like
Speaker 5: expressing like love and like how damaging this must be
Speaker 5: for like a four year old to have. Like the
Speaker 5: first thing that it constantly expressed like love an affection
Speaker 5: for is this little rolling robot that's that you're gonna
Speaker 5: throw in the garbage in like you know, four years
Speaker 5: when you're when you're like too old for it. How
Speaker 5: like traumatizing and like deeply fucked up. That's gonna be
Speaker 5: for your for like your sense of self and like
Speaker 5: love and affection.
Speaker 1: The mix of things that we're trying to have this do.
Speaker 1: Like the other ones were build as toys, this was
Speaker 1: built as like a friend for your child as well
Speaker 1: as like a home assistance. Yeah, it's supposed to also
Speaker 1: act as like it'll change that you can hook it
Speaker 1: into your smart home so it can change the temperature.
Speaker 1: Like they did a little in person demo where like
Speaker 1: a woman pretending to be a mom talked with it
Speaker 1: about like planting, planned a birthday party for her kid
Speaker 1: with it, Yeah, and it like put food in her
Speaker 1: Amazon cart and like change the temperature inside because more
Speaker 1: people were coming over. One of the things they advertise
Speaker 1: is is security mode, where it like travels around your
Speaker 1: house at night and acts as a sentry watching your
Speaker 1: home like wild stuff.
Speaker 5: No, it's it was Honestly, I've seen a few like
Speaker 5: disturbing things, you know, all of like the the new
Speaker 5: drone tech to have like solar powered drones that can
Speaker 5: stay in the air to drop bombs is like bad,
Speaker 5: But like this type of stuff is like really dehumanizing.
Speaker 5: It really like viscerally upsets me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think probably very bad for children. Everything
Speaker 1: they showed us was incredibly curated, Like I when we
Speaker 1: watched this live thing where she was having a very
Speaker 1: fluid conversation with it that was clearly scripted. Yes, and
Speaker 1: so I wonder how well this thing actually works in practice.
Speaker 5: We never got an actual like live down, No.
Speaker 1: Because they always show it perfectly recognizing the kid, perfectly
Speaker 1: recognizing like what's in their you know, little kid drawings
Speaker 1: and stuff. What it's supposed to be to make beautiful,
Speaker 1: creepily shiny AI moving version some stuff. So like I
Speaker 1: wonder how much less good it's going to be in
Speaker 1: reality than the thing that they've showed us, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely some amount shittier than what they've displayed already. And
Speaker 1: part of why I think that is, like we went
Speaker 1: to check out the booth that this other the South
Speaker 1: Korean company just called I think sk had like a
Speaker 1: they called it a quantum security camera that was AI enabled,
Speaker 1: And then thinking about how like in the ads, it
Speaker 1: always like recognized the kid and its parents and a
Speaker 1: drawing accurately, Well, this one when I flipped off the
Speaker 1: camera with both middle fingers, recognized it and wrote up
Speaker 1: a description of a man giving the camera a thumbs up.
Speaker 1: Like I'm really curious for when these things hit the
Speaker 1: market and people start buying them, like what sort of
Speaker 1: fucked up stuff it'll do, and how kind of big
Speaker 1: the seams are. I don't expect a long life for
Speaker 1: this thing, which is going to be funnier because like
Speaker 1: there was already a big eight hundred dollars like Children's
Speaker 1: Companion AI toy that failed last year and the company
Speaker 1: shut off access to them, and like so parents had
Speaker 1: to explain to their kids who had bonded with this
Speaker 1: thing that it was dying forever. And that's especially excited
Speaker 1: to be because they They've built a robot that talks
Speaker 1: to your kid and tells it it loves them, and
Speaker 1: eventually that robot is going to be taken away from
Speaker 1: the child by the company when it no longer becomes profitable.
Speaker 1: And that's I'm excited for that, like new ground and
Speaker 1: how to fuck up kids. Anyway, that's what I got, Garrison.
Speaker 5: What an uplifting adventures again?
Speaker 1: Yeah? No, that's all. Yeah, it's all great. All right, everybody,
Speaker 1: Well this has been behind the bastards. No it's not,
Speaker 1: or no it's not.
Speaker 5: What is this?
Speaker 1: This has been? It could happen here? A podcast by
Speaker 1: somebody who is slowly going insane.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because we're like four days in Vegas now we
Speaker 5: still have one more day.
Speaker 1: I'm out of my mind. I'm completely broken.
Speaker 5: Uh. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have our final of our like
Speaker 5: on the ground coverage with our with our cees best
Speaker 5: in show. Yeah so and always going to be maybe
Speaker 5: a high note.
Speaker 1: So see you there who.
Speaker 13: Welcome Dick It appen here a podcast increasingly about it
Speaker 13: having happened. We have spent a long time on this
Speaker 13: show talking about what the second Trump administration is going
Speaker 13: to be for trans people and you know, go listen
Speaker 13: to those episodes. The short version is that it is
Speaker 13: going to be very very bad. We're facing care bans,
Speaker 13: we're facing federal funding bands. Things are about to get
Speaker 13: unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.
Speaker 13: It is the combination of almost a decades worth of
Speaker 13: fighting by the right, And I think we have a
Speaker 13: tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as
Speaker 13: something abstract right, as a sort of abstract political debate,
Speaker 13: or even if it affects us, we tend to treat
Speaker 13: the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment, as sort
Speaker 13: of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking
Speaker 13: at it this way is that the harassment, the hatred,
Speaker 13: the violence is happening to real people, with real names
Speaker 13: and faces, who live lives exactly like yours. The difference
Speaker 13: between you sitting in your house right now and someone
Speaker 13: whose face is on TV is about the difference between
Speaker 13: whether a few right wing journalists cover who you are.
Speaker 13: So today we're going to be talking to someone who
Speaker 13: has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range
Speaker 13: of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people,
Speaker 13: who have seen basically the entire campaign against trans people
Speaker 13: evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them, and
Speaker 13: that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out
Speaker 13: of La Welcome to the show. I wish it was
Speaker 13: under better circumstances.
Speaker 11: Thank you, Thank you for having me mea.
Speaker 1: I glad to be here. Yeah, and I'm excited to
Speaker 1: talk to you.
Speaker 13: I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my god, this
Speaker 13: stuff sucks.
Speaker 11: But yeah, oh you know, it's it's our lives. What
Speaker 11: can we do?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 11: What will we do?
Speaker 8: Wow?
Speaker 13: Yes, that's the question for the end of the episode,
Speaker 13: is what are we going to do about all of
Speaker 13: this shit? But let's go back to sort of the beginning.
Speaker 13: Can you can you sort of talk about your first
Speaker 13: encounter with I guess at that point what was a
Speaker 13: not especially mainstream part of the religious right back in
Speaker 13: night around twenty eighteen.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so I've been I've been making music as Precious
Speaker 8: Child for almost a decade and it was my very
Speaker 8: first album that I put out, one called Trapped, that
Speaker 8: had this track on it titled Phantom, and that was
Speaker 8: an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: It wasn't a song per se. It was experimental and
Speaker 8: I put on a music video with it, and it
Speaker 8: was pretty It's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights. You know,
Speaker 8: if you think of movies from the eighties like hal Raiser,
Speaker 8: it's kind of like that, you know, like kind of
Speaker 8: evocrative of some type of greater supernatural horror. And the
Speaker 8: far right at that time, the far right, vintage twenty eighteen,
Speaker 8: they found it and started reporting it on mess and
Speaker 8: tagging their friends and saying report this, report this. And
Speaker 8: this was on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube as well.
Speaker 8: And that video, like, as I said, you know, it's creepy,
Speaker 8: but it's there's nothing political in it. There's a little
Speaker 8: bit of like of blood, but there's no gore. But
Speaker 8: if they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic, that's what
Speaker 8: they said.
Speaker 11: It's is satanic. And that was my first brush with
Speaker 11: the right.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically
Speaker 13: the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like it's
Speaker 13: like in this early enough phase that they're still sort
Speaker 13: of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite
Speaker 13: like metastasized transphobia as like they're driving things, so they're
Speaker 13: kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic
Speaker 13: panic era, like the weird nineties and two thousand stuff
Speaker 13: that like when when I was growing up, the town
Speaker 13: that I grew up with super religious, and like you know,
Speaker 13: we had to have lists of like if you were
Speaker 13: inviting like a friend in high school to a party
Speaker 13: whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party
Speaker 13: and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about
Speaker 13: which is it's like that kind of thing, which I
Speaker 13: don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even even
Speaker 13: as the stuff's escalated.
Speaker 8: But yeah, it was, as I said, it was a
Speaker 8: moral panic. And their point was that that I was
Speaker 8: a moral for making art like this, and it was
Speaker 8: this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm a
Speaker 8: moral for the art that I make.
Speaker 1: And it's not just my art, but it's me.
Speaker 10: It's me.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think that's perhaps what has changed as well,
Speaker 8: Like before they were saying that this is a satanic
Speaker 8: evil person because they're making this art, and now they're
Speaker 8: saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think part of the focus on art here, right,
Speaker 13: is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of
Speaker 13: I mean of the original Nazis, Right, Like one of
Speaker 13: their big things was just like cracked out on quote
Speaker 13: unquote degenerate art, and they had like these like quote
Speaker 13: unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and
Speaker 13: people whose art they didn't like it. It was, you know,
Speaker 13: like what a thing that was like a significant factor
Speaker 13: in their rise. And I think there's this sort of
Speaker 13: mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in
Speaker 13: a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out
Speaker 13: of this very very weird like Christian moral panic shit.
Speaker 13: That's I guess if you want to look at how this,
Speaker 13: you know, plays out, like that's kind of where it
Speaker 13: is in like twenty eighteen, Right, this is the first
Speaker 13: bathroom in past By twenty eighteen it was Carolina. But
Speaker 13: there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it, and
Speaker 13: that's something that's I think very different than now, where
Speaker 13: like all of this city transhit is happening and everyone's
Speaker 13: just kind of going eh, So, do you want to
Speaker 13: talk about the second time he became Tarken a.
Speaker 8: Far right Yeah, I mean realistically, like this has been
Speaker 8: pretty constant throughout my life as a public artist. And
Speaker 8: there was another there was another track on that album
Speaker 8: that was also targeted. One call it titled My Little
Speaker 8: Problem Violet Door, that has some more provocative imagery than
Speaker 8: the track Phantom, has some nudity, and that was the
Speaker 8: collaboration between myself and a artist who is trans themselves,
Speaker 8: Kid out of Brazil, and that has again some body
Speaker 8: horror in it. There's a commentary about gender norms and
Speaker 8: plastic surgery and identity, but it wasn't explicitly political. Again,
Speaker 8: it was kind of a surreal body horror video. And
Speaker 8: that was Brigade reported not in twenty eighteen, but in
Speaker 8: twenty nineteen and actually taken down from YouTube and then reinstated.
Speaker 8: And that video is notable because as a result of
Speaker 8: what's going on today, YouTube took that down despite it
Speaker 8: being up for five years without a problem that you know,
Speaker 8: I'd had tens of thousands of views and now it's gone.
Speaker 11: So that was the second time.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and that one I think is interesting to in
Speaker 13: the sense of like that one's like a lot more,
Speaker 13: it's more overtly trans and it's also I think the
Speaker 13: more trands you are, the more the more like very
Speaker 13: obviously trans it is. And this is I guess something
Speaker 13: that's very common among trans artists is this kind of
Speaker 13: like art that's an exploration of sort of body horror it.
Speaker 13: You know, I mean, I'm not going to project onto it.
Speaker 13: I don't know if this is ucifically are doing, but like,
Speaker 13: you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror
Speaker 13: as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria, and like it's
Speaker 13: this way of sort of thinking about the things that
Speaker 13: are happening to your body, things that have been done
Speaker 13: to your body, and the things that you're doing back
Speaker 13: to it.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 8: You know, I didn't really think too much about the
Speaker 8: concepts in that direction when I made it or when
Speaker 8: or and I okay didn't either at that time. However,
Speaker 8: the truth is, for much of my young life, I
Speaker 8: felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to
Speaker 8: match my personal vision of myself and my identity. And
Speaker 8: that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.
Speaker 11: When I was young.
Speaker 8: I didn't have access to the information and communities that
Speaker 8: are out there now that sup portraans people. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: I have had some gender confirming procedures done, but not
Speaker 8: as many as I think I would have when I
Speaker 8: was younger. I did feel existential discordance, and I don't
Speaker 8: know if that's a word, but if it's not, I'm
Speaker 8: going to coin it because pretty sure I didn't. I
Speaker 8: didn't feel feel in concordance with my flesh, and so
Speaker 8: you know, I came to experiment what the boundaries were
Speaker 8: of of my fleshy identity in my existence in my art.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think there's something about the way that
Speaker 13: your art works and the way that a lot of
Speaker 13: Curtis are where there's you know, and this isn't to
Speaker 13: say that all currotas like this, but there's definitely like
Speaker 13: an edge to it.
Speaker 1: There's stuff going on.
Speaker 13: There's body horror things happening, There's like eighties aesthetic stuff,
Speaker 13: and I think it conflicts with this kind of weird
Speaker 13: concaid everything is like happy and cozy, sort of kitch
Speaker 13: aesthetic thing that a lot of like this kind of
Speaker 13: fascism is really into. They use the kind of a
Speaker 13: kind of aesthetic sensibility as as a weapon to go
Speaker 13: after stuff that they opposed for more oftly political reasons
Speaker 13: they can do this kind of like hey, look at
Speaker 13: this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera kind of attack
Speaker 13: on queer art as a result of this kind of
Speaker 13: like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this this,
Speaker 13: you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society.
Speaker 13: And I think I have I haven't one worked out
Speaker 13: the political inplication of this, but I think there's this
Speaker 13: kind of connection between their their weaponization of like revulsion
Speaker 13: and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind.
Speaker 1: Of like horror that they kind of like use as
Speaker 1: the political attack.
Speaker 11: Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period.
Speaker 8: Yeah, not just for queer people, but also for CIS people,
Speaker 8: Like I'm gonna defend CIS people here for a second.
Speaker 11: So SIS people struggle with gender dysphoria.
Speaker 8: I think maybe I would say every bit as much
Speaker 8: as trans people, but they sure fucking struggle with that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: For instance, an example I will give is facial hair.
Speaker 8: Lots of people that were assigned male at birth, they
Speaker 8: fret and earn worry over their facial hair.
Speaker 11: Is it too much? Is it too little?
Speaker 8: Then people that are signed female at birth, you know,
Speaker 8: if they have facial hair, you know, they thread over it.
Speaker 8: You know, well, people see it. Do I have to
Speaker 8: bleach it? Do I have to pluck it? People fret
Speaker 8: over like they're freaking jaw lines. Like, you know, if
Speaker 8: you search online like masculine jawline, how do I get?
Speaker 8: There's a huge community out there of assigned male at
Speaker 8: birth SYS men that are trying to get more defined
Speaker 8: jaw lines because they feel that their genetics are presenting
Speaker 8: them as a non optimal male quote unquote, and of course,
Speaker 8: same thing for quote unquote females, like do I have
Speaker 8: the female feminine bodies?
Speaker 11: Is it curvy enough in the right way? Is my
Speaker 11: waist slim enough? You know? Is am I just brick shaped?
Speaker 8: And then all the industries around that, and that I
Speaker 8: think is horrifying, and everyone goes through the struggles with it,
Speaker 8: and very few people are lucky enough to embody the
Speaker 8: ideals of gender that we thrust upon ourselves.
Speaker 11: And to me, that is a tragedy.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think that sort of like fear and
Speaker 13: that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to
Speaker 13: like perform a gender in a certain way. Well, okay,
Speaker 13: I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars
Speaker 13: are going to get extremely.
Speaker 1: Mad at me.
Speaker 5: But the.
Speaker 13: Way in which are forced to sort of live up
Speaker 13: to these standards that are sort of nonsense. I think
Speaker 13: it gets to this thing where you know, you could
Speaker 13: either sort of like muddle through it and try to
Speaker 13: ignore the distance as much as you can. You can
Speaker 13: attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely bad
Speaker 13: at everyone else is trying to do something about it,
Speaker 13: and I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option. Yeah,
Speaker 13: Unfortunately we need to go to ads, which is another
Speaker 13: thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these
Speaker 13: are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards.
Speaker 13: But you know who knows people are wizards. Sty'll find
Speaker 13: a way brought to you by Mabeline.
Speaker 1: And we are back.
Speaker 13: I mean, I guess the way should stay. Highway patrol
Speaker 13: does for skinder dorms on people.
Speaker 8: Oh, they sure do MAKEI another example of hideous gender
Speaker 8: and arms.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So you listener, you're hearing me right, and you're hearing
Speaker 8: my voice. And this is another thing that all people
Speaker 8: fret about. It's not trust trans people. Lots of a fabs.
Speaker 8: I know, I'm just gonna say a fab and amap Okay,
Speaker 8: lots of a fabs, I know. You know, they have
Speaker 8: pretty darned deep voices naturally, and they I've talked with
Speaker 8: them privately and they say that they worry about how
Speaker 8: husky their voice is when they just relax. And then
Speaker 8: same thing for amaps, they talk about worrying if their
Speaker 8: voice is squeaky and thinner. I'm talk like a freaking
Speaker 8: wrestler from w WE, you know, like people people like that.
Speaker 11: People struggle with that too.
Speaker 8: Just so yeah, just something as simple as our appearance
Speaker 8: and our voice, you know, we're just torturing ourselves. And ultimately,
Speaker 8: I gotta say Nia, you know, I'm I'm a trans woman. However,
Speaker 8: ultimately I'm a gender abolitionist because this shit sucks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's not it's not great. It's not a
Speaker 5: good time for any way.
Speaker 13: It fauld Yeah, speaking of bad times, this isn't even
Speaker 13: an activate. I just do this now, which really bad.
Speaker 13: I do it to people my daily life. They're like,
Speaker 13: why are you anpivoting me? And I'm like, oh God,
Speaker 13: but yeah, I guess God. This and the sort of
Speaker 13: racialization aspect, and I don't know this is the aspect
Speaker 13: of zones of gender performance. God damn, I keep saying
Speaker 13: performance that I literally mean that you were performing it,
Speaker 13: as in you were acting and not the butler thing
Speaker 13: of your perform to get to make it real.
Speaker 5: Please don't yell at me.
Speaker 1: Of the comments I had.
Speaker 13: I had the guy who wrote a writer on the
Speaker 13: Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter.
Speaker 6: What times.
Speaker 1: It's really okay.
Speaker 13: Sorry, I about to rail this enough, partially because this
Speaker 13: next part is really depressing. But so a while back
Speaker 13: on this show, my my co host Garrison, who is
Speaker 13: I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at
Speaker 13: the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far
Speaker 13: right panic that became don as the we spat contraversia.
Speaker 13: Do you want to talk about how the right stuck
Speaker 13: you into that shit, because Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So you know, in twenty eighteen, as I said, I
Speaker 8: put out this album, and then I put out another,
Speaker 8: and I start I was touring the country and Canada
Speaker 8: and stuff and doing shows pretty much constantly, and then
Speaker 8: twenty happened and I became involved in the George Floyd
Speaker 8: uprising and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting, and
Speaker 8: so I began to live stream those protests and marches
Speaker 8: with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was
Speaker 8: going on on the streets to people watching, because a
Speaker 8: lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did
Speaker 8: not understand what the issues were. And the thing is,
Speaker 8: in LA there were a lot of continual police murders
Speaker 8: even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean
Speaker 8: the cops shooting on armed black people in the back
Speaker 8: as they were running away, or executions are shooting them
Speaker 8: in the car, that type of thing. And so I
Speaker 8: was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is why
Speaker 8: people are in the streets, this is a specific issue,
Speaker 8: these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions
Speaker 8: by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.
Speaker 8: And so I was doing that and I became pretty
Speaker 8: darn visible and popular, like I was maybe one of
Speaker 8: the top five best known activist or racial justice voices.
Speaker 8: And I was targeted by a right wing activist who
Speaker 8: was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium
Speaker 8: specifically because I was visible, because I was trans, and
Speaker 8: so she went for me and posted and said that
Speaker 8: I was a transgender individual who was in the women's
Speaker 8: spa of we Spa and I was sexually harassing people,
Speaker 8: and that went viral on social media. It was covered
Speaker 8: on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant
Speaker 8: death threats, and you know, I was docksed. It was
Speaker 8: pretty terrible, especially because I was not that person in
Speaker 8: the spa and I was only best picked up because
Speaker 8: I was picked up for my visibility. My response to
Speaker 8: that was no, I didn't immediately say yeah, it wasn't
Speaker 8: mean it wasn't me, leave me alone, Leave me alone.
Speaker 8: I didn't do that because I knew that if I
Speaker 8: said that, then they would just pick and attack some
Speaker 8: other trans person. Yeah, and you know, I know that
Speaker 8: like the ship that the that the right wing machine
Speaker 8: and acts, if it happens to one of us, it
Speaker 8: can happen to all that's end, it likely will.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I mean, I think the thing that it
Speaker 13: reminds me the most something we've also covered on the
Speaker 13: This is one of the problems with talking about this.
Speaker 13: It's like doing this for so long that like there's
Speaker 13: very few things that I can say that I can't
Speaker 13: be Like I've said this on the show before. But
Speaker 13: we spent a lot of time, typically Garrison, I spend
Speaker 13: a lot of time covering the way that every time
Speaker 13: there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks
Speaker 13: a random transperson and goes, it was this person. Yeah,
Speaker 13: and this reminds me a lot of the same thing,
Speaker 13: although this isn't more targeted, Like we've invented a fake
Speaker 13: controversy about a trans person and then we're going to
Speaker 13: like also just pick a random famous rand well not
Speaker 13: your favous, but like a random trans person that we
Speaker 13: know about and don't like.
Speaker 8: It's my understanding that this twenty twenty one we saw
Speaker 8: a controversy that I was targeted for became something of
Speaker 8: a right wing playbook.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 8: It was after that that they started saying, oh, this
Speaker 8: and that person's trans, and before that they didn't have
Speaker 8: a real moral panic around trans people unless you look
Speaker 8: all the way back to the North Carolina South Carolina
Speaker 8: bathroom man.
Speaker 13: Yeah, I mean I think I think there's an interesting
Speaker 13: intermediary thing too. Where so my friend Vicky ashterwhile who
Speaker 13: depending on when this episode comes out, you'll be hearing
Speaker 13: from either right before this episode or right after. I
Speaker 13: had another version of this where she wrote a book
Speaker 13: called In Defensive Looting. It came out in twenty twenty
Speaker 13: and just for like three months became all the rest
Speaker 13: of it. Really two months, like became the like the
Speaker 13: giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising
Speaker 13: was just like taking it out on, so like like
Speaker 13: sitting in Congress, people were like denouncing this book that
Speaker 13: you wrote. Every base re media outlet like specifically had
Speaker 13: their editorial people going like, this book is evil.
Speaker 1: Vicky's evil.
Speaker 13: And I think that was also like this moment of
Speaker 13: deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the
Speaker 13: anti trans uprisings, because the people who you know are
Speaker 13: trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves,
Speaker 13: even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level,
Speaker 13: understand that they're that these things are preserving the same
Speaker 13: systems of violence, and so they picked us as sort
Speaker 13: of like the wedge point to to break this thing apart.
Speaker 13: And I think with Vicky they hadn't really figured out
Speaker 13: how to do it. And I think it was like
Speaker 13: specifically your case, the the we spaw like with you
Speaker 13: being put in as the figure of the we spause.
Speaker 13: This is where they like actually really figured out how
Speaker 13: to do the whole thing, And yeah, there's just something
Speaker 13: really bleak up with how effective it was and the
Speaker 13: fact that it's like these are just people I don't know,
Speaker 13: like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of
Speaker 13: like astrak figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having
Speaker 13: conversations with are how they.
Speaker 1: Did this Just I don't know.
Speaker 8: I wish I had more and ELS's but yeah, I
Speaker 8: think the trends people like to to greater America, to most,
Speaker 8: to a lot of America, I'll say, are are sensational.
Speaker 11: You know, people people imagine.
Speaker 8: Chicks with dicks and dudes with dudes without dicks, and
Speaker 8: so I think that's really exciting for a lot of people, for.
Speaker 11: Better or for worse. I think for for worse.
Speaker 8: But yeah, I think that's just like people and their bodies, right, Like,
Speaker 8: you know, I guess some people walk around think all
Speaker 8: the time about other people's crotches.
Speaker 11: I'm not going to say that's a bad thing. Crush
Speaker 11: the first of your scene.
Speaker 13: Okay, you know, But on the other hand, right, there's
Speaker 13: this there's this aspect of which like you know, there's
Speaker 13: a serisacialism, but then there's also the experience of being
Speaker 13: a trans person is like I too am trying to
Speaker 13: find a way to not pay rent, Like that's like,
Speaker 13: I don't know.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so back to back to Wei SPA. Yeah, that
Speaker 8: was a pretty terrible experience for me, and I'm not
Speaker 8: going to lie about it.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: I I'm glad that I stood up for for myself.
Speaker 8: I'm glad I stood up for trans people that I
Speaker 8: didn't pass the buck. It was also really difficult and traumatic,
Speaker 8: and I didn't appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate
Speaker 8: being docs and you know, people have come after me
Speaker 8: my my whole life, like I present, I think just
Speaker 8: naturally physically, like I present as being gender queer, like
Speaker 8: I've been pretty like fearing like looking fem my entire life.
Speaker 8: That had nothing to do with my internal identity. I've
Speaker 8: been weird my entire life. I've perpetually been curious and
Speaker 8: provocative and interested in things that were provocative, and so
Speaker 8: I've been harassed my whole life. However, UNTI was SPA
Speaker 8: and to experience strangers by the hundreds saying that they're
Speaker 8: gonna hunt me down, and fucking shoot me. Yeah, I
Speaker 8: never know if someone will recognize me when I'm out
Speaker 8: and be like, hey buddy.
Speaker 5: I know you.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And it's one of these things where like the
Speaker 13: more of a target on you, the more likely it
Speaker 13: is to happen. And even people who don't have targets
Speaker 13: on them, like I know people you know who've never
Speaker 13: experienced anything like this that have still just like had
Speaker 13: attacks on them, And it's fucking terrifying.
Speaker 1: It is an absolutely terrible.
Speaker 13: Way to have to live in, a terrible sort of
Speaker 13: thing to have to experience, especially is it's just intensifying.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that was That was twenty twenty one, and
Speaker 1: that changed me.
Speaker 8: That experience of being targeted and just picked on out
Speaker 8: of the freaking blue that changed me as an artist.
Speaker 8: And at the same time it also firmly established me
Speaker 8: as a sort of celebrity. And I want to speak
Speaker 8: to that because there's different tiers of celebrity, you know.
Speaker 8: At that yes, at the top, there's the tier that's
Speaker 8: known as I get a Christmas card from Tom Cruise
Speaker 8: every year, and that's an actual thing, and that's the
Speaker 8: A List. And you know you're on the A List
Speaker 8: because Tom cruise since your Christmas card. And at the
Speaker 8: bottom is me who's been in mass media many times
Speaker 8: now but has none of the benefits.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: You know, I make very little money as an artist,
Speaker 8: and I don't have an entourage. I can tour and
Speaker 8: I play play some shows, and you know, some of
Speaker 8: them are sold out. I'm playing a show in LA
Speaker 8: that's sold out, but I'm not playing large venues. No,
Speaker 8: I maybe play like you know, three hundred, five hundred
Speaker 8: capacity tops, and most of the places I play like
Speaker 8: small colabs that one hundred and fifty or so. Yeah,
Speaker 8: And so I don't I don't have the protection that
Speaker 8: most celebrities inherently have. I don't have book deals. I
Speaker 8: don't have movie deals. I don't even have an asia.
Speaker 8: I don't even have a record label.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So I'm the freaking D tier. I'm the D tier,
Speaker 11: and they're coming after me.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And it's I mean, and that's the thing about the
Speaker 13: sort of like this status of like niche D tier
Speaker 13: internet micro celebrity is like I don't like I feel
Speaker 13: like I got the best possible version of it, where
Speaker 13: like I got a job that pays slightly. I think
Speaker 13: I might have hit no I'm still I'm still below
Speaker 13: the median salary of assists man in the.
Speaker 1: US, but I'm approaching it.
Speaker 13: We're getting closer every year, every union fight, we approach
Speaker 13: median cis man salary. But like, yeah, the situation I
Speaker 13: got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right,
Speaker 13: Like this is about the best you could possibly hope
Speaker 13: for if you're a transperson and you get famous, Like yeah,
Speaker 13: I mean, like I get that threats too, right, Like
Speaker 13: nothing anywhere near the scale that you get, And mostly
Speaker 13: what happens is like I mean, like single digit numbers
Speaker 13: of trans people in the US have the kind of
Speaker 13: protection that actual celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity
Speaker 13: is just another It's just a giant target painted on you.
Speaker 13: And yes, you have none of the benefits and all
Speaker 13: of the sort of Hey, here is one hundred and
Speaker 13: fifty million people who absolutely hate you and who've been
Speaker 13: primed and targeted like specifically at you.
Speaker 8: Yeah, It's something that I wonder about, Like why why
Speaker 8: would they do something like this? Why would Fox News
Speaker 8: we talk about me? Why would the founder of the
Speaker 8: Proud Boys, Gavin mccinnis that old video about me bad
Speaker 8: Boys is a terrorist group if you don't now listener
Speaker 8: to ever recognize as a terrorist group by Canada, not here,
Speaker 8: because like we're just cool with that.
Speaker 11: Should hear? They're white supremacist terrorist group? So why me?
Speaker 11: Why why would a congress person come after me?
Speaker 8: And my own hypothesis is that they punched down because
Speaker 8: they secretly believe that they themselves are weak and attacking me,
Speaker 8: attacking people like me, is a fight that they can win.
Speaker 8: And my view is that it's not a fight that
Speaker 8: they can win because they've already lost. They're trying to
Speaker 8: get power in small, small ways and false ways, in
Speaker 8: my opinion, and they're trying to get money. First of all,
Speaker 8: they want money, you know, they want their views, they
Speaker 8: want their donations, and that's the entire top of the
Speaker 8: pyramid for them and for me though, I'm a fucking artist,
Speaker 8: and power is something that I've always been developing because
Speaker 8: I've sought to know myself. I've sought to understand who
Speaker 8: I am and why that extends to myself as a
Speaker 8: queer person. To come to understand myself who I am
Speaker 8: as a queer person, that's not something they'll ever have.
Speaker 8: So I've read a fucking won. And same with all
Speaker 8: the other queer people that are under attack, all you
Speaker 8: other DCER queer celebrities out there, we fucking won.
Speaker 1: Hopefully well.
Speaker 13: And I think part of this is also like the
Speaker 13: reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to
Speaker 13: stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how
Speaker 13: far in the tide had already come, and now they're
Speaker 13: trying to like dam off the tide. And you know, like,
Speaker 13: probably it's not going to work. But the only way
Speaker 13: that it can is if everyone just like sits here
Speaker 13: does nothing and let's to just keep building and building
Speaker 13: and building more walls. It's something that is within our
Speaker 13: power to resist. We just have to actually do it, right.
Speaker 13: You have to actually organize, You have to talk to
Speaker 13: the people around you, you have to go get them
Speaker 13: to do things to resist this. And if we do, yeah, well,
Speaker 13: like with the things that we've already won, the things
Speaker 13: that we are going to win are going to stick.
Speaker 13: But if not, like things are going to get really
Speaker 13: really bad really quickly. And yeah, and speaking of things
Speaker 13: getting very bad very quickly, I carre some more ats
Speaker 13: before we get back to these getting wars. We are back, Yeah,
Speaker 13: You've been specifically targeted by a sitting US Congresswoman, Nancy Mace,
Speaker 13: who is the person who actually I don't know if
Speaker 13: we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's
Speaker 13: the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans
Speaker 13: people to not be able to use the bathroom on
Speaker 13: Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti trans figure in Congress.
Speaker 13: Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about
Speaker 13: trans women and how they should be put in men's jails,
Speaker 13: which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a
Speaker 13: bunch of people get horribly braved and killed, which is
Speaker 13: one of the predominant things that happens when we get
Speaker 13: put in ben's prisons. And she specifically came after years,
Speaker 13: you want to talk about how that happened and the
Speaker 13: latest sort of a congress woman tweets and a fucking
Speaker 13: social media company does their bidding.
Speaker 8: Yeah, so right at the end of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 8: I think it was on December twenty eighth, I was
Speaker 8: doxed by a right wing control nazi that has docked
Speaker 8: multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends, and
Speaker 8: they pointed out in a tweet how my art was
Speaker 8: on YouTube, specifically, my music videos were on YouTube calling
Speaker 8: for violence and how I was in evil trans person
Speaker 8: and they added like at symbol YouTube and said that
Speaker 8: these videos are in violation of your terms of service?
Speaker 11: Why are they still up?
Speaker 8: And Nancy May saw that because if you look at
Speaker 8: her Twitter, it's all just the stocks and trans people
Speaker 8: and perpetual like rage bait about the queer menace, the
Speaker 8: trans menace, and so she saw that retweeted and said, YouTube,
Speaker 8: this squarly violates your terms of service. Why haven't you
Speaker 8: done anything? And then immediately following that, my videos were
Speaker 8: taken down, the ones that were mentioned in these tweets.
Speaker 8: And as I said before, some one of these videos,
Speaker 8: what was that of my little problem that's been up
Speaker 8: for seven years?
Speaker 1: Yeah, for a long time.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And YouTube terms of service they're very clear, and I
Speaker 8: do my best to stay within YouTube terms of service
Speaker 8: so my work doesn't get taken down.
Speaker 11: And they state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity that is.
Speaker 8: Allowed within the context of art, within the context of
Speaker 8: music videos, and so my videos, you know, they weren't
Speaker 8: designed to this is from the terms of service. They
Speaker 8: weren't designed to sexually titillate or gratify. That's exactly what
Speaker 8: it says in the in the terms. Now they weren't
Speaker 8: recreations of real life violence, and they weren't real life violence,
Speaker 8: but they were still they were still removed at the
Speaker 8: behest at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And I think there's there's a couple of things
Speaker 13: going on here, one of which is, you know, so
Speaker 13: we've seen this with Facebook and the last I guess
Speaker 13: when this comes out will be like a week ago.
Speaker 13: But you know, Facebook has in stated policies that allow
Speaker 13: you to basically stay slurs against queer people, allowed you
Speaker 13: to call core people the illnesses and stuff like that
Speaker 13: that's very specifically you could only do to queer people.
Speaker 13: You can't do it to anyone else. And I think
Speaker 13: there's this sort of trend here of I don't know
Speaker 13: with Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with
Speaker 13: the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is
Speaker 13: just your Facebook is right, like they did the Row
Speaker 13: Higg the genocide, like the genocide into Gray too, that
Speaker 13: was also a Facebook thing. So they've always just been
Speaker 13: evil and they have been sort of looking for the
Speaker 13: excuse that they needed to like drop the hammer on us.
Speaker 13: But I think YouTube, to some extent to what we're
Speaker 13: seeing right now is this kind of like mask coming
Speaker 13: off moment where people are realizing that with Trump and power,
Speaker 13: they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist
Speaker 13: because specifically like on a trans artist, because now they
Speaker 13: have this sort of like backing to do this stuff,
Speaker 13: and the right has you know, realized that they can
Speaker 13: feel like YouTube, take this video down, and they'll do it.
Speaker 13: And that's a really terrifying p residents in a lot
Speaker 13: of ways. And also it's very you know, I was like, yeah, obviously,
Speaker 13: because a point of a hypocrisy does nothing. But like,
Speaker 13: I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of
Speaker 13: censorship than a member of the government says that something
Speaker 13: should be taken down and it's taken down.
Speaker 10: It's like, it's really so you.
Speaker 8: Know, it makes me kind of afraid, honestly, because you know,
Speaker 8: before I was a victim of a moral panic, and
Speaker 8: now my work is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare.
Speaker 8: So you know, what's what's going to happen next? What
Speaker 8: will we see just made invisible and unseen? And I
Speaker 8: know that in this country, I have freedom of speech,
Speaker 8: but that's that's really bullshit. We all know that, Like,
Speaker 8: I'm not going to reach many people if I stand
Speaker 8: on a street corner at the park and yell at people.
Speaker 11: What matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that.
Speaker 8: These social media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now
Speaker 8: by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom
Speaker 8: of reach is annihilated and then suddenly trans people are
Speaker 8: actually invisible.
Speaker 11: We're very close to that. I think Fancy proved that.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first
Speaker 13: step for how you destroy a people.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Art art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak,
Speaker 8: and I know that's why she came after my art.
Speaker 13: There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen.
Speaker 13: And then like the next tweet is again a sitting
Speaker 13: member of the US government saying that trans women should
Speaker 13: be put in men's prisons, and it's like, Okay, one
Speaker 13: of these is considered violence fight sort of the media machine.
Speaker 1: One of them isn't.
Speaker 8: Yeah, does she even actually do work for the people
Speaker 8: of South Carolina? Like I saw, all she does is
Speaker 8: just like start shit with trans people, like, she says,
Speaker 8: another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer. And she's
Speaker 8: just a knockoff product of a bootleg Trump, that's what
Speaker 8: she is. And she's not even good at her fucking politics.
Speaker 8: Like she's tried to get this bathroom band for disallowing
Speaker 8: trans people to use a bathroom methaiost Capital and her
Speaker 8: own freaking party kicked the bill out of the out
Speaker 8: of the bylaws for this year, so she couldn't even
Speaker 8: get that. And yeah, so I guess she thinks you
Speaker 8: can get a get a win by harassing me, harassing
Speaker 8: my art. Yeah, try to get people to come after me.
Speaker 13: You know, these people are not as powerful as they
Speaker 13: want you to believe. Right, A lot of their stuff
Speaker 13: just fails. But they will only fail if people are
Speaker 13: willing to resist and people are willing to stop them.
Speaker 13: And that's the thing that's needed in this moment. Is
Speaker 13: organization is you know, like is an organization. It is action,
Speaker 13: it is it is now. It is now the time
Speaker 13: to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being
Speaker 13: like a should I be organizing a union? Should I
Speaker 13: be like setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations?
Speaker 13: It's like, yeah, it's time, it's time to go because otherwise,
Speaker 13: you know, and I think this is something that like
Speaker 13: every trans person now understands intimately, and I think most
Speaker 13: people don't. Which is that right now it's us, But
Speaker 13: you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive,
Speaker 13: there's a very good chance that it's going to be
Speaker 13: you like showing up on this show because a fucking
Speaker 13: congress person is deliberately interviewed to destroy your life. And
Speaker 13: I would rather we had stopped this before it got
Speaker 13: to any of us. But they're going to come for
Speaker 13: you too unless we stop them. Thank you so much
Speaker 13: for coming on the show. And where can people find
Speaker 13: you and find your art? And yeah, support you?
Speaker 8: Yeah, thanks for having me. May I really like talking
Speaker 8: with you. It's been very good and listeneris You can
Speaker 8: find my work on Spotify. You can also check out
Speaker 8: my website at precious Child dot com and please sign
Speaker 8: up for my mailing list there as well. That is
Speaker 8: the best and best direct way for me to stay
Speaker 8: in touch with my friends and fans. I'm also Precious
Speaker 8: Child on Instagram on TikTok. I am the last Precious Child.
Speaker 8: I also will be doing live shows this spring and
Speaker 8: summer in the US, and so follow me on my
Speaker 8: website and on social media to stay up to date
Speaker 8: on that and come say him in person.
Speaker 13: Hell yeah, we will have thanks to all of that
Speaker 13: in the description. So yeah, go check it out and
Speaker 13: resist the creep of fascism.
Speaker 8: That's one thing I want to add about I said
Speaker 8: earlier about personal power and how I have to develop
Speaker 8: plan personal power by getting to down myself. I want
Speaker 8: to toil trans people out there, you queer people and
Speaker 8: your allies. That first thing is getting today's and then
Speaker 8: next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws, Fuck these
Speaker 8: fucking lawmakers. Yeah, good to know each other and strengthen
Speaker 8: our bonds with each other, because those are bigger than
Speaker 8: any type of oppressive laws then we put upon us.
Speaker 8: And it's only by the strength that we developed with
Speaker 8: each other, within each other that we will persevere.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about it,
Speaker 1: the Consumer Electronics Show happening here to everyone, And of
Speaker 1: course it is in fact happening to everyone because over
Speaker 1: the course of the day, all of our subjects here,
Speaker 1: all of our experts here, have watched different kinds of
Speaker 1: dudes explain the different kinds of jobs they want to
Speaker 1: replace with a chatbot that was trained on redit it.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to go around a circle and introduce
Speaker 1: our guests today. First off, we've got the great Ed
Speaker 1: Angwaiso Junior. Ed, thank you for being here, Thanks for
Speaker 1: having me on. We've got Garrison Davis, who's also great,
Speaker 1: but I'm not gonna say it at the same time
Speaker 1: because I don't want Ed's compliment to feel like less.
Speaker 1: But you're contractually obligated to not mind.
Speaker 5: Yes, thank you boss. Great to be here, as always.
Speaker 1: Very natural, very natural. Zi hi hi, Hello, Hello, hello, hello,
Speaker 1: thank you. This is your first cees as well. That's right,
Speaker 1: your first time being a journalist? Also true. How do
Speaker 1: you feel doing the job that Alex Garland has just
Speaker 1: reminded us in the movie Civil War is a fundamentally noble,
Speaker 1: perfect endeavor only practiced by heroes.
Speaker 14: I love wearing a dress, shirt and tie and just
Speaker 14: getting very drunk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were very surprised when I gave you your gun,
Speaker 1: but you can't be a journalist without one. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm playing with it without the safety and last but
Speaker 1: certainly not least in fact, maybe better than some people
Speaker 1: in the room. Again, I'm not going to say who.
Speaker 1: You can wonder that for yourself. Feel in.
Speaker 4: Rath.
Speaker 15: Thanks, I agree that I'm pretty good. How much better
Speaker 15: I am than how many people in this room?
Speaker 1: I'm not. I'm not even really like something that was
Speaker 1: not like talking about Yeah, exactly, because we haven't gotten
Speaker 1: those numbers back from open AI. Yeah, it would be
Speaker 1: irresponsible to speculate at the mind. Yeah, I got away
Speaker 1: for three So what I want to do here? I
Speaker 1: think this is kind of our roll up. We spent
Speaker 1: our last day on the floor. I want to go
Speaker 1: around and I'll start first. You guys have a second
Speaker 1: to get your thoughts together. What comes to mind immedia
Speaker 1: is like, this is the thing that I had the
Speaker 1: most positive reaction to, and this is the thing that
Speaker 1: I had the most negative reaction to. I think it
Speaker 1: is a solid way for us to start out, and
Speaker 1: I think my most negative reaction, obviously was the Amy
Speaker 1: artificial child best Friend toy, which was deeply upsetting and uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: and I hated both that. Like I could tell from
Speaker 1: an industrial design standpoint, pretty good design, Like it looked
Speaker 1: like something like oh, Kitt'll think that's cute and from
Speaker 1: a this is our intent for this product standpoint, it
Speaker 1: felt like a replacement for the love of adults in
Speaker 1: the life of a small child, which I thought was
Speaker 1: like evil in a profound way. And I guess the
Speaker 1: best thing that I saw. I'm not perfectly competent at
Speaker 1: this point to like analyze how well it worked, but
Speaker 1: from the demo I saw, I was very impressed with
Speaker 1: Naqi Knakis basically reads facial microemotions in order to let
Speaker 1: people control the computer, not exclusively, but especially if they're
Speaker 1: quadriplegic or whatever. Like, I thought that was really interesting,
Speaker 1: and it's the kind of thing because honestly, I might
Speaker 1: loop that in with There was a AI assisted like
Speaker 1: Caine for people who were blind. There was another device
Speaker 1: that led you to control a computer through like facial
Speaker 1: movements in your mouth. It was like a retainer all
Speaker 1: the stuff that's like, oh, these are like really people
Speaker 1: care a lot about helping somebody regain the ability to
Speaker 1: utilize technology to let them reconnect to the world. That's
Speaker 1: like the opposite of replacing a child's parents with a
Speaker 1: toy ed. You're in the hot seat next.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 16: The thing I loved the most was obviously the Global
Speaker 16: Pavilion for connecting Web three businesses.
Speaker 1: Across crypto botching.
Speaker 16: Oh yeah, DeFi fintech cb DC's, which are central bank
Speaker 16: digital currencies and legal advocacy. You know, this made my
Speaker 16: heart flutter because you know what, even when you think
Speaker 16: they're down, Crypto finds a way to squirm into your life.
Speaker 16: It really is the zombie of the tech world. Yeah,
Speaker 16: because it's dead and yet it's undead. It's constantly trying
Speaker 16: to crawl that.
Speaker 1: Somehow the fact that it's dead makes it more dangerous. Now, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's specifically a zombie. I will try to figure out
Speaker 1: what's the vampire, but specifically Crypto is the zombie.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. When I first read the line that is not dead,
Speaker 1: which can eternal lie and with strange eons, even death
Speaker 1: may die. Yeah, it would.
Speaker 16: When I think of, you know, twenty eight years later
Speaker 16: trailer where they used that poem.
Speaker 1: Three six.
Speaker 16: You know, like, I'm just guessing where the price of
Speaker 16: bitcoin is gonna go. I think we're we're at the
Speaker 16: beginning of a golden age, not for us but for
Speaker 16: the grifters. Oh God, next week, when are dear Golden
Speaker 16: Boy gets or Orange Boy gets elected. So I are inaugurated?
Speaker 16: Has he already won the election?
Speaker 1: You did?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: Well, that's that's that's debatable. I think there was some
Speaker 5: very curious irregularities in days right straightforward from here.
Speaker 1: To be encouraging the Blue and one people let him,
Speaker 1: let him have it, Let him have it. You're right,
Speaker 1: he wasn't shot at all. That was all an AI trick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: fifteen would blow your whole head off that way.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 16: The thing I actually did like the most, similar to you,
Speaker 16: I really did like the assistive tech. I mean the
Speaker 16: stuff that is for people who are disabled, not able
Speaker 16: body either experiencings either cognitive decline or you know, the
Speaker 16: nerodegenitive things or paralyzed.
Speaker 7: Like.
Speaker 16: This is actual stuff that we need a lot more
Speaker 16: investment in development and I assume maybe the scale up
Speaker 16: production of it and figure out ways that it can
Speaker 16: be offered to people in a variety or in a
Speaker 16: spectrum of use cases.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 16: I think the stuff that I did not like, hmm,
Speaker 16: you know, I didn't really care for a lot of
Speaker 16: the luxury surveillance stuff, you know, the fake cgms that
Speaker 16: you know, I'll never forget this woman telling someone right
Speaker 16: next to me, it's a It was a medical device
Speaker 16: that when I asked, she looks at my attack and goes, no,
Speaker 16: it's not a medically.
Speaker 1: We had a beautiful moment where it was this like
Speaker 1: it was like a set of smart goggles, which there
Speaker 1: were a lot of that had like night vision, but
Speaker 1: also it had like threat assessments. So the specific thing
Speaker 1: they bragged is like it can help a police officer
Speaker 1: identify if somebody has a gun. Right, And this this
Speaker 1: was right after we had gone to an AI security
Speaker 1: camera that I had flipped off with both hands and
Speaker 1: it had identified as a man giving the thumbbat And
Speaker 1: I don't feel great about it identifying the gun.
Speaker 16: Luxury surveillance for health, luxury surveillance for a recognition. Also
Speaker 16: like they had it in litter boxes and shit, don't
Speaker 16: need that.
Speaker 10: I really don't need that.
Speaker 16: Why does the letterbox need to be connected to the internet.
Speaker 16: Why does it need a camera?
Speaker 1: You know that does maybe think of a better world
Speaker 1: where we have exactly as much money and focus on AI,
Speaker 1: but it's all integrating it into cat focused products like
Speaker 1: fifty billion dollars being poured into cattle. Translate whatever you're
Speaker 1: cat is saying into French perfectly. Your cat can make
Speaker 1: deals with Chinese and by the way, we've hooked him
Speaker 1: up to venture capital. He has an open line of
Speaker 1: soft bank. Siri, why you know that?
Speaker 16: I would love this translation. Let's help my cat make
Speaker 16: some deals. Help me figure out why or how he
Speaker 16: learned to open my door, you know, things like this,
Speaker 16: But what we get an am bullshit.
Speaker 1: I want to see a guy dressed as Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: be like ladies and gentlemen. We have finally done it.
Speaker 1: We have gotten across the concept of death to a cat,
Speaker 1: and I understand there.
Speaker 15: Mortalent actually that like common ad where he's talking about AI,
Speaker 15: but he's like, we taught proofs to a dog.
Speaker 1: Got turtleback on what a dog would think about It's
Speaker 1: just a dog sitting at a table smoking a cigarette.
Speaker 1: The future. Mm hmm, Garrison, you're up.
Speaker 5: Best of CS I think was definitely the VLC media
Speaker 5: booth at the park where they they had like they
Speaker 5: had big, big traffic cones on their head, wearing them
Speaker 5: like wizard hats with huge cloaks.
Speaker 1: They were dressed as wizards.
Speaker 5: They were dressed as wizards, and we walked up to
Speaker 5: them and they said.
Speaker 1: Let's let's start VLC folks, if you if you don't
Speaker 1: know this, this was especially relevant to those of us
Speaker 1: who pirated a lot. It's a media app that allows
Speaker 1: you to basically play any kind of like any video Fi, idiophile, yes,
Speaker 1: or audio file, and now it will automatically give you
Speaker 1: subtitles to using local AI. That's not like reaching to
Speaker 1: the cloud or anything to do.
Speaker 5: It, because putting some titles on pirated media can sometimes
Speaker 5: be really hard. So they said, we have something that
Speaker 5: analyzes the audio that's being spoken in whatever media you're watching,
Speaker 5: and we will put some titles up for you. We
Speaker 5: walked up and we're like, so what do you have here? Like,
Speaker 5: we are not selling anything, We have nothing to sell you.
Speaker 1: In this beautiful they're fringe. So it was in this
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, wonderful access. I'm not going to the
Speaker 1: degree of like I don't give a fuck about anything
Speaker 1: else of this stupid goddamn show that they gave off.
Speaker 1: They exuded it and.
Speaker 5: They're they're they're by far the coolest because of something
Speaker 5: Robert You said to them.
Speaker 1: I walked up and I was like, VLC is a
Speaker 1: very popular app. They just crossed six billion downloads. I've
Speaker 1: been using them for almost as long as you've been alive.
Speaker 1: And I walked up and I was like, I've been
Speaker 1: using your product for fifteen years. In ordered a pirate
Speaker 1: media and they said, very nonchalantly, keep going, keep keep going,
Speaker 1: keep doing that, keep doing that. I'm obsessed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: About this too, because, like I, it's a good app.
Speaker 1: I have also used it. I saw the guy in
Speaker 1: the hat and I was like, Oh, it's the VLC
Speaker 1: from you know, from on your desktop.
Speaker 15: And then I was like, that's that's stupid. I don't
Speaker 15: need to talk to the man. He's wearing a hat
Speaker 15: and a cape. And I'm glad that you followed through.
Speaker 15: As a journalist pushed aside your instinct to be like,
Speaker 15: do not approach stranger in a cape?
Speaker 1: Garrison does not have that answer.
Speaker 5: No, no, At some point the contrary, I feel a
Speaker 5: magnetic attraction.
Speaker 1: This is why I keep an air tag on them.
Speaker 1: A great way to get abducted.
Speaker 5: I think similarly, obviously all of the AI stuff for kids,
Speaker 5: all of like the AI slop is like obviously bad.
Speaker 5: We've talked about that a lot already. The other thing
Speaker 5: that's like kind of like the worst is similar to
Speaker 5: what you said, ed like the level of surveillance tech.
Speaker 5: I tried out multiple a systems that are supposed to
Speaker 5: like detect and predict behavior based on facial expressions or
Speaker 5: gesture and this is really tricky. There was one at
Speaker 5: Eureka Park. It's a South Korean company that's powered I
Speaker 5: believe by Samsung with money and also they've access to
Speaker 5: like their training data. They're called Visomatic And specifically why
Speaker 5: this exists. It is a camera that you can put
Speaker 5: on a put on a computer. It will it will
Speaker 5: detect where your face is pointing and where your eyes
Speaker 5: are paying attention to. And the reason why this exists
Speaker 5: is for online test taking. It's so people don't like
Speaker 5: look at their phone to like cheat, so it tracks
Speaker 5: where your eyes are moving and if your eyes look
Speaker 5: down too much, it's gonna flag it as someone's possibly cheating.
Speaker 5: So this was obviously like introduced after the pandemic. There's
Speaker 5: a lot a lot of online test taking. Samsung uses
Speaker 5: this tech themselves for any kind of like online exams
Speaker 5: that they as a company will put on, you know,
Speaker 5: whether it's like for people students, employees. But they also
Speaker 5: had like other features where you could switch it. I
Speaker 5: assume what it's doing all the same work, it just
Speaker 5: is placed differently on the monitor and instead of can
Speaker 5: you know, do like object detection you know what you're wearing,
Speaker 5: and the general like behavior analysis if you seem like
Speaker 5: you're behaving suspiciously, which is something that we tried at
Speaker 5: the SK booth, which also South Korean company for their
Speaker 5: own like like surveillance detection. But I asked Visomatic like like,
Speaker 5: what kind of use cases do you see for this
Speaker 5: beyond test tick? You know, like yeah, general surveillance, Like yeah,
Speaker 5: we want to learn how to like predict or like
Speaker 5: analyze potentially suspicious human behavior. As we were walking by
Speaker 5: the SK version. One quite funny thing is as I
Speaker 5: walked by, it first at first identified me as a
Speaker 5: blonde war holding a cup. It then changed and said
Speaker 5: blonde person, which I think is pretty it's pretty deep.
Speaker 1: Very progressive. It's doing the opposite of a Facebook.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it could sense the pronouns. It's like hmm, maybe
Speaker 5: maybe not maybe not a woman, maybe not a blonde person,
Speaker 5: but but yes, that was you know, something that was
Speaker 5: like quite well done. Specifically the visomatic stuff like very functional.
Speaker 5: It could tell when I was looking at the screen,
Speaker 5: when I was looking at my phone, it could tell
Speaker 5: from like various various angles, like what I was holding,
Speaker 5: what I was looking at, where my attention was being directed.
Speaker 14: Like it was.
Speaker 5: It was very well done. It was very accurate, but
Speaker 5: you know, possibly scary.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of possibly scary, the sponsors of this podcast
Speaker 1: don't know who they are, could be the Washington State
Speaker 1: Highway Patrol again, in which case, thank you boys for
Speaker 1: your noble service on our nation's roads. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: that because I got pulled over the other week and
Speaker 1: I'm really trying to fight a case right now. I
Speaker 1: would never do that anyway. Thanks guys, and we're back.
Speaker 11: Is it my turn?
Speaker 1: It is your turn?
Speaker 5: Okay, So I'm going to introduce our special white woman
Speaker 5: CORRESPONDENTSI to give us some exciting breaking news in the
Speaker 5: white woman tech development world.
Speaker 14: Okay, so the first one is positive for contexts, I'm
Speaker 14: a trans woman. And one of the boosts that was
Speaker 14: pretty interesting it was this group. Were they French, Garrett,
Speaker 14: you remember I, I you know they're they're they're European.
Speaker 14: They're called Ellie Ellie Health.
Speaker 10: It's E l I.
Speaker 14: Anyways, this is a at home hormone tester, So it
Speaker 14: is saliva base. It's like a little disposable package. Currently
Speaker 14: they only advertise cortisol and progress rone, but they have
Speaker 14: plans for estrade, isle and other hormones, testoster as well,
Speaker 14: testosterone as well. Sorry, and yeah, so you swab your
Speaker 14: mouth in the morning or evening and then you wait,
Speaker 14: what was it, like, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, and then
Speaker 14: you scan this little like QR thing on the device
Speaker 14: and your phone calculates what your levels are. And this
Speaker 14: has very interesting implications for like the DIY hormone market
Speaker 14: or use case. I started DIY and did my own
Speaker 14: like blood tests, but a lot of like trans kids
Speaker 14: don't have access to that.
Speaker 3: So this is a it's a good idea if it's actually.
Speaker 14: Effective, Like we an't have hands on yet, we haven't
Speaker 14: tested it yet, but I would love to do a
Speaker 14: comparison of like testing my own levels and then trying
Speaker 14: this very interesting, very intriguing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we will certainly as soon as possible. Has this
Speaker 5: compared to the regular like mail in blood tests, which
Speaker 5: is like the current way to do it, but that
Speaker 5: requires shipping your blood to a laboratory, and that's maybe
Speaker 5: not always the best or even like convenient. So being
Speaker 5: able to test this just at home without shipping any
Speaker 5: of your DNA to some random laboratory would be really
Speaker 5: really cool.
Speaker 14: Right, There's no insurance involved. This is completely supposedly close source.
Speaker 1: From what y'all were telling me earlier today, when you
Speaker 1: explained this to me, it sounded kind of like the
Speaker 1: people making this have an understanding of the dangers inherent,
Speaker 1: particularly to the trans community, and why they might want
Speaker 1: to use this, and a focus on privacy. For that reason,
Speaker 1: I didn't press them on that because I don't know.
Speaker 1: I follow ces you know, wide variety of Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, we tried to expect as much intel as possible
Speaker 5: about kind of what their future plans are, but not
Speaker 5: specifically like in that level.
Speaker 1: But privacy, like they seemed like they had of coursably
Speaker 1: good understand.
Speaker 5: Of course, it's because it's because it is your own
Speaker 5: like DNA and hormones, you know, Like, I do not
Speaker 5: know this company is even thinking about trans people if
Speaker 5: it is trans friendly, but it could be used by
Speaker 5: trans people regardless.
Speaker 1: Yeah, much like a glock exactly exactly.
Speaker 14: The potential is great.
Speaker 11: And then probably my least favorite goofs.
Speaker 14: I have to call out some other white women my
Speaker 14: so call boho white women is ebjects.
Speaker 1: And has that spelled ev ev J E C t okay?
Speaker 4: And what this is?
Speaker 1: Oh god?
Speaker 14: Yes, this is a special plug for your charging port
Speaker 14: of your EV. So the idea is a nefarious party
Speaker 14: sees you and your fancy EV and approaches you and
Speaker 14: you need a quick getaway. Their words, their words, their words,
Speaker 14: by the way, like they see your fancy car and
Speaker 14: your targets. So this device will like e jacks, you
Speaker 14: can just drive away from the charge the power cart.
Speaker 1: Leaving broken pieces of plastic both yes, the charger way
Speaker 1: like this is not reusable, single use, one time use.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 14: So yeah, all those all those people targeting so call
Speaker 14: white women.
Speaker 15: This is finally someone is serving the community of people
Speaker 15: that think that if you find a zip.
Speaker 5: Tie on your car door handle MS thirteen. That was
Speaker 5: the first thing I said. As soon as soon as
Speaker 5: we walked away, I was like, this product wins the
Speaker 5: Coolson Media Award for the most white woman product. It's
Speaker 5: specifically right, like if you see a slice of cheese
Speaker 5: on your windshield, you're already targeted. Way this is this
Speaker 5: is that exact demographic of people who think they're going
Speaker 5: to get trafficked in like your local like olive garden
Speaker 5: parking lots.
Speaker 1: Gangs stalked Americans in the Tesla charging station in Brentwood, California,
Speaker 1: where they average incomes like in the eight figures. I
Speaker 1: gotta say, though, you're being very unfair to them. It
Speaker 1: was so nice of them to put down the phone
Speaker 1: where they were doom scrolling TikTok, to look at all
Speaker 1: of the different reasons their kids are going to be abducted.
Speaker 15: We're talking about this product. You know, they're like some
Speaker 15: finally someone's gonna do something about it. Create a disposable
Speaker 15: piece of plastic.
Speaker 16: You notice that guy is always sitting down at the
Speaker 16: gym and the coffee shop and the gas station.
Speaker 1: This is what he doesn't get.
Speaker 3: Be careful.
Speaker 1: I feel like I could have upsold them, and like
Speaker 1: what if we put some explosives in this, you know,
Speaker 1: really like keep them off of the.
Speaker 16: Car, like blo, create a diversion inside of it, called
Speaker 16: the police station and took a picture of him.
Speaker 1: And someone scared. A lady driving a Vibe that's one
Speaker 1: of the electric.
Speaker 5: Cars, right, It's like a crocodile tail as as as
Speaker 5: it whips around, mobilizing anyone in the vicinity.
Speaker 1: We're calling it the iguana, and it does with enough
Speaker 1: force to break a grow man. Yeah, yes, Okay, David Roth.
Speaker 15: So there's a lot of I guess I gathered less
Speaker 15: than in years past that this was at one point
Speaker 15: like basically a car show. There is not a lot
Speaker 15: of transit stuff this time around. I didn't get to
Speaker 15: see very much of it, but I did have. I
Speaker 15: guess this is both my best and my worst experience,
Speaker 15: the most powerful transit experience of my life.
Speaker 1: So I live in New York City. I take the
Speaker 1: subway pretty much everywhere I go, and you know, it
Speaker 1: has its ups and downs. For the most part, it's good.
Speaker 15: It moves like twelve hundred people through a tunnel of
Speaker 15: thirty odd miles an hour, and for the most part,
Speaker 15: everybody leaves everybody else alone, or you know, watches videos
Speaker 15: on their phone and stuff. But I knew that there
Speaker 15: had to be a better way, and at the Las
Speaker 15: Vegas Convention Center, I got to experience it.
Speaker 1: You're familiar Elon Musk, serial entrepreneur.
Speaker 15: Yeah, so he invented something called the hyper loop which
Speaker 15: is a car that goes through a tunnel that's the
Speaker 15: exact same size as the car at eleven miles an hour,
Speaker 15: and it takes there's someone has to drive it, and
Speaker 15: also someone has to help you into the car. But
Speaker 15: you can fit up the three additional people into the car,
Speaker 15: so that ratio everyone, I know, Yes, right, So yeah,
Speaker 15: you got two people moving three people two hundred yards
Speaker 15: at the speed of like a brisk walk. Now, David,
Speaker 15: this kind of technology wasn't possible just a few decades, right, exactly.
Speaker 1: I mean, this was the sort of thing. Though there
Speaker 1: had been tunnels, they were mostly used by animals, voles miners, yes, right,
Speaker 1: and thought yeah, and that was mostly for pirates in
Speaker 1: at least one movie I saw recently, Yes, but no
Speaker 1: one had thought about it as a transit sort of thing.
Speaker 15: It was more of a like a place where you
Speaker 15: would go if you needed to get copper. And of course,
Speaker 15: but in this case, so this is like where it's
Speaker 15: good to have and this I guess every ces is
Speaker 15: like this. This was my first to be reminded that
Speaker 15: there are visionaries out there who are like, what if
Speaker 15: you put car through hole? What if instead of a
Speaker 15: thing that moves multiple people at once. You had a
Speaker 15: thing that took exactly the same number of people to
Speaker 15: move a number of people slightly more than Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 15: so that was cool. I mean it's just like fun
Speaker 15: to see like where this stuff is going. And I
Speaker 15: really wonder if we're not going to start seeing things
Speaker 15: like cars on the streets of American cities, you know,
Speaker 15: like it could be okay, David, I mean most of
Speaker 15: the obviously this is something we'd go on. Last yere
Speaker 15: was like three or four good things you all said them.
Speaker 15: I thought the accessibility tech stuff was the the stuff
Speaker 15: that made me feel good about what was going on here,
Speaker 15: and there was a great deal of stuff that made
Speaker 15: me feel like pretty bad about what was going on. Yeah,
Speaker 15: up to and including like the surveillance stuff beyond the
Speaker 15: you know, like advanced Samsung powered snitch tech so that
Speaker 15: nobody whatever your boss can tell if you're really looking
Speaker 15: at the zoom that you're on. I don't really love
Speaker 15: that personally, But for me, the a lot of the
Speaker 15: smart home stuff is real drag like just in the
Speaker 15: sense that it clearly, first of all, beyond being like
Speaker 15: sort of unnecessary, there's a level of just willingly giving
Speaker 15: over your agency over the small moments that make you
Speaker 15: know human life human life, and just being like I
Speaker 15: would really love it if just like an artificial intelligence
Speaker 15: could pick my pants out for the day. I'll simply
Speaker 15: stand here waiting for that to happen. Yeah, just fucking
Speaker 15: grim actually, like didn't really care for it. I feel
Speaker 15: like you gotta like, what are you using that time
Speaker 15: to do?
Speaker 1: Yeah? What are you getting? What are you optimizing from
Speaker 1: yourself by not having like pieces of like the thing
Speaker 1: that a human being does, which is like pick your
Speaker 1: clothes right? Yeah, I wonder how you feel about this
Speaker 1: because you and I have been going to sees from
Speaker 1: and I guess a broadly similar number of years. Like
Speaker 1: I've never been to CEO. Oh really this is your No,
Speaker 1: I'm a fucking sports writer man, Like, this is a
Speaker 1: lot of out here because Ed got me a folding head.
Speaker 1: I have like the dead eyedes veterans. Oh yeah, well
Speaker 1: I'm very tired. Yeah.
Speaker 15: This is the thing with like I think, as far
Speaker 15: as I can tell, it seems like it's a loop
Speaker 15: where you more or less like you start out it's
Speaker 15: too much, you get big eye right away, and then
Speaker 15: you just sort of feel zombiefied. But then we have
Speaker 15: talked to people over the last few days that are like,
Speaker 15: you know, I remember like fourteen cess ago that was
Speaker 15: pretty good, like and they're also tired and also arranged
Speaker 15: by this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the first time someone showed me a tablet computer,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh man, science has given me everything
Speaker 1: I want, like, and I guess it's I don't know.
Speaker 1: Do you remember like when the last one was that
Speaker 1: you felt like even sort of that stirring. Yeah, twenty
Speaker 1: like eleven or twelve when they did. I got to
Speaker 1: see inductive charging of a car for the first time,
Speaker 1: and it like was so big. The Las Vegas Convention
Speaker 1: Center is like as the size of a city, and
Speaker 1: seeing like the lights in that whole convention center dim
Speaker 1: as they were doing it was very inefficient because our
Speaker 1: wild Yeah, but that was just like that was like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, this is kind of like amazing that this
Speaker 1: is even possible. But yeah, not really sense, not really sense.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm really glad that there's lights in the
Speaker 1: hyper loop tunnel. Yeah, otherwise it'd be unless something goes wrong,
Speaker 1: would it started to seem kind of grim? Otherwise? Well,
Speaker 1: I the smart home stuff is interesting because that has
Speaker 1: been as long as I've been going to these they've
Speaker 1: been trying to sell people on smart homes, and I
Speaker 1: don't think I've ever gotten a good idea of what
Speaker 1: a smart home is that I think a person would want.
Speaker 1: I can think of two things a person would want right.
Speaker 1: One of them is, it would be nice if, like
Speaker 1: I didn't have to think about playing music. I could
Speaker 1: just like tell my house to play the music I wanted,
Speaker 1: and it would play the music and I could hear
Speaker 1: it everywhere and I didn't have to fuss with a
Speaker 1: bunch of shit. And the second is, what if I'm
Speaker 1: coming home from vacation and my house is cold, it
Speaker 1: would be nice to turn on the heat or like
Speaker 1: an hour before I get home. And one of those
Speaker 1: things you'd use every day, and one of those things
Speaker 1: it's not really viable to base a business off of.
Speaker 1: But like, they keep trying to find new ways to
Speaker 1: stick computers in my house, and I don't know, does
Speaker 1: anyone else have anything they want out of a fucking
Speaker 1: smart home?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 15: I mean, I like, it's not an accident that my
Speaker 15: apartment is basically going to be in the year two
Speaker 15: thousand and five forever means it's expensive to do all
Speaker 15: this stuff. This is the bit thatit with so many
Speaker 15: of these demos, like just you start to notice how
Speaker 15: incredibly grandiose the residences in which all of this stuff
Speaker 15: is being sort of like postulated as being useful. Is
Speaker 15: It's like the like Lexus December to remember sales event
Speaker 15: type energy just a.
Speaker 1: Big fuck what lives do you live?
Speaker 16: Yeah?
Speaker 15: This also we've talked about this on Ed's show that
Speaker 15: like there's a lot of stuff here that feels like
Speaker 15: like the first fifteen minutes of a George Romero movie,
Speaker 15: like just getting you set for Eventually there's going to
Speaker 15: be a lot of like, you know, disembowelings and hideous
Speaker 15: shambling zombies. Yeah, and smart home not a bad horror
Speaker 15: movie concept. I don't think it's a great consumer concept.
Speaker 1: Yeah, speaking of great consumer concepts, the ads for this podcast.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and I want to close this
Speaker 1: out by asking everybody a question, which is, how do
Speaker 1: you feel about where tech is going?
Speaker 16: I think we're going to hell. I think we are
Speaker 16: getting wrapped it up very fast into the sweet abyss.
Speaker 16: I'm worried about the fact that so much of the
Speaker 16: tech is oriented around surveillance, around precursor forms of prepping,
Speaker 16: around very soft forms of like perfection and optimization that
Speaker 16: rhyme with eugenics. I'm like, I don't like the direction
Speaker 16: that a lot of this stuff is going, but also
Speaker 16: there I don't know what to do about it because
Speaker 16: so much of it is driven by private interest, right,
Speaker 16: It's like venture capitalists, well capitalized individuals and firms that
Speaker 16: they're connected to decide what we get to get pushed
Speaker 16: and these corporations, you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, the nature of like you can you can
Speaker 1: really tell that a lot of like the health products
Speaker 1: are very optimized for like rich tech executives. Like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of sleep products that are relied on you
Speaker 1: being willing to like bathe yourself in speakers, playing benaural
Speaker 1: beats while you slept, and like at different devices measure
Speaker 1: You're like do an ECG and it's like I don't know,
Speaker 1: my aunt's not going to do that.
Speaker 16: Oh yeah, you know, like I was, you know, I was.
Speaker 11: I took with my partner about this.
Speaker 16: They have type one diabetes, they have a CGM, they
Speaker 16: use it constantly, and they're We've been talking about and
Speaker 16: thinking about writing about how there's been a crop of
Speaker 16: devices that are like trying to push onto this idea
Speaker 16: that you need to have close monitoring of it to
Speaker 16: preempt if you are going to be prediabetic, or to
Speaker 16: optimize what you're eating throughout the day, but that you know,
Speaker 16: when you actually dig into what they're doing, it's like
Speaker 16: part of this track of rhetoric where it's like, wow,
Speaker 16: you know, if you're sugar slightly goes out, it's because
Speaker 16: you're being a bad person. It's because you're eating the
Speaker 16: way that you shouldn't. It's because there's a moral failing
Speaker 16: or character failing there that this tech can help purify
Speaker 16: you of and you can be your best self, which
Speaker 16: is really just like not.
Speaker 1: Large, you know.
Speaker 16: And I feel that sort of rhetoric lurking behind a
Speaker 16: lot of the bi metric surveillance stuff, even though there
Speaker 16: are applications that are not that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's kind of focused on like the sin,
Speaker 1: the health sins that you're committing. We spend a decent
Speaker 1: amount of this week hanging out with a Catholic priest,
Speaker 1: and I do feel like several tech companies were the
Speaker 1: ones trying to sell us indulgences, right, yeah, yeah, all
Speaker 1: right gear.
Speaker 5: There's small improvements for consumer tech.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: This is a very consumer based where it's supposed to
Speaker 5: be a consumer based tech show. There's products like the
Speaker 5: Shocks headphones, which every year get a little bit better.
Speaker 5: I try to bone conducting headphones last year, which are
Speaker 5: very good. They work underwater.
Speaker 1: If you're deaf in an ear you can listen to
Speaker 1: your music the way you used to be able to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very cool stuff. This year they have what they
Speaker 5: called air conductive. I don't quite know how it works,
Speaker 5: but it does work. I can hear it if you're
Speaker 5: standing like two three feet away. There's no sound bleed,
Speaker 5: but I hear music in the middle of my head
Speaker 5: despite having to not put an earbud actually like in
Speaker 5: my ear. They're super useful, work, great, really good sound quality, durable.
Speaker 1: I'm on year two of the same pair that I
Speaker 1: run with every single day, like sweat rain. Great products.
Speaker 5: It's like small improvements, right, It's not it's not necessarily
Speaker 5: like revolutionizing hearing, but it's it's very very small improvements.
Speaker 5: Where as the other kind of big, big trend, which
Speaker 5: isn't necessarily like holly consumer based. It's kind of what
Speaker 5: these larger companies are trying to move towards is I
Speaker 5: feel like they're trying to replace friendship with this form
Speaker 5: of like technology and like AI enable technology. You used
Speaker 5: to have friends to get recommended new music. You used
Speaker 5: to have like friends to like tell you about new
Speaker 5: stuff that they're interested in. No longer. Now you have
Speaker 5: an AI agent that can do that for you. You
Speaker 5: you don't need you don't need friends to help kind
Speaker 5: of talk about, you know, you had a rough breakup. Instead,
Speaker 5: you can have a short term replacement. Using AI, you
Speaker 5: could have a friend replacement of a girlfriend replacement. It's
Speaker 5: all these things are trying to replace the core concept
Speaker 5: of friendship, even as like as even as like a baby,
Speaker 5: even as a toddler. Your first friend doesn't need to
Speaker 5: be people you meet outside. It can be this little
Speaker 5: hovering robot you have in the living room that can
Speaker 5: also organize your fridge, tell you what to tell you what.
Speaker 5: We'll roll around your house in the middle of the
Speaker 5: night with cameras, and that could be your first friend.
Speaker 5: It's replacing the core concept of friendship. It's this move
Speaker 5: towards complete optimization of every aspect of human life. Because
Speaker 5: as smooth as possible, that completely ignores like what it
Speaker 5: means to be human.
Speaker 1: It's the fascinating difference between that elder care robot elie Q,
Speaker 1: which was clearly a man with a tremendous amount of
Speaker 1: empathy trying to design a device to help people, and
Speaker 1: what I usually see with AI, which is trying to
Speaker 1: design a device to remove the need for human empathy.
Speaker 1: Like I went to a there was a vet app
Speaker 1: called Laika that's like chat GPT for veterinarians, and they
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, you know what, most of it we
Speaker 1: focused initially on like technical questions, so like if I
Speaker 1: have these symptoms, what can that mean? But that's asking
Speaker 1: us is like we would really like advice on how
Speaker 1: to talk to people that their pets are going to die?
Speaker 1: And I was like, do you are Vett's not getting
Speaker 1: out of that school, because that's like that's a big
Speaker 1: part of being an a vet, Like do they need
Speaker 1: chet GPT for this?
Speaker 5: I saw this other company that was like it was
Speaker 5: designed to help you get over the loss of your pet,
Speaker 5: where you could you could pump tons of photos of
Speaker 5: your pet into this AI into this AI generator and
Speaker 5: it will generate new images and this is proven to
Speaker 5: help you move on from loss, which is literally a
Speaker 5: Nathan Fielder joke from like seven years ago, seven years ago,
Speaker 5: and like, no, you should talk with your friends about that.
Speaker 5: That's why you are a human. That's how you can
Speaker 5: move on from loss. You have to make new connections.
Speaker 5: Poorly AI generated images of your cat aren't going to
Speaker 5: help you move on, Like what why? Anyway, Replacing friendship
Speaker 5: is the thing that I see a lot of the
Speaker 5: tech world wanting to do, maybe because they don't understand
Speaker 5: real human relationships that aren't like innately transactional. I'm not sure,
Speaker 5: but that is like a huge trend that I've seen
Speaker 5: multiple multiple people mention.
Speaker 14: All right, Zi, So I've worked in this industry for
Speaker 14: like three years now and this is my first big convention,
Speaker 14: and I would say, uh, this is just affirmed pretty
Speaker 14: much all of my disillusions with the tech world, and
Speaker 14: most of it's just nonsense. And maybe the postive people
Speaker 14: are onto some stuff.
Speaker 1: Well you say that, but I really do think via
Speaker 1: dox is kind of revolutionize the way in which mysterious
Speaker 1: fogs kill large numbers of the Maybe, but don't name
Speaker 1: it something so sinister. Yeah, yeah, it's if you were
Speaker 1: to be like this is the thing that keeps your
Speaker 1: apples fresh for a long time. That would be great.
Speaker 1: I would just don't call it apple fresh, yes, but
Speaker 1: call it apple fresh.
Speaker 5: By the way, you should listen to You should listen
Speaker 5: to Better Offline to hear context for veradox, which we
Speaker 5: discussed in the last episode of our daily Cees coverage
Speaker 5: over there with the wonderful Edixitron. But essentially baradox is
Speaker 5: this missed. They get sprayed on produce, which allegedly helps
Speaker 5: it stay shelf stable for a few more days.
Speaker 1: Exactly. So maybe that shelf stable mist will also translate
Speaker 1: to waking.
Speaker 15: Up the dead possibly, But you don't know that it's
Speaker 15: gonna do You don't know that it's not going to
Speaker 15: do that, right right.
Speaker 1: As a journalist, that's sorry, you have to ask these questions.
Speaker 5: And we discussed that way more in depth on Better Offline.
Speaker 15: Yeah, we do discuss whether the ability to bring red
Speaker 15: leaf led us back to life does have any repercussions
Speaker 15: in a pet cemetery sort of way for your possibly
Speaker 15: dead loved ones.
Speaker 1: David, it's me sorry. A lot of good points.
Speaker 15: I mean, I think garyin ever both made the point
Speaker 15: about the sort of sociopathic like thread of a lot
Speaker 15: of this just sort of like an inability to understand
Speaker 15: not just what people might want from a technology, I think,
Speaker 15: which is to fuel not I mean, they're probably our people.
Speaker 1: I imagine that. It's like if you were the guy,
Speaker 1: the dude that's like trying to age himself backwards. You know,
Speaker 1: he's like Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson. We love Brian's.
Speaker 15: Yeah, but he like I feel like he would have
Speaker 15: been walking through this clapping his hands with delight.
Speaker 5: A day, drinking his son's blood time for Yeah, it's a.
Speaker 1: It's I drink his son's blood pretty rights and it's
Speaker 1: not bad.
Speaker 15: The high quality plot, but that it felt like it
Speaker 15: was that that there was a lot of this sort
Speaker 15: of like an optimization onto like transcending being human at all.
Speaker 15: And I don't think I mean again, there probably are
Speaker 15: people that want that. They certainly have money. I don't
Speaker 15: imagine that. I think what most people would like. I mean,
Speaker 15: then you don't expect technology to make you feel more human.
Speaker 15: But something I've been thinking.
Speaker 1: About a lot. We're talking about this a lot on Better.
Speaker 15: Offline, But there's a passivity that a lot of this
Speaker 15: sort of seems to be forcing onto people where you're
Speaker 15: just like sort of are happening to you that make
Speaker 15: your life more efficient and convenient.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that I want that.
Speaker 15: I mean, I'm older than and poorer than the you
Speaker 15: know market that I think they're aiming for with this,
Speaker 15: But it's certainly old enough to remember, as you said,
Speaker 15: like finding music, like that's a thing that yeah, you know,
Speaker 15: your friends tell you about it. And in my case,
Speaker 15: I mean again just being in my middle age, you
Speaker 15: like go to a store and you flip through shit,
Speaker 15: like there's a distinction between finding something and being given
Speaker 15: something or being fed to something like you're a foa
Speaker 15: grag goose and it's just getting sort of piped into
Speaker 15: your brain and life and being.
Speaker 1: And I think it's an important distinction. I think that
Speaker 1: little bit of.
Speaker 15: Agency of having some sense of doing the things that
Speaker 15: you want to do, like I would imagine that, well,
Speaker 15: I don't have to imagine it technology that helps you
Speaker 15: do that as opposed to doing it for you.
Speaker 1: I think that.
Speaker 15: I don't want stuff that makes me feel less human.
Speaker 15: I don't want stuff that makes me feel more like
Speaker 15: I'm in a fucking matrix pod and I think that
Speaker 15: a lot of the stuff that was out there seemed
Speaker 15: targeted towards the.
Speaker 1: Matrix pod dwelling community. I think that's that's about the
Speaker 1: best line we could go out on, like, that's that's yeah,
Speaker 1: you nailed it.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 1: I thought I crushed that one. Yeah you did. You did,
Speaker 1: great job, Dave. Where can people find your workday defector
Speaker 1: dot com? Why let me do that without crushing my water? No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's okay.
Speaker 5: Let me.
Speaker 1: That's a load bearing piece of content. Defector dot com
Speaker 1: is the website and at.
Speaker 16: Big black Jack a bit on Twitter and Blue Sky.
Speaker 16: This Machine Kills is my podcast. Tech Bubble dot Soapstack
Speaker 16: dot com is the newsletter.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, do you want to tell people how to
Speaker 1: find you?
Speaker 14: Zi hat new old woman on Twitter with okay zeros.
Speaker 5: Zeros for neo.
Speaker 1: Zeros, All right, everybody, Well, uh, that's going to do
Speaker 1: it for us here at It could happen here and
Speaker 1: are week at cees. You know, just try to hub
Speaker 1: hug your loved ones until the Viera ox sweeps through
Speaker 1: all of their homes neighborhoods. Yeah, it's in the room,
Speaker 1: It's in the room.
Speaker 13: Welcome to ninkadappan here a podcast about things falling apart,
Speaker 13: how to put them back together again. I am your host,
Speaker 13: Mia Long Return for the holidays, Returned, rejuvenated, returned, refreshed,
Speaker 13: Return to do something a little bit different.
Speaker 1: In the coming weeks.
Speaker 13: We're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty
Speaker 13: analysis of the coming wave of fascism.
Speaker 1: But what we haven't really been doing as much.
Speaker 5: What I want to take some time to do today
Speaker 5: is to talk about fascism atic sort of macro level
Speaker 5: and what it looks like right now, and also talk
Speaker 5: about an extremely cooked guy.
Speaker 9: Who blew himself up in a cyb outside of Trump Building,
Speaker 9: and with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator,
Speaker 9: doer of so many different things that like, I don't
Speaker 9: know someone's going to write a great biography in like
Speaker 9: one hundred years.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 1: It is the one and only Vicky Oshtawhile.
Speaker 10: Thank you.
Speaker 17: Sorry, I couldn't keep the giggle down long enough for
Speaker 17: you to get to the intro before you're you find
Speaker 17: people could hear me.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm glad to have you here.
Speaker 13: And part part of this the initial thing that was like, okay,
Speaker 13: we need to do this was I saw you called
Speaker 13: all of this the years of lead paint, and that
Speaker 13: is just it has stuck in my mind every for
Speaker 13: every single second of every day since then.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, I was writing for the journal that I
Speaker 17: am working and fundraising for CA Go chext us out,
Speaker 17: but I wrote a piece about how unpleasant the cyberpunk
Speaker 17: dystopia is in the face of you know, that sort
Speaker 17: of that image of the cyber truck on fire outside
Speaker 17: the Trump Hotel. Then about you know, as we were
Speaker 17: about to talk about Matthew Livelsburger, I think is how
Speaker 17: it's pronounced, who's the green beret? Then big Trump fan
Speaker 17: who thought blowing up a cyber trunk outside of the
Speaker 17: Trump Hotel would start not a race war, but like
Speaker 17: the purging of democratic politicians.
Speaker 13: Is that what we think his yeah, version was, Now
Speaker 13: that seems to be it like politicians, and like it's
Speaker 13: kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep
Speaker 13: state thing where he wants democrats gone from like the
Speaker 13: army and right right, you know, so it's the kind
Speaker 13: of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi
Speaker 13: fantasy of the day of the rope from the Turner
Speaker 13: Diaries is kind of like metastasized into all this right
Speaker 13: wing culture where they have their own sort of like
Speaker 13: less race worry or like less anti Semitic versions of it. Yes,
Speaker 13: and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start
Speaker 13: off by exactly blowing himself up with a.
Speaker 5: Truck full of fireworks in front of a Trump.
Speaker 17: So basically, this guy that the spaping a Green Beret, which,
Speaker 17: like say what you will, arguably some of the most
Speaker 17: trained and experienced murderers in the world, you know, whatever
Speaker 17: else you say about and this is important.
Speaker 13: You know, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in
Speaker 13: the world that is greater than the drop from like
Speaker 13: green Beret to like former Green Beret.
Speaker 1: This guy was active duty, so like right, yes, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: This wasn't even like a cooked vet.
Speaker 17: This is a guy who is like in the shit
Speaker 17: and we know that he was drinking the kool aid
Speaker 17: because he used chat GPT.
Speaker 10: He've just turned out today to help plan his attack.
Speaker 17: But unfortunately, despite his murder expertise which undeniable, cyber truck,
Speaker 17: like all Tesla's, is designed mostly to endanger the people
Speaker 17: inside it because they won't sue Tesla because they're already
Speaker 17: huge super fans, And what I really mean, of course,
Speaker 17: is that they have terrible safety protocols. And the cyber truck,
Speaker 17: which is like a twelve year old's idea of a
Speaker 17: good idea, which is an incredibly incredibly firm, stainless steel
Speaker 17: body which does not crumple and does not take damage,
Speaker 17: which means that your frail human body inside it in
Speaker 17: an accident bashes against a wall of steel metal, very
Speaker 17: dangerous to be inside. But the car doesn't take damage,
Speaker 17: and that means that if you leave a bomb in it,
Speaker 17: the sides of the car were fine, so the explosion
Speaker 17: went straight up right, so it did no damage to
Speaker 17: the hotel. It's not clear if he intended that, but
Speaker 17: it seems like he probably wanted to do a.
Speaker 10: Little damage at the hotel.
Speaker 17: Most people who are doing suicide bombings want that, I
Speaker 17: would imagine. So anyway, all this is to say, you
Speaker 17: know this guy who's like an active duty green beret
Speaker 17: who believes for some reason that attacking a Trump hotel
Speaker 17: in an elon musk car will somehow lead to the
Speaker 17: murder of Democrats. But he's so tech pilled that he
Speaker 17: takes a cyber truck, which doesn't even work as a
Speaker 17: bomb and dies in it and just leaves this like
Speaker 17: horrible image. And I mean, you know, I'm being flippant
Speaker 17: about this, Like it's awful thing obviously, but no one
Speaker 17: else was hurt except himself. I mean, the image was
Speaker 17: everywhere on social media for like the last three days
Speaker 17: of that of that cyber truck on fire outside of
Speaker 17: the Trump towers. Yeah, it was the perfect image of
Speaker 17: a thing I had already been thinking of as the
Speaker 17: years of life. So I wrote an essay around that basically.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So I want to start talking about this by
Speaker 13: getting a little bit into what the years of lead are,
Speaker 13: because I imagine it's some of you, like there's probably,
Speaker 13: like I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you
Speaker 13: who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and
Speaker 13: like know the name of every single guy he was
Speaker 13: implicated for these car bombings, but for everyone else who's normal.
Speaker 13: And I caught myself among the non normal people because
Speaker 13: I did. I spent about two years going down the
Speaker 13: years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. But
Speaker 13: the years of lead were this thing in roughly the
Speaker 13: seventies and the eighties, in Italy, where as a response
Speaker 13: to the sort of rising power of the left through
Speaker 13: the sixties, and like the giant uprising is ninety sixty eight.
Speaker 13: And Italy's kind of different from the rest of Europe
Speaker 13: because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example,
Speaker 13: France has this huge up rising in May sixty eight,
Speaker 13: like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils
Speaker 13: have seized control of the factories, like they lose this
Speaker 13: our bottle, Like there's you know, the president's like fleeing
Speaker 13: at a helicopter. But then after that, like they kind
Speaker 13: of never seriously threatened the French government. Again in Italy,
Speaker 13: that is not true.
Speaker 5: Like sixty eight.
Speaker 13: In Italy, there's a very similar thing going on, but
Speaker 13: like the seizure of the factories has been going on
Speaker 13: since Like I mean, stuff like this has been happening
Speaker 13: since the fifties, and it really only stops in nineteen
Speaker 13: seventy seven when like they have one last big push
Speaker 13: uprising and it fails. So as a way to contain this,
Speaker 13: the Italian government develops this strategy of backing right wing
Speaker 13: terror groups and then also orchestrating left wing terror groups
Speaker 13: and by terror groups I mean, like the most famous
Speaker 13: thing in this is called the Bolognia train bombing in
Speaker 13: nineteen eighty. It kills eighty five people, wounds like two
Speaker 13: hundred and ninety. Like it's a really really horrific attack,
Speaker 13: and it's immediately blamed that an anarchist group. It turns
Speaker 13: out it's not an anarchist group. It is a state
Speaker 13: back like fascist group. And yeah, like there are other
Speaker 13: ones I will pass over to VICTI you talk about,
Speaker 13: like the other terrible shit that they did.
Speaker 17: Well, that bombing kind of ends in some ways ends
Speaker 17: the years of lad you could end it there.
Speaker 10: It's sort of the last big terrorist month.
Speaker 17: The first thing, the event that like sort of after
Speaker 17: sixty eight kind of starts at as this thing called
Speaker 17: the Piazza Fontana bonding in Milan, which is like an
Speaker 17: agriculture bank, I think is what it's called. It's just
Speaker 17: like but seventeen people are killed, almost one hundred people
Speaker 17: are wounded, and the first thing that the police do
Speaker 17: is they blame anarchists in sixty eight as well, And
Speaker 17: there's a famous there's a famous case of this anarchist
Speaker 17: organizer named Pinelli who is arrested and then while he
Speaker 17: is under interrogation, falls out of the window of the
Speaker 17: police department to his death.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 17: It has still never been proven that he was pushed.
Speaker 17: The police claimed he've jumped out after they interrogated him
Speaker 17: really hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Sure.
Speaker 17: Oh Like here's a very famous Italian play about it
Speaker 17: by Dario Foe called the Death of an Anarchist. So anyways,
Speaker 17: they blame the anarchists, They literally murder a leading anarchist
Speaker 17: printer and organizer, and then of course it turns out
Speaker 17: that it was this terrorist group called ordinay Nuovo, who was,
Speaker 17: you know, this neo fascist group that had let's say
Speaker 17: significant overlap with parts of the Italian state. And I
Speaker 17: think like one way of understanding the years of Lead,
Speaker 17: I think that might be easy forople who aren't familiar
Speaker 17: with it, is that it's it's like a very low
Speaker 17: level civil war. It's it's I think the closest thing
Speaker 17: we can maybe think of as the troubles in Northern Ireland. Yeah,
Speaker 17: and the reason those were a little different was because
Speaker 17: a lot of those attacks were happening in England, whereas
Speaker 17: like the you know, the movement was in Ireland. But
Speaker 17: this is very similar, which is like there's these armed wings,
Speaker 17: both on the right and the left that are like
Speaker 17: both meeting in combat and sort of fighting each other.
Speaker 17: But in this instance, rather than a colonial occupation that
Speaker 17: they're fighting against, the Italian government was literally both paying
Speaker 17: for arming the fascists and instructing them to frame the
Speaker 17: left for these attacks.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and there's I mean, there's other stuff too. We're
Speaker 13: not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here.
Speaker 13: I have explained this on the show at some point.
Speaker 1: I think it's in.
Speaker 13: I think it's in if you go to the Hall
Speaker 13: of Weed episode we did where we talk about conspiracies.
Speaker 13: I've explained that whole thing. But like the goal of this, right,
Speaker 13: the reason that you know, they're they're giving all of
Speaker 13: these weapons to these like stay behind networks, so it's
Speaker 13: designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and
Speaker 13: having all these bombings was specifically something they call the
Speaker 13: strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort
Speaker 13: of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to
Speaker 13: drive people back towards the state. Because the idea was
Speaker 13: and this and this seems to have worked. You know,
Speaker 13: you scare people enough by the fact that there's you know,
Speaker 13: there's bombs going off all the time, people are getting killed,
Speaker 13: people are getting kidnapped, There's all of this just like
Speaker 13: horror happening, and the goal is to get people to
Speaker 13: turn to the state for you know, sort of order
Speaker 13: insecurity and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff
Speaker 13: because we need you know, we need to sort of
Speaker 13: terror to end.
Speaker 5: And it was.
Speaker 13: Extremely effective, and the sort of knowledge of this has
Speaker 13: I guess proliferated through the American left in the last
Speaker 13: like decade, and that has led to a lot of
Speaker 13: I think kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people
Speaker 13: sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is
Speaker 13: those those state behind networks that were armed by the
Speaker 13: Italian state and used as sort of the basis of
Speaker 13: these neo fascist groups, and like to refer to this
Speaker 13: sort of like I don't like what's happening in the US,
Speaker 13: and that's not really what's happening. And this is where
Speaker 13: I want to pass it to VICKI to talk about
Speaker 13: sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the Years
Speaker 13: of Lead Paint and how they're sort of different from
Speaker 13: the Italian ones.
Speaker 17: Yeah, in classic American fashion. Everything is more chaotic and autonomous, yes,
Speaker 17: and widely proliferated and also widely proliferated all over America
Speaker 17: products and services.
Speaker 10: Did I do again?
Speaker 1: Let's support this podcast. That's a good one. We are back,
Speaker 1: all right, Years of Blood Paint. Let's go.
Speaker 17: Yes, Right, So I actually think, you know, as you
Speaker 17: were saying that, I think actually a thing that might
Speaker 17: be the closest to Gladio And it's not Gladio, because
Speaker 17: that was very conscious and it was like these stay
Speaker 17: behind networks are organized explicitly but the US state defense
Speaker 17: of the Second Amendment and of like assault rifle availability
Speaker 17: and making the US the sort of home for military
Speaker 17: surplus because obviously, like the military industrial complex sells lots
Speaker 17: of guns. It's a very helpful thing that producing a
Speaker 17: reign of mass shooters who also operate in a sort
Speaker 17: of Years of Lead terroristic sort of strategy of tension way,
Speaker 17: I think might actually be close. But you can tell
Speaker 17: that that's very disorganized. Yeah, it's very distributed through the
Speaker 17: social it's done by you know, volunteers, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 13: And also the people who are doing the Years of
Speaker 13: Lead are unbelievably cynical about it right, Like they don't
Speaker 13: they don't believe any of this shit, right, yes, yes,
Speaker 13: no exactly, we're the Second Amendment guys. Like that stuff
Speaker 13: is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true
Speaker 13: believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a
Speaker 13: bunch of mass shooting to push people in towards extreme
Speaker 13: like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not
Speaker 13: what they were trying to do, but that's sort of
Speaker 13: you know, that's the effect of a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it wasn't.
Speaker 17: It wasn't a conscious effort at all. But that's also
Speaker 17: not the years of lead paint. That's just like a
Speaker 17: similar thing, the years of lead paint, which is obviously
Speaker 17: like which is a joke about. There's this big reactionary
Speaker 17: myth from like the freakonomics guys. I think that like
Speaker 17: the rise in crimes like correlated to like the use
Speaker 17: of lead paint in children's bedrooms, which is.
Speaker 13: Really funny because for the freakonomics guy that that is
Speaker 13: a down right left wing theory standard.
Speaker 10: Yeah exactly, or maybe it was a dude directing it.
Speaker 17: I don't even remember now anyway, So it became it
Speaker 17: became a meme to like talk about sort of boomers
Speaker 17: and generation acts people you know, having the bled paint
Speaker 17: in their gasoline and in their walls cause all this stuff.
Speaker 17: Obviously I'm not advocating that kind of like ablest insult
Speaker 17: when I talk about this, and is a memetic way
Speaker 17: of making fun of that concept.
Speaker 10: But all of that to say, they.
Speaker 17: Have completely drunk the kool aid, right, the fascists, as
Speaker 17: you're saying, Yah, they knew what they were doing. They
Speaker 17: knew they were framing the left. They were like making
Speaker 17: it up. But like a lot of people on the
Speaker 17: right in Italy, yeah, yeah, in Italy, excuse me, in
Speaker 17: Italy in the sixties and in the actual years of lead,
Speaker 17: years of lead paint, you've got people genuinely probably believing
Speaker 17: that January was Antifah, like people whose friends were there,
Speaker 17: you know, yeah, like stuff like Q and the other
Speaker 17: thing that the reason that this is years of lead
Speaker 17: pain and not the first Trump administration is because during
Speaker 17: the first Trump administration there was actually pretty pretty well
Speaker 17: organized on the ground fascist movements and they could they
Speaker 17: could certainly come back in the US right now.
Speaker 10: There's no reason they couldn't.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And it's also worth talking about we'll be covering
Speaker 13: this on the show, like at some point in the
Speaker 13: future when we've had time to go through the documents.
Speaker 13: But there was recently a massive from distributed to Nile Secrets,
Speaker 13: a massive drop of stuff on the militia movements from
Speaker 13: a guy who infiltrated it. It's a very good Republic
Speaker 13: of story talking about the guy that will link in
Speaker 13: the show notes. So, like, the militia movement has survived,
Speaker 13: but the kind of stuff that like we saw in
Speaker 13: like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty twenty.
Speaker 9: Like is not.
Speaker 17: Yeah, the Proud Boys Q and on, the folks who
Speaker 17: made up J six and the folks who made up
Speaker 17: the alt right, you know, broadly were largely defeated by
Speaker 17: anti fascists in the street. And then the people who
Speaker 17: remained QAnon folks who were I think, you know, some
Speaker 17: of those people were pretty hardcore neo Nazis obviously, but
Speaker 17: a lot of those folks were confused Internet boomers, right,
Speaker 17: and like those people mostly got discouraged by the repression.
Speaker 17: The repression I think successfully sort of put the ends
Speaker 17: to that organized Q stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 13: Well, and also, and I also have talked about on
Speaker 13: this show The other thing they put an end to
Speaker 13: that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you
Speaker 13: could use the literally the exact same structure of Q
Speaker 13: and on, but they make it about trans people. Yes,
Speaker 13: and that has been unbelievably effective.
Speaker 17: Now the strategy as a media strategy has continued, but
Speaker 17: as an on the ground organizing principle, it's not that functional.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's not, which is very lucky. But what that
Speaker 10: means is that Trump has come to.
Speaker 17: Power without a ground movement in the same way that
Speaker 17: he had in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, Like that was
Speaker 17: a real movement. His rallies were really well attended. His
Speaker 17: rallies this election. People left early. You know, it was
Speaker 17: like it was like going to see a losing team
Speaker 17: and their last home game of the season. You know,
Speaker 17: was the vibe at those rallies.
Speaker 13: Yeah, to do a very specific example, it's like the
Speaker 13: vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics
Speaker 13: before they were fucking run out to be for their
Speaker 13: owner move in the last bag exactly where like they've
Speaker 13: had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner
Speaker 13: who decided to make who made a bad team? So
Speaker 13: people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to La
Speaker 13: like it's like that kind of.
Speaker 17: Hyeah, those are the vibes. And yet of course the Democrats,
Speaker 17: in their infinite infinite capacities, lost the election. And so
Speaker 17: what that means, though, is that is that you have
Speaker 17: this moment where actually the right has as much power
Speaker 17: in the federal government as it's ever had. You know,
Speaker 17: the resistance is you know, they you know, they're very
Speaker 17: proud of legally handing power to the man and ending
Speaker 17: all of his charges or whatever.
Speaker 10: But the street movement is disorganized.
Speaker 17: So you have this gap between the two where there's
Speaker 17: this really powerful media apparatus Fox News, Truth, Social X,
Speaker 17: the Everything app you know, all of these like all
Speaker 17: these places where the fascists you know, and I guess
Speaker 17: Meta has now just officially announced they're like going to
Speaker 17: remove all content restrictions or whatever today.
Speaker 10: I mean, you know when we're recording this. So it's
Speaker 10: just there's this.
Speaker 17: Huge spectacular apparatus, but there isn't this on the ground organization.
Speaker 17: You get people like this Green beret who has been
Speaker 17: really radicalized, made angry, desperate, and like is blowing not
Speaker 17: even the Trump hotel up, which would be a nonsensical
Speaker 17: thing to do, but like literally failing to blow the
Speaker 17: Trump Hotel up in an attempt to start the race
Speaker 17: war by getting Democrats hung. So it's still kind of
Speaker 17: strategy of tension stuff, right, the imagination of as you said,
Speaker 17: the Turner Diaries or this sort of like you know,
Speaker 17: the right wing terror networks in the US. You know,
Speaker 17: there's a reason they're obsessed with attacking electrical power grits.
Speaker 10: Right, they think of the cause enough chaos, like.
Speaker 17: You will return everything to the hobbsy and world of
Speaker 17: all against all, and you'll get a race war and
Speaker 17: everything will fall apart. Whatever it's you know, it's step one,
Speaker 17: kill my family, step two, question mark question marks, step three,
Speaker 17: white supremacist revolution.
Speaker 10: It's horrifying. I mean, it's horrifying, horrifying idea, But.
Speaker 17: That's happening in these groups that have really really they
Speaker 17: believe I think genuinely that, Like I think the right
Speaker 17: does not understand the difference between like Nancy Pelosi and
Speaker 17: Asana Shakur, Like they see them both as equally dangerous.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 10: They hate Liz Cheney.
Speaker 17: Yeah, Like in the final days of elections, she was
Speaker 17: the person they were saying we're gonna go after her,
Speaker 17: like Liz Cheney like.
Speaker 13: Really like yeah, it's like like the closest parallel could
Speaker 13: think of this as like there was a faction of
Speaker 13: people between the Cold War who thought that like the
Speaker 13: Sino Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked,
Speaker 13: and like there were literally guys murdering each other, like
Speaker 13: Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other
Speaker 13: like on the border like in sixty nine, right, like
Speaker 13: and there were people who were convinced for the entire
Speaker 13: Cold War, even as like as China is invading Vietnam,
Speaker 13: are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy
Speaker 13: and that like and that's the secretly like the USSR
Speaker 13: and the PUERC are working together, and these are not
Speaker 13: like you know, some random guys that's like, these are
Speaker 13: these are like the guys that like like the peak
Speaker 13: of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true.
Speaker 13: And this is I think, yeah, like this this is
Speaker 13: the kind of thing we're in now. Just like these
Speaker 13: people are completely cooked. They don't they don't have any
Speaker 13: analytical building whatsoever. They just they actually have drunk their
Speaker 13: own kool aid.
Speaker 10: There was just a scoop. Sorr jop is really quick.
Speaker 17: There was a scoop right before we got on to
Speaker 17: record that Heritage Foundation, you know, authors of products Many
Speaker 17: day five.
Speaker 10: Their new big plan is to go after Wikipedia.
Speaker 17: They want to take down Wikipedia, like because because that's
Speaker 17: a place you can verify facts at right, They've already
Speaker 17: got the Post, They've got the Times, Like, what are
Speaker 17: they gonna do? They gotta GoF to Wikipedia. This is
Speaker 17: the kind of like level of unreality they're trying to build.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world
Speaker 5: of unreality and that attempts to sell it to you?
Speaker 1: Ooh, prox and services. That's a fourth this podcast.
Speaker 13: Yes we are back. I'm very proud of that one.
Speaker 13: That that's one of the best ones I've ever done.
Speaker 13: And I just completely off the top of my head,
Speaker 13: just came back better than ever.
Speaker 1: She's never been so bad.
Speaker 13: So I want to move a little bit from the
Speaker 13: just what does the state look like? How pilleda these
Speaker 13: people kind of thing to I want to talk a
Speaker 13: bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on
Speaker 13: here because I think part of what's happening here and
Speaker 13: it's become kind of unfashionable in academic to talk about
Speaker 13: neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like the Chips Act
Speaker 13: and like the capacity of the state or whatever. But
Speaker 13: I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going
Speaker 13: on here, a good place to go is like going
Speaker 13: back to here David Graver, and he has this line
Speaker 13: talking about neoliberalism. I think this might God, I should
Speaker 13: have actually looked up where this quote is from before
Speaker 13: I quote it. I think it might be from the
Speaker 13: Shock of Victory. But he has this line about how neoliberalism,
Speaker 13: when given a choice between making their system actually work
Speaker 13: and making it seem like alternative and neoliberalism is impossible,
Speaker 13: it will always choose making me alternatives seem impossible, because
Speaker 13: that's what neoliberalism is, right. This is, you know, the
Speaker 13: sort of maxim of Margaret Thatchery is the reason of alternative.
Speaker 13: It is a system that is designed to destroy all
Speaker 13: alternatives in the you know, and this includes the possibility
Speaker 13: of a future and the goal of this And this
Speaker 13: is I think that the sort of dominant affect of
Speaker 13: the years of lead paint is this induced helplessness. Yeah,
Speaker 13: this is some thing thicky I would ask you about
Speaker 13: the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, I was sort of vibing with what you're saying.
Speaker 17: But yeah, I think a lot of people online have
Speaker 17: accepted sort of you know, don't give in an advance, right.
Speaker 17: But like, I think one big thing that has been
Speaker 17: part of the Biden like strategy of counter revolution and
Speaker 17: part of what's been going on over the last four years,
Speaker 17: but indeed over the last four decades as well as
Speaker 17: sort of part of neoliberalism, is like the idea that
Speaker 17: you actually really can't do stuff yourself. You need a market,
Speaker 17: you need assistance, you need a professional, you need an
Speaker 17: expert to make a choice, right, and any choice made otherwise,
Speaker 17: you know, is doomed to failure.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 17: And I think part of why Trump feels like to people,
Speaker 17: some people like he's resisting neoliberalism is because he's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 17: I don't listen to experts. I don't listen to anyone
Speaker 17: except my gut. I just do what I want. The
Speaker 17: incredibly exhausting and miserablest strategy of the previous thirty years
Speaker 17: of politics, which is you get a ton of expert
Speaker 17: reviews and then you do a political change that moves
Speaker 17: things like twelve percent one way, you know, nudge politics
Speaker 17: as like Barack Obama loved or whatever.
Speaker 10: Right, So that's sort of like there's there's that sense.
Speaker 10: But then on the individual sense, it's.
Speaker 17: Also about distributing the workplaces and breaking down the possibility
Speaker 17: of labor solidarity, right, because part of what the sixties
Speaker 17: was and the reason the sixties lasted so long in
Speaker 17: Italy is because Italy had the biggest factories and had
Speaker 17: the like the last in Western Europe. They had the
Speaker 17: last folks still becoming proletarians from peasantry, like coming up
Speaker 17: from Sicily. So they had this like massive, massive factories
Speaker 17: that had these like crazy strikes over over again. So
Speaker 17: the distribution of labor, you know, with globalization, neoliberalism and
Speaker 17: blah blah blah, breaking down labor workforce. Like, we also
Speaker 17: are very helpless individually in our workplaces, right, and like
Speaker 17: we go to the HR department to get help, right.
Speaker 10: Where we sort of get self care. We like work
Speaker 10: on ourselves.
Speaker 17: We get therapy, you know that our boss offers us
Speaker 17: you know, thoughts and prayers right when when things are hard.
Speaker 17: But like there's a big attempt to allow people to
Speaker 17: define themselves sort of the carrot. The carrot of the
Speaker 17: sixties was like, you know, you get to like have
Speaker 17: an identity, like, Okay, we won't be officially racist.
Speaker 10: Yeah, quote unquote, you know, okay, we won't be officially sexist.
Speaker 17: And they claim, okay, whatever, none of that's true, but
Speaker 17: they but they sort of sell that, and then they say,
Speaker 17: but in return, you have to like do all of
Speaker 17: the self work.
Speaker 10: You have to be an identity in the marketplace.
Speaker 17: So basically you get exhausted because like even choosing what
Speaker 17: shoes to wear becomes like both an identity defining question
Speaker 17: and an exhausting slog through debt structures and infinite marketplaces, right,
Speaker 17: like yeah, and so that in you know, spoony world
Speaker 17: becalled that sort of choice paralysis, right, And I think
Speaker 17: that's probably accepted as well, that like you have so
Speaker 17: much choice that you feel absolutely helpless on the face
Speaker 17: of it. You can't do anything, and so that produces
Speaker 17: a craving for authoritarianism, for authority, right, That's another thing
Speaker 17: people want is like.
Speaker 10: Someone else decide for me. I'm sick of thinking about this.
Speaker 13: Yeah, And that's I think been one of the most
Speaker 13: important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is
Speaker 13: this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for
Speaker 13: someone else to make choices for you, to free you
Speaker 13: from this just like this endless nightmare of like trying
Speaker 13: to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy
Speaker 13: and shit.
Speaker 5: Like that and oh my god, you know, and the
Speaker 5: right has a bunch of alternatives here right with like
Speaker 5: this is the fantasy of what treadwives is. It's like
Speaker 5: what if someone else did your thinking for you.
Speaker 13: It's also the entire logic behind AI right and betwinding,
Speaker 13: this sort of AI agent's thing that they're like pushing
Speaker 13: right now, go listen towards see ES coverage and you'll
Speaker 13: care much about it.
Speaker 1: Is like what if someone just like planned your life
Speaker 1: for you?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 13: What if you could talk to a machine and it
Speaker 13: would plan all your trips and it would tell you
Speaker 13: what to eat, and we would tell you how to live.
Speaker 5: And this is you know, this is also the structure
Speaker 5: of how cults work.
Speaker 1: Like this is why colts have been able to.
Speaker 13: Attract people that, like, I think the media conception of
Speaker 13: cults you wouldn't think would be in them, as why
Speaker 13: there so many engineers in cults because there's like a
Speaker 13: once of people who have to make choices constantly, and
Speaker 13: the cult is like, hey, what if I just like
Speaker 13: made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately,
Speaker 13: you know, we talked about this a little bit before.
Speaker 13: This is ultimately part of what's going on with like
Speaker 13: trump Ism, right, because Trump is also to some extent,
Speaker 13: like if you're in this movement, like you no longer
Speaker 13: have to choose anymore.
Speaker 1: You just you know, here is the guy. The guy
Speaker 1: is going to do the thing for you.
Speaker 13: This is also if you go back to your original
Speaker 13: sort of conceptions of fascism, right, it's about the sort
Speaker 13: of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual,
Speaker 13: and the single heroic individual like acts outside of the
Speaker 13: bonds of the system in order to preserve it and
Speaker 13: like does all this stuff for you. And I think
Speaker 13: there's a compa of that with this sort of paralysis
Speaker 13: and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety also, and this
Speaker 13: is something that is very well documented that you know,
Speaker 13: we're are going to get into a foll here. But
Speaker 13: all of the stuff we've been talking about about the
Speaker 13: information space, where there's this constant deluge of just nonsense.
Speaker 13: And that's designed specifically, not even necessarily to convince you
Speaker 13: that something is true, but to convince you that it's
Speaker 13: impossible to figure out what is happening and to make
Speaker 13: you just give up. And when you're refusing to make
Speaker 13: a choice between like was there a gas attack in
Speaker 13: Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as
Speaker 13: the fallse flag, right, you're refusing to make the choice,
Speaker 13: has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also
Speaker 13: removes you from sort of the field of play of action.
Speaker 13: And this has been a really important part of this
Speaker 13: to sort of demobilize the left. Like it's part of
Speaker 13: what the sort of Tulsi gabberd Gabit was right, was
Speaker 13: that you could take a bunch of this sort of
Speaker 13: like rising nominally anti imperialist thing and you could just
Speaker 13: do this shit to them. And you know, now, Tulsi
Speaker 13: Gabbert is like one of the big people in Trump world, right,
Speaker 13: I think, what's his name? I disrespect him by not
Speaker 13: remembering his name, but I should. For the podcast, Steve
Speaker 13: Bannon put it well when he said, just flood the
Speaker 13: zone with shit, right, it's sort of the strategy. You
Speaker 13: just release so much terrible information that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 13: And this is how Trump also like kept ahead of
Speaker 13: his you know, many scandals, as he would just like say,
Speaker 13: the next most outrageous thing, and you know, you'd have
Speaker 13: to commit to responding to one, but he was already
Speaker 13: at the next thing. And it was just a sort
Speaker 13: of like amplifying, amplifying wave of like chaos and nonsense
Speaker 13: that you eventually, yeah, you get bowled over by it,
Speaker 13: you get exhausted, And I think, you know, you mentioned
Speaker 13: healthcare markets, and I think, like that's really that's really
Speaker 13: telling too, because we've just like lived through a pandemic.
Speaker 13: We're in the midst of a pandemic. Covids is in
Speaker 13: another wave that like no one has named right now,
Speaker 13: and no one even mentioned healthcare, let alone the pandemic
Speaker 13: during the election of twenty twenty four. Yeah, So part
Speaker 13: of what's been going on too is that there has
Speaker 13: been this mass push by the Biden administration of the
Speaker 13: Democrats to make us forget what happened in twenty twenty
Speaker 13: in terms of the uprising YEA, and then make us
Speaker 13: forget the pandemic, which is so unpopular and which continuing
Speaker 13: to actually prevent would have done significant damage to the economy. Right,
Speaker 13: it was already pretty bad for it, and it would
Speaker 13: have continued to get worse. So everyone had to be
Speaker 13: forced back to work.
Speaker 17: How do you force people back to work who evidently
Speaker 17: care about each other and their own safety. You lied them,
Speaker 17: You confuse them about what's actually going on. Right, So
Speaker 17: there's been this huge priming of the pump for this
Speaker 17: strategy by Biden and the Democrats, and by our own
Speaker 17: exhaustion over the pandemic and the fact that we had
Speaker 17: to go back to work, so we had to get
Speaker 17: over the cognitive dissonance of that. So all of these
Speaker 17: factors together have produced a psychic stew culturally in which
Speaker 17: people are very susceptible to just throwing up their hands
Speaker 17: and going, I don't know whatever.
Speaker 14: Yeah.
Speaker 13: But on the other hand, the strategy of the Years
Speaker 13: of Lead was a strategy born of strength, right, the
Speaker 13: years of Lead paint This is not a strategy built
Speaker 13: by people who haven't credibly solid grasp on power.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 13: The actual base that put Trump in power, right, and
Speaker 13: their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right, they are
Speaker 13: about to tank the entire global economy like through by
Speaker 13: by putting like fifty percent taria of some like every
Speaker 13: single country in the world. They okay, let's let's be
Speaker 13: accurate here. That on on on Chinese, Mexican and Canadian goods,
Speaker 13: which is like, okay, like I'm gonna I'm gonna ask you,
Speaker 13: as an exercise to the reader to go look up
Speaker 13: the places that the US imports things from.
Speaker 5: Right, So, like, you know, this is how you resist.
Speaker 5: This is this how you resist.
Speaker 13: Here you're learned helplessness is by going and research and
Speaker 13: things for yourself. But you know they're about to annihilate
Speaker 13: the entire economy when the thing that brought into power
Speaker 13: was fury at rising prices. Right, these fucking arrogant bastards
Speaker 13: have sown the winds and they are going to reap
Speaker 13: the fucking whirlwinds. The basis of this fucking of this
Speaker 13: entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this, like,
Speaker 13: dear listener, do you think these people can hold three
Speaker 13: hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force?
Speaker 1: No, of course not.
Speaker 13: There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed
Speaker 13: population that has ever existed in human history.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 13: This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting
Speaker 13: your compliance. Yes, And if they can't get your compliance
Speaker 13: by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to
Speaker 13: get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 13: They need you scared, They need you confused, They need
Speaker 13: you completely convinced of your own helplessness. They need you
Speaker 13: to forget that, as the old song says, in your
Speaker 13: hands is placed to power greater than their hoarded gold,
Speaker 13: greater than the might of armies magnified one thousandfold. They
Speaker 13: need you to forget the next line of the song,
Speaker 13: which goes, we can bring to birth a new world
Speaker 13: from the ashes of the old when the union makes
Speaker 13: us strong. And this is the entire fucking thing, right,
Speaker 13: If these people were actually strong, they would not need
Speaker 13: an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization.
Speaker 10: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 11: And the thing is right.
Speaker 13: The thing about this moment is that basically everyone is
Speaker 13: incredibly disorganized. However, that means that you just literally any
Speaker 13: random person can just take the things that you know
Speaker 13: how to do and start organizing. The system is designed
Speaker 13: to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what,
Speaker 13: it's not very hard for you to pick up the
Speaker 13: things that you know how to do for you, to
Speaker 13: use the relationships in people you know in your life
Speaker 13: to get together with them and to go do things.
Speaker 13: And they are fucking terrified of this. Yes, their entire
Speaker 13: strategies to make sure that you simply do not do this.
Speaker 13: And every single one of you has the power to
Speaker 13: do this. And I know this because I also was
Speaker 13: just some random dipshit Like I was just literally a
Speaker 13: random college student, right, Like, I was just some asshole,
Speaker 13: and I just started doing things right. And I got
Speaker 13: together with my friends and we fucking we made a
Speaker 13: tendance union and we did anti I stuff, and we
Speaker 13: did all of this shit. And it wasn't that like
Speaker 13: any of us are any different than you. We just
Speaker 13: you know, decided one day we were going to do it.
Speaker 13: And it happens to return one last time to David Graeber.
Speaker 13: One of one of his most famous quotes is theultimate
Speaker 13: hidden truth of this world is that it is something
Speaker 13: that we make and could just as easily make differently.
Speaker 13: And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely
Speaker 13: terrified of the idea of you making this world differently,
Speaker 13: and together we can do that.
Speaker 10: Yes, that's exactly right.
Speaker 17: And another thing that I think is really powerful about
Speaker 17: getting started in that way is that all of those
Speaker 17: false choices they become so much less important. And actually,
Speaker 17: when you have a real goal that you and your
Speaker 17: friends have made together, that you're building towards, it's actually
Speaker 17: a lot easier to make choices as to make decisions, yeah,
Speaker 17: because you would know what you need for the next step,
Speaker 17: or you'll have an idea of it. You might make
Speaker 17: a mistake, you might be wrong, but each step along
Speaker 17: that way, like, it's an easier way to do this
Speaker 17: and to feel the power of real choices rather than
Speaker 17: the false choices of like do you want your AI
Speaker 17: from grock or do you want it from CHATGBT, Right,
Speaker 17: And obviously like that's a joke, but it's true that
Speaker 17: they aren't offering us anything anymore. They they have decided,
Speaker 17: they have decided that what we get is stomped We
Speaker 17: get stomped on. That's what they've agreed to give us.
Speaker 17: Is like getting stomped on. Like, okay, that was always
Speaker 17: what they wanted to give us in the past, but
Speaker 17: they might learn very very quickly and reaping the whirlwind
Speaker 17: that the reason that a century of American politicians have
Speaker 17: tipped their hat to democratic norms and have tried really
Speaker 17: hard to preserve the niceties of the government. Is because
Speaker 17: they have a slightly fresher memory of the French Revolution
Speaker 17: and the guillotines which haunts them, or the Haitian Revolution,
Speaker 17: which is the real fear lurking behind the fear of
Speaker 17: the French. Yeah, when the slaves rose up and destroyed
Speaker 17: the sugar plantation of Heiti and it has been punished
Speaker 17: ever since.
Speaker 10: The point being that.
Speaker 17: These things that they are overwhelming. This flooding the zone
Speaker 17: was shit, as Mia says, is from a position of
Speaker 17: weakness because when they were strong, when they were strong,
Speaker 17: they had Obama was a sign of strength. We can
Speaker 17: elect a black person, a black man in this racist country,
Speaker 17: and he can just go on hope and he can
Speaker 17: actually make very few changes and he'll still be incredibly popular,
Speaker 17: like even through a huge economic collapse. Right, that was
Speaker 17: a sort of strong gesture. Trump is a sign of
Speaker 17: real senescence. That I use the phrase advisably. And there
Speaker 17: are a lot of holes.
Speaker 10: And they have drunk the kool aid. The right has
Speaker 10: drunk the kool aid.
Speaker 17: They don't know the difference between democrats and anarchists, not really,
Speaker 17: they genuinely don't really know the difference. Some of them do,
Speaker 17: their philosophers do, but the main ones on the street
Speaker 17: have no idea about the difference. That gives us a
Speaker 17: lot of space to move, That gives us a lot
Speaker 17: of space to take action, to build things that are
Speaker 17: invisible to them, and that might be invisible to social media,
Speaker 17: which is a place built around reinforcing our helplessness. In
Speaker 17: many ways, the strategies we have to take will be
Speaker 17: less visible in many ways, I think, than they were
Speaker 17: in previous times, and they're going to have to be
Speaker 17: of necessity because maga is basically, you know, it's the
Speaker 17: eye of sore on and if it lands on you like,
Speaker 17: you're in trouble. But if it doesn't, like, you can
Speaker 17: just kind of move, and if you don't, you know,
Speaker 17: run into any any trouble like, you can get a
Speaker 17: lot done. I think that's as much as I'll say
Speaker 17: about that. But there's a lot to do, and there's
Speaker 17: a lot of movements to make and a lot of
Speaker 17: building to do that will both give you a sense
Speaker 17: of power and solve these big problems for you and
Speaker 17: your community. And if enough people start doing that, then
Speaker 17: they will take away all their power.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the universe.
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