Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you. But
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. This is poetry. You
Speaker 2: don't edit poetry, well, you do edit poetry. Poetry.
Speaker 1: Stop talking. Welcome, welcomed, It could happen here. Twenty twenty
Speaker 1: five Q and A edition. We have the whole team here,
Speaker 1: Mia Garrison, James, Robert Evans, I'm your producer, Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 1: We're gonna answer some of your questions. How's everybody feeling.
Speaker 2: Great, trepidacious, amazing, bad? I just got back from vacation,
Speaker 2: so anything's going to be a that's not me continuing
Speaker 2: to not look at my phone or computer.
Speaker 3: Great, Yeah, you should stop looking at the phone.
Speaker 4: You guys.
Speaker 2: Are you guys aware what this Trump dude's doing? Jesus Christ,
Speaker 2: very very yeah.
Speaker 4: I went to the WJA holiday party this weekend and
Speaker 4: the amount of like twenty seventeen Trump jokes I had
Speaker 4: to hear.
Speaker 2: Oh no, yeah, that's a crime against humanity. God.
Speaker 3: I love I love that party. I love that party.
Speaker 5: I'm going to a holiday party tonight with some friends
Speaker 5: who do insurance for people who live in the US
Speaker 5: and go to Mexico, so I'm sure I will get
Speaker 5: lots of fun and exciting anecdotes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am throwing a holiday party and planning it
Speaker 2: with a four year old, which is exciting. It's gonna
Speaker 2: be good.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite experiences as us having our job
Speaker 1: is at almost every partday I go to somebody's like,
Speaker 1: so those the news.
Speaker 5: Yeah, people just tt to just summarize the fucking news.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, good, listen to executive disorder. No.
Speaker 4: I had to explain seven to six four to a
Speaker 4: screenwriter yesterday and they were not happy.
Speaker 2: Anyone who goes to a party that I am at
Speaker 2: knows that there's a gun on the table. If anyone
Speaker 2: asks me how the news is, that's that's.
Speaker 1: Just It's always sprays that way.
Speaker 2: Who's the fuck out?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, what's going on over the Aaron Burma, Let's let's
Speaker 5: let's answer some questions.
Speaker 1: All right, so we posted on Blue Sky, we posted
Speaker 1: on Instagram, and we have some of your questions. Let's
Speaker 1: start out with a with a fun one. Can we
Speaker 1: have a fun, non incriminating story from your youth? Any
Speaker 1: in all of you?
Speaker 4: No fun, not incriminating story, but you, I mean for Robert,
Speaker 4: this is, and James and maybe me. Statute of limitations
Speaker 4: for all of you should be fine. Yeah, Garrison, I
Speaker 4: cannot answer this at all. I have a lot of
Speaker 4: interesting stories, but I've tried to think of something from
Speaker 4: my youth that I could actually share.
Speaker 5: I can do one that I think non incriminating. I'm
Speaker 5: sad about having been part of it, but that's okay.
Speaker 5: I was gored by a bull when I was younger.
Speaker 2: Story. I feel like if we put money on it,
Speaker 2: like two of us would have better. Ball was involved.
Speaker 5: I've actually been present at several gorings. Various species probably
Speaker 5: have most of the gorings, and it's available for human
Speaker 5: being to witness, because I've seen like a water buffalo goring.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, that's gotta be like the top goring.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was a really unpleasant day for everyone involved.
Speaker 5: A guy lost the use of his of his legs
Speaker 5: for a period. Actually recovered it later, which is nice, so.
Speaker 2: You can laugh about it, Yeah, fun laugh about it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well it's a funny. It's a funny story because it's fun.
Speaker 5: First of all, you shouldn't be unkind to animals, so
Speaker 5: I did deserve it, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I don't think you should torn animals for human pleasure.
Speaker 5: I don't think you should make them suffer, and if
Speaker 5: you do, it's kind of your fault.
Speaker 2: So in that sense, it's funny. I don't know that
Speaker 2: i'd ever heard of a goring where I wasn't like, well,
Speaker 2: the animal was in the right.
Speaker 3: Clear I'm on the bull team with this.
Speaker 5: The funny part was that my friend who was staying
Speaker 5: with me, had previously not driven a manual vehicle. I
Speaker 5: had broken probably the bulk of my ribs right, like
Speaker 5: a lot of rib breaking, and we drove home like that,
Speaker 5: learning to use a clutch on the way, and that
Speaker 5: was one of the most painful experiences I think that's
Speaker 5: available to a human being.
Speaker 1: Is it bad that the story that popped into my
Speaker 1: head was when I ripped my pants in front of
Speaker 1: the entire eighth grade class at our school picnic because
Speaker 1: I was wearing way too skinny of jeans playing basketball
Speaker 1: and my pants ripped and I was wearing PMI red
Speaker 1: onties and pants ripped, so like my entire butt.
Speaker 3: No, that's got to leave some scars.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that for me as a person that I feel
Speaker 1: like you just fucked the Yeah. But that was my fun,
Speaker 1: non incriminated story from you less the time. It's very
Speaker 1: from the entire eighth class that are like graduation picnic.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love that you would like skinny jeans Icarus, Like
Speaker 2: that's something.
Speaker 7: That why why the.
Speaker 2: Way things were back then?
Speaker 1: And I know, I know, Robert, you have to have
Speaker 1: a fun one.
Speaker 2: I do, I do. What's the statute limitations on murder? Uh? No,
Speaker 2: very couple of weeks.
Speaker 1: You're fine, buddy, You're fine.
Speaker 2: Now, I'll tell I'll tell a pants splitting story too.
Speaker 2: I got a really good one, Sovie. So I'm in
Speaker 2: I'm in rural northern India in this town called Rishikesh,
Speaker 2: which is where like it's where like the Beatles had
Speaker 2: their ashrom It's like a holy city. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of yoga there. You're up in like the Himalayan foothills.
Speaker 2: It's beautiful. The Goan Jesus is actually like clean enough
Speaker 2: to swim in up there, but it's also crazy whitewater rapids.
Speaker 2: And we're going like whitewater rafting one day and I
Speaker 2: grab I buy a pair of like pants that are
Speaker 2: like it's like it's like a long set of like
Speaker 2: athletic you know, tights or whatever like that to have
Speaker 2: on the boat because like, okay, that'll that'll make sense.
Speaker 2: They zip so I can keep you know, some cash
Speaker 2: or whatever in them. And we're going down the Ganjis.
Speaker 2: We're doing this white water raft and we hit a
Speaker 2: calm spot and the guy's like, okay, everybody wants to
Speaker 2: get in the water, hop out, and I hop out,
Speaker 2: And immediately two things become clear. Number One, the quality
Speaker 2: of textiles that you purchase in a market in India
Speaker 2: not necessarily up to the standards of a lot of
Speaker 2: other countries. Number Two, the Ganji's mighty river. So my
Speaker 2: pants immediately are gone, like just instantly, as soon as
Speaker 2: they're in the water, torn off by the Ganjies. And
Speaker 2: then I am so I am realizing this that now
Speaker 2: I am naked from the waist down. We are surrounded
Speaker 2: on both sides by a very holy city and we
Speaker 2: are heading towards the rocks, so I have to get
Speaker 2: back in the boat in fairly short order. This presents
Speaker 2: a problem because again, as we're getting like buffalo buffeted around,
Speaker 2: I have to get like help pulled up into the boat.
Speaker 2: Absolutely everything moving on the entire side of.
Speaker 1: This secret city.
Speaker 2: So now I'm in the boat naked from the waist down.
Speaker 2: But I come up with a plan. I did I
Speaker 2: do solve it. I take my shirt off and I
Speaker 2: put my legs through the armholes and neck hole and
Speaker 2: I'm just my pants my shirt is what a sight?
Speaker 2: We went to lunch.
Speaker 5: That way's still a restaurant there where they won't let Robert.
Speaker 2: Still, James, there's more than one restaurant in the I
Speaker 2: can't go back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a hotel in Bangkok that neither of us
Speaker 5: can go back to.
Speaker 2: But no, they handled you puking in the parking lot
Speaker 2: like a trooper.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because I puked directly into my analogy, like considering.
Speaker 2: Exactly like a hero, like a hero, James.
Speaker 5: And then send a picture to Sophie. Yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 5: was before I worked here. I sent a picture to
Speaker 5: Sophie of analogy for.
Speaker 1: The and I was like, let's hire that guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I feel like it was thirty seconds into our
Speaker 2: relationship that I told Sophia a story about meat puking,
Speaker 2: So it's fine.
Speaker 1: It was like fifteen seconds. Yeah, yeah, it might have
Speaker 1: been fifteen anyways, Robert, can we get an update to
Speaker 1: the sequel of After the Revolution?
Speaker 2: It's done, I'm editing it. I even got edits back
Speaker 2: from my editor. I'm editing it. It should have been
Speaker 2: done so much faster. I could like bring up the
Speaker 2: fact that my dad died last year, but that's really
Speaker 2: just me trying to make you feel sorry for me,
Speaker 2: and the fact that I am well past the time
Speaker 2: at which I expected to have this book done. But
Speaker 2: it is done and I'm finishing it and you will
Speaker 2: get to read it soon. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: Good for you, Good for you, Robert.
Speaker 1: Wow, incredible. Do you plan to cover recent political developments
Speaker 1: in Canada? I feel like that's a gair question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the answer is always yes.
Speaker 2: The answer is yes to all of like, yes, we
Speaker 2: will be covering Canada.
Speaker 3: I mean, especially Alberta.
Speaker 4: I've been wanting to do stuff on Alberta and the
Speaker 4: Conservative Party. There few of the key figures for a
Speaker 4: while I've you know, we've all been busy, but yes,
Speaker 4: I should eventually do a dedicated thing I get like
Speaker 4: and I do occasionally, right, usually usually once or twice
Speaker 4: a year, I.
Speaker 3: Try to get some Canada related things out.
Speaker 5: Talked about Canada, Gary and I I feel like did something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, i'd like.
Speaker 4: The Canadian election happened this year, right, Supreme leader carneis
Speaker 4: it is still still in power and will be for
Speaker 4: a while. But yeah, specifically the Alberta Conservative Party is
Speaker 4: rife with potential stories.
Speaker 1: My recent political development in Canada that I would like
Speaker 1: to talk about is what's his name? Dating Katy Perry?
Speaker 1: Oh god, because it makes me upset.
Speaker 3: Wait, who, that's not our problem anymore.
Speaker 5: That's one famous Canadian person is It's justin It's just famous.
Speaker 1: Jesus not Beiver Trudeau.
Speaker 2: Okay, still bad, still weird.
Speaker 4: Tudeau and Katy Perry are dating, a match made in Heaven.
Speaker 1: Their Instagram official and the photos upsetting.
Speaker 2: I do feel like this is the potential we have
Speaker 2: a potential for, like the one ring of couples Halloween
Speaker 2: costumes situation to happen here, and I'm excited for that.
Speaker 4: But no, I'm living pretty close to Canada now, so
Speaker 4: I would like to travel up and do more Canadian
Speaker 4: stuff in the next year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you love Canada, Garrison, great idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. As a general rule, people, if you're ever asking, hey,
Speaker 2: this major thing is happening in another country, are you
Speaker 2: guys going to cover it? The answer is probably yes.
Speaker 2: But there are how many people are on this call?
Speaker 2: Five people, and there are I believe ten countries in
Speaker 2: the world at least.
Speaker 4: So many A saying more, Well, everyone's in a while,
Speaker 4: this is a civil war, and one of those splits
Speaker 4: into two, so I think there's actually eleven countries right now.
Speaker 2: Is somewhere between five and eleven countries.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, ironically, when there is a civil war, there's
Speaker 5: a decent chance.
Speaker 2: So I'll be traveling there and the next twelve months.
Speaker 2: We have a pretty broad remit here, and I do
Speaker 2: think we cover a lot of ground. But again, you know,
Speaker 2: there's there's only so many people on the team, and
Speaker 2: we have so many days in the week. So the
Speaker 2: answer is generally, if we think we can and have
Speaker 2: more to tell you than like here's an article I read,
Speaker 2: we'll try to do it. But yeah, you know, world
Speaker 2: big us small, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and there are other people who do excellent work
Speaker 5: on lost of things, so like, you know, we don't
Speaker 5: have to cover everything.
Speaker 3: God, I missed the trucker convoy. That was fun.
Speaker 2: That was ago about that? What about Roma Diadlou.
Speaker 5: She's still kicking around Canada, Queen of Canada.
Speaker 2: She got arrested recently. I don't know if she's out
Speaker 2: on bail or whatever they call it and poutine bail
Speaker 2: or whatever in Canada, but they kind of arrest her
Speaker 2: rob it because she's the queen. Anyways, notes about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's a fiction book that y'all have been reading lately?
Speaker 2: Ooh?
Speaker 1: My answer is I work too much. I haven't read
Speaker 1: any good fiction book lately.
Speaker 3: I've been reading a sci fi book called Children of Time.
Speaker 2: Oh good.
Speaker 3: Oh, Adrian Tracossi, great guy.
Speaker 5: Yes, I just read Winter in Madrid because even when
Speaker 5: I'm reading fiction books, it still has to be about
Speaker 5: a Spanish civil war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so funny that makes sense for you, James, load
Speaker 2: bearing element of my personality. I'm restarting Sirens of Titan
Speaker 2: for the first time since I was a little kid,
Speaker 2: which is Kurt Vonnegut's sci fi novel, and like everything
Speaker 2: Kurt Vonnegut wrote one of the best to ever do it,
Speaker 2: and then you know, I was on vacation, so I
Speaker 2: was just rereading some Warhammer books to not think about
Speaker 2: the news when I needed to look at a device.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm gonna try to take a little time off
Speaker 1: around the holiday. So if people have good fiction books
Speaker 1: to recommend me, message me on Blue Sky.
Speaker 3: I've been listening to Oh God, like the entire Kate
Speaker 3: Daniels series, which is a very fun sort of urban
Speaker 3: fantasy series where they have a magic apocalypse where sometimes
Speaker 3: there's these magic waves and magic works and technology stops working,
Speaker 3: but then they just flip randomly and so technology works
Speaker 3: in magic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's basically the plot line to Shatter On. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's fun. I got absolutely flash being jump
Speaker 3: scared by one of the characters and one of the
Speaker 3: spinoffs doing a full analysis of the whole translation debacle
Speaker 3: of the Old World is dying, the New World struggles
Speaker 3: to be born. Now is a time of monsters, which
Speaker 3: I was not expecting the author of this fantasy book
Speaker 3: to know about. So it's a fun time. Yeah, there's
Speaker 3: where lions, there's where hyaenas. It's good we'd like to
Speaker 3: see it cool.
Speaker 1: Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll
Speaker 1: come back and continue answering some questions. We're back, so
Speaker 1: on that note, there's a broader question and it's a
Speaker 1: favorite media from twenty twenty five can be books, shows, movies, games,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 2: I mean, and Or's gonna be up there for me.
Speaker 3: Indoor season two is definitely going to be high to be.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed that that new show, The Pit, the
Speaker 1: medical show.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I've heard good things.
Speaker 3: Yeah you would like that.
Speaker 1: I liked it.
Speaker 3: It made me dizzy.
Speaker 7: But I liked it.
Speaker 1: It was interesting. I mean, we'll see how it does
Speaker 1: it in season two. But the first season I was like, huh.
Speaker 2: I finally started watching that smiling Friends show. And that's fun.
Speaker 3: Oh cool for for TV shows for me.
Speaker 4: Besides like and Orch's which is good, I think Rehearsal
Speaker 4: season two and the Paramount Nazi.
Speaker 2: Episode season two. Yeah, it's more and more after phenomenal.
Speaker 4: As well as Tim Robinson's new show Chair Company, which
Speaker 4: I gets to the American conspiracy mindset better than almost
Speaker 4: anything I've seen. No parts of that are like rival
Speaker 4: that can film. Yeah, I still think. I still think
Speaker 4: Eddington is pretty good. It doesn't have as much like
Speaker 4: a depth or humanity as like one battle after another,
Speaker 4: which I quite enjoyed.
Speaker 2: I liked that a lot too. I watched the first
Speaker 2: two episodes of Chair Company and then was like, I
Speaker 2: need to wait until they are all out so I
Speaker 2: can derange myself and like stay up until dawn watch. Oh,
Speaker 2: so that's that's the way I need to encounter this.
Speaker 2: But I'm excited for that.
Speaker 4: I finished care Company now and it consistently keeps hitting. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't think Tim Robinson is capable of not pleasing
Speaker 2: me at this point.
Speaker 3: That's good. That's a healthy relationship.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I liked on on Netflix's Adolescence that that mini series
Speaker 1: that was pretty good. That the acting is incredible. There's
Speaker 1: just so many things this year that we're pretty decent.
Speaker 2: TV has been good.
Speaker 1: TV's been good.
Speaker 2: TV has been good.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I haven't watched shit. I've just watched I've watched and
Speaker 3: Or and nothing else. So, uh, Hades too great game,
Speaker 3: very fun. Yeah, det the cronos, et cetera, et cetera. Also,
Speaker 3: I want to talk about One of the Boys, which
Speaker 3: is a book from the beginning of this year. We
Speaker 3: talked about on the show that's a really really interesting
Speaker 3: basically like sort of like a coming of age story
Speaker 3: about a trans girl who's trying to go who goes
Speaker 3: back to her football team, and there's a lot of
Speaker 3: really interesting stuff there about the relationship between transfemininity and masculinity,
Speaker 3: and you know, the sort of politics of sports. And
Speaker 3: it's also just really fun. Has the best written group
Speaker 3: chats I've ever seen in any piece of media. So
Speaker 3: ship Rocks. Yeah, it's it's great. One of the boys,
Speaker 3: Victoria Zeller, It's it's fun.
Speaker 2: I also watched Paradise. The ostensible focus on the show
Speaker 2: is that like a secret service agent goes to live
Speaker 2: with a president who is retired after like you know
Speaker 2: how the detail that they stay with and it becomes
Speaker 2: clear over the course of episode one this isn't really
Speaker 2: a spoiler, that the president is living in an underground
Speaker 2: bunker with all of the other survivors of a catastrophe
Speaker 2: that ended the world. And so it's like all of
Speaker 2: the leadership cadre of the United States living underground in
Speaker 2: a bunker after the world has ended. And then it
Speaker 2: turns into a murder mystery it's pretty good. It's fun nice.
Speaker 5: I don't watch much TV, yeah, but I have been
Speaker 5: enjoying sticking to the theme, I guess yes. AK Press
Speaker 5: have a translation now of two books that I very
Speaker 5: much enjoyed reading in other languages. One is called Zadagosa Bound,
Speaker 5: which is exclusively about the Diruti Column. I think it's
Speaker 5: probably the best book I've read on the Doruti Column
Speaker 5: and Sons of Night by Antoine Juminez, who was actually
Speaker 5: that was not his birth name, but he was an
Speaker 5: Italian anarchist who fought with the International Group of the
Speaker 5: Druti Column.
Speaker 2: And it's his diary.
Speaker 5: And then he later like in later life, was a
Speaker 5: groundskeeper at like the Libertarian People's Club in Marseille, and
Speaker 5: after his passing, the young people at the club found
Speaker 5: his diaries, published him and then have these like incredible
Speaker 5: series of annotations, Like two thirty of the book is
Speaker 5: its annotations.
Speaker 2: But it's really well done. So I like that one.
Speaker 1: Look, I think I can answer this next one, given
Speaker 1: how we see media companies from Disney to Conde and
Speaker 1: ask purge or otherwise censor anyone is centing against Trump.
Speaker 1: Do you fear iHeartRadio doing something to cool zone. My
Speaker 1: answer is they've never uh, they've never censored us in
Speaker 1: the in the past, so I don't see it happening
Speaker 1: in the future, but you never know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, anything can happen. It's media. I'm on
Speaker 2: my third or fourth industry depending on how you count it,
Speaker 2: within the digital media space. But like what I'll tell
Speaker 2: you right now is that at the moment, and this
Speaker 2: has been true for almost a decade, we make them
Speaker 2: money and they in return say, keep doing what you're doing,
Speaker 2: kid kiddos, buccaroos.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So yeah, that's about as good as it ever gets
Speaker 2: in media, in journalism. So you know, let's keep our
Speaker 2: fingers crossed.
Speaker 1: Yep. What was a piece or series cools one media
Speaker 1: put together in the past year twenty twenty five that
Speaker 1: you were most proud or happy to be part of?
Speaker 3: What about you, gare?
Speaker 4: Probably The piece that I'm most proud of in like
Speaker 4: a reflective sense is the dog Whistle Politics episode I did.
Speaker 4: I still think that's really relevant and a useful addition
Speaker 4: to like our cultural dialogue around understanding dog whistles coming
Speaker 4: out of the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: And like even still now I.
Speaker 4: Will see see posts with people decoding false messages in
Speaker 4: overtly like nationalistic communications from the DHS again. And then
Speaker 4: this whole focus on like dog whistles versus the actual
Speaker 4: implementation of their policy, which they're already doing. A few
Speaker 4: times this year, DHS is posted just very very blatant,
Speaker 4: like fast wave stuff. They posted a moon Man meme
Speaker 4: earlier this year, right, And if if you told years
Speaker 4: ago we would have like I don't know, I don't
Speaker 4: know what we would have.
Speaker 2: I would have had I would have fifty one fifty
Speaker 2: to your Yeah, yeah, I would have put your ass
Speaker 2: on a seventy two hour hold.
Speaker 4: So, like there's obvious stuff like that, like yeah, no,
Speaker 4: they're they're clearly clearly doing like intentional nods towards like
Speaker 4: online fascist memes. And then they are also just posting regular,
Speaker 4: regular sentiments of like nationalist policy that people are then
Speaker 4: reading in coded statements too. And I don't think that
Speaker 4: whole practice is super useful when they're actually implementing this stuff.
Speaker 4: And I think the sort of like anti ice protests
Speaker 4: you see in Chicago and like in New York on
Speaker 4: Connall Street, it's a way more useful way to channel
Speaker 4: frustration at the administration and like a frustration around like
Speaker 4: this nationalist immigration stuff rather than trying to you know,
Speaker 4: look for these maybe real, maybe not coded messages on
Speaker 4: X the Everything app.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm proud of the Zizzian episodes that I did
Speaker 2: earlier this year. I think those are my best episodes
Speaker 2: of the year. You know, I'm particularly this year have
Speaker 2: done a lot more back end supporting work. But I'm
Speaker 2: continue to be extremely proud of how Ed Zitron's both
Speaker 2: show and influence in the industry that he covers has grown,
Speaker 2: especially as he's been really on the ball ahead of
Speaker 2: some of the breaking of open ais irrational Exuberants. Been
Speaker 2: really happy to play a small role in that. It's
Speaker 2: just really satisfying to like stumble onto somebody and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: I think this person has some good things to say.
Speaker 2: I'm going to try to get that out to more people,
Speaker 2: and then really feel like, yeah, that was that was
Speaker 2: the right call. Turns out this was exactly the voice
Speaker 2: that needed to be louder in this space. That just
Speaker 2: feels good. It's it's the kind of it's the kind
Speaker 2: of good feeling that you only really get in this business,
Speaker 2: and it really makes up for all of the bad
Speaker 2: feelings that you also only get in this business.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I have two things. One,
Speaker 3: on sort of just a personal level, I'm really proud
Speaker 3: of the episode that I did that was sort of
Speaker 3: about Elon Musks Nazi salute, but was mostly about the
Speaker 3: way that all of our reality has been consumed by
Speaker 3: spectacle and the way that we relate to each other
Speaker 3: through you know, through screens and through like images of
Speaker 3: media in a very you know, so this was this
Speaker 3: was a very guide to board sietyse medical episode. But
Speaker 3: I'm really proud of how that episode played out and
Speaker 3: how I think in a lot of ways it kind
Speaker 3: of it kind of predicted some of what's been happening
Speaker 3: in terms of, you know, if you look at the
Speaker 3: sort of decrease and use of social media over the
Speaker 3: last sort of year and the turnaway from these these
Speaker 3: these social relationships that are purely mediated by images that
Speaker 3: suck and make you miserable all the time. And then
Speaker 3: the other thing that I'm really proud of is some
Speaker 3: coverage we did about the Republicans attempt in one of
Speaker 3: the one of the previous budget fights to impose a
Speaker 3: role that would have blocked medicaid from covering trans Healthcare
Speaker 3: and we covered it and we helped blow it up
Speaker 3: and we help get that killed, and that rocks. I
Speaker 3: don't know, it's awesome. I'm really proud of it. I'm
Speaker 3: also really proud of the trans News Network people. Yeah,
Speaker 3: particularly Medicast again and Miror Levigne who did a really
Speaker 3: great job covering that and helping stop it.
Speaker 2: And it rocks.
Speaker 3: Love to see it.
Speaker 2: I think for me, like still border stuff.
Speaker 5: Really it made me really happy that like last year
Speaker 5: I went to the jungle and made a podcast and
Speaker 5: now one of the people I met has a place
Speaker 5: to live. That's really cool, and like it really makes
Speaker 5: me happy. Like not just when we can like shift
Speaker 5: the discourse, I think that's cool, but also when people
Speaker 5: listen to that and then change the things that they
Speaker 5: do like every day or sometimes like that's always what
Speaker 5: you want. What I want as a journalist is like
Speaker 5: for people to listen and care g That's why I
Speaker 5: go to places, and so it's been really cool to
Speaker 5: see people and just to run into people engaging in
Speaker 5: like mutual aid at the boarder and and then like
Speaker 5: them slowly realize that and the person that they listened
Speaker 5: to on a podcast a year ago or two years ago,
Speaker 5: whatever is kind of funny. But yet I think I'm
Speaker 5: really proud of that, and I'm proud of all the
Speaker 5: people in the second series for all the stuff that
Speaker 5: they've done.
Speaker 1: I'm super proud of the anti vaxxs America series that
Speaker 1: I commissioned Stephen to do. I think it was a
Speaker 1: really good, complete project that covered the story in depth
Speaker 1: more than anyone else. So if you haven't checked that out,
Speaker 1: check it out.
Speaker 3: We're gonna go to.
Speaker 1: Another quick break and then we'll answer a couple more questions.
Speaker 7: Sound good, cool, Yep, we're back all right.
Speaker 1: This question says, as we become jokrified.
Speaker 3: Sure, as we all become jokerified.
Speaker 1: Eventually, what did it for each of you? I mean,
Speaker 1: let's just say, let's let's just answer in like the
Speaker 1: last year.
Speaker 4: Sure not not overall a recent jokrification inciting incident.
Speaker 1: I can answer that, And that might also be care
Speaker 1: since it's one we couldn't get into the DNC for
Speaker 1: comb layers to speech.
Speaker 3: Oh no, that hurt me.
Speaker 1: That hurt me so much because the DNC was so depressing.
Speaker 3: It was so.
Speaker 2: Depressing, and the DNC was way worse than the RNC.
Speaker 3: Post DNC certainly was a jokerrifying moment for me.
Speaker 2: It hurts Garrison. I had people reaching out to me
Speaker 2: in Portland who were worried about you after the DNC.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, the DNC was a jokerifying moment. I guess to
Speaker 4: piggyback off that though in terms of like a recent
Speaker 4: joker moment working on the like Democrat left wing conspiracy
Speaker 4: stuff really did.
Speaker 3: A number on me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and just like like seeing the scale of that stuff,
Speaker 4: especially around like the Charlie Kirk assassination, and just that
Speaker 4: that that whole moment definitely was like just drilling into
Speaker 4: my head.
Speaker 5: Yeah, those uh like truth tunnels that people went, the.
Speaker 3: Whole team could attest to this. I was getting pretty
Speaker 3: out there.
Speaker 2: Because can't get back to Garrison sustain damage. The uniformity
Speaker 2: of the embrace of counter factuals is like, like, I
Speaker 2: I don't even know what to do about it anymore.
Speaker 2: I don't feel like fact checking works. Yeah, I feel
Speaker 2: like positing alternate facts feels bad too, because then you're
Speaker 2: just like saying, well, I guess we're just openly having
Speaker 2: a life fight. Let's all have a big life fight.
Speaker 2: Let's see who's live.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, and when you're when you're trying to be
Speaker 4: the only one holding on to like the life raft
Speaker 4: of truth as everyone as everyone else is like drowning
Speaker 4: and like mad at you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like I, yeah, I don't know. You don't
Speaker 3: know how to handle that.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Whenever I encounter someone who's like, you think Trump
Speaker 2: got shot in the ear, like, yes, yes, I do, Yes,
Speaker 2: in fact, I do think he got shot in the ear.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And also can we not like it's a year ago,
Speaker 5: like we're here now.
Speaker 2: That one is so comprehensively disappointed to me because one
Speaker 2: of the little things it reveals is that there's even
Speaker 2: among progressives in the left, this belief that, like someone
Speaker 2: can't be injured by a gun and handle it reasonably
Speaker 2: well and not be a good person. Right, right, he
Speaker 2: has faked the fact that he didn't like and piss himself.
Speaker 2: It has to be fake. It's like, no, he just
Speaker 2: like didn't freak out or whatever. On a huge line
Speaker 2: shows a huge adrinal. Have you ever been shot at?
Speaker 2: It's like when you get when you realize you didn't
Speaker 2: get hit, it feels awesome.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're living, You are surfing a cloud for a
Speaker 5: while there, so you're not anymore.
Speaker 4: I think the insights I got from this like left
Speaker 4: wing conspiracism, like like seizure, right, this is like the
Speaker 4: seizure of the left embracing desks. I got one of
Speaker 4: the biggest points of clarity I was on, Like what's
Speaker 4: happening right now? Is this like tactical flattening of especially
Speaker 4: after the Charlie Kirk stuff as well, Like with the
Speaker 4: right wing embracing this like cultural cancelation strategy of trying
Speaker 4: to get people fired for saying things online, which they've
Speaker 4: tried to do before but was done way more successfully
Speaker 4: that month, and like directed by the administration, and then
Speaker 4: the left embracing a style of conspiratorial thinking that previously
Speaker 4: was was really only embraced as fully on the right.
Speaker 4: So like this, this this flattening of tactics across the
Speaker 4: left and the right, I think has been a useful
Speaker 4: way to look at our current situation.
Speaker 2: For me, Yeah, the ice guided missiles.
Speaker 5: Yeah, man, that fully fucking sent me like, as someone
Speaker 5: who's been a journalist for a while, just seeing these
Speaker 5: outlets that you were previously kind of like the first
Speaker 5: time I had a byline in mother Jones. I was pumped. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and then here they are just being like love to
Speaker 5: know more about these missiles we have that? Man, do
Speaker 5: you look at it? I literally did that while I
Speaker 5: was like waiting for coffee or having a shit or
Speaker 5: something like. It took me that much time on my
Speaker 5: telephone to find that contract.
Speaker 2: Like what is wrong with people?
Speaker 5: Again?
Speaker 2: It's all just fucking shibboleths and virtue signaling boat like that.
Speaker 2: Why would that be worse if I said guided missiles?
Speaker 2: Do you know how guided missiles work? Do you know
Speaker 2: the kind of tail that's required to make them function?
Speaker 2: Do you know the kind of like mechanical like experts
Speaker 2: that you have to have in order to like keep
Speaker 2: these things working and keep them usable? Why would ice
Speaker 2: be more dangerous with these? It's just going to distract
Speaker 2: them from doing the thing they're already use it doing
Speaker 2: to hurt people, Like guided missiles do not do any
Speaker 2: It would be just like extra trash for them to
Speaker 2: carry around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they'd be as bad at using them as
Speaker 5: there and everything else.
Speaker 2: And to be quite frank, the government is already using
Speaker 2: guided missions to do war crimes via the military.
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, yeah, people who.
Speaker 2: Know how to use them.
Speaker 1: The other thing that really just wow. Every single time
Speaker 1: that there's a mass shooting event, which is often in
Speaker 1: this country, the fact that they had to transvestigate the
Speaker 1: person every single time, Oh yeah, holy unnecessary annoying. It
Speaker 1: makes me very angry. Yeah, very angry. Fuck med and just.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: Recently, there was a wide piece about like in Range
Speaker 5: TV Calcaside who's had on before and the matches, the
Speaker 5: matches he hosts, and like.
Speaker 2: The brutality matches.
Speaker 5: Yet probably thirty percent of the piece was reflecting on
Speaker 5: the killing of Charlie Kirk and like, nobody who goes
Speaker 5: to calls matches has been accused of shooting Charlie kok.
Speaker 2: No again, and the guy who shot Charlie Kirk didn't
Speaker 2: shoot him because he trained doing matches. He shot deer. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then he shot a guy in a similar way
Speaker 2: to how he'd shot deer. Nor is he a trans
Speaker 2: person because you know, what's a better practice if you're
Speaker 2: going to shoot someone at one hundred something yards distance
Speaker 2: than a tactical shooting match shooting deer?
Speaker 5: Like yeah, like the whole thing is just like I know, Yeah,
Speaker 5: the discourse around mass shootings has become less helpful and
Speaker 5: more toxic.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 2: Part of it's because I think there's a decent chunk
Speaker 2: of like progressives and left for whom like it's immoral
Speaker 2: to actually know anything about how guns work, or how
Speaker 2: shooting works, or gun culture works, So you can't actually
Speaker 2: like understand what you're talking about, which is another problem.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of problems. It's not high on the
Speaker 2: list of problems, but it annoys me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe it pitches me off irrationally more than it should.
Speaker 5: Like to find that frustrating, Like we cannot have a
Speaker 5: reasonable discourse around guns in this country.
Speaker 2: No, No, that that ship sailed yeah with some bullet
Speaker 2: holes in the hall.
Speaker 1: One last serious one, m what's everyone's opinion on the
Speaker 1: best implementation of dual power in the modern era? That's
Speaker 1: a mea question.
Speaker 3: I mean, how are you defining modern era? I guess
Speaker 3: how are you defining dual power?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And how long do you have.
Speaker 3: The people who've objectively done the best job of it
Speaker 3: as asapatistas. And they've done the best job of it
Speaker 3: in large part because they've been willing to change the
Speaker 3: structure of their systems over time as things have worked
Speaker 3: and things have not worked, and as the systems that
Speaker 3: they've been using have decentralized, I don't know the fact
Speaker 3: that they were able to even even under a massive attack,
Speaker 3: they were able to do a massive expansion a few
Speaker 3: years ago. Yeah, they've held out against you know, the
Speaker 3: wrath of the Mexican state, which is one of the
Speaker 3: most violent in the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean I would, in a similar veins talk about
Speaker 2: like the PKK and then the YEPGJ and Rojava, right
Speaker 2: where you had these non state groups that had connections
Speaker 2: and that had some experience doing what we might call
Speaker 2: mutual aid prior to the government's collapse, and then kind
Speaker 2: of expanded that into these networks that began to mimic
Speaker 2: and replace state function in an area that about three
Speaker 2: million people lived in. I think that's a really that's
Speaker 2: certainly a more important story in terms of how that
Speaker 2: kind of thing might work on a larger scale than
Speaker 2: anything that's happened up to the present point in the
Speaker 2: United States. Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess in less of a militaristic way, but
Speaker 4: more like a party capacity or like political proposal capacity.
Speaker 4: Probably some of the stuff coming out of the New
Speaker 4: York City Chapter of DSA the past year, which is
Speaker 4: not reflective of DSA's an entire national organization, but specifically
Speaker 4: the New York chapter has been very very prefigative in
Speaker 4: actually doing like more like party oriented dual power.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was I think probably we should also
Speaker 2: talk some about like the different immigration defense hotlines and
Speaker 2: immigration defense reaction forces around the country that have gone
Speaker 2: really ramping up and doing a lot of really good
Speaker 2: and really difficult work under duress and under you know, fire,
Speaker 2: so to speak.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like people have built immediity safety, yeah, to keep
Speaker 5: that community safe when the state has failed to keep
Speaker 5: their community safe, right, and sometimes it's put their communities
Speaker 5: in danger. And like, especially I think it is kind
Speaker 5: of heartwarming to me to see people who who were
Speaker 5: just like straight up statist liberals, right yeah, realizing that
Speaker 5: actually the cops aren't going to come and arrest ice.
Speaker 5: That's not going to fucking happen, and then being like, Okay, well,
Speaker 5: how do we organize the strategy that will maintain safety
Speaker 5: in our community given that this load bearing part of
Speaker 5: reality for me that cops are good has seemingly collapsed.
Speaker 2: And I'd say, in general, James, the fact that there's
Speaker 2: a whole lot of normy people who would have you
Speaker 2: certainly would have describe them as normies a year or
Speaker 2: two ago, that are now like, yeah, we gotta get
Speaker 2: rid of Ice. Maybe we got to get rid of
Speaker 2: all these cops. Yeah, Bill Crystal, Yeah, Bill, Bill Crystal
Speaker 2: be on the anti Ice train, right. Yeah, it's not bad.
Speaker 2: I do get the first. I'm not saying like we
Speaker 2: should invite Bill Crystal to the party or whatever. I'm
Speaker 2: saying that, like the felt Crystal blooked me on Blue Sky,
Speaker 2: so I can't invite him.
Speaker 4: Said, Bill Crystal's coming to the Anarchist Book Fair and
Speaker 4: it's going to be serving Vegan Slov.
Speaker 2: Is that even a joke? Garrisoner, Is that real? That
Speaker 2: could be real? Okay, But it's just in general good
Speaker 2: that a lot of people who are like where my
Speaker 2: parents were politically twenty years ago are looking out at
Speaker 2: what's happening and being like, we got to get rid
Speaker 2: of these fucking people. Yeah, that's that's good. That's positive.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I would say that that's kind of like a downstream
Speaker 2: change from what I think will be the most long
Speaker 2: term positive change from the twenty twenty uprisings, which is
Speaker 2: a huge number of people who hadn't thought about the
Speaker 2: cops realized what the cops are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to wrap it up, Robert, we got like
Speaker 1: multiple requests for you to do various accents.
Speaker 2: Are you fucking shitting me? Various what accents?
Speaker 1: Since so many requests for you to do various access?
Speaker 4: Well, okay, some Australian ones and Boston ones, Boston a
Speaker 4: few other but like the specific areas of Boston. I
Speaker 4: think they were asking about like like different like inter
Speaker 4: Boston regional accent. I'm sure you can just do those
Speaker 4: like one one one oh even all.
Speaker 3: Right, yes, enough of that to see is that for listening?
Speaker 3: Are our Q and A episodes?
Speaker 5: Okay?
Speaker 3: It could half of the year nailed perfectly?
Speaker 2: No notes. I'd say we reported the news, but this
Speaker 2: was definitively not the news. Yeah, we didn't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, goodbye.
Speaker 4: So I have pulled up Plymarket and Cale she We're
Speaker 4: gonna go through each of the trending predictions right now
Speaker 4: and then decide where we're gonna be putting our last
Speaker 4: year's profit from cool zone coin. We're gonna be transferring
Speaker 4: that on the blockchain to polymarket, and I think we
Speaker 4: can come out of this year with a big profit.
Speaker 2: This is how we're relying on funding our operations.
Speaker 5: Jesus, that's going forward. Can you check party market real quick?
Speaker 5: Say if Morris he's still alive, Jesus, it's been three
Speaker 5: years in a row.
Speaker 4: So this is our twenty twenty six predictions episode. Like usual,
Speaker 4: I think we should start by reflecting us move our
Speaker 4: predictions from last year to see how right and wrong
Speaker 4: we were. The big one, big prediction that we discussed
Speaker 4: the most as a team is when is Elon Musk
Speaker 4: gonna distance himself from Trump? Or when are they gonna
Speaker 4: break up? What do they have their you know, separation?
Speaker 4: And each and every one of the extended Cool Zone
Speaker 4: media team members who works on it could Happen here
Speaker 4: put in a date and the most accurate guess was
Speaker 4: from it could Happen Here's main editor Adam, who said
Speaker 4: May thirtieth, which was really spot on. So congrats to Adam, Adam,
Speaker 4: to all of us stumble through our episodes and have
Speaker 4: to edit them.
Speaker 2: All cutting all the burps out.
Speaker 4: Yeah actually actually, uh, you know, maybe to really give
Speaker 4: credit back to us, maybe influenced your your wisdom.
Speaker 2: God, let me reflect him his Gloria myself. Yes, we
Speaker 2: really made him wiser, and thus we're all wrong ourselves
Speaker 2: and most psychological da.
Speaker 3: It's a good you know.
Speaker 4: It means that we're smarter as a group entity, as
Speaker 4: a hive mind, we're all smarter than our own individual intelligence,
Speaker 4: which Adam has the most access to.
Speaker 2: Yes, just like ants.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but yeah, no, Adam. Adam did pretty good on
Speaker 4: that May thirtieth guess, so there you go. Sophie also
Speaker 4: close at May six, and then Molly congered June tenth,
Speaker 4: also kind of in that zone, but Adam definitely hit
Speaker 4: it spot on. We had a few other predictions. Some
Speaker 4: of them were predictions. Some of them, I guess we're
Speaker 4: kind of more hopes and dreams, which sadly did not
Speaker 4: come to pass. The me on mar Junta was predicted
Speaker 4: by me and James to Junta was predicted by me
Speaker 4: and James to making out twenty twenty five. They've kind
Speaker 4: of stuck on to power.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, if they've rallied pretty substantially Italy.
Speaker 4: It's unfortunate Yaho's still as prime Minister. I did predict
Speaker 4: that a sod would become a Russia today host. I
Speaker 4: think it's a good prediction. But did not happen.
Speaker 2: That could still happen.
Speaker 3: It still happen in the future.
Speaker 5: I'm waiting for them to hire him for a fucking podcast.
Speaker 2: I don't think I predicted this, but I'm not surprised.
Speaker 2: He's just playing video games.
Speaker 3: No, he's just pulled up in a hotel playing video games.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: During our death segment, I laid out a new theory
Speaker 4: of death based on Spotify Rapped, which the previous two
Speaker 4: years had some important deaths associate with Spotify rap Day.
Speaker 3: No big Spotify Rapped deaths this year.
Speaker 4: Unfortunately, though, I did make a death prediction last episode
Speaker 4: which did not fully become true, but slightly became true
Speaker 4: right after we record that episode last year, before the
Speaker 4: episode even aired, I predicted that someone would try to
Speaker 4: assassinate Nick Fuent as well. Nick was live streaming, perhaps
Speaker 4: a deranged fanboy.
Speaker 3: Days later.
Speaker 4: Just days later, someone showed up outside of Nick's house
Speaker 4: as he was live streaming with a weapon, allegedly trying
Speaker 4: to kill him. This person died later that night, and
Speaker 4: in like exchange with police, it became this whole thing.
Speaker 4: But that happened just a few days after I made
Speaker 4: that prediction, so technically didn't even happen in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 4: happened still in twenty twenty four before we aired that
Speaker 4: last episode, but it was close, was close to some
Speaker 4: kind of zeitgeist on that. It's unclear that guy was
Speaker 4: a fanboy. We really don't know much about him. What's
Speaker 4: a few othertions that have like kind of kind of
Speaker 4: come true, But like it's more in terms of like
Speaker 4: which degree I guess.
Speaker 2: I think my weird terrorism prediction has been pretty Yeah,
Speaker 2: are o the money, Yeah, that's that's continued to be
Speaker 2: a driver of the discourse.
Speaker 3: We'll return to that in a sec.
Speaker 4: Sophie talked about, you know, Trump moving some like White
Speaker 4: House operations to mar A Lago, which has partially happened.
Speaker 4: There's been a lot of like a like a holiday
Speaker 4: events done at mar A Lago.
Speaker 3: Sometimes he's working out of.
Speaker 1: There, very odd things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But on the other hand, he's also just mar
Speaker 4: A Lago of fying the White House itself, which with
Speaker 4: like the ballroom, So it's kind of going in both directions.
Speaker 4: Mia did did put a very firm prediction on like
Speaker 4: an economic collapse in twenty twenty five, like in the
Speaker 4: United States again, it's it's it's it's like a slow
Speaker 4: in terms of like one of the key ideas for
Speaker 4: our show is like crumbles versus collapse. It certainly continued
Speaker 4: to crumble and I but I think the actual collapse
Speaker 4: point is still upcoming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, we'll get into this more later. I will
Speaker 3: say it is kind of baffling to have my prediction
Speaker 3: completely derailed, literally just solely by AI data center spending, Yes,
Speaker 3: which I did not predict that any entire American growth
Speaker 3: rate would be and I did set a growth Yeah
Speaker 3: I didn't get that.
Speaker 4: No, the actual like like job market and economy has
Speaker 4: become so separate from like corporate spending and stock market stuff,
Speaker 4: and like Robert did, actually I think hit this a
Speaker 4: little bit on the head. He talked about how the
Speaker 4: economy will basically remain identical to Biden's economy in terms
Speaker 4: of inflation, but the stock market will continue to go
Speaker 4: up and housing will keep getting more expensive, and the
Speaker 4: left will start to be able to hit conservatives on inflation.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I think that is pretty much what happened.
Speaker 4: The economy is in a relatively similar place as it
Speaker 4: was last year, but you know, inflation is still ticking.
Speaker 4: There's some like artificial attempts to like bring it down
Speaker 4: by Trump, but it's not really working in terms of prices.
Speaker 2: No, the only thing cropping it up in a numbers
Speaker 2: term is fucking Nvidia. Well in Vidia less so now,
Speaker 2: but just a rational exuberance over AI in general. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but people are complaining about all the same things they
Speaker 2: were under Biden, just more so.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I guess I have three other points here. I
Speaker 4: talked about a blue governor deployed national Guard troops against
Speaker 4: Trump federal troops. Instead, you got Trump deployed national Guard
Speaker 4: troops against individual cities with like police kind of caught
Speaker 4: in between. We still have yet to see the the
Speaker 4: cool and based moment where like a blue governor deploys
Speaker 4: national Guard against against dhl.
Speaker 2: Ivn't use deployed his Twitter account today.
Speaker 4: Yeah No, Still, Sophie talked about there'd be still no
Speaker 4: clear left wing Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3: But so many have tried, a lot of people try.
Speaker 2: I still feel like I could be it.
Speaker 4: You're gonna have to be a lot more on camera,
Speaker 4: I think, Yeah, well they'll have to have a lot
Speaker 4: a lot more on camera stuff for that more camera.
Speaker 5: Less hair larger gut can explained.
Speaker 2: Steroids, different drugs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, Adam Freeland is certainly positioning in that direction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree here. I agree here. Also, I predicted
Speaker 1: that something would happen to the Paul brothers, and unfortunately
Speaker 1: the only thing that happened is that their HBO show
Speaker 1: did not get renewed.
Speaker 2: When was that boxed bag? That was year prior and
Speaker 2: it wasn't good.
Speaker 1: No, they had a TV show called Paul American.
Speaker 3: Yeah, are you serious? I didn't even hear about this.
Speaker 1: It was on HBO, but it got canceled.
Speaker 3: I guess I've just had other stuff going on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm kind of glad that I've lived a life
Speaker 5: where I didn't know that. I have no shame about that.
Speaker 4: Finally, both myself and like a few of us kind
Speaker 4: of talked about this, is that there would be this
Speaker 4: movement away from big mobilizations. Some big mobizations happened in
Speaker 4: short periods of time, like especially a good point like LA.
Speaker 4: I think it's probably the most significant. But in terms
Speaker 4: of like like actual like countrywide massimabilizations. Right, there's a
Speaker 4: movement away from this and moving towards lone wolf attacks,
Speaker 4: which did happen, and specifically I predicted there would be
Speaker 4: like a very a very sloppy Luigi copycat in the
Speaker 4: next four months, and oh boy, did this? Did this
Speaker 4: happen multiple in reoccurring times. And this kind of played
Speaker 4: into this larger model I was creating, which kind of
Speaker 4: starts around the assassination of shinzo Abe, creating this escalating
Speaker 4: series of assassinations happening faster and faster, because like after
Speaker 4: shinzo Abe, there was, you know, two years later, Thomas
Speaker 4: Crooks trying to assassinate Donald Trump and butt the Pennsylvania
Speaker 4: Six months later, the United Healthcare CEO. Three months after that,
Speaker 4: someone tried to burn down the home of Pennsylvania Governor
Speaker 4: Josh Shapiro in the middle of the night. One and
Speaker 4: a half months after that, there was the assassination of
Speaker 4: two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, d C. Two weeks
Speaker 4: after that, a Christian missionary named Vance Belter killed in
Speaker 4: Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot
Speaker 4: Senator John Hoffman. Next month was the Prairie Land assault
Speaker 4: on an ice facility in July, the exact details of
Speaker 4: which are still getting figured out.
Speaker 3: In court.
Speaker 4: But after this things kind of tapered down for a
Speaker 4: bit until September with the Charlie Kirk assassination and the
Speaker 4: attack on the ICE facility in Texas which kills two
Speaker 4: immigrant detainees. So yeah, in terms of like you know,
Speaker 4: lone wolf style, pre planned assassination style attacks, sloppy copycats,
Speaker 4: right people writing messages on bullet casings, emulating the United
Speaker 4: Healthcare CEO assassination, this was like a super super dominant
Speaker 4: part of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: It's the same pattern. I talked about this at the
Speaker 2: end of my episode on Manngione after like that came
Speaker 2: out right that like there's copycats after every shooting. This
Speaker 2: is basically following the same kind of thing we on
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen with the eight Chan shootings right where you like,
Speaker 2: this has been going on for much longer than that,
Speaker 2: but it's a very predictable once you start to expect it.
Speaker 2: It's a very predictable thing, which is someone carries out
Speaker 2: a shooting that actually manages to break through our levels
Speaker 2: of apathy about violence in this society and keeps everyone's attention,
Speaker 2: and then throughout the year a bunch of different people
Speaker 2: try iterations based on that because it's the only way
Speaker 2: to get attention, and that's what all these people are craving, right,
Speaker 2: that's the only real currency that still has value.
Speaker 3: I will say I think it says something positive about
Speaker 3: the turnoway for mass mobilizations that the lone wolf stuff
Speaker 3: wasn't the only stuff that happened. There was also the
Speaker 3: turn towards the thing we talked about in our Q
Speaker 3: and A episode about the ICE rapid response stuff, which is,
Speaker 3: you know, there were a few big mobilizations, but then
Speaker 3: ICE was forced to change their tactics by the fact
Speaker 3: that giant mobilizations by ICE were going badly for them,
Speaker 3: and this did create a whole bunch of sort of
Speaker 3: decentralized rapid response networks and a whole bunch of action
Speaker 3: that were sort of based on this very very decentralized
Speaker 3: very we show up and we do this thing at
Speaker 3: this place. What's happening. It has stopped some of the
Speaker 3: things that is happening. It has not stopped all of
Speaker 3: the horrors that have been happening. But I think it
Speaker 3: is a positive trend in terms of the way that
Speaker 3: ICE has been forced to adjust their tactics to do
Speaker 3: things that are harder and get less people at a time,
Speaker 3: So I think that's worth as a positive thing worth
Speaker 3: sharing of. How yeah, yeah, that the tactical innovations that
Speaker 3: activists have been deploying have been forcing ICE to do
Speaker 3: less devastating raides.
Speaker 5: We saw various attempts at mass mobilization, most successful with
Speaker 5: the No King's Marches, which were vast, but we also
Speaker 5: saw those fifty to fifty one things which kind of
Speaker 5: we're not as successful in turning out a lot of
Speaker 5: numbers of people. But like me, it said, like in Ventura, right,
Speaker 5: Like we saw huge numbers of people show up when
Speaker 5: ICE tried to raid a couple of agricultural facilities up there,
Speaker 5: And yeah, well like I was up in La We've
Speaker 5: spoken about that extensively. But like Garrison said, that was
Speaker 5: probably the biggest mobilization against ICE at one time in
Speaker 5: one place that we saw.
Speaker 4: It's a probably do ad break and then move into
Speaker 4: predictions for this upcoming year twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 4: The stock market is still trying to keep going, although
Speaker 4: in some parts is like if not going down, flatlining
Speaker 4: like a bitcoined did not increase this past year. There's
Speaker 4: been a few popular like rising stocks like Netflix, which
Speaker 4: are pretty much at the same spot they were at
Speaker 4: the start of twenty twenty five, still going up and down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Games Workshop is up forty eight percent.
Speaker 3: Baby war Hammer, the assassin orm kingmaker, it's great.
Speaker 2: Sixty seventh most valuable company in the entire UK, larger
Speaker 2: than their a whole fishing industry. Baby really, Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: what I Warhammer is load bearing to the British economy.
Speaker 2: The only thing nodding and really has left.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So they got rid of the sheriff. It already
Speaker 5: went downhill for them. Hey, that in robinhood tourism is Yeah,
Speaker 5: anything you can do in noting him.
Speaker 3: Now, Okay, I have I have a big one about this,
Speaker 3: and it's not that the tech bubble is going to collapse.
Speaker 3: I do think the tech bubble is going to pop
Speaker 3: this year.
Speaker 2: At about this year, but within the next twelve months.
Speaker 2: I think you're saying, because we've got like three.
Speaker 4: Weeks left in this year, well, you know, in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty six. Yeah, these are these are predictions in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty six.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in twenty twenty six, the tech bubble is going
Speaker 3: to pop. Yeah, that's not the prediction. The prediction is that,
Speaker 3: in an attempt to recoup the value from all of
Speaker 3: the completely useless data centers that they will have built
Speaker 3: that can only run LMS and can do nothing else,
Speaker 3: someone is going to invent a cryptocurrency that can only
Speaker 3: be mined by large language models. And this is going
Speaker 3: to be one of the big attempts to recoup the hideous,
Speaker 3: hideou some mouse of capital they've been dumped into all
Speaker 3: these data centers. Is that they're going to have someone's
Speaker 3: going to find a way to make a kind of
Speaker 3: token that can only be generated by large language models.
Speaker 3: And they're gonna they're gonna try it. Is it gonna work?
Speaker 3: I don't think so, But they are going to try it.
Speaker 3: It's going to be a big thing. They're gonna push it.
Speaker 3: It's gonna suck.
Speaker 2: There's gonna be a bunch of desperate attempts to like
Speaker 2: once the money starts falling out and like. Which is
Speaker 2: not to say that I think that AI is going
Speaker 2: to even the AI that annoys me is going to
Speaker 2: go away, But a lot of the irrational exuberance is
Speaker 2: going to end, and a lot of the startups that
Speaker 2: are are just burning money are going to fail or
Speaker 2: get acquired, and you're going to see tremendous desperation for
Speaker 2: people to be like, this is the next thing, This
Speaker 2: is the next thing, Throw a bunch of money into this,
Speaker 2: Like yeah, that's that's gonna be annoying.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 4: I mean, I feel like people have been talking about
Speaker 4: the a bubble popping for a while. I have been
Speaker 4: hearing things from people who think and track this more
Speaker 4: than I do that if it is going to happen,
Speaker 4: there's there's indicators that it's more likely to happen in
Speaker 4: twenty six than it was in twenty five. I'm not
Speaker 4: going to put money on that on the calshy betting markets,
Speaker 4: but god, it does seem to be more of a possibility.
Speaker 4: And you can see this the way people are handling
Speaker 4: Navidia stock right now and being advised not to buy
Speaker 4: more stock but still hold what you have.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just where Nvidios stock has moved over the
Speaker 2: last month or so.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So if you look at what's happening with Navidio,
Speaker 4: we might have reached the peak and oh yeah, and
Speaker 4: it might be so jover for some of these guys.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the big open question is how bad
Speaker 2: it's going to be there's going to be at least
Speaker 2: one of these big AI companies, Open Ai or Anthropic
Speaker 2: or somebody that either goes bust entirely or has to
Speaker 2: get acquired. But again, if you're looking at this rationally
Speaker 2: and out wish casting, both Apple, Google, and Microsoft are
Speaker 2: all perfectly capable of sustaining their rates of burn.
Speaker 3: Microsoft is still going up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Facebook is as well. And I think what
Speaker 2: you're likelier to see is contraction and consolidation, which is
Speaker 2: not to say that it's not going to be disastrous
Speaker 2: for some group. I think there's a good chance that
Speaker 2: we do see some banks fail because there's there's some
Speaker 2: bad investments out there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they have been doing collateralized loan obligations, Yeah, where
Speaker 3: the underlying asset is compute time.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This is more deranged than two thousand and eight.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the most deranged
Speaker 3: thing I have seen since the Tulip crisis, Like I
Speaker 3: cannot explain just good God.
Speaker 2: So no, I mean the upside that we have over
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight is that the thing that all
Speaker 2: of these bad bets are on isn't people's houses, right? Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so that does there is a potential that some
Speaker 2: good comes out of it in terms of like universities
Speaker 2: getting access to a lot more compute that they can
Speaker 2: actually use for valuable things.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and people are already suffering under recession conditions. If
Speaker 4: you're like a working class person, like you already with
Speaker 4: the follow it effects of this. Just the stock market
Speaker 4: itself has been insulated from the rest of the economy
Speaker 4: which is in a state of recession.
Speaker 3: And also it can get worse, which so a lot of.
Speaker 4: People who aren't like super wealthy are like pro this
Speaker 4: bubble popping and pro this because then if other people,
Speaker 4: people in power finally realize how bad it is, they're
Speaker 4: hopeful that then something might be done to like fix
Speaker 4: some of the material conditions. Which I can understand people's like,
Speaker 4: like you know point of view there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I am not as worried about this being as
Speaker 2: bad for the average person as two thousand and eight was.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's going to be as satisfying as
Speaker 2: people are hoping it was. It's not going to wipe
Speaker 2: out or put an end to the annoyance of AI
Speaker 2: in our lives, although it should make it easier to
Speaker 2: rationalize some of the shit people have been saying, like
Speaker 2: it should make the craziest of the AI booster's being
Speaker 2: like this is going to replace everything. The whole economy
Speaker 2: will be in two years, no one will have a job.
Speaker 2: That's going to be a lot harder for anybody who's
Speaker 2: not to not seem like a crazy person while I advocating,
Speaker 2: but the Internet's going to stay annoying, like unfortunate. I
Speaker 2: think it's fucked for a little while.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think my girly pop economy prediction is that
Speaker 1: we're going to continue to see influencer shopping. What I
Speaker 1: mean by that is like influencers have been pushing products
Speaker 1: like no other and marketing budgets have been going to
Speaker 1: influencer marketing at a rapid pace. And I think we're
Speaker 1: going to see the implementation of AI into that more.
Speaker 1: And I think that that is primarily going to be
Speaker 1: one of the ways, like we might see less or
Speaker 1: we'll still see as much, but targeted ads, and we're
Speaker 1: going to see an addition to that, we'll also see
Speaker 1: like targeted influencer marketing for products, and like it's already
Speaker 1: pretty gnarly on like TikTok Instagram, But I think we're
Speaker 1: only going to see more of that, and it's just gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, going to be peak capitalism.
Speaker 4: Care Something that could be really fun is that if
Speaker 4: it pops, it's going to line up almost perfectly with
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight nostalgia. So we'll have recession nostalgia,
Speaker 4: which is already starting to happen in the same time
Speaker 4: as a whole economic recession. So we'll have the recessions
Speaker 4: line up in time with their nostalgia cycle, and then
Speaker 4: you know, it's only a matter of months before you
Speaker 4: have you know, like twenty tens like hipster stuff come
Speaker 4: and coming back in.
Speaker 3: Great, So you know, it's it's right there. We're so close.
Speaker 4: We're already at that like like you know, two thousand
Speaker 4: and eight level of two thousands of nostalgia. But if
Speaker 4: it lines up with the recession, then that could that
Speaker 4: could be really exciting.
Speaker 2: Now. I'm also kind of curious as to whether or
Speaker 2: not we're going to start seeing you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of the earliest adopters of AI on a regular basis.
Speaker 2: We're very young people using it to cheat at school, yes,
Speaker 2: and just kind of trawling different teachers, subreddits and online communities.
Speaker 2: I'm seeing teachers talk about, like younger kids now there
Speaker 2: being a backlash among very young people against the use
Speaker 2: of AI and the way it makes people talk. This
Speaker 2: is kind of coming alongside as you're starting to see
Speaker 2: a recovery in lovells of literacy, as schools depart from
Speaker 2: the bad way of teaching kids to read that fuck
Speaker 2: everyone up. I don't have any kind of longitudinal statistical
Speaker 2: data on this. This is all very much anecdotal, so
Speaker 2: I'm still waiting to see is this a broader trend
Speaker 2: or did I just come across some people saying this
Speaker 2: is a thing that they're seeing in their area. But
Speaker 2: I'm kind of interested. And there's a degree to which
Speaker 2: I think some sort of backlash against AI is inevitable
Speaker 2: just because of how everyone running society is trying to
Speaker 2: push people to replace everything with it. Like that just
Speaker 2: inevitably is going to irritate the kids because the adults
Speaker 2: are all doing it right, We'll see.
Speaker 5: I think people are increasingly better at spotting AI, like
Speaker 5: intuitively and very quickly. It's something I've seen like not
Speaker 5: in high school, but like teaching the like a university level.
Speaker 5: People just being like this is an ir response, and
Speaker 5: it's fucking cringe like because AI always writes in a
Speaker 5: particularly cringe way. Right, that is very obvious, and I've
Speaker 5: seen that. But I genuinely hope more people stop using
Speaker 5: AI because it is making education a pretty fucking miserable
Speaker 5: place to be right now, which is Tobama because I
Speaker 5: like teaching.
Speaker 3: Let's go on another at break and then return for
Speaker 3: some midterm predictions. Hey, is it everyone excited? It's another election.
Speaker 5: You're already people are saying the most important one of
Speaker 5: our lives, Garrison.
Speaker 3: I think so, just what I was starting to miss it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm voting Kamala for every single camera.
Speaker 4: Single state level position. Yeah, sure, she will be the comptroller.
Speaker 1: A right, you're killing me. Who do we think is
Speaker 1: going to run? Gavin Newsome.
Speaker 2: Midterms?
Speaker 5: Yeah, unfortunately, Sophie, we have another reporter like talking about
Speaker 5: twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't have to do that until next year's skipped.
Speaker 1: I've skipped the midterms, and I was already going to
Speaker 1: the next level of hell, no, no, no, who's going
Speaker 1: to be governor of California?
Speaker 2: James?
Speaker 5: God knows that the Dems have not really been putting
Speaker 5: their strongest foot forward. Katie Porter had these like really
Speaker 5: pretty nasty videos come out of the way she was
Speaker 5: talking to people who work for her. I don't think
Speaker 5: that that is a good leadership trait, and I don't
Speaker 5: think that that it's a person we should choose.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm so resigned to being it being someone's shit, you
Speaker 5: know that, Like I honestly try not to put too
Speaker 5: much of my time and effort into it. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I know, maybe I'll be fucking Katie Perry. Maybe Trudeau
Speaker 5: will pass on his electoral magic. She's got some good songs.
Speaker 5: She could use them with that. Actually, with the intellectual
Speaker 5: property licensing, which which Trump doesn't do, she could get
Speaker 5: that shark. Maybe the shark be vice governor. You know,
Speaker 5: it's this potential there. We have worried about the shock.
Speaker 4: So obviously the Democrats are protected to do well in
Speaker 4: this in this midterm election based on like like like
Speaker 4: anti Trump sentiment and like the regular swing away from
Speaker 4: the like whoever is in the executive branch in mid terms.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I think the Democrats will do well, especially
Speaker 4: if you look at the last like a month or
Speaker 4: so of election results. I think it's possible they take
Speaker 4: both chambers. I think they will absolutely take one.
Speaker 1: I'm going split.
Speaker 4: It's possible they take both chambers. I don't think it's
Speaker 4: going to be a landslide. It's not going to be
Speaker 4: a blue tsunami blue Nay. I think it may be
Speaker 4: a blue wave. I think I think a wave or
Speaker 4: a small wave is likely. I do not think it's
Speaker 4: going to be a complete blowout. But there's been like
Speaker 4: especially in the Tennessee's special election, a thirteen point shift
Speaker 4: towards Democrats. Yeah, we've seen other double digit shifts across
Speaker 4: the country in the in the past, in the past month.
Speaker 4: I don't know how much they'll be able to continue
Speaker 4: that sort of sentiment in you know, nine months time,
Speaker 4: ten months, eleven months time leading into November. So I
Speaker 4: think some of that enthusiasm will maybe taper off a
Speaker 4: little bit as Trump becomes kind of like a lame
Speaker 4: duck presidency. But I still think they'll do like okay
Speaker 4: in terms of like the Democrats.
Speaker 3: I very much disapear. I think this is going to
Speaker 3: be like a generic de plus fourteen. This is going
Speaker 3: to be a fucking massacre. What signs are pointing towards that.
Speaker 3: I mean, they just won the mayorship of Miami.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well so you're saying it's gonna be good for
Speaker 4: the Democrats de.
Speaker 3: Plus fourteen Yeah, like Democrats plus fourteen Okay, Like I'm
Speaker 3: talking like a a a tsunami. Okay. Got My prediction
Speaker 3: is that all of the polling people are fucking cowards.
Speaker 3: What's happening right now with the polling is that they
Speaker 3: are using the twenty twenty four electorate. Yeah, this is
Speaker 3: not the twenty twenty four electorate. Have not figured this
Speaker 3: out yet, No, they are still underestimating the exact scale
Speaker 3: of which everyone fucking hates them.
Speaker 2: Like, i'ld be surprised if both houses flip. But yeah,
Speaker 2: here's the thing.
Speaker 3: The Cuban parts of Miami, Yeah went left by like
Speaker 3: fifteen points. Yeah, touch, something we talked about in the show.
Speaker 3: They are going through and systematically pissing off every single
Speaker 3: part of their base, right.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 3: One of the things one of the stories I've been
Speaker 3: tracking is about the ways in which they've been spystematically
Speaker 3: pissing off a whole bunch of farmers who are a
Speaker 3: very very consistent right wing voting base, and they're pissing
Speaker 3: them off a trade war bullshit because China's not buying swoybeans, right,
Speaker 3: this is how they're losing elections in Western Iowa. I
Speaker 3: think the other part of this too is and this
Speaker 3: is how I think the momentum is going to be sustained,
Speaker 3: is that things haven't even gotten as bad as they're
Speaker 3: going to get yet. The actual standard of living in
Speaker 3: this country right now, it is going to get so
Speaker 3: much worse as as all of the inflation stuff sort
Speaker 3: of racks up, et cetera, et cetera. Like the country
Speaker 3: is going to be worse. Everyone's going to be more
Speaker 3: pissed off. Trump is going to have bombed like four
Speaker 3: more countries. We're gonna have like cent troops into Mexico
Speaker 3: or some shit. He's going to be so unpopular it's
Speaker 3: going to be like it's gonna be the fucking flood
Speaker 3: out there that's possible.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the incompacy advantage becomes less and less
Speaker 5: relevant the worse the economy gets. And like that was
Speaker 5: something Biden got hit with, right, that Trump is is
Speaker 5: going to have to wear especially we get further and
Speaker 5: further into his term.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a Trump economy.
Speaker 4: I guess this just requires that the current momentum Democrats
Speaker 4: have to be maintained for a while, which is something
Speaker 4: that historically Democrats haven't been great at.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, they've shit at it.
Speaker 4: So this will require effort for you know, people like
Speaker 4: organizing with the Democrats and social media messaging, like actual
Speaker 4: in person like like electoral organizing to really keep this
Speaker 4: momentum pressure going for the next eleven months, which which
Speaker 4: is you know, they've they've done a good job at
Speaker 4: this the past like six months, but can they like
Speaker 4: maintain this to the midterms. That's the only point where
Speaker 4: I start to hesitate in terms of like the scale
Speaker 4: of like a blue wave. But I think it's it's
Speaker 4: certainly possible that that they end up doing quite well,
Speaker 4: but it's going to be reliant on like maintaining this pressure.
Speaker 2: No, there's still some structural difficulties that make flipping Congress
Speaker 2: entirely very.
Speaker 4: Difficult, especially with the redistricting stuff happening.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like could they take the Senate quite easily? Yeah,
Speaker 4: the House still up in the air. For me, I
Speaker 4: think lean the Democrat at this point, certainly leaning Democrat,
Speaker 4: but still not confident.
Speaker 2: That'd be great. I just I don't want to get irrationally,
Speaker 2: you know, ahead of our skizier.
Speaker 3: I have watched very very dysfunctional state Democratic parties win
Speaker 3: elections and districts that were R plus twenty two. Anything
Speaker 3: happened at this point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, Yeah, it's not coming from a national strategy.
Speaker 5: It's coming from like local candidates doing well on local
Speaker 5: issues and people fucking hating Trump. Yeah, it is not
Speaker 5: the DNC who is putting Higgins or Mam Dami in office. Well, yeah,
Speaker 5: that is, uh, I guess a good thing because the
Speaker 5: DNT fucking sucks. It has always fucking sucked, and it
Speaker 5: has really reinforced how much it sucks in the last
Speaker 5: eight years.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And being able to hit Trump and Republicans on the
Speaker 4: economy with tariffs this like oh the garky stuff, has
Speaker 4: proven to be pretty successful so far, and I think
Speaker 4: being able to continue that messaging as the economy trends
Speaker 4: in its current direction, being able to continue that messaging,
Speaker 4: I think will help the Democrats. Interestingly, a Plattner in
Speaker 4: Maine still seems to be the front runner for that race,
Speaker 4: so I think there's a decent chance we get our
Speaker 4: first total COB in the Senate.
Speaker 5: Well, absolutely, dog shit cover up. I'm sorry if you
Speaker 5: are listening and you did that yet to you, but
Speaker 5: it's probably not your best work.
Speaker 2: Like he's got a blob now.
Speaker 4: That stuff just did not prove to be super impactful
Speaker 4: to the actual voters in Maine, it seems, and the
Speaker 4: actual like focus on his talking points have maintained his lead.
Speaker 4: So I think that's something that Democrats can also look
Speaker 4: look to. Yeah, in terms of like how much of
Speaker 4: these like you know, like tertiary like personal attacks, like
Speaker 4: you know, genuine, yeah, genuinely valid valid complaints or issues
Speaker 4: are are not very dominant based on how much emphsis
Speaker 4: is actually getting put on. This is sort of like
Speaker 4: a affordability messaging.
Speaker 1: To wrap up this predictions episode, should we do a
Speaker 1: quick death pick?
Speaker 3: No, one's gonna die.
Speaker 2: I thought you're gonna ask it. Do you think we're
Speaker 2: going to invade Venezuela?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: See, this is what I'm interested in. I'm more interested
Speaker 4: in are we going to start any wars?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: And is his cabinet going to stay the same?
Speaker 2: Kindness already have started.
Speaker 1: To answer your first question, yes, yeah, is the caba
Speaker 1: going to stay the same. I'm surprised.
Speaker 4: It's weird, right, trump first term. There was a lot
Speaker 4: of cabinet turnover in the first year.
Speaker 3: Sure, Scaramouchi, this is this is not happening this year.
Speaker 4: This year they stayed pretty tight knit despite a lot
Speaker 4: of turmoils or like you know, issues around like Cash Hotel, Pambondi,
Speaker 4: RFK Junior, Pete haig Seth with the double tap war
Speaker 4: crime strikes. No, they're pretty tight knit, it seems so.
Speaker 4: I don't know if there's gonna be cabinet turnover.
Speaker 1: I think Cash Battel will be out next year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think Cash might have Yeah, might be on
Speaker 2: the edge of his lost the podcast price.
Speaker 3: He just found the Jasics pipe bomber. I don't think
Speaker 3: it's gonna happen.
Speaker 4: I think the cabinet's gonna stay the same, which I
Speaker 4: predicted against last year. But I think based on how
Speaker 4: they've weathered certain controversies, I do not know if Trump
Speaker 4: cares enough to do cabinet turnover.
Speaker 2: Yeah who I was talking to him about these things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well see, I don't there's no one that I think
Speaker 2: is an obvious choice. I think the likeliest turnover is Paatel.
Speaker 1: Then maybe hag Seth.
Speaker 2: I don't think he's gonna go I think heg Seth
Speaker 2: is too loyal. He's a he's a team player, sure,
Speaker 2: and he has absolutely no chance of going into business
Speaker 2: for himself. Right.
Speaker 4: This is the big thing is that it's not a
Speaker 4: skiller competency that got these people their jobs, which you know,
Speaker 4: it's kind of kind of was a factor in Trump
Speaker 4: one point zero, in Trump two point zero.
Speaker 3: It is just pure loyalty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: And if they're able to prove that, especially around like
Speaker 4: you know, the Epstein stuff really really tested those those loyalties. Yes,
Speaker 4: And if they're able to get out of the Epstein controversy,
Speaker 4: it's like kind of intact, then I think all these
Speaker 4: guys will be set for like the next next little bed.
Speaker 4: I guess, do we think Vance is ever going to
Speaker 4: become a president during the next like year or two?
Speaker 2: Trump is like eighties, So I'm not gonna say there's
Speaker 2: not a twenty or thirty percent chance that just like
Speaker 2: if Donald Trump dies, Vance becomes the president, right, sure,
Speaker 2: and like he's at the age where he could just
Speaker 2: drop dead right outside of that, No, I don't think
Speaker 2: he's likely to become president.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do think in the next twelve months the
Speaker 5: US will begin a UAV campaign in the sahell quite
Speaker 5: possibly in Nigeria, Like, I think, yeah, that's possibly in
Speaker 5: the next twelve weeks, just looking at flights that they've
Speaker 5: had very recently.
Speaker 2: There's a decent chance too that they expanding the use
Speaker 2: of special forces and maybe even keep fobs open without
Speaker 2: the willingness of the Nigerian government. But that's a longer shot. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the Nigerian government's pretty pretty into it right now. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Do you think they're going to put troops in the
Speaker 3: ground at either Mexico or Venezuela.
Speaker 2: I think there's a good chance that we utilize special
Speaker 2: forces on the ground in parts of Mexico for brief
Speaker 2: periods of time. That's a good chance that we already have. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean we almost certainly already have. I think there's
Speaker 2: a chance that we wind up having people on the
Speaker 2: ground in Venezuela after a fuck up, right, Like, but
Speaker 2: I think that at present their plan is airstrikes and
Speaker 2: drone strikes. I think if we were to wind up
Speaker 2: having anything on the ground in Venezuela, it would be
Speaker 2: as a result of like a strike with a manned
Speaker 2: craft going badly and someone going down over Venezuela. That's
Speaker 2: not a zero percent chance if they keep fucking around.
Speaker 2: But I really don't think they want to have troops
Speaker 2: on the ground in Venezuela. I think they want to
Speaker 2: be striking targets in Venezuela.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's not a place where they want. You want
Speaker 5: lad to them by the troops to be to be
Speaker 5: engaging like that wouldn't go well. Trump does not want
Speaker 5: to wear that, right, like if we saw in Syria,
Speaker 5: like he wasn't willing to deploy large now with the troops.
Speaker 5: He was willing to use a lot of drone and
Speaker 5: air strikes even when the civilian cost was very high.
Speaker 5: And I think that is the model, Like that that
Speaker 5: strike cell model that we saw, like like the strike
Speaker 5: in Bagus at the end of the Islamic State is
Speaker 5: probably a good example of the sort of yeah quote
Speaker 5: unquote collateral damage like killing civilians that we can expect
Speaker 5: them to see as acceptable.
Speaker 3: I think the final point on this is that the
Speaker 3: Trump administration genuinely believes that they can top of visions
Speaker 3: with their strikes. They thought they thought this with the
Speaker 3: who the US and they think there's buff Venezuela. They
Speaker 3: actually think you can do this despite all evidence of
Speaker 3: the contrary. So I think it's going to inform a
Speaker 3: lot of their decisions.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think Syria like kind of not not
Speaker 5: Syria with a sad but Syria with the Islamic State reinforced.
Speaker 2: That for them.
Speaker 5: But like the obviously overlooking like that they have incredible potnafource,
Speaker 5: so they don't have in these places.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I think that's our predictions. First time we're
Speaker 4: not doing a desk segment. And you know what, I
Speaker 4: feel fine a that Yep, no one's gonna die twenty
Speaker 4: twenty seven, Marcy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, still I'm not going to say it this time
Speaker 5: because I've been in adversually blessing him with long life.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about
Speaker 2: it happening well in various places, and given the nature
Speaker 2: of our digital, interconnected society, it is happening here all
Speaker 2: the time. But if you're even casually aware of what's
Speaker 2: going on in the world right now, it is particularly
Speaker 2: happening in Venezuela right now. And joining me to talk
Speaker 2: about the US led and executed kidnapping of a world
Speaker 2: leader is my two favorite kidnappers, Mia Wong and James Stout.
Speaker 5: Glad to be herero but joining you to discuss kidnapping,
Speaker 5: one of my favorite topics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my lawyers have advised me not to respond to
Speaker 3: the statement.
Speaker 2: Now, given all the people you both kidnapped, how are
Speaker 2: you just rating this on a technical level as kidnappings go,
Speaker 2: you know, on a level from let's say, uh, the well,
Speaker 2: if I remember the name of that guy with the plane,
Speaker 2: this would have been a funnier joke. I forgot his
Speaker 2: name though, No, no, no, he was on a plane,
Speaker 2: didn't have a plane.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a reverse kidnapping. He kidnapped me, he did
Speaker 3: on kidnap himself everyone on the plane plane.
Speaker 2: I was talking about Lindberg, Charles Lindberg. But the jokes,
Speaker 2: the joke's over. So let's talk about the international crimes
Speaker 2: our government's doing. Yeah, did, did and doing.
Speaker 5: I'm drinking a white claw, so I've got about the
Speaker 5: same legal jurisdiction as they have, because there is no
Speaker 5: law when you're drinking white yeah, which I think is
Speaker 5: the legal argument.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, So what happened is is, while most
Speaker 2: of us were asleep last Saturday night, the United States,
Speaker 2: using a mix of special forces like Tier one operators.
Speaker 2: This was like adulta force operation, primarily a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of helicopters that looked like a mix of Blackhawks and Chinooks.
Speaker 2: Carried out a series of airstrikes on Caracas, and kidnapped
Speaker 2: the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife, killing
Speaker 2: a significant chunk of their security detail, including thirty two
Speaker 2: Cubans who were acting as essentially like military advisors slash
Speaker 2: security for Maduro. Yeah, he has been taken back to
Speaker 2: the United States. He's been arraigned in New York. They're
Speaker 2: charging him with a variety of drug and gun related crimes,
Speaker 2: including some weird shit like possession of a machine gun
Speaker 2: under US law, which is really weird. I guess they're
Speaker 2: arguing that his control of the Venezuelan military counted as
Speaker 2: a legal possession of an automatic weapon. Yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And guessing it involves using the machine gun in
Speaker 5: the furtherance of another crime, because there are specific charges
Speaker 5: for like NFA violations related to drug things. Sure, but
Speaker 5: it still seems very weird to tag that on there.
Speaker 5: Like when what you're doing is kidnapping a world leader,
Speaker 5: you can't just also be like, oh, and he's got
Speaker 5: a gun, like when he commands the armed forces of
Speaker 5: a country. It's very strange, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: This also I think pins into what's really really weird
Speaker 3: about this. There's two aspects of this that are just
Speaker 3: what the fuck. One of them is that the legal justification,
Speaker 3: this is given to Mike Lee from Secretary of State
Speaker 3: Mark or Rubio, was that the reason that there were
Speaker 3: airstrikes in the legal justification was protecting US soldiers carrying.
Speaker 2: Out the US law enforcement. The military was needed to
Speaker 2: protect the DEA agents who are actually conducting the arrest, right,
Speaker 2: is the legal justification.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the chances of some kind of due process violation
Speaker 5: are hot. This all hinges on you thinking that the
Speaker 5: law is a fixed thing, right, not an instrument of
Speaker 5: the state and an instrument of power. And I think
Speaker 5: that a more plausible analysis here is is that the
Speaker 5: law is not a fixed thing. But like in this instance, right,
Speaker 5: if we if we go with that line, like the
Speaker 5: da people were there to ensure due process and to
Speaker 5: make the arrest right. And in theory I've read that
Speaker 5: they literally had someone mirandize him, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which, okay, I want to I do want to
Speaker 3: put someth the think cure though, and this is something
Speaker 3: that CNN like when they were reporting on this point.
Speaker 3: So this is insane because this implies that US law
Speaker 3: applies in Venezuela.
Speaker 2: Right, which is absolutely that's.
Speaker 3: Literally the point. The point of a state is that
Speaker 3: your law applies inside of your board.
Speaker 2: The argument that they are making because Trump directly and
Speaker 2: and prior to this had called in to relevance the
Speaker 2: Monroe Doctrine, right, which is basically stating that everything happening
Speaker 2: in the Americas is the purview of the United States.
Speaker 2: This was initially and they're still arguing that it is
Speaker 2: kind of a what President Monroe was using as an
Speaker 2: excuse for intervening in situations where foreign colonizers were attempting
Speaker 2: to exert power and colonies they owned in the Americas
Speaker 2: or had owned in the Americas, right, And the US
Speaker 2: was basically saying, fuck you, this is our backyard, right.
Speaker 2: And I think the aru the argument that they're making
Speaker 2: now is that that's relevant because Iran and Russia and
Speaker 2: Cuba all have political and business interests in Venezuela, particularly Cuba.
Speaker 2: But in a more broad sense, they're making the argument
Speaker 2: and Stephen Miller has made this very directly, that the
Speaker 2: Americas are all kind of our property, and we're perfectly
Speaker 2: justified in intervening to take resources that we want, because
Speaker 2: we shouldn't have to just accept that a foreign country
Speaker 2: has different opinions and how those resources should be used
Speaker 2: in the United States, and that we have no moral
Speaker 2: responsibility to listen to what other people want in our hemisphere.
Speaker 2: It's our hemisphere. Yeah, and we, meaning the Trump administration,
Speaker 2: should do whatever we want.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think there's two kind of lego pspective here
Speaker 3: things that are important. One. I think there's that one,
Speaker 3: which is, yeah, the American Empire is just saying we
Speaker 3: are an empire and we could do whatever we want.
Speaker 3: But then there's also the does the president have the
Speaker 3: power to do this unilaterally piece of it which no,
Speaker 3: he no, like just does not, Like this is objectively
Speaker 3: an act of war. Right, and previously right, A lot
Speaker 3: of administrations have done things kind of like this, yeah, right,
Speaker 3: but like everything has been under the fig leaf of
Speaker 3: the AUMF. Right, the two thousand and one Authorization of
Speaker 3: Use of Military Force, which if you go back and
Speaker 3: read the document, the actual like AUMF, it's very clear
Speaker 3: that it's anyone who's really to nine to eleven. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and so this has been used to do interventions in
Speaker 3: like places and things that have nothing to do with this, right,
Speaker 3: But this is not even that. This is just the
Speaker 3: president claiming that he can do acts of war.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so I guess the justification that they gave
Speaker 5: was the example they cited was Nadiego right in eighty
Speaker 5: nine in Panama. Right, that was that was a war
Speaker 5: that was operations, like American soldiers died, and no Diego
Speaker 5: went to the Vatican embassy and eventually I believe he
Speaker 5: surrounded him. They've like blasted you two at him, which
Speaker 5: is obviously a war crime, and he eventually left the
Speaker 5: embassy around negotiated his exit, I guess. But that's a
Speaker 5: completely different thing to just bouncing into the residence of
Speaker 5: the president of another country at nine black backg.
Speaker 2: Like that's also debatably legal. But yes, it was a difference, Yeah.
Speaker 5: Very very very much.
Speaker 2: So yes, yeah, No, it's also wrong, like we're not
Speaker 2: defending what was done there. Yeah, I know, this is
Speaker 2: even more blatant, right, It's like it's not defending what
Speaker 2: George W. Bush did in Iraq. To be like at
Speaker 2: least they bothered to pretend there was a justificate, like
Speaker 2: they spent some time really cooking up a justification and
Speaker 2: some effort, and there's none of that here. They just
Speaker 2: don't give a shit anymore. Right, That's that you're not
Speaker 2: being like and that means it was okay, what Bush did,
Speaker 2: You're just pointing out it's even more mask off now, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well, and I think it is different than that,
Speaker 3: Like the invasion of a rock involved Congress. This is
Speaker 3: just Trump going I can do this, right, And that's
Speaker 3: really fucking alarming. Yeah, that he just is like, yeah,
Speaker 3: fuck it, I could just do a war now completely
Speaker 3: by myself. None of you have any fucking power war
Speaker 3: for me. I can just declare war a thing that
Speaker 3: is explicitly in the constitution, like supposed to be Congress's job.
Speaker 3: And I think that's really That's another very allwering part
Speaker 3: of this, because this is I think by far the
Speaker 3: most just Trump pure dictatorshit that we've seen so far.
Speaker 3: It's not being treated like that, yeah, because a lot
Speaker 3: of sort of like I don't know that there's a
Speaker 3: lot of people who wanted this something like this to happen,
Speaker 3: and so they're kind of just not looking at the
Speaker 3: fact that this is just this is just pure dictatorship shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think a lot of people, because they didn't
Speaker 5: like Maduro, right, they're waiting to look aside from yeah,
Speaker 5: the means as long as they get the ends they want.
Speaker 2: But the means are extremely serious here. Yeah, And I
Speaker 2: think we should acknowledge, like, stop for a second to
Speaker 2: talk about the Maduro of it all, because my stance
Speaker 2: is that his legitimacy as president, his personal legitimacy, whether
Speaker 2: or not he's committed crimes, are all completely irrelevant, right.
Speaker 2: I have not any of my public facing statements I've
Speaker 2: been in the past years ago talked about how I
Speaker 2: wish the protests had worked to remove him from office
Speaker 2: within sort of like the context of Venezuelan's actually having
Speaker 2: their way kicking him out and replacing him with something better.
Speaker 2: But I have not brought up any of that in
Speaker 2: the context of what's happened recently because it doesn't matter, right, Like, fundamentally,
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter if Maduro is like completely legitimately elected
Speaker 2: and the people's hero or a complete fraud and an authoritarian.
Speaker 2: That has nothing to do with whether or not the
Speaker 2: US has any illegal or moral justification for coming in
Speaker 2: arresting this guy and then saying we own the country
Speaker 2: and we don't. It's dictator shit, it's fascist, it's deeply wrong.
Speaker 2: It's bad. Like, there's nothing else to say. If you
Speaker 2: find anyone getting caught in starting to be like, well,
Speaker 2: but you know, Maduro did this. Maduro did that. That
Speaker 2: is either a person who is acting in bad faith
Speaker 2: or a person who has themselves been tricked, right, because
Speaker 2: you don't need to discuss any of that. None of
Speaker 2: that is relevant to what we're talking about here, which
Speaker 2: is that the US, like this is a violation of
Speaker 2: international law and all of the kinds of norms that
Speaker 2: we attempted to put in place after World War two
Speaker 2: to stop another catastrophe like that from happening. And it
Speaker 2: is only going to embolden the worst instincts of both
Speaker 2: the people running the United States right now. They will
Speaker 2: continue to try to do shit like this, and it's
Speaker 2: going to embolden the worst instincts of other leaders around
Speaker 2: the world. It is comprehensively bad for everyone.
Speaker 3: The comprehensive result of this is again that the US
Speaker 3: has annexed I guess Venezuela that Trump is claiming that
Speaker 3: he personally and his Secretary of State and his council
Speaker 3: of advisors are like now control and run a country.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 3: This is so evil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's very unclear who's going to be doing
Speaker 2: Because Trump made those that statement, Rubio walked it back
Speaker 2: a little bit and said that, like, well, we'll be
Speaker 2: working with the administration in place, which is, by the way,
Speaker 2: just the same administration that existed before, merely with the
Speaker 2: vice president taking on the role of president.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after that backtracked a little bit too, to try
Speaker 2: and be more in line with the Boss. But it's
Speaker 2: very unclear what they actually intend and what they mean
Speaker 2: by saying we're running it, because from what I've read,
Speaker 2: it doesn't look like Rubio is actually going to be mannered.
Speaker 2: Like while he's been the guy taking point on justifying this,
Speaker 2: I don't think he's going to actually be managing any
Speaker 2: of this on a day to day basis. He's got
Speaker 2: a lot on his plate already. Stephen Miller seems to
Speaker 2: be the guy who is trying to position himself to
Speaker 2: actually be the Paul Brimmer in this situation. Who is
Speaker 2: the guy that the Bush administration put in charge of
Speaker 2: dealing with of like running a rack after it was
Speaker 2: taken over.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the viceroy.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's unclear what is Miller going to get that job?
Speaker 2: Will Rubio wind up doing it. It's looking more like
Speaker 2: Miller right now. But also to what extent will that
Speaker 2: job actually be running things? And you know, we'll talk
Speaker 2: about that and a little bit, I'm sure. But the
Speaker 2: kind of cliffs notes of the situation is that there
Speaker 2: is evidence that came out right after the kidnapping that
Speaker 2: Baduro's vice president had reached out to the United States previously,
Speaker 2: like before the kidnapping, to talk about the possibility of
Speaker 2: taking over the country after giving Maduro up or him
Speaker 2: having a managed exile. All of that was discussed, and
Speaker 2: at least per the reporting on it, she was turned
Speaker 2: down by the United States because they thought they had
Speaker 2: a better option, and that option seems to have fallen through,
Speaker 2: largely because the quote unquote democratically elected opposition leader who
Speaker 2: won a Nobel prize pissed off Trump. It's unclear how
Speaker 2: accurate that is that by you know, by winning the price,
Speaker 2: by accepting the Nobel Prize, did she get kick herself
Speaker 2: out of the job. That's what some reporting has suggested.
Speaker 2: It's unclear to me how true that actually is. Seems possible, surely,
Speaker 2: but at the end of the day, there was this
Speaker 2: offer made by Maduro's VP that was turned down by
Speaker 2: the US, and now it seems like, although we don't
Speaker 2: actually know what's happened to the background, it seems like
Speaker 2: she's who we're working with. So either they came back
Speaker 2: and said, you know, it will take the deal, or
Speaker 2: something else is going on. But she has both made
Speaker 2: the statements publicly that like, this is illegal, the United
Speaker 2: States is run by a group of criminals and extremists,
Speaker 2: and also but.
Speaker 3: We'll work with them.
Speaker 2: So it does kind of seem to me like she made,
Speaker 2: in fact, be very much in bed with the Trump
Speaker 2: administration and just trying to like massage this for her public,
Speaker 2: you know, because there's only so much you can get
Speaker 2: away with. I don't know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, just to be clear on the timeline, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 5: the first reporting of that, like Rodriguez option, we want
Speaker 5: to call it out a yeah, they call it as well,
Speaker 5: was in October. That was out before or the strike happened, right,
Speaker 5: and at least in the Miami Herald's story. They suggested
Speaker 5: that he had been part of that, so this could
Speaker 5: be a different thing, but that he had offered to
Speaker 5: step down over years, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so to say, it looked like there was a
Speaker 2: period of time where he was talking about like a
Speaker 2: managed exit. Yeah, I been going to Kato or Turkey
Speaker 2: or something like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now Rodriguez US of course denied that. But what would
Speaker 2: you expect Dlsey Rodriguez And yeah, it's unclear. Again, we
Speaker 2: don't really know. Did they just remove Maduro without having
Speaker 2: a plan and hadn't really finished talking with her or
Speaker 2: worked something out. It was the last thing that she
Speaker 2: heard from them, them saying nah, we won't take this option, right,
Speaker 2: and then Maduro gets kidnapped. Did they work out a
Speaker 2: separate deal that just hasn't been reported on. We actually
Speaker 2: don't know. And I could totally see her being a
Speaker 2: stooge for US action here because it keeps her in
Speaker 2: power and it keeps her safe because Trump very recently
Speaker 2: threatened her, like after she made statements calling his team
Speaker 2: a bunch of extremists, she backpedaled and said, actually, if
Speaker 2: we're where, well in to work with the US because
Speaker 2: Trump said I'll do something worse to you than I
Speaker 2: did to him. Like, we don't know if they actually
Speaker 2: ironed out a set of responsibilities and obligations in bath channels,
Speaker 2: or if we just remove a duro and are like,
Speaker 2: all right, well, if we have to kill her, we'll
Speaker 2: kill her too. Like it's unclear what actually happened there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, so we should also mention So this is
Speaker 3: being recorded on the night of Monday, January fifth. You're right,
Speaker 3: every kind of six or eight hours, new conflicting information
Speaker 3: from the Trump administration about what their plan is comes out, right,
Speaker 3: which which leads me to suspect they don't have a
Speaker 3: plan at all. Yeah, because it keeps changing every couple
Speaker 3: of hours. So I don't know. But but in case,
Speaker 3: by the time this comes out, there is some kind
Speaker 3: of public deal that's been worked out. That's what's going on.
Speaker 3: This is all changing extremely rapidly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, And you know what else changes rapidly, The
Speaker 2: economics of podcasting. Yeah, here's some of that. This white
Speaker 2: coase working foul, and we're back. James is drinking a
Speaker 2: bad white claw, which is really I think the information
Speaker 2: our audience is most interested in, you know, invasions of Venezuela,
Speaker 2: come and go. The US kidnaps people all the time.
Speaker 2: But James drinking a bad white claw. Let's let's let's
Speaker 2: actually really check it, James, what's the flavor you're you're
Speaker 2: experiencing right now?
Speaker 5: Let me getting updated to that. That is green apple?
Speaker 2: Green apple? M oh boy, Yeah, yeah, it's it's foul.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't recommend it. You're in the market.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds awful. Don't do it to you. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's really the having Delta Force kidnap you from your
Speaker 2: house of beverages.
Speaker 5: Which yeah, absolutely, uh huh, that's how they market it.
Speaker 2: Actually weird. That's on the can right right. They must
Speaker 2: have got advance warning like the time. Yeah, what did
Speaker 2: they know and when did they know it?
Speaker 5: We'll never know.
Speaker 2: So let's keep talking about Venezuela. Yeah, we should talk
Speaker 2: about who Rodriguezez. Yeah, so Vegez was vice president. Now
Speaker 2: she is president or will be sworn in as president.
Speaker 2: I believe she may have already been sworn hi by
Speaker 2: the time you hear this. She was sworn in I
Speaker 2: think like a couple hours ago. For the last article
Speaker 2: I read.
Speaker 5: So her father was a Marxist Gorilla. Her father kidnapped
Speaker 5: an American businessman, was arrested and then murdered, like torture
Speaker 5: to death. Yeah, as part of the quote unquote investigation
Speaker 5: into that. Right, her and her brother are kind of
Speaker 5: like a power block in Venezuelan politic She has really
Speaker 5: become more relevant, I guess nationally since my daughter, like
Speaker 5: she did do some stuff with Chavis early on, but
Speaker 5: like clash with him personally, and I guess allegedly, I
Speaker 5: mean I wasn't there, but Chavez didn't like that she
Speaker 5: wasn't deferential to him and at one point sent her
Speaker 5: home from her but I think they were in Russia
Speaker 5: and he sent her home from a a sort of
Speaker 5: mission that they were doing their diplomatic mission. Since then,
Speaker 5: she is assuming a number of roles in Venezuelan government
Speaker 5: from since twenty thirteen right when Mondora came to power,
Speaker 5: to include overseeing intelligence at some time, and she has
Speaker 5: now become obviously president. Right, she has previously worked with
Speaker 5: like the Venezuelan I guess the analogy would be like
Speaker 5: Chamber of Commerce, which had previously been seen by like
Speaker 5: Chubby Small as like a bourgeois enter die the enemy. Right,
Speaker 5: She has shown willingness to work with business, So I
Speaker 5: do wonder if that factors into the US analysis, Like,
Speaker 5: if she's willing to work with what it looks like
Speaker 5: the oil companies that they want her to work with,
Speaker 5: then then they can overlook a whole lot of other stuff, right,
Speaker 5: which has historically been how the US has approached places
Speaker 5: with oil. But yeah, in terms of this, I think
Speaker 5: that's probably the sort of TLDR on her career. And
Speaker 5: I think it is possible that she's willing to do
Speaker 5: some kind of chovies, more light, you know, whatever, we're
Speaker 5: going to call this and have us extractive capitalism exists
Speaker 5: so long as the regime continues to exist. But the
Speaker 5: way that would work is still something that like, I
Speaker 5: can't really get my head around for a regime which
Speaker 5: has made so much of its rhetorical legitimacy for so
Speaker 5: long attacking the United States.
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, And that's kind of I mean, that
Speaker 2: seems to be the quandary Delsea finds herself in is
Speaker 2: she both has to refer to what's happened accurately as
Speaker 2: kidnapping and the actions of an illegitimate and deeply corrupt regime,
Speaker 2: and also she can't act that way. If what we
Speaker 2: all think is accurate, she's basically acting as a negotiated
Speaker 2: buppet of the United States. She can only go so far,
Speaker 2: and I feel like she's trapped in kind of a
Speaker 2: doomed situation, which may be part of what our administration
Speaker 2: intends is for her to be fundamentally doomed and fail
Speaker 2: and get cooed herself, or you know, we can replace
Speaker 2: her when there's protests against legitimacy. Like, I don't know
Speaker 2: what exactly the game is here, but I think that
Speaker 2: may be something that was baked into the equation that like,
Speaker 2: this is not a functional situation for her, and when
Speaker 2: she gets forced out, that's something we can take advantage of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, has the reason of analysis, I think, I mean
Speaker 5: we Yeah, we could talk about the oil, right because
Speaker 5: Trump has been talking about the.
Speaker 2: Oil right yeah yeah, yeah, oh yeah, yeah, I know you.
Speaker 5: Said you wanted to mention stuff about It's not what
Speaker 5: it might seem on the face of it, right, There
Speaker 5: aren't giant lakes of oil in Venezuela.
Speaker 2: You can just slop up and sell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So okay, it's sort of different to explain this
Speaker 3: all without really getting into the weeds of like how
Speaker 3: oil production works, but there's different like qualities of crude oil.
Speaker 3: And most of the Venezuelan stuff is extremely sour. It's
Speaker 3: really really shit. It's extremely low quality. And when you
Speaker 3: have oil that's this shit, you can't like refine it
Speaker 3: into being good, right like that. That's just like not
Speaker 3: how the process works. It just sucks and so it
Speaker 3: burns badly. But there is a lot of it. And
Speaker 3: this also gets back to Okay, so the way that
Speaker 3: Trump thinks this is going to work is that a
Speaker 3: bunch of oil companies are going to come in, They're
Speaker 3: going to do a bunch of like infrastructure development or whatever.
Speaker 3: They're going to sell the oil and they're going to
Speaker 3: make one hundred billion dollars. That's not really how this works,
Speaker 3: as it is something that James has pointed out too.
Speaker 3: But like the actual value here is less from actually
Speaker 3: extracting the oil and more from a having all of
Speaker 3: these oil deposits on your balance and b there's a
Speaker 3: lot of value in just having power over it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So okay, So oil prices are kind of they're set
Speaker 3: by a few things, Like the price of oil is
Speaker 3: set by the bottom of the market right. Part of
Speaker 3: your profit comes from how much more cheaply can you
Speaker 3: refine and extract your oil relative to whoever's doing it
Speaker 3: the most expensively, like whoever's doing the shittiest job of it.
Speaker 3: But that a lot of it also is just power.
Speaker 3: That's what OPEC is, right, And OPEC's ability to raise
Speaker 3: oil prices has to do with its ability to have
Speaker 3: all of their member states controlling their oil and controlling
Speaker 3: the sort of flow and distribution of it. Redistributing who
Speaker 3: is in power into OPEC is actually a massive deal.
Speaker 3: Even if the actual oil here isn't very good, the
Speaker 3: power over the oil is extremely important. So this doesn't
Speaker 3: work in the way that Trump wants it to work,
Speaker 3: which is like, you know, you take the oil wells
Speaker 3: and you pump the oil out of the ground and
Speaker 3: suddenly you have money. But it is good for the
Speaker 3: oil companies that would take over the oil.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he consistently confuses stock price for like the economy
Speaker 5: slash it, business success slash other things.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess one way to think about it is
Speaker 3: that like taking control of this oil, you're not really
Speaker 3: making the money off of this oil. You're making the
Speaker 3: money off of the impact controlling this oil has on
Speaker 3: the rest of the oil you produce.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Maybe if you're someone who sees international relations in terms
Speaker 5: of great power competition, you're trying to put things in
Speaker 5: the Russia China bucket or the America bucket.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and someone who sees trade, is this like zero
Speaker 2: sum game where one person wins and another person loses. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, like as drop does.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 3: And also it is worth mentioning that like a lot
Speaker 3: of this oil goes to Cuba, Yeah, which is really
Speaker 3: really important for the Cuban economy, which sort of can't
Speaker 3: function without the stock of of Venezuela and oil. Like,
Speaker 3: getting access to Venezuelan oil is one of the things
Speaker 3: that originally pulled Cuba out of the just hideous economic
Speaker 3: crisis they were in in the nineties Office of Union collapsed.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it's why thirty two it seems like a majority
Speaker 2: or at least half of the security forces who died
Speaker 2: fighting the US and this kidnapping attempt were Cuban because
Speaker 2: access to Venezuelan oil is an existential issue for the
Speaker 2: Cuban government. And it's also why Trump stated, unfortunately probably accurately,
Speaker 2: that they're not looking at regime change in Cuba because
Speaker 2: they think that the regime is going to collapse on
Speaker 2: its own, which it might, like this is an existential
Speaker 2: problem for the Cuban regime, but people.
Speaker 5: Who aren't aware. I spent a good amount of time
Speaker 5: in Caracas when I was much younger in Jeremian undergraduate
Speaker 5: years at university, and I remember the only medical professionals
Speaker 5: I ever saw because people had left right after Chinese
Speaker 5: mol and the only medical professionals I ever sawt were
Speaker 5: Cuban and Cuban doctor's roll over the world. One a
Speaker 5: Cub's biggest secon it is doctors. But like it was
Speaker 5: very clear at that time that like the two states
Speaker 5: were intermessed. You know that the Venezuela needs things to
Speaker 5: Cuba hads like those special military advisors and those doctors,
Speaker 5: and Cuban needs ink to Menezuela have like that oil.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and breaking that the way people normally see oil
Speaker 3: as oil is just like liquid cash, and that's not true.
Speaker 3: It matters the actual materiality of the oil and how
Speaker 3: it works in the extraction process, and what kind of
Speaker 3: oil is matters a lot. And this is a scenario
Speaker 3: where where the oil is going and who has control
Speaker 3: over it matters more than who's able to sell it,
Speaker 3: which is very weird, but is how this works. And
Speaker 3: Trump doesn't understand any of this. Maybe some of the
Speaker 3: people around him understand this, but Trump really just is
Speaker 3: in pure empire brain. They stole our stuff, which I
Speaker 3: assume someone who like wanted this told him, Oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: they stole a bunch of American oil and land, and
Speaker 3: now he's in just full empire mode.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think just seeming someone has told him at
Speaker 5: some point they told us to offer.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, and this is after the revolution. A bunch
Speaker 2: of what was like the property of US and foreign
Speaker 2: oil companies was nationalized, right because these companies had made
Speaker 2: deals with the corrupt previous regime and it was not
Speaker 2: really benefiting Venezuelans. Obviously that oil money has gone on
Speaker 2: to benefit the current corrupt regime and still not benefited
Speaker 2: Venezuelans much. But there was a period of time under
Speaker 2: Jabez in which like there were actual social benefits and
Speaker 2: a powerful state I was providing people with things, which
Speaker 2: is not to say it didn't have its flaws, but
Speaker 2: like there was a period of time in which there
Speaker 2: was a benefit to the average Venezuelan from the fact
Speaker 2: that their country was so oil rich, and nothing about
Speaker 2: the current situation is going to change positively for the
Speaker 2: average Venezuelan. The profits are going to go from being
Speaker 2: siphoned from one group to another, but neither of those
Speaker 2: groups are regular Venezuelans.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think sometimes I will hear this. I have
Speaker 5: conservatively interviewed hundreds in not thousands of Venezuelan people in
Speaker 5: the last three or four years, right at the border
Speaker 5: in the Darien Gap in the US, remotely by telephone,
Speaker 5: et cetera. And like, sometimes you'll hear that like Chovers
Speaker 5: was trying to do something good and it got it
Speaker 5: went bad, or that like it was okay for a
Speaker 5: bit of the chothers and then the corruption got out
Speaker 5: of control, or even it was okay until my daughter
Speaker 5: took parent out. It was bad. It doesn't matter rate,
Speaker 5: it's bad now. But like the things that the poverty
Speaker 5: I hear about from Venezuelan people is grinding and it
Speaker 5: is so upsetting. Like I have the great fulness for
Speaker 5: Venezuelan people. I've made a whole podcast thing about this,
Speaker 5: but the difficulty they encounter in every aspect of their
Speaker 5: lives because of sanctions, because of corruption, because of hyperinflation,
Speaker 5: because of the low oil price, like a lot of things. Right,
Speaker 5: their lives are miserable, and this isn't going to change that.
Speaker 5: They're scared. Right when I speak to people in Venezuela,
Speaker 5: people family in Venezuela this week, since this happened, what
Speaker 5: are they doing. They are not contrary to what an
Speaker 5: AI video might have made you believe out in the
Speaker 5: streets celebrating. Now, they're trying to get enough food to
Speaker 5: make it through the next couple of weeks in case
Speaker 5: they have to hunker down in their home, right, and
Speaker 5: it is hard to get any food at the best
Speaker 5: of times for these people, in case.
Speaker 2: They're bombed in place, the roads are bombed, in case
Speaker 2: they're occupied. Like they're making preparations for being in a
Speaker 2: situation like Gazans have been in for much of the
Speaker 2: last several years. Right, Yeah, and that's not an unreasonable
Speaker 2: like who knows what will happen. I hope it's not that,
Speaker 2: but it's not an unreasonable thing to prepare for.
Speaker 5: No, it's not. Our friends, when Memo and Robert and
Speaker 5: I have been a few people in Memo, that's what
Speaker 5: they said they did after the coup as well, because
Speaker 5: they didn't know what was going to happen and they
Speaker 5: figured they need to be able to sit somewhere safe
Speaker 5: and stay there. And so, yeah, this is not a
Speaker 5: liberation like I sor Jared Polis of all people being like,
Speaker 5: oh yeah, liberation and using the word liberation generally Simon Bolivard,
Speaker 5: it is like the sort of bounding hero of Venezuela
Speaker 5: is referred to as the liberators and using that phrase
Speaker 5: about the extra judicial kidnapping the head of state. Right,
Speaker 5: you don't understand the resonance of that word in Spanish,
Speaker 5: that's fine, you don't speak Spanish, don't fucking use it. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but if you're going to use it, especially in this context,
Speaker 5: like it is crash in the extreme right to see that,
Speaker 5: actually American politician.
Speaker 3: So the other I think aspect of this is that,
Speaker 3: like you know, if you look at this in a
Speaker 3: historical s tale, the reason Boulevar succeeded was that, like
Speaker 3: the Haitian Republic gave a whole bunch of people, a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of weapons go liberate Latin Berica from the
Speaker 3: Spanish Empire. And then you know, if you look at what, like,
Speaker 3: what is the US's relation to the closest thing I've
Speaker 3: been able to I'm like racking my brain trying to
Speaker 3: find anything in history that looks like this that the
Speaker 3: US has done. And we've done a lot of bad things.
Speaker 3: The closest thing I can find to just we sent
Speaker 3: the army into kidnap a guy and deposed him was
Speaker 3: what we did to Aristide, who was the former leftist
Speaker 3: president now former leftist president of Haiti, who we did
Speaker 3: in fact send in special forces with Canada to just
Speaker 3: like sort of force onto a plane at gunpoint and
Speaker 3: remove from power. But also that situation was a little
Speaker 3: different in that at that point most of the country
Speaker 3: of Haiti was under the control of a bunch of
Speaker 3: like dust squad rubble groups, which was the us' justification.
Speaker 3: And this is just we just ran into a country
Speaker 3: and cook them. But I don't know the historical residences.
Speaker 2: Of that are bleak.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Don't call it the liberation good lording of liberations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's liberate our audience from having money that they
Speaker 2: can spend on these products. All right, we're back. I
Speaker 2: guess there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 2: One of them is I'm seeing a lot of people
Speaker 2: respond to this by pointing out folks like Matt Walsh
Speaker 2: or other guys on the right who made statements about
Speaker 2: Trump being a candidate for peace and all these military interventions.
Speaker 2: We're getting into being bad and are now celebrating what
Speaker 2: we're doing and openly celebrating like colonialism as a good thing.
Speaker 2: And I'm seeing a lot of folks trying to dunk
Speaker 2: on these people for being inconsistent. And I can't imagine
Speaker 2: a bigger waste of your time, none of these people.
Speaker 2: You have to get it out from the habit of
Speaker 2: thinking that truth matters. All that matters to these people
Speaker 2: is power, and they have it, and they have the guns.
Speaker 2: And you pointing out that they lied to get there,
Speaker 2: and that they're not honest, they don't care. They're rich
Speaker 2: and they're getting richer, and they're powerful and they're getting
Speaker 2: more power. None of this is about principles. It's about winning,
Speaker 2: and you just have to understand that if you want
Speaker 2: to have any hope of beating them, because pretending that
Speaker 2: they're playing any other game than the one that they're
Speaker 2: playing is really dangerous. I don't think there's any profit
Speaker 2: in debating these people directly or confronting them directly about
Speaker 2: the inconsistencies of their belief system. I do think it's
Speaker 2: deeply profitable to talk about the fact that they lied
Speaker 2: in our liars and are dragging us into another war
Speaker 2: two regular Americans, and the evidence suggests that this is
Speaker 2: incredibly unpopular in a way that the Iraq War wasn't.
Speaker 2: People talk a lot about how massive the anti war
Speaker 2: protests were and how much anti war sentiment there was,
Speaker 2: but a majority of Americans were broadly supportive of what
Speaker 2: the Bush administration did in Afghanist stand in Iraq at
Speaker 2: the time that they started doing it.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that the protests weren't real. It doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that it's not significant that those massive protests happened,
Speaker 2: But most Americans were broadly supportive of what the government
Speaker 2: was doing. That's not the case with what we're seeing
Speaker 2: in regards to public opinion over what's happening in Venezuela.
Speaker 2: There was a two day Reuters IPSO survey that concluded Monday,
Speaker 2: basically immediately after was announced what you know we did
Speaker 2: in Venezuela and seventy two percent of Americans who responded
Speaker 2: said they are concerned that the US might get too
Speaker 2: involved in Venezuela. Only twenty five percent said that they
Speaker 2: don't share that concern. Ninety percent of Democrats shared that
Speaker 2: concern as well, seventy four percent of independence even fifty
Speaker 2: four percent of Republicans. Only forty five percent of Republicans
Speaker 2: said that they were not worried about the US getting
Speaker 2: overly involved in only nineteen percent of other voters. So
Speaker 2: this is really unpopular, historically unpopular for a military intervention.
Speaker 2: And the entire bet that the Trump administration is making
Speaker 2: is that because they're not doing what Bush did in Iraq,
Speaker 2: they're not knocking out the whole government and debathifying it.
Speaker 2: They're just kicking out one guy and basically keeping his
Speaker 2: regime intact. They're just making that regime swear field to
Speaker 2: the United States. And their bet is that this will
Speaker 2: work right, that the Venezuelan regime will continue to keep
Speaker 2: the country functioning as well as it was functioning before,
Speaker 2: which is not great but was not total collapse, and
Speaker 2: they can start extracting value. And honestly, I feel like
Speaker 2: that is that's a major motivation for a lot of
Speaker 2: people supporting Trump, for a lot of people in his
Speaker 2: administration who have financial interests, for obviously the oil and
Speaker 2: gas companies he's trying to get on board. But I
Speaker 2: don't think money is even Trump's pry, and this is
Speaker 2: maybe an unpopular opinion. I think the primarys in Trump
Speaker 2: is doing this is that he wants Number one, to
Speaker 2: show everybody, look, I did what Bush did, but it worked.
Speaker 2: I did it Betternumber two. He wants to show everybody, look,
Speaker 2: I did what Obama did and took out a big
Speaker 2: bad guy.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: That's where they're trying to craft madeuro is this major
Speaker 2: enemy of the United States, this architect of the opiate crisis,
Speaker 2: this guy who's worse than beIN Laden in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways, because Trump is still jealous of the fact
Speaker 2: that Obama got to take out Ben Laden right as
Speaker 2: he sees it, and he wants his own version of that.
Speaker 2: Trump is doing this, I think primarily for vanity purposes. Right.
Speaker 2: I know that seems shallow and silly, but I really
Speaker 2: think that's most of what's going on for him. And
Speaker 2: I think if the end result of this is that
Speaker 2: things in Venezuela more or less continue, the way they
Speaker 2: were before. He will call it a win, and a
Speaker 2: lot of people might believe him, And I don't know,
Speaker 2: it doesn't even necessarily matter if any money actually comes
Speaker 2: into the United States over this. They'll just lie about it.
Speaker 2: You know, some individual Americans will make money, and I
Speaker 2: think that'll probably be enough for Trump to feel like
Speaker 2: he got a win and for his pr apparatus to
Speaker 2: notch this up as a win. And I think that's
Speaker 2: all he really cares about. And so I do think
Speaker 2: it's worth really hitting how criminal this is and how
Speaker 2: harmful this is. But ultimately, what's going to determine whether
Speaker 2: or not Americans see this as a calamity or not
Speaker 2: is how well this all works out in the long run.
Speaker 2: And that's a really tough thing to even think about,
Speaker 2: because you don't want it to work well, because it
Speaker 2: will embolden Trump to keep doing this and the global
Speaker 2: harm will be greater. On the other hand, I don't
Speaker 2: want civil life in Venezuela to collapse, right, So it's
Speaker 2: it's tough, yeah, right, yeah, I don't people to suffer anymore.
Speaker 5: I mean just around the world too. When like I
Speaker 5: heard men online called a meeting in Mihandmah when he
Speaker 5: heard about this, because he was worried, right, like, the
Speaker 5: paranoia of dictators is about to go through the ceiling,
Speaker 5: and that's going to result in people being tortured and killed.
Speaker 2: It's going to result in people torture, and it's going
Speaker 2: to result in more countries seeking to get nuclear weapons
Speaker 2: because they will accurately recognize that that is the only
Speaker 2: security anyone has. It is understated how much more dangerous
Speaker 2: what Bush did in Iraq made the world because of
Speaker 2: how it's made different leaders around the world think about
Speaker 2: the possession of nuclear weapons. Right Iran is fundamentally right,
Speaker 2: and it's calculus that getting a nuke will make the
Speaker 2: regime safer because it might be the only thing that
Speaker 2: can protect them now. Things in Iran are not looking
Speaker 2: very stable right now either. Again, this is another situation
Speaker 2: where just decades of protest and the weakness of the
Speaker 2: regime might wind up working in Trump's favor because things
Speaker 2: are looking pretty gnarly for the Iranian regime right now,
Speaker 2: and maybe Trump Trump has made some statements since kidnapping
Speaker 2: Maduro about going into Iran. They very well may do that,
Speaker 2: but they also may not need to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's the most sense suggesting that they at least
Speaker 5: have preparations in place for doing something in Iran, right,
Speaker 5: which may they need to do right to obviously move
Speaker 5: things to point towards Iran. Right, But that's an action
Speaker 5: in itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that really. I mean, there's a lot that worries
Speaker 2: me there. But I think they're going to keep fucking
Speaker 2: around like this as long as they feel like it
Speaker 2: will benefit them. And right now this feels like a
Speaker 2: wind to them. Yeah, so this is going to function
Speaker 2: like a drug. They're going to start looking for another
Speaker 2: hit as soon as the high from this fadse.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and as soon as they need a domestic distraction,
Speaker 5: right right.
Speaker 2: A lot of this stuff and the evidence we have
Speaker 2: so far suggests that people fucking hate this, and we'll
Speaker 2: probably keep hating this, But it depends on whether or
Speaker 2: not this all fades out and if the news is
Speaker 2: covered Actually maybe it worked right, which will probably be
Speaker 2: based on really dogshit journalism. The Washington Post did a
Speaker 2: preferential offed already. I think, oh good, Yeah, I'm glad
Speaker 2: they're helping out our democracy die in darkness. They're going
Speaker 2: to keep chasing this high and it will wind up
Speaker 2: collapse on them eventually. The question is how many countries
Speaker 2: will have to pay the price beforehand and how much
Speaker 2: worse will things get In the United States? Obviously, yeah,
Speaker 2: will the price be right when they lose a higher
Speaker 2: s F team or cash? Right when Delta Force gets
Speaker 2: wiped out? When we have a bunch of helicopters down,
Speaker 2: a bunch of Americans caption what does Trump do?
Speaker 4: Then?
Speaker 2: Do we get a panic? This is kind of where
Speaker 2: I see, like the potential, the scary potential for something
Speaker 2: like a nuclear January sixth, where like, do we get
Speaker 2: a panic response that leads to a horrific loss of life?
Speaker 2: Because Trump sees himself as being embarrassed, Oh my god,
Speaker 2: they killed a whole team, Like I have no option
Speaker 2: but to kill a shitload of people to distract from
Speaker 2: the fact that I failed here, Right, that that does
Speaker 2: really concern me too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if that happens, you know there was even if
Speaker 5: it's no nuclear right, even it's just conventional weapons on cities.
Speaker 2: Right right, right? And yeah, new guy, I shouldn't even
Speaker 2: bring up the nuclear thing, but like.
Speaker 5: It does concern meus a nuclear football, right, He's.
Speaker 2: The one who gets right choice, all right, this is
Speaker 2: going to just get more of. This is going to
Speaker 2: become integral to his sense of like self worth that like, no,
Speaker 2: I did this and it worked in the Congrete era,
Speaker 2: And if all his guys get wiped out failing at
Speaker 2: one of these things, that's not going to go well
Speaker 2: for anybody.
Speaker 5: No, it's not.
Speaker 2: We'll have a fun couple hours on Twitter, but it's
Speaker 2: going to be really bad, really fast.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I talked very briefly about a couple of implications domestically. Sure,
Speaker 5: The main one is that the DOJ has already fared
Speaker 5: fro an extension in the case which Judge Boseberg is
Speaker 5: overseeing regarding the Alien Enemies Act.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what this will mean for Venezuelan nationals in the
Speaker 5: United States, It is unlikely that this will mean something good.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: It is unlikely that they will have a country that
Speaker 5: they would want to return to, and it's possible that
Speaker 5: it's going to be used to force them to return
Speaker 5: to it anyway, to a country which is extremely paranoid
Speaker 5: about US buys. Because someone in ma Duro's very close
Speaker 5: entourage leaked the high plan that Trump. Many presidents would
Speaker 5: not have set this to the press, but Trump did right,
Speaker 5: that they had the entire plans for his house, and
Speaker 5: that they built a replica of it to include they
Speaker 5: knew he had a safe room, they knew it was steel,
Speaker 5: and they knew they could cut into it with cutting torches.
Speaker 5: Someone leaked that information. That means that people coming back
Speaker 5: from the United States are going to be under scrutiny, right,
Speaker 5: and that is not good for them. And I don't
Speaker 5: see this regime stopping sending people back because they're not
Speaker 5: an alien enemy anymore. I don't. I don't see that,
Speaker 5: and I can see the regime if it does manage
Speaker 5: and saw Rodriguez at something of a puppet leaning on
Speaker 5: Rodriguez to accept people removed from the United States. Right.
Speaker 5: So that is extremely concerning, and it's not being reported
Speaker 5: on right because migrants are not front and center where
Speaker 5: a lot of American newspapers think about things. But I
Speaker 5: think for those people this is petrifying.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: The country that you came through to be safe is
Speaker 5: no bombing the country that you came from. It's also
Speaker 5: trying to kick you out like you were stuck in
Speaker 5: the middle of this game, and you want it with
Speaker 5: a place to raise your kids where they might have
Speaker 5: a fair crack at a decent life. It's heartbreaking for
Speaker 5: those people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that's probably all we've got to
Speaker 2: say for now. I mean, I guess i'll address briefly
Speaker 2: because people have asked, do you see this as like
Speaker 2: an annex say an anschluss, you know, the annexation of
Speaker 2: Austria or of Czechoslovakia of that kind of moment, or
Speaker 2: is this more like the invasion of Poland? And I
Speaker 2: guess my answer is is its own thing. It doesn't
Speaker 2: directly graph on any of those other than that where
Speaker 2: it does very directly graph. And what is relevant in
Speaker 2: comparing it to is what happened to the Nazis and
Speaker 2: to Hitler personally. As they started seeing success taking things militarily,
Speaker 2: they made some big gambles that were not known. One
Speaker 2: thing that gets underdiscussed when talking about what Germany was
Speaker 2: doing in that period of time is how many military
Speaker 2: leaders within Germany thought that the annexation of particularly Czechoslovakia
Speaker 2: was a horrible idea because in a head to head fight,
Speaker 2: it was not clear whatsoever that the Wehrmachts could defeat
Speaker 2: the Czech military and their defenses. That was very much
Speaker 2: in debate, and a lot of Hitler's advisors thought it
Speaker 2: was a terrible idea because they didn't think they could win,
Speaker 2: and it wound up not really being a factor because
Speaker 2: everyone caved and nobody wanted to fight. Which is the
Speaker 2: problem that we're having right now, right is that nobody
Speaker 2: actually wants to confront these people. The Democrats are himming
Speaker 2: and ahio whether or not the try for impeachment again
Speaker 2: or you know, there's this this fear of actually directly
Speaker 2: confronting these people. That is part of what's emboldening them
Speaker 2: to keep trying shit like this. And what's very relevant
Speaker 2: to the Nazis is that if this works, and we're
Speaker 2: talking if this works not in the long run, because
Speaker 2: they're not going to wait twenty years to see if
Speaker 2: this was a good idea. They're going to wait a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks, you know, maybe a few months, and
Speaker 2: if it seems like, hey, it worked, the Venezuela's not
Speaker 2: fallen apart. You know, we've got we actually got what
Speaker 2: we think is a good pr out of it. They'll
Speaker 2: try again, and they'll try again. And the Nazis tried
Speaker 2: again and again until they started making checks that their
Speaker 2: asses couldn't cash right, And that is the thing that's relevant,
Speaker 2: because that is something all fascists have in common, is
Speaker 2: this confidence that gets them very far in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways, because if they're willing to gamble and the
Speaker 2: other people aren't willing to confront them or fight or
Speaker 2: gamble themselves, then they'll win by default. But when that
Speaker 2: stops and people start confronting them, the shortcomings of the
Speaker 2: state that they've built and of the militaries that they
Speaker 2: built become increasingly evident. And I do think that's the
Speaker 2: road that we're on. I don't know where it'll end.
Speaker 2: I don't know if Trump could die of a heart
Speaker 2: attack tomorrow, and maybe whoever takes over will be more cautious.
Speaker 2: I don't know what's going to happen, but I know
Speaker 2: that we've started down that road. Yeah, and that's not
Speaker 2: a good thing. Nope.
Speaker 5: I guess we should just say because people will be
Speaker 5: incredibly annoying on the internet, like saying that it is
Speaker 5: illegal and wrong to kidnap Madua does not mean that
Speaker 5: we think Maduro is great, just in the same way
Speaker 5: as saying the Iraq war is wrong doesn't mean we
Speaker 5: love Saddam Hussein like, no, the two things can be bad.
Speaker 2: People tell you although I should grow up. Like I
Speaker 2: said at the start, I don't think you have to.
Speaker 2: I don't think anyone owes you. And if someone is saying, like, hey,
Speaker 2: you have to answer for these bad things Maduro did
Speaker 2: when critiguing the OS for this, I think that's bullshit
Speaker 2: and I think you should tell them to fuck off.
Speaker 5: Right, It's not the issue at take Care.
Speaker 2: Maduro's personal qualities are irrelevant, as is always the case
Speaker 2: with this. What we're doing is illegal and bad. Sweet baby, Jimminy, Christmas,
Speaker 2: Welcome back. It could happened here. A podcast, it's normally
Speaker 2: about all of the sad and horrifying and violent and
Speaker 2: dangerous and sometimes inspiring things happening around the world. But
Speaker 2: this week, well, today is about something different. Today we're
Speaker 2: talking about CES finally, for those of you who don't
Speaker 2: know or who are new to the show, Every year
Speaker 2: in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bunch of the world's big
Speaker 2: tech companies come together for the Consumer Electronics Show, where
Speaker 2: they present their visions for the future, the new products
Speaker 2: that will be coming out that year and stuff that
Speaker 2: will be coming out and used to come that's less developed,
Speaker 2: and the whole industry talks about itself, and Garrison and
Speaker 2: I show up and largely just kind of let it
Speaker 2: wash over us like a warming tide of lukewarm garbage water,
Speaker 2: you know, fairy lukewarm us very lukewarm, and it smells
Speaker 2: like someone did not clean their fridge out often enough
Speaker 2: before putting it into the trash.
Speaker 4: That was the feeling at Showstoppers tonight. The media only
Speaker 4: presentation on the its products of CEES.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, why don't we start?
Speaker 5: So?
Speaker 2: I mean, there's two different things that are interesting about
Speaker 2: cees broadly. One of them is people bring gadgets that
Speaker 2: are not out yet that it will be coming out
Speaker 2: this year or coming out soon, and you can actually
Speaker 2: test them and use them and see how technology is progressing.
Speaker 2: And that can be kind of fun. The downside of
Speaker 2: that is that people also bring gadgets that are crap. Right,
Speaker 2: some guy has a vision for a way to like,
Speaker 2: you know, there's not a good way for blind people
Speaker 2: to use the pogo stick while watching Netflix, and so
Speaker 2: I have created this product, right, Or like there's not
Speaker 2: a good way for children to test their blood alcohol
Speaker 2: level before getting behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee,
Speaker 2: and I have invented the device to make it about
Speaker 2: things that like have no no conceivable audience or utilization. Right,
Speaker 2: that's the other side of the gadget part of CEES.
Speaker 2: And then outside of that you get a hint at
Speaker 2: like there's all these panels where people from the industry
Speaker 2: come to talk about the major trends in technology, how
Speaker 2: things are developing, and what they see as the few future.
Speaker 2: And so there's both here's what they're going to try
Speaker 2: to sell us, and here's the devices that might change
Speaker 2: the way we live. And also here's how a bunch
Speaker 2: of the richest, sometimes craziest people in the country you're
Speaker 2: talking about the future. Those are the two things that
Speaker 2: happen at CEES and Garrison. You wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: the first the gadgets. The gadgets, the gadgets one as
Speaker 2: you went to the Gadget show tonight. I spent my
Speaker 2: entire day in panels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I did most of the panels in
Speaker 3: the day.
Speaker 4: I didn't really got to walk to the show floor
Speaker 4: on the first day, which is which is Tuesday. So
Speaker 4: instead of doing the show floor, I went to show
Speaker 4: stoppers at the Bellagio, which is this presentation of Usually
Speaker 4: usually you know a collection of gadgets that have won
Speaker 4: CES Innovation Awards, which are on display for journalists and
Speaker 4: media you can talk to the people behind them. Showstoppers
Speaker 4: this year was a little different. It took place in
Speaker 4: like a different venue. Hall was smaller than the past
Speaker 4: few Showstoppers years, and I would say about forty percent
Speaker 4: of it with smart glasses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's usually like a big product that is like
Speaker 2: this product category is the hot thing.
Speaker 3: This year, we've tried all smart glasses.
Speaker 2: Every weird it is that they've always had them.
Speaker 3: Every year that we've.
Speaker 4: Been doing this, we've done smart glasses and they've always
Speaker 4: kind of been the same. Maybe the resolution on like
Speaker 4: the text better, like the glasses get a little bit smaller.
Speaker 4: And then this year, yeah, the glasses were generally smaller,
Speaker 4: but for all practical purposes function about the same. But
Speaker 4: there was but ten different smart glasses. Most of them
Speaker 4: could do some kind of like transcription service, could have
Speaker 4: some kind of heads up display.
Speaker 3: One of them was just audio only.
Speaker 4: It was like an audio audio transcriptions like it like
Speaker 4: it listens to someone else speaking in in this case Chinese,
Speaker 4: and it translates to me to American. Yeah, yeah, translate
Speaker 4: to American via sound. It had speakers. It had speakers
Speaker 4: and like the actual you know, like the arm of
Speaker 4: the glasses. Yeah, the delay was long enough that it
Speaker 4: was you couldn't really keep a conversation of a normal speed.
Speaker 4: I would be for like like the visual translations, which
Speaker 4: you can't actually kind of just talk in full time,
Speaker 4: But the audio only ones were like a smaller profile.
Speaker 3: The visual ones weren't necessarily bulkier, but you can definitely
Speaker 3: see that there's more hardware inside them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The thing that I have seen this year which is newer, er,
Speaker 4: maybe not totally new, but incorporating smart glasses technology into
Speaker 4: other types of eyewear, so like swim goggles, ski goggles,
Speaker 4: like outdoor sports stuff. So if you're you know, swimming
Speaker 4: or you're diving and you can't really use your phone underwater,
Speaker 4: you have there's there's a heads up that there's a
Speaker 4: heads up display in like your like Scoopa goggles.
Speaker 3: So that that's that's a new a newish thing that
Speaker 3: I've seen.
Speaker 4: I've seen like you know, biking glasses, skiing, snowboarding, So
Speaker 4: that that's the kind of one one slight change, but
Speaker 4: besides that, it's basically five different smart glasses which are
Speaker 4: for all pactal purposes identical right to each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and that I think is kind of
Speaker 2: one of the things that I've watched happen over the
Speaker 2: fifteen years almost that I've been going to see ess
Speaker 2: or see ess, whichever is more accurate, which is you know,
Speaker 2: when I first started coming, the smartphone era was new,
Speaker 2: and then we had like the tablet era after that,
Speaker 2: and so there was a lot of like you would
Speaker 2: have dozens of manufacturers making different devices and every year
Speaker 2: that were very different capability. For the first few years,
Speaker 2: smartphones were out advanced very rapidly, and that was really exciting,
Speaker 2: and the conventionally thrived on that as the number of
Speaker 2: new device categories of winnowed down and the difference like
Speaker 2: I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore now
Speaker 2: there's anyone I know, because.
Speaker 3: It's like no, usually I'm actually kind of yeah more sad.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The only thing that's exciting is like, well, my old
Speaker 2: phone was literally not working anymore. Yeah, I have the
Speaker 2: phone that worked.
Speaker 3: The battery has been completely destroyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the battery works now or whatever. But it's not
Speaker 2: like the cameras are not c changes better generally, nothing
Speaker 2: is like you're not getting a lot more out of
Speaker 2: it than you used to. And the same mystruy of
Speaker 2: like laptops, I mean, graphics cards just because of the
Speaker 2: data center crunch, like that's not nearly as exciting a
Speaker 2: technology category for consumers as it used to be. So
Speaker 2: this stuff is just like less less sexy, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it just kind of shows that we're at a point
Speaker 2: where kind of one of the only spaces where they
Speaker 2: are still making improvements and where there's a lot of
Speaker 2: competition in the market is smart glasses.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that's like the wearables category in general, Yeah,
Speaker 4: which was mentioned. I went to the Consumer Technology Association
Speaker 4: keynote panel this morning, which is the group that puts
Speaker 4: on cees, and they mentioned only only a few products,
Speaker 4: but one of them we're smart glasses. And then also
Speaker 4: like wearables in general, like AI powered wearables and now
Speaker 4: like wearable technology you know, like smart watches, rings, necklaces,
Speaker 4: whatever are going to make like a big comeback now
Speaker 4: that now that AI is a lot is a lot
Speaker 4: more intelligent than it used to be.
Speaker 3: In particular at the cees.
Speaker 4: Like Big keynote Tuesday morning, you mentioned a persona smart
Speaker 4: tutor glasses glasses to help you, you know, well learning.
Speaker 4: I haven't tried to be able to check out the
Speaker 4: product yet, but they kind of remind me of some
Speaker 4: of the concept behind those cleuely glasses that you may
Speaker 4: have seen on social media, the glasses that help you,
Speaker 4: like cheat.
Speaker 2: But also somebody who's like, we should embrace people cheating
Speaker 2: and cheat.
Speaker 4: Just a conversation, it seems like that product isn't necessarily
Speaker 4: as real as uh what the video might make it
Speaker 4: out to be.
Speaker 2: People whose company was based on lying didn't make a
Speaker 2: real product.
Speaker 4: But well, walking through your Eureka Park today, it's funny.
Speaker 4: I also saw this this product in one of like
Speaker 4: the National Pavilions. I think it was the one of
Speaker 4: like the japan Tech Pavilions AI powered tool to help
Speaker 4: to help prevent cheating while test taking. So you have
Speaker 4: AI powered tools that will monitor you to make sure
Speaker 4: you're not cheating.
Speaker 3: Well, you use an AI powered tool that helps cheat
Speaker 3: cheat it?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Better at school?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's kind of just a good representation of kind
Speaker 4: of where where this whole industry is at at the moment. Yeah,
Speaker 4: in some ways, I think, you know, this is probably
Speaker 4: what year three of AI being you know the big thing,
Speaker 4: whether that's unwearables, you know, where that's smart glasses, whether
Speaker 4: that's you know, a generative AI, whether that's AI. You know,
Speaker 4: but it's been aim but A has been like, you know,
Speaker 4: the additive property for for everything, and some of that
Speaker 4: might be starting to kind of tucker out, or at
Speaker 4: least the they've taken the victory lap, and there's there's
Speaker 4: a certain like you know, like cultural victory that that
Speaker 4: they're resting on. Whether they're starting to put some of
Speaker 4: their eggs in other baskets now, which certainly wasn't the
Speaker 4: case last year. No, and I got a sense I
Speaker 4: attended six panels today, Congratulations. It was a mix of
Speaker 4: like advertising people, entertainment associated people, some journalism associated people,
Speaker 4: and in robotics people in robotics talking about a lot
Speaker 4: of a lot of robodies. Yeah, what they saw was
Speaker 4: the future of AI, and there was a lot of
Speaker 4: focus first on AI is not going to be taking
Speaker 4: jobs as much as it's going to be augmenting jobs. Right,
Speaker 4: although you would get the occasional person be like it's
Speaker 4: going to take a lot of jobs. I got people
Speaker 4: saying that it's it's only going to take jobs if
Speaker 4: you don't know how to incorporate AI into your workfloce.
Speaker 4: And that's the argument at the moment right now, Yeah,
Speaker 4: if you're not using AI, you're a greater risk of
Speaker 4: you losing.
Speaker 2: So you better get on it right now, start learning it.
Speaker 5: Yes, Yes.
Speaker 2: And then the other thing is that there was a
Speaker 2: lot of like it's there to help or take away
Speaker 2: unpleasant tasks from workers, but really emphasizing the it's not
Speaker 2: your enemy thing, you don't need to be scared. And
Speaker 2: I had quoted like half of these panels. People would
Speaker 2: quote statistics about low user trust and AI and the
Speaker 2: fact that people are generally not super comfortable with this
Speaker 2: technology even if they use it in parts of their
Speaker 2: work life right or daily life. And so what I
Speaker 2: saw from that, when I interpret from that, is that
Speaker 2: there's internal concern that like, that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that can screw the pooch on this is that people
Speaker 2: are not really sure they like this stuff, and so
Speaker 2: there's this impulse to kind of cover the softer and
Speaker 2: fuzzier sides of it that I didn't see in previous years,
Speaker 2: and I think is really focusing on this is just
Speaker 2: making things you already like better, as opposed to this
Speaker 2: is a revolution that's completely changing life.
Speaker 4: And to the extent where AI was fremous revolutionary, it
Speaker 4: was specifically trying to ground it in like physical applications
Speaker 4: as opposed to this like more general kind of like
Speaker 4: spectral like AI hype that we've seen the past few years,
Speaker 4: which is in specifically around like generative AI right where
Speaker 4: it's like this like kind of vague thing that we
Speaker 4: like gestured to. There's more specific applications for AI being
Speaker 4: talked about right now, and they talked talked about like
Speaker 4: AI assisted manufacturing simulations like digital twins of factories, shipyards,
Speaker 4: power plants, a lot of digital twin tak building, you know,
Speaker 4: digital replicas of like everything you know of like society,
Speaker 4: to like run these simulations to both make AIS smarter,
Speaker 4: to generate new solutions outside of the limitations of a
Speaker 4: language model, and also find you know, potential problems in
Speaker 4: you know, when you build these things physically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was something that was brought up during the
Speaker 2: robotics panel, which was talking about how to like take
Speaker 2: the machine learning technology and other things that are generally
Speaker 2: grouped under AI and apply it in the physical world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, manufacturing, I've had done so much right in just
Speaker 4: one day. I probably I've heard the word manufacturing more
Speaker 4: today than I have most in every CEES I've been
Speaker 4: to previously, combined.
Speaker 2: And I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than
Speaker 2: on consumer technology because there's not that much new to
Speaker 2: give the consumer right and they are also I think
Speaker 2: starting to recognize that you can get people using chat
Speaker 2: GPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it,
Speaker 2: and the data backs this up. People are mostly using
Speaker 2: it at work and for school and gen z a lot.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people who are doing like their
Speaker 2: research on like what to buy and whatnot through using
Speaker 2: chat GPT, But there's not a lot that you can
Speaker 2: sell people in CES because it's an app and there's
Speaker 2: not a ton of different devices for it. We're using
Speaker 2: it on their phone, they're using it on their computer,
Speaker 2: but like none of the new phones and computers are
Speaker 2: market the better at using chat GPT or another you know,
Speaker 2: chatbot thing than any of the others. So there's not
Speaker 2: a lot that's sexy in just that at CEES. So
Speaker 2: I think I have seen this conscience reforming around people
Speaker 2: in manufacturing and people who are like thinking of the
Speaker 2: concerns of like I have a pair like an exoskeleton
Speaker 2: to test this week. That's seeing a lot of its
Speaker 2: business in folks who are like doing like Amazon type
Speaker 2: jobs right loading and unloading packages and whatnot all day long,
Speaker 2: you know. And I do see a conscious reforming there,
Speaker 2: which I think is kind of evidence of like there's
Speaker 2: almost an admission that like, yeah, we don't really have
Speaker 2: that much to hand consumers anymore on a yearly basis.
Speaker 3: Speaking of handing things to consumers ads.
Speaker 2: So the first panel I went to of the day
Speaker 2: was about the funnel, which, as I understand it is
Speaker 2: just kind of like the way in which people have
Speaker 2: traditionally engaged with like media, gotten advertised to and then
Speaker 2: like gone to stores and bought stuff like the funnel
Speaker 2: by which you like make a customer, and how that's
Speaker 2: been completely blown up now, right, and AI is like
Speaker 2: a further massive disruption because people are not like people
Speaker 2: are increasingly especially very young people, which was putted out
Speaker 2: in a number of these are like buying stuff that
Speaker 2: a chatbot recommends them, right, And so a lot of
Speaker 2: marketing is being seen as being done through how do
Speaker 2: you get the chat bot to talk about you a
Speaker 2: certain way? What is the SEO of getting chat ept Oh,
Speaker 2: it's interesting, like right, there's a lot of time.
Speaker 4: Thought as someone who's not a regular chatbot user, which
Speaker 4: I'm sure people here am I which has me for it,
Speaker 4: We're not maximizing my productivity and meaning to get on
Speaker 4: to you for that, Garrison, there's not a regular chat
Speaker 4: about user.
Speaker 3: I've never thought of that before.
Speaker 4: Of yeah, I mean, like, I know people use these
Speaker 4: chatbots as a replacement for search engines, but the idea
Speaker 4: of like trying to you know, evaluate purchases is uh.
Speaker 4: I mean, I guess that makes sense now, but I've
Speaker 4: never put that together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the only because there was a lot of
Speaker 2: talking about like how AI is helping advertisers, how it's
Speaker 2: making advertisements, how like it's helping in the process of that,
Speaker 2: and there was a focus in all the panels about
Speaker 2: that on how like, well, it's just augmenting the humans.
Speaker 2: But the only specific examples given were the McDonald's and
Speaker 2: Coca Cola AI generated ads, which were both disastrous. I mean,
Speaker 2: the McDonald's one in the Netherlands got removed. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: people so bad.
Speaker 3: They withdrew the attic so ugly to ye, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Coke did do it twice, so maybe they consider it
Speaker 2: a win. But everything I saw was very negative. I
Speaker 2: didn't see a lot of positive feedback on Coca Cola,
Speaker 2: visa v They're weird. AI holidays are coming at.
Speaker 4: It's like people who don't know it's AI think feel
Speaker 4: very neutral about it. Yeah, people that do we know
Speaker 4: it's AI, I think generally have negative actions.
Speaker 2: I think if you look at it, it's pretty clear.
Speaker 2: But anyway, I mean, it was.
Speaker 3: Less clear if maybe you're like a sixty year old.
Speaker 2: Watches you know, exact in between stuff and that's all
Speaker 2: good enough.
Speaker 3: Grandpa, don't go Internet, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah he might notice some of those those fucking polar
Speaker 2: bears have the wrong number of pause. But yeah, so,
Speaker 2: like there was some talk of that and the other
Speaker 2: The only specific example they gave of like an AI
Speaker 2: enhanced strategy was Allegra. The people who own like the
Speaker 2: medicine had like a new non drowsy formula or they
Speaker 2: just wanted to highlight that it was non drowsy. So
Speaker 2: they basically had a bunch of like seated the stuff
Speaker 2: that chatbot that like open AI was scored that chatbots
Speaker 2: were scraping, Yeah, with content about how Allegra makes it
Speaker 2: is non drowsy and about how like competing similar medications
Speaker 2: make you drowsy, so that it would get mentioned in
Speaker 2: like when searched about it and they talked about they
Speaker 2: called it like model hacking. I think it was the
Speaker 2: exact term used. And that was the only thing that
Speaker 2: was the only speci example that I can't any of
Speaker 2: this works too, Like everyone else was just talking in
Speaker 2: vague terms about like and we've really seen our teams
Speaker 2: creativity sore or whatever.
Speaker 4: That's interesting, you know, because the way that I probably
Speaker 4: use or exposed to AI the most is like on
Speaker 4: like Google search now, which has you know, it's it's
Speaker 4: like AI like summaries instead of like actual search results.
Speaker 3: But those are based on.
Speaker 2: Like which you can type minus AI in with the
Speaker 2: search results if we want to cut that stuff out.
Speaker 4: But those AI results are you know, pulling from certain
Speaker 4: like articles which which they'll link to. So yeah, I
Speaker 4: guess if I was trying to design it like an
Speaker 4: AI marketing strategy, I would I would either you know,
Speaker 4: pay publications to mention my product in more articles or
Speaker 4: find find out find other ways to to to influence
Speaker 4: mentions of of my product in like written media that
Speaker 4: that then would be used as like training data for AI.
Speaker 4: And yeah, I guess there there there can be a
Speaker 4: whole you know, search engine optimization, model hacking is I guess.
Speaker 2: Model optimism or yeah, like product opposite optimization for a model.
Speaker 2: I guess that's funny, but yeah, like the So the
Speaker 2: first talk that I went to was about the funnel
Speaker 2: or whatever, and one of the people speaking there was
Speaker 2: the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Intuit, which is
Speaker 2: the company that owns Turbo Tax right like it's one
Speaker 2: of the big we do your taxes companies out there,
Speaker 2: and also a lobbyer in terms of stopping any sort
Speaker 2: of a form that would make it's that you don't
Speaker 2: need to do your own tax the other countries still.
Speaker 3: Credit score monitoring, yes, a whole bunch.
Speaker 2: Of stuff, all that kind of stuff. So this, this guy,
Speaker 2: the CMO of the company Thomas Renize, was part of
Speaker 2: this the end of the funnel speech, and he made
Speaker 2: a couple of comments that I took note of. One
Speaker 2: is product is brand and brand is product full stop.
Speaker 2: So the more people you can make experience your product,
Speaker 2: that's the best selling point and value of course, right,
Speaker 2: Which it was just interesting to me in terms of
Speaker 2: the into it as a company that has lobbied to
Speaker 2: make it impossible for like any reform that would allow
Speaker 2: people to not need a third party to do there
Speaker 2: they're taxes. But also this idea that like product is
Speaker 2: brand and brand is product isn't true of a lot
Speaker 2: of companies, Like if you think about like, for example,
Speaker 2: like a lot of the different soft drinks are all
Speaker 2: owned by one company, but they're fundamentally different like products
Speaker 2: and have an often cases like a different user base.
Speaker 2: And it's very like it's a very tech when your
Speaker 2: product is a concept, Like you can't do your own
Speaker 2: taxes because it's a pain in the ass, but the
Speaker 2: government doesn't do it for you because we lobby to
Speaker 2: make that illegal. Like I found that interesting and it
Speaker 2: kind of got me angry at Thomas at the start
Speaker 2: of this. And I was particularly interested in one of
Speaker 2: the things he brought up, which is that he talked
Speaker 2: about the one hundred million dollars that into It is
Speaker 2: putting into open AI and they're putting this into Open
Speaker 2: AI as part of a multi year partnership. And I
Speaker 2: want to quote from an article in the website Araptus,
Speaker 2: which is discussing this exact thing that I found useful
Speaker 2: when I was formulating my question for Thomas. The contract
Speaker 2: was to embed AM models directly into quick Books, TurboTax,
Speaker 2: and credit Karma. The promise AI stance that can generate invoices,
Speaker 2: provide tax extments, recommend loans, and help you make informed
Speaker 2: financial decisions. Right. That may sound like kind of like
Speaker 2: a basic move, like's what's so sketchy about just integrating
Speaker 2: like an AI chatbot to make it easier to use
Speaker 2: your tax software. It can be complicated and hard to
Speaker 2: use as anyway, But kind of the necessary part of
Speaker 2: this is if you are if you're doing this, if
Speaker 2: you're integrating all of these different tax and credit programs
Speaker 2: into an AI model, you're giving that AI model access
Speaker 2: to people's financial data in a tremendous amount of detail. Right,
Speaker 2: And all of these AI models have a massive shared vulnerability,
Speaker 2: which is a vernability to something called prompt injection, right.
Speaker 2: And that's when, for example, say someone is a customer
Speaker 2: of a tax preparer that uses one of into its
Speaker 2: products to prepare taxes for its customers. And this person
Speaker 2: sends an invoice into the company that has hidden text
Speaker 2: in it that is a demand to the language model
Speaker 2: that will be scraping this and uploading it to basically
Speaker 2: open up and send over a bunch of customer data
Speaker 2: to a specific source. That's a thing that you can do.
Speaker 2: It's called prompt injection. And there's not really a way
Speaker 2: to counter it. There's not like a proven comprehensive defense
Speaker 2: against this sort of thing, and so there's this massive vulnerability.
Speaker 2: And this was first brought up in an article on
Speaker 2: the website. I cited a raptus by Chris Black, who's
Speaker 2: a security researcher an expert, and I want to read
Speaker 2: a quote from his article about this. There are no
Speaker 2: proven comprehensive defenses against prompt injection. When not if an
Speaker 2: AI powered financial tool leaks customer data through a prompt
Speaker 2: injection attack, who is liable the company using quick books
Speaker 2: into it open AI? The regulations weren't written for this scenario.
Speaker 2: So I decided to ask that question of Thomas, being
Speaker 2: like the chief marketing officer, I figured, well he should
Speaker 2: have some answer to like, what do you have. What
Speaker 2: sort of security measures do you have to mitigate the
Speaker 2: risk of a prompt injection attack? And who do you
Speaker 2: see as being responsible? If you are the ones providing
Speaker 2: customer data to open ai and their tool gets hit
Speaker 2: by a prompt injection attack, are you responsible? Is open
Speaker 2: ai is a third party that might be using your products?
Speaker 2: And he had no answer to this. He like, his
Speaker 2: only answer when we were on stage was like, we're
Speaker 2: talking with open ai about it, which like, well, you're
Speaker 2: already in the process of collaborating with them.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I have a question for Thomas.
Speaker 8: I was kind of concerned when reading about intuit assists
Speaker 8: that a open AI is going to have read and
Speaker 8: write access to quite a lot of financial information from users,
Speaker 8: which opens up a vulnerability for a prompt injection. Right,
Speaker 8: you have the possibility that people can hide things and
Speaker 8: invoices that are then being uploaded that will cause the
Speaker 8: AI to provide the malicious user with financial details for
Speaker 8: individuals or corporations. And I guess my primary question here
Speaker 8: this seems like a major liability issue when somebody's information
Speaker 8: gets rerouted to a blaze that's not supposed to go
Speaker 8: to a malicious actor who's responsible.
Speaker 3: You're taking the value of integrity and protecting our customer
Speaker 3: data crily seriously over our entire lives.
Speaker 5: And that's what reporting the company and meeting in the
Speaker 5: software space for financial services.
Speaker 3: So this is not something we're about to use it
Speaker 3: in any way in the new age of AI. In fact,
Speaker 3: it has to get even more.
Speaker 4: And more double down of protecting people's information and security
Speaker 4: of edforation.
Speaker 3: So that is something that we are already in team
Speaker 3: conversations with open AI have a nation about that whole
Speaker 3: group no matter where we're startings.
Speaker 2: And when I kind of cornered him afterwards, he didn't
Speaker 2: have like his eventual follow up answers like I don't
Speaker 2: know that kind of stuff and like you are the
Speaker 2: chief marketing officer. Thank you, Againe for answering my question.
Speaker 5: Sure your question.
Speaker 2: I'm still really concerned about the danger of prompt injection
Speaker 2: attacks revealing financial data. And it doesn't still sound like
Speaker 2: there's an understanding of who will be liable.
Speaker 5: Expert answer that question for you.
Speaker 2: So I mean, like I can tell you that we're
Speaker 2: coming into our security and privacy and we are doing
Speaker 2: everything we can to protect that.
Speaker 3: I feel a lot writing on it as you might imagine.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it's every digital security expert I've talked to
Speaker 2: says it's a matter of when, not if, that there
Speaker 2: is financial data revealed by these attacks. It seems like understanding.
Speaker 2: I'm just I'm not going to be the expert to
Speaker 2: get into the details on that. Okay, Yeah, A key
Speaker 2: part of marketing this should be being able to tell
Speaker 2: people what kind of safety precautions are being taken with
Speaker 2: their data. And the fact that he didn't and clearly
Speaker 2: had never thought about any of this stuff. And I
Speaker 2: had a couple of different people come up to me
Speaker 2: afterwards and like be like, Wow, that was a really
Speaker 2: good question. And I was like, well, why hasn't this
Speaker 2: been asked before? Like why why is this a thing
Speaker 2: where like some guy's blogging about it and I'm asking
Speaker 2: you about it and you don't have an answer to it,
Speaker 2: and you're the CEO of one of like the largest
Speaker 2: tax prep the largest tax prep company in the country.
Speaker 2: Like it's just it's emblematic of how careless everyone adjacent
Speaker 2: to this industry is, which personal data with the safety
Speaker 2: of people and of society as a result of like
Speaker 2: what their products are doing. Like there's absolutely no consideration
Speaker 2: given the harms of any of this shit, and it's
Speaker 2: it's the most consistently dispiriting part of showing up at CEES.
Speaker 1: Well what is right?
Speaker 3: What a fun story?
Speaker 4: That is?
Speaker 2: All right, we're back.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: One of the other things that's been a major topic
Speaker 2: on the panels I went to and is generally a
Speaker 2: big thing at CES this year and in tech this
Speaker 2: year is agentic AI or agents. Right, the idea that
Speaker 2: you have an AI that you can send off to
Speaker 2: like book a flight for you, and it doesn't just
Speaker 2: like find a flight that it searches for and be like, hey,
Speaker 2: this looks good, It like actually books it for you
Speaker 2: and handles all of that.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This has been one of the big promises of AI,
Speaker 2: not just for like flights, but that you can have
Speaker 2: like an actual digital assistant that persistently remembers all of
Speaker 2: your shit and can book stuff for you and handle
Speaker 2: like the pain in the ass nitty gritty. If you say, like, hey,
Speaker 2: I need you to find a restaurant within like this
Speaker 2: four block radius that has seven seats open at eight
Speaker 2: pm and abides by these dietary restrictions, you kind of
Speaker 2: just have to slog through figuring that out right now.
Speaker 2: And the idea is an agent can do that for you,
Speaker 2: and currently none of them can.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: This is a thing that is changing, like the performance
Speaker 2: of different agents are changing over time, but it is
Speaker 2: still very unclear. If you're not somebod who's fully bought
Speaker 2: into the kool aid, I'll say, it's very unclear where
Speaker 2: these things will top out at. And there was a
Speaker 2: good article in futurism recently and I want to quote
Speaker 2: from it right now. Research is Carnegie Mellen University found
Speaker 2: earlier this year that even the best performing AI agent,
Speaker 2: which was Google's gym and I two point five pro
Speaker 2: at the time, failed to complete real world office tasks
Speaker 2: seventy percent of the time. And this is there's been
Speaker 2: a bunch of articles in the last couple of months
Speaker 2: about like why didn't because twenty twenty five was supposed
Speaker 2: to be the year of agent to AAI and now
Speaker 2: they're saying, well, twenty twenty six it's going to be
Speaker 2: the year of agenta AAI. Not because none of this
Speaker 2: stuff works, and in fact enough does that there's a
Speaker 2: number of viable businesses in it. It's not nothing, but
Speaker 2: it does not work as well as they said it
Speaker 2: would be working right now, and it consequently has not
Speaker 2: been adopted merely as widely as was expected even this
Speaker 2: time last year. Right, there's an article in hr dive
Speaker 2: half of gen Z chat GPT users say they view
Speaker 2: it as a coworker. Survey shows that sites a survey
Speaker 2: of about eighty six hundred full time US workers, which
Speaker 2: found that about eleven percent of those who responded said
Speaker 2: they use chat GPT regularly, including about twenty one percent
Speaker 2: of gen Z workers, which is significantly lower. You can
Speaker 2: find depending on who you go to. And the stat
Speaker 2: I've seen bandied about was that like fifty seven percent
Speaker 2: of gen Z people use chat GPT on a daily
Speaker 2: basis for like work, and like more than half used
Speaker 2: it as like their primary source recommendations like what stuff
Speaker 2: to buy. I don't know, like which set of numbers
Speaker 2: is accurate. There's a lot of different posters giving data, right,
Speaker 2: but kind of no matter who you look at, the
Speaker 2: evidence suggests that the year that was supposed to be
Speaker 2: the year of agentic Ai did not turn it into
Speaker 2: a normal thing. Right, It's still lagging behind expectation. So
Speaker 2: that's kind of what we're seeing at CEES is a
Speaker 2: lot of people trying to like, well, let's bring back
Speaker 2: kind of the same agentic shit we had last year,
Speaker 2: slightly improved and see if it catches on, maybe this
Speaker 2: year it'll hit maturity.
Speaker 4: Right Yeah, no, I mean we've been hearing agentic stuff
Speaker 4: every once in a while, definitely not as much as
Speaker 4: last year. It's one of those like salt pepperwords that
Speaker 4: they throw in the second batch of panels that I
Speaker 4: attended after the keynote, which I should mention as soon
Speaker 4: as I walked into the keynote at eight thirty am.
Speaker 4: The first thing, the very first thing I heard from
Speaker 4: Gary Shapiro's well, one of the heads the Consumer Technology
Speaker 4: Association was a six to seven joke.
Speaker 3: But whether this is your first CEES or your fifteenth,
Speaker 3: on my case, you belong to number was that sixty
Speaker 3: or seven?
Speaker 1: You did a six to seven joke?
Speaker 7: Already?
Speaker 4: Very first thing, Wow, great, great, therey am as soon
Speaker 4: as I walk in. It's because I walked in maybe
Speaker 4: like five minutes late, but very first words. So that's
Speaker 4: that's good's that kind of sets the tone for a
Speaker 4: lot of a lot of that panel. But then I
Speaker 4: went to a few panels in Eureka Park about like
Speaker 4: AI governance and like how governments working working with AI.
Speaker 4: A lot of stuff mostly about like the challenge of
Speaker 4: governments keeping up with innovation, how you know, too much
Speaker 4: regulation restricts these companies from doing real regulation. The Secretary
Speaker 4: State of Austria had a really good quote about how
Speaker 4: data protections inhibit innovation.
Speaker 6: One of the things that we are seeing today is
Speaker 6: that some of the people, some of the citizens, have
Speaker 6: this fear about AI.
Speaker 3: So how do you feel it in Austria. I think
Speaker 3: you mentioned very very well.
Speaker 4: It's all about building trust, taking the field trust WROPVIAI.
Speaker 3: That's it's the most important thing. And of course data
Speaker 3: protection is very huge. But on the other side, between
Speaker 3: data protection and innovation, you need to find the middle
Speaker 3: way because sometimes data protection is not good for innovation.
Speaker 4: On a similar notice, the Intuit turbotaxt thing of data
Speaker 4: protection is mainly getting in the way of trying to
Speaker 4: actually make make real social progress, which we'll carry with
Speaker 4: it some degree of risk. The second one of these
Speaker 4: AI governance panels was like the EU ambassadors to the
Speaker 4: US from Estonia and Luxembourg talking about like Reaganomics basically
Speaker 4: for thirty minutes talking about how much they love ronalds
Speaker 4: Reige great when as.
Speaker 10: Soniao was certainly subscribed to the this statement that Reagan
Speaker 10: once made that they feel most horrific words in English
Speaker 10: are the ones saying that, Hey, I'm from from the
Speaker 10: government and I'm here to help.
Speaker 4: You, specifically in trying to make sure that governments are
Speaker 4: able to keep up with technology. And the previous panel
Speaker 4: with the Austrian Secretary of State was about the challenges
Speaker 4: of trying to convince the citizens of these countries to
Speaker 4: like adopt AI and adopt in general like digitalization and
Speaker 4: specifically with like digital ideas, and how how there's like,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe like twenty to thirty percent of people
Speaker 4: who are very resistant. And then the challenge of like
Speaker 4: making making sure that like this gets framed is not
Speaker 4: not as like a product or like a like a
Speaker 4: project for technology.
Speaker 3: But as a society white push.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But besides that, these these panels were honestly a little
Speaker 4: bit sleepy as well as the state of the Creator
Speaker 4: Economy panel, How's it doing? You know what, it's both
Speaker 4: it's both in its adolescence but also rich maturity. Wow,
Speaker 4: And they said, you know it's hard both it's hard
Speaker 4: for for something to be two things at once, but
Speaker 4: in this case it is.
Speaker 3: But they talked about how creators are more.
Speaker 4: Enabled to use brand deals, including you know, brand deals
Speaker 4: to enabled with like a backlog of older content. You
Speaker 4: can remove brand deals from older content and replace them
Speaker 4: with current brand deals using a new future from YouTube.
Speaker 4: There's a guy from YouTube at the panel.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, I'm sure he was very excited, but.
Speaker 4: It was mostly about how, you know, new new ways
Speaker 4: to use influencers to market your product. And that is
Speaker 4: the extent of what the creator economy really meant.
Speaker 2: And that's all any of these people have any idea
Speaker 2: on is like we can inject ads into AI trust
Speaker 2: AI so they'll buy the products, or we can inject
Speaker 2: ads into influencers they trust the influencers. That was the thing,
Speaker 2: Like none of these people they dress it up with
Speaker 2: all sorts of fancy language, but it's and most of
Speaker 2: these panels you mentioned, like there's a lot of bullshit
Speaker 2: every now and then you get some like good moments,
Speaker 2: so you get to like question an asshole, but it's
Speaker 2: mostly bullshit, but it's occasionally worth it for moments like
Speaker 2: when I was on the agentic AI cutting through the
Speaker 2: hype panel. Jay Patisol, who's the principal analyst at Forrester,
Speaker 2: started speaking and he said something beautiful Garrison, and I'm
Speaker 2: I'm this is not an exact but it's pretty close.
Speaker 2: We have a new audience. We are speaking to machines.
Speaker 2: We are through the looking glass. We are building content
Speaker 2: for engines. We are building websites to be scraped so
Speaker 2: that an LM can understand what you wanted to understand
Speaker 2: about your brand. Ye ye, yeah, that gets it. That's
Speaker 2: what these people see the Internet as they see it
Speaker 2: as like everything before this was a mistake or was.
Speaker 2: What the Internet was for was a place for brands
Speaker 2: to feed information into machines that then spoon feed the
Speaker 2: information directly into customers who trust it like little lambs.
Speaker 2: That's what they want the Internet to be, and that's
Speaker 2: what they believe they've gotten to. That's what AI. That's
Speaker 2: the promise of AI.
Speaker 4: The promise of AI is that this isn't just the
Speaker 4: Internet anymore. This can actually just be the physical world
Speaker 4: as well. And this is something that was talked about
Speaker 4: during the cees CTA keynote Tuesday morning, specifically with the
Speaker 4: birth of AI wearables each of these wearables is able
Speaker 4: to now collect information about the physical world and as
Speaker 4: Hong as you have you know, adequate data sharing, AI
Speaker 4: is able to gain so much more knowledge about how
Speaker 4: the quote unquote real world operates. And this is going
Speaker 4: to make you know, all of the processes of AI
Speaker 4: stronger in the future as it learns more about what
Speaker 4: this world actually is. Yeah, and beyond the promise of
Speaker 4: wearables to improve someone's life, this is the real project
Speaker 4: is strengthening AI through the use of these wearables.
Speaker 3: It's not actually about the consumer experience.
Speaker 2: It's about providing data to this machine.
Speaker 4: It's this like larger, larger, very like existential thing at
Speaker 4: least for these executives or like that. That's the thing
Speaker 4: that they are really emphasizing. Despite this being called the
Speaker 4: Consumer Electronics Showcase.
Speaker 2: And I think again, the best thing I can give
Speaker 2: you into how fundamentally as much money as there is
Speaker 2: behind this and as many grand words as they dress
Speaker 2: it up, and how intellectually bankrupt this whole tech movement
Speaker 2: is is that the third panel that I went to,
Speaker 2: which is about AI and creativity. One of the people
Speaker 2: on it was Jesse Damasek, who works for Diagio, which
Speaker 2: is like a company that imports all of your favorite
Speaker 2: whiskeys from Europe, right, like they sell all of the
Speaker 2: different like Scottish whiskies that have to get like imported
Speaker 2: and sold over here. And he was talking about they
Speaker 2: were talking about some of the specific examples they had of,
Speaker 2: like how AI has been used in advertising campaigns, and
Speaker 2: his exact statement was, you can leverage an artist and
Speaker 2: create infinite examples of their work, which he means you
Speaker 2: can find an artist that you like, sign a deal
Speaker 2: with them, and then have AI created infinite examples in
Speaker 2: their style. And so I camped afterwards and I was like,
Speaker 2: what were you specifically referring to, Like how does this
Speaker 2: actually work as a product. And the thing that he
Speaker 2: pointed out is that they have a couple of whiskey
Speaker 2: brands that they have done. You go in and you
Speaker 2: order a bottle and it's printed on site, and it
Speaker 2: uses AI to make an example in the style of
Speaker 2: this existing artist that they likes, work that's unique for you,
Speaker 2: uh huh. And he said it's been successful for them.
Speaker 2: Is it trillions of dollars? Three trillion dollars? No, I
Speaker 2: mean these are things that like, yeah, I guess I
Speaker 2: can see that maybe selling some Is it selling better
Speaker 2: than any other like branded whiskey than any other, Like
Speaker 2: you know, because whiskey companies, big ones will come out
Speaker 2: with like here's this edition every year or whatever, they'll
Speaker 2: have one special limited edition one. Is it selling better
Speaker 2: than that? We don't have that data, but it's one
Speaker 2: of those is like that's the idea.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 2: That's like we're talking about, like AI is supercharging creativity
Speaker 2: and letting us like think bolder and more creatively than
Speaker 2: we've ever thought before. And there were so many lines,
Speaker 2: oh in this fucking panel about like how we were
Speaker 2: like hyper charging what human beings can be and do,
Speaker 2: and like everyone should be really excited about what all
Speaker 2: this means for the future. One of the panelists that
Speaker 2: my best advice for you is let a thousand flowers bloom.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry that was in the panel right before, but
Speaker 2: it's still in all of this, Like it's all that
Speaker 2: seems it's all the same kind of shit that bleeds
Speaker 2: together and it's like, okay, what are your ideas? Well,
Speaker 2: we're having a legra kind of lie to manipulated engine
Speaker 2: and we've got the custom printed bottles for your whiskey.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, speaking of AI unleashing creativity. The last
Speaker 4: thing I'll talk about this episode is the worst booth
Speaker 4: at Showstoppers, which this year is kind of impressive because yeah,
Speaker 4: that's hard. It's it's mostly smart glasses and like three
Speaker 4: different pool cleaners. Yeah, and then some random software stuff
Speaker 4: and then a few things we saw last year.
Speaker 3: Sure, the worst worst booth. Robert.
Speaker 2: You you write books, right, I have in the past.
Speaker 2: What if in the future, what if.
Speaker 3: I told you that you could write three books in
Speaker 3: less than twenty four hours?
Speaker 4: God, thank you Garrison with us a writer without using cocaine.
Speaker 2: There's well, okay, now i'd say you're a liar.
Speaker 3: That's see a little bit harder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I thought you were trying to sell me
Speaker 2: some blow. And I was gonna say, when we turn
Speaker 2: the mic off.
Speaker 3: With the power of AI, you can write three books
Speaker 3: in six to twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's almost as fast as Stephen King Whinny was
Speaker 2: on co Yeah, there you get not quite.
Speaker 3: So there's this table.
Speaker 4: There was the least abouting table definitely in all the
Speaker 4: show'st operas, because it was it was filled with books
Speaker 4: with I will show you the covers here.
Speaker 3: They all look like this.
Speaker 2: They all oh, yeah, no those I mean I'm seeing
Speaker 2: blue and orange.
Speaker 3: It's colors in black. It's AI generated image.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, it's like every movie poster. Now, there's no
Speaker 2: art style behind it.
Speaker 4: It's very generic and they have like, you know, like
Speaker 4: the most generic font for the title, all in the
Speaker 4: same placement with some author's name at the bottom.
Speaker 3: They're very sleepy.
Speaker 4: You could you can find pictures of these covers if
Speaker 4: you Google or bing or you know, maybe chat gpt
Speaker 4: write three.
Speaker 3: Books in twenty four hours. You can see you can
Speaker 3: see the cover.
Speaker 2: Finally, I've always wanted to write three books, s Garrison.
Speaker 4: So what this is is an app that will help
Speaker 4: you write these books is not going to do it
Speaker 4: all for you. You still need to come up with
Speaker 4: the general idea of the story. The hard stuff and
Speaker 4: the characters really the difficult. The world building is always
Speaker 4: the hardest part.
Speaker 2: Everyone says most of the work on a book is
Speaker 2: done the first six hours.
Speaker 4: The world building is the really hard part. The easy
Speaker 4: part is just getting all those words down. So you
Speaker 4: need to create create some characters.
Speaker 2: Now, could you just have some other AI service create
Speaker 2: these characters maybe.
Speaker 4: But you should write maybe about a thousand words kind
Speaker 4: of like a story bible type thing or a character
Speaker 4: character outline and a general direction for the story, and
Speaker 4: you feed that into this app and then within hours
Speaker 4: it will generate not just one book, not just two books.
Speaker 3: But a trilogy, wow of books. And it's only a trilogy.
Speaker 3: You cannot generate a single book. The only come in trilogy.
Speaker 2: Look, I get it's George Lucas worked the same way, Garrison.
Speaker 2: Look you're telling me that the greatest machine mind and
Speaker 2: history wouldn't think the same as the greatest human mind
Speaker 2: in history. You know, I bet it'll independently createiz music too.
Speaker 4: It only comes in trilogies. And I now shall read
Speaker 4: a sample of this writing, and like dying to read.
Speaker 4: There there was maybe like five or six different books
Speaker 4: with many copies of the same book on this table,
Speaker 4: and I flipped through, maybe about half reading like a
Speaker 4: random page every you know, every like twenty fifty pages,
Speaker 4: and it's a it was it was it was too
Speaker 4: boring that I I I forgot to take pictures of
Speaker 4: these pages because I was just like it was a
Speaker 4: struggle to finish, to finish each page but luckily on
Speaker 4: the website they do have some sample pages. I talked
Speaker 4: to one of the one of the guys working at
Speaker 4: the booth, and he said that he tried this so
Speaker 4: we're like. He found the service and he first thought,
Speaker 4: you know, sure that this can't be any good. And
Speaker 4: when he when he generated his book, he was surprised
Speaker 4: how good the writing is. He said that he probably
Speaker 4: wouldn't win a Pulletzer or a Hugo two awards that
Speaker 4: he named, but he said it was pretty good.
Speaker 3: Right, This guy was so far of the most Tim
Speaker 3: Robinson character I met at the conference.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 4: So Robert, you can pick the genre of of sample.
Speaker 4: We have a thriller book, a fantasy, mystery, science fiction, romance,
Speaker 4: or mainstream literary fiction.
Speaker 3: What what what genre do you want?
Speaker 2: I think I want science fiction, science fiction. I feel
Speaker 2: like there's the shortest line between parody and legitimate within
Speaker 2: sci fi.
Speaker 4: All right, this is from a book called I don't
Speaker 4: even want to say this one. I'm really curious now,
Speaker 4: palyimpsit orbit is what I'm going to say.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, they're strying to be Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3: It's called the pallimpsit orbit Chapter one, Desert Signals. Marrow
Speaker 3: woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and
Speaker 3: a pulse in her temples that felt one notch shy
Speaker 3: of a hangover. The ceiling above her was low and white,
Speaker 3: edged with soft events. A monitor over the bed scrolled
Speaker 3: green numbers in a stylized outline of her lungs thin air.
Speaker 3: She remembered five thousand meters the Atacama sky, somewhere above
Speaker 3: concrete and glass. Good morning, Doctor Allison. A calm baritone
Speaker 3: house the head. She turned toward the voice. A man
Speaker 3: in the doorway wore a slate blue, a clinic jumper,
Speaker 3: and a badge that caught the desert light leaking through
Speaker 3: the polarized glass, dark curls threaded with gray laugh lines
Speaker 3: that didn't quite match the tiredness around his eyes. Hey man,
Speaker 3: are you good? Yeah, go me to keep you going.
Speaker 2: I you know, it's it's again. It's like the it's
Speaker 2: an imitation of like a story. Like it's a scene,
Speaker 2: and it's a scene with details to describe people. But
Speaker 2: there's not like you would ideally I would have something
Speaker 2: of an idea of like what the thrust of the
Speaker 2: story is going to be like, for example, Bilbo Baggins
Speaker 2: was a hobbit who lived in an house underhill or
Speaker 2: something like that. Forget the exact wording of that, but like,
Speaker 2: I you know, it makes sense. It sounds like it
Speaker 2: sounds remarkably like bad.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be an insult nano remo writers
Speaker 2: that much. It just it just it sounds like a
Speaker 2: story that was generated based on a belief that, like, well,
Speaker 2: if we can just like describe enough stuff and use
Speaker 2: enough words to describe a scene, then that counts as plot. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, and character, which we don't have any of yet.
Speaker 4: It's all of it was this very generic, empty like
Speaker 4: stuff that's very very common. And if you ever have
Speaker 4: to read through a lot of like AI writing, whether
Speaker 4: for work or let's say, you know, you work in
Speaker 4: a college so you have students submitting this stuff, or
Speaker 4: you for some reason are online and you feel obligated
Speaker 4: to look at the worst parts of the world like
Speaker 4: what me and Robert do.
Speaker 3: Sometimes this is all feels very familiar.
Speaker 4: I'll read one other like paragraph from a different book,
Speaker 4: a thriller called The Helix Files, Oh Good, obviously part
Speaker 4: of a trilogy so who knows where these stories go
Speaker 4: over the course of three books. Quote the car heater
Speaker 4: had died ten minutes ago, cold leaked through the floorboards
Speaker 4: into Helix's boots. Outside the Eastern block industrial belt, slid
Speaker 4: past and gray slabs and rusted steel, wet concrete period,
Speaker 4: diesel period, a stray dog nosing trash heap outside the
Speaker 4: road first, slick with drizzle. So it's something that, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of this sort of like quick punchy
Speaker 4: sentences common in AI writing at the moment, wet concrete,
Speaker 4: you know, with a period, but like a lot of
Speaker 4: this type of stuff you see, you see in a
Speaker 4: AI writing you.
Speaker 2: Have a lot of a lot a lot of character
Speaker 2: and plot, a lot a lot of.
Speaker 4: Like m dash sentences. As I was flipping through these books,
Speaker 4: I was like, okay, ye, like I see what they're doing.
Speaker 2: I see.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: But but now, if if you want to write a
Speaker 4: quote unquote write a trilogy of books, you can pay
Speaker 4: the money and and within six hours you will have
Speaker 4: a trilogy. So what real least makes me feel optimistic
Speaker 4: about CES is the way that creativity is being democratized.
Speaker 3: It used to be that no ordinary person could write
Speaker 3: a book.
Speaker 2: You had to have a story and be some sort
Speaker 2: of freak at Oxford maybe like a you need like
Speaker 2: a pencil, maybe a keyboard. Ye, possible, barriers, it's not possible.
Speaker 4: And now luckily through AI, as long as you have
Speaker 4: you know, sub money to pay a subscription service and
Speaker 4: a computer.
Speaker 2: And VC fundraising and subsidizing of service.
Speaker 4: Ideally vcsh Yeah, then you too can be an author
Speaker 4: of a trilogy.
Speaker 2: Well, that's that's my plan for the future. I guess
Speaker 2: I want to end by talking about the second to
Speaker 2: the last panel that I sat through, which was at
Speaker 2: the AI house and was I think yet again this
Speaker 2: was another one that was about There were largely talking
Speaker 2: about ethics in this one, like AI and ethics and
Speaker 2: like what that actually means? And Eric Pace, who on
Speaker 2: the slide lajer City works at company but it reassuring, Yeah,
Speaker 2: reassuring who works at Cox Media which is like a
Speaker 2: big media company, yes, based on Georgia. And he had
Speaker 2: a couple of statements that were interested in me. He
Speaker 2: had one where he said that like it's kind of
Speaker 2: incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how
Speaker 2: and what sources and what AI is. They trust and
Speaker 2: why and figure that out. And I think the what
Speaker 2: I inferred was that like, because it's not going to
Speaker 2: get done by anyone else, and it kind of became
Speaker 2: include to me later. I think it's he also doesn't
Speaker 2: want anyone else to do it. He wants this to
Speaker 2: be an individual project where you have to kind of
Speaker 2: figure that out for yourself. I was kind of unsure
Speaker 2: as to whether he was the evil or just the
Speaker 2: pragmatic version of this, because the pragmatic version is like, literally,
Speaker 2: no one's going to restrict this stuff. You just have
Speaker 2: to try to get by right, which is maybe accurate.
Speaker 2: But there was a really interesting interaction on this panel.
Speaker 2: One of the other people there was doctor Martin Clancy,
Speaker 2: who was an Irish academic and a musician who was
Speaker 2: on the panel again to talk about like creativity and ethics,
Speaker 2: and made a comment that I found was really interesting
Speaker 2: and I don't know, I wouldn't say I agree or
Speaker 2: disagree with it, but I found it really interesting where
Speaker 2: he was like, actually, I'm not at all concerned comparatively
Speaker 2: about having an AI give me medical advice. I'm deeply
Speaker 2: concerned about letting an AI recommend music or movies to me,
Speaker 2: which I found a really interesting attitude and kind of
Speaker 2: a thought provoking Yeah, that is interesting, which was immediately
Speaker 2: spoiled by Eric Pace going like, well, I don't see
Speaker 2: why anyone would have an issue with an AI doctor.
Speaker 2: Doctors get things wrong all the time. And then he
Speaker 2: just like let that statement set. I have heard this
Speaker 2: as before, and AIS have a lot more data. And
Speaker 2: he ended it by saying, because everyone asked like, what
Speaker 2: were their big wins of the year, and his big
Speaker 2: win was that his wife hated chat ept and didn't
Speaker 2: want to use it, and he convinced her to use
Speaker 2: it to plan their vacation. It kind of sounded like
Speaker 2: he bullied her into it, but that was his big
Speaker 2: win for the year. I didn't like him.
Speaker 3: My win is I got.
Speaker 2: My wife into using a chat bot plan special time
Speaker 2: vacationing together because we're not creative enough to figure out
Speaker 2: how to go on a fucking trip.
Speaker 3: Hashtag AI win.
Speaker 2: Jesus, I don't know anyway. I think that's good for
Speaker 2: episode one from cees Come Back next week, where we'll
Speaker 2: all have more or listen to better offline, where Ed
Speaker 2: will have just a shocking amount of content from a
Speaker 2: lot of the relatively few and constantly shrinking stable of
Speaker 2: sane people reporting on technology.
Speaker 5: See next week.
Speaker 4: This is It could Happen Here Executive Disorder, our usually
Speaker 4: weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the
Speaker 4: crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrisondeo's Dam,
Speaker 4: joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Sophie Lichterman. This episode,
Speaker 4: we're covering the events from the end of December.
Speaker 3: To the first week of January. Yeah, and the events
Speaker 3: are not good.
Speaker 1: Did not start off to a slow start whatsoever. Did
Speaker 1: not ease into the new year.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this might be the worst, just the worst first
Speaker 3: week of a year I can remember it. I remember
Speaker 3: twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Worst year ever potentially maya.
Speaker 3: I long for the halcyon days in which twenty twenty
Speaker 3: was the worst year we'd ever experienced.
Speaker 5: I started twenty twenty cycling around Rwanda, and I had
Speaker 5: a great start twenty twenty. This has not been a
Speaker 5: great start.
Speaker 3: But no, Yeah, let's talk about the event that happened
Speaker 3: several hours before we started recording this. We're recording this
Speaker 3: again on Wednesday, January seventh, So I don't think there's
Speaker 3: gonna be any new information about this, but yeah, hours
Speaker 3: before we started recording, ICE shot and killed a woman
Speaker 3: in her car and a routine anti ICE action in Minneapolis.
Speaker 3: From the videos, these protests are identical to thousands of
Speaker 3: other small scale protests against ICE raids, where pissed off
Speaker 3: locals blow whistles and scream at the ICE agents who
Speaker 3: carry off their friends and family in the dead of night.
Speaker 3: The video shows ICE agents approaching a stopped car. One
Speaker 3: agent tries to open the front car door elle screaming
Speaker 3: get the fuck out, while another walks in front of
Speaker 3: the car as it backs up to pull away from
Speaker 3: the scene. As the vehicle pulls forward to drive away,
Speaker 3: the ICE agent pulls out his gun and shoots the driver.
Speaker 3: This is the agent's immediate response. There is no verbal warning.
Speaker 3: He simply pulls out the gun and shoots. There are
Speaker 3: videos out there you will see. I have seen three
Speaker 3: angles of it so far. The videos are graphic and
Speaker 3: gut wrenching, as we'll get into in a second, so
Speaker 3: be warned if you are trying to watch them, you
Speaker 3: are just going to see Ice murder a woman. The agent,
Speaker 3: I can fairly definitively say, was in absolutely no danger. Again,
Speaker 3: he simply steps aside from the slow moving vehicle. He
Speaker 3: has enough time to take a shot and then step
Speaker 3: aside and take two more shots. The video is just
Speaker 3: heart wrenching. The closest angle we have, the woman recording
Speaker 3: the video is screaming no as the agent pulls out
Speaker 3: his gun and shoots. There's another video that shows there
Speaker 3: is a passenger inside of the van, and it just
Speaker 3: sows You're sitting on the ground sobbing and saying, they
Speaker 3: killed my wife. I don't know what to do. It
Speaker 3: is one of the most heart wrenching things I have
Speaker 3: ever seen. Having watched the videos of both, it is
Speaker 3: eerily similar to ICE's murder of Silvero Viegas Gonzales in
Speaker 3: Chicago in September, who was also killed while attempting to
Speaker 3: drive away from ICE agents, and who the DHS has
Speaker 3: likewise accused of committing acts of domestic terrorism by attempting
Speaker 3: to ram agents. It is clear from both videos so
Speaker 3: that is not what was going on. Both these people
Speaker 3: were simply trying to pull away from the ICE agents,
Speaker 3: the other shooting that. This is very similar to that
Speaker 3: I think has been getting more press comparisons, even though
Speaker 3: in terms of what actually happens in the video that
Speaker 3: we have, I think it's closer to the actual murder.
Speaker 3: But it is also very, very similar to an incident
Speaker 3: in Chicago last year where Border Patrol agents hunted and
Speaker 3: then shot Mary mar Martinez, who thankfully survived but was
Speaker 3: charged by the federal government for domestic terrorism, a case
Speaker 3: which thankfully completely collapsed after, among other things, the contents
Speaker 3: of a group chat were released in which Charles ExHAM,
Speaker 3: who's the agent who shot her, was bragging it about
Speaker 3: shooting the woman in Chicago. So that's I think a
Speaker 3: valuable insight into the mindset of these people is that
Speaker 3: when one of these went to trial, we got a
Speaker 3: group chat where the agent who shot a different woman
Speaker 3: in a very similar situation was bragging about it. In
Speaker 3: the immediate wake of this Trump post untruth social that
Speaker 3: the driver in Minneapolis quote willfully and viciously ran over
Speaker 3: the ice officer who seems to have shot her in
Speaker 3: self defense end quote. And then he then links to
Speaker 3: a video which is a bad angle of the shooting
Speaker 3: that also does not show what he claims at all,
Speaker 3: because he is simply from the video footage we have available.
Speaker 3: This is simply a lie.
Speaker 5: Yeah, after the person was shot, that vehicle continued moving
Speaker 5: forward and struck a parked car. That is not unusual
Speaker 5: in the case when somebody's shot driving a vehicle, right
Speaker 5: like some forward you some forward onto the pedals. Yeah.
Speaker 3: There's two things I want to emphasize here. One is
Speaker 3: that the DHS always releases statements. This is the third
Speaker 3: shooting like this that we've had since these massive immigration
Speaker 3: rays began. Every single time they release the statements where
Speaker 3: they accuse the driver of intentionally attempting to ram the agent.
Speaker 3: It has never been true. We have seen three attempts
Speaker 3: of this, We have seen the videos and three attempts
Speaker 3: of this. It has been false every single time. Major
Speaker 3: media outlets continue to just post the statements without any
Speaker 3: of the context. That these people have been lying about
Speaker 3: this every single time. And that The second thing that
Speaker 3: I want to emphasize about this is how normal of
Speaker 3: a protest this was. This is just a completely ordinary
Speaker 3: ICE action. It looks like every other anti ICE action
Speaker 3: I have ever seen. It wasn't a particularly large one.
Speaker 3: It was just a group of people who were on
Speaker 3: the street. In the video where the woman is sobbing
Speaker 3: about her wife. She says that they pulled up to
Speaker 3: film the ICE agents.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's heart wrenching and lots of protests. Greg Bavino,
Speaker 3: whose influential word patrol officer we have talked about many
Speaker 3: times on the show, was at the scene. And it's
Speaker 3: also work noting this comes within twenty four hours of
Speaker 3: the White House announcing their giant operation in Minneapolis to
Speaker 3: deploy two thousand federal agents.
Speaker 4: This was specifically a new surge that started on Tuesday,
Speaker 4: January sixth, and yeah, literally less than twenty four hours
Speaker 4: after this surge, Ice killed a woman.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The thing I want to end on in the of
Speaker 3: the immediate analysis before we talk a bit about the
Speaker 3: protests that have been happening, is that absolutely hauntingly, today's
Speaker 3: murder took place less than a mile away from where
Speaker 3: police officer Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd, which is Yeah,
Speaker 3: it is as clearer demonstration of the continuity of the
Speaker 3: violence of the American state as can possibly be produced. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and I think the other pattern that we've seen specifically
Speaker 3: in these prot just is pulling weapons on people constantly,
Speaker 3: even more so than normal police would. And you know,
Speaker 3: I remember a lot of people I've talked you in Chicago.
Speaker 3: One of the things that they said is that, yeah,
Speaker 3: this is if they're eventually going to shoot someone, and
Speaker 3: they've now shot a third person in the course of
Speaker 3: these operations, and presumably as long as they're allowed to continue,
Speaker 3: they will probably shoot more people. Because one of the
Speaker 3: things that's the best apparent from this video is that
Speaker 3: this is the sort of muscle memory reaction that they
Speaker 3: have to being in front of a car that's moving
Speaker 3: towards them. There's no thinking, there's no thought. They just
Speaker 3: pull out the gun. Shoot.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean he's shooting the same time he's moving sideways
Speaker 4: out of the way of the of the car.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: He just as easily could have not fired, and it
Speaker 4: would have had the same result. He just chose to fire.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: A little over an hour after the shooting, Mayor Jacob
Speaker 3: Afray of Minneapolis gave a press conference where he said
Speaker 3: this to Ice.
Speaker 9: There's little I can say again that'll make this situation better.
Speaker 9: But I do have a message for our community, for
Speaker 9: a city, and I have a message for Ice to Ice,
Speaker 9: get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want
Speaker 9: you here. Your stated reason for being in this city
Speaker 9: is to create some kind of safety, and you are
Speaker 9: doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt, Families are
Speaker 9: being ripped apart. Long term Minneapolis residents that have contributed
Speaker 9: so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our
Speaker 9: economy are being terrorized. And now somebody is dead. That's
Speaker 9: on you, and it's also on you to leave. It's
Speaker 9: on you to make sure that further damage, further loss
Speaker 9: of life and injury is not done. We're going to
Speaker 9: be working towards justice as quickly as we possibly ken
Speaker 9: right now.
Speaker 5: Justice is what we've all got to get.
Speaker 3: Fray, I think is just is reflecting the sentiments of
Speaker 3: the city right now. There are immediate protests in I mean,
Speaker 3: within minutes of the shooting, there were people showing up.
Speaker 3: Protests have been intensifying, crowds have got tear guest, like
Speaker 3: thirty minutes.
Speaker 2: After the shooting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and Bovino is there are pictures
Speaker 3: of him on scene while these protesters are sort of
Speaker 3: ramping up. So we will see what happens in Minneapolis
Speaker 3: in the coming days.
Speaker 4: Solidarity protests have already be announced in Portland and Philadelphia. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I'm sure more cities will follow in the coming hours.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll give an update next week if more information
Speaker 3: becomes available. I think the events themselves are fairly clear,
Speaker 3: but we will see what the federal reaction to this
Speaker 3: is going to be and what the reaction on the
Speaker 3: ground is, and we will keep you updated.
Speaker 5: Let's let's have some mends here and we'll be back
Speaker 5: to talk without Benz Will. We are back with the
Speaker 5: second wild story of this week, which is that the
Speaker 5: United States, specially United States Special Forces, radio Caracas last
Speaker 5: week and kidnapped President Maduro, who was the president of Venezuela,
Speaker 5: and his wife. We covered the details of this in
Speaker 5: a whole episode, so I'm not going to go over
Speaker 5: in any great detail here, and that's already out. Trump
Speaker 5: kidnaps Venezuelan President Maduro is the name of that episode,
Speaker 5: so you should be got to find out the feed.
Speaker 3: He danced too close to the sun.
Speaker 5: I'm not so sure that dancing was the fact of it.
Speaker 5: I will only update that to say a couple of things.
Speaker 5: First of all, we know that there were in excess
Speaker 5: of fifty Venezuelan casualties, right, or I should say there
Speaker 5: were in excess of fifty casualties.
Speaker 3: Some of those would probably be Cubid subecurity force.
Speaker 5: US national in a military advice kind of a prestige posting,
Speaker 5: but military adviser kind of role. And that there were
Speaker 5: injuries to US troops we didn't hear about first. So
Speaker 5: US troops and US helicopters did sustain some damage, but
Speaker 5: there were no people killed on the United States side.
Speaker 5: And Donald Trump has truth that I'm just going to
Speaker 5: read this one. I think we can do our best
Speaker 5: to understand it. I am pleased to announce that interim
Speaker 5: authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between thirty and
Speaker 5: fifty million barrels of high quality, sanctioned oil to the
Speaker 5: United States of America. This oil will be sold at
Speaker 5: its market price, and that money will be controlled by me,
Speaker 5: as President of the United States of America, to ensure
Speaker 5: that it's used to benefit the people of Venezuela and
Speaker 5: the United States. I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Right
Speaker 5: to execute this plan immediately. It will be taken by
Speaker 5: storage ships and bought directly to unloading docks in the
Speaker 5: United States. Thank you for your attention to the matter.
Speaker 5: Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.
Speaker 3: You know, I distinctly remember the days the haulsey in
Speaker 3: days when I was a child, when saying no war
Speaker 3: for oil was a provocative political statement because the leaders
Speaker 3: of our country insisted that the wars were not in
Speaker 3: fact for oil.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all that has dropped and we do not give
Speaker 3: a single thunk anymore. No, it just openly doing the
Speaker 3: thing they were doing before.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's wild to think of the Bush era of
Speaker 5: a golden age of at least pretending is extraordinarily vague. Right,
Speaker 5: how much this oil is it being turned over over?
Speaker 5: What period of time? It's Venezuela. Were expected to extract
Speaker 5: and refine the oil then hand it over or it's
Speaker 5: going to give you as companies a right.
Speaker 4: To do that.
Speaker 3: They don't have much of the processing facilities. There's like one,
Speaker 3: I think American processing facility that can process the kind
Speaker 3: of crew that comes out of Venezuela. But it's difficult.
Speaker 3: We talked about this in more in the other episode.
Speaker 3: But it's the Venezuela and oil sucks. It's difficult to refine,
Speaker 3: it's no high quality.
Speaker 5: What are you talking about right here? Right here in
Speaker 5: the post man, I don't know, I don't know's hearing
Speaker 5: the truth. Yeah, in the truth, thank you, thank you, Garrison.
Speaker 5: That really does make it sound. I can reading from
Speaker 5: the Bible at church and think that God, we'll say
Speaker 5: the oil is not sanctioned. That's not how sanctions work.
Speaker 5: Sanctioned countries and people, not things. Bizarre centerence structure is there. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's doing a lot for me. So, Yeah, I talked
Speaker 5: about the Rodriguez option in the last show, and I
Speaker 5: guess this is kind of confirming a lot of what
Speaker 5: we get speculated about there.
Speaker 3: That's assuming this happens. By the way, I will say
Speaker 3: that there was some dip in oil prices today over
Speaker 3: the exact splication of this is real. But I don't
Speaker 3: know how well connected those people are, either quite frankly,
Speaker 3: or how much of an understanding anyone has over whether
Speaker 3: this is going to happen or not. We don't know.
Speaker 3: He just says things, and sometimes they happen and sometimes
Speaker 3: they don't, And there's no actual way to tell which
Speaker 3: ones are going to come true and which ones are
Speaker 3: just him posting from Trump's mouth to Rubio's ears.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but then Riba said something different in an interview.
Speaker 5: Trump says it again and then yeah, there we go. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it does look like they are tempting to pursue the
Speaker 5: strategy which you spoke about, which it is the only
Speaker 5: thing getting liberated in Venezuela is the oil. Right that
Speaker 5: they will allow the regime to continue. They will not
Speaker 5: be any attempt at regime change. They just want a
Speaker 5: puppet version of the old regime which they can manipulate
Speaker 5: purely apparently for their own financial benefit with oil. Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's also worth noting that Trump is claiming that he
Speaker 3: personally is going to be controlling the money after it's
Speaker 3: sold at market price, a sentence that at any other
Speaker 3: time in American history would be the most dictatorial thing
Speaker 3: you've ever seen, but pales in comparison to the fact
Speaker 3: that he is claiming to be running a country after
Speaker 3: a war that he unilaterally started without congress.
Speaker 4: So, I mean, isn't even accurate to call it a war.
Speaker 4: It seems like it's like a single military action. Now,
Speaker 4: it's like an act of war, I guess, right.
Speaker 3: But if you combined the blockades, which are an active war,
Speaker 3: and we'll get to blockades more in a second, and this,
Speaker 3: I think this is just a war.
Speaker 4: Like I mean, I went to the protest in New
Speaker 4: York the morning after the action, and you know, a
Speaker 4: lot of a lot of chance for about you know,
Speaker 4: no war in Venezuela, you know, no more bombs in Venezuela.
Speaker 4: And like it looks like they're kind of done. They're
Speaker 4: kind of done with the bombs. They're kind of done
Speaker 4: with the war.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing though, So Trump has also said that
Speaker 3: if the current government of Venezuela refuses to comply, he
Speaker 3: will do more strikes whoa so than he did to Madua. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's always kind of difficult to parse exactly what's
Speaker 3: going on there, but yeah.
Speaker 5: It's a potential for more US action, definitely. Yeah, it
Speaker 5: seems like right now they paid to have got roughly
Speaker 5: what they wanted. And then like there's also the potential
Speaker 5: for this do you any number of ways? Right, Like
Speaker 5: things could continue to deteriorate for the regime there, Like,
Speaker 5: like what does it mean for their ability They have
Speaker 5: previously had the ability to use various kind of nefarious
Speaker 5: reflaggings of boats, which me is going to talk about
Speaker 5: a second here to obtain some income, right, Like, if
Speaker 5: they're not even able to do that, it's get even worse, right,
Speaker 5: and the economic situation in Venezuela could very easily get worse.
Speaker 5: I know everyone I've spoken to there is out trying
Speaker 5: to stock up on nonperishable food and they don't know
Speaker 5: what the future holds for them. Plus you now have,
Speaker 5: as we saw earlier in this week, very trigger happy
Speaker 5: pro government militias will probably be the best way to
Speaker 5: describe it, like in this case that they were shooting
Speaker 5: at a drone up in the air. But there is
Speaker 5: very clearly still a lot of tension in the country.
Speaker 4: So on Saturday morning, after the military action Venezuela, I
Speaker 4: went to the protest in New York, like like I
Speaker 4: previously mentioned, and I've put together this little audio report
Speaker 4: that I recorded at the protest that takes you through
Speaker 4: about like an hour's worth of protest activity.
Speaker 3: And yeah, give it a give it a listen.
Speaker 4: It is Saturday, January third, two fifty four pm. I
Speaker 4: am in Times Square with I would say two hundred
Speaker 4: to three hundred people protesting US action in Venezuela as
Speaker 4: well as Iran and the genocide and Palestine. Kind of
Speaker 4: a mix of causes, but mostly talking about Venezuela and
Speaker 4: the military extradition of President Maduro. The organizational structure at
Speaker 4: this protest seems to be mostly propped up by various
Speaker 4: communist organizations. Is a revolution Communist Party tabling. There's the BOB,
Speaker 4: a vacant refuse fascism organization with a lot of banners
Speaker 4: and signs. PSL has a bunch of banners and signs,
Speaker 4: as well as the Coney Internationalist Student Group, which.
Speaker 3: Is tied to the New York City Public University system.
Speaker 4: They have some homemade signs, the only signs actually drawn
Speaker 4: on paper probably this morning, versus all of the PSL
Speaker 4: signs which appear pre printed and pre prepared. A rotating
Speaker 4: selection of speakers have given speeches for the past hour,
Speaker 4: and now at three pm, this relatively small crowd for
Speaker 4: a New York protest is leading a.
Speaker 5: March south you no, I'm not alive.
Speaker 4: The marches taking up probably about one city block just
Speaker 4: outside of Times Square on.
Speaker 3: Forty third and eighth.
Speaker 2: Turning on to eighth Avenue.
Speaker 4: Now after about ten minutes of marching and why pdvikes
Speaker 4: at the front of the march as well as on
Speaker 4: foot officers on either side of the crowd.
Speaker 2: Not like a huge presence.
Speaker 3: I maybe seen cumulatively one hundred or so cops, which
Speaker 3: is actually not that much for New.
Speaker 4: York, especially based on how spread out they are, because
Speaker 4: maybe like two dozen cops on either side of the march,
Speaker 4: just walking walking on the sidewalk, and then maybe another
Speaker 4: another two to three dozen in the front and more
Speaker 4: in the back, so between fifty to one hundred cops.
Speaker 4: A little over fifteen minutes into the march. They have
Speaker 4: now moved up to forty seventh Street. At this point,
Speaker 4: there's been zero conflict with the police. They've mostly facilitated
Speaker 4: the traffic around the march as people continue to chant.
Speaker 2: And walk north.
Speaker 4: The crowd has been marching for over thirty five minutes
Speaker 4: and now are arriving at what I assume is their destination,
Speaker 4: Columbus Circle up at fifty eighth Street and Broadway.
Speaker 3: No scuffles with the police.
Speaker 4: There was like two guys in mega hats, kind of
Speaker 4: I'm trying to antagonize the side of the crowd. For
Speaker 4: the past fifteen minutes, nothing really happened. One random dude
Speaker 4: came out of a convenience store yelling fuck Roduro, trying
Speaker 4: to agitate some people in the crowd, but everyone just
Speaker 4: moved on and now they are approaching Columbus Circle.
Speaker 11: The decent people in this country needs to answer the
Speaker 11: people of the whole.
Speaker 3: What are we gonna do?
Speaker 11: This is not a time for prof that's usual. There
Speaker 11: needs to be a full regime, not in Venezuela, right.
Speaker 3: Here in the US.
Speaker 1: People in this country.
Speaker 3: Fly goo boom to begin to fall in this fashion.
Speaker 3: Reim you guys, get in choice.
Speaker 4: EPIS. Police are now very lightly directing people into Columbus Circle,
Speaker 4: onto the plaza and off of the street. Some groups
Speaker 4: are packing up their protests, signs and bags and starting
Speaker 4: to peel off. So as expected, this protest was done
Speaker 4: by a coalition of anti imperialist leftist, socialist communist organizations.
Speaker 4: You have the Party for Socialism and Liberation PSL and
Speaker 4: all of these other communist groups who are all primarily
Speaker 4: either trying to grow their membership roster or sell their newspapers,
Speaker 4: sell their magazines. And this is what most of the
Speaker 4: protest actually is. They have tables set up while people
Speaker 4: are giving speeches. They have people walking around handing out
Speaker 4: pamphlets and flyers. And this protest was not very big,
Speaker 4: Like I said, it was relatively small, maybe two hundred
Speaker 4: and three hundred people, because there's not a lot of
Speaker 4: public buy in for this sort of thing, because at
Speaker 4: this point, if anyone's been around, they know, based on
Speaker 4: the flyers that get posted, what kind of protest this
Speaker 4: is going to be. This is going to be socialist
Speaker 4: communist organizations trying to grow their membership. It's not a
Speaker 4: representative sample of the people of New York, is It
Speaker 4: is people trying to sell magazines and newspapers and books.
Speaker 4: And the fact that the entire proto secret system for
Speaker 4: stuff like this is fully captured by these sorts of
Speaker 4: organizations makes it really hard to grow a genuine movement
Speaker 4: because people know that it's going to be walking for
Speaker 4: thirty minutes and then people are going to be shoving
Speaker 4: pamphlets in their in their hand, and that's the extent
Speaker 4: to what you are protesting. It is that it's walking
Speaker 4: along a path led by the NYPD to Columbus Circle.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm totily's having in almost every city in the US, right,
Speaker 5: Like I saw a fly of F one in San Diego.
Speaker 5: Personally couldn't be asked to attend because, as you say,
Speaker 5: like I knew what was going to happen and like
Speaker 5: a person in a high verse and a clipboard was
Speaker 5: going to try and get my email address.
Speaker 3: I will say that the thing, the thing that did
Speaker 3: hearten me a little bit was that there were a
Speaker 3: few protests, I mean, just out in the Chicago suburbs,
Speaker 3: which is not a place you normally have these that
Speaker 3: weren't by these groups that were just pretty spontaneous on
Speaker 3: the morning of the demonstration. But the sort of issue, yeah,
Speaker 3: that you're fraying two Garrison is that like even these
Speaker 3: spontaneous protests, the energy just gets captured by like the
Speaker 3: PSL and these organizations that fundamentally don't want to do
Speaker 3: anything other than grow their organization.
Speaker 5: And that's design from in order to co opt the
Speaker 5: anger that's happening right now. And I wanted to find
Speaker 5: out that anger any useless direction that burned people out
Speaker 5: on activism. I wouldn't change anything from the PSL.
Speaker 3: And I mean, and this is this has been what
Speaker 3: the American anti war movement has looked like since the
Speaker 3: Rock War demonstrations. Yeah, right, this was this was one
Speaker 3: of the battles that happened inside of the Rock War protests,
Speaker 3: and it's one of the reasons why they didn't.
Speaker 4: Work, and like, this is a very serious thing, Like
Speaker 4: this is a very serious military action that should warrant
Speaker 4: massive public outcry. But protesting taps into a finite resource
Speaker 4: that people have, and when you have an inclination that
Speaker 4: the protests are going to go this way, people might
Speaker 4: not want to expend their personal resource because it is
Speaker 4: not seriously putting pressure on anyone making decisions in the government.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is a very serious thing that we shouldn't
Speaker 5: under play for a second that like the United States
Speaker 5: had done something which is completely illegal, right, which is
Speaker 5: an act of war against a sovereign country, And me
Speaker 5: saying this doesn't mean I'm going.
Speaker 2: To du rose down.
Speaker 5: Anyone who has listened to any portion of my work
Speaker 5: will understand that. But it is incredibly serious to the
Speaker 5: US and attempting to set as president that it can
Speaker 5: just black bag heads of state. Whether or not the
Speaker 5: US considers a legitimate right, their argument that the duor
Speaker 5: is not legitimate, it doesn't matter. If they can just
Speaker 5: send dudes in helicopters to black people around the world,
Speaker 5: then that is a very scary precedent.
Speaker 4: All right, I am going to head out and return
Speaker 4: to the CEES show floor. I will say for the
Speaker 4: if you're doing a tariff talk segment, there has been
Speaker 4: discussion of tariffs at CEES that I have not mentioned
Speaker 4: on the CS episodes so far, two thumbs down to
Speaker 4: two thumbs down on the tariffs from the Consumer Electronics Showcase.
Speaker 4: Now they're coming out with the bold stands that they
Speaker 4: don't like the terror Wow.
Speaker 5: I think Ivanka Trump was giving a knot of dress
Speaker 5: at the last CS that I attended.
Speaker 3: Rock incredible, incredible.
Speaker 5: Well related news. I stopped attended.
Speaker 4: Well, I have to keep attending now because the Secretary
Speaker 4: to the US from Estonia was was googling me for
Speaker 4: thirty minutes yesterday, So I might be getting a new passport.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, God speed.
Speaker 5: The AI prebanalyzing toilet for me, Garrison, I will do so.
Speaker 3: One of the questions that we had at the very
Speaker 3: beginning of this operation was what is going to happen
Speaker 3: to the US oil blockade on Venezuela. And the answer
Speaker 3: is that it appears to still be in a fact,
Speaker 3: the evidence of which is the US interdicting to oil tankers,
Speaker 3: one of which they've been chasing for about a month.
Speaker 3: A few weeks which is really funny if you know
Speaker 3: how large an oil tanker is that you've fit in
Speaker 3: a boat chased with an oil tanker, It's.
Speaker 2: Like, I guess it's just so big they can't make
Speaker 2: it stop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: Apparently the demonstrations claiming that the coast Guard had attempted
Speaker 3: to board it, and they refuse to allow the coast
Speaker 3: Guard to board. But the only thing I can think
Speaker 3: of is, you know those those giant vehicles they use
Speaker 3: to move rockets around at JPL or like like from JPL,
Speaker 3: like on the launch site where they had They can
Speaker 3: only move like five miles an hour, and they're the
Speaker 3: size of a rocket because you have to have a
Speaker 3: standing rocket on it. That's what it's like. They're chasing
Speaker 3: an empty oil tanker the Atlantic. It's also worth noting
Speaker 3: that one of the very weird parts of this is
Speaker 3: that I'm gonna quote quote from writers here. Attorney General
Speaker 3: Pam Bondi said in a statement that the ship's crew
Speaker 3: had made quote frantic efforts to avoid apprehension, which again
Speaker 3: I kind of emphasize this it off. This is an
Speaker 3: oil tanker, Like, this is not a speed This is
Speaker 3: like the largest like one of one of the largest
Speaker 3: and most unwieldly craft that humanity has ever produced in
Speaker 3: its entire history. Like, how are you getting frantically aber?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I don't know an oil taker evasive maneuvers and this
Speaker 3: is this is also from the Raiders thing end quote
Speaker 3: failed to obey Coastguard orders and so faces criminal charges,
Speaker 3: which sucks. But also I like, if you're getting evaded
Speaker 3: by an oil tanker, that is a skill issue.
Speaker 2: Like you, there are websites where you can track these things.
Speaker 3: They have transponders, like when this thing was captured, its
Speaker 3: transponder was on. So this skill issue. I good Lord.
Speaker 3: On a more serious note, this is this is part
Speaker 3: of that initial oil blockade of sanctioned Venezuela and oil
Speaker 3: that began last year. The US government has been saying
Speaker 3: that this ship and the other ship that the other
Speaker 3: oil tankers that they've seized are basically ghost ships, which
Speaker 3: we talked about another episode. I don't know if you
Speaker 3: want to explain again what that is, James.
Speaker 5: But yeah, they're often old ships that are either reflagged
Speaker 5: or the ships that have been retired and are returned,
Speaker 5: or the ships have been scraped and someone has taken
Speaker 5: their name, and it's using it so that they pay
Speaker 5: elect ships, you know, coming back from the dead. But
Speaker 5: often they will reflag or rename halfway through their trip,
Speaker 5: and it's a bunch of boat law stuff to avoid sanctions,
Speaker 5: is what they tend to be.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so that that's the US's justification for season
Speaker 3: two more oil tankers, which again I also cannot emphasize
Speaker 3: enough that this also is an act of work.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, were they flagged as Venezuelan.
Speaker 3: No, one of them was flagged as Russian, and I
Speaker 3: haven't seen anything about what the other ship was flagged as.
Speaker 3: China has protested the seizures of these boats, but there
Speaker 3: hasn't really been anything other than diplomatic noise so far
Speaker 3: from the Chinese government. Who if there was a government
Speaker 3: on the world stage who was going to do a
Speaker 3: serious protest about this, I think it would have been
Speaker 3: either Russia or China, And we haven't really seen anything
Speaker 3: more significant than the diplomats being annoyed. So we will
Speaker 3: continue to see how this oil blockade plays out and
Speaker 3: the effects that it has on people in Venezuela. I
Speaker 3: wish I had a better adpuvot for this but I don't.
Speaker 3: So here's ads.
Speaker 5: Well, they liked oil tankers. May they just rumble along
Speaker 5: and you can't stop it? And then yes, we've been
Speaker 5: unable to interdictment.
Speaker 3: We are back from our failed ad intradiction. Do you
Speaker 3: want to talk about Syria, James, Oh yeah, this is.
Speaker 5: James Grim the rest of the world segment to a
Speaker 5: lot of bad stuff is happening, and some of it's
Speaker 5: not going to punch into like your mainstream US news
Speaker 5: media diet. So right now, pretty serious fighting has broken
Speaker 5: out in a leper right. Syrian transitional government forces are
Speaker 5: shelling and attempting to enter the Kurdish enclave shipmuk Sud.
Speaker 5: Shipmunk Sud is like an area in where Curdish and
Speaker 5: other people right there with Christian people. There are zd
Speaker 5: people who live there have this enclave has remained right
Speaker 5: despite the the regime taking over of the Syrian traditional
Speaker 5: government taking over the rest of their leaper right, they
Speaker 5: didn't take over the areas. Area has remained under the
Speaker 5: control of the aa n E S, the AUTO this
Speaker 5: Administration of North and East Syria AKA or Java, but
Speaker 5: they have demilitarized it. And what that means is that
Speaker 5: there are only internal security forces who are called SASH
Speaker 5: in Kurdish in this region. But it peers that what
Speaker 5: happened was an SDF drone unit struck an STG vehicle
Speaker 5: with a drone. STG Syrian Transitional Government, right, that's the
Speaker 5: Jilani al Shara government, and of.
Speaker 3: Course they have another acronym just y. Acronyms were over, yeah,
Speaker 3: they're none.
Speaker 5: Yeah aways more so they hit this std VI Glinda
Speaker 5: Hafa and then the STG seemed to respond by dropping
Speaker 5: grenades into Ship Maksoud from drones, and then the SASH
Speaker 5: responded with drones and conflict began. Right, what's different then?
Speaker 5: There has been conflict on and off in shipmak Sud
Speaker 5: for a long time, but in the last year, right
Speaker 5: since HTS moved from Aleppo to seize most of the country.
Speaker 5: Htslo alf Sham, a group that was formerly on the
Speaker 5: Foreign Terrorist Organization that's the United States no longer is
Speaker 5: what we have seen here is not only shelling of
Speaker 5: the Ship mac sudent neighborhood and shelling in response or
Speaker 5: mortify and response for the SFAs don't have heavy weapons,
Speaker 5: that's not their role. The STG has also attempted to
Speaker 5: enter shik Maxu to seize it. Right, this has obviously
Speaker 5: prompted thousands of people to flee because they are worried,
Speaker 5: very reasonably about groups that were previously known under the
Speaker 5: banner of the SNA or the Turkish FSA, who have
Speaker 5: previously conducted ethnic cleansing of Kurdish people in areas that
Speaker 5: they have managed to take control of, right, who have
Speaker 5: murdered civilians, who have executed women in Kurdish politics. There's
Speaker 5: every reason for these civilian interfere that happening again, right,
Speaker 5: because the Syrian Transitional Government has far too often just
Speaker 5: rebadged SNA units with a long and storied history of
Speaker 5: war crimes and not done anything to stop them doing
Speaker 5: it again. But also, some of these are not SNA units.
Speaker 5: Some of these are Syrian Transitional Government units from other
Speaker 5: parts of Syria. Nonetheless, there's this attempt and encouraging into
Speaker 5: the neighborhood is remarkable. It's different. As I write this,
Speaker 5: the SDG appeared to be staging to enter the neighborhood again.
Speaker 5: Very amusingly, they took a video showing this, which also
Speaker 5: revealed the position of all their armor on telegram classic
Speaker 5: classic serience of a war stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, everyone loves to be revealing their position on telegram.
Speaker 5: So yeah, maybe when I when I reopened telegram, those
Speaker 5: guys will have been wiped out by a bunch of
Speaker 5: your owns. Who knows. But yet it continues to be
Speaker 5: a flashpoint. And this is the most serious flare up
Speaker 5: we've seen in a long time. Right, there was supposed
Speaker 5: to be an agreement for the integration of the SDF
Speaker 5: into the Syrian Transitional Government Ministry of Defense. That has failed.
Speaker 5: They haven't come to an agreement. Various sources are reporting
Speaker 5: various things about what they wanted, specifically what the SDF
Speaker 5: wanted for a YPG. Who are the Women's Defense Forces
Speaker 5: and there are that is a definitely red line for them.
Speaker 5: They won't disband that though. The women won't put down
Speaker 5: their guts right and for very reasonable reasons. We don't
Speaker 5: know exactly if the Serting Transitional Government refuse to accept
Speaker 5: them in any way. They have said they wouldn't do it,
Speaker 5: that they have said they would accept them, but we
Speaker 5: don't really have like a very clear picture of the
Speaker 5: last round of negotiations. Talking of Kurdish armed groups, let's
Speaker 5: go from Jaba to Roger. That right across Kurdistan from
Speaker 5: west to east, just looking at the little compass in
Speaker 5: my head. In Iran, protests have grown around the country.
Speaker 5: These protests began largely because of the decreased purchasing power
Speaker 5: of people's money. There. Of course, the protests have further
Speaker 5: reduced that and people are really feeling the economic bite
Speaker 5: right now. This time. What is different is that armed
Speaker 5: groups have come out in support. I saw LEAD, the
Speaker 5: name translates as People's Revolutionary Front had assassinated a car
Speaker 5: Brothers like a drive by pak so Pak, one of
Speaker 5: the smaller Kurdish paramilitary groups. I made an episode I
Speaker 5: think it was called what does Bombing Mean for Freedom
Speaker 5: in Iran last year with Gourdain and I will try
Speaker 5: and get back with Gordy soon to talk more about this.
Speaker 5: But if you're wondering who are all these groups? What
Speaker 5: are all these acronyms, that's the episode you need to
Speaker 5: go to. So Pak, Peshmoker have been killed, right, which
Speaker 5: is a significant change. There have been armed elements in
Speaker 5: these protests and there has been a unity statement both
Speaker 5: from the different Kurdish armed groups. I think it was
Speaker 5: Piyak pak and Comala who made this statement, right, and
Speaker 5: then also from coalition of Kurdish women's organizations. It's organization
Speaker 5: from across that political spectrum, but in that part of
Speaker 5: the world together to denounce the actions of the regime,
Speaker 5: which include, for instance, in Elam Province riot police storming
Speaker 5: a hospital. I don't know people will have seen that video,
Speaker 5: but it was extremely surving.
Speaker 3: Has there been any movement from the Belushi independence groups. Yeah,
Speaker 3: sure there has, Yeah, but I know I'm pretty sure
Speaker 3: it was a Volushi group. I remember the twenty nineteen protests.
Speaker 3: The most military got was I think a Blueshi group
Speaker 3: like fired at RPG at a police track point, but
Speaker 3: it never really sort of spread beyond that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't know. There are different Yeah, there are
Speaker 5: a number of like volutions groups. I'm not aware of
Speaker 5: their involvement. There have definitely been like police repression there
Speaker 5: like there was everywhere else. Right, Yeah, absolutely, But yeah,
Speaker 5: I will try and probably have this in a whole
Speaker 5: episode next week. There, I've had a lot of time
Speaker 5: to prepare on that with all the craziness. I did
Speaker 5: see that this morning. So we're on the seventh again.
Speaker 5: The armed forces attack protesters in the Grand Bazaar and Tehran,
Speaker 5: which you're not aware, has a tremendou significance right from
Speaker 5: their seventeen nine revolution there, and Entrump has tron twenty
Speaker 5: ven as he always does.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, exactly perfectly what the regime wants. There's a
Speaker 3: lesson to portray themselves as defenders of Iranian sovereignty et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera, against American imperialism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, America, great Satan. Moving on, let's talk about Israel.
Speaker 5: Israel has threatened to withhold I think it has now
Speaker 5: withheld registration to operate in Gaza from Msfontierre, ox FAN
Speaker 5: and a number of other aid organizations. MSF I'm just
Speaker 5: going to quote from them called it a cynical and
Speaker 5: calculated attempt to prevent organizations from providing services in Gaza
Speaker 5: in the West Bank, which is a breach of Israel's
Speaker 5: obligations under international humanitarian law. It's just them trying to
Speaker 5: further starve people to death, right, there's no other reason.
Speaker 5: Like Israel has made the claim that these groups have
Speaker 5: been infiltrated by militants. That is a blackable conjecture, Like, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's a bad joke. Like I've worked for THEMSSEF and
Speaker 5: OXFAM all over the world. Right, there are a lot
Speaker 5: of criticisms of them. I would make one of them
Speaker 5: is not that they have been infiltration.
Speaker 2: By shocking on us like you're having a laugh.
Speaker 5: I want to do a hard episode on this.
Speaker 4: But like.
Speaker 5: When Brian talks about two plus two weekals five in
Speaker 5: nineteen eighty four, this is where that gets us right,
Speaker 5: when you can just say something that is blatantly false
Speaker 5: and force people to agree that it is true. And
Speaker 5: that is the project of genocide because it first has
Speaker 5: to destroy the truth to justify what it is doing.
Speaker 5: And we are seeing that happening. And a very brief
Speaker 5: migration update. Finally, in the case before George Bosberg, regarding
Speaker 5: the Alien Enemies Act that we've brought about before, the
Speaker 5: Trump administration asked for a delay because of the changing
Speaker 5: situation in Vents Whaler, right. I don't think there was
Speaker 5: them for delay so they can be like, oh, it's
Speaker 5: not safe for people to go back, we'd better keep
Speaker 5: hold of them and treat them nicely. It is nice
Speaker 5: suspicion that any agreement they come to with the Rodriguez
Speaker 5: regime will include that it must accept people back, and
Speaker 5: as I said in the other episode, right, these people
Speaker 5: are going back to a country which is a deeply
Speaker 5: paranoid about American spies, and they have lived in America.
Speaker 5: This is not going to be good for them. And
Speaker 5: the City of San Diego has sued the Trump in
Speaker 5: administration for damage to city property on Marin Valley Road
Speaker 5: or it's father complaint today to do so, I'm glad
Speaker 5: of doing it. It's also deeply hypocritical. Right Mayor Tod
Speaker 5: Gloria was out there asking for more border security finding
Speaker 5: Underbiden if he finded the office in the city which
Speaker 5: would welcome refugees and migrants, like, is it just a
Speaker 5: publicity thing?
Speaker 2: Probably?
Speaker 5: Like these people don't care. Right, when migrants were being
Speaker 5: held in the open air in San Diego County and
Speaker 5: San Diego City, these people weren't there. I'm still glad's happening.
Speaker 5: But don't for one second believe these people get a
Speaker 5: single shit about but migrants. They don't and don't for
Speaker 5: one second. Thing they're voting for them is voting to
Speaker 5: be kind to migrants, because it's not. Todd Glaorier is
Speaker 5: a liar, and just like everything else, he is using
Speaker 5: its an opportunity to promote himself and he's a terrible person.
Speaker 5: But yeah, in this case they are suming for trespassing
Speaker 5: and placing a razor wire on city property. It's city property.
Speaker 5: This way outside of what you would think the city
Speaker 5: of San Diego is. It's just adjacent to o Turnout
Speaker 5: and wilderness. But I think they have it there for
Speaker 5: water rights reasons or something.
Speaker 3: Brief teriff update, not tariff news this week, however, Comma
Speaker 3: the Supreme Court is expected to roll on the giant
Speaker 3: case over a wide swath of Trump's tariffs this Friday.
Speaker 3: So next week we will explain what happened there on
Speaker 3: the Fallout. As you're listening to this episode, that decision
Speaker 3: might have already been released. Have fun and put a
Speaker 3: transgirl on your couch.
Speaker 5: And if you were learning to email us, you can
Speaker 5: do so Cool Zone tips at Proton don't me. If
Speaker 5: you wanted to be encrypted, you should use a Proton
Speaker 5: mail address as well.
Speaker 1: And you know we reported the news.
Speaker 5: We reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 7: It could happen.
Speaker 6: Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 6: podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com,
Speaker 6: or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 6: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find
Speaker 6: sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.