Speaker 1: Al Zone Media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.
Speaker 1: So every episode of the week that just happened is
Speaker 1: here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package
Speaker 1: for you to listen to in a long stretch if
Speaker 1: you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every
Speaker 1: day this week, there's going to be nothing new here
Speaker 1: for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's Pippin'
Speaker 1: my bops? It could happen here? A podcast that is
Speaker 1: sometimes competently introduced, but not on the days that I'm recording.
Speaker 1: We're at CEES, the Consumer Electronics Show, seeing what the
Speaker 1: tech industry has in mind for all of us. Right,
Speaker 1: This is a show where the industry talks to itself
Speaker 1: and its investors and clients about what the future is
Speaker 1: going to be. And so Garrison Davis and I are
Speaker 1: going to sit down with you and tell, based on
Speaker 1: our explorations and investigations this week, what the future of
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence means for all of us and for the world. Garrison, Hi,
Speaker 1: how you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm tired?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you look tired.
Speaker 2: It's been a long week. It's been a long week
Speaker 2: convention walking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've worked very hard.
Speaker 2: I've talked to too many robots.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've talked to a lot of chat bots.
Speaker 2: I mean it's a bit of a stretch, is that
Speaker 2: we've talked with them.
Speaker 1: I've talked to add a lot of chat bots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't.
Speaker 1: I guess one of the things that's kind of shocked
Speaker 1: me is it because, like, despite being very critical about
Speaker 1: AI in the industry, I have actually a pretty good
Speaker 1: idea of what these things are capable of. And I
Speaker 1: know that chat GBT and Jim and I and the
Speaker 1: other like, they're capable of doing some things that look
Speaker 1: very impressive. They are capable of conversations. You know that
Speaker 1: it can be fairly in depth, and that can cover
Speaker 1: a wide variety of topics. And so one of the
Speaker 1: things that has surprised me is that as I have
Speaker 1: gone up and tried to communicate with every various chatbot
Speaker 1: enabled AI enabled product, about seventy percent of the time
Speaker 1: it's not actually capable of responding to me in a
Speaker 1: way that makes any sense. Like the majority of those
Speaker 1: products just don't function. Sorry, was that literally your AI
Speaker 1: and your phone yelling at us.
Speaker 2: Yes, case in point, I was trying to pull up
Speaker 2: one of the one of the AI robots that we
Speaker 2: saw today, and I guess this is something that we
Speaker 2: talked about on Better Offline a bit. And the main
Speaker 2: thing this this year is the complete, the complete like
Speaker 2: victory of of like chat GPT across not just not
Speaker 2: just like.
Speaker 1: It's like the cultural victory within the tech industry.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, and it's moved into like the physical world
Speaker 2: through like their API license saying yeah, so many of
Speaker 2: the quote unquote products this year is building a physical
Speaker 2: thing around chat GPT.
Speaker 1: We have a necklace that has chat GPT and you
Speaker 1: can talk to it. We have a pin that chat
Speaker 1: GPT is in and you can talk to it and
Speaker 1: have it do things like transcribe an interview.
Speaker 2: Earbuds there's there's earbuds, little tiny robot Dogslassy. Everything has
Speaker 2: has chat GBT inside it. And that's the main thing
Speaker 2: that makes it like unique or special compared to you know,
Speaker 2: the types of products we've seen we've seen before.
Speaker 1: And I would say again when I say that, like
Speaker 1: seventy percent of the chatbot enabled products that I tried
Speaker 1: to interact with could not converse with me or could
Speaker 1: not do so in a functional way. It's not because
Speaker 1: the chatbots aren't able to talk to you, because they
Speaker 1: are anyone who's not like you can. It's that all
Speaker 1: of the chatbots require an active Internet connection because the
Speaker 1: vast majority of these products do not have anything on device,
Speaker 1: and when you're in a crowded convention floor, the Internet
Speaker 1: is bad and so they just don't work. And it
Speaker 1: kind of it's one of those I'm sure most of
Speaker 1: these products would work better in the real world, but
Speaker 1: also the fact that they're all completely hobbled by their
Speaker 1: access to data is kind of one of the things.
Speaker 1: It's one of the seams that you can see here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the LLLM rappers, so LM rappers and robotics are
Speaker 2: the big things this year. Often these things are between you.
Speaker 1: Mean by an LLLLM rapper garrison.
Speaker 2: Well, this is this is the thing that we're talking about.
Speaker 2: It it's say, it's that this physical product that's built
Speaker 2: around something like chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or
Speaker 2: a number of like the Chinese made ones, right, So
Speaker 2: a lot of Chinese companies here. So these physical products,
Speaker 2: whether those are you know, headphones, earbuds, or in many
Speaker 2: cases little tiny robots whose main main features that you
Speaker 2: can talk to can talk to it, and what you're
Speaker 2: actually talking to is like a filtered version of chat GPT.
Speaker 2: And there's a lot of these products for kids that
Speaker 2: we've seen, like robots for kids, because there's a lot
Speaker 2: a lot of robotics this year as well. That these
Speaker 2: these are the two things that after years and years
Speaker 2: of them trying to find a new thing for each cees,
Speaker 2: they've like settled on not not actually having anything robotics,
Speaker 2: not having anything new because like we've we've seen robotics
Speaker 2: before at other years, and this is the year that
Speaker 2: they're combining their physical robotics which aren't new, but combining
Speaker 2: them with chat GPT and presenting it as a new product.
Speaker 1: Look at now you can intelligence the robot and no,
Speaker 1: can't do more tasks than it used to, Like we're
Speaker 1: still doing really good if it can slowly and not
Speaker 1: very competently fold laundry. Oh right, like LG's Kloyd Cloyd,
Speaker 1: which is a robot designed to be in your home
Speaker 1: and do chores for you and visibly does not do
Speaker 1: them well. We watched it now where they're presumably it's
Speaker 1: presumably working better than it normally does because it's a demo.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: I went to the first Cloyd Cloyd demo and they
Speaker 2: had like three three different setups for the different stories
Speaker 2: for like different use cases for Cloyd, once with ones
Speaker 2: with a family, ones with like a single guy, and
Speaker 2: ones with like a like a middle aged woman. And
Speaker 2: with the family, the robots able to find keys that
Speaker 2: are lost. Notably, what that means is that Cloyd is
Speaker 2: moving keys around the house, which might actually contribute to
Speaker 2: the problem of somewhere else. The robot could put a
Speaker 2: tray of croissants in an oven and the robot knows it,
Speaker 2: and the robot knows exactly how you want your croissants done.
Speaker 2: You don't even have to tell the robot. It already knows,
Speaker 2: of course. And that's something that was stressed the power
Speaker 2: of AIL for and over again is that it will
Speaker 2: it will start to like know what you want?
Speaker 4: Is it?
Speaker 2: So you want need to tell you have a memory?
Speaker 1: So many of these products with the big selling points
Speaker 1: like it's got a memory and it has they can't
Speaker 1: they can't stop themselves. And I think some of this
Speaker 1: was like the actual companies and the way that they're
Speaker 1: structuring their ad campaigns. But a lot of this was
Speaker 1: just most of the companies here hire pr people who
Speaker 1: don't regularly work for the company and don't know much
Speaker 1: about the products, and they're just there to demo stuff,
Speaker 1: and some of it is those people just defaulting too.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 1: They're talking about how this thing like like remembers and
Speaker 1: knows you, So I'll talk about how it like it
Speaker 1: has a personality, It has memories, it has experienced, it
Speaker 1: has core memories, you know, it has preferences, and like
Speaker 1: a personality, it wants things. I talked to a couple
Speaker 1: of different people at booths who like that was the
Speaker 1: thing they were emphasizing, is that like, this is an
Speaker 1: AI that like feels and gets to know you and
Speaker 1: has a relationship with you. And it's very number one
Speaker 1: not what they would want publicly because that's crazy and
Speaker 1: none of the products actually work that way, but the
Speaker 1: attempt to convince people that, like, what we have done
Speaker 1: is create a robot that lives in your home and
Speaker 1: does chores and it can think and feel. And anytime
Speaker 1: you say, like, well, is there you just saying you
Speaker 1: built a slave? Like are you saying, well, there's thinking
Speaker 1: sentient robots that you have lived in your house and
Speaker 1: do your laundry. Isn't that a slave like And it's
Speaker 1: not actually because the robot doesn't say not actually, but
Speaker 1: what they were saying was true, it would be a problem, right.
Speaker 2: Oh, if you get it, introduce yourself however you want introduced.
Speaker 5: Oh, I'm Ben Ben Rosporter. I am an academic, I'm
Speaker 5: a sociologist at Kearney.
Speaker 2: And you have accompanied us through the wonderful world of
Speaker 2: Las Vegas and the cees this year. I always like
Speaker 2: bringing people to witness the beautiful world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've been brought to this place very far from god,
Speaker 5: Las ve Guess and the Tech Convention Center. There is
Speaker 5: this moment where we were walking through and it was
Speaker 5: the the the amy Bot for kids.
Speaker 2: Which me and Robert saw last year, that the little
Speaker 2: like oval owl looking robot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, and they had this She's got to be
Speaker 5: an actress and she was doing like a little skit
Speaker 5: with the amy Bot where it was like it was
Speaker 5: like the Amy About's birthday or something, and she was
Speaker 5: like very clearly having this this very produced. It reminded
Speaker 5: me exactly of how like cheap Tella Novella's like actors
Speaker 5: talk where she was just like, wow, Amy, you've really
Speaker 5: gotten to know me over the years. And it was
Speaker 5: bizarre in that one the selling point of the robot
Speaker 5: was I think they said, turning data into empathy. Yes,
Speaker 5: it's able to turn data into empathy, which God knows
Speaker 5: what that means. But also that like, so clearly the
Speaker 5: robot turns data into empathy, but also we cannot show
Speaker 5: you the robot doing anything concretely, so we will have
Speaker 5: a person like it was just this very one side
Speaker 5: like skit where this person was doing this really overly
Speaker 5: emotional like back and forth as a robot, where the
Speaker 5: robot would just respond with like the bare minimum like phrases,
Speaker 5: and so like what they're selling is is questionable if
Speaker 5: anyone wants it, and all speculative, it's all none of
Speaker 5: it can actually be presented. It's all like the potential
Speaker 5: to do this, and then and then even the way
Speaker 5: that they're actually showing that is mostly just cheap tricks.
Speaker 5: There's another booth where they had the sex robots, and
Speaker 5: I was just I it was shocking because the stand
Speaker 5: like you're at this convention, you've presumably you know, gone
Speaker 5: through a lot to get here and you're the image
Speaker 5: you're putting forward of your robot that you know you're
Speaker 5: selling as the sex or whatt It's like this cheap
Speaker 5: AI image, not even one of the good ones, like
Speaker 5: that they're like clear artifacts and very weird lines and things,
Speaker 5: and that you could google an anime jpeg and get
Speaker 5: a better image for this. So just even the smoke
Speaker 5: and mirrors of it was cheap.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was that Love Ants is the sex Robot booth,
Speaker 2: And yeah, they had two products. One was like just
Speaker 2: like you know, silicon like realistic human skin sex robot,
Speaker 2: which is similar to like you know, those horrifying sex dolls,
Speaker 2: except now we have an LM inside. It's another one
Speaker 2: of those LM rappers, except it's wrapped around of redheaded women.
Speaker 1: Garrison. I find that very offensive. It's actually some people
Speaker 1: are just they're not capable of talking to women or
Speaker 1: other human beings of any kind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people with ADHD.
Speaker 1: It's actually a disability where people can't know other people
Speaker 1: and can only have sexual gratification through a creepy robot.
Speaker 2: I apologize for my spect for my on air ableism. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but no again, this is the year of LM rappers,
Speaker 2: and now they're putting it, putting it in a sexpod,
Speaker 2: which is more unnerving between than a regular sex doll
Speaker 2: because a regular sex doll, you kind of know it's
Speaker 2: an object. Like it's it's not trying to be much
Speaker 2: more than an object. It can't, you can't. You could
Speaker 2: you put in positions, but it's it's static. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: because this thing tries to kind of engage with you.
Speaker 2: It activates my Uncanny Valley response way more because it's
Speaker 2: like it's kind of trying to pretend to be a person,
Speaker 2: and like I could not look at the thing for
Speaker 2: very long, so I just like started like I just
Speaker 2: felt bad. Yeah, and some of that's probably my latent Protestantism,
Speaker 2: but I just feel I just felt bad. But the
Speaker 2: other product they had like around the corner was this
Speaker 2: was this like you know anime style like like Avatar,
Speaker 2: which was which is on like a screen that you
Speaker 2: can talk to and it's synced up to like a
Speaker 2: jack off robot, right, so you can you can engage
Speaker 2: with this. You can engage with this like this like
Speaker 2: blonde blonde hair, blue eyed anime woman as it's as
Speaker 2: it connects to like a little a little like jackof Machine,
Speaker 2: and that was there. That was the other product which
Speaker 2: did not work because there was no Wi Fi in
Speaker 2: the Venetian Yeah, so we could we could not see it,
Speaker 2: but the jackoff machine was still going strong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you could say, I guess that, like, well,
Speaker 1: obviously there's there's fundamental issues with like having Wi Fi
Speaker 1: be decent. When you've got seventy thousand people like all
Speaker 1: cramming themselves into a room. Of course, that's going to
Speaker 1: cause problems. That the chatbots and the devices using them
Speaker 1: are actually capable of more they should. They're more impressive
Speaker 1: than you giving them credit for just because the WiFi
Speaker 1: didn't work. But also if all your build is a
Speaker 1: shell that without the Internet and access to someone else's chatbot,
Speaker 1: it's useless, It doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2: This is the big people, I haven't really made a product.
Speaker 2: All these products are are going to brick as soon
Speaker 2: as soon as as soon as chat GPT raises its
Speaker 2: API costs, they're going to do one of two things.
Speaker 2: They're either going to stop working or they're going to
Speaker 2: move their chatbot provider to a different one that's going
Speaker 2: to behave differently. And then it's fundamentally a different.
Speaker 1: And that's why periodically I would run into someone where
Speaker 1: it's like everything that we do is on device and everything,
Speaker 1: even the ones that were still because almost you almost
Speaker 1: have to say that whatever you're doing is AI and
Speaker 1: stuff like. There was a company that I came across
Speaker 1: because of their name because I just saw the name
Speaker 1: trans Ai and I was like, well, I gotta go
Speaker 1: see what that is. I did see that, and it's
Speaker 1: simply I believe they're a Korean company, but it's it's
Speaker 1: just a company that makes like a translator, right, and
Speaker 1: they make it specifically. It's like the size of a
Speaker 1: smaller smartphone. It looks kind of like a smartphone and
Speaker 1: you set it down and it will on device. It
Speaker 1: does not touch the cloud at all for any reason.
Speaker 1: It can translate, so if you want to have a
Speaker 1: conversation with someone in a foreign language, it can like
Speaker 1: like live translate for you both. And also it will
Speaker 1: transcribe whatever conversations you're happening. And they were like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is for people who want to transcribe notes when
Speaker 1: they're at college. It's for people who are doing interviews,
Speaker 1: journalists and stuff. So and it was a really good
Speaker 1: it seemed to be a good product. I've not gotten
Speaker 1: to test it outside of the show floor I saw.
Speaker 2: I saw a few of these.
Speaker 5: One of the big differences I saw between like the
Speaker 5: few there were like two or three or four booths
Speaker 5: that we saw where the product I was like, I
Speaker 5: had a positive.
Speaker 6: I was like I walked away with some mildly positive.
Speaker 5: Was that almost everything else talk about like the sort
Speaker 5: of insatiability of capital is that it has to sell.
Speaker 5: The sex doll was a perfect example of this in
Speaker 5: that you know, if you make a sex doll and
Speaker 5: you put the chat GPT inside of it and then
Speaker 5: you sell it as this this is a sex doll.
Speaker 5: It's an object you fought, but now you can like
Speaker 5: you could have sexy conversation with Its still an object,
Speaker 5: but like you know, that's fun for some people.
Speaker 1: That's a thing that people didn't have and it is new.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's a phenomena you could clearly show off.
Speaker 5: It's like, oh you can, you know now the sex
Speaker 5: doll can like say your name and stuff. But almost
Speaker 5: all of the booths that we're selling some kind of
Speaker 5: a product. It was like, we have to sell the
Speaker 5: opportunity to like transcend, Like the your mortal shell and
Speaker 5: become a part of the cosmos itself. Like the sex
Speaker 5: Doll was literally sitting in this corner talking to no
Speaker 5: one and saying stuff like I'm about emotional intelligence and
Speaker 5: building a connection, getting to know you and reaching into
Speaker 5: your soul. And it's like, it clearly cannot do this.
Speaker 5: And the few products that were good were the ones
Speaker 5: where the people showing it were just able to like
Speaker 5: just put that aside and just say, here's what the
Speaker 5: product does, right, here's what it can do concrete.
Speaker 1: And that that has become my baseline and first question,
Speaker 1: which is like, have you done anything with your product?
Speaker 1: And if all that you've done is we invented a
Speaker 1: new device that didn't previously have a chatbot that it
Speaker 1: connects to through data that someone else built, you didn't
Speaker 1: do anything that's not a product, that's not real, So
Speaker 1: kind of my first my filter was like, is there
Speaker 1: anything here beyond another way to interact with a completely
Speaker 1: different product that you didn't make.
Speaker 2: To go back to like the AI note taking devices,
Speaker 2: which I saw a few where where's a linch and
Speaker 2: it will take notes through you. I saw like a
Speaker 2: lot of these like marketed to like a college student.
Speaker 1: And it's the thing that it is a thing that
Speaker 1: machine learning, because I hate that it gets lomped in
Speaker 1: with AI. But machine learning has gotten a lot better.
Speaker 2: They know, they're really good. It's it's good at note taking.
Speaker 2: And here's the thing, and that's alliable. And there's different
Speaker 2: devices that you can get it on. Like I saw
Speaker 2: like like a note taking pin that's a pin that
Speaker 2: just automatically takes notes for you. That was you know,
Speaker 2: kind of like kind of kind of fly. But the
Speaker 2: thing is you can do this exact same thing on
Speaker 2: your phone with the chet GPTPP. It's the exact same thing. Yes,
Speaker 2: you don't need it in a pen, just turn your
Speaker 2: phone on and it'll auto do the notes for you.
Speaker 2: The actual product part is useless. The whole idea of
Speaker 2: the smartphone is that you have everything you need already
Speaker 2: on it.
Speaker 1: And that's why I did respect again companies like trans Ai,
Speaker 1: where it's like, no, this is actually on device and
Speaker 1: this is a thing.
Speaker 2: This is that's better.
Speaker 1: YEA utility that my phone doesn't have, which is that
Speaker 1: no matter where I am, even if I'm not connected
Speaker 1: to the internet, I can translate and I can transcribe
Speaker 1: using this device that's real utility, and TRANSA is not
Speaker 1: the only company. A couple of companies had products like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we saw this emotion tracking pendant which is oh
Speaker 2: my god, on device, which which listens to everyone.
Speaker 1: So you said motion, not emotion, no emotion, oh god.
Speaker 2: But it listens. It listens to everything you're saying. It
Speaker 2: doesn't up put anything to cloud, but it in the
Speaker 2: AA is on device, so it listens everything. It is
Speaker 2: like emotional scent analysis. It also monitors your breath and
Speaker 2: your heartbeat because the necklace like rests like on your chest.
Speaker 2: And then it like taught and then it can like
Speaker 2: analyze like around like six or seven. That's a mystic
Speaker 2: seven different emotions. And like it was like fine, I
Speaker 2: don't I would never need this thing to tell me
Speaker 2: how I'm feeling. I know how to feel, but like
Speaker 2: it might be fun for some people to like track
Speaker 2: how they're feeling or be like, oh I was more stressed.
Speaker 2: I was more stressed this week than like last week.
Speaker 2: And like still and there's.
Speaker 1: There's even there's at least a degree of baseline optimism
Speaker 1: that you have for the product when it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a device where you're trying to track people's emotions,
Speaker 1: and your immediate first thing you decided as a company
Speaker 1: was this, can't go on a cloud. That would be
Speaker 1: a responcible.
Speaker 2: This is why that was the first thing I asked, right, right,
Speaker 2: And that is.
Speaker 1: I guess the most important fundamental difference between companies and
Speaker 1: people here, and between the companies that are embracing to
Speaker 1: some extent AI is the ones who whose default was like, well,
Speaker 1: but we're doing something that involves emotions or that involved
Speaker 1: like interviews or conversations that people might not want on
Speaker 1: like we shouldn't have that on the cloud, versus the
Speaker 1: people who are like, why wouldn't you put literally everything
Speaker 1: on the cloud. Why don't you want your health and
Speaker 1: medical data on the cloud. Why don't we want your
Speaker 1: financial data on the cloud? Right, Like that is kind
Speaker 1: of like the most fundamental difference that you see between
Speaker 1: people here.
Speaker 5: Part and parcel of the insatiable like just drive for
Speaker 5: endless value. And probably the comparisons between this convention and
Speaker 5: its location, Las Vegas are really overlaiden at this point,
Speaker 5: but I mean there is something about, like, you know,
Speaker 5: the appeal of gambling is the promise of the speculative
Speaker 5: promise of endless value and how all of these technologies
Speaker 5: are selling themselves off of endless value. And for the
Speaker 5: producer side, that means like this, this device has endless
Speaker 5: function potentially, you know we say endless functions.
Speaker 2: Especially with these like AI devices.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But from the consumer side, it's from a well,
Speaker 5: if you just give yourself over to you know, to
Speaker 5: the god of capital, if you if you just bleed
Speaker 5: into the machine and connect yourself to the cloud and
Speaker 5: give over like everything, and it really is everything. I mean,
Speaker 5: there's like AI towels that are like analyzing your sweat.
Speaker 5: If you give over everything, there is this vague promise
Speaker 5: of transcendence and that like you will escape the like
Speaker 5: the misery of the world that this place is just
Speaker 5: both completely blind to and then also without ever saying it,
Speaker 5: like also responding to it entirely.
Speaker 1: First off, obviously you're coming at this from more of
Speaker 1: a left wing perspective, so you probably don't understand that
Speaker 1: gambling always works and you're definitely going to win. So
Speaker 1: first off, you.
Speaker 2: Know, no Vegas really is the anarcho capitalist paradise.
Speaker 1: It sure is, But no, like what you're saying is
Speaker 1: they want you to give everything over. There is absolutely
Speaker 1: there's not outside of again the odd booth where you
Speaker 1: find sane people, which is almost how I think about
Speaker 1: it them in my head, where it's like yeah, where
Speaker 1: you're putting front and forward. This stays on the device.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be online. We are not exposing
Speaker 1: your data.
Speaker 2: It's like seeing a lighthouse right like in like a
Speaker 2: horrible like rainstorm and you're like sailing got his ship
Speaker 2: and you can't see anything, and everyone's you'll see a
Speaker 2: booth with like a real person. God, it's like talking
Speaker 2: about it was solving a real plumbing, like oh finally, Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's a spectrum between talking to the ais, talking to
Speaker 5: the real few people and then the other people who
Speaker 5: are kind of in between the two.
Speaker 1: And it was I went from seeing this app where
Speaker 1: the whole purpose of this this company that makes like
Speaker 1: agentic ai solutions, who I'm scrolling to find there the
Speaker 1: company name right now, all of it is they're making
Speaker 1: agents that you can put in like point of sale things,
Speaker 1: or you can put in like cars as a chat.
Speaker 1: But like one thing they said is yeah, we can
Speaker 1: put this in a car and we can have the
Speaker 1: you know, you can navigate using voice the way you
Speaker 1: would normally like with a bunch of other apps. But
Speaker 1: if you navigate with voice using our app, it will
Speaker 1: only send you to restaurants or businesses that we have
Speaker 1: a deal with that are giving us a cut and
Speaker 1: so and you too the car company gets a cut two.
Speaker 1: And that was the innovation is that we can not
Speaker 1: give people like tell people where things are. We can
Speaker 1: tell people where things are that hey, us and you
Speaker 1: get a cut up.
Speaker 2: The company can like make a partnership with like Coca Cola. Right,
Speaker 2: so then when you we were.
Speaker 1: Literally talking to Coca Cola reps when I was there,
Speaker 1: it's showing them that like, yeah, we have a like look,
Speaker 1: we've replaced the human beings that take your orders at
Speaker 1: Burger King, and the chatbot can alter on the fly
Speaker 1: of the menu. If you have to get a smooth
Speaker 1: a lot of vanilla coat and you want to sell
Speaker 1: as many large as possible, it can tell people that's
Speaker 1: the only option. WHOA And like like the fact that
Speaker 1: they were just like bald faced about it, because when
Speaker 1: I showed up, they were they were demoing how this uh,
Speaker 1: this like Burger King menu with AI worked, and they
Speaker 1: were like there was a full menu that you could
Speaker 1: see that was like a like an updated screen menu,
Speaker 1: but there was a secondary menu where they're like pretending
Speaker 1: to be a guy who drew up to Burger King.
Speaker 1: And the way that they started was like, yeah, what
Speaker 1: burgers are good? What do you think I'd like? And
Speaker 1: I was like, who No one.
Speaker 2: Drives up, No one could drive through window and asks
Speaker 2: what's good?
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, that's not how they And again there's a
Speaker 1: menu in front of you. You look at the menu
Speaker 1: and like, that's how everyone buys food. So at first
Speaker 1: I was like, is this just a company that doesn't
Speaker 1: know how life works? Who are like trying to pretend
Speaker 1: this is like what people want where they go through? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, well what's good today in McDonald's. You know,
Speaker 1: do you have any specials? Which was crazy, But then
Speaker 1: I realized because they were talking to this small group
Speaker 1: of people, and I realized after a second, oh, because
Speaker 1: I looked at their badges. Everyone has badges that all
Speaker 1: of the people worked for Coca Cola, and so they
Speaker 1: were talking about how, yes, if Burger King wants to
Speaker 1: move you know, a specific kind of whopper, then we
Speaker 1: can put that front and center when people ask what's
Speaker 1: good and we can push it and said for coke,
Speaker 1: if you guys want to move vanilla coke, we can have.
Speaker 1: Whenever people order anything, we can have it. Say do
Speaker 1: you want to add a vanilla coke? A large vanilla cokes?
Speaker 2: Just like yeah.
Speaker 1: And so what I realized is that this company whose
Speaker 1: name is this is SoundHound.
Speaker 2: AI sound Hound Yeah, yeah, great, pretty pretty good name.
Speaker 1: Their motto was faster and more accurate, higher revenue. I
Speaker 1: came to realize, and this is this is not entirely
Speaker 1: a separation from other years because they are always selling
Speaker 1: to companies like this, but there was absolutely they were
Speaker 1: the only thing that they were talking about actual end users,
Speaker 1: as was a thing that you can pull extra money
Speaker 1: out of by tricking them, by pushing extra ads to them.
Speaker 1: And that's who they were actually selling to, is these
Speaker 1: companies that they were like. The other thing they demoed
Speaker 1: was you can make an agent on the fly and
Speaker 1: you can include the capabilities, and they showed us how
Speaker 1: to select it and then built an AI an agent
Speaker 1: to live in your car. And the demo they did
Speaker 1: was like, hey, my car is making this sound. What
Speaker 1: do you think it is? They didn't play the sound
Speaker 1: for the AI by the way they described it, and
Speaker 1: the AA said that sounds like it could be da
Speaker 1: da da da. It'll cost about seven hundred dollars to fix.
Speaker 1: Great book me an appointment with the dealership. So, first off,
Speaker 1: that's not how people work. I've had car everyone has
Speaker 1: car issues. A regular person there's a problem with your car.
Speaker 1: You either have a mechanic that's not the dealership that
Speaker 1: you go to because they didn't rip you off in
Speaker 1: the past, and you're like, well, I trust them not
Speaker 1: to bock me too bad, or you go to a
Speaker 1: couple because most people don't just drop seven hundred dollars
Speaker 1: in a repair and not think about it. But the
Speaker 1: person that this engineer is pretending to be for the
Speaker 1: purpose of this AI demo said, great book me a
Speaker 1: repair at the dealership, and the AI was like, okay,
Speaker 1: I've called them and I've booked you an appointment, and
Speaker 1: by the way, would you like to schedule the test
Speaker 1: drive for this specific kind of car. Oh, my wife
Speaker 1: loves that car. Book us And that was the whole
Speaker 1: thing is he was like, don't be impressed that we
Speaker 1: can theoretically book you an appointment. Be impressed that we
Speaker 1: can have the machine upsell you on trying to buy
Speaker 1: a new car when you come in to fix your
Speaker 1: old car that broke because you bought a bad car.
Speaker 1: And there was no shame. They were so proud of themselves,
Speaker 1: for this machine can repeatedly upsell you things. And that
Speaker 1: was the only utility. It was not this allows you
Speaker 1: to more easily navigate town. This allows you to more
Speaker 1: easily cut out problems in your life. It was. This
Speaker 1: machine can upsell you every minute of your day, everything
Speaker 1: you add to do, everything you try to have it do,
Speaker 1: and we get a cut of that. If we send
Speaker 1: it to a restaurant and you buy food there, we
Speaker 1: get a cut of that. And so does whatever company
Speaker 1: you know put the thing in your car. If you
Speaker 1: buy a new car, we get a cut of that.
Speaker 1: That was the product and that we have gone from
Speaker 1: here machines that do things. And even back in the
Speaker 1: glorias of smartphones, at least everyone was showing like, look,
Speaker 1: we have a new phone that's thinner than a phone
Speaker 1: has ever been.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or like the camera is like you know, four
Speaker 2: K now or something whatever.
Speaker 1: The focus is always and now people who buy them
Speaker 1: can do this with it. Right.
Speaker 5: I mean, I would guess that so much of the
Speaker 5: impetus for creating this stuff and developing it is all
Speaker 5: for producer goods, and then the more revenue is honest,
Speaker 5: and that like, that's what the and all the consumer
Speaker 5: goods are mostly just getting you know, cast off is
Speaker 5: like now we have all I mean literally, that's what
Speaker 5: the LM wrappers are. It's just like, oh, we have
Speaker 5: this thing, let's throw a plastic robot on it and
Speaker 5: try and sell it. But what drives its development is
Speaker 5: squeezing just little bits, squeezing labor out of the pores
Speaker 5: of the production process, which it just gets you a
Speaker 5: little bit more capital to keep this engine going a
Speaker 5: little bit further.
Speaker 1: And it's so because the way it'll work is I
Speaker 1: saw that thing where it's literally all you've invented is
Speaker 1: a way to try to con people out of more
Speaker 1: of their money. I hope you're proud of yourselves, because
Speaker 1: I think redacted is what you should do to yourself.
Speaker 1: And I went from that to the booth of a
Speaker 1: company called Gintex, who had never heard of before, but
Speaker 1: they make different automotive products, and an engineer there showed
Speaker 1: me a thing that he had been the lead on
Speaker 1: inventing which was a sun visor. So like you know,
Speaker 1: when you're driving and there's a glare, you put down
Speaker 1: the advisor, and the visor is just like basically a
Speaker 1: piece of fabric and it blocks a chunk of your view,
Speaker 1: but it at least blocks the sun. And this was
Speaker 1: an intelligent visor that was clear and so you could
Speaker 1: see through it, but it also blocked UV rays and
Speaker 1: you could adjust the level of opacity if you needed
Speaker 1: it to be more or less, but you could still
Speaker 1: see through the mirror and it still blocked the glare.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, that's really neat. And then
Speaker 1: he pressed a button and it turned into a mirror.
Speaker 1: Suddenly that functioned. It looked great. I saw it. I
Speaker 1: know it works, and I got like an an, honest wow,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that was a thing that could happen.
Speaker 1: And that's a that's a real product, and I can
Speaker 1: imagine using it. That's like a problem where yeah, if
Speaker 1: you want to block glare, you're losing a degree of
Speaker 1: visibility and now you're not You've actually done something right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you could put Gemini into a toaster and
Speaker 2: call it a day.
Speaker 1: What if your toaster could talk to you about Proust.
Speaker 2: I guess see, I mean this is actually now that's
Speaker 2: an idea. If we're going to close this this more
Speaker 2: AI focused episode, I kind of want to circle back
Speaker 2: to Cloyd and like, why and why Chloyd Bloyd again exists.
Speaker 1: Just take a second, if you're listening to this at
Speaker 1: home on the drive, if you've got family around, look
Speaker 1: at each other, look another person in the eye, and
Speaker 1: say the word LG has a new home assistance robot
Speaker 1: named Cloyd. Cloyd roll it around in your tongue, you know,
Speaker 1: just think about it for a second.
Speaker 2: Okay, why Cloyd exists? Like why why is LG who's
Speaker 2: previously had some really impressive booths over the years.
Speaker 1: And they had cool TVs.
Speaker 2: They had TVs where the wallpaper TV was impressive.
Speaker 1: Every time I go to an LG's booth every year,
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, that's a better look on TV.
Speaker 2: Really TV. Yeah, it's great, But why why? And then
Speaker 2: the wallpeer TV is Okay, we there was wellpaper TV
Speaker 2: last year. It was it was slightly worse. This one's
Speaker 2: a little bit better. But why does Cloyd the big
Speaker 2: thing at the LG booth this year? Loyd right, because
Speaker 2: none of the technology that Cloyd is doing is new.
Speaker 2: Remember last year at Showstoppers, me and you we saw
Speaker 2: that really janky robot.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be more specific, but you said.
Speaker 2: Taking a robot that moves up in down.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, the pusher and shover robots.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, And Cloyd is like kind of that. It's
Speaker 2: like the actual physical robotic parts of Cloyd aren't new.
Speaker 2: And the sort of the sort of AI that's running.
Speaker 1: Clod and Cloyd as if someone needed to make Wally
Speaker 1: that was legally distinct enough to stop Disney from suing them,
Speaker 1: and tall and taller. That's how Chloyd looks.
Speaker 2: So why is Cloyd there?
Speaker 1: Why is Cloyd there? I'm always asking myself this.
Speaker 2: Is This goes into like what this what like Cees
Speaker 2: is like doing this year, and how it reflects this
Speaker 2: current state of the tech industry. Is that these lms
Speaker 2: like TRAGVT are not actually better than they were last year. No,
Speaker 2: they are. They are the same. So how do we
Speaker 2: make things look look cool?
Speaker 1: Just whatever improvements they are is not enough to notice
Speaker 1: for an average person.
Speaker 2: Very minimal. Yeah, So instead of actually having anything new
Speaker 2: or any kind of sizeable improvement to display. They're combining
Speaker 2: too old and some of their products are kind of archaic,
Speaker 2: combining two older products and trying to pass it off
Speaker 2: as a new thing. And that's these these these like
Speaker 2: older older like robotic systems right that you're usually kind
Speaker 2: of humanoid. Maybe they have hands, Maybe the hands can
Speaker 2: grab things. Can the hands unscrew up a milk carton?
Speaker 8: To no?
Speaker 2: Can can the robot grab milk out of the fridge?
Speaker 5: Yes, so long as you want milk from a very
Speaker 5: specific carton and croissants and only croissants, you, guys.
Speaker 1: As long as the milk has a QR code that
Speaker 1: the robot can recognize to know that it's milk. And
Speaker 1: also when it's emptier than a certain level, it actually
Speaker 1: will crush the milk thing like it has to be
Speaker 1: a certain level a full otherwise doesn't.
Speaker 2: But neither of these things are new. And the fact
Speaker 2: that ALG doesn't have anything else to display at their booth,
Speaker 2: the fact that they had to stoop so low is
Speaker 2: to regurgitate this old kind of cheap robotics and slap
Speaker 2: an LM in there and then call it a day,
Speaker 2: so that they have very little to actually show for us,
Speaker 2: and you see this walking through like the central hall set,
Speaker 2: the Samsung booth is into there, the Nikon booth is
Speaker 2: into there, the Sony booth is mostly a car. Like
Speaker 2: there's a lot of these big companies are really absent
Speaker 2: from actual products. The Panasonic has a really big booth,
Speaker 2: but it's mostly about like servers, it's mostly about how
Speaker 2: they're how they're improving, how they're improving data farming. There's
Speaker 2: no stuff, and a lot of the stuff that does exist.
Speaker 1: You even have to separate further from stuff that exists
Speaker 1: and actually might be useful to stuff that exists and
Speaker 1: might be useful because it solves a problem that the
Speaker 1: thing that it is already created. Like, for example, a
Speaker 1: bunch of I came to several different companies that had
Speaker 1: a car AI assistance whose job was to yell at
Speaker 1: you if you fell asleep or got distracted, and they
Speaker 1: were all built into these giant dashboard things that were
Speaker 1: the whole dashboard is a screen, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see why you need a robot to yell
Speaker 1: people get distracted because we have data.
Speaker 2: Because they're putting subway surfers on your fucking car dash.
Speaker 1: We have ample data that shows that when you have
Speaker 1: a giant screen in a car and people use that screen,
Speaker 1: they are actually worse drivers than when they're just drawn
Speaker 1: on a normal car. And soh yes, you have made
Speaker 1: the car. You can show me how this whole dashboard
Speaker 1: you can change it in a second. Look at all
Speaker 1: these different modes you have. You can smartly change your
Speaker 1: dashboard be whatever you want, and it'll yell at you
Speaker 1: if you get distracted. And it's like, well, but the
Speaker 1: only reason you're getting distracted is because your entire car
Speaker 1: is a computer screen, which it shouldn't be, and we
Speaker 1: know it shouldn't be.
Speaker 2: They're either trying to solve problems that they created or
Speaker 2: inventing solutions to things that aren't really problems. And like
Speaker 2: with and this is this specifically with Cloyd, and they
Speaker 2: kept the guy who is like doing the demo kept
Speaker 2: reiterating that Cloyd cluld Or already knows what you want
Speaker 2: before you have to say anything, right, whether that's a
Speaker 2: croissant that's slightly under baked, or he knows had a
Speaker 2: fold laundry just the way you use the way you
Speaker 2: like it badly, which is what she said in a
Speaker 2: kind of self aware ironic tone because this robot spent
Speaker 2: two minutes trying to fold a single towel and it
Speaker 2: couldn't do it. These things don't work, and they're not
Speaker 2: meant to. It's meant to drive traffic and attention towards
Speaker 2: the LG brand, because there's many tons of ours been
Speaker 2: like look at LG's new butler robot, right and that,
Speaker 2: and that's that's all that they're doing at this demo,
Speaker 2: because this is not a real product for sale.
Speaker 1: Yeah it is.
Speaker 2: It is meant to drive attention to the brand and
Speaker 2: get articles, and then those articles are going to get
Speaker 2: you know, cited by by other by other lllfs, and
Speaker 2: it's this it's this cycle that just keeps building.
Speaker 1: There's some really impressive stuff there too, Like I went
Speaker 1: to Persona AI's booth which had a bunch of computers
Speaker 1: that had without that were not connected to the internet.
Speaker 1: All the signs told you that, And it has on
Speaker 1: pc AI image generators where it's all on the machine itself,
Speaker 1: and you know, one of the representatives said, come on,
Speaker 1: give it a prompt, it will generate an image. And
Speaker 1: I've never used an AI image generator, and so I
Speaker 1: kind of panic I'll be honest, like I got freaked out.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be some bullshit.
Speaker 1: Tom size more with dead kid. Yeah, now that's not
Speaker 1: Tom size more, but that is a man cuddling a
Speaker 1: dead child. The kid doesn't the face is gone, and
Speaker 1: that's not Tom size more. Like but you know, the future,
Speaker 1: the future.
Speaker 2: No this, I can't. I don't want to harp on
Speaker 2: Cloyd too much, but it's so it's such.
Speaker 1: A good Every additional time you say Cloyd, it sounds
Speaker 1: less like, such.
Speaker 2: A good example of what this show is specifically this year,
Speaker 2: how there's there's there's nothing new, so they're reaching into
Speaker 2: like into like the cees of of yesteryear. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: trying to push two things together and pretend that it's
Speaker 2: a new thing. And when it doesn't work, they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is actually a good things. He's folding the towel
Speaker 2: just the way I like, and that's bad. Poorly. Look,
Speaker 2: he spends ninety seconds putting a single shirt into the
Speaker 2: washing machine, and this is him being very thorough. That
Speaker 2: that was the words.
Speaker 1: He's being very thorough, really putting the time, and.
Speaker 2: You're like, this thing doesn't work.
Speaker 1: It is bad. It's a bad product. Part of the
Speaker 1: mistake they made, I think is that because this is
Speaker 1: the year of robots, there are robots there that are
Speaker 1: like industrial application robots that are showcasing we have made
Speaker 1: a robot with humanoid hands that is capable of more
Speaker 1: intricate movements than any other human hand robot before, and
Speaker 1: they should showed it like intricately folding like a wheel.
Speaker 1: And I was like, yeah, that I have not seen
Speaker 1: a robot with humanoid hands that has had that much
Speaker 1: dexterity before. I'm sure that has some useful industrial applications.
Speaker 1: And then you go from that and there's a bunch
Speaker 1: of other robots that are industrial where it's like, we
Speaker 1: have built a new tip for this robot that allows
Speaker 1: it to do this kind of automotive work, or allows
Speaker 1: it to do this kind of like manufacturing work, right
Speaker 1: where I'm like, I assume not being an expert on robotics,
Speaker 1: but you're saying it's the world's first robot that can
Speaker 1: handle this task. But that's at least an innovation. You
Speaker 1: talk about the ethics of replacing hit, but like that's
Speaker 1: a thing that is a new capability, and you have
Speaker 1: those robots next to the robots that human beings arectionally
Speaker 1: meant to buy and put in their homes, none of
Speaker 1: which work well, all of which are exactly as capable
Speaker 1: as robots twenty years ago, except there's a chatbot on them,
Speaker 1: and it makes it all look worse. Where you're showing
Speaker 1: me what theoretically the best in robotics can do, and
Speaker 1: then I'm looking at the thing I'm supposed to have
Speaker 1: in my house and it just fell down and it
Speaker 1: can't fold laundry, and you want me to spend six
Speaker 1: thousand dollars or twelve thousand dollars. One of the robot
Speaker 1: the uh uh I think it was like Booster X
Speaker 1: or something like that, the one that was dressed like
Speaker 1: Michael Jackson. You're supposed to have as a companion for
Speaker 1: your child. It'll help it with its homework using chatch ept.
Speaker 2: It's small dancing robots.
Speaker 1: Small dancing robot. Yes, yes, the small dancing robot that
Speaker 1: you've been hit in the head with a liquor bottle
Speaker 1: and it won't break. That was part of the ad video.
Speaker 2: You know how you always would to hit your get
Speaker 2: into the head with a liquor bottle, Get out this
Speaker 2: anger with this tiny child's high.
Speaker 6: Robot robot senator for your child.
Speaker 1: And again, if someone was marketing a robot senator, like
Speaker 1: are you angry at your spouse? You can beat the
Speaker 1: shit out of this robot and be fine. At least
Speaker 1: that's an idea.
Speaker 5: You know, with AI technology, the robot will actually learn
Speaker 5: your spouse's personality and respond accordingly. Take the beatings.
Speaker 1: Look, look, I've been hitting this robot after I come
Speaker 1: back from work every day for the last two weeks.
Speaker 1: And look as soon as I walk on the door
Speaker 1: it starts to shake the.
Speaker 6: Previous models in this way. It wasn't satisfied.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it took a long time for a team to
Speaker 1: figure out how to give a robot PTSD. By god,
Speaker 1: we've crossed the rubicon.
Speaker 2: As you can see, Vegas is taking its toll on
Speaker 2: our psyches as we've done a extended intimate partner abuse. Bid.
Speaker 1: He's not a partner. It's robot Garrison.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're right, it's not.
Speaker 1: Also, the robot can think and feel and has core
Speaker 1: memories and can love.
Speaker 2: You don't put those two things together. These only exist
Speaker 2: as separate thoughts.
Speaker 1: So this robot basically has a soul watches hit it
Speaker 1: with a liquor bottle.
Speaker 5: It would just be so great to like with all
Speaker 5: of the how much they're focused on the AI can
Speaker 5: develop real human connection.
Speaker 6: But it's also Sacharin.
Speaker 5: I would love to just do a booth where it's
Speaker 5: like we're teaching our robots hate they can't know how
Speaker 5: to hate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I do want to end by noting one
Speaker 1: thing that we talked about a little briefly, but it
Speaker 1: is kind of low key. The most upsetting thing about this,
Speaker 1: which is I saw a bunch of different booths that
Speaker 1: use the term empathy, and what they meant by empathy
Speaker 1: was the robot can understand and anticipate what you want
Speaker 1: right that it's learning you and your patterns in order
Speaker 1: to offer you in more effect we assist you. And
Speaker 1: I guess technically, yeah, but reducing the concept of empathy
Speaker 1: to the robot knows when you might want snacks is
Speaker 1: kind of evil, like it's in its right empathy means
Speaker 1: the robot knows when to serve you. Is like a
Speaker 1: bad way to talk about empathy. I don't think most
Speaker 1: people when you know what is empathy, well, it means
Speaker 1: someone knows when I want to be up sold on
Speaker 1: a Hyundai. That's not what empathy is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, our robot learns empathy by being instrumental to you
Speaker 5: and useful seeaously what you know the core of empathy.
Speaker 1: We made our robot watch four hours of videos from
Speaker 1: Gaza and it immediately said, I bet those kids went
Speaker 1: on Hyundai a Lantra like that. I anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's if your version of empathy is trying to sell
Speaker 2: coke vanilla because we have all of this, all this stock.
Speaker 2: Oh wait too much.
Speaker 3: We fucked up.
Speaker 2: We are in trouble, We're under That's what empathy is.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, Welcome to the future.
Speaker 2: Everyone's a CES miracle.
Speaker 1: It's a CES miracle. Goodbye. This is it could happen
Speaker 1: here a podcast about things falling apart and today the
Speaker 1: things falling apart our consumer electronics as an industry. We
Speaker 1: are at CES twenty twenty six, the trade show where
Speaker 1: the tech industry shows us everything that's going to sell
Speaker 1: us in the next year. And we've seen some cool
Speaker 1: stuff and a lot of bloatwear, a lot of crap,
Speaker 1: a lot of AI enabled stuff that doesn't need to
Speaker 1: be AI enabled. Here to talk about it is our
Speaker 1: panel of experts.
Speaker 2: Needs experts is a strong word.
Speaker 1: But okay, yeah, panel is a strong word. Is even
Speaker 1: a strong word. I'm Robert Evans, Garrison Davis is also
Speaker 1: with me.
Speaker 6: And I'm Ben Rose Porter.
Speaker 1: And you know been you're an academic, right you do
Speaker 1: you do college?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 6: College, I'm a teach sociology.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, as a sociopath. Uh, how academy, folks.
Speaker 5: It's fascinating, love, I mean, you know, it's a fascinating world. Sociologically.
Speaker 5: You can learn a lot of the maladies of society
Speaker 5: at this place.
Speaker 1: It's most of them are on display here.
Speaker 2: We are now going to walk you through a bunch
Speaker 2: of the largely non ai products that we were able
Speaker 2: to find after sorting through the gunk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of like like you know how people
Speaker 1: like pan for gold. Yes, if instead of like panning
Speaker 1: for gold and like a beautiful mountain stream like you
Speaker 1: were panning for gold and like a pile of used condoms, gold.
Speaker 2: Is also generous. This is the panning for pennies in
Speaker 2: a pile of used condoms.
Speaker 1: Right right now? What was the best used condom you
Speaker 1: saw it? Twenty twenty six?
Speaker 2: Garrison, I think you mean, what's the best Penny good products.
Speaker 2: Did we see any good products?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's some good ones.
Speaker 2: Did I I don't know if I saw any good
Speaker 2: products this year.
Speaker 1: The translation stuff is still around, and some of it's
Speaker 1: really cool now.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, we've in other episodes we've talked about
Speaker 2: the glasses and the earbuds. Most of the product sheets
Speaker 2: I have out now are at the very least mixed
Speaker 2: if if if not, it's not bad. At Eureka Park
Speaker 2: there was this product called Nodi, which is a smartphone
Speaker 2: replacement for kids, like kids like six to twelve if
Speaker 2: you don't want them having a smartphone, and it allows
Speaker 2: them to send voice messages to a parent and who
Speaker 2: like you know has like this approoved contact list, so
Speaker 2: you can you can also listen to music, listen to
Speaker 2: like some like radio, like like you know radio, dramas,
Speaker 2: price and books. It connects to Spotify. You can learn
Speaker 2: languages allegedly or you can you can learn words, right,
Speaker 2: you can learn words from other languages, and you can
Speaker 2: communicate with your parents. And this was like fine, right,
Speaker 2: it's the stuff that we've kind of seen before, but
Speaker 2: it was this little like you know, silken kind of
Speaker 2: looks like like a elf bar. If you're familiar with
Speaker 2: an elf bar, it kind of looks like that, and
Speaker 2: it's if, yeah, if you don't want to give your like,
Speaker 2: you know, six year old an iPhone, but you you know,
Speaker 2: want them to have a way to contact you, right,
Speaker 2: and that's like fine. Right. So there's there's a lot
Speaker 2: of like basic stuff like that. I guess that is
Speaker 2: like kind of okay. I don't want to be cynical
Speaker 2: for the sake of being cynical. That kind of stuff
Speaker 2: bores me. But there really wasn't that many good products
Speaker 2: this year because so many of them just were LLLM rappers,
Speaker 2: as we discussed in our previous episode.
Speaker 1: And there's another there were products that were good and
Speaker 1: I could tell we're good products on their own that
Speaker 1: they had still thrown AI functionality that I don't want
Speaker 1: that I know will blow out the price and also
Speaker 1: makes it me less want to buy it. LG was
Speaker 1: advertising their new OLED television that has like the most
Speaker 1: vibrant colors, the best OLED screen that's ever been on
Speaker 1: a TV. I'm sure it looked fucking great. Yeah, video
Speaker 1: of it. The colors, the darks are amazing. Screens are
Speaker 1: really good, but it's also with AI with Evo AI
Speaker 1: and show off it's vibrant colors and what's capable of.
Speaker 1: They had a loop of videos that were inspired by
Speaker 1: the hubbled Space telescope and you can see it if
Speaker 1: if you ever watched Deep Space nine. It's about the
Speaker 1: quality of the Deep Space nine intro.
Speaker 2: It does look very Star Trek intro.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is frustrating because again we have images show
Speaker 1: the actual image show they look cool because you know
Speaker 1: what they are is real, Like they're real products of
Speaker 1: one of the most impressive things human beings ever made.
Speaker 1: And you're bragging that, like we have an AI generating
Speaker 1: images inspired by this thing that look worse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a lot of those things. They're kind
Speaker 2: of mixed.
Speaker 1: I wanted the TV I want. I was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I might like a TV like that until you displayed
Speaker 1: that part of it, and now I just kind of
Speaker 1: feel dirty about even the prospect of wanting one of
Speaker 1: your products.
Speaker 2: This is an interesting product I saw the like the
Speaker 2: Innovation Awards showcases is the acoustic eye, which is kind of.
Speaker 1: First off, that's an ear.
Speaker 2: That's an ear, like, right, that's an ear. We don't
Speaker 2: need to do that, But this is a secifically a
Speaker 2: security system that tries to detect very small drones. And
Speaker 2: this is like for you know, high profile people's houses.
Speaker 2: Mostly you can put that on your roof or your
Speaker 2: window and it'll detect very small drones that cameras would
Speaker 2: not be able to detect. So it's trying to like
Speaker 2: listen for drones. It provides three hundred and sixty degree
Speaker 2: omnidirectional aerial surveillance detecting invisible aerial threats. So I would
Speaker 2: assume that they're trying to excel these to like, you know,
Speaker 2: like executives like CEOs, politicians, people who are at risk
Speaker 2: of either you know, drones filming around their house or
Speaker 2: more like kinetic drone based attacks. Right, And this is
Speaker 2: an interesting product that's like very current. It's a very
Speaker 2: current product like this is this is a reflection of
Speaker 2: some of the times that we're in.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Found I found that to be one of an interesting thing.
Speaker 2: I guess these we should discuss the exoskeleton, which is
Speaker 2: maybe the best part of the show for me.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's all a lot more exoskeletons this year. The
Speaker 1: technology is clearly matured and mature to the point that
Speaker 1: not only is it, do they have viable versions for
Speaker 1: like industrial use for people working in factories and whatnot? Right,
Speaker 1: which two years ago is what they were always advertising,
Speaker 1: is that these are things that you buy at an
Speaker 1: enterprise level. And I know they're not primarily concerned with
Speaker 1: the health and well being of their workers, but actually
Speaker 1: these do improve health and well being of workers. Right.
Speaker 1: It reduces the felt load and the felt strain, It
Speaker 1: reduces the damaged knees and back, right.
Speaker 2: And that does affect their productivity, right, And it.
Speaker 1: Also affects the profit because you're not you're less likely
Speaker 1: to have workmen's comp claims. Right. It's one of those
Speaker 1: It's one of those things where it's a really good
Speaker 1: idea and the products work. There's a number of very
Speaker 1: good exoskeletons we received from a company called hyper Shell,
Speaker 1: an exoskeleton before the convention this year that you and
Speaker 1: I both wore on the floor. I have some data
Speaker 1: on it, which is that I timed my normal walking
Speaker 1: pace when I'm not particularly trying to get anywhere about
Speaker 1: nineteen minutes a mile, right, if I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: like walking casually. When I put the Hypershell on and
Speaker 1: had it at seventy five percent power mode. My walking
Speaker 1: pace was fifteen to sixteen minutes a mile, about fifteen
Speaker 1: and a half, I think is what I generally advertised.
Speaker 1: And my heart rate didn't change meaningfully. It was like
Speaker 1: one or two higher than it normally is, but not
Speaker 1: really a significant change and heart rate, right, And I
Speaker 1: felt like at the end of the day, my feet
Speaker 1: heard about a normal amount for a day at cees,
Speaker 1: but my lower back in my knees felt less strained. Right.
Speaker 1: That was my experience with the iber shell.
Speaker 2: It's like an external hip almost attatches around your waist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a belt around your hip and it goes
Speaker 1: up to right above your knees. Is kind of the
Speaker 1: and so it's not a huge footprint.
Speaker 2: No, it's a very small device. And yeah, goes goes
Speaker 2: on your hip. Then another strap like goes above your
Speaker 2: knee and it kind of assists or guides your leg
Speaker 2: and your hip up and down.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And for the record, folks, the basic version of
Speaker 1: this product is about a thousand dollars. The version we
Speaker 1: had was about twenty one hundred dollars, right, And the
Speaker 1: battery will last about thirty kilometers. They say I didn't
Speaker 1: have any trouble getting about an eight hour day out
Speaker 1: of it.
Speaker 2: Ben, you wore it much more than I did. I
Speaker 2: wore it a little bit. Do you want to just
Speaker 2: talk about your experience with hyper Shell.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was impressed with it. It was, first of all, Hypershell,
Speaker 5: very funny. Am I like that name. It was pretty
Speaker 5: comfortable to wear, which is I always see the exoskeletons
Speaker 5: and I'm like, it looks kind of awkward. But it
Speaker 5: was like it was very easy to take on and
Speaker 5: pull off. I was, and it was comfortable, and it
Speaker 5: was pretty simple. And it basically just has two motors
Speaker 5: that sort of assist. When you move your leg, it
Speaker 5: pushes your leg and when it comes back in the step,
Speaker 5: it pushes it back down, and so it's just assisting
Speaker 5: and it tracks your leg pretty well, so there's just
Speaker 5: very little time when you're pushing against the machine. It's
Speaker 5: coordinated very well. I mean, it just functioned. It worked,
Speaker 5: and you could walk a long time.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The fact that it's like, yes, it's a product
Speaker 1: that works and it does a thing that has utility,
Speaker 1: it feels increasingly rare at CEES.
Speaker 5: I was a little disappointed that the product did not
Speaker 5: pay attention to my emotions and build a relationship of
Speaker 5: empathy with me.
Speaker 9: But the walking was cut.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I asked the hyper Michelle about its opinions on Proust,
Speaker 1: and it had very little to say.
Speaker 2: It is it isn't like two main modes. It has
Speaker 2: like this eco mode and it's this hyper mode, which
Speaker 2: can get really aggressive.
Speaker 1: If you turn up hyper mode of lifting your legs,
Speaker 1: you can.
Speaker 2: You can you can be bounding, yeah, and you you
Speaker 2: can even you can addres like the torque. You can
Speaker 2: address like how how much delay it has. You have
Speaker 2: a lot of different settings. The one thing that I
Speaker 2: had a lot of fun with is that there's this
Speaker 2: other experimental mode I don't know if you turned it
Speaker 2: on yet, called called fitness mode. Fitness mode is cool.
Speaker 2: It does the opposite. It adds resistance to the like,
Speaker 2: so it's it's for like working out. If you want
Speaker 2: like a harder hype right, then you can you can.
Speaker 2: You can turn on fitness mode and then it'll be
Speaker 2: it's more work like how Goku trained to walk. Sure,
Speaker 2: But something I I I that's an anime thing.
Speaker 1: By the way.
Speaker 2: Now, one thing that I've found out through through my
Speaker 2: own my my, my own cunning is that if you
Speaker 2: have hyper mode turned on all the way, which it
Speaker 2: was when when Ben was wearing the exoskeleton on my phone,
Speaker 2: I can switch from hypermode to fitness mode immediately, which
Speaker 2: completely halts any movement. So you can be walking at
Speaker 2: like seven.
Speaker 1: Fuck up your friends if they don't have the app.
Speaker 2: At seven, you're walking with like seven miles an hour,
Speaker 2: really fast speed walking, and then I press a button
Speaker 2: and your legs are go to an immediate halt. And
Speaker 2: it was really fun to do that for about seven hours.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I almost crashed into several people just scare to
Speaker 5: get his kicks.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm glad you found the terrorize your friend option
Speaker 1: on that.
Speaker 2: It was really fun. It was fun.
Speaker 1: Most of the time I used it. I had installed
Speaker 1: the app when I got it, but I didn't think
Speaker 1: about it after that. Because there you can do everything
Speaker 1: on device, or at least you can do a lot
Speaker 1: a lot of analyze device. You get a lot more
Speaker 1: options when you're using the app, but you don't need
Speaker 1: the app to handle the basic functionality, right.
Speaker 2: I loved adjusting the like the intensity of how much
Speaker 2: how much doing? And it shows a who bunch of
Speaker 2: like applications, right you can wear yeah, hiking, like running,
Speaker 2: doing you know, lifting your work.
Speaker 1: And I like the thoughtfulness in there. You don't need
Speaker 1: the app to use this, but the app vastly the
Speaker 1: app allows you, gives you a lot of control that
Speaker 1: you're not going to get off of a simple like button.
Speaker 10: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It just struck me as good design.
Speaker 2: It has a lot of like fidelity. Yeah yepp.
Speaker 1: So that's the Hypershell folks good exos kels, And I've
Speaker 1: used a few at various cess and this one certainly
Speaker 1: strikes me as like a very good like consumer option,
Speaker 1: like if you, as an individual want one. And I'm
Speaker 1: sure still most of the sales are going to be
Speaker 1: like enterprise different companies that have like you know, want
Speaker 1: these for people who are doing like loading and unloading
Speaker 1: and like a loading dock or whatever. But I think
Speaker 1: the price prices will continue to go down and they
Speaker 1: are now hitting the point where this is like a
Speaker 1: thing that individuals can afford if they want one. And
Speaker 1: there is a lot of and Hypershell focused on this
Speaker 1: in some of their advertising, but there's a lot of
Speaker 1: utility for people with disabilities for stuff like this, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's part of the point of all of these
Speaker 1: different products and in general, when it came to the
Speaker 1: stuff where like the because there's AI in this too,
Speaker 1: Hypershol talks about it, and it's mostly just like how
Speaker 1: it learns and reacts to your motions, right that that's
Speaker 1: like machine learning. When we talk about AI, usually the
Speaker 1: useful applications you could also just call machine learning. That's
Speaker 1: what we used to say. But in general, the products
Speaker 1: that impressed me most and scared me most at CEES
Speaker 1: were healthcare related products. Right where we have a towel
Speaker 1: that reads your sweat and can tell if you have
Speaker 1: like vitamin deficiencies or if you're if you're not hydrated enough,
Speaker 1: or all of these different like the number of products
Speaker 1: where it's both like, yes, this thing can tell if
Speaker 1: you've like fatty liver disease like based on without needing
Speaker 1: to go to a doctor. And I'm sure that is
Speaker 1: useful and will help a lot of people. And also
Speaker 1: all of these products are selling your data to the
Speaker 1: highest better your health data. You're biometrics. If you ask
Speaker 1: them about that, Sorry, I am not aware of that
Speaker 1: being the specific thing for the fatty liver people. That
Speaker 1: was my problem with all the health wearables, I should
Speaker 1: just to be sure, I should clarify the wearable are
Speaker 1: all on the cloud, and every one of the ones
Speaker 1: I saw has deals with the LLLM companies that they're
Speaker 1: working with and are handing your data over.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that's how they get quote unquote smarter is
Speaker 2: through a massive data data collection.
Speaker 1: And so there's this thing where there is this kind
Speaker 1: of baseline expectation here that everyone is fine with handing
Speaker 1: over all of their data, all of their physical data,
Speaker 1: all their biometrics, which I they're like, the utility is
Speaker 1: undeniable of things that can diagnose that you need to
Speaker 1: go to the to a doctor, or can at least
Speaker 1: suggest like the existence of problems combined with and we
Speaker 1: are not at all interested in keeping that information secure.
Speaker 1: I find the kind of casual and no one will
Speaker 1: because I don't think people will. I think people will
Speaker 1: buy these products and not think about who's getting access
Speaker 1: to their biometric data. And I wish that people cared
Speaker 1: about that.
Speaker 2: And we've seen that specifically be a problem like around
Speaker 2: like pregnancy, yeah, and with states restricting abortion and the
Speaker 2: ways in which these companies are aware of people's bodies
Speaker 2: even before the actual people are.
Speaker 1: Here's an AD break. All right, we're back from ADS.
Speaker 1: So I went to Lenovo's booth. It was a bunch
Speaker 1: of laptops. I use Lenovo laptops. They make good products.
Speaker 1: It was every product there was. Either here is a
Speaker 1: new update to the line of laptops we've been making
Speaker 1: for thirty years. This is the latest one, this is
Speaker 1: the latest think pad carbon, this is the latest you know,
Speaker 1: idea pad or whatever. And then they had a couple
Speaker 1: of like the big thing that were showing was the
Speaker 1: Lenovo Twist, which is a laptop that has a screen
Speaker 1: that can twist around and so it can lay flat
Speaker 1: like a tablet, but it can also the thing that
Speaker 1: we're really showing is that it's motorized and it has
Speaker 1: AI enabled, so it can follow your face and you
Speaker 1: can set it to track an individual's face and as
Speaker 1: you move, it will move with you. Now it has
Speaker 1: two different modes. Is also you can like gesture to it,
Speaker 1: or you can command it by voice and you can
Speaker 1: say go into laptop mode, go into tablet mode, turn left,
Speaker 1: turn right. That did not work well. About half the
Speaker 1: time in the demo that I saw, it did not respond,
Speaker 1: maybe because the room was loud, maybe because the data
Speaker 1: was bad. But then he put it into face tracking
Speaker 1: mode and when you have multiple faces, you can pick
Speaker 1: which face it tracks and it swiveled to meet your
Speaker 1: face and it was cool and it did work very well.
Speaker 1: I was like, this is impressive, Like what is the use?
Speaker 1: Why would you want it? And he was like, well,
Speaker 1: say you're doing a presentation, like you're a CEO or
Speaker 1: something doing a presentation. This way the screen with your
Speaker 1: text on it or the PowerPoint on it will follow
Speaker 1: you as you move around. And I was like, that
Speaker 1: could be useful. I don't feel like many people are
Speaker 1: in that situation often. I've never been in that situation
Speaker 1: in my life, and I speak in public for a
Speaker 1: living sometimes, so I guess, yeah, there probably is a
Speaker 1: CEO who would benefit. There's like of those guys like
Speaker 1: what is the This is a whole laptop product line,
Speaker 1: you have multiple versions, and I didn't get a single
Speaker 1: reason why you would want this other than that, other
Speaker 1: than for presentations. And it's genuinely impressive that it can
Speaker 1: track your face and move as you move, but why
Speaker 1: And another product they had that was in the bolt
Speaker 1: Y category was the Lenovo Legion and this is not
Speaker 1: a product that's ever going to come out, but it
Speaker 1: was like a proof of concept. So it's their gaming
Speaker 1: laptop line and it has a normal screen that can
Speaker 1: widen to be three times as long and it unfolds.
Speaker 1: They have screens that unfold, and it's cool that they
Speaker 1: could do that, and it looked neat, and it's neat
Speaker 1: that a screen has that capability. I don't want it
Speaker 1: because it also it doesn't look I could see like
Speaker 1: obviously I can see utility and like you can have
Speaker 1: a screen that gets bigger without it being a bigger
Speaker 1: footprint for the laptop. But when the screen is unfolded,
Speaker 1: there's huge like speed bump size, looking like wads of
Speaker 1: screen that are bigger and like bulge out, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't look good, like it's a bad screen.
Speaker 2: It's like a little like bubby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when it's fully extended, it's not like a good screen.
Speaker 2: You said, it's a prove of concept piece, Like there's
Speaker 2: this thing. I mean like they're.
Speaker 1: Showing that they've they're working on folding screen technology.
Speaker 2: The Twist was was like a previous version of that.
Speaker 2: The proof of concept called the Swivel was at CES
Speaker 2: last year. Yes, and they improved it and now it's
Speaker 2: a real product called the twist, right, and maybe this
Speaker 2: could be the case for this, like like unrolling unfolding.
Speaker 1: Eventually it will be in products, right, Yeah, But I
Speaker 1: also don't think I don't see how you cannot have
Speaker 1: the bulge just kind of and a girl to the
Speaker 1: screen work.
Speaker 2: The folding screens have come along way the past five years.
Speaker 1: I use one. Yeah, they also do have some pixel
Speaker 1: dying in the fold area.
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, if you're trying to buy products for longevity,
Speaker 2: probably not the thing for you. If you like it
Speaker 2: for the novelty, and for some reason have enough cash
Speaker 2: to burn, then maybe it's something I think someone will
Speaker 2: be interested in.
Speaker 1: As I was watching an unfold, there were two guys
Speaker 1: behind me and talking about it, and one of them
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, it's not a real it's not going
Speaker 1: to actually come out like that's even like the old
Speaker 1: version of the chassis. And I said, I just don't
Speaker 1: really see a use. I don't think people want a
Speaker 1: product like this, Like I'm looking at it, the screen's
Speaker 1: not great, and I just don't see who's going to
Speaker 1: buy this. And the guy behind me said, well, I
Speaker 1: think like the the use case is like billionaire CEOs
Speaker 1: and other people have a lot of money. And I
Speaker 1: looked at it. It was a Lenovo rep and I was like, hah,
Speaker 1: that's not that's the use Why who are like that's not?
Speaker 1: Like did you just say that to me?
Speaker 2: A Lenovo rep said that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he's one of the guys doing the demos.
Speaker 1: He had a wild Lenovo badge on and I, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was weird to me.
Speaker 2: That's wild.
Speaker 1: But again, at least it was a thing.
Speaker 2: No, it was it was a physical product.
Speaker 1: Cause the other thing they had they had the workstation,
Speaker 1: which the thing they were showing was there's an app
Speaker 1: on it that looks at your face and said shows
Speaker 1: you how fatigued you are by person, and how fatigued
Speaker 1: your eyes are, and like other data. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's creepy and kind of impressive. But then I walked
Speaker 1: away and I came back and it gave me a
Speaker 1: totally different set of numbers for my fatigue.
Speaker 2: Where you differently fatigued.
Speaker 1: No, I was a second later, and I did it
Speaker 1: four times, and every time the set of numbers was
Speaker 1: like different enough that the only assumption I can make
Speaker 1: is that it was those aren't real numbers. It's just
Speaker 1: generating a number and telling you that. And it's full
Speaker 1: of shit because it wouldn't have been so different if
Speaker 1: it was actually measuring anything. It's just random numbers that
Speaker 1: it's putting on to make you think it's measuring something.
Speaker 2: It's probably trying to it. There might be just subtle
Speaker 2: things that dramatically changed the numbers.
Speaker 1: I tried. I specifically once I noticed that, tried to
Speaker 1: keep my face flat, and I did notice when you
Speaker 1: move closer and further it changes. But I think it's
Speaker 1: just programmed to as you move, alter the numbers so
Speaker 1: that you see the number moving. But every time I
Speaker 1: came on new it was a different number. It went
Speaker 1: from like when I started was like point oh two,
Speaker 1: and the second time I came back it was point
Speaker 1: five to zero. And again I did nothing. I was
Speaker 1: specifically keeping my face neutral, like it's just this, it's
Speaker 1: not a big I think.
Speaker 2: I think that type of stuff will will get better,
Speaker 2: like we've seen versions of that before that have actually
Speaker 2: done like okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, but there could.
Speaker 2: Be a lot of factors into like into why why
Speaker 2: the demo goes a certain way.
Speaker 1: The face tracking and facial recognition were But I went
Speaker 1: to this booth that like the big thing they were
Speaker 1: doing was like uh, driving assistant robots that would like
Speaker 1: yell at you if you fell asleep or if you
Speaker 1: like looked away and were like texting or something. It
Speaker 1: would say, like look away from your phone, look at
Speaker 1: the screen please, And there's definitely like utility there, right,
Speaker 1: Like that is probably a good idea.
Speaker 2: I mean we saw that last year at Samsung's section
Speaker 2: of Eureka Park for like like test taking, to like
Speaker 2: make sure students aren't cheating at tests, right, So it
Speaker 2: like sends an alert every time the students' eyes goes
Speaker 2: away from like the computer screen, like if they like
Speaker 2: keep like looking down like like under if they could
Speaker 2: be checking like their phone or notes.
Speaker 1: Smart Eye is the company. One thing I did appreciate
Speaker 1: it was that the little device that they put in
Speaker 1: was just like a circle with two eyes on it
Speaker 1: as opposed to like a whole dashboard. So that seemed nice.
Speaker 1: But the thing that they had the first thing I
Speaker 1: used was this optical recognition system where it learned my
Speaker 1: eyes and then when I came on, it would give
Speaker 1: my name every time I walked up to it and
Speaker 1: so like, yeah, it definitely like recognizes at least your eyes.
Speaker 2: That's a message.
Speaker 1: It could switch between different people. But it was also
Speaker 1: it can tell when you're drunk, they claim, And I
Speaker 1: couldn't tell that. I couldn't. I was high on kratom
Speaker 1: and I had smoked Delta aid, so I was definitely
Speaker 1: not sober. It didn't recognize me as not sober, so
Speaker 1: it couldn't measure those things. Maybe it can tell if
Speaker 1: you're drunk. The demo, it's it, they said it could,
Speaker 1: and they showed a woman when she was sober and
Speaker 1: when she was drunk, and they explained to me it
Speaker 1: was actually really difficult because we did this on a
Speaker 1: close track and she is really drunk and we had
Speaker 1: to jump through a lot of hoops for them to
Speaker 1: let us have a person drunk driving that's track. And
Speaker 1: I did find that kind of funny. Your response, that
Speaker 1: is how you test?
Speaker 2: That would be kind of a hard thing to test. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you could testing like simulations, right, but.
Speaker 1: They wanted like this was supposed to be a perf
Speaker 1: concept in vehicle and it'll shut down the car. I
Speaker 1: did have some people posting when I posted a video
Speaker 1: of that that like I have this condition with my
Speaker 1: eyes or that condition with my eyes, and normal optical
Speaker 1: recognition stuff doesn't work with me. Is this going to
Speaker 1: show that I'm drunk or is it going to be
Speaker 1: able to And I actually don't know. Again, I'm not
Speaker 1: I was not able to test the product that that
Speaker 1: does seem like a concern I would hope they've dealt with,
Speaker 1: But also I kind of doubt they did because usually
Speaker 1: there's gaps.
Speaker 2: I mean, I could see a company like this partnering
Speaker 2: with like an insurance company or partnering with like certain
Speaker 2: cars that would like, yeah, stop the car from being
Speaker 2: able to be moved if it detects the driver as drunk, yes,
Speaker 2: and how like false positives would play into that. And
Speaker 2: then you just like are like locked out of your
Speaker 2: car right because this robot thinks you're intoxicated and actually
Speaker 2: you're fine. You just like look like that.
Speaker 1: And I could also see them like rolling this product
Speaker 1: out and it hits like Thailand or something, and then
Speaker 1: there being a big store where it's like they didn't
Speaker 1: test this on any people of like Thaie Ancestry, and
Speaker 1: I actually sees all of them as drunk because of
Speaker 1: like an error in the coding sure, and being like
Speaker 1: oh great, like like I'm not again smart ie. From
Speaker 1: what I can tell, their technology worked, but in order
Speaker 1: to adequately like review and test it, you do need
Speaker 1: you need more access to it than they're giving it
Speaker 1: the show. I can't actually tell you if it works
Speaker 1: a determined when people are drunk. I can just show
Speaker 1: you they had a video claiming it does so.
Speaker 2: One product that I feel at best mixed about I
Speaker 2: first saw in the CS Innovation Awards section. This is
Speaker 2: called Self Insight Therapy Resolve XR from South Korea.
Speaker 1: Oh, one of my two favorite Koreas by the way,
Speaker 1: just since we're talking Korea.
Speaker 2: This is a VR therapy program that is supposed to
Speaker 2: give give you a final goodbye with a deceased loved
Speaker 2: one in VR. Yes, this was my initial reaction as well.
Speaker 2: And like I've seen Jon, I've seen versions of this
Speaker 2: before where it's like an LM or like an AI yeah,
Speaker 2: pretending to be your like dead wife that you're like
Speaker 2: hug in VR. Sure, and that type of stuff. I've
Speaker 2: I've generally felt bad about some of the people who've
Speaker 2: used it, like in like you know, like the promotional
Speaker 2: videos are you know, crying, and I feel and like
Speaker 2: the product in a way.
Speaker 1: As a friend, I will promise you if that moment
Speaker 1: ever comes for you all pretend to be your dead wife.
Speaker 2: I don't even know what to say that I've but
Speaker 2: what I found interesting about Resolve XR is that the
Speaker 2: the avatar of your deceased loved one is not that
Speaker 2: is not actually an AI, nor is it a fully
Speaker 2: pre recorded like prescripted like simulation. It is being puppeted
Speaker 2: by a therapist that you are working with as a
Speaker 2: part of the Gestalt empty chair therapy technique. And this
Speaker 2: this is what the product is. So you're working with
Speaker 2: a therapist who is using text to speech, that is
Speaker 2: talking as your deceased, as your deceased loved one as
Speaker 2: a part of this therapy exercise. If you have if
Speaker 2: you have recordings of their voice, the AI will try
Speaker 2: to replicate their voice. That's something I feel a little
Speaker 2: bit odd about. But like that is like the one
Speaker 2: like aspect of like que unquote AI that's being used
Speaker 2: here is for is for the voice cloning. And then
Speaker 2: there is like a pre a prerecorded set of like
Speaker 2: gestures that someone does in like motion capture, but the
Speaker 2: actual like like live puppeting of this thing is done
Speaker 2: by a therapist that you were sitting across from. But
Speaker 2: you have you know the VR goggle song mm hm.
Speaker 2: And this is this is not supposed to be something
Speaker 2: that you do like routinely. It's not like, oh, I
Speaker 2: like like I'm talking to my wife like my wife
Speaker 2: is in VR. It's this is a therapeutic exercise meant
Speaker 2: for people dealing with extreme grief, specifically when loved ones
Speaker 2: have been taken away during like like like accidents like
Speaker 2: they specifically mentioned like a plane crash that happened a
Speaker 2: year ago. And so just for people like an extreme
Speaker 2: extreme grief to give them like closure through this therapeutic exercise.
Speaker 2: And this is this is this is the this is
Speaker 2: the pamphlet.
Speaker 1: I went through a lot of whiplash because obviously my
Speaker 1: first assumption was this is an evil product where you
Speaker 1: like feed your loved one social media data and it
Speaker 1: pretends to be them, and it's not that, and it's
Speaker 1: good that it's not that, But then it's like it's
Speaker 1: being basically a therapist puppeting your dead loved one. There's
Speaker 1: a couple of conclusions I have. First off, these people
Speaker 1: are trying to be ethical. It does seem it seems
Speaker 1: like they care and they are attempting to provide something
Speaker 1: that is useful to people who are suffering. I also
Speaker 1: think this might fundamentally this idea might be fundamentally unethical
Speaker 1: and impossible to do well. So I think this might
Speaker 1: be a case of someone trying to do the most
Speaker 1: ethical version of something that cannot be done ethically, which
Speaker 1: is a category of AI device that I've seen this year.
Speaker 5: It's tricky because on one hand, you know, as I
Speaker 5: was talking to the woman at the booth and reading
Speaker 5: through the materials they had, it seemed like they were
Speaker 5: selling this as this is just sort of augmentation to
Speaker 5: a therapeutic practice that has already done. We're just putting
Speaker 5: a you know, a digitally generated face and voice to it.
Speaker 5: But it's so I mean, it's so easy to imagine
Speaker 5: just this company seems somewhat ethically focused. But yeah, all
Speaker 5: kinds of directions you could go in this. It's a
Speaker 5: Pandora's box, a little bit of like, yeah, where where
Speaker 5: we're starting to venture into creating replicas of the dead?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that is And I went to a panel
Speaker 1: kind of in the same tone on mental health and
Speaker 1: AI that I thought was going to be an opportunity
Speaker 1: for me to harass an executive during a Q and
Speaker 1: A because which is which is one of your favorite activity?
Speaker 1: Everything to do with CES and there literally is like AI.
Speaker 1: There's ample data that it is a disaster for mental health,
Speaker 1: not just AI psychosis, but there are a lot of
Speaker 1: things that it makes worse, and a lot of problems
Speaker 1: that it causes people, and a lot of problems that
Speaker 1: it exacerbates, including like suicidal ideation. This is documented, there's
Speaker 1: data on it. So that's what I was showing up
Speaker 1: prepared to do that, and what I actually got was
Speaker 1: an actual clinical therapist who was trying to talk about
Speaker 1: who first started by kind by very much admitting the
Speaker 1: dangers with AI and the things that it harms in
Speaker 1: terms of mental health, and then was trying to say
Speaker 1: what would a responsible and ethical like therapeutic AI do.
Speaker 1: And her argument was, we know how many people need
Speaker 1: therapy and don't have access to it within the United
Speaker 1: States and worldwide, and some sort of automated BOT system
Speaker 1: that handles aspects of therapy might be the only way
Speaker 1: to provide affordable therapy to the number of people who
Speaker 1: needed who can't currently afford it, and I disagree, or
Speaker 1: at least I don't think that. I don't disagree. It's
Speaker 1: accurate that there's way more people who need mental health
Speaker 1: than can afford it. Right, that's undeniable, undebatable. I disagree
Speaker 1: that AI can help this problem in any meaningful way,
Speaker 1: and in fact think it will only make it worse.
Speaker 1: But I understand that she was coming at this from
Speaker 1: a I am attempting to define what a responsible, a
Speaker 1: therapeutic AI might do, and through the course of that
Speaker 1: I believe she is partially because I talked to her
Speaker 1: about this afterwards too. She thinks it might be possible,
Speaker 1: but is not convinced that it is in fact possible
Speaker 1: for there to be an AI therapy system that is
Speaker 1: actually useful. And one of the things she brought up
Speaker 1: was that in traditional AI chatbots, the big ones are
Speaker 1: all programmed to gas you up in order to keep
Speaker 1: you using them, right, the program to make you want
Speaker 1: to continue to interact with them, and so it does
Speaker 1: things that are really bad for your mental health and
Speaker 1: that can exacerbate and cause new problems, right because of
Speaker 1: the way these are programmed. So any responsible AI therapy
Speaker 1: chatbot would have to not do that, which I'm like,
Speaker 1: that is true, that you can't be a useful therapeutic
Speaker 1: tool that only praises people. Right, that's just not a thing.
Speaker 1: But when I came to afterwards, I was like, my
Speaker 1: issue is I think you're right about that, but I
Speaker 1: also think if you're saying the AI therapy bot is
Speaker 1: going to be a separate product that does not do
Speaker 1: these things. Number one, it's a high bard to get
Speaker 1: people to pay money for a tool when they already
Speaker 1: have the chat bot. And number two, if the chatbot
Speaker 1: that is good for them doesn't do the thing that
Speaker 1: makes it addictive, people will continue to use the addictive
Speaker 1: one for therapy. And she said, yeah, that's my worry too.
Speaker 1: And so I came away from being like, she's trying
Speaker 1: to explore if this can be done, and my conclusion
Speaker 1: based on her exploration as it can't.
Speaker 5: But it's so interesting that she said that because she
Speaker 5: and this is I mean me hearing you talk about her,
Speaker 5: she sounds like the only person who is thinking about
Speaker 5: this at all.
Speaker 6: Yes, that's convention.
Speaker 1: She was the only person on the panel. Yeah, of
Speaker 1: just it was a speech, not a panel, really, yeah.
Speaker 5: Of thinking about that, what are the social relations behind
Speaker 5: these technologies, because of course that's the main question here.
Speaker 5: Is a technology that can generate that can have a
Speaker 5: conversation with you? Is one thing It's not that really
Speaker 5: doesn't seem like the war of the problem so much. Well,
Speaker 5: all the machines that are having conversations are driven by
Speaker 5: very specific incentives, you know, to interact with their users
Speaker 5: in a particular way that has everything to do with
Speaker 5: the social relationships of their production and use. And the
Speaker 5: notion that technology would have any connection to social relations
Speaker 5: at all is completely absent from any discussion of any
Speaker 5: product I've seen here.
Speaker 1: Speaking of social relations between products and human beings, here's
Speaker 1: some ads. We're back and God, I really love those
Speaker 1: Chumba casino ads. They remind me that whenever I'm out
Speaker 1: in the world, sitting down with my loved ones, you know,
Speaker 1: watching the big Game, I could be gambling, and kind
Speaker 1: of every other moment of my life that I'm not
Speaker 1: gambling is wasted.
Speaker 2: Robert, have you heard of Calshi?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: So you know about politics, right, I love politics, And
Speaker 2: you know about insider trading, right, I love insider What
Speaker 2: if you could do insider trading about all of politics
Speaker 2: on the exclusive inferation that you learn as a journalist.
Speaker 1: Wow, that sounds legal.
Speaker 2: It shockingly is there's actually zero federal or state regulation
Speaker 2: affecting this whatsoever.
Speaker 1: That's the Calcie guarantee.
Speaker 2: There is no regulatory mechanism that exists on a state
Speaker 2: level to regulate this behavior.
Speaker 1: Now years and you say that, but that's literally just
Speaker 1: what's printed above their booth.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about maybe the worst product that I saw
Speaker 2: at CEES child Free Trust.
Speaker 1: Boy, So what is it like a software that lets
Speaker 1: you make a trust?
Speaker 5: This software was marketed towards child free people. They lead
Speaker 5: with twenty five percent of Americans don't have children and
Speaker 5: don't intend to have them. Hell yeah yeah, And so
Speaker 5: their idea is that they right here. Child Free Trust
Speaker 5: is the first comprehensive nationwide solution providing medical and financial
Speaker 5: poa executor and trustee representation for child free and permanently
Speaker 5: childless people. So if you are childless and you don't
Speaker 5: want to burden your loved ones, that's their wording with
Speaker 5: you know, your estate plan when you die, This is
Speaker 5: a company that will do that for you. What's interesting, though,
Speaker 5: is that I asked them. I said, well, look, you
Speaker 5: know this presumably already happens, what is in place, and.
Speaker 1: I have a trust in no children.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, Well does state appoints someone to handle this,
Speaker 5: they'll they will first see if that you have, if
Speaker 5: you have any loved ones who would want to take
Speaker 5: on these duties.
Speaker 1: And obviously people have kids aren't capable of love.
Speaker 5: So yeah, yeah, they a little bit, I mean strangely
Speaker 5: like so it's it's an it's a product that is
Speaker 5: for we already have a public service that searches for
Speaker 5: people loved ones that could take on these responsibilities, and
Speaker 5: if it cannot find those, it takes it on as
Speaker 5: a as a public good. So it was a product
Speaker 5: completely without purpose. It was like you, in order to
Speaker 5: use this, you just have to be intent on separating
Speaker 5: yourself from society in this way. You have no loved
Speaker 5: ones presumably or you don't want them involved in your
Speaker 5: estate planning. You also don't want the state involved, so
Speaker 5: it requires this third party company.
Speaker 6: It was just a very strange product the way they
Speaker 6: presented it.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's again, I have a trust and
Speaker 1: a will. If you don't have a kid, and you
Speaker 1: don't have like a you're not like married, or you
Speaker 1: don't have a surviving spouse, like, yes, the state will
Speaker 1: appoint somebody, but that process is slower and more expensive.
Speaker 1: If you want to avoid the cost, or if you
Speaker 1: want to avoid like having a trust and a will
Speaker 1: is not an unreasonable thing, especially if you want to
Speaker 1: make sure if you have assets and you want to
Speaker 1: make sure they go a specific place, you want to
Speaker 1: donate them somewhere whatever.
Speaker 2: Well, and like a lawyer can handle that, a lawyer.
Speaker 1: Should handle That is what I'm saying is you shouldn't
Speaker 1: use an app.
Speaker 2: Specifically, what they do that the lawyer can't is they
Speaker 2: provide a service for the corporation to execute power of attorney.
Speaker 2: And that is the main thing. So this is the
Speaker 2: most anti social This is the most anti social service
Speaker 2: I've seen it all of ces because it's built on
Speaker 2: this idea that if you have no kids and you
Speaker 2: are so separated from the rest of your family, like
Speaker 2: you don't trust any siblings, you don't trust a spouse,
Speaker 2: a partner maybe you don't have one, you don't trust parents,
Speaker 2: you don't even trust a friend to to like do
Speaker 2: this for you. Instead that you turn to a company
Speaker 2: a private company. You don't even trust the state, right
Speaker 2: because the state can handle this. It is a private
Speaker 2: corporation that it's going to handle your will, your estate
Speaker 2: and power of attorney. And that that's what really, that's
Speaker 2: what really got me because I asked them it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like a lawyer can handle all this, and like, well, no,
Speaker 2: regular lawyer can't be power of attorney. And I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is the core of your product actually is that
Speaker 2: it's it's for people who are so anti social, who
Speaker 2: have so separated themselves that they don't trust, They don't
Speaker 2: trust anyone with this. You don't have any loved ones. Really,
Speaker 2: it's not just about being child free. No, it's like
Speaker 2: it's about you you do not exist like in a
Speaker 2: social network whatsoever.
Speaker 1: Because I can see the kind of people who might
Speaker 1: need this are people or might want this are not
Speaker 1: the people kind of people who'd use apps, because the
Speaker 1: actual the group of people who definitely don't have kids
Speaker 1: and also may not have any living friends are people
Speaker 1: who are incredibly elderly. It's not even a factor of
Speaker 1: like their life is bleak that it's just you lived
Speaker 1: way too long. You literally don't have anyone left that
Speaker 1: you knew, But they're not going to use an app,
Speaker 1: Like that's just not how they think about. If they
Speaker 1: don't have a lawyer, they'll let have the state handle it.
Speaker 1: But like they're not they're not going to download the
Speaker 1: child free app. That's one hundred and four year old
Speaker 1: Okinawan woman to like handle this for them. There's like
Speaker 1: a graph on the bottom that here's like features and
Speaker 1: like which different versions have which features, and the three
Speaker 1: features are child free, trust, trust and will and then
Speaker 1: free will as one word, but the ws capitalized. I
Speaker 1: just like seeing free well and then checks and exis
Speaker 1: at the bottom. You don't get free well on all
Speaker 1: of the options. Sorry, what is free will as a
Speaker 1: surface scarrison? Are they saying the machine has it? Or
Speaker 1: is it literally a free will making service?
Speaker 2: It's I think I think it's creating a will and
Speaker 2: they're saying at free will. I think that's what I think.
Speaker 1: That's what they're doing. Okay, I mean but yeah, no,
Speaker 1: and this wasn't This was in Eureka part yeah, which
Speaker 1: is where the cool little products are. That's bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was really bizarre.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a fun bit that you could do if
Speaker 1: you had the money to show up and just do
Speaker 1: bits at CEES where it's like this company can handle
Speaker 1: all of your end of life care and decisions and
Speaker 1: just a booth with a handgun on the table.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about to close, let's just discuss like
Speaker 2: what this CEES kind of means in general. We already
Speaker 2: kind of discussed like the AI angle of this, and
Speaker 2: that's something that we've seen throughout this show is these
Speaker 2: these massive banners hanging everywhere about how CES is where
Speaker 2: innovators show k yeah, absolutely, and and how everything's based
Speaker 2: around innovation and creativity and this is where everything descends
Speaker 2: from and this sort of like like tech idealism that
Speaker 2: the world is based around these concepts of innovation and creativity,
Speaker 2: and they do not mention any any physical way that
Speaker 2: actually comes into the world or the sort of mechanisms
Speaker 2: of the world that allow innovation to take place. And Ben,
Speaker 2: we we've been talking a lot about this the past
Speaker 2: like two days.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's all we're solving all the problems of
Speaker 5: the world and we're fixing everything, and it's all eternal sunshine,
Speaker 5: and where that comes from is innovation and creativity. But
Speaker 5: those are just yeah, totally abstract quantities. There's not even
Speaker 5: a subject given of like innovators, Well, who who is that?
Speaker 1: Are the product you're innovating?
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you is that?
Speaker 6: The owner?
Speaker 5: Is that the workers who make it? I mean, no
Speaker 5: mention of labor at any point in any of this,
Speaker 5: which I mean that's a given, but.
Speaker 1: Well that's not true. They talked about all the labories
Speaker 1: you could replace.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all right, you can, we don't need them. It's
Speaker 5: the innovation is drawn the full circle, it produces itself. Now, Yeah,
Speaker 5: just that this abstract quantum of I mean, it really
Speaker 5: is kind of interesting. It does become a blur of
Speaker 5: like who is the magical font producing all of this stuff?
Speaker 5: It almost sometimes it almost seems like it's the consumer.
Speaker 5: It's sort of suggesting is like it's actually you who
Speaker 5: creates all of this. It was very vague, very strange.
Speaker 6: M h.
Speaker 2: We went to that one panel about like trying to
Speaker 2: address underserved people who are who are like cut out
Speaker 2: of tech and like cut out of cut out of
Speaker 2: all of these industries.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it was very nondescript about who exactly
Speaker 5: that was.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: They had people talking for the that are paralyzed veterans.
Speaker 5: Someone from the NAACP, and I mean it was just
Speaker 5: one again. There was no actual discussion of the social
Speaker 5: relationships behind technology. It was just entirely about this technology
Speaker 5: is here, It is the first priority, so everything else
Speaker 5: has to follow after. And yeah, very very unclear about
Speaker 5: they They would all talk about what technology could be
Speaker 5: used for, but entirely nondescript about where that process comes from,
Speaker 5: Who's making those decisions, where those centers of power are.
Speaker 1: The reach to have an for existing brands and companies
Speaker 1: that make real things to have an AI angle was
Speaker 1: the most obvious and tortured thing that I saw, And
Speaker 1: like one of my favorite booths every year is the
Speaker 1: Jackery booth. Jacqueery makes batteries and solar panels, and they
Speaker 1: make pretty good batteries and solar panels for like expeditions
Speaker 1: for camping, like the rugged that they can and I
Speaker 1: use them. They're good products. And this year they had
Speaker 1: the new addition of all their batteries and the new
Speaker 1: edition of all their solar panels, and as generally happens
Speaker 1: with technology, everything's a little better than it was last year.
Speaker 1: But there's not much room for AI aside from like
Speaker 1: the batteries have AI by which they mean there's like
Speaker 1: a learning algorithm that can determine like how to optimize
Speaker 1: aspects of like power draw or whatever.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 1: Sure, that's not really AI in the way that the
Speaker 1: AI industry means it, but I'm sure sounds real. But
Speaker 1: because that wasn't enough, they had this thing that they
Speaker 1: called their Mars rover, which was not a Mars rover.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'll ever go on Mars. Does not
Speaker 1: look like it could survive on Mars. But it is
Speaker 1: a rover that is a big battery on wheels that
Speaker 1: is intelligent and can drive itself and has solar panels
Speaker 1: that slide out. And the use case for this was
Speaker 1: it will travel around and can go to where the
Speaker 1: sun is in order to charge itself up and then
Speaker 1: head to you to offer you outlets when you're doing work.
Speaker 1: And it's like, is a robot that moves? Really? I
Speaker 1: can see like two points in my life where I
Speaker 1: might have gotten used to who's gonna buy this for?
Speaker 8: What?
Speaker 1: Where will it be deployed? It just roams around outside
Speaker 1: this expensive machine that does not look like it should
Speaker 1: get rained on too much, and finds the sun to
Speaker 1: charge itself up and then heads over to you to
Speaker 1: charge device. It can't charge a home. It doesn't power
Speaker 1: a house. It's like a little robot.
Speaker 2: Is it really camping? I don't know.
Speaker 1: That was unclear. They showed it being used, and they
Speaker 1: showed it as like I'm outside and using power tools.
Speaker 1: The robot came up to me so I could plug in,
Speaker 1: and like.
Speaker 2: I guess you could take like the park, you could
Speaker 2: take it to park.
Speaker 1: But it's big.
Speaker 2: It is pretty big.
Speaker 1: It's like a sizeable machine. It probably weighed eighty pounds.
Speaker 1: And again, like, it's impressive that it can go seek
Speaker 1: out the sun to charge itself up. It's impressive that
Speaker 1: you could like call it or like call it with
Speaker 1: an app and it will come over to you. And
Speaker 1: there's an outlet. Who what is the Who will buy this? Why?
Speaker 2: When that is not one?
Speaker 1: Again? I can think working in my yard, working out
Speaker 1: you know, when I'm shearing the goats or whatever, I
Speaker 1: have had to carry a battery with me because there's
Speaker 1: not an outlet out there and the shears need a battery.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I guess it would be easier if the
Speaker 1: robot moved there. But this has to be like twenty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars I'm not gonna buy a robot to do that.
Speaker 1: I can just pick up a battery and walk with
Speaker 1: it one hundred feet. Who will use this? Why it's
Speaker 1: not going to Mars? I assure you it's not going
Speaker 1: to Mars. Again, I wouldn't want it to be left
Speaker 1: out in the rain. And I love the Jaggery products.
Speaker 1: They make good stuff and the fact that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you clear scrambled to make this, that you had a
Speaker 1: thing that can compete with all the other AI things.
Speaker 1: And I wish you were just devoting your LIFs to
Speaker 1: making better solar panels, which is what I want from you. Anyway.
Speaker 5: I'm just curious are the how many is here? Are
Speaker 5: they profitable?
Speaker 6: Like do they?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean some of them, some.
Speaker 6: Of them, but a lot.
Speaker 1: I mean some of them are funded with VC money
Speaker 1: and have not made a profit. Some of them are
Speaker 1: funded from VC money and have been losing money for years.
Speaker 1: And then there's also like like Lenovo makes it's a company,
Speaker 1: it makes a profit. They make products people buy, you know,
Speaker 1: Jaggery makes products people buy.
Speaker 2: There's also a lot of startups like the Eureka Park
Speaker 2: section that we've been referring to, like the stuff in
Speaker 2: the bottom floor of the Venetian that those there are
Speaker 2: you know a lot of startup companies who are looking
Speaker 2: for investors as well, So yeah, it is definitely a mix.
Speaker 2: Some of them are trying to do like business business sales,
Speaker 2: some of them are more consumer facing, some of them
Speaker 2: are looking for investors, some of them are profitable, and
Speaker 2: other ones are trying to boost their stock price by
Speaker 2: being here, kind of like Kloyd at LG. But I
Speaker 2: think what's really important is that everyone here is an innovator.
Speaker 2: And you know why we know that they're an innovators
Speaker 2: because they've shown up and only innovators show up here
Speaker 2: and they're the real the driving force of the economy.
Speaker 1: And I was feeling bad about myself until I saw
Speaker 1: that band and realize that I am an innovator.
Speaker 2: You know you are an innovator.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I showed up and I figured out how
Speaker 1: to be the guy on the most kratim at the
Speaker 1: at the CEO show floor.
Speaker 2: No, I mean, CS is so is so interesting toe
Speaker 2: be innovated like it? It runs both on this like
Speaker 2: technology idealism where everything is based on people geniuses, you know,
Speaker 2: your Steve Jobs having like ni Stag's job and he
Speaker 2: is the innovator, and everything descends from the idea that
Speaker 2: it's like the thing is like this like like tech platonism,
Speaker 2: So like this is one side of it. You also
Speaker 2: have like the tech accelerationists at CES where it's like
Speaker 2: they occupy this position of being so pro technology no
Speaker 2: matter whatever downsides is the current iteration might have because
Speaker 2: they need someone to hold that position in order for
Speaker 2: this thing to move forward. They know that there's concerns
Speaker 2: around data protection, but their opinion is that it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: There is problems there, but we we the people here
Speaker 2: I see, Yes, the innovators need to ignore them because
Speaker 2: we have to push forward. And this is like this
Speaker 2: is what like the the Austrian Secretary of State said
Speaker 2: that at that one panel I went to. It's like
Speaker 2: data protection is a problem but in a but like
Speaker 2: it gets in the way of innovation. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 2: that's literally literally what he said. Yeah, and so you
Speaker 2: have you have this like this this like tech optimistic
Speaker 2: like acceleration like viewpoint of like technology will be better,
Speaker 2: but in order for it's to be better and safe, essentially,
Speaker 2: it's it's it's gonna gets kind of shitty and has
Speaker 2: some problems now, but we need to push forward through
Speaker 2: that all the way, Like we can't, we can't, we
Speaker 2: can't go slowly. It has it has to go forward.
Speaker 2: So they adopt this this viewpoint because like they need
Speaker 2: someone to hold this like tech optimism viewpoint in order
Speaker 2: for the process to like unfold.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's something strangely clear eyed about that in the
Speaker 5: way that it's like, yeah, if I mean, if you're
Speaker 5: limiting your view to the system of capitalism, yeah, the
Speaker 5: whole thing goes into crisis if you are not squeezing
Speaker 5: a little more juice out of the orange, and if
Speaker 5: this is what it takes to do that, then then
Speaker 5: full steam ahead. They're lucid about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what else is lucid us saying it's
Speaker 1: time to end this fucking podcast.
Speaker 2: Goodbye, another CES miracle we have kind of survived.
Speaker 9: Hey, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. It's me James
Speaker 9: today and I'm very lucky to be joined again by Goudain,
Speaker 9: who's a journalist from East Kadistan working with HENGO, the
Speaker 9: human rights organization and lots of other organizations, and we're
Speaker 9: going to talk today about what has been happening in
Speaker 9: Iran for the past few weeks. So thanks for joining Uscordaine.
Speaker 11: Hello, thank you very much for inviting me again to
Speaker 11: the to this and yeah, I'm really glad to be
Speaker 11: here and I am ready to talk about all the
Speaker 11: things that have happening in the past few weeks in
Speaker 11: Kurdistan and Iran.
Speaker 9: Yeah. I think for a lot of people, what is
Speaker 9: happening in Iran in the last few weeks has not
Speaker 9: made punched into the mainstream US media for the most part, Right,
Speaker 9: So I think we should probably begin with a very
Speaker 9: basic overview of what has been happening and a little
Speaker 9: bit of why it has been happening and also where,
Speaker 9: because I think that's worth mentioning, right.
Speaker 11: Yeah, sure, So, just a few days before the Near's
Speaker 11: Eve on December twenty eighth, there was a spontaneous demonstration
Speaker 11: and strike in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, which is basically the
Speaker 11: center of Iran's trade and one of the most important
Speaker 11: backbones of the Islamic.
Speaker 8: Regime or revolution.
Speaker 11: There were strikes inside the Bazzar and so many shop
Speaker 11: person business owners just closed down their businesses and they
Speaker 11: took to the streets and inside the shopping centers and
Speaker 11: they started chanting against the regime and they were basically
Speaker 11: protesting the horrible economic situations and the decrease of the
Speaker 11: Iranian reol or the Iranian currency against the US dollar,
Speaker 11: which was one dollar was equal to one million point
Speaker 11: four hundred thousand Iranian reols. And then these protests quickly
Speaker 11: spread it all over the city in Tehran, and as
Speaker 11: usual this is what happens all the time, the Iranian
Speaker 11: regime forces they started attacking people and trying to control
Speaker 11: the situation, but it somehow got out of their.
Speaker 12: Control and the next days these protests, these strikes spread
Speaker 12: it to other cities, to other major cities from Shira's Mashad, Isfahan,
Speaker 12: Tabriz and many other cities.
Speaker 8: Got in involved. But in the.
Speaker 11: Early January, around January five to six and seven, there
Speaker 11: were major protests in cities like Malikshahi in Ilan Province
Speaker 11: and other cities in Kermanshah Province, which are basically the
Speaker 11: Kurdish provinces in western Iran. What is really unique about
Speaker 11: this is that usually when when protests happened across Iran,
Speaker 11: or when there is something happening, the Kurdish regions are
Speaker 11: the first to react, But this time the Kurdish regions,
Speaker 11: like if I want to say, the West Azerbaijan Province
Speaker 11: and the San and Dutch Province, they were not really
Speaker 11: involved because a lot of people were saying that in
Speaker 11: the previous movements, especially in twenty twenty two, we gave
Speaker 11: too much. There were too many victims here. But the
Speaker 11: center was silent. I mean Tehran and Shiras and these
Speaker 11: major Iranian cities, So a lot of people didn't really
Speaker 11: come out and there was nothing happening. And at the
Speaker 11: same time, this is my personal opinion, I think because
Speaker 11: there was also a heavy snowfall in Kurdish regions and
Speaker 11: it was really cold, and I think a lot of people.
Speaker 8: Just didn't want to go out.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So this was happening in Malikshahi and other cities
Speaker 11: in Elam and Kermanshah Province until I think it was
Speaker 11: January fifth that there was a really really big demonstration
Speaker 11: in Malikshahi. And it's a small city, but I can
Speaker 11: say majority of the people were out on the streets
Speaker 11: and then the Iranian region forces started shooting at people
Speaker 11: and they injured and killed a lot of people. And
Speaker 11: the hospital in that city that in that small city
Speaker 11: was full and they had no space anymore. So the
Speaker 11: people took the injured protesters to the center or the
Speaker 11: capital of the province in Ilam City, to the Imam
Speaker 11: Romani Hospital. What happened in this hospital was that there
Speaker 11: were so many people in front of the hospital, like
Speaker 11: families and relatives of the victims, and then after a
Speaker 11: few hours, the Iranian regime forces started attacking the hospital.
Speaker 11: There were so many videos and footage that came out,
Speaker 11: and we also posted it on hangout and all over
Speaker 11: the internet that the regime forces were basically surrounding the
Speaker 11: whole building and then they started shooting tear gases inside
Speaker 11: the hospital. And then there was a video that came
Speaker 11: out that these regime forces were trying to get inside
Speaker 11: the hospital and arrest or kidnap all the injured people
Speaker 11: or if there was a dead body or something, and
Speaker 11: then there was some sort of resistance from the medical staff,
Speaker 11: and then they started beating the medical staff. And then
Speaker 11: a few days later we also posted about it that
Speaker 11: some of these medical stuff in that hospital were also arrested.
Speaker 11: The same thing was also happening in a few other cities,
Speaker 11: but this was very specific and it got very viral
Speaker 11: on social media and a lot of people talked about it.
Speaker 11: But at the same time, there were massive protests taking
Speaker 11: place in Tehran and other major cities, which like I
Speaker 11: am twenty eight years old and I think I've never
Speaker 11: seen such thing happening in Iran.
Speaker 8: It was really extraordinary. So while these things were happening.
Speaker 11: There were also a lot of calls from people in
Speaker 11: Kurdistan that they were calling on Kurdish parties to do something,
Speaker 11: to say something. So on January sixth seven, Kurdish parties
Speaker 11: from Iran they had a meeting and they announced a
Speaker 11: call for a general strike in Kurdistan for all over Iran.
Speaker 11: So on Thursday, January eighth, over forty cities across Kurdistan
Speaker 11: they went on a strike which was really big, and
Speaker 11: it wasn't really discussed or talked about on major media,
Speaker 11: and it was somehow ignored while it was a really
Speaker 11: big action that took place there and usual after the
Speaker 11: strikes in Curtison, this is something that's happening for years.
Speaker 11: People take to the streets and protests during the night.
Speaker 11: It happened in a few cities and there were some
Speaker 11: people injured and also killed and then it's been over
Speaker 11: one hundred and twenty four hours right now as we're
Speaker 11: talking now that there is no internet connection in Iran
Speaker 11: and even the normal lines don't work. You cannot call
Speaker 11: anyone from outside of Iran. However, there are some people
Speaker 11: who have access to the Starlink Internet and some a
Speaker 11: few people that have access to I don't know, some
Speaker 11: sort of strong VPNs that work for a few minutes
Speaker 11: and then they disconnect. And at the same time, I
Speaker 11: have contact to two people who have been using the
Speaker 11: SIM cards or the Internet from Iraq or Turkey. They
Speaker 11: are living on the border regions, but they also have
Speaker 11: a limited access. So this is what's happening right now.
Speaker 11: And as we were talking about this, this blackout in
Speaker 11: Iran has caused a lot of confusion, a lot of
Speaker 11: horror that the world doesn't know what's happening exactly right now.
Speaker 11: After the blackout, there were a few videos and footage
Speaker 11: that came out that were published by major activists or
Speaker 11: journalists like ali Joan Mardy and so many others that
Speaker 11: they received these videos I don't know, from the Internet
Speaker 11: from Starlink, and you can see in these videos that
Speaker 11: in a place called Carrizac. It's near Tehran. It's where
Speaker 11: the Tehran's Forcenic Medical Center is located. You can see
Speaker 11: in these videos that countless of bodies, maybe hundreds or
Speaker 11: maybe thousands of bodies are just on the ground. They're
Speaker 11: in bodybags and desperate family members, relatives, all troum ties,
Speaker 11: they are looking for their loved ones, and it's just
Speaker 11: like it's so unbelievable.
Speaker 8: It's like movies.
Speaker 11: And apparently the regime forces have machine gunned all these people. Jesus,
Speaker 11: and right now, because of the blackout, we really don't
Speaker 11: know how many people are exactly killed, how many people
Speaker 11: are injured, how many people are arrested, or these things.
Speaker 11: You know, we don't know the exact numbers, and it
Speaker 11: makes things so hard. But today, a few hours ago,
Speaker 11: there was a report from Iran International that stated that
Speaker 11: over twelve thousand people have been killed, but this also
Speaker 11: is not fully confirmed because they just got these things
Speaker 11: through some sources. And then at the same time, CBS
Speaker 11: News also published a report and said that between twelve
Speaker 11: thousand to twenty thousand people have been killed, but again
Speaker 11: this is not really fully confirmed or terrified because there
Speaker 11: is no information coming out that much. At the same time,
Speaker 11: we also got reports from Kurdistan that in the city
Speaker 11: of Kermanshah, these regime forces were taking the dead bodies
Speaker 11: with bosses. We don't know how many, but we know
Speaker 11: that they were taking these bodies with bosses like we
Speaker 11: don't know how many hundreds. And from this footage that
Speaker 11: you can also see that the regime is taking all
Speaker 11: these bodies with containers like with talks all over the
Speaker 11: city in Tehran and they're bringing it to the center
Speaker 11: that I mentioned before, and all families are looking for
Speaker 11: their children and their people. At the same time, I
Speaker 11: also got this direct information from someone who is from
Speaker 11: rash In north of Iran. She was traveling from Tehran
Speaker 11: to Rush and she said that the people have burnt
Speaker 11: down most of them and also the banks and other
Speaker 11: government buildings. Are also footage all over the internet that
Speaker 11: in most of the cities that people have burnt down
Speaker 11: the whole mosques and buildings.
Speaker 8: Belonging to the government.
Speaker 11: And at the same time she also said that in
Speaker 11: that city there are so many people that are killed.
Speaker 11: She doesn't know how many or who, but families were
Speaker 11: desperately looking for their loved ones on the streets or anywhere.
Speaker 11: This is basically the same in almost every major city
Speaker 11: or even small city. We don't know exactly, but this
Speaker 11: is the footage that we got from Tehronily that it
Speaker 11: shows what's going on.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's horrific.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there are.
Speaker 11: Many many also in our organization, we got a few
Speaker 11: confirmations from these limited access that some of these people
Speaker 11: killed in Tehran are also Kourdish, and obviously from other
Speaker 11: minoritory groups as well. At the same time, there is
Speaker 11: a special case that I want to talk about. There
Speaker 11: is a person like a protester. His name is Erfon Sultani.
Speaker 11: He was arrested a few days ago and he is
Speaker 11: planned to be executed tomorrow. We don't know if they're
Speaker 11: really going to do that or whatever, but this is
Speaker 11: a really big sign that a lot of people are
Speaker 11: warning about it, like human rights organizations, and that the
Speaker 11: regime might carry out mass executions everywhere and just to
Speaker 11: take control over the situation. This is also something that
Speaker 11: might happen.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so it did execute people after the mini protest,
Speaker 9: but they didn't do a three day trial right that
Speaker 9: they did here, They had like a show trial first
Speaker 9: that in those interesting series.
Speaker 11: Yeah, they executed dozens of people after gin Imani was killed,
Speaker 11: and also previously in the previous years.
Speaker 8: So this is like what what's in general is happening.
Speaker 11: And at the same time, like in diaspora in Western countries,
Speaker 11: there are groups that are on the streets, like people
Speaker 11: that are calling for solidarity or whatever that can be
Speaker 11: done to help people out inside Iran. Yeah, this is
Speaker 11: like a general overview of what's happening. And as I
Speaker 11: said before, because there is no internet connection and if
Speaker 11: there is, it's very limited, nobody knows what's happening exactly.
Speaker 11: Nobody knows the exact scale of the crimes that are
Speaker 11: taking place right now there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, let's take a little break for advertisements here and
Speaker 9: then we'll come back and talk a little more. Okay,
Speaker 9: and we're back. So if people have seen anything about this,
Speaker 9: I don't know, if they're on like a X they
Speaker 9: would have seen videos of mosk burning and maybe videos
Speaker 9: of the pak like shooting at buildings. You know, these
Speaker 9: are the videos that were kind of widely circulated before
Speaker 9: people lost access to the Internet. And I think there's
Speaker 9: some idea that like this isn't armed uprising, and I
Speaker 9: think it would be good to explain to people that
Speaker 9: like that there are people clearly the press. There is
Speaker 9: presence of like armed groups who apposed a regime in Iran, right,
Speaker 9: but they are not necessarily the ones like leading the
Speaker 9: charge here. So maybe we could explain a little bit
Speaker 9: about both the armed groups who are Kurdish. There are
Speaker 9: some armed groups in Balochistan as well, and like where
Speaker 9: they sit in relevance to these protests.
Speaker 11: Yeah, so far I can speak for Kurtisan, Yeah, there
Speaker 11: have I've seen also the footage that pak or the
Speaker 11: Freedom Party of Kurtisan published social media. I cannot personally
Speaker 11: confirm that, but but there has always been a call
Speaker 11: for military action against the regime in the previous years,
Speaker 11: and even before Regina Amini in twenty twenty two, there
Speaker 11: was always some sort of call from the people. But
Speaker 11: right now, as we are seeing, the Kurdish Party is
Speaker 11: the seven major Kurdish parties from Iran, they are not
Speaker 11: taking really a real military action because there is a
Speaker 11: big fear that if they do this, the regime might
Speaker 11: bomb the cities and kill thousands of civilians with heavy
Speaker 11: weapons and even missiles. So this is also one of
Speaker 11: the main reasons that even the parties have talked about
Speaker 11: it many times before when people called for a military sport.
Speaker 11: But of course I can also confirm this that all
Speaker 11: of these parties, all of these organizations have some sort
Speaker 11: of networks inside Iran that they are they are monitoring
Speaker 11: the situation, they are collecting information and they are like
Speaker 11: connecting people together. And in some cases that I am
Speaker 11: aware of that happened in my hometown in Urmia in
Speaker 11: twenty twenty two, some of these parties also have been
Speaker 11: able to lead the protests, like to organized protests. So
Speaker 11: this is for now the presence of these parties. But
Speaker 11: for Baluchistan, I can also say that I think it
Speaker 11: was in October or November twenty twenty five that all
Speaker 11: these groups in Baluchistan they had a conference and they
Speaker 11: announced that they are all united and they're all working
Speaker 11: together under one banner. So they also carried out a
Speaker 11: lot of attacks on the IRGC bases and vehicles in
Speaker 11: their regions in the past few months. But so far
Speaker 11: we haven't heard much from them in the past few weeks.
Speaker 11: We don't know they're not doing anything, or if they
Speaker 11: are doing anything, it's not on the inter.
Speaker 8: Yeah, or it's published yet. Yeah.
Speaker 11: This is the situation right now with the with these groups.
Speaker 11: But at the same time groups or parties actually like Pijac,
Speaker 11: they also have warned that this was like, if I
Speaker 11: want to say, quote on quote, don't play with fire.
Speaker 11: They were this Ermian regime that they shouldn't play with fire. Yeah,
Speaker 11: this is a situation right now that's going on with
Speaker 11: the parties as well.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's very complicated for people who are not
Speaker 9: right familiar. I think like maybe we should take a
Speaker 9: step back even further and just explain I guess the
Speaker 9: concept of it ran as like a contiguous empire might
Speaker 9: be a good way to see it, right, with different
Speaker 9: ethnic groups currently under the control of one state, Can
Speaker 9: you just explain that for people if they if they're
Speaker 9: not familiar it, because I think in the US, like
Speaker 9: Persian identity and Iranian identity by people who are not
Speaker 9: familiar with it are conflated, right, But if you could
Speaker 9: explain the different nations that exist within the state, that
Speaker 9: might help people.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Like Iran as a geography is a very diverse country.
Speaker 11: So basically the Persians or as they call themselves Iranians,
Speaker 11: are the dominant group. They are the majority, but we
Speaker 11: also have the Osari Turkish people who are the second majority,
Speaker 11: and then we have the Kurds, we have the Baluchis.
Speaker 11: Then there are Ahwazi Arabs in the south, and then
Speaker 11: there are Turkmen people, and then there are Thailishis, but
Speaker 11: their numbers are really small. And at the same time
Speaker 11: there is also the mas and Dharrani or the Gilak
Speaker 11: people that live in the Caspian Sea coast. There are
Speaker 11: also a different ethnic group. They have a different linguistic background,
Speaker 11: but because of the Iranian state policies of one hundred years,
Speaker 11: majority of them are assimilated and no longer carry that
Speaker 11: cultural heritage or identity. But in Kurdistan, in Baluchistan, in Ahwas,
Speaker 11: in Azerbaijan, it's it's really different, and also in the
Speaker 11: Turkument regions. Basically this is this is what Iran looks like.
Speaker 11: Of course, there are other small minorities like Armenians, even
Speaker 11: Georgians that migrated to like hundreds of years ago. There
Speaker 11: are also several religious groups like the Shia Muslims are
Speaker 11: the majority, which Persians and Azari Turks are basically the
Speaker 11: followers of this religion, and then there are Sunni Sunni
Speaker 11: Muslims who are like majority of them are Baluchis and
Speaker 11: Kurds and Awazi Arabs or other groups. And then we
Speaker 11: have several other groups from Jews, Christians and also the Yarsanis,
Speaker 11: which is a Kurdish religious minority, and they are about
Speaker 11: one million to two million people. Yeah, this is what
Speaker 11: Iran looks like.
Speaker 9: Yes, yeah, and I think people can can be easy
Speaker 9: for them to just see it as like Shia Muslim
Speaker 9: Persian modelith right, Yeah.
Speaker 11: But I also want to add a little bit more
Speaker 11: of how this works. So because the Iranians or the
Speaker 11: Persians are the majority, they own the state. The entire
Speaker 11: identity is evolving around them. And because of this, during
Speaker 11: the past one hundred and fifty one hundred years, there
Speaker 11: has been a policy of assimilation in every region in
Speaker 11: what's called Iran right now, for example, if I want
Speaker 11: to talk about the language right now, the only official
Speaker 11: language is Persian, and in the past one hundred years,
Speaker 11: this language has not just been a language of communication,
Speaker 11: it has been a language of oppression and assimilation. And
Speaker 11: there are many regions in Iran that were For example,
Speaker 11: if I want to talk about Kurtison, there are many
Speaker 11: regions in Kermanshah and Elam provinces and other regions that
Speaker 11: used to be fully Kurdish and they used to speak
Speaker 11: Kurdish just a few decades ago, but now they are
Speaker 11: completely assimilated. The same policy was also followed strictly but
Speaker 11: heavily in in Turkey and also in Iraq and also
Speaker 11: in Syria.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So this is how this has been working in the
Speaker 11: past century, and how all these ethnic groups with different
Speaker 11: languages and cultural backgrounds and identities have been forced to
Speaker 11: accept an Iranian identity that evolves that turns around the
Speaker 11: Persian identity and Persian language and history.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 11: So this is also like a general overview of the
Speaker 11: oppression if I want to.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think it's pretty the right way. I think
Speaker 9: people who have listened to our coverage of ME and
Speaker 9: MA will be familiar or like, I mean, this is
Speaker 9: happening in countersplaces, right, This is this is why British
Speaker 9: people will speak English now, yeah, right, this is this
Speaker 9: is how sort of channel empire works. I wonder like
Speaker 9: we should talk about the possibilities and to an extent,
Speaker 9: the demands here, right, Because in the US it seems
Speaker 9: to be that there is a binary choice or that
Speaker 9: it's presented as a binary choice between the current state
Speaker 9: in Iran and a monarchy, and it doesn't seem to
Speaker 9: be an option for self governance, right for Iranian people
Speaker 9: to have democracy, to have liberty, and that's evidently not
Speaker 9: the case, right, Like when you have this many people
Speaker 9: in the streets, that's how democracy works. But let's talk
Speaker 9: about the sort of the demands and then the possibilities
Speaker 9: of just being co opted and turned into another type
Speaker 9: of state.
Speaker 11: So here in these days or basically in the past decades,
Speaker 11: the main demand of people, all different ethnic groups and
Speaker 11: in the geography of Iran has always been a regime change.
Speaker 11: They want just regime gone. Yeah, this is the first
Speaker 11: thing that everybody wants. At the same time, there are
Speaker 11: other possibilities that could be there. One of the things
Speaker 11: that when you look at these ethnic groups and their
Speaker 11: organizations and the people, you can see that also most
Speaker 11: of them want some sort of federalism or autonomy or
Speaker 11: self governance. At the same time, this idea of federalism
Speaker 11: and self governance or self determination is nothing that let's
Speaker 11: say that the dominant group would accept because they don't
Speaker 11: understand it. Because for them, I wouldn't say all of them,
Speaker 11: because I can we cannot generalize everyone. But when you
Speaker 11: look at it, the dominant group sees Iran as an entity.
Speaker 11: That's that's not the verse. It's just Iran and everybody's Iranian,
Speaker 11: just like the way Turkey, you know, or the Turmh
Speaker 11: government sees everything everybody's Turkish. But in Iran they also
Speaker 11: say everybody's Iranian. We will have an election, we will
Speaker 11: choose a president, we will have a parliament, and that's it.
Speaker 11: That's what is also being let's say offered. But at
Speaker 11: the same time, there is also a call for monarchy.
Speaker 11: But this is also something that not majority of people,
Speaker 11: even Persians, majority of them don't want monarchy back because
Speaker 11: there is a huge discussion between people that here we
Speaker 11: are fighting against a dictatorship, why would we bring back
Speaker 11: another dictatorship. Overall, I can say that the minority groups,
Speaker 11: majority of them, for now, I would say, like if
Speaker 11: the regime is going to be changed, they want self governance.
Speaker 11: But maybe in the future also independence. We don't know
Speaker 11: that this is something complicated to talk about, but for
Speaker 11: now this is what minority groups. But in the Persian community,
Speaker 11: some of them want to have like a republican system
Speaker 11: or whatever. But some of them also want to have
Speaker 11: monarchy back. And there are also other groups who reject
Speaker 11: both Republicans and also like monarchists, and they want to
Speaker 11: have more diverse and more open system for the future.
Speaker 11: But again this is something that we cannot say how
Speaker 11: it's going to be proceeded because we don't know how
Speaker 11: the situation is going to be and how these opposition
Speaker 11: groups are going to work together in the future. Are
Speaker 11: they gonna start a civil war or are they going
Speaker 11: to sit down together and find a solution. This is
Speaker 11: all depends on how the regime falls and when, and
Speaker 11: the destruction of this regime is the biggest priority right now.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I mean we could see a situation very
Speaker 9: much like the one that's happening and folding right now
Speaker 9: in Western Kurdishtwan, and folding later in Iran if theyre
Speaker 9: falls right, which unfortunate is something else we have to
Speaker 9: talk about at the time, but very terrible things happening
Speaker 9: there too. Because you know, most of our listeners are
Speaker 9: in America. The way that people may have engaged with
Speaker 9: this is through Donald Trump's posting on truth Social where
Speaker 9: he has said that help is coming recently, Like, let's
Speaker 9: talk about what US intervention means, like, especially in the
Speaker 9: context of a like the US having intervened all over
Speaker 9: the Middle East, and what that has meant and be
Speaker 9: Like the US's recent national security strategy, which suggests that
Speaker 9: basically they don't care about the region and they don't
Speaker 9: want to be involved in the region. Let's talk about
Speaker 9: what that means and why it might not be the
Speaker 9: panas here people think it is.
Speaker 11: Yeah, So in the past few weeks, Trump has.
Speaker 8: Said a lot of things.
Speaker 11: In the first few days, he came out and said
Speaker 11: that if the regime is going to kill civilians, we're
Speaker 11: going to do this, and that we're going to punish
Speaker 11: the regime.
Speaker 8: And then I.
Speaker 11: Think it was an interview or he was on TV,
Speaker 11: I don't exactly remember, but he said something that all
Speaker 11: the people that were killed, we don't know if the
Speaker 11: regime killed them. Maybe they just were killed in the crowd,
Speaker 11: like there were like thousands of people in.
Speaker 13: The really yeah, like a crush. They were crushed. And
Speaker 13: this is so unbelievable. He's making these comments and then
Speaker 13: he's just threatening the regime all over again. And just
Speaker 13: a few hours ago, as you mentioned, he said that
Speaker 13: the help is coming, and he's asking people to keep
Speaker 13: fighting and keep protesting and.
Speaker 8: Things like that.
Speaker 11: However, we should also, like regarding this, we should talk
Speaker 11: about what people also want from Trump. Yeah, this has
Speaker 11: been like something that a lot of people, again this
Speaker 11: is not the majority, A lot of people have been
Speaker 11: calling on him or basically on America or something to
Speaker 11: do an action against the regime, to do something against
Speaker 11: the regime or damage the regime so that people can
Speaker 11: get rid of it. And right now, I saw some
Speaker 11: screenshots from people who were able to get access to
Speaker 11: the internet for a few moments. I saw one there
Speaker 11: was shared on the internet that a woman from Tehran
Speaker 11: was saying that they are killing everyone. I don't know
Speaker 11: where my children are. One of them is nineteen and
Speaker 11: the other one is twenty three. She was just saying, please,
Speaker 11: please be our voice and just tell them to attack,
Speaker 11: tell Trump to help. So this is also something that
Speaker 11: there is a call for attacking Iran and destroying the regime.
Speaker 11: But again we don't know if Trump is really gonna
Speaker 11: do this or not. There is also like threats coming
Speaker 11: from Europe as well in UK. But again, as you mentioned,
Speaker 11: if these attacks happen. We don't is it going to
Speaker 11: be something like Iraq or Afghanistan or other places, or
Speaker 11: is it gonna really help the people of Iran, the
Speaker 11: people inside around to get rid of the regime, which
Speaker 11: is also really hard to understand because Trump hasn't been
Speaker 11: really clear about all these things. On one side, he
Speaker 11: was also asked if he has any talks or connections
Speaker 11: with the so called Prince Razapa Levi, and he said, no,
Speaker 11: he's a good guy, but I don't want to talk
Speaker 11: to him. But then now you can see that on
Speaker 11: Fox News, like all the Trump affiliated or pro Trump media,
Speaker 11: they are promoting this guy all the time. And at
Speaker 11: the same time, Rizzo was also on TV and he
Speaker 11: was on CBS and he said that he's directly in
Speaker 11: touch with Trump and administration. So we don't know like
Speaker 11: what exactly, I mean, it's so hard to some what
Speaker 11: exactly the US is going to do. Yeah, they also
Speaker 11: announced that we're going to put more like twenty five
Speaker 11: percent tariff on countries who work with Iran or trade
Speaker 11: with Iran, And then the European Parliament also announced that
Speaker 11: we're going to ban all Iranian diplomats from entering the
Speaker 11: European Parliament.
Speaker 9: Right, not made to begin with, all.
Speaker 11: These comments that are coming out, they are so vague,
Speaker 11: and at the same time there are calls from Germany,
Speaker 11: France and I think Australia too that they were calling
Speaker 11: on the citizens that are in Iran, like tourists or whatever,
Speaker 11: to immediately leave Iran. Yeah, this is also something that
Speaker 11: we don't know, like Trump is not somebody that you
Speaker 11: could trust.
Speaker 9: Yeah, ask people.
Speaker 11: And at the same time, sorry, this is also important.
Speaker 11: There was also some news that the Iranian authorities in
Speaker 11: the Foreign ministry were trying or they contacted some people
Speaker 11: from Trump administration for negotiations, but then Trump said that
Speaker 11: we will not negotiate anything.
Speaker 8: So this is all like all.
Speaker 11: These contradictions that Trump is just talking about, and he's
Speaker 11: denying that the regime is killing people and people are
Speaker 11: just being killed because it's too crowded.
Speaker 9: And then you see Harminly like tweeting that everyone out
Speaker 9: in the street is a Trump supporter, right, which is
Speaker 9: like that's useful to him, that narrative is useful to him,
Speaker 9: that these are American imperialists or American whatever puppets.
Speaker 11: Yeah, of course that has been the regime's behavior forever. Yeah,
Speaker 11: whenever something happens, they immediately blame it on America, Israel.
Speaker 11: I don't know UK, but it's good that you mentioned
Speaker 11: what company was saying. In the first few days, he
Speaker 11: said that, yeah, we hear you the people in bazaar,
Speaker 11: and yeah we hear you, sorry that this is going on,
Speaker 11: and things like that. But then he immediately said that
Speaker 11: the people who are protesting, they are destroying everything and
Speaker 11: we will deal with them in the harshest way. And
Speaker 11: then the president of Iran and he also came out
Speaker 11: and he said almost the same thing, and then he
Speaker 11: started threatening people. And a few days after that, the
Speaker 11: head of the judiciary, the Iranian judiciary came out and
Speaker 11: said that like in a very very aggressive language. He
Speaker 11: said that we will deal with you in the worst
Speaker 11: ways possible, we will destroy you, and things like that.
Speaker 11: It's he posted a lot of texts on his Twitter account.
Speaker 8: His name is Mosci.
Speaker 11: So yeah, there is also like a huge online fightings
Speaker 11: between these politicians and so called leaders that makes the
Speaker 11: situation even more complicated and hard to understand.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think from a US perspective, like when America
Speaker 9: invaded Rock Right, they had a partner force in Kurdistan.
Speaker 9: When when America worked in Syria, they had a partner
Speaker 9: force again in Western Kurdistan, Like they don't really have
Speaker 9: that here like this, it's not really a I mean,
Speaker 9: the payarch is still on the American Foreign Terrorist Organization List.
Speaker 9: It's not like that, like American sort of partner force
Speaker 9: boots on the ground like that that they had these
Speaker 9: other places to likely what they would do is just
Speaker 9: bomb stuff. That's kind of the approach it most likely
Speaker 9: here in it bombing alone is unlikely to remove the regime.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I think bombing was is definitely not enough of
Speaker 11: because they bombed. They tried regime hardly last year, but
Speaker 11: it is there. Of course there was the regime got weaker,
Speaker 11: like weekend really bad. But at the same time, like
Speaker 11: I think, if there's gonna be something, and if there's
Speaker 11: gonna be something like Syria or Iraq, I think the
Speaker 11: Americans or the American government would possibly work with the
Speaker 11: Kurdish groups even though they are on the so called
Speaker 11: terror list. Like you know, it happened in Rosova in Syria.
Speaker 11: That's how they they've been working with the Kurdish groups
Speaker 11: even though they are related to PKK and pkk is on.
Speaker 9: The terror or they removed them that they did with HTS, right,
Speaker 9: and then suddenly these guys they've transformed.
Speaker 11: Now, yeah, so this could also happen, but we don't
Speaker 11: know because it's been years. It's been decades that the
Speaker 11: US is always threatening Iran and then something happens, then
Speaker 11: they do nothing and it's just there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it reinforces the legitimacy of both states to threaten
Speaker 9: each other, right, and see each other as adversaries, and
Speaker 9: to a degree use that for domestic violence against their
Speaker 9: own citizens, right or if you know terrorism stuff. I
Speaker 9: guess finally we should just talk about one other thing
Speaker 9: that Hamani said, which is like that American and it's
Speaker 9: really shipping would become legitimate target if you thought the
Speaker 9: Americans were involved, right, just to explain, this is the
Speaker 9: possibility to have people if they're not familiar.
Speaker 11: Well, this is not a new thing, to be honest.
Speaker 11: They've won this before and in the previous years many times.
Speaker 11: And there were times that they attacked some US bases,
Speaker 11: like the one in Iraq it's called Al Assad or
Speaker 11: something like that. They attacked it a few times I
Speaker 11: guess in the past few years.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like This.
Speaker 11: Is also really complicated because how can I explain the
Speaker 11: regime always does the threats and it might not do
Speaker 11: it at all. But at the same time, this is
Speaker 11: also something that I think that if the regime falls
Speaker 11: and if it's the last moments, they would probably try
Speaker 11: to do something to damage the region or to damage
Speaker 11: the people as much as they can, and then they
Speaker 11: would just give up on everything and just disappear.
Speaker 8: So they could do that.
Speaker 11: But if I want to go back to last year,
Speaker 11: we also need to understand that after the Twelve Day War,
Speaker 11: Israel also destroyed a massive amount of Iranian military bases
Speaker 11: and all these buildings and structures, but still nobody truly
Speaker 11: understand how much has been destroyed. But the Iranian Air
Speaker 11: force is really really weak right now and apparently completely destroyed,
Speaker 11: so Iran is not as strong as before. So there
Speaker 11: could be a possibility that Iran actually doesn't have the
Speaker 11: capability to attack US Bass across the region anymore. So
Speaker 11: this could be also a possibility that they're just threatening.
Speaker 11: They really don't have anything left anymore more. Their trick
Speaker 11: capabilities are completely down.
Speaker 9: Yeah, or they'll do that sort of symbolic send a
Speaker 9: half dozen Shaheed drones and then let the Americans shoot
Speaker 9: them down and they say, oh, well we tried, or
Speaker 9: you know, we h we attack them, even though you
Speaker 9: know most of the time they have hurt a couple
Speaker 9: of American people with them, but relatively unsuccessful. I wonder
Speaker 9: like this is obviously a situation that people will want
Speaker 9: to follow. Things are developing very quickly and new good news,
Speaker 9: good reporting on around. It is very hard to find
Speaker 9: in America. So where would you suggest people look? Either
Speaker 9: you know your own stuff or other sources you suggest
Speaker 9: people should look to.
Speaker 11: If I want to mention for obviously, I work with
Speaker 11: a hangout organization. It's a trusted organization. People can follow them.
Speaker 11: And there is also a journalist called Ali Jawan Mardi.
Speaker 11: He is a supervisor at Voice of America, Kurdish, Persian
Speaker 11: and Afghanistan. And these are like for the sources that
Speaker 11: I personally trust. There are other organizations such as Curtis
Speaker 11: and Human Rights Network. There is also Iran Rights or
Speaker 11: Abdur Rahan Buruman Center for Human Rights in Iran. There
Speaker 11: are several organizations human rights organizations that are constantly reporting
Speaker 11: and they are trying to reflect what's happening and there
Speaker 11: I could say majority of them are honest and they're
Speaker 11: not trying to push for a specific narrative, especially the Palabists,
Speaker 11: because right now, if you check the media, the international media,
Speaker 11: the Iranian media such as Iran International or BBC, Persian
Speaker 11: and all of these major medias, even in the US,
Speaker 11: they are pushing for the monarchists and they are completely
Speaker 11: ignoring the other groups.
Speaker 8: Like, for example, the Kurdish people.
Speaker 11: I said, I mentioned that there was this great and
Speaker 11: big strike that happened in forty cities. It's it's a
Speaker 11: very big social act, but barely anyone talked about it.
Speaker 11: Barely anyone mentioned it. So I think it's for people
Speaker 11: it's better to follow human rights organizations and do not
Speaker 11: really fall for the things that some media that are
Speaker 11: just promoting a specific person, because they're just taking away
Speaker 11: the truth.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think that's a fantastic place to finish up.
Speaker 9: Thank you so much for joining. Guys, if people want
Speaker 9: to follow you, do you have any social media or
Speaker 9: people can find your work.
Speaker 11: I have my personal page, but it's not really big.
Speaker 11: I just post some slides recently, and my other page
Speaker 11: curtis signing people. It got disabled unfortunately I started. I'm
Speaker 11: just posting like some updates and like slides about the
Speaker 11: important things that I find. I can also put the
Speaker 11: links there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, will include them, believe the podcast, so people can
Speaker 9: click on them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us
Speaker 9: this evening. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 11: Yeah, thank you very much for having me again. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Why do you listen to this podcast? It may be
Speaker 3: because it's a strange comfort in naming the thing that's
Speaker 3: breathing down our X today. I want to archive this
Speaker 3: past year of systemic collapse, a pile up of small
Speaker 3: and large failures we can start to make sense of
Speaker 3: in retrospect. If we don't look back at our past
Speaker 3: and the patterns within it, if we don't keep these
Speaker 3: moments and events in our memory, it's very very easy
Speaker 3: to get stuck into a perpetually overwhelming present. Welcome to
Speaker 3: take it up in here. I'm Andrew Sage, the guy
Speaker 3: behind Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here with.
Speaker 9: James Stout, the guy you here all the time this podcast.
Speaker 3: Welcome to your podcast. Yeah, it's nice.
Speaker 9: It's nice to do one with you.
Speaker 3: Are you ready to take a look at some of
Speaker 3: the stories that shaped twenty five.
Speaker 9: Yes, it's been a hell of a year. So did
Speaker 9: she be fun?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I mean I don't expect to be exhaustive, but
Speaker 3: we can, you know, talk about some of the incidents
Speaker 3: in climate, in politics and technology and geopolitics, and through
Speaker 3: all that, I want to ask what these stories are
Speaker 3: teaching us as anarchists, activists and just people trying to
Speaker 3: live in a society. Yeah, so I suppose first we
Speaker 3: could talk about the climate and infrastructural situations, some of
Speaker 3: them that took places. Yet it really covered all of
Speaker 3: the elements. We had heat, flooding, drought, fire storm. According
Speaker 3: to the World Meteorological Organization, global temperatures in twenty twenty
Speaker 3: five ranked among the hottest on record.
Speaker 2: Great.
Speaker 3: The WMO put twenty twenty five as likely this second
Speaker 3: or third warmest year in the observational record. So a
Speaker 3: little round of applause for hitting some miles stuarts right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's good to be winning.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Power systems also have been overloaded under air conditioning demand,
Speaker 3: leading to rolling blackouts in cities and rural areas, schools
Speaker 3: closing during heat waves, and mortality rising among the elderly
Speaker 3: and Preherious international agencies have worned that extreme heat is
Speaker 3: producing double digit crop losses and mass livestock die offs
Speaker 3: in some cases. Brazil in particular felt that heat in
Speaker 3: agriculture and supply chains. Staple production and food imports both
Speaker 3: suffer due to the heat, and those ripples are going
Speaker 3: to be felt for the rest of us too, because
Speaker 3: Brazil is a bread basket of sorts. It's a top
Speaker 3: exporter of tons of really important agricultural products. And the
Speaker 3: monsoons also arrived with quite a mood this year. South
Speaker 3: Asia's Turn twenty five rains came very heavy and very persistent.
Speaker 3: In many places, urban drainage, field neighborhoods became isolated by
Speaker 3: the waters. Trains and roads were unusable for days. Bangladeshi
Speaker 3: and parts of India saw a catastrophic flooding that took
Speaker 3: hundreds of lives and displaced millions. Over in the Horn
Speaker 3: of Africa, wells ran low, pastures, field and small farmers
Speaker 3: suffered under the pressures of the drought. Their water distribution
Speaker 3: systems weren't built to withstand multi year dry spells, and
Speaker 3: so hunger crisis has ended up escalating, particularly in Somalia.
Speaker 3: Yeah North America and Europe also had severe wildfires this year.
Speaker 3: At this point, it's very easy to kind of see
Speaker 3: them as a new normal, you know. Canada's Turn twenty
Speaker 3: five season pushed agencies into one of their largest domestic
Speaker 3: wildfire responses in years. Firefighters were stretched, entire towns had
Speaker 3: to evacuate, and Southern Europe, in particular Greece and Spain
Speaker 3: also saw fast moving fires that consumed homes and utilities
Speaker 3: and left landscapes scorched and infrastructure severely weakened. And then,
Speaker 3: of course they were the hurricanes. This year, The Caribbean
Speaker 3: was slammed by Hurricane Melissa, a very slow and powerful
Speaker 3: storm that devastated Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti and others, tearing up infrastructure,
Speaker 3: and they even large swaths without power for weeks. The
Speaker 3: storm's exceptional energy is of course thanks to climacy. And
Speaker 3: so all these events and I'm definitely leaving outs. I
Speaker 3: believe they review a few things. For one, I think
Speaker 3: it's clear that our systems can't handle the new extremes
Speaker 3: being brought about by climacy. They may have been built
Speaker 3: for previous normals, but not this. And this is something
Speaker 3: that climate scientists have been worn and about for some time.
Speaker 3: You know, electrical grids were sized for incremental loads, so
Speaker 3: they couldn't handle these simultaneous peak demands. Urbans to a
Speaker 3: water management was built for a particular volume of water
Speaker 3: over a particular period of time, they can handle these
Speaker 3: volumes of water that are pouring down from above. And
Speaker 3: also water management systems in more arid regions weren't prepared
Speaker 3: for years of drought, and so the systemic shocks of
Speaker 3: this year have been very devastating for infrastructure. And unlike
Speaker 3: their propaganda, which tasted they are necessary for our survival,
Speaker 3: for our well being. To manage society. State responses to
Speaker 3: these catastrophes were often reactive and chronically delayed. Government intervention
Speaker 3: and international aid helped in some places, I'm not denying that,
Speaker 3: but communities have also often found themselves on their own,
Speaker 3: having to improvise survival strategies. And of course with every
Speaker 3: disaster there's an extremely long tale of recovery after the
Speaker 3: initial crisis has passed. So it may leave the news cycle,
Speaker 3: but that people still dealing with the consequences and we'll
Speaker 3: be dealing with it in the year to come. But
Speaker 3: these disasters continue to show the ingenuity and capability of
Speaker 3: ordinary people to organize, support, distribute aid, facilitate evacuation, share resources,
Speaker 3: and so on. So we're not powerless. We don't have
Speaker 3: to be dependent on slow bureaucracies. Develop resilience. It starts
Speaker 3: with us as people being proactive, especially you know, I
Speaker 3: would say, don't wait for the disaster to happen in
Speaker 3: your area to develop a response plan. Invest your time
Speaker 3: and energy in this coming year in horizontal capacities, skill training,
Speaker 3: community drills, share two libraries, seed and food sovereignty projects,
Speaker 3: local medical knowledge, decentralized energy and water projects. I don't
Speaker 3: place much on the demands of the state, but they
Speaker 3: are also sometimes granted to may be able to apply
Speaker 3: for that. Can you know, secure some resources in community hands,
Speaker 3: and of course keep documenting these incidents as they're happening.
Speaker 3: You know, don't wait for a disaster to hit your
Speaker 3: area to learn the lessons that other places had to learn,
Speaker 3: you know, go and see where your vulnerabilities lie un
Speaker 3: others have done to respond, Train people wh necessary, and
Speaker 3: just try and keep up to good fight. Would you
Speaker 3: say there was a particular environmental crisis for natural disaster
Speaker 3: the year that really stood out to you.
Speaker 1: I mean to me.
Speaker 9: I think the ones that I just because they're personally
Speaker 9: related to places I've been were the earthquake in Memma,
Speaker 9: right where we saw not only people die as a
Speaker 9: result of natural disaster, but people die as a result
Speaker 9: of the state considering it's desire to keep people in
Speaker 9: mem r away from the world more important than their lives, right,
Speaker 9: like the state choosing not to allow search and rescue
Speaker 9: teams from France, for example, to enter and instead like
Speaker 9: you know folks I know who are fighting and the
Speaker 9: revolution in the Ammar, like laying down their arms and
Speaker 9: trying to work out how to pull collapse buildings apart
Speaker 9: before the people in them died exactly. I think that
Speaker 9: it really was like the poly crisis and then the
Speaker 9: flooding of indigenous communities in Alaska, right, the coastal communities
Speaker 9: that we saw like a month or so ago, And
Speaker 9: that one hit me particularly hard because like these people
Speaker 9: have been screaming for a decade that climate change has come.
Speaker 9: It's not coming, it's come right like the like the
Speaker 9: end is not nigh for them, the end is here.
Speaker 9: The ways of life are being destroyed by climate change,
Speaker 9: and the whole communities got wiped out right just before winter,
Speaker 9: and in a place which has one of the hardest
Speaker 9: winters on Earth. All their food caches, right, because these
Speaker 9: are people who tend to to fish for a lot
Speaker 9: of food, so they cash food they don't go to
Speaker 9: the store, were also wiped out. Like it's just one
Speaker 9: of those examples of like one can't be prepared enough
Speaker 9: to deal with things and one can't control, right, And
Speaker 9: one of the things that we can't control is climate change,
Speaker 9: and it's coming.
Speaker 3: For all of us, but yeah, it's coming for some
Speaker 3: people foost.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's always going to be indigenous and more
Speaker 9: marginalized people, right whose plate is ignored. Like people can
Speaker 9: say climate change isn't real because they have the relative
Speaker 9: privilege of not having their homes destroyed. And like, rebuilding
Speaker 9: those communities will be very, very hard because the only
Speaker 9: way to get there is on a tiny little plane
Speaker 9: or a boat, and everything they've got there is taking
Speaker 9: generations to build and it's all gone. Yeah, So those
Speaker 9: two really struck me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I take ways from what you've shared there,
Speaker 3: as the state will often get in the way, Yes,
Speaker 3: of our survival will well be in Yeah, and that
Speaker 3: you know, the crisis is here and it's already hitting people,
Speaker 3: and just the people are being hit right now, are
Speaker 3: the ones designated as sacrificial arms? Yeah, in a sense
Speaker 3: for the continued pursuit of economic growth and progress.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Two twenty five also saw an accelerated political coming of age.
Speaker 3: You know, gen Z has not been all teenagers for
Speaker 3: a very long time now, it's been mostly adults or
Speaker 3: soon to be mostly adults at this point, depending on
Speaker 3: where you draw the line. And that generation our my
Speaker 3: generation has shown up in the numbers for the past
Speaker 3: few years, but particularly this year, inspiring millions. You know,
Speaker 3: gen Z became a very visible political force in the
Speaker 3: headlines across very different geographies. Madagascar, Morocco, Kenya, Nepal, Peru,
Speaker 3: and Mexico all had uprisings driven by a mix of
Speaker 3: grievances rather be corruption, the cost of live in, lack
Speaker 3: of services, violent policing, and a feeling that all institutions
Speaker 3: had nothing to offer. Now, these movements were not a monolith,
Speaker 3: you know, but they did have some common templates. You know.
Speaker 3: They organized digitally on platforms like discord or telegram, and
Speaker 3: they mobilized very quickly, a lot faster than states were
Speaker 3: originally able to keep up with. In Madagascar, the youth
Speaker 3: had mobilized during water, power cuts and broader corruption, which
Speaker 3: eventually toppled the rule in government and triggered military moves
Speaker 3: in the form of a kulita. But it doesn't seem
Speaker 3: so far that anything fruitful, stable or lasting has come
Speaker 3: out of their cause quite yet. Right now Madagascar is
Speaker 3: a military kernel for president, so it remains we see
Speaker 3: in what that leadership brings. In Morocco, the movement gen
Speaker 3: Z two on two organized demand better education and healthcare,
Speaker 3: decent housing, and jobs, and we're eventually met with state
Speaker 3: pushback in the form of arrests and infiltrations. Now they
Speaker 3: eventually won some concessions from the government in the form
Speaker 3: of greater funding in this sectors demanded and draft bills
Speaker 3: that incentivize youth participation in the official channels of power.
Speaker 3: But it remains we've seen how long that will quell
Speaker 3: the tide, because it seems to me at least that
Speaker 3: this is the classic tactic of, you know, incorporating a
Speaker 3: radical movement into the machinations of the state to temper
Speaker 3: its energy. Yeah, in Kenya, we saw mass mobilization against
Speaker 3: police brutality that was met with yet more police brutality
Speaker 3: and extra judicial killings, now numbering in the sixties. With
Speaker 3: a very clear aim for the suppression of descent. So far,
Speaker 3: none of their goals have really been recognized or achieved
Speaker 3: as a movement, and it seems as though they've similed
Speaker 3: down due to the share violence that they are faced
Speaker 3: in response. In Nepal, perhaps the most famous of these
Speaker 3: worries for this year, the students led uprisings topple the
Speaker 3: corrupt government and forced concessions with an election coming up
Speaker 3: next year twenty twenty six. But again, what comes next
Speaker 3: is yet to be seen. Whether it be lasting, empowering,
Speaker 3: or sustainable is an open question. It's another uprising where
Speaker 3: in my view, the fundamental institutions have not been overcome
Speaker 3: and thus their goals will not be achieved mediately. But
Speaker 3: I think every movement, every generation has their place for
Speaker 3: political development and figuring out some of these shortcomings of
Speaker 3: these approaches. But I think because of how tight the
Speaker 3: timeline is for the need for like radically drastic action
Speaker 3: for the sake of the planet and for the people
Speaker 3: on it, I really wish that these lessons were learned
Speaker 3: a bit quicker. You know that we didn't have to
Speaker 3: go through these seam cycles of you know, missteps again
Speaker 3: and again with movements. Yeah, you're right, what it means
Speaker 3: to be seen whether that sort of political development can
Speaker 3: be accelerated as the crisis accelerates.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like I feel for the youth, like like now
Speaker 9: these revolutions, a sense of urgency is so high, right
Speaker 9: because the system, Like, if you're a millennial, I guess
Speaker 9: you grew up. If you're me, maybe I'm saying here,
Speaker 9: like really you grew up. You know, you were told
Speaker 9: like things will always get better and you will work
Speaker 9: hard and like just like your folks, you will buy
Speaker 9: a house in the house will get more valuable and
Speaker 9: that will be nice and blah blah blah. Right if
Speaker 9: you live in in this sort of the colonial core
Speaker 9: and that didn't work out for most of us, but
Speaker 9: for for gen Z folks, it's like the town that
Speaker 9: you live and will continue to exist is up for debate, right,
Speaker 9: Like the climate that you were born in will be
Speaker 9: completely stink from the one that you have children raise
Speaker 9: children in. Probably the urgency of the need for change
Speaker 9: is so much with young people today, right, Like, you know, yeah,
Speaker 9: the economy that my generation was promised doesn't exist for us,
Speaker 9: but the planet that gen Z was promised isn't going
Speaker 9: to exist for them. And the information system is so
Speaker 9: fucked for young people today, right, and so captured by
Speaker 9: corporate and state interests. And yet despite that, or maybe
Speaker 9: because of that, we've seen some of the most beautiful
Speaker 9: revolutions that I can recall, Right, Like, when I speak
Speaker 9: to gen Z folks in Myanmar, they approach the revolution
Speaker 9: in a distinct way from the way that like the
Speaker 9: revolutions I'm familiar with from the nineties and two thousands did,
Speaker 9: but also just from like a very human desire for
Speaker 9: a better world, for equality, for a beautiful life. And
Speaker 9: so like, I'm very hopeful at the same time as
Speaker 9: I feel for people of the younger generation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think there's there's a lot of cause
Speaker 3: for hope that such numbers can be mobilized. But I
Speaker 3: would love to see those numbers get mobilized in the
Speaker 3: countries that we've been talking about a more radical be
Speaker 3: than simply bringing demands to the state or or changing
Speaker 3: up one government for another.
Speaker 9: You know, yeah, yeah, I mean in the case of
Speaker 9: me and Marlika. That's certainly like that is the case, right,
Speaker 9: Like they're not thinking about changing one running party for another,
Speaker 9: They're thinking about changing the way governance works, right, They're
Speaker 9: like bringing democracy to people. To be clear, there isn't
Speaker 9: really a coherent set of exact demands for the revolution,
Speaker 9: but many of the young people they speak to are
Speaker 9: looking at how can we create a model that doesn't
Speaker 9: allow for a genocide to happen against one group, that
Speaker 9: doesn't allow for the military to walk into one building
Speaker 9: and take away everyone's future. And I think that's very.
Speaker 3: Beautiful exactly, that's that's inspiring. Yeah, yeah, I think asking
Speaker 3: those questions and asking even more questions, I think as
Speaker 3: how this generation is going to get to, you know,
Speaker 3: certain conclusions about whether this current project should continue. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this current state project, this current capitalist project, this current
Speaker 3: patriarchal project. The more questions get asked, the more answers
Speaker 3: get illuminated, and the closes, I think we can get
Speaker 3: to a viable and liberatory alternative.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, definitely the case. And I think some of
Speaker 9: this is just like some of it we have to
Speaker 9: work out on the way and that's okay. Like I
Speaker 9: think the twentieth century, the idea of a revolution was
Speaker 9: like this violent seizure of state power, often by a
Speaker 9: vanguard group with a very specific project that they were
Speaker 9: looking to implement. Right, And in the twenty first century,
Speaker 9: we haven't seen that, or the time, we have seen
Speaker 9: a lot more of like this is bad and it
Speaker 9: has to change, and we're going to make it change,
Speaker 9: and we'll work out which direction we're moving as we go.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, then that's latently ideological, I'd.
Speaker 9: Say, yeah, And like I think that's a good thing
Speaker 9: because what we've seen I mean, I mean, we have
Speaker 9: seen like this, this idea that revolutions have to stick
Speaker 9: to a strict pathway have horrific consequences for humanity. Right,
Speaker 9: Like I'm thinking of the Gulag, you know, like the
Speaker 9: thinking of the strict ideology which allowed the Soviet Union
Speaker 9: to become this place where where you created, like you know,
Speaker 9: the things that all were were about in nineteen eighty four. Right,
Speaker 9: it is better that a revolutionarized on what the people
Speaker 9: want as they continue to move through it, rather than
Speaker 9: saying we will tell the people what they need and
Speaker 9: we'll be the one steering the ship here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that will model is not going to get us
Speaker 3: all to this NOP so. Honestly, my observation of the
Speaker 3: sur political shifts of this year has re exposed the
Speaker 3: flaws of traditional politics and parties, how they've largely sued
Speaker 3: as gatekeepers to suppress, to absorb and blunt the energy
Speaker 3: is the massive and show the potential of spontaneous uprisings.
Speaker 3: But I think this year also show that we cannot
Speaker 3: keep rising up again and again and again and again,
Speaker 3: you know, feeding bodies to the brutal police forces and
Speaker 3: prison systems. You know, for movements to matters beyond these
Speaker 3: episodes of disruption, I believe they need to develop infrastructure.
Speaker 3: You know, let's let's let's do something that lasts longer
Speaker 3: than a headline, and of course the actions that you know,
Speaker 3: I'm not denying that some of these movements are in
Speaker 3: eh and building infrastructure. It's just that those sorts of
Speaker 3: efforts are less likely to make the international use headlines.
Speaker 3: You know. But I love to see these centralized mobilizations.
Speaker 3: I just want to see them paid with something more
Speaker 3: refigurative politics that can sustain them, that can expand the
Speaker 3: zones of freedom they can tune. They will mentum into
Speaker 3: lasting change. I will say that I appreciate that these
Speaker 3: movements have and breazed tactical variety. You know that they
Speaker 3: have largely understood the need for anonymity. But I don't
Speaker 3: want them to keep fall into this trap of this
Speaker 3: sort of dissipation of energy. They get a government concession
Speaker 3: and they dissipate that there's not a long term ambition,
Speaker 3: or they're not enough steps being taken to resist infiltration
Speaker 3: and surveillance through operational security. I think that if that
Speaker 3: you know, OPSEEC is not present, it's very easy for
Speaker 3: these movements get disrupted from within. You know, platforms like
Speaker 3: Discord have already proven themselves to be ops you know,
Speaker 3: to these kinds of causes. They will willingly sell people out.
Speaker 3: But I have a lot of hope and say that tentatively,
Speaker 3: but we can stand up for something that some line
Speaker 3: can be drawn somewhere. Because even though an uprising like
Speaker 3: the one in Nepal or Morocco hasn't taken place in
Speaker 3: Trinidad yet, I mean, we've been under a state of
Speaker 3: emergency for the entire time that this new government has
Speaker 3: been in power. I will say that I often in
Speaker 3: you know, casual conversation here rumbling. So we need to
Speaker 3: do what Nepal did, you know? We need to do it,
Speaker 3: proved it. And I think that's the power, the potential
Speaker 3: of these kind of moments. Even if they don't lead
Speaker 3: to something lasting in the immediate aftermath, they still save
Speaker 3: as an inspiration. They still open up the landscape of possibilities.
Speaker 9: Yeah, what's so Commandente Marcus used to say it was
Speaker 9: like to open up a pinprick of light in the
Speaker 9: curtain of darkness exactly. Yeahs to show people what it's possible.
Speaker 3: That's a perfect expression. I actually never did that quote before.
Speaker 3: That's good one.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I used to read a lot of Apia Steps.
Speaker 9: I think you had some wonderful ways of expressing things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gen Z is not going to save anyone. You know,
Speaker 3: as a generation, we're just as susceptible to flaws and
Speaker 3: resurrections as any other. There are those who are invested
Speaker 3: in welfare and anti corruption, and they are those who
Speaker 3: are invested in reactionary popularism. But the waves of uprisings
Speaker 3: I think are mostly positive. And I just hope that
Speaker 3: that that spark can light a fire and the way
Speaker 3: that we get that spark to light that fire. So
Speaker 3: we put fuel in place, fuel like networks, fuel like collectives,
Speaker 3: unions and so on. Oh when speaking of unions, I
Speaker 3: forgot to mention this. Ye, India actually had a coalition
Speaker 3: of major trade unions stagion nationwide protests and strikes this
Speaker 3: year against the new labor codes. That's cool, So shout
Speaker 3: out to them as well.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, especially in a state which is uh, it's
Speaker 9: not necessarily know like you will, they will cut down
Speaker 9: pretty hard on you in the ear if you stand
Speaker 9: up against the state indeed.
Speaker 3: And so to wrap the section, I think I'll say
Speaker 3: that twenty twenty five protests show a fraction of our frustration,
Speaker 3: but they also show that we can't just keep screaming
Speaker 3: into the void, you know. Yeah, the ruptures that come
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty six and beyond need to start from
Speaker 3: somewhere other than scratch, if you want to say tech crises. Now,
Speaker 3: I think as EI continued to boom in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 3: we saw a massive build out of physical infrastructure, data centers,
Speaker 3: server farms, water hungry cooling systems, and energy hungry hardware. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's very easy to think of the Internet as a cloud,
Speaker 3: but it's a very physical thing. It demands land, water,
Speaker 3: and electricity. It strains local communities, It drains local communities
Speaker 3: of resources. The water use of data centers in particular,
Speaker 3: can eat up millions of liters of water daily, taken
Speaker 3: away from households and agricultural needs. In fact, data centers
Speaker 3: in the US now consume more than four percent of
Speaker 3: total electricity, with over half still being powered by fossil fuel.
Speaker 9: Jesus. Yeah, Like how much electricity we use in the US.
Speaker 9: Like we go hard on electric right, Like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so four percent is quite a jump from something
Speaker 3: that basically didn't exist ten years ago, five years ago, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so all this scaling up of AI is pushing
Speaker 3: us much faster towards the limits of growth. You know.
Speaker 3: It feels like we are being ruled by accelerationists at times,
Speaker 3: you know. And all the while we have these tech
Speaker 3: browers pushing their text savior gospel on us, even though
Speaker 3: it's very clear that AI is just another vector of extraction, consumption,
Speaker 3: and inequality. Yeah, there's just another way for the owners
Speaker 3: of profit to gain greater control of our data and
Speaker 3: greater surveillance over our lives. What I am proud of
Speaker 3: is that people continue to speak out against it, to
Speaker 3: challenge it, to question it, to call it out wherever
Speaker 3: they see it. There are people who refuse to support
Speaker 3: you know, YouTube channels that are pushing out AI music
Speaker 3: or EI visuals or EI scripts, people who refusing to
Speaker 3: support you know, pages and profiles that have those kinds
Speaker 3: of things or companies that use those sort of that software.
Speaker 3: We have to keep that energy up, we have to
Speaker 3: keep it going, and we're asying to buildings that will
Speaker 3: increase our ability to operate outside of the AI fueled
Speaker 3: the corporate overlord Internet that many of us currently exist
Speaker 3: as pseudo safs within. Yeah, you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of roof open source software integital commands that are out
Speaker 3: of the hands of corporations that we can venture into.
Speaker 3: You know, tech is contested ter rain that the tech
Speaker 3: ordgarchs are currently winning. But that araine is something that
Speaker 3: we can continue to challenge into the new year.
Speaker 9: Definitely.
Speaker 3: But geopolitics in twenty thirty five was a catalogue of
Speaker 3: catastrophes from continuing was fueled by a cast of properties
Speaker 3: to straight up genocides. So in Palestini we saw this
Speaker 3: year repeated rounds of siege, bombardment and cruelty, repeated cease
Speaker 3: fire violations and the part of Israel, all enabled by
Speaker 3: America's military support and political cover. To this day, food,
Speaker 3: water and medical provisions continue to be strained as a
Speaker 3: result of Israel's genocidal ambitions. In Sudan, the fractures they
Speaker 3: have only worsened as the bloodshed famously can be seen
Speaker 3: from space. Millions have been internally displaced, the casualties are
Speaker 3: currently incalculable, and the fighting between the Sudanese armed forces
Speaker 3: and the rapid support forces rages on, all supported by
Speaker 3: regional powers including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In
Speaker 3: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflicting armed groups supported
Speaker 3: by the government of the DRC and the neighboring Rwanda, respectively,
Speaker 3: have continued attacking communities and the infrastructure, inflicting mass rapes,
Speaker 3: and engaging in other war crimes, all while funded by
Speaker 3: mining operations in one of the most resource rich regions
Speaker 3: in the world. In Yemen, the violence continues for tens
Speaker 3: of millions as the saudil That coalition, the UAE and
Speaker 3: Western powers continues to supply arms, logistics and diplomatic cover
Speaker 3: for the displacement, collapse, and brutality inflicted upon the civilians
Speaker 3: of the country. In Ukraine, the war with Russia continues
Speaker 3: to consume resources and lives. In the Caribbean Sea, the
Speaker 3: US ramped up its violence as it targets and bombs
Speaker 3: boats and international waters that it alleges are carrying drugs,
Speaker 3: and appears some gear enough for some kind of operation
Speaker 3: against Venezuela and Myanmar. Resistant groups continue to fight against
Speaker 3: the military junta, which continues to receive economic and political
Speaker 3: cover from neighboring China. Now this isn't exhaustive, so because
Speaker 3: I know if I missed any of the major stories
Speaker 3: from this year, there's so many.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's so sad to think about this new drone
Speaker 9: war that we're starting in Venezuela, right, and we will
Speaker 9: probably start another one in this at hell soon. You know,
Speaker 9: it's very easy for those things to seem tangential to
Speaker 9: our lives. I have experienced what it's like to be
Speaker 9: in a place where drones are killing people every day.
Speaker 9: What that does to you, Just like not knowing who's
Speaker 9: going to get killed tonight, right, woul't be you very
Speaker 9: unlikely might be might be someone you saw today, might
Speaker 9: be someone you've ever met. Dozens of people get killed,
Speaker 9: but thousands of people have to live in with this
Speaker 9: sense of fear and maybe after a while you get
Speaker 9: used to it. I don't know, but I don't think
Speaker 9: we realize like potential of the human joy even though
Speaker 9: it's not like in this case, not like a ground war, right,
Speaker 9: like for many people don't see it as a war.
Speaker 9: The terrible trauma that that causes, not just to the
Speaker 9: people who are killed in their families, but to so
Speaker 9: many other people who have to live with the knowledge
Speaker 9: that like they could be killed in the world wouldn't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that the mental torment and trauma even
Speaker 3: if you survive, Yeah, something like Palestine or something like Sudan, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's going to stay with you for the rest of
Speaker 3: your life. I don't reverberate in future generations, even generations
Speaker 3: that they not experience the genocide directly, do not experience
Speaker 3: the war directly, they're still going to feel that in
Speaker 3: the every ones in the way that you know, the
Speaker 3: generations of that experience that interact with them in the
Speaker 3: stories that they tell.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's yeah, that trauma lives for a long time, right,
Speaker 9: and trauma creates sometimes a cycle of violence, right, Like
Speaker 9: it's it's not a good thing. Yeah, But the idea
Speaker 9: of drone warfare is the idea of that these like
Speaker 9: clean surgical strikes. That's not how war works, that's not
Speaker 9: how killing works, that's not how explosive warheads work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I remember in Rajare sat down with a family who
Speaker 9: had lost their son who had just turned fourteen, and
Speaker 9: like thinking of the waves of repercussion from that one bomb,
Speaker 9: and hundreds of bombs fell that year, you know, And
Speaker 9: that was just in Syria. Thousands of these drone bombs
Speaker 9: fell all around the world, and for the most part,
Speaker 9: people didn't remark on it and didn't care. But that's
Speaker 9: happening more now.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean it's very very easy to zoom out and
Speaker 3: just think of the pures statistics, the pure numbers, because
Speaker 3: when you actually zoom in and even an individual incident
Speaker 3: that is an entire lifetime affected, multiple lifetimes affected by
Speaker 3: even one building being leveled or one bullet being fired.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And I think there's a reason we don't put
Speaker 9: on war like that, right, Like I try to when
Speaker 9: I write my stuff, because like, everyone's life is the
Speaker 9: most valuable thing they have, and every death of the
Speaker 9: tragedy it's hard on the reporter, like, it's not sustainable.
Speaker 9: Fox you up and be people wouldn't like wars if
Speaker 9: we get like you see it to an extent in
Speaker 9: the way that the European nations talked about World War One,
Speaker 9: right like, to get a significant number of upper class
Speaker 9: British people to be opposed to the concept of warfare.
Speaker 9: It's quite a remarkable in dev right like that those
Speaker 9: are people who have gone to schools whose sole purpose
Speaker 9: was to raise them as military officers for empire from
Speaker 9: the age of five. Yeah, but we saw it after
Speaker 9: World War One, because the war wasn't abstract, right, it
Speaker 9: was close by. The people dying weren't a different class
Speaker 9: or race. They were everyone, and especially young upper class
Speaker 9: men who became officers, right like. But somehow along the
Speaker 9: way since then, we've lost that and we've we've convinced
Speaker 9: ourselves that this is something that like, it'sn't a human tragedy,
Speaker 9: even if it doesn't involve us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned in World War One in particular,
Speaker 3: because I actually sat down to finally watch or quiet
Speaker 3: in the Western Front. Oh yeah, last night I watched
Speaker 3: like the first five minutes and I was like, I
Speaker 3: don't know if I could watch this right now, And
Speaker 3: we're going to watch something else. Yeah, that's it. And
Speaker 3: that's a movie, you know, it's not even the real thing.
Speaker 3: It's a fictional depiction of the occurrence. And I felt
Speaker 3: like I was there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I don't like watching those films. I don't
Speaker 9: watch those films. Gives me bad memories, dreams. But yeah,
Speaker 9: like I can't understand how we have this ability to
Speaker 9: we have fucking VR now, right, like surgeons can practice
Speaker 9: operations in VR. But like in a world where we
Speaker 9: can have so many experiences, experienced things that we would
Speaker 9: never experience otherwise, we have inflicted a genocide through starvation
Speaker 9: on the people of Palestine. Like in a world where
Speaker 9: we can see and know more about other people's lives
Speaker 9: than ever, we've done this thing. Like I don't want
Speaker 9: to harp on the fact that, like It'srael, it's built
Speaker 9: on the idea of never again, and here they are
Speaker 9: doing it again, right, But like it's just so sad
Speaker 9: that like we're in this world where we can know
Speaker 9: and share more things and yet it's resulted in somehow
Speaker 9: are still not seeing our common humanity. I mean more
Speaker 9: people have I guess. Also, Like one thing that has
Speaker 9: happened this year, in the last two year, is that
Speaker 9: like when I came here, I would never have believed
Speaker 9: that you would get thousands of American people out to
Speaker 9: call for the basic human rights of Palestinian people like
Speaker 9: it did. It wasn't a thing that American people were
Speaker 9: aware of. So like that is something there of the
Speaker 9: last two years, think we have seen solidarity, some of.
Speaker 3: That's yeah, there has been a shift.
Speaker 9: Yeah, some of that solidarity I think has been misguided.
Speaker 3: But I think some of the I guess anti Israel
Speaker 3: shift has come less from a concern for Palestinians and
Speaker 3: more so for the sort of you know, we don't
Speaker 3: want our tax cart dollars they spent, they want it's
Speaker 3: spent on us. Or it's more of an internally minded
Speaker 3: sort of America first ideology.
Speaker 9: Yep, and they're straight up anti Semitic bigotry as well.
Speaker 3: But there has been that solidarity shift as well.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Like there has been that, like a global solidarity
Speaker 9: and like even as a millennial, right, like from the
Speaker 9: age of thirteen right when I was a kid, when
Speaker 9: nine to eleven happened, and even I guess the First
Speaker 9: War in the Persian Gulf. The media project of most
Speaker 9: of the nations in which I've lived has been to
Speaker 9: demonize Muslim people, people specifically living in the Middle East, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's more of an a racialized tree than
Speaker 3: a particularly religious milia tree. I mean, it does take
Speaker 3: that religious courting, and there are religion specific elements to
Speaker 3: the bigatory, but it does tend to be more racialized
Speaker 3: that yeah, because I already know that some people will
Speaker 3: be like, oh, well, I just don't like Islam as
Speaker 3: because of its authoritarian and inclinations where the case. Maybe,
Speaker 3: but it's a bit more than just religious beast bigotry.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's not just a philosophical disagreement, right, Like it
Speaker 9: took on, like you say, this racial character and so
Speaker 9: like to see people noting their common humanity, Like I
Speaker 9: was just talked to someone about this the other day.
Speaker 9: Be familiar with miss Rachel. Yeah, yeah, Like it is inconceivable.
Speaker 9: It would have been inconceivable when I was in high
Speaker 9: school that an American children's entertainer would be like, well,
Speaker 9: I guess you had the Dixie Chicks, But it's not
Speaker 9: the same, right, it would be like continually not to
Speaker 9: take away from what they did. I think they were
Speaker 9: very brave actually, but you know, to be able to
Speaker 9: stand up for the lives of young children in Palestine
Speaker 9: so consistently, Yeah, so vaciferously for so long like that,
Speaker 9: that's very hot. That gives me, you know, a great
Speaker 9: sense of hope.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not really. I think it's an indication of just
Speaker 3: how much there has been a shift, and of course
Speaker 3: she has been bullied and targeted relentlessly since, but yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, it does indicate that people are willing to
Speaker 3: face that kind of bullying and these that kind of
Speaker 3: attack that I suppose segment of empire for the sake
Speaker 3: of stand off. What's right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yes, I guess I think it's so it's impressive,
Speaker 9: right that, like, yeah, people have bullied and attacked her,
Speaker 9: but like, also she has been so brave and so
Speaker 9: consistent and not just miss Rachel. To be clear, there
Speaker 9: are many many other people who've done this and has
Speaker 9: been able to continue to do that because so many
Speaker 9: people have been like, no, these are just children, Why
Speaker 9: the fuck you? Why are you arguing that it's wrong
Speaker 9: to say we shouldn't kill children. What the fuck is
Speaker 9: wrong with you? Yet a lot of people showed up
Speaker 9: against the war in Iraq too, But like, it's good
Speaker 9: to see that that media project has not succeeded, because
Speaker 9: it's been two decades in my life that it has
Speaker 9: been trying to succeed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that we've been seeing so very familiar
Speaker 3: dynamics across the jubiscal crises that I've a sort of
Speaker 3: mentioned there. We have this external patronage of global powers
Speaker 3: and regional powers that seemed to be sustaining these fights
Speaker 3: that were in lives over years, because if they wouldn't
Speaker 3: get in that constant flow of money for weapons and
Speaker 3: weapons support and military support, these wars will not be
Speaker 3: able to last as long as they have, you know.
Speaker 3: But it's these outside actors in Sudan and in Palestine
Speaker 3: that are supporting the fight and supporting the barrage, supporting
Speaker 3: the suffering, and not supporting the aid necessary to support people.
Speaker 3: You know, there's been a very slow and insufficient piece
Speaker 3: of humanity response due to funding gaps, access constraints, and
Speaker 3: the politicization of aid. And there are people who have
Speaker 3: managed to act directly not waiting for any official channels.
Speaker 3: In the case of the flotilla. Something else that happened
Speaker 3: this year that I found particularly admirable, but it hasn't
Speaker 3: been enough so far. It hasn't broken through quite yet,
Speaker 3: and people are still without much of the necessary aid
Speaker 3: that will sustain even their survival. We also see that
Speaker 3: even as these was a ragion in these regions, in
Speaker 3: many cases the extraction is continuing, particularly in Congo and Sudan. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think it's very critical that we can just speak
Speaker 3: out against these wars as we get into twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: where we see them, we document what's happening, We keep
Speaker 3: a record offline of what's going on independently, because another
Speaker 3: thing I've noticed this year is how blatantly the news
Speaker 3: media is showing its colors, you know. And that's where
Speaker 3: independent media is meant to fill the gaps, even though
Speaker 3: it may not have as many resources as main industream media,
Speaker 3: you know, so things like this podcast is Herefore, it's
Speaker 3: something that I think when the listeners can take responsibility
Speaker 3: in being part of in gathering information and archiving information,
Speaker 3: in sharing sources and direct connects so that the information
Speaker 3: gets out there and so as we wrap up this
Speaker 3: retrospective for twenty twenty five, two things in particular standout
Speaker 3: to me. One is that our system is brittle as hell,
Speaker 3: and two that people are resilient as well, and taken together,
Speaker 3: I believe it's an indication that we are indeed in
Speaker 3: a world of transition, and it's still uncertain, and it's
Speaker 3: as to how it will turn out. The future hasn't
Speaker 3: been written yet. We don't know. We do have the
Speaker 3: ability to choose what we do next. So if you
Speaker 3: look towards a new year, think about something you want
Speaker 3: to build or strengthen, whether it be a skill, a relationship,
Speaker 3: a practice, a project of some kind that conserve you
Speaker 3: and those around you going forward. That's all I have
Speaker 3: for today. All power to all the people, Happy New Year, Peace.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here Executive Disorder, our weekly
Speaker 2: newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world,
Speaker 2: and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today
Speaker 2: I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong and maybe Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 5: Maybe yeah, let's send you first name.
Speaker 2: I'm always here.
Speaker 14: I just don't necessarily have anything to add, because you're
Speaker 14: all so good at your jobs.
Speaker 2: No, no, we love when Sophie has something to contribute
Speaker 2: to this show. So what should we talk about?
Speaker 8: First?
Speaker 14: Let's do some quick updates from last week. As we
Speaker 14: mentioned in the episode description, last week we recorded prior
Speaker 14: to an incident that happened in Portland where two people
Speaker 14: were shot by Border patrol or ice. Very unclear that
Speaker 14: there was not a lot of information given out and
Speaker 14: the way that the situation unfolded, the way that DHS
Speaker 14: said it that there was a targeted stop of two
Speaker 14: people and they resisted dress So of course what do
Speaker 14: they do? Just shoot into a car and those people
Speaker 14: drove away and then quickly called for help and then
Speaker 14: went to the hospital. We really don't know anything further
Speaker 14: than that. I watched many press conferences from Oregon and
Speaker 14: Portland officials, including the governor and the mayor, talking about
Speaker 14: the situation. Everybody's pretty horrified by it locally, but that's
Speaker 14: not the story we were getting from DHS. I can
Speaker 14: read the statement if you guys want, Okay, Yeah, since
Speaker 14: Robert's not here, Robert was at CS but was also
Speaker 14: following the story very closely and did some reporting on
Speaker 14: his blue sky if you want to.
Speaker 2: Go back and look at that.
Speaker 14: But the statement from DHS said at two nineteen pst.
Speaker 14: US Border Patrol agents were conducting a targeted vehicle stop
Speaker 14: in Portland. Organ the passengers of the vehicle and target
Speaker 14: is a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational gang
Speaker 14: trend de Agua prostitution ring and involved in a recent
Speaker 14: shooting in Portland. The vehicle drivers believed to be a
Speaker 14: member of the vicious Venezuelan gang trendy Agua. They love
Speaker 14: to just throw that out of there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 14: When agents identified themselves to the vehicle occupants, the driver
Speaker 14: weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law
Speaker 14: enforcement agents. Fearing for his life and safety. An agent
Speaker 14: fire defensive shot. The driver drove off, with the passenger
Speaker 14: fleeing the scene. The situation is evolving and more information
Speaker 14: is forthcoming. That was on January eighth, at about five
Speaker 14: pm Pacific. And that's their take, that's their like go
Speaker 14: to move. The excuse for randomly shooting at a car
Speaker 14: is that they were weaponizing the vehicle towards the agent.
Speaker 14: We really don't know much further than that. Miya, do
Speaker 14: you have anything you want to add.
Speaker 15: Yeah, so I think we should make two things through one.
Speaker 15: Most of the people who were shot have survived, which
Speaker 15: is good.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yes, it's also worth noting that So the day we
Speaker 15: are recording this, on the fourteenth, there was a report
Speaker 15: released by Del Cameron and Ryan Shapiro at Wired talking
Speaker 15: specifically about how they got a bunch of intelligence documents
Speaker 15: from the Trump administration about trend Agua and to briefly
Speaker 15: summarized sory coms, I'm just gonna quote the subtitle of
Speaker 15: it because it gives a good representation of what is
Speaker 15: in the actual intelligence documents.
Speaker 2: See, that's all we need.
Speaker 15: Yeah, hundreds of records are pained by Wired shows thin
Speaker 15: intelligence on the Venezuelan Gang of the United States, describing fragmented,
Speaker 15: low level crime rather than a coordinated terrorist threat. So
Speaker 15: they can barely even find existence of this group in
Speaker 15: the United States. These two people, I am ninety nine,
Speaker 15: I would would I would stake my life on the
Speaker 15: on none of the stuff in that report about them
Speaker 15: being in this Venezuelan criminal organization being true. Almost everything
Speaker 15: that has come out of Homeland Security, as we've talked
Speaker 15: about with every other previous shooting almost everything that out
Speaker 15: of Homeland Security is a lie. So yeah, we will
Speaker 15: probably in the coming weeks figure out what actually happens,
Speaker 15: but unfortunately, right now we're relying on a combination of
Speaker 15: Portland government officials who are somewhat more reliable and Department
Speaker 15: of full Land Security, which is utterly unreliable.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I do have one thing to note here as for
Speaker 2: what the local officials in Portland are saying. Portland Police
Speaker 2: Bureau Chief Bob Day started a January tenth press conference
Speaker 2: by saying, quote, recently I read the Declaration of Independence
Speaker 2: for the first time unquote, and then stated that the
Speaker 2: two victims of the shooting have quote some nexus to
Speaker 2: involvement with Trenda Agua, and then on January eleventh, Maltnama
Speaker 2: County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez was interviewed on CADU News
Speaker 2: and said that he believes Trenda Agua is active in Portland,
Speaker 2: but he could not confirm in his office has any
Speaker 2: criminal cases against the gang.
Speaker 16: The Department of Homeland Security has identified the people who
Speaker 16: were shot, saying they are affiliated with Trinda Ragua, the
Speaker 16: Venezuelan gang, and are connected to other crimes in Portland.
Speaker 16: Does your office have any cases against these individuals?
Speaker 17: You know, this is all These are all things that
Speaker 17: we're going to be looking at and going through very
Speaker 17: carefully as we evaluate the case. One to make sure
Speaker 17: that if there are other pending matters out there, that
Speaker 17: they're taken care of, but also just to make sure
Speaker 17: we get a full picture of what's going on in
Speaker 17: this situation.
Speaker 16: Do you have any knowledge of whether Trendera or Ragua
Speaker 16: is active in Portland and Moltmama County.
Speaker 17: It's certainly something that we have seen and we are
Speaker 17: we are working on with our local law enforcement.
Speaker 3: We have seen them in our area.
Speaker 17: They are one of kind of a host of different
Speaker 17: groups or individuals out there that are engaged in criminal activity,
Speaker 17: and it's something that we're working on.
Speaker 14: Just a lot of biased disinformation and misinformation. We don't
Speaker 14: actually really know what happened, but I am grateful that
Speaker 14: that those folks did not lose their lives unlike Renee Good.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 15: Yeah, And I also briefly want to mention here about
Speaker 15: Renee Good. There's been an attempt by the Department of Justice.
Speaker 15: A bunch of people at the Department Justice have resigned
Speaker 15: rather than attempt to prosecute Renee Good's wife.
Speaker 2: Six high level prosecutors have resigned in the past week.
Speaker 15: And this has been a very very standard reaction from
Speaker 15: law enforcement when they don't kill someone or when there's
Speaker 15: someone else on the scene. A few months ago, I
Speaker 15: shot a woman in Chicago. She thankfully survived, but they
Speaker 15: also charged her afterwards. So this is a very very
Speaker 15: standard practice. And they are right now trying this on
Speaker 15: Renee Goods wife after she watched her fucking wife get
Speaker 15: killed in front of her.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so I know people have also been waiting for
Speaker 9: updates on It run. We have an episode that came out.
Speaker 9: It would have come out on Wednesday, two days before
Speaker 9: this comes out. You'd like to know more about what's
Speaker 9: happening in Iran. We had a really excellent talk with Gordayen,
Speaker 9: and I would suggest you go back and find that episode.
Speaker 9: And I wanted to update people on what is happening
Speaker 9: in Syria, I guess specifically northern Syria right now. So
Speaker 9: the two neighborhoods Shikmunk sud Nesa Fria, those are both
Speaker 9: neighborhoods in Aleppo right that there's sometimes characterized as Kurdish neighborhoods.
Speaker 9: But like you ZD people live there. There are various
Speaker 9: Christian people living there as well. Right, it's not one
Speaker 9: hundred percent Kurdish. I think sometimes there's a tendency among
Speaker 9: people who write about Syria to see things as ethnic modelists,
Speaker 9: and I think that is not the way to approach
Speaker 9: these things. But anyway, both of those neighborhoods have now
Speaker 9: been fully seized by the Syrian Transitional Government. Some SDF
Speaker 9: fighters were bust back to Kamishlo, which is the capital
Speaker 9: of the aa ne s somethime's going as Rosjava fighting
Speaker 9: is now moving closer to the Euphrates, right closer to
Speaker 9: the core of what people will call Roshjava. I think
Speaker 9: at a minimum the goal is probably to remove the
Speaker 9: SDF from any areas that are not majority Kurdish. So
Speaker 9: right now that they're fighting in Derhafa and they will
Speaker 9: begin fighting, or that they have already been drawn attacks
Speaker 9: in other areas as well. In a leopard Is Syrian observed.
Speaker 9: Joined Human Rights, which is a Britain based human rights organization,
Speaker 9: documented several war crimes and going to quote here, SOHR
Speaker 9: documented twenty three cases of extra judicial executions and desecration
Speaker 9: of bodies in shik Maksud and Alasafria neighborhoods in Aleppo
Speaker 9: City in the past few days. Here are further details.
Speaker 9: The bodies of fifteen members of the Internal Security Forces ASAISH,
Speaker 9: including bodies of four female members, were deliberately incinerated. A
Speaker 9: female member of the SASH forces was killed during the
Speaker 9: clashes and her body was thrown from the top of
Speaker 9: the building. The reason they've been able to document these
Speaker 9: is that they're widely broadcast on telegram. Right people are
Speaker 9: very proud of what our war crimes, the desecration of
Speaker 9: the remain. At the same time, the Islamic State carried
Speaker 9: out three simultaneous attacks on the twelfth of January, enduring
Speaker 9: several SDF personnel, and it seems that this whole debacle
Speaker 9: has put the peace process between the PKK. The PKK
Speaker 9: is a distinct entity from the SDF right, but nonetheless
Speaker 9: the PKK guess is seeing Kurdish people killed in Syria
Speaker 9: and Turkish support right. There have been some reports of
Speaker 9: Turkish drones being used or flying around there, so the
Speaker 9: KSEK if people aren't familiar, the KSEK is the organization
Speaker 9: that brings together the different political groups in kurdis Dan
Speaker 9: that broadly adhere to the political ideology or thought of
Speaker 9: abdulah Ojulan, but take different approaches to that. The KSEK
Speaker 9: released a statement saying, quote, the attacks on chikmuk Sud
Speaker 9: and a Sophia and the preparations for attacks on the
Speaker 9: east of the Euphrates also call into question the ceasefire
Speaker 9: between our movement and Turkey and the ongoing piece democratic society.
Speaker 9: That is not great, right. Yeah, you know, this is
Speaker 9: a place where people have been at war, killing and
Speaker 9: dying for more than a decade, and it's very sad
Speaker 9: to think of more killing and dying happening there. Garana,
Speaker 9: you wanted to talk a little bit about some domestic terrorism,
Speaker 9: I guess some actual domestic terrorism and us AN attack rate.
Speaker 9: Do you want to talk about that?
Speaker 8: Yes.
Speaker 2: On Saturday, January tenth, the Beth Israel Congregation synagogue in Mississippi,
Speaker 2: and historic synagogue, the oldest in the state that was
Speaker 2: once targeted by the KKK, was set on fire in
Speaker 2: the middle of the night, damaging the interior of the building.
Speaker 2: A nineteen year old college student named Stephen Spencer Pittman
Speaker 2: has been charged with federal and state arson charges, as
Speaker 2: well as a hate crime enhancement. On Instagram, Pittman described
Speaker 2: himself as a quote unquote follower of Christ and shared
Speaker 2: a meme of the anti Semitic happy Merchant hours before
Speaker 2: the attack.
Speaker 9: Jesus Christ Jesu.
Speaker 2: The happy merchant is an anti Smenic Jewish stereotype that
Speaker 2: is often used in memes originating from the four Chen
Speaker 2: era of whoa Jack memes. You've probably seen it before.
Speaker 2: It's a crude, anti Semitic rendering of a Jewish person
Speaker 2: with his hands clasped together. Pittman has confessed to starting
Speaker 2: a fire in the building, which he described as the
Speaker 2: quote unquote Synagogue of Satan. According to an FBI affidavit
Speaker 2: and reporting from the AP states that during his first hearing,
Speaker 2: when the judge read him his rights, Pittman said, quote
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ is Lord.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: According to the FBI affi, David Pittman texted his own
Speaker 2: father during the arson, sending a photo of the synagogue
Speaker 2: with the messages there's a furnace in the back, hoodie
Speaker 2: is on, and they have the best cameras unquote. Pittman's
Speaker 2: father attempted to can Vince's son to come home and
Speaker 2: later turned him into the authorities. Pittman suffered burns to
Speaker 2: himself during this attack. He's the only person injured as
Speaker 2: a result of this incident. Big flee. I'm glad he
Speaker 2: got hurt. Pittman's phone was found in the synagogue damage
Speaker 2: from the fire, though his location was able to be
Speaker 2: tracked via the Life three sixty GPS tracking app which
Speaker 2: shows a stop at a gas station where Pittman allegedly
Speaker 2: picked up gasoline before heading onto the synagogue.
Speaker 9: Great of what a fucking idiot. But yeah, I think
Speaker 9: this is the only synagogue in the state, right, like.
Speaker 2: To the oldest synagogue in the state. I doubt this
Speaker 2: is the only synagogue in Mississippi.
Speaker 9: The largest one.
Speaker 2: That's it. Yeah, yes, yeah, it's it's like the most
Speaker 2: famous one from.
Speaker 9: The Yeah yeah, And like you said, it was attacked
Speaker 9: by the Klan before it was didn't he attack exactly
Speaker 9: the same part of the synagogue that the Klan previously burned.
Speaker 2: I don't have that in my notes.
Speaker 9: That is, it seems like that's what he was same vibes.
Speaker 2: Now, he did say that he did a lot of
Speaker 2: research on the target and that he needed a home
Speaker 2: run in communications to his father and Pittman was a
Speaker 2: baseball player in the state. There's not much more to
Speaker 2: say about this, Like this is a weirdo Instagram Christian Zoomer,
Speaker 2: who also offered like a fitness service. It's unclear how
Speaker 2: real this is or if he had like, you know, customers,
Speaker 2: but he was offering faith based fitness transformations.
Speaker 9: Es.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the thing, Like you have a little bit
Speaker 2: of like the Christian looks max or vibe going on
Speaker 2: with him, as well as sharing a series of anti
Speaker 2: Smitic posts made on Instagram.
Speaker 9: Yeah did you see this Deborah lipstat tweet geah No,
Speaker 9: so Deborah lipsdat right, who was previously the she like
Speaker 9: the Envoil anti Semitism, posted a twenty three on January eleventh.
Speaker 9: This is a major tragedy, but it's more than that.
Speaker 9: It's an arson attack and another step in the globalization
Speaker 9: of the Intifada.
Speaker 2: That does not seem to be the case. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: doesn't know.
Speaker 9: No, but this is like pretty uh way off base
Speaker 9: in fact, right, But yeah, I think it's still rather
Speaker 9: telling that.
Speaker 2: This is this is not like a Hamas anti imperialist Zoomer,
Speaker 2: Red Triangle and biotype guy. This is a right wing
Speaker 2: Christian nationalist college athlete, Christian Zoomer who shares antisemitic memes
Speaker 2: on Instagram. This is a pretty standard, you know, pre
Speaker 2: twenty twenty two type of like synagogue attack. Yeah, in fact,
Speaker 2: the fire was started right in front of a Tree
Speaker 2: of Life memorial plaque in the synagogue.
Speaker 7: Jesus Christ God, of course it was yeah, and we
Speaker 7: are back.
Speaker 15: So the thing I thought I was going to be
Speaker 15: talking about this week was a Supreme Court ruling on
Speaker 15: Trump's tariffs. However, the Supreme Court, contrary to the expectations
Speaker 15: of basically everyone, didn't actually release a ruling on the
Speaker 15: tariff stuff today.
Speaker 2: We have no idea when they're going to release that. However,
Speaker 2: instead of that, we got one of.
Speaker 15: The most bizarre and extraordinary statements and videos I have
Speaker 15: ever seen from someone who was even remotely affiliated with
Speaker 15: the US government. So on Sunday, Thuderal Reserve chair Jerome
Speaker 15: Powell released I don't even have a good reference for
Speaker 15: what this is. The closest thing I can think of
Speaker 15: is it's a kidnapping video, but it's more like a
Speaker 15: help I'm about to be kidnapped video in which he says, quote,
Speaker 15: the Department of Justice serve the Thorough Reserve with grand
Speaker 15: jury subpoenas threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony
Speaker 15: before the Senate Banking Committee.
Speaker 1: Last.
Speaker 15: So, this is nominally about cost overruns effectively in renovations
Speaker 15: of the Federal Reserve. If anyone has ever paid attention
Speaker 15: to any single US government project ever, you will know
Speaker 15: that there are cost overruns on by most projects. This
Speaker 15: is just how the government works, because you come in
Speaker 15: with your little bid that's below what the actual cause
Speaker 15: is going to be, and then it costs more than that.
Speaker 15: Now this investigation is being run directly into your own power.
Speaker 15: And by the way, this statement was published on the
Speaker 15: Federal Reserves. This is like an official statement from the
Speaker 15: Federal Reserve Board.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 15: So, he also says later in the statement, quote, the
Speaker 15: threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal
Speaker 15: Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessments of
Speaker 15: what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences
Speaker 15: of the presidents. This is about whether the Fed will
Speaker 15: be able to continue to set interest rates based on
Speaker 15: evidence and economic conditions or whether instead monetary policy will
Speaker 15: be directed by political pressures or intimidation. This is extraordinary.
Speaker 15: They got sixteen other central bank leaders from around the world,
Speaker 15: and we're talking about Norway to Indonesia to submit a
Speaker 15: letter expressing where they use the words solidarity to express
Speaker 15: the support of Powell. I can't emphasize enough. Do you
Speaker 15: know how bad it is to get central bank leaders
Speaker 15: to say the word solidarity?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 15: Now, this is following a Trump two pattern of using
Speaker 15: the DOJ to attack their political enemies. Today the fourteenth,
Speaker 15: as we're recording, this also saw the beginning of investigation
Speaker 15: into Senator Elisa Slotkin over her participation in a video
Speaker 15: a few months ago encouraging US troops to disobey illegal orders.
Speaker 15: Mark Kelly, who was also in that video, was also
Speaker 15: targeted with a Pentagon investigation over the video.
Speaker 2: So this has become very common.
Speaker 15: However, Jerome Powell is a Trump one appointee, so this
Speaker 15: is someone who is also and this is this is
Speaker 15: this is something that worth mentioning.
Speaker 2: Powell is very popular in conservative.
Speaker 15: Circles, largely outside of a very very immediate circle of
Speaker 15: people around Trump, who want their president to be able
Speaker 15: to control the interest rate.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 15: I'm going to do a full episode about this, probably
Speaker 15: next week, but the independence of the central bank is
Speaker 15: one of the core pillars of the global reputation and
Speaker 15: stability of the US dollar. Now I'm not saying here
Speaker 15: that the central bank is good. I'm saying that this
Speaker 15: is how the entire world economic system operates, right. It
Speaker 15: is based on the central Bank operating as a series
Speaker 15: of quasi public but still technically non government entities that
Speaker 15: make independent decisions on interest rates. Now FED interest rates effectively.
Speaker 15: And I'm saying effectively here because I'm simplifying a very
Speaker 15: complicated set of economic interactions into one sentence, but they
Speaker 15: effectively set in for bank loans and the broader economy,
Speaker 15: which in turn has a massive impact on how fast
Speaker 15: or slow the economy grows. And the FED uses this
Speaker 15: as a tool to control inflation and unemployment through a
Speaker 15: basically a single macroeconomic policy lever. The FED does much
Speaker 15: much more stuff than this. I will get into this
Speaker 15: in the other episode. It has a series of unbelievably
Speaker 15: crucial functions. But what is happening here is the Trump
Speaker 15: administration attempting to directly seize control of the FED, and
Speaker 15: this is a nightmare. The actual mechanisms that work here
Speaker 15: in terms of the relationship between interest rates and the
Speaker 15: Fed's economic policy toolkit and inflation are not well understoody
Speaker 15: even by the Fed, which is something you can get
Speaker 15: if you go read the Federal Reserve documents. It's very complicated,
Speaker 15: it's all contested, but it is the Fed's job to
Speaker 15: be able to do this, and they will admit they're
Speaker 15: not incredible at its Trump administration is running this directly.
Speaker 15: The trumpdministration has absolutely no idea how any of this
Speaker 15: stuff works. Yeah, this is giving them the keys to
Speaker 15: the global economy and they are going to just start
Speaker 15: pushing buttons. This is a significant enough threat that several
Speaker 15: Republican senators and this is not just Morowski, these are
Speaker 15: just regular Republican senators have spoken out against this move
Speaker 15: and have expressed, you know, expressed that they think that
Speaker 15: drump Powell is innocent and that they will vote against
Speaker 15: any attempt to approve a Trump nominee for the head
Speaker 15: of Federal Reserve, which is also extraordinary. This is one
Speaker 15: of the largest breaks we've seen with Trump from the
Speaker 15: Republican Party so far, and the reason that there have
Speaker 15: been actual breaks from the Republican Party is that this
Speaker 15: is the rubicon for a lot of sectors of capital.
Speaker 15: Almost anything can be endured as long as the president
Speaker 15: does not have direct control over the money supply, which
Speaker 15: is what Trump controlling the Federal Reserve directs would be. Now,
Speaker 15: part of what's going on here, right is that this
Speaker 15: is an attempt to choose a new chair of the
Speaker 15: Federal Reserve Board by getting.
Speaker 1: Powell out of his job.
Speaker 15: However, so Powell's term expires in May, but that's Powell's
Speaker 15: term as the Chair of the Federal Reserve. He's still
Speaker 15: on the Board of Governors, and the Board of Governors
Speaker 15: also has to approve a new head of the Federal Reserve.
Speaker 15: So Trump needs to oust him from his position as
Speaker 15: the governor of the Federal Reserve Board, because if he
Speaker 15: doesn't do this, he doesn't have enough votes to get
Speaker 15: his appointments. The really dangerous thing here, on top of
Speaker 15: the abstract principle of you know, the president having direct
Speaker 15: control over the central banking system, the direct media threat
Speaker 15: is that his preferred candidates, who is currently one of
Speaker 15: the Federal Reserve Board governors or one of the Federal
Speaker 15: Reserve governors she's on the board is Stephan Merin, who
Speaker 15: is the guy who wants to charge other countries for
Speaker 15: holding US bonds.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I forget.
Speaker 15: This guy is a mediac, right Like, that's sorry, that
Speaker 15: is that is deeply unfair to mediacs, who are very
Speaker 15: reasonable people. This guy is I cannot emphasize enough if
Speaker 15: you put someone in charge of the Federal Reserve who
Speaker 15: literally did not understand what economics was, they would do
Speaker 15: less damage than putting Stiffevan Mirron in charge of this.
Speaker 15: This is a nightmare. This guy has no idea what
Speaker 15: he's doing at all. He is effectively a cipher for
Speaker 15: Trump administration. And this is one of the positions in
Speaker 15: the entire capitalist system where the chair of the Federal
Speaker 15: Reserve has to be someone who at least sort of
Speaker 15: knows what's going on. They can be evil, and they
Speaker 15: very often have been, but they have to sort of
Speaker 15: know what's happening. If this guy gets put in charge
Speaker 15: of the Federal Reserve, he is going to turn the
Speaker 15: US economy into a smoking crater. And that's what's at
Speaker 15: stake here with this attempt to prosecute Jerome Powell.
Speaker 2: Powell blink three times. If you need help. He is
Speaker 2: cabin s o s with his fingers. It is a
Speaker 2: very unnerving video that he posted.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's just like one of those if I disappear.
Speaker 2: He looks really scared.
Speaker 15: Yeah, and I think this is going to be one
Speaker 15: of the major flashpoints here because even the tariffs don't
Speaker 15: have the potential impact for economic disruption that handing the
Speaker 15: make countries pay money the whole US bonds guy, the
Speaker 15: Federal Reserve Board chairman does so.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you will see a position from Republicans because it
Speaker 9: directly impacts their bag.
Speaker 15: Yeah, this is the most you can possibly fuck with
Speaker 15: the money by tending to take control of the entire
Speaker 15: money supply. There's a lot of fears here too, and
Speaker 15: it's sort of worth mentioning this. I've been seeing this
Speaker 15: passed around a lot. Is that there is another sort
Speaker 15: of recent example of a technically elected president assuming effectively
Speaker 15: dicatorial powers, and it's Air Towan, and Air Towan eventually
Speaker 15: took control of the central bank. And to get a
Speaker 15: sense of how that's going, the inflation rate in Turkey
Speaker 15: right now is currently thirty percent and everyone is celebrating
Speaker 15: because it's below thirty one percent, and this is the
Speaker 15: lowest the inflation rate has been in ages. It was
Speaker 15: like seventy percent when they first started this, and it
Speaker 15: was fifty percent last year, and they've gotten it down
Speaker 15: to a mere thirty percent inflation rate.
Speaker 9: Yeah, thinks Karen.
Speaker 15: Well, so this is the kind of thing that's on
Speaker 15: these people's minds because they all understand this. And this
Speaker 15: is not the Turkish Central Bank k central bank is
Speaker 15: obviously important in the world economy. This is the United
Speaker 15: States Central Bank. This is a question of the fundamental
Speaker 15: legitimacy of the dollar as the world reserve currency and
Speaker 15: of the premier currency in the world economy. So we
Speaker 15: will see what happens as this continues to unfold. But
Speaker 15: this is probably the premier economic fight of the entire
Speaker 15: Tip administration, and we will we will continue to update
Speaker 15: it as we learn more about how this is going
Speaker 15: to go.
Speaker 9: So I want to talk about something that came to
Speaker 9: my attention of the break here.
Speaker 2: I feel like we should utilize a banking segue in
Speaker 2: my opinion.
Speaker 9: Okay, fine, yeah, fine, fine, fine, talking of banks and
Speaker 9: of centralizing bank power under the state.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 9: Let's talk about an organization that once began as a
Speaker 9: member of the KPD. We're going to talk about Germany,
Speaker 9: and specifically I want to talk about an organization called
Speaker 9: Roster Hilfer red Aid. Don't really speak German, so if
Speaker 9: I've pronounced that wrong, I hope you'll understand. Why we're
Speaker 9: talking about Rotter Hilfer is that we a few months
Speaker 9: ago reported on the State Department adding various European organizations
Speaker 9: to its FTO list Foreign Terrorist Organization, right, and we
Speaker 9: wondered what this was about and what it would mean.
Speaker 9: We are now starting to see a little bit of
Speaker 9: what it would mean because Rotter Hilfer red Aid has
Speaker 9: had its bank account closed in Germany. It had accounts
Speaker 9: with two different banks, both of which had sort of
Speaker 9: broadly social or ecological missions, right. They were sort of
Speaker 9: progressive banks. I guess if such a thing can exist,
Speaker 9: because these banks are concerned with being sanctioned and effectively
Speaker 9: locked out of the United States swift system for doing
Speaker 9: business with a terrorist organization. Just to give some background
Speaker 9: on the org, I guess there's not a direct lineage
Speaker 9: from the KPD to this, but there was an organization
Speaker 9: of the same name from which it sees itself as descended,
Speaker 9: set up by the German Communist Party, which of course
Speaker 9: was dissolved by the Nazis. Today what they do is
Speaker 9: they do legal aid stuff. They appear to like send
Speaker 9: observers out to protests to kind of document state violence
Speaker 9: that they have done, some made for asylum seekers. It
Speaker 9: has grown massively, like it's doubled and they're doubled again
Speaker 9: in the last day in terms of membership right, and
Speaker 9: there have been attempts to ban it from the domestic
Speaker 9: right in Germany. I've linked to one of their after
Speaker 9: ones in the show notes of people want to read it.
Speaker 9: But it being undbanked is effectively going to be fatal
Speaker 9: for the organization, right like it can't provide legal aid,
Speaker 9: It can't provide legal support if it doesn't have a
Speaker 9: place to store its money. I mean, I guess it
Speaker 9: could just have a big box of cash, but it's
Speaker 9: going to make it very hard for the organization to
Speaker 9: take donations or to allocate that the money that it has.
Speaker 9: So this is something we might see more right certainly
Speaker 9: in Germany because Anti for aust is the organization that
Speaker 9: was sanctioned, but potentially also in other places. Talking of
Speaker 9: having no money, here are advertisements that can liberate you
Speaker 9: of some of yours.
Speaker 2: So for one of our last stories, I would like
Speaker 2: to discuss one of the bigger news stories from the
Speaker 2: end of the year, but something we did not have
Speaker 2: time to discuss in our last ed of twenty twenty five,
Speaker 2: and this is the Turtle Island Liberation Front. An episode
Speaker 2: next week will be going into even more detail, but
Speaker 2: I will go over some of the broad strokes of
Speaker 2: the Turtle Island Liberation Front alleged bombing plot. On December twelfth,
Speaker 2: the FBI arrested four people in southern California, who the
Speaker 2: government claims are members of a left wing activist group
Speaker 2: called the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The criminal complaint, signed
Speaker 2: on December thirteenth by an FBI agent working at the
Speaker 2: Joint Terrorism Task Force in La alleges that these four
Speaker 2: individuals conspired an a bombing plot planned for New Year's
Speaker 2: Eve twenty twenty five. According to the complaint, on November
Speaker 2: twenty sixth, one of the alleged TILF members I'm gonna
Speaker 2: say TILF instead of the full name from now on,
Speaker 2: named Audrey Irene Carrol, gave an eight payge handwritten document
Speaker 2: titled Operation Midnight Sun outlining the plan for the bombing
Speaker 2: to a confidential human source who works for the FBI
Speaker 2: as an informant. The criminal complaint says this of the
Speaker 2: confidential human source quote. The confidential human source is cooperating
Speaker 2: with law enforcement and is a validated and vetted source.
Speaker 2: The confidential human source has been a reliable source information
Speaker 2: since in or around August twenty twenty one. The confidential
Speaker 2: human sources cooperating for financial compensation. The confidential human source
Speaker 2: does not have any criminal history. The confidential human source
Speaker 2: provided past reliable reporting on other cases and has provided
Speaker 2: reliable reporting in this case.
Speaker 8: En quote.
Speaker 2: The plan was for teams of four on the ground
Speaker 2: participants to plant backpacks containing complex pipe bombs quote unquote
Speaker 2: or IEDs outside of buildings at five locations, targeting two
Speaker 2: US companies, and then simultaneously detonate the bombs at midnight
Speaker 2: on New Year's Eve twenty twenty five. There would be
Speaker 2: an off the ground member assisting the team remotely by
Speaker 2: listening to police scanners or be stationed in a vehicle
Speaker 2: in case a quote emergency getaway is needed on quote
Speaker 2: that's quoting from the plan, and one member of each
Speaker 2: on the ground team would create graffiti of a red
Speaker 2: triangle and one message of the team's choosing on the
Speaker 2: sidewalk closest to the building while the other three are
Speaker 2: placing the devices. This indictment is a really interesting look
Speaker 2: at the modern direct action left because it includes a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of little tidbits like block and d block.
Speaker 2: It includes the alleged co conspirators ground names like asanoch Ak, Nomad,
Speaker 2: and kickware, which are their ground names for this action.
Speaker 2: The criminal complaint states that after making the initial plan,
Speaker 2: Carol and another individual, Zachary Aaron Page, recruited additional co
Speaker 2: conspirators who participated in further planning meetups and helped procure
Speaker 2: bob making materials. On December twelfth, the four defendants traveled
Speaker 2: to a remote location in the Mohabi Desert with the
Speaker 2: alleged intent to build and test explosive devices. FBI observed
Speaker 2: from a surveillance plane and then arrested Carrol Paige, Dante Garfield,
Speaker 2: and Tina Lai before they completed assembling a functional explosive device.
Speaker 2: They have since been charged with conspiracy and possession of
Speaker 2: an unregistered destructive device.
Speaker 10: As I mentioned in my talking points on December twelfth,
Speaker 10: a group of individuals, again members of this anti government group,
Speaker 10: traveled out to the desert to test their explosive devices.
Speaker 2: They had precursor.
Speaker 10: Chemicals there and they were going to they were going
Speaker 10: to create these bombs in the desert. What they are
Speaker 10: starting to do is put their chemicals and whares and
Speaker 10: they'll compos out on the table on the table there.
Speaker 10: This footage that you're watching is from our surveillance plane.
Speaker 10: And then what happened after this is the Los Angeles
Speaker 10: FBI swat team, along with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team
Speaker 10: moved in and arrested all four subjects without incident.
Speaker 2: Now, the Turtle Island Liberation Front appears to be a
Speaker 2: relatively new group, with a social media footprint that only
Speaker 2: was back to July twenty twenty five. The Instagram page
Speaker 2: for their LA chapter reads quote liberation through decolonialization and
Speaker 2: tribal sovereignty unquote. Their most recent post from December twelfth,
Speaker 2: the day of the arrests, is promoting a quote Palestine
Speaker 2: pop up market in Culver City. A post from November
Speaker 2: twenty eighth reads quote if they hurt you, they hurt
Speaker 2: me too. Our destinies are intertwined. Liberation for one must
Speaker 2: mean liberation for all. The empire must fall, and from
Speaker 2: within the belly of the beast, we must be the
Speaker 2: ones to dismantle it. Revolution is the only way stop
Speaker 2: quote peaceful protesting unquote, rise up, fight back. We are
Speaker 2: not outnumbered. They are organized and be ready unquote.
Speaker 15: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The FBI source met with two TILF members in late November,
Speaker 2: Carol and Page, and during this meeting, Carol gave the
Speaker 2: FBI source the handwritten bombing plot and retained three to
Speaker 2: four additional copies of this plan. And the plan identified
Speaker 2: five locations to target as marks with more blank slots
Speaker 2: on the plan which are captioned add more if enough comrades.
Speaker 2: According to the criminal complaint, these targets were quote property
Speaker 2: and facilities operated by two separate companies that are used
Speaker 2: or engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce unquote.
Speaker 2: These are Amazon distribution type facilities. They've not specifically confirmed
Speaker 2: they are Amazon facilities, but they are these sorts of
Speaker 2: like global shipping facility. One of the things I find
Speaker 2: really interesting about this criminal complaint is the way that
Speaker 2: this FBI agent describes direct action tactics and the Turtle
Speaker 2: Island Liberation Front members like security practices throughout the planning
Speaker 2: of this action. This is quoting from the criminal complaint. Quote.
Speaker 2: The plan described multiple operation security measures the co conspirator
Speaker 2: should take to conceal their identities, such as the use
Speaker 2: of a burner phone that would be disposed of after
Speaker 2: the bombings by quote submerging it in a concrete brick
Speaker 2: after destroying the sim and then disposing of the brick
Speaker 2: in a body of water.
Speaker 8: Quote.
Speaker 2: The target date of the operation, New Year's Eve was
Speaker 2: identified as an opportune time because quote fireworks will be
Speaker 2: going off at the time, so the explosions will be
Speaker 2: less likely to be noticed as immediately as any normal day.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 2: The plan emphasized that quote absolutely no mistakes can be made.
Speaker 7: Quote.
Speaker 2: The plans outline the use of quote unquote black block
Speaker 2: over top a layer of quote unquote casual gray block
Speaker 2: on top of normal street clothes, and noted to keep
Speaker 2: hair very tightly concealed, and to wear gloves for the
Speaker 2: purpose of avoidance of leaving behind DNA. The plan further
Speaker 2: instructed that precipins should leave their personal devices at home
Speaker 2: and make sure that devices were set up to stream
Speaker 2: a long movie during the time of the attacks as
Speaker 2: to craft an alibi or quote unquote plausible deniability by
Speaker 2: having it appear as though the actor was actively using
Speaker 2: their devices. The plan discussed pre operational surveillance of targets,
Speaker 2: identification of D block or D clothing locations, and not
Speaker 2: leaving quote anything other than IED's behind, as they could
Speaker 2: not quote risk any evidence tracing back to us unquote.
Speaker 2: The plan also noted the benefit of placing a small
Speaker 2: tebble in a shoe to alter natural gait to obfiscate
Speaker 2: their identification. Instructions on how to purchase materials to construct
Speaker 2: a pipe bomb suggested using cash only, purchasing only in
Speaker 2: small quantities toward suspicion, and splitting purchases amongst a team
Speaker 2: rather than individually unquote. This is the type of stuff
Speaker 2: I find really interesting, is this emphasis and all of
Speaker 2: these you know, op sec like operational security measures, all
Speaker 2: while working with an FBI informant from the very start
Speaker 2: of the operation and then recruiting another one during the
Speaker 2: planning stages. During a meeting on December seventh, three Turtle
Speaker 2: Island Liberation Front members at least met both with the
Speaker 2: confidential human source as well as an undercover FBI employee
Speaker 2: while trying to recruit more members to join this operation,
Speaker 2: both of whom accompanied the Turtle Island Liberation Front members
Speaker 2: as they traveled to the Mohave Desert on December twelfth
Speaker 2: to allegedly build and test out explosive devices for the
Speaker 2: direct action. There's a lot more information in the indictment,
Speaker 2: as well as some news that has happened since then,
Speaker 2: like an arrest in Louisiana also tied to Turtle Island
Speaker 2: Liberation Front, but we will discuss those in a future episode.
Speaker 2: As of now, three defendants in this case have pled
Speaker 2: not guilty and the fourth is set to be arraigned
Speaker 2: on January twenty.
Speaker 14: Are you planning on doing that next week?
Speaker 8: Here?
Speaker 2: Yes, there will be an episode next week going into
Speaker 2: more details about this group, their politics, as well as
Speaker 2: the FBI undercover and informant and their level of involvement
Speaker 2: in this action, which has spurred a lot of discourse
Speaker 2: online about this being a quoe unquote like sting operation,
Speaker 2: about this being a quote unquote syop.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I guess I'll just say very briefly, other the FBI,
Speaker 9: it's not their first time, and it's not their last
Speaker 9: time probably doing something like this, right, Like, you can
Speaker 9: look at many other cases and see FBI sort of
Speaker 9: CI is doing this kind of thing. So I think
Speaker 9: that context is important here. I just want to finish
Speaker 9: up with a migration update. First of all, DHS fractured
Speaker 9: the skull of a protester and blinded him by firing
Speaker 9: a less and lethal munition into his face at close range.
Speaker 9: It's Santa Anna this week. I've linked to an article
Speaker 9: for people who like to read more of that. Secondly,
Speaker 9: Judge Boseberg, who is the judge over seeing the case
Speaker 9: about the Alien Enemy Act, ordered the government to provide
Speaker 9: relief to Venezuelan and sent to SECOT Marco Rubio provided
Speaker 9: a statement responding that doing so would quote materially damage
Speaker 9: US foreign policy interests. Essentially, he's saying the state can't
Speaker 9: comply with the order to provide redress for wrongdoing by
Speaker 9: returning them, and it can't even give them due process
Speaker 9: right because it has since kidnapped the president of Venezuela.
Speaker 9: In related news, senators including Schmidt and Cruz have called
Speaker 9: for Boseberg's impeachment. Cruz makes these allegations. They're pretty minor,
Speaker 9: and crucially and very unusually. Both of them have been
Speaker 9: repudiated by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts,
Speaker 9: which doesn't normally do this kind of thing, right, But
Speaker 9: in both cases they've written letters kind of clarifying why
Speaker 9: Boseberg's conduct is totally normal. Both the Cruz claims related
Speaker 9: to decisions Boseburg made with which he disagrees. One pertains
Speaker 9: to a non disclosure order that he gave so that
Speaker 9: Republican senators would not be notified of subpoenas of their
Speaker 9: phone records in the fake elector investigation that was called
Speaker 9: the Arctic Frost investigation at the time that looked at
Speaker 9: attempts to overturn the twenty twenty United States election. They're
Speaker 9: also trying to impeach Judge Boardman for a separate decision
Speaker 9: in which they feel her sentence for a person who
Speaker 9: played guilty to attending to murder Justice Covenar was too light.
Speaker 9: And then just today, which is Wednesday of this week
Speaker 9: as we're recording, the State Department announced on x dot com,
Speaker 9: the Everything website, that it is pausing visa processing for
Speaker 9: seventy five countries. Quote whose migrants take welfare from the
Speaker 9: American people at unacceptable rates. The freeze will remain active
Speaker 9: until the US can ensure that new immigrants will not
Speaker 9: extract wealth from the American people. It's not clear what
Speaker 9: they are talking about. They talking about immigrant non immigrant
Speaker 9: visas both of the above. Are they talking about people
Speaker 9: who have violated the public charge rule or they just
Speaker 9: feel that any access of any benefit of state support
Speaker 9: is quote unquote extracting wealth from the American people. If
Speaker 9: you do not know what the public charge rule is,
Speaker 9: luckily to you, I made a podcast about it in
Speaker 9: November of twenty twenty four, so you can scroll all
Speaker 9: the way back more than a year and find that.
Speaker 9: I'll try and find it for you and include a
Speaker 9: link in the show notes.
Speaker 8: I think what's.
Speaker 9: Crucial here is that this will reduce dramatically the rate
Speaker 9: of which migrants access government services right, which are often
Speaker 9: very beneficial, especially when it comes to things like child nutrition,
Speaker 9: child welfare services right. Finally, the State Department also posted
Speaker 9: on x dot com, the Everything website, that it has
Speaker 9: revoked one hundred thousand visas, including eight thousand student visas,
Speaker 9: in the last year. We have no way of verifying
Speaker 9: that if you would like to email us, you could
Speaker 9: do so. Just email cool Zone Tips at proton dot me.
Speaker 9: If you want it to be encrypted, you should use
Speaker 9: a proton mail address as well.
Speaker 2: We reported the news.
Speaker 3: We reported the news.
Speaker 1: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 1: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 14: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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