It Could Happen Here Weekly 214

Summary

Behind the Bastards: It Could Happen Here Weekly 214

Date: January 10, 2026
Hosts: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, James Stout, Mia Wong, Sophie Lichterman
Topic: Weekly roundup of U.S. and global politics, listener Q&A, tech industry trends (CES), and breaking news on Venezuela and domestic U.S. events (notably ICE violence).

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Episode Overview

This wide-ranging episode covers multiple main areas:

• A listener Q&A with the full team, sharing personal stories and insights on recent projects.
• Predictions and analysis about U.S. politics (midterm elections, the economy, the state of the Democratic and Republican parties).
• Tech industry trends with a report from CES 2026, focusing on the rise (and possible stall) of AI and wearable gadgets.
• In-depth discussion of the U.S. military kidnapping of Venezuelan President Maduro, the geopolitical and ethical fallout, and public protest responses.
• Breaking domestic news, notably an ICE agent’s killing of a protester in Minneapolis and its resonance with previous police violence.

The tone oscillates between irreverent, bleakly humorous, and deeply earnest as the team discusses the chaos of the last year and the dark shape of things to come.

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1. Listener Q&A – Humor, Humanity, and Political Reflections

[01:46–24:59]

Team Banter & Personal Stories

• The team trades deeply personal and often darkly comic stories from their youth.
  • James Stout talks about past gorings by bulls, admitting, “First of all, you shouldn't be unkind to animals. So I did deserve it.” ([04:58])
  • Sophie Lichterman recalls public humiliation from ripping her pants at an eighth-grade picnic: “That was my fun, non-incriminating story from youth.” ([06:08])
  • Robert Evans recounts being stripped by the Ganges while whitewater rafting in India: “As soon as I get in the water, [my pants are] gone, torn off by the Ganges. And then I am naked from the waist down.” ([07:55])

Recent Work & Pride

• Robert Evans confirms the sequel to After the Revolution is finished and near release ([09:24]).
• Team members reflect on episodes they’re most proud of:
  • Garrison Davis cites his “dog whistle politics episode” on understanding modern propaganda as continuing to resonate amid fascistic government social media posts ([19:52]).
  • Mia Wong is proud of her episode predicting the “turn away from social media” and the team’s work helping stop anti-trans Medicaid cuts through news coverage ([22:34], [23:28]).
  • James Stout values “the border stuff” and seeing people “change the things they do every day” in response to reporting ([24:04]).
  • Sophie Lichterman highlights commissioning the Anti Vax America series ([24:59]).

Scars of Political Cynicism

• The panel discusses what “Jokerified” them in the past year, citing disillusioning moments like the DNC, conspiracy rabbit holes, and the left increasingly embracing “lie fights” and flattening tactics with the right:
  • “The uniformity of the embrace of counterfactuals… I don't feel like fact-checking works.” (Robert Evans, [26:58])
  • “Trying to get people fired... and then the left embracing conspiratorial thinking… this flattening of tactics across the left and right has been useful for me.” (Garrison Davis, [29:15])
  • Deep frustration at how any mass shooting is instantly followed by transphobic “transvestigations.” ([30:32])
  • General despair at the left’s ignorance about guns and gun policy debates ([31:41–32:12]).

Dual Power & Uprisings

• The team discusses historical and current “dual power” (parallel/alternative institutions to the state):
  • Mia Wong: “The people who've objectively done the best job of it is the Zapatistas… They've held out against, you know, the wrath of the Mexican state.” ([32:35])
  • Robert Evans and James Stout point to Rojava, the PKK, and the YPG/J as broader models ([33:08]).
  • U.S. examples include NYC DSA, immigration defense networks, and local mutual aid safety strategies ([34:06], [34:24]).

Notable Quote

“All of the news is bad, but not all of the work is useless. Sometimes it matters.”
— James Stout ([24:22])

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2. Predictions & Analysis – Midterms, Economy, and the Copycat Era

[40:24–74:20]

Review of Last Year’s Predictions

• The team reflects on their 2025 predictions, with surprising accuracy on the Trump-Musk breakup and ongoing disappointment as authoritarian regimes (e.g., Myanmar) cling to power ([41:05]).

The Era of “Lone Wolf” Political Violence

• Dramatic increase in high-profile, copycat killings and attacks, inspired by events like the Shinzo Abe assassination and the Trump shooting:
  • “Sloppy Luigi copycat” attacks became “a super, super dominant part of 2025,” continuing the escalating “runaway feedback loop” of violence ([47:54–49:54]).
  • Activists respond via decentralized, rapid mobilizations—especially against ICE—which force federal agencies to adapt tactics even as large protests decline ([50:39–52:10]).

2026 Predictions – Tech Bubble, Economic Turmoil, Elections

• Mia Wong predicts: “Someone is going to invent a cryptocurrency that can only be mined by large language models… They’re going to try it. It's going to suck” ([53:39]).
• Unease about an “AI/tech bubble” collapse, rising layoffs, economic crumbling insulated from the stock market due to AI irrational exuberance ([54:25–57:36]).
• Sophie Lichterman predicts rise of “influencer shopping” and AI-powered targeting of consumers ([58:14]).
• Garrison Davis notes recession nostalgia cycle aligning with actual economic hardship ([59:00]).
• Backlash among younger generations against AI in both language and education ([59:40–61:21]).

Midterms Outlook

• Garrison Davis: Predicts Democrats will “do okay”—perhaps take one chamber, but not a landslide ([63:13]).
• Mia Wong: Strongly disagrees: “D plus 14. This is going to be a massacre!” (i.e., massive blue wave; [64:33]).
• Structural obstacles for Democrats discussed (redistricting, Senate/House dynamics) ([67:13–67:25]).
• The importance of local strategies and the DNC’s fecklessness ([68:10]).

War and the Trump Cabinet

• Predictions of further U.S. military adventurism, especially in Venezuela, Mexico, and the Sahel ([71:34–73:33]).
• Trump’s cabinet: Less turnover than expected, with “loyalty, not competence” the defining trait ([70:58–71:12]).

Notable Quotes

"We are living through the era of copycats—runaway feedback loops of violence because that's the only way to get attention."
— Robert Evans ([49:54])

"It's not a skill or competency that got these people their jobs—it's loyalty."
— Garrison Davis ([71:04])

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3. Tech Industry & CES 2026 – AI Plateau, Data Risks, and Dispiriting Futurism

[122:04–168:53]

Smart Glasses and Wearables

• Garrison visits CES: Overwhelming focus on AI-powered smart glasses and wearable tech, but little practical advancement—gadgets are “virtually identical,” just with sleeker form factors ([123:25–126:37]).
• Mixed applications (e.g., swim and ski goggles with displays) but the sense is of innovation stalling—“less sexy,” “not excited to get a phone anymore” ([125:16–126:45]).

AI, Data, and Security

• Robert Evans questions Intuit’s CMO at a panel about exposing sensitive financial info to AI prompt injection attacks: “Every digital security expert I've talked to says it's a matter of when, not if that there is financial data revealed by these attacks.” ([142:32–143:58]).
• The CMO is stumped, unable to detail how liability or security is handled for such data leaks ([143:59–144:37]).

Marketing Meltdown

• Panels focus on AI as a friend (“not your enemy – it's here to help!”), but repeatedly cite low trust in AI among users.
• New “model hacking” strategies: flooding the internet with positive or targeted mentions so chatbots will recommend your brand. “What is the SEO of getting chatgpt?” ([134:29]).

Creative Bankruptcy & AI Content

• Example of AI “supercharging” creativity: A whiskey company lets you buy bottles printed with AI-generated art in a specific illustrator’s style—a trivial application ([157:31]).
• At Showstoppers, Garrison is pitched an app that will “write three books in 24 hours”—producing unreadable, empty, generic novels ([158:05–165:32]).
• “If you ever have to read through a lot of AI writing… it was so boring I forgot to take pictures.” ([160:55])

Notable Quote

“We have a new audience: we are speaking to machines. We're building content for engines. We are building websites to be scraped so that an LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand.”
— Jay Patasol, Forrester (quoted by Robert Evans, [153:11])

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4. U.S. Coup in Venezuela – “Mask Off” Empire

[74:36–120:07]

The Operation

• U.S. special forces carried out a night assault in Caracas, kidnapping President Maduro and his wife, killing a sizable portion of their security (including 32 Cubans), and bringing them to New York to be arraigned on drug and weapons charges ([76:01]).
• The legal pretext: U.S. law enforcement agents needed protection to carry out an arrest. This is interpreted by the panel as an outright act of war and raw assertion of global hegemony ([77:08–78:08]).

Justifications and Precedent

• Comparisons to past regime overthrows (Noriega, Aristide), but this time “the mask is off.” No AUMF fig leaf, no Congressional consultation.
• “The Americas are our property, and we're perfectly justified in intervening to take resources that we want.” (Stephen Miller doctrine, summarized by Evans, [79:53])
• Media/diplomatic confusion as the Trump admin vacillates between claims of “running Venezuela” directly and working with a new “interim” government ([86:07]).

Oil, Empire, and Sanctions

• Real motivation is control of Venezuelan oil. Trump openly announces he will “control the profits.”
  “At other times in U.S. history, saying 'no war for oil' was provocative; now they just say, 'yes, war for oil.'” (Mia Wong, [181:11])

Repercussions

• Grave implications for international law, sovereignty, and global nuclear arms races:
  • “This is going to embolden the worst instincts of both the people running the U.S. and leaders around the world… It's comprehensively bad for everyone.” (Evans, [84:48])
• Precedent of extrajudicial U.S. actions against hostile heads of state.

Reactions

• Public opinion is sharply negative—more so than during the Bush invasions—72% of Americans worry the “U.S. will get too involved in Venezuela” ([113:02]).
• Concerns about Venezuelan nationals in the U.S. being forced to return and the impact of blockades, oil seizures, and further strikes ([115:31], [117:23], [199:12]).

Notable Quotes

“Maduro's personal qualities are irrelevant… What we're doing is illegal and bad. Sweet baby Jiminy Christmas.”
— Robert Evans ([120:24])

“Saying that it is illegal and wrong to kidnap Maduro does not mean we think Maduro is great. Just in the same way that saying the Iraq war is wrong doesn’t mean we love Saddam Hussein. People who tell you otherwise, you grow up.”
— James Stout ([120:07])

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5. Breaking News: Domestic ICE Violence Echoes State Power

[169:30–178:44]

ICE Killing in Minneapolis

• Hours before recording, ICE agents shot and killed a woman in her car during a routine anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis—a block from where George Floyd was murdered ([170:02–170:48]).
• Video evidence makes clear the agent was not threatened, and no verbal warning was issued.
• The government labeled it “self-defense” and “terrorism” by the victim, consistent with a pattern of lies in past ICE shootings ([173:49–175:04]).
• Minneapolis mayor demands ICE “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” ([177:04]).

Protests and Continuity

• Immediate protests and broader anger liken ICE actions to police violence against Black Americans.
• The shooting is interpreted as the state using violence to enforce political priorities, “a demonstration of the continuity of the violence of the American state as can possibly be produced.” (Mia Wong, [176:45])

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6. International Updates: Iran, Syria, Gaza, and Migration

[200:14–210:53]

• Flare-up between Kurdish and Turkish-backed forces in Aleppo; Kurdish groups in Iran united amid broader unrest.
• Israel blocks operations by global NGOs in Gaza.
• U.S. border and immigration news—San Diego sues for Trump policies damaging border property; concerns about forced returns of Venezuelan migrants amid new regime change.
• Supreme Court decision on tariffs pending.

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Notable Memorable Moments / Quotes

• “You ever just lose your pants in the Ganges in front of a sacred city?”—Robert Evans ([08:29])
• “The only thing cropping [the economy] up in numbers is fucking Nvidia. Well, Nvidia less so now, but just irrational exuberance over AI in general.” —Robert Evans ([46:13])
• “We make them money and they in return say, keep doing what you’re doing, kid. Kiddos. Buckaroos.” —Robert Evans, on not being censored by iHeart ([19:14])
• “ICE was forced to change their tactics by the fact that giant mobilizations by ICE were going badly for them.” —Mia Wong ([50:39])
• “We are building content for engines. We are building websites to be scraped so that a LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand.” —Jay Patasol (quoted at [153:11])
• “No one’s going to die in 2026.” (re: skipping the traditional “death segment” at end of predictions; [74:17])
• “Saying the Iraq war is wrong doesn’t mean we love Saddam Hussein.”—James Stout ([120:07])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Q&A and Youth Stories: [01:46–14:30]
• Books and Media Discussion: [12:46–17:27]
• Favorite Projects: [19:41–24:59]
• Jokerification & Political Despair: [25:30–33:00]
• Dual Power and Activism: [32:17–36:05]
• Predictions Review & Copycat Terrorism: [40:24–52:10]
• 2026 Predictions (Economy, AI, Elections): [52:28–74:20]
• CES & Tech Industry Analysis: [122:04–168:53]
• Venezuela Coup Deep Dive: [74:36–120:24]
• ICE Domestic Violence: [169:30–178:44]
• International News Roundup: [200:14–210:53]

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Closing Thoughts

This episode sharply encapsulates It Could Happen Here’s blend of gallows humor and urgent, clear-eyed critique of authoritarian trends. Its panoramic scope—shuffling from bull gorings and tech foibles to global coups and street shootings—is both grimly entertaining and alarmingly timely. The hosts lay bare the rising threat of unchecked power abroad and violence at home, with a thread of hope in grassroots resistance and critical, unbought journalism.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

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[Garrison Davis]

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[James Stout]

Dear Winter, Toyota can't get enough of you.

[Robert Evans]

Cause Toyota's got 25 vehicles with available.

[James Stout]

All wheel drive and four wheel drive. And that's more than any other auto brand. From the versatile RAV4 to the svelte crown, the sleek Camry all wheel drive, the Corolla hybrid all wheel drive, the rugged Tacoma, the tenacious tundra, and the spacious grand Highlander with all wheel drive to keep you and yours safe. Hey, you bring the action, we'll bring the traction. Toyota, let's go places. Based on manufacturers websites as of October 2025.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. This is poetry. You don't edit poetry. Well, you do edit poetry.

[James Stout]

One of the things. Was poetry.

[Robert Evans]

Bad at poetry?

[Sophie Lichterman]

Please stop talking.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Welcome to it could happen here 2025 Q&A edition. We have the whole team here. Mia Garrison, James Robert Evans. I'm your producer, Sophie Lichterman and we're gonna answer some of your questions. How's everybody feeling?

[Garrison Davis]

Great.

[James Stout]

Trepidatious.

[Mia Wong]

Amazing.

[Robert Evans]

Bad. I just got back from vacation, so anything's gonna be bad. That's not me continuing to not look at my phone or computer.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, you should stop looking at the phone.

[Robert Evans]

Have you guys aware what this Trump dude's doing? Jesus Christ.

[Sophie Lichterman]

What a guy.

[Garrison Davis]

Very, very. Yikes. I went to the WJ holiday party this weekend and the, the amount of like 2017 Trump jokes I had to hear.

[James Stout]

Oh, no, that's a crime against humanity.

[Garrison Davis]

God, I love. I love that party. I love that party.

[James Stout]

I'm going to a holiday party tonight with some friends who do insurance for people who live in the US and go to Mexico. So I'm sure I will hear lots of fun and exciting anecdotes.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I am throwing a holiday party and planning it with a four year old, which is exciting. It's gonna be good.

[Sophie Lichterman]

One of my favorite experiences as us having our job is at almost every party I go to, somebody's like, so, how's the news?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

When people just ask you to summarize the fucking news. Yeah. Not good is the answer.

[Mia Wong]

Listen to executive disorder.

[Garrison Davis]

No. I had to explain 764 to a screenwriter yesterday and they were not happy.

[Robert Evans]

Now, anyone who goes to a party that I am at knows that there's a gun on the table. If anyone asks me how the news is, that's.

[Mia Wong]

That's just.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It's always phrased that way.

[Robert Evans]

Stay the fuck out.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. What's going on over there in Burma?

[Garrison Davis]

Let's answer some questions. All right, let's do it.

[Sophie Lichterman]

All right, so we posted on Blue sky, we posted on Instagram, and we have some of your questions. Let's start out with a fun one. Can we have a fun, non incriminating story from your youth? Any and all of you?

[Robert Evans]

No fun, non incriminating story about you.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, for Robert, this is. And James and maybe Mia, the statute of limitations for. For all of you should be fine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Garrison, I cannot answer this at all. I have a lot of interesting stories, but I'm trying to think of something from my youth that I could actually share.

[James Stout]

I can do one that's, I think, non incriminating. I'm sad about having been part of it, but that's okay. I was gored by a bull when I was younger.

[Robert Evans]

That's a Jane's story. I feel like if we put money on it, like, two of us would have bet a bull was involved.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I've actually been present at several gorings, various species. I probably have most of the gorings that it's available for a human being to witness because I've seen like a water buffalo goring.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, nice. That's gotta be like the top goring.

[James Stout]

Yeah. That was a really unpleasant day for everyone involved. Guy lost the use of his legs for a period. Actually recovered it later, which is nice.

[Robert Evans]

So you can laugh about it. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Said funny.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Now we can have a laugh about it. Yeah. Well, it's a funny story because it's fun. First of all, you shouldn't be unkind to animals. So I did deserve it.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

I don't think you should taunt animals for human pleasure. I don't think you should make them suffer. And if you do, it's kind of your fault. So in that sense, it's funny.

[Robert Evans]

I. I don't know that I've ever heard of a goring where I wasn't like, well, the animal was in the right, clearly, 100%.

[James Stout]

I'm on the bull team with this. The funny part was that my friend who was staying with me had previously not driven a manual vehicle, and I had broken probably the bulk of my ribs.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, a lot of rib breaking. And we drove home like that, learning to use a clutch on the way. And that was one of the most painful experiences, I think, that's available to a human being.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Is it bad that the story that popped into my head was when I ripped my pants in front of the entire 8th grade class at our school picnic because I was wearing way too skinny of jeans, playing basketball and my pants ripped and I was wearing TMI red undies and pants ripped. So, like, my entire butt.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that's got to leave some scars.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, that for me, as, as a person, that I feel like you just felt. Yeah. But that was my fun, non incriminating story from youth was the time I heard.

[Robert Evans]

That's a very millennial trauma from the.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Entire 8th grade class at our, like, graduation picnic.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I love that you were like, skinny jeans, Icarus. Like, that's something that generation tight. Why? Why? It was the way things were back then, Sophie.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I know, I know. Robert, you have to have a fun one.

[Robert Evans]

I do, I do. What's the statute of limitations on murder?

[James Stout]

Not very long. Couple weeks.

[Sophie Lichterman]

You're fine, buddy. You're fine.

[Robert Evans]

No, I'll tell a splitting story, too. I got a really good one, Sophie.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Oh, good.

[Robert Evans]

So I'm in. I'm in rural northern India in this town called Rishikesh, which is where, like, it's where, like, the Beatles had their ashram. It's like a holy city. There's a lot of yoga there. You're up in, like, the Himalayan foothills. It's beautiful. The Ganges is actually, like, clean enough to swim in up there, but it's also crazy whitewater rapids. And we're going, like, whitewater rafting one day, and I grab. I buy a pair of, like, pants that are like. It's like a long set of athletic tights or whatever like that to have on the boat. Cause, like, okay, that'll make sense. They zip so I can keep some cash or whatever in them. And we're going down the Ganges. We're doing this whitewater raft, and we hit a calm spot, and the guide's like, okay, everybody who wants to get in the water, hop out. And I hop out. And immediately two things become clear. Number one, the quality of textiles that you purchase in a market in India, not necessarily up to the standards of a lot of other countries. Number two, the Ganges mighty river. So my pants immediately are gone, like, just instantly as soon as I get in the water, torn off by the Ganges. And then I am. So I am realizing this, that now I am naked from the waist down. We are surrounded on both sides by a very holy city, and we are heading towards the rocks. So I have to get back in the boat in fairly short order. This presents a problem because, again, as we're getting, like, buffeted around, I have to get, like, help pulled up into the boat and wind up showing absolutely everything moving the entire side of this sacred city. So now I'm in the boat, naked from the waist down. But I come up with a plan. I do solve it. I take my shirt off, and I put my legs through the armholes, and I get to, like, tie the neck hole, and I'm just tying my pants. My shirt is pants.

[James Stout]

What a sight.

[Robert Evans]

We went to lunch that way.

[James Stout]

There's still a restaurant there where they won't let. Robert, still.

[Robert Evans]

James, there's more than one restaurant in India I can't go back to. Oh, yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

There's a hotel in Bangkok that neither of us can go back to.

[Robert Evans]

But no, they handle you puking in the parking lot like a trooper.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I puke directly into my Nalgene. Like a considerable.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Like a hero.

[James Stout]

Like.

[Robert Evans]

Like a hero, James.

[James Stout]

And then sent a picture to Sophie.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

That was before I worked here. I sent a picture to Sophie of a Nalgene full of puke, and I.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Was like, let's hire that guy.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I feel like it was 30 seconds into our relationship that I told Sofia's story about me puking, so it's fine.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It was, like, 15 seconds.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, it might have been 15.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Anyways, Robert, can we get an update to the sequel of after the Revolution?

[Robert Evans]

It's done. I'm editing it. I even got edits back from my editor. I'm editing it. It should have been done so much faster. I could, like, bring up the fact that my dad died last year, but that's really just me trying to make you feel sorry for me and the fact that I am well past the time at which I expected to have this book done. But it is done and I'm finishing it and you will get to read it soon. I'm sorry.

[Garrison Davis]

Good for you. Good for you, Robert.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Wow. Incredible. Do you plan to cover recent political developments in Canada? I feel like that's a Gare question.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, the answer is always yes.

[Robert Evans]

The answer is yes to all of. Like, yes, we will be covering Canada.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, especially Alberta. I've been wanting to do stuff on. On Alberta and the Conservative Party there and a few of the key figures for a while. I've, you know, we've all been busy. But yes, I should eventually do a dedicated thing again. Like. And I do occasionally. Right. Usually. Usually once or twice a year I try to get some Canada related things.

[Robert Evans]

Talked about Canada.

[James Stout]

Gary and I feel like. Did something.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. I mean like the Canadian election happened this year. Right. Supreme Leader Carney is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Is still. Still in power and will be for a while. But yeah, specifically the Alberta Conservative Party is rife with potential stories.

[Sophie Lichterman]

My recent political development in Canada that I would like to talk about is. What's his name? Dating Katy Perry.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, God.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Because it makes me upset.

[James Stout]

Wait, who?

[Garrison Davis]

That's not our problem anymore.

[James Stout]

That's one famous Canadian person, is it?

[Sophie Lichterman]

It's Justin. It's just.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's the famous Jesus Christ.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Not Bieber. Trudeau.

[Garrison Davis]

Trudeau.

[James Stout]

Okay, okay. Still bad. Still weird.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Trudeau and Katy Perry are dating.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

A match made in heaven.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Oh, they're Instagram official and the photos are upsetting.

[Robert Evans]

I do feel like this is the potential. We have a potential for like the one ring of couples Halloween costumes situation to happen here. And I'm excited for that.

[Garrison Davis]

But no, I'm living pretty close to Canada now, so I would like to travel up and do more Canadian stuff in the next year.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you love Canada, Garrison. Great place.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I do, yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

As a general rule, people, if you're ever asking, hey, this major thing is happening in another country, are you guys going to cover it? The answer is probably yes. But there are. How many people are on this call? Five people. And there are, I believe, 10 countries in the world at least.

[James Stout]

So many are saying more.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, every once in a while there's a civil war and one of those splits into two. So I think there's actually 11 countries right now.

[Robert Evans]

Somewhere between five and 11 countries.

[James Stout]

Yeah, well, ironically, when there is a civil war, there's a decent chance that I'll be traveling there in the next 12 months.

[Robert Evans]

We have a pretty broad remit here and I do think we cover a lot of ground, but again, you know, there's only so many people on the team and we have so many days in the week. So the answer is generally if we think we can and have more to tell you than like, here's an article I read. We'll try to do it, but, you know, world big, us small.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

And there are other people who do excellent work on lots of things. So, like, you know, we don't have to cover everything.

[Garrison Davis]

God, I missed the trucker convoy. That was fun.

[Robert Evans]

That was a hoot.

[James Stout]

Oh, I forgot about that. What about Roma Diadloo? Is she still kicking around?

[Garrison Davis]

The queen of Canada?

[James Stout]

Yeah, Queen of Canada.

[Robert Evans]

She got arrested recently. I don't know if she's out on bail or whatever they call it in poutine bail or whatever in Canada.

[James Stout]

Well, they can't arrest her, Robert, because she's the queen.

[Robert Evans]

Anyways, notes about that. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

What's a fiction book that y' all have been reading lately? Ooh, my answer is I work too much. I haven't read any good fiction book lately.

[Garrison Davis]

I've been reading a sci fi book called Children of Time.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, good.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great guy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[James Stout]

I just read Winter in Madrid because even when I'm reading fiction books, it still has to be about the Spanish Civil war.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, so funny.

[Robert Evans]

That makes sense for you, James.

[James Stout]

Load bearing element of my personality.

[Robert Evans]

I'm restarting Sirens of Titan for the first time since I was a little kid, which is Kurt Vonnegut's sci fi novel. And like everything Kurt Vonnegut wrote, one of the best to ever do it. And then I was on vacation, so I was just rereading some Warhammer books to not think about the news when I needed to look at a device. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I'm gonna try to take a little time off around the holidays. So if people have good fiction books to recommend me, Message me on blue sky.

[Mia Wong]

I've been listening to. Oh, God. Like the entire Kate Daniel series, which is a very fun sort of urban fantasy series where they have a magic apocalypse where sometimes there's these magic waves and magic works and technology stops working, but then they just flip randomly and so technology works in magic, does it?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That's basically the plot line to shadow on. Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's. It's fun. I got absolutely flashbang jump scared by one of the characters and one of the spin offs doing a full analysis of the whole translation debacle of the old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Now Is the time of Monsters, which I was not expecting the author of this fantasy book to know about. So it's a fun time.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

There's were lions, there's were hyenas. It's. It's good.

[Robert Evans]

We.

[Mia Wong]

We like to see it.

[James Stout]

Oh, cool.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back and continue answering some questions. We're back. So on that note, there's a broader question, and it's favorite media from 2025 can be books, shows, movies, games, et cetera.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, andor's gonna be up there for me.

[Garrison Davis]

Andor season two is definitely gonna be.

[Robert Evans]

It's gonna be hard to beat.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I really enjoyed that new show, the Pit, the medical show.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. I've heard good things.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. You would like that.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I liked it. It made me dizzy, but I liked it. It was interesting. I mean, we'll see how it does in season two. But the first season I was like, huh?

[Robert Evans]

I finally started watching that Smiling Friends show and that's fun. Oh, cool.

[Garrison Davis]

For. For TV shows for me, besides like Andorches, which is good. I. I think Rehearsal season two and the. The Paramount Nazi.

[Robert Evans]

Ever heard of season two?

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Is more and more after every single day.

[Robert Evans]

Nominal.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

As well as Tim Robinson's new show, Chair Company, which I think gets to the American conspiracy mindset better than almost anything I've seen. No parts of that are like rival. They can film.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I still think Eddington is pretty good. It doesn't have as much like, depth or humanity as like one battle after another, which I quite enjoyed.

[Robert Evans]

I liked that a lot too. I watched the first two episodes of Chair Company and then was like, I need to wait until they are all out so I can derange myself and like, stay up until dawn. Watch.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, it's so good.

[Robert Evans]

That's the way I need to encounter this. But I'm excited for that.

[Garrison Davis]

I finished Chair Company now and it consistently keeps hitting.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think Tim Robinson is capable of not pleasing me at this point.

[Garrison Davis]

That's good. That's a. It's a healthy relationship.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I liked on. On Netflix Adolescence that. That miniseries. That was pretty good. The acting was incredible. There's just so many things this year that were pretty decent.

[Robert Evans]

TV's been good.

[Sophie Lichterman]

TV's been good.

[Robert Evans]

Tv's been good.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I haven't watched shit. I just watch. I watched Andor and nothing else. So. Hades 2, great game. Very fun. Yeah. Death to Kronos, et cetera, et cetera. Also, I want to talk about One of the Boys, which is a book from like the beginning of this year we talked about in the show that's a really, really interesting, basically sort of like a coming of age story about a trans girl who's trying to go. Who goes back to her football team. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff there about the relationship between trans femininity and masculinity and you know, the sort of like politics of sports. And it's also just really fun. Has the best written group chats I've ever seen in any piece of media. So Shitrocks. Yeah, it's great. One of the Boys, Victoria Zeller. It's fun.

[Robert Evans]

I also watched Paradise. The ostensible focus on the show is that a Secret Service agent goes to live with a president who is retired after the detail that they stay with. And it becomes clear over the course of episode one, this isn't really a spoiler that the president is living in an underground bunker with all of the other survivors of a catastrophe that ended the world. And so it's like all of the leadership cadre of the United States living underground in a bunker after the world has ended and then it turns into a murder mystery. It's pretty good. It's fun.

[James Stout]

Nice. I don't watch much tv, but I have been enjoying sticking to the theme, I guess. AK Press have a translation now of a two books that I very much enjoyed reading in other languages. One is called Zaragosa Bound, which is exclusively about the Darutti column. I think it's probably the best book I've read on the Daruti column. And Sons of Night by Antoine Jimenez, who was actually, that was not his, his birth name, but he was an Italian anarchist who fought with the international group of the Daruti column. And it's his diary. And then he later, like in later life, was a groundskeeper at like the Libertarian People's Club in Marseille. And after his passing, the young people at the club found his diaries, published them and then have these like incredible series of annotations. Like two thirds of the book is annotations, but it's really well done. So I like that one a lot.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I think I can answer this next one. Given how we see media companies from Disney to Conde Nast purge or otherwise censor anyone dissenting against Trump. Do you fear iheartradio doing something to Cool Zone? My answer is they've never, they've never censored us in the, in the past, so I don't see it happening in the future. But you never know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, anything can happen. It's media. I'm on my third or fourth industry, depending on how you count it within the digital media space. But like, what I'll tell you right now is that at the moment, and this has been true for almost a decade, we make them money and they in return say, keep doing what you're doing, kid. Kiddos, buckaroos. Yeah, so, yeah, that's about as good as it ever gets in media and journalism. Uh, so, you know, let's keep our fingers crossed.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yep. What was a piece or series Cool Zone Media put together in the past year, 2025 that you were most proud or happy to be part of? What about you, Gare?

[Garrison Davis]

Probably the piece that I'm most proud of in like a reflective sense is the dog whistle politics episode I did. I still think that's really relevant and a useful addition to, to like our cultural dialogue around understanding dog whistles coming out of the Trump administration. And like, even still now I will see, see posts with people decoding false messages in overtly like nationalistic communications from the DHS again. And then this whole focus on like dog whistles versus the actual implementation of their policy, which they're already doing a few times this year. DHS has posted just very, very blatant like fash wave stuff. They posted a Moon man meme earlier this year. Right. And if you, if you told that to like five years ago, we would have like. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what we would have.

[Robert Evans]

I would have had. I would have 5150. You like. Yeah, yeah, I would have put your ass on a 72 hour hold.

[Garrison Davis]

So like there's obvious stuff like that. Like. Yeah, no, they're clearly, clearly doing like intentional nods towards like online fascist memes. And then they are also just posting regular, regular sentiments of like nationalist policy that people are then reading in coded statements to. And I don't think that whole practice is super useful when they're actually implementing this stuff. And I think the sort of like anti ice protests you see in Chicago and like in, in New York on Canal street is a way more useful way to channel frustration at the administration and like frustration around like this nationalist immigration stuff rather than trying to, you know, look for these maybe real, maybe not coded messages on X. The Everything app.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I, I'm proud of the, the Zizzian episodes that I did earlier this year. I think those are my best episodes of the year. You know, I, I'm, I'm particularly This year have done a lot more backend supporting work, but I'm continue to be extremely proud of how Ed Zitron's both show and influence in the industry that he covers has grown, especially as he's been really on the ball ahead of some of the breaking of open AI's irrational exuberance. Been really happy to play a small role in that. It's just really satisfying to stumble onto somebody and be like, oh, I think this person has some good things to say. I'm going to try to get that out to more people and then really feel like, yeah, that was the right call. Turns out this was exactly the voice that needed to be louder in this space. That just feels good. It's the kind of good feeling that you only really get in this business. And it really makes up for all of the bad feelings that you also only get in this business.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Mia?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I think I have two things. One, on sort of just a personal level, I'm really proud of the episode that I did that was sort of about Elon Musk's Nazi salute, but was mostly about the way that all of our reality has been consumed by spectacle and the way that we relate to each other through, you know, through screens and through like, images of media in a very, you know, this was. This was a very guided board sighted spectacle episode. But I'm really proud of how that episode played out and how I think in a lot of ways it kind of, it kind of predicted some of what's been happening in terms of, you know, if you look at the sort of decrease in use to social media over the last sort of year and the turn away from these social relationships that are purely mediated by images that suck and make you miserable all the time. And then the other thing that I'm really proud of is some coverage we did about the Republicans attempt in one of the previous budget fights to impose a rule that would have blocked Medicaid from covering trans healthcare. And we covered it and we helped blow it up and we helped get that killed. And that rocks. I don't know, it's awesome. I'm really proud of it. I'm also really proud of the Trans News Network people. Yeah. Particularly like Medicast again. And Mira Levine, who did a really great job covering that and helping stop it. And it rocks. Love to see it.

[James Stout]

I think for me, still the border stuff really, it made me really happy that last year I went to the jungle and made a podcast and now one of the people I met has a place to live that's really cool. And it really makes me happy. Not just when we can shift the discourse.

[Robert Evans]

That's cool.

[James Stout]

But also when people listen to that and then change the things that they do every day or sometimes. That's always what you want. What I want as a journalist is for people to listen and care. That's why I go to places. And so it's been really cool to see people and just to run into people engaging in, like, mutual aid at the border and then then, like, them slowly realize that I'm the person that they listened to on a podcast a year ago or two years ago, whatever, is kind of funny. But, yeah, I think I'm really proud of that. And I'm proud of all the people in the second series for all the stuff that they've done.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I'm super proud of the Anti Vax America series that I commissioned Steven to do. I think it was a really good, complete project that covered the story in depth more than anyone else. So if you haven't checked that out, check it out. We're going to go to another quick break and then we'll answer a couple more questions. Sound good?

[James Stout]

Cool. Yep.

[Sophie Lichterman]

We're back. All right, this question says, as we become Joker ified. Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

As we all become Joker ified eventually.

[Sophie Lichterman]

What did it for each of you? I mean, let's just say. Let's. Let's just answer in, like, the last, like, year.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Not. Not overall.

[Garrison Davis]

A recent Joker vacation inciting incident.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I can answer that. And that might also be Carrison's.

[James Stout]

It's when we couldn't get into the.

[Sophie Lichterman]

DNC for Kamala Harris's speech.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, no, that was nothing. To me, that hurt.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That hurt me so much. Because the DNC was so depressing. It was so depressing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The DNC was way worse than the RNC post.

[Garrison Davis]

DNC certainly was a joker ifying moment for me.

[Robert Evans]

It hurt Garrison. I had people reaching out to me in Portland who were worried about you after the fucking dnc.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, the DNC was a Joker ifying moment, I guess to piggyback off that, though, in terms of, like, a recent Joker moment, working on the, like, Democrat left wing conspiracy stuff really did a number on me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And just like, seeing the scale of that stuff, especially around, like, the Charlie Kirk assassination. And just that whole moment definitely was like, just drilling into my head.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Those truce tunnels that people went down.

[Garrison Davis]

The whole team could attest to this. I was getting pretty out there.

[James Stout]

Garrison sustained damage.

[Robert Evans]

The uniformity of the embrace of counterfactuals is like, I don't even know what to do about it anymore. I don't feel like fact checking works.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I feel like positing alternate facts feels bad, too, because then you're just, like, saying, well, I guess we're just openly having a lie fight. Let's all have a big lie fight. Let's see whose lies with it.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. No. And when you're trying to be the only one holding on to a life raft of truth as everyone else is, like, drowning and mad at you, it's like, I don't know. I don't know how to handle that.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Whenever I encounter someone who's like, you think Trump got shot in the ear? Yes. Yes, I do. Yes. In fact, I do think he got shot in the ear. Yeah. And also, can we not.

[James Stout]

It's a year ago. Like, we're here now.

[Robert Evans]

That one is so comprehensively disappointing to me because one of the little things it reveals is that there's even among progressives on the left, this belief that, like, someone can't be injured by a gun and handle it reasonably well and not be a good person. Right.

[James Stout]

So it has to have been fake.

[Robert Evans]

It had the fact that he didn't, like, panic and piss himself. It has to be fake. It's like, no, he just, like, didn't freak out or whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

Fucking huge mind.

[Robert Evans]

She was a huge adrenaline. Have you ever been shot at it? Like, when you get. When you realize you didn't get hit, it feels awesome.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You are living. You are surfing a cloud for a while.

[Garrison Davis]

There's.

[James Stout]

So you're not anymore.

[Garrison Davis]

I think the insights I got from this, like, left wing conspiracism, like, like seizure, right? This, like, like the seizure of the left embracing this. I got one of the biggest points of clarity as on, like, what's happening right now is this, like, tactical flattening of. Especially after the Charlie Kirk stuff as well, like, with the right wing embracing this, like, cultural cancellation strategy of trying to get people fired for saying things online, which they've tried to do before, but was done way more successfully that month. And, like, directed by the administration and then the left embracing a style of conspiratorial thinking that previously was really only embraced as fully on the right. So, like, this, this. This flattening of tactics across the left and the right, I think has been a useful way to look at our current situation for me.

[James Stout]

Yeah, the ice guided missiles. Shit, man, that fully fucking sent me, like, as someone who's been a journalist for a while, Just these outlets that you were previously. Kind of like the first time I had a byline in Mother Jones, I was pumped.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And then here they are just being like, love to know more about these missiles.

[Robert Evans]

We have it up, man. Do your job. Do your job.

[James Stout]

Look, I literally did that while I was like waiting for a coffee or having a shit or something. Like, it took me that much time on my telephone to find that contract. Like, what is wrong with you people again?

[Robert Evans]

It's all just fucking shibboleths and virtue signaling. Why would that be worse if ICE had guided missiles? Do you know how guided missiles work? Do you know the kind of tail that's required to make them function? Do you know the kind of like mechanical, like experts that you have to have in order to like keep these things working and keep them usable? Why would ICE be more dangerous with these? It's just going to distract them from doing the thing they're already doing to hurt people. Like, guided missiles do not do any. It would be just like extra trash for them to carry around.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And they'd be as bad at using them as they are at everything else.

[Robert Evans]

And to be quite frank, the government is already using guided missiles to do war crimes via the military.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yep.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

People who know how to use them.

[Sophie Lichterman]

The. The other, the other thing that really just. Wow. Every single time that there's a mass shooting event, which is often in this country, the fact that they have to transvestigate the person every single time.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah. Holy.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Is it unnecessary annoying. It makes me very angry.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Very angry. Fuck me. God.

[Robert Evans]

Man. Just. I don't know.

[James Stout]

Recently there was a wired piece about like in range tv. Carl Casado, he's had on before and the matches, the matches he hosts and.

[Robert Evans]

Like the brutality matches. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Probably 30% of the piece was reflecting on the killing of Charlie Kirk. And like nobody who goes to Karl's matches has been accused of shooting Charlie Kirk.

[Robert Evans]

No again. And the guy who shot Charlie Kirk didn't shoot him because he trained doing matches. He shot deer. And then he shot a guy in a similar way to how he'd shot deer.

[James Stout]

Nor is he a trans person.

[Robert Evans]

You know what's a better practice if you're going to shoot someone at 100 something yards distance than a tactical shooting match shooting deer.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like the whole thing is just like. I know. Yeah. The discourse around mass shootings has become less helpful and more toxic.

[Robert Evans]

No part of it's because I think there's a decent chunk of like progressives in the left for whom like it's immoral to actually know anything about how guns work or how shooting works or gun culture works. So you can't actually understand what you're talking about. Which is another problem. There's a lot of problems. It's not high on the list of problems, but it annoys me.

[James Stout]

Yeah, maybe it pisses me off irrationally more than it should, but I find that frustrating. Like we cannot have a reasonable discourse around guns in this country.

[Robert Evans]

No, no. That ship sailed with some bullet holes in the hull.

[Sophie Lichterman]

One last serious one. What's everyone's opinion on the best implementation of dual power in the modern era? That's a MIA question.

[Mia Wong]

I mean, how are you defining modern era?

[Garrison Davis]

I guess how are you defining dual power?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And how long do you have?

[Mia Wong]

The people who've objectively done the best job of it is the Zapatistas. And they've done the best job of it in large part because they've been willing to change the structure of their systems over time as things have worked and things have not worked and as the systems that they've been using have decentralized. I don't know. And the fact that they were able to, even, even under massive attack, they were able to do a massive expansion a few years ago. Yeah. They've held out against, you know, the wrath of the Mexican state, which is one of the most violent in the world.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, I would in a similar veins talk about like the PKK and then the YPG and J in Rojava. Right. Where you had these non state groups that had connections and that had some experience doing what we might call mutual aid prior to the government's collapse and then kind of expanded that into these networks that began to mimic and replace state function in an area that about 3 million people lived in. I think that's a really, that's certainly a more important story in terms of how that kind of thing might work on a larger scale than anything that's happened up to the present point in the United States. Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, sure, I guess in less of a militaristic way, but more in like a party capacity or like political proposal capacity. Probably some of the stuff coming out of the New York City chapter of DSA the past year, which is not reflective of DSA as an entire like national organization, but specifically the New York chapter has been very, very provocative in actually doing like, more like party oriented dual power.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And obviously I think probably we should also talk some about like the different immigration defense hotlines and immigration defense reaction forces around the country that have really ramping up and doing a lot of really good and really difficult work under duress and under fire, so to speak.

[James Stout]

Yeah. People have built a means, community safety. Yeah. To keep their community safe when the state has failed to keep their communities safe. Right. And sometimes it's put their communities in danger. And especially I think it is kind of heartwarming to me to see people who were just like straight up statist liberals.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Realizing that actually the cops aren't going to come and arrest ice. That's not going to fucking happen. And then being like, okay, well how do we organize the strategy that will maintain safety in our community given that this load bearing part of reality for me that cops are good has seemingly collapsed.

[Robert Evans]

And I'd say in general, James, the fact that there's a whole lot of normie people who would have. You certainly would have described them as normies a year or two ago that are now like, yeah, we gotta get rid of ice. Maybe we gotta get rid of all these cops.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Bill Crystal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Bill Crystal being on the anti ICE train. Right. Yeah, it's not bad. I do get the first. I'm not saying like we should invite Bill Crystal to the party or whatever. I'm saying that like the fact that.

[James Stout]

Blocked me on Blue sky so I can't invite him.

[Garrison Davis]

Sad Bill Crystal's coming to the Anarchist Book Fair and it's gonna be serving vegan slop.

[Robert Evans]

Is that even a joke, Garrison? Or is that real? That could be real. Okay, but, but it's, it's just in general good that a lot of people who are like where my parents were politically 20 years ago are looking out at what's happening and being like, we gotta get rid of these fucking people. Yeah, that's, that's good, that's positive. Yeah, I would say that that's kind of like a downstream change from what I think will be the most long term positive change from the 2020 uprisings, which is a huge number of people who hadn't thought about the cops, realized what the cops are. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

And to wrap it up, Robert, we got like multiple requests for you to do various accents.

[James Stout]

Are you shitting me?

[Robert Evans]

Various what accents?

[Sophie Lichterman]

Since so many requests for you to do various accents.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

Some Australian ones, some Boston ones, a few other. But like the specific areas of Boston, I think they were asking about like, like different, like inter Boston regional accents.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, sure.

[Garrison Davis]

And I'm sure you can just do those like 1, 1, 1.

[Robert Evans]

Oy, Evan. Sealed boys.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, that's enough of that.

[Robert Evans]

See Is that happening?

[Garrison Davis]

Thank you for listening.

[James Stout]

Are we good?

[Garrison Davis]

Our Q and A episode.

[James Stout]

Okay. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Of a good half a deer.

[Robert Evans]

Nailed it.

[James Stout]

Perfect. Yeah. No notes.

[Robert Evans]

I'd say we reported the news, but this was definitively not the news.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we didn't do that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Goodbye.

[Robert Evans]

Fall is here.

[Garrison Davis]

Which means it's time to plan ahead.

[James Stout]

And make sure your brand is showing.

[Robert Evans]

Up in ways that have an impact.

[James Stout]

That's where 4imprint comes in.

[Robert Evans]

4Imprint have promotional products that work as.

[Garrison Davis]

Hard as you do. Durable, useful, and designed to make a lasting impression.

[Robert Evans]

Think quality apparel your team will wear.

[Garrison Davis]

Again and again, including popular and exclusive brands. Drinkware that's enjoyed again and again.

[Robert Evans]

Bags, notebooks, tools and tech items that.

[Garrison Davis]

Don'T just look good, but actually get used. With thousands of customizable options.

[Robert Evans]

4Imprint makes it easy to find what.

[Garrison Davis]

Fits your brand and your budget.

[Robert Evans]

You'll get expert help, free samples and their 360 degree guarantee means you can be four imprint certain your order shows up just right. Right on time. Whether you're gearing up for fall events or simply planning ahead for the season, 4imprint helps your brand show up, stay.

[Garrison Davis]

Useful, and make connections that last. Explore the [e-mail] 4imprint for certain.

[Robert Evans]

Here's the truth no one in pet.

[Garrison Davis]

Food wants to say out loud.

[Robert Evans]

If it isn't just fresh from just.

[Garrison Davis]

Food for dogs, it isn't fresh, period. Because a lot of fresh dog foods.

[Robert Evans]

In those cute little packages, they're not.

[Garrison Davis]

100% human grade, they're not backed by radio real science. And they're definitely not something you could.

[Robert Evans]

Eat unless you enjoy mystery meat puree with a side of marketing spin.

[Garrison Davis]

Just fresh is different. It's real beef, chicken, sweet potatoes, green beans.

[Robert Evans]

Actual food you recognize. It's cooked daily in real kitchens. Vets recommend it.

[Garrison Davis]

Dogs lose their minds for it.

[Robert Evans]

And honestly, if your dog could talk, they'd ask you why you ever fed them anything else. New year, new you. But what about your dog?

[James Stout]

Fresh start.

[Robert Evans]

Make the switch. Make it just fresh from just food for dogs. Get 50% off your first box at justfood4dogs.com that's justfood for dogs.com.

[James Stout]

No code, no fine print, no fake fresh. Just real food.

[Robert Evans]

Finally.

[Garrison Davis]

After the holidays, your brain wants one thing less.

[Robert Evans]

Less noise, less clutter, less doing.

[Mia Wong]

Pura helps you reset your space with.

[James Stout]

Premium smart home fragrance. No complicated routine required.

[Robert Evans]

Right now you can get a free Pura 4 home diffuser.

[James Stout]

When you subscribe for 12 months, set schedules, adjust intensity, and come home to.

[Robert Evans]

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[James Stout]

With paying attention to our own experiences.

[Robert Evans]

And the real life experiences of others. Healing from the effects of racism takes.

[James Stout]

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[Robert Evans]

We all start somewhere.

[James Stout]

Take part in the 10th annual National.

[Robert Evans]

Day of Racial Healing on Tuesday, January 20th and take a step toward building.

[James Stout]

Understanding and fostering connection in your community.

[Garrison Davis]

Learn [e-mail]. So I have pulled up Poly Market and Kalshi. We're going to go through each of the trending predictions right now and then decide where we're going to be putting our last year's profit from Cool Zone coin. We're going to be transferring that on the blockchain to, to Poly Market. And I think we can come out of this year with a big profit.

[Robert Evans]

This is how we're relying on funding our operations.

[James Stout]

That's going forward. Can you check Poly Market real quick, see if Morris is still alive?

[Sophie Lichterman]

Jesus.

[James Stout]

It's been three years in a row.

[Garrison Davis]

So this is our 2026 predictions episode, like usual. I think we should start by reflecting on some of our predictions from last year to see how right and wrong we were. The big one big prediction that we, we discussed the most as a team is when is Elon Musk gonna distance himself from Trump or when are they gonna break up or anything? What do they have their, you know, separation? And each and every one of the extended Cool Zone media team members who works on it could happen here put in a date and the most accurate guess was from it could Happen. Here's main editor Adam who, who said May 30, which was really spot on. So congrats to Adam. Adam, all of us stumble through our episodes and have to edit them all.

[Robert Evans]

Cutting all the burps out.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, actually, actually, you know, maybe to really give credit back to us maybe influenced your, your wisdom.

[James Stout]

Let me reflect on his glory, on myself.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, we really made him wiser. And thus we're all wrong ourselves.

[James Stout]

And she's probably taking more psychological damage.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a good, you know, it means that we're smarter as a group entity, as a hive mind. We're all smarter than our own individual intelligence, which Adam has the most access to.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, just like ants.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, no, Adam, Adam did pretty good on that May 30th guess. So there you go. Sophie also close at May 6th. And then Molly, Molly conger, June 10th. So kind of in that zone, but Adam definitely hit it spot on. We had A few other predictions. Some of them were predictions. Some of them, I guess, were kind of more hopes and dreams, which sadly did not come to pass. The Myanmar junta was predicted by me and James to. Junta.

[James Stout]

Oh, God.

[Garrison Davis]

Was predicted by me and James to not make it out. 2025. They've kind of stuck on to power.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah, They've rallied pretty substantially, actually.

[Robert Evans]

It's unfortunate.

[Garrison Davis]

Netanyahu still is prime minister. I did predict that Assad would become a Russia Today host, which I think is a good prediction, but did not happen.

[Robert Evans]

That could still happen.

[Garrison Davis]

It still might happen in the future.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm waiting for them to hire him for a fucking podcast.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think I predicted this, but I'm not surprised. He's just playing video games.

[Garrison Davis]

No, he's just holed up in a hotel playing video games now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

During our death segment, I laid out a new theory of death based on Spotify wrapped, which the previous two years had some important deaths associated with Spotify wrapped day. No big Spotify wrapped deaths this year, unfortunately, though, I. I did make a death prediction last episode, which did not fully become true, but slightly became true right after we recorded that episode. Last year, before the episode even aired, I predicted that someone would try to assassinate Nick Fuentes while Nick was live streaming, perhaps a deranged fanboy. Days later, just days later, someone showed up outside of Nick's house as he was live streaming with a weapon, allegedly trying to kill him. This person died later that night in an like, exchange with police. It became this whole thing. But that. That happened just a few days after I made that prediction. So it technically didn't even happen in 2025. Happened still in 2024, before we aired that last episode, but was close. Was close to some kind of zeitgeist on that. It's unclear if that guy was a fanboy. We really don't know much about him. What's a few other predictions that have, like, kind of, kind of come true, but, like, it's more in terms of, like, which degree, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

I think my weird terrorism prediction has been pretty.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Money.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That's. That's continued to be a driver of the discourse.

[Garrison Davis]

We'll return to that in a sec. Sophie talked about, you know, Trump moving some, like, White House operations to Mar a Lago, which has partially happened. There's been a lot of, like, a. Like a holiday events done at Mar a Lago. Sometimes he's working out of there.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Very odd things. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But on the other hand, he's also just Mar A lagoa fighting the White House itself, which with like the ballroom. So it's kind of going in both directions. Mia did, did put a very firm prediction on like an economic collapse in 2025, like in the United States. Again, it's, it's like a slow. In terms of like one of the key ideas for our show is like crumbles versus collapse. It certainly continued to crumble and I. But I think the actual full collapse point is still upcoming.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, we'll get into this more later. I will say it is kind of baffling to have my prediction completely derailed, literally just solely by AI data center spending.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

Which I did not predict that the entire American growth rate would be a set of growth. Yeah, I, I didn't get that.

[Garrison Davis]

No, the actual like, like job market and economy has become so separate from like corporate spending and stock market stuff. And like, Robert did actually, I think hit this a little bit on the head. He talked about how the economy will basically remain identical to Biden's economy in terms of inflation, but the stock market will continue to go up and housing will keep getting more expensive and the left will start to be able to hit conservatives on inflation. And yeah, I think that is pretty much what, what happened. The economy's in a relatively similar place as it was last year, but you know, inflation is, is still ticking. There's some like, artificial attempts to like bring it down by Trump, but it's not, not really working in terms of prices.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

No. The only thing cropping it up in a numbers term is fucking Nvidia. Well, Nvidia less so now, but just irrational exuberance over AI in general. Yeah, but people are complaining about all the same things they were under Biden, just more so.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah. I guess I have three other points here. I talked about a blue governor deploying National Guard troops against Trump federal troops. Instead you got Trump deploying National Guard troops against individual cities with like police kind of caught in between. I. We still have yet to see the, the, the cool and based moment where like a blue governor deploys National Guard against, against dhs.

[James Stout]

And Newsom deployed his Twitter account instead.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, still. Sophie talked about there'd be still no clear left wing Joe Rogan, but so many have tried. A lot of people try.

[Robert Evans]

I still feel like I could be it.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you're going to have to be a lot more on camera, I think. Yeah, I think we'll have to have a lot, a lot more on camera stuff for that.

[James Stout]

More camera, less hair, larger gut.

[Robert Evans]

Can't be explained more steroids, I can do different drugs. Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean Adam Freeland is certainly positioning in that direction.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah, I agree, Gary. I agree. Also, I predicted that something would happen to the Paul brothers and unfortunately the only thing that happened is that their HBO show did not get renewed.

[James Stout]

When was that boxing match?

[Garrison Davis]

That was the year prior.

[Robert Evans]

And it wasn't good?

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[Sophie Lichterman]

They had a TV show called Paul American.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Are you serious? I didn't even hear about this.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It was on hbo but it got canceled.

[Garrison Davis]

I guess I've just had other stuff going on. I. Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

I'm kind of glad that I've lived a life where I didn't know that. I have no shame about that.

[Garrison Davis]

Finally both myself and like a few of us kind of talked about this is that there would be this movement away from big mobilizations. Some big mobilizations happened in short periods of time. Right. Like especially you can point to like la. I think it's probably the most significant. But in terms of like, like actual like countrywide mass mobilizations, right, There's a movement away from this and movement towards lone wolf attacks which did happen. And specifically I predicted there would be like a very, a very sloppy Luigi copycat in the next four months. And oh boy, did we get them. Did this, did this happen multiple in reoccurring times? And this kind of played into this larger model I was creating which kind of starts around the assassination of Shinzo Abe, creating this escalating series of assassinations happening faster and faster because like after Shinzo Abe there was, you know, two years later, Thomas Crooks trying to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Six months later, the United Healthcare CEO. Three months after that, someone tried to burn down the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro in the middle of the night. One and a half months after that, there was the assassination of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington D.C. two weeks after that a Christian missionary named Vance Belter killed the Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband and shot Senator John Hoffman. Next month was the Prairieland assault on a nice facility in July, the exact details of which are still getting figured out in court. But after this things kind of tapered down for a bit until September with the Charlie Kirk assassination and the attack on the ICE facility in Texas which kills to immigrant detainees. So yeah, in terms of like you know, lone wolf style pre planned assassination style attacks, sloppy copycats, right. People writing messages on bullet casings emulating the United Healthcare CEO assassination, this was like a super, super dominant part of 2025.

[Robert Evans]

It's the same pattern. I talked about this at the end of my episode on Mangione after, like, that came out, right? That like, there's copycats after every shooting. This is basically following the same kind of thing we saw in 2019 with the 8chan shootings, right where you like. This has been going on for much longer than that. But it's a very predictable. Once you start to expect it, it's a very predictable thing, which is someone carries out a shooting that actually manages to break through our levels of apathy about violence in this society and keeps everyone's attention. And then throughout the year, a bunch of different people try iterations based on that because it's the only way to get attention. And that's what all these people are craving, right? That's the only real currency that still has value.

[Mia Wong]

I will say, I think to say something positive about the turn away from mass mobilizations was that the lone wolf stuff wasn't the only stuff that happened. There was also the turn towards the thing we talked about in our Q and A episode about the ICE rapid response stuff, which is, you know, there were a few big mobilizations, but then ICE was forced to change their tactics by the fact that giant mobilizations by ICE were going badly for them. And this did create a whole bunch of sort of decentralized rapid response networks and a whole bunch of actions that were. That were sort of based on this. Very, very decentralized, very. We show up and we do this thing at this place, when it's happening, it has stopped some of the things that is happening. It has not stopped all of the horrors that have been happening. But I think it is a positive trend in terms of the way that ICE has been forced to adjust their tactics to do things that are harder and can get less people at a time. So I think that's a positive thing. Worth sharing of how the tactical innovations that activists have been deploying have been forcing ICE to do less devastating raids.

[James Stout]

We saw various attempts at mass mobilization, most successful with the no Kings marches, which were vast. But we also saw those 50, 51 things which kind of were not as successful in turning out large numbers of people. But like Mia said, like in Ventura, right? Like, we saw huge numbers of people show up when ICE tried to raid a couple of agricultural facilities up there. And yeah, well, like, I was up in L. A. We've spoken about that extensively. But like Garrison said, that was probably the. The biggest mobilization against ICE at one time, at one place that we saw.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's try to ad break and Then move into predictions for this upcoming year. 2026.

[James Stout]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

The stock market is still trying to keep going, although in some parts is like if not going down, flatlining.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Like bitcoin did not increase this past year. There's been a few popular like rising stocks like Netflix which are pretty much at the same spot they were at the start of 2025. Still going up and down.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Games workshop is up 48%, baby.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, there you go.

[James Stout]

Stop the Warhammer train, baby.

[Mia Wong]

Read Assassinorum kingmaker.

[Garrison Davis]

It's great.

[Robert Evans]

67Th most valuable company in the entire UK. Larger than their whole fishing industry, baby.

[Garrison Davis]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Really?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

That's wild, man.

[Robert Evans]

Warhammer is load bearing to the British economy. It's the only thing Nottingham really has left.

[James Stout]

Yeah. After they got rid of the Sheriff, it already went downhill for them. Hey, that and Robin Hood tourism is. Yeah, it's the only thing you can do in Nottingham now.

[Mia Wong]

Okay, I have, I have a big one about this and it's not. The tech bubble is going to collapse. I do think a typical is going to pop this year and about this.

[Robert Evans]

Year, but within the next 12 months. I think you're saying because we've got like three weeks left in this year.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you know, in 2026. Yeah, these are, these, these are predictions for 2026.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. In 2026 the tech bubble is going to pop. Yeah, that's not the prediction. The prediction is that in an attempt to recoup the value from all of the completely useless data centers that they will have built that can only run LLMs and can do nothing else, someone is going to invent a cryptocurrency that can only be mined by large language models. And this is going to be one of the big attempts to recoup the hideous, hideous amounts of capital that have been dumped into all these data centers is that they're going to have. Someone's going to find a way to make a kind of token that can only be generated by large language models. And they're gonna, they're gonna try it. Is it gonna work? I don't think so, but they are going to try it. It's going to be a big thing. They're gonna push it. It's gonna suck.

[Robert Evans]

There's gonna be a bunch of desperate attempts to like once the money starts falling out, like, which is not to say that I think that AI is going to even the AI that annoy, but a lot of the irrational exuberance is going to end and a lot of the startups that are just burning money are going to fail or get acquired and you're going to see tremendous desperation for people to be like, this is the next thing. This is the next thing. Throw a bunch of money into this. Like, yeah, that's, that's gonna be annoying.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, I feel like people have been talking about the. A bubble popping for a while. I have been hearing things from people who think and track this more than I do that if it is going to happen, there's, there's indicators that it's more likely to happen in 26 than it was in 25. I'm not going to put money on that on the, on the couchy betting markets, but it does seem to be more of a possibility. And you can see this the way people are handling Nvidia stock right now and being advised not to buy more stock but still hold what you have.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And just where Nvidia stock has moved over the last month or so.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So if you look at what's happening with Nvidia, we might have reached the peak and it might be so jover for some of these guys.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I think the big open question is how bad it's going to be. There's going to be at least one of these big AI companies OpenAI or Anthropic or somebody that either goes bust entirely or has to get acquired. But again, if you're looking at this rationally and not wishcasting, both Apple, Apple, Google and Microsoft are all perfectly capable of sustaining their rates of burn.

[Garrison Davis]

Microsoft is still going up. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Facebook is as well. And I think what you're likelier to see is contraction and consolidation, which is not to say that it's not gonna be disastrous for some group. I think there's a good chance that we do see some banks fail because there's some bad investments out there. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

They have been doing collateralized loan obligations.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Where the underlying asset is compute time.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is more deranged than 2008.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the most deranged thing I have seen since the tulip crisis. Like I cannot explain. Just. Good God, that's so.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, the upside that we have over 2008 is that the thing that all of these bad bets are on isn't people's houses. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And so that does. There is a potential that some good comes out of it in terms of like universities getting access to a lot more compute that they can actually use for valuable things.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And people are already suffering under recession conditions. If you're like a working class person like you are already dealing with the fallout effects of this. Just the stock market itself has been insulated from the rest of the economy, which is in a state of recession.

[Mia Wong]

And also it can get worse, which.

[Garrison Davis]

So a lot of people who aren't like super wealthy are like pro this bubble popping and pro this. Because then if other people, people in power finally realize how bad it is, they're hopeful that then something might be done to like fix some of the material conditions. Which I can understand people's like, like, you know, point of view there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I am not as worried about this being as bad for the average person as 2008 was. I don't think it's going to be as satisfying as people are hoping it was. It's not going to wipe out or put an end to the annoyance of AI in our lives. Although it should make it easier to rationalize some of the shit people have been saying. Like it should make the craziest of the AI boosters be like, this is going to replace everything. The whole economy will be AI in two years. No one will have a job. That's going to be a lot harder for anybody who's not to not seem like a crazy person while advocating. But the Internet's going to stay annoying.

[James Stout]

Like unfortunately gets fucked for a little while there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I think my girly pop economy prediction is that we're gonna continue to see influencer shopping. What I mean by that is like, influencers have been pushing products like no other and marketing budgets have been going to influencer marketing at a rapid pace. And I think we're seeing the implementation of AI into that more. And I think that that is primarily going to be one of the ways, like we might see less or we'll still see as much. But targeted ads. And we're gonna see, in addition to that, we'll also see like targeted influencer marketing for products. And like, it's already pretty gnarly on like TikTok Instagram, but I think we're only gonna see more of that and it's just gonna, you know, gonna be peak capitalism. Care.

[Garrison Davis]

Something that could be really fun is that if it pops, mm, it's gonna line up almost perfectly with 2008 nostalgia. So we'll have recession nostalgia, which is already starting to happen in the same time as a whole economic recession. So we'll, we'll have the recessions line up in time with their nostalgia cycle. And then, you know, it's only a matter of months before you have, you know, like 2010s, like, hipster stuff coming, coming back in.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

So, you know, it's. It's right there. We're so close. We're already at that, like, like, you know, 2008 level of 2000 nostalgia. But if it lines up with the recession, then that could. That could be really exciting.

[Robert Evans]

Now I'm also kind of curious as to whether or not we're going to start seeing, you know, a lot of the earliest adopters of AI on a regular basis were very young people using it to cheat at school.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

And just kind of trawling different teachers, subreddits and online communities. I'm seeing teachers talk about, like, younger kids now there being a backlash among very young people against the use of AI and the way it makes people talk. God, I hope this is kind of coming alongside as you're starting to see a recovery in levels of literacy as schools depart from the bad way of teaching kids to read that fucked everyone up. I don't have any kind of longitudinal statistical data on this. This is all very much anecdotal. So I'm still waiting to see is this a broader trend or did I just come across some people saying this is a thing that they're seeing in their area? But I'm kind of interested, and there's a degree to which I think some sort of backlash against AI is inevitable just because of how everyone running society is trying to push people to replace everything with it. Like that just inevitably is going to irritate the kids because the adults are all doing it right. We'll see.

[James Stout]

I think people are increasingly better at spotting AI, like, intuitively and very quickly is something I've seen not in high school, but teaching at a university level. People just being like, this is an AI response, and it's fucking cringe. Because the AI always writes in a particularly cringe way. Right. That is very obvious, and I've seen that. But I genuinely hope more people stop using AI because it is making education a pretty fucking miserable place to be right now. Which is a bummer because I like teaching.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's go on another ad break and then return for some midterm predictions. Hey, isn't everyone excited? It's another election year.

[James Stout]

Already people are saying the most important one of our lives. Garrison.

[Robert Evans]

I think so.

[Garrison Davis]

Just when I was starting to miss it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm voting Kamala for every single candidate writing in Karla Harris.

[Garrison Davis]

Every single state level position.

[James Stout]

Yeah, sure.

[Garrison Davis]

She will be the comptroller.

[Robert Evans]

All right.

[Sophie Lichterman]

You're killing me. Who. Who do we think is going to run Gavin Newsom.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Midterms. Yeah. Unfortunately, Sophie, we have another important election.

[Robert Evans]

Talking about 2028 yet we don't have to do that until next year.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I've skipped the midterms and I was already going to the next level of hell.

[Garrison Davis]

No, no, no.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Who's going to be governor of California? James?

[James Stout]

God knows the Dems have not really been putting their strongest foot forward, have they? Katie Porter had these like really pretty nasty videos come out of the way. She was talking to people who work for her. I don't think that that is a good leadership trait and I don't think that that is a person we should choose. I don't know. I'm so resigned to being it, being someone shit, you know, that like, I honestly try not to put too much of my time and effort into it, but yeah, I know. Maybe I'll be fucking Katy Perry. Maybe Trudeau will pass on his electoral magic. She's got some good songs. She could use them with actually with the intellectual property licensing, which Trump doesn't do. She could get that shark. Maybe the shark could be vice governor. You know, there's potential there be worried about the shark.

[Garrison Davis]

So obviously the Democrats are projected to do well in this midterm election based on anti Trump sentiment and like the regular swing away from the, like whoever's in the executive branch in midterms. And yeah, I think the Democrats will do well, especially if you look at the last like a month or so of election results. I think it's possible they take both chambers. I think they will absolutely take one.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I'm going split.

[Garrison Davis]

It's possible they take both chambers. I don't think it's going to be a landslide. It's not going to be a blue tsunami, Blue nami. I think it may be a blue wave. I think, I think a wave or a small wave wave is likely. I do not think it's going to be a complete blowout. But there's been like, especially in the Tennessee special election, a 13 point shift.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Towards Democrats.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

We've seen other double digit shifts across the country in the, in the past, in the past month. I don't know how much they'll be able to continue that sort of sentiment in, you know, nine months time, 10 months, 11 months time leading into November. So I think some of that enthusiasm will maybe taper off a little bit as Trump becomes kind of like a lame duck presidency. But I still think they'll do like okay in terms of like the Democrats.

[Mia Wong]

I very much disagree. I Think this is going to be like a generic D plus 14. This is going to be a fucking massacre.

[Garrison Davis]

What signs are pointing you towards that?

[Mia Wong]

I mean, they just won the mayorship of Miami.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, so you're saying it's going to be good for the Democrats?

[Mia Wong]

D plus 14. Yeah. Like Democrats plus 14.

[Garrison Davis]

Okay.

[Mia Wong]

Like I'm talking like a tsunami. OK. Like my, my prediction is that all of the polling people are fucking cowards. What's happening right now, polling, is that they are using the 2024 electorate.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is not the 2024 electorate. They have not figured this out yet.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Mia Wong]

They are still underestimating the exact scale of which everyone fucking hates them.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I'll be surprised if both houses flip.

[Mia Wong]

But yeah, here's the thing. The Cuban parts of Miami.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Went left by like 15 points.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Something we talked about on the show. They are going through and systematically pissing off every single part of their base.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Like, one of the things I, one of the stories I've been tracking is about the ways in which they've been systematically pissing off a whole bunch of farmers who are a very, very consistent right wing voting base. And they're pissing them off a trade war bullshit. Because China's not buying soybeans. Right. This is how they're losing elections in western Iowa. I think the other part of this too is, and this is how I think the momentum is going to be sustained is that things haven't even gotten as bad as they're going to get yet. The actual standard of living in this country right now, it is going to get so much worse as, as all of the inflation stuff sort of racks up, et cetera, et cetera. Like the country is going to be worse, everyone's going to be more pissed off. Trump is going to have bombed like four more countries. We're going to have like sent troops into Mexico or some shit. He's going to be so unpopular. It's going to be, it's going to be the fucking flood out there that's possible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I think the incumbency advantage becomes less and less relevant the worse the economy gets. And like that was something Biden got hit with. Right. But Trump is, is going to have to wear, especially we get further and further into his term.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

It's a Trump economy.

[Garrison Davis]

I guess this just requires that the current momentum, Democrats have to be maintained for a while, which is something that historically Democrats haven't been great at.

[James Stout]

Yes. They're shit at it.

[Garrison Davis]

So this will require effort for, you know, People, like, organizing with the Democrats and social media messaging, like, actual in person, like, like electoral organizing to really, like, keep this momentum and pressure going for the next 11 months, which, which is, you know, they've. They've done a good job at this the past, like, six months, but can they, like, maintain this to the midterms? That's the only point where I start to hesitate in terms of, like, the scale of, like, a blue wave. But I think it's. It's certainly possible that. That they end up doing quite well, but it's going to be reliant on, like, maintaining this. This pressure.

[Robert Evans]

No, there's still some structural difficulties that make flipping Congress entirely very difficult, especially.

[Garrison Davis]

With the redistricting stuff happening.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So, like, could they take the Senate quite easily?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The House still up in the air for me. I think lean Democrat at this point, certainly leaning Democrat, but still not confident.

[Robert Evans]

That'd be great. I just. I don't want to get irrationally, you know, ahead of our skis here.

[Mia Wong]

I have watched very, very dysfunctional state Democratic parties win elections in districts that were R +22.

[James Stout]

Fucking.

[Robert Evans]

Fucking.

[Mia Wong]

Anything could happen at this point.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, no, yeah.

[James Stout]

It's not coming from a national strategy. It's coming from, like, local candidates doing well on local issues and people fucking hating Trump. It is not the DNC who is putting Higgins or Mamdame in office. Well, yeah, that is, I guess, a good thing because the DNT fucking sucks. It has always fucking sucked, and it has really reinforced how much it sucks in the last eight years.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. And being able to hit Trump and Republicans on the economy with tariffs, this, like, oligarchy stuff has proven to be pretty successful so far. And I think being able to continue that messaging as the economy trends in its current direction, being able to continue that messaging, I think will help the Democrats. Interestingly, Platner in Maine still seems to be the front runner for that race.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So I think there's a decent chance we get our first Tokov in the Senate.

[Robert Evans]

Well, he doesn't have a total cover.

[James Stout]

Absolutely, dog. Cover up. I'm sorry if you are listening and you did that tattoo, but it's probably not your best work. Like, he's got a blob now.

[Garrison Davis]

That stuff just did not prove to be super impactful to the actual voters in Maine, it seems. And the actual, like, focus on his talking points have maintained his lead. So I think that's something that Democrats can also look. Look to in terms of, like, how much of these, like, you know, like, tertiary like personal attacks or like, you know, genuine.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Genuinely valid. Valid complaints or issues are not very dominant based on how much emphasis is actually getting put on this sort of like affordability messaging.

[Sophie Lichterman]

To wrap up this predictions episode, should we do a quick death pick?

[Garrison Davis]

No one's going to die.

[Robert Evans]

I thought you're going to ask, do you think we're going to invade Venezuela?

[Garrison Davis]

No. See, this is what I'm interested in. I'm more interested in are we going to start any wars?

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And is his cabinet going to stay the same?

[Robert Evans]

Kind of already have started one.

[Sophie Lichterman]

To answer your first question.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Is the cabin going to say the same? I'm surprised.

[Garrison Davis]

It's weird, right? Trump first term, there was a lot of Cabinet turnover in the first year.

[James Stout]

Scaramucci.

[Garrison Davis]

This is, this is not happening this year. This year they stayed pretty tight knit despite a lot of turmoil or like, you know, issues around, like Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr, Pete Hegseth with the double tap war crime strikes gnome as well. They are pretty tight knit, it seems. So. I don't know if there's going to be cabinet turnover.

[Sophie Lichterman]

I think Kash Patel will be out next year.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I think Cash might have. Yeah. Might be on the edge of this.

[James Stout]

He's lost the podcast, Bryce.

[Garrison Davis]

He just found the J6 pipe bomber. I don't think it's going to happen. I think the Cabinet's going to stay the same, which I predicted against last year. But I think based on how they've weathered certain controversies, I do not know if Trump cares enough to do cabinet turnover.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or whoever's talking to him about these things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we'll see. There's no one that I think is an obvious choice. Likeliest turnover is Patel.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Then maybe he says, I don't think.

[Robert Evans]

He'S going to go. I think Hegseth is too loyal. He's. He's a, he's a team player.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

And he has absolutely no chance of going into business for himself. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the big thing, is that it's not a skill or competency that got these people their jobs.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It's loyalty, which, you know, it's kind of, kind of was a factor in Trump 1.0, in Trump 2.0, it is just pure loyalty.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And if they're able to prove that, especially around like, you know, the Epstein stuff, really, really tested those, those loyalties.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And if they're able to get out of the Epstein controversy, like, kind of intact, then I think all these guys will be set for like, the Next, next little bit, I guess. Do we think Vance is ever going to become a president during the next like year or two?

[Robert Evans]

Trump is like 80. So I'm not going to say there's not a 20 or 30% chance that just like if Donald Trump dies, Vance becomes the president. Right. And like he's at the age where he could just drop dead Right. Outside of that. No, I don't think he's likely to become president.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I do think in the next 12 months the US will begin a UAV campaign in the Sahel, quite possibly Nigeria. Like I think. Yeah, that's possible in the next 12 weeks. Just looking at flights that they've had.

[Robert Evans]

Very recently, there's a decent chance too that they start expanding the use of special forces and Maybe even keep FOBs open without the willingness of the Nigerian government. But that's a longer shot.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And the Nigerian government's pretty, pretty into it right now.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you think they're going to put troops on the ground in either Mexico or Venezuela?

[Robert Evans]

I think there's a good chance that we, we utilize special forces on the ground in parts of Mexico for brief periods of time.

[James Stout]

There's a good chance that we already have.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we almost certainly already have. I think there's a chance that we wind up having people on the ground in Venezuela after a fuck up. Right. Like, but I, I think that at present their plan is airstrikes and drone strikes. I think if we were to wind up having anything on the ground in Venezuela, it would be as a result of like a strike with a manned craft going badly and someone going down over Venezuela. That's not a zero percent chance if they keep fucking around. But I really don't think they want to have troops on the ground in Venezuela. I think they want to be striking targets in Venezuela.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's not a place where they want, you want large numbers of troops to be, to be engaging. Like that wouldn't go well. Trump does not want to wear that. Right. Like if we saw in Syria, like he wasn't willing to deploy large numbers of troops, he was willing to use a lot of drone and airstrikes even when the civilian cost was very high. And I think that is the model, like that strike cell model that we saw. Like, like the, the strike in Baghouz at the end of the Islamic State is probably a good example of the sort of collateral damage killing civilians that we can expect them to see as acceptable.

[Mia Wong]

I think the final point on this is that the Trump administration genuinely believes that they can topple regimes with airstrikes. They thought this with the Houthis, and they think this is about Venezuela. They actually think you can do this despite all evidence to the contrary. So I think that's going to inform a lot of their decisions.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I think Syria, like, kind of not Syria with Assad, but Syria with the Islamic State, reinforce that for them. But they're obviously overlooking that they have an incredible partner force that they don't have in these places.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, Well, I think that's our predictions. First time we're not doing a death segment. And you know what? I feel fine about that.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Garrison Davis]

No one's gonna die in 2026.

[James Stout]

Morrissey is still. I'm not gonna say it this time because I've been inadvertently blessing him with long life.

[Robert Evans]

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about it happening. Well, in various places. And given the nature of our digital interconnected society, it is happening here all the time. But if you're even casually aware of what's going on in the world right now, it is particularly happening in Venezuela right now. And joining me to talk about the US Led and executed kidnapping of a world leader is my two favorite kidnappers, Mia Wong and James Stout.

[James Stout]

Glad to be here, Robert. Joining you to discuss kidnapping. One of my favorite topics.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

My lawyers have advised me not to respond to this statement.

[Robert Evans]

Now, given all the people you've both kidnapped, how are you just rating this on a technical level as kidnappings go? You know, on a level from let's say the. Well, if I remember the name of that guy with the plane, this would have been a funnier joke. I forgot his name, though. D.B.

[James Stout]

Cooper.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, no. He was on a plane. He didn't have a plane.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, that's a reverse kidnapping. He un. Kidnapped himself.

[Robert Evans]

He did un. Kidnap himself.

[Mia Wong]

Everyone on the plane.

[Robert Evans]

I was talking about Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh. But the jokes. The joke's over. So let's talk about the international crimes our government's doing. Yeah. Did, did and doing.

[James Stout]

I'm drinking a white claw. So I've got about the same legal jurisdiction as they have because there is no law when you're drinking white cloth.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Which I think is their legal argument.

[Robert Evans]

I mean. Yeah. So what happened is, while most of us were asleep last Saturday night, the United States, using a mix of special forces, like Tier one operators, this was like a Delta Force operation, primarily a whole bunch of helicopters. It looked like a mix of Blackhawks and Chinooks, carried out a series of airstrikes on Caracas and kidnapped the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, killing a significant chunk of their security detail, including 32 Cubans who are acting as essentially like military advisors. Slash, security for Maduro. Yeah. He has been taken back to the United States. He's been arraigned in New York. They're charging him with a variety of drug and gun related crimes, including some weird shit like possession of a machine gun under US Law, which is really weird. I guess they're arguing that his control of the Venezuelan military counted as illegal possession of an automatic weapon. Yeah, it's weird.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I'm guessing it involves using the machine gun in the furtherance of another crime because there are specific charges for like, NFA violations related to drug things.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[James Stout]

But it still seems very weird to tag that on there. Like, when what you're doing is kidnapping a world leader, you can't just also be like, oh, and he's got a gun, like when he commands the armed forces of a country. It's very strange.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. This also, I think, pins into what's really, really weird about this. There's two aspects of this that are just. What the fuck? One of them is that the legal justification this is given to Mike Lee from Secretary of State Marco Rubio was that the reason that there were airstrikes in a legal justification was protecting U.S.

[Robert Evans]

Soldiers carrying out U.S. law enforcement. The military was needed to protect the DEA agents who were actually conducting the arrest. Is the legal justification.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The chances of some kind of due process violation are high. This all hinges on you thinking that the law is a fixed thing. Right. Not an instrument of the state and an instrument of power. And I think that a more plausible analysis here is that the law is not a fixed thing. But in this instance, if we go with that line, the DEA people were there to ensure due process and to make the arrest. And in theory, I read that they literally had someone Mirandize him.

[Mia Wong]

Right, yeah. Which I do want to point out the thing here, though, and this is something that cnn, like, when they were reporting on this, points out. This is insane because this implies that U.S. law applies in Venezuela.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Which it doesn't. It absolutely doesn't.

[Mia Wong]

That's literally the point. The point of a state is that your law applies inside of your borders.

[Robert Evans]

The argument that they are making because Trump directly, and prior to this, had called into relevance the Monroe Doctrine. Right. Which is basically stating that everything happening in the Americas is the purview of the United States. This was initially. And they're still arguing that it is kind of what President Monroe was using as an excuse for intervening in situations where foreign colonizers were attempting to exert power and colonies they owned in the Americas or had owned in the Americas. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And the US Was basically saying, fuck you, this is our backyard. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I think the argument that they're making now is that that's relevant because Iran and Russia and Cuba all have political and business interests in Venezuela, particularly Cuba.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But in a more broad sense, they're making the argument, and Stephen Miller has made this very directly, that the Americas are all kind of our property, and we're perfectly justified in intervening to take resources that we want, because we shouldn't have to just accept that a foreign country has different opinions on how those resources should be used than the United States and that we have no, like, moral responsibility to listen to what other people want in our hemisphere. It's our hemisphere. And we, meaning the Trump administration, should do whatever we want.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And I think there's two kind of legal perspectives here, things that are important. One, I think there's that one which is. Yeah. The American. The American empire is just saying, we are an empire and we can do whatever we want. But then there's also the. Does the President have the power to do this unilaterally piece of it? Which.

[Robert Evans]

No, he.

[Mia Wong]

No, like, just does not. Like, this is. This is. This is objectively an act of war.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And previously. Right. A lot of administrations have done things kind of like this.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Right.

[Mia Wong]

But like, everything has been under the fig leaf of the AUMF.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

The 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force, which, if you go back and read the document, the actual, like, AUMF, it's very clear that it's anyone who's related to 9, 11.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And so this has been used to do interventions in, like, places that. Things that have nothing to do with this. Right. But this is not even that. This is just the President claiming that he can do acts of war.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I guess the justification that they gave was the example they cited was Noriega, right. In 89 in Panama, right. There was a. There was a war that was operation like, American soldiers died. Right. Noriega went to the Vatican Embassy and eventually, I believe he surrendered him. They'd, like, blasted U2 at him, which is obviously a war crime. And he eventually left the embassy.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And negotiated his exit, I guess. But that's a completely different thing to just bouncing into the residence of the President of another country at night, black baggage like that's.

[Robert Evans]

Also debatably legal, but yes, it was a different situation. Yeah, very, very, very much so. Yes.

[James Stout]

Yeah. No, it's also wrong.

[Robert Evans]

To be clear, we're not defending what, what was done there. Yeah, no, this is even more blatant. Right. It's like, it's not defending what George W. Bush did in Iraq to be like, at least they bothered to pretend there was a justifica. Like they spent some time really cooking up a justification and some effort. And there's none of that here. They just don't give a shit anymore. Right. That's. That you're not being like. And that means it was okay what Bush did. You're just pointing out it's even more mask off now. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, well, and I think it is different in that, like the invasion of Iraq involved Congress. This is just Trump going, I can do this.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

And that's really fucking alarming.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

That he just is like, yeah, fuck it, I can just do a war now completely by myself. None of you have any fucking power over me. I can just declare war. A thing that is explicitly in the Constitution, like, supposed to be Congress's job. And I think that's really. That's another very alarming part of this because this is I think, by far the most just Trump peer dictator shit that we've seen so far. And it's not being treated like that.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Because a lot of sort of like, I don't know, like there's a lot of people who wanted this, something like this to happen, and so they're kind of just not looking at the fact that this is just, this is just pure dictatorship.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think a lot of people, because they didn't like Maduro. Right. They're willing to look aside from the. The means as long as they get the ends they want, but the means are extremely serious here.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And I think we should stop for a second to talk about the, the Maduro of it all. Because my stance is that his legitimacy as president, his personal legitimacy, whether or not he's committed crimes, are all completely irrelevant. Right. I have not, in any of my public facing statements I've been in the past years ago, talked about how I wish the protests had worked to remove him from office within sort of like the context of Venezuelans actually having their way, kicking him out and replacing him with something better. But I have not brought up any of that in the context of what's happened recently. Because it doesn't matter. Right. Like, fundamentally, it doesn't matter if Maduro is like completely legitimately elected and the people's hero or a complete fraud and an authoritarian. That has nothing to do with whether or not the US has any legal or moral justification for coming in, arresting this guy and then saying, we own the country and we don't. It's dictator shit, it's fascist, it's deeply wrong, it's bad. Like, there's nothing else to say. If you find anyone getting caught in starting to be like, well, but, you know, Maduro did this, Maduro did that. That is either a person who is acting in bad faith or a person who has themselves been tricked. Right. Because you don't need to discuss any of that. None of that is relevant to what we're talking about here, which is that the US like this is a violation of international law and all of the kinds of norms that we attempted to put in place after World War II to stop another catastrophe like that from happening. And it is only going to embolden the worst instincts of both the people running the United States right now. They will continue to try to do shit like this and it's going to embolden the worst instincts of other leaders around the world. It is comprehensively bad for everyone.

[Mia Wong]

The comprehensive result of this is again, that the US has annexed, I guess, Venezuela. That Trump is claiming that he personally and his Secretary of State and his Council of advisors are now control and run a country.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

This is so evil.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's very unclear who's going to be doing. Because Trump made that statement. Rubio walked it back a little bit and said that like, well, we'll be working with the administration in place, which is, by the way, just the same administration that existed before, merely with the Vice President taking on the role of president.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we should talk about that a little bit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. After that, backtracked a little bit too, to try and be more in line with the boss. But it's very unclear what they actually intend and what they mean by saying we're running it. Because from what I've read, it doesn't look like Rubio is actually going to be managed like, while he's been the guy taking point on justifying this, I don't think he's going to actually be managing any of this on a day to day basis. He's got a lot on his plate already. Stephen Miller seems to be the guy who is trying to position himself to actually be the Paul Brimmer in this situation. Who was the guy that the Bush administration put in charge of dealing with running Iraq after it was taken Over. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The Viceroy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's, it's unclear. Is Miller going to get that job? Will Rubio wind up doing it? It's looking more like Miller right now, but also to what extent will that job actually be running things? And we'll talk about that in a little bit, I'm sure. But the kind of Cliff's notes of the situation is that there is evidence that came out right after the kidnapping that Maduro's vice president had reached out to the United States previously, like before the kidnapping, to talk about the possibility of taking over the country after giving Maduro up or him having a managed exile. All of that was discussed. And at least per the reporting on it, she was turned down by the United States because they thought they had a better option. And that option seems to have fallen through largely because the quote, unquote, democratically elected opposition leader who won a Nobel Prize pissed off Trump. It's unclear how accurate that is that by, you know, by winning the prize, by accepting the Nobel Prize, did she get her kick herself out of the job? Oh, my God. That's what some reporting has suggested. It's unclear to me how true that actually is. It seems possible, surely, but at the end of the day, there was this offer made by Maduro's VP that was turned down by the US and now it seems like, although we don't actually know what's happened in the background, it. It seems like she's who we're working with. So either they came back and said, you know what, we'll take the deal, or something else is going on. But she has both made the statements publicly that, like, this is illegal, the United States is run by a group of criminals and extremists. And also. But we'll work with them. So it does kind of seem to me like she may in fact be very much in bed with the Trump administration and just trying to, like, massage this for her public, you know, because there's only so much you can get away with. I don't know.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Just to be clear on the timeline, Robert. Yeah, the, the first reporting of that, like Rodriguez option, we want to call it that. Yeah. They call it Madurismo is out. Maduro as well was in October.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

That was out before the strike happened.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And it, at least in the Miami Herald story, they suggested that he had been part of that. So this could be a different thing. But he had offered to step down over years, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Sort of say it looked like there was a period of time where he was talking about Like a managed exit. Yeah.

[James Stout]

Going to Qatar or Turkey or somewhere like that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Now, Rodriguez has, of course, denied that.

[Robert Evans]

But what would you expect, Dulcie Rodriguez? And, yeah, it's unclear. Again, we don't really know. Did they just remove Maduro without having a plan and hadn't really finished talking with her or worked something out? Was the last thing she heard from them, them saying, nah, we won't take this option.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And material gets kidnapped. Did they work out a separate deal that just hasn't been reported on? We actually don't know. And I could totally see her being a stooge for US Action here because it keeps her in power and it keeps her safe because Trump very recently threatened her. Like, after she made statements, calling his team a bunch of extremists, she backpedaled and said, actually, we're willing to work with the US Because Trump said, I'll do something worse to you than I did to him. Like, we don't know if they actually ironed out a set of responsibilities and obligations in back channels or if we just removed Bajuro and are like, all right, well, if we have to kill her, we'll kill her too. Like, it's unclear what actually happened there.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. So we should also mention. So this is being recorded on the night of Monday, January 5th.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Every kind of six or eight hours, new, conflicting information from the Trump administration about what their plan is comes out.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

Which. Which leads me to suspect they don't have a plan at all because it keeps changing every couple of hours. So I don't know. But. But in case, by the time this comes out, there is some kind of public deal that's been worked out. That's what's going on. This is all changing extremely rapidly.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And you know what else changes rapidly? The economics of podcasting.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Well, here's some of that.

[James Stout]

This White claw is fucking foul.

[Robert Evans]

And we're back. James is drinking a bad white claw, which is really, I think, the information our audience is most interested in. You know, invasions of Venezuela come and go. The US Kidnaps people all the time. But James drinking a bad white claw. Let's actually really check in. James, what's the flavor you're experiencing right now?

[James Stout]

Let me get an update to that. That is green apple.

[Robert Evans]

Green apple.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, boy.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yep. It's foul. I wouldn't recommend it. You're in the market.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that sounds awful.

[James Stout]

Don't do it to yourself.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It's really the having Delta Force kidnap you from your house of beverages.

[James Stout]

Beverages. Yeah, absolutely. That's how they market, actually. It's weird. That's. That's on the can.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right.

[James Stout]

They must have got advanced warning like the Times.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What did they know and when did they know it?

[James Stout]

We'll never know.

[Robert Evans]

So let's keep talking about Venezuela.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

We should talk about who Rodriguez is.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So Delta Rodriguez was vice president, and now she is president or will be sworn in as president. I believe she may have already been sworn in by the time you hear this.

[Robert Evans]

She was sworn in, I think, like a couple hours ago, per the last article I read.

[James Stout]

So her father was a Marxist guerrilla. Her father kidnapped an American businessman, was arrested and then murdered. Like tortured to death.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

As part of the quote, unquote, investigation into that. Right. Her and her brother are kind of like a power block in Venezuelan politics. She has really become more relevant, I guess, nationally since Maduro. She did do some stuff with Chavez early on, but, like, clashed with him personally and I guess allegedly. I mean, I wasn't there, but Chavez didn't like that. She wasn't deferential to him and at one point sent her home from. I think they were in Russia and he sent her home from a. Like a sort of mission that they were doing, their diplomatic mission. Since then, she has assumed a number of roles in Venezuelan government from. Since 2013. Right. When Maduro came to power, to include overseeing intelligence at some time. And she has now become obviously president. Right. She has previously worked with, like, the Venezuelan. I guess the analogy would be like, Chamber of Commerce, which had previously been seen by, like, Chavez Moore as like, a bourgeois entity, I. E. The enemy.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[James Stout]

She has shown willingness to work with business. So I do wonder if that factors into the US Analysis, like, if she's willing to work with the. What looks like the oil companies that they want her to work with, then. Then they can overlook a whole lot of other stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Which.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Has historically been how the US has approached places with oil. But, yeah, in terms of this, I think that's probably the sort of TLDR on her career. I think it is possible that she's willing to do some kind of Chovismo light, you know, whatever we're going to call this, and have US Extractive capitalism exist so long as the regime continues to exist. But the way that would work is still something that, like, I can't really get my head around for a regime which has made so much of its rhetorical legitimacy for so long, attacking the United States.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. Yeah. And that's kind of. I Mean, that seems to be the. The quandary Delsey finds herself in is she both has to refer to what's happened accurately as kidnapping and the actions of an illegitimate and deeply corrupt regime. And also, she can't act that way if what we all think is accurate. She's basically acting as a negotiated puppet of the United States. She can only go so far. And I feel like she's trapped in kind of a doomed situation, which may be part of what our administration intends is for her to be fundamentally doomed and fail and get couped herself. Or, you know, we can replace her when there's protests against illegitimacy. Like, I don't know what exactly the game is here, but I think that may be something that was baked into the equation that, like, this is not a functional situation for her. And when she gets forced out, that's something we can take advantage of.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's a reasonable analysis, I think. I mean, we. Yeah, we should talk about the oil. Right. Because Trump has been talking about the oil.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

I know you said you wanted to mention stuff about, like, it's not what it might seem on the face of it. Right. There aren't giant lakes of oil in Venezuela you can just slurp up and sell.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So, okay. It's sort of difficult to explain this all without really getting into the weeds of, like, how oil production works. But there's different, like, qualities of crude oil, and most of the Venezuelan stuff is extremely sour. It's really, really shit. It's extremely low quality. And when you have oil that's this shit, you can't, like, refine it into being good. Right. Like, that's. That's just, like, not how the process works. It just sucks and so it burns badly. But there is a lot of it. And this also gets back to. Okay, so the way that Trump thinks this is going to work is that a bunch of oil companies are going to come in, they're going to do a bunch of, like, infrastructure development or whatever, they're going to sell the oil, and they're going to make 100 bazillion dollars. That's not really how this works, as it is something that James is pointed out, too. But, like, the actual value here is less from actually extracting the oil and more from, A, having all of these oil deposits on your balance sheet. And B, there's a lot of value in just having power over it.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So, okay, so oil prices are kind of. They're set by a few things, like, the price of oil is set by the bottom of the market. Right. Part of your profit comes from how much more cheaply can you refine and extract your oil relative to whoever's doing it the most expensively, like whoever's doing the shittiest job of it. But then a lot of it also is just power. That's what OPEC is. Right. And OPEC's ability to raise oil prices has to do with its ability to have all of their member states controlling their oil and controlling the sort of flow and distribution of it. Redistributing who is in power in OPEC is actually a massive deal. Even if the actual oil here isn't very good, the power over the oil is extremely important.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

So this doesn't work in the way that Trump wants it to work, which is like, you know, you take the oil wells and you pump the oil out of the ground and suddenly you have money, but, comma, it is good for the oil companies that would take over the oil.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

He consistently confuses stock price for, like the slash business success slash other things. Right.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I guess one way to think about it is that, like, taking control of this oil, you're not really making the money off of this oil. You're making the money off of the impact controlling this oil has on the rest of the oil you produce.

[James Stout]

Yeah, maybe. If you're someone who sees international relations in terms of great power competition, you're trying to put things in the Russia, China bucket or the America bucket.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And someone who sees trade is this like zero sum game where one person wins and another person loses.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You know, as Trump does.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Mia Wong]

And also it is worth mentioning that a lot of this oil goes to Cuba, which is really, really important for the Cuban economy, which sort of can't function without the stock of Venezuelan oil. Getting access to Venezuelan oil is one of the things that originally pulled Cuba out of the just hideous economic crisis they were in in the 90s after the Soviet Union collapsed.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So it's why 32 seems like a majority or at least half of the security forces who died fighting the US in this kidnapping attempt were Cuban. Because access to Venezuelan oil is an existential issue for the Cuban government. And it's also why Trump stated, unfortunately, probably accurately, that they're not looking at regime change in Cuba because they think that the regime is going to collapse on its own, which it might like. This is an existential problem for the Cuban regime.

[James Stout]

For people who aren't aware, I spent a good amount of time in Caracas When I was much younger, during my undergraduate years at university. And I remember the only medical professionals I ever saw being. Because people had left right after Chavismo. Like, the only medical professionals I ever saw were Cuban. And to be clear, Cuban doctors are.

[Robert Evans]

All over the world.

[James Stout]

One of Cuba's biggest exports is doctors. But like, it was very clear at that time that like the two states were intermeshed. You know, like Venezuela needs things that Cuba has like those special military advisors and those doctors and. Yeah, and Cuba needs things in Venezuela.

[Robert Evans]

Have like that oil.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And breaking that, the way people normally see oil is. Oil is just like liquid cash. And that's not true. It matters. The actual materiality of the oil and how it works in the extraction process and what kind of oil. It matters a lot. And this is a scenario where, where the oil is going and who has control over it matters more than who's able to sell it, which is very weird, but is how this works. And Trump doesn't understand any of this. Maybe some of the people around him understand this, but Trump really just is in pure empire brain. They stole our stuff, which I assume someone who like wanted this told him, oh yeah, they stole a bunch of American oil and land and now he's in just full empire mode.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think it does seem like someone has told him that at some point they stole our stuff right now.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah. And this is after the revolution. A bunch of what was like the property of U.S. and foreign oil companies was nationalized. Right. Because these companies had made deals with the corrupt previous regime and it was not really benefiting Venezuelans. Now, obviously that oil money has gone on to benefit the current corrupt regime and still not benefited Venezuelans much. But there was a period of time under Chavez in which like, there were actual social benefits and a powerful state was providing people with things. Which is not to say it didn't have its flaws, but like there was a period of time in which there was a benefit to the average Venezuelan from the fact that their country was so oil rich. And nothing about the current situation is going to change positively for the average Venezuelan. The profits are going to go from being siphoned for from one group to another, but neither of those groups are regular Venezuelans.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I think sometimes I'll hear this. I have conservatively interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of Venezuelan people in the last three or four years right at the border in the Darien Gap in the US Remotely, via telephone, et cetera. And sometimes you'll hear that Chavez was trying to do something good and it went bad, or that it was okay for a bit under Chavez and then the corruption got out of control, or even it was okay until Maduro took power and then it was bad. Doesn't matter. Right. It's bad now. But, like, the things that. The poverty I hear about from Venezuelan people is grinding and it is so upsetting. Like, I have a great fondness for Venezuelan people. I've made a whole podcast thing about this. But the difficulty they encounter in every aspect of their lives because of sanctions, because of corruption, because of hyperinflation, because of the low oil price. Like a lot of things. Right. Their lives are miserable and this isn't going to change that. Yeah, they're scared. Right. When I speak to people in Venezuela or people with family in Venezuela this week since this happened, what are they doing? They are not, contrary to what an AI video might have made you believe, out in the streets celebrating.

[Robert Evans]

No.

[James Stout]

They're trying to get enough food to make it through the next couple of weeks in case they have to hunker down in their homes. Right. And it is hard to get enough food at the best of times for.

[Robert Evans]

These people in case they're bombed, in case the roads are bombed, in case they're occupied. They're making preparations for being in a situation like Gossens have been in for much of the last several years. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And that's not an unreasonable. Like, who knows what will happen? I hope it's not that, but that's not an unreasonable thing to prepare for.

[James Stout]

No, it's not. Our friends, when Myanmar, and Robert and I have interviewed people in Myanmar, that's what they said they did after the coup as well, because they didn't know what was going to happen and they figured they need to be able to sit somewhere safe and stay there. And so, yeah, this is not a liberation. Like a sort of Jared Polis, of all people, being like, oh, yeah, liberation. Often using the word liberation, generally Simon Bolivar, who's like the sort of founding hero of Venezuela, is referred to as the liberator. So using that phrase about the extrajudicial kidnapping of the head of state.

[Robert Evans]

Right, yeah.

[James Stout]

If you don't understand the resonance of that word in Spanish, that's fine. You don't speak Spanish, don't fucking use it. But if you're going to use it, especially in this context, it is crass in the extreme to see that American politician.

[Mia Wong]

So the other, I think, aspect of this is that if you look at this on a historical scale, the reason Bolivar succeeded was that the Haitian Republic gave a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of weapons to go liberate Latin America from the Spanish Empire. And then if you look at what is the US's relation to.

[Garrison Davis]

The closest.

[Mia Wong]

Thing I've been able to. So I've been like, racking my brain trying to find anything in history that looks like this, that the US has done. And we've done a lot of bad things, but the closest thing I can find to just we sent the army in to kidnap a guy and deposed him was what we did to Aristide, who was the former leftist president. Now former leftist president of Haiti, who we did, in fact, send in special forces with Canada to just like, sort of force onto a plane at gunpoint and remove from power.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But also that situation was a little different in that at that point, most of the country of Haiti was under the control of a bunch of like, death squad rebel groups.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Which was the US's justification. And this is just. We just ran into a country and took them. But I don't know, the historical resonances of that are bleak.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And Jesus Christ, don't call it the liberation. Good Lord.

[James Stout]

Talking of liberation.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Let's liberate our audience from having money that they can spend on these products. All right, we're back. I guess there's a couple of things I wanted to talk about. One of them is I'm seeing a lot of people respond to this by pointing out folks like Matt Walsh or other guys on the right who made statements about Trump being a candidate for peace and all these military interventions. We're getting into being bad and are now celebrating what we're doing and openly celebrating colonialism as a good thing. And I'm seeing a lot of folks trying to dunk on these people for being inconsistent. And I can't imagine a bigger waste of your time. None of these people, you have to get it out from the habit of thinking that truth matters. All that matters to these people is power, and they have it and they have the guns. And you pointing out that they lied to get there and that they're not honest, they don't care. They're rich and they're getting richer and they're powerful and they're getting more power. None of this is about principles. It's about winning. And you just have to understand that if you want to have any hope of beating them, because pretending that they're playing any other game than the one that they're playing is really dangerous. I don't think there's any profit in debating these people directly or confronting them directly about the inconsistencies of their belief system. I do think it's deeply profitable to talk about the fact that they lied and are liars and are dragging us into another war to regular Americans. And the evidence suggests that this is incredibly unpopular in a way that the Iraq war wasn't. People talk a lot about how massive the anti war protests were and how much anti war sentiment there was, but a majority of Americans were broadly supportive of what the Bush administration did in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time that they started doing it. Right. That doesn't mean that the protests weren't real. It doesn't mean that it's not significant that those massive protests happened. But most Americans were broadly supportive of what the government was doing. That's not the case with what we're seeing in regards to public opinion over what's happening in Venezuela. There was a two day Reuters Ipsos survey that concluded Monday, basically immediately after it was announced what, you know, we did in Venezuela. And 72% of Americans who responded said they are concerned that the US might get too involved in Venezuela. Only 25% said that they don't share that concern. 90% of Democrats shared that concern, as well as 74% of independents. Even 54% of Republicans. Only 45% of Republicans said that they were not worried about the US getting overly involved. And only 19% of other voters. So, so this is really unpopular, historically unpopular for a military intervention. And the entire bet that the Trump administration is making is that because they're not doing what Bush did in Iraq, they're not knocking out the whole government and de baathifying it, they're just kicking out one guy and basically keeping his regime intact. They're just making that regime swear fealty to the United States. And their bet is that this will work, right? That the Venezuelan regime will continue to keep the country functioning as well as it was functioning before, which is not great, but was not total collapse. And they can start extracting value. And honestly, I feel like that is, that's a major motivation for a lot of people supporting Trump, for a lot of people in his administration who have financial interests, for obviously the oil and gas companies, he's trying to get on board. But I don't think money is even Trump's prior, and this is maybe an unpopular opinion. I think the primary reason Trump is doing this is that he wants, number one, to show everybody, look, I did what Bush did, but it worked, I did it better. And number two, he wants to show everybody. Look, I did what Obama did and took out a big bad guy. Right. That's where they're trying to craft Maduro as this major enemy of the United States, this architect of the opiate crisis, this guy who's worse than bin Laden in a lot of ways, because Trump is still jealous of the fact that. That Obama got to take out bin Laden. Right. As he sees it, and he wants his own version of that. Trump is doing this, I think, primarily for vanity purposes. Right. I know that seems shallow and silly, but I really think that's most of what's going on for him. And I think if the end result of this is that things in Venezuela more or less continue the way they were before, he will call it a win, and a lot of people might believe him. And I don't know, it doesn't even necessarily matter if any money actually comes into the United States over this. They'll just lie about it. You know, some individual Americans will make money, and I think that'll probably be enough for Trump to feel like he got a win and for his PR apparatus to notch this up as a win. And I think that's all he really cares about. And so I do think it's worth really hitting how criminal this is and how harmful this is. But ultimately, what's going to determine whether or not Americans see this as a calamity or not is how well this all works out in the long run. And that's a really tough thing to even think about, because you don't want it to work well, because it will embolden Trump to keep doing this and the global harm will be greater. On the other hand, I don't want civil life in Venezuela to collapse. Right. So it's tough.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Yeah.

[James Stout]

I don't want people to suffer anymore. And just around the world, too, when, like, I heard Min Aung Hwang called a meeting in Myanmar when he heard about this because he was worried, like, the paranoia of dictators is about to go through the ceiling, and that's going to result in people being tortured and killed.

[Robert Evans]

It's going to result in people torture, and it's going to result in more countries seeking to get nuclear weapons because they will accurately recognize that that is the only security anyone has. It is understated how much more dangerous what Bush did in Iraq made the world because of how it's made different leaders around the world think about the possession of nuclear weapons. Right. Iran is fundamentally right in its calculus that getting a nuke will make the regime safer because it might be the only thing that can protect them now. Things in Iran are not looking very stable right now either. Again, this is another situation where just decades of protest and the weakness of the regime might wind up working in Trump's favor because things are looking pretty gnarly for the Iranian regime right now. And maybe Trump. Trump has made some statements since kidnapping Maduro about going into Iran. They very well may do that, but they also may not need to.

[James Stout]

Yeah. There's some OSINT suggesting that they at least have preparations in place for doing something in Iran.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Which may be all they need to do. Right. To obviously move things to point towards Iran.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

That is an action in itself.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. That really. I mean, there's a lot that worries me there. But. But I think they're going to keep fucking around like this as long as they feel like it will benefit them. And right now this feels like a win to them.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this is going to function like a drug. They're going to start looking for another hit as soon as the high from this fades.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And as soon as they need a domestic distraction.

[Robert Evans]

Right. A lot of this stuff and the evidence we have so far suggests that people fucking hate this and we'll probably keep hating this, but it depends on whether or not this all fades out. And if the news is coverage, actually maybe it worked. Right. Which will probably be based on really dogshit journalism.

[James Stout]

The Washington Post did a preferential op ed already, I think.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, good. Yeah. I'm glad they're helping out our democracy. Die in darkness. They're going to keep chasing this high and it will wind up collapsing on them eventually. The question is how many countries will have to pay the price beforehand and how much worse will things get in the United States, obviously.

[James Stout]

Yeah. What will the price be? Right when they lose higher SFT or.

[Robert Evans]

Right when Delta Force gets wiped out, when we have a bunch of helicopters down, a bunch of Americans captured, What does Trump do then? Do we get a panicked. This is kind of where I see like, the potential, the scary potential for something like a nuclear January six, where, like, do we get a panic response that leads to a horrific loss of life? Because Trump sees himself as being embarrassed. Oh, my God, they killed a whole team. Like, I have no option but to kill a shitload of people to distract from the fact that I failed here. Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That does really concern me, too.

[James Stout]

Yeah. If that happens, you know, the response, even if it's not nuclear. Right. Even if it's just conventional weapons on cities.

[Robert Evans]

Right, right, right. And yeah, I Shouldn't even bring up the nuclear thing. But, like, it does concern me.

[James Stout]

Dude has a nuclear football. Right. Like, he's the one who gets the choice now.

[Robert Evans]

Right. This is going to just get more. This is going to become integr. Integral to his sense of, like, self worth. That, like, no, I did this.

[James Stout]

And it worked in the conquering era.

[Robert Evans]

And if all his guys get wiped out, failing at one of these things, that's not going to go well for anybody.

[James Stout]

No, it's not.

[Robert Evans]

We'll have a fun couple hours on Twitter, but it's going to be really bad, really fast.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I'm going to talk very briefly about a couple of implications domestically.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[James Stout]

The main one is that the DOJ has already filed for an extension in the case which Judge Boasberg is overseeing regarding the Alien Enemies Act. Right.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

What this will mean for Venezuelan nationals in the United States. It is unlikely that this will mean something good. Right. It is unlikely that they will have a country that they would want to return to. And it is possible that it's going to be used to force them to return to it anyway. To a country which is extremely paranoid about US Spies, because someone in Maduro's very close entourage leaked the entire plan that Trump. Many presidents would not have said this to the press, but Trump did, that they had the entire plan for his house and that they built a replica of it to include. They knew he had a safe room. They knew it was steel, and they knew they could cut into it with cutting torches. Someone leaked that information. That means that people coming back from the United States are going to be under scrutiny. Right. And that is not good for them. And I don't see this regime stopping sending people back because they're not an alien enemy anymore. I don't see that. And I can see the regime, if it does manage to install Rodriguez as something of a puppet, leaning on Rodriguez to accept people removed from the United States. Right. That is extremely concerning. And it's not being reported on. Right. Because migrants are not front and center where a lot of American newspapers think about things. But I think for those people, this is petrifying. Right. The country that you came to to be safe is now bombing the country that you came from. It's also trying to kick you out. Like, you are stuck in the middle of this game and all you wanted was a place to raise your kids where they might have a fair crack at a decent life. It's heartbreaking for those people. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I think that's probably all we've Got to say, for now, I mean, I guess I'll address briefly because people have asked, do you see this as like an Anschluss, you know, the annexation of Austria or of Czechoslovakia of that kind of moment, or is this more like, like the invasion of Poland? And I guess my answer is it's its own thing. It doesn't directly graph on any of those other than that where it does very directly graph. And what is relevant in comparing it to is what happened to the Nazis and to Hitler personally. As they started seeing success, taking things militarily, they made some big gambles that were not known. One thing that gets under discussed when talking about what Germany was doing in that period of time is how many military leaders within Germany thought that the annexation of particularly Czechoslovakia was a horrible idea because in a head to head fight, it was not clear whatsoever that the Wehrmacht could defeat the Czech military and their defenses. That was very much in debate. And a lot of Hitler's advisors thought it was a terrible idea because they didn't think they could win. And it wound up not really being a factor because everyone caved and nobody wanted to fight. Which is the problem that we're having right now, right, is that nobody actually wants to confront these people. The Democrats are hemming and a hawing whether or not they'll try for impeachment again or you know, there's this, this fear of actually directly confronting these people that is part of what's emboldening them to keep trying shit like this. And what's very relevant to the Nazis is that if this works, and we're talking if this works not in the long run, because they're not gonna wait 20 years to see if this was a good idea. They're gonna wait a couple of weeks, you know, maybe a few months. And if it seems like, hey, it worked, the Venezuela's not falling apart, you know, we actually got what we think is good PR out of it. They'll try again and they'll try again. And the Nazis tried again and again until they started making checks that their asses couldn't cash. Right? And that is the thing that's relevant because that is something all fascists have in common, is this confidence that gets them very far in a lot of ways. Because if they're willing to gamble and the other people aren't willing to confront them or fight or gamble themselves, then they'll win by default. But when that stops and people start confronting them, the shortcomings of the state that they've built and of the militaries that they built become increasingly evident. And I do think, think that's the road that we're on. I don't know where it'll end. I don't know if, you know, Trump could die of a heart attack tomorrow, and maybe whoever takes over will be more cautious. I don't know what's going to happen, but I know that we've started down that road.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And that's not a good thing.

[Robert Evans]

Nope.

[James Stout]

I guess we should just say, because people will be incredibly annoying on the Internet. Like, saying that it is illegal and wrong to kidnap Maduro does not mean that we think Maduro is great. Just in the same way that saying the Iraq war is wrong doesn't mean we love Saddam Hussein. Like, no two things can be bad. People who tell you otherwise, you grow up.

[Robert Evans]

Like I said at the start, I don't think you have to. I don't think anyone owes you. And if someone is saying, like, hey, you have to answer for these bad things Maduro did when critiquing the US for this, I think that's bullshit and I think you should tell them to fuck off. Right.

[James Stout]

It's not the issue at stake here.

[Robert Evans]

Maduro's personal qualities are irrelevant, as is always the case with this. What we're doing is illegal and bad. Sweet baby Jiminy Christmas. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's normally about all of the sad and horrifying and violent and dangerous and sometimes inspiring things happening around the world. But this week, well, today is about something different. Today we're talking about ces. Finally, for those of you who don't know or who are new to the show, every year in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bunch of the world's big tech companies come together for the Consumer Electronics show, where they present their visions for the future, the new products that will be coming out that year and stuff that will be coming out in years to come that's less developed. And the whole industry talks about itself. And Garrison and I show up and largely just kind of let it wash over us like a. Like a. A warming tide of lukewarm garbage water. You know, it's very lukewarm, usually very lukewarm. And it smells like someone did not clean their fridge out often enough before putting it into the trash.

[Garrison Davis]

That was the feeling at Showstoppers tonight.

[Robert Evans]

The.

[Garrison Davis]

The media only presentation on the finest products of ces.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Why don't we start? So, I mean, there's two different things that are interesting about ces, broadly. One of them is people Bring gadgets that are not out yet that will be coming out this year or coming out soon, and you can actually test them and use them and see how technology is progressing. And that can be kind of fun. The downside of that is that people also bring gadgets that are crap. Right. Some guy has a vision for a way to, like, you know, there's not a good way for blind people to use the pogo stick while watching Netflix. And so I have created this product. Right. Or, like, there's not a good way for children to test their blood alcohol level before getting behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. And I have. I have invented the device to make it pop. Things that, like, have no. No conceivable audience or utilization. Right. That's the other side of the gadget part of ces. And then outside of that, you get a hint at, like, there's all these panels where people from the industry come to talk about the major trends in technology, how things are developing, and what they see as the future. And so there's both. Here's what they're going to try to sell us, and here's the devices that might change the way we live. And also here's how a bunch of the richest, sometimes craziest people in the country are talking about the future. Those are the two things that happen at Cesar and Garrison. You wanted to talk about the first.

[Garrison Davis]

The gadgets.

[Robert Evans]

The gadgets.

[Garrison Davis]

The gadgets. 1.

[Robert Evans]

Because you went to the Gadget show tonight. I spent my entire day in panels.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. I mean, I did mostly panels in the day. I didn't really get to walk the show floor on the first day, which is Tuesday. So instead of doing the show floor, I went to Showstoppers at the Bellagio, which is this presentation of usually. Usually a collection of gadgets that have won CES Innovation Awards, which are on display for journalists and media. You can talk to the people behind them. Showstoppers this year was a little different. It took place in a different venue hall. It was smaller than the past few Showstoppers years, and I would say about 40% of it was smart glasses.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's usually a big product that is like, this product category is the hot thing this year.

[Garrison Davis]

We've tried on smart glasses every year.

[Robert Evans]

That's what's weird about it, is that they've always had them.

[Garrison Davis]

Every year that we've been doing this, we've done smart glasses, and they've always kind of been the same. Maybe the resolution on, like, the text a little better, couple extra features like the glasses get a little bit smaller. And now this year, yeah, the glasses were generally smaller, but for all practical purposes function about the same. But There was about 10 different smart glasses. Most of them could do some kind of like transcription service, could have some kind of heads up display. One of them was just audio only. It was like an audio, audio transcription. Like, like it listens to someone else speaking in, in this case Chinese. And it would translate to me.

[Robert Evans]

To American.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, yeah, it would translate to American via sound. It had, it had speakers in like the actual, you know, like the arm of the glasses. Yeah, the delay was long enough that it was, you couldn't really keep a conversation up at normal speed.

[Robert Evans]

It would be ideal. It would be for like unlike the.

[Garrison Davis]

Visual translations, which you can actually kind of just talk in real time. But the audio only ones were like a smaller profile. The visual ones weren't necessarily bulkier, but. But you can definitely see that there's more hardware inside them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The thing that I have seen this year, which is newer, maybe not totally new, but incorporating smart glasses technology into other types of eyewear. So like swim goggles, ski goggles, like outdoor sports stuff. So if you're, you know, swimming or you're diving and you can't really use your phone underwater, you have, there's, there's a heads up, there's a heads up display in like your, like scuba goggles. So that's a newish thing that I've seen. I've seen like, you know, biking glasses, skiing, snowboarding. So that's kind of one slight change. But besides that, it's basically five different smart glasses which are for all practical purposes identical to each other.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, and that I think is kind of one of the things that I've watched happen over the 15 years almost that I've been going to CES or cess, whichever is more accurate, which is, you know, when I first started coming, the smartphone era was new and then we had like the tablet era after that. And so there was a lot of like, you would have dozens of manufacturers making different devices and every year they were very different capability. For the first few years, smartphones were out advanced very rapidly and that was really exciting. And the convention really thrived on that as the number of new device categories have winnowed down. And the difference, like, I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore. Neither is anyone I know.

[Garrison Davis]

Cause it's like, no, usually I'm actually kind of more sad.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. The only thing that's exciting is like, well, my Old phone was literally not working anymore. Yeah, I have a phone that works.

[Garrison Davis]

The battery has been completely destroyed.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, the battery works now or whatever. But it's not like the cameras are not see changes better. Generally nothing is like you're not getting a lot more out of it than you used to. And the same is true of like laptops, I mean graphics cards just because of the data center crunch. Like that's not nearly as exciting a technology category for consumers as it used to be. So. So this stuff is just like less, less sexy and yeah, it just kind of shows that we're at a point where kind of one of the only spaces where they are still making improvements and where there's a lot of competition in the market is smart glasses.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I mean that's like the wearables category in general which was mentioned. I went to the Consumer Technology association like keynote panel this morning, which is the group that puts on CES and they mentioned only, only a few products but. But one of them were, were smart glasses. And then also like wearables in general, like AI powered wearables and how like wearable technology, you know, like smart watches, rings, necklaces, whatever, are going to make like a big comeback now that now that AI is a lot, is a lot more intelligent than it used to be. In particular at the ces, like big keynote Tuesday morning, you mentioned a Persona, Smart Tutor Glasses. Glasses to help you, you know, while learning. I haven't been able to check out the product yet, but they kind of remind me of some of the concept behind those cluly glasses that you may have seen on social media. The glasses that help you like cheat.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, but also somebody who's like we should embrace people cheating and really cheat.

[Garrison Davis]

Just in a conversation.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

It seems like that product isn't necessarily as real as what the video might make it out to be.

[Robert Evans]

The people whose company was based on lying didn't make a real product.

[Garrison Davis]

But while walking through Eureka park today, it's funny, I also saw this, this product in one of like the national pavilions. I think it was the one of like the Japan Tech Pavilions. This AI powered tool to help to help prevent cheating while test taking. So you have AI powered tools that will monitor you to make sure you're not cheating while you use an AI powered tool to help cheat at the same time.

[Robert Evans]

Better at school.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, that's kind of just a good representation of kind of where, where this whole industry is at at the moment.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In some ways I think, you know, this is probably what year Three of AI being, you know, the big thing, whether that's on wearables, you know, whether that's smart glasses, whether that's, you know, a generative AI, whether that's AI, you know, in.

[Robert Evans]

But it's many other forms.

[Garrison Davis]

But it's been like, been like, you know, the additive property for, for everything. And I, Some of that might be starting to kind of tucker out or at least the, They've taken the victory lap and there's. There's a certain, like, you know, like cultural victory that they're resting on where they're, they're starting to put some of their eggs in other baskets now, which certainly wasn't the case last year.

[Robert Evans]

No. And I, I got a sense I, I attended six panels today.

[Garrison Davis]

Congratulations.

[Robert Evans]

It was a mix of like, advertising people, entertainment, associated people, some journalism associated people and, and robotics. People in robotics talking about a lot.

[Garrison Davis]

Of, A lot of robotics.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. What they saw as the future of AI, and there was a lot of focus first on AI is not going to be taking jobs as much as it's going to be augmenting jobs. Right. Although you would get the occasional person be like, AI is going to take a lot of jobs.

[Garrison Davis]

I got people saying that it's only going to take jobs if you don't know how to incorporate AI into your workflow.

[Robert Evans]

And that's the argument I saw at the moment.

[Garrison Davis]

Right now, if you're not using AI, you're at greater risk of you losing your AI.

[Robert Evans]

So you better get on it right.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, start learning it.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And then the other thing is, there was a lot of like, it's there to help or take away unpleasant tasks from workers, but really emphasizing the it's not your enemy thing. You don't need to be scared. And I had quoted like half of these panels, people would quote statistics about low user trust in AI and the fact that people are generally not super comfortable with this technology, even if they use it in parts of their work life. Right. Or daily life. And so what I saw from that, what I interpret from that, is that there is internal concern that like, that's one of the things that could screw the pooch on this, is that people are not really sure they like this stuff. And so there's this impulse to kind of COVID the softer and fuzzier sides of it that I didn't see in previous years. And I think is really focusing on this is just making things you already like better as opposed to this is a revolution that's completely changing lives. Life.

[Garrison Davis]

And to the extent where AI was framed as revolutionary, it was specifically trying to ground it in like physical applications, as opposed to this more general kind of like spectral like, AI hype that we've seen the past few years, which specifically around generative AI, right, where it's like this kind of vague thing that we gesture to. There's more specific applications for AI being talked about right now. And they talked about like AI assisted manufacturing simulations, like digital twins of factories.

[Robert Evans]

Shipyards, power plants, lot of digital twin talk.

[Garrison Davis]

Building, you know, digital replicas of like everything, you know, of like society to like run these simulations to both make AIs smarter, to generate new solutions outside of the limitations of a language model and also find, you know, potential problems in, you know, when you build these things physically.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that was something that was brought up during the robotics panel, which was talking about how to like, like take the machine learning technology and other things that are generally grouped under AI and apply it in the physical world.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, manufacturing. I've heard so much in just one day. I've heard the word manufacturing more today than I have.

[Robert Evans]

It's been more focused almost in every.

[Garrison Davis]

CES I've been to previously combined and.

[Robert Evans]

I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than on consumer technology because there's not that much new to give the consumer. Right. And they are also, I think, starting to recognize that you can get people using ChatGPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it. And the data backs this up. People are mostly using it at work and for school and Gen Z a lot there. There's a lot of people who are doing like, their research on like what to buy and whatnot through using ChatGPT. But there's not a lot that you can sell people in CES because it's an app and there's not a ton of different devices for it. People are using it on their phone, they're using it on their computer. But like, none of the phones and computers are markedly better at using ChatGPT or another, you know, chatbot thing than any of the others. So there's not a lot that's sexy in just that at ces. So I think there I, I have seen this conscience reforming around people in manufacturing and people who are like, thinking of the concerns of like, I, I have a pair like an exoskeleton to test this week that's seeing a lot of its business in folks who are like doing like Amazon type jobs, right? Loading and unloading packages and whatnot all day long, you know, and I do See a conscious reforming there, which I think is kind of evidence of like, there's almost an admission that, like, yeah, we don't really have that much to hand consumers anymore on a yearly basis.

[Garrison Davis]

Speaking of handing things to consumers, ads.

[Robert Evans]

So the first panel I went to of the day was about the funnel, which, as I understand it, is just kind of like the way in which people have traditionally engaged with media, gotten advertised to and then gone to stores and bought stuff like the funnel by which you make a customer and how that's been completely blown up now.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

And AI is like a further massive disruption because people are not like. People are increasingly, especially very young people, which was pointed out in a number of. These are like buying stuff that a chatbot recommends them. Right. And so a lot of marketing is being seen as being done through. How do you get the chatbot to talk about you a certain way? What is the SEO of getting chatgpt?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Like, right.

[Garrison Davis]

There's a lot of talk as someone who's not a regular chatbot user, which I'm sure most people here would chastise me for. For not maximizing my. Of productivity.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've been meaning to get onto you for that, Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

But as someone who's not. Who's not a regular chatbot user, I've never thought of that before. Yeah. I mean, I know people use these chatbots as a replacement for search engines, but the idea of, like, trying to, you know, evaluate purchases is. I mean, I guess that makes sense now, but I've never put that together.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And the only. Because there was a lot of talking about, like, how AI is helping advertisers, how it's making advertisements, how like, it's helping in the process of that. And there was a focus in all the panels about that on how, like, well, it's just augmenting the humans. But the only specific examples given were the McDonald's and Coca Cola. AI generated ads which were both disastrous. I mean, the McDonald's one in the Netherlands got removed.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. They so badly, they withdrew the ad because it was so ugly to look at.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. Coke did do it twice, so maybe they consider it a win. But everything I saw was very negative. I didn't see a lot of positive feedback on Coca Cola vis a vis their weird AI holidays are coming in.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like people who don't know it's AI think feel very neutral about it. People that do know it's AI, I think generally have negative reactions.

[Robert Evans]

I think if you look at it, it's pretty clear.

[Garrison Davis]

But anyway, I mean less clear if maybe you're like a 60 year old who watches Law and Order on just.

[Robert Evans]

Coming on in between stuff and that's all good enough.

[Garrison Davis]

Grandpa don't got Internet, right? Yeah, he doesn't know.

[Robert Evans]

He might notice some of those fucking polar bears have the wrong number of paws. But yeah, so there was some talk of that. And the only specific example they gave of an AI enhanced strategy was Allegra. The people who own like the medicine had like a new non drowsy formula or they just wanted to highlight that it was non drowsy. So they basically had a bunch of like seeded the stuff that chatbot that like OpenAI or that chatbots were scraping.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

With content about how Allegra makes it is non drowsy and about how like competing similar medications make you drowsy.

[James Stout]

I mean, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So that it would get mentioned in like, like when people searched about and they talked about. Yeah they called it like model hacking I think was the exact term used.

[Garrison Davis]

This is interesting.

[Robert Evans]

That was the only specific example that I got how any of this works too. Like everyone else was just talking in vague terms about like and we've really seen our team's creativity soar or whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

That's interesting. No, because like the, the way that I probably use or exposed to AI the most is like on like Google Search now which has, you know, it's, it's like AI like summary instead of like actual search results. But those are all based on like.

[Robert Evans]

But you can type minus AI in with the search results if you want to cut that stuff out.

[Garrison Davis]

But those AI results are you know, pulling from certain like articles which, which they'll link to. So I mean, yeah, I guess if I was trying to design it like an AI marketing strategy, I would, I would either you know, pay publications to mention my product in more articles or find. Find out, find other ways to, to influence mentions of, of my product in like written media that then would be used as like training data for AI. And yeah, I guess there can be a whole, you know, search engine optimization model hacking is I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Model optimization or yeah like product optimization for a model. I guess that's funny. But yeah, like the. So the first talk that I went to was about the funnel or whatever and one of the people speaking there was the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Intuit IT, which is the company that owns TurboTax. Right. Like it's one of the big we do your taxes companies out there. And also A lobbyer in terms of stopping any sort of reform that would make it so that you don't need.

[James Stout]

To do your own tab tax.

[Garrison Davis]

Other countries do credit score monitoring, a.

[Robert Evans]

Whole bunch of stuff, all that kind of stuff. So this, this guy, the CMO of the company, Thomas Rennie's was part of this, the end of the funnel speech and he made a couple of comments that I took note of. One is product is brand and brand is product, full stop. So the more people you can make experience your product, that's the best selling point in value of course. Right. Which it was just interesting to me in terms of the Intuit as a company that has lobbied to make it impossible for like any reform that would allow people to not need a third party to do their, their taxes. But also this idea that like product is brand and brand is product isn't true of a lot of companies. Like if you think about like for example, like the, a lot of the different soft drinks are all owned by one company but they're fundamentally different like products and have in often cases like a different user base. And it's a very, like, it's a very tech. When your product is a concept like you can't do your own taxes cause it's a pain in the ass, but the government doesn't do it for you because we lobby to make that illegal. Like I found that interesting and it kind of got me angry at Thomas at the start of this. And I was particularly interested in one of the things he brought up, which is that he talked about the hundred million dollars that that Intuit is putting into OpenAI and they're putting this into OpenAI as part of a multi year partnership. And I want to quote from an article in the website Araptus which is discussing this exact thing that I found useful when I was formulating my question for Thomas. The contract was to embed AI models directly into QuickBooks, TurboTax and Credit Karma. The promise AI assistance that can generate invoices, provide tax estimates, recommend loans and help you make informed financial decisions. Right. That may sound like kind of like a basic move. Like what's, what's so sketchy about just integrating like an AI chatbot to make it easier to use your tax software. It can be complicated and hard to use as anyway, but kind of the necessary part of this is if you are, if you're doing this, if you're integrating all of these different tax and credit programs into an AI model, you're giving that AI model access to people's financial data. In a tremendous amount of detail. Right. And all of these AI models have a massive shared vulnerability, which is a vulnerability to something called prompt injection. Right. And that's when, for example, say someone is a customer of a tax preparer that uses one of Intuit's products to prepare taxes for its customers, and this person sends an invoice into the company that has hidden text in it that is a command to the language model that will be scraping this and uploading it to basically open up and send over a bunch of customer data to a specific source. That's a thing that you can do. It's called prompt injection. And there's not really a way to counter it. There's not like a proven comprehensive defense against this sort of thing. And so there's this massive vulnerability. And this was first brought up in an article on the website I cited a wrapped this by Chris Black, who's a security researcher and expert. And I want to read a quote from his article about this. There are no proven comprehensive defenses against prompt injection. When not if an AI powered financial tool leaks customer data through a prompt injection attack, who is liable? The company using QuickBooks? Intuit? OpenAI? The regulations weren't written for this scenario. So I decided to ask that question of Thomas being like the chief marketing officer. I figured, well, he should have some answer to what, what do you have? What sort of security measures do you have to mitigate the risk of a prompt injection attack? And who do you see as being responsible? If you are the ones providing customer data to OpenAI and their tool gets hit by a prompt injection attack, are you responsible? Is OpenAI is a third party that might be using your products? And he had no answer to this. His only answer when we were on stage was like, we're talking with OpenAI about it, which like, well, you're already in the process of, of collaborating with them.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I have a question for Thomas. I was kind of concerned when reading about Intuit assist that a OpenAI is going to have read and write access to quite a lot of financial information from users, which opens up a vulnerability for prompt injection. Right. You have the possibility that people can hide things in invoices that are then being uploaded that will cause the AI to, to provide the malicious user with financial details for individuals or corporations. And I guess my primary question here, this seems like a major liability issue when somebody's information gets rerouted to a place it's not supposed to go to a malicious actor, who's responsible? We have taken the value of integrity.

[Mia Wong]

And protecting our customer data incredibly seriously.

[Robert Evans]

Over our entire lives. That's over 40 years as a company.

[Garrison Davis]

And leading in the software space for financial services. So this is not something we're about.

[Mia Wong]

To loosen in any way in the.

[Garrison Davis]

New age of AI. In fact, it has to get even.

[Robert Evans]

More and more when we double down on protecting people's information and the security of that information.

[James Stout]

So that is something that we are already in deep conversations with open AI and how to make sure that that will be true no matter where we're.

[Robert Evans]

And when I kind of cornered him afterwards, he didn't have like his eventual follow up answer is like I don't know that kind of stuff. And like you are the chief marketing officer. Thank you again for answering my question.

[James Stout]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

Is it your question?

[Robert Evans]

I'm still really concerned about the danger of prompt injection attacks revealing financial data. And it doesn't still sound like there's an understanding of who will be liable. Is it intuit, is it open AI.

[Mia Wong]

To answer that question for you?

[James Stout]

So I mean like I can tell.

[Mia Wong]

You that we're committed to security and.

[Robert Evans]

Privacy and we are doing everything we.

[Garrison Davis]

Can to protect that and give a.

[Mia Wong]

Lot riding on, on it, as you might imagine.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yeah, every digital security expert I've talked to says it's a matter of when, not if that there is financial data revealed by these attacks. It seems like there be an understanding.

[James Stout]

I'm not going to be the expert to get into the details on that.

[Robert Evans]

Okay. Yeah. Thank you. A key part of marketing this should be being able to tell people what kind of safety precautions are being taken with their data and the fact that he didn't and clearly had never thought about any of this stuff. And I had a couple of different people come up to me afterwards and like be like wow, that was a really good question. And I was like, well why hasn't this been asked before? Like why, why is this a thing where like some guy's blogging about it and I'm asking you about it and you don't have an answer to it and you're the CEO of one of like the largest tax prep, the largest tax prep company in, in the country. Like it's just, just, it's emblematic of how careless everyone adjacent to this industry is with personal data with the safety of people and of society as a result of like what their products are doing. Like there's absolutely no consideration given to the harms of any of this shit. And it's, it's the most consistently dispiriting part of showing up at ces.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, what I got, what a fun story that is.

[Robert Evans]

All right, we're back. So one of the other things that's been a major topic on the panels I went to and is just generally a big thing at CES this year and in tech this year is agentic AI or agents, right? The idea that you have an AI that you can send off to like book a flight for you and it doesn't just like find a flight that it searches for and be like, hey, this looks good. It like actually books it for you and handles all of that. Right? This has been one of the big promises of AI, not just for like flights, but that you can have like an actual digital assistant that persistently remembers all of your shit and can book stuff for you and handle like the pain in the ass nitty gritty. If you say like, hey, I need you to find a restaurant within like this four block radius that has seven seats open at 8pm and abides by these dietary restrictions. You kind of just have to slog through figuring that out right now. And the idea is an agent can do that for you and currently none of them can. Right? This is a thing that is changing. Like the performance of different agents are changing over time. But it is still very unclear if you're not somebody who's fully bought into the Kool Aid. I'll say it's very unclear where these things will top out at. And there was a good article in Futurism recently and I want to quote from it right now. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found earlier this year that even the best performing AI agent, which was Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at the time, failed to complete real world office tasks 70% of the time. And this is. There's been a bunch of articles in the last couple of months about like, why didn't. Because 2025 was supposed to be the year of agentic AI and now they're saying, well, 2026 is going to be the year of agentic AI. Not because none of this stuff works and in fact enough does that there's a number of viable businesses in it. It's not nothing, but it does not work as well as they said it would be working right now. And it consequently has not been adopted nearly as widely as was expected even this time last year. Right. There's an article in HR Dive half of Gen Z Chat. GPT users say they view it as a coworker survey shows that cites a survey of about 8,600 full time US workers which found that about 11% of those who responded said they use ChatGPT regularly, including about 21% of Gen Z workers, which is significantly lower you can find depending on who you go to. And the stat I've seen bandied about was that like 57% of Gen Z people use ChatGPT on a daily basis for work, and more than half used it as their primary source for recommendations, like what stuff to buy. I don't know which set of numbers is accurate. There's a lot of different pollsters giving data. Right. But kind of no matter who you look at the, the evidence suggests that the, the year that was supposed to be the year of agentic AI did not turn it into a normal thing. Right. It's still lagging behind expectation. So that's kind of what we're seeing at ces is a lot of people trying to like, well, let's bring back kind of the same agentic shit we had last year, slightly improved and see if it catches on. Maybe this year it'll hit maturity. Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, no, I mean, I, we've been hearing agentic stuff every once in a while, but definitely not as much as, as last year. It's one of those like salt and pepper words that they throw in. The second batch of panels that I attended after the, the keynote, which I, I should mention as soon as I walked into the keynote at 8:30am the first thing, the very first thing I heard from Gary Shapiro, one of the heads of the Consumer technology association was a 6, 7 joke. But whether this is your first CES.

[Mia Wong]

Or your 15th or in my case, you belong here.

[Garrison Davis]

What number was that?

[Mia Wong]

60 or 70.

[Garrison Davis]

He did a 6, 7 joke already. Very first.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, wow, great, great.

[Garrison Davis]

30Am as soon as I walk in, it's because like I walked in maybe like five minutes late, but very first words. So that's, that's good, that's, that kind of sets the tone for a lot of, a lot of that panel. But then I, I went to a few panels in Eureka park about like AI governance and like how governments working, working with AI. A lot of stuff mostly about like the challenge of governments keeping up with innovation, how, you know, too much regulation restricts these companies from doing real regulation. The Secretary of State of Austria had a really good quote about how data protections inhibit IT innovation.

[Robert Evans]

One of the things that we are seeing today is that some of the.

[Garrison Davis]

People, some of the citizen have this fear about AI.

[Robert Evans]

So how do you feel it in Austria?

[Garrison Davis]

I think you mentioned it very, very well. It's all about Building trust, taking the fear, trustworthy eye, that's the most important thing. And of course data protection is very huge. But on the other side between data protection and innovation, you need to find the middle way because sometimes data protection is not good for innovation. On a similar note of the Intuit turbotax thing of data protection is mainly getting in the way of trying to actually make, make real social progress which will carry with it some degree of risk. The second one of these AI governance panels was like these EU ambassadors to, to the US from Estonia and Luxembourg talking about like Reaganomics basically for 30 minutes talking about how much they love Ronald Reagan.

[Robert Evans]

Great win Estonia. We certainly subscribe to this statement that Pitt Reagan once made that the few most horrific words in English are the ones saying that, hey, I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.

[Garrison Davis]

Specifically in trying to make sure that governments are able to keep up with technology. And in the previous panel with the Austrian Secretary of State was about the challenges of trying to convince the citizens of these countries to like adopt AI and adopt just in general like digitalization and specifically with like digital IDs and how, yeah, how there's like, you know, maybe like 20 to 30% of people who are very resistant and the challenge of like making, making sure that like this gets framed not, not as like a product or like a, like a project for technology, but as like a society wide push.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But besides that these, these panels were honestly a little bit sleepy as well as the state of the creator economy panel.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, how's it doing that?

[Garrison Davis]

I went, you know what, it's both, it's both in its adolescence but also reach maturity.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

And they said, you know, it's hard.

[Robert Evans]

Brave to pick both.

[Garrison Davis]

It's hard for two, for something to be two things at once. But in this case it is. But they, they talked about how creators are more enabled to use brand deals, including you know, brand deals enabled with like a backlog of older content. You can remove brand deals from older content, replace them with current brand deals using a new feature from YouTube.

[Robert Evans]

Great.

[Garrison Davis]

There's a guy from YouTube at the panel.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, yeah, I'm sure he was very excited.

[Garrison Davis]

But it was mostly about how, you know, new, new ways to use influencers to market your product. And that was the extent of what the creator economy really meant.

[Robert Evans]

And that's all any of these people have any idea on is like we can inject ads into AI, they trust AI so they'll buy the products or we can inject ads into influencers.

[Garrison Davis]

They Trust the influencers. That was the thing.

[Robert Evans]

Like none of these people, they dress it up with all sorts of fancy language, but it's, and most of these panels you mentioned, like, there's a lot of bullshit. Every now and then you get some like good moments or you get to like question an asshole, but it's mostly bullshit. But it's occasionally worth it. From moments like when I was on the agentic AI Cutting through the hype panel, Jay Patasol, who's the principal analyst at Forrester, started speaking and he said something beautiful. Garrison. And this is not an exact quote, but it's pretty close. We have a new audience. We are speaking to machines. We are through the looking glass. We are building content for engines. We are building websites to be scraped so that an LLM can understand what you want it to understand about your brand. Yep, yep, yep, that gets it. That's what these people see the Internet as. They see it as like everything before this was a mistake or was, was what the Internet was for, was a, a place for brands to feed information into machines that then spoon feed the information directly into customers who trust it like little lambs. That's what they want the Internet to be and that's what they believe they've gotten to. That's what AI. That's the promise of AI.

[Garrison Davis]

The, the promise of AI is that this isn't just the Internet anymore. This can actually just be the physical world as well. And this was something that was talked about during the CESCTA keynote Tuesday morning, specifically with the birth of AI wearables. Each of these wearables is able to now collect information about the physical world. And as long as you have, you know, adequate data sharing, AI is able to gain so much more knowledge about how the quote unquote real world operates. And this is going to make, you know, all of the processes of AI stronger in the future as it learns more about what this world actually is. Yeah, and beyond the, the promise of wearables to like improve someone's life, this is the real project is strengthening AI through the use of these wearables. It's not, it's not actually about the consumer experience.

[Robert Evans]

It's about providing data to this machine.

[Garrison Davis]

It's, it's this like larger, larger, very like existential thing, at least for these executives or like that. That's the thing that they are really emphasizing despite this being called the Consumer Electronic Showcase case.

[Robert Evans]

And I think again, the best thing I can give you into how fundamentally as much money as there is behind this and as Many grand words as they dress it up in how intellectually bankrupt this whole tech movement is. Is that the. The third panel that I went to, which is about AI and creativity? One of the people on it was Jesse Damasek, who works for Diageo, which is like, the company that imports all of your favorite whiskies from Europe. Right, right. Like, they sell all of the different, like, Scottish whiskeys that have to get, like, imported and sold over here. And he was talking about. They were talking about some of the specific examples they had of, like, how AI has been used in advertising campaigns. And his exact statement was, you can leverage an artist and create infinite examples of their work. By which he means you can find an artist that you like, sign a deal with them, and then have AI create infinite examples in their style. And so I came up to afterwards, and I was like, what were you specifically referring to? Like, how does this actually work as a product? And the thing that he pointed out is that they have a couple of whiskey brands that they have done. You go in and you order a bottle and it's printed on site, and it uses AI to make an example in the style of this existing artist that they like's work that's unique for you. And he said, it's been successful for them. Is it. It billion trillions of dollars? Is it $3 trillion? No, I mean, these are. These are things that, like. Yeah, I guess I can see that maybe selling some. Is it selling better than any other, like, branded whiskey than any other, like, you know, because whiskey companies, big ones will come out with, like, here's this edition every year, whatever. They'll have one special limited edition one. Is it selling better than that? We don't have that data, but it was. It's one of those. Is like, that's the idea, huh? That's like. We're talking about, like, AI is supercharging creativity and letting us, like, like, think bolder and more creatively than we've ever thought before. And there were so many lines in this fucking panel about, like, how we. We're, like, hypercharging what human beings can be and do. And, like, everyone should be really excited about what all this means for the future. One of the panelists said, my best advice for you is let a thousand flowers bloom. I'm sorry, that was in the panel right before. But anyway, it's still in all of this.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, it's all that seems.

[Robert Evans]

It's all this same kind of shit that bleeds together. And it's like, okay, what Are your ideas. Well. Well, we're having Allegra kind of lie to manipulate an engine, and we've got custom printed bottles for your whiskey.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, you know, speaking of AI unleashing creativity, the last thing I'll talk about this episode is the worst booth at Showstoppers, which this year, it's kind of impressive because.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's hard.

[Garrison Davis]

It's mostly smart glasses and, like, three different pool cleaners and then some random software stuff and then a few things we saw last year.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

The worst part, Booth. Robert, You. You write books, right?

[Robert Evans]

I have. In the past.

[Garrison Davis]

What if.

[Robert Evans]

In the future, what if I told.

[Garrison Davis]

You that you could write three books in less than 24 hours?

[Robert Evans]

God. Thank you, Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

As a writer, without using cocaine, there's no.

[Robert Evans]

Well, okay, now I'd say you're a liar.

[Garrison Davis]

That's the. A little bit harder.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, but I thought you were trying to sell me some blow. And I was going to say when we turned the mic on, off.

[Garrison Davis]

With the power of AI, you can write three books in six to 24 hours.

[Robert Evans]

Wow. That's almost as fast as Stephen King. Winnie was unco. Yeah, there you go.

[Mia Wong]

Not quite.

[Garrison Davis]

So there's this table. It was the least dividing table, definitely, in all Showstoppers because it was filled with books with. I will show you the covers here. They all look like this.

[Robert Evans]

They all. Oh, yeah, no, those. I mean, I'm seeing blue and orange.

[Garrison Davis]

It's colors.

[Robert Evans]

And black.

[Garrison Davis]

It's AI generated images.

[Robert Evans]

It's like every movie poster now in, like, palette of colors.

[Garrison Davis]

There's no art style behind it. It's very generic, and they have, like, you know, like the most generic font for the title, all in the same placement with some author's name at the bottom. They're very sleepy. You could. You can find pictures of these covers if you Google or. Or. Or Bing or, you know, maybe chat. GPT. Write three books in 24 hours. You can see. You can see the COVID Finally.

[Robert Evans]

I've always wanted to write three books, Garrison, So what this is, is.

[Garrison Davis]

Is an app that will help you write these books. It's not going to do it all for you. You still need to come up with the general idea of the story. Oh, the hard stuff and the characters.

[Robert Evans]

The difficult things.

[Garrison Davis]

The world building is always the hardest part.

[Robert Evans]

Everyone says most of the work on a book is done the first six hours. The.

[Garrison Davis]

The. The. The world building is the really hard part. The easy part is just getting all those words down.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So you need to create. Create some characters. Now. Could you just have some other AI service create these characters, maybe be. But you. You should write maybe about a thousand words, kind of like a story Bible type thing or a character. Character outline and a general direction for the story. And you. You feed that into. Into this app, and then within hours, it will generate not just one book, not just two books.

[James Stout]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

But a trilogy.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

Of books. And it's only a trilogy. You cannot generate a single book. Look, the only common trilogy.

[Robert Evans]

Look, I get it. George Lucas worked the same way. Garrison. Look, you're telling me that the greatest machine mind in history wouldn't think the same as the greatest human mind in history. I bet it'll independently create jizz music too.

[Garrison Davis]

It only comes in trilogies. And I now shall read a sample.

[Robert Evans]

Of this writing and, like, dying to read this.

[Garrison Davis]

There was maybe like five or six different books with many copies of the same book on this table. And I flipped through maybe about half reading like a random page every. You know, every like 20, 50 pages. And it. I. It was. I. It was. It was too boring that I forgot to take pictures of these pages because I was just like. It was a struggle to finish. To finish each page. But luckily, on their website, they do have some sample pages. I talked to one of the guys working at the booth, and he said that he tried this, and we're like, he found the search, and he first thought, you know, surely this can't be any good. And when he. When he generated his book, he was surprised how good the writing is. He said that he probably wouldn't win a Pulitzer or a Hugo. This is two awards that he named. Probably not, but he said it was pretty good writing. This guy was so far the most Tim Robinson character I've met at the conference.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's great.

[Garrison Davis]

So, Robert, you can pick the genre of. Of sample. We have a thriller book, a fantasy mystery, science fiction, romance, or mainstream literary fiction. What.

[Robert Evans]

What.

[Garrison Davis]

What genre do you want?

[Robert Evans]

I think I want science fiction.

[Garrison Davis]

Science fiction.

[Robert Evans]

Because I feel like there's the shortest line between parody and legitimate within sci fi.

[Garrison Davis]

All right. This is from a book called. I don't even want to say this one.

[Robert Evans]

I'm really curious now.

[Garrison Davis]

Palimpsit Orbit is what I'm gonna say.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, my God. They're starting to be Arthur C. Clarke.

[Garrison Davis]

It's called the Palimpset. Orbit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Chapter one, maybe.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know. Desert signals. Morrow woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and a pulse in her temples that felt one notch shy of a hangover. The ceiling above her was low and white, edged with soft vents. A monitor over the bed scrolled green numbers in a stylized outline of her lungs. Thin air, she remembered. 5,000 meters, the Atacama sky somewhere above concrete and glass. Good morning, Dr. Ellison. A calm baritone. How's the head? She turned toward the voice. A man in the doorway wore a slate blue clinic jumper and a badge that caught the desert light leaking through the polarized glass. Dark curls threaded with gray laugh lines that didn't quite match the tiredness around his eyes.

[Robert Evans]

That's him, man.

[Garrison Davis]

You good?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

You want me to keep going?

[Robert Evans]

I. You know, it's. It's. Again, it's like the. It's an imitation of, like, a story. Like it's a scene, and it's a scene with details to describe people. But there's not like you would. Ideally, I would have something of an idea of, like, what the thrust of the story is going to be like. For example, Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in a house under a hill or something like that. Forget the exact wording of that. But, like, you know, it makes sense. It sounds like. It sounds remarkably, like, bad. No, I don't want to insult NaNoWriMo writers that much. It sounds like a story that was generated based on a belief that, like. Well, if we can just like, describe enough stuff and use enough words to describe a scene, then that counts as plot.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, and a character, which we don't have any of yet, either.

[Garrison Davis]

All of it was this very generic, empty, like, stuff that's very, very common in. If you ever have to read through a lot of, like, AI writing, whether for work or let's say, you know, you work in a college, so you have students submitting this stuff, or you for some reason are online and you feel obligated to look at the worst parts of the world. Like what me and Robert do sometimes. This all feels very familiar. I'll read one other, like, paragraph from a different book, a thriller called the Helix Files.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, good.

[Garrison Davis]

Obviously part of a trilogy, so who knows where these stories go over the course of three books. Quote the car heater had died 10 minutes ago. Cold leaked through the floorboards into Helix's boots. Outside the eastern block industrial belt slid past in gray slabs and rusted steel, wet concrete, period diesel, period. A stray dog nosing trash heap beside the road, fur slick with drizzle. So it's. It's something that. Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A lot of this sort of like, quick, punchy sentences are common in AI writing at the moment Wet concrete, you know, with a period.

[Robert Evans]

But like. No, no.

[Garrison Davis]

A lot of this type of stuff, you. You see, you. You see in AI writing, you have a lot of.

[Robert Evans]

A lot. A lot of easier than character and plot.

[Garrison Davis]

A lot. A lot of like em dash sentences. As I was flipping through these books, I was like, okay, yeah, like, I see what they're doing.

[Robert Evans]

I see what. Yeah, but.

[Garrison Davis]

But now if. If you want to write a quote, unquote, write a trilogy of books, you can pay the money and. And within six hours, you will have a trilogy.

[Robert Evans]

So that's impressive.

[Garrison Davis]

What really makes me feel optimistic about CES is the way that creativity is being democratized, because it used to be that no ordinary person could write a book.

[Robert Evans]

You had to have a story and be some sort of freak at Oxford.

[Garrison Davis]

Maybe like a. You need like a pencil, maybe a keyboard.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Impossible barriers.

[Garrison Davis]

It's not possible. And now, luckily, through AI, as long as you have, you know, money to pay a subscription service and a computer.

[Robert Evans]

And VC fundraising and subsidizing of these.

[Garrison Davis]

Service, ideally some VC cash.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Then you too can be an author of a trilogy.

[Robert Evans]

Well, that's my plan for the future, I guess. I want to end by talking about the second to the last panel that I sat through, which was at the AI house and was, I think, yet again, this was another one that was about. They were largely thinking about ethics in this one. Like AI and ethics and like what that actually means. And Eric Pace, who on the slide, they just said he works at Company, but it's reassuring. Yeah, reassuring. He works at Cox Media, which is like a big media company. Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

Based in Georgia.

[Robert Evans]

And he had a couple statements that were interesting to me. He had one where he said that it's kind of incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how and what sources and what AI is they trust and why and figure that out. And I think what I inferred was that, like, because it's not gonna get done by anyone else, and it kind of became clear to me later, I think he also doesn't want anyone else to do it. He wants this to be an individual project where you have to kind of figure that out for yourself. I was kind of unsure as to whether he was the evil or just the pragmatic version of this, because the pragmatic version is like, literally no one's gonna restrict this stuff. You just have to try to get by. Right. Which is maybe accurate. But there was a really interesting interaction on this panel. One of the other people there was Dr. Martin Clancy, who was an Irish academic and a musician, who was on the panel again to talk about creativity and ethics and made a comment that I found was really interesting. And I don't know, I wouldn't say I agree or disagree with it, but I found it really interesting where he was like, actually, I'm not at all concerned comparatively about having an AI give me medical advice. I'm deeply concerned about letting an AI recommend music or movies to me, which I found a really interesting attitude and kind of a thought provoking one.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it is interesting.

[Robert Evans]

Which was immediately spoiled by Eric Pace going like, well, I don't see why anyone would have an issue with an AI doctor. Doctors get things wrong all the time. And then he just, like, let that statement sit.

[Garrison Davis]

I have.

[Robert Evans]

Chris, don't.

[Garrison Davis]

I have heard this at CES before.

[Robert Evans]

And doctors AIs have a lot more data. And they ended it by saying because everyone asked, like, what were their big wins of the year? And his big win was that his wife hated ChatGPT and didn't want to use it, and he convinced her to use it to plan their vacation. It kind of sounded like he bullied her into it, but that was his big win for the year. I didn't like him.

[Garrison Davis]

My win is I got to neg my wife.

[Robert Evans]

I got to neg my wife into using a chatbot to plan our special time vacationing together because we're not creative enough to figure out how to go on a fucking trip.

[Garrison Davis]

Hashtag aiwin.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus. I don't know. Anyway, I think that's good for episode one from ces. Yes, come back next week where we'll have more or listen to Better Offline, where Ed will have just a shocking amount of content from a lot of the relatively few and constantly shrinking stable of sane people reporting on technology.

[Garrison Davis]

See you next week. This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, Our usual weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Sophie Lichterman. This episode, we're covering the events from the end of December to the first week of January.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, and the events are not good.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Did not start off to a slow start whatsoever. Did not ease into the new year year.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, this might be the worst, just the worst first week of a year I can remember. And I remember 2020.

[James Stout]

Worst year ever, potentially. MIA.

[Mia Wong]

I long for the halcyon days in which 2020 was the worst year we'd ever experienced.

[James Stout]

I started 2020, cycling around Rwanda and I had a Great start to 2020. This has not been a great start though.

[Mia Wong]

No. Yeah. Let's talk about the event that happened several hours before we started recording this. We were recording this again on Wednesday, January 7th. So I don't think there's going to be any new information about this. But yeah. Hours before we started recording, ICE shot and killed a woman in her car at a routine anti ICE action in Minneapolis. From the videos, these protests are identical to thousands of other small scale protests against ICE raids where pissed off locals blow whistles and scream at the ICE agents who carry off their friends and family in the dead of night. The video shows ICE agents approaching a stopped car. One agent tries to open the front car door screaming get the fuck out. While another walks in front of the car as it backs up to pull away from the scene. As the vehicle pulls forward to drive away, the ICE agent pulls out his gun and shoots the driver. This is the agent's immediate response. There is no verbal warning. He simply pulls out the gun and shoots. There are videos out there you will see. I have seen three angles of it so far. The videos are graphic and gut wrenching as we'll get into in a second. So be warned, if you are trying to watch them, you are just going to see ICE murder a woman. The agent, I can fairly definitively say was in absolutely no danger. Again, he simply steps aside from the slow moving vehicle. He has enough time to take a shot and then step aside and take two more shots. The video is just heart wrenching. The closest angle we have, the woman recording the video is screaming no. As the agent pulls out his gun and shoots. There's another video that shows there was a passenger inside of the van and it just shows her sitting on the ground sobbing and saying, they killed my wife. I don't know what to do. It is one of the most heart wrenching things I have ever seen. Having watched the videos of both, it is eerily similar to ice's murder of Silvero Villegas Gonzalez in Chicago in September, who was also killed while attempting to drive away from ICE agents and who the DHS has likewise accused of committing acts of domestic terrorism by attempting to ram agents. It is clear from both videos that that is not what was going on. Both these people were simply trying to pull away from the ICE agents. The other shooting that, this is very similar to that I think has been getting more press comparisons. Even though in terms of what actually happens in, in the video that we have, I think it's closer to the actual murder. But it is also very, very similar to an incident in Chicago last year where Border Patrol agents hunted and then shot Mary Mar Martinez, who thankfully survived but was charged by the federal government for domestic terrorism. A case which. Which thankfully completely collapsed after, among other things, the contents of a group chat were released in which Charles Exum, who's the agent who shot her, was bragging about shooting the woman in Chicago. So that's, I think, a valuable insight into the mindset of these people is that when one of these went to trial, we got a group chat where the agent who shot a different woman in a very similar situation was bragging about it. In the immediate wake of this Trump post on True Social that the driver in Minneapolis, quote, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer who seems to have shot her in self defense, end quote. And then he then links to a video which is a bad angle of the shooting that also does not show what he claims at all because he is simply from the video footage we have available. This is simply a lie.

[James Stout]

Yeah. After the person was shot, their vehicle continued moving forward and struck a parked car. That is not unusual in the case when someone is shot driving a vehicle. Right. Like you slump forward. You slump forward onto the pedals.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. There's two things I want to emphasize here. One is that the DHS always releases statements. This is. This is the third shooting like this that we've had since these massive immigration raids began. Every single time, they release a statement where they accuse the driver of intentionally attempting to ram the agent. It has never been true. We have seen three attempts of this. We have seen the videos and three attempts of this. It has been false every single time. Major media outlets continue to just post the statements without any of the context that these people have been lying about this every single time. And the second thing that I want to emphasize about this is how normal of a protest this was. This is just a completely ordinary ICE action. It looks like every other anti ICE action I have ever seen. It wasn't a particularly large one. It was just a group of people who were on the street. In the video where the woman is sobbing about her wife, she says that they pulled up to film the ICE agents.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. It's heart wrenching. There have been lots of protests. Greg Bevino, whose influential Border Patrol officer we have have talked about many times on the show, was at the scene. And it's also worth noting this comes within 24 hours of the White House announcing their giant operation in Minneapolis to deploy 2,000 federal agents.

[Garrison Davis]

This was specifically a new surge that started on Tuesday, January 6th. And literally less than 24 hours after the surge, ICE killed a woman.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

The thing I want to end on in the. Of the immediate analysis before we talk a bit about the protests that have been happening is that absolutely hauntingly, today's murder took place less than a mile away from where police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd Jesus. Which is. Yeah. It is as clear a demonstration of the continuity of the violence of the American state as can possibly be produced. Yeah. And. And I think the other pattern that we've seen specifically in these protests is pulling weapons on people constantly, even more so than normal police would. And I remember a lot of people I've talked to in Chicago, one of the things that they said is that, yeah, they're eventually going to shoot someone and they've now shot a third person in the course of these operations. And presumably as long as they're allowed to continue, they will probably shoot more people. Because one of the things that's best apparent from this video is that this is the sort of muscle memory reaction that they have to being in front of a car that's moving towards them. There's no thinking, there's no thought. They just pull out the gun and shoot.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, he's shooting the same time. He's moving sideways out of the way of the car. He just as easily could have not fired and it would have had the same result. He just chose to fire.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

A little over an hour after the shooting, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis gave a press conference where he said this to ice.

[Mia Wong]

There's little I can say again that'll make this situation better.

[James Stout]

But I do have a message for.

[Robert Evans]

Our community, for our city, and I.

[Mia Wong]

Have a message for ICE to ice.

[James Stout]

Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.

[Mia Wong]

We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of.

[James Stout]

Safety, and you are.

[Mia Wong]

Are doing exactly the opposite.

[James Stout]

People are being hurt.

[Mia Wong]

Families are being ripped apart. Long term, Minneapolis residents that have contributed.

[Robert Evans]

So greatly to our city, to our.

[Mia Wong]

Culture, to our economy are being terrorized.

[Robert Evans]

And now somebody is dead.

[Mia Wong]

That's on you. And it's also on you to leave.

[James Stout]

It's on you to. To make sure that further damage, further.

[Mia Wong]

Loss of life and injury is not done. We're going to be working towards justice.

[James Stout]

As quickly as we possibly can right now.

[Mia Wong]

And justice is what we've all got to get. Fray, I think, is just. Is reflecting the sentiments of the city right now. There are immediate protests in, I mean, within minutes of the shooting, there were people showing up. Up protests have been intensifying.

[Garrison Davis]

Crowds got tear gassed like 30 minutes after the shooting.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, and Bovino is, there are pictures of him on scene while these protests are sort of ramping up. So we will see what happens in Minneapolis in the coming days.

[Garrison Davis]

Solidarity protests have already been announced in Portland and Philadelphia and I'm sure more cities will follow in the coming hours.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah. We'll give an update next week if more information becomes available. I think the events themselves are fairly clear, but we will see what the federal reaction to this is going to be and what the reaction on the ground is and we will keep you updated.

[James Stout]

Let's have some ads here and we'll be back to talk about Venezuela. We are back with the second wild story of this week, which is that the United States supposedly United States special forces raided Caracas last week and kidnapped President Maduro, who is the president of Venezuela, and his wife. We covered the details of this in a whole episode, so I'm not going to go over them in great detail here. And that's already out. Trump Kidnaps Venezuelan President Maduro is the name of that episode, so you should be able to find it in the feed.

[Garrison Davis]

He danced too close to the sun.

[James Stout]

I'm not so sure the dancing was the factor. But I will only update that to say a couple of things. First of all, we know that there were in excess of 50 Venezuelan casualties. Right. Or I should say there were in excess of 50 casualties.

[Garrison Davis]

Some of those would probably be Cuban.

[James Stout]

Security forces, Cuban nationals. Yeah. In a military advice, kind of a prestige posting, but military advisor kind of role. And that there were injuries to US Troops we didn't hear about at first. And some U. S. Troops and US Helicopters did sustain some damage, but there were no, no people killed on the United States side. And Donald Trump has truthed that. I'm just going to read this one. I think we can do our best to understand it. I am pleased to announce that interim authorities in Venezuela will be turning over between 30 and 5050 million barrels of high quality sanctioned oil to the United States of America. This oil will be sold at its market price and that money will be controlled by me as President of the United States of America to ensure that it's used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States. I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan immediately. It will be taken by storage ships and bought directly to unloading docks in the United States States, thank you for your attention to this matter. Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.

[Mia Wong]

You know, I distinctly remember the days, the halcyon days when I was a child, when saying no war for oil was a provocative political statement because the leaders of our country insisted the wars were not, in fact, for oil.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. All that has dropped and we do not give a single fuck anymore.

[Mia Wong]

No, we're just openly doing the thing we were doing before.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It is wild to think of the Bush era of a golden age of at least pretending. It is extraordinarily vague. Right. How much this oil, is it being turned over? What period of time is Venezuela expected to extract and refine the oil, then handed over or. It's going to give US Companies a right to do that.

[Mia Wong]

They don't have much of the processing facilities. There's like, one, I think, American processing facility that can process the kind of crude that comes out of Venezuela. But it. It's difficult. We talked about this more in the other episode, but it's. The Venezuelan oil sucks. It's difficult to refine. It's.

[James Stout]

No, it's high quality. What are you talking about? Right here in the Post, man, I don't know.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know what you're talking about hearing the truth.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

In the truth. Thank you. Thank you, Garrison. That really does make it sound like I'm reading from the Bible at church or something, doesn't it? God. Also, the oil is not sanctioned. That's not how sanctions work. Sanction countries and people, not things. Yeah, bizarre sentence. Sentence structure is. Yeah, it's doing a lot for me. So, yeah, we talked about the Rodriguez option in our last show, and I guess this is kind of confirming a lot of what we had speculated about there.

[Mia Wong]

That's assuming this happens. By the way, I will say that there was some dip in oil prices today over the expectation that this is real, but I don't know how well connected those people are either, quite frankly, or how. How much of an understanding anyone has over whether this is going to happen or not. We don't know. He just says things and sometimes they happen and sometimes they don't. And there's no actual way to tell which ones are going to come true and which ones are.

[Garrison Davis]

Just him posting from Trump's mouth to Rubio's ears.

[James Stout]

Yeah. But then Rubio says something different in an interview. Trump says it again, and then. Yeah, here we go. Yeah. And it does look like. Like they are attempting to pursue the strategy which you spoke about, which is the only thing getting liberated in Venezuela is the oil. Right. That they will allow the regime to continue. There will not be any attempt at regime change. They just want a puppet version of the old regime which they can manipulate purely apparently for their own financial benefit with oil. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

It's also worth noting that Trump is claiming that he personally is going to be controlling the money after it's sold at market price. A sentence that at any other time in American history would be the most dictatorial thing you've ever seen, but pales in comparison to the fact that he is claiming to be running a country after a war that he unilaterally started without Congress.

[Garrison Davis]

So I mean, is it even accurate to call it a war? It seems like it's like a single military action now. It's like an act of war, I guess. Right.

[Mia Wong]

But if you combined the blockades, which are an act of war, and we'll get to blockades more in a second and this, I think this is just a war.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, I mean, I went to the protest in New York the morning after the action and you know, a lot of, a lot of chants were about, you know, no war in Venezuela, you know, no more bombs in Venezuela. And like, it looks like they're kind of done, they're kind of done with the bombs, they're kind of done with the war.

[Mia Wong]

Well, here's the thing though, so. So Trump has also said that if the current government of Venezuela refuses to comply, he will do more strikes worse.

[James Stout]

Than he did to Maduro.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And it's always kind of difficult to parse exactly what's going on there.

[James Stout]

But yeah, there's a potential for more US Action. Definitely. It seems like right now they appear to have got roughly what they wanted. And then like there's also the potential for this. Do you know, any number of ways, right. Like things could continue to deteriorate for the regime there. Like, like what does it mean for their ability? They have previously had the ability to use various kind of nefarious reflaggings of boats, which MIA is going to talk about a second here to obtain some income. Right. Like if they're not even able to do that, it's get even worse. Right. And the economic situation in Venezuela could, could very easily get worse. I know everyone I've spoken to there is out trying to stock up on, on non perishable food and they don't know what the future holds for them. Plus you now have, as we saw earlier in this week, very trigger happy pro government militias would probably be the best way to describe it. Like in this case they were shooting at a drone up in the air, but there's very clearly still a lot of 10 in the country.

[Garrison Davis]

So on Saturday morning after the military action Venezuela, I went to the protest in New York like, like I previously mentioned. And I've put together this little audio report that I recorded at the protest that takes you through about like an hour's worth of protest activity. And yeah, give it a, give it a listen. It is set up. Saturday, January 3, 2:54pm I am in Times Square with I would say 200 to 300 people protesting US action in Venezuela as well as Iran and the genocide in Palestine. Kind of a mix of causes, but mostly talking about Venezuela and the military extradition of President Maduro. The organizational structure at this protest seems to be mostly propped up by various communist organizations. There's Revolution Communist party tabling, there's the Bob Avakin Refuse Fascism organization with a lot of banners and signs. PSL has a bunch of banners and signs as well as the CUNY Internationalist student group which is tied to the New York City public university system. They have some homemade signs, the only signs actually drawn on paper probably this morning versus all of the PSL signs which appear pre printed and pre prepared. A rotating selection of speakers have given speeches for the past hour. And now at 3pm this relatively small crowd for a New York protest is leading march south. No, I'm not alive. The march is taking up probably about one city block just outside of Times Square on 43rd and 8, turning onto 8th Avenue. Now after about 10 minutes of marching, NYPD bikes at the front of the march as well as on foot officers on either side of the crowd. Not like a huge presence. I've maybe seen cumulatively a hundred or so cops, which is actually just not that much for New York, especially based on how spread out they are. I guess maybe like two dozen cops on either side of the march just walking, walking on the sidewalk and then maybe another, another two to three dozen in the front and more in the back. So between 50 to 100 co.

[Robert Evans]

Remember vietnam?

[Garrison Davis]

A little over 15 minutes into the march, they have now moved up to 47th Street. At this point there's been zero conflict with police. They've mostly facilitated the traffic around the march as people continue to chant and walk north. The crowd has been marching for over 35 minutes and now are arriving at what I assume is the our destination, Columbus circle up at 58th street and Broadway. No scuffles with the police. There was like two guys in Mega Hats kind of trying to antagonize the side of the crowd. For the past 15 minutes nothing really happened. One random dude came out of a convenience store store yelling Maduro. Trying to agitate some people in the crowd. But everyone just moved on and now they are approaching Columbus Circle.

[Mia Wong]

The decent people in this country need.

[Robert Evans]

To answer the people of the world.

[Mia Wong]

What are we gonna do? This is not a time for protest. As usual, there needs to be are fall of a regime not in Venezuela, but right here in the US for the people in this country mobilizing non.

[Garrison Davis]

Violently while it's still legal to do.

[Mia Wong]

So to begin the fall of this fascist regime.

[Garrison Davis]

Police are now very lightly directing people into Columbus Circle, onto the plaza and off of the street. Some groups are packing up their protest signs and bags and starting to peel off. So as expected, this protest was done by a coalition of anti imperialist leftist socialist communist organizations. You have the Party for Socialism and Liberation, PSL and all of these other like communist groups who are all primarily either trying to grow their membership roster or sell their newspapers, sell their magazines. And this is what most of the protest actually is. They have tables set up while people are giving speeches. They have people walking around handing out pamphlets and flyers. And this protest was not very big like I said it was. It was relatively small, maybe 200, 300 people. Because there's not a lot of public buy in for this sort of thing. Because at this point if anyone's been around, they know based on the flyers that get posted what kind of protest this is going to be. This is going to be socialist communist organizations trying to grow their membership. It's not a representative sample of the people of New York. It is, it is people trying to sell magazines and newspapers and books.

[Robert Evans]

Books.

[Garrison Davis]

And the fact that the entire approach to secret system for stuff like this is fully captured by these sorts of organizations makes it really hard to grow a genuine movement because people know that it's going to be walking for 30 minutes and then people are going to be shoving pamphlets in their, in their hand. And that's the extent to which you are protesting. It is that it's walking along a path led by the NYPD to Columbus Circle.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I'm sure this happened in almost every city in the US right. Like I saw a Flyer 4 in San Diego personally couldn't be asked to attend because as you say, like I knew what was going to happen and the person in a hi vis and a clipboard was going to try and get my email address.

[Mia Wong]

I will say that the thing that did hearten me a little bit was that there were a few protests. I mean, just out in the Chicago suburbs, which is not a place you normally have these that weren't by these groups that were just pretty spontaneous on the morning of the demonstration. But the sort of issue. Yeah. That you're referring to, Garrison, is that even these spontaneous protests, the energy just gets captured by the PSL and these organizations that fundamentally don't want to do anything other than grow their organization.

[James Stout]

And if I was designing an org to co opt the anger that's happening right now, and I wanted it to funnel the anger in a useless direction that burned people out on activism, I wouldn't change anything from the psl.

[Mia Wong]

And I mean. And this has been what the American anti war movement has looked like since the Iraq War demonstrations.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

This was, this was one of the battles that happened inside of the Iraq War protest. And it's one of the reasons why they didn't work.

[Garrison Davis]

And like, this is a very serious thing. Like, this is a very serious military action that should warrant massive public outcry. But protesting taps into a finite resource that people have. And when you have an inclination that the protests are going to go this way, people might not want to expend their personal resource because it is not seriously putting pressure on anyone making decisions in the government.

[James Stout]

Yeah. This is a very serious thing that we shouldn't underplay for a second that, like, the United States have done something which is completely illegal. Right. Which is an act of war against a sovereign country. And me saying this doesn't mean I'm like a Maduro stand. Anyone who's listened to any portion of my work will understand that. But it is incredibly serious that the US Is attempting to set this precedent that it can just black bag heads of state whether or not the US Considers them legitimate.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Their argument that Maduro is not legitimate. It doesn't matter. If they can just send dudes in helicopters to black and people around the world, then that is a very scary precedent.

[Garrison Davis]

All right, I am going to head out and return to the CES show floor. I will say for the. If you're. If you're doing a Tariff Talk segment, there has been discussion of tariffs at CES that I have not mentioned on the CES episode so far. Two thumbs down. Two. Two thumbs down on the tariffs from the Consumer Electronics Showcase. They're coming out with the bold stance that they don't like the tariffs.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Wow.

[James Stout]

I think Ivanka Trump was giving a keynote address at the last CES that I attended.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That rocks.

[Mia Wong]

Incredible. Incredible.

[James Stout]

Related news, I've stopped attending. Cesar.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, I, I have to keep attending now because the secretary to the US from Estonia was, was oogling me for 30 minutes yesterday, so I might be getting a new passport.

[Mia Wong]

Oh boy.

[James Stout]

Good luck in Godspeed the AI poop analyzing toilet for me. Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

I will do so.

[Mia Wong]

One of the questions that we had at the very beginning of this operation was what is going to happen to the US Oil blockade on Venezuela? And the answer is that it appears to still be, in effect, the evidence of which is the US Interdicting two oil tankers, one of which they've been chasing for about a month, a few weeks. Which is really funny if you know how large an oil taker is that you've been in a boat chase with an oil tanker.

[James Stout]

It's like, I guess it's just so big they can't make it stop.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, I guess so. Apparently the administration is claiming that the Coast Guard had attempted to board it and they refused to allow the Coast Guard to board. But the only thing I can think of is, you know those, those giant vehicles they use to, to move rockets around at JPL or like, like from jpl, like on the launch site where they have, they can only move like five miles an hour and they're the size of a rocket because you have to have a standing rocket on it. That, that, that's what it's like chasing an empty oil tanker across the Atlantic. It's also worth noting that one of the very weird parts of this is that I'm going to quote from Reuters here. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the ship's crew had made, quote, frantic efforts to avoid apprehension, which.

[Garrison Davis]

Again, I cannot emphasize this enough.

[Mia Wong]

This is an oil tanker. Like, this is not a speedboat.

[Garrison Davis]

This is like the largest.

[Mia Wong]

This is like one of the largest and most unwieldy craft that humanity has ever produced in its entire history. Like getting frantically avoided. Oil taker.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Is it zigzagging?

[Garrison Davis]

I don't know.

[Mia Wong]

Oil taker, evasive maneuvers.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And this is, this is also from that raiders thing. And quote, failed to obey Coast Guard orders and so faces criminal charges, which sucks. But also, I like if you're getting evaded it by an oil tanker, that is a skill issue. Like you, you could. There are websites where you can track these things. They have transponders. Like when this thing was captured, its transponder was on. So the skill issue, I. Good Lord. On a more serious note, this is, this is part of that initial oil blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil that began last year. The US government has been saying that this ship and the other ship that the other oil tanker that they've seized are basically ghost ships, which we talked about in other episodes. I don't know if you want to explain again what that is, James.

[James Stout]

Yeah, they're often old ships that are either reflagged or the ships that have been retired and are returned, or the ships have been scrapped and someone has taken their name and is using it so that they appear like ships coming back from the dead, but often they will reflag or rename halfway through their trip. And. And it's a bunch of boat law stuff to avoid sanctions is what they tend to be.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And so that's the US's justification for seizing two more oil tankers, which, again, I also cannot emphasize enough that this also is an act of war.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I mean, were they flagged as Venezuelan?

[Mia Wong]

No, one of them was flagged as Russian. And I haven't seen anything about what the other ship was flagged as. China has protested the seizures of these boats, but there hasn't really been anything other than diplomatic noise so far from the Chinese government, who, if there was a government on the world stage who was going to do a serious protest about this, I think it would have been either Russia or China. And we haven't really seen anything more significant than the diplomats being annoyed. So we will continue to see how this oil blockade plays out and the effects that it has on people in Venezuela. I wish I had a better ad pivot for this, but I don't. So here's ads.

[James Stout]

Well, they're like oil tankers mia. They just rumble along and you can't stop it. And then. Yes, we've been unable to interdict them.

[Mia Wong]

We are back from our. Our failed ad introduction. Contradiction. Do you want to talk about Syria, James?

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah, this is. James. Oh, that's grim. The rest of the world segment. Because a lot of bad stuff is happening and some of it's not going to punch into, like, your mainstream US news media diet. So right now, pretty serious fighting has broken out in a leper, right. Syrian Transitional Government forces are shelling and attempting to enter the Kurdish enclave of Sheik Maxu is like an area in where Kurdish and other people, right, There are Christian people, there are Zvi. People who live there have. And this enclave has remained. Right. Despite the. The regime taking over of the Syrian Transitional Government taking over the rest of Aleppo. Right. They didn't take over that area. And this area has remained under the control of the aanes, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, AKA RJAB Other, but they have demilitarized it. What that means is that there are only internal security forces who are called asaish in Kurdish in this region. It appears that what happened was that an SDF drone unit struck an STG vehicle with a drone. Stg? Syrian Transitional Government. Right. That's the Jelani Alshara government.

[Mia Wong]

Of course they have another acronym, just. Just acronyms for over.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah. Then no. God, yeah. There's always more. So they hit this STG vehicle in De Haa, and then the STG seemed to respond by dropping grenades into Sheik Maud from drones. And then the AS responded with drones and conflict began. Right. What's different from them? There has been conflict on and off in Sheikh Maud for a long time. But like in the last year, right, since HTS move from Aleppo to seize most of the country. Htshan a group that was formerly on the foreign terrorist organization that's the United States, but no longer is. What we have seen here is not only shelling of the Sheikh Mac student neighborhood and shelling in response or mortar fire and response, maybe s for each don't have heavy weapons. That's not their role. The STG has also attempted to enter Shikmaksu to seize it. Right. This has obviously prompted thousands of people to flee because they're worried, very reasonably, about groups that were previously known under the banner of the SNA or the Turkish FSA who have previously conducted ethnic cleansing of Kurdish people in areas that they have managed to take control of, who have murdered civilians, who have executed women in Kurdish politics. There's every reason for these civilians to fear that happening again. Right? Because the Syrian Transitional Government has far too often just re badged SNA units with a long and storied history of war crimes and not done anything to stop them doing it again. But also, some of these are not SNA units. Some of these are Syrian Transitional Government units from other parts of Syria. Nonetheless, this attempt, an incursion into the neighborhood is remarkable. It's different. As I write this, the STG appear to be staging to enter the neighborhood. Again, very amusingly, they took a video showing this, which also revealed the position of all their armor on telegram.

[Mia Wong]

Classic, classic Syrian civil war stuff.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Everyone loves to be revealing their position on telegram.

[James Stout]

So yeah, maybe, maybe when I, when I reopen telegram, those guys would have been wiped out by a bunch of drones who know knows. But yet it continues to be a Flashpoint. And this is the most serious flare up we've seen in a long time. Right. There was supposed to be an agreement for the integration of the SDF into Syrian Transitional Government, Ministry of Defense. That has failed. They haven't come to an agreement. Various sources are reporting various things about what they wanted. Whereas specifically what the SDF wanted for ypj, who are the Women's Defense Forces, and they're all are. That is a definite red line for them. They won't disband, that the women won't put down their guns. Right. And for very reasonable reasons.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

We don't know exactly if the Syrian Transitional Government refused to accept them in any way. They have said they wouldn't do that. They have said they would accept them. But we don't really have like a very clear picture of the last round of negotiations. Talking of Kurdish armed groups, let's go from Rojava to Rojalat, right across Kurdistan, from west to east. Just looking at a little compass in my head. In Iran, protests have grown around the country. These protests began largely because of the decreased purchasing power of people's money there. Of course, the protests have further reduced that and people are really feeling the economic bite.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

This time what is different is that armed groups have come out in support. I saw LE the name translates as People's Revolutionary Front had assassinated a car like a drive by Pak. So Pak, one of the smaller Kurdish paramilitary groups. I made an episode, I think it was called what does Bombing mean for freedom in Iran? Last year with Gordan and I will try and get back with Gordie soon to talk more about this. But if. If you're wondering who are all these groups, what are all these acronyms, that's the episode you need to get to. So P. Peshmerga have been killed. Right. Which is a significant change. There have been armed elements in these protests and there has been a unity statement both from the different Kurdish armed groups. I think it was P A, K and K who made this statement. Right. And then also from coalition of Kurdish women's organizations. It's organizations from across that political spectrum. But in. In that part of the world coming together two to denounce the actions of the regime, which include, for instance, in Elan province, riot police storming hospital. I don't know people will have seen that video, but it was extremely disturbing.

[Mia Wong]

Has there been any movement from the Belushi independence groups?

[James Stout]

Yeah, sure there has. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

But I know. I'm pretty sure it was a Belushi group. I remember in the 2019 protest, the most militant it got was, I think, a Belushi group, like, fired at RPG at a police checkpoint. But it never really sort of spread beyond that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I don't know.

[James Stout]

Indifferent. Yeah. There are a number of, like, Volusia groups. I'm not aware of their involvement. There have definitely been, like, police repression there. Like, there is everywhere else, Right? Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, I will try and probably cover this in a whole episode next week. So I had a lot of time to prepare on that with all the craziness. I did see that this morning. So we're on the 7th again. The Armed forces attacked protesters in the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, which, if you're not aware, has a tremendous significance right. From the 1709 Revolution there. And Trump has threatened to intervene, as he always does.

[Mia Wong]

Right, yeah, exactly. Perfectly what the regime wants, because it lets them portray themselves as defenders of Iranian sovereignty, et cetera, et cetera, against American imperialism.

[James Stout]

Yeah, America, Great Satan. Moving on, let's talk about Israel. Israel has threatened to withhold, I believe it has now withheld registration to operate in Gaza from msf, Medicons, Frontieres, Oxfam and a number of other aid organizations. Msf, I'm just going to quote from them, called it a cynical and calculated attempt to prevent organizations from providing services in Gaza and the west bank, which is a breach of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law. It's just them trying to further starve people to death. Right. There's no other reason. Like, Israel has made the claim that these groups have been infiltrated by militants. That is a laughable conjecture. Like, it's a bad joke. Like, I've worked with MSF and Oxfam all over the world. Right. There are a lot of criticisms of them I would make. One of them is not that they have been infiltrated by fucking Hamas. Like you're having a laugh. I want to do a whole episode on this. But like when O' Brien talks about two plus two equals five in 1984, this is where that gets us, right? When you can just say something that is blatantly false and force people to agree that it is true. True. That is the project of genocide. Because it first has to destroy the truth to justify what it is doing. And we are seeing that happening. And a very brief migration update. Finally, in the case before Judge Boberg regarding the Alien Enemies act that we've reported about before, the Trump administration asked for a delay because of the changing situation in Venezuela. Right. I don't think they're asking for Delays so they can be like, oh, it's not safe for people to go back. We'd better keep hold them and treat them nicely. It is my suspicion any agreement they come to with the Rodriguez regime will include that it must accept people back. And as I said in the other episode, right, these people are going back to a country which is now deeply paranoid about American spies and they have lived in America. This is not going to be good then. And the city of San Diego has sued the Trump administration for damage to city property on Marin Valley Road or has filed a complaint today to do so. I'm glad they're doing it. It's also deeply hypocritical, right. Mayor Todd Gloria was out there asking for more border security funding under Biden. They defunded the office in a city which would welcome refugees and migrants. Like, is it just a publicity thing? Prob. Like these people don't care, right? When, when migrants were being held in the open air in San Diego county and San Diego City, these people weren't there there. Yeah, I'm still glad it's happening. But don't for one second believe these people give a single shit about migrants. They don't. And don't for one second think the voting for them is voting to be kind to migrants, because it's not. Tod Gloria is a liar. And just like everything else, he's using this as an opportunity to promote himself and he's a terrible person. But, yeah, in this case, they are suing for trespassing and the placing of razor wire on city property. It's city property. That's way outside of where you would think the city of San Diego is. It's just adjacent to Oto Mountain Wilderness, but I think they have it there for water rights reasons or something.

[Mia Wong]

Brief tariff update, not tariff news. This week, however, comma, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the giant case over a wide swath of Trump's tariffs this Friday. So next week we will explain what happened there in the fallout. As you're listening to this episode, that decision might have already been released. Have fun and put a trans girl on your cap couch.

[James Stout]

And if you would like to email us, you can do so. CoolZoneTips Proton me. If you wanted to be encrypted, you should use a protonmail address as well.

[Sophie Lichterman]

And you know we reported the news.

[James Stout]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Sophie Lichterman]

Here is a production of Cool Zone Media for more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

Guaranteed Human.