It Could Happen Here Weekly 215

Summary

Podcast Summary — Behind the Bastards / It Could Happen Here Weekly 215

Date: January 17, 2026
Host: Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Featuring: Robert Evans, Garrison Davis, Ben Rose Porter, James Stout, Andrew Sage, Mia Wong, others

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Overview

This episode is a weekly compilation for the “It Could Happen Here” series, primarily featuring discussion from CES 2026 (Consumer Electronics Show). The episode examines trends and failures in the current tech industry, especially focusing on AI-enabled consumer electronics, skepticism about their real-world impact, surveillance, privacy, and broader global events from Iran to the US political system and climate disaster retrospectives.

The tone remains irreverent, skeptical, and deeply critical of hype-driven tech culture, while incorporating analysis of recent political and international crises.

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Main Themes

• A critical, first-hand look at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and “the future” offered by tech companies, especially relating to artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and questionable product innovation.
• Sober analysis of the illusion of tech “innovation,” capital’s relentless drive, and the lack of meaningful progress for consumers.
• Updated discussions on current global political upheaval, particularly Iran’s crisis, environmental disasters, and tech’s growing infrastructural demands.
• Illumination of the intersection between technology, state power, and social justice movements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. CES 2026: AI Overload, Vapidity in Innovation

• AI Ubiquity with Little Substance:
  • The event showed a proliferation of products claiming AI-integration, mostly as “wrappers” around existing chatbots like ChatGPT.
  • Quote: “This is a year of robotics not having anything new because... they’re combining their physical robotics, which aren’t new, but combining them with ChatGPT and presenting it as a new product.” (Garrison Davis, 04:46)
• Product Failures & Reliance on Connectivity:
  • Many chatbot-enabled products simply didn’t work, especially due to poor Wi-Fi on the convention floor.
  • Quote: “About 70% of the chatbot-enabled products that I tried to interact with could not converse with me or could not do so in a functional way.” (Robert Evans, 01:28)
• The Memory & Empathy Illusion:
  • Vendors repeatedly touted “memory” and “empathy” for their robots, but in reality, these were marketing ploys; robots were not genuinely intelligent or feeling.
  • Quote: “Reducing the concept of empathy to the robot knows when you might want snacks is kind of evil...” (Robert Evans, 37:46)
• On-Device vs. Cloud AI:
  • A few products, like translation devices, worked entirely offline and were considered practical improvements, contrasting against most cloud-dependent devices.
  • Quote: “No, this is actually on device... that’s real utility. And Trans is not the only company.” (Robert Evans, 16:24)

2. Skepticism Toward Capital’s Drive for “Endless Value”

• Panelists note that tech companies push the idea of endless utility and potential transcendence, but this masks empty innovation and an insatiable drive for profit.
  • Quote: “If you just give yourself over... bleed into the machine and connect yourself to the cloud and give over like everything... there is this vague promise of transcendence.” (Ben Rose Porter, 18:54)
• The CES floor is filled with products purporting to solve problems that either don’t exist or were created by earlier tech “innovations.”

3. Ethics & Privacy: Data Collection and Surveillance

• Worries about surveillance, privacy, and consumer data, especially in health-focused wearables and AI “empathy” machines.
  • Quote: “There is this kind of baseline expectation here that everyone is fine with handing over all of their data, all of their physical data, all of their biometrics...” (Robert Evans, 53:20)
• Companies rarely address these concerns; a few “lighthouse” booths present on-device, privacy-centric design as a rare ethical alternative.

4. Notable Products: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

• CLOYD by LG:
  • A home assistance robot, very much a product of slapping an LLM chatbot onto dated robotics hardware and passing it off as innovative. Critiqued for lack of actual capability.
  • Quote: “...the sort of AI that's running Cloyd — and Cloyd to also be a picture if someone needed to make Wall-E that was legally distinct enough to stop Disney from suing them... that's how Cloyd looks.” (Robert Evans, 29:15)
• Exoskeletons (Hypershell):
  • Stood out for real utility, allowing enhanced mobility and lessening joint/back pain for industrial or even casual use. Noted for thoughtful design.
• Sex Robots:
  • Another example where integration of chatbots does not meaningfully enhance products and instead raises even weirder questions about consumer needs and the uncanny valley.
• Emotion-Tracking Wearables:
  • Pendants claiming to track “emotional sentiment,” furthering the datafication of the self.
  • Quote: “I don't need this thing to tell me how I'm feeling. But, like, it might be fun for some people...” (Garrison Davis, 16:54)

5. Political & Global Crisis Segments

Iran Protests and Communication Blackout:

• Special report details the eruption of spontaneous demonstrations in Iran, escalation into violent government crackdowns (including at hospitals), mass deaths (estimates 12,000–20,000), and a full government-imposed internet blackout.
  • Quote: “There is no internet connection in Iran ... it has caused a lot of confusion, a lot of horror that the world doesn't know what's happening exactly right now.” (Gordain, 94:20)
• Interview with Kurdistan-based journalist “Gordain” contextualizes ethnic politics, state brutality, and fears of both regime collapse and international intervention.

Retrospective on 2025: Climate, Protest, and Geopolitics

• Run-down of 2025 as the hottest year on record, with global climate disasters exposing infrastructural and state failures, and corresponding resilience in grassroots organizing.
• Political mobilization of Gen Z across continents; frustration that radical movements are often absorbed by the state or face deadly repression.
  • Quote: “2025's protests show a fraction of our frustration, but they also show that we can't just keep screaming into the void.” (Andrew Sage, 149:41)
• Tech’s physical and environmental cost: data centers, AI expansion eating resources, and growing calls for digital commons/open source alternatives.

US News: Judicial, Immigration, and Domestic Terror

• DHS and ICE shooting in Portland, with disinformation and local outrage.
• Updates on federal court, visa policy changes, and state department actions against immigrants.
• Synagogue Arson in Mississippi:
  • Young right-wing Christian nationalist arrested for attack, highlighting the ongoing reality of anti-Semitic domestic terror amidst debate about root causes and media mischaracterization.

US Fed Independence Crisis

• Jerome Powell (Fed Chair) releases what’s described as a “kidnapping video” revealing the Trump administration is threatening criminal indictment to seize direct control of US monetary policy; a rare moment uniting central bankers globally against overt executive interference.
  • Quote: “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment... rather than following the preferences of the President.” (Jerome Powell quote, 184:10)
  • Panelists warn, “If this guy gets put in charge of the Federal Reserve, he is going to turn the US Economy into a smoking crater.” (Garett, 190:33)

Domestic Security/FBI Activity

• Discussion of the “Turtle Island Liberation Front” FBI arrest—classic case of would-be militants, aggressive online rhetoric, and infiltration via informants before crimes committed; compared to historic patterns of FBI “sting” operations and entrapment.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Tech “Empathy”:
  “Empathy means the robot knows when to serve you is like a bad way to talk about empathy. I don't think most people... Well, it means someone knows when I want to be upsold on a Hyundai.”
  — Robert Evans, (38:27)

• On CES Innovation:
  “Look at LG's new butler robot... that's all that they're doing at this demo. Because this is not a real product for sale... it's this cycle that just keeps building.”
  — Garrison Davis, (33:07)

• On the State’s Crisis Response:
  “[COVID and disaster] continue to show the ingenuity and capability of ordinary people to organize, support, distribute aid, facilitate evacuation, share resources.”
  — Andrew Sage, (131:58)

• On Gen Z Political Mobilization:
  “For Gen Z folks, it's like—The town that you live in will continue to exist is up for debate."
  — James Stout, (141:15)

• On US Tech Hype/Surveillance:
  “There is this baseline expectation here that everyone is fine with handing over all of their data, all of their physical data, all of their biometrics...”
  — Robert Evans, (53:20)

• On US Fed Independence:
  “...This is a significant enough threat that several Republican senators... have spoken out against this move and have expressed... they think Jerome Powell is innocent.”
  — Garett, (187:10)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:10 – Opening thoughts from CES: What future does the AI industry offer?
• 04:03 – Defining “LLM wrappers,” the prevalence of physical AI products
• 06:14 – “AI” product marketers anthropomorphizing their robots
• 17:47 – Privacy noteworthy: Only a few products keep data off the cloud
• 21:09 – Voice assistants pitched as new avenues for corporate upselling
• 28:03 – CLOYD “the worst-named robot” and the hollowness of innovation
• 46:03 – Hypershell exoskeleton, rare genuinely useful innovation
• 53:15 – Wearables, health data, and privacy concerns
• 87:09 – Iran political crisis: On-the-ground reporting/intel blackout
• 127:09 – 2025 Retrospective: Climate, youth protest, and geopolitics
• 167:25 – US Executive, Iran, and immigration/new visa crackdowns
• 184:09 – Jerome Powell’s unprecedented video statement on DOJ pressure
• 195:37 – Turtle Island Liberation Front “bust,” informant infiltration

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Conclusion

This episode provides a sweeping survey—from the tech world’s self-congratulatory nadirs and dubious “AI” advances to truly consequential political and global emergencies. The panel issues warnings about false innovation, overblown AI claims, the costs and dangers of state and tech collusion, and the need for grassroots skepticism, solidarity, and actual functional action.

Despite the episode’s dark humor and relentless critique, there are flashes of hope in the resilience of ordinary people—communities organizing around disaster, youth movements pushing for radical change, and the potential for privacy-focused technology. Ultimately, the hosts urge listeners to stay vigilant, keep organizing, and see through both utopian tech promises and state-sponsored narratives.

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For further detail or segment breakdown, refer to the timestamps above alongside the full transcript.

Transcript

[Garrison Davis]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Guaranteed Human. 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's pippin my bops? It's. It could happen here. A podcast that is sometimes competently introduced, but not on the days that I'm recording. We're at ces, the Consumer Electronics show, seeing what the tech industry has in mind for all of us. Right? This is a show where the industry talks to itself and its investors and clients about what the future is going to be. And so Garrison Davis and I are going to sit down with you and tell, based on our explorations and investigations this week, what the future of artificial intelligence means for all of us and for the world. Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

Hi. How you doing? I'm tired.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you look tired.

[Garrison Davis]

It's been a long week.

[Robert Evans]

It's been a long week.

[Garrison Davis]

Convention walking.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we've worked very hard.

[Garrison Davis]

I've talked to too many robots.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've talked to a lot of chatbots.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to say. We've talked with them.

[Robert Evans]

I've talked at a lot of chatbots.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And sometimes they respond and sometimes they don't.

[Robert Evans]

I guess one of the things that's kind of shocked me is because, like, despite being very critical about AI and the industry, I have actually a pretty good idea of what these things are capable of. And I know that ChatGPT and Gemini and the other very, like, they're capable of doing some things that look very impressive. They are capable of conversations, you know, that can be fairly in depth and that can cover a wide variety of topics. And so one of the things that has surprised me is that as I have gone up and tried to communicate with every various chatbot enabled, AI enabled product, about 70% of the time, it's not actually capable of responding to me in a way that makes any sense. Like, the majority of those products just don't function. Sorry, was that literally your AI and your phone yelling at us? Yes, case in point.

[Garrison Davis]

I was trying to pull up one of the AI robots that we saw today. And I guess this is something that we talked about on Better Offline a bit in the main thing this year is the complete. The complete, like, victory of like chatgpt.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Across. Not just, not just like it's like.

[Robert Evans]

A cultural victory within the tech industry.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And it's moved into like the physical world through like their API licensing.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So many of the quote unquote products this year is building a physical thing around Chat GPT.

[Robert Evans]

We have a, a necklace that has ChatGPT and you can talk to it. We have a pin that ChatGPT is in and you can talk to it and have it do things like transcribe an interview.

[Garrison Davis]

Earbuds.

[Robert Evans]

There's, there's earbuds, tons of glasses, there's.

[Garrison Davis]

Little tiny robot dogs. Everything has, has chatgpt inside it and that's the main thing that makes it like unique or special compared to, you know, the types of products we've seen, we've seen before.

[Robert Evans]

And I would say again, when I, when I say that like 70% of the chatbot enabled products that I tried to interact with could not converse with me or could not do so in a functional way, it's not because the chatbots aren't able to talk to you, because they are. Anyone who's not like you can, it's that all of the chatbots require an active Internet connection because the vast majority of these products do not have anything on device. And when you're in a crowded convention floor, the Internet is bad and so they just don't work. And it kind of, it's one of those, I'm sure most of these products would work better in the real world, but also the fact that they're all completely hobbled by their access to data is kind of one of the things. It's one of the seams that you can see here.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, the LLM wrappers. So LLM wrappers and robotics are the big things this year. Often these things.

[Robert Evans]

What do you mean by an LLM wrapper, Garrison?

[Garrison Davis]

Well, this is the thing that we're talking about. It's this physical product that's built around something like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude or a number of the Chinese made ones.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

A lot of Chinese companies here. So these physical products, whether those are headphones, earbuds, or in many cases little tiny robots whose main feature is that you can talk to, you can talk to it. And what you're actually talking to is like a filtered version of ChatGPT.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And there's a lot of these products for kids that we've seen, like robots for kids. Because there's a lot of robotics this year as well. These are the two things that after years and years of them trying to find a new thing for each ces they've like settled on not, not actually having anything.

[Robert Evans]

It's a year of robotics not having.

[Garrison Davis]

Anything new because like we've, we've seen robotics before.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And other years. And this is the year that they're combining their physical robotics, which aren't new, but combining them with ChatGPT and presenting it as a new product.

[Robert Evans]

Look at the old intelligent robot. Robot. And the robot can't do more tasks than it used to.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like we're still. We're doing really good. If it can slowly and not very competently fold laundry.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Oh my.

[Robert Evans]

Like LGs Cloyd. Cloyd, which is a robot designed to be in your home and do chores for you and visibly does not do them. Well. We watched it a demo where they're presumably. It's presumably working better than it normally does because it's a demo.

[Garrison Davis]

No. I went to the first Cloyd demo and they had like three different setups for different stories for like different use cases for Cloyd ones with a family, one's with like a single guy and one's with like a middle aged woman. And with the family, the robots able to find keys that are lost. Notably what that means is that Cloyd is moving keys around the house, which might actually contribute to the problem of.

[Robert Evans]

Losing keys being lost. Where did the fucking robot.

[Garrison Davis]

The robot is picking up your keys and moving them somewhere else. The robot can put a tray of croissants in an oven and the robot knows it's croissant and the robot knows exactly how you want your croissants done. You don't even have to tell the robot. It already knows. And that's something that was stressed.

[Robert Evans]

That's the power of AI over and.

[Garrison Davis]

Over again is that it will start to know what you want so you won't need to tell it to.

[Robert Evans]

You have a memory. So many of these products with the big selling point is like it's got a memory and it has ramp. They can't stop themselves. And I think some of this was like the actual companies and the way that they're structuring their ad campaigns. But a lot of this was just most of the companies here hire PR people who don't regularly work for the company and don't know much about the products and they're just there to demo stuff. And some of it is those people just defaulting to. Well, they're talking about how this thing remembers and knows You. So I'll talk about how it, like, it has a personality, it has memories, it has experience, it has core memories, you know, it has preferences and like a personality. It wants things. I talked to a couple of different people at booths who like, that was the thing they were emphasizing is that like, this is an AI that like feels and gets to know you and has a relationship with you. And it's very number one. Not what they would want publicly because that's crazy and none of the products actually work that way. But the attempt to convince people that like what we have done is create a robot that lives in your home and does chores and it can think and feel and anytime you say, like, well, are you just saying you built a slave? Like, are you saying there's thinking sentient robots that you have live in your house and do your laundry, isn't that a slave? Like, and it's not actually. Because the robot doesn't think. It's actually what they were saying was true. It would be a problem. Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, you could introduce yourself however you want. Introduced.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Oh, I'm Ben, Ben Rose Porter. I am an academic, I'm a sociologist.

[Garrison Davis]

At cuny and you have accompanied us through the wonderful world of Las Vegas and CES this year. I always like bringing people to witness the beautiful world.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, I've been brought to this place very far from God. Las Vegas and the Tech Convention Center. There is this moment where we were walking through and it was the, the, the, the Amy Bot for, for kids.

[Garrison Davis]

Which me and Robert saw last year. That little like Oval Owl looking robot. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

And they, they had this. She's gotta be an actress and she was doing like a little skit with the, the Amybot where it was like, it was like the Amy Bout's birthday or something. And she was like very clearly having this very produced. It reminded me exactly of how cheap telenovelas actors talk where she was just like, wow, Amy, you've really gotten to know me over the years. And it was bizarre in that one. The selling point of the robot was, I think they said, turning data into empathy.

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, it's able to turn data into.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Empathy, which God knows what that means. But also that like so clearly the robot turns data into empathy, but also we cannot show you the robot doing anything concretely. So we will have a person. It was just this very one sided like skit where this person was doing this really overly emotional like back and forth as a robot where the robot would just respond with like the bare minimum like phrases. And so like what they're selling is. Is questionable if anyone wants it. And all speculative. It's all, none of it can actually be presented. It's all like the potential to do this and then, and then even the way that they're actually showing that is mostly just cheap tricks. There's another booth where they had the, the, the sex robots. And I was just, I was, it was shocking because the stand like you're at this convention, you've presumably you know, gone through a lot to get here and your, the image you're putting forward of your robot that you know you're selling as the sex robot. It's like this cheap AI image. Not even one of the good ones like that there are like clear artifacts and blurry weird lines and things and that you could google an anime JPEG and get a better image for this. So just even the smoke and mirrors of it was cheap.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. That was at Loveance is the sex robot booth. And yeah, they had two products. One was like, just like you know, silicon like realistic human skin sex robot which is similar to like you know, those horrifying sex dolls. Except now we have an LLM inside. It's another one of those LLM rappers except it's wrapped around a red headed woman.

[Robert Evans]

Garrison. I find that very offensive. It's actually some people are just. Are not capable of talking to women or other human beings of any kind.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, people with adhd.

[Robert Evans]

It's actually a disability where people can't know other people and can only have sexual gratification through creepy robot shots.

[Garrison Davis]

I apologize for my, for my on air ableism.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But no, again this is the year LLM rappers and now they're putting it.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Putting it in a sex bot. Which is more unnerving to me than a regular sex doll because a regular sex doll you kind of know it's an object. Like it's, it's not trying to be much more than an object.

[Robert Evans]

It can't.

[Garrison Davis]

You can't you can you put it in positions but it's, it's static.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

This. Because this thing tries to kind of engage with you. It activates my uncanny valley response way more because it's like it's kind of trying to pretend to be a person. And like I, I could not look at the thing for very long. They just like started like I just felt bad.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And some of that's probably my latent Protestantism but I, it's. I just feel, I just felt bad. But the, the other product they had like around the corner was this, was this like you know, anime style, like, like Avatar, which was, which is on like a screen that you can talk to and it's synced up to a, like a jack off robot.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

So you can, you can engage with this. Finally you can engage with this like this like blonde, blonde hair, blue eyed anime woman. As it's, as it connects to like a little, a little like jack off machine. And that was their, that was the other product which did not work because there was no wifi in the Venetian.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So we could, we could not see it, but the jack off machine was still going strong.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So you could say, I guess that like, well obviously there's, there's fundamental issues with like having WI fi be decent. When you've got 70,000 people like all cramming themselves into a room, of course that's going to cause problems. The chatbots and the devices using them are actually capable of more, they're more impressive than you're giving them credit for just because the WI fi didn't work. But also if all you built is a shell that without the Internet and access to someone else's chatbot doesn't do anything.

[Garrison Davis]

This is the big problem.

[Robert Evans]

You haven't really made a product.

[Garrison Davis]

All these products are going to brick. As soon as, as soon as ChatGPT raises its API costs, they're going to do one of two things. They're either going to stop working or they're going to move their chatbot provider to a different one that's going to behave differently and then it's fundamentally a different product.

[Robert Evans]

That's why periodically I would run into someone where it's like everything that we do is on device and everything, even the ones that we're still. Because you almost have to say that whatever you're doing is AI and stuff. Like there was a company that I came across because of their name. Because I just saw the name Trans AI and I was like, well, I gotta go see what that is.

[Garrison Davis]

I did see this as well.

[Robert Evans]

Simply, I believe they're a Korean company, but it's just a company that makes a translator. Right. And they make it specifically, it's like the size of a smaller smartphone. It looks kind of like a smartphone and you set it down and it will on device, it does not touch the cloud at all for any reason. It can translate. So if you want to have a conversation with someone in a foreign language, it can like, like live translate for you both. And also it will transcribe whatever conversations you're having. And they were like, yeah, this is for People who want to transcribe notes when they're at college. It's for people who are doing interviews, journalists and stuff.

[Andrew Sage]

So.

[Robert Evans]

And it was a really good, it seemed to be a good product. I've not gotten to test it outside of the show floor.

[Garrison Davis]

I saw, I saw a few of these.

[Ben Rose Porter]

One of the big differences I saw between like the few. There were like two or three or four booths that we saw where the product. I was like, I had a positive. I was like, I walked away with some mildly positive. Was that almost everything else talk about like the sort of insatiability of capital.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Is that it has to sell. The, the, the sex doll was a perfect example of this in that, you know, if you make a sex doll and you put the chatgpt inside of it and then you sell it as this is a sex doll, it's an object you fuck. But now you can like, you could have sexy conversation with it. Still an object. But like, you know, that's fun for some people.

[Robert Evans]

That's a new thing that people didn't have before. It is new.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. And it's a phenomena you could clearly show off. It's like, oh, you can, you know, now the sex doll can like say your name and stuff. But almost all of the booths that were selling some kind of AI product, it was like, we have to sell the opportunity to like transcend like your mortal shell and become a part of the cosmos itself. Like the sex doll was literally sitting in this corner talking to no one and saying stuff like, I'm about emotional intelligence and building a connection, getting to know you and reaching into your soul. And it's like, it clearly cannot do this. And the few products that were good were the ones where the people showing it were just able to like just put that aside and just say, here's what the product does, right? Here's what it can do concrete.

[Robert Evans]

And that, that has become my baseline first question, which is like, have you done anything with your product? And if all that you've done is we invented a new device that didn't previously have a chatbot that it connects to through data that someone else built. You didn't do anything. That's not a product. That's not real. So kind of my first my filter was like, is there anything here beyond another way to interact with a completely different product that you didn't make?

[Garrison Davis]

To go back to like the AI note taking devices which I saw a few where there's a list of and it will take notes for you. I saw like a Lot of these, like, marketed to like college students.

[Robert Evans]

And it's the thing that. It is a thing that machine learning, because I hate that it gets lumped in with AI. But machine learning has gotten a lot better. Really good.

[Garrison Davis]

It's good at note taking.

[Robert Evans]

And here's the thing, and that's valuable.

[Garrison Davis]

And there's different devices that you can get it on. Like I saw like, like a note taking pen. That's like a pen that just automatically takes notes for you. And that was, you know, kind of like, kind of, kind of fun. But the thing is you can do this exact same thing on your phone with the Chat GPT app. It's the exact same thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't need it in a pen. Just turn your phone on and it'll auto do the notes for you. The actual product part is useless. The whole idea of the smartphone is that you have everything you need already on it.

[Robert Evans]

And that's why I did respect again, companies like Trans AI where it's like, no, this is actually on device. And this is a thing, this is utility that my phone doesn't have, which is that no matter where I am, even if I'm not connected to the Internet, I can translate and I can transcribe using this device. That's real utility. And Trans is not the only company. A couple of companies had products like that.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, we, we saw this emotion tracking pendant, which is.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God.

[Garrison Davis]

Device, which, which listens to every.

[Robert Evans]

So you said motion, not emotion.

[Garrison Davis]

No emotion.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Oh, no.

[Garrison Davis]

But it listens. It listens to everything you're saying. Yeah, it doesn't upload anything to cloud, but in the air is on device. So it listens everything and it's like emotional sentiment analysis. It also monitors your breath and your heartbeat because the necklace like rests like on your chest. And then it like, then it can like analyze like around like six or seven. That's a mistake. Seven different emotions. And like it was like, fine. Like, I don't, I would never need this thing to tell me how I'm feeling. I know how to feel. But like, it might be fun for some people to like track how they're feeling or be like, oh, I was more stressed, I was more stressed this week than like last week. And like, still.

[Robert Evans]

And there's at least a degree of baseline optimism that you have for the product when it's like, okay, this is a device where you're trying to track people's emotions and your immediate first thing you decided as a company was this can't go on the cloud. That would be irresponsible.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, this is why that was the first thing I asked.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And that is I guess the most important fundamental difference between companies and people here and between the companies that are embracing to some extent AI is the ones who, whose default was like, well, but we're doing something that involves emotions or that involves like interviews or conversations that people might not want on, like we shouldn't have that on the cloud versus the people who are like, why wouldn't you put literally everything on the cloud? Why don't you want your health and medical data on the cloud? Why don't we want your financial data on the cloud? Right. Like that is kind of like the most fundamental difference that you see between people here.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Part and parcel of the insatiable. Like just drive for endless value. And probably the comparisons between this convention and its location, Las Vegas are really overlaid in at this point. But I mean there is something about like, you know, the appeal of, of gambling is the promise of, the speculative promise of endless value and how all of these technologies are selling themselves off of endless value. And for the producer side that means like this, this device has endless function potentially. You know, we say endless functions especially.

[Garrison Davis]

With these like AI devices. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

But from the consumer side, it's from a. Well, if you just give yourself over to you know, to, to the God of capital. If you, if you just bleed into the machine and connect yourself to the cloud and give over like everything and it really is everything. I mean there's like AI towels that are like analyzing your sweat. If you give over everything, there is this vague promise of transcendence and that like you will escape the, like the misery of the world that this place is just both completely blind to and then also without ever saying it, like also responding to it entirely.

[Robert Evans]

First off, obviously you're coming at this from more of a left wing perspective. So you probably don't understand that gambling always works and you're definitely going to win. So first off, you know, no, Vegas.

[Garrison Davis]

Really is the anarcho capitalist paradise.

[Robert Evans]

It sure is. But no, I, like, like what you're saying is they want you to give everything over. There is absolutely. There's not outside of again the odd booth where you, you find sane people, which is almost how I think about them in my head where it's like, yeah, where you're putting front and forward. This stays on the device. You don't have to be online. We are not exposing your data.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like seeing a lighthouse in a horrible rainstorm and you're sailing on a ship and you can't see anything. And every once in a while you'll see a booth with a real person.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, thank God.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like talking about it, solving a real problem and you're like, oh, finally.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It's a spectrum between Talking to the AIs, talking to the real few people and then the other people who are kind of in between the two.

[Robert Evans]

And I went from seeing this app where the whole purpose of this company that makes like agentic AI solutions, who I'm scrolling to find their, the company name right now, all of it is they're making agents that you can put in like point of sale things or you can put in like cars as a chatbot. Like one thing they said is, yeah, we can put this in a car and we can have the, you know, you can navigate using voice the way you would normally like with a bunch of other apps. But if you navigate with voice using our app, it will only send you to restaurants or businesses that we have a deal with that are giving us a cut. And so. And you too, the car company gets a cut too. And that was the innovation is that we can not give people like tell people where things are. We can tell people where things are that pay us and you get a cut of it.

[Garrison Davis]

So the company can like make a partnership with like Coca Cola.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

So then when you ask, they were.

[Robert Evans]

Literally talking to Coca Cola reps when I was there and showing them that like, yeah, we have a like, look, we've replaced the human beings that take your orders at Burger King. And the chatbot can alter on the fly of the menu. If you have to get move a lot of vanilla Coke and you want to sell as many larges as possible, it can tell people that's the only option.

[Garrison Davis]

Whoa.

[Robert Evans]

And like, like the fact that they were just like bald faced about it because when I showed up they were, they were demoing how this, this like Burger King menu with AI worked and they were like, there was a full menu that you could see that was like a, like an updated screen menu, but there was a secondary menu where they're like pretending to be a guy who drove up to Burger King. And the way that they started was like, yeah, what burgers are good? What do you think I'd like? And I was like, who?

[Garrison Davis]

No one drives up, no one drives through window and asks what's good.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, no, that's not how they.

[Robert Evans]

And again, there's a menu in front of you. You look at the menu and decide like, that's how everyone buys food. So at first I was like, is this just a company that doesn't know how life works? Who are, like, trying to pretend this is, like, what people want? Where they go, yeah, what's good today in McDonald's? Do you have any specials? Which was crazy. But then I realized, because they were talking to this small group of people, and I realized after a second, oh. Cause I looked at their badges. Everyone has badges that say, all of the people worked for Coca Cola. And so they were talking about how, yes, if Burger King wants to move a specific kind of whopper, then we can put that front and center when people ask what's good? And we can push it. And said, for Coke, if you guys want to move vanilla Coke, we can have. Whenever people order anything, we can have it say, do you want to add a vanilla Coke? A large vanilla Coke? Just like, yeah. And so what I realized is that this company whose name is. This is Soundhound AI Sound Hound.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Yeah, great.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Pretty.

[Garrison Davis]

Pretty good name.

[Robert Evans]

Their motto was faster and more accurate higher revenue. I came to realize, and this is. This is not entirely a separation from other years because they are always selling to companies like this. But there was absolutely.

[Garrison Davis]

They were.

[Robert Evans]

The only thing that they were talking about actual end users, as was a thing that you can pull extra money out of by tricking them, by pushing extra ads to them. And that's who they were actually selling to is these companies that they were like. The other thing they demoed was you can make an agent on the fly and you can include the capabilities. And they showed us how to select it and then built an AI, an agent to live in your car. And the demo they did was like, hey, my car is making this sound. What do you think it is? They didn't play the sound for the AI by the way they described it. And the AI said, that sounds like it could be da da da da da. It'll cost about $700 to fix. Great. Book me an appointment with the dealership. So first off, that's not how people work. I've had car. Everyone has car issues. A regular person, there's a problem with your car. You either have a mechanic that's not the dealership that you go to because they didn't rip you off in the past. And you're like, well, I trust them not to fuck me too bad, or you go to a couple. Because most people don't just drop $700 in a repair and not think about it. But the person that this engineer was pretending to Be for the purpose of this AI demo said, great, book me a repair at the dealership. And the AI was like, okay, I've called them and I've booked you an appointment. And by the way, would you like to schedule a test drive for this specific kind of car? Oh, my wife loves that car. Book us. And that was. The whole thing is he was like, don't be impressed that we can theoretically book you an appointment. Be impressed that we can have the machine upsell you on trying to buy a new car when you come in to fix your old car that broke because you bought a bad car. And there was no shame. They were so proud of themselves. For this machine can repeatedly upsell you things. And that was the only utility. It was not. This allows you to more easily navigate town. This allows you to more easily, you know, cut out problems in your life. It was. This machine can upsell you every minute of your day, everything you ask it to do, everything you try to have it do. And we get a cut of that. If we send it to a restaurant and you buy food there, we get a cut of that. And so does whatever company, you know, put the thing in your car. If you buy a new car, we get a cut of that. That was the product. And that we have gone from. Here are machines that do things. And even back in the glory days of smartphones, at least everyone was showing, like, look, we have a new phone that's thinner than a phone has ever been.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Or like, the camera is like, you know, 4K now or something.

[Robert Evans]

Whatever. The focus is always. And now people who buy them can do this with it. Right.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I mean, I would guess that so much of the impetus for creating this stuff and developing it is all for producer goods and that the. The more revenue is honest and that, like, that's what the. And all the consumer goods are mostly just getting, you know, cast off as, like, now we have all. I mean, literally, that's what the. The LLM rappers are. Is just like, oh, we have this thing. Let's throw a plastic robot on it and try and sell it. But what drives its development is squeezing just little bits, squeezing labor out of the pores of the production process, which you just get you a little bit more, you know, capital to keep this engine going a little bit further.

[Robert Evans]

And it's so. Because the way it'll work is I saw that thing where it's. Literally all you've invented is a way to try to con people out of more of their money. I hope you're proud of yourselves, because I think redacted is what you should do to yourself. And I went from that to the booth of a company called Gentex, who I'd never heard of before, but they make different automotive products. And an engineer there showed me a thing that he had been the lead on inventing, which was a sun visor. So, like, you know, when you're driving and there's a glare, you put down a visor, and the visor is just like basically a piece of fabric, and it blocks a chunk of your view, but it at least blocks the sun. And this was an intelligent visor that was clear and so you could see through it, but it also blocked UV rays. And you could adjust the level of opacity if you needed it to be more or less, but you could still see through the mirror, and it still blocked the glare. And I was like, oh, that's really neat. And then he pressed a button and it turned into a mirror. Suddenly that functioned. It looked great. I saw it. I know it works. And I got, like, an honest wow. I didn't know that was a thing that could happen. And that's a real product. And I can imagine using it. That's like a problem where, yeah, if you want to block glare, you're losing a degree of visibility, and now you're not. You've actually done something right.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, but you could just put Gemini into a toaster and call it a day.

[Robert Evans]

What if your toaster could talk to you about Proust?

[Garrison Davis]

I guess. Yeah, this is actually. Now that's an idea. If we're going to close this, this more AI focused episode, I kind of want to circle back to. To Cloyd and, like, why and why exists?

[Robert Evans]

Just take a second. If you're listening to this at home on the drive, if you've got family around, look at each other, look another person in the eye and say the word. LG has a new home assistance robot named Cloyd. Cloyd. Roll it around in your tongue. Do you know, Just think about it for a second.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

We talk about why Cloyd exists. Like, why. Why is lg, who's previously had some really impressive booths over the years, and.

[Robert Evans]

They had cool TV.

[Garrison Davis]

They had TVs where the wallpaper TV was impressive.

[Robert Evans]

Every time I go to an LG's booth every year, I'm like, yeah, that's a better looking TV than I've seen before.

[Garrison Davis]

Really figured out tv.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it was great.

[Garrison Davis]

But why? Why in the wallpaper TV is okay. There was wallpaper TV last Year it was. It was slightly worse. This one's a little bit better. But why is Cloyd the big thing at the LG booth this year?

[Robert Evans]

Cloyd. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

Because none of the technology that Cloyd is doing is new. Remember last year at Showstoppers, me and you, we saw that really janky robot.

[Robert Evans]

You'd have to be more specific, buddy.

[Garrison Davis]

Janky robot that, like, moves up and down.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The pusher and shover robot.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yes.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And the Cloyd is like kind of that. It's like the actual physical robotic parts of CLOYD aren't new. And the sort of. The sort of AI that's running Cloyd.

[Robert Evans]

And Cloyd to also be a picture if someone needed to make wall E that was legally distinct enough to stop Disney from suing them.

[Garrison Davis]

And tall.

[Robert Evans]

And tall and taller. That's how Cloyd looks.

[Garrison Davis]

So why is Cloyd there?

[Robert Evans]

Why is Cloyd there? I'm always asking myself this.

[Garrison Davis]

This goes into, like, what this. What, like, CES is like doing this year and how it reflects this current state of the tech industry, is that these LLMs, like ChatGPT are not actually better than they were last year. No, they are. They are the same. So how do we make things look. Look cooler at least?

[Robert Evans]

Whatever improvements they are is not enough to notice for an average person.

[Garrison Davis]

Very minimal.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

So instead of actually having anything new or any kind of sizable improvement to display, they're combining two old. And some of their products are kind of archaic. Combining two older products and trying to pass it off as a new thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's these. These. These, like, older. Older, like, robotic systems. Right. That usually kind of humanoid. Maybe they have hands. Maybe the hands can grab things. Can the hands unscrew a milk carton? No, can. Can. Can the. Can the robot grab milk out of the fridge? Yes.

[Ben Rose Porter]

So long as you want milk from a very specific carton. And croissants, and only croissants, you're good.

[Robert Evans]

As long as the milk has a QR code that the robot can recognize to know that it's milk. And also, when it's emptier than a certain level, it actually will crush the milk thing. Like, it has to be a certain level of full. Otherwise, neither of these things are new.

[Garrison Davis]

And the fact that LG doesn't have anything else to display at their booth, the fact that they had to stoop so low as to regurgitate this old kind of cheap robotics and slap an LLM in there, and then Call it a day. So that they have very little to actually show for us.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And you see this walking through like the central hall set. The Samsung booth isn't there. The Nikon booth isn't there. The Sony booth is mostly a car. Like, there's a lot of these big companies are really absent from actual products. Panasonic has a really big booth. But it's mostly about like servers. It's mostly about how, how they're, how they're improving, how they're improving data farming. There's no stuff.

[Robert Evans]

And a lot of the stuff that does exist, you even have to separate further from stuff that exists and actually might be useful to stuff that exists and might be useful because it solves a problem that the thing that it is already created. Like, for example, a bunch. I came to several different companies that had car AI assistants whose job was to yell at you if you fell asleep or got distracted. And they were all built into these giant dashboard things that were. The whole dashboard is a computer screen. And it's like, yeah, I can see why you need a robot to yell. People get distracted because we have data.

[Garrison Davis]

Because they're putting subway surfers on your fucking car. Dash.

[Robert Evans]

We have ample data that shows that when you have a giant screen in a car and people use that screen, they are actually worse drivers than when they're just drunk in a normal car. And so, yes, you have made the car. You can show me how this whole dashboard, you can change it in a second. Look at all these different modes you have. You can smartly change your dashboard, do whatever you want, and it'll yell at you if you get distracted. It's like, well, but the only reason you're getting distracted is because your entire car is a computer screen, which it shouldn't be, and we know it shouldn't be.

[Garrison Davis]

They're either trying to solve problems that they created or inventing solutions to things that aren't really problems. And like with, and this is specifically with Cloyd. And they kept. The guy who was like doing the demo kept reiterating that Cloyd already knows what you want before you have to say anything.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

Whether that's a croissant that's slightly under baked or he knows how to fold laundry just the way you want. You like it badly, which is what she. Which he said in a kind of self aware, ironic tone. Because this robot spent two minutes trying to fold a single towel and it couldn't do it. These things don't work and they're not meant to. It's meant to drive traffic and attention towards the LG brand. Because there's going to be tons of articles being like, look at LG's new butler robot.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Garrison Davis]

And that. And that's. That's all that they're doing at this demo. Because this is not a real product for sale. Yeah, it is. It is meant to drive attention to the brand and get articles, and then those articles are going to get, you know, cited by. By other. By other LLMs. And it's this. It's this cycle that just keeps building.

[Robert Evans]

There's some really impressive stuff there, too. Like, I went to Persona AI's booth, which had a bunch of computers that had without that were not connected to the Internet. All the signs told you that. And it has on PC AI image generators where it's all on the machine itself. And, you know, one of the representatives said, come on, give it a prompt. It'll generate an image. And I've never used an AI image generator. And so I kind of panicked. I'll be honest. Like, I got freaked out.

[Garrison Davis]

This is gonna be some bullshit.

[Robert Evans]

I did pull some bullshit here. I would do Tom Sizemore with Dead Kid. Yeah, I know now that's not Tom Sizemore, but that is a man cuddling a dead child. The kid doesn't. The face is gone. And that's not Tom Sizemore, like, but, you know, the future. The future.

[Garrison Davis]

No, this, this. I can't. I don't want to harp on Cloyd too much, but it's so. It's such a good.

[Robert Evans]

Every additional time you say Cloyd, it sounds less like a.

[Garrison Davis]

Such a good example of what this show is specifically this year, how there's.

[Gordain]

There's.

[Garrison Davis]

There's nothing new. So they're reaching into, like. Into like the CES of yesteryear.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And trying to push two things together and pretend that it's a new thing. And when it doesn't work, they're like, oh, this is actually a good thing. It's. He's. He's folding the towel just the way I like. And that's Bad Boy kind of poorly. Look, he spends 90 seconds putting a single shirt into the washing machine. And this is him being very thorough. That was the word. He's being very thorough.

[Robert Evans]

He really puts in the time and.

[Garrison Davis]

You'Re like, this thing doesn't work.

[Robert Evans]

It's bad. It's a bad product. Part of the mistake they made, I think, is that because this is the year of robots, there are robots there that are like, industrial application robots that are showcasing we have made a robot with humanoid hands that is capable of more intricate movements than any other human hand robot before. And they showed it like intricately folding like, like a pinwheel. And I was like, yeah, that. I have not seen a robot with humanoid hands that has had that much dexterity before. I'm sure that has some useful industrial applications. And then you go from that and there's a bunch of other robots that are industrial where it's like, we have built a new tip for this robot that allows it to do this kind of automotive work or allows it to do this kind of like manufacturing work. Right. Where I'm like, I assume not being an expert on robotics, but you're saying it's the world's first robot that can handle this task, that that's at least an innovation. They talk about the ethics of replacing, but like that's a thing that is a new capability. And you have those robots next to the robots that human beings are actually meant to buy and put in their homes, none of which work well, all of which are exactly as capable as robots 20 years ago. Except there's a chatbot on them. And it makes it all look worse. Where you're showing me what theoretically the best in robotics can do. And then I'm looking at the thing I'm supposed to have in my house and it just fell down and it can't fold laundry. And you want me to spend $6,000 or $12,000. One of the robot, the, I think it was like Booster X or something like that, the one that was dressed like Michael Jackson you're supposed to have as a companion for your child. It'll help it with its homework using ChatGPT.

[Garrison Davis]

That small dancing robot.

[Robert Evans]

The small dancing robot, yeah, I saw it. Yes, yes, the small dancing robot that you can hit in the head with a liquor bottle and it won't break. That was part of the ad video.

[Garrison Davis]

You know how you always want to hit your kid in the head with a liquor bottle? Now you this anger with this tiny child sized robot.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Robot Sin Eater for your child.

[Robert Evans]

And again, if someone was marketing a robot sin Eater, like, are you angry at your spouse? You can beat the shit out of this robot. Fine. At least that's an idea.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. With AI technology, the robot will actually learn your spouse's personality and respond accordingly to the beatings.

[Robert Evans]

Look, look, I've been hitting this robot after I come back from work every day for the last two weeks. And look, as soon as I walk in the door, it starts to shake.

[Ben Rose Porter]

The previous Models.

[James Stout]

It just.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It wasn't satisfying.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. It took a long time for our team to figure out how to give a robot ptsd. By God, we've crossed the Rubicon.

[Garrison Davis]

As you can see, Vegas is taking its toll on our psyches as we've done a extended intimate partner abuse bit.

[Robert Evans]

It's not a partner. It's a robot, Garrison.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, you're right. It's not a part.

[Robert Evans]

But also the robot can think and feel and has core memories and can love.

[Garrison Davis]

You don't put those two things together. These only exist as separate thoughts.

[Gordain]

No.

[Robert Evans]

This robot basically has a soul. Watch us hit it with a liquor bottle.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It would just be so great to, like, with all of the. How much the. They're focused on the. The AI can develop real human connection, but it's also saccharine. I would love to just do a booth where it's like, we're teaching our robots hate. They know how to hate.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And I do want to end by noting one thing that we talked about a little briefly, but is kind of low key. The most upsetting thing about this, which is I saw a bunch of different booths that use the term empathy. And what they meant by empathy was the robot can understand and anticipate what you want. Right. That it's learning you and your patterns in order to offer you and more effectively assist you. And I guess technically. Yeah. But reducing the concept of empathy to the robot knows when you might want snacks is kind of evil. Like, it's in its like a minor evil Fritos. Right? Right. Empathy means the robot knows when to serve you is like a bad way to talk about empathy. I don't think most people. When you. What is empathy? Well, it means someone knows when I want to be upsold on a Hyundai. That's not what empathy is.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Our robot learns empathy by being instrumental to you and useful.

[Robert Evans]

See, we famously.

[Ben Rose Porter]

You know the core of empathy.

[Robert Evans]

We made our robot watch four hours of videos from Gaza, and it immediately said, I bet those kids want a Hyundai Elantra like that. I. Anyway, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

If your version of empathy is trying to sell Coke vanilla, because we have all of this, all this stock. Way too much.

[Robert Evans]

We fucked up. We are in trouble. We're underwater.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what empathy is.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, welcome to the future, everyone.

[Garrison Davis]

It's a CES miracle.

[Robert Evans]

It's a CES miracle. Goodbye. New year, new vibe.

[Garett]

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[Andrew Sage]

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[Garett]

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[Garrison Davis]

So you can celebrate big and still.

[Garett]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Garett]

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[Robert Evans]

This is it could Happen here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today the things falling apart are consumer electronics as an industry. We are at CES 2026, the trade show where the tech industry shows us everything it's going to sell us in the next year. And we've seen some cool stuff and a lot of bloatware, a lot of crap, a lot of AI enabled stuff that doesn't need to be AI enabled. Here to talk about it is our panel of experts.

[Garrison Davis]

Me experts is a strong word, but.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, yeah, panel is a strong word. That's even a strong word. I'm Robert Evans Garrison Davis.

[Garrison Davis]

Hello.

[Robert Evans]

Is also with me.

[Ben Rose Porter]

And I'm Ben Rose Porter.

[Robert Evans]

And Ben, you're an academic, right? You do college?

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You're a college.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I teach sociology.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. That's right. As a sociopath.

[Ben Rose Porter]

How have you been, folks? It's fascinating. I mean, it's a fascinating world sociologically. You can learn a lot of the maladies of society at this place.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's. Most of them are on display here.

[Garrison Davis]

We are now going to walk you through a bunch of the largely non AI products that we were able to find after. After sorting through the gunk.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's kind of like, like, you know how people like pan for gold?

[Garrison Davis]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

If instead of like panning for gold in like a beautiful mountain stream, like you were panning for gold in like a pile of used condoms.

[Garrison Davis]

Gold is also generous. This is the panning for pennies in a pile of used condoms.

[James Stout]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Now, what was the best used condom you saw at CES 2026? Garrison?

[Garrison Davis]

I think you mean what's the best Penny? Good products. Did we see any good products?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, there's some good ones.

[Garrison Davis]

Did I? I don't know if I saw any good products this year.

[Robert Evans]

The translation stuff is still around and some of it's really cool.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean, yeah, we've, in other episodes we've talked about the glasses and the earbuds. Most of the product sheets I have out now are at the very least mixed. If, if, if not, it's not bad. At Eureka park, there was this product called Nodi which is a smartphone replacement for kids, like kids like 6 to 12, if you don't want them having a smartphone. And it allows them to send voice messages to a parent who has this approved contact list. So you can also listen to music, listen to some radio, radio dramas, prize and books. It connects to Spotify. You can learn languages, allegedly. Or you can learn words.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

You can learn words from other languages and you can communicate with your parents. And this was like fine, right? It's the stuff that we've kind of seen before. But it was this little like, you know, silicon kind of looks like, like a elf bar. If you're familiar with an elf bar, it kind of looks like that. And it's if, yeah, if you don't want to give your like, you know, six year old an iPhone, but you, you know, want the them to have a way to contact you.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's like fine, right. So there's a lot of like basic stuff like that, I guess that is like kind of. Okay. I don't want to be cynical for the sake of being cynical. That kind of stuff bores me. But there really wasn't that many good products this year because so many of them just were LLM rappers, as we discussed in our previous episode.

[Robert Evans]

And there's another category. There were products that were good and I could tell were good products on their own that they had still thrown AI functionality that I don't want that I know will bloat the price and also makes it me less want to buy it. LG was advertising their new OLED television that has like the most vibrant colors. The best O L E D screen that's ever been on a tv. And it looked fucking great. I have a video of it. The colors, the darks are amazing.

[Garrison Davis]

LG screens are really good.

[Robert Evans]

But it's also with AI, with EVO AI. And to show off its vibrant colors and what it's capable of, they had a loop of videos that were inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope. And you can see it. If you ever Watch Deep Space 9. It's about the quality of the Deep Space 9 intro.

[Garrison Davis]

It does look very Star Trek intro. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Which is frustrating because again, we have images.

[Garrison Davis]

Just show the actual images.

[Robert Evans]

They look cool because you know what they are is real. Like they're real products of one of the most impressive things human beings ever made. And you're bragging that like we have an AI generating images inspired by this thing that look worse.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, a lot of those things are kind of mixed.

[Robert Evans]

I wanted the TV I was like, wow, I might like a TV like that until you displayed that part of it. And now I just kind of feel dirty about even the prospect of wanting one of your products.

[Garrison Davis]

This is an interesting product I saw at the like the Innovation Awards showcase. This is the acoustic eye, which is kind of disturbed.

[Robert Evans]

First off, that's an ear.

[Garrison Davis]

That's an ear, right? That's an ear. We don't need to do that. But this is specifically a security system that tries to detect very small drones. And this is like for you know, high profile people's houses mostly. You can put that on your roof or your window and it'll detect very small drones that cameras would not be able to detect. So it's trying to like listen for drones. It provides 360 degree omnidirectional aerial surveillance, detecting invisible aerial threats. So I would assume that they're trying to sell these to like, you know, like executives, like CEOs, politicians, people who are at risk of either you know, drones filming around their house or more like kinetic drone based attacks.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And this is an interesting product that's like very current. It's a very current product. Like this is, this is a reflection of a, of some of the times that we're in. And yeah, I found, I found that to be one of interesting thing. I guess we should discuss the exoskeleton, which is maybe the best, the best part of the show for me.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, there's a lot more exoskeletons this year. The technology is clearly matured and matured to the point that not only is it do they have viable versions for like industrial use for people working in factories and whatnot. Right. Which two years ago is what they were always advertising, is that these are things that you buy at an enterprise level. And I know they're not primarily concerned with the health and wellbeing of their workers, but actually these do improve health and well being, wellbeing of workers. Right. It reduces the felt load and the felt strain. It reduces the damaged knees and back. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And that does affect their productivity.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And it also affects the profit because you're not, you're less likely to have workman's comp claims. Right. It's one of those, it's one of those things where it's a really good idea and the products work. There's a number of very good exoskeletons we received from a company called Hypershell, an exoskeleton before the convention this year that you and I both wore on the floor I have some data on it, which is that I timed my normal walking pace when I'm not particularly trying to get anywhere is about 19 minutes a month mile. Right. If I'm just kind of like walking casually. When I put the hypershell on and had it at 75% power mode, my walking pace was 15 to 16 minutes a mile, about 15 and a half, I think is what I generally advertised. And my heart rate didn't change meaningfully. It was like 1 or 2 higher than it normally is, but not really a significant change in heart rate. Right. And I felt like at the end of the day, my feet hurt about a normal amount for a day at ces, but my lower back and my knees felt less strained. Right. That was my experience with the Hyper Shell.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like an external hip almost attaches around your waist.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's a belt around your hip and it goes up to right above your knees is kind of the. And it's. So it's not a huge footprint.

[Garrison Davis]

No, it's a very small device. And yeah, it goes, it goes on your hip. Then another strap, like, goes above your knee and it kind of assists or guides your, like, leg and your hip up and down. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

And for the record, folks, the basic version of this product is about $1,000. The version we had was about $2,100. Right. And the battery will last about 30 kilometers, they say. I didn't have any trouble getting about an eight hour day.

[Garrison Davis]

Ben, you wore it much more than I did. I wore it a little bit. Do you want to talk about your experience with Hyper Shell?

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, I was impressed with it. It was first of all, hypershell. Very fun name. I like that name. It was pretty comfortable to wear, which is I always see the exoskeletons and I'm like, it looks kind of awkward, but it was like, it was very easy to take on and pull off, and it was comfortable and it was pretty simple. And it basically just has two motors that sort of assist when you move your leg, it pushes your leg, and when it comes back in the step, it pushes it back down. And so it's just assisting and it tracks your leg pretty well. So there's just very little time when you're pushing against the machine. It's coordinated very well. I mean, it just functioned. It worked. And you could walk a long time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. The fact that it's like, yes, it's a product that works and it does a thing that has utility. It feels increasingly rare. At ces.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I was a little Disappointed that the product did not pay attention to my emotions and build a relationship of empathy with me. But the walking was good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I asked the hype Rochelle about its opinions on Proust, and it had very little to say.

[Garrison Davis]

It does have two main modes. It has this eco mode, then it's this hyper mode, which can get really aggressive. If you turn up Hyper mode, you can feel it.

[Robert Evans]

It's like kind of lifting your legs.

[Garrison Davis]

You could be bounding.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And you, you can. You can. You can adjust like, the torque. You can adjust, like, how. How much like delay it has. You have a lot of different settings. The one thing that I had a lot of fun with is that there's this other experimental mode. I don't know if you turn it on yet called, called fitness mode. Fitness mode is cool. It does the opposite. It. It adds resistance to the leg movement. So it's. It's for like, working out. If you want, like a harder hike.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Right. Then you can, you can. You can turn on Fitness Mode and then it'll be. It's more work.

[Robert Evans]

It's like how Goku trains to walk.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

But something I. That's an anime thing, by the way. Now, one thing that I found out through my own cunning is that if you have hyper mode turned on all the way, which it was when Ben was wearing the exoskeleton on my phone, I can switch from hyper mode to fitness mode immediately, which completely halts any movement. So you can be walking at like.

[Robert Evans]

Seven fuck up your friend. If they don't have the app at.

[Garrison Davis]

Seven, you're walking with like seven miles an hour, really fast speed walking. And then I press a button and your legs are go to an immediate halt. And it was really fun to do that for about seven hours.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. I almost crashed into several people just because. For Garrett to get his kicks.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, I'm glad you found the terrorize your friend option on that.

[Garrison Davis]

It was really fun. It was really fun.

[Robert Evans]

Most of the time I used it. I had installed the app when I got it, but I didn't think about it after that because you can do everything on device, or at least you can do a lot of device on device. You get a lot more options when you're using the app, but you don't need to use the app to handle the basic functionality. Right.

[Garrison Davis]

I loved adjusting the, like, the intensity of how much it's. How much it's doing. And it shows a whole bunch of, like, applications. Right. You can wear this hiking, like running, doing, you know, lifting work and I.

[Robert Evans]

Like the thoughtfulness in there. You don't need the app to use this, but the app vastly. The app allows you, gives you a lot of control that you're not going to get off of a simple like button.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it just struck me as good design.

[Garrison Davis]

It has a lot of like fidelity via the app.

[Robert Evans]

So that's the hypershell folks. Good exoskeleton. I've used a few at various cess and this one certainly strikes me as like a very good like consumer option. Like if you as an individual want one and I'm sure still most of the sales are going to be like enterprise. Different companies that have like you know, want these for people who are doing like loading and unloading and like a loading doc or whatever. But I think the price prices will continue to go down and they are now hitting the point where this is like a, a thing that individuals can afford if they want one. And there is a lot of and hypershell focused on this in some of their advertising. But there's a lot of utility for people with disabilities for stuff like this. Right? Like that's part of the point of all of these different products. And in general when it came to the stuff where like the cause there's AI in this too Hypershol talks about and it's mostly in just like how it learns and reacts to your motions. Right. That that's like machine learning. When we talk about AI, usually the useful applications you could also just call machine learning. That's what we used to say. But in general the products that impressed me most and scared me most at CES were healthcare related products. Right. Where we have a towel that reads your sweat and can tell if you have like vitamin deficiencies or if you're not hydrated enough or all of these different like the number of products where it's both like yes, this thing can tell if you have fatty liver disease based on without needing to go to a doctor. And I'm sure that is useful and will help a lot of people. And also all of these products are selling your data to the highest bidder. Your health data, your biometrics.

[Garrison Davis]

Did you ask them about that?

[Robert Evans]

Sorry, I am not aware of that being the specific thing for the fatty liver people. That was my problem with all of the health wearables. I should just to be clear, I should clarify. The wearables are all on the cloud and every one of the ones I saw has deals with the LLM companies that they're working with and are handing your data over.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, because that's how they get, quote, unquote, smarter, is through a massive data collection.

[Robert Evans]

And so there's this thing where there is this kind of baseline expectation here that everyone is fine with handing over all of their data, all of their physical data, all of their biometrics, which I like. The utility is undeniable of things that can diagnose without you needing to go to a doctor or can at least suggest the existence of problems combined with. And we are not at all interested in keeping that information secure. I find the kind of casual. And no one will ever. Because I don't think people will. I think people will buy these products and not think about who's getting access to their biometric data. And I wish that people cared about that.

[Garrison Davis]

And we've seen that specifically be a problem, like around. Like pregnancy.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And with states restricting abortion and the ways. Ways in which these companies are aware of people's bodies even before the actual people are.

[Robert Evans]

Here's an ad break. All right, we're back from ads. So I went to Lenovo's booth. It was a bunch of laptops. I use Lenovo laptops. They make good products. It was every product there was either. Here is a new update to the line of laptops we've been making for 30 years. This is the latest one. This is the latest ThinkPad carbon. This is the latest, you know, IdeaPad or whatever. And then they had a couple of, like, the big thing they were showing was the Lenovo Twist, which is a laptop that has a screen that can twist around. And so it can lay flat like a tablet, but it can also. The thing that we're really showing is that it's motorized and it has AI enabled, so it can follow your face and you can set it to track an individual's face. And as you move, it will move with you. Now, it has two different modes. One of them is also. You can, like, gesture to it, or you can command it by voice and you can say, go into laptop mode, go into tablet mode, turn left, turn right. That did not work well. About half the time in the demo that I saw, it did not respond. Maybe because the room was loud, maybe because the data was bad. But then he put it into face tracking mode. And when you have multiple faces, you can pick which face it tracks. And it swiveled to meet your face, and it was cool. And it did work very well. I was like, this is impressive. Like, what is the use case? Why would you want it? And he was like, well, say you're doing a Presentation. Like you're a CEO or something doing a presentation. This way the screen with your text on it or the PowerPoint on it will follow you as you move around. And I was like, that could be useful. I don't feel like many people are in that situation often. I've never been in that situation in my life and I speak in public for a living sometimes. So I guess, yeah, there probably is a CEO who would benefit from. There's like five of those. Like what is the. This is a whole laptop product line. You have multiple versions and I didn't get a single reason why you would want this other than that, other than for presentations. And it's genuinely impressive that it can track your face and move as you move. But why? Another product they had that was in the but why category was the Lenovo Legion. And this is not a product that's ever going to come out, but it was like a proof of concept. So it's their gaming laptop line and it has a normal screen that can widen to be three times as long. And it unfolds. They have screens that unfold and it's cool that they could do that. And it looked neat. And it's neat that a screen has that capability. I don't want it because it also. It doesn't look. I could see like obviously I can see utility and like you can have a screen that gets bigger without it being a bigger footprint for the laptop. But when the screen is unfolded, there's huge like speed bump sized looking like wads of screen that are bigger and like bulge out and it doesn't look good. Like it's a bad screen.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like a little like bubbly.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. When it's fully extended, it's not like a good screen.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

You said it's a proof of concept piece. Like there's this thing, I mean like.

[Robert Evans]

They'Re showing that they've. They're working on folding screen technology.

[Garrison Davis]

The twist was, was like a previous version of that.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

The proof of concept called the Swivel was at CES last year.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And they improved it. And now it's a real product called To Twist.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

And maybe this could be the case for this. Like unlike unrolling, unfolding, eventually it will be in products.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

But I also don't think. I don't see how you cannot have the bulge. It's kind of integral to how the screen works.

[Garrison Davis]

The folding screens have come a long way the past five years.

[Robert Evans]

I use one. They also do have some pixels dying in the Fold area.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, yeah, if you're trying to buy products for longevity, probably not the thing for you. If you like it for the novelty and for some reason have enough cash to burn, then maybe it's something someone will be interested in.

[Robert Evans]

As I was watching it unfold, there were two guys behind me and talking about it, and one of them was like, yeah, it's not a real. It's not gonna actually come out. Like, that's even, like, the old version of the chassis. And I said, I just don't really see a use. I don't think people want a product like this. Like, I'm looking at it, the screen's not great, and I just don't see who's gonna buy this. And the guy behind me said, well, I think, like, the use case is, like, billionaire CEOs and other people have a lot of money. And I look back and it was a Lenovo rep. And I was like, that's not.

[Garrison Davis]

That's insane.

[Robert Evans]

Why? Who? Like, that's not like. Did you just say that to me?

[Garrison Davis]

A Lenovo rep said that?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, he was one of the guys doing the demos. He had a Lenovo badge on. And I. Yeah, that was weird to me.

[Garrison Davis]

That's wild.

[Robert Evans]

But again, at least it was a thing.

[Garrison Davis]

No, it was a physical product.

[Robert Evans]

Because the other thing they had. They had the workstation, which the thing they were showing was there's an app on it that looks at your face and shows you how fatigued you are by percent and how fatigued your eyes are and, like, other data. And I was like, oh, that's creepy. And kind of impressive. But then I walked away and I came back and it gave me a totally different set of numbers for my fatigue.

[Garrison Davis]

Were you differently fatigued?

[Robert Evans]

No, I was a second later, and I did it four times, and every time, the set of numbers was, like, different enough that the only assumption I can make is that those aren't real numbers. It's just generating a number and telling you that, and it's full of shit. Because it wouldn't have been so different if it was actually measuring anything. It's just random numbers that it's putting on to make you think it's measuring something.

[Garrison Davis]

It's probably trying to. There might be just subtle things that dramatically change the number that's being.

[Robert Evans]

I specifically, once I noticed that, tried to keep my face flat. And I did notice when you move closer and further, it changes, but I think it's just programmed to, as you move, alter the numbers so that you see the Number moving. But every time I came on new, it was a different number. It went from, like, when I started, it was, like, 0.02. And the second time I came back, it was 0.50. And again, I did nothing. I was specifically keeping my face neutral.

[Ben Rose Porter]

It's just this.

[Robert Evans]

It's not a big deal.

[Garrison Davis]

I think that type of stuff will get better. We've seen versions of that before that have actually done. Okay.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

There could be a lot of factors into why the demo goes a certain.

[Robert Evans]

Way, the face tracking and facial recognition work. But I went to this booth that, like, the big thing they were doing was, like, driving assistant robots that would, like, yell at you if you fell asleep or if you, like, looked away and were, like, texting or something. It would say, like, look away from your phone. Look at the screen, please. And there's definitely, like, utility there. Right? Like, that is probably a good idea.

[Garrison Davis]

We saw that last year at Samsung's section of Eureka park for, like. For, like, test taking, to make sure students aren't cheating at tests.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[Garrison Davis]

So it, like, sends an alert every time the student's eyes goes away from, like, the computer screen. Like, if. If they, like, keep, like, looking down, like. Like, under. If they could be checking, like, their phone or notes.

[Robert Evans]

SmartEye is the company. One thing I did appreciate was that the little device that they put in was just like a circle with two eyes on it as opposed to, like, a whole dashboard. So that seemed nice. But the thing. The thing that they had. The first thing I used was this optical recognition system where it learned my eyes. And then when I came on, it would give my name every time I walked up to it. And so, like, yeah, it definitely, like, recognizes at least your eyes. That's a different. It could switch between different people, but it was also. It can tell when you're drunk, they claim. And I couldn't tell that. I couldn't. I was high on Kratom and I had no delta 8, but. So I was definitely not sober. It didn't recognize me as not sober, so it couldn't measure those things. Maybe it can tell if you're drunk demo. It's it. They said it could. And they showed a woman when she was sober and when she was drunk, and they explained to me it was actually really difficult because we did this on a close track and she is really drunk, and we had to jump through a lot of hoops for them to let us have a person drunk driving on a close track. And I did find that kind of funny.

[Ben Rose Porter]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

That is how you test.

[Garrison Davis]

That would be kind of a hard thing to test. Yeah. They could test in, like, simulations.

[Robert Evans]

Right. But they wanted, like, this was supposed to be a proof of concept in a vehicle and it'll shut down the car. I did have some people posting, when I posted a video of that, that, like, I have this condition with my eyes or that condition with my eyes, and normal optical recognition stuff doesn't work with me. Is this going to show that I'm drunk or is it going to, like, be able to. And I actually don't know. Again, I'm not. I was not able to test the product. That. That does seem like a concern I would hope they've dealt with. But also, I kind of doubt they did because usually there's gaps.

[Garrison Davis]

I could see a company like this partnering with, like, an insurance company or partnering with, like, certain cars that would, like, stop the car from being able to be moved if it detects the driver is drunk.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

And how, like, false positives would. Would play into that. And then you just, like, are, like, locked out of your car because this robot thinks you're intoxicated and actually you're fine. You just, like, look like that.

[Robert Evans]

And I could also see them, like, rolling this product out and it hits, like, Thailand or something. And then there being a big store. It's like, they didn't test this on any people of, like, Thai ancestry. And it actually sees all of them as drunk because of, like, an error in the coding.

[Garrison Davis]

Sure.

[Robert Evans]

And being like, oh, great. Like, like I'm not, again, smart. I. From what I can tell, their technology worked. But in order to adequately, like, review and test it, you do need. You need more access to it than they're giving at the show. I can't actually tell you if it works at determining when people are drunk. I can just show you. They had a video claiming it does.

[Andrew Sage]

So.

[Garrison Davis]

One. One product that I feel at best mixed about. I. I first saw in the CES Innovation Awards section. This is called Self Insight Therapy Resolve XR from South Korea.

[Andrew Sage]

Oh.

[Robert Evans]

One of my two favorite Koreas, by the way. Just since we're talking Korea, this is.

[Garrison Davis]

A VR therapy program that is supposed to give. Give you a final goodbye with a deceased loved one in VR. Yes. This was my initial reaction as well. And like, I've seen version. I've seen versions of this before where it's like an LLM or like an AI.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Pretending to be your, like, dead wife that you, like, hug in VR.

[Robert Evans]

Sure.

[Garrison Davis]

And that type of stuff.

[Robert Evans]

I've.

[Garrison Davis]

I'VE generally felt bad about. No, some of the people who've used it like in like you know, like the promotional videos are you know, crying and I feel and like the product in a way.

[Robert Evans]

As a friend, I will promise you if that moment ever comes for you, I'll pretend to be your dead wife.

[Garrison Davis]

I don't even know what to say to that. But what I found interesting about Resolve XRP is that the, the avatar of your deceased loved one is not.

[Robert Evans]

That's a bleak term.

[Garrison Davis]

Is not actually an AI, nor is it a fully pre recorded like, pre scripted like simulation. It is being puppeted by a therapist that you are working with as a part of the gestalt empty chair therapy technique. And this, this is what the product is. So you're working with a therapist who is using text to speech that is talking as your deceased, as your deceased loved one as a part of this therapy exercise. If you have, if you have recordings of their voice, the AI will try to replicate their voice. That's something I feel a little bit odd about. But like that is like the one like aspect of like quote unquote AI that's being used here is, is for, is for the voice cloning. And then there's like a pre, a pre recorded set of like gestures that someone does in like motion capture. But the actual like, like live puppeting of this thing is done by a therapist that you were sitting across from, but you have you know, the VR goggles on. And this is, this is not supposed to be something that you do like routinely. It's not like oh, I'm like I'm talking to my wife, like my wife is in VR. It's, this is a therapeutic exercise meant for people dealing with extreme grief. Specifically when loved ones have been taken away during like, like, like accidents. Like they specifically mentioned like a plane crash that happened a year ago. And so this is for people like in extreme, extreme grief to give them like closure through this therapeutic exercise. And this is the pamphlet.

[Robert Evans]

I went through a lot of whiplash because obviously my first assumption was this is an evil product where you feed your loved ones social media data and it pretends to be them. And it's not that. And it's good that it's not that. But then it's like it's being basically a therapist puppeting your dead loved one. There's a couple of conclusions I have. First off, these people are trying to be ethical. It does seem, it seems like they care and they are attempting to provide something that is useful to people who are suffering. I also think this might fundamentally. This idea might be fundamentally unethical and impossible to do well. So I think this might be a case of someone trying to do the most ethical version of something that cannot be done ethically, which is a category of AI device that I've seen this year.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I. It's tricky because on one hand, you know, as I was talking to the. The woman at the booth and reading through the materials they had, it seemed like they were selling this as. This is just sort of augmentation to a therapeutic practice that is already done.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

We're just putting a, you know, a digitally generated face and voice to it. But it's so. I mean, it's so easy to imagine. Just this company seems somewhat ethically focused, but all kinds of directions you could go in this. It's a Pandora's box. A little bit of like we're starting to venture into creating replicas of the dead.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

And that is.

[Robert Evans]

And I went to a panel kind of in the same tone on mental health and AI that I thought was going to be an opportunity for me to harass an executive during a Q and A because.

[Garrison Davis]

Which is. Which is one of your favorite CES.

[Robert Evans]

Activities, Favorite thing to do at ces. And there literally is like, AI. There's ample data that it is a disaster for mental health, not just AI psychosis, but there are a lot of things that it makes worse and a lot of problems that it causes people and a lot of problems that it exacerbates, including like suicidal ideation. This is documented. There's data on it. So that's what I was. I was showing up prepared to do that. And what I actually got was an actual clinical therapist who was trying to talk about, who first started by kind, by very much admitting the dangers with AI and the things that it harms in terms of mental health. And then was trying to say, what would a responsible and ethical like therapeutic AI do? And her argument was, we know how many people need therapy and don't have access to it, both in the United States and worldwide. And some sort of automated bot system that handles aspects of therapy might be the only way to provide affordable therapy to the number of people who need it, who can't currently afford it. And I disagree. Or at least I. I don't think that. I don't disagree. It's accurate that there's way more people who need mental health than can afford it. Right. That's undeniable, undebatable. I disagree that AI can help this problem in any meaningful way and in fact think it will only make it worse. But I understand that she was coming at this from a. I am attempting to define what a responsible therapeutic AI might do. And through the course of that, I believe she is, partially because I talked to her about this afterwards too. She thinks it might be possible, but is not convinced that it is in fact possible for there to be an AI therapy system that is actually useful. And one of the things she brought up was that traditional AI chatbots, the big ones, are all programmed to gas you up to. In order to keep you using them. Right. They're programmed to make you want to continue to interact with them. And so it does things that are really bad for your mental health and that can exacerbate and cause new problems. Right. Because of the way these are programmed. So any responsible AI therapy chatbot would have to not do that. Which I'm like, that is true that you can't be a useful therapeutic tool that only praises people. Right. That's just not a thing. But when I came up to afterwards, I was like, my, my issue is, I think you're right about that. But I also think if you're saying the AI therapy bot is going to be a separate product that does not do these things, number one, it's a high bar to get people to pay money for a tool when they already have the chatbot. And number two, if the chatbot that is good for them doesn't do the thing that makes it addictive, people will continue to use the addictive one for therapy. And she said, yeah, that's my worry too. And so I came away from being like, she's trying to explore if this can be done. And my conclusion based on her exploration is it can't.

[Ben Rose Porter]

But it's so interesting that she said that because she. And this is, I mean, me hearing you talk about her. She sounds like the only person who was thinking about this at all at this convention.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, she was the only person on the panel.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. Of just.

[Robert Evans]

It was a speech, not a panel, really.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Of thinking about that. What are the social relations behind these technologies? Because of course, that's the main question here is a technology that can generate, that can have a conversation with you is one thing. It's not. That really doesn't seem like the core of the problem so much as. Well, all the machines that are having conversations are driven by very specific incentives, you know, to interact with their users in a particular way that has everything to do with the social relationships of their production and use and the notion that technology would have any connection to social relations at all is completely absent from any discussion of any product I've seen here.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of social relations between products and human beings, here's some ads. Oh, we're back. And God, I really love those Chumba casino ads. They remind me that whenever I'm out in the world sitting down with my loved ones, you know, watching the big game, I could be gambling. And kind of every other moment of my life that I'm not gambling is wasted.

[Garrison Davis]

Robert, have you heard of Kalshee?

[Robert Evans]

No.

[Garrison Davis]

So you know about politics, right?

[Robert Evans]

I love politics.

[Garrison Davis]

And you know about insider trading, right?

[Robert Evans]

I love insider trading.

[Garrison Davis]

What if you could do insider trading about all of politics on the exclusive information that you will learn as a journalist?

[Robert Evans]

Wow, that sounds legal.

[Garrison Davis]

It shockingly is. There's actually zero federal or state regulation affecting this whatsoever.

[Robert Evans]

That's the Couchy guarantee.

[Garrison Davis]

There is no regulatory mechanism that exists on a state level to regulate this behavior.

[Robert Evans]

Now years. And you say that, but that's literally just what's printed above their booth.

[Garrison Davis]

Let's talk about maybe the worst product that I saw at ces, Child Free Trust.

[Robert Evans]

Boy. So what I don't know, is it like a software that lets you make a trust?

[Ben Rose Porter]

This software was marketed towards child free people. They, they lead with 25% of Americans don't have children and don't intend to have them.

[Robert Evans]

Hell yeah.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. And so their idea is that they write here, child Free Trust is the first comprehensive nationwide solution providing medical and financial POA executor and trustee representation for child free and permanently childless people. So if you are childless and you don't want to burden your loved ones, that's their wording with, you know, your estate plan when you die. This is a company that will do that for you. What's interesting though is that I asked them, I said, well, look, you know, this presumably already happens. What is in place?

[Robert Evans]

I have a trust in no children. Yes.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. Well, the state appoints someone to handle this. They will first see if you have any loved ones who would want to take on these duties.

[Robert Evans]

And obviously people without kids aren't capable of love.

[Ben Rose Porter]

So yeah, yeah, they a little bit. I mean, strangely, like. So it's a product that is for. We already have a public service that searches for people, loved ones that could take on these responsibilities. And if it cannot find those, it takes it on as a, as a public good. So it was, it was a product completely without purpose. It was like you, in order to use this, you just have to be intent on, on separating yourself from society in this way, you have no loved ones, presumably, or you don't want them involved in your estate planning. You also don't want the state involved. So it requires this, this third party company. It was just a very strange product the way they presented it.

[Robert Evans]

Well, I mean it's again, I have a trust and a will. If you don't have a kid and you don't have like a, you're not like married or you don't have a surviving spouse, like, yes, the state will appoint somebody, but that process is slower and more expensive if you want to avoid the cost or if you want to avoid like having a trust and a will is not an unreasonable thing. Especially if you want to make sure, if you have assets and you want to make sure they go a specific place, you want to donate them somewhere or whatever.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, and like a lawyer can handle that.

[Robert Evans]

A lawyer should handle that. Is what I'm saying is you shouldn't use an app specifically.

[Garrison Davis]

What they do that the lawyer can't is they provide a service for the corporation to execute power of attorney. And that is the main thing. So this is the most anti social, this is the most antisocial service I've seen at all of CES because it's built on this idea that if you have no kids and you are so separated from the rest of your family, like you don't trust any siblings, you don't trust a spouse, a partner, maybe you don't have one, you don't trust parents, you don't even trust a friend to. Yeah, to like do this for you instead that you turn to a company, a private company. You don't even trust the state. Right. Because the state can handle this. It is a private corporation that is going to handle your will, your estate and power of attorney.

[Robert Evans]

That's that POA thing.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what really got me because I asked them, it's like, yeah, like a lawyer can handle all this. Like, well, no, regular lawyer can't be power of attorney. And I was like, oh, this is the core of your product actually is that it's for people who are so antisocial, who have so separated themselves that they don't trust, they don't trust.

[Robert Evans]

There's no one, anyone with this.

[Garrison Davis]

They don't have any loved ones. Really. It's not just about being child free. No, it's like it's about you do not exist in a social network whatsoever.

[Robert Evans]

Because I can see the kind of people who might need this are people or might want this are not the people kind of people who use apps because the actual, the group of people who definitely don't have kids and also may not have any living friends are people who are incredibly elderly. It's not even a factor of like their life is bleak. It's just you lived way too long. You literally don't have anyone left that you knew. But they're not going to use an app. Like, that's just not how they think about. If they don't have a lawyer, they'll let have the state handle it. But like, they're not, they're not going to download the child free app, this 104-year-old Okinawan woman to like handle this for them. There's like a graph on the bottom that shows like features and like what different versions have, which features. And the three features are child, free, trust, trust and will. And then free will as one word, but the W is capitalized. I just like seeing free will and then checks and Xs at the bottom. You don't get free will on all of the options. Sorry, what is free will as a service, Garrison? Are they saying the machine has it or is it literally a free will making service?

[Garrison Davis]

I think it's creating a will for.

[Robert Evans]

Free and they're just calling it free will.

[Garrison Davis]

I think that's what they're doing.

[Robert Evans]

Okay.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, but yeah, no, and this was in, this was in Eureka Park.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Which is where the cool little products are. That's bad.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, it was really bizarre.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's a fun bit that you could do if you had the money to show up and just do bits at CES where it's like, this company can handle all of your end of life care and decisions and it's just a booth with a handgun on a table.

[Garrison Davis]

So let's talk about. To close, let's just discuss like what this Cesar kind of means in general. We already kind of discussed like the AI angle of this and something that we've seen throughout this show is these, these massive banners hanging everywhere about how CES is where innovators show up.

[Robert Evans]

Sure, yeah, absolutely.

[Garrison Davis]

And in how everything's based around innovation and creativity. This is where everything descends from and this sort of like, like tech idealism that the world is based around these concepts of innovation and creativity. And they do not mention any, any physical way that actually comes into the world or the sort of mechanisms of the world that allow innovation to take place. And Ben, we've been talking a lot about this the past like two days.

[Ben Rose Porter]

I mean, it's all we're solving all the problems of the world, and we're fixing everything, and it's all eternal sunshine. And where that comes from is innovation and creativity. But those are just, yeah, totally abstract quantities. There's not even a subject given of, like, innovators. Well, who. Who is that?

[Robert Evans]

Like, you're innovating.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. If you. Is that the owner? Is that the workers who make it? I mean, no mention of labor at any point in any of this, which. I mean, that's a given.

[Robert Evans]

But that's not true. They talked about all the laborers you could replace.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, all right, you can.

[Garrison Davis]

We don't need them.

[James Stout]

It's.

[Ben Rose Porter]

The innovation is this is drawn the full circle. It produces itself now. Yeah, just the. This abstract quantum of. I mean, it really is kind of interesting. It does become a blur of, like, who is the magical font producing all of this stuff? It almost. At sometimes it almost seems like it's the consumer. It's sort of suggesting it's actually you who creates all of this. It was very vague, very strange.

[Garrison Davis]

We went to that one panel about, like, trying to address underserved people who are. Who are, like, cut out of tech and, like, cut out of. Cut out of all of these, like, industries.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah. I mean, it was very nondescript about who exactly that was. Yeah, they had people talking for the paralyzed veterans, someone from the naacp, and, I mean, it was just one. Again, there was no actual discussion of the social relationships behind technology. It was just entirely about this. Technology is here. It is the first priority, so everything else has to follow after. And, yeah, very unclear about. They would all talk about what technology could be used for, but entirely nondescript about where that process comes from, who's making those decisions, where those centers of power are.

[Robert Evans]

The reach to have an. For existing brands and companies that make real things, to have an AI angle was the most obvious and tortured thing that I saw. And, like, one of my favorite booths every year is the Jackery booth. Jackery makes batteries and solar panels, and they make pretty good batteries and solar panels for, like, expeditions, for camping. Like, they're rugged. They can. And I use them. They're good products. And this year, they had the new edition of all their batteries and the new addition of all their solar panels. And as generally happens with technology, everything's a little better than it was last year. But there's not much room for AI Aside from, like, the batteries have AI, by which they mean there's, like, a learning algorithm that can determine, like, how to optimize aspects of, like, power Draw or whatever. Like, sure, that's not really AI in the way that the AI industry means it, but I sure sounds real. But because that wasn't enough, they had this thing that they called their Mars rover, which was not a Mars rover. I don't think we'll ever go on Mars. Does not look like it could survive on Mars. But it is a rover that is a big battery on wheels that is intelligent and can drive itself and has solar panels that slide out. And the use case for this was it will travel around and can go to where the sun is in order to charge itself up and then head to you to offer you outlets when you're doing work. And it's like. Is a robot that moves really? I can see, like, two points in my life where I might have gotten used to who's going to buy this for what? Where will it be deployed? It just roams around outside this expensive machine that does not look like it should get rained on too much and finds the sun to charge itself up and then heads over to you to charge device. It can't charge a home. It doesn't power a house. It's like a little robot.

[Garrison Davis]

Is it for, like, camping?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. That was unclear. They showed it being used, and they showed it as like, I'm outside and using power tools. The robot came up to me so I could plug in and, like, I.

[Garrison Davis]

Guess you could take it, like, the park. You could take it to park.

[Robert Evans]

But it's big.

[Garrison Davis]

It is pretty big.

[Robert Evans]

It's like a sizable machine. It probably weighed 80 pounds. And again, like, it's impressive that it can go seek out the sun to charge itself up. It's impressive that you could, like, call it or, like, call it with an app and it will come over to you and there's an outlet. Who. What is the. Who will buy this? Why? When?

[Garrison Davis]

That is an odd one.

[Robert Evans]

Again, I can think working in my yard, working out, you know, when I'm shearing the goats or whatever. I have had to carry a battery with me because there's not an outlet out there and the shears need a battery. And yeah, I guess it would be easier if the robot moved there, but this has to be like $20,000. I'm not gonna buy a robot to do that. I can just pick up a battery and walk with it a hundred feet. Who will use this? Why? It's not going to Mars. I assure you it's not going to Mars. Again, I wouldn't want it to be left out in the rain. And I love the Jackery products. They make good stuff. And the fact that like, yeah, you clearly scrambled to make this, that you had a thing that could compete with all the other AI things. And I wish you were just devoting your lives to making better solar panels, which is what I want from you.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Anyway, I'm just curious, are the companies here, are they profitable? Like, do they?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, some of them, some.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Of them, but a lot. I mean, some of them are funded.

[Robert Evans]

With VC money and have not made a profit. Some of them are funded from VC money and have been losing money for years. And then there's also like, like Lenovo makes. It's a company, it makes a profit. They make products people buy. You know, Jackery makes products people buy.

[Garrison Davis]

There's also a lot of startups like the Eureka park section that we've been referring to, like the, the stuff in the bottom floor of the Venetian that those are, you know, a lot of startup companies who are looking for investors as well. So yeah, it is definitely a mix. Some of them are trying to do like business to business sales, some of them are more consumer facing, some of them are looking for investors, some of them are profitable, and other ones are trying to boost their stock price by being here. Kind of like Cloyd at lg. But I think what's really important is that everyone here is an innovator. And you know why we know that they're an innovator? It's because they've shown up and only innovators show up here. And they're the real, the driving force of the economy.

[Robert Evans]

And honestly, I was feeling bad about myself until I saw that banner and realized that I am an innovator. You know, you are an innovator. Thank you. I showed up and I figured out how to be the guy on the most kratom at the, at the CES show floor.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I mean CES is so, is so interesting. I innovated like it runs on both, on this like technology idealism where everything is based on, you know, people geniuses. You know, your Steve Jobs having like an idea, Steve's job, and he is the innovator. And everything descends from the idea that it's like the thing is like this, like, like tech platonism. So this is one side of it. You also have like the tech accelerationists at CES where it's like they occupy this position of being so pro technology, no matter whatever downsides of the current iteration might have, because they need someone to hold that position in order for this thing to move forward. They know that there's concerns around data protection, but their opinion is that it doesn't matter. There is problems there. But we, we, the people here at ces, the innovators need to ignore them because we have to push forward. And this is like, this is what, like the, the Austrian Secretary of State said that at that one panel I went to is like data protection is a problem, but in a bit like it gets in the way of innovation.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And that's literally, literally what he said.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And so you have, you have this like, this, this like tech optimistic, like acceleration, like viewpoint of like technology will be better, but in order for it to be better and save us, eventually it's, it's gonna, it's kind of shitty and has some problems now. But we need to push forward through that all the way. Like, we can't, we can't, we can't go slowly. It has, it has to go forward. So they adopt this, this viewpoint because like, they need someone to hold this like tech optimism viewpoint in order for the process to like, unfold.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah, there's something strangely clear eyed about that in the way that it's like, yeah, if, I mean, if you're limiting your view to the system of capitalism. Yeah, the whole thing goes into crisis if you are not squeezing a little more juice out of the orange. And if this is what it takes to do that, then full steam ahead. They're lucid about that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

You know what else is lucid? Us saying it's time to end this fucking podcast. Goodbye.

[Garrison Davis]

Another CES miracle. We have kind of survived.

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[James Stout]

Hey everyone and welcome to the podcast. It's me, James Today and I'm very lucky to be joined again by Gordain, who's a journalist from East Kurdistan, working with Hengo, the Human Rights organization and lots of other organizations. And we're going to talk today about what has been happening in Iran for the past few weeks. So thanks for joining us. Gordon, hello.

[Gordain]

Thank you very much for inviting me again to the, to this show and yeah, I'm really glad to be here and I am ready to talk about all the things that have happening in the past few weeks in Kurdistan and Iran.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think for a lot of people, what is happening in Iran in the last few weeks has not really punched into the mainstream US Media for the most part. Right. So I think we should probably begin with a very basic overview of what has been happening and a little bit of why it's been happening and also where. Because I think that's worth mentioning. Right?

[Gordain]

Yeah, sure. So just a few days before the New year's Eve on December 28, there was a spontaneous demonstration and strike in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, which is basically the center of Iran's trade and one of the most important backbones of the Islamic regime or revolution. There were strikes inside the bazaar. And so many shopkeepers and business owners just closed down their businesses and they took to the streets and inside the shopping centers and they started chanting against the regime. And they were basically protesting the horrible economic situations and the decrees of the Iranian riyal, or the Iranian currency against the US dollar, which was $1, was equal to 1,400,000 Iranian riyals. And then these protests quickly spread it all over the city in Tehran. And as usual, this is what happens all the time. The Iranian regime forces, they started attacking people and trying to control the situation, but it somehow got out of their control. And the next days, these protests, these strikes, spread it to other cities, to other major cities from Shiraz, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, and many other cities got involved. But in the early January, around January 5 to 6 and 7, there were major protests in cities like Malikshahi in Ilam province and other cities in Kermanshah Province, which are basically the Kurdish provinces in western Iran. What is really unique about this is that usually when protests happen across Iran or when there is something happening, the Kurdish regions are the first to react. But this time, the Kurdish regions, like, if I want to say the West Azerbaijan province and the Sanandas province, they were not really involved because a lot of people were saying that in the previous movements, especially in 2022, we gave too much. There were too many victims here. But the center was silent. I mean, Tehran and Shiraz and these major Iranian cities. So a lot of people didn't really come out, and there was nothing happening. And at the same time, this is my personal opinion, I think, because there was also a heavy snowfall in Kurdish regions and it was really cold, and I think a lot of people just didn't want to go out. So this was happening in Malik Shahi and other cities in Elam and Kermanshah province until I think it was January 5th, that there was a really, really big demonstration in Malik Shah. And it's a small city, but I can say majority of the people were out on the streets. And then the Iranian regime forces started shooting at people and they injured and killed a lot of people. And the hospital in that city, in that small city was full and they had no. No space anymore. So the people took the injured protesters to the center of or the capital of the province, in Elam city, to the Imam Khomeini hospital. What happened in this hospital was that there were so many people in front of the hospital, like families and relatives of the victims. And then after a few hours, the Iranian regime forces started attacking the hospital. There were so many videos and footage that came out, and we also posted it on Hangout and all over the Internet, that the regime forces were basically surrounding the whole building. And then they started shooting tear gases inside the hospital. And then there was a video that came out that these regime forces were trying to get inside the hospital and arrest or kidnap all the injured people or if there was a dead body or something. And then there was some sort of resistance from the medical staff, and then they started beating the medical staff. And then a few days later, we also posted about it that some of these medical staff in that hospital were also arrested. The same thing was also happening in a few other cities, but this was very specific and it got very viral on social media and a lot of people talked about it. And at the same time, there were massive protests taking place in Tehran and other major cities, which, like, I am 28 years old and I think I've never seen such thing happening in Iran. It was. It was really extraordinary. So while these things were happening, there were also a lot of calls from people in Kurdistan that they were calling on Kurdish parties to do something, to say something. So on January 6, seven Kurdish parties from Iran, they had a meeting and they announced a call for a general strike in Kurdistan for all over Iran. So on Thursday, January 8, over 40 cities across Kurdistan, they went on a strike, which was really big, and it wasn't really discussed or talked about on major media, and it was somehow ignored while it was a really big action that took place there. And usually after the strikes in Kurdistan, this is something that's happening for years. People take to the streets and protest during the night. It happened in a few cities and there were some people injured and also killed. And then it's been over 124 hours right now as we're talking now that there is no Internet connection in Iran and even the normal lines don't work. You cannot call anyone from outside of Iran. However, there are some people who have access to the Starlink Internet and some, a few people that have access to, I don't know, some sort of strong VPNs that work for a few minutes and then they disconnect. And at the same time, I have contacts to two people who have been using the SIM cards or the Internet from Iraq or Turkey. They are living on the border regions, but they also have a limited access. So this is what's happening right now. And as we were talking about this, this blackout in Iran has, has caused a lot of confusion, a lot of horror that the world doesn't know what's happening exactly right now. Yeah, after the blackout there were a few videos and footage that came out that were published by major activists or journalists like Ali Jawan, Marty and so many others that they received these videos, I don't know, from the Internet, from Starlink. And you can see in these videos that in a place called Kharizak, it's near Tehran, it's where the Tehran's Forsenik Medical center is located. You can see in these videos that countless of bodies, maybe hundreds or maybe thousands of bodies are just on the ground. They're in body bags. And desperate family members, relatives all traumatized, are looking for their loved ones. And it's just like, it's so unbelievable. It's like movies. And apparently the regime forces have machine gunned all these people.

[James Stout]

Jesus.

[Gordain]

And right now, because of the blackout, we really don't know how many people are exactly killed, how many people are injured, how many people are arrested or these things. You know, we don't know the exact numbers and it makes things so hard. But today, a few hours ago, there was a report from Iran International that stated that over 12,000 people have been killed. But this also is not fully confirmed because they just got these things through some sources. And then at the same time, CBS News also published a report and said that between 12,000 to 20,000 people have been killed. But again, this is not really fully confirmed or verified because there is no information coming out that much. At the same time, we also got reports from Kurdistan that in the city of Kermanshah, these regime forces were taking the dead bodies with bosses. We don't know how many, but we know that they were taking these bodies with bosses. Like we don't know how many hundreds. And from this footage that you can also see that the regime is taking all these bodies with containers, like with trucks all over the city in Tehran and they're bringing it to the center that I mentioned before.

[James Stout]

God.

[Gordain]

And all families are looking for their children and their people. At the same time, I also got this direct information from someone who is from Rasht in north of Iran. She was traveling from Tehran to Rash and she said that the people have burnt down most of the mosques and also the banks and other government buildings. Are also footage all over the Internet that in most of the cities that people have burnt down the. The whole mosques and buildings belonging to the government. And at the same time she also said that in that city there are so many people that are killed. She doesn't know how many or who, but families were desperately looking for their loved ones on the streets or anywhere. This is basically the same in almost every major city or even small city. We don't know exactly, but this is the footage that we got from Tehran that it shows what's going on.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's horrific.

[Gordain]

Yeah, there are many, many. Also in our organization we got a few confirmations from these limited access that some of these people killed in Tehran are also Kurdish and obviously from other minority groups as well. At the same time, there is a special case that I want to talk about. There is a person like a protester. His name is Irfan Sultani. He was arrested a few days ago and he is planned to be executed tomorrow. We don't know if they're really going to do that or whatever, but this is a really big sign that a lot of people are warning about it, like human rights organizations and that the regime might carry out mass executions everywhere and just to take control over the situation. This is also something that might happen.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Because they did execute people after the Armenia protest, but they didn't do a three day trial. Right. That they did here. They had like a show trial first in those instances.

[Gordain]

Yeah. They executed dozens of people after Gina Amini was killed and also previously in the previous years. So this is like what's in general is happening. And at the same time, like in diaspora in Western countries, there are groups that are on the streets, like people that are calling for solidarity or whatever that can be done to help people out inside Iran. Yeah, this is like a general overview of what's happening. And as I said before, because there is no Internet connection and if there is, it's very limited. Nobody knows what's happening exactly. Nobody knows the exact scale of the. The crimes that are taking place right now there.

[James Stout]

Yeah, let's Take a little break for advertisements here and then we'll come back and talk a little more. Okay. And we're back. So if people have seen anything about this, I don't know if they're on like, X X, they would have seen videos of mosques burning and maybe videos of the Pak, like, shooting at buildings. You know, these are the videos that were kind of widely circulated before people lost access to the Internet. And I think there's some idea that, like, this is an armed uprising. And I think it would be good to explain to people that, like, that there are people. Clearly there is presence of, like, armed groups who are opposed to the regime in Iran. Right. But they are not necessarily the ones leading the charge here. So maybe we could explain a little bit about both the armed groups who are Kurdish. There are some armed groups in Balochistan as well and where they sit in relevance to these protests.

[Gordain]

Yeah, so far I can speak for Kurdistan. Yeah, there have. I've seen also this footage that P A K or the Freedom Party of Kurdistan published on social media. I cannot personally confirm that, but there has always been a call for military action against the regime. In the previous years and even before Gina Amini In 2022, there was always some sort of call from the people. But right now, as we are seeing the Kurdish parties, the seven major Kurdish parties from Iran, they are not taking really a real military action because there is a big fear that if they do this, the regime might bomb the cities and kill thousands of civilians with heavy weapons and even missiles. So this is also one of the main reasons that even the parties have talked about it many times before when people call for a military support. But of course, I can also confirm this, that all of these parties, all of these organizations have some sort of networks inside Iran that they are. They are monitoring the situation, they are collecting information, and they are like, connecting people together. And in some cases that I am aware of, that happened in my hometown in Urmia in 2022. Some of these parties also have been able to lead the protests, like to organize protests. So this is, for now, the presence of these parties. But for Baluchistan, I can also say that I think it was in October or November 2025 that all these groups in Balochistan, they had a conference and they announced that they are all united and they're all working together under one banner. So they also carried out a lot of attacks on the IRGC bases and vehicles in their regions in the past few months. But so far we haven't heard much from them. In the past few weeks.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

We don't know they're not doing anything or if they are doing anything. It's not on the Internet.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

Or it's not published yet. Yeah. This is the situation right now with the, with these groups, but at the same time, groups or parties actually like pg. They also have warned that this was like, if I want to say, quote unquote, don't play with fire. They were warning Iranian regime that they shouldn't play with fire. Yeah. This is a situation right now that's going on with the parties as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's very complicated for people who are not. Right. Familiar. I think, like, maybe we should take a step back even further and just explain, I guess the concept of Iran as like a contiguous empire might be a good way to see it.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

With different ethnic groups currently under the control of one state. Can you just explain that for people if they're not familiar? Because I think in the US Like Persian identity and Iranian identity by people who are not familiar with it are conflated.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Right.

[James Stout]

But if you could explain the different nations that exist within the state, that might help people.

[Gordain]

Yeah. Like Iran as a geography is a very diverse country. So basically the Persians or as they call themselves Iranians are the dominant group. They are the majority. But we also have the. The Azeri Turkish people who are the second majority. And then we have the Kurds, we have the Baluchis, Then there are Ahwazi Arabs in the south, and then there are Turkmen people, and then there are Tailishies, but their numbers are really small. And at the same time, there is also the Mazandarani or the Gilak people that live in the Caspian Sea coast. There are also a different ethnic group. They have a different linguistic background. But because of the Iranian state policies of 100 years, majority of them are assimilated and no longer carry that cultural heritage or identity. But in Kurdistan, in Baluchistan, in Ahwaz in Azerbaijan, it's. It's really different. And also in. In the Turkmen regions, basically this is, this is what Iran looks like. Of course, there are other small minorities like Armenians, even Georgians that migrated.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

To Iran like hundreds of years ago. There are also several religious groups, like the Shia Muslims are the majority, which Persians and Azeri Turks are basically the followers of this religion. And then there are Sunnis, Sunni Muslims who are like, majority of them are Baluchis and Kurds and Ahazi Arabs or other groups. And then we have several other groups from Jews, Christians and also the Yis which is a Kurdish religious minority. And there are about 1 million to 2 million people. Yeah, this is what Iran looks like.

[James Stout]

Yes. Yeah. And I think people can be easy for them to just see it as like Shia Muslim, Persian monolith. Right?

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

But I also want to add a little bit more of like how this works. So because the Iranians or the Persians are the majority, they own the state, the entire identity is evolving around them. And because of this, during the past 150, 100 years, there has been a policy of assimilation in every region in what's called Iran. Right now, for example, if I want to talk about the language, right now the only official language is Persian. And in the past 100 years, this language has not just been a language of communication, it has been a language of oppression and assimilation. And there are many regions in Iran that were, for example, if I want to talk about Kurdistan, there are many regions in Kermanshah and Elam provinces and other regions that used to be fully Kurdish and they used to speak Kurdish just a few decades ago, but now they are completely assimilated. The same policy was also followed strictly, but heavily in Turkey and also in Iraq and also in Syria. So this is how this has been working in the past century and how all these ethnic groups with different languages and cultural backgrounds and identities have been forced to accept an Iranian identity that evolves, that turns around the Persian identity and Persian language and history. Yeah. So this is also like a general overview of the oppression if I want to.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, I think that's probably the right word. I think people who have listened to our coverage of Myanmar will be familiar or like, I mean, this has happened in countless places. Right. This is why British people all speak English now. This is how sort of internal empire works. I wonder. We should talk about the possibilities and to an extent the demands here. Right. Because in the US it seems to be that there is a binary choice or that it's presented as a binary choice between the current state in Iran and a monarchy. And it doesn't seem to be an option for self governance for Iranian people to have democracy, to have liberty. And that's evidently not the case. Right. When you have this many people in the streets, that's how democracy works. But let's talk about the demands and then the possibilities of this being co opted and turned into another type of state.

[Gordain]

So here in these days, or basically in the past decades, the main demand of people, all different ethnic groups in the geography of Iran has always been regime change. They want this regime gone. This is the first thing that everybody wants. At the same time there are other possibilities that could be there. One of the things that when you look at these ethnic groups and their organizations and the people, you can see that also most of them want some sort of federalism or autonomy or self governance. At the same time, this idea of federalism and self governance or self determination is nothing that let's say, that the dominant group would accept because they don't understand it. Because for them, I wouldn't say all of them, because we cannot generalize everyone. But when you look at it, the dominant group sees Iran as an entity that's not diverse, it's just Iran and everybody's Iranian. Just like the way Turkey or the Turkish government sees everything. Everybody's Turkish, but in Iran they also say everybody's Iranian. We will have an election, we will choose a president, we will have a parliament and that's it. That's what is also being, let's say, offered. But at the same time there is also a call for monarchy. But this is also something that not majority of people, even Persians, majority of them don't want monarchy back. Because there is a huge discussion between people that here we are fighting against a dictatorship. Why would we bring back another dictatorship? Yeah, overall I can say that the minority groups, majority of them for now, I would say like if the regime is going to be changed, they want self governance, but maybe in the future also independence. We don't know that this is something complicated to talk about. But for now this is what minority groups want. But in the Persian community, some of them want to have like a republican system or whatever. But some of them also want to have monarchy back. And there are also other groups who reject both republicans and also like monarchists and they want to have more diverse and more open system for the future. But again, this is something that we cannot say how it's going to be proceeded because we don't know how the situation is going to be and how these opposition groups are going to work together in the future. Are they going to start a civil war or are they going to sit down together and find a solution? This is all depends on how the regime falls and when. And the destruction of this regime is the biggest priority right now.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we could see a situation very much like the one that's happening unfolding right now in Western Kurdistan, unfolding later in Iran if the regime falls.

[Gordain]

Right, yeah.

[James Stout]

Which unfortunately is something else we'll have to talk about another time. But very terrible things happening there too. Because you know, Most of our listeners are in America. The way that people may have engaged with this is through Donald Trump's posting on Truth Social, where he has said that help is coming recently. Like, let's talk about what US Intervention means. Like, especially in the, in the context of A, like the US Having intervened all over the Middle east and what that has meant, and B, like the U.S. s recent national security strategy, which suggests that basically they don't care about the region and they don't want to be involved in, in the region. Let's talk about what, what that means and why it might not be the panacea people think it is.

[Gordain]

Yeah. So in the past few weeks, Trump has said a lot of things. In the first few days, he came out and said that if the regime is going to kill civilians, we're going to do this and that we're going to punish the regime. And then I think it was an interview or he was on tv, I don't exactly remember, but he said something that all the people that were killed, we don't know if the regime killed them. Maybe they just were killed in the crowd. Like there were like thousands of people and they were just.

[James Stout]

Yeah, like a crush.

[Gordain]

They were crushed. And this is so unbelievable. He's making these comments and then he's just threatening the regime all over again. And just a few hours ago, as you mentioned, he said that the help is coming and he's asking people to keep fighting and keep protesting and things like that. However, we, we should also like regarding this, we should talk about what people also want from Trump. Yeah, this, this has been like something that a lot of people, again, this is not the majority, but a lot of people have been calling on him or basically on, on America or something to do an action against the regime, to do something against the regime or damage the regime so that people can get rid of it. And right now I saw some screenshots from people who were able to get access to the Internet. For a few moments, I saw one. There was a. It was shared on the Internet that a woman from Tehran was saying that they are killing everyone. I don't know where my children are. One of them is 19 and the other one is 23. She was just saying, please, please be our voice and just tell them to attack, tell Trump to help. So this is also something that there is a call for attacking Iran and destroying the regime. But again, we don't know if Trump is really going to do this or not. There is also, like threats coming from Europe as well, and UK but again, as you mentioned, if these attacks happen, we don't. Is it going to be something like Iraq or Afghanistan or other places, or is it going to really help the people of Iran, the people inside Iran, to get rid of the regime? Which is also really hard to understand because Trump hasn't been really clear about all these things. On one side. He was also asked if he has any talks or connections with the so called Prince Reza Pahlavi. And he said, no, he's a good guy, but I don't want to talk to him. But then now you can see that on Fox News, like all the Trump affiliated or pro Trump media, they are promoting this guy all the time. And at the same time, Reza Pahlavi was also on tv, he was on cbs and he said that he is directly in touch with Trump and administration. So we don't know what, what exactly. I mean, it's so hard to, to understand what exactly the US Is going to do.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

They also announced that we're going to put more like 25% tariff on countries who work with Iran or trade with Iran. And then the European Parliament also announced that we're going to ban all Iranian diplomats from entering the European Parliament.

[James Stout]

Not made to begin with.

[Gordain]

All these comments that are coming out, they are so vague. And at the same time there are calls from Germany, France and I think Australia too, that they were calling on the citizens that are in Iran, like tourists or whatever, to immediately leave Iran. Yeah. This is also something that we don't know. Like Trump is not somebody that you could trust.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Ask people in Rojava, like they.

[Gordain]

And at the same time, sorry, this is also important, there was also some news that the Iranian authorities in the Foreign Ministry were trying or they contacted some people from Trump administration for negotiations. But then Trump said that we will not negotiate anything. So this is all like all these contradictions that Trump is just talking about and he's denying that the regime is killing people and people are just being killed because it's too crowded.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And then you see Khomeini tweeting that everyone out in the street is a Trump supporter. Right. Which is like, that's useful to him. That narrative is useful to him. That these are American imperialists or American whatever, puppets.

[Gordain]

Yeah. Of course, that has been the regime's behavior forever. Whenever something happens, they immediately blame it on America. Israel, I don't know uk. But it's good that you mentioned what Khamenei was saying in the first few days. He said that. Yeah, we hear you. The people in bazaar and yeah, we hear you. Sorry that this is going on and things like that. But then he immediately said that the people who are protesting, they are destroying everything and we will deal with them in the harshest way. And then the President of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, he also came out and he said almost the same thing and then he started threatening people. And a few days after that the head of the judiciary, the Iranian judiciary came out and said that in a very, very aggressive language. He said that we will deal with you in the worst ways possible. We will destroy you and things like that. He posted a lot of, of texts on his Twitter account. His name is Mohsen ej. So yeah, there is also like a huge online fighting between these politicians and so called leaders that makes the situation even more complicated and hard to understand.

[James Stout]

Yeah. I think from a US perspective, like when America invaded Iraq, Right. They had a partner force in Kurdistan when, when America worked in Syria, they had a partner force again in Western Kurdistan like they did. I don't really have that here. Like there's, there's not really a, I mean the, the PAYAK is still on the American foreign terrorist organization list. There's not like that like American sort of partner force boots on the ground like that that they had in these other places. Likely what they would do is just bomb stuff. That's kind of the approach that's most likely here. And then bombing alone is unlikely to, to remove the regime.

[Gordain]

Yeah, I think bombing was, is definitely not enough because they bombed the regime hardly last year. But it is still there. Of course it was. The regime got weaker. Like it got weakened really bad. But at the same time, like I think if there is going to be something and if there's going to be something like Syria or Iraq, I think the Americans or the American government would possibly work with the Kurdish groups even though they are on the so called terror list. Like you know, it happened in, in Rojava, in, in Syria. That how they, they've been working with the Kurdish groups even though they're related to pkk and PKK is on the terror.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or they remove them like they did with hts. Right. And then suddenly these guys are, they've transformed now.

[Gordain]

Yeah. So this could also happen, but we don't know because it's been years, it's been decades that the US is always threatening Iran and then something happens, then they do nothing and it's just there.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It reinforces the legitimacy of both states to threaten each other.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Right.

[James Stout]

And see each other as Adversaries and to a degree use that for domestic violence against their own citizens. Right. Or for terrorism stuff. I guess, finally, we should just talk about one other thing that Khomeini said, which was that American and Israeli shipping would become legitimate targets. If you thought the Americans were involved, just explain the possibilities there for people if they're not familiar.

[Gordain]

Well, this is not a new thing, to be honest. They've done this before in the previous years, many times. And there were times that they attacked some US Bases, like the one in Iraq, it's called Al Assad or something like that. They attacked it a few times, I guess, in the past few years.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Gordain]

Like, this is also really complicated because how can I explain? The regime always does this threats, and it might not do it at all. But at the same time, this is also something that I think that if the regime falls and if it's the last moments, they would probably try to do something to damage the region or to damage the people as much as they can, and then they would just give up on everything and just disappear. So they could do that. But if I want to go back to last year, we also need to understand that after the 12 Day War, Israel also destroyed a massive amount of Iranian military bases and all these buildings and structures, but still nobody truly understand how much has been destroyed. But the Iranian Air Force is really, really weak right now and apparently completely destroyed. So Iran is not as strong as before. So there could be a possibility that Iran actually doesn't have the capability to attack US Bases across the region anymore. So this could be also a possibility that they're just threatening. They really don't have anything left anymore. Or their military capabilities are completely down.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Or they'll do their sort of symbolic send a half dozen Shahid drones and let the Americans shoot them down. And they say, oh, well, we tried. Or, you know, we attack them, even though, you know, most of the time they have hurt a couple of American people with them, but relatively unsuccessful. I wonder, like, this is obviously a situation that people will want to follow. Things are developing very quickly. And good news, good reporting on Iran is very hard to find in America. So where would you suggest people look, either, you know, your own stuff or other sources that you suggest people should look to.

[Gordain]

If I want to mention for, obviously I work with Hangout Organization. It's a trusted organization. People can follow them. And there is also a journalist called Ali Jawan Mardi. He is a supervisor at Voice of America, Kurdish, Persian and Afghanistan. And these are like the sources that I Personally trust. There are other organizations such as Kurdistan Human Rights Network. There is also Iran Rights or Abdurrahman Buruman center for Human Rights in Iran. There are several organizations, human rights organizations that are constantly reporting and they are trying to reflect what's happening. And they are, I could say majority of them are honest and they're not trying to push for a specific narrative, especially the Pahlavist, because right now if you check the media, the international media, the Iranian media, such as Iran International or BBC Persian and all of these major medias, even in the US they are pushing for the monarchists and they are completely ignoring the other groups, like for example, the Kurdish people. I said, I mentioned that there was this great and big strike that happened in 40 cities. It's a very big social act, but barely anyone talked about it, barely anyone mentioned it. So I think for people it's better to follow human rights organizations and do not really fall for the things that some media that are just promoting a specific person because they're just taking away the truth.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a fantastic place to finish up. Thank you so much for joining us. If people want to follow you, do you have any social media or place people can find your work?

[Gordain]

I have my personal page, but it's not really big. I just post some slides recently and my other page, Curtis Signing people, it got disabled. Unfortunately, I started again. I'm just posting like some updates and like slides about the important things that I find. I can also put the links there.

[James Stout]

Yeah, we'll include them. Release the podcast so people can click on them.

[Gordain]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Stout]

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining us this evening. We really appreciate it.

[Gordain]

Yeah. Thank you very much for having me again. Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Why do you listen to this podcast? It may be because it's a strange comfort to naming the thing that's breathing down our necks today. I want to archive this past year of systemic collapse. A pileup of small and large failures that we can start to make sense of in retrospect. It if we don't look back at our past and the patterns within it, if we don't keep these moments and events in our memory, it's very, very easy to get stuck into a perpetually overwhelming present. Welcome to Could Happen Here. I'm Andrew Sage, the guy Behind Andrewism on YouTube, and I'm here with James.

[James Stout]

Stout, the guy you hear all the time, this podcast.

[Andrew Sage]

Welcome to your podcast.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it's nice to do one with you.

[Andrew Sage]

Are you ready to take a look at some of the stories that shaped 2025.

[James Stout]

Yes. It's been a hell of a year, so this should be fun.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I mean, I don't expect to be exhaustive, but we can talk about some of the incidents in climate, in politics, in technology and geopolitics. And through all that, I want to ask what these stories are teaching us as anarchists, activists and just people trying to live in a society.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

So I suppose first we could talk about the climate and infrastructural situations. Some of them that took place this year really covered all of the elements we had. Heat, flooding, drought, fire, storm. According to the World Meteorological Organization, Global temperatures in 2025 ranked among the hottest on record.

[James Stout]

Great.

[Andrew Sage]

The WMO put 2025 as likely the second or third warmest year in the observational record. So a little round of applause for hitting some milestones. Right?

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's good to be winning.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. Power systems also have been overloaded under air conditioning demand, leading to rolling blackouts hitting cities and rural areas, schools closing during heat waves and mortality rising among the elderly and precarious. International agencies have warned that extreme heat is producing double digit crop losses and mass livestock die offs in some cases. Brazil in particular felt that heat in agriculture and supply chains, staple production and food imports both suffered due to the heat. And those ripples are going to be felt for the rest of us too, because Brazil is a breadbasket of sorts. It's a top exporter of tons of really important agricultural products.

[Gordain]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And the monsoons also arrived with quite a mood this year. South Asia's 2025 rains came very heavy and very persistent in many places. Urban drainage failed, neighbourhoods became isolated by the waters. Trains and roads were unusable for days. Bangladesh and parts of India saw catastrophic flooding that took hundreds of lives and displaced millions. Over in the Horn of Africa, wells ran low, pastures failed, and small farmers suffered under the pressures of the drought. Their water distribution systems were not built to withstand multi year dry spells. And so a hunger crisis has ended up escalating, particularly in Somalia.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

North America and Europe also had severe wildfires this year. At this point, it's very easy to kind of see them as a new normal, you know?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Canada's 2025 season pushed agencies into one of their largest domestic wildfire responses in years. Firefighters were stretched, entire towns had to evacuate. And Southern Europe, in particular Greece and Spain, also saw fast moving fires that consumed homes and utilities and left landscapes scorched and infrastructure severely weakened. And then, of course, there were the hurricanes. This year, the Caribbean was slammed by Hurricane Melissa, a very slow and powerful storm that devastated Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti and others, tearing up infrastructure and leaving large swaths without power for weeks. The storm's exceptional energy is of course, thanks to climate change. And so all of these events, and I'm definitely leaving out some, I believe they reveal a few things. For one, I think it's clear that our systems cannot handle the new extremes being brought about by climate change. They may have been built for previous normals, but not this. And this is something the climate scientists have been warning about for some time. You know, our electrical grids were sized for incremental loads, so they couldn't handle these simultaneous peak demands. Our urban stormwater management was built for a particular volume of water over a particular period of time. It can handle these volumes of water that are pouring down from above. And also water management systems in more arid regions weren't prepared for years of drought. And so the systemic shocks of this year have been very devastating for infrastructure. And unlike their propaganda which stated they are necessary for our survival, for our well being, to manage a society, state responses to these catastrophes were often reactive and chronically delayed. Government intervention and international aid helped in some places, I'm not denying that. But communities have also often found themselves on their own, having to improvise survival strategies. And of course, with every disaster, there is an extremely long tail of recovery after the initial crisis has passed. So it may leave the news cycle, but there are people still dealing with the consequences and will be dealing with it in the year to come. But these disasters continue to show the ingenuity and capability of ordinary people to organize, support, distribute aid, facilitate evacuation, share resources and so on. So we're not powerless. We don't have to be dependent on slow bureaucracies to develop resilience. It starts with us as people being proactive. Especially, I would say don't wait for the disaster to happen in your area to develop a response plan. Invest your time and energy in this coming year in horizontal capacities, skill training, community drills, shared two libraries, seed and food sovereignty projects, local medical knowledge, decentralized energy and water projects. I don't place much on the demands of the state, but there are also sometimes grants you may be able to apply for that can secure some resources in community hands. And of course, keep documenting these incidents as they're happening. Don't wait for a disaster to hit your area to learn the lessons that other places had to learn. Go and see where your vulnerabilities lie. Learn what others have done to respond. Train people where necessary and just try and keep up the good fight. Would you say there was a particular environmental crisis or natural disaster this year that really stood out to you?

[James Stout]

I mean, to me, I think the ones that I just. Because they're personally related to places I've been, were the earthquake in Myanmar.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Right.

[James Stout]

Where we saw not only people die as a result of the natural disaster, but people die as a result of the state considering its desire to keep people in Myanmar away from the world more important than their lives. Right. Like the state choosing not to allow search and rescue teams from France, for example, to enter. And instead, like, you know, folks I know who are fighting in the revolution in Myanmar, like laying down their arms and trying to work out how to pull collapsed buildings apart before the people in them died like that. I think that.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[James Stout]

It really was like the poly crisis and then the flooding of indigenous communities in Alaska. Right. The coastal communities that we saw like a month or so ago. And that one hit me particularly hard because, like, these people have been screaming for a decade that climate change has come. It's not coming. It's come.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like the end is not nigh for them. The end is here. Their ways of life are being destroyed by climate change and their whole communities got wiped out. Right. Just before winter. And a place which has one of the hardest winters on Earth. All their food caches. Right. Because these are people who tend to. To fish for a lot of food. So they cash food, they don't go to a store, were also wiped out. It's just one of those examples of one can't be prepared enough to deal with things that one can't control. And one of the things that we can't control is climate change. And it's coming for all of us.

[Andrew Sage]

But it's common for some people first.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And it's always going to be indigenous and more marginalized people whose plight is ignored. People can say climate change isn't real because they have the relative privilege of not having their homes destroyed. And like, rebuilding those communities will be very, very hard because the only way to get there is on a tiny little plane or a boat. And everything they've got there has taken generations to build, and it's all gone.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

So those, those two really struck me.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I think my takeaway is, from what you shared there, is that the state will often get in the way.

[James Stout]

Yes.

[Andrew Sage]

Of our survival, our well being.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And that, you know, the crisis is here and it's already hitting people. And just the people that are being hit right now are the ones designated as sacrificial lambs. Yeah, in a sense, for the continued pursuit of economic growth and progress.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

So 2025 also saw an accelerated political coming of age. You know, Gen Z has not been all teenagers for a very long time now. Yeah, it's been mostly adults, or soon to be mostly adults at this point, depending on where you draw the line. And that generation, our generation, my generation, has shown up in their numbers for the past few years, but particularly this year, inspiring millions. You know, Gen Z became a very visible political force in the headlines across very different geographies. Madagascar, Morocco, Kenya, Nepal, Peru and Mexico all had uprisings driven by a mix of grievances, whether it be corruption, the cost of living, lack of services, violent policing, and a feeling that older institutions had nothing to offer. Now, these movements were not a monolith, you know, but they did have some common templates. You know, they organized digitally on platforms like Discord or Telegram, and they mobilised very quickly, a lot faster than states were originally able to keep up with. In Madagascar, the youth had mobilised around water, power cuts and broader corruption, which eventually toppled the ruling government and triggered military moves in the form of a coup d'.

[James Stout]

Etat.

[Andrew Sage]

But it doesn't seem so far that anything fruitful, stable or lasting has come out of their cause quite yet. Right now, Madagascar is a military colonel for president, so it remains to be seen what that leadership brings. In Morocco, the movement Gen Z212 organized to demand better education and healthcare, decent housing and jobs, and were eventually met with state pushback in the form of arrests and infiltration. Now, they eventually won some concessions from the government in the form of greater funding in the sectors demanded and draft bills that incentivise youth participation in the official channels of power. But it remains to be seen how long that will quell the tide, because it seems to me at least that this is the classic tactic of incorporating a radical movement into the machinations of the state to temper its energy. Yeah, in Kenya, we saw mass mobilization against police brutality that was met with yet more police brutality and extrajudicial killings, now numbering in the 60s with a very clear aim for the suppression of dissent. So far, none of their goals have really been recognized or achieved as a movement and it seems as though they've simmered down due to the sheer violence that they have faced in response. In Nepal, perhaps the most famous of these stories for this year, the student led uprisings toppled the corrupt government and forced concessions, with an election coming up next year 2026. But again, what comes next is yet to be seen. Whether it'll be lasting, empowering, or sustainable is an open question. It's another uprising where, in my view, the fundamental institutions have not been overcome and thus their goals will not be achieved meaningfully. But I think every movement, every generation has their place for political development and figuring out some of these shortcomings of these approaches. But I think because of how tight the timeline is for the need for radically drastic action for the sake of the planet and for the people on it, I really wish that these lessons were learned a bit quicker, that we didn't have to go through these same cycles of missteps again and again with movements.

[James Stout]

Yeah, you're right.

[Andrew Sage]

But it remains to be seen whether that sort of political development can be accelerated as the crisis accelerates.

[James Stout]

Yeah, like, I, I feel for the youth, like, like now these revolutions, the sense of urgency is so high, right? Because the, the system, like, if you're a millennial, I guess you grew up. If you're me, maybe I'm saying here, like, really you grew up, you know, and you were told, like, things would always get better and you will work hard and like, just like your folks, you will buy a house and the house will get more valuable and that will be nice and blah, blah, blah.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

If you live in the, in this sort of the colonial core, and that didn't work out for most of us, but for Gen Z folks, it's like the town that you live in will continue to exist is up for debate. Right. Like the climate that you were born in will be completely distinct from the one that you have children, raise children in. Probably the urgency of the need for change is so much with young people today. Right. Like, you know, yeah, the economy that my generation was promised doesn't exist for us, but the planet that Gen Z was promised isn't going to exist for them. And the information system is so fucked for young people today. Right. And so captured by corporate and state interests. And yet despite that, or maybe because of that, we've seen some of the most beautiful revolutions that I can recall. Right. Like when I speak to Gen Z folks in Myanmar, they approach the revolution in a distinct way from the way that, like the revolutions I'm familiar with from the 90s and 2000s did, but also just from like a very human desire for a better world, for equality, for a beautiful life. And so, like, I'm very hopeful at the same time as I feel for people of the younger generation.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah. I think there's a lot of cause for Hope. Hope that such numbers can be mobilized. But I would love to see those numbers get mobilized in the countries that we've been talking about. A more radical way than simply bringing demands to the state or changing out one government for another.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the case of Myanmar, that certainly. That is the case. Right. Like, they're not thinking about changing one ruling party for another. They're thinking about changing the way governance works.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[James Stout]

They're like, bringing democracy to people. To be clear, there isn't really a coherent set of exact demands for the revolution, but many of the young people I speak to are looking at how can we create a model that doesn't allow for a genocide to happen against one group, that doesn't allow for the military to walk into one building and take away everyone's future? And I think that's very beautiful.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly. That's. That's inspiring.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

I think asking those questions and asking even more questions, I think, is how this generation is going to get to, you know, certain conclusions about whether this current project should continue.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

This current state project, this current capitalist project, this current patriarchal project, the more questions get asked, the more answers get illuminated, and the closer I think we can get to a viable and liberatory alternative.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Definitely the case. And I think some of this is just like. Some of it we have to work out on the way, and that's okay. Like, I think the 20th century, the idea of a revolution was like, this violent seizure of state power, often by a vanguard group with a very specific project that they were looking to implement.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And in the 21st century, we haven't seen that all the time. We have seen a lot more of, like, this is bad and it has to change, and we're going to make it change, and we'll work out which direction we're moving as we go.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, yeah. That's blatantly ideological, I'd say.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And, like, I think that's a good thing because, like, what we've seen, I mean. I mean, we have seen, like, this. This idea that revolutions have to stick to a strict pathway, have horrific consequences for humanity.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, I'm thinking of the gulag, you know, like, I'm thinking of the strict ideology which allowed the Soviet Union to become this place where you. Where you created, like, you know, the things that Orwell wrote about in 1984. Right. It is better that a revolution relies on what the people want as they continue to move through it, rather than saying, we will tell the people what they need and we'll be the one steering the ship here.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, that whole model is not going to get us out of this.

[Robert Evans]

Nope.

[Andrew Sage]

So I'll say my observation of the sort of political shifts of this year has really exposed the flaws of traditional politics and parties, how they've largely served as gatekeepers to suppress, to absorb and blunt the energies of the masses and show the potential of spontaneous uprisings. But I think this year also showed that we cannot keep rising up again and again and again and again, you know, feeding bodies to the brutal police forces and prison systems. You know, for movements to matter beyond these episodes of disruption, I believe they need to develop infrastructure. You know, yeah, let's do something that lasts longer than a headline. And of course, the actions that, you know, I'm not denying that some of these movements are engaging in building infrastructure. It's just that those sorts of efforts are less likely to make the international news headlines.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, but I love to see these decentralized mobilizations. I just want to see them paired with something more refigurative politics that can sustain them, that can expand the zones of freedom, that can turn their momentum into lasting change. I will say that I appreciate that these movements have embraced tactical variety, you know, that they have largely understood the need for anonymity. But I don't want them to keep falling into this trap of this sort of dissipation of energy. They get a government concession and they dissipate. There's not a long term ambition or there are not enough steps being taken to resist infiltration and surveillance through operational security. I think that if that OPSEC is not present, it's very easy for these movements to get disrupted from within. Platforms like Discord have already proven themselves to be ops to these kinds of causes. They will willingly sell people out. But I have a lot of hope, and I say that tentatively, that we can stand up for something, that some line can be drawn somewhere. Because even though an uprising like the one in Nepal or Morocco hasn't taken place in Trinidad yet, I mean, we've been under a state of emergency for the entire time that this new government has been in power. I will say that I often in, you know, casual conversation, hear rumbling. So we need to do what Nepal did, you know, we need to do what Peru did. And I think that's the power, the potential of these kind of moments. Even if they don't lead to something lasting in the immediate aftermath, they still serve as an inspiration. They still open up the landscape of possibilities.

[James Stout]

Yeah. What Sukoma Dante Marcos used To say it was like to open up a pinprick of light in the curtain of darkness.

[Andrew Sage]

Exactly, yeah.

[James Stout]

It's to show people what is possible.

[Andrew Sage]

That's a perfect expression. I've actually never heard that quote before. That's a good one.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I used to read a lot of Zapatista stuff. I think he has some wonderful ways of expressing things.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, Gen Z's not going to save anyone. You know, as a generation, we're just as susceptible to flaws and misdirections as any other. There are those who are invested in welfare and anti corruption and there are those who are invested in reactionary populism. But the waves of uprisings I think are mostly positive. And I just hope that that spark can light a fire. And the way that we get that spark to light that fire is when we put fuel in place. Fuel like networks, fuel like collectives, unions and so on. Oh, and speaking of unions, I forgot to mention this. India actually had a coalition of major trade unions staging nationwide protests and strikes this year against the new labor codes.

[James Stout]

That's cool.

[Andrew Sage]

So shout out to them as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah. Especially in a state which is. It's not necessarily, you know, like you will. They will come down pretty hard on you in India if you stand up against the state.

[Andrew Sage]

Indeed. And so to wrap this section, I think I'll say that 2025's protests show a fraction of our frustration, but they also show that we can't just keep screaming into the void. You know, the ruptures that come in 2026 and beyond need to start from somewhere other than scratch. Moving on to the tech crises now, I think as AI continued to boom in 2025, we saw a massive build out of physical infrastructure, data centers, server farms, water hungry cooling systems, and energy hungry hardware. Yeah, it's very easy to think of the Internet as a cloud, but it's a very physical thing. It demands land, water and electricity. It strains local communities, it drains local communities of resources. The water use of data centers in particular can eat up millions of liters of water daily taken away from households and agricultural needs. In fact, data centers in the US now consume more than 4% of total electricity, with over half still being powered by fossil fuel.

[James Stout]

Jesus. Yeah, like how much electricity we use in the US like we go hard on electric, right?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. So 4% is quite a jump from something that basically didn't exist ten years ago. Five years ago.

[James Stout]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And so all this scaling up of AI is pushing us much faster towards the limits of growth. You know, it Feels like we are being ruled by accelerationists at times, you know, and all the while we have these tech brewers pushing their tech savior gospel on us. Even though it's very clear that AI is just another vector of extraction, consumption and inequality. There's just another way for the onus of profit to gain greater control of our data and greater surveillance of our lives. What I am proud of is that people continue to speak out against it, to challenge it, to question it, to call it out wherever they see it. There are people who refuse to support, you know, YouTube channels that are pushing out AI music or AI visuals or AI scripts. People who are refusing to support, you know, pages and profiles that have those kinds of things or companies that use those, that software. We have to keep that energy up, we have to keep it going. And we also need to build things that will increase our ability to operate outside of the AI fueled corporate overlord Internet that many of us currently exist as pseudo serfs within. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of room for open source software and digital commons that are out of the hands of corporations that we could venture into. You know, tech is a contested terrain that the tech oligarchs are currently winning, but that terrain is something we can continue to challenge into the new year.

[James Stout]

Definitely.

[Andrew Sage]

Geopolitics in 2025 was a catalog of catastrophes from continuing wars fueled by caste profiteers to straight up genocides. So in Palestine we saw this year repeated rounds of siege, bombardment and cruelty. Repeated ceasefire violations on the part of Israel, all enabled by America's military support and political cover. To this day, food, water and medical provisions continue to be strained as a result of Israel's genocidal ambitions. In Sudan, the fractures there have only worsened as the bloodshed famously can be seen from space. Millions have been internally displaced, the casualties are currently incalculable and the fighting between the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces rages on. All supported by regional powers including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and uae. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflicting armed groups supported by the government of the DRC and the neighbouring Rwanda respectively, have continued attacking communities and their infrastructure, inflicting mass rapes and engaging in other war crimes, all while funded by mining operations in one of the most resource rich regions in the world. In Yemen, the violence continues for tens of millions as the Saudi led coalition, the UAE and Western powers continue to supply arms, logistics and diplomatic cover for the displacement, collapse and brutality inflicted upon the civilians of the country. In Ukraine, the war with Russia continues to consume resources and lives in the Caribbean Sea. The US has ramped up its violence as it targets and bombs boats in international waters that it alleges are carrying drugs and appears to be gearing up for some kind of operation against Venezuela. And in Myanmar, resistance groups continue to fight against the military junta, which continues to receive economic and political cover from neighboring China. Now, this isn't exhaustive, so you can let me know if I missed any of the major stories from this year.

[James Stout]

There's so many. I know. Yeah. It's so sad to think about, like, this new drone war that we're starting in Venezuela. Right. And we will probably start another one in the Sahelsun. No, it's very easy for those things to seem tangential to our lives. I have experienced what it is like to be in a place where drones are killing people every day, what that does to you. Just like not knowing who's gonna get killed tonight. Right. It probably won't be you. Very unlikely. Might be. Might be someone you saw today. Might be someone you'd ever met. Dozens of people get killed, but thousands of people have to live in with this sense of fear. And maybe after a while, you get used to it. I don't know. But I don't think we realize potential of the human joy. Even though it's not like a. In this case, not like a ground war.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, for many people, don't see it as a war, the terrible trauma that. That causes, not just to the people who are killed in their families, but to so many other people who have to live with the knowledge that, like, they can be killed and the world wouldn't care.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

I mean, the mental torment and trauma, even if you survive something like Palestine or something like Sudan.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

That's going to stay with you for the rest of your life and reverberate in future generations, even generations that did not experience the genocide directly, did not experience the war directly. They're still going to feel that in their bones, in the way that, you know, the generations that did experience it interact with them in the stories that they tell.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's. Yeah. That trauma lives for a long time.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

And trauma creates sometimes a cycle of violence. Right. Like, it's. It's not a good thing.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

The idea of drone warfare is the idea that these, like, clean, surgical strikes. That's not how war works. That's not how killing works. That's not how explosive warheads work.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

I remember in Brejavaray, sat down with a family who had lost their son, who had just turned 14, and thinking of the waves of repercussion from that one bomb and hundreds of bombs fell that year, and that was just in Syria. Thousands of these drone bombs fell all around the world. And for the most part people didn't remark on it and didn't care. But that's happening more now.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, I mean, it's very, very easy to zoom out and just think of the pure statistics, the pure numbers. Because when you actually zoom in at even an individual incident that is an entire lifetime affected, multiple lifetimes affected by even one building being leveled or one bullet being fired.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I think there's a reason we don't report, report on war like that. Right. Like, I try to when I write my stuff because like, everyone's life is the most valuable thing they have and every death is a tragedy. But A, it's hard on, on the reporter, like it's not sustainable, fucks you up. And B, people, people wouldn't like wars if we kept. Like, you see it to an extent in the way that the European nations talked about World War I.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, to get a significant number of upper class British people to be opposed to the concept of warfare is quite a remarkable endeavor.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like that. Those are people who have gone to schools whose sole purpose was to raise them as military officers for empire from the age of five.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But we saw it after World War I because it, the war wasn't abstract.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

It was close by. The people dying weren't of different class or race. They were everyone. And especially young upper class men who became officers.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like, but somehow along the way, since then, we've lost that and we've convinced ourselves that this is something that isn't a human tragedy, even if it doesn't involve us.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned World War I in particular because I actually sat down to finally watch All Quiet in the Western Front.

[James Stout]

Oh, yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Last night I watched like the first five minutes and I was like, I don't know if I could watch this right now. I don't even want to watch something else.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's a.

[Andrew Sage]

And that's a movie, you know, it's not even the real thing. It's a fictional depiction of the occurrence. And I felt like I was there.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And I don't like watching those films. I don't watch those films. Gives me bad memories, dreams.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

But yeah, like I, I can't understand how we have this ability to. We have VR now.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Like surgeons can practice operations in VR, but like in a world where we can have so many experiences Experience things that we would never experience otherwise. We have inflicted a genocide through starvation on the people of Palestine.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Like in, in a world where we can see and know more about other people's lives than ever that we've done this thing. Like, I didn't want to harp on the fact that, like, Israelis built on the idea of never again and here, here they are doing it again.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

But like, it's just so sad that, like, we're in this world where we can know and, and share more things, and yet it's resulted in somehow us still not seeing our common humanity. I mean, more people have, I guess also, like, one thing that has happened this year in the last two years, that, like, when I came here, I would never have believed that you would get thousands of American people out to call for the basic human rights of Palestinian people like it did. It wasn't a thing that American people were aware of. So that is something that over the last two years, I think we have seen solidarity. Some of that's.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah, there has been a shift.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Some of that solidarity I think has been misguided, but I think some of.

[Andrew Sage]

The, I guess anti Israel shift has come less from a concern for Palestinians and more so for the sort of, you know, we don't want our tax dollars being spent there, we want it spent on us. Or it's more of an internally minded sort of America first ideology.

[James Stout]

Yep. And they're straight up anti Semitic bigotry as well.

[Andrew Sage]

But there has been that solidarity shift as well.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like there has been that like a global solidarity and like even as a millennial. Right. Like from the age of 13.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Right.

[James Stout]

When I was a kid, when 9, 11 happened and even, I guess, first war in the Persian Gulf. The media project of most of the nations in which I have lived has been to demonize Muslim people and people specifically living in the Middle East. Right.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's more of an. A racialized bigotry than a particularly religious bigotry. I mean, it does take that religious coating and there are religion specific elements to the bigotry, but it does tend to be more racialized than.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

Because I already know that some people be like, oh, well, I just don't like Islam as. Because of its authoritarian inclinations, whatever the case may be. But it's a bit more than just religious beast bigotry.

[James Stout]

Yeah. It's not just a philosophical disagreement. Right. Like it took on, like you say, this racial character. And so like to see people noting their common humanity. Like, I was Just talking to someone about this the other day. Are you familiar with Ms. Rachel?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Like, it is inconceivable. It would have been inconceivable when I was in high school that an American children's entertainer would be like, well, I guess you had, like, the Dixie Chicks, but it's not the same.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

Would. Would be like, continually not. Not to take away from what they did. I think they were very brave, actually. But, you know, to be able to stand up for the lives of young children in Palestine so consistently.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

And so vociferously for so long like that, that's very. That gives me, you know, a great sense of hope.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. That really, I think, is an indication of just how much there has been a shift. And of course, she has been bullied and targeted relentlessly since. But, you know, it does indicate that people are willing to face that kind of bullying and face that kind of attack, that, I suppose, segment of empire, for the sake of standing up.

[Robert Evans]

What's.

[Andrew Sage]

Right.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess. I think it's so. It's impressive, right, that, like, yeah, people have bullied and attacked her, but, like, also, she has been so brave and so consistent. And not just Ms. Rachel, to be clear, there are many who've done this and has been able to continue to do that because so many people have been like, no, these are just children. Why the fuck are you. Why are you arguing that it's wrong to say we shouldn't kill children? What the fuck is wrong with you? Yeah, a lot of people showed up against the war in Iraq, too. But, like, it's good to see that. That that media project has not succeeded because it's been two decades of my life that it's been trying to succeed.

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah. I think that we've been seeing some very familiar dynamics across the geopolitical crises that I've sort of mentioned there. We have this external patronage of global powers and regional powers that seem to be sustaining these fights that ruined lives over years. Because if they weren't getting that constant flow of money for weapons and weapons support and military support, these wars would not be able to last as long as they have, you know, but it's these outside actors in Sudan and in Palestine that are supporting the fighting, supporting the barrage, supporting the suffering, and not supporting the aid necessary to support people.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

You know, there's been a very slow and insufficient pace of humanitarian response due to funding gaps, access constraints, and the politicization of eid. And there are people who have managed to act directly, not waiting for any official channels in the case of the flotilla. Something else that happened this year that I found particularly admirable. But it hasn't been enough so far. It hasn't broken through quite yet. And people are still without much of the necessary aid that will sustain even their survival. We also see that even as these wars are raging in these regions, in many cases the extraction is continuing, particularly in Congo and Sudan. Yeah, I think it's very critical that we continue to speak out against these wars as we get into 2026, wherever we see them, we document what's happening. We keep a record offline of what's going on independently. Because another thing I've noticed this year is how blatantly the news media is showing its colors. And that's where independent media is meant to fill the gaps, even though it may not have as many resources as mainstream media. That's what things like this podcast is here for. Something that I think even listeners can take responsibility in being part of gathering information and archiving information, in sharing sources and direct connects so that the information gets out there.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Andrew Sage]

And so as we wrap up this retrospective for 2025, two things in particular stand out to me. One is that our system is brittle as hell, and two, that people are resilient as hell. And taken together, I believe it's an indication that we are indeed in a world of transition and it's still uncertain as to how it will turn out. The future has not been written yet. We don't know. But we do have the ability to choose what we do next. So as we look towards the new year, think about something you want to build or strengthen, whether it be a skill, a relationship, a practice, a project of some kind that can serve you and those around you going forward. That's all I have for today. All power to all the people. Happy New Year. Peace.

[Robert Evans]

Foreign.

[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. Executive Disorder, our 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 James Stout, Mia Wong, and maybe Sophie Lichterman.

[Mia Wong]

Maybe, yeah.

[James Stout]

That'S her new first name.

[Mia Wong]

I'm always here. I just. Just don't necessarily have anything to add. Because you're all so good at your jobs.

[Garrison Davis]

No, no. We love when Sophie has something to contribute to this show. So what should we talk about?

[Mia Wong]

First, let's do some quick updates from last week. As we mentioned in the episode description, last week we recorded prior to an incident that happened in Portland where two people were shot by Border Patrol or ice. Very unclear. There was not a lot of information given out. And the way that the situation unfolded, the way that DHS said it, that there was a targeted stop of two people and they resisted arrest. So of course, what do they do? Just shoot into a car and those people drove away and then quickly called for help and then went to the hospital. We really don't know anything further than that. I watched many press conferences from Oregon and Portland officials, including the governor and the mayor, talking about the situation. Everybody's pretty horrified by it locally. But that's not the story we were getting from dhs. I can read the statement if you guys want.

[James Stout]

Okay.

[Gordain]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Since Robert's not here. Robert. Robert was. Was at ces, but was also following the story very closely and did some reporting on his blue sky, if you want to go back and look at that. But the statement from DHS said at 02:19 PST US Border Patrol agents were conducting a targeted vehicle stop in Portland, Oregon. The passengers of the vehicle and target is a Venezuelan illegal alien affiliated with the transnational gang Trende Agua prostitution ring and involved in a recent shooting in Portland. The vehicle driver is believed to be a member of the vicious Venezuelan gang Trend Agua. They love to just throw that out there. When agents identified themselves, the vehicle occupants, the driver weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents. Fearing for his life and safety, an agent fired a defensive shot. The driver drove off with a passenger fleeing the scene. The situation is evolving and more information is forthcoming. That was on January 8th at about 5pm Pacific. And that's their take. That's their like go to move. The excuse for randomly shooting at a car is that they were weaponizing the vehicle towards the agent. We really don't know much further than that. Mia, do you have anything you want to add?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[Garett]

So I think we should make two things clear. One, both of the people who were shot have survived, which is good.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

Yes.

[Garett]

It's also worth noting that. So the day we are recording this, on the 14th, there was a report released by Del Cameron and Ryan Shapiro at Wired talking specifically about how they got a bunch of intelligence documents from the Trump administration about Trend Agua. And to briefly summarize the article, I'm just going to quote the subtitle of it because it gives a good representation of what is in the actual intelligence documents.

[Mia Wong]

That's all the info we need.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garett]

Hundreds of records obtained by Wired shows thin intelligence on the Venezuelan gang in the United States describing fragmented, low level Crime rather than a coordinated terrorist threat. So they could barely even find existence of this group in the United States. These two people. I am 99. Like, I, I would, I would, I would stake my life on none of the stuff in that report about them being in this Venezuelan criminal organization being true. Almost everything that has come out of Homeland Security, as we've talked about with every other previous shooting, almost everything that comes out of Homeland Security is a lie. So, yeah, we will probably in the coming weeks figure out what actually happens. But unfortunately, right now we're relying on a combination of Portland government officials who are somewhat more reliable, and the Department of Homeland Security, which is utterly unreliable.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, I do have one thing to note here as for what the local officials in Portland are saying. Portland Police Bureau Chief Bob day started a Jan. 10 press conference by saying, quote, recently I read the Declaration of Independence for the first time, unquote, and then stated that the two victims of the shooting have, quote, some nexus to involvement with Trends. And then on January 11, Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez was interviewed on Kaidu News and said that he believes Trenda Agua is active in Portland, but he cannot confirm that his office has any criminal cases against the gang. The Department of Homeland Security has identified the people who were shot, saying they are affiliated with Trend Aragua, the Venezuelan gang, and are connected to other crimes in Portland. Does your office have, have any cases against these individuals?

[Garett]

You know, this is all. These are all things that we're going to be looking at and going through.

[Robert Evans]

Very carefully as we evaluate the case.

[Garrison Davis]

One, to make sure that if there.

[Robert Evans]

Are other pending matters out there that they're taken care of, but also just.

[Garett]

To make sure we get a full picture of what's going on in the situation.

[Garrison Davis]

Do you have any knowledge of whether Trindre Aragua is active in Portland and Multnomah County?

[Garett]

It's certainly something that we have seen and we are, we are working on with our local law enforcement. We have seen them in our area. They are one of kind of a host of different groups or individuals out there that are engaged in criminal activity. And it's something that we're working on.

[Mia Wong]

Just a lot of biased disinformation and misinformation. We don't actually really know what happened, but I am grateful that those folks did not lose their lives. Unlike Renee Good.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garett]

Yeah. And I also briefly want to mention here about Renee Good. There's been an attempt by the Department of Justice. A bunch of people at the Department of Justice have Resigned rather than attempt to prosecute Renee Good's wife.

[Garrison Davis]

Six high level prosecutors have resigned in the past week.

[Garett]

And this, this has been a very, very standard reaction from law enforcement when they don't kill someone or when there's someone else on the scene. A few months ago I shot a woman in Chicago. She thankfully survived, but they also charged her afterwards. So this is a, this is a very, very centered practice and they are right now trying this on Renee Good's wife after she watched her fucking wife get killed in front of her.

[James Stout]

Yeah. So I know people have also been waiting for updates on Iran. We have an episode that came out, it will have come out on Wednesday, two days before this comes out. So if you'd like to know more about what's happening in Iran, we had a really excellent talk with Qurayin and I would suggest you go back and find that episode. And I wanted to update people on what is happening in Syria, I guess specifically northern Syria right now. So the two neighborhoods, Sheikh Maqsood, N Esafriyah, those are both neighborhoods in Aleppo.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

They're sometimes characterized as Kurdish neighborhoods, but like Yazidi people live there. There are various Christian people living there as well. Right. Like it's not, not 100% Kurdish. I think sometimes there's a tendency among people who write about Syria to see things as ethnic modelists and I think that is not the way to approach these things. But anyway, both of those neighborhoods have now been fully seized by the Syrian Transitional Government. Some SDF fighters were bused back to Qamishlo, which is the capital of the Aanes, sometimes known as Rojava. Fighting is now moving closer to the Euphrates, right closer to the core of what people will call Rojava. I think at a minimum the goal is probably to remove the SDF from any areas that are not majority Kurdish. So right now that they're fighting in Deirhofa, they will begin fighting or that there have already been drone attacks in other areas as well in Aleppo. The Syrian Observatory on Human Rights, which is a Britain based human rights organization, documented several war crimes. I'm going to quote here. SOHR documented 23 cases of extrajudicial executions and desecration of bodies in Sheikh Maqsood and Alasafriya neighbourhoods in Aleppo city in the past few days. Here are further details. The bodies of 15 members of the internal security forces Asahish, including bodies of four female members, were deliberately incinerated. A female member of the Saish forces was killed during the clashes and her body was thrown from the top of the building. The reason they've been able to document these is that they're widely broadcast on telegram. Right. People are very proud of what are war crimes. Right. The desecration of the remains. Jesus. At the same time, the Islamic state carried out three simultaneous attacks on 12 January and during several SDF personnel. And it seems that this whole debacle has put the peace process between the pkk. The PKK is the. A distinct entity from the sdf. Right. But nonetheless, the pkk, I guess, is seeing Kurdish people killed in Syria and Turkish support. Right. There have been some reports of Turkish drones being used or flying around there. So the kck, if people aren't familiar, the KCK is the organization that brings together the different political groups in Kurdistan that broadly adhere to the political ideology or thought of Abdul Ozilan, but take different approaches to that. The KCK released a statement saying, quote, the attacks on Sheikh Maqsood Nasafriyya and the preparations for attacks on the east of the Euphrates also call into question the ceasefire between our movement in Turkey and the ongoing peace and democratic society. That is not great. Right?

[Andrew Sage]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

This is a place where people have been at war, killing and dying for more than a decade and it's very sad to think of more killing and dying happening there. Gare, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about some domestic terrorism, I guess, some actual domestic terrorism and arson attack, right? Do you want to talk about that?

[Garrison Davis]

Yes. On Saturday, January 10, the Beth Israel Congregation Synagogue in Mississippi, an historic synagogue, the oldest in the state that was once targeted by the kkk, was set on fire in the middle of the night, damaging the interior of the building. A 19 year old college student named Steven Spencer Pittman has been charged with federal and state arson charges as well as a hate crime enhancement. On Instagram, Pittman described himself as a quote, unquote, follower of Christ and shared a meme of the anti Semitic Happy Merchant hours before the attack.

[Robert Evans]

Jesus Christ.

[James Stout]

Jeez.

[Garrison Davis]

The Happy Merchant is an anti Hispanic Jewish stereotype that is often used in memes originating from the 4chan era of Wojack memes. You've probably seen it before. It's a crude anti Semitic rendering of a Jewish person with his hands clasped together. Pittman has confessed to starting a fire in the building which he described as the quote, unquote, synagogue of Satan, according to an FBI affidavit. And reporting from the apartment states that during his first hearing when the judge read him his rights, Pittman Said, quote, jesus Christ is Lord, unquote. According to the FBI affidavit, Pittman texted his own father during the arson, sending a photo of the synagogue with the messages. There's a furnace in the back, hoodie is on, and they have the best cameras, unquote. Pittman's father attempted to convince his son to come home and later turned him into the authorities. Pittman suffered burns to himself during this attack. He's the only person injured as a result of this incident, thankfully.

[Garett]

Glad he got hurt.

[Garrison Davis]

Pittman's phone was found in the synagogue damaged from the fire, though his location was able to be tracked via the Life360 GPS tracking app, which shows a stop at a gas station where Pittman allegedly picked up gasoline before heading onto the synagogue.

[James Stout]

Great. What a fucking idiot. But yeah, I think this is the only synagogue in the state, right?

[Garrison Davis]

It's the oldest synagogue in the state. I doubt this is the only synagogue in Mississippi.

[James Stout]

The largest one. That's it. Yeah. Yes.

[Garrison Davis]

It's like the most famous one from the state.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[James Stout]

Yeah. And like you said, it was attacked by the Klan before. Didn't he attack exact the same part of the synagogue that the Klan previously burned?

[Garrison Davis]

I. I don't have that in my notes, but that is.

[James Stout]

It seems like that's what he was saying. Vibes.

[Garrison Davis]

No, he did say that he did a lot of research on the target and that he needed a home run in communications to his father. And Pittman was a baseball player in the state. There's not much more to say about this. Like, this is a weirdo Instagram Christian Zoomer who also offered like a fitness service. It's unclear how real this is or if he had like, you know, customers. But he was offering faith based fitness transformations.

[James Stout]

Yeah, that's the thing.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, you have a little bit of like the Christian looks maxer vibe going on with him, as well as sharing a series of anti Semitic posts made on Instagram.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Did you see this Deborah Lipstadt tweet Ger.

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[James Stout]

So Deborah Lipstadt, right. Who was previously the. She liked the envoy on anti Semitism. Posted 8:23 on January 11. This is a major tragedy. But it's more than that. It's an arson attack and another step in the globalization of the Intifada.

[Garrison Davis]

That does not seem to be the case.

[James Stout]

Yeah, no, no, but this is like pretty way off base in fact. Right. But yeah, that. I think that's still rather telling that this is.

[Garrison Davis]

This is not like a Hamas anti imperialist zoomer red triangle embio type Guy. This is a right wing Christian nationalist, college athlete, Christian zoomer.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Who shares anti Semitic memes on Instagram. This is a pretty standard, you know, pre2022 type of, like, synagogue attack.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

In fact, the fire was started right in front of a Tree of Life memorial plaque in the synagogue.

[James Stout]

Jesus Christ, God.

[Garett]

Of course it was.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garett]

And we are back. So the thing I thought I was going to be talking about this week was, was a Supreme Court ruling on Trump's tariffs. However, the supreme. Contrary to the expectations that basically everyone didn't actually release a ruling on the tariff stuff today. We have no idea when they're going to release that. However, instead of that, we got one of the most bizarre and extraordinary statements and videos I have ever seen from someone who was even remotely affiliated with the US Government. So, on Sunday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell released. I don't even have a good reference for what this is. The closest thing I can think of is it's a kidnapping video, but it's more like a help, I'm about to be kidnapped video in which he says, quote, the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve with grand jury subpoenas threatening a criminal indictment related to my testimony before the Senate Banking Committee last June. So this is nominally about cost overruns, effectively in. In renovations of the Federal Reserve. If anyone has ever paid attention to any single US Government project ever, you will know that there are cost overruns on, like most projects, this is just how the government works. Because you come in with your little bid that's below what the actual cost is going to be, and then it costs more than that. Now, this investigation is being run directly into Jerome Powell. And by the way, this statement was published on the Federal Reserves. This is like an official statement from. From the Federal Reserve Board.

[James Stout]

Yeah, yeah.

[Garett]

So he also says later in the statement, quote, the threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President. This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions, or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressures or intimidation. This is extraordinary. They got 16 other central bank leaders from around the world, and we're talking about Norway to Indonesia to submit a letter expressing where they use the word solidarity to express their support of Powell. I cannot emphasize enough. Do you know how bad it is to get central bank leaders to say the word solidarity?

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garett]

Now, this is following a Trump 2 pattern of using the DOJ to attack their political enemies. Today, the 14th, as we're recording this, also saw the beginning of an investigation into Senator Elisa Slotkin over her participation in a video a few months ago encouraging US Troops to disobey illegal orders. Mark Kelly, who was also in that video, was also targeted with a Pentagon investigation over the video. So this has become very common. However, Jerome Powell is a Trump 1 appointee. So this is someone who is also, and this is, this is, this is something that worth mentioning. Powell is very popular in conservative circles, largely outside of a very, very immediate circle of people around Trump who want the president to be able to control the interest rate. Now, I'm going to do a full episode about this probably next week. But the independence of the central bank is one of the core pillars of the global reputation and stability of the US Dollar. Now, I'm not saying here that the central bank is good. I'm saying that this is how the entire world economic system operates, right? It is based on the central bank operating as a series of quasi public, but still technically non government entities that make independent decisions on interest rates. Now, Fed interest rates effectively, and I'm saying effectively here, because I'm simplifying a very complicated set of economic interactions into one sentence. But they effectively set interest rates for bank loans in the broader economy, which in turn has a massive impact on how fast or slow the economy grows. And the Fed uses this as a tool to control inflation and unemployment through basically a single macroeconomic policy lever. The Fed does much, much more stuff than this. I will get into this in the other episode. It has a series of unbelievably crucial functions. But what is happening here is the Trump administration attempting to directly seize control of the Fed. And this is a nightmare. The actual mechanisms at work here in terms of the relationship between interest rates and the Fed's economic policy toolkit and inflation are not well understood even by the Fed, which is something you can get if you go read the Federal Reserve documents. It's very complicated. It's all contested, but it is the Fed's job to be able to do this. And they will admit they're not incredible at it. If the Trump administration is running this directly. The Trump administration has absolutely no idea how any of this stuff works. Yeah, this is giving them the keys to the global economy and they are going to just start pushing buttons. This is a significant enough threat that several Republican senators, and this is not just Borowski, these are like just regular Republican senators, have spoken out against this move and have expressed you know, expressed that they think that, that Jerome Powell is innocent and that they will vote against any, any attempt to approve a Trump nominee for the head of Federal Reserve, which is also extraordinary. This is one of the largest breaks we've seen with Trump from the Republican Party so far. And the reason that there have been actual breaks from the Republican Party is that this is the Rubicon for a lot of sectors of capital. Almost anything can be endured as long as the President does not have direct control over the money supply, which is what Trump controlling the Federal Reserve directly would be. Now, part of what's going on here, right, is that this is an attempt to choose a new chair of the Federal Reserve Board by getting Powell out of his job.

[Gordain]

However.

[Garett]

So Powell's term expires in May, but that's Powell's term as the chair of the Federal Reserve. He's still on the Board of Governors. And the Board of Governors also has to approve a new head of the Federal Reserve. So Trump needs to oust him from his position as the governor of the Federal Reserve Board, because if he doesn't do this, he doesn't have enough votes to get his appointments. The really dangerous thing here, on top of the abstract principle of, you know, the President having direct control over the central banking system, the direct immediate threat is that his preferred candidate, who is currently one of the Federal Reserve Board governors, one of the Federal Reserve governors who's on the board is Stefan Mirren, who is the guy who wants to charge other countries for holding U.S. bonds.

[James Stout]

So, yeah, I forgot.

[Garett]

This guy is a maniac, right?

[Garrison Davis]

Like, he, he.

[Ben Rose Porter]

That's.

[Robert Evans]

Sorry.

[Garett]

That is deeply unfair to maniacs who are very reasonable people. This guy is. I, I cannot emphasize enough. If you put someone in charge of the Federal Reserve who literally did not understand what economics was, they would do less damage than putting Steve Devon Mirren in charge of this. This is a nightmare. This guy has no idea what he's doing at all. He is effectively a cipher for the Trump administration. And this is one of the positions in, in the entire capitalist system where the chair of the Federal Reserve has to be someone who at least sort of knows what's going on. They can be evil, and they very often have been, but they have to sort of know what's happening. If this guy gets put in charge of the Federal Reserve, he is going to turn the US Economy into a smoking crater. And that's, that's what's at stake here with this attempt to prosecute Jerome Powell.

[Garrison Davis]

Powell, blink three times if you need help.

[Garett]

He's blinking three times a second.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he is.

[Garett]

He is tapping SOS with his fingers.

[Garrison Davis]

It is a very unnerving video that he posted.

[James Stout]

Yeah, it does look like one of those. If I disappear, he looks really scared.

[Garett]

Yeah. And I. I think this is going to be one of the major flashpoints here, because even the tariffs don't have the potential impact for economic disruption that handing the make countries pay money to hold US Bonds guy, the Federal Reserve Board chairman, does.

[Andrew Sage]

So.

[James Stout]

Yeah. You will see opposition from Republicans because this directly impacts their bag.

[Garett]

Yeah. This is the most you can possibly fuck with the money by attempting to take control of the entire money supply. There's a lot of fears here, too, and it's sort of worth mentioning this, I've been seeing this passed around a lot, is that there is another sort of recent example of a technically elected president assuming effectively dictatorial powers, and it's Erdogan. And Erdogan eventually took control of the central bank. And to get a sense of how that's going, the inflation rate in Turkey right now is currently 30%. And everyone is celebrating because it's below 31%. This is the lowest the inflation rate has been in ages. It was like 70% when they first started this, and it was 50% last year. And they've gotten it down to a mere 30% inflation rate.

[James Stout]

Yeah. Things going well?

[Garett]

So this is the kind of thing that's on these people's minds because they all understand this. And this is not the Turkish Central Bank. Turkish Central bank is obviously important in the world economy. This is the United States Central Bank. This is a question of the fundamental legitimacy of the dollar as the world reserve currency and of the premier currency in the world economy. So we will see what happens as this continues to unfold. But this is probably the premier economic fight of the entire Trump administration. And we will. We will continue to update it as we learn more about how this is going to go.

[James Stout]

So I want to talk about something that came to my attention over the. Over the break here.

[Garrison Davis]

I feel like we should utilize a banking segue, in my opinion.

[James Stout]

Okay, fine. Yeah, fine, fine, fine. Talking of banks and of centralizing bank power under the state.

[Garrison Davis]

There you go.

[James Stout]

Let's talk about an organization that. That once began as member of the kpd. We're going to talk about Germany, and specifically, I want to talk about an organization called Rottehilfer Red Aid. Don't really speak German. So if I've pronounced that wrong, I hope you'll understand why we're talking about Rotherhilfer is that we a few months ago reported on the State Department adding various European organizations to its FTO list. Foreign terrorist organization. Right. And we wondered what this was about and what it would mean. We are now starting to see a little bit of what it would mean because Rotte Hilfer Red Aid has had its bank account closed in Germany. It had accounts with two different banks, both of which had sort of broadly social or ecological missions. Right. They were sort of progressive banks, I guess, if such a thing can exist. Because these banks are concerned with being sanctioned and effectively locked out of the United States swift system for doing business with a terrorist organization. Just to give some background on the org, I guess there's not a direct lineage from the KPD to this, but there was an organization of the same name from which it sees itself as descended, set up by the German Communist Party, which of course was dissolved by the Nazis. Today what they do is they do legal aid stuff. They appear to like send observers out to protest, to kind of document state violence. They have done some aid for asylum seekers. It has grown massively. It's like it's doubled and then doubled again in the last decade in terms of membership. Right. And there have been attempts to ban it from, you know, the domestic right in Germany. I've linked to one of the AFDE ones in the show notes, if people want to read it, it. But it being unbanked is effectively going to be fatal for the organization. Right. Like it can't provide legal aid, it can't provide legal support if it doesn't have a place to store its money. I mean, I guess it could just have a big box of cash, but it's going to make it very hard for the organization to take donations or to allocate the money that it has. So this is something we might see more. Right. Certainly in Germany, because Antifa OST is the organization that was sanctioned, but potentially also in other places. Talking of having no money, here are some advertisements that can liberate you of some of yours.

[Garrison Davis]

So for one of our last stories, I would like to discuss one of.

[Ben Rose Porter]

One of the.

[Garrison Davis]

One of the bigger news stories from the end of the year, but something we did not have time to discuss in our Last ed of 2025. And this is the Turtle Island Liberation Front. An episode next week will be going into even more detail, but I will go over some of the broad strokes of the Turtle Island Liberation Front alleged bombing plot. On December 12, the FBI arrested four people in southern California who the government claims are Members of the a left wing activist group called the Turtle Island Liberation Front. The criminal complaint, signed on December 13 by an FBI agent working at the Joint Terrorism Task Force in LA, alleges that these four individuals conspired in a bombing plot planned for New Year's Eve 2025. According to the complaint, on November 26, one of the alleged TILF members. I'm gonna say TILF instead of the full name from now on, named Audrey Irene Carroll, gave an eight page handwritten document titled Operation Midnight sun outlining the plan for the bombing to a confidential human source who works for the FBI as an informant. The criminal complaint says this of the confidential human source, quote, the confidential human source is cooperating with law enforcement and is a validated and vetted source. The confidential human source has been a reliable source of information since in or around August 2021. The confidential human source is cooperating for financial compensation. The confidential human source does not have any criminal history. The confidential human source provided past reliable reporting on other cases and has provided reliable reporting in this case, unquote. The plan was for teams of four on the ground participants to plant backpacks containing complex pipe bombs, quote, unquote, or IEDs outside of buildings at five locations targeting two US companies and then simultaneously detonate the bombs at midnight on New Year's Eve 2025. There would be an off the ground member assisting the team remotely by listening to police scanners or be stationed in a vehicle in case a, quote, emergency getaway is needed, unquote. That's quoting from the plan. And one member of each on the ground team would create graffiti of a red triangle and one message of the team's choosing on the sidewalk closest to the building while the other three are placing the devices. This indictment is a really interesting look at the modern direct action left because it includes a whole bunch of little tidbits like block and D block. Yeah, it includes the alleged co conspirators, ground names like Asinock, ak, Nomad, and Kickware, which are their ground names for this action.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The criminal complaint states that after making the initial plan, Carol and another individual, Zachary Aaron Page, recruited additional co conspirators who participated in further planning meetups and helped procure bomb making materials. On December 12, the four defendants traveled to a remote location in the Mojave Desert with the alleged intent to build and test explosive devices FBI observed from a surveillance plane and then arrested Carol Page, Dante Garfield and Tina Lai before they completed assembling a functional explosive device. They have since been charged with conspiracy and Possession of an unregistered destructive device.

[Garett]

As I mentioned in my Talking points, on December 12, a group of individuals.

[Gordain]

Again members of the this anti government.

[Garett]

Group, traveled out to the desert to test their explosive devices. They had precursor chemicals there and they were going to create these bombs in the desert. What they were starting to do is put their chemicals and wares and the components out on the table there. This footage that you're watching is from our surveillance plane. And then what happened after this is the Los Angeles FBI SWAT team, along with the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team moved in and arrested all four subjects without, without incident.

[Garrison Davis]

Now, the Turtle Island Liberation Front appears to be a relatively new group with a social media footprint that only goes back to July 2025. The Instagram page for their LA chapter reads, quote, liberation through decolonialization and tribal sovereignty, unquote. Their most recent post from December 12, the day of the arrests, is promoting a, quote, palestine pop up market in Culver City. A post from November 28 reads, quote, if they hurt you, they hurt me too. Our destinies are intertwined. Liberation for one must mean liberation for all. The empire must fall, and from within the belly of the beast, we must be the ones to dismantle it. Revolution is the only way. Stop, quote, peaceful protesting, unquote. Rise up, fight back. We are not outnumbered. They are. Organize and be ready. Unquote.

[James Stout]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

The FBI Source met with 2 til members in late November, Carol and Paige. And during this meeting, Carol gave the FBI source the handwritten bombing plot and retained three to four additional copies of this plan. And the plan identified five locations to target as marks with more blank slots on the plan which are captioned Add more if enough, comrades. According to the criminal complaint, these targets were, quote, property and facilities operated by two separate companies that are used or engaged in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce, unquote. These are Amazon distribution type facilities. They've not specifically confirmed they are Amazon facilities, but they are these sorts of like global shipping facilities. One of the things I find really interesting about this criminal complaint is the way that this FBI agent describes direct action tactics. And the Turtle Island Liberation Front members like security practices throughout the planning of this action. This is quoting from the criminal complaint. Quote, the plan described multiple operations security measures the co conspirators should take to conceal their identities and such as the use of a burner phone that would be disposed of after the bombings by quote, submerging it in a concrete brick. After destroying the SIM and then disposing of the brick in a body of Water, unquote. The target date of the operation, New Year's Eve, was identified as an opportune time because, quote, fireworks will be going off at the time, so the explosions will be less likely to be noticed as immediately as any normal day, unquote. The plan emphasized that, quote, absolutely no mistakes can be made, unquote. The plans outline the use of quote, unquote black block over top, a layer of quote, unquote casual gray block on top of normal street clothes, and noted to keep hair very tightly concealed and to wear gloves for the purpose of avoidance of leaving behind DNA. The plan further instructed that participants should leave their personal devices at home and make sure that devices were set up to stream a long movie during the time of the attacks as to craft an alibi or quote, unquote quote plausible deniability by having it appear as though the actor was actively using their devices. The plan discussed pre operational surveillance of targets, identification of D block or D clothing locations, and not leaving, quote, anything other than IEDs behind, unquote as they could not, quote, risk any evidence tracing back to us, unquote. The plan also noted the benefit of placing a small pebble in a shoe to alter natural gait to obfuscate their identification. Instructions on how to purchase materials to construct a pipe bomb suggested using cash only, purchasing only in small quantities to avoid suspicion, and splitting purchases amongst a team rather than individually, unquote. This is the type of stuff I find really interesting is this emphasis on all of these, you know, OPSEC like operational security measures, all while working with an FBI informant from the very start of the operation and then recruiting another one during the planning stages. During a meeting on December 7, three Turtle Island Liberation Front members at least met both with the confidential human source as well as an undercover FBI employee while trying to recruit more members to join this operation, both of whom accompanied the Turtle Island Liberation Front members as they traveled to the Mojave Desert on December 12 to allegedly build and test out explosive devices for the direct action. There's a lot more information in the indictment as well as some news that has happened since then, like an arrest in Louisiana, also tied to Turtle Island Liberation Front, but we will discuss those in a future episode. As of now, three defendants in this case have pled not guilty, and the fourth is set to be arraigned on January 20th.

[Mia Wong]

Are you planning on doing that next week, Garrett?

[Garrison Davis]

Yes, there will be an episode next week.

[Ben Rose Porter]

Cool.

[Garrison Davis]

Going into more details about this group, their politics, as well as the FBI undercover and informant, and their level of involvement in this action, which has spurred a lot of discourse online about this being a quote unquote, like sting operation. About this being a quote unquote psyop.

[James Stout]

Yeah, I guess I'll just say very briefly, the FBI, it's not their first time and it's not their last time, probably doing something like this. Right. Like you can look at many other cases and see FBI sort of CIS doing this kind of thing. So I think that context is important here. I just want to finish up with a migration update. First of all, DHS fractured the skull of a protester and blinded him by firing a less than lethal munition into his face at close range at Santa Ana this week. I've linked to an article for people who'd like to read more of that. Secondly, Judge Boasberg, who was the judge overseeing the case about the Alien Enemies act, ordered the government to provide relief to Venezuelans. Sent to Secot. Marco Rubio provided a statement responding that doing so would, quote, materially damage US foreign policy interests. Essentially, he's saying the state can't comply with the order to provide redress for wrongdoing by returning them and it can't even give them due process. Right. Because it has since kidnapped the President of Venezuela. In related news, Senators including Schmidt and Cruz have called for Boasberg's impeachment. Cruz makes these allegations, they're pretty minor and crucially and very unusually, both of them have been repudiated by the Administrative Office of United States Courts, which doesn't normally do this kind of thing.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[James Stout]

But in both cases they've written letters kind of clarifying why Boasberg's conduct is totally normal. Both the Cruz's claims related to decisions Boasberg made with which he disagrees One pertains to a non disclosure order that he gave so that Republican Senate senators would not be notified of subpoenas of their phone records in the fake elector investigation that was called the Arctic Frost investigation at the time that looked at attempts to overturn the 2020 United States election. They're also trying to impeach Judge Boardman for a separate decision in which they feel her sentence for a person who pled guilty to attempting to murder Justice Kavanaugh was too light. And then just today, which is Wednesday of this week, as we're recording this, the State department announced on X.com the everything website that it is pausing visa processing for 75 countries, quote, whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates. The freeze will remain active until the US can ensure that new immigrants will not extract wealth from the American people. It's not clear what they are talking about. Are they talking about immigrant, non immigrant visas, both of the above? Are they talking about people who have violated the public charge rule? Or they just feel that any excess of any great benefit of state support is quote unquote extracting wealth from the American people? If you do not know what the public charge rule is, luckily for you, I made a podcast about it in November of 2024 so you can scroll all the way back more than a year and find that. I will try and find it for you and include a link in the show notes. I think what's crucial here is that this will reduce dramatically the rate at which migrants access government services, right? Which are often very beneficial, especially when it comes to things like child nutrition, child welfare services, right? Finally, the State Department also posted on X.com, the Everything website, that it has revoked 100,000 visas, including 8,000 student visas in the last year. We have no way of verifying that. If you would like to email us, you could do so just email coolzonetipsoton me. If you want it to be encrypted, you should use a protonmail address as well.

[Garrison Davis]

We reported the news.

[Gordain]

We reported the news.

[Robert Evans]

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

[Mia Wong]

It Could Happen. Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia. 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.

[Garrison Davis]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Robert Evans]

Guaranteed Human.