It Could Happen Here Weekly 164

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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

Hi.

Everyone, it's James coming at you. We're pretty nasty cold here. I wanted to share with you that Wildfast has swept through Los Angeles in the last couple of days. While I'm recording this. Thousands of people have been displaced. Five people have died that we know of so far, thousands of structures have been burned, and many many people in I will be finding themselves out of their homes with

All right, I'm gonna go rest my voice order in the court order in the court Justice Robert Evans presiding, I see we have a fine jury here to take questions from the audience of our of our daily news show, which is also my court room. Everybody, everybody get it, because I'm a judge now, really, because that's how the legal system works.

All those rubers finally have true.

No municipal Judge Garrison.

That's okay, okay, that's get You're right, You're right, You're right here.

I will now for the rest of my life be able to say when people ask questions, well as a man of the law, which I'm very much looking forward to.

No, only able to say, Robert quite likely.

To say, anyway, that's all I got.

All right, this is the it could happen here. A Q and A episode. We've got what what are we calling you now? Robert Evans? What's your title?

The Honorable Robert Evans and I I actually all the judge who made me a judge sent me a gabble, but I didn't grab it for this one. So I just used I have a the the barrel and lower receiver from an antique sought off shotgun that belonged to a bootlegger, and I just sort of slammed that into my table.

I'm sure editor will love that.

Yeah, yeah, but before we broadcast, so you have a sort of shotgun.

It's not a it's not functional, it's been destroyed.

I see, I see good. Didn't want a little really rich moment.

Yeah, we've got Mio Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout and the dishonorable Robert Evans.

And Sophie Lickterman. Oh yes, it mean yeah, we're.

Gonna do the We're gonna do some questions we posted in on our Blue Sky. If you not following us on Blue Sky, we are on there.

Blue Ski one does not post on Blue Sky. So if you want.

Skeets, I really hope that's not true, because that's really.

Embarrassing Unfortunately, they really tried to get that off the ground. I don't see anyone actually using skeat.

I saw someone using it in French and it was a real moment. Hi are you Garrison.

Instead of saying send a tweet, now, I just say send skeet in conversation. Everyone loves it. M hm.

Do you re skeet? Is that a thing? Yeah?

I guess you do. I guess you do, mm hm.

And we're moving on. I'm just gonna throw out some of the questions we received on online. I'm not even gonna say the name of the app again because I'm afraid being labeled as an old Garrison's embarrassed by me. I can tell I didn't say that, but you thought it.

But you thought it. I didn't think that you did.

Any advice for someone with a desire to do some hobby or freelance journalism in the coming few years, I want to actively fight for equality. Also, thank you for your questions. Everyone.

Hm, I don't thank you for your questions. I'm actively angry at you for your question.

Yeah, that's why you're the dishonorable.

Yeah, start rich if you want to be a freelance journalist. Because you'll progressively become poorer.

It's my I have funded my journal I get I love whatever people ask me questions like how did you convince Krack to send you to Iraq? I didn't. I bought plane tickets, Like being an entertainer has always been what's funded my journalism.

I guess my advice would be get really autistic about something problematic, just like one thing, this one thing I get like RELLI into it to the point where it kind of takes over your life. Your personal life starts fading away, it kind of blends into your whole state of existence. And only then will you actually get good at that thing. Yep, that's my advice. And then you just take one thing at a time and every few years you kind of change the scope of the thing

Yeah, you just finished thirty six hours of digging into the life of a school shooter. And I also built the back of my career spending hours and hours digging through the online lives of mass shooters. And you don't have to do that, but you do have to do that thing, which is Yeah, exactly what Garrison said. You have to pick a very narrow thing and make it your life, and not just a random thing, but like

I would say if you want to get started freelancing, it's a good idea to join that IWW Freelance Journalist Union. You can learn a lot from people who are freelancing there. You can learn who not to pitch, which editors are toxic as fuck, which is a surprisingly large amount. Yeah, you can learn which email to send your pitches to and how to pitch if you're not familiar with how

Cool.

What is the consensus on what the next Trump administration will do? On the first day or first week, all of us just look like we're in pain.

Oh fus like it's chaos of the Yeah.

I'm not.

I'm not for seeing good things. There'll be a lot of executive orders that are you know, probably bad, you know, things that aren't great.

Yeah, I think that, Uh, he's going to try to do as much of what he's promised to do in terms of particular not in terms of everything he's prounded, but in terms of going after immigrants. Yeah, he's going to do as much of what he's promised to do as he possibly can't. Now that doesn't mean he's going

I think the other thing that's going to happen pretty quickly is I think he's gonna start moving on tariffs very very fast.

Yeah. If you're planning to buy a computer, go ahead and grab that fucker now if you can.

If you're getting anything from overseas, you should get it in the few weeks that you still can.

Yeah, it has a battery.

It made here.

I had my annual physical today because otherwise our insurance screws us over. And my doctor was like, you should try to get as many prescriptions filled before the end of the year before things come up, just in case. There you go, and you know that's not terrible advice.

Yeah.

I think in terms of executive orders, he will try and further restrict access to asylum, try and further change that. There are things he can do by executive order with ICE and CBP in terms of how they operate that he will try and do. It's not impossible that they will try and again immediately mobilize public health law against migrants like he did in twenty twenty. Right, Yeah, those

So, yeah, not impossible. Party won't be a great day.

Somebody's getting fired the first week, probably first day.

Yeah. I mean, I've seen the fact that the FBI director is stepping down pushed as like an act of resistance because it means that Trump now has to actually go through like Congress to get it done. I don't know if how much I buy that, how much I think that. I think a lot of what I'm seeing

Okay, several of you have asked about the Android ad free version subscription channel, and I want you all to know that it will happen next year. I have been trying to get this to happen for two years now, and for unforeseen reasons, it just keeps getting roadblocked. But it is happening. We're just waiting on a couple of final things to get into place, so that will be happening, hopefully very soon into twenty twenty five. I will update everybody as soon as that's possible. And I'm so sorry

Yeah, we've seen it, Sophie has. It's been a nightmare, Harder than I have worked on anything else this year. Like, it's been nuts. Yeah, And here's the thing that sucks for no reason, no reason, but not that there's no reason to launch the app. There's a great reason. There's no reason it should have taken this long. Correct, But we can't say anymore for reasons that are also equally frustrating. I'd like to say in general, folks, there's a few things that get brought up a lot. It's like, why

On some bureaucracy bullshit.

Some be rock some legal shit where you're like, you don't actually realize it's illegal to do this if you do it this way or whatever, like some sort of bullshit that makes it impossible. It's not that we want to make this is it is as possible for people to have the best listening experience that we can afford to provide them. But there's a lot of annoying bullshit that exists for reasons beyond our comprehension.

Sorry, anyways, here's ads. Unless you have an iPhone and subscribe to color Zone Media on Apple. All right, we're back. How do you each motivate yourself to write or do your jobs. I get asked that question all the time, but I'll let each of you tackle it. While this is a communally hosted show, I feel like each of you do very different things, so your answers are going to be all over the place. So Garrison, Oh.

Well, I mean paying rents a great motivator.

Sure, yes, yes, understated, this is a big thing that a lot of people who want to be writers but have never done it for a living. Miss is that all of your favorite writers who do it for a living, a big part of how they get over fucking writer's block is they have to pay rent or mortgage. Yeah, it turns out that helps.

It's it's it's a quite compelling motivator, and sometimes it has required the assistance of you know, caffeine or other things. I have a variety of playlists to help me in when I'm in like different moods. I definitely will about you know, maybe twice a month, I just do a complete, like a complete body check to my sleep schedule to get a special project finished. And that's just kind of part of the deal, at least in terms of how

Yeah for me.

Okay, So the easiest way something gets done is just pure rage. I can just do it like.

It just comes out. The anger is a great motivator.

The other fun one is pure joy as something funny happening, Like this is the shinzo Abe assassination. The easiest writing I've ever done in my lifetimes.

It just flows.

Yeah.

Other times it's just like there's a deadline and everyone is counting on me, and I have to get it out, and I've gotten to the right level of sleep deprivation where I can just do it.

That's right, That's right.

Yeah.

But I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance. But yeah, and then the last thing, and this is the sort of the serious one, is that like this, you know, I mean I do some organizing stuff too, but like this, this is the thing that I have to do that can materially affect the world. Which is a very very weird thing to say about a podcast.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

Very large hammer will be a banging name for a podcast.

I agree, Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, there's a there's a great speech in the comic series trans Metropolitan about how journalism is a gun that you you wire up to your eyes and your ears and several other organs in order to shoot at the world. And that's I think a good way to keep yourself doing it when it feels like you're just shouting into a void.

Yeah.

I really like the process of writing.

I like telling stories like that makes me happy and I feel.

So lucky I can do it for my job.

I don't ticularly like like receiving trauma, which I also do for yob but.

Like, really it can be sometimes I can't sleep.

So many people trusted me with their stories, especially this year, that they didn't have to and sometimes a great personal risk, and it's a massive privilege that they trusted me with those stories, and I think I owe it to them to do my best to tell those stories as well

Yeah, for me, it's two part answer. The first part is that I genuinely give a shit about everything that we put out and what we do is not really while it is a job, it matters so much. And the second part is if I don't do my job, the amount of people's lives that that impacts is a lot of fucking people, and I give a shit about each and every one of them. So I'm gonna keep doing my job so that everybody else can keep doing their job and maybe we make a difference in this world,

Have did I already not give an answer?

You gave an answer, that's why, but you were starting to speak.

Oh yeah, I do it for the fame, baby.

Great. Next, What episode or episodes were your favorite this year to make or otherwise?

Yeah?

My favorite this year We're definitely James's series from the Darien Gap. That was an incredible series. I'm so unbelievably proud of it. Yeah, James had been trying to do that work for a long time, and I'm I'm happy that we were able to fund it and James was able to do the incredible reporting that he did. I'm also quite proud of Robert Garrison and I surviving the RNC and d n C and C.

Was a good time, like legitimately.

Great time, pulling the worst people in the world.

It was the d n C that fucked me up. Yeah, yeah, same.

I was like destroyed emotionally after the d see.

Yeah, the DNC was really a huge bummer. And then MIAs covered some of the most important labor stories that like nobody covers absolutely yeah, and like without those genuinely like nobody covers like small labor stories or big labor stories, and she's always on top of that beat. And yeah, I also really just like Robert's don't Panic episode something some great writing, my friend, I answered, Now everybody else has to, Well, I'll start with Miyah.

There's weirdly a few this year cool I normally isn't I like the Boeing ones that was fun.

Yeah.

The one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview doctor Julia Serrano, who if you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it.

Great book.

Yeah, Whipping Girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the like like the concept of misgendering is from that book, right, Like like the language that we used to talk about Transnist today is directly her and so few people who ever read the book, so a few people even know who she is, and getting a

Yeah, so I'm proud of that one.

Yeah, let's take a quick break then, Garrison, Robert James, you can answer that question and we're back. James, how about you.

I'm proud of doing the Darien ones. I think, like, I'm so happy that we finally got to a place where like we could do that, where we could fund that, Like I've been trying to do that, like I said, for nearly.

A decade, and.

Yeah, it's been hard, and it continues to be hard, like one of the people you heard from in those episodes got deported last week then, so like it continues to kind of be emotionally difficult. But I really liked how many people messaged me and were like, I sent this to my father, uncle, not just dudes aunts and their mum's too, I'm sure, and think non binary relatives, but like, well maybe not because they sent it to their right wing relatives and they like learned some compassion.

So yeah, that may be really happy.

The reason we're all different on this, by the way, is because we have not done a Come twenty twenty four episode, and if we had, this would have been a much much shorter segment.

James, let me just tell you, I think we can all look forward to all white Christmas this year.

Jesus mother.

Set him up. It's my own fault.

Wow, I guess I'll go now. I'll just short clean out the aftertaste of that.

So it's worse.

I think I started out pretty strong with police drones, even more topical as we record this now as New Jersey is about to get completely abducted I think by alien aircraft.

Yeah, there's no one left in New Jersey.

Now they've all been taken away by all these unidentified drone.

That actually happened three days ago. It just took a long time for the rest of the country to notice or care. Breece Springsteen hasn't made a song about it. We have no way of known.

Besides the mass hysteria of the New Jersey drone panic. Police drones are a real problem, and those are going to be increasingly so. I was happy with my porting on that at CES, and then I guess I mean to echo Sophie. I had a great time at the RNC. It's fun, a sentence I never thought I would say, yeah, And particularly the R and C Grinder episode, I still think is Bruce pretty is pretty good.

It's pretty great. The amount of places that Garrison and I snuck into at the rn C a time.

It was really dangerous too, because I was having to like do my RNC research next to Robert and Sophie the whole time, and oh boy, it's like a minefield scrolling through.

That app effects an experience, to say the least. Any thoughts on the proposed twenty twenty eight general strike, How are people feeling about that?

I'll start with Mia, Yeah, I mean it's it's a pretty good idea, Like there's definitely sort of and I'm immediately going into this nacying a little bit. There's definitely problems with it. It's going to be extremely hard to execute because we just don't have a modern history of doing that in the US, and even some of the success so ones in the last decade that people have

Anyone else have anything they want to add?

The time to start figuring out those logistics, like is now it's it's not waiting till twenty twenty seven.

Yeah, I agree, Garrison. I think that the fact that there are serious people who represent serious unions talking about it is part of way. It's one of the things that does give me a degree of hope. We're going to have to start working now towards it. It's not going to be so in any way, shape or form. If they see it coming, they are going to start trying to criminalize things preemptively. If it is something that even looks like a real possibility, they're going to come

Yeah, it's strained to be seeing something like this organized so far off like it.

Yes, it's not something where any of us are familiar with, which it has to be to be clear. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it has to.

Be barring, like an actual coup. That's the only way you get a general strike, right like, either something so earth shattering that everyone so that everyone's ready to risk it because they're already in danger or yeah, you take the time when you plan that you do it properly. But it's just not something we're familiar with. I love the general strike. I'm always going to support a general strike. I'm excited to see a general strike. But yeah, we have to put in the work now.

Yeah, the only responsible way to characterize the organized left in the United States is a complete and utter failure. Like it has been a calamity for the causes that it seeks to represent. And a lot of that is because of like fucking bullshit online clicktivism. You know, we're all going to do a general strike. Everybody, get ready next week, We're going to do it. You know, shit

You know, and last, do each of you have you know a movie or a book or something you would like to recommend.

In twenty twenty five, when I finished my books, you should buy it, yes, but.

Read General Strike.

I've been reading a book called Platentive, which is in English, but it's about how San Francisco doc workers block to shipment of weapons to El Salvador and it just seems a very relevant book. And they did it to Pinochet as well. It's easy to read and like. It just reminded me how important labor organizing is going to be in the next four years and how powerful it can be too. So I'll give that one a little plug.

Excellent.

There's a film called The End Will Be Spectacular which is about the Kurdish use movement in Northern Kurdistan in Turkey. It's a really good film. I think of understand to help you understand the Kurdish freedom movement, and it's worth a watch. It's not like a necessarily a happy, feel good film, but I think it's worth a watch. Fifty if you've recently become interested in that because of what you've heard on the podcast.

Yeah, yeah, I have a couple, so I'm trans fiction pilled. Right now, you've given you fiction for trans authors.

Would you say you're transfixed? Wow?

I walked.

I walked right into that one, like drove directly into it, like JFK's head into that bullet.

Oh my god.

Wow.

We spent a lot of time with each other.

Yeah.

The first one I wanted to talk about is The gun Runner and Her Hound by Maria Ying, which is the pen name of a couple of authors. Okay, so it's this is a This is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime ward and here a do bodyguard who is also a lesbian, and it rules. Uh, there's a whole sort of like post apocalypse US thing going on, but they're still in like civilized Hong Kong. It's awesome, it's great. It's you need you need war

Yeah. So I'm actually right now in the middle of a book that I found myself surprised by how much I've liked. It's called When Paris Went Dark, and it is a history of the occupation of Paris under the Nazis.

Here, I guess just two recent things I've enjoyed. Finally finished the Steppenwolf by Herman Hess. Yes, I enjoyed that deeply. It kind of it kind of my picked my twin Peaks the Return Brain. So that was that was pleasant for and for a more recent release, Luca Guardaghino's new movie Queer, adapting the short story by William S.

Burrows.

I found this movie to be utterly fascinating and transfixing, to use the term from me, Robert. I don't have much else to say about it because I would rather people just watch it and take away what they want to themselves. But it got me thinking a lot about the lack of meaning inherent to identity and why I hate the term queer bodies. So yeah, good.

Movie, awesome. I just have one movie to recommend, and it's one of my favorite movies of all time, the original nineteen seventy three, seventy two, so seventy three, seventy three, The Wicker Man, not the fucking Nicholas Cage version, the original version. And if you have a local theater that plays old movies a lot of times, they'll play it in theaters, and I highly recommend that experience. It's really fun,

Finally we will acknowledge the Armenian genocide.

I was I was vibing, okay, James, I.

Was vibing genocide.

Just James, all right, Viba side God all right? Mia woggs here, I'm Bred Garrison's here, James Stout's here, and the dishonorable Robert Evans is also here.

I judge that nickname bad Jesus Christ.

Wow, let's let's go over some of our terrible twenty twenty four predictions just briefly. Now, Unfortunately there was a lot of election ones which were very sad to listen to. Oh no, now, we were correct about many things we did. We did talk about how Harris would probably be a really bad candidate to run against Trump. Totally forgot about that.

We did. We did huge for us. Yeah, for the country. That brief period of time when Biden stepped down, it really felt like it might be I mean, she did better than he would have done. Yeah.

Well, I think that's just because we were still just reeling from that debate, because so bad that like anything was like, oh my god, there's like a life.

Look at how she can walk thirty forty feet at a time, exact exact sentence. Good God.

None of us picked Vance specifically at that point in time, but we did pinpoint Trump's orbit and his like campaign like hmmm crew pretty well, like Mia predicted that RFK Junior could be a Trump VP pick, and though he didn't become VP, he essentially kind of took over the VP like campaigning role from Vans in.

Like August Ye was so bad at it.

We all decided that like Vivec was simply like way too loud and like obnoxious. So Trump would like find some other spot for him. Stand by that, And that's what happened. He's still in the orbit, but he's not super close. So if he talked about possibly Christine nome As is getting LinkedIn with Trump maybe for VP. Now that didn't happen for VP, but christineoam is in the cabinet.

Good job passed me.

Yeah, and Robert said that he would not be shocked if Trump got close with Tulca Gabbert and other less good predictions I predicted that a daily wire host would get unfortunately did not come to pass. There's still time.

It's still twenty twenty fours, right.

Not when this airs, not when this air.

Yes, Kim Kardashian getting into politics didn't really happen, she kind of stated at her regular coast level. Sorry, Sophie so far.

Trust me. She did all those things when Trump was elected the first time, where all of a sudden she was, like with other lawyers trying to get people out of jail by utilizing Trump.

Yeah, I mean, and she was doing that with the Biden campaign as well, not as visible a Harris campaign. She was meeting with Harris multiple times. She kind of stayed at this like distant but like talkative place.

That's the Kardashian way, distant and talkative.

Speaking of speaking of your other prediction was that people would start forgetting about the Nazi stuff and Kanye would put out a well received album, which kind of happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit.

God, I haven't thought about Kanye so many months. It was really nice, well, really nice, thanks Garrison.

Lastly, my failed prediction is that if Trump won the election, that there would be two solid weeks of writing which simply did not happen.

Yes, nothing happened.

I think it's actually kind of interesting, and we will maybe unpack that in the coming months as Trump's second term kind of settles in. I'm sure we will kind of revisit why we think this did not happen. Certainly, I'm curious about what inauguration Day will look like. But but yeah, that was a lot so sorry. Morsey is still alive, David David Scavenger is still alive, Putin is still alive, and though James did say that Asad would eat it, and though a sawd didn't die, he kind of did eat it.

Well, yeah, I mean, James, Yeah, that's that's not gonna be the biggest dub of the year. Yeah, that's right.

Damn I forgot no one about that. Really happy with myself.

Now, James, I'm so proud of you, buddy.

You got to pick another one this year. Yeah, may on long, baby, he's next.

Let's I guess let's start with some kind of dictator predictions. What do we think will happen to like a dictator in twenty twenty five.

Which is Hace is gonna die? Do we think go just general dictator predictions?

Dictator predictions. It can be maybe we get a new one, you know, maybe we get a new fancy one.

Yeah, well I don't know. Yeah, something's happening in January.

I have two well one of them, I mean it's kind of a hack one, but I don't think. I don't think the June to memr makes out of twenty twenty five. Yeah, I think not in the version is today. Yeah, that's the hack one. The the other one is another assad one. Is I think someone actually does assassinate a sod Well, he's like like he he gets too full of himself and he goes to Abi Dabi and some Mosan brotherhood guy just wax him.

Yep, okay.

May Assaud prediction is he becomes a Russia Today host. That's my assad prediction.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, he's going to open his ophthalmology clinic.

No, I mean I think he's going to get signed to host a podcast by a little a little network you might have heard of called cool Zone Media. Congratulations, guys, let's bring him on. So if you get him on the get him on the zoom, tell him you can kick an hop in the room. Now for sure, baby.

We are merging with Tennant Media to bring up our friend.

Yeah, welcome to the Podsha. He's actually doing a whole media tour with the Pod Save guys next week. That's got to be fascinating.

Pod Save bathis Siria the most cursed podcast in the world.

My Dictator slash world Leader prediction is that despite being Nen Yahoo's I was thinking, yeah, last ride.

From your mouth to whatever fucking clot is working its way through his coronary sy in a year.

I really fucking hope. I'm really fucking hope. I'm right, we all do.

I don't know what else to say there?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a big thing for the world.

Yeah.

I mean we are verging into not doing predictions, just doing hopes and dreams.

Yeah. Well I did Morrissey like that last year. We didn't get it, and I'm sack.

We need some hopes and dreams out in the world.

I fair enough.

Yeah, do you know what else? We need team money from these advertisers. That's right, and we.

Are back, all right, Garrison, what's next?

So usually in the middle of these prediction episodes, I like doing our like third annual death segment, who do we think will die? And I guess we kin we kind of touched on this briefly, but I don't think we we actually secure death for any of those people in our prediction, just that they would, you know, have circumstances change, though for this year's death segment we have.

Who's dying on.

Spotify rap to day? So this is what late November, early December, we don't really know. Spotify rapped death day predictions.

So long, farewell, Love Eider saying goodbye, Mitch McCall.

Oh, that's a good one. That's an easy one. But okay, I'll give it to you.

I'm thinking, like, who's got to get through most of the year but not finish it out. You know, it's tough.

I'm gonna make my call tye up resip air to one. You know. That's that's that's my hope. That's a long shot. I know, yes, he doesn't seem like he's in bad health, but that's a big one.

Kissinger was a long shot too, because he was like arguably immortals.

He'd kept living for so fucking long.

Ah, so long, farewell, Love Eater, say goodbye Musk.

I was gonna say that I think he might die.

You think we're finally gonna get that drug over do.

So I just he just seems to be spiraling so hard right.

Now, the spiral's mad real.

Yeah, he's getting everything he wants though, but I mean that that also.

It's It's true.

Sometimes that's dangerous, Yeah, especially if you are addicted to a drug that you can get in unlimited peer quantities and no one will ever say no to handing it to you.

We have some more must predictions for later on the episode. Okay, but I can see of some, you know, like fantously the Secret Service, you know, not not great at hiding there own drug problems. I can I can see possibly with Musk entering a new level of comfort, maybe the spiraling a little, a little too far out of his control.

He and two Secret Service ations are found dead with fitnyl infected blow.

Maybe a SpaceX launch goes really wrong. Who's to say? Who's to say? Damn? I gotta think of who? Who? My who? My Spotify Rapped Day death is.

I have a long shot. Oh yeah, My long shot is that sometime on Spotify rap Day, JK Rolling sees a trans woman just like existing and gets so mad, he has an aneurysm and dies.

No, she's looking through the Spotify wraps and she knows that trans would make the best music, and she she sees it, gets so mad she just she just kills over.

She transvestigates every single female artist on the Spotify rap list and dies of sleep deprivation doing so.

Her her own fans start transvestigating her.

This is the edge.

Okay, I have a real long shot here, but I can see how it could happen. So we're we're in. We're in like what like month, month ten eleven of Trump term two. Right, the right wing nazi content creators are settling, are settling into their into their kind of groove. Some of them aren't really happy at Trump, not like you know, carrying on all of all of his big

From his nasra.

Yeah, Yeah, I don't know. I feel like it's it's his fandom's getting close enough to pull some like weird crazy shit like that on, like a weird like on, like a on, like a deeply parasocially destructive level, like Stephen King's misery. A misery happens to Nick Quintes, but he doesn't but he doesn't make it, he doesn't make it out. That's that's my Spotify wrapped prediction.

I have said for years Nick Fuintes is going to go down live probably maybe maybe live. He's gonna go down like George Lincoln Rockwell. It is not going to be like an enemy of his, that does it. It's going to be a result of his incredibly messy personal life. Yeah, like someone is going to take him down. H Like it's it's that Yeah, Yeah, that feels right.

Do we have a non categorized predictions? Is it that time yet?

Sure?

Now that we have, we have finished our Spotify wrapped predictions, And I do not know who my top artists will be. This last year it was Trent Resnor so salute that's like, okay, Garrison Challenger soundtrack, that thing fucking bops.

I tried to make Robert watch that on the way to Oh is it the d n C or the r n C. I don't remember, and but he wouldn't watch it with headphones, and so it was just on on the plane. I think it was the DNC.

That's terrible.

Yeah, I think I think I was reading a Nick Land.

Honestly, that's a vibe that actually pairs quite well.

I landed completely deranged. It was great, Ready to work.

A prediction. A prediction that I have is that like Trump basically tries to move a lot of the main time he spends to mar Alago versus the White House. Like, I feel like he's going to make mar A Lago some like national monument type shit so that he can take whatever the fuck documents he wants from the White House to mar A Lago and spend as much time there as he wants and make that like a national residence or some shit.

Went to White House, Yeah, the whiter House, we could call it.

Yeah, so true, true Harrison. No, I'm kind of interested to watch what happens with AOC over the next year, because she has definitely become to a lot of folks that progressive and on the left, like a villain over the last year, And I kind of wouldn't be surprised if, like, in assuming there's still politics in twenty years. When we're talking to young people, they think of her like Pelosi and like, oh, you've got to understand when things started out,

My My big one for the year is this is the this is the year the economy finally collapses, Like, this is the year you find out that no company has made any fucking money in a decade. It's all been being pumped up by like a deranged combination of interest rate bullshit, a bunch of fucking money from like overnight repo purchases, keeping the banks propped up. And I don't know if it's gonna be the trade war that fucking blows it up, although I think that will instantly detonate everything.

I don't know.

Maybe it's maybe he's a Chinese housing bubble, maybe the tech bubble finally collapse. Maybe all three of them hit at the same time. This is the year fucking goes. I've never actually put my name down down on this on the show. On any other fucking year. This is the year the zombie economy will fall over dead. The necromancy cannot hold.

I guess my prediction is that the economy is going to be basically identical to the Biden economy in that we're going to get like fucked up inflation and people are going to be very angry, and the number will continue to go up on the stock market because that's kind of what it's designed to do. That's my theory.

And the housing market will still be trash.

Yeah, we will never afford times and the housing's just gonna get more expensive. It will be interesting to see Trump's entire all of his backers and his whole media like one thing that will be easier for the left is really hitting conservatives on inflation as it gets horrible again or continues to suck, because that's, you know, at this point, just a factor of the economy working as intended. Yeah, that they all have to pretend, isn't. Yeah.

And before we go to a break, I just want to say the price of eggs will go up.

I need to get chickens now. Oh yeah, this bird flu thing is not gonna help with eggs. Oh boy, oh boy, get your eggs now, by one hundred, by thousands of dollars of eggs.

Now, there was some kind of device to make eggs and you could have in your own God, oh.

My goodness, it's time for ads.

I guess to piggyback off of Robert and MEA's predictions there in the economy. My prediction is that once I finally launched cool zone coin this year, I'm gonna make a big If the economy is gonna go down, I am gonna be going up. Everyone's gonna start buying coole zone coin because the US dollar becomes worthless. Bitcoin's gonna crash too. It's fake, but cool zone coin has real fungible value.

Well, yeah, the thing about cool zone coin. That makes it different from all of the other crypto coins is that it is really based on a fundamentally limited and valuable resource, which is movies from the nineties that I showed Garrison and they actually liked. So, you know, there's there's only so many cool Zone coins that can be in circulation.

We're lucky I was in Portland this Christmas because we really stocked up a few more of those nineties classics to bump up the price of cool Zone coin going into twenty twenty five.

That's right, everybody, Wow, sell your house by cool Zone coin.

Have you seen Hook? Garrison? I have seen Hook. I like, of course, good, Yeah, a classic.

Have you seen Wickerman nineteen seventy three?

You know, I actually haven't. I've been waiting to catch it in the theater.

We will make this happen at some point necessary.

I would I would love too. I would love too.

I bet one thing. I think it's very predictable border stuff. They will stunt on an the caravan of migrants, and I think it's pretty easy for them to kind of organize that and make that happen, and it will be a way for Trump to flex his border fascism yeah, much like he did in twenty eighteen. Maybe they'll wait till the midterms again. There's always a fun border disaster for the midterms.

Could I just do one? That might not be a prediction, but like a Sophie Hope.

Sure, yeah, get it.

Something has to happen to those Paul brothers.

Oh, Sophie, Oh yeah, that's possible. Yeah. My prediction for the Paul brothers is that one of them dies within the next five years, and one of them lives to be one hundred and seven.

Oh that tracks sure.

Yeah, they decide to take on Bob Dylan in a boxing match and only one of them survives.

I think Bob Dylan'll live in this next year.

But I've just found Bob Dylan's tweets the purest thing. He just tweets about what he's doing.

What a hero.

Netflix paying Jake Paul to billions of dollars to fight nine hundred year old Mike Tyson and then Jake Paul coming in on like a vintage car and spraying his product and it having higher streaming numbers than the Super Bowl?

Is that real?

Yes?

To be fair, that was a rancid super Bowl.

Rancid Super Bowl. This this cannot this cannot be.

Most of us just turned in on the off chane, So Jake Paul would die.

Yes, that is true.

That is true, or at least get bitten.

Like Yeah, all of us were hoping that Mike Tyson was not in fact sixty years old. But he is sixty years old. So uh yeah some god, yeah something, something's gotta give. Oh, and there won't be a left wing Joe Rogan, thank you so much.

Oh, I don't know, Sophie.

I can as soon as we logicals so good, I think we can.

Really.

Oh, there'll be there'll be somebody trying to be.

Oh, Sorphie, there already. By the way, it's time for me to do our new ad plug. You've heard of how good elk meat is for you, and you've heard of how liver is a superfood. Well now try new elk liver steaks. It's just just ground up liver shoved inside a steak. I send it through the mail through FedEx five day delivery. It is not refrigerated in any way.

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ROOPTEMP to get the healthy bacteria it gives you mystical powers.

Of One of my I guess more hopes and still partial predictions is that National Guard gets into a scuffle with border patrol in some kind of blue state.

Yeah, yeah, good chance.

We have some brave and strong governor is gonna is gonna salute the troops and send out our proud National Guard boys to fight off ice. That's just a battle I would love to see. I've wanted to see that ever since Portland twenty twenty. I've wanted to see National Guard troops fight against federal forces.

Two groups of men who don't really know how to use their guns, using their guns, No, it's gonna be amazing.

So battle, I've wanted to see you for like five years.

Who's plate carriers at the top, closer to their nipples? It's anyone's game.

I need to see it. I need to see it. Come on.

I would like to see it from a distance, because that would be a shit show.

Yeah, from a sizable distance.

Yeah, General Whitmer, let's go.

Let's go expensing a fucking telescope for that firefight. Yeah, yeah, a periscope. Maybe I trust the Iraqi Army more than either of those sides.

I've seen a lot of dudes five guns while ducking behind a KB holding the gun.

I love you.

And then it does look fun. It does look fun.

It is.

Yeah, definitely, I would like to do that. That they kicked me out the range every time because of woke how sad?

Well, not anymore, James, Yeah, that's also the casualties yet, not any more, James. Wolke is beaten.

That's right. Yeah, they wait, went, they went broke.

I'm going to buy the range, that's right, and we'll all fall from behind the bentress.

Now, oh mama.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Other predictions, maybe we'll get a good, solid couple of weeks of writing again, and that Garrison said, like, maybe it'll let me take a year or two this time.

I don't think that anymore.

Something will have to change. Yeah, there will have to be a material change in either organizing or social conditions, because people will need to either be vastly more desperate than they are right now, or they will need to have a specific reason to think, well, this time, getting out in the street might do something. Yeah.

I think we're gonna kind of continue the trends that that we've been seeing, which which points towards a bit of an apathy towards like like big popular mobilizations and more towards kind of bizarre lone wolf attacks, something that you know could be slight even a slightly probable or you know, possibly darker productions. I think we'll have like a really bad Luigi copycat within the next like four months. Sure, yes, the years of Luigi, Like, it's not gonna be good.

It's not gonna be good. There's probably gonna be a situation where some guy either gets the best case is that he gets killed immediately by the dude's security. The worst case is there's a big public firefight and a whole fuck let of people get hit.

Yeah, didn't I predict that there would be a big public crime with a three D printed gun last year?

I think that was the year before we talked about that.

Oh damn, okay, so close and.

Yeah, you know, I mean this, this certainly does kind of fit that mold. We'll see how much that like gets focused on in the trial and like continued reporting.

Yeah, and in that legislation too, I missed a death. We can also include it in the hope section. Matthew Iglesias, that motherfucker, motherfucker has been standing bullshit for twenty years. It just it cannot can he knew he's lost a juice a little bit. I think he ses on the way out.

All Right, Something very funny did just happen that we should talk about as a team. Senator Doug Mastriano taught, a thirty year US Army veteran who taught at the War College, just tweeted an indignant, furious tweet about the US government not being honest with Americans about like what's happening with these drones? And yeah, and the picture of the crash drone is a tie fighter. That's like a model tie fighter on the bed of a flatbed.

Yes, we've all lost our mind.

Hot at the US Army War College, they're not sending their best people. Oh fuck, that's funny, amazing stuff. That's one of the best things I've seen out here. Oh good me.

Finally, I like the closer predictions a little bit on Trump's cabinet. I think it's pretty pretty safe to say, becausidering his last presidency, we'll have at least one third cabinet turnover by the end of the year. Yeah, this

It just came out that he's not going to be able to get a high the highest security clearance. There you go, that's funny.

But like he has him sitting next to his family at Thanksgiving totally.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, totally, And especially in like the three weeks after the election, they were like they were like honeymoon, right, they were neck and neck and something that's gonna like start dissipating. Musk can't get fully booted out because like you know, the federal government needs SpaceX and and unlike Musk's other like technologies, so like they will remain friendly, but like you're not going to be

I think that RFK Junior is probably at pushed out of the picture before Musk is.

Yeah, if he tries to get rid of the fucking polio vaccine, it's gonna be a real quick trip to the unemployment line for Bobby Boy.

Yeah, I really, I don't think Trump's that reckquest No, like that that would be quite quite a line to get rid of the polio vaccine.

Trump, I'm still so old, like he remembers he's old.

But if, but if ORFK Junior could get the wheat ingredient out of the McDonald's fries, I'd be most obliged.

Oh yeah, no, I'm I'm sure that he's gonna he's gonna reverse one hundred years of corn subsidies. And get corn served out of our Coca Cola. I believe in RFK.

Yeah, I feel pretty good about the continuing legality of Kraton as long as he's the HHS head.

There you go.

All it's gonna take, is one of Joe Rogan's friends, speaking in his ear.

We'll be all right, We're gonna have legally required DMT for everyone in the country.

Yeah, why not? I think we need and I've been I've been saying this for years. We need to put the lithium back in the water. We also need to use those crop dusting planes and just like fill them with xanax. Just just just calm everyone down, take everything back a couple of steps.

All right, I'm gonna go pet some dogs. So the podcast over. Happy New Year, everyone, Happy, Happy new everyone. I do want everyone to pick one thing that that that they're gonna do this year that will improve their life, however small.

For me, I'm gonna get a new mirror. We're gonna all pick one thing. We call that Project twenty twenty five. It's what one thing we can do to improve our lives and you know, and then by extension, the lives of everyone else around us. So make sure everyone has their own personal project twenty twenty five going into this next year. I think we will need it.

Yeah, I'm holding my Project twenty twenty five in my arms right now.

Your new dog, your new dog I adopted.

I adopted Anderson a sibling, and her name is Truman.

Lovely after our greatest US president, after not.

The greatest US president. I would never name a child of mine after our president.

After the sheriff in Twin Peaks, that's right. Also, no, all right, well we love that.

After the house did viv who grew up in the Truman Shows Gate is Gates?

Yeah, named you're after Matt Gates.

Tildhoods is like totally unoven job. Now that's so funny.

It's very funny. It's very very funny, and I feel like I feel like we should end on that note. So ha to Matt Gates. Anyways, Anderson Truman to the fuck out.

Of here, welcome back to it could happen here, A podcast about it, which in this week's case is the Consumer Electronics Show is happening here. And yeah, we're here to talk about things falling apart. And again, in this case that's the tech industry because The story this CES, as it has been for the last several CES, is is that the continuing degradation of big tech as it seeks more places to get money from while providing less and less utility to the people that it needs to

Okay, thanks, okay, all right, all right, Boddy them.

And the supernumerate supernumerary. I'm sorry, I messed up the word I was using as a superlative to praise you.

I'll take at longways.

So Junior, thanks Ed, Thank you so much for joining us. Everybody, are you ready to see some of the dumbest AI generated videos?

Sure sell me with more pleasure?

Excellent, excellent.

Nothing fills me with pleasure.

So the first panel I sat down today with at ten am in the Goddamn Morning Jesus was the Hollywood Trajectory Generative AI Timeline twenty twenty five to twenty thirty.

Oh boy, I am fascinated for what they think will happen in twenty thirty.

Everything's just gonna get better Garrison. This panel featured a number of luminary thinkers, including Mary Hamilton, a managing director at a Centsure, who announced her company's three billion dollar investment in AI by dropping this gym.

I have a digital twin.

And she's constantly evolving and how she gets used and what she says, and.

You know there's you know, big educations around that.

So I think this is a really exciting space to be thinking.

That to any like that she just stole Hurley Herndon's thing.

But okay, they've probably said that to a dolta they think I had a concussion.

The shere would this person needs?

Like psychologically, Yeah, you.

Should be allowed to drive.

You need a trying kid.

Okay, let's get you, let's get you sit down, and.

We're taking the phone away from you. Now. I think this is very silly because again I think, yeah, it's just a fundamental mismatch and what people might want from an AI agent, and like the way in w which they get talked about.

But also they use digital twin, which is cement to prise software.

Shit. Yeah, oh my god, yeah it's it's it's I'm excited to go see some digital twin technology that I'm sure we'll make a cheap egg code switching.

This was this is the first thing I reported on at CEES was there was the digital twin. Like back in like twenty twenty two, twenty one, there was like one single company and all of c Yes, I was promising like a digital twin, and now it's like every other company.

Yees. It means so many different things.

It means literally a digital representation of anything.

It doesn't even mean an AI agent.

The fact that they're using it in the wrong place is very annoying to me.

Yeah. I keep seeing like they can now make an an AI chatbot trained off of your social media presence. That's eighty five percent accurate.

Oh, as all twins are.

And I want to say I know they can't. But then you talk to the average person at CEES or the average panelist on this particular panel, I'm like, yes, I do believe in fact, everyone on that panel you could accurately, you could accurately get eighty five percent of their personality with the I bought for a bit, you know, maybe a lot higher improvement. Yeah. Yeah, So I will say, like that was silly. That's not the silliest thing I saw.

Guess yeah, I've seen pictures. I think I've watched one.

Okay, well let's let's let watch a few times. We're gonna play. There's three different versions of this.

So why we're just gonna I mean, that's that's what it's about.

Out Oh my God, if there's three different versions that that's just they saved the from.

Everyone is the same length of shark.

Can you believe this song's AI generated? I can't believe the cou Could they teach a computer to write the lyrics? Holidays are going?

I just can't believe we finally have the technology to have three trucks driving somewhere.

And there wagging its tail with a dead eye too horrible girls move trucks with Coca cola and them driving down not a street. Raccoons.

What the why is there a satellite?

Are they going to drop the iron cannon on the polar bears?

It's all clearly a it's all glowing like the city shots of like snow colored villages with that, as we're going to see in later videos. A. I loves putting smoke and random fires where there should not be smoking.

Random fire. Chris, that's such a bad omen for four more years of a Trump presidency. It's a bleak that we have like even uglier Thomas Kincaid esque artwork.

That's all every frame looks like animated.

It's like they just generated a Thomas Kincaid like frame and then like badly animated and.

The way that they move is very weird, like it looks kind of right but kind of right, looks very strong.

It does that all of the scenes because it's like showing you a bunch of you see like a polar bear, obviously it's a Coca Cola Christmas ad. You see like a fucking reindeer, you see squirrels, you see a dog. But it always is like this very ai shot where it just pans across the animal and it's like glowing and kind of glossy and steering much. But they're not going anywhere with the movement.

It's just like they doing something and that's it.

Yeah.

You think in ten years they're still gonna have these commercials. Yeah no, because where's the snoke. It's just a polo bez walking around like.

System one, which tests emotional responses to ads, claims that the initial response to their Christmas ad was overwhelmingly positive.

I don't think they're lying about that. I think if you walked up to someone like randomly on the street and showed them this, I think they'd be like, oh, yeah, it looks fine.

Yeah.

No one's watching a Coca Cola RDE and being like, yeah, wow, I've never had one of these before.

Yeah, it's never a new experience. Not yet.

We need an ad man.

Need an ad man for the coke holdouts, we.

Need an AI Don Draper.

Yeah, well, do not give them ideas.

What if a.

Company lost five billion dollars.

It's just an air that doesn't work.

Instead of going to the movies like Don Draper does throughout all.

Of mad Man, it just doesn't work and respond to any of your queries.

Just Don Draper spending hours watching that looping Christmas video.

Staring at nothingness.

Yeah. So there was like an immediate, pretty immediate backlash to this, like all of the responses. If you go to any of like where these things live on YouTube, it's just people shitting on them, which he did acknowledge Jason by saying the video was very debated.

Yes, classic thing with commercials.

We love debating commercials.

Many things are very debated these days.

A lot of people are saying.

And then he showed us next an AI generated video, the Heist, which was entirely made by a tech script that itself was mostly written by chat GPT. And here's how Jason describes the workflow for what you're about to see. It took thousands of generations to get the final film, but I'm absolutely blown away by the quality, the consistency, and adherence to the original prompt when I described gritty New York City in the eighties, it delivered in spades consistently.

It is, so I thought that I had another one. By the way, I'm sure what you're about to show me looks like a dog's.

As it looks like, yeah, New York, exactly like New York at Juliani right before he came in clean it up.

So this is like the competitor to Sora. I guess that's the other big like video generation brand new.

I don't buy for a fucking and I'm not impressed. But we'll see what you guys think. Okay, I don't want to poison your I wouldn't.

Oh god, okay, there is fire in.

This The last time you're gonna see the sack full of money. It does not shine again.

It's a lot of a lot of fire, random fire and go.

Backwards when they're driving forwards.

Wheel again another straight fire.

I would love to do freeze frames on this.

Actually it's in Gosthel. Why is there so many fires?

Just all right, let's take a shot every time?

Oh my god, and also take a shut every time. He is wearing different clothing and has a clearly different face. The car has changed. Column he's praising the consistency and it is a he is dressed completely differently every scene.

His jacket has has has changed since the last one.

Yeah, yeah, and again the cop car the cars. When it shows the cars dragging across the screen, they're kind of doing the same thing usually that the animals doing the coke.

And minimal motion at the best.

Yeah. I also love this. Can you believe this music?

I also want to just say when he swoved hit that thing, he was driving like half a mile on it.

Yeah, that's how I run.

Yeah, look an obviously different man.

That's by the way he runs was like he had his arms.

Looks cops are three kes actually, look how they run.

The running is very funny.

Yeah, the bond his seat Yeah different, okay.

What is going on with his feet and that, different levels of facial hair, different different jackets, he's wearing different colors, jackets.

Vaguely definiteness and in this SA just move.

What the fuck is going on? Oh my god, I got me? Yeah, directed by Jason's Odd in big flaming words because again the AI only knows how to put random fires on.

Wow, I'm so glad that we have the technology that there a thing where a guy gets chased by the place.

Yeah, we couldn't. This would have been impossible before.

As he runs at anywhere from one to one hundred miles an hour.

I assume they just trained they like this was specifically like pulling on like Scorsese movies a lot.

I just want to know about these thousands of generations of script because.

That is interesting.

I am very curious because I just don't believe that for did he just uh read there?

Yeah no, that's the opening crawl to just like some uh generated Star Wars.

It seems like shot by shot, right, each each shot is going to require a lot of.

Like iteration the script.

It's just yeah, I mean again, like it unpacking. What he actually is saying is unclear.

Because I went to the YouTube video for this and the first five or four comments are looks like we found the new king of video. Jesus Christ, give it a rest close change in every shot. Four to six year old boys are gonna love it and still acts character and vehicle consistency. But we're getting close.

Which is which is the exact?

By twenty thirty, you'll make a man wear the same clothes for an entire video. Oh this is This has happened before with Sora.

When they put Sora out there, like check out airhead on your man God, and the balloon changes every single shot.

It's a different size and color each time.

There are just people running in the background sometimes and then they made a new one. You're like, oh, this is gonna be good. It was worse and less consistent, and this is what they think of us. They're like, these pigs will slop up anything.

You.

I can't expect technology to do something as complicated as dress a man in clothing and have him stay in that same clothing over multiple scenes. Hollywood never figured it so cool.

That this costs like so much money as well just burning there's some fucking gpu melting and a day just enter in Arizona.

The strain learning North Carolina.

It is also there's gonna be like thirty forty companies trying to recreate the same misshapen wheel you know, for the next five days.

Also, the little pigs that watch Star Wars, including myself, they'll notice every miner inconsistency. Do you think that they're going to tolerate Luke Skywalker's and Watteau and all their favorite.

Characters they're going to drive? Do you think that they're going to be happy office with a cyber truck?

That's a cyber truck situation. You I think the issues are twofold, which is like number one. In order to make this shiit sell to the people who watch movies, you have to dramatically reduce the average intelligence of people watching movies. You have to give everyone brain damage, which except they are.

Working in Giant Yeah.

And the other thing is the models have to get much better. And Jason made a point that like, look, every time people would like talk about the criticism and be like, look, this is the worst it's gonna look guys, And I was just looking into it. GPT four took fifty times as many resources in like fifty times as much energy to train as GPT three did. So this is these are the kind of like exponential increases that

Yeah, I mean you could. You could even like animate it.

M I mean, look, you give me a PS four and somebody's grandmother and I will make them think that they're watching that.

No, seriously, seriously that six.

But also this, I just want to read out some of the fucking people that use this model. We started working with creatives like Donald Glover, who I said was washed ten years ago.

I'm fucking sick of people.

My Love was a was a good album.

America is an objectively bad song.

It's a bad song with a great video.

Yeaheah, I thought he's like kind of bar and be stuff is.

Very interesting anyway, moving and of course the week in it so weekend and someone called great. I'll work with creators on VO one and form the development of VO two, and we look forward to working with trusted testers and creators to get feedback on this new model.

How long are you going to get fucking feedback? It stinks.

We've got some feedback from Yeah, I got a few thoughts.

Hopefully those people are are just getting paid to tell them words and be like yeah, sure, I'll take your money.

Yeah, if they can be twenty million dollars, I'm flipping the hole like just no, I will turn on a dime. Speaking of turning on a dime for money, here's.

Ads Ah, we're back.

So the next video that our friend I now feel he's like a brother to me, Jason puts on was of an AI generated fictional elderly rock star talking about death to do this plastic and incapable of dynamic expression as he guzzles randomly from bottles of liquor that flash in and out of existence. Sometimes he lies on his back in empty streets while talking about all the all of the cgi featureless women that he has loved in

Can you chest like the world's just you, God damn big and you're just to go passing through them?

What's he doing?

He carried my heart concerts, Granddad, calm down, It scattered. I love these slash cuts, the fast cuts, these fosse cuts, because the next frame was unusable.

Yes, actually yes.

Like that he drank and the bottle changed in his hand. You could see it starting to happen? What is just anonymous with destroyed It? Just a beautiful music. Listen to that lived It to the bow?

Could you believe.

By firing a Roman candles time?

I like so?

The old man does look very different each time, very different old man.

That's a different that's a different guy.

Yeah, that's the Emperor from the first Cladiators, trotting get running.

Away from this the way this model generates running diesel.

There he is drinking on the fire, old rock star, drinking in front of a flaming house, the a I loves burning building.

What is this voice? I would love to track his tattoos from three.

We'll say he's about to eat the micro different, I've done it, yum.

Now he's sleeping and a broken Mustang, the classic Ferrari Mustang Mustang. It's in like a pool in front of a mansion, but he clearly isn't questioned to it. The car is hovering slightly over the pool like I love this, I love this, I love him, And he tells us. He tells us during this as if we're supposed to be impressed that Chatchypt wrote seventy five and that's fucking hell.

I can't believe that.

Frankly, as a bartender, I regret walking into the room to see if people want drinks.

This is a bartender.

I apologize. I apologize that you had to hit a drink.

I also would like, actually, can I have a drink too?

We are in the line.

Ces Sweet and we're all drinking because I just want to say, I'm fucking disassociating after that, I'm so fucking saying every a year of doing this nonsense, and I look at these chit eaters and they show us that, and they like slope down the slop.

Oh my god, it's it's it's hitting the easiest.

Things to find an old man that drinks.

For an idea of like how real this company is. Obviously they were one of the companies. They were not the only people who made that Coca Cola add They were one of like three or four companies.

It takes four companies to take companies to make that.

Can't believe it. They have six hundred and twenty two followers on Twitter, Hell yes or not? Twitter, on YouTube, on YouTube, on YouTube, on YouTube, I don't know than I post this karaoke song and this this fade out is there or Sorry. The Heist is their most successful video, with fifty six thousand views. Fade Out, which we just watched, has less than five thousand views. They're not ready, so they're not they're not white.

It's only going to get better.

Yeah, it's only going to get get only going to get better.

Obviously, things will only get.

Read floor for a small price of one billion dollars.

It's just like one hundred thousand dollars to compute.

Yeah, imagine how good it would be much a billion will only get worth more. I mean, I get now, Garrison, I do think you should invest all of your salary.

I just did a sixteenth minute about talking this.

I think I would rather hook To has a more obvious use case than this ship. Hey, do you want to spend way more money to get something way worse? I actually can't get over the seventy five percent check GPTO.

That should be more twenty.

No, it should be Theoretically it should be it should be one.

Hundred, should be hundred percent, which means that a quarter a quarture of it was just fucking unusable.

No.

Absolutely, they're generating like individual shots that they're like stitching together and like who knows how how long it takes to like get like the prompt right for that shot to work.

However long it takes, it was too long because it looks like, shit, we're gonna watch a video I haven't seen yet, or at least of course, because it's five minutes, so we're not watching all this.

Oh my god.

It's two hundred and fifty two views and came out a week ago. It's called miniminade.

What Yeah, it's a word.

Now it's like when you find your cat's momented on the floor again.

So first we see a diner called Minimonade that appears to be both on the fire.

Light runner yeah, light runner, oh god.

And an old lady Rice is up out of a pile of ashes. That's how mouths work.

Where am I.

Great? AI voice?

What is this pantasticgoria or all voice acting? It's me Harris Forward. The funk is going on with the tea.

What I think this is death? This old lady is dead. That's how I.

Now.

She's tripping on tomatoes. The decaying Sandy diner that exploded has turned into a lively fifties diner off off.

Dennis phil Villa News.

This a segregated diner.

I only see why going back to the good old days.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

There's a little Indian book he is. He is the help though. Yeah mm hmmm, oh that's not. The little kid just fell down, and the way it shows falling is that he just sort of deflays.

And he's up again. The action is staring at.

Well, that's terrible. We don't need to watch anymore of that. No one, no one, no one want to watch watch this and have a positive reaction.

They should, They should keep you in a holding cell.

Yeah, I'm deeply unhappy at the time we already spent watching.

Yeah, like, we don't know what you're gonna do next.

We're building a facility for you.

Yeah. The phrase reality distortion field gets used a lot when we talk about texts, but I really tasted it in that room because all anyone on stage could talk about is how good it looks. And every one of these videos people are like clapping, They're like, wow, this is amazing.

Why do you think they think it looks good?

It looks better than an Xbox.

Yeah, And the idea is you talk to thing in and now a thing came out, and that's magical.

So why virtue of not having humans work on it?

It's so it's better than you'd have Yeah, Okay. There was a moment after this where Jason like joked about how like I don't like obviously I don't want to replace actors yet yeah yeah, and another Panels was like, I think we're gonna have to make some you have to see how some decisions go as to fair use, because obviously this is cribbing from a bunch of fuck Scorsese, like it kind of looked like nine. Yeah, and Thomas can get and.

Later On in twenty foury nine, and Denny Villanou in general, like all of his films have been like a massive source for for these emotion and still generations, so much so that like I think, like later On twenty forty nine is like one of the easiest films to like like replicate film stills almost exactly for based on like how like how like load bearing that film has been for a whole bunch of these models that could be due to a number of factors.

Now I know what you're wondering, How soon until we can get a full ninety minute movie that looks like this?

Oh?

I mean I'm guessing days away.

No, no, Jason said, probably not at least for a decade or so.

Really, okay, years, that's interesting.

I don't want to wait that long. What a worthwhile endeffort.

Though, because he could have said shorter. That actually is interesting.

He could have said anything those chums believed.

I think it is like he did have to spend probably hundreds of hours of his precious one human life stitching those those turds together, and he's like, it's nowhere near ready. There's no way it could make it nice.

It's giving him.

Because I've only really seen one interesting genitive video thing. But it wasn't a generative video thing. It was they filmed, uh, Brian, you know, filmed a documentary and they created, you know, some backhand software so that they would be able to do cuts of existing footage and try to focus on the parts of the documentary. But I never ever see anything interested in like constructing narratives or it's like, you

And that's the thing. If I if i'd sat down there because I'm sitting I said this. I was sitting next to a guy from usc who was one of the only people in the room who was like similarly critical to me of what we were seeing on stage.

They also like make cameras and.

They make a lot of stuff. I was just shitting on Nokia. She's like, can we use neuroscience to see how people are reacting to AIA generated videos? And then adjust the ending to be like, you know, let's make this resonation of a night. That way, we're helping the creative. And I was like, are you out of your fucking mind?

We attached electrodes to found people skulls.

I would I would have supported electrodes in their skulls. Yes, Jesus Christ, we should do the monkey neuralink thing to perhaps a pair of calipers.

Skulls.

I am fascinated the skull shapes of that fucking.

To say that is there's so many things that you've said that just they wouldn't survive at that position.

Speaking of things that wouldn't survive a deposition the sponsors to this podcast. Okay, so that first panel was a real moment for me. I went through a couple of more, one of which was on like advertising and AI and was mostly mostly pretty boring. The third panel I went through though, was called AI Cinematic Spatial and XR and I just want to actually play you guys, you'll have to cluster around.

I would actually believe that was generated with chat GPT GPT two point zero.

So let's start with this one. AI will be more impactful than.

The Internet, maybe it's a trick question because it is then that was that was.

The Internet, although it can wrong about the Internet.

So I'm like, oh, yeah, there you go.

All right, what's what when you impact.

AI?

AI is going to resolve in astronomical job losses?

True, bolsh, there will be an evolution of job laws.

Next redistribution of.

M That was the scene I wanted you to hear with. They're like, we don't want to say it out loud, and then everyone chuckles.

These people are too fucking smug.

Yeah, these people sound too confident and too chumming and too happy to say things like this.

That's not good. I don't like these people laughing about people losing jobs.

No, I shouldn't have jobs.

That's that's a good place to start. Yeah, I don't like that either. And the people you're hearing from. Let me let me tell you who's in this fucking panel who was just laughing about like, well, there will be a uh an evolution law. Yeah. So the motherfuckers who are all that panel laughing about people losing their jobs. Ted Shillowitz literally his name is Shilowitz, futurist at Cinemersion, Inc.

That's like a j.

Rebecca Barkin, co founder in CEO laman o One, Aaron Luber, Director Partnerships at Google, IPG Media Lab, Layla Emirsadegi, Principal program manager at Engineering Microsoft, and Katie Henson, s VP post Production at Fear Studios. So those are the people who are.

Are sad, all laughing and like it's like genera of AI is like good at like one thing creatively, it's good at like streamlining VFX, like workflow to the workflow of of how to do like it is it is like there's aspect. Famously, the only useful thing it's been used for is making people's eyes blue in Dune Part two.

It's not one hundred billion dollars.

And like it is applicable for like changing objects into other objects on screen. It can produce really like kind of odd like uncanny effects that could be utilized by a team of human artists. Really well. What it can't do is generate a short film that is in any way compelling piece well that is anyway compelling as a piece of art. Okay, And the fact that they're like laughing at how much how much have you lost?

Enough jobs they have not.

Or that had structures full to the beauty of the flame.

Right, although the AI keeps keeps foreboding coming for them and wants somethings. I'm going to end on a happy note because the last panel I went to was actually really cool. It was AI in the Crisis of Creative Rights, Deep Fakes, Ethics and the Law, and it featured the first intelligent person that I've seen at CES this year, Moya McTeer, who is a folklorist and senior advisor at

The thing is, any of these things would be fucking fight OPA, because if what you have to remove something from a model, how the fuck do we do that?

Yeah, we don't know how.

You have to throw away the entire model, you.

Have to retrain, like there's no way around it.

Yeah, And there was a really good point where kind of at the end of this part of what I appreciate is again there was no bullshit. Like Moya at one point was like, I think it is absolutely it being generative. AI is absolutely a net negative for the artistic community. The point is, the point is not to get something out as quick as possible to like make art right.

And this has to be like one of maybe five people who are doing panels at CES who's like willing to say that.

Yes, and Duncan got I was like, look, you can't stop the technology from being invented, So the best path forward is to like try and channel this into a direction that like is at least better for artists, Like there were there was very little for most of the people on the panel, very little bullshit. There was some bullshit from one person on the panel, Jenny Katzman, Senior director of Government Affairs from Microsoft. Oh I bet that

Everyone everyone loved and a great creative.

This is the fucking problem with all of this.

On top of house ship it is and how expensive it is, which kind of AI are we talking about?

That dip shit.

That's not generative AI, that's not what that fucking waste.

And it also steals us from being able to cast a young River Phoenix's blat lovely thing.

It's getting cast in more stuff. Garrett, I'm very unfair.

Well, luckily, with the power of AI.

Look, I can put into every newspaper sequentially starting in eighteen thirty four, So I've not gotten to the end of Phoenix. It would be a really long career.

It would be really cool.

Sleeping guy.

I think he's got the bold ideas. This is gonna work out really well for Germany.

It won't be really cool that instead of just doing Young Harrison for they just do a River Phoenix deep fake for you him. Look it's canonical.

Yeah great.

Oh, I love the movies in the future of them too. This is so good. This is so bad.

James mangled, You're a hacking So.

I gotta say it was very funny because she also suggests Jenny, there's we can use animals without causing harm thanks to AI, a thing that no one had figured out how to do before. Nobody had ever figured out how just like not hurt animals in movies that didn't exist before a I thank.

God, thankfully AI will never do any harmed animals or the environment.

Nobody asked the lobbyist for Microsoft, what else the company is doing with AI? Right, with police deployments or with fossil fuel companies?

Yeah?

Is that bad for animals?

No?

Actually, it's really good. They they needed it. They yearn for the month.

They love datasets. Great for their habitats. She said, there's issues with employment, but there's lots of issues that fall around that, and I do think you need a balance. And at the end of it, the guy running the panel just says, Okay.

It sounds like you guys are saying a bunch of woke ship.

On this panel. All right, all right, Microsoft, Just once, I'd like on the panel someone to go and say, what the fuck do you mean? Closest to that that you were going to get.

I think we do need a balance of some people being fired like these people, and other people keeping their jobs like everyone else.

Like Moya give somebody has to lose and somebody has.

To work exactly that's their entire Somebody has the guns, somebody doesn't.

Somebody knows the way the maze works and something.

He's gonna what, we shouldn't have guns.

We shouldn't have a man and one of them knows the maze and have a gun.

We should have a gun, mace, you're talking about the gun. Now, Look, we all like keeping a couple of people in a maze beneath our house. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with this.

This is just the dormant next this we just we keep doing it.

It's a nice maize under my house they have.

It's nice to run some of them.

The minotag gets them only sometimes I'm the minotta.

Anyway, the gun maze isn't real.

But also most of their arguments kind of mostly just come down to, well, you can't make an omelet without breaking, like you have to make people.

You have to break the human drive to create art. Obviously, to make an not taste good an omelet esque food, it's a piss omelet, Like there's piss in the omelet, and we had to We had to burn down the susteined chapel to make the piss omelet. Computer made it, though, yeah, and clap for the computer. We did firebomb the louver. But look look at look at this rock star.

Oh god.

All right, well that's the episode. That's all I got, folks. That was my first day at CES twenty twenty five. Huzzah. Yeah, this is just my first day.

Better offlines here all week.

I'm gonna hear about stuff like this all week, and I think I'm gonna be fully jokeified.

I'm gonna wake up in the clown makeup on Friday.

I'm gonna find the funnest thing to bring back for you.

I'm gonna find an artist to put me in full joke.

Now, I'm gonna try to steal that AI enhanced grill. Yeah, grill that tests you can I just like move this around. I just want to test that would roll se ail, open the door, open the door.

As someone who's done a lot of like grilling, done a lot of spoken barbecue, I don't know what a I would do.

Is it gonna talk to me in the sixth.

Wait till you are you? Are you trying to tell us here at Zra, yes, that you have grilled meat without a robot texting you about it? Because I just don't believe.

I don't know how I did it, but I did it.

You're never always way took the robots. It was impossible.

Oh god, we're at the death of innovation.

Yeah, at the end of a lot of things maybe and the end of the episode. Yeah, and the end of the episode. Thank god. You know, everyone else be the cyber truck in the oh, welcome back to It could happen here? A podcast about it happening here, which is really true in a lot of ways. Tonight, Harrison Davis and I are seated at the Glorious Majestical hotel

Gear?

It's an average day in America, average.

Day in America. Temperature's not coming down anytime soon. No, no, well, just take a moment to breathe with that. So you want to start us off with what you did this morning? I was panel guy yesterday. There was a man of action walking around and mostly trying all the free massage chairs. What did you see this morning?

I saw so many AI panels, half of which I left halfway through because I knew they.

Weren't gonna be useful for me, just dogshit.

The other half I took notes on and just got sad. But no, today was full panel starting bright and early in the morning, where I walked into a panel where I heard augmentation and not replacement about twenty times in the span of like twenty minutes.

Yeah, I keep hearing for of that too. In the Hollywood panels, they would be like, yeah, we want to develop a machine that can read the brains of our viewers and alter the endings of movies, you know, but we see this as a way of augmenting the artists work.

Yes. And the biggest thing that I noticed across multiple panels today is an almost like anxiety among these tech executives about consumers rejecting the AI slopification of everything, and they're trying to find ways to like actually force people to start like using these products or having them like like it. Yeah, and I haven't really since that anxiety before. It's all been very, very positively.

And I think it's a mix of Number One, the money still isn't there where they need it to be. It has not started like blooming to the extent that they were expecting it by now. And the other part is people are still not happy with this stuff. I'm glad you felt that too, because that almost was like especially after the election, Like, I don't trust my feelings on this that they're really scared, but I really do think there's a piece of that coming through it.

No of a phrase one of the panelists used this morning was the AI ick, Like how do we how do we beat the AI ick? And if you're ever saying yourself, how do I stop having people feel an ick around me? Maybe you should really look inwards. Yeah, maybe the problems you not them.

You know, who doesn't need to worry about quote unquote ick for their product market is people who make things that people like.

So but I heard a lot about, you know, and trying to get people to use these products is like making sure artists don't feel like they're being replaced instead having their like art production process be augmented with AI and how how that can make art easier to make while still keeping the human at the center of AI tools. And this is just what they talked about for like a while, while reiterating that lots of the developments they need to see on AI they have it on the

How much worse can you make the world before people stand up and stop you with their fists or guns.

And you mentioned something about like trying to like tailor like movie endings for specific people, and I definitely heard

People. Have you friends? Have you tried people?

How can you engage with like art and culture without friends? How can you like learn more about like what your friends are into what they like? How can you discover new music just like without that instead replacing that beautifully human process.

Every year at cees, there are points in time where I get that, like, oh yeah, twenty twenty really fucked us up a lot, Like twenty twenty really did some lasting damage. Like I know it was that was happening with the younger generation before the iPad kid generation, but like that that really did a number on some folks.

Someone from Meta right of Facebook specifically they're like metaverse division, which they're still trying to push.

For by the way, Oh yeah, now, I mean they're still calling it meta, which honestly there's a degree which I almost respect it because we are not binding on no one is.

But she talked about how they can like blend the metaverse and AI to make customized personal experiences. Say that you're watching an immersive live concert in mixed reality, something that both me and Aubert do all at the time, and.

I mixed red hairy style mixed reality concerts. We're seeing the one hundred gets you.

Know, honestly, a one hundred GEX mixed reality concert could go crazy.

Here, We'll finally I'll finally get you pilled on real big fish.

But Basically, as you're in this like metaverse concert, they can have an AI that will sense your own excitement and personalize the ending of the experience based on your favorite songs or artists. So as they're getting excited from like AI, Taylor Swift can like finish the song like for you based on like your own like musical tastes, based on what the AI knows about you. And it's about creating these customized experiences.

It's such a you can clearly tell that none of these people have souls, right, It's such a mismatch of what people get from music because they think that like, oh, this is just like a if I see that like this specific beat line is I can just sort of like plug this in and like I don't know, Like what makes people react to musicians and artists is that they like make things that make them feel something like That's why people get like really into artists, is they

No.

Another panel I went to later in the day was about, like how do you market to gen z? Very funny panel. Yeah, and and they're talking about how like authenticity is so important, like you need to partner with influencers that have like have like an authentic brand, and it's funny having that ductionapost with like these like these like AI slot panels were like you need like an AI Taylor Swift to come like boost the excitement for all these kids who

I had it. So the video I didn't play you guys from my terrible fucking AI generated videos was this. It was like a girl coming to college, we need a picture of her dad, and it was like a narration of her life with her father who like is dead that she misses and all that she learned from Dada, and it like it's a mix of like all these different Like there's a chunk where it looks like a Disney animated picture, there's a chunk where it looks like anime.

No, they do not have a journey. But even they themselves admit that they still don't have the content. The content it's elf still isn't even there. And that's something like they even acknowledge. And this is like a hurdle to this is this is a hurdle to get over. What they do have is the data. And like this is like something that Adobe has done, because if you use Adobe products now some of the most used creative products.

One of these accounts was literally like I'm a mother of two, queer black woman. You know, yeah, I got a lot to say about the world.

Someone call up the situationists please, And some like people started talking to her like we're any black people at all involved in like making this chat Bob.

She's like, well no, and that's a real problem. That is a real problem, Okay.

Yes, And the excuse that this person from Meta said is that the market just isn't ready yet. It's not that the actual product itself is like bad or like no one really wants. The market's not ready yet.

Well, they're so used to everything that they've done so far. They've kept getting money right, and like it slowed down and they've had to do layoffs, but like nobody's just made them stop at any point, which, honestly, you know, I made a comment about healthcare executives a while back, needing like a fucking retirement plan paid in millimeters. So I'm not going to make that same comment about tech industry rules because you know, we all know what's in

The last thing I had to add out of this panel just in terms of how much this stuff is just actually taking over more and more of the market even if people don't want it. Is that the guy from Adobe announced it in the fourth quarter of last year. They were able to boost all of the Adobe's like you know emails. If you send like an email to Adobe, right, you have a problem, like you need help. But like everything that they do on emails is now one hundred

There comes like when the company itself is like communicating with customers through email.

That's that's what it sounded like.

Yes, they're still writing emails sometimes to each other or AI for that too.

He described it as like email content, So I'm pretty sure it is like content then customer service stuff like marketing, maybe like outreach, like certain like outreach things. But yeah, now generated by AI with some human like moderation. But yeah, that is where things are moving. And that's how I started my morning.

Well better than a cup of coffee. Is that sense of creeping dread that, Like, wow, I just saw a bunch of people who will probably would rather kill the world than be stopped from shoveling AI slop into people's mouths, because this is the only future they can imagine is one in which they work for a company that feeds the planet poison and kills the human concept of creativity so that they can buy a house in San Francisco.

Do you know what I want to feed the concept of.

Yeah, we'll talk about that, but here's some ants. We're back. What was part two of this episode? That's be buddy, I'm a oh, let's talk about that helicopter.

No, yeah, I think as I was going from panel to panels stripling notes on AI has some very exciting news stories drop that we'll talk about later. What were you up to, Robert.

Well, I was. I was trawling the show floor as I off to do at some point in a cees and I came across a number of majestic products. You know, a lot of it was AI based, and we'll talk some more about that here, but I ran into something that was, thank god, had nothing to do with AI, and it's a death trap. Every every one of these.

There's like some sort yes, we find a new death.

There's a lot of connected vehicles. There were a lot of evs last year. There were a ton of different flying taxi type options. People that were really trying to.

You don't see it all this year.

Nothing this year, nothing this year, because it's a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea. The people who are rich enough to pay for flo flying vehicles don't want it to be a taxi, and the people who can't afford their own flying vehicles also can't afford anyway. So this is instead of any of that Richter Richter ri ct O R which is a Chinese company. Their ads say, I'll say, why be normal? Are saying this the future of travel will not be on the ground. And the Richter is

How high can these things go up?

Less than two hundred meters? You know why, Garrison?

Why?

Why is that? Because if you try to go up that you need a pilot's license.

You don't need a pilot's license.

I have that.

When I was interviewing them, I was like, so I assume there's gonna be some sort of pilot's license for this flying craft. And they're like, no, as long as you stand or two hundred meters you get, do you need drivers?

Like?

Are you gonna put a license plate on this? Or is there's no space for one?

Buddy?

Completely unregularly to be.

Honest, and I don't say this for any problematic reason, but like, these folks are Chinese and did not seem to have a great deal of knowledge about the US words. Sure that said, I can't imagine China's less strict about personal aircraft.

I would like to take this fucker on the I five.

Just start.

Start zooming. Yeah, see it up in the air, because you could probably do like a pretty a pretty good road trip on this right you can you can you can move about that.

So it's very small and it's completely electric. So I asked him, how much time do you get in the air with this bad boy on battery? Maybe twenty five minutes? What happens after twenty minutes. I did ask this and I was like, this is just rough out of the sky, and they were like, no, we're working on like a like an intelligent thing that will like yeah, which is also very exciting, really looking forward to seeing how they pull that off. The videos that they have show it

It can't. It can't move forward.

It only only went up in the videos I saw, so you can't actually travel absolutely not by the way. I couldn't fit in this thing like you would be cramped in this fucker.

But it's good for vertical travel.

It's great if you just need to go up to under two hundred meters, there's no more efficient ways.

If you're gonna pull over by the cops, you just.

Just go up above them. I'm in the sky. Now you get new shit to me for twenty five mass minutes. Oh god, it's like if you're just driving, you go up to one hundred kilometers, which made me think, so a second, that's like sixty the AAR for twenty minutes than I land. Then my battery is dead.

Then you can't go anywhere.

You can't go anywhere. You can get back.

The battery issue is gonna is gonna be troubling.

But it seems completely useless.

But as we've heard NonStop the past two days, this is the worst it's gonna be.

This is the worst it's gonna be. Only gonna get better. Things, only ever get better. That's that's what everyone was trying to insist upon to me. Here, what else did you see on the show floor that caught your off Garrison? So many magical, wonderful, marvelous things, most of which were just like various different AI connected smart houses. That was what Samsung was showing off. That was what LG was

It was kind of the same as same as last year. The Samsung booth was too intimidating. But I should check it out because last year we didn't do the Samsung booth because we were going to and then either either one of us threw up or spilled something.

Hey, okay, okay, yes, right?

Did I did I.

Pour my crative into a constant into a carbonated beverage that spewed a geyser a blood red foam into the sky around to.

The white Samsung guard.

Did the security guard stare at me as it happened? Did I set the drink down as it continued to spew and said, I'll go get some towels and then leave forever.

Wet towels left.

We fucking bounced, So.

We couldn't do this some booths last year. Maybe I'll try this year. But tell me about these smart houses.

Well, Garrett sam Sumi has a great idea for a smart house. First of all, you remember that game the Sims. No, well they're really betting that you do, because their current plan is design your home with the AI powered map views. Okay, okay, sure you get like you feed it like a picture, you like, you lay out your your floor, planning your house, and it gives you like a three D model, and you can take pictures of your furniture or pictures of furniture that you want, and then it really places it

Sure.

Sure, but it does look like the actual like map that they've got. I'll show you the picture that I took. I'll try to put it up somewhere like it looks like the video game the Sims. You're populating like a little three D CG house. And I was like, okay, well there's there's a use there, right. People like planning

Oh okay.

So that made me very confident.

That does make you feel safe about sharing your personal data?

Right, yeah, I'm the layout of my actual house.

Well.

And the thing is, I really don't like that at all, because this is this is something that people were asking Facebook slash meta when they were doing like their you know, like metaver stuff because their headsets are recording you know, very very extensively, like your home layout and the whole point. Well, part of the point was that some of that data could then be used to send you targeted advertisements based

Yeah, and they were that wasn't really One thing they had is for like their retail segment, they had like a live video grocery store ad showing you prices of different produce and I think like the insinuation that didn't layout is like you can change prices on the fly, you know it, which kind of made me think about that.

The people slapped the word AI onto everything there was.

Another big thing was all Samsung, because Samsung makes a ton of appliances, they make TVs, all sorts of entertainment products. All of them have this I figure what they called like Samsung tag or something that you can you can map it in your phone, so you can have a whole map of all of the devices and shit that you have in your phone and you can control them all from a single point. And right, no one, by the way, had any interest in answering my security questions there.

No, if you're getting a smart home, I don't think you really care about that.

But also none of it was like, yeah, I can control everything from my phone. You've been promising me that, literally, like in twenty eleven. It's decades they were promising me You're gonna be able to control your whole house.

Thing feels new this year. This is the thing. Is like even walking through the LGBO, which usually has some really cool new thing this year nothing new. No, nothing new. They slapped the word AI on one corner of their television set. Right, I guess lg does have like a large language model in like one corner of their booth, but like, so does everyone else, Like that's not like, yeah compelling.

There was sk which is a South South Korea company there booth again the massive like AI a big thing, but it's nothing.

It's just a big visual.

Display that looks cool, that looks like a bunch of server racks, like you're in this huge cube of servers. But everything does in different actual products. One of them was real time CCTVs that use an AI like an M type thing to summarize pictures. So I like walked through and it did pick me out as a notable person. So I've got like this people of interest thing where it's like a man holding a smartphone standing next to another man. But also I'm like, what does that really

Ah, yeah, no, it's it doesn't seem very new, it doesn't seem very innovative. Nah.

So again when I'm when I'm seeing here overwhelmingly for all to talk about, like there's no resisting it. AI's coming. It's going to dominate everything. This is the next big thing. A remarkable lack outside of what I will say, the one thing where there are continuously new products that are better every year. The smart glasses, yes, they're getting more impressives. I don't think I'll ever be a smart glasses guy. I hated glasses enough that I let them shoot me

If we have high power smart glasses. Yeah, that looks like a regular pair of glasses. I will get a pair eventually, because yeah, why not.

There was a great demo. I'm pulling over to an LAWK view. They had like one glass that was the first world smart glasses for TikTok Life. Not particularly excited about that. But they had another set of ar glasses with a twelve hour battery, where like, if it works as well as the demo, and that's a big if, but it seems to like your smart watch. So it'll tell you you can see in a heads up display

Do you know what else always seeks improvement, Robert No, The capacity for you to get personalized possibly AI powered ads. Well, that human is exciting form the consumer choices. Let's all sit down for some AI powered ads.

Wow, I can't believe they put Jay Shetty's voice the d aged Harris and Ford the latest in Handed Jones movie, My Dick's Hard. How are you Garrison? Oh?

I feel good because today, as we are recording this, it's late Tuesday night, there was a series of fascinating breaking news articles that happened as we were sitting or at least as I was sitting in on these AI panels, which made it hard to not just like completely interrupt everything and be like, yeah, hey, hey, any comment on this.

Guys, Guys, something real happened. Shut your fucking stupid mouds about this AI Hollywood bullshit.

So yeah, So a few weeks ago, if you were unaware, a Green Beret rented a test the cyber truck to feel like Batman and Halo and drove to first the wrong Las Vegas and then eventually Las Vegas, Nevada, parked outside of the Trump Hotel and Casino and then loo himself up. And this has been a big news story. It happened during the same day as a pretty horrible terrorist attack in New Orleans, which resulted in about fifteen people dead, done by a guy who was employed by Deloitte,

You know, Garrison. I made a comment the other night about how like it's pretty well documented that veterans, you know, not that they're more likely to carry out violence, but when they do, they tend to have higher body counts because they have more skills. It turns out I thought we were getting more literal bang for our buck training

He's certainly used chat gpt in the planning process of this attack.

Yeah, fair to say that.

And It's odd because both me and you spent a number of hours today actually like attending like demos from like these you know, speech to text, text to speech AI systems. We went to like two specific ones that they like, you know, demonstrated demonstrated the capabilities of their like you know, like AI assistive tech. The first one we went to spent twenty minutes talking about how they're bigest inspiration there quote unquote. North Star was the movie Her with Joaqui Fi.

They had a whole slide about how that was the gold standard for AI human communications. The movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson who hires a prostitute to have sex with them while she participates vocally. And then it turns out the AI is really kind of Polly and Joaquin Phoenix is not okay with that, and then maybe the ais all go to space. It's kind of unclear at the end. I don't think it was a great movie.

The actual chatbot they had was like fine. It was. It was. It was actually pretty good at translation, you know, translitting from Spanish to English.

It works quite well. Yeah, the demo was like solid, It was pretty accurate.

You know.

I love coming here and fucking with people. I love like being a dicky. They asked for a volunteer, and at that point we knew about the chat GPTs. I wanted to go up and ask, like live this robot to like help me make a bomb. But the guy who was pretty handsome and like an interesting like English Spanish like that you specified he was, and he didn't want to be mean to him. He seemed nice, handsome.

That was someone else.

That that was someone else at his company. And like he just seemed like he wanted to do I didn't want to be a dick to it. No, no, and like it it wasn't hurting anything.

It was fine. Like similarly, we went to this a nice jaw line, we went to this other one about this like actually a much more dubious concept in my mind, which is like this this AI assistant to help like elderly people, like people in like their eighties and nineties who don't want to be an assistant living facilities, who have been living on their own, but they're getting to the point in their life where like they need like some degree like in home care.

He specified. A lot of them are people who have either just lost a spouse or maybe their spouse is aging faster and worse than them. It is no longer really able to be the kind of companion that they were before.

Yeah, so it's like this. It's both like a conversation tool. It helps like memory recall. It's kind of in some ways has the features that like, you know, someone in their sixties would just use their smartphone for it to help keep in touch with their family. It's kind of simplified and more automated, so you know, ways to help keep in touch with like your family can prove like your memory, like talked about your own life.

And the device is weird. It's about the width of like a bedside table maybe six to eight inches deep, So think about like eighteen inches long to maybe six inches deep something like that. Half of it is like a little tablet, like a seven inch tablet with a speaker. Half of it is something about the shape and size of a head on like a neck that can pivot and nod on the neck. There's no face, so when it's talking, there's like a white light in the center of it that kind of like pulses in time with

Find pretty distasteful in general, is like replacing actual like you know, friends or human contact or like like in home care with a fucking like Alexa machine essentially, and to be clear.

I still think this product might be a bad idea that doesn't work. But the guy behind it, who is the dude that we talked to, cares a lot and is really very clearly trying to do a good thing and thought through the ethics and the efficacy of what he was doing a lot, And I I'm not convinced it will actually do anything, but I like wish him the best.

No, Like, it specifically is designed to not look like a human, so that someone's using it, you know, wouldn't like start to believe it's like human, Like, we don't.

Want to trick people. We don't want them to mistake it.

It refers to itself to like like as a robot as like, it refers to its own like you know, like motors and functionality like like pretty consistently to to like you know, make sure that the person who's talking to it gets like reminded of that. And something I talked about is, you know, there's been a lot of news stories this year about people building very unhealthy attachments and relationships to these kind of ai AI programs, like

Was not a teenager, was no character? Was that a journalist?

Last year there was there was a journalist people fellow in love with an ai chat thing. A few weeks ago there was the kid who you know was talking to this like a character.

Also, I just need to reiterate her not a great movie.

But but you know, there has been a lot of these stories of these things like going wrong or you know, encouraging or like not stopping you know, like these like intense conversations with like suicidal ideation or you know, like self harm, all these things.

We brought these up kind of thinking he would flinch away and not want to talk about it, and he very much acknowledged that, like he was aware of this, and this is something that they were attempting to build in.

This is this is like this is you know, built into it. I think this is still you know, a big problem with this entire industries. I'm sure everyone would say this is the you know obviously that we have we have guardrails for this, and then becomes a new story when those guardrails fail. Similarly, was to go back to the Tesla bomb. You know, they're supposed to be guardrails and chat GPT to make sure he doesn't tell you how to build a bomb and those guardrails can fail.

He showed us one which was like he told the robot, I love you. What was it? L e q l q was the l eq e l l i q, I love you l eq and the robot like respond with a like, oh that makes like my fans are all spinning or something like that, where he's like, I wanted the responsibility that it's reminding the person talking to it that it's a machine, that it can't think we're love them back. We don't want it to be negative, but we like we don't want to be like feeding

Change the subject either and like continue conversation.

This will prompt you out of the blue, be like, hey, how are you doing? How are you feeling today? It's been a way and specific.

You want to see pictures of your family?

You see pictures of your family. Do you want to call your son?

You know?

But do you want to play a game?

Talk to me about that movie you saw last Talk to.

Me about that. Hey, remind me how did you meet your husband? You know? Like literally, these are all the

I asked him, is like, you know, part of this product is designed to like, you know, help solve like loneliness in older adults, And like, how much of this is really just like kind of trying to like replace actual human contact with this, like you know AI contact. Will that really help, you know, lowliness? And he talked about how like like I think, like he said, like ninety percent of the people who like use this, like it results in actually more more communication with their family.

They have this in like some two thousand homes right now, they have like two thousand units.

It's like a subscription model. I think it's right now it is like ninety nine dollars a Month's gonna be boost up to like one hundred and fifty with some like extra features in the next year.

It's very much still under evolution. So one thing he pointed at is that, like, yeah, initially we had the ability to like connect people to other elderly folks using this, and so they've kind of formed their own community, had like a weekly Bingo game and asked us to build in more chats so they can message each other directly, and so some of them are like playing bingo directly now through these machines. And I'm like, well, that seems probably good.

Yeah, yeah, because like I still am like fundamentally opposed to this premise. Yes, but it's interesting to seeing someone still.

But age sad aging. Yeah right, that's not their fault.

And it's interesting to see someone like approach this from like a you know, a very like compassionate standpoint, even if I find the actual kind of nature of this thing existing to be like deeply uncomfortable.

Because yeah, I can't not find it off putting, but I I think there's a chance that it will help with the real problem. I certainly would prefer if it helped. Yeah, So I don't know. It was kind of it was a unique in this world of like as it was a unique kind of like product for me where it's like I don't know that this application of AI technology will actually do what you're hoping it will. But I got the vibe from that guy I got was nothing but good will.

Yeah.

Some of the other people we talked to today who are completely soul.

Out of yes, yes, nothing behind their eyes, dead eyes, black eyes, like a dull's eye.

Even the way this guy is talking, you could tell you you had like a very like empathetic voice, like much like.

One of the things he did is he he would tell it like, I'm in some pain, and then the robot would cycle through to the pain scale and would try to because one of the things it does is it will take information for care and it will text actively, so it's not just communicating with the old person. It will text and message their kids, you know, and whatnot, prompt their kids, Hey, your mom's lonely.

Yeah, or it'll even say if you know, someone like didn't take their meds today.

And again it's kind of sad that. But also his part of this is he was talking a lot about like empathy, and I think just because of the kind of brain you have to have to want to do this, he used it in terms of like the machines empathy, which it doesn't have, but the whole project, it was impossible not to see that he was a deeply empathetic man who was really trying to make the world better. And I can't not respect that.

Well, I think that does it for us here at Cees.

That's right, what a packed thirteen. No worry, no empathy. Tomorrow takes just a real dead eyed monster. I am a true villain you're gonna hear from in the next episode.

I am a stumbbag. I am the best that I'm gonna be. Because I'm starting this week, I can still feel the Cees magic. Yeah, by Friday, I am going to be a different person. I am going to rip some poor pr person two shreds, I swear, but yeah, tune tomorrow to hear are our takes from the Cees kind of side show called show Stoppers to here also some exclusive, brand new AI generated SKA music, So we'll give you that hint for tomorrow's episode. See you see you there.

M h We'll see you all there. I love you all. Good help, oh man, welcome to it can happen here? A podcast that's happening here? If here is your ears. If you're deaf and reading this, then it's happening to your eyes either way, it's happening.

Here here also being Las Vegas.

Well, yes, also Las Vegas. That's Nevada, not the other one. Nevada A yeah, uh huh. Podcast number three, How the time does fly?

Sure does.

By the time you listen to this, Garrison and I will have just had the best meal that we're going to have.

Oh my god. Yeah, it's tomorrow for.

Us still, but we're still we're very excited about Moramoto, which is a fantastic Every year we have a very special dinner just them and me and a couple of friends who will remain anonymous because people get weird on the internet.

Sometimes it is literally the highlight of my year. Sometimes it does keep me going. Actually really gives me a lot of power. Some of the best tacos I've ever had in my life. So good. Uh huh.

Anyway, ah, we're just thinking about delicious food. Let's talk about the dead eyed ghoul we met. Oh wait, no, we yet. We met a dead eyed that I'm gonna spoil now. Real monster, like real, real, real evil vibes, Like if this guy as soon as I met him, shook his hand like oh if you get if this guy gets power, you're going to be responsible for a lot of death and suffering.

I mean speaking of kind of think he will.

He's just not that talented. He wishes, but you never know where these guys are gonna end up.

Speaking of sad evil Uh, Twitter X the everything appy, that's what people are calling it. They gave a keynote which was very sad.

The the CEO Linda Linda really yakarino about Twitter for a while oh so bad.

So they started by talking about how Facebook meta has has copied Twitter's like fact checking policy of actually not having real fact checks. Yes, now maybe has actually kind of failed as an industry, but for you know, our problems perhaps with fact checking very different from these people's problems.

Now you can comment that women are a piece of property, well, I.

Mean I think specifically this is this is like trans like no, no, no stuff too.

One of the things that is specific exemption now is that you can now refer to women as if they are property on Facebook.

This is the future of communication.

Right, Yeah, thank god, Linda is really blazing a trail for women everywhere.

Linda was very excited about that. And they yakarino about that for like a good ten minutes about how you know this is this is where we're really entering a new era of free speech and social media. And then she got asked a question about how much x Twitter, the everything app, will we'll take a part in Elon Musk's plans for the Department of Government Efficiency DOGE, and and this got the the first applause of the panel. It applause only happens two times during the DOGE section.

People really yeah, I had to had to be intentional here. This is not like they were just overdue for class.

No, no, no. They talked about Vivak talked about, you know, elon turning to Twitter, X the everything app for like suggestions on which government agencies to get rid of.

I hope we get rid of the ATF so so that that was machine guns mandatory? Why not at this point, right, it can only help, It can only help. Look, if we learned anything from a thing I'm not going to specify that happened late last year. More suppressors is always is handy.

The second thing that got applause was what they talked about next, was about you know, everyone's everyone's turning to to x, Twitter everything everything else for information now and and and Twitter x everything app played a crucial part in bringing to light the Muslim rape gang story in the UK and how that was so important for saving children and we have to we have to post more, not less, and like this was the other thing that got massive applause was talking about the rape gangs.

People love rape gangs, people love rape gangs. That that was a pretty good Star Trek episode. That was Doctor R's Planet with the rape gangs, one.

Of one of the more black pilling things.

It wasn't a very good Star Trek episode.

It's also not a good track episode. I was referring to the panel, not the Trek episode. But that's the other thing that got massive applause is it's like save the children type rhetoric and you know, saying, you know, like as a mother, it's it's so important that the more people post about this problem. That was the two big applause moments. But I think in general, this this whole panel was trying to like, you know, demonstrate how symbiotic a new Trump presidency and Elon Musk's Twitter.

This is issue a direct info line, this is a tap from the Trump presidency.

Tou this is how you talk to the new government. Like, this is how you talk to all of these new people, all these new cabinet members. They're all on Twitter. They're all talking on Twitter. This is this is how you stay connected to the new government.

It's interesting. One thing I'm curious about so that this is the thing that happened the last set of Nazis that gained power in a country in a big way, the German ones. There was this common attitude of like if only Hitler knew. Because Nazi policies didn't help the people that were supposed to help, They hurt a lot of people like they were just bad at everything, like

Ye, I mean yeah, I'm not sure if they care anymore. I mean, something else Linda talked about is how you know, Twitter's the only place for independent news to spread and as both of us have, you know, worked in the independent journalism, minds nothing nothing spreads on Twitter anymore.

Now if it's news, it doesn't. The only thing that spreads is yeah, like the shit that makes people very angry but keeps them on the site, like articles, videos, if it takes you off site, it doesn't mean.

Yeah, the things that go viral and get spread is like encouraging racial bias, yes, pogrooms essentially.

Yeah, which is what happened last year in the UK, and they're sure trying to do it again.

I mean, I think some of someone's some of what she's referencing is, you know, there's a lot of like throttling attentionally of you know people on maybe our proclivities, and there is a degree of boosting for more you know, centrist or right wing journalists. And maybe that's that's some of some of what they could be kind of more more refer to there, But you know it was it was a short keynote, only thirty minutes. Just the two things that got applause are doge.

Well Linda doesn't know that many words, so they really need to keep it under thirty minutes.

Jen and literally Muslim rape gangs is you know this type of like like very very gross racial fear mongering, and those are things that like lit up the room.

You know, we all want there to be an after where there's even the minimal degree of accountability that happened after the Nazis. But like what I try to in my darker moments think is like, well that's another person who like really made the argument of like what needs to happen when this this ends, because it's just I want to hurt people. My business is enabling a harm. I want to get mobs in the street beating migrants like that's Linda's business. That's the business she has willfully

Actually, I think it might be time for an ad break speaking of damaging communities of people.

That's right, there's a chance.

Yeah, ads, Oh well we're back.

Boy. I'm so glad that those ads told me that Fragaccio Blow is touring with Bono. I never thought they'd do it, but boy howdy, and they're singing each other's song, so you know, that's really exciting. It's like when Barbara Diden. I don't know who Barber Selene is, but that's, oh my god, that's cool. Robert Luckily, I do know what SKA is.

I consider myself a day of culture and for for tonight, me and Robert attended this kind of like side event at CEES called Showstoppers, And as you walk around the CEES floor, there's a lot of frankly garbage. There's a lot of just like mostly mostly garbage stuff.

That you or stuff that like you're just not interested in because you're literally buying like screens from a manufacturer in China. Like it's like that's just not the business you're into because some of this stuff has be meant for companies.

So much floor space, Like there's like, I we walked to what twenty town.

That I spent the first seven years of my life in is smaller than one of the room CEU.

It's across like three hotels and a massive convention center.

Ninety thousand people come into town for this thing.

It could be hard to like see everything you want to. Now, what's cool about Showstoppers, this is the side event at the Bellaggio, is that basically it's a room full of kind of all all the coolest stuff, a whole bunch of stuff that has won CEES innovation awards, all packed into one room with food and alcohol. So oh boy, did I order free food and free alcohol, so many drinks that I then just left on tables. And it always pretty good food, pretty good food.

Yeah.

So we walked around show stoppers and there was a number of pretty pretty cool stuff that we saw. Yeah, but I think I think it's maybe time to talk about the saddest, the saddest man.

The villain, the villain of the episode and of our this year's ces. I have trouble. Can you bring up their name? Because I'm gonna want to get this right.

Oh, so we could be dangerous.

We had neither of us had eaten and I had had like a hot dog eight hours ago and walked literally nineteen thousand steps and also done forty minutes of push ups in between. So I was starving. So we we like shovel food into our faces and we turn the first booth we see is called open Droid.

Open Droid or open Droids Droids droids.

Yes, I did. There is an s Open Droids and it's like kind of Star Wars. He font it is and I did ask them if you know they had any issues with Lucasfilm. Apparently not yet sue them. Lucasfilm, by the way, sue these kids.

I know there's people who work for Lucasfilm who listen to this, crush.

Them, burn them like Los Angeles is burning down as we see.

They had a giant sign that said R two D three.

Yeah, that's the name of the robot that they're selling. And the robot. The robot that they're selling is like a an AI enabled household helping slash like retail you know, like you know robot where it basically is like a human torso with articulated arms and pincher hands on. And then the base is like a little tank. Basically it's got like treads or wheels and it rolls.

It is wheels, yeah, and.

Then the torso there's like a tall maybe six foot tall like pillar built into this like rolling base that the torso slides up and down on. And this was their way of not making like what Musk is trying to do, right, a humanoid robot where you have to

I got foisted over to the other of the two guys.

There were two guys there, right, I'm not sure because they don't have listed any where what their role in the company is. I got a co founder's vibe from them. That's how it seemed to be to me, at least in terms of like the way these two were talking. But I don't know the scope of the open Droid's company. Maybe there's a lot more there, but these were the

Right.

The second guy, Jack j Jessenowski, So he is wearing what Garrison described as a Jordan Peterson suit because it is half purple face suit split down the motherfucking middle.

With like like new age hippie like.

Necklaces, five necklaceslaces, five necklaces.

He had pants with like like embroidered flowers on those and like a nose bridge, like it looked like one of those things you put in your nose. That was one of the other things U showstoppers. There was a company that was doing that.

So yeah, he had want to be Steve Jobs vibes from his half unbuttoned shirt and like many many spiritual medallions to his like Jordan Peterson's suit, and very much just that. Like I am the charismatic founder and what I bring to the table. My partner knows how to build robots. I'm charismatic. I'm Jack j Jessanowski, and Jack and I started talking and boy howdy, we had us a conversation and I think we're just going to play that. What do I need to do to set this up?

No, I think you've set it up. We walk up to Jack, I start, I start recording, and we start talking about the robot, and then things spin in some pretty interesting directions.

Yeah, all right, So what is this thing useful for?

Well, generally capable, just like a human can reach to the floor and reach up high to a cupboard, go up and down.

That's what we made this for.

Obviously in a little bit of a different fashion because most surfaces are level.

We don't need to reinvent the wheel.

And the biggest market that we're going after is households. Domestic dishes, laundry, make the bed, clean up around the house, eventually cooking that's more fine tuned, you know, dishes and laundry is really that first task that is gonna be fully autonomous. Obviously from a folding standpoint and cooking standpoint, you can do teleoperation today, so can use cheaper labor internationally through a robot. But full autonomous is coming very quickly, like Jensen talked about recently.

So I see there's a lot of folks in the robot space that are trying robots based on the human form. Right, you guys have not gone that route. Talk to me about.

That droid form.

Yes, Well, as we know, robots didn't evolve from monkey, and so we have an ability to reimagine them. All of the existing hardware we use in the world has wheels for a reason. It just works better. It's easier, there's less friction. That means there's less maintenance. That means there's less energy output. It's efficiency. It's also easier for us to manufacture that stuff at scale. So I think long term, do robots all have legs? Yeah, more or less.

You just said, because the robot can go in the car with you, what do you see people wanting to have a robot in the car with them for?

I think it will just become basically the same way if you have enough money, a lot of people afford like an assistant to come with them places.

It's a lot of people.

Because that seems like a niche market compared to household I think it's the barrier I think is because of the the cost and then the humanness, like then you have to care for another human.

And whereas in this case it's kind of all positive sum And yeah, I guess it's wrong to try to say majority.

Of people, but anyone who's you know in media.

You know they videographer will be something you use a robot for to follow you around and take media and film for you. Every won't get tired and say go grab me a drink or you know, go figure that thing out.

But it also can't decide, oh, that's actually not a good location to film from. It's not going to look as good. We need to get over here, or we need another camera on this side here, we need to get like different angles because we're want to edit this together into a thing. And as a videographer, I'm not just a machine. I'm a part of a collaborative creative enterprise.

I think we're starting to see just how artistic these ais can be.

What's the best example of that, you sing.

Well, I think the most used thing is this the Jenai art And then you have some of the new video models are pretty cool and.

They're using certain sort of zoom in shots.

Everything I think they'll make just as good of movies as humans.

Oh.

I think the best reference in order to.

Actually say that that's possible is music. I don't know if you've played with the most recent AI music. There's song GBT dot com.

I've heard some things people call music that are produced by that.

Yeah, we can make one live right now that.

I don't know if you've heard like the latest models up pick me a genre.

Uh Irish spirituals SCA, you can try Scott too.

You love sk ska is like definitely probably niche stuff is where it's gonna have a harder time, but skka s ka.

I wonder how much SKA data there is out there.

There's a lot of SKA music out there.

What should we make it about? Should we make it about iHeart radio?

Sure?

iHeart radio?

And communication?

Robert and clear Channel Communications?

All right, it's here a SKA song. We're like, oh, it has to load for like thirty seconds.

It feels weirdly like I'm upset that I have to wait that long for something to load online.

Is that really how it feels to you? Huh?

Yeah, I got what They're playing with it a lot, But it's funny to think about how much time and effort it does take to like produce a song typically I am twenty seven.

That's interesting, wouldn't a guess that?

What?

Uh one thing that's really compelling to me is your partner. When I came in here was very very much talking about the utility of this in terms of replacing human beings and tasks that are generally unpleasant laundry, doing the dishes, cleaning up trash. You seem a lot more bullish on robots replacing human beings and what are generally considered to

From a business endpoint, we're one hundred percent going after the dishes, laundry, uh nursing practice of just doing vitals, which is the very repetitive task that's the push. I was starting to just talk into the aspect of the legged robots and kind of imagining why a leged version would have better utility or be something someone wants to purchase scare rather than the wheeled robot and Yeah, stairs is definitely a big one of those.

There are wheel types we're working on right now.

We have ability to climb like single stairs obviously easiest, and that's what most people have in their home if they do have stairs.

Oh, are we gonna listen to some robots?

Scott my Heart Listeners System or.

Scott Clear Crazy sco Is this Scot?

It's a pretty basic melody. I mean there's horns in it, but I feel like it's kind of takes in a I think it's Ophelia is trying to do pot that it's just thrown some horns in on. This is a little closer to SCA, although it's still Yeah, it's not really singing, but I guess that's a matter of taste. What do you listen to?

This is the worst that's gonna be.

I hear that a lot.

It's interesting because GPT four took fifty times as much power as GPT three to train, and there's a lot of mixed reactions on that. And we're entering into a period where we're very likely looking at a recession venture capital funding. There's a chance it's not going to be

I think even if we created no more energy as a human species today, the amount of advancements we create would from an architectural standpoint, continue to advance.

So you have other models.

Like I think LAMA three point three, which has matched four ohs capabilities and is I forget how many parameters, but like super like much much much smaller and was much scheaper to train, and like we're continuing to see like smaller models that are just as effective and we're much cheaper training runs.

I think Deep Seek was one of the newest ones.

I'm what I'm concerned about is I'm looking at the p and L right, I'm looking at open AI's PNL. I'm looking at the fact that they're losing five or six billion dollars last year and we're very good chance it's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood to double that this year. And I'm it's not that there's nothing impressive there it's not that I don't see like, oh, you can generate a song that's got like guitar and trumpets and vocals and stuff and you know a minute

Well, obviously, I personally am in the the boathouse of focusing on allowing this intelligence to flourish and doing these laborious tasks and getting them in the households. I do think from open eye standpoint, and the reason why vcs and private investors will value them so highly is what's next is white collar work. A lot of the jobs online.

That's what they do.

Have an internal model which is able to control the computer, you know, the same way you would ask an executive assistant to do certain things online.

Now it's just Sdobe's handing along all of their emails now through AIS, which is you know, we'll see how well that works on the long term. There's been some interesting polling on like the degree to which customers and investors feel trust when somebody's responding to them with an AI. But what's interesting, I mean more here is the dichotomy between what I see here is a very pragmatic choice, which is, we're not going to try and remake a human being formed robot and deal with like knees and

I'd say, I tailor my pitch to the person I'm talking to. Uh huh.

So some people definitely enjoy thinking about more of the sci fi futures that are coming, for example, the droids building Droid's moment. It's when you know you are decreasing your own manufacturing costs by using your own hardware to build more of that hardware and.

Parts are just being shipped into the factory.

Obviously, I think the first fully automated phone factory just came out in chinery, which is like some cool press in news, but the phone is separate from the actual manufacturing process.

So there's that interesting component.

The exciting part of the idea that how do we reach true abundance as a species of material and resources is well, because GDP is a calculation of capita times productivity, a robot really represents capita one unit of creation. And I'd say that's where the sci fi thinking comes into play.

Okay, well, I appreciate your time and he gave me a lot. I'm gonna let you get to the other peak. Thank you, Thank you so much to meet you.

Jack.

Oh wow, that's super interesting. I hope you all liked Jack Jay as much as I didn't.

Getting to twenty seventy years old and not knowing what Scott is that old. I thought he was much younger, like you thought he was like twenty two. Yes, but the fact that he didn't know what SKA was as a genre, he wasn't was unaware of it.

I don't think he listens to music.

Well, he listens to AI generated hess to AI generated music, he's just as good. He has the most, he has the most. I listened to AI generated music vines. If anyone I've ever seen before just.

Very clearly does not have a soul, no, like nothing, nothing would leave the universe if he did, right, Like.

It's so opposite from the first guy you talked to, who was it so like about? No? I want to how smart actual tasks that people don't enjoy. Yeah, I love cinematography, I love I love filmmaking. I don't First of all, I don't think a robot can can replace this.

No.

I watched five different AI generated movies yesterday, and they all looked like shit.

Even like a robot handling a physical camera to make like to make like choices on like shot framing and composition, and like it's.

One thing to be like we want we have a race cargoing, and so we've got this robot on a track so we can go seventy miles an hour and we're just kind of running on a street. Follow it because a human being can move that. That's sure. One thing we've left out of this up so far. So this this machine that I described earlier, this robot that goes up and down this rolling base has a floppy Donald Trump mask over the over its head, which first

A robot moving its arms around wearing a Donald Trump mask. And as Robert was interviewing this guy, the robot was like moving around and like trying to stimulate its washing dishes capability, and it knocked over the same water bottle about five times. It couldn't it couldn't pick it up consistently, So I will not trust it with my fine china. I'll say that.

As soon as I got up there, I asked like, I couldn't take my jacket off, now can it fold? And he's like, well, we'd have to reprogram it. And it was this when I talked to the guy, I was like because he was like, yeah, we really see this as being you know, potentially good for elder care. Sure, and you know, we had just seen the product we talked about in the last episode, which, for all of it's I don't know that I think it'll work, was

Yeah cool, there always could be code.

Yeah, there could be code. I mean again, the other guy, the actual engineer, seemed very interested in the nuts and bolts of making an affordable, reproducible machine that could handle specific tasks, and Jack Jay had absolutely no interest in the actual machine that they were making. This is clearly, could not be clear. This is just a stepping stone, and he's kind of grossed out by it because it's not replacing all human art with a machine that he owns.

He's a man completely fueled by Lex Friedman podcasts, and he doesn't want to actually do any real work. He just wants to talk about how AI is going to take over everything and we have to welcome it in and here listen to this is SKA.

He wants to take money by owning something that does not provide anything and also put people out of work. Like, at no point did he express a desire to do anything other than replace something people were already doing with something worse that tech guys could profit from. That's all there is to this man. He's not a human.

It's so anti human.

Yeah, I cannot overemphasize the degree to which there was nothing behind this boy's eyes.

Well, do you know what, there's also nothing super intelligent behind.

That's not true. All of our ads are sponsored by real people, even if they're bad people, they're at least people. They live and they love and they hate and you know, maybe they have a promo code. Let's let's see, all.

Right, So after our our lovely, our lovely Robotic Jack j Jessanowski SKA Adventure. Oh god.

Also the SKA was shit, not good, not good? It did it just kept saying the words Scott.

He kept saying the word Ska music and saying the word Robert Robert Scott, well, just doing random noises. After we had our fill of that, we did walk around the rest of Showstoppers. He was so surprised that I wasn't.

I wasn't impressed by any of the He was like, you must have heard the lady, man, I hear them. It's not good. It's like it's like I made this comparison a few times. If somebody like walked in while I'm at a house party was like, hey, man, I taught my dog to masturbate to pornography with its with its pause. I would be like, well, I mean that's like, I guess impressed. I didn't think a dog could do that. Like I am kind of impressed, I guess, But I

What what value does this?

How does the dog know who Farah Fauce it is? I have questions, sure, but it doesn't give me anything like no Fara Fauce it was Garrison. No, God damn it.

What do you think I do?

What?

I I don't know anymore? Well, what I did is walk around the rest of showstoppers. I saw this one booth that had like a like an iPhone case with like a little like keyboard on the bottom that like plugs in, and I started messing around with it, and the guy that booth walked up to me and made fun of me because he's like, you've never you've never held a phone with the BlackBerry. He literally said, like, you've never had a BlackBerry before?

Have you?

Like no, Like, yeah, you're typing all wrong on there.

There was a solid nine day news cycle when Barack Obama, newly the president, revealed that he had a BlackBerry.

I remember that, which sounds like a lifetime.

There was a company called r I M once and they made a tablet that was pretty good, and we only made a couple of rim job jokes about it, but it didn't do very well, and so I gave it to my dad and accidentally there was still a picture of my dick on it. Anyway, that's a story for another day.

Cool.

These are the kind of things you get recording at eleven fifty six pm and we.

Caught Tuesday night. Gott to get to bed, but no, keep making fun of me. For not knowing how to use a smartphone keyboard.

He did the right thing.

I don't need to use that because I have a keyboard on my phone built in already. It's much faster. So anyway, we stopped it at this company that makes well now just makes the software to use in conjunction with the augmented reality glasses and any like high powered laptop.

You put on the glasses and it's like you've got six monitors or whatever that are all full size.

And it's actually really easy to use. It works very well, seamlessly, it's nice, it's it's good quality, easy to use, you can move the monitors around.

It's an excellent an excellent game.

We talked to them last year, and the main thing that was holding this, like holding us back on it is that you needed to use their own proprietary lap. It was their own laptop, and it wasn't a great one. It was just like a Linux laptop didn't. It didn't have everything I like I want out of my own personal laptop.

And we were still impressed with it.

Then it was still it was still good. Yeah, and now you can just use any high power laptop with it essentially. So it's lovely to see that improved. We saw this lovely like like very small foldable projector. Oh yeah, that was cool.

What's the company? That company name, because we should be we should be giving out the names of these Yes.

The ar glasses and the software system is called spacetop very good by a company called Sightful. It works works great. But yeah, this this little folding folding projector currently has a Kickstarter. The company is called Aura Zen yeah or a Zen specifically, it was the zip trifled projector right now. It's it's a seven to twenty p very small foldable projector. It has a whole it has like like an auto

If you're a gadget Ritina, Like it felt like a quality piece of electronics in my hands, Like the way

It doesn't need Wi Fi to work. It just can cast from your phone.

A U r Z and ZIP trifle projector or zen yep yep. I think they're selling them for two fifty right now. That's for the for the Kickstarter, for the Kickstarter. It will go up a little when it's a product. But we saw it. It works. They had a lot of they had tracking and stuff so it like automatically would focus.

Auto focuses and at like it scales correctly, forwards, projecting it automatically like adjusts like the tilt of it so that it you.

Know, yeah, obviously this isn't the full review because we don't own one, but everything we could tell by looking at it in the moment.

We tried it out, I hooked up my phone to it. As I went to my phone screen, I realized I have a slightly I would say, artful flute image of an angel. So I quickly swiped away from we shouldn't show your dick to your damn my home screen of my phone. You know, things can always be worse.

Things could always be worse. But I think where will end is? And this actually is not entirely in order, because this is the next after we had that conversation with our friend Jack Jay, which just left me thinking about, like, some people aren't really people, right, That's what I The sole thing.

Is is a sham. It's all. It's all for rooms. It's soulless.

We immediately walk over and we just kind of like randomly turn a corner and there's like a human shin like tibia amphibia basically with like a carbon fiber you know, frame around it. That's roughly the shape of like a person's lower leg, lower leg, and it's called bio leg.

He's spent like ten years working on this.

Yeah, eight years, he's said, eight years. And that's like really the thing that is like so both like addictive and also like this like very tonal whiples you get at ces as you will go from like this dead eyed con man trying to scam the world so he can do god knows what kinds of other harms with absolutely nothing, nothing inside him at all, And then I lost my leg and I built a better prosthetic to help the entire world. And that's like thirty seconds between those two experiences.

And like that's like that's like the dark magic of Cees. And like I don't, like I'm not like anti tech, like I think there. I think technology can really improve people's lives if used well. And sometimes I get kind of black pilled walking around Cees. But then we'll stumble across this, like you know someone who like literally lost a leg and made themselves their own better leg.

Eight years figuring out how to do this.

Yeah, is winning award. It's like for it award winning like tech innovations.

It's changing your as a person who has lost your lower like changing being able to like have a normal gait and balance again, like massive potential to improve people's lives as a result of this.

Yeah, just steps away from Ai ska at Ai and Donald trump Man the laund the profile. The company is again Bionic IM and it's the bioleg biolags the product. Yeah, the biolague is the product by Bionic Im.

I'm going to try to check it out more.

Tomorrow at Eureka Park, which at this point, you know that'll be like maybe future episodes come next week. But I guess this closes our actual Like Coridge, Let's go get fucked up and eat Japanese food. Oh I'm down. Yeah, I'm down.

Let's do it.

Hey.

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

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