Draft and Greetings friends, it's Monday, February 19th and Chappo is back at it. Good evening, Felix and I today is our old pal Ed Ziptron who's here to talk about the internet and why it's better than it's ever been. Oh yeah, Ed, welcome to the show. Thank you so much and yeah, the internet's doing fantastically right now. We're in the glory days. I've never seen it better.
I mean, it's so good watching all of these incredulous AI freaks, seeing this open AI, text a video, generate and going, wow, this is amazing as like a monkey. Sprouts a third arm, like a bunch of people combine into just the gelatinous blob at the end of a straight. And but they tell me any day now it's going to be better, which is the same thing that being telling us for about a year about everything else, generate a very good.
I love this stuff where like the poster video, it always is like no longer than 15 seconds and it's always in super slow motion. So the physics and the and the weight of the objects doesn't look incredibly fucked up and they'll be like Hollywood has six months left of existing. I saw one that was called bling zoo, which is about as good as that sounds where within one second and it was like 30 seconds long, I think.
There was a tiger with four legs monkey with three arms lots of just broken text everywhere, just things. The sides of the thing just falling apart, it's so good and that cost a I believe that to just burn an entire forest just for bling zoo on its own. That's the other thing about it like none of it like looks real, not even mentioning like you know extra limbs or like people sprouting new tongues or one being completely coming out of another.
The creative minds of the people who are really into this are so shitty, you know, in their minds, they can create anything. There are no limits and the things they make are like, what if Ronald Reagan got Rick roll was one where someone said very soon will be able to do a new season in 2025. I believe VC from first mock cap to said this with by 2025 will be able to put into an AI that I can have not a new season of Narcos with Brad Pier, Travis Kelsey and Mr. Beast.
And this is the best they can do all the world's creations and this is what they come up with. This is the future for them. I just want brand and Mr. Beast in the Narcos, where SpongeBob. Yeah, I mean, it's this idea that I mean like as this open AI stuff debuted all of their excellent videos over the past week. And you know, you know, bling zoo is pretty cool, but like that to create the bling zoo, it involves shoveling animals from actual zoos into a furnace to create the electricity needed.
They generated so like, you know, for the cost of one African rhino, you can have cat cathedral. Yeah. And they did actually have one with a king of cats. It was, it looks bad. It just looks bad. Like, I mean, Ed, like you mentioned it, but like whether it's like the custom season of Narcos just for you, starring Mr. Beast.
I mean, it's just like it's like, how do you feel like the tech industry's relationship to culture because like it seems to me like I think they fundamentally misunderstand that like culture needs to be like, I had something that's like a reference point that's available to everyone rather than something that is has no relevance because it is only just the preferences of one individual that's like boutiquely created for them alone.
Like, hey, let's say I want to see some of Narcos with Mr. Bean instead of Mr. Beast. Give me that. Now that I'd watch. But like, I mean, like what is it like what is the mentality of the people the people selling AI? Like, well, how do you view their relationship to culture and like how they understand it? So there's two different ways here. There is the people making these AI models and the people who are profting off of it. So the Sam Orments of the world.
I don't believe that they care about creativity. They care about finding new ways to sell cloud computing to people. And they've got a whole industry believing this as well that this is going to be the future. Now AI fantasists.
I believe that they look at creativity as a skill issue that if they could just play guitar, they too could be Iron Maiden. And the only thing stopping them from Narcos doing Narcos with SpongeBob is that they just they lack the skill, which is just a set they don't have the time because they're too busy coding because coding or whatever
that who's business thing they do. It kind of goes back. I don't know if you remember the George Carl in AI special which ended up being just completely a guy wrote him when that came out. You saw people being like, well, and that you will sass on that podcast said it we could really use a voice like we could use George Carl in 2024.
And that is ultimately the problem. They see art as something that is generative you learn enough funny you are now a comedian. They don't see it as you do enough stand up and you get funny. But the problem is they don't understand that creativity is limited. It's fallible. It's finite.
George Colin is dead and he got different in the way he was funny changed over the years as he got older. That's because it was an experience based things based on the people he met and the things he did and the things he read and so on and so forth. They don't understand that they don't believe culture is
experient yet. Experient. I can know that's I believe culture is experienced there with go. I'm small promise. You know, I mean like you say that but I really was George Carl and was around in 2024 because I love his some of his observations on the political cultural scene. It's just a shame that it's a shame that none of his comedy was recorded or existed. If we like none of his past thoughts were ever recorded to be consumed again in the future day.
So like we were only left to wonder what what would he think about Joe Biden and what would he possibly think and what was actually funny with the George Colin thing again written by a person written by Chuck Chad Couligan that whole thing these were all jokes that he'd already made George Carter made jokes about politics and politicians he made jokes about Christianity. He hadn't made jokes about Bill Cosby because just that whole thing was a whole other problem.
But I believe with the wider AI thing the reason that they're able to look at these horrifying videos these really like genuinely chilling videos that just a gross. They make you feel nasty inside like some of the AI generated art. The video of the video of the woman and the cat in bed. I found genuinely disturbing and like that was the one that was being touted of like this is a watershed moment for AI. This is the whole shit moment.
Yeah, there's the holy shit moment like what this is going to be able to do and like the next year or something is going to change the world. And like what it did was like basically emulate what looking at a woman in a bed with a cat would feel like if you were on LSD and ketamine. Well, all of it is built to be looked at for one second.
Because if you looked at that and then just never saw it again, you think yeah, that was a cat hits a human and an arm comes up. If you looked at it for three seconds, you'd see there is no arm. Her arm is made of comforter. She moves the comforter over and her hand is sticking out of the nothingness. The cats.
Poor is actually mold into each other and pop out another poor. That's the thing if you consume culture while you're looking at your phone and barely looking up, even then it won't work because the human eye is kind of humans dicks look we look at stuff and we're going to go that doesn't look right that doesn't look right. And these things the way they don't look right it's very weird. It's unsettling.
Yeah, and I've also noticed that like, you know, similar to how with the carlin special turned out it was just like a guy that wrote it anything that's like a cat or like a person in bed any like mundane scene from life, right.
It turns out that is something from getty images that the AI is just recreating. Whenever you have it, you know, make something that's more fantastical in the minds of people who are really into it, like that idiotic, like cat cathedral one where there's the giant cat or like, you know, like a hot dog the size of Godzilla, like whatever fucking dumb thing that the people who love this make. That's when it looks really fucking bad. That's when it looks like a PS3 pre rendered cutscene.
It looked like anything anything that isn't just a recreated stock image with new dimensions is I feel like I'm watching cutscenes from heavy rain or for another David Cage game. And one of the things you when you talk about in a piece you just wrote for your newsletter called subprime intelligence is that like AI is a marketing term.
And like the idea that it's like it's artificial intelligence where you're you're you're prompting it to like create an image of something that it knows about and it goes off of that. That's not really the case. It's not really creating anything new. It's like running on an impossible number of mathematical equations to scour the internet for things that already exist of like what's the best analog for what like a people consider a cat.
Yes. So these models run off. I'm somewhat butchering the tech here, but it's most of this. It's they run off of giant data sets that they've had tagged and sometimes when you've done some of those capture images and you have to go that's a bridge. This has a bridge in it. That's actually helping training those models. So artificial intelligence does not have an intellect. It does not know what a monkey is a recat is it doesn't know anything.
It does however know what its database says and it generates based on that database. This is why still to this day. And I don't know if anyone wants to super pop up. There was a commercial for Microsoft's new copilot AI and this guy typed in classic truck image from truck logo for truck shop called mics.
On the thing mics popped up three times it said mics when you actually type this into copilot what comes up is Spurger Skurberla but just like Kathulu language because these AI models do not know language. They don't know it. They can in the written form in chat GPT do it.
But when it comes to images they then have to think what does a word look like what is a word what comes after a word so they can't really do mics they can't just write a word on the sign so the truck might look good and then you look at the truck a little closer and there's two steering wheels.
And it's just there's these little things the yeah if you're just shoveling shit into a machine if you were just trying to make a lot of crap great cool if you ever try and do this in a way where people have to look at the image classical thing that you do with a visual image is have someone look at it they're going to say this is wrong and you can't really edit that.
What do you say to the point that people make with this specifically whether they go okay admittedly a lot of this stuff looks fucked up now but a year from now when the machine has learned how to perfectly emulate a human beings repertoire of recognizing an image that it will be perfect.
Well the answer is it hasn't done that in the last year we've had image generators for over a year now and they've still had these problems these hallucinations hallucination is when it says something authoritatively that is not true and in the case of an image where it thinks something looks like something it doesn't the problem is these are not bugs these are features of these models the only way to fix these things is to heavily constrain them and by doing so you can't most of the things it can do.
You can't fix hallucinations they are part of a model like this when you make an AI generated thing it has to work like this that's why they want average general intelligence which is another marketing term for these things that claims they can think because they need it to think because before it can think it can't really know anything like you can give it petabytes of training data and train it but it's still not when you type in picture of a monkey it's still not saying okay a monkey looks like this and now I will draw you a monkey.
Here's the monkey it is saying based on this data set the word monkey is these series of images I will now combine all of these and try and output a monkey whatever that is I don't know what that is I don't have any idea what a monkey is they don't know anything and thus getting better how hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into this and it's not improved.
That's always the thing with it like they always it's always like a year from now or two years from now it will get better it will know exactly what a human being wants to see why because you say so like pretty much like pretty much like yeah like you said it can't think it's never going to be able to do that so why is it going to be able to do that when you just shovel more data into it a year from now it doesn't have a human being's ability to differentiate with that.
It doesn't differentiate between anything like that's the it differentiates based on the tag data set and now it has quote unquote memory just means it saved things you've told it before into another data set these these problems are intractable and right there's a war street journal article came out last week we're saying that anthropic and open a ice they make Claude and chat GPT that they are selling into the enterprise but they're running into the hallucinations problem and the article was just incredibly like well we're going to be able to get a new one.
So they're like well you know they can't fix any of these problems they can't fix the fact that it spits out information but they do have an idea and you want to know what that idea was it's that sometimes the models will say I don't know that is the thing I don't know that's another afraid that if they do that the models won't output anything because they'll just be like I want to give you wrong information brother what you want for me if they've changed the chat GPT into Bartle be the
Scrivener just says I'd rather not I'd rather not create cat cathedral because there's no use for it there's no need for it really I would love that if they made it yeah yeah it's like yeah come up with a better idea and I'll create some hallucinations for you but I guess like I mean yeah like prayer all the sort of tramfulness trampleist language about like Hollywood is over this is a holy shit
I just think it speaks to like a fundamental misunderstanding here because like if what this what these models are doing is only scouring existing images and human knowledge that fundamentally can never create anything new or novel or different it's only just recycling the same shit that's already out there
which is like I mean like for art really to like matter like people want a like unique emotional experience they want to see something they haven't seen before look at the world in a new way and none of these models that are like without human beings you can't do that and it's funny people say well what about covers of songs or
what about remakes it's like even in those house the rising sun we don't even know who made that could be hundreds of years old they've never actually found out who there are some insane versions of that song because people reinterpret it every time
the animals most famous version arguably very different from the muse version which I absolutely love great version of that song there are Jimi Hendrix is kind of shit but nevertheless it was it's interesting following that even bad art can be interesting even seeing where someone has fucked up
even based on the constraints of finances or bad acting the the doom movie is so bad but color bad has some of the funniest lines in it these are things that I can't do because you can't teach an AI okay your constraints are that no one in this movie can act in the right
or in terrible but these aren't I realize that's a weird thing to say but I don't think anyone using these and thinking this will replace Hollywood understands how to create anything I think it really is that simply they've never done
anything creative they've never appreciated it and they've never really thought that they had to they just think it's something that people do they think it's like driving a car nothing special just a thing we do every day and if I did it I'd be the best but now I have AI to do it for me I completely agree with that that's one of the most depressing things about it that take into its logical extension it really takes all the fun part out of bad art
bad art is so interesting because you get to see the enormous golf between the creators ambition and their abilities and in that gap you learned so much about the person that made it about the people that are acting in it whatever it is it's incredibly interesting I mean we've probably done like a third of our episodes about bad art because it needs to exist it always will I think it's like one of those things that nobody quite verbalizes but it's incredibly it's incredibly vital
and this is this can only create bad art for the most rudimentary reasons it's like a wood template for bad off isn't satisfying exactly because what makes bad art entertaining is the choice choices are like the baffling or incorrect choices made by the people who produced it was like bad a art there's nothing it's just boring there's nothing there it's it's it's devoid of any context or anything like potentially interesting or revealing
and I guess that goes into like what I said at the beginning of the episode like how good the internet is now and Ed you know sort of another piece about sort of like the death of techno optimism and just like what the like the gap between like what the promise of like the internet or like all its various iterations over the last couple years like you know web 2.0 crypto and fts and now AI it's just like we've gone through these series of like marketing cycles that all of heralded the arrive
of some revolutionary game changing technology but practically what it what it's done is just create like an endless endless just sludge pipe of just spam and this making the internet fundamentally unusable like so I mean is it is this just like a reflection of like the declining profits of the tech industry that they keep trying to like come up with like new
and that's the thing you're right on you're on the right path but it is the opposite what it is is up until about 2015 2016 actually really starts in 2011 when market I believe 2011 2012 mark entries and wrote software is eating the world which people have taken to mean wow software is going to change the world what it actually meant was mark
the country's and wants to make software companies disconnected from other companies in their value he wanted it so that these companies didn't have to be profitable or good they just had it to be innovative so this led to a massive boom of start up investment and actually a few different things that really help consumers so cloud computing basic CDN like CDN is kind of a ramp
consumer cloud computing things like drop box one drive so on and so forth really help people this led to iCloud which is kind of Apple second go really helped things like WhatsApp which then got acquired by Facebook slash meta these were all cool things and there was a
mass they were these massive jumps each year and then somewhere in the middle of the 2010s the promises started to outpace the actual developments we got told we're going to have AI and everything is about the time we heard about AI for the first time we got Siri we got Alexa nothing
really super duper changed though we were promised autonomous cars pretty much never happened and things just stopped happening we stopped seeing new shit while this was happening every single tech company the big ones the Microsoft Google's Apple's the world Facebook as well just started printing money online advertisement became a multi trillion dollar in Australia believe like at this point the main like 90% of
matters revenue comes from it huge deal and they realized shit we can squeeze so much money from these little pigs is little fruit nasty little piglets who using Google and Facebook we can just twist them up and they just started abusing customers so we get to Cambridge Analytica of course Cambridge Analytica led up to you may know I think your politics podcast might heard about it but nevertheless Cambridge Analytica was the first time that you hurt you really felt
oh shit tech can be against us this is also that time was also around when they destroyed a chunk of journalism by lying that Facebook video was watched by everyone they just wasn't that was fine nothing change nothing happened to matter but basically things just tech companies made more money without really contributing anywhere near as much tech stopped innovating quite as fast or at all one might argue and then they just stopped having new things
they weren't really new apps that change things we got what tick tock tick tocks cool but it's also it's changed the world but I don't know if it's for the better and it's still videos we got crypto which did nothing we got the metaverse which never existed and now we have AI we're being told AI is in everything but the actual output of AI and most stories about AI are wow this thing really fucked up really badly wow this does not want look like what I
want a lawyer getting sanctioned a delivery bot in England writing a poem about how much the delivery company sucks is dpd I believe and they do suck so good work but there and that's the thing the stories about AI and the stories about the tech industry are no longer my life has changed the better it's my Uber driver assaulted me or I'm an Uber driver and I make
three dollars an hour and I'm not insured between rights or it's I don't know the Facebook managed to make billions of dollars while not showing you your pictures on Instagrams of the people of Instagram of people you actually follow this is how people view tech now no wonder people are mad so I mean it's a function of them having way too much money and yes because they have so much money on things like advertising
are they're not really cease to create anything useful just one other thing though this is really important not a lot of people know it Google pays Apple $18 billion a year or something like that so that you can only use that you're shown Google on the iPhone that's like that is what it's like they're able to just monopolize you can't leave their systems in terms of like the next new amazing thing I would like to talk about your experience using the
the new Apple vision pro of virtual reality goggles and you're supposed to review on your newsletter how game changing how revolutionary is this awesome new vision pro technology so I'm super conflicted about it because it isn't game changing right now this form factor though could do something watching videos on this is absolutely sick it's genuinely awesome to watch TV on
it's awesome to watch movies on does that mean it's worth three and a half thousand dollars absolutely God damn not it's just too expensive it's inconsistent setting it up depending if you get the wrong fitting it just hurts you and does not look right when it works it's great but that's a very big win and it's also insane that Apple does this by scanning your face with your iPhone to order it and it got mine wrong when it did it and it's $300
for a different light seal it's just crazy this is why people are angry at tech but also sometimes it's really cool like I was watching a concert or talk to my fiance talking to friends reading some websites it was great like that was cool I also would never wear this outside or with another person in the room I'd look like a colossal bell end but it's just it's something like this could be the future at some point but
that future is five to ten years before any number of people would ever think about using this and I actually believe that they can get there eventually I just don't know when and when it works when it's consistent when it has the apps it could be kind of good which is not enough for how much it costs like you can't even do PS5 remote play on it such a
gimmick you could it they could put that shit on there of drank that slop up willingly but no every time you want to do something it feels like they were like I just didn't think about it you can't change the title of a Google document properly you have to you navigate with your eyes and you look at it and sometimes it won't select it's like you
didn't think of Google Docs was sitting this goddamn thing up Jesus Christ so yeah the vision pro is very much a glimpse of the future but definitely not there and it's laughable the apple has shipped something this incomplete so moving on from from apple Ed one of my one of my favorite things that you cover is the the wonderful life and career of tech god god emperor Elon Musk and I guess I was going to like check in check in with like Ed how was you
summarized Elon Musk's tenure as owner and CEO of Twitter over the last year or so so something I've really enjoyed about watching him run Twitter is I've always wanted to see one of these big brain genius guys truly actually do some work and truly run a company without any guard rails and this is what happens he tried to kill the sale due to the bot problem it was like yeah there's two there's too many bots there all work as well and he then proceeded to create
arguably the worst for a problem I've seen on a website I've never seen worse than this every two posts it says as in bio to pussy and bio as in bio how did this have because I remember when he was buying the website I mean look obviously
like we talked about this multiple times before he never did what he tried to get out of buying this website and one of the ways he tried to get out of it was by ginning up issues about like it's the supposed bot problem then he was forced to buy it by the Delaware court of the Pennsylvania council rear whatever and now there are like that it is there is more bots than I've ever seen it's like it is I know there are bots on Twitter before but now it's like every single thing you see I feel
like is pussy and bio how did this happen so what happened was he fired all of the trust and safety people that was a big thing he did he put so much money he saved so much money to get rid of them though it's not clear how much money he saved and also just stopped some of the server bills to Google that would have also helped and just thought you know what I don't need trust and safety and I don't need these people we
fired thousands of people it will be fine it won't be fine these people did I'm sure there was someone who got let go from Twitter who wasn't doing anything sure whatever I think every company over a certain size has one person and God bless them who gives a sheet you sin for me on
the bottom but he fired all the people that would have stopped this and in turn hired some of the dumbest people to ever walk the earth to run it with him Linda yes or yes or no yaccharino she's fantastic I love you in the back of the world were huge fans over here she's the best she one of the animaniacs yacco get out everybody here she came in and she just every two days post like hamburgers are up on hashburg hashtag hamburger dot com x dot com it's the future
of the limit and does nothing the company is in disarray there's not enough people there to run it because running a giant social network is a lot of people are not going to be able to do that but it's not going to be a lot of people but also he just fired all the people that would deal with this
problem and also fired all the people who know how they who know how to build a system that would stop this because it may seem easy to stop every third post having pussy and bio or arse in bio it may seem like an easy thing to do but it's actually quite difficult but it is almost every single he's banned the automated killed the automated systems even and there's no fixing this Twitter will only get better when he is either forced to sell it or he just I don't
know leaves one day and doesn't goes out for a pack of smokes I don't know but he need money will need to be spent if he ever sells this this will probably cost someone hundreds of millions of dollars to fix and then even then it probably won't make money that he's just not a good
businessman I think we're finally seeing it it rocks and now there's this you have you heard about his his compensation package yeah Oh is it is it that another Delaware court exed out like what is it if it's a billion dollars and Tesla a compensation for
him can I just say you have to fuck up so bad for the courts in Delaware to be like that you're too greedy that's too much money right and you also have to fuck up really badly to lose a class action suit yeah as a it's so hard to do that you have to prove so much and they did and now the 56 billion dollars in pay I believe a lot of it was options so we wouldn't have to give back anything so much as he just would not be able to exercise those options what's genuinely scary and
scarier than the money which is by the way very scary for him because guess what most of his money is tied up in loans on Tesla stock and Tesla options I think he also has loans on no the biggest problem is the chance to record and it doesn't matter if he moves it doesn't matter if he appeals he's not going to win they're going to make him real or can I is the board his board right now is run by a series of cronies like you got that you got like rock
steady from two nice mutant Ninja Turtles you got Steve Jervitson you got all these freaks who are like yes master this for you they three of them have to go and now three independent people have to come in who are probably
going to say stuff like hey is it a problem that are techno king which by the way is his legal company name at Tesla techno king fucking duh he's so annoying they're probably going to say huh is this guy who ever so often posts anti-Semitic stuff or races other races stuff or you know if he did that is insane sexist stuff or is just very unfunny and annoying but online 24 7 is that bad is it bad if he takes ketamine is it bad if there are Wall Street Journal stories about how much he loves
drugs and how he bullies members of his board into taking drugs yeah they're probably going to go this is not good and also all of this is happening while the EV market has started to cool and frankly Tesla is running out of ideas they don't really they've made one new car in what last five years 10
years they lose the cyber truck which looks like from what's another world that old PC game and also that thing is now getting giant rust spots on it due to the fact that Elon Musk forced the design through his designers came to him with another cyber truck design and he's like no no no no
I need a very small very horrible metal truck please that's the thing you want with trucks is for them to immediately fall apart when exposed to the elements there was a drag race as well where one was doing donuts and one of the wheels fell off that's so good I mean it's like a Saturn rocket it reduces its weight so it can go faster it's adjusting parts but also at some point this new board is just going to be like yeah this guy is not worth
having around he's not contributing anything other than being insane and causing headlines that we don't really want to be associated with and it's funny because this is this is the actual scariest thing that board change is so big because most of his wealth is leveraged on his actual Tesla stock he needs Tesla and he needs Tesla to keep being worth an insane amount of money their market cap is like larger than
the real car companies combined for no reason going back a little bit to like how he's running Twitter there are like ancillary things like you know the whole ex branding which I thought is the most insane thing because I hate to earnestly use the word branding but like the branding of Twitter was that's the best something like that can possibly go everyone use their terminology everyone called them tweeds everyone used every
word that Twitter used to describe itself and he just completely just flush that down the toilet the equivalent of burning hundreds of billions of dollars for no reason and the bot thing that is most incriminating to me it isn't the pussy and bio bots even though those are hilarious it's things like you know the most popular type of account now like historic videos or badass science it's when an account like that will post a video
where it doesn't have sound or something or just a blank screen and it will get 20,000 retweets thus exposing that all the biggest accounts their popularity is completely automated there's just a system of bots that are just mindlessly retweeting these accounts and you go to the replies of any of any like large account it doesn't matter what it's a video of what it's a picture of it'll just be like a blue check account that's just giving like generic NPC commentary great video awesome picture
it'll be a picture of like those orphans running from Nepal and Vietnam inspiring it's cool and what's even funny about that is so a report came out a few days ago from a company called Czech which is a cybersecurity firm that literally tracks bots and fake users map it was Matt Bindo over at Mashable published this so apparently according to check 75.8 75.85% of traffic from X to its advertising clients websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake like that is it's where it happens
is this yeah it means ad fraud yeah it's and also the other funny thing I this is something I laugh about a lot is the fact that he's giving money away he gives money to people who have Twitter blue like the Mister Beast thing yeah that was so good where he like he was using advertisement like ad revenue he was using ad spots on Twitter not going to X to put Mr. Beast video in front of so Mr. Beast could make money but then Mr. Beast posted yeah I make
like 250 grand however I think it was messed with somehow so he spent quarter of a million dollars to get Mr. Beast to suggest that he's doing ad fraud it's so good it's so funny this is it's it's definitely it feels like the kind of idea like a 13 year old would have about business like yeah the way to get people through the door is to give him a little money so they feel like they're posted which will create value and then you're like how will that create value and they'll go well scale
so why don't we take these patties dollars and just distribute them amongst the shanties that way they buy the booze from us with the dollars right and then they run out of booze then they got to buy more patties dollars thus creating the self-sustaining economy we've been looking for it stimulates our economy that's what Dave and Busters does give me one up here boom the pay all the thing he does with ad revenue is so funny because
the you know when he first rolled out monetization do you remember how all those accounts that were like you know and wokeness yes the anti the anti woe taxidermist the woe killing hunter all those guys were like oh my god I made 27,000 dollars and he gave tens of thousands of those to Andrew tight yeah he what and he wanted to make it seem like that was an attainable thing for the average like twitter blue user and it turns out like I follow Andrew Yang I don't know why I think just to harm
myself but he like Andrew Yang is a pretty big account there are like enough stupid people out there where they still want to listen to what Andrew Yang has to say about whatever you know there's a mass shooting they want to see Andrew Yang go we could solve this if we had handshake parties yeah that there's a way that the gun industry could work with schools to educate more on
guns yeah and he like he's a huge account saying that type of shit and he does this hair brain thing where he's like I'm randomly giving away my my ad revenue every month to one Andrew Yang fan and they build pooled yeah but like the amount he's giving away every month is like
$121 like what is this worth it for anyone but what's funny about that is so I've really to my way of hurt my brain is like go and look up Twitter or X payouts like on look what's great is he regularly gives away like eight to 25 to 35 bucks to just about any user now this is not a lot of money objectively but you know what it is more than the amount they are paying for Twitter blue so he is just basically giving the money he's giving the money back you will find some
1000 follow up that 1000 following account that will post I got 35 bucks from X it's like you just absorbed multiple people's Twitter blue subscriptions and you are no one is reading their ship by the way it's like other people that are just scamming Twitter blue he it's so cool
I've never seen a company just create a degenerative revenue policy like one where we will make money but deliberately give it away in such a way that there's no value to this it's not like it's a public company so they can say well we're growing it this
rate because he never wants to be a public company because I think the public markets might say hi you can't just post a graph every three months that says Twitter is bigger with a line going up and then users and then 500 at the top we need a little more fundamentals than that but I think this is just it's horrifying he is destroying this platform he's destroying a platform that I may prepare on frankly let's be honest I think we all kind of did in some level it's annoying to
it that feels bad but the same time he's destroying this for no appreciable reason he is not making more money he didn't turn this into something where he's making a ton of money just for himself or really helping himself in any way I don't argue this site has only been bad for him yeah that's the crazy thing about it is like we've seen a lot of things like this where someone takes a public company and through like debt financing and you know borrowing
against their own wealth they take a giant public company private and they either just completely loot the company for all its assets or they strip down costs so much and make it run on a thread bear operation making one person doing the job of eight people so they can sell it for a massive profit like five years later that's you know bad enough that's already a pretty big sector of our economy especially in tech but he's not even doing that it's like he's doing the
private equity thing of breaking the company down but for no conceivable purpose like he's made a big deal about like ads are coming back every ad I see there is like a six year old it's like a six year old saying I think Mercedes is the best car I just I think what's important so actually any listeners who play man or I will be the show this is what would happen if someone who ran a madden franchise actually ran a football team this is the tech equivalent of that this is a guy
who is like I know what I'm doing watch this who just he has absolute power there is no more board there is just Elon this is this company has the same corporate structure as mine which has one person like it's that's it and he's running it as he wants to which is to say not well at all and from every report I've read what actually happens is at like three in the morning an engineer will get a text from Elon must be like we need to
make the we need to move the retweet button and the like button we need to put them at opposite ends of the page so that we have more clicks and the engineer will be like that Elon that doesn't make a decision I will fire you now I will fire you from the company will not be paid and so this these book and then he'll wake up the next day and he'll be like oh I move the likes to be like I never said that he's just I don't I will not speak to I've never
taken a video and he actually legal drugs somehow with enough already but from what I have heard from people that have this man is on something all the time and based on there's multiple war street general reports about drugs this man may just be on ketamine all like and just abusing it in a way that only an insanely rich guy can so it doesn't just destroy him all the time but I think at some point he is I think we are watching a man just
constantly over leverage himself physically and financially in real time at some point something has to crack and you may think well things have gone badly so far absolutely not like right now he's also quite old for a guy who might be abusing drugs like his body may just give up on him but these are the things that I don't think the tech industry realizes and also it's a disgusting point in the tech industry that not one of these
shit fucks not Mark Zuckerberg not Jeff Bezos not Tim Cook and these people have just said hey maybe don't be like this Elon Musk like fuck Elon Musk like something a miniature piece of a soul that exists within them but they don't want to call out another billionaires
they know they'll get in trouble for it they know they will get more scrutiny even though like Elon Musk can take up most of the news but what's more insane this is the stuff that drives me truly mad is all of this crazy stuff we said that should be immediately
disqualifying almost everything that we've said just on its own could be and yet when Elon Musk tweeted yes we put the first neural link inside a man's brain everyone's like yep absolutely let me get let me just type that one out neural link Elon Musk it's just they just reported it
because he tweeted it and it's this this man has killed multiple monkeys with this chip already you think he's just put this shit in a guy's head and he's first of all he has not done it but second of all you think this man is alive anymore you think he didn't die of during the operation
that's such an ignominious way to die they put in a human's brain but like are they alive after it like that that's a question that was the human being alive when they put it in yeah we are it could be a dabber put it in a corpse they shut up his ass and didn't say it was in his brain
like well you talk about his reported drug use and like yeah when the Wall Street Journal has a giant article outlining your use of LSD cocaine ecstasy mushrooms and ketamine so vice to say you may have a drug problem but I mean like I guess I'm wondering like like is
you know like his his like every time he replies like a white supremacist account like talking about the great replacement theory and says hmm wow concerning interesting could this just be a side effect of him being like in a K hole and not actually believing in white supremacist ideology is he
just so high that he's blown away by anything he reads on the internet so I think he actually could be that I think that's true I think it also could be something even more depressing which is he just doesn't care I think he's just like yeah sure whatever like whoever is mad for me is my friend even if that's an incoherent ideology and I think yeah he I'm sorry you can't do this as many times he has and not hold these views I think he is a racist I think he may be anti-Semitic
or he has a very confused version of what anti-Semitism is that perhaps aligns with Zionism just a guess and he definitely well Tesla has had terrible problems with racism Tesla and he's definitely a sexist based on a lot of the things he said and done he's a peculiar creep like he's a nasty
fucking creep he's also gelatinous he's horrible to look at oh really that picture of him and Raya Manuel I think it was that was that was um Raya manual Raya was Raya manual is Raya manual Raya was Raya manual is Raya manual is brother and he's the based Raya gold from entourage off of you you're
stupid fucking balcony fuck you the most so just that's the thing I think he's just a boring old piece of shit just a really based on his humor alone he's not like a particularly sophisticated bigger he's just a fucking asshole who gets like he posted the other day like a picture of dogs
and the outline of the dogs first said send nudes or I like milfs it's it's a shit that wouldn't have been funny back on e-bounds well this is this is things that something awful members were making out found of what 10 15 years ago or more these are not funny or new things these suggest
that his cultural appreciation or consumption is just paper thin he's just this man has more money than anyone else in the world he could do anything at all times wherever he wants and he chooses not just the post but the post in this vacuous empty very sad way even bill acumen who
is a fucking loser at least he's dropping 10,000 word tweets that no one will read but at least he seems to believe in something to be clear he's also culturally hollow just like Elon but musk is just so deeply sad very very sad and his humor is so boring it's not even Rick and Morty
level it's just like old school but that movie it's still kind of funny yeah it's very sad the most illustrative thing for his sensibility at his cultural touchstones was where he he posted some like you know reposted someone's meme about like Evan Gellion and someone in their applies asked him
oh do you like Deanna Genesis Evan Gellion and he just replied nerve he's just like like any way wait what yeah sorry it took me a second to understand what he did they ask him straight up do you oh do you watch the Genesis Evan Gellion and he replies nerve
that's like if someone says do you watch Star Wars you respond with death star Jedi it's like it's like he got that question and panicked and was like oh my god fuck fuck fuck and just started to read the Wikipedia article for it everything like he just he's into the things
that he thinks he's supposed to be into them but on the most basic surface level like not even reading the Wikipedia plot summary that's that's too too much depth and and you know past surface knowledge for him that his racism is kind of the same way like I don't I don't believe he's like
a true racism head all like he's just copy he's just copying I do think it's funny how he does get on there and he's like Jews are importing non white to destroy America and and the ADL is like well he likes Israel like what what it's well not and then they started advertising again he was
like great I won't sue you anymore yeah that's so and it's it's so strange as well because I just don't know what he does all day because he has posted himself playing Diablo 4 to like very high levels and I should say as someone who's put a good amount of time into it that game is boring as
far I played a lot I played hundreds of hours at Diablo 3 Diablo 4 is such a grind and it's a really boring one as well less satisfying everything takes too long and he's at like tall men 125 on some this man has probably put thousands of hundreds maybe over a thousand hours into arguably the most
boring of the Diablos including the first two and also does not appear to do anything else other than yell at his engineers in the dead of night it's just this man is definitely some level of horrifyingly depressed let's be he just he's certainly acting like he is very depressed like he's
acting like I would when I was 13 and I don't run Twitter well X so whatever you call this fucking so like that's the X thing is even weirder because to your point earlier Felix everyone was posting that fucking bird people talked about tweets people they did free branding everywhere everywhere
across the internet now it's like X formerly known as Twitter that's what everyone's right it's very sad you have to say X formerly known as Twitter but like the other thing I did's baffling about the decision to re-brand into X is that like it doesn't work when you take like you can't
tape it into a browser like a bar and like X dot com or like it just it still says Twitter dot com on on like a web browser but it doesn't say that in spotlight in your iPhone anymore which is just annoying well and then like and then X it's like if you had a website like X dot com like
people think we think it's pornographic or something it's just it's baffling and what's crazy is the last time he had a company called X dot com it was actually before pateo stole it from him while he was on honeymoon Elon Musk went on honeymoon and pateo just while he was away just like had a
board coup and changed its name to paypal what was crazy though was the original X dot com this is why everyone should not be excited about Elon Musk having their banking on there not that they are X dot com had an original problem going back to the 2000s I think it was where you could just enter
a bank account into there and just send people's money from the account with no other checks of any kind so like several people lost thousands of dollars but this is where they can spend them fucking this up forever were they competing with like dark web drug bark that is just one of
the first banking platforms that this is one of the very first it back in the 2000s there was one of the first banking platforms and there was one article in like CNAMP I don't have it in front of me where it was like yeah multiple people just they left their username and password behind
and someone just logged on and sent money to their bank and there wasn't anything that check that or had someone call you so people just lost thousands of dollars out of nowhere this is the last time he tried to do banking this is what he will do with your money can I really on some level I
don't believe he will ever add banking or anything money related to this platform but on some level are kind of though because you know someone like I don't know one of those lower tier conservative guys is going to lose a bunch of money it's just very weird because like dumb lucra is going to end
up losing 15 thousand dollars off the sun here for a fucking only fan swap that guy for if you don't remember by the way that was the one that got banned from Twitter for posting something with child pornography in there and then came back and now all he does is complain about the fact that
X is create a program does not pay him what it used to it's all he posts now he's just like yeah I don't understand I posted a old day I don't get anything this is ridiculous then this is a guy who mostly just post like trans panic shit and just weird conservative stuff that doesn't really
make any sense that was one of the craziest fucking pigs I've ever seen that guy he posted CP like straight on the timeline and it would I guess he was trying to say like look how bad this is like I don't think anyone was on the fan we all agree that it's yeah I used to approve it but I
realized I never actually sat down with it oh my god this is pretty bad and they like just like he should like be in jail yes you have that on your fucking computer yeah that's it he had to open his computer to put that on there yeah that was insane and he gives like a thousands of dollars
yeah like that's the unbound I like the idea though of a company where that's allowed and then taking on banking I mean I think like financial regulation in America really is it where it should be but even even the lacks standards of where it's at now I it would be like the most surefire way
for him to go to prison probably you know for all the problems with banking in America you can't have your banking platform allow child porn on it like I'm pretty sure if you went to JPMorgan online banking and there was a guy like a chatbot said you CP regulators would probably step in
that would probably be bad for them yes and but what's great about this as well as another great dog loop from moment is when he was complaining back in August of last year about the amount of him he got 472 million impressions and he was the number one trending topic on Twitter the month
previous and then he only got $2,400 as a payout but also what's great is Elon's response was if you can find advertisers want to advertise alongside your content then you get revenue share we cannot make them do this Elon must just complaining that he can't get advertisers but also
somewhat suggesting yeah your shit's gross but you know that's not what he thinks he's just like well it's not my fault the advertisers left even though he is the probably the only person really at full here he is the one person who could change things to make advertisers come back and the
thing he would have to do would have to be kind of violent but you know well how bad you want your company to be good his thing with advertisers was so insane to me because he he was sort of taking his stance like you know almost as if the advertisers need him more than he needs them and I mean
correct me if I'm wrong but does him Twitter represent an incredibly minuscule part of most large companies advertising budgets used to be 2% and now it's less of all online advertising spending yeah so he it's it's it's so it's insane to just create this problem where there was
none and you know it's a very easy thing for these companies to just not advertise there it probably doesn't affect them at all it's one of those things where like no people should not be noticing this and despite what Dom Luka is posting on Twitter for X formerly known as Twitter another
weird thing on notice about Elon is that like he conceptualizes his his mission in buying Twitter as saving the human race which is kind of translated now into this kind of like natalist ideology of encouraging people to have more children and Elon already always has like one
kid of his on his shoulders at like big press events like yet he took one of his kids to Auschwitz you remember when he met with Erdogan and Erdogan said where's your wife Erdogan Ole yeah I mean I mean that the whole have more children thing is really weird because I mean he does
that's one thing where he actually backs up what he's saying with a Nick Cannon like dedication to the cause and he that whole thing is very weird because he had like two kids he's had multiple kids with woman he wasn't even in relationships with and like whatever do whatever with your life
but it's also just very bizarre because it's almost the kind of thing you would think if you hadn't had human experiences like if you're just looking at humanity in a very distant way of like uh what if we have more people what could that have what could what could what if we have more people
even more companies right I don't fucking know all I do all day is played the ablifor and respond exactly to racist guys and so he's so I think he's just so otherworldly rich that he has completely removed himself from actual things not just bills obviously
and struggles but also from relationships to other people who might have children in a normal sense and I don't even mean ultra rich parents who have nannies I mean to the point that he just like no one around him has to his I don't know he probably doesn't I don't know do you how many kids
he has now like six like I don't fucking I think it's actually like 10 or 11 and it is which is insane it's crazy how do you spend time with them yeah how do you spend time with them and how do you like he had three of those kids by you know as you pointed out just going to an executive at space X
it'd be like uh can you accept my comb for two hundred thousand dollars and she said yes yeah sure why not fuck it I don't I don't go any for no one for the next nine it's just but it's the kind of thing that doesn't make sense because none of us have no bills none of us have no struggles
we must pay the power company or the power company will turn off our power we must buy more food and then put it in our mouths do it consume it otherwise we will die he just has people bring him things and bring him two places yeah and I think he might just have reached a point where he's like
I don't like what maybe more but he he may just be completely disconnected from humanity in this truly insane way like he is there's whatever is going on up there is very dark and weird in a way that I don't think any of us can truly conceptualize because this isn't just oh I don't have to worry
about it about pays all my bills or I have a nanny and they deal with one of my 10 children it's there are no predators there are no challenges my businesses cannot fail everything I do is news every one I speak to is more important by virtue of speaking to me here there was a tweet a while
ago about billionaires were saying it was like it must be like being kicked in the head by a horse every day when you wake up and I kind of think that might be what's happening to be clear this guy's a fucking asshole a piece of shit I wish him nothing but ruin but there's something very strange
happening something very horrifying almost I think however it ends with Elon in five 10 15 years it could be very dark yeah it right like he's not just surrounded by yes man the media were his yes men too it's and now it's kind of crumbling before his eyes and I think he's realizing well
I don't think he realizes what's happening but I think he's realizing something is different and he has no control over him yeah absolutely I don't like his current stance against the media is so insane because no one got as much uncritical free exposure and positive press as he did never from
like twenty twenty twelve to like twenty eighteen but I do yeah I think if any current you know top fifty richest person in the world is a candidate to do the Aubrey McClendon and like kill themselves in an insane way it kind of is here like he's the best candidate for that I feel like or he'll just
die of a heart attack yeah that is I don't know really much about the drugs he takes but I'll tell you taking all of those things while also definitely being really unhealthy that's that's a recipe for disaster and I will say he did he also deprived me of the thing I would have really
love to see which is Mark Zuckerberg beating him up remember that I would have paid any amount of money to see that fight it would have been you low tax versus uve bowl round two I don't know I mean I guess with like Elon and the have more kids thing or like paying space
ex executives to like have have more of his bring more of his seed into the world I think it comes back to like what we were talking about at the beginning with the AI generated art I think he's fundamentally disconnected from human beings in the sense that like I don't think he views like
having kids is like oh you have a kid and then you're like a presence in the kids life you raise them yeah you like you put in work I think he just views like human beings is just like a series of inputs and outputs and if you put the right sperm in the right in the right woman then you have
like more elons like you said I had more companies more innovation but like we're actually raising the kid or being a father to them as long as you've been as long as you have money it's just like it's immaterial to him and I think that a good way to look at it as well is everything has just
kind of worked out for him and there's a combination of luck and opportunism here I think you can't everything is technically luck and especially in his case it was he was born at the right time he was able to move to America and just go to what was it Princeton or Stanford he went but then he
dropped out and he happened to meet the right people and he was there at the right time and had good enough ideas and I think he is a good operator or at least was he was capable of signing the right deals with the right people and kissing the right ass and also being able to invest millions
of dollars at the right time being in those deals because people knew you had the money and knew you knew the right people helped him and I think right now what he's realizing is he is taking artwork to be clear actually don't think he's realizing this what's happening is he is managed
to find the only problems that don't get solved by knowing everyone you cannot fix Twitter by bringing more attention to it in fact bringing more attention to Twitter right now is killing it because the more people to see this sorry sack of crap who see arse and bio who see all of these
fucking weird things they're not going to go this is the place this is where it happens I want to get my news here they're like this is fucking straight what is going on why is this like this and he doesn't know what to do he doesn't know why the cyber truck isn't doing well the answer is
because he designed it he doesn't want to credit the people who did the things first it does tie back to what you said it's the same thing of these generative i-freaks who say okay yeah I'll just generate more art based on looking at a lot of other art great no it's not based on just having
more of something is actually understanding the problem you were solving it Elon Musk has never really been the problem solver other than finding more money and now also we we haven't heard a lot about Grop recently which is the generative i-freaks yeah yeah by the way Grop still refers to Twitter
as Twitter yeah that's so good he built and also what's great about that is did you see the did you see the the Grop roasting Stephen King and Elon just a 10 cry laughing emojis did you see that bullshit I did because it begins the same way every Grop grows begins with oh well oh boy
I don't know where to start with every single one you see says that it's this fucking corny apple bees dad fucking look where he's just like yeah don't know how to Stephen King he's more like Stephen Queen it's just very limp empty echoing hollowness more from Elon but also what's great
about Grop and what's great about X dot AI the AI company that makes Grop is generative AI does not make anyone any money it burns as we've mentioned it burns you throw like 18 cats per query in it but in all seriousness he built this thing he spent millions of dollars on it and it's probably
losing him money with each message he found oh he is so good at coming up with ways to make himself less money he's actually genuinely really good at destroying companies if he was doing a producer style thing here I would be like cool that's very funny but he's not he actually thinks
these are all great ideas but where was where was actually his last good idea as he had one Tesla designed by someone else all the Tesla's other than the cyber truck Twitter designed by someone else every new feature on Twitter he's done designed by someone else community notes he tried to
claim that was his someone else did it it existed as birdwatch before all of these features that he's done view counts on Twitter not useful actually a really good way of showing people you're doing ad fraud every idea he has his bad and the media is still not they're not showing up and saying this
everyone should roll their eyes at him but they're not just because there's money it's the same thing with general FBI there's an obvious problem with these things but there's something there's a fear I think of just folding one's arms and saying I actually don't fucking believe you what is the
actual point of rock existing is it just because like chat GPT's to woke is that really is yes that's actually the whole thing the whole thing was that he wanted it partly because I think he wanted in on the AI boom yeah he wanted to say he had his own AI but also Elon Musk actually found
it open AI and so he feels like he didn't get enough from that he didn't he didn't get enough credit for it because he's a fucking quatt this is a fucking nincompoop he doesn't care that he has all this money he has to have more and more credit but it's needs to be credit in the way that makes him
happy it's so weird it isn't obvious what he even wants I don't think he even knows yeah it like from what I can tell with Grock everything I've ever seen from it it is like those you know the sort of like Dutch and German guys that love Elon Musk they'll just the same thing every time
where you know they'll they'll they'll be like I asked Grock what it thinks of Brittany Griner and like you said it always starts out the same way oh boy where do I start and it like with sometimes chat GPT can can imitate someone's prose or style in a way that I think is like
kind of interesting or funny but with Grock it's just like okay am I am I making fun of an athlete they should spend more time thinking about basketballs and less time thinking about tweets am I talking about an author they should spend more time on chapters at less time in chat rooms
it's like who like that's actually funny yeah yeah genetically the only people that can actually laugh at that are Dutch people in Germans well guys who don't experience comedy yeah yeah the crying laughing reactions from Elon to Grock is just that is him like talking the shot
going out of his mouth yeah oh I will never feel sorry for him I think we should leave it at I think that's a good spot yeah I think that's a good place to end it again Ed Zitron thank you for your time if people want more Ed Zitron your newsletter your podcast where should they get
so go to betrothline.com and please click podcast and subscribe to betrothline starts week of the week of the 19th comes out on the 21st of February first things are the rock economy and my vision pro review and you can find betrothline.com will get you to my newsletter as well all right Ed Zitron what's again thanks for joining us today that does it for Chop-Low talk to you guys soon thank you so much Ed thank you bye