All media.
Welcome to you.
It happen here a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers.
It is it is your host me along with me as Garrison Davis. I I've I've played a video game before. I'm not very powerful, but I too have played many several video games. See I wouldn't I wouldn't say several. I've I've played like a few many. I have played too many, simply too many video games. So okay, this is this.
Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there, It's all really bad, And one of the people who's been making everything really really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers.
The PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of X I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah you might. You might.
You might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.
We will get to that I don't play those games. Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo huh, Mecca games and hell Divers two like a loser. That's that's reasonable, that's reasonable. Those are those are those are fine games. Oh and Sonic Oh god, okay.
Pushing aside the subject of Sonic, So okay, I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers. And I think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in one hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined.
So this is the largest entertainment market in the world, old by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value.
Right, something like.
Three billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games, and it's also mostly people who are women and non white. And yet, however, Comma, when people think about like the gamer TM you are not thinking about.
That, yeah, like as a political class.
Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first, like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity.
And obviously this is you know, this is a fascist movement. Now.
Part of the reason this works, and we're gonna be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is
an extremely large group of people because it's new. No one has sort of defined it as a political identity before, and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit, or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money, and
then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.
Yeah yeah.
And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on their right. There are a lot of like sort of political figures. I don't know, you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming, like h Bomber guy, I guess an example, like Hassan. To some extent, there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then by sort of like
become political. But on the other hand, game has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh god, Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is. Have I told you the story about Kebab the German No?
Oh boy?
Okay, so back in the dawn of Time I played a lot of Hearthstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like, good.
Is that like a resource management type game for like gae autistic people. No, this is this is the world of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad.
I think I think I peaked at like two k legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world's.
Digital collectible card video game.
Come on, Oh yeah, yeah, but two k legend na is like fucking shitter ranks.
It's bad.
I was never like good, good at it. I was just like okay, kind of. But you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up, and something I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers and these were like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kobob the German and it turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because he was a fucking German neo Nazi.
Well many such cases, yeah.
For people who like are not aware of of like mid twenty tens German fascism. Remove Kebob is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany.
So great stuff, great stuff.
This is just was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the twenty tens. Now this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're gonna look at are Sam bank and Freed's and this is this is really technically on both sides
of the political spectrum. Right, We're gonna look at Sam Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon musk Are new O. Lord, I guess, so we're gonna start with Sam Bankmon Fried, and you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why it's
so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to know like Sam bakmon Fried like is I guess like he is a gamer in the sense that like he's like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly.
Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense.
Yeah yeah, before before he was put in prison for twenty five years for fraud.
Well probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God. Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote, it's the most valuable voting block. Now all young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote for whoever makes line go up.
I'm gonna become the joker, So okay, then think about Sam magon FRIEDA for people who have forgotten who SBF is. He is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone money embedded on the stock market and lost it.
And you know, Robert did a sort of behind the bassarides on him.
And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit game called Story Big Bralgy Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like as as as any gamer will know a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the
worst categories people who's ever existed. And one of the things that that SBF did as as a sort of pr thing right was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big shorts We're gonna get to Moneyball in a second, blindside other books.
Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.
But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him, and this is something that like ICBF was like you know, was like projecting right in order for this to be the image of him, was him as like the gamer.
And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis right because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit.
So he plays video games stream meetings like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean.
I actually don't play video games stream meetings because it is too obvious.
But I play. I play video games a once a week. That's that's that's kind of my Oh.
God, this is the one part about sam Bakmon Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games. It is my like antidepression strategy, basically, like when I need to not think for a while, there's just MEO playing Actually pat the faxtyle too. One of the games that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.
That I play a lot of.
I've done so much fucking gaming, Like god, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a it's like a mob like League of Legends, but like third person and I played so much Smite that they were pro showing my casual games. When the Zoomer Revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute b I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know that's reasonable.
Like I can't argue with that. All in form the council. I'll aet our next spokes Council meeting. I'll bring it to the table.
But you know, so, so what what what what happens with this sort of thing is that is that Michael Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be so unbelievably brilliant totally because he's just like playing fucking.
Video games all the time.
And and this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this, this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing and and like and like SBF like is a gamer, right, but like why they why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would.
See for something like movies or like respectability in some way. Yeah, except in like the reversed Sam Bankman freedway, where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an extent your genius, right, like like like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, that's like he's he's so different, right, Like he's he's he's not like put together, and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker.
So it's kind of like it's kind of like a double edged sword in like that specific way.
Yeah, well, this this is all a feedback loop, right, because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been. These people don't play video games. They're one of the figures people who
just like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists, right, And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on, And it's just really really easily just sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer like you know you like you show a gamer like a League of Legends addicts, and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also, by the like gaming addiction like
is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like leg of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I know too many League Legisp players of my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game. Yeah, but arcane though, right, all right, oh god, Okay, we're gonna take an ad break, and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis.
Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.
So we are back now, Okay, Obviously, part of the reason this works too is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market.
Right.
But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really truly an unbelievably globle, dumbass. And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports. So he Lewis has written two of them famous books ever written about sports, right. He wrote Moneyball, which is just the book that we're gonna be talking about,
which we'll get to in a second. And he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bassarge and go listen to that, But I want to go in on Moneybomb. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog an athletics team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to like like build this roster out of nothing that like
went to the playoffs and did really well. And like I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, Like whatever, I'm not gonna argue about baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses, and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Pedesta, and he is he is like one of the main figures in this book.
He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically, what baseball team is this? Oh?
This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas Athletics or some shit.
I don't know that they moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called the athletics now.
No, no, no, they were originally called the Athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the well except what just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been the A's forever. But yeah, they've they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.
Oh see, I was thinking of the football team, yeah, because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las Vegas.
Theators go there too? Yes, yes, they stole both of them. That's what I was thinking.
And I am more of a baseball head than a football head.
But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna talking about football here. So this guy, right, Paul Podesta's like one of these sort of geniuses. She later goes on to be it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns.
Now to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are.
My opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons going one in thirty one, which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the Earth, no one is going to fucking go one in thirty one into cluss two seasons of football again, so again, that is a one in fifteen season followed by an
oh in sixteen season the second oh to sixteen season. Ever, unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's like mea, why the fuck you're talking about this? Part of this is also like these people are just evil. Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists
mostly have accused him of sexual assault. He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit, So so that that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson's He is just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right, He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him.
For a season.
And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy whom Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting, is like this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who've been on the Texans, And again, like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.
Nia, Do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans.
It is a team from Houston, Texas.
That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners.
They fucking traded this guy, right, and Popadesta orchestrates this trade that is three is it is the worst trade in the history of football.
It is three first.
Round picks, two thirds, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy who, again I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right, they hand him two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So, how does Shan Watson, like again this guy who's being held up by the guy who like is now laundering being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural like being.
A rogue outsider.
Right, how does Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due on the field. So in his first season he basically got injured immediately In his second season in weeks one through five out of out of seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.
They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get point three less points than an average team would.
How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video.
Game, don't We're we're we're almost we're almost done with the sports part of it. But there, I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is which is the argument, that's that that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for the right.
Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that. I can I can see that. Yes.
Also, I've always wanted to fuck you complain about this on area and this is this is the best fucking chance I've ever gonna get, So Jesus fucking because that's.
Like what I talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, Yes, this is what it feels like. Is this what I sound like? Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like.
So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback, they sign away basically the entire future of this team hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator two hundred and thirty million dollars. And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on, like by
the jock or whatever. Right, Like that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there' are like oppressed by this. But like it's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way down. And you can watch, like, just like the worst people in fucking history, this trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using,
by using both of these fucking affects. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as as this sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read Something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called game Boys.
Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that
one must master to live under current economic conditions. Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.
They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else the
fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by
CIS men. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to you remember both for Sam Bapen Freed and also for the construction of right wing gaming movements in general, and for like what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is contested ground.
Right.
As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right, there are a lot of what you would call it, you like traditionally sort of left flooming demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn, the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work, they're also a thing that people use to like escape
the fucking hell world totally. And like, I mean I know this right, Like I am fucking like I'm a Chinese chance better, he's better at video games, and both the people have been to be fucking talking about in this story, right, Like, well I.
Heard, I heard his Path of Exile character was actually quite advanced.
But oh, we're gonna where we're gonna talk about the Path of Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I mean it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which is a very very trans genre.
Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games, Yeah, it depends. It depends a lot on the genre.
But yeah, like competitive fighting games like yeah, Melee, I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black, non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time, incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat someone thirteen to zero in a first to eleven, absolute legend.
Right.
But you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life. Right now, these people are in power, and you know who else is in power. It's a product and services to support this podcast, All hail, we are back now. Obviously, the other part of this,
you know, we've talked to it. We've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. And you know, the thing about gaming, right is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system. And like I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dipshit.
Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad.
But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right, is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence and sort of different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system, but these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right, And this is you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and like I would compare it to like you know, lots and lots of people deal
with social isolation right and deal with this violence, but like you know, on the other hands, most of us don't become mass shooting.
Most most Yeah, I would say that's that's true.
Yeah, right, and so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like fuck them, like eat shit, like I'm sorry, you've you've become Nazis, like fuck off.
Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.
But yeah, yeah, but but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking like they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right, I mean like yeah, like okay, Like Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right, but like, also he is the richest man in the world's the most powerful man live. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived. And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement
that powers all these people. And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now it's it's been shifted into this not anymore. Yeah, Now now they believe that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women in minorities, right.
And and it's actually the people who actually doing the oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the top of the system. Now it's been we have we've had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso. But the thing is, these people.
Have always been at the top of the fucking system, right and like. But but it's this affect, it's it's this, it's this feeling they have of their of them being the ones who are oppressed, that like you know, made them into the shock troopers that we saw with gamer Gate. If you're gonna read one vicioskal Al thing, and I'm signing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't
done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry which are fucking terrible, and it's good, but like, as a medium, there hasn't been anyway near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music. But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read a piece called goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of
Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven when it came out. And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being i mean literally being used as like scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games, and you know, and this expands out to like workers more broadly, they're literally being used to silence anyone who talks about the problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint twenty seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people seizures
because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit anthe they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken.
Shitty game.
And you know, they're also used for just like anti queer and like anti feminist rasping campaigns, and that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too. And and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right, is that they're also like signaling to their base that like I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera, like you should
fucking support me for this shit. Now pivoting a little bit so when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of Sam Bankman freed, because like.
Then they said, yeah, in many such cases, Yeah.
Like the last the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out though I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamers stick thing totally.
Like specific in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now.
And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is like not really a gamer. I would say, like he sort of plays video games.
He's a Kenemian user. He's a Twitter power user. He is the shadow President, Yeah, the chisman of the world's bridges man who's ever lived. Yeah.
Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like a he's an elite video game player in like multiple games.
He's obsessed with this. He's also I believe the term is a meme. Lord h if I'm reading this right, Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two characters.
I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus, So like, this is the level of mind.
That that is one of his favorite names. In his White House office, he has a he has a Kechius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated image of like pet Bee the Frog and like and like Roman, like like Caesar at higher I hate everything. So yeah, this is the guy who reads the country now.
Yeah.
Oops.
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games, and the preface to everything we're going to get to you is that he has. Actually he's like for a long time been doing a like I'm a gamer thing. So his his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're gonna get you in a second. This is something that blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of because I'd
forgot he has so many gaming scandals. I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game, and he had two different shields equipped, which makes.
Literally no sense.
It's like over encumbered, Like it's okay, like the best eesspimation I've tried to I figured out for like how bad at this game he is? Is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports cards, stepping into like the shittiest call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking break.
On Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like the gaming equivalents.
And everyone who looked at me immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing. He is just like like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game, like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit.
And this was like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one, but like especially like this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot, and people were giving him shit about it. So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diabo four. I'm not gonna talk about diebol stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not Diabble players.
The Diablo and path backs are like fairy.
Much the same kind of game aim basically, like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things that it does attacks. But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the best Path of Exile two players in the world, and he was doing this on his alt ac count, which is has to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but the all the e's are threes. So with CYB three r GA M three R four twenty Wait.
Wait wait, wait, say say that again.
It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.
So I think I found something. I think the four to twenty at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday April twentyth God damn it.
So okay, he like claims to have one of the like the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of X or if he died once you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. It's to like prove that he actually did this. He like does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like on a Twitter live stream, and it is immediately obvious that, like he has no idea what he's doing, Like it's not just obviously people who play
the game. I hadn't played Path of Exil to at this point, right, I had only played the original one like a decade ago, like a little bit of it, And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before, like has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like it was so unbelievably obvious, Like he like walked past one of those valuable currencies in the game, just
like walk past it, didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious anyone who plays video games, This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing.
And this actually explodes on.
Him and eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile to account, and then he claims that he never claims that it was his path of XIL to account and this Jenny Weinley has been a real problem for him because it pissed
off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asthma Goold, who was like a he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass, like is like a turbo right winger, like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is dei and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry and fucking Asthma Goold is watching this video and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck?
And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's it's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this, to like to elon like this and like again, like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying. Now.
What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of Little Pets of Path of Exile player on a stream using someone else's account, But like, there's
no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And a lot of people he talks to you about the stuff are people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people. Right, it's like a lot of it's a lot of people who aren't gamers. And he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand, he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet of of gaming as like the sort of renegade writ
wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked up because he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer. But the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very very popular. That is just like people exposing people who cheated video games, cheated record to video games. And Elon has walk just like directly into this bear trap, right.
And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap it up, we beat Elon us. It's over. He's he's been cast out of civil society with the high crime of pretending to play a video game. He has lost all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.
So what's next? We have what he has? He has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Is this about the one video game he hasn't played? Which is the funniest Elon musk gamer story in my opinion? Which which are you? Which one are you talking about? That's the one that that that he had to publicly announce that he he does not play GTA five. Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that because he doesn't like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn't do it unquote. Oh, I really forgot about that.
So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity. God, now some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know, violence power fantasies. But at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GDA five. That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times strange behavior.
Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like a different like the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violent Sinfia games is bad because he's trying to single to all of his groups simultaneously, and all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.
It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy because again, he is the most powerful man in the world. No, but it is mildly amusing.
Yeah, But so that there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that like the pushback he is getting here is like I think actually kind of is significant. So the last thing I want to talk about it is him pretending to have been like a quake pro which the thing that he did quake, And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs, who is like his thing is like people who fake who like fake things in video games basically, and he is like not a leftist, He's like like
a center right guy basically. I mean, there's arguments about
exactly how far right he is. But he did a video about about Elon claiming to be a quake player and what he found so is Elon like apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of the good players were there, and he he came his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better WiFi than everyone else and so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good WiFi, and then
he got destroyed, which I just I just think it is funny, right, That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he he has this theme claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran someone who had the same amount of money that he did
and just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up is that, like at the end of this video, Jobstays goes on this whole thing about how and this is this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk and I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here
is a lie. And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass, but literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know.
And this is a real shift, right.
I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this, and so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon Musk is doing, and like just the willingness to just be like this guy is a fucking just just a serial liar, Like everything says is a lie. He literally calls him a con like, says that his
activity is like a con man. He says the things that he's saying are like either liars or delusional. There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like, really you are turning on him. There's day that happened literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft is a famously like not a leftist company, right, Like they've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff.
So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as like a character in it, and literally the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing
your Path of Axile two account told you? And like replied and replied to a thing about Hassan like we we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right this thing that had been like a really really consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him, is sort of being polarized against him by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pandering to them, and how unbelievably transparent it is, and like obviously, like I don't think like the gamers
are going to like fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this other and like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these people do this, and like gamers is like a demographic that's important to these people. Is that like, the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right, that.
Doesn't happen that often.
But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay home and that was enough enough. People just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks like came for Curenzi's government was enough
for them to take power. And I think like the actual, like the actual serious points of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can they can be stopped.
So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the start of gamer Gate two.
Gamer Get two is already happening, damn it, this is gamer Gate three.
This is an open call to begin Gamergate two point five right now on. Behalf of me along, because are you at me? A oh no, and then hopefully and I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we get enough gamers just to stay home or even better rise up right, we can we can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or a keyboard, if you're a nerd about it.
Gamers are the cosacks. We've got to get them to knock back the regime. That's actually the fine revolution where they stood down. But you know, same point, same point.
Come on, yeah, geez fuck, I am one of the.
Biggest things of Like people need to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist guy who was from the provisional government. In between the first Okay, we're done, We're done here, We're done here, we're fucking out, we're leaving.
What games are you play? What case if my playing path extyl too? Don't play Rotato it will consume your life. Okay, play robo quest. Roboquest is great.
Rob Request dares to ask the question, what if, like the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat.
That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that. Then I do Hell Divers to nearly every Monday. Armored Corps six Course six rules, love that game, Love that game, Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy seven, and I'm waiting for Mecca Break to come out for like their their official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character selection is very gooner coded. Many many such cases. No, I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest
size available on my on my model. But the gameplay is fun. This has been It could Happen here? I good they pay me for this. I had. I had to.
Watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of of of Elon Musk playing video games for this.
Oh, it could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.