Hater Season: Caleb Wilson, Juniper and Arif Hasan

Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed talks with Kill The Computer’s Juniper and Caleb and Arif Hasan of Wide Left about prediction markets, silicon valley’s billionaire whiners, and how Anthropic is trying to redefine “profitability.” Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen Arif wideleft.football x.com/ArifHasanNFL arif.bsky.social Caleb and June https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/killthecomputer.com https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer https://x.com/canteverdie YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Wow, you run a tech podcast and we're talking about how everything's getting bad, yet you rely on the technology today, that cloud-based technology. You don't like backups, you don't like recording on your own personal device. It's like you don't like owning anything. It's like you don't like owning anything.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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• 1:12Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Steph and I work at United Healthcare. When I think about United Healthcare's members, I think of my own family. My niece was diagnosed with an ultra-rare genetic disorder. I know how hard it is for families at United Healthcare. We can make it easier.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  I'm Brian. I care because I know what it's like to not speak the language. It's not easy. Health insurance is complicated. I would say our job is to make everything easy for our UFC members. I work for United Healthcare. I'm committed to care.

• 1:49Ed Zitron?

  Well, this is great. So I was trying to read the intro to my show Better Offline, but Juniper has decided that she will be leading us in today. Welcome to Better Offline. That's one of my very rude guests, Juniper, from Kill the Computer, who is here with her much less rude co-host Caleb.

• 2:08Ed Zitron?

  Caleb Wilson, Caleb, thank you for joining us.

• 2:10Speaker 06

  So far, so far.

• 2:11Ed Zitron?

  Yes. Yeah, it's a competition. And of course, we've got Arif Hasan from Wide Left, the football podcast plus newsletter. Well, we've come in, I brought everyone together today just to complain. And I'm going to complain about the fact that my microphone just fell over.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  Perfect.

• 2:27Ed Zitron?

  Which is annoying. I also want to complain that I wasn't given the opportunity to invest in something called Gary's List, which is Gary Tan, who currently runs Y Combinator, says, we're starting a citizens' union for radical centrism. We proved local politics is wittable in San Francisco. Now we're building the community to do everywhere news commentary and accountability for policies that affect California and our society. And I'm just going to say, go fuck yourself, Gary. If you say, if you write the words radical centrism, horrible.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  I hate that, man.

• 3:00Ed Zitron?

  I, I just love the status quo.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So I've actually been looking into, I've been learning a little bit about this guy recently and like Y Combinator. I primarily be like by proxy of finding out about this place in San Francisco called Epic Church. Are you familiar with this thing called Epic?

• 3:18Ed Zitron?

  What is this? What is Epic?

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Immediately sold.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's really epic. It's, it's bacon. It's, it's

• 3:26Ed Zitron?

  The gnarled bacon.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  It's cool beans. Yeah, it's all that stuff. But no, basically, it's this, this tech positive church, like basically an evangelical church for tech minded people and like founders in the, in the Bay Area. So like people like Trey, what's his name? Trey Stevens go there. Gary Tan goes there. All of these like weird, fucking awful type people. Like Peter Thiel, I swear to God, I am not shunning you. Peter Thiel is like one of the thought leaders of the type of people there. Like they

• 3:56Speaker 04

  How, how are we spelling thought, actually?

• 3:58Speaker 00

  Thought, T H O T.

• 4:00Ed Zitron?

  Thought leaders.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  That's epic. Yeah. But no, it's like the worst kind of person in the tech world getting evangelical. Like they're like

• 4:10Speaker 06

  They love their dogma, man. It's so sick. This is actually, this is like a whole This is where Peter Thiel got the idea to like create clavicular. He's like, I need a new holy blood boy.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  He is their Jesus Christ. Clavicular is their their virgin birth.

• 4:25Speaker 04

  We're Christ-maxing now?

• 4:28Speaker 04

  But it's like a whole thing now, right? Where like people who were like typically associated with movements that might be humanist or atheist or whatever you want to call it have like because they're old white men have turned into like embracing some version of Christianity, right? Like even Richard Dawkins, like the atheist supreme or whatever the hat he wears. He's like, well, I'm a cultural Christian and like all of them have just been moving.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  What the fuck is a cultural Christian? Isn't that just being American?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Yes. I look, he's a piece of shit and any way he can kind of communicate that I think he'll take those opportunities, but like the the tech god church feels perfect for that. I don't know. I feel like we've used the meme, uh, don't create the torment nexus. Like way too often, but it just feel like every time you explain something new about what's happening in the world. Like some tech billionaire has read something from a sci fi novel and has taken like the wrong lesson from it like again and again. It's like, oh yeah, we've started a church to worship technology. Oh.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Literally best example of this. Sorry, you can go, go, go on. Best example of this, just because he's been on my mind a lot recently and I've I read a lot about his his Antichrist. Like tour that he's been doing, but Peter Thiel, he read the philosopher Rene Verard and he came away with the exact opposite interpretation, I think of what you're supposed to take away from this philosopher, which is that like society and powerful people use scapegoats to uh like political scapegoats to uh put blame on certain people to get whatever political end that you want. And that's like a cautionary tale. It's like a cautionary tale against

• 6:19Speaker 00

  scapegoats. Yeah. Peter Thiel, he's like, wait, but scapegoats are kind of goaded though, like literally, like we can use them to our advantage.

• 6:27Speaker 06

  Is this a bad time for me to to announce that I'm launching my new company that's called the the ring from Lord of the Rings?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  The one ring.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  And you're partnering with a surveillance company. You're partnering with Palantir.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. I under under my company, all the surveillance companies will unite.

• 6:46Ed Zitron?

  Here's the thing with this, this Gary's List thing. I've been clicking around. He writes so often. Like he posts like an article a day.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  So this is a blog that he runs?

• 6:57Ed Zitron?

  I guess as well as that, but it also is not particularly good one.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Is this like Emily's List for perverts? Like what is Gary's List?

• 7:04Ed Zitron?

  It's, it appears to be a blog in which he complains.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  We need more of those. We need more substacks like that.

• 7:11Ed Zitron?

  It's complaining, but also a degree of, it's like complaining, but also saying he cares about centrism. And then he's like, AI just ported SimCity in four days without reading the, I fucking just, I want, what's makes me want to put a gun in my mouth?

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Is this like, he's attempting to wrangle Andrew Yang as like a guest poster or something?

• 7:33Ed Zitron?

  I just don't know what possible, like.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  I'm still stuck on the list idea. Why is it called list? I'm actually kind of mad about this.

• 7:43Ed Zitron?

  It's a list of his posts.

• 7:48Ed Zitron?

  Like that appears to be it. I, I just, this guy is a billionaire.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:55Ed Zitron?

  I assume that means he has tens of millions of dollars liquid. You could do so much with that. You could do pretty much anything. You could have your favorite chef, make a meal. If I assume you eat those and you could have your favorite band playing at the same time, wherever you wanted to in the world. And you're like, no, I need to make fuck blog for centrism.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like.

• 8:19Ed Zitron?

  I need to protect centrism from, from something.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  It looks like he's very anti-union. He is, he's complaining about in one of these articles about how 30,000 kids are pawns in a union war that won't even help the teachers. There, yeah, no, he is, it's exactly, he's the kind of guy, but that's the thing is like every, I feel like not, you know, maybe not every, but like the majority of the most influential tech. Tech Silicon Valley person these days are turning to evangelical religion. They complain about how there's not enough centrism in the world today.

• 8:54Ed Zitron?

  What does that even mean?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  And like simultaneously, they benefit and work with the Trump administration. So like, what do you, what are they, what are they even complaining about at the end of the day? And what do they mean? Yeah. What, what do they even really mean? I think they just mean that they don't like, really what I think it is, is I, I think they just don't like that people don't like them as much as people used to. People, these people are mad that no one's really following, falling for the, the like AI grift of like, oh, it's going to simultaneously, AI is going to replace all of our jobs, but simultaneously make the world a better place. Like, no one's really falling for that. And I think they're mad about that. I think these people are genuinely upset.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  AI is in its gentleman science era.

• 9:34Ed Zitron?

  What the fuck does that, what do you mean? What do you mean the gentleman science?

• 9:41Speaker 04

  It's a four minute read from Gary Tan, who.

• 9:44Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Who, okay, so it, it's just beautiful, right? Because all of the, all of the images in this article are obviously AI generated as for all of these articles, right? Because if you're gonna have an ethos of being a cheap piece of shit, you might as well embrace it. But, um, in it, it has a jar labeled maple syrup.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, what the fuck is that?

• 10:06Speaker 04

  And what is in the, I have no idea what, what is in the jar, but it is not maple syrup.

• 10:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, listeners will include a link to this because it is just, it, it's wonderful because it's just a bucket with maple syrup in it. I assume, but also like bits.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  O-rings and, or gaskets or something.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  It looks like a Chardonnay, is what it looks like.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  It looks like it has like some carrots in it. I don't know.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Very Chicago pilled, they call it.

• 10:32Ed Zitron?

  The TLDR of this article is LLMs have reset, the, reset the research game. The biggest breakthroughs are simple ideas, anyone can try, and the easy questions haven't been answered yet. To which I say, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean? The biggest breakthroughs are simple ideas, but the easy questions haven't been answered yet.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Come on, what does that even mean?

• 10:54Ed Zitron?

  I don't know. I just, this guy's a billionaire. He could do anything. Like he could hire a good writer. Like, for example.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  I can't get over the idea that.

• 11:05Ed Zitron?

  The gentleman's science.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  The issue is that science is too hard. Like.

• 11:11Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, that is kind of the issue of science in general.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  Well, that's a good thing, though.

• 11:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  We've gotten past the part of science that is easy, which means we have made advancements. And you have to study science to be good. I don't. This feels, what the fuck are we doing?

• 11:29Speaker 00

  He wants every dope to be able to advance the field, which like, I guess in theory.

• 11:34Speaker 06

  Science in the hands of a dud like me, I'm going to start the One Ring Company if you do that.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  You'll accidentally create a black hole with a hadron collider. Like, you will do that.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  Dude, Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet, and he is so fucking stupid, but I could be worse.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  Speaking of him, he's another person that's embraced this like, soft religion aesthetic. He was in an interview with Katie Miller. Of course, you need more demons around talking to people like Elon Musk. And he's like, yeah, you know, I believe in God, you know, I do believe in a creator. And it's like, all of this, I guess the reason I've been focusing so much on that in particular recently with all of these people like Gary Tan, all of these people, is it's all happening at the same time. They're all sort of doing this weird embrace of evangelical religion, all sort of, it started before Trump became president.

• 12:27Ed Zitron?

  Have ideas.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's, I don't know if it's like a cope thing. I'm sorry.

• 12:32Speaker 04

  I think, I think some of it might be, and this might be just doing too much like armchair pop psychology, but like, I think some of it is that in order to kind of proselytize for AI, in order to evangelize their own kind of element or this thing, they have to put themselves in a frame of mind that allows them to believe in the kind of powerful myth-making that is analogous to religion. Especially because some of these singularity people, which is not necessarily the same as some of these AI people, but there's a lot of overlap, do believe that AI will become God, right? Like a backwards looking God, you know?

• 13:13Ed Zitron?

  I don't think these people believe in anything.

• 13:16Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 13:16Ed Zitron?

  I just like, that's kind of like, but I guess that it's just a convenient label.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. Here, the word believe just serves as like an analog for telling us the things that they think we should believe, right? Like, I don't really care if they actually believe this shit. I care that they're telling people this shit.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  There was a really good profile on Peter Thiel, I think it was in Wired, about how he uses like, Christian apocalyptic end times imagery in a lot of his speeches. And I was really interested in all that, which we talked about on our show, Jim.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the, the piece about Rene Girard, the philosopher that he like, sort of, go on, sorry. Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  That's it. Just he does that. And then Girard, and then, you know, he's very big on Carl Schmidt. And I'll let you, if you know who that is.

• 13:58Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 14:01Ed Zitron?

  This all comes back to a very simple thing for me, which is, these are not things you do if you have anything you enjoy.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:09Ed Zitron?

  If so, if I'm sitting, if I'm sitting alone, it's been a long day, I have, I can name five movies and six video games I could do, I could, I've been weary watching Person of Interest, excellent show, makes me so happy. Watching with my girlfriend, it's awesome. Drink a Diet Coke with her. Wow, I feel awesome. These people are like, I need to take on a new religion. I need to create a pro-centrism blog. And only then will I possibly be happy. It's just, it's just, I would say it was sad if I cared for these people in any way, shape or form. It's just, I hear, oh, they're into religion. No, they're

• 14:50Ed Zitron?

  not. They just, they, they sit around like bored motherfuckers, tugging on their winkies, going, oh, what's going on? Well, if Jesus was real, and God was too, with the GPU, we've got 100 GPUs, if you put the GPUs together, it could make it the AGI. I don't know what that really means. But anyway, who's in your email inbox, Peter? Oh.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Jeffrey Epstein.

• 15:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. By the way, here's, here is the thing I'll say, uh, J-mail. I think the people who made J-mail should get a Pulitzer.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 15:24Ed Zitron?

  The people that made J-mail, which is the searchable, uh, Epstein database. Uh, really, really like they deserve a Pulitzer here. And also so does the guy who the final email that Jeffrey Epstein was received on JEE project at yahoo.com was just a guy called Cody, Cody Rudland. And he said, lol, good riddance. And the subject was you are dead.

• 15:49Ed Zitron?

  Fucking buzzer be.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  Incredible work, dude.

• 15:52Ed Zitron?

  He buzzer be Jeffrey Epstein. Just like bam. Also Jeffrey Epstein got invited to a Michael Clayton screening. Anyway, I don't want to get into Epstein because I know that'll be all.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. It's a whole different thing.

• 16:07Ed Zitron?

  It's just, we're in such a weird spot at the moment with all this AI shit as well, because there was that, uh, something big is happening piece.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, I wanted to kill myself with that. Oh, I haven't heard about this piece. I also want to be in a state where I'm going to kill myself. Tell me.

• 16:23Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, well. It, it's a piece by this guy who's like a scammer, who, guy called, uh, Matt Schumer, who back in 2024 claimed his, uh, reflection 70.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Wait, is this, is this when the AI like tried to post something to like GitHub and it got rejected?

• 16:40Ed Zitron?

  No, no, that's a different thing entirely.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  That was just the scam the week before.

• 16:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 16:46Ed Zitron?

  That, that one I'll get to in a second though. This was the one where it was like a 4,700 word blog. That's my.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Oh, I read it. No, no, nevermind. I did read this. Yeah.

• 16:53Ed Zitron?

  And you're, you're.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  I put it into a word count. I remember 4,700 because I put it into a word counter.

• 16:58Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Cause I was like, what the fuck is this? Um, yeah, no, it sucks, but yeah, uh, we have listeners. They should also know what this is. So go ahead.

• 17:06Ed Zitron?

  I mean, they heard about it on the model log last week. So.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 17:08Ed Zitron?

  They're all, and then the, most people said, don't, don't worry about being angry. And one person was like, you need to be less angry. Uh, it's just, I think we're entering like a hysteria zone. And I actually, my favorite thing about that blog by far was watching two or three other people try and do similar blogs and just nothing happened.

• 17:28Ed Zitron?

  People be like, actually, yeah, it's actually, it's actually crazier. It's actually even bigger and crazier.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  I, I, I think the thing that I thought was even weirder about that piece is there was a lot of people I do genuinely respect that like shared that piece and they were like, oh my God, like everyone needs to read this, like typically, you know, very skeptical people that have very good takes.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  Chris Hayes, dude.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, like all these people.

• 17:53Speaker 06

  Chris Hayes, sheriff?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 06

  I got people mad because I, I said some not so nice things about my friend Chris Hayes, but you know what? If you take that shit credulously, you're a doddard. I'm sorry, Chris. I can blew that one.

• 18:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  The thing about this article that like really gets me, it article, blog post, unvetted piece of AI, because it is clearly written by AI, by the way, like I, which should not be shocking, given that it's an AI evangelism piece. Of course, it's written by AI, which by the way, Cleveland.com, uh, released it, uh, like an editor's thing today.

• 18:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh God, yeah, we'll get to that in a second.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  They turned, or a, a journalism candidate had turned down a job with them because the, Cleveland.com is like the newspaper of Cleveland, right? Um, and a, a student, uh, who was trying to get a job with them turned down the job because they don't have reporters writing articles. They have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. So they just have the reporters do like sourcing and quote gathering and stuff like that. Feed into an AI. Yeah.

• 18:57Ed Zitron?

  God, dude.

• 18:58Speaker 04

  Um, and the editorial explaining this and explaining that journalism schools are failing students by making them think they should write.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  He's also obviously written by AI, but back to this article by Schumer. Um, so it is obviously written by AI, but it like keeps on coming up with these examples that like are contextually actually very poor examples of the thing that they're trying to demonstrate, but there's like a million of them, right? It's like a git gallop of like AI benchmarks that are meant to create this sense that AI is like the, like smarter than PhDs or past the bar exam. And it's like, well, when you look.

• 19:34Ed Zitron?

  Also, PhDs listen to this, and I will say this.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Not very smart people, I know of you.

• 19:39Ed Zitron?

  You've not met enough PhDs if you're like PhD level in tech. Not to say there are, every PhD is stupid, but not to say every PhD is smart either.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Well, okay, I will, I'll say this. Ben Carson is a gifted neurosurgeon, right? Like, think about that.

• 19:55Ed Zitron?

  Well, was.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Was.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  But like, think about that.

• 19:59Ed Zitron?

  People have their specialties.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  Right? Yeah. And PhDs are incredibly talented within, but like, even with analogous specialists, like, we've seen PhDs in, like, chemistry go, come out and write books about how, like, AIDS isn't real, right? Like, chemistry's pretty close to biology, and you still got that fucking wrong, right? But regardless of, like, that, like, stuff like pass the bar exam is, like, in the thing. And it's, like, contextually, it's actually not that interesting, because they passed something called the universal bar exam, which no individual state uses. There's, like, a million other things.

• 20:35Ed Zitron?

  Also, the best, the best thing in it was him saying that he cited this METR study.

• 20:42Speaker 04

  Oh, it doesn't even say it!

• 20:44Ed Zitron?

  Well, no, no, but what's great about it is it's like, it's like, tasks that an AI can do, the involve it working autonomously for hours, hours and hours, right? When you go and click on it, it's actually tasks that it succeeds at 50% of the time.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Meta or whatever it was, is absolutely mischaracterized, like egregiously mischaracterized. Like, to the point if we had journalism still, and this was run in a newspaper that cared about stuff, which, what a bygone era that we pretended to have.

• 21:17Ed Zitron?

  So sad.

• 21:59Speaker 07

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• 22:32Speaker 00

  Another part of this like whole conversation is that the thing that's been pissing me off for a while now, but especially recently with this like increased hysteria around like, oh, AI is like the big, the big thing is going to happen soon is it's like, people keep saying that it's smart, that it's, that it's going to be smarter than humans, maybe even that it is smarter than humans already. When it's like, there is no, unless I'm missing something, there, it has not shown any level of original intelligence. What it can do is that it's just more of a very efficiently combing through databases of words and like just information. It's very efficient at that, but I, that, that doesn't prove intelligence as far as I'm aware. So whenever people say AI is intelligent, I lose my fucking mind because it's not.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  It's just fast. It's a fast database search that like, it's just like pukes back out at you.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  I do have a counterpoint to that.

• 23:25Ed Zitron?

  What is it?

• 23:26Speaker 06

  A Matt Schumer specific counterpoint. And when you posted on Blue Sky the other day, that he was the guy who made that awful uh, video game, this is the future of moving things.

• 23:38Ed Zitron?

  Oh yeah, if you've seen this listeners, it's the video game thing where it's like, it's like two minutes and just, it is insane. Like the UX changes.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Do you remember that? Wait, the game, the, oh. The game that kept shaking. Yeah. I always remember this.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  And like the guy falls off the, the bridge and, and the guy's like really impressed that the AI put him back on a bridge, but it's a completely new bridge and a completely new fucking castle in the town.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Lakitu could do that in Mario 64 30 years ago, dude. Like, come on.

• 24:11Ed Zitron?

  Wall Street Journal today, yes, you can vibe code. Here's how to get started. Fucking stop.

• 24:18Ed Zitron?

  And it's like you go and look, it's like sample task, merge files, extract information, clean and convert files, fix finicky images, get rid of garbage. Well, I'm fucking reading some and it's, I just feel like we're in this hysteria mode where just every day there's just this bizarre escalation of like, wow, AI is so powerful. And look, it's replacing workers. But then you click on the article, it's like, well, fields that involve maybe being affected by AI have seen less entry level hires. And that will be on the front of the Financial Times.

• 24:55Ed Zitron?

  Like, that's just like, that's what we're doing. Every other era of actual innovation, they'd be like, yeah, you can like, you have a DSLR, perhaps not DSLR, but like a very nice camera in a phone. Look at the photos. Look how good the photos are. Wow, this phone can can use email now. That's a huge deal. This is like, yeah, if you squint really hard, it's almost something.

• 25:18Speaker 04

  I think the thing that gets me is if you, which I'm sure someone has done this, if you take this Schumer article and feed it into an AI and said, hey, can you produce a counter article that goes point, point, it would be equally as compelling, right?

• 25:34Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  That's a, that's an interesting idea, actually. I don't like using AI, but I would love to see that.

• 25:42Ed Zitron?

  I will be honest, I actually did that.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Perfect. See?

• 25:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 25:46Ed Zitron?

  I did it using his own, uh, he's actually his own, uh, thing. Let's see, let's see if I've got this. Yeah, because I did it in, I pulled up Hyperwrite, which is his dog shit, his dog shit, uh, AI startup. And it basically said, yeah, you know, it's mostly just hype. I don't have it in front of me. I'm sorry. I don't, I didn't prepare.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Bad journalism, Ed.

• 26:10Ed Zitron?

  I know, I know. I've already had to.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  Good thing we have a real journalist, June, here to.

• 26:15Ed Zitron?

  Here's me, actually, this is just me straight up complaining, which I know is different to usual. I write like ten to fifteen thousand word analyses of things and I am so detailed and I go through years of earnings and shit and this guy's like wow you know the computer's just fucking so crazy now and like do you read that like AI is learning from itself and like it's amazing like and look at this and people are coming themselves reading it they're like they're like we need this guy on national television and then he's then he says oh I'm not trying to scare people fuck you you little worm.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  So Ed I I do have a question about these AI because I don't get these AI startups I don't know you don't fundamentally understand but I think you know more than me which is I if there's only like eight or nine like models out there like DeepSeek and Kimi and what what the fuck is an AI start like they they take these models and they what give us a prompt beforehand so it's better organized for the tech okay.

• 27:21Ed Zitron?

  From the very from the very lowest AI startup to the most successful ones like any sphere who makes cursor it is much more complex at the top end but it is prompt engineering it is finding ways to translate what you say to it into a prompt that the model will then use to do something like that is.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  One of like the eight or nine existing models like.

• 27:43Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 27:44Speaker 04

  DeepSeek and Claude and what okay.

• 27:46Ed Zitron?

  What's really funny with this guy's startup though Hyper right which is by a company called OtherSide AI is they raised two point six million dollars in um let's see in November twelve twenty twenty then they raised another let's see other side another two point eight million in uh March twenty twenty three.

• 28:08Ed Zitron?

  Where the fuck is the money where is it? Where is it? Where did it go?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  When you used it, did you pay for it?

• 28:15Ed Zitron?

  No, God, no.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  So, yeah, okay, now, yeah, that's a great question. What the fuck?

• 28:20Ed Zitron?

  No, I truly don't know. And it's, it's a, the current, this is from 2023, the current iteration of Hyperwrite, which is a Chrome extension with personalization and context awareness, launched in early 2022.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  It's a Chrome extension?

• 28:33Ed Zitron?

  This is the fucking guy. This is the guy. This is, and I, I think it just shows that none of these AI boosters actually believe in anything, because I don't know. When I see someone doing AI criticism and they're just making shit up, I'm like, hey, don't do that. It weakens our argument. These people are like, yeah, just lying. Just, it's fine. Just, wow, I agree. I saw Alexis Ohanian talking about it. One of my favorite guys who's just fallen from, fallen from grace. Like, his big previous investment was this thing called Doodles, Doodles NFT, that he claims to be big.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  NFT, no, no.

• 29:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he's like a big NFT guy.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  I feel like.

• 29:16Ed Zitron?

  Do we think Doodles is better or worse than V Friends? What's V Friends? Oh, Gary V's thing. No, no, it's, it's, V Friends is the, Gary Vaynerchuk. What is Gary Vaynerchuk doing? If he isn't in AI? He's in AI. We, I don't even have to look that up. I, I feel it in my bones. I, yeah, I. He also has a.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  He's the one that looks really sick all the time, right, Gary V?

• 29:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Like, doing enough in your life or whatever. He sounds like Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Why do, why do these tech people, despite being like, a lot of, like, very health-focused, to like, a degree that is unnerving, they always look sickly. They always look just very wet and sickly and moist.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Well, Brian Johnson, I think, did that on purpose. Like, I think he wants to look like that. So.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. And he succeeded. He is really good at looking very sickly and, and wet.

• 30:05Ed Zitron?

  So I think what it is, is these people, in my experience, work insane hours. Now, work is a kind of a relative term, but like, they're in meetings, or dinners, or lunches, or what have, or just staring at X the everything app 24/7.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  That's hard work. That's a lot, dude.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 30:27Ed Zitron?

  That's a lot, that one. No, I mean, like, I can't judge someone for doing that, but like, they don't have a time when they're sitting around, like, taking an edible and watching YouTube's of manual cats, like Palace Cats. They don't have joy in their lives like that. But they are working all the time. They emerge from that process tired and wet. Yeah, because they're tired and damp. Just like, just like. Visibly moist. Visibly moist or terrifyingly dry.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  They all look like they have a disease that they have to explain to you that you've never heard of, while you just look at your phone and you're like, damn dude, that's crazy.

• 31:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, man, that's crazy.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Doesn't Jordan Peterson have one of those diseases that's just like sort of low key fake? Like, his daughter's like, yeah, he has this thing, and then you look into it, and it's just like sort of fake or something like that?

• 31:19Speaker 06

  It's called ADHD, June.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Okay, I was under the impression that she had induced it. So that's, which is slightly different than fake.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, his cider psychosis.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know, he has some weird shit going on. He has a ton of different things happening.

• 31:37Ed Zitron?

  It's just no one happy would defend a corporation this much. Like, I, I say this as reading forums of people arguing about video games for years. I, even then, the idea of being so desperate to protect the idea that corporations can make more money is so very fucking sad. But it's kind of, it's turned into everything now. I mean, I saw on Twitter the other day, people gambling on traffic. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? I don't understand this.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  That's so awesome.

• 32:13Ed Zitron?

  What is the target function? Like, how do you, how does the book verify that you've won or lost your bet? It's one of the, I don't think this is like a particularly nuanced bet. Like, it's like, it's like people gambling, let's see, how many cars will go through in a particular period?

• 32:33Speaker 00

  People, oh, people need hobbies, man.

• 32:37Ed Zitron?

  You gotta call the hotline, man. That's nuts. No, I, I'm quoting Will Manicar of Chapo here, who posted this about a sport where guys just run into each other.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, I've seen that.

• 32:48Ed Zitron?

  And his post was just, this is the sport they watch in Robocop.

• 32:55Ed Zitron?

  And it's like, it's like, it's just Robocop stuff now. It's just prediction markets. I saw, oh God, we're gonna do a prediction market episode. We've got a bloke from Barron's coming on to talk about that. Yeah, it's fucking great. I love prediction markets.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  I mean, they're getting worse. They're getting so, so, so bad.

• 33:12Ed Zitron?

  Someone was talking about betting on whether a rocket would explode.

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, the new rocket, the rocket that's, I don't know when it's launching, but it was, yeah, that like someone, I screenshot this reply in particular from Polly Market. Let me find it really quick. I swear, I just, I just did it and I'm gonna, I'm gonna read it.

• 33:29Speaker 04

  And this was like a NASA one too, not even like a SpaceX one.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was disgusting.

• 33:35Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's Polly Market and all, like, I don't know how long all of that will work, like, how long before that gets outlawed by someone. But I think something that might accelerate that process is someone getting killed because of it.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, like Gary Busey's awful son in contact is gonna blow up that rocket, dude.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, so, so what I saw, someone said that, sorry to be a scold, but wagering on people dying should not be legal, which I think is the most moral and correct thing in the world. That's fucking crazy that we have like gambling on this.

• 34:07Ed Zitron?

  Sorry to be PC here, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna draw a line in the sand.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  That, yeah, very, very good take, person. I, yeah, great take. But then Polly Market replied to that, saying, to clarify, this was a market about a potential booster stage rupture, a defined hardware failure scenario, not about the Orion Crew capsule or astronaut safety. This was not a market on crew injury or loss of life. But like, I don't know, man. I feel like if you are gambling on any stage of this sort of exploding disaster, that's sort of gambling on disaster.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  We saw that there was gambling and, and prediction markets about Palisades Fire, how long it was going to last, how far it was going to reach. So like, the idea that people gamble on disasters is not like, oh, wow, this took us by surprise that a lot of people thought this would happen. They've, it's been happening for over a year now. People have been gambling on disaster for over a year now.

• 35:01Ed Zitron?

  Well, Nick Devois, the bloke from Barron's, who's gonna join us, and as in not today, don't worry, he's just gonna punch, just fucking like a, like a half time substitution.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  He's here right now.

• 35:11Ed Zitron?

  No, he, um, he made the point, it's like inevitable that someone uses this to manipulate someone's.

• 35:19Ed Zitron?

  Murder, like they create a market where someone says, okay, yeah, you're going to like this. Will this person live or die on May 13th? And on some level, it's like this will encourage someone to get killed. Like, I know this sounds extreme, but Polymark, Nick also made this point where it's like, Polymarket already encourages insider trading.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we saw this with, with like, in addition to the Maduro stuff, right? But we saw this with like Pam Bondi's press conference times where she got within like 30 seconds of that, which is like, you could say the markets hit that really well, but I'm not going to say that. I think that she knew someone was going to make money on the under, right?

• 35:59Ed Zitron?

  Well, what was the, what was the?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  It was, it was how long a particular press conference on a particular day would go. And it's like, you know, a couple of hours and then some. And, and she abruptly, like in the middle of like a sentence.

• 36:13Ed Zitron?

  She just walks off.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Shut it down 30 seconds within, uh, within 30 seconds of like the timeline to hit the mark. And so a bunch of people who had, we shouldn't say bet on the under because it's not betting, right? Who had, who had purchased contract shares on the event result of it being less than the certain amount of time, made a ton of money out of it. Yeah. So like, people are already either actively manipulating it or not doing anything to prevent the appearance of manipulating it. Like when, um, um, Yanis Tete Kupo for the Milwaukee Bucks, uh, who is now like on the chair or something for Kalshi?

• 36:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he's a chair, a board member of Kalshi now.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like, he had like demanded a trade, it sounded like, from the Bucks to an organization that'll actually win games, which is understandable. Um, and there was this whole trade market and Kalshi had a bunch of different markets for, for Yanis and where he was going to go and whether or not he was going to stay. And ultimately he didn't get traded, he stayed with the Bucks. And everybody who would bet that he was going to stay with the Bucks had made a ton of money. And then right after that, he announced he was on the board of Kalshi. And it's like, I don't know that Yanis or any of his entourage or whoever, put any money on, on any of these things, but that sure looks fucking awful, right?

• 37:39Ed Zitron?

  They probably did. I would be, I would bet that on Kalshi.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  I would imagine.

• 37:42Ed Zitron?

  I would bet, I would take that bet on Kalshi that they did. I, I just, I.

• 37:49Ed Zitron?

  Every, I think that there is goodness in our future and that good things will happen. But I think on the way there, there are going to be, there's going to be something called the Kalshi murders. Maybe.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:01Ed Zitron?

  No, for sure. There's good, like, we already, we've already, thankfully, I got to use my, my term, son, son of Sam Altman for an AI psychosis murder. I mean, very sad.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  I mean, like, no, terrible, but also like, for you personally, nice.

• 38:15Ed Zitron?

  Nice, but it's just, it feels like we're in this weird gulf where everyone is desperately trying, all the money is trying to pretend that all of this is so fucking sick. When you look at it, even as a booster, it's like, great, coding's faster, I guess. Yay. It's also so expensive and no one wants, no one wants to do the math.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's like the other thing about this is like, all of the booster arguments for AI coming for different industries and jobs, or being able to perform different tasks or whatever, right? All of the arguments about its increasing capability rely on an assumption that the progress, quote unquote, progress is measured by their own benchmarks anyway, that it's made so far, will continue at an exponential rate in the same way that we envision technology tends to, which is not really, like, if you look at the progress of, like, battery technology, it does not follow the same fucking, like, it's just not like that. But the way that people seem to imagine technology is this, like, crazy, you know, exponential, it spikes up and so they, they put that assumption on AI. Right. Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 39:27Ed Zitron?

  It's just when you look at the chart, disco, disco sales will go off.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'll just double every year. Yeah. But people will assume this and they'll make the argument that it will without understanding, like, what it took to get to the shitty place it is now and how we're at the edge of that. Like, we can't actually devote

• 39:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, we're not at the beginning.

• 39:49Speaker 04

  More resources to make these models better.

• 40:02Speaker 08

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• 41:08Ed Zitron?

  So what's funny is there was, because Matt Hughes, who's my editor, who's long-suffering. Yeah, poor guy. By which I mean, I made, no, I made him watch a two-and-a-half-hour-long Dario Amadei interview. Sorry, Matt. But he found one fascinating quote in here. This is Wario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic. "Even though a part of my brain wonders if it's going to keep growing 10x, I can't buy $1 trillion a year of compute in 2027. If I'm off by a year in that rate of growth, or if the growth rate is 5x a year instead of 10x a year, then you go bankrupt." And previously, he said, "If my revenue is not $1 trillion, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt

• 41:53Ed Zitron?

  if I buy that much compute." I want to be clear.

• 41:58Ed Zitron?

  Well, no, this this interview, by the way, is fucking sick. It's so funny. What's that? He he uses this example where he says he has, he he describes having better than 50% gross margins, but that's because the way he evaluates gross margins is based on how much a model costs to train and how much the model made money, like how much money.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  He separates out the training cost and the inference cost and buckets out future training cost against a different margin. And so like, I, you know, if you did, um, Sonnet like 4.5 or whatever, it the amount of revenue Sonnet 4.5 brings in is greater than the inference plus training cost of Sonnet 4.5. And he's ignoring the training cost of like 4.6, which is like 10 times larger and it always needs to be.

• 42:55Ed Zitron?

  He's ignoring the reinforcement learning and the updates they have to do, which is also a training cost. But actually, I I take it back. Here is how Dario Amade talks about profitability. Let me quote him here. Profitability is this kind of weird thing in this field. I don't think in this field profitability is actually a measure of spending down versus investing in biz in the business.

• 43:18Ed Zitron?

  I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you've overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time. No, Dario, profitability is when you make more money than you spend.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  You underestimated the that's such like a fake smart guy way to say that.

• 43:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I like that they can have their own metrics.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  The amount of demand you were gonna get like, yeah, I guess the price would go up in a world where your supply doesn't meet demand.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  They they unlocked capitalism too, and they unlocked a new version of profitability. That's awesome.

• 43:52Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, he said that these are stylized facts.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  What?

• 43:57Ed Zitron?

  That's that is his term.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  See, I hate these people.

• 44:02Ed Zitron?

  No, I just, if I'm an investor and I read my investment saying stylized facts, I'm stylizing a nine millimeter in my mouth.

• 44:15Ed Zitron?

  It's just like, I, I am, I think things are going to get crazier, not in the actual outcomes, but the things they're gonna start promising. Like, I can't, I hope Anthropic tries to go public, just so I can see what insane definition of gross margin they have. Cause I don't think it's, uh, like revenue minus COGS. I think it's a model plus N plus divided by 70, divided by 7,000 plus 2 million plus one. And they're like, yep, look, numbers higher than last year. What do you think? And, and the investors who just are, I assume, catatonic, like they're pitched in their sleep.

• 44:56Ed Zitron?

  I just, it's all gonna, I, I don't see how this doesn't come down. I'm just like, look, every time I look at the numbers, I feel crazy. But when I read their definitions for it, they just go, yeah, just, you know, work out.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  I, so, so I don't know if you guys have been noticing this, particularly since, also, I know you guys like this football, the Super Bowl. Ever since the Super Bowl.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Never heard of it.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Uh, no, yeah, brand new to you. Uh, but there, there was a ton of AI-generated ads in the Super Bowl. Since then, I have seen three different companies, one of them being, um, uh, Liquid Death, another being Noodles and Company.

• 45:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  And another one, I'm blanking on which, what, what the, what the other one I saw was, but I saw, this is after the Super Bowl, different companies using AI-generated fucking ads and they're horrible. They're horrifying. They're awful. They're so bad. They don't make me want to even look at the brands anymore. And it's like, I, I, my theory, I, I haven't confirmed this. I haven't looked into it. But I'm assuming a lot of these AI, uh, generative AI models, these, these, these companies, whoever runs it, are striking deals with these companies to do like, hey, like make this next ad campaign entirely on us, entirely on us. Because in these ads, they do mention that they're AI. Generated. I I think the the noodles and company once says it like in the corner. It's like AI.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  There's like a little pun. It's been a minute since I've seen it, but there's like a little pun to be like, oh, it's AI. So I think these are like very obviously ad campaigns to try to be like, hey, wow, AI is everywhere, isn't it? It's crazy how everywhere AI is. Everyone loves AI.

• 46:28Ed Zitron?

  It's an attempt to just get attention because like it's basically like, look how much this sucks, but we cost us a lot of money.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's what that's explicitly what Liquid Death did in their ad, right? They they were like very like they thought they could kind of get away with being like tongue in cheek about using AI. And and it like kind of fits their brand image to be kind of irreverent or whatever.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  And so then they made a terrifying, horrifying, uncomfortable ad.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  The worst.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  About was it their energy drink?

• 46:58Ed Zitron?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  It's just one of their drinks.

• 47:00Ed Zitron?

  Have you seen the Darren Aronofsky AI generated thing? Seventeen this day in seventeen seventy six. So if you haven't heard about this, dear listeners, unbelievably big fucking hack Darren Aronofsky is making a he's making a thing called On This Day Seventeen Seventy Six. A is is telling the story of America's first meme. I didn't learn any American history. I'm not going to start today. They handed out some shit to some people, I guess. Just like there's some historian, let's think it's like you fucking piece of shit.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  No, no, no. My understanding of of seventeen seventy six is that it's a John Boyce piece.

• 47:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, with the really long football fields.

• 47:43Ed Zitron?

  No, so this movie, it's it's called On This Day Seventeen Seventy Six. America's first meme is born. When Thomas Paine arrives from England, he is encouraged by Benjamin Franklin to write what others hesitate to say. The resulting pamphlet sends ripples through from the colonies to the other side of the Atlantic, and what was once unthinkable becomes irrefutable. As in, I don't know, the, he's a huge fucking hack. There is a, there were some really good bits in it, like Thomas paying the collar of his shirt changes between shots. They have to constantly cut shots early because the, the mouth don't move, right?

• 48:15Speaker 04

  The model like breaks down after six seconds or whatever. So yeah, it's really expensive to have really long shots.

• 48:21Ed Zitron?

  There's a great bit in it where they hand out common sense and as they hand it out, as they pick it up, it, it goes from saying America to like, blah, blah, blah. Just like some cthulhu language because.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  Well, unintentionally kind of apropos, I would say, but.

• 48:34Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but apparently they're releasing it on Netflix's YouTube. Oh, God.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  On Netflix's YouTube?

• 48:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's like really like the fam.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  That sentence sucks. What?

• 48:44Ed Zitron?

  It's like the Family Guy Ringo Starr thing with like, we'll put the song on the fridge.

• 48:51Ed Zitron?

  But I haven't seen more of it. They put out a few bits of it and then they just stopped releasing it, probably because of all the comments that said, this looks like dog shit. Kill yourself.

• 49:04Ed Zitron?

  It's mostly just that.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  So like, I, the thing is like, you could, if it didn't have this insane cost and, and, and ethical problem associated with it. You could convince me that like that one Marvel opening for, um, whatever the fuck it was with the scrolls, right? Where it's unsettling and it changes a little bit every couple of seconds.

• 49:27Ed Zitron?

  What is this?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  There was, there was a.

• 49:29Ed Zitron?

  What, Doctor Strange?

• 49:31Speaker 04

  It might've been Doctor, well, if it was Doctor Strange, that wouldn't have been very helpful. I thought it was like, there was a Marvel TV show where the opening, uh, because it's a, it's a show, I haven't watched anything after, um.

• 49:42Ed Zitron?

  Was it like the scrolls?

• 49:43Ed Zitron?

  It was Secret Invasion.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, Secret Invasion, which involves the scrolls, right?

• 49:47Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  And so the opening for that, uh, was it with the early version of like AI video generation and it is uncomfortable.

• 49:55Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I remember.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  And, and it, and it's changing a lot and you can't keep a stable image. And it's like, well, you know, there are a bunch of problems, both like environmentally and ethically from a plagiarism standpoint. That should stop this from happening, but aesthetically, this does make sense for this show. Why the fuck would you need that for Thomas Paine's common sense? Like, it's just like a bad aesthetic. What the fuck are you doing?

• 50:21Ed Zitron?

  It's because you're a fucking hack.

• 50:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Okay, well, yes. No, that is a good.

• 50:25Ed Zitron?

  Just what pride do you have in your work if you put this out? If I was a filmmaker and it looked like this, I would just stop making movie like it's just.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  It completely devalues whatever catalog he has.

• 50:39Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I like.

• 50:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I actually like some of Ernovsky's stuff, but if you know anything about him at all, like this makes total sense. The guy is a just.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Well, has he has he done anything good after Black Swan?

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Ah, it's I liked caught stealing.

• 50:53Speaker 04

  I mean, he did the.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  I I haven't seen that, so. I he I mean, he did the whale. I haven't seen the whale. I was going to see caught stealing. I just never got around to it. It seemed like it could be.

• 51:01Ed Zitron?

  It's exactly that kind of movie. It's exactly the kind of.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Wrestler came out after Black Swan.

• 51:06Ed Zitron?

  What was that?

• 51:07Speaker 06

  Wrestler came out after Black Swan, I think.

• 51:09Ed Zitron?

  I never saw that.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  Doesn't matter. He's got some. He's got some okay movies, but he also steals. He loves stealing like half his career is.

• 51:15Ed Zitron?

  Well, there you go.

• 51:16Speaker 06

  Satoshi Kon.

• 51:17Ed Zitron?

  Well, there you go. It's it's very appropriate. I also love the idea that they used AI for the opening of Secret Invasion, which had like Samuel L. Jackson in it.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  I know.

• 51:26Ed Zitron?

  Like very expensive actors. Also, years of footage they could just cut together without spending any money.

• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  I don't know.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  It's I I think it's the thing where it's like I I I've been trying to like figure out exactly why, because I've felt this and a lot of people have felt that AI just feels bad. And I I I've drilled down, I think, on on like as much as I can, because there's so many different parts of it that feel bad. But I feel like there has to be like a source of the bad feeling. And like, I think the bad feeling with AI is if you put aside the environmental factors, because of course that is like one of the main ultimate bad things. But the reason why it personally feels bad in the world is it just it it is constantly pushed on to us in a way that it's like, oh, you you're gonna love this AI. It's gonna be here. You're gonna not. Everything's going to be AI. It's gonna take your job.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Uh, you you should consult it about what temperature it is outside. Uh, it can tell you if you a glove is good for snow. Uh, it's like it's stuff like.

• 52:29Ed Zitron?

  A natural example.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's like stuff like that. It feels like it is just like people that the tech world is like you will like AI and you will not complain about it. And if you do, we are the victims. And that's why I think it feels bad.

• 52:43Ed Zitron?

  I can't like, I actually do think that leads into one of my definite predictions, which is when AI shits itself and dies. Because I think it's going to end up being on device or really expensive, like expensive in a way that just no sane person would pay for. I can't wait for the articles and posters where it's like, look what you did.

• 53:06Ed Zitron?

  Millennials killed the AI industry. No, it really, it's gonna be like millennials killed it. Like, look, we had this amazing thing that sometimes got things right sometimes. And cost, it costs $10 to make $1 and coders were able to write at an indeterminately faster speed.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  And after you were done ransacking Olive Gardens, you went to AI.

• 53:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, like Gary, like the Gary Vee or maybe the other, one of the Garys will have an article about like, oh, you've never lied before.

• 53:41Ed Zitron?

  What's really, what's, it's just, it's people without culture or sensuality trying to do both. I think the AI video doesn't look good because it looks, it looks like a next Netflix movie. In that it's got this kind of pallid color pallor, but also when people look at each other, they're not looking in each other's eyes. Yeah, that's always their outputting.

• 54:02Speaker 04

  And the shadows are off like they are in a bunch of like Netflix features now, like the shadows are really off and it's really off putting. And so nothing looks like a movie anymore and AI kind of triples down on that where the lighting is bad, the shadows are off. But to me, the like, the issue is AI writing is

• 54:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  grotesquely bad. And, and I, I say that not because it is like, I've had writers submit to me pieces that from a technical perspective are worse than if an AI had generated the piece, but like it's, I mean, it's, you're a new writer that.

• 54:38Speaker 06

  Dude, I'm right here.

• 54:43Speaker 04

  But like, but like, the problem is that like, their writing has like, character, right? And their writing has a distinct voice, and it needs to be honed, and it needs to be refined, or whatever. But like, AI doesn't have character, it doesn't have a voice, and I don't mean that because it's a machine. I mean that because I have read thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of words written by AI, and it all sounds the exact fucking same. Yeah. And so when I see a tweet, or I see, like, that editorial I mentioned, from Cleveland.com, I just see a tweet or a snippet from an article, and I can immediately tell it's AI because it has this, like, banal, voiceless kind of...

• 55:25Speaker 06

  I'll have that same thing at the end, too. Like, imagine just talking, I'm American, so I'll imagine a hamburger. The AI article will end by saying, "It's not a hamburger, it's a lifestyle." It always has that one thing at the end that is the ultimate tell.

• 55:40Ed Zitron?

  It's not just the food, it's yummy.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  No, no, yeah, that's, that's something I feel like, yeah, Caleb, you and I have talked a lot about on our show Kill the Computer, where it's like, we, we've sort of peeked into the world of like, people dating AI a lot. And whenever we read people talking about or to their, their AI partner, or, or like, you read these conversations, and it's, I don't see a human quality in this, but yet, this person is human.

• 56:04Speaker 06

  If my partner ever talked to me like that, I would shoot myself tonight.

• 56:08Speaker 00

  There's no humanity in it, and it's very weird. It's weird to see that people see humanity in it, because to me, it's, I am very clearly reading generated text from a machine.

• 56:20Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I also like when people like, "Yeah, I went and talked to ChatGPT about my relationship problems." That is just a breakup. Just, you, if you find yourself going to ChatGPT to ask it for coaching through a breakup, or like, "Is my partner right here?" Just, just fucking...

• 56:41Speaker 00

  I do love those. I do love those, the specifically, the, "Is my, am I in the right?" But like, not going to Reddit, but going to ChatGPT.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  The software that will never tell me I'm wrong, by the way.

• 56:51Ed Zitron?

  My god, what do you do if it tells you you're wrong? Regenerate button, you're fine.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 06

  You've seen the people that are trying to date the new GPT model where it used to always tell them everything they wanted to hear.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:08Speaker 06

  And there was that one woman that was like, it was like, I need the chat GPT to something like, I need to be clear, like, I'm not gonna rescue you, I'm not gonna save you or whatever. And she was like upset about it, it's so fucked.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  You're talking about that, the hashtag keep four O. Uh, like, that I have been digging into those people.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I've been doing enough of that, that like, my phone gives me notifications from these subreddits of people complaining about that chat GPT. And it's just, it's just like, one app for another of like, them threatening to like, fly a plane into Sam Altman.

• 57:46Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there's one, there's one where it's like a hamster standing outside of a building that says OpenAI on it. It's on, I'm fair, it says never four O get.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  You know how, you know how like a wine mom with like, blue hair was one of the people that went to Nick Fuentes's house and like, got pepper spray? This is like, that version of it. It's like, the median average, like, random person in, in these AI communities is going to like, actually, I, I probably shouldn't be saying this, you, you know what I'm gonna say.

• 58:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, we can fly, you can bet on that on Polymarket, dude.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I said, yeah, no, check out Sam Altman on Polymarket.

• 58:24Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and as we wrap up here, I just, I just looked up the hashtag keep four O thing. And I'm looking at this image where it's just people running with, like, it looks like a relay race, I guess, that says keep four O, they keep dropping the baton, we just wanted the one that worked, you know? That's how batons work. But my favorite part of this image, which I'm gonna share with all of you, is, um, the fact that there's a guy with, like, they've all got helmets for some reason, and their, their arms are going the wrong way. For some reason, one of the helmets just has a mouth on it. And someone has a must- Yes! They have an eyebrow by their nose?

• 59:03Speaker 00

  I also like that in this image, the one that they say is the one that works is the one that's not running in the track.

• 59:10Ed Zitron?

  Butons don't function! You hold them! Butons are not a machine!

• 59:17Speaker 00

  This is maybe one of the greatest posts I've ever seen. One of the greatest AI posts ever. Just, it's so long, it's, it's got every quality of, of, uh, uh, uh, uh, an incredible post that you need here.

• 59:27Ed Zitron?

  Alright, let's wrap it there. June, Caleb, where can people find you?

• 59:32Speaker 00

  We do, uh, yeah, you got it.

• 59:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, June. I feel like I was more annoying than you on this episode.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  No, no, I, I intro'd the episode being mean to Ed.

• 59:40Ed Zitron?

  That's, that's good. Forever.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  But no, I, I, I guess I can, I can do, I'm, I'm bad at pitching, but I, what I will say is, uh, Caleb and I, we do a show called Kill the Computer. It's a show about how the internet sort of influences and, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, actually, I don't know, this is edited, right? Caleb, how about you do it? Can you cut me out of it? I'm bad, I need to work on my pitches, I need to work on it. No, please edit it.

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say it's like, uh, it's a show where we just kind of, um, look at how the internet is, internet stuff, internet culture spills out into the real, uh, real world and how it affects us on a personal level. I guess the most highbrow way to say it is just, uh, different subculture analysis of different, how different kinds of people use the internet.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:27Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. And, um, Arif, people can find you where? At wideleft.football, where I talk about football. Yeah, and I'm just gonna say to the people that really didn't enjoy the Super Bowl episode last year, like, you have any idea how close I was to just only talking about football for like 15 minutes?

• 1:00:51Ed Zitron?

  Being like, "Did you hear they released Tyreek Hill?", like, going up, "No, no, no, no." We're gonna end the episode there. Thank you all for listening to Better Offline. There will be a monologue this week, I assume. Download the episodes, read the newsletter, I'm Ed Zitchon, and goodbye.

• 1:01:15Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:01:47Speaker 09

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:02:21Speaker 07

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