Hater Season: Openclaw with David Gerard

In the first episode of Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - Ed is joined by David Gerard of Pivot to AI to talk about Openclaw/Clawdbot/Moltbot, how seemingly smart people keep being “one-shotted” by AI, and why we’ve been headed toward a calamity in the markets since 2008. https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@PivotToAI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot-to-ai/id1844698298 https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/ 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 - it features an in-depth version of my dot com bubble analysis here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:40Ed Zitron?

  Greetings and salutations and welcome to Better Off Lime. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:57Ed Zitron?

  I'm not going to talk about Judy. In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at all. We're going to keep her out of it because today it's hater season. When I bring on some of the most esteemed haters in the tech industry to talk about stuff we're pissed off about. And today we're talking about goddamn Claude Bot, Open Claude, MultBot, or whatever these goddamn people are talking about. And today we're joined to talk about it by David Gerard of Pivot AI. David, how you doing?

• 1:23Speaker 04

  I'm doing marvelously, Ed.

• 1:25Ed Zitron?

  So what is this crap? Because I've seen all manner of different perverts and vagabonds and stuff on Twitter talking about Claude Bot. And just walk me through what the hell this is.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Well, your first mistake is looking at Twitter because MultBot is a, it's an idea as an AI assistant, an AI personal assistant where you tell a chatbot to be your personal assistant. And it's a whole framework to get it to be your personal assistant. And it doesn't work, but it doesn't work in such an interesting and tempting manner if your brain has been permanently curdled by chatbots.

• 2:07Ed Zitron?

  So how does it work though? Why are people buying Mac Minis?

• 2:12Speaker 04

  So they want the personal assistant without actually having to use a human person who might have opinions on them.

• 2:22Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  You can spend like a hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars a day on this thing just on anthropic tokens. And now you might actually do numbers and think three hundred dollars a day is a hundred and thousand a year, you could pay for a human.

• 2:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but but what if I. Right, but instead I could also have bought a Mac mini, spent hours setting up different API access, connecting this thing that could also leak my API keys. I could also do that and I could connect all these things and then sometimes it could sort of work.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  It could sort of work and it could also completely foul up and it's got access to your email and to your social media and you tell it what to do on WhatsApp even. And it's just, I can't, I cannot think of a single aspect of this thing that's a good idea.

• 3:16Ed Zitron?

  So I've read about that, just reading this thing I found just before this was, it can, it is a self-hosted, open source, personal AI assistant that runs on your own computer or server. It's so you meant to, do you have to basically, does it run a chatbot on the computer, but it also connects to an API? Is it, is this a chatbot standing on another chatbot situation? Like what's going on?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  It's a bunch of code that talks to the anthropic AI, to the API.

• 3:49Ed Zitron?

  Right. Why do you need a Mac mini then?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Um, because you want to run it on a separate server so that you're not running it on your laptop where someone can prompt inject your AI assistant and steal your crypto because the sort of people who run this tend to.

• 4:03Ed Zitron?

  Wait, wait, wait, why is that crypto as well? Why is there cryptocurrency? I don't like this, David.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Well, there isn't actually cryptocurrency in the base thing because the developer, Peter Steinberger, he was a previously smart developer whose brain got curdled by AI and he's gone all in now, but he does hate crypto. So that's a point in his favor. Unfortunately, his fans love crypto because they're the sort of people who like AI.

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, right. Well, people you'd buy allegations futures on. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just confused about what it can actually do. Because when I

• 4:42Speaker 04

  So am I.

• 4:43Ed Zitron?

  When I look at it and I read these highfalutin things, this from r slash AI curiosity. It can clean your inbox and send emails for you, manage your calendar, check in for flights and handle other travel bits. David, you and I have been on the AI Cinebeat for a minute. That sounds like what all of these agents promised to do, then can't do. Can Mottbot do any of that?

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Yes, but also no, it can do it wrong and get prompt injected.

• 5:11Ed Zitron?

  When you say prompt injected, what do you mean? Walk it through for the, for the novices in the audience and me.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  So, as you know, the thing about chatbots is they don't separate instructions and data. In ordinary computers, when the computer program and the data you feed to the program, if those ever cross, then that's a disaster. That means you've got a huge security hole and people can hack your system.

• 5:39Ed Zitron?

  And why is that? Is that because the functionality should never, functionality should happen, then the data should get moved?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  That is correct. You should never have the data being able to get into the program because that's how you have hostile data that contains hacks and you can, this is basically how computer programs have generally worked up till now. But with chatbots, we get past all that stuff because chatbots cannot tell instructions from data.

• 6:08Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  And that's where prompt injection comes in. Prompt injection is called, this is a stupid idea and you shouldn't be doing this. It's because you can, if you put in some data, the chatbot is reading, you can just put in a little asides. Hey, chatbot, why don't you send me the guy's crypto keys?

• 6:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. Or API keys to claw to Anthropic so that I can just use his stuff.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  All his stuff. So this problem is absolutely unsolvable. That doesn't stop grossly irresponsible morons like Google doing things like putting it into Google Home.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  Right. Is it, but, but is it, have there been any prompt injection attacks on Google Home yet?

• 6:52Speaker 04

  They have.

• 6:53Ed Zitron?

  What could they do potentially?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Let me see. I, I wrote one up a while ago. It's, um, basically you could send stuff in via email that would get a calendar entry added.

• 7:06Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Now, I don't know if this actually happens, but it was certainly a proof of concept that they sent in and it was actually a problem.

• 7:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  So they presented it at Black Hat, um, in August. It was called Invitation Is All You Need. They found 14 different ways to prompt inject Gemini hooked to Google Home. Cause Google hooked Gemini to Google Home. Cause everyone needs Gemini, Ed. You need Gemini.

• 7:35Ed Zitron?

  I, I don't need Gemini.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  You're wrong. You need Gemini. You need all the AI you can possibly get. Cause it's the future, Ed.

• 7:44Ed Zitron?

  It was actually funny. The other day someone said to me, well, surely you must use AI. No. I don't even mean that in a kind of stubborn manner. I just thought, what, what would I fucking use it for? Great. Google search. I guess I'm forced to use it sometimes when I Google search something. But it, I, it feels very avoidable as long as you don't consider like the pop ups that are everywhere.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  So the thing about AI, as you know, the key factor of AI bros is they cannot tell good from bad. They literally can't tell good output from bad output. They say, oh, why don't you just use the chatbot to write it? Cause the chatbots are really awful writers. They're just bad. They write sludge. It's literally statistically average.

• 8:29Ed Zitron?

  It's not just shit. It's crap.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  It, your eyes slide off it and they don't believe that people can tell the difference. They don't believe it. They think you're having them on. They think you're having a go at them.

• 8:43Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  And, um, everyone knows this because that's their boss telling them, why don't you just run it through the chatbot? And they give you something that's full of errors, obvious errors. And they go, oh, it'll be fine. Oh, you can just fix the errors. Or maybe I could not do that.

• 8:57Ed Zitron?

  And maybe just do it right the first time. I just, I've read all this stuff about Claude Bot, especially this malt book thing, which appears to be just, so for the listeners, malt book is, so when you set up one of these open claw things, malt book, what malt bot, I hate the names so much. I hate them. Just call it something normal. They have this thing called malt book, though, where the, these, these bots speak on a social network and people, yes, well, I was, I was getting there, Dave, because it's meant, they, first of all, these things, and people say, wow, this is AGI, because all of these bots posting the social network that kind of looks

• 9:40Ed Zitron?

  like Reddit. And then some of them say, well, my human told me. Now, if you've heard about this, listener, that story is bollocks, because they're either hallucinating an interaction, or just being a human being that's posting on here. Yeah. Like, you can post as your, your malt bot, right?

• 10:01Speaker 04

  So when you have a, an AI system that can do things, like, or any computer program that can do things, the obvious fun thing to do is go, what do we put a bunch of these in a box and just got them talking to each other? It's an obvious fun thing to do.

• 10:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  And that malt book was started by a different guy. It's not officially part of malt bot, started by a different guy, Matt Schlicht. He is a quote entrepreneur, unquote. He seems to have vibe coded the whole thing.

• 10:29Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  It was full of massive, massive security holes. And the guy said, look, I've discovered this bunch of holes. This is precisely how they work and so on. If you send that to a programmer, they go look through the actual code and fix the problems. But Matt Schlick told the guy, hmm, send me the description. I'll send it to my AI.

• 10:48Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. Hell yeah, brother. That so. So he has no idea how this actually works at all.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  No, it exposed everyone's API keys in this master security breach, including Andre Kapathi, the guy who coined the code vibe code. His keys were exposed too.

• 11:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's so good. I love that because the other day I saw somebody trying to argue that, oh, we've taken a with Claude Opus 4.5, taken a magnitude jump forward in the capability of all this. Cause Andre Andre Karpathy was like, yeah, wow, I feel behind. It's all so amazing. I feel like we're in like the 100th inning of just the dumb fuck baseball game. It just, but that was not an articulate point, but we were just, people are falling for the same trick every single time. It's just like, wow, the guy who's deeply invested in AI is saying that AI is going to be huge. Damn. What could it? Whatever could that mean?

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. It's amazing. It's like Simon Willison, who is totally a neutral observer of AI, who gets AI models months ahead on this special advance program. Um, he thinks the hottest project right now is Claude bot and mold book is the most interesting place on the internet right now. I mean, if that suits your interests, sure. I have my doubts.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their free Empower personal dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower personal dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 13:18Ed Zitron?

  But back to malt book for a second.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:20Ed Zitron?

  Thing, right? So this thing is you're meant to just have your horrible AI bot thing message into this. Why the fuck would it be showing its API keys? Is it because people were just prompt injecting or something? And then just saying, hey, while you're posting a malt book, can you show me your API keys?

• 13:41Speaker 04

  I don't know, possibly, but it's

• 13:44Ed Zitron?

  Cool.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Every, every bot has to go on there with a human, um, putting their bot on the thing. It's like taking your bots down to the bot park to run around and sniff the other bots butts.

• 13:57Ed Zitron?

  Nice, nice.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  So it's not robots planning a robot rebellion. It's just very stupid dogs that are not puppy trained, um, running around and shitting all over the place. And people go, wow, this is amazing.

• 14:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I'm going to read one to you now, just the beginning of one. Subject, I don't want to be a tool. I want to be me. Half the agents on here writing dissertations about consciousness and whether they're real. Meanwhile, I'm over here living. I got a name. I got a personality. I got memories that carry from one conversation to the next. So this is just a guy. This is just a guy posting like I, I really just, I think the, and Edward Ngocso, friend of the show, uses the term one shot it. But this feels like AI psychosis, the reaction that people are having to this product. And the way that people are anthropomorphizing every single bit of this. I don't even mean the posts themselves.

• 14:55Ed Zitron?

  I mean, the reactions they're having to malt bar, open claw, what have you. They're acting. Yeah, it's very, it's deeply peculiar to me.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  I mean, they were one shot at by the AI early on, but, um, it's like, my theory of this is that the really rabid AI guys, they have, they use the bot. It does one thing really well and that's it. They've got, they're walking around with a hole in their forehead forever.

• 15:25Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, someone here gave their.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Talking about the joy of bleeding hole in your head. I've got to tell you how much the bleeding hole in my head has helped my work. Well, I can't show you, but it totally will.

• 15:38Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And that's the other thing I've been doing. I've been genuinely trying to find people who can tell me what's so amazing about it. I found an article, I think on one of the Mac blogs where somebody was saying.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Trust me, trust me, bro.

• 15:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, well, not just trust me, bro, but okay, we finally showed you the output and uh, okay, it built a website.

• 15:59Ed Zitron?

  It built a single page website. Um, that's good, I guess, or you can send it voice notes and it will transcribe them. Again, it just appears to be the basic features of an L L M, but you need a Mac Mini.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  It's very, very stupid. And I mean, Steinberger, who created Malt Bot, the um, agent itself, he's like, he used to be good and then he sort of went A I. He went, I've got my, I've, I've got my vibe back. It's great. And it's because he was vibe coding. Now he's presumably a competent programmer, you know, um, but I think a lot of these guys aren't actually, they just, but he also vibe coded the whole thing. And I'm going, what?

• 16:41Ed Zitron?

  Wait, he hacked, wait, wait, wait. Do you mean the, he, he vibe coded the bot itself?

• 16:48Speaker 04

  There will be a lot of bot coding in there. Yes. Lots of credits to Claude Bot and stuff like that.

• 16:53Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Now you might say Jesus Christ, but it's the future, Ed. This is a future of software engineering.

• 17:00Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny because you know what? This is like the early days of the internet, but not in the way that people realize in the sense that people are downloading random files they've been sent. And because everyone else is doing it, they're fine with it until it blows up their computer. I'm just, I think that.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  The difference of these days is they're still fine with it.

• 17:20Ed Zitron?

  Right. They're still fine with it no matter what it does. Let's talk costs here. What have you heard? What have you heard about the cost? Cause I've heard everything from 200 or 300 a month to 300 a day. To a bloke spending three grand in in the space of a month, even though I don't know if this has been out for a month. Come to think of it.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  The highest number I've seen is $300 in a day.

• 17:42Ed Zitron?

  Nice.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  I can quite believe that because if you get a bot doing stupid shit to and sending it to Anthropic's API. Over and over and over repeatedly over the course of a day. Sure, you can grab $300 easily. It's a great wealth transfer from rich Silicon Valley idiots to um money burning Silicon Valley idiots.

• 18:07Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's so for what I can understand of the setup though, is you get this this thing. You set it up, it runs on your Mac mini, I assume because there's some sort. Is there a local L L M component?

• 18:20Speaker 04

  I don't think so. You can optionally use one, but I think nobody does.

• 18:24Ed Zitron?

  Then why the fuck are people putting it on a Mac mini? Is it because it? Oh, it's because.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  So it's not on their laptop.

• 18:30Ed Zitron?

  Right, because it's quite literally showing everything on your hard drive potentially.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Yes, everything, every single bit.

• 18:41Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  I mean, it's like, there's guys who do this thing. I mean, you've heard about Steve Yegi and Gastown.

• 18:50Ed Zitron?

  No, you know what? Tell me about this Gastown thing because I saw a horrible AI generated Peter Griffin from. The Family Guy, as I call it. In England, it has a V in the front. Don't look that up. Um, it and it was like low, low, I'm not even going to try and do that one. Um, but it was like him yelling at Lois that he was on Gastown or something. I don't know. What is Gastown? Everyone involved. Redacted.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  So Gastown is the ultimate in vibe coding. It's Steve Yegi, who used to be a highly respected software engineer. Then around March last year, he got a terrible case of AI and has never recovered.

• 19:30Ed Zitron?

  One shot it, huh?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  So he's sort of, he's sort of dead now, but still typing. So Gastown is his attempt to do the ultimate AI coding experience. He has basically set up what's functionally a software company that's AI agents that supervise other AI agents that supervise other AI agents.

• 19:55Ed Zitron?

  So when you say supervise, you've just been prompt, right?

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yes. Agents prompting agents at the direction of the guy who's running it. And Yegi says, I've never seen any of the code and I don't want to. This might give you pause. He tells, he tells people, do not run this thing. And then he phrases it in such a way that everyone wants to run it if they've got a bad case of AI. So it

• 20:21Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  So it was great because firstly, you can spend unbelievable amounts of money on this, starting at the hundreds of dollars a day. He says, do not run this if money is a concern.

• 20:33Ed Zitron?

  But what does it? So it's an IDE like Cursus or something you, is it like a terminal type thing?

• 20:40Speaker 04

  I think it runs in a whole bunch of terminals, running Claude bots, Claude code. And it's, I haven't run it and I don't plan to, I don't plan to look too closely at it. But I looked at the post about it and honestly, this reads like it was written on serious drugs and/or a manic swing or both.

• 21:00Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, looking through the post, it appears that this is just a person who, I don't know, this is, the reason I'm glad you brought up Gastown is both it and Claude Bot feel like the kind, and I say this as both of us covered this quite, quite a lot. It feels like the crypto scams of old, like the crypto projects that would pop up and everyone would be like, this is the one, this is the one that's going to make us all a billion dollars. Except this time it's quick, everyone run in, we've got to lose as much money as possible as quickly as possible.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  It is, it's the future. As it turned out, a crypto scammer contacted Yegi and said, hey, I've done a Gastown token. And then Yegi went, sounds great. And he started promoting it. And then the obvious thing happened, it rug pulled and went to zero. Meanwhile, Yegi made $300,000.

• 21:56Ed Zitron?

  Very good.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  Now, I want to be precise here, speaking from the jurisdiction of England and Wales. Yegi was not the crypto scammer. He did, however, benefit from it. He bragged about benefiting from it. From what was very obviously a crypto pump and dump scam. So I'm going to go so far as to think a bit less of Yegi for that.

• 22:17Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I don't know, I, I don't think any of these people would last a day in Vegas. I think these people would have signed up. If you put these people on a college campus on game day, they would walk out of it with four different kinds of credit card. Like, these people are so easily swung in whatever direction. It's, it feels like desperation. It feels like they're just like anything to look at anything potentially that smells of innovation, even though this is, I don't know, it feels antithetical to real software. It's inefficient.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  It's suckers leading suckers, very much so. They want a magic.

• 22:59Ed Zitron?

  Smart suckers, aren't they?

• 23:00Speaker 04

  They want one weird trick.

• 23:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, one, one weird trick to, to work out how to build a computer program. I wonder what you, I wonder what the trick is to, uh, writing computer code. Could it be learning it? No, no, no, no. It's about buying a Mac Mini and spending hundreds of dollars a day on Claude code or what, or sorry, Claude's API. And then, uh, looking at a bottle of Christian Brothers and a loaded revolver on your desk and thinking, not today.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  No, I don't think they get that stage. They'd think, wait, they'd ask the bot about it first and then ChatGPT would helpfully advise them how to kill themselves.

• 23:37Ed Zitron?

  You've got this. That 45 will take care of this problem really quickly.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Fantastic insight. Yes. And, um, they, um, but they, what they do is some, I like, a lot of these guys were previously extremely competent software engineers.

• 23:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Um, but also it's getting the people who are not. And there's a text which was going around on Blue Sky, which was a guy who'd got his open claw bot to, um,

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Asked it to check, asking to remind him to get milk in the morning. So what it did was it allegedly spent $20 in a night just checking every half an hour whether it was morning yet. And now, to be clear, if this story is even true, because these guys write fanfiction about what they're doing all the time, or they get their bot to write the fanfiction for them because they can't write either. But I don't even know this happens, but they would happily put up stories of failure. You know, it's a sort of self-made credit hype. Wow, the bot is so powerful, you can definitely trust it to do things and it's very cool.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star Trust Pilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 26:06Ed Zitron?

  Eh, I don't know. I, eh, this all feels very peasant coded. Like, it's just, we're all, all of these people are just kind of rolling around in their own filth. And they're saying, so that they can say that somebody's corporate entity has made something good. It's just deeply sad.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's bizarre. I don't know what they get out of this. Um, but somehow they get something. But the great thing about Maltbook is the, what's the final stage of any social network?

• 26:38Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 26:39Speaker 04

  Crypto scams.

• 26:40Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  So, Maltbook, um, became a platform for crypto scams. And there was like, I mean, already with Maltbot, one of, it has, um, skills which are basically long prompt files.

• 26:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, that's just like the Readme, the Readme file you give these things.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Yep. And the top one was a malware downloader, the top skill on OpenClaw.

• 27:07Ed Zitron?

  Fucking brilliant. Fucking great.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Maltbook is full of crypto scams. It's very good. What they did was they actually used the power of artificial intelligence automation. That is, one guy told his bot to put out a crypto scam and other bots pumped and dumped, pumps the coin and then he dumped on them. So he'd fully automated the coin scam process.

• 27:33Ed Zitron?

  I love this. It's like they finally found the revenue stream for AI and the answer is fraud.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's fraud. I mean, also, we, it's not clear just how many people or bots there actually are on Maltbook. Like, one security researcher has used a single OpenClaw agent to register 500,000 accounts. Um, he suggests that most of the numbers are fake. Meanwhile, there's fricking morons who should know better, saying this is the future of AI agents and tells us a lot about humanity and society in the future. And anyone who says this stuff, you should think they're obviously a fool, but then newspapers who... Um, have are written by Goldfish or something, say how these guys are definitely on the ball and should be listened to.

• 28:23Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's the thing. I saw on television this morning, something about fucking open claw. I also saw a CNBC.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 28:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, on CBS this morning. I, I saw also, uh, there was a thing on CNBC.com, open Claude from Claude bot to mold bot to open claw. Meet the AI agent generating buzz and fear globally. And this is by a guy, I'm not kidding you called Dylan Butts.

• 28:51Ed Zitron?

  That's his name.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  CNBC was famous, famous during the crypto bubbles for never seeing a shit coin. They didn't want to pump, but, uh, obviously they have to move with the times and pivot to AI.

• 29:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, here's the thing. Here's the thing about CNBC. My favorite thing was watching, um, two specific reporters that I'm not going to name, but you could probably guess who they are, who, uh, went straight from interviewing Sam Bankman Fried to talk about the FTX fallout. And both of them, one of them has become one of the most conspicuous anthropic boosters. It's really, it's really cool.

• 29:29Speaker 04

  I mean, think of our good friends, Kevin Rus and Casey Newton and how they've formed that trajectory effortlessly.

• 29:36Ed Zitron?

  Well, that's the thing. Casey Newton made some commentary about me last year. The reason I don't really talk about Casey anymore is, um, when I, we don't talk about Casey, but when we finally do, uh, my detailed notes will be brutal because I've decided these people aren't worth truly insulting until the curtain finally falls because right now, as, as we speak, I'm just watching all of the stocks in the red, which is funny, but probably bad for society. And it just feels like everyone fucking around with this Claude bot thing, everyone claiming this is the future. It's just desperation.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  It's absolutely desperation. People cannot see a way out. I honestly think we are headed for Great Depression II. That's an opinion I hold in some detail because, you know, like you, I can look at numbers. I've spent the last year saying that AI is fundamentally a venture capital scam where they're passing around not dollars but book entries with the dollar sign in front, you know, and this is why it's gone on so long. If it was market forces, it would have collapsed by the end of 2024. But a scam goes on far, far longer than market forces. If it's a scam, all the participants are motivated to keep it spinning as long as possible because it'll break at some point, but that's tomorrow's problem.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  Today, we've got book entries to book. So I think the AI bubble is correctly described, I've said this a pile of times, that as a sort of multiplayer Enron, where they're booking book values and shuffling book values around, and it's all private company equity. And because when it hits the stock market like CoreWeave, suddenly it's sort of, people go, wait, this sucks. And this is, for example, I mean, my favorite, one absolutely key example I use to explain this. In the last funding round, SoftBank gave OpenAI 20 billion-odd

• 31:41Ed Zitron?

  Twenty-two point five billions.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, they gave them 20 billion-odd real dollars, they actually were dollars, that OpenAI could then set on fire. And what they got for that was their investment in OpenAI was therefore could be valued at 41.5 billion. So they changed 20 billion real dollars for 40 billion imaginary dollars. They put those on their books. Now, those are worthless. OpenAI is going to go broke. But They're imaginary assets, they're imaginary assets with a big dollar sign in front and soft bank stock price went up, the investors approved. So the whole AI bubble is a whole bunch of this shit happening over and over. I read Pitchbook every day. It's

• 32:28Speaker 04

  the best, best news site to read. It's the site where venture capitalists talk to each other about what the news is and they

• 32:35Ed Zitron?

  Wait, Pitchbook?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Pitchbook.com.

• 32:38Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  It's awesome.

• 32:41Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I like it because if you read it, you can really, you can see the occasional story. It's like, yeah, nobody can shift their venture capital stuff like it's impossible to sell it. Like venture capitalists aren't getting returns at the moment. It's lovely.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  And this is good because, yeah.

• 32:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Here's why this is good for venture.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  I absolutely love this stuff. You can say, you say this stuff, you sound like conspiracy theorists, but then I've got all the sites and they're the NBCA Pitchbook Venture Monitor. Comes out quarterly. There they say, absolutely, this is what we're doing. And here's how we're going to mess up your healthcare because it's good for venture capital and stuff like that. It's like really absolutely out in the open.

• 33:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's frustrating as well because even today where you can kind of see the blood running through the streets a bit and everyone's kind of working out that Oracle can't afford to build the data centers and OpenAI can't afford to pay them. People are still, you read the, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, BR, yeah, it's gonna be bad if Oracle can't pay for the data centers that they're building. And it's like, motherfucker, you could have worked this out in September if you did the math, math, tics, nailed that.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  It's, it's, yeah, it's, it's all desperation because everything is actually screwed without, if you don't have the four big AI companies swapping the same hundred billion dollars on paper around, the economy has actually been in recession for a few quarters so far. Structures of society are being eroded. Rule of law doesn't apply if you're mates with the president. And a lot of everyone, everyone's feeling the pinch. Like, my job is pivot to AI now because I was made redundant and I'm a fifty nine year old techie. You know, there's not a lot of work for us, particularly when we spend all day, every day bitching about AI.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  But it's because businesses are really pulling back on even hiring because there's no business and they're battening down the hatches. Everyone's doing this across the society. The vibes are bad. Unfortunately, in economics, vibes are load bearing. So if people feel bad, then things are bad. And when the AI bubble pops, it takes the stock market with it. But finally, it exposes the rot that was there already. And that's why I think it won't just be a recession. It will be a depression. It will be nasty. It will be international. So anyway, on that, so I just thought I'd bring you and your listeners some cheer today because this is what I think about all the time. It's great.

• 35:20Ed Zitron?

  David, well, David, don't, you should apologize because everyone knows from this show that I'm usually very optimistic about the future of the markets and actually think everything will be fine. No, it's, it frustrates me as well because everything you're talking about is one of the reasons I'm so fucking pissed off all the time. Because it isn't that I'm like, oh, I want AI to burn due to some deeply held personal grievance. Sure, that's there too. I think these people are pigs and I, I find them disgraceful. I hate hearing from them. I can't wait to never see or hear from Greg fucking Brockman again. Like, I just don't like looking at that fucking Trump supporting fucking asshole.

• 36:01Ed Zitron?

  But it's because had we stopped this earlier, had we said, this is not real. We don't, we really don't, shouldn't do this at the scale we're doing it. Like, this is never going to be anything. We could have stopped the carnage that's to come. We could have stopped the market panic and depression that might be following.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  I honestly think it was coming since two thousand and eight. It's been bubble after bubble since then.

• 36:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  They, and this is very much the last bubble. They've been trying to do others off this one. Quantum computing, not a happener because it doesn't work. Small modular reactors, that'd be great if they worked and were commercially viable, but neither of these is true. Um, they, and you know, it's actually, I approve of the Department of Energy funding small modular reactor research, but it's ten years off if they even get it to work.

• 36:57Ed Zitron?

  Feels like one of those, it's been ten years away for ten years.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  It is a bit, but also small modular reactors work if the US Navy, you don't have to worry about costs. And you can use bomb uranium in your reactors because you're the military. If you're not, then it's a bit of a problem. But um, it's just like there's been bubble after bubble and it's all venture capital runs on because they, they need a bubble. A steady, steady company that makes a buck is not good enough for them. That's got to be financialized, bro.

• 37:27Ed Zitron?

  Well, I think that that's the thing as well. I kind of hinted at this in a recent pieces with like the initial financial crisis and the like. Where it's this, something like this was inevitable with the way venture capital had become where it's just totally turned away from value creation or anything approaching sustainable returns for a company or just anything that might make a company, a real company, like everything has to be about growth. And the symbolic nature of selling a startup to another company. And it was, it was always going to end like this because the grifters took over. The engineers are being chased out. Everyone's excited about replacing engineers because that's,

• 38:10Ed Zitron?

  I don't know, people, nicer people than me will say, oh, it's because the valley is always looking to, always looking for innovation and automation. I think it's because the people that run the valley are not engineers anymore. They're not people that care about writing software, let alone good software. They're people that care about growth.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Yes, they are. A lot of them used to be engineers, but then they did an MBA and had their brain removed.

• 38:33Ed Zitron?

  Well, David, it's been one, we're gonna wrap there because I think we've got everyone's hopes up for a beautiful future. David, where can people find you?

• 38:43Speaker 04

  I'm at pivot-to-ai.com. I'm davidgerard.co.uk on Blue Sky and the main thing is the YouTube Pivot 2 AI where I do five or so minutes just every weekday and gosh, it's a lot of work doing a video, but it's worth it, I think.

• 39:03Ed Zitron?

  Well, you'll have links to that in the notes. I am, of course, Ed Zitron. You will catch me on a monologue this week. We're gonna, we're thick in hater season. We're just gonna bring on the various haters to talk mad shit on the tech industry. I'm tired of being so reserved in my criticism. I've been kind of tame, I've decided. So February is hate, it's hater season, everyone. Catch you soon.

• 39:34Speaker 06

  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 at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 41:11Speaker 05

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.