AI Creativity Doesn't Exist With Chloe Radcliffe and Ed Ongweso Jr.

In this week's Better Offline, Ed is joined by comedian Chloe Radcliffe and critic Ed Ongweso Jr. to talk about AI’s attempts to interfere with the creative arts, horrible little robots, Mark Zuckerberg’s terrible AI essay, and why we can’t respect people writing using AI. Chloe’s Show Cheat - https://publictheater.org/performances-jp/2026/c/chloe-radcliffe-cheat/ - August 19th and 20th in NYC! Chloe Radcliffe: https://www.instagram.com/chloebadcliffe/?hl=en Ed Ongweso Jr.: https://bsky.app/profile/bigblackjacobin.bsky.social Ed Ongweso’s newsletter https://www.thetechbubble.info/ Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  Callzone Media.

• 2:52Speaker 06

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host, Ed Zitron.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  I am back in the iHeartRadio studio, bringing you it all live, to tape technically, from here in beautiful New York City. And today I'm joined by two returning angels of the Better Offline Choir from CES 2026 and very likely 2027 as well. On my right, I have the wonderful Chloe Radcliffe.

• 3:25Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 3:26Speaker 06

  Actress and author and writer and everything at this point.

• 3:30Speaker 07

  I haven't written a book, but I write a lot.

• 3:32Speaker 08

  You're writing scripts and shit.

• 3:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess, I guess, yes, yeah, writer.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  And on top of the, top of the show, you have a show coming up.

• 3:40Speaker 07

  I do have a show coming up, yeah. I'm doing my solo show. It's called Cheat. It's about how I have, uh-oh, cheated in all of my relationships. The show does not condone cheating. I think it is always bad. I think it always hurts somebody, but I think it happens all the fucking time and nobody's willing to stick a microphone in front of their face and say that they did it. And I happen to be the one. Anyway, I'm doing it August 19th and 20th at Joe's Pub in New York City. It's gonna be, I think it's really gonna be amazing.

• 4:04Speaker 06

  I've, I've seen it, it's fantastic.

• 4:06Speaker 07

  I think it's gonna be amazing, dude.

• 4:08Speaker 06

  I think it's gonna be fun, no.

• 4:09Speaker 07

  I think, look, I'm very proud of the show. I have seen it, I've seen it hit people and, uh...

• 4:14Speaker 06

  I watched the old version, it was fantastic, and that was two years ago.

• 4:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  And of course, Mr. Edward Ongweso, junior writer and critic. How are you doing, Eddie?

• 4:21Speaker 08

  I'm doing pretty good, you know? Having a nice day?

• 4:24Speaker 07

  Ed and I are at such different paces.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  Well, I've been up since five in the morning because I've been doing media stuff all day, but that's, that's the power of Zitron. But we're gonna start with you, Chloe. I wanted to actually ask you a very direct question. So you're going Hollywood, you've been in the acting business. What have you seen of AI in Hollywood? Because if you read crap like The Ankle, they're like, it's everywhere, every, every single thing is written in AI now. What have you seen, if anything?

• 4:51Speaker 07

  Um, it is, I mean, it's carving out jobs like VFX and animation, for sure. There's a bunch of stuff in production, particularly in post-production, that is really, really, really being eaten by AI.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  Right.

• 5:04Speaker 07

  Um, I don't know any screenwriters who are like actively using AI. It's totally possible that people are in the background and they're just not talking about it. I had, so I, I, you know, at my core, I'm a stand-up and I come from stand-up. And I was like, no stand-ups are using AI. We all think it's fucking dumb. And then an exec told me recently that she hears in so many meetings with stand-ups that stand-ups all use AI to write their jokes or help them write their jokes, which is so fucking insane. It's so dumb and it's also like, well, that's why, I mean, I do think that there's a lot of comedy that's starting to sort of coalesce. It's starting to sound the same a little bit. And I'm like, I wonder if that's why.

• 5:45Speaker 06

  So what's interesting about that, though, is because we're already seeing a monoculture develop outside of AI, that people are trying to do the same thing and box it up and sell it a million times. So I'm kind of unsurprised. The idea that stand-ups would write jokes using AI.

• 5:57Speaker 07

  So embarrassing.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  I wanna, I want, if you're a listener of this show and you know one, please email me, easy at betteroffline.com.

• 6:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, see something, say something.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is important.

• 6:06Speaker 07

  And I do, look, I understand the idea of like having something to bounce your ideas off of, to say like, what are other, you know, help me brainstorm angles on this concept? Help me brainstorm takes, like, I, I understand that impulse, but it comes down to the core debate around using AI in art, which is, do we value that art is made by humans? And like, I just at my core, I do. And, and do we value that when you're using AI, you know, as a brainstorming tool, what you are, I guess, I guess there's the argument that you're like sort of weirdly using other humans because it's fundamentally eating ideas that other people have had and then, right?

• 6:49Speaker 07

  And, and so you are sort of, like, I, I can wrap my head around how somebody justifies it. I don't mean to be like, these fucking tools, you know, like...

• 6:57Speaker 06

  I mean, let me do that for you.

• 6:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, great.

• 6:58Speaker 06

  Because, just to be clear, I think if, having not done stand-up, but just witnessing enough of it, I feel like the only reason you wouldn't run your material by another stand-up is they might not find it funny and they might give you direct feedback that you don't like or you don't respect them. Like, it's one of the two, surely.

• 7:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, I think the more senior you get in the industry, the less you're running your material by people and the more you are just trying it on stage for the first time, definitely. But, yeah, you know, I, I like, to me, so much of this is,

• 7:37Speaker 07

  it really just comes down to the core of it matters if it is human versus a computer. I care less if it is a computer. I'm impressed that we made a big database machine. I think the database machine is very cool. It, wow, that is, it is so big.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Search two at that point.

• 7:52Speaker 07

  It's search two, yeah, exactly. And, and I, I do really care about the texture that comes from a person themselves.

• 8:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also stand-up is about the brittleness of human life, like it's about, like, I don't...

• 8:05Speaker 07

  Absolutely, oh, totally. I mean, like, an AI can tell you, uh, an amalgamation of what other people have taught, have said about anxiety, but an AI does not experience anxiety and will never actually have a personal, uh, a, a personal touch, a personal understanding of it.

• 8:21Speaker 06

  It's not gonna push back. It's never gonna say, yeah, dude, that sucks.

• 8:25Speaker 07

  No. Oh, I mean, also because, in, in no small part, because a lot of what it is suggesting sucks.

• 8:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 8:30Speaker 07

  And from a stand-up, from a stand-up writing.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  It's also a glazing machine. It exists to make you feel good about it, which is not what you want. From, from the stand-ups I know, including you, it's like, you don't want people to just be like, that was dry.

• 8:42Speaker 07

  Well, no, oh, stand-ups want that desperately. Are you kidding?

• 8:45Speaker 06

  No, no, no.

• 8:45Speaker 07

  I would actually say that's sort of the number one thing stand-ups want.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, yes. But when you're on stage, you want that. Offstage, when you want the joke to be good, if you wanna run material and get it better.

• 8:54Speaker 07

  So now what you're coming to is, again, this is actually, it's, it's, it's a very human principle and that principle is, do you want to push yourself to create art that is the best it possibly could, could be? Or are you satisfied with something that is, that serves the purpose of getting a laugh? Or insert whatever, right? That serves the purpose, we, going back to Hollywood, are you satisfied with something that serves the purpose of moving pictures in front of your eyes for 20 to 50 minutes, right? Um, or 20 to 120 minutes, whatever.

• 9:31Speaker 07

  Or do you want, do you have the drive within yourself to make something that is earnestly creative and boundary pushing and interesting and feels new? It feels like a new take on an old topic, on a thing that we've all thought, you know, that, that's making people in the audience feel seen, that's making yourself feel seen, whatever. And that's, it's the, it, it, that line is where, is to me, what divides people who I respect versus people I, whose efforts I don't respect as much. And the people whose efforts I don't respect as much wind up oftentimes falling in the category of hack. And hack is built to crush. And that is the only purpose of hack.

• 10:12Speaker 07

  What hack is to do is to be the broadest possible, uh, take or broadest possible reference or broadest possible punchline or broadest possible topic that the most people can relate to so that it crushes, but to me, it crushes without a soul.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  And it's, it's content versus art.

• 10:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Are you a machine? And it's kind of a funny version. Ed, you're on Substack, of course, you might have seen this. My favorite version of this right now is, um, Substack, in their first good product move in possibly ever, they added something called Pangram AI, which is like a decent AI checker. None of these things are unanimously correct. And so you can hit a button that says, check for AI. You'd think a thousand nine-elevens happened on Substack because people are like, I can't believe this. I can't believe that. They're shaming me, they're shaming me for using AI. And it's beautiful.

• 11:01Speaker 08

  It is beautiful. I sadly found out a bunch of essays I've quoted at length because they were, they had, you know, they're like academic reports and I was like, oh, you know, this is, you know, it's, it's tiers and, and whatever. But it pointed the direction of something that I was interested in following up or written with, uh, generative AI. Hit up the authors, they have not responded.

• 11:25Speaker 06

  Like most of Substack is like, my girlfriend pointed this out to me. This is her idea. Just, just give her credit. But she found this and showed it to me and it's great because there are these people who are like, actually, it's unfair to point this out. Would you judge someone if they used autocorrect? No, that's a different thing. That's not the same thing at all.

• 11:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's not autocorrect is not an idea.

• 11:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think it's fair to say that if you are presenting this as if this requires your attention to read at length, just as I'm hyperlinking all my sources, just as I'm articulating all the sources of my thinking, if there's another author, you should know that.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  And I should know. This thing is as well, it's like, you can kind of tell, and I say this as somebody who writes way too long, whenever a regular person starts writing 4,000 word essays, you're like, ah, is the three fingers.

• 12:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, why are you doing this? And there's like, the first link is this. It's like, okay, motherfucker, I know what you're up to. And it's like alarming how much of financial journalism is this now. And you, it's really interesting watching the fraction, fracturing here because you've got some people like, I've used it for search and like, I really shouldn't. I use it for brainstorming. And then the people who are getting the most angry, like, oh, you use it for everything. You use it to find out how to go to the toilet.

• 12:40Speaker 07

  And now they're exposed. Right. They're, they're, uh, they're outsourcing their decision making to AI.

• 12:47Speaker 06

  Yes. And the funny thing is, is, I don't know, if you're so sure of how good this is, why are you so anxious? Why are you so upset about this? Is it?

• 12:55Speaker 07

  That's funny. That's so funny. Yeah, yeah. Just stand behind it then.

• 12:58Speaker 06

  If, if you think this is good enough to run your work or your business, and I see these, I see the most insane.

• 13:04Speaker 07

  That's such a funny take.

• 13:05Speaker 06

  My, well, the, my favorite Substack one is people like, well, I have ADHD and autism. And actually, um, you can't judge me for this. And I'm like, well, guess what? I've got both of. I, I got, I got the full fucking deck here, motherfucker. I got, I got both those. What you gonna do now? And what their argument is, is it helps with executive function? Oh, it helps with this. It's like, yeah. Um, it doesn't. You're off, you're kind of, you think it's helping with that. You can't tell it's writing for you. And I think it's just watching people trying to justify this in all walks of life is so funny because it, again, it's like, if this is such a great thing and you're so proud of it, why aren't you just with your whole chest being like, yeah, I actually think this is great?

• 13:47Speaker 08

  And it's also funny what the, there are a few people who are like out with their chest being like, yeah, I wrote this with AI and it sucks.

• 13:55Speaker 08

  I've, I've been still on the lookout this year and last year for like, okay, what are some like interesting workflows that people have created where they're writing at length with AI? And most of the time it's, what they think is interesting is they've acted a bunch of long, drawn out, like, you know, well crafted prompts, but the prose is horrible. It's still defined by like the, the limits of the models where they don't really want to take a stance. So they're exhaustively like documenting both sides of any discussion or debate. That's not really what you want in the writing.

• 14:27Speaker 07

  And it's also just, it's boring takes that we've heard before. It's sort of by nature.

• 14:31Speaker 06

  And on top of that, the way they lead into every point has the same, this is one thing I've noticed, that has the same dramatic weight, no matter what the point is. And it's always way too much. It's always like, then the most important thing happened and it will be a report I cited in a single sentence, seven thousand words. It's like a, like, oh, the BIS report from this. It's just like, okay, well, you took 300 words to lead to a single thing and then didn't build on it at all because you didn't read it. Because you didn't, you definitely didn't read the thing because you definitely didn't write this.

• 15:00Speaker 07

  And because the, the AI model doesn't have its own, uh, personal judgment calls about what is and isn't the most important. And then if the person is completely outsourcing their decision making, then they are also not making those judgment calls.

• 15:12Speaker 08

  You know, yeah, your moral values don't come into it. And that's an important part of writing, especially if you're doing something where you're trying to argue what people should believe in, right? If, if I can't sense any sort of urgency and you're hedging constantly, then, and you're using an AI to hedge, what's the point of that?

• 15:26Speaker 06

  What I think it is, is that, so I, understandably, these people don't want to talk to me very much, probably due to the things.

• 15:33Speaker 07

  They want to talk to their AI.

• 15:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, they want to talk to AI. But what they, the, the few that will engage with me, they'll say, well, I take an idea to it and I go back and forth, then I edit what it says. I'm just like, then you're just copy pasting their words. And like, well, how's that, what's the difference between that and a human editor? The answer is, the answer is when I speak to Matt Hughes, he's a human being with the same demented mind as me. And we workshop ideas.

• 15:56Speaker 07

  I'm so sorry, man.

• 15:56Speaker 06

  No, Matt, Matt Hughes is a fucking legend. He's the better offline legend of reality. And he is, he and I will workshop things and sometimes be like, I don't know about that, man. I don't know, that makes sense. And that's the most valuable thing in the world. That is more, being told bad idea or I don't really get it, is the best feedback in the world. The best thing in the world is just someone being like, I don't know. You derisively talk about yourself sometimes, Chloe, and say, oh, well, I'm not an expert. Actually, being able to explain something to someone who is a layman is actually way more useful than to an expert. Because otherwise.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Thank you. I am a hero.

• 16:31Speaker 06

  You are, yeah. Thank you. But it, but it's, it really is it.

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Oh, also, I think, I think, uh, a relationship where somebody is able and willing to critique someone else's work is actually one of the most respectful relationships because it is entrusting the, the creator, the writer, the thinker, whatever, with, it, it is inherently trusting that that person can handle the criticism and can better their work. And it is, to me, it's, it feels so much better when somebody looks at me and is like, hell, yeah, what you did is like, it's really not good enough. Because I'm like, thank fucking God. I, I'll fix it. I want to get, I want to make it better.

• 17:08Speaker 06

  And then the converse of that is when you impress them, you've actually impressed them. When they're like, damn, this bangs.

• 17:13Speaker 07

  It's honest.

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• 20:09Speaker 06

  And the other thing that these AI people, they, you ever see them mention taste online?

• 20:13Speaker 08

  No.

• 20:14Speaker 06

  These AI freaks are like, oh, we gotta bring taste into it. And the way they use taste is like how, like the Ferengi from Star Trek, the next generation.

• 20:23Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 06

  Talk about, I don't know, everything, or just like guys online go like.

• 20:26Speaker 07

  I'm retweeting from you. I do not understand that reference.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  Don't worry, don't worry.

• 20:29Speaker 07

  The one girl, the girl who works in Hollywood is like.

• 20:33Speaker 06

  No, it's fine. It's a really simple comparison. It's guys online who refer to women as females. It's this thing, females, yeah, yeah, we need taste in our models, yeah. And what they mean is discernment, but they're not smart enough to actually realize that. And you can't train discernment. Discernment is contextual and cultural and all these other things. And when you say this to AI people, they're like, you're just being superior. You're just being superior to people you don't really understand. And it's like.

• 20:59Speaker 07

  It's very funny because they're being superior.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Also, show me some stuff that you've written that actually is good.

• 21:03Speaker 07

  So this, okay, so this actually will go back to your, your very initial question to me was about, I, I sort of answered about stand-up and not Hollywood more broadly. But Hollywood from a creative standpoint, so it's hollowing out post-production stuff, but.

• 21:16Speaker 06

  And just actually, before I forget, is that stuff it's hollowing out ChatGPT and stuff like that? Or is that another kind of AI?

• 21:24Speaker 07

  I don't know. That I don't know.

• 21:25Speaker 06

  That's kind of thing.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  And that's the thing, like, because all the AI gets conflated. Anyway, I talked over your question. I apologize.

• 21:33Speaker 07

  No, no, no, no, you're good. Um, the, when I think about like the actual creative output within Hollywood, because that's what people, right? People are like, we're gonna make a whole movie with AI. We're gonna make a whole, uh, whatever. You're, you're gonna be able to make, it's, I mean, it's the famous video of, what was it? Tom Cruise and?

• 21:49Speaker 06

  Oh, the Brad Pitt, which actually ended up being green screen and like a bunch of like non-AI stuff.

• 21:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 06

  Hell, yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 07

  Um, but the idea that we will make things that people can watch that are fully purely AI or that are some vast, vast, vast majority AI, um, is fundamentally going to suck. It is what, right? That's what you're saying. And, or it's going back to what you're saying, and I agree that like, that will happen. I do think that that will happen. I think it will happen from outside of the current studio, studios and guild, creative guild model. I think that, you know, somebody in some warehouse will create an AI model that will be putting out, right? They, they maybe already are.

• 22:30Speaker 06

  They just put out one and it looks like a dog shit.

• 22:32Speaker 08

  Oh, is it that old generative AI film that just came out?

• 22:35Speaker 06

  I'm gonna look this up while we're talking.

• 22:35Speaker 07

  But it will get good, right? Like, there will be people who are able to, you know, fill your entire,

• 22:43Speaker 07

  your entire short form feed can be filled with stuff that looks kind of, AI verticals that look kind of like Hollywood, right? And it is going to be crap. It, whatever, to whatever degree it already exists, it is. And what is lacking there is, it's exactly what you were saying. It is the discernment for people to say, to stand up and say, this is not interesting enough for me to count as my entertainment.

• 23:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 07

  And I think that people have less of that pushback now. I think they have less willingness to push back like that now. And I think, I, I think that people have less of that willingness to push back against, to, to employ discernment now than ever. And I actually lay the blame of that at the feet of the endless scroll feed.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 23:29Speaker 07

  Not at the feet of AI. Like, I think that AI sort of came in and was this incredibly powerful tool. But because our standards for entertainment have already kind of been nuked by the endless scroll feed, now this incredibly powerful tool can come in and produce stuff that's shit and we're not gonna push back.

• 23:50Speaker 06

  Well, my, my controversial perspective on that is I think streaming media is a bad idea. I think streaming media, I think Netflix streaming media is a terrible idea because it's both what you're saying, Chloe, and just the overall sense that there is unlimited content. So the sense that you could just build as much of it as possible and it'll be fine. I will say, I don't think it's gonna take over just because it's too expensive. It's also, it, it's so hard to actually make a cogent video of longer than a few minutes.

• 24:16Speaker 07

  And do you not think that it will get good enough in a year?

• 24:20Speaker 06

  The problem is, is that there's a bunch of psychological things with movies that they'll have trouble really.

• 24:26Speaker 07

  Totally, totally. I don't.

• 24:27Speaker 06

  There is, I think, over in Asia, I forget where, they're, they've got a lot of these ones which are coming out, which are just like tight, like short melodramas that are watched through.

• 24:36Speaker 08

  I mean, yeah, I've been seeing these on my feed where also it feels like they catch on not because they're good, but because it's absurd. Like, there's this one with this black girl was a mermaid and her classmates found out and they're racist. So they're just saying slurs. And I looked in the comments to see, okay, or, and you know, get a sense of, this is viral, this is getting, are people liking it? And it's mainly just like, sort of engagement based.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  I've also seen a fair amount of evidence that those things are bought, like they're paying to, paying to push them into the algorithm. Because there was a big thing, New York Times, I think, last year about like a really successful AI house. It was making AI films and the views just randomly crashed.

• 25:19Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 06

  And I mean, I, it, there's this company called Higgs Field AI that's doing really dodgy influencer stuff. They just bought, for those of you listening, the 12 of you will know what I mean. There's this thing called Marcus the Worm, which is a guy in a VR, VR environment going, Robert. Anyway, one of the, one of the Marcus accounts sold to Higgs Field AI and it's just AI dog shit.

• 25:41Speaker 08

  Oh, that guy's an AI guy?

• 25:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they just sold it to an AI slop account. And it's really hard to pass the success of them and like how actually, because to your point, Eddie, it's like people are laughing at them because they're real, like some of them are so bad.

• 25:55Speaker 07

  I, I think that there is going to be a sort of, I think that there's gonna be a split between people who, uh, put a premium on something that they know was made by people and people who are completely willing to accept just moving picture on my screen.

• 26:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the, well, we're already kind of seeing it more with the Substack stuff, but people are violently rejecting this. And I think what the AI people hope happens is that people are just so beaten down. I get the opposite feeling. People are getting more and more angry.

• 26:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 06

  People are getting more aggressive about it. People are, but I mean, there's this whole thing of the, did you see the OpenAI influencer day? OpenAI paid for a bunch of influencers to go to like an OpenAI thing in upstate New York and like, I don't know, walk around being like.

• 26:40Speaker 08

  Sheen tried to do this, where they brought them all to the fact and they're like.

• 26:43Speaker 06

  Sheen, that was, yeah, when Sheen flew them out and they're like, this, look, this isn't a sweatshop. We have air conditioning. Like, it's like, oh yeah, we don't, they can't kill themselves. We have nets to catch them. No, with this, it was just like.

• 26:55Speaker 08

  We don't use any water at this data center. Come and check it out.

• 26:58Speaker 06

  I, but I looked into it and it was mostly influencers who only already did Claude stuff or like OpenAI stuff. So, but the occasional ones that didn't, they had to post videos from like, like a person that said a slur in 2021. Like, they were like, I'm very sorry for using ChatGPT. I swear to God. I mean, the whole, did you see the Hank Green thing?

• 27:18Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, I did, yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  So there's this science communicator.

• 27:21Speaker 08

  The little struggle session.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  There's some people who are gonna email me about this. I'm gonna be happy. He's a science communicator. Just to be clear, he's beloved. He's got a lot of things wrong about, he's got things wrong about testosterone and autism. Like I've, and also he has fallen hook, line and sinker and been sponsored by Control AI and Effective Altruist Institute. Anyway, during one of his videos, he goes, he just, apropos of nothing, just goes, well, it means this, and thank you for the pushback. And he's like, oh, yeah, I was using it for research. And he's still to this day is like, yeah, I was losing it, using it for research. I looked at the script. I didn't say that in the script. It's just like, no one says, I appreciate the pushback other than an AI model. Regular people don't say that in the flow of conversation.

• 28:03Speaker 06

  But he is basically like, I'm gonna shut down this. I'm gonna stop producing for a while. I've relied too much on AI. And it's like, it's so bizarre because that, I don't think this is changing. I don't think it's gonna become more permissible to use AI. AI is everywhere now, whether you like it or not. But that doesn't mean people are tolerant. People are getting like.

• 28:21Speaker 07

  Frustrated.

• 28:22Speaker 06

  Aggressive. Like they're, I don't think the AI industry realizes how angry people are. And to be clear, I'm not encouraging anger or violence or anything like that. But I don't have to. I think people are already angry. I saw a video from a few months ago of a data center getting cancelled and a guy running outside and going like, it's cancelled and everyone cheering. When OpenAI finally dies, it's gonna be like Coruscant on the end of Return of the Jedi and the remake specifically.

• 28:48Speaker 07

  I hope, another reference I don't get. I hope.

• 28:50Speaker 06

  Have you never seen Return of the Jedi?

• 28:51Speaker 07

  Which one is that one? I hope, I'm sorry. Everybody, man, all of, all of your, all of your nerd fans who were gonna come to my show are like, we're cancelling those tickets now. And I love nerds and I love you and I'm also a nerd. Actually, come up to me, tell me the.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  I will comp you a year's subscription to my premium newsletter if you buy a ticket. I mean it.

• 29:11Speaker 07

  Oh, wow. That's a, that's a big offer. Uh, one, one time I, when I didn't wanna have a conversation with a friend, I asked him to explain the plot of The Matrix to me.

• 29:19Speaker 08

  Boy, and you could just.

• 29:20Speaker 07

  And then, and we burned a couple hours. And then we would get to like, I would be like, and what happened in the next one? I was going through a breakup and I had to hang out with this friend. And I did, I like really didn't wanna talk about my breakup. And I was like, what, oh, and what does Trinity do? Anyway.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  It's a little like a libertarian mousetrap.

• 29:35Speaker 08

  What's the architect?

• 29:38Speaker 07

  Oh, and what does that symbolize? And he thought I was so interesting.

• 29:40Speaker 06

  What's Zion? Oh, wow.

• 29:42Speaker 07

  Oh, they're like.

• 29:43Speaker 06

  Oh, interesting. And you're just inside your head just going. The thing is, you could never have a conversation like that with an AI. Well, actually, you could get a boring explanation of The Matrix.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 29:53Speaker 06

  But he wouldn't be there.

• 29:54Speaker 07

  He would, yeah, I could just walk away.

• 29:55Speaker 08

  Well, now, I, the voice mode, you could, you could probably get that going, right? You could have the conversation with it.

• 30:01Speaker 06

  Chloe, they got, they got this thing now where they got voice mode for these things. And they're all buying little microphones, like I barely even type anymore. You know, it smelled crazy in there also, but they're just sitting there being like, computer, computer, no, add the code now. No, delete that code. Oh, I don't like it, computer. And these motherfuckers never share their code. They never share the software they're building. They're just working on AI for 15 hours a day. So you know it's shit. You know they don't read any of it.

• 30:25Speaker 08

  You know.

• 30:26Speaker 07

  So tell me, okay, wait. Okay, I just had a friend who works, he works in, in tech and AI, I don't know. Um, and he was like, my goal is to build an AI agent for myself so that every single morning, my AI agent can just tell me what emails are in my inbox and I can tell my agent, you know, what to respond to who and that I never have to be in my inbox. I can just talk to my AI agent.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  Right.

• 30:54Speaker 07

  And when he says that, I'm like, honestly, that sounds amazing.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  I, I can't. I'm sorry. Emails are not that hard.

• 31:02Speaker 07

  I, I, yes, I agree. And like, we all deal with emails, but I'm like, it's hard. It's like, that fantasy is very seductive, right?

• 31:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 31:11Speaker 07

  The idea that I can just be like, and tell me what's in my inbox. Yeah. And tell her, uh, I'll, I can do the 24th and, uh, but we need to push it by a half an hour. And tell him that, right? Like, that is very, it's very, very tempting.

• 31:25Speaker 06

  I see that, but my thing is like, I feel like if I don't read an email, I don't want to respond to it. Like, I don't want to just be like dashing stuff off because also, if you don't read a contract and you sign it, you're still bound by it. And that's how I feel with my emails. It's like, if my AI agent decides to call someone the wrong name, or swear at them, or send them an attachment that's just my last seven years' tax returns, like, I don't know. I don't know what's happening. And maybe it will work.

• 31:51Speaker 07

  And what if they would say that the AI is not going to make those mistakes?

• 31:54Speaker 06

  I wouldn't believe that. But the other thing is like, how much time are you saving? How much time are you realistically, I'm sorry, is your inbox so, person I've never met, is your inbox so huge? But this is the thing as well. It's the grand promise of AI. It's like, what are you getting back? What is this saving you? And everywhere I look, it's people are working more. They're not actually saving time. Like, the thing, the problems I have in my life don't come from too many emails.

• 32:21Speaker 07

  I also think, as I'm thinking about this for myself, I'm like, I think I ingest information so much more clearly when I am sitting in front of the email, reading it, thinking about my response, typing out my response, rather than just sort of having a chat with a robot. I'm not really clinging to that information. And I'm not really having new ideas about, oh, fuck, I should actually talk to that other person about this, and I should ask them if they have it in here, and they blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 08

  I think there's also this thing where it's like, you know, a lot of the desires in automation are, how can we get assistant labor? How can we get some form of slave labor, servant labor? Like, what shortcut can we do? And I feel like, for a lot of the impulses around, like, making your home a bit more smarter, or making your digital life a little bit more streamlined, they are like, what if we could get the thing a human does? But like you're saying, you still need the human, right? The reason why the assistant works is because the assistant literally is a person, goes through them and talks with you about them, and not like, you're playing a game of telephone with overviews and summaries.

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• 36:35Speaker 06

  These things dilute your life to a series of calendar appointments and emails, when it's not like, it's, I don't know, it's Wednesday, I've been on a bunch of calls all day, I don't want to do anything after 4:30 PM. I might regularly go after 6:00 PM, but today I don't want to do this. And honestly, the only AI thing that's actually impressed me, I'm going to tell you a story now. Random, I get reached out to by this company called Matic that makes a robot that mops and vacuums your floor. And it fucking rocks because all the data is on the device, and I called it Turdsly, and it cleans my floors, and it's great. $1,800 fucking dollars.

• 37:06Speaker 07

  What data is it?

• 37:06Speaker 06

  It's like, it looks around your apartment and maps it out with radar, but it's all kept on device. I know.

• 37:11Speaker 07

  You have shit in corner.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong? Why did you do this?

• 37:17Speaker 07

  You shit in the corner again.

• 37:19Speaker 06

  Is this puke?

• 37:20Speaker 08

  55% of the time, it's here.

• 37:24Speaker 06

  And that's the thing. It's like, why do I like this? Because I don't have to mop my floor. And also, I didn't...

• 37:29Speaker 07

  But I have news for you. You don't have to mop your floor to start with.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, that's true. Also, I didn't pay for it.

• 37:34Speaker 07

  I'm not gonna mop my floor. You just go.

• 37:37Speaker 06

  But I think that that's the thing. This thing is $1,800. And it does very straightforward things very well. But that's the thing, 1,800 bucks to clean your floors. And these people are like, 20 bucks, it'll do everything. No, it won't. Because your life is not a series of bits of data, or watching your screen. It's the crazy bullshit that happens around it, and your emotions, your endocrine system, and how your life is going, and how you feel that particular day, and what you're capable of doing. And, I don't know, I don't think that is data that can be captured, nor is it data that can be fucking trained on there. And to your point, Eddie, as well, they really want a slave. They really suffer. They keep fucking talking about AGI. And they're like, yeah, we just want a conscious being that will trap, and bend to our will.

• 38:18Speaker 08

  In a cellar, and he'll run the market for us, and he'll make everything richer, you know?

• 38:23Speaker 06

  And he'll do the work for us, and we will get paid, and we will not do anything for him, but we will own him. The AGI.

• 38:32Speaker 08

  And we will keep those who walk away from Omalus outside of his training.

• 38:36Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 38:36Speaker 08

  So he doesn't know what we're doing to him.

• 38:38Speaker 06

  Which actually leads me neatly into Mark Zuckerberg's recent blog. Before we wrap up, I just want to read you one little quote from this piece of shit motherfucker. Now, this is a blog called The Future is for Everyone.

• 38:50Speaker 08

  The most trustworthy man in America.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  The most trustworthy and damp man out there, other than Clammy Sam Altman himself. "The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. So, just to be clear, this is the guy who owns all of social media. And his idea of the future is that everything should be shared other than the stuff he owns." And he is saying that he believes that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer the question of how people decide what matters in their own lives. And you may wonder, what the fuck does that mean? And that's because he doesn't know either. He says, "Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about." This man has spent $150 billion or more on data centers, and has yet to build that.

• 39:34Speaker 08

  Did Lava write it?

• 39:35Speaker 06

  That's the thing. I ran it through Pangram, and it said it was 100% human, which makes me think a team of interns and lawyers wrote this.

• 39:44Speaker 06

  My favorite one is...

• 39:44Speaker 07

  Something as insane as, "This robot will help you figure out what you want in your life," might actually have been written by Mark Zuckerberg himself.

• 39:53Speaker 06

  This is actually really good, though. "Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas. My eight-year-old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening that would have taken me months or been impossible previously." What the fuck are you talking about, Mark? Why are you letting your eight-year-old daughter in front of an LLM?

• 40:10Speaker 08

  Also, what are you doing that, you know, she could do it a few days, that would take you months?

• 40:15Speaker 06

  Now we're designing a robot together.

• 40:18Speaker 08

  Are they?

• 40:18Speaker 06

  No, you're not. Meanwhile, researchers at Meta are generating novel crystal structures that are ideal for augmented reality glasses, and engineers are creating new apps in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. So, here's actually what's happening at Meta. Last year, an old man with dementia was talking to a Kylie Jenner-branded bot, and he then got on a train to New York, and then fell over and died. And that was the end of the story. Also, you could have sex chats with a John Cena bot, even if you said you were a child. This is Meta. This is what Meta builds. Now, the reason I brought this up is, I have spent most of the day talking to people about the promise of AI. And whenever I try and bring up real things, it does, everyone says, it can summarize emails, it

• 41:01Speaker 06

  can do research. No one will talk like this, because this is not real. The promise of AI is a fucking lie. And also... All of these people live in compounds disconnected from the world. Why?

• 41:12Speaker 07

  That's why, that's why his kid has to have sex chats with the John Cena box.

• 41:15Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no. Chloe was misinformed on that one. That was not.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Just pulling the.

• 41:29Speaker 07

  Shepherd's hook is pulling me out.

• 41:32Speaker 06

  And it's just, this I think is like, this, I, this is what I think is so vulgar about AI though, which is the, the people up the top who don't use this shit, who don't touch it, just like, yeah, it's gonna do everything for everyone, as happens for me with my army of servants I pay.

• 41:47Speaker 08

  Right.

• 41:48Speaker 06

  Now, I'm just gonna give that to everyone else. How? I don't fucking know. That's someone else's job. Everything is someone else's job.

• 41:53Speaker 08

  It's, it's a hard problem and we need to figure it out together.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  And, but not me though. You're gonna figure it out. And it just, it feels like living in an alternative reality sometimes, because they talk about this shit, like building robots with their daughter or whatever.

• 42:05Speaker 08

  Also, didn't he write some shit like this when he's pushing the metaverse?

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, he did the same thing with the metaverse.

• 42:11Speaker 08

  Live in a digital virtual reality where you can pay $3 million for a square foot of virtual space and you'll realize your dreams.

• 42:18Speaker 06

  Do you ever go in the metaverse? Have you ever tried out?

• 42:20Speaker 08

  I will never go there.

• 42:24Speaker 06

  I will die in the metaverse.

• 42:26Speaker 08

  I will die a million times.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  Didn't go to the Walmart Robot Experiment.

• 42:32Speaker 08

  Keep that away from me.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  Keep me away from the Walmart in the Roblox.

• 42:36Speaker 07

  It's so crazy that actually, so the promise of AI, let's like, take that semi-seriously.

• 42:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 07

  It is insane to me that the goal at the end of the day is this thing that is inherently so human, which is answer the unanswerable question that you know exists within the blackness of your soul, right? Like, that is, it is like, he is grappling with, look inside yourself. Why do you feel unfulfilled when you wake up in the morning?

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 07

  And he is saying, now we have invented a technology that will answer that. And that, there's no bridge to that gap. There's no reason why this technology is going to fill the unfillable hole that we have not been, that, that people have been grappling with for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 08

  Forever.

• 43:31Speaker 06

  He's like, he's like, this tool will find my soul. It's definitely in there.

• 43:35Speaker 08

  I didn't find it in the metaverse.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  But this is, it's, but that's actually a really good point. It's, these people are bereft of culture, that bereft of love and joy. Like, they don't seem to enjoy anything.

• 43:44Speaker 08

  Well, you know, he's got the Julius Caesar cut again. He enjoys culture.

• 43:48Speaker 06

  The way they spend their money is not like.

• 43:51Speaker 07

  Well, this is what's weird. So, these, these people do not want to make product, they, they don't want to make art or jobs or products, really. They want to make money.

• 44:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  But they do benefit from art and products. And they, and I think that is what is so off-putting about them. That it's like, this guy is dealing with the same problems that we are dealing with. He's dealing with the, he's on the same search. He's on, you know, the same hunt for a purpose and fulfillment that any of us are.

• 44:24Speaker 07

  And it feels so smarmy to say, I have a way, I have figured out how to answer that, that soul question better than any of you dumb fucks.

• 44:39Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 44:39Speaker 07

  With my computer machine.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  Which does the same thing as everyone else is.

• 44:43Speaker 07

  Right, right. It's, it's very, very off-putting to watch somebody benefit from art and enjoy, enjoy human connection and talk about wanting it, and then like, hand a thing to us that is inherently non-human connection, that is inherently non-human, and that inherently just makes him money.

• 45:02Speaker 06

  Yes, and ultimately is just an extraction tool, that also is nothing like what he's, just what he's describing with superintelligence for all and like, a smart assistant that knows everything. It doesn't exist. It's not what he's talking about. Kind of reminds me, we were just talking before the show about this, about Sam Altman was interviewed on, recently, and he was like, well, what's it gonna do? It's gonna be, it's gonna be able to answer wishes.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  First of all, the moment they bring up magic, it's over. Like, they, it's like.

• 45:29Speaker 07

  And I asked you, was that a joke? Was he trying to be funny?

• 45:32Speaker 06

  No.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  And you said no.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  No, it's hu, also, humorless man.

• 45:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  Just like, and he said, yeah, and then, you won't believe the wishes it'll land. He sounds like, honestly, he occasionally slips into Trump voice. Like, if it's just like, it's gonna grant any wish you want, although you won't believe her bit, beautiful wishes. But he said, because it's the same kind of like, soullessness, just like overpromising. But what, I was watching it earlier, it was like, three questions and the third one was like, you won't believe the kind of wishes it will answer. And it's just like, what the fuck are you, when you don't experience problems, I guess you just stop having ideas. When you just stop having any friction in your life, you're like, what are fucking people dealing with? Email?

• 46:13Speaker 08

  Do you think if Sam Altman's initial plan, when he was pitching the Gulf Monarchs for $7 trillion? If that had been successful, do you think he'd be speaking about it in even more grand terms? Or just the same sort of like, it's a genie, it's a gin, you know?

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Well, also, I love the idea of just being like, yeah, it's a genie, it's a gin, which is, you know, famously always friendly.

• 46:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  Famously, never a, never a deal with consequences or costs of any kind. No famous stories about this at all, including Aladdin.

• 46:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, definitely not in that region of the world. There are no stories about that.

• 46:51Speaker 06

  Jesus Christ. But with, with him as well, I think he would have gone exactly the same path, because if he'd have got $7 trillion, we'd be in the same fucking place.

• 46:59Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  We'd be doing the same shit, because large language models are inherently limited. Because, and this is not even a technical point, there is only so much that you can get from training something. You, you are, they, it's what happens when you're disconnected from humanity and culture and love and joy, and you see the world as ones and zeros, and you say, okay, how do I learn? Well, I just read a hundred books. I read a hundred books, and then I talk to the smartest person I know for seven hours. I listen to Lex Fridman.

• 47:28Speaker 08

  On 4X.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  And I have peptides every minute. Ah, and everything will be optimized when in fact, our experiences inform us, and we have no idea what experiences will inform us in what ways. Some of the best things and most interesting ideas I've had have been in the weirdest places, or like, middle of the night when I've not slept, when I got to bed too late, or I didn't eat enough, so I woke up hungry. I'm like, why? And it's not because I'm hungry, it's just because my brain goes, hey, why have you looked at this part of the earnings?

• 47:59Speaker 07

  And again, this is, this is the line between a human experience, which is inherently unpredictable, versus a machine experience, which, the goal, the goal of which is to make it as predictable as possible. And, I mean, I'm thinking about Hollywood, you were asking about Hollywood at the beginning. It's like, Hollywood is a business of unpredictability.

• 48:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 48:20Speaker 07

  And the point of making art is to take a shot, and you don't know if it's gonna work, and you don't know if it's gonna flop. And we are trying, tech people and finance people, I think, are trying to lay a, a lens of predictability, and your, your language growth at all costs, onto my business, which is inherently a business of unpredictability. And I think that that's art, you know, art and human experience is valuable when shit hits when you don't expect it to.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  And also, the other thing to, to yes and this, a lot of great art is not, doesn't have an answer. Like, I just watched last year's Girlfriend, watching Twin Peaks The Return. There's a large amount of that where you just have to kind of work it out. And David Lynch would never have told you.

• 49:08Speaker 08

  Nope.

• 49:08Speaker 06

  He would have, he would have just said no. Like, the fireman creating, I can't actually continue that, it was spoiled, spoiled Twin Peaks there. But it's like, some of the stuff that happens, you just have to kind of experience. You can't generate that, because that's whatever the hell, I think he had a, like, deeply spiritual process as well.

• 49:24Speaker 08

  One of my favorite interviews with him, where he's like, you know, you go to the movies and people want to talk about the movie when it's done, and it's like, the movie was the talking.

• 49:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 08

  You have to just do that and then leave.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  And sometimes there aren't answers. And I think that that, like, that's the fundamental, and that's the fundamental thing of all of this. It's like, oh, there must be an answer for everything. Everything must be normalized and packaged and financialized and commoditized. And the funny thing is, is, I feel like this is the end run of capitalism as we know it. That's my big, like, people think it's the AI, but no, I think we're at the end run of this stage of capitalism, and whatever follows will be chaos, because the markets are no longer based on reality.

• 50:03Speaker 07

  They're completely divorced from any, any material value.

• 50:06Speaker 06

  And even the discussion of AI, it's like, yeah, it's so powerful. Is it? Or is, does it just use a lot of power? It, everyone interprets everything based on like, these fucking shadows in the walls of the cave, and the very fundament of meaning is being stripped out. Partly because these companies think they can normalize creation of stuff, of everything, that everything can be generative, at the highest cost possible, just the most in the same way. Also, we're four years in and we're still reading the same shit. They were saying this shit about superintelligence in 2022.

• 50:36Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  They, they were promising this bullshit for years, and it's still where, I, I, people can, I, I will get an email from one of you people. I love most of you. Some of you email me, and you're like, well, actually, I've proven this is that. Don't you realize that you could do this?

• 50:50Speaker 07

  And one person emails with an entire breakdown of Return of the Jedi.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  An explanation. You know what?

• 50:58Speaker 07

  Email me, email me. My emails on my website. No, you can email me. If you find my email on my website, you can email me.

• 51:04Speaker 08

  The first six movies.

• 51:06Speaker 06

  I'm gonna wrap this up here. Eddie, where can people find you?

• 51:09Speaker 08

  Um, BigBlackJacobit on Twitter, and, uh, the Tech Bubble on Substack.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  Hell, yeah. And Chloe, you got a show.

• 51:19Speaker 07

  I am, yes, I am at Chloe Badcliff on all socials, like my last name Radcliffe but bad. And my show is in New York at Joe's Pub, August 19th and 20th. It is called Cheat.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  And if you email me a receipt of your ticket, I'll give you a year of the newsletter.

• 51:33Speaker 07

  Wow. I mean, that's crazy. That's amazing.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  It's a good deal. Uh, anyway, thank you all for listening. I'm of course Ed Zitron. This has been an inverse week, where you've got the big episode at the end of the week versus on the Wednesday. That was because of technical differences. We will be back next week. I think we're gonna have Steve Burke. Wonderful Steve Burke of Games Next is gonna return, and we have some really interesting shit for CES 2027. The people in front of me don't even know this. Cal Newport's gonna join us.

• 51:57Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 51:57Speaker 06

  Wonderful Cal Newport, and we might even have Brendan Lee Mulligan.

• 52:00Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 52:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be fucking great. I'm really, I'm already planning CES 2027. When I tell people this, they are horrified. They are really, they really don't like it.

• 52:09Speaker 08

  CES is like how the years pass for me now.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  I'm the planner, all right? Listen, as much as I joke about it, you're all incredible. I hear from you every day on the subreddit, on email, on Signal, on even the Bloomberg Terminal. Thank you so much for your support. We're winning, everyone. Thank you all, and I love you all.

• 52:27Speaker 07

  And kill a delivery robot.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  True. I'm not endorsing this.

• 52:40Speaker 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.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  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.

• 53:45Speaker 13

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