Hater Season: Henry Zebrowski

Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - continues as Ed is joined by Henry Zebrowski of Last Podcast on the Left to talk about Business Idiots, the metaverse, and the beauty of the human mind. https://www.patreon.com/cw/lastpodcastontheleft youtube.com/@lpntv 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 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

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• 0:34Speaker 02

  My name is Jessa. One of the things I love the most about working for United Healthcare is that everybody matters. Every moment matters. There's a person behind every problem. I care because it's what I was put on this earth to do.

• 0:50Speaker 03

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• 1:05Speaker 04

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• 1:36Ed Zitron?

  Small businesses are the pulse of every community. They bring people together, create opportunities, and drive growth. Chase for Business helps business owners like you with personalized guidance and convenient digital tools all in one place. With that guidance and your determination, you can take your business further and help build a brighter future for your community. Learn more at chase.com/business. Chase for Business: Make More of What's Yours. The Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase & Company.

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  Callzone Media Hello, welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host Ed Zetron.

• 2:39Ed Zitron?

  Apologies to everyone for missing the monologue last week. I know many of you have threatened my life. That's a joke. You're all very lovely about it. But we are back this week. It's hater season. I'm gonna be honest, hater season has been so much fun that everyone is just, I think we're just gonna do this forever. And today I'm joined by an incredible guy. I'm gonna be one of two divas coming together to maximize our joint slay. I'm joined by Henry Zebrowski of Last Podcast on the Left. Henry, how are you?

• 3:07Speaker 06

  I am good. I'm filled with rage.

• 3:10Ed Zitron?

  With rage about what?

• 3:11Speaker 06

  I'm ready. Honestly, I hate the goddamn Metaverse.

• 3:15Ed Zitron?

  It's, I saw it pop up the other day. I saw a person mention the Metaverse and there is one guy, Jamie something, just a guy on Twitter, you can find him. Who, I watched him go from crypto, from Clubhouse to web three, to NFTs, to Metaverse, to AI, and now he's back to Metaverse. And I think people

• 3:38Speaker 06

  He's wrong.

• 3:39Ed Zitron?

  He's wrong, but also

• 3:41Speaker 06

  He's professionally wrong.

• 3:43Ed Zitron?

  But that's crazy. Like, I, people are very unfair to me about my correct opinions, but it's insane to me how many of these consultant swindlers still exist. And how there are still people being like, yeah dude, yeah, the Metaverse is still here, man. I'll pay you. I'll do this.

• 3:59Speaker 06

  It's because they're desperate. They're desperate for some other realm of productivity and work. There's something, they really thought they had us pegged during COVID. Like at some point, they were like, they miss work. They miss work. They miss, they, they, they miss. They miss people. They miss us. And they had this idea of like, oh, the social network, like what we have to do is convince them they're hanging out. We have to convince all of them that they're all just gonna like, oh, no, no, it's, it's, it's work. Sure. But it's like a lifestyle. Work is like your lifestyle.

• 4:40Ed Zitron?

  Do you remember that whole period as well, just before the metaverse, where there were all of the remote work articles that were like, "We're missing the serendipity of the office. We're missing it. You can't bump into a friend at the office and have these thoughts." I love that because it was always written by a boss, because you could tell, because everyone else at work is like, "I just want to put my fucking headphones in. I just want to get my job done. Please leave me alone."

• 5:01Speaker 06

  We have crawled into the heads of these giant corporate guys. Like, that's kind of what we're living in. I feel like we're living in a giant ketamine, like, we're in a ketamine-fueled dream right now. Like, we are in a-

• 5:14Ed Zitron?

  We live inside the ketamine dream, but what is the, who is the dreamer?

• 5:17Speaker 06

  The dreamer is people like Zuckerberg and these guys that are kind of forming how they think we view reality. They're like, trying to put that on us. They're trying to say, "We love work, we love productivity." As a, as a, as a, as a animal, as a human animal, they believe we crave crushing it. We crave dividends. We crave-

• 5:43Ed Zitron?

  I love hustling.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  We love hustling. And I've just, we've just been in this place now where we're kind of being dragged through their version of the future, which is just not panning out. You know, like, the metaverse, I did a show on the metaverse once.

• 6:00Ed Zitron?

  Right, right.

• 6:01Speaker 06

  I, I did New Year's Eve-

• 6:03Ed Zitron?

  In the metaverse? What, which one? Facebook Horizon Worlds?

• 6:08Speaker 06

  It was some, yes, I wa, it was something like, so everybody was a little weebalwobble person, right? Because they had to eliminate gener, you remember when they had to go through the whole thing? Because they had to eliminate lower halves of people?

• 6:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes, because they said they were bringing in legs, but then the legs didn't, didn't pan out?

• 6:26Speaker 06

  Legs, yes, because legs mean penis and balls or vagina, right? And so what happened was, is that as soon as those were in play, as soon as legs were in play, penis and balls and vaginas were in place, and then immediately the people started getting sexually harassed on the metaverse.

• 6:45Ed Zitron?

  But did they ever put the legs in? I thought they weren't able to get them in at all.

• 6:49Speaker 06

  No, because that was the, let's just say, I believe you, you saw several attempts at this, this idea of like, "We can't put in legs. You can't put in legs?" You mean to tell me you built an entire second reality and you can't put in fucking legs?

• 7:06Ed Zitron?

  I mean, I mean practically speaking, putting in functional legs that map to movement from the user would be difficult. But it's just, I never really understood.

• 7:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's not even with your, there's the aesthetics of legs.

• 7:18Ed Zitron?

  Have like a flat like a Ken doll, who cares?

• 7:21Speaker 06

  It's, as soon as people saw legs, they saw genitals and they started saying horrific stuff to each other on the metaverse. And so they got rid of legs.

• 7:30Ed Zitron?

  Tell me about this metaverse experience you had, this New Year's Eve.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  So I was asked to do, uh, it was during COVID. I was asked to do the comedy for a New Year's Eve party, quote unquote, in a build out. It was like a metaverse build out. It was one of those, they had done it for this, this specific event. And the goal was that people were walking around this virtual space and they would come upon you. And then your camera would turn on and you'd see quote unquote, the real person there. I was in a character, it was wildly invasive. Everybody was obviously had, uh, agreed to it, but I was Cheddar Goblin, which is a character from a movie called Mandy. Right? I was playing, yeah, this is my life.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  This is called the entertainer's life, Ed.

• 8:21Ed Zitron?

  I mean, yeah.

• 8:22Speaker 06

  They gave me a thousand dollars.

• 8:24Ed Zitron?

  That's worth it.

• 8:25Speaker 06

  It was, it was for the tears. Cause then I put in, I propped up, I have a build out of the Cheddar Goblin from Mandy, right? I have a pole from the original model. I put it in a chair and I put it on a, I put a camera on it. And then I was talking as him, roasting people that would arrive to the little comedy build out. Right. That they had, and the thing is, is that, which what happened after every single COVID stream show is that obviously it was janky. It was strange. People were not, even though they thought they, they were prepped that their cameras were, would turn on. They were not prepped that their cameras would turn on and they would get scared and it was bad. You know, it's like all that type of stuff.

• 9:09Speaker 06

  But in the end, it really is, which is what I discovered afterwards is the closing of the laptop after this and the silence.

• 9:18Ed Zitron?

  Oh, was it just like constant noise in there?

• 9:21Speaker 06

  Well, just the idea of like, as a performer, like this was kind of one of the big issues I had to just even just during COVID, which is.

• 9:30Speaker 06

  The cavern of silence after the show that you have now done on Zoom and which you've been in a sort of simulacrum of real life for half a second. And then as soon as the laptop closes, all that illusion is shattered. And now you're just sitting in silence. And there's a part of me that thinks that that is kind of the issue with the phenomena as a whole, which is this fake, a fake version of society that they wanted to recreate for us in order for us to obey whatever rules they want to set up for us. And so like, as I was in this, I was like, oh, I'm a part of the normalizing process of this. Like this is if I am a person and I am here doing

• 10:15Speaker 06

  this as a way to show all of you, look, even if the world is uninhabitable, even if all the corporations of the world make the surface, a giant like lava stream, the rest of us can still go underground and don't worry, there can still be the Friends reboot. Don't worry, there can still be any type of Charmin you like. It can be there, it can be underground, we can live underground. We don't need all of this real life.

• 10:43Ed Zitron?

  Right. I also think it's just, to your point about living inside their heads, it is really funny watching them try and sell, like make stuff to sell us when they do not speak to real people. Like, yeah, what, what are you fucking pigs like? You have sitting at desks, right? You wanna walk around the world? I guess, look, it's the few, you pigs like this, right? What do you think you hogs?

• 11:09Speaker 06

  Thing about the human version of the, right now, what I see is the IRL version of the metaverse are the corporate like, it is not only a, it's an apartment complex, it's where you work, it's also where the, you got your slot bowls and then you can go over here and you can get your face injections and you can go over here and you can do the thing that makes you look and sound and you can get the clothes that make you look just like everybody else.

• 11:33Ed Zitron?

  Google version of Worry Free from Sorry to Bother You.

• 11:36Speaker 06

  Yes, yes, there is. That's, that's like one soft rollout, right? For I do believe.

• 11:44Ed Zitron?

  They've started pulling back though. They've started pulling back on corporate benefits. So I think it is going to be the, the moment a company offers housing within their campus. That's how you know that they've just lost the plot and they're like, how do fuck it? How do we do this? We'll just give them housing, I guess.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  I genuinely believe all of this is the dry run for some form of United States of Peter Thiel.

• 12:08Ed Zitron?

  See, that's, that's the thing though. Cause I, I see that argument. But whenever I read them or hear them talk or actually look at the success of them trying to do like their network state stuff, which always seems to go poorly because running a city or a country is hard.

• 12:24Speaker 06

  It's hard.

• 12:25Ed Zitron?

  But I also see it fall apart and I see them put like AI in general is this thing. It's very much a cultureless person, a person who doesn't know anything, how they think knowledge or culture works. Culture is just when you go to the art spender and you're like, what art please? I've got a hundred dollars. How much art can I get for this?

• 12:45Speaker 06

  Culture is humans hanging out, spending time.

• 12:48Ed Zitron?

  And in perfection too.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's like, it's this culture is literally just a, there was a, not to, not to minimize it, but it's almost a, to me, in my mind, it's a, it's, it's a product of our connectivity as, as an animal, as a psychic animal. Like it's a, that's the point of it. And so they're just trying to, they don't, they think that's gay. Okay?

• 13:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. They, they have, no, they really have like a deep homophobia towards anything emotional or sensual. So feminine is what they get.

• 13:20Speaker 06

  I do believe that, that that is the literal vibe that I get, which is this idea of you look at Peter Thiel talking, look at these people talking. And I guess that's what it is, is that they fail.

• 13:31Ed Zitron?

  Though, but you, but you saying there's like a self-loathing to it?

• 13:34Speaker 06

  I just mean in terms of his. The way they they view it as frivolous and stupid.

• 13:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:41Speaker 06

  That our our need for connection is something that is replaced.

• 13:46Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  That is very easily replaced. Yes, and that that is, and it's extremely easy to place. And so what they didn't do, little things, what you were saying too, is the idea of a corporate culture. It's like when I was working in office jobs, the idea of a culture, I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I'm here to get health insurance. Like, I'm not here to meet you, buddy. Like, I'm here for health insurance, you know, like, I'm here to work, like, to just get the fuck out of here and go home. But they want, yeah, they just want all of us. They want to, they want every minute of our fucking breathing lives.

• 14:19Ed Zitron?

  Well, that kind of reminds me again, around just before the metaverse, all of the anti-remote work stuff that talked about office culture, it's like, office culture is so important. You need office culture. Office culture is what brings the company together. Missing from most of these articles was the definition of office culture because it was just kind of work propaganda.

• 14:39Speaker 06

  It's doing what your boss wants you to do.

• 14:42Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 14:42Speaker 06

  That is what office culture means.

• 14:44Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:45Speaker 06

  Which means you're living in a dictator, you're living in his, you're living in his reality.

• 14:50Ed Zitron?

  And on top of that, it's like, you, oh, so you're saying we should have a culture that involves supporting labor and respecting labor and valuing work and supporting us. They're like, oh, God, no. No, no, no, sorry, sorry. Don't get us wrong. It's the culture of the office, not the people in it.

• 15:06Speaker 06

  It is the foosball tables.

• 15:09Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  It's the foosball tables. There's a, we got a never-ending soup bowl.

• 15:14Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 15:15Speaker 06

  You know, hmm.

• 15:16Ed Zitron?

  Hmm, we love, I I used, I used to have a WeWork long ago, and I never tried the beer. And when I finally tried it, I'm like, wow, these people fucking hate us. Because it was like the worst beer. They could have put like a keg of Bud Light and it would have been fine. But they somehow found like a beer that tasted not quite as bad as Natty Light. But.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they just, and then, but it's their beer. It's the WeWork of beer.

• 15:45Ed Zitron?

  Yes, it really is. Yeah, it's like the beer slop.

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Yep, beer slop. These, I I find it. We are not living up to their expectations, Ed.

• 15:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 06

  I think that's what it is, is that we're really not living up to their expectations. We're not dying fast enough. We're not working hard enough. And that's the thing is that we really should be working and dying up until the very minute. The very minute that we die, technically, we should be productive in that. It is, and that's why, you know, when I hear the argument, like about how people like me should be having kids. And then I hear where the argument's coming from. And I hear it's about me keeping up the ever exponentially rising capitalistic output. That's really all they're concerned about.

• 16:36Ed Zitron?

  So there are enough workers.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 16:39Ed Zitron?

  It's really funny. We're gonna get the listener, the occasional listeners who are like, because occasionally with, I think we've got a fairly left-leaning audience. But occasionally, I'm sure you're listening now, one of you guys, who's like a straight up like somehow a center-left person who's very pro-work. Could be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Office culture's important so that everyone knows why they're doing their job. I know why I'm doing my job, make money. Well, I'm an entertainer now, I guess, not, guess is a real job. But I remember the offices I've worked in, the one that was the worst was the one that I actually respected the most for just not pretending there was a work culture. They didn't have any of that shit. They were just like, you need to do this enough or we fucking fire you.

• 17:20Ed Zitron?

  It's a PR firm, truly nightmarish place, but it didn't try, no one tried to pretend like we're a family here. No, we're not. This is jail.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Unless you're working at a not-for-profit, helping people directly. There is absolutely no reason for you to have a fucking thesis statement outside of we're a company that makes goods for people. Or we provide X and we pay you to do X. That is it. That's all we do. Like it's, there doesn't even have to be special in that. And this is the problem is that we're, I see it from, literally from reality television shows all the way up to this top now. This like concept of everything has to have like a presented story. Everybody already has to be arriving with a character arc, ready to go locked in. And now.

• 18:11Speaker 06

  The bosses are doing that. The bosses are applying a character arc to us. They are saying, they're trying to tell us what we are gonna do for them. And now I feel like we're in this process of they are going to try over the next decade or so to kill as many of us as possible, to literally weed out the, the, uh, the people that are against it. They're gonna make us sick. They're gonna put bad things in the food. They're gonna pull out all of the things protecting the environment. They're extremely sure they're gonna be able to beat all of those for themselves, right? And then what they're gonna do is create a break off civilization. All of this is a dry run for them to leave us behind.

• 18:56Ed Zitron?

  The funny thing is, is though, I believe you that that's what they may plan.

• 19:02Speaker 06

  I mean, the plan. It's the plan.

• 19:04Ed Zitron?

  I don't think they're competent enough to prove it because the, the metaverse was the, I think Clubhouse was the beginning for me, but the metaverse was the moment when I was like, oh, you don't speak to any real people.

• 19:15Speaker 06

  Clubhouse was the single dumbest, giantest, flaming pile of waste of money of anything I have ever, that was so stupid. I was gonna almost use a presidential word, Ed. It was so stupid that the whole thing, I cannot believe the whole thing needs to be deleted. It was just repackaging intercoms? It was repackaging a Zoom call, a conference call?

• 19:44Ed Zitron?

  It's like, have you ever wanted really, really, really, really bad, non-produced radio with people that thought they were great? Welcome to Clubhouse. Do you wanna hear VCs talk for hours and say multiple slurs? Well, guess what? We, we have a place for you.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  We already have podcasts, man.

• 20:03Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but the thing is though, it was, I remember, the reason that it got to me, Clubhouse specifically, was because the amount of people I talked to was like, Ed, this is the future, man. It's the future. This is how everything's gonna get done.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Tell me about it, dude.

• 20:16Ed Zitron?

  What's your Clubhouse strategy?

• 20:18Speaker 06

  And every, but, you, how many times I heard that fucking sentence? And I was just like, this super flu is gonna kill all of us. That was like the only, that was my main response.

• 20:27Ed Zitron?

  I was like terrified of dying.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  Yes. I was like, we're all gonna fucking die and you want me to repackage radio again? I've already done it, dude. I did it 15 years ago.

• 20:37Ed Zitron?

  Just like the good doctor. I am a podcaster.

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• 21:18Ed Zitron?

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• 22:18Speaker 04

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• 23:58Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's... But it was also just a moment where I was like, looking at all of these supposedly smart people, all these people who are meant to really know what they're fucking talking about, and watching them as they just went, "Yeah, this is, this is crazy, man." And then, at the same time, I'd been reading all this anti-remote stuff. And I was like, "Wait a minute. All of these are written by managers or bosses who aren't in the office." And then it was just kind of obvious, but none of these people interact with their businesses or regular people. So they're just... The things that they make do not reflect solving human problems. And then the metaverse comes along, and half, most of the media was like, "Yep. This makes perfect sense." And I, as a gamer, was like, "You are describing World of Warcraft?"

• 24:45Ed Zitron?

  Or like an MMORPG, you're just describing going online in a group. I played EverQuest, I have the scars.

• 24:51Speaker 06

  It already happened. And also, it's looks like somebody read the book Snow Crash, like one of the, one of their aides read the book Snow Crash at some point in college, vaguely described the concept of making real estate out of nothing, which I think really was what the metaverse was about, was this idea of recreating a world in which they could own everything from the get.

• 25:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, they wanted to own the next internet. That was very much what Zuckerberg wanted.

• 25:18Speaker 06

  That was the idea, is that they would have, and they would again, set all the rules. They'd set all the rules, they'd already had set up all the real estate parameters. They'd, you'd show up into this like, brand new world of a thing, and then you'd be described, "Oh my god, there's a McDonald's. Oh my god, there's a fucking Pizza Hut. Oh my god", because they've already bought into this real estate concept, because they were just trying to figure out. I also feel like that's a part of it. They saw some of the writing on the wall of like, "It's gonna be hard to get these fuckers back in the office." These fuckers went home and they're fucking enjoying their fucking oatmeal and their families.

• 25:50Ed Zitron?

  They're doing as much work, if not more, and they seem happy. I fuck that shit.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  I fucking hate, I hate the fact, I can't see, I wanna smell what he's eating. I wanna look, I wanna hear what he's listening to. I wanna ask him about his wife, I wanna look at his wife, I wanna think about fucking his wife. And so what I think, like, that's what I think it turns into, right? I think it could go a little bit all this shit. Yes, and so they just then realized like, "Oh, but what if we could do it so we can bring them into this other world, and then we own, it's like that, it's, it's reality, then eventually we can let go." Yeah, then we can let go of real life real estate. Then maybe if we build it all in the, in the metaverse, just like in that great book Snow Crash, anybody read the end? Is that what we could do is we could build up this amazing new real estate system while the earth eats itself alive on the surface. I do think that that's the other side.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  What we're also seeing is the other side of this too, which is why they all showed up at the inauguration, because they were all so excited for the fact that they were gonna just be like, "Let's boil the planet." "Let's boil the surface of the planet," and then they have to come to the metaverse. They have to come to us, because we're the only ones that are gonna have the stuff to protect them.

• 27:03Ed Zitron?

  It's really funny as well because everything you're saying is true, but they left out because their lack of this, their lack of connection to anything. Um, it working. They didn't check if it worked. They also left us out.

• 27:14Speaker 06

  What about us?

• 27:15Ed Zitron?

  It also didn't work.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  And that's the best part. And that's the best part is that what I

• 27:20Ed Zitron?

  Because they don't know us.

• 27:21Speaker 06

  Human beings are fascinating.

• 27:25Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:26Speaker 06

  And there's no, they have tried to model us. They have tried to model us again and again. And they've looked at history and they've done all the number crunching and they can't figure it out. They can't, they can't figure it out. They, all of these things fail because they legitimately are operating in a fantasy world. They're operating outside of reality. They, because they believe they can imprint their, they can literally just put their reality on us. They just think that they can do that.

• 27:53Ed Zitron?

  Well, look at L L Ms.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  And look at us. And then you see, it's actually super difficult. It's actually really weird. Uh, I, I actually think part of what broke my brain was in the 2016 election when Trump won in the first place. That was the first time I saw something and I was like, oh, wow. Elections might actually do something.

• 28:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  I It was like the first time I realized that the fix might not be entirely in from people that actually are in control.

• 28:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I definitely like, I didn't get particularly political until after that. I will fully admit to being completely ignorant of stuff.

• 28:27Speaker 06

  Same. Why would I? I didn't feel these things and then everything changed.

• 28:30Ed Zitron?

  Then everything happened and then it was, you suddenly look backwards, you're like, oh, did I miss everything? And I'm still learning as well, a lot of this stuff. And I feel like when you saw all of them turn up at the White House, it was so fucking grim. But I saw people who were surprised and that really made me laugh. The people were like, wait, what? Huh? Why are they all kissing, kissing up? They said three years ago that they liked me. Huh?

• 28:59Speaker 06

  There's a part of me, you see, this is my problem is that I look at this and it made me laugh.

• 29:04Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  I finally felt like I'm correct. I'm correct.

• 29:09Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 06

  They're all on, they all, they, they, they couldn't give a fuck.

• 29:15Ed Zitron?

  Not even.

• 29:16Speaker 06

  Couldn't give a fucking shit about our lives. The only reason, they wanna replace us so bad.

• 29:24Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  And that's the thing, when we're talking about Ed, I actually got turned on to your work about this idea that we're gonna be hitting this AI wall. And I could not be more in agreement. There's a part of my brain that's saying like, where's the guy that wants to make the trillion dollars? That finally makes the little robot that puts dirty dishes in the dishwashing machine? That's what we want.

• 29:46Ed Zitron?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  What we want is a little robot man that I can yell at, that can do, does laundry? Does, puts the clothes away and does the dishes. Oh, no. That's it.

• 29:57Ed Zitron?

  Henry, the problem is, is that, is that's really difficult. Like, that's the thing they're, they're like, okay, uh, can we do stuff that would help people maybe? Uh, I don't know, or wash their floors? We kinda got vacuum robots, but, ah, they're expensive.

• 30:10Speaker 06

  Rumors suck and they scare my dogs.

• 30:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 06

  I want a thing that can pet the dog. But also, when it comes down to it, I don't need it to be God in the machine, cause guess what? The real God doesn't exist and the real God gives children AIDS. I don't need another one.

• 30:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Also, I don't know. None of this works. Like, just, none of it, none of it works.

• 30:34Speaker 06

  It's not gonna happen.

• 30:35Ed Zitron?

  It's not gonna happen, but also.

• 30:36Speaker 06

  But then, Ed, what do we do about continuing to be in their delusion?

• 30:43Ed Zitron?

  We break it. Like, that's what I'm do, like, that's the thing. Right now, as, as we talk, I've recently been working on this piece about how, like, Anthropic admitted in court, they made five billion dollars cumulatively, like, of all time. Which, when you follow their previous revenue reports, does not make sense. And I'm arguing with people constantly, all through today, leading up to this, because what has actually, what the real power of these people is, is that they've, they control, like, we live in their world through narratives. The narratives that are created. And it is, you, it's true, yep, it's Elon Musk buying Twitter. Yes, it's Google search, yes, it's this, but a lot of it is just.

• 31:24Ed Zitron?

  Institutions like CNN, CNBC, New York Times, like they are captured, but not necessarily by the entities, but by the ideologies, the ideology that AI will be big, AI will be big. It's not that it's, oh, it may be, it's, it will be.

• 31:41Speaker 06

  And they can't say how, you notice that too, right? They all are like, all this stuff about AI and they project all of these, but none of them actually says specifically, what do you mean? Like, what are the uses of AI? Like, what exactly, you say, oh, it has all these uses, it's inevitable, it's gonna replace all of these things. And it's more like, but to what end?

• 32:08Ed Zitron?

  How also?

• 32:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, like what to what?

• 32:10Ed Zitron?

  Is it doing that?

• 32:13Speaker 06

  I don't think it is, dude, because guess what, man? Guess what you, this shit with the fucking Waymo? When they came out and they said that they have to kick it to some guy in the Philippines to drive it if it gets specifically stuck?

• 32:25Ed Zitron?

  With Waymo, that's not even generative AI, because they love to say AI so that you can flate them. Waymo kind of works, Waymo's interesting, because

• 32:32Speaker 06

  It's interesting.

• 32:33Ed Zitron?

  It's interesting, it's an actual thing that drives people around. I think that there are a ton of issues that I will go into in a future episode. But with like large language models, I have been, and I'm gonna say this in passing, I'm not gonna go into depth, because I don't want them to, people to get mad at me, but I'm currently learning to code. And the more I learn about code, the more I get scared about people using large language models to code. Because, I don't know, I'm getting worried that there are software engineers out there that can't read code and just copy paste it from place, or that they're willing to ship code that kinda looks right, but they don't really understand. I'm not saying this is all software engineers, but I'm worried that the software engineers they're building these LLMs for are the ones that don't know what they're fucking talking about.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  Buddy, I think that that is exactly what we're seeing here.

• 33:19Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  I think that we are in

• 33:21Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  I literally think that this is a, it's all human led. All of the issues are human led. It is still because you would need a perfect AI to make a perfect AI. Right? You would need, it's, it's too human. It's too janky. We, we are, I, my, my whole view, one of my more, I guess, I guess they call it a mystical view. But I think one of the problems I have with AI is I do believe that there is like a 1% of the human brain that we just can't. We literally can't see if we wanted to see it because we're looking at ourselves. That there's like a, like in terms of just the observer gets in the way of the thing that we need to be looking at.

• 34:05Speaker 06

  Right? Like we are, there's a part of our consciousness that we will never duplicate. Ever. We just won't.

• 34:11Ed Zitron?

  We don't even understand thinking.

• 34:13Speaker 06

  We don't. This is what I'm saying is that at the very bottom of it, we don't really understand what the key is. So how is a bunch of cargo short wearing basement dwelling coders? Sitting in a place that probably have never kissed a girl or a man before. And then now they're going to make the new human thought machine. You know what I mean? Like, that's kind of like what we're seeing. So what we're seeing here is it's all based, it's all, it's turtles all the way down. And it's just going to keep going.

• 34:42Ed Zitron?

  With the software engineers, I found that there's this real, we're seeing this schism between those types of basement dweller, incel types. There are the coders who know just enough to get by and keep their job without being fired. And then the people who actually do software engineering, who are relatively normal folks who are just going about their lives.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  And the art people, like the truth, they view it as like, because I know that it can go as far as to being like an art form and like a, it's a whole thing. But again, that points to not to create an absolutely bedrock structure for a new conscious entity on. It doesn't sound like the way that works.

• 35:19Ed Zitron?

  Was the summation of what code is, is not, Nick, Nick Suresh could make mine made the point where it's like, coding is not just writing code, there is an art form to it. Cal Newport as well did as well, where it's like, it's a, there is a cultural awareness. There is the awareness of how one constructs stuff. If you, I don't know, the way I put it is like, how comfortable would you be feeling about a building where, I don't know. The architect only kind of knew what materials were in it. It's most, I think it's mostly bricks.

• 35:49Speaker 06

  I legitimately think that that is another big issue is that it's they low they're low balling. The creation of the new god, you know, like they're literally like nickel and diming it. With guys and they're creating these dumb deadlines and they're creating all of these things where it's like, you know, if Peter Thiel really wanted to take over the very globe, yes, to my mind, he has to have more like a thousand year view. Like with the old, like the other way that they they view the world more and like China and stuff like that. We're like, he needs more of a longer view of who's gonna take this forward.

• 36:27Ed Zitron?

  But Henry, that's not American capitalism. American capitalism.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  Tell me about it, bro. Tell me about it. I got fucking agents fucking breathing down my neck every day. All right. And I do podcasting. I can't imagine what what these idiots, all these people in the fake money realm and then the fake computer god realm are what the pressure is from the inside for them all to make all this bullshit money.

• 36:50Ed Zitron?

  I have to wonder if the people inside the labs though, at this point, as they kind of, it's become kind of obvious that like, this isn't really doing the thing they they don't actually, they haven't made any gods. And now it's just kind of like, uh, what are we doing? So I think I think they're all just fucking, not in like a completely labor free way. They're just like doing experiments and spending like millions of dollars of computer data just being like, what if this works? What if this works? What if this works?

• 37:17Speaker 06

  Ed, I'm a CEO. That's what I've learned. What do you know I've learned about being a CEO?

• 37:21Ed Zitron?

  What?

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Is that he the only job replaceable by AI.

• 37:25Ed Zitron?

  You see?

• 37:25Speaker 06

  Is a CEO.

• 37:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, 100%.

• 37:27Speaker 06

  It's the easiest. It's the dumbest. They have nothing but like, not to be like, I work very hard, blah, blah, blah. But they have plenty of time. They uh, they can just sit and think about these dumb things all day and play around with it. And they're just waiting for enough like the I also also think there's a massive, obviously it's capitalism, but the the lateral moves these guys just get to make. Like they get to just sort of like decimate a company, decimate a bunch of stuff, lose everything. And then they get to just kind of jump ship to another thing.

• 37:58Ed Zitron?

  Can I tell you my favorite one? So there's a guy called Jay Perique, who was the co-CEO of a company called. Lace Works, I believe. I'm just gonna check that on there. Uh, and let's see, Lace Works. So this company, uh, yeah, Lace Work. So this company was famous for doing an event where they handed out $30,000 worth of Lululemon gift cards in a night to convince people to use their software. So that guy ran that company into the fucking ground. And you know what happened? He got a job at Meta and now he heads up one of the AI divisions in Microsoft. The meritocracy's real.

• 38:37Speaker 06

  What is, do they not, at some point, it has to almost be purposeful. It has to be purposeful, right? Like, do you think that they do it almost in a way, what if there is a game being played to? Where they all know it's not gonna happen and we all know it's not gonna happen. But they are, we're all like, all of these middlemen have propped up the economy with this shit. So it almost kind of feels like, it's, it's almost like they're making money on the constant rug pull and the moving of all of the stuff back and forth. It's almost like, maybe it's good to hire somebody that will purposely blow it all up. So then they never have to get it done.

• 39:19Ed Zitron?

  I just think, I think it's more stupid than that. I think it is, they hire people who look and sound like them, who they've worked with before, who have the right things on LinkedIn, who then go, who then can say that, I have this theory, the era of the business idiot, I call it, where it's like, these people are just morons and if you look at them-

• 39:36Speaker 06

  Oh, they're morons!

• 39:36Ed Zitron?

  If you look at them as dipshits without much strategy, the world actually makes a way more sense than-

• 39:43Speaker 06

  This is what we've been saying, you know, we've been saying on the show, this idea of like, trying to come back from conspiracy theory and just understand that there's just way more human beings being extremely bad at really important jobs.

• 39:54Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and those are the humans that run these companies. Cause like, if you've ever heard Satya Nadella talk, CEO of Microsoft, it is like sustaining 100 concussions a second. It's insane. He meanders. There was a interview I saw him give in Davos, I think, where he spoke for three straight minutes to a yes or no question.

• 40:18Ed Zitron?

  And it's just like, and this is, and the ju- the ju- I think as a journalist, you should just be able to get out like a taser at that point. You don't have to use it, but you can just like start crackling it a bit like, yep. Uh huh, like the Oscars music.

• 40:31Speaker 06

  Like the Oscars music. Is there, why does no one ever just say, just straight, stand up and be like, excuse me, sir. What in the living hell are you talking about?

• 40:40Ed Zitron?

  I know, I know.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  Why can't there just be one person be like, hey, just one question. What in the living fuck is going on? Why, what do you do? I want you to tell me what you did today from the moment you woke up until when you got here. I want to hear what you did for the money.

• 40:58Ed Zitron?

  I, and like, that's the thing. They will never answer that because a lot of it is just, I read emails and I drank coffee. I went to lunch. I went to a meeting. I didn't really listen.

• 41:06Speaker 06

  Hey, CEO's shop's extremely important, okay? When I have my executive time, Rob knows, my producer, he knows. When I'm there and I am in my blessed somnulence, you think I'm sleeping.

• 41:19Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 06

  I'm thinking, dreaming of the business.

• 41:24Ed Zitron?

  Mind dojo.

• 41:25Speaker 06

  Gee, I, I'm in my mind dojo. That's where I do every day. I do my karate. And I think about different ways for me to spend our money, you know?

• 41:35Ed Zitron?

  It takes a lot of effort and work as a CEO to go, hey, do this.

• 41:41Speaker 06

  Hey, have you guys thought about not having buttons on this? You know what I mean? Like that, I love those, that stuff. Where it's like, Steve Jobs is a genius and it's just like, make it not have buttons.

• 41:52Ed Zitron?

  Well, Steve Jobs was a genius in the sense that he was, no, no, I don't mean this in a defensive way. I mean genius in quotation marks because it was, he was like, what if it was good? Like he's like, what if instead of it, instead of being clicky buttons, it was a touchscreen? But because touchscreens have been shit, what if they were good and responsive? And people used it and went, wow, this is fucking great. I should come up with that. It's like.

• 42:16Speaker 06

  That's like what I'm saying.

• 42:17Ed Zitron?

  Something worked.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  Why, like, that's a other thing, Ed, that I've never really understood. And I feel like there's like, I'm just dumb in that way where I was like. I feel like when it comes to the environment, that there is a lot of money in saving the environment.

• 42:33Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 42:33Speaker 06

  Right? It feels like in my head, there's somebody that's gonna maybe clean the ocean, that will also then become a trillionaire. And I feel like that could be a really good focus on what we need to do in the future, and you can make money. I just don't understand. And I just feel like I'm a silly dumb, I'm a bad capitalist. I learned that I could give all my people raises, and it really doesn't affect my fucking bottom line, because my bottom, it's ridiculous. It's fucking, the margins are fucking ridiculous.

• 43:03Ed Zitron?

  It's short terminism, because if you think of it, you probably wouldn't make money immediately from saving the environment. You wouldn't make it yet, so...

• 43:12Speaker 06

  No, you sell some penguins. Honestly, dude, there's ways, you're talking to a capitalist. Just get some, round up a bunch of good, healthy penguins. You're selling them to an elementary school. Like, it's like, it's stuff like that. You do certain things where you, you, you, you, there's ways to do it in fun ways. There's fun things.

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• 45:36Ed Zitron?

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• 46:52Ed Zitron?

  I also just think solar power is kind of magical and batteries are kind of magical like like that stuff. But in if you think of it in the short term way, it's weird because what I'm about to describe is buying batteries and solar panels before you make much money off of them such as just to be clear, a capital expenditure which will lead to an eventual payoff. Now that they hear and they go fuck no, that sounds terrible. However, if they're like investing a bunch of GPUs for a possible return, but probably not, they're like fuck yeah, that makes perfect sense. Because they're all trapped in the past. They keep because these people are so discount. The thing I always say is like they don't have problems, they don't know how to fix them.

• 47:37Ed Zitron?

  So they look at the world and they go, what are my problems? Well, I don't have enough money. What do poor people like? Tik Tok and hamburger, I guess.

• 47:49Speaker 06

  I mean, you saw the, did you read that Epstein file, that one email? There was one that went back and forth about the idea of it was an extremely racist email from, I forgot. It was somebody within, I forget who it was, who was explaining to Jeffrey Epstein. He's like, look, you see the same people was about Jay-Z buying into the NFL and they were doing this, this

• 48:13Speaker 06

  this commercial with Jay-Z and he's like, he's like, look, you see that's the same people. They're doing their advertising to the people who should be super angry. It's exactly what we're going to do. You see, look, you just gave them exactly what they wanted. That's all they care about, which I think is minimizing of human beings, obviously, because they think that there's more than this. Because what they've just done is we do actually, our countries actually, which I'm certain you're well aware of, Ed, is kind of in a deep turmoil right now and there's protests in every single major city that exists almost 24/7. And they're just not talking about it. And that's really the issue is that they're just, they're just trying to delete that out of the narrative. As if.

• 48:51Ed Zitron?

  It's funny as well because if you want to make people happy, you make food cheaper and better and you make housing and you make their general life better.

• 49:00Speaker 06

  It's easy to do. The fucking fat boy actually ran in a really good, the idea of bringing manufacturing to people or something. If he had done one single maybe good thing, maybe anybody could have a good favorable opinion of what's going on, but we are nothing.

• 49:18Speaker 06

  Nothing good happened, right? Nothing's good is happening and we are, we've just now started a new war and, and we, uh, and I go to Florida, the groceries are as expensive as they are in Los Angeles.

• 49:31Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ.

• 49:32Speaker 06

  You know what I mean? Like, and they don't see the difference in Florida, they think it's perfect.

• 49:35Ed Zitron?

  They don't buy groceries. They don't buy, like, these people don't buy groceries. They don't, I, I genuinely wonder if they'd have someone who brings them like a soda. Like, do they go to the fridge? Do you think these people like, like, I, like, that's the thing, because I think the, they see the world as friction to be removed. They see every experience as friction and they, at the top of the pile, have removed all friction, such as, they don't meet unexpected people.

• 50:01Speaker 06

  No.

• 50:01Ed Zitron?

  There's, they don't get talked to by anyone they don't want to talk to, and indeed can reject anyone they want. They, uh,

• 50:08Speaker 06

  Anybody.

• 50:09Ed Zitron?

  Anything they don't want to do. So, things like, oh, I gotta go to the bathroom, I gotta go do my laundry, I gotta go unload the dishwasher. Maybe the dishwasher is like something we can automate, fine. Washing dishes sucks, laundry sucks. They're not trying to fix those problems. What they're trying to fix is, um, what do you people do? Well, you do something and I want to get rid of that. So I've created a large language model that will tell you what will do anything, I guess.

• 50:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, because that's all it does.

• 50:37Ed Zitron?

  You want to be friends with it?

• 50:39Speaker 06

  And I think that that is also an important thing we have to constantly call it, which is, they're not AI, they're language models. There's no, there is no intelligence inside. And I think that that has to keep being hit, being like, and I keep saying this places and people are like, oh, well, you know, but they're pretty smart. And I'm like, I,

• 50:57Ed Zitron?

  They're not smart at all.

• 50:58Speaker 06

  I don't think you, it is easy to, to mimic how we talk.

• 51:03Ed Zitron?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  It's, we are, because this is the thing, the human mind is unknowable. The human mind is endlessly complex.

• 51:12Ed Zitron?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Our communication, however, is extremely patterned. We know exact, we know how to, we, it is, we have so, um, endless amounts of examples of human conversation. And it's easy to mimic.

• 51:30Ed Zitron?

  But here's the thing about Thor. I don't know about you, but my thoughts are not linear.

• 51:35Speaker 06

  No.

• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  I've got like rockets going off in my head constantly, not like genius thoughts. It's like stupid thoughts. It's like, oh, what do I got?

• 51:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like my butt hurts, I'm hungry.

• 51:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, do I need to be? Probably not. Like, things like that, constantly. Like, human thought is chaos. And if you're a listener, by all means, email me, easy at betteroffline.com, and tell me how you think. Because I think that a lot of these people want to believe that they sit there and they enter their mind dojo and they do their gun card from equilibrium to think. And then the genius spits out. Because if you do that, you think large language models are genius. They also, it goes back to my thing, where it's, they're all looking at the past. They believe that the only way to tell the future is by just looking at the past and going, "It's kinda like that." You know, sort of fucking like, was, as, you know?

• 52:26Speaker 06

  Meanwhile, we are heading into, I love, you know, I'm a big, I love Terrence McKenna and that kind of shit. And I love his concept of the idea of we're in this like novelty zone.

• 52:35Ed Zitron?

  Okay, go on, tell me more.

• 52:37Speaker 06

  That, that the universe longs for novelty and builds novelty out. And that life doesn't, it doesn't get, like, but he was the way you describing it. So it's like, instead of like imagining our technology and our society ever going upwards towards some form of utopia, we're actually endlessly folding in on top of ourself like a fractal, right? Like, we're constantly folding, we're slowly breaking large groups into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller niche microgroups. There's more and more layers to a single subject, the more and more information that is readily available to the human consciousness. We just complicate it again and again and again and again.

• 53:19Speaker 06

  And that what we are in, and that's where we're going to be headed to, is more unique situations as we have more information to deal with it. As each generation came up before, we operated largely, each country, each area operated in a sort of like a vacuum of information and, and kinda had to do its own thing and develop itself. This is the kind of like, we're heading into an area where everybody knows what everybody's doing at all times. And it's going to change how we behave.

• 53:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it already is.

• 53:52Speaker 06

  It's going, it already is. It's going to change. And I think that that is kind of what we're seeing now. Is that these things are, nothing can play out. Like, in another world, like in another country, I could have seen a thing with January 6th back in the day, the, the insurrection. In another country, uh, you, the White House would have been burnt to the ground. People would have been mass executions, that style. And I do believe that the internet created another worlds where they

• 54:23Speaker 06

  observe themselves insurrecting.

• 54:26Ed Zitron?

  Yes, that's like posting insurrection.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Yes, they didn't understand, they were, they couldn't understand that they were being history. They were, they were walking through a thing as if they were on their own cell phones, watching somebody else do it. That's like the way I describe it, which is a, I think a new phenomenon. Like you were like watching a bunch of people doing a pro, doing a, a, what, what used to be like an inherent human way of changing our government. Right? That used to be a way we used to do.

• 55:01Ed Zitron?

  Like, an attack on the very fabric of society.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  We used to get together and hang a bunch of guys. You know what I mean? It was like a thing that we used to do. And now that it's not, I, I, I feel like that's up, what we're seeing here is, is this effect is that we're all on camera. And so it's going to affect how we behave.

• 55:19Ed Zitron?

  I see, I have this theory that I like, that I love saying, even though it doesn't matter, the thing called the beginning of history. Which is just that it is no longer illustrative to use history to explain stuff. It is no longer, it's, you can't, you're like, we are not, like, everyone's like, okay, we've worked everything out. It's just a question of going up from here. Great.

• 55:41Ed Zitron?

  No, I actually think what's happening is we have done stuff for decades based on looking backwards. That the situations we've got ourselves in where, look, everything's Trump, Trump's doing. It's horrifying. But what he is doing is instead of going, well, we didn't do this before, so we're going to keep being nice. It's just. What if I didn't do that? A lot of the boundary pushing is just the result of ignoring what decorum was. And a lot of the rationalizations for a lot of tech stuff comes from looking at the past. It's the same bullshit. Uber lost a lot of money. No, it didn't. Thirty two point nine billion is a lot of money, but OpenAI raised forty two billion dollars in the last year. Amazon Web Services costs a lot of money. Actually, not normalized for inflation.

• 56:24Ed Zitron?

  Amazon Web Services cost about thirty eight point nine billion dollars in eleven years. Amazon is going to spend two hundred billion dollars in capex in twenty twenty six. The actual historic comparisons are used as ways to placate people. It's don't worry about it. This didn't happen before. And the reason I say the beginning of history is you need to start looking forward. Like, that's what everyone needs to like, stop pretending the because thing didn't happen before. Have none of you played craps? One dice roll does not placate. Anything can happen. And if you start.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  Anything can happen.

• 57:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's just.

• 57:02Speaker 06

  Oh, no, I believe it entirely. I think that we are, we have been let loose from those examples. I think that once we understand, but you know, I think this goes all the way to a psychic thing, though. I think this goes straight to this.

• 57:16Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 06

  Full to an idea of human beings not fully understanding what they're capable of and their potential at all times.

• 57:26Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 57:27Speaker 06

  And I think that we have accepted a very low position in reality as, as, as this amazing quantum computer walking around fired by like, like, literally, like, I, I do. It gets a little in the woo wee area, but it's the truth is that they, we're capable of a lot. And I think that they make a lot of money on debasing the human spirit.

• 57:56Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 57:57Speaker 06

  And say, like, and that's the idea. The idea is that we are, we need them. They're nothing, we're nothing without them. We have to be constantly entertained by them. We need to be, oh, we're just as hungry as like, like all this kind of shit. And we just have to do more of, no, we're not going to do that. Instead, we're going to do a naked bike ride. Instead, we're going to do this thing, like, literally, like, I know that's like ridiculous, but there needs to be more of that sort of culture jamming, which we're already seeing.

• 58:26Ed Zitron?

  And I think the, no, I fully agree because it's, I say that like, I've taught myself a lot of economics and accountancy in the last year. Because a lot of people said, you couldn't possibly understand this. I was like, okay, let me find out. I think that everyone underestimates human beings. I think that many of my listeners, actually with last podcast, I imagine you get this as well. People like, oh, I couldn't possibly understand something so complex. I have listeners who email me complex economic theories who are like builders and teachers and realtors and shit. Yeah, the human, they want you to believe that you are mediocre. And that the summation of your life is a large language model, which is just everything on the internet crammed into something.

• 59:07Ed Zitron?

  And that you don't need to think this, you must think this is intelligent. Because if you do that, you'll look down on yourself and you'll be easier to sell to, easier to capture and easier to use. Because in the end, when you use a large language model, it is training you.

• 59:22Speaker 06

  I saw a really interesting statement that I, I forgot where it was, but it was like the idea that we're in this, we're being governed by gigantic economic and political forces that are all under the, the guise of you don't really care though, do you? Right? Like it's this idea of, we're now in this area where it's a bunch of guys, we're like, well, you never cared about this stuff. So what do you care? What do you care about this thing? What do you care what we do? You just like, just fucking eat your slop and go to work or I'll kill you. All right. Why do you care? I feel like you care, you know?

• 59:53Ed Zitron?

  Buy more fucking software.

• 59:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. Shut the fuck up. Right? Just shut the fuck up. Whatever. Just shut like, that's, I mean, it's going to take us to say, I do care. I do actually care about human beings. I care that you've assigned masked, uh, shock troops to, uh, fucking, uh, arrest children.

• 1:00:16Ed Zitron?

  You're building fucking, fucking warehouses to prison people.

• 1:00:20Speaker 06

  I, I, I care. I care about the Epstein files. I care about them a great deal.

• 1:00:25Ed Zitron?

  Fun fact, Henry, um, did you know that the CEO of LinkedIn, per Gmail, Reid Hoffman, he, uh, he actually endorsed Jeffrey Epstein on LinkedIn.

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  And I refuse to believe that.

• 1:00:40Ed Zitron?

  Well, it's sadly in the files. But what's so funny is so.

• 1:00:43Speaker 06

  You mean that sea of disinformation?

• 1:00:46Ed Zitron?

  I, here's the thing, when I read that, I was crying with laughter. Because it's just like, there are so many people in the Epstein files who are like guilty by association because they fucking went to the island. But like, you are the CEO of LinkedIn and you endorsed Jeffrey Epstein, could not find out what for?

• 1:01:04Speaker 06

  God knows. Did you get into, well, you see, my own, my own pet obsession is Epstein's connections to the comedy world. Which is just amazing. Oh, it is just, you know what I'll tell you, man? I'll say a year of, so many years of being nervous around people. It is so nice to know that every single person I've ever liked is just not shit. And they can all absolutely suck my dick.

• 1:01:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  You know, there's a release, there's a release of like, the guys at Book J, Just for Laughs, used to be connected to him. Timothy Chalamet's, uh, PR, uh, person, his, her pub, his, his publicist Peggy Siegel is connected to him. The guys from the Interlochen that trained Chapel Rohn and all those people that did make all these, these superstars. He was like, he gave them $450,000. So it's like all of this stuff where you're like, I'm really ready to tell all of these guys to go fuck themselves.

• 1:02:06Ed Zitron?

  And Gmail was great as well. You could just go in there and type the name of anyone you meet and hopefully they're not in there.

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  You just do that, man. I'd recommend you do that.

• 1:02:14Ed Zitron?

  That's all I do. That's all I, like, every time I meet a new person, I'm like, yeah, let me just, let me just run that name through Gmail. Oh.

• 1:02:22Speaker 06

  Where were you? What do you do?

• 1:02:25Ed Zitron?

  Where were you in 2018, by the way? It's so weird though. It's like. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were in there. Like Sergey Brin definitely seems to have at some point associated with Epstein. Nothing, nothing in the tech media really about it. It's

• 1:02:41Speaker 06

  Well, then you also look at his connections with moot is all of that kind of stuff, but I yeah, yeah, the I always believe all of that, though. I actually got a great breakdown on the show about that from a listener. Again, how our listeners are some of the smartest, most educated

• 1:02:56Ed Zitron?

  It's so fucking cool. Isn't that so fucking cool?

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  It means the world to me.

• 1:03:00Ed Zitron?

  It's same. Like, I love my listeners. Like, I adore them.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  I love it. And this, someone broke me down about like, the secret history of 4chan, which is just the idea of that. Well, at the time Christopher Poole was moving away from 4chan already. He already had other ideas. He was already on the way out. He had already kind of segwayed. He'd been trying to create a sort of area for bad actors on 4chan for a while. It never took. And when Epstein and Steve Bannon got involved with him, he was already kind of out the door. So Epstein probably had nothing, Epstein had nothing to do with 4chan. But then it was interesting how that took off because of the Steve Bannon Epstein connections to him. But it really was just, to me, what I thought was interesting is more so after

• 1:03:44Speaker 06

  the fact about how they were making fun of the QAnon, 4chan, Pizza Gate stuff by using the Pizza Gate stuff themselves.

• 1:03:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  So it's like a game on a game on a game on a game. And it's all just, it just makes people go crazy.

• 1:03:58Ed Zitron?

  You know what's really interesting, though? None of this generative AI is like Epstein was kind of into AI, it seems, but he was into it in the same way every business idiot is. So he's like, what if it could do all this stuff that I've imagined? But

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, he had no

• 1:04:12Ed Zitron?

  era is part of, like, he, maybe he was like a load bearing pedophile, like, because

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  I think they missed the ketamine. I think it was no ketamine. And I do think it was a different thing. Because at the time, what Epstein really was more focused on was His appearance on the internet. He was focused on the information about him on the internet. And that's why he got into all of the informational technology and all that shit. Because he was trying to figure out, how can I control how people hear about me? And talk about me? And that's really what, that's what that was about. And then, because remember, he was into fucking freezing his cum and making a world of of supermodel sex slaves that he would make endless children with. And that's his big idea, Zed.

• 1:05:02Speaker 06

  He was trying to fucking live forever and just, he had other ideas. So he wasn't here in this one.

• 1:05:07Ed Zitron?

  Didn't turn out that way.

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  No, no. He's looking great now, though.

• 1:05:12Ed Zitron?

  Well, I mean, I don't know if I agree that Jeffrey Epstein looks great. I don't know if I-

• 1:05:18Speaker 06

  Oh, he's talking about, I just saw him. Oh, yeah, I always, me and him, whenever I go to Tel Aviv, I see him. That's my whole thing. I go check in with Jeff, we go down there. It's amazing, I love it.

• 1:05:30Ed Zitron?

  We high five.

• 1:05:31Speaker 06

  Hang out with him, David Bowie, Michael Jackson.

• 1:05:34Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden! Finally, we're here.

• 1:05:40Ed Zitron?

  They're all there. All right, all right, Henry, we're gonna wrap it there. Henry, where can people find you?

• 1:05:46Speaker 06

  Go and check it out, and last podcast on the left, and all of the worst shits. Our videos are on Netflix now, and you can also see also on YouTube. And we've got a new, if you want to check out, if you like live play, role playing games, we have entered into the fray over here, and we do Bloodbath, Vampire the Masquerade. It's LPN RPG, it's over on our YouTube channel, LPN TV. And it is, honestly, I think it's really good. And it is, it is a dark and evil version of an LPN, of a RPG playthrough.

• 1:06:17Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah, we'll get some links at that in the notes. You can also now buy, we've just launched our Better Offline Fuck Data Centers merch. Wonderful t-shirt, beanie, stickers, tank tops, baby onesies. Put them everywhere, you're gonna love them. I'm Ed Zitron, subscribe to the newsletter, you'll have a monologue this week. Sorry for missing it last week. Cheers, everyone, I love you all.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  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 wheresyoured dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. 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

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