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

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

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.socialEd 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 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: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to Our Town on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Uh, hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host Ed Zittra. I'm back in the IHeart Radio 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 off-line choir from CES 26 and very likely 2027 as well. On my right, I have the wonderful Chloe Radcliffe.

Hello. Actress and author and writer and everything at this point. Yeah, I haven't written a book, but I write a lot. You're writing scripts and shit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess, I guess, yes, yeah, writer. And top of the, top of the show, you have a show coming up. 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 going to be, I think it's really going to be amazing. I've seen it. It's fantastic. I think it's going to be amazing, dude. I think it's going to be funny. I think, look, I'm very proud of the show. I have seen it. I've seen it hit people and... I watched the old version.

It was fantastic and that was two years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, Mr. Edwin-on-Gueso, junior writer and critic, how are you doing, Eddie? I'm doing pretty good, you know? So... I'm having a nice day. Ed and there are such different paces. Well, I've been up since 5 in the morning because I've been doing media stuff all day,

but that's the power of Zitron. I'm going to 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 Ancler, they're like, it's everywhere. Every single thing is written in AI now. What have you seen, if anything? 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. Right.

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, 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. 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 up and sell it a million times. So I'm kind of unsurprised. The idea that stand-ups would write jokes using AI. It's so embarrassing. I want to, if you're a listener of this show and know one, please email me, easy at betteroffline.com. I see something, say something. Yeah, this is important.

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, healthy brainstorm takes. Like, 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 add my core, I do. And do we value that when you're using AI, you know, as a brainstorming tool, what you are, 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. Right.

And so you are sort of like I can wrap my head around how somebody justifies it. I don't mean to be like, these fucking tools, you know, like. I mean, let me do that for you. Yeah, great. Because just to be clear, I think if having not done stand-up, 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.

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 to, trying it on stage for the first time, definitely. But yeah, you know, I, like, to me, so much of this is, 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. It's just search two at that point. It's search two. Yeah, exactly. And I do really care about the texture that comes from, a person themselves. Yeah, and also stand-up is about the brittleness of human life.

Like, it's about, like, I don't... Absolutely. Oh, totally. I mean, like, an AI can tell you an amalgamation of what other people have said about anxiety, but an AI does not experience anxiety and will never actually have a personal, a personal touch, a personal understanding of it. It's not going to push back. It's never going to say, yeah, dude, that sucks.

No. That blows. Oh, I mean, also because in no small part, because... a lot of what it is suggesting sucks. Yes. It's from a stand-up, from a stand-up ready. It's also a glazing machine. It exists to make you feel good about it, which is not what you want.

From the stand-ups I know, including you, it's like, you don't want people to just be like, that was dry. Well, no, no, no, oh, stand-ups want that desperately. Are you getting? No, no, no. I would actually say that's sort of the number one thing, Stan-S-S-W. Yes, yes, yes. But when you're on stage, you want that.

Off-stage, when you want the joke to be good, if you want to run material and get it better. Well, so now what you're coming to is, again, this is actually, 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 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 that line is where is to me what divides people who I respect versus people 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.

What hack is to do is to be the broadest possible 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. And it's content versus art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 Substack in their first good product move in, possibly ever. They added something called Pangram AI, which is like a decent AI check. And none of these things are unnaturally correct. And so you can hit a button that says check for AI. You'd think 1,000911's 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. 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 tears and whatever. But it points of the direction of something that I was interested in following up were written with generative AI.

Hit up the authors. They have not responded. Like most of Substack is that my girlfriend pointed this out to me This is her idea just to 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 auto-correct?

No, that's a different thing That's not the same thing at all Yeah, that's not autocorrect is not an idea 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. And I should know. The thing is as well, it's like you can kind of tell, and I say this is somebody who writes way too long. Whenever a regular person starts writing 4,000-word essays, you're like, uh-uh,

is the three things. You don't have that the audience. Yeah, the three things. Yeah, it's just like, well, yeah, why are you doing this? And it'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 it's really interesting watching the 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. Yes. You use it to find out how to go to the toilet.

And now they're exposed. Yeah. Right. They're outsourcing their decision making to AI. Yes. And the funny thing 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 if you're funny, that's such a funny.

Yeah, yeah. Just stand behind it then. If you think this is good enough to run your work or your business, and I see these, I see the most insane. That's such a funny thing. Well, my favorite substack one is people are like, well, I have ADHD in autism. And actually, you can't judge me for this. And I'm like, well, guess what I've got both of. I got the full fucking deck here, motherfucker.

I got both those. What are you going to do now? And what their argument is is, oh, it helps with executive function. Oh, it helps with this. It's like, yeah, 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, 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. And it's also funny what the, there are a few people. who are like out with their chest being like, I wrote this with AI and it sucks. Yeah, it actually sucks. I've been still on the lookout this year and last year for like, okay, what are some 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 asked it a bunch of long, drawn out, like, you know, well-crafted prompts, but the prose is horrible. It's still defined by like the limits of the market 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. And it's also just it's boring cakes that we've heard before. Sort of by nature. And on top of that, the way they lead into every point has the said. 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. Yeah.

It's always like, then the most important thing happened. And it will be a report I cited in a single sentence in 7,000. 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 definitely didn't read the thing because you definitely didn't write this. And because the AI model doesn't have its own 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.

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 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? What I think it is is that, so I understandably these people don't want to talk to me very much. Right. They want to talk to the things. They want to talk to their AI.

Yeah, they want to talk to right. But 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 they're like, well, 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.

I'm so sorry, man. 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 he'll be like, I don't know about that, man. I don't know what that makes sense. And that is 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, like, 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... Thank you. I am a hero. You are, yeah. Thank you.

But it's, it really is it. Oh, also, I think 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 interesting. because it is entrusting the creator, the writer, the thinker, whatever, with, it is inherently trusting that that person can handle the criticism and can better their work. And it is, to me, 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. Yeah.

Because I'm like, thank fucking God. I'll fix it. I want to get, I want to make it better. And then the converse of that is when you impress them, you've actually impressed them. It's true. When they're like, damn this bangs. It's honest. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, clean up, and

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or wherever you get your podcast. And the other thing that these AI people, you ever see them mention taste online? These AI fix are like, oh, we got to bring taste into it. And the way they use taste is like how like the frangie from Star Trek, the next generation, talk about, I don't know, everything, or just like guys online go like, retro inform you, I do not understand that. Don't worry, don't worry. The one girl, the girl who works in Hollywood is like, 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. 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 being superior to people. You don't really understand. It's like, people agree.

They're being superior. And also, show me some stuff that have you written that actually is good. So this, okay, so this actually will go back to your very initial question. to me was about, I sort of answer about stand-up and not Hollywood more broadly, but Hollywood from a creative standpoint. So it's hollowing out post-production stuff. But just actually, before I forget, is that stuff it's hollowing out chat GPT and stuff like that, or is that another kind of AI?

I don't know. That I don't know. Because that's kind of thing. And that's the thing like, because all the AI gets complained. Anyway, I talked to have your question. I apologize. No, no, no, no, no. You're good. The, when I think about like the actual, creative output within Hollywood because that's what people, right, people are like, we're going to make a whole movie with AI. We're going to make a whole whatever. You're going to be able to make it.

I mean, it's the famous video of what was it, Tom Cruise and... Which actually ended up being green screen and like a bunch of like non-AI stuff. Yeah. Hell yeah. 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. Yeah. is fundamentally going to suck.

That's what you're saying. It's going back to what you're saying, and I agree that that will happen. I do think that that will happen. I think it will happen from outside of the current studios and Guild, Creative Guild model. I think that somebody in some warehouse

will create an AI model that will be putting out, they may be already on. They just put out one and it looks like a dog shit. Oh, is it that old generative AI film? I'm going to look this up. it's okay but it will get good right like there will be people who are able to you know fill your entire 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. Yeah. 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 that people have less of that willingness to push back against, to employ discernment now than ever.

And I actually lay the blame of that at the feet of the endless scroll feeds, not at the feet of the feet of AI. Like I think that AI sort of came in and was this incredible. 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 going to push back. Well, 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 fit as possible and it'll be fine. I will say I don't think it's going to take over just because it's too expensive. It's also it's so hard to actually make a cogent video of longer than a few minutes. And do you not think that it will get good enough in a year? The problem is that there's a bunch of psychological things with movies that they'll have trouble really. Totally, totally. But there is, I think over in Asia, I forget where they've got a lot of these ones which are coming out,

which are just like tight, like short melodramas that are watched. I mean, yeah, but. 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 as a mermaid.

Uh-huh. Her classmates found out and they're racist. So they're just saying slurs. And I looked in the comments to see, okay, I've also seen a fair amount of evidence that those things are bought, like they're 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. There's making AI films and the views just randomly crashed. And I mean, there's this company called Higgsfield AI that's doing really dodgy influencer stuff.

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 Vig's. VR environment going, Robert. Anyway, one of the Marcus accounts sold to Higgsfield AI, and it's just AI dog shit. Oh, that guy's an AI guy. 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. I think that there is going to be a sort of, I think that there's going to be a split between people. people who 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. 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. Yeah. People are getting more aggressive about it. People are, like, I mean, there's this whole thing of the, did you see the open AI influence a day? Open AI paid for a bunch of influencers to go to like an open AI thing

in upstate New York and like I don't know or walk around being like Sheen tried to do this with him bottom all to the fact and they're like That was yeah When she and flew them out

And they're like this This isn't a sweatshop We have air conditioning Like It's like they're Oh yeah They can't kill themselves We have nets to catch them

No but this it was just like We don't use any water at this data center Come and check it out But I looked into it And it was mostly influencers who only already did clawed stuff or like open AI stuff. But the occasional ones that didn't, they had to post videos from like a person that said a slur in 2021.

Like they were like, I'm very sorry for using chat GPT. I swear to God. I mean, did the whole, did you see the Hank Green thing? Oh, yeah,

I did. Oh, so there's this science communicator. Yeah, a little struggle session. There's some people who are going to email me about the song, I'm going to be happy. He's a science communicator.

Just to be clear, he's got a lot of things wrong about testosterone and autism. And also, he has fallen hookline and sync out and been sponsored by Control AI and Effective Altruist Institute. Anyway, during one of his videos, he goes, 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 still, to this day, it's like, yeah, I was losing 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. But he is basically like, I'm going to shut down this. I'm going to 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 going to 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 aggressive. Frustrated. 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 canceled. And a guy running outside and going like, hey, it's canceled and everyone cheering. When Open AI finally dies, it's going to be like chorosent on the end of Return of the Jedi and the remake specifically. I hope, another reference I don't get. I hope. You've never seen Return of the Jedi? Which one is that one?

I'm sorry. Everybody, man, all of your nerd fans who are going to come to my show are like, We're canceling those tickets now. And I love nerds and I love you and I'm also a nerd. Yeah, yeah, actually. Come up to me and tell me the... I will comp you a year's subscription to my premium news letter if you buy a ticket. I mean it.

Oh, well, that's a big offer. One time when I didn't want to have a conversation with a friend, I asked him to explain the plot of the Matrix to me. Boy, you could just... God, we burned a couple hours. And then we would get to like... And what happened in the next one? I was going through a breakup and I had to hang out with this rent.

And I really didn't want to talk about my breakup And I was like, oh, and what does Trinity do? Anyway. It's like a libertarian mousetrap. What's the architect? And I kept being like, oh, and what does that symbolize? And he thought I was so interesting. What's Zion?

Oh, wow. Oh, interesting. And you were just inside your head just going, ah! Yeah. The other thing is you could never have a conversation like that with an AI. Well, actually, you could get a boring expression of the Matrix. Oh, absolutely. But he wouldn't be there.

Yeah, I could just walk away. Now, the voice mode, you could probably get that going, right? You could have the conversation with it. Chloe, 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 and 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 anything. You know?

So tell me, okay, wait. Okay, I just had a friend who works, he works in tech and AI. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. 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. Right. And when he says that, I'm like, honestly, that sounds amazing. I can't. I'm sorry. Emails are not that hard. 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? Right. The idea that I can just be like, and tell me what's in my inbox. Yeah. And tell her, I can do the 24th and, 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.

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, there'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. And what if they would say that the AI is not going to make those mistakes? I wouldn't believe them.

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'd never bet? Is your inbox so huge? But this is the thing as well. It's the grander 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 problems I have in my life don't come from too many emails. 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 haven't in here.

And they, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also this thing where it's like, you know, a lot of the desires and automation are how can we get assistant labor, how we 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 smart

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, a telephone with overviews in summer ease. Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes, prep, cleanup, and half your Sunday gone. Factors solves all that. These are fresh,

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Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month.

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Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-Eyehart to get started. That's 844-8-4-8-4-I-Hart. I'm Nick Tuturo. You probably know me from NYPD Blue, The Longest Yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman. But I'm also from Queens,

which means I know pizza. And on my new podcast, delivering happiness with Nick Totoro, I deliver pizza from Prince Street pizza to a new guest. Are you delivering pizza now? Then we sit down for a real conversation. I've shared a slice with everyone. From Seth Rollins.

What are you doing my belt? To Alex Rodriguez. Just to let you people know, we're talking to one of the goats here. To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now, we even have more great guests coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness. Delivering Happiness.

Mariano Rivera. Oh, my God. And many, many more. Open your free high-heart radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Totoro. And listen now. These things dilute your life to a series of Canada appointments. 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 4.30pm. I might regularly go after 6pm, 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 Matick 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. It's 1800 fucking dollars. What data is it? It's like it looks around your apartment and maps. out with radar, but it's all kept on device. You have shit in corner.

What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Why did you do this? You shit in the corner again. Is this puke? 55% of the time, it's here. 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. But I don't have to mop your floor to start with. Well, I mean, that's true. Also, I didn't pay for it. It was like, but I think 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 that will 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 keep fucking talking about AGI. And they're like, yeah, we just want a conscious being that will trap and bend to our will. In a cellar and he'll run the market for us and he'll make everything richer. 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. And we will keep those who walk away from Omalis outside of his training. Yes. It doesn't know what we're doing to him. 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.

The Most Trustworthy Man in America. The most trustworthy and damp man out there other than Clammy Sam Elman 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 super intelligence 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 is yet to build that. That's the thing. I ran it through pangrum. said it was 100% humor, which makes me think a team of interns and lawyers wrote this something as insane as this robot will help you figure out what you want in your life might actually have been written by Marks. 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? Also, what are you doing that, you know, she could do it a few days? That would take you months. Now we're designing a robot together.

Are they? 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 bar, 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 the 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 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? That's why his kid has to have sex chats with the John Cena bar. No, no, no, no. You can get that. No, no, no, no. Chloe was misinformed on that one. That was not mom's our first daughter.

Just pulling the, got the cane. The shepherd's like it's pulling me up. No, it's, and it's just, this I think is, like, This is what I think is so vulgar about AI though, which is the people up the top who don't use this shit, who don't touch it. It's just like, yeah, it's going to do everything for everyone, as happens for me with my army of servants I pay. Right. Now, I'm just going to give that to everyone else. How I don't fucking know.

That's someone else's job. Everything is someone else's job. It's a hard problem and we need to figure it out together. But not me, though. You're going to figure 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. Also, didn't he write some shit like this?

Like a year ago. Like a year ago. You know? Yeah, he did the same thing. We're going to go live in a digital virtual reality where you can pay three million dollars for a square foot of virtual space and you'll realize your dreams. Do you ever go in the matter of a day? You ever try out?

I will never go there. I will never. I will die in the metaverse. I will die a million times before I go to the one. The Walmart robots experiment. Keep that away from me. Keep me away from the world. Walmart in the Roblox.

It's so crazy that actually, so the promise of AI, let's like take that semi-seriously. Yeah, yeah. 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, it is like, he is grappling with looking. inside yourself, why do you feel unfulfilled when you wake up in the morning? Yeah.

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 people have been grappling with for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. Yeah. Forever. He's like, he's like, this tool will find my soul. It's definitely in there.

I didn't find it in the metaverse. But that's actually a really good point. It's these people are bereft of culture, the bereft of love and joy. Like they don't seem to enjoy anything. Well, you know, he's got the Julius Caesar cut again. But that's the thing, though. The way they spend their money is not like people. Well, this is what's weird.

So these people do not want to make product. They don't want to make art or jobs or products, really. They want to make money. Yeah. 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 on the same search.

He's on, you know, the same hunt for a purpose and fulfillment that any of us are. And it feels so smar me to say, I have a way, I have figured out how to answer that that soul question better than any of you dumb fucks with my computer machine which does the same thing as everyone else is

right right it's very very off-putting to watch somebody benefit from art and enjoy human connections 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 yes and ultimately is just an extraction tool. That also is nothing like what he's doing, just what he is describing with super intelligence for all and like a smart assistant and knows everything. It doesn't exist.

It's not what he's talking about. It kind of reminds me just talking before the show about this about Sam Altman was interviewed on it recently and he was like, well, what's it going to do? It's going to be able to answer wishes. And it's like, first of all, the moment they bring up magic, it's over. And I asked you, was that a joke? Was he trying to be funny?

No. And you said no. No, it's also humorless man. Yeah. And he said, yeah, and then you won't believe the wishes a lot. He sounds like, honestly, he occasionally slips into Trump. Like, if it's just like, it's going to grant any wish you want, you won't believe her. Beautiful wishes.

But he said, because it's the same kind of like soullessness, just like over promising. But what I was watching it earlier. It was like three questions. And the third one's 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 a fucking people deal with? Email.

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

Yeah, definitely not in that region of the world. There are no stories about that. Yeah, Jesus Christ. But with him as well, I think he would have gone exactly the same path because if he had got $7 trillion would be in the same fucking place. Yeah. 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 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 100 books. I read 100 books. And then I talk to the smartest person I know for seven hours. I listen to Lex Friedman. On four hours. And I have peptides every minute.

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, wait. 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? And again, this is the line between a human experience, which is inherently unpredictable, versus a machine experience, which 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. And the point of making art is to take a shot and you don't know if it's going to work and you don't know if it's going to flop. And we are trying, tech people and finance people, I think, are trying to lay a lens of predictability and 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. And also, 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. He would have just said no. Like the fireman creating, I can't actually continue that, was spoil 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 deeply spiritual process as well. One of my favorite interviews with him,

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. Yeah. You have to just do that and then leave. And sometimes there aren't answers. Yeah. And I think that 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 ball. 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. They're completely divorced from any material value. And even the discussion of AI, it's like, yeah, it's so powerful.

Is it? Or does it just use a lot of power? Everyone interprets everything based on like these fucking shadows on the wall of the cave. And the very fundamental 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 super intelligence in 2022. Yes. They was promising this bullshit for years.

And it's still where people can, 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 and this is there. Don't you realize that you could do this? And one person emails with an entire breakdown of Return of the Jedi. Returned the Jet. An explanation. You know what?

You go on X- Email me. Email me. Email me. Tell me about, no, you can email me. If you find my email on my website, you can email me. The first six movies. You can email.

I'm going to wrap this up here. Eddie, where can people find you? Um, Big Black Jack a bit on Twitter and, uh, the tech bubble on substack. Hell yeah. And Chloe, you got a show. I am, yes. I am at Chloe Badcliffe 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. And if you email me a receipt of your ticket, I'll give you a year of the newsletters. Wow. I mean, that's crazy. That's amazing. That's a good deal. Anyway, thank you all for listening. I'm, of course, Editron.

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'll be back next week. I think we're going to have Steve Burke. wonderful Steve Burke of Games next is going to 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 going to join us.

Wonderful Cal Newport and we might even have Brennan Lee Mulligan. Oh, yeah, it's going to be fucking great. I'm already planning CES 2027 and when I tell people this, they are horrified. They are really, they really don't like to get. DES is like how the years pass for me now. I'm the planet, all right?

Listen, as much as I joke about it, you're all incredible. I hear from you every day on the subred. it 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. And kill a delivery robot.

Two. I'm not endorsing this. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me. easy at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course,

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