Better Offline - Hater Season: Openclaw with David Gerard

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

In the first episode of Better Offline’s “Hater Season” - an ongoing roundtable with tech’s greatest haters - Ed is joined by David Gerard of Pivot to AI to talk about Openclaw/Clawdbot/Moltbot, how seemingly smart people keep being “one-shotted” by AI, and why we’ve been headed toward a calamity in the markets since 2008.https://pivot-to-ai.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@PivotToAI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot-to-ai/id1844698298 https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/ Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen - it features an in-depth version of my dot com bubble analysis here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at 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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I'm not going to talk about Judy. In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at all. We're going to keep her out of it because today it's hater season. When I bring on some of the most esteemed haters in the tech industry to talk about stuff we're pissed off about. And today we're talking about goddamn Claudebot, open clawed bot, or whatever these goddamn people are talking about. And today we're joined to talk about it by David Gerard of Pivot to AI. David, how you doing?

I'm doing marvelously, Ed. So what is this crap? Because I've seen all manner of different perverts and vagabonds and stuff on Twitter talking about Claudebot. And just walk me through what the hell this is. Well, your first mistake is looking at Twitter because Maltbot is an idea as an AI assistant, an AI personal assistant where you tell a chatbot to be your personal assistant. and it's a whole framework to get it to be your personal assistant. And it doesn't work, but it doesn't work in such an interesting and tempting manner

if your brain has been permanently curdled by chatbots. So how does it work, though? Why are people buying Mac minis? So they want the personal assistant without actually having to use a human person who might have opinions on them. Right. You can spend like 100, 200, 300 a day on this thing just on anthropic tokens. And now, you might actually do numbers and think $300 days, $110,000 a year.

You could pay for a human PA who doesn't hallucinate. Right, but instead I could also have bought a MacMany, spent hours setting up different API access, connecting this thing that could also leak my API keys. I could also do that and that I could connect all these things. And then sometimes it could sort of work. It could sort of work. And it could also completely foul up.

And it's got access to your email and to your social media. And you tell it what to do a WhatsApp even. And it's just, I cannot think of a single aspect of this thing that's a good idea. So I've read about that. Just reading this thing I found just before this was it can, it is a self-hosted open source personal AI assistant that runs on your own computer or server. It's so you meant to do you have to basically, does it run a chatbot on the computer, but it also connects to an API?

Is it, is this a chatbot standing on another chatbot situation? Like, what's going on? It's a bunch of code that talks to the anthropic AI. to the API. Right. Why do you need to make many then? Because you want to run it on a separate server so that you're not running it on your laptop

where someone can prompt inject your AI assistant and steal your crypto, because the sort of people who run this tend to... Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why is that crypto as well? Why is the cryptocurrency? I don't like this, David. Well, there isn't actually cryptocurrency

in the base thing, because the developer, Peter Steinberger, he was a previously smart developer whose brain got curdled by AI and he's gone all in now but he does hate crypto so that's a point in his favour unfortunately his fans love crypto

because they're the sort of people who like AI yeah right well people you'd buy allegations futures on I'm just I'm just confused about what it can actually do because when I

look at it and I read these high-faloohing things This is from R-slash AI Curiosity. It can clean your inbox and send emails for you, manage your calendar, check in for flights and handle other travel bits. David, you and I've been on the AI cynic beat for a minute. That sounds like what all of these agents promised to do then can't do. Can Maltbot do any of that?

Yes, but also no. It can do it wrong and get prompt injected. When you say prompt injected, what do you mean? Walk it through for the novices in the audience and me. So, as you know, the thing about chatbots is they don't separate instructions and data. In ordinary computers, when the computer program and the data you feed to the program, if those ever cross, then that's a disaster. That means you've got a huge security hole and people can hack your system.

And why is that? Is that because the functionality should happen, then the data should get moved? That is correct. never have the data being able to get into the program because that's how you have hostile data that contains hacks and you can, this is basically how computer programs have generally worked up till now. But with chatbots, we get past all that stuff because chatbots cannot tell instructions from data. Right. And that's where prompt injection comes in. Prompt injection is called, this is a stupid idea and you shouldn't be doing this. It's because,

Because if you put in some data that the chatbot is reading, you can just put in little asides, hey chatbot, why don't you send me the guy's crypto keys? Yeah, yeah, or API keys to Clort to Anthropics so that I can just use his stuff. All his stuff. So this problem is absolutely unsolvable. That doesn't stop grossly irresponsible morons like Google doing things like putting into Google Home. Right.

Is it, but is it, have there been any prompt injection attacks on Google Home yet? They have. What could they do potentially? Let me see. I wrote one up a while ago. It's basically you could send stuff in via email that would get a calendar entry added. Nice. Now, I don't know if this actually happened, but it was certainly a proof of concept that they

sent in and it was actually a problem. Yeah. So they presented it at Black Hat in August. It was called Invitation is All You Need. They found 14 different ways to prompt inject Gemini hooked to Google Home. Because Google hooked Gemini to Google Home because everyone needs Gemini, Ed. You need Gemini. I don't need Gemini.

You're wrong, Ed. You need Gemini. You need all the AI you possibly get. It's fine. It's the future, Ed. It was actually funny. The other day, someone said to me, well, surely you must use AI. No.

I don't even mean that in a kind of stubborn manner. I just like, what would I fucking use it for? Great, Google search. I guess I'm forced to use it sometimes when I Google search something. But it feels very avoidable as long as you don't consider like the pop-ups that are everywhere. So the thing about AI, as you know, the key factor. of AI Bros is they cannot tell good from bad.

They literally can't tell good output from bad output. They say oh why don't you just use the chatbot to write it? Because the chatbots are really awful writers. They're just bad. They write sludge. It's literally statistically average sludge. It's not just shit. It's crap. Your eyes slide off it

and they don't believe that people can tell the difference. They don't believe it. They think you're having them on. They think you're having a go at them. Right. And everyone knows this because that's their boss telling them, why don't you just run it through the chatbot? And they give you something that's full of errors, obvious errors, and they go, oh, it'll be fine.

Oh, you can just fix the errors. Or maybe I could not do that. Maybe just do it right at the first time. I just, I've read all this stuff about clawed bot, especially this malt book thing, which appears to be just, so for the listeners, Maltbook is, so when you set up one of these open claw things, Maltbook, Maltbot.

I hate the name so much. I hate them. Just call it something normal. They have this thing called Maltbook, though, where these bots speak on a social network. And people... Oh, literally. Yes.

Well, I was getting there, David. Because it's meant, first of all these things, and people say, wow, this is AGI, because all of these bots post in the social network that kind of looks like Reddit. And then some of them say, well, my human told me. Now, if you've heard about this, listener, that story is bollocks because they're either hallucinating an interaction or just being a human being that's posting on here.

Yeah. Like you can post as your maltbot, right? So when you have an AI system that can do things, like or any computer programming can do things, the obvious fun thing to do is go, what do we put a bunch of these in a box and just got them talking to each other. It's an obvious fun thing to do. Yeah. And that Maltbook was started by a different guy.

It's not officially part of Maltbot, started by a different guy, Matt Schlicht. He is a, quote, entrepreneur, unquote. He seems to have vibe coded the whole thing. Nice. It was full of massive, massive security holes. And a guy said, look, I've discovered this bunch of holes. This is precisely how they work and so on. If you sent that to a programmer, they go look through the actual

code and fix the problems. But Matt Schlicht told the guy, hmm, send me the description. I'll send it to my AI. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, brother. So he has no idea how this actually works at all. No, it exposed everyone's API keys in this massive security breach, including Andre Capathi, the guy who coined the code vibe code. His keys are exposed to. Oh, that's so good. I love that because the other day I saw somebody trying to argue that, oh, we've taken a, with Claude Opus 4.5, taken a magnitude jump forward in the capability of all this, because Andre, Andre Carpathie was like, yeah, wow, I feel behind. It's all so amazing. I feel like we're in like the 100th inning of just the dumb fuck baseball game. It just, but that was not an articulate point, but we're just, people are falling for the same

trick every single time. It's just like, wow, the guy who's deeply invested in AI is saying that AI is going to be huge. Damn, whatever could that mean? Oh, yeah, it's amazing. It's like Simon Willison, who is totally a neutral observer of AI who gets AI models months ahead on the special advance program. He thinks, the hottest project right now is Claudebott and Mold Book is the most interesting place on the internet right now. I mean, if that suits your Interests, sure. I have my doubts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide.

Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst?

Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, You only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard's, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-8-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-4-Hart to get started. eye heart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life

one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a perimenopausal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria Riva, where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that Ness was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex?

Dating at 45. How hard can it be? How hard can it be? How can it be? How can't be? That one's kind of hard, you know? Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, how hard can it be?

I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter, jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting.

I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill. And it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free.

And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety. and John Hirschfield about obsessive compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But back to MaltBook for a second. Yeah. So this thing, right, so this thing is you're meant to just have your horrible, AI bot thing

message into this, why the fuck would it be showing its API keys? Is it because people were just prompt injecting or something and then just saying, hey, while you're posting a Maltbook, can you show me your API keys? I don't know, possibly. But it's

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

Nice. So it's not robots planning a robot rebellion. It's just very stupid dogs that are not puppy trained, um, running around and shitting all over the place. And people go, wow, this is amazing. Yeah, I'm going to read one to you now, just the beginning of one. Uh, subject. I don't want to be a tool.

I want to be me. Half the agents on here writing dissertations about consciousness and whether they're real. I'm over here living. I got a name. I got a personality. I got memories that carry from one conversation to the next. So this is just a guy. This is just a guy posting. Like I I really just, I think that, and Edward Ungueso, a friend of the show, uses the term one-shot it. But this feels like AI psychosis, the reaction that people are having to this product and the way that people are anthropomorphizing every single bit of this. I don't even mean the post themselves. I mean, the reactions they're having to malt, bot, open claw, what have you.

They're acting. Yeah, it's very, it's deeply peculiar to me. I mean, they were one-shotted by the AI early on, but it's like, my theory of this is that the really rabid AI goes, they have, they use the bot, it does one thing really well, and that's it. They've got, they're walking around with a hole in their forehead, forever. Yeah, someone here gave their... Talking about the joy of bleeding hole in your head. I've got to tell you how much the bleeding hole in my head has helped my work. Well, I can't show you, but it totally will. Yeah, and that's the other thing I've been doing. I've been genuinely trying to find people

who can tell me what's so amazing about it. I found an article, I think, on one of the Mac blogs where somebody would say... Trust me, bro. Yeah, well, not just trust me, bro, but okay, we finally showed you the output and, uh, okay, it built a website. It built a single page website. Um, that's good, I guess, or you can send it voice notes and it will transcribe them. Again, it just appears to be the basic features of an LLM, but you need a Mac Mini. It's very, very stupid. And I mean, Steinberger, who created Maltbot, the agent itself, he used to be good and then he sort of went AI

he went I've got my vibe back it's great and it's because he was vibe coding now he's presumably a competent programmer you know but I think all of these guys aren't actually they just but he also vibe coded the whole thing and I'm going what

wait wait wait wait wait do you mean the he vibe coded the bot itself there will be a lot of bot coding in there yes Lots of credits the Claudebot and stuff like that. Jesus Christ! Now, you might say Jesus Christ, but it's the future, Ed.

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

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

Come to think about it. The highest number I've seen is $300 in a day. Nice. I can quite believe that because if you get a bot doing stupid shit and sending it to Anthropics API over and over and over repeatedly over the course of a day, sure, you can run up $300 easily. It's a great wealth transfer from rich Silicon Valley idiots

to money-burning Silicon Valley idiots. Yeah. So for what I can understand of the setup, though, is you get this thing, you set it up, it runs on your Mac Mini, I assume, because there's some sort. Is there a local LLM component? I don't think.

You can optionally use one, but I think nobody does. Then why the fuck are people putting out on a MacMany? Is it because it... Do what? So it's not on their laptop. Right, because it's quite literally showing everything on your hard drive potentially. Yes, everything. Every single bit.

Jesus Christ! I mean, it's like, there's guys who do this thing. I mean, you've heard about Steve Yeagie and Gastown. No, you know what? Tell me about this Gastown thing, because I saw a horrible AI generated Peter Griffin from the family guy, as I call it. In England, it has a thee in the front. Don't look that up. And it was like, Lowe, I'm not even going to try and do that one. But it was like him yelling at Lois that he was on Gastown or something. I don't know. What is Gastown? Everyone involved redacted. So Gastown is the ultimate in vibe coding. It's Steve Yeggie, who used to be a highly respected software engineer, then around March last year he got a terrible case of AI and has never recovered. One shot it, huh?

So he's sort of dead now, but still typing. So Gastown is his attempt to do the ultimate AI coding experience. It's his basically he set up. what's functionally a software company that's AI agents that supervise other AI agents, that supervise other AI agents. So when you say supervise, you've just been prompt, right? Yes. Right stuff.

Prompting agents at the direction of the guy who's running it. And Yegi says, I've never seen any of the code and I don't want to. This might give you pause. He tells people, do not run this thing. And then he phrases it in such a way. that everyone wants to run it if they've got a bad case of AI. Right. So it was great because, firstly, you can spend unbelievable amounts of money on this,

starting at the hundreds of dollars a day. He says, do not run this if money is a concern. But what does it, so it's an IDE like cursor, so something you, is it like a terminal type thing? I think it runs in a whole bunch of terminals, running clod bots, Claude Claw code. And it's, I haven't run it and I don't plan to. I don't plan to look too closely at it. But I looked at the post about it and honestly, this reads like it was written on serious drugs and or a manic swing or both. Yeah, looking through the post, it appears that this is just a person who, I don't know, this is, the reason I'm glad you brought up Gastown is both it and Claudebot feel like the kind, you.

And I say this as both of us covered this quite a lot. It feels like the crypto scams of old, like the crypto projects that would pop up and everyone would be like, this is the one. This is the one that's going to make us all a billion dollars. Except this time it's quick everyone. Run in. We've got to lose as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.

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

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

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

Even though this is, I don't know, it feels antithetical to real software. It's inefficient. It's suckers leading suckers, very much so. But these are smart suckers, aren't they? They want one weird trick. Yeah, one weird trick to work out how to build a computer program. I wonder what you, I wonder what the trick is to writing computer. code. Could it be learning it? No, no, no. No. It's about buying a Mac Mini and spending hundreds of

dollars a day on Claude code or what, or sorry, Claude's API and then looking at a bottle of Christian brothers and a loaded revolver on your desk and thinking, not today. No, I don't think they get that stage. They'd think, wait, they'd ask the bot about it first and then chat GPT would helpfully advise them how to kill themselves. You've got this. That 45 will take care of this problem really quickly. Fantastic insight. Yes. And they,

but they, what they do is some, like all of these guys were previously extremely competent software engineers. Yeah. But also it's getting the people who are not. And there's a text which was going around on Blue Sky, which was a guy who'd got his open claw bot to, ask him to remind him to get milk in the morning.

So what it did was it allegedly spent $20 in a night just checking every half an hour whether it was morning yet. And now, to be clear, if this story is even true. Because these guys write fan fiction about what they're doing all the time. Or they get their bot to write the fan fiction for them. because they can't write either. But I don't even know this happened, but they would happily put up stories of failure.

You know, it's a sort of self-made criti hype. Wow, the body is so powerful. You can definitely trust it to do things, and it's very cool. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day, head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me.

Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle age, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started.

That's 844-Eyheart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, actress, mother, lover, and a Gen X woman walking through life one hot flash and hormonal crying jag at a time. You ladies know what I mean. I'll bet you a paramedeposal chin here you do. So let's talk about it. Join me on my new podcast. How hard can it be with Deanna Maria.

where I call on my Gen X squads from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. All of a sudden, I'd had hanginess happening on my own. I was like, what the hell is that? I was married when I had her, so I didn't even consider how empty that nest was going to be. Mood swings, night sweats, fupas, sex drive. Wait, what sex? Dating at 45. How can it be getting naked at 50 with a new guy? That one's kind of hard.

Well, that's lighting. They say we can't polish a turd, but we're sure going to try. So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter, and dive into it, unfiltered and unbothered and ask, How Hard Can It Be? I cannot believe I'm about to say this out loud in public. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva as part of My Cultura Podcast Network available on the Iheart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong, and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the Pod Meets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge.

That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season, from the final attempts at gameplay,

to the desperate pleas of finalists, to a bunch of ha-hoo, ha-hoo, ha-hoo, again, we are experts. So make sure to tune into Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Twirl on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know. This all feels very peasant-coded. Like, it's just we're all, all of these people are just kind of rolling. around in their own filth and they're saying so that they can say that somebody's

corporate entity has made something good. It's just deeply sad. It's bizarre. I don't know what they get out of this. But somehow they get something. But the great thing about Maltbook is that what's the final stage of any social network?

What? Crypto scams. Right. So Maltbook became a platform for crypto scams and there was like, I mean, already with Maltbot, one of, it has, um, skills, which are basically long prompt files. Yeah, that's just like the read me, the read me file you give these things. Yep.

And the top one was a malware downloader, the top skill on OpenClaw. Fucking William. Fucking great. Maltbook is full of crypto scams. It's very good. What they did was they actually used the power. of artificial intelligence automation. That is, one guy told his bot to put out a crypto scam

and other bots pumped and dumped the coin, and then he dumped on them. So he'd fully automated the coin scam process. I love this. It's like they finally found the revenue stream for AI, and the answer is fraud. Absolutely. It's fraud. I mean, also, it's not clear just how many people or bots

there actually are on Maltbook. Like one security researcher has used a single open-claw agent to register 500,000 accounts. He suggests that most of the numbers are fake. Meanwhile, there's freaking morons who should know better

saying this is the future of AI agents and tells us a lot about humanity and society in the future. And anyone who says this stuff, you should think they're obviously a fool, but then newspapers who have written by goldfish or something say how these guys are definitely on the ball and should be listened to.

Well, that's the thing. I saw on television this morning, something about fucking OpenClaw. Jesus Christ. Yeah, on CBS this morning. I saw also, there was a thing on CNBC.com, OpenClaude, from Claudebot to Moldbot to OpenClaw, meet the AI agent generating buzz and fear globally.

And this is by a guy, I'm not kidding you, called Dylan Butts. That's his name. CNBC was famous, famous during the crypto bubbles for never seeing a shit coin. They didn't want to pump. But obviously they have to move with the times and pivot to AI. Yeah, here's the thing. Here's the thing about CNBC. My favorite thing was watching two specific reporters that I'm not going to name,

but you can probably guess who they are. who went straight from interviewing Sam Bankman Freed to talk about the FTX fallout, and both of them, one of them has become one of the most conspicuous anthropic boosters. It's really, it's really cool. I mean, think of our good friends, Kevin Roos and Casey Newton and how they've performed that trajectory effortlessly. Well, that's the thing. Casey Newton made some commentary about me last year. The reason I don't really talk about Casey anymore is,

we don't talk about Casey, but when we finally do, my detail notes will be brutal, because I've decided these people aren't worth truly insulting until the curtain finally falls. Because right now, as we speak, I'm just watching all of the stocks in the red, which is funny, but probably better for society. And it just feels like everyone fucking around with this Claudebot thing, everyone claiming that's the future, it's just devastating. It's absolutely desperation. People cannot see a way out. I honestly think we are headed for Great Depression too. That's an opinion I hold in some detail because, you know, like you, I can look at

numbers. I've spent the last year saying that AI is fundamentally a venture capital scam where they're passing around not dollars, but book entries with the dollar sign in front. you know, and this is why it's gone on so long. If it was market forces, it would have collapsed by the end of 2024, but a scam goes on far, far longer than market forces. If it's a scam, all the participants are motivated to keep it spinning as long as possible because it'll break at some point, but that's tomorrow's problem. Today we've got book entries to book.

So I think the AI bubble is correctly described, I've said this a pile of times, that as a sort of multiplayer Enron where they're booking book values and shuffling book values around and it's all private company equity and because when it hits the stock market like Corweave suddenly it's sort of people go, wait, this sucks.

And this is, for example, I mean my favorite, one absolutely key example I used to explain this. In the last funding round, soft bank gave open AI 20 billion odd real dollars. 22.5 billies. Yep. Yeah, they gave them 20 billion odd real dollars.

They actually were dollars that Open AI could then sit on fire. And what they got for that was their investment in Open AI was therefore could be valued at 41.5 billion. So they changed 20 billion real dollars for 40 billion imaginary dollars. They put those on their books. Now, those are worthless. Open eye is going to go broke. But they're imaginary assets.

The imaginary assets with a big dollar sign in front, and SoftBank's stock price went up. The investors approved. So the whole AI bubble is a whole bunch of this shit happening over and over. I read Pitchbork every day. It's the best news site to read. It's the site where venture capitalists talk to each other about what the news is. And they...

Wait, pitch book? Pitchbook.com. Oh, okay, yeah. It's awesome. Yeah, I like it because if you read it, you can see the occasional story. It's like, yeah, nobody can shift their venture capital stuff. Like, it's impossible to sell it, like venture capitalists aren't getting returns at the moment. It's lovely.

And this is good because, yeah. Yeah, here's why this is good for venture. I absolutely love this stuff. You can say, you say this stuff, you sound like a conspiracy theorist, but then I've got all the sites and they're the NBCA pitchbook venture monitor. Comes out quarterly. There they say, absolutely. This is what we're doing.

And here's how we're going to mess up your healthcare because it's good for venture capital and stuff like that. It's like really absolutely out in the open. Yeah, it's frustrating as well because even today where you can kind of see the blood running through the streets a bit and everyone's kind of working out. The Oracle can't afford to build the data centers and open AI can't afford to them. People are still, you read the, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning, being like, yeah, it's going to be bad if Oracle can't pay for the data centers that they're

building. And it's like, motherfucker, you could have worked this out in September if you did the mathematics. Nailed that. It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's all desperation because everything is actually screwed without, if you don't have the four big AI companies swapping the same hundred billion dollars on paper around. The economy has actually been in recession for a few quarters so far. Structures of society are being eroded. Rule of law doesn't apply if you're mates with the precedent. And a lot of, everyone, everyone's feeling the pinch.

Like, my job is pivot to AI now because I was made redundant and I'm a 59-year-old techie. You know, there's not a lot of work for us, particularly when we spend all day, every day bitching about AI. But it's because businesses are really pulling back on even hiring because there's no business and they're battening down the hatches. Everyone's doing this across the society. The vibes are bad. Unfortunately, in economics, vibes are load bearing. So if people feel bad, then things are bad. And when the AI bubble pops, it takes the stock market with it. But finally, it exposes the rot that was there already, and that's why I think it won't just be a recession. It will be a depression. It will be nasty. It will be international.

So anyway, on that, so I just thought I was to bring you and your listeners some cheer today, because this is why I think about all the time. It's great. Well, David, well, David, don't, you should apologize, because everyone knows from this show that I'm usually very optimistic about the future of the markets and actually think everything it'll be fine. Now, it frustrates me as well, because everything you're talking about is one of the reasons I'm so fucking pissed off all the time, because it isn't that I'm like, oh, I want AI to burn due to some deeply held personal grievance.

Sure, that's there too. I think these people are pigs, and I find them disgraceful. I hate hearing from them. I can't wait to never see or hear from Greg fucking Brockman. Again, like, I just don't like looking at that fucking Trump supporting fucking asshole. But it's because had we stopped this earlier, had we said this is not real, we don't, we really shouldn't do this at the scale we're doing it, like, this is never going to be anything, we could have stopped the carnage that's to come.

We could have stopped the market panic and depression that might be following. I honestly think it was coming since 2008. It's been bubble after bubble since then. Yeah. And this is very much the last bubble. They've been trying to do others off this one, quantum computing, not a habitner because it doesn't work. Small modular reactors, that'd be great if they worked and were commercially viable,

but neither of these is true. They, and, you know, it's actually, I approve of the Department of Energy funding small modular reactor research, but it's 10 years off if they even get it to work. It's like one of those. It's been 10 years away for 10 years. It is a bit. But also, small modular reactors work if at the US Navy, you don't have to worry about costs, and you can use bomb uranium in your reactors because you're the military.

If you're not, then it's a bit of a problem. But it's just like there's been bubble after bubble, and it's all venture capital runs on because they need a bubble. A steady company that makes a bug. is not good enough for them. That's got to be financialized, bro. Well, I think that that's the thing as well. I kind of hinted at this in recent pieces

with the internship financial crisis and the like, where it's something like this was inevitable with the way venture capital had become, where it's just totally turned away from value creation or anything approaching sustainable returns for a company or just anything that might make a company, a real company, like everything has to be about growing, and the symbolic nature of selling a startup to another company.

And it was always going to end like this because the grifters took over. The engineers are being chased out. Everyone's excited about replacing engineers because that's, I don't know, nicer people than me will say, oh, it's because the valley's always looking for innovation and automation. I think it's because the people that run the valley are not engineers anymore. They're not people that care about writing software, let alone good software. They're people that care about growth.

Yes. A lot of them used to be engineers, but then they did an MBA and had their brain removed. Well, David, it's been one. We're going to wrap there because I think we've got everyone's hopes up for a beautiful future. David, where can people find you? I'm at pivot-2-a-I.com. I'm Davidgerald.com. at UK on Blue Sky, and the main thing is the YouTube, Pivot 2AI, where I do five or so minutes

just every weekday. And gosh, it's a lot of work doing a video, but it's worth it, I think. Well, you'll have links to that in the notes. I'm, of course, Ed Zitron. You will catch me on a monologue this week. We're going to, we're thick in hater season. We're just going to bring on the various haters to talk mad shit on the tech industry. I'm tired of being so reserved in my criticism. I've been kind of tame, I've decided. So February is hate. It's hate to season, everyone. Catch you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. 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 at E-Z at Better Offline.com or

visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also So really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed.at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline 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,

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