Chapo Trap House - 808 - Pussy in Bardo feat. Ed Zitron (2/19/24)

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

Friend of the show & tech journalist Ed Zitron stops by to check in on the state of the internet. Have they cracked AI video yet? Does the VisionPro herald an en-goggled future? Just how stupid is Elon Musk, actually? We explore the end of the era of techno optimism and as our most advanced internet tech seems to aid less and abuse more. Subscribe to the Better Offline podcast here: https://www.betteroffline.com/ Find Ed’s newsletter here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/tag/newsletter/

I Greetings, friends. It's Monday, February 19th, and Shapo is back at it. Joining Felix and I today is our old pal Ed Ziptron, who's here to talk about the internet and why it's better than it's ever been. Oh yeah. Ed, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. And yeah, the internet's doing fantastically right now. We're in the glory days.

I've never seen it better. I mean, it's so good watching all of these incredulous AI freaks seeing this open AI, takes the video generator and going, wow, this is amazing as like a monkey sprouts a third arm or like a bunch of people combined into just the gelatinous blob at the end of a street. But they tell me any day now it's gonna be better, which is the same thing they've been telling us for about a

year about everything else, generate of AI. It's all very good. I love this stuff where like the post a video, it always is like no longer than 15 seconds and it's always in super slow motion. So the physics and the weight of the objects doesn't look incredibly fucked up. And they'll be like, Hollywood has six months left of existing. I saw one that was called bling zoo, which is about as good as that sounds, where within one second, and it was like 30 seconds long, I think, there was a tiger with four legs, monkey with three arms, lots of just broken text everywhere, just things, the sides of the thing,

just falling apart. It's so good. And that cost a, I believe they had to just burn an entire forest just for Bling Zoo on its own. That's the other thing about it. Like none of it like looks real. Not even mentioning like, you know, extra limbs or like people sprouting new tongues or one being completely coming out of another. The creative minds of the people who are really into this are so shitty, you know, in their minds, they can create anything. There are no limits. And the things they make are like, what if Ronald Reagan got Rick rolled? It was one where someone said, very soon we'll be able to do a new season in 2025. I believe

it was the VC from First Mark Capital who said this, by 2025, we'll be able to put into an AI that I can have a new season of Narcos with Brad Pitt, Travis Kelsey and MrBeast. And this is the best they can do. All the world's creations. And this is what they come up with. This is the future for them. I just want Brandt and MrBeast in the Narcos. Where's SpongeBob? the beast in the narcos? Where's SpongeBob? Well, yeah. I mean, it's this idea that, I mean, like, as this open AI stuff debuted, all of their excellent videos over the past week. And, you know, bling zoo is pretty cool. But, like, to create the bling zoo, it involves shoveling animals from actual zoos into a furnace to create the electricity needed. They generate it. So, like, like you know for the cost of one African rhino You can have cat cathedral. Yeah, and they did actually have one with a king of cats

It was it's looks bad. It just looks bad Like I mean I had like you mentioned it but like whether it's like the a custom season of narcos just for you starring mr. Beast I mean it's just like it's like how do you feel like like the tech industry's relationship to culture because like it seems to me like I think they fundamentally misunderstand that like Culture needs to be like add something that's like a reference point that's available to everyone rather than something that is Has no relevance because it is only just the preferences of one individual that's like Boutique Lee created for them alone like hey, let's say I want a season of Narcos with Mr. Bean instead of Mr. Beast. Give me that. Now, that I'd watch.

I mean, like, where does the mentality of the people selling AI? Like, how do you view their relationship to culture and how they understand it? So there's two different ways here. There is the people making these AI models and the people who are profiting off of it, so the salmon to the world. I don't believe that they care about creativity. They care about finding new ways to sell cloud computing to people. And they've got a whole industry believing this as well, that this is going to be the future. Now, AI fantasists, I believe that they look at creativity as a skill issue. If they could just play guitar,

they too could be Iron Maiden. The only thing stopping them from doing narcos with SpongeBob is that they lack the skill, which is just a set. They don't have the time because they're too busy coding because coding or whatever vacuous business thing they do, it kind of goes back. I don't know if you remember the George Carlin AI special, which ended up being just completely a guy wrote it. When that came out, you saw people being like, well, and actually Will Sassow on that podcast said it, we could really use a voice. We could use George Carlin 2024. That is ultimately the problem.

They see art as something that is generative. You learn enough funny, you are now a comedian. They don't see it as you do enough stand-up and you get funny. But the problem is, they don't understand that creativity is limited. It's fallible. It's finite. George Collin is dead and he got different in the way he was funny changed over the years as he got older. That's because it was an experience-based thing based on the people he met, the things he did and the things he read and so on and so forth. don't understand that they don't believe culture is experientia experiment.

I can help us believe culture is experience there we go i'm smart promise you know i mean like you say that but i really wish george carlin was around in 2024 because i'd love his some of his observations on the political cultural scene. the political cultural scene. It's just a shame that none of his comedy was recorded or existed. None of his past thoughts were ever recorded to be consumed again in a future date. We only left to wonder, what would he think about Joe Biden and Donald Trump? What would he possibly think? And what was actually funny with the George Cullen thing? Again, written by a person, written by Chad Kultgen. That whole thing, these were all jokes that he'd already made. George Cullen had made jokes about politics and politicians. He'd made jokes about Christianity. He hadn't made jokes about Bill Cosby because just that whole thing was a whole other problem. But I believe

with the wider AI thing, the reason that they're able to look at these horrifying videos, these really genuinely chilling videos that just are gross gross they make you feel nasty inside like some of the AI generated Up they just video of sure is a commodity the video the woman and the cat in bed I found genuinely disturbing and like that was the one that was being touted of like this is a watershed moment for AI This is the whole shit moment. Yeah, this is the holy shit moment Like what this is gonna be able to do and in the next year or something is going to change the world. What it did was basically emulate what looking at a woman in a bed with a cat would feel

like if you were on LSD and ketamine. Well, all of it is built to be looked at for one second. If you looked at that and then just never saw it again, you'd think, yeah, that was a cat hits a human and an arm comes up. If you looked at it for three seconds, you'd see there is no arm. Her arm is made of comforter. She moves the comforter over and her hand is sticking out of the nothingness. The cat's paws actually mold into each other then pop out another paw. That's the thing. If you consume culture while you're looking at your phone and barely looking up, even then it won't work because the human eye is kind of a, human's a dicks.

Look, we look at stuff and we're going to go, that doesn't look right. That doesn't look right. And these things, the way they don't look right, it's very weird. It's unsettling. Yeah. And I've also noticed that, similar to how with the Karlin special, it turned out it was just like a guy that wrote it. Anything that's like a cat or like a person in bed, any mundane scene from life, right?

It turns out that is something from Getty Images that the AI is just recreating. Whenever you have it, you know, make something that's more fantastical in the minds of people who are really into it, like that idiotic cat cathedral one, where there's the giant cat or a hot dog the size of Godzilla, whatever fucking dumb thing that the people who love this make. That's when it looks really fucking bad. That's when it looks like a PS3 pre-rendered cut-seat. It looked like anything that isn't just a recreated stock image with new dimensions is, I feel like I'm watching cut-seats from Heavy Rain

or another David Cage game. And one of the things you talk about in a piece you just wrote for your newsletter called Subprime Intelligence is that AI is a marketing term. The idea here is that it's artificial intelligence where you're prompting it to create an image of something that it knows about, and it goes off of that. That's not really the case. It's not really creating anything new.

It's like running an impossible number of mathematical equations to scour the internet for things that already exist of like, what's the best analog for what like people consider a cat. Yes. So these models run off, I'm somewhat butchering the tech here, but it's most of this, it's they run off of giant data sets that they've had tagged. And sometimes when you've done some of those capture images and you have to go, that's a bridge.

This has a bridge in it. That's actually helping training those models. So artificial intelligence does not have an intellect. It does not know what a monkey is or a cat is. It doesn't know anything. It does, however, know what its database says, and it generates based on that database. This is why still to this day, and I don't know if anyone watched SuperBob, but there was a commercial for Microsoft's new Copilot AI. And this guy typed in classic truck image from a logo for truck shop called Mike's. On the thing, Mike's popped up three times. It said Mike's. When you actually type this into Copilot, what comes up is Sperger's Skerbera, but it's just like Cthulhu language because these AI models do not know language.

They don't know it. They can in the written form in chat GPT do it. But when it comes to images, they then have to think, what does a word look like? What is a word? What comes after a word? So they can't really do mics. They can't just write a word on a sign. So the truck might look good.

And then you look at the truck a little closer, and there's two steering wheels. And it's just, there's these little things that, yeah, if you're just shoveling shit into a machine, if you were just trying to make a lot of crap, great, cool. But if you ever try and do this in a way where people have to look at the image, classical thing that you do with a visual image is have someone look at it, they're going to say, this is wrong. And you can't really edit that. What do you say to the point that people make with this specifically? Where they go, okay, admittedly, a lot of this stuff looks fucked up now. But a year from now, when the machine has learned how to perfectly emulate a human being's repertoire of recognizing an image, then it'll be perfect.

Well, the answer is it hasn't done that in the last year. We've had image generators for over a year now, and they've still had these problems, these hallucinations. Hallucination is when it says something authoritatively that is not true, and in the case of an image where it thinks something looks like something it doesn't. The problem is these are not bugs. These are features of these models. The only way to fix these things is to heavily constrain them.

And by doing so, you can't, most of the things it can do, but you can't fix hallucinations. They are part of a model like this. When you make an AI generated thing, it has to work like this. That's why they want average general intelligence, which is another marketing term for these things that claims they can think because they need it to think because before it can think, it can't really know anything. You can give it petabytes of training data and train it, but it's still not, when you type in picture of a monkey, it's still not saying, okay, a monkey looks like this, and now I will draw you a monkey. Here's the monkey. It is saying, based on this dataset, the word

monkey is these series of images. I will now combine all of these and try and output a monkey, whatever that is. I don't know what that is. I don't have any idea what a monkey is. They don't know anything and thus getting better how hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into this and it's not improved. Yeah, that's always the thing with it. Like they always it's always like a year from now or two years from now, it will get better. It will know exactly what a human being wants to see. Why? Because you say so. Like, pretty much, like, pretty much like, yeah, like you said, it can't think

it's never going to be able to do that. So why is it going to be able to do that when you just shovel more data into it a year from now? It doesn't have a human beings ability to differentiate between things. It doesn't differentiate between anything like that's the it differentiates based on the tag data set. And now it has quote unquote memory just means it saved things you've told it before into another data set. These problems

are intractable. There was a Wall Street Journal article came out last week where it was saying that Anthropica and OpenAI, so they make Claude and ChatGPT, that they are selling into the enterprise, but they're running into the hallucinations problem. And the article was just incredulously like, well, you know, they can't fix any of these problems. They can't fix the fact that it spits out information, but they do have an idea. And you want to know what that idea was? It's that sometimes the models will say, I don't know. That is the... I don't know. And now they're afraid that if they do that, the models won't output anything because they'll just be like, I want to give you wrong information, brother. What do you

want from me? They've changed the chat GPT into Bartleby the Scrivener. It just says I'd rather not create cat cathedral because there's no use for it. There's no need for it really. I would love that if they made it to Hickey. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, yeah, come up with a better idea and I'll create some hallucinations for you. But I guess like, I mean, yeah, like prayer all the sort of triumphalist language about like, Hollywood is over. This is a holy shit moment. I just think it speaks to like, a fundamental misunderstanding here because like, if what well what these models are doing is only scouring

Existing images and human knowledge that fundamentally can never create anything new or novel or different It's only just recycling the same shit that's already out there Which is like I mean like for art really to like matter like people want a like unique emotional experience they want to see something that haven't seen before or look at the world in a new way. And none of these models are like without human beings, you can't do that. And it's funny. People say, well, what about covers of songs or what about remakes? It's like even in those House of the Rising Sun, we don't even know who made that.

It could be hundreds of years old. They've never actually found out who. There are some insane versions of that song because people reinterpret it every time. The animals most famous version, arguably, very different from the muse version, which I absolutely love. Great version of that song. Jimi Hendrix is kind of sheer. But nevertheless, it's interesting following that. Even bad art can be interesting. Even seeing where someone has fucked up, even based on the constraints of finances or bad acting.

The Doom movie is so bad, but Carla Bann has some of the funniest lines in it. These are things that AI can't do because you can't teach an AI, okay, your constraints are that no one in this movie can act and the writing's terrible. But these aren't... I realize that's a weird thing to say, but I don't think anyone using these and thinking this will replace Hollywood. Understands how to create anything. I think it really is that simple.

They've never done anything creative. They've never appreciated it. And they've never really thought that they had to. They just think it's something that people do. They think it's like driving a car. Nothing special, just a thing we do every day. And if I did it, I'd be the best. But now I have AI to do it for me. I completely agree with that. That's one of the most depressing things about it. That

take into its logical extension. It really takes all the fun part out of bad art. Bad art is so interesting because you get to see the enormous gulf between the creator's ambition and their abilities. And in that gap, you learn so much about the person that made it, about the people that are acting in it, whatever it is, it's incredibly interesting. I mean, we've probably done like a third of our episodes about bad

art because it needs to exist. It always will. I think it's like one of those things that nobody quite verbalizes, but it's incredibly vital. And this can only create bad art for the most rudimentary reasons. It's like a word template for bad art. Yeah. It isn't satisfying. Exactly. Because what makes bad art entertaining is the choices

are like the baffling or incorrect choices made by the people who produced it. Whereas like bad AI art, there's nothing. It's just boring. There's nothing there. It's devoid of any context or anything like potentially interesting or revealing. I guess that goes into what I said at the beginning of the episode, like how good the internet is now. Ed, you also wrote another piece about the depth of techno optimism and just like

the gap between the promise of the internet or like all its various iterations over the last couple years like you know web 2.0 crypto NFTs and now AI it's just like we've gone through these series of like marketing cycles that all of Harold did the arrival of some revolutionary game changing technology but practically what it's done is just create an endless, endless just sludge pipe of just spam and just making the internet fundamentally unusable. So I mean, is this just like a reflection of the declining profits of the tech industry that they keep trying to come up with new? It's actually the opposite.

Oh, yeah? That's the thing. You're on the right path, but it is the opposite. Oh, yeah. That's the thing. You're on the right path, but it is the opposite. What it is, is up until about 2015, 2016, actually, it really starts in 2011, when Mark ... I mean, it was 2011, 2012, when Mark Andreessen wrote SoftGrooze Eating the World, which people have taken to mean, wow, software is going to change the world. What it actually meant was Mark Andreessen wants to make software companies disconnected from other companies in their value.

He wanted it so that these companies didn't have to be profitable or good. They just had it to be innovative. This led to a massive boom of startup investment and actually a few different things that really helped consumers. Cloud computing, basic CDN, like CDNs were kind of a ramp, but consumer cloud computing, things like Dropbox, OneDrive, so on and so forth, really helped people. This led to iCloud, which is kind of Apple's second goad there, really helped. Things like WhatsApp, which then got acquired by Facebook slash Meta. These were all cool things.

There were these massive jumps each year. Then somewhere in the middle of the 2010s, the promises started to outpace the actual developments. We got told, we're going to have AI in everything. It was about the time we heard about AI for the first time. We got Siri, we got Alexa. Nothing really super-duper changed, though. We were promised autonomous cars. Pretty much never happened. Things just stopped happening. We stopped seeing new shit. While this was happening, every single tech company, the big ones, the Microsofts,

Google's, Apple's, the world, Facebook as well, just started printing money. Online advertisement became a multi trillion dollar industry, I believe, like at this point, the main like 90% of Meta's revenue comes from it. Huge deal. And they realized, shit, we can squeeze so much money from these little pigs, these little nasty little piglets who are using Google and Facebook. We can just twist them up. They just started abusing customers. So we get to Cambridge Analytica, of course. Cambridge Analytica led up to, you may know, I think you're a politics podcast, you might have heard about it. But nevertheless, Cambridge Analytica was the first time that you really felt, oh shit, tech can be against us.

Lithuca was the first time that you hurt, you really felt, oh shit, tech can be against us. This is also, that time was also around when they destroyed a chunk of journalism by lying that Facebook video was watched by everyone and it just wasn't. That was fine, nothing changed, nothing happened to matter. But basically, things just, tech companies made more money without really contributing anywhere near as much. Tech stopped innovating quite as fast or at all, one might argue. Then they just stopped having new things. There weren't really new apps that changed things. We

got what? TikTok. TikTok's cool, but it's also changed the world, but I don't know if it's for the better and it's still videos. We got crypto, which did nothing. We got the Metaverse, which never existed. Now we have AI. We're being told AI is in everything. But the actual output of AI and most stories about AI are, wow, this thing really fucked up, really badly. Wow, this does not want, look like what I want. A lawyer getting sanctioned. A delivery bot in England writing a poem

about how much the delivery company sucks. It's DPD, I believe, and they do suck. So good work, bot there. And that's the thing. The stories about AI and the stories about the tech industry are no longer, my life has changed the better. It's, my Uber driver assaulted me, or I'm an Uber driver and I make $3 an hour and I'm not insured between rights. Or it's, I don't know, the Facebook managed to make billions of dollars while not showing you your pictures on Instagram of people you actually follow. This is how people view tech now.

No wonder people are mad. So, I mean, this is a function of them having way too much money. And because they have so much money on things like advertising, they're just cease to create anything useful. Just one other thing, though, this is really important. Not a lot of people know it. Google pays Apple $18 billion a year or something like that, so that you can only use that you've shown Google on the iPhone.

That's like, that is what it's like. They're able to just monopolize. You can't leave their systems. In terms of like the next new amazing thing, I would like to talk about your experience using the new Apple Vision Pro of virtual reality goggles. Ed, you're supposed to review on your newsletter how game changing, how revolutionary is this awesome new Vision Pro technology? So I'm super conflicted about it because it isn't game changing right now. This form factor, though,

could do something. Watching videos on this is absolutely sick. It's genuinely awesome to watch TV on. It's awesome to watch movies on. Does that mean it's worth $3,500? Absolutely, goddamn no. It's just too expensive. It's inconsistent. Setting it up, depending if you get the wrong fitting, it just hurts you and does not look right. When it works, it's great, but that's a very big win. And it's also insane that Apple does this by scanning your face with your iPhone to order it. And it got mine wrong when it did it. And it's $300 for a different light seal. It's just crazy. This is why people are angry at tech. But also, sometimes it's

really cool. Like I was, I watched a concert or talked to my fiance, talking to friends, reading some websites, it was great. Like that was cool. I also would never wear this outside or with another person in the room. I'd look like a colossal bell end, but it's just, it's something like this could be the future at some point, but that future is five to 10 years before any number of people would ever think about using this. I actually believe that they can get there eventually. I just don't know when and when it works, when it's consistent, when it has the apps, it could

be kind of good, which is not enough for how much it costs. You can't even do PS5 remote play on it. Such a gimme, Such a gimme. They could have put that shit on there and drank that slop up willingly. But no, every time you want to do something, it feels like they were like, we just didn't think about it. You can't change the title of a Google document properly. You navigate with your eyes and you look at it and sometimes it won't select it. It's like you didn't think of Google Docs while setting this goddamn thing up. Jesus Christ. So yeah, the Vision Pro is very much a glimpse of the future, but definitely not there.

And it's laughable that Apple has shipped something this incomplete. So, moving on from Apple, Ed, one of my favorite things that you cover is the wonderful life and career of tech god, god emperor Elon Musk. And I guess I just want to check in with, like, Ed, how would you summarize Elon Musk's tenure as owner and CEO of Twitter over the last year or so? So something I've really enjoyed about watching him run Twitter is I've always wanted to see one of these big brain genius guys truly actually do some work and truly run a company without any guard rails. And this is what happens. He tried to kill the sale due to the bot problem.

It was like, yeah, there's too many bots. They're all work as well. And he then proceeded to create arguably the worst bot problem I've seen on a website. I've never seen worse than this. Every two posts, it says ass in bio. The pussy in bio, ass in bio. How did this happen? Because I remember when he was buying the website. I mean, look, obviously, like we've talked about this multiple times before.

He never did. He tried to get out of buying this website. And one of the ways he tried to get out of it was by ginning up issues about like, it's the supposed bot problem. Then he was forced to buy it by the Delaware court of chancellery or whatever. And now there are more bots than I've ever seen. I know there were bots on Twitter before, but now it's like every single thing you see, I feel like, is pussy in bio. How did this happen? So what happened was he fired all of the trust and safety people. That was a big thing he did. He saved so much money to get rid of them, though it's not clear how much money he saved,

and also just stopped paying some of the server bills to Google that would have also helped, and just thought, you know what? I don't need trust and safety, and I don't need these people. We've fired thousands of people. It will be fine. It won't be fine. These people did. I'm sure there was someone who got let go from Twitter who wasn't doing anything. Sure, whatever. I think every company over a certain size has one person, and God bless them. Who gives a shit? You're stealing from Elon Musk. Fuck him. But he fired all the people that would have stopped this and in turn hired some of the dumbest people to ever walk the earth to run it with him. Linda, yes, yes, Serena, yeah, Carino.

She's fantastic. I love her. She's incredible. We're huge fans over here. She's the best. She's one of the animaniacs. Yeah, go get out of her body. Yep.

She came in and she just every two days post like hamburgers are up on hash book, hashtag hamburger.com, X.com. It's the future of the limit and does nothing. The company is in disarray. There's not enough people there to run it because running a giant social network is difficult, but also he just fired all the people that would deal with this problem and also fired all the people who know how to build a system that would stop this. Because it may seem easy to stop every third post having pussy in bio or ass in bio. It may seem like an easy thing to do, but it's actually quite difficult. But it is almost every single post now.

And they get banned fairly quickly. If you quote, tweet one, they're usually banned by the end of the day, but that's the thing. He's banned the automated. It killed the automated systems even. And there's no fixing this. Twitter will only get better when he is either forced to sell it or he just, I don't know, leaves one day and doesn't goes out for a pack of smokes.

I don't know. But one day and goes out for a pack of smokes. I don't know. But money will need to be spent. If he ever sells this, this will probably cost someone hundreds of millions of dollars to fix. And even then, it probably won't make money. He's just not a good businessman. I think we're finally seeing it. It rocks.

And now there's this... Have you heard about his compensation package? Yeah. Oh, is this another Delaware court, X'd out, like what is it? If it's a billion dollars and Tesla of compensation for him? Can I just say you have to fuck up so bad for the courts in Delaware to be like, that you're too greedy. That's too much money. You're right.

And you also have to fuck up really badly to lose a class action suit. Yeah. As a, it's so hard to do that. You have to prove so much and they did. And now the $56 billion in pay, I believe a lot of it was options. So we wouldn't have to give back anything so much as he just would not be able to exercise those options. What's genuinely scary and scarier than the money, which is by the way very scary for him because guess what? Most of his money is tied up in Tesla stock, loans on Tesla stock, and Tesla options. I think he also has loans on. No, the biggest problem is the chance to recort and it doesn't matter if he moves it, doesn't matter if he appeals, he's not going to win. They're going to make him reorganize the board. His board right now is run by a series of cronies.

You got Rocksteady from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you got Steve Jervitson, you got all these freaks who are like, yes, master, I'll get this for you. Three of them have to go. And now three independent people have to come in who are probably going to say stuff like, hey, is it a problem that our Techno King, which by the way is his legal company name, at Tesla, Techno King, fucking, he's so annoying. They're probably going to say, huh, is this guy who

ever so often posts anti-Semitic stuff or other racist stuff, you know, if he's insane, sexist stuff, or is just very unfunny and annoying, but online 24 seven. Is it bad if he takes ketamine? Is it bad if there are Wall Street Journal stories about how much he loves drugs and how he bullies members of his board into taking drugs? Yeah, they're probably going to go, this is not good. And also all of this is happening while the EV market has started to cool. And frankly, Tesla is running out of ideas. They've made one new car in what, last five years, 10 years. It was the Cybertruck, which looks like from what's it, another world, that old PC game.

And also that thing is now getting giant rust spots on it due to the fact that Elon Musk forced the design through. His designers came to him with another cyber truck design, and he was like, no, no, no, no, I need a very small, very horrible metal truck, please. That's the thing you want with trucks is for them to immediately fall apart when exposed to the elements. Oh, there was a drag race as well, where one was doing donuts and one of the wheels fell off. That's great. That's so good. I mean, well, I mean, it's like a Saturn rocket.

It reduces its weight so it can go faster. It's suggesting parts. But also at some point this new board is just going to be like, yeah, this guy is not worth having around. He's not contributing anything other than being insane and causing headlines that we don't really want to be associated with. And it's funny because this is the actual scariest thing. That board change is so big because most of his wealth is leveraged on his actual Tesla

stock. He needs Tesla and he needs Tesla to keep being worth an insane amount of money. Their market cap is larger than several car companies combined for no reason. Going back a little bit to how he's running Twitter, there are ancillary things like the whole X branding, which I thought is the most insane thing because I Hate to earnestly use the word branding, but like the branding of Twitter was That's the best something like that can possibly go

Everyone use their terminology. Everyone called them tweets. Everyone used every word that Twitter used to describe itself, and he just completely just flushed that down the toilet, the equivalent of burning hundreds of billions of dollars for no reason. And the bot thing that is most incriminating to me, it isn't the pussy and bio bots, even though those are hilarious. It's things like, you know, the most popular type of account now, like historic videos or badass science. It's when an account like that will post a video

where it doesn't have sound or something or it's just a blank screen, and it will get 20,000 retweets, thus exposing that all the biggest accounts, their popularity is completely automated. There's just a system of bots that are just mindlessly retweeting these accounts. And you go to the replies of any of any like large account, it doesn't matter what it's a video of, what it's a picture of, it'll

just be like a blue check account that's just giving like generic NPC commentary. Great video, awesome picture. It'll be a picture of like those orphans running from Nepal and Vietnam inspiring image. Well, and what's even funnier about that is, so a report came out a few days ago from a company called Czech, which is a cybersecurity firm that literally tracks bots and fake users. Matt Bindo over at Mashable published this. So apparently, according to Czech, 75.85% of traffic from X to its advertising clients' websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake. Like that?

Jesus. It's where it happens. Jesus. Yeah. And it means ad fraud. It's insane. And also the other funny thing, this is something I laugh about a lot is the fact that he's giving money away. He gives money to people who have Twitter blue. Oh, like the MrBeast thing. Yeah, that was so good. he was using advertisements like ad revenue. He was using ad spots on Twitter, not calling it X, to put MrBeast video in front of so MrBeast could make money.

But then MrBeast posted, yeah, I make like 250 grand. However, I think it was messed with somehow. So he spent a quarter of a million dollars to get MrBeast to suggest that he's doing ad fraud. It's so good. It's so funny. This is so it's definitely it feels like the kind of idea like a 13 year old would have about business like, yeah, the way to get people through the door is to give them a little money. So they feel like they'll post that which will create value. And then you're like, how will that create value? And they'll go, uh, well, scale.

So why don't we take these patties dollars and just distribute them amongst the shanties? That way they buy the booze from us with the dollars. Right. And then they run out of booze, then they got to buy more patties dollars. Thus creating the self-sustaining economy we've been looking for. It stimulates our economy. That's what Dave and Busters does. Give me one up here.

Boom. Boom. The Paola thing he does with ad revenue is so funny because you know, when he first rolled out monetization, do you remember how all those accounts that were like, you know, and wokeness, the anti-woke taxidermist, the woke killing hunter, all those guys were like, oh my God, I made $27,000.

And he gave tens of thousands of dollars to Andrew Tite. Yeah, he wanted to make it seem like that was an attainable thing for the average Twitter blue user. And it turns out, I follow Andrew Yang. I don't know why. I think just to harm myself. But Andrew Yang is a pretty big account. There are enough stupid people out there where they still want to listen to what Andrew Yang has to say about whatever. There's a mass shooting, they want to see Andrew Yang go, we could solve this if we had handshake parties. Yeah, there's a way that the gun industry could work with schools to educate

moron guns. Yeah. And he like he's a huge account saying that type of shit. And he does this hair brain thing where he's like, I'm randomly giving away my my ad revenue every month to one Andrew Yang fan. And Bill Pult. Yeah. But like the amount he's giving away every month is like $121. What is this worth it for anyone? But what's funny about that is, so I've really, my way of hurting my brain is I go and look up Twitter or X payouts. I go and look, and what's great is he regularly gives away like eight to 25 to 35 bucks to just about any user. Now, this is not a lot of money objectively, but you know what it is more than the amount they are paying for Twitter Blue. So he is

just basically giving the money back. You will find some thousand follower, thousand following account that will post, I got 35 bucks from X. It's like, you just absorbed multiple people's Twitter Blue subscriptions. And you are no one is reading their shit, by the way, it's like other people that are just scamming Twitter Blue. It's so cool. I've never seen a company just create a degenerative revenue policy, like one where we will make money, but deliberately give it away in such a way that there's no value to this. It's not like it's a public company. So they can say, well, we're growing at this rate, because he never wants to be a public company, because I think the public markets might say, hi, you can't just post a graph every three months that says Twitter is bigger with a line going up

and then users and then 500 at the top. We need a little more fundamentals than that. But I think that this is just, it's horrifying. He is destroying this platform. He's destroying a platform that I made my career on. Frankly, let's be honest, I think we all kind of did in some level. It's annoying to admit that it feels bad. But at the same time, he's destroying this for no appreciable reason. He is not making more money. He didn't turn this into something where he's making a ton of money just for himself or really helping himself in any way. I'd argue this site has only been bad for him. Yeah, that's the crazy thing about it is like we've seen a lot of things like this where

someone takes a public company and through like debt financing and you know borrowing against their own wealth, they take a giant public company private and they either just completely loot the company for all its assets or they strip down costs so much and make it run on a threadbare operation making one person do the job of eight people so they can sell it for a massive profit like five years later. That's, you know, bad enough. That's already a pretty big sector of our economy, especially in tech. But he's not even doing that. It's like he's doing the private equity thing of breaking the company down, but for no conceivable purpose. Like he's made a big deal about ads.

Ads are coming back. Every ad I see there is a six-year-old. It's like a six-year-old saying, I think Mercedes is the best car. I just, I think what's important, so actually any listeners who've played Madden or MLB, the show, this is what would happen if someone who ran a Madden franchise actually ran a football team. This is the tech equivalent of that. This is a guy who is like, I know what I'm doing.

Watch this. He has absolute power. There is no more board. There is just Elon. This company has the same corporate structure as mine, which has one person. That's it. And he's running it as he wants to, which is to say, not well at all. And from every report I've read, what actually happens is at three in the morning, an engineer will get a text from Elon Musbine, like, we need to move the retweet button and the like button. We need to put them at

opposite ends of the page so that we have more clicks. And the engineer would be like that. Elon, that doesn't make any sense. I will fire you. Now I will fire you from the company. You will not be paid. And so this, these poor, and then he'll wake up the next day and he'll be like, oh, I moved the likes of you.

Like I never said that. He's just, I will not speak to, I've never taken ketamine, never taken any of, any actually legal drugs somehow, weird enough already. But from what I have heard from people that have, this man is on something all the time and based on those multiple Wall Street Journal reports about drugs, this man may just be on ketamine, all the, like, and just abusing it in a way that only an insanely rich guy can, so it doesn't just destroy him all the time. But I think at some point, I think we are watching a man just constantly overleverage

himself physically and financially in real time. At some point, something has to crack. And you may think, well, things have gone badly so far. Absolutely not. Like right now, he's also quite old for a guy who might be abusing drugs like his body may just give up on him. These are the things that I don't think the tech industry realizes. And also, it's a disgusting point in the tech industry that not one of these shitfucks, not Mark Zuckerberg, not Jeff Bezos, not Tim Cook, none of these people have just said, Hey, maybe don't be like this Elon Musk, like fuck Elon Musk, like something, a miniature piece of a soul that exists within them. But they don't want to call out another billionaire because they know they're getting

trouble for it. They know they will get more scrutiny, even though like Elon Musk can take up most of the news. But what's more insane, this is the stuff that drives me truly mad is all of this crazy stuff we said that should be immediately disqualifying. Almost everything that we've said just on its own could be. And yet, when Elon Musk tweeted, yes, we put the first Neuralink inside a man's brain, everyone's like, yep, absolutely. Let me just type that one out, Neuralink Elon Musk. They just reported it because he tweeted it. This man has killed multiple monkeys with this chip already. You think he's just put this shit in a guy's head

and he's, first of all, he has not done it, but second of all, had he, you think this man is alive anymore? You think he didn't die during the operation? That's such an ignominious way to die. They put in a human's brain, but like are they alive after it? Like that's a question that- What's the human being alive when they put it in? Yeah, well, yeah, it could be a daver. They just put it in a corpse.

They shut it up, his ass, he didn't say it was in his brain, like. Well, Ed, you talk about his reported drug use. And like, yeah, when the Wall Street Journal has a giant article outlining your use of And like, yeah, when the Wall Street Journal has a giant article outlining your use of LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms, and ketamine, suffice to say you may have a drug problem. But I mean, like, I guess I'm wondering, like, is, you know, like, his, his, like, every time he replies to like a white supremacist account, like talking about the great

replacement theory and says, hmm, wow, concerning, interesting. Could this just be a side effect of him being like in a k-hole and not actually believing in white supremacist ideology? Is he just so high that he's blown away by anything he reads on the internet? So I think it actually could be that. I think that's true. I think it also could be something even more depressing, which is he just doesn't care. I think he's just like, yeah, sure, whatever, like whoever is mad for me is my friend, even if that's an incoherent ideology. And I think, yeah, he, I'm sorry, you can't do this as many times as he has and not hold these views. I think he is a racist. I think he may be anti-semitic, or he has a very confused version of what anti-Semitism

is that perhaps aligns with Zionism, just a guess. And he definitely, well, Tesla has had terrible problems with racism. Tesla, and he's definitely a sexist based on a lot of the things he said and done. He's a peculiar creep. Like he's a nasty fucking creep. He's also gelatinous. He's horrible to look at. He's really that picture of him and Rahm Emanuel. I think it was this. That was Ary Emanuel. It was Ary Emanuel.

Ary Emanuel is Rahm Emanuel's brother, and they based Ary Gold from entourage off of him. Fuck you, you fucking stupid fucking balcony! Fuck you, you fucking stupid fucking balcony! Fuck off! Fuck you the most! So, but just that's the thing. I think he's just a boring old piece of shit, just a really based on his humor alone. He's not like a particularly sophisticated bigger.

He's just a fucking asshole who gets on. He posted the other day like a picture of dogs and the outline of the dogs first said send nudes or I like milfs. It's shit that wouldn't have been funny back on e-bombs world. This is things that something awful members were making out, found out what 10, 15 years ago or more. These are not funny or new things, these suggest that his cultural appreciation or consumption is just paper thin. This man has more money than anyone else in the world, he could do anything at all times, wherever he wants, and he chooses not just the post, but the post in this vacuous, empty, very sad way, even Bill Ackman, who is a fucking loser.

At least he's dropping 10,000 word tweets that no one will read. But at least he seems to believe in something, to be clear. He's also culturally hollow, just like Elon. But Musk is just so deeply sad, very, very sad. And his humor is so boring, it's not even Rick and Morty level. It's just like old school. But that movie, it's still kind of funny. It's very sad. The most illustrative thing for his sensibility at his cultural touchstones

was when he posted some like, you know, reposted someone's meme about like, Evangelion and someone in their replies asked him, oh, do you like Dion Genesis Evangelion? And he just replied, nerve. He's just like, like reading like any way. Wait, what? Yeah, sorry. It took me a second to understand what they ask him straight up. Do you? Oh, do you watch the Genesis Evangelion and he replies nerve that's like if someone says do you watch Star Wars you respond with Death Star

Jedi it's like it's like he got that question and panicked and was like oh my god fuck fuck fuck and just started reading the Wikipedia article for it. Everything, like he just, he's into the things that he thinks he's supposed to be into them, but on the most basic surface level. Like not even reading the Wikipedia plot summary. That's too much depth and, you know, past surface knowledge for him.

That his racism is kind of the same way. Like, I don't I don't believe he's like a true racism. And all like he's just copy. He's just copying. I do think it's funny how he does get on there and he's like, Jews are importing non whites to destroy America. And and the ADL is like, well, he likes Israel. Like, what?

It's fine. And then they started advertising again. He was like, great, I won't sue you anymore. Yeah. That's so. And it's so strange as well, because I just don't know what he does all day, because he has posted himself playing Diablo 4 to like very high levels. And I should say as someone who has put a good amount of time into it, that game is boring as fuck.

I played hundreds of hours of Diablo 3. Diablo 4 is such a grind and it's a really boring one as well, less satisfying, everything takes too long and he's at like torment 125 on some. This man has probably put thousands of hours of Hundreds maybe over a thousand hours into arguably the most boring of the Diablo's including the first two and Also does not appear to do anything else other than yell at his engineers in the dead of night. It's just this man is definitely Some level of horrifyingly depressed. Let's be he just he's certainly acting like he is very depressed. He's acting like i would when i was thirteen and i don't run twitter. Well x or whatever you call this fucking so like that's the x thing is even weird because to your point earlier felix.

Everyone was posting that fucking bird people talked about tweets people they did free branding everywhere. people talked about tweets, people that they did free branding everywhere, everywhere across the internet. Now, it's like X formerly known as Twitter. That's what everyone's writing. It's very sad. You have to say X formerly known as Twitter. But the other thing that's baffling about the decision to rebrand into X is that it doesn't work when you type. You can't type it into a browser like a store bar and X.com.com, or like it just, it still says twitter.com on like a web browser. But it doesn't say that in spotlight in your iPhone anymore, which is just annoying. Well, and then like, and then X, it's like, if you had a website like x.com, like people

would think it's pornographic or something. It's just, it's, it's Bethlin. And what's crazy is the last time he had a company called x.com, it was actually before Peter Thiel stole it from him while he was on honeymoon. Elon Musk went on honeymoon and Peter Thiel just while he was away just like had a boardcoo and changed his name to PayPal. What was crazier though was the original x.com. This is why everyone should not be excited about Elon Musk having their banking on there. Not that they are. X dot com had an original problem going back to the 2000s.

I think it was where you could just enter a bank account into there and just send people's money from the account with no other checks of any kind. So like several people lost thousands of dollars. But this man has been fucking this up forever. Were they competing with like dark web drug bark? That is just one of the first banking platforms. That this is one of the very first back in the 2000s. There was one of the first banking platforms and there was one article in like CNAP. I don't have it in front of me where it was like, yeah, multiple people just

they left their username and password behind and someone just logged on and sent money to their bank. And there wasn't anything that checked that or had someone call you. So people just lost thousands of dollars out of nowhere. This is the last time he tried to do banking. This is what he will do with your money. I really, on some level, I don't believe he will ever add banking or anything money related to this platform. But on some level, I kind of do because you know someone like, I don't know, one of those lower tier conservative guys is going to lose a bunch of money. It's just very weird because like Dom Lucra is going to end up losing $15,000 after sending it to a fucking only fan squad. That guy, if you don't remember, by the way, that was the one that got banned from Twitter

for posting something with child pornography in it and then came back and now all he does is complain about the fact that X's creator program does not pay him what it used to. That's all he posts now. He's just like, yeah, I don't understand. I post here all day. I'm not getting anything. This is ridiculous. And this is a guy who mostly just posts like like transpanic shit and just weird conservative stuff that

doesn't really make any sense. That was one of the craziest fucking things I've ever seen. That guy, he posted CP like straight on the timeline. And it was, I guess he was trying to say like, look how bad this is. I don't think anyone was on the fence. We all agree that it's bad. You don't need to say it. I used to approve of it, but I realized I never actually sat down with it.

Oh, my. Oh, wow, this is pretty bad. And they like, like he should like be in jail. Yes. What do you have that on your fucking computer? Yeah, that's he had to open his computer to put that on there. Yeah, that was insane. And he gives that guy thousands of dollars. Yeah, he had to open his computer to put that on there. Yeah, that was insane. And he gives that guy thousands of dollars. Yeah. Like that's, he unbanned him. I like the idea, though, of a company where that's allowed and then taking on banking. I mean, I think like,

financial regulation in America really is it where it should be, but even the lax standards of where it's at now, it would be the most surefire way for him to go to prison, probably. For all the problems with banking in America, you can't have your banking platform allow child porn on it. I'm pretty sure if you went to JP Morgan online banking and there was a guy like a chatbot, said you, CP regulators would probably step in. That would probably be bad for them. Yes. But what's great about this as well as another great Dom Luke for a moment is when he was complaining back in August of last year about

the amount of him. He got 472 million impressions and he was the number one trending topic on Twitter the month previous. And then he only got $2,400 as a payout. But also what's great is Elon's response was, if you can find advertisers that want to advertise alongside your content, then you get revenue share. We cannot make them do this. Elon Musk just complaining that he can't get advertisers, but also somewhat

suggesting, yeah, your shit's gross. But you know, that's not what he thinks. He's just like, well, it's not my fault. The advertisers left, even though he is the probably the only person really at thought here. He is the one person who could change things to make advertisers come back. And the thing he would have to do would have to be kind of violent, but how bad do you want your company to be good? His thing with advertisers was so insane to me because he was sort of taking a stance

almost as if the advertisers need him more than he needs them. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Twitter represent an incredibly mincule part of most large companies' advertising budgets? It used to be 2% and now it's less of all online advertising spending. Yeah. So, it's insane to just create this problem where there was none. And it's a very easy thing for these companies to just not advertise there. It probably doesn't affect them at all. It's one of those things where, like, no, people should not be noticing this.

Ed, despite what Dom Luecher is posting on Twitter, ex-formally known as Twitter, another weird thing I noticed about Elon is that he conceptual his his mission in buying Twitter as saving the human race which is kind of translated now into this kind of like natalist ideology of encouraging people to have more children and Elon already always has like one kid of his on his shoulders at like big press events like yet He took one of his kids to Auschwitz you remember when he met with Erdogan and Erdogan said where's your wife? Erdogan, oh, yeah,, where's your wife? Erdogan, okay. Well, yeah. I mean, that the whole have more children thing

is really weird because I mean, he does. That's one thing where he actually backs up what he's saying with a Nick Cannon like dedication to the cause. And he, that whole thing is very weird because he had like two kids. He's had multiple kids with women he wasn't even in relationships with. And like whatever, do whatever with your life.

But it's also just very bizarre because it's almost the kind of thing you would think if you hadn't had human experiences. Like if you're just looking at humanity in a very distant way of like, ah, what if we had more people? What could that have? What could, huh, what if we have more people? What could that have? What could walk out? What if we have more people? There's even more companies, right?

I don't fucking know. All I do all day is play Diablo 4 and respond exactly to racist guys. And so he's so, I think he's just so otherworldly rich that he has completely removed himself from actual things. Not just bills, obviously, and struggles, but also from relationships to other people who might have children in a normal sense. And I don't even mean ultra-rich parents who have nannies. I mean, to the point that he just like,

no one around him has children. I don't know, he probably doesn't I don't know do you how many kids He has now like six like I don't fucking know if it gets actually something like 10 or 11 And it is insane. It's crazy. How do you spend time with them? Yeah, how do you spend time with them? And how do you like he had three of those kids by you know as you pointed out just going to an executive at SpaceX and being like, uh, can you accept my comfort $200,000? And she said yes.

Yeah, sure. Why not? Fuck it. Yes. I don't go anything on from the next nine months. It's just, but it's the kind of thing that doesn't make sense because none of us have no bills. None of us have no struggles. We must pay the power company,

or the power company will turn off our power. We must buy more food and then put it in our mouths, do it, and consume it. Otherwise, we will die. He just has people bring him things and bring him to places. Yeah. And I think he might just have reached a point where he's like, And I think he might just have reached a point where he's like, I don't like what maybe more, but he may just be completely disconnected from humanity in this truly insane way. Like he is, there's whatever is going on up there is very dark and weird in a way that I don't think any of us can truly conceptualize because this isn't just, oh, I don't have to worry about it about pays all my bills, or I have a nanny and they deal with one of my 10 children.

There are no predators. There are no challenges. My businesses cannot fail. Everything I do is news. Everyone I speak to is more important by virtue of speaking to me. There was a tweet a while ago about billionaires saying it must be like being kicked in the head by a horse every day when you wake up. I kind of think that might be what's happening. To be clear, this guy's a fucking asshole, a piece of

shit. I wish him nothing but ruin. But there's something very strange happening, something very horrifying almost. I think however it ends with Elon in 5, 10, 15 years. It could be very dark. Yeah. It, right. Like, he's not just surrounded by yes men. The media were his yes men, too. It's and now it's kind of crumbling before his eyes. And I think he's realizing, well, I don't think he realizes what's happening.

But I think he's realizing something is different and he has no control over it. Yeah, absolutely. I don't like his current stance against the media is so insane because no one got as much uncritical free exposure and positive presses he did never from like 20, 2012 to like 2018. But I do. Yeah. I think if any current, you know, top 50 richest person in the world is a candidate

to do the Aubrey McLendon and like kill themselves in an insane way, it kind of is hit. Like he's the best candidate for that, I feel like. Or he'll just die of a heart attack. Yeah. That is, I don't know really much about the drugs he takes, but I'll tell you, taking all of those things while also definitely being really unhealthy, that's a recipe for disaster. And I will say, he also deprived me of the thing I would have really loved to see, which is Mark Zuckerberg beating him up.

Remember that? I was always excited for that. I would have paid any amount of money to see that fight. It would have been low tax versus UV bowl round two. I don't know. I mean, I guess with like Elon and the have more kids thing or like paying SpaceX executives to like have more of his bring more of his seed into the world. I think it comes back to like what we were talking about at the beginning with the AI-generated art. I think he's fundamentally disconnected from human beings in the sense that like,

I don't think he views like having kids as like, oh, you have a kid and then you're like a presence in the kid's life, you raise them. You like, you put in work. I think he just views like, human beings as just like a series of inputs and outputs. And if you put the right sperm in the right woman, then you have more elons. Like you said, add more companies, more innovation. But we're actually raising

the kid or being a father to them. As long as you have money, it's immaterial to him. And I think that a good way to look at it as well is, everything has just kind of worked out for him. And there's a combination of luck and opportunism here. I think you can't, everything is technically luck and especially in his case it was he was born at the right time. He was able to move to America and just go to, what was it, Princeton or Stanford? He went but then he dropped out and he happened to meet the right people and he was there at the right time and had good enough ideas.

And I think he is a good operator, or at least was. He was capable of signing the right deals with the right people and kissing the right arse and also being able to invest millions of dollars at the right time. Being in those deals because people knew you had the money and knew you knew the right people helped him. And I think right now what he's realizing is he is taking art work to be clear, I actually don't think he's realizing this. What's happening is he has managed to find the only problems that don't get solved by knowing everyone. You cannot fix Twitter by bringing more attention to it.

In fact, bringing more attention to Twitter right now is killing it because the more people that see this sorry sack of crap who see us in bio, who see all of these fucking weird things they're not gonna go this is the place this is where it happens i want to get my news here they're like this is fucking straight what is going on why is this like this and he doesn't know what to do he doesn't know why the cyber truck isn't doing well the answer is because he designed it he doesn't want to credit the people who did the things first.

It does tie back to what you said, because it's the same thing of these generative AI freaks who say, okay, yeah, I'll just generate more art based on looking at a lot of other art. Great. No, it's not based on just having more of something. It's actually understanding the problem you were solving it. Elon Musk has never really been the problem solver other than finding more money. And now also, we haven't heard a lot about Grok recently, which is the generative of that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. By the way, Grok still refers to Twitter as Twitter. So, you should do that. Yeah. That's so good. That's, he built, and also what's great about that is you see the did you see the the grok roasting Stephen King

and Elon just a 10 cry laughing emojis. Did you see that bullshit? I did because it begins the same way every grok grows begins with. Oh, oh, boy, I don't know where to start with. Every single one that you see says that it's this fucking corny Applebee's dad fucking look. He's just like, yeah, I don't know.

Oh, Stephen King. He's more like Stephen Queen. It's just very limp, empty, echoing, hollowness, more from Elon. But also what's great about GROC and what's great about X.ai, the AI company that makes GROC is generative AI does not make anyone any money. It burns, as we've mentioned, it burns, you throw like 18 cats per query in it. But in all seriousness, he built this thing, he spent millions of dollars on it, and it's probably losing him money with each message.

He found he is so good at coming up with ways to make himself less money. He's actually genuinely really good at destroying companies. If he was doing a producer style thing here, I would be like, cool, that's very funny, but he's not. He actually thinks these are all great ideas. But where was actually his last good idea as he had one? Tesla designed by someone else, all the Teslas other than the Cybertruck. Twitter designed by someone else. Every new feature on Twitter he's done,

designed by someone else, community notes, he tried to claim that was his, someone else did it, it existed as birdwatch before had. All of these features that he's done, view counts on Twitter, not useful. Actually a really good way of showing people that you're doing ad fraud. Every idea he has is bad and the media is still not showing up and saying this. Everyone should roll their eyes at him, but they're not just because there's money. It's the same thing with Generative AI. There is an obvious problem with these things, but there's something, there's a fear, I think, of just folding one's arms and saying, I actually don't fucking believe you.

What is the actual point of Grock existing? Is it just because like chat GPT is too woke? Is that really it? Yes. Yes, that's actually the whole thing. The whole thing was that he wanted it partly because I think he wanted in on the AI boom. Yeah. He wanted to say he had his own AI, but also Elon Musk actually found it open AI.

And so he feels like he didn't get enough from that. He didn't he didn't get enough credit for it because he's a fucking twat. This is a fucking nincompoop. He doesn't care that he has all this money. He has to have more and more credit, but it needs to be credit in the way that makes him happy. It's so weird. It isn't obvious what he even wants. I don't think he even knows. Yeah, it like from what I can tell with Grock, everything I've ever seen from it, it is like those, you know, the sort of like Dutch and German guys that love Elon Musk.

They'll, it's to me, really is just the same thing every time where, you know, they'll, they'll be like, I asked Grock what it thinks of Brittany Griner. And like you said, it always starts out the same way. Oh boy, where do I start? And it like, sometimes chat GPT can, can imitate someone's pros or style in a way that I think is like kind of interesting or funny. But with Grock, it's just like, okay, am I am I making fun of an athlete? They should spend more time thinking about basketballs and less time thinking about tweets. Am I talking about an author?

They should spend more time on chapters and less time in chat rooms. And it's like, who like that's actually funnier than it would be. That would be clunkier. Yeah. They genetically, the only people that can actually laugh at that are Dutch people in Germans. Well, guys who don't experience comedy. Yeah. The crying, laughing reactions from Elon to Grog is just that is him like talking the shotgun out of his mouth

Oh, I will never feel sorry for him. I think that's a good spot Yeah, I think it's a good place to end it. Again, Ed Zittron, thank you for your time. If people want more Ed Zittron, your newsletter, your podcast, where should they go? So, go to betteroffline.com and please click podcast and subscribe to Better Offline. It starts week of the 19th. It comes out on the 21st of February. First things are the Rot economy and my Vision Pro review. you can find better offline.com or get you to my newsletter

as well. All right. And ZipTron, what's good? Thanks for joining us today. That does it for Chop Boat. Talk to you guys soon. Thank you so much, Ed. Thank you. Do you think you're better off alone? Thanks for watching!