It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Elon Musk Has Lost the Gamers

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Mia and Gare discuss the social and political role of gamers and why people like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried spend so much effort portraying themselves as gamers. Original Air Date: 3.27.25 Sources:https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2024/09/15/deshaun-watson-trade-details-texans-browns/75189022007/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ykCc588Zw https://thecourier.com/news/549130/browns-need-to-start-asking-questions-about-depodesta/ https://www.georgiaentertainment.com/2024/04/georgias-got-game-why-the-gaming-industry-is-larger-than-film-television-and-music-combined/#:~:text=The%20dominant%20entertainment%20industry%20is,than%203%20billion%20active%20gamers https://app2top.com/news/the-gaming-industry-in-2024-by-the-numbers-a-review-by-gamesindustry-276003.html https://www.ign.com/articles/asmongolds-twitch-channel-banned-following-racist-rant-about-palestinians https://g-mnews.com/en/global-games-market-will-generate-usd-187-7-billion-in-2024/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human. On this week's episode of Next Chapter, I, TDJ, sit down with Denzel Washington, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon. I don't take any credit for it. I just didn't put me first. I just put God first, and he's carrying me. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast new episodes drop weekly podcasters it's time to get the recognition you deserve the

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I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from him? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash.

I don't know how you got on the show. Check out Not My Best Moment with me kept on stage on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you.

Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a business. a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast,

Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It is your host, Me, along with me as Garrison Davis. Hi, I've played a video game before.

I'm not very powerful, but I too have played many several video games see I wouldn't I wouldn't say several I've played like a few I many I have played too many simply too many video games so okay this is this is in some ways

kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ everything's really depressing is something going on out there it's all really bad and one of the people who's in making everything really really bad is Elon Musk who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers the PayPal guy

The PayPal guy The owner of X I've I've been I've been locked in my In my gamer cave for the past like five months I've not left I'm just hearing about this now Yeah you might you might know of him

As the guy who paid another guy To play Path of Exile 2 for him We will get to that See I don't play those games Those games are gay I only play Nintendo Mecca games And Hell Divers 2

Like a loser That's that's reasonable That's reasonable those are those are fine games oh and sonic oh god okay pushing aside the subject to sonic so okay i want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers and i think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in a hundred and eighty four point three billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy, but is also right, points out that this is more

money than TV, movies, and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right? Something like three billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird, because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games and it's also mostly people who are women and non-white and yet however comma when people think about like the gamer TM you are not thinking about that yeah like as a political class yeah yeah you know like when people say the word gamer yeah you're thinking of a bunch of weird in-cell right-wing dipshits who are white and suck ass and this is in large part because gamer

was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity and obviously this is you know this is a fascist movement now part of the reason this works and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people because it's new no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money

and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously yeah yeah and so the the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people and this is true actually really both on the left as much as it is on the right there are a lot of like sort of political figures I don't know you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming

like H-bomber guy I guess is an example like Hassan to some extent there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like become political but on the other hand

gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space oh god Garrison I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is have I told you the story

about Kabab the jerk German? No. Oh, boy. Okay, so back in the dawn of time, I played a lot of Harstone as a kid, and I was like, I wasn't like good. Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people? No, this is the, this is the World of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's, that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think, I think I peaked at like 2K legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top like half of percent of players in the world. Digital collectible card video game? Come on.

Oh yeah. Yeah. But 2K legend N.A. is like fucking shitter ranks. It's bad. I was never like good, good at it. I was just like okay, kind of. But you know, this is like a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is like all over the fucking Hartstone streamers. And these are like really big streamers would play

music from this guy. They called Kabob the German. And it turns out that his actual name was removed Kabob. Because he was a fucking German neo-Nazi Well, many such cases. Yeah, for people who are not aware of like mid-2010s

German fascism, remove kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So, great stuff, great stuff. This was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the 2010s. Now,

this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech CEOs who want to be thought of as gamers

and so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bank and Freed and this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum right? We're going to look at

Sam Bank and Fried and we're going to look at Elon Musk our new overlord I guess so we're going to start with Sam Bankman Freed and you know

as we go through what's happening here we're going to sort of unravel it's so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to know, like, Sam Bakeman-Fried, like, is, I guess, like, he is a gamer

in the sense that, like, he's, like, addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah, he looks to the part too, no offense. Yeah, yeah. Before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud. Well, probably not anymore. He's probably going to get part of God. Maybe. We'll see.

We'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting block now. All young Americans are two poor. to open bank accounts, so they put all their money in crypto, so now they're going to vote for whoever makes line go up. I'm going to become the Joker. So, okay, think about Sam Bank and Fried, for people who have forgotten who SBF is, he is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it. And, you know, Robert did a sort of behind the

bastards on him. And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always He's fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dog shit game called Story Brick Borology Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like, as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed.

And one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of The Big Short, we're going to get to Moneyball in a second blindside other books reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing but you know our very very powerful influential

and wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him and this is something that like SBF was like you know was like projecting right in order for this to be the image of him was him as like the gamer

and this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit so he plays video games meetings. Like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video games

in meetings because it is too obvious. I play video games once a week. That's kind of my limit. Oh God. This is the one part about Sam Baker free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games. It is my like anti-depression strategy basically like when I need to not think for a while. There's just me playing. Actually, Path of Exile, too. One of the games

that we're going to be fucking talking about today. Something that I play a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming, like, God, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a Mova, like League of Legends, but like third person. And I played so much smite that they were pros showing my casual games. When the Zuma Revolution comes

and they execute the gamers and they execute B, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that. I'll inform the council. I'll, can't argue. For our next spokes council meeting, I'll bring it to the table. That's reasonable. but you know so so what what what happens with this sort of thing is that is that Michael Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant yeah totally because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time and and this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing and like and like SBF like is a gamer right but like why they why they make us part of their cultural image which is that a lot of the traditional media people even though gaming is an enormous industry.

It's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies. Or like respectability in some way. Yeah. Except in like the reversed Sam-Bakman-Friedway where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius, right? Like like that era of like Silicon Valley guy.

that's like he's he's so different right like he's he's not like put together and this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker so it's kind of like it's kind of like a double-edged sword in like that specific way yeah well this this is all a feedback loop right because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like michael lewis right who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been these people don't play video games they're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists right and so they run into this shit, and they have no fucking idea what the hell

is going on. And it's just really, really easily to sort of bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer like, you know, you, like you show a gamer, like a League of Legends addicts and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction is like kind of a

fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does, you just get mad all the time. I know too many League Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit. Terrible game. Yeah, but arcane, though, right? All right.

Continue. Oh, God. Okay, we're going to take an ad break, and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence. A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught. The answers were there, hidden in plain sight, so why did it take so long to catch him?

I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster, hunting the Long Island serial killer, the investigation into the most notorious killer in New York, since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finish drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link.

There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen.

I got to thinking, could I be that one? in person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcast. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast, called Not My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends,

people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from it? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest. We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal failed through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like, we got into the small talk and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like,

oh, no. What? Check out not my best moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back. making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history and some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to Fight Its Way Into the

airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. so we are back now okay obviously part of the reason this works too is you know as i've been talking about right like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just

don't understand an enormous market right but lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass and to get an understanding of this i'm going to go into something that lewis in theory understands a lot better which is sports so he Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which I'll get to in a second,

and he wrote The Blindside, which is another book that, like, talk they talk about on Behind the Bastards and go listen to that. But I want to go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog Oakland athletics team invented,

like, baseball metrics. And they used Sabre metrics to, like, build this roster out of nothing that, like, went to the playoffs and did really well. And, and like, I'm not, not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team, like whatever, I'm not going to argue about

baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right? Is this guy named Paul Podesta? He is like one of the main figures in this book. He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach basically.

What baseball team is this? Oh, this is the Oakland athletics or now the, uh, Las Vegas athletics or some shit. I don't know. They moved Vegas. I don't know what they're called the athletics now. No, no, they are originally called the athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the, well, the, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's. Well, they've been the A's forever, but yeah, they've, they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland. Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah, because I was like,

wait a minute, didn't, didn't Las Vegas steal? Didn't the Raiders go there too? Yes. Yes, they stole both of them. That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head, but Yeah, so, okay, unfortunately, we're going to be talking about football here. So this guy, right, Paul Podesta's, like, one of these sort of geniuses. She later goes on to be, it's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the

Browns over the course of two seasons going 1 in 31, which is a feat of like, just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go 1 in

31 in 2 cross two seasons of football again. So again, that is a 1 in 15 season followed by an 0 in 16 season. It's the second 0 in 16 season ever. Unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade. okay it's like me

why the fuck you're talking about this part of this is also like these people are just evil um de sean watson is a serial sexual predator I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women specifically massage therapist mostly have accused him of sexual assault he is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely

fucking suck shit so so that's the first thing you have to understand about watson is that he is just really fucking like morally reprehensible right he is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season and Paul Podesta, who again is the guy who Michael Lewis is

supposed to be like touting as like this genius analytics guy decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshawn Watson who had been on the Texans and again like Garrison like imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking

moral grounds. Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans? It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners. They fucking traded this guy, right? And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade that is three is the worst trade in the history of football. It is three first round picks, two thirds, two third round picks and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy who again, I kind of emphasize this enough is a serial sexual

predator, right? They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary, the history of the NFL. So, okay, so how does Deshawn Watson, like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who, like, is now laundering being a gamer as like the great

symbol of sort of like cultural, like, being a rogue outsider, right? How does Deshaun Watson, his like greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season, in weeks one through out of out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000s to start weeks 1 through 5 out of again

759 quarterbacks he ranks 753 out of 759 EPA for dropback 753 out of 759 they traded three first round picks for this guy he has a mind-boggling an EPA of negative point three which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would. How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games. Don't worry. We're almost done with the sports part of it. I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this, which is the argument that sports

and the sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right. Yeah, of course. Yes. I understand that. I can, I I can see that. Yes, also I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air and this is the best fucking chance I've ever gonna get so Jesus fucking Christ.

Is this like what I talk about like movies or something? Is this? Yes, yes, this is what it feels like. Is this what I sound like? Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like

a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of this team hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator $230 million and this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius.

And this all comes back to, again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're, like, picked on, like, by the jock or whatever, right? That's like, that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there's, like, oppressed by this. But, like, it's just, like, the same masculinity bullshit all the way down. And you can watch, like, just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using by using both of these fucking affects. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like, specifically in the culture and, you know, why these people choose to use gaming as, like, you know, as the sort of affect they're trying to project to project into the world.

I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicki Osterweil, in a piece called Game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety. To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one once mastered to live under current economic conditions, games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups,

but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play. that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them, but they are also capable of giving everyone else

the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist's patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men.

So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Sambay been freed and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is contested ground. As much as we think of gamers as like right-wingers, right, there are a lot of what you would call to like traditionally sort of left-looming

demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that you know you use for fucking work they're also a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally and like i mean i know this right like i am fucking like I'm a Chinese trans woman who is better at video games and both the people I'm gonna be fucking talking about in this story right like well I heard I heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced but we're gonna we're gonna talk about the path of exile character fucking next you know but but I mean it's worth it's worth mentioning like speed running right which is a very very trans genre competitive gaming in general competitive fighting games uh yeah it depends it depends a lot on the genre melee I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox who is a black non-binary who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time incredibly beloved uh the only person history ever to beat someone 13 to zero and a first to

11 absolute legend right but but you know these are the people that that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like as a sort of cultural force and this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life right now these people are in power and you know who else is in power it's a products and services to support this podcast all hail a decade ago i was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers but it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught the answers were there hidden in plain sight so why did it take so long to catch him i'm josh zeman and this is monster hunting the long island serial killer the investigation into the most notorious killer in new york

since the son of Sam, available now. Listen for free on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan.

It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shellgame on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What up, y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not My Best Month, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What do they mess up on? What is their heartbreak?

And what did they learn from him? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show. Boo, somebody had tomatoes. I'm kidding. But if they had tomatoes, they would have thrown the tomatoes. Let's be honest.

We've all had those moments we'd rather forget. We bumped our head. We made a mistake. The deal fell through. We're embarrassed. We failed. But this podcast is about that and how we made it through. So when they sat me down, they were kind of like,

We got into the small talk, and they were just like, so what do you got? What? What ideas? And I was like, oh, no. What? Check out Not My Best Moment with me, Kevin on stage on the Iheart radio app, Apple podcast, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people. horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing.

It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The Most Texas Story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have Mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons.

So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked, like Thomas Edison and the Electroship. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

We are back. Now, obviously the other part of this, you know, we've talked about, We've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. And, you know, the thing about gaming, right, is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system. And, like, I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy, Nazi, like, gamer dip shit, right? Yeah, that's why I boot up FF7 remake to stare at Cloud Stryfe for hours on end when I'm feeling sad. Mm-hmm. But, you know, the problem with what's happening here, right, is that, like, the right, that we're experiencing violence in sort of in different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from the gender system, that is the same system. But these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right? And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this, for a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from. And, like, I would compare it to, like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right, and deal with this violence. But, like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters.

Most, most, yeah, I would say that's true. Yeah, right. And so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like, fuck them. Like, eat shit. Like, I'm sorry, you've become Nazis. Like, fuck off. Skill issue in some ways, among other environmental factors.

Yeah, yeah. But also a lot of times, these people aren't fucking, like, they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right? I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right? But, like, also, he's the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people

who has ever lived and he still has the same sense of like aggrievement that powers all these people and this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right? Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed

by like jocks or whatever and now it's been shifted into this. Not anymore. Yeah, now they believe that they're being oppressed by like fucking women and minorities. Right. And it's actually,

the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the don't nerds at the top of the system now. It's, it's, but we have, we've had a, we've had a, we've had a full uno reversal. But the thing is, people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right? And like, but, but it's this affect, it's this, it's this, it's this feeling they have of their, of them being the ones who are oppressed that, like, you know, made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate.

If you're going to read one Vicky Oswald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is to feel that, I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been a awesome stuff about working conditions in the games industry which are fucking terrible and it's good but like as a medium there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like film or music

but if you're going to read one thing from her read a piece called Goon Squad which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broken state of cyberpunk 2077 when it came out and one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being I mean literally being used as like scabs

and pinkertons against people who make video games and you know and this expands out to work more broadly. They're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game

that like when CyberPoint 277 came out it was literally giving people seizures because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes

and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken shitty game and you know they're also used for just like

anti-queer and like anti-feminist harassment campaigns and that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too and that gives you an insight into why

these people sort of like do this signaling right? is that they're also, like, signaling to their base that, like, I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera, like, you should fucking support me for this shit. Now, pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode,

I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman freed because, like... Yeah, many such cases. Yeah, like, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out, though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this, like, gamer stick

thing, like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is

not really a gamer, I would say. Like, he sort of plays video games. He's a ketamine user. He's a Twitter power user. He is the Shadow President. Yeah, the The rich is man in the world.

Rich is a man who has ever lived. Yeah. Also that he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like, he's an elite video game player in like multiple games. He's obsessed with this. He's also, I believe the term is a meme lord. If I'm reading this right. Oh God.

One of his Path of Exile 2 characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about. But one of his characters in that game was named Keckius Maximus. So like this is the level of mine. That is one of his favorite names. In his White House office, he has a he has a kekius maximus portrait hanging behind his desk there's an AI generated image of like pepe the frog and like and like roman like caesar attire i hate everything so yeah this is the

guy who runs into country now yeah oops so elin musk has been lying about being good at video games and the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually he he's like for a long time been doing a like i'm a gamer thing so his his kind of problems and i think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're going to get to in a second this is something that Blue Sky user Gay Dog reminded me of because I'd forgot

he has so many gaming scandals I'd forgotten about this one which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Eldon Ring which is very difficult game and he had two different shields equipped which makes

literally no sense it's like overencumbered like it's okay The best explanation I've tried to I figured out for like how bad at this game he is is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game

equivalence of going like hey look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest call you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking break on. Hey I love the Mazda Miata. That's like the game equivalent. Everyone who looked at it immediately was like this is

the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing he is just like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game like just baffling incomprehensible bullshit

and this was like kind of a scandal for him it wasn't like a huge one but like especially like this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it so the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games

he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4 I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player and not a Diablo player Diablo and Path of Exile like very much the same kind of game

basically like you click somewhere and your character goes there and it you click other things that it does attacks but famously like this year he pretended to be one of like the best Path of Exile 2 players in the world and he was doing this on his

alt account which is has to handle it's Cybergamer 420 but all the E's are threes so it's C-Y-B-3-R-G-A-M-3-R-420 Wait, wait, wait, wait, say you that again? It's at C-Y-B-3-R-G-A-M-3-R-420. So I think I found something.

I think the 420 at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday, April 20th. God damn it. so okay he like claims to have one of the like the best characters in hardcore which is a mode of path of exile where if he die once you get kicked out of it so it's very hard it's to like prove that he actually did this he like does a live stream where he tries to play path of exile like on a twitter live stream and it is immediately obvious that like he has no idea what he's doing like it's not just obvious people who play the game i hadn't played path of exile too at this point right i had only played the original one like i a decade ago, like a little bit of it. And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game

before. Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like, it was so unbelievably obvious. Like, he, like, walked past one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just, like, walk past it, didn't notice it. It's, like, staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes

on him. And eventually, he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile 2 account and then he claims that he never claims, that it was his PathfaxL2 account and this Jenny Wynley has been a real problem for him because

it pissed off like the entire gaming scene so you have videos with like millions of views some guys like Asma Gold who was like he's a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass like is like a turbo right winger like spends his time

screaming about how like black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry and fucking Asma Gold is watching this video

and being like this guy is a lying piece of shit what the fuck and like everyone fucking reacts like this it's genuinely wild I've never actually

seen people like react to this to like to Elon like this and like again like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like

wait this guy's just like lying now what's interesting about about this to some extent, is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to, like, pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affact is still largely targeted towards non-gamer in the sense that, like, there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely

is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of a little pex of path of exile player on a stream using someone else's account. But, like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And a lot of the people he talks to about the stuff are people like Joe Rogan, who aren't, like, gamer TM people, right? it's like a lot of people who aren't gamers and he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's really on the one hand yeah he is signaling to his sort of fascist base

but in the other hand he's trying to use this sort of like cultural cachet of gaming as like this sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation except he fucked up because he he you know spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer but the thing about gamers is that like

there is literally an entire genre of video on YouTube that is very, very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games and cheated records of video games and Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right? And that means we got them folks.

Mission accomplished, wrap it up, we beat Elon Musk. We fucking got him. It's over. He's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game. He's lost all respect

among the farthest reaches of the right so what's next we have one he has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about is this about the one video game he hasn't played

which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story in my opinion which what are you which what are you talking about that's the one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play

GTA 5 oh that was funny I forgot about that because he doesn't like quote unquote doing crime and GTA 5 quote,

required shooting police officers in the opening scene just couldn't do it, unquote. Oh, I can believe forgot about that. So that proves that at least he has some integrity. God.

Now, some gamers might be sick individuals acting out, you know, violence, power fantasies, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GTA5.

That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this. you know, at times strange behavior. Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like a different,

like the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violence and video games is bad. Because he's trying to signal to all of his group simultaneously. And all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.

It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy because, again, he is the most powerful man in the world. No. But it is my, mildly amused it. Yeah, but I, so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that, like, the pushback

he is getting here is, like, I think actually kind of is significant. So the last thing I want to talk about is, is, is him pretending to have been like a quake pro, which the thing that he did. Quake pro. And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs, who is like, his thing is like people who fake, who like fake things in video games, basically. And he is, like, not a leftist. He's like, like, a center-right guy, basically.

I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is. But he did a video about Elon claiming to be a quake player. And what he found, so Elon apparently did actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of the good players were there. And his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better Wi-Fi than everyone else. And so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good Wi-Fi and then he got destroyed.

Which I just think is funny, right? That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he has his thing claiming that, he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than anyone else until he ran to someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up is that like, at the end of this video,

Jobs does like goes on this whole thing about how, and this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press, where he literally goes in a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie. And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass, but literally every

in a field that I know. This means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right? I have never seen a mainstream journalist right down. Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this. And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback and anything else ever fucking seen outside of like the left about what Elon Musk is doing. And like just the willingness to just be like, this guy is a fucking just a serial liar. Like, that he says is a lie. He literally calls him a con, like says his activities like a con man.

He says the things that he's saying are like either lies or delusional. There is a kind of like shift happening right now where people like really are turning on him. There's a thing that happened literally today where Ubisoft, you know, Ubisoft is famously like not a leftist company, right? Like

they've done a lot of horrible, it's fucked up sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as as like a character in it. And And literally the official assassin's creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing

your path of exile two account told you? And like replied to a thing about Hassan? Like we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right? This thing that had been like a really, really consistent base of support with people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him. It's sort of being polarized against him

by just like the fact that he's just is so obviously cynically pan. pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is. And, like, obviously, like, I don't think, like, the gamers are going to, like, fucking rise up or whatever. But the actual serious point to all of this, other than, like, looking at the ways that fascism, like, why these people do this and, like, gamers is, like, a demographic that's important to these people is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition

by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right? That doesn't happen that often. But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay home. And that was enough. Enough people just

staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks came for currencies government was enough for them to take power. And I think the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalition so that when

the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can be stopped. So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the start of GamerGate 2. Gamergate 2 is already

happening, damn it. This is Gamergate 3. This is an open call to begin Gamergate 2.5 right now on behalf of Mia Wong because are you at Mia. Oh no. And then

hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we get enough gamers to stay home. Or even better rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller

or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it. Gamers are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not back the regime. That's actually the February Revolution where they stood down. But you know, same point. Same point. Yeah, come on, Mia. Jeez, fuck.

Look, I am one of the biggest things of like people need to remember that that Lenin did not overthrow the czar, he overthrew Korenski, who was kind of a socialist e-guy, who was from the provisional government in between the... Okay, we're done, we're done here, we're fucking out, we're leaving. What games are you playing? What games are I playing Path of Exile 2?

Don't play Brotato, it will consume your life. Okay. Play RoboQuest. Robo Quest. Robo Quest is great. Robo Quest dares to ask the question. What if, like, the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a rogue-like with like Dooms combat?

That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that then. I do Hell Divers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Corps 6. Armored Corps 6 rules. Love that game. Love that game. Sonic X Shadow Generations,

Final Fantasy 7, and I'm waiting for Mecca Break to come out for like their official release now that the beta is closed. Unfortunately, the character selection is very gooner-coded. Many, many such cases. So I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size

available on my model but the gameplay is fun this has been it could happen here I good Lord they pay me for this I had to watch so many videos about

Deshawn Watson and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this oh it could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. On this week's episode of next chapter, I, TDJ, sit down with Denzel Washington,

a two-time Academy Award-winning actor and cultural icon. And I don't take any credit for it. I just didn't put me first. I just put God first and he's carrying me. Listen to the next chapter podcast on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes drop weekly. Podcasters, it's time to get the recognition you deserve.

The I Heart Podcast Awards are coming back in 2026. Got a mic? Then you've got a shot. Every year, we celebrate the most creative, compelling, and game. changing voices in podcasting. Is that you? Submit now at iHeartpodcastawards.com for a chance to be honored on the biggest stage in the industry. Deadline December 7th. This is your chance. Let's celebrate the power of podcasting and your place in it. Enter now at iHeartpodcastawards.com. What up y'all? It's your boy, Kevin on stage. I want to tell you about my new podcast called Not

My Best Moment, where I talk to artists, athletes, entertainers, creators, friends, people I admire who had massive success about their massive failures. What did they mess up on? What is their heartbreak? And what did they learn from you? I got judged horribly. The judges were like, you're trash. I don't know how you got on the show.

Check out Not My Best Moment with me kept on stage on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc. And send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan. plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed

Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.