It Could Happen Here - Elon Musk Has Lost the Gamers

Episode Date: March 27, 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. 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.

Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one.

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Then tune in to Locatora Radio, Season 10 today. Okay. Now that's what I call a podcast. I'm Theosa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novela. Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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Welcome to You 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, Mio Wong. With me is 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 I've played like a few I Many I have played too many simply too many video games so okay What this is this is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ everything's really depressing It's something going on out there It's all really bad and one of the people who's been 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 been I've been locked in my in my gamer cave for the past like five months. I'm not left I'm just hearing about this now

Yeah, you might 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 ha mecha games and hell divers to like a loser. That's that's reasonable That's reasonable. Those are those are those are fine games. Oh and sonic. Oh god. Okay Pushing aside the subject of 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 $184.3 billion industry. Todd Harris, who is 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 incel right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass. And this is in large part because Gamergate 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 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 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 where you're sort of like online people who come out of gaming Like the H bomber guy, I guess as an example like a song 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 is 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 kebab the Germans no oh boy Okay, so back in the dawn of time I played a lot of Hearthstone 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 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 peeked at like 2k legend North America which like Technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world Digital collectible card a video game. Come on. Oh, yeah Yeah, but 2k legend na 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 So this is like a thing that I did growing up and something I remember is like all over the fucking Hearthstone streamers

And these are like like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called kebab the German and it turns out that his actual name was remove kebab Because he was a fucking German neo-nazi well many such cases yeah for people who like 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 is just 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 like who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're going to look at our Sam Bankman freed and this is this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum, right? We're going to look at Sam Bank and freed and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess.

So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Fried and, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to know, like Sam Bankman 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 the part too. No offense. Yeah. Yeah before before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud Well, probably not anymore. He's probably gonna 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 too poor to open bank accounts They put all their money in crypto, so now they're going to vote for whoever makes the line go up. I'm going to become the Joker.

So okay, the thing about Sam Makenfree, for people who have forgotten who SPF 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, embedded on the stock market and lost it. And you know, Robert did a sort of behind the backstories on him. 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 it Robert did a to the behind the bastards on him and one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just Like always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit game called story big parology meetings He is a League of Legends addict Which is like as as as any gamer will know a person who plays League of Legends all the time like one of the worst categories people who's ever existed.

And one of the things that that SPF did as as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of The Big Short, we're gonna get to Moneyball in a second, Blindside, other books, reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm but you know like a very very powerful influential and like wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and and Michael Lewis is sort of angle on understanding him I mean, this is something that like ISPF 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, right? 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 in 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. But I play video games once a week. that's that's that's kind of my 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 of playing actually path of exile to one of the games that we're gonna be fucking talking about today something

I I've done so much fucking gaming like God, I used to play this game called smite, which is like a it's like a MOBA like League of Legends But like third person and I played so much smite that there were pros showing up my casual games When the zoomer revolution comes and they execute the gamers and execute B I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable like can't argue with that. I'll inform the council Get our next folks council meeting. I'll bring it to the table But you know so what what happens with this sort of thing is that is that Michael Lewis's image of SPF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant

Yeah, because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time. And this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing. And like SPF is a gamer, right? But like 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 Bankman Friedway where like the slubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius, right? Like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah. That's like he's so different, right? Like 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 a double edged sword in like that specific way. Yeah, well, 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 just sort of like bamboozled them by just doing something that any gamer like

You know you like you show a gamer like a League of Legends addict and they will instantly be able to just like read this Person like a fucking book also about their gaming addiction like 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 of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game. Yeah, but arcane though, right? All right. Continue. God. Okay, we're gonna take an ad break and then when I come back

I'm gonna 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. forward to that. I love hearing about unique and competence. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, dickless version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, beardless, dickless me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really

hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, S***less Me on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. Sonoro and iHeart's My Kultura podcast network present The Setup, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Yen and Christian Navarro. My Kultura Podcast Network present The Set Up, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Set Up follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life,

Well I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Delano painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close.

And jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think? After you, Chulito. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando is never going to love you as much as he loves this doll. Chulito, that painting is ours. Listen to The Set Up as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say que? Yeah! Then tune in to Locatora Radio, season 10 today. Okay! I'm Dioza. I'm Mala.

The host of Locatora Radio, a radio-phonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying, a podcast. We're launching this season with a mini-series, Totally Nostalgic, a four part series about the Latinos who shaped pop culture in the early 2000s. It's Lala checking in with all things Y2K 2000s. My favorite memory honestly was us having our own media platforms like Mundoz and MTV3. You could turn on the TV, you see Thalia, you see JLo, Nina Sky, Evie Queen,

all the girlies doing their things, all of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle.

No belongings were found. Except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were ten vile... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, grotesque, horrific stories that to this day have been kept restricted from the public until now. You feeling this too? A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 gonna go into something that Lewis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports. So Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're gonna be talking about, which we'll get to in a second. right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're gonna be talking about,

which we'll get to in a second. And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bastards, you can go listen to that. But I wanna go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog in the athletics team invented baseball metrics. And they used sabermetrics to build this roster out nothing that like went to the playoffs and did really well and And like I'm not gonna get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that

Oakland A's team like whatever I'm not gonna 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 that like Michael Lewis loves to find right is this guy named Paul Podesta? Can he is 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 are now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know they moved to 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 here. Well the example just calls them the Oakland A's

Well, they've been the A's forever. But yeah, 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, cuz I was like, wait a minute didn't didn't Las Vegas steal 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 gonna be talking about football here. So this guy right Paul pedestals 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 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 one in thirty one, 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 two cross two seasons of football again so again that is a 1 in 15 season followed by an 0 in 16 season the second 0 in 16 season ever unclear how responsible for for this he is but what he is responsible for is the Sean Watsonun Watson trade. Okay, it's like Mia, why the fuck are you talking about this? Part of

this is also like these people are just evil. Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists 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 that that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson's 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 the Sean Watson who've 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 all Podesta orchestrates this trade that is three is the it 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 in the history of the nfl and so okay so how does the sean

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 five out of out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000 to start weeks one through five out of out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000 to start weeks one through five out of again 759 quarterbacks he ranks 753 out of 759 EPA per drop back 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 point three 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 we're almost done with the sports part of it But there and I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this Which is which is the argument that's that that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very very similar cultural roles for the right Yeah, of course. Yes. I I understand that I can I can see that. Yes Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air And this is this is the best fucking chance of 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 He was a serial sexual predator 230 million dollars 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 it that's like that's like the fundamental base of their mythology that there's like oppressed by this but like or whatever, right? That's like the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're like oppressed by this. But like, it's just like the same masculinity bullshit all the way

down and you can watch just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses 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 in the culture and and you know why these people choose to use gaming as like You know as as this sort of affect they're trying to project into the world I want to read something by a friend of the show Vicky Oshawaile 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 was 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 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 Sembe, I've Been Freed, and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general and for like what we're gonna talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is contested ground right 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-wing 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 chance. I'm a new better. He's better at video games and both the people I'm going to be fucking talking about in this story. Right? Like 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. Yeah, it depends. is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games... Yeah, it depends a lot on the genre. But yeah, like competitive fighting games, like... Yeah, melee, I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox, who is a black non-binary furry, who's like one of the greatest

fighting game players of all time, incredibly beloved. The only person in history ever to beat someone 13-0 in a first to 11., absolute legend, right? But you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as like a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life.

Right now these people are in power. And you know who else is in power? It's the products and services that support this podcast. All hail. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me.

And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? Lot of cussing, lot of bad language. It's for adults only or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite

sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless **** with me on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Sonoro and iHeart's My Kultura Podcast Network present The Setup, a new romantic comedy podcast starring Harvey Guillen and Christian Navarro. The Setup follows a lonely museum curator searching for love. But when the perfect man walks into his life, Well, I guess I'm saying I like you.

You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Delano painting. We could do this together. To pull off this heist, they'll have to get close and jump into the deep end together. That's a huge leap, Fernando, don't you think?

After you, Chulito. But love is the biggest risk they'll ever take. Fernando is never going to love you as much as he loves this job. ["The Big Bang"] Judito, that painting is ours. Listen to The Set Up as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say, que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio, season 10 today.

OK. I'm Diossa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radio-phonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying a podcast. We're launching this season with a mini series, Totally Nostalgic, a four part series about the Latinos who shaped pop culture in the early 2000s.

It's Lala checking in with all things Y2K 2000s. My favorite memory honestly was us having our own media platforms like Mundos and MTV 3. You could turn on the TV, you see Talia, you see JLo, Nina Sky, Evie Queen, all the girlies doing their things, all of the beauty reflected right back at us. It was everything. Tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10. Now that's what I call a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On November 5th, 2018, at 6.33 a.m., a red Volkswagen Golf was found abandoned in a ditch out in Sleephole Valley. The driver's seat door was open. No traces of footsteps leaving the vehicle. No belongings were found, except for a cassette tape lodged in the player. On that tape were ten vile... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you feeling this too? A horror anthology podcast. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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 dipshit, right? Yeah, that's why I boot up FF7 remake to stare at cloud strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad. Mm-hmm But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right? Is that like the right they could we're experiencing violence in sort of different ways, but it's like the systemic Violence from the gender system that is the same system, but these people solution to is to blame it on women, right? And this is you know I had a conversation with Vicky about this where 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 that's true Yeah, right And so and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people 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, but yeah. Yeah, but 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 is the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He is 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 to this not anymore yeah now they believe that they're 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 doge nerds at the top of the system now it's it's but we have we've had it we've had a we've had a full uno reverso But the thing is people have always been at the top of the fucking system, right? And like but it's this a fact anyway 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 gamer gate Oh, if you're gonna read one Vicky awesome Well thinking I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best Critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been a lot of 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 like, more broadly, they're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game that like, cyberpunk 2077 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 rasping campaigns And that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life, too

And 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 Fried 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 gamers stick thing Totally 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. Elon Musk is like 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 richest man in the world, the richest man who has ever lived. But he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like 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 gonna talk about but one of his characters in that game was Named Keckiest Maximus. So like this is the level of mind that that is one of his favorite names in his White House office He has a he has a Keckiest Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk

There's an AI generated image of like Pepe the Frog and like Roman like Caesar attire. I hate everything. So yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now. Yeah. Oops. So Elon 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's like for a long time been doing a like, I'm a gamer thing.

So 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 that blue sky user gay dog reminded me of because I 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 Elden Ring, which is very difficult game. And he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered. Like it's okay, like the best explanation I've tried to figure out

for like how bad at this game he is, is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, Hey, look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on hey I love the Mazda Miata like that's that that that's like the game equivalent and 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 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, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile are like very much the same kind of game basically. Like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things

that it does attacks But famously like this year he pretended to be one of like the the best path of exile to players in the world And he was doing this on his alt account, which is has the handle. It's cyber gamer 420 But the all the ease are threes So it's CYB 3 R GAM 3R420. Wait it wait wait wait say say say that again? It's at CYB3RGAM3R420. 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 you die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. To like to 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 to at this point, right?

I had only played the original one like 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 Path of Exile 2 account. And this, genuinely, 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 from guys like Asmogold, who was like a, 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 Asmogold 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 his whole thing here is he's trying to like, pretend that he's like a pro gamer or

whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like, there's no way. I mean, OK, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of the pecs of that 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 people he talks to about the suffer people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people right it's like a lot of it's 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 on the other hand He's trying to use this sort of like cultural cache of 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 Because 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, like on YouTube, that is very, very popular. That is just like, people exposing people who cheat in video games. They cheat in record to video games.

And Elon has walked just like, directly into this bear trap. Right? And that means we got him, 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 one are you talking about? The one that he had to publicly announce that he does not play GTA V. 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 completely 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 GTA V. 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 in video games is bad. Cause he's trying to single to all of his groups 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 mildly amusing Yeah, but 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 him pretending to have been like a quake pro It's the thing that he did quick And there's a very interesting video about this by the youtuber Karl 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 About Elon claiming to be a Quake player. And what he found, so Elon like apparently did actually play in an early Quake tournament, but none of the good players were there. And he came his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better Wi Fi than everyone else. 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 I just think is funny, right? That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until

he ran into 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 just goes on this whole thing about how, and this this is a like a stronger statement against Elon Musk that I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally goes on 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 everything 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 write 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 than 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 Just a serial liar like everything says is a lie I 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 they happen literally today where Ubisoft, you know, Ubisoft is a famously like not a leftist company

Right, like they've done a lot of horrible fucked up sexual assault stuff So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a man as like a character in it And and the literally the official Assassin's Creed accounts replied one of his tweets Saying is that what the guy playing your Path of Axile 2 account told you? And like replied in reply to a thing about Hassan? Like we are 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 is sort of being polarized against him by just like. The fact that he's just is so obviously cynically 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, 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 the one of the ways you can do this, and this is 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 like came for currency government was enough for them to take power. And and I think like the actual like the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess 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 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 3 this is an open call to to begin gamer gate 2.5 Right now on behalf of me along make sure you at me. Oh no And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution Uh-huh after we get enough gamers to stay home. Or even better, rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with 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. Same point. Same point. Yeah, come on, Mia. Geez. 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 first, okay? We're done. We're done here. We're done here. We're fucking out. We're leaving What games are you playing what case of my playing path of exile to I don't play potato it will consume your life

Okay, play RoboQuest RoboQuest great. RoboQuest 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 Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Core 6. Armored Core 6 rules. Love that game. Love that game. Sonic X Shadow Generations. Final Fantasy 7.

And I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for their official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character selection is very Gooner coded. Many, many such cases. So I made sure to make the smallest chest size available on my model. But the gameplay is fun. This has been a Kadaffin 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. If What Happened 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. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version

of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only.

Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure, we're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, D***less Me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You Feeling This Too is a horror anthology podcast.

It brings different creators to tell 10 vile, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Crying! Please, no! What do you... You're feeling this too. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the producers who brought you Princess of South Beach comes a new podcast,

The Set Up. The Set Up follows a lonely museum curator, but when the perfect man walks into his life... Well, I guess I'm saying I like you. You like me? He actually is too good to be true. This is a con. I'm conning you to get the Dilama painting. We can do this together.

Listen to The Setup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are your ears bored? Yeah. Are you looking for a new podcast that will make you laugh, learn, and say que? Yeah. Then tune in to Locatora Radio Season 10 today. Okay! Now that's what I call a podcast.

I'm Fiosa. I'm Mala. The host of Locatora Radio, a radiophonic novella. Which is just a very extra way of saying, a podcast. Listen to Locatora Radio Season 10 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.