QAA Podcast - The Art of Intelligence with Donald & Elon (E290)

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Donald Trump is advancing novel ways of denying reality. He claimed that an authentic photograph of the crowd at a Harris rally was somehow generated by artificial intelligence. This bizarre claim was a bridge too far for even some ardent Trump supporters. The former president also attempted to boost his languishing campaign by publicly chatting with Elon Musk via “X Spaces” on the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter. Julian listened to the ghoulish conversation in its entirety, nearly sapping his will to podcast. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: http://www.patreon.com/QAA Pick up new merch! We've got a mug, a two-sided tee, a hoodie, and an embroidered hat. Each item shows off the new QAA logo by illustrator Pedro Correa. shopqaa.myshopify.com/ Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Corey Klotz. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

Thank you. If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 290, The Art of Intelligence with Donald and Elon. As always, we are your host, Jake Rockatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View. Hello, beautiful listeners. It's time to once again lower ourselves into the pit of diarrhea that is the presidential election season. This time, with the help of conspiracy theories about AI-generated crowds, Real deep fake crypto scams and a long-form conversation between two of the shittiest rich guys on Earth,

Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Before we get started, a little bit of housekeeping. I thought I'd get this out of the way. I want to keep both of these guys. You know what? Let's not beep it. Let's just see what happens. I would prefer that we stick with the beeping just in case I don't, you know, get my green card if it's unbeeped.

So let's beep that. But yeah, once again, I hope they break. both I would them personally if I could and fuck them. Anyways, we have some merch available feature our new cover art. If you haven't already heard,

a mug, a hat, a two-sided t-shirt, and a hoodie are available in our store which you can find on our website QAAAPodcast.com or by simply following the link in the show description. Go buy them. Go check them out. Do whatever you want. I don't care. I don't fucking care.

With that, let's get started. Yeah, we got to kick off by talking about the fact that Donald Trump attempted to dismiss images of large crowds at the Harris rallies by claiming that they were geek fate, which is, you know, which is, I don't know where he learned this. I mean, he picked it up from internet conspiracy theories, but it's a new step for him, a new way for him to deny reality, which is very exciting. We're still talking about crowd sizes. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking in order to really understand where this is coming from, we sure, we need to first dive into Donald Trump's all-consuming and like.

lifelong insecurity. Because, you know, what Donald Trump actually values can sometimes be an enigma. But there's one thing that Trump sincerely and passionately believes distinguishes a worthwhile human being, the ability to draw a crowd. So true. You hear that? Fucking smaller podcasts. You're nothing. It's really, it really goes back to carnival barking and Barnum and Bailey, you know, can you draw a crowd?

It's all we have left. Get our friends together in a big outdoor thing. Then one of the friends shoots another friend and clips your ear. So, yeah, Trump has long been obsessed with crowd sizes and, like, television ratings as a mark of success. This was especially evident when he was the star of the NBC reality show The Apprentice, which he frequently and falsely claimed was the number one show in the country. In 2016, the public relations director, for The Apprentice, Jim Dowd, was interviewed by Frontline about his work with Trump.

Dowd said that Trump was fixated on ratings as soon as he understood how television ratings are determined. He quickly became obsessed. He knew nothing about Nielsen ratings. Within a week, he started to really study up. When he studies up on something that involves numbers and entertainment, then he's going to really kind of let that sink in. And we'd have calls every single day a show aired. He'd usually start calling at 8 in the morning. but the ratings don't come in until 10. I'd always have to tell him, Mr. Trump, we have to wait until 10. As soon as they come in, I will call you. Oh, my God, this is exactly what I did when I was like, basically eight years old

trying to go over to my friend's house to play the Nintendo. I would just call their house at like 8 a.m. And be like, hey, can I come over and play the... And the parents eventually just told my parents, you got to tell them to stop calling. In that interview, Dowd went on to explain how Trump tried unsuccessfully to get the television press to go along with the narrative that The Apprentice was the number one show. There's about 10 people who cover ratings in terms of the publications that matter most. And he would want to make sure I called all those 10 people and told them,

number one show on television, won its time slot. And I'm looking at the numbers. And at that point, say, season 5, for example, we were number 72. I can't tell that to him. I can't say that. Maybe I should have. You know, maybe I should have gotten Jeff Zucker involved. but he became kind of a monster when it came to these ratings.

Well, I like the idea that he like studied up on how ratings worked, but then he ultimately decided to dismiss all how all of that worked and decided that actually I have the number one show and you should tell everyone that. Yeah, I know he's he's a science guy, you know. He's a science guy that didn't like the result of the experiment. Yeah. Trump did not give up this obsession with like audience size after he was elected. He was reportedly very unhappy with images of his presidential inauguration, which showed a smaller crowd than either of Obama's inaugurations.

So, on 9.30 a.m., on his first full day of his presidency, the day after the inauguration, he called the then-acting Park Service director, Michael Reynolds, asking to see official photos of the inauguration crowd. This request was relayed to Park Service employees, one of whom believed that the president wanted photos that showed more of a crowd, so they crossed. the photo quote where the crowd ended according to a 2017 investigation oh my god unbelievable this is like if i went cosplaying as like uh you know uh hicks from aliens you know at a comic con or something and i was like hey can't take you guys take a lot of pictures can you take pictures of me where the gun looks the most real and oh can you get me with the eggs and stuff so it sort of looks like i'm in the hive it's like he's doing that as president while also cosplaying as a more popular president than he is.

I also cropped the photo, quote, where the penis ends. I just think it's amazing that he woke up one day with the awesome powers of the presidency, which includes, by the way, the ability to see and declassify any information in the federal government. He could ask about, you know, what was known about UFOs if you were so inclined. But instead, he said, I want to see photos of a inauguration, and they better make me happy. Wow, what a special brain, a special mind. Can't believe he got to be president once.

This fixation on crowd sizes and having the biggest crowd size continued even after his presidency. In 2022, Trump gave a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition in which he compared the crowd size at his 2019 speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial to the crowd that was gathered at the same spot in 1963 when Martin Luther. Luther King Jr. gave his famous, I Have a Dream speech. Trump falsely claimed that MLK spoke to a crowd of a million people. Most estimates say that there are about 250,000 civil rights supporters who gathered on that day. And he also falsely claimed that his speech was better attended than Dr. King's speech. They said it was a million people, one million people. And then I gave my speech and they showed the same thing. It's hard to believe many, many decades later, but it's identical architecture, identical pools. You look at it, the Lincoln. Everything was identical,

but it was many years later. I gave my speech. So his, they said, one million people, now my pictures were exactly the same, but the people were slightly closer together. They were more compact, but exactly the same. But there were more people. They were tighter together if you look at it. Donald Trump has 25,000 people today. So Dr. Martin Luther King had a million, and that's fine. Donald Trump, with more people, had 25,000.

It's so funny. He sounds worse than than he does now. He hasn't been getting more sane, I'll put it that way. Yeah, but he's he, everybody, everybody's talking about how, how Trump has declined. To me, this video, he looks about the same, if not worse. I mean, it's a tiny little, like, video clip in terms of what we're being shown here. But I like that you've estimated that this tiny, blurry Donald Trump is approximately what we're looking at today.

I think you might change your mind when you hear him in the interview with Elon where he's developed some sort of lisp. I'm not saying that he's good here. I think you misunderstand. I'm saying he's just as bad then as he is today. He's always been. I'm just saying he's not getting worse. He's always been the worst. I'm saying he's getting better and he's the best he's ever been.

Can't wait to vote for him again for the third time. For the fourth time. I mean, the fact that he was like still seething about this after he was president, it's just crazy because most people acknowledge. So like that 1963 speech, this is part of a large civil rights march. And it culminated with 12 speakers actually, 12 people speaking, including at the end that list, Martin Luther King, at the height of his influence. Most people would acknowledge, like, obviously, I'm not going to draw a crowd quite as big

as that, but Trump somehow in his brain sincerely believes that he did, and the only reason that people don't think that he did was because the press was saying that was a smaller crowd size. Yeah, he rules. Can you imagine going up and judging every event by how many people were there? I don't know. It must be some sort of weird, like old money. rich family thing where that's kind of what they talk about you know they're like oh did you well in aunt edna's

funeral there was the crowd was i mean there were so many people there oh when we did the opening at the at the sweet shop on division did you see how many people we had so many people there i mean how else would somebody become so obsessed with this just seemingly minuscule uh irrelevant fact well you know americans want to be number one yeah if you're the best that means yet you have the most attention. And if you're not the best, that means that you are unfixably broken and unworthy of your father's love. Yeah. Well, but who goes outside for a real crowd anymore? I mean, you know, you could judge online impressions. Why is he so caught up with the, with the third dimension? Oh, he loves online impressions too. Yeah. So considering that he values

crowd size so much, how can Donald Trump cope with all the images of the large crowd? at rallies for the Harris-Waltz campaign. By the Harris campaigns count, 12,000 people turned out for rallies in Philadelphia and O'Clair, followed by 15,000 in Glendale, Arizona. In Las Vegas, more than 12,000 people were inside a university arena to see Harris. So what Trump did is that he turned to the old reliable,

which is repeating the most deranged conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. This particular conspiracy theory concerns an image of a large crowd gathered at the Detroit Metro metro airport for a Harris campaign rally. Trump and many online conspiracy theorists falsely claimed that this image of the crowd was AI generated. Now, if you look at the photo, it just shows the sea of people, some holding Harris campaign

signs, standing in front of Air Force 2, and all the people are presumably waiting for the vice president to descend the stairs next to the plane. The image was captured by the campaign's Michigan Digital Director Ben Sarl and posted on Twitter on August 7th by a different Harris campaign staffer. Now, this is not the only image that shows a large crowd present here. There were other images which show the same large crowd, including those published by Getty Images, NBC News, PBS, and BBC News. And that doesn't count the images of the crowd published by attendees of the event.

Are there any, like, non-Satanic cabal pictures or because everything you listed there? The local media outlet, M-Live, cover the event. and estimated that about 15,000 people attended the rally. So, I mean, it's so clearly real. So why would anyone think that it isn't real? Online conspiracy theorists zoomed in on the jet engine of Air Force 2 in the image and noted that it didn't appear like the crowd was reflected off of it. And this seems explainable by the fact that the plane is at a slight angle from the photographer

and therefore the engine is reflecting an empty part of the tarmac and not the crowd in front of the photographer. Yeah, I just saw a TikTok video recently where they did some experiment and you could see an object behind another object in a mirror. And it was to demonstrate that what your camera photographs is actually relative, reflection wise is relative to where the photographer is standing. So you know what, Travis? Fact check true from me. Yeah, anyone who wants to fact check this, I would recommend just using like a kind of silver shiny pistol. And you want to point the the barrel directly into your face, maybe even in your mouth. Well, yeah?

Well, look, here's the thing. People are getting very good at telling nowadays when an image is AI generated. If it was AI generated, you would see the six fingers. You would see the double heads. You would see posters that says Heritwag. AI isn't perfect yet. And it's very easy to spot. We've done some other episodes.

I remember we did the Civil War movie episode. You know, people instantly spotted these AI-generated movie posters that they made. I mean, people would spot that. You know, I did a brief look at this picture. Five fingers on everybody, you know, the signs have the correct spelling. It seems to be the proper resolutions on everything. Once again, expert me is saying fact-checked, real photo. This shows that AI is like a couple months out from tricking Jake completely.

Yeah, give it like a, give it like, give it like, six months. Also, Jake, what are you saying about the Herit-Wall campaign? I'd like to vote for that. I think they're doing a great job. I'm going to write in Herrit and Walg. Donald Trump, on his account on Truth Social, his social media website, posted a screenshot of a tweet by a conspiracy theorist who zoomed in on that jet engine. And then Trump posted this, which cites a non-existent maintenance worker who supposedly blew the whistle on this cheating. Yes, a maintenance worker, cute. This is good. The janitor, Q.

Has anyone noticed that Kamala cheated at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she A-Ied it and showed a massive crowd and so-called followers, but they didn't exist. She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, and there was nobody there. Later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror-like finish on the vice presidential plane, she's a cheater. She had nobody waiting, and the quote-unquote crowd looked like 10,000. and people. Same thing is happening with her fake crowds and her speeches. This is the way Democrats win elections by cheating. So, okay, so she's going to win? It sounds like you're... This is the way the Democrats win is by AI photoshopping crowds posted to their online social media accounts.

If that's all it takes to win, well, heck, I might, maybe fucking, maybe I'll be the campaign manager for Herit Wall and, um, you know, we'll get them into the White House. He is not as nimble as he once was. He is not able yet to shift out of the Biden mode to properly targeting Harris. Yeah, it's funny. He's like a comedian who had his whole act ruined. It's like he had all this material. It's like it's just garbage now because like something changed. I was going to compare him to a garage opener. You know, when you get a new garage opener, you have to kind of click the little switches on the inside to make sure that it matches. It's like his switches are calibrated to to go against Joe Biden.

And now he's waving the clicker at the garage door of Kamala, and it's doing nothing. Wow, yeah, I couldn't think of any better analogy than that, for sure. I think it's a great analogy. Yeah, it's like a garage clicker, totally. That's funny. People are going to laugh at that, and they're going to write in, tell me. They're going to write at me. They're going to write at me.

I got the most write-ins. So many you wouldn't believe it. And Julian's write-ins, they're all AI. People did like wallet and grommis, so you are, you know, ever since you play the hits, Wallet and Grommis. Heron and Wahl. Yeah. Colvin and Habe's.

There's a lot of good ones out there. So, I mean, this is obviously on his face absurd. The image itself doesn't show any indications. It was AI generated. And there was a lot of other corroborating evidence that the crowd was, in fact, real. This is a bad angle. And it was so far off base that even some reliable Trump boosters stated that the crowd is in fact real.

For example, Ian Miles Chiang tweeted this. Kamala's crowd at the airport was in fact real. You can claim their paid actors or that they were just there for a concert, but they are definitely not AI. I love that he's like policing the proper bounds of paranoia here. Like, you can't have that conspiracy theory. There's a lied here.

You're going too far. You're making us look bad. There's no way anyone's going to believe this. But here's a consolation conspiracy theory. That's like they're all paid, you know? Secret communications to Donald Trump's campaign, please use one of these other more believable conspiracy theories next time. I just think it's good that in defense of the facts, Travis here, has been reduced to quoting Ian Miles Chong. That's how you know, we're in a bad place.

Yeah, that really, really is. Ian Miles Chong, Ben Shapiro, these are now seen as voices of reason in the darkness. We're in a bad place. You know, I'm really interested in this thing, like, like, how far he, like, goes with this. I mean, like, you know, is he going to, like, assuming he loses, is he going to, like, say, you know, the inaugurations AI? Now they have this tool in his back pocket. He loves calling things fake and cheating and not real. And here's a way for him to dismiss any video or photographic evidence he wants just by saying it's AI, it's fake, it's not real.

He's taking the Democrat warnings of deep fakes, you know, used. to potentially spread misinformation. And he's turned it into a new weapon, just like he did fake news. It doesn't make any sense, but he's got it in his arsenal, and his followers will believe it. Good luck, everybody. That's a good point, because originally, like, you know, fake news was this sort of like institutional and journalistic concept about, like, oh, no, there are these websites, and they publish nonsense, and it spreads on social media, but it's not really, you shouldn't, you shouldn't trust it. And then Trump took that concept, and then sort of use it for itself. No, actually, CNN is fake news, all the MSM is fake news, anything that makes me look bad as fake news.

He was able to do a judo move on this warning about bad information on the Internet. Well, it's going to be like we read earlier with the Nielsen ratings. He's going to be calling his campaign every morning being like, is this one AI generated? I saw some new pictures of a rally came out last night. Now, are these ones also AI? Or were there people there or mostly AI? Anyways, call me back. It's 845.

Now, what's interesting about this incident is that it's probably the highest profile instance of a secondary hazard of deep fake technology, which is called The Liar's Dividend. This label comes from a 2019 article published in the California Law Review titled Deepfakes, a looming challenge for privacy, democracy, and national security. In that article, the authors lay out a bunch of potential harms of deep fake technology, like how could. facilitate identity theft, libel, undermining journalism, worsening social divisions, you know, that kind of stuff. But the authors say the dangers aren't limited to when people believe that the fake images are real. It would also enable bad actors to cast doubt on real material because they can claim it's

been deep faked. So this is what they call the liar's dividend. The article explains how the technology makes authentic audio and images easier to doubt. The dividend flows perversely in proportion to success. in educating the public about the dangers of deepfakes. The liar's dividend would run with the grain of larger trends involving truth skepticism. Most notably, recent years have seen mounting distrust of traditional sources of news. That distrust has been stoked relentlessly by President Trump and like-minded sources in television and radio. The mantra, fake news, has become an instantly

recognized shorthand for a host of propositions about the supposed corruption and bias of a wide array of journalists and a useful substitute for argument when confronted with damaging factual assertions. Whether one labels this collection of attitudes postmodernist or nihilist, the fact remains that it has made substantial inroads into public opinion in recent years. Against that backdrop, it is not difficult to see how fake news will extend to deep fake news in the future. As deep fakes become widespread, the public may have difficulty believing what their eyes and ears are telling them, even when the information is real. Yeah, cool, awesome. I mean, this is kind of amazing when you think about it.

Like deep fake technology is so harmful, it doesn't need to actually be used in order to further pollute our information landscape. It's technology that makes the world a worse place just because people know it exists. Yeah, it's really good. We're doubling down folks, and we're going to get new profit margins, and we're really investing hard into this. So no problem at all. Everything is fine.

Yeah. You know what I want to take, like, the people who are really technically making this technology better and harder to spot as fake and take them to a screening of Terminator 2. And afterwards, I want to turn them as like, you know the character of like Miles Dyson? And you notice that how instead of developing the world destroying technology, he died? I would then like to line them up in front of the building and Dyson them. I think some of them might be like, you mean one of the greatest movie deaths of all time? Yeah, I want to be just like that. Yep, that's what they would say.

No, they'll say that there's too many roadblocks in a place that Skynet could never happen because AI essentially at the end of the day is controlled by human beings. But what they don't understand is Travis just, you know, so poignantly mentioned is that the AI itself doesn't matter. The fact that it exists is enough to. It's like we're all a jury. You know, we're all a jury of reality. And if somebody can, you know, you now have to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that something is real or else people will doubt it. There is a good analogy in there somewhere. I didn't say it perfect, but I don't think I can do any better right now. And I'm going to leave it at that. And Julian, you can translate and interpret if anybody has any questions or anything. thing you're doing great rickie i thought for my section i would examine this interview debacle that happened where elon decided to host trump and this led me down a rabbit hole of trying to set it up and uh wow i mean i can't tell you how little i enjoyed both the research and the writing so uh here we go so you're going to get a good this is a good back nine of the episode.

Mm-hmm. Elon Musk hasn't always been a Trump fan. Here's from Theodore Schleifer and Ryan Mack for the New York Times. Days before the 2016 election, he told CNBC that Mr. Trump did not, quote, seemed to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States. After Mr. Trump won, Mr. Musk told some associates that the outcome was proof that they were living in a simulation, according to one person close to him. In 2020, Mr. Musk in a private conversation with another associate,

called Mr. Trump a stone cold loser. I love explaining that we're in a simulation when politics turn out differently than I might have thought. Yeah, no, I mean, it's already you can tell. He's a smart guy. In 2022, Trump was already promoting his future return to the presidency from rally podiums. And at the time, he was still banned from Twitter. Despite this, he was not positive about Elon Musk's attempt to buy the platform. In fact, he had so little respect for the man that he briefly flubbed his name,

referring to him as Leon. The context for this clip is that he was launching his own Twitter competitor, Truth Social. Leon's, I tell you what, Elon, Elon is not going to buy Twitter. Where did you hear that before? From me. From a fake account. She says fake. A lot of them.

Nah, he's got himself a mess. You know, he said the other day, oh, I've never voted for a Republican. And I said, I didn't know that. He told me he voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist, but he's not going to be buying it. He's not going to be buying it. Although he might later, who the hell knows what's going to happen. He's got a pretty rotten contract.

I looked at his contract, not a good contract. So just incredible to remember a time where they were at odds in such a beautiful way. Well, you know, these little petty personal differences are no match for the power of class solidarity. So true. So here's what, Elon. Musk tweeted in reaction to Trump's comments. I don't hate the man, but it's time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset. So I think this is like a mix of...

Yeah. This is like a Jake saying, sail into the sunset. Yeah, this is a Jake story for sure. Yeah, I believe the proper saying is ride off into the sunset, meaning you are on your horse and you're riding in the direction of where the sun is. setting, as if your story is coming to an end. But the way that Elon phrases it, it's kind of like in the Truman show where he sails kind of like into the end of the soundstage.

Trump responded on Truth Social. When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere. without which subsidies he'd be worthless and tell me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican I could have said drop to your knees and beg and he would have done it.

Oh man. Honestly, it's awesome because when they're angry at each other, they actually like tell the truth for a moment. Like I actually agree with both of them in their responses to each other here. Leon was later forced to buy Twitter, of course, and he eventually reinstated Trump's count, but the former president snubbed the platform until recently. Fast forward to August

2024, and the two seemed to have buried the beef, with Elon having grown increasingly fond of Trump's rancid views on immigration and trans people, and Trump needing all the help he can get after Joe Biden dropped out, the DNC closed ranks behind Kamala Harris, and J.D. Vance was selected as the Republican vice presidential nominee. As many are aware, personal donations to political campaigns are limited to $5,000 per person in the United States. But we wealthy people have been getting around this for a while now by using super PACs, which allow unlimited dark money to flow into campaigns as long as there isn't direct coordination between the PAC and the candidate, which obviously is very easy to just, you know, make some calls

behind the scenes. I mean, it's just a joke. During an interview with Jordan Peterson in July of this year, which I guess I'm just glad I didn't have to listen to all of that, Elon Musk admitted to creating one such entity, America PAC, although he denied the Wall Street Journal report that he use the SuperPack to spend $45 million every month on Trump's re-election. In August, Elon Musk organized a space, essentially a live-streamed audio conversation on Twitter, now known as X, where he promised to have a chat with Donald Trump, free of the mainstream media's evil editing, and, thanks to his hosting, free of interviewing skills altogether. Since I made the mistake of volunteering to cover this historic event, I dutifully logged on

to X and tried to join the space at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Monday. only to be met with an emoji of a monkey holding its ears and an error message. This space is not available. It would be 42 minutes until the event finally kicked off. And during these 42 minutes, a lot of conservative accounts sounded off in disappointment. So here we've got all of the best people. Oh, yeah, they're so disappointed. They're taking to Twitter to complain.

They can't see their two favies. Libs of TikTok said, Not working, frowny face. Andy Noe said, It's not working for me. The Hodge Twins said... Anyone else not able to listen? Says unavailable.

Thank you, Hodge Twins. Ian Miles Chong said, I'm in, but looks like no one else can join. And the beautiful Bill Ackman said, Please let Elon know we can't join. This is a... I mean, I assume Bill Ackman has Elon's phone number. What the fuck are you doing this on Twitter for?

Yeah. Maybe he's just so annoying that even Elon won't pick up. This is the stupidest reality. Thousands such messages flooded X, some making reference to the similar fuck-up during Ron DeSantis's 23 announcement that he was running for president, which Elon had explained was the result of overloaded servers at the time. Elon quickly flew in action, blaming the debacle on evil-doers engaged in an all-out assault. There appears to be a massive DDoS attack on X, working on shutting it down. Worst case, we will proceed with a smaller number of live listeners and post the conversation later.

So I'm being hacked. I mean, what's really amazing about this is that this is actually something Q did a lot. Whenever like 8chan, like win off line or something, it's like the deep state is hacking me because I'm delivering such red-hot truths that, you know, the forces of evil are trying to stop me. I mean, literally a Q style message. A Verge article would later republish quoting two employees at the company who wish to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. The first claim there was no denial of service attack. and the second one said there was a, quote, 99% chance that Musk was lying. But this didn't stop conservatives from going buck wild.

Kevin Sorbo said, Unreal. The world wants to witness it, and the elites refuse to let them. The Hodge Twins returned to say, 1, 2, 3. Deep State attack. Let's try it over. Let's start it over.

God damn. One, two, three. Deep State attack. Guaranteed. these fucking idiots the hodge twins are fucking up get it together morons okay all right three two one deep state attack guaranteed they don't want the people to hear what you and Donald Donald Trump have to say okay Corey you got to leave all this shit in here I love to see these morons fucking up I wasn't even my fucking idea no too late it's staying in it's too good it's too good

Because I know on the second one, my ADD wouldn't allow me to read and process what Travis is saying at the time. So I could hear myself saying nothing, saying just gibberish, but I couldn't stop myself. Kyle B responded to them saying, these lefties are sick in the head. A guy called Gunther Eagleman said, Oh, he's been around. I see a lot of tweets from this guy. Fucking Democrats never want a point nice. Joey Manorino said.

Hey, this is the EU and the CIA. Then a guy called Mark Pinkus said, It's Dems fighting to quote unquote save democracy from two massive disruptors. Now, I bring up Mark Pinkis because Elon responded. Yeah. So that's cool that he's just like, oh yeah, the Democrats are DDoSing us. Yeah, he used just, he used like cool tech language, like disruptors. Like these guys, they're really disrupting a democracy.

Oh, they disrupted my good mood, very effectively. While people repeatedly failed to get in, a fake Tesla YouTube account with 166,000 followers started broadcasting a pre-recorded video titled live Elon Musk's interview with Donald Trump, Elon endorsement, and Trump support. It featured a deep fake of Elon Musk speaking to a crowd in the Tesla factory and a QR code that funneled viewers who clicked on it to a crypto scam. Oh my God. At its peak, the video was being watched by two hundred. hundred thousand people it has since been deleted but i did tune in while it was ongoing and honestly it was a pretty good fake elon spouting relatively generic things about the election i think the text was probably written by chat gpt and then funneled through a deep fake algorithm in advance to

generate a rather convincing video which they then broadcast live so that's great there must have been a ton of people basically just getting scammed out of a bunch of money oh damn having all their apes stolen terrible yeah and this is the non fucked up platform this is youtube so i I mean, we just need to burn all of these platforms to the ground, I think. But after 42 minutes of such shenanigans, the conversation between Elon and Donald finally kicked off, not with a bang, but with a whiner. All right. Hello, everyone. So my apologies for the late start. We unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service attack against our servers and saturated all of our data lines, like basically hundreds of gigabets of data were saturated. But we think we've overcome most of that, and so it's not time to proceed. But as this massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing

what President Trump has to say. Yeah, so just immediately, like, we are under attack, folks. The truth is under attack. It also appeared very early in the conversation, and this continued for the couple hours that this lasted for, that Trump has. as a LISP now, which is, I think, new. I hadn't noticed it at least this much before. Congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions

of people, and that's an honor. We view that as an honor. And then you do want silencing of certain voices. Usually those are voices that have something to say that are constructive, oftentimes constructive. And so we have to consider it an honor. But congratulations and breaking every record in the book tonight. That's great.

He sounds like a kind of teenager with braces in? Yeah. Yeah, he sounds totally different. Very weird. I think he's rotting, folks. Trump also, he later blamed this on something about technology. He says it was because of, quote, complexity of modern day equipment and cell phone technology. He claimed that he didn't actually have a Lisp.

It was just Elon's fault. Folks, folks, I do not have gay mouth. They're saying that I have gay mouth. I don't have it. Well, I mean, we'll see. I mean, he's going to have to speak in public again between now and the election. So I guess we'll see. I am very much in cope mode.

I just put in gum and started smoking a cigarette, even though I have to continue. Oh, yeah, let's go. Let's go. I'm barely coping. What kind of gum? Like nicotine gum? So you're getting double, double, doubles? No, it's like this black mint flavored airwaves, which you can't get in the country.

I have to now, like, get them sent to me from the UK because your gum is all too sweet here in America. All your gum sucks. Yeah, I don't chew gum. So, uh, spoiler alert, the conversation. was very boring and Elon Musk acted like a total psychopath, lauding Trump and agreeing with his arguments at every turn. Here he is sucking him off for Trump's reaction during the assassination attempt, which is what they spoke about for the entire beginning of the conversation. Instead of shying away from things, instead of ducking down, you were pumping your fist in the

air and saying, fight, fight, fight. And I think that's, I mean, you know, the president of the United States represents America. And I think that is, that is America. That is strength. under fire. And so that's, you know, a big, you know, part of the reason why I was excited to endorse you as the President of the United States for having another term here is that was just incredibly inspiring. But, I mean, what was it like for you? Not pleasant. I said, there was blood. I had more blood. I didn't know I had that much blood. The doctors later told me that the ear is a place that is a very bloody place if you're going to get hit. Oh, my God.

If you're wanting to get hit and bleed a lot, the ear is the place to do it. If you're looking for not so much blood, a finger, maybe a toe. Elon seemed intent on implying that there was something suspicious about the shooter being allowed to gain access to the rooftop in the first place. But Trump was blissfully unaware that he was being asked to participate in some soft conspiracy theorizing, the like just asking questions kind. So instead he just kind of ranted. He was like lauding the secret service sniper who killed the shooter, boasting about his own bravery. And then he vaguely explained that the whole snafu was caused by miscommunication between local police

and federal agents, which is the simplest explanation here. Musk dutifully licked his boots and then tried to transition to illegal immigration. Well, and I mean, speaking of the, the sort of slide that got you to turn that saved your life, really, was the illegal immigration slide. Maybe this is worth talking about that. It was, that slide, that slide says saved your life. You're right. Now, the illegal immigration saved my life. You're right. So that's good, good stuff. And you can tell just Elon is just such a good interviewer. He's so good at speaking. He's so charismatic.

It just shows, just shows you guys. Money can buy happy. but it can't prevent stupidity. The two then engaged in an improvised session of yes and, during which they claimed that countries were emptying their jails and mental institutions to send their worst criminals and least productive citizens to the United States. Nothing new here. Ugly stuff. Trump promised the largest deportation in history.

Musk marveled that there weren't more criminals coming to rob people in Democrat-run cities. If somebody's, you know, if somebody's like, you know, has a career in theft or robbery. I don't understand what's taking them so long to get here because we're at such a target-rich environment. I mean, you know, why aren't more people who have a career in, you know, bad things coming here sooner because it's, I mean, it's a piece of cake to go rob, you know, house in L.A. or New York.

He's like doing this thing where it's like, for me to be right, We need more people coming here to rob people, specifically in these two cities that are Democrat run. So could you just start doing it? Because I'm not yet right. I like the idea of someone saying, you know, I'm doing a pretty good job with my robbery career here in my hometown. Yeah. And I dream one day, I'm going to make it to America. I'm going to make it to the big leagues.

And I'm going to rob homes in L.A. Get myself an agent. There are no locks in America. And the streets are paved with soft cops that won't shoot me because they're woke. The two then discussed geopolitics with a pretty straightforward angle. Other world leaders are no joke, and they will screw over the United States unless they're intimidated by the president. Trump claimed that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if you were still in power.

I said to Vladimir Putin, I said, don't do it. You can't do it, Vladimir, you do it. It's going to be a bad day. You cannot do it. And I told him things that what I do, and he said, no way. And I said, way. And, you know, it's the last time we ever had the conversation. Can you imagine?

And I said way. And I said, way, Ted. Trump explained that during the transition of power at the beginning of his presidency, he had a conversation with Obama about potential foreign threats. I said, what's the biggest problem? He said, North Korea. I had that problem worked out very quickly. It was nasty at the beginning with Rocket Man and, you know, all the different things.

But all of a sudden, I got a call. Those were some epic tweets, by the way. Yeah, they were epic everything. Ah, fuck yourself. Can they beep me if I'm whispering? Just a very soft, light beep. Trump briefly touched on global warming, which he said would only raise ocean levels just a bit

and create more beachfront property. After some more mutual masturbation about how good Trump is at geopolitics, the two started tackling inflation, which they believe can be solved by, instead of taxing the wealthy or regulating large corporations, cutting. This is particularly rich from them because, you know, the government subsidizes Elon's companies a lot.

But yeah, anyways, Trump then lauded Elon for being good at firing people, specifically anybody who dared unionize. I mean, I think it would be great to just have a government efficiency commission that takes a look at these things and just ensures that the taxpayer money, to the taxpayers are hard-earned money, is spent in a good way. And I'd be happy to help out on such a commission. I'd love it. If it were full.

Well, you, you're the greatest cutter. I mean, I look at what you do. You walk in and you just say, you want to quit? They go on strike. I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, that's okay. You're all gone. You're all gone. So every one of you is gone.

And you are the greatest. You would be very good. Oh, you would love it. Just two of the most villainous motherfuckers. Yeah, it's crazy. I'm a little baffled that they even talk this way about, like, mistreating working people so openly because like darn't they supposed to at least pretend to like give a shit about the vast majority of people who vote who are working people well not

if they're up but you know yeah anytime anytime uh you know a conservative or maga person hears them talking about mass firings they they assume that it must have been all the woke people the two then shared in their love for argentina's new far right president havier millet and Elon explained that Argentina used to be prosperous in the 30s and 40s before a series of government policies ruined that prosperity. Now I looked into this and the 30s were known as the infamous decade in Argentina, characterized by military coups, electoral fraud, and the persecution of opposition parties. That continued well into the 40s. In fact, it wasn't until 46 that the country even had free elections. So not surprising that Elon loved that period. Trump then

explained to Elon that he wanted to close the Department of Education and move education, and move education back to the states. Elon agreed, of course. In a particularly egregious part of the conversation, the two men discussed how nuclear radiation is kind of chill, actually. It's actually not that bad. So, like, after Fukushima happened in Japan, like, people were asking me in California, you know, are we worried about like a nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I'm like, no, that's crazy. It's actually, it's not even dangerous in Fukushima. I actually flew there and ate locally grown vegetables on TV to prove it. And I donated a solo. water treatment, a solar power system for a water treatment plant.

Yeah, but you haven't been feeling so well lately, and I'm worried about it. No, no, but I'm only getting it. It's fine, you know. It's like, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, but now they're like full cities again. So it's really not something that, you know. So it's not as scary as people think, basically. Yeah, that is such an amazing take. They bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah, we committed a like a split-second genocide, probably the most deadly split-second in human history. And look at them now. Those cities are fine, dude. So, like, you know, people are really exaggerating the issues here. Yeah, there isn't, like, generations of people, like, yeah, as if there aren't, like, generations of people who have gotten sick and will become sick. This really is, Julian, you nailed it. It is like, you know, in movies at the end when the villain thinks they're in the clear and they tell you their plan. This is. This is. You know, Julian, you nailed it. It is like, you know, in movies, at the end, when the villain thinks they're in the clear and they tell you their plan. This. This is. This is. This is. This. This is, This is like three hours of that.

This is like, that's the, oh, that's the movie. The movie is just the villains telling you what their plan is. It's so awesome. They're so out of touch. And I mean, there are, you know, genuinely safe versions of nuclear energy. But then to just, to just launch into like, well, you know, this big disaster, which was obviously fucked up in Fukushima. And then, well, also the bombs.

Those are fine, too. They're giving off this horrible energy that's like, well, you know, you know, because we're rich. And when you're, when you're as rich as we are, you know, naturally have more knowledge than poor people do. Like, it's just the worst fucking vibes. Oh, yeah, horrible vibes. The two men then ranted about how radical left Kamala Harris is, how Walls wants to put tampons in boys' bathrooms, which that would probably be worse, I guess, than like, Hiroshima,

how Kamala is anti-Israel and all the usual right-wing garbage talking points. Extremely grim and boring, especially considering the Biden-Harris administration just agreed to send another giant pile of money to Israel to fund their genocide of the Palestinian people and then to still be like, yeah, they hate Israel. Like, fuck off. Fuck off. They have to create an enemy in the same way

that they have to create the grievances that they claim to be wanting to reclaim their country from. It's never been better for rich white guys. You know, it's never been better. And it has been pretty good for quite a long time. So, of course, they have to make up, you know, they have to create a reality in which they're oppressed.

I mean, this is, this is, this is, this has been. It's been like this forever. It's so boring. Elon then congratulated Trump for being such a pro-free speech president. I think it's obvious that you're, you know, a believer in an advocate of a free speech because during your first time as president, you were attacked relentlessly every day, often very unfairly with false attacks. And you didn't try to shut down the media.

You didn't try to inhibit their freedom of speech. And I think that says a lot. Well, the good thing is that you and I have, and some people, very few, we can get the word out. Although sometimes it's hard because they don't want to print it, you know, like we're having a great conversation right now. Kamala wouldn't have this conversation. She can't because she's not smart. You know, she's not a smart person, by the way. She can't have this conversation.

And Biden, we don't even have to talk about it. I mean, he couldn't have this conversation. He would have given up in the first half of a question. He would have walked out. He would have said, where am I? Where am I going? So anyway, but no, he wouldn't have this. That's true. Oh, man, yeah, yeah, definitely.

They wouldn't be smart enough to have this awesome conversation. Elon then expressed how great it was that he could have a conversation with Trump, something that wouldn't be possible with Biden or Harris, who he compared to NPCs or non-playable characters. So just read a brain drivel, just nonsense. And I am no fan of Joe and Kamala. In a very confusing moment, Trump said that the Time Magazine cover featuring a drawing of Harris resembled his wife. She's terrible.

But he's getting a free ride. I saw a picture of her on Time Magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing. And actually, she looked very much like a great first lady, Melania. She didn't look like Camilla. That's right. But of course, she's a beautiful woman.

So we'll leave it at that, right? She's so many layers here. Yeah, I think the fact that he's running against someone he finds a little attractive is kind of short-circuiting his brain. Yeah, Camilla, I think he means Kamala, but I don't know. Well, he's morphing. He went from Kamala to Kamala and next week probably Cruella DeVille from 101 Dalmatians. Oh, Creella Harris. See, come on, we're giving you this one for free, Trump.

Crewella Harris and Dim Waltz There we go Fucking pay us Actually fuck it Not free Not free Elon understandably moved on

From that comment Without really talking about it But then he wanted to just get into Some of his pet projects Like tunnels But I think there are like You know Some grand projects that we could do

I mean I think Like You know we could build a base on the moon We could send American National Woods to Mars We could build high-speed connections that are more advanced than anything else in the world between our cities. So people have fast transport. You know, it's possible to solve traffic with tunnels. We already made great progress in Vegas doing that.

And just do things that are exciting and inspiring to make the future feel like it's better than the best. Well, I saw what you did in Vegas, and I'll tell you, it was amazing. I got to see, I took a big glimpse at it, and it's incredible. You know, it's incredible. And you could do that all over. You could do that all over. I took a big glimpse at it. A big glimpse is pretty funny.

That's very funny. And honestly, I got to say, Elon, put your fucking money where your mouth is. If you make, if you allow me to be able to get to New York in 30 minutes and I don't have to get on a plane anymore, if you make it so I can travel at high speeds underground and don't have to fly. No. I'll give you that. I'll give you that. He won't. You'll notice that he doesn't mention rail.

He just means these grim tunnels with like an endless procession of fucking Tesla's in him. He is actually standing in the way of high-speed rail, which China has been deploying with incredible speed, and yet the United States cannot seem to wrap their heads around. Elon's Vegas tunnel, of course, was a safety disaster. Here's from Max Chafkin and Sarah McBride for Bloomberg. The muck pooling in the tunnel at the north end of the Las Vegas strip had the consistency of a milkshake and in some places sat at least two feet deep. The tunnel to be, which would eventually stretch about half a mile,

was part of a system intended to connect two hotels, the Encore Las Vegas and the Westgate with the enormous Las Vegas Convention Center. Workers doing the digging later said they had to wade through the mud every day. It splashed up over their boots, hit their arms and faces, and soaked through their clothes. At first, it merely felt damp. But in addition to the water, sand, and silt, the natural byproducts of any dig, The workers understood that it was full of chemicals known as accelerants. The accelerants cure the grout that seals the tunnel's concrete supports,

helping the grout set properly and protecting the work against cracks and other deterioration. They also seriously burn exposed human skin. At the Encore Dixite, such burns became almost routine, workers there told Nevada's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an investigation by the state OSHA, which Bloomberg Businessweek has obtained via a Freedom of Information request, describes workers being scarred permanently on their arms and legs. According to the investigation, at least one employee took a direct hit to the face.

In an interview with Business Week, one of the tunnel workers recalls the feeling of exposure to the chemicals. Quote, you'd be like, why am I on fire? So I just want to be able to set workers on fire in my horrible tunnels so we can have a single file of Teslas. Oh, man. Half a mile between hotels in Las Vegas. Yeah, man, definitely. Deploy it at the national level. Very smart.

Actually, send Jake through it. He seems down. Well, I didn't even know about this. I remember years ago Elon was talking about a frictionless, sort of like frictionless subway car. He lied. Yeah, okay. So you think Vicki, he lied. He didn't know exactly what he was talking about or doing.

Because this thing in Vegas sounds like in Chernobyl, where they forced the miners, you know, to go in and clean out the rub. at the power plant. He doesn't even really want to do a lot of this stuff. He just consistently brings it up so that the conversation is derailed, no pun intended, from high speed rail, and he can continue selling his shitty cars. This is like me talking to my wife about going to see an E&T. I constantly bring it up. I talk about how much I need to do it. I want to do it. I can't breathe at night. And then I just, I just never do it. I never go. Fuck, I want to go too. You want to go together? Yo, should we motivate each other to go get our nasals, our nasals? checked up. Let's do it.

I just keep having stress dreams and I feel like I'm dying and my snoring is crazy. All right, let's go. All right, that problem is solved. Friendship. Friends supporting each other. That's right. Let's go. In the ex-interview, Musk unsurprisingly complained to Trump about regulations getting in the way of his high-speed

transportation endeavors. Not like I said, high-speed rail, like China has, but something even better and cooler. Sludge tunnels with people stuck in single-file Teslas. Oh, so cool. Here they are getting excited about deregulation, painting an extremely cool future for Americans, which I think we could all agree sounds just great.

I just want to hop on this point that, like, there has to be an active process for reducing rules and regulations, because otherwise they just keep building up every year and you get like hardening of the arteries, and eventually everything's illegal or takes forever. And then we just ossify as a society. We just can't make any progress. And that's a really big deal. Well, you know, Elon, just getting back to the FDA for one second, I got something done called Right to Try.

This is where you can go in and if you're terminally ill, you can use a space age medicine or whatever it may be. We have the best doctors, the best labs in the world. We really do. But people would go to other countries because you couldn't use this. the product, even if they thought it worked, because it's going through the FDA. I got it approved where you can, you basically, look, nobody wanted. The doctors didn't want it because of the liability.

The country didn't want it, our country, because they didn't want to get sued. These are people terminally ill. The insurance companies didn't want it and the pharmaceutical companies. Nobody wanted it. I got everybody into a room, and we came up with an agreement that you won't get sued. And also, they didn't want it on their record. If somebody's terminally ill and they die after taking a drug, they didn't want that on their record. So we said a second, a separate list if somebody was, so it wouldn't count as a

negative. Yeah. Okay. So they're making a second list for the dead from these experimental treatments that he wants to bypass the FDA on. Meanwhile, fucking Elon wants less problems burning his workers and the toxic sludge in the tunnels. Oh, man, really? Let's get these two guys collaborating on our new reality. They seem awesome. And it sounds like Trump is saying all this, like he's taken a whole pouch of big league chew and, you know, shoved it in one side of his mouth. Yeah, yeah, definitely. He's a squirrel. He's got like nuts in his cheeks. They caught him. They caught him right before hibernation. He was going. He had packed a bunch of acorns in each cheek. And he was really going down for the long nap up until November 4th. And his advisors told him, you know what?

if you wake up and you see your shadow, you're president. And if you wake up and you don't see your shadow, you can stage another coup attempt. I'm not sure how this relates to groundhogs, but Travis, do you have any comments on a deregulated society as, you know, foreseen by these two geniuses? No, yeah, I can't wait to live in a world in which I spend my days digging a tunnel for a, a project that won't really work very well, even if it's completed, and then get burned in the process and then get fired for trying to unionize in order to stop getting burned every time I work. Well, then you can get the treatment, because you'll probably be terminal.

So you can get the unregulated treatment that the FDA wouldn't approve, and they'll put your death on a list that's separate so that the fucking insurance companies don't have to say how many people they killed. cool the conversation ended in a sickening series of statements about crime overrunning our cities our borders being overwhelmed by hordes of criminal immigrants and of course the continuous glazing

of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate genuinely two of the most annoying privileged and stupid people out there I regret listening to their conversation and covering this at all you're welcome Travis next time we'll do it the opposite you cover this or whatever equivalent of this all right all right

wouldn't want you to suffer through this again i feel bad i'm tired i mean yeah another episode awesome don't say don't say what another episode awesome awesome hate myself hate my job hate my life well that's not true i mean there's there's one thing that would cheer me up yeah what's that i think elon musk and donald trump thanks for listening to another episode of the q aa podcast you can go to patreon dot com slash and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week plus access to our entire archive

of premium episodes. For everything else, we've got a website. That's QAAPodcast.com. Listener, until next week, may the underground tunnels and the chemicals that burn you alive bless you and keep you.

We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. Elon Musk is on the mic, got a wild new view. Says, gather around folks, yeah, I've got something new. Forget the rules. We thought we knew Toxic sludge is healthy, yeah, it's good for you In a world where we're told what's bad and what's right

Yeah, he long's got a vision that's shining so bright Toxic sludge is the future of health A sip of this wonder And you feel your best out Forget the old warnings It's a brand new day Toxic sludge is here And it's here to stay

He's got the last The test and the data to show That sludge is a tonic that's ready to go With minerals and wonders It's a miracle brood. A little toxic sludge is just what you need to do. It's a revolution in the way that we see. It's good for our bodies and what makes us free.

Oh, toxic sludge, the light's the few. future of hell A sip of this wonder And you'll feel your best out Forget the old warnings It's a brand new day Toxic slurs is here And it's here to stay

Oh toxic slush It's a future of hell A sip of this wonder And you'll feel your best of hell Forget the old warnings It's a brand new day There's toxic slugs here And it's here to stay

So raise your glass high And take a daring taste And Elon's toxic sludge It's not going to waste In a world of tomorrow It's the way to be Toxic slush delight, the future is free When toxic slush is the future of hell

A sip of this wonder And you feel your best at health Forget the old warnings It's a brand new day Toxic slurs here And it's here And it's here to stay Thank you.