Hater Season: Henry Zebrowski

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course, your host, Ed Zitron. apologies to everyone for missing the monologue last week i know many of you have threatened my life that's a joke you're all very lovely about it but we are back this week it's hater season i'm gonna be honest hater season has been so much fun that everyone is just i think we're just gonna do this forever and today i'm joined by an incredible guy i'm going to be one of two divas coming together to maximize our joint slay i'm joined by henry zebrowski of last podcast on the left henry how are you i am good i'm filled with rage with rage about what i'm ready honestly i hate the goddamn metaverse it's i saw it pop up the other day i saw a person mention the metaverse And there is one guy, Jamie something, just a guy on Twitter, you can find him, who I watched him go from crypto, from Clubhouse to Web3 to NFTs to Metaverse to AI. And now he's back to Metaverse. And I think people... He's wrong. He's wrong, but also... He's professionally wrong. But that's crazy. People are very unfair to me about my correct opinions, but it's insane to me how many of these consultant swindlers still exist and how there are still people being like, yeah, dude, yeah, the metaverse is still here, man. I'll pay you. I'll do this. It's because they're desperate. They're desperate for some other realm of productivity and work. There's something. They really thought they had us pegged during COVID. Like at some point they were like, they miss work. They miss work. They miss, they, they, they miss, they miss people. They miss us. And they had this idea of like, oh, the social network, like what we have to do is convince them they're hanging out. We have to convince all of them that they're all just gonna like, oh no, no, it's, it's, it's work. Sure. But it's like a lifestyle. Work is like your lifestyle. Do you remember that whole period as well? just before the metaverse where there were all of the remote work articles that were like we're missing the serendipity of the office we're missing it you can't bump into a friend at the office and have these thoughts i love that because it was always written by a boss because you could tell because everyone else at work is like i just want to put my fucking headphones in i just want to get my job done please leave me alone we have crawled into the heads of these giant corporate guys like that's kind of what we're living in i feel like we're living in a giant ketamine like we're in a ketamine fuels dream right now like we are in a we live inside the ketamine dream but what is the who is the dreamer the dreamer is people like zuckerberg and these guys that are kind of forming how they think we view reality they're like trying to put that on us they're trying to say we love work we love productivity as a as a as a as a animal as a human animal they believe we crave crushing it we crave dividends we love hustling we love hustling and i just we've just been in this place now where we're kind of being dragged through their version of the future which is just not panning out you know like yeah the metaverse i did a show on the metaverse once right I did New Year's Eve. In the metaverse? Which one? Facebook Horizon Worlds? Yes, it was something like everybody was a little weeble wobble person because they had to eliminate you remember when they had to go through the whole thing? Because they had to eliminate lower halves of people. Oh yes, because they said they were bringing in legs but then the legs didn't pan out. Legs? Yes, because legs mean penis and balls or vagina right and so what happened was is that as soon as those were in play as soon as legs were in play penis and balls and vaginas were in plays and then immediately the people started getting sexually harassed on the metaverse but did they ever put the legs in i thought they weren't able to get them in at all no because that was the let's just say i believe you saw several attempts at this idea of like, we can't put in legs. You can't put in legs? You mean to tell me you built an entire second reality and you can't put in fucking legs? I mean, practically speaking, putting in functional legs that map to movement from the user would be difficult, but it's just, I never really understood. Yeah, that's not even with your, there's the aesthetics of legs. Have like a flat like a Ken doll, who cares? As soon as people saw legs, They saw genitals and they started saying horrific stuff to each other on the metaverse. And so they got rid of legs. Tell me about this metaverse experience you had this New Year's Eve. So I was asked to do it was during COVID. I was asked to do the comedy for a New Year's Eve party, quote unquote, in a build out. It was like a metaverse build out. It was one of those that they had done it for this specific event. And the goal was that people were walking around this virtual space and they would come upon you and then your camera would turn on and you'd see, quote unquote, the real person there. I was in a character. It was wildly invasive. Everybody was obviously had agreed to it. But I was Cheddar Goblin, which is a character from a movie called Mandy. Right. I was playing. Yeah, this is my life. This is called the entertainer's life, Ed. i mean yeah they gave me a thousand dollars that's worth it it was it was for the tears because then i put in i propped up i have a build out of the cheddar goblin from mandy right i have a pole from the original model i put it in a chair and i put it on a put a camera on it yeah and then i was talking as him roasting people that would arrive to the little comedy build out right that They had. And the thing is, is that it's what happened after every single COVID stream show is that obviously it was janky. It was strange. People were not, even though they thought they were prepped that their cameras would turn on, they were not prepped that their cameras would turn on and they would get scared and it was bad. You know, it's like all that type of stuff. but in the end it really is which is what i discovered afterwards is the closing of the laptop after this and the silence oh was it just like constant noise in there well just the idea of like as a performer like this was kind of one of the big issues i had to just even just during covid which is the cavernous silence after the show that you have now done on zoom in which you have been a in a sort of simulacrum of real life for half a second and then as soon as the laptop closes all that illusion is shattered and now you're just sitting in silence and there's a part of me that thinks that that is kind of the issue with the phenomena as a whole which is this fake a fake version of society that they wanted to recreate for us in order for us to obey whatever rules they want to set up for us. And so like, as I was in this, I was like, oh, I'm a part of the normalizing process of this. Like, this is, I am a person and I am here doing this as a way to show all of you, look, even if the world is uninhabitable, even if all the corporations of the world make the surface, a giant like lava stream, the rest of us can still go underground and don't worry there can still be the friends reboot don't worry there can still be any type of charmin you like it can be there it can be underground we can live underground we don't need all of this real life right i also think it's just to your point about living inside their heads it is really funny watching them try and sell like make stuff to sell us when they do not speak to real people like yeah what what are you fucking pigs like you have sitting at desks right you want to uh walk around uh the world i guess look it's the few you pigs like this right what do you think you think about the human version of the right now what i see is the in the irl version of the metaverse are the corporate like it is not only a it's an apartment complex it's where you work It's also where you've got your slop bowls, and then you can go over here and you can get your face injections, and you can go over here and you can do the thing that makes you look and sound, and you can get the clothes that make you look just like everybody else. Like the Google version of Worry Free from Sorry to Bother You. Yes, yes, there is. That's like one soft rollout, right, for I do believe. They've started pulling back, though. They've started pulling back on corporate benefits. So I think it is going to be the moment a company offers housing within their campus. That's how you know that they've just lost the plot. And they're like, how do we do this? We'll just give them housing, I guess. I genuinely believe all of this is the dry run for some form of United States of Peter Thiel. See, that's the thing, though. Because I see that argument. but whenever i read them or hear them talk or actually look at the success of them trying to do like their network state stuff which always seems to go poorly because running a city or a country is hard it's hard i also see it fall apart and i see them put like ai in general is this thing that's very much a cultureless person a person who doesn't know anything how they think knowledge or culture works culture is just when you go to the arts vendor and you're like, one art, please. I've got $100. How much art can I get for this? Culture's humans hanging out, spending time. And in culture... Yeah, it's like, it's this... Culture is literally just a... It was a... Not to minimize it, but it's almost a... In my mind, it's a product of our connectivity as an animal, as a psychic animal. Like, that's the point of it. And so they're just trying to... They think that's gay. Okay, Ed. No, they really have like a deep homophobia towards anything emotional or sensual. So feminine is what they get. I do believe that that is the literal vibe that I get, which is this idea of you look at Peter Thiel talking, look at these people talking. And I guess that's what it is, is that they fail. Well, Thiel is gay though, but you're saying there's like a self-loathing to it? I just mean in terms of his, the way they view it as frivolous and stupid. Right. That our need for connection is something that is replaced. Yes. It takes you away from the grind set. Yes. And it's extremely easy to place. And so what they didn't do, little things, what you were saying too, is the idea of a corporate culture. When I was working in office jobs, the idea of a culture, I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'm here to get health insurance. Like, I'm not here to meet you, buddy. Like, I'm here for health insurance. you know like i'm here to work like to just get the fuck out of here and go home but they want yeah yeah they just want all of us they want us they want every minute of our fucking breathing lives well that kind of reminds me again around just before the metaverse all of the anti-remote work stuff that talked about office culture it's like office culture is so important you need office culture office culture is what brings the company together missing from most of these articles was a definition of office culture because it was just kind of work propaganda and it's doing what your boss wants you to do yes oh that is what office culture means because it means you're living in a dictator you're living in his you're living in his reality and on top of that it's like you oh so you're saying we should have a culture that involves supporting labor and respecting labor and valuing work and supporting us they're like oh god no no no no sorry sorry don't get us wrong it's the culture of the office not the people in it it is the foosball tables yes we have a table there's a we got a never-ending soup bowl you know we love i i used i used to have a we work long ago and i never tried the beer and when i finally tried it i'm like wow these people fucking hate us because it was like the worst beer they could have put like a keg of bud light and it would have been fine. But they somehow found like a beer that tasted not quite as bad as Natty Light, but... And they just, and then, but it's their beer. It's the we work of beer. Yes, it really is though. Yeah, it's like the beer slop. Yeah, it's beer slop. These, I find it, we are not living up to their expectations, Ed. Yeah. I think that's what it is, is that we're really not living up to their expectations. We're not dying fast enough. We're not working hard enough. And that's the thing is that we really should be working and dying up until the very minute. The very minute that we die, technically we should be productive in that. And that's why, you know, when I hear the argument like about how people like me should be having kids, and then I hear where the argument's coming from, and i hear it's about me keeping up the ever exponentially rising capitalistic output that's really all they're concerned about it's other enough workers yep it's really funny we're gonna get the listener the occasional listeners who are like because occasionally with i think we've got a fairly left-leaning audience but occasionally i'm sure you're listening now one of you guys who's like a straight up like somehow a center left person who's very pro-work will be like whoa whoa, whoa, whoa. Office culture's important so that everyone knows why they're doing their job. I know why I'm doing my job. Make money. Well, I'm an entertainer now, I guess not. Guess it's a real job. But I remember the offices I've worked in, the one that was the worst was the one that I actually respected the most for just not pretending there was a work culture. They didn have any of that shit They were just like you need to do this enough or we fucking fire you It a PR firm Truly nightmarish place But it didn try No one tried to pretend like we a family here No, we're not. This is jail. Unless you're working at a not-for-profit helping people directly, there is absolutely no reason for you to have a fucking thesis statement outside of we're a company that makes goods for people. or we provide X and we pay you to do X. That is it. That's all we do. Like it's, there doesn't have to be special than that. And this is the problem is that where I see it from literally from reality television shows all the way up to this top. Now this like concept of everything has to have like a presented story. Everybody already has to be arriving with a character arc ready to go locked in. And now the bosses are doing that. the bosses have are applying a character arc to us they are saying they're trying to tell us what we are gonna do for them and now i feel like we're in this process of they are going to try over the next decade or so to kill as many of us as possible to literally weed out the the uh the people that are against it they're gonna make us sick they're gonna put bad things in the food they're going to pull out all of the things protecting the environment they're extremely sure they're going to be able to beat all of those for themselves right and then what they're going to do is create a break-off civilization all of this is a dry run for them to leave us behind the funny thing is is though i believe you that that's what they may plan i just i mean the plan that's the plan i don't think they're competent enough to prove it because the the metaverse was the, I think Clubhouse was the beginning for me, but the Metaverse was the moment when I was like, oh, you don't speak to any real people. Clubhouse was the single, dumbest, giantest, flaming pile of waste of money of anything I have ever that was so stupid. I was going to almost use a presidential word, Ed. It was so stupid that the whole thing, I cannot believe the whole thing needs to be deleted. It was just repackaging intercoms. It was repackaging a Zoom call, a conference call. It's like, have you ever wanted really, really, really, really bad non-produced radio with people that thought they were great? Welcome to Clubhouse. Do you want to hear VCs talk for hours and say multiple slurs? Well, guess what? We have a place for you. We already have podcasts, man. yeah but the thing is though it was i remember getting the reason that it got to me clubhouse specifically was because the amount of people i talked to was like ed this is the future man's the future this is how everything's gonna get done tell me about it dude what's your clubhouse strategy what's your every but you how many times i heard that fucking sentence and i was just like this super flu is gonna kill all of us that was like the only that was my main response i was like terrified of dying yes i was like we're all gonna fucking die and you want me to repackage radio again. I've already done it, dude. I did it 15 years ago. Just like the good doctor. I am a podcaster. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, I heart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits he stood trial for murder and got acquitted the biggest mind game of all nlp might actually work this is wild listen to mind games on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts yeah it's but it was also just the moment where i was like looking at all of these supposedly smart people all these people who are meant to really know what they're fucking talking about and watching them as they just went yeah this is this is crazy man and then at the same time i've been reading all this anti-remote stuff and i was like wait a minute all of these are written by managers or bosses who aren't in the office and then it was just kind of obvious but none of these people interact with their businesses or regular people so they're just the things that they make do not reflect solving human problems and then the metaverse comes along and half most of the media was like yep this makes perfect sense and i as a gamer was like you were describing world of warcraft or like an mmorpg you're just describing going online in a group i played everquest i have the scars it already happened and also it looks like somebody read the book snow crash like one of the one of their aides read the book snow crash at some point in college vaguely described the concept of making real estate out of nothing which i think really was what the metaverse was about was this idea of recreating a world in which they could own everything yeah they wanted to own the next internet that was very much what zuckerberg wanted that was the idea is that they would have said they would again set all the rules They'd set all the rules. They'd already had set up all the real estate parameters. You'd show up into this like brand new world of a thing. And then you'd be described, oh my God, there's a McDonald's. Oh my God, there's a fucking Pizza Hut. Oh my God. Because they've already bought into this real estate concept because they were just trying to figure out. I also feel like that's a part of it. They saw some of the writing on the wall of like, it's going to be hard to get these fuckers back in the office. These fuckers went home and they're fucking enjoying their fucking oatmeal and their families. They're doing as much work, if not more, and they seem happier. Fuck that shit. I fucking hate. I hate the back. Did you see? I want to smell what he's eating. I want to look. I want to hear what he's listening to. I want to ask him about his wife. I want to look at his wife. I want to think about fucking his wife. And so what I think, that's what I think it turns into, right? I think it's all the shit. Yeah. And so they just then realize like, oh, but what if we could do it so we can bring them into this other world? And then we own. It's like that. It's reality. Then eventually we can let go. Yeah, then we can let go of real life real estate. And maybe if we build it all in the metaverse, just like in that great book, Snow Crash. Anybody read the end? What we could do is we could build up this amazing new real estate system while the earth eats itself alive on the surface. I do think that that's the other side. What we're also seeing is the other side of this, too, which is why they all showed up at the inauguration, because they were all so excited for the fact that they were going to just be like let's boil the planet let's boil the surface of the planet and then they have to come to the metaverse they have to come to us because we're the only ones that are going to have the stuff to protect them it's really funny as well because everything you're saying is true but they left out because their lack of this their lack of connection to anything um it working they didn't check if it It worked. They also left us out. What about us? It also didn't work. That's the best part. And that's the best part is that what I know. Because they don't know us. Human beings are fascinating. Mm-hmm. And there's no, they have tried to model us. They have tried to model us again and again. And they've looked at history and they've done all the number crunching. And they can't figure it out. They can't. They can't figure it out. But all of these things fail because they legitimately are operating in a fantasy world. They're operating outside of reality. Because they believe they can imprint, they can literally just put their reality on us. They just think that they can do that. Well, look at LLM. And look at us. And then you see, it's actually super difficult. It's actually really weird. I actually think part of what broke my brain was in the 2016 election when Trump won in the first place. That was the first time I saw something and I was like, oh, wow, elections might actually do something. Yeah. It was like the first time I realized that the fix might not be entirely in from people that actually are in control. Yeah, I definitely, like I didn't get particularly political until after that. I will fully admit to being completely ignorant of stuff. Same. Why would I? I didn't feel these things and then everything changed. Then everything happened. And then it was, you suddenly look backwards. You're like, oh, did I miss everything? And I'm still learning as well. A lot of this stuff And I feel like when you saw all of them turn up At the White House It was so fucking grim But I saw people who were surprised And that really made me laugh The people were like Wait what? Huh? Why are they all kissing up? They said three years ago that they liked me Huh? There's a part of me You see this is my problem Is that I look at this And it made me laugh Because I finally felt like I'm correct I'm correct they're all on they couldn't give a fuck they couldn't give a fucking shit about our lives the only reason, they want to replace us so bad and that's the thing, when we talk about Ed I actually got turned on to your work about this idea that we're going to be hitting this AI wall and I could not be more in agreement there's a part of my brain that's saying Like, where's the guy that wants to make the trillion dollars that finally makes the little robot that puts dirty dishes in the dishwashing machine? That's what we want. What we want is a little robot man that I can yell at that can do does laundry, does puts the clothes away and does the dishes. That's it. Henry, the problem is that's really difficult. like that's the thing they're like okay uh can we do stuff that would help people maybe uh i don't know or wash their floors we kind of got vacuum robots but ah they're expensive suck and they scare my dogs yeah i want a thing that can pet the dog but also when it comes down to it i don't need it to be god in the machine because guess what the real god doesn't exist and the real god gives children aids i don't need another one yeah also i don't know none of this works like just none of it none of it works it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen but also but then ed what do we do about continuing to be in their delusion we break it like that's what i'm doing like that's the thing right now as as we talk i've recently been working on this piece about how like anthropic admitted in court they made five billion dollars cumulatively like of all time which when you follow their previous revenue reports does not make sense and i'm arguing with people constantly all through today leading up to this because what has actually what the real power of these people is is that they've they control like we live in their world through narratives the narratives that are created and it is you it's true yep it's elon musk buying twitter yes it's google search yes it's this but a lot of it is just institutions like cnn cnbc new york times like they are captured but not necessarily by the entities but by the ideologies the ideology yes a the ai will be big ai will be big it's not that it's oh it it may be it's it will be we are just we can't say how you notice that too right they all are like all this stuff about ai and they project all of these but none of them actually says specifically what do you mean like what are the uses of ai like what exactly you say oh it has all these uses it's inevitable it's going to replace all of these things and it's more like but to what end how also yeah like what is it doing that i don't think it is dude because guess what man guess what you've this shit with the fucking waymo when they came out and they said that they have to kick it to some guy in the Philippines to drive it if it gets specifically stuck? The thing is, with Waymo, that's not even generative AI, because they love to say AI so that you conflate them. Waymo kind of works. Waymo's interesting, because... It's interesting. It's interesting. It's an actual thing that drives people around. I think that there are a ton of issues that I will go into in a future episode. But with, like, large language models, I have been, and I'm going to say this in passing, I'm not going to go into depth because I don't want people to get mad at me, but I'm currently learning to code. And the more I learn about code, the more I get scared about people using large language models to code because I don't know. I'm getting worried that there are software engineers out there that can't read code and just copy paste it from place or that they're willing to ship code that kind of looks right, but they don't really understand. I'm not saying this is all software engineers, but I'm worried that the software engineers they're building these LLMs for are the ones that don't know what they're fucking talking about buddy i think that that is exactly what we're seeing here oh no i think that we are oh no i literally think that this is a it's all human-led all of the issues are human-led it is still because you would need a perfect ai to make a perfect ai right you would need it's it's too human it's too janky we we are my whole view, one of my more I guess you could call it a mystical view, but I think one of the problems I have with AI is I do believe that there is like a 1% of the human brain that we just can't, we literally can't see if we wanted to see it because we're looking at ourselves that there's like a in terms of just the observer gets in the way of the thing that we need to be looking at, right? There's a part of our consciousness that we will never duplicate. Ever. We just won't. We don't even understand thinking. We don't. This is what I'm saying, is that at the very bottom of it, we don't really understand what the key is. So how is a bunch of cargo short-wearing, basement-dwelling coders sitting in a place that probably have never kissed a girl or a man before, and then now they're going to make the new human thought machine? You know what I mean? That's kind of like what we're seeing. So what we're seeing here is it's all based, it's all, it's turtles all the way down and it's just going to keep going. With the software engineers, I found that there's this real, we're seeing this schism between those types of basement dweller in cell types. There are the coders who know just enough to get by and keep their job without being fired And then the people who actually do software engineering who are relatively normal folks who are just going about their lives and they aren people like the truth they view it as like because i know that it can go as far as to being like an art form and like a it's a whole thing but again that points to not to create an absolutely bedrock structure for a new conscious entity on it doesn't sound like the way that works which the summation of what code is is not Nick Suresh could make mine made the point where it's like coding is not just writing code there is an art form to it Cal Newport as well did as well where it's like there is a cultural awareness there is the awareness of how one constructs stuff I don't know the way I put it is like how comfortable would you be feeling about a building where I don't know the architect only kind of knew what materials were in it it's most I think it's mostly bricks i legitimately think that that is another big issue is that it's they're they low they're low balling the creation of the new god you know like they're literally like nickel and diming it with guys and they're creating these dumb deadlines and they're creating all of these things where it's like you know if peter till really wanted to take over the very globe yes to my mind, he has to have more like a thousand year view. Like the way that they view the world more in like China and stuff like that. He needs more of a longer view of who's going to take this forward. Henry, that's not American capitalism. Tell me about it, bro. Tell me about it. I got fucking agents fucking breathing down my neck every day. Alright? And I do podcasting. I can't imagine what these idiots, all these people in the fake money realm and in the fake computer god realm are what the pressure is from the inside for them all to make all this bullshit money i have to wonder if the people inside the labs though at this point as they kind of it's become kind of obvious that like this isn't really doing the thing they don't actually they haven't made any gods and now it's just kind of like uh what are we doing well because i think i think they're all just fucking around not in like a completely labor-free way they're just like doing experiments and spending like millions of dollars of computer dates being like what if this works what if this works what if this works ed does this i'm a ceo that's what i've learned you know i've learned about being a ceo what is it he the only job replaceable by ai is a ceo it's literally it's the easiest it's the dumbest they have nothing but like not to be like i work very hard blah blah blah but they have plenty of time they uh they can just sit and think about these dumb things all day and play around with it and they're just waiting for enough like i also also think there's a massive obviously it's capitalism but the the lateral moves these guys just get to make like they get to just sort of like decimate a company decimate a bunch of stuff lose everything and then they get to just kind of jump ship well to another thing can i tell you my favorite one so there's a guy called jay parik who was the co-ceo of a company called laceworks i believe i'm just gonna check that on air uh and let's see laceworks so this company yeah lacework so this company was famous for doing an event where they handed out thirty thousand dollars worth of lululemon gift cards in a night to convince people to use their software so that guy ran that company into the fucking ground and uh you know what happened he got a job at meta and now he heads up one of the AI divisions in Microsoft. The meritocracy is real. What is, do they not, at some point it has to almost be purposeful. It has to be purposeful, right? Do you think that they do it almost in a way, what if there is a game being played too where they all know it's not going to happen and we all know it's not going to happen, but they are, we're all like, all of these middlemen have propped up the economy with this shit yeah so it almost kind of feels like it's it's almost like they're making money on the constant rug pull and the moving of all of the stuff back and forth it's almost like maybe it's good to hire somebody that will purposely blow it all up so then they never have to get it done i just think i think it's more stupid than that i think it is they hire people who look and sound like them who they've worked with before who have the right things on linkedin who then go who then can say that i have this theory the era of the business idiot i call it where it's like these people are just morons and if you look oh they're morons if you look at them as dipshits without much strategy the world actually makes up way more sense than this is what we've been saying you know we've been saying on the show this idea of like trying to come back from conspiracy theory and just understand that there's just way more human beings being extremely bad at really important jobs yeah and those are the humans that run these companies because like if you've ever heard satire nadella talk and ceo of microsoft it is like sustaining 100 concussions a second it's insane he meanders there was a interview i saw him give in davos i think where he spoke for three straight minutes to a yes or no question and it's just like I think as a journalist You should just be able to get out Like a taser at that point You don't have to use it But you can just like start crackling it a bit Like yep Like the Oscars music Why does no one ever just say Just straight up and be like Excuse me sir What in the living hell are you talking about I know Why can't there just be one person be like Hey just one question What in the living fuck is going on why what do you do i want you to tell me what you did today from the moment you woke up until when you got here i want to hear what you did for the money i and like that's the thing they will never answer that because a lot of it is just i read emails and i drank coffee i went to lunch i went to a meeting i didn't really listen hey ceo's job's extremely important okay when i have my executive time rob knows my producer he knows when i'm there and i am in my blessed somnulescence if you think i'm sleeping yeah i'm thinking dreaming of the mind dojo gee i i'm in my mind dojo that's where i do every day i do my karate and i think about different ways for me to spend our money you know it takes a lot of effort and work as a ceo to go hey do this hey have you guys thought about not having buttons on this you know i mean like that i love those i have that stuff where it's like steve jobs is a genius and it's just like making out of buttons well steve jobs was a genius in the sense that he was no no i don't mean this in a defensive way i mean genius in quotation marks because it was he was like what if it was good like he's like what if instead of it instead of being clicky buttons it was a touch screen but because touchscreens have been shit what if they were good and responsive and people used it and went wow this is fucking great i should come up with that it's like that's like what i'm saying something worked why like that's a other thing ed that i've never really understood and i feel like there's like i'm just dumb in that way where i was like i feel like when it comes to the environment that there is a lot of money in saving the environment yes right it feels like in my head there's somebody that's going to maybe clean the ocean that will also then become a trillionaire and i feel like that could be a really good focus on what we need to do in the future and you can make money i just don't understand and i just feel like i'm a silly dumb i'm a bad capitalist i learned that i could give all my people raises and it really doesn't affect my fucking bottom line because my bottom it's ridiculous it's fucking the margins are fucking ridiculous it's short-termism because if you think of it you probably wouldn't make money immediately from saving the environment no you wouldn't make it yeah so no you sell some penguins honestly dude there's ways you're talking to a capitalist just get some pay round up a bunch of good healthy penguins you selling them to an elementary school like it's like it's stuff like that you see you do certain things where you you you get there's ways to do it in fun ways there's fun things Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? 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NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also just think solar power is kind of magical. and batteries are kind of magical like that stuff but if you think of it in the short term way it's weird because what I'm about to describe is buying batteries and solar panels before you make much money off of them such as, just to be clear, a capital expenditure which will lead to an eventual payoff. Now that they hear and they go, fuck no, that sounds terrible however, if they're like investing a bunch of GPUs for a possible return but probably not they're like fuck yeah that makes perfect sense because they're all trapped in the past yeah they keep because these people are so disconnected i think i always say it's like they don't have problems so they don't know how to fix them so they look at the world and they go what are my problems well i don't have enough money what do poor people like uh tiktok and hamburger i guess uh i mean you saw the did you read that epstein file that one email there was one that uh went back and forth about the idea of uh it was an extremely racist email from i forgot it was somebody within i forget who it was explaining to jeffrey epstein he's like look you see the same people was about jay-z buying into the nfl and they were doing this this uh this commercial with jay-z and he's like he's like look you see that's like the same people They're doing their advertising to the people who should be super angry. That's exactly what we're going to do. You see, look, you just gave them exactly what they wanted. That's all they care about, which I think is minimizing of human beings, obviously, because they think that there's more than this. Because what they've just done is we do actually our countries actually, which I'm certain you're well aware of, Ed, is is kind of in a deep turmoil right now. And there's protests in every single major city that exists almost 24 seven. And they're just not talking about it. And that's really the issue is that they're just trying to delete that out of the narrative as if. It's funny as well, because if you want to make people happy, you make food cheaper and better and you make housing and you make their general life better. It's easy to do. The fucking Fatboy actually ran on a really good thing. The idea of bringing manufacturing to people or if he had done one single maybe good thing, maybe anybody could have a good uh a favorable opinion what's going on but the we are uh nothing nothing good happened right nothing's good is happening and we are we've just now started a new war and and we uh and i go to florida the groceries are as expensive as they are in los angeles jesus christ you know what i mean like and they don't see the difference in florida they think it's because they don't buy groceries they don't buy like these people don't buy groceries they don't i i genuinely wonder if they'd have someone who brings them like a soda like do they go to the fridge do you think these people like like i like that's the thing because i think the they see the world as friction to be removed they see every experience as friction and they at the top of the pile have removed all friction such as they don't meet unexpected people no there's they don't get talked to by anyone they don't want to talk to and indeed can reject anyone they want. Anybody. Anything they don't want to do. So, things like, oh, I've got to go to the bathroom. I've got to go do my laundry. I've got to go unload the dishwasher. Maybe the dishwasher is something we can automate. Fine. Washing dishes sucks. Laundry sucks. They're not trying to fix those problems. What they're trying to fix is, um, what do you people do? Well, you do something, and I want to get rid of that. So I've created a large language model that will tell you it will do anything, I guess you want to be friends with it and I think that that is also an important thing we have to constantly call it which is they're not AI they're language models there is no intelligence inside and I think that that has to keep being hit and I keep saying this places and people are like oh well you know but they're pretty smart and I'm like I it is easy to mimic how we talk we aren't Because this is the thing. The human mind is unknowable. The human mind is endlessly complex. Our communication, however, is extremely patterned. We have so endless amounts of examples of human conversation, and it's easy to mimic. But here's the thing about thought. I don't know about you, but my thoughts are not linear. no i've got like rockets going off in my head constantly not like genius thoughts it's like stupid thoughts it's like oh yeah yeah yeah it's like my butt hurts i'm hungry i'm like yeah yeah uh do i need to pee probably not like things like that constantly like human thought is chaos and if you're a listener by all means email me easy at better offline.com and tell me how you think because i think that a lot of these people want to believe that they sit there and they enter their mind dojo and they do their gun carter from equilibrium to think and then the genius spits out because if you do that you think large language models are genius they also it goes back to my thing where it's they're all looking at the past they believe that the only way to tell the future is by just looking at the past and going it's kind of like that you know sort of fucking like was as you know meanwhile we are heading into i love you know i a big i love terence mckenna and that kind of shit And I love his concept of the idea of we in this like novelty zone Okay go on Tell me more That the universe longs for novelty and builds novelty out And that life doesn't, it doesn't get like, but he was the way you describing it. So it's like, instead of like imagining our technology and our society ever going upwards towards some form of utopia, we're actually endlessly folding in on top of ourself like a fractal, right? Like we're constantly folding. We're slowly breaking large groups into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller niche micro groups. There's more and more layers to a single subject. The more and more information that is readily available to the human consciousness, we just complicate it again and again and again and again. And that's where we're going to be headed to. is more unique situations as we have more information to deal with it. As each generation came up before, we operated largely, each country, each area, operated in a sort of like a vacuum of information and kind of had to do its own thing and develop those stuff. This is the kind of like, we're heading into an area where everybody knows what everybody's doing at all times. And it's going to change how we behave. Yeah, it already is. It already is. It's going to change. And I think that that is kind of what we're seeing now is that these things are nothing can play out. Like in another world, like in another country, I could have seen a thing with January 6th back in the day, the insurrection. And in another country, the White House would have been burnt to the ground. People would have been mass executions, that style. And I do believe that the internet created another world where they observe themselves insurrecting. Yes, like posting insurrection. Yes, they didn't understand. They couldn't understand that they were being history. They were walking through a thing as if they were on their own cell phones watching somebody else do it. That's like the way I describe it, which is a, I think a new phenomenon. Like you were like watching a bunch of people doing a pro doing a, a, what used to be like an inherent human way of changing our government. Right. That used to be a way we used to do like an attack on the very fabric of society. We used to get together and hang a bunch of guys. You know what I mean? It was like a thing that we used to do. And now that it's not, I, I feel like that's what we're seeing here. is this effect, is that we're all on camera. And so it's going to affect how we behave. I see, I have this theory that I like, that I love saying, even though it doesn't map to the thing called the beginning of history, which is just that it is no longer illustrative to use history to explain stuff. It is no longer illustrative. You can't, you're like, we are not, like everyone's like, okay, we've worked everything out. It's just a question of going up from here. Great. No, I actually think what's happening is we have done stuff for decades based on looking backwards. The situations we've got ourselves in where, look at everything Trump's doing. It's horrifying. But what he is doing is instead of going, well, we didn't do this before, so we're going to keep being nice. It's just, what if I didn't do that? A lot of the boundary pushing is just the result of ignoring what decorum was. And a lot of the rationalizations for a lot of tech stuff comes from looking at the past. It's the same bullshit. uber lost a lot of money no it didn't 32.9 billion is a lot of money but open ai raised 42 billion dollars in the last year amazon web services cost a lot of money actually not normalized for inflation amazon web services cost about 38.9 billion dollars in 11 years amazon is going to spend 200 billion dollars in capex in 2026 the actual historic comparisons are used as ways to people it's don't worry about it this didn't happen before and the reason i say the beginning of history is you need to start looking forward like that's what everyone needs to like stop pretending the because thing didn't happen before have none of you played craps one dice roll does not indicate anything can happen and if you anything can happen yeah it's just oh no i believe it entirely i think that we are we have been let loose from those examples i think that once we understand but you know i think this goes all the way to a psychic thing though i think this goes straight to this oh yeah full to an idea of human beings not fully understanding what they're capable of and their potential at all times okay and i think that we have accepted a very low position in reality as as as this amazing quantum computer walking around fired by like like literally like i do it gets a little in the wooey area but it's the truth is that they we're capable of a lot and i think that they make a lot of money on debasing the human spirit hell yeah and so like and that's the idea the idea is that we are we need them they're nothing we're nothing without them we have to be constantly entertained by them we need to be oh we're just as hungry as like all this kind of shit and we just have to do more of no we're not going to do that instead we're going to do a naked bike ride instead we're going to do this thing like literally like i know that's ridiculous but there needs to be more of that sort of culture jamming which we're already seeing And I think the, no I fully agree Because it's I say that like I've taught myself a lot of economics And accountancy in the last year Because a lot of people said You couldn't possibly understand this I was like okay let me find out I think that everyone underestimates human beings I think that Many of my listeners, actually with the last podcast I imagine you get this as well People are like oh I couldn't possibly understand something so complex I have listeners who email me Complex economic theories who are like builders and teachers and realtors and shit. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The human, they want you to believe that you are mediocre and that the summation of your life is a large language model, which is just everything on the internet crammed into something. And that you don't need to think this, you must think this is intelligent because if you do that, you'll look down on yourself and you'll be easier to sell to, easier to capture, and easier to use. Because in the end, when you use a large language model, it is training you. I saw a really interesting statement that I forgot where it was, but it was like the idea that we're in this we're being governed by gigantic economic and political forces that are all under the the guise of you don't really care, though, do you? Right. Like, it's this idea of we're now in this area where it's a bunch of guys. We're like, well, you never cared about this stuff. So what do you care? What do you care about this thing? What do you care what we do? You just like just fucking eat your slop and go to work or I'll kill you. all right why do you act like you care you know buy more fucking software yeah shut the fuck up right just shut the fuck up whatever just shut like that's i mean it's going to take us to say i do care i do actually care about human beings i care that you've assigned massed uh shock troops to uh fucking uh arrest children you're building fucking warehouses to prison people I care. I care about the Epstein files. I care about them a great deal. Fun fact, Henry. Did you know that the CEO of LinkedIn, per Gmail, Reid Hoffman, he actually endorsed Jeffrey Epstein on LinkedIn? And I refuse to believe that. Well, it's sadly in the files. But what's so funny is that- You mean that sea of disinformation? Fuck him. thing when i read that i was crying with laughter because it's just like there are so many people in the epstein files who are like guilty by association because they fucking went to the island but like you are the ceo of linkedin and you endorsed jeffrey epstein could not find out what for god knows did you get into well you see my own my own pet obsession is epstein's connections to the comedy world which is just oh i haven't looked in close it oh yeah it is just you know what i'll tell you man i'll say a year of so many years of being nervous around people it is so nice to know that every single person i've ever liked is just not shit and they can all absolutely suck my dick yeah it's you know there's a release there's a release of like the guys that book just for laughs used to be connected to him timothy chamelay's uh pr uh person his her pub his his publicist peggy siegel is connected to him the guys from interlocken that trained chapel rone and all those people that didn't make all these these superstars he was like he gave them 450 000 so it's like all of this stuff where you're like i'm really ready to tell all of these guys to Go fuck themselves And Jmail's great as well You can just go in there and type the name of anyone you meet And hopefully they're not in there You just do that man I'd recommend you do that That's all I do Every time I meet a new person I'm like let me just run that name through Jmail Oh Where were you What do you do Where were you in 2018 by the way It's so weird though It's like Sergey Brin and Larry Page were in there like sergey brin definitely seems to have at some point associated with epstein nothing is nothing in the tech media really about it it's well then you also look at his connections with moot is all of that kind of stuff but i yeah yeah the to me i always believe all that though i actually got a great breakdown on the show about that from a listener again how our listeners are some of the smartest most educated so fucking cool isn't that so fucking cool it means the world to me it's same Like, I love my listeners. Like, I adore them. I love it. And someone broke me down about, like, the secret history of 4chan, which is just the idea of that. Well, at the time, Christopher Poole was moving away from 4chan already. He already had other ideas. He was already on the way out. He had already kind of segued. He had been trying to create a sort of area for bad actors on 4chan for a while. It never took. And when Epstein and Steve Bannon got involved with him, he was already kind of out the door. So Epstein probably had nothing to do with 4chan, but then it was interesting how that took off because of the Steve Bannon Epstein connections to him. But it really was just to me, what I thought was interesting is more so after the fact about how they were making fun of the QAnon 4chan Pizzagate stuff by using the Pizzagate stuff themselves. Yeah. So it's like a game on a game on a game on a game. And it's all just it just makes people go crazy. You know what's really interesting, though? none of this generative AI like Epstein was kind of into AI it seems but he was into it in the same way every business idiot is so he's like what if it could do all this stuff that I've imagined but yeah he had no this era is part of like he maybe he was like a load-bearing pedophile like because I think they missed the ketamine I think it was no ketamine and I do think it was a different thing because at the time what epsin really was more focused on was his appearance on the internet he was focused on the information about him on the internet and that's why he got into all of the informational technology and all that shit because he was trying to figure out how can i control how people hear about me and talk about me and that's really what that's what that was about and then because remember he was into fucking freezing his cum and making a world of of supermodel sex slaves that he would make endless children with and that's his big ideas ed he was trying to fucking live forever and so he had other ideas so he wasn't here in this one he was there no no he's looking great now though well i mean i i don't know if i agree that jeffrey Epstein looks great. I don't know if I... I just saw him. Oh, yeah. I always... Me and him. Whenever I go to Tel Aviv, I see him. Jesus Christ. That's my whole thing. I go check in with Jeff. We go down there. It's amazing. I love him. We high five. Hang out with him. David Bowie. Michael Jackson. Oh, God. Well, Henry... Sama Bin Laden. Sama Bin Laden! Finally, we're here. They're all there. All right. All right, Henry. We're going to wrap it there. Henry, where can people find you? Go and check it out. And the last podcast on the left and all of the worst shits. Our videos are on Netflix now and you can also see us on YouTube. And we've got a new, if you want to check out, if you like live play role-playing games, we have entered into the fray over here and we do Bloodbath, Vampire the Masquerade. It's LPN RPG. It's over on our YouTube channel, LPN TV. And it is, honestly, I think it's really good. And it is a dark and evil version of an lpn of a rpg playthrough hell yeah we'll get some links at that in the notes uh you can also now buy uh we've just launched our better offline fuck data centers uh merch wonderful t-shirt beanie stickers tank tops baby onesies put them everywhere you're gonna love them i'm ed zitron subscribe to the newsletter you'll have a monologue this week sorry for missing it last week cheers everyone i love you all Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit thank you so much for listening better offline is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.