Hater Season: Caleb Wilson, Juniper and Arif Hasan

you wow you run a tech podcast and we're talking about how everything's getting bad yet you rely on the the technology today that the cloud-based technology you don't like backups you don't like recording on your own personal device it's like you don't like owning anything it's like you don't like owning anything 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. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by Black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019 And that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B. from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, this is great. So I was trying to read the intro to my show, Better Offline, but Juniper has decided that she will be leading us in today. Welcome to Better Offline. That's one of my very rude guests, Juniper from Kill the Computer, who is here with her much less rude co-host, Caleb. Caleb Wilson, Caleb, thank you for joining us. So far. So far. Yes. Yeah, it's a competition. And of course, we've got Arif Hasan from Wide Left, the football podcast plus newsletter. Well, we've come in. I brought everyone together today just to complain. And I'm going to complain about the fact that my microphone just fell over. Perfect. Which is annoying. I also want to complain that I wasn't given the opportunity to invest in something called Gary's List, which is Gary Tan, who currently runs Y Combinator. He says, we're starting a citizens union for radical centrism. We proved local politics is wittable in San Francisco. Now we're building the community to do everywhere news commentary and accountability for policies that affect California and our society. and i'm just gonna say go fuck yourself gary if you say if you write the words radical centrism horrible i hate that man i i just love the status quo i so i've actually been looking into i i've been learning a little bit about this guy recently and like y combinator i i primarily be like by proxy of finding out about this place in san francisco called epic church are you familiar with this thing called epic church i'm immediately sold it's it's really epic it's it's bacon it's it's it's cool beans yeah it's all that stuff but no basically it's this this tech positive church like basically an evangelical church for tech-minded people uh and like founders in the in the bay area so like people like trey uh what's the name trey stevens go there gary tan goes there all these like weird fucking awful type people like peter teal i swear to god i i am not shitting you peter teal is like one of the thought leaders of the type of people there like they like how are we spelling thought actually a thought t-h-o-t because that's yeah but no it's like the worst kind of person in the tech world getting evangelical like they're like they love their dogma man it's so sick this is where peter keel got the idea to like create clavicular he's like i need a new holy blood boy he is their jesus christ clavicular is their their virgin's birth we're christ maxing now uh but that's like a whole thing now right we're like people who were like typically associated with movements that might be humanist or atheist or whatever you want to call have like because they're old white men have turned into like embracing some version of christianity right like even richard dawkins like the atheist supreme or whatever the hat he wears um is like well i'm a cultural christian and it and like all of them have just been moving what the fuck is a cultural christian isn't that just being american i yes i look he's a piece of shit and any way he can kind of communicate that i think he'll take those opportunities but like the the tech god church feels perfect for that i don't know i feel like we've used the meme uh don't create the torment nexus like way too often but it just like every time you explain something new about what's happening in the world like some tech billionaire has read something from a sci-fi novel and has taken like the wrong lesson from it like again and again time like oh yeah we've started a church to worship technology oh no literally best example of this sorry uh you can go go on best example of this just because he's been on my mind a lot recently and i've i read a lot about his his antichrist like tour that he's been doing but peter thiel he read the philosopher uh renee gerard and uh he came away with the exact opposite interpretation i think of what you're supposed to take away from this philosopher which is that like society and powerful people use scapegoats to uh like political scapegoats to uh put blame on certain people to get whatever political end that you want and that's like a cautionary tale it's like a cautionary tale against scapegoats. Yeah, Peter Thiel, he's like, wait, but scapegoats are kind of goaded though, like literally. We can use them to our advantage. Is this a bad time for me to announce that I'm launching my new company that's called The Ring from Lord of the Rings? The One Ring. And you're partnering with a surveillance company? You're partnering with Palantirio? Oh yeah, under my company all the surveillance companies will unite. here's the thing with this this gary's list thing i've been clicking around he writes so often like he posts like an article a day so this is a blog that he runs i guess as well as that but also it's not like emily's list for perverts like what is gary's list it's it appears to be a blog in which he complains okay we need more of those we need more sub-facts like that it's complaining but also a degree of it's like complaining but also saying he cares about centrism and then he's like ai just ported sim city in four days without reading the fucking just what makes me want to put a gun in my mouth is this like he's attempting to wrangle andrew yang as like a guest poster or something i just don't know what possible I'm still stuck on the list idea Why is it called list? I'm actually kind of mad about this It's a list of his posts Like that appears to be it I just This guy is a billionaire Yeah I assume that means he has tens of millions of dollars Liquid You could do so much with that You could do pretty much anything You could have your favorite chef make a meal if i assume you eat those and you could have your favorite band playing at the same time wherever you wanted to in the world and you're like no i need to make a fucking blog for centrism yeah it looks like protect centrism from from something it looks like he's very anti-union he is he's complaining about in one of these articles about how 30 000 kids are pawns in a union war that won't even help the teachers there yeah no he is he it's exactly he's the kind of guy but that's the thing is like every i feel like not you know maybe not every but like the majority of the most influential tech uh tech silicon valley person these days are turning to evangelical religion they complain about how there's not enough centrism in the world today while they benefit and and like simultaneously they benefit and work with the trump administration so like what do you what are they what are they even complaining about at the end of the day and what do they mean yeah what do they even really mean i think they just mean that they don't like really what i think it is is i i think they just don't like that people don't like them as much as people used to people these people are mad that no one's really following falling for the the like ai grift of like oh it's going to simultaneously ai is going to replace all of our jobs but simultaneously make the world a better place like no one's really falling for that and i think they're mad about that. I think these people are genuinely upset. AI is in its gentleman science era. What the fuck does that, what do you mean? What do you mean with gentleman science? It's a four minute read from Gary Tan. Come on. This is beautiful, right? Because all of the images in this article are obviously AI generated as for all of these articles, right? Because if you're going to have an ethos of being a cheap piece of shit, you might as well embrace it but um in it it has a jar labeled maple syrup yeah what the fuck is and what is in the i have no idea what what is in the jar but it is not maple syrup we'll include a link to this because it is just it it's wonderful because it's just a bucket with maple syrup in it i assume but also like o-rings and or gaskets or something it looks like a Jardinera is what it looks like. It looks like it has some carrots in it. I don't know. Very Chicago-pilled. The TLDR of this article is, LLMs have reset the research game, the biggest breakthroughs of simple ideas, anyone can try, and the easy questions haven't been answered yet. To which I say, what the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean? The biggest breakthroughs of simple ideas, but the easy questions haven't been answered yet. Come on. What does that even mean? I don't know. I just, this guy's a billionaire. He could do anything. Like, he could hire a good writer. Like, for example. I can't get over the idea that the issue is that science is too hard. Like. Well, I mean, that is kind of the issue of science in general. Well, that's a good thing, though. Yeah. We've gotten past the part of science that is easy, which means we have made advancements, and you have to study science to be good. This feels, what the fuck are we doing? He wants every dope to be able to advance the field, which I guess in theory- I was going to say, you don't want science in the hands of a dullard like me. I'm going to start the One Ring Company if you do that. You'll accidentally create a black hole with a Hadron Collider. I'm just saying, dude, Elon Musk is the richest man on the planet and he is so fucking stupid, but I could be worse. I could be worse. Speaking of him, he's another person that's embraced this like soft religion aesthetic. He was in an interview with Katie Miller. Of course, you need more demons around talking to people like Elon Musk. And he's like, yeah, you know, I believe in God. You know, I do believe in a creator. And it's like all of this. I guess the reason I've been focusing so much on that in particular recently with all of these people like Gary Tan, all of these people is it's all happening at the same time. They're all sort of doing this weird embrace of evangelical religion. All sort of – it started before Trump became president. So much as if they don't have ideas. Yeah. But I don't know if it's like a cope thing. I think some of it might be – and this might be just doing too much like armchair pop psychology. But like, I think some of it is that in order to kind of proselytize for AI, in order to evangelize their own kind of element or this thing, they have to put themselves in a frame of mind that allows them to believe in the kind of powerful myth making that is analogous to religion. Especially because some of these singularity people, which is not necessarily the same as some of these AI people, but there's a lot of overlap, do believe that AI will become God. Right? Like a backwards looking God. You know? I don't think these people believe in anything. Sure. I just, like, that's kind of, like, but I guess that it's just a convenient label to bond stuff. Here the word believe just serves as, like, an analog for telling us the things that they think we should believe. Right? Like, I don't really care if they actually believe this shit. I care that they're telling people this shit. Well, there was a really good profile on Peter Thiel. I think it was in Wired about how he uses like Christian apocalyptic end times imagery in a lot of his speeches. And I was really interested in all that, which we talked about on our show, Jim. Yeah, that's the piece about Rene Girard, the philosopher that he like sort of – go on, sorry, yeah. That's it. Just he does that and then Girard and then, you know, he's very big on Carl Schmitt. I'll let you – if you know who that is, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. this all comes back to a very simple thing for me which is these are not things you do if you have anything you enjoy yeah if i'm sitting alone it's been a long day i have i can name five movies and six video games i could i've been weary watching person of interest excellent show makes me so happy watching with my girlfriend it's awesome but i drink a diet coke with that wow i feel awesome these people are like i need to take on a new religion i need to create a pro-centrism blog and only then will i possibly be happy it's just it's just i would say it was sad if i cared for these people in any way shape or form it's just i hear oh they're into religion no they're not they just they they sit around like bored motherfuckers tugging on their winkies going, oh, what's going on in the world? Jesus is real. God was too. It's the GPU. We've got 100 GPUs. He put the GPUs together. It could make an AGI. I don't know what that really means. But anyway, who's in your email inbox, Peter? Oh. Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. By the way, here is the thing I'll say. J-mail. I think the people who made J-mail should get a Pulitzer. For sure. Absolutely. The people that made J-Mail, which is the searchable Epstein database, really, really, like, they deserve a Pulitzer here. And also, so does the guy who the final email that Jeffrey Epstein received on JEEproject at Yahoo.com was just a guy called Cody Rudland. And he said, lol, good riddance. And the subject was, you are dead. Fucking buzzer beating. That's so much more. Incredible work, dude. He buzzer beat Jeffrey Epstein. That's so sick. Also, Jeffrey Epstein got invited to a Michael Clayton screening. Anyway, I don't want to get into Epstein because I know that'll be all... Right, yeah, it's a whole different thing. It's just we're in such a weird spot of the moment with all this AI shit as well because there was that something big is happening piece. Oh, yeah. I wanted to kill myself with that one. Oh, I haven't heard about this. I also want to be in a state where I'm going to kill myself. Tell me. Yeah. Well, it's a piece by this guy who's like a scammer, a guy called Matt Schumer, who back in 2024 claimed his reflection 70b Wait is this when the AI tried to post something to GitHub and it got rejected no no that a different thing entirely that was just the scam the week before yeah that was the scam no no no that one i get to in a second though this was the one where it was like a 4 700 word blog that's my phone oh i read it no never mind i did read this yeah i remember 4 700 because i put it into a word counter yep because i was like what the fuck is this um yeah no it sucks but yeah but we have listeners they should also know what this is so i mean they heard about it on the monologue last week so okay they're all and then the most people said don't don't worry about being angry and one person was like you need to be less angry uh it's just i think we're entering like a hysteria zone and i actually my favorite thing about that blog by far was watching two or three other people try and do similar blogs and just nothing happened just people being like actually yeah it's actually it's actually crazier than this it's actually even bigger and crazier i i think the thing that i thought was even weirder about that piece is there was a lot of people i do genuinely respect that like shared that piece and they were like oh my god like everyone needs to read this like typically you know very skeptical people that have very good takes chris hayes yeah yeah like all these people share it yeah yeah Yes. I got people mad at me because I said some not so nice things about my friend Chris Hayes. But you know what? If you take that shit credulously, you're a dullard. I'm sorry, Chris. You fucking blew that one. Yeah. The thing about this article that like really gets me, article, blog post, unvetted piece of AI. Because it is clearly written by AI, by the way, which should not be shocking given that it's an AI evangelism piece. Of course, it's written by AI, which by the way, Cleveland.com released like an editor's thing today. Oh, God. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second. They turned – or a journalism candidate had turned down a job with them because the – Cleveland.com is like the newspaper of Cleveland, right? And a student who was trying to get a job with them turned down the job because they don't have reporters writing articles. They have an AI rewrite specialist who turns their material into drafts. They just have the reporters do like sourcing and quote gathering and stuff like that, feed into an AI. Oh, Christ. Yeah. And the editorial explaining this and explaining that journalism schools are failing students by making them think they should write. He's also obviously written by AI. But back to this article by Schumer. So it is obviously written by AI, but it keeps on coming up with these examples that are contextually actually very poor examples of the thing that they're trying to demonstrate. But there's like a million of them, right? It's like a gish gallop of like AI benchmarks that are meant to create this sense that AI is like the like smarter than PhDs or pass the bar exam. And it's like, well, when you look. I'm sorry. Also, PhDs listen to this. And I will say this. Not very smart people. I know a few. You've not met enough PhDs if you're like PhD level. Not to say there are every PhD is stupid, but not to say every PhD is smart either. Well, OK, I will. I'll say this. Ben Carson is a gifted neurosurgeon, right? Like, think about that. Well, was. Or was. But, like, think about that. People have their specialties. Right? Yeah. And PhDs are incredibly talented within. But, like, even with analogous specialists, like, we've seen PhDs in, like, chemistry come out and write books about how, like, AIDS isn't real. Right? Like, chemistry is pretty close to biology, and you still got that fucking wrong. Right? But regardless of that, stuff like pass the bar exam is in the thing. And it's like contextually, it's actually not that interesting because they passed something called the universal bar exam, which no individual state uses. There's like a million other things. Also, the best thing in it was him saying that he cited this METR study. Oh, it doesn't even say it. well no no but what's great about it is it's like it's like tasks that an ai can do the involve it working autonomously for hours hours and hours right when you go and click on it it's actually tasks that it succeeds at 50 of the time yeah the meta or whatever it was is is absolutely mischaracterized like egregiously mischaracterized like to the point if we had journalism still and this was run in a newspaper that cared about stuff, which what a bygone era that we pretended to have. So sad. 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When it's like there is no, unless I'm missing something, it has not shown any level of original intelligence. What it can do is that it's just more very efficiently combing through databases of words and like just information. It's very efficient at that. But that doesn't prove intelligence as far as I'm aware. So whenever people say AI is intelligent, I lose my fucking mind because it's not. It's just fast. It's a fast database search that just like pukes back out at you. I do have a counterpoint to that. What is it? Okay. A Matt Schumer specific. And when you posted on blue sky the other day, that he was the guy who made that awful video game. This is the future. Oh yeah. If you've seen this list, it's the video game thing where it's like, it's like two minutes and just, it is insane. Like the UX changes. Oh yes. You remember that? Wait, the game, the game. Yes, yes, yes. and like the guy falls off the the bridge and and the guy's like really impressed that the ai put him back on a bridge but it's a completely new bridge and a completely new fucking castle like he too could do that in mario 64 30 years ago dude like come on yes you can vibe code here's how to get started fucking stop and it's like you go and look it's like sample task merge files extract information clean and convert files fix finicky images get rid of garbage well i'm fucking reading some and it's i just feel like we're in this hysteria mode where just every day there's just this bizarre escalation of like wow ai's so powerful and look it's replacing workers but then you click on the article it's like well fields that involve maybe being affected by ai have seen less entry-level hires and that will be on the front of the financial times like that's just like that's what we're doing every other era of actual innovation they'd be like yeah you can like you have a a ds perhaps not dsl but like a very nice camera and a phone look at the photos look how good the photos are. Wow, this phone can use email now. That's a huge deal. This is like, yeah, if you squint really hard, it's almost something. I think the thing that gets me is if you, which I'm sure someone has done this, if you take this Schumer article and feed it into an AI and said, hey, can you produce a counter article? That goes point, point. It would be equally as compelling right yes that's a that's an interesting idea actually i don't like using ai but i would love to see that i will be honest i actually did that perfect see oh my god did it using his own uh his actually his own uh thing let's see let's see if i got this yeah because i did it in i pulled up hyper right which is his dog shit his dog shit uh ai startup and it basically said yeah you know it's mostly just hype i i don't have it in front of me i'm sorry i don't i didn't prepare journalism ed i know i know i've already had good thing we have a real journalist june here to here's me actually this is just me straight up complaining which i know is different to usual i write like 10 to 15 000 word analyses of things and i am so detailed and i go through years of earnings and shit and this guy's like wow you know the computer is just fucking so crazy now bro and like do you read that like ai is learning from itself and like it's amazing like and look at this and people are coming themselves reading it they're like they're like we need this guy on national television and then he's then he says oh i'm not trying to scare people fuck you you little worm so i ed i i do have a question about uh these ai because i don't get these ai startups i know you don't fundamentally understand but i think you know more than me which is i if there's only like eight or nine like models out there like deep seek yeah kimmy and what what the fuck is an ai start like they they take these models and they what give us a prompt beforehand so it's better organized for the tech okay from the very from the very lowest ai startup to the most successful ones like any sphere who makes cursor it is much more complex at the top end but it is prompt engineering it is finding ways to translate what you say to it into a prompt that the model will then use to do something like that one of like the eight or nine existing models like yes deep seek and which is okay what's really funny with this guy's startup though hyper right which is by a company called other side ai is they raised 2.6 million dollars in um let's see in november 12 2020 then they raised another let's see other side another 2.8 million in uh march 2023 where the fuck is the money where is it where is it where did it go when you used it did you pay for it no god no so yeah okay now yeah that's a great question what the fuck no i truly don't know and it's it's a the current it's this is from 2023 the current iteration of hyperwrite which is a chrome extension with personalization and context awareness launched in early 2022 too it's a chrome extension this is the fucking guy this is the guy this is and i i think it just shows that none of these ai boosters actually believe in anything because i don't know when i see someone doing ai criticism and they're just making shit up i'm like hey don't do that it weakens our argument these people like yeah just lying just it's fine just wow i agree i saw alexis Sohenium talking about it. One of my favorite guys who's just fallen from grace. Like his big previous investment was this thing called Doodles. Doodles NFT that he claims to be bigger than Disney. NFT, no. Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, he's like a big NFT guy. No. Do we think Doodles is better or worse than VFriends? What's VFriends? Oh, Gary V's thing. No, no. VFriends is Gary Vaynerchuk. What is Gary Vaynerchuk doing? If he isn't an AI. He's an AI. I don't even have to look that up. I feel it in my bones. Yeah. He's the one that looks really sick all the time, right, Gary V? Yeah. He's not doing enough in your life or whatever. He sounds like Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Why do these tech people, despite being a lot of very health-focused to a degree that is unnerving, they always look sickly. They always look just very wet and sickly and moist and disgusting. Well, Brian Johnson, I think, did that on purpose. Like, I think he wants to look like that. Yeah, and he succeeded. He is really good at looking very sickly and wet. So I think what it is, is these people, in my experience, work insane hours. Now, work is a kind of a relative term. But, like, they're in meetings or dinners or lunches or whatever, or just staring at X the everything app 24-7. That's hard work. That's a lot, dude. Yeah, no, yeah. Let's not knock that one. No, I mean, like, I can't judge someone for doing that. But, like, they don't have a time when they're sitting around, like, taking an edible and watching YouTubes of manual cats, like palace cats. Right, yeah. They don't have joy in their lives like that. But they are working all the time. They emerge from that process tired and wet. Yeah, because they're tired and damp. Just, like, visibly moist. visibly moist or terrifyingly dry they all look like they all look like they have a disease that they have to explain to you that you've never heard of while you just look at your phone and you're like damn dude that's crazy yeah man that's crazy doesn't Jordan Peterson have one of those diseases that's just like sort of low key fake like his daughter's like yeah he has this thing and then you look into it and it's just like sort of fake or something like that it's called ADHD June Jesus Christ Okay, I was under the impression that she had induced it, which is slightly different than Faith. Oh, yeah, his cider psychosis. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. He has some weird shit going on. He has a ton of different things happening. It's just no one happy would defend a corporation this much. I say this as reading forums of people arguing about video games for years Even then the idea of being so desperate to protect the idea that corporations can make more money is so very fucking sad. But it's kind of, it's turned into everything now. I mean, I saw on Twitter the other day people gambling on traffic. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? I don't understand this. That's so awesome. What is the target function? How does the book verify that you won or lost your bet? I don't think this is a particularly nuanced bet. It's like people gambling, let's see, how many cars will go through in a particular period. I think it is. People need hobbies, man. You've got to call the hotline, man. That's nuts. I'm quoting Will Meneker of Chapo here, who posted this about a sport where guys just run into each other oh yeah i've seen that and his post was just this is the sport they watch in robocop and it's like it's like it's just robocop stuff now it's just prediction markets i saw oh god we're gonna do a prediction market episode we've got a bloke from barons coming on yeah it's fucking great i love prediction markets i mean they're getting worse they're getting so so so someone was talking about betting on whether a rocket would explode yeah the new the rocket that's i don't know when it's launching but it was yeah that like someone i i screenshot this reply in particular from polymarket um let me find it really quick i swear i just i just did it and i'm gonna i'm gonna read it this is like a nasa one too not even like a spacex yeah it was disgusting yeah it's polymarket and all like i don't know how long all of that will work like how long before that gets outlawed by someone but i think something that might accelerate that process is someone getting killed because of it yeah yeah like gary buce's awful son in contact is gonna blow up that rocket dude yeah yeah like so so what i saw someone said that sorry to be a gold but wagering on people dying should not be legal which i think is the most moral and correct thing in the world that's fucking crazy that we have like gambling on this sorry to be pc here but i'm gonna no that person is correct yeah very very good take person i that yeah great take but then polymarket replied to that saying to clarify this was a market about a potential booster stage rupture a defined hardware failure scenario not about the orion crew capsule or astronaut safety This was not a market on crew injury or loss of life. But like, I don't know, man. I feel like if you are gambling on any stage of this sort of exploding a disaster, that's sort of gambling on disaster. We saw that there was gambling and prediction markets about Palisades fire, how long it was going to last, how far it was going to reach. so like the idea that people gamble on disasters is not like oh wow this took us by surprise that a lot of people thought this would happen they've it's been happening for over a year now people have been gambling on disaster for over a year now well nick defore is the bloke from barris who's going to join us and as in not today don't worry he's just gonna punch just right just fucking like a like a half-time substitution he's here right now no he um he made the point it's like inevitable that someone uses this to manipulate someone's murder like they create a market where someone says okay yeah you're going to like this but will this person live or die on may 13th and on some level it's like this will encourage someone to get killed like i know this sounds extreme but polymark nick also made this point where it's like polymarket already encourages insider trading yeah i mean we saw this with um with like in addition to the maduro stuff right but we saw this with like pam bondy's press conference times where she got within like 30 seconds of that which is like you could say the markets hit that really well but i'm not going to say that i think that she knew someone was going to make money on the under right well what was the what was the it was it was how long uh a particular press conference on a particular day would go and It's like, you know, a couple hours and then some. And she abruptly, like in the middle of like a sentence, shut it down 30 seconds within 30 seconds of like the timeline to hit the mark. And so a bunch of people who had, we shouldn't say bet on the owner because it's not betting, right, who had purchased contract shares on the event result of it being less than the certain amount of time made a ton of money off of it. Oh, okay. Yeah. So like people are already either actively manipulating it or not doing anything to prevent the appearance of manipulating it. Like when Giannis Tete Kupo for the Milwaukee Bucks, who is now like on the chair or something for Kalshi. Yeah, he's a chair, a board member of Kalshi now. Yeah. So like he had like demanded a trade, it sounded like, from the Bucks to an organization that will actually win games, which is understandable. And there was this whole trade market and Kalshi had a bunch of different markets for Giannis and where he was going to go and whether or not he was going to stay. and ultimately he didn't get traded he stayed with the bucks and everybody who would bet that he was going to stay with the bucks had made a ton of money and then right after that he announced he was on the board of kalshi and it's like i don't know that yannis or any of his entourage or whoever put any money on on any of these things but that sure looks fucking awful right they probably did i would be i would bet that i would imagine i would bet i would take that bet and Kalshi that they did. I just... Every... I think that there is goodness in our future and that good things will happen, but I think on the way there there's going to be something called the Kalshi murders, maybe? Yeah, no, for sure. There's good... We've already, thankfully, I've got to use my term, son of Sam Altman, for an AI psychosis murder. I mean, very sad. I mean, like, no, terrible, but also terrible but also like nice nice uh but it's just it feels like we're in this weird gulf where everyone is desperately trying all the money is trying to pretend that all of this is so fucking sick when you look at it even as a booster it's like great coding's faster i guess yay it's also so expensive and no one wants the no one wants to do the math yeah that's like the other thing about this is like all of the booster arguments for AI coming for different industries and jobs or being able to perform different tasks or whatever, right? All of the arguments about its increasing capability rely on an assumption that the progress, quote unquote progress, as measured by their own benchmarks anyway, that it's made so far will continue at an exponential rate in the same way that we envision technology tends to, which is not really like if you look at the progress of like battery technology it does not follow the same fucking like it's just not like that but the way that people seem to imagine technology is this like in crazy you know exponential it spikes up and so they they put that assumption right yeah exactly it's just when you look at the chart disco sales will go off yeah it'll just double every year and yeah um but uh people will assume this and they'll make the argument that it will without understanding like what it took to get to the shitty place it is now and how we're at the edge of that like we can't actually devote more resources to make these models better 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, iHeart'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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So what's funny is there was, because Matt Hughes, who's my editor, who's long-suffering. Yeah, poor guy. By which I mean I made him watch a two-and-a-half-hour-long Dario Amadei interview. Sorry, Matt. But he found one fascinating quote in here. This is Wario Amadei, CEO of Anthropic. Even though a part of my brain wonders if it's going to keep growing 10x, I can't buy $1 trillion a year of compute in 2027. If I'm off by a year in that rate of growth, or if the growth rate is 5x a year instead of 10x a year, then you go bankrupt. And previously he said, if my revenue is not $1 trillion, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if i buy that much compute why did he say that well no this this interview by the way is fucking sick it's so funny it was that he he uses this example where he says he has he he describes having better than 50 gross margins but that's because the way he evaluates gross margins is based on how much a model cost to train and how much the model made money like how much money he separates out the training cost in the inference cost and buckets out future training cost against a different margin and so like if i you know if you did um sonnet like 4.5 or whatever the amount of revenue sonnet 4.5 brings in is greater than the inference plus training cost of sonnet 4.5 yeah and he's ignoring the training cost of like 4.6 which is like 10 times larger and it always needs to be he's ignoring the reinforcement learning and the updates they have to do which is also a training cost but actually i i take it back here is how dario amidi talks about profitability let me quote him here profitability is this kind of weird thing in this field. I don't think in this field profitability is actually a measure of spending down versus investing in the business. I actually think profitability happens when you underestimated the amount of demand you were going to get and loss happens when you've overestimated the amount of demand you were going to get because you're buying the data centers ahead of time. No, Dario! Profitability is when you make more money than you spend. You underestimated the data. That's such like a fake smart guy way to say that. Yeah, I like that they can have their own metrics. The amount of demand you were going to get. Like, yeah, I guess the price would go up in a world where your supply doesn't meet demand. They unlocked capitalism too, and they unlocked a new version of profitability. That's awesome. Yeah. He said that these are stylized facts. What? That is his term. Dog. See, I hate these people. I hate these people so much. If I'm an investor and I read my investment saying stylized facts, I'm stylizing a nine millimeter in my mouth. It's just like, I think things are going to get crazier, not in the actual outcomes, but the things they're going to start promising. I hope Anthropic tries to go public, just so I can see what insane definition of gross margin they have. because I don't think it's like revenue minus COGS. I think it's a model plus N plus divided by 70 divided by 7,000 plus 2 million plus one. And they're like, yep, look, numbers higher than last year. What do you think? And the investors who just are, I assume, catatonic, like they're pitched in their sleep. I just, it's all gonna, I don't see how this doesn't come down. I'm just like, every time I look at the numbers, I feel crazy. But when I read their definitions for it, they just go, yeah, just, you know, work out. So I don't know if you guys have been noticing this particularly since, also, I know you guys like this football, the Super Bowl. Ever since the Super Bowl. Never heard of it. Yeah, brand new to you. But there was a ton of AI-generated ads in the Super Bowl. since then i've seen three different companies one of them being um uh liquid death another being noodles and company and another one i'm blanking on which what what the other one i saw was but i saw this is after the super bowl different companies using ai generated fucking ads and they're horrible they're horrifying they're awful they're so bad they don't make me want to even look at the brands anymore and it's like i i my theory i i haven't confirmed this i haven't looked into it but i'm assuming a lot of these ai uh generative ai models these these these companies whoever runs it are striking deals with these companies to do like hey like make this next ad campaign entirely on us entirely on us because in these ads they do mention that they're ai generated i i think the the noodles and company once says it like in the corner it's like ai there's like a little pun it's been a minute since i've seen it but there's like a little pun to be like oh it's ai so i think these are like very obviously ad campaigns to try to be like hey wow ai is everywhere isn't it it's crazy how everywhere ai is everyone loves ai it's an attempt to just get attention because like it's basically like look how much this sucks but it cost us a lot of yeah well that's what that's explicitly what liquid death did in their ad right they they were like very like they thought they could kind of get away with being like tongue-in-cheek about using ai And it like kind of fits their brand image to be kind of irreverent or whatever. And so then they made a terrifying horrifying uncomfortable ad The worst About was it their energy drink product Wait wait wait it just one of their drinks have you seen the darren aronofsky ai generated thing yeah this day in 1776 so if you haven't heard about this dear listeners uh unbelievably big fucking hack darren aronofsky is making a he's making a thing called on this day 1776 a is telling the story of America's first meme. I didn't learn any American history. I'm not going to start today. They handed out some shit to some people, I guess. Just like there's some historian, Les Linger's like, you fucking piece of shit. No, no, no. My understanding of 1776 is that it's a John Boyce piece. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With the really long football fields. No, so this movie, it's called On This Day, 1776. America's first meme is born. When Thomas Paine arrives from England, he is encouraged by Benjamin Franklin to write what others hesitate to say. The resulting pamphlet sends ripples through from the colonies to the other side of the Atlantic, and what was once unthinkable becomes irrefutable. As in, I don't know, he's a huge fucking hack. There are some really good bits in it, like Thomas Payne, the collar of his shirt changes between shots. They have to constantly cut shots early, because the mouth don't move right. The model breaks down after six seconds or whatever. so it's really expensive to have really long shots. There's a great bit in it where they hand out common sense, and as they hand it out, as they pick it up, it goes from saying America to like... Just like Cthulhu language because... Well, unintentionally kind of apropos, I would say. Yeah, but apparently they're releasing it on Netflix's YouTube. Oh, God. On Netflix's YouTube? Yeah, it's like really like the family... That sentence sucks. It's like the family guy Ringo Starr thing with like we'll put the song on the fridge but i haven't seen more of it they put out a few bits of it and then they just stopped releasing it probably because of all the comments that said this looks like dog shit kill yourself like it's mostly just that so like i the thing is like you could if it didn't have this insane cost and and an ethical problem associated with it you could convince me that like that one marvel opening for um whatever the fuck it was with the scrolls right where it's unsettling and it changes a little bit every couple of seconds what is this there was there was a doctor strange it might have been doctor well if it was doctor strange that wouldn't have been very helpful i thought it was like there was a marvel tv show where the opening uh because it's a show i haven't watched anything after um what's it like the scroll it was secret invasion yeah secret invasion which involves the scrolls right yeah and so the opening for that uh was it with the early version of like ai video generation and it is uncomfortable oh i remember and and it's changing a lot and you can't keep a stable image and it's like well you know there are a bunch of problems both like environmentally and ethically from a plagiarism standpoint that should stop this from happening. But aesthetically, this does make sense for this show. Why the fuck would you need that for Thomas Paine's common sense? It's just like a bad aesthetic. What the fuck are you doing? Well, it's because you're a fucking hack. Yeah. Okay, well, yes. No, that is a good- It's also just what pride do you have in your work if you put this out? If I was a filmmaker and it looked like this, I would just stop making movie. It completely devalues whatever catalog he has. I mean, I like Cod Stealing. Yeah, I mean, I actually like some of Aronofsky's stuff, but if you know anything about him at all, like, this makes total sense. The guy is just a dumbest bitch. Has he done anything good after Black Swan? I liked Cod Stealing. No one else liked it. I haven't seen that, so. I mean, he did The Whale. I haven't seen The Whale. I was going to see Cod Stealing. I just never got around to it. It seemed like it could be good. It's exactly that kind of movie. it's exactly the kind of wrestler came out after black swan what was that the wrestler came out after black swan i think i never saw that doesn't matter he's got some he's got some okay movies but he also steals he loves stealing like half of his career is well there you go satoshi khan like well there you go it's very appropriate i also love the idea that they used ai for the opening of secret invasion which had like samuel l jackson in it i know like very expensive actors also years of footage they could just cut together without spending any money i don't know it's i think it's the thing where it's like i i've been trying to like figure out exactly why because i've felt this and a lot of people have felt that ai just feels bad and i i i've drilled down i think on on like as much as i can because there's so many different parts of it that feel bad but i feel like there has to be like a source of the bad feeling and like i think the bad feeling with ai is if you put aside the environmental factors because of course that is like one of the main ultimate bad things but the reason why it personally feels bad in the world is it just it is constantly pushed onto us in a way that it's like oh you you're gonna love this ai it's gonna be here you're gonna not everything's going to be ai it's gonna take your job uh you you should consulted about what temperature it is outside uh it can tell you if a glove is good for snow uh it's like it's stuff like that example yeah yeah but it's like stuff like that it feels like it is just like people that the tech world is like you will like ai and you will not complain about it and if you do we are the victims and that's why i think it feels bad i can't like i actually do think that leads into one of my definite predictions which is when ai shits itself and dies because it i think it's going to end up being on device or really expensive like expensive in a way that just no sane person would pay for i can't wait for the articles and boosters where it's like look what you did millennials killed it no it really it's gonna be like millennials killed it like look we had this amazing thing that sometimes got things right sometimes and cost it costs ten dollars to make one dollar and coders were able to write at an indeterminately faster speed and after you were done ransacking all of gardens you went to ai yeah yeah i can't like get like gary v or maybe the other one of the gary's will have an article about like oh you've never lied before what's really what's it's just it's people without culture or sensuality trying to do both i think the ai video doesn't look good because it looks it looks like a next netflix movie in that it's got this kind of pallid color palette but also when people look at each other they're not looking in each other's eyes yeah that's all yeah it's just like and the shadows are off like they are in a bunch of like Netflix features now, like the shadows are really off and it's really off putting. And so nothing looks like a movie anymore. And AI kind of triples down on that where the lighting is bad. The shadows are off. But to me, the like the issue is AI writing is grotesquely bad. And I say that not because it is like I've had writers submit to me pieces that from a technical perspective are worse than if an AI had generated the piece. but like it's great i mean it's you're a new writer that's why yeah um dude i'm right here but like but like the problem is that like their writing has like character right and their writing has a distinct voice and it needs to be honed and it needs to be refined or whatever but like ai doesn't have character it doesn't have a voice and i don't mean that because it's a machine i mean that because i have read thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of words written by ai and it all sounds the exact fucking same yeah and so when i see a tweet or i see like that editorial i mentioned from cleveland.com i just see a tweet or a snippet from an article and i can immediately tell it's ai because it has this like banal voiceless kind of I'll have that same thing at the end too imagine just talking, I'm American so imagine a hamburger the way an article will end by saying it's not a hamburger it's a lifestyle it always has that one thing at the end the ultimate tell it's not just the food, it's yummy that's something I feel like Caleb, you and I have talked a lot about on our show Kill the Computer we've sort of peeked into the world of people dating AI a lot and whenever we read people talking about or to their AI partner. You read these conversations and it's, I don't see a human quality in this, but yet this person is human. If my partner ever talked to me like that, I would shoot myself tonight. There's no humanity in it. And it's very weird. It's weird to see that people see humanity in it because to me, I am very clearly reading generated text from a machine. Yeah, I also like when people like, yeah, I went and talked to ChatGPT about my relationship problems. That is just a breakup. Just you, if you find yourself going to chat GPT to ask it for coaching through a breakup or like, is my partner right here? Just, just fucking. I do love those. I do love those, the specifically the, it's my, am I in the right, but like not going to Reddit, but going to chat GPT. The software that will never tell me I'm wrong. My God, what do you do if it tells you you're wrong? the regenerate button you're fine yeah yeah good i'm changing you've seen the people that are trying to date the new uh gpt model where it used to always tell them everything they wanted to hear yeah there's that one woman that was like it was like i i need the chat gpt said something like i need to be clear like i'm not gonna rescue you i'm not gonna save you or whatever she was like upset about it it's so fun you're you're talking about that the hashtag keep 4-0 uh like the movement yeah that i've been digging into those people yeah so i've been doing enough of that that like my phone gives me notifications from these subreddits of people complaining of that chat gpt and it's just it's just like one after another of like them threatening to like fly a plane into sam malt man yeah there's one there's one where it's like a hamster standing outside of a building that says open ai on it it's off on fire it says never four oh get you know how you know how like a wine mom with like blue hair was one of the people that went to nick fuentes's house and like got pepper spray this is like that version of it it's like the the median average like random person in these AI communities is going to actually... I probably shouldn't be saying this. You know what I'm going to say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can bet on that on Polymarket, dude. Yeah, yeah. Check out Sam Altman on Polymarket. Yeah, and as we wrap up here, I just looked up the hashtag Keep4O thing, and I'm looking at this image where it's just people running with... It looks like a relay race, I guess, that says Keep4O. They keep dropping the baton. we just wanted the one that worked you know that's how batons work but my favorite part of this image which i'm going to share with all of you is um the fact that there's a guy with like they've all got helmets for some reason and their their arms are going the wrong way one of the helmets just has a mouth on it and someone has a they have an eyebrow by their nose I also like that in this image the one that they say is the one that works is the one that's not running in the track batons don't function you hold them this is maybe one of the greatest posts I've ever seen one of the greatest AI posts ever it's so long it's got every quality of an incredible post that you need here alright let's wrap it there June, Caleb, where can people find you? We do... I feel like I was more annoying than you on this episode. No, no. I introed the episode being mean to Ed. That's good forever. I guess I can do it. I'm bad at pitching, but what I will say is Caleb and I, we do a show called Kill the Computer. It's a show about how the internet sort of influences and... Actually, I don't know. This is edited, right? Caleb, how about you do it. Can you cut me out of it? I'm bad. I need to work on my pitches. I need to work on this. I would say it's a show where we just kind of look at how the internet stuff, internet culture spills out into the real world and how it affects us on a personal level. I guess the most highbrow way to say it is just different subculture analysis of how different kinds of people use the internet. Absolutely. Hell yeah. And Arif, people can find you where? At wide left dot football, where I talk about football. Yeah. And I'm just going to say to the people that really didn't enjoy the Super Bowl episode last year. Like, you have any idea how close I was to just only talking about football for like 15 straight? Being like, do you hear they released Tyreek Hill? No, no, no, no. We're going to end the episode there. Thank you all for listening to Better Offline. there will be a monologue this week i assume download the episodes read the newsletter i'm and goodbye thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.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 betteroffline 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 iHeartRadio 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. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on my iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Thank you.