Hater Season: Henry Zebrowski

15:06Ed: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 the definition of office culture because it was just kind of work propaganda.

15:27Henry Zebrowski:It's doing what your boss wants you to do.

15:29Ed:Yes.

15:30Henry Zebrowski:That is what office culture means.

15:32Ed:Which means you're living in a dictator.

15:34Henry Zebrowski:You're living in his reality.

15:37Ed:And on top of that, it's like, 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

16:04Ed: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

16:30Henry Zebrowski:where it's the we work of beer yes it really is though yeah it's like the beer slop yep it's I find it, we are not living up to their expectations, Ed.

16:46Ed:Yeah.

16:46Henry Zebrowski: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. It is. 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 arguments 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.

17:23Ed:so there are enough workers yeah 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 office culture's importance that everyone knows what 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 is 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't have any of that shit they were just like you need to do this enough or we fucking fire you it's a pr firm truly nightmarish place but it didn't try no one tried to pretend like we're a family here no we're not this is jail unless you're working at a not-for-profit

18:18Henry Zebrowski: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 in 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, 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 are applying a character arc to us.

19:05Henry Zebrowski:They are saying, they're trying to tell us what we are going to 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 going to make us sick they're going to 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

19:45Ed: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 like you just don't

20:03Henry Zebrowski: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.

20:31Ed: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. you want to hear vcs talk for hours and say multiple slurs well guess what we 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 everyone tell me about it dude what's your clubhouse strategy what's your every but you how many times i heard

21:08Henry Zebrowski: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

21:23Ed:15 years ago just like the good doctor i am a podcaster

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24:10Henry Zebrowski:How is TD making banking more human with less bank talk and more real talk? less your call is important to us and more how can we help it's getting more of what you want and less of what you don't that's how td's making banking more human

24:28Ed:yeah it's but it was also just a 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

25:20Henry Zebrowski: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 from the get.

25:44Ed:Yeah, they wanted to own the next internet. That was very much what Zuckerberg wanted.

25:48Henry Zebrowski:That was the idea, and they would again set all the rules. They'd set all the rules. They'd already set up all the real estate parameters. You'd show up into this 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 gonna be hard to get these fuckers back in the office these fuckers went home and they're fucking enjoying their fucking meal and they're

26:20Ed:just doing they're doing as much work if not more and they seem happy and fuck that shit fucking

26:24Henry Zebrowski:hate i hate the fact i can't 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, like, that's what I think Gord turns into, right? I think it could go over 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. Then maybe if we build it all in the metaverse, just like in that great book, Snow Crash.

26:56Henry Zebrowski:Anybody read the end? is that 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.

27:33Ed:It's really funny as well because everything you're saying is true, but they left out because their lack of connection to anything. It working. They didn't check if it worked. They also left us out. What about us? It also didn't work.

27:47Henry Zebrowski:That's the best part. And that's the best part is that what I don't know us. Human beings are fascinating. 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 they 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's And look at us.

28:26Henry Zebrowski: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.

28:51Ed:I definitely, like I didn't get particularly political until after that i will fully admit to being completely ignorant of stuff so 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 honestly kissing up they said three years

29:26Henry Zebrowski: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 oh yeah i finally felt like i'm correct i'm correct yeah 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're talking about Ed, I actually got turned on 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 it's 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 is that's really difficult

30:30Ed:like that's 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 they're expensive suck and they scare my dogs

30:42Henry Zebrowski: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

30:54Ed:aids i don't need another one yeah also i don't know none of this works like just none of it

31:03Henry Zebrowski: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

31:16Ed: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

32:13Henry Zebrowski:how you notice that too right they all are like all this stuff about ai and they project all of these things 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 can't they have to kick it to some guy in the philippines to dry it every drive it if it gets specifically stuck with with waymo that's not

32:57Ed: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.

33:27Ed: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.

33:45Henry Zebrowski: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 i my my whole view one of my more i guess okay I guess they 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.

34:27Henry Zebrowski:That there's like a, like in terms of just the observer gets in the way of the thing that we need to be looking at. Right? Like we are, there's a part of our consciousness that we will never duplicate.

34:40Ed:Ever. We just won't. We don't even understand thinking.

34:43Henry Zebrowski: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 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? Like, 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.

35:12Ed:with the software engineers i found that there's this real we're seeing this schism between those types of basement dweller incel 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 the art people like the truth

35:32Henry Zebrowski: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

35:49Ed:was the summation of what code is is not nick nick's a rush 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 it's a there is a cultural awareness there is the awareness of how one constructs stuff if you 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

36:15Henry Zebrowski: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 Thiel really wanted to take over the very globe yes to my mind he has to have more like a thousand year view like with the old like the other way that they they view the world more in like China and stuff like that where they he needs more of a longer view of who's going to take that forward but Henry that's not American capitalism american tell me about it bro i know about it i got fucking agents fucking breathing down my neck every day all right and i do podcasting i can't imagine what 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

37:22Ed: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

37:46Henry Zebrowski:if this works ed does this i'm a ceo that's what i've learned we know i've learned about being a ceo what is that he the only job replaceable by ai is a ceo oh 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

38:26Ed: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 going to check that on air and let's see Laceworks so this company yeah Lacework so this company was famous for doing an event where they handed out$30 ,000 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 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

39:06Henry Zebrowski:real what is do they not at some point it has to almost be purposeful it has to be purposeful right like 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 gonna happen and we all know it's not gonna 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 And it feels like 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 that they never have to get it done.

39:49Ed: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 at them - Oh, they're morons. If you look at them as dipshits without much strategy, the world actually makes way more sense.

40:13Henry Zebrowski:This is what we've been saying on the show, this idea of 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.

40:25Ed:Yeah, and those are the humans that run these companies. Because if you've ever heard Satya Nadella talk, 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 and this is i'm so 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 uh-huh yeah like the oscars music why doesn't

41:04Henry Zebrowski:no one ever just say just straight to sit up and be like, excuse me, sir. What in the living hell are you talking about? I know. 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.

41:28Ed: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 is extremely important okay

41:39Henry Zebrowski: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 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

42:05Ed:It takes a lot of effort and work

42:07Henry Zebrowski:As a CEO to go

42:09Ed:Hey do this

42:11Henry Zebrowski:Hey have you guys thought about not having buttons On this You know what I mean like that I love that stuff where it's like Steve Jobs is a genius And it's just like Make it not have buttons

42:22Ed: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 touch screens 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 What if something worked?

42:49Henry Zebrowski:Why? That's another 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.

43:32Henry Zebrowski:The margins are fucking ridiculous.

43:34Ed:It's short-terminism because if you think of it, you probably wouldn't make money immediately from saving the environment.

43:40Henry Zebrowski:You wouldn't make it yet. No, you sell some penguins. Honestly, dude. There's ways. You're talking to a capitalist. Just get some penguins. Round up a bunch of good, healthy penguins. You're selling them to an elementary school. It's stuff like that. You do certain things. There's ways to do it in fun ways. There's fun things.

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47:12Henry Zebrowski:How is TD making banking more human with less bank talk and more real talk? Less, your call is important to us, and more, how can we help? It's getting more of what you want and less of what you don't. That's how TD is making banking more human.

47:32Ed:i also just think solar power is kind of magical and batteries are kind of magical like like that stuff but in 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 invest in 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 tick tock and hamburger i guess uh i mean you saw the did you read that epstein file that one

48:32Henry Zebrowski: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 a the same they're doing they're advertising to the people who should be super angry that's exactly what we're gonna 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 way more than this because what they've just done is we have we do actually our our countries actually which i'm certain you're well aware of ed is uh is kind of in a deep turmoil right now and there's protests in every single major city that exists almost 24 7 and they're just not talking about it and that's really the the issue is that they're just they're just trying to delete that out of

49:29Ed:the 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 but it's easy to

49:41Henry Zebrowski:do the fucking fat boy actually ran on a really good 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 that they get because they don't buy groceries

50:16Ed: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.

50:41Henry Zebrowski:No.

50:41Ed: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 got to go to the bathroom. I got to go do my laundry. I got to go unload the dishwasher. Maybe the dishwasher is like 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. Mark Zuckerberg says you want to be friends with it.

51:18Henry Zebrowski: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, being like, and I keep saying this places, and people are like, oh, well, you know, but they're pretty smart. And I'm like, I don't think you. 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 know how to, it is, we have so endless amounts of examples of human conversation.

52:07Ed: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 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.

52:52Ed: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, eh, it's kind of like that. You know, sort of fucking like,

53:04Henry Zebrowski:was as you know meanwhile we are heading into i love you know i'm a big i love terrence mckenna and that kind of shit and i love his concept of the idea of we're in this like novelty zone okay go on tell me more that get 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.

53:49Henry Zebrowski: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 we are in the 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 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

54:28Ed:it's going to change how we behave yeah it is going to it's going it already is it's going to

54:33Henry Zebrowski:change and i think that that that is kind of what 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 the insurrection and another country uh you 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 they posting insurrection yes they didn't understand they were they couldn't understand that they were being history they were 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 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

55:41Ed:an attack on the very fabric of society we used to get together and hang a bunch of guys you know

55:46Henry Zebrowski:i mean it was like a thing that we used to do and now that it's not i i feel like that's up what we're seeing here is is this effect is that we're all on camera and so it's gonna affect how we

55:58Ed: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 it's 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 the situations we've got ourselves in where look everything's trump 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 in 11 years Amazon is going to spend 200 billion dollars in CapEx in 2026 the actual historic comparisons are used as ways to placate 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 advocate 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

57:46Henry Zebrowski: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 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 say 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 and said we're going to do a naked bike ride and said we're going to do this thing like literally like i know that's like 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 said it like i've taught myself a lot of economics

59:12Ed: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 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

1:00:01Henry Zebrowski:you i saw a really interesting statement that i 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 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. Alright? Why do you care? I feel like you care. You know? Buy more fucking software.

1:00:35Yeah.

1:00:36Henry Zebrowski:Shut the fuck up. Right? Just shut the fuck up. Whatever. Just shut. Like that's and 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 i i care i care about the epstein files i care about them a great deal fun fact henry um

1:01:06Ed: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. Here's the 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

1:01:46Henry Zebrowski:see my own my own pet obsession is epstein's connections to the comedy world which is just oh i haven't looked at those 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 j 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 Interlochen that trained Chapel Rhone and all those people that did make all these superstars.

1:02:34Henry Zebrowski: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.

1:02:45Ed:And J-Mail was great as well. You could just go in there and type the name of anyone you meet and hopefully they're not in there. You just do that, man.

1:02:53Henry Zebrowski:I'd recommend you do that.

1:02:54Ed:That's all I do. That's all I like every time I meet a new person I'm like yeah 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 Nothing in the tech media really About it it's

1:03:21Henry Zebrowski:Well then you also look at his connections with

1:03:23Ed:moot is all of that kind of stuff but i'll yeah yeah the awesome to me i always believe all that

1:03:29Henry Zebrowski: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

1:03:39Ed:means the world to me it's same like i love my listeners like i adore them i love it and this

1:03:44Henry Zebrowski:someone broke me down about like the secret history of 4chan which is just the idea of that well at the time christopher pool 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. Epstein had nothing to do with 4chan, but then it was interesting how that took off because of the Steve Bannon Epstein connections to him.

1:04:20Henry Zebrowski: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 q anon 4chan pizza gate stuff by using the pizza gate 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

1:04:39Ed:none of this generative ai's 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

1:04:57Henry Zebrowski: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 supermodel sex slaves that he would make endless children with.

1:05:40Henry Zebrowski: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 doing that.

1:05:48Ed:No.

1:05:50Henry Zebrowski:He's looking great now, though.

1:05:52Ed:Well, I mean, I don't know if I agree that Jeffrey Epstein looks great. I don't know if I... What are we talking about?

1:05:58Henry Zebrowski: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 it. We high five. Hang out with him. David Bowie. Michael Jackson.

1:06:14Ed:Oh, God. Well, Henry...

1:06:15Henry Zebrowski:Osama Bin Laden.

1:06:16Ed:and finally we're here they're all there um all right all right henry we're gonna wrap it there

1:06:24Henry Zebrowski:henry where can people find you go and check it out and the last podcast and 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 it is a dark and evil version of an lpn event rpg playthrough hell yeah we'll get some links at that in the notes uh you

1:07:00Ed: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 going to 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.

1:07:26Ed: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 matasowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot 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.

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