AI Creativity Doesn't Exist With Chloe Radcliffe and Ed Ongweso Jr.

Welcome and guest introductions

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2:23CallZone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course, your host, Ed Zitron.

2:38Better Offline. I am back in the iHeartRadio studio bringing you it all live to tape technically from here in beautiful New York City. And today I'm joined by two returning angels of the Better Offline Choir from CES 2026 and very likely 2027 as well. On my right, I have the wonderful Chloe Radcliffe. Hello. Actress and author and writer and everything at this point. Yeah, I haven't written a book, but I write a lot. No, you're writing scripts and shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess, I guess, yes.

3:09Yeah, writer. And top of the, top of the show, you have a show coming up. I do have a show coming up. Yeah, I'm doing my solo show. It's called Cheat. It's about how I have, uh-oh, cheated in all of my relationships. The show does not condone cheating. I think it is always bad. I think it always hurts somebody. But I think it happens all the fucking time. And nobody's willing to stick a microphone in front of their face and say that they did it. And I happen to be the one. Anyway, I'm doing it August 19th and 20th at Joe's Pub in New York City. It's going to be, I think it's really going to be amazing. I've seen it. It's fantastic.

3:40I think it's going to be amazing, dude. I think it's going to be fun. I think, look, I'm very proud of the show. I have seen it. I've seen it hit people. I watched the old version. It was fantastic. And that was two years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, of course, Mr. Edwin Anguaso, Jr., writer and critic. How are you doing, Eddie? I'm doing pretty good. You know, having a nice day. Ed and I are such different paces. Well, I've been up since five in the morning because I've been doing media stuff all day. But that's the power of Zitron.

AI in Hollywood and stand-up comedy

4:07But we're going to start with you, Chloe. I wanted to actually ask you a very direct question. So you're going Hollywood. You've been in the acting business. What have you seen of AI in Hollywood? Because if you read crap like The Ankler, they're like, it's everywhere. Every single thing is written in AI now. What have you seen, if anything? It is, I mean, it's carving out jobs like VFX and animation, for sure. There's a bunch of stuff in production, particularly in post-production, that is really, really, really being eaten by AI. Right.

4:37I don't know any screenwriters who are, like, actively using AI. It's totally possible that people are in the background and they're just not talking about it. I had, so I, you know, at my core, I'm a stand-up and I come from stand-up. And I was like, no stand-ups are using AI. We all think it's fucking dumb. And then an exec told me recently that she hears in so many meetings with stand-ups that stand-ups all use AI to write their jokes or help them write their jokes, which is so fucking insane.

5:09It's so dumb. And it's also like, well, that's why, I mean, I do think that there's a lot of comedy that's starting to sort of coalesce. It's starting to sound the same a little bit. And I'm like, I wonder if that's why. So what's interesting about that, though, is because we're already seeing a monoculture develop outside of AI. That people are trying to do the same thing and box it up and sell it a million times. So I'm kind of unsurprised the idea that stand-ups would write jokes using AI. It's so embarrassing. I want to, I want, if you're a listener of this show and you know one, please email me easy at betteroffline.com. Yeah, see something, say something. Yeah, this is important.

5:39And I do, look, I understand the idea of like having something to bounce your ideas off of to say like, what are other, you know, help me brainstorm angles on this concept. Help me brainstorm takes. Like, I understand that impulse, but it comes down to the core debate around using AI in art, which is, do we value that art is made by humans? And like, I just at my core, I do. And do we value that when you're using AI, you know, as a brainstorming tool, what you are, I guess, I guess there's the argument that you're like sort of weirdly using other humans because it's fundamentally eating ideas that other people have had.

6:22Right. And so you are sort of, like, I can wrap my head around how somebody justifies it. I don't mean to be like, these fucking tools, you know, like. I mean, let me do that for you. Yeah, great. Because just to be clear, I think if having not done stand up, but just witnessing enough of it, I feel like the only reason you wouldn't run your material by another stand up is they might not find it funny. And they might give you direct feedback that you don't like or you don't respect them. Like, it's one of the two, surely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, I think the more senior you get in the industry, the less you're running your material by people and the more you are just trying it on stage for the first time, definitely.

7:04But, yeah, you know, like, to me, so much of this is, it really just comes down to the core of it matters if it is human versus a computer. I care less if it is a computer. I'm impressed that we made a big database machine. I think the database machine is very cool. Wow. That is, it is so big. It's just search two at that point. It's search two. Yeah, exactly. And I do really care about the texture that comes from a person themselves. Yeah, and also stand-up is about the brittleness of human life.

7:37Like, it's about, like, I don't. Absolutely. Oh, totally. I mean, like, an AI can tell you an amalgamation of what other people have said about anxiety. But an AI does not experience anxiety and will never actually have a personal touch, a personal understanding of it. It's not going to push back. It's never going to say, yeah, dude, that sucks. No. That blows. Oh, I mean, also because, in no small part, because a lot of what it is suggesting sucks. Yes. And from a stand-up, from a stand-up writing perspective. It's also a glazing machine. It exists to make you feel good about it, which is not what you want.

8:10From the stand-ups I know, including you, it's like, you don't want people to just be like, that was great. Well, no. Oh, stand-ups want that desperately. Are you kidding? No, no, no. I would actually say that's sort of the number one thing stand-ups want. Yes, yes, yes. But when you're on stage, you want that. Off stage, when you want the joke to be good, if you want to run material and get it better. Well, so now what you're coming to is, again, this is actually, it's a very human principle. And that principle is, do you want to push yourself to create art that is the best it possibly could be?

8:41Or are you satisfied with something that is, that serves the purpose of getting a laugh or insert whatever, right? That serves the purpose. Going back to Hollywood, are you satisfied with something that serves the purpose of moving pictures in front of your eyes for 20 to 50 minutes, right? Right. Or 20 to 120 minutes, whatever. Or do you want, do you have the drive within yourself to make something that is earnestly creative and boundary-pushing and interesting and feels new?

9:14It feels like a new take on an old topic, on a thing that we've all thought, you know, that's making people in the audience feel seen, that's making yourself feel seen, whatever. And that's, it's the, that line is where, is to me what divides people who I respect versus people whose efforts I don't respect as much. And the people whose efforts I don't respect as much wind up oftentimes falling in the category of hack. And hack is built to crush. And that is the only purpose of hack.

9:46What hack is to do is to be the broadest possible take or broadest possible reference or broadest possible punchline or broadest possible topic that the most people can relate to so that it crushes. But to me, it crushes without a soul. And it's, it's content versus art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you a machine? And it's kind of a funny version.

Substack and AI detection tools

10:06Ed, you're on Substack, of course, you might have seen this. My favorite version of this right now is Substack in their first good product move in possibly ever. They added something called Pangram AI, which is like a decent AI check. And none of these things are unilaterally correct. And so you can hit a button that says check for AI. You'd think a thousand nine elevens happened on Substack because people are like, I can't believe this. I can't believe that. They're shaming me. They're shaming me for using AI. And it's beautiful. It is beautiful. I sadly found out a bunch of essays I've quoted at length because they were, they had, you know, they're like academic reports.

10:42And I was like, oh, you know, this is, you know, it's, it's tears and, and whatever. But it points at the direction of something that I was interested in following up or written with generative AI. Hit up the authors. They have not responded.

10:58Like most of Substack is, my girlfriend pointed this out to me. This is her idea. Just, just give her credit. But she found this and showed it to me. And it's great because there are these people who are like, actually, it's unfair to point this out. Would you judge someone if they used autocorrect? No, that's a different thing. That's not the same thing at all. Yeah, that's not, autocorrect is not an idea. I think it's fair to say that if you are presenting this as if this requires your attention to read at length, just as I'm hyperlinking all my sources, just as I'm articulating all the sources of my thinking.

11:29If there's another author, you should know that. And I should know. The thing is as well, it's like, you can kind of tell, and I say this is someone who writes way too long. So whenever a regular person starts writing 4,000 word essays, you're like, uh-uh, it's the three things for glorious bastards. You don't have any audience. It's just like, well, yeah, why are you doing this? And it's like, the first link is this. It's like, okay, motherfucker, I know what you're up to. And it's like alarming how much of financial journalism is this now. And it's really interesting watching the fracturing here because you've got some people like, I've used it for search.

12:05And like, I really shouldn't. I use it for brainstorming. And then the people who are getting the most angry, like, oh, you use it for everything. You use it to find out how to go to the toilet. And now they're exposed. Right. They're outsourcing their decision-making to AI. Yes. And the funny thing is, I don't know, if you're so sure of how good this is, why are you so anxious? Why are you so upset about this? That's funny. That's such a funny. Yeah, yeah. Just stand behind it then. If you think this is good enough to run your work or your business. And I see these, I see the most insane.

12:37That's such a funny take. Well, my favorite sub-stack one is people are like, well, I have ADHD and autism. And actually, you can't judge me for this. And I'm like, well, guess what I've got both of. I got the full fucking deck here, motherfucker. I got both those. What are you going to do now? And what their argument is, is it helps with executive function. Oh, it helps with this. It's like, yeah, it doesn't. You're off. You're kind of, you think it's helping with that. You can't tell it's writing for you. And I think it's just watching people trying to justify this in all walks of life is so funny.

13:12Because again, it's like, if this is such a great thing and you're so proud of it, why aren't you just with your whole chest being like, yeah, I actually think this is great. And it's also funny, there are a few people who are out with their chest being like, yeah, I wrote this with AI. And it sucks. Yeah, it actually sucks. I've been still on the lookout this year and last year for like, okay, what are some interesting workflows that people have created where they're writing at length with AI? And most of the time, what they think is interesting is they've asked it a bunch of long, drawn out, well-crafted prompts.

13:47But the prose is horrible. It's still defined by like the limits of the models where they don't really want to take a stance. So they're exhaustively like documenting both sides of any discussion or debate. That's not really what you want in writing. And it's also just, it's boring cakes that we've heard before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of by nature. And on top of that, the way they lead into every point has the same, this is one thing I've noticed, that has the same dramatic weight no matter what the point is. And it's always way too much. It's always like, then the most important thing happened. And it will be a report I cited in a single sentence in 7,000 words.

14:19It's like, oh, the BIS report from this. It's just like, okay, well, you took 300 words to lead to a single thing and then didn't build on it at all. Because you didn't read it. Because you didn't, you definitely didn't read the thing because you definitely didn't write this. And because the AI model doesn't have its own personal judgment calls about what is and isn't the most important. And then if the person is completely outsourcing their decision making, then they are also not making those judgment calls. You know, yeah, your moral values don't come into it. And that's an important part of writing, especially if you're doing something where you're trying to argue what people should believe in, right?

14:53If I can't sense any sort of urgency and you're hedging constantly, and you're using an AI to hedge, what's the point of that? What I think it is, is that, so I understandably, these people don't want to talk to me very much. Right. Probably due to the things like- They want to talk to their AI. Yeah, they want to talk to their AI. But the few that will engage with me, they'll say, well, I take an idea to it and I go back and forth. Then I edit what it says. I'm just like, then you're just copy pasting their words. I'm like, well, what's the difference between that and a human editor? The answer is, when I speak to Matt Hughes, he's a human being with the same demented mind as me.

15:28And we workshop ideas- I'm so sorry, Matt. No, Matt Hughes is a fucking legend. He's the better offline legend of reality. And he and I will workshop things. And sometimes we'll be like, I don't know about that, man. I don't know what that makes sense. And that's the most valuable thing in the world. That is more being told bad idea or I don't really get it is the best feedback in the world. The best thing in the world is just someone being like, I don't know. You derisively talk about yourself sometimes, Chloe, and say, oh, well, I'm not an expert. Actually, being able to explain something to someone who is a layman is actually way more useful than to an expert.

16:02Because otherwise- Thank you. I am a hero. You are. Thank you. But it really is it. Oh, also, I think a relationship where somebody is able and willing to critique someone else's work is actually one of the most respectful relationships because it is entrusting the creator, the writer, the thinker, whatever. It is inherently trusting that that person can handle the criticism and can better their work. And it is, to me, it feels so much better when somebody looks at me and is like, hell, yeah, what you did is like, it's really not good enough.

16:37Yeah. Because I'm like, thank fucking God. I'll fix it. I want to make it better. And then the converse of that is when you impress them, you've actually impressed them. It's true. When they're like, damn, this bangs. It's honest. All right, folks, I'm here talking to you again about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. We've got a little under two months' worth of summer left, so it's worth looking at some of the new lightweight, down-packable puffers for the fall. I, personally, am going to be picking up one of their new non-iron cotton Oxford dress shirts, as apparently that's what you wear at the stock exchange, not a t-shirt.

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17:47Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash better. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. Why did I search the internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that.

18:20Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Health care just got less painful. Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story. I'm Ron Moore. And I'm Kelly Moore. And starting our own business in our 50s was a little scary, but exciting. The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships.

18:51We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients. We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me. Pay it forward. If you work to give, you just see the world differently. I'm going to help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me. To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

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Taste and generative video quality

19:57And the other thing that these AI people, you ever see them mention taste online? These AI freaks are like, oh, we've got to bring taste into it. And the way they use taste is like how the Ferengi from Star Trek, The Next Generation, talk about, I don't know, everything. Or just like guys online. I retro inform you, I do not understand that reference. Don't worry. Don't worry. The one girl, the girl who works in Hollywood is like, I don't know. No, it's fine. It's a really simple comparison. It's guys online who refer to women as females.

20:28It's this thing. Females. Yeah, we need taste in our models. And what they mean is discernment, but they're not smart enough to actually realize that. And you can't train discernment. Discernment is contextual and cultural and all these other things. And when you say this to AI people, they're like, you're just being superior. You're just being superior to people you don't really understand. And it's like, they're being superior. And also, show me some stuff that you've written that actually is good. So this, okay. So this actually will go back to your very initial question to me was about, I sort of answered about standup and not Hollywood more broadly.

21:02But Hollywood, from a creative standpoint, so it's hollowing out post-production stuff. But just actually, before I forget, is that stuff it's hollowing out, chat GPT and stuff like that? Or is that another kind of AI? I don't know. Because that's the kind of thing. And that's the thing, like, because all the AI gets conflated. Anyway, I talked over your question. I apologize. No, no, no, no, no. You're good.

21:25When I think about, like, the actual creative output within Hollywood, because that's what people, right? People are like, we're going to make a whole movie with AI. We're going to make a whole, whatever. You're going to be able to make, it's, I mean, it's the famous video of, what was it, Tom Cruise? Oh, the Brad Pitt, which actually ended up being green screen and, like, a bunch of, like, non-AI stuff. Yeah. But the idea that we will make things that people can watch that are fully, purely AI, or that are some vast, vast, vast majority AI, is fundamentally going to suck.

21:58It is what, right? That's what you're saying. Or it's going back to what you're saying. And I agree that, like, that will happen. I do think that that will happen. I think it will happen from outside of the current studios and guild, creative guild model. I think that, you know, somebody in some warehouse will create an AI model that will be putting out, right? They maybe already are, right? Well, they just put out one and it looks like a dog shit. Oh, is it that old generative AI film that just came out? I'm going to look this up while we're talking. But it will get good, right? Like, there will be people who are able to, you know, fill your entire, your entire short form feed can be filled with stuff that looks kind of, AI verticals that look kind of like Hollywood, right?

22:41And it is going to be crap. Whatever, to whatever degree it already exists, it is. And what is lacking there is, it's exactly what you were saying. It is the discernment for people to say, to stand up and say, this is not interesting enough for me to count as my entertainment. Yeah. And I think that people have less of that pushback now. I think they have less willingness to push back like that now. And I think, I think that people have less of that willingness to push back against, to employ discernment now than ever.

23:15And I actually lay the blame of that at the feet of the endless scroll feed. Yes. Not at the feet of AI. Like, I think that AI sort of came in and was this incredibly powerful tool, but because our standards for entertainment have already kind of been nuked by the endless scroll feed, now this incredibly powerful tool can come in and produce stuff that's shit and we're not going to push back. My controversial perspective on that is I think streaming media is a bad idea. I think streaming media, I think Netflix, streaming media is a terrible idea because it's both what you're saying, Chloe, and just the overall sense that there is unlimited content.

23:54So the sense that you could just build as much of it as possible and it'll be fine. I will say, I don't think it's going to take over just because it's too expensive. It's also, it's so hard to actually make a cogent video of longer than a few minutes. And do you not think that it will get good enough in a year? The problem is, is that there's a bunch of psychological things with movies that they'll have trouble really. Totally, totally. But there is, I think over in Asia, I forget where, they've got a lot of these ones which are coming out, which are just like tight, like short melodramas that are watched for you.

24:26I mean, yes. I've been seeing these on my feed where it feels like they catch on not because they're good, but because it's absurd. Like there's this one with this black girl was a mermaid and her classmates found out and they're racist. So they're just saying slurs. And I looked in the comments to see, okay, and you know, I get a sense of, is this viral? Is this getting, are people liking it? And it's mainly just like sort of engagement bait. Also, I've also seen a fair amount of evidence that those things are, like they're paying to push them into the algorithm because there was a big thing, New York Times, I think last year, about like a really successful AI house that was making AI films and the views just randomly crashed.

25:09And I mean, there's this company called Higgsfield AI that's doing really dodgy influencer stuff. They just bought, for those of you listening, the 12 of you will know what I mean. There's this thing called Marcus the Worm, which is a guy in a VR environment going, Robert. Anyway, one of the Marcus accounts sold to Higgsfield AI and it's just AI dog shit. Oh, that guy's an AI guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they just sold it to an AI slop account. And it's really hard to pass the success of them and like how actually, because to your point, Eddie, it's like people are laughing at them because they're like, some of them are so bad.

25:45I think that there is going to be a sort of, I think that there's going to be a split between people who put a premium on something that they know was made by people and people who are completely willing to accept just moving picture on my screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the, well, we're already kind of seeing it more with the Substack stuff, but people are violently rejecting this. And I think what the AI people hope happens is that people are just so beaten down. I get the opposite feeling. People are getting more and more angry.

26:16People are getting more aggressive about it.

Public backlash against artificial intelligence

26:17People are, I mean, there's this whole thing of the, did you see the OpenAI Influencer Day? OpenAI paid for a bunch of influencers to go to like an OpenAI thing in upstate New York. And like, I don't know, walk around being like. Machine tried to do this where they brought them all to the factory and they're like. That was, yeah, when Shein flew them out and they're like, this, look, this isn't a sweatshop. We have air conditioning. It's like, oh yeah, they can't kill themselves. We have nets to catch them. No, but this, it was just like. We don't use any water at this data center.

26:47Come and check it out. But I looked into it and it was mostly influencers who only already did Claude stuff or like OpenAI stuff. So, but the occasional ones that didn't, they had to post videos from like, like a person that said a slur in 2021. Like they were like, I'm very sorry for using chat GPT. I swear to God. I mean, the whole, did you see the Hank Green thing? Oh yeah, I did. Oh, so there's this science communicator. Yeah, the little struggle session. There's some people who are going to email me about this. I'm going to be happy. He's a science communicator. Just to be clear, he's beloved.

27:18He's got a lot of things wrong. He's got things wrong about testosterone and autism. Like I've, and also he has fallen hook, line, and sink out and been sponsored by Control AI, an effective altruist institute. Anyway, during one of his videos, he goes, he just, apropos of nothing, just goes, well, it means this. And thank you for the pushback. And he's like, oh yeah, I was using it for research. And he still to this day is like, yeah, I was losing it, using it for research. I looked at the script. I didn't say that in the script. It's just like, no one says, I appreciate the pushback other than an AI model.

27:50Regular people don't say that in the flow of conversation. But he is basically like, I'm going to shut down this. I'm going to stop producing for a while. I've relied too much on AI. And it's like, it's so bizarre because that, I don't think this is changing. I don't think it's going to become more permissible to use AI. AI is everywhere now, whether you like it or not. But that doesn't mean people are tolerant. People are getting like- Frustrated. Aggressive. Like they're, I don't think the AI industry realizes how angry people are. And to be clear, I'm not encouraging anger or violence or anything like that.

28:22But I don't have to. I think people are already angry. I saw a video from a few months ago of a data center getting canceled. And a guy running outside and going like, hey, it's canceled. And everyone cheering. When OpenAI finally dies, it's going to be like Coruscant at the end of Return of the Jedi and the remake specifically. I hope- Another reference I don't get. I hope- You've never seen Return of the Jedi? Which one is that one? I hope- Jesus Christ. I'm sorry. Everybody, man, all of your nerd fans who are going to come to my show are like, we're canceling those tickets now. And I love nerds and I love you and I'm also a nerd fan.

28:53Yeah, actually, come up to me and tell me the- I will comp you a year's subscription to my premium newsletter if you buy a ticket. I mean it. Oh, wow. That's a big offer. One time when I didn't want to have a conversation with a friend, I asked him to explain the plot of The Matrix to me. Boy, and you could just- And then we burned a couple hours. And then we would get to like, I would be like, and what happened in the next one? I was going through a breakup and I had to hang out with this friend. And I really didn't want to talk about my breakup. And I was like, oh, and what does Trinity do? Anyway. It's like a libertarian mousetrap.

29:25What's the architect? And I kept being like, oh, and what does that symbolize? And he thought I was so interested. What, Zion? Oh, wow. Oh, they're like- Oh, interesting. And you were just inside your head just going, ah. Yeah. But the thing is you could never have a conversation like that with an AI. Well, actually, you could get a boring explanation of The Matrix. Oh, absolutely. But he wouldn't be there. He would, yeah. I could just walk away. Well, now the voice mode, you could probably get that going, right? You could have the conversation with it. Chloe, they got this thing now where they got voice mode for these things and they're all buying little microphones.

29:56Like, I barely even type anymore. Or, you know, it smelled crazy in there also, but they're just sitting there being like, computer, computer, no, add the code now. No, delete that code. Oh, I don't like it, computer. And these motherfuckers never share their code. They never share the software they're building. They're just working on AI for 15 hours a day. So, you know it's shit. You know they don't need anything. You know, and it breaks. So, tell me, okay, wait.

The false promise of email automation

30:17Okay, I just had a friend who works, he works in tech and AI. I don't know. And he was like, my goal is to build an AI agent for myself so that every single morning my AI agent can just tell me what emails are in my inbox and I can tell my agent, you know, what to respond to who and that I never have to be in my inbox. I can just talk to my AI agent. Right. And when he says that, I'm like, honestly, that sounds amazing.

30:48I, I can't. I'm sorry. Emails are not that hard. I, I, yes, I agree. And like, we all deal with emails, but I'm like, it's hard. It's like, that fantasy is very seductive, right? Right. The idea that I can just be like, and tell me what's in my inbox. Yeah. And tell her, uh, I'll, I can do the 24th and, uh, but we need to push it by a half an hour and tell him that, right? Like that is very, it's very, very tempting. I see that. But my thing is like, I feel like if I don't read an email, I don't want to respond to it.

31:23Like, I don't want to just be like dashing stuff off because also if you don't read a contract and you sign it, you're still bound by it. And that's how I feel with my emails. It's like, if my AI agent decides to call someone the wrong name or swear at them or send them an attachment, that's just my last seven years tax returns. Like, I don't know. I don't know what's happening and maybe it will work. And what if they would say that the AI is not going to make those mistakes? I wouldn't believe them. But the other thing is like, how much time are you saving? How much time are you realistically? I'm sorry. Is, is your inbox so, person I've never met, is your inbox so huge?

31:55But this is the thing as well. It's the grand promise of AI. It's like, what are you getting back? What is this saving you? And everywhere I look, it's people are working more. They're not actually saving time. Like the thing, the problems I have in my life don't come from too many emails. I also think as I'm thinking about this for myself, I'm like, I, I think I ingest information so much more clearly when I am sitting in front of the email, reading it, thinking about my response, typing out my response, rather than just sort of having a chat with a robot.

32:26I'm not really clinging to that information and I'm not really having new ideas about, oh fuck, I should actually talk to that other person about this. I should ask them if they have an in here and they, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also this thing where it's like, you know, a lot of the desires and automation are how can we get assistant labor? How can we get some form of slave labor, servant labor? Like what, what shortcut can we do? And I feel like for a lot of the impulses around like making your home a bit more smart or making your digital life a little bit more streamlined, they are like, what if we could

33:00get the thing a human does, but like you're saying, you still need the human, right? The reason why the assistant works is because the assistant literally is the, is a person goes through them and talks with you about them and not like you're, you're playing a game a telephone with overviews and summaries. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts. I, um, I can't stop scratching my downtown.

33:33Yeah, but I'm not itching to go downtown and tell a receptionist I'm here to talk about my downtown, some things you'd rather type than say out loud. There's no question too embarrassing for Amazon Health AI. Chat your symptoms and get virtual care 24-7. Healthcare just got less painful.

33:55Hi, it's Kathleen Griffith, co-host of the Unshakeables podcast. Listen in as Ron and Kelly Moore share their story. I'm Ron Moore and I'm Kelly Moore and starting our own business in our fifties was a little scary, but exciting. The biggest advantage was our community. The whole thing about business is relationships. We'll say team a lot, not just our internal team. It's the team of our vendors, the team of our clients.

34:26We help the Veterans Resource Center and we give scholarships. I'm doing this for my heart, for my children, for you, for your children's family. I don't want anything back. And I tell a lot of people, don't give back to me, pay it forward. If you work to give, you just see the world differently. I'm going to help as many people as we can. I can't take it with me. To hear more from Ron and Kelly, listen to the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts.

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36:28These things dilute your life to a series of calendar appointments and emails. When it's not like, it's, I don't know, it's Wednesday, I've been on a bunch of calls all day, I don't want to do anything after 4.30pm. I might regularly go after 6pm, but today I don't want to do this.

Practical robots versus abstract AI

36:41And honestly, the only AI thing that's actually impressed me, I'm going to tell you a story now. Random, I get reached out to by this company called Matic that makes a robot that mops and vacuums your floor. And it fucking rocks because all the data is on the device and I called it turdsly and it cleans my floors and it's great. It's $1,800 fucking dollars. What data is it? What data? It's like it looks around your apartment and maps it out with radar, but it's all kept on device. You have shit in corner. What's wrong with you? I clean your shit up corner. What's wrong with you? What's wrong? Why did you do this? You shit in the corner again.

37:12Is this puke? 55% of the time it's here.

37:17And that's the thing. It's like, why do I like this? Because I don't have to mop my floor. And also, I didn't- Buddy, I have news for you. You don't have to mop your floor to start with. Well, I mean, that's true. Also, I didn't pay for it. I've never mopped my floor. You just go. But I think that that's the thing. This thing is $1,800. And it does very straightforward things very well. But that's the thing. $1,800 bucks to clean your floors. And these people are like, $20 bucks, it'll do everything. No, it won't. Because your life is not a series of bits of data or watching your screen. It's the crazy bullshit that happens around it.

37:47And your emotions, your endocrine system and how your life is going and how you feel that particular day and what you're capable of doing. And I don't know. I don't think that is data that can be captured. Nor is it data that can be fucking trained on there. And to your point, Eddie, as well. They really want a slave. They really suffer. But they keep fucking talking about AGI. And they're like, yeah, we just want a conscious being that will trap and bend to our will. In a cellar and he'll run the market for us and he'll make everything richer. And he'll do the work for us.

38:17And we will get paid. And we will not do anything for him. But we will own him. The AGI. And we will keep those who walk away from Omelas outside of his training. Yes. That doesn't know what we're doing.

Mark Zuckerberg and tech utopianism

38:31Which actually leads me neatly into Mark Zuckerberg's recent blog. Before we wrap up, I just want to read you one little quote from this piece of shit motherfucker. Now, this is a blog called The Future is for Everyone. The most trustworthy man in America. The most trustworthy and damp man out there other than Clammy Sam Elton himself. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. So, just to be clear, this is the guy who owns all of social media. And his idea of the future is that everything should be shared other than the stuff he owns.

39:04And he is saying that he believes that delivering super intelligence to everyone is the way to answer the question of how people decide what matters in their own lives. And you may wonder, what the fuck does that mean? And that's because he doesn't know either. He says, everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. This man has spent $150 billion or more on data centers and has yet to build that. That's the thing. I ran it through Pangrum and it said it was 100% human. Which makes me think a team of interns and lawyers wrote it.

39:35Yeah, yeah. My favorite was everyone- Something as insane as, this robot will help you figure out what you want in your life might actually have been written by Mark Zuckerberg himself. This is actually really good though. Everyone will have incredible tools for creation to express your ideas. My eight-year-old daughter can already code her ideas and produce videos in an evening that would have taken me months or been impossible previously. What the fuck are you talking about, Mark? Why are you letting your eight-year-old daughter in front of an LLM? Also, what are you doing that she could do it a few days that would take you months?

40:08Now we're designing a robot together. Are they? No, you're not. Meanwhile, researchers at Meta are generating novel crystal structures that are ideal for augmented reality glasses and engineers are creating new apps in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. So, here's actually what's happening at Meta. Last year, an old man with dementia was talking to a Kylie Jenner branded bot and he then got on a train to New York and then fell over and died. And that was the end of the story. Also, you could have sex chats with a John Cena bot even if you said you were a child.

40:40This is Meta. This is what Meta builds. Now, the reason I brought this up is I have spent most of the day talking to people about the promise of AI. And whenever I try and bring up real things it does, everyone says it can summarize emails. It can do research. No one will talk like this because this is not real. The promise of AI is a fucking lie. And also, all of these people live in compounds disconnected from the world. That's why his kid has to have sex chats with the John Cena bot. No, no, no. I don't think that's... You can go that. You can go that.

41:11No, no, no, no, no. Chloe was misinformed on that one. That was not mom's first daughter.

41:18Just pulling the... Got the cane. Got the cane. The shepherd's like it's pulling me out. And it's just, this I think is like, this is what I think is so vulgar about AI though, which is the people up the top who don't use this shit, who don't touch it. They're just like, yeah, it's going to do everything for everyone. As happens for me with my army of servants I pay. Right. Now, I'm just going to give that to everyone else. How? I don't fucking know. That's someone else's job. Everything is someone else's job. It's a hard problem and we need to figure it out together.

41:49But not me though. You're going to figure it out. Yeah. And it just, it feels like living in an alternative reality sometimes because they talk about this shit like building robots with their daughter or whatever. Also, didn't he write some shit like this when he's pushing the metaverse? Yeah, he did the same thing with the metaverse. We're going to go live in a digital virtual reality where you can pay $3 million for a square foot of virtual space and you'll realize your dreams. Do you ever go in the metaverse, Eddie? Do you ever try it out? I will never go there. I will never. I will die in the metaverse. I will die a million times before I go there once.

42:22You didn't go to the Walmart robots experiment. Keep that away from me. Keep me away from the Walmart in the robots. It's so crazy that actually, so the promise of AI, let's like take that semi-seriously. It is insane to me that the goal at the end of the day is this thing that is inherently so human, which is answer the unanswerable question that you know exists within the blackness of your soul. It is like he is grappling with look inside yourself.

42:59Why do you feel unfulfilled when you wake up in the morning? Yeah. And he is saying now we have invented a technology that will answer that and that there's no bridge to that gap. There's no reason why this technology is going to fill the unfillable hole that we have not been – that people have been grappling with for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. Yeah. Forever. He's like this tool will find my soul. It's definitely in there. I didn't find it in the metaverse.

43:29But that's actually a really good point. It's these people are bereft of culture, they're bereft of love and joy. Like they don't seem to enjoy anything. Well, you know, he's got the Julius Caesar cut again. He enjoys culture. The way they spend their money is not like – Well, this is what's weird. So these people do not want to make product – they don't want to make art or jobs or products really. They want to make money. Yeah. But they do benefit from art and products. And they – and I think that is what is so off-putting about them that it's like – this guy is dealing with the same problems that we are dealing with.

44:07He's dealing with the – he's on the same search. He's on, you know, the same hunt for a purpose and fulfillment that any of us are. And it feels so smarmy to say, I have a way – I have figured out how to answer that soul question better than any of you dumb fucks. Yes. With my computer machine. Which does the same thing as everyone else's. Right, right. It feels – it's very, very off-putting to watch somebody benefit from art and enjoy human connection and talk about wanting it and then, like, hand a thing to us that is inherently non-human connection, that is inherently non-human, and that inherently just makes him money.

44:55Yes, and ultimately is just an extraction tool that also is nothing like what he's – just what he's describing with superintelligence for all and, like, a smart assistant that knows everything. It doesn't exist. It's not what he's talking about.

Sam Altman and the promise of genies

45:07It kind of reminds me – just talking before the show about this – about Sam Altman was interviewed on it recently, and he was like, well, what's it going to do? It's going to be – it's going to be able to answer wishes. And it's like, first of all, the moment they bring up magic, it's over. And I asked you, was that a joke? Was he trying to be funny? And you said no. No, it's – also, humorless man. Yeah. Just like – and he said, yeah, and then, you won't believe the wishes of that. He sounds like – honestly, he occasionally slips into Trump voice. Like, if it's just like, it's going to grant any wish you want, you won't believe it.

45:40Beautiful wishes. But he – because it's the same kind of, like, soullessness, just, like, over-promising. But what – I was watching it earlier, it was, like, three questions, and the third one was, like, you won't believe the kind of wishes it will answer. And it's just like, what the fuck are you – when you don't experience problems, I guess you just stop having ideas. When you just stop having any friction in your life, you're like, what the fuck can people deal with? Email? Do you think if Sam Altman's initial plan, when he was pitching the Gulf Monarchs for $7 trillion, if that had been successful, do you think he'd be speaking about it in even more grand terms?

46:19Or just the same sort of, like, it's a genie. It's a djinn. I think – well, also, I love the idea of just being like, yeah, it's a djinn. It's a djinn, which is, you know, famously always friendly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Famously, never a deal with consequences or costs of any kind. No famous stories about this at all, including Aladdin. Yeah, definitely not in that region of the world. There are no stories about that. Yeah, Jesus Christ. But with him as well, I think he would have gone on exactly the same path. Because if he'd have got $7 trillion, we'd be in the same fucking place.

46:52We'd be doing the same shit because large language models are inherently limited. Because – and this is not even a technical point – there is only so much that you can get from training something. You are – they – it's what happens when you're disconnected from humanity and culture and love and joy, and you see the world as ones and zeros, and you say, okay, how do I learn? Well, I just read a hundred books. Right. I read a hundred books, and then I talk to the smartest person I know for seven hours. I listen to Lex Fridman. On four hours. And I have peptides every minute.

47:22And everything will be optimized when, in fact, our experiences inform us, and we have no idea what experiences will inform us in what ways. Some of the best things and most interesting ideas I've had have been in the weirdest places, or like middle of the night when I've not slept – when I got to bed too late, or I didn't eat enough, so I woke up hungry. I'm like, wait. And it's not because I'm hungry. It's just because my brain goes, hey, why have you looked at this part of the earnings? And again, this is the line between a human experience, which is inherently unpredictable,

47:58versus a machine experience, which the goal of which is to make it as predictable as possible.

Unpredictability in art and capitalism

48:05And I mean, I'm thinking about Hollywood. You were asking about Hollywood at the beginning. It's like Hollywood is a business of unpredictability. Yes. And the point of making art is to take a shot, and you don't know if it's going to work, and you don't know if it's going to flop. And we are trying – tech people and finance people, I think, are trying to lay a lens of predictability and your language growth at all costs onto my business, which is inherently a business of unpredictability.

48:37And I think that that's – art and human experience is valuable when shit hits when you don't expect it to. And also, the other thing to yes and this, a lot of great art doesn't have an answer. Like I just watched last year's girlfriend watching Twin Peaks The Return. There's a large amount of that where you just have to kind of work it out. And David Lynch would never have told you. No. He would have just said no. Like the fireman creating – I can't actually continue. That was spoiled Twin Peaks there.

49:08But it's like some of the stuff that happens, you just have to kind of experience. You can't generate that because that's whatever the hell – I think he had a deeply spiritual process as well. One of my favorite interviews with Tim, he's like, you go to the movies, and people want to talk about the movie when it's done. And it's like the movie was the talking. Yeah. You have to just do that and then leave. And sometimes there aren't answers. And I think that that's the fundamental thing of all of this. It's like, oh, there must be an answer for everything. Everything must be normalized and packaged and financialized and commoditized.

49:41And the funny thing is, I feel like this is the end run of capitalism as we know it. That's my big – like people think it's the AI ball. No, I think we're at the end run of this stage of capitalism and whatever follows will be chaos because the markets are no longer based on reality. They're completely divorced from any material value. And even the discussion of AI, it's like, yeah, it's so powerful. Is it? Or does it just use a lot of power? It – everyone interprets everything based on like these fucking shadows on the wall of the cave. And the very fundament of meaning is being stripped out.

50:13Partly because these companies think they can normalize creation of stuff, of everything, that everything can be generative at the highest cost possible, just the most in the same way. Also, we're four years in and we're still reading the same shit. They were saying this shit about superintelligence in 2022. They were promising this bullshit for years. And it's still where – people can – I will get an email from one of you people. I love most of you. Some of you email me and you're like, well, actually, I've proven that this is there. Don't you realize that you could do this?

50:43And one person emails with an entire breakdown of Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi. An explanation. You know what? You go on – Email me. Email me. My email's on my website. Email Chloe. Don't email. Tell me about – no, you can email me. If you can find my email on my website, you can email me. The first six movies. You can email –

Show wrap up and upcoming guests

50:59I'm going to wrap this up here. Eddie, where can people find you? Big Black Jackabit on Twitter and the Tech Bubble on Substack. Hell yeah. And Chloe, you've got a show. I am – yes, I am at Chloe Badcliffe on all socials, like my last name Radcliffe but bad. And my show is in New York at Joe's Pub, August 19th and 20th. It is called Cheat. And if you email me a receipt of your ticket, I'll give you a year of the newsletter. Wow. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah. That's amazing.

51:29That's a good deal. Anyway, thank you all for listening. I'm, of course, Ed Zitron. This has been an inverse week where you've got the big episode at the end of the week versus on the Wednesday. That was because of technical differences. We will be back next week. I think we're going to have Steve Burke. Wonderful Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus is going to return. And we have some really interesting shit for CES 2027. The people in front of me don't even know this. Cal Newport's going to join us. Okay. Wonderful Cal Newport. And we might even have Brennan Lee Mulligan. Oh, yeah. It's going to be fucking great. I'm really, I'm already planning CES 2027. When I tell people this, they are horrified.

52:00They are really, they really don't like CES. CES is like how the years pass for me now. I'm the planner. All right. Listen, as much as I joke about it, you're all incredible. I hear from you every day on the subreddit, on email, on Signal, on even the Bloomberg Terminal. Thank you so much for your support. We're winning, everyone. Thank you all. And I love you all. And kill a delivery robot. Two. I'm not endorsing this. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.

52:35The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

53:05Better 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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