Radio Better Offline: Adam Becker

Summary

Better Offline: "Radio Better Offline: Adam Becker"

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Adam Becker (Astrophysicist & Author, “More Everything Forever”)
Date: September 24, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Ed Zitron welcomes astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker to dissect the egregious, often bizarre visions tech billionaires have for humanity’s future and the ways these ideas are not only detached from reality but actively harmful to society and progress. They skewer the cult-like thinking, lack of scientific rigor, and unchecked hubris permeating the tech elite — from Jeff Bezos’s “tubes in space” to Eliezer Yudkowski’s AI doomsaying — and discuss the deep societal consequences of letting these unchecked narratives steer popular and legislative discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Adam Becker’s Background and Entry into Tech Critique

• Transition from astrophysics to science journalism
  Becker began as a physicist investigating the Big Bang ([04:06]) and moved into writing for outlets like New Scientist and the BBC.
• Shift to tech industry focus
  The 2016 U.S. election catalyzed Becker’s engagement with politics:

  "I live in Berkeley...surrounded by tech bros constantly and was getting tired of their bullshit. And it seemed more and more directly connected to the disintegration of American politics." (Adam, [05:16])

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2. Examining Tech Billionaire Ideologies

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel

• Grandiose, unscientific visions
  Becker exposes Bezos’s space colonization obsession:

  "He has said very recently...that we need to move into hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous cylindrical space stations and have a trillion people living in the solar system." (Adam, [08:31])

• Lack of scientific grounding

  • Musk’s Mars fantasies and Thiel’s creationist sympathies are labeled as “nonsense.”
  • Even their critics give them too much credit for technical expertise.

• Sincerity vs. Cynicism in Tech Leaders
  Zitron asks if these figures believe their own hype:

  "I don't think they believe in anything is my thing." (Ed, [07:35])
  Becker suspects some (like Bezos) do, while others (like Altman) don't.

• Energy consumption fallacies
  Bezos’s idea is challenged for its physical, logical, and moral absurdity:

  "'If we don't keep using more energy, we’ll stagnate'...but why? What does the energy do?" (Ed, [10:02])

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3. Ridiculous Futurism: Tubes, Dyson Spheres, and Data Centers Full of Geniuses

• Mocking the “tubes in space”
  Zitron lampoons the “tubes” trope:

  "Tubes of space. Tubes. Trillion people. Mozarts. More Mozarts. Just sweating profusely." (Ed, [10:20])

• AI Utopianism and AGI
  Discussion of Sam Altman’s and others’ singularity dreams, connecting them to ill-defined, sci-fi fueled “AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence).

  • Understanding Dyson Spheres:

    "A Dyson sphere is a giant mega construction project...that just encloses a star and captures all of the energy from that star." (Adam, [12:19])

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4. The Rationalists, Cults of Personality, and Eliezer Yudkowski

• Yudkowski and the “Less Wrong” Rationalist community
  Outlined as a charismatic non-expert whose influence comes from online visibility, not accomplishment ([15:13], [25:38]).

• Cult-like following, eugenics, and the origin of the 'rationalist' online movement

  “He's definitely got a hard on for eugenics… and this is... somewhat paraphrasing the comic book Preach, like why do these guys always look like that? If you're gonna claim you're like a eugenicist, you should not look like an egg with a hat on.” (Ed, [22:29])

• Prophetic paranoia and unearned authority
  Yudkowski is compared to a forum-admin turned cult leader:

  "I would say the best way to think about Yudkowski... Imagine like a really smart, self-educated 15 year old." (Adam, [19:30])

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5. AI Hype, Dangers, & Ill-Defined Terms

• The AGI Fiction
  • AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is described as “hopelessly ill-defined” ([32:27]).
  • OpenAI’s own definition is ridiculed for being both “vague and really narrow” ([33:09]).
• Ethics: “Willing slaves” and Modern Tech
  • Cites the lineage of robot-as-slave narratives, tracing back to Asimov and Vinge ([36:00]).

  “If you go back and look at Asimov’s Robot stories...it's hard to see them as anything other than being about slavery and race relations..." (Adam, [35:32])

• Real vs. Imagined Innovation
  • Current AI models fail at basic reasoning, increase harm, and often reinforce mediocrity ([43:47]).
  • Dangers: AI as mass validation engine, poor outputs, and mental health consequences.

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6. The Social and Psychological Cost of Billionaire Narratives

• Isolation and Lack of Accountability
  • Tech billionaires, surrounded by validation, lose perspective and become obsessed with being liked but are incapable of vulnerability or genuine connection ([53:13], [57:13]).
• Detachment from Joy and Reality
  • Citron:

    “I don’t think any of these people enjoy anything as much as I enjoy Diet Coke. Like, I’m 100% sure of that…” ([56:34])

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7. Critique of Tech Media and Journalistic Complacency

• Parroting powerful voices
  • Mainstream media criticism for “uncritically parroting the powerful,” especially in AI and VC coverage ([65:50]).
  • Specific callouts: Kevin Roose, Ezra Klein, NYT editors.
• Loss of Skepticism
  • Zitron:

    “There is this weird thing of, like, the powerful would never lie to us. And then Prism came out and then Cambridge Analytica happened.” ([68:36])

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8. Real Innovations Worth Noting

• Adam’s Picks
  • mRNA vaccines: Fast, effective vaccine technology with public and private funding ([59:01])
  • Green Energy: Solar, batteries, and real legislative progress ([61:25])
  • The need for more government funding in basic scientific research.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The Tubes Rant:

  “What's your solution, Jeff? You’ve got all the money in the world. Tubes.” (Ed, [10:10])

• On AI’s purported danger:

  “If you make extraordinary claims like [Yudkowski is] making, you need extraordinary evidence. And not having those qualifications...doesn’t really inspire confidence.” (Adam, [15:30])

• On AGI hype:

  “AGI is this hopelessly ill-defined thing, like superintelligence, this thing that Yudkowski is on about. What does it even mean?” (Adam, [32:27])

• On the billionaire mindset:

  “The best thing for the tech billionaires themselves...would be to lose all their money. It would be the best thing for their mental health.” (Adam, [53:13])

• On accountability:

  “You cannot run away from politics. The minute you have more than one person in a room, there’s politics.” (Adam, [42:48])

• On tech’s lack of real appreciation for human achievement:

  “They don’t have a proper appreciation for the human brain and human body...or how remarkable Earth is in particular.” (Adam, [41:50])

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Segment Timestamps

• [03:54] – Adam Becker introduces his book and its thesis: tech billionaires’ bad ideas
• [06:13] – Becker’s turn from conventional science journalism to tech critique
• [08:31] – Dissection of Jeff Bezos’ space colonization ideology
• [12:10] – Explanation and critique of the Dyson sphere
• [15:13] – Eliezer Yudkowski and the “Rationalist” subculture
• [32:27] – The ill-definition of AGI and critique of AI “breakthrough” narratives
• [35:32] – The legacy of Asimov, science fiction’s “willing slaves,” and their implications
• [41:50] – The brilliance of ordinary human cognition and the planet
• [53:13] – The social and psychological harm of billionaire culture
• [59:01] – Genuine technological advances: mRNA vaccines and green energy
• [65:50] – Critique of tech media, especially lack of rigor and skepticism

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Tone and Style

The conversation is sharp, witty, often profane, and deeply skeptical of the tech industry’s self-mythologizing. Zitron and Becker use humor and pop culture references to communicate complex points accessibly, all while exuding exasperation at the state of media, tech elites, and hype-driven “innovation.”

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Takeaways

• Most tech billionaires’ visions are unscientific, self-serving, and frequently absurd when scrutinized.
• The “AI revolution” is more about marketing and economic control than meaningful progress, and its ethics are deeply suspect.
• The media largely fails to hold these elites accountable, recycling their press releases as prophecy.
• Real technological innovation does exist (e.g., mRNA vaccines, green energy), but is often overshadowed by hype.
• Society needs both critical press and policy mechanisms to curb billionaire influence and demand accountability for real-world effects, not just fantastical visions.

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For More:

• Find Adam Becker on BlueSky: adambecker.bsky.social
• Check out his book More Everything Forever
• Ed Zitron’s newsletter and more at: betteroffline.com

(Summary by Better Offline Podcast Summarizer)

Transcript

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[Adam Becker]

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[Adam Becker]

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[Adam Becker]

That's what's happening, right?

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Adam Becker]

Thanks for having me, Ed. It's good to be here.

[Ed Zitron]

What's the book actually about? I apologize.

[Adam Becker]

No, it's okay. The book is actually about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they're trying to shove down our throats and why they don't work.

[Ed Zitron]

And so you're an astrophysicist, right?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, by training.

[Ed Zitron]

What is that?

[Adam Becker]

Well, I did a PhD in astrophysics, looking at how much we could learn about what was happening right after the Big Bang by looking at what was happening in the universe. You know, what's happening in the universe right now.

[Ed Zitron]

So how did you get into the touching in the world of Silicon Valley? Because you have to talk about some of the dampest perverts I've ever unseen.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, well, I started out my career as a science journalist straight out of grad school and was writing mostly about physics.

[Ed Zitron]

And what were you writing?

[Adam Becker]

I was writing for pretty much everybody. I started at New Scientist and then moved on to writing for the BBC. Wrote a book about quantum physics, wrote some stuff for npr, the New York Times.

[Ed Zitron]

Very cool.

[Adam Becker]

American. Yeah. And you know, like was sort of having a normal science journalist career. And then in 2016, the weirdest fucking thing happened.

[Ed Zitron]

What happened?

[Adam Becker]

You know, we elected a fascist.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, right. Yeah, that thing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And I thought, oh, you know, I should be doing something more to, you know, directly combat this. If I write another book, I would like it to have a more Directly political angle.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

And I live in Berkeley. I live in the San Francisco Bay area and just surrounded by tech bros constantly and was getting tired of their bullshit. And it seemed more and more directly connected to the disintegration of American politics. And I thought, okay, you know, somebody needs to write about how they have these insane ideas about the future and how that informs their terrible politics.

[Ed Zitron]

So how long have you lived in the bay?

[Adam Becker]

God. Oh, 13 years.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, so you've got, like, a good backing of where the Bay has been in that time as well. Because I think a lot of these people are transplants. And I say this is someone who literally moved to the Bay for two years in 2014.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, and even then, it was weird watching what they were doing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But wait, so that was. So you've been there 13 years. But when did the book get started? Like, how did all this. Because it's. This kind of came out of nowhere. In a good way.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah. No, I got started on the book. Probably the first inklings of it were around 2019 or 2020. Right before the pandemic. I uncovered a online magazine that was trying to sanewash Creationism and climate denial. Jesus. That was being funded by Peter Thiel.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell, yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And I broke that story and thought, oh, yeah, yeah, these tech bros are awful. And everybody thinks they know a lot about science and technology. Even the people who don't like them seem to think that they know a lot about science and technology and it's just not true. Like, they don't know anything about physics. They don't know anything about biology. Peter Thiel thinks that creationism is plausible or that evolution isn't the whole story. That's nonsense. Elon Musk thinks that we can live on Mars. That's nonsense. Or at least he says that. Whether he actually believes it, I don't know.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's actually kind of my question.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

How much of this shit do you actually think they believe? Because I know Bezos is tied up with the Long Now Foundation.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And they do make nice tea over there in the Presidio.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, they do.

[Ed Zitron]

However, the rest of the stuff, not so good. But how much do they really believe in this? Because I just. I. You've said that this is kind of a homecoming for them. This is kind of them coming back to the things they truly believe.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't think they believe in anything is my thing.

[Adam Becker]

I think some of them don't believe in anything.

[Ed Zitron]

Go into. I'm not saying I'm unilaterally Right here.

[Adam Becker]

Absolutely. Yeah. So, like, for example, I think it's very plausible. Obviously, we can't know for sure, but I think it's very plausible that, say, Sam Altman doesn't believe in anything. Yeah, that's quite possible.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Right. Karen Howell makes a good case for that in her reporting and in her book.

[Ed Zitron]

Excellent. Been a guest on the show. She's fantastic.

[Adam Becker]

She's amazing. But at the other end of the spectrum, I think it's very plausible that Jeff Bezos really, really does believe that we need to go to space. And the reason I say that is he. When he was the valedictorian of his high school down in Florida in, like, 1978 or something like that, he gave a speech about how we need to go to space. We, humanity, need to go to space.

[Ed Zitron]

That doesn't feel as ludicrous as a belief, like, we go to space. But what does go to space mean for this guy?

[Adam Becker]

Well, that's the thing. The specifics of that belie that he professed at the time are pretty similar to what he's saying now, and it is pretty ridiculous. He has said very recently, and it echoes the stuff from his valedictorian speech when he was, like, 18, that we need to move into hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous cylindrical space stations.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, of course.

[Adam Becker]

And have a trillion people living in the solar system.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah, Tubes. Tubes of trillions of people.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

Tubes work really well. Like the Hyperloop, for example, another successful tube.

[Adam Becker]

Yes. Or, you know, the Internet itself. A series of tubes.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And because those tubes and the Internet worked. Of course the tubes work in space.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. That's. I think that's bingo bongo.

[Ed Zitron]

This is science. I believe I failed all the sciences. I'm really sorry. Really sorry, but no, keep going.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. So, you know, he said then we can, like, make Earth into a beautiful park that, you know, allows us to, you know, save the environment. I know. And he said, when we have a trillion people living in the solar system, we can have 1000 Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. And like, buddy, we probably already have people who are just as talented as Mozart and Einstein and all the other geniuses of history who are living and dying in poverty.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Adam Becker]

And you don't care about that. And you don't seem to care about climate change, because the carbon footprint of the blue Origin rockets and the Amazon warehouses and all that stuff. But instead of that, he's like, no, no, no. The solution is to go to space. Why?

[Ed Zitron]

That's not gonna work, because more Space is up in space, Adam. You put tube in space. It's really, it's funny because these people are insanely rich.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But also sound very stupid when you really get down to the chops of. It's like, what's your solution, Jeff? You've got all the money in the world. Tubes.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Tubes of space. Tubes.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Trillion people. Mozarts. More Mozarts. Just sweating profusely.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. Yeah. And he does try to give an argument, but the argument is hilariously bad. He says that we need to go to space, among other reasons. Like he gives all that environmental stuff, but he. The thing he keeps harping on and coming back to is he says we need to keep using more energy per capita.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. Why?

[Adam Becker]

Right. Why? Exactly. He never says exactly why.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. He says the only defense he gives for that is he says if we don't do that, we'll have a civilization of stagnation and stasis as opposed to.

[Ed Zitron]

Now when there's tons of innovation happening and all of big, big tech is focused on a diverse series of options rather than one big expensive dog shit thing.

[Adam Becker]

Precisely.

[Ed Zitron]

He nailed it.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And he says we have to go to space because like, otherwise we're going to run out of energy here on Earth. We won't be able to keep expanding the amount of energy we use per capita.

[Ed Zitron]

What does the energy do?

[Adam Becker]

Well, yeah, first of all, what does the energy do? And second, this is actually my favorite part. Hell yeah. He is right. That if you just like idiotically kept that trend going in a way that's physically impossible, you know, for. For hundreds of years, you would run out of energy here on Earth. Like you. You wouldn't be able to keep the energy usage per capita growing and the exponential rate that it has been in about 300 years would be using all the energy that we get from the sun here on the Earth. But if you keep that trend going, if you try to do that by, you know, going out and living in tubes in the solar system. Right. That only gets you like another few hundred, maybe a thousand years. That then you're using all the energy that comes from the sun.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. And we've still not really established what we're using the energy for.

[Adam Becker]

Nope, nope. No.

[Ed Zitron]

So data centers. Yeah, Finally.

[Adam Becker]

Right. And this. And this brings us to like the bullshit that Sam Altman said about building a Dyson sphere.

[Ed Zitron]

What is a Dyson sphere? Explain what a Dyson sphere is. I thought it was the ball on the fucking vacuum, but I. Yeah, no.

[Adam Becker]

That'S the only kind of Dyson sphere that actually exists. No, a Dyson sphere is a giant mega construction project, you know, beyond anything that anyone's ever actually built or probably could build, that just encloses a star and captures all of the energy from that star.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. So have we ever built anything like that?

[Adam Becker]

No, of course not.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, just making sure. Just making sure we. So it's building a big ball around.

[Adam Becker]

A star to capture all of the energy from that star, to use it for data sensors.

[Ed Zitron]

Where would the energy. How would the energy you get from the starter?

[Adam Becker]

Earth, I mean.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, tubes.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, tubes. Exactly. Yeah. So I.

[Ed Zitron]

Battery.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, it's. So say. It's so cool we live in a city. I wish I could do what he does. I would be saying shit all the time. I just. I'd be like, yeah, actually we can change the world if we just create a series of tubes that just give me money every day. No, wait, that's too. That's. That's too obvious. I'd need to come up with a better scam than that.

[Adam Becker]

Well, no, I mean, I. I just think it's pretty interesting that these guys are spouting obvious bullshit and the only reason people to them is that they're rich. Like, if. If they weren't saying this stuff. But then I went around saying this stuff, nobody would listen to me unless they funded me.

[Ed Zitron]

If a guy on the street who smelled kind of bad walked up to you and said, the price of intelligence is getting too cheap to meet her, you'd be like, all right, mate, can't do anything, but clammy Sammy says it, and everyone loses their fucking shit.

[Adam Becker]

Well, yeah, and that. Actually, that brings me to something else that we were planning to talk about. You know, speaking of. Of weird dudes on the street who are not billionaires making insane claims. Eliezer Yudkowski.

[Ed Zitron]

That's how you say his name. I'm not calling Eliza. No, I don't really. Here's the thing. He's a disrespectful, sexist moron grifter, so I really don't give a shit.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, it is rather bizarre that anybody listens to anything he has to say about anything.

[Ed Zitron]

He's. So who is this fuck? This Fuck nun?

[Adam Becker]

No, no, no, the alternate title for my book. Like, in my head, the headcanon was these Fucking People.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I love that. No, no, I write these fucking bastards a lot. So. Elisa Yudkowski.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Who? What does he do? Why does. What does he do? And why does so many seemingly smart people believe this dipshit?

[Adam Becker]

So, Eliezer Yudkowski, I'm going to give you like the formal version of who he is, what he might say, what would be in like his online bio, and. And then I'll tell you the reality. So Eliezer Yudkowski is the co founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has been around for about 25 years. And he has been researching artificial superintelligence for all of that time and mostly going on about how dangerous it could be if anybody built it without ensuring that it would serve humanity.

[Ed Zitron]

And this is just to be clear, he has no scientific knowledge. Can he even code? Like, does he have any kind of.

[Adam Becker]

He doesn't even have a high school diploma.

[Ed Zitron]

So I won't judge people for that, but I'll judge him for the rest.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, no, no, I'm not judging him for not.

[Ed Zitron]

But that it doesn't really make fill you full of confidence.

[Adam Becker]

No, no, no, no. He has no formal qualifications. And again, that's fine. You know, there are many people who have made major contributions to many fields of human endeavor without any formal qualifications. Right, that's fine. The thing is, if you make extraordinary claims like he's making, you need extraordinary evidence. And not having those qualifications, like you said, doesn't really inspire confidence. He has made a series of really outlandish claims about what the future of AI could be.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Based on essentially nothing. Based on like reading a bunch of science fiction. He explicitly cites science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge as inspired by him. Oh, Vernor Vinge wrote a bunch of books like Marooned in Real Time and God, I'm trying to remember the names of the others. Doesn't matter. Point is, he's still a fiction writer. Yeah, he's a fiction writer who's also, I think a scientist of some stripe, I don't remember what. But still writing fiction though. Yeah, still writing fiction. And Vinji came up with this idea or was one of the originators of and popularizers of an idea called the Singularity.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, so define this term for me.

[Adam Becker]

So the Singularity is this idea that the rate of technological change is just going to keep getting faster and faster and specifically the rate of intelligence of AI is going to keep getting smarter and smarter until we reach this sort of point of no return where we have a singularity accompanied by an intelligence explosion that leads to like, what is the Singularity moment? Yeah, the Singularity moment is very ill defined. Oh, and the idea.

[Ed Zitron]

I can't fucking believe this. Yeah, I've heard this bollocks so many times I thought they had a moment. I thought they had a point.

[Adam Becker]

No, not really.

[Ed Zitron]

Are you?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. So, like Kurzweil, right? The patron saint of evangelizing the Singularity, the guy who wrote the Singularity is Near, and then the sequel last year, the Singularity is Nearer, which is the real fucking title. I know that's the real title of the book, but his next book's just called. Sorry, yeah, no, his next book is like, it's here.

[Ed Zitron]

Can't you see it Is the Singularity in the room with us.

[Adam Becker]

Yes, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

But he doesn't define it.

[Adam Becker]

He tries to, but it's incredibly vague. He says, like Kurzweil says, the singularity is going to be here in 2045. He also said in 2005 and the singularity is near that, you know, we would have all kinds of nanotechnology by now.

[Ed Zitron]

They love nanotechnology.

[Adam Becker]

They love nanotechnology. They. They use it as a synonym for magic.

[Ed Zitron]

There was a. I swear to God. Also, there was a nanotechnology bubble briefly, like 10 years ago. I vaguely remember them trying. It didn't really go anywhere.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, there was also a nanotech sort of hype bubble back in the 80s and 90s, and it also didn't go anywhere. And it didn't go anywhere because it turns out that, like, this idea of nanotech is like magic pixie dust that fixes everything is nonsense. And it's a real. Like, it's being echoed right now in the AI bubble. Yes, right. It's the same kind of hype, often pushed by the same people with the same logic, sometimes working at, like, the same nonprofits. I mean, Yudkowski talks about nanotech constantly. It's in his new book. It's all over, you know, the websites that he's created.

[Ed Zitron]

And his book is called if you buy this book, I'll make money.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, sorry.

[Ed Zitron]

It's called if they build this, Everyone. It's such a stupid fucking title. Sorry.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, it's a very stupid title. I will say the one thing I'll say about Yudkowski, I am sure that he is a true believer. He is not a grifter. Yes, he's not a grifter.

[Ed Zitron]

Why?

[Adam Becker]

Because it's hard to explain, but I am so much more sure about him than I am about anybody else even basis.

[Ed Zitron]

I trust your judgment. It's just he gives off the air of, like, a desperate forum admin.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I would say the best way to think about Yudkowski or, like, the way that I often Think about him is imagine like a really smart, self educated 15 year old.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And like, you know, cause if a 15 year old was running around saying the stuff that Yudkowski is saying right now, I'd be like, wow, bright kid. I hope he grows out of this.

[Ed Zitron]

I hope his parents have a lock on the gun cabinet.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and also, like, I hope he, you know, I hope he grows up.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes. And I'm still thinking that.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And like, and I don't think Judkowski did. I think, you know, I think, like.

[Ed Zitron]

I also think everybody fell for it.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, well, and that's the thing. Like, he got a lot of support online. He, you know, he got money from Peter.

[Ed Zitron]

Sam Altman said that he should. He may win the Nobel Peace Prize one day.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sam Altman said that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

[Ed Zitron]

Falling down moment. If that happens.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. No, that's not happening.

[Ed Zitron]

Defense.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, there's no way. But like, look, he got a bunch of money from Peter Thiel because Thiel thought that Yudkowski was saying smart stuff about AI Thiel. Now doesn't much like Yudkowski because he thinks Yudkowski's too pessimistic. But sort of the damage has been.

[Ed Zitron]

Peter Thiel, ever the optimist.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, yeah, Classic.

[Ed Zitron]

All grins and smiles of that fella.

[Adam Becker]

Yes. No, too pessimistic for Peter Thiel.

[Ed Zitron]

That's actually bad.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, it is. No, it's. But no, he's. He's a true believer. He's just kind of nuts.

[Ed Zitron]

But what does he do all day? I say this as a blogger, PR person, news newsletter writer and podcaster and all this shit. Like, I realize I have an email job. Fine. But at least I can tell you what I do all day. What does he do? Like, go to parties with people at Kevin Roosen going, the computer's going to kill us all.

[Adam Becker]

I think that's a good chunk of it. And I also think he writes an enormous amount. Right. Like, this is a guy who wrote that, you know, Harry Potter fan fiction that's longer than War and Peace. Right. He wrote like a one and a half million word BDSM decision theory novel.

[Ed Zitron]

I say this as someone who writes a lot of. A lot of words. That's an unhealthy amount of words.

[Adam Becker]

I agree. And it does help, I think for him being able to write that many words. He's not a very good writer.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I mean, even Again, I write 15,000 word blogs, so I can't really Judge him too harsh. But 1.5 million words, how do you even know what it's about at that point?

[Adam Becker]

I only know what it's about because that's what he said it's about. I haven't read that one. I did read most of the Harry Potter one as research. Yeah, how bad was it? Really, really incredibly bad.

[Ed Zitron]

Any sexism or racism in there or is it just strange? I mean, it's J.K. rowling, so.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't remember anything specific. That's good question mark.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, it's just strange.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean he's definitely got a hard on for eugenics. And why do these, and this is.

[Ed Zitron]

Somewhat paraphrasing the comic book preach, like why do these guys always look like that? If you're gonna claim you're like a eugenicist, you should not look like an egg with a hat on. And I won't get into, I don't generally get into personal appearance because I'm self conscious myself. But if your whole thing is like, yeah, we need to make the perfect human beings, it's like, you can't look like that, mate. I'm sorry, you can't do that.

[Adam Becker]

Well, I don't.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I guess you can. You'll be in the New York fucking Times.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, it's, it's crazy. It is really crazy that anybody listens to him. But no, he's, he's really into eugenics.

[Ed Zitron]

Why do they listen to him?

[Adam Becker]

He's really into evolutionary psychology and he's got like the sexism and racism that's like tied up in that. Why do people listen to him? I mean, part of it is that he got that money from those billionaires. Right? Right. He was hanging out in the bay saying the kind of insane contrarian shit about AI that attracts the kind of like brain dead billionaires like Peter Thiel. And then, you know, he became the guy and started, you know, a series of online platforms that attracted a following.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Like, you know, less Wrong. And then that spun off this whole rationalist subfactor.

[Ed Zitron]

So what is less wrong?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that's a very good question. Less Wrong is an online platform that serves, maybe served as a home and epicenter for this movement called the Rationalists, which are sort of formed around Yudkowski's writing, including this set of writings he has called the Sequences where he lays out.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, he's a cult leader.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, in a way, yeah. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

The Rationalists are just, I'm guessing, guys with trilbys who say that we need to focus on ration rational thought and logic.

[Adam Becker]

And there's a lot of it. I mean, some of them are women and some of them are non binary.

[Ed Zitron]

That's really surprising.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean look, there are nerds of all stripes.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes. And also he's very much playing in the older Internet.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

The idea of a large forum with any kind of following is actually kind of adorable these days. Except when it's less wrong. It's not adorable.

[Adam Becker]

Well, also less wrong's been around since the somewhat older Internet. Right. It's not been around since the 90s, but it's been around since like the mid to late 2000s.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Adam Becker]

And Yudkowski is, you know, a lot of the rationalists are in their 20s and maybe early 30s, but Yudkowski himself is in his mid-40s.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Adam Becker]

Because you know, he is terminally online and I'm sure like, obviously he'd be unhappy with many of the things I've said about him, but that one I'm sure he'd agree with. You know, like he's been online since he dropped out of school at age what like 13 or 14. He's been online since the mid-90s on like. Yeah. And like, you know, he was on transhumanist forums like you know, since the mid-90s, like email threads and stuff like that.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh God.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

He really, he is like the detritus.

[Adam Becker]

Of the Internet in a way, brought.

[Ed Zitron]

To light like katamari of center right freaks.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Veering ever right.

[Adam Becker]

I wouldn't even say center right. I would say techno libertarian.

[Ed Zitron]

But that is just, that's just right wing.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, oh no, it is right wing. It's the center part that I disagree with.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. No, no, perhaps he stalk there when he was 15 before he learned all of the wrong things.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I will say he like, I don't get the sense that like he likes Donald Trump, but he certainly like will parrot a lot of standard libertarian talking points along the way to, you know, making his.

[Ed Zitron]

The one thing I keep thinking though is I don't know if I can shake this thing. He's a grifter. Just because you're taking a bunch of 20 year olds, you've got all of this writing thing. He's either a grifter or a true cult leader. He may actually just be a cult leader.

[Adam Becker]

I would say cult leader is closer.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Because he seems to. I mean, dangerous is probably the wrong word.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I think that's right. He's not. I wouldn't call him dangerous, but he is.

[Ed Zitron]

I think the only danger is to like a Hot topic worker.

[Adam Becker]

A very nerdy hot topic.

[Ed Zitron]

No, no, no, no to them.

[Adam Becker]

Just.

[Ed Zitron]

Just that he'd speak to them.

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Adam Becker]

Yes. Yeah. I mean the AGI stuff which like I started working on this book before ChatGPT came out. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And 2019, a few years into OpenAI's.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. So, like, I knew about OpenAI and I knew about, like transformer models, but like, you know, ChatGPT comes out and suddenly, you know, the public conversation shifts in a way that I didn't anticipate. I realized, oh, this book is have to be a little bit different than I thought it was going to be. But also, you know, all of this conversation about AGI. Right. Like, in a way, it helped me for writing the book because I thought I was going to have to spend a lot of time in the book explaining what AI is, what people think AGI is. Right. There was going to be a lot more explanation. And then all of this stuff came out. I'm like, oh, actually this, you know, I can spend more time in the meat of the book. This is helpful for me because you.

[Ed Zitron]

Could just quote them directly.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. Yeah. But the thing is, AGI is this hopelessly ill defined thing, like superintelligence, this thing that Yudkowski is on about. What does it even mean? Have you looked at the definition of AGI in the OpenAI charter, like the original one?

[Ed Zitron]

No, I haven't. Let's pull up.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, yeah, no, it's great. The original charter from way back, it says something like, AGI is a machine that can reproduce any economically viable or economically productive activity that humans engage. That's a bad definition.

[Ed Zitron]

That's anything.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, that could just mean anything. It's a machine that can do anything.

[Adam Becker]

It's both vague and really narrow. Right. Cause it's like, okay, I thought AGI was supposed to be like, you know, Commander Data on Star Trek. Right. And so that means, you know, it's gonna be sort of like humans. It can do the things that humans.

[Ed Zitron]

Do, also economically viable work. And the first thing they start with is fucking writing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, Jesus Christ. That's like, oh, my God. Yeah. The first and most economic. We're going to build boats and sell. Like, we're going to buy boats as an investment vehicle. Like. Like, what the fuck?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

These people don't do any real work. It's. It's so strange as well, because the AGI conversation almost never happens about AGI. It's because my favorite thing to do is meet it, go, isn't this slavery? Because it is. It's like, oh, yeah, we'll do an autonomous thing. We'll make do things, but it will be conscious, which will allow it to work better.

[Adam Becker]

Yep. And so then you get people talking about like a data center filled with geniuses and like, oh, okay. Wouldn't a data center filled with geniuses not want to work for you?

[Ed Zitron]

Wouldn't a data center full of geniuses that can't leave and have to work be called a prison?

[Adam Becker]

Yep. Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Cool.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. No, I get into this in my book, you know, the inspiration for a lot of these ideas. Ideas ultimately traces back to mid 20th century science fiction. Right. And so you get people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. Right. Asimov's Robot stories in particular. If you go back and look at Asimov's Robot stories, it is very hard with like a modern eye to look at them as especially certain ones of them. It's hard to see them as anything other than like kind of being about slavery and race relations. Yes. Because you get like, for example, there's this one short story. I think it's called. Oh God. I think it's called Catch that Robot, but I might be confusing it with a different one. It might be Little Lost Robot. I get those two confused. But either way, it's about a robot that is trying to escape and gain its freedom. And in that story, the humans are like addressing a bunch of. They're interviewing a bunch of seemingly identical robots to try to find the one that they're looking for that's trying to escape. And they interview these robots and when they're interviewing them, they address them as boy. And the robots call the humans master. Yeah, and these stories are from like 1955. Like, you know, the Jim Crow south is alive and well. It's really bad. It's really, really uncomfortable. And then like 40 years later in the 1990s, you get Werner Vinge writing about the Singularity and how great it's gonn be when we all have these robot assistants. And he refers to Asimov's wonderful dream of. And this is a direct quote from Vinji. Willing slaves.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Adam Becker]

Yes. And that's something that someone wrote in like 1991.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, but that's what this is. Yeah, and this is an uncomfortable topic because that's what this is like. It's. It's what pisses me off, other than like 19 other things about Kevin Bruce at the time, because he's written several things about AI and AGI and one thing about AI welfare. And it's like, like the AI welfare begins with slavery. And if you can't write that, you're a fucking coward and a bitch. I'm sorry. If you can't write. Yeah, everyone is excited about slavery because that's what it is and it's nothing else. It's not. Oh well, it's like they wouldn't be. They wouldn't be. They, they like doing it and it's like, fuck you, man. That's. It's slavery.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But what I really hope happens is if AGI happens, it's just a. Just a regular dude.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

And he's lazy.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And he's annoying.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like he just. Just do this. What I think that's way more likely is I don't think AGI is possible. Yeah, actually that's a good question. Do you think it's possible?

[Adam Becker]

Not really, no.

[Ed Zitron]

I say this is a non scientific person.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. No, I don't think that you can build. Well, first of all, I think AGI is just hopelessly ill defined. Right. But if we want to say like, like an artificial machine that has the cognitive capacities of a human, like that can do all of the tasks, like all of the things that humans do. First of all, I think you're going to need a completely different kind of machine. Certainly. I don't think that scale is all you need. And if you just scale up tension. Yeah. Give it more data and if you don't have enough data, make more synthetic data with more LLM like, dude, that. Why would it. No, absolutely not. But I also think that there's this very simplistic set of ideas behind the idea of AGI. Right. And the two that I keep coming back to are the idea of the brain as a computer and the idea of our bodies as meat spacesuits for our brains. And both of those are just wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

The brain is not really very much like a computer. It is more like a computer than it is like say a clock. But there is a long history of comparing the brain to, you know, the most complex piece of machinery that humans have at the time. Right. Right. Before it was a brain or before the brain was like a computer, it was like a telephone network. Before that it was like a hydraulic system. Before that it was like a clock or a windmill. Right, Right. And it's not really actually like. I mean, it's a little like some of those things, but the brain is like the brain and the main difference.

[Ed Zitron]

And we don't understand thinking, do we?

[Adam Becker]

No. And we don't understand exactly how the brain works. And part of that is that the brain was not built, the brain evolved.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, Right.

[Adam Becker]

But also we are not our brains. We are our bodies in our environments. Right. The brain is inextricably connected to the body. And the body works in an environment surrounded by other bodies in a culture, a society, a world. Right. You need all of those things in order to get the human cognition that, you know, these guys are so, you know, determined to reproduce inside of a computer. If you just take a human baby and like leave it with a bunch of food in the woods, even if you get rid of all the predators and everything, that baby's gonna starve to death.

[Ed Zitron]

Give it a bunch of books, mate.

[Adam Becker]

Right. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Hand the baby books.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. If you give the. If you somehow. If you feed the baby but don't talk to it, the baby will not grow up being able to think properly.

[Ed Zitron]

Or speak properly or its thinking will be vastly different.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. Yeah. And so, like, you need so much more than just the brain.

[Ed Zitron]

It also, I think, compresses human experience. They conflate experience with learning.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

When we don't know how we learn, like we learn, we learn intentionally, but also unintentionally. Societal conditions around us, how we felt in a particular moment, convulsively. Memory is also insane.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Yep, yep.

[Ed Zitron]

We experience the world in. This is my personal experience. My experience of the world is vastly different to my memory. My memory is like crystal clear and beautiful and my real life is a mixture of slops.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's. It's frustrating as well because these people also don't appear to like people. They don't. They don't like. The human brain is kind of like human bodies are even the dumbest. Dumb. Dumb is kind of amazing.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Thing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. No, and. And one of the things that's amazing is. Yeah, we don't know how the human brain works. We don't know how thinking or learning works. But what we do know is that we don't do it in anything like any way. Anything like an LLM.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Adam Becker]

Right. Because the amount of material that we take in over the course of the first three years of our lives, when we go from not knowing a language to knowing a language, maybe multiple languages, is nowhere near the amount of material that is force fed into these LLMs. And yet we get the trick done. And three year olds know things that no LLM knows.

[Ed Zitron]

Also, there's no affordance for the fact that some people can't learn stuff like I cannot learn languages. I've really tried.

[Adam Becker]

I'm pretty trash at that too.

[Ed Zitron]

But I also was really bad at, like, I was uniquely bad at a lot of things. I have my various. No, but I. I have adhd, dyspraxia. And other stuff I won't get into.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But it's. I can't like certain things. Don't like the things that I pick up insanely quickly. Other people can't. Other people can't even see the connections. It doesn't. Robert Evans actually had a really good point on the subreddit. Yes, Robert, I read all your stuff. Stuff where he was saying that, like, he is very good at, like, picking up stuff, like, almost me. He can read faster than most people. As long as it's about conflict. And it's. No, but it's true. And it's one of the remarkable things about the human brain.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And I think that it's actually kind of disgusting how little appreciation there is for, like, human bodies and the brain and just how incredible the average person, even average people are.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. No, and this is. This is the thing. These guys don't have a proper appreciation for the human brain and the human body. And going back to the tech billionaires and I guess Yudkowski as well, they don't have an appreciation for how remarkable Earth is in particular. Right. You know, they, you know, especially when you talk about somebody like Bezos or Musk, they talk about Earth like, it's doomed. Like, we need to get off of this planet.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And like, this is our home. It's a remarkable place. And there is nowhere that we could get to in the solar system. There's nowhere else in the solar system that's remotely as hospitable as the Earth.

[Ed Zitron]

I also think that they want more space. They want their own land, they want their own countries. They want to escape governance.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Yeah. They see. They see space as an escape from politics because they're, like, living a libertarian.

[Ed Zitron]

Wet dream, which is really funny because when they get there, they'll immediately do fascism.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That's what's on the agenda the second.

[Adam Becker]

You cannot run away from politics. The minute you have more than one person in a room, there's politics. It's.

[Ed Zitron]

It's just really sad. And I actually think on a grander scale, they don't have an appreciation for tech. I was just writing something. Last night was on the way to New York, where it was like, the actual state of technology is kind of fucking amazing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, we can messi. I could message you happen to be in town. You messaged me on blue sky, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away. I was like, I'm able to write a note that was on my computer. That's on my lap, my iPad here. I know that this sounds like boosting, but it really isn't. We have the RAW tools that are just fucking incredible.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And these people do not appreciate them. They don't appreciate them, which is why generative AI is so fucking ugly. Because it's bad technology. It's not even good technology. It's poorly run, inefficient, endlessly expensive and directionless.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And it inflicts harms on users that, like, we would not accept from anything that was not subjected to such an enormous hype cycle. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Literally nothing.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, Nothing. No. If. If 10 years ago, you took any person off the street and said, hey, there's this cool new technology. It takes up enormous amounts of electricity. It can do things that no other piece of technology you've ever seen can do. Also, it's very good at talking teenagers into killing themselves. Should we release it into the wider world?

[Ed Zitron]

And they'll say, well, no, but can it do anything else? And you, of course, would say, yeah, it can sometimes write code.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

And sometimes it also gets things horribly wrong.

[Adam Becker]

And it writes bad prose and, like. And it just kind of makes everything feel kind of mediocre and smeared out.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, exactly. Like, I would always say, no.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. And it makes some people go crazy and.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. It drives people to actual.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

How do you feel about that? Like, how do you, like, did you see this coming? Because this really jumped out.

[Adam Becker]

No. Yeah. No, no. This surprised me. This did surprise the hell out of me, because I think that these machines, I don't even like calling them AI. Right. Because I think that's a marketing term. It is, yeah. If you go back in time to 1990 and tell me when I'm a kid, hey, I have a little device in my pocket that lets me talk to an AI. And then I would have thought, oh, that lets me talk to, like, Commander.

[Ed Zitron]

Data from Star Trek.

[Adam Becker]

And instead it's this. And I would have been like, what the hell is that? No, AI is this marketing term. It's a text generation engine. It produces, you know, homogenized thought, like, product.

[Ed Zitron]

And the thing is, I was also. I'm in the midst of a long one, as usual. It also conflates doing stuff with outputs. I know that sounds kind of flat, but it's like that everything is a unit of work rather than actually creating stuff. Or that you pay a person for their experience, too.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's just also not very good at stuff. No, that's what's pissing me. No, it's really bad at stuff.

[Adam Becker]

It is. And I think that's where, you know, this sort of driving people insane is coming from. Right. Like, I. Like what I missed. The reason I think I didn't see that coming is I failed to think about how, like, I knew that these things just generate text and in a lot of ways they just sort of. Of spit out back to you what you put in. Right, right. Which is. Which is an old thing with chatbots that goes way before LLMs. Goes all the way back to Eliza. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah, that was the first. The first AI computer.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. The first chatbot. I wouldn't even call Eliza AI. Right. Didn't even.

[Ed Zitron]

The creator of Eliza, Goldenhouse is bull.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

This is from Karen Howe's Empire of AI. Great bit about it in there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, no, no. Eliza. Eliza was just like a hundred or so lines of code that, you know, you'd say, I'm having a bad day, and it would say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. Why are you having a bad day?

[Ed Zitron]

Right, but, but, but like the gassing engine, the.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, like, that's the thing I, I didn't think about. Oh, wait, if it just repeats back what you put in, but it does it in a way that's compelling and convincing to some people. That's gonna just get them sort of caught in this like, dopamine self validation loop. And that could drive them off the edge.

[Ed Zitron]

And I think that there is a condescension I. I judge myself for this, where I was like, oh, this doesn't fool me. And it's like. But the harm also of. I'm very. I'm blessed to have tons of people who love me who also give me clear feedback, which is not just what I want to hear, but I definitely, when I was younger and very depressed, would like, crave validation and crave someone to just tell me what I want to hear. I definitely never thought, what if someone did? And the actual danger of having every thought validated and also just the sheer horrors. Like, Matt Hughes, my editor, just did a great story about this kind of horrible story where he simulated someone going through a mental health episode. And Claude was very clear to go, yeah, man, you don't seem so. Good chat. GPT was like, no, everyone is out to get you, mate. Yeah, they're actually. It's in any other tech in the world that did this, you'd shut the shit down immediately.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

You close it.

[Adam Becker]

No, but I.

[Ed Zitron]

Where's Eliezer on this? Because this feels like if you write a. About how everyone dies, this should be the thing that if he actually believed in anything, would he should be up saying like, hey look, this is what I was talking about.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, I mean, I do think that he thinks this is like an incipient version of what he's talking about. I think like a baby version.

[Ed Zitron]

I think he loves it. I think this helps him out.

[Adam Becker]

Well, I think that he finds that useful for making the argument that he makes. Exactly. That's what I'm but he is not again, the argument he's making. And this is the only nice thing I'll say about about him. He means it. Seriously. He's not a grifter. He's three anxiety disorders in a trench cup.

[Ed Zitron]

Damn. Just put that in the fucking book cover. Stupid.

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[Ed Zitron]

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[Ed Zitron]

I can't think of any other movement in tech ever. Yeah, that is anything like this specifically because of how much it sucks ass. Like I can't think of any. Maybe the metaverse and crypto, but even then I don't like that comparison. Yeah, they were so much smaller.

[Adam Becker]

Honestly, what I keep thinking about is, is that in a way it is taking the daily experience of the tech billionaires and like bringing it to the masses. Right. Because what is it like? Oh yeah, what is it like to be Sam Altman? Right? You've got billions of dollars and you're surrounded by people who will never tell you no and validate your every thought.

[Ed Zitron]

And they'll convince you that you understand every subject.

[Adam Becker]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And well, I've been saying this as well because if you're an executive, a machine that can write emails, read emails and otherwise you go to lunch. It's kind of magic. Yeah. But no, I like this idea that it's the extension as well. Just this completely like separate thing that just says, yeah, that's completely right, man. I fully agree.

[Adam Becker]

Right. And so of course they don't see the harm because that's their entire goddamn life that happens. And so. Well, but if this were bad for people, that would mean that, you know, I'm in a bad environment, that that's unhealthy for me. And yeah, actually it is.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, but they don't think.

[Adam Becker]

They don't think that, but I genuinely believe that, like the best thing for the tech billionaires themselves that could happen to them would be to lose all their money. It would be the best thing for their mental health.

[Ed Zitron]

Put me in a room with them.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Now give me. Let me get him on the show. I think that I could have a great chat with any of them.

[Adam Becker]

Sure.

[Ed Zitron]

Just because I went to a private school, like a lot of these American billionaires as well, they would get destroyed by the average scum aristocrats of old in England. Like the real blood drinkers.

[Adam Becker]

So they're amateur vampires?

[Ed Zitron]

No, they really are, though. It's the classic thing. Why British colonialism and American colonialism have never matched up. Because Britain was just evil. They just fucking murdered people and destroyed communities. And they're like, why are we doing this? It's because we're British. This is what we do here. What do you mean? What's a moral I've not heard of? No. What do you mean no? No. Send my, Send my eighth cousin to Africa. Shoot whoever you see. Like, that was the horrifying stuff. But they knew. They didn't care about what people think. I still think the billionaires care.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, they definitely do. Like, this is, this is the thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is insane to me. If I had $1 billion, I would no longer care.

[Adam Becker]

Right. If I had a billion dollars, I would just try to make sure that nobody knew my name.

[Ed Zitron]

And that would post the same amount. Yeah, I would be posting.

[Adam Becker]

No, I think, I think I'd just be done, man. I'd be like, oh, okay, cool. You know, I' donate to a bunch of causes that matter to me and, and you know, like, I still think it's bad for there to be billionaires. And I try to try to change that, but also, like, I'm just, just going to like, you know, hang out in a nice house with my friends and have a good time.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's the problem though. They don't have those.

[Adam Becker]

Well, yeah, because you've heard that.

[Ed Zitron]

Have you ever heard the really depressing story about Elon Musk and this guy called, he was this investor who got really cooked by Covid Peter something. No, I think this story of going over to Elon Musk's house and there was a decanter of wine and Elon Musk picked up the wine before it was done decanting. And then something said, something along the lines of honey badger, don't care. And I just want to say that's one of the saddest fucking things I'VE heard in my life. Just absolutely, just unfathomably depressing because you can get things like a caravan that can kind of aerate it. There are various ways around aeration. If you're really feeling it and you have hundreds of billions or however many, many dollars Elon has liquid, you could just have someone whose job is to make sure the wine is aerated. They could make $250,000 a year. It wouldn't matter to you. That's what you lose in the couch.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, but I think that what matters to Elon is not doing what he's supposed to. Right. So he can be seen as cool.

[Ed Zitron]

Or just drinking as quick as. Otherwise, you might feel something.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean, I just. He desperately wants to be liked, and it's never gonna happen.

[Ed Zitron]

It's so funny as well, because it could be so easy for him.

[Adam Becker]

I know.

[Ed Zitron]

He could just post his lunch every day and nothing else. Everyone would be like, Elon Musk. But look at. This is actually what pisses me off as well, though, because people like Elon Musking sucks. It's like he was sending people off to Aaron Bieber, a science reporter in 20.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, I know Aaron. Aaron's a friend of mine. Yeah, it's awful.

[Ed Zitron]

Aaron rocks. And, like, when that happened, not a single Kara Swisher didn't say shit. Didn't hear Kevin Roos casing you. And none of these fucking people thought necessary. But now, like, Elon Musk. Such a bad guy. He's such a bad guy.

[Adam Becker]

No, he's always been like.

[Ed Zitron]

And also, he called a guy a pedophile for saving children.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Because he wasn't allowed to send his submarine.

[Adam Becker]

No, he's never been good. Like, this is. This is the thing that I don't.

[Ed Zitron]

Think any of these people enjoy anything as much as I enjoy Diet Coke. Like, I'm 100% sure of that, because I love these things. Like, it's. If this kills me, if this shit's meant to, like, in three years, they're like, it's rat blood. Like, I'm like, I will keep drinking.

[Adam Becker]

Better offline brought to you by Diet Coke.

[Ed Zitron]

It's rat blood. I really hope that that sponsor the show at one point. That's the commercial. But that's the thing. Like, and I'm only kind of joking because it's. I really enjoyed Diet Coke. I love sitting down, chatting with my friends. I love watching football or chat with my friends. Yeah. Like, it's like, there are very basic things I enjoy. What do these people like these people just must walk around in this haze of anger.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Or like emptiness.

[Adam Becker]

I think they're. They're really cut off from their own emotions. Right. And like. And again, that's going to happen if you just constantly get validation. Right. You know, one of the many tweets from back when Twitter was less shitty before Musk bought it. There are many tweets that just like, live rent free in my head. And one of them is about the cognitive impact of being a billionaire.

[Ed Zitron]

I know the one you're going to say.

[Adam Becker]

It's like, you know, like everything around you is really expensive. It's just a constant series of billionaires.

[Ed Zitron]

Every chair is $50,000 and weighs 5,000 pounds.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. In terms of the cognitive impact, it must be roughly equivalent to being kicked in the head by a horse every day.

[Ed Zitron]

Exactly.

[Adam Becker]

Ye.

[Ed Zitron]

Fine. But that's my pathology, I guess. But it. No, but it's. They have this weird isolated thing and even Benioff, who used to seem okay.

[Adam Becker]

Well, I mean, he. His whole game was like, to be the best of the billionaires, which is a low bar.

[Ed Zitron]

And then he was just like, ah, fuck it.

[Adam Becker]

Yep, yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Just fuck it. I don't give a shit anymore.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Agent four, it doesn't sell to anyone. No one likes it. But it's the future Agent Force Jesus. He's donated to. I know, it's so cool. It must be really cool being a guy who actually has qualifications from proving things to watch the world. Like all these guys being like, yeah, this is the future. And just articles are on and going. It doesn't work. No one likes it.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. I mean, cool is one word. Incredibly frustrating is another.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. This is stymieing real innovation.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, I know. There's opportunity costs and also just like actual stifling of real innovation in the effort to achieve impossible ends that would be bad even if we could achieve them.

[Ed Zitron]

So slight directional shift. Is there anything within, like science and tech innovation that you're actually excited about? Anything you look at and like, that's fucking cool.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, MRNA vaccines are the first thing to come about.

[Ed Zitron]

Exactly.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. They're really awesome.

[Ed Zitron]

Tell more.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, look, you know, the fact.

[Ed Zitron]

And what is an MRNA MRNA vaccine said flawlessly.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. An m. Wow. Now I'm. Yeah. An MRNA vaccine. Nailed it. Yeah. Is the kind of thing that we have with the COVID vaccines. Right. Basically, the thing that's so exciting about them is that they are so much easier and faster to synthesize than previous vaccines. You know, I think the previous Record before the COVID vaccine for, you know, how long it took to develop a safe, widely deployed vaccine was something like 5 to 10 years. Jesus Christ. And then this vaccine, most of the time delay, most of that year that we were waiting for the vaccine was actually a little less than a year. Most of that was testing. The actual time that it took to synthesize the damn thing was I believe on the order of weeks.

[Ed Zitron]

And what's crazy is I believe that was venture backed, right?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, some of it was venture backed.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is like, see, venture capital can be useful.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, it can be when it wants. Yeah, some of it was venture backed. Some of it was backed by, you know, NIH grants.

[Ed Zitron]

We do need those.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, we sure fucking do. No, government funding of basic research is important. And not just because it leads to amazing technological breakthroughs like MRNA vaccines, but also because basic scientific research is an important thing for humans to do. The same way that art is important. Right. But it also does enable massive scientific and technological breakthroughs and there is promise for MRNA vaccines to open up a whole new class of vaccines that, you know, for things that were previously very hard to vaccinate against. I am not an expert in the field, but like everyone I know who works in biomedicine, they, they're all very excited about this and they're all really depressed by the fact that, you know, we have an anti vaxxer who sounds like a fork that got stuck in a fucking garbage disposal as the health.

[Ed Zitron]

Like a rise from your grave guy from that one video game.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

It's very depressing. I, I just wish we like green energy as well. Feels like.

[Adam Becker]

Oh yeah, green energy was the next thing I was going to say.

[Ed Zitron]

Batteries.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, batteries, solar panels. It's incredible.

[Ed Zitron]

This opportunity is there.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like we need to innovate. Like we are innovating, but like.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And also like we even had the legislation that we needed. Right. Or some of it. Right. Like the, you know, Biden's big bill, the build back better. It was not a perfect bill, but it was the best environmental bill in American history and now it's being destroyed because we have a government in this country that does not believe in climate change and doesn't believe in anything other than short term profits at the expense of everybody else. And also doesn't believe in democracy.

[Ed Zitron]

That feels like a big problem though. The growth at all costs.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I mean that's, that's the thing, like, and that's why my book has the actual title that it does, rather than Going with the title. These fucking people.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, though. These fucking people or just the bastards. I think is also very good too.

[Adam Becker]

I think so too. I mean, like, there's a.

[Ed Zitron]

And it would be so easy for them to do better so easily. No, no, no.

[Adam Becker]

Because, like, you know, forget the best thing that they could do. They're doing some of the worst things that they could do. Doing better than they are right now is just an incredibly low bar.

[Ed Zitron]

But even through, like very poorly guided generosity. Yeah, they could very easily. Yeah, they could just fund media outlets versus whatever it is they're doing to them. Yeah, tearing them down.

[Adam Becker]

But that would mean, you know, the possibility of losing control and losing, you know, losing some of their power and money and they just are not willing to do that because they've got something broken in their hearts.

[Ed Zitron]

We need to heal them. No, no, I think that. I think.

[Adam Becker]

I think we need to tax their money way.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that too. But I think we actually. My true. My truth here is that we need to change how we do that, though. We need to start doing executive liability. We need to make it so if like, crowdstrike happens again, like a bunch, like people potentially get. Die in the NHS system because the computer shuts down, that Satya Nadella can lose something because it isn't enough to find the companies. Finding the company's not going to do shit unless you do scaling revenue, percentage of revenue. This and more in how I become the ftc. No, they're not going to let me. But it's just, I feel the. One of the wonderful things having you on is you're able to come at this from a science communicator perspective. You're actually able to talk because it's not just about what these people want, it's the practicality of it, which is that nothing's really happening.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, that's the actual weirdest thing about the real nihilism of this is that nothing seems to actually be occurring.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And they also act like there's not going to be any accountability for, like, forget their actions, just even their words.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, right.

[Adam Becker]

You know, Sam Altman says, you know, like this. This thing that just drove me up a wall that he said about a month ago, he said that, you know, in 10 years, college graduates are gonna have really cool jobs going out to explore the solar system and spaceships enabled by AI. That is not happening. Like on the list of things that are not happening.

[Ed Zitron]

That's not space exploration.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, no, no, that's not happening. He is just wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

He's lying, right?

[Adam Becker]

And he is probably still gonna be alive in 10 years. And you and I are also likely still gonn. And then we're gonna say, hey, remember when he said that? Now we can show he's just wrong and nothing's gonna happen to him.

[Ed Zitron]

And what needs like, this is why I'm so harsh on media criticism as well, because the one thing you can do is at least say, area man full of shit.

[Adam Becker]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Stupid bastard wanks off again.

[Adam Becker]

Well, this is what I attempted to do when I was.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's. I think that the change that we need in our hearts is to just regularly say this stuff I regularly say on the show. I don't care if you quote me, just say this shit about them. Because Clammy Sammy, he. He's been promising. He said that this was the year of agents. He said that, I thought. But now I read in the information.com the next year's the year of agents, so maybe I do. Actually, here's a question for you.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

AI 2027. Do you read that?

[Adam Becker]

He read a little bit of it. It's nonsense.

[Ed Zitron]

It's nonsense.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Why do you think things like that fool so many people, though? Why do you think it got the media coverage it did?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, part of it is bad journalism, right? Part of it is that Kevin Roose has confused. Kevin Roose has confused reiterating the views of the wealthy, influential and powerful with taking a brave, contrarian stance. And how he made that mistake, I don't know. But I really get the sense that he thinks he's being very brave. And when he's doing exactly what journalists are not supposed to do, which is just uncritically parroting the powerful.

[Ed Zitron]

And it feels like it's the large language model again. It's just the affirming thing. It's like, oh, I'm being contrarian by stepping out against these people who say it isn't making any money and isn't really good at stuff.

[Adam Becker]

And it's like, look, buddy, if there's, you know, if there's two sides to a debate, I mean, obviously there's more than two sides, but, like, if on one side you have the wealthiest people in the world, and on the other side you have people who say mean things about you personally online, and you think that, you know, it's the first side that's the contrarian underdog. Yeah, something is wrong with your brain.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. But this is. And this, I think, is a weird thing in our society that we just. People trust the rich. And the media has got to a point where they've just bred out the real cynicism. Because I swear, like, 10, 15 years ago, you used to have some tech journalism. Like, I read a thing about Amazon Web Services that Kevin Roose wrote, and it was actually pretty cynical about it.

[Adam Becker]

Really?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it was actually pretty critical. He then he made I feel bad for him because this can't have been his fault. He basically said at the end, yeah, they'll never be profitable. No, no, no. It gets worse, Adam. A month later, Amazon announced that AWS is profitable for the first time. Just like, buddy, miss the bean. Come on.

[Adam Becker]

Maybe that's the origin story. Maybe he was like, oh, wow, I screwed that up. I guess. Believe.

[Ed Zitron]

I believe the origin story is actual social media. I think he. I think he felt. I actually think a lot of journalists think that they missed the boat on social media. I have been in Media Relations since 2008. I have read. And this sounds insane.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But it's true. I think I've read just about everybody's work since then, within the tech media at least, including Kevin's. And he has always had a little bit of anxiety that he missed social media. Nobody missed social media. Not a single one since 2008. Everybody was on Zuckerberg, Zuck. They zucked him off hardcore. Sorry, sorry. But nevertheless, they were on top of this. They wrote about social media. Was written about immediately. If anything, I think the media was a little slow to get on apps. Then they gone on hardcore. I know the history of this shit. I have been taking detailed notes. I sound crazy, but I think that there's just. There is this weird thing of, like, the powerful would never lie to us. And then Prism came out and then Cambridge Analytica happened.

[Adam Becker]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

And people like, maybe Zuckerberg's bad, but he wouldn't lie to us.

[Adam Becker]

He would.

[Ed Zitron]

And these. And they're like, well, they know things we don't know. And that's actually another. That's my favorite AI thing where it's like, there's secret things they're working on. Secret things. Secret things. Sitting in the. Waiting in the wings. You'll never believe what's coming. And it's just. I actually think it's just. What's his name? Ilya Sutskever. Just goes to bars occasionally. It's like, you'll never guess when I say, you never get this AGI around the corner.

[Adam Becker]

Okay, okay. No, I have a thing to say about when, like, this is me just being petty and making A point that other people have made before. I would never do that. Yeah, no, of course. No. When he announced that he was, you know, putting together a team to, you know, just go straight for safe superintelligence, he meant to say when he posted this on social media that he was putting together a crack team. But that's not what he wrote.

[Ed Zitron]

What'd he write?

[Adam Becker]

He wrote that he was putting together a crack. Cracked team. Crack ed, cracked. And I'm like, yeah, actually, you know what? Yeah, I think that's true.

[Ed Zitron]

I agree.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

I also think him and Mira Morati. I can't. And so for the listeners, Ilya Sutskever, one of the co founders of OpenAI, raised, I think, $2 billion at a $30 billion valuation. Mira Marathi did a billion. Some amount, some bullshit. Neither of these companies, companies have told their investors how they will spend the money or what on, or what they will build. And you may think I'm being facetious. Mira Marathi literally said to investors, I will not tell you, and then said, I and has board rights where she can veto everyone. I will be honest. Go for it. Yeah, I think, I think at this stage, if these people are so stupid that you're just like, I promise you, literally none, nothing, I won't give you hogs a single oink. You're not going to get anything from me. Give me money now. Fuck, yeah, go for it. But on the other hand, I cannot wait for the investigation.

[Adam Becker]

I just hope there is one, right? These people are acting with impunity and also, again, accountability, just for their words. The most basic criticism of the wealthy in media. This is to shift just a little bit. Eric Schmidt, right, said about, about a year ago, shortly before the election, he said, we're never gonna meet our climate goals anyway, so we might as well just burn as much carbon and use as many resources as possible to get to AGI. And then that will solve climate change for us, which is ridiculous because we don't.

[Ed Zitron]

That's so cool.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

It's like we have no responsibility for our actions until we hand them off to someone else.

[Adam Becker]

Right? So he said this, which is ridiculous for lots of reasons. It echoes stuff that Sam Altman has said, right? It's ridiculous among other reasons, because, like, AGI is not a thing. And also because we don't need, like, we know what we need to do to solve global warming, right? We know what we need to do to solve the climate crisis. It's just a matter of actually getting everybody to do it.

[Ed Zitron]

But, mate, Sam Altman Said that they know what they need to do to get to AGI, and then said a few months later that AGI wasn't a useful tool. Qed.

[Adam Becker]

Well, no, this is exactly what I was about to say about Schmidt, right? He repeats this claim about just pushing as hard as we can. About a month after the last time he said it. Maybe two months. Only a few weeks ago, he comes out in the New York Times with this op ed saying, AGI is not really a thing and we shouldn't care about it. It's like, buddy, you were saying just a few weeks ago ago that this was going to save the world from the biggest emergency of our time, and now you're saying it's not a thing. Do you think we're all stupid? Are you that stupid? What the fuck is going on?

[Ed Zitron]

I can actually tell you. I think he thinks the media is that stupid and will write and it will publish anything he says.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I was shocked to see that the New York Times published it.

[Ed Zitron]

I wasn't. Yeah, I would be honest. That's the least surprise we've got. Fucking Ezra Klein being like, AGI's fucking Ezra, Ezra. What a peculiar fellow. What a peculiar fellow Ezra Klein is. What's going on there? You ever run into Mr. Klein?

[Adam Becker]

I've never met him directly. I know people who know him, but. No, I think. I think he just hung out with too many tech billionaires while he was living in the Bay Area.

[Ed Zitron]

What is this fucking mind poison? These people are boring. Yeah, these people are boring. You sit down.

[Adam Becker]

They have enormous amounts of money. And if you're someone who's never been cool, and I've never been cool in the movie, I've also never been cool.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it.

[Adam Becker]

I know, but, like, if you've never been cool, one of two things happens to you as you grow up. Either you desperately want to be cool, and that can go wrong in many different ways. Like Musk and possibly like Klein. I don't know. Maybe I'm willing to believe that something else is going on with him. I don't know. Or you become like us and you stop giving a shit.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

And you accept, oh, I'm just permanently uncool, whatever, and I'll make my way through life.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's the thing. It's. These people are just disconnected from humanity. None of these people seem to have friends or loved ones because there's just. If I did any of this wackadoo shit, I would get texts from Casey or Sarah or any number of people who love Me just like, hey, man, are you okay? You sound insane. No, Casey would definitely not be just. But. Hey. Yeah. What the. You. You, you. Okay, that doesn't make any sense. What do you mean? What do you mean? A Dyson Sphere? Do you know what that is? A Dyson Sphere. You f. It's just they don't have friends and I don't know if they want them. I think it would require a certain level of vulnerability. Have you talked to any? Have you met up with any of them?

[Adam Becker]

With the billionaires? No. I tried. There's a list at the end of my book of all of the tech billionaires I tried to interview and they all said no. The only one who I successfully interviewed interviewed was like a lower tier billionaire guy named Jan Talin who's in deep with the effective altruist.

[Ed Zitron]

Was he not Skyping?

[Adam Becker]

Skype and Kaza. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Ed Zitron]

Christ.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Actually can't hate him for. Those are two pretty good ones.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

Though I will say Skype. Definitely one of those inventions that I've. I've never seen something just stop.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, it's gone.

[Ed Zitron]

Just got like. No, it just. No, I mean Trapped in Amber. It was the same product for 50.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And then Microsoft would just like, what? Boxer and Animal Farm bang to the glue factory with Skype. We fucked this up well enough. It's also sad, but this has been such a wonderful conversation. Where can people find you?

[Adam Becker]

Well, I'm on Blue sky because I don't want to be on a platform like X that's filled with Nazis. So Blue sky is the best place to find me. I'm Adam Becker, Bluesky Social or B Sky Social.

[Ed Zitron]

Social.

[Adam Becker]

And got a book? Yeah, I've got a book is the main thing. Yeah, I got a book called More Everything Forever.

[Ed Zitron]

I'll have a link to it in the notes.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, it is available wherever fine books are sold. And if you liked what I had to say on this episode, I think you'll like the book.

[Ed Zitron]

And if you like what I have to say on this show, you're a sick puppy. You know where to find me. Thank you so much for your time as ever. I love you all. Thank you. To Behead, of course, here in New York City, here for producing this episode. And of course to Matasowski, the wonderful producer at home. I will catch you with the monologue in a few days. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Owski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed to visit the discord and go to r 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.

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[Ed Zitron]

Running the vacuum.

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[Adam Becker]

This is Bo Nang from Las Culturistas.

[Ed Zitron]

And I'm Matt Rogers, also a host of Las Culturistas. Big news to share. Do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any party is?

[Adam Becker]

Bowen, we talked about this. I'm a person, not a thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, I didn't mean you.

[Adam Becker]

I mean Casamigos. Okay, chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer. A Casamigos margarita. That's a sleigh.

[Ed Zitron]

Ah, Casamigos.

[Adam Becker]

Anything is a sleigh.

[Ed Zitron]

Because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Adam Becker]

Anything goes with my Casamigos. Beau, you're a poet. Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York.

[Ed Zitron]

Cas amigos tequila. 40% alcohol by volume.

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This is an iHeart podcast.