A (2:41)

Cool Zone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast. Trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It is. It is your host, Mio Wong. With me is Garrison Davis.

E (2:54)

Hi. I've played a video game before. I'm not very powerful, but I too.

A (3:00)

Have played many, several video games.

E (3:03)

See, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say several. I've played like a few.

A (3:06)

I, I, many. I have played too many, simply too many video games. So, okay, this is, this is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because. Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing.

E (3:18)

Is something going on out there?

A (3:20)

It's all really bad. And one of the people who's in making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers.

E (3:29)

The PayPal guy.

A (3:30)

The PayPal guy.

E (3:31)

The owner of X. I've been locked in my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've not left. I'm just hearing about this now.

A (3:41)

Yeah, you might know of him as the guy who paid another guy to play Path of Exile two for him. We will get to that.

E (3:47)

I don't play those games. Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo, mecha games and Helldivers 2 like a loser.

A (3:57)

That's, that's reasonable. That's reasonable. Those are, those are, those are fine games.

E (4:01)

Oh, and Sonic.

A (4:02)

Oh God. Okay, pushing aside the subject of Sonic. So, okay, I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers. And I think the place to start here is with the fact that Gaming is in $184.3 billion industry. Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy, but is also right, points out that this is more money than tv, movies and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value. Right. Something like 3 billion people play video games. It's mostly mobile games. Which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games, again, it's, it's a lot of mobile games and it's also mostly people who are women and non white. And yet, however, comma, when people think about like the gamer tm, you are not thinking about that.

E (5:08)

Yeah. Like as a political class.

A (5:11)

Yeah, yeah. You know, like when people say the word gamer. Yeah. You're thinking of a Bunch of weird incel. Right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass. And this is in large part because Gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity. And obviously this is, you know, this is a fascist movement. Now part of the reason this works, and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people because it's new. No one has sort of defined it as a political identity before. And it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium. Which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be like treated like movies or some shit or they want it to be sports because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money in them that are taken like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah, yeah. And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this is true actually. Really both on the left as much as it is on the right. There are a lot of like sort of political figures. I don't know, you're sort of like online people who, who come out of gaming. Like the Hbomberguy, I guess as an example, like Hassan to some extent there's just like a lot of people who are like gamers and then they sort of like become political. But on the other hand, gaming has always been like a. Not always, but has traditionally been an extremely right wing space. Oh God. Garrison, I feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is. Have I told you the story about Kebab the German?

E (6:51)

No.

A (6:52)

Oh boy. Okay, so back in the dawn of time, I played a lot of Hearthstone as a kid and I was like, I wasn't like good.

E (6:59)

Is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people?

A (7:03)

No, this is, this is the World of Warcraft card game.

E (7:06)

Okay, that's. That's even more embarrassing.

A (7:09)

Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think, I think I peaked at like 2k legend North America which like technically speaking is like top like half a percent of players in the world.

E (7:20)

Digital collectible card video game. Come on.

A (7:23)

Oh yeah, yeah. But 2K Legend NA is like fucking shitter Ranks. It's bad. I was never like good good at it. I was just like, okay, kind of. But you know, but this is like a thing that I did growing up and something I remember is like all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers. And these were like, like really big streamers would play music from this guy they called Kebab the German. And it turns out that his actual name was Remove Kebab because he was a fucking German neo Nazi.

E (7:52)

Well, many such cases, yeah.

A (7:55)

For people who like are not aware of like mid-2010s German fascism, remove Kebab is like a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So great stuff, great stuff. This is, this was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in like the, the 2010s. Now this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession these tech CEOs, like, who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bankman Fried and this is, this is really technically on both sides of the political spectrum. Right? We're going to look at Sam Bankman Fried and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess. So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Fried. And you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers. And I guess it is important to note like Sam Bankman Fried, like, is, I guess, like he is a gamer in the sense that like, he's like addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly.

E (9:02)

Yeah, he looks the part too. No offense.

A (9:04)

Yeah, yeah, before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud.

E (9:08)

Well, probably not anymore. He's probably going to get partisan.

A (9:11)

Oh, God, maybe. We'll see. We'll see. I don't know.

E (9:14)

Crypto vote. It's the most valuable voting bloc now. All young Americans are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put all their money in crypto. So now they're going to vote for whoever makes line go up.

A (9:25)

I'm going to become the joker. So, okay, the thing about Sam Bankman Fried, for people who have forgotten who SBF is, he is the guy who was the founder of ftx, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it. And you know, Robert did a, did a behind the Bastards on him. And one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dog Shit game called Storybook Meetings. He is a League of Legends addict, which is like as, as, as any gamer will know. A person who plays League of Legends all the time, like one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed. And, and one of the things that, that SBF did as, as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big Short. We're going to get to Moneyball in a second. Blindside other books, reputable financial advice books.

E (10:21)

Is what I'm hearing.

A (10:23)

But you know, like a very, very powerful, influential and like wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and, and Michael Lewis is sort of angle on understanding him. And this is something that like SBF was like, you know, was like projecting, right. In order for this to be the image of him was him as like the gamer. And this sort of just like baffles Michael Lewis, right, Because he just like doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit. So he plays video games meetings. Like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video games meetings because it is too obvious.

E (11:01)

But I play, I play video games once a week. That's, that's, that's kind of.

A (11:05)

My God. This is the one part about Sam Bankman Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games. It is my like antidepressant strategy basically. Like when I need to not think for a while, there's just me playing actually Path of Exile to one of the games that we're going to be fucking talking about today. Something that I play a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming. Like God, I used to play this game called Smite which is like a. It's like a mobile like League of Legends but like third person. And I played so much Smite that there were pros showing up my casual games. When the Zoomer revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that.

E (11:39)

I'll inform the council. I'll get our next spokes council meeting. I'll bring it to the table.

A (11:45)

That's reasonable. But you know, so what happens with this sort of thing is that, is that Michael Lewis image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant.

E (11:58)

Yeah.

A (11:59)

Because he's just like playing fucking video games all the time. And this gets you one of the aspects of why these people do this sort of like pretending to be a gamer thing and like SBF is a gamer. Right. But like why they, why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's extremely profitable and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have the same kind of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would see.

E (12:29)

For something like movies or like respectability in some way.

A (12:33)

Yeah.

E (12:33)

Except in like the reversed Sam Bakeman Freedway where like the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an eccentric genius. Right. Like, like, like that era of like Silicon Valley guy. Yeah, that's like, he's, he's so different, right? Like he's, he's, he's not like put together. And this like shows how he's like a new and innovative thinker. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like a double edged sword in like that specific way.

A (12:57)

Yeah, well, this, this is all a feedback loop, right? Because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been, these people don't play video games. They're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game. Are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists. Right. And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on. And it's just really, really easy to sort of like bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer like, you know, you like, you show a gamer like a League of Legends addict and they will instantly be able to just like read this person like a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction like is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I know too many League of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit. Terrible game.

E (13:45)

Yeah, but arcane though, right? All right, continue.

A (13:49)

God. Okay, we're going to take an ad break and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis.

E (13:56)

Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about unique incompetence.

F (14:06)

In 1993, three 8 year old boys were brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas as the small town local police struggled to solve the crime. Rumors soon spread that the killings were the work of a satanic cult. Suspicion landed on three local teenagers, but there was no real evidence linking them to the murders. Still, that would not protect protect them. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US History. Presidential lies, Environmental disasters, Corporate fraud. In our latest series, three teenage boys are falsely accused of a vicious triple homicide. But their story doesn't end with their trials or convictions. Instead, their plight will capture the imagination of the entire country and spark a campaign for justice that will last for almost two decades. Follow American Scandal on the Wondria or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Scandal the West Memphis three early and ad free right now on Wondery.

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B (16:36)

It's the gaming event of the year, featuring T Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus NE Gentleman's Gaming. It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Trackmania, Tony hawk, Pro Skater 34 and Tekken 8. Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to globalgamingleague.com.

A (17:10)

So we are back now. Okay. Obviously, part of the reason this works is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these, these really out of touch, sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market. Right. But Louis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really, truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass. And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Louis in theory understands a lot better, which is sports. So he. Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports. Right. He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which I'll get to in a second. And he wrote the Blind side, which is another book that, like, they talk about on behind the Bastards. You can go listen to that. But I want to go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog oath and Athletics team invented like, baseball metrics and they use saber metrics to like, like build this roster out of nothing that, like, went to the playoffs and did really well. And, and like, I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that. Oakland A's team, like, whatever. I'm not going to argue about baseball statistics. What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of underdog geniuses and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Podesta. And he is like one of the main figures in this book. He's kind of like an assistant coach, basically.

E (18:31)

What baseball team is this?

A (18:32)

Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit.

E (18:37)

I don't know.

A (18:37)

They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called.

E (18:38)

They're called the Athletics now.

A (18:40)

No, no, they were originally called the Athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the. Well, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's. Well, they've been the A's forever, but yeah, they, they, they've, they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.

E (18:53)

Oh, see, I was thinking of the football team. Yeah. Because I was like, wait a minute. Didn't, didn't Las Vegas, didn't the Raiders go there too?

A (18:59)

Yes, yes, yes. They stole both of them.

E (19:02)

That's what I was thinking. And I am more of a baseball head than a football head.

A (19:06)

But yeah, so, okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about football here.

E (19:09)

Bummer.

A (19:09)

So this guy, right, Paul Podesta, is like one of these sort of geniuses he later goes on to be. It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns. Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons, going 1 in 31, which is a feat of like just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports. I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go 1 in 31 in to cross two seasons of football again. So again, that is a 1 in 15 season followed by an 016 season. It's the second 016 season ever. Unclear how responsible for. For this he is, but what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trademark. Okay? It's like, Mia, why the fuck are you talking about this? Part of this is also like, these people are just evil. Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly, have accused him of sexual assault. He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck. Shit. So. So that, that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson is that he's just really fucking like morally reprehensible, right? He is like a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season. And Paul Podesta, who again is, is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be like touting as, like this genius analytics guy decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who've been on the Texans. And again, like Garrison, like, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.

E (21:00)

Mia, do you expect me to know anything about the Houston Texans?

A (21:03)

It is a team from Houston, Texas. That's. That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy.

E (21:09)

Hey, at least it's not Austin. No offense to our Austin listeners.

A (21:14)

They fucking traded this guy, right? And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade. That is three is like. It is the worst trade in the history of football. It is three first round picks, two thirds, two third round Picks and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy, who again I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right? They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL. So okay, so how, how does Deshaun Watson like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who like, is now laundering, being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort of like cultural, like being a rogue outsider, right? How, how, how does Deshaun Watson, his like greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season, in weeks one through five out of, out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000 to start weeks one through five out of again 759 quarterbacks, he ranks 753 out of 759. EPA for drop back. 753 out of 759. They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind boggling an EPA of minus 0.3. Which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would.

E (22:36)

How did you trick me into being on a sports episode? I only agreed to this because I thought it was video games.

A (22:43)

Don't worry, we're almost done with the sports part of it, I promise. There is actually a reason why I'm doing this. Which is, which is the argument that's that that sports and the sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the. Right, yeah, of course, yes, I, I understand that.

E (22:59)

I can, I, I can see that, yes.

A (23:01)

Also, I've always wanted to complain about this on air and this is, this is the best chance we're ever gonna get. So. Jesus Christ.

E (23:07)

Like what I talk about, like movies or something is this.

A (23:10)

Yes, yes. This is what it feels like.

E (23:12)

Is this what I sound like?

A (23:14)

Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of hand, this guy who's a serial sexual predator, $230 billion. And this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius. And this all comes back to again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on like by the jock or whatever, right? That's like, that's like, that's like the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're like oppressed by this. But like it's just like the same masculinity all the way down. And you can watch like, just like the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using, by using both of these fucking affects. So I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like specifically in the culture, and you know, why these people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as, as the sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read something by friend of the show Vicky Osterweil in a piece called Game Boys. Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control and unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning and boredom that one must master to live under current economic conditions. Games rely on affects, moods and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self importance under conditions that disempower them. But they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers and fans have found space in and around games, despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by CIS men. So I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember, both for Sam Bankman Fried and also for the construction of right wing gaming movements in general and for. What we're going to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right? There are a lot of what you would call traditionally sort of left wing demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like, is something that you learn the kinds of like, ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that that, you know, you use for fucking work. They're also a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally. And like, I mean, I know this right Like I am fucking, like I'm a Chinese trans woman. Who better. Who's better at video games than both the people I'm going to be fucking talking about in this story, Right?

E (26:30)

Like I heard his Path of Exile character was actually qu. Advanced, but.

A (26:34)

Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about the Path of Exile character next, you know, but, but I mean it's worth, it's worth mentioning like speedrunning, right? Which is a, a very, very trans genre.

E (26:43)

Competitive gaming in general. Competitive fighting games.

A (26:46)

Yeah, it depends, it depends a lot on the genre. Yeah, competitive fighting games. Like yeah, melee. I'm, I'm gonna briefly mention Sonic Fox who is a black non binary furry who's like one of the greatest fighting game players of all time. Incredibly beloved, the only person in history ever to beat someone 13 to 0 in a first to 11. Absolute legend. Right? But you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life. Right now these people are in power. And you know who else is in power? It's the products and services that support this podcast.

E (27:24)

All hail.

F (27:31)

In 1993, three 8 year old boys were brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. As the small town local police struggled to solve the crime, rumors soon spread that the killings were the work of a satanic cult. Suspicion landed on three local teenagers, but there was no real evidence linking them to the murders. Still, that would not protect them. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of wondry show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, three teenage boys are falsely accused of a vicious triple homicide. But their story doesn't end with their trials or convictions. Instead, their plight will capture the imagination of the entire country and spark a campaign for justice that will last for almost two decades. Follow American Scandal on the Wondria or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Scandal. The West Memphis three early and ad free right now on Wondery plus the.

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B (30:01)

It's the gaming event of the year featuring T. Pain's Nappy Boy Grizzlies versus Neo's Gentleman's Gaming. It's a 4v4 matchup featuring Call of Duty, Tetris, Trackmania, Tony hawk, Pro Skater 34 and Tekken 8. Season 0 of the Global Gaming League is live streaming on YouTube and Twitch. Head over to globalgamingleague.com.

A (30:36)

We are back. Now obviously the, the other part of this, you know, we've talked a bit, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's, there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. And you know, the thing about gaming, right, is that it is to some extent a tool that people use to cope with like you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system. And like I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy Nazi like gamer dipshit, right?

E (31:03)

Yeah. That's why I boot up FF7 Remake to stare at cloud strife for hours on end when I'm feeling sad.

A (31:11)

But you know the problem with what's happening here, right? Is that like the right like that we're experiencing violence in different ways. But it's like the systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system but these people's solution to it is to blame it on women. Right? And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicki about this where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from and like I would compare it to like, you know, lots and lots of People deal with social isolation, right, and deal with this violence. But like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters.

E (31:41)

Most, most, Yeah, I would say that's, that's true.

A (31:44)

Yeah. Right. And so, and so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like them, like eat shit. Like, I'm sorry, you've, you've become Nazis.

E (31:52)

Like off skill issue in some ways, among other environmental factors. But.

A (31:57)

Yeah, yeah, but, but also a lot of times these people aren't fucking, like, they're not dealing with shit at all mostly. Right? I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right? But like, also he's the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He is one of the most powerful people who has ever lived. And he still has the same sense of like, aggrievement that powers all of these people. And this is like one of the key things of like the gamer mythos, right, is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by like jocks or whatever. And now it's, it's been shifted into this.

E (32:30)

Not anymore.

A (32:30)

Yeah, now, now they believe that they're being oppressed by like women and minorities. Right.

E (32:36)

And, and it's actually the people who are actually doing the oppression is now all of the Doge nerds at the.

A (32:41)

Yeah.

E (32:42)

Top of the system now. It's, it's. But we have, we've had, we've had a, we've had a full UNO reverso.

A (32:47)

But the thing is these people have always been at the top of the system, right? And like, but, but it's this affect many ways. It's this, it's this feeling they have of their, of them being the ones who are oppressed that like, you know, made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate. If you're going to read one Vicky Osterwald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with. Like, I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible and it's good. But like, as a medium, there hasn't been anywhere near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with like, film or music. But if you're gonna read one thing from her, read A piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of like fascist reaction to the really broke state of Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out. And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are being, I mean, are literally being used as like, scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games. And, you know, and this expands out to workers more broadly. They're literally being used to silence anyone who sort of talks about the problems with like this game that like, when Cyberpunk 2077 came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was broken. Shitty game. And, you know, they're also used for just like anti queer and like anti feminist harassment campaigns. And that's, that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too. And, and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling, right, Is that they're also like signaling to their base that, like, I am one of you, et cetera, et cetera. Like, you should fucking support me for this shit. Now pivoting a little bit. So when, when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman fried. Because like, many.

E (34:24)

Yeah, many such cases.

A (34:25)

Yeah, the last, the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam. And it turns out, though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like, gamer stick thing, like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is like, not really a gamer, I would say. Like, he sort of plays video games.

E (35:02)

He's a ketamine user. He's a Twitter power user. He is the shadow president.

A (35:08)

Yeah. The richest man in the world. Richest man who has ever lived.

E (35:11)

Yeah.

A (35:11)

But he's. He is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is like, he's an elite video game player in like, multiple games. He's obsessed with this.

E (35:18)

He's also, I believe the term is a meme Lord, if I'm reading this right.

A (35:23)

Oh, God. One of his path of exile. Two characters. I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but One of his characters in that game was named Kekius Maximus. So, like, this is the level of.

E (35:33)

Mind that that is one of his favorite names. In his White House office, he has a. He has a Kekius Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk is an AI generated image of like Pepe the Frog and like in like Roman, like, like Caesar attire.

A (35:48)

I hate everything.

E (35:50)

So, yeah, this is the guy who runs the country now.

A (35:52)

Yeah.

E (35:53)

Oops.

A (35:54)

So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games. And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually he's like, for a long time been doing a, like, I'm a gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're gonna get to in a second. This is something that Blue sky user Gaydog reminded me of because I had forgotten he has so many gaming scandals. I'd forgotten about this one, which is that he at one point posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is very difficult game, and he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's like over encumbered. Like, it's okay. Like the. The best explanation I've tried to. I figured out for like how bad at this game he is is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car. Stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen. And then like slamming the accelerator with the parking.

E (36:54)

Hey, I love the Mazda Miata.

A (36:56)

Like, that's that. That, that's like the gaming equivalent. Everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing. He is just like, like unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game. Like just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit. And this was like kind of a scandal for him. It wasn't like a huge one, but like, especially like this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it. So. So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4. I'm not going to talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. The Diablo and Path of Exile are like very much the same kind of game. Basically, like you click somewhere and your character goes there and it. You click other things and it does attacks. But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of like the, the best path of Exile 2 players in the world. And he was doing this on his Alt account, which is. Has the handle, it's Cyber Gamer 420, but the all the E's are threes. So it's CYB3R G A M3R420.

E (38:09)

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Say, say, say that again.

A (38:12)

It's at CYB3R G A M3R420.

E (38:19)

So I think I found something. I think the 420 at the end is actually a reference to Hitler's birthday. April 20th.

A (38:31)

God damn it. So, okay, he like claims to have one of the like the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of Exile where if you die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. It's to like prove that he actually did this. He like does a live stream where he tries to play Path of Exile like on a Twitter live stream and it is immediately obvious that like he has no idea what he's doing. Like, it's not just obvious. People who play the game. I hadn't played path of exile 2 at this point, right? I had only played the original one like a decade ago. Like a little bit of it. And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before. Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like, it was so unbelievably obvious. Like he like walked past one of the most valuable currencies in the game. Just like walked past it, didn't notice it. It's like staggeringly obvious. Anyone who plays video games, this guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him. And eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his path of exile 2 account. And then he claims that he never claims that it was his path of exile 2 account. And this genuinely has been a real problem for him because it pissed off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos with like millions of views from guys like Asthma Gold, who was like a. Is a very famous right wing streamer who like sucks ass. Like is like a turbo right winger. Like spends his time screaming about how like black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry. And fucking Asthma Gold is watching this video and being like, this guy is a lying piece of shit. What the fuck? And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's, it's, it's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people like react to this to like, to Elon like this. And like, like again, like this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just like lying now. What's interesting about, about this to some extent is that like again his, his whole thing here is he's trying to like pretend that he's like a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non gamers in the sense that like there's no way, I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a top of the path of exile player on a stream using someone else's account. But like there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And a lot of people he talks to about this stuff are people like Joe Rogan who aren't like gamer TM people. Right? It's like a lot of, it's a lot of people who aren't gamers that he's like sort of hyping up his reputation with. And so he's weirdly, on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist base, but on the other hand he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet of, of gaming as like this sort of renegade right wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked up because he, he, you know, spent all of this time trying to like pretend to be a gamer. But the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very, very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheat in video games, cheated records of video games. And Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap, right?

E (41:44)

And that means we got him folks. Mission accomplished. Wrap it up. We beat Elon Musk.

A (41:49)

We fucking got him.

E (41:50)

It's over. He's, he's been cast out of civil society for the high crime of pretending to play a video game. He has lost all respect among, among the farthest reaches of the Right. So what's next?

A (42:06)

We have what he, he has, he has one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.

E (42:10)

Is this about the one video game he hasn't played? Which is the funniest Elon Musk gamer story, in my opinion.

A (42:17)

Which, which are you, which one are you talking about?

E (42:18)

That's the one that, that, that he, he had to publicly announce that he, he does not play GTA 5.

A (42:26)

Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that.

E (42:28)

Because he doesn't like, quote, unquote, doing crime and GTA 5, quote, required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just couldn't do it, unquote.

A (42:39)

Oh, I completely forgot about that.

E (42:41)

So that proves that at least he has some integrity.

A (42:44)

God.

E (42:44)

Now some, some gamers might be sick individuals acting out, you know, violence, power fantasies, but at least Musk has some integrity to not harm police officers in GTA 5. That really shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this, you know, at times strange behavior.

A (43:05)

Yeah, that's also like, that's also him signaling to like a different, like the weird Christian part of the base that's like, oh, violence of video games is bad. Which way? Because he's trying to signal to all of his groups simultaneously and all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass and we hate him.

E (43:24)

It is pretty embarrassing. That doesn't bring me much joy because again, he is the most powerful man in the world. No, but it is mildly amusing.

A (43:32)

Yeah, but so there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that like, the pushback he is getting here is like, I think, actually kind of insignificant. So the last thing I want to talk about is him pretending to have been like a Quake pro, which is the thing that he did.

E (43:46)

Quake Pro.

A (43:46)

And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Karl Jobst, who is like, his thing is like people who fake, who like, fake things in video games, basically. And he is like not a leftist. He's like, like a center right guy, basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is, but he did a video about, about Elon claiming to be a Quake player and what he found. So Elon, like, apparently did actually play in an early Quake tournament, but none of the good players were there. And he, he came, his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better WI fi than everyone else. And so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good WI fi and then he got destroyed. Which I just, I just think is funny.

E (44:26)

Right.

A (44:26)

That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he, he, he, he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran into someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed. But the reason I bring this up is that, like, at the end of this video, Jobsters, like, goes on this whole thing about how. And this is like, a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press, where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie. And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right? I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down, Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this. And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else ever fucking seen outside of, like, the left about what Elon Musk is doing. And, like, just the willingness to just be like, this guy is a fucking.

E (45:28)

Just.

A (45:28)

Just a serial liar. Like, everything he says is a lie. He literally calls him a con, like, says his activities like a con man. He says the things that he's saying are like, either lies or delusional. There is a kind of, like, shift happening right now where people, like, really are turning on him. There was a thing that happened literally today where Ubisoft, you know, Ubisoft is a famously, like, not a leftist company, right? Like, they've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff. So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a. As like a character in it. And. And the. Literally, the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your path of exile 2 account told you in, like, replied. In reply to a thing about Hasan. Like, we are. We are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right? This thing that had been like, a really, really consistent base of support for people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him and is sort of being polarized against him by just, like, the fact that he's just. Is so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is. And, like, obviously, like, I don't think, like, the gamers are gonna, like, fucking rise up or whatever, but the actual serious point to all of this, other than like, looking at the ways that fascism, like, why these people do this and like, game versus, like, a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition by. This isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side, right? That doesn't happen that often. But the. One of the ways you can do this. And this is. This is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents to allies to stay home. And that was enough. Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks, like, came for Kerenzi's government was enough for them to take power. And I think, like, the actual, like, the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalition so that when the confrontation with these people comes, there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can. They can be stopped.

E (47:35)

So this is Wong publicly calling for the start of Gamergate 2.

A (47:41)

Gamergate 2 is already happening. Damn it. This is Gamergate 3.

E (47:43)

This is an open call to. To begin Gamergate 2.5 right now. On behalf of Mia Wong, make sure you. Mia.

A (47:53)

Oh, no.

E (47:55)

And then hopefully it'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik revolution. After we get enough gamers to stay home or even better, rise up, right? We can make some kind of graphic with like a fist holding a controller or a keyboard if you're a nerd about it.

A (48:16)

Gamers are the Cossacks. We've got to get them to not back the regime. That's actually the February revolution where they stood down, but, you know, same point, same point.

E (48:23)

Yeah. Come on, Mia. Geez.

A (48:25)

Look, I am one of the biggest things of, like, people need to remember that Lenin did not overthrow the tsar. He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist Y guy who was from the provisional government in between the first. Okay, we're done. We're done here. We're done here. We're fucking out. We're leaving.

E (48:39)

What games are you playing?

A (48:41)

What games am I playing? Path of exile 2. Don't play Brotato. It will consume your life. Play RoboQuest. RoboQuest is great. RoboQuest dares to ask the question. What if, like, the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also your doing a roguelike with like Doom's combat?

E (49:00)

That sounds very gay. So I probably can't do that. Then. I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday. Armored Core 6.

A (49:09)

Armor Core 6 rules. Love that game. Love that game.

E (49:11)

Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy 7. And I'm waiting for Mecha Break to come out for like their official release now that the beta is closed. Unfortunately the character selection is very gooner coded many many such cases so I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my on my model. But the gameplay is fun.

A (49:36)

Oh this has been a Could Happen here I Good Lord they they pay me for this. I I I had I had to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and clips of of Elon Musk playing video games for this. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.

E (50:02)

Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us.

A (50:05)

Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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