Elon Musk Has Lost the Gamers

Summary

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Podcast Summary: It Could Happen Here

Episode: "Elon Musk Has Lost the Gamers"

Date: March 27, 2025

Hosts: Mia Wong & Garrison Davis

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Overview

In this episode, Mia Wong and Garrison Davis delve into why powerful tech and financial figures like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried are desperate to be seen as “gamers,” and how recent blunders have triggered unexpected backlash, even from typically supportive demographics. What starts as a lighter episode quickly morphs into a sharp critique of power, masculinity, media gullibility, and the cultural construction of “gamer” identity—tracing the intersection of tech, gaming, politics, and fascism, and looking at how collapsing myths may fracture right-wing coalitions.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Do the Powerful Want to Be “Gamers?”

[02:55]

• Video gaming is a $184.3 billion industry—bigger than TV, movies, and music combined, with around 3 billion players globally (Mia).
• Despite a diverse gaming audience (predominantly mobile, often women and non-white players), the public image of "gamer" remains that of a white, right-wing, insecure male—a legacy of “Gamergate” (Mia).
• The “gamer” identity became a potent political tool. Gamergate marked the first “truly effective political mobilization” of gamers as a class, mainly for reactionary and fascist purposes (Mia, [05:22]).
• Mia: “Gaming is contested ground... there are a lot of traditionally left wing demographics that play video games and have made spaces here.” [26:44]

2. The Media’s Gullibility & Myth of the Tech Genius

Sam Bankman-Fried as “The Archetype”

[09:39]

• SBF, founder of FTX (now serving 25 years for fraud), was publicly characterized by author Michael Lewis as an enigmatic, genius gamer addicted to League of Legends and Storybook Brawl.
• Mia criticizes Lewis and "mainstream journalists" for being "genuinely, truly, an unbelievably gullible dumbass" ([17:34])—especially in failing to understand gaming and conflating addiction or eccentricity with brilliance.
• Garrison: “Except in the reversed Sam Bankman-Fried way where the schlubbiness is part of what makes him, like, an eccentric genius.” [12:47]

Sports, Masculinity, and the Nerd Myth

[17:34–23:37]

• Deep dive into Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball” and the Cleveland Browns fiasco under Paul Podesta (trading for Deshaun Watson, a serial sexual predator).
• The “nerd” is lionized—portrayed as oppressed underdogs; in practice, these figures become complicit in, or architects of, oppressive systems (Mia).

3. Gaming, Marginality, and Fascist Co-optation

[23:37–26:44]

• Cites Vicky Osterweil’s analysis: Games offer alienated people a way to embody power fantasies and cope with capitalist boredom, as well as spaces for queer and marginalized creatives. But they are also deeply susceptible to co-optation for violent, reactionary ends.
• Garrison and Mia discuss the trans and queer roots and innovations in competitive genres like fighting games (Sonicfox, speedrunning).

4. The Gender Politics of Gaming

[31:09–34:57]

• Games as outlets for dealing with the “violence of the gender system.” Both marginalized and privileged people use games to cope, but the right-wing solution fixates on blaming marginalized groups.
• Mia: “The Right... experiences violence in different ways, but the solution is to blame it on women.” [31:44]
• Elon Musk’s insecurity is tied to gender, but his immense power complicates the trope of “gamer as oppressed loser.”

5. Elon Musk: The Gamer Persona Falls Apart

Lies, Scandal, and Community Backlash

[34:58–43:01]

• Musk has repeatedly lied about being good at games: posting a nonsensical Elden Ring build ([36:06]), paying people to level his Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2 accounts, and being quickly exposed in a disastrous livestream ([39:04]).
• “It was so unbelievably obvious...this guy has never played this game before.” –Mia [39:18]
• Even right-wing streamers like Asmongold publicly called out Musk’s fakery, signaling a broad-based loss of trust.

Other Musk “Gamer” Scandals

• Musk’s alt gamer handle: “CYB3R G A M3R420”—a nod to meme culture and potentially to Hitler’s birthday ([38:52]).
• Notable hypocrisy: Musk famously claimed he doesn’t play GTA V because it “required shooting police officers”… but the hosts point out this is just another performative signaling ploy ([42:52]).

6. Why Game “Legitimacy” Matters

• Gaming status is now weaponized to signal authenticity to a right-wing base, and to impress media figures who still misunderstand gaming culture.
• But faking prowess is uniquely dangerous: The gaming community is adept at catching cheaters, and Musk has alienated even his core demographics ([41:09]–[44:05]).

7. A Broader Political Lesson: Fracturing the Right

• Mia posits that you don’t have to win everyone over, but fracturing coalitions is powerful: “The only way we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people’s coalitions so that … they can be stopped.” [47:20]
• Historic analogy: the Bolshevik victory relied on opponents’ supporters simply staying home.

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Memorable Quotes

• On gamergate’s legacy:
  “Gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity … 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.” —Mia [05:22]

• On the perils of media credulity:
  “Michael Lewis is … a genuinely, truly, an unbelievably gullible dumbass.” —Mia [17:34]

• On status in gaming:
  “There is literally an entire genre of video … that is very, very popular. That is just people exposing people who cheat in video games … Elon has walked just like, directly into this bear trap.” —Mia [41:09]

• On coalition fracture as a left strategy:
  “One of the ways you can do this… is get their coalition to stay home … that was enough. Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines… they can be stopped.” —Mia [47:20]

• On Musk’s hypocrisy:
  “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.” —Garrison [43:17], mocking Musk’s performativity.

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Key Timestamps

• [02:55] – Main episode introduction; why powerful people want to be “gamers”
• [05:22] – Breakdown of who the “gamer” actually is and Gamergate’s impact
• [09:39] – Sam Bankman-Fried as PR “gamer” and media’s misunderstanding
• [17:34–23:37] – Sports analogies; dissecting Michael Lewis’s gullibility
• [23:37] – Vicky Osterweil on gaming’s dual potentials (liberation/co-optation)
• [31:09] – Gender politics, gaming, and coping mechanisms
• [34:58] – Enter Elon Musk’s gamer scandals and livestream expose
• [41:09] – Gamers as anti-cheat watchdogs; Musk’s loss of core support
• [44:19] – Musk’s fake Quake credentials and YouTube takedown by Karl Jobst
• [47:20] – “How to break a political coalition” and lessons for the left

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Notable Moments

• Mia’s sports tangent devolving into a mini-rant about the Cleveland Browns’ trade for Deshaun Watson. [19:02–23:37]
• Mia’s reading from Vicky Osterweil’s “Game Boys” — illuminating games’ dual social role. [23:37]
• Elon Musk exposed on livestream, losing the respect of right-wing gamers. [39:04]
• Ubisoft dragging Musk with a savage tweet — corporate pushback even from non-progressive quarters. [45:41]

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Tone and Closing

The tone is snarky, personal, and highly online—rich with inside jokes and explicit left critiques. The hosts skewer both the “gamer” archetype and the out-of-touch elites who try to co-opt it, while acknowledging the complex, contested ground gaming represents: a space for both reactionary and radical possibilities.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The "gamer" identity is politically important, contested, and much broader than stereotypes suggest.
• Powerful men’s adoption of the gamer persona is about signaling belonging, leveraging a misunderstood—and powerful—demographic.
• Attempts to fake gamer prowess are uniquely damaging among online communities obsessed with legitimacy and detection of cheating.
• Coalition politics matter: Fracturing your opponent’s support may be as decisive as flipping supporters.
• The episode, while tongue-in-cheek, lays out a clear argument for understanding and leveraging cultural divides in the battle against fascist movements.

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End of summary.

Transcript

[Mia Wong]

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Wait, are you talking about you put your hole into the sun?

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That's crazy. Downward dog mooning the sun. I was gonna say. Is it cheeks open? It's cheeks open all the way wide. Is it cheeks open?

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[Mia Wong]

Call 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, Mia Wong. With me is Garrison Davis.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Too have played many, several video games.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

Is something going on out there?

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

The PayPal guy.

[Mia Wong]

The PayPal guy.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

That's reasonable. That's reasonable. Those are fine games.

[Garrison Davis]

Oh, and Sonic.

[Mia Wong]

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 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 one 84.3 billion dollar industry. Todd Harris, who is 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 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Like as a political class.

[Mia Wong]

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, fascist movements. Now part of the reason this works, and we're gonna 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 come out of gaming like Hbomberguy, I guess as an example, like Hasan 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?

[Garrison Davis]

No.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

Digital collectible card, video game. Come on.

[Mia Wong]

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 so this, 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Well, many such cases.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. 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 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 bank and Freed, and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess. So we're gonna start with Sam Bankman Fried. And, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're gonna 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, he looks the part too. No offense.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

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 sort of 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 game called Storybook Brawl Jean 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 one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of the Big Short. We're gonna get to Moneyball in a second Blindside.

[Garrison Davis]

Other books, reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing.

[Mia Wong]

But a very, very powerful, influential and wealthy American journalist just let him sort of tag along and, and Michael Lewis sort of angle on understanding him. 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. Like no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video games for meetings because it is too obvious.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Oh 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 anti depression strategy basically. Like when I need to not think for a while, there's just me playing actually path of Exile 2, one of the games that we're gonna 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 moba, 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 B, I'm gonna be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

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 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, 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.

[Garrison Davis]

For something like movies or like respectability in some way.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

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 is 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Right.

[Mia Wong]

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 easily just sort of like bamboozled them by just doing something that any gamer like, you know, 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Oh, 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

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[Mia Wong]

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 Lewis 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 Lewis, 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.

[Garrison Davis]

What baseball team is this?

[Mia Wong]

Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know. They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called now.

[Garrison Davis]

They're called the Athletics now?

[Mia Wong]

No, no, they were originally called the Athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always Been the. Well, because 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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?

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. So, okay, unfortunately we're gonna be talking about football here. Bummer. 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 that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson, that he is 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 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

They. 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, 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 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 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 negative 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Don't worry, we're almost done. We're almost done with the sports part of it. And 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.

[Garrison Davis]

I can, I, I can see that.

[Mia Wong]

Yes. 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 fucking Christ.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Yes. Yes. Is this what it feels like?

[Garrison Davis]

Is this what I sound like?

[Mia Wong]

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 this team. Hand this guy who is 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 bullshit 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Totally.

[Mia Wong]

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?

[Garrison Davis]

Like, well, I heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced, but.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

Competitive gaming in general. Competitive fighting games.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, it depends, it depends a lot on the genre. Yeah, competitive fighting games, like, yeah, melee. 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 like as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fuck it in real life, right? Now that these people are in power. And you know who else is in power? It's the products and services that support this podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

All hail.

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[Mia Wong]

We are back now, obviously, the other part of this. You know, we've talked a bit, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but 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?

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

But, you know, the problem with what's happening here, right, is that like the. Right, like that we're experiencing violence in sort of in different ways, but it's like the systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system, but these people 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Skill issue in some ways, among other environmental factors. But.

[Mia Wong]

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 is the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived. And he still has the same sense of, like, aggrievement that powers all 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Not anymore.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

But the thing is, these people have always been at the top of the system, right? And like, but. But it's this affect. 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 gonna read one Vicky Oswald 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 broken 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, like, 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 was. It had just like fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was a broken, shitty game. And, you know, they're also used for just like anti queer and like, anti feminist harassment campaigns. And 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. Now pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman fried. Because like, many.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, many such cases.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, like 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Also, but he's.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

I hate everything.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Oops.

[Mia Wong]

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, 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 going to get to in a second. This is something that that Blue sky user Gaydog reminded me of because I'd 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 accelera with the parking brake on.

[Garrison Davis]

Hey, I love the Mazda Miata.

[Mia Wong]

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 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. 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 you click other things and it does attacks. But famously, like this year, he pretended to be one of the. 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

It's at CYB3R G A M3R420.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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 Asmagold 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 level of 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, 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?

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

We fucking got him.

[Garrison Davis]

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's lost all respect among. Among the farthest reaches of the. Right. So what's next?

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Which. Which are you. Which one are you talking about?

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Oh, that was funny. I forgot about that.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, I completely forgot about that.

[Garrison Davis]

So that proves that at least he has some integrity.

[Mia Wong]

God.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

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 in video games is bad. Which 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

Quake Pro.

[Mia Wong]

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, right? 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, just, 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 the 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 literally the Official Assassin's Creed account replied 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 going to, 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 Kerensky's government was enough for them to take power. And I think 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.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Gamergate 2 is already happening, damn it. This is gamergate 3.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

Oh, no.

[Garrison Davis]

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

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. Come on, Mia. Jeez.

[Mia Wong]

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 e guy who was from the provisional government. In between the okay, we're done. We're done here. We're done here. We're fucking out. We're leaving.

[Garrison Davis]

What games are you playing?

[Mia Wong]

What games am I playing? Path of exile 2 don't play Brotato. It will consume your Life. Okay, 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?

[Garrison Davis]

That sounds very gay so I probably can't do that. Then I do Helldivers 2 nearly every Monday.

[Mia Wong]

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

[Garrison Davis]

Sonic X Shadow Generations Final Fantasy 7 and I'm waiting for Mecca Break to come out for like their their official release now that the beta is closed. Unfortunately the character selection is very Gooner.

[Mia Wong]

Coded many many such cases.

[Garrison Davis]

So I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest size available on my on my model. But the gameplay is fun.

[Mia Wong]

Oh this has been It 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, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us 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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[Danielle Fishel]

This is Danielle Fishel from Pod Meats World. Parents, quick question. When is the last time you won snack Time? The other day I handed my son a perfectly portioned Pinterest level snack and he traded it for a Mott's Applesauce pouch. I'm not mad, just impressed. And that's why Mott's no Sugar added Applesauce pouches are perfect to keep on hand. They're made with real apples packed in a super easy pouch. Perfect for tossing in a lunchbox, keeping in the car, or grabbing as you're running out the door. Plus, they're a good source of vitamin C and kids love them. Win win. Make sure your kid wins snack time with Mottz. Real apples make real good applesauce.

[Julian Edelman]

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[Mia Wong]

This is an I Heart podcast.