March 27, 2025 • 41 mins
Mia and Gare discuss the social and political role of gamers and why people like Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried spend so much effort portraying themselves as gamers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ykCc588Zw
https://thecourier.com/news/549130/browns-need-to-start-asking-questions-about-depodesta/
https://g-mnews.com/en/global-games-market-will-generate-usd-187-7-billion-in-2024/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to you.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
It 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.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is it is your host me along with me
as Garrison Davis. I I've I've played a video game before.
I'm not very powerful, but I too have played many
several video games. See I wouldn't I wouldn't say several.
I've I've played like a few many. I have played
too many, simply too many video games. So okay, this
(00:34):
is this.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because
Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on
out there, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of X
I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in
my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've
not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah you might.
You might.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
You might know of him as the guy who paid
another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We will get to that I don't play those games.
Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo huh, Mecca
games and hell Divers two like a loser. That's that's reasonable,
that's reasonable. Those are those are those are fine games.
Oh and Sonic Oh god, okay.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
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 one hundred and eighty
(01:47):
four point three 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,
old by such an astounding margin in terms of just
dollar value.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Right, something like.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Three 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
(02:27):
not thinking about.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That, yeah, like as a political class.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
a political identity.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And obviously this is you know, this is a fascist movement. Now.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
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
(03:15):
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, and
then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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 their 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 h Bomber guy, I guess an example, like Hassan.
(03:51):
To some extent, there's just like a lot of people
who are like gamers and then by sort of like
become political. But on the other hand, game 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 No?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Oh boy?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Is that like a resource management type game for like
gae autistic people. No, this is this is the world
of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing. Yeah,
really bad, really bad.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I think I think I peaked at like two k
legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top
like half a percent of players in the world's.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Digital collectible card video game.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Come on, Oh yeah, yeah, but two k legend na
is like fucking shitter ranks.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's bad.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I was never like good, good at it. I was
just like okay, kind of. But you know, this is
like a thing that I did growing up, and something
I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers
and these were like really big streamers would play music
from this guy they called Kobob the German and it
turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because
(05:09):
he was a fucking German neo Nazi.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Well many such cases, yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
For people who like are not aware of of like
mid twenty tens German fascism. Remove Kebob is like a
slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish
people in Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So great stuff, great stuff.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
This is just was just sort of like the water
you were swimming in if you were a gamer in
like the twenty tens. 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
(05:49):
examples we're gonna look at are Sam bank and Freed's
and this is this is really technically on both sides
of the political spectrum. Right, We're gonna look at Sam
Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon musk Are
new O. Lord, I guess, so we're gonna start with
Sam Bankmon Fried, and you know, as we go through
what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why it's
(06:09):
so important to them to be seen as gamers. And
I guess it is important to know like Sam bakmon
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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah yeah, before before he was put in prison for
twenty five years for fraud.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Well probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.
Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote,
it's the most valuable voting block. Now all young Americans
are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put
all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote
for whoever makes line go up.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I'm gonna become the joker, So okay, then think about
Sam magon FRIEDA for people who have forgotten who SBF is.
He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
a giant scam where he took everyone money embedded on
the stock market and lost it.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And you know, Robert did a sort of behind the
bassarides on him.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
And one of the things that happens constantly is that
he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing
this really dogshit game called Story Big Bralgy 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 people who's ever existed. And one of the
things that that SBF did as as a sort of
(07:27):
pr thing right was let the author Michael Lewis of
the Big shorts We're gonna get to Moneyball in a second,
blindside other books.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along
and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him,
and this is something that like ICBF 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
(08:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
So he plays video games stream meetings like no one
has ever been like this. I have no idea what
you mean.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I actually don't play video games stream meetings because it
is too obvious.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
But I play. I play video games a once a week.
That's that's that's kind of my Oh.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
God, this is the one part about sam Bakmon Free
that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
It is my like antidepression strategy, basically, like when I
need to not think for a while, there's just MEO
playing Actually pat the faxtyle too. One of the games
that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
That I play a lot of.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
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 mob like League of Legends, but like
third person and I played so much Smite that they
were pro showing 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.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Like I can't argue with that. All in form the council.
I'll aet our next spokes Council meeting. I'll bring it
to the table.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
But you know, so, so what what what what happens
with this sort of thing is that is that Michael
Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing
these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be so unbelievably
brilliant totally because he's just like playing fucking.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Video games all the time.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
And and this gets to one of the aspects of
why these people do this, this sort of like pretending
to be a gamer thing and and like and like
SBF like 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 it's extremely profitable
and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't have the same
(09:47):
kind of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
See for something like movies or like respectability in some way. Yeah,
except in like the reversed Sam Bankman freedway, where like
the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an
extent your 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
(10:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
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 figures 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 easily just
(10:40):
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 addicts, and they will
instantly be able to just like read this person like
a fucking book. Also, by the like gaming addiction like
is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly
joking here, but also like leg of Legends makes you
a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad
(11:00):
all the time. I know too many League Legisp players
of my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game. Yeah, but
arcane though, right, all right, oh god, Okay, we're gonna
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about
unique incompetence.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
So we are back now, Okay, Obviously, part of the
reason this works too 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.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special
case because he is really truly an unbelievably globle, 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
them famous books ever written about sports, right. He wrote Moneyball,
(12:03):
which is just the book that we're gonna be talking about,
which we'll get to in a second. And he wrote
The Blindside, which is another book that they talk about
on Behind the Bassarge and go listen to that, But
I want to go in on Moneybomb. Moneyball is supposed
to be this book about how this underdog an athletics
team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to
like like build this roster out of nothing that like
(12:24):
went to the playoffs and did really well. 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 gonna 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 like underdog geniuses, and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right,
is this guy named Paul Pedesta, and he is he
(12:47):
is like one of the main figures in this book.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically,
what baseball team is this? Oh?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas
Athletics or some shit.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
I don't know that they moved to Vegas. I don't
know what they're called the athletics now.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
No, no, no, they were originally called the Athletics. I don't
know what they're called now. They've always been the well
except what just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been
the A's forever. But yeah, they've they've also been stolen.
Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and
the baseball team of Oakland.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Oh see, I was thinking of the football team, yeah,
because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Theators go there too? Yes, yes, they stole both of them.
That's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And I am more of a baseball head than a
football head.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna talking about football here.
So this guy, right, Paul Podesta's like one of these
sort of geniuses. She 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.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Now to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland
Browns are.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
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 one in
thirty one, 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 one in thirty
(14:11):
one into cluss two seasons of football again, so again,
that is a one in fifteen season followed by an
oh in sixteen season the second oh to sixteen season. Ever,
unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he
is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's
like mea, why the fuck you're 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
(14:34):
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's He is just really
fucking like morally reprehensible, right, He is like a bad
(14:54):
enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
For a season.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy whom Michael
Lewis is supposed to be like touting, is 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.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Nia, Do you expect me to know anything about the
Houston Texans.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
It is a team from Houston, Texas.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
That's all you need to know about this. And they
traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No
offense to our Austin listeners.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
They fucking traded this guy, right, and Popadesta orchestrates this
trade that is three is it is the worst trade
in the history of football.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
It is three first.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
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 two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars,
the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So,
how does Shan Watson, like again this guy who's being
held up by the guy who like is now laundering
(16:04):
being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort
of like cultural like being.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
A rogue outsider.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Right, how does Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due
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 seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks
one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out
(16:32):
of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven
hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.
They traded three first round picks for this guy. He
has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three,
which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back
to make a pass, they are expected to get point
three less points than an average team would.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
I only agreed to this because I thought it was video.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Game, don't We're we're we're almost we're almost done with
the sports part of it. But there, 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.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that. I can I
can see that. Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Also, I've always wanted to fuck you complain about this
on area and this is this is the best fucking
chance I've ever gonna get, So Jesus fucking because that's.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Like what I talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, Yes,
this is what it feels like. Is this what I
sound like? Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you
sound like.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
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 two hundred
and thirty million dollars. 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
(17:58):
the jock or whatever. Right, Like that's like the fundamental
base of their mythology that there' are 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, this 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
(18:21):
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 and you know why these
people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as
as this sort of affect they're trying to project into
the world. I want to read Something by a friend
of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called game Boys.
(18:41):
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. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety
to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that
(19:02):
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 the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different
(19:23):
compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.
They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions 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
(19:44):
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 you remember both for Sam
Bapen Freed and also for the construction of right wing
gaming movements in general, and for like what we're going
(20:06):
to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is
contested ground.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right,
there are a lot of what you would call it,
you like traditionally sort of left flooming 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,
(20:34):
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 chance better, he's better at video games, and both
the people have been to be fucking talking about in
this story, right, Like, well I.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Heard, I heard his Path of Exile character was actually
quite advanced.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
But oh, we're gonna where we're gonna talk about the
Path of Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I
mean it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which
is a very very trans genre.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games, Yeah, it depends.
It depends a lot on the genre.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
But yeah, like 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 thirteen to zero in a
first to eleven, absolute legend.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
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, these people
are in power, and you know who else is in power.
It's a product and services to support this podcast, All hail,
(21:55):
we are back now. Obviously, the other part of this,
you know, we've talked to it. 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
(22:15):
like I am also doing this as much as the
fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dipshit.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven
remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
feeling sad.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right,
is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence
and sort of different ways, but it's like the systemic
violence from the gender system that is the same system,
but these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
And this is you know, I had a conversation with
Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
sort of drawn from and like I would compare it
(22:51):
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 hands, most of us
don't become mass shooting.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Most most Yeah, I would say that's that's true.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
But 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's the most powerful man live.
He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived.
And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement
(23:38):
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 not anymore. Yeah, Now now they believe
that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women
in minorities, right.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And and it's actually the people who actually doing the
oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the
top of the system. Now it's been we have we've
had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso.
But the thing is, these people.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Have always been at the top of the fucking system,
right and like. But but it's this affect, it's 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 gamer Gate.
If you're gonna read one vicioskal Al thing, and I'm
signing 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
(24:29):
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 anyway 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 twenty seventy seven when it came out. And one
(24:51):
of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers
are being i mean 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 talks about the
problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint twenty
seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people seizures
because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes
(25:11):
and bullshit anthe they didn't warn anyone about because it
was a broken.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Shitty game.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
And you know, they're also used for just like anti
queer and like anti feminist rasping 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
(25:37):
bit so when I was first talking about this episode,
I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of
Sam Bankman freed, because like.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Then they said, yeah, in many such cases, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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 gamers stick thing totally.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Like specific in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating.
They're both fucking doing it now.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
He's a Kenemian user. He's a Twitter power user. He
is the shadow President, Yeah, the chisman of the world's
bridges man who's ever lived. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
is like a he's an elite video game player in
like multiple games.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
He's obsessed with this. He's also I believe the term
is a meme. Lord h if I'm reading this right,
Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two characters.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
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 mind.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
That that is one of his favorite names. In his
White House office, he has a he has a Kechius
Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated
image of like pet Bee the Frog and like and
like Roman, like like Caesar at higher I hate everything.
So yeah, this is the guy who reads the country now.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Oops.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
get to you 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
gonna get you in a second. This is something that
(27:34):
blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of because I'd
forgot 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.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Literally no sense.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
It's like over encumbered, Like it's okay, like the best
eesspimation 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 cards, stepping into like the
shittiest call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the
accelerator with the parking break.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
On Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like
the gaming equivalents.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
And everyone who looked at me 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.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
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 Diabo four. I'm not gonna talk about diebol stuff
much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not Diabble players.
(28:57):
The Diablo and path backs are like fairy.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Much the same kind of game aim basically, like you
click somewhere and your character goes there and you click
other things that it does attacks. But famously, like this year,
he pretended to be one of like the best Path
of Exile two players in the world, and he was
doing this on his alt ac count, which is has
to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but the all the
(29:21):
e's are threes. So with CYB three r GA M
three R four twenty Wait.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Wait wait, wait, say say that again.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So I think I found something. I think the four
to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Hitler's birthday April twentyth God damn it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
So okay, he like claims to have one of the
like the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode
of Path of X or if he died 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
(30:13):
is immediately obvious that, like he has no idea what
he's doing, Like it's not just obviously people who play
the game. I hadn't played Path of Exil to 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
(30:33):
past one of those valuable currencies in the game, just
like walk 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.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
And this actually explodes on.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Him and eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid
someone to level his Path of Exile to account, and
then he claims that he never claims that it was
his path of XIL to account and this Jenny Weinley
has been a real problem for him because it pissed
off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos
(31:05):
with like millions of views from guys like Asthma Goold,
who was like a he's 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
(31:26):
Goold is watching this video and being like this guy
is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's it's genuinely wild.
I've never actually seen people like react to this, to
like to elon like this and 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.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again,
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 Little Pets of Path of Exile player
(32:10):
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 you about
the 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. And he's like
sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's
really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to
his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand,
(32:31):
he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet
of of gaming as like the sort of renegade writ
wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked
up because 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
(32:53):
very popular. That is just like people exposing people who
cheated video games, cheated record to video games. And Elon
has walk just like directly into this bear trap, right.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
it up, we beat Elon us. It's over. He's he's
been cast out of civil society with the high crime
of pretending to play a video game. He has lost
all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
So what's next? We have what he has? He has
one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Which is the funniest Elon musk gamer story in my opinion?
Which which are you? Which one are you talking about?
That's the one that that that he had to publicly
announce that he he does not play GTA five. Oh,
that was funny. I forgot about that because he doesn't
like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five
(33:52):
quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just
couldn't do it unquote. Oh, I really forgot about that.
So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity. God,
now some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,
violence power fantasies. But at least Musk has some integrity
(34:13):
to not harm police officers in GDA five. That really
shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this,
you know, at times strange behavior.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
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, violent Sinfia games is bad because he's
trying to single 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.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, But so that 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
is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
about it is him pretending to have been like a
quake pro which the thing that he did quake, And
there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber
Carl Jobs, who is like his thing is like people
(35:11):
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 is Elon like apparently did
actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of
the good players were there, and he he came his
(35:33):
team came in second, but they came in second because
they had better WiFi than everyone else and so they
had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran
into a team that also had good WiFi, and then
he got destroyed, which I just I just think it
is funny, right, That's like a classic Elon Musk story,
which is he he has this theme claiming that he's
like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he
had more money than everyone else until he ran someone
(35:54):
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,
Jobstays goes on this whole thing about how and this
is this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk
and 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
(36:18):
out of his ass, but 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.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
And this is a real shift, right.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
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 says is a lie.
(36:50):
He literally calls him a con like, says that his
activity is like a con man. He says the things
that he's saying are like either liars or delusional. There
is a kind of like shift happening right now where
people like, really you are turning on him. There's day
that happened literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft
is a famously like not a leftist company, right, Like
they've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff.
(37:13):
So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games
has a black guy as like a character in it,
and literally the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one
of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing
your Path of Axile two account told you? And like
replied and replied to a thing about Hassan like we
we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right
(37:36):
this thing that had been like a really really consistent
base of support with people like Elon is kind of
fracturing against him, 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
(37:57):
the actual serious point to all of this other and
like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these
people do this, and like gamers is 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.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Doesn't happen that often.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
But one of the ways you can do this, and
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 Curenzi's government was enough
for them to take power. And I think like the actual,
(38:37):
like the actual serious points of this is that the
only way that we get out of this mess is
by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions 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.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
start of gamer Gate two.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Gamer Get two is already happening, damn it, this is
gamer Gate three.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
This is an open call to begin Gamergate two point
five right now on. Behalf of me along, because are
you at me? A oh no, and then hopefully and
I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we
get enough gamers just to stay home or even better
(39:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Gamers are the cosacks. We've got to get them to
knock back the regime. That's actually the fine revolution where
they stood down. But you know, same point, same point.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Come on, yeah, geez fuck, I am one of the.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Biggest things of Like people need to remember that that
Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky, who
was kind of a socialist 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.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
What games are you play? What case if my playing
path extyl too? Don't play Rotato it will consume your life. Okay,
play robo quest. Roboquest is great.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Rob Request dares to ask the question, what if, like
the art style of Borderlands was used for a game
about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with
like Doom's combat.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Then I do Hell Divers to nearly every Monday. Armored
Corps six Course six rules, love that game, Love that game,
Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy seven, and I'm waiting
for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character
(40:43):
selection is very gooner coded. Many many such cases. No,
I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest
size available on my on my model. But the gameplay
is fun. This has been It could Happen here? I
good they pay me for this. I had. I had to.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips
of of of Elon Musk playing video games for this.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Oh, it could Happen Here is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot 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.
All media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to you.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
It 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.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It is it is your host me along with me
as Garrison Davis. I I've I've played a video game before.
I'm not very powerful, but I too have played many
several video games. See I wouldn't I wouldn't say several.
I've I've played like a few many. I have played
too many, simply too many video games. So okay, this
(00:34):
is this.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Is in some ways kind of a lighter episode, because
Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on
out there, 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.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
The PayPal guy, the PayPal guy, the owner of X
I've I've been I've been locked in my uh in
my gamer cave for the past like five months. I've
not left. I'm just hearing about this now. Yeah you might.
You might.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
You might know of him as the guy who paid
another guy to play Path of Exile two for him.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We will get to that I don't play those games.
Those games are gay. I only play Nintendo huh, Mecca
games and hell Divers two like a loser. That's that's reasonable,
that's reasonable. Those are those are those are fine games.
Oh and Sonic Oh god, okay.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
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 one hundred and eighty
(01:47):
four point three 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,
old by such an astounding margin in terms of just
dollar value.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Right, something like.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
Three 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
(02:27):
not thinking about.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
That, yeah, like as a political class.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Yeah yeah, you know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah,
you're thinking of a bunch of weird in cell right
wing dipshits who are white and suckass. And this is
in large part because gamer Gate was sort of the first,
like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as
a political identity.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
And obviously this is you know, this is a fascist movement. Now.
Speaker 3 (02:54):
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
(03:15):
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, and
then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
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 their 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 h Bomber guy, I guess an example, like Hassan.
(03:51):
To some extent, there's just like a lot of people
who are like gamers and then by sort of like
become political. But on the other hand, game 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 No?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Oh boy?
Speaker 3 (04:13):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Is that like a resource management type game for like
gae autistic people. No, this is this is the world
of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's that's even more embarrassing. Yeah,
really bad, really bad.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
I think I think I peaked at like two k
legend North America, which like technically speaking is like top
like half a percent of players in the world's.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
Digital collectible card video game.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Come on, Oh yeah, yeah, but two k legend na
is like fucking shitter ranks.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It's bad.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
I was never like good, good at it. I was
just like okay, kind of. But you know, this is
like a thing that I did growing up, and something
I remember is like all of the fucking Heartstone streamers
and these were like really big streamers would play music
from this guy they called Kobob the German and it
turns out that his actual name was removed Kobob because
(05:09):
he was a fucking German neo Nazi.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Well many such cases, yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
For people who like are not aware of of like
mid twenty tens German fascism. Remove Kebob is like a
slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish
people in Germany.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
So great stuff, great stuff.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
This is just was just sort of like the water
you were swimming in if you were a gamer in
like the twenty tens. 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
(05:49):
examples we're gonna look at are Sam bank and Freed's
and this is this is really technically on both sides
of the political spectrum. Right, We're gonna look at Sam
Banker Freed, and we're gonna look at Elon musk Are
new O. Lord, I guess, so we're gonna start with
Sam Bankmon Fried, and you know, as we go through
what's happening here, we're gonna sort of unravel why it's
(06:09):
so important to them to be seen as gamers. And
I guess it is important to know like Sam bakmon
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.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, he looks the part too, no offense.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Yeah yeah, before before he was put in prison for
twenty five years for fraud.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Well probably not anymore. He's probably gonna get part of God.
Maybe we'll see, we'll see. I don't know. Crypto vote,
it's the most valuable voting block. Now all young Americans
are too poor to open bank accounts, so they put
all their money in crypto. So now they're gonna vote
for whoever makes line go up.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
I'm gonna become the joker, So okay, then think about
Sam magon FRIEDA for people who have forgotten who SBF is.
He is the guy who was the founder of FTX,
which was like a crypto change that was actually effectively
a giant scam where he took everyone money embedded on
the stock market and lost it.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
And you know, Robert did a sort of behind the
bassarides on him.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
And one of the things that happens constantly is that
he's just like always fucking playing video games. He's playing
this really dogshit game called Story Big Bralgy 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 people who's ever existed. And one of the
things that that SBF did as as a sort of
(07:27):
pr thing right was let the author Michael Lewis of
the Big shorts We're gonna get to Moneyball in a second,
blindside other books.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Reparatable financial advice books, is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
But you know, like a very very powerful, influential and
wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along
and and Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him,
and this is something that like ICBF 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
(08:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
So he plays video games stream meetings like no one
has ever been like this. I have no idea what
you mean.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I actually don't play video games stream meetings because it
is too obvious.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
But I play. I play video games a once a week.
That's that's that's kind of my Oh.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
God, this is the one part about sam Bakmon Free
that's relatable to me. I play so many video games.
It is my like antidepression strategy, basically, like when I
need to not think for a while, there's just MEO
playing Actually pat the faxtyle too. One of the games
that we're gonna be fucking talking about today, something.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
That I play a lot of.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
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 mob like League of Legends, but like
third person and I played so much Smite that they
were pro showing 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.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Like I can't argue with that. All in form the council.
I'll aet our next spokes Council meeting. I'll bring it
to the table.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
But you know, so, so what what what what happens
with this sort of thing is that is that Michael
Lewis's image of SBF becomes as this gamer who's doing
these completely incomprehensible things. He's mind must be so unbelievably
brilliant totally because he's just like playing fucking.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Video games all the time.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
And and this gets to one of the aspects of
why these people do this, this sort of like pretending
to be a gamer thing and and like and like
SBF like 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 it's extremely profitable
and is enormously culturally powerful. It doesn't have the same
(09:47):
kind of critical culture around. It doesn't exist that you would.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
See for something like movies or like respectability in some way. Yeah,
except in like the reversed Sam Bankman freedway, where like
the schlubbiness is part of what makes him like an
extent your 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
(10:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
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 figures 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 easily just
(10:40):
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 addicts, and they will
instantly be able to just like read this person like
a fucking book. Also, by the like gaming addiction like
is like kind of a fake thing. I'm like mostly
joking here, but also like leg of Legends makes you
a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad
(11:00):
all the time. I know too many League Legisp players
of my goddamn life. Holy shit, terrible game. Yeah, but
arcane though, right, all right, oh god, Okay, we're gonna
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.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Well, I look forward to that. I love hearing about
unique incompetence.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
So we are back now, Okay, Obviously, part of the
reason this works too 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.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special
case because he is really truly an unbelievably globle, 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
them famous books ever written about sports, right. He wrote Moneyball,
(12:03):
which is just the book that we're gonna be talking about,
which we'll get to in a second. And he wrote
The Blindside, which is another book that they talk about
on Behind the Bassarge and go listen to that, But
I want to go in on Moneybomb. Moneyball is supposed
to be this book about how this underdog an athletics
team invented like baseball metrics, and they use sabermetrics to
like like build this roster out of nothing that like
(12:24):
went to the playoffs and did really well. 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 gonna 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 like underdog geniuses, and like Michael Lewis loves to find, right,
is this guy named Paul Pedesta, and he is he
(12:47):
is like one of the main figures in this book.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
He's like, he's kind of like an assistant coach. Basically,
what baseball team is this? Oh?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
This is the Oakland Athletics are now the last Vegas
Athletics or some shit.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
I don't know that they moved to Vegas. I don't
know what they're called the athletics now.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
No, no, no, they were originally called the Athletics. I don't
know what they're called now. They've always been the well
except what just calls them the Oakland A's. They've been
the A's forever. But yeah, they've they've also been stolen.
Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and
the baseball team of Oakland.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Oh see, I was thinking of the football team, yeah,
because I was like, wait a minute, didn't didn't Las Vegas.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Theators go there too? Yes, yes, they stole both of them.
That's what I was thinking.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
And I am more of a baseball head than a
football head.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
But yeah, so okay, unfortunately we're gonna talking about football here.
So this guy, right, Paul Podesta's like one of these
sort of geniuses. She 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.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Now to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland
Browns are.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
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 one in
thirty one, 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 one in thirty
(14:11):
one into cluss two seasons of football again, so again,
that is a one in fifteen season followed by an
oh in sixteen season the second oh to sixteen season. Ever,
unclear how responsible for this he is, but what he
is responsible for is the Shawn Watson trade. Okay, it's
like mea, why the fuck you're 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
(14:34):
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's He is just really
fucking like morally reprehensible, right, He is like a bad
(14:54):
enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
For a season.
Speaker 3 (14:59):
And Paul Podesta, who again is the guy whom Michael
Lewis is supposed to be like touting, is 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.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Nia, Do you expect me to know anything about the
Houston Texans.
Speaker 3 (15:23):
It is a team from Houston, Texas.
Speaker 2 (15:26):
That's all you need to know about this. And they
traded this guy. Hey, at least it's not Austin. No
offense to our Austin listeners.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
They fucking traded this guy, right, and Popadesta orchestrates this
trade that is three is it is the worst trade
in the history of football.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
It is three first.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
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 two hundred and thirty million guaranteed dollars,
the largest guaranteed salary the history of the NFL. So, okay, So,
how does Shan Watson, like again this guy who's being
held up by the guy who like is now laundering
(16:04):
being a gamer as like the great symbol of sort
of like cultural like being.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
A rogue outsider.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
Right, how does Deshaun Watson his greatest fucking project due
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 seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks. Since the year two thousand, to start weeks
one through five out of again seven hundred and fifty
nine quarterbacks, he ranks seven hundred and fifty three out
(16:32):
of seven hundred and fifty nine EPA for dropback seven
hundred and fifty three out of seven hundred and fifty nine.
They traded three first round picks for this guy. He
has a mind boggling an EPA of negative point three,
which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back
to make a pass, they are expected to get point
three less points than an average team would.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
How did you trick me into being on a sports episode?
I only agreed to this because I thought it was video.
Speaker 3 (17:02):
Game, don't We're we're we're almost we're almost done with
the sports part of it. But there, 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.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, of course, yes, I understand that. I can I
can see that. Yes.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
Also, I've always wanted to fuck you complain about this
on area and this is this is the best fucking
chance I've ever gonna get, So Jesus fucking because that's.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
Like what I talk about, like movies or something. Is this, yes, Yes,
this is what it feels like. Is this what I
sound like? Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you
sound like.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
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 two hundred
and thirty million dollars. 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
(17:58):
the jock or whatever. Right, Like that's like the fundamental
base of their mythology that there' are 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, this 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
(18:21):
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 and you know why these
people choose to use gaming as like, you know, as
as this sort of affect they're trying to project into
the world. I want to read Something by a friend
of the show, Vicky Osterwel and a piece called game Boys.
(18:41):
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. An unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety
to structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that
(19:02):
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 the horizon outside of capital's clutches. Games provide different
(19:23):
compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy.
They give white men aggrandizing power, inventions 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
(19:44):
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 you remember both for Sam
Bapen Freed and also for the construction of right wing
gaming movements in general, and for like what we're going
(20:06):
to talk about with Elon Musk is that gaming is
contested ground.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Right.
Speaker 3 (20:11):
As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right,
there are a lot of what you would call it,
you like traditionally sort of left flooming 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,
(20:34):
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 chance better, he's better at video games, and both
the people have been to be fucking talking about in
this story, right, Like, well I.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Heard, I heard his Path of Exile character was actually
quite advanced.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
But oh, we're gonna where we're gonna talk about the
Path of Exile character fucking next, you know. But but I
mean it's it's worth mentioning like speed running, right, which
is a very very trans genre.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games, Yeah, it depends.
It depends a lot on the genre.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
But yeah, like 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 thirteen to zero in a
first to eleven, absolute legend.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
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, these people
are in power, and you know who else is in power.
It's a product and services to support this podcast, All hail,
(21:55):
we are back now. Obviously, the other part of this,
you know, we've talked to it. 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
(22:15):
like I am also doing this as much as the
fucking weird white guy nazi like gamer dipshit.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Right, Yeah, that's why I hooed up f F seven
remake Hysteric Cloud Strife for hours on end when I'm
feeling sad.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
But you know what the problem with what's happening here, right,
is that like the right, like that we're experiencing violence
and sort of different ways, but it's like the systemic
violence from the gender system that is the same system,
but these people's solution to is to blame it on women, right,
And this is you know, I had a conversation with
Vicky about this where a lot of this stuff is
sort of drawn from and like I would compare it
(22:51):
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 hands, most of us
don't become mass shooting.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Most most Yeah, I would say that's that's true.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Skill issue in some ways among other environmental factors.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
But 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's the most powerful man live.
He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived.
And he still has the same sense of like aggrievement
(23:38):
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 not anymore. Yeah, Now now they believe
that they're that they're being oppressed by like fucking women
in minorities, right.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
And and it's actually the people who actually doing the
oppression is now all of the doge nerds at the
top of the system. Now it's been we have we've
had we've had a we've had a full Uno reverso.
But the thing is, these people.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Have always been at the top of the fucking system,
right and like. But but it's this affect, it's 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 gamer Gate.
If you're gonna read one vicioskal Al thing, and I'm
signing 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
(24:29):
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 anyway 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 twenty seventy seven when it came out. And one
(24:51):
of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers
are being i mean 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 talks about the
problems with like this game that like when Cyberpint twenty
seventy seven came out, it was literally giving people seizures
because it was it had just like fucking strobing flashes
(25:11):
and bullshit anthe they didn't warn anyone about because it
was a broken.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Shitty game.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
And you know, they're also used for just like anti
queer and like anti feminist rasping 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
(25:37):
bit so when I was first talking about this episode,
I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman as that of
Sam Bankman freed, because like.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Then they said, yeah, in many such cases, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
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 gamers stick thing totally.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Like specific in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating.
They're both fucking doing it now.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
He's a Kenemian user. He's a Twitter power user. He
is the shadow President, Yeah, the chisman of the world's
bridges man who's ever lived. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Also, he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he
is like a he's an elite video game player in
like multiple games.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
He's obsessed with this. He's also I believe the term
is a meme. Lord h if I'm reading this right,
Oh god, what one of his path of xtyle two characters.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
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 mind.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
That that is one of his favorite names. In his
White House office, he has a he has a Kechius
Maximus portrait hanging behind his desk. There's an AI generated
image of like pet Bee the Frog and like and
like Roman, like like Caesar at higher I hate everything.
So yeah, this is the guy who reads the country now.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Oops.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at
video games, and the preface to everything we're going to
get to you 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
gonna get you in a second. This is something that
(27:34):
blue Sky user gay Dog reminded me of because I'd
forgot 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.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Literally no sense.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
It's like over encumbered, Like it's okay, like the best
eesspimation 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 cards, stepping into like the
shittiest call you've ever seen, and then like slamming the
accelerator with the parking break.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
On Hey, I love the masdamiata Like that's that's like
the gaming equivalents.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
And everyone who looked at me 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.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
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 Diabo four. I'm not gonna talk about diebol stuff
much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not Diabble players.
(28:57):
The Diablo and path backs are like fairy.
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Much the same kind of game aim basically, like you
click somewhere and your character goes there and you click
other things that it does attacks. But famously, like this year,
he pretended to be one of like the best Path
of Exile two players in the world, and he was
doing this on his alt ac count, which is has
to handle. It's Cybergamer for twenty, but the all the
(29:21):
e's are threes. So with CYB three r GA M
three R four twenty Wait.
Speaker 2 (29:28):
Wait wait, wait, say say that again.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
It's at CYB three r GA M three R four twenty.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
So I think I found something. I think the four
to twenty at the end is actually a reference to
Hitler's birthday April twentyth God damn it.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
So okay, he like claims to have one of the
like the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode
of Path of X or if he died 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
(30:13):
is immediately obvious that, like he has no idea what
he's doing, Like it's not just obviously people who play
the game. I hadn't played Path of Exil to 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
(30:33):
past one of those valuable currencies in the game, just
like walk 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.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
And this actually explodes on.
Speaker 3 (30:45):
Him and eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid
someone to level his Path of Exile to account, and
then he claims that he never claims that it was
his path of XIL to account and this Jenny Weinley
has been a real problem for him because it pissed
off like the entire gaming scene. So you have videos
(31:05):
with like millions of views from guys like Asthma Goold,
who was like a he's 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
(31:26):
Goold is watching this video and being like this guy
is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And like everyone fucking reacts like this. It's it's genuinely wild.
I've never actually seen people like react to this, to
like to elon like this and 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.
Speaker 3 (31:49):
What's interesting about about this to some extent is that, like, again,
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 Little Pets of Path of Exile player
(32:10):
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 you about
the 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. And he's like
sort of hyping up his reputation with and so he's
really on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to
his sort of fascist bass, but on the other hand,
(32:31):
he's trying to use the sort of like cultural cachet
of of gaming as like the sort of renegade writ
wing phenomena to like launder his reputation. Except he fucked
up because 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
(32:53):
very popular. That is just like people exposing people who
cheated video games, cheated record to video games. And Elon
has walk just like directly into this bear trap, right.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
And that means we got him, folks, mission accomplished. Wrap
it up, we beat Elon us. It's over. He's he's
been cast out of civil society with the high crime
of pretending to play a video game. He has lost
all respect among among the farthest reaches of the right.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
So what's next? We have what he has? He has
one more scandal that we actually have to talk about.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Is this about the one video game he hasn't played?
Which is the funniest Elon musk gamer story in my opinion?
Which which are you? Which one are you talking about?
That's the one that that that he had to publicly
announce that he he does not play GTA five. Oh,
that was funny. I forgot about that because he doesn't
like quote unquote doing crime and g t A five
(33:52):
quote required shooting police officers in the opening scene. Just
couldn't do it unquote. Oh, I really forgot about that.
So that that proofs that at least he has some integrity. God,
now some gamers might be sick individuals acting out you know,
violence power fantasies. But at least Musk has some integrity
(34:13):
to not harm police officers in GDA five. That really
shows that there's like a moral compass behind all of this,
you know, at times strange behavior.
Speaker 3 (34:25):
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, violent Sinfia games is bad because he's
trying to single 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.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, But so that 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
is significant. So the last thing I want to talk
about it is him pretending to have been like a
quake pro which the thing that he did quake, And
there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber
Carl Jobs, who is like his thing is like people
(35:11):
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 is Elon like apparently did
actually play in an early quake tournament, but none of
the good players were there, and he he came his
(35:33):
team came in second, but they came in second because
they had better WiFi than everyone else and so they
had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran
into a team that also had good WiFi, and then
he got destroyed, which I just I just think it
is funny, right, That's like a classic Elon Musk story,
which is he he has this theme claiming that he's
like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he
had more money than everyone else until he ran someone
(35:54):
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,
Jobstays goes on this whole thing about how and this
is this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk
and 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
(36:18):
out of his ass, but 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.
Speaker 2 (36:26):
And this is a real shift, right.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
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 says is a lie.
(36:50):
He literally calls him a con like, says that his
activity is like a con man. He says the things
that he's saying are like either liars or delusional. There
is a kind of like shift happening right now where
people like, really you are turning on him. There's day
that happened literally today where Ubisoft. You know, ubi Soft
is a famously like not a leftist company, right, Like
they've done a lot of horrible, fucked up sexual assault stuff.
(37:13):
So Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games
has a black guy as like a character in it,
and literally the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one
of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing
your Path of Axile two account told you? And like
replied and replied to a thing about Hassan like we
we are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right
(37:36):
this thing that had been like a really really consistent
base of support with people like Elon is kind of
fracturing against him, 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
(37:57):
the actual serious point to all of this other and
like looking at the ways of fascism, like why these
people do this, and like gamers is 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.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Doesn't happen that often.
Speaker 3 (38:15):
But one of the ways you can do this, and
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 Curenzi's government was enough
for them to take power. And I think like the actual,
(38:37):
like the actual serious points of this is that the
only way that we get out of this mess is
by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions 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.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
So this is at Mia Wong publicly calling for the
start of gamer Gate two.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
Gamer Get two is already happening, damn it, this is
gamer Gate three.
Speaker 2 (39:03):
This is an open call to begin Gamergate two point
five right now on. Behalf of me along, because are
you at me? A oh no, and then hopefully and
I'll finally usher in the American Bolshevik Revolution after we
get enough gamers just to stay home or even better
(39:27):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Gamers are the cosacks. We've got to get them to
knock back the regime. That's actually the fine revolution where
they stood down. But you know, same point, same point.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Come on, yeah, geez fuck, I am one of the.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Biggest things of Like people need to remember that that
Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky, who
was kind of a socialist 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.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
What games are you play? What case if my playing
path extyl too? Don't play Rotato it will consume your life. Okay,
play robo quest. Roboquest is great.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Rob Request dares to ask the question, what if, like
the art style of Borderlands was used for a game
about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with
like Doom's combat.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
That sounds very gay, so I probably can't do that.
Then I do Hell Divers to nearly every Monday. Armored
Corps six Course six rules, love that game, Love that game,
Sonic X Shadow Generations, Final Fantasy seven, and I'm waiting
for Mecca Break to come out for like their their
official release now that the beta's closed. Unfortunately, the character
(40:43):
selection is very gooner coded. Many many such cases. No,
I made sure to make the smallest the smallest chest
size available on my on my model. But the gameplay
is fun. This has been It could Happen here? I
good they pay me for this. I had. I had to.
Speaker 3 (41:04):
Watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips
of of of Elon Musk playing video games for this.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Oh, it could Happen Here is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot 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
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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