WTW73: Elon Musk Claimed to Be a Top PoE2 Gamer. Turns Out He Was Cheating

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:41 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke. This is episode 73. I'm Thomas Smith. That over there is the brains of the operation. Beautiful wife, Lydia Smith. How you doing?

0:00:50 Lydia: Aw, thanks. I'm good. How are you?

0:00:53 Thomas: Great. Now, having said that, this is actually my episode. Now I realize I'm

0:00:55 Lydia: I know, I'm zero brains for this episode.

0:00:57 Thomas: Doing most of the talking. Yeah, but I'm so excited. That's because this is about a video games, something Lydia doesn't, doesn't know about. So, So in addition to having to entertain our son all day, as he tells you stuff about his video game that you don't understand, you get to do that now for another couple hours for double episode.

0:01:07 Lydia: It's fine. You can say it. Yeah. Yeah. With adults.

0:01:22 Thomas: Yeah, but at least in this, your job is to not understand video games essentially so that we don't leave anyone behind.

0:01:27 Lydia: Yes. And I'm dang good at it.

0:01:31 Thomas: Yeah, you're a real natural. Just I've worried about losing you actually, because there's such a natural fit for that job. Up. Yeah. You're going to be recruited after this one. We are talking about the funniest, most pathetic thing in the world by the funniest in a bad way, most pathetic person in the world. Elon Musk pretended to be good at a video game. And that's, that's putting it so mildly. Like he, he, it's, it'S so fraudulent. Like, I don't know if I can legally say committed any kind of fraud, but like he might as well. Like it's the most fraudulent thing. This This is so dumb that I needed even more help, and I'm so glad that we are lucky enough to have Noah Lusions, amazing podcaster from Godawful Movies, Scathing Atheist, The Skeptocrat, D &D Minus, Citation Needed. I think that's all of them. I think I got them.

0:01:37 Lydia: Wow, thank you. Mm hmm.

0:02:21 Lydia: I think you guys are tied.

0:02:22 Thomas: Oh, I don't even think in those terms. Noah's always been an avid video gamer, at least retro games, which is not exactly what we're going to be talking about today, but it's still really fun to have someone else on who knows a little bit about this and is excited to go over the situation, to put it mildly. This story is insane. It's absolutely batshit insane.

0:02:45 Lydia: Right.

0:02:45 Thomas: If you think you know how crazy and silly Elon Musk is, there's no bottom. There's always further to go. So buckle up. Lydia, prepare to not know what's going on, except make sure to ask questions if you don't know know what's going on. All right?

0:02:57 Lydia: Will do. I'm strapped in. Ready to go.

0:03:00 Thomas: Well then, we'll hit start, and if you'd like to support the show, please do at patreon.com slash where there's woke. Very important in this day and age, especially as I feel like, you know, people of our persuasion, of our political persuasion, are not really welcome as much on a lot of places like Twitter and, you know, now kind of Facebook and, you know, Threads for that matter, I guess. I don't know, there's a lot of things, and it feels like it could be TikTok any minute depending on how that goes and who owns that eventually. So for now we've got Patreon, and it is vital to us continuing to make all of our podcasts, so please consider supporting patreon.com slash where there's woke, and please enjoy this double episode on just how much Elon Musk is a fraud.

0:03:50 Thomas: And we are joined by No Illusions, one of my all-time favorite podcasters and friends. How's it going, Noah?

0:03:51 Ad: [Ad break 1 — ad music]

0:03:56 Noah: It's going great, man. I am super excited to chat with you guys.

0:03:59 Thomas: Oh my god, I'm so, I'm så glad you're down to do this, Noah. This, this is the best now. Now, I will say it is unfortunate for me. It's unfortunate because I don't personally play any of the video games, really, that we're going to talk about today that Elon. It sucks.

0:04:12 Noah: Yeah, I honestly, I, if I'd had a little bit more time to prep, I would have at least played the game enough to get a sense of the Path of Exile, at least to get, to get a sense it, but yeah.

0:04:17 Thomas: And it looks really cool. These are actually more along the games that I play. It's funny. I think it's great to have Lydia on here because she knows nothing about gaming. Yeah, please let us know, Lydia, and ask any questions you don't understand, because it's hard to remember what it's like to not know anything about video games, because that only happened for like three years of mine and Noah's lives, probably. But these are my kinds of games. I actually did play Diablo three a lot. I played Diablo two a bajillion million trillion hours, but there tends to be different kinds of gamers, you know, and, and some people dabble in everything. Some people stick to genre, and this is in a genre that I've played quite a bit. What about you? I, my guess was that you don't play these types of games. They're pretty grindy, but I might be wrong about that. What's your type of game that you tend to play? Yeah.

0:04:28 Lydia: I'm the lay person. Okay.

0:04:42 Noah: Yeah, we're right. Exactly. Between the ages of three and six, yeah.

0:05:10 Noah: Yeah, no, this is this definitely isn't my speed. You know, I played Diablo 4 a bit, but I don't like, I shouldn't say I don' like I don''t have time for that type of

0:05:18 Thomas: I was gonna say these are grindy, grindy games, and you're too busy pumping out really excellently done podcasts to be able to do that.

0:05:26 Lydia: Can you explain grind? Yes.

0:05:27 Thomas: Thank you. So there's lots of different kinds of games, and I want to not position myself as any kind of game expert. Uh, Noah knows far more about video games, but very basically speaking, there's going to be games that are highly skilled games where you're playing against other people a lot. Like, I do play Rocket League. Is one that I play a lot. It's just soccer with cars, and you can play any amount of that, but what determines how good you are at that is your skill at the game. There's no amount of me playing that earns me any, like, gear or points or, and, and nothing, none of that makes you better at the game. What makes you better the game is practicing and getting good at mechanics and other things, and then you play against people if you want to test, like, how good you aren't gaming. It's going against other people, mostly, especially this day and age. Back in the day it was different because he, you know, it was mostly played Nintendo by yourself or with your immediate family or whoever was there, you know?

0:05:28 Noah: Game.

0:06:16 Noah: Yeah, back in the day when we were playing Nintendo by ourselves, Thomas. Yeah.

0:06:18 Thomas: Nope. Mine's still hooked up. No, I don't worry. But there are games that are more grindy games where you play a ton of stuff, especially loot -based games. So these games where you kill just a zillion monsters and they drop stuff, basically speaking. If you collect a bunch of it, or sometimes there's really rare drops and you're looking for those. And nowadays they've gotten really good. They just get better and better at making games. They do some combination of, like, a gajillion bad items might help you get something, or the really good item might drop randomly. It's just taking our reward centers, and yes.

0:06:26 Noah: Specifically

0:06:35 Lydia: Okay.

0:06:50 Lydia: It's like a slot machine. Okay.

0:06:51 Thomas: Yeah, exactly, and and in very similar way, the good items have a different color, and like, literally in Diablo 2 back in the day, that one was around 2000, I don't know, like early 2000s to now, played the shit out of that. I haven't played it lately, but I played a lot of hours of that, and the good items, you know, what the good atoms are, and you know the color that they're going to be when they drop. And you know, even before they're identified, you know like what they're gonna look like. So you play countless hours for those kinds of games because it's just the nature of how they are. In this day and age, at people of our advanced age, playing those kinds OF games is a commitment. It's a commitment and that's important.

0:07:26 Noah: Though the element that Thomas was talking about, the grind element of a game, means you have to play this over and over and over again in order to get the items that you're going to need to be good at it, right? Like, you could imagine somebody sitting down at a game like Rocket League and just being really fucking good at like just immediately really being good at because they're so skilled with with video game maneuvers, whatever, right? With a game like Path of Exile 2 or Diablo 4, something like that, there's no way to do that. No matter how good you are at the game, you still have to put in hours and hours of grind, hours and horas of work, just killing more and more bad guys, hoping to get better loot drops before you can conceivably be really, really good at it and compete at a high level.

0:07:38 Lydia: Mm -hmm. Man.

0:07:43 Thomas: Yes.

0:08:10 Lydia: Yeah, I would have no interest in a game like that.

0:08:13 Noah: I'm with you, I'm generally don't either. I get why people like it. It's meditative in a sense, right?

0:08:13 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:15 Lydia: Yeah.

0:08:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So I meant to actually start this with a content note. Everyone in this story sucks. I wanted to do the like any resemblance to any real persons, you know fictional or what. But it's like any resemblance to anyone good is accidental. There are people in this story that accidentally become maybe good by comparison to Elon Musk in terms of the confrontation. That's purely accidental.

0:08:20 Lydia: Yeah, yeah,

0:08:20 Noah: Yeah.

0:08:43 Thomas: I assure you, everyone sucks.

0:08:44 Noah: They're all shit too. Yes, right.

0:08:44 Lydia: Yeah.

0:08:45 Thomas: But that's what's amazing. I just want to say, Elon, and another reason I'm so glad to have Noah is because I know that Noah is another person who doesn't entertain fake genius. It's just so infuriating. I can't even be online anymore. I guess it's been a while, but the amount that these idiots worship Elon Musk, and he's been the ultimate emperor with no clothes, only instead of one kid saying he has no clothes and then the whole town is like, yeah, you're right.

It's like, everybody keeps saying he Has No Clothes and then a few people realize it, but then a significant chunk of the townspeople are being directly paid by Elon Musk to say like, no, he does. He has great clothes. They're the best clothes.

And it's just like, you can never tell if the the townspeople are serious. You have someone saying like he has amazing clothes, there's the best clothes, and they're winking, and you're like, do you know you're lying or or not, you know? Like, that's the entire And you don't know. Like, some of them aren't lying, some of whom do seem to have convinced themselves, but a lot of them, I think they know. For one, he's obviously the richest person in the world, arguably now might be the most powerful person in the world now that we elected him president, so there's clout chasing that goes on. And in order to do this coverage, I've had to watch so much of just the most mediocre fucking white dude podcasts and game streams. I, I'm sorry to vent to you, but I think after this off to listen to some of Noah's stuff just to hear, like, well thought out, written, scripted stuff, because it is the most lowest common denominator stream of consciousness bullshit worshiping Elon, and he goes on those shows and they know that they need the the clout.

And so they're going to worship him and they're going to say the shit, and like in continues to enable the cycle of an emperor with no clothes, you know, where it's just like they, they have the emperor on their podcast. Like, tell us about your amazing clothes. And like, yes, I agree. They're so great. You should see his clothes right now. They're amazing. It's just a bunch of that shit. And it's, it's exhausting. I'm going to play a few clips of that.

But this is great because I feel like inevitably more and more people have to realize when he bought Twitter and just completely completely exposed how little he knew about how anything works with that. I hoped that that would be an awakening of sorts, because then that's nerds. You know, like, it's a lot of the same people who I think are the angry gamer gator, right wing online people. It's a lot of overlap with those class of people who would understand why the stuff he was saying about programming when he took over Twitter made no sense.

0:09:36 Noah: Right. Right.

0:11:10 Thomas: There was famously, I was almost going to play it, but there was like a call, like a Twitter Spaces car, something that he went into, and he was like, we need to write rewrite the whole code and a bunch of people are like, fans of his, were like, sorry, what? What? You're not gonna rewrite the full code? That's fucking insane. Stuff like that. And with every passing day where he pulls off this bullshit, more people who know about the thing he happens to claim to be good about in that day are like, oh shit, he's not good. And this is a great instance of this because this is when he finally went to the exact demographic of people who suck the most and like him and defrauded them.

0:13:20 Thomas: And so the worst people are coming to realize that he's lying about this. They'll probably still make excuses for something, but like, that's why the characters we're going to be talking about all suck.

0:13:20 Noah: Important Caveat, yeah, because we're going to be citing a lot of sources that I normally wouldn't cite here, yeah.

0:13:35 Thomas: I don't know how much exposure you have to this, Noah, but I remembered in the course of this when he posted his Elden Ring build. I don't know if you remember that. So here's the thing, I'm going to sound insane, I have avoided all of that because Because I want to someday play Elden Ring and be completely blind about it. Like, I don't want to look anything up. I never do. I'm anti-spoiler. So I know that that exists. But if you have anything more to say about that, please add it. Because I deliberately am like, I'm not going to look into that. Noah, do you want to tackle this one?

0:13:43 Noah: Oh. Yeah.

0:14:03 Noah: Yeah, sure, okay, so Elden Ring is a game that sucks, I hate it so much, no, it's, it's a, yeah, no, it's a great, it's a great game, I just don't like that genre of game because because it's incredibly difficult, and it delights in being difficult, right? And I just, I don't have time for that shit in my life. But one of the things that makes this game so difficult is that you have to, like, attune your character in a very certain way to maximize the specific powers of that character, right, so you can play as a mage, or you can pay as a barbarian, or you play as an elf, or whatever, I'm making shit up, I don' t really know what the builds are in this, in the game.

But each of these different types of characters has different powers, right right, different abilities, and the types of items that you equip at the beginning of your adventure are going to either help or hinder those abilities. What Elon Musk did was not just put together a build that didn't make sense for his character. He put together an idea that was going to help a build that just didn't makes sense, period. Like, for example, this is a game where, like, everything that you carry has weight,

0:14:07 Thomas: Oh, really? Oh, okay. Ah. Yeah.

0:14:48 Lydia: Okay.

0:15:00 Noah: And they amount of weight that you can carry is going to slow down your character in the...

0:15:00 Thomas: That sounds so fucking cool, Noah. God damn, it sounds so cool.

0:15:05 Noah: Sorry, I'm trying to do this without spoilers here.

0:15:08 Thomas: Yeah, no, thank you. I do appreciate that. I really do.

0:15:10 Noah: So you don't want to carry any superfluous items, right? He carried two shields, yeah.

0:15:12 Lydia: Okay.

0:15:14 Thomas: Too, which I think you can understand, hun, just by knowing what shields are like in all the in all the history.

0:15:18 Lydia: Yeah, I know what a shield is.

0:15:20 Noah: Right, yes, yeah. Imagine a battle formation where you're like, "What I need here is a"

0:15:28 Thomas: It's like you're a golfer and you're trying to pick which club to hit. You're like, is this a is this sand wedge shield or?

0:15:31 Noah: Yeah, yes. You can imagine maybe a Witcher has to carry two shields under certain circumstances, but yeah, it's just dumb. It was just like clearly didn't know what he was, because in most games, right, like in most video games, you You can carry 37 shields or whatever, and it doesn't make any fucking difference at all.

0:15:49 Lydia: Yeah, yep.

0:15:48 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. That's why I said that sounded so cool, hun. Is that's not common. Like normally you carry infinite things.

0:15:54 Lydia: Right, right, right.

0:15:56 Noah: Yeah, yeah. Or not quite infinite. You need to get more Korok seeds to get, but way more than you could carry in any reasonable. Yeah, I bet you are.

0:15:58 Thomas: Well, sure. Yeah, she has witnessed our son and me play Breath of the Wild every single waking hour so yeah

0:16:00 Lydia: Yeah. I'm familiar with that, at least. Yes. Yes.

0:16:08 Noah: Yeah, but that's the kind of, and there's like basic items that he didn't have equipped, which would be insane not to equip for the character type that he had. Like he was a mage, and he didn't have this flask that refills your health. You know, like this obvious thing that you would, that anyone would have. And so he puts this build out, and, like, people who play the game are like, we should do a challenge to see who can get the furthest in the game using this idiot fucking build. It's so bad.

0:16:13 Lydia: Huh. Yeah.

0:16:29 Thomas: Yeah, it's so true, it's so true. In my googling again, I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but I was loading up some of that stuff like, oh, how can I talk about this? I'm so glad, thank you for taking that. No, I appreciate it. But everything I came up with, I wanted to find someone just tell me why it was bad, but everything I googled was like, I did the Elon Musk build challenge and I saw how far I could get, which is the best, like, that's the best. That's a fun thing about video games, especially in this day and age, is people are still playing the games that Noah and I love from 30 years ago or whatever, and they're finding, oh god, more like almost 40 now, Jesus Christ, uh, and they'll find, yeah

0:16:52 Lydia: Yeah, wow.

0:16:53 Noah: Yes.

0:17:09 Noah: Yeah, I mean, video games are over 50, right? Like, we've passed over the 50 -year commercial video games in terms of the commercial, the video game industry. I believe that Computer Space, which was the first one, I believe dat came out in 72?

0:17:17 Thomas: Right. Yeah, I think you did the Citation Needed on that somewhat recently, right? Wasn't there, I think you talked about the first. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. And I don't, I'm only, you know, NES is my origin of knowing anything about video games, and even that, I was gonna say 30 years, I'm realizing that's like 40 years now That's, we're in 2025, I think that's 1985, right? Or Maybe.

0:17:26 Noah: Yeah, it did the Pong one. So, yeah, I guess 2021 would have been the 50 -year anniversary, I guess. It is.

0:17:41 Noah: Mm -hmm. Yep. Yeah, 39?

0:17:45 Thomas: In Japan it might have been 84, I can't remember, but in the U.S. it was later, but anyway, people are still finding ways to play those games and they'll do like crazy things, like they try to beat games with only no items or this item and it's It's so perfect that this happened. I just had a few things ready, like for example this Reddit post that just says this build looks like it was put together by a literal child. It's got just like 3.5k upvotes. Yeah, yeah. And in Tears the Kingdom, yeah.

0:17:57 Noah: Mm -hm.

0:18:09 Lydia: Like when Arlo does the banana boomerang and like carrot sword.

0:18:15 Noah: Oh,

0:18:15 Thomas: Oh yeah, just, no, you play, obviously played Tears the Kingdom, right?

0:18:19 Noah: Yeah. I love that game.

0:18:20 Thomas: The other day Arlo was playing and I just, just heard him say, "Oh no, my butter shield is gone." And he had fused a stick of goat butter to a shield. And I was like, what? Yeah. I was Like, I didn't even know you could do that. And then he looked at his weapon.

0:18:32 Noah: Oh, really? Oh, I bet you when you do the shield sliding, does it, like...

0:18:39 Thomas: That's what I told him. I actually said like, oh, that would be really good for shield serving. And He did it. And then it wore off instantly. I Was like, ah, that was kind of disappointing.

0:18:45 Noah: Ah. That sucks.

0:18:46 Thomas: But then later I look and he pulls out his weapons and every single one of them has a different, like, fruit attached to it. He's like, he has a banana boomerang and like a tomato, you know, sword. I was like, what? Anyway, yeah, there you go, that is like it. Yeah, and I found this one, I love this one too, because 10 months ago this happened, three years ago, by the way. This was just about

0:18:46 Lydia: He pulls up all of his weapons. Yeah. Yeah, I was

0:18:58 Noah: Yeah, right. So that's Elon Musk playing Elden Ring. Yes. Absolutely. Lydia, you nailed it. Yeah.

0:19:11 Lydia: Just going to ask when it happened.

0:19:11 Thomas: Three, two and a half years ago. Yeah, around May. Oh, it was May 23rd, 2022, I see the time stamp on the tweet and I just saw it post 10 months ago. I still think about the Elon Musk Elden Ring build from time to time and mostly how his fans tried to defend it. It was just another, like, you know, I looked at the most popular Reddit posts, you know, and that was one that came up Point is, it was terrible, and one thing that I hope Noah can help me articulate better is, when it comes to this stuff, I think it'll come across like just a matter of opinion. It'll be like, well, okay, this is us saying, yeah, this is dumb, but you know, it's a video game and he's just playing a video game. Again, it's like, like, I don't know how to properly communicate. Maybe now it can help. There are things in this, and we'll get to it, that it's not a matter of opinion. He's a fraud. Like, he just is.

0:19:57 Noah: Yes.

0:19:57 Thomas: Yeah, when it comes to this Elden Ring build, it just objectively was terrible. Like, it's no like, oh, that's a different strategy. It's like, I saw a comment that said, this is the first build I've ever seen where simply removing items without replacing them would make it better. Yep.

0:20:12 Noah: Yes. Right. Well, so the analogy that I like to, so it's going to be difficult for anybody who doesn't understand video games, but think of the thing that you do understand. Like imagine like a musician. I'm not a musician, I'm kind of a musician but I'm really not a musician, but a serious musician could look at a person and be like, based on the amp you're using, I can tell you're not a serious musician, right? Like I can't tell by the way that you put the strap on your guitar that you're not a serious guitarist, right?

0:20:39 Thomas: 100%. I could tell by somebody starting to play there, like picking up their guitar and like when you get really good at something and I'm not like super duper good at guitar, but I played countless hours of it and there are things and people, especially when you're talking about, you know, not you or I as hobbyists, but people who literally are the best at something like Video games or anything, sports, they have put in so many fucking hours, so many fucking hours that, like, you couldn't fool them for 2.4 seconds. You know, like if they're like, hey, pick up that guitar as though you're the greatest guitar player to ever play and you played countless hours, the minute you started doing anything they'd be like, no, like, they could tell instantly, and it's, and it's not like you, it's not as though it's infallible, but also it is, it's like if you get enough information from that. Yes, yes, yeah.

0:20:48 Noah: Yes. Right.

0:21:16 Noah: Well, there is a degree to which it's infallible, right? There's a degree to which a person could pick up a guitar and you could be like, no, this is, you've never touched one of those before But That's just the thing with Elon, is that you have to be so spectacularly below what you've presented yourself as in order for any of this to happen, right?

Like, like, you remember that, this is a little obscure, but you remember the controversy a little while back where, like, the guy who was the best in the world at Guitar Hero, it turned out he was faking some of his videos to make it look like he was, he was better, and he was still like the best of the world, but he was like tweaking his videos, like he's A little bit better than he was, and it took years and years for people to figure out that he was doing that, because he was really, really good at it, and because of that he could easily fake being a little bit better. But with Elon Musk it would be like me pretending, like altering a video and just speeding it up really fast or whatever. People would be like, but that's not how fast that level goes though, or whatever, right?

0:21:35 Thomas: Yeah. Oh.

0:21:37 Lydia: Oh. Wow.

0:21:57 Thomas: No. Oh, oh, that sucks. Right. Right, mm Mm-hmm, mm, hmm.

0:22:27 Noah: You know, but that's just the thing, is that the extent to which Elon Musk is not what he claims to be is just staggering Right, it's like he picked up the guitar with his

0:22:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:22:39 Ad: [Ad break 2 — ad music]

0:22:39 Thomas: So, I remembered that Elden Ring thing, and then what happened next in this story for me is I, uh, actually watched the entire fucking Joe Rogan, Elon Musk recording, um, from November.

0:22:51 Thomas: I was gonna, no, it's even worse. No, it gets worse. I watched it to do coverage of it, and, then, we didn't end up doing it. Like, so I just,

0:22:57 Noah: Feet. Oh.

0:22:59 Lydia: You. Just watched it for the hell of it?

0:22:59 Thomas: I just was a Joe Rogan listener for, and I

0:23:03 Noah: God. Oof, oof. I don't know if we can hang out anymore, man, honestly. Like, so, well, now you're using it, now you're using it now. So, yeah.

0:23:05 Thomas: Did, I know, man. No, I've taken a lot, a lot of showers. I've disinfected since then. No, it's okay. It's the only reason we're doing this episode. And he talked about being the

0:23:12 Noah: I'm helping redeem you from that, yeah.

0:23:19 Lydia: Yeah.

0:23:19 Thomas: Top 20 in the world in Diablo 4 in the beginning of that. And right away, and like I said, I played quite a lot of Diablo 3. I also have ADHD, so the minute I quit something I go from knowing, like with that game, go from knowing everything about it to within a couple weeks forgetting the name of the game I played. A ton of Diablo 3, it doesn't really help because Diablo 4 is quite a bit different, but the principles are the same. And right when I heard that I was like, top 20 in the world? I know Diablo 4, as we talked about it's a grindy game, like there's not, I mean, yeah, there's skill for sure, like there is skill for everything, like you can come up with anything and there's, but for the most part, being top in a game like that means countless hours.

And I don't know if you know this, this fucking asshole says he's the CEO of like three companies and he at least, and he starts a new one every day that doesn't do anything. And just like this, this can't be right. Let's play a little bit of that.

0:23:23 Noah: Yes. Mm -hmm. Right.

0:24:03 Lydia: At least, yeah.

0:24:12 Clip: We're talking about something that I think is a really good one, because people always think that video games are frivolous. But what you were saying, I think that's really important, is it, it's so difficult that it requires you to only think about that, and it can, like, relieve stress. Yeah, it can take out the rest of the world because it's so hard. Yeah, you can only think that. Yeah, I'm gonna finally, if I play video game on extreme difficulty, then I have to concentrate fully on the game and it's, it's has a calming effect. Yeah. It's sort of chills down. And I mean, you mentioned, I think, and many people, like if you play martial arts or you play pool, yeah, like something that forces you, it's like, I think any, anything that forces you to concentrate fully actually has it as a calming effect. I find it just sort of like, kind of a mental restoring effect. Yeah, it's good. Jiu-jitsu is like that, archery is like as well. Like when you're shooting a bow you have to, it's, there's so many moving things and you're trying, you have think only

0:25:08 Thomas: Noah, how does that come across to you? Just that little clip about him talking about games. I'm just curious. Sure.

0:25:11 Noah: He's such a dick. I mean, look, I think that Elon Musk is a gamer. I think he plays video games, and I agree that I don't play anything on fucking hard mode anymore, but I agree there's a meditative state that you achieve from playing video games.

0:25:31 Thomas: Absolutely. Or anything. But what came across to me and, and, and I actually mean this, if, if you don't think this is valid, please let me know, but what came across to me is that, like, on extreme difficulty, because here's the thing about playing games: the minute you start a new game that's extreme difficulty, there's no, like, just playing a new, you're figuring out the game wherever you are. I mean, it varies a little bit depending on the kind of game, but wherever you are at your skill level is going to be the hardest it is so far for you.

0:26:01 Noah: Yeah.

0:26:01 Thomas: You know, like, you don't, what I mean to say is, like, he's just describing playing video games and focusing on it. It doesn't need to be extreme difficulty. I mean, you can make, it's not Candy Crush or something. I don't know. You can make a, maybe you can make a claim about, like, some games or you have to pay attention less.

0:26:15 Noah: I've met a lot of gamers in my life, right? Right. If I met a gamer and he like mentioned like he added the addendum on extreme level difficulty, I'd just be like, oh, you know how to kill a man with a comb, don't you? It's like trying to. Well, it's like working your martial arts belt into the conversation.

0:26:29 Lydia: Insufferable. Right.

0:26:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:34 Noah: Well, you Know, I'm actually a third degree. Yes.

0:26:36 Thomas: It's like a yellow flag. This isn't one of those infallible things. Like I wouldn't hear this and think there's no, he's a fraud, but it's like, when you get into something, there's lingo, there's ways people talk about it. I'm sure there's like musical theater comparison, hun. I can't really think, but if I were, if I'm just a gamer and I'm talking to another gamer, where he's like, yes, I play it on extreme difficulty. I'd be like, okay, that's a weird way to say it.

0:26:37 Noah: Yeah, sure. Sure.

0:26:41 Lydia: Right.

0:26:57 Lydia: Like certain people who insert where they go to law school as part of the

0:27:02 Thomas: Yes, like people who say where they go to law school, except that does mean they went there because everyone who went to Harvard does say they went to... Yeah.

0:27:06 Lydia: Conversation. Yeah, but it tells you something about the person in.

0:27:11 Noah: Yes, it does. It does. And look, I don't play games, generally speaking, against other players. Right? Like, I, I play games where there are online leaderboards, right? So I compare myself to other players and stuff, but I don't generally play PVP or player versus player type games. So there are definitely games that I play on extreme difficulty levels, but like, generally those are games that I've already beat and I'm already really good at and I'm trying to find a new challenge that, that's generally what the extreme difficulty level is there for, right? It's, it's for somebody who's played through the game and then they're like, all right, well, like, I'm so good at it that, that there's almost no point in it. Let me crank this up to stupid hard and see if I can beat it there.

0:27:22 Lydia: Right. Right, yeah.

0:27:27 Thomas: Right.

0:27:50 Thomas: If you're PVP, this sentence makes no sense. It makes no sens. If you are like Noah, wherever you are in that game is going to be the hardest difficulty for you. Uh, oh, I actually

0:27:53 Noah: Yes. Yes. Environment.

0:27:59 Lydia: Wait, what's the E? Okay.

0:28:03 Noah: Player versus environment.

0:28:03 Thomas: Didn't know that. Oh, okay. I don't know why I never thought, when she called me, I was like, fuck, what is E?

0:28:04 Lydia: Okay. That's like the first time

0:28:11 Noah: That's why I'm here. That's like...

0:28:11 Lydia: That's ever happened. Electronics.

0:28:11 Thomas: Uh, E, yeah, E computer. I don' know. E, E electric. Electronics. It's PVE electronics. God, that is so funny. I've never thought about that. But anyway, if you are PVE, if I play a level 20 Diablo character and I have level 20 gear and I'm in a level 20 area, that's just as hard, relatively speaking, than if I'm in level 90. I have all level 90 gear and I guess sometimes there's more monsters, but not

0:28:43 Noah: Yeah, no, there are definitely... If you think about the hard mode that they came out with for Breath of the Wild, where suddenly there's the Lynels on the... Sorry, I'm getting really deep. I'm Getting Really Deep into the lore here, but

0:28:47 Thomas: ... Master mode. Yeah. No, Lydia knows this as well.

0:28:55 Lydia: I know a little bit of it. Yeah.

0:28:56 Noah: Yeah, right. Right. So there are a lot of games that have, you know, like, like Ubisoft games tend to have like five different levels of difficulty that you can play it on, just a story mode where I'm not really going to die in combat or whatever. And, and, and very often that's what I play, right? Because I don't have time to be like, yeah, exactly.

0:29:03 Thomas: Right, right, right. Yeah, it's more relaxing. It's more about the story and the experience.

0:29:17 Noah: And If the game's 30 hours long already, I don't have more than that to devote to a single game. So I think that there's a legitimate difference between I play video games and I play video games on hard mode, even when it comes to what Elon Musk is talking about there the meditative quality of it, right? How much of, because, like, if I'm playing a game on easy mode, it, you know, I might be half paying attention to it and just chatting with my wife, right, if I playing a game on hard load, I'm probably drilled right into it. So I think it's a red flag in terms of, is this guy an asshole? I wouldn't have seen it as a yellow flag in turns of, is this guy a fake game.

0:29:17 Thomas: Yeah, for sure. Fair enough.

0:29:39 Lydia: So

0:29:39 Thomas: Fair enough, for sur.

0:29:51 Thomas: Sure. Yeah, it could be that I already hate him so much. Like if someone I liked is, yeah, honestly, like if this was an interview with someone I liked and they said that, I'd be like, yeah. Okay. I'd probably forgive it. So somewhere between yellow and beige, we'll say beige flag. I'm going to play a little more just because it's clearly important to Elon to be a good gamer. You can hear him talk about like how gamers are great in different ways.

0:30:02 Lydia: Boring.

0:30:01 Noah: Yeah. Yes. It's a big part of his personality and his, his sort of his legend, right? Like, it's a big heart of his, his, uh, our persona.

0:30:17 Thomas: Yeah. So a little bit more about him talking about that.

0:30:20 Clip: Oh, I think it certainly would be a very good test to see if somebody can't play video games well, like that means because you got to move both hands simultaneously, right? They're reactive something very fast then on the screen. So, and, and if your keystrokes or your mouse clicks or whatever are wrong, then you lose the game, right? So

0:30:40 Thomas: Oh, no, I just want to remind you that this guy has 400 million trillion times the listeners that you and I have combined and multiplied together. It's just nothing. It's just nothing. I'm

0:30:44 Noah: Yeah, I know, I know, and it's just, it's unlistenable. I

0:30:50 Lydia: Yeah,

0:30:50 Thomas: So sorry. I'd like, trying to scramble to skip through it, but like, I'm making it worse because then if I skip the thing, but, oh

0:30:55 Noah: Know.

0:30:55 Clip: So if somebody has a good rank in video games, I would say that necessarily their manual dexterity If you think about StarCraft or any game like Quake, any game where a lot of people are playing, to rise to the top, you have to Be Exceptional, period, There has to be something exceptional about you. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, Quake. Way back in the day, I was one of the world's best Quake players. Yeah, yeah. In my final semester in college, I probably put more time to Quake than all my college classes.

0:31:07 Thomas: This is important, so I believe that that last part, but he says he was one of the best in the world at Quake. He mentions that, pin in that. So, like I said, when I watched this whole thing the first time, thinking we're gonna use this it was kind of weird, and then the coverage came out that, like, oh wait, it's actually true true. There was this wave of coverage that was like, wait, he's actually, it is, look, he is this top number something in the leaderboard on Diablo. And I was like, God, that is, that's kind of crazy. That takes a lot of time. And then, so first it was top 20, as you heard. That's what he said, top 20 in the world. And then there was another, like, slightly after that, there was another wave of coverager, another few headlines. And have one here. Here's the headline: Elon Musk apparently just became the number one Diablo 4 player in the world. I was like, what? What? And then, so if you want to know the details of

0:31:34 Lydia: No way.

0:32:18 Noah: Sure.

0:32:18 Thomas: This, it turns out he did a run on something called the Pit, which I guess is just one of the, like, late-game dungeons. Yeah.

0:32:25 Noah: Like after you finish the game, it's like, here's an extra challenge for you. Yeah, yeah. Can you survive the pit? Yeah.

0:32:29 Thomas: And there's different ones are, yeah, there's different things you can do, and it's a real thing to, like, okay, what, who's the bet, who can finish this thing the fastest. That's certainly like a, a legitimate way to compete. My understanding was, because I played Diablo 3, I thought he was talking about the ladders. Yeah. So like what will happen is there will be seasons and the seasons will change however many times a year. There'll be a month or two months or whatever, and with a new season, everyone has to start a new character at zero, and the latter will be who's gotten the farthest in that time.

So it's a way to, like, consistently have a new competition, and it's really fun because they, like, change up some of the skills for the season, or there'll be different seasonal tweaks. And my bragging claim to fame is I actually decided for the first time to do a hardcore character in Diablo 3. Now hardcore hun is when, if you die, the character's dead forever. Yeah. So like, and that's going to become important to what we're talking about. Yeah. And so I always thought that was insane. Like, when I played Diablo 2 and I heard people playing hardcore, I was like, that's insane, because for one, unless you're going to play just

0:32:48 Noah: Yes.

0:33:16 Lydia: Okay. Okay. Permanent. Okay.

0:33:29 Thomas: On the offline mode, there's the internet involved. My thinking was, there's going be some lag in the internet, something's going, going to disconnect, I'm going to lose my character I put a million hours into, and it'll be dead forever. I was like, I'm never doing this. But in Diablo 3, I was like, you know, I think I'm gonna try a hardcore character. And I actually got, I did for the, they have ladders for each different class or whatever, and for that season I got in, I can't remember, but it was, it was in the top, like, 10 for how high I got for Diablo 4, for Diabo 3, for a hardcore character. And that was based on what level of, it's not the pit, but it's like, like that equivalent, like some instance you clear, and there's levels that you get up to in Diablo 3. And it's not about time. It's about, like, what level can you clear? And that was what determined who was on the ladder.

And so for Diablo 4, I assumed when he said he was top 20 and then when this article said he's top one, I was like, wow, that must mean that he's at the top of these ladders. No, it's just his time in one specific dungeon. And It's not even an official leaderboard. It's a website. This website, and it's not that this is nothing.

0:33:30 Lydia: Oh, yeah. Oh

0:33:54 Noah: Nice, right?

0:34:33 Noah: So

0:34:33 Thomas: Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is Nothing. But it's Not What I Would Understand Anyone to be Saying If They Said I'm Top 20 in the World at Diablo.

0:34:40 Noah: Much so that you're lying, right, if you say you're top 20. So there was a game called pac -man 99 that that came out on the Nintendo Switch, where you wouldn't, 98 people would compete in a pac -Man game where, like, if you get a thing, it attacks the other players and blah blah blah. There was the leaderboard for that, and at one point, very shortly after it came out, I was number one on that leaderboard.

0:34:43 Lydia: My god. Yeah.

0:35:00 Thomas: Nice.

0:35:02 Noah: If I had gone out, right?

0:35:02 Thomas: You're number one in the world, Noah! Hey, this just in. We're playing with number one Pac -Man 99 player in the world.

0:35:05 Lydia: Wow. What an honor.

0:35:06 Noah: If, well, that's, but that's just the thing, right? Like, if I had gone out at that moment and said, I am actually the best Pac-Man player in the world, I'd be lying.

0:35:18 Thomas: First question for No Illusions today. Noah, why do you think it makes you a better person to be so good at Pac -Man? Yeah, yeah.

0:35:23 Noah: Well, because of the, the meditative qualities of, yeah, my manual dexterity that I get from pushing buttons. But, but that's just the thing, right? Like, like, when you say I am number four at this game, like, the games today have, like, official fucking leaderboards where you can just go and look and you can be like, oh, here are the top 12 people. I notice Elon Musk isn't there.

0:35:29 Thomas: It must take a real intense, quiet genius to be that good at Pac -Man.

0:35:49 Thomas: Not only that, but a game like Diablo 4, you can't really cross -compare classes. So, like, there's druids, there're sorcerers, there are whatever, and those leaderboards, it's totally different depending on what class you are. And so, like there's going to be like eight different leaderboards. You could be number 10 on one of them, but you wouldn't say like, I'm top 10 in the world. It's like, yeah, okay. And that's why I was specific. I was in hardcore mode for this given season that I played.

I got to like eighth, I think, on one class of character of which there were, I don't know, eight, six, eight ten, something like that in one particular season, which was season like 18 or something, you know, so like there's so many variables there that to say you're not your top 20 in the world is absurd. And furthermore, to not even be talking about the official like ladder system, which is already weird enough to be talking about your time in a run that is only on a website where it, get this, this website grabs these times by whoever has recorded it. So like what they'll do is they'll see in a stream, oh, this person did this run in this time, which again, it's not nothing, but it's just not what he's saying. Yeah.

0:36:09 Noah: Right. Yeah, yes.

0:36:41 Noah: Yes, so, well, right, so, so he wasn't top 20 out of the millions of people that play Diablo 4, which is, which is what Joe Rogan specifically said he was the top 20 of. Get this: the 900 entries on this website at this challenge, right? So there's a game that I love to play in VR called Pistol Whip. It's a rhythm-based game, so there's, like, 40 different songs, each song has three difficulty levels, and there are a bunch of different variations, right? Uh, extra, like, bullet hell, uh, you know, more life, less life, double wield, whatever, and each one has a separate high scoreboard ultimately. So there are this exponentially huge 27,000 scoreboards. So if you wanted, you could go on that game and find some variation of some song at some difficulty level that nobody's ever played and be number one at it, and you could be like, I'm number one in the world at Pistol Whip. You know, that's the, basically what he's done here. Like you said, it's more than nothing, right? Because there are other people trying to, but, but that's, but, but that's assuming that was actually his video.

0:37:12 Lydia: Oh,

0:37:42 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:38:00 Thomas: Yeah. Which, okay. And then another quirk to this is then it said, so his time was two minutes, 50 seconds at the time. And they're like, "Wow, that is, I think it was 18th or something." And then there was this news coverage that was Elon Musk apparently just became the number one Diablo Four player in the world. You might notice that's quite a bit different than being top 20. That was because he submitted a time under two minutes and he bragged on X about, "Wow, Diablo tier one 50 under two months."

And the person's like, "It's weird, cause it's not showing up on the board," and it turns out that it's because it was due to a bug, like there was a bug temporarily that if you drank a potion it gave you like infinite fucking life for a second. And so I looked at that leaderboard and it's that his time of under two is not on it because it didn't count because it wasn't real. But he did, he did brag about it, which, what, look, all this stuff, again, it's like, you could do that, you could say it was cool, you could post it, but this ecosystem that that creates, this myth that he is knowingly participating in where, no, it's not that

0:38:33 Noah: Yep. Yep.

0:38:34 Lydia: Right. Yeah.

0:39:01 Lydia: Gotcha.

0:39:01 Thomas: He did a fast run based on a bug that's kind of cool and whatever. No, he's the best in the world now. He's number one in the World. This is Forbes .com that has this thing.

0:39:11 Noah: Well, the idea being that he's superhuman, right? Because you and I, as video gamers, we know how difficult it is to be truly top tier at any video game, right, and it takes an enormous amount of practice, not any video games, any video gaming that a lot of people are playing, right. There are games, VR games, that me and 88 people are paying, and I'm number one at a lot on those. But to be like top tier at a game that a lot of people play, it takes an enormous amount of skill and practice, and for Elon Musk to be that good, well, you know, he can't have all that practice, he can't have all the time that the rest of us would have, it he must be superhuman to some degree, right? Like that's the myth he's trying to create with all this shit.

0:39:14 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. Yeah . .

0:39:56 Thomas: . Now, in full fairness, in looking into the Diablo 4 component Of this, he does play Diablo 3. He streamed multiple times playing it and he seemed competent enough at it, but here's the thing about Diablo 4 and Diablo 3, I think is similar, it's pretty much about the gear you have. So as Noah explained in the beginning, you have to grind a bunch to get that gear. Once you have the best gear, like, it's not, it's not that there's no skill, don't get me wrong, it's that it's pretty easy to just be good enough by looking up the basic guide to play this build.

If I give someone who's played some Diablo, like a decent amount of Diablo, the best build and gave them the guide to the build and all, had them go, the difference between, like, the top performer with that exact gear and, let's say, like me, like, I would be a good example of that, I imagine if I played Diablo 4 for like a week, I'd be easily as good as Elon Musk, I'm pretty sure, or around that skill. The difference in performance between me with this set of gear versus the best player in the the world with that set of gear, it's not that big because it's mostly gear based.

It's mostly about having the gear. And as long as you know the game and you know roughly what the build is supposed to be doing, if I played it, I would look like, oh yeah, I'm playing the game. It would look like I belonged essentially. Now the best player in the world, they would probably, they would find ways to be a little better. They would find countless ways to be a lot better.

0:39:59 Noah: Yes.

0:40:14 Noah: Well, And, and they'd probably be able to look at you and go like, "You're not really that good, you just have good equipment." It, yeah, yep.

0:41:20 Thomas: Oh yeah, for sure. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. But in terms of sort of the verdict on Diablo 4 at this time was like, all right, he looks like he plays. He streamed with a camera on him playing for a few times. And, you know, it was like all right. He plays Diablo, whatever. Like I guess that's cool. The stuff about the leaderboard is total bullshit. And like Noah said, he is lying about that. But like he played it. And so it didn't really blow up as like a big controversy at that time. There's a component we haven't talked about yet, which is that while it's against the rules, it is possible. To just buy your way to good gear in a game like that.

0:41:43 Lydia: Oh.

0:41:57 Thomas: There's something called RMT, which, oh, will I know real money trading? Now I'm questioning every acronym I've ever known.

0:41:56 Noah: I I believe that's correct. Yeah. Oh Yeah. Right.

0:42:07 Thomas: I think so. Yeah.

0:42:07 Noah: Right. Deoxyribonucleic acid.

0:42:10 Thomas: So there's a thing in these grindy games and this depresses me to no end. There's a things in these grinding games where you can either work your ass off and play countless hours to try to get gear. There's one level of it, which is part of the game, which you also trade for gear. And that's part of the game, a legitimate part of the game. You try to get stuff and

0:42:06 Lydia: Oh, my

0:42:28 Noah: Right, because, because, like, uh, like you were saying earlier, you eventually you get so much crappy loot that you can't use. You got to have some value to it. Yeah.

0:42:36 Thomas: You might get an item that's not good for your build, but it's really good. And so, you know, it's like any market trading is a legitimate way to get good gear. But in order to trade and get good year, you still have to have earned something. So like if you're playing totally legitimately, it's not like you can just trade your way into great gear from nothing. Like you still have to earn something to get there. So that's why it's still a legitimate part of game.

Like you're still grinding. You might get some good, I guess, good value trades or something, but like you can't trade from nothing to amazing. You have to still earn something to be able to trade, but enter RMT. So there are people for any game that is popular. There is like kind of a black market of people who will try to earn real money for this stuff.

And the depressing thing about this is, if you ever have done this, and I've one time I looked at the values for some stuff just to see, it's depressingly small. Like, that's the thing that's so funny about this is you don't even have to be like rich Elon Musk if

0:43:32 Noah: Yeah.

0:43:32 Thomas: You want to buy your way to a good character in a game, it's so cheap because, like, people in China do it all day, you know. It's like, it's relatively easy. Like, if you look at this thing that takes a hundred hours to grind and would feel like a huge accomplishment if you got, you could probably buy it for like a dollar seventy.

0:43:39 Noah: Right. Yeah.

0:43:49 Lydia: God.

0:43:49 Thomas: It's like, so there's always the possibility now. Now it's the higher you get, you know, it's a little tricky. They do try to police it. You can get caught. Sometimes they do things in games. They make certain gear where you can't trade it. There's usually some mix in these games. Like it's some mix of gear that is tradable versus stuff that's like bound to your account.

0:43:56 Lydia: Oh

0:44:07 Noah: Right.

0:44:07 Thomas: So you would have to earn it. And I find that really fun. I like it when you, you have to actually, I want to feel like if I'm going to, if I ever going to grind in a game, I don't want to be like, I could also just buy the thing for a dollar 70. Like that, that doesn't work for me. So if it has to be a game where it's like, you Have to earn the stuff, but like some Some people also still like trading. And so there's usually like some combination of both. And so the theory is like, yeah, he could have been like just kind of buying his way into that gear, but he did play. It looked like he knew how to play. And as a part of this, he also was on Noah. Do you know someone named Lex Friedman?

0:44:32 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:44:35 Noah: No, it doesn't ring a

0:44:35 Lydia: God. Freaking Lex Friedman.

0:44:39 Thomas: So he went on the Lex Friedman, and this one I have to play because it's such a perfect example of these very average white dudes trying to appear smart. And Lex Friedman, from what I can tell, I've listened to so little of it, but, but he's entirely that sort of affective genius or thoughtfulness. And so, Noah, here is some of his interview. I'll skip. There's only a few things here. He talks about and more in depth about his Diablo character. And they try to do a thing called metaphor. And I just know Noah will die inside. Noah, are you insured? Do you have life insurance?

0:44:43 Noah: Bell.

0:44:44 Lydia: Yeah,

0:45:13 Noah: Yeah.

0:45:15 Clip: You're also, with the Paragon board and the build, are not somebody like me who perfectly follows whatever they suggest on the internet. You're an innovator there. Which is hilarious to watch. It's like a mad scientist just trying to figure out the Paracon board and in the build.

0:45:36 Thomas: Such a fucking kiss ass. I'm so sorry. This is very clearly, I think, designed to soothe Elon's ego over the Elden Ring thing a little bit. Don't you think? I mean, it's like, oh, you don't necessarily follow the, you know, the online builds. It's like it's such a kiss -ass. Everything has to be in the most kiss -as way to Elon. You're a mad scientist experiment. Yeah, you're playing the game like every fucking person plays the game.

0:45:48 Noah: Oh, yeah. Sometimes you just pick out two shields, and then you just say, I wonder how, maybe I need to be slower when I'm fighting these enemies. I didn't think of that. Yeah, want

0:46:08 Clip: You know, um, is there some interesting insights there about, um, if somebody's starting as a druid Do you have advice? Um, I would not recommend playing a druид in the eternal realm. Um, right now I think the most powerful character in this, in the seasonal realm, is the sorcerer with the lightning balls. So the sorcerers have huge balls in, um, the seasonal, well, yeah, that's what they say. Sorcerers have huge balls. Um, they do. Uh, huge balls of lightning. I'll take your word for it. And it's

0:46:09 Lydia: Yeah.

0:46:41 Noah: To make sure everybody had plenty of time to laugh at his balls

0:46:44 Lydia: So dumb. Teenagers. Yeah.

0:46:45 Thomas: It's so painful. This is the person in charge of the whole world, everyone. He's in charge of the world. Balls. It's like he has to deal with the round of applause he hears in his own head.

0:46:47 Noah: Joke. Yeah, yep, yep. Balls, balls. Guys, did you get it? They. Okay, so they have huge balls.

0:47:02 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, totally.

0:47:02 Thomas: It's as if he's contending. If you played over it, and maybe I should someday, if you played it over at a massive standing ovation, it would make sense. You know when the comedian hits the great joke live and he's like, yeah, I know, yeah. And you put a couple tags on it. Great ball. Big balls. Yeah. Got a bunch of laughter. It's like he has to do that, except it's silence. Big balls. Yeah, yeah, big balls. Yeah. Lex Friedman takes a second. Oh, I have to react to that. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Big Balls, man. God, this guy is so fucking dumb. I'm sorry, he's so, he's so dumb. Okay, we've moved on from the big balls, I think.

0:47:11 Noah: Right, yeah, yeah. Mm -hmm. You can get the applause break, yeah?

0:47:30 Noah: Oh. Woo. Let that sink in.

0:47:31 Clip: Actually, in the seasonal realm you can, you can, it's, it's like pretty easy to beat, uh, Uber Loathe with, about, because you get these vampiric powers that amplify your damage and increase your defense and whatnot, so, um, but really quite easy to defeat hatred seasonally, but to defeat hate

0:47:42 Noah: Do the vampiric powers suck?

0:47:45 Thomas: Then no, that would have actually taken thought.

0:47:51 Clip: Hatred eternally, very difficult, um, almost impossible. It's virtually impossible. It seems like this is a metaphor for life, you know. I like the idea that Elon Musk, because I saw, I was playing

0:47:59 Thomas: It's a metaphor for life.

0:48:03 Clip: Diablo yesterday and I saw 100, level 100 druid just run by, I will never die, and then run back, and there's just some, this metaphor is kind of hilarious that you Elon Musk is fighting hatred, hatred, restlessly fighting hatred in this demonic realm.

0:48:23 Noah: Fucking what? Makes me want to pull your hair out, too. Well, yeah -yeah.

0:48:26 Lydia: Jeez. His hair plugs out, you mean? Yeah.

0:48:27 Clip: Really, it exercises absurdity and it makes me want to pull my hair out.

0:48:36 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, he'll just have it surgically put back. I can't, I, it, Noah, please help me. Please help me describe and, and, and articulate.

0:48:46 Noah: I don't even know. Where are you going? Running around fighting hate? Where are you even coming from?

0:48:53 Thomas: It's a, it's a metaphor, Noah, for fighting hate. They're

0:48:55 Noah: Oh, that's, I didn't, I didn't understand the literary device that was, right, right because the trolls are the hate.

0:49:04 Thomas: Trying so hard to be geniuses, and it, they bring it back

0:49:05 Noah: Oh my God.

0:49:09 Clip: Because it's my primary recreational activity. Um, and yes, beating hatred in the internal realm is the hardest boss battle in life and in the video game. I'm not sure it's possible, but it's, it's I do make progress.

0:49:16 Lydia: What?

0:49:32 Clip: So then I'm like, okay, I'm making progress. Maybe if I just tweak that Paragon board a little more, I can do it. But if I just dodge a few more waves, I can do it. Well, the simulation is created for the purpose of figuring out if it can be done, and you're just a cog in that simulation, in the machine of the simulation. I have a feeling that at least I think it's doable, yes. Yes, well, that's the human spirit right there to believe. Yeah, I mean

0:49:32 Thomas: 1 1.43 million subscribers to this to this clip this is a channel that's just clips of this guy. And it's 1 .43 million. Now they try to get a little philosophical here. So let's all learn something.

0:50:11 Noah: My fucking God. Oh, Jesus.

0:50:20 Clip: Did prompt me to think about just hate in general, which is, you know, you want to be careful of the, one of those things where you wish for something that sounds good, but in, but if you get it, it's actually a dystopian situation. So you know, you can sort of run a sort of, uh, have artists of like, if you wish for world peace, sounds good, but how is it enforced and, and at what cost is it, what, at what cost? Eternal peace. It might actually be worse to have eternal peace because of what that would entail, the suppression of everyone. That might be the suppression, progress. It might be an ossified society that never changes. What I'm saying is that there is an argument that you, you that if that, if you wish for no war, you should be careful what you wish for, because what's required in order for there to be no war? Oh, dude, Elon. Oh, Elon, Elon.

0:51:25 Noah: And that's how I want to, I recommend you do a druid build. Right.

0:51:31 Thomas: It's so painful to what, like, I just want to say, I have never heard Elon Musk say a smart thing ever. I've never heard it. Like I'm, I'm not saying it's impossible. He must be smart at something. There must be some, I've just never heard It. Like, if I watch a lecture from Daniel Dennett, I said this on Dad's the other day, I don't think it's out, but like, if I, I watch a lecture from some smart philosopher, some, anybody, scientist, they're gonna say something where I'm like, oh, if whether or not it's an insight or something from their study they did or some way of framing the data, something I'd be like, oh, that's, wow, interesting thought. I have never from the alleged smartest man in the universe, Elon Musk, I have never heard anything that gave me a second's pause ever that he's ever said It's, he doesn't have any clothes, he's no, don't close! It drives me crazy! And these weird fucking worshippers fucking just absolutely blowing smoke up his ass so hard. Oh, Elon Musk is fighting demons in the eternal realm. That's so ironic.

0:52:09 Noah: Nope.

0:52:09 Lydia: Yeah,

0:52:18 Noah: No.

0:52:22 Lydia: It's really bad.

0:52:35 Thomas: Here's a comment on YouTube, on the video. Got chills when Elon said, killing demons in a video game calms the demons in my mind. Ah! It's not... Okay.

0:52:42 Lydia: Oh, my God.

0:52:45 Noah: That's The, at the back of a 14-year-old's Trapper Keeper, right? Like, that is nothing. Like, the whole thing he's saying, that whole thing at the end, and I'm just like, where is he even going with that? And then he says a culture that is ossified, and I am like, oh, you were steering this whole thing towards the word ossified, weren't you? You wanted a chance to use that fucking

0:52:50 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, mm

0:53:01 Thomas: Minor point, I also think it betrays a worldview view that like the way we have peace is by law enforcement. Like the way, like the way, it's not that we need a politics of abundance in which if people aren't fucking dying of hunger and other things and other conflict and climate change, it's not as though that would yield peace. It's that you would just need to have an army strong enough or a police force strong enough to just kill the people who wouldn't be peaceful. Yeah.

0:53:09 Lydia: -hmm.

0:53:13 Noah: Word, right, which isn't peace, right? Like that's not even the thing. Yeah, yeah.

0:53:31 Thomas: And it's, it just, so it's so typical for the richest man in the world to think of the world that way, like, yeah the, you know, we can't be, exactly, it's the

0:53:32 Lydia: Yeah it's oppression. Right.

0:53:37 Noah: Yeah, like the path to peace is fascism.

0:53:40 Thomas: Only way. So bear, be careful what you wish for.

0:53:42 Lydia: His apartheid background and stuff you know it's like yeah.

0:53:44 Noah: Yeah.

0:53:45 Thomas: Yeah, I just had to play it because it's so fucking dumb.

0:53:47 Lydia: I want to say very quickly, Lex Friedman has been on my radar for a bit because he hosted a debate debate between Ben Shapiro and Destiny on wokeness. Yeah, and you know, like a lot of people are on, come on his show. Bernie Sanders was just on It's, it's so tough to see the space that Lex Friedman has in this world. He has four and a half million subscribers. He's going to the inauguration, like he was invited. This guy, he's everywhere, honestly.

0:53:55 Thomas: Oh, yeah, yeah, watch that.

0:54:16 Thomas: He's a clout chaser, Lex Friedman. My understanding of him is he just tries to not piss anyone off, like he tries to make everyone kind of happy, so he's sort of kiss ass to everyone while providing, I think, almost nothing really himself other than being, being that sycophant to different people and putting them on his channel. And, hey, he's got a massive thing. Like, congrats. But like, I don't, I don't spare a lot of time hating on him. Cause it's not, he'S not like, I don' t think he's like a force for evil necessarily, but like he'S willing to kind of have anyone and everyone on in order to, to chase the clout.

0:54:17 Lydia: Yeah.

0:54:50 Lydia: Well, And he owes his career to Elon, um, Because when Friedman, he, he was at MIT. Elon, like, talked about a study that he did, which was not peer reviewed or anything like that, because it was in praise of the self-driving of Tesla. And so Elon was like, oh, check out the study, yada, yadda, yedda. And then that's kind of how he rose to prominence. He, like took that as an opportunity and then just, like went with it.

0:54:54 Thomas: Uh, Hmm. Hmm. Oh, wow. And there's a lot people like that. And it's, It's how the myth of Elon's genius. There's a ton of that. There's tons of components of it. But we need to get to finally starting the episode because now we come to the latest thing that is, it is the best. It is the best. Because all this was still like, okay, he's playing Diablo. Yeah, he talked about this stuff, whatever. It's like yellow to beige flags. Okay, yes, he is definitely lying about his ranking, as we talked about. But it wasn't enough for anyone to really care that much, other than Noah and I being annoyed at how he would lie like that.

And a few other people. But then the other day he starts streaming a game called Path of Exile 2. I have never played this. I've never played Path of Exile 1. I actually thought it was Diablo 4 when he was doing it, because it seems to be a clone of that game to me. That'll be an insult, I'm sure, because my understanding is it's way better than Diablo4. It actually looks really cool. I, I wish I had time. Like, as I was covering this, I was like, man, if I had Time, I would love to play this game. It looks really cool. Here's

0:55:18 Lydia: Mm -hmm, yeah. Oh.

0:56:13 Thomas: What I also didn't realize, it's not even out yet yet. It's out. You can play it, but it's not officially out. This is still in the pre-release of it. Yeah, essentially.

0:56:12 Noah: Mmm, yeah, looks Good, the Beta.

0:56:22 Thomas: He starts streaming it. And before that, he started sort of bragging about his accomplishments in the game, just on Twitter and stuff. And it was like pretty crazy. It got to the point where he said he had a top character on the hardcore ladder. And I think I've already explained that. And again, hardcore. For a while, he was playing a non -hardcore character and was doing that and bragged about insane accomplishments there, which I'll talk about. Then he started playing hardcore and it got to the point where it's like, wow, he has, like, different times somewhere in the top 20 and then, like, 21 hardcore character in this game, and that's kind of crazy. And then he streams his gameplay, and apropos of what we talked about earlier with the picking up the guitar or the whatever the thing is you're an expert at, if you saw someone do it, he is so unfamiliar with parts of this game that instantly it's clear to anyone who knows anything that he has not played this game seriously. Yeah.

0:57:15 Lydia: My god, how embarrassing. Oh my God.

0:57:17 Noah: Well, well, let's be clear that this is the, the picking the guitar up with your feet version Of this though, right? Like, as I've, you and I have never seen this game, but you and I could tell, like, man, he's just clicking on that over and over again. He does not know how this interface works, right? Or like, wow, he's dragging and dropping each of those items, and there has to be a quicker way to do that, right? It, it genuinely is. It, it looked like somebody who, who didn't even know how to play video games.

0:57:22 Thomas: Yes. Yeah, yep, yep.

0:57:25 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, it's like

0:57:43 Thomas: Let's go through some of these. I don't know this streamer, this Quinn 69 guy, but unfortunately his voice is incredibly funny and I have to play it. So, like, I, like I said in the beginning, this guy I haven't vetted, he probably sucks. The other streamer we're going to talk about really sucks. But this guy, he's so fucking funny, I, I have to play some of these clips because this is a guy who has actually played the game and he watches him. And it's so funny how quickly it becomes clear that he's full of shit. So this is just this guy, Quinn69TV, who I've never heard of. It probably sucks. Who's a game streamer who has played PoE 2. I don't think he's like a best-in-the-world guy or anything, but he's played it. You know, he's playing it. He's a serious player. And he sees that Elon Musk is going to stream Path of Exile 2. And imagine, that's probably awesome to enthusiasts of this game, like, "Oh cool, this guy with a huge platform is going to stream on his, like, Twitter," because Twitter's trying to do Twitch now. They're trying to, like

0:57:46 Lydia: Me, it's

0:58:10 Noah: Yes, uh -huh.

0:58:40 Thomas: Do game stream. And so this guy tunes in, so he's excited that he's going to play the

0:58:46 Clip: Elon, I want, I just want to see what, uh, what is, what level is this guy, and, uh, what league is he playing? Is he actually playing hardcore? All right, okay, scrolling around. All right, oh, big juice, big juice, huge juice. Two T15 maps and ID gear in his bag. Oh, he's cut, he's going, oh, hoa gloves, bro. Bro, he must be trade league, right? Elon says.

0:59:09 Clip: What about the mass in the inventory bro? Like what? What? What about mass in his inventory?

0:59:09 Thomas: Game, and

0:59:13 Noah: He's still in the selection menu. Yeah, he seems to be walking through, like, just the, like... looking at his build and choosing his location and shit kind of part of the game.

0:59:25 Thomas: You You could kind of hear that instantly. Quinn said like, whoa, big character, because when you load the interface again, I don't play this game, but it's pretty easy as someone who's played any games to see, oh, he has access to a bunch of stuff, or his, you know, his power level is in the display somewhere. So like quickly this guy's like, whoa, this is a big character, this is, he's gotten far. And we're 30 seconds in, he's like, he's starting to already get, like, pretty

0:59:51 Clip: He's trying to click. It's grayed out.

0:59:52 Thomas: Suspicious. He's trying to go to a place in the map he can't go. Third, so 45 seconds, 45 seconds. I want to make clear that

0:59:54 Lydia: Grayed out. Oh my, my god. Oh my god. No.

1:00:06 Noah: Yeah!

1:00:06 Thomas: This guy was, this is not a video in which the guy, like you and I know on this show, we're like, clearly we're going to take down Elon. This is a guy who just wanted to watch Elon play. And 45 seconds into this video, he's like, he hasn't played this.

1:00:20 Clip: Bro, He's NOT played this game before has He? He's 100% getting piloted. He's got the management injury So it's really tough That would have taken a long time to get to level 96 Like the game actually mentions When people die on the hardcore ladder

1:00:30 Thomas: It's so good.

1:00:49 Thomas: There's one more thing at 140 here. One sec.

1:00:56 Clip: Clicking a map repeatedly, trying to access it. It was clearly not, like, he was not eligible to enter that map. Wait, what? And he's going into the map with a full inventory right now.

1:01:02 Thomas: Oh, this hurt me so bad. So you just heard him say he's going to the map with a full inventory right now. I'm just curious, dude. Does that, what does that mean? Does that mean anything to you? Okay. So back to what this kind of game is, As we've talked about, this is a grindy game where you have to beat a gajillion monsters over and over to get drops for stuff, to get items that you then eventually, if you get the right items or you get enough of them, you can slowly convert to better stuff.

1:01:14 Lydia: Uh -huh Okay.

1:01:30 Thomas: And he has just started to go on a, they call it maps in this game apparently, but whatever, like he's going to a dungeon, an instance, whatever the terminology would be of a given game. He's about to do a run, essentially, with full inventory.

1:01:31 Lydia: Literally

1:01:41 Noah: So he can't pick anything up.

1:01:44 Thomas: So you can't pick things up. Yeah, like this is where it's now in the infallible Mode, like it's getting toward now. You could say, oh, he's just playing, he's just showing people his thing, but Like, here's where I just want to spend a second to talk about the experience of playing a grindy game like this in order to be one of the top players. At this time this game came out December 6th, this date when this is happening is January 7th, and he's the top. But you know how much you have to play to be top level in this game?

1:01:48 Lydia: Okay, and There's No way. Just side note, there's No Way he has time to play that and also become the most annoying person at Mar-a-Lago that's like driving everyone insane?

1:02:15 Thomas: No. Now, it takes work to be as annoying as he is. There's no way. Imagine how much time.

1:02:24 Noah: Right, yeah.

1:02:25 Lydia: He's busy. He's busy pissing everybody off in Florida.

1:02:29 Thomas: What you have to do is grind so much. And this is hardcore character. So keep in mind that you wouldn't have just started the game with a hardcore character you absolutely. And he says as much. Elon says as Much. This is not me speculating. You would start playing a non -hardcore character. You would learn the game.

You would eventually get confident enough to want to try a hardcore character, and he is level 96 or 7 on this hardcore character at this time, which is insane. The amount of times you would have to do the exact thing he's doing in this video, which is, all right, gonna do a run, clear the inventory, click on the map, go to the spot, I'm gonna do, like, it's hard to explain if you're not a gamer, but like, you could do it in your sleep.

Like, the games that I've played to this extent, you could blindfold me and I would do all the menu selections in a second Like I would just, like, I know you, 'cause you've done it thousands of times. If you actually played this character, you've played 10 hours a day, every day. Like, you've just, you would know, I'm there. And it's not just, oh, I've learned that 'cause I played so much. It's also actually, that's the difficulty in being this good this early. Yes, the game is really hard, but when you're playing hardcore, you usually try to stick to, like, easier areas 'cause you don't want to risk dying.

And so the competition of becoming a really top hardcore player is about skill, but it's also more the grind. So the skill of being good at a hardcore game is actually about the very thing we're talking about. It's about being so efficient that you can do these grinds from December 6th when the game came out to now one month later, as this video is coming, you have to be incredibly efficient. You can't waste any time.

That's how you be at the top of these ladders. It's not even necessarily game skill, like, oh, I'm good at dodging, I'm good at casting. It is that, but it's also just as much how efficient are you in every part of this fucking gameplay: the menus, the navigation, the inventory. This is non-negotiable, like it's, this isn't an opinion, this is true. If you have played this character, you have

1:03:16 Lydia: Mm hmm. Yeah. Oh

1:04:35 Thomas: Done, done all this thousands of times and he cannot do the most basic stuff.

1:04:35 Noah: Right, So on the one hand, the low level of cheating at these games is just buying the items. The high level is just sharing your login information with somebody that you pay a certain amount to go grind the damn game for you, right? So there is some kid in Indonesia playing this game 11 hours a day for 16 cents an hour to up Elon Musk's character. That's the only way, right. Like now, so we should say like Elon Musk is notorious for like playing video games during other shit while he's doing other shit. He's notorious for putting off meetings because he's trying to finish a game session.

1:04:57 Lydia: My God. Oh, my God.

1:05:13 Thomas: And hey, who among us, hey, and hey, you know, who amongst, I mean, let's like, like, let's do, you Know, like totally normal stuff like that part, right?

1:05:24 Noah: I'm playing Candy Crush as we speak, Thomas. But no, but, but that's so, so, like, that's the thing, is that, like, there is a certain amount of this shit that you can imagine if this is, like, your thing, right? Like, this game is your thing and you're always doing it, you're playing it during your breaks and you're playing at night, whatever. You can imagine somebody, like, even, you know, somebody who has a really busy work

1:05:37 Thomas: Yeah. Rest assured, if I still had an office job when COVID hit, I would have been playing video games while on work meetings.

1:05:52 Noah: Schedule. Yes.

1:05:53 Thomas: 100%.

1:05:54 Lydia: Yeah,

1:05:54 Noah: Absolutely. And when you're the richest guy in the world, you, you can get away with that to a degree that you and I can't. So, like, it's not impossible that he actually put in all of those hours. It's impossible that he put in all of those hours and then looked so inept during the street, right? So the only explanation for this is that He has paid someone else to play His video games for Him.

1:06:17 Lydia: That's so crazy.

1:06:18 Thomas: It's so bad. It's so, and, and it's so funny. We have to go through more of these things because it's fucking hilarious. This one hurts so bad because it reminded me of Diablo. When you're grinding for that item you're trying to get, you have to kill the same boss, like in Diablo 2, you gotta kill this Mephisto runs. But a lot of people listening, a significant percentage of the people listening, will know exactly what I mean. In college, I would do Mephisto runs, like, all fucking night, like, you're just, you're beating the same bus over and over trying to get this drop. And so now we're three minutes into, well, it's edited, so we're a little bit, he's finally figured out the maps and he's actually playing

1:06:50 Clip: Like dropping the bell. That's a nice sound. That's nice ring to it.

1:06:55 Thomas: I just love this guy's voice. It's so

1:07:01 Clip: His loot filter is like, no, he's just running past chaos orbs. He just ran past the chaos orb. Dude, you are not this far in the game and you're running past house orbs. You are No, I'm sorry, bro. Bro, there's no way you are not leaving castles on a sea trade. I see trade castles of valuable

1:07:08 Thomas: Funny. There's also an exalted orb there, but he just got a drop that is very valuable, like very valid, like to the point where there is no excuse. And, and you heard him mention it, this is a trade server. I actually didn't understand this at first, but I, I guess as part of that beta process or whatever this pre -release process is, this is, is a server. It's a hardcore server and it's, uh, it is a trade server. And the way you would have gotten any of this gear is by picking up exactly the item that he just got. And it is not as though that item is like, oh, that's a B plus. He has other guys later talk about it, but there's one guy who said he's played countless hours of this and he's only seen, like, nine of these items, like, in the, in the in the countless hours he played this. Chaos orb is apparently very important because it's, it's essentially part of the currency that he could trade to get better stuff.

And I don't care if you are just demonstrating something. There's a lot of this where I can say, okay, he's streaming to demonstrate something. He's not caring too much. But I don' t give a shit. If this was real, if this was your real thing and you were playing and you get an item that important, you're going to say, oh, going to get that real quick. And he does try to pick up other stuff

1:07:29 Lydia: Oh, wow.

1:08:30 Noah: Yeah.

1:08:30 Thomas: That isn't valuable, but completely useless. Useless, and it is, that just hurt me to my core, because, like, this guy's reaction is so genuine, and this chat goes nuts. They're like, "Chaos up, chaos up," because, like, as a gamer, that's, you just know that's the kind of thing you're looking for. And then he talks about this loot filter, which is a new thing for me, because this is a crazy amount, these games have gotten so crazy with their loot that, like, this game has something called a loot filter where you can turn it on and it'll only show you important stuff, because I guess this particular game the mobs drop so much stuff that it would be really annoying. And Elon Musk is playing with no loot filter, which my understanding, again, from people who've actually played this game is that's insane. You would never, ever, ever, ever do that. It just would make it impossible to do the grinding that you would need to do. God, it's so good. And then I got to play this clip because after not picking up the chaos orb toward the end of this particular spot here, this

1:08:31 Lydia: Oh my gosh.

1:08:31 Noah: Well, that's useless. That's completely useless. Yeah.

1:09:26 Clip: Knows he knows, you know, he knows about the bosses, you about breach hands. Okay, boss fight. Here we go. You know, put down the bell. He dressed up the bell. Yeah, he's clearly played the character, so there's clearly got hours on, he has hours of play time. He's not even a man of last night if he's not pressing his man of us.

1:09:49 Clip: Now he pressed it. He pressed the man boss.

1:09:57 Clip: He does, it's the one thing he brings over the maps, he tries to see another, still looking.

1:09:59 Thomas: Is so good, I'll explain, playing, don't worry so It was, I know that you couldn't really see, so some great things happen for one. So he gets to the end boss of that particular dungeon thing, and you heard him say he's not pressing his mana flask, he's now pressing his manaflask, hun. Do you know what mana is? I think you do.

1:10:24 Lydia: Yeah, I don't, I would not know how to define it, but I've heard the term before, and I'm

1:10:45 Noah: Moses eats it.

1:10:43 Thomas: Right, okay. Yeah, it's, uh, she knows even less about that. No, she knows even less. Um, in general, mana is like your magic resource in games, and used to be that, like, oh, only the mage type characters would use mana, like it's only the magical ones. And then I think they kind of adjusted it. So it's usually it's like more of an energy thing that every character will use different, like every class will use for something, you know, just so that it's not something that's like not used by certain classes. But point is, you have usually in these games, you've got your health, which, you lose your health. You die. That's pretty self -explanatory. And that's on the left and that's red. It's very Diablo -esque. And Then on the right, you got your mana, which is blue. And that's what you use to basically fucking do anything, if you especially if you're a character that uses it a lot, and he continues to try to attack this boss with empty mana for, like, a while.

1:11:36 Lydia: Familiar.

1:11:36 Thomas: And these games, again, you've got so many hours into it, you know, your fingers just do it, like, you just, you know when to hit the mana thing, your eyes know exactly what to look at to know. And so he's saying he's not hitting his mana flask, meaning the potion that, like, restores his, his mana, he's not hitting it for a while. And he's just sitting there clicking on the boss, and his, like, And nothing's happening for a wild, not like, oh, a second or two. It's like five seconds, like that, which if you really have played this much is not possible. Like, it's just, it's just not possible. And then the stuff at the end when he said, "Is Joe Biden playing?" That is beyond a hundred percent certain. So here's the deal with that. He starts trying to pick stuff up, stuff up, which normally you just click on stuff and it goes in your inventory, you don't even have to open your inventory, but

1:11:47 Lydia: Oh, right, right, yeah, and Nothing's happening. Yeah, yeah.

1:12:00 Noah: It's

1:12:25 Thomas: If you hear, he starts trying to pick it up and it makes this sound. There, let me just play the, the sound it makes.

1:12:32 Thomas: See that? Like, that sound, like, donk, donk, that's because he's picking it up, it's dropping back on the ground. And why is that happening? Huh? Because his inventory was full.

1:12:35 Lydia: Yeah, oh, uh-huh, oh, uh-huh. Because He can't use it. Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:12:42 Thomas: When he started going, so his inventory is full, he's trying to take stuff up and is dropping back down to the floor, and then he opens his inventory and he's like, "Okay." Okay. And based on the inventory, it's hard to explain, but there's big items that take up a bunch of slots. Imagine a grid and there's items that pick up like, oh, four by two. And then there's items that take one by one, you know? And so you have to kind of fit them in the grid. It usually auto does it, like when you pick them up. So he starts dropping stuff. And then the things he tries to pick up are useless. And the reason is, when you don't have a loot filter on, the game defaults to highlighting these useless, like, waystone map things, and it makes it look like they're important. And so after he kills the boss, he just starts trying to pick those up, doesn't have room, opens in his inventory, starts manually dragging them into his inventory, like clicking and dragging it in. I can't explain, like, does that make sense? Like, it's, it's just not

1:13:41 Lydia: Like he's reacting like the issue is that he just can't pick it up because maybe there's something wrong with the game, so he's gonna do this other thing that's also not gonna work because his inventory is full.

1:13:50 Thomas: Essentially. Did you ever try to get your, no, this doesn't really apply to you. Did you, you ever try to get your parents to do something on a computer in the 90s, hon? Well, your dad was good at computers though.

1:14:00 Lydia: No, yeah. Yeah. That doesn't apply to me.

1:14:02 Thomas: Okay. If you were of a certain age in the nineties or maybe 2000s and your parents were a certain age and you tried to get them to do anything on a computer, it was agony. That's why he says, "Is Joe Biden playing?" It's like, what's an equivalent of this? You just wouldn't fucking do it. I don't know.

1:14:19 Noah: Like your parents trying to program the VCR, right? Yeah. It's, like, I bought my dad an Oculus headset, a VR headset, a couple years back for Christmas and regretted it. Yeah, it's that.

1:14:31 Thomas: I just thought of a comparison. Let's say your parents open, trying to do something in Microsoft Word. And you're like, all right, just copy that sentence to this spot. And they're like okay. And they highlight each word individually and press control C and then go down and hit control V. Like they know control C control V it's not nothing like he knows kind of how the games work.

1:14:52 Thomas: And then he goes to the next word, copy that one, put it down. Oh, he put it in the wrong spot. So then he like tries to hit copy it again. It's not that he's never done it. It's that like, no, you, you are not, you were not a writer. You know, you're not somebody who who has spent a thousand hours using Microsoft Word, yeah, you would just do it in two milliseconds. And the fact that he's picking up the most worthless item in the game, that is 100 % impossible. Like there is no explanation for finishing the boss, skipping one of the most important items in the Game along the way, and then picking up these useless items. This is why I'm just hoping, I know I'm repeating myself, but the thing I'm trying to convey is that this isn't, there's no guesswork here. He 100 is a fraud in this instance. He is pretending that he's playing this character and he has not done it. Okay, here's one more thing that's kind of funny that I gotta play. His reaction to that, I just love for a few seconds here.

1:14:49 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, because then you'd be actually efficient at this. Yeah. Okay.

1:15:42 Ad: [Ad break 4 — ad music]

1:15:48 Clip: Okay, this is as hard as pretty much as hard

1:15:54 Thomas: He's back in the map interface trying to pick a new thing to play

1:15:56 Clip: So level 16. There are four things there.

1:16:08 Clip: God, dude. Four things. It's four things, dude. Dude, you had not this far in the game. Stop, bro.

1:16:05 Thomas: Should be right around here.

1:16:24 Clip: He literally can't.

1:16:26 Thomas: So he was picking his map, and the things he's talking about are, I believe, again, I don't play this game, but I believe they're modifiers, and and there are ways that that map that you're about to go into become harder or easier. And so it just it just is part of the difficulty. And the reason you wouldn't say four things is because what those modifiers are really matters.

So based on your type of character and based on the gear you have, there's modifiers that are like these monsters will do more damage in this way or, you know, like to try to not get technical, that kind of stuff. And so if you were someone who played the game, you would be very intentional about about what those are to the point where you, you would know to say like, all right, I'm playing with this, this, and this, or you wouldn't even really mention it.

Cause it's just kind of like obvious from like, you know what I mean? Does that make sense? So like four things. So that became a meme where people just kept saying four things and later he said, he says, sorry, they, they bring it up again in a really funny way.

1:17:17 Lydia: Oh,

1:17:28 Clip: Why have you done this to me, man? I genuinely believe that he was addicted, right? He clearly has no idea, bro. Some guy plays in the camp for him, he just logs in to do a map every now and then. That's why there's a tab called me on this map. That's the way he has no clue how to activate the atlas or put maps. This is about as believable as the time Snoop Dogg was streaming the dog survival game while quote playing end quote. Unsurprising max difficulty on hardcore. Oh, oh, with no live filter and you're just leaving higher difficulty, I don't know what it is, but there's everything maxed out

1:18:14 Thomas: So The whole chat is going insane and saying max difficulty, LOL kind of thing. So like, suffice to say, it's not quote unquote max difficulty. Apparently the hard part of the game in this game is fighting bosses, and so this is the grind part of a game that, like, yes, it's harder, easier, but it's not really the dangerous part of the game. The dangerous party the game is trying to take on like one very very difficult boss, and so that's an insane thing to say and and ridiculous.

I also I think I didn't mention to get into the the game he pulls up that map interface and there's a tab called Elon's map. This guy is like, why would you in your own game why would she have a tab that's like Elon's, like Thomas's map, because that's very clearly the person who's played the account a ton made a shortcut for him to be like, all right, you can go to this one so you don't kill, by the way, our hardcore character that I've probably spent 10 bajillion hours on so this whoever actually played this is probably probably made some presets or something and labeled it Elon's map.

1:18:49 Lydia: Yeah. A separate tab.

1:19:03 Lydia: Yeah

1:19:11 Noah: Right.

1:19:17 Lydia: That's so crazy. Yeah, yeah.

1:19:18 Noah: What's so amazing about this to me is that this is clearly a kid giving a book report on a book he didn't read, right, that's what we're seeing here. But what's amazing to me is that he didn'T seem to realize that everyone would be able to call him on it. I feel like maybe like he has bought into this idea that he's a hyper genius, but he's actually just a like, you know, what slightly above average intelligence guy. And so he has to assume that everyone else is profoundly stupid, right? Like that's the only explanation that I can think of, of why he

1:19:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's what's so insane. That's what so insane, yeah.

1:19:50 Noah: Didn't know that this was going to be a meme, that everybody was going to just call him out on this.

1:19:55 Thomas: I don't, it's the gall to think you could get away with something. It reminds me of someone I once knew. There's some level of narcissism that I don - like you could sub me in with all the same horrible qualities as someone else, but I would still be be like, well, I'm not going to get away with this lie. So I won't try that lie. You know what I mean? Like I could be completely bad motivations trying to getaway with whatever I can. But then there's the part where you're like, why would you stream a game where the people are going to be able to see what you're doing? And it gets worse. This is the final, like really, really, really dumb thing that I am. I still I'm dying at. And just for fun, I'll see if Lydia can guess.

1:19:59 Lydia: That

1:19:59 Noah: Yeah. Yeah,

1:20:28 Lydia: You don't know what you're doing. Yeah. Oh God.

1:20:37 Thomas: Yes. So he starts talking about his gear. Why would you, why would you do this? Because people ask, it's so good. It's the best part. I saved it for the end. People are asking him, Elon, like, hey man, what's your build? How, you know, and that, hun, that means like your build usually it could be your skill allocation, but also your, your gear. And so people convince him to show them his gear and so Elon's like, all right. And he starts telling you about what he has.

1:20:43 Noah: This is so good. This is so, oh God, oh

1:21:02 Clip: Okay, what's up for his gear? Okay, fine, it is pretty great gear. It's, uh, could be better, but it's pretty great. Oh well, okay, I mean, it's an advanced barrier. Okay, with the tank speed, crit damage, crit bonus. Okay, yeah, just, you know, 200 divided into two points. Okay, all right, so you can see, like, this is, this is a great staff, but it's only a level, you know, 62 staff.

1:21:28 Thomas: Okay, he is, I've told you, level 90, I can't remember if he's 96 at this point. He ended up 97, and he's about to talk about his gear, and you know from what we've talked about that this is one of the top characters at this moment in time in the whole world, and he goes to talk about his gear. He's level 97 and he says, well, the staff is pretty good, but it's only level

1:21:53 Lydia: I don't know. Then how did you get to

1:21:55 Thomas: 62. I'm just wondering, like, what do you think could be wrong with that? Yeah, oh, there you go.

1:21:57 Lydia: Your level. Okay.

1:21:57 Thomas: Yeah, I like that. No, that's a good thought. The reason I'm not trying to just embarrass you, the reason is I think if you were trying to pull off this lie, you would even do better. So, like, if you start looking at your gear and you see, well, I'm level 97 but this staff is level 62, for him to say, yeah, it could be better, see, this staff's only 62, for him to not make the mental connection of, wait a minute, I have one of the top characters in the entire universe of this, does it make sense that just on the face of it that my staff is 35 levels lower than it should be? Does that make sense? I'm so glad you identified it. Like, how would you be there? Here's the key. That's just the minimum level requirement to have the item.

1:22:23 Lydia: Yeah, that you don't have the gear to have gotten you there. Yeah.

1:22:42 Noah: That's fucking hilarious.

1:22:43 Thomas: That will... In some video games, that does, it depends on how you build your game. In some games, the level is kind of everything. Like, if you are level 60 and you equip, whip. Yeah, like, if it depends on how you do the math of damage and combat and all, and how you do the modifiers of the weapons, like some games that makes sense where it's like, yeah, if you're level 50 and your shit is level 45, it sucks, you can't use it. Now, that's not this game. This game and many other games, it's more about what the equipment does. There's other components, put it this way, there's others things, hun, about the gear than the level that are very important, and I have have to play a

1:22:56 Noah: Yeah, in Assassin's Creed, for example. Yeah, you need to upgrade your shit.

1:23:27 Thomas: Bit of this because it is so fucking funny, and I think it explains it, but long story short, there's other things besides the level that make the gear good, and for him to not know that, and for, yeah there's there's others, and you can see when he highlights the item there's like a bunch of text, so yeah, there is a list, yeah.

1:23:27 Noah: Yeah.

1:23:30 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, like when Arlo talks about

1:23:43 Noah: There's like a list, there's a whole big list.

1:23:43 Lydia: Damage. Okay, so so he could talk about other specs but decides to

1:23:49 Noah: And it's also, it's not like cryptic, right? Like, this stuff will say, you know, like, bonus critical damage or something below it or whatever, and there's was like nine things.

1:23:58 Thomas: But Importantly, if Noah or I were put into, by bad luck, were subbed into Elon Musk's personhood and had to pull this off, I wouldn't know what the fuck any of that means. 177 % increased physical damage. Well, okay. I would be able to figure out what those mean. What I wouldn't know is the context. 176 % increased physical damage, is that a lot? Do items have 150 %? Do item have 200 %? Here's another variable. Sometimes in these games, some of those are pointless. Like, maybe I don't do physical damage, maybe I only do magic damage, I don't know. I might know enough about the build because I played it a little. Uh, adds 27 to 49 physical damage, is that a lot? I don't know. Is it, should it be 50, should it be 10, should I have no idea? But here's what I would know: I'm playing literally one of the best fucking builds

1:24:00 Noah: There

1:24:05 Lydia: Yeah. Mm hmm.

1:24:44 Noah: Right.

1:24:44 Thomas: In the entire world, so whatever this is that I've hired a guy in Indonesia or China, I think it is, to play countless hours, I would KNOW that this person has put together the best fucking build that my bajillion dollars could buy. And so instantly I would say, yeah, check out this thing. Oh yeah, that's it. And, like, if I were trying to do this improv game of lying, I probably would stay pretty vague because I don't want to accidentally highlight a stat that isn't important.

1:24:46 Lydia: Right.

1:24:46 Noah: You would just go like, look at all of the add add-ons on this vest. You know, look at it, look at the stuff I've got on this staff, right?

1:25:17 Thomas: Check out those modifiers. Pretty fucking crazy, right? Oh, check out this. Oh man, that one was so hard for me to get. You have no idea. Check out the modifiers on that one. Now, this stuff is so complicated that I would still probably pretty easily be found to be lying, but not as easily, because like I, you know, if I accidentally highlight a piece of gear that, that, like, relatively speaking wasn't as good as the others, or relatively wasn't, it's hard to get as the other, that's all stuff I wouldn't know. But he just completely blows it and just, like, to not be smart enough to lie better is what really gets me about this. Let me play more of this. It's so fucking funny.

1:25:50 Clip: Like, it's actually very hard to get equipment in Hardcore. So, uh, I don't know. Why did you make TTS? My staff is only level 62. So I haven't been able to find a better staff. Level 95, the staff is level 62? I'm like, yeah, he should say it's an advanced one. Why isn't he saying it's advanced, bro? You know, in over 30 levels. Oh, my God, bro.

1:26:16 Thomas: Oh man, it gets so better

1:26:23 Clip: My helmet is level 56. It's 400 ES, bro, he's got a 400 ES with Chaos Res and Lightning Res helmet, bro Bro, I've been playing this game fucking giga hard at minus 342, bro. What is he even talking about? That's an insanely good helmet. I guess he doesn't need magic point because he doesn'T actually loot stuff.

1:26:51 Thomas: I just want to emphasize on, I don't know what all that means either, but it is fucking hilarious. I can tell that this guy knows what it means, and his reaction to, to Elon just, there, there is so much text on each of these items, and for Elon to just isolate the level requirement, that might as well be like if I had the best shoes and it was like, "Yeah, but it's only a size 10 and a half shoe. Like, someday I'll get to a size 13 shoe," but it gets so much, but I have to play a couple more bits of this because it's so fucking

1:26:53 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah,

1:27:21 Clip: My helmet is level 56. Okay, he clearly has no idea what he's talking about, right? Bro, bro...

1:27:35 Lydia: Okay.

1:27:39 Clip: Ring is only level 48

1:27:34 Thomas: Funny. It's clearly the best, like, possible item. This

1:27:48 Clip: Some rarity in this one. Okay. All right, what are you nine? 1.3k evasion It's kind of mid 1.2 k evasion

1:27:56 Thomas: Is the best. I love this part. So what happens here is this guy Quinn does see a piece of gear and he's like, "Okay, that piece isn't that great," and then he realizes something

1:28:08 Clip: Yeah, It's kinda mid that just kind of bit. Yeah, that's just gonna mid my I got Casper's and 1.6 k evasion Wait, it's what I read with a yes. Are you kidding me, bro? Bro, what the fuck? This one's like twice as good as mine. Fuck, bro? What the

1:28:36 Thomas: I love it so much because it's just what he realized was like he was looking at one particular stat and then it turned out that this body armor had, uh, it's like a hybrid, he's saying, so it can have dual stats, but when you get a hybrid, both those stats are going to be lower apparently. So like, so basically it's even harder to get a good number. So he looks at one number and says, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. That's not bad.

And then he realizes it actually has two different things. And so it's like twice as hard to get good. Well, actually, it might even be more probability-wise to get a good, like, number value for two amazing stats, and that's when he realizes, like, "Oh no, this is even better than he could have possibly imagined." So whoever he's paying to do this, whoever Elon is paying to play this, is just out of this world. Like, he's getting the best possible stuff, or Elon is buying it for real money somehow. Like, he has unbelievably good gear, and I could, I relate to this guy so hard.

I relate to this so hard, because if you, if you're someone who has grinded a game like this for countless fucking hours and you see someone who has impossible to get stuff, like truly just jaw-dropping good stuff, and is like, "Yeah, it's only level 52," it's just like, there's no room for error here. Like there is, it is objectively speaking, he's a liar, and he's continuing to try to pretend that he has this. All right, here's what I did. I took a list of everything he's claimed about this game. It might not be exhaustive, but it's enough. He claimed early, early on that he had a soft core character who farmed nine citadels within the first 11 days of launch.

Now, I don't know what that means, but the important thing is other people do. And that apparently is very hard. The launch was on 12 -6, like I said, December 6th. And the video where he claims that was recorded on December 17th. So that's a different claim. He claimed that. That's a softcore character. Then he had an hardcore character.

He got the 59th best hardcore character, level 94, died sometime around January 7th. Then he had this character that we're talking about now, which was the number 21st, that was level 97. And then he said he has said he had several other hardcore characters who have died. Now here's what I did, this isn't 100 science, but just for fun I plugged all that into Chat GPT and I said, "Hey, Chat GBT, come up with a schedule for how you could have done this." I even said "highly dedicated player with optimized strategies." That's one thing that Chat GPT is pretty good for, is coordinating all that. And so to do all those things, the first, farming nine citadels, total time 50 to 60 hours. If he had several characters, and these are optimistic estimates, it'd be like 40 hours of gameplay per character that he got anywhere to like 71. Now, here's another bit of information, hun: this uh leveling is exponential, exponential. So I believe the stat I saw is that level 92 is halfway to level 99

1:31:32 Thomas: So to get from 1 to 92 is the same amount of time or experience it takes to get to 92 to 99. And so keep in mind what that means, like, getting to 71 versus getting to, like, 94 is, like, insane. He has this hardcore hardcore character to 94 that dies. ChatGPT says 90 to 110 hours on that at least. And then finally, the hardest hardcore character, 120 to 150 hours at least on that. These are estimates that are very, very generous. And so I said, okay, fit that into the timeline. Because again, it's only been a month. He says, okay. December 6th through 11th, that's at least 10 to 12 hours December 12th through 29th, 12 to 14 hours

1:31:38 Lydia: Okay. Yeah Yeah, I was gonna say it's a new game.

1:32:16 Thomas: A day. And that's the multiple hardcore characters now across maps. December 30th to January 7th, that's 12 to 16 hours a day because that's just dedicated to hardcore. And then January to January 10th is that last little bit that has to be 14 to 16 hours a day. So he is average, it's got to be at the end it says at least 450 hours across 35 days, which would mean 12 to 14 hours a day. And this is fucking minimum. This is, this is, I didn't even gather, there might be more things he claimed he did. These are just like the, the main ones I found. So the idea, whoa, 12 to 14 hours a day this game and yet doesn't even know how these basic things work and is doing all the other things he's doing, it's just a joke, man. It's just a joke. So then we get to what happened like today.

Apparently there's this streamer called Asmongold, and he fucking sucks. This guy sucks so goddamn hard. I, God, let me just, just here's, here's a recent tweet just to give you an idea, because Twitter is, we're going to talk about that with this guy. January 7th, Asmogold says, "Everybody always always talking about hoflation, but it's actually the opposite. I used to be able to go to Game Stopper, Target, and see hot bitches

1:32:16 Lydia: Yeah

1:32:39 Noah: Yeah, Jesus.

1:32:40 Lydia: This geez oh my god right yeah yeah yeah

1:33:03 Ad: [Ad break 5 — ad music]

1:33:31 Thomas: Working there every day. Now it's just hogs. Why? Because those girls are at home doing OnlyFans now instead of working." You could, it, like, you're a game streamer, you're game streamers, the thing they're doing is better and harder than what you do. You're game stream. And then someone replied with a picture of his room, hun. I was going to show it it to you, but we're low on time. It's all takeout and fast food cops. It's just, apparently this guy is notoriously gross, and how he lives, like, he's really, really super gross.

1:33:31 Lydia: Oh my God oh god yeah

1:34:01 Thomas: So anyway, this guy wasn't calling Elon Musk out for a while, even though he has hours and hours of video content where he called out some girl who pretended that she did a run blindfolded. And so when it was some woman online who, yeah, was lying about a thing, but his, somebody nobody's heard of, doesn't matter matter and pretended to, yeah, pretended to do a game blindfolded, uh, he had like five videos of that that were each an hour or something like that. Uh, when it's the richest, most powerful person in the world completely lying about a video game that this guy specifically knows and plays, he resisted doing

1:33:54 Lydia: Yeah of course weird yeah Yeah. He goes scorched earth. Yeah.

1:34:33 Thomas: Anything about it for a while, and then finally it's like too obvious, so he has to do something about it. This guy has to do his dream. He's a fucking Trumper, he's at whatever, he sucks. But Elon is such a liar that even this guy is like, yeah, he's lying. And so Asmongold makes a video about Elon lying. That's how bad it is. And then he issues a challenge to Elon. He says, look, if you prove that this is your real character, I will switch to streaming on Twitter or X for a year, which, you know, because we live in the worst fucking timeline, that's a major thing because this guy's a massive streamer.

1:34:33 Lydia: Mm hmm. Yeah,

1:35:06 Thomas: This guy's massively popular streamer fucking. I can't believe we live this world. World. No, I can't believe we live in a world where these people are so popular. And so this is a major like thing, like that would be a huge boon to Elon's new streaming thing he's trying to do on Twitter. And So apparently Elon did interact with them about it a little bit. And this is all like today, today, uh, that challenge was on like the 12th. And then what happened was I wake up to news today when we're about to do this, that Elon Musk has taken away Asmongold's check mark on X and leaked their DMs. Yeah.

1:35:39 Lydia: Leaked their DMS. Wow.

1:35:41 Noah: Christ. Oh My God.

1:35:45 Thomas: Yes. This guy who's the king of free speech, everybody.

1:35:49 Lydia: Whiny baby.

1:35:50 Thomas: So he leaks this because he messaged Asmongold and we don't get the full conversation. But what we see from Elon is that there, maybe he's going to work out like something, like he's gonna try to prove it or something. They seem to be coordinating on maybe doing some content around this bullshit. And so we see, from this guy, Zach is his real name, the Asmogold guy, the shitty guy. He says, says, I'm going to see if my editors might want to make a second account for it even. And Elon says, sure.

Who are these mysterious editors? And then Asmon says, two guys, he names their names. They basically run the entire YouTube account, LOL. So it's basically any content I post is edited or uploaded by them and they just get a cut of the ad rev. It's a super good system, to be honest. Almost everyone on YouTube does it. To which Elon replies, interesting. And then Elon, like I said, does all that shit he does and then tries to get out of it.

You know how Elon tries to find the first way to, like, we did with the buying Twitter when he tried to get out of that, and he said, like, well, too many bots,

1:35:54 Lydia: Mm hmm. Hmm. Yeah yeah

1:36:48 Thomas: You know, but it didn't work because he had signed an airtight fucking agreement on that. He tries to say Asmon is being controlled by someone else. He's a fraud. He has these editors who are in charge of what he does. And so I can't work with him. There's no other way to say it. He is being controlled by other people. And he posts his DMs, like, think about how big that is to, like, post the DM with the guy on your fucking platform where you're the free speech warrior and take away his checkmark. The problem is what he's talking about is the fact that this asshole streams on Twitch like most streamers do. He doesn't run the YouTube because that's redundant. It's annoying.

1:37:24 Noah: Yeah.

1:37:24 Thomas: Like I've run into this a little. So what he does is he just has someone else run the Youtube part and they grab his Twitch streams, they edit for him and they upload it in exchange for a cut of the ad revenue. Him. That's all that fucking means. It's all it means. And, and Elon's own, you know, when it's Elon getting caught by his own notes, it says readers added context.

1:37:13 Lydia: Yeah right right right and upload it there. Yeah Yeah.

1:37:45 Thomas: They thought people might want to know. Elon Musk seems to think Asmongold is an employee with editors overseeing him. That's incorrect. Asmogold's editors are actually his employees. They edit, upload his content for a revenue share. They don't control what he does. And there's another one where it says under Elon's tweet that says, Asmon behaves like a maverick, independent, but in reality, he has to ask his boss for permission before he can do anything. He is not his own man. Readers added context. They thought people might want to know. Asmongold does not have bosses. He employs content editors to package and redistribute content from his live Twitch streams on other platforms such as YouTube. The editors mentioned in the DMs leaked in Elon's follow-up comment are his employees. And there's yet another one that says he's been completely open about this. Here's a link where where he's talked about it on his own stream. And so that's how Elon tries to get out of this, which is just, it's

1:37:46 Lydia: Yeah Mr.

1:38:34 Lydia: Business

1:38:39 Thomas: Just a transparent attempt to find the

1:38:40 Lydia: Not understanding a very like basic business approach, yeah, yeah, and

1:38:41 Thomas: First little thing to like disqualify someone and get out this whole thing that he's gotten into. And so the final, it's juste ridiculous. That happened like literally today. And people are really like, I think this might be, look, nothing's gonna take Elon fucking down, but this is a new milestone milestone in terms of the number of people who have seen through Elon Musk. And I think that's very good news.

1:39:06 Lydia: I also do think it's like a segment of the population that we weren't necessarily going to reach in other ways. It's kind of that that bro verse of people who are right-wing adjacent at least and into all the tech bros and stuff and and I don't think conventionally we would have been able to reach them.

1:39:11 Thomas: Exactly.

1:39:12 Noah: Yeah.

1:39:24 Noah: Yeah, well, the thing that you have to keep in mind about that group of people is that, paradoxically, is as quickly as they are or as quick as they are to glom onto whatever idiotic social shit they've been convinced of, when it comes to actual video gaming, the gaming community brooks very little bullshit, rightly so. So you compare it to like musicians, right? Like, you guys know a bunch of musicians, I'm sure, and you'll see, you'll meet musicians that have like these ridiculous like monster cables or some shit like that where they, it's just, it's woo, right? It's like they bought a high-end cable that costs an extra 150 dollars because of woo.

1:39:26 Lydia: Otherwise from

1:39:41 Thomas: Yeah.

1:39:59 Thomas: Yeah, from Tom. Yeah in the 90s and Best Buy or whatever.

1:39:59 Lydia: Tom

1:40:00 Noah: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, but you generally, you generally don't see that in the video game world. Like there was a famously, when the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo were competing, Sega started advertising that their system had blast processing, which was a nonsense term that they just sort of, it, it means something, but it's, it's irrelevant to how well the game worked. It just sounded good, and the video game buying world was just like, oh, fuck off, right? Like Like, in a way that very few other groups would be, right? So when it comes to lying about video game shit, like, that's something that, like, I hate to say it, but these people are going to take way more seriously than, you know, lying about, you Know, how a woman got her job or whatever, whatever kind of sick shit they tend to revel in. This is one of those things where, like... Not only do they take it seriously, but they take far more seriously than most other people take their hobbies, right. Right. So like this is the cardinal sin of gamerdom is lying about how good a gamer you are.

1:40:03 Lydia: Yeah.

1:40:29 Thomas: Yeah.

1:41:04 Thomas: And it's so pointless. I wanted to talk a little bit about like all the friction. So what you see with this stuff, you see it with Trump and you see a lot with Elon Musk, is the excuses that their fans make. They, they sometimes, uh, when they run out of excuses and explanations, which they very quickly did on this, there's just no excusing it, then they switch tactics and you see a bunch of different tactics that focus on you. So like for example in one of the major posts on Reddit about this where it's like, Elon is clearly paying people to play, which is against the TOS.

And you get a bunch of comments that are like, did you think the richest man in the world was playing himself? Obviously he would be. So then it switches. So that switches from not the focus on Elon. It switches to you. Oh, you thought that he played this. Oh you thought. So it's like all these little ways that these, I don't think they even noticed that they're doing it. It's very childish, but it's all these ways that they switch. Now the focus is on me or whoever for For being dumb enough to think that he was playing, not focusing on, holy shit, this guy is a fraud, the richest guy in the world.

And it's not just like a white lie, the blah, blah, like he tried to pull off a stream where he lied about playing a thing he's never, he's played barely at all, knew nothing. Like that's crazy. That's like genuinely psychotic behavior. They'll do anything but fucking reconcile with what that actually means. There's another one that really burned me so much that just, so the main Reddit post that I got a lot of this from that organized some of these things.

It's in the Path of Exile 2 subreddit. And a mod, the top comment is, "This is a well-sourced and organized post without antagonistic language. This is how to post when there's a controversy about a public figure. Mods will be monitoring the comments. Try to keep the conversation related to Path of Exile and or how anyone would have made it to the end game with level 52 gloves." It was just a joke or whatever. To which someone else commented, and that was my first thought, why is there so much worry about policing the language of how you talk about this

1:41:53 Lydia: That's so crazy.

1:43:05 Lydia: Yeah.

1:43:05 Thomas: Thing like This is a part of the asshole internet infrastructure that goes on into propping people that they don't do for women. When a woman is accused of something in gaming, you don't see the the same, "Oh, you would have thought she actually did the thing with a blindfold, you idiot." Like, you know, like it, no, it's just, this is an awful person, exactly.

1:43:22 Lydia: Or any concern about how people talk about it. Yeah.

1:43:26 Thomas: It's just this is an awful person that obviously, and then just be flaming for, you know, months to where the, then the woman has to never go back on the internet, but like all this stuff that they think they're being fair, but really they're finding every way to bend over backwards to accommodate like Elon's ego and not piss off the entrenched power of the fucking internet, you know. Oh, it's a, well, so it's, this is, this is how to talk about it, no antagonistic language. It's just a bunch of nonsense. Final note, and I promise it's final, remember when he said he was like the best Quake player in the world at a time? Well, I dug up an interview from four years ago with like the Best Quake Player from that time that happened to talk about that briefly.

1:43:56 Lydia: Yeah.

1:44:06 Clip: And so, you know, a good buddy of mine. Well, actually, I mean, it was funny, like Elon Musk used, you Know, he's known as a huge gamer. We used to play in the same Quake server. Almost every day, I'd see him on. He'd be playing as Zip2, was his username. And a really good buddy of mine, he was okay. Hold on, Dennis, hold on. Was Elon Musk any good? He was okay. Uh, I, I mean, it's, you could be honest, it's no, he wasn't, right? He wasn't, he wasn, but right now I think the most powerful character in this, in the seasonal realm is

1:44:39 Thomas: There you have it. Fitting way to go out.

1:44:43 Lydia: The truth.

1:44:44 Thomas: Yeah, he's one of the best in the world. And then the actual guy who was the best at that time was like, yeah, he was. I mean, I'm sure he was like OK. He was able to play with that guy, I guess. So like Like, he's probably fine. You could just be fine at games, guy. Elon, you could just be okay at games.

1:44:57 Noah: That's the thing is that the bar for entry here is so low. Just the fact that he played games at all was enough for virtually everyone in the gaming world. Right. But of course, it's not just about his weird quest to be a real boy. It's about his queer quest to become a gamer. It's his weird request to be superhuman one.

1:45:03 Lydia: Right. Right. Mm

1:45:12 Thomas: Yep. He has to be a genius. The thing he has been good at is somehow keeping a group of people convinced that he's a genius and I think it's an ever dwindling group, but it's still way too big. I hope we've done our part here to help get the word out about this one. Noah, I'm so sorry I took so much of your time. I want to thank you so much for coming on. I could name all the shows or I could just ask you to do it.

1:45:21 Lydia: -hmm.

1:45:34 Thomas: That'd be easier. If you want to hear more, Noah, where should they go?

1:45:34 Noah: So check us out wherever you get your podcasts on Scathing Atheists, God Awful Movies, D&D Minus, The Skeptocrat and Citation Needed.

1:45:44 Thomas: Such a pleasure to have you. And I just can't fucking believe I can't. I'll never stop thinking about this. Like, what a bold lie.

1:45:50 Noah: It's so ridiculously sad. Yeah, thanks, thanks for the invite. It's been a ton of fun to chat.

1:45:53 Lydia: Thank you.

1:46:16 Noah: About so much so that you're lying.

1:46:22 Clip: Is the Sorcerer with the lightning balls. So the Sorcs have huge balls in the seasonal. Well, yeah, that's what they say. They do, huge balls of lightning.