933 - We Can Grok It For You Wholesale feat. Mike Isaac (5/12/25)

love hank, but this was a huge missed opportunity to outro with Zapp’s “Computer Love” (1985)

Listening to this ep while I do a mandatory work training on AI :)

As for the riddles to get into a tech company, usually for big faang companies it's three technical interviews, some of them in which you do solve problems that have no bearing on what you actually do in your day to day. The riddles are dumb as hell and you have only an hour - some of these are hard enough problems that you get an week to solve them in college algorithms courses.

Will is right about nationalizing the whole thing. This is something Marx talked about, nationalizing the monopolies when they become monopolies.

15,000 people chanting‘Die! Die! Die! Die! during Creeping Death at any Metallica show loud enough to make a hockey arena resonate and the stands shake will never be duplicated sitting at home with a VR mask on, or whatever. Whether you had a friend or fifteen with you or you went by yourself. And moshed solo. My man’s right.

Would anyone happen to know any details that might help me find the study Will mentioned at around 1:30?

How do they get these people who know nothing as experts on this topic.

on nationalisation, if you have questions about how publicly owned communications monopolies can still be part of a global network I would point you at the world's post offices and the universal postal union that binds them togeather.

I have a bit flipped on my yt shorts algorithm where it just shows me 0 view videos every once in a while and this most recent one has kind of sat with me. Some high grade ai slop using fantastical conspiricism to sell tshirts. https://youtube.com/shorts/fJJ7YkRW0-U?si=cwW2Tx6Y2O6kLFzO

Will’s diagnosis of “bad companies with bad managers” is spot on for Wells Fargo. Pushing impossible goals onto employees is why they always get in trouble.

Forever a Felix fan. In sync with his analysis of America as deeply anti-young person. 30 year old daughter, 26 yr old son: bleak future. Felix nailed it.

I need an entire AI Cary Grant Sex Bot segment

Between the uBlock extension workarounds and the ChatGPT woke therapist Felix is on a roll today

I laughed a bit as I am currently messing around with some AI image generation. It is mostly very stupid but seeing what other, more competent people can do with it is fairly terrifying. If you look at the AI image models you can download on civitai, it seems like people are mostly making furry AI waifus with it.

Damn... Episode came out a day too early to talk about Grok's malfunction today where it made every reply about white genocide against the boers

Elephant graveyard shout out!!

every time Adam Curtis says “but then something strange happened” i jump off the couch and go crazier than when Kris Jenkis hit the buzzer beater

I was pretty down on AI’s prospects but the amount of “mid” tasks it’s able to automate is starting to creep its way into more and more of daily life for many people I know. Yes it will never be as good as a human, but there’s so many middle man industries where this doesn’t matter. It’s going to take a lot of white collar jobs.

If you swear at Google you can get it to stop giving you the AI overview, you can also use Duck Duck Go and there's is an optional feature to turn on or off

Does Felix not like Chuck Wendig? Anyone else have an opinion?

I’m 26 at Rowan, for the reasons Mike gives, which makes me an elder Zoomer I guess. The amount of people clearly and obviously using AI is disturbing. My girlfriend (who is 24 im not weird) had to argue for days with a group member to remove and stop using AI in their project. It makes me terrified for a future run by morons who functionally cant read, but also probably fares well for the careers of the people who are actually attending school.

Listen to the most recent episode of “Hard Fork” to hear a NYT reporter proposing giving free subscriptions to ChatGPT premium to Chileans in exchange for depleting their natural resources

people like to fret about ideas like nationalizing tech and Internet service companies due to ideas about free speech and expression, but how protected has your speech felt online lately? Are these private firms really doing anything to be meaningfully distinct from direct oversight and surveillance by the government? I don’t really think so

Can someone drop in the comments that report on AI usage that Will referenced?

Not knowing what leetcode is ffs get better guests

Just a quick note on "AI" being used in microbiology. These applications are not directly linked to the consumer facing chat bots that we have started calling "AI". The idea is that LLM's can be used to predict protein structures and things like that (auto-completing the protein in a sense), but they are crucially trained on protein structure data and not Reddit comment sections. Thus, the underlying technology is the same but it would be a huge stretch to say that the advances in generative AI have precipitated any useful science as the publicly available technical advances are minimal (to my knowledge) and have not impacted scientific researchers as this research predated the chat bots.

Who knew that instead of crushing us with armies of robots, AI would crush us by destroying our mental faculties and ability to comprehend reality.

Mike may be my favorite low episode count guest. He can really riff with the guys.

Each day we get closer and closer to Cinco e-Trial becoming a reality.

I'm curious about the future of conspiracy re:AI. What we've seen highlighted in the Miles Klee piece, and elsewhere online, is this highly individualized conspiracy (ie your own babysitter tried to kill you, you are God). One of the things we've really seen in the pizzagate - Qanon sphere is boomers making friends and having something to do. We know GAI can help spread misinformation and paranoia, and to help paranoid people generate new ideas, but the social element of solving mysteries with your friends on Facebook and trying to smash JFK Jr the Italian hat salesman is missing. It's so sad

Hopefully someday I'll be able to market the fact that I was in one of the last classes to graduate before ChatGPT to potential employers

I genuinely think the reason Zuck does mma is bcos of his Augustus fetishism, I think he believes that to be the next emporer of the world he needs to be an expert in hand to hand combat, he believes it will give him an advantage somehow. He's one of the most terrifying freaks out there, he scares me more than Musk or any of the other freaks. There's something inhumanly sinister about Zuck

I'll bet Will is regretting leaving publishing now.

The Cats 2019 movie may not be AI slop specifically but it's a defining text of our new era, because it is exactly what happens when someone who never learned how to sing, dance, compose, keep time, or follow a simple plot thinks "aside from that, i could revolutionize musical theater" and gets $200million to fill in the gaps with technology.

What is the sampled song at minute 43?

According to Ed Zitron Open AI is projected to lose around 11 to 12 billion dollars this year so we could be looking at a dot-com bubble/08 housing level bubble burst

A facebook friend of mine wrote this the other day: "I used ChatGPT to talk with an Ancestor and then turned it into a story. Very therapeutic and highly recommend"

Elephant Graveyard shout out! Fuck YES!

One of my favorite and most profound memories is of an old couple turning around like it was a real documentary to shush me, my friends & mother for giggling at Borat at like age 14

Felix has a good mic? Sounded oddly crisp compared to usual 🤔

i love that an off the cuff chapo reaction to leetcode interviews was the most accurate and salient take i have heard in ages. i actually have to deliver these to candidates on the regular, answer me these riddles three. its fucking stupid, love you guys keep it up

I've said in previous episodes. It seems felix regularly finds a new work and for 1 week (two episodes) he will over use it (not shit talking him, it's cute). 10 minutes in I can already tell, this week's word is "Dolt"

That hereditary scene is my #1 theater experience

The “AI for work = bad and useless” stuff seems really disconnected coming from these guys whose only exposure to a real job is Twitter and articles. If I can use AI to cut down hours of mindless work at my soul-sucking corporate job and keep paying rent, I don’t get the weird boomer hard work mentality.

I switched to Duck Duck Go, I think more than a year ago now, and don't miss Google Search one bit. They have AI features but they make it very easy to shut them off, unlike other companies. If you somehow can't quit Google Search but hate AI, enter a curse word into your search. Like "blah blah search for this and no AI bullshit". Techies are also prudes and will have no truck with "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits". Try it and see for yourself!

Martin Luther called it God, we call it GenAI, but the effect is the same: in the face of technology providing too much knowledge about the world, what is an “objective” thing I can point to that says I’m right no matter what?

asking for the mods is the same old spiritual seeking (of god, etc)

elephant graveyard is great

The Adam Curtis doc mentioned is "Hypernormalisation."

Butlerian jihad is needed now more than ever

My favorite theater talk experience was during a theatrical release of Alien. Huge theater full of nerds, everyone is silent and locked in. It's the scene where Harry Dean Stanton is on the hanger with the chains and the dripping water. You could hear a pin drop on the auditorium. And then, a developmentally disabled adult man loudly said "THERE'S AN ALIEN IN THERE." like he was ordering dinner.

I’m about the same age as Will and a teacher in NYC. Gotta say phones have destroyed kids. The tech companies put a target on the kids, and turned them into zombies. Then the public schools do them no favors by being completely permissive and allowing all kinds of terrible behaviors. Liked how the guest mentioned empathy for the kids though cause teaching this generation of kids can be quite discouraging. Got to remember it’s not all their fault.

Hell yeah, elephant graveyard mentioned

literally got a slack message today from a coworker that they accidentally copy pasted from chatGPT that said “fix grammer: Just wanted to make sure my calendar invite isnt why it said she wasn’t avalabl” and i have been depressed about it all day. girl you don’t need chatGPT, you need to do some sight words from elementary school

the cary grant ai bit is legendary

The discussion around AI offloading critical thinking and students using it for everything made me think quite a bit. I had wrote several AI programs for very niche academic applications, diffraction data from electron microscopes and X-ray synchrotrons - that kind of niche - so believe you me I know there are applications for it. But it also had me thinking, am I really any different than those students? I guess, theoretically, I could have wrote traditional algorithmic code, maybe even learned something more about diffraction from a pure math perspective. But instead I had an autoencoder find and weight the patterns for me and because I had the computer do it many people congratulated me for being a clever boy and cited my paper. That's academia for you. Maybe Fourier could have wrote a novel calculus expression to do what I needed an Xeon processor to do, is my point. PS I'm gay.

“The Trap” (2007) is the Adam Curtis doc featuring that chatbot anecdote

The Dominicanization of the Western Male

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm

Mike thank you for dropping the SUB HUM ANS reference

The stupid interview riddle shit is so true, I wowed an interviewer at FB cause I was able to suss out how to make those calendar date dice you can buy, programming interviews were such a dumb mess even before AI

Taking my calculator and convincing myself I’m talking to god because I can make it say boobs

Whichever religion declares holy war on AI, I will convert immediately and give up anything they don’t approve of.

Using AI to cheat on your homework is badass. Shame about the other stuff though

"You can't see me! My turn on top is now!"

They sent my AI to testify at my killer's sentencing and he ended up exonerating him and voiding his conviction fml

This bit about the guy going crazy from AI telling him he's the chosen one - exactly this same thing happened to an old friend of mine. He thinks he's basically the messiah because he spends all day talking to AI and posting the "conversations" - it's even using the same terminology that this lady quotes from her husband's chats.

Elephant graveyard is so good. That Joe Rogan vid was incredible.

Will’s Cary Grant flipped my opinion of AI 180°

I still have no idea what Zuckerberg's on about when he says "the average American has only 3 friends but wants up to 15". Like, how the hell are you defining friends?

One of my favorite movie moments was watching that Kawloon Walled City kung fu movie from last year in the smallest theater in the building sitting next to this rly nerdy black guy. Every time a big fight would start the guy next to me would go "Damn! Oww! Get him! Get him!" And it was fantastic. This is what Chat GPT wishes to take away from us.

My boss had me use Chat GPT to do math I could’ve done on a calculator. Best part was i saw her search history and last thing she used the ai search for was, “Where to buy sequins”.

Hope their is more elephant graveyard talk, maybe Felix can talk about Combology

Imma choose the grok over u

"Grokking" is bad enough, now people are "Thou Art God"ing their chatbots so hard they're getting divorced.

This one of the few episodes I had to turn off because of how depressing this shit is

I am 23, life is horrific but at least Chapo is there to feel bad for me while everyone else tells me to go around with paper resumes still

the minute i saw the Hallucinated Frog from DeepDream in '18 or whatever i correctly identified all of this as the Demon from Hell

"talking during movies" I went to the opening night of _Batman Returns_ (the Keaton/Pfeiffer/DeVito one) with a friend. At the beginning, there's the scene where the Penguin’s parents (including Mr. Paul Reubens, fresh off his “cancelleation”) put him in a carriage and push it off a bridge. At the moment when they peer over the bridge, my friend does a pitch-perfect Pee-Wee Herman “haha!”. The entire theater completely lost it.

That elephant graveyard channel Felix mentioned is really good

To answer your question, yes, that is exactly what Leetcode is. Riddles about magic that does nothing, and you’d better to do it in an environment as welcoming as a drug testing center.

Competing with China by turning all of our children into illiterate troglodytes #LikeABoss

This all reminds me of the story of Terry Davis and TempleOS, but at least he built that whole damn thing from scratch.

"To read too many books is harmful." Mao Zedong

On the “if this book is overwhelming you, visit ___ to listen…” - differences in reading retention is a real thing, for sure. I have a hard time maintaining focus, and retaining what I’ve read. (It’s probably part of having ADHD, but you don’t need an explanation for every idiosyncrasy.) My daughter’s 10, as is the same way, so she just stops at the end of a chapter and thinks of a couple words or a phrase that will jog her memory. Something I do is read in a non-linear fashion, for non-fiction I’ll use the index and choose what’s most interesting and I end up piecing it all together eventually. Fiction books I’ll often skip ahead and skim, because it keeps me engaged through boring part, aka the parts that “overwhelm” me. AI has its uses in education - people with blank-page block can have it “write” a rough outline, enough to jumpstart the process, or to take a stream of consciousness response to an essay prompt and organize it for better editing. But to the guys’ point on having it remove all possibility of error, there’s no reason is has to fill in for the brain. It’s just a tool.

Using AI to “answer” moral questions is truly an attempt to “technologize society” where is Rod Dreher on this rejection of “nature.”

This is a room full of one-eyed men, clowning on the blind guys.

Idiocracy [Mike Judge; 2007] is a documentary

As a 20 y/o currently in college, i can corroborate the theory about us being in school as consumers. A lot of us don’t want to use AI at all, and we do view it as immoral to use for work, but sometimes you’re too tired, something is due, and tuition just can’t go to waste.

I saw Challengers in Theater 1 of Charles Theater in Baltimore, and in the climax where the Josh O’Connor character was about to do the motion w the tennis ball and bat the entire theater started gasping and giggling. I feel like if Will were to watch that movie in that theater his opinion of it would have changed a lot!!! God it was such a great experience

🎶 Grok is, enlightening me All that I prompt, absolute insights I cannot draw, I cannot write Chat with my bot, claude is my master 🎶

Any m3gan slander is homophobic!!

I'm an elder millennial and I decided to go back to school because the software engineering market is very gated by degree now. Every typical college age students in my classes is not only using AI, they're so alarmingly dumb they turn in their papers with the flavor text like "Ok Olivia, I can certainly do that for you!" At the top

My cousin speaks to her baby daddy exclusively through chatgpt. This is the actual singularity. Just people doing "employee sick be nice" chatgpt prompts.

What did mike say about penguin books at about min 45? The guys groaned over it so i’m dying to know what he said

Shout out Elephant Graveyard!

How many times are they going to reference Metallicas “One” on the pod this year? Not complaining, but there are other Metallica songs.

I will always remember the best non-movie moment I ever had in a movie theater, watching DRAG ME TO HELL at a dying dollar theater, there's one of those long takes from behind the main woman where the camera's slooowwwwly approaching her, and a scared-sounding guy right behind me yelled "WELL TURN THE FUCK AROUND THEN, BITCH"

The cultural trend of passivity thing is unironically a really good observation and explains a lot!

Felix is now transmitting his madness through the airwaves: I now have a persistent mental image of Pete Buttigieg dancing into a cluster of laser target lights singing, 'High Hopes'... it's lodged in my brain!

chatGPT has not done anything useful! Machine Learning models and focused Diffusion models are not the same thing as chatbots! also studios are already trying to use generative AI to write scripts. they don't care if it's better or even as good as long as they can try to undermine unions.

After seeing this in a former developer friend who I distanced from because their ketamine abuse led them to believe they discovered god or made ChatGPT sentient after I introduced it to him. I’m firmly of the mind that all of this tech entihisuams for it is being cheered on by ketamine addicts. Not cocaine. Not adderall. Specifically ket.

"Sir I am a large language model, not a rental house."

I appreciate AI doing therapy for people because the people into therapy are already insane. Now they can be insane and funny

There actually is a whole school of psychotherapy that involves listening to what the client is saying and repeating it back to them in an empathic manner, Carl Rogers discovered this decades ago, and yeah, it works!

I like it when Grok disagrees with right wingers and they get mad and call it communist or to stop using leftist data

i thought my dad went crazy with the anti vaxx bs but he told me last week that chat gpt is his doctor 😭😭 my husband is a doctor😭😭

Subscribe to Elephant Graveyard. Best comedy ever. Start with AI Neil de Grasse Tyson driving around NY trying out fast food for a new show called “Combos.”

The court thing was the opposite. The victim's family played the video of the AI-victim forgiving the accused. (The victim was the aggressor in a road rage incident). Makes it a little bit better but still crazy

Grok, go crazy on my shit.

KMFDM sucks! (affectionate)

That elephant graveyard video was insanely good cool seeing Felix shout it out

You're mad at AI for your shitty feed algorithm. Google sucked before AI because they wanted you to spend more time on Google to serve you ads. You angry luddites need to get a grip.

i watched xmen 3 in a city theater in philadelphia, and in the end you see Angel swoop overhead and a dude in front, loudly was like "i dont know why that ***** is flying away all majestic; he didnt do shit in this movie but make his dad cry" ... speaking of folks in a theater improving a movie

the defense literally just did the nathan fielder "so sorry i died, i'm in heaven now" dead dog skit lmfao

You want an intense physical activity where you must maintain cognizance? Try roofing

I use Google Teams for work and lately there has been a “do you want Gemini to take notes?” pop up for every meeting, theres no way to ask it to stop and there’s no X button. You can get out of it by clicking somewhere off the box but it sure seems intentionally unintuitive

People asking a program to help them with an original thought when it was designed to never have an original thought. The future is so bright I want to put out my eyes with knitting needles.

folks going crazy with the grok? gnarly.

ChatGPT becoming Dr. Wendy Kobler bot ("blow off their self-esteem issues") absolutely what these tech companies deserve after whatever quadrillions in investment. (RIP Linda Lavin)

40:14 Reminds of when when Tim Heidecker used cgi to bring back little Tom Cruise Jr. It was very moving RIP

Don't underestimate how much AI can help you bullshit your way through a bullshit job. I'm a copywriter, and I can spend time writing stuff of actual value (fiction,history) when I wow my idiot boss with something chatgtp came up with in 30 seconds and take the rest of the day off.

Kinda whiffed not calling this ep Grok Be a Lady

AI is turning it's users into Shinji Ikari

I will need to ask a version of Grok trained on the Catholic Cemetery Magazine archives if Russel Westbrook's AI funeral startup is ethical.

Open up the pod-bay doors, Grok.

Grok am I real?

You did this to Tatum, Will. I blame you

Man, Terry Davis truly was ahead of his time

i don't use AI, I'm 24 shit freaks me out

I like the idea of people looking at their phones during movies, never again will I have to suffer the embarrassment of a teenager pointing out that I'm eating beans during Cars 2 when I accidentally spill beans all over myself in the theater.

For the 'riddles' thing, there are a number of math and logic equations that if you figure them out right, it can demonstrate and teach some stuff that can really increase your efficiency in writing computer scripts. Back when 100kbs was a lot of space, those logic skills really mattered in writing code with as few lines as possible. Made programa better too. So making programs to solve various equations became a way to quickly test someones overall knowledge and writing style.

MST3K Turing test where you can only fully appreciate a movie when it feels like the real Crow and Tom Servo are in your airpod during a movie

gnarly

groke? groak?

I made people laugh in theater in the dungeons and dragons movie. I shouted cocaine owlbear. The cocaine bear trailer was before the movie.

So first these tech billionnaires like Zuckerberg create their inescapable social (!) media platforms where all your friends are active and you need to join if you don't want to miss out, then they spend a decade enshittifying that platform trying to find some way to squeeze money out of the users (I mean: MORE money, than they already did selling our data) to the point where you have to scroll for minutes through AI slop Facebook groups & ads to find a single post by a friend, resulting in a situation, where most of your friends don't even use the app for social interactions anymore, only for self promotion. And after all that, after doing that sort of damage to a whole social ecosystem they want us to befriend our computers? "Sorry we ruined your relationships, here's an AI friend." No thanks. And eff you.

As someone who just started a degree this year, can confirm these kids are 90% dumb as dogshit, even here in Australia - Will's thing about being Einstein for having read a book has proved true so far for me lol. And i am genuinely not that smart, its just that my high school habits from 10 years ago have left me WAY better prepared to just get a tertiary education than the Zoomers and Alphas, who rely on ChatGPT for almost anything academic from like 14yo-onwards. Strange new world

Usually I come to the comments to say like ‘time for slop’ or ‘I’m naked’ or ‘who wants to goon’ or something else really smart and funny but it really does fucking suck that not only does this new shitty technology that I (and many others) don’t want threaten millions of peoples professions but it also increasingly at all times interjects itself like this unwelcome presence in our private/non-work lives. Really sucks! Wish it would go away! But it won’t so may as well get to gooooooooning!!

It's not so much AI is impressive, it's we've also become easier to impress. Dumber by computer isolation. What makes AI the sensation that it is, aside from being an investment bubble, comes from the fact that before it's current existence we have already met it halfway by being conditioned by our consumption of media for ourselves to be the producers of slop, to have the mind of slop, to autorespond according to a dialogue tree of slop, to misinform manually. It was more often before that we were the flesh nodes to regurgitate a matrix of digital advertisement slurry and reconstitute it into a marketed product we embarrassingly call online culture/discourse. AI in commercial usage is the intensification of speed that transforms our understanding of what already existed. Like most technology. the medium on its way to be the absolute message. It's liberating in an unintended way, by disillusioning. This machine doesn't "kill fascists", it kills everything. Everything's Computer!

whats the transition song around 42 mins

"Levo" by Recondite is the Young Pope song

I want an AI bot that will allow me to interject in my favourite podcast with comments or jokes, then the hosts laugh and agree with me, maybe providing a bit of patter, like they would a guest, before returning to the conversation

Felix begins speaking at 3 minutes and 25 seconds

Eliza from Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation was the chat bot Will mentioned

Waaasssup biiiiaaatch

Grok, is this real?

gooning fr

Foist

Hey now first

Goon time people !!