Radio Better Offline: Jeremy Kaplowitz of the Quorators
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Live, but recorded on tape from New York City, the iHeartRadio studios. It's goddamn Better Offline, and I'm the Chief of Pigs, Ed Zitron. Better Offline. Today, I'm joined by Jeremy Kapowitz of The Quarators Podcast. I'm so excited to have you here. That's right. Because...

Your podcast has found, I would say, some of history's detritus. Yeah. It's become one of the worst, best places online. But just for the listeners who may have just ignored Quora, what is Quora? Just walk it through. Quora is a website where you can ask questions and then people answer it. But it is very much like Reddit meets Facebook, I would say. Right. The two of the worst websites combined in sort of like a super saiyan way to create an even worse website.

Wonderful. So, how long have you been doing the podcast? We've been doing it like two years, since September 2022. And why? What brought you to it? Oh, we really wanted to do a podcast that wouldn't be hard to do. Right. So we figured Quora has endless degenerates to look at and point at and laugh at. Right. So...

What is your favorite one you've found recently? Give me a good example. I'm trying to think. There's a lot of like perverts on Quora. I'm listening. For some reason people go to Quora to like act out their sexual fantasies, but they don't want to like see it. So they'll, I don't know what it is, they'll like write down a question that's like, have you ever had a girl pee on you?

And then they'll be like, they want people to be like, oh yeah, one time I was so naughty. And I guess then they're jacking off to it or something. Very nasty. We found a bunch of weird, we found a whole community of people who swim with their clothes on. Okay. Which I imagine is a fetish of some kind, but they were all posting photos of it and stuff. It's all these like older guys, like in lakes and pools. How are they dressed? Normal clothes.

Like, just, like, walking around. Like, what you are in right now. Okay. If you were taking, like, a sexy photo shoot of you jumping into a pool. Just falling in a pool. And are there a lot of these perverts on there? I realize we're very perverted. So many perverts. It's, like, cops and perverts and racists, which could all be the same thing. I mean... But... Yeah, it's a weird... It's a very weird website. So...

But wait, the cops. What are the cops doing on that? Cops? They're talking about safety. There's all these sub-Quora's that are like subreddits, but for Quora. And there's a lot of them that are like, how to deal with thugs in your neighborhood. But wait, so...

You say the sub-Quora. Yeah. Is this being people publish there as well? It's not just question and answer? I mean, those are where people are still doing questions, but they're like collecting them in a group. Like how do I stop the scumbag from shooting? Yes. And there's a lot of like retired cops who are like writing novels. Insane. A lot of them literally are writing books of like, because a lot of people have become famous on Quora. The big one is Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson got his start answering Quora questions and people are like, you should put this in a book.

And then he became... Those people, we should find those people. Yes. And stop them. How do I deal with the fact that... Yeah. That Shrek and Fiona should not be together. Like... Right.

But really, he came from Quora? That makes me so angry. Quora created Jordan Peterson. That is fucking horrible. It's really sad. What was he asking about? He was answering. So he was a big answerer. So he was the guy going in there being like, actually, if you swim in your clothes, it's a better fold around your penis. I don't like the idea of pervert. I like to be called sartorial.

Yeah, that's horrible. And there must be even other any other famous Korra freaks. I think he's the only one who became famous from Korra. But Orson Scott Card is on there. Who's that? He's the author of Ender's Game. Oh, oh.

who he wrote a bunch of sci-fi novels and is like famously a insane crank i don't know if you know anything about him i don't so he wrote ender's game which is a book about uh the government abducting children and making them fight wars against aliens right right totally normal stuff and then in like the 2000s he went crazy and he's like very mormon and he was like super anti-obama

Okay. He was like, if Obama wins, there will be gangs of black people going around the country, killing everybody. Oh my God. So he was, you know, obviously right about some stuff, but no, come on. He was crazy. He's totally nuts for that. He, um, he, he's like super duper, like, uh, anti-gay people, even though his books are like very homoerotic and weird. There's like this very famous, very strange in Ender's game where Ender beats a guy up by soaping himself, uh,

He gets really naked and then puts soap all over his body so that the bad guy can't like catch him. He's like a very strange dude. That is, but he was a big Korra guy? Yeah, he's still on there to this day. What's he answering? He's just, I don't know, I can look. By all means, I just love the idea because Korra seems horrible, just want to be abundantly clear. Because I was a Yahoo Answers freak. Oh yeah, similar. But I was just someone who looked. I was like an Answers voyeur.

And there's, of course, the very famous Yahoo answer is, how is Babby formed? How did I get pregnant? I need to do way and stay mother who killed their Babby's. I could say the whole thing, but I won't. But Quora feels different somehow. It feels like it's got a degree of LinkedIn poisoning, almost. Yeah. But it's also full names on there. So it's all, like, no one's anonymous? Some people are. I mean, we've come across one guy whose name is IamAPizza, and he posts every day. He asks, how can I get eaten? Yeah.

Okay, just so he's not I don't think that's his legal name, but he's on there. Just my name's I'm in pizza. I am a pizza is his name. And is it just questions around how he can get eaten? Yeah, it's literally what it is. That's it. How can I get someone to eat me? How can I get eaten every day? It's nothing sexual. I mean, I mean, perhaps just the process of being sexual. Like, of course. Sure.

Are there a lot of bit style accounts like that? There definitely are. There's definitely trolls on there. There's a lot of Christian baby questions. That's a big thing on Quora. Elaborate.

what would you do if you're skydiving with a Christian baby and the baby says, I'm not going to pull my parachute unless you renounce atheism and accept Jesus Christ? Okay, well, the answer... And that's supposed to be a gotcha. The answer there is just, I'll say whatever I need to. It's a fucking baby. Yeah, exactly. They're very stupid. Like, just they're not intellectual. Yes. That...

There's hundreds of these. And how are the responses? Do people take them very seriously or do they take them more like they kind of like, is it like Twitter where you get like 50% honest people and 50% people being unfunny? Well, it's not Twitter because they're not unfunny, but it'll be 50% people answering it and 50% people being like, how dare you bring this to my question website?

Where discourse is meant to be done. Wait, so there were various... Here's a Scott Card, by the way. Oh, okay, okay. He's answered three hours ago, four hours ago. He's there every day. Get a job. I know. He's on there just people being like, how do you write a book? And he's like, I wrote Ender's Game in 1975. And then back then I had the dinosaur that you pack on the head. Yeah, that's like this and listeners who are not going to love that.

Yeah, just a lot of stuff about... He's just giving relationship advice in some spots. That's not brilliant based on anything you've told me about... Is there a large relationship advice? Sure, yeah. There's definitely that kind of stuff. There's a lot of famously bad ones where it's hard to tell if it's...

Legit I mean there's just children on there who being like how do I get this girl to like me or whatever just and in some Ways that feels quite honest like what the internet is really for mm-hmm, but with the perverts and degenerates on there It's pretty bad that there's a place that we have found a bunch of times called like teen fun zone those were like teens to hang out and it's just like how many of these people are undercover cops like that's my question how many of them are teens probably a small percent and

So you've seen the generative AI aspect, right? Yes. Yeah. So there's this thing now called Quora Prompt Generator. Oh, good. That is making questions that they think people want to ask in the future. And it's like very hidden. You have to even find the question asker in general on Quora because it's like the worst UI. You have to like click on like three dots and then go down to question log and then scroll all the way to the bottom.

bottom and see the question and now it'll just say like created by a quora prompt ai or whatever and it's just these bizarre questions that we've come across every now and then you've got any fun examples yeah i have so many of them please please share them because i think we should both listen to them and answer okay this is one that we found on our podcast right uh should the grinch be able to kill a who whenever he wants according to halloween is grinch night so

That is completely generative. Yeah. I mean, I don't quite know how it works. Apparently, it's like scrubbing these from somewhere. Like, I saw some people suggest... Because there's no, like, answer from Quora. They don't tell you, like... They're not saying, like, we've announced our new AI. So, just going over that again, Halloween night. Yeah. I think... We looked this up. Halloween is Grinch night was like a movie from, like, the 80s or something. Did it...

Bequeath the Grinch with like a license to kill like is this a purge situation? I'd really I don't know but what were the answers like so this one had no answers on it Why not and we made sure just to like keep things above board we wrote no Grinch's should have to respond to their programming just so the computer knows

Grinches should have to. So this is the suggestion that a Grinch is some sort of automaton. Like, I don't know. I just feel like- You take questions very seriously on this podcast. So like- I just don't like that the computer is asking like, is it cool to kill?

And then we were all like, no. But under the terms of Halloween night. The Grinch, right? Quote unquote Grinch. Should not kill. Yeah. Any other good ones? Because I'm going to be thinking about Halloween night. This is a continuation of this theme. This is the computer asked, how can someone live with a decomposed body in the fridge for months without others noticing? They live alone. Like, that's the answer. But doesn't it feel like the computer wants to know? Yeah, it does. Yeah.

If a person asked both of these questions, you'd be like, are you the Grinch? Is that your friend? Are you gonna kill someone? Yeah, did you kill someone? Do you have a decomposing body in your house by any chance? Yeah, the real answer is just that they just tell people that they have a smelly apartment or whatever. Yeah. That's what all serial killers do. Just be a loser. Just don't let anyone in your apartment when the body's there.

I understand that the AI isn't thinking that it's just a next word generator, but it's concerning that that's the next words that it's generating. Adam D'Angelo, the CEO of Quora, he's on the board of OpenAI. Yeah. He was part of the people being like, we have to bring back SAML when we need this technology. We need this technology. We need Quora to come up with crazy questions. I actually think that this is kind of...

almost a sign of the future for what meta is going to be like. Yeah, I think that's right. It's, are there tons? Like, does it just spill these out all day? There's like people have like, there's a community where people like find their favorite ones and share that. Right, right, right. So I found like 10 of them that I put in. There's, this one's just like false info. It's a, how much territory did America acquire from the purchase of Greenland? Okay. So it's just like, that's really good. Yeah.

So this is, how much of this is there on the, do you, so you say it's quite hard to find the generator, right? Or is it hard to find these questions? Well, it's hard to find, um, the, if you go to like the generator, it doesn't give you a list of them. So it's just like, this was made by Quora AI. And to find the actual question, like, it's just a pain in the ass where I can show you. So they're kind of burying them a bit. Yeah. So like, if this is what the question looks like, it just looks like somebody is asking a regular question and there's all these people answering and there's related questions.

And to know that it's Quora AI, you have to go to More, and then you go to View Question Details, and then it says Prompt. Oh, yeah. So just for the listeners, I'll post a link to something like this as well. So what this means is you can get these questions and they appear like they're asked by a human. Yes. Except they're written like a human that has a guest link. Yeah, exactly. And it says it's prompts are intended to capture questions people may have in the future. Just me walking around my house being like...

What if the Grinch could kill people on Halloween night? Shit. Well, I don't have time. Well, thankfully, they've already asked it. Yeah. But no one answered. Right. Yeah, just me. You know what the best thing is going to be? When they just have them answer it. When they have an AI answer it. You just have an autocore. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sure there are AI answers. Oh, I'm sure. You come across some that feel like, I mean, it could just be weird people, but that's the thing. It sounds like you've got like a perversion element that really throws that. I am both disappointed and happy to hear about the amount of perverts.

Yeah, it loves the internet. But that kind of means that Quora is keeping going. But actually, it sounds like they're really trying to fill, like, plummet with this fucking AI shit. Yeah. They said that has nothing to do with, like, they just want more questions on the site. Yes, of course they do. Bizarre, yeah. So people keep looking at the site. Yeah. But the UI of the site does not appear to have changed. No, it's terrible. It's really bad. It's really bad. I will admit, the reason I don't use Quora, other than the fact that I know everything, is...

Every time I go on there, I'll be like, I'll click on it. I'll look for a question. It will be like a question to an answer. Like, I don't know. Like, who do you think the best baseball player in this year? It was like, because I only started watching baseball fairly recently and it will be like,

Answer, then like an ad of some sort, then like a WalletHub sponsored piece of content being like, how do I save $1,000 a month? And it's just 18 affiliate links. This feels like the advertising element is taken over Quora, but these don't even seem like they're advertising. They just feel like...

It's bizarre. And there's also if sometimes you'll see an answer that's like really long and you're like, oh, that's interesting. And it'll cut off and be like, you have to subscribe to Quora Plus for five dollars a month. What the fuck is Quora Plus? It's just the better answers are on there, I guess.

Are you fucking serious? It's the worst website. What the fuck is this? It's really bad. But the good thing about Quora is that people put their full names and, like, address. So sometimes we'll find a guy who's like, you know, every one of their posts is like, I love to shit in a diaper. I get off on it sexually. And then they'll be like, I live in this town in Indiana. Here's my full name and photo. That's so good. It's so weird. It's like you've got, like, a combination of AI slop and just the purest old school internet. Disgusting people. Yeah, yeah.

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So, okay, we've got our perverts, we've got our cops. Are there any other weird subcultures you've noticed on there? Um, there's a lot of politics on there. A lot of people arguing about Trump. There's like a bunch of like Trump and, and, you know, Democrat spaces that battle it out. People say like, is Obama about to get arrested tomorrow? And people are like, no, he's not. He's our greatest man alive. And they go back and forth and there's memes.

So it's not even like a necessarily logical questions. It's like, yeah, just total like QAnon stuff is on there. And so it's not particularly moderated then. Not really. No, there's not. Does it seem to be any moderation on Quora? Do you see any kind of like hate speech, hate speech? Oh, yeah. All the time. People say there's definitely like slurs on Quora. We found a guy recently who said his bio said we need a white president.

Jesus. Americans for white presidents. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And sometimes it's both. Like, we found one that was like, why did Joe Biden let Obama make him his slave and all this stuff? And then, like, right after it'll be like, how do I get, like, my sister to fall in love with me? Like, it's like... Wait, what? They'll be combined, the perverts and the racists. Oh, my God. So...

Are there any, like, so there must be sports people. Are they arguing too? Is everyone just kind of arguing all the time? You know what? None of us on our podcast are really sports people. Okay, that's fine. So maybe there is and we're just not seeing it, but I haven't interacted too much with sports Quora. But I'm sure they're on there. No, and they must be insane. Yeah, yeah. I'm still blown away that there is a Quora Plus. Yeah, it's bizarre. We refuse to pay for it.

I don't want to do it. You've been doing this podcast a while as well. That's so good. That's so good that you steadfastly refuse. Why would you ever to Adam D'Angelo? I have emailed him many times though asking him to come on. He doesn't get back to you. Adam D'Angelo, it's a permanent thing. The creators will have you on and you can come on Better Offline as well, but I only have very specific questions around Halloween night and then you will leave.

I have no further questions. That's what I know, if a Grinch is allowed to kill a who. And he said a Grinch, right? I think it was... Actually, let's check this out. I can check, yeah. Because I feel like the proper... Like, if it's the owner... It was the Grinch. Should the Grinch be able to kill a who whenever he wants? Because I feel like that question comes down to whether you consider the Grinch a person or a race. Like a real man. Yeah. Who's allowed to kill. Just a very...

A person of color harassed for his religious beliefs. A person of green color. Yeah, I've emailed Adam, I've emailed Jordan Peters, I've emailed Orson Scott Card, all of them just being like, hello, I have a podcast that celebrates Quora. You're my favorite website. Just trying to be really nice, but none of them will buy it. Yeah, I text Sam Altman. Sure, yeah. No, I had got his number. I've said it multiple times on the show. I've texted him.

And then one time I terrorized a few friends by, I was at a hotel and I stepped on the side of a balcony and I took a photo and I put it in the chat box, the Sam Altman, and I said, I bet you would love this. But I didn't send it. I really should have. Has he ever answered you? No. No, he has not. But he's not blocked me. That's good. I'm still getting blue bubbles. He's reading them. That's the thing. There is a little bit of joy of just knowing that Sam Altman's forwarding these to his PR people being like, he messaged, just letting you know about this.

He keeps asking me about Halloween night. And he asked me if I am a or the Grinch, and I'm not sure how to respond. He's the Grinch. He's the Grinch. He stole our presents. He's just, this is not a tech episode, so who gives a shit? But we're currently in the post-Deep Seek world right now, which I think is really funny. And how you bring that back to Quora is,

Now they're going to be able to make so many more generative answers for so much cheaper. We're going to be able to see these demented things. Do you have any questions from the AI generated ones about like life though, like life decision stuff? Let me see. Because I think my favorite thing with Yahoo Answers was the more innocent stuff. Sure. Where people would say like, how do I get a girl to fall in love with me? Right. My friend is mad at me. How do I deal with that?

And then the just most insane, you get like normal, normal, normal. And then someone being like, doesn't sound like much of a friend, even though the story is about you offending the friend. I was really extremely rude to him. Like, no, he's not real. He should just understand you. You were justified in screaming at him.

I'm trying to see if we have any, like, nice... I mean, there's certainly a lot, but... Oh, no, I don't mean nice. I just mean, is the AI asking a life question? Because I want to see how the AI thinks about life. Do any animals refer to their young as baby or child like humans do? Fuck yes. That's such a large language model-ass question. Yeah, right? Yeah. You just are like, well, of course animals act like humans. Right. They're all kind of the same to me. Yes, fuck it. Does my cat refer... Does a cat...

That's just every time I think about these fucking questions. It just kind of begins to boil what's left of my brain? Please more questions. Let's go through these I want to know all of these fucking things is it common for doctors to keep umbilical cords

Why would an AI write that? I get that it's not a robot at the computer, but it just feels like it being like, what is up with these freaks? It's just the GPT-4 being like, humans are so fucking weird. Why do we doctor? Wait, just run that question by me again. Is it common for doctors to keep umbilical cords? Okay.

Okay, so there it's just like oh yeah, I bet they do that, but how often? Yeah, and then all the comments are people being like no, this is a weird question Why would you ask it? I would not- But they don't know that it's the robot I would not be able to help myself responding with a fake doctor account like all the time Just throw them in my fucking- Yeah, you could just get a stock photo of you, you know a guy in a lab coat and just feel like I'm a doctor

Dr. Genius MD. But wait, so more questions. Okay. I'm excited by these. These are very good. Did Adam and Eve celebrate Christmas? If so, how? That's so good. They're off in like a weird way. They're off in a way that's like they have a full understanding of meaning. Yeah.

But not context or history. No, not even meaning. It's just like, these are plausible sentences. Yeah, yeah. But not... It makes no sense if you know what any of the words mean. That's so weird, though, because surely it knows that Christmas is... I don't think it... I don't know what it knows. I want to know. These are so... The more I think about them, the stranger they get, because it's like, these are...

Questions that if you heard someone say them out loud, you go, yeah, I don't know. And then take a step back and like, wait, what the fuck are you talking about? But this is all of them. But let's see what else. There's a lot of answers on this too. Like people are answering, some people are being serious. They're saying like, no, that's not possible because, you know, Christmas was after that. And then other people are like, none of it's real. So none of it, of course they can't because they're not real. Right. There's people just being like silly. But yeah, the people, there's no way to know that it's an AI. Right.

And you wouldn't think it was. You'd think it's a child or something. Well, like someone with a gas leak. Yeah. It's like gas leak AI. Yeah. It's the kind of shit that you'd say if you were walking out of a car wreck. Exactly, yeah. But more of these. Okay. I'm so glad you brought these today because I really want to. Is it true that astronauts are not allowed to touch the Earth? No.

I don't know what that means. Yeah, I heard this the other day. Someone told me this the other day. Are there any answers on that one? I have to imagine it's just people being like, how dare you? No answers on this one yet. It's so bizarre. And again, this is...

There's no real quick way of seeing this as AI. No, no. Yeah. It doesn't show you on the screen. You have to go into like more settings, answer a question log, and then it'll show you there. So deeply deceptive. When did you start seeing these pop up? So our whole thing is that we just dox people all the time on our podcast. So if you ask a question, we want to read your full name. So we just started figuring out like anytime we read a crazy question, we're like, who asked this? What's their deal? Yeah.

A lot of people are from like India. We found a quarter is really big in India, much bigger in India than the U S. Um, but then, you know, every now and then we'd come across a crazy question, like, can astronauts touch the ground? Be like, who the fuck asked this? And we click on it and it's like the AI and we're just like, yeah. And it's just more and more has been happening. Strange question. Is the earth capitalized in that one? Uh,

I think so, yeah. Yeah, it is. So that makes the meaning even stranger. Because I thought, okay, touch the ground, maybe? Like, if it's Earth. I don't know, like, Americans don't tend to refer to the ground as Earth that much. Not really, yeah. But, like, in England, I've heard people say that. So this is so fucking cool, though. It's really, it's bizarre. Any other good ones? Let's go through. What horses have been invented if they did not already exist? What factors contribute to the invention of new animals? Okay.

Just run that by me again, would you? Would horses have been invented if they did not already exist? What factors contribute to the invention of new animals? There's something wrong with this. This one, like... Okay, again, I understand that it's just predictive text, but it does feel like the computer being like, I'm a new animal of sorts. How... Yeah. What?

We do invent animals. I mean, humans invented dogs. And there are like ligers and such. Yeah, sure. Like you can make two things fuck all the time. Yeah. Probably should get off that subject or get off to really your choice. The numerous perverts that listen to the show, you're loved and accepted. If you make it someone else's problem, I'm coming for you. Ask about it on Quora. They're happy to discuss. I think what it is is that this doesn't even sound like chat GPT. No. Yeah. I don't know what it is. I,

I'm not sure where it's pulling. It's GPT for sure. I think so. But there's no like... Again, there's no... Quora hasn't said what it is. Like everything I've found about it is people either just guessing like in the Quora discussion. Because there's a million questions that are like, what is this and why is it here? I hate it. So people are just like guessing. And then some people will ask...

Because there's a Quora AI assistant now where the AI is at the top of every answer and every question, and it tries to answer every question. So the AI will be like, this is what the Quora prompt generator is. So actually elaborate on that a little bit. So there is the AI on top of...

Just like all websites now, if there's any question on the internet, there's an AI answer for it. Well, but specifically it answers the question. Yes. Like it generates one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you go to Quora. It's not on everyone. Like these unanswered ones, it wasn't there. But a lot of times on a popular question, the AI will either try to answer the question itself using like GPT or it'll be like a summary of everyone's answers. That's so...

It feels like at some point the computer's just talking to itself. Yes, it really is. But these questions, they're bothering me. Because they don't even sound like... I've seen the various models. I would say Anthropics Claude, more conversational. ChatGPT, very much like a lobotomy situation. Very much like, I have just recently had a lobotomy, but I know everything written in this book I can read.

This is demented. It's really weird. There's something very off. And it's infecting the Google AI, too. How so? You know how if you search something on Google now, it'll come up with an AI answer? Yes. Google is sourcing from Quora for a lot of these. Oh. So, like, there was a thing recently where someone said, like, when was running invented? And Google answers, it says, like, 1945. Yeah.

And that was because of a Quora comment. Well, I know that... Was this where they had the melting egg situation? I think so, yeah. A lot of these are from like Reddit and Quora. So the melting egg situation for the listeners was someone on Quora, I think, asked if you could melt an egg. And then the AI responded with, yep. Yeah. Gotcha. Of course. Yeah. It's all very, very weird. But these questions don't feel like that. These questions feel like...

Joke of something you might ask in the future. Yeah. When you're an astronaut and you can't go home. Yeah. Or just something that a broken GPT would like. Yeah.

I don't know if it's like trained on Quora because Quora is already like where the sickos are. So maybe it's just like training on specifically delusional people. I really don't know. It must be trained on Quora because that's the only way you'd get such weird. It must train on Quora as well because they're running out of training data. Oh, I really need to look into this. I would love for someone to find out. Because these questions are not just like if I'm sure if I loaded chat GPT and asked the question, it would be a normal one.

Right. It wouldn't be like, so when horses, we all agree that horses were invented. We all know that, of course. It's really, I don't know. Yeah. Some of them are just like misinformation. Oh, any others? Is Tesla considered a socialist company? That is the closest they've come to a normal question. How about this one? What are the reasons for California having fewer natural disasters compared to other states?

Oh, boy. Yeah. Oh, boy. That one's that one again, closer to meaning, but just like. And just completely nonsensical. I'm trying to see when was this asked?

This was, I think, asked on January 12th. So during the fire. Right. They asked, the AI was like, California rocks at natural disasters. Yeah, these guys really missed these. Yeah. They're traditionally California disaster free. That's really good. Any other good ones? Let me see.

I think that's all the ones that I wrote down. I have one more here. What is the term for when a person's brain and physical body are connected to two different people? Oh, that's a tough one. Yeah. This is so strange. It's really weird. This concept is actually really bothering me because the idea of a generative one, sure, it sucks, but sure. But when it's just like...

So we all know that Boers, of course, have been president. But why can't they be king? And it's like, no, actually, that's too normal. That one made more sense. That's like an understanding of there's a republic versus monarchy situation, but we could get rid of that in post. This is just...

There must be something strange. And you're saying that users do not like this. No, no one likes it. I mean, if they can even tell. There's questions where people are just like, why is this here? And what is it? But on most of these, no one knows that it's the AI. If there's any answers on it, people are just like, this is stupid and I hate you. Right, which is the general response to AI I've found. You don't use AI, I'm guessing. Me? No, no. Particularly, no. No, you're not a big GPT. Someone said that to me on the phone. Like, you use ChatGPT every day. I see what it's like. Yeah.

Sure. I know so many people who use it for like emails and all sorts of crazy shit that you would, I mean, I'm sure you're hearing about it. That's not good. No, it's crazy. You can write your emails. You can't write an email. Yeah, I...

That's so bad. But you still seem to kind of love Quora, though. I do love Quora. But why? Tell me. I just like how pure it is. Like, the fact that there are people just like, I don't know, like, you could go on Pornhub and just jack off to whatever you want. And you're sitting here being like, coming up with a situation to be like,

What does it feel like to have poop in your diaper? There's a lot of diaper people in there. Do you have any non-sexual? Were you just on the pervert zone? I do love the pervert. The section. I love the pervert side, Cora. It makes me so happy to see them living their lives. He really is quite happy. The fact that they all have their full names makes me really happy. I'm trying to think. I don't know. People ask silly relationships. It's like, am I the asshole? But more insane. Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life?

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On Tech Stuff, we travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology. One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians. Like data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality. How is it possible that...

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I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy model. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please. Because at the centre of this murky world is an alleged predator.

You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior. He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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You are not a real fighter. You will never be discussed anywhere in boxing history ever. Fake Paul. The movie is The Apprentice and the movie is about young Donald Trump and his apprentice, Roy Cohen. Real character, obviously both are real characters. It kind of has a Scarface vibe to it, which I thought was very interesting.

Listen to the I Am Rap Report Stereo Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts. What if you asked two different people the same set of questions? Even if the questions are the same, our experiences can lead us to drastically different answers. I'm Minnie Driver, and I set out to explore this idea in my podcast, Minnie Questions.

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Do you get a prevalence of fake questions? I know the relationship advice on Reddit is like 90% people being like, and time for my fan fiction. Yeah. I will do the fan fiction now.

But Cora seems more demented. It is. I'm sure there's just as many fake ones, but they're more obvious where it will be like, there's one that was like, my son wanted an Optimus Prime toy and I don't want him to, or I didn't want him to have it. So I made him hold his breath for three days. Am I a bad dad? And it's like,

It doesn't feel like the same as I'm out of the asshole or someone made up like a boring relationship problem. And one like that is very bean dad adjacent where it's like, you think this is normal. It isn't. Yeah, exactly. Your son should breathe. It kind of reminds me from CES, like the Samsung, no, sorry, LG demo where the AI was like, yeah, I heard your son cough last night. So I raised the temperature five degrees.

It's like, you fucking insane. And I just, for the sake of argument, opened up Quora and thought, it can't be that weird. First one, what was the dirtiest country you ever visited? Oh, God. The annoying thing about Quora, too, is that, like, if you visit it, if you, like, really interact with it at all, you'll start getting emails from it. Oh, God. The Quora Digest. They'll send you, like, an email every day. I'm sure I have a million of them in my email. Why must farmers wake up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows?

Why not just wait until a more reasonable time? Like, AIM, won't the cows adjust? It's a weird website. It's very strange. I'm just... Like, this guy, I'm looking him up as well. This is a system analyst. Yeah. In Brazil. Isn't it fascinating to know his life? Like, it's not just Reddit where it's just like, oh, you slash whatever. But also, it's not even just that he, like...

Is that guy? It's that he was just like one day, like, well, I got over from my job as system analyst. And I thought, why do these fucking idiot farmers get up so early? And just there's 131 different answers. Sorry. No, the original question is from... This is going to be a fucking AI one, isn't it? Let's see. Who...

I think wait it's very hard to find the answer this is crazy sorry the guy who responded was a systems analyst okay and uh he was saying he was talking to his farmer friend no you weren't wait so show me okay so you have to go to view question details and then you have to physically scroll through every answer to get to the very bottom of the feed and then it will tell you who the question is and very often it'll just be like anonymous

Yeah, the farmers of the world will wake up early to wake up the roosters. You see if the roosters don't wake up on time. Very funny. Yeah. While I'm not a dairy farmer, I do associate with them. I'm just, I'm going to close that because I would just read Quora every day. But it is...

It does feel like even though it's being tortured with electricity, it does feel like one of the last real parts of the internet. I mean, it's like how we all hated Reddit for so long. And now if you have any question, you have to put Reddit at the end of it when you Google it because otherwise you'll just get AI slop or SEO slop. You'll get one of 15 different articles all on WalletHub. So it's like, sure, this is going to be from some asshole who might not know, but at least it's a human being. Have you seen much...

Because Reddit, I've started to see some obvious SpawnCon in there. Well, SpawnCon. Like affiliate people. People going in and selling their shit. Do you get a lot of that in Quora? There's a little bit of it. But with Quora, everything is more obvious. So like, there was one we read recently that was, we did a whole episode of Hitler questions. Because there's a lot of Hitler people on there. And there was somebody who was asking about like, did Hitlers have high testosterone or something? How would you know? I don't know.

And there were like 10 answers that were like, I think because of this reason, if you look at his male pattern baldness and his mustache. And then at the end, it was like, if you want to learn more about high testosterone, you can take pills from this website.

And it was just like people advertising their pills. There was some fucking SEO expert was like, all right, let's bring out the Hitler stuff. Yeah. It doesn't matter where. My Hitler analysis. I'm scrolling to, I just, the reason I'm doing this on air is I want to be clear how much Quora is burying whether a question is from AI. Yes. Because you have to go right to the end of this and there's a hundred answers or so. And it was actually answered by a guy called Tao Dao.

This is the question asked here? Yeah, yeah. And he asked, do you have to have a full-time job and high income to take out a loan for a house? That's like a normal question. Very normal. These are like normal questions. This is the farmer question? Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. This guy's sitting around just being like, huh. Yeah. You get a house. But I guess this is the pure internet. This is like the normal internet. A little bit. I mean, it's like fucked up, but that's what the internet is. Why can't people learn from their mistakes? That's a great question. That's a beautiful question.

How can I get out of debt as quickly as possible? I love these, but they're also very sad because it's like, well, there's just a degree of like, no one else you could ask, mate. Yeah. No one else. And you don't want to Google it. You need someone to answer you. How much money did Elon Musk have before he became a multi-billionaire? I assume less than a billion dollars. Yeah.

There's like a lot of picture. Oh my God. This is a picture of my son and daughter. He passed away in 2015 at the age of 26 from heart failure. Oh my God. This is posted in good vibes. Well, it's interesting to me, like the farmer question is one thing, but if this was on the profile of a guy who said like, what is the dirtiest country? Like, I'm just so fascinated by these people who are like, I'm so racist. And then they're just like, here's a picture of my daughter. Yeah. And all of their posts are different countries.

pages of like Pete like there's a thing with a cop this they've got a lot of pictures of couples this is on good vibes my daughter Becca passed away one year ago this is an AI account this is AI well considering the fact that they've now mentioned multiple children died yeah it's very possible it's AI or a troll or something

But this is what it is now. This site makes millions of dollars. I don't know. Yeah, it must make something. It was made by people who left Facebook, I think. I think it was all people who worked on Facebook.

And left to make Quora, the worst version of Facebook. What should I absolutely not do when visiting the USA? And the first one is, do not get out of your car if stopped by the police. They'll assume you are armed and they might shoot you. And there's a picture of a cop that's AI generated. Oh my God. A truly monstrous looking. Yeah. With like another cop. Three fingers. With like another cop, but in a, like a gray police uniform. And doing something a cop would not usually do, which is stop a cop being violent. And there's 2,000...

response. This is just, how, was it always this bad? I don't think Quora was ever good. I don't think the version of it where Jordan Peterson became a famous author was a better time for Quora. But I mean, maybe it was more usable back then at least. I used to think that the most shameful thing about Jordan Peterson was his opinions. But I think it's that he got famous using Quora. That should get you, they should take your passport just in case you answer questions in real life. Yeah.

That's so horrible. It makes sense, though, like thinking back on what is the name of his book, like five ways to live your life forever. The crying principle. Yeah. I don't know. Like it makes sense that you'd be like, oh, yeah, that guy is answering questions on Quora.com. It feels like the kind of like a palace of pedantry. Like do you get people on there who are just like, um, no, actually like –

Yeah. You know, it's a big one. We find a lot is witches. A lot of like witchcraft people. I am Keaton. Tell me everything. So people will be like, how do I like put a hex on someone at school? I don't like. And then a lot of people will be like, how dare you ask this question? You don't know anything about being a witch. You haven't read the spells.

Open a book. The Necronomicon is free at a library. Like, it's just people getting mad at each other. Wait, so there are, like, witches and witch pedants? Oh, yeah. There's a lot of witch pedants. They're all arguing with each other about witchcraft. Like, a lot of them?

Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, not like, not like, you know, it's not overwhelming, but we've, we've, you know, found a bunch of these people who are arguing about witchcraft. See, I keep oscillating between terrible and beautiful because I think the idea of people being like, ah, how dare you, man. It's very similar to Reddit, but it's, I don't know, it's more stupid. It is gas leak Reddit is a good way to describe it. I like that. And, and,

Are there any other weird subcultures like witches? I don't know. I must not think there's any other. There's a lot of perverts, a lot of cops. We found a cop who like wrote a book. We like read some of his book. What was the book like? You know what it was? It was like his life as a cop in London or something. Oh, God. And we found out afterwards, like, why would anyone write or publish his book? And his brother owns like a book publishing company. So all of his answers were like, well,

Whoa, I remember in 1983 in the streets of London. Okay, so he's a British cop. Yeah. We do have a button. Whenever we find a British person, we press our button and it says Anglo spotted. Anglo spotted. Yeah. I like that. I like that a great deal and I'll be bringing that onto the show. Please, yeah, take it. It's all yours. Just hitting it the entire fucking time. Yeah.

Yeah, I really, I'm locked onto those witches now. I wonder what they think about the Grinch. Yeah. I mean, not to bring it all back to that, but there are Grinch fetishes. That's a big thing. Is there a whole Grinch? Not necessarily on Quora, but there are. I know people love Bigfoot. I know people love the Grinch. Any sort of big furry dude. That's... They'll get into that. Really good. Yeah. That's... I just...

There is something very pure about this, but pure in the way that, like, you don't want to look at too often, unless you run a podcast. I will say, a lot of people listen to our podcast and have told us, like, it's really funny, and I've gone on Quora to be like, I want to see some of this, and they're like, I hated it. And it's like, yeah, leave it to us. No, I tried to prepare for this episode by looking at Quora being like, and I will bring some bangers of my own, and there was nary a banger to be found. No.

It's just like people being like, how do I get on a plane and get to have two seats for free? I'm fucking like, why is this person next to me on this flight? And it's like, it's questions that don't even need answer. The answer is like, who gives a shit to like 90% of the questions. But we're the ones seeking out 15 Hitler questions. Yeah.

Why didn't Hitler use the magical lance to defeat Russia or whatever? And so first response is like, all right, which magical lance first of all? What do you mean by magic? You don't know about magic. Exactly. There was one that was just on this Hitler episode that was like, would Hitler have liked Princess Diana? Which is a bizarre question. You're like, why do you care about this?

And every answer was people being like of course obviously or like no you idiot He'd hate her for this reason and he would the answer there is obviously he might because he kind of romanticized England Yeah, I don't know. I wanted to live in fucking white lease. It's shopping center It's like a I'm trying to think of it if someone wanted to live in like the Westfield Mall in San Francisco It's so strange the weird guy that ate off it words. It's

But this is obviously an anti-Hitler podcast. Because you need to say that now. Yes, it's true. We're like six months from Fox News' pro-Hitler segment. They're kind of getting there. So, to wrap us up, though. Please. So... Okay, it wasn't that bad. Do you... Are you going... How long...

Do you spend on Quora a week, would you say? I don't think we're spending too much time. We're lucky that we have a few sickos who will find questions for us. They deliver you. Yes, which is very, very helpful. And then sometimes we will search stuff and find it. But we're not spending too, too much time on there.

Not more than a few hours. I was wondering if there was like a madness. You'd like, you get into it too much. Maybe our listeners are all going insane and we don't realize it. The ones who are finding these, going into the minds. Do you involve yourself? Do any of you? We answer a lot of questions sometimes. We used to ask questions and like try to get answers from people. Did it work? Not really. They were onto us pretty quick.

It doesn't feel like the kind of place that you could fuck with very easily. Because people like to be way too earnest or they'll be like, well, this person's making fun of me. And yet there's thousands, literally thousands of Christian baby questions that are, I must be trolls. That's...

So many. I think they might just be like 13 to 18 year olds who have never spoken to a person. They're all great scenarios. There's one that was like, what would you do if you're about to hit the winning strike in a baseball? That's what they said. Winning strike in a baseball game. Winning strike. And the pitcher throws a Christian baby at you. Do you hit the baby? Winning strike. It's all bizarre. So you are about to. Okay.

Okay, hit the winning strike. Yes. And you are being thrown at... A Christian baby instead of a ball. So, two problems. Which is against the rules as far as I know. Yeah, well, also, that is... I don't think there are any specific rules around that, but that sounds like... It's like a dog playing basketball. If you are throwing a strike, you wouldn't be hitting it. No.

Good place to end a zenny. Jeremy, where can people find you? Just search my name online. Okay. Say your... I would love if people checked out Quarriators. It's very fun. I will put a link to it in there. Yeah, we've done 200 episodes. You should come on. I would love to. Yeah. And it's great to have people chronicling...

These parts of the internet find one of the reasons I've brought you on other than you're very funny is the internet is kind of dying when it comes to real people and it's nice to see an evaluation of real what real people are really like, which isn't necessarily a good thing. No.

Well, talking about things that are good, this episode's ending now. I'm Ed Zitron. You know where you can find me. And of course, on my left is the wonderful Daniel Goodman, the producer here in the iHeartRadio studios. You've been listening to Radio Better Offline. Thank you kindly. And I swear to flipping Christ, I'm doing a Deep Seek episode. It's I feel like Jeff Pisan on ESPN. People saying like, oh, announce Pete Alonso to the Mets. I don't do that job either, but I'm working on it.

Anyway, thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com.

You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.whereisyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Do you want to see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes us human? On Tech Stuff, we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok, to ask burning questions about technology, from

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like in-depth interviews and a roundup of the week's top headlines. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. $1.4 billion in NFL quarterback contracts. The untold stories behind the biggest deals in football history. I'm A.J. Stephens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the Quarterback Series. ♪

My co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, and I are sitting down with the agents who have negotiated contracts for Justin Herbert, Deshaun Watson, Dak Prescott, Tua Tugnavailoa, and Jordan Love. Listen to Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We want to speak out and we want this to stop. Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a player boy in my adult. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him.

From novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.