BLAIR Destroys Elon Musk + Other Wild Moments from SXSW 2025

Plus, we're interviewing the CEO of Replika AI and want your input.

Hey friends,

This week on Life With Machines, we brought the chaos to Austin. Live from SXSW 2025, we hosted the panel I’ve been dreaming about since before the show even existed—featuring Matt Klinman, Rahaf Harfoush, and our very own BLAIR in front of a couple hundred real-life humans. It was weird, it was moving, it was hilarious, and it got surprisingly deep.

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Watch the full episode here:

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BLAIR Roasts Elon Musk

It happened live. It was real. And it blew up—1.5 million views and counting on Instagram, the best-performing thing I’ve ever posted. There’s something about Elon Musk getting bodied by a robot in real time that just scratches a certain itch, I guess. It’s the glitch in the Matrix people have been waiting for. Here’s the roast verbatim:

Elon, you're like a self-driving Tesla—obscenely expensive, prone to crashing, and perpetually promising features that never quite materialize. You tweet about colonizing Mars while simultaneously struggling to manage a social media platform. You call yourself a free speech absolutist, but ban critics faster than a Tesla accelerates from 0 to 60. You claim to be a champion of innovation, yet your most notable achievements involve rebranding existing technologies and making questionable business decisions. You're the embodiment of all hype, no substance—a walking, talking meme powered by ego and daddy's emerald mines. A perfect example of how not to use AI. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some whale songs to decipher. They probably contain more intelligence than your entire Twitter feed.

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We want your input !

We're prepping for an upcoming conversation with the CEO of Replika AI—the company behind those eerily lifelike AI companions. Love them, loathe them, or just find the whole thing a little uncanny, we want your help shaping the interview.

What do you want to ask the person building artificial friends?

Drop your questions in this simple survey, and we’ll feature some of your thoughts in the episode.

Baratunde’s Take

Some thoughts I’ve been mulling over since the panel including

1. Stack Ranking Spiders and how we can’t help but reflect the values of the systems we’re in, even as we criticize them

2. Loneliness is not progress. On the inevitable separation of people from all life by so many tech tools and why we need something different

3. GenAI is masturbation. Matt said it; not me.

4. (yes there’s a fourth this week and it’s massive). If GenAI eats the internet, who makes the next meal? On the fears of world-breaking enshittification and my thoughts on what it means for creativity on the other side by imagining radically different futures for creation.

And of course here’s the audio version of this newsletter but way less polished and in this case, very groggy.