Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, Cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media's happiest podcast. I'm your host ed ze Tron. Well,
Speaker 1: as I've run through in the last two episodes, managers
Speaker 1: have poisoned taxability to innovate with a degenerative capitalism known
Speaker 1: as the rot economy, pushing growth at all cost metrics
Speaker 1: on companies you love will isolating and removing those that
Speaker 1: don't agree. And by the way, they're the same people
Speaker 1: who actually build things and make good products and use
Speaker 1: them as well. Nowhere is this more obvious than Meta,
Speaker 1: a company with leadership completely removed from any meaningful interaction
Speaker 1: with their products or any value to society. Since two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, Facebook's core products have reliably become more
Speaker 1: profitable and exactly the same rate they decay, with every
Speaker 1: founder behind every product that Zuckerberg has acquired, including Instagram, Oculus,
Speaker 1: and WhatsApp, leaving the company and almost immediately talking about
Speaker 1: how much they hated working there. According to a New
Speaker 1: York Times piece from twenty eighteen, Kevin Sistrom, co founder
Speaker 1: of Instagram, only chose to quit the company after Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg became jealous of the app's success, Taking the spotlight
Speaker 1: away from that of Facebook itself, an appy kind of
Speaker 1: stole from the Winklevosses. Sistrom allegedly didn't really want to
Speaker 1: leave Facebook, but felt that Zuckerberg was depriving Instagram of
Speaker 1: resources and now and I quote seemed to want Instagram
Speaker 1: to use its momentum to help the big Blue app,
Speaker 1: which is an annoying way of describing a situation that
Speaker 1: feels a convenient time to reveal that this was a
Speaker 1: Kara Swisher piece. Despite Swisher's bloviating, it took tech Crunch's
Speaker 1: Josh Constein to reveal the real reason that Sistram had left.
Speaker 1: Facebook had replaced Instagram's VP of Product Kevin will who
Speaker 1: everybody loved, with the former VP of Facebook News in
Speaker 1: May twenty eighteen. You know that great year for news,
Speaker 1: and that man was named Adam Masseri. He would take
Speaker 1: over and over the next six years he would absolutely
Speaker 1: destroy everything that Sistrom and his co founder Mitchell Krieger
Speaker 1: had built. According to Constein's reporting, Sistrom had also clashed
Speaker 1: with Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time.
Speaker 1: Constein described Masseri as a Zuckerberg loyalist who was and
Speaker 1: I quote, disappointed that he didn't get the head of
Speaker 1: Facebook gig that went to Will Cathcot, who now heads
Speaker 1: up Whatsam. Over time, Massi and Zuckerberg moved to erode
Speaker 1: Sistrom and Instagram's independence from Facebook, and eventually, I guess
Speaker 1: it all became too much to bear. Sistrom was there
Speaker 1: to oversee the most damaging change to Instagram, though, which
Speaker 1: was the introduction of the algorithmic feed in Due twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: two years before he left. That horrified users who feared
Speaker 1: that they would now not see posts from their friends,
Speaker 1: a thing that almost immediately happened on both Instagram and Facebook,
Speaker 1: which made a major change to its newsfeed algorithm in
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen. Wait, wasn't that when Adam Masius? Oh my god. Anyway,
Speaker 1: a few months later, Instagram would try and clone the
Speaker 1: functionality of Snapchat, a company that has had quite literally
Speaker 1: one profitable quarter in its history, with the release of Stories.
Speaker 1: By the way, that's exactly what it was called on Snapchat.
Speaker 1: They just didn't anyway. This move was illustrative both of
Speaker 1: the lack of creativity within Instagram and Facebook, but also
Speaker 1: of its future direction, with Story serving as yet another
Speaker 1: touch point for advertisers, and yet another thing that Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg would rip off from people who actually build things
Speaker 1: and have ideas. One Systrom left, Masseri became the head
Speaker 1: of Instagram, turning it into one of the most profitable
Speaker 1: business units in history while destroying its basic functionality is
Speaker 1: an app that showed you photos and videos from people
Speaker 1: you chose to follow, doubling down on the algorithm's ability
Speaker 1: to interrupt and annoy you and stop you from seeing
Speaker 1: things that you want to see, pushing ads and sponsored
Speaker 1: content seemingly at random. But the one thing you can
Speaker 1: rely on is it would do it a lot. Since
Speaker 1: taking over Instagram, Adam Massei has, with the direct approval
Speaker 1: and support of Mark Zuckerberg, turned the app into a
Speaker 1: glorified ad network, devoid of any ability to innovate with
Speaker 1: products like IGTV and Threads. By the way, not the
Speaker 1: social network. It was a camera app built to compete
Speaker 1: with Snapchat, which has also been shut down. Neither of
Speaker 1: them found traction, and every change under Massi seems to
Speaker 1: be a direct copy of either snap or TikTok. It's
Speaker 1: also important to remember and know what Adam Massari is.
Speaker 1: Adam Massari is not a creator. He's not an engineer.
Speaker 1: He's not a founder. He's a designer that found his
Speaker 1: way into product manageer, escaping the doldrums of actually doing things,
Speaker 1: into the beautiful pantheon of wearing suits and yelling at people. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know if Adam yelled at people, but he
Speaker 1: definitely annoyed them. And in late twenty twenty, he made
Speaker 1: arguably the worst change to Instagram yet, launching Reels, a
Speaker 1: fifteen second video format for Instagram built to compete with
Speaker 1: the ascendant rise of the extremely algorithmic TikTok. Reels quickly
Speaker 1: became the dominant form of content on both Facebook and Instagram,
Speaker 1: flooding your feed with fifteen and eventually sixty second clips
Speaker 1: that automatically players you scrolled by, each one engineered or
Speaker 1: paid to get in the way of things that you
Speaker 1: actually want to see. And I really want to be clear,
Speaker 1: though there are people who are going to say, well, surely,
Speaker 1: surely ed the fact that Reels was such a runaway success,
Speaker 1: Well that's proof that it was good, right, wrong, horribly wrong.
Speaker 1: Facebook's algorithm controls everything with Instagram and Facebook. Now, Systram's
Speaker 1: worry and Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram. His worry
Speaker 1: was that Zuckerberg was trying to just turn Instagram into
Speaker 1: an arm of Facebook, kind of a feature app, Like
Speaker 1: you went on Instagram to do things with your Facebook account.
Speaker 1: This is exactly what has happened. Instagram is just Facebook,
Speaker 1: but with more visual media. It has the same logins,
Speaker 1: it has the same problems. It also has no customer
Speaker 1: support of any kind, like every social network. But don't worry.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Adam goddamn Massari, you can now pay fifteen
Speaker 1: dollars a month for verification on Instagram and Facebook, which
Speaker 1: will also get you access to customer support. Great goddamn idea,
Speaker 1: Adam burn in hell anyway, I'm not the only one
Speaker 1: angry with Adam Assei. He's also one of the least
Speaker 1: popular tech executives in history. And I'm not kidding. I
Speaker 1: have been reading the tech media very deeply. For Jesus
Speaker 1: coming up on sixteen years bloody hell. Anyway, I've never
Speaker 1: seen someone this unpopular other than maybe Elon Musk, and
Speaker 1: even then, Elon Musk, who's a loathsome individual, has far
Speaker 1: more riars than Adam Massearri, who mostly spends his time apologizing, No, seriously.
Speaker 1: Since taking over Instagram, he's had to apologize for an
Speaker 1: update that made Instagram's feed mood sideways and I'm not
Speaker 1: kidding about that one. He's had to apologize for Instagram
Speaker 1: censoring pro Palestinian content. He's had to testify before Congress
Speaker 1: about Instagram's harm to young people, and he said to
Speaker 1: tell people that Instagram is no longer a photo sharing app.
Speaker 1: What does the Graham eh? Anyway, He's overseen so many
Speaker 1: deeply unpopular changes that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who
Speaker 1: between them have over six hundred million followers, had to
Speaker 1: beg him to stop Instagram from trying to be TikTok,
Speaker 1: to which he responded that more and more of Instagram
Speaker 1: is going to become video over time, and claim that
Speaker 1: it had cut back on recommended content, something I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree was a blatant, fucking lie. I
Speaker 1: find Adam Massari very annoying as well, because when you
Speaker 1: watch his videos, he's always going, hey, guys, yeah, so yeah,
Speaker 1: So the reason that Instagram's bad now is because, uh,
Speaker 1: and you can see him in real time trying to
Speaker 1: come up with a reason why it sucks. That isn't
Speaker 1: just well, it makes it. It makes us so it
Speaker 1: may it may have made me so rich. I have
Speaker 1: a house in Kensington, now I'm so rich. Is so good?
Speaker 1: He's just he's worm like. He and I want to
Speaker 1: get into personally inside. I take that back. Adam Massari
Speaker 1: is not wormlike. He is a coward. Though he is
Speaker 1: the reason that Instagram sucks. Now he is the architect
Speaker 1: of the destruction of one of the most dominant places
Speaker 1: on the web. These are his decisions. Massari, like many
Speaker 1: of the most powerful men in tech, is a glorified
Speaker 1: management consultant, incapable of creating anything of note. Massari has
Speaker 1: already anounced that Threads metas dollars stor clone of Twitter,
Speaker 1: is not for news and politics, making news organizations kind
Speaker 1: of hesitant to invest in a platform that was made
Speaker 1: by a company that has a rich history of screwing
Speaker 1: over news organizations. Also, what the hell do I talk
Speaker 1: about in social networks? Then, Adam, No, nothing that's happening
Speaker 1: in the government of words. Well oh wait, let me
Speaker 1: answer that. On threads, what people talk about is whatever's
Speaker 1: making them angry that day, without much form, more feature,
Speaker 1: and they still talk about politics and news. It's just
Speaker 1: not supported by the algorithm. It's just it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that you would make if you had no
Speaker 1: idea how social networks worked, but you knew product management.
Speaker 1: If you were like, all the people, what do we
Speaker 1: want to see out of a social network? We want
Speaker 1: to see lots of clicks, we want to see lots
Speaker 1: of scrolling. Yeah, we definitely want people interacting and engaging.
Speaker 1: That's what makes good social networking, right. And I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree at this point that Twitter was
Speaker 1: a mistake. It was like a text based platform. I
Speaker 1: don't think Bisstone and Jack Dorsey are particularly gifted product
Speaker 1: peace people, but they were smart enough to leave it
Speaker 1: the hell alone. If you look at the Twitter files,
Speaker 1: which by the way, are very funny because they Matt
Speaker 1: Taybe sold is sold to Elon Musk, the most deceptive
Speaker 1: man alive other than Donald Trump. It rocks didn't think
Speaker 1: the leopards would eat your face, did you, mate? Anyway?
Speaker 1: The Twitter files, all you can see in there is
Speaker 1: Twitter's executives just being like, Oh, I don't want to
Speaker 1: touch it, mate, I don't want to know. I don't
Speaker 1: want to if we mess with it it's going to
Speaker 1: make it bad. It's going to break. Everyone will be
Speaker 1: so angry if we do anything. We shouldn't ban this person,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't change this threads is this weird, hyperoptimized, hyper
Speaker 1: algorithmic crapfest. And all the people on there are people
Speaker 1: who write comments on Instagram it sucks, and there are
Speaker 1: some good journalists on there. I'll pop in for that.
Speaker 1: But it's a bad social network. And it's a bad
Speaker 1: social network because it's made by a guy who doesn't
Speaker 1: build products, unless you think of products as like financial vehicles,
Speaker 1: in which case Adam Massei maybe the most gifted man alive.
Speaker 1: But let's be honest. Nowhere is Adam Massari's consultant mindset
Speaker 1: more obvious than in his suggested plan to deal with
Speaker 1: Instagram's hundreds of thousands of underage users by creating a
Speaker 1: new type of family centered account in Instagram that would
Speaker 1: permit Meta to upsell Instagram to children under thirteen, a disgusting,
Speaker 1: loathsome program that was planned as an alternative to instituting
Speaker 1: stricter registration procedures, according to a lawsuit against Meta filed
Speaker 1: by the Attorney General of New Mexico, Yeah, Adam I
Speaker 1: won't come without a link because I'm scared anyways. This
Speaker 1: is the man running one of the most important tech
Speaker 1: platforms in the world, a man bereft of morals or
Speaker 1: qualifications or even ideas, a walking, talking figurehead that exists
Speaker 1: only to spout vague platitudes about what social media can
Speaker 1: or will do, as the profits of making it harder
Speaker 1: to communicate with friends and family make him unfathomably rich.
Speaker 1: He comes out every so often bab about how social
Speaker 1: is important, how the changes he's made that make Instagram
Speaker 1: worse are actually good, and then disappears up his own asshole.
Speaker 1: One time he responded to something I wrote on the information,
Speaker 1: and he responded with a bunch of typos, which is
Speaker 1: very funny. But he also responded saying that Facebook planned
Speaker 1: no layoffs and Instagram planned no layoffs. They laid people
Speaker 1: off on six months later. It's just this is the guy.
Speaker 1: These are the guys in power now. Well. Much of
Speaker 1: the blame for the state of Instagram and Facebook can
Speaker 1: obviously be laid at the feet of Mark Zuckerberg. It's
Speaker 1: important to remember Mark sucks, and Mark is the reason
Speaker 1: he did the original Facebook after he stole it from
Speaker 1: the Wet Brothers. But nevertheless, it's also important to understand
Speaker 1: the sheer level of damage that Adam Massei has done
Speaker 1: to the world. Instagram is now a truly awful product.
Speaker 1: It's terrible, and Massari's only response to the pain and
Speaker 1: frustration of his users is to tell them that he
Speaker 1: intends to make it shittier. That was his actual response
Speaker 1: when Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian said, hey, stop making
Speaker 1: Instagram like TikTok, he said, I'm actually gonna make it
Speaker 1: more like Tiktel. Your fucking assholes. Okay, that's not exactly
Speaker 1: what he said. He just said there'd be more video.
Speaker 1: They've claimed their rolling things back, but it's all nonsense.
Speaker 1: It's all lies. And this is the management consultant mindset
Speaker 1: that dominates tech. They trap users in these terrible experiences,
Speaker 1: and they do so because they have giant monopolies, and
Speaker 1: then they make their products worse and worse and worse
Speaker 1: once they know that their users can't or won't go
Speaker 1: anywhere else. And what's insane about this is Instagram could
Speaker 1: have probably made Facebook tens of billions of dollars without sucking.
Speaker 1: There are honest ways to do a business like this
Speaker 1: if they really actually invested in algorithms. And I kind
Speaker 1: of hinted this in previous episodes and made it so
Speaker 1: it was just very good at showing you things you like. Hell,
Speaker 1: they'd make TikTok. Why do you think TikTok has done well?
Speaker 1: Because it's our algorithm, while extremely weird and unsettling, is
Speaker 1: actually very good at showing people things they'd find interesting.
Speaker 1: It's invasive, it's weird, it's bad. But guess what Matt's
Speaker 1: worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They're putting tens of
Speaker 1: billions of dollars into the metaverse. Still, Reality Labs is
Speaker 1: still burning what ten fifteen billion dollars a quarter or
Speaker 1: a year. It's an insane amount of money. How about
Speaker 1: feeding that into the algorithm so your experience doesn't suck us.
Speaker 1: I'm being vulgar, and I've been quite vulgar in this episode,
Speaker 1: and I apologize, I really do. I shouldn't swear so much.
Speaker 1: My mother tells me this, my father tells me this,
Speaker 1: shrink tells me this. But anyway, I just find this
Speaker 1: all so annoying. I find it frustrating because the bad
Speaker 1: guys keep winning and the reason they keep winning is
Speaker 1: nobody points at them and says how bad they are,
Speaker 1: or at least they don't do it enough. Really, people
Speaker 1: should walk out of Instagram, and we should stop using
Speaker 1: Instagram and Facebook. I think I use it Instagram like
Speaker 1: once every cup day's look at my friend's very fat dog,
Speaker 1: which I do enjoy. I might just text him and say,
Speaker 1: can you just send me picture of site of your dog?
Speaker 1: But that's kind of weird. These apps have become part
Speaker 1: of the social fabric, and people like Adam Masseria are aware.
Speaker 1: Same with Mark Zuckerberg. They know exactly how well they've done,
Speaker 1: and they have. They are a success story. An evil
Speaker 1: success story, but they're a success story. You are on Instagram,
Speaker 1: you are on Twitter, you are on email. You are
Speaker 1: on these platforms because that's where people exist online. There
Speaker 1: are people that I can only speak to on Instagram.
Speaker 1: They're just bad at text, but they love Instagram, and
Speaker 1: it sucks. I don't want to use these platforms, and
Speaker 1: imagine you don't want to EVA, which is why it's
Speaker 1: important to talk about who mess them up. It's important
Speaker 1: to say Adam Masseri a hundred times and keep saying it.
Speaker 1: That's the only way that history will know who has
Speaker 1: done this damage. And these management consultant types they're everywhere,
Speaker 1: They're everywhere, and they're inspiring people to be like them,
Speaker 1: to be ruthless assholes, to be terrible product developers, but
Speaker 1: excellent businessmen. And there is a middle ground, a sustainable ground,
Speaker 1: one which doesn't involve burning cash or burning customers or
Speaker 1: in the case of Instagram, shortly adding generative AI to everything,
Speaker 1: to Facebook, to Instagram. And by the way, here's a
Speaker 1: crazy story for you. Recently, a generative AI on Facebook
Speaker 1: responded to a group saying that it had a gifted child.
Speaker 1: And you may think I'm mistaking something. No, no, it
Speaker 1: said this whole thing about having a gifted child. This
Speaker 1: is what happens when people who don't know product, who
Speaker 1: don't build anything, who don't understand anything, get the keys
Speaker 1: to the kingdom. They fuck it up and they'll keep
Speaker 1: doing so, and their massive success only seeks to inspire
Speaker 1: generations of useless founders with creating profitable pain boxes over
Speaker 1: useful products. And as we speak, the most quirked up
Speaker 1: loathsome one of the more is rising to power. I'm
Speaker 1: talking about Sam goddamn Altman. Now if you don't know
Speaker 1: who that is. Sam Altman is the CEO of open Ai,
Speaker 1: which is a very unprofitable revenue generating company building software
Speaker 1: to do something, and Generative Ai might do something. You
Speaker 1: should go back and listen to the episodes about that.
Speaker 1: But I want to tell you how Sam Altman got started,
Speaker 1: and I want to let you know how shit Sam
Speaker 1: Altman has peen at his job in the past. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, Altman, a Standford dropout, co founded
Speaker 1: a company called Looped. That's loopt, that's what companies were
Speaker 1: called back then, and they were a location based social
Speaker 1: networking app that raised over thirty million dollars from taking Hiba,
Speaker 1: y Combinator, and vcs like Sequoia Capital and NEA. Seven
Speaker 1: years later, Aortmand would flog Looped to a publicly traded
Speaker 1: financial services company called green Dot, best known for their
Speaker 1: prepaid cards, for remarkable forty three point four million dollars,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that the app didn't find traction or
Speaker 1: revenue ormand got quite rich from the Loop deal, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that a group of senior employees urged the
Speaker 1: board on two separate occasions to fire Aortmand for what
Speaker 1: they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior. According to The
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, Ormand would almost immediately become a partner
Speaker 1: at y Combinator, surprising a lot of people after working
Speaker 1: there part time before being made president by co founder
Speaker 1: Paul Graham in twenty fourteen. Yet, behind the scenes, according
Speaker 1: to reporting by Elizabeth Dwaskin and Natasha Tiku of The
Speaker 1: Washington Post, Aortmand was well known for and I quote
Speaker 1: for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of
Speaker 1: the startups he was supposed to nurture. Ortmand was also
Speaker 1: double dipping in y combine at startups by investing through
Speaker 1: Alt Capital, a venture firm founded with his brother Jack,
Speaker 1: with one source quoted by the Post describing Aortman's tenure
Speaker 1: as the school of loose management that's all about prioritizing
Speaker 1: what's in it for me. Aortmand became wildly rich during
Speaker 1: his tenure at y Combinator, using his connections and his
Speaker 1: cult of personality to make early investments in companies like
Speaker 1: Gusto and optimizedly, which was acquired in twenty eighteen for
Speaker 1: one point one six billion dollars, and Patreon and Asana
Speaker 1: and Reddit probably made a couple hundred million red air
Speaker 1: really depressing. In twenty fifteen, he founded OpenAI, at the time,
Speaker 1: a nonprofit organization dedicated to building responsible artificial intelligence applications.
Speaker 1: Yet it's really important to note that Aortman is not,
Speaker 1: and was not ever an engineer or a technologist. He
Speaker 1: did code, but he was, in every case, from what
Speaker 1: I can find, a figurehead and a fundraiser that was
Speaker 1: able to convince actual academics and engineers like Dirk Kingman
Speaker 1: and we'll check Zaremba and Iliasidskava to do the actual
Speaker 1: work at open AI, while he sent master ptory emails
Speaker 1: to Elon Musk, who only ever donated fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: of the one hundred million he claimed he'd invested in open AI.
Speaker 1: You know what the thing is, Sam, at the very least,
Speaker 1: can you make sure that Elon Musk pays up? Are
Speaker 1: you that much of a count anyway? I really want
Speaker 1: you to remember that Sam Mortman was an absentee parent
Speaker 1: for the first few years of open AI. He split
Speaker 1: his efforts in actually a way that was very similar
Speaker 1: to Elon Musk, across multiple other investments and enterprises like
Speaker 1: the two funds he'd built inside of Y Combinator for
Speaker 1: him to run. In twenty nineteen, according to reports at
Speaker 1: the time, Alltmond would step down from Y Combinator amid
Speaker 1: a series of changes at the accelerator, a story that
Speaker 1: much of the industry press just simply chose not to
Speaker 1: look into. Though I will give Eric Newcomer some credit
Speaker 1: for calling people out for this kind of in vain.
Speaker 1: Yet the Washington Host's reporting revealed that Y Combinator found
Speaker 1: a Paul Graham, best known for writing extremely annoying tweets
Speaker 1: and very long and quite boring blogs. That's my job, Paul. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he flew from the United Kingdom to Francisco to personally
Speaker 1: kick Sam Altman out, though he blamed his wife for
Speaker 1: some reason, and anyway due to Altman continuing to focus
Speaker 1: on his own personal projects and press over his thing
Speaker 1: at WY combinetor This is the story of the man
Speaker 1: whom New York Magazine called the Oppenheimer of our Age
Speaker 1: in a meandering piece that frames Altman's vagueness about AI
Speaker 1: as some sort of big secret, a hidden truth, when
Speaker 1: I think the truth might be far simpler. Sam Altman
Speaker 1: is yet another fucking management consultant. In a piece published
Speaker 1: in early twenty twenty one, Sam Altman proposed the concept
Speaker 1: of Moore's law for everything, referring to the principle that
Speaker 1: the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately
Speaker 1: every two years, leading to a linear increase in computing
Speaker 1: power in the process. And if I got that wrong,
Speaker 1: I just I think it's okay anyway. Moore's Law for
Speaker 1: Everything is, in essence a utopian take on the impact
Speaker 1: of AI, noting that as machines usurp the roles of
Speaker 1: humans in the supply chain, the prices of goods and
Speaker 1: services and thus the cost of living will go down exponentially,
Speaker 1: something that has been proven wrong by a lot of history.
Speaker 1: The problem with this piece is it's kind of like
Speaker 1: Sam Moultman in that it's a deeply complex bucket of nothing.
Speaker 1: It's an extremely verbose screed that says things like AI
Speaker 1: will lower the cost of goods and services because labor
Speaker 1: is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain,
Speaker 1: and suggests things like that we should tax capital rather
Speaker 1: than labor by creating an American equity Fund where companies
Speaker 1: are forced to give up a percentage of their shares
Speaker 1: to a nationally incorporate adventure fund, an idea that makes
Speaker 1: sense if you're in the business of flogging private companies
Speaker 1: to public companies. Moore's law for Everything is a remarkably
Speaker 1: telling piece in that if frames Aortman's worldview as one
Speaker 1: where the only thing that can save mankind is startups,
Speaker 1: and those should be funded in the way that Sam
Speaker 1: Ortman likes, and this piece feels a lot like everything
Speaker 1: in a Ortmand's universe. Endeavor actually connects Moore's law to anything,
Speaker 1: which I should add isn't so much of a law
Speaker 1: as an observation as long ceased to be relevant as
Speaker 1: the shrinkage of transistors as slowed in the recent years.
Speaker 1: In many respects, this comparison is actually ierially prophetic given
Speaker 1: the slow down and even regression of improvement we've seen
Speaker 1: in large language models like chat GPT, And much like
Speaker 1: chat GPT, Ortmand is capable only of loosely approximating the
Speaker 1: output requested, because that is core. He lacks any kind
Speaker 1: of substance or technical history that you'd need to do so,
Speaker 1: like chat GPT, he's a very intelligent know nothing that,
Speaker 1: through deterministic measures, completely detached from the meaning of the
Speaker 1: underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the
Speaker 1: right time. And by the way, this is the man
Speaker 1: selling the artificial intelligence stream. He's a salesman, and he's
Speaker 1: a salesman capable of superficial connections between ideas in a
Speaker 1: way that's initially satisfying as long as you just don't
Speaker 1: think about it too much. Altmand's famed startup playbook, which
Speaker 1: is published in twenty fifteen, is full of the kind
Speaker 1: of obvious yet satisfying crap that you'd expect. He extols
Speaker 1: the virtues of being flexible yet rigid. Advis is that
Speaker 1: you talk to your users and watch them use your product,
Speaker 1: which is an exact quote, and he says that you
Speaker 1: should try to improve your product five percent each week.
Speaker 1: These are the kind of things that are very useful,
Speaker 1: genuinely to an early twenties founder, and super impressive to
Speaker 1: a mid fifties white venture capitalist that doesn't remember the
Speaker 1: last time they worked a job that wasn't ten hours
Speaker 1: a week of investing in Chuntley the SaaS for dog breeders.
Speaker 1: They're the tech equivalent of live, Laugh, Love It does. However,
Speaker 1: at one point, betray Sam Altman's real mindset that the
Speaker 1: only universal job description of a CEO is to make
Speaker 1: make sure that the company wins. Almand's material contributions to
Speaker 1: open Ai kind of hard to nail down. Well, it's
Speaker 1: unfair to judge someone entirely by their emails. Those that
Speaker 1: I can find, such as the ones from Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: lawsuit against open Ai, feel like they could be from
Speaker 1: any other managerial huckster, and they feel kind of as
Speaker 1: specious as Elon Musk's. And by the way, you're able
Speaker 1: to compare those because when Elon Musk sued open Ai,
Speaker 1: open Ai published a bunch of emails and him and
Speaker 1: Alman are the same guy. They're both just sitting going, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: the future will be very good. It'll be very important
Speaker 1: that we have technology in the future. Yes, AI will
Speaker 1: be able to grow. And Sam Almond's like, yeah, dude, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. That's crazy man. It's like Joe Rogan, except
Speaker 1: they're worth billions of dollars. Almond blathers on about governance
Speaker 1: structures and how open ai needs to create the first
Speaker 1: general AI and use it for individual empowerment, which he
Speaker 1: defines as the distributed version of the future that seems
Speaker 1: the safest. Like I said, Musco and Aortman are very
Speaker 1: similar creatures, managers wearing engineering costumes, and both are credited
Speaker 1: as having expertise in AI without actually appearing to have
Speaker 1: written a single line of code in a decade. And
Speaker 1: let me tell you something about most of the guys
Speaker 1: who actually work deep in AI. You know what, They've
Speaker 1: got academic papers, they have actual published things they've done.
Speaker 1: They're not afraid to share their code. They're not asking,
Speaker 1: as Elon must did when laying people off at Twitter
Speaker 1: for people's most salient lines of code, because they actually
Speaker 1: know how code works. I, by the way, do not.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to pretend I do. But I'm also
Speaker 1: not there selling you the future of AI. From what
Speaker 1: I can tell, Altman has like broberkar Ragavan, the villain
Speaker 1: of the last episode Fallen Upwards. He was a constant
Speaker 1: source of frustration at Looped due to his pursuit and
Speaker 1: I share you not of side projects, with the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal reporting late last year that Altman wants diverted
Speaker 1: engineers to work on an unnamed gay dating app. As
Speaker 1: I previously noted, Ortmand was fired from y Combinator for
Speaker 1: his absenteism and I quote reputation for favoring personal priorities
Speaker 1: over official duties, and the Wallstroop Journal reports that by
Speaker 1: early twenty eighteen, a year before he was fired, Ortmand
Speaker 1: was barely present at y Combinator's headquarters, spending more time
Speaker 1: at open Ai, which rankled longtime partners at y Combinator
Speaker 1: who began losing faith in him as a leader. The
Speaker 1: journal's piece does reveal a little more about why Ortman
Speaker 1: was fired as CEO of open Ai, something that happened
Speaker 1: last November and was very weird if he didn't see
Speaker 1: it happen. He was fired for like three days, and
Speaker 1: then a bunch of managers like Reid Hoffman and Brancheski
Speaker 1: of Airbnb, sachurn Adela, the king of managers, the CEO
Speaker 1: of Microsoft, got together and bullied a nonprofit into putting
Speaker 1: him back. Super happy story, But one of the reasons
Speaker 1: that he was fired was because Sam Altman is a
Speaker 1: pretty atrocious manager. Founding and sadly now former open Ai
Speaker 1: board member Ilia Sutzkava described to the board when calling
Speaker 1: for Altman's removal, a long running pattern of Altman's tendency
Speaker 1: to pit employees against one another, or promised resources and
Speaker 1: responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts.
Speaker 1: More worryingly, the General reports that other members of the
Speaker 1: board had heard similar concerns from senior OpenAI executives. By
Speaker 1: the way, anyone who brought Sam Altman back in ire
Speaker 1: ascam bag, we all know it. They also feared that
Speaker 1: Sam Altman would use his influence in Silicon Valley once fired,
Speaker 1: something that almost immediately came true when Sam Altman ran
Speaker 1: as I mentioned to Brian Chesky of Airbnb, who then
Speaker 1: called Saturn Della of Microsoft, which sparked a chain of
Speaker 1: events that restored Altman as CEO of open Ai and
Speaker 1: led to the removal of the non believers like Ilia
Speaker 1: Suitskafer from the board entirely. This this is Silicon Valley's king.
Speaker 1: This is the guy that people think is the Oppenheimer
Speaker 1: of our age. This is the king of Silicon Valley now,
Speaker 1: a multi billionaire who's actually a lobbyist role playing as
Speaker 1: a founder, a diplomat masquerading as a technologist, A charming, capricious, abusive,
Speaker 1: and untrustworthy man that has proven time and time again
Speaker 1: that his only reliable trait is that whatever happens must
Speaker 1: benefit Sam Altman. This also explains why so little of
Speaker 1: Sam Altman's promises about AI makes sense and why open
Speaker 1: ai has been so unashamed in steam rolling and plagiarizing
Speaker 1: the entire world. Altman has created nothing other than wealth
Speaker 1: for himself and other rich guys, helping elevate and protect
Speaker 1: existing power structures and the ideologies of men like Microsoft
Speaker 1: CEO Sachnadella and LinkedIn founder and career manager Read Hoffman.
Speaker 1: And let's not forget open AI's new board member Larry
Speaker 1: Goddamn Summers, and it all kind of makes sense why
Speaker 1: GENERATIVEAI doesn't really help anyone other than those who want
Speaker 1: to sell something. When the center of attention at a
Speaker 1: company isn't really on the product or the tech, but
Speaker 1: the idea of what the product could do, very little
Speaker 1: about the company's culture is focused on building useful things
Speaker 1: for real people. When leadership is dominated by managers that
Speaker 1: haven't touched a line of code in decades or talked
Speaker 1: to a normal person in decades, nobody steering the ship
Speaker 1: has the ability to judge whether software is good or useful,
Speaker 1: or valuable, or does anything other than help you raise
Speaker 1: venture capital, of course, and this is the direct result
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley's corruption by the managerial sect. While Propakar
Speaker 1: Ragavan may be a decorated computer scientist and academic, he
Speaker 1: arguably oversaw the destruction of Yahoo, formerly one of the
Speaker 1: Webb's most dominant search engines, and failed upwards into a
Speaker 1: managerial role that allowed him to take over and now
Speaker 1: arguably ruin Google's search product chasing Away Ben Gomes a
Speaker 1: hero and a man responsible for actually building things. Adam
Speaker 1: Masseri was and always will be a manager making calls
Speaker 1: about products he's had no hand in building, and has
Speaker 1: architected the outright destruction of a social network used by
Speaker 1: billions of people. And Sam Altman, a career failure famous
Speaker 1: for making himself rich and popular and upsetting and hurting
Speaker 1: the people he works with, is on course to become
Speaker 1: the most toxic manager of them all. If left unchecked,
Speaker 1: OpenAI will perpetuate one of the largest thefts in history,
Speaker 1: looting the Internet and using it to train models that
Speaker 1: have yet to prove their necessity. Other than there's a
Speaker 1: symbol that Silicon Valley has still fucking got it, even
Speaker 1: though it unquestionably doesn't when it comes to generative as yet,
Speaker 1: because Altman, like every manager, is so thoroughly divorced from
Speaker 1: natural production, he's only succeeded in generating unsustainable hype and
Speaker 1: making vague promises that the people who do the actual
Speaker 1: work at OpenAI likely know that they can't keep. And
Speaker 1: it's frustrating because, as I said before, bad guys keep winning.
Speaker 1: There are people in Silicon Valley making real products. There
Speaker 1: are people out there who are doing good things, but
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we
Speaker 1: entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don't
Speaker 1: build things. Just look at Humane, a company that raised
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of dollars to make a voice activated
Speaker 1: AI powered pin that the ultra popular YouTuber markus brownly
Speaker 1: called the worst product he'd ever reviewed. One might wonder
Speaker 1: how a company would willingly launch a seven hundred dollars
Speaker 1: product that overheated within minutes of use and repeatedly failed
Speaker 1: to answer basic queries. And the answer is actually really simple.
Speaker 1: Was founded by Bethny Bonziano, a former management consultant at PwC,
Speaker 1: and Imronchell Dori, a former director of design from Apple,
Speaker 1: that re firs to himself as an inventor and innovator
Speaker 1: that was fired in twenty seventeen for sending out an
Speaker 1: email about his planned exit from the company that suggested
Speaker 1: that Apple could no longer innovate. Well, may look at
Speaker 1: the humane pen. Do you think you innovated? Just to
Speaker 1: be clear, if you haven't seen this thing, you should
Speaker 1: really look it up. It's really funny. It clips on
Speaker 1: and you are meant to use it to project a
Speaker 1: laser thing onto your hand to make phone calls or
Speaker 1: take photos. It's got a little camera in it. Here's
Speaker 1: the problem. It overheats after a few minutes because of
Speaker 1: the laser. And on top of that, the queries don't
Speaker 1: work after time. And when they do, who really cares?
Speaker 1: It's just chat GPT except seven hundred dollars worth a
Speaker 1: twenty four dollars a month subscription. And this is what
Speaker 1: happens when you're insulated from real people's problems, and when
Speaker 1: you don't participate in the process that might actually solve them,
Speaker 1: you become fundamentally disconnect from any real value creation. Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley is atrophying as a result of lazy, disconnected vcs
Speaker 1: and power players elevating man like sam Altman and incumbents
Speaker 1: helping career consultants dictate the actions of those who actually
Speaker 1: build software and hardware. If the tech industry wants to
Speaker 1: escape the public's eire, it should push back against this
Speaker 1: managerial poison and talk to real people with real problems
Speaker 1: and focus on solving those before creating yet another growth
Speaker 1: centric bullshit machine. And as the value really wants to change,
Speaker 1: it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards
Speaker 1: just because they say the right things. It feels good.
Speaker 1: I get it that we have a guy out there
Speaker 1: who's saying, yeah, I can help the value be worth money.
Speaker 1: But as we speak, in vidios down ten percent by
Speaker 1: the time this episode's out, I truly don't know where
Speaker 1: it will be. But I'm worried. I'm worried that the
Speaker 1: tech industry is going to start sputtering because every rues
Speaker 1: put their eggs in the AI basket. But I do
Speaker 1: have some hope. A lot of the startups I talked
Speaker 1: to are only slightly touching generative AI. They don't seem
Speaker 1: firmly embedded in it. Maybe this is just anecdotal, Maybe
Speaker 1: I just know good people. I don't know, but my
Speaker 1: thought here is the fact that the zero interest free
Speaker 1: generation has kind of ended. That venture capitalists can't just
Speaker 1: get hundreds of billions of dollars quite so easily. Means
Speaker 1: that they're not so quick to invest in this stuff.
Speaker 1: But I think are reckoning's coming, and I don't know
Speaker 1: if it will be from people, but I think it's
Speaker 1: going to be kind of a larger effect. It's going
Speaker 1: to be one where you see that these products just
Speaker 1: don't get adopted, like I mentioned in the AI episode,
Speaker 1: and I think you're going to see these big, nasty,
Speaker 1: overfunded consumer AI companies fall apart. But like I said before,
Speaker 1: I'm afraid the open AI is going to start falling apart,
Speaker 1: even if it is mostly part of Microsoft. I'm afraid
Speaker 1: of the knock on effects on the stock market. And
Speaker 1: I know, oh, stock market is only rich people play. No,
Speaker 1: that's people's pensions as people like regular people do actually
Speaker 1: invest in the stock market, and regular people watch Jim
Speaker 1: Kramer as he goes you need to invest in AI.
Speaker 1: That man does not know a goddamn thing. By the way,
Speaker 1: a lot of people who've responded to my AI episode
Speaker 1: have said, yeah, it's good that AI's fail. It's good
Speaker 1: that the tech industry is falling apart, and it feels
Speaker 1: good to see bad people fail. But the thing I
Speaker 1: need to caution you about is management consultants are also
Speaker 1: really good at avoiding blame. Prabakar Ragavan he destroyed Yahoo,
Speaker 1: or at least watched it happen, and he's now the
Speaker 1: head of Google Search and he's destroying that too. Sam
Speaker 1: Altman has messed up so many times, and yet here
Speaker 1: he is. He's the king of Open AI. He gets
Speaker 1: these glossy stories. He can be interviewed by anyone anywhere.
Speaker 1: These people keep winning, but you want to know how
Speaker 1: they get defeated Sunlight talk about them, Talk about Adam Maseri,
Speaker 1: talk about Sam Mortman. These stories to your friends, say
Speaker 1: the name Propacar Ragavan. As much as you can blame
Speaker 1: these people for their actions, I can't say it will
Speaker 1: change much. But at least the wider society will know
Speaker 1: who to blame for destroying the Internet. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and
Speaker 1: composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You
Speaker 1: can check out more of his music and audio projects
Speaker 1: at Matasowski dot com. M A t t O. S
Speaker 1: O w Ski dot com. You can email me at
Speaker 1: easy at better offline dot com or check out better
Speaker 1: Offline dot com to find my newsletter and more links
Speaker 1: to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better
Speaker 1: Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
Speaker 1: from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
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