Speaker 1: Zone Media. Hello there, I'm at Zetron and welcome to
Speaker 1: Better Offline and you're on the second part of the
Speaker 1: Business City at Trilogy. And indeed that was a concept
Speaker 1: I introduced you to last episode. Think of the business
Speaker 1: idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con
Speaker 1: has become the standard way of doing business for an
Speaker 1: alarmingly large part of society. The business audiot is the
Speaker 1: manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted,
Speaker 1: and the CEO of a public company that says boring,
Speaker 1: specious nonsense about artificial intelligence that the tenured professor that
Speaker 1: you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears
Speaker 1: to be opening and closing the laptop, and the consultant
Speaker 1: that can come up with a million reasons to charge
Speaker 1: you more money, yet not one metric to judge their
Speaker 1: success by. Also the marketing executive that's worked exactly three
Speaker 1: years at every major cloud player but does not appear
Speaker 1: to have done it anything. And of course the investor
Speaker 1: that invests based on founders but really means guys that
Speaker 1: look and sound exactly like me. These people are present
Speaker 1: throughout the private and public sector and our governments too,
Speaker 1: and they paradoxically do nothing of substance, but somehow damage
Speaker 1: everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public
Speaker 1: and private sector is entirely useless, just that these people
Speaker 1: are poisoned so many partss of our power structure that
Speaker 1: avoiding them is entirely impossible. Our economy is oriented around them,
Speaker 1: made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their
Speaker 1: literal only goal in life has been to take and
Speaker 1: use power and help others who feel the same. The
Speaker 1: business is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they
Speaker 1: need to, including harming the institution that they work for
Speaker 1: or those closest to them, like their coworkers, of their community,
Speaker 1: as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades
Speaker 1: of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize
Speaker 1: society to become management, to manage or run a company,
Speaker 1: rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're
Speaker 1: incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into
Speaker 1: whatever field the person goes into, be a public or private.
Speaker 1: Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions.
Speaker 1: As such, every government, the top quarter of every chart
Speaker 1: features little neroes, who, instead of battling the fire and
Speaker 1: gulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces, strumming an off
Speaker 1: key version of Wonder Wall and the Lyre and grumbling
Speaker 1: about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe
Speaker 1: we could replace them with an LLM or a smart
Speaker 1: sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor
Speaker 1: forces at arm's length, and effectively, anything built at scale
Speaker 1: quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer.
Speaker 1: This disconnection or alienation better put sits at the center
Speaker 1: of almost every problem I've ever talked about. Why would
Speaker 1: companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their
Speaker 1: services even though their customers don't like it and it
Speaker 1: doesn't really work. It's simple they neither know or care
Speaker 1: what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function,
Speaker 1: They barely know what their products do, and barely understand
Speaker 1: what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels
Speaker 1: magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an
Speaker 1: impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate
Speaker 1: way of describing how most existives and middle managers operate.
Speaker 1: But let me get a little more specific. An IBM
Speaker 1: study based on conversations with two thousand global CEOs recently
Speaker 1: found that only twenty five percent of AI initiatives have
Speaker 1: delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years,
Speaker 1: and were still sixty four percent of the CEO's surveyed
Speaker 1: acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments
Speaker 1: in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the
Speaker 1: value they brought to the organization. Fifty percent of respondents
Speaker 1: also found that the pace of recent investments has left
Speaker 1: their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology, almost as if they
Speaker 1: don't know what they're doing and they're just put in
Speaker 1: AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason.
Speaker 1: Johnson and Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad
Speaker 1: generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value
Speaker 1: use cases. I quote from The Wall Street Journal adding
Speaker 1: that only ten to fifteen percent of use cases were
Speaker 1: driving about eight percent of the value pareto principle MVP
Speaker 1: baby its last two CEOs, Alex Gorsky and Yoki Duato,
Speaker 1: both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous ten years
Speaker 1: at J ANDJ being some sort of chairman or vice president,
Speaker 1: and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and
Speaker 1: marketing people. A fun fact about Bill Gorsky. During his
Speaker 1: first tenure at Johnson Johnson, he led marketing of products
Speaker 1: that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off
Speaker 1: the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more
Speaker 1: drugs to old people. Well a lovely man. The term
Speaker 1: executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers
Speaker 1: and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead,
Speaker 1: They prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run
Speaker 1: predominantly by people that by design are entirely removed from
Speaker 1: the business itself, even in roles like marketing. In sales
Speaker 1: were cemos and vps park orders without really participating in
Speaker 1: the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in
Speaker 1: entry level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work,
Speaker 1: and that too, is the neoliberal poison in the veins
Speaker 1: of our society, because by definition, your very first experience
Speaker 1: of the workforce is working hard enough so that you
Speaker 1: don't have to work as hard, and you have to
Speaker 1: do the shit that nobody else wants to do and anyway.
Speaker 1: The same managerial types you bitch about the entitlement and
Speaker 1: unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that
Speaker 1: are also viscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder,
Speaker 1: typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them
Speaker 1: in responsibilities that they're increasingly burned out senior workers, or
Speaker 1: SEEAI as a way to eliminate what they see as
Speaker 1: an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce.
Speaker 1: I should also be clear with that this is the
Speaker 1: big thing with AI and jobs right now, that people
Speaker 1: are afraid of these entry level positions that are going
Speaker 1: to get quote automated out. I made a point in
Speaker 1: the last monologue that I want to clear up as well.
Speaker 1: I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I
Speaker 1: think it's taken jobs already. Tons of freelancers, copy editors,
Speaker 1: aren't directors. People are really suffering. The point is these people,
Speaker 1: the business idiots. They want you to believe that AI
Speaker 1: is going to take every job next year, in three months,
Speaker 1: or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't
Speaker 1: tell you they don't understand they're fucking wrong. They need
Speaker 1: you to do this so that you start giving up.
Speaker 1: That you give up because you giving up gives them
Speaker 1: more power. If you believe they can replace you with
Speaker 1: AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will.
Speaker 1: They will do so. Now it may happen to you anyway.
Speaker 1: They may happen that they'll put an AI that can't
Speaker 1: do the shit that you do and replace you with
Speaker 1: properly contract labor. That's gonna happen, regardless of whether AI happens.
Speaker 1: Off suring and contract to work have being eroding employment
Speaker 1: work for a long time at will. Employment in America
Speaker 1: is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The
Speaker 1: way that labor is treated here is fucking insane. And
Speaker 1: a little comment as well for this episode. As I
Speaker 1: record this, the Vox Union is yet to get an
Speaker 1: agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not
Speaker 1: give the deal in the next week, you're probably gonna
Speaker 1: hear this one that's happening. I request that every single
Speaker 1: listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott
Speaker 1: every single Vox property, which because the Verge has some
Speaker 1: great writers and also Neli Patel, and you should boycott
Speaker 1: everything that Fox is doing right now based on this anyway,
Speaker 1: which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter
Speaker 1: called hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones
Speaker 1: who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox
Speaker 1: is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox,
Speaker 1: do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway,
Speaker 1: moving on, one of my favorite things that really fucking
Speaker 1: pissed me off was quite ac quitting it. It was
Speaker 1: something that they've berated people for in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: And is this gas the euphemism for doing the job
Speaker 1: as specified in your employment agreement. Because journalism is enthralled
Speaker 1: by the management class, and because the management class has
Speaker 1: so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means, the
Speaker 1: people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this
Speaker 1: is because the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker
Speaker 1: as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as
Speaker 1: a kind of an asset that must provide a return.
Speaker 1: As a result, if another asset comes long that could
Speaker 1: potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or
Speaker 1: a theoretical AI agent, that medal manager won't hesitate to
Speaker 1: start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting
Speaker 1: rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing
Speaker 1: that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read
Speaker 1: the manager's mind, and also keeps asking the manager all
Speaker 1: these annoying questions. Leave the manager and learn to get paid.
Speaker 1: But really, though, our official intelligence is the ultimate paniseer
Speaker 1: of the business city, a tool that gives an impression
Speaker 1: of productivity with far more production than the business city
Speaker 1: it themselves because they don't really do any work. The
Speaker 1: Information reported recently that Service Now CEO Bill McDermott, the
Speaker 1: chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of
Speaker 1: over two hundred billion dollars. By the way, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do,
Speaker 1: he chose to bush Ai across his entire organization, both
Speaker 1: in the product and in practice in the organization itself,
Speaker 1: based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with
Speaker 1: a raven finding a shiny object. The following is an
Speaker 1: actual quote from the article HM. When chain GPT debuted
Speaker 1: in November twenty twenty, McDermott joined his executives around a
Speaker 1: boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there,
Speaker 1: he made a quick decision, and this is a guy's voice.
Speaker 1: Bill's like, let me make it clear to everybody here.
Speaker 1: Everything you do Aiyi Hei Ai AI recalled sitson the
Speaker 1: Service Now Vice chair to begin a customer meeting on AI.
Speaker 1: Mcdommot has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to
Speaker 1: their best impression of him. Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. Ooh,
Speaker 1: I'm a fucking idiot. Anyway, present AI not as a
Speaker 1: matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms
Speaker 1: like business transformation. During the push to grow AI, mcdommot
Speaker 1: has insisted these manager's improve efficiency across their teams. He's
Speaker 1: laser focused on the sales team's participation rate. Let's assume
Speaker 1: you're a manager and you have twelve direct reports, he said. Now,
Speaker 1: let's assume out of those twelve, two people did good,
Speaker 1: which it was so good that the manager was one
Speaker 1: hundred and ten percent of plan. I don't think that's good.
Speaker 1: I tell the manager what did the other ten do?
Speaker 1: You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What
Speaker 1: do you mean, efficienc See what does that quote even mean?
Speaker 1: One hundred and ten percent of plan? What are you
Speaker 1: on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill,
Speaker 1: did you like, do you have a gas leak in service? Now?
Speaker 1: I fucking swear these people make so much money, but
Speaker 1: when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They
Speaker 1: sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff
Speaker 1: like that to someone, they check us for a concussion.
Speaker 1: But I'd wager that mister McDermot is concussion free. And
Speaker 1: then true example of a business idiot, a person with
Speaker 1: incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on
Speaker 1: knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the
Speaker 1: latest shiny object that makes him thing line go up. No,
Speaker 1: that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: he said to Yahoo Financed that the metaverse was real
Speaker 1: and that service Now could help someone create an emil
Speaker 1: in the metaverse and have a futuristic storefront of some sort.
Speaker 1: One might wonder how Service Now provided that, and the
Speaker 1: answer is it did not provide that at all. I
Speaker 1: cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes
Speaker 1: anything of the sort. But like any of these CEOs,
Speaker 1: he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just
Speaker 1: is des can't asked. Motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a
Speaker 1: stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it
Speaker 1: got there, but hasn't been removed, and it's kind of
Speaker 1: difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up.
Speaker 1: The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and
Speaker 1: the media has due to a large amount of business
Speaker 1: idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the
Speaker 1: editorial class, being trained to never ask different questions such as,
Speaker 1: what the fuck are you talking about, Bill, or even
Speaker 1: the simple what does that mean? Or how would you
Speaker 1: do that? Or I'm not sure I understand? Would you
Speaker 1: mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of
Speaker 1: the overall problem. Though so many layers of editorial and
Speaker 1: managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything,
Speaker 1: and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's
Speaker 1: ignorant themselves. We're still, in many fields, journalism included, we're
Speaker 1: rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right
Speaker 1: in the way that keeps the people with the keys
Speaker 1: from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded
Speaker 1: for saying the right thing at the right time, which
Speaker 1: more often than not means resembling our white male superiors,
Speaker 1: speaking like our peers, and delivering results in the way
Speaker 1: that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves. Now.
Speaker 1: A great example of our vibeespace society was back in
Speaker 1: October twenty twenty one, where a Washington Post article written
Speaker 1: by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing
Speaker 1: a Microsoft funded anti remote work study and quoting an
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty year old economist called Alfred Marshall
Speaker 1: about how and I quote workers gather in dense clusters,
Speaker 1: ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've
Speaker 1: written academic papers about him, and also ignoring how excited
Speaker 1: he was about eugenics or the fact that he was
Speaker 1: writing about fucking factories. Remote work terrifies the business idiot
Speaker 1: because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to
Speaker 1: stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative,
Speaker 1: and white and black women are less likely to be
Speaker 1: promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of the
Speaker 1: office is all about making sure the business idiot continues
Speaker 1: railing supreme. Removing the ability for the MANAGERI or horn
Speaker 1: monitors to look at you and try and work out
Speaker 1: what you're doing without ever really helping is a big
Speaker 1: part of being a manager. And if for a manager
Speaker 1: hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge
Speaker 1: you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.
Speaker 1: The business idiot does reim supreme. Their existence holds up
Speaker 1: every public company almost and remote work was the first
Speaker 1: time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily.
Speaker 1: Google demanded employees returned to the office in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because
Speaker 1: absolutely none of the decision making was done with people
Speaker 1: that actually do work. In mind, while we can, well
Speaker 1: you can, I'm not interested debate whether exclusively working remote
Speaker 1: is productive or not. The return to office push was
Speaker 1: almost entirely done in two ways, one executive's demanding people
Speaker 1: return to the office, two journalists asking executives if remote
Speaker 1: work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that
Speaker 1: do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good,
Speaker 1: and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how
Speaker 1: bad it was, asking managers. This guy called Callum Boucher's
Speaker 1: over the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some
Speaker 1: real scorches, Borcher scorches, if you call them, by which
Speaker 1: I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing
Speaker 1: what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run
Speaker 1: a PR firm that should tell you everything. But The
Speaker 1: New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: and many many other outlets all fell for this crap
Speaker 1: because the business idiots have captured our media too, training
Speaker 1: even talented journalists to dever to power every term. When
Speaker 1: every power structure is stuff full of do nothing management
Speaker 1: types that have learned exactly as little as they need
Speaker 1: to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to
Speaker 1: them specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful sideas Look at
Speaker 1: the coverage of AI or the metaverse or cryptocurrency or clubhouse.
Speaker 1: Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based
Speaker 1: on practical experience or what the technology can do, but
Speaker 1: what the powerful and the popular as suddenly interested in.
Speaker 1: Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and
Speaker 1: that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism
Speaker 1: from small blogs to the biggest mast heads. Look at
Speaker 1: how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they
Speaker 1: ask things like Neeli Ptel's hundred plus word questions to
Speaker 1: send off as shy, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk,
Speaker 1: the constant scam artist who has an FT thing. NELI,
Speaker 1: what the pardon me? Pardon me? Let me take this
Speaker 1: from the top. If you look at how reporters talk
Speaker 1: to executives, you should look not just at the way
Speaker 1: they ask things, but the things they accept them saying,
Speaker 1: and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told.
Speaker 1: Sach An Adela is the CEO of a company with
Speaker 1: a market capitalization of over three trillion dollars that's Microsoft,
Speaker 1: by the way, and, according to an interview mentioned in
Speaker 1: the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and
Speaker 1: digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of
Speaker 1: his daily working life. I have no idea how you
Speaker 1: are a reporter. Do not say, Satcha, what the fuck
Speaker 1: you're outsourcing most of your life degenerate ive AI, that's insane,
Speaker 1: or even do you actually do that? And then asking
Speaker 1: further questions but that would get you in trouble. And
Speaker 1: the editorial class is the managerial class now, and it's
Speaker 1: spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not
Speaker 1: to ask questions, how not to push back, and to
Speaker 1: believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them.
Speaker 1: Karas wish as half asked interviews are considered daring and
Speaker 1: critical because journalism has at large lost its teeth, breeding
Speaker 1: reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things,
Speaker 1: and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse
Speaker 1: to fall in line. The reason that they don't want
Speaker 1: you to ask these questions is that the business idiot
Speaker 1: isn't big on answers. Editors that tell you to not
Speaker 1: push too hard at doing so because they know the
Speaker 1: executive one have an answer, or they themselves don't know
Speaker 1: fucking anything. It isn't just about the pr person that
Speaker 1: trained them, but the fact that these men more often
Speaker 1: than not do not have a glancing understanding of their
Speaker 1: underlying business or even the things they're saying. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part
Speaker 1: of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism.
Speaker 1: While we can and should scream at the disconnected idiots
Speaker 1: that ran vice into the ground, the problem is everywhere
Speaker 1: because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but
Speaker 1: infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom. While there are
Speaker 1: some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely
Speaker 1: understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or
Speaker 1: that make reportersable punches for fear of advertiser blowback, or
Speaker 1: worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media.
Speaker 1: Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward.
Speaker 1: That and mentorship is dead across effectively or parts of society,
Speaker 1: meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learned by
Speaker 1: watching each other, which means they all make sure to
Speaker 1: not ask the rough questions and not push back too
Speaker 1: hard against the party or market or company messaging until
Speaker 1: everybody else is doing it. And under these conditions business
Speaker 1: idiots thrive. The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness
Speaker 1: and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance, and of theft. Mentoring
Speaker 1: people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It
Speaker 1: may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately in
Speaker 1: the mind of a business that it creates a competitor
Speaker 1: or arrival. Investing in talent or worker conditions, or even
Speaker 1: really work itself would require you to know what you're
Speaker 1: talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make
Speaker 1: sense when you're talking to a work who should be
Speaker 1: doing it for you, and they're the ones that are
Speaker 1: meant to work, right, you're there to manage them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you
Speaker 1: wanted to do. I ask you need to step in
Speaker 1: and help on something. And that's so annoy you. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm a manager. I'm not here to non sir, I'm
Speaker 1: a blog here. I'm not here to do work. Just
Speaker 1: know the stuff, do the stuff. I have to go
Speaker 1: get lunch, and then I have to go back out
Speaker 1: because I have another lunch. Okay enough, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: you want another thing. Why haven't you done the thing?
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you yet. Anyway, I believe that this
Speaker 1: is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful, to
Speaker 1: the point that everything in the world is constructed to
Speaker 1: reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path.
Speaker 1: Our stock market is inherently illogical, driven not by whether
Speaker 1: a company is good or is bad, but whether it
Speaker 1: can show growth even if said growth is horrifically unprofitable
Speaker 1: or ultimately unsustainable. I'd argue it's because the market has
Speaker 1: no idea how to make intelligent decisions, just complex ones
Speaker 1: that mean you don't really have to understand the business
Speaker 1: so much as you have to understand the associated vibes
Speaker 1: of the industry and the weird black magic of how
Speaker 1: hedge funds work. Freedman's influence and Reagan's policies have allowed
Speaker 1: our markets to be dominated by business idiocy, where a
Speaker 1: bad company can be a good stock because everybody, specifically
Speaker 1: other traders and the business press likes how it looks
Speaker 1: and smells, which allows the business idiots to continue making
Speaker 1: profit using illogical and partially rigged market making, with the
Speaker 1: business press helpfully pushing up their narratives. This also keeps
Speaker 1: regular people from accumulating too much wealth. If regular people
Speaker 1: could set the tone for the markets as a company
Speaker 1: that makes something people like and people pay them for it,
Speaker 1: and they make more money than they spend, that may
Speaker 1: make things a little too even. It would make things
Speaker 1: too accessible. Why would you hire a hedge one where
Speaker 1: you could just follow a common sense No, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's not how we run our markets here, sir. It
Speaker 1: doesn't matter that core Weave, a company that went from
Speaker 1: mining crypto to taking on multi billion dollar contracts to
Speaker 1: provide compute for open AI and other companies, quite literally
Speaker 1: does not have enough money for its capital expenditures and
Speaker 1: lost over three hundred million dollars in the last quarter.
Speaker 1: But everyone still liked it because if it's year over
Speaker 1: year of growth, which was four hundred and twenty percent,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter that Corewave has an October loan payment
Speaker 1: that will crush the life out of the company either.
Speaker 1: These narratives referred to the media knowing that the media
Speaker 1: will print them because thinking too hard about stock would
Speaker 1: mean the business idiot had to think also, and that
Speaker 1: is not why they're in this business. The AI trade
Speaker 1: is the business idiot nirvana, a fascination for a managerial
Speaker 1: class that long since gave up any kind of meaningful
Speaker 1: contribution to the bottom line, as moving away from fundamental
Speaker 1: creation of value as a business naturally leads to the
Speaker 1: same kind of specious value that one finds from generative AI.
Speaker 1: Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or
Speaker 1: that llms don't do anything or even than there's no
Speaker 1: possible commercial use case for them. They just don't do enough,
Speaker 1: almost by design, And we're watching companies desperately try and
Speaker 1: contort them into something, anything that might work, pretending so
Speaker 1: fucking hard they'll stake their entire futures on the idea
Speaker 1: scrimming just fucking work? Will you? Agent Force doesn't make
Speaker 1: any money? It sucks, But goddamn is Marky Mark Bennioff
Speaker 1: gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent
Speaker 1: Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Bennioff and
Speaker 1: Salesforce have got rich selling to fellow business idiots who
Speaker 1: then shove Salesforce into their organization without thinking about who
Speaker 1: would use it or how they'd use it other than
Speaker 1: in most general purposes, which they can barely explain anyway.
Speaker 1: Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product,
Speaker 1: charging right now two dollars a conversation for a chat
Speaker 1: that to quote, the information provides customers with and I
Speaker 1: quote incorrect answers AI hallucinations while testing how the software
Speaker 1: handles customer service queries. I should also add I've heard
Speaker 1: rumblings that salesforce will actually be changing to a different
Speaker 1: model now because the two dollars conversation one has really
Speaker 1: not been working for them. I just don't think the
Speaker 1: new one is going to work either. But generat of
Speaker 1: AI this hit is catnip to the business idio, because
Speaker 1: the business idiot really ideally never has to deal with
Speaker 1: work workers or customers. Generave AI doesn't do enough to
Speaker 1: actually help us be better at our jobs, but it
Speaker 1: gives a good enough impression of something useful so that
Speaker 1: it can convince someone really stupid that doesn't understand what
Speaker 1: you do that they don't need you. Sometimes, a generative
Speaker 1: output is a kind of generic solus version of a production,
Speaker 1: one that resembles exactly how a know nothing executive or
Speaker 1: manager would summarize your work. Open AI's deep research. Wow's
Speaker 1: professional business idiot Ezra Cline, and I'll link to his
Speaker 1: shitty fucking article in the show notes, because he doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to realize that part of research is the research itself,
Speaker 1: not just the out as you learn about stuff. As
Speaker 1: you research a topic and you come to a conclusion,
Speaker 1: you search for things, and you don't just go I
Speaker 1: have enough research now. You kind of like dig in
Speaker 1: and you learn things and you come to something called
Speaker 1: a conclusion. This is what you would know if you
Speaker 1: did work. But back to AI. The concept of an
Speaker 1: agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of
Speaker 1: the managerial sect. It's a work that they can personally
Speaker 1: command to generate product that they say as their own,
Speaker 1: all without having to know or do anything other than
Speaker 1: the bare minimum of keeping up appearances, which is the
Speaker 1: entirety of the business that it's resume. I should also
Speaker 1: add the other term for this is slave, and it's
Speaker 1: something that everyone's fucking dancing around. And the reason the
Speaker 1: AGI people Kevin Ruson included, don't want to talk about
Speaker 1: what the actual consequences of conscious AI, which is fictional
Speaker 1: by the way, are is because what people are describing
Speaker 1: me with AGI is a form of slavery. If this
Speaker 1: thing is conscious, it means that we are enslaving a
Speaker 1: conscious being to do our bidding. That's called slavery. And
Speaker 1: we're not going to get AGI from these freaks. But
Speaker 1: I think the next person that interviews Wario Ama Day
Speaker 1: or Sam Moltman or satchan Adella and they bring up agents,
Speaker 1: they should say they should bring up AGI and say
Speaker 1: what do you think of AGI? Get talking about it
Speaker 1: and then say so this conscious creation? They say yes,
Speaker 1: and you say this conscious creation that you own? Yes,
Speaker 1: so you own the conscious creation? Yes, I own the agent. Great,
Speaker 1: so you own slaves? And just see what they do,
Speaker 1: because that really is it. I feel like every AGI
Speaker 1: conversation really that this is what they don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about because they're describing how do we make a
Speaker 1: digital slave and they're afraid of that language because they
Speaker 1: know the shit storm that would come, which is why
Speaker 1: I think everyone needs to start calling it that it
Speaker 1: is slavery. That's what they're trying to do. They want
Speaker 1: a digital wife, or a digital work slaver, or a
Speaker 1: digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot
Speaker 1: that does things that go up and get them a soda.
Speaker 1: And I drink like eleven diet cokes a day. I
Speaker 1: can get up and do it myself. I'm not fucking
Speaker 1: stupid or lazy, but I think it's important. This is
Speaker 1: such a tangent as well. But I'm glad I said
Speaker 1: it put back to the thing. As far as the
Speaker 1: business idiot career goes, though they've mostly built it on
Speaker 1: only knowing exactly enough to get by, and they don't
Speaker 1: dig into what large language models can actually do other
Speaker 1: than hammering away at Chat GPT in saying we must
Speaker 1: put this in everything, Everything must have AI now. Yet
Speaker 1: the real problem is that for every business city it's
Speaker 1: selling a product, there are many more that will buy out.
Speaker 1: Which has worked in the past for software as a
Speaker 1: service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, howking
Speaker 1: giant annual contracts and continual upsells because CIOs and CTOs
Speaker 1: that's chief information officer and chief technology officers work for
Speaker 1: business city at CEOs that demand that they put AI
Speaker 1: in everything now, a nonsensical and desperate rebit that's part
Speaker 1: of the growth last and part ignorance born of the
Speaker 1: fear that one gets when they're out of their depth
Speaker 1: and want to follow everyone else, and how they are
Speaker 1: honking Look at every single institution installing some kind of
Speaker 1: Chat GPT integration and look for the business idiom. Perhaps
Speaker 1: it's the cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia who claimed
Speaker 1: that giving everybody a Chat GPT subscription would elevate students'
Speaker 1: educational experiences across all fields of study in powers faculties
Speaker 1: teaching and research and help provide the highly educated workforce
Speaker 1: that will drive California's future AI driven economy, Which is
Speaker 1: a nonsensical series of words to justify a sixteen point
Speaker 1: nine million a year single vendor, no bid contract or
Speaker 1: a product that is best known as either a shitty
Speaker 1: search engine or a way for college students to cheat.
Speaker 1: And I think that any actually tons of teachers listen
Speaker 1: to this. Sorry for how much that paragraph pissed you
Speaker 1: off in some ways. By the way, Sam Altman is
Speaker 1: also the business idiot's antichrist. He takes advantage of a
Speaker 1: society with a powerful rarely know much other than what
Speaker 1: they want to control or dominate. Chat, GPT and other
Speaker 1: AI tools are for the most part sold based on
Speaker 1: what they might do in the future to people that
Speaker 1: will never really use them. An Aortman has done well
Speaker 1: to manipulate, pest and terrify those empowered the idea that
Speaker 1: they might miss out on something. Does anyone know what
Speaker 1: what it is? No, they don't, because the powerful are
Speaker 1: business idiots, too willing to accept anything that somebody brings
Speaker 1: along that makes them feel good or bad in a
Speaker 1: way that they can make headlines with in any case,
Speaker 1: alltmand's whole Slopenheimer motif has worked wonders on the business
Speaker 1: idiots in the markets and global governments that fear what
Speaker 1: AI could do. Even if they can't really define artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence or what it could do or what it is,
Speaker 1: they're scared of it doing. The fear of China's rise
Speaker 1: in AI is one particularly based on sinophobia, but also
Speaker 1: based on the fact that China has their own business
Speaker 1: idiot's willing to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into
Speaker 1: data centers which are, according to some stories, not being
Speaker 1: used over there is that good anyway. Generative AI has
Speaker 1: created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest
Speaker 1: of the society. It's forced adoption and proliferation, providing a
Speaker 1: meager return for the massive investment of capital, and the
Speaker 1: revulsion it causes in many people, not just in the
Speaker 1: business idiot's excitement in replacing them, but how wrong the
Speaker 1: business idia is. Well, there are people that dick around
Speaker 1: with chat GBT. Years since it launched, we still can't
Speaker 1: find a clean way to say what it does and
Speaker 1: why it matters, other than the fact that everybody agreed
Speaker 1: it did and a lot of people are putting a
Speaker 1: lot of money into things that look like it. The media,
Speaker 1: now piloted by business idiots, has found itself deplored, its reporters, unprepared, unwilling,
Speaker 1: and unsupported. The backbone torn out of most newsrooms for
Speaker 1: fear that they're being too critical and that doing so
Speaker 1: is somehow not being objected, despite the fact that what
Speaker 1: you choose to cover objectively is still subjective. Report are
Speaker 1: still to this day as these companies burn hundreds of
Speaker 1: billions of dollars to make an industry the size of
Speaker 1: the mobile free to play gaming industry, refuse to save
Speaker 1: things that bluntly, because the cost of influence is coming
Speaker 1: down and these companies have some of the smartest people
Speaker 1: in the world, they ignore the truth that sits in
Speaker 1: front of them that the combined annual recurring revenue of
Speaker 1: the Information's comprehensive database of every single generative AI company
Speaker 1: is less than ten billion dollars or four billion dollars
Speaker 1: if you remove anthropic and open AI. You can add
Speaker 1: on top of that, by the way, the thirteen billion
Speaker 1: dollars that Microsoft makes, ten billion dollars of which is
Speaker 1: open AI's compute spend on Azure and there's an information
Speaker 1: story behind that too. Yeah, it's so small, man, it's
Speaker 1: so small. The revenue is so small. I cannot get
Speaker 1: over how small it is. But chat GPT's popularity is
Speaker 1: the ultimate business city, its success story. It's the fastest
Speaker 1: growing product in Silicon Valley history that didn't grow because
Speaker 1: it was super useful or good at anything, or able
Speaker 1: to do a specific thing, but because it could do
Speaker 1: a lot of vague things, and because the media is
Speaker 1: controlled by business idiots who decided it was the next
Speaker 1: big thing and started talking about it NonStop since November
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, and
Speaker 1: even to this day, even if the company can't really
Speaker 1: explain what it is you're meant to use it for,
Speaker 1: everybody still acts super impressed. Much like the business city
Speaker 1: it themselves. Chat gpt doesn't need to do anything specific.
Speaker 1: It just needs to make the right sounds at the
Speaker 1: right times to impress people that barely care what it
Speaker 1: does other than the fact it makes them feel forward looking,
Speaker 1: trail blazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots,
Speaker 1: not middle and just not executives, not coaches, not NBA's
Speaker 1: not CEOs, not Kevin Bruce, not Neeli Patel have seen
Speaker 1: this for what it was early and often, but real
Speaker 1: people are seldom the ones with the keys, and the media,
Speaker 1: even the people writing good stuff rigally fails to directly
Speaker 1: and clearly say what's going on. The media is scared
Speaker 1: of doing the wrong thing, of getting in trouble with
Speaker 1: someone for misquoting them or misreading what they said. And
Speaker 1: in a society where in depth knowledge is subordinate to
Speaker 1: knowing enough catchphrases, the fight often doesn't feel worth it.
Speaker 1: Even with Needitor is blessing and frankly, I don't believe
Speaker 1: that most outlets give their writers any backing. Sam Willman
Speaker 1: humiliated a writer from The Verge last year. I didn't
Speaker 1: see fucking Neeli Patel say boo. Probably can see once
Speaker 1: I'm on the pod. I'm backing on Neelight because Neil
Speaker 1: has done some good shit at some point. It's just
Speaker 1: that when you have power and you use it in
Speaker 1: such a Lasaday's agal power forward way, someone's got to
Speaker 1: do it, you know. I wanted to wrap this up
Speaker 1: into a nice two part, so that was the original plan.
Speaker 1: I couldn't do it. It's not going to happen. But
Speaker 1: this next one's gonna be fun. The third part is
Speaker 1: gonna be a laugh. It's gonna give you some hope,
Speaker 1: and we'll both enjoy being pissy about something together. And
Speaker 1: this next episode will truly wrap this up. And I
Speaker 1: really appreciate you for listening to our first three part episode.
Speaker 1: I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 2: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 2: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 2: T O s O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 2: can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
Speaker 2: or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 2: links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 2: you go to chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to
Speaker 2: visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
Speaker 2: to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. Better off Line is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media.
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