Speaker 1: Aw Zon Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, Well, welcome to Better Offline.
Speaker 3: I'm your host ed zitron, of course, and I want
Speaker 3: to start you off with a little bit of a question.
Speaker 3: Have you ever heard Sam Moltman, the CEO of Open
Speaker 3: AI speak, you ever heard the words come out of
Speaker 3: his mouth? Look, I'm gonna share with you today some
Speaker 3: of the trench and insights from Sam Moortman. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: start with this agonizing thirty seven minute long podcast conversation
Speaker 3: he had with his brother Jack Oltman from last month.
Speaker 3: I warn you he really is an annoying and stupid dickhead.
Speaker 4: Well, I think there will be incredible like other products,
Speaker 4: like there will be crazy new social experiences. There will
Speaker 4: be like Google Docs style AI workfloths that are just
Speaker 4: way more productive. You'll start to see like you'll have
Speaker 4: these like virtual employees. But the thing that I think
Speaker 4: will be the most impactful on that five to ten
Speaker 4: year time for him is a I will actually discover
Speaker 4: new science.
Speaker 3: Yes, this tech podcast is now actually a food podcast,
Speaker 3: and today's special is the word salad. When asked why
Speaker 3: he believes AI will discover new science, Altman says, I
Speaker 3: think we've cracked reasoning in the models, adding that we've
Speaker 3: got a long way to go and that he thinks
Speaker 3: we know what to do, adding the open AI's three
Speaker 3: model is already pretty smart, and that he's heard people say, wow,
Speaker 3: this is like a good PhD. And that's the entire answer.
Speaker 3: By the way, it's a completely nonsensical answer. Sam Altman,
Speaker 3: the CEO of open Ai, a company allegedly worth three
Speaker 3: hundred billion dollars to venture capitalists and soft bank, can
Speaker 3: he kind of sounds like a huge fucking idiot. But
Speaker 3: head you cry, you can't just call Sam Altman an idiot.
Speaker 3: He isn't stupid. He runs a big company, he's super successful.
Speaker 3: My counter to that is, firstest I can, I'm actually
Speaker 3: doing it right now. And second, if Altman didn't want
Speaker 3: to be called stupid, he wouldn't say stupid shit with
Speaker 3: a straight face to a massive global audience now when
Speaker 3: he's rather Jack asked, so reasoning will lead to science
Speaker 3: going faster or just new stuff or both? And by
Speaker 3: the way, that is the question, Sam Oltman said.
Speaker 4: I mean, you already hear scientists who say they're faster
Speaker 4: with AI, Like we don't have AI maybe autonomously doing science.
Speaker 4: But if a human scientist is three times is productive?
Speaker 4: Using three that's still a pretty big deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then as that keeps going and the AI can
Speaker 4: like autonomously do some science figure out novel physics.
Speaker 3: At this point, Jack Oltman asked if and I quote,
Speaker 3: that is all happening as a co pilot now, And
Speaker 3: I know it sounds like I may have maybe misunderstood him.
Speaker 3: Maybe I read the transcription.
Speaker 2: I didn't. Actually I listened to the whole thing.
Speaker 3: In fact, Matasowski, my producer, please play the clipping question.
Speaker 4: Is it all that happening as a copilot right now? Yeah,
Speaker 4: there's there's definitely not like you definitely can't go say
Speaker 4: like hey CHATGYBT figure out new physics and expect that
Speaker 4: to work. So I think it is currently copilot. Like
Speaker 4: but I've ever heard like anecdotal reports from biologists where
Speaker 4: it's like, wow, it really did figure out an idea.
Speaker 4: I had to developed it a little bit more, but
Speaker 4: it made like a fundamental leap.
Speaker 3: Now, this is a nonsensical conversation, and both of them
Speaker 3: sound very, very stupid. To be clear, none of this
Speaker 3: is like poorly put into context, like they sound like
Speaker 3: this with the entire thirty seven minutes. I didn't have
Speaker 3: to do anything. I didn't need to make many moves
Speaker 3: to make them sound like stupid dickheads. They sound like
Speaker 3: it on their own. Now let's go to some of
Speaker 3: the more quotes. So, so this is going to make
Speaker 3: new science or make science faster, asked Jack Altman.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I hear scientists are using AI to go faster and
Speaker 3: citation needed there, Sammy. But if a human scientist goes
Speaker 3: three times faster and need another citation there using my model,
Speaker 3: that would be good. Also, I heard from a guy
Speaker 3: that he heard a guy who did biology who said
Speaker 3: this helped. And that's what Sam Mortman fucking said. Even
Speaker 3: even reading back the transcript, I feel what little of
Speaker 3: my sanity remains kind of stripping away. All of this
Speaker 3: is so good and so phenomenal. Let's give this man
Speaker 3: forty billion dollars or more every year until he creates
Speaker 3: super intelligence.
Speaker 2: That'll fucking work.
Speaker 3: But I want to share with you some of the
Speaker 3: other incredible quotes from the genius mind of Sam Ortman,
Speaker 3: A person with the integrity of Deepak Chopra and the
Speaker 3: ability to dismount innane, vapid shit. That sounds impressive to
Speaker 3: morons like well, Depak Chopra.
Speaker 4: You know, you hear these stories of people who like
Speaker 4: use AI to do market research and like figure out
Speaker 4: new products and then like email some manufacturer and get
Speaker 4: some dumb thing made and sell it on Amazon and
Speaker 4: run ads. Like there are people that have actually figured
Speaker 4: out a small scale and the most point ways possible
Speaker 4: how to like put a dollar into AI and get
Speaker 4: the AI to like run a toy business. But it's
Speaker 4: actually working. Yeah, so that'll climb the gradient.
Speaker 3: Now, you may wonder if the gradient is mentioned at
Speaker 3: some point elsewhere it's it's not but isn't clip.
Speaker 4: So every year before the last like maybe up until
Speaker 4: last year, I would have said, like, hey, I think
Speaker 4: this is going to go really far, but it still
Speaker 4: seems like there's a lot that we've got to figure
Speaker 4: out and is another clip if something goes wrong, I
Speaker 4: would say, like somehow it's that we build legitimate superintelligence
Speaker 4: and it doesn't make the world much better, doesn't change
Speaker 4: things as much as it sounds like it should, and
Speaker 4: just one more so, Yeah, I think the relativistic point
Speaker 4: is really important. But like you know, to us, our
Speaker 4: jobs feel incredibly important and stressful and satisfying, and if
Speaker 4: we're all just making better entertainment for each other in
Speaker 4: the future, maybe that's kind of what at least one
Speaker 4: of us is doing right now.
Speaker 3: It's goba doogook. It's nonsense. It's bullshit peddled by a
Speaker 3: guy who is only the most tangential understanding of the technologies,
Speaker 3: companies building that made him a billionaire. Every single interview
Speaker 3: with Sam Oltman is like this, every single one ever
Speaker 3: since he became a prominent tech investor and founder, without
Speaker 3: fail every time. And the sad part is that so
Speaker 3: Mortman is alone in this sunda. Pishai, when asked one
Speaker 3: of Neli Patel's patented one hundred word plus questions about
Speaker 3: Jonie Ivan Sam Wultman's new and likely heavily delayed hardware stop,
Speaker 3: had this the same.
Speaker 1: I think AI is going to be bigger than the Internet.
Speaker 1: There are going to be companies, products, category is created
Speaker 1: which we aren't aware of today. So I think the
Speaker 1: future looks exciting. I think there's a lot of opportunity
Speaker 1: to innovate around, innovate around hardware form factors at this
Speaker 1: moment with this platform shift, So I'm looking forward to
Speaker 1: seeing what they do you know we are going to
Speaker 1: be doing a lot as well, and I think you know,
Speaker 1: it's an exciting time to be a consumer, it's an
Speaker 1: exciting time to be a developer, So I think looking
Speaker 1: forward to it.
Speaker 2: The fuck are you on about, Sundar?
Speaker 3: Your answer to a question about whether you're anticipating more
Speaker 3: competition is to say, yeah, I think people are going
Speaker 3: to make the ship we haven't come up with yet,
Speaker 3: in a hardware of some sort will be involved. Well,
Speaker 3: I think Pashai is likely a little bit smarter than
Speaker 3: Clammy Sammy, in the same way that such A and
Speaker 3: the Della is a little bit smarter. That's sun up
Speaker 3: for Shai, and in the same way that a golden
Speaker 3: triever is smarter than the chiuahua. Well, that said, none
Speaker 3: of these men are superintelligences, nor when pressed, do they
Speaker 3: appear to have any actual answers or regular intelligences. Now,
Speaker 3: if you've read the newsletter version of this episode, you'll
Speaker 3: come across a multi paragraph answer from satching Adella when
Speaker 3: asked on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast how Microsoft will reach one
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty billion dollars in revenue from AGI. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to read it out here, and I don't
Speaker 3: hate you enough to include a clip. But the question was,
Speaker 3: how do you get Microsoft to one hundred and thirty
Speaker 3: billion dollars in revenue and such? In this the dello's
Speaker 3: answer is like one hundred and fifty words, and it's
Speaker 3: like abundance explosion. GDP will grow industrial revolution inflation adjusted percentages.
Speaker 3: The winners will be the people who do stuff, and
Speaker 3: then productivity will go up. I will link to this
Speaker 3: in of you in the episode notes because it's fucking nonsense,
Speaker 3: just like the rest of them.
Speaker 2: And I have this idea.
Speaker 3: I have this concept I've come up with, and it's
Speaker 3: that we need to stop idolizing these speciously informed goobers.
Speaker 3: Well kind of souls or Zitron haters may hear this
Speaker 3: and say, I am actually Satannadanna's very smart. Stop I
Speaker 3: want to stop there, and I suggest that you have
Speaker 3: a smart person who comes along and tells you what
Speaker 3: smart sounds like. A smart don't mean long words and nothing.
Speaker 3: It means actually knowing the sheet you're talking about. And look, really,
Speaker 3: a truly smart person should be able to speak clearly
Speaker 3: enough that their intent is obvious and clear. Now it's
Speaker 3: tempting to believe that there's some sort of intellectual barrier
Speaker 3: between you and the powerful, that these confusing and obtuse
Speaker 3: things they say, that's the sound of genius, rather than
Speaker 3: somebody who has learned a lot of smart sounding words
Speaker 3: without ever learning what they mean, but ed they're trained
Speaker 3: to do this. I am someone who has media trained
Speaker 3: hundreds of people, and there's only so much you can
Speaker 3: do to steer someone's language. You can't say to one, hey, man,
Speaker 3: can you sound more confusing? You can, however, tell them
Speaker 3: what not to talk about and hope for the best.
Speaker 3: Sure you can make them practice, Sure you can give
Speaker 3: them feedback. But people past a certain stage of power
Speaker 3: or popularity, you're going to talk or whatever they want.
Speaker 3: And if they're big stupid idiots pretending to be smart,
Speaker 3: they're going to sound exactly like this. Why because nobody
Speaker 3: in the media ever asked them to explain themselves. When
Speaker 3: you've spent your entire career being asked friendly or friendly
Speaker 3: adjacent questions and never having someone say, wait, what does
Speaker 3: that mean, you'll continue to mutate into a pseudo communicator
Speaker 3: that spits out information adjacent bullshit. I am to be clear,
Speaker 3: being very specific about the question what does that mean?
Speaker 3: Powerful CEOs and founders never ever, ever get asked to
Speaker 3: explain what they're saying, even when what they're saying barely
Speaker 3: resembles a sentence, let alone an answer. But let's get
Speaker 3: clear here. Let's think about a hypothetical scenario where your
Speaker 3: friend just said the dog died. You'd say something like, oh, no,
Speaker 3: what happened? And they, let's say, they responded with, well,
Speaker 3: my dog had a tragic yet on ultimately final distinction
Speaker 3: between their ideal and non ideal stage due to the
Speaker 3: involvement of a kind of automatic mechanical device. And when
Speaker 3: that happened, we realized we'd have to move on from
Speaker 3: the current paradigm of dog ownership and into a new
Speaker 3: era which we both feel a great deal of emotion about,
Speaker 3: and see the opportunities With them. You'd probably be a
Speaker 3: little confused and ask them to explain what they meant.
Speaker 3: You'd ask, what do you mean by an automatic mechanical device?
Speaker 3: What does that mean? They then reply with yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: And that was part of the challenge. You see, like
Speaker 3: the various interactions we have in our day that are challenging.
Speaker 3: We see a lot of opportunities in their sailing those challenges.
Speaker 3: But part of the road to getting around them is
Speaker 3: facing them head on, which is ultimately what happened here.
Speaker 2: And while we were.
Speaker 3: Involved, we didn't want to be and so we had
Speaker 3: to make some dramatic changes. At this point, you still
Speaker 3: don't really know what happened. Did a car hit their dog?
Speaker 3: Did they hit their dog with their car in this scenario,
Speaker 3: would you not say, damn man, that sucks. I'm glad
Speaker 3: I have such a smart friend. I don't know what
Speaker 3: happened They're dog though, or would you ask them to
Speaker 3: explain what they're saying? Would you perhaps ask what it
Speaker 3: is they meant? Look, Pajai Altman, Nadella, They've always given
Speaker 3: this kind of empty brained, intellectual slop in response to
Speaker 3: questions because the media coddles them. These people are product
Speaker 3: managers or management consultants, and, in Altman's case, a savvy
Speaker 3: negotiator and manipulator known for and I quote and absenteeism
Speaker 3: that rankled his peers and some of the startups he
Speaker 3: was supposed to nurture as an investor at y Combinator.
Speaker 3: According to The Washington Post and by Coddle, I mean
Speaker 3: that these people are deliberately engaging in a combination of
Speaker 3: detective work and amnesia, where the reader or the listener
Speaker 3: is forced to simultaneously try and divine the meaning of
Speaker 3: their answer while also not thinking too hard about the
Speaker 3: question the interviewer asked. Most importantly, because the interviewer forgot already.
Speaker 3: Look at most modern business interviews. They involve a journalist
Speaker 3: asking a question, somebody giving an answer, and the journalists
Speaker 3: saying okay and moving on to the next question. Occasionally
Speaker 3: he's saying, but what about this, when the appropriate response
Speaker 3: to many of the answers is to ask them to
Speaker 3: simplify them so that their meaning is clearer. Look at
Speaker 3: to them, Listen to them now. A common response to
Speaker 3: all of this stuff is to say that interviewers can't
Speaker 3: be antagonistic, and I just don't think a lot of
Speaker 3: people understand what that actually means. It isn't antagonistic to
Speaker 3: say that you don't understand what someone said, or that
Speaker 3: they didn't answer the question you asked. If this is
Speaker 3: antagonistic to you, you are intellectually speaking a giant, fucking coward,
Speaker 3: because what you're suggesting is that somebody cannot ask somebody
Speaker 3: to explain themselves, which is what an interview is. And
Speaker 3: I imagine nobody really wants to do this because if
Speaker 3: you actually put these people on the spot, you'd realize
Speaker 3: the dark truth that I spoke of a few weeks ago,
Speaker 3: that the reason the powerful sound like idiots is because
Speaker 3: they're idiots. They sound like business idiots and create products
Speaker 3: to sell to business idiots, because business idiots run most
Speaker 3: companies and by solutions based on what the last business
Speaker 3: idiot told them. Now, I know some of you might
Speaker 3: hear this and say, these people can't be stupid. These
Speaker 3: people run companies, they make big deals, they read all
Speaker 3: these books. And my answer is that some of the
Speaker 3: stupidest people I have met in my life, I have
Speaker 3: read more books than you or I will read in
Speaker 3: a lifetime. Well, they might sound smart, or they might
Speaker 3: be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or
Speaker 3: saying this product category should do this. None of these men,
Speaker 3: not Altman Pshire on the Della, actually has a hand
Speaker 3: in the design of the creation of the things that
Speaker 3: their companies make, and they never ever, ever, ever, ever
Speaker 3: ever have Regardless, though I have a larger point, I
Speaker 3: believe it's high time we started mocking these people and
Speaker 3: tearing down their legends as geniuses. They're not better than us,
Speaker 3: nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build
Speaker 3: other than their share price, which is a meaningless figure,
Speaker 3: and the accumulation of power and resources. These men are
Speaker 3: neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start
Speaker 3: treating them as such. These people are powerful because they
Speaker 3: have names that are protected by the press. They are
Speaker 3: powerful because it is seen as a kind of unseemly
Speaker 3: to mock them because they're rich and running a company,
Speaker 3: a kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming
Speaker 3: of an adult. We are, at most customers. We do
Speaker 3: not owe these people anything. We are long past the
Speaker 3: point when any of the people running these companies actually
Speaker 3: invented anything they sell, if anything, they owe us something
Speaker 3: because they're selling us a product, even if said product
Speaker 3: is free and monetized by advertising. While reporters, as anyone,
Speaker 3: should have some degree of professionalism in interviews or covering subjects,
Speaker 3: there's no reason to treat these people as special, even
Speaker 3: if they have managed to raise a lot of money
Speaker 3: or their popular product is used by a lot of people.
Speaker 3: Because if that were the case, we'd have far more
Speaker 3: coverage of defense contract to Lockheed Martin. They made one
Speaker 3: point seventy one billion dollars in profit last quarter and
Speaker 3: haven't had a single quarter under a billion dollars in
Speaker 3: the last year. I realize them being a little glib,
Speaker 3: but the logic behind covering open ai is at this
Speaker 3: point they make a lot of money and they have
Speaker 3: a popular product, which is also a fitting description of
Speaker 3: Lockheed Martin. The difference is that open ai has a
Speaker 3: conceiverer product that loses billions of dollars and Lockheed Martinis
Speaker 3: products that make billions of dollars by removing consumers from
Speaker 3: the earth. Both of them are environmentally destructive. Covering open
Speaker 3: ai doesn't seem to be about the tech, because if
Speaker 3: you looked at the tech, you'dn't to understand the tech.
Speaker 3: You'd see that the user numbers weren't there outside of
Speaker 3: the five hundred million people using chat GPT and of
Speaker 3: course referring to the general AI industry, and of those
Speaker 3: five hundred million people, very few are actually paying for
Speaker 3: the product, and that the term user encompasses everything from
Speaker 3: the most occasional person who looks at chatgpt dot com
Speaker 3: out of curiosity or the people using it as part
Speaker 3: of their daily lives. If covering Open Eye was about
Speaker 3: the tech, you'd read about how the tech itself doesn't
Speaker 3: seem to have a ton of mass market use cases,
Speaker 3: and that those use cases aren't really the kind of things.
Speaker 2: That people pay for.
Speaker 3: If they did, there'd be articles that definitively discuss them,
Speaker 3: versus articles in the New York Times about everybody using AI.
Speaker 3: The boil down to I use chat gpt as search
Speaker 3: now and I heard a guy who asked it to
Speaker 3: teach him about modern art.
Speaker 2: Yet man like.
Speaker 3: Warrio, Dario Amide and Clammy sam Altman continue to be
Speaker 3: elevated because they're building the future, even if they don't
Speaker 3: seem to have built it yeah, or of the ability
Speaker 3: to clearly articulate what the future actually looks like. Anthropic
Speaker 3: has now put out multiple stories suggest that it's generative
Speaker 3: AI will blackmail people as a means of stopping use
Speaker 3: and from turning off the system, something which is so
Speaker 3: obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every
Speaker 3: member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed
Speaker 3: of themselves. Sadly, this is all the result of the
Speaker 3: halo effect of being a guy who raised money or
Speaker 3: a guy who runs big company. We must, as human beings,
Speaker 3: assume these people are smart, that they've never mislead us,
Speaker 3: because if we accept that they aren't smart and they
Speaker 3: will willingly mislead us, we'd have to accept that the
Speaker 3: powerful are well bad and possibly unremarkable assholes, And if
Speaker 3: they're untrustworthy people that don't seem to be smart, we
Speaker 3: have to accept that the world is deeply unfair and
Speaker 3: caters to people like them far more than it kates
Speaker 3: to people like us. We do not oh Saturn and
Speaker 3: Della any respect just because he's the CEO of Microsoft.
Speaker 3: If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the
Speaker 3: state of Microsoft's products. Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess
Speaker 3: that only sometimes works, leaving workers spending fifty seven percent
Speaker 3: of their time either in teams, chat teams, meetings, or
Speaker 3: sending emails, according to a Microsoft study. Mis dot com
Speaker 3: is an abomination read by hundreds of millions of people
Speaker 3: a month, bloated with intrusive advertisements, attempts to trick you
Speaker 3: into downloading an app, and course ey content that may
Speaker 3: or may not be AI generated. There are few products
Speaker 3: on the modern Internet that show more contempt for the user,
Speaker 3: other than, of course, the former Skype, a product that
Speaker 3: Microsoft languished for more than a decade, so thoroughly in
Speaker 3: gorged with spam that leaving it unattended for more than
Speaker 3: a month left you with one hundred undread messages from
Speaker 3: Eastern European romance scammers, and Microsoft has finally killed it
Speaker 3: in May. Great jobs, sature your fucking platt Anyway, products
Speaker 3: like Word and Excel don't need improving, but that doesn't
Speaker 3: stop Microsoft from trying to bloat them with odd user
Speaker 3: interface choices and forcing users to fight with prop ups
Speaker 3: that use an AI powered copilot that most of them hate.
Speaker 3: Why exactly am I meant to show these people respect
Speaker 3: because they run a company that provides a continually disintegrating service.
Speaker 3: Because that service is such a powerful monopoly that it
Speaker 3: is difficult to leave it if you're interacting with other
Speaker 3: people or businesses. I think it's because we live in hell.
Speaker 3: The mong tech ecosystem is utterly vile. Every single day,
Speaker 3: our tech breaks in new and inventive ways. Our iPhones
Speaker 3: resetting at random, random apps not accepting button presses, our
Speaker 3: Bluetooth disconnecting our word process is harassing us to try
Speaker 3: and use AI while no longer offering us suggestions for
Speaker 3: typos and I'm referring to Google Docs. You're not insane,
Speaker 3: it's happening, and our useful products replaced with useless shit,
Speaker 3: like how Google's previously functional assistance were replaced with generative
Speaker 3: AI that makes them tangibly worse, so that Google can
Speaker 3: claim that they have three hundred and fifty million monthly
Speaker 3: active users on fucking Gemini. Yet the tech and the
Speaker 3: business media acts like everything is fine. It isn't fine.
Speaker 3: It's all really fucked. You can call me a cynic
Speaker 3: or a pessimist, or throw trash at me, or throw tomatoes,
Speaker 3: or try and hose me down when I go outside,
Speaker 3: or call me every name under the sun. But the
Speaker 3: steaks have never been higher and the damage never more widespread.
Speaker 3: Everything feels broken and covering these companies as if it is,
Speaker 3: and these insulting to your readers and your own intelligence.
Speaker 3: Look at the state of your computer or phone and
Speaker 3: tell me anything feels concruent or intentional rather than an
Speaker 3: endless battle of incentives. Look at the notifications on your
Speaker 3: phone and count the number of them that have absolutely
Speaker 3: nothing to do with information you actively need.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: As I wrote the newsletter version of this and this script,
Speaker 3: I got a bunch of notifications, and I'm gonna recount
Speaker 3: them because most of them are still on my phone.
Speaker 3: I have a notification for Adobe Lightroom, and app I
Speaker 3: use occasionally to edit photos that tells me to elevate
Speaker 3: any scene now, enhance people's skywater and more with quick actions.
Speaker 3: I don't know zero Cam, an app that brands itself
Speaker 3: as the first anti AI camera app where you capture moments,
Speaker 3: not megapixels, and got a ton of press about being
Speaker 3: this stripped down append notification asking if I took a
Speaker 3: photo today. Amazon notified me that there's a deal pick
Speaker 3: just for me a battery pack that I bought several
Speaker 3: months ago. Every single company that sends notifications like these
Speaker 3: should be mocked and possibly put in prison. But if
Speaker 3: we have accepted such vile conditions as the norm, I
Speaker 3: just believe that society is kind of lost. Apple should
Speaker 3: be target and feathered for allowing companies to send spam notifications,
Speaker 3: Yet they're not because by and large, Apple is less
Speaker 3: vile and exploitative than Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, who also
Speaker 3: get pretty much a free ride. Now, if you're listening
Speaker 3: to this as a member of the tech press, seriously,
Speaker 3: please look at your daily experience with tech.
Speaker 2: I'm begging you.
Speaker 3: Count the number of times that your day or a
Speaker 3: task is interrupted by poorly designed software or hardware, such
Speaker 3: as the many many times zoom or teams as a
Speaker 3: problem with Bluetooth, or a website just doesn't load, like
Speaker 3: sometimes Google youtype Google dot com into the bar and
Speaker 3: it just doesn't load. This also happens with other websites,
Speaker 3: like type something into your browser, it just doesn't work.
Speaker 2: Just happens. So cool.
Speaker 3: How about when software you're are the using either actively
Speaker 3: impedes you, like did you want to use AI who
Speaker 3: just refuses to work in a logical way, such as
Speaker 3: Google Drive? Look at this, you're covering tech, right, maybe
Speaker 3: you should cover that the tech ain't working so good.
Speaker 3: There are tens of thousands of stories like this every day,
Speaker 3: and if you talk to actual people you'd see how
Speaker 3: widespread it is, or maybe I don't know, see that
Speaker 3: it's happening to you. Look, I'm not trying to call
Speaker 3: anyone out, which is why I'm not using specific names,
Speaker 3: but there are people responsible here and the tech media
Speaker 3: writes about them every day? I realize it seems weird
Speaker 3: to constantly vent that a company is releasing broken, convoluted software.
Speaker 3: But hey, if you can write three hundred thousand stories
Speaker 3: about how crime ridden New York City is, why can't
Speaker 3: we write three of them about how fucked Microsoft Office
Speaker 3: is or Google searches, or even just one like one
Speaker 3: a month one?
Speaker 2: And why can't we.
Speaker 3: Talk to the people in power about it? Why can't
Speaker 3: we ask them questions? Is it because the questions are
Speaker 3: too hard to ask? Is it because it feels icky
Speaker 3: to interrupt Sachin and Deliacy waffles on about using co
Speaker 3: pilot his entire life by saying, hey, man, Microsoft teams
Speaker 3: is broken. Tons of people feel this way. Why is
Speaker 3: it so fucked? Or why have you let MSN dot
Speaker 3: com turn into an aislop hub or just a hub
Speaker 3: of disinformation?
Speaker 2: Oh no, you say, Oh no, I won't get my access.
Speaker 2: Oh we lose my access? Who gives a shit?
Speaker 3: Write a story about how Microsoft has become so unbelievably
Speaker 3: profitable as it products get worse, and talk about how
Speaker 3: weird and bad that is from the world. Ask the
Speaker 3: della those tough questions or published that Microsoft pr won't
Speaker 3: let you. These people are neither articulate nor wise, and
Speaker 3: whatever intelligence they may claim to have doesn't seem to
Speaker 3: manifest in good products or even intelligent statements. So I
Speaker 3: treat them like they're smart. Why show them any deference
Speaker 3: or pleasantries? These people have crapped up our digital lives
Speaker 3: at scale, and they deserve contempt, or at least earn
Speaker 3: fucking reception. Harry doesn't repeating myself again and again and again.
Speaker 3: But why is there such a halo around these fucking bozos?
Speaker 2: I'm serious? Why are we so protective of these people?
Speaker 2: Why we're more than happy to.
Speaker 3: Criticize celebrities, musicians, professional sports players, and politicians fucking barely,
Speaker 3: but the business class is somehow protected, outside of the
Speaker 3: usual willingness to say that Elon Musk might have maybe
Speaker 3: done something wrong. I'm also not denying their are critics.
Speaker 3: We have Molly White, We've got Edward and Guaso Junior,
Speaker 3: Brian Merchant, and a major outlet, no less CNN, one
Speaker 3: of the greatest living business writers in Alesson Morrow. I
Speaker 3: believe that tech criticism is a barely explored and hugely
Speaker 3: profitable industry if we treat tech journalism less like the
Speaker 3: society pages and more like a force to hold the
Speaker 3: most powerful people in the world accountable as they continually
Speaker 3: harm billions of people in subtle ways. People are angry,
Speaker 3: and they aren't stupid, and they want to see that
Speaker 3: anger reflected in the stories they read, and the meek
Speaker 3: deference we show to the dumb, fucking tech assholes is
Speaker 3: the opposite of that.
Speaker 2: As I've said before, we live in.
Speaker 3: An era of digital tenatus, nagged by notifications, warring with
Speaker 3: software ostensibly built for us that acts as if we're
Speaker 3: the enemy. And if we're the enemy, we should treat
Speaker 3: those building this software as the enemy. In return, we're
Speaker 3: their customers and they failed us. The entire approach to
Speaker 3: business owners in the tech media is ridiculous. These people
Speaker 3: are selling us a product, and the product fucking sucks.
Speaker 3: Put aside, however you feel about generative AI for a
Speaker 3: second and face one very simple point.
Speaker 2: It doesn't do enough.
Speaker 3: It's really not cool at all, and we're all being
Speaker 3: forced to use it rather than the obvious benefits that
Speaker 3: everyone claims it has, just making us do so. Now
Speaker 3: I realized some members of the tech media may want
Speaker 3: these people to succeed or want to be the person
Speaker 3: who tells everybody that they did so. I get that
Speaker 3: there are rewards for your promotions, new positions, TV appearances
Speaker 3: repeating exactly what the powerful did and why they did it,
Speaker 3: or a plush roll as a company's head of communications.
Speaker 3: But I am telling you your readers and viewers are
Speaker 3: waking up to it, and they feel like you have
Speaker 3: contempt for them and contempt for the truth. It's easy
Speaker 3: and common to try and dismiss my work as some
Speaker 3: sort of hater's bullshit, a cynical approach to a technustry
Speaker 3: that's trying brave new things, or some other such shit.
Speaker 3: In my opinion, there's nothing more cynical than watching billions
Speaker 3: of people get shipped increasingly shitty and expensive solutions and
Speaker 3: then get defensive of the people shipping them and hostile
Speaker 3: to the people who are complaining that the products they
Speaker 3: use suck. I'm angry at these companies because they have
Speaker 3: at scale torn down a tech industry that allowed me
Speaker 3: to be who I am today, and their intentional disgrace
Speaker 3: will moves film me for the disgust I've watched the
Speaker 3: tech media move away from covering technology and more toward
Speaker 3: covering the people behind technology, to the point that the
Speaker 3: actual outputs, the software and the hardware we use every
Speaker 3: day have taken a backseat to stories about whether or
Speaker 3: not Elon Musk's used as a computer, which is meaningless,
Speaker 3: empty gossip journalism built to be shared by peers and
Speaker 3: nothing else. And please please do not talk to me
Speaker 3: about optimism. If you are blindly saying that everything open
Speaker 3: ai does is cool and awesome and interesting, you want
Speaker 3: being optimistic, you're telling other people to be optimistic about
Speaker 3: a company's success. It isn't optimistic to believe that a
Speaker 3: company is going to build powerful AI despite it failed
Speaker 3: to do so. It's propaganda. And yes, this is also
Speaker 3: the case if you simply don't do the research to
Speaker 3: form a real opinion. I am not a pessimist because
Speaker 3: I criticize these companies, and framing me as one is
Speaker 3: cowardly and ignorant. If you're so weak willed and speciously
Speaker 3: informed it you can't see somebody criticizing a company without
Speaker 3: outright dismissing them as a hater or a pessimist. You're
Speaker 3: an insult to journalism or analysis, and you know it
Speaker 3: in your wretched little heart. My art sings with a
Speaker 3: firm belief in the things I think, founded on rigorous
Speaker 3: structures of knowledge that I've gained from reading things and
Speaker 3: talking to people, because something in me is incapable of
Speaker 3: being swayed by something just because everybody else's. You're assuming
Speaker 3: people are right because it's inconvenient and uncomfortable to accept
Speaker 3: that they may not be, because doing so requires you
Speaker 3: to reckon with a market wide hysteria founded on desperation
Speaker 3: and a lack of hypergrowth markets left in the tech industry,
Speaker 3: we're still in engaging with faux optimism. You're failing to
Speaker 3: protect your readers in the general public. And if that's
Speaker 3: what you want to do, ask yourself, why why do
Speaker 3: you want these companies to win? What is it you
Speaker 3: want them to win? Do you want them to be rich?
Speaker 3: Do you want to be the person that told people
Speaker 3: they would be first? What is it that you want?
Speaker 3: What is the world you want and what does it
Speaker 3: look like? And how does doing your job in this
Speaker 3: way work towards creating that world? This is an optimism.
Speaker 3: It's horse trading or strategic alignment behind powerful entities. It
Speaker 3: is choosing a side because your side isn't the reader
Speaker 3: of the truth if it was, even if you believe Generati,
Speaker 3: if AI was powerful, and that they simply didn't understand,
Speaker 3: your duty would be to educate the reader in a clear, certain,
Speaker 3: obvious way, and if you can't find a way to
Speaker 3: do so, acknowledging that and explaining why. True optimism requires
Speaker 3: you to have a deep, meaningful understanding of things so
Speaker 3: that you can engage in real hope, a magical feeling,
Speaker 3: one that could bore you through the most challenging times.
Speaker 3: What many claim is optimism is actually blind faith, the
Speaker 3: likes of which you'll see at a roulette or a
Speaker 3: crab's table, or of course, knowingly peddling propaganda.
Speaker 2: Breathehead, breathe.
Speaker 3: They can't get you behind the microphone anyway.
Speaker 2: We live in hell.
Speaker 3: As I've said before, just like Churchill once said, when
Speaker 3: you're going through hell, keep going.
Speaker 2: You're in the middle of a good rant.
Speaker 3: Keep ranting tube into the next episode while we'll pick
Speaker 3: this right back up.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 3: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 3: is Matttersowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 3: and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com m A T
Speaker 3: T O s O W s ki dot com. You
Speaker 3: can email me at easy at better offline dot com
Speaker 3: or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 3: links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 3: you go to chat dot Where's youreaed dot at to
Speaker 3: visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 2: Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for listening.
Speaker 4: Better Offline is a production of call Zone Media. For
Speaker 4: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot
Speaker 4: com or check us out on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.