WEBVTT - Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff 0:00:02.440 --> 0:00:03.560 Also media. 0:00:04.360 --> 0:00:07.160 Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course your 0:00:07.160 --> 0:00:22.079 host ed zitron and today I am joined for a 0:00:22.160 --> 0:00:25.360 dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief 0:00:25.360 --> 0:00:27.920 of the Register, who has been in Silicon Valley. 0:00:27.960 --> 0:00:31.080 I believe three hundred years. You said it was three 0:00:31.160 --> 0:00:33.920 hundred and twenty five. Yeah, so I'm actually a vampire. 0:00:34.560 --> 0:00:37.920 That's nice. Oh, what like Kevin O'Leary and Martin Supreme. Sorry, 0:00:37.920 --> 0:00:40.559 Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have 0:00:40.600 --> 0:00:41.159 you heard about that? 0:00:41.680 --> 0:00:43.520 No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet. 0:00:43.680 --> 0:00:45.159 Ping Pie doesn't really do it for me. 0:00:45.600 --> 0:00:47.440 I didn't really like it, but there is a bit 0:00:47.479 --> 0:00:50.200 in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire. 0:00:50.520 --> 0:00:53.880 I've lived for this many years and I read about this. 0:00:54.080 --> 0:00:56.760 I did not like the movie, but I read about it. 0:00:56.800 --> 0:00:58.920 I was like, oh, I would actually love it if 0:00:58.960 --> 0:01:02.960 this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs, 0:01:04.200 --> 0:01:05.800 and they should have done that. They should have just 0:01:05.880 --> 0:01:08.200 had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's 0:01:08.240 --> 0:01:09.840 regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they 0:01:09.840 --> 0:01:14.280 would have squared that circle. AnyWho, my time only computers. 0:01:14.600 --> 0:01:17.760 So Matt, you were what were you We're just going 0:01:17.800 --> 0:01:20.360 to go straight into it. What were you doing in 0:01:20.400 --> 0:01:21.760 the dot com bubble era? 0:01:21.920 --> 0:01:22.000 Like? 0:01:22.040 --> 0:01:24.479 Where did you begin and where did you find yourself 0:01:24.480 --> 0:01:25.200 as it progressed? 0:01:25.720 --> 0:01:30.360 Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past. 0:01:30.400 --> 0:01:34.440 But I moved to San Francisco in nineteen ninety two, 0:01:34.760 --> 0:01:37.800 sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession, 0:01:37.880 --> 0:01:38.800 so there wasn't much. 0:01:38.680 --> 0:01:39.320 Going on then. 0:01:39.360 --> 0:01:42.920 I was interning doing different kinds of od jobs, copy editing, 0:01:42.959 --> 0:01:45.160 doing some of those kinds of things, and then in 0:01:45.280 --> 0:01:49.840 nineteen ninety five I joined a little startup that was 0:01:49.960 --> 0:01:53.720 going to publish content on the World Wide Web. They 0:01:53.760 --> 0:01:56.160 didn't call it content then, I guess it was. They 0:01:56.280 --> 0:01:56.680 called it. 0:01:56.640 --> 0:01:57.920 An online magazine. 0:01:57.960 --> 0:01:59.840 They already had a TV network and that was Senet, 0:02:00.200 --> 0:02:03.400 So cnet is still out today in a very different format. 0:02:03.760 --> 0:02:07.520 But I was employee number forty two there. Started off 0:02:07.560 --> 0:02:12.399 as an editorial assistant, and my very first task there 0:02:12.560 --> 0:02:15.120 was to come up with an email newsletter, which we 0:02:15.200 --> 0:02:18.440 called Digital Dispatch, and it was mostly summaries of stuff 0:02:18.480 --> 0:02:21.480 that we were publishing on the site, and then occasional 0:02:21.560 --> 0:02:24.360 snarky commentary. I remember a couple of years later, we 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:28.360 did ten reasons why Wired's IPO failed, and one of 0:02:28.360 --> 0:02:31.320 them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and 0:02:31.400 --> 0:02:34.519 red paper, which we thought was OK, funny and cute 0:02:34.520 --> 0:02:35.080 at the time. 0:02:36.080 --> 0:02:37.880 So anyway, that was a lot of fun. 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:43.160 We were, you know, growing at a very rapid pace. 0:02:43.240 --> 0:02:46.240 I think I was there from ninety five to ninety nine. 0:02:46.680 --> 0:02:48.360 Like I said, I was employee number forty two on 0:02:48.400 --> 0:02:49.880 the way in, and I think when I left there 0:02:49.880 --> 0:02:52.839 were over five hundred people working there with that. One 0:02:52.960 --> 0:02:55.640 was owned by Zif Davis at the time, it was 0:02:55.720 --> 0:02:59.800 not Cnet, was an independent company. It had a number 0:02:59.880 --> 0:03:04.200 of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co founder. 0:03:04.200 --> 0:03:05.360 I don't remember the other ones. 0:03:05.840 --> 0:03:08.840 The CEO was guy named Halsey Minor, and no, it 0:03:08.880 --> 0:03:11.640 was it was completely you know, it was privately held 0:03:11.639 --> 0:03:16.519 and weipo'd in ninety seven or ninety eight, I'm not, oh. 0:03:16.560 --> 0:03:20.320 Just before that was just before things started to fall apart, right. 0:03:20.680 --> 0:03:24.679 Well, ninety eight was still go go go. I think 0:03:24.720 --> 0:03:30.079 it really kind of went on until two thousand and 0:03:30.080 --> 0:03:32.520 two thousand and one was when things started to turn. So, 0:03:33.200 --> 0:03:35.160 you know, it was fun being a company that was 0:03:35.200 --> 0:03:35.800 growing fast. 0:03:35.840 --> 0:03:36.720 I was able to do a. 0:03:36.680 --> 0:03:39.360 Whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing 0:03:39.400 --> 0:03:43.120 TV scripts and doing CD ROM reviews back when multimedia 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:45.720 was a thing, and writing features and I interviewed a 0:03:45.720 --> 0:03:48.120 two way pager from this little company called Research in 0:03:48.160 --> 0:03:51.640 Motion before the BlackBerry was out, and I interviewed one 0:03:51.640 --> 0:03:53.400 of the first MP three players. I think it was 0:03:53.440 --> 0:03:56.080 the Rio, and I was like, Wow, interesting idea, but 0:03:56.120 --> 0:03:58.160 it can only hold like twelve songs, so this is 0:03:58.200 --> 0:04:00.560 a complete waste time. It'll never go was before the 0:04:00.600 --> 0:04:04.480 Creative Nomad. Then I think around the same time. I 0:04:04.520 --> 0:04:06.720 don't remember which one was first, but yeah. 0:04:06.640 --> 0:04:09.040 I remember the Creative Nomad could have like three hundred 0:04:09.080 --> 0:04:11.800 songs on it. I felt like, oh, yes, Sultan of 0:04:11.840 --> 0:04:15.800 BRUNEI I was the fanciest man ever, three hundred songs. 0:04:15.840 --> 0:04:16.880 How would I ever choose? 0:04:17.240 --> 0:04:20.240 Yeah, that's it, that's right. Yeah. No, this was a 0:04:20.240 --> 0:04:20.960 lot less than that. 0:04:21.040 --> 0:04:22.640 I mean, we had to sort of do math and 0:04:22.680 --> 0:04:24.800 go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only twelve songs. 0:04:24.839 --> 0:04:29.480 That's worthless. So anyway, and then you know, took some 0:04:29.560 --> 0:04:32.080 filthy dot com Luker went backpacking for a little bit 0:04:32.120 --> 0:04:34.880 with my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife. 0:04:35.000 --> 0:04:38.400 And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle, 0:04:38.800 --> 0:04:41.280 and I think we came back on the day that 0:04:41.440 --> 0:04:47.400 Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case. 0:04:47.680 --> 0:04:48.920 Yeah, the MS one. 0:04:49.000 --> 0:04:52.719 Right, Yeah, this was well, this was anti trust. 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:56.240 Basically they had a whole bunch of different charges against them. 0:04:56.480 --> 0:04:59.560 Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one, 0:05:00.320 --> 0:05:02.760 you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:06.040 certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software 0:05:06.040 --> 0:05:06.640 and all kinds. 0:05:06.800 --> 0:05:12.080 And incentivizing bundling MS dos. Yeah, I vaguely know this story. 0:05:13.000 --> 0:05:13.720 Yeah, it was. 0:05:13.920 --> 0:05:16.200 It was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing, 0:05:16.200 --> 0:05:17.760 and you know, that's what we were all using in 0:05:17.839 --> 0:05:20.200 nineteen ninety five. It started with Mosaic and it was Navigator, 0:05:20.520 --> 0:05:23.880 and then Microsoft built Internet Explorer in the Windows ninety 0:05:23.880 --> 0:05:26.760 five and four years later Navigator didn't really exist for 0:05:26.800 --> 0:05:28.320 all intents and purposes. 0:05:27.920 --> 0:05:31.080 So it was But anyway, that was the day. 0:05:31.560 --> 0:05:34.560 It was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them 0:05:34.640 --> 0:05:38.640 to be broken into two companies, an APPS company, which 0:05:38.680 --> 0:05:41.359 is office and all those products, and an OPS company, 0:05:41.400 --> 0:05:45.440 which was Windows. I believe now maybe remembering this slightly 0:05:45.480 --> 0:05:47.240 wrong and I don't have a resource in front. 0:05:47.000 --> 0:05:50.479 Of YEA very recently covered this and you will back on. 0:05:51.040 --> 0:05:51.480 Yeah. 0:05:51.520 --> 0:05:53.840 So but I think that was kind of the peak, 0:05:53.880 --> 0:05:57.840 and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of 0:05:57.960 --> 0:06:00.600 the end. So it's even though Microsoft had had very 0:06:00.640 --> 0:06:04.480 little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there 0:06:04.600 --> 0:06:08.040 was sort of this sense that, oh, the tightest turning anyway, 0:06:08.080 --> 0:06:11.200 long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I 0:06:11.240 --> 0:06:14.520 found work with this startup. At the time, they were 0:06:14.560 --> 0:06:16.640 called a Cadio and the idea was that they were 0:06:16.640 --> 0:06:21.480 going to do online education, so they wanted to have 0:06:21.680 --> 0:06:25.320 articles written and I was the computers tech guy. We 0:06:25.320 --> 0:06:28.680 were going to you know, training people on computer technology. 0:06:28.920 --> 0:06:34.840 And it was the most incompetently run company I have 0:06:34.960 --> 0:06:38.520 ever seen been a part of. I walked in immediately 0:06:38.560 --> 0:06:40.040 realized that I needed to get out. 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:43.240 So by way of example, they didn't have so you 0:06:43.240 --> 0:06:45.480 know what. Yeah, it was this was. 0:06:45.440 --> 0:06:48.719 Early two thousands, so this is still this was when 0:06:49.400 --> 0:06:53.039 companies were getting funding on a promise and going public 0:06:53.080 --> 0:06:56.200 on powerpoints. Still it was still still at the peak, 0:06:56.480 --> 0:06:59.039 but we could see it starting to turn. So you know, 0:06:59.080 --> 0:07:01.640 these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people, 0:07:01.640 --> 0:07:04.040 and they had a cool loft in Pineer Square, which 0:07:04.080 --> 0:07:07.040 is you know, brick building and all this kind of stuff. 0:07:07.440 --> 0:07:08.080 But they didn't. 0:07:08.640 --> 0:07:09.960 So they you know, they hired me, and they're like, 0:07:09.960 --> 0:07:12.400 go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers, 0:07:12.400 --> 0:07:14.280 and we need to get some content up. They had 0:07:14.320 --> 0:07:17.120 no way to put the content on the internet. They 0:07:17.160 --> 0:07:20.720 didn't have a CMS, they didn't know what a CMS was. 0:07:21.600 --> 0:07:23.880 And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a 0:07:23.920 --> 0:07:27.640 Microsoft product used for you know, creating code and sharing code. 0:07:27.720 --> 0:07:31.040 It was that level. And I remember later here over, 0:07:31.080 --> 0:07:34.800 you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very 0:07:34.880 --> 0:07:38.000 tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one 0:07:38.000 --> 0:07:40.240 of the investors yelled through a closed door, we might 0:07:40.280 --> 0:07:43.080 as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank. 0:07:43.440 --> 0:07:46.400 So I quickly got out of there, found a job 0:07:46.400 --> 0:07:48.480 at Directions on. Microsoft did that for ten years, and 0:07:48.520 --> 0:07:50.960 they were out of business by I believe, early two 0:07:51.000 --> 0:07:51.600 thousand and one. 0:07:52.520 --> 0:07:55.880 So about when did it become obvious something was wrong. 0:08:00.440 --> 0:08:06.400 So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale, 0:08:06.560 --> 0:08:09.680 but it was obvious that a lot of the specific 0:08:09.920 --> 0:08:15.040 individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air. 0:08:15.240 --> 0:08:19.680 There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers, 0:08:19.800 --> 0:08:23.320 or they were you know, selling dollars for seventy five 0:08:23.440 --> 0:08:27.120 cents basically. So you know, pets dot Com was a 0:08:27.160 --> 0:08:30.480 big one, Cosmo dot Com was another one, And all 0:08:30.480 --> 0:08:34.239 these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable 0:08:34.240 --> 0:08:36.480 in the second go round. So Cosmo dot Com was 0:08:36.559 --> 0:08:38.319 just home delivery. It was like Instacart. 0:08:38.440 --> 0:08:41.880 It's basically Cosmo was Instacom, and pets dot Com was Chewy. 0:08:42.080 --> 0:08:45.120 And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, three point one 0:08:45.280 --> 0:08:48.760 billion dollars in a quarter fifty million dollars of profit, 0:08:48.840 --> 0:08:52.480 which is good. But also one of those business is 0:08:52.520 --> 0:08:54.360 what I hear metrics like that, I get scared. 0:08:55.520 --> 0:08:58.120 Yeah, it's fine, it's a you know, it's a low 0:08:58.200 --> 0:08:59.400 margin retail business. 0:08:59.400 --> 0:08:59.920 That's fine. 0:09:00.080 --> 0:09:04.120 Retail retail's good, you know, it's it's okay, it's real. Yeah, 0:09:04.200 --> 0:09:06.480 it's it's you sell things for more than you make 0:09:06.520 --> 0:09:09.040 them for. That's that's how it's supposed to work. So 0:09:09.080 --> 0:09:11.080 I think there were just so many of those. The 0:09:11.120 --> 0:09:13.280 other one was there was a business and I think 0:09:13.320 --> 0:09:16.480 they were only based in Seattle, called Lackeye dot com. 0:09:16.880 --> 0:09:19.200 And I remember my uh my boss at directions at 0:09:19.200 --> 0:09:21.400 the time said that, you know, this is when I 0:09:21.440 --> 0:09:24.400 knew that the revolution was impending. Is when you have 0:09:24.480 --> 0:09:27.520 a website called Lackeye dot com that is basically a 0:09:27.559 --> 0:09:29.920 personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like task Rabbit, 0:09:30.080 --> 0:09:30.760 that kind of thing. 0:09:31.120 --> 0:09:33.599 Yeah, but even toss grab it has never really is 0:09:33.920 --> 0:09:35.319 tosk grab it even profitable. 0:09:36.320 --> 0:09:38.920 They got bought by Ikea, so it's buried now. I 0:09:38.960 --> 0:09:40.480 don't I don't think they ever were. 0:09:40.400 --> 0:09:45.199 My lackey dot com. Okay, I I hate to interrupt 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:48.040 to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in 0:09:48.080 --> 0:09:49.600 April not you know, you know, by a guy called 0:09:49.640 --> 0:09:52.800 Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Bonnacle. 0:09:54.520 --> 0:09:56.480 I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name with 0:09:56.520 --> 0:09:58.439 an I right correct, yes. 0:09:58.320 --> 0:10:02.720 Yes, yeah. In the memo he had a memo that 0:10:02.760 --> 0:10:05.320 was on fuck Company. It said this is still a startup. 0:10:05.760 --> 0:10:07.719 And he complains that it is now six forty five 0:10:07.760 --> 0:10:09.800 PM and they're only twelve people in our office. We 0:10:09.880 --> 0:10:12.160 have sixty four people who work here in Seattle. It's 0:10:12.200 --> 0:10:16.080 totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things 0:10:16.080 --> 0:10:16.680 stay the same. 0:10:17.360 --> 0:10:20.400 I think that's true. Yeah, there are there are absolutely 0:10:20.440 --> 0:10:24.440 some similarities and some differences between today and them. 0:10:25.120 --> 0:10:29.040 But what about the the telecom side though, was it 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:31.199 did everybody just think that was going to work out 0:10:31.280 --> 0:10:33.800 until it didn't? What was their a point when the 0:10:33.880 --> 0:10:36.480 Loosens and the wind stars of the world got scared 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:37.400 or scary? 0:10:38.240 --> 0:10:38.600 Yeah. 0:10:38.720 --> 0:10:41.760 I was less close to that at the time. I 0:10:41.880 --> 0:10:44.040 was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff. But I 0:10:44.040 --> 0:10:47.360 remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and 0:10:47.440 --> 0:10:50.160 talking to me about Siena, Siena Networks, It's going to 0:10:50.240 --> 0:10:55.080 be huge. And I think those busts came a little 0:10:55.080 --> 0:10:58.320 bit later, right with WORLDCLM. I think that was maybe 0:10:58.360 --> 0:11:02.320 a bit after the doc Bom bust. And I'm a 0:11:02.400 --> 0:11:04.760 little bit less familiar with how all of that worked. 0:11:04.760 --> 0:11:06.720 But as I understand it, there was a lot of 0:11:06.800 --> 0:11:10.040 circular There were a lot of circular deals and deals 0:11:10.040 --> 0:11:12.680 that weren't really deals, and deals that were agreements but 0:11:12.920 --> 0:11:15.280 actual no money changing hands. 0:11:15.720 --> 0:11:19.640 Yeah, it's interesting because as I dig into this, and 0:11:19.679 --> 0:11:21.920 I've spent the last week or two digging into kind 0:11:21.920 --> 0:11:24.400 of how we got to this conversation, I realized it 0:11:24.480 --> 0:11:27.040 seems like there were two very specific The dot com 0:11:27.080 --> 0:11:29.440 bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot 0:11:29.480 --> 0:11:33.360 com website stuff, and then the follow up of the 0:11:33.360 --> 0:11:37.000 the the what was it the telecommunications fiber. 0:11:36.640 --> 0:11:38.920 Boom fiber boom, Yeah, it was, you know, it was 0:11:38.960 --> 0:11:43.120 the it was the the websites. There was definitely some 0:11:43.200 --> 0:11:47.680 circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements 0:11:47.720 --> 0:11:52.120 from each other. But you know, you remember AOL bought 0:11:52.200 --> 0:11:55.160 Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there 0:11:55.200 --> 0:11:57.440 were some really huge deals that turned out to be 0:11:57.840 --> 0:11:59.600 in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think 0:11:59.600 --> 0:12:02.520 once you're once, you know, once all of those things 0:12:02.559 --> 0:12:06.400 fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there A 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:10.440 lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well. 0:12:11.160 --> 0:12:13.520 What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment? 0:12:13.559 --> 0:12:15.800 What was was there an event where you went, oh shit, 0:12:16.679 --> 0:12:17.080 and yeah? 0:12:17.080 --> 0:12:19.840 When I joined that startup and I wasn't I couldn't 0:12:19.840 --> 0:12:21.800 believe they had any money, So that was that was 0:12:21.880 --> 0:12:24.439 a spring of two thousand. I was like, it felt 0:12:24.480 --> 0:12:27.600 like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody, 0:12:27.640 --> 0:12:30.120 and I mean, this guy had a record. I think 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:34.720 he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce 0:12:34.800 --> 0:12:37.960 that either sold or went public, So he wasn't a 0:12:38.040 --> 0:12:42.480 total nobody. It's just they couldn't hire enough people to 0:12:42.760 --> 0:12:47.720 actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't 0:12:48.000 --> 0:12:50.240 It just wasn't working, and everybody was kind of showing 0:12:50.280 --> 0:12:53.120 up to the office and play acting. There were some 0:12:53.200 --> 0:12:56.240 moments during the nineties that were, you know, kind of crazy, 0:12:56.320 --> 0:12:59.439 like see it they funded this party. I played bass 0:12:59.440 --> 0:13:01.520 and I was playing base and sort of this pickup 0:13:02.440 --> 0:13:06.240 band at work, and they basically rented out the. 0:13:06.200 --> 0:13:08.360 Film more for our holiday party. 0:13:08.400 --> 0:13:10.640 And you know, we played on a stage in front 0:13:10.679 --> 0:13:13.120 of twelve hundred or however, maybe the film is not 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:15.800 that big, five hundred people. And then they had a 0:13:16.440 --> 0:13:18.440 I can't remember the name of the of the you know, 0:13:18.440 --> 0:13:20.760 they had an actual working band come on after us. 0:13:20.840 --> 0:13:23.240 But it was a lot of fun. The singer we 0:13:23.280 --> 0:13:25.440 were playing with nailed, Janis Joblin. She did a really 0:13:25.440 --> 0:13:27.760 spectacular job. We had a couple of good songs. So 0:13:28.240 --> 0:13:30.520 but that was those kinds of things were regular, like 0:13:30.559 --> 0:13:34.520 that was just expected these big parties, and nobody really 0:13:34.520 --> 0:13:36.600 asked where the money was coming from. I do remember 0:13:37.559 --> 0:13:40.880 after Senet went public. I don't remember what year this was, 0:13:40.960 --> 0:13:44.160 ninety eight or ninety nine. I actually looked at an 0:13:44.160 --> 0:13:49.560 earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money. 0:13:49.800 --> 0:13:52.680 I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money. 0:13:52.800 --> 0:13:53.800 How naive I was. 0:13:54.520 --> 0:13:58.040 That's so see, that's the thing I admit as I've 0:13:58.080 --> 0:14:02.840 got further into finance in general and learned stuff the 0:14:02.880 --> 0:14:06.680 amount of companies that just burn cash and then die, 0:14:06.800 --> 0:14:08.839 but also the ones that are burning cash right now, 0:14:08.920 --> 0:14:10.520 and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's 0:14:10.559 --> 0:14:14.400 actually fine, it's good that happens. It's like a completely 0:14:15.760 --> 0:14:19.840 like a completely different world that has only worked a 0:14:19.880 --> 0:14:22.000 few times in the past. It's actually not worked many 0:14:22.040 --> 0:14:22.840 many more times. 0:14:23.280 --> 0:14:25.040 Right, most of the time it doesn't work. 0:14:25.080 --> 0:14:27.480 But I think the bet is when it does work, 0:14:27.520 --> 0:14:29.120 it pays off spectacularly. 0:14:29.840 --> 0:14:30.080 Right. 0:14:30.840 --> 0:14:33.040 And the question, I don't think Google was ever losing 0:14:33.200 --> 0:14:35.840 huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years. 0:14:36.800 --> 0:14:40.000 Yeah, I've I've looked into it, and the companies that 0:14:40.120 --> 0:14:42.960 have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere 0:14:43.000 --> 0:14:46.160 near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:49.520 like sixty nine billion over nine years, and that was 0:14:49.560 --> 0:14:52.480 all of Amazon's Capex, not just AWS focused. 0:14:52.840 --> 0:14:57.880 Yeah, yeah, no, they yeah, And again there was to me, 0:14:59.800 --> 0:15:03.040 the Internet at large and the World Wide Web as 0:15:03.080 --> 0:15:06.520 we used to call it, was a lot more immediately 0:15:06.800 --> 0:15:10.960 obviously huge, and it was going to change a lot 0:15:11.000 --> 0:15:14.040 of things and how business was done and how media 0:15:14.160 --> 0:15:15.040 was distributed. 0:15:15.160 --> 0:15:16.240 It was it was clear. 0:15:16.400 --> 0:15:19.240 It was just a question of when and where the 0:15:19.320 --> 0:15:21.760 technology had to go in which parts had to evolve. 0:15:21.800 --> 0:15:24.840 You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth 0:15:24.880 --> 0:15:28.360 before video became a realistic thing and so forth, and 0:15:28.440 --> 0:15:29.760 you know, they were gonna be fits and starts, but 0:15:29.800 --> 0:15:34.240 I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not 0:15:35.320 --> 0:15:37.680 fake like these things, some of these companies were going 0:15:37.760 --> 0:15:41.320 to succeed. Something was gonna happen. When I look at AI, 0:15:41.920 --> 0:15:45.640 to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I 0:15:45.680 --> 0:15:48.000 don't even really like to call it AI because it's 0:15:48.000 --> 0:15:51.520 not intelligent, but that's the that's the term that we use. 0:15:52.320 --> 0:15:57.800 But it's you know, it's right, uh, you know, matrix math, 0:15:58.440 --> 0:16:05.080 determinating determined, you know, basically auto complete. So it's interesting. 0:16:05.160 --> 0:16:09.040 It can do some stuff that can be valuable in 0:16:09.080 --> 0:16:13.760 certain situations. But it doesn't to me feel immediately massively 0:16:13.840 --> 0:16:19.000 obvious that this is a huge change the internet did. Yeah, 0:16:19.120 --> 0:16:22.240 web browsers did the iPhone. The first time I played 0:16:22.240 --> 0:16:24.520 with one of those, I was kind of a skeptic 0:16:24.520 --> 0:16:26.520 because I mean, I had a palm pilot and I'd 0:16:26.520 --> 0:16:29.360 been yeah, yeah, I had around, Yeah, I had a 0:16:29.400 --> 0:16:32.280 compact them, so keep going no, no, you know, and 0:16:32.320 --> 0:16:34.360 you're you're you're playing with that stylist. And then someone 0:16:34.400 --> 0:16:36.400 brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever, 0:16:36.480 --> 0:16:38.960 they're not going to do this, and I was like, oh, responsive, 0:16:39.000 --> 0:16:42.440 touch screen, email, autocomplete maps, I'm like, this thing's cool. 0:16:42.520 --> 0:16:43.680 And then it got better from there. 0:16:43.800 --> 0:16:46.320 So yeah, I haven't felt that, and I've used all 0:16:46.360 --> 0:16:46.880 the chatbots. 0:16:46.880 --> 0:16:47.840 I've played around with them. 0:16:48.320 --> 0:16:51.080 I don't code, but you know, from what I understand 0:16:51.600 --> 0:16:54.920 from people who do, is if you're a non coder, 0:16:54.960 --> 0:16:59.280 it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas, 0:16:59.280 --> 0:17:02.240 which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and 0:17:02.280 --> 0:17:06.760 you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable. You know, 0:17:06.840 --> 0:17:09.280 you can't deploy them like they you know, they they 0:17:09.359 --> 0:17:10.880 tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort 0:17:10.920 --> 0:17:12.159 of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as 0:17:12.200 --> 0:17:16.480 a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated 0:17:16.480 --> 0:17:18.760 writing and it's not good. 0:17:30.480 --> 0:17:33.359 That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So 0:17:33.840 --> 0:17:36.640 when you got into the internet industry, was there that 0:17:36.720 --> 0:17:39.200 sense of wonderment. I'm not even being like a shield. 0:17:39.200 --> 0:17:41.520 I'm just like because I remember when I first used 0:17:41.520 --> 0:17:45.040 the internet in like nineteen ninety seven, I want to say, yeah, 0:17:45.160 --> 0:17:47.920 like a child and being amazed by it, but even 0:17:47.960 --> 0:17:49.879 like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were 0:17:49.880 --> 0:17:52.320 getting into it in like the mid to late nineties, 0:17:52.760 --> 0:17:54.840 was there that sense of wonderment and excitement? 0:17:55.200 --> 0:17:55.400 Oh? 0:17:55.480 --> 0:17:56.280 Absolutely. 0:17:56.480 --> 0:17:56.600 So. 0:17:57.119 --> 0:17:59.160 There had been online services for a while. 0:17:59.160 --> 0:18:01.840 People used AOL compu serve, and you know, you hang 0:18:01.880 --> 0:18:04.600 out in chat rooms and you do these keywords and 0:18:04.640 --> 0:18:07.000 it would call up sort of a specific I don't 0:18:07.000 --> 0:18:08.520 even remember what they were called, but i'd call them 0:18:08.560 --> 0:18:13.359 apps now. But the web was interesting because it was 0:18:13.440 --> 0:18:18.120 immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website, 0:18:18.840 --> 0:18:21.639 and it was yeah, immediately huge, and it was a 0:18:21.640 --> 0:18:25.280 little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement. 0:18:25.280 --> 0:18:28.160 But I remember in San Francisco even in nineteen ninety five, 0:18:28.160 --> 0:18:30.199 and you know, you had had wired magazines sort of 0:18:30.240 --> 0:18:35.440 sounding sounding the bells for it for several years by 0:18:35.440 --> 0:18:38.119 that point. But in nineteen ninety five, everybody was online, 0:18:38.160 --> 0:18:42.399 everybody was getting online, and you know, you had tons 0:18:42.440 --> 0:18:45.280 of TV commercials, and everybody was talking about the World 0:18:45.320 --> 0:18:47.760 Wide Web on the evening news, and it just it 0:18:47.800 --> 0:18:51.439 was immediately clear that this was a new thing and 0:18:51.480 --> 0:18:53.000 it was a new way that we were going to 0:18:53.080 --> 0:18:55.879 do a lot of stuff. Right, So, yeah, there was 0:18:55.960 --> 0:18:58.359 there was massive excitement over it. 0:18:58.560 --> 0:19:02.160 Was there any kind of AI sorry, I same leading 0:19:02.240 --> 0:19:05.440 question then? Were there dissenters? Were there people other than 0:19:05.480 --> 0:19:07.919 the obvious news we call call that everyone sends me 0:19:08.000 --> 0:19:11.400 every time, you know, the one I'm talking about the dynalltics, 0:19:11.760 --> 0:19:13.080 weird gloss things now. 0:19:13.720 --> 0:19:18.520 But it was that descent there was, and I think 0:19:18.560 --> 0:19:22.280 a lot of the descent, interestingly, was centered around some 0:19:22.440 --> 0:19:24.760 of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over 0:19:24.760 --> 0:19:28.120 the last five, six, seven years. So it wasn't that 0:19:28.320 --> 0:19:30.879 this is stupid or this isn't going to work. It 0:19:30.960 --> 0:19:34.639 was you know, there are no guard rails, there are 0:19:34.680 --> 0:19:37.480 no there's no regulation. This thing is going to run 0:19:37.520 --> 0:19:40.520 a muck. It's gonna you know, how how are we 0:19:40.600 --> 0:19:43.280 going to protect against fraud? How are we going to 0:19:43.400 --> 0:19:48.080 protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How 0:19:48.080 --> 0:19:51.080 are we going to protect against you know, this kind 0:19:51.160 --> 0:19:54.439 of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody. So 0:19:54.560 --> 0:19:57.760 there were those kinds of questions, and people were, you know, 0:19:57.800 --> 0:20:00.159 maybe we should slow down a little bit and put 0:20:00.200 --> 0:20:04.560 some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most 0:20:04.560 --> 0:20:07.760 of that's that, Yeah, most of it didn't get done. 0:20:07.880 --> 0:20:11.240 You know, the Telecoms Act, you know whatever, Section two 0:20:11.240 --> 0:20:14.439