Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm, of course your
Speaker 2: host ed zitron and today I am joined for a
Speaker 2: dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief
Speaker 2: of the Register, who has been in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: I believe three hundred years. You said it was three
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty five. Yeah, so I'm actually a vampire.
Speaker 2: That's nice. Oh, what like Kevin O'Leary and Martin Supreme. Sorry,
Speaker 2: Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have
Speaker 2: you heard about that?
Speaker 1: No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet.
Speaker 1: Ping Pie doesn't really do it for me.
Speaker 2: I didn't really like it, but there is a bit
Speaker 2: in it where Kevin O'Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire.
Speaker 2: I've lived for this many years and I read about this.
Speaker 2: I did not like the movie, but I read about it.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I would actually love it if
Speaker 2: this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs,
Speaker 2: and they should have done that. They should have just
Speaker 2: had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's
Speaker 2: regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they
Speaker 2: would have squared that circle. AnyWho, my time only computers.
Speaker 2: So Matt, you were what were you We're just going
Speaker 2: to go straight into it. What were you doing in
Speaker 2: the dot com bubble era?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: Where did you begin and where did you find yourself
Speaker 2: as it progressed?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past.
Speaker 1: But I moved to San Francisco in nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession,
Speaker 1: so there wasn't much.
Speaker 3: Going on then.
Speaker 1: I was interning doing different kinds of od jobs, copy editing,
Speaker 1: doing some of those kinds of things, and then in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five I joined a little startup that was
Speaker 1: going to publish content on the World Wide Web. They
Speaker 1: didn't call it content then, I guess it was. They
Speaker 1: called it.
Speaker 3: An online magazine.
Speaker 1: They already had a TV network and that was Senet,
Speaker 1: So cnet is still out today in a very different format.
Speaker 1: But I was employee number forty two there. Started off
Speaker 1: as an editorial assistant, and my very first task there
Speaker 1: was to come up with an email newsletter, which we
Speaker 1: called Digital Dispatch, and it was mostly summaries of stuff
Speaker 1: that we were publishing on the site, and then occasional
Speaker 1: snarky commentary. I remember a couple of years later, we
Speaker 1: did ten reasons why Wired's IPO failed, and one of
Speaker 1: them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and
Speaker 1: red paper, which we thought was OK, funny and cute
Speaker 1: at the time.
Speaker 3: So anyway, that was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: We were, you know, growing at a very rapid pace.
Speaker 1: I think I was there from ninety five to ninety nine.
Speaker 1: Like I said, I was employee number forty two on
Speaker 1: the way in, and I think when I left there
Speaker 1: were over five hundred people working there with that. One
Speaker 1: was owned by Zif Davis at the time, it was
Speaker 1: not Cnet, was an independent company. It had a number
Speaker 1: of early venture investors, including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co founder.
Speaker 3: I don't remember the other ones.
Speaker 1: The CEO was guy named Halsey Minor, and no, it
Speaker 1: was it was completely you know, it was privately held
Speaker 1: and weipo'd in ninety seven or ninety eight, I'm not, oh.
Speaker 2: Just before that was just before things started to fall apart, right.
Speaker 1: Well, ninety eight was still go go go. I think
Speaker 1: it really kind of went on until two thousand and
Speaker 1: two thousand and one was when things started to turn. So,
Speaker 1: you know, it was fun being a company that was
Speaker 1: growing fast.
Speaker 3: I was able to do a.
Speaker 1: Whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing
Speaker 1: TV scripts and doing CD ROM reviews back when multimedia
Speaker 1: was a thing, and writing features and I interviewed a
Speaker 1: two way pager from this little company called Research in
Speaker 1: Motion before the BlackBerry was out, and I interviewed one
Speaker 1: of the first MP three players. I think it was
Speaker 1: the Rio, and I was like, Wow, interesting idea, but
Speaker 1: it can only hold like twelve songs, so this is
Speaker 1: a complete waste time. It'll never go was before the
Speaker 1: Creative Nomad. Then I think around the same time. I
Speaker 1: don't remember which one was first, but yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember the Creative Nomad could have like three hundred
Speaker 2: songs on it. I felt like, oh, yes, Sultan of
Speaker 2: BRUNEI I was the fanciest man ever, three hundred songs.
Speaker 2: How would I ever choose?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's it, that's right. Yeah. No, this was a
Speaker 3: lot less than that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we had to sort of do math and
Speaker 1: go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only twelve songs.
Speaker 1: That's worthless. So anyway, and then you know, took some
Speaker 1: filthy dot com Luker went backpacking for a little bit
Speaker 1: with my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife.
Speaker 1: And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle,
Speaker 1: and I think we came back on the day that
Speaker 1: Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the MS one.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, this was well, this was anti trust.
Speaker 1: Basically they had a whole bunch of different charges against them.
Speaker 1: Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one,
Speaker 1: you know, and making deals with PC makers to bundle
Speaker 1: certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software
Speaker 1: and all kinds.
Speaker 2: And incentivizing bundling MS dos. Yeah, I vaguely know this story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing,
Speaker 1: and you know, that's what we were all using in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five. It started with Mosaic and it was Navigator,
Speaker 1: and then Microsoft built Internet Explorer in the Windows ninety
Speaker 1: five and four years later Navigator didn't really exist for
Speaker 1: all intents and purposes.
Speaker 3: So it was But anyway, that was the day.
Speaker 1: It was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and he ordered them
Speaker 1: to be broken into two companies, an APPS company, which
Speaker 1: is office and all those products, and an OPS company,
Speaker 1: which was Windows. I believe now maybe remembering this slightly
Speaker 1: wrong and I don't have a resource in front.
Speaker 2: Of YEA very recently covered this and you will back on.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So but I think that was kind of the peak,
Speaker 1: and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of
Speaker 1: the end. So it's even though Microsoft had had very
Speaker 1: little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there
Speaker 1: was sort of this sense that, oh, the tightest turning anyway,
Speaker 1: long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I
Speaker 1: found work with this startup. At the time, they were
Speaker 1: called a Cadio and the idea was that they were
Speaker 1: going to do online education, so they wanted to have
Speaker 1: articles written and I was the computers tech guy. We
Speaker 1: were going to you know, training people on computer technology.
Speaker 1: And it was the most incompetently run company I have
Speaker 1: ever seen been a part of. I walked in immediately
Speaker 1: realized that I needed to get out.
Speaker 3: So by way of example, they didn't have so you
Speaker 3: know what. Yeah, it was this was.
Speaker 1: Early two thousands, so this is still this was when
Speaker 1: companies were getting funding on a promise and going public
Speaker 1: on powerpoints. Still it was still still at the peak,
Speaker 1: but we could see it starting to turn. So you know,
Speaker 1: these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people,
Speaker 1: and they had a cool loft in Pineer Square, which
Speaker 1: is you know, brick building and all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: But they didn't.
Speaker 1: So they you know, they hired me, and they're like,
Speaker 1: go get some freely, you know, fine, start hiring freelancers,
Speaker 1: and we need to get some content up. They had
Speaker 1: no way to put the content on the internet. They
Speaker 1: didn't have a CMS, they didn't know what a CMS was.
Speaker 1: And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a
Speaker 1: Microsoft product used for you know, creating code and sharing code.
Speaker 1: It was that level. And I remember later here over,
Speaker 1: you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very
Speaker 1: tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one
Speaker 1: of the investors yelled through a closed door, we might
Speaker 1: as well just sell the servers back to the investment bank.
Speaker 1: So I quickly got out of there, found a job
Speaker 1: at Directions on. Microsoft did that for ten years, and
Speaker 1: they were out of business by I believe, early two
Speaker 1: thousand and one.
Speaker 2: So about when did it become obvious something was wrong.
Speaker 1: So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale,
Speaker 1: but it was obvious that a lot of the specific
Speaker 1: individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air.
Speaker 1: There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers,
Speaker 1: or they were you know, selling dollars for seventy five
Speaker 1: cents basically. So you know, pets dot Com was a
Speaker 1: big one, Cosmo dot Com was another one, And all
Speaker 1: these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable
Speaker 1: in the second go round. So Cosmo dot Com was
Speaker 1: just home delivery. It was like Instacart.
Speaker 2: It's basically Cosmo was Instacom, and pets dot Com was Chewy.
Speaker 2: And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently, three point one
Speaker 2: billion dollars in a quarter fifty million dollars of profit,
Speaker 2: which is good. But also one of those business is
Speaker 2: what I hear metrics like that, I get scared.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fine, it's a you know, it's a low
Speaker 1: margin retail business.
Speaker 3: That's fine.
Speaker 1: Retail retail's good, you know, it's it's okay, it's real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's you sell things for more than you make
Speaker 1: them for. That's that's how it's supposed to work. So
Speaker 1: I think there were just so many of those. The
Speaker 1: other one was there was a business and I think
Speaker 1: they were only based in Seattle, called Lackeye dot com.
Speaker 1: And I remember my uh my boss at directions at
Speaker 1: the time said that, you know, this is when I
Speaker 1: knew that the revolution was impending. Is when you have
Speaker 1: a website called Lackeye dot com that is basically a
Speaker 1: personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like task Rabbit,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but even toss grab it has never really is
Speaker 2: tosk grab it even profitable.
Speaker 1: They got bought by Ikea, so it's buried now. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think they ever were.
Speaker 2: My lackey dot com. Okay, I I hate to interrupt
Speaker 2: to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in
Speaker 2: April not you know, you know, by a guy called
Speaker 2: Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Bonnacle.
Speaker 1: I remember that name. Yeah, I remember that name with
Speaker 1: an I right correct, yes.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah. In the memo he had a memo that
Speaker 2: was on fuck Company. It said this is still a startup.
Speaker 2: And he complains that it is now six forty five
Speaker 2: PM and they're only twelve people in our office. We
Speaker 2: have sixty four people who work here in Seattle. It's
Speaker 2: totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things
Speaker 2: stay the same.
Speaker 1: I think that's true. Yeah, there are there are absolutely
Speaker 1: some similarities and some differences between today and them.
Speaker 2: But what about the the telecom side though, was it
Speaker 2: did everybody just think that was going to work out
Speaker 2: until it didn't? What was their a point when the
Speaker 2: Loosens and the wind stars of the world got scared
Speaker 2: or scary?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was less close to that at the time. I
Speaker 1: was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff. But I
Speaker 1: remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and
Speaker 1: talking to me about Siena, Siena Networks, It's going to
Speaker 1: be huge. And I think those busts came a little
Speaker 1: bit later, right with WORLDCLM. I think that was maybe
Speaker 1: a bit after the doc Bom bust. And I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit less familiar with how all of that worked.
Speaker 1: But as I understand it, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: circular There were a lot of circular deals and deals
Speaker 1: that weren't really deals, and deals that were agreements but
Speaker 1: actual no money changing hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting because as I dig into this, and
Speaker 2: I've spent the last week or two digging into kind
Speaker 2: of how we got to this conversation, I realized it
Speaker 2: seems like there were two very specific The dot com
Speaker 2: bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot
Speaker 2: com website stuff, and then the follow up of the
Speaker 2: the the what was it the telecommunications fiber.
Speaker 1: Boom fiber boom, Yeah, it was, you know, it was
Speaker 1: the it was the the websites. There was definitely some
Speaker 1: circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements
Speaker 1: from each other. But you know, you remember AOL bought
Speaker 1: Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean, there
Speaker 1: were some really huge deals that turned out to be
Speaker 1: in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think
Speaker 1: once you're once, you know, once all of those things
Speaker 1: fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there A
Speaker 1: lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well.
Speaker 2: What was the moment you knew? Like, when was the moment?
Speaker 2: What was was there an event where you went, oh shit,
Speaker 2: and yeah?
Speaker 1: When I joined that startup and I wasn't I couldn't
Speaker 1: believe they had any money, So that was that was
Speaker 1: a spring of two thousand. I was like, it felt
Speaker 1: like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody,
Speaker 1: and I mean, this guy had a record. I think
Speaker 1: he had had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce
Speaker 1: that either sold or went public, So he wasn't a
Speaker 1: total nobody. It's just they couldn't hire enough people to
Speaker 1: actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't
Speaker 1: It just wasn't working, and everybody was kind of showing
Speaker 1: up to the office and play acting. There were some
Speaker 1: moments during the nineties that were, you know, kind of crazy,
Speaker 1: like see it they funded this party. I played bass
Speaker 1: and I was playing base and sort of this pickup
Speaker 1: band at work, and they basically rented out the.
Speaker 3: Film more for our holiday party.
Speaker 1: And you know, we played on a stage in front
Speaker 1: of twelve hundred or however, maybe the film is not
Speaker 1: that big, five hundred people. And then they had a
Speaker 1: I can't remember the name of the of the you know,
Speaker 1: they had an actual working band come on after us.
Speaker 1: But it was a lot of fun. The singer we
Speaker 1: were playing with nailed, Janis Joblin. She did a really
Speaker 1: spectacular job. We had a couple of good songs. So
Speaker 1: but that was those kinds of things were regular, like
Speaker 1: that was just expected these big parties, and nobody really
Speaker 1: asked where the money was coming from. I do remember
Speaker 1: after Senet went public. I don't remember what year this was,
Speaker 1: ninety eight or ninety nine. I actually looked at an
Speaker 1: earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money.
Speaker 1: I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money.
Speaker 1: How naive I was.
Speaker 2: That's so see, that's the thing I admit as I've
Speaker 2: got further into finance in general and learned stuff the
Speaker 2: amount of companies that just burn cash and then die,
Speaker 2: but also the ones that are burning cash right now,
Speaker 2: and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: actually fine, it's good that happens. It's like a completely
Speaker 2: like a completely different world that has only worked a
Speaker 2: few times in the past. It's actually not worked many
Speaker 2: many more times.
Speaker 3: Right, most of the time it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: But I think the bet is when it does work,
Speaker 1: it pays off spectacularly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And the question, I don't think Google was ever losing
Speaker 1: huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've I've looked into it, and the companies that
Speaker 2: have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere
Speaker 2: near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was
Speaker 2: like sixty nine billion over nine years, and that was
Speaker 2: all of Amazon's Capex, not just AWS focused.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, no, they yeah, And again there was to me,
Speaker 1: the Internet at large and the World Wide Web as
Speaker 1: we used to call it, was a lot more immediately
Speaker 1: obviously huge, and it was going to change a lot
Speaker 1: of things and how business was done and how media
Speaker 1: was distributed.
Speaker 3: It was it was clear.
Speaker 1: It was just a question of when and where the
Speaker 1: technology had to go in which parts had to evolve.
Speaker 1: You know, you needed consumers to have much more bandwidth
Speaker 1: before video became a realistic thing and so forth, and
Speaker 1: you know, they were gonna be fits and starts, but
Speaker 1: I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not
Speaker 1: fake like these things, some of these companies were going
Speaker 1: to succeed. Something was gonna happen. When I look at AI,
Speaker 1: to me, it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I
Speaker 1: don't even really like to call it AI because it's
Speaker 1: not intelligent, but that's the that's the term that we use.
Speaker 1: But it's you know, it's right, uh, you know, matrix math,
Speaker 1: determinating determined, you know, basically auto complete. So it's interesting.
Speaker 1: It can do some stuff that can be valuable in
Speaker 1: certain situations. But it doesn't to me feel immediately massively
Speaker 1: obvious that this is a huge change the internet did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: web browsers did the iPhone. The first time I played
Speaker 1: with one of those, I was kind of a skeptic
Speaker 1: because I mean, I had a palm pilot and I'd
Speaker 1: been yeah, yeah, I had around, Yeah, I had a
Speaker 1: compact them, so keep going no, no, you know, and
Speaker 1: you're you're you're playing with that stylist. And then someone
Speaker 1: brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever,
Speaker 1: they're not going to do this, and I was like, oh, responsive,
Speaker 1: touch screen, email, autocomplete maps, I'm like, this thing's cool.
Speaker 3: And then it got better from there.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I haven't felt that, and I've used all
Speaker 1: the chatbots.
Speaker 3: I've played around with them.
Speaker 1: I don't code, but you know, from what I understand
Speaker 1: from people who do, is if you're a non coder,
Speaker 1: it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas,
Speaker 1: which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and
Speaker 1: you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't deploy them like they you know, they they
Speaker 1: tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort
Speaker 1: of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as
Speaker 1: a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated
Speaker 1: writing and it's not good.
Speaker 2: That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So
Speaker 2: when you got into the internet industry, was there that
Speaker 2: sense of wonderment. I'm not even being like a shield.
Speaker 2: I'm just like because I remember when I first used
Speaker 2: the internet in like nineteen ninety seven, I want to say, yeah,
Speaker 2: like a child and being amazed by it, but even
Speaker 2: like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were
Speaker 2: getting into it in like the mid to late nineties,
Speaker 2: was there that sense of wonderment and excitement?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 3: There had been online services for a while.
Speaker 1: People used AOL compu serve, and you know, you hang
Speaker 1: out in chat rooms and you do these keywords and
Speaker 1: it would call up sort of a specific I don't
Speaker 1: even remember what they were called, but i'd call them
Speaker 1: apps now. But the web was interesting because it was
Speaker 1: immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website,
Speaker 1: and it was yeah, immediately huge, and it was a
Speaker 1: little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement.
Speaker 1: But I remember in San Francisco even in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 1: and you know, you had had wired magazines sort of
Speaker 1: sounding sounding the bells for it for several years by
Speaker 1: that point. But in nineteen ninety five, everybody was online,
Speaker 1: everybody was getting online, and you know, you had tons
Speaker 1: of TV commercials, and everybody was talking about the World
Speaker 1: Wide Web on the evening news, and it just it
Speaker 1: was immediately clear that this was a new thing and
Speaker 1: it was a new way that we were going to
Speaker 1: do a lot of stuff. Right, So, yeah, there was
Speaker 1: there was massive excitement over it.
Speaker 2: Was there any kind of AI sorry, I same leading
Speaker 2: question then? Were there dissenters? Were there people other than
Speaker 2: the obvious news we call call that everyone sends me
Speaker 2: every time, you know, the one I'm talking about the dynalltics,
Speaker 2: weird gloss things now.
Speaker 1: But it was that descent there was, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the descent, interestingly, was centered around some
Speaker 1: of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over
Speaker 1: the last five, six, seven years. So it wasn't that
Speaker 1: this is stupid or this isn't going to work. It
Speaker 1: was you know, there are no guard rails, there are
Speaker 1: no there's no regulation. This thing is going to run
Speaker 1: a muck. It's gonna you know, how how are we
Speaker 1: going to protect against fraud? How are we going to
Speaker 1: protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How
Speaker 1: are we going to protect against you know, this kind
Speaker 1: of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody. So
Speaker 1: there were those kinds of questions, and people were, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we should slow down a little bit and put
Speaker 1: some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most
Speaker 1: of that's that, Yeah, most of it didn't get done.
Speaker 1: You know, the Telecoms Act, you know whatever, Section two
Speaker 1: thirty whatever, the big Omnimus Bill that that was a
Speaker 1: part of that was an attempt to deal with some
Speaker 1: of that stuff.
Speaker 3: But it was pretty it was pretty lenient.
Speaker 1: It was more about sort of protecting companies from from liability.
Speaker 1: But there were some yeah, there was some at least
Speaker 1: some thought around it, but.
Speaker 2: But there wasn't just people saying this won't work in
Speaker 2: the same way.
Speaker 1: Very few, very few, I mean there, you know, I
Speaker 1: suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper
Speaker 1: at the time and probably would have heard some arguments
Speaker 1: that now in retrospect sound insane. But you know, who
Speaker 1: wants to read on a screen that was one that
Speaker 1: you sometimes heard people want to have a piece of
Speaker 1: paper in their hand and you know, print is print
Speaker 1: is the way nobody wants to read on a screen,
Speaker 1: or you know, this is this is this is sort
Speaker 1: of a nerd toy. This is never going to take
Speaker 1: off among you know, mainstream people. There were issues with
Speaker 1: internet access. It wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I
Speaker 1: mean we were using pretty low speed modems for a
Speaker 1: very very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country.
Speaker 1: So there was some skepticism around that, you know, And
Speaker 1: part of it, I have to be honest, is I
Speaker 1: was in my twenties at the time, so I think
Speaker 1: people at that age tend to be much more go
Speaker 1: go about the future than perhaps old cynics as as
Speaker 1: we are now.
Speaker 2: But there wasn't any kind of well maybe there was,
Speaker 2: you can tell me. There wasn't a kind of bifurcation
Speaker 2: between people who were like pro internet anti internet in
Speaker 2: the same way.
Speaker 3: Nah.
Speaker 1: No, I don't remember that anyway, No, I really don't
Speaker 1: think so. Yeah, it was all it was all hands
Speaker 1: on deck. I mean, I mean again, like this was
Speaker 1: on TV. This is like you know, advertisements, there were
Speaker 1: there were commercials. There were people on that evening news,
Speaker 1: you know, reaching, reaching mom. You know my parents who
Speaker 1: are boomers, They were fully aware and gung ho about
Speaker 1: the web by ninety seven or ninety eight, and that's
Speaker 1: I think that's who was investing. So, you know, one
Speaker 1: of the big differences between then and today it was
Speaker 1: these companies were going public and it was really fueled
Speaker 1: in large part by retail investors. You know, you wanted
Speaker 1: to buy stocks on the stock market in these new
Speaker 1: companies that represented the future. So you know, you had
Speaker 1: doctors and dentists and you know, professors with a little
Speaker 1: money and people putting their retirement savings into these things,
Speaker 1: and they were the ones who probably got wiped out
Speaker 1: the most in you know, two thousand and one through
Speaker 1: two thousand and four.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean, was was that before e trade?
Speaker 3: Was it?
Speaker 2: Do you start to call a stockbroker? I literally don't
Speaker 2: know how they bought stock back then.
Speaker 1: I realized, Yeah, I think E trade started in the
Speaker 1: dot com boom, if I recall late in.
Speaker 2: Nineties, because I remember in England at the time, the
Speaker 2: story is about how E trade led to people losing
Speaker 2: tons of money, and there was one thing I'll credit
Speaker 2: the press with at the time as being like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know
Speaker 2: what you're doing, right.
Speaker 3: Yes, index funds hold forever.
Speaker 1: That's the that's the random walk down Wall Street, the
Speaker 1: only investment strategy that works. But yeah, people were playing,
Speaker 1: you know, they wanted they saw these ridiculous returns and
Speaker 1: they wanted a piece of it. So yeah, I think
Speaker 1: online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had
Speaker 1: the Yahoo Chat forums that's where people would pump and
Speaker 1: dump these penny stocks.
Speaker 3: They were all clad and.
Speaker 2: Really they were like there were actual pump groups back then.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean yah. Yahoo Chat was sort of
Speaker 1: infamous for it. Like you would hear about something, you'd
Speaker 1: hear it was a lot like what happened with crypto
Speaker 1: in twenty one twenty two. You know, someone issues a
Speaker 1: new time and everybody rushes in to buy it and
Speaker 1: then it crashed. You know, there's a rug pull and
Speaker 1: it crashes, like it was. Those kinds of things were happening.
Speaker 1: But Yahoo, I remember being that was the forum that
Speaker 1: I was the most familiar with back then. It was
Speaker 1: probably going on on AOL too.
Speaker 2: That's magical. Oh, the innocent days. It was the I
Speaker 2: remember when I I'm Gonna do the It was a
Speaker 2: Rockahaua speech and the end of Blade round of the
Speaker 2: things I've seen in telegram groups about icos. But it's
Speaker 2: it's kind of it's adorable to hear that stuff happening,
Speaker 2: until you remember people lost lots of money. But it
Speaker 2: doesn't feel like it doesn't sound like maybe it was
Speaker 2: a different media climate, like there was that kind of
Speaker 2: almost have There wasn't the noxious part of it where
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, if you don't get on the internet,
Speaker 2: you're gonna be left behind, You're an idiot, or maybe
Speaker 2: I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: Not so much of that, but it was it was
Speaker 1: just presumed that this is the future and if you
Speaker 1: don't want part of the if you don't want to
Speaker 1: be part of the future, that's fine, But you know,
Speaker 1: why don't you go be a survivalist and live off
Speaker 1: the grid in the woods? Kind of right, It was
Speaker 1: just assumed. I mean, it's like, you know, do you
Speaker 1: watch TV. There was a time when if you said
Speaker 1: I don't have a TV you were very pretentious and
Speaker 1: very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable. But
Speaker 1: so it was sort of like that. It was just
Speaker 1: presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board.
Speaker 1: I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home?
Speaker 1: That was a real question in the late eighties, right,
Speaker 1: Oh PC on every desktop? Yeah, sure, bill, whatever you say.
Speaker 1: Who wants one of these things? And then you know,
Speaker 1: you find justifications for it. Oh, well you can you know,
Speaker 1: you can pay your bills automatically, and you can do
Speaker 1: this and that. And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built
Speaker 1: into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing,
Speaker 1: like that was, oh, of course, everybody has to have
Speaker 1: a PC and we're all going to be on the web,
Speaker 1: surfing the web.
Speaker 2: It also feels like it was a genuine too, like
Speaker 2: a lot of these things would just too early and
Speaker 2: run too crazy because the actual fundament of it, it
Speaker 2: sounds like, was people were excited to get on the internet,
Speaker 2: which was which was obviously a beneficial thing and had
Speaker 2: immediate returns, like people could use it and say this
Speaker 2: is useful in my life in this manner, right.
Speaker 1: I think the initial thing was access to information. You
Speaker 1: could you could find out a lot of things very
Speaker 1: fast and actually and there were some communication aspects, right,
Speaker 1: You could talk to anybody anywhere in the world pretty easily,
Speaker 1: pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: And then other things.
Speaker 1: You know, e commerce was very early, but you know,
Speaker 1: suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and
Speaker 1: ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for
Speaker 1: a year in nineteen ninety, and you know, it was
Speaker 1: a thing if you don't have the book in stock,
Speaker 1: they come in and you order the book, and then
Speaker 1: they come back a week later, and suddenly you just
Speaker 1: press a button and the you know, the book will come.
Speaker 1: And then they started adding music. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, again, the lack of bandwidth among a
Speaker 1: lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of
Speaker 1: digital video, but it eventually came around in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one or two. That's when YouTube really took off.
Speaker 1: Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft.
Speaker 3: Oh real real player.
Speaker 1: Yeah, buffer, Remember we're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer
Speaker 1: a couple times. You know, he had the right idea.
Speaker 1: But again, Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market
Speaker 1: pretty quickly with Windows Media Player, and then Apple came
Speaker 1: along and I they kind of blew everybody else away. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: all of the ideas were there, and I think most
Speaker 1: of what we were sort of experimenting with later became
Speaker 1: real businesses. I mean, you know LimeWire and all the
Speaker 1: sort of music MP three trading sites that was later
Speaker 1: late nineties, I guess, early two thousands. That all eventually
Speaker 1: became legitimized through Spotify and Apple Music and so on.
Speaker 1: So every idea was already there. It was just maybe
Speaker 1: it's a little bit underground. Maybe it doesn't work quite right,
Speaker 1: it's a little clunky, it's a little cluegy, or maybe
Speaker 1: the companies were just you know, they borrowed too much
Speaker 1: money too fast and couldn't turn it around.
Speaker 2: Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble, like
Speaker 2: it's they such in a Dela on the morning of
Speaker 2: recording this, uh At Davos was saying, Yeah, the thing
Speaker 2: that might make the suspeculative bubble if nobody but if
Speaker 2: nobody buys it. But if nobody buys AI. Not really,
Speaker 2: he's so cool. I love that we live in this area.
Speaker 2: I'm going to read you this sentence actually because this
Speaker 2: really got me. Microsoft chief executive Search and a Delas
Speaker 2: warn that AI risk becoming a speculative bubble unless its
Speaker 2: use is spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies.
Speaker 2: For this not to be a bubble, by definition, it
Speaker 2: requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread.
Speaker 2: He knowed that a telltale sign of it's abobble would
Speaker 2: be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise
Speaker 2: of AI rather than the companies and other sectors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's good, good shit self evident. Yes, correct, he's
Speaker 1: not wrong.
Speaker 2: Creative perhaps if no one uses also, isn't his job.
Speaker 2: But nevertheless, there was a question I had. So something
Speaker 2: that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly
Speaker 2: people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good.
Speaker 2: What was the aftermath like?
Speaker 1: So this is where things get a little bit complicated,
Speaker 1: because I don't think that you can really fairly separate
Speaker 1: events from other events that happen at the same time. So,
Speaker 1: the the dot com bubble did burst, but then you
Speaker 1: had nine to eleven happen in September of two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, sort of in the late middle of it,
Speaker 1: and that literally changed everything. It changed confidence, it changed
Speaker 1: where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money
Speaker 1: flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative
Speaker 1: and so forth.
Speaker 3: So I think.
Speaker 1: The real effect of the dot com bust, I mean,
Speaker 1: you had a lot of people my age, people who
Speaker 1: were in their twenties and the go go nineties, suddenly
Speaker 1: lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks
Speaker 1: that they.
Speaker 3: Had become accustomed to.
Speaker 1: And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out.
Speaker 1: You know, some people lost their lost their life savings
Speaker 1: or a big portion of their life savings. And you know,
Speaker 1: my attitude toward investing has always been caveat empt or
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You
Speaker 1: should put your money in an index fund, and you
Speaker 1: should hold on to that until you retire. That's the
Speaker 1: safest thing to do. But you know, some people say, hey,
Speaker 1: I've got ten percent of this of my holdings are
Speaker 1: play money, and I'm just going to make some bets
Speaker 1: and see what happens. And then you find other people
Speaker 1: who who go too far with it.
Speaker 2: But what about people in tech?
Speaker 1: You know, in tech, most those skills didn't become useless, right,
Speaker 1: so the technology was always changing. If you were you know,
Speaker 1: learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming, and then you
Speaker 1: could transition into new different kinds of things. The technology
Speaker 1: continued to evolve, so people who had those technical skills
Speaker 1: could continue forward and find other interesting things to do.
Speaker 1: And then, you know, honestly, after the sort of telecoms
Speaker 1: bus two thousand and four, two thousand and five, you
Speaker 1: had a pretty long boom. I mean, there was the
Speaker 1: financial collapse of eight around the housing market, but the
Speaker 1: tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons
Speaker 1: of companies got started in the wake of the dot
Speaker 1: com bust, and many of those companies are still around today.
Speaker 1: So I don't feel like people in the tech industry
Speaker 1: were permanently hurt. You know, there was a couple of
Speaker 1: years set back, and then they generally were able to
Speaker 1: learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned, and go
Speaker 1: find other things that some of which turned out to
Speaker 1: be really lucrative.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But I think, I think, how can I phrase this?
Speaker 2: I think that people are very flippant about the consequences
Speaker 2: of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really
Speaker 2: what I'm that's where my concern you're talking about today today, Yes,
Speaker 2: because people compare it to the dult com bubble, and
Speaker 2: they say, well, after the dult kombubble, there was that value,
Speaker 2: which is completely correct.
Speaker 1: But yeah, again, I think the other thing is about today.
Speaker 1: So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know,
Speaker 1: ninety two ninety three, the Cold War was over. There
Speaker 1: was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into
Speaker 1: national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying, you know, good times.
Speaker 1: There was a book called The End of History by
Speaker 1: Francis Fukuyama that's sort of posited.
Speaker 3: Hey, this is it.
Speaker 1: You know, we're here in this permanent utopia world. Of course,
Speaker 1: events intervened and I think nine to eleven was the
Speaker 1: big turning point there, and there's some other stuff around
Speaker 1: that time, you know.
Speaker 3: The contested election of two thousand.
Speaker 1: Now, contested elections are such a common thing we don't
Speaker 1: really think about them anymore, but that was the first
Speaker 1: big one in my lifetime. The situation today, I think
Speaker 1: you would agree, is very different. You know, we have
Speaker 1: an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems
Speaker 1: to be bent on ripping down old world orders that
Speaker 1: have enabled stability since World War Two. I mean, if
Speaker 1: you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally, and
Speaker 1: you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with
Speaker 1: the rest of the world, and so forth, and so on.
Speaker 1: We could go on and on about this, but I don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not an analytical expert. But the background scenario is
Speaker 1: very different, and I think you could almost make a
Speaker 1: case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of
Speaker 1: a certain number of years of rot in the business
Speaker 1: and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument.
Speaker 1: You know, you can decide where that started. Did it
Speaker 1: start in the eighties and nineties when the US started
Speaker 1: off shoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries.
Speaker 1: Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear
Speaker 1: for some time that a lot of the easy sort
Speaker 1: of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution
Speaker 1: and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered like those. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's not that much more upside. You can get
Speaker 1: a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody
Speaker 1: kind of knows how the internet works, you know, what
Speaker 1: advertising looks like, you know, so this sort of to
Speaker 1: me seems like it's it's sort of the last big push.
Speaker 1: And you know, you have a lot of people in
Speaker 1: big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this, they don't
Speaker 1: really produce much day to day. They produce a lot
Speaker 1: of emails and a lot of presentations, and they sit
Speaker 1: in meeting occasionally they got to make a yes no
Speaker 1: decision and they got to you know, mune some data
Speaker 1: together and say, Okay, it looks wiser if we do
Speaker 1: this instead of doing that. But you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of it is performative, and I think, you know, AI
Speaker 1: is great for that. I don't have to create the
Speaker 1: spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't have to write the email that no one's
Speaker 1: going to read, and then they don't have to read
Speaker 1: it because they can have AI summarized for them. I
Speaker 1: think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of jobs that are good enough.
Speaker 1: But I want to it's a bigger problem with the economy.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI
Speaker 1: is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.
Speaker 2: But even then, it's like, can it do presentations? Because
Speaker 2: I've never been a like I've genuinely tried just to
Speaker 2: see if it could do it. It's never been able
Speaker 2: to do it. I think it's an interest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I've seen presentations created with AI that
Speaker 1: are pretty good.
Speaker 3: I think you get it, gets you.
Speaker 1: A certain percentage of the way there, and then you
Speaker 1: tweak it a little bit.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, it's just that. But but then you kind
Speaker 2: of look at it and say, great, did we really
Speaker 2: need to spend however, many hundreds of billions of dollars
Speaker 2: to get a spreadsheet maker. I also think that people
Speaker 2: are just being flippant about the idea of a financial
Speaker 2: collapse as well. That's what that's what's worrying me as well.
Speaker 1: Right, But again, I think that there are a lot
Speaker 1: of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse, and AI
Speaker 1: is one of some number.
Speaker 3: I don't think it.
Speaker 1: Again, the dot com bust was not entirely attributable to
Speaker 1: ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts
Speaker 1: of the world. There was a change of in confidence,
Speaker 1: and I think here again, you've got you've got a
Speaker 1: lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a
Speaker 1: lot of chaos. So there are many many things that
Speaker 1: could happen. But I agree, I think people maybe underestimate
Speaker 1: how how deep this is. Then again then again, you know,
Speaker 1: who are the big investors in this? I mean it's
Speaker 1: mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive.
Speaker 2: Cash maybe highly anymore though one hundred and seventy eight
Speaker 2: point five billion dollars of data center credit deals, you've
Speaker 2: got venture capital is actually they yeah, venture capital is
Speaker 2: also half a venture capital is going into it. But
Speaker 2: the other thing that shocked me as well was back
Speaker 2: then in the dot com boom, venture capital was so
Speaker 2: much smaller.
Speaker 1: Oh it was tiny, but yeah, you need it was
Speaker 1: investment banking is where is where you found the money.
Speaker 1: So venture capital though, you know, that's not their money.
Speaker 1: They're they're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money
Speaker 1: are they playing with? Who are the LPs, Well, we
Speaker 1: don't really know, but it's it's personal wealth funds, it's
Speaker 1: sovereign wealth funds, you know, it's it's Middle Eastern and
Speaker 1: other country sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers pensions, and
Speaker 1: there's university endowments, and there's some other things that that
Speaker 1: that those LPs are holding that will actually harm you know,
Speaker 1: normal working folk.
Speaker 3: But I think a lot of it is.
Speaker 1: Massive excess wealth at the top of society where people
Speaker 1: are looking for new, new kinds of returns, they're looking
Speaker 1: for outsized returns because all the easy all the easy
Speaker 1: money is sort of already taken. So I don't know
Speaker 1: if that. I think where it hurts is when you
Speaker 1: think about, Okay, the you know, the real estate carry
Speaker 1: on effects, all the people who are employed now and
Speaker 1: will be suddenly unemployed. Those those kinds of things could
Speaker 1: really hurt. But I just it doesn't seem to me
Speaker 1: like you have the retail trader exposure as you did
Speaker 1: during the dot com boom. Yeah, okay, if there's a
Speaker 1: huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of
Speaker 1: its value, sure people are going to hurt who have
Speaker 1: invested in in video, but they're not going to get
Speaker 1: wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle.
Speaker 1: I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result, and.
Speaker 2: Neither do I. I think the thing that people need
Speaker 2: to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be
Speaker 2: what hurts. It's going to be a draw down. It's
Speaker 2: going to be because in Vidia eighty eight percent of
Speaker 2: the revenue's data center like and I even looked back
Speaker 2: for a premium I date a few weeks ago where
Speaker 2: it was the amount of revenue that like Loosened or
Speaker 2: Corning or whomever had in those specific segments, or how
Speaker 2: weighted they were on their customers, Like I think Loosen's
Speaker 2: top customers were eight and T and Verizin, but those
Speaker 2: only represented thirteen to fourteen percent. In Nvidia has customers
Speaker 2: that make up fifteen to twenty percent of their revue
Speaker 2: new each quarter. They have massive centralization around four to
Speaker 2: five customers that diversified revenues dropping. It's just it isn't
Speaker 2: that in video is going to die. It's the half
Speaker 2: to eighty percent of their revenue is going to disappear.
Speaker 2: It happened with crypto with them, yeah, I'm really worried.
Speaker 1: They were never as Yeah, they were never as dependent
Speaker 1: on Crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years.
Speaker 1: I mean right, they were doing so chips for self
Speaker 1: driving cars and all kinds of things.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 1: I am not as technical as the writers on the
Speaker 1: registers staff to bias Man, for example, does a great
Speaker 1: job covering GPUs and data centers. It is positive that
Speaker 1: there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be
Speaker 1: very interesting with in terms of high performance computing and
Speaker 1: some other things that are AI adjacent, you know, different
Speaker 1: kinds of data processing and so forth.
Speaker 3: So it may not what we call AI.
Speaker 1: Even if that you know that those end use cases
Speaker 1: and turn out to be eh, you know, vibe coding, eh,
Speaker 1: chatbots eh, even though those aren't it. Some of these,
Speaker 1: some of the some of the hardware may be repurposable
Speaker 1: into other functions. I don't think it. It's just not
Speaker 1: at this.
Speaker 2: But not at the scale that they're building.
Speaker 1: Though. No, no, again, I would be stunned if all
Speaker 1: of the data centers that are being promised by twenty
Speaker 1: thirty are actually built.
Speaker 3: But maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2: I also just don't think that that will be happening.
Speaker 2: I just don't see it happening. I am looking through
Speaker 2: the old dot com companies, though I really can't find
Speaker 2: anything like open AI. They are truly special.
Speaker 1: They are.
Speaker 2: It's like they took a bit of Global Crossing, a
Speaker 2: bit of Enron, a bit of loosen but also a
Speaker 2: bit of pets dot Com just kind of amazed what
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley can still spoot out. No like innovations but
Speaker 2: financial collapses like these, We've never seen one this big, folks.
Speaker 3: It's massive. Yeah, it's it's there.
Speaker 1: There are there are a lot of commitments there in
Speaker 1: The value is massive, massive, massive. I do think their
Speaker 1: announcement last week or their acknowledgment that they're finally getting
Speaker 1: into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about
Speaker 1: this offline before, but when I think about all of
Speaker 1: the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user,
Speaker 1: they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at
Speaker 1: least as well as Facebook and at least as well
Speaker 1: as Google.
Speaker 3: Right, so good to know.
Speaker 2: About that, because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic
Speaker 2: data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that
Speaker 2: can track I don't know if, especially as these are
Speaker 2: free users, we don't know how much actual personal data.
Speaker 2: Like Facebook's big advantage was that when you registered, you
Speaker 2: gave them the demographic data they needed to target right right.
Speaker 1: I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they
Speaker 1: can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in,
Speaker 1: everything that you've been talking about for the last year,
Speaker 1: they should be able to track that back to an
Speaker 1: individual user. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know the.
Speaker 2: Details maybe, but they've said low billions of revenue. But
Speaker 2: it is. It is just interesting because in any I
Speaker 2: maybe you know this, I looking through the history of
Speaker 2: the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was
Speaker 2: just screaming that something that didn't work would work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh wow, it's hard to it's hard to
Speaker 1: remember something that has been you know, this hyped.
Speaker 3: And again I always leave. I always try to approach
Speaker 3: this with.
Speaker 1: An open mind because I am, you know, older, so
Speaker 1: I tend to be more cynical with experience. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite
Speaker 1: understand the big deal here. Doesn't seem to really do
Speaker 1: what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still you know,
Speaker 1: Gemini has foist it on me every day when I
Speaker 1: try to do Google searches, and it's nearly almost always
Speaker 1: slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong,
Speaker 1: because it lulls you into this false sense of security
Speaker 1: and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right,
Speaker 1: and then you go to the source link and it
Speaker 1: just got it wrong.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, the beginning of the Google chapter of my
Speaker 2: book that's coming out next year is I went to
Speaker 2: look for how many people, how many users Google has,
Speaker 2: and it's just me going insane as I get an
Speaker 2: AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles
Speaker 2: that do not cite their sources.
Speaker 1: Right, there's a lot of that, so it's taking what
Speaker 1: all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as
Speaker 1: an editor, I'm I have for the last fifteen years
Speaker 1: been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the internet.
Speaker 1: I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you
Speaker 1: know that's a reliable source? And AI just sort of
Speaker 1: absorbs it all and presents and Lodi da, here you go.
Speaker 1: They don't have any you know, they don't care, they
Speaker 1: don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the one, the one thing I would what you were
Speaker 1: saying about never seen sort of this much happen. I
Speaker 1: do remember before the Segue came out and people were
Speaker 1: saying I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: or somebody, but somebody was saying this is going to
Speaker 1: revolutionize transportation and change cities.
Speaker 3: And we were like, WHOA, what could this thing be?
Speaker 1: And then it was the Segue. Maybe not, but that
Speaker 1: was one very small, isolated thing I don't. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the
Speaker 1: industry was saying this is going to revolutionize everything, and
Speaker 1: end users are kind of going, I don't know how
Speaker 1: many times a day, co pilot comes up on my
Speaker 1: Windows PC and I dismissed it immediately because I didn't
Speaker 1: really want it to show up. It just sort of
Speaker 1: pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks, Nah,
Speaker 1: I'm good.
Speaker 2: I keep thinking about the thing you said, though, It's
Speaker 2: like the conditions that different. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: we've read like it's not like we're in a new
Speaker 2: frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that
Speaker 2: might work. It's where it almost feels like the end
Speaker 2: of something. It feels like the dot com bubble was
Speaker 2: created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this.
Speaker 2: It is people trying to pretend that something's happening and
Speaker 2: that we're not at the end of an ela. I
Speaker 2: should say, I don't think we're at the end of society.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think we are probably seeing probably
Speaker 1: the beginning of new pretty major global shifts and power,
Speaker 1: and you know, some of the guiding societal philosophies that
Speaker 1: guide that will change. And yeah, there's there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different things going on right now. You know,
Speaker 1: I started a climate section at the NBC and was
Speaker 1: very deeply entrenched in climate tech and some of the
Speaker 1: climate politics.
Speaker 3: And things around that.
Speaker 1: And you talk to the green piled folks and they think,
Speaker 1: you know, eighty years from now, we're all doomed.
Speaker 3: So do I believe that?
Speaker 1: No, not necessarily, but I do feel like things are
Speaker 1: changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of
Speaker 1: different fronts, and AIS just kind of this, Hey, let's
Speaker 1: let's keep this, let's keep this playbook running this place.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's keep doing That's really it. It's like keeping
Speaker 2: let's keep doing what we've done the whole time during
Speaker 2: the dult kombubble, people would trying new shit.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 1: It goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean, this,
Speaker 1: this tech boom has been going on since the since
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties, really in different waves, but it's been
Speaker 1: going on and on and on. I mean, I do
Speaker 1: think like when Bill Gates said a computer on every
Speaker 1: desktop whenever, that was in the eighties, that was nuts.
Speaker 1: And then it was a computer on every desk and
Speaker 1: in every home, and that was even more nuts, but
Speaker 1: it happened. So, you know, I think that it's been
Speaker 1: I don't want to say easy, but it's been running
Speaker 1: so well for so long that I think everybody just
Speaker 1: kind of wants it to keep running.
Speaker 3: And I'm not. I don't know, I'm not. I'm with you.
Speaker 1: I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton
Speaker 1: of day to days. I mean, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: you look at the teenage demographic.
Speaker 3: That's kind of who I always go to.
Speaker 1: And my son is fifteen, and he's very cynical about
Speaker 1: like he jokes about obvious AI writing and like they
Speaker 1: make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI.
Speaker 1: And he'll see a you know, a poster and advertisement
Speaker 1: he's like, that's so AI and it's it's something that
Speaker 1: you scoff at and make it.
Speaker 2: Oh they're fuck, No, okay, AI is fuck. Then I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: If you've got teenagers who are making fun of calling
Speaker 2: bad stuff AI, right, I don't. I'm actually serious. That
Speaker 2: is legitimately lethal. Teenagers dumb people. I'm I'm thirty nine
Speaker 2: years old now, like I was, I've never been cooler
Speaker 2: a year of my life. But I know that when if,
Speaker 2: because that's in because you read a lot of things
Speaker 2: that people try and say, well, young people love AI
Speaker 2: not be my experience either.
Speaker 1: I don't young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels.
Speaker 1: You know, they're on they're on vertical they're scrolling vertical
Speaker 1: video all.
Speaker 3: Day and and commony.
Speaker 1: I don't even want to say they love you know,
Speaker 1: Snap or any social media because it's all you know,
Speaker 1: it's all text change, right, It's all you just get
Speaker 1: your different text strings. Like. There's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: that they love. Games, huge online games, you know, participatory games.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I don't see them hanging out all.
Speaker 3: Day with their chatbot.
Speaker 1: You know, once in a while, if you have something
Speaker 1: you really want to you're curious and you want to
Speaker 1: experiment with something, it'll prototype something quite quickly for you.
Speaker 1: And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful.
Speaker 1: It's like, Okay, this is a prototype, this is cool.
Speaker 1: This would have taken me six hours of grunt work
Speaker 1: to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there
Speaker 1: are some you know, I don't want to I don't
Speaker 1: want to slam and say it's totally useless in all
Speaker 1: scenarios because it's not it's a it's just it's sort
Speaker 1: of an extension of a compute. It's just a better computer.
Speaker 1: In some ways it helps you do certain things, some fast.
Speaker 2: But some times it's a better that's the other thing.
Speaker 2: It's like, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis
Speaker 2: being far more common than people think, because I think
Speaker 2: that there is something that happens when people use a
Speaker 2: large language model and what they extrapolate from there that
Speaker 2: makes some people do insane things like I don't know
Speaker 2: by two hundred billion dollars worth of data centers and GPUs.
Speaker 2: And on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just
Speaker 2: business idiots being business idiots. No, I think such An
Speaker 2: Adela and sun Dar Pashai used an LM and went,
Speaker 2: holy shit, I need to do this. I mean I
Speaker 2: got told once that such An Adella's whole reason that
Speaker 2: he started this facade was because he saw chat GPT
Speaker 2: and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is
Speaker 2: that everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Bruce's Chat
Speaker 2: GPT told me to leave my wife thing. It's just
Speaker 2: what do you believe AI will do next, Like what
Speaker 2: do you think it will do? And what do you
Speaker 2: believe will happen if you don't use it today? And
Speaker 2: it's just very bizarre. Sorry that was that was more
Speaker 2: of a point than a question, I should be clear.
Speaker 1: But how many people are subject to that? I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a huge number. Yeah, to some degree. The
Speaker 1: folks who are, you know, the sachun Adelas of the world,
Speaker 1: are I should say, someone insulated from the trials and
Speaker 1: tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money.
Speaker 1: And if you are someone like Sam Altman or Elon
Speaker 1: Musk who is surrounded by a cadre of people who
Speaker 1: always say yes to everything you suggest and and you know,
Speaker 1: are constantly saying you are a genius. You're a genius, man,
Speaker 1: You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these
Speaker 1: chatbots almost duplicate that mentality, like it's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I
Speaker 1: am great and I am special and I have inside
Speaker 1: knowledge that nobody else has.
Speaker 2: That's a nice but that's kind of what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2: Using a large language but convinces some people that they
Speaker 2: are in the field future and creates this kind of
Speaker 2: religious feeling around it.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I hate to explore this idea more. I've just never
Speaker 2: I've seen it in like game FAQs, when people would
Speaker 2: argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but
Speaker 2: not like that. You don't have people just saying the
Speaker 2: Xbox can do things things it can't.
Speaker 3: But it's part of what we're seeing.
Speaker 1: I think that feeling it's pervasive in our society right now. Regardless,
Speaker 1: we have this sort of strong current of anti expert
Speaker 1: right the people who've studied this for years are no
Speaker 1: smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my
Speaker 1: own special knowledge and.
Speaker 3: Nobody else has it.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've
Speaker 1: learned that's, you know, really important.
Speaker 3: I think that.
Speaker 1: Whatever if you want to call it psychosis or that
Speaker 1: narcissism that comes out of fifteen years of social media,
Speaker 1: like that's old enough to remember. In fact, Facebook didn't
Speaker 1: come out until I was already an adult and and
Speaker 1: had a child. I mean, Facebook didn't really become mainstream.
Speaker 1: I had a two year old kid. So I'm old
Speaker 1: and I remember how sort of society changed and how
Speaker 1: people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media
Speaker 1: became popular, and it was much more about you're on
Speaker 1: stage all the time and look at my life, and
Speaker 1: your life is better than my life. We I mean,
Speaker 1: there's some of that that's always been around, but it
Speaker 1: just wasn't so easy to indulge.
Speaker 3: That side of oneself pre social media.
Speaker 1: So I think, you know, again, everything that was set
Speaker 1: in the past just continues along its way. Like I
Speaker 1: think again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know,
Speaker 1: the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth
Speaker 1: of a lot of different trends that have been happening
Speaker 1: for a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I keep thinking a long term jok
Speaker 2: I make is posting it's the beginning of history with
Speaker 2: a big smiley face, because I actually worry that that
Speaker 2: that's what like, It's not that everything's coming to an end.
Speaker 2: It's that one era is ending and another is beginning
Speaker 2: aggressively and loudly.
Speaker 3: This is the.
Speaker 1: Dawning of the Aquarius.
Speaker 2: All right, I think that's a great place to end it.
Speaker 2: Matt rose Off, editor in chief of The Register, Thank
Speaker 2: you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3: All right, Thank you ed a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Thank you everyone to listen. Thank you everyone to listening.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to edit that out. You'll have him
Speaker 2: on log this week as well. Maybe I'll chuck you
Speaker 2: an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks everyone for
Speaker 2: stomaching the four part of last week, and yeah, catch
Speaker 2: you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 4: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 4: is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 4: and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, m A T
Speaker 4: T O s O W s ki dot com. You
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