Speaker 1: All media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Gosh darn Evans for you here and
Speaker 2: you know, but for the end of the year, to
Speaker 2: celebrate and stuff, we've got our normal behind the Bastards
Speaker 2: content coming to you. Do not worry, that's all going
Speaker 2: to continue as normal. But we also wanted to highlight
Speaker 2: some other shows in our network, most of which are
Speaker 2: new and launched this year. We've got some compilation best
Speaker 2: of episodes that we think the Bastard's audience is going
Speaker 2: to love, and we're delivering to you now in a
Speaker 2: special format with fewer ads. So today you're going to
Speaker 2: hear some episodes of Better Offline, ed Zytron's excellent critical
Speaker 2: tech industry podcast, which has taken the tech world by storm.
Speaker 2: And I'm excited for you to learn about the man
Speaker 2: who killed Google Search, about Sam Altman, the CEO of
Speaker 2: Open Ai, and why he's dangerous for society, and what
Speaker 2: ed Zitron calls the rot economy.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, that Zichron, And.
Speaker 4: In the next two episodes, I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to tell you the names some of the people
Speaker 3: responsible for destroying the Internet. And I'm going to start
Speaker 3: on February fifth, twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes, Google's former
Speaker 3: head of Search, well, he had a problem.
Speaker 4: Jerry Dishler, then.
Speaker 3: The VP and GM of Ads at Google, and Shiv
Speaker 3: Van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads
Speaker 3: on Google Properties, had called something called a code yellow
Speaker 3: for search revenue due to and I quote emails that
Speaker 3: came out as part of Google's anti trust hearing steady
Speaker 3: weakness in the daily numbers, and a likeliness that it
Speaker 3: would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics. That kind
Speaker 3: of unclear for those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of
Speaker 3: scientology esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain,
Speaker 3: a code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss or
Speaker 3: some sort of crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according
Speaker 3: to Stephen Levy's Tell All book about Google, refers to
Speaker 3: and I promise this is not a joke, the color
Speaker 3: of a tank top that a former VP of Engineering
Speaker 3: called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at
Speaker 3: the company. It's essentially the equivalent of deafcom one and activates,
Speaker 3: as Levy explained, a war room like situation where workers
Speaker 3: are pulled from their desks and into a conference room
Speaker 3: where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any
Speaker 3: other projects or concerns are sidelined and independently. I've heard
Speaker 3: there are other colors like purple. I'm not going to
Speaker 3: get into that, though, it's quite boring and irrelevant to
Speaker 3: this situation. In emails released as part of the Department
Speaker 3: of Justices antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned,
Speaker 3: Dishla laid out several contributing factors. Search query growth was
Speaker 3: significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches was significantly behind,
Speaker 3: and he had this vague worry that several advertiser specific
Speaker 3: and sector weaknesses existed in search. Now I want to
Speaker 3: cover something because I've messed up, and I've really want.
Speaker 4: To be clear about this.
Speaker 3: I've previously and erroneously referred to the code yellow as
Speaker 3: something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention
Speaker 3: to the proximity of Google's ad side getting a little
Speaker 3: too close to Search. I'm afraid the truth is extremely
Speaker 3: depressing and so much grimmar. The code yellow was actually
Speaker 3: the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue
Speaker 3: arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying
Speaker 3: enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years that basically
Speaker 3: built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down
Speaker 3: as one of the few people in tech that actually
Speaker 3: fought for an actual principle, and he was destroyed by
Speaker 3: a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist class traitor
Speaker 3: that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one
Speaker 3: of their problems was that there was insufficient growth in queries,
Speaker 3: as in the amount of things that people were asking Google.
Speaker 3: It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were
Speaker 3: going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles
Speaker 3: on their truck. This whole story has personally upset me,
Speaker 3: and I think you're going to hear that in this
Speaker 3: but going through these emails is.
Speaker 4: Just very depressing. Anyway.
Speaker 3: A few days beforehand, on February first, twenty nineteen, Kristen
Speaker 3: gil then Google's VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakker,
Speaker 3: then Google's VP of Engineering Search and Discover, saying that
Speaker 3: the ADS team had been considering a code yellow to
Speaker 3: close the search gap it was seeing, vaguely referring to
Speaker 3: how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.
Speaker 3: To be clear, this email was in response to Thaker
Speaker 3: stating that there is nothing that the search team could
Speaker 3: do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the
Speaker 3: Ads department had demanded. Shashi forward did the email to
Speaker 3: Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with
Speaker 3: san Dar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was
Speaker 3: no way he would sign up for a high fidelity
Speaker 3: business metric for daily active users on search. Thakkh also
Speaker 3: said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I
Speaker 3: read these emails, that there was a good reason that
Speaker 3: Google's founders separated search from ads. I want you to
Speaker 3: remember that line for later. A day later, on February second,
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,
Speaker 3: a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
Speaker 3: multiple day long debate about Google's some lust for growth.
Speaker 4: This thread is.
Speaker 3: A dark window into the world of growth focus tech,
Speaker 3: where the Kherr listed the multiple points of disconnection between
Speaker 3: ads and search, discussing how the search team wasn't able
Speaker 3: to finally optimize engagement on Google without hacking it, a
Speaker 3: term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time
Speaker 3: on a site, and that doing so would lead them
Speaker 3: to and I quote, abandoned work on efficient journeys. In
Speaker 3: one email, Fox adds that there was a pretty big
Speaker 3: disconnect between what finance and ads wants and what Search
Speaker 3: was doing. Every part of this story pisses me off
Speaker 3: so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests
Speaker 3: for growth, Fox added that all three of them were
Speaker 3: responsible for Search and that Search was and again I
Speaker 3: quote the revenue engine of the company, and that bartering
Speaker 3: with the ads and finance teams was now potentially the
Speaker 3: new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: Gomes said that he believed that Search was getting too
Speaker 3: close to the money and ended his email by saying
Speaker 3: that he was concerned that growth is all that Google
Speaker 3: was thinking about. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google
Speaker 3: VP of Product Management Darshan Cantac would declare the end
Speaker 3: of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory
Speaker 3: emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
Speaker 3: saying that the plans architected as part of the Code
Speaker 3: Yellow would do well throughout the year, enter probaka Ragavan,
Speaker 3: then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
Speaker 3: the code yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the
Speaker 3: current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and
Speaker 3: that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very
Speaker 3: clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth
Speaker 3: was not happening at the rate he needed it to.
Speaker 3: A day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he
Speaker 3: intended to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he
Speaker 3: was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
Speaker 3: In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
Speaker 3: how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
Speaker 3: added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
Speaker 3: short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
Speaker 3: off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively
Speaker 3: labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
Speaker 3: that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
Speaker 3: of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he
Speaker 3: was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this. He also added that
Speaker 3: this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as
Speaker 3: in the amount of the things with people searching on Google,
Speaker 3: were a good metric to measure search, and that the
Speaker 3: best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create
Speaker 3: compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.
Speaker 4: Crazy idea there, what if the product was good?
Speaker 3: Not good enough of probaca, So little bit of history
Speaker 3: about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do Core
Speaker 3: updates to Search. These are updates that change the algorithm.
Speaker 3: Let's say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing,
Speaker 3: we can elevate this kind of thing. And they are
Speaker 3: actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites
Speaker 3: suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton
Speaker 3: of traffic, some don't get any, and so on and
Speaker 3: so forth. But they do a lot of them. The
Speaker 3: one that's really interesting and a little bastard and I
Speaker 3: went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.
Speaker 3: The one that stood out to me was the March
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a
Speaker 3: week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that
Speaker 3: it's very likely that this was a result of Prabaker's
Speaker 3: blome shit. So This was expected to be one of
Speaker 3: the largest updates to search in a very long time,
Speaker 3: and I'm quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched,
Speaker 3: many found that the update mostly rolled back changes and
Speaker 3: traffic was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by
Speaker 3: previous updates, like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve
Speaker 3: that specifically targeted spami search results.
Speaker 4: There were others that were.
Speaker 3: Seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on
Speaker 3: the first of August twenty eighteen that was a few
Speaker 3: months after Gomes became head of Search. While I'm guessing here,
Speaker 3: I really don't know. I do not work for Google.
Speaker 4: I do not have friends there.
Speaker 3: I think the timing of the March twenty nineteen Core update,
Speaker 3: along with the traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that
Speaker 3: one hundred percent were spamy SEO nonsense. I think these
Speaker 3: suggest that Google's response to the Coyello was to roll
Speaker 3: back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search.
Speaker 3: A few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would
Speaker 3: roll out a redesign of how ads we shown on
Speaker 3: Google Search, specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green ad
Speaker 3: label and URL color on ads with a tiny, little,
Speaker 3: bolded black note that said ad in the smallest font
Speaker 3: you could possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise
Speaker 3: identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how
Speaker 3: they managed to start hating their numbers.
Speaker 4: Huh.
Speaker 3: And then in January twenty twenty, Google would bring this
Speaker 3: change to desktop, and the vergess John Porter would suggest
Speaker 3: that it made Google's ads look just like search results
Speaker 3: now awesome. Five months later, a little over a year
Speaker 3: after the code yellow situation, Google would make Probakar Ragavan
Speaker 3: the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dishler taking his
Speaker 3: place as the head of Ads. After nearly twenty years
Speaker 3: of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to the
Speaker 3: SVP of Education at Google. Domes, who was a critical
Speaker 3: part of the original team that made Google Search work,
Speaker 3: who has been credited with establishing the culture of the
Speaker 3: world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out
Speaker 3: by a growth hungry managerial type several of them, actually
Speaker 3: led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
Speaker 3: As a side note, by the way, I use the
Speaker 3: term management consultant there as a pejorative. While he exhibits
Speaker 3: all the same bean counting morally young guided behaviors of
Speaker 3: a management consultant. From what I can tell, Ragavan has
Speaker 3: never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.
Speaker 4: But you know who has. San Dhar Pashai, the CEO.
Speaker 3: Of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably the most
Speaker 3: morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played roles both
Speaker 3: in the two thousand and eight financial crisis, where it
Speaker 3: encouraged banks to load up on debt and floored mortgage
Speaker 3: backed securities, and the ongoing opiord crisis, where it effectively
Speaker 3: advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth hack sales of
Speaker 3: oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has paid nearly
Speaker 3: one billion dollars over several settlements due to its work
Speaker 3: with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one last point.
Speaker 3: McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company brings in
Speaker 3: a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise on how
Speaker 3: to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey
Speaker 3: is to the middle class what fleshy in bacteria.
Speaker 4: Is the skin.
Speaker 3: But back to the emails, which are a stark example
Speaker 3: of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the growth that all
Speaker 3: costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem. And if you
Speaker 3: take one thing away from this episode, I want it
Speaker 3: to be the name Prabakar Ragavan and an understanding that
Speaker 3: there are people responsible for the current state of the Internet.
Speaker 3: These emails, which I really encourage you to look up
Speaker 3: and if you go to where's youreaed dot at, you'll
Speaker 3: be able to see a newslet that has links to them. Well,
Speaker 3: these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance
Speaker 3: and advertising teams, led by Ragavan, with the blessing of
Speaker 3: CEO Sandhar Pashai, the McKinsey guy, actively worked to make
Speaker 3: Google worse to make the company more money. This is
Speaker 3: exactly what I mean when I talk about the economy,
Speaker 3: an illogical, product destroying mindset that turns products you love
Speaker 3: into torturous, frustrating, quasi tools that require you to fight
Speaker 3: the company to get the thing you want. Ben Gomes
Speaker 3: was instrumental in making search work both as a product
Speaker 3: and a business. He joined the company in nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 3: a time long before Google established dominance in the field,
Speaker 3: and the same year when Larry Page and Serge Britain
Speaker 3: tried to sell the company to Excite for one million dollars,
Speaker 3: only to walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor
Speaker 3: and co founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC
Speaker 3: who tried to stop people going to a beach in
Speaker 3: Half Moon Bay, Well, he tried to low ball them
Speaker 3: with a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars offer, also
Speaker 3: known as a one hundred square foot apartment in San Francisco.
Speaker 3: In an interview with Fast Companies Harry mc crack him
Speaker 3: from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's challenge as taking the
Speaker 3: page erank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of machines and they weren't very good machines at the time.
Speaker 3: Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made
Speaker 3: head of Search in the middle of twenty eighteen after
Speaker 3: John Gianderia moved to Apple to work on its machine
Speaker 3: learning in AR strategy.
Speaker 4: Gomes had been.
Speaker 3: Described as Google's searches are beloved for his ability to
Speaker 3: communicate across Google's many quite decentralized departments. Every single article
Speaker 3: I've read about Gomes and his tenure at Google spoke
Speaker 3: of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one
Speaker 3: of the most important technologies ever made, a man who
Speaker 3: had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a and
Speaker 3: I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving the user
Speaker 3: and using technology to do that.
Speaker 4: And when finally given the keys.
Speaker 3: To the kingdom, the ability to elevate Google Search even further,
Speaker 3: he was rap fucked by a series of rotten careersts
Speaker 3: trying to please Wall Street, led by Probakar Ragavan. Do
Speaker 3: you want to know what Provakar Ragavan's old job was?
Speaker 3: We Probacar Ragavan, the new head of Google Search, the
Speaker 3: guy that ran Google Search, that runs Google Search right now,
Speaker 3: that is running a Google Search into the goddamn ground.
Speaker 3: Do you want to know what his job was? His
Speaker 3: job before Google, He was the head of search for
Speaker 3: god damn Yahoo from two thousand and five through two
Speaker 3: thy and twelve when he joined the company. When Probakar
Speaker 3: Ragavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a thirty point
Speaker 3: four percent market share, not far from Google's own thirty
Speaker 3: six point nine percent, and miles ahead of the fifteen
Speaker 3: point seven percent that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By May
Speaker 3: twenty twelve, Yahoo was down to just thirteen point four
Speaker 3: percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months
Speaker 3: and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing.
Speaker 3: That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its
Speaker 3: corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of
Speaker 3: its overall work. For the man who deposed Ben Gomes,
Speaker 3: someone who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings,
Speaker 3: was so shit at his job that in two thousand
Speaker 3: and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its
Speaker 3: own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's engine in
Speaker 3: a ten year deal. If we take a long view
Speaker 3: of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company,
Speaker 3: which went from being worth one hundred and twenty five
Speaker 3: billion dollars at the peak of the dot com boom
Speaker 3: to being sold to Verizon for four point eight billion
Speaker 3: dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly a three thousand
Speaker 3: square foot apartment in San Francisco. With Search no longer
Speaker 3: a priority in making less money for the company, Yahoo
Speaker 3: decided to pivot into web two point zero and original
Speaker 3: content making sum beats that paid off, but far far
Speaker 3: too many that did not. It spent one point one
Speaker 3: billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen, only for Verizon
Speaker 3: to sell it for just three million dollars in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: It put Zimbra in two thousand and seven, ostensibly to
Speaker 3: complete with the new Google Apps productivity, only to sell
Speaker 3: it for a reported fraction of the original purchase price
Speaker 3: to VMware a few years later. That's not his fault,
Speaker 3: but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without a mission, a purpose,
Speaker 3: or an objective. Nobody, and I'll speculate even those leading
Speaker 3: the company really knew what it was or what it did. Anyway,
Speaker 3: just a big shout out right now to Kura Swisher,
Speaker 3: who referred to Prabaka as well respected. When he moved
Speaker 3: from Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang
Speaker 3: up job. In an interview with zdnets Dan Farber from
Speaker 3: two thousand and five, Ragavan spoke of his intent to
Speaker 3: align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with
Speaker 3: social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to
Speaker 3: inspire the audience to give more data. What anyway before that,
Speaker 3: it's It's actually hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did,
Speaker 3: though according to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing
Speaker 3: search and data mining research ibm M. In April twenty eleven,
Speaker 3: The Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him
Speaker 3: Yahoo's secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific
Speaker 3: research and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,
Speaker 3: and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had
Speaker 3: shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks
Speaker 3: of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic
Speaker 3: to innovation that is very different to the common perception
Speaker 3: the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.
Speaker 3: A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I
Speaker 3: really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and
Speaker 3: how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly,
Speaker 3: this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm
Speaker 3: actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I
Speaker 3: feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right?
Speaker 3: How has nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a
Speaker 3: day job. I run a PR firm. I am a
Speaker 3: blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: drag Killer is now the CEO of the blood Bank.
Speaker 3: Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
Speaker 3: just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
Speaker 3: But to be clear, this was something written several years
Speaker 3: after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in
Speaker 3: a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
Speaker 3: replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
Speaker 3: as what zd net referred to as the search Master
Speaker 3: was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
Speaker 3: by a search engine that not a single person in
Speaker 3: the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran
Speaker 3: exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
Speaker 3: firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Speaker 3: Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Speaker 3: Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as
Speaker 3: president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in
Speaker 3: the role before he was replaced by former Google executive
Speaker 3: a Mayor, in part because it emerged he lied on
Speaker 3: his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey brabaka,
Speaker 3: did you not notice that anyway, whatever Barts joined Yahoo
Speaker 3: in two thousand and nine, so about four years into
Speaker 3: Braba Kha's bign of terror, I guess, and she joined
Speaker 3: in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing
Speaker 3: to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.
Speaker 3: In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people
Speaker 3: and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power
Speaker 3: Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft
Speaker 3: paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained
Speaker 3: from searches, a deal that made Ya who are couple
Speaker 3: hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the
Speaker 3: tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated,
Speaker 3: when Brabakar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work,
Speaker 3: Yahoo's search was so valuable that it was replaced by
Speaker 3: Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm
Speaker 3: being a little unfair.
Speaker 4: There's a way of.
Speaker 3: Looking at this that you could say that Yahoo's entire
Speaker 3: value at the end of his career was driven by
Speaker 3: nostalgia and association with days before he worked there. Anyway,
Speaker 3: thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very,
Speaker 3: very difficult to find much about Ragavan's history.
Speaker 4: It took me.
Speaker 3: Hours of digging through Google and at one point being
Speaker 3: embarrassingly to find three or four articles that went into
Speaker 3: any depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his
Speaker 3: expertise lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the ranks
Speaker 3: of technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed.
Speaker 3: In a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler
Speaker 3: Stephen Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he
Speaker 3: just runs the place, and described his addition to the
Speaker 3: company as a move from research to management. While Levy
Speaker 3: calls him a world class computer scientist who has authored
Speaker 3: definitive text in the field, which is true, he also
Speaker 3: describes Ragavan as choosing a management track which definitely tracks
Speaker 3: with everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares
Speaker 3: that Google's third party adtech plays a critical role in
Speaker 3: keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a
Speaker 3: question that was also made at a time when he
Speaker 3: was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a
Speaker 3: year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit
Speaker 3: about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable, and
Speaker 3: it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.
Speaker 4: And I've said this.
Speaker 3: Before, but look, we complain about the state of Twitter
Speaker 3: under Elon Musk and justifiably he's a vile, anti semi
Speaker 3: racist bigger. We all know this, It's fully true. We
Speaker 3: can say it a million times. However, I'd argue that Ragavan,
Speaker 3: by extension Sundhar Pushai deserve one hundred times more criticism.
Speaker 3: They've done unfathomable damage to society. You really can't fix
Speaker 3: the damage they've been doing and the damage they'll continue
Speaker 3: to do, especially as we go into an election. Ragavan
Speaker 3: and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man
Speaker 3: who dedicated a good portion of his life to making
Speaker 3: the world's information more accessible, in the process burning the
Speaker 3: Library of Alexandria to the goddamn ground so that Sundar
Speaker 3: Peshai could make more than two hundred million dollars a year,
Speaker 3: and Ragavan, a manager high by Sundar Peshai, a former
Speaker 3: McKinsey man. The King of Managers, is an example of
Speaker 3: everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as
Speaker 3: a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials. Ragavan chose
Speaker 3: to bulldoze actual workers, people who did things, and people
Speaker 3: that care about technology and replace them with horrifying toadies
Speaker 3: that would make Google more profitable and less useful. Since
Speaker 3: Prabakar took the reigns of Google in twenty twenty, Google
Speaker 3: search has dramatically declined. With these core search updates are mentioned,
Speaker 3: allegedly made to improve the quality of results, having the
Speaker 3: adverse effect increasing the prevalence of spammy shitty search optimized content.
Speaker 3: It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice. The
Speaker 3: emotion is because I've read all of these antitrust emails.
Speaker 3: I have gone through this guy's history, and I've read
Speaker 3: all the things about Ben Gomes too. Every article about
Speaker 3: Ben Gomes where they interviewed, is this guy just having
Speaker 3: these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the
Speaker 3: complexity of delivering it at high speed. Every interview with
Speaker 3: Ragavan is some vague bullshit about how important data is.
Speaker 3: It's so goddamn offensive to me, and all of this
Speaker 3: stuff happening is just one example of what I think
Speaker 3: are probably hundreds of things happening across startups or that
Speaker 3: have happened across startups in the last ten or fifteen
Speaker 3: years and big tech two. And it's because the people
Speaker 3: running the tech industry are no longer those who built him.
Speaker 3: Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing,
Speaker 3: and while they remained as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't
Speaker 3: give a shit about what Google means anymore. Probakar Ragavan
Speaker 3: is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell,
Speaker 3: is mostly made up of did some stuff at IBM,
Speaker 3: failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and fucked up
Speaker 3: Google so badly that every news outlet has run a
Speaker 3: story about how bad it is. This this is the
Speaker 3: result of taking technology out of the hands of real
Speaker 3: builders and handing it to managers at a time when
Speaker 3: management is synonymous with staying as far away from actual
Speaker 3: work as possible. When you're a do nothing looking to
Speaker 3: profit as much as possible, who doesn't use tech, who
Speaker 3: doesn't care about tech, and you only care about growth, well,
Speaker 3: you're not a user.
Speaker 4: You're a parasite.
Speaker 3: And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now
Speaker 3: draining the tech industry of its value.
Speaker 4: They're driving it into a goddamn ditch.
Speaker 3: Ragavan's story is unique in so far as the damage
Speaker 3: he's managed to inflict, or if we're being exceptionally charitable,
Speaker 3: failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo on two
Speaker 3: industry defining companies, and the fact that he did it
Speaker 3: without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yeah, he's
Speaker 3: far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.
Speaker 3: I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I want to
Speaker 3: think about your job history. I want you to think
Speaker 3: about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management,
Speaker 3: and specifically to do with remote work and the whole
Speaker 3: thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely
Speaker 3: in the office telling you you need to be in
Speaker 3: the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and
Speaker 3: managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me
Speaker 3: now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll
Speaker 3: do work.
Speaker 4: All the time. Yeah, make sure you do.
Speaker 3: That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
Speaker 3: are at your job. People who actually do work don't
Speaker 3: feel defensive about it. People who do things and are
Speaker 3: part of the actual profit center, they don't need a
Speaker 3: podcast to tell them they're good at their job.
Speaker 4: What I think the problem is.
Speaker 3: In modern American corporate society is that management is no
Speaker 3: longer synonymous with actually managing people. It's not about getting
Speaker 3: the people what they need. It's not about organizing things
Speaker 3: and making things efficient and good. It's not about execution.
Speaker 3: It's about handing work off to other people and getting
Speaker 3: paid handsomely. And if you disagree easy at better offline
Speaker 3: dot com, I will read your email, maybe I'll even respond.
Speaker 3: But the thing is management has become a poison in America.
Speaker 3: Managers have become poisonous because managers are not actually held
Speaker 3: to any kind of standard. No, only the workers who
Speaker 3: do the work are What happened to Ben Gomes is
Speaker 3: one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things to happen in
Speaker 3: the tech industry. It's an absolute joke. Ben Gomes was
Speaker 3: a goddamn hero. And I really need you to read
Speaker 3: the newsletter and read these emails. I need you to
Speaker 3: see how many times him and thaka Great Guy as
Speaker 3: well were saying, hey, growth is bad for searching. Thing
Speaker 3: that Ben Gomes was being asked to do was increase
Speaker 3: queries on Google. The literal amount that people search. There
Speaker 3: are many ways of looking at that and thinking, oh shit,
Speaker 3: that's not what you want. Surely you don't want no queries.
Speaker 3: You don't want people not using it at all. But
Speaker 3: queries going upwards linearly suggests that if you're not magic
Speaker 3: good to use the growth, at least the people are
Speaker 3: not getting what they want on the first.
Speaker 4: Try, which, by the way, kind of feels like how
Speaker 4: Google is nowadays.
Speaker 3: When you go to Google and the first result, and
Speaker 3: the second result, and the fifth result and the tenth
Speaker 3: result just don't get what you need because it's all
Speaker 3: that SEO crap. Now, this is all theorizing, But what
Speaker 3: I think prabagar Ragavan did was I think he took
Speaker 3: off all the fucking guidelines on Google Search. I think
Speaker 3: he rolled back changes specifically to make search worse, to
Speaker 3: increase queries, to give Google more chance to show you adverts.
Speaker 3: I am guessing don't have a source telling me this,
Speaker 3: but the pattern around on the core search updates. The
Speaker 3: fact that Google Search started getting worse toward the middle
Speaker 3: and end of twenty nineteen and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty.
Speaker 3: Well that's when Prabaka took over that's when the big
Speaker 3: Man took the reins. That's when drack Killer got his
Speaker 3: job at the blood bank. And this is the thing.
Speaker 3: There's very little that you and I can actually do
Speaker 3: about this. But what we can do is say names
Speaker 3: like Probakar Ragavan a great deal of times so that
Speaker 3: people like this can be known, so that the actions
Speaker 3: of these scurrilous assholes can be seen and heard and
Speaker 3: pointed at and spat upon. I'm not suggesting spitting on anyone,
Speaker 3: No violent acts. No can be pissy on the internet
Speaker 3: like the rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize
Speaker 3: i'm ranting, but this subject really really got to me.
Speaker 3: But it's not the only one. In the next episode,
Speaker 3: I'm going to conclude this sordid three part fiasco with
Speaker 3: a few more examples, and how many of these managers,
Speaker 3: these bean counters, devoid of imagination or ability or anything
Speaker 3: of note save for that.
Speaker 4: Utter slug likability.
Speaker 3: To protect oneself, I want to talk about how these
Speaker 3: people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by pretending to
Speaker 3: be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending to
Speaker 3: be innovators. I want to tell you all about how
Speaker 3: Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram, and I want to tell you
Speaker 3: how little Sam Altman has achieved other than making him
Speaker 3: and his friends rich. See you next time. Thank you
Speaker 3: for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of
Speaker 3: the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check
Speaker 3: out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski
Speaker 3: dot com, m A T T O s O W
Speaker 3: s ki dot com. You can email me at easy
Speaker 3: at better offline dot com or check out better offline
Speaker 3: dot com to find my newsletter and more links to
Speaker 3: this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 5: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 5: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
Speaker 5: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
Speaker 3: zait Tron. Also, as I discussed in the last episode,
Speaker 3: Sam Mortman has spent more than a decade accumulating power
Speaker 3: and wealth in Silicon Valley without ever having to actually
Speaker 3: build anything, using a network of tech industry all stars
Speaker 3: like LinkedIn co founder and investor Reid Hoffman, and Airbnb
Speaker 3: CEO Brian Chesky to insulate himself from responsibility and accountability.
Speaker 3: Yet things are beginning to fall apart as years of
Speaker 3: half baked ideas and terrible, terrible product decisions have kind
Speaker 3: of made society sour on the tech industry, and the
Speaker 3: last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with
Speaker 3: the chaos cause by open ai blatantly mimicking Scarlet Johansson's
Speaker 3: voice for the new version of chat GBT, followed by
Speaker 3: the resignation of researchers who claimed the open ai prioritized
Speaker 3: and I quote shiny products over AI safety. After the
Speaker 3: dissolution of open AI's safety team, I know, it's just
Speaker 3: it's almost cliche. Shortly thereafter, former open ai bos bard
Speaker 3: member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired from
Speaker 3: an open Ai because of a regular pattern of deception,
Speaker 3: one where Aortman would give inaccurate info about the company's
Speaker 3: safety processes on multiple occasions, and his deceat was so
Speaker 3: severe that open aye's board only found out about the
Speaker 3: launch of chet GPT, which, by the way, is open
Speaker 3: Ayes first product that really made money, arguably the biggest
Speaker 3: product in tech. Do you wont know how they found
Speaker 3: out about it, Well, they found out when they were
Speaker 3: browsing Twitter. They found out then, not from the CEO
Speaker 3: of open Ai, the company which they were the.
Speaker 4: Border very weird.
Speaker 3: Toner also noted that Aortman was an aggressive political player
Speaker 3: with the board, correctly by the way, worrying the and
Speaker 3: I quote again that if Sam Altman had any inkling
Speaker 3: that the board might do something that went against him,
Speaker 3: he'd pull out all the stops, do everything in his
Speaker 3: power to undermine the board and to prevent them from
Speaker 3: even getting to the point of being able to fire him.
Speaker 3: As a reminder, by the way, the Board's seeded in
Speaker 3: firing Sam Altman in November last year, but not for long,
Speaker 3: with Ortmand returning as CEO a few days later, kicking
Speaker 3: Helen Toner off of the board along with Ilia Sudskava,
Speaker 3: a technical co founder that Altman manipulated long enough to
Speaker 3: build chat GBT and announced it him the moment that
Speaker 3: he chose to complain Sidskava, by the way, has resigned now.
Speaker 3: He's also one of the biggest technical minds there. It's
Speaker 3: so how is open are going to continue anyway? Last week,
Speaker 3: a group of insiders at various AI companies published an
Speaker 3: open letter asking for their overlords, for the heads of
Speaker 3: these companies, for the right to warn about advanced artificial
Speaker 3: intelligence in a monument genuinely impressive monument to the bullshit
Speaker 3: machine that Sam Altman has created. While there are genuine
Speaker 3: safety concerns with AI, there really are, there are many
Speaker 3: of them to consider. These people are desperately afraid of
Speaker 3: the computer coming alive and killing them when they should
Speaker 3: fear the non technical asshole manipulator getting rich making egregious
Speaker 3: promises about what AI can do. Airis you have to
Speaker 3: live up to Sam Altman's promises. Sam Alton doesn't. This
Speaker 3: is not your friend. The problem is not the boogeyman
Speaker 3: computer coming alive. That's not happening man. What's happening is
Speaker 3: this guy is leading your industry to ruin, and the
Speaker 3: bigger concern that they should have should be about what
Speaker 3: Leo Ashenbrenner, a former safety researcher Open ai, had to
Speaker 3: say on the Duaquesh Ptel podcast, where he claimed that
Speaker 3: security processes of open ai were and I quote egregiously
Speaker 3: insufficient and that the priorities that the company were focused
Speaker 3: on growth over stability of security. These people are afraid
Speaker 3: of open AI potentially creating a computer that can think
Speaker 3: for itself that will come and kill them at a
Speaker 3: time where they should be far more concerned about this
Speaker 3: manipulative con artist that's running open AI. Sam Altman is
Speaker 3: dangerous to artificial intelligence. Not because he's building artificial general intelligence,
Speaker 3: which is a kind of AI that meets or surpasses
Speaker 3: human cove capabilities by the way, kind of like data
Speaker 3: from Star Trek. They're afraid of that happening when they
Speaker 3: should be afraid of Aortmand's focus. What does Sam Moortman
Speaker 3: care about? Because the only thing I can find reading
Speaker 3: about what Sam Mortman cares about is Sam bloody Aortman.
Speaker 3: And right now the progress attached to Sam Mortman actually
Speaker 3: isn't looking that great. Open AI's growth is stalling, with
Speaker 3: Alex Cantruwitz reporting that user growth has effectively come to
Speaker 3: a halt based on a recent release claiming that chat
Speaker 3: gpt had one hundred million users a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 3: which is, by the way, the exact same number that
Speaker 3: the company claimed chat gpt had in November twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: Chat gpt is also a goddamn expensive product to operate
Speaker 3: with the company burning through capital at this insane rate.
Speaker 3: It's definitely more than seven hundred thousand dollars a day.
Speaker 3: It's got to be in the millions if not. What
Speaker 3: it's insane and what open ai is aggressively monetizing chat GPT,
Speaker 3: both the customers and to businesses. It's so old, fiercely
Speaker 3: far from crossing the break even rubicon. They keep leaking
Speaker 3: and they'll claim, oh, I didn't put that out there.
Speaker 3: They keep telling people, oh, it's making billions of revenue,
Speaker 3: but they never say profit. And eventually someone's going to
Speaker 3: turn to them and say, hey, man, you can't just
Speaker 3: do this for free or for negative. At some point,
Speaker 3: Sacha Nadella is going to call Sam Ortman and say, Sammy, Sammy,
Speaker 3: it's time, Sammy.
Speaker 4: It's got to be a real business.
Speaker 3: I assume he calls him that because the supernatural. But
Speaker 3: as things get desperate, Samuel was going to use the
Speaker 3: only approach he really has, sheer force of will. He's
Speaker 3: going to push open ai to grow and sell into
Speaker 3: as many industries as possible. And he's a specious hype man.
Speaker 3: He's gonna be selling to other specious hype men, the
Speaker 3: Jim Kramers of the world are going to eat it up.
Speaker 3: And they're all all of them. The mock Bernioff's, the
Speaker 3: Sacha Nadellas, a Sun dapashies. They're all desperate to connect
Speaker 3: themselves with future and with generative AI and those that
Speaker 3: he's selling to the company's brokering deals. Yes, even Apple,
Speaker 3: they're desperate to connect their companies to another company which
Speaker 3: is building a bubble, a bubble inflated by Sam Altman.
Speaker 4: And I'd argue that this.
Speaker 3: Is exceedingly dangerous for Silicon Valley and for the tech
Speaker 3: industry writ large, as executives that have become disconnected from
Speaker 3: the process of creating software and hardware follow yet another
Speaker 3: non technical founder hooking unprofitable, unsustainable, and hallucination prone software.
Speaker 3: It's just very frustrating. If there was a very technical
Speaker 3: mind at these companies, they might walk away. And I'm
Speaker 3: not going to give Tim Cook much credit, but looking
Speaker 3: into it, I can't find any evidence that Apple is
Speaker 3: buying a bunch of GPUs, the things that you use
Speaker 3: to power these generative AI models. I found some researcher
Speaker 3: and analysts suggesting that they would buy a lot. But
Speaker 3: now open Ai is doing a deal with Apple to
Speaker 3: power the next iOS, and it's interesting. It is interesting
Speaker 3: that Apple isn't doing this themselves. Apple a company with
Speaker 3: hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. I believe
Speaker 3: that pretty much prints money. That alone makes me think
Speaker 3: it's a bubble. Now, it might look like an asshole
Speaker 3: if it comes out they have. But also, why are
Speaker 3: they subcontracting this to open ai when they could build
Speaker 3: it themselves, as Apple has always done. Very strange, It's
Speaker 3: all so peculiar. But I wanted to get a little
Speaker 3: bit deeper into the Sam Almonds story. And as I
Speaker 3: discussed last episode, Ellen Hewett of Bloomberg she's been doing
Speaker 3: this excellent reporting on the man and joins me today
Speaker 3: to talk about the subject of a recent podcast, Sam
Speaker 3: Almond's Rise to Power. So tell me a little bit
Speaker 3: about the show you're working on.
Speaker 1: The show is the new season of Foundering, which is
Speaker 1: a serialized podcast from Bloomberg Technology. So this is season five,
Speaker 1: and in every season we've told one story of a
Speaker 1: high stakes drama in Silicon Valley. I was also the
Speaker 1: host of season one, which came out several years ago,
Speaker 1: was about we work, and we've done other companies since then,
Speaker 1: and season five is about Open AI and Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: and I think we really tried to, you know, cover
Speaker 1: the arc of the company's creation and where it is now.
Speaker 1: But in doing so, we really tried to do a
Speaker 1: character study of Sam Altman, like he's a very important
Speaker 1: person in the tech industry right now, with a lot
Speaker 1: of power, and we really wanted to ask ourselves a
Speaker 1: question and to help listeners ask themselves a question. Should
Speaker 1: we trust him? Should we trust this person who is
Speaker 1: currently in a position of a lot of influence and
Speaker 1: about whom there have been very serious, you know, allegations
Speaker 1: and questions raised about, you know, to put it in
Speaker 1: the words of the opening eyeboard, his not consistently candid behavior.
Speaker 1: And I think it's, you know, my hope is that
Speaker 1: we give listeners a chance to hear kind of the
Speaker 1: whole story. And it's like broader you know, when there's
Speaker 1: news that's happening, it can happen so quickly it's hard
Speaker 1: to get a step back. And I think what the
Speaker 1: show really does is it collects a lot of information
Speaker 1: in one place, and we also have lots of new
Speaker 1: information that you won't hear anywhere else, and interviews with
Speaker 1: people who you know have worked with Sam, who knew
Speaker 1: him when he was younger. We have an interview with
Speaker 1: Sam's sister Annie, from whom he is estranged, and there's
Speaker 1: a lot of material in there. I think that tries
Speaker 1: to get closer to this answer of like, what should
Speaker 1: we make of this person? How should we think about
Speaker 1: checks and balances of power when we have these companies
Speaker 1: that are, by all appearances, gathering a lot of power
Speaker 1: and there for the people who are running them have
Speaker 1: a lot of power as well. So we have it's
Speaker 1: a five episode arc, five episode season, and the first
Speaker 1: three episodes are out now to the general public and
Speaker 1: the last two will come out on subsequent Thursdays, And
Speaker 1: if you would like to binge the whole season right away,
Speaker 1: the episodes are available early to Bloomberg dot com subscribers.
Speaker 3: So you've just started this series about Sam Altman and
Speaker 3: his upbringing indoors, so the growth of Open Ai and
Speaker 3: Looved and everything. Who are the people that have helped
Speaker 3: him get where he is today?
Speaker 4: Though?
Speaker 1: So the making of Sam Altman is a really interesting
Speaker 1: part of the overall story of Sam Altman. You know,
Speaker 1: many people know him as the CEO of open Ai
Speaker 1: because that's the role he's been in when he has
Speaker 1: risen to prominence, you know, beyond Silicon Valley. Like I
Speaker 1: think for many years he was well known in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: but this is like now he's kind of a household name,
Speaker 1: and so it's important to understand where Sam came from.
Speaker 1: You know, he's been in the valley for you know,
Speaker 1: since two thousand and five, I think is when he
Speaker 1: started college two thousand and four, two thousand and five
Speaker 1: at Stanford. Then he dropped out, and then he joined
Speaker 1: y Combinator, the now famous startup accelerator. But he was
Speaker 1: actually part of the first cohort of founders ever in
Speaker 1: in YC.
Speaker 3: Along with Witch as well, right, yes.
Speaker 1: Including the the co founders of Twitch and of Reddit,
Speaker 1: and so EMMITTT. Sheer, you know, for those who know
Speaker 1: Emmit Sheer has a like very short seventy two hour
Speaker 1: cameo in the open Ai very Sam been firing saga.
Speaker 1: But yes, Emmett and Sam were both in the same
Speaker 1: YC batch. So when we think about Sam's early career
Speaker 1: in Silicon Valley, I think what's important to know is
Speaker 1: that he rose very quickly, in part because he was
Speaker 1: very successful in making these strategic, advantageous friendships and connections
Speaker 1: with already established people in the valley. The most important
Speaker 1: one is Paul Graham, who is the you know, one
Speaker 1: of the founders of y Combinator and you know basically
Speaker 1: like immediately took Sam under his wing when Sam joined
Speaker 1: this first batch of YC. And yeah, Paul's a really
Speaker 1: important mentor to Sam. He's kind of the first person
Speaker 1: who really sees in Sam this you know, ambition, this
Speaker 1: hunger for power, this like drive to really build bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger companies, even when you know, they met when
Speaker 1: Sam Altman was nineteen, so Paul like sees him as
Speaker 1: a teenager and sees this future potential. And so yes,
Speaker 1: you know, not only did Paul become a mentor to
Speaker 1: him and sort of helped build Sam's profile over those
Speaker 1: early years because he would you know, Paul Graham is
Speaker 1: very famous for writing these essays about how to build
Speaker 1: startups and how to build the best startups, and if
Speaker 1: you're at all interested in building startups, you've read many
Speaker 1: of them. They're kind of like almost like a startup bible,
Speaker 1: and in many of them. He extols the virtues of
Speaker 1: Sam Altman. He talks about Sam's ambition, He talks about
Speaker 1: Sam's cunning, his ability to like you know, make deals
Speaker 1: and like think big and.
Speaker 3: Never actually think Sam Moltman is done. Is what I've found.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are some interesting you know, I've read many
Speaker 1: of the things Paul has written about Sam. Some of
Speaker 1: my favorite ones include Paul writing that within three minutes
Speaker 1: of meeting Sam, this was when Sam was nineteen, Paul
Speaker 1: thought to himself, Ah, so this is what a young
Speaker 1: Bill Gates is like, or you know, this is what
Speaker 1: Bill Gates was like at nineteen, I think is the
Speaker 1: exact quote. So, you know, he really build him up
Speaker 1: in this way. And I do think Paul had like
Speaker 1: unique insight into Sam, like they were close. They in
Speaker 1: many ways I'm sure still are. But it is this
Speaker 1: interesting role where you know, Paul met Sam when he
Speaker 1: really didn't have much to his name, and he really
Speaker 1: elevated him early on through his writings as this like
Speaker 1: startup founder to emulate right, that other founders should be
Speaker 1: emulating Sam. And then of course, as Sam progresses in
Speaker 1: the Valley, he also starts to write these like startup
Speaker 1: Wisdom essays in a similar style to Paul. And then,
Speaker 1: of course, the most important thing that happens is that
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen, when Paul decides he no longer wants
Speaker 1: to run hy Combinator, which at this point is a
Speaker 1: much bigger vehicle than it was when Sam first started.
Speaker 1: It has no longer just a few stops totally. It
Speaker 1: has produced Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb. This is a big job,
Speaker 1: right like running y Combinator. And when Paul wants to
Speaker 1: hand it off to someone, you know, he has said
Speaker 1: that the only person he considered giving this to was Sam.
Speaker 1: So in twenty fourteen, when Sam is I believe twenty
Speaker 1: eight years old, he becomes the president of y Combinator,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, he had started a startup,
Speaker 1: it didn't really work, he sold it and was starting
Speaker 1: to tabble in angel investing. And at that point Paul
Speaker 1: really elevated Sam to this new position of power. And
Speaker 1: then he ran YC for a while and then started
Speaker 1: open Ai. And in starting open Ai, he also leveraged
Speaker 1: these like very useful connetions with particularly powerful people who
Speaker 1: could help him, such as Elon Musk, who was able
Speaker 1: to give the vast majority of the pledged funding to
Speaker 1: start open Ai. Later, when Elon Musk splits from open Ai,
Speaker 1: Sam makes his very powerful partnership with Satya Nadella to
Speaker 1: help fund open Ai. Another important partnership that Sam has made,
Speaker 1: you know, much earlier on was his friendship with Peter Teel.
Speaker 1: And one of the things Peter Teal does is also,
Speaker 1: you know, gives him millions of dollars to start investing.
Speaker 1: This is like before Sam takes over at White Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know another thing that Paul did that really
Speaker 1: Paul Graham did that really helped Sam was also he
Speaker 1: gave Paul had the opportunity to be one of the
Speaker 1: first investors in Stripe. He was offered the chance to
Speaker 1: invest thirty thousand dollars for four percent of Stripe, which,
Speaker 1: of course now that Stripe is enormous, we all know
Speaker 1: how valuable that was, and Paul split it with Sam.
Speaker 1: He was like, oh, I might as well this with Sam.
Speaker 1: So Sam has said that that fifteen thousand dollars for
Speaker 1: a two percent of Stripe has been you know, one
Speaker 1: of his best performing Angel investments.
Speaker 3: Ever, that was some point he Austen is always where
Speaker 3: he got fifteen grand from He was still working on
Speaker 3: looped at the time. It's funny how perf litric anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, my guess is fifteen grand was I don't actually
Speaker 1: know this, but my guess is fifteen gen was not
Speaker 1: hard for him to pull up. And it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where it's really is, you know, access to
Speaker 1: access and relationships are the sorts of things that can
Speaker 1: build a career and can lead to great wealth. Right
Speaker 1: like Sam is now you know, by our own internal
Speaker 1: accounts and by other lists, a billionaire. And this money
Speaker 1: comes from you know, not from open Ai, but from
Speaker 1: these angel investments that he's made early on that have
Speaker 1: been enormously successful.
Speaker 3: So you called him in one of the titles, the
Speaker 3: most Silicon Valley Man Alive. Is this what you're getting at,
Speaker 3: this kind of power player mentality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it's it reflects a few things. One
Speaker 1: that even though he is you know, he's in his
Speaker 1: late thirties, he's been a player in Silicon Valley for
Speaker 1: such a long time, you know, close to two decades.
Speaker 1: And also that he's just someone who is extremely well connected.
Speaker 1: So even before he took over y Combinator, which I
Speaker 1: think you could argue is like kind of king of
Speaker 1: the startup world in some sense, like Y combinators, like
Speaker 1: you know, the topics totally. Even before he took over
Speaker 1: I y comminator, I think he was extremely well connected.
Speaker 1: He's very social, he's very helpful, he's very efficient, Like
Speaker 1: many people have told me stories in which he you know,
Speaker 1: calling Sam and talking for five minutes has solved their
Speaker 1: problem because he knows exactly the right person to call
Speaker 1: to fix it, or you know, he's really good at
Speaker 1: making deals. I think it's just clear he's extremely well
Speaker 1: integrated into this world and has very successfully moved up
Speaker 1: the Silicon Valley status ladder to the point where he
Speaker 1: is now, which is kind of you know, one of
Speaker 1: the you know, he's the CEO of the one of
Speaker 1: the arguably hardest companies in the valley right now. And
Speaker 1: I think that that's not luck right, Like he didn't
Speaker 1: just come up with He's not like a nobody who
Speaker 1: came up with an idea. It's like he has the
Speaker 1: connections and has parlayed his connections into power to bring
Speaker 1: him to the point he is now.
Speaker 3: So, in your experience talking to people about Sam Ortman,
Speaker 3: how technical is he? Do you think what if you
Speaker 3: heard because you say there he wasn't lucky. But he
Speaker 3: also does not appear to have successfully run a business
Speaker 3: because Luke shut down two people, well, two executives tried
Speaker 3: to get him fired from there, he got fired from
Speaker 3: y Combinator, which did very well, but at the same
Speaker 3: time YSI was basically a conveyor belt for money at
Speaker 3: one point, not so much recently. Yeah, it just it
Speaker 3: feels weird that this completely non technical, semi non technical
Speaker 3: guy has ascended so far.
Speaker 1: My sense is that's not maybe the most fair description. Like,
Speaker 1: I think Sam is incredibly smart, and people say this
Speaker 1: a lot, and you know, I believe them. I think
Speaker 1: his special skill, you know, he obviously knows how to
Speaker 1: like he's an engineer, he has training. I'm sure he
Speaker 1: can build a lot of stuff. It seems like his
Speaker 1: comparative advantage. His special skill is relationships, deal making, figuring
Speaker 1: out who exactly is the right person to help him
Speaker 1: in whatever he's really trying to get done, and figuring
Speaker 1: out the best way to get something to happen. You know,
Speaker 1: one of the people I spoke to is someone who
Speaker 1: knows Sam from when he was younger and knows him personally,
Speaker 1: and said that his superpower is figuring out who's in
Speaker 1: charge or figuring out who is in the best position
Speaker 1: to help him, and then charming them so that they
Speaker 1: help him with whatever goal he's trying to get done.
Speaker 1: And I think that, like, yeah, one could argue that
Speaker 1: that's actually a really good skill set if you want
Speaker 1: to build a very big company, which you know, I
Speaker 1: think at this current moment he has, right like opening
Speaker 1: eyes really, you know, you can there's a lot that
Speaker 1: you can say about whether they're upholding their digital mission
Speaker 1: or that. You know, that's up for debate, but I
Speaker 1: think that they've obviously been commercially successful so far, so.
Speaker 3: It feels like Silicon Valley on some level. And I
Speaker 3: just to give some thoughts here within the two episodes
Speaker 3: I'm doing here, the pattern I've seen with sam Oltman
Speaker 3: is that everyone seems to want him to win, and
Speaker 3: there's almost a degree of they will make it. So
Speaker 3: have you seen anyone who's really a detractor or anyone
Speaker 3: who's not pro sam Oltman, because it's interesting how few
Speaker 3: people are in tech.
Speaker 1: Well, there is. I won't get too into it because
Speaker 1: this is in some of the future episodes which will
Speaker 1: drop in future weeks. But you know, I would say
Speaker 1: in in in some of the conversations that I've had
Speaker 1: off the record about people about in some of the
Speaker 1: conversations I've had off the record with people about Sam,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, my general impressions are people often
Speaker 1: do find him impressive in terms of what he has
Speaker 1: gotten done, you know, the size and scale of his ambitions,
Speaker 1: and the way that he has generally been able to
Speaker 1: make that happen. I think there's also a lot of
Speaker 1: people who you know, are willing to privately share some
Speaker 1: gripes that they might have about him. Also, you know,
Speaker 1: in recent weeks, we've seen people be a lot more
Speaker 1: public about some of those gripes. We have Helen Toner,
Speaker 1: a former former board member at open AI who voted
Speaker 1: to remove Sam last November, saying publicly in the last
Speaker 1: few weeks that Sam lied to her and the other
Speaker 1: former board members that his you know, misdirection made them
Speaker 1: feel like they couldn't do their jobs. And she has
Speaker 1: also said that people were intimidated to the point where
Speaker 1: they did not feel comfortable speaking more publicly about negative
Speaker 1: experiences they'd had about Sam, that they are afraid to
Speaker 1: speak more publicly about you know, times that he has
Speaker 1: been honest with them or you know, has in which
Speaker 1: they've had challenging experiences. And that has also been reflected
Speaker 1: in some of the private conversations I've had in which people,
Speaker 1: you know, they might have complaints or they might have
Speaker 1: had like challenging situations with him, and I think they
Speaker 1: just feel like the risk calculus is not worth it
Speaker 1: to come out and say something like that. But you know,
Speaker 1: there have been bits and pieces where people have come
Speaker 1: out and said things that you know, Sam has. You know,
Speaker 1: another thing that the board members have said was that
Speaker 1: Sam had been deceptive and manipulative, and that's also followed
Speaker 1: up by or not followed up. There was also, I
Speaker 1: think back in November, a former Open Eye employee who
Speaker 1: had tweeted something publicly about that, you know, saying that
Speaker 1: Sam had lied to him on occasion, even though he
Speaker 1: had also always been nice to him, which I think
Speaker 1: is a very interesting combination of.
Speaker 3: Charter Silicon Valley though I'm afraid of dealing with them,
Speaker 3: but they were so nice to me.
Speaker 1: And yeah, of course that you know, that person has
Speaker 1: not elaborated more publicly about what they meant. But I
Speaker 1: think I think, you know, I think this is why
Speaker 1: people are asking themselves these questions, which is like, you know,
Speaker 1: the more that we hear about what the board uh
Speaker 1: was thinking before they decided to fire Sam, I think
Speaker 1: the more people are wondering about what are the patterns
Speaker 1: of behavior that he shows that you know that led
Speaker 1: to the board trying to make this drastic move.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's actually an interesting point. So when Samulton was
Speaker 3: fired from open AI, there was this very strange reaction
Speaker 3: from Silicon Valley, including some in the media, where it
Speaker 3: was almost like Hunger Games, everyone doing the symbol thing
Speaker 3: where everyone's like, oh, we got to put Sam Alton
Speaker 3: back in, isn't it kind of strange? We still don't
Speaker 3: know why he was actually fired though, I mean Helen
Speaker 3: Tona has elaborated like, I've never seen a have you
Speaker 3: seen anything like this in your career?
Speaker 1: I think that it has been surprising that there has
Speaker 1: not been more of a clear answer. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: as as time has gone on, like we have heard
Speaker 1: a little bit more Like I think Helen Toner has,
Speaker 1: you know, to her credit, tried to give more information
Speaker 1: in recent weeks about what happened. I think, you know,
Speaker 1: people were obviously asking this question six months ago, and
Speaker 1: so I think like there's been a little bit of
Speaker 1: a delay and trying to get this this answer, and
Speaker 1: I wonder if maybe there just isn't like a very
Speaker 1: neat answer to it, and so and then in that
Speaker 1: absence we get this kind of more of a like murky, multifaceted,
Speaker 1: multi voiced answer. But I, yes, I agree that it
Speaker 1: is sort of surprising that there that there hasn't been
Speaker 1: more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit
Speaker 1: more granular detail about what led up to it.
Speaker 3: So on today, aihype in general said that a bit weird.
Speaker 3: I'll keep going, why do you think there's such a
Speaker 3: doulf between what Sam Altman says and what chat GPT
Speaker 3: can actually do?
Speaker 1: What Sam Moltman says, what are you talking about specifically, as.
Speaker 3: In he says it will be a super smart company. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that he'll be all of these things.
Speaker 1: Well, this is something that we get into in episode three,
Speaker 1: which is a personal interest of mine, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the psychology of the AI industry right now. And
Speaker 1: you know, I what I find so interesting about this
Speaker 1: and what we try to delve into in episode three
Speaker 1: and kind of throughout the series is these kind of
Speaker 1: like extreme projections about AI. And in the industry you
Speaker 1: see both positive ones and negative ones, and I think,
Speaker 1: you know, the negative ones, that's what looks like AI dooomerism,
Speaker 1: AI existential risks, sometimes called AI safety depending on your
Speaker 1: point of view. But you know, it's these projections that
Speaker 1: you know, superintelligence might very quickly and very soon learned
Speaker 1: to self improve in a way that allows it to
Speaker 1: rapidly outstrip our control and our capabilities and could lead
Speaker 1: to the extinction of humanity. There are so many interesting
Speaker 1: things to say about the psychology of believing that our
Speaker 1: human race might either be wiped out or incredibly changed
Speaker 1: within our lifetimes, and we get into that in episode three.
Speaker 1: I think I really wanted to get into the psychology
Speaker 1: of someone who believes that AI doom is just around
Speaker 1: the corner, and so we talked to someone who sort
Speaker 1: of became convinced of this belief soon after the twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen Alpha Go matches in which the go playing AI
Speaker 1: beat the the world's champion in Go, and he talks
Speaker 1: about yeah, no longer, you know, deciding not to make
Speaker 1: a retirement account because he was like, what is the
Speaker 1: point by the time I reach retirement age, either the
Speaker 1: world will be dramatically different and money won't matter, or
Speaker 1: will all be dead. And I think that, even though
Speaker 1: some people might scoff at that, that's like a real
Speaker 1: belief that people believe that this, you know, these extreme
Speaker 1: possible scenarios are in our near future. And on the
Speaker 1: other hand, we also see extreme projections in a positive direction.
Speaker 1: You know, this idea that AI is going to unlock
Speaker 1: a whole new era of human flourishing, that we might
Speaker 1: expand beyond our planet, that we might be able to
Speaker 1: give say what abundance abundance, right exactly. You know, one
Speaker 1: of the things we do I believe in episode three
Speaker 1: is is do a little bit of a supercut of
Speaker 1: Sam all been talking about abundance. It's it's pretty clear
Speaker 1: that this is a way that he likes to frame
Speaker 1: our AI future is going to be this future in
Speaker 1: which everyone has plenty, right, everyone has, you know, access
Speaker 1: to intelligence, abundant energy, abundant access to superintelligence that can
Speaker 1: help us live kind of our best lives and beyond
Speaker 1: our wildest dreams. Right. And I you know, obviously Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley is a place where people like to make grandiose statements.
Speaker 1: But this is beyond that, right, This is not just yeah,
Speaker 1: this is not just like you know, we joked about
Speaker 1: we work.
Speaker 4: We works.
Speaker 1: Mission statement was to elevate the world's consciousness, like well,
Speaker 1: galaxies of human flourishing for eons beyond us. Like that
Speaker 1: is on another scale, right, Like we're talking about something
Speaker 1: that is sort of at an unprecedented level of extreme rhetoric.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really interesting. I think it is
Speaker 1: a very powerful motivator, both in a you know, in
Speaker 1: the Doumer sense and also in the abundance sense. People
Speaker 1: believing that what they're working on is the most important
Speaker 1: technological leap forward for humanity. Talk about a motivating reason
Speaker 1: to work on this technology, right, talk about a way
Speaker 1: to feel powerful, feel like you're making a huge difference.
Speaker 1: I think that's a really key part of what's driving
Speaker 1: a lot of work in AI right now.
Speaker 4: Striving a lot of work.
Speaker 3: Sure, But with Altman himself, there is the golf. It
Speaker 3: is a million mile golf between the things he says
Speaker 3: and what chat GBT is, even even on the most
Speaker 3: basic level, capable of doing and will be capable, And
Speaker 3: it just feels like it almost feels like he's become
Speaker 3: the propagandist for the tech industry, and it's very strange
Speaker 3: to me how far that distance is. Because you've got
Speaker 3: the AI doomers and the AI optimist I guess you'd
Speaker 3: call them, but Allmond doesn't even feel like he's in
Speaker 3: with He's just kind of He'll say one day that
Speaker 3: he doesn't think it's a creature, the next one will
Speaker 3: say it's gonna kill us, or it all just feels
Speaker 3: like a pr campaign but for nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it has been interesting to try to answer the question.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: One of the questions we tried to answer in the
Speaker 1: podcast is does Sam actually believe you know, because as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, there are some early clips of him, you know,
Speaker 1: and when I say earlier, I mean around the time
Speaker 1: of founding open Ai twenty fifteen or so. There's some
Speaker 1: clips of him talking about, you know, saying somewhat jokingly
Speaker 1: that AI might kill us all. But there's also this,
Speaker 1: you know, very famous blog post that he wrote in
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen in which he says that, you know, basically,
Speaker 1: super intelligence is one of the most serious risks to humanity,
Speaker 1: you know, full stop. And so it's clear that at
Speaker 1: some point in his life, he believed kind of what
Speaker 1: we might now call a more doom ory outlook. But
Speaker 1: as time has gone on, he has you know, offered
Speaker 1: views that are a little bit more measured and more positive.
Speaker 1: You know, he tends to you know, in his big
Speaker 1: media tour of twenty twenty three, he tended to talk
Speaker 1: about how AI was going to. You know, his projection
Speaker 1: was that AI would radically transform society, but that it
Speaker 1: would be net good, right that like, overall we would
Speaker 1: be glad that this happened, and that it would improve lives,
Speaker 1: even if in the short term or for some people
Speaker 1: it might prove to be bringing a lot of challenges
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 3: And so it is.
Speaker 1: You know, I think one of the interesting things about
Speaker 1: is about him is it is a little hard to
Speaker 1: pin down exactly what he thinks. I think you're right
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't consider him like a gung ho effective accelerationist.
Speaker 1: I would not consider him a dumer. He is like
Speaker 1: somewhere in this large gulf in between there. But I
Speaker 1: think he's also smart enough to know that making grandiose
Speaker 1: projections about what AI could bring is a compelling story, right,
Speaker 1: like is a story that he can help sell by
Speaker 1: being like a spokesman for it. And often that is
Speaker 1: the role of a CEO is to be a really
Speaker 1: good storyteller, to bring the pitch of the company to
Speaker 1: the public, to investors, to potential employees, to customers, to
Speaker 1: try to sell them on this vision of the future.
Speaker 1: And I do think Sam is good at that. There
Speaker 1: is an interesting tidbit in episode three in which we
Speaker 1: interview a fiction writer who was actually hired on contract
Speaker 1: by open Ai to write like a novella about AI
Speaker 1: futures and things like that. And yeah, he just talks
Speaker 1: a little bit about you know, the novella is not
Speaker 1: I think in active use within open ai, but they
Speaker 1: did at some point, see they did at some point
Speaker 1: see value in commissioning it. And I think you know
Speaker 1: something that the author Patrick House explains to us is
Speaker 1: you know that open a Ey, just like many other startups,
Speaker 1: is really motivated by story, right, and that Sam Altman
Speaker 1: is inspired by fiction. You know, it's inspired by certain
Speaker 1: kinds of sci fi. I think this is not unique
Speaker 1: to Sam. Many founders in Silicon Valley, you know, Elon
Speaker 1: Musk has talked about this as well, are driven to
Speaker 1: create things in part because of what they read about
Speaker 1: when they were younger, that you know, these dreams of
Speaker 1: the future. And so it's just interesting to get his
Speaker 1: perspective on how motivating a story can be, and how
Speaker 1: motivating this compelling story of like, oh, we're building something
Speaker 1: that's gonna change the course of human history. Like you
Speaker 1: just couldn't ask for a more powerful motivating force.
Speaker 3: So as Alman accumulates power and as he kind of
Speaker 3: sends to the top of open AI, do you think
Speaker 3: he's done there? Do you think there's going to be
Speaker 3: another thing he starts? Because it feels like you've discussed
Speaker 3: like UBI and all these other things. Do you think
Speaker 3: he has grander ideas that he wants to pursue?
Speaker 1: Well, obviously I can't speak to what's inside Sam's.
Speaker 3: I don't know the man's mind, but I.
Speaker 1: Mean past indicators would suggest yes, Like I think he
Speaker 1: has proven pretty consistently that he's someone who you know,
Speaker 1: is you know, as much as he might focus on
Speaker 1: one project with a lot of effort, like he is
Speaker 1: cooking things on the side, Like this is a man.
Speaker 1: This is going to be an extended metaphor, but this
Speaker 1: is a man working at a stove that has like
Speaker 1: six burners, not one. And you know he we already
Speaker 1: know that.
Speaker 3: What are you saying, sorry, he's got a big house, He's.
Speaker 1: Got multiple houses. The uh the you know, we already
Speaker 1: know that. You know. In addition to running open ai,
Speaker 1: he has funded and or helped prompt the founding of,
Speaker 1: or has you know, been very involved in investing in
Speaker 1: or supporting other startups that you know, are part of
Speaker 1: this kind of ecosystem of businesses that are connected to
Speaker 1: an AI future or might benefit in an AI future.
Speaker 1: So for example, Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company
Speaker 1: which he has invested a ton of money into. I
Speaker 1: think he has said publicly that you know, his his
Speaker 1: vision is that this is a potential way to provide
Speaker 1: abundant energy that could then power the technology that we
Speaker 1: need to you know, uh, improve AI to the level
Speaker 1: that we're hoping that it can get to, or that
Speaker 1: he's hoping that it can get to. At the same time,
Speaker 1: you know, we've talked a little bit about universal basic income.
Speaker 1: This has been something that Sam has been a proponent
Speaker 1: of and an advocate of since at least twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: when he was running y Combinator and they started a
Speaker 1: side research project to study universal basic income by giving
Speaker 1: cash payments to families in Oakland of I believe a
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a month. That research project is still ongoing.
Speaker 1: It's now moved away from y Combinator and is associated
Speaker 1: with open Research, which is I believe funded by open Ai,
Speaker 1: and so it has kind of moved with Sam to
Speaker 1: his new role. And of course he also co founded
Speaker 1: this company called world Coin, which used these silver orbs
Speaker 1: machines to scan to take pictures of your iris and
Speaker 1: give everyone register every individual human as like a unique
Speaker 1: human individual, and to create this eyeball registry in which
Speaker 1: by which one could in the future distribute a universal
Speaker 1: basic income. So he's funding these energy companies. He's like
Speaker 1: involved in these sort the sort of crypto eyeball registry
Speaker 1: project that will help distribute UBI in this future that
Speaker 1: he's imagining. Like I think it's safe to say he's
Speaker 1: definitely thinking about things beyond just open AI for the
Speaker 1: future and imagining like, Okay, well, if we have this
Speaker 1: piece that's growing, what else will we need to support it?
Speaker 1: And I'm sure there are other things he's working on
Speaker 1: that we don't even know about, right, Like I know
Speaker 1: he has also funded some like longevity bioscience projects and
Speaker 1: things like that. He's I guarantee he's thinking about stuff
Speaker 1: beyond what we know about.
Speaker 3: Final question, why do you think the entire tech industry
Speaker 3: has become so fascinated with AI?
Speaker 4: Do you think it's just oldman or is it something more?
Speaker 1: I do think chat GBT started heating up this interest
Speaker 1: that was already percolating a little bit in the tech industry.
Speaker 1: But it does seem like something about chatchept capture the
Speaker 1: public imagination made people imagine very seriously for the first time,
Speaker 1: how AI could affect their lives, their lives individually. It
Speaker 1: used to be kind of this abstract thing that was
Speaker 1: a little farther away, or maybe you understood that like
Speaker 1: you were interacting with AI sometimes, like when you would
Speaker 1: look at like flight price predictors. Yeah, exactly. But you know,
Speaker 1: I think as we you know, we talk about this
Speaker 1: in episode three, but that you know, chat chipet wasn't
Speaker 1: even new technology. It was actually just a different user
Speaker 1: interface on a model that already existed GPT three point five.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 1: To me, that actually speaks I guess to the power
Speaker 1: of like making a technology accessible to everyone. And in
Speaker 1: a way that was like easy to use and you know,
Speaker 1: for better or worse. That kind of got a lot
Speaker 1: of people in this like public momentum of people thinking
Speaker 1: about AI feeling you know, just feeling like it had
Speaker 1: rapidly increased its capabilities in a short period of time.
Speaker 1: And yeah, something about that really captured not just you know,
Speaker 1: the minds, but also the hearts of people and like
Speaker 1: getting them really thinking about, like what could a future
Speaker 1: like this look like? And I think while some people
Speaker 1: were excited, a lot of people also reacted with fear
Speaker 1: right and like I think in the valley like you
Speaker 1: will hear a lot of people more openly discussing their
Speaker 1: fears of sort of like job loss or or just
Speaker 1: like dramatic social change that might come about in the
Speaker 1: next ten or twenty years. The feeling I get in
Speaker 1: conversations that I have in and around San Francisco is,
Speaker 1: you know, even people who are pretty deep in this
Speaker 1: technology are uncertain about whether it's going to be overall
Speaker 1: good or bad. Like they're just uncertain of how to
Speaker 1: look back on this time, like whether it will have
Speaker 1: ended up being elite forward for humanity or something differ.
Speaker 3: Aortman has taken advantage of the fact that the tech
Speaker 3: industry might not have any hypergrowth markets left, knowing that
Speaker 3: chat GPT is much like Sam Altman, incredibly adept at
Speaker 3: mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those
Speaker 3: that have actually done things. Like Sam Altman, chat GPT
Speaker 3: consumes information and feeds it back to the people using
Speaker 3: it in a way that feels superficially satisfying, and it's
Speaker 3: quite impressive to those who don't really care about creativity
Speaker 3: or depth, And like I've said, it takes advantage of
Speaker 3: the fact that the teche CoSystem has been dominated and
Speaker 3: funded like people who don't really build tech. As I've
Speaker 3: said before, generative AI things like chat gpt, anthropics Claude,
Speaker 3: Microsoft's co Pilot, which is also powered by chat gp.
Speaker 3: It's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam
Speaker 3: Mortman is promising. It will not be a virtual brain
Speaker 3: or imminently human like or a super smart person that
Speaker 3: knows everything about you, because it is, at its deepest complexity,
Speaker 3: a fundamentally different technology based on mathematics and the probabilistic
Speaker 3: answer to what you have asked it, rather than anything
Speaker 3: resembling how human beings think, or act or even know things.
Speaker 3: Generative AI does not know anything. How can a thing
Speaker 3: think when it doesn't know a anyone? I want to
Speaker 3: ask bradlight Cap Miramurati, Sam Ortman any of these questions
Speaker 3: just once hear what they fart out. No, Well, chat
Speaker 3: GBT isn't inherently useless. Almand realizes that it's impossible to
Speaker 3: generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based
Speaker 3: on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate
Speaker 3: power and money, which is his only goal, he has
Speaker 3: the speciously hype it and he has the hype it
Speaker 3: to wear healthy and powerful people who also do not
Speaker 3: participate in the creation of anything.
Speaker 4: And that's who he is. I've been pretty mean about
Speaker 4: this guy, I really have. But he does have a skill.
Speaker 3: He knows a mark, he knows he knows how to
Speaker 3: say the right things and get in the right rooms
Speaker 3: with the people who aren't really touching the software or
Speaker 3: the hardware. He knows what they need to hear, he
Speaker 3: knows what the vcs need to hear. He knows quite
Speaker 3: aptly what this needs to sound like. But if he
Speaker 3: had to say what chat GBT does today, what would
Speaker 3: he say, Yeah, yeah, it's really good at generating a
Speaker 3: bunch of TEGs that's kind of shitty.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it does math right and sometimes it does it
Speaker 3: really wrong. Sometimes you ask it to do It can
Speaker 3: draw a picture, Hey, what do you think of that?
Speaker 3: These are all things, by the way, that if like
Speaker 3: a six year old told you'd be like, wow, that's
Speaker 3: really impressive, or like a ten year old, perhaps because
Speaker 3: that's a living being. CHATGBT does these things, and it
Speaker 3: does it I know it's cheesy to say, but in
Speaker 3: a soulless way, but it really does that because and
Speaker 3: the reason all of this, the writing and the horrible
Speaker 3: video and the images, the reason it feels so empty
Speaker 3: is because even the most manure adjacent press release still
Speaker 3: has gone through someone's manure adjacent brain. Even the most
Speaker 3: pallid empty copy you've read has gone through someone. A
Speaker 3: person has put thought and intention in, even if they're
Speaker 3: not great with the English language. What chat GPT does
Speaker 3: is use math to generate the next thing, and sometimes
Speaker 3: it gets it pretty right. But pretty right is not
Speaker 3: enough to mimic human creation. But look at Sam Altman.
Speaker 4: Look who he is. What has he created? Other than wealth?
Speaker 3: For him and other people. What about Sam Moltman is
Speaker 3: particularly exciting. Well, he's been rich before and his money
Speaker 3: made him even richer.
Speaker 4: That's pretty good.
Speaker 3: He was why Combinator don't ask too much about what
Speaker 3: happened there. Just feels like sometimes Silicon Valley caun't wipe
Speaker 3: its own ass. It can't see when there's a wolf
Speaker 3: amongst the sheep. It can't see when someone isn't really
Speaker 3: part of the system other than finding new ways to
Speaker 3: manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is
Speaker 3: a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin, and their sin,
Speaker 3: by the way, is empowering and elevating those who don't
Speaker 3: build software, which in turn has led to the greater
Speaker 3: sin of allowing the tech industry to drift away from
Speaker 3: fixing the problems of actual human beings. Sam Altman's manipulative
Speaker 3: little power plays have been so effective because so many
Speaker 3: of the power players in venture capital and the public markets,
Speaker 3: and even tech companies are disconnected from the process of
Speaker 3: building things, of building software and hardware, and that makes
Speaker 3: them incapable or perhaps unwilling to understand that sam Altman
Speaker 3: is leading them to a deeply desolate place and on
Speaker 3: some level it's kind of impressive how he succeeded in
Speaker 3: bending these fools to his whims, to the point that
Speaker 3: executives like Sunned Up a Shi of Google, are willing
Speaker 3: to break Google Search in pursuit of this next big
Speaker 3: hype cycle created by Sam Altman. He might not create anything,
Speaker 3: but he's excellent at spotting market opportunities, even if these
Speaker 3: opportunities involve him transparently lying about the technology he creates,
Speaker 3: or while having his nasty little boosters further propagate these bullshit,
Speaker 3: mostly because they don't know, or perhaps they don't care
Speaker 3: if Sam Morton's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: to them. It doesn't matter that Google Search is still
Speaker 3: plagued with nonsensical AI answers that sometimes steal other people's work,
Speaker 3: or that AI in legal research has been proven to
Speaker 3: regularly hallucinate, which, by the way, is a problem that's
Speaker 3: impossible to fix. It's all happening because AI is the
Speaker 3: new thing that can be sold to the market, and
Speaker 3: it's all happening because Sam Altman, intentionally or otherwise has
Speaker 3: created a totally hollow hype cycle. And all of this
Speaker 3: is thanks to Sam Moltman. And a tech industry that's
Speaker 3: lost its ability to create things worthy of an actual
Speaker 3: hype cycle to the point that this spacious, non technical
Speaker 3: manipulator can lead it down this nasty, ugly offensive anti
Speaker 3: tech path. The tech industry has spent years pissing off customers,
Speaker 3: with platforms like Facebook and Google actively making their products
Speaker 3: worse in the pursuit of perpetual growth and ashamedly turning
Speaker 3: their backs on the people that made them rich and
Speaker 3: acting with this horrifying contempt for their users. And I
Speaker 3: believe the result will be that tech is going to
Speaker 3: face a harsh reprimand from society. As I mentioned in
Speaker 3: the rock Com bubble, things are already falling apart. WHEB
Speaker 3: traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is the people
Speaker 3: around Sam Moultman should have been able to see this,
Speaker 3: even putting aside his I've listened to an alarming amount
Speaker 3: of Sam Onman talk, and I'm a public relations person,
Speaker 3: who the hell am I I'm someone who's been around
Speaker 3: a lot of people who make shit up. I've been
Speaker 3: around a lot of people whose job it is to
Speaker 3: kind of obfuscate things, and quite frankly, almost really obvious.
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna do any weird light to me esque
Speaker 3: ways of proving he's lying. He just doesn't ever get
Speaker 3: pushed into any depth. No one ever asks him really
Speaker 3: technical questions or even just a question like, Hey, Sam,
Speaker 3: did you work on any of the code at open AI?
Speaker 4: What did you work on? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I know you can't talk about the future, Sam, but
Speaker 3: how close are we actually to AGI? And if he says, ah,
Speaker 3: a few years, that's not specific enough, Sam, how about
Speaker 3: give me a ballpark? And then when he lies again,
Speaker 3: you say, okay, Sam, how do we get from generative
Speaker 3: AI to AGI? And when he starts waffling, say no, no, no,
Speaker 3: be specific, Sam. This is how you actually ask questions.
Speaker 3: And when you say things like this, by the way,
Speaker 3: to technical founders, they don't get worried. They don't offer skate.
Speaker 3: They may say I can't talk about this duty of
Speaker 3: legal things, which is fine, but they'll generally try and
Speaker 3: talk to you. Listen to any interview with any other
Speaker 3: technical AI person, listen to them, and then listen to
Speaker 3: Sam Altman.
Speaker 4: He's full of it.
Speaker 3: It's so obvious and one deeply unfair thing with the
Speaker 3: value is there are people that get held to these
Speaker 3: standards early stage startups generally do the ones that aren't
Speaker 3: handed to people like Aortman or Alexis Ohanian have read it,
Speaker 3: or Paul Graham or read Hoffman. They don't get those
Speaker 3: chances because they're not saying the things that need to
Speaker 3: be said to the venture capitalists. They're not in the circles.
Speaker 3: They're not doing the right things because the right things
Speaker 3: are no longer the right thing for the tech industry.
Speaker 3: And when all of this falls apart, Sam Almon's going
Speaker 3: to be fine. When this all collapses, He'll find something
Speaker 3: to blame it on, market forces, a lack of energy, breakthroughs,
Speaker 3: unfortunate economic things, all of that nonsense, and he'll remain
Speaker 3: a billionaire, capable of doing anything he wants. The people
Speaker 3: that are going to suffer are the people working in
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley who aren't Sam Almon, The people that did
Speaker 3: not get born with a silver spoon in each hand
Speaker 3: and then handed further silver spoons as they walk the
Speaker 3: streets of San Francisco, people that don't live in nine
Speaker 3: and a half thousand square foot mansions, the people trying
Speaker 3: to raise money who can't write now because all the
Speaker 3: vcs are obsessed with AI the people that will get
Speaker 3: fired from public tech companies when a depression hits, because
Speaker 3: the markets realize that the generative AI boom was a bubble,
Speaker 3: when they realize that the most famous people in tech
Speaker 3: have been making these promises for nobody other than the markets. Well,
Speaker 3: the markets need you to do something eventually, and I
Speaker 3: just don't think it's gonna happen. And I think that
Speaker 3: we need to really think why was Sam Altman allowed
Speaker 3: to get to this point? Why did so many people
Speaker 3: like Paul Graham, like Reid Hoffman, like Brian Chesky, like
Speaker 3: Sacha Nadella. Back up, it's obvious con artists who has
Speaker 3: acted like this forever? And what sucks is I don't
Speaker 3: know if the valley is going to learn anything unless
Speaker 3: it's really bad, and I don't want it to be
Speaker 3: by the way. I would love to be wrong. I
Speaker 3: would love for all of this to just be like
Speaker 3: Sam Ortman's actually a genius. Turns out the whole thing
Speaker 3: is no, no, it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 4: And I worry that.
Speaker 3: There is no smooth way out of this, that there
Speaker 3: is no way to just casually integrate OpenAI with Microsoft,
Speaker 3: because now there's an antitrust thing going in with Microsoft
Speaker 3: and acquiring Inflection Ai, another AI company, and that's the thing.
Speaker 3: It feels like we were approaching a press apiss here,
Speaker 3: and the only way to avoid it is for people
Speaker 3: to come clean, which is never going to happen, or
Speaker 3: of course for Sam Wortman not to be laying for
Speaker 3: Agi to actually come out of open AI. And by
Speaker 3: the way, it's going to need to be in the
Speaker 3: next year. I don't think they've got even three quarters left.
Speaker 3: I think that once this falls apart, once the markets realize,
Speaker 3: oh shit, this is not profitable, this is not sustainable,
Speaker 3: they're going to walk away from it. When companies realize
Speaker 3: that generative AI it's given him a couple percent profit,
Speaker 3: maybe they're going to be pissed because this is not
Speaker 3: a stock rally worthy boondoggle. This is not going to
Speaker 3: be pretty when things fall apart from it. For Nvidia,
Speaker 3: you're still over one thousand dollars. When those orders stop
Speaker 3: coming in quite as fast. What do you think is
Speaker 3: going to happen to tech stocks? Startups are already having
Speaker 3: trouble raising money, and they're having trouble raising money because
Speaker 3: the people giving out the money are too disconnected from
Speaker 3: the creation of software and hardware. The only way to
Speaker 3: fix Silicon Valley perhaps is an apocalypse. Perhaps is people
Speaker 3: like Sam Ortman getting washed out. I don't want it
Speaker 3: to happen. I really must be bloody clear. But maybe
Speaker 3: it won't be apocalyptic. Maybe it would just be a
Speaker 3: brutal realignment. And maybe Silicon Valley needs that realignment because
Speaker 3: this industry desperately needs a big bathful of ice and
Speaker 3: need to dunk the head in it aggressively and wake
Speaker 3: the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back
Speaker 3: into real things. The largest tech companies need to realign
Speaker 3: and build for sustainability so they're not binging and purging
Speaker 3: staff with every boom. And if we really are at
Speaker 3: the end of the hypergrowth era, every tech company needs
Speaker 3: to be thinking profit and sustainability again. And that's a
Speaker 3: to Silicon Valley because a better Silicon Valley builds things
Speaker 3: for people, It solves real problems. It doesn't have to
Speaker 3: lie about what the thing could do in the future
Speaker 3: so that it can sell a thing today. And I
Speaker 3: realize that sounds like the foundation of most venture capital.
Speaker 3: That's fine at the seed stage, that's fine at this
Speaker 3: moonshot stage where your early early days. It is not
Speaker 3: befitting the most famous company in tech, It is not
Speaker 3: befitting a multi billionaire, It is not befitting anyone, and
Speaker 3: it is insulting to the people actually building things, both
Speaker 3: in and outside of technology.
Speaker 4: The people I hear from after.
Speaker 3: Every episode, they are angry, They are frustrated because there
Speaker 3: are good people in tech. There are people building real things.
Speaker 3: There are people that remember a time when the tech
Speaker 3: industry was exciting, when people were talking about cool shit
Speaker 3: in the future, and then they'd actually do it. Returning
Speaker 3: to that is better for society and the tech industry.
Speaker 3: Just don't know when it's going to happen. Thank you
Speaker 3: for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of
Speaker 3: the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check
Speaker 3: out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski
Speaker 3: dot com, m.
Speaker 4: A T T O S O W s ki dot com.
Speaker 3: You can email me at easy at better Offline dot com,
Speaker 3: or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
Speaker 3: links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
Speaker 3: you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to
Speaker 3: visit the discord and go to our slash Better Offline
Speaker 3: to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 5: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 5: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
Speaker 5: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 3: Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
Speaker 3: ze Tron. It's been a hard couple of weeks. It's
Speaker 3: been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters,
Speaker 3: I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit.
Speaker 3: Just try not to think about everything happening outside.
Speaker 4: But it's time to do so.
Speaker 3: Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog or
Speaker 3: a podcast store, or even a Twitter account or XD everything, Apple,
Speaker 3: whatever it's called now, they've all tried to drill down
Speaker 3: into what happened on November fifth, to find the people
Speaker 3: to blame, to explain what could have gone differently. Really
Speaker 3: looking for who to blame though, and find out why
Speaker 3: so many actions led to a result that well overwhelmingly
Speaker 3: home woman, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower income workers
Speaker 3: is terrifying. It fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words,
Speaker 3: not that I would usually anyway, and I don't feel
Speaker 3: fully equipped to respond to the moment. I don't have
Speaker 3: any real answers, at least not political ones. I'm not
Speaker 3: a political analyst, and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect
Speaker 3: either the Harris or the Trump campaigns, because I just
Speaker 3: feel like there's a take Olympics right now. It's the
Speaker 3: Dunning Kruger Festival out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize
Speaker 3: and intellectualize these events that ultimately come down to something
Speaker 3: quite simple. People don't trust authority, and yet it's pretty
Speaker 3: ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I
Speaker 3: don't want to give you the impression that I'm going
Speaker 3: to go on my crank mode that and somehow against
Speaker 3: institutions on their face.
Speaker 4: I'm not.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, understanding this moment requires us
Speaker 3: to acknowledge that institutions have failed us and failed most people,
Speaker 3: and how certain institutions missteps have led us to exactly
Speaker 3: what we are today. Legacy media, and while oftentimes they're
Speaker 3: staffed by people who truly love their readers and care
Speaker 3: about their beats, they're weighed down by this hysterical, nonsensical
Speaker 3: attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and the will
Speaker 3: of the markets. Case in point, regular people have spent
Speaker 3: years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation,
Speaker 3: despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly
Speaker 3: driven by get this, corporations raising their prices. Now, that's
Speaker 3: not to say that external factors like the war in
Speaker 3: Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things did
Speaker 3: play a role in it. They did, But the bulk
Speaker 3: of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies
Speaker 3: raising the prices. It was in their earnings.
Speaker 4: It was right there.
Speaker 3: Pepsi Cola said it on the news. Yet some parts
Speaker 3: of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time
Speaker 3: chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their
Speaker 3: own reporting. And there will be links in the episode
Speaker 3: notes promise as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting
Speaker 3: again and again that the economy is actually good, contorting
Speaker 3: their little bodies to prove that prices aren't actually higher,
Speaker 3: even as companies literally boasted about raising their prices on earnings.
Speaker 3: In fact, the media spent years debating with itself, where
Speaker 3: the price scouging was actually happening despite years of proof
Speaker 3: that it was. Some of them even reported that the
Speaker 3: price gouging was happening, So like, get this. I just
Speaker 3: don't think people trust authority, and they especially don't trust
Speaker 3: the media, especially the legacy media. It also probably didn't
Speaker 3: help that the legacy media implored readers and viewers to
Speaker 3: ignore what they saw at the supermarket or at the
Speaker 3: pump and the growing hits that their wallets from the
Speaker 3: daily incessities of life. It was just a national level
Speaker 3: gas lighting and it was disgusting. And I know some
Speaker 3: of you might say, you know where to email me.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's not just this.
Speaker 3: No, of course, it's not just this asshole, but I
Speaker 3: think this is a big thing now. Before a go
Speaker 3: any further, I've used the term legacy media here repeatedly,
Speaker 3: but I don't completely intend for it to come across
Speaker 3: as a pejorative despite my criticism. Believe me, I've got
Speaker 3: a few of them. There are people in the legacy
Speaker 3: media doing a good job. They're reporting the truth, they're
Speaker 3: doing the kinds of work that matters, and they're actually
Speaker 3: trying to teach their reader's stuff and tell them what's
Speaker 3: happening and giving them context. I read and pay for
Speaker 3: several legacy media outlets. I think the world is a
Speaker 3: better place for them existing despite their flaws. The problem is,
Speaker 3: as I'll explain, is this editorial industrial complex and how
Speaker 3: these people are writing about the powerful don't seem to
Speaker 3: be able to or maybe they don't want to actually
Speaker 3: interrogate the powerful. This could be an entire episode on
Speaker 3: its sign, But I don't think the answer to these
Speaker 3: failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely.
Speaker 2: But I want to.
Speaker 3: Implore them to do better and to strive for the
Speaker 3: values of truth hunting and truth telling and actually explaining
Speaker 3: what's happening and criticizing the people that don't have pr
Speaker 3: firms and lobbying groups, lawyers and the means to protect
Speaker 3: themselves from the world. The time for fucking around is
Speaker 3: over and we're currently finding out now. Anyway, as you know,
Speaker 3: as a person existing in the real world, the price
Speaker 3: of everything has kept increasing despite the fact that wages
Speaker 3: are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to
Speaker 3: choose between food and fuel or I don't know, eating
Speaker 3: and having heat simultaneously. Businesses have spent several years telling
Speaker 3: workers they're asking for too much and doing too little,
Speaker 3: telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting,
Speaker 3: which is a fucking stupid term that just means going
Speaker 3: to your job and doing the thing you're paying to
Speaker 3: do any anyway, And a year later, in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: they insisted that the years of remote work were actually
Speaker 3: bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one, which was something to do with remote work. Now,
Speaker 3: did anyone actually prove this, did anyone actually going.
Speaker 4: No, they didn't.
Speaker 3: They just well, I just listened to Mark Benioff, who's
Speaker 3: one of the more evil people alive. Now I also so,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of these problems come to twenty
Speaker 3: twenty one, a year that we really need to dig
Speaker 3: into more. We might not do so today, but we
Speaker 3: will in the future. But one of the big things
Speaker 3: that punish workers and led to so many layoffs in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three was the fact that we couldn't get
Speaker 3: back to the post lockdown boot of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 3: when everyone bought everything always as they left the house
Speaker 3: for the first time in a while. Now, any corporation
Speaker 3: would be smart enough to know that that was a phase,
Speaker 3: that that was not going to be forever. Except every
Speaker 3: single big company seemed to make the same mistake and
Speaker 3: say number going up forever, line go up forever. When
Speaker 3: it didn't, well, they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well,
Speaker 3: could it be that we as companies we set unrealistic
Speaker 3: expectations for the markets and we just thought that we'd
Speaker 3: keep growing forever. Or maybe it was the people using
Speaker 3: the computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better anyway, Well,
Speaker 3: the majority of people don't work remotely. From talking to
Speaker 3: the people I know outside of tech business, there's this
Speaker 3: genuine sense that the media has allied itself with the bosses,
Speaker 3: and I imagine it's because of the many articles that
Speaker 3: literally call workers lazy and have done so for years.
Speaker 3: Yet when it comes to the powerful legacy, media doesn't
Speaker 3: seem to have that much pisson vinegar. They just have
Speaker 3: much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging.
Speaker 3: It's always directed that middle and working class workers and
Speaker 3: seemingly disappears what a person has a three character job
Speaker 3: title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes
Speaker 3: it's demoralizing for the average person, despite the fact that
Speaker 3: Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing is intent to uses
Speaker 3: billions of dollars to wield power equivalent to that of
Speaker 3: a nation state. As you may remember from my first
Speaker 3: episode of Anything over On, it could happen here.
Speaker 4: Too. Much of the media, both.
Speaker 3: Legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously, failing to call him
Speaker 3: a liar, a con artist, an aggress or, a manipula
Speaker 3: of rasis the deadbeat dad, you know all the thing's
Speaker 3: actually happening.
Speaker 4: No, no, no.
Speaker 3: They kind of danced around him. They reported stories that
Speaker 3: might make you think they maybe noticed it, But there
Speaker 3: was this desperation to guard objectivity, and it was just
Speaker 3: it lacked any real intent. It lacked any interest in
Speaker 3: calling account to a man who has pretty much bought
Speaker 3: an election for Donald Trump, a racist billionaire using his
Speaker 3: outsized capital the Benz Society to his will. Just isn't
Speaker 3: a fucking problem for the media, or at least not
Speaker 3: as much of a problem as a worker who might
Speaker 3: not work fifty to one hundred hours a week for
Speaker 3: a boss who makes one hundred and thirty times what
Speaker 3: they do. The news at least outside of the right wing,
Speaker 3: is always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe for
Speaker 3: fear that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased,
Speaker 3: something that happens anyway. And while there are columnists are
Speaker 3: given some space to have their own thoughts, sometimes in
Speaker 3: the newspaper, sometimes online, the stories themselves are delivered with
Speaker 3: the kind of reserved hmmmm tone that often fails to
Speaker 3: express any actual consequences or context around the news itself,
Speaker 3: and just doesn't I seem to care about making sure
Speaker 3: that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey
Speaker 3: has a good point about podcasts, and I applied some
Speaker 3: of the news too, that there's too much stuff out
Speaker 3: there that is there to make you feel intelligent rather
Speaker 3: than make you intelligent.
Speaker 4: I think this falls into him.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: This isn't to say that outlets are incapable of doing
Speaker 3: this correctly. I love the Washington Post. They've done an
Speaker 3: excellent job on analyzing major tech stories. But a lot
Speaker 3: of these outlets feel custom built to be bulldozed the
Speaker 3: moment an authoritarian turns up. This force that exists to
Speaker 3: crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity authoritarians know
Speaker 3: that they're ideologically charged words we quoted ad verbatim with
Speaker 3: the occasional.
Speaker 4: Ah, this could mean little dribble, this drizzle, this.
Speaker 3: Spunk of context that's lost in the headline that repeats
Speaker 3: exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to.
Speaker 4: And guess what.
Speaker 3: Some people don't read the article, They just read the headline.
Speaker 3: And Musk is the most brutal example of this. By
Speaker 3: the way, despite the fact that he's turned Twitter into
Speaker 3: a website pump full of racism and hatred that literally
Speaker 3: helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to
Speaker 3: get mostly positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream
Speaker 3: media for his fucking robotaxi nonsense, despite the fact that
Speaker 3: he spent the best part of a decade lying about
Speaker 3: what Tesla will do next. There are entire websites just
Speaker 3: based on how much Elon Musk lies, yet they still
Speaker 3: report this shit. It makes me very upset, And it
Speaker 3: doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by the way,
Speaker 3: had a company in coverage that suggested that the markets
Speaker 3: weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robotaxi plans or their fake
Speaker 3: cass robots run by people.
Speaker 4: Musk is still able.
Speaker 3: To use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and
Speaker 3: he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on
Speaker 3: stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk
Speaker 3: might say their bias, which he has been doing for years.
Speaker 3: Do you see my goddamn point yet? And this, by
Speaker 3: the way, is not always the fault of the rayers.
Speaker 3: There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith
Speaker 3: in the markets and the powerful than they do the
Speaker 3: people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And
Speaker 3: above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make
Speaker 3: sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside
Speaker 3: the lines or informs people a little too much. And
Speaker 3: not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell jobs
Speaker 3: or any number of billionaires who are in any number
Speaker 3: of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters
Speaker 3: who don't know anything about business and tech, or the
Speaker 3: senior editors the terrified of any byline that might dare
Speaker 3: get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call
Speaker 3: their boss it's fucking cowardice. There are, however, I should add,
Speaker 3: also those who simply defer to the powerful that assume
Speaker 3: that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money,
Speaker 3: in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong, and
Speaker 3: there's an entire website about the wrong US and the
Speaker 3: liars and the bullshit, and I'm talking about Elon Musk still. Obviously,
Speaker 3: these editors are the people that look at the current
Speaker 3: crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver
Speaker 3: any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they.
Speaker 4: Go ooh, oh, send me more.
Speaker 3: Daddy showed me more of the apps. It's fucking disgraceful.
Speaker 3: Just look at the coverage of Sam Mortman from the
Speaker 3: last year. You know, the guy who spent years lying
Speaker 3: about what AI can do, and tell me why every
Speaker 3: single thought he says must be uncritically catalog is every
Speaker 3: goddamn decision applauded, his every claim, trumpeted as certain, his
Speaker 3: brittle little company that burns five billion dollars a year
Speaker 3: talked about like it's a fucking living god. Sam Moltman
Speaker 3: is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including
Speaker 3: open Ai, and yet because he's a billionaire with a
Speaker 3: buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get a
Speaker 3: completely different set of rules to live by and exist
Speaker 3: in a totally different media environment. Their geniuses, entrepreneurs, fire brands.
Speaker 3: Their challenges are framed as missteps and their victories framed
Speaker 3: as certainties by the same outlets that told us that
Speaker 3: we were quiet quitting and that the economy is actually good,
Speaker 3: and that we're the problem for high prices. Well, it's
Speaker 3: correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideological
Speaker 3: and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look at
Speaker 3: the rest of the media and claim that they are not.
Speaker 3: The problem is that the so called left media, which
Speaker 3: usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what we
Speaker 3: may consider left wing causes like universal health care, strong unions,
Speaker 3: expanded social safety, and it's you know, the stuff that
Speaker 3: would actually be helpful. Now, they're biased in favor of
Speaker 3: filating an ever growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes, elevating
Speaker 3: them to the status of American royalty, where they exist
Speaker 3: above expectations and norms that you and I must live by.
Speaker 3: This is the definition of elitism. The media has literally
Speaker 3: created a class of people who can lie and cheat
Speaker 3: and steal, and rather than condemn them for it. They're celebrated.
Speaker 3: While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology
Speaker 3: into this, I truly believe that everybody is affected by
Speaker 3: the rot economy, the growth or costs ecosystem where number
Speaker 3: must always go up because everybody is using technology all
Speaker 3: the time, and the technology in question is getting worse.
Speaker 3: This election cycle saw more than twenty five billion text
Speaker 3: messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was
Speaker 3: crown full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections.
Speaker 3: They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum
Speaker 3: on the incumbent party you're president, and by proxy, a
Speaker 3: poll on how people feel. And the reality is that
Speaker 3: most people are fucking miserable. There's this all encompassing feeling
Speaker 3: that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay
Speaker 3: your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends.
Speaker 3: It's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy
Speaker 3: a house, it's harder to fall in love, it's harder
Speaker 3: to do everything. And what we're seeing is an in
Speaker 3: shitification of existence.
Speaker 4: To use mister doctor Roe's phrase.
Speaker 3: Everything just I don't want to be this much of
Speaker 3: a commudgeon. But everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible,
Speaker 3: it's miserable, and hardly anyone thinks it's going.
Speaker 4: To get better.
Speaker 3: And this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a
Speaker 3: strong man to have emerged, one who arises and says
Speaker 3: that only he can fix things, even if he spent
Speaker 3: four years proving how he could not. And the problem
Speaker 3: for democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the
Speaker 3: all encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard
Speaker 3: to solve. It's hard to change the perception that everything's
Speaker 3: terrible when you're reminded of it when you're trying to
Speaker 3: do the most basic of tasks. Our phones are full
Speaker 3: of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things
Speaker 3: that companies want. Our apps are full of micro transactions.
Speaker 3: Our websites are slower and harder to use, with endless
Speaker 3: demands of our emails and our phone numbers, and the
Speaker 3: nay to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose
Speaker 3: a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington
Speaker 3: Post article. And yes, I'm talking about the post, which
Speaker 3: I fucking pay for, despite the fact it logs me
Speaker 3: out all the time. Our social networks are so algorithmically
Speaker 3: charged that they barely show us the things we want
Speaker 3: them to anymore, With executives dedicated to filling our feeds
Speaker 3: full of AI generated slop. Because despite being the customer,
Speaker 3: we're also the revenue mechanism, our search engines do less
Speaker 3: as a means of making us use them more. Our
Speaker 3: dating apps have become vehicles of private equity to add
Speaker 3: a toll to falling in love. Our video games are
Speaker 3: constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite
Speaker 3: it losting money and being attached to our account, we
Speaker 3: don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase.
Speaker 3: We're drowning in spam, both in our emails and our phones,
Speaker 3: and at this point in our lives, we've probably agreed
Speaker 3: to three million pages of privacy policies allowing companies to
Speaker 3: use our information as they see fit. We get one
Speaker 3: value transaction with every company they get eleven, they get
Speaker 3: one hundred. We really actually don't know because there's no
Speaker 3: legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing. And these
Speaker 3: are the issues that hit everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly.
Speaker 3: Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use
Speaker 3: our phone, we check our text, three spam calls, two
Speaker 3: spam texts. We look at our bank balance, two factor
Speaker 3: authentication check, we're rid the news.
Speaker 4: A quarter of the pages bot.
Speaker 3: Bone advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to
Speaker 3: hide the button to get rid of them. And then
Speaker 3: we log into slack and feel a pang of anxiety.
Speaker 3: Is fifteen different notifications appear in a way there is
Speaker 3: really not built for us to find what we need,
Speaker 3: just to let us know something happen. Modern existence is
Speaker 3: just engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist to cut
Speaker 3: through it seem to bounce between the ignorance of their
Speaker 3: masters and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for
Speaker 3: exploring and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful
Speaker 3: forces that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices
Speaker 3: is wilfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack
Speaker 3: from applications, websites, and devices that are built to make
Speaker 3: us do things for them, rather than operate with dignity
Speaker 3: and freedom that much of the Internet was actually founded upon.
Speaker 3: These millions of invisible acts of terror are too often
Speaker 3: left undiscussed because accepting the truth requires you to accept
Speaker 3: that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that
Speaker 3: billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of
Speaker 3: people every single day of their lives through the devices
Speaker 3: that we're required to use in order to exist in
Speaker 3: the modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most
Speaker 3: of the media fails to account for them, and in turn,
Speaker 3: people walk around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing
Speaker 3: who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants,
Speaker 3: like the Democrats, like whatever fucking works. Because we can't
Speaker 3: actually call the people out, the corporations crushing our existence,
Speaker 3: Why wouldn't people crave change?
Speaker 4: Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world?
Speaker 3: Absolutely fucking sucks. Sometimes it's miserable. It's bereft of industry
Speaker 3: and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified, it's disrespectful, and it
Speaker 3: must be crushed if we want to escape this depressing,
Speaker 3: goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are
Speaker 3: fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it
Speaker 3: starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without
Speaker 3: fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said, repeatedly, happen
Speaker 3: either way. The truth is that the media is more
Speaker 3: afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading
Speaker 3: their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope,
Speaker 3: and it may very well be one, there must be
Speaker 3: room to inject the writer's voice back into their work,
Speaker 3: and a willingness to call out bad actors as such,
Speaker 3: no matter and how rich they are, no matter how
Speaker 3: big their products are, no matter how willing they are
Speaker 3: to bark and scream that things are unfair as they
Speaker 3: accumulate more power and money. We need context in our news.
Speaker 3: We need it, we need it now. We need opinion,
Speaker 3: we need voice, we need character, we need life, because
Speaker 3: as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed.
Speaker 3: And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this
Speaker 3: and saying.
Speaker 4: Oh, the media is tea critical of tech, if that
Speaker 4: fucking wrong, kiss my asshole.
Speaker 3: Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result
Speaker 3: of a society that let technology in the ultra rich
Speaker 3: run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might
Speaker 3: have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have
Speaker 3: actually held them in check. Our default position in interrogating
Speaker 3: the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become
Speaker 3: that they will work it out, as they continually redefine
Speaker 3: what work it out means and turn it into make
Speaker 3: their products worse but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google,
Speaker 3: open Ai, and other huge tech companies as if the
Speaker 3: products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectable to
Speaker 3: the reader intelligence and a disgusting abdication of responsibility, as
Speaker 3: their products, even when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying,
Speaker 3: more frustrating, and more convoluted than ever. And that's before
Speaker 3: you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that
Speaker 3: are out right broken. I don't give a shit if
Speaker 3: these people have raised a lot of money unless you
Speaker 3: use that as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with
Speaker 3: the tech industry. Meta making billions of dollars of profit
Speaker 3: is a sign that something is wrong with society, not
Speaker 3: proof that it's a good company or anything that should
Speaker 3: grant Mark Zuckerberg any kind of special treatment. Shove your
Speaker 3: chains up your ass, Mark open Ai being worth one
Speaker 3: hundred and fifty seven billion dollars for a company that
Speaker 3: burns five billion or more a year to make a
Speaker 3: product that destroys our environment. For a product yet to
Speaker 3: find any real meaning, isn't a sign that it should
Speaker 3: get more coverage or be taken more seriously. No, it
Speaker 3: should be a sign that something is broken, that something
Speaker 3: is wrong with society. Whatever you may feel about chat GPT,
Speaker 3: the coverage it received is outsized compared to its actual
Speaker 3: utility and the things built on top of it. And
Speaker 3: that's a direct result of a media industry that seems
Speaker 3: incapable of holding the powerful accountable or actually learning about
Speaker 3: the subject matter in question. It's time to accept that
Speaker 3: most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way
Speaker 3: we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible.
Speaker 3: Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos, whose
Speaker 3: wealth and the inherent cruelty of Amazon's labor practices makes
Speaker 3: him an obvious target, but please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, Sander Peshai, Tim Cook, and every single other
Speaker 3: tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become
Speaker 3: fucked up through algorithms that we know nothing about. Similarly,
Speaker 3: governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that
Speaker 3: might stop the raw, both in terms of dominance and
Speaker 3: a patness of algorithmic manipulation and the ways in which
Speaker 3: tach products exist with few real quality standards. We may have,
Speaker 3: at least for now, consumer standards for the majority of
Speaker 3: consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is
Speaker 3: why so much of our digital lives are such unfettered.
Speaker 4: Doug shit.
Speaker 3: And if you're hearing this and saying I'm being a
Speaker 3: hater or a pess and miss shut the fuck up,
Speaker 3: I'm tired of you. I'm so fucking tired of being
Speaker 3: told to calm down about this as we stare down
Speaker 3: the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top
Speaker 3: of the decay of our lives, both physical and digital,
Speaker 3: with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job
Speaker 3: explaining what's being done to the people in an ideologically
Speaker 3: consistent way. There's this extremely common assumption in the tech media,
Speaker 3: based on what I'm really not sure that these companies
Speaker 3: are all doing a good job, and that good job
Speaker 3: means having lots of users and making lots of money,
Speaker 3: and it drives tons of editorial decision making. If three
Speaker 3: quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits
Speaker 3: by making half of their cars or the break that
Speaker 3: sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news. Government inquiries would
Speaker 3: app but people will go to prison. And this isn't
Speaker 3: even conjecture. It actually happened after Volkswagen was caught deliberately
Speaker 3: programming its engines to only meet emission standards during laboratory testing.
Speaker 3: They were left to spew excessive pollution into the real world,
Speaker 3: but once lawmakers found out, they responded with civil and
Speaker 3: criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted, one
Speaker 3: received seven years in jail, and their former CEO is
Speaker 3: currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the
Speaker 3: US too. And here we are in the tech industry.
Speaker 3: Facebook barely works, used to nigenocides and bully people and
Speaker 3: harassed teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant on there. There was
Speaker 3: a Wall Street Journal about story about it.
Speaker 4: They're fine.
Speaker 3: So much of the tech industry consumer software like Google
Speaker 3: or Facebook, Twitter, and even chat GBT and business software
Speaker 3: from companies like Microsoft and Slack.
Speaker 4: It sucks. It sucks, It's bad. You use it every day.
Speaker 3: You've been listening to be Ramble for fifty episodes, now
Speaker 3: you know what I'm talking about. It's everywhere, Yet the
Speaker 3: media covers it just like, eh, you know, it's just
Speaker 3: how things are mate now. Meta, by the admission of
Speaker 3: its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to
Speaker 3: the mental health of teenage girls, and it hasn't made
Speaker 3: any substantial changes as a result, nor has it received
Speaker 3: any significant pushback for fame to do so. Little bit
Speaker 3: of a side note here, big shout out to Jeff
Speaker 3: Horwitz and the rest of the Wall Street General people
Speaker 3: who did the Facebook files. There are our legacy media
Speaker 3: people doing a good job on this. Nevertheless, Meta exercises
Speaker 3: this reckless disregard for public safety, kind of like the
Speaker 3: auto industry in the sixties, and that was when Ralph
Speaker 3: Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed in his book. It
Speaker 3: actually brought about change. It led to the Department of
Speaker 3: Transportation and the passage of seatbelt laws in forty nine states,
Speaker 3: and a bunch of other things that can get overlooked.
Speaker 3: But the tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind
Speaker 3: of public pressure or shame because it operates in this
Speaker 3: completely different world with this different rule book and a
Speaker 3: different criteria for success, as well as this completely different
Speaker 3: set of expectations. By allowing the market to become disconnected
Speaker 3: from the value it creates, we enable companies like I
Speaker 3: don't know, in Vidia that reduce the quality of their
Speaker 3: services they make more money for their g Force now service,
Speaker 3: or Facebook they can just destroy our political discourse so
Speaker 3: they can facilitate genocide in Myanmar, and then well, they
Speaker 3: get headlines about how good a CEO Mark Zuckerbig is
Speaker 3: and how cool his chains are, and how how everything's
Speaker 3: just fine with Facebook and they're making more money.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 4: No, I actually want to take a step back, though.
Speaker 4: I want to take a little bit of step back.
Speaker 3: I previously mentioned I said it twice now, Oh, Meta
Speaker 3: enables genocide and it destroys our politic our political discourse.
Speaker 3: I want to be clear when I say that everything
Speaker 3: is justified at Meta, I'm actually quoting their chief technology officer.
Speaker 3: That's quite literally what Andrew Bosworth said in an internal
Speaker 3: memo from twenty sixteen where he said that and I
Speaker 3: quote ahem, all the work Facebook does in growth is justified,
Speaker 3: even if that includes and I'm quoting him directly, somebody
Speaker 3: dying in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tool. Now,
Speaker 3: the mere mention of violent crime is enough to create
Speaker 3: dreams of articles questioning whether society is safe and whether
Speaker 3: we need more plastic in our walgreens. Yeah, our digital
Speaker 3: lives are this wasteland that people still discuss like a utopia,
Speaker 3: seriously putting aside the social networks. Have you visited a
Speaker 3: website on the phone recently? Have you tried to use
Speaker 3: a new app? Have you tried to buy something online
Speaker 3: starting with a Google search? Within those experiences, sis, has
Speaker 3: anything gone wrong? You know it, I know it has,
Speaker 3: you know it has.
Speaker 4: It's time to wake up. We the users of products.
Speaker 3: We're at war with the products we're using and the
Speaker 3: people that make them, and right now we are losing.
Speaker 3: The media must realign to fight for how things should be.
Speaker 3: This doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or
Speaker 3: give credit where credit is due, or be willing to
Speaker 3: accept that something could be something cool. But has the
Speaker 3: change is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have
Speaker 3: been allowed to decay to a level that has become
Speaker 3: at best annoying and at actively harmful for society. Our
Speaker 3: networks are rotten, Our information ecosystem is poisoned with its
Speaker 3: pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking
Speaker 3: to those that we love and making new connections are
Speaker 3: so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is.
Speaker 4: All but removed. But there is hope, there really is.
Speaker 3: Those covering the tech industry right now have one of
Speaker 3: the most consequential jobs in journalism if they choose to
Speaker 3: fucking do it. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland,
Speaker 3: those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad
Speaker 3: things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable and say
Speaker 3: what good might look like have the opportunity to push
Speaker 3: for a better future by spitting in the faces of
Speaker 3: those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by
Speaker 3: the way, I don't know what to call myself. Am
Speaker 3: I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines.
Speaker 3: Am I an independent contractor?
Speaker 4: Am I an influencer? Am I content?
Speaker 3: I truly don't know, and I don't know over care.
Speaker 3: But all that I know is that I feel like
Speaker 3: I'm at war two and that we, if I can
Speaker 3: be considered part of the media, are at war with
Speaker 3: people that have changed the terms of innovation so that
Speaker 3: it's synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I became
Speaker 3: a person, how I met my closest friends and loved ones.
Speaker 3: And without it, I wouldn't be able to write, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't be able to.
Speaker 4: Read this podcast. I wouldn't have got this podcast.
Speaker 3: And I feel this poison flowing through my veins as
Speaker 3: I see what these motherfuckers have done and what they're
Speaker 3: continuing to do, and I see how inconsistently and tipidly
Speaker 3: they're interrogated. Now is the time to talk bluntly about
Speaker 3: what is happening. The declining quality of tech products, the
Speaker 3: scourge of growth, hacking, the cancellrous growth at all cost mindset.
Speaker 3: These are all the things that need to be raised
Speaker 3: in every single piece, and judgments must be unrelenting.
Speaker 4: The companies will.
Speaker 3: Squeal ooh that they're being so unfairly treated by the
Speaker 3: biased legacy media. Oh oh save me, hey, Nelle Patel
Speaker 3: interview with Sandhar Pishchai. This is how you sounded when
Speaker 3: you handed him your phone. It was pathetic. They should
Speaker 3: be scared you, Nille. The powerful should be scared of
Speaker 3: the media. They shouldn't be sitting there sending letters to
Speaker 3: the editor like fucking customer support. No, they should see
Speaker 3: this podcast, they should see these news letters. They should
Speaker 3: see everything published by the tech media and go uh oh.
Speaker 4: And there can be good people. There can be good
Speaker 4: boys and girls than others.
Speaker 3: There can be plenty of people that make good products
Speaker 3: and get great press for it. But do you really
Speaker 3: think meta Google, Apple to an extent, frankly, do you
Speaker 3: think Amazon looks good right now? Do you think it's
Speaker 3: easy to find stuff? Or do you think it's slop
Speaker 3: full of more slop? Mark Zuckerberg said on an Earning
Speaker 3: Score the other day that he intends there to be
Speaker 3: an AI specific slop feed that should These are harmful things.
Speaker 3: This is pouring vants of oil into rivers and then
Speaker 3: getting told you're the best boy in town. These companies,
Speaker 3: they're poisoning the digital world and they must be held
Speaker 3: accountable for the damage they're causing.
Speaker 4: Readers are already aware.
Speaker 3: But ah, and this is really thanks to members of
Speaker 3: the media, by the way, the gaslighting themselves into believing that, oh,
Speaker 3: I just don't I don't keep up with technology. He
Speaker 3: is getting away from me. I'm not technical enough to
Speaker 3: use this. When the thing that they don't get that
Speaker 3: the average person doesn't get is that the tech industry
Speaker 3: has built legions of obfiscations, legions of legal tricks, and
Speaker 3: these horrible little user interface traps specifically made to trick
Speaker 3: you into doing things, to make the experience kind of
Speaker 3: subordinate to getting the money off of you. And I
Speaker 3: think that this is one of the biggest issues in society.
Speaker 3: And yes, of course I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast
Speaker 3: about tech, but for real, though, billions of people use smartphones,
Speaker 3: billions of people are on the computer every day. It's
Speaker 3: how we do everything. And it stinks. It stinks so bad.
Speaker 3: This is the rot economy. We're in the rot society.
Speaker 3: But things can change, and for them to change, it
Speaker 3: has to start with the information sources, and that starts
Speaker 3: with journalism. Work has already begun and will continue, but
Speaker 3: it must scale up and it must do so quickly.
Speaker 3: And you, the user, have the power learn to read
Speaker 3: a privacy policy and the link there is to the
Speaker 3: Washington Post. Yes, there are plenty of great reporters there.
Speaker 3: Fuck Bezos. You can move to Signal, which is an
Speaker 3: encrypted messaging app that works on just about everything. Get
Speaker 3: a service like delete me, and by the way I
Speaker 3: pay for it, I work from four years ago.
Speaker 4: I have no financial relationship with them.
Speaker 3: But they're great for removing you from data brokers.
Speaker 4: Molly White, who's a dear.
Speaker 3: Friend of mine and even better right who might remember
Speaker 3: from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia. She's also
Speaker 3: written this extremely long guide about what to do next
Speaker 3: that are linked to in the notes, and it runs
Speaker 3: through a ton of great things you can do unionization,
Speaker 3: finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and store sensitive data,
Speaker 3: and so on. I also heartily recommend Wired's guide to
Speaker 3: protecting yourself from government surveillance, which is linked in the
Speaker 3: show notes. Now, before we go, I want to leave
Speaker 3: you with something that I posted on November sixth on
Speaker 3: the Better.
Speaker 4: Offline redd app.
Speaker 3: The last twenty four hours of felt bleak and will
Speaker 3: likely feel more bleak as the months and years go on.
Speaker 3: It'll be easy to give in to doom, to assume
Speaker 3: the fight is lost, to assume that the bad guys
Speaker 3: have permanently won and there will never be any justice
Speaker 3: or joy again. Now's the time for solidarity to crystallize
Speaker 3: around ideas that matter, even if their a position in
Speaker 3: society is delayed. Even as the clouds darken and the
Speaker 3: storm's brew and the darkness feels all encompassing and suffocating.
Speaker 3: Reach out to those you love and don't just commiserate.
Speaker 3: Plan It doesn't have to be political, it doesn't even
Speaker 3: really have to matter, but shit on your fucking calendar.
Speaker 3: Keep yourself active and busy and if not distracted, at
Speaker 3: very least animated.
Speaker 4: Darkness feeds an idleness.
Speaker 3: Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and a sense
Speaker 3: of inability to make change. You don't know me very well,
Speaker 3: but know that I'm aware of the darkness and the
Speaker 3: sadness and the suffocation of when things feel overwhelming, give
Speaker 3: yourself some mercy and then the days to come. Don't
Speaker 3: castigate yourself a feeling gutted, Then keep going. I realize
Speaker 3: it's little solace to think, well, if I keep saying
Speaker 3: stuff out loud, things will get better. But I promise
Speaker 3: you doing so as an effect and actually matters. Keep
Speaker 3: talking about how fucked up things are, Make sure it's
Speaker 3: written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly, and with the
Speaker 3: rage and fire and piss and vinegar it deserves. Things
Speaker 3: will change for the better, even if it takes more
Speaker 3: time than it should.
Speaker 4: Look.
Speaker 3: I know I'm imperfect, emotional, off kill or at times
Speaker 3: I get emails saying that too angry.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry if it's ever triggered.
Speaker 3: You really do mean that. It's not intentional. I just
Speaker 3: I feel this in everything I do. I use technology
Speaker 3: all the time, and it is extremely annoying. But also
Speaker 3: I'm aware that I have privilege, and the more privilege
Speaker 3: you have with intake, the more you're able to escape
Speaker 3: the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today.
Speaker 3: Try and see what two hundred and three hundred.
Speaker 4: Dollars laptop is.
Speaker 3: It's slow, It's full of eighteen pop ups trying to
Speaker 3: sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll
Speaker 3: never use, Tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops,
Speaker 3: so people that just don't know. When I see this stuff,
Speaker 3: it enrages me, not just for me, but because I
Speaker 3: know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how
Speaker 3: to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online,
Speaker 3: spent most of my life playing with tech and how
Speaker 3: it works. And I know I have my tangents and
Speaker 3: my biases, but I wear them kind oft my heart,
Speaker 3: on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff in
Speaker 3: a way that might be a little different to some,
Speaker 3: and it's because I've I've watched an industry that really
Speaker 3: made me as a person, that allowed me to grow
Speaker 3: as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel
Speaker 3: as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like
Speaker 3: this too, and then watching what happens to it every day,
Speaker 3: watching the people who get so rich off of making
Speaker 3: it so much worse, and then seeing what happen on
Speaker 3: November fifth, and you can draw a line from it.
Speaker 3: People are scared, they're lost. Their lives are spent digitally,
Speaker 3: and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm.
Speaker 3: Some of you know your way around take so you
Speaker 3: can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape
Speaker 3: all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't.
Speaker 3: Everything is online, and everything online, everything on your phone
Speaker 3: is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses,
Speaker 3: one deprived of dignity. And I see the people doing
Speaker 3: this and it feels me full of fucking rage, and
Speaker 3: it makes me angry for you and for me, for
Speaker 3: my son growing up, and what will probably be a
Speaker 3: worse world for my friends and loved ones who are
Speaker 3: harder to see, harder to speak to, whose lives too
Speaker 3: are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions
Speaker 3: of people who have no fucking idea it's happening, that
Speaker 3: just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism,
Speaker 3: poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly, And I
Speaker 3: don't want Early on in this I got a message saying,
Speaker 3: don't tell people to be angry, and I stick by that.
Speaker 3: But I'm not going to hide that I am. I'm
Speaker 3: not going to hide the pain I feel. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to hide the pain I feel seeing this shit happen.
Speaker 3: And I've watched this thing that I love technology, really
Speaker 3: do love tech, I really do deeply.
Speaker 4: I've watched it.
Speaker 3: Corrupted and broken, and the people breaking it. They don't
Speaker 3: just make billions of dollars. They get articles in, they
Speaker 3: get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerbug, he wears a
Speaker 3: chain and there's articles about how cool he is. He
Speaker 3: should be in fucking prison. He should be on a
Speaker 3: prison on a boat that just circles the world, and
Speaker 3: he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat depending on how
Speaker 3: the weather is. And I know that I'm kind of
Speaker 3: errand and again tons of tangents. But look, the reason
Speaker 3: I'm like this is because I really care. And I
Speaker 3: think caring. I think being angry at the things that
Speaker 3: actually matter and giving context as a result. I think
Speaker 3: that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do for to
Speaker 3: handle a lot, but it really.
Speaker 4: Is because I care.
Speaker 3: I care about you, I care about the subject matter.
Speaker 3: I'm so grateful and so honored that you spend your
Speaker 3: time listening to me every week, and I hope you'll
Speaker 3: continue to do so because I'm not going anywhere. Thank
Speaker 3: you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer
Speaker 3: of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
Speaker 3: check out more of his music and audio projects at
Speaker 3: Matasowski dot com.
Speaker 4: M A T T O s O W s ki
Speaker 4: dot com.
Speaker 3: You can email me at easy at Better Offline dot
Speaker 3: com or visit Better Offline dot com to find more
Speaker 3: podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
Speaker 3: recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at
Speaker 3: to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Speaker 3: Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
Speaker 3: for listening.
Speaker 5: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 5: more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia
Speaker 5: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 5: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.