Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Oh hello, fancy meeting you here. I'm
Speaker 1: at Zetron and this is better offline. Also in the
Speaker 1: previous episode, I walk through how General Electrics Jack Welch
Speaker 1: created the disgraceful terms of modern capitalism. A corporate mindset
Speaker 1: where thousands of people are laid off the boost revenues
Speaker 1: when a company is making millions or billions of dollars
Speaker 1: in profits, and an era of growth at all costs.
Speaker 1: Corporations that create nothing but shareholder value, run by an
Speaker 1: entire class of managerial pencil pushers that only really care
Speaker 1: about hitting analyst targets. In this episode, I'm going to
Speaker 1: show you how bad that's been, specifically for the tech industry.
Speaker 1: As ever, please check out the episode details for an
Speaker 1: URL that has sources for everything I'm talking about in
Speaker 1: this and future episodes. Sorry to repeat myself on that one,
Speaker 1: but it's really important. You know. I did not just
Speaker 1: make all of this up anyway. A couple weeks back,
Speaker 1: Open ai CTO, Mira Murati spoke for nearly an hour
Speaker 1: at Dartmouth University, where she recently accepted an honorary which,
Speaker 1: by the way, means fake doctorate of Science for and
Speaker 1: I quote, pushing the frontiers of what neural networks can do.
Speaker 1: This is, by the way, very funny. It's very funny indeed,
Speaker 1: because other than when she graduated with her Bachelor of
Speaker 1: Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering and for one
Speaker 1: year of her career, Mira Murati has only ever been
Speaker 1: a manager, specifically a project manager, somebody who doesn't write
Speaker 1: code or build software, but points at things and says, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should, we should do that. After graduating, Mira Murati
Speaker 1: worked briefly at a French aerospace company called Zodiac as
Speaker 1: an advanced concepts engineer before joining Tesla in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 1: Is a product manager before moving to Leap Motion from
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, where she was the VP
Speaker 1: of Product and Engineering. A deceiving title again does not
Speaker 1: mean she actually wrote code for a company that also
Speaker 1: burned tens of millions of dollars on a gesture based
Speaker 1: control system for a Mac, only to be acquired for
Speaker 1: thirty million dollars in twenty nineteen at about a tenth
Speaker 1: of its all time value. Her role would have undoubtedly
Speaker 1: involved wrangling gang charts, weird product management stuff, just Google
Speaker 1: it and spec sheets rather than lines of code in
Speaker 1: a text editor. After leaving Leap Motion, mir Murti's career
Speaker 1: trajectory accelerated in a way that's kind of hard to explain.
Speaker 1: She moved to open Ai as its Vice president of
Speaker 1: Applied AI in Partnerships, and was promoted to SVP of Research,
Speaker 1: Product and Partnerships in twenty twenty, and then, at some
Speaker 1: indeterminate time in twenty twenty two, became its Chief Technology officer,
Speaker 1: despite having from what I can tell, exactly one academic
Speaker 1: credit to her name in a list of twenty or
Speaker 1: so people. By the way, open ai co founder Ilia Suitskaeva,
Speaker 1: if you're curious, he has overall one hundred, and I
Speaker 1: realized this is the kind of dick measuring stuff might
Speaker 1: not matter, but in this specific case, for the CTO
Speaker 1: of an organization that's about researching how to build AGI,
Speaker 1: you'd think you'd have an academic But don't worry. There's
Speaker 1: many more annoying things about mirror Murti. During her speech,
Speaker 1: she spoke about how artificial intelligence could kill creative jobs,
Speaker 1: and I quote that shouldn't have been there in the
Speaker 1: first place, something you'd only say if you'd never created
Speaker 1: anything in your entire goddamn life putting that aside, and
Speaker 1: trust me, I'll get to it. Murti, much like Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: seems like she's full of shit, rambling in the biggest
Speaker 1: of ways about how the societal impacts of this work
Speaker 1: are not an afterthought and that you kind of have
Speaker 1: to build them alongside the technology. They are real fucking technical.
Speaker 1: The chief technology officer of the most prominent startup in
Speaker 1: America appears to not know that much about technology, to
Speaker 1: the point that a couple months back, she was unable
Speaker 1: to answer whether open AI's generator video product was trained
Speaker 1: on publicly available data, making a face that kind of
Speaker 1: looks like she was doing a vinegar flavored wasp. And
Speaker 1: I've linked to this. You know the face if you've
Speaker 1: looked it up already. It's not a great one. She
Speaker 1: could have been lying, but Maurati rarely demonstrates any kind
Speaker 1: of technical depth, dancing around answers with these vague, weird explanations.
Speaker 1: And if you're wondering why the host didn't push back
Speaker 1: at her at all, it's because the host at Dartmouth,
Speaker 1: by the way, was Jeffrey Blackburn, a career manager at
Speaker 1: Amazona recently joined door dashes, bored. Maurati's a weird one.
Speaker 1: I've watched a lot of her interviews, a lot of them,
Speaker 1: hours of them. They're all so boring. I cannot explain
Speaker 1: how boring they are. But they're not boring because I'm stupid.
Speaker 1: That's another problem. They're boring because they're meandering, they're nonspecific,
Speaker 1: and the people interviewing her are just like, yeah, wow, damn,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. Yeah, so you think AI is good, then
Speaker 1: oh shit, that's the criticism she's got. She never, much
Speaker 1: like mister Raltman, seems to be in front of anyone
Speaker 1: who knows what they're talking about or is capable of
Speaker 1: asking those questions. And yes, the media interviewing these people
Speaker 1: are limited. They have remits about what they can and
Speaker 1: can't say. I don't speak to the exact fundament of it,
Speaker 1: but it isn't great. But it's very goddamn worrying that
Speaker 1: the future of the tech industry is in the hands
Speaker 1: of people who don't seem to know much about tech.
Speaker 1: Open Ai is run by Sam Altman, an unqualified non
Speaker 1: technical founder who has conned his ways to the heights
Speaker 1: of Silicon Valley. Google is run by San darp As Shai,
Speaker 1: an MBA and a former McKinsey management consultant that's overseen
Speaker 1: the destruction of Google's core products, laid off tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people, and pushed Google to shoehorn generative AI
Speaker 1: into the core search product with disastrous results including telling
Speaker 1: you to put glue on pizza and eat rocks and
Speaker 1: so on and so bloody forth. Microsoft is run by
Speaker 1: sachy in Adela, yet another MBA that has in his
Speaker 1: tenure overseen layoffs of over thirty thousand people and pushed
Speaker 1: his company deep into the deeply unprofitable and unsustainable world
Speaker 1: of generative AI while laying off people from the Xbox group,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the only beloved things Microsoft has left,
Speaker 1: and also wasting a lot of time on the metaverse.
Speaker 1: But I'll get to him. Amazon CEO Andy Jesse, who
Speaker 1: replaced Jeff Bezos. Surprise surprise, he's another NBA and he
Speaker 1: started Amazon as a marketing manager in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 1: To his credit, he came up with the idea of
Speaker 1: Amazon Web Services, which is the cloud platform that a
Speaker 1: chunk of the Internet uses. And by the way, ten
Speaker 1: other people also came up with the idea, and then
Speaker 1: he was made CEO of Amazon in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: at which point a man called Adam Seleipski was made
Speaker 1: CEO of Amazon Web Services and guess what, he also
Speaker 1: has a Harvard MBA. But then he was replaced in
Speaker 1: March by another guy who also had an MBA, this
Speaker 1: time from Northwestern. It's always these management guys, the most
Speaker 1: technical and one of the most profitable parts of Amazon,
Speaker 1: their cloud storage and processing product. And I'm crushing it
Speaker 1: down for the podcast Calm Down. If you super technical,
Speaker 1: you'd think that would be a tech guy. You think
Speaker 1: that would be someone who actually knew what they were
Speaker 1: got down talking about other than the osmosis of being
Speaker 1: in rooms with people who actually do the work. And
Speaker 1: the reason I'm harping on about this is the founding
Speaker 1: story of Amazon Web Services. Maybe one of the greatest
Speaker 1: lies in texts history. I can find no maybe a
Speaker 1: little specific evidence as to who the actual architect of
Speaker 1: AWS was. Just this hindless muling about how Andy Jasse
Speaker 1: and NBA built one of the most important pieces of
Speaker 1: technological infrastructure of all time. It's just bollocks. And Jesse
Speaker 1: regularly uses the Royal we to talk about how we
Speaker 1: he built Amazon Web Services, despite the fact that he
Speaker 1: didn't build shit. He didn't build anything at all. He
Speaker 1: was a manager, managing managers. Jeff Bezos, who was the CEO,
Speaker 1: who was another manager. It's all managers, all managers doing
Speaker 1: a management centipedeugh And what little I can find suggests
Speaker 1: that much of the actual technical work to build Amazon
Speaker 1: Web Services was done by people like then CTO Alan
Speaker 1: Vermulen and Brewster Kale, who founded a company called Alexa
Speaker 1: Internet that Amazon acquired in nineteen ninety nine. There was
Speaker 1: instrumental to spinning up the services that became Amazon Web Services,
Speaker 1: two names that I've never really read in the many
Speaker 1: many articles crediting Jasse as the architect behind Amazon's most
Speaker 1: profitable service, yet arguably the most Welsh pilled management based
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley staple is Meta, a company dominated by NBA's
Speaker 1: like Sheryl Samdberg. It's first chief operating officer, who has left,
Speaker 1: replaced by a guy called Javier Olivan who also has
Speaker 1: an NBA. Facebook's Chief People Officer Lori Gohler, and the
Speaker 1: chief privacy officer Michael Protty, all NBAS. Yet what makes
Speaker 1: Meta such a Welshian nightmare is its dedication to making
Speaker 1: its products worse in the search of growth, with career
Speaker 1: product managers like CMO Alex Schultz and head of product
Speaker 1: Naomi Glit dominating the company from its earliest days, and
Speaker 1: creating a culture that focused entirely on gaming Facebook's metrics.
Speaker 1: To please Mark Zuckerberg's demand for perpetual ten percent year
Speaker 1: over year growth in core growth metrics, Meta has laid
Speaker 1: off of a thirteen percent of its workforce in the
Speaker 1: last year, over eleven thousand people, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: the company has been profitable for over a decade, even
Speaker 1: while plunging tens of billions of dollars into Zuckerberg's reality
Speaker 1: Labs Metaverse division and authorizing fifty billion dollars in stock buybacks.
Speaker 1: In many ways, Zuckerberg is Welsh perfected the CEO of
Speaker 1: a company that provides a continuously deteriorating service that prints
Speaker 1: money or gaming its metrics, such as no longer reporting
Speaker 1: its monthly active users on earnings to make Wall Street
Speaker 1: believe that it's a quote good company. It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: that Meta has effectively given up on trying to solve
Speaker 1: its massive problems with AI generated spam and scams and
Speaker 1: four h four media reports that Meta has turned its
Speaker 1: back on the experts that helped bolster its content moderation
Speaker 1: services sadly, and this really matters because the markets still
Speaker 1: love Meta, even though they punish the company briefly in
Speaker 1: recent earnings for a and I quote light forecast, where
Speaker 1: it quote raised investor expectations due to its improved financial
Speaker 1: performance in recent quarters, leaving little room for error. According
Speaker 1: to the NBC, a business network that Jack Welch owned
Speaker 1: a large chunk of through his acquisition of NBC as
Speaker 1: part of a deal the General Electric acquired RCA Corp.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, it all goes back to Welch,
Speaker 1: and it's also important to add that despite all of
Speaker 1: these layoffs and these light forecasts, Meta executives received bonuses
Speaker 1: when they fired thousands of people in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Google isn't much better since san Dar Pashai, a career
Speaker 1: product manager in NBA, came CEO in twenty fifteen. Google's
Speaker 1: culture is soured, giving Android inventor Andy Ruben ninety million
Speaker 1: dollars in twenty eighteen to leave the company after credible
Speaker 1: sexual misconduct claims causing a massive walkout over Google's forced
Speaker 1: arbitration clauses over harassment and discrimination that muzzles victims and
Speaker 1: empowers the fucking assholes to hide behind Google and gives
Speaker 1: Google the ability to hide its failure to police these people.
Speaker 1: This happened in the same year that others walked out
Speaker 1: over Google's work with the Pentagon. Under Peshai, Google has
Speaker 1: been fined billions of dollars by the European Union for
Speaker 1: anti trust violations around its Android operating system, and has
Speaker 1: found itself embroiled in a three year long anti trust
Speaker 1: battle with the US Department of Justice around its anti
Speaker 1: competitive approach to keeping Google Search on top, including paying
Speaker 1: Apple twenty billion dollars in twenty twenty two to the
Speaker 1: be the fault search engine on Safari, their web browser.
Speaker 1: Under Peshai, Google has replaced hard working lifers that built
Speaker 1: the very foundation of the company with contractors and on
Speaker 1: the higher levels scumbags cretins like Prabagar Ragavan and Jerry Dishler,
Speaker 1: the latter of which transparently intimidated the Google Search team
Speaker 1: to increase ad revenue generate by search In emails revealed
Speaker 1: in the trial from March twenty nineteen, you'll be shocked
Speaker 1: by the way to hear that Jerry Dishler has an MBA. Yet,
Speaker 1: as with Meta, and as with all of these companies
Speaker 1: excluding open Ai, which is not public, Google prints money
Speaker 1: knitting over twenty three billion dollars in its first quarter
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four earnings the same ones were announced its
Speaker 1: first dividend, and a seventy billion dollar stock buyback program.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter that Google Search is incredibly broken as
Speaker 1: a result of Google's constant drive to increase revenue, or
Speaker 1: that Google has decided to generate results on Search using
Speaker 1: unreliable generative AI that generates insane answers. Alphabet Google's holding
Speaker 1: company has seen its stock continually rise since much of
Speaker 1: this year, even after the eating rocks thing. Doesn't that
Speaker 1: fill your veins full of bile? How doesn't it make you?
Speaker 1: It just really really makes me angry. It makes you
Speaker 1: very annoyed. I don't like this. I don't like that
Speaker 1: you and I I guess I'm a podcast that's probably not.
Speaker 1: But regular people like you. You go to a job,
Speaker 1: you do the job. If you do the job badly,
Speaker 1: you get shit canned. Fair enough, That's what happens, right,
Speaker 1: These guys, they get paid through the nose for it,
Speaker 1: they get appreciate it, they get a go get them
Speaker 1: boy for fucking everything up. It's just disgusting. It makes
Speaker 1: me very upset. And as I've said previously, this is
Speaker 1: a special kind of financial nihilism that the market continues
Speaker 1: to reward, one that's poisoned Silicon Valley and elevated men
Speaker 1: and woman like Sam Altman and Mira Murrati the positions
Speaker 1: of power, despite the fact that neither of them actually
Speaker 1: seems to build technology. Altman himself is a CD charlatan,
Speaker 1: one that's growing incredibly powerful in the valley despite not
Speaker 1: really having done anything. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned previ one of Altman's nine recommended books
Speaker 1: is Winning by Jack Welsch, a book where Welch claims
Speaker 1: that Winning companies and meritocracies and lionizes Kenneth Yue of
Speaker 1: three m's Chinese operations for and I quote throwing out
Speaker 1: the phony ritual of annual budgeting and replacing it with
Speaker 1: Sky's The Limit dialogue about Opportunities, claiming that budgeting at
Speaker 1: three M is not about delivering good enough plans and
Speaker 1: being them, but about having the courage and zeal to
Speaker 1: reach for what can be done. And doesn't that sound
Speaker 1: like more fun than budgeting? Yes, that last part is
Speaker 1: a quote, and I imagine he must have been referring
Speaker 1: to three M bribing Chinese government officials and means of
Speaker 1: selling product between twenty fourteen and twenty seventeen, or the
Speaker 1: thousands of people that three MS laid off in the
Speaker 1: last few decades, including in China. Sure that's what he meant.
Speaker 1: Jack Welsh wouldn't have just been talking I have his ass,
Speaker 1: would he? No. Jack Welch is the man that Sam
Speaker 1: Altman lionizes, a sleazy con artist that continually moved around
Speaker 1: data as a means of making General Electric look bigger
Speaker 1: and stronger than it really was. Kind of like how
Speaker 1: Sam Mortmon regularly says things like an I quote that
Speaker 1: we'll be able to ask our computer to solve all
Speaker 1: of physics. Now, this came up on a previous episode
Speaker 1: of the Interview with Nick the man who said he
Speaker 1: of fucking pile drive. You've mentioned AI again. I just
Speaker 1: want to be clear that's actually what Sam Wrtman said.
Speaker 1: He said, you can ask the computer to solve all
Speaker 1: of physics. This kind of proves that he doesn't understand take,
Speaker 1: but it also proves that he might just be really
Speaker 1: goddamn stupid. How do you solve physics? Sam? What are
Speaker 1: you solving? Physics? Isn't the solution, Sam? What do you?
Speaker 1: Maybe you should have stayed in Stanford instead of dropping
Speaker 1: out and becoming a carst Sam Altman is kind of
Speaker 1: in trouble though, because behind the scenes, generative AI it
Speaker 1: isn't moving the needle, with Isabel Busquette of The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal reporting that companies are finding getting the full
Speaker 1: value of AI assistance requires heavy lifting, including in her
Speaker 1: article this hilarious quote from Google Cloud chief evangelist Richard Sirota,
Speaker 1: by the way, as a career product manager, where he
Speaker 1: blames those not finding the value in AI for and
Speaker 1: I quote, not having their data house in order, chirping
Speaker 1: that you can't just buy six units of AI and
Speaker 1: then magically change your business. And you know what, I
Speaker 1: actually agree with him, in essence, it isn't generative AI's fault.
Speaker 1: That it isn't adapting to your workflows or fulfilling anything. No,
Speaker 1: it's your faulty, nasty little pig. You didn't do the
Speaker 1: work to make artificial intelligence smart, right, That's your fault.
Speaker 1: Somehow you should feel ashamed. You should apologize to Sam Moltman.
Speaker 1: Just kidding in all seriousness. The commonality between all of
Speaker 1: these people Jack Welch, suned Up a Shai Mirror, Marati,
Speaker 1: Sam Altmanmuk Zuckerberg, and honestly an alarming amount of CEOs
Speaker 1: inside and outside of tech is that they, along with
Speaker 1: their companies, have kind of escaped humanity. They've escaped the
Speaker 1: human condition. They make their companies bigger for the sake
Speaker 1: of making them bigger, making more money, to increase the
Speaker 1: value of the financial instrument attached to the company, Abstracted
Speaker 1: away from purpose or craft or creativity or production. These
Speaker 1: management concerns MBA's product managers. They're not creators of anything
Speaker 1: other than financial occultism, a dark heart. Whether financial value
Speaker 1: of a company is often separated from what it does
Speaker 1: or whether it's good at it. They're parasites meta calls itself.
Speaker 1: It's still calls itself. Go on their website and look
Speaker 1: a social metaverse company that's and I quote committed to
Speaker 1: keeping people safe and making a positive impact. But at
Speaker 1: its core. It's a near monopolistic social data and advertising
Speaker 1: company that's testing the limits of how little connectivity it
Speaker 1: can provide in its core products without sacrificing advertising revenue.
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg has proven he'll do whatever he needs to,
Speaker 1: including letting deadly misinformation spread on Facebook to keep showing
Speaker 1: that meta is growing. One might be forgiven for thinking
Speaker 1: that Mark Zuckerberg is the exception that he isn't a
Speaker 1: management goon disconnected from the processes of writing code. This
Speaker 1: guy coded Facebook right. This guy's a nerd. He's a
Speaker 1: nerd with his keyboard. He types right wrong. Oh he
Speaker 1: stopped coding eighteen fucking years ago, in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: This is the guy like just every time I think
Speaker 1: I've really nailed how bad it gets? Hey wait a second,
Speaker 1: hold up, wait second, I just thought about starthing for
Speaker 1: a second though. Wasn't Sheryl Sandberg brought in to make
Speaker 1: Facebook a real mature business. Ah fuck? She shared a
Speaker 1: communications coach with goddamn Jack Welch. It all goes back
Speaker 1: to the all right, sorry sorry sorry, Like Welch. Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: has weathered numerous scandals the social network, a movie that
Speaker 1: framed him as a sociopathic thief. A data leaking scandal
Speaker 1: that may or may not have influenced Mark Paul elections,
Speaker 1: a scandal where Facebook deliberately emotionally manipulated seven hundred thousand
Speaker 1: users using the news feed in twenty fourteen. And that
Speaker 1: is real, by the way, there's a link to it.
Speaker 1: It's completely insane. Oh yeah, and a five billion dollar
Speaker 1: FDC fine. And he's come out and scathed all as
Speaker 1: he publicly destroys the company that was once globally beloved
Speaker 1: in the name of endless growth. In fact, much like Welsch,
Speaker 1: was applauded as one of the greatest business minds in
Speaker 1: management for decades as he burned G to the ground. Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: a man who has taken a once profitable company that
Speaker 1: once benefited society and made it both harmful and shitty
Speaker 1: at providing its services, was named one of Barons's top
Speaker 1: CEOs of twenty twenty four a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 1: where it credited him with a corporate course correction from
Speaker 1: metaverse to artificial intelligence. Neither of those are making money.
Speaker 1: Much like so many journalists in industry figures failed to
Speaker 1: properly identify Welch, when he was right in their midst.
Speaker 1: Barons failed to call Zuckerberg what he is another con
Speaker 1: artist that took useful software and turned it into a
Speaker 1: data collection firm with a shitty product attached. Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: trying something that Welsh could have only dreamed of, though
Speaker 1: seeing how little he can actually make to convince the
Speaker 1: markets that matter is valuable. It's almost a little on
Speaker 1: the nose, and it fits, It perfectly fits shareholders. Supremacy
Speaker 1: is the force currently driving the tech ecosystem, and one that,
Speaker 1: as I've noted, and lacks any remaining hypergrowth markets funding
Speaker 1: and proliferating technologies that exist not to provide an innovative,
Speaker 1: useful service, but to create more growth. A phony sense
Speaker 1: of progress that allows companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and
Speaker 1: Amazon to create something that looks and smells sort of innovative,
Speaker 1: even if their models are all extremely similar, as they're
Speaker 1: all trained on the same quickly dwindling amount of training data,
Speaker 1: and AI developers don't seem to really care what training
Speaker 1: data they use, or indeed what data source they use
Speaker 1: at all. Look at Google Search, which, as I've mentioned,
Speaker 1: took a Reddit post that made it recommend putting glue
Speaker 1: on a pizza to keep cheese on, or claiming that
Speaker 1: you should eat a rock each every day. It's just
Speaker 1: every time I read this, it's so frustrating, it's so annoying,
Speaker 1: and then putting aside how funny the Google AI search
Speaker 1: was on top of it. These companies are running out
Speaker 1: of data and they very clearly don't care about quality
Speaker 1: at all. They're not doing the work, they're not doing
Speaker 1: the things they need to do to make sure this
Speaker 1: is done right. No, they must have it today. They
Speaker 1: must have it now, even if it's bad, even if
Speaker 1: it burns money. And it's not like the markets are
Speaker 1: actually seeing if the shit does anything or whether it's
Speaker 1: truly revolutionary. They didn't care that. Many tech products have
Speaker 1: got increasingly worse over time as tech executives rewarded again
Speaker 1: and again for pursuing growth overt delivering any kind of
Speaker 1: quality product. Since becoming CEO of Google Sundopieschid has been
Speaker 1: paid over half a billion dollars literally in the last
Speaker 1: three years, by the way, taking home two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighty one million dollars mostly made up of stock in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, fateful year that many of you might remember
Speaker 1: from the man who killed Google Search, and then he
Speaker 1: got paid two hundred and twenty six million twenty twenty two,
Speaker 1: a year before Google laid off ten thousand people. Sundupisci's
Speaker 1: job as CEO at Google is not to make sure
Speaker 1: that Google delivers great products such as a quick path
Speaker 1: to an answer using Google Search. No no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you fool, you buffoon, you ignoramus. Why would you think that. No,
Speaker 1: Sundai's job is to continually grow the amount of money
Speaker 1: that Google's business units make. I have complete confidence that
Speaker 1: if Sundar Pashai was able to make Google Search worse
Speaker 1: than it already is and maintain double digit year of
Speaker 1: a year revenue growth, he would not only do so,
Speaker 1: but he would do so with a big smile on
Speaker 1: his face and be rewarded with hundreds of billions of
Speaker 1: dollars of stock options, pretty much in perpetuity. Sunda Pashai
Speaker 1: is not judged for what he's done to Google, for
Speaker 1: turning it into this Welshair nightmare, not by the markets,
Speaker 1: not by Nile Patella, the verger, who pretty much gave
Speaker 1: him softballs the whole time, And nobody's punishing him at all,
Speaker 1: or really saying it to his face that he's burning
Speaker 1: a genuine technological innovation that billions of people rely upon.
Speaker 1: And it's a heartbreaking tragedy that's happening in real time,
Speaker 1: one where a bad person makes worse people richer in
Speaker 1: a way that tangibly hurts us all. We're all forced
Speaker 1: to suffer the consequences and mourn the loss of Google
Speaker 1: Search in slow motion, with nobody really wanting to admit
Speaker 1: the obvious that Goo Google intends to bleed this thing
Speaker 1: out until regulation or the markets stop them. And I
Speaker 1: realized it sounded a little bit dramatic describing this as
Speaker 1: a tragedy. Google Search was always a for profit business,
Speaker 1: and advertising would so obviously poison it that founders Brin
Speaker 1: and Page warned about it in the original Google paper,
Speaker 1: saying that they expected that advertising funded search engines would
Speaker 1: be biased towards advertisers and away from needs of customers.
Speaker 1: But Google Search was, for a while something magical. It
Speaker 1: was a thing we all took for granted. And I
Speaker 1: think you're being disingenuous if you pretend that this isn't
Speaker 1: something you cared about or relied upon. And I'd argue
Speaker 1: for the earlier days of Facebook and Instagram to kind
Speaker 1: of fit this bill too. These are, or perhaps were, sadly,
Speaker 1: institutions that helped many people my age and I'm an
Speaker 1: ancient thirty eight years old become who we are today,
Speaker 1: finding the things and the people we needed and the
Speaker 1: connections we otherwise wouldn't have made or sustained. I know,
Speaker 1: at least in my that social networking is how I
Speaker 1: met the world. I was kind of a lonely kid.
Speaker 1: I didn't make friends easily. I never have. Really, I've
Speaker 1: done a lot better thanks to the Internet. Pretty Much
Speaker 1: everything that I found has been through on the Internet,
Speaker 1: much of it from Google Search, much of it from
Speaker 1: social networking from Facebook, from Instagram to extent Twitter to
Speaker 1: a much larger Watching these things get burned sucks And
Speaker 1: I think a problem that some people have with this
Speaker 1: show is that they think I'm just pissy and I
Speaker 1: hate all of this stuff, and I don't. I would
Speaker 1: love it to go back to how it was, or
Speaker 1: maybe how it felt. I wish it was less craven
Speaker 1: of a value exchange. These were companies that made billions
Speaker 1: of dollars in profit by providing a kind of a
Speaker 1: social good, even if it was one where they realized
Speaker 1: they could use it to create a monopoly and then
Speaker 1: rug pull when they needed to for the shareholders. But
Speaker 1: I do mourn the loss of these products, and I
Speaker 1: think many of us. Maybe if I'm wrong, you can
Speaker 1: email me easy at letter E, letter Z at better
Speaker 1: offline dot com if you disagree. By all means, I
Speaker 1: love to hear from you, even the haters one or
Speaker 1: two of you. But in all seriousness, I'm more on
Speaker 1: this stuff. I'm sad about this. I'm pissed off. Not
Speaker 1: because I like being angry, I genuinely don't. I'm sad.
Speaker 1: I'm a broken hearted romantic. I love the tech industry
Speaker 1: and what it used to do. Perhaps I was naive.
Speaker 1: Perhaps now I'm realizing that a lot of that stuff
Speaker 1: that I thought was great wasn't. It wasn't this bad
Speaker 1: wasn't Where Jack Welch destroyed multiple local economies in Massachusetts, Indiana,
Speaker 1: and Pennsylvania by laying off thousands of workers in favor
Speaker 1: of cheaper outsourced options. Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg have
Speaker 1: realized that shareholder supremacy only means making a product as
Speaker 1: useful as necessary and optimizing it at all times to
Speaker 1: me analyst expectations of revenue. The unique problem that Sundar
Speaker 1: Pishai and the rest of the rock barons currently faces
Speaker 1: that there aren't any hypergrowth markets left, and they've been
Speaker 1: so desperately adapting to that reality since twenty fifteen. And
Speaker 1: now I've said later, but I think twenty fifteen is
Speaker 1: the year so many promises, augmented reality, homo robotics, autonomous cars,
Speaker 1: and even then artificial intelligence writ large never quite materialized
Speaker 1: into these viable business units, making big tech that little
Speaker 1: bit more desperate. I've repeatedly and substantively proven in my
Speaker 1: newsletter and this podcast that both Meta and Google have
Speaker 1: made their products worse in pursuit of growth, and they've
Speaker 1: done so by following a roadmap drawn by Jack Welch,
Speaker 1: a sociopathic scumbag that realized that he could turn General
Speaker 1: Electric into a shambling monstrosity of a company that could
Speaker 1: shape shift into whatever the street needed, even if the
Speaker 1: product sucked. And I believe that this is the same
Speaker 1: financial nihilism that empowers people like Mirror Marati and Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: and also millions more middle managers and absentee CEOs. The
Speaker 1: kind of been writing about and speaking about for the
Speaker 1: last three years. Our economy is run by people that
Speaker 1: have never built anything, running companies that they can taught
Speaker 1: to make a number go up for showlders. They rarely
Speaker 1: meet people like David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery,
Speaker 1: who intentionally chose not to release Coyote Versus Acme, a
Speaker 1: fully produced and ready to debut movie featuring Warner Brothers'
Speaker 1: core brands, choosing instead to never release it ever in
Speaker 1: exchange for a cut to its tax bill. Zaslav, a
Speaker 1: CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, has overseen one of the
Speaker 1: darkest periods in the company's history, including endless cutbacks, and
Speaker 1: through his own mismanagement, caused a five month long strike
Speaker 1: in Hollywood. Zaslav continued to complain even after the strike ended,
Speaker 1: claiming that studios overpaid for the strike to end as
Speaker 1: he earned a fifty million dollar salary for driving his
Speaker 1: company into the ground. Hey hey, just one moment, though,
Speaker 1: where do you think David Zaslav learnt? Do you think
Speaker 1: he learned it by reading books? Or maybe he learned
Speaker 1: his management philosophy a little more directly? Can you guess
Speaker 1: who his close friend was. It was Jack Wells. Jack
Speaker 1: Welch was his. Oh my god, but you know who's
Speaker 1: not horrible our advertisers. During a commencement speech in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three where David Zaslav was booed by students, he
Speaker 1: told the story of how, sometime after General Electric acquired
Speaker 1: NBC through g's acquisition of RCA in ninety eighty five,
Speaker 1: he sent a handwritten note to Jack Welch telling him
Speaker 1: about himself, David Zaslav, and what he'd been doing he
Speaker 1: was a lawyer, leading to a job running NBC in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. This story doesn't make a ton of sense,
Speaker 1: by the way, based on any living history of David
Speaker 1: Zaslav's life. He joined NBC three years after the acquisition
Speaker 1: of RCA closed. He claimed he was working for a
Speaker 1: few years in cable news, but everything I found suggests
Speaker 1: that he went straight from school to working at a
Speaker 1: law firm called Lebooth LAMB Libyan McRae according to his
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers profile when he graduated from Boston University in
Speaker 1: ninet eighty five, meaning that he would have had to
Speaker 1: send that note while working at a firm that was
Speaker 1: mostly not working in anything to do with Capernews at all,
Speaker 1: just a liar, just lying. Regardless of whether Zaslav made
Speaker 1: up an entire story about how he got his job,
Speaker 1: he was and is one of Welch's most nasty cronies,
Speaker 1: his most staunch acolytes, telling David Gellis, who wrote The
Speaker 1: Man Who Destroyed Capitalism about Jack Welch, that Jack set
Speaker 1: the path, that he saw the whole world, that he
Speaker 1: was above the whole world, and that what Jack Welch
Speaker 1: created at G became the way that companies now operate,
Speaker 1: which is true. David Zaslav, a man who has caused
Speaker 1: unfathomable damage to the entertainment industry while intentionally choosing not
Speaker 1: to release two different movies, learned to do so from
Speaker 1: the Michael Jordan of corporate destruction, and to Zaslav, Welch
Speaker 1: was like an older brother that would pick people at
Speaker 1: NBC with a hug when things were tough, and that
Speaker 1: there was no better friend. According to an interview with
Speaker 1: CNBC Jesus christ Man, it's like a poorly written drama.
Speaker 1: I hope it ends with a big anvil falling on me. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I realize I'm oscillating between industries and names, but the
Speaker 1: shareholder's supremacy is something that has poisoned almost every part
Speaker 1: of global capitalism. Dedication to the shareholders, in many ways
Speaker 1: is kind of like a religion. It isn't even about
Speaker 1: a shareholder or the shareholder, just moving acids to make
Speaker 1: a number go up and making another number look like
Speaker 1: it might go up in the future. Welch Zaslav, Peshai, Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: They're all the same kind of monster, one divorced from
Speaker 1: consequence and production and capable of contributing meaningfully to the
Speaker 1: world at large because the market is shown it doesn't
Speaker 1: really care if they do so. Sanda Pashai doesn't use Google,
Speaker 1: and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use Instagram, Facebook, or threads, at
Speaker 1: least not like a regular person does anyway, much like
Speaker 1: how David Zaslav doesn't watch or care about TVs and
Speaker 1: movies and doesn't even release them sometimes it's crazy. The
Speaker 1: deep sea a nihilism means that they aren't users or
Speaker 1: creators or even active participants in any part of society.
Speaker 1: They're there to move the stuff around so that they
Speaker 1: can keep the number going up. And I believe this
Speaker 1: is all the consequence of Jack Welcher's legacy, where the
Speaker 1: economy has been built on the back of a management
Speaker 1: philosophy that no longer involves managing people or building things.
Speaker 1: The business media and society at large elevates executives like
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg and Peshai as they demolish their products, and they
Speaker 1: are thousands of people because the terms of success are
Speaker 1: no longer about making money by providing a good service
Speaker 1: or a product people like. The markets don't reward steady growth,
Speaker 1: nor that they punish executives for the quality of their
Speaker 1: product because analysts and investors aren't really concerned about the product,
Speaker 1: just the financial output. I don't think their users either.
Speaker 1: At this point, theological rush to boost artificial intelligence makes
Speaker 1: a lot more sense when you have a society and
Speaker 1: economy dominated by people who don't create things or understand
Speaker 1: the things they're selling. People that don't experience or respect
Speaker 1: labor or talk to people. Of course, their natural thought
Speaker 1: will be that any form of creativity or work can
Speaker 1: and should be automated. It isn't about what's good, but
Speaker 1: what's good enough, and artificial intelligence allows them to test
Speaker 1: the boundaries of what enough can mean. Toys, r us
Speaker 1: or at least what remains of it after a leveraged buyout.
Speaker 1: Should feel an abundance of shame for releasing a horrifying
Speaker 1: AI generated orision of Toys of Rus movie full of
Speaker 1: ugly hallucinations and yanky animations. But what it's really trying
Speaker 1: to see is how much it can get away with,
Speaker 1: how shitty something can be without losing customers, or whether
Speaker 1: the potential loss of customers is worth it to save
Speaker 1: the money it would take to actually shoot a goddamn commercial.
Speaker 1: And what's crazy, by the way, and you should watch
Speaker 1: this thing. It's terrible. Is this video looks so bad
Speaker 1: and they put it on the main Toys of US account.
Speaker 1: They don't give a shit. They're trying to see what
Speaker 1: they can get away with. And I think that's a
Speaker 1: big thing theme. When Mirror Murarti said that AI might
Speaker 1: kill creative jobs that shouldn't have been there in the
Speaker 1: first place, it wasn't just the grotesque insult to those
Speaker 1: actually working cret When Mirror Mourati said that AI might
Speaker 1: kill creative jobs that should have never been there in
Speaker 1: the first place, it wasn't just a nasty insult to
Speaker 1: those working in the creative fields. It was also a
Speaker 1: demonstration of an unchained sociopathy and this nasty kind of
Speaker 1: hubris that these tech people have, and the fact that
Speaker 1: she believes that she, a woman of little actual accomplishment
Speaker 1: and talent and the intellectual depth of a puddle on
Speaker 1: a flat sidewalk, is singlely ordained to decide which jobs
Speaker 1: are worthy and which ones should die. Really, it was
Speaker 1: an insult to all of us. It was an expression
Speaker 1: of her belief that consumers don't deserve things created by
Speaker 1: a person who actually gives a shit. You don't deserve
Speaker 1: to watch movies that only exist thanks to the combined
Speaker 1: efforts of illustrators, sound engineers, composers, actors, directors, and countless
Speaker 1: other uncelebrated roles, where each cog in the machine has
Speaker 1: spent years honing their skills until they've reached a level
Speaker 1: of honest mastery. You, yes, you don't deserve to use
Speaker 1: software created by someone who actually thought about the problem
Speaker 1: and at the very least made a best effort to
Speaker 1: write secure, robust code. You don't deserve anything. In their eyes.
Speaker 1: You deserve the minimum viable product. You deserve as little
Speaker 1: as possible so that they can make as much as possible.
Speaker 1: That is what Mirror Murti is saying. No amount of
Speaker 1: two long tweet storms, no amount of vacuous blogs, no
Speaker 1: amount of apologia is going to make up for the
Speaker 1: fact that this is what these people think. They see
Speaker 1: work and creativity as something to be optimized away, and
Speaker 1: it's disgraceful. And even when you get to the more
Speaker 1: workhorse roles, the coding roles, there are still these huge
Speaker 1: problems and they don't care. As pointed out by cybersecurity
Speaker 1: firms nick, Microsoft's get hub copilot tool routinely and unquestionably
Speaker 1: outputs insecure code because, as said ad nauseum in other places,
Speaker 1: it doesn't know anything a human being can look at
Speaker 1: a code based and identify, for example, areas where the
Speaker 1: system doesn't check for SQL injection attacks, which could allow
Speaker 1: an attacker to steal and modify data from a database.
Speaker 1: An AI tool merely guesses what code looks right probabilistically
Speaker 1: given the prompt that was involved. When Murti gleefully brags
Speaker 1: about how AI will eviscerate an unknowable amount of creative jobs,
Speaker 1: which she is personally identified as expendable by the way,
Speaker 1: what she's really saying is that people should be content
Speaker 1: with using shitty broken AI generated software and watching shitty
Speaker 1: broken AI generated films with a number of digits on
Speaker 1: each hand fluctuates wildly that the line on a sisoscope
Speaker 1: and where nothing new is said, but rather a machine
Speaker 1: is regurgitating stuff created by other people solely based on
Speaker 1: a mathematical model of probability. It's insulting, it's disgusting, and
Speaker 1: it sucks. It just objective if he sucks. It's not
Speaker 1: even like this stuff is any good. It's not even
Speaker 1: like the things that it's producing are respectable. Not the
Speaker 1: replacing people is good. But the amount of money they're
Speaker 1: being given, the amount of compute they're using, the amount
Speaker 1: of water they're boiling to make dogshare shows a complete
Speaker 1: contempt for everything, for creativity and labor itself. And generative
Speaker 1: AI is exciting to the disconnected business fucks running our
Speaker 1: economy because it's a way to abstract and outsource even
Speaker 1: more forms of labor. We have spent decades pushing young
Speaker 1: people to get into management without ever teaching anybody about
Speaker 1: what managers are meant to do, creating a class structure
Speaker 1: in organizations where there are those that do things and
Speaker 1: those that take the credit, and the latter are the
Speaker 1: people in charge, disconnected from labor, disconnected from quality, disconnected
Speaker 1: from production, and thus incapable of making informed decisions other
Speaker 1: than what if we moved around this number here and
Speaker 1: what if we start paying these people. The AI bubble
Speaker 1: has been inflated by people excited about the prospect of
Speaker 1: not happening to deal with filthy laborers that do work,
Speaker 1: and they ultimately aspire to make companies with as few
Speaker 1: people as possible, with the CEO making the most money
Speaker 1: because they're the ones that move the numbers around for
Speaker 1: the markets. This also explains where they're so incapable of
Speaker 1: describing what AI is, what it does, and why it's useful.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter that data centers might end up using
Speaker 1: as much power as India by twenty thirty four, or
Speaker 1: that generator of AI isn't actually that useful. It's a
Speaker 1: chance for them to further disconnect themselves from having to
Speaker 1: pay actual people to do actual work, a thing that
Speaker 1: they themselves consider the product of the underclass. They don't
Speaker 1: care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable,
Speaker 1: that there's a quickly approaching wall that generative AI can't
Speaker 1: leap over as it runs out of training data, or
Speaker 1: that the transformer based architecture of large language models has
Speaker 1: hard limitations that are impossible to overcome. No, this is
Speaker 1: a shiny new object that they can way of investors
Speaker 1: that already don't know what any of this stuff means,
Speaker 1: one that lets them dream of a world without labor.
Speaker 1: Generative AI wants us to stop researching, or talking or thinking,
Speaker 1: and eventually it will come for your livelihood if it worked.
Speaker 1: But even then, when it doesn't work, it's still taking
Speaker 1: money out of freelancer's mouths. It's replacing good coders with
Speaker 1: shit generated code. There is a poison here, and it's disgusting.
Speaker 1: In some respects. Generative AI is morally worse than Jack
Speaker 1: Welch's odious anti worker philosophy. Whereas Welch saw workers as
Speaker 1: a cost center to be minimized and eliminated where possible,
Speaker 1: generative AI extends that idea to the raw materials necessary
Speaker 1: to build apps like chat GPT, with must of Our Sulliman,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Microsoft AI and the co founder of DeepMind,
Speaker 1: declaring the existence of an unspoken social contract where and
Speaker 1: I quote online content is freeware for building AI models.
Speaker 1: The law I know it tends to regard actual contracts
Speaker 1: more seriously unspoken and let's face it, imaginary contracts. And
Speaker 1: I desperately look forward to the day when Sulliman's ideas
Speaker 1: are tested in court. But I don't fancy these chances.
Speaker 1: And most of you come from my content. You're not
Speaker 1: gonna have words, mate. But that's the thing. In many
Speaker 1: of my newsletters and podcasts, I've argued that the current
Speaker 1: trajectory of the tech industry will lead it to ruin
Speaker 1: the poison of the shareholder supremacy. This nihilistic intention of
Speaker 1: contorting companies, the police, analysts, and investors is one that
Speaker 1: will uniquely punish the tech industry, just like it did
Speaker 1: to General Electric. Google, Microsoft, and Meta have bet their
Speaker 1: futures on generative AI, cramming it into their products with
Speaker 1: little regard for utility, all to show the markets that
Speaker 1: they're futuristic rocket ship growth companies rather than at least
Speaker 1: in matter in Google's case, aging and decaying empires that
Speaker 1: got too big and were corrupted by the forces of
Speaker 1: the MBA management sect. I realized that's master of business
Speaker 1: administration management. This is the force behind everything. This is
Speaker 1: it the dark hand that demanded you return to the
Speaker 1: office in spite of the productivity gains of remote work,
Speaker 1: The weight behind the people destroying the media, the people
Speaker 1: the very same people who lied about cryptocurrency being the
Speaker 1: future of finance, and the people that collapsed multiple banks
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three. Because risk management, to quote Mark Andresen,
Speaker 1: is considered the enemy. These people will burn the world
Speaker 1: to a crisp in search of a profit, in search
Speaker 1: of eternal growth, in search of the things that will
Speaker 1: make them richer, richer, nastier, disconnected monsters even more capable
Speaker 1: of escaping the drudgery of knowing and doing things. This
Speaker 1: is a dark future where somehow all labor is automated,
Speaker 1: all money flows upwards, and society drained of taxes in
Speaker 1: any kind of social safety net, does something with all
Speaker 1: the children that Elon Musk is saying we need to have.
Speaker 1: The tech industry is dominated now by management consolants, product managers,
Speaker 1: and middle management in general, with people that have written
Speaker 1: few lines of code in their lives holding sway over
Speaker 1: the actual builders, instructing them to create things they don't
Speaker 1: understand as means of improving the bottom line, rather than
Speaker 1: solving an actual need or even addressing the obvious business
Speaker 1: fundamentals like profitability and stability. A few episodes back, when
Speaker 1: I was talking with Nick Siesh, one of the very
Speaker 1: basic things he said was, have you checked your backups?
Speaker 1: This is a problem throughout the valley. We don't maintain
Speaker 1: anything anymore as a society. We have a terrible approach
Speaker 1: to maintenance. We have a terrible approach to business maintenance.
Speaker 1: When you throw sustainability out in the window, you don't
Speaker 1: really check if everything's working well. And I think that
Speaker 1: that's going to be the problem. That and the financial
Speaker 1: precariousness of all of this, That and the fact the
Speaker 1: markets just kind of turn on them when things don't
Speaker 1: work their way, and at some point things have to collapse.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that every tech company goes belly up,
Speaker 1: but I believe that the generative AI boom is the
Speaker 1: force that creates It's a massive reckoning in this industry.
Speaker 1: It's almost a little too on the nose with the
Speaker 1: wider shareholder supremacy. Generate AI. It's a tool that only
Speaker 1: seems revolutionary to people that haven't written or coded, or
Speaker 1: drawn or sang or created anything in years. The last
Speaker 1: four years have proven that the tech industry is desperate
Speaker 1: for somebody to follow, and follow they have. Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: claimed the metaverse the future in the most flimsy way,
Speaker 1: and the market, along with Microsoft and many other companies agreed.
Speaker 1: Even if the metaverse was barely conceived pipe during by
Speaker 1: a guy who hasn't written code since two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: Generative AI is the next step up a trend with
Speaker 1: a natural product, a superficially impressive do dad that can
Speaker 1: sell cloud compute access and proliferate more software, even if
Speaker 1: the underlying technology is so remarkably unprofitable and unreliable that
Speaker 1: big tech firms are having to calm down their salespeople,
Speaker 1: which happened a few months ago with Amazon, and big
Speaker 1: tech was so desperate for something new to follow, something
Speaker 1: new to do with themselves that would sustain the value's
Speaker 1: thread facade is a crucible of innovation and progress. Rather
Speaker 1: than doing the hard work to actually invest in and
Speaker 1: research and develop important technologies that people like and would
Speaker 1: use and would care about, Sam Altman gave them all
Speaker 1: something to do with themselves, and he packaged it in
Speaker 1: a way that told them how to think about it,
Speaker 1: and of course lie about it. At some point, something
Speaker 1: has to give. The markets are fickle and demanding and
Speaker 1: engineered to demand endless growth and endless returns. GENERATIVAI is
Speaker 1: hitting a wall. I'll go into that in the next episode,
Speaker 1: and any future improvements will be marginal and cost billions
Speaker 1: of dollars to achieve. The transformer based architectures like the
Speaker 1: kind used in open aised GPT models are gigantic maths,
Speaker 1: machines that know nothing and will never, ever, ever ever
Speaker 1: create the artificial general intelligence the conscious tech being that
Speaker 1: Sam Altman has been claiming it will. GENERATIAI does not
Speaker 1: appear to provide the kind of easy business return and
Speaker 1: it's reminiscent of the cloud computing boom and mobile app
Speaker 1: store booms. And once that becomes clear, the markets will
Speaker 1: punish those most deeply invested in quite a painful way,
Speaker 1: and once they do, the real thumb will begin as
Speaker 1: big tech reconciles with the lack of innovation and leadership
Speaker 1: teams stuffed with management consultants, product managers, and sick evans
Speaker 1: that lank any real ideas or expertise that might inform
Speaker 1: what actually might be next, not least because they've sequested
Speaker 1: themselves away from creators and pretty much any normal person
Speaker 1: or anyone who does an actual job. I don't really
Speaker 1: know when this reckoning will happen, though, but I do
Speaker 1: know this. When I started writing this script, it was
Speaker 1: a brief way to connect the past to the present.
Speaker 1: And as with everything I've written, it seems I found
Speaker 1: my argument as I wrote it, searching as I went.
Speaker 1: There's no prompt that could have told a generative AI
Speaker 1: to write what I've written, Nor is there a prompt
Speaker 1: that would let me delightfully enrage myself in a tiny
Speaker 1: sound proof in my garage and all of that. That
Speaker 1: is the magic that creates things like this podcast, things
Speaker 1: like my news there, things like you're writing, you're singing,
Speaker 1: your coding, and everything like that. The process of creation,
Speaker 1: the actual labor of considering what you should do next,
Speaker 1: the mistakes you make, the finding the theories behind the
Speaker 1: decisions you make, is what creates great work. What creates
Speaker 1: great writing, not the probabilistic formulation of whatever you might
Speaker 1: create if you trained on billions of words of other
Speaker 1: people's stuff. It kind of reminds me chat GBT, especially
Speaker 1: reminds me of the kind of writing i'd read in college,
Speaker 1: where it was very much people saying things in the
Speaker 1: order that they thought they should say them. The structures
Speaker 1: like intro, body, conclusion. It was the same words, it
Speaker 1: was the same things. And this was quite a long
Speaker 1: time before chat GBT, and it was because people were
Speaker 1: writing to spec they were doing what they thought they
Speaker 1: should do, rather than writing a lot and coming out
Speaker 1: with something at the end and no offense them. They're
Speaker 1: college students. They should have been told. They shouldn't have been taught. Writing,
Speaker 1: should be taught, talking, should be taught. They there are
Speaker 1: social things that we learn, but we learn through making mistakes.
Speaker 1: I can't code, but those people that I know can
Speaker 1: have messed up so many times to their code. They've
Speaker 1: broken things tons and tons of times. Part of the
Speaker 1: great thing of creation is the destruction that you have
Speaker 1: to go through to get there. I've written about seven
Speaker 1: hundred thousand words in the last four years, and I
Speaker 1: only really became good I'd say in the last two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand, maybe one hundred and fifty thousand. I couldn't
Speaker 1: have got there just by reading that many words. You
Speaker 1: need to put in the time But if you don't
Speaker 1: put time into anything, if you don't create anything, of
Speaker 1: course you don't respect that, And of course you don't
Speaker 1: know what good looks like. But these people, these people
Speaker 1: who are so disconnected, they will demand, as Jack Welch did,
Speaker 1: that we burn whatever we need in pursuit of growth.
Speaker 1: We must divert billions of dollars, exobites of data, endless
Speaker 1: acres of data centers. Also that we could maybe create
Speaker 1: a future they don't understand or care about. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter if generat if AI actually does anything, just as
Speaker 1: long as they can convince shareholders and an analyst that it
Speaker 1: might one day do so. It's hard to consider any
Speaker 1: of this a grift, because doing so would be it
Speaker 1: to admit how much of the economy is controlled by grifters.
Speaker 1: But you know what, I'm gonna leave you with a
Speaker 1: quote from Nick shi Rash, who I interviewed a few
Speaker 1: episodes ago about it, and this is a quote from
Speaker 1: his excellent blog. I will fucking pile drive you if
Speaker 1: you mention AI again. Not gonna do an Australian accent.
Speaker 1: That's rude. You see, Well, hype is nice. It's only
Speaker 1: nice and small burst for practitioners. We have a few
Speaker 1: key things that a grifter does not have, such as
Speaker 1: job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not
Speaker 1: have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment
Speaker 1: the gold rush is over due to the sad fact
Speaker 1: that we've actually needed to study things and build experience. Grifters,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, wield the omni tool that is
Speaker 1: self aggrandizingly called politics. That is to say, it turns
Speaker 1: out that the core competency smiling and promising things that
Speaker 1: you can't actually deliver, is highly transferable. Generative AI is
Speaker 1: an active theft in and of itself, perpetuated by people
Speaker 1: that have stolen innovation in the name of shareholder supremacy,
Speaker 1: creating a degenerative form of innovation that optimizes the tech
Speaker 1: industry to create things that sound cool rather than actually
Speaker 1: do things and help people. And the people perpetuating these
Speaker 1: acts sundarp Isshai, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Jesse Sachy Nadella, Sam Lman,
Speaker 1: Mirror Marati are all the same kind of charlatan, the
Speaker 1: ultimate manager, one that has created the means to escape
Speaker 1: the workforce and ultimately having to create anything of any kind.
Speaker 1: These people, the crave the ultimate business where it's just
Speaker 1: them and all the money flows up, kind of like
Speaker 1: the final shade from Destiny Too or the Ultimate Sukiyomi
Speaker 1: from Narutau. And I won't spoil the fun Fantasy seven
Speaker 1: Rebirth collection either, But there is this thing in fiction
Speaker 1: about this idea of a final shape, of an ultimate
Speaker 1: dream where everything's locked under one eye, And as crazy
Speaker 1: as that sounds, this really feels like what they want
Speaker 1: as few people as possible to make them as much
Speaker 1: money as possible, and the people who invest in them
Speaker 1: as much money as possible. And it's gross. It's frustrating.
Speaker 1: They could make a tenth of what they do and
Speaker 1: still be so incredibly rich and probably not destroy their companies.
Speaker 1: Google could putter around a two to five percent profitability
Speaker 1: each quarter, it doesn't matter. It would still be fine,
Speaker 1: but the markets don't care. It sucks. It makes me angry,
Speaker 1: and I don't claim to have any answers or truly
Speaker 1: know how to unwind all of this. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to change things other than loudly saying what I
Speaker 1: see in front of my eyes and how it makes
Speaker 1: me feel, and wanting others to at the very least
Speaker 1: have more clarity into the things that are being done
Speaker 1: to them and the ways in which others have twisted
Speaker 1: the system to make more money than anyone's ever had,
Speaker 1: transforming company into these horrifying nihilist engines for growth, anti
Speaker 1: companies that create value by reducing what they contribute to
Speaker 1: the world. But I encourage you not to be nihilistic yourself.
Speaker 1: Do not lose faith in the power of sunlight in
Speaker 1: calling these people what they are. Parasites. Sam Altman is
Speaker 1: a parasite, Sundar Pishai is a parasite, satch Nadella is
Speaker 1: a parasite. Every single one of these people, these people
Speaker 1: who have taken good companies that built good things that
Speaker 1: people like that still made money and made them more
Speaker 1: money while making the things worse, they are parasites, and
Speaker 1: calling them that is necessary. If you Sundar Pishai or
Speaker 1: one of your ilk here's this and are offended, fix
Speaker 1: your goddamn company, make good things again, stop laying people off,
Speaker 1: pay yourself less, and do more for the world. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you are a parasite and you're deliberate in doing so.
Speaker 1: Be clear and concise when speaking about these people. By
Speaker 1: the way, be continually outraged damage they are doing to society.
Speaker 1: And I encourage you all to catalog everything you see.
Speaker 1: And I know posting through it doesn't sound like much,
Speaker 1: but believe me, these people see it. These people know,
Speaker 1: and these people have names. Sam Aortman, Sandra Pishai, Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: Satya Nadela, Andy Jasse, all of these people diverting the
Speaker 1: world's most talented engineers into an unsustainable, unprofitable boondoggle that
Speaker 1: does nothing that they don't understand. All of them can
Speaker 1: at least be held accountable on record, if not in
Speaker 1: real life. Believe your eyes. You are being given less
Speaker 1: so that others can have more. You are having things
Speaker 1: taken from you by corporations because they must always please
Speaker 1: the nebulous form of the shareholder. As I said, don't
Speaker 1: give into nihilism. Though these people do read all this stuff.
Speaker 1: They are aware of things like this podcast, but they
Speaker 1: also see social media. They see the clouds of people
Speaker 1: talking about how bad Google is now thanks to AI.
Speaker 1: Even before that. Public pressure does work. Loud public pressure
Speaker 1: consist in public pressure, but also Sunda Pishai, Prabagar Ragavan,
Speaker 1: zach In Adela, Sam Altman say the goddamn name. Say
Speaker 1: them repeatedly, loudly everywhere when you don't like something with
Speaker 1: Google mention, Prabagar Ragavan mentioned sundar Pieshai engrave their names
Speaker 1: to their bad acts. When you talk about how shitty
Speaker 1: Facebook is, Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivan, Alex Schultz, Naomi gLite,
Speaker 1: put their names by them. Let them not hide behind
Speaker 1: the names of their corporations. Let history show that they
Speaker 1: made so much money while doing so much damage, because
Speaker 1: that is how they've gotten away with it. These people
Speaker 1: have no more worldly concerns. They don't worry about bills,
Speaker 1: they don't worry about the mortgage, they don't worry about
Speaker 1: any of that crap. They don't have real problems. All
Speaker 1: they have is their legacy and their goddamn name. So
Speaker 1: take it from them. Take their name. Say the Cheryl Samberg,
Speaker 1: a McKinsey operator an MBA is the reason that Facebook
Speaker 1: started going downhill. Then Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Oliven, Naomi gLite,
Speaker 1: Alec Schultz, Andrew Bosworth. All these people our why Facebook
Speaker 1: is full of AI generated spam, say Sam Altman, Mirror
Speaker 1: Marathi of open Ai. They are the people that are
Speaker 1: stealing the entire internet to train models most of Varsuliema,
Speaker 1: the Microsoft CEO of AI. Guess what, that guy is
Speaker 1: also stealing your data. He is also training models on it.
Speaker 1: He is the one perpetuating the great theft. As long
Speaker 1: as their names are attached these acts, it'll be scarier
Speaker 1: for them. I can't promise it will stop them. But
Speaker 1: giving them a level of accountability, no matter Howell Thinn,
Speaker 1: is necessary and the first step to fixing things. And
Speaker 1: celebrate companies that make good shit. Celebrate things like the
Speaker 1: steam Deck, one of the best consoles I've ever used.
Speaker 1: I love that thing. So break companies like Anchor great
Speaker 1: battery packs. There are things in tech that are still cool.
Speaker 1: There are things in tech that are still good. You
Speaker 1: just have to look for them, and you're not finding
Speaker 1: them in big tech. And you're not finding them in
Speaker 1: big tech because you are not the customer. You are
Speaker 1: not the person that Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Sachin at
Speaker 1: Deel or sand Uppishi cares about. No, they care about
Speaker 1: the nebulous form of the shareholder, the markets and analyst targets.
Speaker 1: You deserve better, so give them so much worse. Thank
Speaker 1: you for listening to better Offline. The editor and composer
Speaker 1: of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
Speaker 1: check out more of his music and audio projects at
Speaker 1: Matasowski dot com, M A T T O. S O
Speaker 1: w Ski dot com. You can email me an easy
Speaker 1: at Better offline dot com or visit Better Offline dot
Speaker 1: com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter.
Speaker 1: I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's
Speaker 1: youreaed dot at to visit the discord, and go to
Speaker 1: our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
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