Ed Zitron (15:05)
Now. If you've read the newsletter version of this episode, you'll come across a multi paragraph answer from Satya Nadella when asked on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast how Microsoft will reach $130 billion in revenue from AGI. I'm not going to read it out here, and I don't hate you enough to include a clip, but the question was how do you get Microsoft to $130 billion in revenue? And Satya Dadello's answer is like 150 words. And it's like abundance explosion, GDP will grow, industrial revolution, inflation adjusted percentages. The winners will be the people who do stuff and then productivity will go up. I will link to this interview in the episode Notes because it's fucking nonsense just like the rest of them. And I have this idea, I have this concept I've come up with and it's that we need to stop idolizing these speciously informed goobers. While kinder souls or Zitron haters may hear this and say actually, Satya Nadella is very smart. Stop. I want to stop there. And I suggest that you have a smart person who comes along and tells you what smart sounds like. A smart don't mean long words and nothing. It means actually knowing the shit you're talking about. And look, really, a truly smart person should be able to speak clearly enough that their intent is obvious and clear. Now it's tempting to believe that there's some sort of intellectual barrier between you and the powerful, that these confusing and obtuse things they say, that's the sound of genius, rather than somebody who has learned a lot of smart sounding words without ever learning what they mean. But Ed, they're trained to do this. I am someone who has media trained hundreds of people and there's only so much you can do to steer someone's language. You can't say to son d', eche, hey man, can you sound more confusing? You can, however, tell them what not to talk about and hope for the best. Sure, you can make them practice, sure you can give them feedback. But people past a certain stage of power or popularity are going to talk whoever they want. And if they're big stupid idiots pretending to be smart, they're going to sound exactly like this. Why? Because nobody in the media ever asks them to explain themselves. When you've spent your entire career being asked friendly or friendly adjacent questions and never having someone say, wait, what does that mean? You'll continue to mutate into a pseudo communicator that spits out information adjacent bullshit. I am, to be clear, being very specific about the question, what does that mean? Powerful CEOs and founders never, ever, ever get asked to explain what they're saying, even when what they're saying barely resembles a sentence, let alone an answer. But let's get clear here. Let's think about a hypothetical scenario where your friend just said their dog died. You'd say something like, oh no, what happened? And they let's say they responded with, well, my dog had a tragic yet ultimately final distinction between their ideal and non ideal state due to the involvement of a kind of automatic mechanical device. And when that happened, we realized we'd have to move on from the current paradigm of dog ownership and into a new era, which we both feel a great deal of emotion about and see the opportunities within. You'd probably be a little confused and ask them to explain what they meant. You'd ask, what do you mean by an automatic mechanical dev? What? What does that mean? They then reply with, yeah, exactly. And that was part of the challenge. You see, like the various interactions we have in our day that are challenging. We see a lot of opportunities in this sailing, those challenges. But part of the road to getting around them is facing them head on, which is ultimately what happened here. And while we were involved, we didn't want to be. And so we had to make some dramatic changes. At this point, you still don't really know what happened. Did a car hit their dog? Did they hit their dog with their car in this scenario? Would you nod and say, damn man, that sucks. I'm glad I have such a smart friend. Don't know what happened their dog though. Or would you ask them to explain what they're saying? Would you perhaps ask what it is they meant? Look, Pichai, Altman, Nadella, they've always given this kind of empty brained intellectual slop in response to questions because the media coddles them. These people are product managers or management consultants, and in Altman's case, a savvy negotiator and manipulator known for, and I quote, an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the startups he was supposed to nurture as an investor at Y Combinator, according to the Washington Post. And by coddle, I mean that these people are deliberately engaging in a combination of detective work and amnesia where the reader or the listener is forced to simultaneously try and divine the meaning of their answer while also not thinking too hard about the question the interviewer asked. Most importantly because the interviewer forgot already. Look at most modern business interviews. They involve a journalist asking a question, somebody giving an answer, and the journalist saying okay and moving on to the next question, occasionally saying, but what about this? When the appropriate response to many of the answers is to ask them to simplify them so that their meaning is clearer. Look at them. Listen to them. Now, a common response to all of this stuff is to say that interviewers can't be antagonistic. And I just don't think a lot of people understand what that actually means. It isn't antagonistic to say that you don't understand what someone said or that they didn't answer the question you asked. If this is antagonistic to you, you are, intellectually speaking, a giant fucking coward. Because what you're suggesting is that somebody cannot ask somebody to explain themselves, which is what an interview is. And I imagine nobody really wants to do this, because if you actually put these people on the spot, you'd realize the dark truth that I spoke of a few weeks ago, that the reason the powerful sound like idiots is because they're idiots. They sound like business idiots and create products to sell to business idiots because business idiots run most companies and buy solutions based on what the last business idiot told them. Now, I know some of you might hear this and say, these people can't be stupid. These people run companies, they make big deals, they read all these books. And my answer is that some of the stupidest people I have met in my life have read more books than you or I will read in a lifetime. Well, they might sound smart, or they might be smart when it comes to corporate chess moves or saying this product category should do this. None of these men, not Altman, Beshaya and Nadella, actually has a hand in the design or the creation of the things that their companies make. And they Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have. Regardless, though, I have a larger point. I believe it's high time we started mocking these people and tearing down their legends as geniuses. They're not better than us, nor are they responsible for anything that their companies build other than their share price, which is a meaningless figure and the accumulation of power and resources. These men are neither smart nor intellectually superior, and it's time to start treating them as such. These people are powerful because they have names that are protected by the press. They are powerful because it is seen as kind of unseemly to mock them because they're rich and running a company. A kind of corporate fealty that I find deeply unbecoming of an adult. We are, at most customers. We do not owe these people anything. We are long past the point when any of the people running these companies actually invented anything they sell. If anything, they owe us something because they're selling us a product, even if said product is free and monetized by advertising. While reporters, as anyone, should have some degree of professionalism in interviews or covering subjects, there's no reason to treat these people as special, even if they have managed to raise a lot of money or their popular product is, like, used by a lot of people. Because if that were the case, we'd have far more coverage of defense contractor Lockheed Martin. They made $1.71 billion in profit last quarter and haven't had a single quarter under a billion dollars in the last year. I realize I'm being a little glib, but the logic behind covering OpenAI is at this point, they make a lot of money and they have a popular product, which is also a fitting description of Lockheed Martin. The difference is that OpenAI has a consumer product that loses billions of dollars and Lockheed Martin has products that make billions of dollars by removing consumers from the earth. Both of them are environmentally destructive. Covering OpenAI doesn't seem to be about the tech, because if you looked at the tech, you'd have to understand the tech. You'd see that the user numbers weren't there outside of the 500 million people using ChatGPT. And of course referring to the generative AI industry. And of those 500 million people, very few are actually paying for the product. And the term user encompasses everything from the most occasional person who looks@chatgpt.com out of curiosity, or the people using it as part of their daily lives. If covering OpenAI was about the tech, you'd read about how the tech itself doesn't seem to have a ton of mass market use cases, and that those use cases aren't really the kind of things that people pay for. If they did, there'd be articles that definitively discuss them versus articles in the New York Times about everybody using AI. That boiled down to I use ChatGPT as search now, and I heard a guy who asked it to teach him about modern art. Yet men like Wario Dario Amade and Clammy Sam Altman continue to be elevated because they're building the future, even if they don't seem to have built it yet or have the ability to clearly articulate what the future actually looks like. Anthropic has now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will blackmail people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system, something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves. Sadly, this is all a result of the halo effect of being a guy who raised money or a guy who runs big company. We must, as human beings assume these people are smart, that they've never mislead us. Because if we accept that they aren't smart, and they will willingly mislead us, we'd have to accept that the powerful are, well, bad and possibly unremarkable assholes. And if they're untrustworthy people that don't seem to be smart, we have to accept that the world is deeply unfair and caters to people like them far more than it caters to people like us. We do not owe Satya Nadella any respect just because he's the CEO of Microsoft. If anything, we should show him outright scorn for the state of Microsoft's products. Microsoft Teams is an insulting mess that only sometimes works, leaving workers spending 57% of their time either in teams, chat teams meetings, or sending emails. According to A Microsoft study, msn.com is an abomination read by hundreds of millions of people a month, bloated with intrusive advertisements, attempts trick you into downloading an app, and quasi content that may or may not be AI generated. There are few products on the modern Internet that show more contempt for the user other than, of course, the former Skype, a product that Microsoft let languish for more than a decade, so thoroughly engorged with spam that leaving it unattended for more than a month left you with 100 unread messages from Eastern European romance scammers. And Microsoft has finally killed it in May. Great job, Satya, you fucking Platt. Anyway, products like Word and Excel don't need improving, but that doesn't stop Microsoft from trying to bloat them with odd user interface choices and forcing users to fight with prop ups that use an AI powered copilot that most of them hate. Why exactly am I meant to show these people respect? Because they run a company that provides a continually disintegrating service because that service is such a powerful monopoly that it's difficult to leave it if you're interacting with other people or businesses. I think it's because we live in hell. The modern tech ecosystem is utterly vile. Every single day our tech breaks in new and inventive ways. Our iPhones resetting at random, random apps not accepting button presses, our Bluetooth disconnecting our word processors harassing us to try and use AI while no longer offering us suggestions for typos. And I'm referring to Google Docs. You're not insane. It's happening and our useful products replaced with useless shit like how Google's previously functional assistants were replaced with generative AI that makes them tangibly worse than so that Google can claim that they have 350 million monthly active users on fucking Gemini. Yet the tech and the business media acts like everything is fine. It isn't fine, it's all really fucked. You can call me a cynic or a pessimist or throw trash at me or throw tomatoes or try and hose me down when I go outside, or call me every name under the sun, but the stakes have never been higher and the damage never more widespread. Everything feels broken and covering these companies as if it isn't is insulting to your readers and your own intelligence. Look at the state of your computer or phone and tell me anything feels congruent or intentional rather than an endless battle of incentives. Look at the notifications on your phone and count the number of them that have absolutely nothing to do with information you actively need.
