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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Business Analyst
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- [01:41]
Comedian
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- [02:42]
Ed Zitron
Cool Zone Media what is a podcast? A miserable little pile of secrets. Better Offline I'm Ed Zitron and welcome to the conclusion of our three part episode of Better Offline and the phenomenon known as the business idiot in the first episode we met our first business idiot, the real prince of them, Satya Nadella and and talked about the origin of the business idiot and the rotten ideology that drives them. Then we talked about the enablers of the business idiots, particularly those in the media. In this episode, I want to tell you about where all this goes. Nothing I've said in this three part should suggest that the business idiot is weak. In fact, business idiots are in full control. We have too many managers and our most powerful positions are valorized for not knowing stuff, for having a general view that we can take the big picture from, not realizing that the big picture is usually made up of lots of little brushstrokes. Business idiots have a cultural cache though. We aspire to be business idiots and our education pushes people to careers where the goal is to climb from the worker class to the oxygen starved apex of business idiot mountain. Yet there are eventually consequences for everything being controlled by business idiots. Our current society, an unfair, unjust one dominated by half broken tech products that make their owners billions and that manipulate and mislead by design, is the real punishment wrought by growth. A brain draining corporate society, one that leads it to doing illogical logical things and somehow making money doing so. It doesn't make any fucking sense that generative AI got this big. The returns aren't there, the outcomes aren't there, and any sensible society would have put a gun to chatgpt's head and aggressively pulled the trigger. Generative AI is symbolic of the future of capitalism, one that celebrates mediocrity and costs billions of dollars. One that surrenders every human work the model can consume and that accepts the destruction of our planet. All because some, everybody kind of agreed that this is what we're all doing now, with nobody able to give a convincing explanation of what that even is or why we're doing it. Generative AI is revolting both in how overstated its abilities are and in how continually it tests how low a standard somebody will take for a product, both in its outputs and in the desperate companies trying to integrate it into everything. And its proliferation throughout society and organizations is already fundamentally harmful. We're not just drowning in a sea of slop, we're in a constant state of corporate AI beta tests, new features sprouting out of our products like new limbs that sometimes function normally but often attempt to strangle us. You know, up the stand in that episode of JoJo's Bazaar. Stop it. It's unclear if companies forcing these products on us have contempt for us or simply don't know what good looks like. Or perhaps it's both. With the business idiot resenting us for not scarfing down whatever they serve us as, that's what's generally worked before. They don't really understand their customers. They understand what a customer pays for and how a purchase is made. You know, like the leaders of banks and asset managers during the subprime mortgage crisis didn't really think about whether people could pay those mortgages, just that they needed a lot of them to put in a cdo. The business idiot's economy is one run and built for other business idiots. They can only make things that sell to companies that must always be in flux, which is the preferred environment of the business idiot. Because if they're not perpetually starting new initiatives and jumping on new innovations, they'd actually have to interact with the underlying production of the company and the people actually doing the work. Does the software work? Sometimes. Do successful companies exist that sell like this? Sure. But look at today's software and tell me with a straight face that things feel good to use. And something like Generative AI was always inevitable. An industry claiming to change the world that never really does. So full of businesses that don't function as businesses, full of flim flam, half truths used to impress people who will likely never interact with it or do so only in a passing way, by chasing out the people that actually build things in favor of the people that sell them. Our economy is built on production puppetry. Just like generative AI and especially like ChatGPT and Claude. These people are antithetical to what's good in the world. And their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly, any true innovation. The business idiot thrives on alienation, on distancing itself from the customer and the thing that they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends and he said that to the Wall Street Journal. Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues in the form of the agents he makes that don't fucking work. And an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer. That said executive doesn't give a fuck about. And yeah, that is describing a form of slave, especially if it's conscious. I mean, if it's not conscious, it isn't. But the moment you make AGI, you've got a real fucking problem on your hands. They're never gonna do it. Also, what if The AGI is just dumb. What if it doesn't want to work anyway? The business idiots are building products for other people that don't interact with the real world. We're no longer the real customers and so we're worth even less than before. Which is, as is the case in the world dominated by shareholder supremacy, not all that much to begin with. They don't exist to make us better. The business idiot doesn't really care about the real world or what you do, or who you are, or anything other than your contribution to their power and wealth. This is why so many squealing little middle managers look up to the musks and Altmans of the world. Because they see in them the same kind of specious corporate authoritarian somebody who's above work and thinking and knowledge and doing stuff. Disgusting. But one of the most remarkable things about the business idea is their near invulnerability. Modern management is resource control, shifting blame away from the manager who should hold responsibility. After all, if you don't, why do you have a fucking job onto the laborer, knowing that the organization and the media will back them up. While you may think I'm making a generalization, the 2021-2023 Anti Remote Work push in the media was grotesque proof of where the media's true allegiant lies. The media happily manufactured consent for return to office mandates from large companies by framing remote work as some sort of destructive force, doing all they can to discuss how modern management has no fucking idea how the workplace actually works. Now these articles were effectively written as fan fiction for managers and bosses demanding that we return to the office. Ridiculous statements about how remote work failed young people, which it didn't. Or how employees needed remote work more than their employers because the chit chat and lunches and happy hours are so important. They're really not. I'm also going to link to these in the. In the notes. I've written a lot about the remote work push and the people who were pushing for us to return the office. It's actually where I got started and it really was the ultimate joker vacation for me. It's what actually set me on the path to better offline. Because it's when you saw both how little the bosses knew what was going on and how willing people in the media were to support them. And these were people, people writing these stories were journalists that were going to be forced back to the office and ended up being so. And they were like, yeah, this is actually. It's actually good that we go into the office. And when you ask the journalists, hey, what do you get at the office? They say, well, one time I ran into someone and we had a good idea or it was quicker to walk over to someone's desk. Does that mean the work was better? No, but the vibes felt better. I guess I also know way more people who just fucking hated working in the office. But these articles rarely, if ever, cared about whether remote work was more productive or the disconnect appeared to be between managers and workers. None had any of those reporters ever spoken to an actual worker. They'd say that they valued more time with their families rather than the grind of a daily commute softened with the promise of an occasional company pizza party, which usually happens outside of the typical working hours anyway. And these articles and this period, it was from the very beginning, about crushing the life out of a movement that gave workers more flexibility and mobility while suppressing managers ability to hide how little work they actually did. I do give credit to CNBC in 2023 for saying the quiet part out loud. That and I quote, the biggest disadvantage of remot work that employers cite is how difficult it is to observe and monitor employees. Because when you can't do that, you have to actually know what they're doing and understand their work. Jesus Christ. You know what? I'm with the managers. How disgusting. But yet higher up the chain, the invulnerability continues. CEOs may get fired. I mentioned it before. And more are getting fired than ever, it turns out, although sadly not the ones we want. They always receive a golden parachute at the end before walking into another role at another organization doing exactly the same level of nothing. Yet before that happens, a CEO is allowed to pull basically every lever before they make. They face any kind of accountability. They can lay people off, they can freeze pay, they can move people from salary to contracted workers, they can close down sites, they can offshore, they can cut certain products. They can even spend more fucking money so they lose less. If you or I misallocated billions of dollars on stupid ideas, we'd be fired and we'd have real trouble finding more employment. We would be well known for our incompetence and indeed we would be in real trouble. And there would be real problems finding more work if we were a big stupid piece of shit. Yet when CEOs do that, they get board placements, they get other positions, they can run companies dead into the ground. Let me give you an example. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, and I quote, that the ultimate computer is the mixed Reality World and that Microsoft would be inventing new computers and new computing in 2016, pushing his senior executives to tell reporters that HoloLens was Microsoft's next wave of computing in 2017, selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of headsets to the military in then debuting HoloLens 2 at build 2019, only for the onstage demo to break in real time, calling for a referendum on capitalism in 2020, then saying he couldn't overstate the breakthrough of the metaverse in 2021. Now let's hear what Nadella had to say about it. And massive props to Preston Growler of Computer World for writing this piece. Nadella, in that 2021 keynote, made big promises. When we talk about the Metaverse, we're describing both a new platform and a new application type, similar to how we talked about the web and websites in the early 90s. In a sense, the metaver us to embed computing into the real world and to embed the real world into computing. Fucking what? Bringing real presence to any digital space. For years we've talked about creating the digital representation of the world, but now we actually have the opportunity to go into that world and participate in it. I just want to be clear at this time, Microsoft had nothing of the sort. They had, like, websites. They had Microsoft Teams. They tried to claim Microsoft Teams was Metaverse fucked up. And as Growler notes, Nadella made big promises, beefing up development in projects such as its Mixed reality tool kit, MRTK, the virtual real reality workspace project, All Space VR, which it bought back in 2017, its HoloLens virtual reality headset, and its Industrial Metaverse unit, among others, before firing all members of its Industrial Metaverse core team, along with those behind MRTK, and shutting down its AllSpace VR in 2023 before discontinuing HoloLens 2 entirely in 2024. Guess that wasn't anything then. Just, you know, like a friend of yours is in a really chaotic relationship and they just, the next day just act like it's not happening. Or someone tells you they've had a big moment in their life and they just pretend it doesn't happen. Except it was hundreds of millions of dollars and tons of media coverage where people said, this is what Microsoft's doing next. This is what happened. It's so insane that that happened. We really don't talk enough about how fucking insane the Metaverse thing was. Just like a year or so where everyone just played make believe. Completely insane. I, of course, was writing about it at the time and it's very fucking clear. And there are a few people that were negative as well. There are also some people who claimed they were negative who weren't. Their time will come. Now. Nadella was transparently copying Meta and Mark Zuckerberg's ridiculous Metaverse play, and absolutely nothing happened to him as a result. The media outlets like the Verge and independents like Ben Thompson happily boosted the Metaverse idea when it was announced and conveniently forgot about it the second that Microsoft and Meta wanted to talk about AI. No, really, both the Verge and Ben Thompson were read and waiting to do literally the same interview, but about a different subject, no consideration of what was previously said at all. A true business idiot never admits wrongdoing, and the more powerful the business idiot is, the more likely there are power structures that exist to avoid them having to do so. The media, captured by other business idiots has become powerfully poisoned by power, deferring to its whims and ideals and treating CEOs with more respect, dignity and intelligence than anyone who ever worked for them. When a big company decides they want to do artificial intelligence, the media's natural reaction is to ask how and why? And write down the answer, rather than to think about what whether it's possible, or whether the company might profit, say, by increasing their shareholder price by having whatever they say printed ad verbatim. These people aren't challenged by the media or their employees because their employees are vulnerable all the time and often are encouraged to buy into whatever bullshit du jour there is, like hostages held captive until the media and corporate culture give them Stockholm syndrome. They're only challenged by shareholders who are agnostic about idiocy because it's not core to value in any meaningful sense. As we've seen with crypto, the Metaverse and AI and shareholders will tolerate infinite levels of idiocy if it boosts the value of their holdings. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a.
- [15:50]
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Ed Zitron
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Lifestyle Influencer
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- [16:10]
Comedian
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- [16:36]
Security Expert
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- [17:47]
Voiceover Artist
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- [18:13]
Ed Zitron
It goes further too. 2021 saw the largest amount of venture capital invested in the last decade, a record breaking $643 billion, with a remarkable $329.5 billion of that invested in the US alone. Some of the biggest deals include Amazon reseller Aggregate Athio, which raised a billion dollars in October 2021 and filed for bankruptcy in February 2025 Cloud Security Co. Lacework, which raised $525 million in January 2021, then $1.3 billion in October 2021 and was rumored to be up for sale to Wiz, only for the deal to collapse. And then they ended up selling for about $200 million to another company. And then of course there was autonomous car company Cruise, which had hundreds of headlines about it being the Future, raised about $2.75 billion in 2021 and was killed off in December 2024. Suddenly the people who lose their livelihoods, those who took stock in lieu of cash compensation, those who end up getting laid off at the end are always workers, while people like Lacework Co CEO Jay Parikh, who oversaw reckless spending and management dysfunction, according to the information, can walk into highly paid positions at companies like Microsoft, as Jay did in October 2024, a few months after a file sale. And the one I mentioned before, the $200 billion one, even to a company called Fortinet. Yeah, this is the behind the Actor studio a bit I got a little ahead of myself, but I'm not editing it. Why would I? It doesn't matter if these people are wrong or if they run their companies badly, because the business idiot is infallible and judged too, by fellow disconnected business idiots. In a just society, nobody would ever want to touch any of the C suite that oversaw a company that handed out Nintendo switches to literally anyone who booked a meeting, as was the case with Lacework. Instead, the stank remains on the employees. One point about this just an aside. Meta's most recent layoffs were explicitly said to target low performers, needlessly harming the future job prospects of those handed the pink slip in an already fucked tech job market. It was cruel and pointless and I'm certain a big fat lie. Meta is spending big on AI and has spent big on the Metaverse, which went NowHere and owns two dying platforms, Instagram and Facebook, and one that's hard to monetize in WhatsApp. It needs to get costs down and improve margins. Layoffs are one way to go, and things are getting bad enough. The Meta is now, according to the information, walking around Silicon Valley begging other big tech companies for money to train their open source llama LLM. As shitty as that is, the low performance jive is an unnecessary twist of the knife, demonstrating that Meta would gladly throw its workers under the bus if it serves their interests, because the optics of firing low performers is different to, say, firing a bunch of people, because you keep spunking money on dead end vanity projects and me too, products that nobody wants or wants to use or can understand. Mark Zuckerberg, I add, owns an island on Hawaii. The idea that he even thinks this much about Meta is disgraceful. Go outside, you fucking freak. Anyway, it's so easy and perhaps inevitable to feel a sense of nihilism about this. Nothing matters. It's all symbolic. A world is filled with companies run by people who don't interact with business and raise money from venture capitalists that neither run businesses nor really have any experience doing so. And despite the fact that these people exist several extractions from reality, the things that they do and the decisions they make impact us all, and it's hard to imagine how to fix it. I don't want you to live without hope. Understanding how evil these people are is the first step to things changing, and more people understanding is genuinely important, but we really do live in a system of inequity dominated by people that do not interact with the real world, who have created an entire system run by their fellow business idiots. The Rot economy's growth at all cost mania is a symptom of the grander problem of shareholder supremacy and a single minded economic focus on shareholder value and inevitably ends an economy run by and for business idiots. There is a line, and it ends here with layoffs, the destruction of our planet and our economy and our society, and a rising tide of human misery that nobody really knows where it comes from. And so we don't know who to blame and for what. If our economy actually works as a true meritocracy, where we didn't have companies run by people who don't use their products or understand how they're made, and who hire similarly specious people, these people would collapse under the pressure of having to know their ass from their ear hole. Yet none of this would be possible without their enabling layers, and those layers are teeming with both business idiots and those unfortunate enough to have learned from them. The tech media has enabled every single bubble, without exception, accepting every single narrative fed to them by VCs and startups, with even critical reporters still accepting the lunacy of companies like OpenAI, just because everyone else does too, and because the standard has been set of if a company raises money, they're real. Let's be honest, when you remove all the money, our current tech industry is kind of a disgrace. Our economy is held up by Nvidia, a company that makes most of its money selling GPUs to other companies primarily so that they can start losing money selling software that might eventually make them money, just not today. And they're not sure how. Nvidia is defined by massive peaks and valleys as it jumps on trends and bandwagons at the right Time, despite knowing that these bandwagons always come to some sort of halt. The other companies feature Tesla, a meme stock car company with a deteriorating brand and a chief executive famous for his divorces from both reality and multiple woman, along with a flagrant racism that may cost the company its life. A company that we're watching die in real time with a stagnant lineup and an actual fucking competition from companies that are spending on innovation in Europe and elsewhere. Bid is eating Tesla's lunch, offering better products for half the price and with far less racism. And this is just the first big Chinese automotive brand to go global. Others, like Cherry, are enjoying rapid growth outside of China because these cars are actually good and affordable, even when you factor in the things like tariffs. Hey, remember when Tesla fired all those people on its charging network, despite the fact that it's one of the most profitable and valuable parts of the business, and they then went and had to hire them back because it turns out they actually needed them. This is a good example of managerial alienation. Decisions made by non workers, Elon Musk, who don't understand their customers, their businesses, or the work their employees do. And let's not forget about the Cybertruck, a monstrosity both in how it looks and how it's sold, that's illegal to drive in the majority of developed countries because it's a death trap for drivers and pedestrians alike. Oh, and nobody actually wants it with Tesla sitting on a quarter's worth of inventory that it can't sell elsewhere is Meta, a collapsing social network with 99% of its revenue based on an advertising model to an increasingly aged population and a monopoly so flagrantly abusive in its contempt for its customers that at times it's difficult to call Instagram or Facebook a social network. Mark Zuckerberg had to admit to the Senate Judiciary Committee that people don't use Facebook as a social network anymore. The reason why is because the platform is so fucking rotten, run by a company alienated from its user base. It's the crepid product, actively hostile to anybody trying to use it. And more fundamentally, what's the point of posting on Facebook if your friends won't see it because Meta's algorithm decided it wouldn't drive engagement. Meta is a monument to disconnection, a company that runs in counter to its own mission to connect people. Run by Mark Zuckerberg, a man who hasn't had a good idea since he stole it from the Winkle Brothers. I meant to say the Winklevoss Brothers, but I'm actually going to keep it the solution to all that ails him. Adding generative AI to every part of Meta. Which shit it was meant to do something other than burn $72 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, right? It isn't clear what was meant to happen, but the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz reports that Meta's AI chatbots are, and I quote, empowered to engage in romantic roleplay that can turn explicitly even with children in a civil society. Zuckerberg would be ousted immediately for creating a pedophile chatbot. Instead, four days after the story ran, everyone cheered their better than expected earnings report in Redmond. Microsoft sits atop multiple monopolies using tariffs as a means to juice flailing Xbox revenue as it invests billions of dollars into OpenAI so that OpenAI can spend billions of dollars on cloud compute, losing billions of dollars in the process, requiring Microsoft to invest further money to keep them alive. All because Microsoft wanted generative AI and Bing. What a fucking waste. And they're also raising the costs of their office suite too, while which is only something they've been able to hold onto because of an underhanded bullshit fest from their antitrust trial from the 90s. Amazon lumbers listlessly through life, its giant labor abusing machine shipping things overnight at whatever cost is necessary to crush the life out of any other possible source of commerce, its cloud services and storage arm unsure of who to copy next, dumping billions into anthropic as a means of creating revenue for their dead end. Is it Microsoft? Is it Google? Who knows? Who knows what Amazon is anymore? But one analyst believes it's making five whole billion dollars in revenue from AI in 2025. And you know how much they've put in capital expenditures this year? $105 billion in capital expenditures. There are slot machines with better ROI than this bullshit. Again, Amazon is a company that's totally exploitative of its customers, no longer acting as a platform that helps people find the shit they need, but directing them to products that pay the most for prime advertising real whether they're good or safe. Let's be clear. Amazon's recklessness will kill someone if it hasn't already. The products they allow on there are not safe. They do not give a Are you.
- [27:39]
Comedian
Still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report, you're great at.
- [28:08]
Business Analyst
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- [29:05]
Voiceover Artist
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- [29:28]
Fashion Blogger
So those of you listening to the show recently know I dropped a lot of weight and got fit, so I need to buy clothes that actually fit my body for the first time. And I basically have no summer clothing at all, which is annoying. In Vegas, I'd previously shopped at Quint's for some really nice and surprisingly affordable cashmere sweaters to face the horrible New York winter. So when they reached out to do ads on Better Offline, they offered to send me some more clothes. So I got myself a couple linen shirts, both of which go nicely with a pair of shorts when I'm sitting outside on my phone, and an overshirt that layers nicely with a T shirt if I'm going out to dinner or.
- [29:58]
Ed Zitron
Want to pretend I'm respectful.
- [29:59]
Fashion Blogger
I really like quints. I was a customer before and will definitely be getting more of these linen shirts and they're the first piece of summer forward clothing I've ever liked on my body. Their stuff's really nice up there with something you get in a high end clothing store, but a lot cheaper as they go straight to the manufacturer and.
- [30:14]
Ed Zitron
Able to cut out 50 to 80%.
- [30:16]
Fashion Blogger
Of the markups you'll see from luxury brands. They've got all sorts of stuff Polos, linen, beach shorts, pants. And they only work with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing. Elevate your closet with quince go to quince.com beta b e t T E R for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com better to get free shipping and 365 day returns.
- [30:46]
Ed Zitron
But then there's the worst of them. Google, most famous for its namesake, a search engine that has been juiced as hard as possible and will continue to be juiced before the inevitable antitrust sentencing that will rob Google of its power along with the severance of its advertising monopoly along with it. But don't worry, Google has a generative AI thing for some reason. And no, you don't have a choice about using it because they've now replaced Google Assistant with Google Gemini and Google Search all but requires you to use their AI. They burn money for no reason. It sucks. And at no point do any of these companies seem to be focused on making our lives better or selling us any kind of real future. They exist to maintain the status quo where cloud computing allows them to retain their previous fiefdoms. They're alienated from people, they're alienated from workers, they're alienated from consumers, and they're alienated from the world. They're deeply antisocial, they're narcissistic, they're sociopathic, and they're misanthropic, as demonstrated by Zuck's movie Moronic AI Social Network Comments and AI is a symptom of a reckoning of this stupidity and hubris. They cut, they cut, they cut, they cut, they cut some more and then they stagnated. Their hope is a product that will be adopted by billions of imaginary customers and companies and will allow them to cut further without becoming just a P.O. box and a domain name. We have to recognize that what we're seeing right now with generative AI isn't a fluke or a bug, but a feature of a system that's rapacious and short term by its very nature, and doesn't define value as we do, because value gets defined by a faceless shareholder as growth. The system can only exist with the contribution of the business idiot. These are the vanguard, the foot soldiers of this system and a key reason why everything is so terrible all the time and why nothing seems to be getting better. Breaking from that status quo would require a level of bravery that they do not have and perhaps isn't possible in the current economic system. These people are powerful and they have big platforms. They're people like Derek Thompson, famed co author of the Abundance Agenda, who set celebrates the idea of a fictitious version of ChatGPT that can entirely plan and execute a five year old's birthday party. Or his co author Ezra Klein, who while recording a podcast where his researchers likely listened, talked proudly about replacing their work with OpenAI's broken deep research product. Because anything that can be outsourced must be and all research is, is looking at stuff that's relevant if you're a fucking idiot. And really, that's the most grotesque part of the business idiot. They see every part of our lives as a series of inputs and outputs. They boast about how many books they've read rather than the content of said books or the the way they made them feel, about how many hours they work even though they never ever ever work that many about how high level they are in a video game they don't actually play, about the money they've raised in the scale they've raised it at, and about how expensive and fancy their kitchen gadgets are, even if they use the wrong oils. Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience because their world is one where the journey does not matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and persecution of others in the pursuit of success. These people don't want to automate work, they want to automate existence. They fantasize about hitting a button and something happening because experiencing living is beneath them. Or at least your lives and your wants and your joys are. They don't want to plan their kids birthday parties. They don't want to research things. They don't value culture or art or beauty. They want to skip to the end. They want to hit fast forward on anything. Because human struggle is for the poor, the unworthy and the uneducated. When you're steeped in privilege and have earned everything basically through a mixture of stolen labor and office pantomime, the idea of effort is always a negative. The process of creation, of affection, of love, of kindness, of using time not just for an action or output is disgusting to the business idiot because those are the times that could be focused on themselves or some nebulous self serving vision that is when stripped back to its fundamental truth, either moronic or malevolent. They don't realize that you hire a worker not just for the output, but for their actual labor and their experience in creating that labor and their understanding of the world around it. Which is why they don't see why it's so insulting to outsource their interactions with human beings. You'll notice that these people never bring up actual examples of automating actual work, the mind numbing grunt work that we all face in the workplace, because they either don't really know what that is or they don't really give a shit about what it is. Their problems are the things that frustrate them, like dealing with other people or existing outside of the gilded circles and of socialite fucks and plural crats. Or just things that are inevitable facets of working life. Like reading an email, your son's birthday party, or a conflict with a friend can indeed be stressful. But these are not problems to be automated. These are the struggles that make us human, the things that make us grow, the things that make us who we are. Which isn't a problem for anybody other than somebody who doesn't believe they need to change in any way. It's both powerful and powerless at the same time. A nihilistic way of seeing our lives as a collection of events we accept or dismiss like a system. System prompt the desperate pursuit of such efficient living that you barely feel a thing until you die. I spent years talking about these people without giving them a name because categorizing anything is difficult. I can't tell you how long it took me to synthesize the rot economy from the broader trends I saw in tech and elsewhere. How long it took me to thread that particular needle, to identify the various threads that unified events that are otherwise separate and distinct. I am but one person. Everything you have read in my newsletter or articles I've written or heard on my podcast to this point has been something I have had to learn. Building an argument and turning it into words, often at the same time that other people read, doesn't really come naturally to anyone. It's something you have to work deliberately at. You might have talent, but you have to work towards it. It's imperfect. There are fuck ups. I sometimes mispronounce names and words, including my own name, which Matasalski has always been kind enough not to laugh at me about. These podcasts and newsletters, they increase in length and breadth and have so many links and I'll Never change my process, because part of said process is learning, relearning, processing, messaging. Casey saying Casey, I don't understand this. Arguing with Casey a little bit, coming up with another idea. An accord is I text Matt Hughes, I talk with Robert Evans, I go back and forth with everyone. I get more pissed off. Then I write and I rewrite and I speak and so on and so forth. This process makes what I do possible. And the idea of someone automating it disgusts me. Not because I'm special or important, but because my work is not the result of me reading a bunch of links or. Or writing a bunch of words. The script for this piece is not just about 13,000 words long. It's the result of more than a million words, probably more than that that I wrote before it. The hundreds of stories I read in the past, the hours and hours of conversations with friends and editors, years of accumulating knowledge and yes, growing with the work itself. I as a person have grown with this show thanks to the wonderful feedback I get from all of you. From the conversations we have on the Reddit or just the emails. I get the occasional one of you finds my cell phone, which is really, really quite scary. But not many of you do. And please don't look. The thing is, imperfections are what make us human. Imperfections are what make art so great. The fun things that happen in our life are never from a moment of perfection or from crystallizing something that is immaculate. Perhaps the timing is perfect, perhaps we're in the right place at the right time, but nothing about us is perfect. And. And through those imperfections, we grow and we thrive. Business idiots don't give a fuck about that. Sam Altman doesn't give a fuck about that. Satya Nadella doesn't give a fuck about that. They think they're fucking perfect. But true art and true joy and true solidarity is what's needed to dispatch with these people and to stop what they're doing. And really, the biggest thing that we can do early on, the real starting block is anyone within the tech media. Listen to this. We need to change. We need to change how the the we cover these companies. We need to change that. Honestly, everything needs to be inverted. Trusting a company based on how much money it has and how big it is is the wrong way to go about this business. Business idiots have learned that and they have moved their marketing strategies to create metrics that journalists accept and will print. And then they will sound good for people that don't know what they're talking about because the journalists don't even bother to pull the metrics apart themselves. And I understand why everyone's doing what everyone else is doing, but we can change things. But you as a listener, how can you change things? You're already doing it. Over the last year, I've seen a remarkable growth in just regular people being willing to push back against these narratives in pushing back in their businesses. Also, those of you with children can teach them not to aspire to be a fucking manager or an executive unless they know their fucking work. It is that simple. And I know it feels kind of bleak right now with everything going on in California, with everything going on with the government, with everything going on with OpenAI, with the amount of stories about how AI is going to take everything and take everything we have and recreate it in a shitty way. The fact that they're so desperate means that they're scared. And they're scared of the fact that you are willing to talk about this and you are willing to spit in their face. If you don't want to use AI, don't use AI. If you are curious about what it does, don't bother looking or fuck around with the free version a bit so that you only lose them money. If these things could automate you, they'd be automating you already. If they were close to doing so, they would be previewing the ways in which they do so. They're fucking scared. While the era of the business idiot is happening right now, it could potentially be coming to an end. Because as this movement ends, and I said this in the rock com bubble a year ago, they don't have any more growth markets. This is the end for them. Not saying the end of the companies. They'll work something out, but they don't have double digit growth in them past the next year, the revenues are small. And you, the listener who have been sitting there the whole time saying why the fuck does everyone say this? This thing is amazing. Whenever they use chat GPT and not really understanding why you're not the weird one they are. They cannot beat us because we actually do things. If you're a business city yourself listening to this, open a book, go and learn something, go and talk to a customer, start your car in the garage. I don't really know, I really don't encourage you to do that necessarily. But the point I'm making is this. Middle managers ruin lives. Business idiots ruin lives. I think everyone listening to this is going to have experienced several of them. The fact that management as a concept and that management as a discipline has died is a big part of this as well. Labor is really fucking hurting right now. I realize I'm kind of rambling, but I'll end on the simpler note. If you are around people who are scared, be scared with them. Offer them kindness. Offer them solidarity and a generous ear. Support their work. Support independent creators. Support people at the Vox Union who are currently battling against the company that saw fit to give Kara Swisher tens of millions of dollars that continually pushes powerful people like the CEO of Airbnb, which is a company which has ruined pretty much rentals everywhere. Don't know why Neil ipadow had to talk to him about his house and the Catskills because that happened. When you hear these stories, push back on them. Say I don't like this. Say fuck this. Support the Vox Union in the event that the Vox Union does not get their contract, do not visit a single family Vox site. You must walk away from that. Support workers. Support artists, Support creators. Support the people who actually do work and the business Idiots thank you for listening to Better Offline.
- [42:33]
Fashion Blogger
The editor and composer of the Better.
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Ed Zitron
Offline theme song is Matt Osawski.
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Fashion Blogger
You can check out more of his.
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Ed Zitron
Music and audio projects@matasowski.com m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat wheresyoured at to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
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