Working In The Dot Com Bubble ft. Matt Rosoff

Summary

Better Offline – "Working In The Dot Com Bubble" ft. Matt Rosoff

Podcast: Better Offline (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Host: Ed Zitron
Guest: Matt Rosoff, Editor-in-Chief of The Register
Date: January 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this incisive episode, Ed Zitron sits down with Matt Rosoff—a Silicon Valley veteran and media editor who’s witnessed the rise and fall of tech cycles since the early 1990s. Together, they dissect the atmosphere of the original dot com boom, what it was like to work in the industry during that era, and draw sharp parallels (and contrasts) with today's speculative AI bubble. The discussion blends first-person anecdotes with sharp industry critique, tackling topics such as the intoxicating optimism of 90s tech, retail investor risk, and today's echoing cycle of tech hype. If you've ever wondered what it actually felt like inside the bubble—or whether the new AI gold rush is just another mirage—this episode is for you.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Life Inside the Dot Com Bubble ([03:54]–[07:16])

• Matt’s Beginnings in Tech:
  • Moved to San Francisco in 1992 during a post-recession lull, started with internships and odd jobs.
  • Joined CNET in 1995 as employee #42, back when "content" was called an "online magazine."
  • Helped launch "Digital Dispatch," one of the first email newsletters—combining web updates with “occasional snarky commentary.”
  • Early tech skepticism: doubted MP3 players ("can only hold 12 songs, complete waste of time"), reflecting the era’s uncertainty about what would last.

"I think when I left [CNET] there were over 500 people working there...it was fun being at a company growing fast." —Matt Rosoff [05:03]

2. Wild Ideas, Startups, and Mass Hysteria ([07:16]–[14:06])

• Startup Mania:
  • Matt briefly worked for "the most incompetently run company" (online education startup: Catio), which had “no way to put the content on the Internet” and no basic digital infrastructure.
  • Venture capital was flowing to companies on the basis of PowerPoint decks and hype, not real products.

"They didn't even know what a CMS was...We were using Visual Source Safe, which is a Microsoft product for code." —Matt Rosoff [09:14]

• First Signs of Trouble:
  • Noticed companies like pets.com, Cosmo.com, and lackey.com ("it was kind of like TaskRabbit") burning cash on unsustainable business models.

"It was obvious that a lot of the specific individual companies...were completely hot air...they were selling dollars for 75 cents." —Matt Rosoff [10:29]

3. The Bubble Bursts: Early Warnings and Fallout ([14:39]–[19:55])

• Moments of Realization:
  • Awareness hit when startups had funding but nothing to show for it; employees were "play acting."
  • Company excesses: CNET's extravagant holiday parties, realizing post-IPO that “we’re losing money.”

"I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money. How naive I was." —Matt Rosoff [16:23]

• The Broader Landscape:
  • Infrastructure companies (like Lucent, WorldCom) collapsed as circular, “deal-for-deal’s sake” strategies unraveled.
  • Bubble felt real: web was universally exciting and transformative, even as the economics cracked.

4. Dot Com vs. AI Bubble: Parallels and Contrasts ([17:21]–[31:38])

• Skepticism Over AI Hype:
  • Matt is unimpressed by AI’s claimed “revolutionary” status, calls it more “autocomplete” than intelligence.
  • Compares immediate, obvious impact of the Internet/iPhone to the more opaque value proposition of today’s LLM-based AI.

"It was a lot more immediately obviously huge...When I look at AI, to me it doesn't seem nearly as revolutionary...it doesn't feel immediately massively obvious that this is a huge change." —Matt Rosoff [17:21]

• Cultural Context:
  • The dot com boom centered around public participation; everyone was gung-ho, and large-scale retail investment fueled the mania.
  • Today, AI’s speculative surge is driven more by venture capital and tech giants, with limited direct retail exposure.

5. Big Tech, Retail Investors & Consequences of Collapse ([31:38]–[47:36])

• Aftermath of the Dot Com Crash:
  • “People in tech weren’t permanently hurt” —many bounced back as the industry kept evolving.
  • Non-tech retail investors were the biggest losers, often wiped out after putting savings into risky IPOs.

"My attitude toward investing has always been caveat emptor. You shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it." —Matt Rosoff [34:42]

• Cautions for the AI Bubble:
  • AI risks are different: "mostly really large tech companies" could weather a drawdown, but massive credit deals and VC inflows are new.
  • Potential contagion due to concentration: “Nvidia has customers that make up 15–20% of their revenue each quarter...half to 80% of their revenue is going to disappear [if the bubble pops].” — Ed Zitron [47:36]

6. Tech Fads, Real Value, and End-of-Era Feelings ([49:38]–[56:43])

• The Nature of Bubbles and Tech Cycles:
  • No historical parallel to the unique mixture of hype, vaporware, and scale seen with OpenAI and the current wave.
  • AI's "killer apps" in everyday life remain elusive, especially compared to the Internet’s instant utility.
  • Teenagers (i.e., the “future demographic”) are mostly indifferent or openly mock AI outputs.

"If you've got teenagers who are like making fun of calling bad stuff AI—I'm actually serious, that is legitimately lethal." —Ed Zitron [56:43]

"Young people love Tiktok...They're scrolling vertical video all day." —Matt Rosoff [57:15]

7. AI Psychosis & Executive FOMO ([58:14]–[62:05])

• Executives Driven by Hype:
  • Ed posits that “AI psychosis” affects tech leaders, leading to mass overinvestment based on overestimating AI potential.
  • Matt links this to "anti-expert" social trends and a desire to feel ahead of the curve.

"That's kind of what I'm getting at...using a large language model convinces some people that they are in the future and creates this kind of religious feeling around it." —Ed Zitron [60:09]

• AI as Continuation, Not Revolution:
  • AI is seen as an extension of past tech cycles, not a bold new epoch.

"AI is just kind of this, 'hey, let's keep this playbook running.'" —Matt Rosoff [55:31]

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Notable Quotes

• On Early Tech Reporting:

  "My very first task there was to come up with an email newsletter which we called Digital Dispatch...occasional snarky commentary."
  —Matt Rosoff [03:54]

• On Realizing Company Instability:

  "I quickly got out of there...found a job at Directions on Microsoft...they were out of business by, I believe, early 2001."
  —Matt Rosoff [10:09]

• On Cultural Memory:

  “It was just presumed that this is the future. If you don’t want to be part of the future, that’s fine, but why don’t you go be a survivalist and live off the grid in the woods kind of thing.”
  —Matt Rosoff [30:14]

• On the Nature of Hype:

  “I don't recall...large scale where everybody in the industry was saying this is going to revolutionize everything and end users are kind of going, huh. I don't know...”
  —Matt Rosoff [51:47]

• On Tech Teen Skepticism:

  "My son is 15 and he's very cynical...They make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI. And he'll see a poster...he's like, ha, that's so AI."
  —Matt Rosoff [56:43]

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Key Timestamps

• Matt’s entry into dot com era: [03:54]
• Excess and culture at CNET: [05:03]
• Dot com startup failures: [09:14]
• Early bubble warning signs: [10:29]
• Public investment & retail boom: [27:08]
• AI skepticism vs. dot com optimism: [17:21], [24:39], [33:28]
• Tech industry resilience post-crash: [37:17]
• Comparison to AI investing scale: [46:04]
• Teen & user sentiment today: [56:43]
• Hype, psychosis, and executive FOMO: [58:14], [60:09]
• Broader cultural/tech era shifts: [54:12]

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Memorable Moments

• Ed and Matt riff on the absurdity and fun of dot com-era parties, including playing live music at the Fillmore—contrasted sharply with their retrospective financial naiveté. ([14:45])
• The frank admission of missing the immediacy of the Internet’s impact, versus the present-day murkiness around AI’s actual utility—especially among younger users. ([17:21], [56:43])
• Ed’s theory of “AI psychosis”: that being exposed to large language models tricks even industry leaders into believing hype, accelerating the cycle of overinvestment. ([58:14])

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Tone and Language

• The conversation is fast-paced, deeply knowledgeable, and laced with humor and cynicism—especially toward the excesses and myths of both old and new tech cycles.
• Both speakers balance nostalgia for the “go-go” past with clear-eyed skepticism of present-day claims.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a rare insider’s look at the dot com era, serving as a cautionary tale for today’s AI-chasing tech world. The hosts dismantle current hype, compare it to lessons from the past, and issue a warning about the social, personal, and financial risks when exuberance outpaces reality.

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Summary prepared for Better Offline listeners and tech history enthusiasts seeking to understand the cyclical nature of tech bubbles—and what, if anything, will be different this time.

Transcript

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[Matt Rosoff]

Media.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm of course your host Ed Zitron. And today I am joined for a dot com special by Matt Rosoff, the editor in chief of the Register who has been in Silicon Valley I believe 300 years.

[Matt Rosoff]

You said it was 325. Yeah. So I'm actually a vampire.

[Ed Zitron]

That's nice. Oh what, like Kevin o' Leary and Marty Supreme. Sorry, Martin Supreme. That's a thing he says in it. Have you heard about that?

[Matt Rosoff]

No, I don't know, but I haven't seen that yet. Ping pong doesn't really do it for me.

[Ed Zitron]

I didn't really like it, but there was a bit in it where Kevin o' Leary goes, I'm a fucking vampire. I've lived for this many years. And I read about this. I did not like the movie, but I read about it. I was like, oh, I would actually love it if this was true. And apparently they did film it with fangs and they should have done that. They should have just had him be a vampire at the end. However, he's regularly in the sun, so I'm not sure how they would have squared that circle. Anywho, nighttime only computers. So Matt, you were, what were you. We're just going to go straight into it. What were you doing in the dot com bubble era? Like where did you begin and where did you find yourself as it progressed?

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, it's an interesting blast from my very distant past. But I moved to San Francisco in 1992, sort of the tail end of the Gulf War recession. So there wasn't much going on then. I was interning, doing different kinds of odd jobs, copy editing, doing some of those kinds of things. And then in 1995 I joined a little startup that was going to publish content on the World Wide web. They didn't call it content and I guess it was. They called it an online magazine. They already had a TV network and that was cnet. So CNET is still around today in a very different format. But I was employee number 42 there. Started off as an editorial assistant and my very first task there was to come up with an email newsletter which we called Digital Dispatch. And it was mostly summaries of stuff that we were publishing on the site and then occasional snarky commentary. I remember a couple years later we did 10 reasons why Wired's IPO failed and one of them was the prospectus was printed on neon green and red paper, which we thought was funny and cute at the time. So anyway, that was a lot of fun. We were, you know, growing at a, at a very rapid pace. I think I was there from 95 to 99. Like I said, I was employee number 42 on the way in. And I think when I left There were over 500 people working there with.

[Ed Zitron]

That one was Cena, owned by Ziff Davis at the time.

[Matt Rosoff]

It was not. CNET was an independent company. It had a number of early venture investors including Paul Allen, the Microsoft co founder. I don't remember the other ones. The CEO was a guy named Halsey Miner. And no, it was completely, you know, it was privately held and we IPO'd in 97 or 98. I'm not.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, just before. That was just before things started to fall apart.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right. Well, 98 was still go, go, go. I think it really kind of went on until 2000, 2001 was when things started to turn. So, you know, it was fun being a company that was growing fast. I was able to do a whole bunch of different kinds of things. I was writing TV scripts and doing CD ROM reviews back when multimedia was a thing and writing features and I interviewed a two way pager from this little company called Research in motion before the BlackBerry was out and this, that and the other. I interviewed one of the first MP3 three players, I think it was the Rio. And I was like, well, interesting idea, but it can only hold like 12 songs. So this is a complete waste of time. It'll never work.

[Ed Zitron]

That was before the Creative Nomad.

[Matt Rosoff]

Then I think around the same time. I don't remember which one was first.

[Ed Zitron]

But yeah, I remember the Creative Nomad could have like 300 songs on it. I felt like, oh yeah, Sultan of Brunei. I, I was the fanciest man ever. 300 songs, how would I ever choose?

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, that's it. That's right. Yeah. No, this was a lot less than that. I mean we had to sort of do math and go backwards and we're like, wait, that's only 12 songs, that's worthless. So anyway, and then, you know, took some filthy.com lucre, went backpacking for a little bit with my girlfriend at the time who later became my wife. And then when I moved back, moved back to Seattle and I think we came back on the day that Microsoft lost a verdict during its big antitrust case.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, the Ms. Dos one, right?

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, this was, well, this was antitrust basically they had a whole bunch of different charges against them. Tying the browser to Windows was kind of the big one. And making deals with PC makers to bundle certain software and not allowing them to bundle other software and all kinds of stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, and incentivizing bundling Ms. Dos. Yeah, I vaguely know this story.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, it was really about like Netscape Navigator was the thing and that's what we were all using in 1995. It started with Mosaic and there was Navigator and then Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows 95 and four years later Navigator didn't really exist for all intents and purposes. So it was. But anyway, that was the day it was Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and he ordered them to be broken into two companies. An apps company which is Office and all those products, and an ops company which was Windows, I believe. Now, I may be remembering this slightly wrong and I don't have a resource in front of you. No, no, you refresh your mind.

[Ed Zitron]

I very recently covered this and you are bang on.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, but I think that was kind of the peak and I think that was actually perhaps the beginning of the end. So it's. Even though Microsoft had very little to do directly with the dot com bubble, there was sort of this sense that, oh, the tide is turning. Anyway, long story short, I moved back to Seattle and I found work with this startup. At the time they were called a Catio and the idea was that they were going to do online education so they wanted to have articles written and I was the computers tech guy. We were gonna, you know, training people on computer technology. And it was the most incompetently run company I have ever seen, been a part of. I walked in immediately realized that I needed to get out.

[Ed Zitron]

So nice.

[Matt Rosoff]

By way of example, they didn't have.

[Ed Zitron]

So you know, what year was this? Just survive.

[Matt Rosoff]

This was early 2000. So this is still. This was when companies were getting funding on a promise and going public on PowerPoint. Still. It was still, still at the peak, but we could see it starting to turn. So, you know, these guys had enough money to hire a bunch of people and they had a cool loft in Pioneer Square which is, you know, brick, brick building and all this kind of stuff. But they didn't. So they, you know, they hired me and they're like, go get some free, you know, find. Start hiring freelancers and we need to get some content up. They had no way to put the content on the Internet. Internet. They didn't have a cms. They didn't know what a CMS was. And we were using Visual Source Safe, which is a Microsoft product used for, you know, creating code and sharing code. It was that level. And I, I remember later here over, you know, hearing secondhand that somebody had overheard a very tense meeting between the CEO and the investors where one of the investors yelled through a closed door, we might as well just sell the servers back to the investments bank. So I quickly got out of there, found a job at Directions on Microsoft, did that for 10 years. And they were out of business by, I believe, early 2001.

[Ed Zitron]

So about when did it become obvious something was wrong?

[Matt Rosoff]

So it was never obvious that something was wrong large scale. But it was obvious that a lot of the specific individual companies that were part of this were completely hot air. There was nothing there. There weren't revenues, there weren't customers or they were, you know, selling dollars for 75 cents, basically. So, you know, pets.com was a big one. Cosmo.com was another one. And all these ideas came around later and were more nearly profitable in the second go round. So cosmo.com was just home delivery. It was like Instacart.

[Ed Zitron]

It's basically Cosmo was Instacart and Pets.com was. And I looked at Chewy's revenues recently. $3.1 billion in a quarter, $50 million of profit, which is good, but also one of those business. When I hear metrics like that, I get scared.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, it's fine. It's a, you know, it's a low margin retail business. That's fine. Retail. Retail's good. You know, it's, it's okay. It's real. Yeah, it's, it's. You sell things for more than you make them for. That's, that's how it's supposed to work. So I think there were just so many of those. The other one was there was a business and I think, think they were only based in Seattle called lackey.com. and I remember my, my boss at Directions at the time said that, you know, this is when I knew that the revolution was impending is when you have a website called lackey.com that is basically a personal assistant. I guess it was kind of like TaskRabbit, that kind of thing. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

But even TaskRabbit has never really. Is TaskRabbit even profitable.

[Matt Rosoff]

They got bought by IKEA, so it's buried now. I don't know. I don't think they ever were my.

[Ed Zitron]

Lackey dot com. Okay, I hate to interrupt to read a Wikipedia page, but it was founded in April 1999 by a guy called Brian McGarvey and another guy called Brendan Barnacle.

[Matt Rosoff]

I remember that name. Yeah, I remember the name with an I. Right, Correct.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, yes. Yeah, in the memo he had a memo that was on fuck company that said this is still a startup and he complains that it is now 6:45pm and there are only 12 people in our office. We have 65 people that work here in Seattle. It's totally unacceptable. So the more things change, the more things stay the same.

[Matt Rosoff]

I think that's true. Yeah. There are absolutely some similarities and some differences between today and then.

[Ed Zitron]

But what about the telecom side though? Did everybody just think that was going to work out until it didn't? Was there a point when the Lucents and the Windstars of the world got scared or scary?

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, I was less close to that at the time. I was pretty focused on end user consumer stuff. But I remember having friends who were sort of retail trading and talking to me about Sienna. Sienna Networks is going to be huge. And I think those busts came a little bit later. Right, with WorldCom. I think that was maybe a bit after the dot com bust and I'm a little bit less familiar with how all of that worked. But as I understand it, there was a lot of circular. There were a lot of circ deals and deals that weren't really deals and deals that were agreements, but actual no money changing hands.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it, it's interesting because as I dig into this and I've spent the last week or two digging into kind of how we got to this conversation, I realized it seems like there were two very specific. The dot com bubble was actually like two bits. It was the dot com website stuff. And then the follow up of the, the, the, what was it? The telecommunications fiber boom.

[Matt Rosoff]

Fiber boom. Yeah, it was the websites. There was definitely some circularity there too. Everybody knew that everybody was buying advertisements from each other. But you remember AOL bought Time Warner and then that valuation collapsed. I mean there were some really huge deals that turned out to be in the end worth almost nothing. And then I think once all of those things fell apart and the end user picture wasn't there, a lot of the infrastructure valuations came crashing down as well.

[Ed Zitron]

What was the moment you knew? Like when was the moment? What was, was there an event where you went, oh shit?

[Matt Rosoff]

And yeah, when I joined that startup and I, I couldn't believe they had any money. So that was, that was, that was spring of 2000. I was like, it felt like they were just sort of handing money out to anybody And I mean, this guy had a record, I think he had, had a CRM company that competed with Salesforce that either sold or went public. So he wasn't a total nobody. It's just they couldn't hire enough people to actually get anything smart done on time. It just wasn't. It just wasn't working. And everybody was kind of showing up to the office and play acting. There were some moments during the 90s that were, you know, kind of crazy. Like CNET, we've. They funded this party. I. I played bass and I was playing bass in sort of this pickup band at work, and they basically rented out the Fillmore for our holiday party. And, you know, we played on a stage in front of 1200 or however, maybe the film was not that big. 500 people. And then they had a. I can't remember the name of the, of the. You know, they had an actual working band come on after us. But it was a lot of fun. The singer we were playing with nailed Janis Joplin. She did a really spectacular job. We had a couple good songs, so. But that was. Those kinds of things were regular, like, that was just expected these big parties and nobody really asked where the money was coming from. I do remember after CNET went public, I don't remember what year this was. 98 or 99. I actually looked at an earnings report and I was like, oh, we're losing money. I didn't know you could stay in business and lose money. How naive I was.

[Ed Zitron]

That's so. See, that's the thing, I admit, as I've got further into finance in general and learn stuff, the amount of companies that just burn cash and then die, but also the ones that are burning cash right now and the amount of people who just say, yeah, it's actually fine. It's good, that happens. It's like a completely, like a completely different world that has only worked a few times in the past. It's actually not worked many, many more times.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right. Most of the time it doesn't work. But I think the bet is when it does work, it pays off spectacularly. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And the question.

[Matt Rosoff]

I don't think Google was ever losing huge amounts of money, but Amazon did for some years.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I've. I've looked into it and the companies that have actually grown and been successful have never burned anywhere near as much money as these AI companies. AWS was like 69 billion over nine years. And that was all of Amazon's capex. Not just aws. Focused.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, yeah, no, they. Yeah. And again, there Was to me, the Internet at large and the World Wide Web as we used to call it was a lot more immediately obviously huge. And it was going to change a lot of things and how business was done and how media was distributed. It was clear, it was just a question of when and where the technology had to go and which parts had to evolve. You needed consumers to have much more bandwidth before video became a realistic thing and so forth. And you know, there were going to be fits and starts, but I think everybody pretty much knew that it was not fake like these, some of these companies were going to succeed, something was going to happen. When I look at AI, to me it does not seem nearly as revolutionary. I don't even really like to call it AI because it's not intelligent. But that's the, that's the term that we use. But it's, you know, it's right, you know, matrix math, determining, determining, you know, basically autocomplete. So it's interesting, it can do some stuff that can be valuable in certain situations, but it doesn't to me feel immediately massively obvious that this is a huge change. The Internet did, yeah, web browsers did, the iPhone. The first time I played with one of those I was kind of a skeptic because I mean I had a Palm Pilot and I'd been, yeah, yeah, I had a compact, I had a.

[Ed Zitron]

Compact, so keep going.

[Matt Rosoff]

No, no, you know, and you're, you're, you're playing with that stylus. And then someone brought an iPhone into work and I was like, oh, Apple, whatever, they're not going to do this. And I was like, oh, responsive touch screen email, autocomplete maps. I'm like this thing's cool. And then it got better from there.

[Ed Zitron]

So yeah, I haven't felt that.

[Matt Rosoff]

And I've used all the chatbots, I've played around with them. I don't code. But you know, from what I understand from people who do is if you're a non coder, it can create some serviceable apps just based on your ideas, which seems pretty magical. But if you do code and you actually look under the hood, they're not maintainable, you know, you can't deploy them. You know, they, they tend to have a lot of problems unless you sort of know what you're doing. And I certainly know as a writer, you know, I can immediately detect AI generated writing and it's not good.

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One to settle, stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella. Edu to learn more.

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Ready to change your Life for just $2 a day, Orangetheory Fitness delivers one hour workouts that combine strength and cardio to help you burn fat, build muscle and feel unstoppable. Right now, get a full month of unlimited classes for just $62. Don't wait. This offer ends soon. Visit orangetheory.com or your local studio and start your transformation today. Offer ends January 31, 2026. New members only Premier Membership Performance Monitor and monthly billing order required Discount applies to first month only. Other terms apply. C Studio for details this is Jacob.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for Any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting, all linked and talking to each other. Check out [e-mail]. that's O D O O dot com.

[Ed Zitron]

That's actually a really good thing to focus on. So when you got into the Internet industry, was there that sense of wonderment? I'm not even being like a shill. I'm just like. Because I remember when I first used the Internet in, like, 1997, I want to say, like a child and being amazed by it. But even like the iPhone moment as well. But when you were getting into it in, like, the mid to late 90s, was there that sense of wonderment and excitement?

[Matt Rosoff]

Oh, absolutely. So there had been online services for a while. People used AOL and CompuServe, and, you know, you hang out in chat rooms and you. You do these keywords and it would call up sort of. I don't even remember what they were called, but I'd call them apps now. But the web was interesting because it was immediately accessible to everyone. Anyone could theoretically set up a website. And it was, yeah, immediately huge. And it was a little hard to separate some of the hype from legitimate excitement. But I remember in San Francisco, even in 1995, and you had had Wired magazines sort of sounding. Sounding the bells for it for several years by that point. But in 1995, everybody was online. Everybody was getting online, and, you know, you had tons of TV commercials, and everybody was talking about the World Wide Web on the evening news. And it just. It was immediately clear that this was a new thing and it was a new way that we were going to do a lot of stuff. Right? So, yeah, there was massive excitement over it.

[Ed Zitron]

Was there any kind of A.I. sorry, I see him leading question there. Were there dissenters? Were there people other than the obvious Newsweek article that everyone sends me every time? You know, the one I'm talking about, the guy who now makes weird glass things now. But was there dissent?

[Matt Rosoff]

There was. And I think a lot of the dissent, interestingly, was centered around some of the same kinds of criticisms that we've heard over the last five, six, seven years. So. So it wasn't that this is stupid or this isn't gonna work. It was, you know, there are no guardrails. There's no regulation. This thing is gonna run amok. It's gonna, you know, how are we gonna protect against fraud? How are we gonna protect against people, you know, using it for crime? How are we gonna protect against you know, this kind of information that maybe shouldn't be available to everybody. So there were those kinds of questions and people were slow down a little bit and put some guardrails and pass some laws around this thing. Most of that.

[Ed Zitron]

Imagine that.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, most of it didn't get done. You know, the Telecoms act, you know, whatever section 230, whatever, the big omnibus bill that, that was a part of, that was an attempt to deal with some of that stuff. But it was pretty, it was pretty lenient and was more about sort of protecting companies from, from liability. But there were some, yeah, there were some, at least some thought around it.

[Ed Zitron]

But, but there wasn't just people saying this won't work in the same way.

[Matt Rosoff]

Very few, very few. I mean, there, you know, I suppose you could go into the boardroom of a newspaper at the time and probably would have heard some arguments that now in retrospect sound insane. But you know, who wants to read on a screen? That was one that you sometimes heard. People want to have a piece of paper in their hand and you know, print is the way nobody wants to read on a screen. Or you know, this is, this is just sort of a nerd toy. This is never going to take off among, you know, mainstream people. There were issues with Internet access. It wasn't available everywhere, especially high speed. I mean, we were using pretty low speed modems for a very, very long time, particularly in rural parts of the country. So there was some skepticism around that. You know, and part of it, I have to be honest, is I was in my 20s at the time, so I think people at that age tend to be much more go, go about the future than perhaps old cynics as, as we are now.

[Ed Zitron]

But there wasn't any kind of, or maybe there was just, you can tell me, there wasn't a kind of bifurcation between people who were like pro Internet, anti Internet in the same way?

[Matt Rosoff]

No, no, I don't remember that anyway. No, I really don't think so. Yeah, it was all hands on deck. I mean, I mean again, like this was on tv, this was like, you know, advertisements, there were commercials, there were people on the evening news, you know, reaching mom. You know, my parents, who are boomers, they were fully aware and gung ho about the web by 97 or 98 and that's, I think that's who was investing. So, you know, one of the big differences between then and today is these companies were going public and it was really fueled in large part by retail investors, you know, wanted to buy stocks on the stock market in these new companies that represented the future. So, you know, you had doctors and dentists and, you know, professors with a little money and people putting their retirement savings into these things. And. And they were the ones who probably got wiped out the most in 2001 through 2004.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And I mean, was that before E Trade? Was it. Do you start to call a stockbroker? I literally don't know how they bought stock back then.

[Matt Rosoff]

I realized, yeah, I think E Trade started in the dot com boom, if I recall, late 90s, because I remember.

[Ed Zitron]

In England at the time the stories about how E Trade led to people losing tons of money. And there was one thing I'll credit the press with at the time as being like, yeah, you shouldn't bet on the stock market unless you know what you're doing.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right? Yes, index funds hold forever. That's the. That's the random walk down Wall street, the only investment strategy that works. But, yeah, people were playing, you know, they wanted. They saw these ridiculous returns and they wanted a piece of it. So, yeah, I think online trading was definitely a thing. You know, you had the Yahoo. Chat forums. That's where people would pump and dump these penny stocks. There were all kinds of.

[Public Investing Sponsor Voice]

Really.

[Ed Zitron]

There were like. There were actual pump groups back then.

[Matt Rosoff]

Oh, yeah. I mean, Yahoo. Yahoo. Yahoo Chat was sort of infamous for it. Like, you would hear about something, you'd hear. It was a lot like what happened with crypto in 2122. You know, someone issues a new token and everybody rushes in to buy it and then it crash. You know, there's a rug pull and it crashes like it was it. Those kinds of things were happening. But Yahoo. I remember being. That was the forum that I was the most familiar with back then. Who's probably going on. On AOL too.

[Ed Zitron]

That's magical.

[Matt Rosoff]

Oh, the.

[Ed Zitron]

The innocent days. It was the. I remember when I sound like I'm going to do the. Was a rocker how a speech in the end of Blade run of the things I've seen in telegram groups about ICOs. But it's. It's kind of. It's adorable to hear that stuff happening until you remember people lost lots of money. But it doesn't feel like it doesn't sound like maybe it was a different media climate. Like there was that kind of almost. There wasn't the noxious part of it where it was like, oh, if you don't get on the Internet, you're gonna be left behind. You're an idiot. Or maybe I'm wrong.

[Matt Rosoff]

Not so much of that, but it was. It was just presumed that. That this is the future. And if you don't want part of the. If you don't want to be part of the future, that's fine, but, you know, why don't you go be a survivalist and live off the grid in the woods kind of thing?

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Matt Rosoff]

It was just assumed. I mean, it's like, you know, do you watch tv? There was a time when if you said, I don't have a tv, you were very pretentious and very special. Now it seems like everybody's cutting cable, but so it was sort of like that. It was just presumed that everybody was eventually going to get on board. I mean, who needs a personal computer in their home? That was a real question in the late 80s, right? Oh, PC on every desktop. Yeah, sure, Bill, whatever you say, who wants one of these things? And then, you know, you find justifications for it. Oh, well, you can, you know, you can pay your bills automatically and you can do this and that. And suddenly when Internet Explorer was built into Windows and everybody could get online, that was the thing like that was, oh, of course everybody has to have a PC and we're all gonna be on the Web, surfing the Web.

[Ed Zitron]

It also feels like it was a genuine. A lot of these things were just too early and run too crazy. Because the actual fundament of it, it sounds like, was people were excited to get on the Internet, which was obviously a beneficial thing, and had immediate returns. Like, people could use it and say, this is useful in my life in this manner.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right. I think the initial thing was access to information. You could find out a lot of things very fast. And there were some communication aspects. Right. You could talk to anybody anywhere in the world pretty easily, pretty quickly. And then other things, you know, E commerce was very early. But, you know, suddenly you don't have to go to the bookstore and ask them to order. I worked at a bookstore for a year in 1990, and, you know, it was a thing. If you don't have the book in stock, they come in and you order the book, and then they come back a week later. And suddenly you just press a button and the, you know, the book will come. And then they started adding music. There were a lot of. Again, the lack of bandwidth among a lot of consumers did sort of stall the idea of digital video. But it eventually came around in 2001 or two. That's when YouTube really took off. Real networks had streaming video and Microsoft.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, real, Real player, yeah, buffering.

[Matt Rosoff]

I remember real player we're all buffering. I interviewed Rob Glazer a couple times. He had the right idea, but again Microsoft sort of, you know, took that market pretty quickly with Windows Media Player and then Apple came along and they kind of blew everybody else away. So yeah, all of the ideas were there and I think most of what we were sort of experimenting with later became real businesses. I mean, you know, Limewire and all the sort of music, MP3 trading sites. That was later, late 90s, I guess, early 2000s, that all eventually became legitimized through Spotify and Apple music and so on. So every idea was already there. It was just maybe it's a little bit underground, maybe it doesn't work quite right, It's a little clunky, it's a little kludgy. Or maybe the companies were just, you know, they borrowed too much money too fast and couldn't turn it around.

[Ed Zitron]

Which feels almost entirely different to the AI bubble. Like it's. They such inadella on the morning of recording this, Davos was saying, yeah, the thing that might make this a speculative bubble if nobody, if nobody buys it, if nobody buys AI. Not really. He's so cool. I love that we live in this era. I'm going to read you this sentence actually, because this really got me. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella has warned that AI risks becoming a speculative bubble unless its uses spread beyond big tech companies and wealthy economies. For this not to be a bubble by definition, it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread. He noted that a telltale sign of it's a bubble would be if only tech groups are benefiting from the rise of AI rather than the companies in other sectors. Yeah, that's good. Good shit.

[Matt Rosoff]

Self evident. Yes, correct. He's not wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Perhaps if no one uses also isn't his job. But nevertheless there was a question I had. So something that frustrates me with this whole conversation is how flippantly people say, oh, it's a bubble, but sometimes bubbles are good. What was the aftermath like?

[Matt Rosoff]

So this is where things get a little bit complicated because I don't think that you can really fairly separate events from other events that happen at the same time. So the dot com bubble did burst, but then you had 911 happen in September of 2001, sort of in the late middle of it. And that literally changed everything. It changed confidence, it changed where everybody's attention was going. You know, you had money flowing into completely different places. Everybody got much more conservative and so forth. So I think the real Effect of the dot com bust. I mean you had a lot of people my age, people who were in their 20s and the go go 90s, suddenly lose their jobs or suddenly not have the great paychecks that they had become accustomed to. And you had a lot of retail traders get wiped out. Some people lost their life savings or a big portion of their life savings. And you know, my, my attitude toward investing has always been caveat emptor. You shouldn't be betting if you can't afford it. You should put your money in an index fund and you should hold on to that until you retire. That's the safest thing to do. But you know, some people say, hey, I've got 10% of this of my holdings are play money and I'm just going to make some bets and see what happens. And then you've got other people who, who go too far with it.

[Ed Zitron]

But what about people in tech?

[Matt Rosoff]

You know, in tech most those skills didn't become useless. Right. So the technology was always changing. If you were, you know, Learning HTML and JavaScript and Java programming and then you could transition into new different kinds of things, the technology continued to evolve so people who had those technical skills could continue forward and find other interesting things to do. And then, then honestly, after the sort of telecoms bust 2004, 2005, you had a pretty long boom. I mean there was the financial collapse of 08 around the housing market, but the tech industry independently was building a lot of stuff. Tons of companies got started in the wake of the dot com bust and many of those companies are still around today. So I don't feel like people in the tech industry were permanently hurt. There was a couple years setback and then they generally were able to learn new skills, apply what they'd already learned and go find other things, some of which turned out to be really lucrative.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. But I think, how can I phrase this? I think that people are very flippant about the consequences of a potential bubble collapse. I think that that's really what I'm, that's where my concern is.

[Matt Rosoff]

You're talking about today.

[Ed Zitron]

Today, yes, because people compare it to the dot com bubble and they say, well after the dot com bubble there was that value, which is completely correct.

[Matt Rosoff]

But yeah, again I think, I think the other thing is about today. So the circumstances around the world are very different. You know, 92, 93, the Cold War was over. There was this peace dividend. They were turning army bases into national parks. Everybody was sort of enjoying good times. There was a book called The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. That sort of posited, hey, this is it. We're here in this permanent utopia world. And of course events intervene. And I think 911 was the big turning point there. And there's some other stuff around that time. The contested election of 2000. Now contested elections are such a common thing, we don't really think, think about them anymore. But that was, that was the first big one in my lifetime.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Matt Rosoff]

The situation today, I think you would agree, is very different. You know, we have an unprecedentedly chaotic leader in the United States who seems to be bent on ripping down old world orders that have enabled stability since World War II. I mean, if you're talking about seizing land from a NATO ally and you're seeing Europe strike all these free trade deals with the rest of the world and so forth and so on, we could go on and on about this. But I don't, I'm not a political expert, but the background scenario is very different. And I think you could almost make a case for AI being sort of the logical outgrowth of a certain number of years of rotten in the business and in the economy. And I think you've made that argument. You know, you can decide where that started. Did it start in the 80s and 90s when the US started offshoring and outsourcing everything to China and other countries? Did it start after that? But it's been somewhat clear for some time that a lot of the easy sort of technological gains that we got from the mobile revolution and from the cloud, those have mostly been gathered like those games.

[Ed Zitron]

We've conquered those lands.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah. And there's not that much more upside. You can get a little efficiency here and a little efficiency there. Everybody kind of knows how the Internet works, you know, what advertising looks like, you know, so this sort of, to me seems like it's sort of the last big push. And you know, you have a lot of people in big bureaucratic jobs who you've written about this. They don't really produce much day to day. They produce a lot of emails and a lot of presentations and they sit in meetings occasionally. They got to make a yes, no decision and they got to, you know, munch some data together and say, okay, it looks wiser if we do this instead of doing that. But, you know, a lot of it is performative and I think, you know, AI is great for that. I don't have to create the spreadsheet anymore. I don't have to create the presentation anymore. I don't have to write the email that no one's going to read and then they don't have to have to read it because they can have AI summarized for them. I think it's good for that kind of good enough stuff and there are a lot of jobs that are good enough. But I wonder that's a bigger problem with the economy. I don't think it's all about AI. I think AI is a symptom rather than perhaps a cause.

[Ed Zitron]

But even then it's like, can it do presentations? Because I've never been like, I've genuinely tried just to see if it could do it. It's never been able to do it. I think it's an interest.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, I mean, I've seen presentations created with AI that are pretty good. I think they get you a certain percentage of the way there and then you tweak it a little bit.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, yeah, it's just that. But then you kind of look at it and say, great. Did we really need to spend however many hundreds of billions of dollars to get a spreadsheet? Make. Foreign.

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[Narrator/Announcer]

You've never been one to settle, stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance at capella University. We help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella Edu to learn more.

[Orangetheory Fitness Sponsor Voice]

Ready to change your Life? For just $2 a day, Orangetheory Fitness delivers one hour workouts that combine strength and cardio to help you burn fat, build muscle and feel Feel unstoppable right now. Get a full month of unlimited classes for just $62. Don't wait. This offer ends soon. Visit orangetheory.com or your local studio and start your transformation today. Offer ends January 31, 2026. New members only. Premier membership, performance monitor and monthly billing required. Discount applies to first month only. Other terms apply. C Studio for details this is Jacob.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing. Slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting. All linked and talking to each other. Check out Odoo at O D O o dot com. That's O d O o dot com.

[Ed Zitron]

I also think that people are just being flippant about the idea of a financial collapse as well. That's what, that's what's worrying me as well.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right. But again, I think that there are a lot of potential reasons for a potential financial collapse and AI is one of some number. I don't think it. Again, the dot com bust was not entirely attributable to ridiculous valuations. There were things going on in other parts of the world. There was a change in confidence and I think here again, you've got, you've got a lot of disruption and a lot of disorder and a lot of chaos. So there are many, many things that could happen. But I agree, I think people maybe underestimate how deep this is. Then again, then again, who are the big investors in this? I mean, it's mostly really large tech companies with massive, massive revenues and massive cash flow. Mostly.

[Ed Zitron]

Not really anymore though. $178.5 billion of data center credit deals. You've got venture capital is actually. Yeah, venture capital is also. Half of venture capital is going into it. But the other thing that Shocked me as well was back then in the dot com boom, venture capital was so much smaller.

[Matt Rosoff]

Oh, it was tiny.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, no, teeny tiny.

[Matt Rosoff]

It was investment banking is where is where you found the money. So venture capital though, you know, that's not their money. They're playing with somebody else's money. So whose money are they playing with? Who are the LPs? Well, we don't really know, but it's, it's personal wealth funds, it's sovereign wealth funds. You know, it's Middle Eastern and other countries sovereign wealth funds. Sure, there's teachers pensions and there's university endowments and there's some other things that those LPs are holding that will actually harm, you know, normal working folk. But I think a lot of it is massive excess wealth at the top of society where people are looking for new, new kinds of returns. They're looking for outsized returns because all the easy money is sort of already taken. So I don't know if that. I think where it hurts is when you think about, okay, the, you know, the real estate carry on effects all the people who are employed now and will be suddenly unemployed. Those kinds of things could really hurt. But I just, it doesn't seem to me like you have the retail trader exposure as you did during the dot com boom. Yeah. Okay. If there's a huge AI bust and Nvidia loses a massive portion of its value, sure people are going to hurt who have invested in Nvidia, but they're not going to get wiped out. I don't see Nvidia disappearing. I don't see Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. I don't see any of those companies disappearing as a result of this and.

[Ed Zitron]

Neither do I. I think the thing that people need to understand is that a wipeout isn't going to be what hurts. It's going to be a drawdown. It's going to be because Nvidia 88% of their revenues, data center like and I even looked back for a premium I did a few weeks ago where it was the amount of revenue that like Lucent or Corning or whoever had in those specific segments or how weighted they were on their customers. Like I think Lucent's top customers were at and T and Verizon, but those only represented 13 to 14%. Nvidia has customers that make up up 15 to 20% of their revenue each quarter. They have massive centralization, around four to five customers. Their diversified revenue is dropping. It's just, it isn't that Nvidia is going to die. It's that half to 80% of their revenue is going to disappear. It happened with crypto with them.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's what I'm really worried about.

[Matt Rosoff]

They were never as, yeah, they were never as dependent on crypto. They've tried a lot of things over the years. I mean right. They were doing chips for self driving cars and all kinds of things. I am not as technical as the writers on the Register staff. Tobias Mann for example does a great job covering GPUs and data centers. It is posited that there are other potential uses for GPUs that could be very interesting in terms of high performance computing and some other things that are AI adjacent different kinds of data processing and so forth. So it may not what we call A.I. even if that, you know, that those end use cases turn out to be eh, you know, Vibe coding. Eh. Chatbots. Eh. Even though those aren't it. Some of these, some of the, some of the hardware may be repurposable into other functions. I don't think it's a jam.

[Ed Zitron]

But not at the scale that they're building though.

[Matt Rosoff]

No, no. Again I would be stunned if all of the data centers that are being promised by 2030 are actually built. But maybe, I don't know, I, I.

[Ed Zitron]

Also just don't think that that will be happening. I just don't see it happening. I am looking through the old dot com companies though. I really can't find anything like OpenAI. They are truly special. They are. It's like they took a bit of Global Crossing, a bit of Enron, a bit of Lucent, but also a bit of pets dot com. Just kind of amazed what Silicon Valley can still spit out. No, like innovations, but financial collapses like these. We've never seen one this big folks.

[Matt Rosoff]

It's massive. Yeah, there are a lot of commitments there and the valuation is massive, massive, massive. I do think their announcement last week or their acknowledgement that they're finally getting into advertising is interesting. And I know we've talked about this offline before but, but when I think about all of the information that a chatbot has about a heavy user, they actually should theoretically be able to target ads at least as well as Facebook and at least as well as Google. Right. So what happened?

[Ed Zitron]

So we don't know about that because Google and Facebook have very hard demographic data and very like a nuanced layer of cookies that can track. I don't know if especially as these are free users, we don't know how much actual personal data like Facebook's big Advantage was that when you registered, you gave them the demographic data they needed to target.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right, Right. I don't know how much they're collecting, but if they can still say, well, I know everything that you're interested in, everything that you've been talking about for the last year, they should be able to track that back to an individual user. I don't know. I don't know the details of it.

[Ed Zitron]

But they've said low billions of revenue. But it is, it is just interesting because in any. I, maybe you know this, I, looking through the history of the computer, have never seen a point when everybody was just screaming that something that didn't work would work.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, it's. Wow. It's hard to. It's hard to remember something that has been, you know, this hyped. And again, I always try to approach this with an open mind because I am older, so I tend to be more cynical with experience. But, yeah, I sort of shrug and I'm like, I don't quite understand the big deal here. It doesn't seem to really do what it's supposed to do. I mean, I'm still. Gemini has voiced it on me every day when I try to do Google searches. And it's, it's nearly, almost always slightly wrong, which is kind of worse than being completely wrong because it lulls you into this false sense of security and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't seem right. And then you go to the source link and it's just got it wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. The beginning of the Google chapter of my book that's coming out next year is I went to look for how many people, how many users Google has. And it's just me going insane as I get an AI generated answer that's generated based on two SEO articles that do not cite their sources.

[Matt Rosoff]

Right. There's a lot of that. So it's taking what, all this kind of garbage data. And I mean, as, as an editor, I'm. I have for the last 15 years been hounding reporters who try to source stuff off the Internet. I'm like, where'd you get that from? How do you know that's a reliable source? And AI just sort of absorbs it all and presents it and la de da, here you go. They don't have any, you know, they don't care. They don't have any checks. It just comes from wherever. So, yeah, the one, the one thing I would. What you were saying about never seen sort of this much time. I do remember before the Segway came out and people were saying, I can't remember who, if it was Steve Jobs or somebody, but somebody was saying this is going to revolutionize transportation and change cities. And we were like, whoa, what could this thing be? And then it was the segue. Maybe not, but that was one very small, isolated thing. I don't, yeah, I don't recall sort of large scale where everybody in the industry was saying this is going to revolutionize everything. And end users are kind of going, huh. I don't know how many times a day copilot comes up on my Windows PC and I dismiss it immediately because I didn't really want it to show up. It just sort of pops up. I hit a key combo too fast. I'm like, thanks. Nah, I'm good.

[Ed Zitron]

I keep thinking about the thing you said though. It's like the conditions are different but at the same time we've re like, it's not like we're in a new frontier of new ideas where everybody has something new that might work. It's. It almost feels like the end of something. It feels like the dot com bubble was created by the excitement about a beginning rather than this is people trying to pretend that something's happening and that we're not at the end of an era. I should say, I don't think we're at the end of society.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, I mean I think we are probably seeing probably beginning of new pretty major global shifts in power and some of the guiding societal philosophies that guide that will change. And yeah, there's a lot of different things going on right now. I started a climate section at CNBC and was very deeply entrenched in climate tech and, and some of the climate politics and things around that. And you talk to the green pilled folks and they think, you know, 80 years from now we're all doomed. So do I believe that? No, not necessarily. But I do feel like things are changing pretty rapidly and pretty dramatically on a lot of different fronts. And AI is just kind of this, hey, let's keep this playbook running. This playbook run.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, let's keep doing. That's really it. It's like keeping, let's keep doing what we've done. The whole time during the dot com bubble people were trying new shit.

[Matt Rosoff]

It was, it goes all the way back to semiconductors. I mean this, this tech boom has been going on since the, since the 1960s really in different waves. But it's been going on and on and on. I mean I do think like when Bill Gates said a computer on Every desktop, whenever that was in the 80s, that was nuts. And then it was a computer on every desk and in every home and that was even more nuts. But it happened. So, you know, I think that, that it's been, I don't want to say easy, but it's been running so well for so long that I think everybody just kind of wants it to keep running. And I'm not, I don't know, I'm not. I'm with you. I'm not seeing it yet. I'm not seeing a ton of day to day excitement. I mean, you know, you look at the teenage demographic, that's kind of who I always go to. And my son is 15 and he's very cynical about like, he jokes about obvious AI writing and like, they make fun of phrases and terms that are so AI. And he'll see a, you know, a poster and advertisement. He's like, ha, that's so AI. And it's, it's something that you scoff at and make.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, they're fuck. No. Okay, AI is fucked then. I'm sorry if, if you've got teenagers who are like making fun of calling bad stuff AI, right? I don't. I'm actually serious. That is legitimately lethal. Teenagers, young people.

[Matt Rosoff]

I'm.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm 39 years old now. Like I was. I've never been cooler a year of my life. But I know that when, if. Because that's because you read a lot of things that people try and say. Well, young people love AI. Not been my experience either.

[Matt Rosoff]

I don't. Young people love TikTok. Young people love Instagram reels. You know, they're on, they're on vertical, they're scrolling vertical. Video all day and, and compenate. I don't even want to say they love, you know, Snap or any social media because it's all, you know, it's all text change, right? It's all. You just got your different text strings. Like there's a lot of stuff that they love. Games, huge online games, you know, participatory games. But yeah, I don't see them hanging out all day with their chatbot. You know, once in a while, if you have something you really want to, you're curious and you want to experiment with something, it'll prototype something quite quickly for you. And I think people do that sometimes and find it useful. It's like, okay, this is a prototype. This is cool. This would have taken me six hours of grunt work to generate. Thanks for doing that for me. So there are some, you Know, I don't want to. I don't want to slam and say it's totally useless in all scenarios, because it's not. It's a. It's just sort of an extension of a computer. It's just a better computer in some ways. It helps you do certain things, sometimes.

[Ed Zitron]

Fast, but sometimes it's a better. That's the other thing. It's like, I have this growing theory about AI psychosis being far more common than people think, because I think that there is something that happens when people use a large language model and what they extrapolate from there that makes some people do insane things, like, I don't know, buy $200 billion worth of data centers and GPUs, and. And on one hand, you might argue, oh, that's just business idiots being business idiots. No, I think Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai used an LLM and went, holy shit, I need to do this. I mean, I got told once that Satya Nadella's whole reason that he started this facade was because he saw ChatGPT and wanted it in Bing. I think that there is. That Everyone is experiencing micro versions of Kevin Roose's ChatGPT told me to leave my wife thing. It's just, what do you believe AI will do next? Like, what do you think it will do, and what do you believe will happen if you don't use it today? And it's just very bizarre. Sorry, that was. That was more of a point than a question. I should be clear. But.

[Matt Rosoff]

Yeah, but how many people are subject to that? I don't think it's a huge number. Yeah, to some degree, the folks who are, you know, the. The Satya Nadellas of the world are, should we say, somewhat insulated from the trials and tribulations that most of us experience. They're insulated from their money. And if you have. Are someone like Sam Altman or Elon Musk, who is surrounded by a cadre of people who always say yes to everything you suggest and. And, you know, are constantly saying, you are a. You're a genius, man. You're a genius. I think, you know, some of these chatbots almost duplicate that mentality. Like, it's like, yeah, I want someone to tell me that whatever I'm doing, I am great and I am special and I have inside knowledge that nobody else has. That's a nice. But that is.

[Ed Zitron]

But that's kind of what I'm getting at. That using a large language model convinces some people that they are in the future and creates this kind of religious feeling around it. I don't know. I need to explore this idea more. I've just never, I've seen it in like game FAQs when people would argue between PlayStation and Nintendo and Xbox. I've seen, but not like that. You don't have people just saying the Xbox can do things it can't.

[Matt Rosoff]

But it's part of what we're seeing. I think that feeling, it's pervasive in our society right now. Regardless. We have this sort of strong current of anti expert. Right. The people who've studied this for years are no smarter than me. I'm really smart because I have my own special knowledge and nobody else has it. And I'm going to tell you the secret that I've learned that's really important. I think that whatever, if you want to call it psychosis or that narcissism that comes out of 15 years of social media, like that's. I am old enough to remember, in fact, Facebook didn't come out until I was already an adult and had a child. I mean Facebook didn't really become mainstream until I had a two year old kid. So I'm old. And I remember how sort of society changed and how people interacting with one another changed dramatically as social media became popular. And it was much more about, you're on stage all the time and look at my life and your life is better than my life. I mean there's some of that that's always been around, but it just wasn't so easy to indulge that side of oneself pre social media. So I think, you know, again, everything that was set in the past just continues along its way. Like I think again, I don't think AI is necessarily, you know, the one thing that is different. It's a natural outgrowth of a lot of different trends that have been happening for a long time.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I mean I keep thinking a long term joke I make is posting it's the beginning of history. History with a big smiley face. Because I, I actually worry that that's what like it's not that everything's coming to an end. It's that one era is ending and another is beginning aggressively and loudly.

[Matt Rosoff]

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius. All right.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that's a great place to end it. Matt Rosoff, editor in chief of the Register. Thank you so much for joining me.

[Matt Rosoff]

All right, thank you, Ed. Lot of fun.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you everyone to listen. Thank you everyone to listening. I'm not going to edit that out you'll have a monologue this week as well. Maybe I'll chuck you an extra one if I'm feeling generous. Thanks everyone for stomaching the four parter last week and yeah, catch you soon. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer is of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezetteroffline.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. Check out our Reddit thank you so much for listening.

[Matt Rosoff]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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