Behind the Bastards Presents: Better Offline

Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast series.

1. Man Who Killed Google Search
2. Sam Altman Is Dangerous to Society
3. Rot Society

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey everybody, Robert Gosh darn Evans for you here and
you know, but for the end of the year, to
celebrate and stuff, we've got our normal behind the Bastards
content coming to you. Do not worry, that's all going
to continue as normal. But we also wanted to highlight
some other shows in our network, most of which are
new and launched this year. We've got some compilation best
of episodes that we think the Bastard's audience is going

(00:27):
to love, and we're delivering to you now in a
special format with fewer ads. So today you're going to
hear some episodes of Better Offline, ed Zytron's excellent critical
tech industry podcast, which has taken the tech world by storm.
And I'm excited for you to learn about the man
who killed Google Search, about Sam Altman, the CEO of

(00:47):
Open Ai, and why he's dangerous for society, and what
ed Zitron calls the rot economy.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, that Zichron, And.

Speaker 4 (01:09):
In the next two episodes, I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
Going to tell you the names some of the people
responsible for destroying the Internet. And I'm going to start
on February fifth, twenty nineteen, when Ben Gomes, Google's former
head of Search, well, he had a problem.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
Jerry Dishler, then.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
The VP and GM of Ads at Google, and Shiv
Van Carterman, then the VP of Engineering, Search and Ads
on Google Properties, had called something called a code yellow
for search revenue due to and I quote emails that
came out as part of Google's anti trust hearing steady
weakness in the daily numbers, and a likeliness that it
would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics. That kind

(01:46):
of unclear for those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of
scientology esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain,
a code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss or
some sort of crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according
to Stephen Levy's Tell All book about Google, refers to
and I promise this is not a joke, the color

(02:07):
of a tank top that a former VP of Engineering
called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at
the company. It's essentially the equivalent of deafcom one and activates,
as Levy explained, a war room like situation where workers
are pulled from their desks and into a conference room
where they tackle the problem as a top priority. Any
other projects or concerns are sidelined and independently. I've heard

(02:30):
there are other colors like purple. I'm not going to
get into that, though, it's quite boring and irrelevant to
this situation. In emails released as part of the Department
of Justices antitrust case against Google, as I previously mentioned,
Dishla laid out several contributing factors. Search query growth was
significantly behind forecast, the timing of revenue launches was significantly behind,

(02:51):
and he had this vague worry that several advertiser specific
and sector weaknesses existed in search. Now I want to
cover something because I've messed up, and I've really want.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
To be clear about this.

Speaker 3 (03:01):
I've previously and erroneously referred to the code yellow as
something that Gomes raised as a means of calling attention
to the proximity of Google's ad side getting a little
too close to Search. I'm afraid the truth is extremely
depressing and so much grimmar. The code yellow was actually
the rumble of the goddamn rot economy, with Google's revenue
arms sounding the alarm that its golden goose wasn't laying

(03:24):
enough eggs. Gomes, a Googler of nineteen years that basically
built the foundation of modern search engines, should go down
as one of the few people in tech that actually
fought for an actual principle, and he was destroyed by
a guy called Prabaka Ragavan, a computer scientist class traitor
that sided with the management consultancy sect. More confusingly, one

(03:45):
of their problems was that there was insufficient growth in queries,
as in the amount of things that people were asking Google.
It's a bit like if Ford decided that things were
going poorly because their drivers weren't putting enough goddamn miles
on their truck. This whole story has personally upset me,
and I think you're going to hear that in this
but going through these emails is.

Speaker 4 (04:08):
Just very depressing. Anyway.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
A few days beforehand, on February first, twenty nineteen, Kristen
gil then Google's VP Business Finance Officer, had emailed Shashi Thakker,
then Google's VP of Engineering Search and Discover, saying that
the ADS team had been considering a code yellow to
close the search gap it was seeing, vaguely referring to
how critical that growth was to an unnamed company plan.

(04:34):
To be clear, this email was in response to Thaker
stating that there is nothing that the search team could
do to operate at the fidelity of growth that the
Ads department had demanded. Shashi forward did the email to
Gomes asking if there's any way to discuss this with
san Dar Pashai, Google CEO, and declared that there was
no way he would sign up for a high fidelity

(04:55):
business metric for daily active users on search. Thakkh also
said something that I've been thinking about constantly since I
read these emails, that there was a good reason that
Google's founders separated search from ads. I want you to
remember that line for later. A day later, on February second,
twenty nineteen, Thacker and Gomes shared their anxieties with Nick Fox,

(05:18):
a vice president of Search and Google assistant, entering a
multiple day long debate about Google's some lust for growth.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
This thread is.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
A dark window into the world of growth focus tech,
where the Kherr listed the multiple points of disconnection between
ads and search, discussing how the search team wasn't able
to finally optimize engagement on Google without hacking it, a
term that means effectively tricking users into spending more time
on a site, and that doing so would lead them
to and I quote, abandoned work on efficient journeys. In

(05:50):
one email, Fox adds that there was a pretty big
disconnect between what finance and ads wants and what Search
was doing. Every part of this story pisses me off
so much. When Gomes pushed back on the multiple requests
for growth, Fox added that all three of them were
responsible for Search and that Search was and again I
quote the revenue engine of the company, and that bartering

(06:13):
with the ads and finance teams was now potentially the
new reality of their jobs. On February sixth, twenty nineteen,
Gomes said that he believed that Search was getting too
close to the money and ended his email by saying
that he was concerned that growth is all that Google
was thinking about. On March twenty second, twenty nineteen, Google
VP of Product Management Darshan Cantac would declare the end

(06:36):
of the Code Yellow. The thread mostly consisted of congratulatory
emails until Gomes made the mistake of responding congratulating everyone,
saying that the plans architected as part of the Code
Yellow would do well throughout the year, enter probaka Ragavan,
then Google's head of Ads and the true mastermind behind
the code yellow, who would respond curtly saying that the

(06:58):
current revenue targets were addressed by heroic RPM engineering and
that the core query softness continued without mitigation, a very
clunky way of saying that despite these changes, query growth
was not happening at the rate he needed it to.
A day later, Gomes emailed Fox Andhaker an email he
intended to center Ragavan. He led by saying that he

(07:19):
was annoyed both personally and on behalf of the search team.
In this very long email, he explained in arduous detail
how one might increase engagement with Google Search, but specifically
added that they could increase queries quite easily in the
short term, but only in user negative ways, like turning
off spell correction or ranking improvements, or placing refinements effectively

(07:42):
labels all over the page, adding that it was possible
that there are trade offs here between the different kinds
of user negativity caused by engagement hacking, and that he
was deeply, deeply uncomfortable with this. He also added that
this was the reason he didn't believe that queries, as
in the amount of the things with people searching on Google,
were a good metric to measure search, and that the

(08:04):
best defense against the weaknesses of queries was to create
compelling user experiences that make users want to come back.

Speaker 4 (08:11):
Crazy idea there, what if the product was good?

Speaker 3 (08:14):
Not good enough of probaca, So little bit of history
about Google here. They regularly throughout the year do Core
updates to Search. These are updates that change the algorithm.
Let's say, okay, we're going to suppress this kind of thing,
we can elevate this kind of thing. And they are
actually the reason that search changes. It's why certain sites

(08:35):
suddenly disappear or reappear. It's why sites get a ton
of traffic, some don't get any, and so on and
so forth. But they do a lot of them. The
one that's really interesting and a little bastard and I
went and looked through pretty much the last decade of these.
The one that stood out to me was the March
twenty nineteen Core update to Search, which happened about a
week before the end of the code yellow, meaning that

(08:56):
it's very likely that this was a result of Prabaker's
blome shit. So This was expected to be one of
the largest updates to search in a very long time,
and I'm quoting Search Engine Journal there. Yet when it launched,
many found that the update mostly rolled back changes and
traffic was increasing to sites that had been suppressed by
previous updates, like Google Search's Penguin update from twenty twelve

(09:19):
that specifically targeted spami search results.

Speaker 4 (09:23):
There were others that were.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
Seeing traffic as well from an update that happened on
the first of August twenty eighteen that was a few
months after Gomes became head of Search. While I'm guessing here,
I really don't know. I do not work for Google.

Speaker 4 (09:36):
I do not have friends there.

Speaker 3 (09:38):
I think the timing of the March twenty nineteen Core update,
along with the traffic increases the previously suppressed sites that
one hundred percent were spamy SEO nonsense. I think these
suggest that Google's response to the Coyello was to roll
back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search.
A few months later, in May twenty nineteen, Google would

(09:58):
roll out a redesign of how ads we shown on
Google Search, specifically on mobile, replacing the bright green ad
label and URL color on ads with a tiny, little,
bolded black note that said ad in the smallest font
you could possibly put there, with the link looking otherwise
identical to a regular search link. I guess that's how
they managed to start hating their numbers.

Speaker 4 (10:20):
Huh.

Speaker 3 (10:20):
And then in January twenty twenty, Google would bring this
change to desktop, and the vergess John Porter would suggest
that it made Google's ads look just like search results
now awesome. Five months later, a little over a year
after the code yellow situation, Google would make Probakar Ragavan
the head of Google Search, with Jerry Dishler taking his

(10:43):
place as the head of Ads. After nearly twenty years
of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to the
SVP of Education at Google. Domes, who was a critical
part of the original team that made Google Search work,
who has been credited with establishing the culture of the
world's largest and most important search engine, was chased out
by a growth hungry managerial type several of them, actually

(11:06):
led by Probagar Ragavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.
As a side note, by the way, I use the
term management consultant there as a pejorative. While he exhibits
all the same bean counting morally young guided behaviors of
a management consultant. From what I can tell, Ragavan has
never actually worked in that particular sector of the economy.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
But you know who has. San Dhar Pashai, the CEO.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
Of Google, who previously worked at McKinsey, arguably the most
morally abhorrent company that's ever existed, having played roles both
in the two thousand and eight financial crisis, where it
encouraged banks to load up on debt and floored mortgage
backed securities, and the ongoing opiord crisis, where it effectively
advised Perdue Farmer on how to growth hack sales of
oxy content, an extremely addictive painkiller. McKinsey has paid nearly

(11:54):
one billion dollars over several settlements due to its work
with Perdue. But I'm getting sidetracked, but one last point.
McKinsey is actively anti labor. When a company brings in
a McKinsey consultant, they're often there to advise on how
to cut costs, which inevitably means layoffs and outsourcing. McKinsey
is to the middle class what fleshy in bacteria.

Speaker 4 (12:15):
Is the skin.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
But back to the emails, which are a stark example
of the monstrous, disgusting rot economy, the growth that all
costs mindset that's dominating the tech ecosystem. And if you
take one thing away from this episode, I want it
to be the name Prabakar Ragavan and an understanding that
there are people responsible for the current state of the Internet.

(12:47):
These emails, which I really encourage you to look up
and if you go to where's youreaed dot at, you'll
be able to see a newslet that has links to them. Well,
these emails tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance
and advertising teams, led by Ragavan, with the blessing of
CEO Sandhar Pashai, the McKinsey guy, actively worked to make
Google worse to make the company more money. This is

(13:10):
exactly what I mean when I talk about the economy,
an illogical, product destroying mindset that turns products you love
into torturous, frustrating, quasi tools that require you to fight
the company to get the thing you want. Ben Gomes
was instrumental in making search work both as a product
and a business. He joined the company in nineteen ninety nine,

(13:30):
a time long before Google established dominance in the field,
and the same year when Larry Page and Serge Britain
tried to sell the company to Excite for one million dollars,
only to walk away after Vinnard Coosler and Excite investor
and co founder of some Microsystems that's now a VC
who tried to stop people going to a beach in
Half Moon Bay, Well, he tried to low ball them

(13:51):
with a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars offer, also
known as a one hundred square foot apartment in San Francisco.
In an interview with Fast Companies Harry mc crack him
from twenty eighteen, Gomes frayed Google's challenge as taking the
page erank algorithm from one machine to a whole bunch
of machines and they weren't very good machines at the time.
Despite his impact and tenure, Gomes had only been made

(14:14):
head of Search in the middle of twenty eighteen after
John Gianderia moved to Apple to work on its machine
learning in AR strategy.

Speaker 4 (14:22):
Gomes had been.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
Described as Google's searches are beloved for his ability to
communicate across Google's many quite decentralized departments. Every single article
I've read about Gomes and his tenure at Google spoke
of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one
of the most important technologies ever made, a man who
had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a and

(14:44):
I quote Gomes here guiding light of serving the user
and using technology to do that.

Speaker 4 (14:51):
And when finally given the keys.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
To the kingdom, the ability to elevate Google Search even further,
he was rap fucked by a series of rotten careersts
trying to please Wall Street, led by Probakar Ragavan. Do
you want to know what Provakar Ragavan's old job was?
We Probacar Ragavan, the new head of Google Search, the
guy that ran Google Search, that runs Google Search right now,
that is running a Google Search into the goddamn ground.

(15:15):
Do you want to know what his job was? His
job before Google, He was the head of search for
god damn Yahoo from two thousand and five through two
thy and twelve when he joined the company. When Probakar
Ragavan took over Yahoo Search, they held a thirty point
four percent market share, not far from Google's own thirty
six point nine percent, and miles ahead of the fifteen

(15:38):
point seven percent that Microsoft's MSN Search had. By May
twenty twelve, Yahoo was down to just thirteen point four
percent and had shrunk for the previous nine consecutive months
and was being beaten by even the newly released Bing.
That same year, Yahoo had the largest layoffs in its
corporate history, shedding two thousand employees, or fourteen percent of

(15:59):
its overall work. For the man who deposed Ben Gomes,
someone who worked on Google Search from its very beginnings,
was so shit at his job that in two thousand
and nine, Yahoo effectively threw in the towel on its
own search tech, instead choosing to license Being's engine in
a ten year deal. If we take a long view
of things, this likely precipitated the overall decline of the company,

(16:22):
which went from being worth one hundred and twenty five
billion dollars at the peak of the dot com boom
to being sold to Verizon for four point eight billion
dollars in twenty seventeen, which is roughly a three thousand
square foot apartment in San Francisco. With Search no longer
a priority in making less money for the company, Yahoo
decided to pivot into web two point zero and original

(16:42):
content making sum beats that paid off, but far far
too many that did not. It spent one point one
billion dollars on Tumblr in twenty thirteen, only for Verizon
to sell it for just three million dollars in twenty nineteen.
It put Zimbra in two thousand and seven, ostensibly to
complete with the new Google Apps productivity, only to sell
it for a reported fraction of the original purchase price

(17:03):
to VMware a few years later. That's not his fault,
but nevertheless, Yahoo was a company without a mission, a purpose,
or an objective. Nobody, and I'll speculate even those leading
the company really knew what it was or what it did. Anyway,
just a big shout out right now to Kura Swisher,
who referred to Prabaka as well respected. When he moved

(17:24):
from Yahoo to Google. He absolutely nailed at Kara bang
up job. In an interview with zdnets Dan Farber from
two thousand and five, Ragavan spoke of his intent to
align the commercial incentives of a billion content providers with
social good intent while at Yahoo, and his eagerness to
inspire the audience to give more data. What anyway before that,

(17:47):
it's It's actually hard to find out exactly what Ragavan did,
though according to zd net, he spent fourteen years doing
search and data mining research ibm M. In April twenty eleven,
The Guardian ran an interview with Ragavan that called him
Yahoo's secret weapon, describing his plan to make rigorous scientific

(18:07):
research and practice to inform Yahoo's business from email to advertising,
and how under then CEO Carol Bart's the focus had
shifted to the direct development of new products. It speaks
of Ragavan's scientific approach and his steady process based logic
to innovation that is very different to the common perception
the ideas and development are more about luck and spontaneity.

(18:30):
A sentence that I'm only reading to you because I
really need you to hear how stupid it sounds and
how specious some of the tech press used to be. Frankly,
this entire article is ridiculous, so utterly vacuous that I'm
actually astonished. I don't want to name the reporter. I
feel bad. What about Ragavan's career made this feel right?
How has nobody connected these thoughts before? I have a

(18:53):
day job. I run a PR firm. I am a
blogger with a podcast, and I'm the one who said, yeah, okay,
drag Killer is now the CEO of the blood Bank.
Nobody saw this. Nobody saw this at the time. I
just feel a bit crazy. I feel a bit crazy.
But to be clear, this was something written several years
after Yahoo had licensed its search technology to Microsoft in

(19:16):
a financial deal that the next CEO, Marissa Maya, who
replaced Barts, was still angry about for years. Ragavan's reign
as what zd net referred to as the search Master
was one so successful that it ended up being replaced
by a search engine that not a single person in
the world enjoys saying out loud. The Guardian article ran

(19:38):
exactly one year before dramatic layoffs at Yahoo that involved
firing entire divisions worth of people, and four months before
Carol Barts would be fired by telephone by then chairman
Roy Bostock. Her replacement, Scott Thompson, who previously served as
president of PayPal, would last a whole five months in
the role before he was replaced by former Google executive

(20:00):
a Mayor, in part because it emerged he lied on
his resume about having a computer science degree. Hey brabaka,
did you not notice that anyway, whatever Barts joined Yahoo

(20:24):
in two thousand and nine, so about four years into
Braba Kha's bign of terror, I guess, and she joined
in the aftermath of its previous CEO, Jerry Yang, refusing
to sell the company to Microsoft for forty five billion dollars.
In her first year, she laid off hundreds of people
and struck a deal that I've mentioned before to power
Yahoo Search using Microsoft's being search engine tech, with Microsoft

(20:46):
paying Yahoo eighty eight percent of the revenue it gained
from searches, a deal that made Ya who are couple
hundred million dollars for handing over the keys and the
tech to its most high traffic platform. As I previously stated,
when Brabakar Ragavan, Yahoo's secret weapon was doing his work,
Yahoo's search was so valuable that it was replaced by
Bing its sole value. In fact, I mean, maybe I'm

(21:08):
being a little unfair.

Speaker 4 (21:10):
There's a way of.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
Looking at this that you could say that Yahoo's entire
value at the end of his career was driven by
nostalgia and association with days before he worked there. Anyway,
thanks to the state of modern search, it's actually very,
very difficult to find much about Ragavan's history.

Speaker 4 (21:25):
It took me.

Speaker 3 (21:26):
Hours of digging through Google and at one point being
embarrassingly to find three or four articles that went into
any depth about him. But from what I've gleaned, his
expertise lies primarily in failing upwards ascending through the ranks
of technology on the momentum from the explosions he's coursed.
In a wide interview from twenty twenty one, GLAD handler

(21:47):
Stephen Levy said Ragavan isn't the CEO of Google, he
just runs the place, and described his addition to the
company as a move from research to management. While Levy
calls him a world class computer scientist who has authored
definitive text in the field, which is true, he also
describes Ragavan as choosing a management track which definitely tracks
with everything I found out about him. Ragavan proudly declares

(22:09):
that Google's third party adtech plays a critical role in
keeping journalism alive and a really shitty answer to a
question that was also made at a time when he
was in aggressively incentivizing search engine optimized content and a
year after he'd deposed someone who actually gave a shit
about search. Under Ragavan, Google has become less reliable, and
it's dominated by search engine optimization and just outright spam.

Speaker 4 (22:33):
And I've said this.

Speaker 3 (22:34):
Before, but look, we complain about the state of Twitter
under Elon Musk and justifiably he's a vile, anti semi
racist bigger. We all know this, It's fully true. We
can say it a million times. However, I'd argue that Ragavan,
by extension Sundhar Pushai deserve one hundred times more criticism.

(22:55):
They've done unfathomable damage to society. You really can't fix
the damage they've been doing and the damage they'll continue
to do, especially as we go into an election. Ragavan
and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man
who dedicated a good portion of his life to making
the world's information more accessible, in the process burning the
Library of Alexandria to the goddamn ground so that Sundar

(23:18):
Peshai could make more than two hundred million dollars a year,
and Ragavan, a manager high by Sundar Peshai, a former
McKinsey man. The King of Managers, is an example of
everything wrong with the tech industry. Despite his history as
a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials. Ragavan chose
to bulldoze actual workers, people who did things, and people

(23:39):
that care about technology and replace them with horrifying toadies
that would make Google more profitable and less useful. Since
Prabakar took the reigns of Google in twenty twenty, Google
search has dramatically declined. With these core search updates are mentioned,
allegedly made to improve the quality of results, having the

(24:00):
adverse effect increasing the prevalence of spammy shitty search optimized content.
It's frustrating. The anger you hear in my voice. The
emotion is because I've read all of these antitrust emails.
I have gone through this guy's history, and I've read
all the things about Ben Gomes too. Every article about
Ben Gomes where they interviewed, is this guy just having

(24:21):
these dreamy thoughts about the future of information and the
complexity of delivering it at high speed. Every interview with
Ragavan is some vague bullshit about how important data is.
It's so goddamn offensive to me, and all of this
stuff happening is just one example of what I think
are probably hundreds of things happening across startups or that

(24:41):
have happened across startups in the last ten or fifteen
years and big tech two. And it's because the people
running the tech industry are no longer those who built him.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin left Google in December twenty nineteen,
the same year, by the way as the Code Yellow thing,
and while they remained as controlling shareholders, they clearly don't
give a shit about what Google means anymore. Probakar Ragavan

(25:04):
is a manager, and his career, from what I can tell,
is mostly made up of did some stuff at IBM,
failed to make Yahoo anything of no, and fucked up
Google so badly that every news outlet has run a
story about how bad it is. This this is the
result of taking technology out of the hands of real
builders and handing it to managers at a time when
management is synonymous with staying as far away from actual

(25:27):
work as possible. When you're a do nothing looking to
profit as much as possible, who doesn't use tech, who
doesn't care about tech, and you only care about growth, well,
you're not a user.

Speaker 4 (25:38):
You're a parasite.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
And it's these parasites that have dominated and are now
draining the tech industry of its value.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
They're driving it into a goddamn ditch.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Ragavan's story is unique in so far as the damage
he's managed to inflict, or if we're being exceptionally charitable,
failed to avoid in the case of Yahoo on two
industry defining companies, and the fact that he did it
without being a CEO or founder is remarkable. Yeah, he's
far from the only example of a manager falling upwards.

(26:10):
I'm going to editorialize a bit here. I want to
think about your job history. I want you to think
about the managers you've had. I've written a lot about management,
and specifically to do with remote work and the whole
thing around guys who don't do work, who are barely
in the office telling you you need to be in
the office. This problem is everywhere. Managers are everywhere, and

(26:32):
managers aren't doing work. I'm sure someone will email me
now and say, well, I'm a manager and off I'll
do work.

Speaker 4 (26:39):
All the time. Yeah, make sure you do.

Speaker 3 (26:41):
That's why you're emailing me telling me how good you
are at your job. People who actually do work don't
feel defensive about it. People who do things and are
part of the actual profit center, they don't need a
podcast to tell them they're good at their job.

Speaker 4 (26:56):
What I think the problem is.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
In modern American corporate society is that management is no
longer synonymous with actually managing people. It's not about getting
the people what they need. It's not about organizing things
and making things efficient and good. It's not about execution.
It's about handing work off to other people and getting
paid handsomely. And if you disagree easy at better offline

(27:20):
dot com, I will read your email, maybe I'll even respond.
But the thing is management has become a poison in America.
Managers have become poisonous because managers are not actually held
to any kind of standard. No, only the workers who
do the work are What happened to Ben Gomes is
one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things to happen in

(27:42):
the tech industry. It's an absolute joke. Ben Gomes was
a goddamn hero. And I really need you to read
the newsletter and read these emails. I need you to
see how many times him and thaka Great Guy as
well were saying, hey, growth is bad for searching. Thing
that Ben Gomes was being asked to do was increase

(28:02):
queries on Google. The literal amount that people search. There
are many ways of looking at that and thinking, oh shit,
that's not what you want. Surely you don't want no queries.
You don't want people not using it at all. But
queries going upwards linearly suggests that if you're not magic
good to use the growth, at least the people are

(28:24):
not getting what they want on the first.

Speaker 4 (28:25):
Try, which, by the way, kind of feels like how
Google is nowadays.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
When you go to Google and the first result, and
the second result, and the fifth result and the tenth
result just don't get what you need because it's all
that SEO crap. Now, this is all theorizing, But what
I think prabagar Ragavan did was I think he took
off all the fucking guidelines on Google Search. I think
he rolled back changes specifically to make search worse, to

(28:50):
increase queries, to give Google more chance to show you adverts.
I am guessing don't have a source telling me this,
but the pattern around on the core search updates. The
fact that Google Search started getting worse toward the middle
and end of twenty nineteen and unquestionably dipped in twenty twenty.

(29:11):
Well that's when Prabaka took over that's when the big
Man took the reins. That's when drack Killer got his
job at the blood bank. And this is the thing.
There's very little that you and I can actually do
about this. But what we can do is say names
like Probakar Ragavan a great deal of times so that
people like this can be known, so that the actions

(29:33):
of these scurrilous assholes can be seen and heard and
pointed at and spat upon. I'm not suggesting spitting on anyone,
No violent acts. No can be pissy on the internet
like the rest of us. Now I'm ranting. I realize
i'm ranting, but this subject really really got to me.
But it's not the only one. In the next episode,

(29:56):
I'm going to conclude this sordid three part fiasco with
a few more examples, and how many of these managers,
these bean counters, devoid of imagination or ability or anything
of note save for that.

Speaker 4 (30:13):
Utter slug likability.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
To protect oneself, I want to talk about how these
people manage to obfiscate their true intentions by pretending to
be engineers, by pretending to be technologists, and pretending to
be innovators. I want to tell you all about how
Adam Masseri destroyed Instagram, and I want to tell you
how little Sam Altman has achieved other than making him

(30:37):
and his friends rich. See you next time. Thank you
for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of
the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check
out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski

(30:59):
dot com, m A T T O s O W
s ki dot com. You can email me at easy
at better offline dot com or check out better offline
dot com to find my newsletter and more links to
this podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 5 (31:14):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
zait Tron. Also, as I discussed in the last episode,
Sam Mortman has spent more than a decade accumulating power

(32:03):
and wealth in Silicon Valley without ever having to actually
build anything, using a network of tech industry all stars
like LinkedIn co founder and investor Reid Hoffman, and Airbnb
CEO Brian Chesky to insulate himself from responsibility and accountability.
Yet things are beginning to fall apart as years of
half baked ideas and terrible, terrible product decisions have kind

(32:25):
of made society sour on the tech industry, and the
last month has been particularly difficult for Sam, starting with
the chaos cause by open ai blatantly mimicking Scarlet Johansson's
voice for the new version of chat GBT, followed by
the resignation of researchers who claimed the open ai prioritized

(32:47):
and I quote shiny products over AI safety. After the
dissolution of open AI's safety team, I know, it's just
it's almost cliche. Shortly thereafter, former open ai bos bard
member Helen Toner revealed that Sam Altman was fired from
an open Ai because of a regular pattern of deception,
one where Aortman would give inaccurate info about the company's

(33:09):
safety processes on multiple occasions, and his deceat was so
severe that open aye's board only found out about the
launch of chet GPT, which, by the way, is open
Ayes first product that really made money, arguably the biggest
product in tech. Do you wont know how they found
out about it, Well, they found out when they were
browsing Twitter. They found out then, not from the CEO

(33:31):
of open Ai, the company which they were the.

Speaker 4 (33:33):
Border very weird.

Speaker 3 (33:35):
Toner also noted that Aortman was an aggressive political player
with the board, correctly by the way, worrying the and
I quote again that if Sam Altman had any inkling
that the board might do something that went against him,
he'd pull out all the stops, do everything in his
power to undermine the board and to prevent them from
even getting to the point of being able to fire him.

(33:57):
As a reminder, by the way, the Board's seeded in
firing Sam Altman in November last year, but not for long,
with Ortmand returning as CEO a few days later, kicking
Helen Toner off of the board along with Ilia Sudskava,
a technical co founder that Altman manipulated long enough to
build chat GBT and announced it him the moment that
he chose to complain Sidskava, by the way, has resigned now.

(34:19):
He's also one of the biggest technical minds there. It's
so how is open are going to continue anyway? Last week,
a group of insiders at various AI companies published an
open letter asking for their overlords, for the heads of
these companies, for the right to warn about advanced artificial
intelligence in a monument genuinely impressive monument to the bullshit

(34:40):
machine that Sam Altman has created. While there are genuine
safety concerns with AI, there really are, there are many
of them to consider. These people are desperately afraid of
the computer coming alive and killing them when they should
fear the non technical asshole manipulator getting rich making egregious
promises about what AI can do. Airis you have to

(35:01):
live up to Sam Altman's promises. Sam Alton doesn't. This
is not your friend. The problem is not the boogeyman
computer coming alive. That's not happening man. What's happening is
this guy is leading your industry to ruin, and the
bigger concern that they should have should be about what
Leo Ashenbrenner, a former safety researcher Open ai, had to
say on the Duaquesh Ptel podcast, where he claimed that

(35:23):
security processes of open ai were and I quote egregiously
insufficient and that the priorities that the company were focused
on growth over stability of security. These people are afraid
of open AI potentially creating a computer that can think
for itself that will come and kill them at a
time where they should be far more concerned about this

(35:44):
manipulative con artist that's running open AI. Sam Altman is
dangerous to artificial intelligence. Not because he's building artificial general intelligence,
which is a kind of AI that meets or surpasses
human cove capabilities by the way, kind of like data
from Star Trek. They're afraid of that happening when they
should be afraid of Aortmand's focus. What does Sam Moortman

(36:07):
care about? Because the only thing I can find reading
about what Sam Mortman cares about is Sam bloody Aortman.
And right now the progress attached to Sam Mortman actually
isn't looking that great. Open AI's growth is stalling, with
Alex Cantruwitz reporting that user growth has effectively come to
a halt based on a recent release claiming that chat

(36:29):
gpt had one hundred million users a couple of weeks ago,
which is, by the way, the exact same number that
the company claimed chat gpt had in November twenty twenty three.
Chat gpt is also a goddamn expensive product to operate
with the company burning through capital at this insane rate.
It's definitely more than seven hundred thousand dollars a day.

(36:51):
It's got to be in the millions if not. What
it's insane and what open ai is aggressively monetizing chat GPT,
both the customers and to businesses. It's so old, fiercely
far from crossing the break even rubicon. They keep leaking
and they'll claim, oh, I didn't put that out there.
They keep telling people, oh, it's making billions of revenue,
but they never say profit. And eventually someone's going to

(37:15):
turn to them and say, hey, man, you can't just
do this for free or for negative. At some point,
Sacha Nadella is going to call Sam Ortman and say, Sammy, Sammy,
it's time, Sammy.

Speaker 4 (37:28):
It's got to be a real business.

Speaker 3 (37:29):
I assume he calls him that because the supernatural. But
as things get desperate, Samuel was going to use the
only approach he really has, sheer force of will. He's
going to push open ai to grow and sell into
as many industries as possible. And he's a specious hype man.
He's gonna be selling to other specious hype men, the
Jim Kramers of the world are going to eat it up.

(37:51):
And they're all all of them. The mock Bernioff's, the
Sacha Nadellas, a Sun dapashies. They're all desperate to connect
themselves with future and with generative AI and those that
he's selling to the company's brokering deals. Yes, even Apple,
they're desperate to connect their companies to another company which

(38:13):
is building a bubble, a bubble inflated by Sam Altman.

Speaker 4 (38:18):
And I'd argue that this.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Is exceedingly dangerous for Silicon Valley and for the tech
industry writ large, as executives that have become disconnected from
the process of creating software and hardware follow yet another
non technical founder hooking unprofitable, unsustainable, and hallucination prone software.
It's just very frustrating. If there was a very technical

(38:40):
mind at these companies, they might walk away. And I'm
not going to give Tim Cook much credit, but looking
into it, I can't find any evidence that Apple is
buying a bunch of GPUs, the things that you use
to power these generative AI models. I found some researcher
and analysts suggesting that they would buy a lot. But
now open Ai is doing a deal with Apple to

(39:03):
power the next iOS, and it's interesting. It is interesting
that Apple isn't doing this themselves. Apple a company with
hundreds of billions of dollars in the bank. I believe
that pretty much prints money. That alone makes me think
it's a bubble. Now, it might look like an asshole
if it comes out they have. But also, why are
they subcontracting this to open ai when they could build

(39:25):
it themselves, as Apple has always done. Very strange, It's
all so peculiar. But I wanted to get a little
bit deeper into the Sam Almonds story. And as I
discussed last episode, Ellen Hewett of Bloomberg she's been doing
this excellent reporting on the man and joins me today
to talk about the subject of a recent podcast, Sam

(39:47):
Almond's Rise to Power. So tell me a little bit
about the show you're working on.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
The show is the new season of Foundering, which is
a serialized podcast from Bloomberg Technology. So this is season five,
and in every season we've told one story of a
high stakes drama in Silicon Valley. I was also the
host of season one, which came out several years ago,
was about we work, and we've done other companies since then,
and season five is about Open AI and Sam Altman,

(40:22):
and I think we really tried to, you know, cover
the arc of the company's creation and where it is now.
But in doing so, we really tried to do a
character study of Sam Altman, like he's a very important
person in the tech industry right now, with a lot
of power, and we really wanted to ask ourselves a

(40:42):
question and to help listeners ask themselves a question. Should
we trust him? Should we trust this person who is
currently in a position of a lot of influence and
about whom there have been very serious, you know, allegations
and questions raised about, you know, to put it in
the words of the opening eyeboard, his not consistently candid behavior.

(41:06):
And I think it's, you know, my hope is that
we give listeners a chance to hear kind of the
whole story. And it's like broader you know, when there's
news that's happening, it can happen so quickly it's hard
to get a step back. And I think what the
show really does is it collects a lot of information

(41:27):
in one place, and we also have lots of new
information that you won't hear anywhere else, and interviews with
people who you know have worked with Sam, who knew
him when he was younger. We have an interview with
Sam's sister Annie, from whom he is estranged, and there's
a lot of material in there. I think that tries
to get closer to this answer of like, what should
we make of this person? How should we think about

(41:50):
checks and balances of power when we have these companies
that are, by all appearances, gathering a lot of power
and there for the people who are running them have
a lot of power as well. So we have it's
a five episode arc, five episode season, and the first
three episodes are out now to the general public and
the last two will come out on subsequent Thursdays, And

(42:13):
if you would like to binge the whole season right away,
the episodes are available early to Bloomberg dot com subscribers.

Speaker 3 (42:22):
So you've just started this series about Sam Altman and
his upbringing indoors, so the growth of Open Ai and
Looved and everything. Who are the people that have helped
him get where he is today?

Speaker 4 (42:34):
Though?

Speaker 1 (42:36):
So the making of Sam Altman is a really interesting
part of the overall story of Sam Altman. You know,
many people know him as the CEO of open Ai
because that's the role he's been in when he has
risen to prominence, you know, beyond Silicon Valley. Like I
think for many years he was well known in Silicon Valley,
but this is like now he's kind of a household name,

(42:58):
and so it's important to understand where Sam came from.
You know, he's been in the valley for you know,
since two thousand and five, I think is when he
started college two thousand and four, two thousand and five
at Stanford. Then he dropped out, and then he joined
y Combinator, the now famous startup accelerator. But he was
actually part of the first cohort of founders ever in

(43:21):
in YC.

Speaker 3 (43:22):
Along with Witch as well, right, yes.

Speaker 1 (43:24):
Including the the co founders of Twitch and of Reddit,
and so EMMITTT. Sheer, you know, for those who know
Emmit Sheer has a like very short seventy two hour
cameo in the open Ai very Sam been firing saga.
But yes, Emmett and Sam were both in the same
YC batch. So when we think about Sam's early career

(43:46):
in Silicon Valley, I think what's important to know is
that he rose very quickly, in part because he was
very successful in making these strategic, advantageous friendships and connections
with already established people in the valley. The most important
one is Paul Graham, who is the you know, one
of the founders of y Combinator and you know basically

(44:09):
like immediately took Sam under his wing when Sam joined
this first batch of YC. And yeah, Paul's a really
important mentor to Sam. He's kind of the first person
who really sees in Sam this you know, ambition, this
hunger for power, this like drive to really build bigger

(44:31):
and bigger companies, even when you know, they met when
Sam Altman was nineteen, so Paul like sees him as
a teenager and sees this future potential. And so yes,
you know, not only did Paul become a mentor to
him and sort of helped build Sam's profile over those
early years because he would you know, Paul Graham is
very famous for writing these essays about how to build

(44:52):
startups and how to build the best startups, and if
you're at all interested in building startups, you've read many
of them. They're kind of like almost like a startup bible,
and in many of them. He extols the virtues of
Sam Altman. He talks about Sam's ambition, He talks about
Sam's cunning, his ability to like you know, make deals
and like think big and.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Never actually think Sam Moltman is done. Is what I've found.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
Yeah, there are some interesting you know, I've read many
of the things Paul has written about Sam. Some of
my favorite ones include Paul writing that within three minutes
of meeting Sam, this was when Sam was nineteen, Paul
thought to himself, Ah, so this is what a young
Bill Gates is like, or you know, this is what
Bill Gates was like at nineteen, I think is the

(45:35):
exact quote. So, you know, he really build him up
in this way. And I do think Paul had like
unique insight into Sam, like they were close. They in
many ways I'm sure still are. But it is this
interesting role where you know, Paul met Sam when he
really didn't have much to his name, and he really
elevated him early on through his writings as this like
startup founder to emulate right, that other founders should be

(45:57):
emulating Sam. And then of course, as Sam progresses in
the Valley, he also starts to write these like startup
Wisdom essays in a similar style to Paul. And then,
of course, the most important thing that happens is that
in twenty fourteen, when Paul decides he no longer wants
to run hy Combinator, which at this point is a
much bigger vehicle than it was when Sam first started.

(46:19):
It has no longer just a few stops totally. It
has produced Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb. This is a big job,
right like running y Combinator. And when Paul wants to
hand it off to someone, you know, he has said
that the only person he considered giving this to was Sam.
So in twenty fourteen, when Sam is I believe twenty
eight years old, he becomes the president of y Combinator,

(46:40):
and this is you know, he had started a startup,
it didn't really work, he sold it and was starting
to tabble in angel investing. And at that point Paul
really elevated Sam to this new position of power. And
then he ran YC for a while and then started
open Ai. And in starting open Ai, he also leveraged
these like very useful connetions with particularly powerful people who

(47:03):
could help him, such as Elon Musk, who was able
to give the vast majority of the pledged funding to
start open Ai. Later, when Elon Musk splits from open Ai,
Sam makes his very powerful partnership with Satya Nadella to
help fund open Ai. Another important partnership that Sam has made,
you know, much earlier on was his friendship with Peter Teel.

(47:25):
And one of the things Peter Teal does is also,
you know, gives him millions of dollars to start investing.
This is like before Sam takes over at White Yeah.
And you know another thing that Paul did that really
Paul Graham did that really helped Sam was also he
gave Paul had the opportunity to be one of the
first investors in Stripe. He was offered the chance to

(47:48):
invest thirty thousand dollars for four percent of Stripe, which,
of course now that Stripe is enormous, we all know
how valuable that was, and Paul split it with Sam.
He was like, oh, I might as well this with Sam.
So Sam has said that that fifteen thousand dollars for
a two percent of Stripe has been you know, one
of his best performing Angel investments.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
Ever, that was some point he Austen is always where
he got fifteen grand from He was still working on
looped at the time. It's funny how perf litric anyway.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
Yeah, my guess is fifteen grand was I don't actually
know this, but my guess is fifteen gen was not
hard for him to pull up. And it's one of
those things where it's really is, you know, access to
access and relationships are the sorts of things that can
build a career and can lead to great wealth. Right
like Sam is now you know, by our own internal

(48:36):
accounts and by other lists, a billionaire. And this money
comes from you know, not from open Ai, but from
these angel investments that he's made early on that have
been enormously successful.

Speaker 3 (48:48):
So you called him in one of the titles, the
most Silicon Valley Man Alive. Is this what you're getting at,
this kind of power player mentality.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Yeah, I think it's it reflects a few things. One
that even though he is you know, he's in his
late thirties, he's been a player in Silicon Valley for
such a long time, you know, close to two decades.
And also that he's just someone who is extremely well connected.
So even before he took over y Combinator, which I

(49:16):
think you could argue is like kind of king of
the startup world in some sense, like Y combinators, like
you know, the topics totally. Even before he took over
I y comminator, I think he was extremely well connected.
He's very social, he's very helpful, he's very efficient, Like
many people have told me stories in which he you know,
calling Sam and talking for five minutes has solved their

(49:38):
problem because he knows exactly the right person to call
to fix it, or you know, he's really good at
making deals. I think it's just clear he's extremely well
integrated into this world and has very successfully moved up
the Silicon Valley status ladder to the point where he
is now, which is kind of you know, one of
the you know, he's the CEO of the one of

(50:00):
the arguably hardest companies in the valley right now. And
I think that that's not luck right, Like he didn't
just come up with He's not like a nobody who
came up with an idea. It's like he has the
connections and has parlayed his connections into power to bring
him to the point he is now.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
So, in your experience talking to people about Sam Ortman,
how technical is he? Do you think what if you
heard because you say there he wasn't lucky. But he
also does not appear to have successfully run a business
because Luke shut down two people, well, two executives tried
to get him fired from there, he got fired from
y Combinator, which did very well, but at the same

(50:37):
time YSI was basically a conveyor belt for money at
one point, not so much recently. Yeah, it just it
feels weird that this completely non technical, semi non technical
guy has ascended so far.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
My sense is that's not maybe the most fair description. Like,
I think Sam is incredibly smart, and people say this
a lot, and you know, I believe them. I think
his special skill, you know, he obviously knows how to
like he's an engineer, he has training. I'm sure he
can build a lot of stuff. It seems like his
comparative advantage. His special skill is relationships, deal making, figuring

(51:12):
out who exactly is the right person to help him
in whatever he's really trying to get done, and figuring
out the best way to get something to happen. You know,
one of the people I spoke to is someone who
knows Sam from when he was younger and knows him personally,
and said that his superpower is figuring out who's in
charge or figuring out who is in the best position

(51:34):
to help him, and then charming them so that they
help him with whatever goal he's trying to get done.
And I think that, like, yeah, one could argue that
that's actually a really good skill set if you want
to build a very big company, which you know, I
think at this current moment he has, right like opening
eyes really, you know, you can there's a lot that

(51:57):
you can say about whether they're upholding their digital mission
or that. You know, that's up for debate, but I
think that they've obviously been commercially successful so far, so.

Speaker 3 (52:08):
It feels like Silicon Valley on some level. And I
just to give some thoughts here within the two episodes
I'm doing here, the pattern I've seen with sam Oltman
is that everyone seems to want him to win, and
there's almost a degree of they will make it. So
have you seen anyone who's really a detractor or anyone

(52:31):
who's not pro sam Oltman, because it's interesting how few
people are in tech.

Speaker 1 (52:38):
Well, there is. I won't get too into it because
this is in some of the future episodes which will
drop in future weeks. But you know, I would say
in in in some of the conversations that I've had
off the record about people about in some of the
conversations I've had off the record with people about Sam,
I think, you know, my general impressions are people often

(53:00):
do find him impressive in terms of what he has
gotten done, you know, the size and scale of his ambitions,
and the way that he has generally been able to
make that happen. I think there's also a lot of
people who you know, are willing to privately share some
gripes that they might have about him. Also, you know,

(53:22):
in recent weeks, we've seen people be a lot more
public about some of those gripes. We have Helen Toner,
a former former board member at open AI who voted
to remove Sam last November, saying publicly in the last
few weeks that Sam lied to her and the other
former board members that his you know, misdirection made them
feel like they couldn't do their jobs. And she has

(53:45):
also said that people were intimidated to the point where
they did not feel comfortable speaking more publicly about negative
experiences they'd had about Sam, that they are afraid to
speak more publicly about you know, times that he has
been honest with them or you know, has in which
they've had challenging experiences. And that has also been reflected

(54:07):
in some of the private conversations I've had in which people,
you know, they might have complaints or they might have
had like challenging situations with him, and I think they
just feel like the risk calculus is not worth it
to come out and say something like that. But you know,
there have been bits and pieces where people have come
out and said things that you know, Sam has. You know,

(54:30):
another thing that the board members have said was that
Sam had been deceptive and manipulative, and that's also followed
up by or not followed up. There was also, I
think back in November, a former Open Eye employee who
had tweeted something publicly about that, you know, saying that
Sam had lied to him on occasion, even though he
had also always been nice to him, which I think
is a very interesting combination of.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Charter Silicon Valley though I'm afraid of dealing with them,
but they were so nice to me.

Speaker 1 (54:59):
And yeah, of course that you know, that person has
not elaborated more publicly about what they meant. But I
think I think, you know, I think this is why
people are asking themselves these questions, which is like, you know,
the more that we hear about what the board uh
was thinking before they decided to fire Sam, I think
the more people are wondering about what are the patterns

(55:20):
of behavior that he shows that you know that led
to the board trying to make this drastic move.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
Yeah, that's actually an interesting point. So when Samulton was
fired from open AI, there was this very strange reaction
from Silicon Valley, including some in the media, where it
was almost like Hunger Games, everyone doing the symbol thing
where everyone's like, oh, we got to put Sam Alton

(55:48):
back in, isn't it kind of strange? We still don't
know why he was actually fired though, I mean Helen
Tona has elaborated like, I've never seen a have you
seen anything like this in your career?

Speaker 1 (56:00):
I think that it has been surprising that there has
not been more of a clear answer. I think, you know,
as as time has gone on, like we have heard
a little bit more Like I think Helen Toner has,
you know, to her credit, tried to give more information

(56:20):
in recent weeks about what happened. I think, you know,
people were obviously asking this question six months ago, and
so I think like there's been a little bit of
a delay and trying to get this this answer, and
I wonder if maybe there just isn't like a very
neat answer to it, and so and then in that

(56:40):
absence we get this kind of more of a like murky, multifaceted,
multi voiced answer. But I, yes, I agree that it
is sort of surprising that there that there hasn't been
more clarification on what exactly happened or a little bit
more granular detail about what led up to it.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
So on today, aihype in general said that a bit weird.
I'll keep going, why do you think there's such a
doulf between what Sam Altman says and what chat GPT
can actually do?

Speaker 1 (57:13):
What Sam Moltman says, what are you talking about specifically, as.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
In he says it will be a super smart company. Yeah, yeah,
that he'll be all of these things.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Well, this is something that we get into in episode three,
which is a personal interest of mine, which is kind
of the psychology of the AI industry right now. And
you know, I what I find so interesting about this
and what we try to delve into in episode three
and kind of throughout the series is these kind of
like extreme projections about AI. And in the industry you

(57:43):
see both positive ones and negative ones, and I think,
you know, the negative ones, that's what looks like AI dooomerism,
AI existential risks, sometimes called AI safety depending on your
point of view. But you know, it's these projections that
you know, superintelligence might very quickly and very soon learned
to self improve in a way that allows it to

(58:05):
rapidly outstrip our control and our capabilities and could lead
to the extinction of humanity. There are so many interesting
things to say about the psychology of believing that our
human race might either be wiped out or incredibly changed
within our lifetimes, and we get into that in episode three.
I think I really wanted to get into the psychology

(58:26):
of someone who believes that AI doom is just around
the corner, and so we talked to someone who sort
of became convinced of this belief soon after the twenty
sixteen Alpha Go matches in which the go playing AI
beat the the world's champion in Go, and he talks
about yeah, no longer, you know, deciding not to make
a retirement account because he was like, what is the

(58:48):
point by the time I reach retirement age, either the
world will be dramatically different and money won't matter, or
will all be dead. And I think that, even though
some people might scoff at that, that's like a real
belief that people believe that this, you know, these extreme
possible scenarios are in our near future. And on the
other hand, we also see extreme projections in a positive direction.

(59:12):
You know, this idea that AI is going to unlock
a whole new era of human flourishing, that we might
expand beyond our planet, that we might be able to
give say what abundance abundance, right exactly. You know, one
of the things we do I believe in episode three
is is do a little bit of a supercut of

(59:33):
Sam all been talking about abundance. It's it's pretty clear
that this is a way that he likes to frame
our AI future is going to be this future in
which everyone has plenty, right, everyone has, you know, access
to intelligence, abundant energy, abundant access to superintelligence that can
help us live kind of our best lives and beyond
our wildest dreams. Right. And I you know, obviously Silicon

(59:57):
Valley is a place where people like to make grandiose statements.
But this is beyond that, right, This is not just yeah,
this is not just like you know, we joked about
we work.

Speaker 4 (01:00:09):
We works.

Speaker 1 (01:00:10):
Mission statement was to elevate the world's consciousness, like well,
galaxies of human flourishing for eons beyond us. Like that
is on another scale, right, Like we're talking about something
that is sort of at an unprecedented level of extreme rhetoric.
And I think that's really interesting. I think it is
a very powerful motivator, both in a you know, in

(01:00:32):
the Doumer sense and also in the abundance sense. People
believing that what they're working on is the most important
technological leap forward for humanity. Talk about a motivating reason
to work on this technology, right, talk about a way
to feel powerful, feel like you're making a huge difference.
I think that's a really key part of what's driving

(01:00:53):
a lot of work in AI right now.

Speaker 4 (01:00:55):
Striving a lot of work.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Sure, But with Altman himself, there is the golf. It
is a million mile golf between the things he says
and what chat GBT is, even even on the most
basic level, capable of doing and will be capable, And
it just feels like it almost feels like he's become
the propagandist for the tech industry, and it's very strange

(01:01:19):
to me how far that distance is. Because you've got
the AI doomers and the AI optimist I guess you'd
call them, but Allmond doesn't even feel like he's in
with He's just kind of He'll say one day that
he doesn't think it's a creature, the next one will
say it's gonna kill us, or it all just feels
like a pr campaign but for nothing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
Yeah, it has been interesting to try to answer the question.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
One of the questions we tried to answer in the
podcast is does Sam actually believe you know, because as
you mentioned, there are some early clips of him, you know,
and when I say earlier, I mean around the time
of founding open Ai twenty fifteen or so. There's some
clips of him talking about, you know, saying somewhat jokingly
that AI might kill us all. But there's also this,

(01:02:08):
you know, very famous blog post that he wrote in
twenty fifteen in which he says that, you know, basically,
super intelligence is one of the most serious risks to humanity,
you know, full stop. And so it's clear that at
some point in his life, he believed kind of what
we might now call a more doom ory outlook. But
as time has gone on, he has you know, offered

(01:02:30):
views that are a little bit more measured and more positive.
You know, he tends to you know, in his big
media tour of twenty twenty three, he tended to talk
about how AI was going to. You know, his projection
was that AI would radically transform society, but that it
would be net good, right that like, overall we would
be glad that this happened, and that it would improve lives,

(01:02:53):
even if in the short term or for some people
it might prove to be bringing a lot of challenges
as well.

Speaker 3 (01:03:01):
And so it is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
You know, I think one of the interesting things about
is about him is it is a little hard to
pin down exactly what he thinks. I think you're right
that I wouldn't consider him like a gung ho effective accelerationist.
I would not consider him a dumer. He is like
somewhere in this large gulf in between there. But I
think he's also smart enough to know that making grandiose

(01:03:24):
projections about what AI could bring is a compelling story, right,
like is a story that he can help sell by
being like a spokesman for it. And often that is
the role of a CEO is to be a really
good storyteller, to bring the pitch of the company to
the public, to investors, to potential employees, to customers, to

(01:03:47):
try to sell them on this vision of the future.
And I do think Sam is good at that. There
is an interesting tidbit in episode three in which we
interview a fiction writer who was actually hired on contract
by open Ai to write like a novella about AI
futures and things like that. And yeah, he just talks

(01:04:09):
a little bit about you know, the novella is not
I think in active use within open ai, but they
did at some point, see they did at some point
see value in commissioning it. And I think you know
something that the author Patrick House explains to us is
you know that open a Ey, just like many other startups,
is really motivated by story, right, and that Sam Altman

(01:04:31):
is inspired by fiction. You know, it's inspired by certain
kinds of sci fi. I think this is not unique
to Sam. Many founders in Silicon Valley, you know, Elon
Musk has talked about this as well, are driven to
create things in part because of what they read about
when they were younger, that you know, these dreams of
the future. And so it's just interesting to get his

(01:04:52):
perspective on how motivating a story can be, and how
motivating this compelling story of like, oh, we're building something
that's gonna change the course of human history. Like you
just couldn't ask for a more powerful motivating force.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
So as Alman accumulates power and as he kind of
sends to the top of open AI, do you think
he's done there? Do you think there's going to be
another thing he starts? Because it feels like you've discussed
like UBI and all these other things. Do you think
he has grander ideas that he wants to pursue?

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
Well, obviously I can't speak to what's inside Sam's.

Speaker 3 (01:05:31):
I don't know the man's mind, but I.

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
Mean past indicators would suggest yes, Like I think he
has proven pretty consistently that he's someone who you know,
is you know, as much as he might focus on
one project with a lot of effort, like he is
cooking things on the side, Like this is a man.
This is going to be an extended metaphor, but this
is a man working at a stove that has like
six burners, not one. And you know he we already

(01:05:57):
know that.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
What are you saying, sorry, he's got a big house, He's.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
Got multiple houses. The uh the you know, we already
know that. You know. In addition to running open ai,
he has funded and or helped prompt the founding of,
or has you know, been very involved in investing in
or supporting other startups that you know, are part of

(01:06:23):
this kind of ecosystem of businesses that are connected to
an AI future or might benefit in an AI future.
So for example, Helion, which is a nuclear fusion company
which he has invested a ton of money into. I
think he has said publicly that you know, his his
vision is that this is a potential way to provide

(01:06:44):
abundant energy that could then power the technology that we
need to you know, uh, improve AI to the level
that we're hoping that it can get to, or that
he's hoping that it can get to. At the same time,
you know, we've talked a little bit about universal basic income.
This has been something that Sam has been a proponent
of and an advocate of since at least twenty sixteen,

(01:07:07):
when he was running y Combinator and they started a
side research project to study universal basic income by giving
cash payments to families in Oakland of I believe a
thousand dollars a month. That research project is still ongoing.
It's now moved away from y Combinator and is associated

(01:07:29):
with open Research, which is I believe funded by open Ai,
and so it has kind of moved with Sam to
his new role. And of course he also co founded
this company called world Coin, which used these silver orbs
machines to scan to take pictures of your iris and

(01:07:50):
give everyone register every individual human as like a unique
human individual, and to create this eyeball registry in which
by which one could in the future distribute a universal
basic income. So he's funding these energy companies. He's like
involved in these sort the sort of crypto eyeball registry

(01:08:11):
project that will help distribute UBI in this future that
he's imagining. Like I think it's safe to say he's
definitely thinking about things beyond just open AI for the
future and imagining like, Okay, well, if we have this
piece that's growing, what else will we need to support it?
And I'm sure there are other things he's working on
that we don't even know about, right, Like I know
he has also funded some like longevity bioscience projects and

(01:08:34):
things like that. He's I guarantee he's thinking about stuff
beyond what we know about.

Speaker 3 (01:08:41):
Final question, why do you think the entire tech industry
has become so fascinated with AI?

Speaker 4 (01:08:47):
Do you think it's just oldman or is it something more?

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
I do think chat GBT started heating up this interest
that was already percolating a little bit in the tech industry.
But it does seem like something about chatchept capture the
public imagination made people imagine very seriously for the first time,
how AI could affect their lives, their lives individually. It
used to be kind of this abstract thing that was

(01:09:12):
a little farther away, or maybe you understood that like
you were interacting with AI sometimes, like when you would
look at like flight price predictors. Yeah, exactly. But you know,
I think as we you know, we talk about this
in episode three, but that you know, chat chipet wasn't
even new technology. It was actually just a different user

(01:09:34):
interface on a model that already existed GPT three point five.

Speaker 4 (01:09:39):
And so.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
To me, that actually speaks I guess to the power
of like making a technology accessible to everyone. And in
a way that was like easy to use and you know,
for better or worse. That kind of got a lot
of people in this like public momentum of people thinking
about AI feeling you know, just feeling like it had
rapidly increased its capabilities in a short period of time.

(01:10:04):
And yeah, something about that really captured not just you know,
the minds, but also the hearts of people and like
getting them really thinking about, like what could a future
like this look like? And I think while some people
were excited, a lot of people also reacted with fear
right and like I think in the valley like you
will hear a lot of people more openly discussing their

(01:10:28):
fears of sort of like job loss or or just
like dramatic social change that might come about in the
next ten or twenty years. The feeling I get in
conversations that I have in and around San Francisco is,
you know, even people who are pretty deep in this
technology are uncertain about whether it's going to be overall

(01:10:50):
good or bad. Like they're just uncertain of how to
look back on this time, like whether it will have
ended up being elite forward for humanity or something differ.

Speaker 3 (01:11:12):
Aortman has taken advantage of the fact that the tech
industry might not have any hypergrowth markets left, knowing that
chat GPT is much like Sam Altman, incredibly adept at
mimicking depth and experience by parroting the experiences of those
that have actually done things. Like Sam Altman, chat GPT
consumes information and feeds it back to the people using

(01:11:34):
it in a way that feels superficially satisfying, and it's
quite impressive to those who don't really care about creativity
or depth, And like I've said, it takes advantage of
the fact that the teche CoSystem has been dominated and
funded like people who don't really build tech. As I've
said before, generative AI things like chat gpt, anthropics Claude,

(01:11:57):
Microsoft's co Pilot, which is also powered by chat gp.
It's not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Sam
Mortman is promising. It will not be a virtual brain
or imminently human like or a super smart person that
knows everything about you, because it is, at its deepest complexity,
a fundamentally different technology based on mathematics and the probabilistic

(01:12:19):
answer to what you have asked it, rather than anything
resembling how human beings think, or act or even know things.
Generative AI does not know anything. How can a thing
think when it doesn't know a anyone? I want to
ask bradlight Cap Miramurati, Sam Ortman any of these questions

(01:12:39):
just once hear what they fart out. No, Well, chat
GBT isn't inherently useless. Almand realizes that it's impossible to
generate the kind of funding and hype he needs based
on its actual achievements, and that to continue to accumulate
power and money, which is his only goal, he has
the speciously hype it and he has the hype it

(01:12:59):
to wear healthy and powerful people who also do not
participate in the creation of anything.

Speaker 4 (01:13:06):
And that's who he is. I've been pretty mean about
this guy, I really have. But he does have a skill.

Speaker 3 (01:13:12):
He knows a mark, he knows he knows how to
say the right things and get in the right rooms
with the people who aren't really touching the software or
the hardware. He knows what they need to hear, he
knows what the vcs need to hear. He knows quite
aptly what this needs to sound like. But if he

(01:13:33):
had to say what chat GBT does today, what would
he say, Yeah, yeah, it's really good at generating a
bunch of TEGs that's kind of shitty.

Speaker 4 (01:13:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
Sometimes it does math right and sometimes it does it
really wrong. Sometimes you ask it to do It can
draw a picture, Hey, what do you think of that?
These are all things, by the way, that if like
a six year old told you'd be like, wow, that's
really impressive, or like a ten year old, perhaps because
that's a living being. CHATGBT does these things, and it
does it I know it's cheesy to say, but in
a soulless way, but it really does that because and

(01:14:03):
the reason all of this, the writing and the horrible
video and the images, the reason it feels so empty
is because even the most manure adjacent press release still
has gone through someone's manure adjacent brain. Even the most
pallid empty copy you've read has gone through someone. A

(01:14:24):
person has put thought and intention in, even if they're
not great with the English language. What chat GPT does
is use math to generate the next thing, and sometimes
it gets it pretty right. But pretty right is not
enough to mimic human creation. But look at Sam Altman.

Speaker 4 (01:14:43):
Look who he is. What has he created? Other than wealth?

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
For him and other people. What about Sam Moltman is
particularly exciting. Well, he's been rich before and his money
made him even richer.

Speaker 4 (01:14:58):
That's pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:14:59):
He was why Combinator don't ask too much about what
happened there. Just feels like sometimes Silicon Valley caun't wipe
its own ass. It can't see when there's a wolf
amongst the sheep. It can't see when someone isn't really
part of the system other than finding new ways to
manipulate and extract value from it. And Sam Altman is

(01:15:21):
a monster created by Silicon Valley's sin, and their sin,
by the way, is empowering and elevating those who don't
build software, which in turn has led to the greater
sin of allowing the tech industry to drift away from
fixing the problems of actual human beings. Sam Altman's manipulative
little power plays have been so effective because so many

(01:15:43):
of the power players in venture capital and the public markets,
and even tech companies are disconnected from the process of
building things, of building software and hardware, and that makes
them incapable or perhaps unwilling to understand that sam Altman
is leading them to a deeply desolate place and on
some level it's kind of impressive how he succeeded in

(01:16:04):
bending these fools to his whims, to the point that
executives like Sunned Up a Shi of Google, are willing
to break Google Search in pursuit of this next big
hype cycle created by Sam Altman. He might not create anything,
but he's excellent at spotting market opportunities, even if these
opportunities involve him transparently lying about the technology he creates,

(01:16:27):
or while having his nasty little boosters further propagate these bullshit,
mostly because they don't know, or perhaps they don't care
if Sam Morton's full of shit. Maybe it doesn't matter
to them. It doesn't matter that Google Search is still
plagued with nonsensical AI answers that sometimes steal other people's work,
or that AI in legal research has been proven to

(01:16:50):
regularly hallucinate, which, by the way, is a problem that's
impossible to fix. It's all happening because AI is the
new thing that can be sold to the market, and
it's all happening because Sam Altman, intentionally or otherwise has
created a totally hollow hype cycle. And all of this
is thanks to Sam Moltman. And a tech industry that's

(01:17:11):
lost its ability to create things worthy of an actual
hype cycle to the point that this spacious, non technical
manipulator can lead it down this nasty, ugly offensive anti
tech path. The tech industry has spent years pissing off customers,
with platforms like Facebook and Google actively making their products
worse in the pursuit of perpetual growth and ashamedly turning

(01:17:34):
their backs on the people that made them rich and
acting with this horrifying contempt for their users. And I
believe the result will be that tech is going to
face a harsh reprimand from society. As I mentioned in
the rock Com bubble, things are already falling apart. WHEB
traffic is already dropping. And what sucks is the people

(01:17:55):
around Sam Moultman should have been able to see this,
even putting aside his I've listened to an alarming amount
of Sam Onman talk, and I'm a public relations person,
who the hell am I I'm someone who's been around
a lot of people who make shit up. I've been
around a lot of people whose job it is to
kind of obfuscate things, and quite frankly, almost really obvious.

(01:18:20):
I'm not gonna do any weird light to me esque
ways of proving he's lying. He just doesn't ever get
pushed into any depth. No one ever asks him really
technical questions or even just a question like, Hey, Sam,
did you work on any of the code at open AI?

Speaker 4 (01:18:36):
What did you work on? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:18:39):
I know you can't talk about the future, Sam, but
how close are we actually to AGI? And if he says, ah,
a few years, that's not specific enough, Sam, how about
give me a ballpark? And then when he lies again,
you say, okay, Sam, how do we get from generative
AI to AGI? And when he starts waffling, say no, no, no,

(01:18:59):
be specific, Sam. This is how you actually ask questions.
And when you say things like this, by the way,
to technical founders, they don't get worried. They don't offer skate.
They may say I can't talk about this duty of
legal things, which is fine, but they'll generally try and
talk to you. Listen to any interview with any other

(01:19:21):
technical AI person, listen to them, and then listen to
Sam Altman.

Speaker 4 (01:19:27):
He's full of it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:28):
It's so obvious and one deeply unfair thing with the
value is there are people that get held to these
standards early stage startups generally do the ones that aren't
handed to people like Aortman or Alexis Ohanian have read it,
or Paul Graham or read Hoffman. They don't get those
chances because they're not saying the things that need to
be said to the venture capitalists. They're not in the circles.

(01:19:52):
They're not doing the right things because the right things
are no longer the right thing for the tech industry.
And when all of this falls apart, Sam Almon's going
to be fine. When this all collapses, He'll find something
to blame it on, market forces, a lack of energy, breakthroughs,
unfortunate economic things, all of that nonsense, and he'll remain

(01:20:15):
a billionaire, capable of doing anything he wants. The people
that are going to suffer are the people working in
Silicon Valley who aren't Sam Almon, The people that did
not get born with a silver spoon in each hand
and then handed further silver spoons as they walk the
streets of San Francisco, people that don't live in nine
and a half thousand square foot mansions, the people trying

(01:20:38):
to raise money who can't write now because all the
vcs are obsessed with AI the people that will get
fired from public tech companies when a depression hits, because
the markets realize that the generative AI boom was a bubble,
when they realize that the most famous people in tech
have been making these promises for nobody other than the markets. Well,

(01:21:02):
the markets need you to do something eventually, and I
just don't think it's gonna happen. And I think that
we need to really think why was Sam Altman allowed
to get to this point? Why did so many people
like Paul Graham, like Reid Hoffman, like Brian Chesky, like
Sacha Nadella. Back up, it's obvious con artists who has

(01:21:22):
acted like this forever? And what sucks is I don't
know if the valley is going to learn anything unless
it's really bad, and I don't want it to be
by the way. I would love to be wrong. I
would love for all of this to just be like
Sam Ortman's actually a genius. Turns out the whole thing
is no, no, it's not gonna happen.

Speaker 4 (01:21:41):
And I worry that.

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):
There is no smooth way out of this, that there
is no way to just casually integrate OpenAI with Microsoft,
because now there's an antitrust thing going in with Microsoft
and acquiring Inflection Ai, another AI company, and that's the thing.
It feels like we were approaching a press apiss here,

(01:22:03):
and the only way to avoid it is for people
to come clean, which is never going to happen, or
of course for Sam Wortman not to be laying for
Agi to actually come out of open AI. And by
the way, it's going to need to be in the
next year. I don't think they've got even three quarters left.
I think that once this falls apart, once the markets realize,

(01:22:25):
oh shit, this is not profitable, this is not sustainable,
they're going to walk away from it. When companies realize
that generative AI it's given him a couple percent profit,
maybe they're going to be pissed because this is not
a stock rally worthy boondoggle. This is not going to

(01:22:46):
be pretty when things fall apart from it. For Nvidia,
you're still over one thousand dollars. When those orders stop
coming in quite as fast. What do you think is
going to happen to tech stocks? Startups are already having
trouble raising money, and they're having trouble raising money because
the people giving out the money are too disconnected from

(01:23:06):
the creation of software and hardware. The only way to
fix Silicon Valley perhaps is an apocalypse. Perhaps is people
like Sam Ortman getting washed out. I don't want it
to happen. I really must be bloody clear. But maybe
it won't be apocalyptic. Maybe it would just be a
brutal realignment. And maybe Silicon Valley needs that realignment because

(01:23:29):
this industry desperately needs a big bathful of ice and
need to dunk the head in it aggressively and wake
the hell up. Venture capital needs to put money back
into real things. The largest tech companies need to realign
and build for sustainability so they're not binging and purging
staff with every boom. And if we really are at

(01:23:53):
the end of the hypergrowth era, every tech company needs
to be thinking profit and sustainability again. And that's a
to Silicon Valley because a better Silicon Valley builds things
for people, It solves real problems. It doesn't have to
lie about what the thing could do in the future
so that it can sell a thing today. And I
realize that sounds like the foundation of most venture capital.

(01:24:15):
That's fine at the seed stage, that's fine at this
moonshot stage where your early early days. It is not
befitting the most famous company in tech, It is not
befitting a multi billionaire, It is not befitting anyone, and
it is insulting to the people actually building things, both
in and outside of technology.

Speaker 4 (01:24:36):
The people I hear from after.

Speaker 3 (01:24:37):
Every episode, they are angry, They are frustrated because there
are good people in tech. There are people building real things.
There are people that remember a time when the tech
industry was exciting, when people were talking about cool shit
in the future, and then they'd actually do it. Returning
to that is better for society and the tech industry.

(01:24:58):
Just don't know when it's going to happen. Thank you
for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of
the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check
out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski
dot com, m.

Speaker 4 (01:25:17):
A T T O S O W s ki dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:25:22):
You can email me at easy at better Offline dot com,
or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend
you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at to
visit the discord and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 5 (01:25:39):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 3 (01:26:07):
Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
ze Tron. It's been a hard couple of weeks. It's
been pretty hard to focus. I've written a few newsletters,
I've gone to Portugal, I've done a bunch of shit.

(01:26:29):
Just try not to think about everything happening outside.

Speaker 4 (01:26:32):
But it's time to do so.

Speaker 3 (01:26:35):
Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog or
a podcast store, or even a Twitter account or XD everything, Apple,
whatever it's called now, they've all tried to drill down
into what happened on November fifth, to find the people
to blame, to explain what could have gone differently. Really
looking for who to blame though, and find out why
so many actions led to a result that well overwhelmingly

(01:26:57):
home woman, minorities, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and lower income workers
is terrifying. It fucking sucks. I'm not going to mince words,
not that I would usually anyway, and I don't feel
fully equipped to respond to the moment. I don't have
any real answers, at least not political ones. I'm not
a political analyst, and I'd feel disingenuous trying to dissect

(01:27:19):
either the Harris or the Trump campaigns, because I just
feel like there's a take Olympics right now. It's the
Dunning Kruger Festival out there. Everyone is trying to rationalize
and intellectualize these events that ultimately come down to something
quite simple. People don't trust authority, and yet it's pretty
ironic that this often leads them towards authoritarianism. Now, I

(01:27:42):
don't want to give you the impression that I'm going
to go on my crank mode that and somehow against
institutions on their face.

Speaker 4 (01:27:48):
I'm not.

Speaker 3 (01:27:48):
But at the same time, understanding this moment requires us
to acknowledge that institutions have failed us and failed most people,
and how certain institutions missteps have led us to exactly
what we are today. Legacy media, and while oftentimes they're
staffed by people who truly love their readers and care
about their beats, they're weighed down by this hysterical, nonsensical

(01:28:09):
attachment to the imaginary concept of objectivity and the will
of the markets. Case in point, regular people have spent
years watching the price of goods increase due to inflation,
despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly
driven by get this, corporations raising their prices. Now, that's
not to say that external factors like the war in

(01:28:30):
Ukraine or lingering COVID restrictions in China, these things did
play a role in it. They did, But the bulk
of these price increases were caused by these fucking companies
raising the prices. It was in their earnings.

Speaker 4 (01:28:45):
It was right there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:47):
Pepsi Cola said it on the news. Yet some parts
of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time
chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their
own reporting. And there will be links in the episode
notes promise as a means of providing balanced coverage, insisting
again and again that the economy is actually good, contorting

(01:29:07):
their little bodies to prove that prices aren't actually higher,
even as companies literally boasted about raising their prices on earnings.
In fact, the media spent years debating with itself, where
the price scouging was actually happening despite years of proof
that it was. Some of them even reported that the
price gouging was happening, So like, get this. I just

(01:29:27):
don't think people trust authority, and they especially don't trust
the media, especially the legacy media. It also probably didn't
help that the legacy media implored readers and viewers to
ignore what they saw at the supermarket or at the
pump and the growing hits that their wallets from the
daily incessities of life. It was just a national level
gas lighting and it was disgusting. And I know some

(01:29:50):
of you might say, you know where to email me.

Speaker 4 (01:29:53):
Oh, it's not just this.

Speaker 3 (01:29:54):
No, of course, it's not just this asshole, but I
think this is a big thing now. Before a go
any further, I've used the term legacy media here repeatedly,
but I don't completely intend for it to come across
as a pejorative despite my criticism. Believe me, I've got
a few of them. There are people in the legacy
media doing a good job. They're reporting the truth, they're
doing the kinds of work that matters, and they're actually

(01:30:16):
trying to teach their reader's stuff and tell them what's
happening and giving them context. I read and pay for
several legacy media outlets. I think the world is a
better place for them existing despite their flaws. The problem is,
as I'll explain, is this editorial industrial complex and how
these people are writing about the powerful don't seem to
be able to or maybe they don't want to actually

(01:30:38):
interrogate the powerful. This could be an entire episode on
its sign, But I don't think the answer to these
failings is to simply discard legacy media entirely.

Speaker 2 (01:30:47):
But I want to.

Speaker 3 (01:30:48):
Implore them to do better and to strive for the
values of truth hunting and truth telling and actually explaining
what's happening and criticizing the people that don't have pr
firms and lobbying groups, lawyers and the means to protect
themselves from the world. The time for fucking around is
over and we're currently finding out now. Anyway, as you know,

(01:31:12):
as a person existing in the real world, the price
of everything has kept increasing despite the fact that wages
are stagnating. It's forcing many of the poorest people to
choose between food and fuel or I don't know, eating
and having heat simultaneously. Businesses have spent several years telling
workers they're asking for too much and doing too little,
telling people a few years ago they were quiet quitting,

(01:31:33):
which is a fucking stupid term that just means going
to your job and doing the thing you're paying to
do any anyway, And a year later, in twenty twenty three,
they insisted that the years of remote work were actually
bad because profits didn't reach the same profit levels of
twenty twenty one, which was something to do with remote work. Now,
did anyone actually prove this, did anyone actually going.

Speaker 4 (01:31:53):
No, they didn't.

Speaker 3 (01:31:54):
They just well, I just listened to Mark Benioff, who's
one of the more evil people alive. Now I also so,
I think a lot of these problems come to twenty
twenty one, a year that we really need to dig
into more. We might not do so today, but we
will in the future. But one of the big things
that punish workers and led to so many layoffs in
twenty twenty three was the fact that we couldn't get

(01:32:14):
back to the post lockdown boot of twenty twenty one,
when everyone bought everything always as they left the house
for the first time in a while. Now, any corporation
would be smart enough to know that that was a phase,
that that was not going to be forever. Except every
single big company seemed to make the same mistake and
say number going up forever, line go up forever. When

(01:32:37):
it didn't, well, they started punishing workers and they started thinking, well,
could it be that we as companies we set unrealistic
expectations for the markets and we just thought that we'd
keep growing forever. Or maybe it was the people using
the computer at home. Yeah, that seems way better anyway, Well,
the majority of people don't work remotely. From talking to

(01:32:58):
the people I know outside of tech business, there's this
genuine sense that the media has allied itself with the bosses,
and I imagine it's because of the many articles that
literally call workers lazy and have done so for years.
Yet when it comes to the powerful legacy, media doesn't
seem to have that much pisson vinegar. They just have
much more guarded critiques. The appetite for shaming and finger wagging.

(01:33:19):
It's always directed that middle and working class workers and
seemingly disappears what a person has a three character job
title like CEO. It's fucking stupid, it's insulting, and yes
it's demoralizing for the average person, despite the fact that
Elon Musk has spent years telegraphing is intent to uses
billions of dollars to wield power equivalent to that of
a nation state. As you may remember from my first

(01:33:40):
episode of Anything over On, it could happen here.

Speaker 4 (01:33:43):
Too. Much of the media, both.

Speaker 3 (01:33:45):
Legacy and otherwise, responded slowly, cautiously, failing to call him
a liar, a con artist, an aggress or, a manipula
of rasis the deadbeat dad, you know all the thing's
actually happening.

Speaker 4 (01:33:54):
No, no, no.

Speaker 3 (01:33:55):
They kind of danced around him. They reported stories that
might make you think they maybe noticed it, But there
was this desperation to guard objectivity, and it was just
it lacked any real intent. It lacked any interest in
calling account to a man who has pretty much bought
an election for Donald Trump, a racist billionaire using his

(01:34:17):
outsized capital the Benz Society to his will. Just isn't
a fucking problem for the media, or at least not
as much of a problem as a worker who might
not work fifty to one hundred hours a week for
a boss who makes one hundred and thirty times what
they do. The news at least outside of the right wing,
is always separate from opinion, always guarded, always safe for
fear that they might piss somebody off and be declared biased,

(01:34:40):
something that happens anyway. And while there are columnists are
given some space to have their own thoughts, sometimes in
the newspaper, sometimes online, the stories themselves are delivered with
the kind of reserved hmmmm tone that often fails to
express any actual consequences or context around the news itself,
and just doesn't I seem to care about making sure

(01:35:01):
that the reader or listener learns something. My mate Casey
has a good point about podcasts, and I applied some
of the news too, that there's too much stuff out
there that is there to make you feel intelligent rather
than make you intelligent.

Speaker 4 (01:35:14):
I think this falls into him.

Speaker 5 (01:35:16):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:35:16):
This isn't to say that outlets are incapable of doing
this correctly. I love the Washington Post. They've done an
excellent job on analyzing major tech stories. But a lot
of these outlets feel custom built to be bulldozed the
moment an authoritarian turns up. This force that exists to
crush those desperately attached to norms and objectivity authoritarians know
that they're ideologically charged words we quoted ad verbatim with

(01:35:38):
the occasional.

Speaker 4 (01:35:39):
Ah, this could mean little dribble, this drizzle, this.

Speaker 3 (01:35:43):
Spunk of context that's lost in the headline that repeats
exactly what the fucking authoritarian wants them to.

Speaker 4 (01:35:49):
And guess what.

Speaker 3 (01:35:50):
Some people don't read the article, They just read the headline.
And Musk is the most brutal example of this. By
the way, despite the fact that he's turned Twitter into
a website pump full of racism and hatred that literally
helped make Donald Trump president, Musk was still able to
get mostly positive coverage from the majority of the mainstream
media for his fucking robotaxi nonsense, despite the fact that

(01:36:12):
he spent the best part of a decade lying about
what Tesla will do next. There are entire websites just
based on how much Elon Musk lies, yet they still
report this shit. It makes me very upset, And it
doesn't matter that some of these outlets, by the way,
had a company in coverage that suggested that the markets
weren't impressed by Tesla's theoretical robotaxi plans or their fake

(01:36:34):
cass robots run by people.

Speaker 4 (01:36:36):
Musk is still able.

Speaker 3 (01:36:38):
To use the media's desperation for objectivity against them, and
he knows that they never dare to combine reporting on
stuff with thinking about stuff for fear that Elon Musk
might say their bias, which he has been doing for years.
Do you see my goddamn point yet? And this, by
the way, is not always the fault of the rayers.
There are entire foundations of editors that have more faith

(01:37:01):
in the markets and the powerful than they do the
people writing or the people reading their fucking words. And
above them are entire editorial superstructures that exist to make
sure that the editorial vision never colors too far outside
the lines or informs people a little too much. And
not even talking about Jeff Bezos or Lauren Powell jobs
or any number of billionaires who are in any number

(01:37:21):
of publications, but the editors editing business and tech reporters
who don't know anything about business and tech, or the
senior editors the terrified of any byline that might dare
get the outlet under fire from somebody who could call
their boss it's fucking cowardice. There are, however, I should add,

(01:37:50):
also those who simply defer to the powerful that assume
that this much money can't be wrong, even if said money,
in the case of Elon Musk, is repeatedly wrong, and
there's an entire website about the wrong US and the
liars and the bullshit, and I'm talking about Elon Musk still. Obviously,
these editors are the people that look at the current
crop of powerful tech companies that have failed to deliver
any truly meaningful innovation in years, and they.

Speaker 4 (01:38:11):
Go ooh, oh, send me more.

Speaker 3 (01:38:12):
Daddy showed me more of the apps. It's fucking disgraceful.
Just look at the coverage of Sam Mortman from the
last year. You know, the guy who spent years lying
about what AI can do, and tell me why every
single thought he says must be uncritically catalog is every
goddamn decision applauded, his every claim, trumpeted as certain, his
brittle little company that burns five billion dollars a year

(01:38:33):
talked about like it's a fucking living god. Sam Moltman
is a liar who's been fired from two companies, including
open Ai, and yet because he's a billionaire with a
buzzy company, he's left totally unscathed. The powerful get a
completely different set of rules to live by and exist
in a totally different media environment. Their geniuses, entrepreneurs, fire brands.
Their challenges are framed as missteps and their victories framed

(01:38:54):
as certainties by the same outlets that told us that
we were quiet quitting and that the economy is actually good,
and that we're the problem for high prices. Well, it's
correct to suggest that the right wing is horrendously ideological
and they're terribly biased. It's very hard to look at
the rest of the media and claim that they are not.
The problem is that the so called left media, which
usually is just the center, isn't biased towards what we

(01:39:17):
may consider left wing causes like universal health care, strong unions,
expanded social safety, and it's you know, the stuff that
would actually be helpful. Now, they're biased in favor of
filating an ever growing carousel of sociopathic billionaire assholes, elevating
them to the status of American royalty, where they exist
above expectations and norms that you and I must live by.
This is the definition of elitism. The media has literally

(01:39:41):
created a class of people who can lie and cheat
and steal, and rather than condemn them for it. They're celebrated.
While it might feel a little tangential to bring technology
into this, I truly believe that everybody is affected by
the rot economy, the growth or costs ecosystem where number
must always go up because everybody is using technology all

(01:40:01):
the time, and the technology in question is getting worse.
This election cycle saw more than twenty five billion text
messages sent to potential voters, and seemingly every website was
crown full of random election advertising. Here's the thing about elections.
They're not really always about policy. No, they're a referendum
on the incumbent party you're president, and by proxy, a

(01:40:22):
poll on how people feel. And the reality is that
most people are fucking miserable. There's this all encompassing feeling
that things are just harder now. It's harder to pay
your bills, it's harder to keep in touch with your friends.
It's harder to start a family, it's harder to buy
a house, it's harder to fall in love, it's harder
to do everything. And what we're seeing is an in
shitification of existence.

Speaker 4 (01:40:43):
To use mister doctor Roe's phrase.

Speaker 3 (01:40:45):
Everything just I don't want to be this much of
a commudgeon. But everything just kind of sucks. It's all terrible,
it's miserable, and hardly anyone thinks it's going.

Speaker 4 (01:40:53):
To get better.

Speaker 3 (01:40:54):
And this creates the kind of fertile conditions for a
strong man to have emerged, one who arises and says
that only he can fix things, even if he spent
four years proving how he could not. And the problem
for democrats and for institutions more broadly is that the
all encompassing nature of this milieu is kind of hard
to solve. It's hard to change the perception that everything's
terrible when you're reminded of it when you're trying to

(01:41:15):
do the most basic of tasks. Our phones are full
of notifications trying to growth hack us into doing things
that companies want. Our apps are full of micro transactions.
Our websites are slower and harder to use, with endless
demands of our emails and our phone numbers, and the
nay to log back in because they couldn't possibly lose
a dollar to someone who dared to consume a Washington
Post article. And yes, I'm talking about the post, which
I fucking pay for, despite the fact it logs me

(01:41:36):
out all the time. Our social networks are so algorithmically
charged that they barely show us the things we want
them to anymore, With executives dedicated to filling our feeds
full of AI generated slop. Because despite being the customer,
we're also the revenue mechanism, our search engines do less
as a means of making us use them more. Our
dating apps have become vehicles of private equity to add
a toll to falling in love. Our video games are

(01:41:57):
constantly nagging us to give them more money, and despite
it losting money and being attached to our account, we
don't actually own any of the streaming media we purchase.
We're drowning in spam, both in our emails and our phones,
and at this point in our lives, we've probably agreed
to three million pages of privacy policies allowing companies to
use our information as they see fit. We get one
value transaction with every company they get eleven, they get

(01:42:20):
one hundred. We really actually don't know because there's no
legislation to tell us what they're fucking doing. And these
are the issues that hit everything we do all the time, constantly, unrelentingly.
Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use
our phone, we check our text, three spam calls, two
spam texts. We look at our bank balance, two factor
authentication check, we're rid the news.

Speaker 4 (01:42:40):
A quarter of the pages bot.

Speaker 3 (01:42:41):
Bone advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to
hide the button to get rid of them. And then
we log into slack and feel a pang of anxiety.
Is fifteen different notifications appear in a way there is
really not built for us to find what we need,
just to let us know something happen. Modern existence is
just engulfed in sludge. The institutions that exist to cut

(01:43:03):
through it seem to bounce between the ignorance of their
masters and this misplaced duty to objectivity. Our mechanisms for
exploring and enjoying the world are interfered with by powerful
forces that are just basically left unchecked. Opening our devices
is wilfully subjecting us to attack after attack after attack
from applications, websites, and devices that are built to make

(01:43:24):
us do things for them, rather than operate with dignity
and freedom that much of the Internet was actually founded upon.
These millions of invisible acts of terror are too often
left undiscussed because accepting the truth requires you to accept
that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that
billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of
people every single day of their lives through the devices

(01:43:45):
that we're required to use in order to exist in
the modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most
of the media fails to account for them, and in turn,
people walk around knowing something is wrong, but not knowing
who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse, like immigrants,
like the Democrats, like whatever fucking works. Because we can't
actually call the people out, the corporations crushing our existence,

(01:44:10):
Why wouldn't people crave change?

Speaker 4 (01:44:12):
Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world?

Speaker 3 (01:44:14):
Absolutely fucking sucks. Sometimes it's miserable. It's bereft of industry
and filthy with manipulation. It's undignified, it's disrespectful, and it
must be crushed if we want to escape this depressing,
goddamn world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are
fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it

(01:44:35):
starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without
fearing accusations of bias that, as I've said, repeatedly, happen
either way. The truth is that the media is more
afraid of accusations of bias than they are of misleading
their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope,
and it may very well be one, there must be
room to inject the writer's voice back into their work,

(01:44:57):
and a willingness to call out bad actors as such,
no matter and how rich they are, no matter how
big their products are, no matter how willing they are
to bark and scream that things are unfair as they
accumulate more power and money. We need context in our news.
We need it, we need it now. We need opinion,
we need voice, we need character, we need life, because
as long as we follow this bullshit objectivity path, we're screwed.

(01:45:20):
And if you're in the tech industry and hearing this
and saying.

Speaker 4 (01:45:23):
Oh, the media is tea critical of tech, if that
fucking wrong, kiss my asshole.

Speaker 3 (01:45:28):
Everything we're seeing happening right now is a direct result
of a society that let technology in the ultra rich
run rampant, free of both the governmental guardrails that might
have stopped them and the media ecosystem that might have
actually held them in check. Our default position in interrogating
the intentions and actions of the tech industry has become
that they will work it out, as they continually redefine
what work it out means and turn it into make

(01:45:49):
their products worse but more profitable. Covering Meta, Twitter, Google,
open Ai, and other huge tech companies as if the
products they make are remarkable and perfect is disrespectable to
the reader intelligence and a disgusting abdication of responsibility, as
their products, even when they're functional, are significantly worse, more annoying,
more frustrating, and more convoluted than ever. And that's before

(01:46:11):
you get to the ones like Facebook and Instagram that
are out right broken. I don't give a shit if
these people have raised a lot of money unless you
use that as proof that something is fundamentally wrong with
the tech industry. Meta making billions of dollars of profit
is a sign that something is wrong with society, not
proof that it's a good company or anything that should
grant Mark Zuckerberg any kind of special treatment. Shove your

(01:46:32):
chains up your ass, Mark open Ai being worth one
hundred and fifty seven billion dollars for a company that
burns five billion or more a year to make a
product that destroys our environment. For a product yet to
find any real meaning, isn't a sign that it should
get more coverage or be taken more seriously. No, it
should be a sign that something is broken, that something
is wrong with society. Whatever you may feel about chat GPT,

(01:46:55):
the coverage it received is outsized compared to its actual
utility and the things built on top of it. And
that's a direct result of a media industry that seems
incapable of holding the powerful accountable or actually learning about
the subject matter in question. It's time to accept that
most people's digital life fucking sucks, as does the way
we consume our information, and that there are people directly responsible.

(01:47:17):
Be as angry as you want at Jeff Bezos, whose
wealth and the inherent cruelty of Amazon's labor practices makes
him an obvious target, but please don't forget Mark Zuckerberg,
Elon Musk, Sander Peshai, Tim Cook, and every single other
tech executive that has allowed our digital experiences to become
fucked up through algorithms that we know nothing about. Similarly,

(01:47:38):
governments have entirely failed to push through any legislation that
might stop the raw, both in terms of dominance and
a patness of algorithmic manipulation and the ways in which
tach products exist with few real quality standards. We may have,
at least for now, consumer standards for the majority of
consumer goods, but software is left effectively untouched, which is
why so much of our digital lives are such unfettered.

Speaker 4 (01:47:59):
Doug shit.

Speaker 3 (01:48:00):
And if you're hearing this and saying I'm being a
hater or a pess and miss shut the fuck up,
I'm tired of you. I'm so fucking tired of being
told to calm down about this as we stare down
the barrel of four years of authoritarianism built on top
of the decay of our lives, both physical and digital,
with a media ecosystem that doesn't do a great job
explaining what's being done to the people in an ideologically
consistent way. There's this extremely common assumption in the tech media,

(01:48:24):
based on what I'm really not sure that these companies
are all doing a good job, and that good job
means having lots of users and making lots of money,
and it drives tons of editorial decision making. If three
quarters of the biggest car manufacturers were making record profits
by making half of their cars or the break that
sometimes didn't work, that'd be international news. Government inquiries would
app but people will go to prison. And this isn't

(01:48:46):
even conjecture. It actually happened after Volkswagen was caught deliberately
programming its engines to only meet emission standards during laboratory testing.
They were left to spew excessive pollution into the real world,
but once lawmakers found out, they responded with civil and
criminal action. The executives and engineers responsible were indicted, one
received seven years in jail, and their former CEO is

(01:49:07):
currently being tried in Germany and being indicted in the
US too. And here we are in the tech industry.
Facebook barely works, used to nigenocides and bully people and
harassed teen girls. Pedophiles run rampant on there. There was
a Wall Street Journal about story about it.

Speaker 4 (01:49:24):
They're fine.

Speaker 3 (01:49:25):
So much of the tech industry consumer software like Google
or Facebook, Twitter, and even chat GBT and business software
from companies like Microsoft and Slack.

Speaker 4 (01:49:33):
It sucks. It sucks, It's bad. You use it every day.

Speaker 3 (01:49:37):
You've been listening to be Ramble for fifty episodes, now
you know what I'm talking about. It's everywhere, Yet the
media covers it just like, eh, you know, it's just
how things are mate now. Meta, by the admission of
its own internal documents, makes products that are ruinous to
the mental health of teenage girls, and it hasn't made
any substantial changes as a result, nor has it received

(01:49:57):
any significant pushback for fame to do so. Little bit
of a side note here, big shout out to Jeff
Horwitz and the rest of the Wall Street General people
who did the Facebook files. There are our legacy media
people doing a good job on this. Nevertheless, Meta exercises
this reckless disregard for public safety, kind of like the
auto industry in the sixties, and that was when Ralph
Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed in his book. It

(01:50:20):
actually brought about change. It led to the Department of
Transportation and the passage of seatbelt laws in forty nine states,
and a bunch of other things that can get overlooked.
But the tech industry is somehow inoculated against any kind
of public pressure or shame because it operates in this
completely different world with this different rule book and a
different criteria for success, as well as this completely different
set of expectations. By allowing the market to become disconnected

(01:50:56):
from the value it creates, we enable companies like I
don't know, in Vidia that reduce the quality of their
services they make more money for their g Force now service,
or Facebook they can just destroy our political discourse so
they can facilitate genocide in Myanmar, and then well, they
get headlines about how good a CEO Mark Zuckerbig is
and how cool his chains are, and how how everything's

(01:51:16):
just fine with Facebook and they're making more money.

Speaker 1 (01:51:18):
No.

Speaker 4 (01:51:19):
No, I actually want to take a step back, though.
I want to take a little bit of step back.

Speaker 3 (01:51:23):
I previously mentioned I said it twice now, Oh, Meta
enables genocide and it destroys our politic our political discourse.
I want to be clear when I say that everything
is justified at Meta, I'm actually quoting their chief technology officer.
That's quite literally what Andrew Bosworth said in an internal

(01:51:44):
memo from twenty sixteen where he said that and I
quote ahem, all the work Facebook does in growth is justified,
even if that includes and I'm quoting him directly, somebody
dying in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tool. Now,
the mere mention of violent crime is enough to create

(01:52:04):
dreams of articles questioning whether society is safe and whether
we need more plastic in our walgreens. Yeah, our digital
lives are this wasteland that people still discuss like a utopia,
seriously putting aside the social networks. Have you visited a
website on the phone recently? Have you tried to use
a new app? Have you tried to buy something online
starting with a Google search? Within those experiences, sis, has

(01:52:26):
anything gone wrong? You know it, I know it has,
you know it has.

Speaker 4 (01:52:31):
It's time to wake up. We the users of products.

Speaker 3 (01:52:35):
We're at war with the products we're using and the
people that make them, and right now we are losing.
The media must realign to fight for how things should be.
This doesn't mean that they can't cover things positively, or
give credit where credit is due, or be willing to
accept that something could be something cool. But has the
change is the evaluation of the products themselves, which have

(01:52:57):
been allowed to decay to a level that has become
at best annoying and at actively harmful for society. Our
networks are rotten, Our information ecosystem is poisoned with its
pure parts ideologically and strategically concussed. Our means of speaking
to those that we love and making new connections are
so constantly interfered with that personal choice and dignity is.

Speaker 4 (01:53:15):
All but removed. But there is hope, there really is.

Speaker 3 (01:53:19):
Those covering the tech industry right now have one of
the most consequential jobs in journalism if they choose to
fucking do it. Those willing to guide people through the wasteland,
those willing to discuss what needs to change, how bad
things have gone, and hold the powerful accountable and say
what good might look like have the opportunity to push
for a better future by spitting in the faces of

(01:53:39):
those ruining it. I don't know where I sit, by
the way, I don't know what to call myself. Am
I legacy media? I got my start writing in print magazines.
Am I an independent contractor?

Speaker 4 (01:53:49):
Am I an influencer? Am I content?

Speaker 3 (01:53:51):
I truly don't know, and I don't know over care.
But all that I know is that I feel like
I'm at war two and that we, if I can
be considered part of the media, are at war with
people that have changed the terms of innovation so that
it's synonymous with value extraction. Technology is how I became
a person, how I met my closest friends and loved ones.
And without it, I wouldn't be able to write, I
wouldn't be able to.

Speaker 4 (01:54:12):
Read this podcast. I wouldn't have got this podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:54:15):
And I feel this poison flowing through my veins as
I see what these motherfuckers have done and what they're
continuing to do, and I see how inconsistently and tipidly
they're interrogated. Now is the time to talk bluntly about
what is happening. The declining quality of tech products, the
scourge of growth, hacking, the cancellrous growth at all cost mindset.

(01:54:38):
These are all the things that need to be raised
in every single piece, and judgments must be unrelenting.

Speaker 4 (01:54:44):
The companies will.

Speaker 3 (01:54:45):
Squeal ooh that they're being so unfairly treated by the
biased legacy media. Oh oh save me, hey, Nelle Patel
interview with Sandhar Pishchai. This is how you sounded when
you handed him your phone. It was pathetic. They should
be scared you, Nille. The powerful should be scared of
the media. They shouldn't be sitting there sending letters to

(01:55:06):
the editor like fucking customer support. No, they should see
this podcast, they should see these news letters. They should
see everything published by the tech media and go uh oh.

Speaker 4 (01:55:17):
And there can be good people. There can be good
boys and girls than others.

Speaker 3 (01:55:20):
There can be plenty of people that make good products
and get great press for it. But do you really
think meta Google, Apple to an extent, frankly, do you
think Amazon looks good right now? Do you think it's
easy to find stuff? Or do you think it's slop
full of more slop? Mark Zuckerberg said on an Earning
Score the other day that he intends there to be
an AI specific slop feed that should These are harmful things.

(01:55:46):
This is pouring vants of oil into rivers and then
getting told you're the best boy in town. These companies,
they're poisoning the digital world and they must be held
accountable for the damage they're causing.

Speaker 4 (01:56:00):
Readers are already aware.

Speaker 3 (01:56:02):
But ah, and this is really thanks to members of
the media, by the way, the gaslighting themselves into believing that, oh,
I just don't I don't keep up with technology. He
is getting away from me. I'm not technical enough to
use this. When the thing that they don't get that
the average person doesn't get is that the tech industry
has built legions of obfiscations, legions of legal tricks, and

(01:56:22):
these horrible little user interface traps specifically made to trick
you into doing things, to make the experience kind of
subordinate to getting the money off of you. And I
think that this is one of the biggest issues in society.
And yes, of course I'm biased. I'm doing a podcast
about tech, but for real, though, billions of people use smartphones,
billions of people are on the computer every day. It's

(01:56:43):
how we do everything. And it stinks. It stinks so bad.
This is the rot economy. We're in the rot society.
But things can change, and for them to change, it
has to start with the information sources, and that starts
with journalism. Work has already begun and will continue, but
it must scale up and it must do so quickly.

(01:57:05):
And you, the user, have the power learn to read
a privacy policy and the link there is to the
Washington Post. Yes, there are plenty of great reporters there.
Fuck Bezos. You can move to Signal, which is an
encrypted messaging app that works on just about everything. Get
a service like delete me, and by the way I
pay for it, I work from four years ago.

Speaker 4 (01:57:22):
I have no financial relationship with them.

Speaker 3 (01:57:24):
But they're great for removing you from data brokers.

Speaker 4 (01:57:27):
Molly White, who's a dear.

Speaker 3 (01:57:29):
Friend of mine and even better right who might remember
from one of the early episodes about Wikipedia. She's also
written this extremely long guide about what to do next
that are linked to in the notes, and it runs
through a ton of great things you can do unionization,
finding your communities, dropping apps that collect and store sensitive data,
and so on. I also heartily recommend Wired's guide to
protecting yourself from government surveillance, which is linked in the
show notes. Now, before we go, I want to leave

(01:57:54):
you with something that I posted on November sixth on
the Better.

Speaker 4 (01:57:57):
Offline redd app.

Speaker 3 (01:57:59):
The last twenty four hours of felt bleak and will
likely feel more bleak as the months and years go on.
It'll be easy to give in to doom, to assume
the fight is lost, to assume that the bad guys
have permanently won and there will never be any justice
or joy again. Now's the time for solidarity to crystallize
around ideas that matter, even if their a position in
society is delayed. Even as the clouds darken and the
storm's brew and the darkness feels all encompassing and suffocating.

(01:58:23):
Reach out to those you love and don't just commiserate.
Plan It doesn't have to be political, it doesn't even
really have to matter, but shit on your fucking calendar.
Keep yourself active and busy and if not distracted, at
very least animated.

Speaker 4 (01:58:36):
Darkness feeds an idleness.

Speaker 3 (01:58:38):
Darkness feasts on a sense of failure and a sense
of inability to make change. You don't know me very well,
but know that I'm aware of the darkness and the
sadness and the suffocation of when things feel overwhelming, give
yourself some mercy and then the days to come. Don't
castigate yourself a feeling gutted, Then keep going. I realize
it's little solace to think, well, if I keep saying

(01:58:59):
stuff out loud, things will get better. But I promise
you doing so as an effect and actually matters. Keep
talking about how fucked up things are, Make sure it's
written down, make sure it's spoken cleanly, and with the
rage and fire and piss and vinegar it deserves. Things
will change for the better, even if it takes more
time than it should.

Speaker 4 (01:59:17):
Look.

Speaker 3 (01:59:19):
I know I'm imperfect, emotional, off kill or at times
I get emails saying that too angry.

Speaker 4 (01:59:26):
I'm sorry if it's ever triggered.

Speaker 3 (01:59:28):
You really do mean that. It's not intentional. I just
I feel this in everything I do. I use technology
all the time, and it is extremely annoying. But also
I'm aware that I have privilege, and the more privilege
you have with intake, the more you're able to escape
the little things. Go and buy a cheap laptop today.
Try and see what two hundred and three hundred.

Speaker 4 (01:59:47):
Dollars laptop is.

Speaker 3 (01:59:47):
It's slow, It's full of eighteen pop ups trying to
sell you access to cloud storage, to shit that you'll
never use, Tricking grannies and people who can't afford laptops,
so people that just don't know. When I see this stuff,
it enrages me, not just for me, but because I
know that I'm at least lucky enough to know how
to get around this shit. Spent most of my life online,

(02:00:08):
spent most of my life playing with tech and how
it works. And I know I have my tangents and
my biases, but I wear them kind oft my heart,
on my sleeve. I care about all this stuff in
a way that might be a little different to some,
and it's because I've I've watched an industry that really
made me as a person, that allowed me to grow

(02:00:30):
as a person, to actually meet people, to not feel
as alone. And I imagine some of you feel like
this too, and then watching what happens to it every day,
watching the people who get so rich off of making
it so much worse, and then seeing what happen on
November fifth, and you can draw a line from it.
People are scared, they're lost. Their lives are spent digitally,

(02:00:55):
and your digital lives are just endless terrorism, endless harm.
Some of you know your way around take so you
can escape some of it, but it's impossible to escape
all of it. Try meeting people these days, you can't.
Everything is online, and everything online, everything on your phone
is mitigated and interfered with. It's an assault on your senses,

(02:01:17):
one deprived of dignity. And I see the people doing
this and it feels me full of fucking rage, and
it makes me angry for you and for me, for
my son growing up, and what will probably be a
worse world for my friends and loved ones who are
harder to see, harder to speak to, whose lives too

(02:01:38):
are interfered with. And there are the millions and millions
of people who have no fucking idea it's happening, that
just exist in this swill, in this active digital terrorism,
poked and prodded and nagged and notified constantly, And I
don't want Early on in this I got a message saying,

(02:01:58):
don't tell people to be angry, and I stick by that.
But I'm not going to hide that I am. I'm
not going to hide the pain I feel. I'm not
going to hide the pain I feel seeing this shit happen.
And I've watched this thing that I love technology, really
do love tech, I really do deeply.

Speaker 4 (02:02:17):
I've watched it.

Speaker 3 (02:02:18):
Corrupted and broken, and the people breaking it. They don't
just make billions of dollars. They get articles in, they
get interviewed on the news. Mark Zuckerbug, he wears a
chain and there's articles about how cool he is. He
should be in fucking prison. He should be on a
prison on a boat that just circles the world, and
he shouldn't have air conditioning or heat depending on how

(02:02:40):
the weather is. And I know that I'm kind of
errand and again tons of tangents. But look, the reason
I'm like this is because I really care. And I
think caring. I think being angry at the things that
actually matter and giving context as a result. I think
that's deeply valuable. And I realize I do for to

(02:03:01):
handle a lot, but it really.

Speaker 4 (02:03:02):
Is because I care.

Speaker 3 (02:03:04):
I care about you, I care about the subject matter.
I'm so grateful and so honored that you spend your
time listening to me every week, and I hope you'll
continue to do so because I'm not going anywhere. Thank
you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer

(02:03:25):
of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
check out more of his music and audio projects at
Matasowski dot com.

Speaker 4 (02:03:32):
M A T T O s O W s ki
dot com.

Speaker 3 (02:03:37):
You can email me at easy at Better Offline dot
com or visit Better Offline dot com to find more
podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really
recommend you go to chat dot Where's youreed dot at
to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better
Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much
for listening.

Speaker 5 (02:03:54):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.