How Shareholders Are Destroying The Tech Industry

The shareholder supremacy has eaten the tech industry, driving private and public companies to chase unprofitable, unsustainable ideas like generative AI as a means of expressing eternal growth to the markets. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how this destructive mindset has created an entirely new kind of manager - one disconnected from labor and creation - and how the dark hand of shareholder supremacy is behind everything strange and bad in tech in the last few years

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
All Zone Media. Oh hello, fancy meeting you here. I'm
at Zetron and this is better offline. Also in the
previous episode, I walk through how General Electrics Jack Welch

(00:24):
created the disgraceful terms of modern capitalism. A corporate mindset
where thousands of people are laid off the boost revenues
when a company is making millions or billions of dollars
in profits, and an era of growth at all costs.
Corporations that create nothing but shareholder value, run by an
entire class of managerial pencil pushers that only really care
about hitting analyst targets. In this episode, I'm going to

(00:48):
show you how bad that's been, specifically for the tech industry.
As ever, please check out the episode details for an
URL that has sources for everything I'm talking about in
this and future episodes. Sorry to repeat myself on that one,
but it's really important. You know. I did not just
make all of this up anyway. A couple weeks back,

(01:10):
Open ai CTO, Mira Murati spoke for nearly an hour
at Dartmouth University, where she recently accepted an honorary which,
by the way, means fake doctorate of Science for and
I quote, pushing the frontiers of what neural networks can do.
This is, by the way, very funny. It's very funny indeed,
because other than when she graduated with her Bachelor of

(01:31):
Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering and for one
year of her career, Mira Murati has only ever been
a manager, specifically a project manager, somebody who doesn't write
code or build software, but points at things and says, yeah,
we should, we should do that. After graduating, Mira Murati
worked briefly at a French aerospace company called Zodiac as

(01:51):
an advanced concepts engineer before joining Tesla in twenty thirteen.
Is a product manager before moving to Leap Motion from
twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen, where she was the VP
of Product and Engineering. A deceiving title again does not
mean she actually wrote code for a company that also
burned tens of millions of dollars on a gesture based
control system for a Mac, only to be acquired for

(02:13):
thirty million dollars in twenty nineteen at about a tenth
of its all time value. Her role would have undoubtedly
involved wrangling gang charts, weird product management stuff, just Google
it and spec sheets rather than lines of code in
a text editor. After leaving Leap Motion, mir Murti's career
trajectory accelerated in a way that's kind of hard to explain.

(02:36):
She moved to open Ai as its Vice president of
Applied AI in Partnerships, and was promoted to SVP of Research,
Product and Partnerships in twenty twenty, and then, at some
indeterminate time in twenty twenty two, became its Chief Technology officer,
despite having from what I can tell, exactly one academic
credit to her name in a list of twenty or
so people. By the way, open ai co founder Ilia Suitskaeva,

(02:58):
if you're curious, he has overall one hundred, and I
realized this is the kind of dick measuring stuff might
not matter, but in this specific case, for the CTO
of an organization that's about researching how to build AGI,
you'd think you'd have an academic But don't worry. There's
many more annoying things about mirror Murti. During her speech,
she spoke about how artificial intelligence could kill creative jobs,

(03:21):
and I quote that shouldn't have been there in the
first place, something you'd only say if you'd never created
anything in your entire goddamn life putting that aside, and
trust me, I'll get to it. Murti, much like Sam Altman,
seems like she's full of shit, rambling in the biggest
of ways about how the societal impacts of this work

(03:42):
are not an afterthought and that you kind of have
to build them alongside the technology. They are real fucking technical.
The chief technology officer of the most prominent startup in
America appears to not know that much about technology, to
the point that a couple months back, she was unable
to answer whether open AI's generator video product was trained

(04:03):
on publicly available data, making a face that kind of
looks like she was doing a vinegar flavored wasp. And
I've linked to this. You know the face if you've
looked it up already. It's not a great one. She
could have been lying, but Maurati rarely demonstrates any kind
of technical depth, dancing around answers with these vague, weird explanations.
And if you're wondering why the host didn't push back

(04:24):
at her at all, it's because the host at Dartmouth,
by the way, was Jeffrey Blackburn, a career manager at
Amazona recently joined door dashes, bored. Maurati's a weird one.
I've watched a lot of her interviews, a lot of them,
hours of them. They're all so boring. I cannot explain
how boring they are. But they're not boring because I'm stupid.
That's another problem. They're boring because they're meandering, they're nonspecific,

(04:50):
and the people interviewing her are just like, yeah, wow, damn,
that's crazy. Yeah, so you think AI is good, then
oh shit, that's the criticism she's got. She never, much
like mister Raltman, seems to be in front of anyone
who knows what they're talking about or is capable of
asking those questions. And yes, the media interviewing these people

(05:10):
are limited. They have remits about what they can and
can't say. I don't speak to the exact fundament of it,
but it isn't great. But it's very goddamn worrying that
the future of the tech industry is in the hands
of people who don't seem to know much about tech.
Open Ai is run by Sam Altman, an unqualified non
technical founder who has conned his ways to the heights

(05:30):
of Silicon Valley. Google is run by San darp As Shai,
an MBA and a former McKinsey management consultant that's overseen
the destruction of Google's core products, laid off tens of
thousands of people, and pushed Google to shoehorn generative AI
into the core search product with disastrous results including telling
you to put glue on pizza and eat rocks and

(05:53):
so on and so bloody forth. Microsoft is run by
sachy in Adela, yet another MBA that has in his
tenure overseen layoffs of over thirty thousand people and pushed
his company deep into the deeply unprofitable and unsustainable world
of generative AI while laying off people from the Xbox group,
you know, one of the only beloved things Microsoft has left,

(06:14):
and also wasting a lot of time on the metaverse.
But I'll get to him. Amazon CEO Andy Jesse, who
replaced Jeff Bezos. Surprise surprise, he's another NBA and he
started Amazon as a marketing manager in nineteen ninety seven.
To his credit, he came up with the idea of
Amazon Web Services, which is the cloud platform that a
chunk of the Internet uses. And by the way, ten

(06:36):
other people also came up with the idea, and then
he was made CEO of Amazon in twenty twenty one,
at which point a man called Adam Seleipski was made
CEO of Amazon Web Services and guess what, he also
has a Harvard MBA. But then he was replaced in
March by another guy who also had an MBA, this

(06:56):
time from Northwestern. It's always these management guys, the most
technical and one of the most profitable parts of Amazon,
their cloud storage and processing product. And I'm crushing it
down for the podcast Calm Down. If you super technical,
you'd think that would be a tech guy. You think
that would be someone who actually knew what they were
got down talking about other than the osmosis of being

(07:19):
in rooms with people who actually do the work. And
the reason I'm harping on about this is the founding
story of Amazon Web Services. Maybe one of the greatest
lies in texts history. I can find no maybe a
little specific evidence as to who the actual architect of
AWS was. Just this hindless muling about how Andy Jasse

(07:41):
and NBA built one of the most important pieces of
technological infrastructure of all time. It's just bollocks. And Jesse
regularly uses the Royal we to talk about how we
he built Amazon Web Services, despite the fact that he
didn't build shit. He didn't build anything at all. He
was a manager, managing managers. Jeff Bezos, who was the CEO,

(08:03):
who was another manager. It's all managers, all managers doing
a management centipedeugh And what little I can find suggests
that much of the actual technical work to build Amazon
Web Services was done by people like then CTO Alan
Vermulen and Brewster Kale, who founded a company called Alexa
Internet that Amazon acquired in nineteen ninety nine. There was

(08:23):
instrumental to spinning up the services that became Amazon Web Services,
two names that I've never really read in the many
many articles crediting Jasse as the architect behind Amazon's most
profitable service, yet arguably the most Welsh pilled management based
Silicon Valley staple is Meta, a company dominated by NBA's

(08:45):
like Sheryl Samdberg. It's first chief operating officer, who has left,
replaced by a guy called Javier Olivan who also has
an NBA. Facebook's Chief People Officer Lori Gohler, and the
chief privacy officer Michael Protty, all NBAS. Yet what makes
Meta such a Welshian nightmare is its dedication to making
its products worse in the search of growth, with career

(09:05):
product managers like CMO Alex Schultz and head of product
Naomi Glit dominating the company from its earliest days, and
creating a culture that focused entirely on gaming Facebook's metrics.
To please Mark Zuckerberg's demand for perpetual ten percent year
over year growth in core growth metrics, Meta has laid
off of a thirteen percent of its workforce in the

(09:26):
last year, over eleven thousand people, despite the fact that
the company has been profitable for over a decade, even
while plunging tens of billions of dollars into Zuckerberg's reality
Labs Metaverse division and authorizing fifty billion dollars in stock buybacks.
In many ways, Zuckerberg is Welsh perfected the CEO of
a company that provides a continuously deteriorating service that prints

(09:48):
money or gaming its metrics, such as no longer reporting
its monthly active users on earnings to make Wall Street
believe that it's a quote good company. It doesn't matter
that Meta has effectively given up on trying to solve
its massive problems with AI generated spam and scams and
four h four media reports that Meta has turned its
back on the experts that helped bolster its content moderation

(10:10):
services sadly, and this really matters because the markets still
love Meta, even though they punish the company briefly in
recent earnings for a and I quote light forecast, where
it quote raised investor expectations due to its improved financial
performance in recent quarters, leaving little room for error. According
to the NBC, a business network that Jack Welch owned

(10:32):
a large chunk of through his acquisition of NBC as
part of a deal the General Electric acquired RCA Corp.
In nineteen eighty five, it all goes back to Welch,
and it's also important to add that despite all of
these layoffs and these light forecasts, Meta executives received bonuses
when they fired thousands of people in twenty twenty three.

(10:55):
Google isn't much better since san Dar Pashai, a career
product manager in NBA, came CEO in twenty fifteen. Google's
culture is soured, giving Android inventor Andy Ruben ninety million
dollars in twenty eighteen to leave the company after credible
sexual misconduct claims causing a massive walkout over Google's forced
arbitration clauses over harassment and discrimination that muzzles victims and

(11:17):
empowers the fucking assholes to hide behind Google and gives
Google the ability to hide its failure to police these people.
This happened in the same year that others walked out
over Google's work with the Pentagon. Under Peshai, Google has
been fined billions of dollars by the European Union for
anti trust violations around its Android operating system, and has
found itself embroiled in a three year long anti trust

(11:39):
battle with the US Department of Justice around its anti
competitive approach to keeping Google Search on top, including paying
Apple twenty billion dollars in twenty twenty two to the
be the fault search engine on Safari, their web browser.
Under Peshai, Google has replaced hard working lifers that built
the very foundation of the company with contractors and on
the higher levels scumbags cretins like Prabagar Ragavan and Jerry Dishler,

(12:04):
the latter of which transparently intimidated the Google Search team
to increase ad revenue generate by search In emails revealed
in the trial from March twenty nineteen, you'll be shocked
by the way to hear that Jerry Dishler has an MBA. Yet,

(12:25):
as with Meta, and as with all of these companies
excluding open Ai, which is not public, Google prints money
knitting over twenty three billion dollars in its first quarter
twenty twenty four earnings the same ones were announced its
first dividend, and a seventy billion dollar stock buyback program.
It doesn't matter that Google Search is incredibly broken as

(12:45):
a result of Google's constant drive to increase revenue, or
that Google has decided to generate results on Search using
unreliable generative AI that generates insane answers. Alphabet Google's holding
company has seen its stock continually rise since much of
this year, even after the eating rocks thing. Doesn't that
fill your veins full of bile? How doesn't it make you?

(13:06):
It just really really makes me angry. It makes you
very annoyed. I don't like this. I don't like that
you and I I guess I'm a podcast that's probably not.
But regular people like you. You go to a job,
you do the job. If you do the job badly,
you get shit canned. Fair enough, That's what happens, right,
These guys, they get paid through the nose for it,

(13:27):
they get appreciate it, they get a go get them
boy for fucking everything up. It's just disgusting. It makes
me very upset. And as I've said previously, this is
a special kind of financial nihilism that the market continues
to reward, one that's poisoned Silicon Valley and elevated men
and woman like Sam Altman and Mira Murrati the positions
of power, despite the fact that neither of them actually

(13:48):
seems to build technology. Altman himself is a CD charlatan,
one that's growing incredibly powerful in the valley despite not
really having done anything. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that,
as I mentioned previ one of Altman's nine recommended books
is Winning by Jack Welsch, a book where Welch claims
that Winning companies and meritocracies and lionizes Kenneth Yue of

(14:09):
three m's Chinese operations for and I quote throwing out
the phony ritual of annual budgeting and replacing it with
Sky's The Limit dialogue about Opportunities, claiming that budgeting at
three M is not about delivering good enough plans and
being them, but about having the courage and zeal to
reach for what can be done. And doesn't that sound
like more fun than budgeting? Yes, that last part is

(14:30):
a quote, and I imagine he must have been referring
to three M bribing Chinese government officials and means of
selling product between twenty fourteen and twenty seventeen, or the
thousands of people that three MS laid off in the
last few decades, including in China. Sure that's what he meant.
Jack Welsh wouldn't have just been talking I have his ass,
would he? No. Jack Welch is the man that Sam

(14:50):
Altman lionizes, a sleazy con artist that continually moved around
data as a means of making General Electric look bigger
and stronger than it really was. Kind of like how
Sam Mortmon regularly says things like an I quote that
we'll be able to ask our computer to solve all
of physics. Now, this came up on a previous episode
of the Interview with Nick the man who said he

(15:10):
of fucking pile drive. You've mentioned AI again. I just
want to be clear that's actually what Sam Wrtman said.
He said, you can ask the computer to solve all
of physics. This kind of proves that he doesn't understand take,
but it also proves that he might just be really
goddamn stupid. How do you solve physics? Sam? What are
you solving? Physics? Isn't the solution, Sam? What do you?

(15:32):
Maybe you should have stayed in Stanford instead of dropping
out and becoming a carst Sam Altman is kind of
in trouble though, because behind the scenes, generative AI it
isn't moving the needle, with Isabel Busquette of The Wall
Street Journal reporting that companies are finding getting the full
value of AI assistance requires heavy lifting, including in her
article this hilarious quote from Google Cloud chief evangelist Richard Sirota,

(15:55):
by the way, as a career product manager, where he
blames those not finding the value in AI for and
I quote, not having their data house in order, chirping
that you can't just buy six units of AI and
then magically change your business. And you know what, I
actually agree with him, in essence, it isn't generative AI's fault.
That it isn't adapting to your workflows or fulfilling anything. No,

(16:16):
it's your faulty, nasty little pig. You didn't do the
work to make artificial intelligence smart, right, That's your fault.
Somehow you should feel ashamed. You should apologize to Sam Moltman.
Just kidding in all seriousness. The commonality between all of
these people Jack Welch, suned Up a Shai Mirror, Marati,
Sam Altmanmuk Zuckerberg, and honestly an alarming amount of CEOs

(16:39):
inside and outside of tech is that they, along with
their companies, have kind of escaped humanity. They've escaped the
human condition. They make their companies bigger for the sake
of making them bigger, making more money, to increase the
value of the financial instrument attached to the company, Abstracted
away from purpose or craft or creativity or production. These

(17:00):
management concerns MBA's product managers. They're not creators of anything
other than financial occultism, a dark heart. Whether financial value
of a company is often separated from what it does
or whether it's good at it. They're parasites meta calls itself.
It's still calls itself. Go on their website and look
a social metaverse company that's and I quote committed to

(17:23):
keeping people safe and making a positive impact. But at
its core. It's a near monopolistic social data and advertising
company that's testing the limits of how little connectivity it
can provide in its core products without sacrificing advertising revenue.
Mark Zuckerberg has proven he'll do whatever he needs to,
including letting deadly misinformation spread on Facebook to keep showing

(17:45):
that meta is growing. One might be forgiven for thinking
that Mark Zuckerberg is the exception that he isn't a
management goon disconnected from the processes of writing code. This
guy coded Facebook right. This guy's a nerd. He's a
nerd with his keyboard. He types right wrong. Oh he
stopped coding eighteen fucking years ago, in two thousand and six.

(18:06):
This is the guy like just every time I think
I've really nailed how bad it gets? Hey wait a second,
hold up, wait second, I just thought about starthing for
a second though. Wasn't Sheryl Sandberg brought in to make
Facebook a real mature business. Ah fuck? She shared a
communications coach with goddamn Jack Welch. It all goes back
to the all right, sorry sorry sorry, Like Welch. Zuckerberg

(18:31):
has weathered numerous scandals the social network, a movie that
framed him as a sociopathic thief. A data leaking scandal
that may or may not have influenced Mark Paul elections,
a scandal where Facebook deliberately emotionally manipulated seven hundred thousand
users using the news feed in twenty fourteen. And that
is real, by the way, there's a link to it.
It's completely insane. Oh yeah, and a five billion dollar

(18:51):
FDC fine. And he's come out and scathed all as
he publicly destroys the company that was once globally beloved
in the name of endless growth. In fact, much like Welsch,
was applauded as one of the greatest business minds in
management for decades as he burned G to the ground. Zuckerberg,
a man who has taken a once profitable company that
once benefited society and made it both harmful and shitty

(19:12):
at providing its services, was named one of Barons's top
CEOs of twenty twenty four a couple of weeks ago,
where it credited him with a corporate course correction from
metaverse to artificial intelligence. Neither of those are making money.
Much like so many journalists in industry figures failed to
properly identify Welch, when he was right in their midst.
Barons failed to call Zuckerberg what he is another con

(19:35):
artist that took useful software and turned it into a
data collection firm with a shitty product attached. Zuckerberg is
trying something that Welsh could have only dreamed of, though
seeing how little he can actually make to convince the
markets that matter is valuable. It's almost a little on
the nose, and it fits, It perfectly fits shareholders. Supremacy
is the force currently driving the tech ecosystem, and one that,

(19:58):
as I've noted, and lacks any remaining hypergrowth markets funding
and proliferating technologies that exist not to provide an innovative,
useful service, but to create more growth. A phony sense
of progress that allows companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and
Amazon to create something that looks and smells sort of innovative,
even if their models are all extremely similar, as they're

(20:21):
all trained on the same quickly dwindling amount of training data,
and AI developers don't seem to really care what training
data they use, or indeed what data source they use
at all. Look at Google Search, which, as I've mentioned,
took a Reddit post that made it recommend putting glue
on a pizza to keep cheese on, or claiming that
you should eat a rock each every day. It's just

(20:44):
every time I read this, it's so frustrating, it's so annoying,
and then putting aside how funny the Google AI search
was on top of it. These companies are running out
of data and they very clearly don't care about quality
at all. They're not doing the work, they're not doing
the things they need to do to make sure this
is done right. No, they must have it today. They

(21:07):
must have it now, even if it's bad, even if
it burns money. And it's not like the markets are
actually seeing if the shit does anything or whether it's
truly revolutionary. They didn't care that. Many tech products have
got increasingly worse over time as tech executives rewarded again
and again for pursuing growth overt delivering any kind of
quality product. Since becoming CEO of Google Sundopieschid has been

(21:30):
paid over half a billion dollars literally in the last
three years, by the way, taking home two hundred and
eighty one million dollars mostly made up of stock in
twenty nineteen, fateful year that many of you might remember
from the man who killed Google Search, and then he
got paid two hundred and twenty six million twenty twenty two,
a year before Google laid off ten thousand people. Sundupisci's

(21:52):
job as CEO at Google is not to make sure
that Google delivers great products such as a quick path
to an answer using Google Search. No no, no, no, no,
you fool, you buffoon, you ignoramus. Why would you think that. No,
Sundai's job is to continually grow the amount of money
that Google's business units make. I have complete confidence that
if Sundar Pashai was able to make Google Search worse

(22:13):
than it already is and maintain double digit year of
a year revenue growth, he would not only do so,
but he would do so with a big smile on
his face and be rewarded with hundreds of billions of
dollars of stock options, pretty much in perpetuity. Sunda Pashai
is not judged for what he's done to Google, for
turning it into this Welshair nightmare, not by the markets,
not by Nile Patella, the verger, who pretty much gave

(22:34):
him softballs the whole time, And nobody's punishing him at all,
or really saying it to his face that he's burning
a genuine technological innovation that billions of people rely upon.
And it's a heartbreaking tragedy that's happening in real time,
one where a bad person makes worse people richer in
a way that tangibly hurts us all. We're all forced
to suffer the consequences and mourn the loss of Google

(22:56):
Search in slow motion, with nobody really wanting to admit
the obvious that Goo Google intends to bleed this thing
out until regulation or the markets stop them. And I
realized it sounded a little bit dramatic describing this as
a tragedy. Google Search was always a for profit business,
and advertising would so obviously poison it that founders Brin
and Page warned about it in the original Google paper,

(23:18):
saying that they expected that advertising funded search engines would
be biased towards advertisers and away from needs of customers.
But Google Search was, for a while something magical. It
was a thing we all took for granted. And I
think you're being disingenuous if you pretend that this isn't
something you cared about or relied upon. And I'd argue

(23:38):
for the earlier days of Facebook and Instagram to kind
of fit this bill too. These are, or perhaps were, sadly,
institutions that helped many people my age and I'm an
ancient thirty eight years old become who we are today,
finding the things and the people we needed and the
connections we otherwise wouldn't have made or sustained. I know,

(23:59):
at least in my that social networking is how I
met the world. I was kind of a lonely kid.
I didn't make friends easily. I never have. Really, I've
done a lot better thanks to the Internet. Pretty Much
everything that I found has been through on the Internet,
much of it from Google Search, much of it from
social networking from Facebook, from Instagram to extent Twitter to

(24:21):
a much larger Watching these things get burned sucks And
I think a problem that some people have with this
show is that they think I'm just pissy and I
hate all of this stuff, and I don't. I would
love it to go back to how it was, or
maybe how it felt. I wish it was less craven
of a value exchange. These were companies that made billions

(24:42):
of dollars in profit by providing a kind of a
social good, even if it was one where they realized
they could use it to create a monopoly and then
rug pull when they needed to for the shareholders. But
I do mourn the loss of these products, and I
think many of us. Maybe if I'm wrong, you can
email me easy at letter E, letter Z at better

(25:05):
offline dot com if you disagree. By all means, I
love to hear from you, even the haters one or
two of you. But in all seriousness, I'm more on
this stuff. I'm sad about this. I'm pissed off. Not
because I like being angry, I genuinely don't. I'm sad.
I'm a broken hearted romantic. I love the tech industry
and what it used to do. Perhaps I was naive.

(25:27):
Perhaps now I'm realizing that a lot of that stuff
that I thought was great wasn't. It wasn't this bad
wasn't Where Jack Welch destroyed multiple local economies in Massachusetts, Indiana,
and Pennsylvania by laying off thousands of workers in favor
of cheaper outsourced options. Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg have
realized that shareholder supremacy only means making a product as

(25:50):
useful as necessary and optimizing it at all times to
me analyst expectations of revenue. The unique problem that Sundar
Pishai and the rest of the rock barons currently faces
that there aren't any hypergrowth markets left, and they've been
so desperately adapting to that reality since twenty fifteen. And
now I've said later, but I think twenty fifteen is
the year so many promises, augmented reality, homo robotics, autonomous cars,

(26:16):
and even then artificial intelligence writ large never quite materialized
into these viable business units, making big tech that little
bit more desperate. I've repeatedly and substantively proven in my
newsletter and this podcast that both Meta and Google have
made their products worse in pursuit of growth, and they've
done so by following a roadmap drawn by Jack Welch,

(26:37):
a sociopathic scumbag that realized that he could turn General
Electric into a shambling monstrosity of a company that could
shape shift into whatever the street needed, even if the
product sucked. And I believe that this is the same
financial nihilism that empowers people like Mirror Marati and Sam Altman,
and also millions more middle managers and absentee CEOs. The

(27:00):
kind of been writing about and speaking about for the
last three years. Our economy is run by people that
have never built anything, running companies that they can taught
to make a number go up for showlders. They rarely
meet people like David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery,
who intentionally chose not to release Coyote Versus Acme, a
fully produced and ready to debut movie featuring Warner Brothers'

(27:23):
core brands, choosing instead to never release it ever in
exchange for a cut to its tax bill. Zaslav, a
CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, has overseen one of the
darkest periods in the company's history, including endless cutbacks, and
through his own mismanagement, caused a five month long strike
in Hollywood. Zaslav continued to complain even after the strike ended,

(27:46):
claiming that studios overpaid for the strike to end as
he earned a fifty million dollar salary for driving his
company into the ground. Hey hey, just one moment, though,
where do you think David Zaslav learnt? Do you think
he learned it by reading books? Or maybe he learned
his management philosophy a little more directly? Can you guess

(28:09):
who his close friend was. It was Jack Wells. Jack
Welch was his. Oh my god, but you know who's
not horrible our advertisers. During a commencement speech in twenty
twenty three where David Zaslav was booed by students, he

(28:29):
told the story of how, sometime after General Electric acquired
NBC through g's acquisition of RCA in ninety eighty five,
he sent a handwritten note to Jack Welch telling him
about himself, David Zaslav, and what he'd been doing he
was a lawyer, leading to a job running NBC in
nineteen eighty nine. This story doesn't make a ton of sense,
by the way, based on any living history of David

(28:50):
Zaslav's life. He joined NBC three years after the acquisition
of RCA closed. He claimed he was working for a
few years in cable news, but everything I found suggests
that he went straight from school to working at a
law firm called Lebooth LAMB Libyan McRae according to his
Warner Brothers profile when he graduated from Boston University in
ninet eighty five, meaning that he would have had to

(29:11):
send that note while working at a firm that was
mostly not working in anything to do with Capernews at all,
just a liar, just lying. Regardless of whether Zaslav made
up an entire story about how he got his job,
he was and is one of Welch's most nasty cronies,
his most staunch acolytes, telling David Gellis, who wrote The
Man Who Destroyed Capitalism about Jack Welch, that Jack set

(29:34):
the path, that he saw the whole world, that he
was above the whole world, and that what Jack Welch
created at G became the way that companies now operate,
which is true. David Zaslav, a man who has caused
unfathomable damage to the entertainment industry while intentionally choosing not
to release two different movies, learned to do so from
the Michael Jordan of corporate destruction, and to Zaslav, Welch

(29:56):
was like an older brother that would pick people at
NBC with a hug when things were tough, and that
there was no better friend. According to an interview with
CNBC Jesus christ Man, it's like a poorly written drama.
I hope it ends with a big anvil falling on me. Anyway,
I realize I'm oscillating between industries and names, but the
shareholder's supremacy is something that has poisoned almost every part

(30:18):
of global capitalism. Dedication to the shareholders, in many ways
is kind of like a religion. It isn't even about
a shareholder or the shareholder, just moving acids to make
a number go up and making another number look like
it might go up in the future. Welch Zaslav, Peshai, Zuckerberg.
They're all the same kind of monster, one divorced from

(30:39):
consequence and production and capable of contributing meaningfully to the
world at large because the market is shown it doesn't
really care if they do so. Sanda Pashai doesn't use Google,
and Mark Zuckerberg doesn't use Instagram, Facebook, or threads, at
least not like a regular person does anyway, much like
how David Zaslav doesn't watch or care about TVs and
movies and doesn't even release them sometimes it's crazy. The

(31:02):
deep sea a nihilism means that they aren't users or
creators or even active participants in any part of society.
They're there to move the stuff around so that they
can keep the number going up. And I believe this
is all the consequence of Jack Welcher's legacy, where the
economy has been built on the back of a management
philosophy that no longer involves managing people or building things.

(31:24):
The business media and society at large elevates executives like
Zuckerberg and Peshai as they demolish their products, and they
are thousands of people because the terms of success are
no longer about making money by providing a good service
or a product people like. The markets don't reward steady growth,
nor that they punish executives for the quality of their
product because analysts and investors aren't really concerned about the product,

(31:47):
just the financial output. I don't think their users either.
At this point, theological rush to boost artificial intelligence makes
a lot more sense when you have a society and
economy dominated by people who don't create things or understand
the things they're selling. People that don't experience or respect
labor or talk to people. Of course, their natural thought
will be that any form of creativity or work can

(32:11):
and should be automated. It isn't about what's good, but
what's good enough, and artificial intelligence allows them to test
the boundaries of what enough can mean. Toys, r us
or at least what remains of it after a leveraged buyout.
Should feel an abundance of shame for releasing a horrifying
AI generated orision of Toys of Rus movie full of

(32:31):
ugly hallucinations and yanky animations. But what it's really trying
to see is how much it can get away with,
how shitty something can be without losing customers, or whether
the potential loss of customers is worth it to save
the money it would take to actually shoot a goddamn commercial.
And what's crazy, by the way, and you should watch
this thing. It's terrible. Is this video looks so bad

(32:53):
and they put it on the main Toys of US account.
They don't give a shit. They're trying to see what
they can get away with. And I think that's a
big thing theme. When Mirror Murarti said that AI might
kill creative jobs that shouldn't have been there in the
first place, it wasn't just the grotesque insult to those
actually working cret When Mirror Mourati said that AI might
kill creative jobs that should have never been there in

(33:14):
the first place, it wasn't just a nasty insult to
those working in the creative fields. It was also a
demonstration of an unchained sociopathy and this nasty kind of
hubris that these tech people have, and the fact that
she believes that she, a woman of little actual accomplishment
and talent and the intellectual depth of a puddle on
a flat sidewalk, is singlely ordained to decide which jobs

(33:36):
are worthy and which ones should die. Really, it was
an insult to all of us. It was an expression
of her belief that consumers don't deserve things created by
a person who actually gives a shit. You don't deserve
to watch movies that only exist thanks to the combined
efforts of illustrators, sound engineers, composers, actors, directors, and countless
other uncelebrated roles, where each cog in the machine has

(33:56):
spent years honing their skills until they've reached a level
of honest mastery. You, yes, you don't deserve to use
software created by someone who actually thought about the problem
and at the very least made a best effort to
write secure, robust code. You don't deserve anything. In their eyes.
You deserve the minimum viable product. You deserve as little

(34:17):
as possible so that they can make as much as possible.
That is what Mirror Murti is saying. No amount of
two long tweet storms, no amount of vacuous blogs, no
amount of apologia is going to make up for the
fact that this is what these people think. They see
work and creativity as something to be optimized away, and

(34:42):
it's disgraceful. And even when you get to the more
workhorse roles, the coding roles, there are still these huge
problems and they don't care. As pointed out by cybersecurity
firms nick, Microsoft's get hub copilot tool routinely and unquestionably
outputs insecure code because, as said ad nauseum in other places,

(35:02):
it doesn't know anything a human being can look at
a code based and identify, for example, areas where the
system doesn't check for SQL injection attacks, which could allow
an attacker to steal and modify data from a database.
An AI tool merely guesses what code looks right probabilistically
given the prompt that was involved. When Murti gleefully brags

(35:22):
about how AI will eviscerate an unknowable amount of creative jobs,
which she is personally identified as expendable by the way,
what she's really saying is that people should be content
with using shitty broken AI generated software and watching shitty
broken AI generated films with a number of digits on
each hand fluctuates wildly that the line on a sisoscope

(35:43):
and where nothing new is said, but rather a machine
is regurgitating stuff created by other people solely based on
a mathematical model of probability. It's insulting, it's disgusting, and
it sucks. It just objective if he sucks. It's not
even like this stuff is any good. It's not even

(36:03):
like the things that it's producing are respectable. Not the
replacing people is good. But the amount of money they're
being given, the amount of compute they're using, the amount
of water they're boiling to make dogshare shows a complete
contempt for everything, for creativity and labor itself. And generative

(36:25):
AI is exciting to the disconnected business fucks running our
economy because it's a way to abstract and outsource even
more forms of labor. We have spent decades pushing young
people to get into management without ever teaching anybody about
what managers are meant to do, creating a class structure
in organizations where there are those that do things and

(36:45):
those that take the credit, and the latter are the
people in charge, disconnected from labor, disconnected from quality, disconnected
from production, and thus incapable of making informed decisions other
than what if we moved around this number here and
what if we start paying these people. The AI bubble
has been inflated by people excited about the prospect of
not happening to deal with filthy laborers that do work,

(37:08):
and they ultimately aspire to make companies with as few
people as possible, with the CEO making the most money
because they're the ones that move the numbers around for
the markets. This also explains where they're so incapable of
describing what AI is, what it does, and why it's useful.
It doesn't matter that data centers might end up using
as much power as India by twenty thirty four, or

(37:30):
that generator of AI isn't actually that useful. It's a
chance for them to further disconnect themselves from having to
pay actual people to do actual work, a thing that
they themselves consider the product of the underclass. They don't
care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable,
that there's a quickly approaching wall that generative AI can't
leap over as it runs out of training data, or

(37:50):
that the transformer based architecture of large language models has
hard limitations that are impossible to overcome. No, this is
a shiny new object that they can way of investors
that already don't know what any of this stuff means,
one that lets them dream of a world without labor.
Generative AI wants us to stop researching, or talking or thinking,
and eventually it will come for your livelihood if it worked.

(38:15):
But even then, when it doesn't work, it's still taking
money out of freelancer's mouths. It's replacing good coders with
shit generated code. There is a poison here, and it's disgusting.
In some respects. Generative AI is morally worse than Jack
Welch's odious anti worker philosophy. Whereas Welch saw workers as

(38:35):
a cost center to be minimized and eliminated where possible,
generative AI extends that idea to the raw materials necessary
to build apps like chat GPT, with must of Our Sulliman,
the CEO of Microsoft AI and the co founder of DeepMind,
declaring the existence of an unspoken social contract where and
I quote online content is freeware for building AI models.

(38:57):
The law I know it tends to regard actual contracts
more seriously unspoken and let's face it, imaginary contracts. And
I desperately look forward to the day when Sulliman's ideas
are tested in court. But I don't fancy these chances.
And most of you come from my content. You're not
gonna have words, mate. But that's the thing. In many
of my newsletters and podcasts, I've argued that the current
trajectory of the tech industry will lead it to ruin

(39:19):
the poison of the shareholder supremacy. This nihilistic intention of
contorting companies, the police, analysts, and investors is one that
will uniquely punish the tech industry, just like it did
to General Electric. Google, Microsoft, and Meta have bet their
futures on generative AI, cramming it into their products with
little regard for utility, all to show the markets that

(39:40):
they're futuristic rocket ship growth companies rather than at least
in matter in Google's case, aging and decaying empires that
got too big and were corrupted by the forces of
the MBA management sect. I realized that's master of business
administration management. This is the force behind everything. This is

(40:00):
it the dark hand that demanded you return to the
office in spite of the productivity gains of remote work,
The weight behind the people destroying the media, the people
the very same people who lied about cryptocurrency being the
future of finance, and the people that collapsed multiple banks
in twenty twenty three. Because risk management, to quote Mark Andresen,

(40:21):
is considered the enemy. These people will burn the world
to a crisp in search of a profit, in search
of eternal growth, in search of the things that will
make them richer, richer, nastier, disconnected monsters even more capable
of escaping the drudgery of knowing and doing things. This
is a dark future where somehow all labor is automated,

(40:44):
all money flows upwards, and society drained of taxes in
any kind of social safety net, does something with all
the children that Elon Musk is saying we need to have.
The tech industry is dominated now by management consolants, product managers,
and middle management in general, with people that have written
few lines of code in their lives holding sway over

(41:05):
the actual builders, instructing them to create things they don't
understand as means of improving the bottom line, rather than
solving an actual need or even addressing the obvious business
fundamentals like profitability and stability. A few episodes back, when
I was talking with Nick Siesh, one of the very
basic things he said was, have you checked your backups?
This is a problem throughout the valley. We don't maintain

(41:28):
anything anymore as a society. We have a terrible approach
to maintenance. We have a terrible approach to business maintenance.
When you throw sustainability out in the window, you don't
really check if everything's working well. And I think that
that's going to be the problem. That and the financial
precariousness of all of this, That and the fact the
markets just kind of turn on them when things don't

(41:49):
work their way, and at some point things have to collapse.
I'm not saying that every tech company goes belly up,
but I believe that the generative AI boom is the
force that creates It's a massive reckoning in this industry.
It's almost a little too on the nose with the
wider shareholder supremacy. Generate AI. It's a tool that only

(42:10):
seems revolutionary to people that haven't written or coded, or
drawn or sang or created anything in years. The last
four years have proven that the tech industry is desperate
for somebody to follow, and follow they have. Mark Zuckerberg
claimed the metaverse the future in the most flimsy way,
and the market, along with Microsoft and many other companies agreed.
Even if the metaverse was barely conceived pipe during by

(42:31):
a guy who hasn't written code since two thousand and six,
Generative AI is the next step up a trend with
a natural product, a superficially impressive do dad that can
sell cloud compute access and proliferate more software, even if
the underlying technology is so remarkably unprofitable and unreliable that
big tech firms are having to calm down their salespeople,
which happened a few months ago with Amazon, and big

(42:54):
tech was so desperate for something new to follow, something
new to do with themselves that would sustain the value's
thread facade is a crucible of innovation and progress. Rather
than doing the hard work to actually invest in and
research and develop important technologies that people like and would
use and would care about, Sam Altman gave them all

(43:15):
something to do with themselves, and he packaged it in
a way that told them how to think about it,
and of course lie about it. At some point, something
has to give. The markets are fickle and demanding and
engineered to demand endless growth and endless returns. GENERATIVAI is
hitting a wall. I'll go into that in the next episode,
and any future improvements will be marginal and cost billions

(43:38):
of dollars to achieve. The transformer based architectures like the
kind used in open aised GPT models are gigantic maths,
machines that know nothing and will never, ever, ever ever
create the artificial general intelligence the conscious tech being that
Sam Altman has been claiming it will. GENERATIAI does not
appear to provide the kind of easy business return and

(44:00):
it's reminiscent of the cloud computing boom and mobile app
store booms. And once that becomes clear, the markets will
punish those most deeply invested in quite a painful way,
and once they do, the real thumb will begin as
big tech reconciles with the lack of innovation and leadership
teams stuffed with management consultants, product managers, and sick evans
that lank any real ideas or expertise that might inform

(44:24):
what actually might be next, not least because they've sequested
themselves away from creators and pretty much any normal person
or anyone who does an actual job. I don't really
know when this reckoning will happen, though, but I do
know this. When I started writing this script, it was
a brief way to connect the past to the present.
And as with everything I've written, it seems I found

(44:45):
my argument as I wrote it, searching as I went.
There's no prompt that could have told a generative AI
to write what I've written, Nor is there a prompt
that would let me delightfully enrage myself in a tiny
sound proof in my garage and all of that. That
is the magic that creates things like this podcast, things
like my news there, things like you're writing, you're singing,
your coding, and everything like that. The process of creation,

(45:09):
the actual labor of considering what you should do next,
the mistakes you make, the finding the theories behind the
decisions you make, is what creates great work. What creates
great writing, not the probabilistic formulation of whatever you might
create if you trained on billions of words of other
people's stuff. It kind of reminds me chat GBT, especially

(45:30):
reminds me of the kind of writing i'd read in college,
where it was very much people saying things in the
order that they thought they should say them. The structures
like intro, body, conclusion. It was the same words, it
was the same things. And this was quite a long
time before chat GBT, and it was because people were
writing to spec they were doing what they thought they
should do, rather than writing a lot and coming out

(45:53):
with something at the end and no offense them. They're
college students. They should have been told. They shouldn't have been taught. Writing,
should be taught, talking, should be taught. They there are
social things that we learn, but we learn through making mistakes.
I can't code, but those people that I know can
have messed up so many times to their code. They've
broken things tons and tons of times. Part of the
great thing of creation is the destruction that you have

(46:14):
to go through to get there. I've written about seven
hundred thousand words in the last four years, and I
only really became good I'd say in the last two
hundred thousand, maybe one hundred and fifty thousand. I couldn't
have got there just by reading that many words. You
need to put in the time But if you don't
put time into anything, if you don't create anything, of

(46:35):
course you don't respect that, And of course you don't
know what good looks like. But these people, these people
who are so disconnected, they will demand, as Jack Welch did,
that we burn whatever we need in pursuit of growth.
We must divert billions of dollars, exobites of data, endless
acres of data centers. Also that we could maybe create
a future they don't understand or care about. It doesn't

(46:58):
matter if generat if AI actually does anything, just as
long as they can convince shareholders and an analyst that it
might one day do so. It's hard to consider any
of this a grift, because doing so would be it
to admit how much of the economy is controlled by grifters.
But you know what, I'm gonna leave you with a
quote from Nick shi Rash, who I interviewed a few
episodes ago about it, and this is a quote from

(47:19):
his excellent blog. I will fucking pile drive you if
you mention AI again. Not gonna do an Australian accent.
That's rude. You see, Well, hype is nice. It's only
nice and small burst for practitioners. We have a few
key things that a grifter does not have, such as
job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not

(47:42):
have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment
the gold rush is over due to the sad fact
that we've actually needed to study things and build experience. Grifters,
on the other hand, wield the omni tool that is
self aggrandizingly called politics. That is to say, it turns
out that the core competency smiling and promising things that
you can't actually deliver, is highly transferable. Generative AI is

(48:07):
an active theft in and of itself, perpetuated by people
that have stolen innovation in the name of shareholder supremacy,
creating a degenerative form of innovation that optimizes the tech
industry to create things that sound cool rather than actually
do things and help people. And the people perpetuating these
acts sundarp Isshai, Mark Zuckerberg, Andy Jesse Sachy Nadella, Sam Lman,

(48:29):
Mirror Marati are all the same kind of charlatan, the
ultimate manager, one that has created the means to escape
the workforce and ultimately having to create anything of any kind.
These people, the crave the ultimate business where it's just
them and all the money flows up, kind of like
the final shade from Destiny Too or the Ultimate Sukiyomi

(48:52):
from Narutau. And I won't spoil the fun Fantasy seven
Rebirth collection either, But there is this thing in fiction
about this idea of a final shape, of an ultimate
dream where everything's locked under one eye, And as crazy
as that sounds, this really feels like what they want
as few people as possible to make them as much
money as possible, and the people who invest in them
as much money as possible. And it's gross. It's frustrating.

(49:18):
They could make a tenth of what they do and
still be so incredibly rich and probably not destroy their companies.
Google could putter around a two to five percent profitability
each quarter, it doesn't matter. It would still be fine,
but the markets don't care. It sucks. It makes me angry,
and I don't claim to have any answers or truly

(49:40):
know how to unwind all of this. I don't know
how to change things other than loudly saying what I
see in front of my eyes and how it makes
me feel, and wanting others to at the very least
have more clarity into the things that are being done
to them and the ways in which others have twisted
the system to make more money than anyone's ever had,
transforming company into these horrifying nihilist engines for growth, anti

(50:03):
companies that create value by reducing what they contribute to
the world. But I encourage you not to be nihilistic yourself.
Do not lose faith in the power of sunlight in
calling these people what they are. Parasites. Sam Altman is
a parasite, Sundar Pishai is a parasite, satch Nadella is
a parasite. Every single one of these people, these people

(50:26):
who have taken good companies that built good things that
people like that still made money and made them more
money while making the things worse, they are parasites, and
calling them that is necessary. If you Sundar Pishai or
one of your ilk here's this and are offended, fix
your goddamn company, make good things again, stop laying people off,

(50:47):
pay yourself less, and do more for the world. Otherwise
you are a parasite and you're deliberate in doing so.
Be clear and concise when speaking about these people. By
the way, be continually outraged damage they are doing to society.
And I encourage you all to catalog everything you see.
And I know posting through it doesn't sound like much,
but believe me, these people see it. These people know,

(51:11):
and these people have names. Sam Aortman, Sandra Pishai, Mark Zuckerberg,
Satya Nadela, Andy Jasse, all of these people diverting the
world's most talented engineers into an unsustainable, unprofitable boondoggle that
does nothing that they don't understand. All of them can
at least be held accountable on record, if not in
real life. Believe your eyes. You are being given less

(51:35):
so that others can have more. You are having things
taken from you by corporations because they must always please
the nebulous form of the shareholder. As I said, don't
give into nihilism. Though these people do read all this stuff.
They are aware of things like this podcast, but they
also see social media. They see the clouds of people

(51:56):
talking about how bad Google is now thanks to AI.
Even before that. Public pressure does work. Loud public pressure
consist in public pressure, but also Sunda Pishai, Prabagar Ragavan,
zach In Adela, Sam Altman say the goddamn name. Say
them repeatedly, loudly everywhere when you don't like something with
Google mention, Prabagar Ragavan mentioned sundar Pieshai engrave their names

(52:20):
to their bad acts. When you talk about how shitty
Facebook is, Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Olivan, Alex Schultz, Naomi gLite,
put their names by them. Let them not hide behind
the names of their corporations. Let history show that they
made so much money while doing so much damage, because

(52:42):
that is how they've gotten away with it. These people
have no more worldly concerns. They don't worry about bills,
they don't worry about the mortgage, they don't worry about
any of that crap. They don't have real problems. All
they have is their legacy and their goddamn name. So
take it from them. Take their name. Say the Cheryl Samberg,

(53:04):
a McKinsey operator an MBA is the reason that Facebook
started going downhill. Then Mark Zuckerberg, Javier Oliven, Naomi gLite,
Alec Schultz, Andrew Bosworth. All these people our why Facebook
is full of AI generated spam, say Sam Altman, Mirror
Marathi of open Ai. They are the people that are

(53:26):
stealing the entire internet to train models most of Varsuliema,
the Microsoft CEO of AI. Guess what, that guy is
also stealing your data. He is also training models on it.
He is the one perpetuating the great theft. As long
as their names are attached these acts, it'll be scarier
for them. I can't promise it will stop them. But

(53:48):
giving them a level of accountability, no matter Howell Thinn,
is necessary and the first step to fixing things. And
celebrate companies that make good shit. Celebrate things like the
steam Deck, one of the best consoles I've ever used.
I love that thing. So break companies like Anchor great
battery packs. There are things in tech that are still cool.
There are things in tech that are still good. You

(54:10):
just have to look for them, and you're not finding
them in big tech. And you're not finding them in
big tech because you are not the customer. You are
not the person that Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Sachin at
Deel or sand Uppishi cares about. No, they care about
the nebulous form of the shareholder, the markets and analyst targets.

(54:30):
You deserve better, so give them so much worse. 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

(54:50):
Matasowski dot com, M A T T O. S O
w Ski dot com. You can email me an 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
youreaed dot at to visit the discord, and go to
our slash Better Offline to check out I'll Reddit. Thank

(55:13):
you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production
of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media,
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