June 11, 2025 • 27 mins
In part one of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how Business Idiots have captured our society, with middle management losers breeding out true meritocracy and value-creation in favor of symbolic growth and superficial intelligence.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media. Hello, will welcome to Better Offline. I'm your
host ed Zitron, and welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy.
What that means will supercome obvious. So on May fifteenth,
(00:25):
Bloomberg profile Microsoft CEO Sacha and Nedella, revealing that on
some level, Sacha Nadella is kind of a fucking idiot.
The article revealed that, assuming we believe him, and this
wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI, the Copilot
consumes Nadello's life outside the office as well as at work.
He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them with
his ears, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on
(00:47):
his phone so that he can chat with the voice
assistant about the content of an episode in the car
as he commutes to Redmond at the office, he relies
on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in
Outlook and teams and toggles among allegedly at least ten
custom agents from Copilot Studio. Now the article does not
say what they do, doesn't seem like they bother to ask,
(01:08):
but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff,
delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again unnamed to
the bots, and to quote such and Adella in this article,
he says, I'm an email typist, and he jokes about this,
noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
None of these tasks are things that require you to
(01:30):
use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and
teams without having them summarized, and I argue that a
well written email is one that doesn't require a summary.
Podcasts are not there to be chatted too or about
with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI,
nor as research, unless, of course, you don't really give
a shit about the actual content of what you're reading,
(01:50):
of what you're saying, just that you are seeing the
right thing and that you know the facts of some kind.
To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs
his life in this way. But if he does, Microsoft
borgered fire him immediately. It's a mission of negligence, akin
to a taxi driver admitting easwallows a couple of glugs
of cram Royale before he starts a shift. In any case,
(02:11):
this article is rambling. It's cloying, and it ignores Microsoft
AICEO most of our soule man's documented history of abusing
his workers ten customer agents to do. What what do
you mean by other toss? Why are these questions never asked?
Is it because the reporters know they won't get an answer?
Is it because the reporters are too polite to ours
probe in questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely
made up as a means to promote a flagging AI
(02:33):
ecosystem that costs billions to construct, but that doesn't seem
to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want
to force Sature to build a bigger has off cuts
a sorry, sorry, I'm in my new studio all I'm
all fired up and this is a bloody long one.
But really, is it because we as a society do
not want to look too closely at the powerful? Is
(02:54):
it because we've handed our economy to men that get
paid seventy nine million dollars a year to do a
job they can't seem to describe, even that they would
sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models they
nactually do the very small amounts of things they have
to do. Look, we live in an era of the
symbolic executive, when being good at stuff matters far less
(03:14):
than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is
dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure,
but rather the vibes pass between managers and executives that
have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it,
and our tech companies are directed by people that don't
experience the problems they alleged to solve for their customers.
As the modern executive is no longer a person with
(03:36):
demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value, something
I went through in their Shareholder Supremacy series you can
go back to if you want, in another extremely long
series of episodes. They're bloody good though, and they're free now.
This three part series examines the phenomenon of something I
call the business idio, looking at the root causes of
the idioc and our economy itself, how they're ruining our world,
(03:56):
and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media.
It's too afraid to say that the emperor as is
dick out, it's it's going to be long. I'll take
you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than
I usually do, which I admit is a lot. But
business idiots are a problem. They deserve our scrutiny and
are discussed. I, however, believe the problem of the business
(04:16):
idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy. Whether
things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger,
more virulent and treatment resistant plague that's infected the minds
of those currently twigging at the levels of power, and
really the only levels that actually matter, the incentives behind
everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking,
where the idea of a company an entity created to
(04:39):
do a thing in exchange for money, has been drained
of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of
everything around it, with their leaders now focusing heavily on
short term gains and growth at all costs. You know,
I've been over that a little bit, and I'll get
back to it in the second, aren't I. In doing so,
the definition of what a good business is has changed
from one that makes good products at a fair price
with a sustainable and loyal market to one that can
(05:00):
display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
This is the rot economy, which is my useful description
of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products
in order to plicate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved
services into a hollow shell of their former selves as
a means of expressing growth to the markets. When a
social network hides things that you want to see because
(05:21):
they want to juce their metrics, that's the rot economy.
But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to
the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred
when the tech industry into its current VC fuel publicly
traded incarnation. We simply notice it more in tech because
we use tech in our personal and professional lives, and
thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of
(05:42):
impossible to ignore. In the shareholder Supremacy, I drew a
line from the early twentieth century court ruling which opened
that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests
of its employees, though it was a bita dicta, meaning
it was just literally said by the judge, but a
lot of people ever since have taken it literally. And
then I went to a course former GES CEO Jack
(06:02):
Welch to the current tech industry. But there's one figure
I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I
regrettably now have to do so. Famed Chicago School economists
and dweller of Hell, Milton Friedman once argued in his
nineteen seventy doctrine No literally, that's what it was called
when it was published, of course in the New York Times,
which is an incredible act of hubris when you think
about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value
(06:25):
were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been
undermining the basis of free society these past decades. Acting
with social responsibility, say, treating work as well. Doing anything
other than focusing on shareholder value is tantamount to an
executive taxing as shareholders buy and I quote, spending their
money on their own personal beliefs, said Freedman. Freedman was
(06:46):
a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and
this zelatory surpassed any sense of basic human morality. If
he had any for example, in his book Capitalism and Freedom,
he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate our
racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be
required to hire an equally or better qualified black person.
Bear in mind, this was written at the height of
(07:07):
the Civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination
of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking
up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process
I add that's ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still
don't seem super happy with. I'm not going to read
the full quote because I've already got a lot of
talking and not much time, and also there are some
(07:28):
words that i really don't want to say, but you
can see it in Falling in its original context on
the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in
the episode notes and as a special tree I'll actually
update them. Freedom was really grotesque. Though I'm not religious,
but I really do hope that hell exists only for
him and Margaret Thatcher and Robert Reagan actually quite a
few people. Anyway. The broader point I'm trying to make
(07:49):
is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish and it believes that
the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation,
or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom
rather than the kind of market dominated, quasi authoritarian dictatorship
thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims
of the affluent, and that there's no institution that could
possibly push back against them. Of course, there's no example
(08:11):
in current politics like that now. Friedman himself makes this
kind of facile argument that economic freedom, which he says
is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of
unfettered political freedom. Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument
that's proven persuasive with a certain class of people that
either intellectually or morally hollow or both, or run the
New York Times op ed page. Neoliberalism also represents a
(08:33):
kind of modern day feudalism, dividing society based on whether
somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking
precedents and the latter seeming irrelevant the best or disposable
at worse. It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a
state that is non interventionist in economic matters, as essential
for political freedom. While also failing to see equality is
the same. I realize all this is kind of clunky
(08:54):
and big, but I want you to understand how these
incentives have fundamentally changed everything, and why they're respond for
the rot we see in our society and our workplaces,
and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit.
(09:15):
When your only incentive is shareholder value, and you raise
shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary,
including the customer you are selling something too. Friedman himself
makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholder value, in
his example, the store owner matters more than racial equality.
At its most basic level. When you care only about
(09:38):
shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote
further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not
to make your company a good place to work, not
to make a good product, and not to make a
difference or contribute anything to the world other than further growth.
While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an
intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid, It's an idea
(09:59):
that's proven depressed, singly endemic among the managerial ely in
part because it's entered the culture and because it is
hammered again and again across in MBA classes and corporate
training seminars. Is simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives
not to be good at something or to make a
company based on their particular skills, but to find a
market opportunity and exploit it. The chief executive who makes
(10:19):
over three hundred times more than their average worker is
no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead
measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization
of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog
it to a public company or they take it public themselves.
It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor,
the amorphousness of its purpose, and the lack of any
(10:40):
clear responsibility other than making sure the money goes up
to them. While CEOs do get fired when things go badly,
it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy
and almost always comes with some kind of payoff. And
when I say badly, I mean that growth is slow
to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't
seem to make things better. We have, as a society
reframe all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of
(11:03):
all management from the C suite down to the equivalent
of Paul Blant mallcop a person that exists to make
sure people are working without having any real accountability for
the work themselves or to even understand the work itself.
And I must apologize to mister Blant. He worked hard,
he stopped some criminals in that movie. Really should respect
his service. But when the leader of a company doesn't
participate in or respect the production of the goods that
(11:26):
enrich them, it creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous
leaders on all levels. Management as a concept no longer
means doing work, or even managing work so the output
of that work is better. You know, management, No, it's
become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A
CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good
(11:47):
the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be
tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A manager,
much like a CEO, is no longer a position with
any real responsibility. They're there to make sure that you're working,
to know enough about your work they can sort tell
you what to do but somehow the job of telling
you what to do doesn't come with any actual work
of their own, and instructions don't need to be useful
or meaningful or impart any great wisdom. Now, if you're
(12:09):
a manager hearing this, you're really not going to like
these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at
your heart. Now. I've heard from a few managers when
I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and
usually fifty to fifty to fifty percent people saying like, Hey,
I get it. I'm a manager too, and like, I
think you're right about management. Great managers move stuff out
the way. They get people the resources they need, They
(12:30):
understand and respect the labor that they're working with, and
they help them do their work. They make sure they're
on tasks, they get the people, get business idiots out
of their way. Then the other fifty percent get real
but her. If you're butt hurt hearing this, go cry,
but go cry outside. Nobody likes you.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Now.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership
means that the people running companies have been selected not
based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became
defined by a lack of actual production, but on whether
they zamble what a manager or executive is meant to
look like based on the work that somebody else did once.
That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade
and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed
(13:10):
to become the head of Warner Brothers. That he kissed
up to Jack Welch of GE who he called a
big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack
Welch fired like over one hundred thousand people over his tenure.
Real piece of fucking shit, talking to pieces as shit.
It's how Carly Fiery fi a arena Fia arena not
going to fix that. An NBA by trade, went on
to become the head of HPO, and he drive the
(13:31):
company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely
missed the biggest opportunities of the early Internet era. The
three CEOs that followed her at HP Mark Hurd was
ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a
love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars
in severance. Leo of Pothaka, who in The New York
Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina and Meg Whitman,
famous for being both a terrible CEO HP and co
(13:54):
founding the doomed video start up Quibi. Well, they all
similarly came from a non take background and similarly did
a shitty fucking job, in part because they didn't understand
the company, or the products or the customers. Are really
give a shit about anything other than getting paid. Hey,
you know where Meg Whitman now is. She's on the
board of fucking Core Weave. I swear to god history
is driving me insane. Management has over the course of
(14:16):
the past few decades eroded the very fabric of corporate America,
and I'd argue it's done much the same to other
multiple other Western economies too. I'd also argue that this
kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons
of politics across the world, and especially in the UK,
my country of birth and where I lived until two
thousand and eight, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects,
but at a macro level, as they impacted not a
(14:38):
single corporate entity, but the very institutions of the state. Now,
the UK has never been an egalitarian society, is demonstrated
by the fact that one fee paying school produced twenty
of our fifty five prime ministers, and that twenty percent
of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University.
And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades.
You can kind of use the Thatcher years as the
epoch when that political culture shifted. I was born in
(15:01):
the midst of the Thatcher government. My formative years were
spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms,
which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding
of the state, and pushed towards an American style individualism. Thatcher,
who fucking loved Readman's thinking, once famously quipped that there
was no such thing as a society. Jesus Christ, It's
(15:22):
like sub jokearean thinking. She didn't understand how things work,
but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the
market to handle what was the functions of the state,
from housing to energy to water And if you know
how things going with Thames water, what do you think?
The end result of this political and cultural shift was,
in the long run pretty bad. The UK is the
(15:44):
smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of
any developed country and some of the worst affordability. The
privatization of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that
would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funneled to
shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain
is literally unable to process human waste and is actively
dumping millions of liters of human sewerage into its waterways
(16:06):
and coastline. When Britain privatized its energy companies, the new
management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas
storage infrastructure. As a result, when the Ukraine War sparked
and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the
smallest reserves of any country in Europe and was forced
to buy gas at market prices which were several times
higher than their pre war levels, thus sending household and
(16:27):
energy builds through the fucking roof. I'm no fan of Thatcher,
and like Freedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts.
(16:49):
The reason that brought her up was to stress the
consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a
macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products
or white collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational
christ of housing and energy in the environment. These crisis
were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone whose belief
in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist
(17:09):
beliefs surpassed the actual, informed understanding of those working in energy,
housing a water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollet once said,
bullshit baffles brains. The sweeping changes we've seen both in
our economy and our societies led them to an unprecedented
gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things things
of actual substance only matter even less. We live in
(17:31):
a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing cvs
and cover letters that will resemble a certain kind of
higher with our resume read by someone who doesn't do
or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining
whether we're worthy of going up to the next step
of the eighty seven point hiring process. All this so
that we can get an interview with a manager or
an executive who will decide whether they think we can
(17:52):
do it. We're managed by people whose job is implicitly
not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't
necessarily mean they understand. We are, as children and young
adults encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive,
or to own our own business, to have people that
work for us, and the terms of our society are
by default that management is not a role you work
(18:13):
at so much as a position you hold a figurehead
that passes the bug and makes far more of them
than you ever will. This problem, i believe, is poison
the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating
people that don't do work to oversee companies that make
things that they don't understand, creating substrates of management that
do not do anything but create further distance from doing
actual work. While some of you might automatically think and
(18:35):
email me again and again that I'm talking about Graver's
concept of bullshit jobs, and I've linked to it in
the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far,
far bigger. The system as it stands selects people at
all levels of management, specifically because they resemble this kind
of specious worker verse dollar that runs seemingly every company.
A person built to go from meeting to meeting with
(18:55):
the vague consternation of someone who may or may not
be busy that suggests I don't know that they're hard
at work and they're important, and that you should respect them.
As a result, the higher you get up in an organization,
the further you get from the customer the problem you're
solving really any of the actual work, and the higher
up you get, the more power you have to change
the conditions of the business and the ways in which
(19:16):
you actually make money. On some level, modern corporate power
structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget
further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand
what's going on, and the more vague ones understanding is
the more likely you are to lean toward what's good
or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating
(19:37):
all charts full of people that become harder and harder
to justify other than they've been here a while and
they're nice. Even if they're not, they do not do
work on the product, and their answer as to why
would be what am I meant to do? Go down
to the line and use a machine, or am I
meant to call a customer and make a sale? And
the answer is yes, you lazy, fucking piece of shit.
(20:00):
You would do that once in a while, or at
the very least go down and watch the well, listen
to somebody else doing so, and do so regularly. Why
are you? Why do you look down on the things
that make you rich? You piece of shit? But that's
not what a manager does, right, Ashman isn't isn't work.
It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do.
It's about making the cause. It's about managing people, and
(20:23):
that can mean just about anything, but often means taking
credit from some ort or passing blame to someone else.
Because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other
than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up.
The system creates products for these people because these people
are more often than not, the ones in power. They're
your boss, your boss's boss, and their boss too. Big
(20:45):
companies build products sold by species executives or manager to
other species executives and managers, and thus the products themselves
stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they
resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it at least,
that the scale of a public or large company isn't
necessarily the fun or recipient or user of the product,
so they too are trained and selected to make calls
(21:07):
based on vibes. I believe the scale of this problem
is society wide, and it is at its core a
destruction of what it means to be a leader and
a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation ish thinking,
turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to
seeing customers in an equally faceless way. Their problems generalize,
their paid points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint rather
(21:27):
than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or
even really thinks about. And that sumes that said pain
points are even considered to begin with, or not ignored
in favor of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that
sound better in presentations. People, be they the ones you're
paying or paying you, become numbers. We've created and elevated
an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and
(21:50):
told decades worth of children that that's what they should
aspire to, and that the next step from doing a
job is for us to tell other people to do
a job, until we're one day able to tell those
people how to do their job, with each rung on
the corporate ladder, further distancing ourselves from anything that actually
interacts with reality. The real breaking point is fairly simple.
The higher up you got a company, the further you
(22:11):
are from problems or purpose. Everything's abstract, the people that
work for you, the people you work for, and even
the tasks that you do. We train people from a
young age to generalize and distance oneselves from other people
and actual tasks, to aspire to do managerial work because
managers are well paid and know what's going on, even
if they haven't actually known what was going on for
(22:32):
years if they ever did so. This phenomena has led
to a stigmatization of blue collar work and the subsequent
evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of
the developed world in favor of universities. Society respects an
mba more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits
society more. Though I can see that both roles involve
on some level a lot of shit, with the plummer
on blocking it in the NBA while finding new places
(22:52):
to put in. I should also add I have nothing
against universities in general. I'm just saying that our university
system is out of work with the working world except
in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there.
We also have many other problems there. But one example
I'll talk about in the next episode is the push
to return to the office. Have you noticed how all
those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles
(23:15):
and not those who do actual jobs. Isn't that fucking weird?
Because if you go back and look, and by the way,
Kevin Russ March twenty twenty, Kevin Roos of a hard
fork podcast in The New York Times had a story
saying that working from home is not as good March
twenty twenty, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet. This
(23:35):
man was so ahead of the terms of what the
powerful wanted him to tell people. I actually kind of
admire it. I wonder if I could do that. I
could just every week just wake up and just go
to Microsoft dot com and be like, that's my work
for the week. Fellas pardon me, sorry, I apologize to
mister Russ. I would go to anthropic dot com and
(23:55):
I find out what they're doing. Oh, Heedgy's such a
petty bitch. But I digress. I believe that all of
this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like
I said, a symbolic society, one where people are elevated
not by an ability to do something or knowledge they
may have, but by the ability to make the right
noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead.
And yeah, usually a white guy, but increasingly getting all
(24:16):
sorts of races of guys who get these roles. The
power structures of modern society are run by business idiots,
people that have learned enough to impress the people above
them and around them. Because the business idiots have been
in power for decades, they bread out true meritocracy or
achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth
and superficial intelligence because real work is hard, and there
(24:38):
are so many of them in power that they've all
found a way to work together that do fucking nothing.
And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is,
because it's why everything feels fucking wrong. And the next
episode will pick up from where we left off here
and it's going to be three straight days of episode
a crazy thing. No monologue this week, unless you consider
me just talking on my own for a while. I'm
(24:59):
onnolog and you're going to say that's the definition of
a monologue, and in which I'll say, shut up, that's rude.
I really do have more to say about business idiots,
though in the abstract, because I feel as though this
phenomenon is complex and multifaceted, and when you can identify
the traits of the business idiot, you start seeing them everywhere.
It's like they live but with management consultants. You see
them in your own life, in your own boss. Are
(25:21):
the people running the biggest and most powerful companies in
the world, and even some of the people you know
in real life, people that don't seem to do real jobs,
not even email jobs. They're everywhere. They can manage stores,
they can be your boss, they can be your friend's boss. Shit,
they can run their own consultancy, they can do all
sorts of things. You run into these people everywhere, and
(25:42):
this three part series is both about the history and
helping you understand where the business idiot in your life is.
Catch you on the next episode. Thank you for listening
to Offline.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski 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 visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
(26:22):
you go to chat dot where's youreaed 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 1 (26:31):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Zone Media. Hello, will welcome to Better Offline. I'm your
host ed Zitron, and welcome to the Business Idiot Trilogy.
What that means will supercome obvious. So on May fifteenth,
(00:25):
Bloomberg profile Microsoft CEO Sacha and Nedella, revealing that on
some level, Sacha Nadella is kind of a fucking idiot.
The article revealed that, assuming we believe him, and this
wasn't a thinly veiled ad for Microsoft's AI, the Copilot
consumes Nadello's life outside the office as well as at work.
He likes podcasts, but instead of listening to them with
his ears, he loads transcripts into the Copilot app on
(00:47):
his phone so that he can chat with the voice
assistant about the content of an episode in the car
as he commutes to Redmond at the office, he relies
on Copilot to deliver summaries of messages he receives in
Outlook and teams and toggles among allegedly at least ten
custom agents from Copilot Studio. Now the article does not
say what they do, doesn't seem like they bother to ask,
(01:08):
but he allegedly views them as his AI chiefs of staff,
delegating meeting prep, research, and other tasks, again unnamed to
the bots, and to quote such and Adella in this article,
he says, I'm an email typist, and he jokes about this,
noting that Copilot is thankfully very good at triaging his messages.
None of these tasks are things that require you to
(01:30):
use AI. You can read your messages on Outlook and
teams without having them summarized, and I argue that a
well written email is one that doesn't require a summary.
Podcasts are not there to be chatted too or about
with an AI. Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI,
nor as research, unless, of course, you don't really give
a shit about the actual content of what you're reading,
(01:50):
of what you're saying, just that you are seeing the
right thing and that you know the facts of some kind.
To be clear, I'm deeply unconvinced that Nadella actually runs
his life in this way. But if he does, Microsoft
borgered fire him immediately. It's a mission of negligence, akin
to a taxi driver admitting easwallows a couple of glugs
of cram Royale before he starts a shift. In any case,
(02:11):
this article is rambling. It's cloying, and it ignores Microsoft
AICEO most of our soule man's documented history of abusing
his workers ten customer agents to do. What what do
you mean by other toss? Why are these questions never asked?
Is it because the reporters know they won't get an answer?
Is it because the reporters are too polite to ours
probe in questions, knowing that these anecdotes are likely entirely
made up as a means to promote a flagging AI
(02:33):
ecosystem that costs billions to construct, but that doesn't seem
to do anything, and the reporter in question doesn't want
to force Sature to build a bigger has off cuts
a sorry, sorry, I'm in my new studio all I'm
all fired up and this is a bloody long one.
But really, is it because we as a society do
not want to look too closely at the powerful? Is
(02:54):
it because we've handed our economy to men that get
paid seventy nine million dollars a year to do a
job they can't seem to describe, even that they would
sooner offload to a bunch of unreliable AI models they
nactually do the very small amounts of things they have
to do. Look, we live in an era of the
symbolic executive, when being good at stuff matters far less
(03:14):
than the appearance of doing stuff, where what's useful is
dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure,
but rather the vibes pass between managers and executives that
have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.
Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it,
and our tech companies are directed by people that don't
experience the problems they alleged to solve for their customers.
As the modern executive is no longer a person with
(03:36):
demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value, something
I went through in their Shareholder Supremacy series you can
go back to if you want, in another extremely long
series of episodes. They're bloody good though, and they're free now.
This three part series examines the phenomenon of something I
call the business idio, looking at the root causes of
the idioc and our economy itself, how they're ruining our world,
(03:56):
and how these idiots are enabled by an embarrassingly deferential media.
It's too afraid to say that the emperor as is
dick out, it's it's going to be long. I'll take
you on tangents, and I'll probably say fuck more than
I usually do, which I admit is a lot. But
business idiots are a problem. They deserve our scrutiny and
are discussed. I, however, believe the problem of the business
(04:16):
idiot runs a little deeper than just the economy. Whether
things we see are merely a symptom of a bigger,
more virulent and treatment resistant plague that's infected the minds
of those currently twigging at the levels of power, and
really the only levels that actually matter, the incentives behind
everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking,
where the idea of a company an entity created to
(04:39):
do a thing in exchange for money, has been drained
of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of
everything around it, with their leaders now focusing heavily on
short term gains and growth at all costs. You know,
I've been over that a little bit, and I'll get
back to it in the second, aren't I. In doing so,
the definition of what a good business is has changed
from one that makes good products at a fair price
with a sustainable and loyal market to one that can
(05:00):
display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
This is the rot economy, which is my useful description
of how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products
in order to plicate shareholders, transforming useful and sometimes beloved
services into a hollow shell of their former selves as
a means of expressing growth to the markets. When a
social network hides things that you want to see because
(05:21):
they want to juce their metrics, that's the rot economy.
But it's worth noting that this transformation isn't constrained to
the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred
when the tech industry into its current VC fuel publicly
traded incarnation. We simply notice it more in tech because
we use tech in our personal and professional lives, and
thus it affects everyone in a way that's kind of
(05:42):
impossible to ignore. In the shareholder Supremacy, I drew a
line from the early twentieth century court ruling which opened
that Ford must put shareholder value ahead of the interests
of its employees, though it was a bita dicta, meaning
it was just literally said by the judge, but a
lot of people ever since have taken it literally. And
then I went to a course former GES CEO Jack
(06:02):
Welch to the current tech industry. But there's one figure
I didn't really pay that much attention to, and I
regrettably now have to do so. Famed Chicago School economists
and dweller of Hell, Milton Friedman once argued in his
nineteen seventy doctrine No literally, that's what it was called
when it was published, of course in the New York Times,
which is an incredible act of hubris when you think
about it, that those who didn't focus on shareholder value
(06:25):
were unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been
undermining the basis of free society these past decades. Acting
with social responsibility, say, treating work as well. Doing anything
other than focusing on shareholder value is tantamount to an
executive taxing as shareholders buy and I quote, spending their
money on their own personal beliefs, said Freedman. Freedman was
(06:46):
a fundamentalist when it came to unrestricted, unfettered capitalism, and
this zelatory surpassed any sense of basic human morality. If
he had any for example, in his book Capitalism and Freedom,
he argued that companies should be allowed to discriminate our
racial grounds because the owner might suffer should they be
required to hire an equally or better qualified black person.
Bear in mind, this was written at the height of
(07:07):
the Civil rights movement, just six years before the assassination
of Martin Luther King, and when America was rapidly waking
up to the evils of racism and segregation, a process
I add that's ongoing, sadly not complete, and people still
don't seem super happy with. I'm not going to read
the full quote because I've already got a lot of
talking and not much time, and also there are some
(07:28):
words that i really don't want to say, but you
can see it in Falling in its original context on
the newsletter version of this episode that I'll share in
the episode notes and as a special tree I'll actually
update them. Freedom was really grotesque. Though I'm not religious,
but I really do hope that hell exists only for
him and Margaret Thatcher and Robert Reagan actually quite a
few people. Anyway. The broader point I'm trying to make
(07:49):
is that neoliberalism is inherently selfish and it believes that
the free market should reign supreme, bereft of government intervention, regulation,
or interference, thinking that somehow these terms will enable freedom
rather than the kind of market dominated, quasi authoritarian dictatorship
thing where our entire lives are dominated by the whims
of the affluent, and that there's no institution that could
possibly push back against them. Of course, there's no example
(08:11):
in current politics like that now. Friedman himself makes this
kind of facile argument that economic freedom, which he says
is synonymous with unfettered capitalism, is a necessary condition of
unfettered political freedom. Obviously, that's bollocks, although it's an argument
that's proven persuasive with a certain class of people that
either intellectually or morally hollow or both, or run the
New York Times op ed page. Neoliberalism also represents a
(08:33):
kind of modern day feudalism, dividing society based on whether
somebody is a shareholder or not, with the former taking
precedents and the latter seeming irrelevant the best or disposable
at worse. It's curious that Friedman saw economic freedom, a
state that is non interventionist in economic matters, as essential
for political freedom. While also failing to see equality is
the same. I realize all this is kind of clunky
(08:54):
and big, but I want you to understand how these
incentives have fundamentally changed everything, and why they're respond for
the rot we see in our society and our workplaces,
and our tech industry and a bunch of other shit.
(09:15):
When your only incentive is shareholder value, and you raise
shareholder value as a platonic ideal, everything else is secondary,
including the customer you are selling something too. Friedman himself
makes a moral case for discrimination because shareholder value, in
his example, the store owner matters more than racial equality.
At its most basic level. When you care only about
(09:38):
shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote
further exploitation and dominance, not to have happy customers, not
to make your company a good place to work, not
to make a good product, and not to make a
difference or contribute anything to the world other than further growth.
While this is, to anyone with a vapor of an
intellectual or moral dimension, absolutely fucking stupid, It's an idea
(09:59):
that's proven depressed, singly endemic among the managerial ely in
part because it's entered the culture and because it is
hammered again and again across in MBA classes and corporate
training seminars. Is simpler terms, modern business theory trains executives
not to be good at something or to make a
company based on their particular skills, but to find a
market opportunity and exploit it. The chief executive who makes
(10:19):
over three hundred times more than their average worker is
no longer a leadership position, but the kind of figurehead
measured on their ability to continually grow the market capitalization
of their company or the theoretical valuation before they flog
it to a public company or they take it public themselves.
It's a position inherently defined by its lack of labor,
the amorphousness of its purpose, and the lack of any
(10:40):
clear responsibility other than making sure the money goes up
to them. While CEOs do get fired when things go badly,
it's often after a prolonged period of decline and stagnancy
and almost always comes with some kind of payoff. And
when I say badly, I mean that growth is slow
to the point that even firing masses of people doesn't
seem to make things better. We have, as a society
reframe all business leadership, which is increasingly broad, consisting of
(11:03):
all management from the C suite down to the equivalent
of Paul Blant mallcop a person that exists to make
sure people are working without having any real accountability for
the work themselves or to even understand the work itself.
And I must apologize to mister Blant. He worked hard,
he stopped some criminals in that movie. Really should respect
his service. But when the leader of a company doesn't
participate in or respect the production of the goods that
(11:26):
enrich them, it creates a culture that enables similarly vacuous
leaders on all levels. Management as a concept no longer
means doing work, or even managing work so the output
of that work is better. You know, management, No, it's
become about establishing cultures of dominance and value extraction. A
CEO isn't measured on happy customers or even how good
(11:47):
the revenue is today, but how good revenue might be
tomorrow and whether those customers are paying them more. A manager,
much like a CEO, is no longer a position with
any real responsibility. They're there to make sure that you're working,
to know enough about your work they can sort tell
you what to do but somehow the job of telling
you what to do doesn't come with any actual work
of their own, and instructions don't need to be useful
or meaningful or impart any great wisdom. Now, if you're
(12:09):
a manager hearing this, you're really not going to like
these episodes. These episodes are really going to dig at
your heart. Now. I've heard from a few managers when
I've had a dalliance with this in the past, and
usually fifty to fifty to fifty percent people saying like, Hey,
I get it. I'm a manager too, and like, I
think you're right about management. Great managers move stuff out
the way. They get people the resources they need, They
(12:30):
understand and respect the labor that they're working with, and
they help them do their work. They make sure they're
on tasks, they get the people, get business idiots out
of their way. Then the other fifty percent get real
but her. If you're butt hurt hearing this, go cry,
but go cry outside. Nobody likes you.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Now.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Decades of direct erosion of the very concept of leadership
means that the people running companies have been selected not
based on their actual efficacy, especially as the position became
defined by a lack of actual production, but on whether
they zamble what a manager or executive is meant to
look like based on the work that somebody else did once.
That's how somebody like David Zaslav, a lawyer by trade
and arguably the worst CEO in the entertainment industry, managed
(13:10):
to become the head of Warner Brothers. That he kissed
up to Jack Welch of GE who he called a
big brother that picked him up like a friend. Jack
Welch fired like over one hundred thousand people over his tenure.
Real piece of fucking shit, talking to pieces as shit.
It's how Carly Fiery fi a arena Fia arena not
going to fix that. An NBA by trade, went on
to become the head of HPO, and he drive the
(13:31):
company into a ditch where it stopped innovating and largely
missed the biggest opportunities of the early Internet era. The
three CEOs that followed her at HP Mark Hurd was
ousted after fudging expense reports to send money to a
love interest and still got tens of millions of dollars
in severance. Leo of Pothaka, who in The New York
Times suggests may have been worse than Fiorina and Meg Whitman,
famous for being both a terrible CEO HP and co
(13:54):
founding the doomed video start up Quibi. Well, they all
similarly came from a non take background and similarly did
a shitty fucking job, in part because they didn't understand
the company, or the products or the customers. Are really
give a shit about anything other than getting paid. Hey,
you know where Meg Whitman now is. She's on the
board of fucking Core Weave. I swear to god history
is driving me insane. Management has over the course of
(14:16):
the past few decades eroded the very fabric of corporate America,
and I'd argue it's done much the same to other
multiple other Western economies too. I'd also argue that this
kind of dumb management thinking also infected the highest echelons
of politics across the world, and especially in the UK,
my country of birth and where I lived until two
thousand and eight, delivering the same kind of disastrous effects,
but at a macro level, as they impacted not a
(14:38):
single corporate entity, but the very institutions of the state. Now,
the UK has never been an egalitarian society, is demonstrated
by the fact that one fee paying school produced twenty
of our fifty five prime ministers, and that twenty percent
of the current MPs went to either Cambridge or Oxford University.
And yet things have changed markedly in the past few decades.
You can kind of use the Thatcher years as the
epoch when that political culture shifted. I was born in
(15:01):
the midst of the Thatcher government. My formative years were
spent as British society tried to recover after her reforms,
which is itself a comfortable euphemism for the reckless shedding
of the state, and pushed towards an American style individualism. Thatcher,
who fucking loved Readman's thinking, once famously quipped that there
was no such thing as a society. Jesus Christ, It's
(15:22):
like sub jokearean thinking. She didn't understand how things work,
but was nonetheless completely convinced that the power of the
market to handle what was the functions of the state,
from housing to energy to water And if you know
how things going with Thames water, what do you think?
The end result of this political and cultural shift was,
in the long run pretty bad. The UK is the
(15:44):
smallest houses in the OECD, the smallest housing stock of
any developed country and some of the worst affordability. The
privatization of the UK's water infrastructure meant that money that
would previously go towards infrastructure upgrades was instead funneled to
shareholders in the form of dividends. As a result, Britain
is literally unable to process human waste and is actively
dumping millions of liters of human sewerage into its waterways
(16:06):
and coastline. When Britain privatized its energy companies, the new
management sold or closed the vast majority of its gas
storage infrastructure. As a result, when the Ukraine War sparked
and natural gas prices surged, Britain had some of the
smallest reserves of any country in Europe and was forced
to buy gas at market prices which were several times
higher than their pre war levels, thus sending household and
(16:27):
energy builds through the fucking roof. I'm no fan of Thatcher,
and like Freedman, I hope she fucking burns and it hurts.
(16:49):
The reason that brought her up was to stress the
consequences of this kind of clueless managerial thinking on a
macro level, where the impacts aren't just declining tech products
or white collar layoffs, but rather the emergence of generational
christ of housing and energy in the environment. These crisis
were obvious consequences of decisions made by someone whose belief
in the free market was almost absolute, and whose fundamentalist
(17:09):
beliefs surpassed the actual, informed understanding of those working in energy,
housing a water. As the legendary advertiser Stanley Pollet once said,
bullshit baffles brains. The sweeping changes we've seen both in
our economy and our societies led them to an unprecedented
gilded age of bullshit, where nothing matters and things things
of actual substance only matter even less. We live in
(17:31):
a symbolic economy where we apply for jobs, writing cvs
and cover letters that will resemble a certain kind of
higher with our resume read by someone who doesn't do
or understand our job, but is somehow responsible for determining
whether we're worthy of going up to the next step
of the eighty seven point hiring process. All this so
that we can get an interview with a manager or
an executive who will decide whether they think we can
(17:52):
do it. We're managed by people whose job is implicitly
not to do work, but to oversee it, which doesn't
necessarily mean they understand. We are, as children and young
adults encouraged to aspire to become a manager or an executive,
or to own our own business, to have people that
work for us, and the terms of our society are
by default that management is not a role you work
(18:13):
at so much as a position you hold a figurehead
that passes the bug and makes far more of them
than you ever will. This problem, i believe, is poison
the fabric of almost every part of modern business, elevating
people that don't do work to oversee companies that make
things that they don't understand, creating substrates of management that
do not do anything but create further distance from doing
actual work. While some of you might automatically think and
(18:35):
email me again and again that I'm talking about Graver's
concept of bullshit jobs, and I've linked to it in
the show notes, what I'm talking about is far, far,
far bigger. The system as it stands selects people at
all levels of management, specifically because they resemble this kind
of specious worker verse dollar that runs seemingly every company.
A person built to go from meeting to meeting with
(18:55):
the vague consternation of someone who may or may not
be busy that suggests I don't know that they're hard
at work and they're important, and that you should respect them.
As a result, the higher you get up in an organization,
the further you get from the customer the problem you're
solving really any of the actual work, and the higher
up you get, the more power you have to change
the conditions of the business and the ways in which
(19:16):
you actually make money. On some level, modern corporate power
structures are a giant game of telephone where vibes beget
further vibes, where managers only kind of sort of understand
what's going on, and the more vague ones understanding is
the more likely you are to lean toward what's good
or easy or makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
The system selects for people comfortable in these roles, creating
(19:37):
all charts full of people that become harder and harder
to justify other than they've been here a while and
they're nice. Even if they're not, they do not do
work on the product, and their answer as to why
would be what am I meant to do? Go down
to the line and use a machine, or am I
meant to call a customer and make a sale? And
the answer is yes, you lazy, fucking piece of shit.
(20:00):
You would do that once in a while, or at
the very least go down and watch the well, listen
to somebody else doing so, and do so regularly. Why
are you? Why do you look down on the things
that make you rich? You piece of shit? But that's
not what a manager does, right, Ashman isn't isn't work.
It's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do.
It's about making the cause. It's about managing people, and
(20:23):
that can mean just about anything, but often means taking
credit from some ort or passing blame to someone else.
Because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other
than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up.
The system creates products for these people because these people
are more often than not, the ones in power. They're
your boss, your boss's boss, and their boss too. Big
(20:45):
companies build products sold by species executives or manager to
other species executives and managers, and thus the products themselves
stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they
resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it at least,
that the scale of a public or large company isn't
necessarily the fun or recipient or user of the product,
so they too are trained and selected to make calls
(21:07):
based on vibes. I believe the scale of this problem
is society wide, and it is at its core a
destruction of what it means to be a leader and
a valorization of a kind of selfish, isolation ish thinking,
turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to
seeing customers in an equally faceless way. Their problems generalize,
their paid points viewed as parts of a PowerPoint rather
(21:27):
than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or
even really thinks about. And that sumes that said pain
points are even considered to begin with, or not ignored
in favor of fictitious and purely hypothetical pain points that
sound better in presentations. People, be they the ones you're
paying or paying you, become numbers. We've created and elevated
an entirely new class of person, the nebulous manager, and
(21:50):
told decades worth of children that that's what they should
aspire to, and that the next step from doing a
job is for us to tell other people to do
a job, until we're one day able to tell those
people how to do their job, with each rung on
the corporate ladder, further distancing ourselves from anything that actually
interacts with reality. The real breaking point is fairly simple.
The higher up you got a company, the further you
(22:11):
are from problems or purpose. Everything's abstract, the people that
work for you, the people you work for, and even
the tasks that you do. We train people from a
young age to generalize and distance oneselves from other people
and actual tasks, to aspire to do managerial work because
managers are well paid and know what's going on, even
if they haven't actually known what was going on for
(22:32):
years if they ever did so. This phenomena has led
to a stigmatization of blue collar work and the subsequent
evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of
the developed world in favor of universities. Society respects an
mba more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits
society more. Though I can see that both roles involve
on some level a lot of shit, with the plummer
on blocking it in the NBA while finding new places
(22:52):
to put in. I should also add I have nothing
against universities in general. I'm just saying that our university
system is out of work with the working world except
in the specialist fields, and we have a problem there.
We also have many other problems there. But one example
I'll talk about in the next episode is the push
to return to the office. Have you noticed how all
those calls have come from people who occupy managerial roles
(23:15):
and not those who do actual jobs. Isn't that fucking weird?
Because if you go back and look, and by the way,
Kevin Russ March twenty twenty, Kevin Roos of a hard
fork podcast in The New York Times had a story
saying that working from home is not as good March
twenty twenty, the fucking lockdown hadn't even begun yet. This
(23:35):
man was so ahead of the terms of what the
powerful wanted him to tell people. I actually kind of
admire it. I wonder if I could do that. I
could just every week just wake up and just go
to Microsoft dot com and be like, that's my work
for the week. Fellas pardon me, sorry, I apologize to
mister Russ. I would go to anthropic dot com and
(23:55):
I find out what they're doing. Oh, Heedgy's such a
petty bitch. But I digress. I believe that all of
this stuff I'm talking about, this process has created, like
I said, a symbolic society, one where people are elevated
not by an ability to do something or knowledge they
may have, but by the ability to make the right
noises and honks and look the right way to get ahead.
And yeah, usually a white guy, but increasingly getting all
(24:16):
sorts of races of guys who get these roles. The
power structures of modern society are run by business idiots,
people that have learned enough to impress the people above
them and around them. Because the business idiots have been
in power for decades, they bread out true meritocracy or
achievement or value creation in favor of this symbolic growth
and superficial intelligence because real work is hard, and there
(24:38):
are so many of them in power that they've all
found a way to work together that do fucking nothing.
And I need you to understand how widespread this problem is,
because it's why everything feels fucking wrong. And the next
episode will pick up from where we left off here
and it's going to be three straight days of episode
a crazy thing. No monologue this week, unless you consider
me just talking on my own for a while. I'm
(24:59):
onnolog and you're going to say that's the definition of
a monologue, and in which I'll say, shut up, that's rude.
I really do have more to say about business idiots,
though in the abstract, because I feel as though this
phenomenon is complex and multifaceted, and when you can identify
the traits of the business idiot, you start seeing them everywhere.
It's like they live but with management consultants. You see
them in your own life, in your own boss. Are
(25:21):
the people running the biggest and most powerful companies in
the world, and even some of the people you know
in real life, people that don't seem to do real jobs,
not even email jobs. They're everywhere. They can manage stores,
they can be your boss, they can be your friend's boss. Shit,
they can run their own consultancy, they can do all
sorts of things. You run into these people everywhere, and
(25:42):
this three part series is both about the history and
helping you understand where the business idiot in your life is.
Catch you on the next episode. Thank you for listening
to Offline.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski 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 visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast
links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend
(26:22):
you go to chat dot where's youreaed 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 1 (26:31):
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts.
Host
Ed Zitron
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