June 12, 2025 • 32 mins
In part two of this week's three-part Better Offline, Ed Zitron walks you through how Business Idiots demanded we all return to the office to hide their own lack of utility - and how this directly led to their desperation to adopt generative AI.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Zone Media. Hello there, I'm at Zetron and welcome to
Better Offline and you're on the second part of the
Business City at Trilogy. And indeed that was a concept
(00:24):
I introduced you to last episode. Think of the business
idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con
has become the standard way of doing business for an
alarmingly large part of society. The business audiot is the
manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted,
and the CEO of a public company that says boring,
specious nonsense about artificial intelligence that the tenured professor that
you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears
(00:47):
to be opening and closing the laptop, and the consultant
that can come up with a million reasons to charge
you more money, yet not one metric to judge their
success by. Also the marketing executive that's worked exactly three
years at every major cloud player but does not appear
to have done it anything. And of course the investor
that invests based on founders but really means guys that
look and sound exactly like me. These people are present
throughout the private and public sector and our governments too,
(01:09):
and they paradoxically do nothing of substance, but somehow damage
everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public
and private sector is entirely useless, just that these people
are poisoned so many partss of our power structure that
avoiding them is entirely impossible. Our economy is oriented around them,
made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their
literal only goal in life has been to take and
(01:30):
use power and help others who feel the same. The
business is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they
need to, including harming the institution that they work for
or those closest to them, like their coworkers, of their community,
as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades
of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize
society to become management, to manage or run a company,
(01:52):
rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're
incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into
whatever field the person goes into, be a public or private.
Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions.
As such, every government, the top quarter of every chart
features little neroes, who, instead of battling the fire and
gulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces, strumming an off
(02:12):
key version of Wonder Wall and the Lyre and grumbling
about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe
we could replace them with an LLM or a smart
sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor
forces at arm's length, and effectively, anything built at scale
quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer.
This disconnection or alienation better put sits at the center
(02:34):
of almost every problem I've ever talked about. Why would
companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their
services even though their customers don't like it and it
doesn't really work. It's simple they neither know or care
what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function,
They barely know what their products do, and barely understand
what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels
magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an
(02:55):
impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate
way of describing how most existives and middle managers operate.
But let me get a little more specific. An IBM
study based on conversations with two thousand global CEOs recently
found that only twenty five percent of AI initiatives have
delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years,
and were still sixty four percent of the CEO's surveyed
(03:18):
acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments
in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the
value they brought to the organization. Fifty percent of respondents
also found that the pace of recent investments has left
their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology, almost as if they
don't know what they're doing and they're just put in
AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason.
(03:40):
Johnson and Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad
generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value
use cases. I quote from The Wall Street Journal adding
that only ten to fifteen percent of use cases were
driving about eight percent of the value pareto principle MVP
baby its last two CEOs, Alex Gorsky and Yoki Duato,
(04:01):
both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous ten years
at J ANDJ being some sort of chairman or vice president,
and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and
marketing people. A fun fact about Bill Gorsky. During his
first tenure at Johnson Johnson, he led marketing of products
that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off
(04:21):
the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more
drugs to old people. Well a lovely man. The term
executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers
and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead,
They prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run
predominantly by people that by design are entirely removed from
the business itself, even in roles like marketing. In sales
(04:43):
were cemos and vps park orders without really participating in
the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in
entry level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work,
and that too, is the neoliberal poison in the veins
of our society, because by definition, your very first experience
of the workforce is working hard enough so that you
don't have to work as hard, and you have to
(05:04):
do the shit that nobody else wants to do and anyway.
The same managerial types you bitch about the entitlement and
unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that
are also viscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder,
typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them
in responsibilities that they're increasingly burned out senior workers, or
SEEAI as a way to eliminate what they see as
(05:24):
an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce.
I should also be clear with that this is the
big thing with AI and jobs right now, that people
are afraid of these entry level positions that are going
to get quote automated out. I made a point in
the last monologue that I want to clear up as well.
I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I
think it's taken jobs already. Tons of freelancers, copy editors,
(05:45):
aren't directors. People are really suffering. The point is these people,
the business idiots. They want you to believe that AI
is going to take every job next year, in three months,
or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't
tell you they don't understand they're fucking wrong. They need
you to do this so that you start giving up.
(06:06):
That you give up because you giving up gives them
more power. If you believe they can replace you with
AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will.
They will do so. Now it may happen to you anyway.
They may happen that they'll put an AI that can't
do the shit that you do and replace you with
properly contract labor. That's gonna happen, regardless of whether AI happens.
(06:27):
Off suring and contract to work have being eroding employment
work for a long time at will. Employment in America
is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The
way that labor is treated here is fucking insane. And
a little comment as well for this episode. As I
record this, the Vox Union is yet to get an
agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not
(06:48):
give the deal in the next week, you're probably gonna
hear this one that's happening. I request that every single
listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott
every single Vox property, which because the Verge has some
great writers and also Neli Patel, and you should boycott
everything that Fox is doing right now based on this anyway,
(07:09):
which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter
called hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones
who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox
is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox,
do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway,
moving on, one of my favorite things that really fucking
pissed me off was quite ac quitting it. It was
(07:31):
something that they've berated people for in twenty twenty two.
And is this gas the euphemism for doing the job
as specified in your employment agreement. Because journalism is enthralled
by the management class, and because the management class has
so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means, the
people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this
is because the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker
(07:53):
as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as
a kind of an asset that must provide a return.
As a result, if another asset comes long that could
potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or
a theoretical AI agent, that medal manager won't hesitate to
start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting
rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing
that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read
(08:15):
the manager's mind, and also keeps asking the manager all
these annoying questions. Leave the manager and learn to get paid.
But really, though, our official intelligence is the ultimate paniseer
of the business city, a tool that gives an impression
of productivity with far more production than the business city
it themselves because they don't really do any work. The
Information reported recently that Service Now CEO Bill McDermott, the
(08:38):
chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of
over two hundred billion dollars. By the way, despite the
fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do,
he chose to bush Ai across his entire organization, both
in the product and in practice in the organization itself,
based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with
a raven finding a shiny object. The following is an
(08:58):
actual quote from the article HM. When chain GPT debuted
in November twenty twenty, McDermott joined his executives around a
boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there,
he made a quick decision, and this is a guy's voice.
Bill's like, let me make it clear to everybody here.
Everything you do Aiyi Hei Ai AI recalled sitson the
Service Now Vice chair to begin a customer meeting on AI.
(09:22):
Mcdommot has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to
their best impression of him. Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. Ooh,
I'm a fucking idiot. Anyway, present AI not as a
matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms
like business transformation. During the push to grow AI, mcdommot
has insisted these manager's improve efficiency across their teams. He's
laser focused on the sales team's participation rate. Let's assume
(09:44):
you're a manager and you have twelve direct reports, he said. Now,
let's assume out of those twelve, two people did good,
which it was so good that the manager was one
hundred and ten percent of plan. I don't think that's good.
I tell the manager what did the other ten do?
You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What
do you mean, efficienc See what does that quote even mean?
One hundred and ten percent of plan? What are you
on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill,
(10:07):
did you like, do you have a gas leak in service? Now?
I fucking swear these people make so much money, but
when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They
sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff
like that to someone, they check us for a concussion.
But I'd wager that mister McDermot is concussion free. And
then true example of a business idiot, a person with
(10:30):
incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on
knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the
latest shiny object that makes him thing line go up. No,
that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in twenty twenty two,
he said to Yahoo Financed that the metaverse was real
and that service Now could help someone create an emil
in the metaverse and have a futuristic storefront of some sort.
(10:50):
One might wonder how Service Now provided that, and the
answer is it did not provide that at all. I
cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes
anything of the sort. But like any of these CEOs,
he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just
is des can't asked. Motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a
stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it
(11:10):
got there, but hasn't been removed, and it's kind of
difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up.
The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and
the media has due to a large amount of business
idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the
editorial class, being trained to never ask different questions such as,
what the fuck are you talking about, Bill, or even
the simple what does that mean? Or how would you
do that? Or I'm not sure I understand? Would you
(11:33):
mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of
the overall problem. Though so many layers of editorial and
managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything,
and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's
ignorant themselves. We're still, in many fields, journalism included, we're
rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right
(11:53):
in the way that keeps the people with the keys
from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded
for saying the right thing at the right time, which
more often than not means resembling our white male superiors,
speaking like our peers, and delivering results in the way
that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves. Now.
(12:21):
A great example of our vibeespace society was back in
October twenty twenty one, where a Washington Post article written
by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing
a Microsoft funded anti remote work study and quoting an
one hundred and thirty year old economist called Alfred Marshall
about how and I quote workers gather in dense clusters,
ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've
(12:41):
written academic papers about him, and also ignoring how excited
he was about eugenics or the fact that he was
writing about fucking factories. Remote work terrifies the business idiot
because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to
stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work,
you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative,
(13:04):
and white and black women are less likely to be
promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of the
office is all about making sure the business idiot continues
railing supreme. Removing the ability for the MANAGERI or horn
monitors to look at you and try and work out
what you're doing without ever really helping is a big
part of being a manager. And if for a manager
hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge
you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.
(13:26):
The business idiot does reim supreme. Their existence holds up
every public company almost and remote work was the first
time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily.
Google demanded employees returned to the office in twenty twenty one,
but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because
absolutely none of the decision making was done with people
that actually do work. In mind, while we can, well
(13:49):
you can, I'm not interested debate whether exclusively working remote
is productive or not. The return to office push was
almost entirely done in two ways, one executive's demanding people
return to the office, two journalists asking executives if remote
work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that
do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good,
and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how
(14:12):
bad it was, asking managers. This guy called Callum Boucher's
over the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some
real scorches, Borcher scorches, if you call them, by which
I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing
what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run
a PR firm that should tell you everything. But The
New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
(14:34):
and many many other outlets all fell for this crap
because the business idiots have captured our media too, training
even talented journalists to dever to power every term. When
every power structure is stuff full of do nothing management
types that have learned exactly as little as they need
to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to
them specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful sideas Look at
the coverage of AI or the metaverse or cryptocurrency or clubhouse.
(14:57):
Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based
on practical experience or what the technology can do, but
what the powerful and the popular as suddenly interested in.
Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and
that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism
from small blogs to the biggest mast heads. Look at
how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they
(15:18):
ask things like Neeli Ptel's hundred plus word questions to
send off as shy, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk,
the constant scam artist who has an FT thing. NELI,
what the pardon me? Pardon me? Let me take this
from the top. If you look at how reporters talk
to executives, you should look not just at the way
(15:38):
they ask things, but the things they accept them saying,
and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told.
Sach An Adela is the CEO of a company with
a market capitalization of over three trillion dollars that's Microsoft,
by the way, and, according to an interview mentioned in
the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and
digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of
his daily working life. I have no idea how you
(15:59):
are a reporter. Do not say, Satcha, what the fuck
you're outsourcing most of your life degenerate ive AI, that's insane,
or even do you actually do that? And then asking
further questions but that would get you in trouble. And
the editorial class is the managerial class now, and it's
spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not
to ask questions, how not to push back, and to
(16:21):
believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them.
Karas wish as half asked interviews are considered daring and
critical because journalism has at large lost its teeth, breeding
reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things,
and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse
to fall in line. The reason that they don't want
you to ask these questions is that the business idiot
(16:41):
isn't big on answers. Editors that tell you to not
push too hard at doing so because they know the
executive one have an answer, or they themselves don't know
fucking anything. It isn't just about the pr person that
trained them, but the fact that these men more often
than not do not have a glancing understanding of their
underlying business or even the things they're saying. Yeah, in
the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part
(17:03):
of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism.
While we can and should scream at the disconnected idiots
that ran vice into the ground, the problem is everywhere
because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but
infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom. While there are
some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely
understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or
(17:25):
that make reportersable punches for fear of advertiser blowback, or
worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media.
Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward.
That and mentorship is dead across effectively or parts of society,
meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learned by
watching each other, which means they all make sure to
not ask the rough questions and not push back too
(17:46):
hard against the party or market or company messaging until
everybody else is doing it. And under these conditions business
idiots thrive. The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness
and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance, and of theft. Mentoring
people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It
may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately in
the mind of a business that it creates a competitor
(18:08):
or arrival. Investing in talent or worker conditions, or even
really work itself would require you to know what you're
talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make
sense when you're talking to a work who should be
doing it for you, and they're the ones that are
meant to work, right, you're there to manage them. Yeah,
they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you
wanted to do. I ask you need to step in
(18:28):
and help on something. And that's so annoy you. Oh,
I'm a manager. I'm not here to non sir, I'm
a blog here. I'm not here to do work. Just
know the stuff, do the stuff. I have to go
get lunch, and then I have to go back out
because I have another lunch. Okay enough, Oh my god,
you want another thing. Why haven't you done the thing?
(18:49):
I didn't tell you yet. Anyway, I believe that this
is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful, to
the point that everything in the world is constructed to
reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path.
Our stock market is inherently illogical, driven not by whether
a company is good or is bad, but whether it
can show growth even if said growth is horrifically unprofitable
(19:09):
or ultimately unsustainable. I'd argue it's because the market has
no idea how to make intelligent decisions, just complex ones
that mean you don't really have to understand the business
so much as you have to understand the associated vibes
of the industry and the weird black magic of how
hedge funds work. Freedman's influence and Reagan's policies have allowed
our markets to be dominated by business idiocy, where a
bad company can be a good stock because everybody, specifically
(19:31):
other traders and the business press likes how it looks
and smells, which allows the business idiots to continue making
profit using illogical and partially rigged market making, with the
business press helpfully pushing up their narratives. This also keeps
regular people from accumulating too much wealth. If regular people
could set the tone for the markets as a company
that makes something people like and people pay them for it,
and they make more money than they spend, that may
(19:53):
make things a little too even. It would make things
too accessible. Why would you hire a hedge one where
you could just follow a common sense No, no, no,
that's not how we run our markets here, sir. It
doesn't matter that core Weave, a company that went from
mining crypto to taking on multi billion dollar contracts to
provide compute for open AI and other companies, quite literally
(20:13):
does not have enough money for its capital expenditures and
lost over three hundred million dollars in the last quarter.
But everyone still liked it because if it's year over
year of growth, which was four hundred and twenty percent,
it doesn't matter that Corewave has an October loan payment
that will crush the life out of the company either.
These narratives referred to the media knowing that the media
will print them because thinking too hard about stock would
mean the business idiot had to think also, and that
(20:34):
is not why they're in this business. The AI trade
is the business idiot nirvana, a fascination for a managerial
class that long since gave up any kind of meaningful
contribution to the bottom line, as moving away from fundamental
creation of value as a business naturally leads to the
same kind of specious value that one finds from generative AI.
(21:08):
Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or
that llms don't do anything or even than there's no
possible commercial use case for them. They just don't do enough,
almost by design, And we're watching companies desperately try and
contort them into something, anything that might work, pretending so
fucking hard they'll stake their entire futures on the idea
scrimming just fucking work? Will you? Agent Force doesn't make
(21:29):
any money? It sucks, But goddamn is Marky Mark Bennioff
gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent
Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Bennioff and
Salesforce have got rich selling to fellow business idiots who
then shove Salesforce into their organization without thinking about who
would use it or how they'd use it other than
in most general purposes, which they can barely explain anyway.
(21:53):
Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product,
charging right now two dollars a conversation for a chat
that to quote, the information provides customers with and I
quote incorrect answers AI hallucinations while testing how the software
handles customer service queries. I should also add I've heard
rumblings that salesforce will actually be changing to a different
(22:13):
model now because the two dollars conversation one has really
not been working for them. I just don't think the
new one is going to work either. But generat of
AI this hit is catnip to the business idio, because
the business idiot really ideally never has to deal with
work workers or customers. Generave AI doesn't do enough to
actually help us be better at our jobs, but it
gives a good enough impression of something useful so that
(22:35):
it can convince someone really stupid that doesn't understand what
you do that they don't need you. Sometimes, a generative
output is a kind of generic solus version of a production,
one that resembles exactly how a know nothing executive or
manager would summarize your work. Open AI's deep research. Wow's
professional business idiot Ezra Cline, and I'll link to his
shitty fucking article in the show notes, because he doesn't
(22:56):
seem to realize that part of research is the research itself,
not just the out as you learn about stuff. As
you research a topic and you come to a conclusion,
you search for things, and you don't just go I
have enough research now. You kind of like dig in
and you learn things and you come to something called
a conclusion. This is what you would know if you
(23:19):
did work. But back to AI. The concept of an
agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of
the managerial sect. It's a work that they can personally
command to generate product that they say as their own,
all without having to know or do anything other than
the bare minimum of keeping up appearances, which is the
entirety of the business that it's resume. I should also
add the other term for this is slave, and it's
(23:41):
something that everyone's fucking dancing around. And the reason the
AGI people Kevin Ruson included, don't want to talk about
what the actual consequences of conscious AI, which is fictional
by the way, are is because what people are describing
me with AGI is a form of slavery. If this
thing is conscious, it means that we are enslaving a
conscious being to do our bidding. That's called slavery. And
(24:02):
we're not going to get AGI from these freaks. But
I think the next person that interviews Wario Ama Day
or Sam Moltman or satchan Adella and they bring up agents,
they should say they should bring up AGI and say
what do you think of AGI? Get talking about it
and then say so this conscious creation? They say yes,
and you say this conscious creation that you own? Yes,
(24:23):
so you own the conscious creation? Yes, I own the agent. Great,
so you own slaves? And just see what they do,
because that really is it. I feel like every AGI
conversation really that this is what they don't want to
talk about because they're describing how do we make a
digital slave and they're afraid of that language because they
know the shit storm that would come, which is why
I think everyone needs to start calling it that it
(24:43):
is slavery. That's what they're trying to do. They want
a digital wife, or a digital work slaver, or a
digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot
that does things that go up and get them a soda.
And I drink like eleven diet cokes a day. I
can get up and do it myself. I'm not fucking
stupid or lazy, but I think it's important. This is
such a tangent as well. But I'm glad I said
(25:06):
it put back to the thing. As far as the
business idiot career goes, though they've mostly built it on
only knowing exactly enough to get by, and they don't
dig into what large language models can actually do other
than hammering away at Chat GPT in saying we must
put this in everything, Everything must have AI now. Yet
the real problem is that for every business city it's
(25:26):
selling a product, there are many more that will buy out.
Which has worked in the past for software as a
service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, howking
giant annual contracts and continual upsells because CIOs and CTOs
that's chief information officer and chief technology officers work for
business city at CEOs that demand that they put AI
in everything now, a nonsensical and desperate rebit that's part
(25:46):
of the growth last and part ignorance born of the
fear that one gets when they're out of their depth
and want to follow everyone else, and how they are
honking Look at every single institution installing some kind of
Chat GPT integration and look for the business idiom. Perhaps
it's the cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia who claimed
that giving everybody a Chat GPT subscription would elevate students'
(26:08):
educational experiences across all fields of study in powers faculties
teaching and research and help provide the highly educated workforce
that will drive California's future AI driven economy, Which is
a nonsensical series of words to justify a sixteen point
nine million a year single vendor, no bid contract or
a product that is best known as either a shitty
search engine or a way for college students to cheat.
(26:30):
And I think that any actually tons of teachers listen
to this. Sorry for how much that paragraph pissed you
off in some ways. By the way, Sam Altman is
also the business idiot's antichrist. He takes advantage of a
society with a powerful rarely know much other than what
they want to control or dominate. Chat, GPT and other
AI tools are for the most part sold based on
what they might do in the future to people that
(26:51):
will never really use them. An Aortman has done well
to manipulate, pest and terrify those empowered the idea that
they might miss out on something. Does anyone know what
what it is? No, they don't, because the powerful are
business idiots, too willing to accept anything that somebody brings
along that makes them feel good or bad in a
way that they can make headlines with in any case,
alltmand's whole Slopenheimer motif has worked wonders on the business
(27:13):
idiots in the markets and global governments that fear what
AI could do. Even if they can't really define artificial
intelligence or what it could do or what it is,
they're scared of it doing. The fear of China's rise
in AI is one particularly based on sinophobia, but also
based on the fact that China has their own business
idiot's willing to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into
data centers which are, according to some stories, not being
(27:36):
used over there is that good anyway. Generative AI has
created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest
of the society. It's forced adoption and proliferation, providing a
meager return for the massive investment of capital, and the
revulsion it causes in many people, not just in the
business idiot's excitement in replacing them, but how wrong the
business idia is. Well, there are people that dick around
(27:56):
with chat GBT. Years since it launched, we still can't
find a clean way to say what it does and
why it matters, other than the fact that everybody agreed
it did and a lot of people are putting a
lot of money into things that look like it. The media,
now piloted by business idiots, has found itself deplored, its reporters, unprepared, unwilling,
and unsupported. The backbone torn out of most newsrooms for
fear that they're being too critical and that doing so
(28:17):
is somehow not being objected, despite the fact that what
you choose to cover objectively is still subjective. Report are
still to this day as these companies burn hundreds of
billions of dollars to make an industry the size of
the mobile free to play gaming industry, refuse to save
things that bluntly, because the cost of influence is coming
down and these companies have some of the smartest people
in the world, they ignore the truth that sits in
(28:39):
front of them that the combined annual recurring revenue of
the Information's comprehensive database of every single generative AI company
is less than ten billion dollars or four billion dollars
if you remove anthropic and open AI. You can add
on top of that, by the way, the thirteen billion
dollars that Microsoft makes, ten billion dollars of which is
open AI's compute spend on Azure and there's an information
story behind that too. Yeah, it's so small, man, it's
(29:03):
so small. The revenue is so small. I cannot get
over how small it is. But chat GPT's popularity is
the ultimate business city, its success story. It's the fastest
growing product in Silicon Valley history that didn't grow because
it was super useful or good at anything, or able
to do a specific thing, but because it could do
a lot of vague things, and because the media is
(29:24):
controlled by business idiots who decided it was the next
big thing and started talking about it NonStop since November
twenty twenty two, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, and
even to this day, even if the company can't really
explain what it is you're meant to use it for,
everybody still acts super impressed. Much like the business city
it themselves. Chat gpt doesn't need to do anything specific.
(29:47):
It just needs to make the right sounds at the
right times to impress people that barely care what it
does other than the fact it makes them feel forward looking,
trail blazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots,
not middle and just not executives, not coaches, not NBA's
not CEOs, not Kevin Bruce, not Neeli Patel have seen
this for what it was early and often, but real
(30:08):
people are seldom the ones with the keys, and the media,
even the people writing good stuff rigally fails to directly
and clearly say what's going on. The media is scared
of doing the wrong thing, of getting in trouble with
someone for misquoting them or misreading what they said. And
in a society where in depth knowledge is subordinate to
knowing enough catchphrases, the fight often doesn't feel worth it.
Even with Needitor is blessing and frankly, I don't believe
(30:31):
that most outlets give their writers any backing. Sam Willman
humiliated a writer from The Verge last year. I didn't
see fucking Neeli Patel say boo. Probably can see once
I'm on the pod. I'm backing on Neelight because Neil
has done some good shit at some point. It's just
that when you have power and you use it in
such a Lasaday's agal power forward way, someone's got to
do it, you know. I wanted to wrap this up
(30:54):
into a nice two part, so that was the original plan.
I couldn't do it. It's not going to happen. But
this next one's gonna be fun. The third part is
gonna be a laugh. It's gonna give you some hope,
and we'll both enjoy being pissy about something together. And
this next episode will truly wrap this up. And I
really appreciate you for listening to our first three part episode.
(31:17):
I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
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
(31:50):
you go to chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
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Speaker 1 (31:57):
Thank you so much for listening. Better off Line is
a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia
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App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Zone Media. Hello there, I'm at Zetron and welcome to
Better Offline and you're on the second part of the
Business City at Trilogy. And indeed that was a concept
(00:24):
I introduced you to last episode. Think of the business
idiot as a kind of con artist, except the con
has become the standard way of doing business for an
alarmingly large part of society. The business audiot is the
manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps getting promoted,
and the CEO of a public company that says boring,
specious nonsense about artificial intelligence that the tenured professor that
you wish would die, the administrator whose only job appears
(00:47):
to be opening and closing the laptop, and the consultant
that can come up with a million reasons to charge
you more money, yet not one metric to judge their
success by. Also the marketing executive that's worked exactly three
years at every major cloud player but does not appear
to have done it anything. And of course the investor
that invests based on founders but really means guys that
look and sound exactly like me. These people are present
throughout the private and public sector and our governments too,
(01:09):
and they paradoxically do nothing of substance, but somehow damage
everything that they touch. This isn't to say our public
and private sector is entirely useless, just that these people
are poisoned so many partss of our power structure that
avoiding them is entirely impossible. Our economy is oriented around them,
made easier and more illogical for their benefit because their
literal only goal in life has been to take and
(01:30):
use power and help others who feel the same. The
business is also an authoritarian and will do whatever they
need to, including harming the institution that they work for
or those closest to them, like their coworkers, of their community,
as a means of avoiding true accountability or responsibility. Decades
of neoliberalism has incentivized their rise because when you incentivize
society to become management, to manage or run a company,
(01:52):
rather than do something for a reason or purpose, you're
incentivizing a kind of corporate narcissism, one that bleeds into
whatever field the person goes into, be a public or private.
Our society is in the thrall of dumb management and functions.
As such, every government, the top quarter of every chart
features little neroes, who, instead of battling the fire and
gulfing Rome, are sat in their palaces, strumming an off
(02:12):
key version of Wonder Wall and the Lyre and grumbling
about how the firefighters need to work harder and maybe
we could replace them with an LLM or a smart
sprinkler system. Every institution keeps its core constituents and labor
forces at arm's length, and effectively, anything built at scale
quickly becomes distance from both the customer and the laborer.
This disconnection or alienation better put sits at the center
(02:34):
of almost every problem I've ever talked about. Why would
companies push generative AI in seemingly every part of their
services even though their customers don't like it and it
doesn't really work. It's simple they neither know or care
what the customer wants. They barely know how their businesses function,
They barely know what their products do, and barely understand
what their workers are doing, meaning that generative AI feels
magical because it does an impression of somebody doing an
(02:55):
impression of somebody doing a job, which is an accurate
way of describing how most existives and middle managers operate.
But let me get a little more specific. An IBM
study based on conversations with two thousand global CEOs recently
found that only twenty five percent of AI initiatives have
delivered their expected return on investment over the last few years,
and were still sixty four percent of the CEO's surveyed
(03:18):
acknowledged that the risks of falling behind drove their investments
in some technologies before they had clear understanding of the
value they brought to the organization. Fifty percent of respondents
also found that the pace of recent investments has left
their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology, almost as if they
don't know what they're doing and they're just put in
AI and stuff because it feels good or for no reason.
(03:40):
Johnson and Johnson recently decided to shift from a broad
generative AI experimentation to a focused approach on high value
use cases. I quote from The Wall Street Journal adding
that only ten to fifteen percent of use cases were
driving about eight percent of the value pareto principle MVP
baby its last two CEOs, Alex Gorsky and Yoki Duato,
(04:01):
both have MBAs, with current CEO Duato's previous ten years
at J ANDJ being some sort of chairman or vice president,
and the previous two CEOs were both pharmaceutical sales and
marketing people. A fun fact about Bill Gorsky. During his
first tenure at Johnson Johnson, he led marketing of products
that deliberately underplayed some drug side effects and paid off
(04:21):
the largest nursing home pharmacy in America to sell more
drugs to old people. Well a lovely man. The term
executive loosely refers to a person who moves around numbers
and hopes for the best. The modern executive does not lead,
They prod. Their managers are hall monitors for organizations run
predominantly by people that by design are entirely removed from
the business itself, even in roles like marketing. In sales
(04:43):
were cemos and vps park orders without really participating in
the process. We talk eagerly about how young people in
entry level jobs should earn their stripes by doing grunt work,
and that too, is the neoliberal poison in the veins
of our society, because by definition, your very first experience
of the workforce is working hard enough so that you
don't have to work as hard, and you have to
(05:04):
do the shit that nobody else wants to do and anyway.
The same managerial types you bitch about the entitlement and
unrealistic expectations of young people are the same ones that
are also viscerating the bottom rung of the career ladder,
typically by offshoring many of these roles or consolidating them
in responsibilities that they're increasingly burned out senior workers, or
SEEAI as a way to eliminate what they see as
(05:24):
an optional cost center and not the future of their workforce.
I should also be clear with that this is the
big thing with AI and jobs right now, that people
are afraid of these entry level positions that are going
to get quote automated out. I made a point in
the last monologue that I want to clear up as well.
I don't think AI will not take any jobs. I
think it's taken jobs already. Tons of freelancers, copy editors,
(05:45):
aren't directors. People are really suffering. The point is these people,
the business idiots. They want you to believe that AI
is going to take every job next year, in three months,
or very soon. It isn't clear how soon. They can't
tell you they don't understand they're fucking wrong. They need
you to do this so that you start giving up.
(06:06):
That you give up because you giving up gives them
more power. If you believe they can replace you with
AI that doesn't work or do your job, they will.
They will do so. Now it may happen to you anyway.
They may happen that they'll put an AI that can't
do the shit that you do and replace you with
properly contract labor. That's gonna happen, regardless of whether AI happens.
(06:27):
Off suring and contract to work have being eroding employment
work for a long time at will. Employment in America
is a big fucking problem. It always has been. The
way that labor is treated here is fucking insane. And
a little comment as well for this episode. As I
record this, the Vox Union is yet to get an
agreement with Vox. In the event that Vox does not
(06:48):
give the deal in the next week, you're probably gonna
hear this one that's happening. I request that every single
listener of Better Offline, I need you to actually boycott
every single Vox property, which because the Verge has some
great writers and also Neli Patel, and you should boycott
everything that Fox is doing right now based on this anyway,
(07:09):
which sucks because they just hired some really excellent reporter
called hayden Field. She's excellent. The writers are the ones
who are the victims here. The power structure of Vox
is not giving them a fair deal. Solidarity with Vox,
do not fucking click their websites unless that deal gets done. Anyway,
moving on, one of my favorite things that really fucking
pissed me off was quite ac quitting it. It was
(07:31):
something that they've berated people for in twenty twenty two.
And is this gas the euphemism for doing the job
as specified in your employment agreement. Because journalism is enthralled
by the management class, and because the management class has
so thoroughly rewritten the concept of what labor means, the
people got called lazy for doing their jobs. And this
is because the middle manager brain doesn't see a worker
(07:53):
as somebody hired and paid for a job, but as
a kind of an asset that must provide a return.
As a result, if another asset comes long that could
potentially provide a bigger return, like an offshore worker or
a theoretical AI agent, that medal manager won't hesitate to
start getting hot and heavy with the idea of getting
rid of this annoying person who keeps doing the thing
that the manager needs them to, but won't magically read
(08:15):
the manager's mind, and also keeps asking the manager all
these annoying questions. Leave the manager and learn to get paid.
But really, though, our official intelligence is the ultimate paniseer
of the business city, a tool that gives an impression
of productivity with far more production than the business city
it themselves because they don't really do any work. The
Information reported recently that Service Now CEO Bill McDermott, the
(08:38):
chief executive of a company with a market capitalization of
over two hundred billion dollars. By the way, despite the
fact that like Salesforce, nobody really knows what they do,
he chose to bush Ai across his entire organization, both
in the product and in practice in the organization itself,
based on the mental consideration I would usually associate with
a raven finding a shiny object. The following is an
(08:58):
actual quote from the article HM. When chain GPT debuted
in November twenty twenty, McDermott joined his executives around a
boardroom table and they played with the chatbot together. From there,
he made a quick decision, and this is a guy's voice.
Bill's like, let me make it clear to everybody here.
Everything you do Aiyi Hei Ai AI recalled sitson the
Service Now Vice chair to begin a customer meeting on AI.
(09:22):
Mcdommot has asked his salespeople to do what amounts to
their best impression of him. Hi, I'm Bill McDermott. Ooh,
I'm a fucking idiot. Anyway, present AI not as a
matter of bots or databases, but in grand sounding terms
like business transformation. During the push to grow AI, mcdommot
has insisted these manager's improve efficiency across their teams. He's
laser focused on the sales team's participation rate. Let's assume
(09:44):
you're a manager and you have twelve direct reports, he said. Now,
let's assume out of those twelve, two people did good,
which it was so good that the manager was one
hundred and ten percent of plan. I don't think that's good.
I tell the manager what did the other ten do?
You'll notice that all of this is complete nonsense. What
do you mean, efficienc See what does that quote even mean?
One hundred and ten percent of plan? What are you
on about? Did you hit your head on something, Bill,
(10:07):
did you like, do you have a gas leak in service? Now?
I fucking swear these people make so much money, but
when you hear them talk, they sound so stupid. They
sound so very stupid. If you or I said stuff
like that to someone, they check us for a concussion.
But I'd wager that mister McDermot is concussion free. And
then true example of a business idiot, a person with
(10:30):
incredible power and wealth that makes decisions not based on
knowing things or caring about his customers, but on the
latest shiny object that makes him thing line go up. No,
that's really Bill McDermott's thing. Back in twenty twenty two,
he said to Yahoo Financed that the metaverse was real
and that service Now could help someone create an emil
in the metaverse and have a futuristic storefront of some sort.
(10:50):
One might wonder how Service Now provided that, and the
answer is it did not provide that at all. I
cannot find a single product that it's offered that includes
anything of the sort. But like any of these CEOs,
he doesn't really know stuff or do stuff. He just
is des can't asked. Motherfucker. The corporate equivalent of a
stain on a carpet that nobody really knows how it
(11:10):
got there, but hasn't been removed, and it's kind of
difficult to get out without ripping the whole fucking thing up.
The modern executive, like I have said, is symbolic, and
the media has due to a large amount of business
idiots running these outlets and middle managers stuffed into the
editorial class, being trained to never ask different questions such as,
what the fuck are you talking about, Bill, or even
the simple what does that mean? Or how would you
do that? Or I'm not sure I understand? Would you
(11:33):
mind explaining? Perhaps the last part is the symptom of
the overall problem. Though so many layers of editorial and
managerial power are filled full of people that don't know anything,
and there's never anyone crueler about ignorance than somebody who's
ignorant themselves. We're still, in many fields, journalism included, we're
rarely rewarded for knowing things or being right, being right
(11:53):
in the way that keeps the people with the keys
from scraping them across our cars. We are, however, rewarded
for saying the right thing at the right time, which
more often than not means resembling our white male superiors,
speaking like our peers, and delivering results in the way
that makes them feel the happiest or the best about themselves. Now.
(12:21):
A great example of our vibeespace society was back in
October twenty twenty one, where a Washington Post article written
by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing
a Microsoft funded anti remote work study and quoting an
one hundred and thirty year old economist called Alfred Marshall
about how and I quote workers gather in dense clusters,
ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist that they've
(12:41):
written academic papers about him, and also ignoring how excited
he was about eugenics or the fact that he was
writing about fucking factories. Remote work terrifies the business idiot
because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to
stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to work,
you know, stuff they've done. Office culture is inherently heteronormative,
(13:04):
and white and black women are less likely to be
promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of the
office is all about making sure the business idiot continues
railing supreme. Removing the ability for the MANAGERI or horn
monitors to look at you and try and work out
what you're doing without ever really helping is a big
part of being a manager. And if for a manager
hearing this and saying you don't do this, I challenge
you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.
(13:26):
The business idiot does reim supreme. Their existence holds up
every public company almost and remote work was the first
time they've willingly raised their heads and started honking angrily.
Google demanded employees returned to the office in twenty twenty one,
but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because
absolutely none of the decision making was done with people
that actually do work. In mind, while we can, well
(13:49):
you can, I'm not interested debate whether exclusively working remote
is productive or not. The return to office push was
almost entirely done in two ways, one executive's demanding people
return to the office, two journalists asking executives if remote
work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people that
do the work and mostly not seeing if it was good,
and mostly just asking whether it was bad and how
(14:12):
bad it was, asking managers. This guy called Callum Boucher's
over the Wall Street Journal, and he has written some
real scorches, Borcher scorches, if you call them, by which
I mean, I've never seen someone so interested in publishing
what bosses think in my fucking life. And I run
a PR firm that should tell you everything. But The
New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal,
(14:34):
and many many other outlets all fell for this crap
because the business idiots have captured our media too, training
even talented journalists to dever to power every term. When
every power structure is stuff full of do nothing management
types that have learned exactly as little as they need
to get by, it's inevitable that journalism will cater to
them specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful sideas Look at
the coverage of AI or the metaverse or cryptocurrency or clubhouse.
(14:57):
Look how willingly reporters will willingly accept narratives not based
on practical experience or what the technology can do, but
what the powerful and the popular as suddenly interested in.
Every single tech bubble has followed the same path, and
that path was paved with flawed, deferential and specious journalism
from small blogs to the biggest mast heads. Look at
how reporters talk to executives, not just the way they
(15:18):
ask things like Neeli Ptel's hundred plus word questions to
send off as shy, or his interview with fucking Gary Vaynerchuk,
the constant scam artist who has an FT thing. NELI,
what the pardon me? Pardon me? Let me take this
from the top. If you look at how reporters talk
to executives, you should look not just at the way
(15:38):
they ask things, but the things they accept them saying,
and the willingness they have to just accept what they're told.
Sach An Adela is the CEO of a company with
a market capitalization of over three trillion dollars that's Microsoft,
by the way, and, according to an interview mentioned in
the last episode, uses AI to summarize podcast episodes and
digest emails and effectively do all the obvious parts of
his daily working life. I have no idea how you
(15:59):
are a reporter. Do not say, Satcha, what the fuck
you're outsourcing most of your life degenerate ive AI, that's insane,
or even do you actually do that? And then asking
further questions but that would get you in trouble. And
the editorial class is the managerial class now, and it's
spent decades mentoring young reporters and teaching them how not
to ask questions, how not to push back, and to
(16:21):
believe that a big, strong, powerful CEO would never mislead them.
Karas wish as half asked interviews are considered daring and
critical because journalism has at large lost its teeth, breeding
reporters rewarded for knowing a little bit about a few things,
and punishing those who ask too many questions or refuse
to fall in line. The reason that they don't want
you to ask these questions is that the business idiot
(16:41):
isn't big on answers. Editors that tell you to not
push too hard at doing so because they know the
executive one have an answer, or they themselves don't know
fucking anything. It isn't just about the pr person that
trained them, but the fact that these men more often
than not do not have a glancing understanding of their
underlying business or even the things they're saying. Yeah, in
the same way that business idiots penetrated every other part
(17:03):
of society, they eventually have found their way to journalism.
While we can and should scream at the disconnected idiots
that ran vice into the ground, the problem is everywhere
because the business idiots aren't just at the top, but
infecting the power structures underlying every newsroom. While there are
some really great editors, there are plenty more that barely
understand the articles they edit, the stories they commission, or
(17:25):
that make reportersable punches for fear of advertiser blowback, or
worse still, just worried they'll get attacked on social media.
Fucking cowards. Go hide under your table, you fucking coward.
That and mentorship is dead across effectively or parts of society,
meaning that most reporters, as with many jobs, learned by
watching each other, which means they all make sure to
not ask the rough questions and not push back too
(17:46):
hard against the party or market or company messaging until
everybody else is doing it. And under these conditions business
idiots thrive. The business idiot's reign is one of speciousness
and shortcuts, of acquisition, of dominance, and of theft. Mentoring
people is something you do to pass on knowledge. It
may make them grateful to you, but it ultimately in
the mind of a business that it creates a competitor
(18:08):
or arrival. Investing in talent or worker conditions, or even
really work itself would require you to know what you're
talking about or actually do work, which doesn't really make
sense when you're talking to a work who should be
doing it for you, and they're the ones that are
meant to work, right, you're there to manage them. Yeah,
they keep talking back, asking questions about the work you
wanted to do. I ask you need to step in
(18:28):
and help on something. And that's so annoy you. Oh,
I'm a manager. I'm not here to non sir, I'm
a blog here. I'm not here to do work. Just
know the stuff, do the stuff. I have to go
get lunch, and then I have to go back out
because I have another lunch. Okay enough, Oh my god,
you want another thing. Why haven't you done the thing?
(18:49):
I didn't tell you yet. Anyway, I believe that this
is the predominant mindset across most of the powerful, to
the point that everything in the world is constructed to
reaffirm their beliefs rather than follow any kind of logical path.
Our stock market is inherently illogical, driven not by whether
a company is good or is bad, but whether it
can show growth even if said growth is horrifically unprofitable
(19:09):
or ultimately unsustainable. I'd argue it's because the market has
no idea how to make intelligent decisions, just complex ones
that mean you don't really have to understand the business
so much as you have to understand the associated vibes
of the industry and the weird black magic of how
hedge funds work. Freedman's influence and Reagan's policies have allowed
our markets to be dominated by business idiocy, where a
bad company can be a good stock because everybody, specifically
(19:31):
other traders and the business press likes how it looks
and smells, which allows the business idiots to continue making
profit using illogical and partially rigged market making, with the
business press helpfully pushing up their narratives. This also keeps
regular people from accumulating too much wealth. If regular people
could set the tone for the markets as a company
that makes something people like and people pay them for it,
and they make more money than they spend, that may
(19:53):
make things a little too even. It would make things
too accessible. Why would you hire a hedge one where
you could just follow a common sense No, no, no,
that's not how we run our markets here, sir. It
doesn't matter that core Weave, a company that went from
mining crypto to taking on multi billion dollar contracts to
provide compute for open AI and other companies, quite literally
(20:13):
does not have enough money for its capital expenditures and
lost over three hundred million dollars in the last quarter.
But everyone still liked it because if it's year over
year of growth, which was four hundred and twenty percent,
it doesn't matter that Corewave has an October loan payment
that will crush the life out of the company either.
These narratives referred to the media knowing that the media
will print them because thinking too hard about stock would
mean the business idiot had to think also, and that
(20:34):
is not why they're in this business. The AI trade
is the business idiot nirvana, a fascination for a managerial
class that long since gave up any kind of meaningful
contribution to the bottom line, as moving away from fundamental
creation of value as a business naturally leads to the
same kind of specious value that one finds from generative AI.
(21:08):
Not even saying there's no returns from generative AI or
that llms don't do anything or even than there's no
possible commercial use case for them. They just don't do enough,
almost by design, And we're watching companies desperately try and
contort them into something, anything that might work, pretending so
fucking hard they'll stake their entire futures on the idea
scrimming just fucking work? Will you? Agent Force doesn't make
(21:29):
any money? It sucks, But goddamn is Marky Mark Bennioff
gonna make you bear witness? Does it matter that Agent
Force barely makes Salesforce any money? No, because Bennioff and
Salesforce have got rich selling to fellow business idiots who
then shove Salesforce into their organization without thinking about who
would use it or how they'd use it other than
in most general purposes, which they can barely explain anyway.
(21:53):
Agent Force was and is a fundamentally boring and insane product,
charging right now two dollars a conversation for a chat
that to quote, the information provides customers with and I
quote incorrect answers AI hallucinations while testing how the software
handles customer service queries. I should also add I've heard
rumblings that salesforce will actually be changing to a different
(22:13):
model now because the two dollars conversation one has really
not been working for them. I just don't think the
new one is going to work either. But generat of
AI this hit is catnip to the business idio, because
the business idiot really ideally never has to deal with
work workers or customers. Generave AI doesn't do enough to
actually help us be better at our jobs, but it
gives a good enough impression of something useful so that
(22:35):
it can convince someone really stupid that doesn't understand what
you do that they don't need you. Sometimes, a generative
output is a kind of generic solus version of a production,
one that resembles exactly how a know nothing executive or
manager would summarize your work. Open AI's deep research. Wow's
professional business idiot Ezra Cline, and I'll link to his
shitty fucking article in the show notes, because he doesn't
(22:56):
seem to realize that part of research is the research itself,
not just the out as you learn about stuff. As
you research a topic and you come to a conclusion,
you search for things, and you don't just go I
have enough research now. You kind of like dig in
and you learn things and you come to something called
a conclusion. This is what you would know if you
(23:19):
did work. But back to AI. The concept of an
agent you've sure heard about is the erotic dream of
the managerial sect. It's a work that they can personally
command to generate product that they say as their own,
all without having to know or do anything other than
the bare minimum of keeping up appearances, which is the
entirety of the business that it's resume. I should also
add the other term for this is slave, and it's
(23:41):
something that everyone's fucking dancing around. And the reason the
AGI people Kevin Ruson included, don't want to talk about
what the actual consequences of conscious AI, which is fictional
by the way, are is because what people are describing
me with AGI is a form of slavery. If this
thing is conscious, it means that we are enslaving a
conscious being to do our bidding. That's called slavery. And
(24:02):
we're not going to get AGI from these freaks. But
I think the next person that interviews Wario Ama Day
or Sam Moltman or satchan Adella and they bring up agents,
they should say they should bring up AGI and say
what do you think of AGI? Get talking about it
and then say so this conscious creation? They say yes,
and you say this conscious creation that you own? Yes,
(24:23):
so you own the conscious creation? Yes, I own the agent. Great,
so you own slaves? And just see what they do,
because that really is it. I feel like every AGI
conversation really that this is what they don't want to
talk about because they're describing how do we make a
digital slave and they're afraid of that language because they
know the shit storm that would come, which is why
I think everyone needs to start calling it that it
(24:43):
is slavery. That's what they're trying to do. They want
a digital wife, or a digital work slaver, or a
digital home slave. They love the idea of a robot
that does things that go up and get them a soda.
And I drink like eleven diet cokes a day. I
can get up and do it myself. I'm not fucking
stupid or lazy, but I think it's important. This is
such a tangent as well. But I'm glad I said
(25:06):
it put back to the thing. As far as the
business idiot career goes, though they've mostly built it on
only knowing exactly enough to get by, and they don't
dig into what large language models can actually do other
than hammering away at Chat GPT in saying we must
put this in everything, Everything must have AI now. Yet
the real problem is that for every business city it's
(25:26):
selling a product, there are many more that will buy out.
Which has worked in the past for software as a
service or SaaS companies that grew fat and happy, howking
giant annual contracts and continual upsells because CIOs and CTOs
that's chief information officer and chief technology officers work for
business city at CEOs that demand that they put AI
in everything now, a nonsensical and desperate rebit that's part
(25:46):
of the growth last and part ignorance born of the
fear that one gets when they're out of their depth
and want to follow everyone else, and how they are
honking Look at every single institution installing some kind of
Chat GPT integration and look for the business idiom. Perhaps
it's the cal State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia who claimed
that giving everybody a Chat GPT subscription would elevate students'
(26:08):
educational experiences across all fields of study in powers faculties
teaching and research and help provide the highly educated workforce
that will drive California's future AI driven economy, Which is
a nonsensical series of words to justify a sixteen point
nine million a year single vendor, no bid contract or
a product that is best known as either a shitty
search engine or a way for college students to cheat.
(26:30):
And I think that any actually tons of teachers listen
to this. Sorry for how much that paragraph pissed you
off in some ways. By the way, Sam Altman is
also the business idiot's antichrist. He takes advantage of a
society with a powerful rarely know much other than what
they want to control or dominate. Chat, GPT and other
AI tools are for the most part sold based on
what they might do in the future to people that
(26:51):
will never really use them. An Aortman has done well
to manipulate, pest and terrify those empowered the idea that
they might miss out on something. Does anyone know what
what it is? No, they don't, because the powerful are
business idiots, too willing to accept anything that somebody brings
along that makes them feel good or bad in a
way that they can make headlines with in any case,
alltmand's whole Slopenheimer motif has worked wonders on the business
(27:13):
idiots in the markets and global governments that fear what
AI could do. Even if they can't really define artificial
intelligence or what it could do or what it is,
they're scared of it doing. The fear of China's rise
in AI is one particularly based on sinophobia, but also
based on the fact that China has their own business
idiot's willing to shovel hundreds of millions of dollars into
data centers which are, according to some stories, not being
(27:36):
used over there is that good anyway. Generative AI has
created a reckoning between the business idiot and the rest
of the society. It's forced adoption and proliferation, providing a
meager return for the massive investment of capital, and the
revulsion it causes in many people, not just in the
business idiot's excitement in replacing them, but how wrong the
business idia is. Well, there are people that dick around
(27:56):
with chat GBT. Years since it launched, we still can't
find a clean way to say what it does and
why it matters, other than the fact that everybody agreed
it did and a lot of people are putting a
lot of money into things that look like it. The media,
now piloted by business idiots, has found itself deplored, its reporters, unprepared, unwilling,
and unsupported. The backbone torn out of most newsrooms for
fear that they're being too critical and that doing so
(28:17):
is somehow not being objected, despite the fact that what
you choose to cover objectively is still subjective. Report are
still to this day as these companies burn hundreds of
billions of dollars to make an industry the size of
the mobile free to play gaming industry, refuse to save
things that bluntly, because the cost of influence is coming
down and these companies have some of the smartest people
in the world, they ignore the truth that sits in
(28:39):
front of them that the combined annual recurring revenue of
the Information's comprehensive database of every single generative AI company
is less than ten billion dollars or four billion dollars
if you remove anthropic and open AI. You can add
on top of that, by the way, the thirteen billion
dollars that Microsoft makes, ten billion dollars of which is
open AI's compute spend on Azure and there's an information
story behind that too. Yeah, it's so small, man, it's
(29:03):
so small. The revenue is so small. I cannot get
over how small it is. But chat GPT's popularity is
the ultimate business city, its success story. It's the fastest
growing product in Silicon Valley history that didn't grow because
it was super useful or good at anything, or able
to do a specific thing, but because it could do
a lot of vague things, and because the media is
(29:24):
controlled by business idiots who decided it was the next
big thing and started talking about it NonStop since November
twenty twenty two, guaranteeing that everybody would try it, and
even to this day, even if the company can't really
explain what it is you're meant to use it for,
everybody still acts super impressed. Much like the business city
it themselves. Chat gpt doesn't need to do anything specific.
(29:47):
It just needs to make the right sounds at the
right times to impress people that barely care what it
does other than the fact it makes them feel forward looking,
trail blazing and futuristic. Real people, regular people, not business idiots,
not middle and just not executives, not coaches, not NBA's
not CEOs, not Kevin Bruce, not Neeli Patel have seen
this for what it was early and often, but real
(30:08):
people are seldom the ones with the keys, and the media,
even the people writing good stuff rigally fails to directly
and clearly say what's going on. The media is scared
of doing the wrong thing, of getting in trouble with
someone for misquoting them or misreading what they said. And
in a society where in depth knowledge is subordinate to
knowing enough catchphrases, the fight often doesn't feel worth it.
Even with Needitor is blessing and frankly, I don't believe
(30:31):
that most outlets give their writers any backing. Sam Willman
humiliated a writer from The Verge last year. I didn't
see fucking Neeli Patel say boo. Probably can see once
I'm on the pod. I'm backing on Neelight because Neil
has done some good shit at some point. It's just
that when you have power and you use it in
such a Lasaday's agal power forward way, someone's got to
do it, you know. I wanted to wrap this up
(30:54):
into a nice two part, so that was the original plan.
I couldn't do it. It's not going to happen. But
this next one's gonna be fun. The third part is
gonna be a laugh. It's gonna give you some hope,
and we'll both enjoy being pissy about something together. And
this next episode will truly wrap this up. And I
really appreciate you for listening to our first three part episode.
(31:17):
I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
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
(31:50):
you go to chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to
visit the discord, and go to our slash Better Offline
to check out our reddit.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Thank you so much for listening. Better off Line is
a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio
Speaker 1 (32:07):
App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Ed Zitron
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